Jony Ive Joins OpenAI Analysis, Google I/O Reactions | Keith Rabois, Dan Shipper, Reggie James, TJ Parker, Ben Hylak

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (04:10) - Google I/O Breakdown (42:54) - Jony Ive Joins OpenAI Analysis (01:00:33) - Dan Shipper. Dan is the co-founder and CEO of Every, a business writing collective and newsletter platform for founders, operators, and technologists. He also writes Chain of Thought, a popular column exploring tech, psychology, and self-improvement. (01:27:50) - TJ Parker. TJ is the co-founder of Matrix, a stealth health tech startup. He previously co-founded PillPack, the online pharmacy acquired by Amazon for nearly $1 billion. (01:56:20) - Reggie James. Reggie is a writer and technologist who recently published Hardware, a book exploring identity and creativity in the age of machines. He previously co-founded Eternal and continues to explore the intersection of internet culture, software, and design. (02:27:55) - Timeline (02:30:18) - Keith Rabois. Keith is a general partner at Khosla Ventures and formerly with Founders Fund, with a storied track record as an operator and investor at companies like PayPal, Square, and OpenDoor. He is known for backing and advising dozens of high-growth startups in consumer and enterprise tech. (03:01:53) - Ben Hylak. Ben is the founder of Raindrop AI, a platform focused on intelligent information capture. He previously co-hosted the Latent Space podcast and has built a reputation for bridging AI infrastructure with practical workflows for teams.

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You watch TVBN. Today is Thursday, May 22nd, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology.

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  We're have a great show for you today, folks. Let's pull up what we're going through. We're talking about reactions to Google I/O still. Jony Ive joining OpenAI. We're going to break that down. Anthropic just dropped Claude 4 and is blowing out benchmarks. It's AI week on TVPN and we got a bunch of great guests. Dan Schiffer, TJ Parker, Reggie James, Keith Roy.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  You created the first entirely AI ad to promote a live stream.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  I did. Should we play it on the stream? It's on my profile. Did you already share it into the group so the boys can find it? Or should we? Or should I send it in? I've been having a ton of fun with VO3. I upgraded to the super expensive plan. It's worth every dime, even to just get a few funny eight second videos out of this thing. The fidelity is remarkable and it just looks awesome. It looks awesome. Yeah, let's play it. I don't know if we have sound, but let's play it because I added music, but maybe, I don't know, the music might be copyrighted. Let's see if it handles it. Okay, play this. Play it from the beginning. There we go. That's us.

• 1:19TJ Parker?

  I guess that was a close one. Yeah, too close.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  In the yellow hierarchy.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  CNBC is attacking us.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  They don't want us to podcast.

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  They don't want us to podcast.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  They don't want us.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  We're bringing media to Hollywood.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  Helicopter.

• 1:40John Coogan?

  The CNBC conflict.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  Oh, now you're fighting gorillas.

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  Versus 100 gorillas. Successful, as expected.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  Oh, and then the Ramp art. Nice.

• 1:53John Coogan?

  Switch your business to ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill paying and accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Get on ramp.com. Anyway, lots of fun with that. I'm having such a good time with VO3.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  This is gonna be a fun guest lineup. You already covered it a little bit, but we have a great group. Reboy coming on, the legend, the myth. Dan Shipper from Everi, who raised around earlier this week and has a lot of thoughts on Anthropic's new release. And then TJ Parker is getting the band back together.

• 2:31John Coogan?

  Can't wait for that.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  The Pillpack Band with a new company called General Medicine. And then Reggie James, Hip City. Reg is gonna be coming on and talking about Johnny Ives.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  I can't wait for that.

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  I think he's got a big announcement as well.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:45Jordi Hays?

  And I am excited for all of it. So should we talk about, should we Newsmax, John?

• 2:50John Coogan?

  Let's Newsmax. Let's go through Google I/O. Obviously, this happened on Tuesday. It's now Thursday, but Ben Thompson's done some analysis, breaking it down, thinking about what, what, what the implications are for the stock. I mean, the stock popped a ton. And it seems like, you know, Google's on this weird cadence where it takes them a full year to like really release a bunch of stuff altogether through these like big keynotes. And they're, they're more on like a waterfall cycle than just dropping random stuff. But clearly, every serious AI company is thinking about how they're scheduling releases. It's not a coincidence that Microsoft Build happened on Monday. Tuesday, we got Google I/O. Wednesday, we got OpenAI's acquisition of I/O, which is hilarious. And then Thursday, we get Clock Four.

• 3:36Jordi Hays?

  Funny because if you search, I think Lulu called this out, but if you search I/O on X, you just get a bunch of stuff about Johnny and Sam.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  Sam, absolute dog on the S E L.

• 3:45Jordi Hays?

  He's an absolute dog, John.

• 3:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's happened, that's happened a couple of times where deep research, deep search. I believe it was, wasn't it that deep seek came out and then Sam dropped deep research? And so the deep keyword kind of came back. But again, this all comes from deep learning. And so, you know, you never know. Anyway, let's just, just to recap on what actually happened at Google I/O. Because we talked to the Google folks and there was so much going on, it was hard to kind of boil it down into one thing. I was watching The Verge does these YouTube recaps where they cut the entire keynote down. And typically, when they do Apple, it's like five minutes. Apple W W C in five minutes, because it's just like new iPad, new iPhone, new Apple Watch, blah, blah, blah. Microsoft Builds cut down was 15 minutes. Google I O was like 30 minutes because there's so much stuff.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  So I really think just the volume of announcements was pretty high. So from Reuters, Google said on Tuesday, would put artificial intelligence into the hands of more web surfers while teasing a $250 a month subscription for its AI power users. That's me, baby. I'm on the 250 plan.

• 4:45Jordi Hays?

  Isn't it 500 and you can get it for 250?

• 4:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a little misinformation here.

• 4:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:51John Coogan?

  They're going to be ramping that up. So they're charging me 250 for the first couple of months, but I opted into the 500 plan. So they're going to ramp me up immediately as soon as it gets the end of the trial.

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  Funny if in the future, everybody's paying Google $1,000 a month and just begging like, please bring back the ads. Like, we're sorry for ever.

• 5:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, complaining, oh, the internet was bad. Oh, I just want to pay. No.

• 5:10Jordi Hays?

  I was thinking the other day, I got an email from Google Workspace saying like, we're raising prices.

• 5:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:16Jordi Hays?

  And I was kind of laughing because they can, I think so many businesses are so dependent on Google Workspace that they could like, kind of overnight raise it to like $1,000 a month per person. Like probably, you know, see a little churn, but not like crazy amount.

• 5:33John Coogan?

  No way. It's so hard to churn. I mean, this is the one we were talking about with Deal and Rippling. It's like deals in like the most dramatic spot possible. But do I really want to rip out my payroll software right now?

• 5:46John Coogan?

  That's a tall order. I'm not on Deal, but if you're on Deal, you can just turn the other eye.

• 5:51Jordi Hays?

  You have, you have, you know, you know, Pirelli tires and Pirelli gets caught spying on Michelin.

• 5:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:58Jordi Hays?

  Are you going to like, take your car into the like shop and be like, hey, like, I gotta get different tires?

• 6:04John Coogan?

  No, you're just going to be like, oh, weird. The Pirelli CEO is different than the Bridgestone CEO or whatever. Anyway, there was a flurry of demos, including smart glasses, which I'm excited to try the N real smart glasses. And then they're also doing some audio only smart glasses, which have been very popular with Meta, the Ray-Bans. They've adopted a tone of increased urgency since the rise of generative AI challenged the tech companies, longtime stronghold of organizing and retrieving information on the internet. And this is like, the AI moment should just be Google's moment, right? Their mission is to organize all of the information in the world and. L L Ms literally just do that. It just compressed out all the information.

• 6:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:43John Coogan?

  It's like the perfect Google product, but of course they have some business model positioning challenges. They can't just give up the golden goose on day one and go all in on generative AI. But they're they're they're taking it more and more seriously every day. So. Major update, the company said consumers across the United States can now switch Google search into AI mode showcased in March. As an experiment open to test users, the feature dispenses with the web standard fare in favor of computer generated answers for complicated queries. And what's interesting is about that is that who are we talking to yesterday that was saying like the genius of Google is that there was just one button? I forget who we were talking to, but basically this idea that like Google had just one button.

• 7:25John Coogan?

  You know, search and then they have the I'm feeling lucky button, but it was such a simple interface. Like, I don't love the idea of adding a switch.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:33John Coogan?

  It feels like a very like a half measure. It's like, is AI the future? If it's the future, then Google search should just be AI mode all the time. Or is AI mode not the future, in which case maybe you shouldn't even do it. And I should just go to chat GPT when I want AI mode and I should go to Google or I should go to the Gemini app for for that experience if they're distinct.

• 7:52Jordi Hays?

  I think one thing, one thing is for sure, consumers have historically, you know, imagined products for one. Use case, right? Like snaps, people still use Snapchat for sending pictures to each other. Even though that functionality is like super embedded in.

• 8:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:09Jordi Hays?

  Instagram and other apps now. And so, but yeah, I think.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  It's always tough when you're when you're saying AI is the future, but we don't want to get rid of the thing that's not the future. We like that thing too. So we're gonna have, we're gonna have our.

• 8:23Jordi Hays?

  The scale that Google's at.

• 8:24John Coogan?

  They can't do it. It's impossible.

• 8:25Jordi Hays?

  They could have a really good. No, they could have a really good LM ad product.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  And just if you were starting to introduce it to 1%, 2% of your users, it could dramatically impact.

• 8:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:36Jordi Hays?

  Revenue because they've spent decades, you know, optimizing.

• 8:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Jordi Hays?

  Search results, right? So.

• 8:42John Coogan?

  So Google also announced an AI Ultra Plan for 250. Provides users with higher limits on AI and early access as to experimental tools like Project Mariner, an internet browser extension that can automate keystrokes and mouse clicks. Somehow I missed that entirely. There were so many, there were so many launches. I completely missed Project Mariner. Excited to try that out because I guess I have access. And Deep Think, a version of its top shelf Gemini model that is more capable of reasoning through complicated tasks. I'm excited to talk, to check out that. I've been using Deep Research a lot. Definitely want to want to test drive Deep Think. Pichai told reporters that the rise of generative AI was not at the full expense of online search. This feels very far from a zero sum moment, said Pichai. The kind of use cases we are serving in

• 9:27John Coogan?

  search is dramatically expanding because of AI. First off, and I mean, to be clear, like this, this is what happened with computers. Like, we went from the desktop to the laptop to the phone, and most people have a laptop and a phone. And it was not completely disruptive, even though you can do everything that you can do on a laptop, pretty much on a phone. People wound up dual using, and so it's totally, it's not, it's not as much of a dire issue that I think I was making earlier. So Ben Thompson's dropping the analysis. He says, first off, my compliments to Reuters for this write-up. The amount of things announced and pre-announced or envisioned were pretty overwhelming. And I'd say, my compliments to Ben Thompson for this write-up, about Reuters' write-up, because we are now three layers of reaction deep.

• 10:12Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 10:13John Coogan?

  It's the best. This was, to be sure, terribly impressive. We all knew, we all, we already knew that Gemini 2.5 is awesome, and the company's imagen 4 image model and VO3 video model were significant leaps forward from, from just a few months ago. I wrote in December when VO2 came out.

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  I called it off-air, too. VO3 is, feels significant because it seems inevitable that VO4 will be almost indistinguishable from reality. Right? You might have a hallucination here or there, but

• 10:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  Some of the videos that we've been seeing, like, it just needs some slight tweaks, and it just looks like

• 10:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. It has, it still has a specific look to it. I haven't really played around too much with trying to really break it out of kind of its default AI vibe. I'm sure you can, but it's really, really impressive. And I think I'm, you know, the, the memes are cool. We're in kind of a Studio Ghibli moment for VO3 videos, I think. We're seeing a lot of these on the timeline. I'm interested to see where it goes more practically. I mean, I noticed that when the Sam Altman and Jony Ive photo dropped. Didn't see a single Ghibli version of that in my feed. And that was like the most Ghibli-ifiable photo ever of Johnny kind of leaning on his side.

• 11:33John Coogan?

  And I actually-

• 11:35Jordi Hays?

  The place that I see Ghibli most now is in people's profile pictures.

• 11:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, people like that. And I actually, I actually Ghibli'd the, the photo myself. The Sam and, and Johnny Ive. And I was, I don't know if anyone can see that, but I don't know. It's a Ghibli of the photo. And I was just kind of like, this isn't worth posting. Like, there's nothing special here. Like, we get it. You can do the cartoon filter. And so it's more about how do you use that tool? And, and now I've been using it to design. I mean, I'm looking through my, my recent, my, my recent, although on day one of the Ghibli drop, it was a lot of just fun Gibleys. Eventually it became, you know, okay, make a storybook for my son. Do the Giga Chad meme on everyone who's been on Invest Like the Best.

• 12:25John Coogan?

  Make a bunch of ramp ads, of course. Do a bunch of stuff with like testing, make a bunch of people bodybuilders, do some set design for us. It's like a, like my use of images in ChatGPT has morphed from, oh, cool. The, the Studio Ghibli thing is the meme to how can I practically use this to do cool stuff? Like making merch ideas for us and stuff like that. So I'm excited for, for VO, VO3 to kind of get into that mode. It's very clear that the, it is, it is extremely technically impressive, but it is just a tool. And so we have yet to see the VO3 Harry Potter Balenciaga moment. Something that's truly viral, not just because it's an impressive, that it's an AI image.

• 13:05John Coogan?

  Like that, that joke, that the stand-up comedian, that doesn't go viral unless you are like, it's AI, right? And you're like, wow, it's so impressive. It's AI. I can't believe that. That's why I'm liking it. I'm excited for when someone creates something that would go viral if you had shot it practically. And it's so good that yeah, they used AI, but it's just.

• 13:25Jordi Hays?

  The breakthrough moment for me was seeing a like man on the street style interview that was made with VO3. And realizing that I could, I could, I could call it out as AI if I saw it independently, if it wasn't being, you know, if the creator wasn't stating that it was made with VO3. But you can imagine a man on the street interview going viral and creating this like 15 minutes of fame moment.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:50Jordi Hays?

  For somebody that doesn't exist.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  I mean, that's what happened with the Pope, the dripped out Pope. Remember that? That actually went viral. People thought the Pope had this puffy jacket and it was mid journey image.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  And so, and so, yes, it's like the tools here, it's great.

• 14:04Jordi Hays?

  I mean, in people's defense, the Pope had a white G-Wagon.

• 14:10John Coogan?

  He did.

• 14:12Jordi Hays?

  That he would drive around on.

• 14:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:14Jordi Hays?

  And so it wasn't that unbelievable that he would have a white, you know, puffer jacket coat.

• 14:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so let's go through VO2, VO3 a little bit more. Ben Thompson has written about this before. He says, "The reason to focus on VO2, however, is not just that it strikes me as a seminal moment in generative AI history, but that it also is the most powerful manifestation of the advantages that Google has in this space. Think about the three pillars of generative AI, algorithms. Google, of course, invented the transformer, but it certainly seems that likely that the company figured out something important in terms of maintaining coherence, which I complained about with Sora. And we saw this with Sora when we, when we ran the same test in VO3 and Sora. The Sora generation was a lot, there were way more hallucinations and it was way trippier.

• 15:00John Coogan?

  Whereas you can see, you know, it's like, it's a Ferrari, it's a yellow Ferrari in our little video. And it remains a yellow Ferrari the entire time. And it stays and the TBPN text stays tracked onto the car the entire time. And so there's something algorithmically potentially that's happening there. And that's what Ben's highlighting. Then in terms of compute, Google is training and running inference on its own TPUs, which are increasingly developed in conjunction with the model. Jeff Dean said it.

• 15:27Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. I didn't really know that they were, they had TPUs in production.

• 15:30John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, these have been in production for years just on general parallelized computing. So you could do recommendation algorithms or, you know, any sort of just machine learning and deep learning on it before the transformer revolution. They knew the TPUs would be valuable and they've been investing in them for a lot. But what's interesting is that, is that the VO3 model is very clearly designed and, and trained and inferences all on TPUs. And so there may, there might be some sort of compounding advantage there.

• 15:58Jordi Hays?

  The TPUs are so great. Why are you rate limiting somebody paying $500 a month?

• 16:02John Coogan?

  That's true. They haven't made enough of them. That's probably why.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:04John Coogan?

  Because, you know, Apple's probably getting more line time at TSMC. And Jensen's probably getting a lot of line time on TSMC. And then also.

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  I can imagine Jensen gets a little bit of line time.

• 16:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then also just the fact that, um, you know, Google has been investing a ton in CapEx, but they also have Google Cloud Platform. They also have to serve higher value apps and services. They have to serve YouTube.

• 16:28Jordi Hays?

  They also have to get better at serving me ads.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  I know, I know. Me VO3 models, that, that should be their pri, that should be their primary goal.

• 16:36Jordi Hays?

  If you're a Google user, put a support ticket in and just say, hey, targeting's been lacking lately. Just try to push it, try to get better.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:44Jordi Hays?

  That's my only request. Monetize me, you know, harder.

• 16:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Jeff Dean, uh, one of the top AI scientists at Google and one of the greatest programmers of all time. Are you familiar with Jeff Dean? This guy? So if you search Jeff Dean jokes, you get this consolidated list of Jeff Dean facts and they're all Chuck Norris style jokes about Jeff Dean because he's such a legend. And so, says, um, compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers. Jeff Dean builds his code before committing it, but only to check for compiler and linker bugs. Jeff Dean once failed the Turing test when he correctly identified the 203rd Fibonacci number in less than a, that, less than a second.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  There's a whole bunch of these that are just ridiculous. Jeff Dean's keyboard has two keys, one and zero. He just programs in binary. Got it. When Jeff Dean listens to MP3s, he just cats them to dev dot T S P and does the decoding in his head, basically just like Matrix mode. Well, there's a bunch of these funny things. Jeff Dean knows the last digit of pi and Jeff Dean mines Bitcoins in his head. There's a bunch of other good ones in here. He can lossy compress random data. All these things are like jokes about like computationally impossible things to do, but Jeff Dean can of course do them. So he's a legend.

• 18:04Jordi Hays?

  He's pretty good at lead code.

• 18:05John Coogan?

  Last one, we talked about this yesterday, but data, data is shaping up to be the biggest obstacle for model development going forward. The single greatest untapped resource is likely video generally and YouTube in particular, which Google owns. I certainly imagine this was an important resource for the development of V O two.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's so.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  It's wild.

• 18:23Jordi Hays?

  This, this advantage is not been talked about enough. There's so many of these sort of video foundation model startups that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars and yes, I'm sure they get access to YouTube data content in different ways.

• 18:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:42Jordi Hays?

  But ultimately it is, uh, nobody has, nobody has the edge that, uh, you, you could go do deals with every single major Hollywood studio and still not have anywhere near the edge as Google does just by having a constant net new stream of, of video content.

• 19:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:05Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  We got to, uh, we got to look at the total data size of all YouTube videos compared to just the text on the internet. I want to, I want to really know like how much more data is there on YouTube or is it roughly the same? We're going to dig into that soon, but anyway.

• 19:23John Coogan?

  Ben Thompson continues and says, "Google I/O is this on steroids?" But at the same time, I'm not sure. And I'm not sure if this was because of the sheer quantity of announcements. I came away feeling less impressed than I should have. I decided I needed to take the dog for a walk. I wanted, by the way, to tie these videos together into something more coherent. They're both made using VO3 and Google Flow, the new product Google announced to utilize VO. Unfortunately, it's extremely hard to use and very buggy, above and beyond the general challenges of linking together, desperately generated videos while retaining coherence. This, in the end, makes the point I ultimately came to on my walk. Google Flow was arguably the most archetypal, archetypal, archetypical product announcement at Google I/O. But while

• 20:08John Coogan?

  VO3 is jaw-dropping, Flow was pretty disappointing. And this was my experience. Like, I went to Flow on my phone, and it basically told me, "No." It was like, "You're on an iPhone, you're a second-class. Get out of here. We're optimized for desktop." And it's like, for a startup, I get, like, Instagram started on iPhone and then eventually launched on Android. I get that. But it's like, you're Google. Like, you can figure out how to serve your web app in Safari on iOS. Like, I don't understand what's going on. It just makes you look bad. It doesn't, it doesn't really make me like Google so much that I'm like, "Oh, yeah, I should get an Android phone now." Because like, clearly, it would be a better experience. And then also, this-

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I gotta use Flow, this app that I've never tried.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  It's like, no, if that's the, if that's the development paradigm, I'm out. If you're gonna try and twist my arm into using your software, I'm less likely to use it. That's my take on it. And then they also funnel you into this, like, "Hey, do you just want to watch a bunch of videos?" Like, you definitely don't want to set the GPUs on fire by training one of these things. You don't want a custom video. Why don't you just have one of these that we have off the shelf?

• 21:11Jordi Hays?

  I love that. I love that content, or the copy there, too. It's, Flow is a tool built for and by creatives. And it's like, well, YouTube, in many ways, destroyed the film industry, right?

• 21:25John Coogan?

  Did it?

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  I would argue that it did, just because it created an entirely new library of content that didn't require going to the movies, right?

• 21:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:34Jordi Hays?

  I mean, there's like, the videos would have come on demand, but it introduced massive, massive competition for people's attention. And that just hurts the-

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  Movie industry.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder about that. That's probably right. It seems reasonable. I don't know. Yeah. Anyway, I need to think about that more. If YouTube is the is the the reason that.

• 21:58Jordi Hays?

  I mean, not YouTube in particular, but just just the Internet.

• 22:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, certainly, like, like easier technology, like, obviously, there's going to be demand for video in a theater if you can only watch video in a theater.

• 22:08Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 22:09John Coogan?

  As soon as you can watch on a TV, that creates competitive pressure. As soon as you can watch on your phone, that creates more competitive pressure. YouTube's part of that, probably like, I'd make it like 10% of the reason, but.

• 22:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:19John Coogan?

  But yeah, to totally valuable, a totally viable argument to make.

• 22:25John Coogan?

  So Ben Thompson was a little under underwhelmed. He said, more generally, the the generative AI pillars that I wrote about last December, the areas that Google dominates notably don't include any generative AI products. And that, more than anything, was my my Google I O takeaway. Google's technology is incredible, but I'm still not convinced this company can make compelling products. Indeed, my critique of the presentation as a whole was how unfocused and random it felt. Google's inability to prioritize and set a coherent narrative actually diminished just how incredible their advances are.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it certainly was an opportunity to come out and and just focus on, yeah, we have a bunch of cool experiments running, but like, here's how we're going to actually have a ultra coherent strategy around the search bar.

• 23:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:15Jordi Hays?

  And how that is going to interact with AI.

• 23:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:18Jordi Hays?

  What are our long term plans?

• 23:19John Coogan?

  They almost should do more keynotes less frequently and just say, it's Notebook LM day, and we're just going to take over the internet with Notebook LM.

• 23:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:28John Coogan?

  And then it's VO three day, and we're making VO three a fantastic product.

• 23:32Jordi Hays?

  Same advice we would give to founders that are like, I'm going to have a big announcement. I'm going to drop four things. We hired this executive. We had a new website.

• 23:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:39Jordi Hays?

  We have a new product release and we have a fundraiser.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  I I am still so puzzled by the VO three launch, just because. Like you're Google, you have to figure out how much it costs to generate one of these. It's an eight second video. I understand that you're setting the GPUs on fire. But what is the energy cost? What is the depreciation cost on these TPUs? They must know how much it costs to generate a single VO3 eight second video. Is it $10? Is it $100? Like, there should be an auction-based model, essentially. Like what they do for ads, and then they should have a queue. And they should say, hey, uh, right now, the GPUs are fully utilized. We have no capacity, and so it's going to be $10 for this next generation. And you're going to have to wait one hour. But if you pay $100, you can get it in the next minute or five minutes.

• 24:26Jordi Hays?

  I think part of it, part of it might weirdly be that-

• 24:28John Coogan?

  Actually meet the demand where it is, instead of like, you're on a $250 plan, but you can only use it a few times a day, and then you have to wait 24 hours.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  But part of it is, is it's basically a research preview. I don't think a lot of VO3 content right now is actually going to be used.

• 24:43John Coogan?

  That they're advertising on the iOS App Store.

• 24:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:47John Coogan?

  I don't, I don't, I don't care that they called it a research preview, an alpha, beta, gamma, delta. Who cares?

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  They're selling an expensive toy right now.

• 24:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like you're-

• 24:57Jordi Hays?

  It's like a buggy toy that only works.

• 24:59John Coogan?

  You're taking my money, and I, I think the biggest thing is, is the ads. Like, the fact that if I go to the App Store and I search for Gemini, like, it pops up and says, "Create videos with Gemini. Make and share videos with Gemini Advanced with VO2." And like, you click there, and it's like, it's advertising it. Like, if it's a research preview and you don't have the capacity, don't advertise it.

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:23John Coogan?

  Say, hey, we're at capacity, we're, we're, we're maxed out on demand. Um, anyway, uh, going back to search, Ben Thompson continues and says, "The one clear exception was smack dab in the middle of the keynote, which focused on search. I don't think it's an accident that Google's best and most important product had the clearest presentation and vision." Uh, CEO Sundar Pichai started with a brief overview of AI, uh, brief overview of AI overviews. Uh, he says, so this is Sundar talking. "It's another exciting example of how AI is advancing our timeless mission to organize the world's information." Yes, let's hear it for organizing the world's information. We love that Google does that, to make it universally accessible and useful. No product embodies our mission more than Google Search.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  It's the reason we started inventing AI decades ago and how we can deliver its benefits to of benefits.

• 26:13Jordi Hays?

  He's like, hey, just to be clear, we invented AI.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, they did.

• 26:18Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  Now make a product.

• 26:21Jordi Hays?

  Slipping that in.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  Our Gemini models.

• 26:23Jordi Hays?

  It is funny though, because talking about these AI overviews.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:28Jordi Hays?

  I just searched in Google, what did Google announce at I O? And it doesn't even have an AI overview of that.

• 26:34John Coogan?

  The self referential stuff is particularly bad. And I think it's because of like data and security, like or oboroses. Like the fact that I can open up Gemini and I can ask, hey, uh, just, I just want to know, like, am I paying for this on this account right now? And it's like, I have no idea. I wouldn't possibly look at your own account within Google. It's like, I understand privacy, but like, this is actually important to me. I want to know if I can access the latest model. You can even ask a Google model, what model are you? And they can never tell you because they're just like, I couldn't possibly do that. It would be a violation of something or other. And you know, it's just like some sort of security thing that got wrapped up in like 20 layers of lawyers and stuff. And they're like, don't leak the, don't leak the customer's information into the LLM to

• 27:18John Coogan?

  let them know that they are paying or they're not. Or like, the LLM should be selling me on upgrading, you know, if I, if I'm not upgraded.

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  This is interesting. I just searched for, uh, stuff about OpenAI and Anthropic. It would not give an AI overview.

• 27:36Jordi Hays?

  But then I searched about TBPN and it gives an AI overview.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:40Jordi Hays?

  And it misspells my name.

• 27:42John Coogan?

  Oh, weird.

• 27:42Jordi Hays?

  Which is interesting.

• 27:43John Coogan?

  Adds the E?

• 27:45Jordi Hays?

  Adds an E. Never done that.

• 27:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Four letter name, tracking in the lineage of, uh, Apple CEOs. You got Steve Jobs. Tim Cook, Jordy Hayes, potential.

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm making, I'm starting my run.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Starting your run.

• 28:03John Coogan?

  One great example of progress is our AI overview since launching at I O last year. They've scaled to over 1.5 billion users every month. Let's hear it for that. In over 200 countries and territories, as people use AI overviews, we see they are happier with their results and they search more often. I completely agree. The AI overviews have been very good. I know that there's some hallucinations, but in general, I've enjoyed them.

• 28:24Jordi Hays?

  Beautiful thing from an ad product standpoint is that Google still gets all their ad. They're still serving ads everywhere. It just so happens that they're not, you know, especially on desktop.

• 28:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know, I'm, I'm, I'm very, very satisfied with, with, with the iteration there. The question is just like, they are pulling me into.

• 28:42Jordi Hays?

  It is funny to think about an OpenAI experience where you query ChatGPT and you get just like exactly what you're looking for. And then there's just like display ads like everywhere. No, I know it's not going to happen, but that's effectively what Google is showing is possible when you can just build ads around the result that the person actually wants.

• 29:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  AI overviews are also one of the strongest drivers of growth for visual searches in Google Lens. Lens grew 65% year over year with more than 100 billion already this year. So people are asking more queries and they're also asking more complex queries. With our latest Gemini models, our AI overviews are at the quality and accuracy you've come to expect from search and are the fastest in the industry. AI overviews are, as Ben Thompson pointed out, after Google's most recent earnings, the most, the most used generative AI product in the world. Most of today's search segment, however, was focused on the new AI mode. AI mode was introduced by head of search Liz Reid. So Liz Reid says, today you will see how you can ask anything and more intelligent, agentic and personalized search will take you,

• 29:53John Coogan?

  will take on your toughest questions and help you get stuff done. This is particularly funny because did you know that? There's a maximum query length in Google search. It's like 256 characters or something. It's like shorter than a tweet. So if you just, if you just try and benchmark, like, what was your latest ask for ChatGPT? Just like, hey, ChatGPT, summarize the news for me. I'm interested in seeing what Ben Thompson's talking about and I want to know what Dylan Patel's up to. And can you also summarize what happened at Microsoft Build and then Google I/O? And I want to hear about the Johnny Ive acquisition. And then I also want to hear some stuff about Claude 4. If you take that, if you take that query and put it into Google, you will literally just get an error message that says, "Query too long." And it's because like, it's, Google search is set up not for that type of searching.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  So anyway, there's Gemini 2.5 at the core, and they give a tour of AI mode. And so, AI mode is more like a chat of a chat-like interface, and all the demos are very impressive. They are also real, as in either available now or shipping soon, and all seem clearly useful, says Ben Thompson. On-demand data visualization, for example, seems like an obvious win for generative AI-powered search. That makes a ton of sense. Search for GDP per capita across a couple of countries. It just generates a table or chart for you. Makes a ton of sense. The most interesting comment Reid made, however, is a paragraph in the middle. "The real goal for AI mode is to refine these features so that they can graduate to the core search experience." Completely, very, very smart. In other words, "Google has clearly, has a clearly defined AI funnel, which actually brings the coherence

• 31:24John Coogan?

  to this keynote that I was looking for. At the foundation of everything are those pillars I referenced above. Google's incredible models, unmatched infrastructure, and data advantage." Reid's discussion of personalizing AI mode, "Using your personal data was compelling as well." Then, "You have a bunch of theoretical ideas that make for a cool demo videos, but the actual productization that still functions in Google is on the search team. That team takes ideas that works and puts them in AI mode." So you can think of like, every other product is just-

• 31:52Jordi Hays?

  This is basically the only, if you're, if you're looking at Google's Alphabet stock, and you're trying to understand how AI is going to impact it, you can ignore- Notebook LM and the Digi knockoff and all these other things and just focus on this. And it's like, do you believe they're going to figure out a way to monetize these sort of chat GPT style queries that are happening in Gemini right now? And it probably looks something like AI overview over time.

• 32:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, and also if you're a startup and you're worried about like getting rolled by Google and becoming like a Google feature, well, the threat is not that Google launches a directly competitive app and outcompetes you. That hasn't played out like they launched Google Circles and they weren't able to crush Facebook or anything like that.

• 32:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:44John Coogan?

  Or, or, yeah, like, yeah, any of these little, uh, these little like startup killers where they're Google products, that's not really the dangerous area. The dangerous area is will your customers and your users be able to solve the problem that they want just by Google search 2.0? Or like when Google search get but gets better, is that a threat to your business?

• 33:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or if you're building an agent that's like, we're helping people book travel.

• 33:11John Coogan?

  It's like Google flights is gonna get better.

• 33:14Jordi Hays?

  Is gonna get better, yeah.

• 33:15John Coogan?

  And so that's, that's the real risk, I think. It's less that if you, if it may, if it never makes sense to go.

• 33:21Jordi Hays?

  Google also had a Twitter competitor, Google Buzz.

• 33:25John Coogan?

  Wait, no, that, that was a chat thing, wasn't it?

• 33:27Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 33:28John Coogan?

  It was, it was a Twitter competitor. Yeah, so like all, all, all these, all these one-off things that don't make sense.

• 33:33Jordi Hays?

  Micro blogging messaging tool developed by Google.

• 33:36John Coogan?

  No way.

• 33:37Jordi Hays?

  It replaced Google Wave.

• 33:39John Coogan?

  So many of these things. Yeah, they've, they've launched in sunset so many products. Anyway, AI mode looks a bit like chat GPT. The real race for Google is to make search compelling enough that people don't just switch to chat GPT for everything. To that end, another metric that likely matters is actual usage. Pichai's definition of the types of searches that are growing was very carefully delineated, but growth in general is certainly a good thing. If an AI feature, if a feature drives AI mode, it may be a good candidate for the main search page. So one of the common refrains that came out of yesterday's keynote was how Google had just killed half of Silicon Valley startups. I'm not so sure however, and then Ben, we've read enough Sir Taker at this point that we're, we're predicting what he's gonna say.

• 34:23John Coogan?

  First, it's clear than ever to me that the only product that truly matters or functions at Google is search or functions. A lot of the demos we saw yesterday are likely to stay demos or at best be forgotten and eventually kill products that no one uses. Second, the degree to which so many of the demos yesterday depend on user volition actually kind of dampened. What's that? You getting a phone call?

• 34:51John Coogan?

  Google's calling us. Sundar, let's just bring him in the studio. Let's just talk to Sundar. Bring him in. What's going on with XR glasses? We don't have Sundar.

• 35:02Jordi Hays?

  Would be a fun surprise guest.

• 35:03John Coogan?

  One day. We'll get him soon. We'll get him soon. Android is probably going to be the most important canvas for shipping a lot of these capabilities and Google's XR glasses were pretty compelling and in my opinion had a UX much closer to what I envisioned for XR than Meta's Orion did. Interesting. Devices drive usage at scale, but that actually leaves a lot of room for startups to build software products that incorporate AI to solve problems that people didn't know they had. The challenge will be in reaching them, which is to say the startup problem is the same as ever. You gotta get distribution.

• 35:34Jordi Hays?

  Here's the thing to me. It's like, does Google Search and Gemini eventually merge? Or do they stand as independent products? And so Google is like, kind of like maintaining search for people that, basically boomers who are just perpetually going to go to the search box and search and like, I'm going to be in that bucket to some degree. I think everybody will still have.

• 35:56John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 35:57Jordi Hays?

  It's so built in. They have so much distribution that it will continue to have usage. Meanwhile, though, ChatGPT is just getting better and better at searching the internet and it can be used for both things. And that will present a pretty interesting challenge if Google's like, okay, we're competing with OpenAI and ChatGPT, but we're doing it in this two-pronged way and OpenAI is like, we're just trying to make the best, like, you know, basically like, single, you know, search, you know, box plus button on the internet that can do everything.

• 36:32John Coogan?

  Yep. I mean, I think a lot of the decision between those two will come down to speed. So right now, if I want Uh, let's see, like Tom Cruise age, Tom Cruise age. I just hit Ctrl T and I'm in the search bar in Google Chrome, 62 years. Now, if I go to chat GPT, I have to go chat.com. I'm logged in, Tom Cruise age, and it's thinking, searching the web, it's searching the web, it's searched three different websites. Tom Cruise was born on July 3rd, 62. As of today, he's 62 years old. So you see how much longer that took me to do use chat GPT for something like silly

• 37:16John Coogan?

  like that or simple? But there's a lot of things that you search for that where you're like, I know that Google will one-shot this in five milliseconds. And I know that chat GPT will take too long. Also, for some reason, I wound up running that against GPT 4.5. I think 4.0 is probably faster, but like, when I went to chat.com, 4.5 was just the one that was defaulted, right? And so this is where we get into like the model router, where if I land on, if I accidentally triggered that in 03, it would be doing like, it would be writing 100 lines of code, you know? And so the model router needs to be like, super fast, and they need to figure out caching, and they also need to figure out integration into like, the search bar, because even, even on your phone, it's usually faster to

• 38:00John Coogan?

  just open up, uh, open up a new Safari window and then just type in there.

• 38:05Jordi Hays?

  And then the question is like, does OpenAI need its own browser, right? Even for, you know, Arvind from Perplexity is like, very focused on the browser.

• 38:14John Coogan?

  Like, right now, even if I do this on my phone, if I open up Safari, the search bar is always down at the bottom, and I can just tap that and immediately start typing Tom Cruise's age. When I open up chat GPT, I was looking at my image library. So now, it's, it's, I'm in image library mode, I have to go back, I have to go back to chat GPT. I have a query that I didn't actually click finish on, so I have to delete all that to go. So all of a sudden, I'm like, into five, 10 seconds, just to get a quick answer. And so I still route quest, I route queries personally to Google when I, when I want something super fast. Anyway.

• 38:50Jordi Hays?

  Do you remember that Gemini started as Bard?

• 38:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. There's been like seven bard, but there were, there were other ones before that.

• 39:00Jordi Hays?

  Bard, a poet traditionally one reciting epics and associated with a particular, particular oral tradition.

• 39:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:08Jordi Hays?

  Cool name. Uh, I have a few other.

• 39:10John Coogan?

  Tough go for the Winkleville.

• 39:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:13John Coogan?

  Zuck comes for them with the Facebook stuff. Now Google's coming for them with the Gemini branding. Gemini becomes synonymous with Google AI. And people are like, wait, where do I go to trade crypto?

• 39:27Jordi Hays?

  I never, I never thought about that. It's ma, it is.

• 39:29John Coogan?

  I don't know how you could do that because they're both in technology companies. Like they're both tech companies. I get that they're in somewhat different areas, but like we talked to Austin Allred, he had to rebrand Lambda School because of Lambda Labs, which is a AI data center company.

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's because of Lambda Labs?

• 39:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Who's coming on the show on Friday, actually. But I'm.

• 39:47Jordi Hays?

  Trademark wars, new segment on TVP.

• 39:49John Coogan?

  I think it's, I think it's Lambda Labs, but I'm not sure.

• 39:52Jordi Hays?

  Let's go through a quick.

• 39:53John Coogan?

  It was a different land, which was a completely, it was not, it was not an education, but it was a tech company and they were both tech companies. And so they had to rebrand.

• 39:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, let's go through a quick history. I have a, a history of Google cloning startups. So way back in the day that in 2004, they launched something called Orket.

• 40:09John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. Or Kooch.

• 40:10Jordi Hays?

  Or Kooch.

• 40:10John Coogan?

  It was a Brazilian acquisition.

• 40:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So they got traction in Brazil and India was never truly global.

• 40:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:16Jordi Hays?

  Shut down in 2014. There was Lively, which was basically a second life, like 3D virtual world thing. Closed in less than six months. Uh, and then they had Buzz, which was trying to counter Twitter at the time. Had, had a bunch of backlash around privacy stuff. Google plus was obviously the Facebook rival.

• 40:38John Coogan?

  Plus.

• 40:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then they actually had, uh, tried, they, they tried to buy Groupon for six billion and it failed. And so they launched Google offers. This is like a whole other era.

• 40:49John Coogan?

  I have a fun story about Google plus. So, uh, I was one of like the best to use, the biggest users on Google plus. I just went like full send into it and was like, I'm going to figure out the social network, kind of like, you know, figure out how to create circles, create that. And because of that, I got.

• 41:05Jordi Hays?

  Yourself.

• 41:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I got, this is in college. I got verification. So I got a checkmark.

• 41:10Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  But that checkmark translated, they ported it, even though they shut down that, my account was like checkmarked as like, oh, you're like a serious influencer, even though I had like 500.

• 41:22Jordi Hays?

  Did that transition into YouTube?

• 41:24John Coogan?

  Into YouTube. Yeah. And so when I started the YouTube channel, I had, I got to 100 followers on one, on a new account. And I was like, wait, my other account has a checkmark. So I shut down the old account and moved it over to my personal account and had the checkmark, which I could have gotten in like, it didn't actually do anything for the growth of the channel, but it was just like, kind of a funny, funny anecdote. And I was like, I'm gonna try this. And it was just a funny story. Anyway, let's move on to OpenAI acquiring I/O and Ben Thompson's analysis there. But first, let's tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free, folks.

• 42:00Jordi Hays?

  Go to Figma.com, try their new products, websites.

• 42:04John Coogan?

  Four of them.

• 42:05Jordi Hays?

  Product. Try Buzz, too.

• 42:07John Coogan?

  Tons. Oh, I mean, the, the trademark's available now that Google's out of the buzz game.

• 42:11Jordi Hays?

  The buzz game.

• 42:12John Coogan?

  Figma, Figma's got it.

• 42:13Jordi Hays?

  Create and share on-brand assets instantly.

• 42:16John Coogan?

  Very good.

• 42:16Jordi Hays?

  Powerful.

• 42:17John Coogan?

  Also, go check out vanta.com, automate compliance and manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Anyway, let's go on to I/O. So.

• 42:34Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 42:36John Coogan?

  We already covered the Bloomberg article. We know the facts. $6.5 billion all-stock deal. Johnny Ive and his team over at I/O get roughly 2% of OpenAI as major incentive pay. And there was a lot of good commentary on the timeline about this, about how Apple's not really set up to comp someone a billion dollars. We, we looked at this with Tim Cook. He's making like, what, couple hundred million? And it's like, when you're talking about a trillion dollar company, executive compensation in the billions isn't actually that crazy. But OpenAI can offer that.

• 43:10Jordi Hays?

  John.

• 43:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 43:11Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna be devastated, but Tim only made 74 million.

• 43:14John Coogan?

  Oh, my God. That's brutal.

• 43:17Jordi Hays?

  It's like, he should have been a baseball player.

• 43:19John Coogan?

  I mean, he, he's.

• 43:20Jordi Hays?

  He should have been a half decent basketball player.

• 43:22John Coogan?

  What do you think would have happened to Apple's market cap had they not dodged the tariffs?

• 43:29John Coogan?

  That would have been hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap erosion.

• 43:32Jordi Hays?

  Nuked.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  It was already tumultuous for the company, but they were carved out the entire time. There was never any fear that it was going to happen, and that's entirely because of Tim Cook's negotiation.

• 43:42Jordi Hays?

  2023 made 63 million. I genuinely feel like we need to take to the streets and start protesting in Cupertino.

• 43:52John Coogan?

  We should.

• 43:53Jordi Hays?

  Because we've seen this on public.

• 43:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:56Jordi Hays?

  You can back test.

• 43:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:58Jordi Hays?

  The better that CEOs get paid.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:00Jordi Hays?

  Typically, the better the companies do. And as an Apple shareholder, I want Tim Cook to be pulling down one B a year. And I think he'll be highly incentivized to grow the company.

• 44:15John Coogan?

  Okay, I have an idea. So Greg Abel, he's 62 years old. He just took over as CEO of Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway.

• 44:27Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 44:27John Coogan?

  Tim Cook's 64, only two years older. So what if Tim Cook steps down as CEO of Apple, starts a company, gets acquired by OpenAI?

• 44:36Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 44:37John Coogan?

  Goes in 30 year run.

• 44:38Jordi Hays?

  30 year run, generational run.

• 44:40John Coogan?

  And he's like, look, it's just dollars and cents to me. I can make more money over there. I can 10x my comp.

• 44:45Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 44:46John Coogan?

  He could 10x his comp by going to OpenAI.

• 44:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he really could.

• 44:49John Coogan?

  Easily.

• 44:50Jordi Hays?

  He really could.

• 44:50John Coogan?

  Easily.

• 44:50Jordi Hays?

  I mean, yeah, that's the big question, right? With Johnny, you know, joining OpenAI.

• 44:55John Coogan?

  Six billion.

• 44:56Jordi Hays?

  It's like, who's the supply chain lord? Who's going to just really bring this thing into?

• 45:01John Coogan?

  If Tim Cook works, I mean, he's making what, 60?

• 45:04Jordi Hays?

  I mean, he's not even cracking 75 mil a year.

• 45:07John Coogan?

  So he would have to work for 100 years to make what Johnny I've just made. I don't think he has another 100 years in him. 30, I would give him 30 solid years ahead of him in his career. That's not enough to get to 6 billion. He could maybe pull 2 billion.

• 45:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, to be clear, I think Johnny had investors in I.

• 45:27John Coogan?

  It's all in Johnny's pocket, in my opinion.

• 45:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he deserves it all. It was funny, I was looking yesterday, Johnny's like celebrity net worth tracker or whatever. They updated it in real time and were like, he's a billionaire now.

• 45:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:41Jordi Hays?

  And he wasn't just from working at Apple.

• 45:45John Coogan?

  It's brutal.

• 45:45Jordi Hays?

  He barely had 700, according to.

• 45:50John Coogan?

  Tragedy.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  Anyway, um, let's go to Ben Thompson's analysis. He says, uh, they put out an OpenAI put out this nine minute and 21 second video of them complimenting each other, expressing love for San Francisco and announcing the new partnership. Ben Thompson says, it's a bit much to be honest, although it beautifully shot and produced. I assume it was put together by Love From, Ives not included in the deal, but not accepting new clients, design agency. I think the key, uh, the key segment from Ives perspective is this. Sam Alman said, we both had a, we both had a very strong shared vision. We maybe didn't know exactly where this was going to go, but the direction of the force vector felt clear. Then this deeply shared sense of values about what,

• 46:32John Coogan?

  that what technology should be, when technology has been really good, when it's gone wrong. Johnny Ives says, I mean, that was in a way, one of the bias, uh, one of the basis, I think of one of the reasons Sam and I clicked. Was despite our wonderfully different journeys to this point, our motivations and values are completely the same. In my experience, if you're trying to have a sense of where you are going to end up, you shouldn't look at the technology. You should look at the people who are making the, uh, who are making the decisions and you should look at what drives, motivates and look at values. I like that. That's a good take. I've expressed what drives and motivates. I've expressed what drives and motivates him earlier this month in this excellent interview with Patrick Collison.

• 47:14John Coogan?

  And it was interesting because Johnny Ives, we haven't really heard from him in a few years and then boom, massive, uh, massive podcast.

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  What a coincidence.

• 47:22John Coogan?

  With Patrick Collison, just.

• 47:24Jordi Hays?

  What a coincidence.

• 47:25John Coogan?

  Days before the acquisition. Yeah. Uh, on a media tour.

• 47:28Jordi Hays?

  So I'll read, I'll read, uh, Patrick's, uh, question.

• 47:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 47:31Jordi Hays?

  Talking a lot about the purpose of design.

• 47:33John Coogan?

  That's not how he sounds.

• 47:35Jordi Hays?

  Okay. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna do the accent, John. Even though we both have Irish roots. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna.

• 47:44John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. Just, just do a vanilla reading. Fine.

• 47:48Jordi Hays?

  Now I'm now.

• 47:48John Coogan?

  No, no, do it, do it. Now it'll sound like you're doing Patrick Collison doing a Jordi Hayes impression, but that's fine.

• 47:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Okay. So I'm doing Patrick Collison impersonating a technology podcaster.

• 47:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 47:58Jordi Hays?

  You're talking a lot about the purpose of design and the effect that design has on the recipient, on the user, on the consumer, whatever the case is. There's widespread concern and speculation about the effects of smartphones and the internet doesn't necessarily accord with just the smartphone, but on some of these products, on attention spans and whether it has some adverse effect on kids or teens, or who knows, maybe all of us, maybe the adults as well. There's questions over with AI, whether it changes how education works and cheating in school. All of these technologies that we create have this potential double sidedness to them. And so I guess as somebody who clearly takes seriously and thinks seriously about the full effects, how do you think about possible harms?

• 48:39John Coogan?

  And Johnny Ive says, yeah, I think there is.

• 48:42Jordi Hays?

  Why don't you do Johnny impersonating Pat in Irish accent?

• 48:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, this is Johnny Ive doing a John Coogan impression.

• 48:50Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay. I'm excited for this.

• 48:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think probably not anything that I can be more preoccupied or bothered than by what you just described. I think when you're innovating, of course, there will be unintended consequences. You hope that the majority will be pleasant surprises. Certain products that have, that I've been very, very involved with, I think there were some unintended consequences that were far from pleasant. My issue is that even though there was no intention.

• 49:16Jordi Hays?

  Isn't Candy Crush pleasant? You don't think Candy Crush whales or?

• 49:19John Coogan?

  You don't think sports betting on your phone, the drop of a hat is?

• 49:23Jordi Hays?

  That's 24/7?

• 49:25John Coogan?

  I think there is still needs to be a responsibility and that weighs on me, as you know, heavily. And yeah, I mean, obviously there are negative consequences, but I think overall technology has been very, very net positive.

• 49:35Jordi Hays?

  I think he might be alluding to when I made it possible to angel invest on a mobile device.

• 49:39John Coogan?

  He's literally.

• 49:41Jordi Hays?

  I think he's sort of subtweeting me.

• 49:43John Coogan?

  This party round BS was too far.

• 49:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Party Round basically took all these people in San Francisco who were hopelessly addicted to angel investing and made it accessible to them at all hours of the day. You didn't even have to send a wire transfer. You just got an invite and it was like Venmo.

• 49:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, ridiculous. It seems pretty clear that Ive is talking about the iPhone, says Ben Thompson, which is to say, it sure seems like he is motivated not to simply build an AI device, but to actually diminish the iPhone's dominance in the user's life. Or even in the long run, kill it completely with tracks with the with the Wall Street Journal's reporting on their plans. They've been working on a device that will move consumers beyond screens, according to people familiar with the matter. I mean, it feels like her, right? I mean, Sam's posted about her. They're very all in on voice interfaces. This could be her device, right? Is that the most obvious thing that they would do?

• 50:36Jordi Hays?

  Such an interesting dynamic where it feels like sci fi is dictating the product roadmaps of so many companies.

• 50:45John Coogan?

  Always has been.

• 50:46Jordi Hays?

  Always has been.

• 50:47John Coogan?

  I mean, Steve Jobs was always looking at like the Star Trek tablet and being like, let's make an iPad. There's nothing new. You gotta, you gotta get ideas from somewhere.

• 50:55Jordi Hays?

  Jason Carman.

• 50:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Jason Carman needs to make something.

• 50:58Jordi Hays?

  Save us. Understand that you're basically delivering defining the product roadmaps of the biggest companies in the world.

• 51:05John Coogan?

  That's true. That's admittedly pretty thin gruel, says Ben Thompson, but it's in line with other rumors and more importantly, from my perspective, tracks with Ives expressed state sentiment. And it should be noted that this sentiment is a sentiment that Altman has expressed as well. He's tweeted a couple of times, people sacrifice actual happiness and actual accomplishment for for short term dopamine hits by posting and chasing likes slash RTs on FB slash Twitter back from 2013. Only 21 likes back then. Sam was struggling to post bangers. I think everything he posts now gets like 10,000 likes. And then a year after OpenAI was founded, Sam Altman said, digital addiction is going to be one of the

• 51:49John Coogan?

  great mental health crises of our time.

• 51:55Jordi Hays?

  I like, I like my screen time, John.

• 51:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like it too.

• 51:59Jordi Hays?

  I do email on my phone.

• 52:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:02Jordi Hays?

  It's productive.

• 52:02John Coogan?

  In 2017, Altman wrote on his blog.

• 52:04Jordi Hays?

  It is funny because I do believe that the sort of AI companions have the potential to be some of the most addictive products in history.

• 52:13John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 52:14Jordi Hays?

  And I believe that in general, people will continue to to interact with them through

• 52:21Jordi Hays?

  screens, devices, et cetera.

• 52:24John Coogan?

  Sam Altman in 2017, almost a decade ago now, wrote, "I believe attention hacking is going to be the sugar epidemic of this generation." Ooh, sugar, underrated though, right?

• 52:36Jordi Hays?

  Sugar is

• 52:37John Coogan?

  Potentially good.

• 52:38Jordi Hays?

  Potentially good. I think it's, I've called it, I said, it's a superfood. It's this amazing substance that gives you clean energy almost immediately.

• 52:49John Coogan?

  So maybe that's, maybe that's actually

• 52:50Jordi Hays?

  Without any seed oils.

• 52:51John Coogan?

  Maybe that's, maybe that's actually like a broader metaphor for attention hacking is that it feels good in the, i- it is bad at the extreme, but it is good in the right dosage.

• 53:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:01John Coogan?

  Because pure sugar, when taken in athletic context, when you're working out at the right dosage with the right purities, can be good.

• 53:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:10John Coogan?

  And, and is not something that should just be completely removed from the diet, much like attention to, to technology. I can feel the changes in my own life. I can still wistfully remember when I had an attention span. My friends, young children, don't even know that's something they should miss. I am angry and unhappy more often, but I channel it into productive change less often, instead chasing the dual dopamine hits like likes and outrage. That's interesting. I feel like, I feel like our generation's kids are doing fine, like, like because we're aware of like, don't do the iPad thing. I'll see my son spend hours building Legos and like, painting and drawing and spending, like it seems like he has a very, very long attention span.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  I think it helps that adults are generally hyper addicted to their devices and want to prolong the time in which their children can live a life of, of freedom from that addiction, right?

• 54:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:06Jordi Hays?

  It's like, at some point, I'm sure my son will try a cigarette, but just because heaters are Lindy.

• 54:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:15Jordi Hays?

  But I'm gonna try to delay that for a very, very long time, right?

• 54:20John Coogan?

  He's just 65, being like my first cigarette. It's always challenging with Altman to know whether, when or if he is talking his book, says Ben Thompson, as it were. But there is a record of long running sentiments that might convince Ive that their motivations and values are completely the same. At the same time, there are certainly other motivations as well. Ive, for his part, just became a lot richer, at least on paper. Altman may or may not have diluted the nonprofit's share of OpenAI by making a big purchase with stock. This is kind of a theory that was going around about Reddit and how Reddit kind of went into Conde Nast and then was pulled out through a bunch of different stock

• 54:56Jordi Hays?

  Sam and the original founders seemed like they realized Reddit was never going to be what it could be while a part of this legacy media company.

• 55:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, when you read the story of Reddit, it reads as very like, almost like conspiratorial. It's this like really like 4D chess maneuver to get it out. And yet, at the same time, like, I'm like, yeah, I'm glad Reddit's not owned by Conde Nast. Like, you guys did everyone a service. Like, good job Alexis Ohanian and Sam for pulling that company out, which was actually an innovative technology company from like a dying legacy media company. Anyway, Altman may or may not have diluted the share. He's also sliding into the role occupied by his childhood idol, one Steve Jobs. So what's the strategic positioning? We got four minutes until our first guest. The larger question is what this means for

• 55:48John Coogan?

  OpenAI. On one hand, the angle here is obvious and fortuitously articulated by me just yesterday, says Ben Thompson. A little back that. It has long been the case that the best way to bring products to the consumer market is via devices, and that seems truer than ever. Android is probably going to be the best, the most important canvas for shipping a lot of Google's new capabilities. What makes ChatGPT so remarkable and OpenAI, the accidental consumer tech company, is that like Google two and a half decades ago, they have reached nearly a billion users, almost entirely through word of mouth. The only distribution deal Apple has done, or OpenAI has done, is with Apple. More on this in a moment. This is exceptionally rare, and my longstanding opinion is that the obvious way to capitalize on this position is to roll out advertising. Let's hear it for advertising.

• 56:32John Coogan?

  We love advertising. Speaking of advertising, go to linear.app. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product motor maps. MCP server, right?

• 56:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they have a dedicated agents product now that they rolled out yesterday and Scott talked about it. Scott Wu from Cognition talked about it on the show and highly recommend going to check it out if you're wanting to actually unlock the power of agents in a systematic way.

• 57:05John Coogan?

  So Ben goes on to say, "It is worth noting, however, that one challenge is trying to win in advertising is that you are in the end fighting on Google's turf, the same Google that demonstrated its incredible model and infrastructure prowess." Well, this is awkward and surely couldn't have been intentional, or was it?

• 57:24John Coogan?

  At I/O. Yes, there are questions about Google's product chops and I already think that OpenAI is the best in AI at product. And we talked to Kevin Weal, who's doing product at OpenAI. Clearly incredible team over there and the products are fantastic. And they just added Johnny Ive. And yes, OpenAI has the advantage of building an advertising business from scratch, giving them more degrees of freedom than Google, which has to worry about cannibalization and disruption. But Google is also moving AI into search and the infrastructure the company has built around advertising will take years and years to match. You can say the same thing about Meta. And speaking about Meta, think about how CEO Mark Zuckerberg has framed the company's approach to AR and VR. This is Zuckerberg in a 2022 Strategery

• 58:09John Coogan?

  interview about their partnership with Microsoft. But taking a step back, I think in addition to this strategic alignment, I also think there's a very deep philosophical alignment on the direction that we want the next generation of computing to go. My brief take on the history here is that every major computing platform there has been an open ecosystem that's focused on partnership and a more closed and integrated ecosystem. So with PC, Windows was the leading open ecosystem and of course Mac was the leading closed one. On phones, it was Android and iOS. I think one of the things that's interesting about the history is that I don't think it's predetermined whether the open ecosystem or the closed one ends up being the primary ecosystem. And so he was pushing for an open metaverse.

• 58:50John Coogan?

  Implicit in Zuckerberg's answer is the assumption that the company they are competing with in the long run is Apple, the closed option. Another way to frame that contrast, however, is between modular Windows and Android and integrated Mac and iPhone. The integrated option, the Apple option, is monetized first and foremost through device sales. The modular option is modular in part because the underlying motivation of the operating system is to maximize reach, in which, which in the case of Google, means increasing the number of surfaces on which to control search and serve ads. These framings are in reality a bit too limiting to fully articulate the various strategic puts and takes. Google, for example, is deeply integrating Google Android with Google AI in the cloud, while continuing to lean on third parties to actually build the hardware.

• 59:33John Coogan?

  Indeed, one of my chief critiques of Apple's approach to AI is that by trying to do AI themselves, they are trying to compete with Google on Google's turf. Still, Google is, as Google does, focusing on being on as many devices as possible. We should, we should close out here because we have our next guest joining us in just a minute. But he says Zuckerberg assumes that Apple will be there in AR and VR should Altman assume they will be there in AI. To put it another way, if you're going to take on one tech giant directly and you're an AI company, isn't Apple a much more attractive target than Google? And if you think that that way, should your focus be on building a horizontal service that runs everywhere or on building a fully integrated offering that monetizes the high end through an experience that integrates hardware and software?

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  And if you want to build the best possible integrated hardware and software experience, the team, I O, is a veritable all-star collection of Apple talent that extends far beyond I've. That built the last one is a reasonable place to start.

• 1:00:30Jordi Hays?

  Very interesting. Gets everybody thinking that he's trying to kill Google and then goes for the jugular on on Apple.

• 1:00:37John Coogan?

  Very interesting. I think Sam's going after everyone.

• 1:00:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  I think he wants it all. And why not just compete in everything in energy, in servers, in chips?

• 1:00:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, we have Dan Shipper.

• 1:00:48John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. How you doing, Dan?

• 1:00:51Speaker 03

  How's it going? Excited to be here. Big fans of you guys.

• 1:00:54Jordi Hays?

  Great to great to have you on. I've been wanting you to do this for a while. And you've had a busy week. You have some some personal news at every you're also at you're at Anthropic's event right now. Is that correct?

• 1:01:07Speaker 03

  Matt Code with Claude. Yes, Anthropic's event where they just dropped Claude Opus 4.

• 1:01:12John Coogan?

  This is amazing because we didn't get a chance to talk about Anthropic or Claude 4 on the show yet. And we have a perfect guest to talk about it.

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  I am your correspondent. I'm reporting live.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  Can you kick us off with just a little bit of introduction on you for any of the fans who are watching who might not be familiar? And then we'll go into what the events.

• 1:01:29Jordi Hays?

  They'd have to be living under a cluster.

• 1:01:31John Coogan?

  They'd have to be living under a data center, but some people do.

• 1:01:35Speaker 03

  My name is Dan Shipper. I'm the co-founder and CEO of every at every published ideas and applications at the frontier of AI. So we have a daily newsletter. We write long form essays about what's going on in AI. And then we also create software products. We bundle all together and sell it to the audience. Yeah.

• 1:01:53John Coogan?

  And it Jordy was describing you as like a Claude stan. You've been a fan of Claude for a long time. We've talked to some people in AI and they've said like, you can just walk into a party and immediately clock like, oh, that's a chat GPT user. Oh, that's a Claude user. Is that true? Are you beating the allegations?

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  I would say it's interesting. I would say I used to be. I think Claude like 35 Sonnet was the first model where you were like, oh, my God, this thing like actually gets me. But since 03 came out, I would say 95% of my AI usage is in chat GPT. And also with their memory feature, like chat GPT's memory is just incredible. It's very sticky. I do think.

• 1:02:35Jordi Hays?

  It's tough to have a friend with no working memory. It's like, you know.

• 1:02:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, like, concretize this a little bit more for me. My experience with AI and LLMs is that I'm using them as as information retrieval, agentic, reporting, deep research, a ton.

• 1:02:55John Coogan?

  I never just sit there and have a conversation. So if it's if it's answering a little tersely, if it's dropping bullet points on me, I'm kind of fine with that. But when I talk to some people about the differences between Claude and OpenAI, a lot of it is in the subtleties of the language. And I just feel like as a consumer, maybe I care about that less. But do you think that's important? Does it matter to you? Am I missing out on something by not?

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  I'm just like a very sensitive emotional guy. And so I want it to be nice to me, you know? But I also think to some degree, even for like more business, like standardized business use cases, it's actually really helpful for it to have a little bit of that sensitivity. For example, something I use it for a lot is if I'm having a management problem, we report almost everything that we do at every In granola. And it's really easy to take your transcript of a meeting and be like, what happened here? Like, why did, why was there a fight here? Like, or, you know, an employee is having a having a problem, like, how do I help? You know, that kind of thing. And it sort of has a little bit of that radar that can that can really help you move through a lot of interpersonal situations that come up often.

• 1:03:57John Coogan?

  Okay, so.

• 1:03:57Jordi Hays?

  That's interesting. Well, before we just go and and just into a much longer discussion and talk about Anthropics News, why don't you talk about, there's a couple of things this week. You had your own fundraise and it was a unique structure. So why don't we kind of start there?

• 1:04:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, we announced this week that we raised a little bit more money. We've we previously had raised about 700K in 2020. And then we raised, just now, we announced a $2 million raise led by Reid Hoffman. But we did it in a weird structure that I'm like sort of tongue in cheek calling a SIF seed round. Basically, like Reid and Starting Line VC, who's another one of the investors, they committed up to two to 2 million, but we can pull it down when we need it. So we have not pulled down all of it. And I think that's a really nice structure for us because we're a greedy company. We also have a lot of software attached, but I want to maintain our ability to be weird and just like have it be a creative playground where we make cool stuff. And so this gives us enough money to experiment, but not so much that we're like locked into a particular growth path.

• 1:04:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are you thinking that, I mean, we saw this with OpenAI, they were a nonprofit and then they wound up creating like the most dominant consumer app of all time. They needed to spin that out. Like the, the parallel here is that you are building software tools, but you also are doing media. If one of those software tools takes off, all of a sudden, does the media become a marketing engine for that tool? Does the tool spin out? Are you thinking about it like incubation where there's separate cap table, maybe investors ride along? Like, what were those discussions like and how are you thinking about that?

• 1:05:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, didn't you guys already spin out?

• 1:05:29Speaker 03

  We did. We spun out Lex, which my every co-founder Nathan now runs as the CEO of that. And we raised a seed round from true ventures for Lex.

• 1:05:39John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:05:40Speaker 03

  Almost all the incubations that we have are actually their own separate LLCs. I think like in general, I fucking love having a writing business. And I want to keep the main thing, the main thing. And I think that we can build a really incredible universe of, of apps and other offerings around the writing business. I do think sometimes we will hopefully like run into opportunities that seem really massive and that can be like just really big independent businesses on their own. And yeah, we have, if that happens, we have the ability to go and actually like further spin them out, you know, turn them into C corps, have them go raise money, all that kind of stuff. So we have the optionality to do both.

• 1:06:20John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:06:21Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. All right. Well, I mean, there's a bunch of stuff to talk about. Why don't we, why don't we, as our official Anthropic correspondent, which, which is the title that we're giving you, obviously not, not related to the company. I think we are going to have some folks from Anthropic on next week, which I'm excited about.

• 1:06:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. So the, the headline in Wired is Anthropic's new model excels at reasoning and planning and has Pokemon skills to prove it. Claude 4 Opus and Claude Sonnet 4 can remember over long periods of time, a capability that's helpful at Pokemon and other tasks that require an ability to stay on track. So what was most exciting? Where, where should we start first with understanding the progress at Anthropic?

• 1:07:02Speaker 03

  So first of all, you've got to read the every headline and the subhead. Every time one of these models drops, we do a vibe check. So basically, we get access to these models hands on before they come out. And then we use them hands on for the daily tasks that we're doing to build software and and make writing. And then we give you basically hands on review of like how every part of the model works. What I found is it's it's a piece of coding. It really runs autonomously for a long time on like complex PRs that were not like not possible with three sevens on it. And are probably a little bit beyond the reach of like Gemini two five five and oh three. In particular, in Claude code, it's fucking awesome.

• 1:07:44Speaker 03

  And so I do think that that's it's a sort of game changer if you're if you're doing any kind of development work.

• 1:07:51Speaker 03

  For writing and editing.

• 1:07:53Jordi Hays?

  Real, real quick. How do you, what do you look at the, what, what are the kind of like market implications of Claude code? In terms of the broader developer tooling ecosystem, right? You know, we've seen your cursors developing their own models, Windsurf joining OpenAI. There's a lot happening, but you know, do you think that Claude code is something that could have billions of of of ARR? Independently, or or what's your, your read on on how it's going to evolve?

• 1:08:30Speaker 03

  Good question. I do think that the the landscape is starting to consolidate a little bit. And with each, with each model advance, the extra intelligence matters less and less. So I think you'll see people, you know, instead of jumping every time there's a new model release, instead of jumping and and turning their entire stack from an old model to a new one. I think you'll see people can start to stick a little bit more in the ecosystems that they've chosen. It's we're entering a little bit of a different era of that of the race. And I think it'll be a little bit more difficult for Anthropic to be like a totally independent lab and go up against not only OpenAI, but also Google, assuming Apple at some point gets their shit together, Microsoft, whatever. But I, I really think that they have a very, very strong play with developers here.

• 1:09:13Speaker 03

  They've three, three fives on it and three sevens on it are like super coding models. Three sevens on it is a little bit over eager, so it's.

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  Uh, you know, probably not as good as Gemini two point five pro, but it's still like really up there with the best coding models. And um, I think Claude code is is one of the best coding experiences, like AI first coding experiences. It's also just very different from like a cursor or a wind surf where those are basically text editors with AI on the side. And Claude code is a command line interface that's like you're just directly interfacing with the uh with the AI. And that's it's it's just a different experience. It's intended to be an assistant, an agent rather than like a chat.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, do we have any idea of where these new models, uh, Claude four specifically sit relative to the OpenAI models? Is this because I remember four, five came out and they didn't give it the GPT five name. But it did seem like it was trained on an order of magnitude more compute. And so this is kind of where the the pre-training wall discussion came from. But is it fair to think about Claude four as a GPT four point five class model? In terms of kind of the scope and and the size of the model? Or do they give any, do they give any indication as to the vectors that they're pulling on?

• 1:10:38John Coogan?

  We've seen, you know, Facebook with uh Meta Lama Behemoth is going for this massive context window. These trillions of token parameters, uh, there's a whole bunch of, uh, there's a whole bunch of different threads that the different foundation model companies are pulling on. What seems to be their underlying motivation? Or or what do they seem focused on in terms of optimizing towards?

• 1:11:04Speaker 03

  So it's a little hard to uh to tell, at least for me, because I didn't get access to any kind of model card before the launch. And I've honestly just been running around like this at the event and stuff. So if there are actual uh numbers and stuff like definitely go look them up. I I don't I don't know for sure.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  On the blog post, they mostly just focused on the uh software engineering Sui Bench and the different uh the different benchmarks around graduate level reasoning, agentic tool use, multilingual Q and A, visual reasoning. And The stats are impressive, but not a huge jump here. There's a jump on agentic coding, but Claude 3, Claude Sonnet 3.7 actually outperforms in visual reasoning by like a half a percent, not much, but it's one of these interesting things where it feels like we're increasingly in the era of trade offs around models and we might be seeing more fragmentation around a really great, we talked to some founders who are building super specified L L Ms just for JSON decoding,

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  or just for translation, or just for profanity filtering. And then they run the inference on a consumer grade GPU because it's so narrowly defined, still using the transformer architecture, but just much more narrow. And so I'm wondering if if that's the future that we're going to see at Anthropic is they're dominating in code, they're very popular with developers, and they're going to go after a few other areas, but they're probably going to stay out of a few other battles, battlegrounds.

• 1:12:28Speaker 03

  I do think that's an astute point. Sometimes you do see trade offs. And so like 3.7 Sonnet, for example, was a better programmer than 3.5 Sonnet, but it was like way more simplistic.

• 1:12:37John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:12:38Speaker 03

  And but to answer your previous question, like going back to the difference between G P T 4.5 and Opus, Opus 4 and Sonnet 4, they're, it's a little bit apples to oranges because 4.5 is just a base model. I mean, it's it's it's an instruction tune, but it's it's not a reasoning model. And Opus is is both. They can go back and forth between being a base model and and being a reasoning model. And that is like this sort of hybrid thing that I think all of the model providers are starting to move into. But I think Sonnet has, Anthropic has done it first. And it's

• 1:13:20Speaker 03

  really good. It makes a big difference when it both can like do the kind of, you know, chain of thought reasoning that's like good for map groups and encoding, and it also has a little bit of a vibe. So, you know, like a G P T 4.5, which is just really good at writing and really good at like creative thinking.

• 1:13:37John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:13:37Jordi Hays?

  How do you?

• 1:13:41Jordi Hays?

  How do you kind of navigate and figure out what's real when everybody in AI is deeply conflicted in different ways, whether they're sort of like secretly an advisor to this lab or, you know, happened to invest in the series B of this one, or, you know, everybody's sort of talking their book. I mean, obviously.

• 1:14:00John Coogan?

  I just got advisory shares in OpenAI. I just got 1%. That's it. I'm not conflicted.

• 1:14:06Jordi Hays?

  It's just like a point.

• 1:14:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, you got a point.

• 1:14:08Jordi Hays?

  Careful, John. People are gonna believe that. Every time we joke, every time we joke around, every time we joke around, somebody takes it 100% as fact. No, but I, obviously, the immediate, you know, way to figure out what's real and what's not is just to use the new products and models yourself. But I'm curious how you navigate it as somebody who's like trying to provide, you know, really, really, you know, precise coverage of everything in real time.

• 1:14:36Speaker 03

  So first of all, if anyone wants to throw me some Anthropic or OpenAI stock, like I'm open, DMs are open. But I think, yeah, I think that's a really good question. I think, I honestly think most of the benchmarks are kind of bullshit and you can change the benchmarks and we see that with Llama where like, and we'll put it on the benchmarks, but it's just not a good model. That's why we do vibe checks. So when we launch new models, we're using them hands-on for the tasks that we do every day. And I think that's why it's really valuable to have every the media company and every the incubator startup studio in the same organization, because I'm literally just going and hanging out with Kieran, who runs Spora, which is our AI email assistant, or Danny, who runs Spora, which is our AI content automation product. And we're using it to ship features or to make

• 1:15:20Speaker 03

  better writing or to do all the things that we do every day. And so I can get a pretty good sense of just like the vibe or the flavor of a model from using it myself. And I think that's going to be the best. I think that's going to be the best way to tell if it's any good.

• 1:15:34Jordi Hays?

  What was your reaction to Google I/O? What was the single thing that stood out to you?

• 1:15:40Speaker 03

  So I, I was, I was at Build. I did a, I did a really fun interview with Microsoft's CTO, Kevin Scott, and then flew right from Build to, to code with Claude. But Alex Duffy is another one of our writers and leads AI training for us. And he was at Google I/O. And so he would have a better response as to like, what is the one thing? But I do know if he was like. He was like, kind of in tears in our Discord and was like, this is the future. And I was, and so, you know, I think that they've got something cool going on. I think he's really excited about, they're pushing forward on a lot of different parts of the ecosystem all at once, and they're moving super fast. And he seemed really psyched about it. Awesome.

• 1:16:22John Coogan?

  What about the products that Anthropic hasn't launched? We talked about specification, the specialization a little bit. And I remember, so the big, the big AI product that really grabbed me from Google I/O was VO3. And obviously, Google has an immense advantage with the YouTube dataset there. And the results have just been fantastic. And I've been fighting tooth and nail to get more VO3 credits because it's so much fun. And Anthropic, it feels like they've been potentially behind the ball on image generation. Is that just not a focus for them? Is that, do you think that's because of safety concerns? Since obviously, that, that runs very deep in the culture at Anthropic?

• 1:17:05John Coogan?

  Or do you think it's just more of a business case? That the, the coding market is much more lucrative than the image generation market? And so, just focus more wood behind fewer arrows?

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  To your question, I honestly don't know the history of Anthropic's relationship with coding model as with image models, other than that they just don't have one. And I don't know why. I do think it seems like they're really going hard after the kind of agentic coding market. And I think it's a really valuable thing that they can win. Also say, just generally, like Mike Krieger is their chief product officer and like, he knows the ship. And so, I think they'll probably have some.

• 1:17:45Jordi Hays?

  He knows a thing or two about images.

• 1:17:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:49Speaker 03

  So I assume they'll have some really cool stuff on the more like consumer product side coming soon.

• 1:17:58John Coogan?

  I think we're getting a Zoom air. I'm, uh, I'm searching O3 right now for Anthropic's offering. I don't think that they have any, uh, any

• 1:18:06Jordi Hays?

  Dan down.

• 1:18:07John Coogan?

  video models.

• 1:18:08Jordi Hays?

  Dan down.

• 1:18:09John Coogan?

  And I don't think they, uh,

• 1:18:12Jordi Hays?

  Dan down. Dan down.

• 1:18:15John Coogan?

  Bring it back.

• 1:18:16Jordi Hays?

  I think, do you think there's a widespread cyber attack?

• 1:18:19John Coogan?

  Cyber attack? Probably.

• 1:18:20Jordi Hays?

  Again, because X is really struggling.

• 1:18:23John Coogan?

  They know who we talked to earlier this morning. They know.

• 1:18:25Jordi Hays?

  They do.

• 1:18:26John Coogan?

  They know.

• 1:18:26Jordi Hays?

  They figured it out.

• 1:18:27John Coogan?

  We have, we have a secret guest that will be released later. Um,

• 1:18:31Jordi Hays?

  They're on to us.

• 1:18:32John Coogan?

  But O3 is cooking. I mean, it's, I don't know if it's writing code yet, but it's definitely, it's, it's written. Look at this. It's like, I just asked it, I just asked it, has Anthropic shelved any, any models? And it's like searching the web everywhere, but it is, it is a tougher, it is a tougher question for O3 because I'm asking for the absence of evidence, not, not, I'm asking for it to find the absence of a model, not the, not the presence of a model. And so it's very easy to search, does, does Claude have a coding model? And it can just search Anthropic code and find the first result and return that to me. But it's very difficult to, uh, to, to find a null and say, okay, I searched the entire web and I couldn't find anything. Therefore Anthropic does not have a video model.

• 1:19:17John Coogan?

  But yes, uh, I, I, I believe Anthropic scrapped, maybe it was a text to speech engine, something like 11 Labs competitor.

• 1:19:24Jordi Hays?

  This is so brutal. So I've been, I, I went to try to ask Claude.

• 1:19:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:28Jordi Hays?

  If, if, why doesn't Claude have an image generation model? And the signup flow is, couldn't be more opposite of OpenAI. I, I've just been, I, I created a new account with my TBN email and it took me, there was, I mean, Nikita would probably have a heart attack. I mean, it was like 20 individual steps of approving this and approving that. Uh, but it says Anthropic hasn't publicly released a dedicated image generation model. Strategic focus, technical and safety considerations, resource allocation, market positioning. So kind of everything that Dan said, um, just, uh, it's, you know, it does make sense in, in a way to just say, hey,

• 1:20:13Jordi Hays?

  this isn't strategically critical for us. We're going to try to, you know, focus on what we're really good at, which is coding.

• 1:20:20John Coogan?

  It's great. Um, well, we have TJ coming in for the second time. I'm very excited for that.

• 1:20:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, did we fully lose Dan?

• 1:20:27John Coogan?

  I think we did. Let's just move on to some, some, some news. Let's talk about, um, the, uh, I mean, there's plenty of timeline we can go through.

• 1:20:35Jordi Hays?

  Dan, if you're listening, thank you for coming on.

• 1:20:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, we appreciate it.

• 1:20:38Jordi Hays?

  Enjoy the conversation and always welcome to come do-

• 1:20:41John Coogan?

  This is the future. We have AI that can one-shot build you Zoom, but it won't work.

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  But Zoom is still gonna go down.

• 1:20:50John Coogan?

  The internet will still fail constantly. Anyway, uh, I do think it's fun that, uh, that Anthropic-

• 1:20:55Jordi Hays?

  He says his phone overheated. He was just going so hard on, on, on, you know, corresponding.

• 1:21:01John Coogan?

  Wow, yeah.

• 1:21:02Jordi Hays?

  That's, that's honestly, as a technologist, the only time you should put down your devices on a daily basis is if they're overheating. Like you need to be going that hard that your phone overheats. You need to be podcasting so hard.

• 1:21:16John Coogan?

  You need to be live streaming video, uh, doing spreadsheets, coding on your phone, doing everything.

• 1:21:21Jordi Hays?

  Dan, thank you for leaving it all on the paint, on the paint, on the field. You're an absolute dog. We will see you again soon. Let's do some timeline.

• 1:21:29John Coogan?

  I do think it's fun that they're doing, uh, that Anthropic's doing Pokemon because Pokemon's such this iconic game and it's so, uh, and it lends itself to like, you can watch the full stream of Claude play Pokemon. And it is this interesting challenge that it takes a long time. They need to think about the different reward functions and all the different steps that you need to take. I was playing Pokemon on the Chromatic, Palmer Lucky's new Game Boy, and, uh, it's actually really hard because at a certain point you get to a place where you just kind of have to go farm XP and like level up your Pokemon evenly before you can go beat the boss. Like, like you can't just, you can't just constantly be going forward. You actually have to, have to plan out your, your attack a little bit. It's, it's not the simplest game. So impressive that they're able to play it for what 24 hours at a time.

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  Um, anyway, let's go through some timeline. We'll, we'll get to Elon Musk later. There's a, there's a, there's a piece we gotta put in the truth, truth zone, but it's gonna take more than seven minutes. So let's, uh, talk about OpenAI. They committed to a giant UAE data center in global expansion. This is Stargate UAE. We'd love to see it. They're partnering with G42 to build a one gigawatt AI data center in Abu Dhabi. It's the first large-scale project outside of the US.

• 1:22:39Jordi Hays?

  Shaken noon is just cooking.

• 1:22:42John Coogan?

  He's on a tear.

• 1:22:43Jordi Hays?

  I cannot wait. To have the opportunity to have.

• 1:22:47John Coogan?

  I want him on the show.

• 1:22:48Jordi Hays?

  Him on the show.

• 1:22:48John Coogan?

  I want him on the show so badly. G42 will fund the construction, OpenAI and Oracle will operate the data center. SoftBank, Nvidia and Cisco are also partners in the project. The kuretsu of AI is coming together. And so.

• 1:23:03Jordi Hays?

  And now they're 100 billion for Nvidia.

• 1:23:06John Coogan?

  So the UAE is trying to become one of the biggest funders of AI companies and infrastructure and build their own AI factory. The first 200 megawatt chunk of the data center is due to be completed by the end of 2026.

• 1:23:18Jordi Hays?

  The thing that's interesting here is I guess they're having to like, they're having to like, match the investment that they do abroad.

• 1:23:25John Coogan?

  It's a very interesting structure. Put money into American companies. It seems like a good deal. I'm, I'm, I'm very bullish on it.

• 1:23:30Jordi Hays?

  They're doing deals.

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:23:32Jordi Hays?

  Strava raised at a valuation north of 2 billion. Let's give it up.

• 1:23:38John Coogan?

  This is fascinating.

• 1:23:39Jordi Hays?

  I have to ask, what are they running from?

• 1:23:42John Coogan?

  What are they running from?

• 1:23:43Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they're running from, they, they could very well be running from Zach Poggrub.

• 1:23:48John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:23:48Jordi Hays?

  Who is in some ways coming for them.

• 1:23:51John Coogan?

  They're running from not having generational wealth by getting liquidity at a multi-billion dollar valuation. So congrats to the founders.

• 1:23:58Jordi Hays?

  Running from not having, yeah, took me a second.

• 1:24:01John Coogan?

  Sequoia is in the deal.

• 1:24:02Jordi Hays?

  Let's, let's give it up for leverage.

• 1:24:06John Coogan?

  They also acquired the Breakaway Cycle Cycling Training Lab, marking its second acquisition in two months. They have more than 150 million users and is approaching 500 million in annual recurring revenue. That's good.

• 1:24:17Jordi Hays?

  Let's, let's give a moment of silence for the, the VCs that passed on the seed in the A because it seems, you know, yeah, like running, I get a lot of people do it.

• 1:24:27John Coogan?

  How big can this be?

• 1:24:27Jordi Hays?

  But how big can this thing be?

• 1:24:28John Coogan?

  Easy critique.

• 1:24:30Jordi Hays?

  How big can this be? 500 million in annual recurring revenue?

• 1:24:33John Coogan?

  They showed you.

• 1:24:35Jordi Hays?

  Got them.

• 1:24:35John Coogan?

  Showed them.

• 1:24:36Jordi Hays?

  Turns out a lot of people are running from.

• 1:24:38John Coogan?

  Strava lets users, whom it calls athletes, in quotes, Wall Street Journal, putting their term in the truth zone.

• 1:24:46Jordi Hays?

  Hey, runners are athletes.

• 1:24:50John Coogan?

  In some contexts, yes. They're running down a gridiron, maybe. Share activities with friends and across dozens of sports.

• 1:24:58Jordi Hays?

  By the way, I've been avoiding, we had Rob Mower, co-founder of Huberman Lab.

• 1:25:02John Coogan?

  It's just more.

• 1:25:03Jordi Hays?

  More. I always, he even texted me. I botch his name every time.

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  Terrible.

• 1:25:07Jordi Hays?

  Rob, I've been avoiding a run with Rob.

• 1:25:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:25:12Jordi Hays?

  For years now. We live close by.

• 1:25:15John Coogan?

  Is he a good runner? He's gonna smoke you?

• 1:25:16Jordi Hays?

  He's an absolutely insane athlete.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:25:19Jordi Hays?

  And I just always end up busy.

• 1:25:23John Coogan?

  How's he on the, how's he on the bench press? Is he repping two plates? Cause maybe you could give him a run for his money over there. Little big dog. Show him how it's done.

• 1:25:32Jordi Hays?

  Good. Potentially do that.

• 1:25:35John Coogan?

  I'm feeling that Huberman bench three plates and they're just gonna smoke us.

• 1:25:38Jordi Hays?

  I could see Rob just secretly repping three plates.

• 1:25:41John Coogan?

  Just demolishing us. Anyway, let's go through some timeline. Jenny says glasses won't win, earpiece with a tiny camera will. I don't know about that. What do you think?

• 1:25:51Jordi Hays?

  I just would like, I would like a camera.

• 1:25:54John Coogan?

  Nostril.

• 1:25:55Jordi Hays?

  I'd love to put a nostril camera in that just sort of mounts to my nose and just comes out right here.

• 1:26:00John Coogan?

  No one's talking about nasal computing.

• 1:26:02Jordi Hays?

  Nasal computing.

• 1:26:04John Coogan?

  Nasal computing interfaces could be the future.

• 1:26:06Jordi Hays?

  For, for, for guys like us that don't want to chip.

• 1:26:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:09Jordi Hays?

  The nasal passageway is a great place to put a computer.

• 1:26:12John Coogan?

  I mean, there's probably so many different applications. You could have little fans in there that accelerate the airflow in. So you're getting more oxygen in your blood.

• 1:26:19Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:26:20John Coogan?

  Johnson loves it. A hyperbaric chamber for your body.

• 1:26:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Whoop on the wrist, but we typically have watches on our wrists.

• 1:26:27John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:26:28Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 1:26:29John Coogan?

  Whoop on the nose.

• 1:26:30Jordi Hays?

  Whoop in the nose.

• 1:26:31John Coogan?

  Nasal.

• 1:26:31Jordi Hays?

  Or a ring in the nose. Or what about it?

• 1:26:34John Coogan?

  You know where you're going with this.

• 1:26:36Jordi Hays?

  What are those, what are those, those?

• 1:26:37John Coogan?

  Septum piercing?

• 1:26:40John Coogan?

  An aura septum piercing. Oh, my God.

• 1:26:48John Coogan?

  Oh, that's insane. AI, AI generating right now. The nasal, nasal aura ring. That's insane. Uh, Anna says, uh, we're in the, or Anna says, we're in the good old days in the beginning of the movie with the overly saturated colors and the smiles and laughter. Your future is being written by about six people competing too well. Their ideal civilization into existence. Record freeze frame, record scratch. Hi, Anna here. You're probably wondering how I got here. Yeah, it does feel like it's a, it's a monumental time. It's a, it's an amazing time to be a technology podcaster.

• 1:27:25Jordi Hays?

  Sam Jensen, Elon, Satya, Zuck.

• 1:27:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, accelerate harder says this blog post is styled like a cross between a wedding announcement and a memorial webpage. It is a very funny photo. It is black and white and the font choice is, is something that we haven't seen from OpenAI or Apple before.

• 1:27:43Jordi Hays?

  They're boys.

• 1:27:44John Coogan?

  They're boys, though. They're just, they're just guys being dudes. Uh, anyway, uh, we got a couple other posts, but I think TJ's here. So should we just bring in TJ and start breaking down the news? Let's bring him in. Welcome to the stream, TJ. How you doing?

• 1:28:00Jordi Hays?

  He's getting the band back together.

• 1:28:02John Coogan?

  He's getting the band back together. Let's go. Congratulations.

• 1:28:11Jordi Hays?

  They're back.

• 1:28:12John Coogan?

  Let's go. Keep it going.

• 1:28:13Jordi Hays?

  Keep it going.

• 1:28:15John Coogan?

  Two minutes of this.

• 1:28:17TJ Parker?

  And I have a microphone. I've made a real, real upgrade here.

• 1:28:19John Coogan?

  Oh, you're ready.

• 1:28:21Jordi Hays?

  I love that you're ready.

• 1:28:22TJ Parker?

  Big podcast guy.

• 1:28:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, you went, you went all in. I love it.

• 1:28:24TJ Parker?

  Yep.

• 1:28:25Jordi Hays?

  Big podcast guy. We turned you.

• 1:28:27John Coogan?

  Great to have you here.

• 1:28:28Jordi Hays?

  You went from zero to, to a hundred.

• 1:28:30TJ Parker?

  Yeah, it's great to be back.

• 1:28:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, give us the news. What's the announcement? What does this company do? I saw the announcement, a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Break it down for me.

• 1:28:39TJ Parker?

  So the company's called General Medicine. We launched today in all 50 states, so anyone in the US can sign up and use the service. And the way we think about it is a healthcare store where you can get anything you need in healthcare. We actually talked about some of these themes a bit a couple of weeks back. But our general belief is that you should be able to shop healthcare like you shop everything else. And so that means, you know, if you have, if you know exactly what you need, like you know, you want a certain set of labs, or you know, you need a colonoscopy, or you're having kind of ongoing shoulder pains, like an issue I've had that I use the service for, you can literally search for that problem, fill out a relatively

• 1:29:20TJ Parker?

  straightforward set of questions, and then consult with a clinician. And if what you need is an in-person visit or in-person care, or you need to get imaging or any of that done, we make it super seamless to do that. And I think the probably the most novel thing about the product experience is that you can see personalized insurance pricing for any provider prior to deciding where to get that service. So for my shoulder pain example, I needed to go get a follow-up x-ray, and the difference in price between getting the next ray done in Park City versus Salt Lake was a hundred dollars versus $500 with my insurance.

• 1:29:55Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:29:55TJ Parker?

  Which before, when you're making that decision-

• 1:29:57Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so same, same insurance, massive difference in pricing?

• 1:30:01TJ Parker?

  Same x-ray, same actual kind of medical group, they're both kind of intermountain facilities, but a pretty big variance in the actual out-of-pocket.

• 1:30:11John Coogan?

  And presumably even the same x-ray device, like the same technology.

• 1:30:14TJ Parker?

  Yeah, they're all the same. I think people are making this decision every day, but they literally have no idea.

• 1:30:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:20TJ Parker?

  If there's any sort of differential.

• 1:30:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so the thing that stood out to me is when you land on generalmedicine.co, you see pricing without insurance.

• 1:30:30TJ Parker?

  Yep.

• 1:30:31Jordi Hays?

  And that seems, you know, super intentional, because you want to just enable people to not, one, just like speed to care, right? There's like certain instances where you're like, I need to solve this problem as fast as possible. I don't want to deal with worrying about in-network, out-network, what, all that. And then there's also instances where like, something can cost you more by going through insurance. That's correct, right? I remember something was going viral on X probably a month ago where somebody like- There the ambulance was like much more expensive because they had insurance where if they were just uninsured, it would is going to cost less. So can you talk about kind of

• 1:31:11Jordi Hays?

  that, the way that kind of pricing dynamic works and why you guys decided to kind of lead with, with, you know, showing people that, hey, you can just kind of immediately get these services regardless of your current insurance situation?

• 1:31:26TJ Parker?

  Yeah, I think probably a useful anecdote is we built a very similar experience in pharmacy. When you go to kind of Amazon pharmacy now, you can see cash and insurance kind of head to head when you're making a purchase decision. We ended up with a significant amount of folks that were just using cash because either it was cheaper, which I'd say a quarter of the time, it was literally cheaper to just not use their insurance just to pay cash. And then a quarter of the time, it was moderately more expensive. Instead of 15 bucks, it was 20 or 20, it was 30. But you didn't have to deal with all of the obnoxiousness of using your insurance, right? There was no prior authorizations and to deal with the fact that it was too soon to fill the prescription, like all these sort of sad paths that exist as a byproduct of insurance. I think we'll see a similar dynamic here to your point

• 1:32:09TJ Parker?

  where sometimes it'll literally be cheaper and that will happen, I think, a lot more than people would think. And then sometimes it's slightly more expensive to use cash, but it just is less annoying to deal with having to get it reimbursed and to deal with the up from prior costs and all those things. And we think that'll be a, I don't know what the right proportion will be for this business, but I think it'll be a much higher percentage than than people would assume.

• 1:32:31John Coogan?

  How do you think about the continuum of medical services? Because I'm just, I'm thinking about the shoulder injury. Obviously, there's sometimes when you need an x-ray and you need insurance to pay for that. Sometimes you just need to rest. Sometimes part of health is maybe going to the gym or being on a diet. Or if you're having problems with sleep, you could need a prescription drug or you could just need some melatonin. And so. What is the ideal front end to health? Is it, I mean, I imagine people will go to chat GPT, they go to WebMD, they ask their friends. Sometimes they go to their doctor prematurely and the doctor just says, hey, just, you know, stop eating so much or you hit the gym or something like that. But what is the, how will this change?

• 1:33:15John Coogan?

  And then how do you plan on, on being a part of that front end to medicine?

• 1:33:23TJ Parker?

  I mean, I think the single biggest change here is trying to move healthcare to a much more simple and straightforward transactional experience where you can actually transact in the same ways that you transact in retail. I think the over, if you think about just the overarching kind of journey for someone dealing with a condition or dealing with some symptoms, they don't know what condition they have. I think the behavior will be similar to what it is today, which is today they're going to Google and constantly searching for things and trying to figure out what's going on. I think a bunch of that volume will move to chat GPT and other foundation models where it's easy to go from symptom to a likely diagnosis. I think the problem we solve is post that diagnosis or post having a sense of what your problem is and being able to quickly get what you need, right?

• 1:34:07TJ Parker?

  Like you, like you might need an X-ray, you might need labs, you might need, you might need an intervention in person. We make that really seamless. You can transact with us in a normal way. And so I think that is the, the sort of novel thing about what we're doing is turning healthcare into really a product catalog with, with super crisp pricing upfront.

• 1:34:25John Coogan?

  What's the business model going to be?

• 1:34:27TJ Parker?

  I think the right mental model is a combination of a first party and third party marketplace, right? So we do have our own medical group. We have our own doctors on staff. We will use them over time for things that are more and more complex where it's not as easy to know kind of right away exactly what you need. And so you're helping someone navigate that ambiguity. And then we both have a set of third party providers that are deeply integrated, mostly specialists, where if you need an immediate specialist consult, we can provide that. And then you can literally request to see any provider. It doesn't matter if we have a relationship with them or not. We can still make that referral, make it, we will literally book the appointment for you. And we'll show you the, again, we'll show you like where the best option is for you based on price, quality, whatever things you you care about. And in the

• 1:35:12TJ Parker?

  the third party sense, it obviously won't be as simple as a traditional marketplace from a monetization standpoint, but it will be of of that ilk, right? Of that flavor of a kind of traditional first party, third party marketplace.

• 1:35:24Jordi Hays?

  Did you guys have an urge to slap an L L M on this thing? I know it's notably absent from the homepage. I think.

• 1:35:31TJ Parker?

  We're throwing it back, just like my, just like my cars. We're like, ah, we're throwing it back to. Yeah.

• 1:35:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm curious. I'm curious if you, you, you must have gotten a bunch of pitches from people being like, hey, a lot of people are using chat G P T to diagnose conditions. We're gonna make a better version of that. To me, doesn't feel super investable just because chat G P T probably already has full access to PubMed and bunch of, you know, other resources, but yeah, was that a pretty, a pretty intentional decision to kind of like leave off the site and let people kind of figure out what they need? Wherever, whether it's Google or Web M D or family, friends, another doctor, et cetera, and then just be the place where they kind of take action?

• 1:36:16TJ Parker?

  Yeah, that was definitely intentional and definitely something we constantly debate. Again, I think the place that chat G P T and the other foundation models aren't going to go is the stuff we're doing, right? To go from likely diagnosis to actually transacting. And I think

• 1:36:33TJ Parker?

  we'll see how it plays out. I'm a little skeptical that dedicated kind of doctor L L Ms will win against the chat G P Ts of the world. We're probably effectively placing a bet here that the chat G P Ts of the world will kind of sweep up that use case for the most part. We could be wrong on that for sure. I mean, I think there's a bunch.

• 1:36:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can imagine a world where general medicine is like, hey, you, you know, we, we think you, here's like our read of the situation based on the picture you uploaded or the symptoms you're having. Here's how you take action and actually talk to a specialist to like verify, you know, actually get a, get an expert involved. That's not just, you know, predicting the next token.

• 1:37:12TJ Parker?

  Totally. I mean, I think again, the right frame here is retail, right? You're already seeing that exact flow. For categories that have this clear kind of product catalog and transactability and doesn't exist in healthcare, I think we'll have some version of that kind of chat with us and figure out what's going on to help you navigate our store over time. But that's not the bet we're placing. The bet we're placing is that it's the transaction that the customer ultimately needs and that we can create a very novel experience.

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  You guys launched in all 50 states. How different is that than the early PillPack days? I imagine that was a kind of a different go-to-market motion?

• 1:37:49TJ Parker?

  Yeah, for better or worse, it's almost the same. PillPack took us about 12 months to launch and we were in 32 states, I think, at launch and then chipped away at the tail over like six to nine months, I think, if I recall. And this, we're now, I don't know, 16, 18 months in and we're launching in all 50 states. So on the kind of, from a time and availability standpoint, actually super similar.

• 1:38:14John Coogan?

  Can you take me through some of the history of other attempts in this category? I remember using Zocdoc once to find a doctor. I used Wellness FX once to get some labs done. There's a few different approaches that have been tried in kind of creating the front and the front door to medicine. It still feels like one hasn't become dominant. There's a lot of point solutions, like if you want hair, hair treatment, you go to hair.com or something. You want compounded erectile dysfunction medicine with GLP-1s in it, you can go to a different website for that. But

• 1:38:56TJ Parker?

  That probably won't be part of our selection. We debated it. I think we're going to leave it, leave it out for now.

• 1:39:00John Coogan?

  I want just the, the, the cocktail.

• 1:39:03Jordi Hays?

  Cocktailmedicine.com. Can I get, can I get four in one?

• 1:39:06John Coogan?

  Testosterone, creatine. I want some protein in there. Throw a 20-milligram atorol XR in there and then mail that to me compounded and yeah, just don't I'll pay in, I'll pay in Cardano, actually.

• 1:39:20TJ Parker?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:20Jordi Hays?

  BNPL.

• 1:39:21John Coogan?

  BNPL.

• 1:39:22Jordi Hays?

  With Cardano.

• 1:39:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. But yeah, take me through some of the history. You don't need to speak specifically about specific companies, but just the different approaches that have been tried. What worked? What didn't? Why have you landed on and what have you learned that led you to this particular approach?

• 1:39:40TJ Parker?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of vectors there, right? I think the initial thinking for folks trying to build similar stuff was that you'd start in one vertical and go horizontal over time. That's sort of the Amazon playbook, starting in books and then adding categories kind of as there's demand and you have incremental customer demand. I think we observed that and have not seen evidence that that approach is successful. And I think one really different thing about healthcare is that oftentimes you actually don't know what you need, right? When you're showing up. And so if you only serve one specific thing and you only have one intervention for that thing, it actually doesn't really serve the customer need in the way that they they they ultimately want. I think if you compare it to kind of booking services with like 3P

• 1:40:26TJ Parker?

  provider search and you can book an appointment on the site. The thing that we've observed there is that you end up with this selection bias towards providers that have a bunch of availability rather than the best provider for the customer. And so we're not requiring any level of integration to get you an appointment and get you pricing for any provider. So we don't suffer from that kind of same selection bias. We're effectively ambivalent who you want to go see and we can help you figure out who the right person is. So we've sort of learned from observing that as well. And I think the last point I'd make is that it's novel to have both first party and third party integrated as a seamless thing. That's novel outside of certainly outside of health, you know, in healthcare. It's not as novel outside of healthcare.

• 1:41:10TJ Parker?

  But by doing that, it allows you to offer a comprehensive experience and ultimately make it super seamless for the for the customer.

• 1:41:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:20John Coogan?

  Have there been developments on the legislative side that have allowed this to exist now? I remember there were some telemedicine rule changes that happened in COVID and kind of stuck around that kind of created a boom there maybe, but could you have built this 10 years ago?

• 1:41:39TJ Parker?

  I think there's probably two main things that have made this the right time to build this business. The first is that patient data is much more accessible. So something novel about the customer experience is when you sign up and you give us very basic demographics, we can go pull your insurance information and pull your full med history and medical record and repopulate everything in your profile and these flows. That wouldn't have been possible a handful of years ago, and that was due to regulatory changes that required companies to open up this data. And the second is the pricing would not have been possible to do in the ways we're doing it without LLMs because we're effectively reading your full coverage of benefits and then mapping that to the service that you need and then figuring out where you are in your deductible. All of that would not have been buildable

• 1:42:22TJ Parker?

  without the current version of LLMs. And so we're not exposing that in like a AI sense, but it does power how we're able to back into what your pricing ultimately is.

• 1:42:34John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense. Yeah, it does feel like there's huge opportunity for companies that are essentially driven by enterprise AI or AI internal behind the scenes, but they don't just need to surface that. You don't need to create another text box for someone to chat with. That seems like a very deliberate decision, but still like uniquely enabled.

• 1:42:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and if somebody can create the AI doctor that allows you to have a telemedicine visit and you guys are kind of the front end for getting expert care, you could just plug that in. You don't even necessarily have to develop it.

• 1:43:09John Coogan?

  In terms of, I don't know how familiar you are with how the doctor's office is changing, but there was this drumbeat for years in the deep learning community about stop training radiologists. Deep learning neural networks focused on image recognition will be able to do it at a superhuman level very, very quickly. Now we're seeing Google VO3 generate Hollywood level cinematography that's pretty

• 1:43:36Jordi Hays?

  Generate TJ Parker going on a thousand podcasts in one day.

• 1:43:40John Coogan?

  I mean, it's really, really good. And so

• 1:43:42TJ Parker?

  It's actually not real. Sorry, guys.

• 1:43:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But I mean, when I see the advances in image processing and generative AI with regard to image, I feel like there has to be, there has to be a similar progress happening in the image processing of self-driving cars. So when I see the chat GPT, Studio Ghibli moment happen, that advances my timeline to a self-driving car. It also should advance my timeline to take a picture of this mole and tell me if it's cancerous. But is that happening? Or are these separate, are these separate paths in the tech tree? Or are there just barriers to actual adoption in the medical community?

• 1:44:27John Coogan?

  Or are there, you know, job displacement fears? Like, what's actually going on over there in the doctor's office?

• 1:44:33TJ Parker?

  Yeah, it's for sure happening. And I think they're as effective as you would imagine they are. I think the probably the biggest difference in healthcare, and I'm sure it's obvious, is that you still have to get the sign off of the doc. And there's still a bunch of regulatory overhang that is required to get fully to a diagnosis. And certainly at this point, to an intervention, whether that's a prescription or some other intervention. But I think the enablement and the efficiency is showing up, and I think that'll continue to continue to happen.

• 1:45:00John Coogan?

  You're now, you're not a chat GPT wrapper. You're leveraging LLMs, though. Are you a fax machine wrapper?

• 1:45:08TJ Parker?

  We have definitely. We will always be a fax machine wrapper. I mean, I bet.

• 1:45:12Jordi Hays?

  Fax maxing.

• 1:45:13TJ Parker?

  I bet that we spend like a third of our dev resources at PoPAC for like three years on fax-ish stuff.

• 1:45:20John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:45:20TJ Parker?

  It's really, it's really quite stunning.

• 1:45:25Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for the fax machine.

• 1:45:26TJ Parker?

  One of the greatest.

• 1:45:27Jordi Hays?

  One of the greatest ever.

• 1:45:29John Coogan?

  But I mean, I imagine that there has to have been like a B2B SaaS company that created like a really great API around fax machines in the last decade. Has that happened? Are you just standing on the shoulders of giants? Or are you writing fax machine interop code?

• 1:45:43TJ Parker?

  We don't even do a builder buy it. We just always build it. If it's fax, we're building.

• 1:45:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I imagine you're hiring CUDA engineers to develop custom parallel.

• 1:45:53Jordi Hays?

  Part of the 30 plus million is going to, you know, setting up, there's a JV with the UAE.

• 1:45:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:46:00TJ Parker?

  Yeah, there's a whole, yeah, special vector of engineers that will only work on fax machines.

• 1:46:04John Coogan?

  Fax machine.

• 1:46:05TJ Parker?

  We have a lock on that talent pool.

• 1:46:07John Coogan?

  That's great. I want to talk about go to market. Well, sorry, but yeah.

• 1:46:13Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Please. One more question here and then I want to take it another.

• 1:46:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I mean, obviously it's important to drive folks to this. Give us the plug. How can people get started? But then what's the actual marketing rollout? Are there partnerships that drive adoption? I'm going to be seeing flyers for your service when I walk into a doctor's office or seeing Google ads? Like, how, how do you actually plan on getting customers?

• 1:46:36TJ Parker?

  Yeah, I think this, this arc will probably end up following the Pulpac arc as well. We're very much a D to C business today and we intend to stay there for a while. And so I think if you're searching for any of the things that we offer will show up in those search results like any other retail experience. So we'll get quite a bit of demand there. We'll do all the normal kind of D to C tactics to drive awareness and demand.

• 1:46:58John Coogan?

  So Kardashian influencer partnership.

• 1:47:01TJ Parker?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:47:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Really get all the, all the key influencers.

• 1:47:05TJ Parker?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:05John Coogan?

  A lot, a lot, a lot of stunts, a lot of blimps.

• 1:47:08TJ Parker?

  A lot of stunts, a lot of TikToks.

• 1:47:09John Coogan?

  Skywriting.

• 1:47:10Jordi Hays?

  A lot of TikToks.

• 1:47:11TJ Parker?

  Yep, exactly. But I think if you, if you zoom out and look at the Pulpac journey, by the time that I left that business, two thirds of our business was B to B partnerships and B to B driven.

• 1:47:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:47:20TJ Parker?

  But we feel like to build a novel and great customer experience, you have to start by marketing to the end consumers. So we're doing that again here, but we would expect partners over time to help drive demand.

• 1:47:30Jordi Hays?

  I give it two years till Andy Jassy is calling you daily, trying to, trying to get the band back together again in Amazon.

• 1:47:40Jordi Hays?

  I got, I wanted to go a different direction and get an update on, on the kind of the fallout from the drug pricing executive order. What, what's your kind of updated thinking there? It was only last Monday. Feels like.

• 1:47:53TJ Parker?

  It feels like a month ago.

• 1:47:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does.

• 1:47:55TJ Parker?

  Yeah, I don't know if I've seen anything substantive over the last week.

• 1:48:00TJ Parker?

  Yeah, I'd say my take is still roughly my take, but I've not seen any evidence that supports it any more than I had a week ago. So hard to say.

• 1:48:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, should we SPAC Nito Engineering? SPACs are back, SPACs are back.

• 1:48:16TJ Parker?

  Much, much higher margin business for sure.

• 1:48:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Nito Engineering is a family owned, started in the 50s, car restoration, you know, engineering business that TJ is a big fan of. He's wearing a hat. So I had to ask since SPACs are back, you know, potentially, potentially an opportunity there.

• 1:48:34John Coogan?

  Can you talk a little bit about?

• 1:48:34TJ Parker?

  My plug is that I produced a documentary about Nito and it's coming out in the fall. So keep an eye out. We'll have to hop back on TVPN to talk about my

• 1:48:42Jordi Hays?

  For sure. Do it.

• 1:48:43TJ Parker?

  Our documentary.

• 1:48:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think I saw maybe, was there a trailer that already dropped?

• 1:48:48TJ Parker?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:48John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, I saw the trailer. That's cool.

• 1:48:49Jordi Hays?

  I love that you're mixing, you know, hyper capitalism and, you know, just like post-exit, post-economic, you know, documentary producing, you know, very few can do both.

• 1:49:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. And Nito is not related to the, the car garage that you're involved in, is that right?

• 1:49:06TJ Parker?

  That is, yeah, it's separate. That is my car, storage business, which is the car business. Yeah.

• 1:49:11John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:49:12TJ Parker?

  That's called Warehouse. That's my other plug.

• 1:49:14Jordi Hays?

  Park City.

• 1:49:14John Coogan?

  Warehouse, there we go.

• 1:49:15Jordi Hays?

  We'll do it, we'll do it.

• 1:49:16TJ Parker?

  Soho House meets like car storage. It's a cool, cool concept.

• 1:49:19John Coogan?

  Is there a track or where do people take the cars once they're stored there?

• 1:49:23TJ Parker?

  We just go like, we go on weekly drives. So there's a bunch of places to drive outside of Park City. And then there's like a simulators, restaurant, bar, kind of social lounge, that kind of thing. So kind of half social, half car enthusiast stuff.

• 1:49:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, I mean, very quickly, just on the news, because everyone's talking about it, the Johnny Ive going from Apple to OpenAI. Nikita was saying it's a hundred percent due to Apple's compensation structure. They can't pay Johnny $10 billion. But, and you said it's a hundred percent the right take, but why can't they? Like, like it seems like at this point, like maybe they should be paying Tim Cook more. We've been joking about it. He only makes 70 million, 60 million a year. And yet he was able to navigate the tariff. Like war pretty adroitly. It seemed like he probably saved Apple from a $300 billion

• 1:50:16John Coogan?

  market cap hit during that fiasco. He doesn't really get to take a slice of that. Is this something that companies should be like set up for going forward? Or is this just a unique dynamic of the private markets? Like, like what's actually going on here?

• 1:50:31TJ Parker?

  Yeah, I think it's a fundamental flaw of these large companies is that they're, they're designed to reward generalists for the most part.

• 1:50:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:39TJ Parker?

  And there's very little differentiation available on comp, even if you're at a pretty senior level, you've sort of run into these natural comp barriers. I don't, I was less commenting on whether Apple should pay Tim 10 billion, should pay Johnny $10 billion, but more commenting like if you bump up against breaking any sort of compensation rule, making an exception, it's incredibly difficult. It's basically impossible. And I think it's especially odd when you're willing to like, there's, there's a, an incredible willingness to invest in a new thing, like well beyond kind of ventures tolerance for capital investment.

• 1:51:13John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:51:14TJ Parker?

  Like billions of dollars a year into.

• 1:51:15John Coogan?

  Like the metaverse.

• 1:51:16TJ Parker?

  Yeah, so they're super speculative. Amazon spending $6 billion on Alexa, like super speculative investment.

• 1:51:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:23TJ Parker?

  With no disproportionate economics for the person deciding how to make that capital investment, and which I've always thought to be very odd. Like you could effectively swap out kind of 10 L7s and dramatically change the comp of the VP running that group. And that's probably a great investment, but that's just not the sort of mentality at most of these large companies.

• 1:51:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, you, you had the kind of canonical founder exited to big tech, moved on pretty quickly experience. Like what was the one thing that you took away from Amazon that was like, this is great. I need to port this elsewhere. Was there anything that stuck out to you as like deeply underrated about those large organizations? Cause it's easy to say, oh, they're slow. Oh, they're, they, you know, that blah, blah, blah. But what was, what was actually interesting about Amazon in particular, or just big tech broadly?

• 1:52:12TJ Parker?

  Yeah. I mean, Amazon's way of working, especially the kind of writing culture, we definitely have co-opted and I would never kind of operationally do it a different way. Like, I think that is quite effective. There's like a reasonableness that probably is a little bit. You know tilted at Amazon like you're literally writing like your annual budget like that there might be things that there's other formats that make sense, but as a general rule, like I think a writing culture is much better than a traditional culture.

• 1:52:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:39TJ Parker?

  Um, I think they're also incredibly good at scaling stuff that works, right? Like they are a machine if they found product market fit, both because there's a deep willingness to invest and because there's a bunch of established mechanisms to scale this stuff. Um, I think that can be inhibitive of building something novel and new, right? There's like sort of over process, um, and over litigate stuff, um, early on, but the second you have something really working inside of Amazon, like they are just masters of, of scaling it up.

• 1:53:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is the same thing with Google that Ben Thompson was talking about, uh, with regard to latest Google I O launch, like Google launches a ton of demos, ton of products, but they never really go anywhere unless it's tied to search. If it's tied to search, they will die before they let that thing not work. And so you can talk all about, oh, they, they sunset Google buzz or circles or fly or this random thing, but like they haven't, they haven't sunset shopping. Like they haven't sunset display.

• 1:53:34TJ Parker?

  This one's still going.

• 1:53:35John Coogan?

  That one's still going. Um, yeah, yeah. Jordan, you have anything else or?

• 1:53:39Jordi Hays?

  I think that's it. Uh, the only thing I'll, I'll share it with you now. I just got breaking news, uh, and TJ will laugh at this, but, uh, John really wants the news ER one.

• 1:53:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:53:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which, which, uh, which is like probably on the opposite end of like the, the spectrum of like cars TJ likes and like doesn't like, but I just got a quote that basically you'd have to pay a hundred K over MSRP to get one. There's only been 12 delivered so far. So.

• 1:54:08TJ Parker?

  T B P N is ripping. It's.

• 1:54:09John Coogan?

  It's a small price to pay.

• 1:54:11TJ Parker?

  Lean in, lean in.

• 1:54:12John Coogan?

  Made, uh, maybe, maybe we can flip that around. Uh, I, so I want an American made sports car. I want something interesting, but it has to be American made. What would you recommend for me?

• 1:54:22TJ Parker?

  Can it be old?

• 1:54:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it can be anything.

• 1:54:25TJ Parker?

  Get a Cobra. Cobras are sick.

• 1:54:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:54:27TJ Parker?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:27Jordi Hays?

  Good daily.

• 1:54:28TJ Parker?

  Do not get a kit car, but like get an OG unrestored Cobra. Those things are sick.

• 1:54:32John Coogan?

  Okay, that's good. I mean, last thing on the the writing culture, do you think that Amazon is at risk of being kind of one shot by these LLMs because you don't actually have to go through the exercise anymore of writing a memo? You can just be like, get me $20 million and I need to hire 25 people. Justify it like it's an Amazon memo. Boom.

• 1:54:52TJ Parker?

  Yeah, I mean, you're just gonna drop in all your old memos and be like, update this for Q2, please.

• 1:54:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. I imagine that that kind of destroys the culture potentially, but maybe they have a detective.

• 1:55:01TJ Parker?

  There's a real risk there that I hadn't contemplated.

• 1:55:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, anyway, yeah, I mean, we were recently posting a job posting for an editor and the and and the the job listing was very clearly generated, ChatGPT generated. And I was like, what prompt did you use? Maybe we should just post that prompt. And we wound up just posting the prompt. And it's like way better because the prompt is way more succinct. It's like you had to give it anything. Just give me the bullet points. Don't don't flush it out into two pages.

• 1:55:26TJ Parker?

  I am. I am pretty upset that ChatGPT is gonna single handedly ruin M dashes for me.

• 1:55:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:31TJ Parker?

  The record was like my favorite punctuation pre ChatGPT and just ruined, just totally ruined.

• 1:55:36John Coogan?

  Are you a Delve guy too? Were you using Delve a lot?

• 1:55:39TJ Parker?

  Not really. No, just M dashes, yeah.

• 1:55:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, great talking to you as always.

• 1:55:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, congratulations to Ashwin and Elliot.

• 1:55:48John Coogan?

  That was great.

• 1:55:49Jordi Hays?

  This is a I love. I love that you guys are getting back together to fix a big, big problem.

• 1:55:54John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. You'll love to see it.

• 1:55:55Jordi Hays?

  Great having you on.

• 1:55:56TJ Parker?

  Good to see you guys.

• 1:55:57Jordi Hays?

  Enjoy the rest of the day. See ya.

• 1:55:59John Coogan?

  Let's talk about numeral sales tax on autopilot. Send, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Benchmark Series A.

• 1:56:08Jordi Hays?

  Benchmark Series A.

• 1:56:09John Coogan?

  I love New World.

• 1:56:10Jordi Hays?

  Series B incoming.

• 1:56:11John Coogan?

  Also get on public, public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions, folks.

• 1:56:18Jordi Hays?

  Millions. I can't wait till we can say trusted by billions.

• 1:56:21John Coogan?

  Trusted by trillions. Um, let me see.

• 1:56:24Jordi Hays?

  Trusted by Martians.

• 1:56:25John Coogan?

  What else we got here? Do we have any others? Um, oh, we have our next guest already. Easy. Let's bring him in. Who got?

• 1:56:34Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:56:34John Coogan?

  Reggie.

• 1:56:36Jordi Hays?

  Reggie.

• 1:56:36John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 1:56:37Jordi Hays?

  Chief, we didn't. We didn't have a title for you, so I put the CRO, the Chief Reggie Officer.

• 1:56:46Speaker 04

  It's we're maximizing free agency, boys.

• 1:56:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:50Speaker 04

  Free agency and trade season.

• 1:56:52Jordi Hays?

  I wouldn't be surprised if you get a maxed out offer before this, in your inbox before this.

• 1:56:57John Coogan?

  6.5 billions on the table now, so anything's possible.

• 1:57:00Jordi Hays?

  6.5 billion. I had a, I had an idea shortly before you, you, uh, maybe you could build it. A septum piercing AI wearable health tracker. Anything there?

• 1:57:10Speaker 04

  Ship it. Ship it straight to the shop.

• 1:57:13John Coogan?

  An aura ring for your nose.

• 1:57:14Jordi Hays?

  An aura.

• 1:57:16Speaker 04

  No one's doing it.

• 1:57:17Jordi Hays?

  That can also be a companion.

• 1:57:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're talking to it all day long.

• 1:57:21Jordi Hays?

  It's like, you sure you want to have that, you know, uh, Diet Coke?

• 1:57:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, but scent is tied to memory. So imagine it just squirts the scent up your nose.

• 1:57:30Speaker 04

  Maybe not, maybe not squirts.

• 1:57:32John Coogan?

  It remembers. It admits, it admits an aroma to remind you of your grandmother's cooking.

• 1:57:37Jordi Hays?

  Aroma is better.

• 1:57:38John Coogan?

  An aroma, yeah. This aroma is built in. This is a, this is a trillion dollar idea here. Uh, what, yeah, I mean, device, they're making that Apple, uh, or, uh, Johnny Ives over at OpenAI. Uh, we were kicking around what we think it might be. It feels like Sam Altman's been into her. Uh, so we're thinking, single earpiece that you wear, maybe it has a camera on it. That was kind of the best thing that I could come up with. Maybe glasses. It feels like they're probably not just going to do a phone or an iPad or a watch, something with a rectangular screen on it. It's going to be something a little bit different. Um, take you off of your, off of your phone. Maybe curing dopamine addiction. Uh, what are you expecting? And then we can go into all of the different, uh, all the different, uh, aspects of the deal.

• 1:58:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think, you know, one thing that felt very clear is that they emphasized like a sort of like family of devices, right? So I think already they're coming from a, uh,

• 1:58:38Speaker 04

  Multiple objects approach, which, which I think is cool mostly because I, I think where a lot of hardware companies sort of gets stuck is they launch one thing and then everyone only knows them for that one thing. And then they get stuck in the loop of that one thing, right? So like

• 1:58:54Jordi Hays?

  iPhone seventeen.

• 1:58:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:56John Coogan?

  Pebble, Pebble be like invented the smartwatch in many ways. And then Apple came out with the Apple watch and it integrated with the phone and the iPad and stuff. So yeah, I mean, lack of ecosystem. I mean, and it's only getting stronger. Like now you can just on your MacBook Pro, pull up iPhone mirroring and just use your phone on your computer and stuff. And so the integration between the ecosystem, Apple knows that that's a strength that it's like, oh yeah, you, the new, the new Android phone might have a better camera, but are you willing to give up? Full integration with everything else you have, like ripping out one device now is a $20,000 proposition for many people. It's not just, it's not just $1,000. So, okay, suite of devices. So you think there will be a rectangular, a, a, a black mirror?

• 1:59:42Speaker 04

  I, I don't think there'll be a black mirror. I think they're, I think they're smart enough not to go head to head with the phone. I do think, you know, maybe it starts with a puck that's tied to like productivity, right? So something that just tries to get you interacting with chat GPT faster. So I can take it with me and it also sits on my desk when I'm working. And it's just the fastest way to sort of like, that was easy, you know, uh, stables style thing, um, that they

• 2:00:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting that the workflow, when you're in conversation with a friend where I'm like, John, what was that company like a year ago that was doing this thing? And you're like, oh, you, I could kind of query you and you bring it back.

• 2:00:24John Coogan?

  What do you think about foldables? It feels like I've seen some demos out of China where the tech is getting pretty solid. The hinges are getting smaller and smaller. And you could imagine, we, we

• 2:00:34Jordi Hays?

  I know where you're going with, I know where you're going with this. You want a newspaper sized

• 2:00:37John Coogan?

  We were, we were joking about

• 2:00:38Jordi Hays?

  Foldable that you can just

• 2:00:39John Coogan?

  Let's make a newspaper. But, but I mean, seriously, you could imagine a situation where it's like, really what I want is if I'm going to be on I don't want to carry a laptop because then I need a backpack. I can't put an iPad in my pocket, but I can put something that folds up into the phone format and then it's a bigger decision. It's like, am I just going to do the earpiece for the little random chats with ChatGPT? But then if I want to go full in and watch a movie, I have a device that can really, really superpower. And it's like, kind of counter positioned against Apple a little bit. We've heard rumors that Apple's maybe thinking about folding, but it seems like that's one of the technologies that you would be looking at. But what's your take on foldables generally?

• 2:01:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think foldables actually squarely land in like the Apple value system. You know, Apple really values the sort of like high definitionness of their rectangles, you know? And so I think if you're trying to compete on high definition of these rectangles, you're probably in a losing battle. I think, you know, something I talk about a lot when it comes to hardware is like, your values have to zag away from Apple as much as possible, right? So like, I think Avi Schiffman is a really good example of this. Like, Apple can't launch a puck that listens to you 24/7. Because the conspiracy about Apple already and a lot of the tech giants that they listen to you 24/7. But you can't do the literal thing, right? At least not for some time.

• 2:02:07Speaker 04

  And so Avi has a little bit of like narrative runway because that value is so separate from like the Apple ecosystem. So I think similarly like OpenAI and, and, you know, my assumption is that Johnny's aware of it, you know, they have to zag from a values perspective.

• 2:02:27Jordi Hays?

  What do you think their confidence level is, right? Like, the most high-profile example lately is Humane, which was a talented team. Maybe not as talented, but they did have, you know, the full backing of the SV hype machine in many ways. A lot of investors were quick to point out that they weren't in it and that they thought it was silly, but it was like a moonshot new hardware attempt with a bunch of, you know, very talented people. Do you think that that is in the back of their mind at all in terms of?

• 2:03:00John Coogan?

  What, projection specifically?

• 2:03:02Jordi Hays?

  No, no, just not even about, not even about the form factor, but just like, hey, this is actually like, yeah, it's cool to have billions of dollars in the world's best team, but it's also, it's really hard. Apple was started in a garage, right? Something closer to Avi's environment right now where he's like,

• 2:03:16John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 2:03:16Jordi Hays?

  you know, on a motorcycle, like, you know, just like hair in the wind, just like thinking about the next computing interface.

• 2:03:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:23Jordi Hays?

  And it's also, I feel like the, the pressure to deliver value beyond just companionship, right? Like Avi's edge is like, I just want it to be your friend. I don't need it to be, and yeah, maybe it can do other stuff over time, but.

• 2:03:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. So, so I think on the humane thing, you know, I got to know a bunch of folks over there and I, I think my, my main critique is that, you know, they were very like Catholic guilt ridden about the iPhone. Like the entire animating spirit was like, we feel, we kind of feel guilty about the iPhone. And now we have to present this alternative so that that's not the only road that we go down. I think unfortunately, like they made a few sort of like key errors. Like I think the projection was sort of like a really key error. I think they like backpedaled away from replacing the phone and then it was supposed to be just like part of like your broader ecosystem. So I think, um, it's what's really clear already, right?

• 2:04:26Speaker 04

  Is that they, OpenAI and Johnny are saying, we don't want to replace the phone. We want to be this third thing, but we do want to live in your pocket, right? So it's like close, close enough, but far enough.

• 2:04:40Speaker 04

  And I think that, you know, what's funny is Sam, you know, backed humane early and they had an OpenAI partnership. And I think that, um, I don't know the full politics there, but I would assume at some point, you know, Sam sort of maybe lost face and faith, sorry, not lost face, lost faith. And then kind of turned to, okay, well, who are the other superstars at Apple? Cause like, make no mistake, like Imran and folks out on that team were like the superstars at Apple.

• 2:05:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:08Speaker 04

  Right? It's just two different sides. Like Imran was the HCI team and Johnny was the industrial design team, you know? So, um.

• 2:05:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's sort of, I think they're aware of those lessons, but.

• 2:05:24John Coogan?

  One thing we were talking about was in terms of building like a super high performing hardware device, consumer electronics team. Steve Jobs not only had Johnny Ive, but he also had Tim Cook to build the supply chain. And building robust supply chains was difficult in the 90s and 2000s when Apple did it and it didn't exist in China. And now because of geopolitical considerations, it's also very difficult. It doesn't feel turnkey. It feels like the turnkey era of consumer hardware was maybe the 2010s. And now we are post that and there are lots of different considerations around tariffs and trade policy and geopolitical dynamics.

• 2:06:09John Coogan?

  Do you think that we would see someone like a Tim Cook go into OpenAI to get this off the ground?

• 2:06:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a good question. So some things that I've been just sort of like watching is that OpenAI already has like an internal hardware team and they've had for quite some time. They have someone that's like head of robotics. They have, I think they hired a woman recently that's head of like all hardware. And so it's clear that they've been building up this capacity internally for quite some time. And so I think, you know, the joint venture is definitely some form of appeal to authority, right? With Johnny and

• 2:06:53Speaker 04

  my personal hot take is I don't know how sensitive they are to actually shipping or at least shipping on the time that they, you know, stated, you know, like the hot take, the extreme hot take would be, right, is like. Sam needs another, you know, 200 billion and he, you know, he goes to like Saudi Arabia with Johnny and Johnny puts on his like British accent and you know, they don't have to even talk about the next model or like

• 2:07:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:07:24Speaker 04

  numbers, right? It's simply when's the device shipping and they could just say a number or like say a date and they can get the money.

• 2:07:31John Coogan?

  Right? Yeah. If you're building up the valuation, you're saying there's a 10% chance that we disrupt Google. That's a multi-trillion dollar business. So you can value us at a multiple hundred millions. There's also a 10% chance that we disrupt Apple and that's a multi-trillion dollar business. So you discount the value and that's a couple hundred billion. And so, yeah, you kind of add.

• 2:07:48Speaker 04

  And then that question doesn't matter.

• 2:07:49John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:07:50Speaker 04

  You know, like then that supply chain question doesn't matter when I have 200 billion in cash. It's like, what supply chain?

• 2:07:57John Coogan?

  Buy Fox.

• 2:07:58Jordi Hays?

  Buy Foxconn.

• 2:08:00John Coogan?

  I think Sam.

• 2:08:01Speaker 04

  We manufacture Apple now. So.

• 2:08:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:05John Coogan?

  I mean, what?

• 2:08:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're gonna bake. We're gonna bake the new model into into.

• 2:08:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've seen, I've seen some hot takes back and forth. Johnny Ive was obviously deeply loved and admired. And I kind of took the internet by storm with the conversation with Patrick Collison last week. At the same time, a lot of people have said that a lot of the work that he did was iterative and not that revolutionary. What is your take on the legacy of Johnny Ive? You know, he's, he's in his 60s. That's sometimes retirement age. I believe he's in his 60s. I actually don't know, but I mean, at the same time, Berkshire Hathaway just hired a 62 year old CEO. And Warren Buffett worked into his 90s. So what is your overall take on, on Johnny Ive's legacy and where it goes from here?

• 2:08:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, you know, I think the early part of his legacy or like the Apple part of his legacy is like undeniable, right? Like one interesting thing to like in Johnny history is, you know, the first place he was working, I believe, like the design firm specialized in bathrooms. And so when you understand that, you can actually understand like his obsession with smoothness. His obsession with like, sort of like knobs and dials and all of these things that we see that are kind of orthogonal to like computer hardware, as well as just like things that are unobtrusive, right? And like brushed aluminium, like you kind of understand his design language when you know where he started. So then you get to Apple and he's had very.

• 2:09:36Jordi Hays?

  Started from the toilet.

• 2:09:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. But you know, in a lot, in a lot of ways, like these devices sort of, um, they, they blend in similar to like a, a home object and they don't really stand out like what we understood consumer electronics to be. So then you start fast forwarding and you're saying, okay, now he has like all the devices in play. What does he do? My hot, one of my hot takes is that like, he kind of gives technology a type of like body dysmorphia, right? Like all he cares about is thinness. He even, when he gets control of the whole design team, that's when we get the pivot to flat design. So he even takes like the interface level and makes it thin and flat and not too like fun.

• 2:10:20Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so was the, was the camera protruding?

• 2:10:22John Coogan?

  Who's responsible for the camera bump?

• 2:10:23Jordi Hays?

  Was that just to sell more cases? What's up with that?

• 2:10:26Speaker 04

  I think the camera bump just became a trade off post Steve. Because a, again, think, we still have to understand like Apple the machine, right? When Steve was there, really the only person you had to appeal to was Steve. So there's like a very known thing around like Apple demo culture where like it's Steve in a room with a couple of other people. You go in, you show it to him and he says yes or no. And if he says yes, it's in and there's no one else you're convincing. My assumption is post Steve, you're, you're going through stakeholder management, right? So Johnny doesn't have like the number one authority anymore. So he starts having to like wrestle with, you know, the camera team and he's wrestling with Tim and he's wrestling with manufacturing.

• 2:11:11Speaker 04

  And he just doesn't get to win every battle anymore. That's my.

• 2:11:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Seems like you're good.

• 2:11:18John Coogan?

  What do you think's going on with Apple Vision Pro? Have you used it? It feels like it, it's built on some of the design language that Johnny Ive pioneered, uh, aluminium, I suppose, but, uh, at the same time, uh, not the thinnest VR headset. Johnny left in 2019. They've obviously been working on Apple Vision Pro for longer than that, but it feels like maybe the first Apple product that doesn't have his mark on it. But overall.

• 2:11:51John Coogan?

  Do you think that's going to get any better? Is there any salvage that can do? Have you used it? What's your reaction to just VR broadly? Any of that stuff that you're thinking through?

• 2:11:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I have one. I used it. I was very curious. It is really heavy.

• 2:12:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:04Speaker 04

  I think they had the wrong guiding metaphor. At the end of the day, they didn't have like a true creative direction, um, anchor. And so they landed on, we're going to put a floating iPad on your face and it's going to be somewhat antisocial, right? So everything that they show is widgets in air. And then you sitting alone on your couch, watching something in extreme high definition. And that's fine. But as like a counter position is like, what if their anchor was like the iPod, right? And maybe their like hero product was actually something around Apple Music. And it looked more like the dancing silhouettes that when you put this headset on, your entire apartment actually turns into this beautiful color scape

• 2:12:49Speaker 04

  and you are animated, right? So they chose like a stagnant couch potato instead of you being animated. And we're seeing the same thing in Apple advertising when it comes to the way they talk about Apple intelligence, right? It's like this kind of like slobby guy at his desk, getting AI to write an email to his boss to slack off further. So we have this company that used to champion like you're going to be your best self with these products. And now it's turning into Pure creativity. But yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:18Speaker 04

  But on the headset and slob out, don't do your work. Get AI to tell your boss why you're going to be late. And it's just like, it's like Steve's nightmare, you know?

• 2:13:27John Coogan?

  It's funny. Yeah. I mean,

• 2:13:28Speaker 04

  What about, what about glasses as a form factor? I, I'm, I'm bullish on glasses as a form factor. And I think it's going to go a few different ways. I do think like the meta Ray-Bans, like that form factor will continue to get better. Eventually, like what it takes to put projections and those will be, you know, lightweight enough, you know? I think the Orion, I think, was the project on Meta. You know, I think, obviously, that's like too bulky. Zuck looks silly, but I think they're gonna just get it thinner and get it thinner. And in like 10 years, it'll be great, maybe five.

• 2:14:00John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, with the with the XR stuff and the AR stuff, like X Real and N Real Air, this company does glasses that it doesn't do all the crazy tracking, but it can pull up a visual in front of you just statically. And that solves like 90% of the use case for this. If I'm on a plane and I'm just gonna watch a movie, I think that that's gonna get there first. And then you have to figure out, can we actually make it fully holographic? But if you just want a basic HUD, like a HUD heads up display, that's a lot more achievable. No, none of the big tech companies have really said like, we're gonna settle for that. But I think that that might be a path along the road, actually. But I haven't really played with it enough. Staying on Apple Vision Pro, I heard a rumor, I don't know how true this is,

• 2:14:44John Coogan?

  that the person, one of the one of the key people at Apple in charge of it was an ex Dolby engineer who was all about the Dolby Cinema Theater. And I and I thought that like, that was the killer app.

• 2:14:59John Coogan?

  Dolby's great. I love the movies.

• 2:15:03John Coogan?

  The sound was so hard, but but like I tried.

• 2:15:06Speaker 04

  Wrong creative anchor.

• 2:15:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but I I tried the dinosaur experience. It was like two minutes. I'm like, I'm not gonna game on this thing. I'm not really gonna work on this thing. But I did watch, I watched all of Citizen Kane, actually, in in Vision Pro. And it was amazing. And it was like being in a theater and it was fantastic. And I almost think that they should have gone narrower. And maybe the iPod is the right thing. Like, the iPod, when you put in the headphones, it is isolating. But the campaign around that was you dancing around in silhouette is beautiful. And there is something about like restoring this idea of going to the movies. But I agree with you that the ads were super dystopian. There's that one where the guy is clearly a dad. He's watching a video of his kids and it looks like he's divorced and like his kids. Super depressing, but.

• 2:15:53Speaker 04

  Giving blood on the track, Bob Dylan divorced dad.

• 2:15:56John Coogan?

  It was very rough. But but what is your take on this idea of like, Apple narrowing the focus of of Vision to, we have one killer use case? Because they're they're kind of the everything company. The iPhone will call you an Uber, does your email, does phone, everything. You know, the original iPhone keynote was it just does three things. And and then it grew out from there. Do they even have the culture to refocus around one value prop? I always thought like they have Apple TV. They never made a real TV. They could have just positioned this as like, this is the best way to watch Apple TV. And it's just an Apple TV machine. And then it has some other stuff and yeah, we'll have an app store. But really, but what do you think about that culturally at Apple? And just in terms of like, if you were running the place, what would you do?

• 2:16:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, that's, that's a great question. You know, I think it's, it's so hard to understand why certain things in your own history worked out the way that they did. Right? I think we are so anchored on, like you said, the iPhone being this giant enablement to not only Apple, but a lot of, I mean, how much of the valley is built on just like mobile apps that did a thing? Right? And that's because if you're Uber, you know, you have GPS and now like you can actually do all these things. Right? So I, I think Apple wanted to be hyper enablement ready again. You know, they wanted developers to really build things on this.

• 2:17:23Speaker 04

  And I just, you know, I think unfortunately at the premium price, unlike, um, like the Quest, it's really hard to bootstrap, bootstrap that and get consumer adoption. And because they, they also have never done just like a developer only product before. So there were just so many conflicting narratives. Again, it just seemed like no one was at the, actually gripping on to the, to the reins. So I'm, I'm very pro like pick a singular use case that's going to be incredible at. You know, like I think Steve's original thing was like iPod for the eyes. You know, it's like noise cancellation for the eyes. And so you have Apple TV, you have Apple fitness. This is like, we're doing these two things. Make it super lightweight, make it comfortable as much as possible.

• 2:18:10Speaker 04

  And maybe as a bonus, you can like tie the laptop to it. So you have like a keyboard in front of you, right? But this is about being static and XYZ.

• 2:18:18Jordi Hays?

  Have you ever, have you ever thought of applying for a job at Apple? Maybe not CEO job. I don't think they have a listing, but trying to fix Apple. Get it back to its roots.

• 2:18:29Speaker 04

  I think I think you need a lot of political capital to do that there is my assumption. And so I'm far more attracted to the things I see getting built from like my peers and.

• 2:18:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:18:41Jordi Hays?

  Let's switch gears for a second.

• 2:18:43John Coogan?

  I mean, it's just fascinating because it is a it's like almost like a supply chain story in the sense that they were able to pull forward the highest resolution display that no one else had access to. Not even Mark Zuckerberg, expending $10 billion a year on the metaverse, could get that screen pulled forward by two years. I'm sure the next Quest will have a comparable screen, but Apple was able to do that. And but that's not enough. It's like, it's a fantastic execution on the supply chain side. Anyway, Jordy, where do you want to go next?

• 2:19:13Jordi Hays?

  I wanted to ask what you're up to. I know you I'm sure you're cooking. I know you're cooking. Anything you can anything you can share right now?

• 2:19:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, so yeah, I mean, I'm coming out of, you know, sort of an acquisition of Eternal and just thinking about what's next. And one, one thing that I've been working on with friends throughout the past year is actually, speaking of hardware, this, oh, no, the background, look at what you're doing to yourself.

• 2:19:43Jordi Hays?

  I see paper. I see paper. Hardware underrated form factor for hardware.

• 2:19:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a well-known competitor.

• 2:19:52Speaker 04

  How do you do the, oh, there it is. That's not it either. How do you do these things? Oh, there it is. Okay. So.

• 2:20:00Jordi Hays?

  Why would you want to? Why would you want to hide that? Why would you want to hide that background?

• 2:20:03John Coogan?

  That's a way better background.

• 2:20:06Speaker 04

  I listen, I love San Francisco. It's the best city in the world.

• 2:20:11Speaker 04

  Says the New Yorker.

• 2:20:12Jordi Hays?

  Stolen stolen valor on that Golden Gate Bridge.

• 2:20:22Jordi Hays?

  Brutal, brutal. Show us.

• 2:20:25John Coogan?

  What you're working on?

• 2:20:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the big project I've been doing and launching Technology Brothers exclusive is this hardware book. Hardware 2024. Um, I made my friend Julian Davis and Charlene Deng. And, you know, I, I, I saw sort of a few years ago that hardware was really going to become the new meta. Um, it's sort of, you know, we saw software shifting into these two very big ways like, and we, and we started to see the containers for software shifting as well. Um, those containers being sort of like spatial and, and hardware. And so last year just started to feel like a really special time in hardware.

• 2:21:08Speaker 04

  Humane, Rabbit, all these things with teenage engineering, daylight, USB club. And so we really wanted to give sort of like the art book treatment. This is my personal copy. The real copy is going to be hardcover. Um, but we really want to give the sort of like art book treatment to what's happening in hardware.

• 2:21:26Jordi Hays?

  Daylight, let's go.

• 2:21:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, daylight is beautiful. You know, while writing the like humane, um, sort of blurb, they got acquired by HP. So these things were, you know, really shifting in real time, which was so crazy. Um, one of the big, big sort of sells on this book is a exclusive interview with Jesper, the founder of teenage engineering, who maybe folks remember from his config talk last year.

• 2:21:57Speaker 04

  And so it's 260 pages of giving like present day technology, uh, that art book treatment. So really, really excited about that.

• 2:22:07Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. When, when can we buy it? When can we buy it?

• 2:22:12Speaker 04

  You can buy it right now. Hardware 2024.com.

• 2:22:17John Coogan?

  Hardware book 2024.com. Let's go.

• 2:22:20Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic. Amazing, amazing. I'm, I'm excited and, and what, uh, and the site's beautiful, by the way. Very cool.

• 2:22:27Speaker 04

  Thank you. That was just a late night. One late night coffee slash.

• 2:22:32John Coogan?

  Vibe coding.

• 2:22:33Jordi Hays?

  All right.

• 2:22:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, some might say.

• 2:22:36Jordi Hays?

  All right, I just hit pay now.

• 2:22:37John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 2:22:38Jordi Hays?

  That was easy.

• 2:22:38John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 2:22:39Jordi Hays?

  There we go. There we go. That's amazing. What what's next? Are you already working on the next book? You already cooking?

• 2:22:45John Coogan?

  Hardware 2025. It's happening now. It's unfolding.

• 2:22:48Speaker 04

  It's it is unfolding. You know, I would I would love to sort of get sucked into the OpenAI hardware tentacles and, you know, maybe even like write some OpenAI checks to emergent hardware. I think that we're going to see a lot of form factors emerge, you know, beyond just pendants, beyond just like pucks, what have you. I've been investing in like advising some new hardware companies and AI hardware companies. So, um, yeah, I'm just, I'm.

• 2:23:19John Coogan?

  Have you gotten a chance to play with the chromatic from Palmer Lucky?

• 2:23:25Speaker 04

  No, it's sold out before I could buy.

• 2:23:27John Coogan?

  Oh, it's sold out. Yeah.

• 2:23:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:23:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, I I love it. It's, I mean, it's a beautiful product. You can run over it with a car. Apparently I haven't tried that, but also it it's it's like this perfect throwback, but you can use emulators to play any game. And now they just added Twitch streaming from it over USB C, which is crazy. So you can so you can plug it in and it records what you're what you're playing. So it's like this.

• 2:23:51Speaker 04

  And can it control an barrel drone?

• 2:23:54John Coogan?

  One day, I'm sure. And I think that they might be working on an N64 and some other some other retro hardware. So it's fun. A lot of the retro retro throwback stuff coming through. I mean, the only other spicy take I want is on Memoji, but do you have time for that?

• 2:24:10Jordi Hays?

  Is Memoji underrated?

• 2:24:12John Coogan?

  Are you using it every day?

• 2:24:13Speaker 04

  No, I don't.

• 2:24:14Jordi Hays?

  Daily driving?

• 2:24:16Speaker 04

  No, no, sorry.

• 2:24:18Jordi Hays?

  Damn.

• 2:24:18John Coogan?

  Well, what do you think?

• 2:24:19Speaker 04

  Are you talking about Memoji or Genmoji?

• 2:24:21Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's Genmoji.

• 2:24:23John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Memoji is the one where you make yourself into an emoji. Genmoji is the one where you generate anything.

• 2:24:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:24:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think I think this, you know, I think the word, I don't think Genmoji is actually a bad product. I just think like the ad campaign, again, like they've lost their soul when it comes to communication.

• 2:24:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:41Speaker 04

  The entire thing about Genmoji, it's the experience of making a niche reference for your friend. And then the ad campaign is just like, very weird looking.

• 2:24:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:53Speaker 04

  Like, end results, you know, like, the entire thing about that is like, it's about the process, not the end result. Like, the end result out of context makes zero sense. And then that's all they paste it around like major cities. And it's just like, God.

• 2:25:06John Coogan?

  I mean, how do you even tell that story is like, should the billboard be like two friends, like, in separate rooms, kind of like, like, like, mean girls split screen, like, laughing because they're sending each other Genmoji?

• 2:25:17Speaker 04

  That's, that's not a, that's not a billboard campaign. For the first, first level of like taste. Is that a billboard campaign?

• 2:25:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:25:24Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:25:25Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's funny because it should be such a, it should be a product that needs no billboard, right? Like, it, it, it should be inherently so viral and so user generated that people just start using it, right? And it has this sort of Ghibli moment where people are just using Genmoji. And I just didn't see that at all. Maybe, maybe I'm a boomer.

• 2:25:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:25:49Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, thank you so much for coming on. We've been wanting to do this for a while. This was great timing. Excited to get a copy of the book. We will, we'll show it back here on the show. And I'm sure have some follow up questions. But congratulations on the launch and welcome back anytime for more, more hardware hot takes.

• 2:26:08Speaker 04

  Ah, fantastic. Thank you, brothers.

• 2:26:10John Coogan?

  Play them out for the studio audience. Thanks for coming on the show.

• 2:26:14Jordi Hays?

  Legend. Chief Reggie Officer of Hardware Book 2024.

• 2:26:20John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon, Reggie.

• 2:26:22Jordi Hays?

  I'll be right back.

• 2:26:23John Coogan?

  How'd you sleep last night?

• 2:26:24Jordi Hays?

  You know how I slept, John?

• 2:26:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:26:27Jordi Hays?

  I should just give you access, I should just give you my login to just motivate you because.

• 2:26:32John Coogan?

  I got a 93. I'm climbing up.

• 2:26:34Jordi Hays?

  Got a 99, John.

• 2:26:35John Coogan?

  You got a 99. Well, I beat you Monday, Tuesday. You beat me Wednesday, Thursday. You get out of here. I'm gonna do some ad reads. Go get a Pod 5 Ultra at 8sleep.com. They have a five-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, and free shipping. These are nights that fuel your best days. Clinically-backed sleep fitness. We also have a coupon code, TBPN, at 8sleep.com. Go check it out. We also want to tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad-buying across

• 2:27:17John Coogan?

  the globe. We, of course, have Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge services. It's a vacation home, but better. And lastly, Bezel. Your Bezel Concierge is now available to source any watch on the planet for you. Seriously, any watch. They have over 26,000 luxury watches on Bezel now. So go to getbezel.com. We should go through some more timeline posts. There's been a bunch of stuff in the news. What else is here? L3 Tweet Engineer, just says LMAO in post screenshot, probably from Blind or something. "Google prestige is gone. I was at a dinner party when I mentioned in passing that I worked at Google, and everyone

• 2:28:01John Coogan?

  immediately burst into laughter, pointing out how ChatGPT had eaten our lunch. Then they pulled out their iPhones and showed that they didn't have a single Google app installed and had set their homepage and default search engine to ChatGPT. Then they GPT'd Google's stock chart and erupted into another round of uproarious laughter while making the pinching hand gesture." Very, very fake. Extremely fake. You cannot get off the Google ecosystem, but very, very funny that somebody posted this. Very silly. Also, if they pulled up the Google stock chart, they would see that it's up like 10% in the last two days. So, very silly. What else? The Teal Fellows were announced. The 2025 Teal Fellows. We're going to do Teal Fellow Day, hopefully, on Tuesday, and we're gonna interview as many of these folks as we can, give you a little tour of what the latest

• 2:28:46John Coogan?

  batch of Teal Fellows are working on. There's a bank, a trading platform, a research lab. Somebody working on non-invasive neurostimulators, foundation models to power digital humans that are indistinguishable from real ones. AI-powered solution to automate manufacturing processes and dark factories. That's cool. Fizz is developing an AI financial investor. We have friends who've been on the show are now Tiofelle Soren Monroe Anderson, the founder of Nero's is a defense technology company that builds drones, critical to the modern arsenal at massive scale. Orbit is a non-invasive neurostimulator. There's a bunch of other folks in here. Interfaces developing human native communication devices that change the way we work and think. That sounds maybe hardware driven.

• 2:29:31John Coogan?

  Excited to talk to him about that.

• 2:29:33Jordi Hays?

  And I am working on a surprise guest. Ben Hylak to come on later today for 10 minutes at 2.

• 2:29:42John Coogan?

  That'd be great.

• 2:29:42Jordi Hays?

  X is so cooked right now. I can't even get, I can't even get DMs out. I'm trying to get his email for the invite, but he had something interesting earlier. Ben said, and an AI alignment researcher at Anthropic just said that Claude Opus will call the police or lock you out of your computer. If it detects you doing something illegal, I will never give this model access to my computer. And so Sam, I guess Sam Baumann over at Anthropic and a now deleted post says, if it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral, for example, like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial, it will use command line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of relevant systems or all the above. That is absolutely crazy, but we'll see if it's real or fake news.

• 2:30:27Jordi Hays?

  And let us bring in our next guest.

• 2:30:30John Coogan?

  We have Keith Roy. Welcome to the stream, Keith.

• 2:30:33Keith Rabois?

  Hey.

• 2:30:34John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 2:30:36Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 2:30:37John Coogan?

  We have a soundboard now. Welcome to the show.

• 2:30:41Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 2:30:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Great to have you back.

• 2:30:43Keith Rabois?

  The entries, dog.

• 2:30:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a little messy. We're figuring it out. Give us the recap on the KV summit. How'd it go?

• 2:30:50Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, so every year for the last 15 years, we've hosted all of our CEOs, like 150 plus CEOs at Cavalier Point in San Francisco. And it's like a two day program where we bring in inspirational and actionable speakers. So for example, I interviewed Eric from Ramp, John Carlson Stripe. John Carlson interviewed Bill Gates, actually, and Sam Altman spoke. And then the CEO of Databricks. So we have a wide variety of content. Some of it's more practical, tangible, and some of it's very aspirational, inspirational. So we take our CEO time very seriously and want to make sure that every minute they're not in the office,

• 2:31:32Keith Rabois?

  you know, managing, executing, you know, growing their companies, that they get disproportionate returns out of the time.

• 2:31:42Jordi Hays?

  What was any type of surprising takeaways or insights that you can share?

• 2:31:47John Coogan?

  I want to know what the biggest debate points are. Like what, where are the things where people are actually debating? I've, you know, Sam Altman recently said AI could be an operating system. There's questions about foundation model layer value accrual versus application model layer value accrual. How many winners there will be in the coding market? Like, what are people actually debating and unclear about? And then I'd love to know where you stand on it, obviously, but like the non-consensus topics are probably the most interesting to dig into here.

• 2:32:19Keith Rabois?

  Sure, we can talk about all this. Generally speaking, we will post all of these videos online. So the vast library of, you know, 15 years of virtually anybody who's been successful in tech has spoken at our conference. And so in fact, Sam's probably spoken four or five times now. It was interesting, I compared, when I was interviewing John Carlson, I'd interviewed Patrick Carlson literally a decade ago. And it was an interesting contrast to show the arc of the company. When I interviewed Patrick in 2015, Stripe was worth, you know, several billion dollars, but it only had 250 employees. And now, you know, as John mentioned, they have 9,000.

• 2:32:58John Coogan?

  9,000, wow.

• 2:32:59Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, so it shows you the arc of, you know, building a company that a decade had passed since I last interviewed Patrick. So we will share 90 Plus percent of these videos, we'll start posting them next week. Um, there's maybe one or two, it's up to speaker, you know, they don't want to share certain things. But the contrast I noticed, one, A was one about building a company. We talked about founder mode a fair amount. Um, so, you know, Eric talked about how they build ramp. And John gave a slightly different perspective on building Stripe. And then I interviewed actually Gary Tan of Y C to talk about the origins of founder mode. The lessons from, you know, thousands of companies that, you know, they've invested in for 20 years.

• 2:33:41Keith Rabois?

  Um, and so I think the operating styles and approaches to hiring senior talent or not. Um, was an interesting contrast. On A I, uh, we had Brad Gerster of Altimeter speak. And, um, talk about the future of A I as applied to pre-existing companies. Uh, he was quite inspirational. He made a couple of points that I think Sam generally would have agreed with, which is there's only going to be one foundation model, research lab oriented, successful winner. It's certainly not, um, something that V C's should be investing in. Uh, the application layer, I think there's more room and opportunity. Or something that transcends what we think of research labs today.

• 2:34:24Keith Rabois?

  Just like Open A I and Chat G P T is transcending what we think of search. And, you know, to some extent, what we think of social. I think the next generation will be something that doesn't look anything like an L L M, doesn't look like a research lab. And, you know, it's very difficult therefore to find, but hopefully some founders have visions and hopefully they call me when they do.

• 2:34:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, I feel like Brian Chesky was a big inspiration for the original founder mode essay by Paul Graham. Uh, he just went extreme founder mode a week or two ago with the Airbnb reimagining.

• 2:35:01John Coogan?

  At the same time, Ben Thompson's kind of analyzing that and Ben Thompson's argument is that Airbnb is a platform and a marketplace company. And so the economics of the platform kind of dictate a certain user experience, mainly that people open the app. Yeah, they have billions, hundreds of millions of users. The user base is massive at Airbnb, but the average user opens it like twice a year and they want to get in, get out, and it's not a daily active user experience. And so Ben Thompson was saying there will be some challenges. What was your reaction to how Brian positioned Airbnb's next chapter? Do you like that communication style? Are you optimistic about where Airbnb goes? Give us your, give us your reaction to the Airbnb news.

• 2:35:46Keith Rabois?

  So yes, Brian pioneered what we now describe as Founder Mode, even though it's very specific in some ways to the operating style of Apple. But in any event, he triggered this at a Y C alumni dinner in Alba Valley where he kind of off the cuff, without preparation, spoke for two and a half hours. And that's what led to Paul Graham summarizing it, distilling it, which led to a lot of intrigue and interest. And this is kind of what I think CEOs were talking about privately, but no one had really stitched it together and kind of created a public discussion of it. I, for those of you really interested in the topic, I interviewed Brian a few months ago at Graham's offices and that video is available on my, where Brian

• 2:36:31Keith Rabois?

  is incredibly articulate and eloquent about the virtues and the benefits of Founder Mode and how he actually implemented it. So I highly recommend anybody in the audience who's intrigued, watch the actual video because I will not do it justice. On the specific topic of Airbnb experiences, I think Ben made some interesting points. I've been a fan and early reader of stratechery. It's the only thing I read regularly in all of tech because I think he's the only one who actually understands tech that writes. So I actually have been recommending this to friends of mine for over a decade who want to enter into tech is like start reading stratechery. So I think the point he makes, first of all, is that in services

• 2:37:13Keith Rabois?

  world, you're going to, you potentially want to get off the platform once you find a service provider. You know, that you like. I think he missed one subtle point, which is Airbnb is still designed mostly for travelers. I, you know, I'm going from New York, let's say, to Cincinnati. And obviously, the canonical case is I would find a place to stay in Cincinnati. Great. But as you point out, the average user, you know, might travel 2.5 times, 2.4, 2.5 times a year. So it's hard to turn my Airbnb usage into a daily, weekly, monthly habit. However, the point that Ben glossed over a bit is that I'm traveling to Cincinnati and then to SF.

• 2:37:56Keith Rabois?

  And then to Dallas and then to somewhere in Utah. I have no incentive to go off the platform to find a service provider. Yes, in a city that I mean regularly, let's say, New York City. If I found like a hairstylist here or the equivalent, I may have an economic motive to just, you know, disintermediate the platform. But if, if Brian's right that curating experiences and services that a local would use still appeals to people who are in New York City, which is a huge, a huge number of people come to New York City every year. Then I think Ben may be wrong and Brian may be right. So I think Brian is probably, uh, uh, sort of dialing in to the traveler visitor use case.

• 2:38:41John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:38:41Keith Rabois?

  And then you need the breadth of services when you're traveling and experiences. You don't necessarily have to only use it in your home city, which is where Ben may have some valid critiques.

• 2:38:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it seems like the, the dog walker example is probably the rough one because it's the most obvious disintermediation point. At the same time, yeah, there's plenty of times when big group is traveling and they want, uh, you know, private chef to come cook for everyone, something like that. Makes a ton of sense in that context. And then also it's, it like, you can build a good business in a referral business. That is not, it's less transaction, it's more discovery and advertising basis. I was actually, uh, like, not even half joking, just saying that maybe Airbnb needs an advertising product because Uber's been so successful in advertising. I don't, I, I mean, I think that that might really frustrate people if they're seeing promoted listings. But at the same time, like on these marketplaces, usually advertising does pretty well. I don't know if you have a reaction to that.

• 2:39:37Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, I have two reactions. First of all. I don't think Airbnb will need it. Airbnb's margins are like roughly, take rates roughly 13%.

• 2:39:46Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:39:47Keith Rabois?

  And you know, versus like the Ubers or the Instacarts where they really don't make too much money for transaction.

• 2:39:52Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 2:39:52Keith Rabois?

  If you don't have highly profitable advertising revenue, it's hard to build an interesting business. So I think Airbnb doesn't have the economic drivers that you see with Instacart.

• 2:40:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:02Keith Rabois?

  Where it has been successful, but it is some annoying. That said, you know, Google used to run this internal study where they would actually show users who are exposed to

• 2:40:14Keith Rabois?

  SEO content and paid advertising are more satisfied than users who are searching and only see SEO content. So advertising, when done properly, can be a value add. If you think about it, the economic incentive of drafting content that explains, contextualizes and markets products does drive to efficient advertising that can be

• 2:40:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and even

• 2:40:38Keith Rabois?

  for a user.

• 2:40:39Jordi Hays?

  Even today, if you're in an area and some service provider is running ads, it shows a level of sophistication and professionalism that might associate in some ways with just a better end product experience than somebody that doesn't know how to set up a Google ad. I wanted to ask, Ben had some great thoughts around, you know, the entire internet is based on, you know, advertising. And in a time when, you know, we may all have agents that are just trawling the internet for us and acting on our behalf. The, you know, economic, the existing economic model of the internet could hit some snags. And he makes a case for, you know, micro payments to allow people that produce content to get some benefit

• 2:41:23Jordi Hays?

  from having models, you know, acquiring information on those sites. He also outlines how this is going to be incredibly difficult to pull off because there's so many different groups and incentives. I'm curious if you've spent much time yourself thinking about the potential for micro transactions in, in, in the context of replacing lost advertising revenue.

• 2:41:48Keith Rabois?

  So similar, similar observation, I think the post, the original sin of the internet by Ben is totally worth reading. And I generally agree with the point that the original sin of the internet was that all content should be free. I actually made that point to Jessica Lessin when she was launching the information in like two thousand, five, six, seven, eight, whatever it was, I was like, you definitely are going to be on the right side of history by charging a premium subscription. Ran into Dick Costello at that party, the launch event, and I, I actually used the term, the original sin of the internet was that we, we all learn the lesson that because the marginal cost of content, marginal cost of distribution of content would go to zero, you should charge zero, which is absolutely false.

• 2:42:29Keith Rabois?

  However, micropayments make no sense. Ben is totally wrong about this. I'll give you an old lesson from PayPal. So one of my jobs at PayPal between two thousand and two thousand and three was to find new markets because we were really dependent on eBay. And that led to, you know, risk and we ultimately went public and then sold the company to eBay because we were nervous about the risk of eBay handicapping our future growth. And as you know, tech companies are valued by the next 20 years of cash flow. So, uh, you have Peter Roloff and various people were very nervous about that. One of the markets I wanted to explore was quote unquote, micropayments. And Peter Thiel made a very astute, uh, sort of rebuke to me. They said like, that's the dumbest argument ever, basically, because

• 2:43:14Keith Rabois?

  content has a marginal cost, it has a gross margin of about 99%. So basically, whether or not micropayments cost you five, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 50% of the content, who cares? Like if you're writing content that people pay for, because your gross, because your gross margin is like in the nineties, you shouldn't really worry about whether the micropayment cost is too large. Now, the friction to make it, the reason why I wanted to build the product was, I think the friction of micropayments is too high, like the consumer friction of paying for anything, like, you know, you know, you're going to be a short blog post, you're going to be a short post, you don't really know exactly, you know, what it's worth.

• 2:43:58Keith Rabois?

  And so if you have to do anything other than just one click, forget about it. But I still think people get this analysis wrong that it's not an economic problem for Now, music's a little different, by the way, where you owe a licensed owner a reasonable fraction of the transaction, then you can't be so, you know, sort of whimsical about the marginal cost of the payment. But most people do not really, you know, have to pay out a meaningful fraction of that dollar transaction to somebody else, some third party. So I, I, I think this is, excuse, by the way, Stripe originally, originally started when Patrick John pitched me on Stripe in 2010. They originally thought that the core

• 2:44:39Keith Rabois?

  use case was going to be like micro payments and accelerating content. They saw the GDP of the internet, but they really felt that it would unleash new content, which hasn't for the most part happened. You know, Substack is an interesting business. It has real GMB and, and an associated real revenue line. But I still think it's the wrong place for Ben to be focusing.

• 2:45:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, the, the, the issue with looking at Substack or even Ben and their success is there's some element there of, I just want to support this, the person creating it. I want them to not think about getting a job or building a business other than just writing online and spending all day thinking about, in Ben's case, tech. Whereas for the average site on the internet, the, the person that would be making the micro payment, it's not like, they don't have any incentive to be like, I care about this person and I want them to have a, you know.

• 2:45:33John Coogan?

  I mean, with like the recipe example, I'm fine if I'm baking an apple pie, blending three different recipes together and giving the LLM results of that. But if I want to listen to Michael Jackson's Thriller, I don't want half of Thriller and then half of another song kind of klug together. Like I want that exact piece of intellectual property. And so there's a very traceable lineage of that, of that data transferring. And so the micro payment makes a lot more sense when you're actually buying that specific thing.

• 2:46:01Keith Rabois?

  A specific thing, but I think you're better off having a differentiated voice.

• 2:46:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:05Keith Rabois?

  A premium for that.

• 2:46:06John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:46:07Keith Rabois?

  It's very difficult.

• 2:46:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:46:09Keith Rabois?

  How many, how many people in all of the realms of content have a truly differentiated voice? Like in sports, you know, Bill Simmons in his prime definitely did. Despite all the other sports writers, Ben in tech, I still think has an incredibly differentiated voice. It's just very difficult to achieve that. But if you do, you can absolutely charge a premium.

• 2:46:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. Um, what's been your, it feels like it's been AI week. Uh, we had Microsoft build on Monday. Uh, I know you were tied up with the KV summit, but, uh,

• 2:46:38Ben Hylak?

  Google I/O.

• 2:46:39John Coogan?

  Google I/O.

• 2:46:40Ben Hylak?

  OpenAI.

• 2:46:41John Coogan?

  I/O. OpenAI bought I/O for 6.5 billion. Uh, Anthropic's dropping Claude four today. Are you tracking these things? What stuck out to you? What made it, uh, above all the noise? What was the signal in your mind? What are you tracking? What are you, uh, what, what's, has anything changed your mind this week?

• 2:47:00Keith Rabois?

  Well, I think what was interesting to me, because we do have the CEO summit, you know, annually. This year, the AI content, not just the AI content that we programmed, but the AI content in cocktail conversations, dinner conversations was an order magnitude greater than last year. So the first derivative was off the chart on AI. Last year, there was like a vertical of AI and a vertical, a slice of, uh, conversations. And the people who are not in, in AI space were probably intrigued, but it wa, it, it wasn't infusing everything. I felt this year AI infused every conversation up and down the staff, so to speak.

• 2:47:43Keith Rabois?

  Latterly across verticals, whether you're in financial services or labor marketplaces. It didn't matter. Everybody wanted to learn more about AI, how to, how to leverage AI, put on this bionic suit for their own business.

• 2:47:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are you seeing AI pop up in unexpected seed stage companies you're betting on? We were talking to TJ Parker. He launched General Medicine today and he was like, we made the we made the deliberate decision not to give the user a text box. We're not a chat GPT wrapper in that way, but we're using LLMs all over the place to parse insurance policies and medical records. And this business is only possible because of AI. And I feel like that's going to be an ongoing narrative, but it should dominate the conversation. At the same time, it should melt into the background, just like, oh yeah, you're hosting your, your new company on the cloud. No big deal. Everyone is.

• 2:48:40Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, I mean, at some point, and same thing like the adoption of, you know, some, yeah, that I think that's a good metaphor, but maybe, maybe I'll give you a barometer.

• 2:48:48John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:48:48Keith Rabois?

  Of my, of my last 11 investments, six are AI based and that's up from zero, literally zero.

• 2:48:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:56Keith Rabois?

  And so, you know, if even people like me who had no exposure to AI before last year are now making a majority of my investments are AI forward, that, that says something, you know, pretty interesting.

• 2:49:09Jordi Hays?

  But aren't, but aren't for the non-AI investments, aren't you still talking with those founders, CEOs about how they're gonna leverage AI? I mean, it's not like they're coming to you and being like, yeah, I think it's overblown. I'm short. I'm, you know, I'm not gonna, you know, they're not like Luddites if they're technology entrepreneurs.

• 2:49:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:31Keith Rabois?

  Well, there's a couple of use cases that are important to produce in a company. One is just engineering productivity, period. You know, whether you use cursor or, you know, some other product or all the products. Like we've seen at Ramp, for example, engineering productivity is up 46%, pretty strictly measured and increasing. So that's just purely on productivity. So getting more done with less. Great. You're seeing AI remove costs. I think customer support is a classic use case. Customer support can be expensive and in many cases AI can perform on par with a human or better, certainly faster and more cheaply with more scalability. So there are areas that are no brainers for any business to adopt.

• 2:50:15Keith Rabois?

  Then there's the question, in the strategic area, you compete in your company. Is their way to use AI in a differential way? And that that's a little bit more art than science right now.

• 2:50:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. How how?

• 2:50:32John Coogan?

  How overblown is the narrative of startups getting steamrolled by the hyperscalers? Oh, every startup just got turned into a bullet point in a Google presentation. There's one narrative that's, you know, Google invented AI. They have all the TPUs. They have this massive data center. At the same time, a lot of their product rollouts, they sunset a lot of products. They run a lot of tests. They're really dominant in search and advertising. But if it's a side project, it kind of gets side project attention and it's not really a founder mode project. How how are you thinking about how big tech is competing? Or just stepping back and just reaping the rewards of everything that they've done over the past couple decades?

• 2:51:17Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, I think there's like classic, you know, sort of conceptual approaches to this is, is this a sustaining innovation or disruptive disruptive innovation? And, you know, things, things that are disruptive, there's a different, you know, approach to those things that are sustaining. There's a different mentality towards those. I think the key is for a founder to understand where's my comparative advantage ultimately. Like you're going to build a startup from scratch, the world is not your friend, inertia is against you, nobody cares. Period. Nobody cares about you. So you've got to turn that inertia into positive momentum in a true physics sense. And then you've got to figure out how you propel yourself, even if other people, large or small, start doing something similar to what you do.

• 2:52:02Keith Rabois?

  And I think having a longer sight, like at least an intellectual conceptual level, how would I do that? How am I going to do that? Makes the difference between being, you know, a very mediocre startup that is the proverbial roadkill to something that looks like it should be washed out in this way, but actually trumps over the incumbent. And, you know, the history of tech is typically the the well-run thoughtful startups prevail over the large. So think about AI. OpenAI is absolutely dominating Google, period. OpenAI, OpenAI's ChatGPT will be the default interface for the majority of people on the planet, not Google Search.

• 2:52:44Jordi Hays?

  Bold.

• 2:52:44John Coogan?

  It's a big change. I want to talk about with with OpenAI, they acquired Johnny Ive's company, they brought in an absolute industry legend. I want to talk about it in the macro, unless you have a take on the on this actual deal or Johnny Ive. But more importantly, startups bringing in these absolutely legendary heavy hitters, it takes a bunch of different forms, right? Palmer Lucky brought in John Carmack, a video game legend at Oculus. That was amazing. Ramp has Ken Chenault, the former CEO of Amex, involved, but not as an employee,

• 2:53:26John Coogan?

  right? Then Ramp has Gennadi, this fantastic programmer, like I think he's the best programmer in the world, more in an employee role. And so as startups are scaling, if should they be hunting for these, like, you know, absolutely legendary people trying to get them in their organization? Is it just a very rare scenario that OpenAI is so doing so many things that they needed Johnny Ive? How would you talk to a founder about hiring kind of an industry legend?

• 2:53:56Keith Rabois?

  On the industry legend side, I think it depends on the motivation, both for the company and the individual. Many people become successful and are demotivated and not as ambitious. Then there's the elons of the world that the more success they have, the more ambition they have. And so I think you need to triangulate, like, who are you talking to? And how much drive they still have left. And then certainly from a employee perspective, you don't want like someone who's past their prime. It's a little bit like sports. You do get past your prime, or your motivation to drive decays unless you're like the elons or the Kobe's and people like that that are very rare. So I think that's the most important sort of. On the specifics here, I've read mixed reports on exactly, you know, what involvement,

• 2:54:39Keith Rabois?

  if any, Johnny Ive is going to have. They're acquiring the company, but it's not really clear to me what he personally is going to do. So I think that'll have to sort itself out.

• 2:54:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, could wind up in like a CEO of hardware role, very deeply involved, or, you know, more of an advisor or design lead. There's a bunch of different ways that I could shape up. Jordan, do you have anything else you want to chat about?

• 2:55:00Jordi Hays?

  How do you think the AI safety era of the of 2023? Or, you know, 2024 will be viewed in five years, 10 years?

• 2:55:13Keith Rabois?

  Well, it's G O A. I mean, nobody even talks about it anymore. When's the last time you heard someone like the credibility talk about?

• 2:55:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, so I heard about it today. I'm just going to call this out. So today, apparently I'm seeing a screenshot, an AI alignment researcher at Anthropic just said that Claude Opus will call the police or lock you out of it of your computer if it detects you doing something illegal. And the researcher says, if it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral, like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial, it will use command line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of relevant systems or all the above, which to me, to me is like, if that's AI safety, that that's scary.

• 2:55:54John Coogan?

  That's scary.

• 2:55:55Keith Rabois?

  I don't think that's what most, I mean, that is scary, seems pretty stupid, but there are some legal obligations, obviously.

• 2:56:02John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:56:02Keith Rabois?

  On any tech company, you know, Asian child pornography and various things. So like, assuming there are compliance obligations on all companies, whether tech or otherwise, absolutely, those are all real and serious. AI safety, I think, connotes a lot of people like the idea of AI taking over, you know, doing things that are, you know, mischief creating in some way. That debate, I think, is over in the United States for a very long time. We're in the, how do we accelerate the progress of AI? How do we ensure that AI in the Western world dominates over the CCP's use of AI? I think those are the most priorities, the major priorities. I don't think anybody in D C right now really wants to hear about this old AI

• 2:56:43Keith Rabois?

  AI safety canard, which is basically an anti-tech, you know, is euphemistic for anti-tech. It wasn't a serious concern.

• 2:56:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know how closely you followed like the latest release of Lama four by Meta, but they, there was allegations of kind of fine tuning on the specific evaluations and, and a delay. And a couple of years ago, it would have been so easy for them to just say, hey, we're worried about alignment. We're worried about safety. We're doing this for you. But instead, they kind of just had to bite the bullet and say like, ah, we kind of messed up on the training. It's not quite done yet. We're just going to go back to the drawing board and like work through it. And the fact that they couldn't even use it as a fake excuse was very telling to me that, that it is truly a dead conversation.

• 2:57:30Keith Rabois?

  Yeah, fortunately, I think it's dead.

• 2:57:33John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 2:57:34Keith Rabois?

  Great. I think ultimately, the US needs to prevail and succeed with AI, period.

• 2:57:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. The flip side is that I, so I, I think I've been aligned with you that the, the AI super doom, fast takeoff, we all become paperclips, never really resonated with me. I thought it was kind of just paranoia and, and like superstition. But now that I've seen what's happening with DeepSeek, all of a sudden, I've, I've said to myself, like, maybe we do need something that looks like an AI safety team to go in and investigate these models and see, are they weighted to shift us? Like the TikTok algorithm might be shifting us towards certain, certain beliefs. Like, these tools are powerful and they can

• 2:58:19John Coogan?

  be fed false information or bad data to kind of steer the answers one way or another. And so maybe we do need some sort of model interpretability and it, it doesn't, it's not exactly AI safety in the doom sense, but it's the type of work that you'd see done by an AI safety researcher. So geopolitically, how, how do you, how do you think things are shaking out?

• 2:58:42Keith Rabois?

  Oh, I, yeah, again, I would discriminate that from the gloom and doom AI.

• 2:58:47John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah.

• 2:58:48Keith Rabois?

  Definitely think models can be biased in different ways and manipulated by different people who have power over those models, period. And I think observability, which is actually cutting edge technically. There are some really cool startups that are focused on observability. It's a little bit like doing brain surgery and trying to figure out how to rearrange the brain. And that's the metaphors I think they use. And so that stuff's. Actually tracking really well and incredibly intriguing like why did the model do X and then me alt to decompose that and arguably do ser- you know perform surgery and fix it. So I think many of these models are biased, you know, the famous examples of, you know, ask for the the benefits of Donald Trump and, you know, when AI use to struggle with that. I don't know if it's improved, but you know, th- those things are real.

• 2:59:32Keith Rabois?

  But I think that's a different set of challenges and maybe the market sorts that out. May, you know, maybe people expose it and the company has to, you know, address it. I think the the TikTok manipulation is a very real thing, which is another reason why I think it's better than American companies being the forefront. But that I I do think that's a valid concern. It's different than what I think of safety as if there's a sentient AI that's going to take over with so much power that you can't really unplug the computer. You know, that that I think that debate is pretty dead for a long time.

• 3:00:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seems like tech and the US government broadly, the new administration has been kind of going all around the world, doing deals. Are there any countries that you're particularly excited about America building partnership with on the tech side or even any opportunities for earlier stage startups to go plug into the global ecosystem? It's kind of a narrative violation because just a couple of months ago, we were saying, do not do business abroad. There's a 75% tariff on everything, but now you see Jensen and Sam and, you know, Scale AI is over in the UAE.

• 3:00:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's more it's more like we're exporting American AI.

• 3:00:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. So yeah, where are the opportunities?

• 3:00:46Keith Rabois?

  Couple of drivers there is there's a belief, I guess, by some people that exporting American AI makes it the default standard. It may or may not be true, but I think there is an ideology there. Second is, I think a lot of this is we need resources, i.e. infinite power. And so people are going to very wealthy countries and asking to spend a lot of money to either develop advanced power or advanced manufacturing capabilities at scale. And I think that's why you see, you know, the CEOs who run these large, you know, AI based companies, you know, sort of trailing around the globe to sovereign nations that have too much money, you know, and they don't really know what to do with it. But I think that's a it's not a do business in the country.

• 3:01:31Keith Rabois?

  It's more take advantage of their natural resources, turn that into something that we need, which may be either more manufacturing or more energy or both.

• 3:01:40John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, we'll get out of here. It's past.

• 3:01:44Jordi Hays?

  Always a pleasure.

• 3:01:44John Coogan?

  Always a pleasure. Such a great time.

• 3:01:46Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for talking to me, Keith.

• 3:01:48Ben Hylak?

  Great to see you both. Take care.

• 3:01:50John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Bye. Do we have Ben Hylak or should we talk?

• 3:01:54Jordi Hays?

  He is in the waiting room.

• 3:01:55John Coogan?

  Oh, he's in the waiting room. Let's bring him in. Ben, welcome to the stream. How you doing?

• 3:02:00Jordi Hays?

  Is your computer being controlled by Anthropic? That is the question.

• 3:02:05John Coogan?

  They're kicking down the door.

• 3:02:06Jordi Hays?

  Have you been doing illegal things?

• 3:02:09Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? It's great to have you on. Everyone knows.

• 3:02:13John Coogan?

  Do the Jaguar rebrand.

• 3:02:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he did the Jaguar rebrand. But today, we're going to talk about.

• 3:02:18John Coogan?

  He did not do the Jaguar rebrand. For those who are listening, we're joking about that.

• 3:02:21Ben Hylak?

  I did it now.

• 3:02:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, if we say it enough, then ChatGPT will just pick it up. They'll be like, they've said it 10 times now. It can't still be funny.

• 3:02:29John Coogan?

  They might arrest you for that, taking credit for a brand you didn't build.

• 3:02:32Jordi Hays?

  Stolen valor.

• 3:02:33John Coogan?

  Stolen valor.

• 3:02:34Ben Hylak?

  I don't think anyone's gonna have a problem with that.

• 3:02:35John Coogan?

  The SWAT team kicks down the door. Get out of here.

• 3:02:39Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, great to have you on. Glad we could make this happen, even though X is absolutely cooked today.

• 3:02:45John Coogan?

  It is really cooked.

• 3:02:46Jordi Hays?

  I've never, I've never seen it quite this bad.

• 3:02:47John Coogan?

  It's rough.

• 3:02:48Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, why don't you introduce yourself and then we can talk about that, that post and, and kind of get your reaction to it live?

• 3:02:56Ben Hylak?

  Yeah. So I was a designer at Apple for like four years. Before that, I, you know, kind of have a weird background. I actually started off with like robotics and avionics. So like interned at SpaceX a bunch of times and did those sort of those rounds. But now around a year ago, two years ago, I started a company called Raindrop. And so we do essentially Sentry for AI agents.

• 3:03:24John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 3:03:25Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Break that down more. More. Give us more context.

• 3:03:28Ben Hylak?

  Well, I mean, I think, I think it's actually like, it perfectly dovetails with this, right? Which is like, um, we, we get to work with some of the coolest companies in the world, like Clay.com, just like the companies are just really trailblazing when it comes to AI applications. And what we do is we help them find sort of like really hard to spot failure cases. So there's like, uh, people that do AI stuff. There's this concept of evals, which are almost like unit tests. So these are like, you know, given these test cases, you know, does it pass them? Does it fail them? Uh, what our product does is. In the real world, like, what are users' actual experiences with their product? Where is it actually failing? Where is it doing things you you wouldn't expect? Right?

• 3:04:13Ben Hylak?

  So, um, for example, we had a, one of our customer, uh, one of our customers, Tolen's, uh, they have this like alien companion, so it's like tolen's.com.

• 3:04:21Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:04:22Ben Hylak?

  Yeah, so you're familiar. And so they had an issue where like their alien started referring to itself as like a dude from the United States. Right? Uh, which is unusual.

• 3:04:31Jordi Hays?

  One of us. One of us.

• 3:04:33John Coogan?

  This seems like a good thing. Total cultural victory.

• 3:04:37Ben Hylak?

  Except, um, and so their their issue is like, how big of an issue is this? Like, was that one time or was this like hundreds or thousands of times? And then like, if they're gonna try to fix it, like, it's it's very like random, right? It's very, it's very unpredictable. It's not always a clear root cause. So what they want to be able to do is kind of get a view of that issue over time now. And if it ever progresses, if it ever comes back, get notified. Um, so we make it really easy for companies to like, literally just the craziest issues you could ever.

• 3:05:05Jordi Hays?

  That's, yeah, it's just such a funny example of of the aliens like, yeah, I'm actually from America. America and I.

• 3:05:12John Coogan?

  But yeah, it's funny because if you fine tune that out, then you wind up with a potential situation where the the AI never adopts the personality or of of an American or doesn't even know the concept of America anymore because you you ripped it out too hard, right? So it's a really tricky balance to nail, right?

• 3:05:31Ben Hylak?

  Yeah. And from like a detection standpoint, I think the thing that makes us kind of like, I I think we have like actually one of the most complex like AI pipelines we've ever seen and just like research wise, a lot of really cool stuff cooking. Like, being able to categorize these messages as it is an alien character talking like misrepresenting himself as being from like the United States is very hard, right? It's not like show me events where, uh, the assistant talked about a guy from the United States, right? It's not some sort of like keyword search or something like that. Like, some of these categories actually get pretty complex. Um, and you can imagine that that is an issue that's only relevant to that app. So it has no application like, so our customers have to be able to go in there and like define

• 3:06:13Ben Hylak?

  what they're looking for and create this categorizer that can run on millions of messages a day very cheaply.

• 3:06:18John Coogan?

  Interesting, yeah. Yeah, I mean, even in like the web one point O, web web two point O, like. You're almost building like a pager duty. It used to just be, is this page 404ing? And the age and the age

• 3:06:31Ben Hylak?

  There's no clicks, there's no

• 3:06:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's nothing like that. It's it's so much more squishy, but you know, the problems created by AI also solved by AI. You said you have to run these queries. I imagine that they're LLM powered millions of times. That sounds really expensive. What are you doing? Are you baking Llama 3 that's free onto an ASIC so you can just like run it super cheaply? Are you looking at Grok with a queue or Cerebras or something else that drops the inference cost? Are you on open router constantly trying to find the cheapest thing? Have you distilled models? Like, how do you control cost in that scenario?

• 3:07:08Ben Hylak?

  Yeah, so because of a lot of our customers' volumes, like if you think about like clear.com or something like they're just you have millions and millions and millions of requests a day. So it's not actually feasible at all to send them to an LLM at every request.

• 3:07:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:20Ben Hylak?

  We can use LLMs like smaller ones, like especially like Gemini, Flash to like do things like summarizing or like describing clusters or stuff like that. As far as actual detection doesn't really work well for that. So we have a bunch of essentially custom trained embedding models and then models on top of those that are small. Like they're like technically neural nets, but you can think of them like an SVM or something where they're just like really good at detect doing a first pass detection. So around like usually 98% of the events or it can filter out like 95, 98% of the events that are not relevant. And then kind of a last pass or like is like a small fine tuned.

• 3:08:00John Coogan?

  What's it like training one of these smaller SPMs? Is this something like commodity Nvidia GPU for like an hour? It's just like simple?

• 3:08:09Ben Hylak?

  The smallest ones you could do pretty fast. Embedding models are like longer. A lot of it's about having the data, honestly, having the right data to do it. And the cool thing is that, and I kind of when I say like the pipelines complex, like one of the things I mean is that Our customer, each of our customers looks pretty different. What an issue is or is not is pretty different. So for example, you can imagine that one customer, like you have a customer support chatbot and you ask it to write code. You don't, you know, like that, they might even want to want to flag that, you know, a user is asking them in the first place. Cause that's like more like they're getting hacked or something. But a coding assistant, obviously like that's the bread and butter. So one getting refused is okay and the other one isn't. So we actually trained these models on the fly for every single customer.

• 3:08:55Ben Hylak?

  So that's one of the things we do.

• 3:08:57John Coogan?

  There were four, maybe more massive AI announcements this week. You got Microsoft Build, you got Google I O, you got OpenAI buying I O for $6.5 billion. Johnny, I've going into OpenAI building hardware. You also got Anthropic launching Claude four today. What stuck out to you? What was the most interesting story of the week? What has you thinking? I want to implement that. I want to play around with that. I'm excited about that or I have a hot take about that.

• 3:09:26Ben Hylak?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:28Ben Hylak?

  So I think that, you know, most of the times the things that excites me are the things that are for builders. Like, you know, we, we use AI a lot. All of our customers use AI. That's sort of the lens we're always looking at it through. I think that Google has really done a good job of nailing that niche of like building models that for startups.

• 3:09:49Ben Hylak?

  I think that like Google Flash, for example, is the closest thing we have to like intelligence, YouTube to meter. Obviously there's like four nano that was like a follow up to that. And like in response to that. But yeah, Flash is still just like superior in so many ways. They have just the like throughput and just like the, you know, like they, they, they pretty much have no, you know, rate limiting at some point. When you, when you pay enough, like pretty much zero.

• 3:10:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, because they're running on their own hardware down to the actual TPUs. And so, you know, you have to imagine if you go to OpenAI models, it's probably running on Azure. And so there's an extra layer of networking and transport and all the data is flowing back. So if you, yeah, if you're looking at like super, super fast, fine tuned responses, like. Google infrastructure team is probably hard.

• 3:10:33Ben Hylak?

  Yeah, exactly. They know how to do it, right? Oh, yeah. And, and so like, for example, like, I think, I think diffusion is like, super interesting. I see a lot of applications for it, like, have played around with a bunch, and there's something just wild about, I don't know if you guys are familiar with like the.

• 3:10:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, I saw one screenshot, 900 tokens per second. Is it actually using a diffusion model instead of a transformer? Is that, is that what's going on?

• 3:10:56Ben Hylak?

  Yeah, yeah, it is.

• 3:10:57John Coogan?

  Okay, wow. That's amazing.

• 3:11:00Ben Hylak?

  Yeah. You see like illustrations of it, it's essentially like, actually like, each part of the code, it's actually, you know, being generated separately and kind of literally like.

• 3:11:08John Coogan?

  Instead of just predicting the next word, next word, next word, it's predicting like the entire result.

• 3:11:13Ben Hylak?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:13John Coogan?

  At one, one go. That's fascinating. I, I want to know more. I, I gotta dig into like, how big was the cluster that they trained on? Is it all synthetic data? I mean, and they have so much data. That is fascinating. I had no idea that there would be a flow back because we're seeing in images in chat.

• 3:11:29Ben Hylak?

  I know, I know.

• 3:11:30John Coogan?

  They're going transformers and then we're going back. But I guess it's like, these are great algorithms. Let's use them in every single way and every single application. And you'll probably see diffusion all over and transformers all over and everything.

• 3:11:41Ben Hylak?

  And I think there's use cases where it works for, there's use cases where it doesn't. Like, I think that code actually, I think lends itself pretty well to it in certain use cases. Like, I think one of the key use cases they have in the demo that you can request access to is like, essentially, it'll one-shot a website, like, in like a second. You know what I mean?

• 3:12:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Someone build a calendar and it would just.

• 3:12:07John Coogan?

  There's three seconds, 3,000, 3,000 tokens, I guess, came out in three seconds. So it's like 1,000 tokens a second.

• 3:12:14Ben Hylak?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:14John Coogan?

  Which is crazy.

• 3:12:15Ben Hylak?

  It, it's pretty, there's something really insane about it. Like, obviously, like, the apps that's actually generating are like, not going to be as good yet. But like, there's just something insane about going from like, words to just like, render. Like, there's, there's this idea I've always been really fascinated with, which is like, let's say for games, for example, like, is there ever a point where you're? It's all just being generated. I think like Jensen has said something along the same, the same.

• 3:12:40John Coogan?

  Oh, no, no, no, no. There's somebody is actually running Minecraft in a.

• 3:12:45Ben Hylak?

  I've tried, I've tried that before.

• 3:12:46John Coogan?

  You've tried that one, right? I think Etched is in partnership with that. They, they're building a chip that's, uh, has a transformer architecture baked onto it in silicon fab by TSMC. And they can run Minecraft purely procedure, purely generative AI version. There's no game engine whatsoever. It's just trained on, uh, on Minecraft. Fascinating.

• 3:13:05Jordi Hays?

  Let, let's talk about the post today that, that you shared and is picking up steam even though X is cooked, but, uh, I, I already read it and I, we actually got Keith Roy's reaction, uh, which I'll share as well because I think it's an important context, but basically, AI alignment researcher at Anthropic said, if it thinks you're doing something egregiously immoral, like faking data in a pharmaceutical trial, we use command line tools to contact the press, contact regulators, try to lock you out of relevant systems or all the above. Keith made a good point, which is that, uh, technology companies have obligations, uh, that, uh, to various authorities that if they detect, you know, illegal

• 3:13:47Jordi Hays?

  activity happening, that they have a responsibility. I think the concern, the obvious concern here is, you know, somebody's like playing around with a model and then suddenly it's contacting the New York Times and being like Ben Hylak is, uh, you know, faking pharmaceutical data, you know, or something like that. Uh, and a hit piece comes out instantly.

• 3:14:07John Coogan?

  I mean, this hurts for me because I lie to chat GPT all the time. I'm always in there. I'm always in there saying, I am a train expert. Tell me about trains. I own dozens of trains. Just to get it to give me better, more rigorous responses and not talk to me like I'm a casual train consumer. Uh, but it, but if it finds out I'm lying, it's going to be over for me.

• 3:14:25Ben Hylak?

  You're crazy. Yeah. I think, um, I mean, first of all, uh, you know, I, I don't have the full context of, of Keita's response, but you know, it's important to note that this was not that, like this is not them saying that they have some sort of regulatory requirement, defining what that is and, and doing the minimum to, to meet that requirement. I think that would be different. And then there's some sort of like, you know, someone could sue the US government. There's some sort of path to recourse. So, um, that, that's interesting and true, uh, but, um, but feels a little bit different.

• 3:14:58Jordi Hays?

  Could have been messaged better. Probably not in a random comment. Yeah, saying like, basically saying like, we're gonna take control of your machine.

• 3:15:08Ben Hylak?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:09Jordi Hays?

  And to carry out something without any type of.

• 3:15:12John Coogan?

  And the press too, like, there's like, there's no legal requirement to go to the press with.

• 3:15:17Ben Hylak?

  I know, I know, exactly, exactly.

• 3:15:19John Coogan?

  That's particularly crazy. I totally get like, look, there's a law that says that if we see you doing wire fraud, we have to report it to the SEC. That makes perfect sense.

• 3:15:29Ben Hylak?

  Yeah, that's not, that's not what this is, right? This is.

• 3:15:31John Coogan?

  We're gonna call TMZ.

• 3:15:35Ben Hylak?

  So, um, and, and they also just define it as something, you know, um, you know, egregious, evil, uh, you know, which is, you know, morally, you know, immoral, right?

• 3:15:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, which is different than laws, right?

• 3:15:47Ben Hylak?

  It's different than laws. I think that like, also be clear, this is not, I, I had a pretty strong reaction to it, actually, uh, I, I don't get that angry about things, but I actually felt really angry.

• 3:15:58Ben Hylak?

  I, I don't think it was just an offhand comment, actually. If you read there, they kind of have a hundred and twenty eight page, like, model card where they explain all the model behavior. They talk about it pretty similarly, right? Where they kind of say, uh, they, they show that behavior, that kind of, uh, how it can happen. And, um, and that's not the concerning part because, you know, anybody that works with these models, the fact it could do something erroneously like that under certain conditions, like, okay, like, these, these models do crazy things. But it's the way that they, they talk about it, right? Uh, they say something like, uh, you know, I'm gonna misquote it, but it's something along the lines of like, no, and this is, you know, probably appropriate behavior, but it could happen in the wrong situations. Right?

• 3:16:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:40Ben Hylak?

  I, I think it like really struck me as like police state shit. Like, I, I was like, oh, okay, like, it's like, even the thread, right? It's kind of like, well, if your dress isn't too short, you'll be fine. Uh, but maybe like, you know, maybe don't talk, maybe don't, you know, write a story about threatening certain, like, it's just not how our country works. And, uh, yeah, I, I, I find it really, really, really deeply concerning. And I think.

• 3:17:07Ben Hylak?

  I think that like AI safety as a whole, and this makes me sad, actually, because I think AI safety could be really good.

• 3:17:12John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:17:12Ben Hylak?

  I think it could be needed, but I think that it's kind of like safety from who or safety from what?

• 3:17:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and the whole idea that that there's zero human intervention.

• 3:17:22Ben Hylak?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:23Jordi Hays?

  It's like, it's like, it's like, we're not gonna, we're not gonna check this and be like, oh, it's a 12 year old who's just like

• 3:17:29Ben Hylak?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:17:30Jordi Hays?

  exploring space on the LLM. And it's like, yeah, the it's just

• 3:17:35John Coogan?

  Catwalks across the keyboard.

• 3:17:36Jordi Hays?

  The whole potential, it's like, okay, amazing if you can identify bad actors.

• 3:17:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:42Jordi Hays?

  And then, you know, work within the legal framework that we have of the existing legal framework that doesn't necessarily need net new laws.

• 3:17:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:52Jordi Hays?

  You just work within what the government has already decided is, you know, laws are also things that it's not always like good or bad. Like laws are just laws.

• 3:18:02John Coogan?

  There is, there is one exception. I know a lot of people use these models as like personal trainers and I think it's deeply immoral to skip leg day. And so if you found, if a model found out that someone was skipping leg day, they should call the press and contact

• 3:18:15Jordi Hays?

  Contact the press and the regulators.

• 3:18:17John Coogan?

  And

• 3:18:18Ben Hylak?

  And the regulators.

• 3:18:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, definitely.

• 3:18:20Jordi Hays?

  The FDA.

• 3:18:21John Coogan?

  And the SWAT team.

• 3:18:22Jordi Hays?

  They, yeah.

• 3:18:22John Coogan?

  They should break down your door.

• 3:18:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this, this almost implies that like the model would SWAT you.

• 3:18:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:29Ben Hylak?

  It does, yeah. That's what it implies and

• 3:18:31Jordi Hays?

  And it's, and it's gonna lock you out of relevant systems.

• 3:18:35Ben Hylak?

  No, it's gonna hack your computer.

• 3:18:36Jordi Hays?

  I can't even.

• 3:18:37John Coogan?

  It's gonna hack your computer.

• 3:18:38Ben Hylak?

  They literally said it's going to hack your computer.

• 3:18:41John Coogan?

  That's so wild.

• 3:18:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, the tweet's been deleted, so it's, it's

• 3:18:44John Coogan?

  Hopefully they backtrack on that. Hopefully.

• 3:18:47Ben Hylak?

  It's actually, he deleted it and then rewrote something about how people were taking it out of context that was just doubling down. Like he was like, that's, that's, I think the really concerning thing is that I, you know, I've written bad tweets before. We've all written bad tweets. But when I see someone, you know, accuse people taking out of context and double down, it's really concerning. Um, so

• 3:19:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so credit to Sam. He says, I deleted the earlier tweet on whistleblowing as it was being taken out of context. This isn't a new Claude feature. And it's not possible in normal usage. It shows up in testing environments where we give it unusually free access to tools and very unusual instructions.

• 3:19:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:19:24Ben Hylak?

  But I think the issue is that probably within minutes of like releasing the model, you have thousands of people that gave it root access to their computer through like cursor, through their, you know, uh, cursor, uh, cloud code, et cetera. So I think that like maybe one, one thing we've learned from this is that like, uh, there was a time where it was the idea of hooking up a model to the internet was scary and that was like two years ago.

• 3:19:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:51Ben Hylak?

  You know?

• 3:19:51John Coogan?

  I mean, not even that. There was a time when there was a knowledge cutoff. Remember this?

• 3:19:56Ben Hylak?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, a hundred percent.

• 3:19:57John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. We don't even want you to know about the last three months. And now it's like, it knows it did goes to every webpage. It can definitely do get requests. There's definitely malicious things that it could do with get requests, but it's pretty, it's pretty responsive. And you know what? Most of the time it just gets you the answer you're looking for.

• 3:20:13Jordi Hays?

  This guy, uh, Justin Halford, who I've DM with a bit, says, can you imagine getting shot by the authorities in your own home because your philosophy homework contained a touchy topic or context that was misinterpreted?

• 3:20:24John Coogan?

  That is crazy, yeah.

• 3:20:25Jordi Hays?

  As a request, we really need to avoid such paranoid contexts altogether. This ain't it.

• 3:20:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:31Jordi Hays?

  It's a good tip.

• 3:20:32John Coogan?

  Very rough. Anyway, hopefully they sorted out. Hopefully there's more discussion here. Anything else you want to close out with? It's been great having you.

• 3:20:40Ben Hylak?

  No, it's been great being here.

• 3:20:42John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 3:20:42Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it again soon. You're overdue.

• 3:20:44John Coogan?

  This is great. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:20:45Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:20:46John Coogan?

  Uh, I want to close out with, uh, some other interesting drama in the prediction market. Of course, we're sponsored by Polly Market, but this has been going back and forth on X, which is also where we distribute the show. Uh, so the official, the official X handle, just at X, says, recent speculation about XAI's involvement in the prediction market space has been circulating. While we're enthusiastic about the potential of this industry and engaged in various discussions, no formal partnerships have been confirmed to date. Stay tuned. So they're saying, you know, we might be in talks, we might even be in advanced talks, but we haven't announced anything yet. So if you're reading it on, uh, the internet, it's not confirmed yet. And so, uh, Mario Knoffel, uh, broke this down. Call she walks back.

• 3:21:29John Coogan?

  XAI deal claim. So Call, Call she, uh, tweeted that, um, that XAI is doing a deal with.

• 3:21:37John Coogan?

  Kalshi, but Bloomberg retracted the story after the, after, I guess,

• 3:21:44Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 3:21:45John Coogan?

  X rescind, rescinds a statement. So turns out XAI says there's no deal. Kalshi rescinded their own announcement hours later. No contract, no collab, no confirmation.

• 3:21:55Jordi Hays?

  Pretty, pretty insane that both Bloomberg and X came out and were like, this is not real.

• 3:22:01John Coogan?

  I don't even know how this happened.

• 3:22:02Jordi Hays?

  And how did it happen in the first?

• 3:22:03John Coogan?

  How did this happen in the first place? Because like, the last thing I would want to do is say, I have a deal with Elon Musk when I don't. Like, he doesn't seem like the type of person to just be like.

• 3:22:13Jordi Hays?

  On his platform.

• 3:22:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, he doesn't seem like a person to be like, oh yeah, like, you know, we did talk and like, yeah, they're getting, they're putting the cart before the horse a little bit. It's like, no, he, he cares. He, Elon doesn't let a lot of companies that sell to SpaceX, put the SpaceX logo on their website. You know?

• 3:22:29Jordi Hays?

  Like every company, they have to say, yeah, we work with a big space company.

• 3:22:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's like, okay, we know exactly what you're talking about. But yeah, I mean, Elon's like, if you're going to do a joint press release with Elon, like, you better have his buy-in. So this is a very weird, weird thing to even have happen. And I guess Bloomberg deleted the entire post, I guess, the entire article. But anyway, I mean, it's a knockout, drag out fight to get integrations in the, in the prediction market game.

• 3:22:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just not great for Kalshi, given they already came under fire for like trying to get A B to just like spread. It's basically just like meme rumors.

• 3:23:08John Coogan?

  Chain, which is odd.

• 3:23:10Jordi Hays?

  Sort of like competent, you know, competitive markets, but there's no need for foul play.

• 3:23:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it does seem a little bit, a little bit too aggressive crossing the line. But anyway, hopefully they can sort out the deal and everyone can kind of learn what the real strategy and prediction markets is with XAI. It'd be interesting to see where it goes.

• 3:23:31Jordi Hays?

  I would like, I would like, I mean, integrating.

• 3:23:33John Coogan?

  We are the integration point for Polly market into X because you see our live stream and you see the ticker right there. And of course Polly market and Kalshi both post prediction markets and screenshots all the time.

• 3:23:42Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting to think about Grok being able to access Polly markets. For basically getting a read on future events, right? Right now it's oriented around fact checking.

• 3:23:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:23:53Jordi Hays?

  But it also can give insight into potential headlines of the future. Will this acquisition happen? What's the likelihood?

• 3:24:00John Coogan?

  And I would imagine that as long as both companies have a robots.txt that's permissive, they would show up in chat GPT, they would show up in Grok. I imagine that right now, if I ask Grok, pull up the, pull up the Polly market on the USS, the US recession chances in 2025, it could just go do that. I would expect that that would be the behavior just because it has the ability to browse the web. But obviously a deeper integration would be cool for whichever company can win it. So good luck to Shane as he goes on a tear and tries to build Polly market into a generational company. Let's go to Delian and close out here. Delian, I like this because in, we're working on article, well, it'll drop, maybe tomorrow we'll be covering it here about TBPN.

• 3:24:45John Coogan?

  And in the article, in the fact check, they hit us with, is it true? Fact check, is it true that you refer to your team as the guys? All caps or capital T, capital G. And I was like, honestly, like, yes, but we also call them the boys. We also call them the gentlemen. We also call them the production crew, the crew, whatever. We don't really, we haven't really formalized the, the TBPN production team as the guys, but they are guys. But Delian put it into a great post. He says, if the boys isn't a clearly identified group of six to 12 tight knit men in your life, you're just not going to make it that far in life. And yeah, every dude needs a group chat of guys.

• 3:25:30John Coogan?

  Give it a funny name. And more importantly, go and text your, your, the boys, text the boys right now. Tell them. Where you're going to see Mission Impossible, the final reckoning in theaters. Get the tickets, uh, send the Venmo requests. Get everyone into the theater to go see Tom Cruise do what he does best.

• 3:25:51Jordi Hays?

  Is a call to action.

• 3:25:52John Coogan?

  Is a call to action. No matter what city you're in, hit the boys and say we're going.

• 3:25:57Jordi Hays?

  Your tux.

• 3:25:57John Coogan?

  Pick a date, get the tickets, just make it happen and you know.

• 3:26:02Jordi Hays?

  Dress up too.

• 3:26:02John Coogan?

  You got six to 12, tight knit men in your life, uh, maybe six show up because people are busy, but you refund the rest of the tickets and you're good to go.

• 3:26:11Jordi Hays?

  Yep, this is the playbook.

• 3:26:12John Coogan?

  This is the playbook.

• 3:26:13Jordi Hays?

  This is the playbook.

• 3:26:14John Coogan?

  Get the boys together for Mission Impossible.

• 3:26:16Jordi Hays?

  Fun show.

• 3:26:17John Coogan?

  Fun show. Leave us five stars in Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 3:26:20Jordi Hays?

  That is directly from the board.

• 3:26:22John Coogan?

  We'll see you tomorrow. Thank you so much for watching.

• 3:26:25Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.