AI Buildout Meets Capex Wall, The Browser Company Effect | Drew Houston, Jacob Andreou, Adam Fry, Ian Rogers, Molly Cantillon, Jonny Dyer, Mike Shebat

(01:35) - The Browser Company Effect (13:54) - AI Buildout Hits Fab Capex Overhang (40:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:11:56) - Jacob Andreou, leading product and growth at Microsoft AI with a focus on Copilot, previously held a similar role at Snap from 2015 to 2023. In the conversation, he discusses Microsoft's integration of various AI models into Copilot, including OpenAI's GPT-5 and their own first-party models, to enhance user experience. He also highlights new features like the AI browser in Edge, which offers agentic capabilities and proactive assistance, and introduces 'Mico,' a new AI persona designed for safe, work-appropriate interactions. (01:30:18) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:58:06) - Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, discusses the evolution of Dropbox from a file-syncing service to an AI-powered platform with the introduction of Dropbox Dash, an AI-driven universal search and knowledge management tool. He highlights how Dash connects various work applications, enabling users to efficiently locate and manage their content across multiple platforms. Houston emphasizes the importance of integrating AI to enhance productivity and streamline workflows in the modern work environment. (02:20:09) - Adam Fry, the product lead for ChatGPT Search and ChatGPT Pulse, discusses the enthusiastic reception of ChatGPT Atlas, highlighting its availability to all users and the integration of AI features into daily workflows. He explains that while the browser is accessible to everyone, advanced features like agent mode are more compute-intensive and thus prioritized for paid users. Fry also emphasizes the long-term vision for Atlas, focusing on user retention and continuous improvement to enhance the browsing experience. (02:31:48) - Ian Rogers, Chief Experience Officer at Ledger, discusses the company's mission to provide secure self-custody solutions for digital assets, emphasizing the importance of protecting private keys using secure element chips. He highlights Ledger's evolution from securing Bitcoin to supporting a wide range of cryptocurrencies and digital assets, including passkeys and identities, underscoring the growing need for security in our increasingly digital lives. Rogers also introduces Ledger's latest product, the Nano Gen 5, a secure touchscreen device priced at $179, designed to enhance user experience without compromising security. (02:45:34) - Molly Cantillon, founder of NOX, a proactive personal assistant company, discusses the challenges of integrating iMessage and WhatsApp to enable seamless communication across both platforms. She explains that by layering onto users' computers and avoiding distribution through the App Store, NOX can facilitate this integration without direct cooperation from Apple or Meta. Cantillon also highlights the importance of message interoperability and the potential for regulatory and market forces to encourage platform cooperation in the future. (02:55:14) - Jonny Dyer, CEO and co-founder of Muon Space, discusses the inevitability of large-scale IT infrastructure in space, emphasizing that the timeline—whether one, ten, or twenty years—is uncertain, but the shift is certain. He highlights Muon Space's partnership with SpaceX's Starlink, aiming to modernize space connectivity by replacing outdated systems with high-speed, always-on broadband connections, which will enable transformative capabilities like a 50-satellite constellation for rapid wildfire detection and tracking. Dyer also mentions Muon Space's recent $140 million Series B funding, plans to significantly scale up production capabilities, and the development of new technologies to enhance their satellite operations. (03:03:30) - Mike Shebat, CEO and co-founder of Traba, discusses how his company leverages AI to streamline industrial staffing by replacing manual processes with technology, resulting in higher fill rates and faster worker placements. He highlights Traba's growth to 150 employees over four years and emphasizes the importance of a strong in-person work culture, drawing parallels to the commitment of aspiring Olympians. Shebat also addresses the challenges of scaling in the physical world, noting the necessity of market-specific strategies and the potential for future expansion into new markets. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today is Thursday, October 23rd, 2025. We are live from the TVP N Ultra Dome.

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  Did you see this graphic in the Wall Street Journal, the business and finance section, talking about the circularity of AI deals? And I thought it was just a beautiful image that reflected nature. It looks like a conch shell.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  Looks like a conch.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  It looks like a conch, right? It looks fantastic. I was, I was laughing to myself about Sachin Adella just being like, yeah, I was into circular deals with OpenAI like six years ago, actually. So Larry Ellison, you're not, yeah, you're not as cool. Like, don't take a victory lap. I was doing crazy complicated deals with OpenAI back in 2019. But, you know, we've talked enough about OpenAI on this show. It's quickly turning into the OpenAI show. We have someone from OpenAI coming on the show later today, actually, to talk about the browser. I am excited for that, but we got to go a different direction. We got to talk about some other stuff.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  And so I want to talk about how we name companies, how we build brands in Silicon Valley. And I want Jordy to take the lead on breaking down his thesis for the uninspired company of Silicon Valley. But first, I want to tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, go pay. County, whole lot more, all in one place. Jordy Hayes, you have the floor, sir.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. This is an idea or an essay I've been thinking about for a while. Finally got around to writing it. And yeah, generally, I felt like the timing was right. The browser company's acquisition closed this week. Six years ago, they started the company. So I'll just read through what I wrote and then we can chat about it. So six years ago, the browser company of New York was born. This week, its acquisition by Atlassian closed. Regardless of how you feel about the product or the ultimate acquisition price, it's undeniable that Josh Hirsch and the team brought an incredibly fresh perspective to what a startup brand could look and feel like.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  Six years is kind of crazy. I, I, I feel like I've found out about the browser company like two years ago, maybe three years ago. What a grind. Congratulations to the team over there.

• 2:22Jordi Hays?

  Overnight success.

• 2:23John Coogan?

  Seriously.

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  The name, the brand design, etc. were all incredibly thoughtful, but they weren't new. Roughly 150 years ago was standard practice to name a company like they did. The Prudential Insurance Company of America founded in 18-

• 2:35John Coogan?

  Standard practice sounds like a good name for a company. That sounds like a real name, yeah.

• 2:39Jordi Hays?

  Standard Oil Company of New York founded in 1911. That was a spin out. The Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York founded in 1880. And there was a bunch of others over history. Again, this was just like the way that you named a company. You weren't trying to think of- Back then, you weren't trying to think of like a cute dot com.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:59Jordi Hays?

  It was, why don't we just name it what it is? And so what I'd like to-

• 3:02John Coogan?

  Name it what it is or name it who we are. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley.

• 3:05Jordi Hays?

  So what was, what was amazing about this naming convention? This isn't an essay, it's just like how explicitly clear it is what the company does. Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  I can imagine what they do. It's good marketing.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  Pretty, pretty simple.

• 3:19Jordi Hays?

  So the browser company of New York was a perfect name for a specific reason. Juxtaposing a 150-year-old naming convention with a modern tool such as the web browser was an incredible way to stand out and signal to the world exactly what their mission was and that they would be bringing inspired thinking to the category. The browser company's name, brand, and marketing materials were so effective that they catalyzed a wave of companies to adopt the same naming convention. Between the browser company's emergence and their eventual exit, I'd estimate that somewhere between 50 to 100 companies adopted this type of legacy naming convention. So, naming a web browser company, the browser company of New York signaled this sort of original thinking. And the problem is that the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, you know, etc. company

• 4:02Jordi Hays?

  to use this sort of convention basically does the exact opposite, right? It signals like, okay, I saw somebody do something cool in my, in my industry. I'm going to do, I'm going to do the cool thing as well.

• 4:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, the genericization, the making that, that whole pattern generic.

• 4:18John Coogan?

  Like I, I, I was not tapped in clearly. I did not know that the browser company in New York was six years old. I found out about it a couple of years ago and there are people that probably found out about it after they found out about five copycats. And so in their mind, they're just like, oh, the browser company in New York, that's one of those copycats.

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it quickly, it quickly became an anti-signal.

• 4:39John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. I completely agree.

• 4:41Jordi Hays?

  So personally, I'm not automatically bearish on the companies that are, that are kind of like, you know, a little too inspired on this front.

• 4:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:47Jordi Hays?

  But I think a lot of the people are make, are kind of missing what made it great.

• 4:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:51Jordi Hays?

  And so, uh, at least one of these companies, uh, the interaction company of California, uh, managed to break through the noise and deliver a truly novel consumer AI product experience. But ironically, they did this under the poke.com branding. So.

• 5:06John Coogan?

  Lore.

• 5:06Jordi Hays?

  Poke came out, they had an incredible launch, very cool, you know, sort of novel consumer AI experience.

• 5:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:12Jordi Hays?

  And so my, my point here is, uh, they should probably just abandon that original name and just run with poke because it's super memorable and, and I think.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  This is what Instagram did. Instagram was bourbon originally.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  And then once Instagram hit, they were like, we have a new brand.

• 5:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:30John Coogan?

  We have a cool thing. And then of course, everyone copied Instagram. Interestingly, Instacart copied Instagram's name and it worked.

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 5:37John Coogan?

  So yeah, not always a total anti-signal, even if it's, uh, yeah.

• 5:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So in defense of copycat branding, naming startups is really hard. Every founder's gone through this. There's only so many domain names. There's some, only so many, uh, English words that mean something. And there's just so many companies being created. It's, it's quite challenging. Uh, another defense, uh, and, and kind of like a misinterpretation, you know, people misinterpret this quote, uh, that's attributed to Picasso, which is good artists steal, great, uh, great artists, uh, good artists copy, great artists steal.

• 6:10John Coogan?

  Picasso said that originally? I know that there's a book.

• 6:12Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's a variety of people that have like, you know, said it throughout history, stole, you know, uh, re made it.

• 6:18John Coogan?

  So funny if he like legitimately copied it word from word for his direct rival, like another painter.

• 6:24Jordi Hays?

  Um, so yes, take, taken literally. If somebody just says, okay, they, they're going to see like, okay, this is good. I'm going to do the good thing.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:32Jordi Hays?

  That someone else is doing, but a better interpretation of it and my interpretation of it is that you're, you're, you're better off like stealing from the past, but like recombining. Inspiration from a variety of sources to create your own unique style and approach.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, before you continue, you know, great, good streamers, stream great streamers, restream with restream.com. One live stream 30 plus destinations. Continue, Jordy, sorry.

• 6:57Jordi Hays?

  So yes, the browser company hit so hard because there was this crazy juxtaposition. And I don't think anyone had done it before. So it got this amazing response, right? Felt like fresh and new.

• 7:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:08Jordi Hays?

  But after they executed against it so perfectly and so loudly, right? You can debate like, you know, was the product truly a hit? You know, that that's up for debate, but the brand was.

• 7:19John Coogan?

  The brand punched through.

• 7:20Jordi Hays?

  The brand, the brand went through. So if you just go after, if you just sort of like clone. To me, it signals that you're in a rush, which I think is fair. A lot of companies in a rush. You don't value naming, which is concerning. I think names matter a lot. Didn't want to spend the time to find a great domain, which is like, fine. Again, a lot of founders like, don't have a broker like our buddy Rob. It snagged. But it also could signal you aren't seeking out inspiration from outside of the tech bubble, which I think is concerning. The world's a big place. You should go, go outside of our little bubble. And then you didn't seek out influence or advice from people that, that understand the value of naming, know how to acquire great domains, because you can go to founders that have been in the game for 10 years

• 8:05Jordi Hays?

  and they will have a domain guy. They'll give you like the playbook. They might even have a domain name lying around. That's great. Or you could talk to a VC and they're like, oh, this portfolio company.

• 8:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  Was using this name 10 years ago. You should pick it up and use it.

• 8:18John Coogan?

  They might even have a billboard for you. Yeah. I've been on adquick.com. Ad of whom advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of ad of whom advertising.

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  Couldn't have said it better myself. Yeah. And so, so in the, in this case, like browsers were all modern, right? You had Netscape, Edge, Chrome.

• 8:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:36Jordi Hays?

  And so it was juxtaposed, but it was also counter positioned, right? And of course, this, this, the browser company naming saga, it's not isolated incident. I brought, I brought it back to linear, linear launched in 2019. The product design, the website was so good that people were just like, I'll take one, please. One linear brand, please. One, one linear dashboard, please. I even, I even talked to a founder.

• 9:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the, the, uh, like earlier this year and he was like, yeah, we're, our, our design, our website and products is going to look exactly like Linear.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  Admittedly.

• 9:11Jordi Hays?

  I was just like, dude, there's so many, I mean, it, it's great, but like, you know, there's probably something better if you've just really thought hard and like spent the time to think through like, what, what could this be? Um, and so, uh, so anyways, I think like copying great design signals that you don't value design in my view.

• 9:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and so, uh, what this comes down to is that I believe the tech industry needs to learn how to copy or steal from outside the industry. Even today, every AI company wants to be the apple of AI. I think you see this in some of the campaigns that, that they're doing, which are good campaigns, but sometimes they feel like, okay, you guys went to an ad agency and said, give me one nineties apple ad, please. Give me, you know, give me one eighties apple ad, please. Um, and so I said, it's counterintuitive, but I bet the apple of AI will probably not build an iconic generational brand by trying to emulate Apple advertisements from the eighties and nineties. They'll do it by being themselves, or said differently, stealing from the past, a variety of sources and a variety of categories

• 10:14Jordi Hays?

  to create their own unique style and approach. It's perfectly respectable and even fair to take inspiration from obvious sources and industries. We at TVPN have been vocal about being inspired by ESPN, SportsCenter, Complex and others. But the key is that we took that inspiration and applied it to an area, TAC, that none of those groups had ever played in, right? We weren't, we weren't copying SportsCenter to build a sports podcast, right? Um, so I said, if you're starting a company today, I urge you to take inspiration from the outside world and other industries and avoid the trap of becoming an uninspired company. So, uh, happy to get this out there. And, uh, again, I love, I truly love, uh, I feel lucky to love the, the hunt for a great domain.

• 10:56John Coogan?

  For sure. Yeah. I'm, I'm, I'm thinking of the different, like, when, when you, when you say, uh, you know, every AI company wants to be the apple of AI, that feels like OpenAI and Anthropic's most recent campaigns to me.

• 11:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and even OpenAI's, uh, OpenAI's Super Bowl campaign, right?

• 11:12John Coogan?

  That, that didn't feel, that didn't feel Apple to me. I don't know. Like all the pixelated, like the dots and stuff. That felt a little aptly. I don't know. That didn't, that didn't really, that didn't really like, like spring out to me like, like that. Um, but I was, I was just thinking back on like, uh, like, you know, like the DeepMind documentary, uh, on the Lisa doll match, the AlphaGo series that culminates in Move 37. Like, that was part of the brand building. And it's odd because typically, I think they paid for it themselves. Like, like typically paying for someone to make a documentary

• 11:53John Coogan?

  about you, as opposed to just like waiting for someone to make the documentary about you. Uh, it looks like, it gets a lot of criticism as like, oh, this is just marketing. But at least in that particular documentary, I think a lot of people have watched it. And I think it was very effective marketing. And I think it actually built DeepMind's brand as in that moment. And I, and I feel like if you could turn back the clock, OpenAI would have really benefited from having a, paying for a documentary, uh, on the Dota match that they did. Or, you know, some of the other initiatives that they were working on during the OpenAI Gym, the original reinforcement learning stuff that they were doing. Um, because the, the AlphaGo documentary, you've seen it, right, Tyler?

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, many times.

• 12:40John Coogan?

  Many times?

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Well, probably like, probably like two or three times.

• 12:43John Coogan?

  Two or three times, yeah. And so, like, that, that's how

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  He didn't just watch, he studied.

• 12:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, you sat your ass down and listened. Isn't that how

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  Did you, did you smoke a, uh, did you smoke a heater?

• 12:57John Coogan?

  But, but, uh, I, I feel like that was like the introduction to Demis. And it really like takes you through, because it opens with him talking about video games, talking about artificial intelligence. And like, it felt like it built him up as a character in many ways, like more than just him going on podcasts.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's probably true. It was also my, it was my introduction to the game of Go.

• 13:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  And I've since become a, a big Go player.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  You play Go a lot?

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Uh, a fair amount. I mean, none of my friends, like, no one knows how to play Go, so I always have to teach them.

• 13:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  But I've gotten a lot of my friends into Go.

• 13:26John Coogan?

  That's

• 13:27Speaker 02

  But I, yeah, I mean, it was definitely the first time, like, Demis was really like, I, I think a lot of people watch that who are outside of tech.

• 13:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, that makes sense. Um.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  Well, before we move on, let me tell you about GetBezel.com. Shop over 26,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. Dwarash Patel has dropped an essay with a friend of his. And Tyler, you had some analysis on this. Did you get a chance to read through his thoughts on the AGI buildout with Romeo Dean?

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so basically, the main point of the article is, is they're trying to address this question that, or address this thing that Sam Altman said, which is that they want, at some point, they want to be doing basically a gigawatt in infrastructure per week.

• 14:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  New, you know, infra or whatever it is.

• 14:16John Coogan?

  One gigawatt per week.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  So it's like, okay, how do you get there? What are the bottlenecks?

• 14:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  Like, how does this actually work out?

• 14:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  So, so there's a couple of things he points out. The first thing is, there's this idea of like, the Fab capex kind of overhang. So if you compare like Nvidia revenue to the capex of fabs, you'll see that like, the revenue kind of like dwarfs this. So, there's, there's like actual specific numbers, but it's something like, this past year of Nvidia revenue is more than the past like three years of TSMC's entire capex.

• 14:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 14:54Speaker 02

  And if you go up the stack, if you're looking at like ASML or Applied Materials, like all those that are kind of just like, a bit kind of lower level than, than TSMC, you see that Nvidia revenue basically accounts for like the past 25 years of RND and capex of those companies.

• 15:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  So basically, the point is that if Nvidia like really wanted to, they could basically fund like all these new fabs without like, you know, they, they just like, increase the margins for these companies by, by a ton, but they could just like spend and just have these fabs like grow massively.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. So this, I mean... This doesn't feel like an answer to the question that most people are asking, which is about like the circularity of deals, the build out of the actual data centers. I haven't heard a lot of people like nervous about the nature of the fab build out. No one's saying like, oh, TSMC is over their skis. Like it's, it's, it's Oracle that people are worried about, right? And so the fact that TSMC is not overbuilding because the, you know, six billion in capex turns into 200 billion in revenue. That's feels like, wow, like, congrats, TSMC. Like they're in a safe place.

• 16:07John Coogan?

  They can basically go to the market, go to OpenAI and all the hyperscalers and say like, oh, you guys want to put up a trillion dollars in spend to revenue? Like, we got you. You're not going to put us out of business if you don't deliver, which is great for them. It just feels like TSMC is in a really strong position.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  Yes, yeah, that's true. But I think Dorcas is saying like they're underbuilding if we want to be on these like timelines, right?

• 16:32John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  Like, if we want to be doing a gigawatt per week, like, how do we actually get there?

• 16:37John Coogan?

  I like this.

• 16:38Speaker 02

  So way more.

• 16:39John Coogan?

  So, yeah, this is good because it's basically like, what is the shape of the overbuild? What is the shape of the build out? And where you don't want to wind up is just like some sort of like fat overbuilding, like data centers and you're building like these massive data centers, but then you haven't built any nuclear power plants. And then you also haven't built any fabs. And so you have like a bunch of data centers with nothing to put in them and nothing to power.

• 17:02Speaker 02

  Yeah. And the fabs are really important because chips are something like 60, 70% of the actual like capex

• 17:08John Coogan?

  Cost.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  Of a data center. Like they're just, there's so much like compared to power or to everything else.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  I mean, I wonder, I wonder how much they're, how much they're rate limiting on the actual build out. Like. It seems like it seems like the the least some of the narrative has been uh there's there's a much longer lead time for energy infrastructure than there is for TSMC line time scale up fabs but also I haven't actually seen anyone break down like this what it takes to 10x production at TSMC because I don't know where their capacity is are they are they close to max capacity is TSMC running 24 7 already and they haven't and they don't have any other facilities?

• 17:57Speaker 02

  I I think probably but yeah what Dr. Kish is saying is that like their CapEx generally is just very small.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  Compared to like what it could be compared to obviously Nvidia is like way higher but like if Nvidia.

• 18:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  You know, make some deals here like there could be a massive increase in CapEx and he says, well, maybe that won't happen with TSMC, but maybe, uh, you know, with the Intel deals like this is kind of what is is being is being done.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, well, interesting. Uh, so he says further up the supply chain, a single year of Nvidia's revenue almost matched the past 25 years of total R and D and CapEx from the five largest semiconductor equipment companies combined. So you take ASML, Applied Materials, Tokyo Electron, SK Hynix, Micron, uh, TSMC, you add all of those together, it only takes like a year or two to actually pay for that just with what Nvidia is actually producing because of because of the margins and the actual ROI on the CapEx. Um, the reason we're emphasizing this point is that if you were to naively speculate about what would be the first upstream component to constrain long-term AI CapEx growth, you

• 19:06John Coogan?

  wouldn't talk about copper wires or transformers. You'd start with the most complicated things that humans have ever made, which are the fabs that make semiconductors. So every time you see someone saying, oh, the, you know, worry about the transformers, uh, and the energy infrastructure, it is potentially more bottlenecked by the fabs. Uh, we were stunned to learn that the cost of these, the cost to build these fabs pales in comparison to how much people are already willing to pay for AI hardware. Uh, Nvidia could literally subsidize entire new fab nodes if they wanted to. That's interesting that we're not seeing those types of like deals like I like. It says, we don't think they will actually directly do this, or will they?

• 19:46John Coogan?

  Wink wink, intel deal, but shows how much of a fab capex overhang there is. For the last two decades, data center construction basically co-opted the power infrastructure left over from USD industrialization. That's where you get like, you know, the Memphis site was like a former washing machine factory or something like that. And they had a lot of power because they need a bunch of machines to move all the different washing machine parts in there to build the washing machines. But of course, that actual business has moved overseas. And so Elon was able to go in and say, give me that power. Google's first operated data center was across a former aluminum plant. Hyperscalers are used to repurposing the power equipment from old steel mills and automotive factories. This is honestly a compelling ode to capitalism.

• 20:31John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for compelling odes to capitalism. As soon as one sector became more relevant, America was quickly and efficiently able to co-op the previous one's carcass. But we are now in a different regime. Not only are hyperscalers building new data centers at a much bigger scale than before, they are building them from scratch and competing for the same inputs with each other, not least of all, not least of which is skilled labor.

• 20:56Jordi Hays?

  Ryan says they should rebrand as the semiconductor company of Taiwan.

• 21:02Jordi Hays?

  To their credit, still the Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company. But yeah, flip it, flip it for the modern era and just copy the browser company.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:14John Coogan?

  Well, if you're looking to invest in one of these companies, go to public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. Multi-asset investing, trusted by millions.

• 21:25John Coogan?

  Maybe you're deploying $2 trillion in AI capex a year. Someone else needs producing, be producing 2 trillion worth of all other data center components, not just the chips. The people upstream of the data centers, the companies producing everything from copper wire to turbines to transformers to switchgear, we need to build more factories. The problem is that those factories have to be amortized over many, a many decade lifespan. And at usual margins, those factories are only worth building if this AI demand lasts for 10 to 30 years. There's an interesting, so he goes into some of the, the gas turbine manufacturing stuff. And ARR projections, the really interesting takeaway is the final chart on AGI timelines. The distribution, where is this electricity?

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Here we go. So not only does China generate more than twice the electricity than you than the US, but that generation has been growing more than 10 times faster than in the United States. The reason this is significant is that the power buildout can now be directed to new data center sites. China state grid could collaborate with Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu to build capacity where it is most helpful for their AI buildout and avoid the zero sum race in the United States between different hyperscalers to take over capacity that already exists.

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  China will basically run the experiment of we have worse chips, but we have like an incredible amount of energy.

• 22:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:50Jordi Hays?

  Efficiency doesn't really matter.

• 22:51John Coogan?

  Yep. And so the basically his like he sums all this up in this chart, which is the probability density, like the probability of the US hitting, hitting AGI over time and the probability of China hitting AGI over time. And the conclusion is basically like if AGI is coming soon, America is good because we have a head start in the race, but we're running slower. China has a slow start, but they're running faster. And so if AGI comes in 2035, China has a higher probability of it emerging there. I guess the question is like, how bad is it to be a year behind? How bad is it to be, you know, just, just six months behind in, in if AGI emerges?

• 23:36John Coogan?

  If you believe in like the fast takeoff of like, once it's there, you know, it's like the immediate win condition, you better be advocating for some American electricity.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was, there was a reference to Tyler Cowen's post from 2023. Do not underestimate the elasticity of supply. This was in the context of energy. So Tyler's post said, I said, when I first read about the discovery of a vast new deposit of lithium in a volcanic crater along the Nevada Oregon border, I can't say that I was surprised, not because I know anything about geology, but because as an economist, I'm a strong believer in the concept of elasticity of supply. Now about elasticity of supply in which economists tend to have more faith than do most people. Time and again, over the centuries, economists have observed that resource shortages are often remedied by discovery, innovation and conservation.

• 24:26Jordi Hays?

  All induced by market prices. To put it simply, if a resource is scarce, there's an upward pressure on its price, new supplies will usually be found. So you can, you know, reference this with the kind of people's energy concerns around AI. The big question is like, where's the energy going to come from for all these new data centers and planned CapEx? But Tyler Cowan's willing to bet that we will discover new sources of energy. We'll figure out how to make more gas turbines. There was some reporting, I think there's already like an immense amount of pressure on the Colossus data center development in terms of, I saw Wired

• 25:07Jordi Hays?

  was posting a video, I sent it to you yesterday, like somebody using this like thermal camera or some type of camera to view how much gas was being like let off. And it was just like, clearly they're just have have all these gas turbines firing.

• 25:23John Coogan?

  That was the, there was some good stuff in that video, but that was the dumbest part because it was like Elon has been publicly saying like, this is the biggest data center with the most energy.

• 25:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was framed as a

• 25:36John Coogan?

  Bombshell.

• 25:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was framed as

• 25:37John Coogan?

  We pointed a camera at it and it's big. It's big. It's the big, it's bigger than everything else. It's like, yeah.

• 25:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was framed as a gotcha, but Elon was saying that.

• 25:46John Coogan?

  Elon is extremely proud of how much energy this thing uses. He actually posts the exact energy figures constantly. But I did think that, we have Sagar and Jetty from Breaking Points joining the show tomorrow. And I think that he lays out a really good case for like, what public sentiment is like. And you can see in that video, there's a politician from Memphis who is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, like if you guys are going to come here and build a massive data center in Memphis, like you have to make sure that the water stays clean, that we don't wind up with really polluted skies. We don't want to be Beijing. We don't want to be, you know, some industrial capacity, like we, some industrial hub, like we've lived through that. We've seen like, you know, Detroit was at one point dirty. The industry

• 26:30John Coogan?

  sort of left, but like we, we want like a more modern futuristic eco-friendly. It's not to be like a total decelerating like tree hugger. It's just like, let's not give each other cancer, people. Like, there's probably a way around this. And so I think the, the actual discussion is going to get super, super heated. And I think Sagar is correct, and we'll unpack this with him more tomorrow.

• 26:56John Coogan?

  The discussion will get extremely heated and it will turn into these extreme ends of like, you want us, you don't want to cure cancer with AI. And like, you want to kill everyone with, you know, this, uh, you know, this insane pollution that's coming out of whatever natural gas turbine.

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  I'm surprised we haven't seen somebody like protesting on top of a data center yet.

• 27:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  You'd think somebody would have scaled one and.

• 27:19John Coogan?

  I, they also.

• 27:20Jordi Hays?

  People used to do this with, with trees, right? They would just climb to the top of a tree and it was going to get cut down.

• 27:26John Coogan?

  This happened at Anthropic, right? But for doom reasons, not for, not for.

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  Environmental.

• 27:30John Coogan?

  Environmental reasons. And so there's like, uh, you know, a very clear alliance that should form, right?

• 27:35Jordi Hays?

  Happened briefly. He got, he was hunger striking. He got hungry.

• 27:40John Coogan?

  He was there for a couple of days, but I mean, no one debates that there are tons of AI doomers that like are actively protesting the lab in one way or another. Like I would put Eliezer Yudikowsky's new book, If We Build It, if they, if anyone builds it, we all die. That's what it's called.

• 27:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:56John Coogan?

  Um, I would put that in like the, the AI protest canon. Uh, and it would be interesting to see if there's like a team of rivals that emerges with Eliezer. And then the, just the folks on the ground who are like, look, I actually think that AI is slop. I don't think it's going to be super intelligent or kill me. I just find that my electricity prices went up and I don't like that. So we're on the same team, like strange bedfellows, basically.

• 28:23Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 28:23John Coogan?

  Where they believe different things, but they arrive at the same conclusion. So they team up.

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  Same cause.

• 28:27John Coogan?

  Um, anyway, if you want to go visit Memphis, book a wander. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7, service. You really should, if you're a true technologist, go on a trip to see a data center in person.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  They, I don't know if they have anything in Memphis, but they have Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.

• 28:48John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 28:49Jordi Hays?

  It's the Wander Smoky Woods and they have Wander Smoky Peaks.

• 28:53John Coogan?

  Truly, that's probably like an amazing wonder.

• 28:56Jordi Hays?

  Forest.

• 28:56John Coogan?

  It's probably an amazing one.

• 28:58Jordi Hays?

  And you can probably see smoke rising from colossus.

• 29:01John Coogan?

  Colossus.

• 29:04Jordi Hays?

  It would be, it would be incredibly, it would be incredibly. Like wild if Colossus just started burning so much like dirty coal. It was just like this black like smoke rising. And they won't go that far.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Just what about just a good old fashioned wood fired data center?

• 29:28John Coogan?

  Tyler, can we figure out what it would take to have have you over there? I want you to have a little, uh, we'll build you a chimney in the Ultra Dome and we'll build you a hearth. And you can, you can stoke the fire with, uh, wood and cedar logs. And then I want you to capture the heat, turn it into steam, turn the flywheel to generate the electricity to run a fine tune of GPT OSS. Work through exactly how, how that would work. Is that possible? How much, how much, how many logs would you need?

• 30:05Jordi Hays?

  A wood fired data center.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  A wood fired data center, which is like the, the, you know how good a worm? It, it's almost fall here. We're cozy maxing. We're already in brown and green. As far as I'm concerned, the holidays are here and nothing would get me more. It would really bring the Christmas spirit forward to have a wood fired data center.

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Generating tokens the old fashioned way.

• 30:30John Coogan?

  Exactly. Just hanging out at the hearth, generating some tokens.

• 30:35Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine late nights with the fellas just tossing wood?

• 30:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:39Jordi Hays?

  The hearth?

• 30:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  Just powering the super intelligent.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  I'm pretty sure that's like how a steam engine works. Like I'm pretty, I mean, there's, I guess it was coal, not wood. But, uh, if you're on like the, the Titanic, you're, you're down in the boiler room and you need to boil water to turn the spring, to spin the turbine. You're taking coal and shoveling it into the fire to make heat, to make boil water. And there's no reason why we can't be doing it here. There's no reason.

• 31:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we gotta, we gotta go to the chat.

• 31:10John Coogan?

  Except all of the environmental regulations.

• 31:12Jordi Hays?

  Adam Hoops says, wife is going into labor. I'm between Jordy and John for my son's name. If Jordy or John can't decide, I'm letting Sam Altman spin up a model and name him himself. How about, how about data center?

• 31:26John Coogan?

  No.

• 31:26Jordi Hays?

  Data center hoops.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  What about, what about Adam, Adam Jr.?

• 31:31Jordi Hays?

  Adam Jr.

• 31:31John Coogan?

  I think Adam's a great name. Adam Jr., we'll call him Junior. Or, uh, have we talked about this?

• 31:37Jordi Hays?

  In all seriousness, Adam.

• 31:38John Coogan?

  Congratulations. This is incredible news.

• 31:40Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, log off. Log off. We'll still be here. You can catch the recording, but we're, we're excited for you and your family.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  I did, I did actually talk to someone who, uh, who, uh, had a baby and, and, uh, the, uh, the, the, the new mom and the husband threw on TV when they were like in recovery. Cause like oftentimes you're hanging out and you need something to watch. And they were like, yeah, let's, let's watch it.

• 32:06Jordi Hays?

  Why not?

• 32:06John Coogan?

  It's gonna blow your mind when I tell you who it is too. Cause it's a very funny, very funny couple. Uh, anyway. Uh, yes, naming the kid AGI would be funny. Aggie for short. Uh, that would be, that'd be great, but.

• 32:19Jordi Hays?

  Tyler is also a strong name for baby boy.

• 32:22John Coogan?

  Yes. Um, how about, uh, 2.6 million? Is that somebody in the chat?

• 32:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:28John Coogan?

  2.6 M. Uh, anyway, there was a, there was a, the timeline was in turmoil a little bit yesterday. Near Cyan and Rune going back and forth. Before we dig into that, let me tell you about Adio. Adio is the AI in AFCRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. Um, stick to this DRM, maybe stay away from the short form video consumption. It would be this, would be the argument from, uh, from near. Uh, it basically people were going back and forth with Rune. Where does Rune stand on Sora? Where does Rune stand on Slop? And so it's short form video.

• 32:58Jordi Hays?

  The Rune deleted his post.

• 33:00John Coogan?

  He did. He did.

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  So I don't know what it said.

• 33:02John Coogan?

  He, he, he committed seppuku effectively. Uh, it's a, it's a har, harikari on the timeline that we experienced. Uh, deleting your post, uh, is, uh, it is, it is.

• 33:15Jordi Hays?

  A sign of honor.

• 33:16John Coogan?

  It's a techno, yes, it's a technology brother ritual effectively. Uh, but, uh, we, we have, we have some, we have some traces. We have some, we have some fossils that we can unf, we can dust off.

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  So what, what was the general, what was the general idea of what he said? So we can get into this comment from Nir.

• 33:35John Coogan?

  He was saying, he was saying, there's, there's sort of a moral panic about, about short form video. I was kind of saying that with him too. And I think there was like, there was a big like, like this all started with like the meta vibes thing. Where everyone was like, this is brain rot. This is gonna one-shot everyone. Get ready to die. This is the worst thing ever. And my like, I was like, yeah, it is kind of sloppy. I, it is sort of infinite jesty. But like, there is like the possibility that this is just not popular. That like, it is possible that like, the slop trough just doesn't taste good. And people just actually want to do something else. Like, like chess.

• 34:16Jordi Hays?

  It was so obvious. It was so obvious on day one that, that it, the, the product was kind of cool.

• 34:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  But it was, it may as well have been.

• 34:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:24Jordi Hays?

  A play, a playlist, a video of like, cool AI videos.

• 34:27John Coogan?

  Like people, people refuse to believe that there is at least a probability that in 50 years, people are still watching humans create content. Like, I don't know, that there is a probability of that. It is possible. I think most, I think many, many people in like traditional media, just in not AGI pilled crazy world would be like, yeah, a hundred percent.

• 34:47Jordi Hays?

  The more people, the more people live online.

• 34:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 34:50Jordi Hays?

  The cooler will be to see a dude like wingsuiting. Cause it's like.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we're, we're, you know, every, you know, 99% of people watching this.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:58Jordi Hays?

  Inside on a screen.

• 35:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:00Jordi Hays?

  And this dude is flying.

• 35:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:02Jordi Hays?

  You know, 20 feet away from a mountain.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:04Jordi Hays?

  Like.

• 35:05John Coogan?

  And so, and so is there, is there a possibility that, that the meta vibes app becomes so addictive, you can't turn it off and it destroys your life? Like, like maybe, I've read the sci-fi. I, I would put a probability on it. I would say it's a couple percent that that happens. It is bad. But there's also just the possibility that people just are like, nah, I'm not into it. Right? Um, but people weren't, people weren't even, no one was saying like, hey, this might just not work. Everyone was like, meta vibes will kill everyone. And, and that was kind of the mood on the timeline. So, so Rune was reacting to that, saying, uh, that, uh, there's a moral panic about short form video. It's not actually that bad. Uh, he's going back and forth. Some people were pressing him.

• 35:43John Coogan?

  On like, like, don't you think this is bad for kids? He was like, I don't, I don't actually know that it's that bad because I watched a couple hours of TV a day as a kid. And is short form, is watching short form for three hours a day fundamentally different than watching TV for three hours a day? Because everyone will say, oh, the, the real trade off is like reading James Joyce versus TikTok. And it's like, that was not what was going on in the nineties.

• 36:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And what it, what does television do, right? They're like, they, they're using hooks, right?

• 36:12John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 36:12Jordi Hays?

  An episode of a television show starts and it starts off maybe dramatic and it pulls you in and then right before an ad.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  All of a sudden it'll slam to an ad for fall. The world's best generative image, audio and video models all in one place, developing fine tuned models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters. Yes. So we don't have a way to quantify brain rot, right? Like is Barney with ads on it on Nickelodeon? I'm getting a lot of things wrong.

• 36:35Jordi Hays?

  Actually, actually.

• 36:36John Coogan?

  Is that more brain rotty?

• 36:37Jordi Hays?

  We do have a way. We have twins.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  Yes. Oh, A B test.

• 36:40Jordi Hays?

  We can A B test them. One.

• 36:43John Coogan?

  I refuse, actually.

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, this, this, you could, I mean, it would, it would, you would effectively be potentially sacrificing.

• 36:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  A son for humanity.

• 36:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:54Jordi Hays?

  But imagine, imagine one son gets five hours a day on the iPad.

• 36:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:58Jordi Hays?

  From a young age in Sora app, in the Meta Vibes app.

• 37:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 37:02Jordi Hays?

  Just scrolling.

• 37:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 37:03Jordi Hays?

  The other is, is gets, you know, a, a, a personalized tutoring from.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you know.

• 37:11John Coogan?

  We also have Tyler. Let me volunteer. Maybe, maybe we can see, uh, uh, how much Sora have you watched?

• 37:21Jordi Hays?

  None. I never go on Sora.

• 37:23John Coogan?

  You're, you're, you're, you're purely like, if I, if I tell, if I order you, if I, if I, as your boss, I give you the task of generate a video for me, then you will do it. But you, you, you truly have not consumed like any.

• 37:36Jordi Hays?

  No, not since like the first day or two.

• 37:38John Coogan?

  What about you, Nick? Have you consumed any AI video, Sora or Meta Vibes? Cause you were really into it on day one, right?

• 37:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 37:52John Coogan?

  You have violated policies and then Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can we hear him at all on the stream? Sorry. I can hear him. Anyway, the, the, what about production team? Hands up if you've watched more than 10 minutes of AI video in the past week.

• 38:09Jonny Dyer?

  Zero.

• 38:11John Coogan?

  Zero. Philistines. Well, um, yeah, so I mean, it will get better. I don't know. But anyway, this all concluded with, uh, near Cyan and Rune going back and forth. Rune said, I like the way Sora looks. I like the content. That was his final, he wasn't saying, I'm not, I'm not doing some 3D chess coping on like, it's not that bad for you. He was just saying like, I like it. I think it's just good content every once in a while. It's fine. And so Nier says, do you actually believe this? Like, do you realize the product is the API, not the app as containment, isn't possible?

• 38:47John Coogan?

  And that short form video consumption is on the order of several hours per day for US adolescents. I didn't comment on the launch, but I'm sure, I'm not

• 38:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is what I, this is what I was saying. Like on launch day, which is like, if you really wanted to give Sora the chance to become a consumption platform, you wouldn't have made Sora 2 available via API for anybody to generate. You would have like, at least tried to contain it as much as possible, right? People still could have like, screen recorded and posted it elsewhere. But it was just very obvious immediately that it, that it was like, an incredibly innovative, like, AI creative tool and like, probably not going to work as a, like, new standalone consumption app. Because there's the, there's a lot of people, the TAM for people that are, will be entertained by AI video

• 39:41Jordi Hays?

  is like, the entire world in the fullness of time.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:44Jordi Hays?

  Anybody that's logging on to the internet will probably at least laugh a few times a year from an AI video, right? Or they're certainly going to see them. Uh, but the TAM of people that today only want to watch AI video is like, basically zero.

• 40:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. I'm trying to imagine the bull case for the API. Like if I'm, if I'm a OpenAI customer as a business and I'm, and I'm using GPT five or you know, some cash stuff and I'm using some reasoning tokens over here and I'm like a big API buyer and then they come out with Sora and I'm like, I really would like to use that in my business. Like I have an actual business use case. I'm trying to think of what that would be. Like I don't, I don't really know.

• 40:33Jordi Hays?

  The business use cases, I mean, think about how many platforms are trying to help people generate ads for social ads.

• 40:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:39Jordi Hays?

  Right? Uh, generate, you know, content for various videos they're making.

• 40:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. So if you're like Canon at Icon, uh, and you're an AI generative ad company or now like an agency and the API is not available for this new tool, you're going to be like bummed out, right?

• 40:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:58John Coogan?

  And so it just, it just feels like, I, I mean, I agree with all the rationalization about like it's better for the long term strategically to, you know, create, uh, to actually bootstrap a real network, keep everything in the network. Um, but at the same time, it just feels like the OpenAI ethos is just like do everything all the time, all at once. And that's just like their, their, their, their core thesis. Um, anyway.

• 41:23Jordi Hays?

  Uh, interrupting our timeline, Palmer Lucky has hit the timeline and says, it says something about society that the most controversial thing I have said in recent history is that I wish I would have married my wife sooner. Not that whales might have had better oral history than humans, not that America should start, should restart nuclear testing, marrying young. So, uh, obviously his comments on TVPN, uh, earlier this week, uh, uh, became somewhat of a current thing on the timeline. Uh, and of course people were, you know, taking, Taking, you know, one part of his statement completely out of context and in, in, in sort of ignoring the, the fullness of, of his point.

• 42:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:06Jordi Hays?

  But it's certainly, certainly been interesting to see the response. It's been very split.

• 42:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was, it was a true like wedge issue, both inside and outside of like the core tech community. Like I saw, um, I saw people who like literally write for like similar outlets on opposite sides of the issue, but I don't think of them as like left or right or pro tech or anti tech. Like there were pro tech people who liked the take or and hated the take and there were anti tech people that liked the take and hated the take. It was like all over the place. It was very, very hard to map. Uh, it was fun watching the conversation get started and I, it, it, it surprised me.

• 42:46Jordi Hays?

  It started with him calling me a turbo normie.

• 42:49John Coogan?

  Hilarious.

• 42:50Jordi Hays?

  Saying that.

• 42:51John Coogan?

  I was just laughing about it.

• 42:52Jordi Hays?

  I know. We were, we were laughing. We were laughing about that and then, and then, uh, he, he, he took it even further. But.

• 42:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it was, it was framed in, in like, let's, let's see how far we can push this envelope way, but you can clearly understand what the core message is.

• 43:09Jordi Hays?

  He even said, easy for me to say.

• 43:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:11Jordi Hays?

  I met my wife when we were teenagers.

• 43:13John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 43:14Jordi Hays?

  Now, and, and, and the broader conversation of how having children.

• 43:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:21Jordi Hays?

  In your thirties at any point is exhausting.

• 43:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:24Jordi Hays?

  Now, basically the younger you are, potentially the, the, in some ways it will be easier.

• 43:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I was, I was trying to think back to like, okay, would, like, like, like, let's say that I, uh, I actually did have kids at, you know, 20 or something like that. Um, so I know some people that had kids at 20, like guys that I grew up with in high school. Um, and they're. Their like, you know, becoming a dad experience is like framed kind of like, oh, it was like an accident or like a, you know, surprise. And they all turned out like, fine, like it all, it didn't, it didn't detract at all. It's just like, kind of just turned into like a funny bit of lore about them. And it's like, oh yeah, they have like a kid that's like much older than like the rest of their cohort.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  So they are in some ways like, you know, like they don't have a huge support group because all of their other friends have kids later. But in terms of like the mechanics of like what their life is like, it's not that much different.

• 44:28John Coogan?

  And I feel like no matter what, when you analyze kids, just the fact that you love them is so, it's such a wrench in the system of like, let's analyze this rationally. Because you wind up just saying, well, like, yeah, they're exhausting. They're exhausting at thirty five, they're, they'd probably be extremely exhausting at twenty. Yeah, you'd have more energy, but you have less experience. And also you love them. And so it's amazing. And it would be amazing then, it'd be amazing now.

• 44:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my, my take has always been the time always comes from somewhere.

• 45:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:00Jordi Hays?

  So if you have kids in your early twenties.

• 45:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:04Jordi Hays?

  Then by the time.

• 45:06John Coogan?

  Get ready to not club.

• 45:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, that's true.

• 45:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:09Jordi Hays?

  But, but, uh, you know, it's going to take up a lot of your time. Maybe it'll be massively distracting from your career, right? I, I think about this all the time.

• 45:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you know, early, you know, after, after my son was born, it was like, okay, there's now, I ended up just completely sacrificing my social life, right? I, there was work time and there was family time and there was like very little in between sometime there, there was work time that was a little bit social.

• 45:32John Coogan?

  But what is the social life for most people, for most?

• 45:36Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's their work.

• 45:37John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no. It's like a mating ritual.

• 45:40Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 45:40John Coogan?

  Like, a lot of the reason why.

• 45:42Jordi Hays?

  People are going out.

• 45:43John Coogan?

  People are, have a social life is because they're trying to meet someone.

• 45:47Jordi Hays?

  Peacock.

• 45:48John Coogan?

  Yes. They're trying to meet that person.

• 45:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 45:51John Coogan?

  And so we've just kind of extended our lives, which is incredible. And then injected an extra ten years of like, let's find the person and delay the process.

• 46:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And in my view, if, if somebody that has kids in their early twenties, well, by the time they're twenty eight and actually have hopefully like a skill set, their kids are in school.

• 46:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:10Jordi Hays?

  And, and maybe their kids are a little bit older.

• 46:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:13Jordi Hays?

  And they're able to potentially, they're, they're not hitting thirty and then having to go through this. Crazy experience of having kids and then it's still going to be a distraction from their career, but then they maybe have more responsibility, higher opportunity costs, you know, it's all these different factors, so.

• 46:29John Coogan?

  I think also people were very triggered by the, uh, the, the fact that he specifically said like, you know, he could, if he had said like 19, it would have been different than 16 because 16 is like underage, right? I, I think that people were probably latching on to that, that it's like very young. Or do you think it was mostly just like, like?

• 46:46Jordi Hays?

  He said it in a provocative way.

• 46:48John Coogan?

  Yes, but, uh, I, I actually don't know about the, the history of like, you know, like when humans had kids, like, I feel like there was a time in like the castle ages, like the medieval ages when like, uh, people were having kids at 16. Like that's true, right? He wasn't like factually incorrect about that?

• 47:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm sure. I mean, you should, you should look back through the Coogan family tax, you know?

• 47:12John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 47:12Jordi Hays?

  Go back a few hundred years and open it up and, and.

• 47:16John Coogan?

  I actually did go back and on my, on my Swedish side, there's this, there's this like 400 year chain where the family just kept using like the same naming convention. So they would say like Olafsson, son of Olaf, and then it would be like Jacobson Olafsson. Jacob Olafsson, Olaf Jacobson. Jacob Oblofsson, Olaf Jacobson. Jacob Olafsson. It would just go back and forth because they just kept naming themselves.

• 47:45Jordi Hays?

  No, my, my dad was the fourth in a row of the exact same.

• 47:48John Coogan?

  Exact same name. Yeah.

• 47:50Jordi Hays?

  And I would have been the fifth. And my mom was like, nah.

• 47:52John Coogan?

  Well, uh, if you have a, if you have another son who you give the same name as the, the dad, you can use the nickname Trip for, oh, no, no, it would be Skip because you skipped a generation.

• 48:06Jordi Hays?

  Really? Is that, is that the origin of Skip?

• 48:08John Coogan?

  Yes. That's where Skip comes from. Uh, and so if you have the same name as your father, you can be called Junior. Uh, everyone knows this. Uh, if you have the same name as your father and your grandfather, people can call you Trip because you're the triple. And if you have the same name as your grandfather, but a different name than your father, you can use the name Skip, which is very funny.

• 48:32Jordi Hays?

  Skip Hayes. Might be coming up.

• 48:34John Coogan?

  It's a good name.

• 48:35Jordi Hays?

  Might be coming up.

• 48:36John Coogan?

  You might have to do it.

• 48:37Jordi Hays?

  Um, in other news, there was some news or fake news this morning that the Trump administration is in talks to take equity stakes in quantum computing firms.

• 48:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:49Jordi Hays?

  Companies including Ionic, Rigetti Computing and D-Wave Quantum are discussing the government becoming a shareholder as part of agreements to get funding earmarked for promising technology companies, according to people familiar with the matter.

• 49:02John Coogan?

  And this is, and this is so important because like the free market just can't solve this. It's not like there's a whole bunch of like multi-trillion dollar companies that are, yeah.

• 49:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, hyperscalers that are heavily invested here, venture capital firms that are happy to fund, promising.

• 49:15John Coogan?

  It's not like Google like actually had a breakthrough like last week that people were pretty excited about. It's not like Microsoft's working on this.

• 49:21Jordi Hays?

  No, I think the admin did this specifically to torture Scralley because this feels very personal, right? So Scralley is very loudly and proudly been shorting, you know, Rigetti and Ionic and all these companies because, you know, I think the general sense is that, you know, there's a spectrum from like science experiments to scams, right? And people tend to kind of sit somewhere there in terms of their opinion on quantum. Josh Wolfe had some choice words earlier. Let me pull it up. He said, "This is beyond stupid, absolute

• 50:00Jordi Hays?

  waste of taxpayer money. Quantum is utterly irrelevant fraudulent BS." So, strong words there. But, yeah.

• 50:09John Coogan?

  Do you know the Rigetti lore?

• 50:11Jordi Hays?

  But before that, Scralley had, these, these companies had been selling off pretty aggressively. And of course, like you get an announcement like this, let's, let's look at Rigetti and see how they've been doing. So.

• 50:24John Coogan?

  Oh, Rigav in the chat, this is, this is a very interesting take. "My conspiracy is this was a planted story by someone in the admin to help with exit liquidity in expiring call options."

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  I think that's, that's potentially what.

• 50:38John Coogan?

  There's something, something odd going on here because.

• 50:40Jordi Hays?

  Because there would just be so much blowback from generally smart people about this that are taxpayers, that are Americans, that are going to say, "I don't want to be a shareholder in Rigetti."

• 50:54Jordi Hays?

  And so more and and there was pushback and concern about the Intel deal, but at least there was broad consensus that we don't want in we want.

• 51:02John Coogan?

  Maybe this is a hot take, but like, I actually disagree with Josh Wolf that quantum is utterly irrelevant fraudulent BS. I don't think it's fraudulent. I mean, I'm kind of, I'm kind of in line with the with the Shkreli take that it's it's just like it has a very narrow use case for very specific algorithms that and we don't really know the business application. It's not like L L Ms where we're just going to be stuffing quantum computing all over the place. It's like, there might be something that we've use it for, but we're not exactly sure. And so it is very much a science project. But I personally don't believe that that like, I won't say all of the quantum computers, but I don't believe

• 51:45John Coogan?

  that they are all fraudulent. Like, I think a lot of them are saying, look, you, the shareholder, are investing in a science project. I'm going to test some things. I'm going to run experiments. It might work, it might not. And you're like, I'm 100% down for that risk. Yes, like, take the risk. That's what I'm signing up for. Everyone's happy. Everyone's happy, even if it goes to zero. And so I don't see this fraud at all.

• 52:09Jordi Hays?

  Google's efforts, which are probably the most advanced in the world.

• 52:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:13Jordi Hays?

  Sundar is not out there like saying, hey, you know, really Alphabet should be a $10 trillion company because of our quantum efforts. Like, it's a project that they believe has real potential. So they're investing many billions of dollars into it. But it's but it's still even internally like structured as a science project.

• 52:32John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, Equus Global says, leave quantum to the Googles and the Microsofts. Fund with free cash flow. I think that's one good option. But to be clear, like, it's also great if VCs want to take a crack at that and say, hey, there's there's this really weird idea in quantum that Google and Microsoft are not going to even take a swing at because it's so bizarre. Everyone thinks it's a failure or, you know, not going to work, such a long shot. And so we are going to do it outside of the system. The analogy here would be like

• 53:02Jordi Hays?

  Quantum startup on that raised like a billion dollars. I don't remember. I don't remember their name.

• 53:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does not seem like it's a bear market.

• 53:09Jordi Hays?

  Capital is a constraint. Progress there. And so, yeah, hopefully this story, it's it's a sad. Sad situation where we have to say, hopefully this story was planted by someone in the admin whose calls were expiring.

• 53:27John Coogan?

  It happens sometimes. Well, you know who's not planting stories? Graphite dev because they're reviewing your code in the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Hub Slope Capital says, I am without speech. I like that as a funny, just like line that you can quote tweet things with. I am without speech.

• 53:48Jordi Hays?

  Brother Buchow Capital says, can't believe my tax dollars are going to be invested in Rigatoni computing.

• 53:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. And the crazy thing is like, this is Jaguar Analytics, this is the kind of stuff that used to happen to repeatedly during dot com bust. And, and it shows like the red, like all the different companies that are.

• 54:08Jordi Hays?

  Jonny Archer.

• 54:11John Coogan?

  And, and, and it's not Rigatoni, it's Rigetti.

• 54:14Jordi Hays?

  Iron.

• 54:15John Coogan?

  Founded by Chad Rigetti, and this is the lore. Do you know the lore? Chad Rigetti is married to Susan Fowler. Susan Fowler is the Uber whistleblower.

• 54:24Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 54:25John Coogan?

  Bombshell. Crazy. Crazy dinner table talk at that point. It's like one's building a quantum computer. The other one is blowing the whistle, writing books about Uber, working with Mike Isaac on that. Probably, I guess they knew each other. Although they did go book for book. That's the funny, that's the other funny lore is that she wrote the blog post that went viral, right? Mike Isaac at the New York Times was doing the, he's at the New York Times now. I don't know if he was there. I think he was there then. Mike Isaac was doing like the beat reporting on the play by play of all the chaos inside Uber as Travis was getting ousted. And then they both came to market with books and they went head to head. And I don't know who sold more copies, but it's just a funny thing of like, you know,

• 55:07John Coogan?

  when you blow the whistle, you gotta get that book deal. You gotta do, you gotta turn it into a 50 episode Apple TV original series. That's, you gotta turn it into, you know what you gotta turn it into? You gotta turn it into a one piece anime. Thousand episodes. None of this like, oh, Theranos was a crazy story. Let's turn it into an eight-episode series. No, I want a thousand animated episodes of the story of Elizabeth Holmes as she goes on adventures and it just continues forever. That would be good.

• 55:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, speaking of Elizabeth Holmes.

• 55:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 55:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, she's probably pretty excited about seeing CZ.

• 55:48John Coogan?

  Pardoned. The pardons are flowing.

• 55:50Jordi Hays?

  Chong Pung Chow.

• 55:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 55:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Canadian businessman and former CEO of Binance, uh, pardoned by the Trump administration. So, uh, you know, I'm sure she's thinking, I'm up next. I'm up next.

• 56:06John Coogan?

  Yes. Although, there is a rumor, she might be getting out early. Not because of like, anything special necessarily, but just the way the, like, when you Google it, it's calculated one way. Basically, like, the autocomplete is just like, when did she go to jail? Plus the maximum sentence and it adds up. But like-

• 56:28Jordi Hays?

  There's like a best behavior.

• 56:29John Coogan?

  It's like best behavior plus time served while you were under investigation and stuff. And so, you can count old times, because it's like, you were in prison while you were, you know, going through the court case, so we count that. And so, uh, I think that if things go well, she could be out in the next like, three to four years, maybe? Um, but yeah, uh, pardon certainly seems interesting. Um, and I think that's probably why we're seeing some posting.

• 57:00Jordi Hays?

  Seems interesting. You're not recommending the admin pardon?

• 57:06John Coogan?

  I haven't seen anything that, that would lead me to recommend a pardon. Um, at the same time, I haven't, I haven't seen a ton of, like, I think, I, I think I'm not exactly sure who got, who got the most burned. Like, there were definitely people that got like, bad test results and that's, and that's obviously like, seriously harmful. But, um, most of the VCs who, who invested, like, the investors were accredited. They took a flyer on a dropout from Stanford. Like, I don't know. Uh, I, I, I think it's kind of like a, you know, buy or re-wear situation with a company like that.

• 57:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but they put devices that didn't work into, into use around the country.

• 57:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  Which

• 57:46John Coogan?

  And so like the

• 57:46Jordi Hays?

  The like, I don't like the investors took the risk.

• 57:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:50Jordi Hays?

  They knew the risk that they were taking.

• 57:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:53Jordi Hays?

  But

• 57:53John Coogan?

  But the nature of the fraud was that they They lied about that.

• 57:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:58Jordi Hays?

  And could negatively impact.

• 57:59John Coogan?

  It's just so crazy that you were

• 58:03John Coogan?

  Bobby Kosnick, I am not a weeb. I merely studied the Antichrist lectures. And I have never seen an episode of One Piece. I have watched one piece of anime, which is Akira, just the movie.

• 58:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, DeeDee Dos was highlighting some sections from Kotu's AI report.

• 58:21John Coogan?

  Before you dive into this, let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Uh, yes, fascinating set of charts. Shall we pull them up?

• 58:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, DeeDee says, why we are not in an AI bubble in four charts.

• 58:39John Coogan?

  You gotta, you gotta summarize these and I'll hit the gong for every, for every positive bull signal out there. Break it down for me.

• 58:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, here's why. Multiples are nowhere near dot com level.

• 58:55Jordi Hays?

  And we got, we got, we got camera, we got face tracking on the camera. This is a new feature. Shout out to the production team. Capex is growing but funded by cash flow.

• 59:08John Coogan?

  Give me something else from the LaFawn.

• 59:09Jordi Hays?

  Largest tech coevaluations lower than nineteen ninety-nine.

• 59:15John Coogan?

  Selling business, baby.

• 59:17Jordi Hays?

  Concentration in the market isn't necessarily negative.

• 59:24John Coogan?

  What about the US government is gonna bail out everything from quantum?

• 59:27Jordi Hays?

  That's also quite exciting. Uh, Brian Halligan, uh, over at HubSpot, who's coming on the show soon, says, in my honest opinion, private markets are in a bubble, are in bubble territory while public markets still seem rational. I think, uh, I think that's a good take. I think a lot of what's holding us back from, from, you know, even more craziness is just the overall state of the economy, right? You have trade wars, tariffs, you have a, uh, weak labor market. You have an unpredictable admin. You have war in the Middle East, war in, in Europe. Uh, and you have a higher rate environment than we've been used to, right? And so imagine if we didn't have. If we didn't have those factors, I think it could be a lot crazier, right?

• 1:00:12Jordi Hays?

  But there's a lot of, there's a lot of real reasons for people to be kind of.

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. I also wonder if.

• 1:00:18Jordi Hays?

  Not, not entirely risk on.

• 1:00:20John Coogan?

  I wonder how much, how much different the, like, AI is, there are some new companies, right? OpenAI, Anthropic, there's a bunch of startups and private markets, but AI is a, is like a growth story for the mag seven. But the mag seven are so huge that it's just hard to like, you can't like turn it into a meme stock, you know? And I'm wondering if you go back to dot com, like, the biggest companies at the time, do you know the biggest companies during the dot com boom?

• 1:00:50Jordi Hays?

  Was it the?

• 1:00:51John Coogan?

  It's the oil companies. The oil companies were the biggest companies by market cap.

• 1:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Oh, by market.

• 1:00:55John Coogan?

  Like ExxonMobil.

• 1:00:56Jordi Hays?

  Not by like, you know, growth.

• 1:00:58John Coogan?

  No, no, no, not by growth at all. So what I'm saying is like, is like, you have this like, you know, like, you have this cruise ship that's like the anchor of the economy. And it's like the big companies. And at that time, it wasn't big tech, it was big oil. And big oil was like something that would be really hard to push. And the dot com narrative like didn't push it at all. But now we have the, the, the big tech folks who is also like a big cruise ship. And, but they're so big that like, it's hard for them to just like, oh yeah, like the mag seven tripled this month. Like, that would be a really, really crazy movie. It would take trillions of dollars of investment to actually drive that in the market. So, I don't know. Um, a bunch of bull cases. Tyler, what do you think?

• 1:01:41Speaker 02

  Okay, so I, I calculated how many, how, how big of a hearth I would need to.

• 1:01:46John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes.

• 1:01:47Speaker 02

  Um, so, okay, so if I'm using GPT OSS, a hundred twenty billion parameters.

• 1:01:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  And then I have.

• 1:01:52John Coogan?

  What do you need?

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  Like eight, eight, eight one hundreds. Um, you can probably get a, a decent fine tune within like an hour. So that's gonna be something around like eight, eight, eight point five kilowatts.

• 1:02:05John Coogan?

  Kilowatts.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  Kilowatt hours. Um, and then if you're, if you're looking at dry wooden logs, about two kilograms each.

• 1:02:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  You probably need uh, something like four to five logs.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:15Speaker 02

  To, to, to, for that energy.

• 1:02:17John Coogan?

  Wait, five logs of, and that's all you need to do this fine tune?

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  One hour, yeah. I, I was actually surprised.

• 1:02:23John Coogan?

  That's insane. I was expecting you to say, I'm gonna need massive family, all the coal.

• 1:02:27Speaker 02

  One hour. I mean, it's not that crazy.

• 1:02:29John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:02:30Speaker 02

  But.

• 1:02:31John Coogan?

  You could really fine tune GPT OSS in one hour?

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  And the model's pretty small.

• 1:02:34John Coogan?

  Okay. How would you, uh, would you need like a server rack? Or could you actually like build a computer that uh, we could house eight H100s? Is that possible? Or do you need like a proper server rack?

• 1:02:45Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I mean, eight is pretty big. You, I don't think you can just fit that in like a normal PC setup. Um, but even then, it's still not that big. A lot of people have that at their house.

• 1:02:54John Coogan?

  There's definitely the trappings of an, of a banger YouTube video here, you know, like those primitive like videos where like, I built a thing from scratch. I built a toaster with no modern technology. Have you ever seen those videos or anything?

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07John Coogan?

  Great. Uh, and, and I, I would imagine I fine tuned an AI model using logs. It would be a ripper for sure. Um.

• 1:03:15Jordi Hays?

  In other news, uh, Charles Gasparino says scoop, scoop alert, people inside Paramount Skydance say David Ellison, advised by his father, uh, Larry Ellison are reluctant to pay more than $25 a share for Warner Brothers as the buyout drama continues. His last offer, the third rejection from David Zaslove was $23.50 to be exact. Company still weighing a public, AKA hostile offer for Warner Brothers, which they will argue cannot be sold to other players who are interested, including Comcast because of regulatory roadblocks. Uh, full story coming. So, uh, Warner Brothers is currently sitting at, uh, I believe $21 a share. Yeah, $21.34. So David Zaslove is, uh, holding out.

• 1:04:05John Coogan?

  Did you know Andrew Ross Horkin got a genuine scoop about this deal while being on TV for three hours a day and promoting the book 1929 and being on one of the most aggressive book tours I've seen recently? Is that the goat noise?

• 1:04:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's my goat.

• 1:04:22John Coogan?

  I didn't realize, I never put it together that that was, okay, I get it now. Wow, that took me way too long.

• 1:04:28Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy.

• 1:04:28John Coogan?

  I just thought it was like you like farm animals.

• 1:04:30Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:04:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:31Jordi Hays?

  That's.

• 1:04:31John Coogan?

  That's the goat.

• 1:04:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's why I play, I played it for Jeff yesterday when he joined the show.

• 1:04:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that makes sense. I like the goat noise. We're building out the full farm analogy. We need the farm map.

• 1:04:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're working on getting live animals, of course. So we'll go to the goat ham.

• 1:04:48John Coogan?

  But truthfully, like I don't, I don't feel like I have a good understanding of, of, of what David Ellison is building. Like I, I'm, I'm newer to coverage of the media conglomerates because I focus more on the mag seven, more on the tech companies, more on the AI stuff. It's a fascinating world.

• 1:05:09Jordi Hays?

  I think he's running the experiment of like, just, you know, basically going to the world and saying one, one media industry, please.

• 1:05:16John Coogan?

  Basically, it feels like he's trying to build some sort of new conglomerate. Um, I don't, I don't know how the synergies pencil out. I don't know how everything works.

• 1:05:25Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get Barry Weiss on the show. Talk about her first couple of weeks over at CBS.

• 1:05:31John Coogan?

  We also have to tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 1:05:40Jordi Hays?

  Philip Johnston is on a tear. He says, I'm super excited to announce Star Cloud's partnership with Crusoe, builder of OpenAI's massive Stargate data center to enable, enabling the first public cloud in space next year. This is the first step in a partnership that will see Star Cloud providing energy for much larger Crusoe data centers over the coming years. There was also a post from Delian. He was firing shots at Nvidia because they announced AI shipbuilding partnership with Sironic. He said, "Nvidia has announced AI data centers in space and an AI shipbuilding partnership in the last two days. Words in physics just don't mean anything anymore. Dear God, this has to be the top. Please, when will it end?"

• 1:06:24John Coogan?

  He said that in the post? I kind of assumed he was like, you know, top pilled, but that was a wild place to go. Yeah, we were kind of, we were kind of dunking on this yesterday. I don't know. It seems like there's a lot of pieces that have to come together for this something to be, for this to be real.

• 1:06:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you know, Delian, from my understanding, will always do a deal that he's extremely excited about, but it's notable that he was very active earlier this year and he's sort of hasn't announced a new investment in the last little bit. So.

• 1:06:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I think some of this is fodder for the public markets, marketing campaigns, just general outlines of, you know, remaining futuristic. Like, there is a world where if you're Nvidia and you're looking at Andre Karpathy saying like, "Hey, the current thing is going to be slow." You're like, "Well, then let's, what are we going to do in the next decade while we're waiting around for ASI? Maybe we put some data centers in space. Maybe we build some ships. Maybe we do a bunch of stuff. More, more SaaS. That's what I want to see. Take some real shots."

• 1:07:33Jordi Hays?

  Mac rumors is reporting that there's virtually no demand for the iPhone Air. And I thought it was notable. I have a friend who used to work at Apple. He bought the iPhone Air, used it for, I think, like 24, 48 hours and returned it. He just said it was not the, the thinness of the phone was not worth the. The battery trade offs and he also said that that phone is so actively trying to conserve energy that it renders things like poorly.

• 1:08:05John Coogan?

  Okay, that's annoying because I feel like there's a little bit of skill issue with regard to the battery where it's just like, just get a car that has a battery charger in it.

• 1:08:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think there's something about phones.

• 1:08:15John Coogan?

  Put one at your desk, like figure out how to actually um, charge it regularly.

• 1:08:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:21John Coogan?

  Everyone has some point in their day where they can plug in and like if you just, maybe if you just are a wild man and have no routine whatsoever, but you're also addicted to sore and TikTok, you're gonna have a bad time. But I feel like if you have any sort of like, yeah, around noon, I'm at my desk and so I just put it down on the charging pad, like regularly, like you're gonna be fine.

• 1:08:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:43John Coogan?

  But I don't know.

• 1:08:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's also something about phones where I think the iPhone era is a bit cheaper, right?

• 1:08:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:08:49Jordi Hays?

  Um, but something about a phone is, is it is so valuable to your life.

• 1:08:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:54Jordi Hays?

  That if you ask somebody, like if you were selling an iPhone, like an iPhone from today to somebody in 2000, like how much would somebody pay for that?

• 1:09:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:04Jordi Hays?

  Would they have paid, would like a high powered executive pay like a hundred thousand dollars a year to have the modern, the iPhone from 2025 and 2000? Like I think it's, I think it's that valuable in terms of what it does for your life and so I don't, I don't think a lot of people are, are making, uh, at least like the average iPhone customer is saying, if I can get slightly more performance out of my phone for an extra couple hundred dollars a month, it's probably a good change.

• 1:09:29John Coogan?

  I'm just surprised there aren't more people that are, you know, like Tyler, were like a couple iPhones before, what were you actually on, 13?

• 1:09:37Jordi Hays?

  I was on, no, I was on the 11.

• 1:09:38John Coogan?

  11.

• 1:09:39Jordi Hays?

  So I was like six generations behind.

• 1:09:41John Coogan?

  Is that six years? You hadn't gotten a phone in six years?

• 1:09:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think that sounds right.

• 1:09:45John Coogan?

  Have you, was this your first phone ever?

• 1:09:48Jordi Hays?

  No, I was like, I was probably like freshman in high school.

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:53John Coogan?

  Okay. Okay, it's sort of adding up to me, but that's like,

• 1:09:57Speaker 02

  Tyler.

• 1:09:57John Coogan?

  What was your first phone?

• 1:09:59Speaker 02

  Um. It was probably like a hand me down, but it was probably like iPhone four.

• 1:10:04John Coogan?

  iPhone four.

• 1:10:04Jordi Hays?

  Wow, started on an iPhone.

• 1:10:06John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  Well, no.

• 1:10:07Jordi Hays?

  Silver spoon, silver spoon alert.

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 1:10:10John Coogan?

  Wait, so you don't remember where you were when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone?

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  I was, I was I even born? Yeah, yeah, I was like two.

• 1:10:19Jordi Hays?

  Brutal. Tyler, are you excited that the Sopranos creator David Chase is developing a new limited series about Project MKUltra for HBO?

• 1:10:28John Coogan?

  Do you know MKUltra? Do you know where you were when MKUltra happened? It's like from the seventies. Oh, you're giving him the tinfoil hat. This is the first, this is the first tinfoil hat. Oh, the tracking cam is phenomenal.

• 1:10:41Jordi Hays?

  Put it on Tyler, there you go.

• 1:10:43John Coogan?

  Why, why is he wearing the tinfoil?

• 1:10:45Jordi Hays?

  You're safe, you're safe now from MKUltra. Right, isn't that, isn't that, uh, wouldn't, wouldn't somebody?

• 1:10:50John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:10:50Speaker 02

  I thought MKUltra was like the LSD.

• 1:10:52John Coogan?

  It's LSD.

• 1:10:52Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I thought it was, I thought it was remote. I thought this was the remote mind control one.

• 1:10:56John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 1:10:57Jordi Hays?

  Exposed for not, exposed for not being.

• 1:10:59John Coogan?

  Wow, fake Skitzo, fake Skitzo, doesn't know his conspiracy theories. Uh, no, ridiculous. Um, uh, anyway, Co2 has a bunch of other stuff. We should go deeper into their, uh, public markets update. We should just have someone from Co2 on again, uh, cause we have a couple, a couple folks on.

• 1:11:17Jordi Hays?

  Love those guys. They said they, they studied.

• 1:11:20John Coogan?

  They studied, they sat, they sat down and.

• 1:11:22Jordi Hays?

  Hundreds.

• 1:11:22John Coogan?

  And read, uh, and they studied 10 books. They went back 400 years, read 10 books, analyzed 30 bubbles.

• 1:11:29Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for reading 10 bucks.

• 1:11:32John Coogan?

  And their conclusion was that it's not a bubble, right? I think, I, I think they think it's like 1996, which is awesome. I'm, I'm rooting for 96. Let's go. I also am rooting for the bubble already popped. It popped last Friday and now we're re-inflating. Anyway, we, we have, we have Jacob from Microsoft AI in the TVP and Ultra. I'm welcome to the show.

• 1:11:58Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Finally, somebody that almost.

• 1:12:00John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, we got a short guy in the studio.

• 1:12:04Jordi Hays?

  How tall are you?

• 1:12:06Speaker 04

  Six, seven.

• 1:12:06Jordi Hays?

  Six, seven.

• 1:12:07John Coogan?

  I'm six, eight.

• 1:12:07Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  Six, seven. Are you getting the six, seven thing? Do you have kids or anything? You know this whole thing? The six, seven thing?

• 1:12:14Speaker 04

  Come on.

• 1:12:14John Coogan?

  Yeah?

• 1:12:14Speaker 04

  Got to be in youth culture.

• 1:12:15John Coogan?

  I, I don't know.

• 1:12:16Speaker 04

  At all.

• 1:12:17John Coogan?

  I found out about it. I, I literally found out about it when the Wall Street Journal published an article.

• 1:12:23Jordi Hays?

  Oh, shit.

• 1:12:23John Coogan?

  And it was like, here's the, here's the latest trend that's causing problems for teachers. And I read it.

• 1:12:29Jordi Hays?

  What, what are you guys even talking about?

• 1:12:31John Coogan?

  You don't know this? Okay, so, so there, there's this meme where in middle schools, if the number six comes as next to seven, six, seven, that, yeah, it started from this meme. It'd be, all the kids would go crazy and go six, seven, and then they do this because, and, and if you trace it back, it goes like seven layers deep into like this. There was a kid at a basketball game who said six, seven, which was a reference to a basketball player's height.

• 1:12:56Speaker 04

  And then one awful rap song.

• 1:12:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:58Speaker 04

  That nobody had listened to before called Dude, Dude.

• 1:13:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:13:01Jordi Hays?

  Dude, dude.

• 1:13:02John Coogan?

  And that's a reference to 67th Street in Chicago, uh, which is like a popular area to sing about, basically.

• 1:13:09Speaker 04

  I'm impressed. That's all from the article?

• 1:13:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, loosely. Yeah, Wall Street Journal knows their stuff, knows their stuff. Anyway, the Wall Street Journal didn't have, uh, your backstory, so you have to give it to us directly.

• 1:13:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:20John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself.

• 1:13:21Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Uh, yeah, Jacob Andreou, uh, I lead product, uh, and growth over at MAI, uh, mostly focused on Copilot. Uh, before that, uh, I was at Snap for like nine years, uh, 2015, 2023, doing the same thing, basically. Uh, and then in the middle, venture for like a year and a half, uh, still do a lot of investment.

• 1:13:39Jordi Hays?

  Was that Greylock?

• 1:13:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:40Jordi Hays?

  That was here in LA?

• 1:13:41Speaker 04

  Uh, no.

• 1:13:42Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:13:42Speaker 04

  SF, uh, in, in the city, but I've been based in LA from 2014-ish, uh, and now just spent a lot of time in Redmond and Mountain View, uh, my, my two favorite places on planet Earth.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 1:13:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:52John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:13:52Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 1:13:55John Coogan?

  Copilot is not nearly sharp enough. Like you're gonna even narrow that down. That's like a million products.

• 1:14:02Jordi Hays?

  We're putting Copilot in everything.

• 1:14:04John Coogan?

  It's a multi-trillion dollar company. Like, uh, what do you focus on vertically, horizontally? How is the organization structured? Like, what are you actually doing on a day-to-day basis?

• 1:14:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's a super, super cool moment for Microsoft right now. We have a bunch of folks that have come together, a bunch of people that have been there. I'm running people all the time, Microsoft, been there for 35 years. It's fucking crazy. I've never seen anyone do this before. Am I allowed to swear on this show?

• 1:14:26John Coogan?

  We don't, but you can.

• 1:14:28Speaker 04

  We don't have any sense.

• 1:14:28Jordi Hays?

  But feel free to, if you feel like that's the right.

• 1:14:31John Coogan?

  If you're fired up.

• 1:14:32Jordi Hays?

  Set of words. Yeah.

• 1:14:33John Coogan?

  If that's what you want the Microsoft comms team to really like, take away from this, is that you went wild on a show? And they maybe shouldn't have greenlit it, then yeah.

• 1:14:42Speaker 04

  All right, we'll push the envelope. Um, no, look, we got together an amazing group of people, a ton of people that have already been there forever. Uh, and we're just trying to transform a bunch of the different things that say Copilot across the company. So we got a group of folks, they're super talented, working on a GitHub Copilot, on VS Code stuff, uh, you know, whether that's competing with Cursor, all the other folks in that agentic IDE kind of world. Uh, and then me and my team, we spent a lot of time on like the consumer Copilot app. So the thing that's in your pocket, uh, the thing that you, uh, can pull out of your pocket, use voice mode, uh, talk back and forth with, web retrieval. And then we introduced a bunch of really cool stuff, uh, just in the last week.

• 1:15:17John Coogan?

  And is, is, is consumer Copilot, is that powered by OpenAI models? Are you model agnostic? Are you training your own models? Like, how are you, how are you describing? Because with some of the foundation labs, they have to put a ton of their marketing behind like their model.

• 1:15:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  And we were having this discussion about like, at some point, consumers are gonna stop caring about the model. So how are you thinking about it?

• 1:15:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. So, uh, Microsoft AI, when we're chipping Copilot, we're just building the best possible product.

• 1:15:43John Coogan?

  Product.

• 1:15:44Speaker 04

  That's it. And we're super product focused, super customer obsessed.

• 1:15:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:15:47Speaker 04

  And at the end of the day, like, whatever's gonna give people the best thing in their pocket, like, that's the job. And so for a long time, that was OpenAI models. And thanks to, you know, the amazing partnership that we have with them, we can put all their models directly into the product. Uh, 4.0 powered the mainline response for us for a really, really long time, until GPT-5 came out more recently. GPT-5. Now is honestly, it's an amazing set of models and it's been really, really popular inside the product. But there are parts of the product where we're already serving other models as well.

• 1:16:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:16:13Speaker 04

  So we introduced a couple of new modes this week. One of them is not powered by an OpenAI model. A few of our own first party models just started to drop. So I think six weeks ago was the first time we privately started running LM arenas on MAI, fully end-to-end trained models.

• 1:16:27John Coogan?

  Okay, cool.

• 1:16:28Speaker 04

  So before that, yeah, before that, we had no ability really to build our own foundation models from scratch. And in the last six weeks, across both language and text and image, we've been in either the top five or the top 10 with our own first-party models. And that's like a first for us. And so it's been super cool.

• 1:16:43John Coogan?

  So does that reflect a view that essentially like the foundation model layer is commoditizing, it's high capex, but it is something that's maybe viable to get near the frontier?

• 1:16:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that a piece of it is a little bit that perceived intelligence. You know, when you try these different systems today, even when they're backed by different models, it is a little bit tough to tell, oh, this is way smarter than that. Like, things are kind of getting a little bit closer.

• 1:17:06John Coogan?

  We saw that with GPT 4.5.

• 1:17:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, totally. And then we went to five. A lot of people, even though it was a smarter model, were complaining about like the tone and the personality. And so

• 1:17:16John Coogan?

  We're in the spiky intelligence era.

• 1:17:17Speaker 04

  We're no longer in a race where just like smarter is just better every single time. And so to really start to build an amazing product, it's not good enough to just have a set of models that are marching up intelligence. You have to actually build what people want in the product.

• 1:17:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:29Speaker 04

  And so an ability to go kind of end-to-end and be able to actually look at the way people are using the product, have that feedback into like model training, especially post-training, and then have that then allow you to iterate the product. It creates this like model-product-user loop that is kind of the main way that you'll probably push the envelope in terms of meeting the user needs. So that's what we've really been focused on.

• 1:17:48John Coogan?

  And when you think about the user, the user of the app, are you thinking more business user, prosumer, consumer? All of the above? Like, there's, there's everyone from like Like the Xbox Call of Duty kit is a Microsoft customer to like the Fortune 100 company CEO is there's a very different archetypes.

• 1:18:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, we long term, we have to serve that whole spectrum to start. It's the consumer.

• 1:18:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:16Speaker 04

  And it's the person that is looking for this thing, you know, they're asking us for advice on health. They're trying to learn new things with co-pilot. They're asking for a lot of help making big decisions.

• 1:18:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:25Speaker 04

  Those are the places where we're really playing the most. And now you can't ship a product from Microsoft without being awesome at productivity. And so in the last few months, huge push in productivity, making way easier upload like tons of files, reason over them, create documents based on the source material you've uploaded. And this is just like rips like the, as soon as we put this in the hands of users completely, you know, we, we kind of expected, okay, if we improve answer quality generally, this is always going to be good. Improving file upload and improving the number of files that people could upload.

• 1:18:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:54Speaker 04

  Users just were drawn to it so quick.

• 1:18:56John Coogan?

  So, so I mean, it's, it feels like the real wheelhouse, like you're just going to knock it out of the park with the customers. If they're running their life on 365, like they have, they have a Microsoft email. They have, you know, OneDrive going, they like, they set up their life in that way. Maybe because they use it at work, maybe it's also hybrid work home, but that's going to be a really great experience for them.

• 1:19:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the product today doesn't actually need to be rooted in M365 at all. You can just download it, you can just use it and it's actually amazing for that use case. Long-term, the system that is the highest context on you is going to be the best in both.

• 1:19:28John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:19:28Speaker 04

  It's going to be the one that knows when your meetings are so it can schedule that dinner that you've wanted to.

• 1:19:32John Coogan?

  Yep, yeah.

• 1:19:33Speaker 04

  And so we actually think that the long view here is that these things ultimately have to come together. But for the next six to nine months, we're going to serve it, focus on nailing the enterprise use case in M365. Inside of all the work apps, you already do all your work in. And then at the same time, on the other end of the spectrum for consumers, nail the co-pilot app that you just download from the app store and you just love and you use.

• 1:19:51Jordi Hays?

  How, how should startups think about your guys' ambitions? Because I think that Sam had a quote, it was probably a few years ago at this point, maybe a couple of years ago, which was like, don't build a company that's, that's assuming models not getting better. And I've seen so many companies this year, we've had some of them on the show, we've talked about them that are basically. They may as well have said like, we're building a different Microsoft Copilot.

• 1:20:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:20Jordi Hays?

  For XYZ or we're building, we're building Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Copilot for Excel. As a new company.

• 1:20:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:28Jordi Hays?

  And it's cool. Like, these are big categories, right? They're extremely valuable products. It's, it's worth new teams like trying to take a crack at some of this like timeless software. But I'm curious, you're, I'm sure you see some of them and you're like, wait, you know that like, we do that already.

• 1:20:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's on our roadmap.

• 1:20:46Jordi Hays?

  And we, we have like, you know, hundreds of millions of people.

• 1:20:49John Coogan?

  As opposed to like Bloomberg has an Excel plugin and they've had one for a long time.

• 1:20:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:54John Coogan?

  That hasn't been on Excel's roadmap because it's a separate thing. But yeah, how, how are you talking to startups?

• 1:20:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, look, I think if you get really specialized, like the Bloomberg example, like we're never going to change all of Excel.

• 1:21:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:03Speaker 04

  To go compete with like a specific vertical of a way people use Excel.

• 1:21:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:07Speaker 04

  You can't change like the core platform that much.

• 1:21:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:09Speaker 04

  But if you're trying to build something and I won't use the Excel example because it's too close to home, I think.

• 1:21:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:21:14Speaker 04

  For people that are working on this problem. But if you built like a plugin for Word that does something that's like pretty horizontal, like it uses Word for you.

• 1:21:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:22Speaker 04

  We know, like this is certainly something we spend a lot of time thinking about.

• 1:21:25John Coogan?

  Word has had templates.

• 1:21:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:27John Coogan?

  For years.

• 1:21:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:29John Coogan?

  And if you think about, you know, prompt to template, like that's the very obvious next step. Do you feel like there's a, there's a responsibility for the Microsoft brand to send clear messaging to startups? So that you don't steamroll them? I always wonder about that. Like, it feels like Sam was kind of saying like, you know, I'm a former YC, you know, head. I want startups to like me, build on my platform, et cetera. And I don't want someone to accidentally get crushed. By the steamroller.

• 1:22:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. I think that when you're training foundation models at the scale that they are, and have kind of been doing it for as long as they have. I think that the world. Is still adjusting to how quickly things are changing.

• 1:22:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:13Speaker 04

  And so I think the degree that the like model builders can signpost and be like, hey, like, this is going to change a lot really quickly. Uh, I do think that this is probably just the right thing to do for the ecosystem. Now, that being said, for us, we're just focused on building an amazing product.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the other thing is some startups are overtly saying, I'm going to kill.

• 1:22:31Speaker 04

  They're coming for itself.

• 1:22:33Jordi Hays?

  They're coming for you. It's not like you'd be like, hey, you know,

• 1:22:36John Coogan?

  It's a knockout drive.

• 1:22:37Jordi Hays?

  Maybe don't do that because we're doing that. It's like, no, they're trying to eat your lunch.

• 1:22:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:41Jordi Hays?

  It's totally fair to just keep expanding your product in ways that, you know, are valuable for the majority of users.

• 1:22:46Speaker 04

  But the agentic stuff happening in Excel, as a specific example, is really cool. Uh, and so it's one of those areas where it's like, look, focus, you can win a lot of things by being focused. So who knows? Maybe the people doing that are still going to have an amazing product and build a great business, but Excel is going to get pretty agentic.

• 1:23:01John Coogan?

  Do you have anything to show us today?

• 1:23:03Speaker 04

  A hundred percent.

• 1:23:03John Coogan?

  Let, let's take.

• 1:23:04Speaker 04

  You got a lot of cool stuff.

• 1:23:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Show us some stuff.

• 1:23:06Speaker 04

  Well, so just quickly, the stuff that we.

• 1:23:08John Coogan?

  We have an active camera here so we can see your phone screen if you want to pull it up.

• 1:23:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the stuff that we talked about, uh, gosh, just a little bit this morning. Um, we have a huge release of the AI browser. Uh, and so I think we heard a lot about AI browsers this week.

• 1:23:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:21Speaker 04

  Uh, and the biggest difference is Edge has, you know, hundreds of millions of people using it.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:26Speaker 04

  And now every single one of them with a flip of a switch now has an agentic browser in the form of co-pilot mode.

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:32Speaker 04

  I've used it to reorder stuff on Amazon.

• 1:23:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:23:34Speaker 04

  Uh, kickoff stuff for me. It's been awesome. Uh, we also, uh,

• 1:23:37Jordi Hays?

  And that's, and get, get into, uh, yeah, get, get into maybe a little bit more there.

• 1:23:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:23:42Jordi Hays?

  Uh, just, just while we're talking about it, but it is just like, you can chat with the pages that you're on and.

• 1:23:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, so sidebar is totally there. Uh, and you can reason over multi-tab context and you can talk about the different stuff that you're doing. The, the thing beyond like actions, like we've seen a bunch of people talk about, whether it was like Comet or the Atlas stuff from earlier this week.

• 1:23:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:59Speaker 04

  Um, you know, actions are just going to get better and better as the models improve. And, you know, co-pilot mode and Edge is, you know, state of the art with respect to the actions that you can do. Uh, the, one of the really cool differences is once you enable it, it'll actually start to pick up like patterns and habits of your browsing. And it'll actually create these journeys, uh, and do things proactively for you and you can jump back in where you left off. And so if you're like. Planning a trip and doing flights in a few tabs and doing hotels and other tabs and trying to figure out stuff to go do. Edge will actually see what's going on with that. And the next time you come into the browser, it'll actually have taken the next step in planning that trip for you. And with a single tap, you just jump straight back into flow where it's actually done the next thing. And so

• 1:24:35Jordi Hays?

  That's cool.

• 1:24:36Speaker 04

  For me, when I'm like interviewing candidates and just doing a bunch of It's perfect for this.

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  How do you, uh, there was some conversation concern about prompt injection. Is that like, how do you think about like solving that problem? It felt like it was, people were saying like, hey, this is a big risk, like slow down, but it felt like something that was somewhat solvable, like pretty quickly.

• 1:24:56Speaker 04

  I think that's right. And I think that you have to look at this whole class of products right now as it sounds a little maybe too over the top, but kind of like a security preview. Like we, we know there's a whole bunch of risks with allowing the browser and these models to take actions like this. You've really have to supervise it. We have a ton of checks and balances. It'll ask you. And a ton of steps along the way to make sure everything's still on the rails. Uh, but we're learning alongside everybody else and this area is going to evolve really, really fast. So we're ready to just keep playing whack a mole as these issues come up.

• 1:25:23Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:25:23John Coogan?

  Are there any surprises? Do you have anything that might be

• 1:25:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:27John Coogan?

  teed up for us? I, we love hitting the gong around.

• 1:25:30Speaker 04

  So, so we did, we are now the first ever AI app to also drop groups.

• 1:25:35John Coogan?

  Okay. Are you on the most aggressive version of liquid glass, by the way?

• 1:25:38Speaker 04

  I am like

• 1:25:39John Coogan?

  Complete

• 1:25:39Speaker 04

  liquided out.

• 1:25:40John Coogan?

  Glass.

• 1:25:41Speaker 04

  I am, it's, it's all glass.

• 1:25:42John Coogan?

  Very cool. Okay. It looks good.

• 1:25:43Jordi Hays?

  And H2O maxing.

• 1:25:44Speaker 04

  And with Pro Max, you actually get the battery life. So it can power liquid glass.

• 1:25:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25:49Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:25:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So groups is phenomenal. It's now the first place where if you're having a chat with Copilot, you just add someone to the group. Use it for my wife. When she's asked me questions, I have no idea. The answer is all the time. I can just put her in the chat and she can just take the

• 1:25:59Jordi Hays?

  That's cool. Like creating a group chat with an AI and other people.

• 1:26:04John Coogan?

  You're not bringing it to teams. It's like, yeah, so sharing this and then, and then we're both on.

• 1:26:08Speaker 04

  So when I'm in, when I'm in the thread,

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:26:10Speaker 04

  I just hit share.

• 1:26:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:12Speaker 04

  Invite with a link. I can drop it in iMessage or whatever. And then she's just in the chat.

• 1:26:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:15Speaker 04

  And they don't even install the app.

• 1:26:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:26:17Speaker 04

  They can use it right from mobile Safari, which is super cool. And so this is the first time across all these apps that you can finally do this.

• 1:26:22Jordi Hays?

  How, how, it seems like it's such a great and somewhat obvious feature. I'm somewhat, I'm somewhat surprised that it hasn't.

• 1:26:29Speaker 04

  I was shocked when I joined, I joined MAI, I was like, no one has built anything social in any of these products. I worked on my, I had Snapchat before I left. And so like, no one had really done social.

• 1:26:40Jordi Hays?

  Why not us?

• 1:26:41Speaker 04

  Like, that's fine.

• 1:26:43John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:26:43Jordi Hays?

  Right back.

• 1:26:44Speaker 04

  And then, and then one of the really cool things that we did, I was Cole Pat knows all about you guys, by the way.

• 1:26:49John Coogan?

  Oh, really? Well, we do put out 15 hours of content every day. Okay.

• 1:26:54Speaker 04

  We introduced Miko, uh, who's this new person that you can talk to, this new character.

• 1:26:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:26:59Speaker 04

  Uh, really cute face. It's not gonna sex with you. So it's completely different than the other AI.

• 1:27:05John Coogan?

  Explicitly.

• 1:27:06Speaker 04

  It's not.

• 1:27:07Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:27:07John Coogan?

  Explicitly non-explicit.

• 1:27:08Speaker 04

  That's not what it's gonna do.

• 1:27:09Jordi Hays?

  This is the counter positioning. We love counter positioning.

• 1:27:11John Coogan?

  Let's bring the gong for decent.

• 1:27:12Speaker 04

  That's not what's gonna happen.

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

  Let's bring the gong.

• 1:27:18Speaker 04

  It's, it's not.

• 1:27:19John Coogan?

  Traditional values.

• 1:27:21Jordi Hays?

  Bull market and traditional values.

• 1:27:25Speaker 04

  And so with traditional values at our core.

• 1:27:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:27:27Speaker 04

  Uh, as soon as we showed, uh, Miko to Satya, his favorite thing actually was like poking it, which I couldn't find a better way to describe that on air without it sounding a little bit weird.

• 1:27:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, it sounds.

• 1:27:37Speaker 04

  But again.

• 1:27:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:37Speaker 04

  It's, it's, it's gonna be strictly platonic.

• 1:27:39John Coogan?

  It's safe for work.

• 1:27:40Speaker 04

  It's totally safe for work.

• 1:27:41John Coogan?

  Because this is from the company that brought you Microsoft Excel.

• 1:27:43Speaker 04

  And, and we, and of course.

• 1:27:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:27:45Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 1:27:45John Coogan?

  And I would trust that brand.

• 1:27:46Speaker 04

  And so as, as you poke Miko.

• 1:27:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:27:49Speaker 04

  And.

• 1:27:50John Coogan?

  Okay. How many times?

• 1:27:53Speaker 04

  You really gotta hammer it.

• 1:27:54Jordi Hays?

  Hammer.

• 1:27:55John Coogan?

  Hey!

• 1:27:55Jordi Hays?

  Oh!

• 1:27:56John Coogan?

  Clippy's back!

• 1:27:57Speaker 04

  Clippy is back.

• 1:27:59Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:28:02Jordi Hays?

  We, we have been, we have been asking for this.

• 1:28:05John Coogan?

  Is this breaking news? Is this a scoop for us?

• 1:28:07Speaker 04

  This is.

• 1:28:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're.

• 1:28:08Speaker 04

  This is the first time this has been on air.

• 1:28:10John Coogan?

  Post the trading card now! Clippy is back.

• 1:28:13Speaker 04

  Clippy is reborn.

• 1:28:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:28:16Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 1:28:17Speaker 04

  Clippy walked so Miko could run.

• 1:28:19John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah.

• 1:28:19Speaker 04

  And so we gotta pay an homage to our roots. And so Satya, when he saw this, demanded.

• 1:28:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:28:24Speaker 04

  That Clippy.

• 1:28:25John Coogan?

  I'm so happy about this.

• 1:28:26Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 1:28:27John Coogan?

  I, I think people, people have, people forget.

• 1:28:31Jordi Hays?

  We've been, we've been begging for this.

• 1:28:32John Coogan?

  We've been begging for this. Obviously Clippy had like a bad, bad rap and people were like, it didn't do what it was promised. But I feel like all of the nuance of like where it wasn't perfect has completely melted away and it's just lore. It's just great lore.

• 1:28:47Speaker 04

  Your parents hated it, so the kids loved it.

• 1:28:48John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:28:49Speaker 04

  And it was cool to love it, so everybody else got on.

• 1:28:51John Coogan?

  And so it's so ready to bring it back. So.

• 1:28:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, I did, yeah. So many good, so many good memories of being in the computer lab at school and just looking down and knowing that Clippy was there. He was riding with me.

• 1:29:01John Coogan?

  How, how are we, what, what does it take to update the name of the app in the iOS App Store to just Clippy? You got it.

• 1:29:08Jordi Hays?

  That's the next.

• 1:29:09John Coogan?

  Right now it's an Easter egg, but we're working here together. Baby steps.

• 1:29:16John Coogan?

  Actually, there's like a team of 25 people that really worked hard on Miko and There's like, there's like three CMOs.

• 1:29:23John Coogan?

  This is not, you know. Bring that Clippy. But that is very exciting. Thank you so much for coming by. No, thanks for having me, guys. Breaking it down. Yeah. What a fascinating time in the industry. What a fascinating place to be. It must be thrilling to be in your seat. It's an absolute treat. There's five places in the world. You can try to build Frontier AI for a billion people and this team and this setup, it's unbelievable. So it's a really

• 1:29:44Jordi Hays?

  No, as a, as a, as a, as a true product guy, like going somewhere where you have that scale, resources, et cetera. And it's actually, you know, it's good that we have just this flood of, flood of talent into, into early stage companies and the labs and all that stuff. But it's actually incredibly important that talented people go and work at, you know, these companies that already power, you know, use cases for billions of people, millions and millions of companies. So I'm glad you're there.

• 1:30:11John Coogan?

  You gotta do it. Hundred percent. Yeah. Anyway, so much. Good to see you guys.

• 1:30:14Jordi Hays?

  Dude.

• 1:30:14John Coogan?

  It was fantastic. Congratulations.

• 1:30:17Jordi Hays?

  Come back on again soon.

• 1:30:19John Coogan?

  Our next guest is Drew Houston from Dropbox hopping on at 1pm. We have 30 minutes to take you through more of the news. But first, let me tell you about numeralhq.com. Let numeral worry about sales tax and VAT compliance. I use it myself. It's the official tax partner of Lucy, the nicotine company. That Palmer also got in trouble with, talking about nicotine. But that is a much lower, that's a much less, you know, controversial topic. I think everyone has hashed out the nicotine story so many times. I hope everyone knows.

• 1:30:54Jordi Hays?

  I can't believe.

• 1:30:55John Coogan?

  The Economist published a

• 1:30:56Jordi Hays?

  Clippy's back.

• 1:30:56John Coogan?

  Wait, what?

• 1:30:57Jordi Hays?

  I can't, I just can't believe Clippy's back.

• 1:31:00John Coogan?

  You're still rocked by this?

• 1:31:01Jordi Hays?

  I'm rocked. This is shaking my worldview.

• 1:31:04John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:31:05Jordi Hays?

  No, but this is, this is super fun.

• 1:31:07John Coogan?

  The, the, the nicotine, the nicotine thing is funny because everyone was getting mad about Palmer for basically, you know, in his own way, teeing up the argument of like, are there benefits to nicotine? And like, this is a topic that has been discussed by Gurn back in 2014, 2015. Then we started Lucy. We were talking about it a little bit. Andrew Huberman did a big deep dive on nicotine, kind of laid out some of the complexities. And he actually revisited that. It's in the stack today. Do you have his post pulled up? What did he wind up actually saying fully?

• 1:31:45Jordi Hays?

  I'll pull it up here.

• 1:31:46John Coogan?

  Pull that up. But the really interesting one is from The Economist, who I regard as a pretty conservative organization. They're not really doing hot takes over there. September 12th, 2025, published an article called, "What Nicotine Does to Your Brain: Their Conclusion. The Drug Is Hugely Addictive, But It Does Boost Mental Performance." And so that's the formulation that I think Palmer was grappling with, which is there's mental performance, it's highly addictive. How do you balance those in a world where you remove the carcinogens and you don't wind up with actually smoking cigarettes?

• 1:32:24Jordi Hays?

  But he was talking about that it's an appetite suppressant.

• 1:32:27John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:32:27Jordi Hays?

  There seems, there's obviously benefits in not being overweight.

• 1:32:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:32:31Jordi Hays?

  There's trade-offs with everything.

• 1:32:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. But anyway, what was Huberman's final? Let's trust the experts on this one.

• 1:32:39Jordi Hays?

  Let's go to the experts.

• 1:32:40John Coogan?

  What was Huberman's final?

• 1:32:41Jordi Hays?

  He said, "With Palmer Lucky's comments about nicotine on TVPN, your reminder that yes, nicotine increases focus, also is very habit-forming. Duh, is not carcinogenic." I know that it's habit-forming. I've quit nicotine, you know, five or six times.

• 1:32:54John Coogan?

  Yes. I typically quit it like every night before I go to bed.

• 1:32:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:59John Coogan?

  And then pick it back up.

• 1:33:04Jordi Hays?

  "Is not carcinogenic unless smoked, vaped, dipped, or snuffed."

• 1:33:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:07Jordi Hays?

  "And is an unusual stimulant because it simultaneously focuses and relaxes you, also raises blood pressure."

• 1:33:14John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:33:15Jordi Hays?

  Again, do your own research.

• 1:33:18John Coogan?

  Also, 21+. Don't get in the game unless you're 21+, Tyler.

• 1:33:24Jordi Hays?

  I've never, why are you looking at me?

• 1:33:28John Coogan?

  Well.

• 1:33:29Jordi Hays?

  They went to the wrong.

• 1:33:31John Coogan?

  They went to the wrong camera. The little jumpscare.

• 1:33:33Jordi Hays?

  Travis Kelsey is teaming up with an activist group to invest in and revive Six Flags.

• 1:33:42Jordi Hays?

  There was another. Oh, I don't know. We have no idea. Left.

• 1:33:48Jordi Hays?

  Mike Isaak says genuinely appreciate how Pop Crave left out the investor part of activist investor group because all the people in the replies think that there's going to be like a BLM takeover of the roller coaster park. Someone else was saying, like, did Travis Kelsey, like, get three wishes when, when he was like 11? And he's like, I want to be a football player. I want to date the biggest pop star in the world.

• 1:34:13John Coogan?

  It's a, it's a $200 million deal. He bought 9% of the theme park operator. And we love to see big name celebrities crossing over into the private equity world.

• 1:34:24Jordi Hays?

  Wow, they have the ticker.

• 1:34:25John Coogan?

  Beak wet.

• 1:34:26Jordi Hays?

  Do you know their ticker?

• 1:34:27John Coogan?

  Fun.

• 1:34:28Jordi Hays?

  So good.

• 1:34:29John Coogan?

  That's a great ticker. And a little fun fact, turns out, according to ChatGPT, you cannot reserve and barter stock tickers. I think we need to do a PSA about this. We heard some rumor that people were trying to, in the way that you buy a domain, maybe you squat on it. Let's say that you think that, you know, after AI.com, after chat.com, after, after quantumcomputing.com, there's going to be a wave in time travel. So you go out and buy timetravel.com and you wait and then somebody comes and buys it from you and you make a nice return on your investment. That's totally cool in the dot com world. That doesn't work with reserving New York Stock Exchange tickers. Like, you can't trade them that way, at least according to ChatGPT.

• 1:35:15John Coogan?

  And.

• 1:35:16Jordi Hays?

  The oracle.

• 1:35:17John Coogan?

  And so, speaking of just funny stock tickers, we do, we do not believe that there's.

• 1:35:21Jordi Hays?

  I can see why, I can see why Travis Kelsey was, was interested in the Six Flags trades at, at, at less than 1X revenue.

• 1:35:29John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:35:31Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:35:33John Coogan?

  Hugely.

• 1:35:34Jordi Hays?

  He's seeing, he's seeing deep value.

• 1:35:36John Coogan?

  Are, are you bullish on, first, do you like theme parks?

• 1:35:41Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:35:43John Coogan?

  Never? Never been?

• 1:35:45Jordi Hays?

  I used to go to Legoland a lot growing up. I enjoyed Legoland.

• 1:35:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but I kind of grew out of theme parks at a young age and I haven't been to one in.

• 1:35:56John Coogan?

  I never had a fear of heights. I never, I never.

• 1:35:58Jordi Hays?

  More than a decade.

• 1:35:59John Coogan?

  I never was like, I don't like them. Uh, but I also was never like, I gotta go a ton.

• 1:36:08John Coogan?

  Kids sort of change that because kids really like them. It's fun to go with the kids. Uh, but Six Flags is, it's a different target audience. It's not as, there's not as much lore around every ride. But are you bullish on theme parks generally in a world where Bill Peebles is updating us on Sora and, and it seems like the march of generative AI is unrelenting? Are we, should you go long slop and then also, you know, steel on the, on the roller coaster track?

• 1:36:49Jordi Hays?

  I think I'm somewhat takeless here. I don't, you know, uh, when Chesky was on a couple of days ago, hi- his point of view was that as, as slop increases, people will, I mean, these are my words, not his, but you know, digital life becomes more intense. People will want to touch grass more. They'll want to go on trips, things like that. But in some ways I feel like the theme park is like real world slop, right? It feels like, I imagine going to Six Flags for me would, for four hours would feel like I would come away feeling like I was using Sora for four hours, right?

• 1:37:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:37:24Jordi Hays?

  Like not exactly, it's, it's not like really counter positioned.

• 1:37:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's not exactly the metropolitan.

• 1:37:30Jordi Hays?

  It feels like the physical, you know, because I, I just, I don't like to pay to be in crowds.

• 1:37:34John Coogan?

  It's physical brain rot.

• 1:37:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:36John Coogan?

  It's brain rot I R L.

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  But maybe Travis Kelsey wants to.

• 1:37:40John Coogan?

  Turn it around.

• 1:37:40Jordi Hays?

  Turn it around.

• 1:37:41John Coogan?

  Tear down the, tear down the whole roller coasters, put in a, put in a museum.

• 1:37:46Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he wants to increase the risk, right?

• 1:37:47John Coogan?

  Or a library.

• 1:37:48Jordi Hays?

  Football players go out there, they're going head to head, right?

• 1:37:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:51Jordi Hays?

  It's a high-risk environment, a lot of injuries. Maybe he says, hey, Six Flags injury rate right now, this is, this is the Nathan Fielder

• 1:37:57John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:37:58Jordi Hays?

  uh, strategy.

• 1:37:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:59Jordi Hays?

  The, the, the, uh, sort of accident rate is so low on the roller coasters that people don't get the same rush as if they thought that there was maybe like

• 1:38:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:09Jordi Hays?

  half a percent chance that it, that each, that a ride would end in disaster, right?

• 1:38:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:38:14Jordi Hays?

  And so then that would, you know, really bring you into the physical world and really make you feel human to be taking on that level of risk, right?

• 1:38:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:20Jordi Hays?

  So, who knows?

• 1:38:21John Coogan?

  Well, good luck to him. Uh, the, the, the Sora update, we already talked about Sora a little bit, but, uh, new, new, uh, you can register cameos of specific things, so your dog can become a cameo.

• 1:38:32Jordi Hays?

  Finally.

• 1:38:32John Coogan?

  And then you can create a

• 1:38:36Jordi Hays?

  Finally. Thank you for listening to your users, Bill Peabody. Finally, finally.

• 1:38:43John Coogan?

  I mean, I, I, I

• 1:38:45Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna, you're gonna do, you're gonna play around.

• 1:38:47John Coogan?

  I'm for sure gonna do this. I like, I, I think it's gonna be hilarious to put my dog on a skateboard at the X Games. Like, if you don't think that's fun, like, you're just like humorless and like, you're, you're, you're like a, a slop scold. You're a scold.

• 1:39:00Jordi Hays?

  I think it's, I think it's

• 1:39:01John Coogan?

  Let me enjoy my dog at the X Games.

• 1:39:03Jordi Hays?

  I've been joking a little bit. I like, I like to horse around, but I think it's smart because they had so much pushback from using IP.

• 1:39:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:39:11Jordi Hays?

  And

• 1:39:11John Coogan?

  It's gotta be personal.

• 1:39:12Jordi Hays?

  It's gotta be like

• 1:39:13John Coogan?

  It's gotta be personal.

• 1:39:13Jordi Hays?

  And people will be excited to generate images

• 1:39:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:39:17Jordi Hays?

  of their dogs at the X Games.

• 1:39:18John Coogan?

  And I'm gonna, and I'm gonna take my dog and I'm gonna scan his face.

• 1:39:21Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna do a kickflip.

• 1:39:21John Coogan?

  And he's gonna do a kickflip and I'm gonna send that to the family group chat, which is the, my new social network. My, I like, there is social media and then there is social networking. I think this is a great take by Chesky. And so my social network exists on iMessage.

• 1:39:36Jordi Hays?

  I would push back on that take. I still very much feel like, like Axe is a social network.

• 1:39:41John Coogan?

  I feel like it's a professional network. It's my LinkedIn.

• 1:39:43Jordi Hays?

  Okay, professional network, but my social life is almost entirely overlapped with my professional life.

• 1:39:50John Coogan?

  If, if I'm, if I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to be doing in my social life on this weekend, Axe has nothing to do with it. That is orchestrated purely in I

• 1:40:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's the way that I catch up with the majority of my friends.

• 1:40:05John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, I agree.

• 1:40:07Jordi Hays?

  In terms of like keeping a pulse on what they're doing in the world.

• 1:40:10John Coogan?

  It is more social media than like pure algo media.

• 1:40:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:13John Coogan?

  So there is something there, but anyway.

• 1:40:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, speaking.

• 1:40:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's gonna be fun to play.

• 1:40:17Jordi Hays?

  Media.

• 1:40:19John Coogan?

  What else?

• 1:40:19Jordi Hays?

  Not really, but Ramp data is now available in the Bloomberg terminal. This is cool. You can track AI adoption rate, business size right in your terminal.

• 1:40:31Jordi Hays?

  Very differentiated in real time data source.

• 1:40:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:40:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, very cool move from Ara and the Ramp team.

• 1:40:37John Coogan?

  It's very good.

• 1:40:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this is crazy.

• 1:40:41John Coogan?

  Before we read this, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, proof trust continuously. Vanta helps you get compliant fast.

• 1:40:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the unit tree G1 crawl policy has been deployed to hardware. Plenty of room for improvement, but it's a start. Let's pull up this video. This is a, this is a humanoid that can turn into.

• 1:41:01John Coogan?

  Oh, wait, this is a humanoid? Oh, this is crazy. I mean, I feel like I, I, I don't want to be too, too negative here, but I feel like the film, the filmmakers are really not stepping up. Like, I feel like the creative tools right now, both with like AI stuff, but also like you could buy one of those or rent it and you could shoot a horror film right now practically. Like you wouldn't be, you wouldn't be like generating the AI.

• 1:41:35Jordi Hays?

  Jason Carmen.

• 1:41:36John Coogan?

  You could make.

• 1:41:36Jordi Hays?

  Make a humanoid robot horror, low budget horror film right now.

• 1:41:40John Coogan?

  Or, or action movie or anything like, that just feels like a character that you could immediately put into a movie and tell a whole story around. What do you think?

• 1:41:49Jordi Hays?

  Or a character on this show.

• 1:41:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true. I think we might have to do it. We might have.

• 1:41:54Jordi Hays?

  I mean, there's something, uh. Beautifully dark about a humanoid that's walking and then it suddenly turns into this insect like.

• 1:42:01John Coogan?

  Crawl policy? Yeah.

• 1:42:04Jordi Hays?

  Thing.

• 1:42:04John Coogan?

  That is very spooky.

• 1:42:06Jordi Hays?

  Very spooky.

• 1:42:07John Coogan?

  Are we really gonna get one of these? Okay, if we get one of these, we also have to get a couple desert eagles. Because if it starts acting up, we have to be able to take it out. Right? Like, we have to have, we have to have, uh, you know, it's like, if we were gonna actually do the, the, the hearth, I would also say, hey, guys, let's get a fire extinguisher. Right? And so, you guys, like, what happens if you're training and you, the log rolls out?

• 1:42:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then the AI becomes sentient and then tries to kill us. Right? That's why we need the fire extinguisher.

• 1:42:40John Coogan?

  Well, that's what, no, no, we just need the fire extinguisher because it's good safety policy if you're using a warm hearth to fine tune GPT OSS on an, a rack of eight H100s. Because if you're going to be burning a log inside, uh, you should have, you know, proper equipment. And I think if we get this humanoid, you gotta be ready to take this thing out. You have to be ready to take this thing out. Jordy, what do you think? How are you taking this thing out if it rises up? If we get one of these, I want to be prepared on day one.

• 1:43:12Jordi Hays?

  I think you strap, I think you strap charges to it.

• 1:43:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:43:16Jordi Hays?

  And so, and it had just happened.

• 1:43:17John Coogan?

  It has a vest, it'll tell anytime.

• 1:43:19Jordi Hays?

  That, that a vest that, that.

• 1:43:21John Coogan?

  And then we have, we have.

• 1:43:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it has an explosive device.

• 1:43:23John Coogan?

  We release it at any moment and it explodes.

• 1:43:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, basically a Kevlar, it has a Kevlar suit over it.

• 1:43:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:43:29Jordi Hays?

  Explosives on the inside.

• 1:43:30John Coogan?

  Oh, so it explodes inwards?

• 1:43:31Jordi Hays?

  So it explodes inward.

• 1:43:32John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:43:33Jordi Hays?

  I feel like strapping a suicide vest on. It's the last, it's the last thing I would do.

• 1:43:37John Coogan?

  I think that might be worse.

• 1:43:38Jordi Hays?

  It's just charging, it's charging at you and you're running away with the.

• 1:43:42John Coogan?

  Oh, no, I know. If it, if it, if in one wrong move, we're all going down. We're all going. Oh, this is, uh, wild. Anyway. Um, let me tell you about figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. What is this? Is this literally, this is literally ChatGPT? Should we play this Family Guy clip or is this a Sora video? I, I'm not familiar with this. Did you put this in here?

• 1:44:07Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:44:07John Coogan?

  Okay, let's move on. Uh, Fareed has a chart that looks so insane. Uh, it's ChatGPT's customer retention. What do you think about this? How do you square this with the earlier data that we saw? That, uh, showed that, hey, there might be some slowing adoption. This looks like a

• 1:44:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, this, this, this can be, this is unrelated to growth.

• 1:44:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:44:30Jordi Hays?

  This is just when somebody tries chat GPT or how, how many months later are they still using it?

• 1:44:36John Coogan?

  I mean, it's directly related to growth because if you have really great retention, you can just add five percent

• 1:44:42Jordi Hays?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:44:43John Coogan?

  Of new people to try it because they'll all stick around forever.

• 1:44:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:45John Coogan?

  As opposed to when you have a leaky bucket, you're like, we need to be doing Super Bowl ads every day because like people are only going to come in and they're going to leave after a week.

• 1:44:51Jordi Hays?

  Sure, sure, sure. But, but, but generally just looking at like, you know, these new cohorts, what percent, like, and, and I think that, uh, this chart is not nearly as impactful if you haven't worked on like a consumer mobile app, right? Because this is like beyond best in class.

• 1:45:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:09Jordi Hays?

  But I think this is what you would expect, right? People try chat GPT. They love it. They stick around. It becomes a part of their life. It becomes like, you know, a, a, a kind of muscle memory quickly. It's become a, you know, a let's ask chat type of thing. So.

• 1:45:25John Coogan?

  Look at the difference of the 10 month line for the, the, the most recent 10 months ago they joined versus two years ago they joined, from a 45% or 10 month retention to 70% retention. Like that is just incredible. They're pushing up those lines. It's not just that the lines plateau at 50%. So for every person that gives it a try, there's a 50% chance that they just never leave, right? Uh, and then also it's smiling. So you get people to come back. That's, that's a great sign. But also they're pushing up the retention curves so much, so quickly. Um, and yeah, I mean, this is just, uh, yeah, product, product getting better, but congratulations to the team over there.

• 1:46:09John Coogan?

  That is, that is fantastic news. Um.

• 1:46:12Jordi Hays?

  Shane Copeland was.

• 1:46:13John Coogan?

  Well, if you're, wait, hold on. If you're trying to run one of these analyses on your company, you probably need to use Julius AI. The AI data analyst that works for you join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions and get insights in seconds.

• 1:46:26Jordi Hays?

  Billions, very soon. Shane Copeland was locked in at, uh, is this? I don't know what sport this is, but I, I can see on the jersey, it's Cleveland.

• 1:46:38John Coogan?

  Cleveland. Some sort of cross town rivalry going on.

• 1:46:42Jordi Hays?

  Some type of stadium. Very cool. Courtside. Love to see it.

• 1:46:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:48John Coogan?

  He's locked in on the phone. That's very fun. Dialing in. And everyone's saying, oh, he's trading. He's front running.

• 1:46:55Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so I'm worried about getting one shot by AI again, but Melissa Chen has a post here. She says, "Actual shot, not AI, of a French detective working the case of the French crown jewels that were stolen from the Louvre in a brazen daylight robbery. Somehow, he looks like he's smoking even without a cigarette in his hand, but surely everything you know about life is screaming at you. This case is officially screwed. To solve it, we need an unshaven, overweight, washed-out detective who's in the middle of a divorce, a functioning alcoholic who the rest of the department hates. Never gonna crack it with a detective who wears an actual fedora. Unironically."

• 1:47:34John Coogan?

  [laughing]

• 1:47:39Jordi Hays?

  This guy really...

• 1:47:41John Coogan?

  There are so many weird things about this photo.

• 1:47:43Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay, okay. Yep. I knew this was too good to be too good to be true. The community note says, "This is a photo is real, taken outside the Louvre after the jewel theft, but the man in the fedora is a passerby, not a detective on the case."

• 1:47:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 1:47:58Jordi Hays?

  Didn't stop it from getting 42,000 likes.

• 1:48:01John Coogan?

  But look at the woman in the back, all the way on the right. Her face is like perfectly lit. Like, this is a remarkable photograph, just from a like a dynamic range perspective. This is...

• 1:48:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so my putting on the tinfoil hat, I think this guy with the fedora is probably one of the thieves that dressed up in an costume and is coming back to the crime scene.

• 1:48:23John Coogan?

  I like this. I like this.

• 1:48:25Jordi Hays?

  You know, because obviously the thief wouldn't come back to the crime scene. So he's kind of, you know, trying to take himself out of the pool of suspects.

• 1:48:33John Coogan?

  Even if you take off the tinfoil hat and just go with like the narrative that's here on the timeline, it is hilarious to be like, "Yeah, I'm gonna dress up like this and then go be a passerby at a jewel thiefery."

• 1:48:44Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I'm gonna go get a fit off.

• 1:48:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's like, I gotta go. I gotta go see what's up at the Lou.

• 1:48:49Jordi Hays?

  I gotta be there. I have to be photographed.

• 1:48:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure, for sure. Drip, he's dripped out Frenchman, for sure.

• 1:48:58Jordi Hays?

  Dripped out.

• 1:48:59John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure, all through one simple API.

• 1:49:09John Coogan?

  Do you want to do this uncapped clip? Look at the lighting. Jack Altman, your team is on a tear. This is beautiful. Good job. I love this. I haven't seen the clip, but let's react. What is it?

• 1:49:20Speaker 05

  Learned at CAA is, uh, star quality is real.

• 1:49:23John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:49:26Speaker 05

  Most people don't have it, some do.

• 1:49:28Jordi Hays?

  What is it?

• 1:49:30Speaker 05

  You just know it when you see it in a room.

• 1:49:34Speaker 05

  Tom Cruise is, you know, maybe my favorite actor growing up. I've seen Top Gun a zillion times. I loved Maverick. I had the opportunity to meet him one day in a very kind of random setting. I was delivering a package to him and, you know, he shook my hand and looked me in the eye and we talked for three minutes and, you know, for three minutes I thought, wow, this, no one cares more about me in the world right now than Tom Cruise does, right? The way he just commands a room in his presence.

• 1:50:00Speaker 05

  But also when Colin Farrell.

• 1:50:01John Coogan?

  You heard it here first. Command the room, no excuses.

• 1:50:04Speaker 05

  Never been in a movie before and you spent 30 minutes in a room with him and, um, he just had so much magnetism about him, the way he composed himself and talked to you and looked at you and just his general kind of persona.

• 1:50:18Speaker 05

  So I do think that to me, um, I do look for that in founders. Um, it's, it's the combination of a mind at work and an opportunity that they're addressing, right?

• 1:50:32Speaker 05

  I remember when I first met Evan from, uh, Snap, he, you know, basically was making the argument that, look at the, look at the, um, generation of young people coming up with the Iraq war essentially having been, you might say a hoax, right? The WMDs were never there. Rolling into the financial crisis. Oh, you told us we had the best economic system and then it almost collapsed, right? Uh, and then COVID.

• 1:51:03Speaker 05

  Right, the, he built Snap as a platform as a reflection of those trends, right? So what was it? Well, everything disappears, right? No one kind of stores your data. You can't trust institutions to look out for you. I think it ended up being incredibly prescient of where we are today as a world, right? Where the institutional breakdown that we've seen. So I think that magnetism about a person in a room and an idea and a market that they're going after.

• 1:51:35John Coogan?

  Be goaded, no excuses. That's my takeaway.

• 1:51:39Jordi Hays?

  That's the right takeaway.

• 1:51:40John Coogan?

  Be goaded.

• 1:51:41Jordi Hays?

  John, by the way, we can lightly hear you snacking on those pistachios. Just a heads up.

• 1:51:48John Coogan?

  I am snacking.

• 1:51:54Jordi Hays?

  Please no snacking ASMR on this show. People can find that elsewhere. We have some breaking news. We, you've heard about, you know, funds that directly buy, you know, equity in companies. You've heard about secondaries funds that buy stakes in other funds. And we've got something new. We've got some breaking news. We've now got tertiary funds.

• 1:52:22John Coogan?

  Quadrinary funds next.

• 1:52:29Jordi Hays?

  Leila says, I can't believe it's come to this, but here's a visual representation of this ridiculous structure. Bottom is actual portfolio companies purchased by PE Funds 1 and 2 with respect to LPs. A secondary fund comes along, buys LP interest in Funds 1 and 2 from some LPs. This secondary fund raises money from other LPs, but now we have a tertiary fund. This fund will buy secondary interest in secondary funds by raising money from other LPs. Does anyone even remember how many layers back the actual value is created? P.S. Not to be confused with C continuation vehicles. Stay tuned for that visual. So.

• 1:53:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is starting to look like the collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps from the mortgage crisis. It's like very similar. Like, you remember in The Big Short, there's like the, you know, you have your stack of champagne glasses. You pour the champagne in one glass and then it like flows down.

• 1:53:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I haven't seen that one.

• 1:53:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:29Jordi Hays?

  One of the five.

• 1:53:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very, very similar where like, at every, at every tranche, you like re-collateralize and re-aggregate and ideally like distribute the risk, but if there's correlation, then there can be problems. I don't really know how big this stuff is and certainly not like publicly traded yet, but wow, to be a tertiary GP.

• 1:53:51Jordi Hays?

  This is asset managers doing asset management stuff.

• 1:53:55John Coogan?

  To be a tertiary GP, that's a, that's a life. Hmm.

• 1:53:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of

• 1:54:00John Coogan?

  We should have one on.

• 1:54:01Jordi Hays?

  Big, short memes going around.

• 1:54:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, we should have one on. There's probably a bull case for it that's actually like pretty, pretty sound. It actually makes, makes, makes sense.

• 1:54:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can see it making sense in some circumstances. I, I think the concern is like you're just, no one can get liquidity. So you're just kind of like passing the buck, passing the buck. You know, GPs are harvesting fees at each level, but there's no actual like returns flowing like from the underlying like sort of value, right?

• 1:54:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I believe it. What else?

• 1:54:34Jordi Hays?

  Yasa, owned by Mercedes, recently smashed their own record for motor weight size and horsepower. This production intent motor weighs 28 pounds and produces 1,000 horsepower. Kyle Cords in the comments says, "I do not understand the point of this. There are already five EV brands with amply good enough motors. The motor power density is nowhere near the limiting factor on EV profitability or adoption. If they can make an adequate motor cheaper, that would be much more valuable innovation, though still not the limiting factor." Yeah, I have no idea what their intention is for this motor. It could be they want to just use it in Formula One, right?

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  I see. Why not? It looks sick. Yeah, this is a

• 1:55:19John Coogan?

  I mean, they'll put in something, put one on every wheel. Why not 4,000 horsepower? Like, there, there seems to be no, no limit. Like, the appetite for horsepower is, is sort of endless.

• 1:55:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. And somebody here says, wouldn't this also be useful for drones, copters, planes?

• 1:55:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:55:34Jordi Hays?

  And the, the original poster says absolutely yes. So.

• 1:55:37John Coogan?

  And also the G63 land delay. The, the G63 six by six. Like, these things need.

• 1:55:45Jordi Hays?

  Version?

• 1:55:46John Coogan?

  Imagine if you put one of these at each, you know, the G-Wagon has gone electric. What will they do with the six by six? The six wheeled G-Wagon. It's a million dollars.

• 1:55:55Jordi Hays?

  What are your intentions with my motor?

• 1:55:59John Coogan?

  Um, but, uh, you know, imagine one of those at each, at each wheel of the six by six. You get 6,000 horsepower in a thing the size of a tank. Uh, it'd be fantastic.

• 1:56:12Jordi Hays?

  Uh, more interesting news. Uh, self-driving taxi company Waymo is now doing 876,000 rides per month in California. 6X increase over the past year and a 69X increase since August of 2023.

• 1:56:28John Coogan?

  Do you think they wind up working with Uber long-term or not? Ben Thompson was talking about like, he has been writing a lot about the Uber, Waymo, the self-driving taxi stuff. Um, mostly because he thinks like, he needs more data, like, because even at Uber and Waymo, like, they don't necessarily know what the consumer behavior will be. Like, will the consumers stay with Uber? And they'll order, and, and they'll order a Waymo when one's available. Um, but then when they'll want one app that can get them anywhere. And so if you say, well, I need you to drive me into the snow to go to Big Bear today. Like, you want to do all that in one app? Or will people say, I, I use the Waymo app for most things.

• 1:57:08John Coogan?

  And then when I want to go into the snow and use a human driver for some specific route, then I'm happy to open up the, the Uber app.

• 1:57:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we should get Dara on.

• 1:57:17John Coogan?

  Because they're actually sort of A/B testing this because some markets are just Waymo app. Some of them are Waymo in Uber and it's very clear that they're running like an experiment.

• 1:57:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll see. Yeah, to be, I mean, right now Waymo is quite a bit more expensive on a per-trip basis than Uber. And so it's possible the rideshare market, you know, it used to be bifurcated a little bit between Uber and Lyft. Lyft was always, you know, I remember when I was in college, I was using Lyft more because it was like slightly cheaper.

• 1:57:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:47Jordi Hays?

  And it's possible that Waymo ends up becoming like more of a luxury good and people just have the Waymo app. And, and, and more price sensitive consumers are just sticking with Uber. So we'll see.

• 1:57:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Before our next guest joins, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent. If you want your AI to handle customer support, go to fin.ai. Our next guest is Drew Housen from Dropbox.

• 1:58:13Jordi Hays?

  Super excited for this one.

• 1:58:14John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Drew, how are you doing?

• 1:58:16Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:58:16Speaker 06

  How's it going, guys?

• 1:58:18John Coogan?

  Great to see you.

• 1:58:19Jordi Hays?

  We've been excited for this one.

• 1:58:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, very, very excited. Where should we start? Are you, are you a Waymo fan? Are you an Uber fan? We were debating like, where does the consumer experience go? I mean, I know you're probably in the position where you might not have to choose, but it's an interesting question in my mind of like, will people want the, you know, the super app for, that can get them the robot taxi or the human long-term? Or if folks just wind up moving over to Waymo entirely?

• 1:58:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's gonna be interesting to see how fast it diffuses. I mean, I think there's still like that, or that like quality problem in the beginning that like third nine, fourth nine, fifth nine.

• 1:59:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:03Speaker 06

  I mean, that's really what's, and Carpathia talked about that on why agents are going to be a further away than people think. And so, but, I mean, I think it's, I mean SF, it's like, Pretty well established, so I think that's probably a sign of what's to come.

• 1:59:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Did the, did the Carpathia, uh, did the Carpathia, uh, podcast like update you on Dropbox's strategy at all? Or was it something that you were already hearing like rumbles of and you were like, okay, now I have like permission to fully write that to long-term memory? Or how were you processing it? You know, because I think they were like, there was nothing there that was like, completely, oh, no one has ever given this take before. It was more like, no one has ever said it in this context with this authority.

• 1:59:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was, it was, uh, it was somebody whose opinion holds a lot of weight that isn't like waiting, didn't feel like he's waiting out for the next like big tender offer, you know?

• 2:00:00John Coogan?

  Yo, totally.

• 2:00:01Jordi Hays?

  So it was like, it was felt like less conflicted than some of the other opinions that get shared.

• 2:00:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:07Speaker 06

  Totally. Yeah, no, I'm very aligned with it. Uh, I don't think there was, to your point, I don't think it was like a lot of new, um, uh, or, you know, I agree with a lot of these themes that the industry's been thinking about for a while, but, um, yeah, sort of like a splash of sobriety on the space. And I, and I think self-driving is a good uh, comp in some ways for like, why this, why AI or AGI or this like fast takeoff might, you know, not be as quick or on the, on the kind of timelines that people are thinking about because,

• 2:00:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:36Speaker 06

  I mean, Carpathia talks about this March of nines, like it's the same amount of work to go from like 90% reliability. That's like one unit of work. Then to get to 99 is like the same amount of work than 99.9. I mean, we've certainly seen that in our, um, as we've worked with AI and as we just work on reliability in general. I think that's, that's very consistent. And I think, yeah, the self-driving car took the world, uh, or captured the world's imagination like 15 years ago. And yet it's these like more intermediate forms of automation. That are that come way before autonomy that create a lot of the commercial value and get a lot more adoption. So for example, like there's like billions of users of Google Maps today, but you know, maybe thousands of people are going to get an A Waymo today.

• 2:01:19Speaker 06

  And then same thing for like, you know, Highway Assist or what Tesla's done or some of these intermediate forms of self-driving that have maybe millions of users. And so we think about that a lot as we deploy AI and, you know, you don't want to be either too early or too late, both with tech in general, but also with automation for sure.

• 2:01:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like if you watched the Carpathia episode on Friday and you walked into the office on Monday and like ripped up your whole plan, like something's maybe going wrong with your leadership style. But but it is an interesting frame to think about it in the decade of agents framing. And I'm wondering, like, you've been at this for two decades now, correct? Like roughly?

• 2:01:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:01:56John Coogan?

  And and so you're you're like fully equipped to think in decades because you have literally thought in decades multiple times, right? And so I'm wondering how you're thinking about the next decade, like in 10 years, what if things play out kind of to the mid case and we get a lot of really powerful AI systems, but they don't come next quarter? How do you set your company up to actually capitalize fully over like a nice, long decade of just solid execution?

• 2:02:25Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, I think when AI first came along, people's imaginations immediately went to like, you know, sci fi movies and the one omniscient omnipotent AI assistant. But for a while, yeah, I think like looking at I was surprised when I was, you know, 30 when self-driving first came out, I was like, oh, yeah, maybe maybe millions of people will be off the road. Maybe we'll never see another human behind the wheel when we go to work. And it just like took a lot longer. And and then I've been working with like, even when you're just designing, like, systems with engineering and certainly as you start to apply machine intelligence, you see these dynamics where it's like the demos look super good.

• 2:03:07Speaker 06

  And sort of convince you that it's like right around the corner, but then when you actually scale these things up, it's a lot harder than it looks. And so we saw that even before AI with like Dropbox to begin with, like we could make a very good demo or a video like in the first couple of months, but then to roll it out at like mission critical and massive to roll out such a mission critical product at massive scale, you know, you can't have a bad day and that just takes a lot more engineering. And we see that with our AI products today. So I mean, we're in a long, we want to build the omniscient, omnipotent AI agent too. But when we actually look at you, like look at customers and look on their screens, the more basic problem that people have that AI can help with today is just that

• 2:03:50Speaker 06

  like if your screen's a mess, like work is a mess, you have like a hundred tabs open. You know, you're working across Google and Slack and your email and Dropbox and a dozen other things. And, you know, the question I started with is like, how much is AI helping with that? Yeah. And the answer is like zero or negative.

• 2:04:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other thing is I'm sure reliability was like a core focus for Dropbox during the early days, because if you're like a online file storage and then like 1% of the time, like a file just like disappears into the ether, it's not saved. And then the, the user, you know, might've lost it forever. And that's like going to stick in their brain forever. And so like reliability at Dropbox means like 99.999999

• 2:04:36Speaker 06

  And then

• 2:04:37Jordi Hays?

  Forever. And, and it feels like the industry in, you know, spending a decade building SaaS and building SaaS, it was pretty reliable and, and having like a bunch of infrastructure that makes it easier to deliver reliability, maybe forgot how like how important it is. And if you have an AI agent that, that does an amazing job 90% of the time and just totally botches, botches it 10% of the time, it's not ready for production. And so you can have these magical, and I think in the context of like customer support is a big one is like, is your agent ready for production? If it, if like 95% of the time it, it solves the consumer's problem, but 5% of the time it makes them like pissed off and they're just

• 2:05:19Jordi Hays?

  like, talk to a human, talk to a human, you know, and they're just running down that, that, that conversation, but.

• 2:05:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, I mean, even if, once you get up to a million users, even if you have a ninety-five or ninety-nine percent success rate, that's still like thousands or ten thousands, the tens of thousands of people having like a really terrible experience like every day. And this was actually part of the motivation why I started Dropbox. Like, step one was not like create Dropbox. Step one was like use all these other services and like have all these near misses or, or things where like, wait, um, what happened to my like tax return? It was just here a second ago. Where did it go? And going into the support forums of these other competitive, like, well, these other companies, these other products that claim to do this on paper, um, but then you go in the support forums and it's like a battlefield medical tent. Like, people are like, oh, my God, what happened to my wedding photos and where's this and where's? And I was like, I like can't believe that, you

• 2:06:11Speaker 06

  know, these things are so brittle. Um, I'm gonna be putting my most important stuff in here, even just as a customer of one, like me, like I need something that I can trust. Um, and, and then that took a lot more like engineering rigor and discipline than we'd seen in the space.

• 2:06:26John Coogan?

  We've been getting into barnyard analogies around here. I want to take you through one and I'd love your feedback. So, uh, we, we, we think about a lot of the, a lot of the dynamics between the various players in enterprise software and foundation models as potentially mimicking the experience of a fox in a hen house. And, uh, and it might be the job of the CEO of the hen house not to let the fox in the hen house. And I'm wondering if that resonates with you at all in terms of, uh, if I'm a foundation model company and I say, hey, I'd love to provide a bunch of great AI tooling to my customers, your customers,

• 2:07:05John Coogan?

  both. Uh, I will need all of your data forever. Uh, and I will need, you know, to significantly erode your mode or your customer retention. Like, is the job of the CEO right now to protect the hen house or go on the attack and be more fox-like? Like, how, help me walk through this from your perspective?

• 2:07:26Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, I think when it comes to using AI, it depends. I mean, first is, it depends what your business is doing and how you're using it and so on. I think, I mean, certainly the CEO's responsibility to like strategically position their company and mitigate risk and things like that.

• 2:07:44Speaker 06

  But certainly every CEO is thinking about how do I like usefully deploy AI. And so I think it helps to have an understanding of the technology. I think it's important to like know who you're working with and what their incentives are. To your point, you know, hen houses, like, I don't think a lot of people have apprehension about using some of these or about working with the foundation model company whose whole business revolves around like taking data and sort of grinding it up into pellets for training the next one. And, you know, you watch Sora videos or whatever and you're like, that comes from somewhere. Probably not their artists. So, so I think, and, you know, certainly in our business, that trust and privacy

• 2:08:30Speaker 06

  and not having incentive conflicts of like not advertising, not training foundation models is super important as, you know, all of our customers think about, you know, who should we partner with?

• 2:08:38John Coogan?

  So, so is there a little bit of a tension there where you, you need to keep customer trust high and let them know that we're going to get you these AI features, but in the Dropbox way that is actually fully integrated and we're not just going to take your customer record or your data and sell it off the back of the truck just to pull something forward. And that actually layers into like the customer experience. Like you might be a couple of months behind on a certain thing, but it's going to wind up with a better experience over time. Is that accurate?

• 2:09:15Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I think it's all of the above. I think it has, it starts with just like. Your business and your incentives, like you have to design some of this in from the beginning. Like, you know, we could probably be, make more money or be more profitable if we did advertising, for example, right? And so, and a lot of scaled, you know, the predominant scaled business model on the internet for, certainly for consumers is advertising and we're like, you know, we're just gonna draw a hard line, we're never, we're just not gonna do that. Um, because of this trust conflict, or this incentive conflict, we would have, and even if we're, even if our intentions are good, it's like, customers just have to wonder, right? And so, um, and then that becomes a big advantage because then we've been like, living up to that

• 2:09:58Speaker 06

  for the last eighteen years and we have a track record of.

• 2:10:01Jordi Hays?

  What, what is the specific concern if, if you were running effectively, display ads? Is it privacy of like, I don't want you to use my data to target me with more ads?

• 2:10:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, and really, this is up to our customers, not us. It doesn't really matter what we think. It really matters what they think. And I think, yeah, everybody feels a little weird when it's like, um, the equivalent of like, even just like the TV in your living room, if it starts showing you, if it's like a smart TV that's showing, it starts showing you ads you didn't ask for, you know, it's like, whoa, there's an invasion of privacy here. Um, and so you have to be super sensitive to the psychology, um, of your users, but I think at a more fundamental level.

• 2:10:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other thing is like, non-targeted ads.

• 2:10:43John Coogan?

  I'm imagining, I'm imagining the worst possible scenario that you were one hundred percent not doing, where the, the file storage company edits ads into my files. So I'm like, wait a minute, I saved my high school transcript and now on page six of this PDF, they edited an ad.

• 2:10:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, the other, the other thing is like, non-targeted ads were really frustrating because I, I remember in college, I bought a Kindle and there was an option, it was like, do you want the ad-supported Kindle?

• 2:11:08John Coogan?

  I went with the ad-supported one.

• 2:11:10Jordi Hays?

  This is a very Amazon move, is to be like, okay, for a hundred dollars, you can get the ad-supported Kindle.

• 2:11:15John Coogan?

  Save like ten bucks.

• 2:11:16Jordi Hays?

  Or for a hundred and twenty, you can buy it, and I'm a college student or whatever.

• 2:11:19Speaker 06

  I got the bougie one, I got the new ads.

• 2:11:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but then I was getting like, the, the ads that, that were, that, when I had this, that were popular were like, the most, it was like romantic novels and stuff like that, like books that I wasn't reading. And so my Kindle would be sitting there and it'd be like.

• 2:11:34John Coogan?

  Just absorb my entire life, so you can target me with something cool for once, yeah.

• 2:11:39Speaker 06

  And the other thing is, I think you have to focus, like you have to really be selective about the problems you solve and like figure about, okay, how do we take what we do today? And build on that in a way, in a way that makes sense for like today's context. So for us, I mean, we always took care of your files. These are already like your most important information, but as we all know, like, what used to be a hundred files on our desktops, now a hundred tabs in our browser.

• 2:12:00Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 2:12:00Speaker 06

  Um, and then the big, a lot of the pain points we have are like, you know, instead of one search box or at home, I can Google anything from one place, search all of human knowledge. I go to work, I've got like 10 different search boxes. My experience is totally fragmented. Um, and that's what I was living personally. That's what my company is living. That's what all of us are living. I mean, look under my zoom window. It's all, you know, we're all dealing with the same thing. And so we're like, all right, let's extend AI into that new world in like a valuable way. Let's give people that one search box. Let's, and then another problem with AI is that our industry is training these, is spending trillions of dollars to train these models that can do like quantum physics, but don't know about, you know, can't find your Q2 Bore Tech.

• 2:12:39Speaker 06

  And so, and the, the missing link there is like AI, these models can only be as smart as the context that you provide them. Um, and that's really the bottleneck and like, no one's focusing on that. And we said, that's why, that's how like we have this new product Dropbox Dash, um, which really aims to close that context gap and finally connect your AI to, to everything at work. Uh, and so on the surface, it's a AI assistant, it's a search engine, it connects, it knows about you, it knows about your work, knows about your company. It connects to all of your work apps. Um, and unlike with a consumer AI tool or, you know, where there's a lot of questions, it can answer a lot of questions, but a lot of questions it can't answer. So if you ask like, when does our office lease expire? Or where's that slide from last year's product launch?

• 2:13:24Speaker 06

  Chat GPT can't tell you because it's not connected to your stuff and, you know, and then Copilot doesn't know about your Slack and Gemini doesn't know about your Salesforce. And so that's where a dash comes in to build this like universal context layer. And the front end is really around search and an AI assistant because that's what people understand. But here's but we're like, this is a natural evolution for us. Dropbox has always been about organizing and sharing your information or like organizing, sharing your most important information, connecting to every ecosystem, being trusted, having this track record of reliability and security. Okay, how can we, what is the manifestation of AI in our world that actually makes sense? And where is there a new problem that hasn't been solved?

• 2:14:02John Coogan?

  I think that's just like the perfect strategy for you right now because I that we had this like, search was great. And then we wound up generating so much data that search, I personally, not a judgment on you particularly, but across all of my services, whether it's iMessage, Gmail, we talk about it all the time. It's not to hate on you. This is a Nate, this is a technology wide thing. Search got really slow and not as accurate and it would, there were so many cookies that it was picking up, like it would just get confused. And then we got like GPT five, deep research, like the thing that can go work for 20 minutes to get you exactly what you need. And it's like, okay, now we need to actually bring these two things together and get really performance, something in the middle and then size them.

• 2:14:47John Coogan?

  And you see this with the model router in the in the consumer product, but to actually bring something like this in the in the business context makes so much, so much sense. So I love that the pitch is not, is not ASI for your, your documents, you know, it's like, hey.

• 2:15:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, we're excited about that too eventually, but you know, if that's, you know, in self-driving, they have like level five, full autonomy, like totally self-driving, human out of the loop. But a lot of the commercial value gets created at like the level one, level two, like, all right, let's give people a working search box. Let's actually give them AI that actually knows about their work. These are going to be the big businesses that get built along the way to that, you know, super intelligence.

• 2:15:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:15:26Jordi Hays?

  Zooming out and kind of going away from what's happening at the product level, like, what is the, what is your updated kind of strategy around running the business and capital allocation? I know you're the single largest shareholder at somewhere around 20%. You've been buying back a bunch of shares, but like, what is your, what is like the the strategy and kind of pitch on that front?

• 2:15:50Speaker 06

  Well, mainly investing for growth. I mean Dropbox has always been a pretty profitable business and we took a lot of the consumer internet playbook in the beginning and built these like self-serve viral product-led motion that was able to scale to millions of, you know, hundreds of millions of people, millions of businesses. We have half a million paying businesses on Dropbox, two and a half billion in revenue. But, you know, the new, yeah, there we go.

• 2:16:14Jordi Hays?

  Hit that gong, John.

• 2:16:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta hit the actual gong.

• 2:16:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:16:18Jordi Hays?

  For two and a half billion of revenue, creating product-led growth.

• 2:16:21John Coogan?

  We get excited about big numbers.

• 2:16:24Jordi Hays?

  The godfather, are you the godfather of product-led growth? Is that fair to say?

• 2:16:28Speaker 06

  I don't think I'm allowed to call myself anything.

• 2:16:30Jordi Hays?

  Okay, well, I'm allowed to call, I'm calling you the godfather of product-led growth.

• 2:16:34John Coogan?

  No, no, I mean, if you, if anyone listening is not familiar with the Dropbox playbook, like, please go study it. It is a clinic for value creation. It's a fantastic story.

• 2:16:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, and you know, we're doing that again. We're running a lot of the same playbook with Dash and I talked a little about search and AI, this sort of AI chat piece, but we're also just thinking very fundamentally about like all the things we kind of lost as we went from kind of the file and PC world into the browser and the cloud. And then it's not just search or AI. There's even just the concept of organizing things, as you were talking about. People are like, somehow we all got convinced that searching for things is like a substitute for organizing things. And it's just not really true in that, you know, all along the way, we had files have folders, songs have playlists, but you think

• 2:17:24Speaker 06

  like links have, right? There's no like container, like a collection of, there's no way to like have a collection of mixed format stuff. If you have like a Google Doc and a 10 gig 4K video and an Airtable, there's no way to still organize. So we have something called Stacks, probably about to show up on this video, that does that. But yeah, I mean, just looking at these very basic problems hidden in plain sight and You know, you give people a search box that works, let people talk to all their stuff in natural language, organize their stuff for them, you know, go beyond documents to organize your images and videos. And so a lot of ways, where I'm putting our capital is just building

• 2:18:05Speaker 06

  the version of Dropbox that I would want to have today, which is, and Dash is step one in that direction.

• 2:18:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and there's, I mean, we've covered a number of companies that have been going after enterprise search, and it feels like you were, and many of them have been able to achieve pretty wild valuations in a short period of time. But of course, you're not asleep at the wheel thinking, I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to dominate that market too. So it's, it's, it's awesome.

• 2:18:31Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, and then I think that the big thing our customers really want, or where Dash fits in there versus Glean or some other companies is like, you don't have to spend six months and 50 grand to get started. And so one of the things we're launching today is like a truly self-serve version of Dash, where you can just download it, get your team up and running, link your apps and just go. And that's something I think that's really been missing, because there's a lot of, you know, there's a bit of a knife fight in the enterprise around a lot of different things. But then we look at any, most of our customers in the SMB segment or lower mid-market is a huge swath of the market has no options. And so we think, it took a lot longer, because it's like hard to make these things totally

• 2:19:13Speaker 06

  self-serve. But that's what we've done with Dash. And again, it's sort of like, it's the version of Dropbox I would build for today's context.

• 2:19:22John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We won't keep you any longer. Obviously, you're very busy. We really appreciate you coming.

• 2:19:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, congrats to the whole team on the launch.

• 2:19:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, I appreciate it. And we're super proud of it.

• 2:19:31Jordi Hays?

  And next time, come on in person, come hang out in the Ultra Dome.

• 2:19:34John Coogan?

  And put on a growth clinic. I'm sure a lot of people would benefit from learning some of the, some of the story, because

• 2:19:41Jordi Hays?

  From the Godfather himself.

• 2:19:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a fantastic one. The Godfather. Thanks so much for coming on the show.

• 2:19:46Jordi Hays?

  Great hanging, Joe.

• 2:19:47John Coogan?

  Have a great race.

• 2:19:48Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:19:49John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Up next, we have Adam Frye from OpenAI. That rhymes. I like that. The product lead for ChatGPT Atlas. We're diving into the browser wars. The, the new web browser from OpenAI had a phenomenal response. I don't know if you saw how many folks saw the YouTube video. I think it has over a million views now. But we will talk to Adam Frye about it.

• 2:20:17John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream, Adam. How are you doing?

• 2:20:19Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 2:20:19Speaker 07

  Doing very well. Nice to meet you.

• 2:20:21Jordi Hays?

  Busy, busy couple of days for you.

• 2:20:23Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's been a bit of a whirlwind. I think just like you said, there's been such a big outpour of a reaction. We're so excited to see the reaction and so excited that people get to use ChatGPT Atlas now.

• 2:20:33John Coogan?

  This is not GPU constrained at all, right? Like, I mean, obviously, it's like it interfaces with your core pool of GPUs, but it's not like a new, an entirely new provision of GPUs, right?

• 2:20:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, that's right. So, you know, it's, it's available to everyone. So ChatGPT Atlas, you can go to the download link, you can download it, it's available, free, plus, pro, everyone. You know, the agent part of it, which I know you guys are savvy about, and we've talked to our colleagues before, you know, that is more compute intensive. And so if you use some of the more advanced features of ChatGPT Atlas, where you ask ChatGPT to go do things, that can be more GPU intensive for our paid users, for sure.

• 2:21:15John Coogan?

  Is there an incentive to set people? I saw a screenshot, but you never know what's real anymore. That if you set Atlas as your default, you can increase your ChatGPT subscription limits. Is there some sort of incentive? We were just talking to Drew from Dropbox about, you know, product-led growth, how you actually, you know, increase customer adoption. Is there something going on there that you can tell us about?

• 2:21:39Speaker 07

  For sure. So, you know, ChatGPT Atlas is, you know, it's a browser, and that's sort of at the core of what you do every day. It's sort of your operating system for your life, whether it's personal or at work. And so, you know, part of that is we wanted to really, we felt like the more people use it, you sort of discover these AI features. I think you guys have talked about this a lot in your show, but, you know, this new generation of browsers, there's a lot to discover. You have to learn how to use ChatGPT in your normal workflow. And so we really wanted incentivized to people to really give it a shot. And the best part of these new browsers is using ChatGPT everywhere you go across the web. And so one of the things that we did to start this off was, if you give it a shot for a week as a default browser, you can sort of extend your limits

• 2:22:23Speaker 07

  and really allow you to test out all those AI features.

• 2:22:25Jordi Hays?

  That's cool. What, what was, was it always obvious that ChatGPT would, would build a standalone browser? Or was there somewhat of a debate internally? I always felt like ChatGPT was a web browser, right? It felt like it was browsing the web on my behalf and serving it up in an interface. And so it feels like It almost feels like this is the second browser that you guys are doing, but you're going and building something that looks more like a traditional browser.

• 2:22:52Speaker 07

  Yeah. It's such a good point. You know, there's that great stat of, you know, if you ask people off the street, you know, what browser do you use? Most people actually don't even know what browser that they use because the concept doesn't always make sense. Yep. And so, you know, it wasn't obvious, but what it really started from was a very specific user insight. You know, we were seeing, you know, you guys probably felt this when you use ChatGPT, but you're on chatgpt.com. You're in a million tabs. You're doing a whole bunch of other stuff. You're in your docs. You're, you're planning for your next show. And you're like copying and pasting back and forth between ChatGPT and all the things you're doing. Yeah. And so we just sort of sat back and said, you know, if ChatGPT is going to be more and more helpful for you over time.

• 2:23:33Speaker 07

  And people are going to rely on it more and more for the work that they do for their personal life. It has to be able to coexist where you're doing that work. And that, that's what the browser is, is, you know, where you're doing your work. And so we said, how can we actually bring ChatGPT into that when you invite it in to actually have the context of what you're working on? And I think that, that spark of an insight was really, once you believe that, we were like, oh yeah, building ChatGPT Atlas is, is of course we've got to do that.

• 2:24:00Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, how, how are you guys thinking about what success looks like with the product over the next few months? I think you have an immense amount of pressure, obviously, that the ChatGPT retention data was flowing around the internet over the last, over the last. And it's kind of hard, hard to fast follow that because if you set the bar.

• 2:24:19Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:24:19Jordi Hays?

  You know, here, uh, but how, how are you thinking about it and how, um, uh, and then I kind of have a follow-up question around like, you have hundreds of millions of happy, active users that you can be porting over to Atlas over time, but um, maybe first, like, yeah, what does success look like in the first, uh, weeks and months?

• 2:24:39Speaker 07

  Yeah. Great question. So the start is, we think of it as a multi-year journey, right? People have been using browsers forever and you're probably your existing one you've been using for 10, 20 years. And so it's, you know, building browsers is sort of like, we joke, it's like you're moving around the furniture in someone's home. You know, you know exactly where this is, you know exactly where that is. And so change is going to take time. So we measure success over the long run. We want to be as helpful to our users as possible. But in the short term, you know, we're focused on retention. You know, we're focused on for the people who are giving it a shot, which is a lot of people, because people are really excited about this. You know, are they sticking with it and you know, are they loving it?

• 2:25:18Speaker 07

  Are they sort of diving in deeper to using chat throughout, you know, as they browse the web to get advice on whatever they're working on as they go? And if we see those signals, which we're starting to see, that's when we sort of, you know, pour on the fire and sort of grow it and grow it. But so short-term retention, but we also understand this is, this is a long-term game for browsers. And you know, we're investing heavily for a long time in it.

• 2:25:40John Coogan?

  Are you thinking about a mobile version?

• 2:25:44Speaker 07

  We are bringing experiences, Atlas, to mobile and to Windows. And so the team is, you know, furiously working on it. We want to bring it to as many people as we possibly can. That's why we brought it to all of our free users, all of our paid, all of our pro right away globally.

• 2:25:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:59Speaker 07

  We think we've got a great browser. We're really excited for people to keep using it.

• 2:26:02John Coogan?

  Very fun. Yeah, it's going to be a big shoes to fill since Sora rocketed straight to the top of the App Store when you go, when you go live on there. I'm sure it'll be.

• 2:26:11Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think Adam can take it to the top again.

• 2:26:13John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:26:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm a believer.

• 2:26:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I, I love the framing of it being like a longer, a longer journey. Like it just does seem like there's not going to be like the Sam Altman stealing GPUs moment for the browser, where it just goes viral and everyone's like, I gotta check this out, right? It's very hard to like accelerate something that's a productivity tool. And so having that mindset makes a ton of sense. I'm wondering about. New, new patterns, new language, new archetypes of features that we might be talking about in a few years after this all rolls out. If you see any glimpses of this, the thing that I'm thinking about is I was talking to someone on our team about Chrome extensions.

• 2:26:57John Coogan?

  And I was thinking about what the extension looks like in the future. And if there's some sort of like, I've prompted an agent to do a certain workflow so many times that then it kind of collapses it into some UI and it places it somewhere in the browser. And it's like, it's almost writing like the custom software. Like there's, you see, I'm kind of like painting a bunch of splatter on the canvas, but there's something there. How do you think about like, these new patterns? How much will your thumb be on the scale? Or do you want the community to customize things? Like, where does the line drawn? How are you thinking about that?

• 2:27:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, so there's probably three, three big things when I look forward a couple of years that I'm really excited about. So the first is, you know, part of this Atlas launch was the agent in your browser where it can take action. It brings up a cursor, it does things for you. I'm really excited for that. As it gets better, so it's still early research preview, but it's starting to do tasks where we've seen it actually be helpful in a short amount of time. And I'm really excited for proactivity around that. Eventually, you can actually suggest, hey, I've already drafted five emails for you. What do you think? You don't even have to task it. And so there's this sort of proactive world of the agents that I think is going to be really, really interesting and valuable for folks. The second is working with developers. I think, you know, as it's more computer to computer interaction, if you have an agent that you're delegating to, to go, you know,

• 2:28:18Speaker 07

  write a document, or go to a website, those websites will evolve to work better with a software that is actually going and clicking around. And we just are sort of scratching the surface. We're teaching these computers to click around the way that we have. But I think eventually the internet and website will evolve to co-work with agents to make things more productive for everyone. And then the third is, you know, I think eventually models will be really good to create their own sort of applications within the browser. And so I think there's so many amazing places that this is going to go. And this is just sort of the beginning of this journey. And I think to Jordy's point earlier, ChatGPT is already so retentive. If you can bring ChatGPT into the browser like we have with

• 2:29:01Speaker 07

  Atlas today, it's already going to be so helpful to your life. And then it's just going to get better from there.

• 2:29:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you guys need to figure out.

• 2:29:08John Coogan?

  Can you share any numbers with us?

• 2:29:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, you gotta, I was gonna say like.

• 2:29:11John Coogan?

  Maybe just the number of YouTube views.

• 2:29:12Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think the, you know, the, the most recent comp that we have to like a scaled consumer tech company launching an ambitious product in a super competitive market was, it was Meta launching Threads.

• 2:29:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:27Jordi Hays?

  And when there's this early excitement around a product, you can see, you know, massive amount of like downloads and then people were ready to call Threads, you know, basically say like, okay, it's over, like good, nice, good effort, basically. And then Meta figured out kind of the right flow to get people to, you know, cultivate like a unique community there, get people moving over there consistently. And so I, I would expect to see something similar out of Atlas and that I think a lot of downloads and excitement and usage early, some people will churn, but you have that massive base of users that you can continue to, you know, show them, like if they do the right prompt in chat GPT, it's like, you know, I can do this on your behalf over

• 2:30:09Jordi Hays?

  here if you like, if, if, if you'd like. So excited to see how this plays out.

• 2:30:15Speaker 07

  Yeah. And I think the key thing there is focus to an investment and, you know, I get to speak on behalf of the team that's working on this, but they're over there working on it right now, just making it better and better. So if you stick with it and you look at the small signals, the small paper cuts that people are telling you about, we just keep filling them, keep getting better. It's, that's when your retention goes up. That's when people really enjoy your product. So, you know, the launch is one thing, we couldn't be more excited. The reception, to your question, has been immense, lots of downloads, but not sharing any numbers today. But, uh, you know, it's really about do people stick around and, and we have to keep working on that to earn that from people.

• 2:30:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes so much sense.

• 2:30:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, we'll hit the gong once you're charting.

• 2:30:52John Coogan?

  Okay. I was ready to go.

• 2:30:55Jordi Hays?

  He's ready to go.

• 2:30:56John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:30:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thanks for breaking it down and congratulations on, on the launch.

• 2:31:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is great.

• 2:31:00Speaker 07

  Thank you guys for having me on. It's, it's such a blast. Appreciate it.

• 2:31:03John Coogan?

  Always a great time. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:31:05Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:31:06John Coogan?

  Our next guest is Ian Rogers from Ledger. He believes already in the restream waiting room.

• 2:31:11Jordi Hays?

  Ryan in the chat, I have to address it. Well, Taylor says, he laughs and says, it's a good chromium wrapper, sir.

• 2:31:17John Coogan?

  I think, I think big things have small beginnings.

• 2:31:20Jordi Hays?

  Chromium wrapper company of California. No, I think, I think that they have the incredible advantage of being able to have, you know, a massive user base and get people over there, continue to iterate and it just.

• 2:31:34John Coogan?

  You know what else is crazy? I mean, the VS Code story, like, like, the browser wars look a lot, a lot less crazy when you think about what happened to VS Code, open source code editor, you get WinSurf, you get Cursor, like, people really did build serious businesses off of those. Anyway, we can talk about that more later. For now, we have Ian Rogers from Ledger in the upstream wedding room. Let's bring him into the TVP and UltraDome. How are you doing?

• 2:31:59Jordi Hays?

  What's happening? Welcome.

• 2:32:00Speaker 08

  I'm good. How are you guys? We're staying 30 at night here in Paris.

• 2:32:04John Coogan?

  Oh, thank you so much for staying up.

• 2:32:05Jordi Hays?

  You're looking, looking quite sharp in that jacket, too.

• 2:32:08John Coogan?

  You look great.

• 2:32:09Speaker 08

  You know, I was thinking, I was like, wow, I, well, I just came from, we've had a big day today when there's a party happening at the Ledger offices and I just came from that. So this is what I was wearing and I'm like, wait, I'm in my living room. Should I put my pajamas on? What's appropriate here? But, you know, you guys are always dressed sharp, so I thought, you know what, I'll just keep, I'll just keep the jacket on. Well, you know, even though it feels a little out of place in my living room, I gotta be honest.

• 2:32:29John Coogan?

  I did not think that this week we'd be talking to someone in Paris.

• 2:32:33Jordi Hays?

  At the scene of the crime.

• 2:32:34John Coogan?

  About security. Tell us what Ledger does. How are you gonna say, are you gonna store my valuables reliably?

• 2:32:42Jordi Hays?

  Not focus on Royal Jewel, unfortunately. Otherwise, we may not have had.

• 2:32:45Speaker 08

  By the way, by the way, I had, I had coffee at Ledger with a number two from the Louvre last Tuesday morning.

• 2:32:51John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:32:52Speaker 08

  Was asking him like, you know, you know, what's it like? Tell me about the job. And he's, oh, it's, you know, pretty, pretty, pretty mellow, long-term, we think long-term horizons, these sort of thing. Wow. That job got, got a lot more interesting.

• 2:33:04John Coogan?

  It did, it did.

• 2:33:05Speaker 08

  Over the weekend.

• 2:33:05John Coogan?

  But anyway, yeah. How, how do you introduce the company now? Give us the general update.

• 2:33:11Speaker 08

  So Ledger's been around for 11 years, which is a very long time in the world of crypto, but really always doing the same thing. You know, it started with this, this simple idea that we have these amazing devices, phones and computers, but they were meant to share information, not protect value, fundamentally. And if we're going to have digital value in our lives, and if, especially if kind of the main invention of this new digital value, Bitcoin, et cetera, is permissionless money, well, then you have self custody, and if self custody, then security is paramount. So let's, let's, you know, use secure element chips to protect private keys. And that, you know, that started with, with really one purpose Bitcoin, but you know,

• 2:33:54Speaker 08

  then we've had much more cryptocurrency, but actually the fact is you can use that same device to, to secure anything. So pass keys, identity, you know, we live increasingly digital lives and proof is increasingly important, and therefore, security. So the other interesting thing about the way, if you think about it, the technology and where it comes from, it's this smart card technology. So it's the same chip that's in your credit card or your passport, but where your credit card protects the secrets of the bank and your passport protects the secrets of the government, right, from you, because you have it in your possession, you're not supposed to hack it. This is using that same technology to, to protect the secrets of the user or of the consumer, which is pretty powerful.

• 2:34:39Speaker 08

  Especially, I mean, I was listening to, to your interview about OpenAI, going into a world of agentic AI. We will need to prove our humanness. It would be nice if we could own our own preferences and then, you know, federate them to the apps that we use. And I'm not sure I want to shove my credit card into that agent. I'd rather it asked me, you know, before it booked the flight, you know, like, here's the info, would you like to verify this transaction on a secure screen? Yes, I would, thank you. You know, so it's, it's that. And today we, we announced a new, a new product, but that's what we've been doing for a few years now.

• 2:35:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's, what's the different about the new product? I feel like Ledger's, like, it feels like something that was like, great idea, solved. And so I'm interested to know what's happening with like, with the iteration cycle.

• 2:35:27Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we have this product that people are very familiar with, the Ledger Nano. Yeah. Which is, it's just like, it's the swivel, it folds out. Yeah. You've seen it. Um, which, you know, and if, when, it's kind of the Air Jordan of crypto. Like, if somebody needs a physical representation of crypto, they include a picture of the, Oh, yeah. Ledger in it. But with Tony Fadell, who is, you know, the founder of, the Podfather. Yeah. He created the iPod and co-invented the iPhone and founded Nest. Um, I mean, you guys will appreciate this. When I started this job, I told Tony, I said, "Yeah, I'm gonna run the consumer business for Ledger." And he said, "There is no consumer business. That business is business to geek." Yeah. You know, your job is to make a consumer business, right? And so, um, we started making these secure touchscreen devices.

• 2:36:12Speaker 08

  So he designed one that's beautiful. It's called Ledger Stacks. It's the world's first curved e-ink display. Um, so we're a Kindle screen, it's silicon on glass. This is an organic substrate on plastic. And you get this, this like, five-millimeter curve. And, you know, it's Tony. He can envision the circuit board and the billboard at the same time. Um, but that, that screen, first ever, and first product to have an organic TFT, took longer than we thought, and the screen ended up costing more than we thought. And then the product is in market for a higher price than we had hoped for. So we, we built a, um, that retails at $3.99. And then we built another one. It's a beautiful device called Ledger Flex.

• 2:36:57Speaker 08

  Steel case, um, really nice e-ink screen. But that clocked in at $2.49. And what we really wanted to do was to do this secure touchscreen, but at the, at the price of a Nano X, which is, which is, you know, one of our most popular models of all time. So this is the one that we introduced today. This is, this is the Ledger, this, this is the Nano Gen 5. Um, and this is on sale today for $1.79. Um, so here, you can see what the, you know, what the box looks like. Hmm. Um, and that's, so that's what we, that's what we did today. The other thing we did today is announce a bunch of features in the software. Because really, I mean, you know, the point, kind of to the point you were making earlier,

• 2:37:40Speaker 08

  it's not about hardware, it's about what can you do with it, you know, and, and you know, this, these, these devices, they started as one thing, this long-term investment asset, you know, Bitcoin, that was what it was for. But now, you, it's all assets because it's, you know, tokenized, you know, RWAs, tokenized stocks, it's also, you know, a yield-bearing savings account with stablecoins these days, and it's a spending account as well, because we have a credit card that's a, well, it's actually a debit card, a crypto debit card that pays Bitcoin rewards. So it's so much more, you know, you can do, we support 10,000 tokens, you know, 100%

• 2:38:19Speaker 08

  of the top 100 tokens, so it's really, you know, it's a, it's, it's a financial tool in your, in your, in your pocket, and a secure one, which is, which your phone is not.

• 2:38:31Jordi Hays?

  Talk a little bit more, uh, yeah, I love, I love how many different, like, really thinking about the full suite and just building these, like, purpose-built devices for different use cases. Talk about, I guess, more, you mentioned earlier, if you have agents operating in the world on your behalf, specifically online, like, how, how you guys are thinking and kind of even timeline there, because I think, uh, this is top of mind for a lot of people that are realizing, like, okay, I'm gonna have a browser that's not just like a window into the web and a way for me to enter into forms, but it'll be acting on my behalf, and if it's gonna be, like, moving money or doing anything else, or, or submitting my information somewhere, like, I wanna have more, you know, real control over that.

• 2:39:15Jordi Hays?

  So I guess, wanted to kind of hear more about how you guys are thinking about that opportunity in the context of Ledger's business.

• 2:39:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, I, I guess the way I think about this, I think about it all in context, right? What was the internet, really? Two computers could talk to each other, we get this revolution of information. What is blockchain? Well, blockchain is the ability to, um, to issue and trade, really, right? So I can, and I can, I can, we talk about scarcity, but it's really about issuance and, and trading, you know, the kind of, what's the, the core building block? And then, you know, with with AI, we have, you know, superintelligence and ultimately things that we can delegate tasks to that will act on our behalf. But if they're going to act on our behalf, then they have to represent us out there. Yeah. Right? And also, when we're interacting with other people, we need to know who it is we're interacting with.

• 2:40:06Speaker 08

  And, you know, so also, I think those those things need to be, you know, machine readable. So interestingly, in both cases, you're talking about tokens, right? We're talking, we talk about eating tokens in the case of AI, and we talk about issuing tokens in the case of, in the case of crypto. But what we're really talking, what we mean when we say those things is we're talking about things that are machine readable and machine translatable. So I think that, you know, I think proof is actually a really important word to consider here. You know, how do you know this is me talking? How do you know these are the words that are coming out of this microphone? I think proof is going to become increasingly important. We already have it, and a lot of, a lot of companies are like trying to take this challenge head on. You know, Reddit is trying to to know that someone's not a bot on the other side.

• 2:40:51Speaker 08

  You know, dating sites, Match.com has a big effort to try to know that someone's... So how exactly are you doing that? And, you know, and who are you trusting? So I think trust brokers will become pretty important in the future. You know, like if I had, I I could, if I said like, ah, yeah, here's a, here's a Warhol print, and you'd be like, okay, well, maybe it is, you know? But if Christie's said it's a Warhol, you'd be like, yeah, it probably is. They probably did the work. And that's the same thing that we have in our lives with things like driver's licenses. You know, it's, um, it's difficult to get a driver's license, it's easy to read one. You know, and I think we'll have, we'll have a lot of those kinds of things where there's a trust broker, that trust broker will issue a token that says, you know, not only am I a human, but I'm a unique human.

• 2:41:36Speaker 08

  This, this token matches, you know, matches a passport, one passport, not multiple passports. And then, you know, and then a machine readable way, in a machine readable way, you know, we'll be able to kind of do a handshake where it's like, oh, yeah, that's a real person. And you could use that in... You know, any context, Twitter, YouTube, or X, YouTube, etc., right? And so I, I think that these kinds of, you know, this is, this is like the super basic version. You know, the more, the only slightly more complex version is that agent that they were talking about earlier in my browser. You know, it's going to go book me a flight to Miami. Well, how have I given it my Delta login? Did I give it my credit card information?

• 2:42:15Speaker 08

  Like, you know, right now we live in this world where kind of our identity is locked behind all of these login password combinations across thousands of websites.

• 2:42:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:26Speaker 08

  There's no need for that. That can, all of that data could be owned by the individual, just like we own, you know, our passport and our driver's license and, and other things. And then it's federated to those applications as needed. It's really a much, it's, it's more scalable, it's more secure. It's a, it's a much better, and, and it's less trust. You know, I think we're already, you know, I mean, I, I haven't installed the OpenAI browser yet. And I'm like, wow, do I really? They've already got so much.

• 2:42:53John Coogan?

  I have an idea. I have an idea.

• 2:42:56Speaker 08

  Bring it.

• 2:42:57John Coogan?

  A, a giant gong that you can store Bitcoin.

• 2:43:01Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:43:02John Coogan?

  What about that? A massive gong that you keep in your vault in your basement and you can store Bitcoin on it.

• 2:43:10Jordi Hays?

  You can smash it every time you want it.

• 2:43:12John Coogan?

  You could actually probably just sneak a little Ledger Nano up in the gong and that would work fine. But I want the full gong.

• 2:43:19Speaker 08

  I was ready to tell you guys, I was ready to tell you guys.

• 2:43:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, give us some numbers.

• 2:43:22Speaker 08

  I was gonna say approximately 20% of all crypto is protected by Ledger devices. I thought that was. Yes. I was like, what can I give you that's worthy of a gong? And, uh.

• 2:43:32Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's insane.

• 2:43:34Speaker 08

  I got two.

• 2:43:35Jordi Hays?

  You guys probably, yeah, you got two, two hits.

• 2:43:38John Coogan?

  Well, we're, we're, we're running over.

• 2:43:39Jordi Hays?

  No, the last thing I wanted to ask, how, what's the Parisian crypto scene like? It sounds cool and you seem really cool, but, uh, but what, what's, what's it like on the ground?

• 2:43:51Speaker 08

  Thanks. I have to say the Ledger Party tonight was crazy. I barely escaped from there because there were just people in the street, you know, going, "Can I get in?" Um, no, it's, it really, it's interesting here. I moved here 10 years ago. I moved here 10 years ago to work for LVMH and a lot, I mean, I really, you know, I moved to LA in 95 and it felt, you know, like it was a million miles away from Silicon Valley at that time, you know what I mean? But then, over time, it, it kind of grew into something that, you know, we, we had a MySpace, we had a Snapchat, we had a, you know, like, it, LA kind of came into its own. And you feel the same thing here, over 10 years, you know, like, it's, uh, it's still France, and France is not America when it comes to startups, that's for sure. Um, but they've, they've really, I mean, it's, it's, uh, there's so

• 2:44:35Speaker 08

  much going on here. It's really fun. Get over here, let's do this. We, we, you know, we'll give you the, we'll give you the proper tool.

• 2:44:40John Coogan?

  I refuse. I refuse. I'm not, I'm not leaving America. I'm sorry.

• 2:44:43Jordi Hays?

  John won't leave our borders, but I, I will. I'll take you up on that at some point.

• 2:44:47Speaker 08

  Okay, cool. Come, yeah, yeah, come on over. Anytime. Does John have a passport?

• 2:44:52Jordi Hays?

  He does.

• 2:44:52John Coogan?

  Unfortunately, yes.

• 2:44:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he does, but he doesn't like to use it.

• 2:44:55John Coogan?

  Otherwise, they could say no to every international invitation.

• 2:44:57Jordi Hays?

  You go, "John, come over here. We got, we got seas and lakes and mountains." And he's like, "We got seas and lakes and mountains over here."

• 2:45:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do they got the Indianapolis 500 over there? Do they got the Kentucky Derby over there?

• 2:45:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, I am, by the way, I am, I am from Indiana. And, uh, and, and, and you can, and this, I'll, I'll give you a fun fact. Kid Rock is on record saying the only reason I would go to France is to visit Ian. So maybe, John, you could come over.

• 2:45:19Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's lore.

• 2:45:21John Coogan?

  That's deep lore.

• 2:45:22Jordi Hays?

  That's deep lore.

• 2:45:23John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:45:23Jordi Hays?

  Ian, great to meet you. Uh, congrats to the whole team on, on the launch and, uh, thank you for securing 20% of all digital assets.

• 2:45:31John Coogan?

  Yes, thank you for your service. Uh, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good day.

• 2:45:35Speaker 08

  I will see you again.

• 2:45:35John Coogan?

  Our next guest, Molly from Knox, is already in the restream waiting room. We're gonna bring her in and ask her how she's going to let you interface with both iMessage and WhatsApp at the same time. Do I have that correct?

• 2:45:50Speaker 09

  Yes, you do.

• 2:45:51John Coogan?

  So this is like a total moonshot company. This is harder than colonizing Mars. This is trying to get Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg to play nice. I, I, how are you possibly gonna pull this off?

• 2:46:01Speaker 09

  Yeah, message interoperability has been one of the problems that just people have talked about for a while. I think the way that we do it is we have this insight where if you layer onto people's computers and you don't distribute within the App Store, you have more interesting things that you could do. And so it's actually possible to do exactly what we want to do here, which is connect iMessage and WhatsApp together.

• 2:46:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I imagine that like if I was super, super hardcore, I could have like a Mac Mini that's running with literally iMessage and WhatsApp open and an agent that's clicking and screen scraping and uploading to a database and then surfacing that in an app. And it's gonna be very hard for WhatsApp and iMessage to like shut me down if I'm doing that. But that's a very prosumer.

• 2:46:45Speaker 07

  You need your own cloud computer.

• 2:46:47John Coogan?

  How far are you from there to the actual product?

• 2:46:52Speaker 09

  What's interesting is the first version of the product was effectively a cloud server that we would ask people to log in, so give us their iCloud details to log into, which, you know, Trey has a funny story about this. But at a certain point, I think you realize that it's just not the most effective and the right way to do it. It's not the perfect answer. And so because it feels inelegant, there's a better way, which is what you described. Essentially, if you can insert mouse clicks and be indistinguishable from a human from the OS level, so Apple can't tell that you're a human versus you're automating your computer, it's over. It's like, okay, great, that's where you want to be. So we've thought a lot about that question and yeah, certainly some of the features sort of play with that aspect.

• 2:47:41John Coogan?

  I mean, do you have to like message the prosumer nature? Do you think that there's a world where you can get big enough that then you exert enough leverage over the platforms that they have to play nice with you? Like, is that the long-term goal to be able to walk into Cupertino or Menlo Park and say like, "Look, like, there are going to be millions of people that are upset if you shut off my API access, so let's make this easier for everyone."

• 2:48:06Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think we already see it moving in one direction with RCS. It's probably going to continue moving that way. So that would be amazing. On the prosumer thing, I think it just comes down to regulation and rights and what you can lobby for, so there's.

• 2:48:20John Coogan?

  How solid, how important do you think iMessage is to Apple's like position? Because recently, we've just come to this like weird realization that it's like my, it's my number one social network. It's like how I plan my social life, my family life, my friends, I'm sure you're the same way. I have group chats with business friends. And all these social platforms are like where I consume news and content and like people that are like friendly acquaintances, but mostly like my social network is iMessage. And that feels like they're going to be able to charge whatever they want for me to keep that every year when they release a new iPhone. So do you, do you buy that thesis as well that it's very important to Apple's position in the market?

• 2:49:01Speaker 09

  I think it's hands down the most important factor as to why people are buying iPhones. Because no one wants to be the icky green bubble in the group chat where all of a sudden nothing works in the group chat and things are delayed and just disgustingly, you know, designed. So at a certain point, you don't want to be that guy. So you just herd mentality and sheep into buying an iPhone. But I think a larger point here is like, I think a larger point here is it's, it's just like when you receive a blue bubble from someone, there's already this preemptive.

• 2:49:34John Coogan?

  Okay. Another farm. This is, wait, sorry, we're trying to build out the ultimate farm analogy for tech. Because you have, you have the trough, the slop trough, you have people who are goaded, but then you have people who are sheep. And so you, you, you just helped us create a new link in the chain and the diagram. But anyway, sorry.

• 2:49:54Jordi Hays?

  Goats, goats need sheep, you know?

• 2:49:57John Coogan?

  Yes. What is a goat without a sheep to contrast with? Sorry. How, how's the actual product launch going, the rollout? Are you in beta? Is it handholding customers on or general availability?

• 2:50:11Speaker 09

  It's really good, yeah, so it's general availability, anyone can download it right now, um, at least on Mac. And then if they want iOS, they can request access through me. So, um, we have been getting a lot of people today just going on. The onboarding experience is mind blowing. It just tells you your life recounted through you, through, you know, all the conversations and, and top people that you've met. Um, and what's funny is I was texting Ben before this, um, trying to coordinate like logistics. And I found out that my messages suddenly turned green. And it was because I hit a quota limit because this morning I sent out, I think, three thousand messages to people. All in my one-on-one group chats, like, hey, guys, can you help me, you know, post about this and, and help me support here?

• 2:50:55Speaker 09

  And yeah, so I guess I read, I realized what the ceiling is on, on, um.

• 2:50:59John Coogan?

  On the rate limit. Oh, that's always a good sign.

• 2:51:01Jordi Hays?

  I'm wondering if I'm gonna get rate, rate limited on my, my inbox. I have five thousand and four unread texts right now.

• 2:51:09John Coogan?

  Well, one, one of our friends, uh, one, one of our friends, uh, Will Manias.

• 2:51:13Jordi Hays?

  I need, I need reply, by the way.

• 2:51:15John Coogan?

  Uh, Bloomberg for private markets and he kind of outlined it as, uh, iMessage plus Signal. And Axe and Twitter as the main one. So, uh, have you thought about that? And what, what, what are the, uh, what are the nuances of like how hostile each API is basically is what I'm looking for? Like a state of the, state of affairs.

• 2:51:34Speaker 09

  Yeah, I saw, I think it was Will's tweet. Um, I saw it and I thought it was interesting. On our roadmap, we have Slack and Discord, uh, maybe email or a few other, uh, messaging platforms. But I think the, the big thing is actually eighty percent of your messages come through. It's not an equivalence, right? Like twenty, twenty, twenty, it's like mostly people are on one thing. And then they'll text this secondary platform for a specific group of people in a niche. And then another maybe five percent of the time. And so, um, I get the sense that it's, it's mostly okay to just focus on iMessage and WhatsApp right now. And then you can add integrations later, or even have the community help you build these integrations. Um, but there are private APIs and, I mean, Telegram API is easy and some other ways that you can, yeah.

• 2:52:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I, I really do wonder about that because it feels like.

• 2:52:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to me, to me, to me, it feels like the more platforms you add, obviously, the more valuable it is.

• 2:52:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:29Jordi Hays?

  Because at two, like I, I'd probably get eighty percent of my texts on iMessage, ten percent, or maybe five percent on WhatsApp, five percent Signal.

• 2:52:40John Coogan?

  No, it's definitely a power law. Like iMessage is the most important. What, I wouldn't even put WhatsApp, I would put WhatsApp like fourth or fifth for me personally. It would go iMessage, then probably X DMs, then maybe Instagram DMs, then WhatsApp, then I would even put Signal above WhatsApp. But the point is, is that like, uh, like a one app to rule them all. Like if it's gonna be a standard in my life, that's like the one unifying interface, like I want it to be across everything, I think, the, the control plane. But I don't know. There, there's a lot of, with all these like unified personal assistant stuff, there's a lot of, uh, you know, expressed preferences versus revealed preferences. Like people might actually use it a different way than they say they want to use it. Um, but I don't know. It's gonna be a fun, fun building process for you. So I'm very excited.

• 2:53:26Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's, it'll be cool to see the longitudinal access come into, right? Cause like our thread on X will be different from our thread on email will be different from our thread iMessage. And if you can just solve that problem of context coming in from all these different places, um, that would be huge for both people and companies. So it's gonna be really exciting.

• 2:53:43John Coogan?

  Have you learned anything from the previous attempts at this, like the beepers of the world?

• 2:53:48Speaker 09

  Um, yeah, you definitely don't wanna poke the bear and do the thing that feels not right and inelegant for too long. Uh, I think the first launch we had, which was sort of a semi-private beta launch in February, um, we had a lot of people come on and, uh, tell us, hey, Apple's watching and, you know, maybe would have issues with iMessage. Um, I think the main thing is just be nimble and agile. And when APIs change that we know that have changed, we just automatically update, right? Day of, four hours later, a new build is out. And so nothing really breaks as long as you, uh, are on the system all the time.

• 2:54:24Jordi Hays?

  Keep shipping.

• 2:54:25John Coogan?

  I mean, Four hours in text message land is a long time for some people if they're like, I didn't get the message from my wife that I need to pick up the kids or something like that does seem like a tall order, but that's why they invented 996 or 002 as the Wall Street Journal put it more recently, which is basically no.

• 2:54:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I think everyone, everyone has this problem. It's very hard to create an elegant solution, but if you do, it will be incredibly valuable.

• 2:54:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, good luck to you. I don't know if we lost the video, but thank you so much for stopping by. We will talk to you soon and have a great rest of your day.

• 2:55:04Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations.

• 2:55:06John Coogan?

  That was kind of a crazy ending, but we have Johnny Dwyer from Muon Space, his second time on the show. And we had a great, we actually played a clip from our previous interview yesterday, and we're very excited to talk to him both about what's going on in his world, but I'll welcome him to the show now. How are you doing, Johnny? Good to see you.

• 2:55:26Jonny Dyer?

  Hey, guys. Good to see you guys again.

• 2:55:28Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 2:55:29John Coogan?

  Thanks so much. We enjoyed the, we enjoyed the previous guest segment immensely. We played a clip from that segment yesterday and we were trying to, yeah, we were trying to contextualize space data centers. We're actually having the founder of the space data center company come back on the show to defend what's going on since a lot of people are skeptical. Where do you sit on it now? This all feels like I'm not ready to call it even a binary. I think we should be discussing timelines more than will it ever happen? But how are you thinking about space data?

• 2:56:04Jonny Dyer?

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's, it's like many things, it's a when, not if, you know, is it a year from now? Is it 10 years from now? Is it 20 years from now? I don't know. But I think as you think about generally the future of the planet and where we're going on it, more and more stuff is going to move to space. And so I think it's inevitable at some level that we will have large scale, you know, IT infrastructure in space. I mean, you know, we're probably going to talk about or deal with Starlink in a minute, and that's an example of a place where I think we're starting to really see what I would call truly modern IT infrastructure starting to show up in space. And I think it's inevitable that data centers will go there as well. A lot depends, I think, obviously, on the fundamentals of what is going to drive the need for future data center capacity, right?

• 2:56:49Jonny Dyer?

  And how some of those needs are met, you know, on Earth and then how that would compare to deploying things in space. I think if you ask anybody even, you know, what a terrestrial data center will look like in five years, they're probably not going to give you a real confident answer. So I think, you know, trying to predict exactly what that's going to look like in space is hard to do right now.

• 2:57:09Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely. What more can you say about this new partnership?

• 2:57:15Jonny Dyer?

  Well, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, one of the things we like to think we're doing at Nuon is really pulling a lot of the aerospace industry kicking and screaming out of the Stone Age. And, you know, you think about a lot of the stuff that's circling the Earth right now and it's still connected with things that look like dial-up modems, frankly. I mean, I think we're kind of in an era where a lot of the space technology is a few generations behind what we take for granted on Earth. And this partnership with SpaceX is now going to give our satellites things that look a lot more like an always-on fiber broadband connection rather than a dial-up connection. And so that's going to completely unlock, you know, a tremendous set of things that have been very difficult or impossible to do in space historically, much as, you know,

• 2:57:59Jonny Dyer?

  Starlink has demonstrated with terrestrial use cases. You know, an example that I'm, you know, we're all very excited about at Nuon is we've been working on this global wildfire constellation for the last several years. This will eventually be a 50-plus satellite constellation that will get 20-minute global revisit latency to detect and track wildfires from the earliest stages of their lifecycle all the way through to help, you know, decision-makers on the ground make better decisions. And a really critical piece of making that system work well is getting that data back to people that are making decisions at very low latency. These satellites produce enormous amounts of data. There's going to be 50 of them. So having this kind of fiber connection in the sky is absolutely transformative in terms of being

• 2:58:42Jonny Dyer?

  able to deliver a capability that's crucially needed around the world and it has not been possible to date. So I think it's a really good example of what this technology can unlock.

• 2:58:51John Coogan?

  Is fiber a metaphor or are you physically putting fiber in the sky somehow?

• 2:58:56Jonny Dyer?

  Yeah, we have big glass spools and we're kind of unwinding in behind that way.

• 2:59:00John Coogan?

  I mean, we're going to put data, massive 1 gigabyte data centers in space. Like I wouldn't be that, it doesn't sound that crazy to put a wire up there.

• 2:59:07Jordi Hays?

  It's a humanoid up there with a spool and just letting it out.

• 2:59:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. So you're not, you're not literally putting fiber in the sky. It's more about connectivity between Starlink satellites or are you putting up your own satellites that are acting as kind of backhaul between the Starlink satellites?

• 2:59:23Jonny Dyer?

  We're basically using Starlink as our backhaul. So you can think about them as sort of our network in the sky and then we'll be connecting with SpaceX lasers or laser terminals, they call them min lasers, into their network and using that network as kind of the backhaul system. So it's not literally unwinding glass fiber guy, but actually the technology is very similar to fiber optic, you know, technology on, on earth and a lot of the same componentry is used. We're just sending the light over these kind of free space optical beams, not over glass fibers.

• 2:59:51John Coogan?

  And then, and then who's your customer? Is it someone who's, who has a satellite or a constellation in space that needs to move internet data around while in space? Or is it more for speed up terrestrial uses in some way or, or just include the Starlink network?

• 3:00:08Jonny Dyer?

  So we're building satellites for customers. So our satellites, you know, serve broad range of customers. You know, one of the customers I, I mentioned is this, there's a global nonprofit that's funding the work on the FIRE mission. So ultimately we're, we're building satellites for them. They're muon satellites that we deploy and operate. And this will now provide sort of a much faster, lower latency network layer for us to operate those satellites on. Other examples of, of customers we're working with, you know, we have a, a customer called Hubble that's doing Bluetooth low energy tracking from space. You can kind of think about like IoT device tracking from space. We have.

• 3:00:44John Coogan?

  The company is called Hubble?

• 3:00:46Jonny Dyer?

  Yeah, it's called Hubble.

• 3:00:46John Coogan?

  What a confusing name. I know that there was a contact lens company named Hubble and that kind of made sense because it's like wildly different market, but if you're

• 3:00:57Jordi Hays?

  So, so I can imagine the commercial use cases for that, right? If you, if you have a lot of hardware out around the world and you want to track it in real time, is that, does that have like defense applications as well? Like what are, what are kind of like, what's the, what's the actual focus there?

• 3:01:18Jonny Dyer?

  Yeah, so I don't want to speak for Hubble, you know, they would better for themselves than I will, they're our customer, but I mean, I think their primary focus is on sort of enterprise and commercial use cases. So, you know, there's millions of asset tracking devices in the world today that are out tracking, you know, shipping containers and remote facility equipment, things like that. And a lot of those are running on kind of these bespoke and frankly, very old school satellite networks. That's how they get the data back. And I think Hubble's vision is that, you know, it, we should be doing the same thing we're doing with consumer devices, which is strapping a nine cent Bluetooth transponder on anything that's out in the world and then being able to track that thing from space. And so we think there's a lot, you know, I think they believe there are many, many commercial and enterprise applications of that.

• 3:02:02Jonny Dyer?

  There probably are also, you know, government applications of that. I don't want to speak specifically to them, but I think that's, you know, it's, it's a type, all of these types of technologies, especially with spacecraft in some way are inherently dual use. So there's always going to be use cases in both the commercial and the government sector.

• 3:02:17John Coogan?

  Give us the fundraising update. I feel like we missed you around a series B potentially. Do you have news? What's up?

• 3:02:24Jonny Dyer?

  We don't have news. I mean, we, we raised a kind of a two-part series B last year and this year. It's a big round for us. I think it totaled about $140 million. Oh, we got the gone.

• 3:02:39Jonny Dyer?

  So yeah, we're doing, we're doing well on the fundraising side. We're, we're well funded. We've got a lot of business coming in. It's been very exciting days around the company. So it's a pretty, pretty exciting path forward right now. We're really just trying to scale the company up a lot. We have a big facility. We're in, we're in the Bay Area. We signed a large facility earlier this year. So we'll be kind of 10x-ing our production capability, our hardware production capability in the South Bay before the end of the year and, and then building out a lot of other new technology pieces that we're really excited to talk about as, as, as we start to hit space with them.

• 3:03:15John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah, great to get to do it. Congratulations on the progress and yeah, thanks for breaking all that down for us. Now we know there's not literally fiber cables up in the sky. That's why we asked the dumb questions. Figured it out. Awesome. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers, John. And up next, we have Mike Shabbitt from Traba. We have a video update from him. Let's play that and welcome him to the Come on over. How you doing? Good. Good to see you. Can we play the little bit of the video that he shared? Let's pull that up and get the update. What's going on?

• 3:03:51Speaker 10

  Within seconds of the request, Traba qualifies thousands of workers for the best methods.

• 3:03:56John Coogan?

  This is, is this your key hero marketing video right now?

• 3:04:00Speaker 08

  Describe proper form for lifting heavy packages.

• 3:04:02Speaker 10

  Quick reel just to show all the products that we've built.

• 3:04:04John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 3:04:05Speaker 10

  Because staffing, there's so many different manual workflows. This video just basically breaks it down with how it all comes together.

• 3:04:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:04:12Speaker 10

  And replays it with tech.

• 3:04:13John Coogan?

  Very cool. How old is the company now?

• 3:04:16Speaker 10

  We're four years old.

• 3:04:17John Coogan?

  Four years old. Are you still in New York?

• 3:04:19Speaker 10

  We're still in New York.

• 3:04:20John Coogan?

  Manhattan?

• 3:04:20Speaker 10

  Yep. All 150 votes.

• 3:04:21John Coogan?

  150 now. Wow. Okay. So I, I, I toured the, when did I come by and do an interview with you? That was maybe like two years ago or so?

• 3:04:30Speaker 10

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. That was across the street. We moved across the street to a bigger office.

• 3:04:33John Coogan?

  Okay, um, so yeah, ta- ta- ta- take us through the basics of like the, the, the, the problem, the market. It's a highly fragmented market.

• 3:04:40Speaker 10

  Yep.

• 3:04:40John Coogan?

  Um, but what's the, wh- wh- what's the high level, like 140 characters that you described, Trava?

• 3:04:45Speaker 10

  Yeah, so basically millions of workers across the country work in industrial staffing and then hundreds of billions of dollars get spent on staffing.

• 3:04:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:04:52Speaker 10

  But if you break it apart, it's really just like a highly fragmented industry with like tons of manual op- opex and things like that.

• 3:05:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:00Speaker 10

  So we basically replace the whole suite with tech.

• 3:05:02John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:05:03Speaker 10

  And we provide double the fill rate, better quality workers. And we, workers within a couple hours versus weeks.

• 3:05:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, and uh, like the staffing industry in general, I think of it as like highly lucrative, but highly fragmented.

• 3:05:16Speaker 10

  Yep.

• 3:05:16John Coogan?

  Is that, is that just generally your experience? Like, I, I, I guess the, I guess to just jump straight forward is like, why build tech startup instead of private equity roll up?

• 3:05:25Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:05:26John Coogan?

  Like you're in a dress shirt, you could go do a PE roll up, right? Uh, like, like, I don't know.

• 3:05:30Speaker 10

  Ready for it.

• 3:05:30John Coogan?

  Like, it's not like you have to do it the Silicon Valley way. Why are you doing it the Silicon Valley way?

• 3:05:34Speaker 10

  Well, basically because of the advancements in AI, this never really was able to happen before.

• 3:05:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:05:39Speaker 10

  But on the staffing end, there's just so much manual work and tons of opex. And we basically just like from a top to bottom, end to end, just have completely redone it with tech.

• 3:05:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:05:48Speaker 10

  Um, and that's why building it as a technology company has been so much better.

• 3:05:52John Coogan?

  And so that's, like, when you say AI or tech, you mean like lead scoring, basically? Understanding who's right for what job, placing them, screening?

• 3:06:00Speaker 10

  Well, it's, it's like a ton of things. So we do the vetting, we do, we actually guide the worker to the shift. There's fraud detection and like essentially follow-ups with the workers.

• 3:06:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:06:09Speaker 10

  And then as the workers perform shifts, we actually, that feeds into our model and.

• 3:06:13John Coogan?

  But it's not the AI doing the job. It's always.

• 3:06:15Speaker 10

  No, no, yeah.

• 3:06:16John Coogan?

  You're, you're, you're, you're, you're sticking it out for the next decade.

• 3:06:18Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah, on the back, on the back end, the customer doesn't really see the AI on the back end, we're doing all that work.

• 3:06:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:24Speaker 10

  So what the customer sees is just like. An incredible group of people showing up for work every day and like helping them out.

• 3:06:30John Coogan?

  Did you see the Uber news that Uber drivers are going to be able to do one-off AI tasks?

• 3:06:35Speaker 10

  I saw that, yeah.

• 3:06:36John Coogan?

  What is your take on that? Do you have any AI companies approached you where you're like, just, I don't know if I'm describing the company correctly, but I remember a couple of case studies is like, there's a big Taylor Swift concert in town and the organizer might go on Trava to pull in a bunch of folks really quickly. Or if it's the rush holiday season and then e-commerce warehouse.

• 3:06:57Speaker 10

  Right.

• 3:06:57John Coogan?

  I don't want to put you in a box, but like, those are two examples, right?

• 3:07:00Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah. Basically like manufacturing, fulfillment, food processing, all those industries have like crazy volatility in their workforce needs. So we help like smooth that out for them.

• 3:07:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so my question is, have any AI companies like reached out to you and said like, hey, you have a big pool of labor. We have a unique use case that we could like.

• 3:07:20Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah. We actually have gotten a few inbounds companies who are just like, hey, we need these workers to do all these other things. But right now we're laser focused on just industrial supply.

• 3:07:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:07:28Speaker 10

  Uh, so focusing on that, we may expand out in the future.

• 3:07:32Jordi Hays?

  Have any humanoid companies come to you and said like, we'll give you robots, like put them out into the field? Or are they not quite at the level where they actually would be willing to let them do unsupervised activity?

• 3:07:44Speaker 10

  Yeah. So I actually like see this, how I talk to our customers about this all the time right now in like, when it comes to humanoid robots, they're not quite there yet. But we're going to be well positioned to essentially like lead that charge when the tech gets a lot better in about five years or so.

• 3:07:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because you're still going to have the, the kind of variability in, in, in workforce needs, right? Where you might need even, even if you have a hundred robots like in a facility and then suddenly it's rush season. You need to deploy like a hundred more on top of that. It's like, where do you, where do you get that?

• 3:08:14Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah. And then all these workers are going to essentially have to get connected to new earning opportunities. So we'll be able to help them with that.

• 3:08:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a little bit of like, I guess the narrative violation behind like AI taking every job or AI being useless is like, I'm pretty sure Amazon is the largest robot operator, but also one of, if not the largest employer as well. And so they're really doing the both robots and humans at scale thing.

• 3:08:39Speaker 10

  Within the facility, it's a lot more dynamic and a lot of these companies, they have to change things really quickly. So to just commit to a certain robotics workflow doesn't work today.

• 3:08:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:48Speaker 10

  Um, which is actually why, if you actually go back to Elon Musk's tweets in like. Five, six years ago, he actually said, he's like, we tried to make the Gigafactory all robotics.

• 3:08:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:08:57Speaker 10

  And then we went back to humans because we couldn't necessarily like get there yet.

• 3:09:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, and they had to do a hybrid.

• 3:09:01Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 3:09:02John Coogan?

  Uh, talk a little bit about where the structure of the market is going in terms of staffing agencies broadly. I imagine that like A I and technology generally are like an accelerant to growth, right? You can just onboard people faster, just using like all the tools in the mobile toolkit allow you to understand where people are going, placing them, GPS, all this stuff is useful. How does that play out? I mean, I imagine that competitors are going to try and catch up. Are you planning to just outcompete them? Are you looking to eventually get into doing acquisitions? Like, how do you think the long-term plan plays out?

• 3:09:41Speaker 10

  So I was in a staffing conference in Dallas and it was pretty crazy.

• 3:09:44John Coogan?

  Electric.

• 3:09:44Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 3:09:45John Coogan?

  That's why we do it.

• 3:09:47Speaker 10

  Literally this year, everyone is like, we are getting disrupted. AI is coming for us. And they were just talking about how like they can't organizationally roll it out.

• 3:09:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:54Speaker 10

  There's just like thousands of people at these organizations that have all these different tasks.

• 3:09:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:09:58Speaker 10

  So we had, they actually approached myself and my chief of staff and they're like, we want, really wanted you to help us move into this new age.

• 3:10:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:10:05Speaker 10

  So when it comes to rollups, we're potentially looking at a few acquisitions. And in that case, it would basically be like, uh, companies that have really good retention on the business side. So like they have customers that continue to spend.

• 3:10:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:10:19Speaker 10

  But then they're just like, we have terrible OpEx and just so many manual expenses. And we want you to essentially improve these margins and essentially take, carry it forward.

• 3:10:28Jordi Hays?

  How do you operate the business? You're obviously like incredibly aggressive, I'm sure, around growth. But at the same time, like you also feel like somebody who you're planning to run this business forever. I imagine and part of putting yourself in a position to do that is like maintaining good unit economics and just running a great business. How do you balance like growth and, and, uh, and burn and those factors?

• 3:10:53Speaker 10

  We're very thoughtful about capital efficiency with growth. So fortunately in staffing, the margins are actually pretty good to play with. So yeah, we're just like. We're operating in the physical world, so there's so much that's going on, which is why our team just like works so hard to kind of get in there. There's not like one specific tool that can essentially get cloned. It's like hundreds of thousands of workers that use our app and like thousands of businesses. So you get those real network effects as you scale up. But yeah, it's basically growth, unit economics, ten X customer experience. That's what we always talk about internally.

• 3:11:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, take a victory lap on the nine nine six thing. It is hilarious. I mean, you didn't obviously invent the nine nine six.

• 3:11:31Speaker 10

  Yeah, it's not invented nine nine six.

• 3:11:33Jordi Hays?

  You invented China.

• 3:11:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, you stole it from them or something. But no, I mean, I, I, I think you were the first to like really go out there and.

• 3:11:43Jordi Hays?

  You were willing to say it when it was like gonna essentially get you a little canceled.

• 3:11:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, you get a little bit canceled and, and I think it was, it was an interesting framing for the brand of Traba to say, look, we're not trying to create super intelligence. We're not trying to cure cancer. We've just found a great business that delivers value to customers, delivers value to our clients. You know, everyone, everyone, all the parties are happy with this, what's going on here? And so we're going to work really, really hard. What was the actual journey of the, you know, get a little canceled? Did that ever really manifest? Were people ever actually mad at you? And then now, what are you seeing out there? Has everyone else adopted this? Are they taking it further? Can they take it too far? Just walk me through your thing.

• 3:12:27Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think it really has to go into what the goal of the company is. So we are a very ambitious company. We want to be a massive publicly traded company. And if you work backwards from any very successful company, the early team was just like all in. It was their number one priority.

• 3:12:40John Coogan?

  Always.

• 3:12:40Speaker 10

  So we basically were like, we did this thing called anti-selling. We're like, look, we're gonna get people working in person with us. We're gonna go build some awesome stuff. And if you're not interested in making this your number one thing, then that's all good. But it created something really great internally because every single person is just like, it's like a team sport. Everyone's in it together. And we're all trying to create leverage on the time that we've done, so.

• 3:13:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I think it's, there, there's something underrated about this where. People have been mapping like the missionary versus mercenary thing on to just how sci fi the project is. And if and they assume like if you're working on something sci fi, everyone's a missionary. And if you're working on something that's maybe just a little bit more tractable of a business problem, everyone's a mercenary. And I think that that's just not true at all.

• 3:13:33Speaker 10

  It's not true.

• 3:13:33John Coogan?

  Like we we see it here, like we're building like a media company. But I feel like everyone, we have a really great culture. Everyone's really bought in. Everyone is thinking creatively and working really hard and getting a ton of reward. And at the end of the at the end of the tunnel is not time travel machine that takes us to Mars or curious cancer. It's it's just a show, but we're all happy and aligned on that. And so what what has the road been? Where have the where have the difficult moments been in the journey? Where you've had to kind of re reignite the flame of of missionary?

• 3:14:07Speaker 10

  Yeah, so yeah, shout out to your team. They're awesome. Like they agree to me here and everyone's like so locked in and love what you guys do.

• 3:14:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:13Speaker 10

  I think a big part of that is just you guys being authentic to who you are.

• 3:14:15John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:14:16Speaker 10

  Look like we're TVPN, we're gonna make this.

• 3:14:18John Coogan?

  It's a show.

• 3:14:18Speaker 10

  Company.

• 3:14:19John Coogan?

  It's a show.

• 3:14:20Speaker 10

  And then everyone gets gets involved in that. Um, with us, you know, there's like challenges every single week. It's just part of building a company. And I think some people really they opt into that. They're like, I'm gonna go learn a lot. I'm gonna work with a great group of people around me. The likelihood of success goes up if everyone's equally committed and really bought in on on making something awesome. And then people just have a great time like they look back and they're like, you you remember the war stories in the days where you're like in the Airbnb, trying to get the customer like this crazy request comes in. You're like, how are we gonna do it?

• 3:14:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:14:51Speaker 10

  And you're really only gonna create that if everyone that opts in and joins the company is like, that sounds exactly like what I want to do with my life.

• 3:14:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:57Speaker 10

  So we get a lot of ex athletes because they remember that in sports and college and things like that.

• 3:15:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:02Speaker 10

  So it's great.

• 3:15:02John Coogan?

  Uh, tell me the story of Uber, your experience there. And then I want the update on like the how you think about opening markets now? Because this is something that not every software company has to do. Like OpenAI launches a browser, they don't need to send a team to Dallas. But at Uber, you did. And at Trava, you have been doing this. So walk me through like the best practice for when you're going hand to hand combat. In the software business, it's a tech company, but you still have to deploy a team.

• 3:15:31Speaker 10

  Yeah, so operating in the physical world, it's quite different. At Uber, I was a launcher where you essentially drop into a city. You hit a bunch of restaurants on the platform, on the Uber Eats product, and then you have to essentially get the couriers and then you run.

• 3:15:41Jordi Hays?

  And you work skydive in, right?

• 3:15:43Speaker 10

  You skydive in, sell the restaurant, say we can make you some more money. Uh, what's different with Trava and Uber Eats is that selection, like, people aren't like, okay, I want to work at like five different warehouses this week. They actually are fine with working in this like middle ground where like I'm going to work for three to six months at this one warehouse.

• 3:16:02John Coogan?

  Okay, so.

• 3:16:03Speaker 10

  And then maybe I'll switch again.

• 3:16:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:16:05Speaker 10

  Um, so our sales cycle is a little bit different where we do have market specific like leaders where people do own a market. But we go for these big accounts if they want hundreds of workers versus, you know, like three to four people.

• 3:16:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:16:17Speaker 10

  And then the worker is kind of like, it goes viral because they get their friends and it's like a very social job and things like that.

• 3:16:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Has the, has the playbook changed at all? Are you in every market now? Are you still on the warpath?

• 3:16:29Speaker 10

  We're in most markets in the country. We're not in California yet, so I was in Vegas before being here for the initial customers that came over.

• 3:16:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:36Speaker 10

  Um.

• 3:16:36John Coogan?

  And that's not a capital constraint, right?

• 3:16:38Speaker 10

  No, it's actually more just the employment laws in California right now.

• 3:16:42John Coogan?

  Making sure you're set up.

• 3:16:43Speaker 10

  Yeah, we offer two different ways to work on Trava. One is 1099, in which workers can get paid within 30 minutes, and the other is W2.

• 3:16:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:16:50Speaker 10

  Uh, but we're very intentional about every market we.

• 3:16:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, you want to make sure you check all the boxes so you have some, oh, we forgot to check, we forgot to file this form and then it comes back. You don't want any of that. That makes sense.

• 3:17:00Speaker 10

  But we're coming, we're coming soon.

• 3:17:01John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 3:17:02Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:17:02John Coogan?

  Let's go. Um, yeah, I, I, I'm thinking about all, all the different uses for a flash mob of human labor that we could put to work.

• 3:17:12Jordi Hays?

  How do you, uh, ha- any, any learnings around like the causes of burnout that you see within your organization if you're pushing people super hard?

• 3:17:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:23Jordi Hays?

  That means you, you, you want to avoid burnout.

• 3:17:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I don't get burned out when I'm working on something that I love and I feel like I'm making real progress on it. I feel like burnout can come from. Not maybe finding meaning in the work or not making progress and running into a dead end over and over, but what's your framework? And I'm sure CEOs have asked you this of like, okay, if you're pushing your team super hard and you're pushing yourself hard, how do you avoid that?

• 3:17:52Speaker 10

  Yeah, so the number one thing is people don't get burned out if they feel like they're winning. We try to get people in.

• 3:17:57Jordi Hays?

  Just win.

• 3:17:58Speaker 10

  They're just winning. So you gotta get the right role, get them some wins in their bill. It's kind of like in school, if you're like studying nonstop seven days a week and you're getting straight A's, you're not really burning out from that. So you're putting them in environments to actually be successful. And then everyone's got something that they do to kind of like take care of themselves. Like a lot of people, they work out, like usually at Trava, people will work until like seven-ish, hit the gym, come back. Like it's a very healthy culture, but it's very much like happy, healthy, wealthy is kind of like what people are aiming for. So they're all there together and like, yeah.

• 3:18:29John Coogan?

  How do you think about the, like, how rigid is the 996 thing? Obviously, some people shift that forward backwards. Now, there's this article in the Wall Street Journal about 002.

• 3:18:43Jordi Hays?

  What is that?

• 3:18:44John Coogan?

  Do you work from midnight to midnight? You're working 24 hours, you take two hours off a day. I don't know.

• 3:18:50Jordi Hays?

  Is this real?

• 3:18:52John Coogan?

  I mean, I can pull up the article because it would be good to get your reaction, but it says, AI workers are putting in 100-hour work weeks to win the new tech's arm race. And there's like a 50% chance that this is like, you know, someone trying to get a PR piece to be like, we work even harder than this guy. Josh Batson no longer has time for social media. The AI researcher's only comparable dopamine hit this year is on Anthropic Slack work-based messaging channels, where he explores chatter about colleagues' theories and experiments on large language models and architecture.

• 3:19:22Jordi Hays?

  So he's on a social work platform, socializing, somewhat of a network.

• 3:19:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you're trying to 996, don't count your Slack time, that's fun. Like, yeah.

• 3:19:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:34Speaker 10

  I think so. So the way it plays out actually is like when we first started the company, we were actually like, let's make this a little bit more structural. Now with 150 people, we have all these different types of roles.

• 3:19:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:43Speaker 10

  It's more just like you gotta be locked in and like make work your number one thing.

• 3:19:47John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 3:19:48Speaker 10

  But what I will say is you go, we are an in-person company. If you swing by Trava at like 8:30 in the morning or 9:30 PM.

• 3:19:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:54Speaker 10

  Literally any day of the week, there will be like people there building really cool stuff.

• 3:19:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:58Speaker 10

  And that's pretty awesome because then you can just like show up and build with your friends.

• 3:20:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:01Speaker 10

  And people feed off of each other's energy.

• 3:20:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can't be too dogmatic about it. I feel like, I mean, we both have kids. We're also on the West Coast. And so we run more of like a 6 AM start time. And, and so we, yeah, we just stack like some extra hours there because then you have kids.

• 3:20:18Jordi Hays?

  That's cute that it really picks up around 8:30 at Trava.

• 3:20:24Speaker 10

  That's why I'm like, wait, oh my gosh. I thought we were intense and you guys talk about this 2002. And I'm like, I'm like calculating the hours. I'm like, man, we like, we have the burnout question.

• 3:20:35Jordi Hays?

  The 002, it's like.

• 3:20:36John Coogan?

  Is that in here?

• 3:20:37Jordi Hays?

  I think if you sleep for two hours.

• 3:20:39John Coogan?

  Okay, so, so, so, uh, working 002, the most intense periods for many come while working on models or new products. When time working extends beyond the 9966 schedule, that stands for 9 AM to 9 PM, six days a week. One startup executive jokingly referred to the schedule as 002, meaning midnight to midnight with a two-hour break on weekends.

• 3:21:03Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah, we don't.

• 3:21:03John Coogan?

  I don't think anyone can actually do that. Like, you're just gonna burn out and like, you need sleep. You actually do need sleep.

• 3:21:09Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:21:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:09Speaker 10

  It's more about just like, look, like, are you all in on this? Especially in New York, there's infinite things you could be doing. You just want people to like, think twice before filling out their social calendars during the week. It's like, look, we're trying to build something epic here.

• 3:21:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:21Speaker 10

  And it's awesome to just know that you're gonna be around your colleagues.

• 3:21:24John Coogan?

  Also, I just feel like there's something about New York City, Manhattan, where if I was at the office late until nine and I get off, like, there's still all the restaurants around.

• 3:21:33Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 3:21:34John Coogan?

  Like, like, like, stuff's gonna happen, whereas in LA or in Pasadena, like, older with kids, like, I wanna be home with the kids, five, six, like, you know, doing dinner.

• 3:21:44Jordi Hays?

  There's something super comforting.

• 3:21:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, that have kind of shifted, but they still probably give it their all.

• 3:21:49Speaker 10

  Oh yeah, parents look like, if you got kids at home, like, we definitely have a group of parents at Trava. They make it work. Uh, shout out to them for sure.

• 3:21:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:21:56Speaker 10

  But there's definitely a huge cohort of, you know, people that don't have the kids and they're like. You know, out the office a little bit more than the parents. Yeah.

• 3:22:01Jordi Hays?

  There's something super comforting, building a business, if you're working as hard as you possibly can, knowing that lack of hard work is not going to be the reason that you don't, you don't achieve the level of success that you want. Because if you're, people out there, a bunch of people are not pushing themselves as hard as they know they could. And then it's always going to be in the back of their mind of like, the whole time building the company. Maybe I worked a little bit harder, I would have achieved like, you know, whatever.

• 3:22:26Speaker 10

  And then success in a startup, it isn't just this binary thing where you either get the gold medal or not. There's like, different revenue targets you can hit. There's different valuations, different like, like ways to please customers and things like that. Um, so yeah, it's great to like, live a life where you look back and you're like, I gave it absolutely everything I got. There's nothing else I could have done better and like, keep pushing forward, so.

• 3:22:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's a good.

• 3:22:49John Coogan?

  That's a great place to end it.

• 3:22:50Jordi Hays?

  Place to end the show.

• 3:22:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:51Jordi Hays?

  Gave it all we got.

• 3:22:52John Coogan?

  We gave it all we got.

• 3:22:53Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for hanging out with us.

• 3:22:54John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for tuning in today. We will be back tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp Pacific.

• 3:23:00Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait. Have a great evening.

• 3:23:02John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:23:03Jordi Hays?

  Love you. Bye.