Weekly Recap: Casey Neistat, OpenAI Cracks Math, The Future of ChatGPT, Apple x F1, Intel Layoffs

(00:00) - Intro (00:04) - OpenAI Achieves IMO Gold (26:07) - OpenAI Product Roadmap (53:20) - Apple Goes Full Throttle on F1 (01:07:36) - Google Doubles Down on Cloud AI (01:31:36) - Intel Lays Off 15% of Workers (01:48:24) - Casey Neistat (ModRetro) TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:04John Coogan?

  OpenAI has announced that they have won a long, they achieved the longstanding grand challenge in AI, gold medal level performance on the world's most prestigious math competition, the International Math Olympiad, that's the IMO. So this went up at 12:50 a.m. on July 19th.

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  Typical timeline.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  Yes, so this is, this is basically like Friday night, Saturday morning, you're looking at basically 1 a.m. from Alexander Wei, and he shares a picture of a strawberry with a medal with the OpenAI logo on it. Someone also tested, they took this picture, they uploaded it to ChatGPT, what's the fruit in the image? How many Rs are in that fruit? And it nailed it. So we are truly, we are truly AGI, has arrived, has arrived. Also, before we go deeper into that story, we have a new partner, Restream. You saw it in the intro. We're very excited to welcome them as a sponsor of the show.

• 1:06Jordi Hays?

  We have been running on Restream.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  Secretly.

• 1:09Jordi Hays?

  Secretly.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  Secretly.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  Since day one.

• 1:11John Coogan?

  Since day one. It's been our secret to success, and it can be your secret to success.

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:16John Coogan?

  If you have.

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  They support a lot of the Fortune 500 already.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  For all their live streaming infrastructure. So if you need to go live, go live with Restream.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  And you see OpenAI do streams. Like, that is a thing that has entered the standard

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  XAI.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  Like com strategy.

• 1:32Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if XAI is running on Restream. They had a little.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  But they do, but they do stream. And, you know, it used to just be the hyperscalers, the Mag7, the big, big companies that would do a live stream around a, an annual event. Then Brian Chesky came out and created Founder Mode and basically said, put all your announcements on an annual release schedule, bundle them all up, have the team celebrate, push to get across the finish line. And part of that is, let's throw an event. Part of that is, let's get the CEO and the product leaders on stage, tell the community about what we're building, what we've built. And now, a lot of people are streaming it. If you're going to stream your stuff, you need Restream. Anyway, go check it out. So Dylan Field, someone who has streamed events, you know, Figma obviously has config

• 2:20John Coogan?

  their dev event annually, and they actually do two of them, and those are streamed all over the place, probably using Restream. And Dylan chimes in on the OpenAI news. He says, "Congrats to the, congrats 2025 IMO winners and participants, including OpenAI, who trained a general-purpose reinforcement learning model and achieved IMO gold. OpenAI team includes these two folks, Sheryl and polynomial, Gnome. Fun fact, polynomial also won the 2025 Diplomacy World Championship as a human. And so people are saying AGI is right around the corner. AJ from SemiAnalysis says, "What stands out to me? Scaling RL and non-verifiable rewards, likely via Rubrik's and LLM as judge.

• 3:04John Coogan?

  Thinking and reasoning for several hours at a time for a highly specific task. This is what the $20,000 per month model will look like." And so there were a bunch of interesting things about this. Apparently, there are a few different ways to tackle math, IMO-level math problems. One is using this program called Lean that is a formal math proof verifier. And there's rumors that Google's building their system to leverage that a lot. OpenAI apparently went way, way down just the text-based LLM reasoning path and had a lot of success there. So even though, as we'll get into in this story, it feels like it's neck and neck.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  Maybe Google was earlier and they just didn't release it faster, and maybe this is a coms thing. There's a whole bunch of different stuff going back and forth. But potentially, the more interesting thing is, did they take different technical approaches and get similar results? Yeah. If they're neck and neck, which one will scale better? Which one will generalize better? There's a whole bunch of different discussions there.

• 4:11John Coogan?

  Do you want to get into some of the controversy or the pushback? Do you have a post pulled up from someone saying about Google's attempt?

• 4:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the whole thing came down to timing. Dennis over at DeepMind was pushing back a little bit, which I can pull up.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  Demis Hassabis from DeepMind, the co-founder and now at Google. Yeah, it was interesting because we immediately jumped to polymarket because this whole idea of an AI system beating the IMO, we talked about this with Scott Wu from Cognition months ago, back in April. I found the clip and he said, "I would be very surprised if an AI system this year does not actually surpass the IMO." He, of course, is an IMO gold medalist himself and so it was big to hear from him. Now, the polymarket had been sitting at like 20% and I think we're going to get into like

• 5:11John Coogan?

  the minutia of like what it means to truly win because the IMO, like the group that actually puts on the competition has a different set of rules. They put the questions out and anyone can go and try and do them, but to actually be awarded a goal for an AI, they said it has to be an open source model potentially, it has to be released in this particular way. And so OpenAI might have used their systems to solve the questions, which is super impressive, but they might not have checked every box to actually technically win the gold from the actual organization. And so, Gnome says today-

• 5:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Demis, to be clear, so he put out a post this morning saying, "Official results are in Gemini achieved gold medal level in the International Mathematical Olympiad."

• 6:01John Coogan?

  Which is different than actually getting a gold medal.

• 6:03Jordi Hays?

  He said, "An advanced version was able to solve five out of six problems, incredible progress." And there's a quote in here from the IMO president, he said, "We can confirm that Google DeepMind has reached the much desired milestone, earning 35 out of a possible 42 points."

• 6:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:18Jordi Hays?

  A gold medal score, their solutions were- Astonishing in many respects.

• 6:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  IMO graders found them to be clear, precise, and most of them easy to follow. You can imagine Watan is just like off on this insane tangent.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  There were some fascinating, fascinating details around how they solve them.

• 6:34Jordi Hays?

  Demis shared, he said, by the way, as an aside, we didn't announce on Friday because we respected the IMO board's original request that all AI labs share their results only after the official results had been verified by independent experts. And the students had rightly received the acclamation they deserved.

• 6:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  And so you can imagine, somebody was saying, I don't know how real this was. Somebody was saying that they were making a claim that like Google needed time to like have the comms team to sign off. But it seems more likely that the original plan was, hey, let's wait and announce this when, when the IMO board

• 7:11Jordi Hays?

  actually comes out.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  The analogy feels like you're a super fast sprinter. You go to the Olympics and you run 100 meter dash that's incredibly fast in the parking lot. Like you're not in the stadium, but everyone's like, wow, that guy's fast.

• 7:26Jordi Hays?

  He's hauling.

• 7:27John Coogan?

  He's hauling. It's very impressive, but you still don't.

• 7:29Jordi Hays?

  Definitely potentially the fastest man on earth.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  And, and ideally you paid for the parking pass to get into the stadium. And it's like, maybe Google and OpenAI were both running 100 meter dashes in the parking lot. One of them had paid for like, you know, enough parking spaces to make it completely clean. OpenAI was just kind of showing up with a buddy and being like, I'm sprinting. That's, that's the vibe I'm getting, but they're both in the parking lot. Like neither of them are in the actual stadium at this point, but you know, who knows? They, they might be soon. There are some questions about, you know, do they have to open source or whatever? So Noam Brown says, you know, we achieved a milestone that many considered years away, gold level of performance, gold medal. Of course, he's saying gold medal level performance, like that's very critical.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  It's not, we got a gold medal. It's that we exhibited gold medal, golden medal level performance. Typically for these AI results, like in Go, Dota, poker, diplomacy, researchers spend years making an AI that masters one narrow domain and does little else, but this isn't an IMO specific model. It's a reasoning LLM that incorporates new experimental general purpose techniques, which would be very exciting because you could apply. An IMO level.

• 8:40Jordi Hays?

  John, hold up that stack of posts for the audience.

• 8:42John Coogan?

  Oh, we got, we got 150 posts today. It's gonna be a quick stream, people. It's gonna be a quick stream, but buckle up. So what's different? We developed a new technique that makes LLMs a lot better at hard to verify tasks. IMO problems were the perfect challenge for this. Proofs are pages long and take experts hours to grade. Compare that to AIME, where, which is another math exam, where answers are simply an integer from zero to 999. So you can verify them really, really quickly. Also, this model thinks for a long time. Oh, one thought per second, deep research for a minute. This one thinks for hours. Importantly, it's also more efficient with its thinking, and there's a lot more room to push the test time, compute and efficiency further. Now, what's interesting is like, these, I think these, I think these questions go up,

• 9:27John Coogan?

  and then you have like, like, I think the students get like two, four and a half hour sections, segments. So there's like, there's a, there's a world where like, the, the AIs can do it, but just not as fast as humans, which would be very interesting. I don't exactly know how, how close they are. So Noam says, where does this go? As fast as recent AI progress has been, I fully expect the trend to continue. Importantly, I think we're close to AI substantially contributing to scientific discovery. There's a big difference between AI slightly below top human performance versus slightly above. This was a small team effort.

• 10:00Jordi Hays?

  Right now, the discovery that, that AI is doing is talking with somebody who is potentially schizophrenic and convincing them that they've figured out how to move faster than the speed of light.

• 10:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's, there's so many accounts of that. It's, it's getting crazy. Yeah, I posted, ChatGPT agent, go win me an IMO gold medal and then update my resume.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  Don't make mistakes.

• 10:28John Coogan?

  But, yeah, I mean, have you actually looked at any of the IMO questions ever?

• 10:33Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 10:34John Coogan?

  I don't even know where to start. Like, it's, it's all stuff that.

• 10:37Jordi Hays?

  It's one call away for us, though. We just text Scott.

• 10:40John Coogan?

  Tyler, have you ever looked at IMO questions?

• 10:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, but I'm looking at them right now. It's like, pretty brutal.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  Would you know where to start?

• 10:47Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, if you can get two out of six right before the end of the stream, we'll buy you a house.

• 10:52John Coogan?

  Well, that's the thing. He's just gonna be able to ask chat G P T.

• 10:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. One shot it?

• 10:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:57John Coogan?

  No tool use.

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no tool use. Gotta qualify that.

• 11:00John Coogan?

  Uh, so yeah, Nick has the, has a comment about DeepMind. DeepMind has also won.

• 11:03Jordi Hays?

  Tyler has another challenge today, by the way.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  We, we will introduce that in just a few minutes. Uh, DeepMind has also won I M O Gold, but they haven't announced it yet, by the way. Confirmed. Congratulations.

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, they did this morning.

• 11:14John Coogan?

  Uh, they did. Yeah, they confirmed it this morning.

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  And so it's been interesting to see the reaction to this. Uh, Gary Marcus is on X saying, "All the tech bros this morning thinking that A G I has been achieved because some parentheses, insanely expensive new form of L L Ms can now match top high school students on one specific task. It's almost cute." So really just ripping into, uh, the entire A I community. But Will Depew comes in and says, uh, he's on leave right now, uh, taking a little summer holiday.

• 11:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 11:46Jordi Hays?

  He says, "Guys, stop using expensive as a disqualifier. Capability per dollar will drop a hundred X a year. The three K task arc A G I eighty percent could probably be thirty dollars if we cared to optimize it. Repeat after me. All that matters is top line intelligence. All that matters is top line intelligence." So, yeah, again, everybody's focused on sort of raw capabilities, not super focused on, uh, efficiency, especially for, uh, projects like this where they're not necessarily, you know, rolling this out at, in, in mass.

• 12:20John Coogan?

  Yep. And you know where a lot of these I M O Gold medalists go to work?

• 12:23Jordi Hays?

  I do, John.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  Ramp dot com. Time is money. Save both easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Uh, Ramp.

• 12:31Jordi Hays?

  Dot.

• 12:31John Coogan?

  Is amazing.

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  Com.

• 12:33John Coogan?

  So the timeline was in turmoil over the Gary Marcus post and it, and they went back and forth and he finally admitted it at the end. He said, he said, "That's impressive."

• 12:43John Coogan?

  So it started with a post by Daniel Lit. He says, "Huge congrats to OpenAI for their I M O Gold. I don't find it too surprising that an A I tool was able to achieve this. See below, though I'd sort of lost hope the last few days, but I'm, but I'm pretty surprised it was an L R M with no tool use." So it didn't have Python. It didn't have web search. It didn't have all the things that you're, that you could imagine would kind of allow you to, to, you know, speed things up or kind of be a shortcut that would put it in a different category. There was always a question about with the, uh, when, when, when the A I's were playing video games, like. Like, computers have wall hacks. Like, they can sometimes like see the, see the map without the fog of war. They can see, like, it's very different to get, to get perfect pixel,

• 13:26John Coogan?

  perfect data on where every character is on the map and be able to make decisions based on that, as opposed to like, looking at pixels and having to like, move the screen over there to see if you're being invaded on the left flank, right? And so, there was always this like, yes, if you gave a computer, like, the raw access, that's not quite, it's impressive, but it's not quite a level playing field. And it's basically the same thing as being like, well, the other folks don't get a calculator and you get a calculator, like, isn't that impressive? But this was very much an even playing field, it seems like. So, Mel Gibson 2.0, great, great name, says, "You are not surprised that they, you are not surprised that they have figured out a way to make the model learn

• 14:07John Coogan?

  in very hard-to-verify domains in a fuzzier reward space? It also appears that the same reasoning model was the one used in the AT Coder competition, showing that it can generalize across domains." Daniel comes back and says, "I don't think we really know that, what they figured out yet. I'll keep my powder dry until we know more." Mel Gibson says, "Go read Gnome Brown's thread on the model if you haven't already." He says, and remember, Gnome Brown says, "This isn't an IMO-specific model." And that's a very important thing, because there's a ton of, there's a ton of situations where you can go and RL on a specific task, and it gets really, really good at it, but then you try and get it to do anything else, and it's not that great. And so, Daniel, it says, "Yeah, I read it." Gary Marcus says, "Chimes in from the rafters," because he's not in

• 14:50John Coogan?

  this chat yet, but he has entered the chat. He says, "I read it too. That's pretty vague. Are we sure that no tools were called?" Gary Marcus then chimes in again, says, "Re-IMO Gold, does no tools mean no use of Python code interpreter, etc.?" Dan says, Daniel Litt says, that's how I understand it. And then Gary Marcus tags in polynomial, Noam Brown, and also Alex Way and says, can you confirm the IMO gold was achieved without using Python or code interpreter or similar? And then Gary Marcus says, humans don't use external tools in the IMO competition. I'm just, I'm just trying to understand what the system is. That's how we do science. Daniel Litt, and at some point, whoever was trying to dunk on Gary Marcus just deleted their account.

• 15:33John Coogan?

  So it just says, this post is from an account that no one exists. Daniel Litt shows Cheryl on the OpenAI team, saying, the model solves these problems without tools like lean, which is a math verifier or coding. It just uses natural language. It also only has four and a half hours to answer our earlier question. We see the model reason at a very high level, trying out different strategies, making observations from examples and testing hypothesis, hypotheses. And Gary Marcus says, that's impressive. So Gary Marcus, you got to fill out the apology form, bro. You got to fill out the deep reinforcement learning apology form. What was the reason for your behavior? No one told me Alex Way was training the model.

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  Mercury was in retrograde.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  I don't know, ML. And then one of them is Gary Marcus convinced me it was fake. Because Gary Marcus was famously said, deep learning is hitting a wall, like, like this, this particular paradigm will not scale. You have to do symbol manipulation, which was like, kind of his bet, encode different relationships between ideas in the model. There were a bunch of different debates over there. And he's gone back and forth on that. He's, he's, he's not as much of like a deep, deep reinforcement learning hater as some people think, but he's got, it's his brand at this point. So, anyway, more on the drum between DeepMind and OpenAI. DeepMind got a gold medal at the IMO on Friday afternoon, but they had to wait for marketing to approve the tweet until Monday. OpenAI, OpenAI shared theirs first at 1 a.m. on Saturday and stole the spotlight.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  In this game, speed is greater than bureaucracy. Miss the moment, lose the narrative. So that's one interesting take. We'll see exactly. Yeah, I, I think there's a little bit of that. I mean, certainly culturally, OpenAI loves to release information before Google.

• 17:16John Coogan?

  Like whatever Google's like next big

• 17:19Jordi Hays?

  And they're playing a win. Remember they after, what did they release after the deep seek moment?

• 17:24John Coogan?

  Deep research.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  And then if you're typing deep and you were looking for an AI product.

• 17:28John Coogan?

  And then, and then Google had I O. And then, and then OpenAI.

• 17:32Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  I O. This is like the day before.

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  With Johnny Ive.

• 17:37John Coogan?

  With Johnny Ive. So anyway, you know, you'll love to see it. All's fair and love and war, I guess. I don't think this crosses any lines.

• 17:46Jordi Hays?

  Warfare.

• 17:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. And this is the benefit of having a bunch of posters on your team, I guess. No brand says it takes us a few months to return the experimental research frontier into a product, but progress is so fast that a few months can mean a big difference in capabilities. And this is from July 18th. So all the models underperform humans on the new IMO questions. And Grok four is especially bad on it, even with best of end selection.

• 18:09Jordi Hays?

  Somebody was accusing Grok four of training on the problem set.

• 18:15John Coogan?

  For, for IMO?

• 18:16Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 18:17John Coogan?

  Oh, for something else. Oh, for the other benchmarks. I mean, benchmark hacking is like a thing that happens all over the place. That's why we need like hidden benchmarks. That's the whole thing of, of Arc AGI that we will talk about. We talked about Will Depew saying, guys, stop using expensive as a disqualifier. Terrence Tao, one of the, one of the most goaded mathematicians of all time, digs in a little bit and is, is adding his perspective as a, as a world renowned mathematician. He says, it is tempting to view the capability of current AI technology as a singular quantity. Either a given task X is within the ability of current tools or it is not. However, there is a, there is in fact, a very widespread in capability, several orders of magnitude,

• 19:00John Coogan?

  depending on what resources and it's an assistance gives the tool and how one reports the results. One can illustrate this with a human metaphor. I will use the recently concluded IMO as an example. Here, the format is that each country fields a team of six human contestants who are high school students, led by a team leader, often a professional mathematician. Over the course of two days, each contestant is given four and a half hours on each day to solve three difficult math problems, given only pen and paper. That is crazy.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  No communication between contestants or with the team leader during this period is permitted, although the contestants can ask the invigilators? I don't know. For clarification, this is like some math term I don't even know. For clarification on the wording of the problems. The team leader advocates for the students in front of the IMO jury during the grading process.

• 19:56Jordi Hays?

  Invigilators are also known as exam proctors.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  Okay, proctors, okay. So, yeah, they can ask the people that are running the test, hey.

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  We gotta start working invigilator into.

• 20:04John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 20:05Jordi Hays?

  We should probably have a show.

• 20:06John Coogan?

  We should hire some.

• 20:07Jordi Hays?

  Just an invigilator too.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 20:10Jordi Hays?

  We should have at least one on staff.

• 20:12John Coogan?

  So, so, so the team leader advocates for the, for the students, but is not involved in the IMO examination directly. The IMO is widely regarded as highly, as a highly selective measure of mathematical achievement for a high school student to be able to score well enough to achieve a medal, particularly a gold medal or a perfect score. This year, the threshold for gold was 35 out of 42, which corresponds to answering five of the six questions perfectly. Even answering one question perfectly merits an honorable.

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  Basically, a B.

• 20:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:40Jordi Hays?

  Gets you gold.

• 20:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  It's that hard.

• 20:42John Coogan?

  They're that hard. But consider what happens to the difficulty of the Olympiad if we alter the format in various ways. First, one gives the students several days to complete each question rather than four and a half hours for three scenarios. To stretch the metaphor somewhat, consider a sci-fi scenario in, in the student, in which the student is still only given four and a half hours, but the team leader places the students in some sort of expensive and energy-intensive time acceleration machine in which months or even years of time pass for the students during this exam. Before the exam.

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  I think Ben might have put us in one of these.

• 21:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Jordi Hays?

  Because we go live and then it's four hours later.

• 21:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Time acceleration. It's wild. Two, before the exam starts, the team leader rewrites the questions in a format the students find easier to work with. Three, the team leader gives the students unlimited access to calculators, computer algebra packages, formal proof assistance, textbooks, or the ability to search the internet. Sounds like that didn't happen. The team leader has the six student team work on the same problem simultaneously, communicate. With each other on their partial progress and reported dead ends. The team leader gives the students prompts in the direction of favorable approaches and intervenes. If one of the students is spending too much time on a direction they know to be unlikely to succeed. Next, each of the six students on the team submits solutions, but the team leader selects only the best solution

• 22:02John Coogan?

  to submit to the competition regarding discarding the rest. Last, if none of the students on the team obtain a satisfactory solution, the team leader does not submit any solution at all and silently withdraws from the competition without their participation ever being noted. Oh, so that, I mean, that could have happened. It didn't in this case, but in each of these formats, the submitted solutions are still technically generated by the high school contestants.

• 22:24Jordi Hays?

  Going back to the parking lot example, it's like if you can go run, go run the race in the parking lot. And then if you don't run as fast as you hoped, it's like, well, I wasn't in the, I mean.

• 22:36John Coogan?

  I wasn't racing. I was just going for a jog.

• 22:39Jordi Hays?

  I was just warming up. I just, I like to be surrounded by excellence.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, don't worry. Yeah, I mean, that is the true one. Because if they'd missed, they'd probably be like, what? The IMO is this weekend? We're working on agents. Like, what are you talking about? Like, have you seen our D I U? So get out of here. To each of these formats, the submitted solutions are still technically generated by the high school contestants rather than the team leader. However, the reported success rate of the students in the competition can be dramatically affected by such changes in format. A student or team of students who might not even reach bronze medal performance in the normal competition under standard test conditions might instead reach gold medal performance under some of the modified formats indicated above. So in the absence of controlled test methodology that was not self-selected by the competing teams,

• 23:26John Coogan?

  one should be wary of making various apples-to-apples comparisons between the performance of various AI models on competitions such as the IMO or between such models and the human contestants. Yeah, the question is like, it seems like of those, not many were actually violated by the way OpenAI and Google attacked this.

• 23:41Jordi Hays?

  Well, this was before, I mean, this was an immediate reaction before, I think there was.

• 23:47John Coogan?

  More details came out.

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  Details, yeah.

• 23:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:49Jordi Hays?

  That we've been covering.

• 23:50John Coogan?

  This was 3 P M. On, on, so this, so on Saturday, but 3 P M. Later.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  Well, Rune has a good post. He says, my bar for A G I is an AI that can learn to run a gas station for a year without a team of scientists collecting the gas station data set.

• 24:08Jordi Hays?

  It's a great post.

• 24:09John Coogan?

  The world isn't ready for gas station bench.

• 24:11Jordi Hays?

  We can run an AI as long as we can, we can run a gas station as long as we have, you know, a perfect, you know, data set.

• 24:18John Coogan?

  And that's, yeah, that's like the way.

• 24:20Jordi Hays?

  On how gas stations operate.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, as soon as we, as soon as we place the goals somewhere, we nail that goal and then we have to move the goalpost. Shows.

• 24:30Jordi Hays?

  This is so.

• 24:31John Coogan?

  This is a great graphic.

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  Picture. So Thomas Wolfe says, my bar for AGI is an AI winning a Nobel Prize for a new theory it originated. It's just image of a team moving the goalpost.

• 24:42John Coogan?

  I do like how consistent Tyler Callen is on AGI. He's like, my bar was the Turing test. We passed that. So I'm, I have to call it like it is.

• 24:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  And I'm not moving the goalpost.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think he's, I think he's gonna look very smart for that.

• 24:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:57Jordi Hays?

  In fullness of time.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  I mean, I, I think it's okay to be like, yeah, we achieved AGI.

• 25:01Jordi Hays?

  It's just tough when you achieve something.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  Now there's something new.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  And it's cool, but not immediately massively transformative.

• 25:08John Coogan?

  But you have to imagine that that was the same, that there was the same thing when people were like, human, human flight. And then the Wright brothers go and do it. And people are like, great. So like, I can hop on a Southwest flight in an hour to go to San Francisco from LA. And they're like, what are you talking about? Like LA is like, you know, a couple of trains and like some people, you know, with orange groves. And it's like, it takes a long time for the infrastructure to get built out. Like now, it, a lot of these AI tools, they do build on top of the internet and on top of technology that we have rolled out. But like, at a certain point, like the UI matters. The economics of these different tools matters. You like, you can't, it might not be economical for,

• 25:49John Coogan?

  for a company to, to, you know, release a, an AI tool that costs $20,000 to inference just to get you the weather or do two plus two. And so, um, all of these things take time to roll out. And that's why we're kind of in this like slow takeoff scenario. It feels like, I don't know. Massive post from Fiji Simo, the CEO of Applications at OpenAI. She is outlining, what her plan is basically. And it's very, very interesting post. So, um, in, uh, so Fiji Simo, uh, is an absolute boardroom general. Give me the Ashton Hall.

• 26:28Jordi Hays?

  She still has the Instacart.

• 26:30John Coogan?

  Yes. VGC Mo. OpenAI and Spotify Board of Directors positions, huge runs at eBay, Facebook and Instacart. Now she's the CEO of applications at OpenAI. Today she outlined how she sees OpenAI's products having the biggest impacts. High level, six things. Knowledge retrieval, health, creative expression, economic freedom, time and support. And those are kind of getting, I think, more abstract, more vague as they go along. But it's interesting, they map pretty closely to my experience. Knowledge retrieval. I use, I use it as a Google replacement for a lot of things. I use deep research as a, as a knowledge retrieval product.

• 27:11John Coogan?

  I also use it a little bit as WebMD replacement, not a ton, but I've seen a lot of people use that. But I do ask it for advice around health, fitness, recommendations for supplements, all sorts of different stuff. Often I'll just go there and say, what is, what type of creatine does Andrew Huberman recommend? And it'll just.

• 27:29Jordi Hays?

  Or complex medical.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Fortunately, I haven't been in one of those situations recently, but I, if I did run into one of those situations, I would definitely go to it.

• 27:40Jordi Hays?

  It is, it is interesting because previously when people were trying to understand maybe a small health issue they're having. They would go do a Google search, add Reddit to it. And then they would look through the comments and the comments would provide kind of like context on the symptoms or whatever they were dealing with. But you, and you could technically leave a comment, but I think the majority of people wouldn't want to post about that. And so the fact that OpenAI has all that Reddit data. You can get that same type of data, but then you can kind of ask a number of follow-up questions. Which is very cool, very powerful. I'm certain that people are probably misusing it, maybe reading too much into the results.

• 28:22Jordi Hays?

  But again, the idea, I think for a long time, doctors that would say, don't, don't look on Google. You're just going to stress yourself out. And then you go into the appointment room and they're over there on, on the equivalent of Doctor Google.

• 28:36John Coogan?

  Totally. It's nothing new. People used to go to WebMD and like the meme was like, you go to WebMD and no matter what you type in, it says like. Could be cancer, like could be like the worst possible thing, but it might just be a cold and maybe you should just take some Advil. But like, for whatever reason, WebMD felt the need to like, kind of give you the full picture and all the possibilities. And then they'd, of course, say like, go consult an expert or talk to your doctor. So, um, but yes, I, I definitely see it, it, it replacing that type of health experience. Uh, also I'm using it as a Photoshop replacement a fair amount of time. If I need to, uh, just quickly generate an image, quickly generate something that I would have normally gone to a 3D rendering program or, or Photoshop and kind of created a collage to kind of.

• 29:21Jordi Hays?

  Huge tailwind for the meme industrial complex.

• 29:23John Coogan?

  Huge tailwind, um, still a lot to work out there. I do find that sometimes when I go to images and chat GPT, I'm going back and forth on the prompt for 10 minutes. And I'm like, I could have just done this with traditional tools. Uh, so it's not perfect, but when it gets it, it's so amazing. And the final product often looks a lot more cohesive than what I would get if I was like collaging and like the shadows didn't match. And they were like rough edges and stuff. So certainly great there. The last three are a bit more vague. We'll have to read into those, but OpenAI is set up to win pretty big in all of these categories. So semi-analysis, clocks, chat GPTs, sheriff queries, it's 71%.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  Meta is in second at 12% and that's with billions of users on meta products. And so, uh, OpenAI is certainly running away with consumer. So there's this question of like, the, it feels like the rest of consumer AI plays will be, I would say like horizontal in the sense that it won't be a new app on your home screen.

• 30:27John Coogan?

  Meta won't have Meta AI as a home screen app.

• 30:31Jordi Hays?

  Loses their lead and becomes the Yahoo of AI, but that doesn't feel likely.

• 30:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels tough. Like, why did Yahoo lose to Google? It's because there was an entirely new paradigm in PageRank. Like a new algorithm emerged. Sure, if that, if that happens from SSI or superintelligence, meta superintelligence, like there could be a leapfrog moment. But so far they've been pretty good at staying near the frontier to the point where it's like. Okay, Google got him on this one, or Grok got him on this one today. But there hasn't been a time when I've been like, okay, like, there is a dramatic difference in the results, such that it's worth it for me to go over. There was that moment for Claude for a little bit. Everyone was like Claude's way better. I went over and used Claude for a bit, and then I went back to OpenAI just because the product was better and had more of an ecosystem.

• 31:22Jordi Hays?

  Product lead is very real.

• 31:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was, I was thinking about this, like, if, if, if you played out a hypothetical scenario, and you went and you, you had, you know, the keys to OpenAI HQ, you went and you exfiltrated all the code, everything, got an app into the App Store, Geordi GPT, you have the exact same model, the exact same inference, the exact same UI, everything. Could you win? Because people would say, well, it's not better, so I'm not gonna switch.

• 31:57Jordi Hays?

  There's, we, we live on a part of the internet where people are constantly debating the merits of the leadership teams and approaches and the philosophies. But then downstream, you have approaching a billion users that are just like, yeah, I like, I like the product, I use it a lot.

• 32:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so even if you ran a Super Bowl ad saying like, we have a product that's exactly as good as ChatGPT, it is feature for feature the same. They would be like, but I already have it installed. You're asking me for two minutes to uninstall this and reinstall the new one, and then I don't get any benefit. I wouldn't do it, even if you match my, even if you match my capabilities, you got a leapfrog.

• 32:35Jordi Hays?

  It's funny, so, so Jason Fried had a great post relevant yesterday. He said, feature parity is just another way to say, we don't need to exist. So if you come out and you're so good at what you do, that you can create as, as good of a product as OpenAI, as models that are as good, you still don't need to exist. And so that is the challenge for anyone competing.

• 32:59John Coogan?

  If you, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ramp.com. Really quickly, so it feels like the rest of consumer AI plays will be horizontal. There won't be a new AI app for Meta that really takes off. Instead, AI will improve everything Meta does across Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Quest, et cetera. And I was thinking about the initial takeoff of Facebook. The other tech companies, they didn't really seriously get to compete in social networking.

• 33:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:31John Coogan?

  Like, Google Plus never really took off. I guess Microsoft bought LinkedIn and that's kind of a niche social network, very profitable business, great business. But it is like its own thing. It doesn't directly compete. But graph databases and the idea of storing efficiently connections in graph networks like Facebook kind of pioneered, that became really widespread and was used all over the place.

• 33:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:58John Coogan?

  And the same thing with Google search, like this, this page rank, just better search algorithms. Those wound up manifesting in better search in all sorts of products. And so when, when a new company comes out and builds, you know, a, a whole paradigm, or they break through in terms of a front end development, or database development, or some sort of structure, like it winds up, it winds up improving everyone. And so I think, I think AI will have these like horizontal benefits all over the ecosystem. And I think it makes a ton of sense that, that Meta is investing so much in super intelligence. But it's not, I don't really think the narrative should be like, they need to play catch up to ChatGPT.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  I think it's more like they just need to implement LLMs in every single crack in their, all of their different systems, like they do with great databases, great infrastructure. I'm not sure.

• 34:49Jordi Hays?

  I still think there's, I still think there's, I mean, remember Meta made some early experiments of making digital clones of big celebrities on Instagram. I still think they'll take more shots on goal around companionship.

• 35:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:02Jordi Hays?

  Will they go Grok, Waifu mode? Uh, no. I don't think I don't think they want that revenue line, but but there's a bunch of other ways in which they could kind of go after that market that I don't even think, I mean, chat GPT is such an interesting product because it's designed to be a functional tool around knowledge retrieval, creative expression, just unlocking consumer surplus, giving people access to expertise, etc. And the the way in which people are using it as a companion is sort of not the sort of default. It's not like you name your chat GPT, right? People will give it a name.

• 35:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, it doesn't really stick. It's not it's certainly not baked into the UI in the way that it could be.

• 35:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:48John Coogan?

  I know people do talk to.

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  And so again, I've said it before, but as as chat GPT user hours are just or sort of user minutes still, but as they're ticking up, I do think Zuck will look at that and say, I want I want some of that action.

• 36:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And and maybe some of that, but I still I still think some of that happens inside of the platforms. I don't.

• 36:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not necessarily in that new app.

• 36:13John Coogan?

  It would be very difficult. And and Meta has yet to really do it. WhatsApp and acquisition, Instagram and acquisition, but Stories massively successful within Instagram.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:25John Coogan?

  And so I would expect, I agree with your take, that I think there's an opportunity for for a lot of AI stuff to live within those apps. And then also just on the monetization side, like they're in a very unique space where they can give great products away for free, but they can't be charged an inference cost to another company. And so if they have their own open source model that they can inference very cheaply, they can give it away for for free, and then they leverage their massive ad network. So let's go through what what Fidji Simo over at OpenAI is building. So a few in a few weeks, I'll be joining OpenAI's CEO of Applications. We've all been waiting for this moment, helping to get OpenAI's technology into the hands of more people around the world. I've always considered myself a pragmatic technologist, someone who loves technology, not just for its

• 37:10John Coogan?

  own sake, but for the direct impact it can have on people's lives. That's what makes this job exciting, since I believe AI will unlock more opportunities for more people than any other technology in history. If we get this right, AI can give everyone more power. And so she has a fantastic career eBay, Facebook, then Instacart, and is now at OpenAI.

• 37:33Jordi Hays?

  And she was heavily involved in building the ads engine at Instacart, correct?

• 37:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:39John Coogan?

  And obviously at Facebook as well. So on knowledge, she says empowerment starts with understanding the world around us and our place in it. When we have the right knowledge at the right time, we can make better decisions, advocate for ourselves and change our path. But for most of history, access to expert level knowledge has been limited to those with more resources. I mean, even even after the invention of the printing press, like you still had to be in a big city that had a library to go check out a book for free. Still had to have the time to do it. And and certainly buying every book and being able to index it was very expensive and difficult. Now it's even easier. It's already working. People who use AI tutors learn twice as much as they do from human ones, and the gains are even bigger compared to learning in a traditional classroom. In a 2024 OpenAI

• 38:21John Coogan?

  study, 90% of users said ChatGPT helped them understand complex ideas more easily. I agree with that. On health, she says, personally, I'm most excited about the breakthroughs that AI will generate in healthcare. A few years ago, I faced a complex and poorly understood chronic illness, oh, that's sad, and it became painfully clear just how fragmented and inaccessible the healthcare system can be. Even with access from some of the best doctors in the world, I found myself acting as a connector, piecing together insights from multiple specialists who weren't speaking to each other. I actually had a friend who got a very, very rare form of cancer and did all of the research pre ChatGPT. I actually downloaded all the frontier science and all the different papers, figured out that it was this one very rare condition,

• 39:06John Coogan?

  found the expert, went to that expert. He was like, yep, you have this thing. It's the I'm the only one that studies this thing. I'm gonna help you. Did the surgery, saved your life. Crazy.

• 39:15Jordi Hays?

  I had an I had an issue. I was I was 18, traveling. I was surfing in South America. There was flash flooding. I was in this tiny town. I got a antibiotic resistant staph infection from that.

• 39:29John Coogan?

  Oh, that's bad.

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  And then was getting repeated infections over the next year. And the doctor kept prescribing antibiotics that were so.

• 39:41Jordi Hays?

  I mean, such an intense antibiotic that doctors won't, it's like a soap, they won't touch it without gloves on. And they use it before surgeries. And they just said, use this twice a day over your entire body. And I kept having, I kept having issues and eventually found in a Reddit community that was like, just like obsessed over this issue. And the, and the thing that fixed it was avoiding gluten.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:04Jordi Hays?

  Like actually just fixed everything.

• 40:06John Coogan?

  That's so crazy.

• 40:07Jordi Hays?

  And I just imagine if I was like, even now, if I was dealing with that issue, I would have been able to, I would have just been able to like, talk with chat GPT about it. They would be able to surface all that kind of thing, build a, build a picture of it. So.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  Very interesting. Well, let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, thirty plus destinations, multi-stream. And reach your audience wherever they are. We use Restream.

• 40:29Jordi Hays?

  The backbone of this show.

• 40:31John Coogan?

  So she closes out health, saying, AI can explain lab results, decode medical jargon, offer second opinions and help patients understand their options in plain language. It won't, won't replace doctors, but it can finally level the playing field for patients, putting them in the driver's seat of their own care. Very excited for that. And also, that feels like something, I don't know, like, yeah, just like, I don't know. It, it'll be interesting to see if that manifests itself in, like, all of this is like, will there be any fracturing in the actual product? Because right now, all the fracturing that's happening in the chat GPT product is in like, what model you're using, you're using agent or deep research. But so far, all the different products.

• 41:12Jordi Hays?

  They're all chats.

• 41:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're all chats and, and, and none of them say, this one's for health, this one, and I'm in like a health, a safe health territory. It's like, that's all driven by the prompt. I would imagine that over the long term, everything's driven by the prompt. I would love to be able to go to chat GPT and just say, hey, quickly, what's the population of Canada? And it knows to use four O for that. And then if I say, Hey, I want you to give me a full report on the history of Canada. Give me a deep research report. I wouldn't need to select it. It would just know from the prompt.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  And you could go to ChatGPT agent, help me annex Canada.

• 41:46John Coogan?

  And then it just goes and starts.

• 41:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, don't mistake.

• 41:48John Coogan?

  And then it just keeps working. So the third one, she says, creative expression. I believe we're all born creators and that the ability to imagine something and make it real is a big part of what makes us human. The problem is that our ability to express that creativity is often limited by our skill sets. Completely agree. I can't draw at all. Not everyone has the resources, time, or training to paint, write, compose, or build. When I imagine the future, it often comes to me in images. I paint in my spare time, but the, ooh, we gotta find some Fiji Simo originals. But I'll hang them on the wall. This is interesting.

• 42:19Jordi Hays?

  Full market.

• 42:20John Coogan?

  This is lore. But the images in my head are much more realistic and complex than what I am able to paint today. Now, AI is collapsing the distance between imagination and execution. With AI and image generation, I can prompt and iterate until the output matches the complexity and realism of the vision in my head, unless it's a Where's Waldo. We gotta solve the Where's Waldo challenge.

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  We do.

• 42:38John Coogan?

  It's coming, for sure. The Where's Waldo eval for image generation. Today, nearly one in three Gen Z users say AI tools have helped them express themselves in ways they never could. So this is another fun, viral, obvious, valuable, like, we know it, we love it, everyone's using ChatGPT for creative expression.

• 42:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and this presents a massive challenge if you are a ChatGPT rapper that's trying to go compete in the creative expression space, because you have to, it's not enough to generate a cool image or generate a meme. It used to be that if you could do text well, that was maybe an advantage that people would use your product, but ChatGPT image generation has just gotten better and better and better. It's fantastic. If you haven't played around with it much, drop your group chat, the profile pictures of your most popular group chat, put them in there and say, make them all Giga Chads.

• 43:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 43:40Jordi Hays?

  And then you can share that back.

• 43:42John Coogan?

  Bodybuilders.

• 43:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:43John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 43:45John Coogan?

  Well, you start with generating an image in ChatGPT, then when you're ready to go pro, you move over to Figma, Figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at Figma.com. Fourth, she says, economic freedom. When people can independently create and capture value, they gain power over their own economic destiny. But starting a company isn't easy. The average cost to start a small business in the US is around $30,000, an impossible threshold for most aspiring entrepreneurs. And until recently, building a product or launching a service required technical knowledge, especially coding. That was a problem for hundreds of millions of people who had ideas for tools, apps, platforms, et cetera, that could have made an impact, but didn't, they didn't have the technical skills to bring them to life.

• 44:27John Coogan?

  The classic ideas guy, I just need a programmer to build it for me. Well, now you can vibe code it. AI now gives the people the power to turn ideas into income, no matter their age, credentials or zip code. A single person can now brainstorm, prototype, market and launch a product with tools that control themselves. A 2024 Shopify report showed AI-enabled solopreneurs launched businesses 70% faster than peers without a tool, without AI tools. I've seen it with my nine-year-old daughter, who decided one day she wanted to be a party planner for kids' birthdays.

• 44:59Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for.

• 45:00John Coogan?

  It's amazing. What a great story. In one weekend, using AI tools, she created a fully functional website showcasing her party ideas, shared it with her peers and started taking on clients. Amazingly, my husband and I didn't have to help her, but we did have to intervene before the confetti cannons were ordered.

• 45:19Jordi Hays?

  Ben, good reminder, we should get some confetti cannons.

• 45:22John Coogan?

  We do need confetti cannons.

• 45:23Jordi Hays?

  Except last time when we had confetti cannons at YC Demo Day.

• 45:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 45:27Jordi Hays?

  My eyes were in pain for days and days and days. We need goggles next time. Yeah, it was, there was so much dust in the confetti cannon.

• 45:36John Coogan?

  We left it all in the field.

• 45:37Jordi Hays?

  We did, we did.

• 45:39John Coogan?

  In the future, people will be able to build new things without waiting for permission, capital, or credentials. This will, of course, will mean a meaningful shift in the workforce. Companies will hire fewer people. So you get more smaller companies. That seems pretty cool.

• 45:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my first real company skateboard company, J-Man Designs, probably, I don't know if I would have done it if my lovely mother wasn't a graphic designer and I needed a logo to print on the decks that I was getting made. And I just would sit with her and tell her, you know, do this, do that, do this, do that. And yeah, it's pretty cool that you can now just talk through that process in natural language and how many more people can do that.

• 46:19John Coogan?

  It was pretty crazy you ran a skateboard company without doing proper SOC 2 compliance.

• 46:23Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 46:24John Coogan?

  You should have got on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process.

• 46:31Jordi Hays?

  Huge alpha, just starting, starting an extreme sports company and saying, look, none of our competitors are serious enough about this to get to really, to really take compliance and security as seriously as you should.

• 46:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I do think for kids especially, I mean, the ability to just, just use AI tools fully to go and solve problems. And it's almost like your, your town's McKinsey consultant. I remember I had an early job of just like scanning photos for someone. They needed a whole bunch of photos scanned. It was like pretty manual labor, but like, I actually wasn't that good at it. I kind of messed it up. There was like too much, like, the scanner wasn't configured properly, so a lot of, I had to redo a lot of them. It was a learning, it was a learning process, but it's probably the first, one of the first small jobs I've had.

• 47:20Jordi Hays?

  I feel like the only thing that's maybe boring and repetitive that you, that I can imagine you doing is the bench press. It's basically the same every time, but, but, but yeah, those type of tasks I've always struggled with. But I don't know that we're at a point, I still think if you were using, I don't think that, I think that job still exists.

• 47:45John Coogan?

  I think it does. I think there are bigger companies where you can just like send in a ton of stuff and they'll just professionally scan it for you. But they're pretty expensive, I think. So I think the kids still have some alpha if your if your if your opportunity cost is low enough.

• 47:59Jordi Hays?

  As after school hours.

• 48:00John Coogan?

  Kids are.

• 48:03John Coogan?

  Fifth, she says, time, regaining control over your time is one of the most liberating empowering shifts a person can experience. The ability to control how you spend your time is often what separates people who feel in charge of their lives from people who feel overwhelmed by them. Wealthy people who have always bought back their time by hiring personal assistants, household staff, private tutors, chefs and more, building full infrastructures to reduce friction in their lives. Meanwhile, the average household spends nearly 20 hours a week on domestic work, logistics and errands. While leading Instacart, I saw firsthand how technology can shift perceptions and behaviors around time. In 2012, the idea of paying someone to shop for your groceries felt like a luxury, something reserved for the ultra wealthy. But with the right product design, logistics and pricing, we made it accessible and indispensable for everyday families.

• 48:48John Coogan?

  Today, the Instacart user base mirrors the US population with millions of families getting hours back each week to spend on higher value activities.

• 48:55Jordi Hays?

  The question is, will OpenAI build a gig worker network where when your agent runs into a wall and needs somebody in the real world to accomplish a task, will you be able to delegate tasks like that? Feels like a stretch, but I don't know. They could plug into the Uber network or any of these other networks.

• 49:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe they'll, I mean, they already have like an Instacart integration, so maybe they will they will rely on other gig work platforms to solve those problems and actually handle that side. And they will stay in the full software.

• 49:30Jordi Hays?

  Like the package, package delivery where you can get an Uber to just pick something up and take it across town.

• 49:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:35Jordi Hays?

  You could imagine that that being integrated.

• 49:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there's there's a host of of of, you know, services and companies and APIs for shipping, mailing, moving things around, hiring someone. I mean, in theory, you could you could hire a personal chef and be communicate, your agent could be emailing with them and say, hey, you know, be here at this time. There's this party here's and it's kind of. You know, it doesn't need to be, it doesn't even, you don't even maybe need a gig work platform because the agent can go out and, and scroll Instagram in theory and find someone who's advertising that service or Google it and find a listing of local people providing that, that, that job and, and go and retain their services directly. Interesting. I believe AI will allow for a similar

• 50:20John Coogan?

  shift in many areas of lifetime consuming activities like researching decisions, planning vacations, scheduling a tutor, and more can be done by an AI agent than any, that anyone can access as we build new products. We have a chance to make these time-saving capabilities feel not only useful, but routine. In doing so, we can empower people to regain control of their time and attention. And I, I certainly feel that, something that I would need to sit down 15 minutes looking for, you know, a new studio space or something, fire off agent and come back with some interesting results. Anyway, let me tell you about graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free. Graphite.dev. Last one, support. For many people, the biggest barriers to progress aren't lack of

• 51:05John Coogan?

  access or opportunity, but self-doubt, isolation and burnout. Sometimes what's most empowering is support, someone or something that can help us reflect, feel seen, or simply move forward with clarity and confidence. My business coach Katia has been transformative in my career. I've joked with her over the years that everyone needs a Katia in their pocket. Personalized coaching has obviously been a privilege, reserved for a few, but now with ChatGPT, it can be available to many. This is something I have not used. This feels like we're getting further out on the curve of like, you know, defining what the product is. Like, knowledge retrieval is like so concrete, generate an image, very concrete. Now, support is much more, it's much more of an amorphous product and there's some companies out there that are doing it right now. It's not

• 51:48John Coogan?

  a drop-in replacement and, and there's much more to define about what this product looks like or how people actually use this.

• 51:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's very general. There's going to be vertical, specific companionship products, right? We've seen this. What's the founder that we had on? The Replica was one of the original ones, started like a decade ago. Grok, Grok Heavy Four has their own specific iteration, but then this is also, to be clear. The area of greatest concern.

• 52:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 52:18Jordi Hays?

  Right, where it's very clear, if you have a business coach.

• 52:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:22Jordi Hays?

  Telling you, John, you got this. You're incredible.

• 52:26John Coogan?

  Probably good.

• 52:26Jordi Hays?

  You're built different. That's great. But then when you tell them that you've discovered, you know, how to break the, you know, space-time continuum.

• 52:35John Coogan?

  They tell you to go raise money.

• 52:36Jordi Hays?

  You're actually right.

• 52:37John Coogan?

  Hit Sand Hill Road right now.

• 52:38Jordi Hays?

  You're right.

• 52:40John Coogan?

  You're good.

• 52:41Jordi Hays?

  You're absolutely right. You did figure this out. And so I think they need to figure out the guardrails for this category. And I'm sure that's top of mind for everybody at the company right now.

• 52:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. AI coaches, on the other hand, can be available throughout every day. She says, this isn't about replacing human connection, but filling a gap that often goes unfilled. Many people don't feel comfortable opening up to family or friends, and most people don't have access to a therapist or coach they can call regularly. Even people who do have access often spend an hour a week or less with these professionals. At the core, at the core of philosophy and religion is the idea of self-knowledge. To become who we want to be, we have to understand who we are. So, very interesting. Apple and F1, that's the story that we're talking about today. We've talked about this before. So, F1, fantastic race series.

• 53:29Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 53:29John Coogan?

  We're big fans. But the actual streaming rights to the, to the races has been kind of hotly debated. There was an article in the Journal a while back that they were going to ESPN saying, hey, we want something like $80 million. And ESPN was like, I don't know if that's worth it. And we were going back and forth.

• 53:51Jordi Hays?

  And they wanted something like 200, right?

• 53:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They wanted a lot. And so, the stack of, of content to go through is growing. So, we will be, we will be thinning out.

• 54:01Jordi Hays?

  Textbook.

• 54:02John Coogan?

  We will be thinning out the guest lineup in the future. But for today, we're going through. Let's kick it off with Ben Thompson. He had some good analysis here and has some, some details from reporting in The Athletic, which is a New York Times property. Formula One is trending towards choosing Apple for its United States broadcasting rights for 2026 onwards. The technology.

• 54:25John Coogan?

  Companies bid being in the 120 to 150 million dollar range. Market clearing order inbound. That is a market clearing order, probably will clear. ESPN has held the rights since 2018, but its current deal is up at the end of the year. The sports media giant's exclusivity negotiation period expired before February 2025, leading to interest from other broadcasters.

• 54:48Jordi Hays?

  Including Netflix and TBPN.

• 54:51John Coogan?

  Yes, we would love to.

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  We decided to sit it out.

• 54:53John Coogan?

  ESPN has remained in the mix for US broadcasting rights, though its bid is lower. Apparently ESPN's offer is in the 90 million dollar per year range.

• 55:01Jordi Hays?

  Which is still wild, because this is the US broadcasting rights.

• 55:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:08Jordi Hays?

  And I believe in 2024, Formula One had around 1 million total viewers.

• 55:14John Coogan?

  1.3 million viewers on average per race.

• 55:20Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 55:21John Coogan?

  But Ben Thompson puts it in a different perspective. He says F1, on the other hand, has a meaningful audience versus MLS, which was averaging around 200,000 viewers per year on linear TV before the Apple deal. And that wasn't growing. So this is six times as big as MLS.

• 55:39Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 55:40John Coogan?

  Again, I think there's more games than, or more games than races. So it's not exactly Apple to Apple. But every race, but one has seen a year-over-year increase in viewership. So F1's getting more popular. A lot of that's driven by Drive to Survive. And this is the crazy thing. Given when races are televised, usually early Sunday morning, and the fact that they aren't promoted by ESPN in any meaningful sense. So it's not like you're getting the Pat McAfee Show talking about, oh, you gotta tune in. And there's a ton of coverage on ESPN throughout the week. They just kind of show up Sunday morning and people turn on the TV and they schedule it. And so you can, he says you can make the case.

• 56:16Jordi Hays?

  I always like the timing because any parents out there, you know, you're certainly not sleeping in on the weekends. The kids wake up and I find it's some nice background. Noise or viewing in those early hours.

• 56:31John Coogan?

  For sure. And so he says you can make the case that F1 makes its own audience, which by extension means they will be able to pull people to a streaming service. Basically, F1 fans are strong enough that they'll go search it out. And when I, when I was really getting into F1 after getting into Drive to Survive, I was like, okay, I'm gonna have to subscribe to F1, the app that like jumped through all these hoops.

• 56:51Jordi Hays?

  That's on your phone.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  And it was, yeah, it's like as many hoops as UFC, but people still do it.

• 56:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:57John Coogan?

  And there's still, there's still a big debate, but anyway.

• 56:59Jordi Hays?

  And I think Netflix had done the analysis and realized that all of the potential viewers of F1 were basically already subscribed to Netflix.

• 57:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:06Jordi Hays?

  And so it didn't, it was a more difficult kind of equation to make work than someone like an Apple TV potentially that, that could potentially drive new subscribers.

• 57:18John Coogan?

  Someone called it like a streaming backwater or something like that in here. We'll dig into it, but somebody had some not nice things to say about, about Apple TV. Although I'm a subscriber and I think it's nice. So he says, what makes, this is Ben Thompson writing in Stratechery. What makes this all work is the fact that for F1 races, F1 races are at the bottom of the funnel in terms of fan engagement. F1, at least in the US, has by and large grown its audience via Netflix's drive to survive. Netflix pays F1 a pittance for rights, apparently, single-digit millions for that. But it's okay for F1 because the way they ultimately make money is by curt converting Netflix viewers into race fans. So if you're F1, you see that as a marketing channel, honestly.

• 57:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and F1 has sponsors at the, at the sort of league level and also the individual teams. All of those sponsors are getting more viewership and engagement through F1. So it's sort of added value to them and they don't have to pay, they're actually making money on, I mean,

• 58:15John Coogan?

  I wonder if the sponsors. I wonder, I mean, of course, the sponsorships are like such like 360 deals that it's like, you know, car livery and also a whole bunch of other, you know, advertising assets. But I wonder if they broke out, okay, how much lift, how much benefit, how many impressions are we getting from Drive to Survive? Would that be, when you total up all the, all the value add to all the different advertisers from being in Drive to Survive and being seen by people on Netflix, how much would, would that be more than the couple million dollars that Netflix pays for the, for the rights? It might be. It might be. Like, there's a lot of people that that see ads that are for specific F1 sponsors.

• 58:57Jordi Hays?

  Saudi Aramco, like, hundreds of times.

• 59:00John Coogan?

  During Drive to Survive.

• 59:01Jordi Hays?

  Drive to Survive.

• 59:02John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah, it's like, pretty valuable ad space. So, interesting deal that kind of works both ways and everyone makes money. Anyway, making that model work, however, means actually monetizing the races, which means that it actually, it's actually quite logical to go with the company willing to pay 30 to 60 million dollars more for those rights. You have to capture value somewhere in the funnel. Moreover, you could make the case that many F1 fans aren't necessarily ESPN subscribers. And this is, this is where it gets interesting, because the cable bundle is shrinking. And the, the F1 did this global fan survey, so it's their data, so Ben Thompson's kind of taking it with a grain of salt. But this is from the F1 Global Fan Survey.

• 59:42John Coogan?

  They, they conducted a study every four years to track how fan engagement is evolving across the sport. They got 100,000 responses from self-identified, highly-engaged fans in 186 countries. That's, that's basically all of them. "The findings offer a detailed snapshot of the modern, modern fan mindset and show that Formula One is increasingly attracting new, younger, and more female audience with growth in markets such as the United States. Gen Z is helping shape the rhythm of modern, of the modern fandom, engaging with the sport more frequently and on a deeper emotional level. Female fans now account for three in four new fans."

• 1:00:23Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 1:00:24John Coogan?

  I would not have predicted that. That's very, very interesting.

• 1:00:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, the drivers are often Chad's.

• 1:00:31John Coogan?

  That's what's driving it?

• 1:00:31Jordi Hays?

  That, that could be part of, part of the factor.

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's also interesting that there, there are no female drivers on the grid right now. There was Danica Patrick in the, in the NASCAR series for a while. But somehow it's breaking through. Maybe it's through Drive to Survive being more accessible on Netflix, more storylines, pulling people in, and they're just going down that funnel. I don't know.

• 1:00:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, there's also the the the wag industrial complex around the F1 that is aspirational lifestyle.

• 1:00:59John Coogan?

  Maybe they should do a spin off of Drive to Survive. Don't they do that with NBA? Isn't there a show about like wags or something like that?

• 1:01:06Jordi Hays?

  Maybe.

• 1:01:07John Coogan?

  That's kind of informally what the Housewives series is, right? Maybe they should do that. With the largest country share of respondents, fans in the US continue to stand out for their growth, youth and digital fluency. They overindex on content engagement, sponsor responsiveness and daily touchpoints signaling a market where fandom is evolving rapidly and is commercially.

• 1:01:28Jordi Hays?

  Saudi Aramco is like, why? We seem to be getting a lot of female American zoomers.

• 1:01:35John Coogan?

  Buying oil.

• 1:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Following our content on Instagram. They seem to be really into this. What's happening?

• 1:01:41John Coogan?

  Maybe, I don't know. So, so basically Ben Thompson's conclusion from this survey is what? What are you? What are you talking about when you're talking about a younger, more female focused audience? Those don't sound like ESPN subscribers. Those actually sound like Apple TV subscribers or potential Apple TV subscribers. Certainly cord cutters, certainly people who are not going to buy a big cable package and get on ESPN two and Red Zone and all of that stuff.

• 1:02:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:10John Coogan?

  That's typically the Gen X male, the maybe older millennial male that probably dominates the ESPN audience.

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  And so.

• 1:02:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's that's really interesting. Apple kind of has an edge where they can build out a service for some of these more lifestyle oriented sports. Some of these alternative, you know, you could imagine them doing doing things in tennis over time because maybe that's a different audience than like the hardcore ESPN Red Zone subscriber.

• 1:02:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So. He says, I could definitely envision a scenario where F1 not only doesn't suffer from being on a streaming service instead of ESPN, but it actually grows further. So this is an interesting bull case. Given Apple TV's lower price point relative to a standalone ESPN streaming service, much less a cable bundle. What is clear is that this deal certainly makes a lot of sense for Apple than the MLS deal did. If the company can capture all 1.3 million of those current viewers and they are incremental to current Apple TV subscribers, then the company will break even on this deal. Those are very generous assumptions, of course, but not nearly as generous as whatever assumptions drove the company to spend double the money on a sport no one watches, which is MLS.

• 1:03:22John Coogan?

  So he's, he is taking shots at MLS because there was an interesting quote in here from, from something else. What was this? It was from The Athletic again, talking about the North American Soccer League general managers. One common theme from general managers, the Apple deal, which is Apple's deal to air MLS, is proving to be too much of a barrier for new fans.

• 1:03:46Jordi Hays?

  Wait, they want the content to be completely free?

• 1:03:49John Coogan?

  New fans just don't want it on Apple, apparently, or the GMs don't want to be limited to the Apple audience, apparently. They want to be on ESPN or something.

• 1:03:57Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:03:58John Coogan?

  Apparently. So the GMs say, hey, if we want this to grow, we're the general managers of a bunch of different MLS teams. If we want to grow soccer in America and grow MLS, change the format, change the salary cap.

• 1:04:11Jordi Hays?

  Why don't they just pivot to football or basketball or baseball if they want?

• 1:04:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's wrong with just throwing it around in pigskin? Yeah, change the format. Just turn it into American football.

• 1:04:20Jordi Hays?

  I have to say, football is one of the best things you can buy under 50 bucks.

• 1:04:26John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:04:27Jordi Hays?

  Period.

• 1:04:28John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:04:29Jordi Hays?

  That's non, non, non-food. I mean, the value you can get out of pigskin is absolutely insane.

• 1:04:33John Coogan?

  Hours of fun.

• 1:04:34Jordi Hays?

  The return on, the return on pigskin.

• 1:04:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's fantastic. He says, allow us to bring more attractive players. I, I didn't realize that MLS had a salary cap because I thought they were signing like massive deals with these like legacy famous.

• 1:04:48Jordi Hays?

  Who was the player that went to Galaxy?

• 1:04:50John Coogan?

  Was it Messi or something?

• 1:04:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:52John Coogan?

  Is that right? I don't know. Well. This is how this is bad because I don't know

• 1:04:57Jordi Hays?

  Out of our territory.

• 1:05:00John Coogan?

  There was somebody who went to Miami. There was someone who went to the LA Galaxy. I don't know. Anyway, this GM says.

• 1:05:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so Messi plays for Inter Miami.

• 1:05:11John Coogan?

  Yep. And it's a huge deal. It's like AI researcher money, remember? That's what we were, how we were comping it. And the GM said, but they also have to end the deal with Apple. It's bad for the fans.

• 1:05:22Jordi Hays?

  Beckham.

• 1:05:23John Coogan?

  David Beckham.

• 1:05:23Jordi Hays?

  Played in the MLS.

• 1:05:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:25Jordi Hays?

  And you have Zlatan Ibrahimovic as well. So they'll pull in some superstars. But usually towards the end of their runs.

• 1:05:35John Coogan?

  So, so, so the GMs of the North American Soccer League MLS, they say, I think we have to be on more linear outlets. We have to be on ABC, NBC, Fox, or more regularly. More regularly because I think a lot of people, a lot more people watched our games when we were in that space. I think Apple and the whole streaming thing is really innovative, innovative. But it's probably where things, and it's probably where things will be going, but I don't think MLS is the leader of that. I don't think enough has been put behind the subscription model. You're in a different league when you're, you're a different league when you're a subscription based league. I don't think the effort has been put in like it should be. It's like selling tickets. You need people out there selling. You can't just hope that people are going to sign up. And so, yeah.

• 1:06:18John Coogan?

  Interesting. The risk for F1 is that the series, which has massive, massive growth, is going to conscript itself to the streaming backwaters, says Ben Thompson. Just so it can make a few more bucks in the meantime. So that's the risk is that F1 goes and, you know, gets stuck in subscription land and no one can just turn on the TV and see it. And the 1.3 million fans don't actually migrate over and they say, I'll just catch the highlights or I'll just watch Drive to Survive on Netflix. Instead of going, setting up a new subscription. But if it's truly, F1 truly does have a younger audience, does have a more female audience. They might be, that might be what gets them to turn on Apple TV streaming at least.

• 1:06:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:59John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:06:59Jordi Hays?

  I still get so confused by all the different cable plans. I watch F1 on YouTube TV, which I guess is through ESPN. I guess that will go away and then I would have to subscribe to Apple. So they would get a net new. I actually don't subscribe to Apple TV.

• 1:07:14John Coogan?

  You don't?

• 1:07:15Jordi Hays?

  I don't. Not for any reason, I just, I never wanna, I never wanna go through the, I never wanna go through the, I just don't watch a lot of television.

• 1:07:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:23Jordi Hays?

  And I don't wanna go through the hassle of like signing up for a new service.

• 1:07:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like recently I got a new iPhone and it just like came with Apple TV plus and I just like clicked the button and didn't unsubscribe and then I've been on that for a while. So let's go over to Ben Thompson, talking about Google earnings.

• 1:07:42John Coogan?

  He has said, I've repeatedly laid out the theoretical case for why AI is potentially disruptive to Google and we asked him about this when he came on the show. My question was like, is there a world where, where revenue and profit from, from generative AI products is actually not as counter positioned against Google? In the sense that like, if they had launched the Gemini app first and become the chat GPT, they'd probably be seeing a drop in search volume. But then also seeing revenue spike from an even more popular Gemini that's monetizing even better. And was it a question of them just like not being able to take that pill? Or was it more about like the risk and PR nervousness than?

• 1:08:23Jordi Hays?

  The thing that Ben said that stood out, that stood out to most, the most to me and I'll probably butcher it a little bit, but he effectively was saying like, it's really hard for companies to change who they are. And when you look at Google's mission statement to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. That is so deeply aligned with AI.

• 1:08:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:44Jordi Hays?

  It's like, what does chat GPT do? Like organizes information and makes it useful, right? Agents, like chat GPT agent is making that information useful.

• 1:08:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:55Jordi Hays?

  And so it just feels like, again, like generative AI is like deeply aligned with the core mission. And so it's easy to see, you know, them continuing to win here.

• 1:09:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I think the, the problem is, is like, The like disruption comes when you create a product that is not as good, but the financials are structurally different. So the idea of like if AI disrupts like a law firm, you look at this product or even like, I don't know, what's the classic example of disruption that people go through? I don't know, but like this idea of like-

• 1:09:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the big thing was innovator's dilemma.

• 1:09:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, in the innovator's dilemma, the example is like a new product comes to market that does something 90% as well. And so it's like unacceptable to the people that are buying the current product, but then over time it gets better and better and better until it replaces the current product. And so there is a world where if they had just changed the Google search bar to just be like, this is just an LLM now, people would have been really, really disappointed with that shift. And they would have been like, I want to go back and ripping that Band-Aid off to the tune of what $300 billion a year in in search revenue would be really painful. So they

• 1:10:17John Coogan?

  had to take a more, a more iterative, like stepwise improvements, but it seems like they're doing well. And Ben Thompson is kind of echoing this. He says, once again, and however, I have to come to Google's defense. All available metrics suggest that the company is doing quite well. Indeed, I would go further. You can make the case that the company's biggest mistake is not going harder. And so they flipped the switch on cloud. Their infrastructure spending is through the roof, as we mentioned. So in after the Q4 2024 earnings and their announcement that they were spending 75 billion on CapEx, then Google, Google Cloud's revenue numbers disappointed, but this was because they didn't have enough GPUs and they were actually constrained. So

• 1:11:01John Coogan?

  they they missed on top line, like they didn't bring in enough revenue, but their margins actually improved. And so what that means is that there was so much demand that they had pricing power and they could say, no, we're not giving you any discounts because everyone wants these GPUs right now or the TPUs. They want our infrastructure. So we don't need to, we don't need to sell them at a discount. And so their margins were really good. And what that revealed was that they were, they were capacity constrained and that justifies the bigger CapEx spend that they're going into right now.

• 1:11:29Jordi Hays?

  And Google is still the polymarket. Which company has the best AI model end of 2025? So December 31st, there's been one and a half million in volume and Google is still sitting comfortably at 46% chance of being at the top of LM Arena at the end of the year.

• 1:11:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is such a crazy supply constraint metric. So the Google CFO, Anat Ashkenazi, said on the earnings call, "In cloud, as I mentioned, the demand for our products is high, as evidenced by the continued revenue growth and the cloud backlog." Guess how big their cloud backlog is? Just the demand for Google Cloud products that they can't fulfill because they haven't built the data centers. But if they had more capacity, they think that they could deliver this. $106 billion. That's so much money.

• 1:12:21Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, more businesses should try to put themselves in the position.

• 1:12:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:12:26Jordi Hays?

  160 billion of demand.

• 1:12:29John Coogan?

  106 billion.

• 1:12:31Jordi Hays?

  We try to not give business advice because it's so.

• 1:12:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:12:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's just like every business is different. Every founder's different. But in general, if you can develop a demand.

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  It's a good call for like a YC company. Like if you go on stage at Demo Day and you say like, "Yeah, we have LOIs and we have some demand backlog."

• 1:12:49Jordi Hays?

  We have $106 billion of demand that we're unable. There was actually a YC company yesterday or two days ago that was getting a little bit roasted because they were like, they'd launched a product and they were like, "Wow, today was insane. Our servers went down immediately." And you could see the user chart and they had like 250 users. And so people are like, "Wait, like your entire product went down on 250 users?"

• 1:13:17John Coogan?

  That's ridiculous.

• 1:13:19Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, but happy for their success.

• 1:13:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at Figma.com. And so this, so he keeps going into the capex.

• 1:13:32Jordi Hays?

  Wait, before we do that, Figma Make is generally available today. You can go to Figma.com/make and just start building various products. Tyler has been using Figma Make to make a product that we'll be releasing very soon.

• 1:13:48John Coogan?

  Very excited for that. We will, we will announce that soon. So from the earnings call, given the strong demand for our cloud products and services, we now expect to invest 85 billion in CapEx from 2025 up from a previous estimate of 75 billion, just a 10 billion incremental investment, absolutely massive. Our updated outlook reflects international investment in servers, the timing of delivery of servers and an acceleration of the pace of data center construction, primarily to meet cloud customer demand. The challenge pitch I cautioned in an answer to an analyst's question is that it takes a while for these investments to come on board. So of course, the, the risk is like you overbuild, but there's certainly

• 1:14:30John Coogan?

  no evidence of that, given the massive backlog. So the other interesting thing that Ben dips his toe into. So Ben Thompson, Mr. Teckery famously does not get caught up in trade deals and non-CEO employee shifts.

• 1:14:49Jordi Hays?

  They're below his line.

• 1:14:50John Coogan?

  They are below his line. They're below his line. But he had to chime in on the CFO change that happened at Google. So he says, I'm always hesitant to delve too much. I like that he's throwing in a delve. You know, it's not written by AI, but he's baiting.

• 1:15:05Jordi Hays?

  He's baiting people. He's like, how dare you accuse. He's like, you can go back and look at how many times I've used.

• 1:15:11John Coogan?

  I created delve. I coined that word.

• 1:15:15Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's, there's a YC company called Dell as well. It's doing well.

• 1:15:21John Coogan?

  So he says, but it's interesting that the Google, that the earnings call was Ruth Perat's last one as CFO. Perat earned a lot of plaudits for getting Google's spending under control in the late 2010s. But what seems clear in retrospect that is that 52.5 billion that Google spent on CapEx in 2024 was too little. And so he's kind of like, you know, noodling on this idea that maybe the CFO was too cautious going into. An AI boom.

• 1:15:55Jordi Hays?

  You could lose your job over that.

• 1:15:57John Coogan?

  Called a, maybe Ruth Perot was calling top signals like us. It looks terrible. Fortunately, we don't lose our job.

• 1:16:04Jordi Hays?

  There's nothing wrong with calling top signals.

• 1:16:07John Coogan?

  There, there, there's something wrong with under investing.

• 1:16:08Jordi Hays?

  You get in hot water if you're calling, specifically calling the top.

• 1:16:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:16:12Jordi Hays?

  Trying to identify top signals is more of a meta game.

• 1:16:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So, uh, so basically, um, Google, it, it, it does seem like Google under invested in CapEx in 2024 based on demand. Wound up with that massive backlog, missed on top line, couldn't, couldn't make enough money, couldn't generate enough revenue. Had higher margins, that's great, but, uh, but didn't deliver on the cloud side, uh, on, on the actual scale. So Askinaz's, Askinaz's calls meanwhile have repeatedly reiterated that Google Cloud is particularly supply constrained. They don't have enough servers and the company has now surprised investors twice in six months with the scale of its CapEx plans. Let's go. Says this, in my opinion, is incredibly bullish for Google. Go back to this, the disruption lens, which we were kind of noodling on earlier.

• 1:16:59John Coogan?

  The exact avenue from which you would expect management resistance to a disruptive innovation to, to flow is from this, is the CFO office. Like the CFO, uh, should be resistant to, uh, disruptive innovation. And when you look at the history of companies that got disrupted, the CFO is saying, we have a good business. Let's just keep printing cash. Like this new thing, let's not worry about it. Let's not go.

• 1:17:24Jordi Hays?

  Nokia CFO.

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

  Are you guys seeing the numbers?

• 1:17:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, but like for a lot of those companies that got disrupted, it's like they were printing cash, high dividends for decades, even after the disruption happened. The next, the iPhone comes out and in order to actually do something to compete, they have to completely go into startup mode. They have to burn a ton of cash, cut their dividend, stop stockpiling cash, issue debt, do a ton, raise more equity maybe. Like they have to become a new product development company and it would be very, very difficult, usually. Um, but.

• 1:17:55Jordi Hays?

  BlackBerry's annual revenue in 2005, 1.9 billion.

• 1:18:00John Coogan?

  They completely.

• 1:18:00Jordi Hays?

  BlackBerry's annual revenue in 2024, 580 million.

• 1:18:07John Coogan?

  It's a cybersecurity company now. They bought a couple cybersecurity assets while they were valuable. While they were like, you know, while the stock was up and then eventually they wound down the phone business and just kind of became a cybersecurity company because obviously they had a ton of enterprise contracts because BlackBerrys were sold into like large enterprises as you know, work phones. Very few people had BlackBerrys as like everyday phones. But so they had all those, they had like solid sales team, solid connections, bought a new asset and were able to continue the business even though obviously it's not the company that it once was. So Ben Thompson goes on to say, there's a, there does seem

• 1:18:50John Coogan?

  to be a major shift in mindset in terms of the company's willingness to lean into AI, particularly for a segment, Google Cloud, that even in the best case scenarios is significantly lower margin than the company's core business. What's interesting about that margin point, however, is that it too is another reason to be bullish on Google's prospects. Google is the only company, we talked about the TPU thing, they're the only company with an at-scale ASIC alternative to Nvidia's GPUs, which should give them a meaningful cost advantage to that end, to the extent the cloud compute

• 1:19:20Jordi Hays?

  At scale to a point where they, they're going to be able to support

• 1:19:22John Coogan?

  SSI.

• 1:19:23Jordi Hays?

  SSI.

• 1:19:24John Coogan?

  Which is crazy.

• 1:19:25Jordi Hays?

  Not just their own needs.

• 1:19:26John Coogan?

  And then, and then there's also another question.

• 1:19:27Jordi Hays?

  And the, the dynamic that's interesting is like, OpenAI needs to massively scale infrastructure and, and as we covered earlier this week, commit to spending tens of billions of dollars with, with Oracle.

• 1:19:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:19:41Jordi Hays?

  And their revenue today doesn't support that. Obviously their, their growth trajectory is absolutely insane, but OpenAI being in a position where they are competing head-on with Google for this very, very critical consumer use case, search, knowledge retrieval, and ultimately usefulness, it is an extremely tough position for OpenAI to be in.

• 1:20:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. So the other hyperscalers are working on ASICs that are alternative to Nvidia GPUs, but they all seem to be following the similar path, trying to get line time at TSMC, not fully at scale. Then there's also the question, and I think a lot of people's mind is like, Is this the end of history? Is there something that's coming down the pipe that could disrupt the Nvidia GPU monopoly, the CUDA ecosystem, or even the Google TPU? And Semi Analysis has a funny meme here, way down in the stack, about the next generation of chips that were, that have been pitched from startups like Etched and a few others. So Semi Analysis says, although baking transformers into silicon may sound cool, it's mostly

• 1:20:49John Coogan?

  just a marketing slogan, 90% of transformers, flops, are just GEMMs and 256x256 or 128x128 systolic arrays in TPU, in TPU Tranium are already optimized for these. Even modern GP GPUs with tensor cores are optimized well for GEMMs. Even if you bake transformers into silicon, AKA just create a giant systolic array, most of your die area will still be taken up with SRAM cells that's the memory, and you will still face the memory wall since your HBM memory bandwidth will be the same as GP GPUs, TPUs, and Tranium. And so, the meme is transformers are just 90% mat moles.

• 1:21:30John Coogan?

  George Hatz had a similar analysis or take, just saying that if you look at the actual energy use of GPUs right now, there isn't that much opportunity to squeeze more value out of them. They're pretty efficient, and most of the, most of the energy that goes in, goes into these very, very specific math calculations that are already pretty optimized. We did hear from someone, something about the, this is from Martin Scrawley, that Jane Street, or was it, was it Jane Street? One of the high frequency trading firms figured out how to run one of those very, very basic mat mole calculations on a GPU more efficiently, and I guess kind of open sourced it or something, or got out into the, into the research world.

• 1:22:12John Coogan?

  So, it doesn't, it doesn't feel like at this moment, I still think that there's a interesting bull case for the Etched crew in some ways, in some niches or something, some specific models. But it doesn't seem like there's some new disruptive chip architecture that's going to come out and, and obviate the need. For both Nvidia GPUs and Google TPUs. And so Google's very well positioned as Ben Thompson is writing. So he says, this should give them their position that they have an at scale ASIC alternative to Nvidia GPUs. Should give them a meaningful cost advantage to that end, to the extent that cloud compute becomes commoditized is the extent to which

• 1:22:52John Coogan?

  Google actually has a margin advantage. Because if all of the clouds are commoditized, but all of them are on Nvidia, and then Google is taking the Nvidia margin, basically, from their TPU, they should be in a very good spot. This is, to be sure, a bit weird. Parat gained these plaudits, those plaudits because there was so much waste in Google to cut, which was downstream of the company's amazing monopoly and margins in search, which hardly seems like the recipe for a structural of cost advantage. But here we are.

• 1:23:18Jordi Hays?

  Sundar is going to tell every employee, we're cutting your daily massage allowance from three massages down to one. We're deeply sorry, but we need to get fit.

• 1:23:28John Coogan?

  Got to get fit. And you got to get on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve 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.

• 1:23:42Jordi Hays?

  It was great talking with Christina yesterday. She's an absolute dog.

• 1:23:47John Coogan?

  Boardroom general.

• 1:23:47Jordi Hays?

  Boardroom general.

• 1:23:48John Coogan?

  She put the KPIs in orbit.

• 1:23:50Jordi Hays?

  She really has.

• 1:23:51John Coogan?

  She really has. Did you see that? Did you see that? She has that Reed shirt?

• 1:23:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this chart, she says, Andrew said Christina often talks about stacking rice on the chessboard.

• 1:24:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:04Jordi Hays?

  And I didn't see this until after the show, but I was like, it seems like you guys are just chopping wood. Like every day, just out there, like.

• 1:24:10John Coogan?

  That's what it is.

• 1:24:11Jordi Hays?

  Putting in the work.

• 1:24:11John Coogan?

  Just, you know, a couple percent here, a couple percent here, just very consistent growth, very consistent growth, very smooth growth curve into a monster of a business. So congrats to everyone over at Vanta on the new round. And we will go back to Google. So more broadly, the way in which Google seems to have flipped the switch in terms of going all in on AI, along with Meta's spending on AI talent, really does strongly suggest that AI, in the end, is a sustaining technology that favors the incumbents most of all. Both see a line of sight to new revenue streams and critically, both can fund AI from profits, not speculative investment or debt. And of course, both have distribution, including search. Sometimes the empire strikes

• 1:24:52John Coogan?

  back. I love that. So there were other takes from, from search. You'll have to subscribe to Sir Teckery to get the full analysis. You gotta go and subscribe to Sir Teckery. If you're not subscribed, what are you doing? But the interesting takeaway from, from search is that there, it seems like Google's being a little squishy about, hey, we don't want to report certain KPIs anymore. So they used to report paid clicks and now the chief business officer, Philip Schindler, is saying, and, and on your paid click question, look, to be very clear, I think we said this before, we manage the business to drive great outcomes for our users and attract our attractive ROI for our advertisers. We don't, we actually

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  don't manage to pay clicks or CPC targets, which is fair and good, but it's funny because Ben Thompson's like, but I want that data. That would be helpful to me.

• 1:25:42Jordi Hays?

  I mean, when a business has a metric that they tell you is important for a long time and then they suddenly tell you it's not important.

• 1:25:49John Coogan?

  Don't worry about it.

• 1:25:50Jordi Hays?

  You gotta, you gotta read into it a little bit.

• 1:25:51John Coogan?

  But it does make sense. They're a huge business. They've moved on to bigger and like higher levels of abstraction.

• 1:25:55Jordi Hays?

  Just look at the growth in tokens.

• 1:25:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:58Jordi Hays?

  Don't worry about anything else.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  What, what he says is that there are, there are product changes and policy changes that actually drive better monetization, but at the expense of paid clicks and that's probably AI searches and stuff like that. You'll see in the 10Q paid clicks were up 4% year on year, but a number of factors affecting this, these metrics from quarter to quarter, such as advertiser spending, product changes, policy changes, user engagement. So it's really important when it comes to pay clicks and CPC to avoid drawing overly broad conclusions solely based on these metrics. Don't put me in the truth zone on this, he says. So Ben Thompson, this is exactly what you said. I don't even think you, you pre-read this, but you basically have Ben Thompson working in your head because.

• 1:26:39Jordi Hays?

  This is what I said when Ben Thompson came on the show. I was like, I think your way of thinking has been so ingrained into my mind that I, I think that I have an original thought and you've already thought it.

• 1:26:49John Coogan?

  Okay. So this is what he says and it's literally what you just said.

• 1:26:53John Coogan?

  The more that management tells me not to pay attention to paid click rates, the more I want to pay attention, which is exactly what you just said. Regardless, once again, the fact that paid clicks were up 4% and search revenue was up 12% makes it clear that search growth is primarily being driven by higher prices. And so the actual number of clicks is up 4%, but revenue is up 12%. That means that they're monetizing each click better. But people are obviously going to read into, oh, paid clicks aren't growing that fast. Like the actual pie isn't growing that fast. They're just getting like, it's basically like, you know, once Instagram reels is popular, everyone's watching it, then you just got to put more ads in the feed. Right. And that's kind of, that seems like what they're doing.

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  And that's what's driving search revenue up 12%. AI overviews is another question. This is a funny one where basically the, the chief business officer, Philip Schindler at Google, says, basically says that AI overviews are monetizing as well as other Google searches. And Ben Thompson says, given the fact that the vast majority of Google searches don't monetize at all, because people just click on a link.

• 1:28:06Jordi Hays?

  That's what I was about to say. Oftentimes, the, if you're searching for information, you can have very low purchase intent.

• 1:28:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:14Jordi Hays?

  Like, how many times a day do I search for a specific fact?

• 1:28:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:28:18Jordi Hays?

  And never would have, you could show me the best ad in the world and I wouldn't click through because I'm just looking for a fact.

• 1:28:24John Coogan?

  Yep. So if you're looking for something like, you know, Hulk Hogan's age, that's not a, that's not a purchase intent. If that comes from an AI overview, or it comes from a, you know how they used to have those like knowledge boxes or like we would pull from Wikipedia? Or if you click on Wikipedia, none of that is making Google any money. So it really doesn't matter the UI or the actual underlying technology to get you that answer. And then Gemini is on absolute tear. Really remarkable. How, how many monthly active users do you think the Gemini app has?

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  These are MAUs, not DUs.

• 1:29:00Jordi Hays?

  On the mobile app?

• 1:29:01John Coogan?

  Gemini app.

• 1:29:02Jordi Hays?

  Combined?

• 1:29:02John Coogan?

  Uh, I think this is probably across mobile, web and desktop, but I would assume mobile.

• 1:29:08Jordi Hays?

  Seventy million?

• 1:29:09John Coogan?

  Four hundred and fifty million.

• 1:29:10Jordi Hays?

  Oof.

• 1:29:11John Coogan?

  Big, right?

• 1:29:12Jordi Hays?

  And that's signed, like, I guess, I guess, I mean, they kind of get the, it's kind of a, they, they have a cheat code because everybody already has a Google accounts that are like, signed in.

• 1:29:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:21Jordi Hays?

  But in, in term, I don't, I don't know.

• 1:29:24John Coogan?

  They're monthly and, and what we know from semi-analysis is that they're not taking share of queries that much, but four hundred and fifty million downloads on an app and monthly active users is pretty, pretty high. And so if there's, if there's a world where Google can build business around, if they can bring in ads faster and keep the Gemini app cheaper and offer better, better products and like you get deep research, you get agent, you get the $200 tier, the ad free, if, if OpenAI and ChatGPT has a $200 tier that's ad free, and then Google's giving you the same product and the same experience, but with ads for free, like that feels like an Android iOS battle going on, that feels like something that could actually be pretty

• 1:30:09John Coogan?

  sustainable and kind of drive this like little bit of a duopoly. I don't know. Uh, we'll have to see how it goes, but, uh, daily requests grew over fifty percent from Q1 to Q2. Um, and I think everyone, everyone is, is pretty surprised, uh, by that. Um, and I was also surprised when I went and pulled up the, uh, the Gemini app, when I went to go download it, um, the number of five star reviews is like hundreds of thousands. And I was like, okay, this is very serious. And that reflects the actual number that they shared, four hundred and fifty million monthly active users. So still a lot of work to be done. I was very frustrated when I went to go get VO3, I got the Gemini app and they were advertising VO, but I couldn't access it.

• 1:30:53Jordi Hays?

  Is Gemini a default in, in Android yet?

• 1:30:57John Coogan?

  I don't know. I imagine that it has to be pre-installed in the next round of Android phones that go out. Why would you not want that pre-installed and there? But I would be surprised if that's what's driving it because, I mean, how many Samsung Galaxies have they sold in the last quarter? Probably not 200 million, right? I doubt that that's what's driving the growth. But maybe, that might be an interesting thing. How many of them are pre-installs, pre-loads? But even then, you have to open it to become an MAU. But yeah, maybe they're testing, maybe people will churn and go back to OpenAI and ChatGPT.

• 1:31:29Jordi Hays?

  Android users have had access to Google Assistant for a long time. That's getting phased out. It's just gonna be Gemini.

• 1:31:35John Coogan?

  Yep. Intel now expects to have 75,000 employees at year end, down from 116,500 in June of 2024. That's basically one year ago. That's a massive cut. Nvidia is on the other side of the trade. Nvidia CEO said they now have 42,000 employees yesterday, up from 36,000 in January of 2025. Massive shifts. It's crazy to think about the market cap per employee difference there. It's pretty remarkable. If you're cutting costs, you gotta get on ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. So, the news is that Intel-

• 1:32:15Jordi Hays?

  Intel has a ramp problem.

• 1:32:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, they really should get on ramp. Lip Bhutan, I know you're listening. You should get on ramp, Lip Bhutan. So, this is from the Wall Street Journal, the Business and Finance section. Intel is going to lay off 15% of their workforce. Chip giant stands at a strategic crossroads. The CEO warns no more blank checks. Intel detailed dramatic steps to revive its sagging fortunes, outlining layoffs for 15% of its workforce and scrapping plans to spend tens of billions of dollars on new chip facilities in Europe. Ooh, bearish for Europe. I didn't realize that was going on. The chip-making giant said Thursday it would refocus its strategy on the highly competitive market for AI chips, regaining market share in personal computer processors, and developing its advanced 14A technology

• 1:33:02John Coogan?

  to sell to large customers. It's like, okay, we're gonna narrow down, we're just gonna do three incredibly difficult things. We're gonna compete in the most aggressive AI chip market, where we're not just competing with Nvidia, but also- The TPU from Google, all the upstarts, Grok, Cerebras, all these different companies. So we're gonna like go from zero to one there and then we're also gonna turn around our, our personal computer processing market.

• 1:33:30Jordi Hays?

  Bold.

• 1:33:31John Coogan?

  Bold. Intel, which has long dominated the business of making chips for laptops and desktop computers, fell far behind competitors like Nvidia, AMD, and TSMC after it failed to anticipate the surge in demand for the powerful chips fueling the artificial intelligence boom. Liputan, the CEO, the new CEO of, of Intel after Pat Gelsinger stepped down about a year ago, I believe, said, "There are no more blank checks," he wrote in a memo. "Every investment must make economic sense." Love to hear that.

• 1:34:03Jordi Hays?

  What is the nominative determinism of Liputan? Hate to put you on the spot.

• 1:34:10John Coogan?

  Hitting the beach, getting a tan?

• 1:34:12Jordi Hays?

  That's...

• 1:34:14John Coogan?

  You know?

• 1:34:14Jordi Hays?

  I can see it. I can see it.

• 1:34:15John Coogan?

  Maybe if, maybe if Intel doesn't work out, he can get into cosmetics. It's like, get a tan with this tanning oil, get some lip balm, lip balm tan.

• 1:34:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's something that, there's something called lip blushing, where I think it's like a mild tattoo. So maybe if this whole semi thing doesn't work out, he could get into the lip blushing franchise game.

• 1:34:36John Coogan?

  Yep, I, I agree. Revenue in the June quarter was roughly flat at 12.9 billion, beating Wall Street's expectations. The quarterly loss, though, widened to 2.9 billion for the quarter from a 1.6 billion loss in the year earlier period. The results represent the company's sixth consecutive quarterly loss, extending its longest streak in 35 years. It's got to suck to be in a position where computing broadly, computers are doing incredibly cool things. AI is magic. We pass the Turing test and you're not a beneficiary. You're losing money and it's because of a bet on, you know, the server and these large scale CPUs and not getting into GPUs and then missing mobile. There's a whole bunch

• 1:35:20John Coogan?

  of things that went into it. So, sales in Intel's PC chip division, the company's largest segment, fell 3% from the year earlier period. I remember about a decade ago, I built a new, you know, ma- massive PC rig to do CGI rendering on it.

• 1:35:36Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:35:36John Coogan?

  Intel was.

• 1:35:37Jordi Hays?

  Sure, John. You weren't, you weren't building it to.

• 1:35:40John Coogan?

  Game.

• 1:35:40Jordi Hays?

  As a gaming rig?

• 1:35:41John Coogan?

  I did use it for a gaming rig.

• 1:35:43Jordi Hays?

  That's John's Vice.

• 1:35:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:44Jordi Hays?

  John's Vice, he said, uh, you.

• 1:35:47John Coogan?

  There's market research, I need to understand what the gaming market's going. I need to understand, uh, the future of VR.

• 1:35:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to your credit, I think, I think, uh, you, you beat your video game addiction.

• 1:35:56John Coogan?

  I did, I haven't played in years. Um, and so, uh, uh, it's, uh, it, it's an interesting time for Intel. We, uh, I have some more, more information here.

• 1:36:08Jordi Hays?

  Do you remember six months ago, there was the rumors floating around that, that Elon was, was a potential buyer?

• 1:36:13John Coogan?

  I was.

• 1:36:13Jordi Hays?

  That feels so long ago.

• 1:36:14John Coogan?

  I was propagating those rumors.

• 1:36:17Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and ultimately, it feels like, uh, you know, he, he got the, uh, got the fun experience of a turnaround at Twitter. Does he want to do that again?

• 1:36:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36:29Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 1:36:29John Coogan?

  I mean, um, my take when, when he bought Twitter and turned it into X was that it was exciting. I thought that he could make it a lot better. He has in many ways made it a better product. We stream on it now and, and it feels like it's still a vibrant community and there's a whole bunch of new features. Good stuff, bad stuff, but overall, I think he put the company back in startup mode. They're shipping very quickly. Interesting things are happening and he's making plays in an interesting way that I like. But at the time I was like, okay, $44 billion, there's something like $50 billion from the CHIPS Act. Maybe going to Intel and foundries in America. Run this back and marshal the same amount of capital. Let him buy Intel, turn that around.

• 1:37:11John Coogan?

  That feels like something that Elon would be uniquely equipped to turn around. It would put us on a very different path, uh, if he got into semiconductor manufacturing, but it would be a huge challenge. And maybe it wasn't as important to him. So, I don't know. Um, but.

• 1:37:26Jordi Hays?

  I mean, only a week ago, a, a small company called AOL, AOL.com was posting, uh, that is Elon Musk about to buy Intel. Um, so this feels like, um, very, uh, you know, Dylan, Dylan Patel on January 17th, saying Elon's jet is in Florida. Global foundries dread is in Florida. Qualcomm's jet is in Florida.

• 1:37:48Jordi Hays?

  And but ultimately, a lot of people were in Florida at that time.

• 1:37:51John Coogan?

  Well, if your jet's flying around the world, you gotta take your jet to a wander. Find your happy place.

• 1:37:55Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 1:37:56John Coogan?

  Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top-of-the-air cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. And so Dylan Patel, speaking of Dylan Patel, he actually hung out with Liputan at a conference, and he has this hilarious story where he clearly wanted to meet Liputan and spend some time with him, and everyone's coming up to Liputan, asking him what the future of Intel is. And so he goes up and offers to make him tea, and makes his tea for him. And they sit down, and they have tea, and they like, and I think Dylan Patel really understands like tea culture and knows what makes for a good cup of tea, in the same way that someone like a coffee snob knows about good coffee.

• 1:38:31Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:38:32John Coogan?

  So they have tea, and Dylan Patel's kind of picking his brain, and it just feels like Liputan's overall goal is just layoffs, reduce costs, right the ship, refocus. And so what's interesting is that we talked to Ben Thompson, and I wanted a clear, I wanted a clear narrative. I wanted something like, oh, it's obvious. Just split the foundry and the design business, split up Intel into two companies, and that will solve all the problems. But everyone seems to agree it's more complicated than that, because part of Intel's foundry business is that they design their own chips. And so they're both their customer and their supplier, and breaking those up might be more difficult. It's not a cure-all. It's not a panacea. And so it is more complicated. So there's not a super

• 1:39:17John Coogan?

  clear path forward. It's a lot of hard decisions. It's a lot of cuts to employees, and that's what we're seeing today with the 15% layoff. There will probably be more in the future as Intel continues to downsize the workforce.

• 1:39:28Jordi Hays?

  Really, really rough for morale, knowing that the workforce will just be, you know, continue to get cut into, you know, like you said, probably not the last.

• 1:39:38John Coogan?

  Yep. And so they are focusing on, the direct quote is "refocus strategy on the highly competitive market for AI chips, regaining market share in personal computer processors, and advancing the 14A technology." Now, the problem is that Intel is still more expensive than TSMC on a normalized per wafer basis. This comes from

• 1:40:00John Coogan?

  This comes from semi-analysis. So they have the Intel 3 node, the 18A, and that goes up against the N5, N3, and N2 nodes from TSMC. And across the board, Intel is more expensive on a per wafer basis. So this is at their own fabs. They're trying to catch up. They're trying to create chips that are that are as as powerful, but the name of the game is always cost.

• 1:40:25Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Yes. Semi-analysis says the company has cost discipline in its DNA, talking about TSMC. Intel, not necessarily. This manifests in many ways. TSMC has more aggressive cost down targets and exercises its leverage on suppliers. It has not used the copy exact dogma that creates unnecessary overhead and resistance to improvements.

• 1:40:45John Coogan?

  Hence, Intel is now moving to copy smart. Are you familiar with the copy exact strategy?

• 1:40:50Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:40:50John Coogan?

  So when Intel built the original fabs, what they would do is they would build this, I mean, it is a incredibly precise process. So you can think of lithography is basically etching. That's why that company, that semiconductor company is called etched, because they, you're etching grooves in a silicon wafer. And that's where, when you put electricity through it, it goes through a series of gates, and that's what a semiconductor is.

• 1:41:15Jordi Hays?

  And that's how you create magic.

• 1:41:16John Coogan?

  That's how you create magic. Yes, it's the it's the spice. The Dune analogy is the most important one here. But basically, you have to etch these grooves at as small, as small a scale as possible. So 3 nanometer silicon atoms are 1 nanometer. So you, in theory, cannot go smaller than 1 nanometer chip, because the space between the atoms is only 1 atom or 1 nanometer. So this is incredibly small. And so you basically have to shine like a laser or some sort of light or some sort of radiation to actually etch into the silicon to create the grooves, basically. This is very, very high level abstraction. But

• 1:41:55John Coogan?

  In order to do that, they get these, they get these mirrors from a company called Trump, which is unrelated to Donald Trump, but, and, and Zeiss makes these lenses and they focus all this stuff and this liquid tin gets like, you know, dispersed and then they bounce light off of it. It's this crazy process. The mirrors are so flat that if you, if you, if you, if you like blew them up to like the size of the moon, you would still would not be able to see a groove even this hot. It's like the most precise process in every single.

• 1:42:24Jordi Hays?

  By the way, uh, Intel missed opportunity to create the TPU. Google's obviously owning that right now, but if Intel had said, we're making Trump processors.

• 1:42:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's back.

• 1:42:36Jordi Hays?

  It's back, you know, I mean, they're already public.

• 1:42:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, you know, what's the chip that's going to be in the Trump phone? The golden, the golden American made phone. Should be an Intel processor.

• 1:42:46Jordi Hays?

  It really should.

• 1:42:47John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 1:42:48Jordi Hays?

  American made.

• 1:42:49John Coogan?

  So the, the semiconductor manufacturing process is so precise that apparently a TSMC, like if there's an earthquake or anything like that, everyone, they don't even need to send out a notification. Everyone just knows, go to TSMC because deal with everything because the slight change in like the road noise or slight could like miscalibrate the machines. If it like rains too much, there will be extra salt in the parking lot that will get tracked in. Even when they go into the clean room, it'll get tracked in and the small sodium particles will throw off the yield. So all of this is about yield. They'll make a ton of these wafers. There'll be small imperfections. It ruins the whole wafer. That's been a big problem with the wafer scale.

• 1:43:25Jordi Hays?

  Which is why TSMC getting any yield in Arizona, despite setting up, you know, this new facility so recently.

• 1:43:33John Coogan?

  Was very unexpected. It's a miracle. Yes. And so the copy exact dogma was it is so hard to build a fab that manufactures semiconductors reliably at good yields that when Intel figured out how to make one fab, they said, let's make a second and let's change nothing. And so they build a building, they build the exact same foundation, they build the, the bathrooms would be in the same place. If there was two urinals in one bathroom, like there would be two urinals at the other one. Like everything was exactly the same.

• 1:44:08Jordi Hays?

  Basically extremely superstitious.

• 1:44:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, basically because they were like anything that changes, like if the water flows through the pipe in the bathroom at the wrong flow rate, it might throw off the amount of. Molecules in the air over here, the atoms over, it's like, it's crazy precise, right? And so that worked for Intel, but it had this problem, which was that every once in a while, you do want to make an iterative change when you're building the next fab, and you do want to increase yield by maybe not copying exactly and doing things slightly differently. And so now Intel's pivoting to copy smart, only copy what's actually improvement, instead of just copying everything exactly. And TSMC has never held themselves to that same standard. And so customers are likely baselining the 18A Intel node against N3,

• 1:44:53John Coogan?

  3 nanometer nodes at TSMC, given the characteristics. But Intel will have to be aggressive on pricing if they want to compete, because they are not competitive on the actual cost of the wafer. And so they would need lower margins if they want to compete. And so you can think about Intel as having kind of like three feature products that people are focused on. It's Intel 3, which is their 5 nanometer class. That one is fabbed in Arizona and Oregon and Ireland. These are at Intel facilities. Intel also has the Intel 18A, which is at the same sites, plus Ohio. And this is competitive with the 2 nanometer class from TSMC.

• 1:45:37John Coogan?

  And then they have the 14A, which is supposed to be 1.4 nanometer or below. This is the most cutting edge, extreme ultraviolet, really, really aggressive lithography. And this is also made in America, which is great.

• 1:45:52John Coogan?

  And these will compete with Nvidia's Blackwells and then the next generation Blackwell successor. And so they're going head to head, but the real question will be, can they go head to head and still squeeze out a decent margin? Because the Nvidia-TSMC partnership is really, really strong. They both have good margins and they've really optimized for cost and reliability and yield. And Intel has kind of lost a step there. And so they will probably need to get on Linear to make this work. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. So Lip Bhutan, if you need an intro to the folks over at Linear.

• 1:46:32Jordi Hays?

  Reach out, we will make it happen.

• 1:46:34John Coogan?

  Reach out and we'll figure it out. So.

• 1:46:38Jordi Hays?

  And Intel is, of course, down almost 10% today. Market is not loving.

• 1:46:46Jordi Hays?

  Much of anything happening over there right now.

• 1:46:48John Coogan?

  Yep. So semi analysis continues saying Intel, the home of Moore's Law, Gordon Moore, of course, worked at Intel and coined Moore's Law, the idea that the number of transistors will double every few years on a silicon chip, allowing for more compute power, basically at the same price. They are evaluating if it will continue at the leading edge. This is, this is what moves the stock, in my opinion, more than the 15% layoff. The layoff seems like reasonable downside, but deciding, hey, we're not even going to compete on the, on the most advanced semiconductors, which is what Elon, Google, Anthropic, Sam Altman, you know, every single company is like, give me all of the best and give me hundreds of

• 1:47:30John Coogan?

  thousands of the best. The rest of the stuff is like, okay, I'll go to anyone because I need a, you know, Wi-Fi chip in my toaster. So the quote from the 10Q, from Intel's 10Q is, however, we are unable to secure a significant external, if we are unable to secure a significant external customer and meet the important customer milestones for Intel 14A, we face the prospect that it will not be economical to develop and manufacture Intel 14A and successor leading edge nodes on a go forward basis. In such event, we may pause or discontinue our pursuit of Intel 14A and successor nodes and various of our manufacturing expansion

• 1:48:11John Coogan?

  projects. Just, and semi analysis says, just like that, we could be talking about a TSMC monopoly and the death of American made semiconductors forever. Very dark. Up next, we have Casey Neistat, recently.

• 1:48:28Jordi Hays?

  The YouTuber, the creator.

• 1:48:29John Coogan?

  He's over at Mod Retro now, working on the Chromatic, which we've been playing in the studio, working on the M64. How are you doing, Casey?

• 1:48:39Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:48:40Casey Neistat?

  Adam, good to see you.

• 1:48:42John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. What's new in your world? How did the, are those the nothing year one? So give us a little review.

• 1:48:49Casey Neistat?

  Oh yeah, these are fantastic. I had to take them off because the noise cancelling on these is um, it's it's like too good and I'm at home right now and my kids were screaming two seconds ago. But yeah, these things are fantastic.

• 1:49:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, we had Carl pay on the show a week ago and uh he put them down and I was like, I was too afraid to ask like, oh, are those for me? Like, are you gonna leave those for me? I kinda want those. I need a new pair. I'll have to pick one up.

• 1:49:13Casey Neistat?

  I'm not enough of an audiophile to know what if something sounds good or not. Like it's either good or it's not good.

• 1:49:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:49:20Casey Neistat?

  But physical switches, like buttons you can touch.

• 1:49:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:26Casey Neistat?

  I really like and the like the Apple, I don't know what they're called. What are they? AirPods?

• 1:49:30John Coogan?

  AirPod Maxes, yeah. AirPod Maxes.

• 1:49:33Casey Neistat?

  There's no on off switch.

• 1:49:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:36Casey Neistat?

  Like I can't.

• 1:49:36John Coogan?

  Digital crown.

• 1:49:37Casey Neistat?

  I needed I needed an on off switch and these have that.

• 1:49:40John Coogan?

  I like that. I like the tactile feeling. Yeah. Are you are you a big teenage engineering guy? It feels like kind of like that that they're almost coining like a trend that's like becoming more mainstream now.

• 1:49:50Casey Neistat?

  Teenage engineering is the only company whose products I buy religiously, even though I have no idea how to use any of them.

• 1:49:58John Coogan?

  The same thing happened to me. I bought the little keyboard. I was like, I'm a musician now. Couldn't figure out how to make a song.

• 1:50:03Casey Neistat?

  I'll use it.

• 1:50:04John Coogan?

  I love it. It's amazing.

• 1:50:05Jordi Hays?

  Looks good on a desk.

• 1:50:06Casey Neistat?

  Beautiful.

• 1:50:07John Coogan?

  It's so beautiful.

• 1:50:07Casey Neistat?

  Someone that cares that much about the craft, um, I wanted to be part of that.

• 1:50:12John Coogan?

  Support them unconditionally. Uh, yeah. So tell me about mod retro. How'd that come together? Uh, what what what is the news in your world?

• 1:50:20Casey Neistat?

  Um, you know, the mod retro thing is really funny because uh I my video says all this, but like I'm a big retro gamer. Um, I'm guilty of sometimes playing Call of Duty on my Xbox, but it doesn't work out when you've got a wife and kids.

• 1:50:35Jordi Hays?

  You're not being guilty. Every every man should have an allocation of time daily for Call of Duty, you know, getting on Rust. Getting on Rust with your boys.

• 1:50:43Casey Neistat?

  I'm so close to that W and then the door comes flying open. The children come running in. It's challenging, but I'm 44. So like.

• 1:50:53Casey Neistat?

  Apex of video games for me was like nineteen eighty-nine, I think, getting a Game Boy, the first year they came out for my grandmother for Christmas. And like, you guys are younger than me, but before that, all we had were those like L- LED LCD games that were like really janky, like the Tiger games, and they were terrible. And the first time I turned on the Game Boy and like saw the Nintendo come down, I was like, holy, this is such a moment. Um, and then Nintendo sixty-four came out when I was, I was like just getting into high school as a freshman. We used to sneak out of high school, get on the city bus, like the, the, the regular bus, and then drive two towns across,

• 1:51:34Casey Neistat?

  and then walk a mile and a half to Toys R Us to sit in Toys R Us and play the demo of Mario sixty-four when that thing came out. I think it was in ninety-four, so I was twelve or thirteen years old. So I, I love that stuff. And Mod Retro, when I first learned about it, when I first learned about the Chromatic, their Game Boy, I thought it was really stupid. I didn't understand because you can get those like Chinese ones off of Amazon for fifty bucks. And, um, a friend of mine was like, no, this is great. They're doing great things. Do you want to talk to Palmer about it? And I'm a huge Palmer Lucky fan. And I was like, I'd love to. And I don't know that I've ever been evangelized so much in my life. Like

• 1:52:16Casey Neistat?

  by the end of that call, he didn't just convince me, but I was like, I felt like an idiot for not seeing what Mod Retro was. And then as I got to know Torin, who, who is the, the CEO of Mod Retro and understand the vision for the company, I was just so like overwhelmed. I was like, this is the most like beautiful vision ever. I don't understand the business of it. It makes no sense to me, but the fact that these guys have the guts to do this, like, can I be a part of it? And I think I pitched back to them what I understood the company was. And they're like, that's it. That's what we want to say. And I was like, all right, give me a job. And my job will be to figure out how to communicate that and we'll make videos and stuff. And they're like, sure, but we're not going to pay you. And I was like, great. I'll take a business card.

• 1:53:01Jordi Hays?

  Business card.

• 1:53:02Casey Neistat?

  It's been great working with it. I also, I'm an investor in mod retro. I have a vested interest in them succeeding. But I mean, that's not, that's not where the passion to be a part of what they're up to comes from for me.

• 1:53:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. So many places we can go with this. Uh, this is fantastic. Um, what, uh, yeah. Do you think that there's a world? I mean, I love the handheld gaming stuff. I, my, my experience having kids was I stopped playing console games. The N64 was actually my first console ever. And, uh, but once I started having kids. Super Mario 64 for sure. Goldeneye was big. Big Headshot, Golden Gun. You gotta do that. And then a couple of other, Donkey Kong and was never really into the Mario Kart racers, but then Smash Brothers kind of took over. And that was the real competition with everyone eventually.

• 1:53:53Jordi Hays?

  I think what, I think what's exciting to me is like building new, new heart, consumer hardware that will still turn on and work and bring joy 20 years from now. I had, I had the, the game, I have like my Game Boy Pikachu edition from growing up. And I, when mod retro came out, I went and found it and I turned it on and it worked. And that was like such an amazing moment for me. Cause like when, like I haven't, I've got old iPhones lying around. I've never been like, not one, I've never been like, oh, I should turn that on. It's going to be fun, right? Cause it's like, it's not evergreen. It was of the moment and you just move on. And so I think if mod retro can do anything, which is like make consumer hardware, which is so disposable today across all these different categories and make it so that,

• 1:54:38Jordi Hays?

  yeah, you're going to get your mod retro or your M64, you know, this year, and then you're going to turn it on in 30 years and like, you know, bridge generations.

• 1:54:48Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, you know, it's, I think there's, there's, it's easy to sort of shit on planned obsolescence because it is real. I think of that, like, we woke up, my house woke up this morning at 7:30 a.m. because the refrigerator repairman finally showed up and was banging on our door at 7:30 in the morning. The dog was freaking out because our two-year-old refrigerator doesn't work. And this is a refrigerator that has Wi-Fi.

• 1:55:14Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Let's give it up for Wi-Fi.

• 1:55:16Casey Neistat?

  It doesn't work. It doesn't work. And when I think about that, it's like that refrigerator that we had as kids with the one big, heavy aluminum door, like, it just worked. It worked forever. But in order to keep selling shit, you have to keep coming out with new things. And I think that's the negative of planned obsolescence. But I think when it comes to consumer technology, there is an argument for having to keep up with the rate of innovation. You know, like, the new phones that come out, every time you get a new phone, it does do something that your other phone didn't. So there's maybe a reason for that. But I think with that sort of tidal wave of innovation that feels faster now than it ever felt when I was young, I think we lose some great things.

• 1:56:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:02Casey Neistat?

  And, you know, my understanding of mod retro, at least what I want it to be, and I think what Palmer and what Torin also want it to be, is like, let's identify consumer electronics that people just love, like, had an unbelievable relationship with. They really, like, the love I had for my Game Boy, I don't know that there was another thing that I owned through my adolescence that I treasured more than my Game Boy. And let's bring them back and let's do them justice. Let's build them so they last forever. I think Palmer's quote when I was interviewing was, "We don't want to build another Game Boy. We want to build the last Game Boy, like, the last one that ever needs to be built." And that's the vision with M64 as well.

• 1:56:42Casey Neistat?

  Like, you can get emulators that kind of, they kind of work, but let's, let's build the thing. That that you know, you and I had John when when we were kids and let's have it last forever. And I, you know, I just think there's so much romance in that. When you start digging deep, you can start to see products everywhere. And you know, Mod Retro is tiny, just a couple of people working out of a small office. But like, the list of of products that that we want to build, the list of ideas that we have is is endless. And that's like a, that's a really exciting thing to take on.

• 1:57:16Jordi Hays?

  It's also such an interesting company because you're trying to recreate things of the past that were good products. And you want to improve on them, but you need to stay true to the original product. Otherwise, you know, what do you, I mean, it's not to say that that Mod Retro couldn't one day create, you know, novel, totally novel products. But it is like an interesting constraint and challenge. And you actually have to, it's it's really, in some ways, it's easy because you know exactly what you need to build. But in other ways, it's harder because you're taking a product that was almost perfect in its original form. And still, like, you need to make it, it needs, it should be better. Otherwise, you know, what are you doing?

• 1:57:56Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, you know, like, one interesting challenge, and I'm not the right person to speak to this, I'm not the technical guy. But to make the screen match the old Game Boy screen was an exhaustive process. So when you buy one of those handheld emulators that looks like a Game Boy, the Chinese made ones, they have fairly high, high pixel density screens on them. So in order for them to give the look of an old Game Boy, you're using multiple pixels to emulate a single pixel. So it's inaccurate. And real psychopaths, I'm not one of them, but I appreciate it. Real psychopaths on Twitter have done like this super zoom into a pixel. And you realize that Mario is like jumping a half a pixel too low or a half a pixel too high within the frame because of the limitation of the screen.

• 1:58:42Casey Neistat?

  And Torin and Palmer's like, Religious obsession with matching that screen was one of the hardest things to overcome. So it's actually harder to build something that matched the quality of a product that's 20 years old than it would be to actually get the latest and greatest screen and just plug it in there.

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember Palmer saying something about like a couple of the companies, the screen is actually rotated 90 degrees. So instead of the scan lines coming down this way, they go across this way and then they just transform it at the last second. But it's like this bizarre, bizarre thing that you would never really notice of, but it's this craftsmanship that actually you feel, I feel like, and it feels like something that's just like been lost in this like everything's disposable, everything's junk, everything's a knockoff culture. And it feels like, I, I don't know, like, it just feels like it's worth it to have stuff that exhibits craft and taste. And even if I don't, even if I'm not the one that can tell that Mario is one pixel too low when I do the jump,

• 1:59:41John Coogan?

  like the fact that the craftsman worked on the product means something. I, it's hard to put a exact like quantitative value on it, but you feel it, right?

• 1:59:50Casey Neistat?

  That, that is the gamble that is the company. Palmer said that in my video where he's like, you know, maybe nobody cares about this, but, but weirdos like you and me, but that's enough. And I think it's like, there is an argument that's like, well, who cares if it's off by half a pixel? And if you're one of those people, totally cool, you're well, there's plenty of products in the market for you. But if you're someone who does care, if you're that weirdo that buys teenage engineering products because you just value the integrity of the product so much, you want to have it, then, you know, there's a place in this world for companies like Mod Retro.

• 2:00:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what do you think about like the temptation to just make like one small change? Like the chromatic has a USB C port on it. That's a huge upgrade, but you could easily turn this into like, well, like, you know, we have the technology to make the M64 handheld. And then, you know, then you're in switch territory and all of a sudden it's like a completely different product, right?

• 2:00:44Casey Neistat?

  I look, that's ever-present. And that's, that's the problem with sort of limitless. You know, like when Nintendo was building this, what was four, almost forty years ago, thirty-five years ago now. They were so limited by what the technology enabled them to do. Like, when you think about the Sega Game Gear, I don't know if you've ever had one of those, great product. It's this big, but it was the first one that had really great color screen on it. And it took six AA batteries instead of four, like the Game Boy. But the battery life on it was like forty minutes.

• 2:01:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:15Casey Neistat?

  And um.

• 2:01:15John Coogan?

  Do you remember the N sixty-four, like, expansion pack that you put in to, like, double the memory? That was.

• 2:01:20Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, dude, I remember that. What about the rumble pack that shipped with Star Fox? That was like the greatest innovation ever. My mind exploded when the controller shook.

• 2:01:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, dude, he's like, uh, like, and he's add-ons, because like, they couldn't bake it all into the first product and the.

• 2:01:33Casey Neistat?

  And yeah, and that's, that's indicative of the limitations of what tech can do.

• 2:01:37John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:01:38Casey Neistat?

  And when you look at like, you know, I don't know, what, what Samsung announced last week, two weeks ago, unpacked, and you're looking at what the limitations are today of like a folding screen that's as thick as ten sheets of paper, you realize how far we've come.

• 2:01:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:51Casey Neistat?

  But when you go in the other direction, but there's kind of no limits, and you're looking to make something that was made thirty years ago. The problem is like, where do you draw the line? And I think that's a really, uh, it's a really interesting thing to try to overcome and confront.

• 2:02:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, what can you teach me about the lore of, uh, in the video camera world? I was looking at a cool, new music video, and it had this fisheye lens and this grain, and I was kind of digging in. It seemed like they shot it on like a Sony skate camera with mini DV tapes. Like, this feels like something that I was looking like, maybe I could buy one on eBay, but it's probably broken. And I want someone to go remake it. But then, of course, you always have like, oh, you could just like throw the filter on there in Premiere or whatever. But what, what, what are some of the, what are some of the iconic video cameras or just like creative tools that might, uh, you know, be worth revisiting at some point?

• 2:02:42Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, it's, it's such an interesting examination, and, and your, your question's great, because my family and I are out, we're in Massachusetts for, for summer vacation. And there's a lot of kids around, like, we went and got ice cream last night, a lot of teenagers around. And a lot of these kids come up and they ask me for selfies.

• 2:02:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:02:59Casey Neistat?

  And the amount of teenagers that come up to me and ask me for selfies, and they're carrying the pointy shoots that we had in like the two thousand teens, like before your phone camera was good enough.

• 2:03:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:10Casey Neistat?

  They all carry them. No one makes that camera anymore, which means if you have one, you have an old one.

• 2:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:17Casey Neistat?

  And every one of these kids has it. And when I I asked them, because I'm curious, like, why do you carry that? They're like, I love the way it looks.

• 2:03:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:25Casey Neistat?

  And I think we've reached this point, like iPhone, cellphone photography, it all looks so perfect.

• 2:03:31Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:03:31Casey Neistat?

  In a way that it almost becomes artificial. Like, I think the iPhone five was the last iPhone where when you took a picture, it just sort of took a picture. And then after that, every time you take a picture now on any modern smartphone, it takes a picture and then runs it through an algorithm to make the picture sweeter and cleaner and sharper and better for you.

• 2:03:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:47Casey Neistat?

  And I think there's sort of this yearning for something that feels more real and authentic.

• 2:03:51Jordi Hays?

  It's like you look at a, you're at a store, looking at at a picture, you know, a camera from a picture from from twenty ten. Uh, or a camera or a picture from an iPhone today is like you're at, you're at the grocery store and there's the organic apples. And they look, they look good, but like they're a little fucked up and and and, you know, they may be like, whatever, part of it's kind of rotten. And then you look over and you see the perfect apple. And like intuitively, you know that you're like, that it's a little bit too good to be true, that apple over there, you know?

• 2:04:22Casey Neistat?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:22Jordi Hays?

  And I think, I don't know, the other thing that's real is removing the camera, like adding the camera to the phone has been one of the greatest innovations of this century, right? In in in many ways, but now removing it, removing the camera from the phone and being able to leave your phone and just bring a camera around is also an innovation, right? Going, going, going backwards. And I think that's the other thing that that kids like, and and I've found that's nice. If I'm going to the beach with my kids, it's nice to be able to bring a camera, but not have my phone.

• 2:04:55Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, um, my daughter is ten. This is the first summer she's allowed to like, walk around with her friends without a parent, and she has a flip phone. And she had this whole argument for getting an iPhone that has nothing on it but the phone and messaging. And my wife and I had this discussion and the reason why we said no, it has to be the flip phone is because of the camera. Like it introduces a new level of sort of attention and why you're in purpose. And the reason why I wanted to have a phone is simply to stay in touch with us, no other reason. But the minute you introduce this other sort of novel aspect of it, it becomes much more of a social dynamic and a social consideration. And the way that you're trying to get away from that.

• 2:05:38Casey Neistat?

  But I think just going back to the camera things is such an obsession of mine. I think that we are quick to, quick to ignore or look past the relationship we have with, with the aesthetic that a camera yields. And when you see those pictures off of those old point and shoots, they look like something specific. Like when you were talking about that old skateboard fish IDV look, it looks like something specific. You have a relationship with that. When you see stuff that looks like it's VHS, we think of the eighties or the nineties. And I think now there's just sort of this generic aesthetic across the board. This like crispy, flat, 4K phone thing. And there's this desire to have something that, that it has some sense of identity attached to it.

• 2:06:20Casey Neistat?

  And that's why we're seeing these sort of Gen Z types, you know, looking for older tech that's, that reflects more of who they are, more individuality. And I think that's a trend that we're going to see continue.

• 2:06:31Jordi Hays?

  Yes, this generation's vinyl.

• 2:06:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I've joked that I want to film, I want to film the first podcast on Panavision film or something. Just spend fortune developing the film.

• 2:06:42Jordi Hays?

  What other, what other, what other consumer tech categories are you excited about? We're having, we're having the founder of Wave on and I, and I, in 20 minutes. And they got like 12 million views yesterday for launching like sunglasses that live, well, just live stream constantly.

• 2:07:00Casey Neistat?

  Do you have a, do you have a ratio of positive to negative mentions in those 12 million views?

• 2:07:06Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I think everybody, people had a viscerally negative reaction to it.

• 2:07:11Casey Neistat?

  That's, that's my take on it as well. And it makes me think. You know, my, my software development company, Beam, my startup, we started that company in 2014. And a little known aspect of that company is initially it was built around Google Glass.

• 2:07:27John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:07:28Casey Neistat?

  And we actually, you know, we, we rewrote the code, we rewrote the, the software that Google Glass ran. So it had a singular function, which was you push a button like this, it captures 10 seconds and immediately shares it to your feed.

• 2:07:39John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:07:40Casey Neistat?

  That's where we started with that. And I remember meeting with Google and they were excited about it and they showed us what Google Glass 2 was gonna look like. And we're like, fuck, yeah. We started raising money based on that. And then a week later, they announced they were killing the entire Google Glass program. And we, we backed off. We're like, all right, we'll just do it on the phone now. Um, but I think when you ask about sort of the social impact of being able to live stream all the time, with the negative reaction that we're seeing based on, on Wave's video they posted yesterday. I think the social dynamic is something that is often overlooked in, in the hardware startup world. I think of the Humane AI pin, you know, a really good friend of mine worked for, for Humane and obviously super excited about new technology.

• 2:08:23Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, Sam, um, which parenthetically, you joke about Panavision for a podcast. Sam Sheffer has in his studio for his live streaming setup, a VHS camera hardwired into his deck so he can live stream from VHS.

• 2:08:36John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:08:38Casey Neistat?

  But Sam would be around.

• 2:08:39Jordi Hays?

  We tried to, I tried to hire Sam, by the way. We worked with him on a project and I was like.

• 2:08:43Casey Neistat?

  He's way too hot. He's way too hot.

• 2:08:44Jordi Hays?

  He's gotta be, he's gotta be so.

• 2:08:46Casey Neistat?

  He's way too big of a deal.

• 2:08:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:49Casey Neistat?

  Sam's the best. But when I'd be around him and he had his AI pin on, I was always sort of looking down at that or like thinking about what I'm saying and uncomfortable about, you know, speaking openly to him. And I think like, that's what I mean by so, social implications. Like, you know, my phone is on my couch right here. But if we're sitting together and I'm holding my phone like this the whole time we're talking, you're uneasy about that.

• 2:09:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:12Casey Neistat?

  And so when I think of a pair of glasses that are live streaming, or at least have the capability of live streaming the whole time, when I look at them, I'm uneasy. And I think of this, you know, maybe the most extreme example of this is Apple Vision Pro, which, you know, blew my mind when I got that thing. Like, I made the most glowing video about it because it was the greatest technology I've ever used. But later that night, because I made the video the same day I got them, I'm at home using them and my wife is like, Casey, take those fucking things off your face and pay attention to your kids. And I was like, oh, you can't wear these around other people.

• 2:09:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:51Casey Neistat?

  And I was like, how did they not see that? And so I think about that because like, we're sort of accustomed to people using their phones and it's kind of okay. Like, we're used to this. This is not okay. And so when I think about wearables, I think that that is going to be a gigantic thing to overcome, which is sort of the...

• 2:10:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, the crazy, so, so, Amazon acquired a company, uh, it got announced this week called B, which is a brace after, after all, everything they faced with Siri, Siri's listening to me, the B band just listens to you all day long, every single conversation.

• 2:10:24Casey Neistat?

  Everything.

• 2:10:25Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and it's, and it's cool, like, I think all new tech for the most part is cool. Do I want my team to be wearing a B bracelet? Are we gonna allow people to wear B bands?

• 2:10:38John Coogan?

  This might be a B-free zone.

• 2:10:38Jordi Hays?

  This might be a B-free zone, you know?

• 2:10:40Casey Neistat?

  I'm not gonna have any friends that wear these. I don't have any friends anyways, but if you have a B, it just means like, we can't hang out.

• 2:10:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:48Casey Neistat?

  Because it makes, it makes me uncomfortable. And look, I think there's an argument, it's like, get over it, like, you fucking Luddite, like, this is the direction everything's headed and you're being recorded all the time anyway. Duh. But in the interim, I do think like, there is a, there's a learning curve. I think that Meta's decision to put wearable glasses with a camera on them in Ray-Bans, the most common sunglasses in the world, was brilliant because we're all familiar with this pair of sunglasses. Like, there was no learning curve. There was no like, what's that thing on your face? We know what it is. I think how emphatic they are about having the indicator light. There's no way you can turn it off. If you cover it, they don't record. There's some degree, at least there's a tacit acknowledgement.

• 2:11:28Jordi Hays?

  That's important. Like, my question, my question for the... Founder in 20 minutes is should your glasses be bright red and have like, you know, a circle in the middle of your head that's flashing that says I'm recording.

• 2:11:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, if someone shows up with a TV camera, like, I don't feel like, oh, this is in violation of my privacy. I'm like, I know exactly what's going on. The news is here. And if I step in front of the camera, I'm on the news. Like, it, it, we have a social understanding of that.

• 2:11:55Jordi Hays?

  You still might not want to be around it.

• 2:11:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I might be like, actually, I'm going to turn around and walk the other way because I don't want to be seen on this camera or whatever. I don't know.

• 2:12:02Casey Neistat?

  But there's, there's an understanding that, yeah, and look on, on Wave's website and the Q and A, there's a question like, is there an indicator light? And their answer is, yeah, but you can turn it off.

• 2:12:10John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:12:12Casey Neistat?

  And so like, I, you know, I don't know that I read that. That makes me a little bit queasy.

• 2:12:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:16Casey Neistat?

  As a guy who has a camera on him, you know, all the time and so much of the, the videos that I've made is about filming everyone in the whole world around me. I still think there's something honest about having that camera on your shoulder, pointing a camera at someone. Versus like, you know, the glass hole movement of the, you know, Google Glass, which like by having this on your face, everyone was uneasy around you. I think it's a big hurdle to overcome as we eventually like figure out what this hardware AI future is going to look like.

• 2:12:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you think about, uh, like airplane demos? It feels like all, there's so much tech where the demo is like, you'll love this on an airplane. The Apple Vision Pro is a great example. A lot of the, a lot of the handheld.

• 2:12:57Jordi Hays?

  But it doesn't work when it's dark?

• 2:12:59John Coogan?

  Uh, it's not too dark on planes. It does work very well on planes. But it's this like weird niche use case that feels like killer application. And then you actually get out into, most of your life is not spent on airplanes usually. And so.

• 2:13:10Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, look, if, if that's the best you've got, like I travel more than most people I know. We're still talking about, you know, maybe double digits, maybe, uh, maybe 10 hours a month tops.

• 2:13:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:21Casey Neistat?

  So, you know, 4,000 bucks for a face computer that I use 10 hours a month on an airplane, which by the way, it doesn't work for me on an airplane. Like I didn't like it at all on an airplane.

• 2:13:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:13:30Casey Neistat?

  No, it worked. Like, the technology worked perfectly. No, when you're on an airplane, you're surrounded by strangers.

• 2:13:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:38Casey Neistat?

  So the idea that like, I'm just gonna. Go like that and watch Avatar with all these people around me. You know, I don't fly Spirit that often, but I have flown Spirit and I know what goes on in those flights. Like it just, again, like the social implication of, yeah, the social implication of it. You know, I think if that's the best you've got, then maybe, you know, maybe you're not thinking holistically enough about your, about your hardware.

• 2:14:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How do you, how do you spot talent? You, you, you discovered Sam, uh, someone in the chat was asking, uh,

• 2:14:09Casey Neistat?

  That's a great question.

• 2:14:10Jordi Hays?

  If you have a, a framework for it.

• 2:14:13Casey Neistat?

  It's a, it's a, it's a difficult question, but you know, it's the same, I, I approach it the same way that I approach, uh, in, investments and it's seldom the work and it's almost always the, the individual. You know, like I, I think Sam is brilliant, but he's brilliant at everything that he does. He's brilliant with the work that he did at Humane, he's brilliant at the work that he did at The Verge before that. He's brilliant with his own YouTube channel. You know, I've got a dear friend of mine, a kid named Hunter, who works in the building with me, but I met him in California.

• 2:14:41Jordi Hays?

  Hunter's a, Hunter's a friend and we invest together, so.

• 2:14:44Casey Neistat?

  Hunter's, Hunter's fantastic and like, I don't know what Hunter does, because every time I have a conversation with him, he's starting some new business or some new endeavor. Like the work is almost irrelevant, it's the individual. And I think it's like, it's that mentality that you have or you don't have. Not everyone has it. I do think maybe you can get it if you don't have it. But when I see that in people, I, I have a tendency to sort of gravitate towards those people. And when I look at the, and I look around at the friends of mine that I have some sort of professional relationship with, a professional admiration for, they all have that thing, that, that sort of desire to, uh, to, to see it through, whatever the it may be.

• 2:15:24Casey Neistat?

  So, you know, I guess the short answer is like, it's always the person, never the, never the product.

• 2:15:30Jordi Hays?

  That's great. Hunter's in the chat, by the way, he says hello. That's great. The, uh, another question I have is, we've been thinking about, uh, AI-generated images, video, etc. is getting so good. If it stays at this pace, you're going to be able to generate characters consistently. You're already seeing this on Instagram, people just creating entire personalities for influencers in different verticals. Do you have any type of strong thesis around how that will play out? If we're going to have sort of organic influencers, regular humans, and then, you know, these synthetic? Prose and conceptions. I've been thinking about it in the context of, you know, an example. It's like, I don't want the AI Andrew Huberman.

• 2:16:15Jordi Hays?

  I want Andrew Huberman to get health advice from because I know Andrew and I trust that he's making the best decisions and studying, you know, and making, you know, these recommendations and understands the weight of that. And you have like a synthetic Andrew Huberman in five years. Doesn't care if he convinces a million people to do something dumb with their health because he can just shut the account down and turn a new one on. But I'm curious how you think.

• 2:16:44Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, okay. My cynical take on it, which is, which I believe is accurate, I'd wager that this is accurate, is that it's a tidal wave that none of us will be able to overcome. We can hold our breath for a while. It is a tidal wave. And I wish I had a better analogy, but it's a little bit like, you know, when Toy Story came out in 1999, it was the first computer animated feature film. And it was great, I loved it. But then five, six years later, there was just this, you know, onslaught of computer animated films. And I was like, you know what? The hand-drawn stuff is better, I miss that. When CGI first started getting introduced into films, I was like, no, practical is better. I like practical better, that's going to be the thing. And it's like, no, you're gonna lose. And I think AI is probably the most existential version of that.

• 2:17:28Casey Neistat?

  I think that it's just going to be so good that it's going to become irrelevant. And old people like us... Might appreciate, you know, real human things and we might keep it alive. But the generation behind us, my children, when they see draw hand drawn animation. They're like, what is this? They don't care. It means nothing to them. So I think it's just going to get so good that it really doesn't matter and that that tidal wave is going to consume everything. And um, I I I think that we're we're it's the progress that we've seen in the last couple of years of how good it is and how quickly it's developing. Is incredible. But when you look at the capabilities of, you know, the latest Grok, uh, the latest G P T, you look at how smart these things are.

• 2:18:13Casey Neistat?

  You look at the sort of conversations you can have with with um, any of these agents. And then you look at how good the images that can be spit out by um, you know, Google's video or whichever whichever A I uh, you you might be fond of. It's like, they're just gonna marry really, really quickly. And I think five or six years from now, we're gonna start to see real sort of erosion in the space. Because what they're delivering is gonna be so good. You know, like another example is like, we haven't had a number one song yet that's completely A I generated. But it's gonna come out of nowhere. It's gonna be like Gangnam Style, which like the novelty of it. Allows us to dismiss the lack of humanity that this song has. The first A I song that's gonna be a number one hit is not going to be a Bob Dylan-esque song that comes from the soul.

• 2:18:58Casey Neistat?

  It's gonna be something fun and outrageous and we're gonna forgive that A I made it. And then slowly it's gonna start to chip away. But I think it is a losing battle. And the optimistic take on that is I think that there is going to be an extreme premium. But on the humans that are able to sustain because of of what they represent uniquely. Um, you know, maybe another bad analogy is it's like, I love Marvel movies. They're fucking fantastic. But as far as cinema goes, like, you know, there's an argument that said it's like. Those kind of artistry that we saw in the seventies or eighties, like the apex of cinema, where it comes from one, when you think of a Tarantino movie, you think of, you know,

• 2:19:40Casey Neistat?

  a truly great filmmaker with a voice. Marvel movies are something else. They're fucking great. We love them. We all show up to see them. We're okay with that. And I think that's going to happen with AI, but it's going to happen at a rate of acceleration that we've never encountered before. And it's going to be so good that we're willing to forgive it. And I think it's going to leave a handful of people out there. Maybe Andrew Huberman will be one of them. I hope so. I'm a fan of his as well. But it will put an extreme premium on the sort of human voices that are distinctly human, that distinctly represents something that AI could never. When you look at the landscape of media, a lot of that shit could be replaced by AI.

• 2:20:20John Coogan?

  The power law gets steeper.

• 2:20:22Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:20:24John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Well.

• 2:20:25Casey Neistat?

  That's like a five hour conversation, by the way.

• 2:20:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, we'll have you back on again soon. This was awesome. And congrats on your new, your new fake, but very real role at Mod Retro.

• 2:20:36Casey Neistat?

  I appreciate it. Thanks for the time, guys.

• 2:20:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:39Jordi Hays?

  Have fun in Massachusetts. We'll talk soon.

• 2:20:41John Coogan?

  We'll talk soon.

• 2:20:42Casey Neistat?

  Take care.