Astronomer Makes a Comeback, Massive Data Leak at Tea, AI-Powered Ads Spark Controversy | Anton Troynikov, Rahul Sonwalkar, Nico Christie

(00:21) - Astronomer Makes a Comeback (20:20) - Massive Data Leak at Tea (59:38) - AI Powered Ads Sparks Controversy (01:23:12) - Trump Wins the Hulkmania Tariffs Brawl (01:28:24) - Anton Troynikov, co-founder of Chroma, a company specializing in AI-native open-source embedding databases, discusses the phenomenon of "LLM psychosis," where individuals experience mental health issues after extensive interactions with large language models. He highlights that while these models are designed to generate plausible responses, they may inadvertently reinforce users' delusions or paranoia, especially in vulnerable individuals. Troynikov emphasizes the need for AI developers to consider the psychological impacts of their technologies and to implement safeguards to prevent such adverse effects. (01:59:07) - Rahul Sonwalkar, founder and CEO of Julius AI, discusses the platform's recent $10 million funding round and the launch of Data Connectors, enabling seamless integration with data stores like Postgres, Google Drive, and OneDrive. He highlights how Julius empowers non-technical users to perform complex data analyses through natural language queries, democratizing data insights across organizations. Sonwalkar also emphasizes the importance of data security, detailing Julius's commitment to providing secure, sandboxed environments for each user. (02:08:40) - Timeline (02:19:06) - Nico Christie, co-founder of Fundamental Research Labs and CEO of Shortcut, discusses the launch of Shortcut, an AI-powered Excel agent designed to automate complex financial modeling tasks. He highlights Shortcut's ability to complete Excel World Championship cases ten times faster than human champions, emphasizing its potential to revolutionize financial analysis by significantly reducing task completion times. (02:39:06) - Timeline TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TBN. Today is Monday, July 28th, 2025. We are live from the TBN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. That's extremely stupid. You should not do that. It's going to shake up. Which one is it? Also, now we have a

• 0:15Jordi Hays?

  All right, we're gonna use another diet code.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  Russian roulette going on.

• 0:19Jordi Hays?

  Good morning, everyone.

• 0:21John Coogan?

  We have a good show for you today, a fantastic show for you today. We'll kick it off with 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 to get started. Speaking of ramp, Astronomer is back. Astronomer had ramp on the website. Apparently ramp's a happy customer.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  Never lost faith.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Never lost faith. Yeah. So Astronomer, if you weren't following, if you were living under a rock, Apache airflow as a service managed enterprise SaaS platform on top of Apache airflow for data analytics, streaming data, that type of stuff. And they had absolutely chaotic week last week with their CEO being caught at a Coldplay concert. Was that last week or the week before?

• 1:04Jordi Hays?

  I think it was the week before.

• 1:05John Coogan?

  The week before. But the CEO was caught having an affair at a Coldplay concert. Chris Martin called him out on stage and said, oh, those people look like they're having an affair.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  Was it was, did he actually say that live?

• 1:17John Coogan?

  He did say that on the video.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:19John Coogan?

  So they're panning around to the different kiss cams or different just cameras. And they spot the CEO of Astronomer hugging the head of HR.

• 1:28Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:29John Coogan?

  Can't even hug your employees anymore, apparently.

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  Can't even give your chief people officer a hug in this country anymore.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  And and and once they see themselves on the screen at the show, they recoil in horror and turn around and and the other person in HR who's sitting next to them is like, oh my God, what's going on?

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's what I didn't understand. Was that actually?

• 1:48John Coogan?

  Apparently, people, people went and dug it up and found out that she works there, too.

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  I thought that was people just saying, hey, this person looks like this person.

• 1:56John Coogan?

  Oh, I don't know.

• 1:57Jordi Hays?

  It seems wild that the HR department was hitting the concert with the CEO.

• 2:02John Coogan?

  It was like, maybe it was an open secret. I don't know.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  Anyway, it did not, it was not good for Astronomer.

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  We were discussing this. Lulu was saying the CEO's got to go because he's a hired gun, not a founder. And it's, it just displays very bad character and it reflects poorly on the company. We were kind of going back and forth on this as, as the, like about the idea of like, okay, yeah, like the CEO did something bad in his personal life, but like, do you really want to find an alternative to your managed Apache airflow service? Like, it's kind of a hassle to rip that out if you're happy with the product.

• 2:35Jordi Hays?

  We, we said that the company would be fine. They did need a new CEO immediately. And the founder, I believe his name is Pete.

• 2:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:44Jordi Hays?

  Stepped up within days.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  Pete DeJoy.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  Oh, wait. So founder's back and the CEO is back?

• 2:49Jordi Hays?

  Back in the seat.

• 2:50John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  That's a bull, that's a real bull case for Astronomer.

• 2:52John Coogan?

  For the Ashton Hall sound effect. I want to hear some good news.

• 2:56Jordi Hays?

  Astronomer is now founder mode, everybody.

• 2:59John Coogan?

  Astronomer is totally in founder mode.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  They were already delivering the world's data.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:04Jordi Hays?

  And now they're in founder mode.

• 3:05John Coogan?

  They're in founder mode. I think they're unsettled. I'm excited. Another billion dollars for Bain Capital. Let's hear it for Bain Capital. They haven't got enough credit.

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  And index.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  Nice. Didn't know that. Anyway, so.

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  And I actually, I emailed briefly with Pete DeJoy.

• 3:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  And he said he's a fan of the show.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we're hoping to get him on. We don't want to actually talk about any of this stuff.

• 3:27John Coogan?

  No, I have, I'm over it. I want to talk about Apache airflow. I'm so into Apache airflow now. I'm so ready.

• 3:33Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, so late Friday night, uh, they, uh, Astronomer watched the video. Let's pull it up.

• 3:38John Coogan?

  They didn't want us to react to this on stream, so they put it up after we, after we logged off.

• 3:42Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up the video.

• 3:43John Coogan?

  I want to watch the full thing.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Thank you for your interest in Astronomer. Hi, I'm Gwyneth Paltrow. I've been hired on a very temporary basis to speak on behalf of the 300 plus employees at Astronomer. Astronomer has gotten a lot of questions over the last few days. And they wanted me to answer the most common ones.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  Yes, Astronomer is the best place to run Apache airflow, unifying the experience of running data, ML and AI pipelines at scale. We've been thrilled so many people have a newfound interest in data workflow automation. As for the other questions we've received.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Yes, there is still room available at our Beyond Analytics event in September. We will now be returning to what we do best.

• 4:31Jordi Hays?

  And you know, so you know that Gwyneth is Chris Martin's ex-wife?

• 4:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  Which makes the entire thing.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  It's very funny. It's, it's not really like Chris, it's not like getting back at Chris Martin in any sort of weird way. It's just funny that it's like another voice from that universe.

• 4:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's, so they, they remain close friends and co-parents.

• 4:52John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 4:53Jordi Hays?

  In, in, in so many ways, like she's like the best spokesperson for this because anyways, you know.

• 5:01John Coogan?

  Remarkable how quickly they shot that, you know, they had to like, probably like a conference room near her office or like her house or something like that.

• 5:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a perfect response. You don't need somebody from Astronomer there at all.

• 5:12John Coogan?

  Six lines. It's really, really quick.

• 5:13Jordi Hays?

  It ties into the story. It made sense. It wasn't just some random celebrity that had some funny tie in.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 5:20Jordi Hays?

  And I think it was incredibly well done. Lulu broke it down. She said, laughing at themselves was the right move because humor does four crucial things. Connects with a new audience. Even for people who don't care about Apache airflow, being in on the joke together forms a connection with Astronomer. Diffuse tension by joining the ridicule. They're no longer its subject or its object. Get closure. They said it out loud. The joke is tapped. Everyone can move on. Signal a fresh start. The CEO and HR lady are gone. It's a new management team and making light of this shows they're, they've consciously uncoupled from the past.

• 5:56John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 5:57Jordi Hays?

  Great breakdown.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  Very well written, Lulu. The, the third point is so funny because there's a little bit about like, like nothing will kill a joke. Like independent of all the crazy Astronomer, Chris Martin Coldplay thing, there's nothing that will kill a joke faster than a series D enterprise SaaS company making the joke. And so if they're making, if they're jumping in on the joke, it's like, well, we wanted to kill the joke. We wanted the joke to stop.

• 6:20Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 6:20John Coogan?

  And so we jumped in, we're playing along and we got the last, literally the last laugh. Like, like if anyone tried to post something about astronomer CEO Coldplay, all the, like, they would immediately be, uh, everyone would be like, yeah, we've moved on.

• 6:33Jordi Hays?

  The real question is, is the IPO windows open? Should they go public?

• 6:37John Coogan?

  Come a meme stock?

• 6:39Jordi Hays?

  And actually have Gwyneth step in like, kind of like chairman type role, you know, really expand the role, not just kind of crisis comms.

• 6:46John Coogan?

  They need a treasury.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  They do.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  But they need something that, that, that speaks to the, the, the history of the company. They need to buy some, some funny, funny asset to put on the balance sheet. I was thinking about, um, that we've moved on from Bitcoin treasuries to like the further out risk curve ones.

• 7:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, there's all the Ethereum treasuries.

• 7:07John Coogan?

  Gamestop treasury, which is hilarious. I, I think the next generation is just straight up lottery ticket treasury. Just scratchers.

• 7:16Jordi Hays?

  I thought you were gonna say like, they should put some like Match Group on the balance sheet.

• 7:20John Coogan?

  They should. That would be good. That would be more like tied to this. And I think that makes sense for astronomer. Get a bunch of Mash Group. Get a bunch of Mash Group stock on your balance sheet.

• 7:29Jordi Hays?

  By the way, we're.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  Or like, uh, uh, Eventbrite maybe, or who, who, who runs like the Coldplay concerts? It's like, uh, uh, didn't Taylor Swift like sue them? Ticketmaster, get some Ticketmaster stock on the balance sheet. Who knows? That would tie into the war a little bit.

• 7:45Jordi Hays?

  Like the values of the company.

• 7:47John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 7:48Jordi Hays?

  Some potential.

• 7:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was that company? There was that biotherapies company that was saying like, we're fighting financial fraud by buying Gamestop stock.

• 7:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:56John Coogan?

  Or something like that, or financial inefficiencies. But yeah, get some scratch.

• 7:59Jordi Hays?

  Market manipulation.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  Get some scratchers on the balance sheet for sure. Get some lottery tickets. Everyone's like, yeah, they have, they have $50,000 in lottery tickets, but if it hits, this could be $500 million on the balance sheet.

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it is such a, I think, a year from now, we'll look back and say like, they found a way to actually turn this into a win.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, totally.

• 8:23Jordi Hays?

  Now some people, if, if, you know, this is maybe some of the best crisis comms work we've seen.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  In, uh, you know, this decade.

• 8:32John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 8:33Jordi Hays?

  But. I think if you you now have a million, millions of people that like have, think your company is kind of like cool and funny.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  And they're aware of it. They're aware of it.

• 8:43Jordi Hays?

  And it would have cost them, it would have cost them, I'm sure this Gwyneth video costs millions of dollars.

• 8:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Jordi Hays?

  I think it probably would have cost them to try to, to try to build that type of brand recognition otherwise.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:56Jordi Hays?

  Like, just, just traditionally, would have cost multiples of that.

• 9:00John Coogan?

  I only have one note on the video. I mean, Autism Capital here says, "You have to give credit where credit is due. This is 10 out of 10 PR recovery." I think it loses one point because it was hard posted and not restreamed. One livestream, 30 destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. They should have restreamed it. Anyway.

• 9:18Jordi Hays?

  Good idea there.

• 9:19John Coogan?

  Fantastic comeback. Lulu says, "Next move is for an Astronomer competitor to hire Chris Martin to do a video on how their product is the best at helping you gain visibility in any environment and keep your private networking secure."

• 9:34John Coogan?

  And, and somebody in the comments says, "The chain is going to end with Brad Pitt."

• 9:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, this is the thing. I don't even know who Astronomer's competitors are.

• 9:40John Coogan?

  I don't know who their competitors are, but I don't know. Maybe they should.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  That's why this is a win for Astronomer.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  It's a huge win for Astronomer. And yeah, I mean, also interesting because this kind of plays into what we were talking about with, with Paul from Browserbase, this idea of like, the, like, Apache airflow is open source. You would expect that managed airflow would be something that's, you know, totally in AWS's wheelhouse. And yet, they were able to scale to a Series D company, 300 employees, like, clearly doing well. And now they have this like breakout moment. And they still are probably facing fierce competition from the, from the hyperscalers, but, and from the, from the big cloud platforms, but they just don't.

• 10:21Jordi Hays?

  It's so, the timing of this is so insane. Bain led the Series D. It was announced on May 1st.

• 10:26John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 10:27Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 10:28John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  Just very recently here. I mean, they've been putting up some incredible numbers.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  Let's get Man Ramney on the show. Have him talk about it.

• 10:35Jordi Hays?

  Last fiscal, the last fiscal year, Astronomer saw 150% year-over-year ARR growth, world-class 130% net revenue retention, and 90% product utilization with customers. So,

• 10:48John Coogan?

  Let's hear it.

• 10:48Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I think they're going to have a massive end, end to the year.

• 10:52John Coogan?

  Speaking of high NPS products, let's tell you about 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.

• 11:01Jordi Hays?

  And we will be in the great city of New York this week.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:05Jordi Hays?

  For the Figma IPO.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  We will be.

• 11:07Jordi Hays?

  We will be live from NYSE, the New York Stock Exchange on Thursday.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  That's what the cool kids call it, NYSE.

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  NYSE.

• 11:14John Coogan?

  I always just call it NYSE, or like the New York Stock Exchange.

• 11:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:17John Coogan?

  But when you're saying it every other word, because you're in that world.

• 11:20Jordi Hays?

  When you're big in that world.

• 11:21John Coogan?

  You're big in that world. You don't have time.

• 11:24Jordi Hays?

  When you're taking companies public like every other week.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. You gotta, you gotta use the slang.

• 11:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:29John Coogan?

  The cool, what the cool kids use. Okay, bull or bear case for Figma? I go to Figma Make and I tell it, build me a collaborative design tool.

• 11:39Jordi Hays?

  Don't make mistakes.

• 11:40John Coogan?

  Don't make mistakes. Recursive, the snake eating its tail. You use Figma to make Figma, then you don't need Figma anymore. Is that bear case? What's going on here?

• 11:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think you're basically still paying Figma to host.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. So they get you to host it. Okay, that's how they get you locked in.

• 11:57Jordi Hays?

  You're paying.

• 11:58John Coogan?

  That's how they get you locked in.

• 11:59Jordi Hays?

  You're paying one way or another.

• 12:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like that, though. It's a, it's an extension, it's an existential risk for all these platforms that allow you to build software vibe.

• 12:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's why every SaaS company.

• 12:07John Coogan?

  First thing I want to vibe code is a vibe coding platform.

• 12:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, every, that's why every SaaS company has to have a vibe coding product now.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  Yes. So you can vibe code the product itself.

• 12:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:17John Coogan?

  Yes, the, the, the tautological vibe code.

• 12:19Jordi Hays?

  No, that is, I mean, so the question, people have been saying like, okay, at some point in the future, you'll be able to one-shot products.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:28Jordi Hays?

  And I, I would say I have a really strong conviction that in the next few years, you'll be able to one-shot a design tool.

• 12:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:37Jordi Hays?

  Will you be able to one-shot a design tool for, that works in the enterprise, that work has like.

• 12:43John Coogan?

  That people are familiar with.

• 12:45Jordi Hays?

  Figma has been like shipping features every single day.

• 12:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:48Jordi Hays?

  For a decade now.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:50Jordi Hays?

  And, and even if you knew exactly which features mattered and how they all work together, it would be very difficult to create a one-to-one clone.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  And then also there's the network of if you hire a designer and you're like, hey.

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  Hey, I need you to use my vibe.

• 13:08John Coogan?

  I need you to use my vibe-coded Figma knockoff that I vibe-coded in Figma.

• 13:12Jordi Hays?

  Can you just pay the 20 bucks a month?

• 13:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. And then, yeah, so the ecosystem is very, very important.

• 13:20Jordi Hays?

  And there's a whole app ecosystem.

• 13:22John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  It makes me, you know, it definitely makes me more bullish on companies that have these like developer app ecosystems.

• 13:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:31Jordi Hays?

  I mean Shopify is the same way. You can one, maybe you could one shot like an e-commerce storefront product, but can you, are you then going to one shot the downstream?

• 13:41John Coogan?

  I mean, as soon as, as soon as LLMs were writing code and we were talking about like AGI takeoff and super intelligence, I had this like running thought about, okay, so at a certain point, you can go to an LLM or a vibe coding platform and say like, build me an e-commerce website and it will just say like, okay, setting up Shopify. But in the far, far future, it could just say, okay, applying for a banking license, applying for a money transfer license. I'm going to rebuild Stripe. I'm going to rebuild Shopify. I'm going to rebuild a database from first principles. I'm going to use just raw C++.

• 14:16Jordi Hays?

  Actually, you're just going to make a data center.

• 14:17John Coogan?

  I'm going to make, I'm going to build a data center.

• 14:19Jordi Hays?

  If I want to build an internet company, I should have at least one data center.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  And it all just does that in one prompt. Because one prompt fires off. I mean, how many man hours have gone into building Stripe or building any of these companies? It's like, you know, tens of thousands of employees for most of them for, you know, decades, you add all that together. But if the LLM can do that, and if the AI system can do that in the data center in just a few minutes, in hyper compression, who knows, maybe. Logan Bartlett has another take on the astronomer video. He says, the astronomer video is great on its own, but I'm even more impressed that the leadership team and the board were able to come to consensus to make this investment and take this risk. Absent the CEO they've had for two years, for the last two years, I can't imagine everyone was on board with this initially. So major kudos to everyone

• 15:05John Coogan?

  getting there eventually and taking this chance. This bodes well for their future IMO. And I agree. Like even with Gwyneth Paltrow, it feels so funny, but like there's this idea of like, let's, let's put out not a standard legal statement.

• 15:22John Coogan?

  Is feels risky and it's so easy for someone to step up and say, hey, like, let's not take this risk. It's not worth it.

• 15:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, they put out the quick statement that Pete was stepping back into the

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, they had put out a few statements, but clearly something, something was was clicking

• 15:36Jordi Hays?

  The question is, what should, what should Andy Byron, the CEO, having the affair?

• 15:41John Coogan?

  I think that's the best part about this video is that it doesn't take shots at him.

• 15:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:44John Coogan?

  It doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't punch down. It doesn't make it like, oh, it doesn't drag that in. It doesn't make it more complicated. And a lot of times when, when CEOs do get pushed out, there's like lawsuits about comp and was it fair to release people? And so there's like all these things that can come back. Like if you are, especially if you're a founder and you're going back into a company where you've hired a CEO, you should be, you should probably not be talking about that, that CEO. Because if you come out and say they were not good, and that's why I had to step back in, then that could hurt their career prospects. And then they could sue you for defamation or something like that. So there's a lot of risk to anything around that. All the corporate comms, like it is like, the lawyers

• 16:27John Coogan?

  are like annoying, but like, they do make a good point that like, there is financial impact if you get it wrong. So, very, very good. And then stay say says, I think we're going to find out that Chris Martin felt bad, asked Gwyneth Paltrow to help out, and they gave astronomer an offer to do damage control. My guess is that this is entertainment industry magic happening, not data tech magic. Hmm.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  Chris Martin wants to wants CEOs who are having affairs to feel welcome at his romantic concerts. He's like, this could be really bad for business. This could be bad for ticket sales. I have to go into damage control.

• 17:04John Coogan?

  I don't think Chris Martin's behind this. This is a ridiculous theory that this stay say, stay sassy or whatever. Logan says totally possible.

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  No, I do. I think there could be some, I think there could be something here. I

• 17:15John Coogan?

  I don't think so. I don't know. Like, why, why he feels bad that this just happened at his show?

• 17:20Jordi Hays?

  Chris Martin has the data. He might be like 10% of people at my concerts are having affairs.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  You the historian at Apache Airflow?

• 17:27Jordi Hays?

  Or yeah, maybe, maybe he just really cares about.

• 17:29John Coogan?

  All of his ticket sales are going through Apache airflow and he's monitoring it using astronomer. He's just like, no, my bags. I love this company. He's like, actually accidentally an investor as well through some fun. Maybe he's bank capital LP. Who knows? He might be at that level.

• 17:44Jordi Hays?

  Index. He might be heavily anchor GP.

• 17:47John Coogan?

  Anchor LP in index.

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  In Bane and Index.

• 17:51John Coogan?

  And to close out, Lulu said, for everyone asking me, this wasn't me. I do not work with astronomer, but I think it was very well done. Kudos to their team. And it says a lot about Lulu's brand that whenever good PR happens, people are like, Lulu's has to be behind this. It's, it's, it can only be her.

• 18:06Jordi Hays?

  It did scream Lulu.

• 18:08John Coogan?

  It did. It did. It did scream Lulu.

• 18:10Jordi Hays?

  I didn't, I didn't, um, I didn't ask her because I didn't want to know because like, I just like, you know.

• 18:16John Coogan?

  The mystery?

• 18:16Jordi Hays?

  I like the mystery. I mean, I feel like if I knew, I'd, I should probably say something, you know?

• 18:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, uh, let's shift gears. Let's tell you about Vanta. Automated 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.

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  Cheers to Vanta.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  In the other side of PR statements, the T app hack is an absolute disaster. This is.

• 18:47Jordi Hays?

  And their statement was a disaster.

• 18:49John Coogan?

  Their statement was a disaster. It does not seem that they're handling it well.

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  Somebody just informed me.

• 18:53John Coogan?

  Please.

• 18:53Jordi Hays?

  A friend of the show.

• 18:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:55Jordi Hays?

  That it was Ryan Reynolds agency that pulled it off.

• 18:58John Coogan?

  No way.

• 18:58Jordi Hays?

  Which makes total sense.

• 18:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, Ryan Reynolds.

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  The bridge between tech, Hollywood and tech.

• 19:03John Coogan?

  Oh, he's a master, master of craft. And I feel like he's done a number of those like solo direct camera shoots.

• 19:10Jordi Hays?

  So there's an article, Ryan Reynolds maximum effort ad agency turned Astronomers viral moment into marketing gold.

• 19:17John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 19:18Jordi Hays?

  The production company was involved with the latest astronomer video featuring Gwyneth Paltrow. The ad is being hailed as a masterclass in crisis PR.

• 19:26John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 19:28Jordi Hays?

  Astronomer, Fortune is saying astronomer got the last laugh.

• 19:32John Coogan?

  They did. They really did.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  Releasing it late on a Friday, too, is great. Shutting down the work week.

• 19:38John Coogan?

  Well, you don't want AWS to trade down too heavily on the news. You know, if you release that during market hours, it could be turmoil. Could trigger an entire market sell off. And last week, we had five back to back all time highs in the S and P 500. That's why we're wearing white suits.

• 19:52Jordi Hays?

  And we're wearing white suits because we have peace with Europe.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  Peace with Europe.

• 19:57Jordi Hays?

  Which we'll get into in a little bit, but let's talk about T. They released a statement.

• 20:02John Coogan?

  So quickly, the T app is an app that allows women to report red flags about men they are dating. It's based loosely on these, are we dating the same man reddits? And it's not been handling its crisis well. I don't know if you want to read the official statement.

• 20:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So they said at eight, at 6:44 a.m. PST on 7/25, we identified an unauthorized access to our systems and immediately launched a full investigation with assistance from external cybersecurity experts to understand the scope and impact of the incident. Here's what we know at this time. A legacy data storage system was compromised, resulting in unauthorized access to a data set from prior to February 2024. And so I think people were already kind of like fact checking this.

• 20:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  Because there's the date they said.

• 20:50John Coogan?

  Cause I remember you told me that they had 60 million users or something. And it was at the top of the app store. So you would assume that it was, it was at this crazy viral inflection point. And the amount of data that they were onboarding just in the past week was probably immense. But prior to February 2024, that's a long time ago. That's what 15, 16 months ago. Pretty, pretty distant. So maybe it is possible it was legacy data storage, but there's more posts that we're going to go into that kind of illuminate exactly what happened. But they say that the data set included 72,000 images, including 13,000 selfies and photo identification, including 13,000 selfies and photo identification submitted.

• 21:34John Coogan?

  What selfies and photo identification, like that's not like photo IDs, photo identification images, like that's not the correct phrasing for that. Submitted by users during account verification.

• 21:46Jordi Hays?

  All the reporting is that there's 13,000 photos leaked.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  Okay. So like 13,000 people got their stuff leaked, basically.

• 21:53Jordi Hays?

  Which feels much lower than than I think what what people had gen-

• 21:58John Coogan?

  People assumed if you had downloaded the app at any point in time, everything was leaked in that in that data set. But anyway, let's go into the PR response.

• 22:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, to be clear, they, I mean, it wasn't like they were hacked. They just like, they made, there was something that was publicly accessible.

• 22:16John Coogan?

  Yes, they apparently they were using a Google Firebase database, which is one of these kind of easy to spin up backends. Tyler, have you used it before?

• 22:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I actually used in high school, like the first ever mobile app I made, I used Firebase.

• 22:31John Coogan?

  I've used Firebase too.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Because you can basically do-

• 22:32Jordi Hays?

  Back when you were a real rookie.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  You can do off, you can do like normal databases, you can do like image storing.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  You have like everything in one platform.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  Got it. Yeah. And it's just like, but specifically Firebase is supposed to be designed as a database that you can access from the front end. So I believe the like most of the value prop is that you you you can focus a lot more on front end coding and still access data on the back end. And you kind of get all the routes out of the box or something.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's probably true. It's just like, it's like very simple to use.

• 23:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 23:08Speaker 03

  It's very easy. It's very easy to use with mobile.

• 23:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Isn't it competitor Parse? I think I think Ilya over at Matrix started Parse and sold that to Facebook. And then I think Firebase was kind of the the Google answer to to Parse. But the these ideas of like quick, easy to use mobile backends, not nearly as robust or scalable as something that's, you know, like a true enterprise, like AWS installation, but something that's certainly usable if you're trying to get up quickly, which kind of makes sense that if they launched this back in February of 2024, that they would have this quick and simple database. And then once they scaled, they might have moved to something else. So I don't know that that's wrong. It's just kind of the way that they wrote this was not great.

• 23:51John Coogan?

  So Lulu breaks it down. She says, eight things to note in the statement that T finally released about their data breach. No apology, really. They should have apologized for sure. Two, it dodges responsibility. They say legacy data storage systems, corporate speak.

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  And it's fundamentally dangerous to their users, right? If if if if random people online can identify this like single woman who's located at this address in this city.

• 24:19John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 24:20Jordi Hays?

  Like that, that's like, like the fact like the, the whole response was terrible. And the level.

• 24:28John Coogan?

  It's so much different from astronomer because like astronomer, you see the CEO doing something bad. You're like, well, he didn't leak my data. He didn't leak my API key. Like it would be honestly worse.

• 24:37Jordi Hays?

  It didn't hurt any of their users.

• 24:39John Coogan?

  No.

• 24:39Jordi Hays?

  Users are like, the product's solid.

• 24:41John Coogan?

  The product's solid. It's the same thing. Yeah, exactly.

• 24:43Jordi Hays?

  But this is like incredible incompetence to put personally identifiable information in a publicly, a publicly accessible database.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:52Jordi Hays?

  And then say, oh, uh, we were hacked.

• 24:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:55Jordi Hays?

  And don't even, and not even say sorry when you've, you've risked the safety of your users.

• 25:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:00Jordi Hays?

  And it's embarrassing, deeply embarrassing for these users.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  People are turning it into a, um, like king of the hill, uh, whatever.

• 25:08John Coogan?

  It was like hot or not.

• 25:09Jordi Hays?

  Hot or not product.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  They built that with like a, with like a leaderboard. And then they also built just a Google map that you could look at and see where everyone, like the pins on the map.

• 25:20John Coogan?

  Just completely extreme, way worse in my opinion than even having a credit card leaked, you know? This is like, uh, this is a dating site almost, or like it's dating site adjacent. And so it reveals something about you.

• 25:30Jordi Hays?

  Cancel a credit card, you can't cancel the fact that your ID.

• 25:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and everyone, everyone has a credit card or it's not, it's not some like secret thing. But like this question of like, were you checking on someone you were dating? It's like, where, did you have a trust issue with someone in your relationship that reflects something about you?

• 25:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:49John Coogan?

  And that's like something that people probably wouldn't want to share at all. Uh, especially not considering the vibe on the 4chan thread that was actually the precursor to all of this. So.

• 26:00Jordi Hays?

  So it's like, hey, we shared your, we shared your name, date of birth, address, driver's license number. But they didn't get your email.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. The, the government IDs, I hadn't seen anyone actually prove that that happened. That because it was unclear that like the IDs went out there. Maybe that's just locked down more.

• 26:21Jordi Hays?

  There was pictures of the IDs floating around.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  Oh, really? Okay. Rough, rough, rough. And so

• 26:26Jordi Hays?

  It was so, I mean, the, the timing was, was wild too, because last week I, I posted,

• 26:33Jordi Hays?

  I posted founder of T Dating was previously a product leader at Salesforce. Massive moment for big tech PMs. Never doubt them again. Obviously like poking fun at, you know, just like the idea that like, you know, people love to say like, oh, big tech PMs are just changing like

• 26:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 26:49Jordi Hays?

  The color of a button.

• 26:51John Coogan?

  But getting to the top of the App Store is impressive.

• 26:54Jordi Hays?

  Very hard to do.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  Nikita Beer or some college kid hacking an app together or a big tech PM or, you know, Mark Zuckerberg. It's always, it's always hard. It's a knockout, drag out fight on those leaderboards.

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

  Quick to say, I spoke too soon.

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  This, uh, but, uh,

• 27:09John Coogan?

  How many likes did the, I spoke too soon get?

• 27:11Jordi Hays?

  10K.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, always dunk on yourself. Don't let other people dunk.

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  We can go back to doubting big tech, big tech PMs and then until they can get back to the top of the App Store.

• 27:24John Coogan?

  But you gotta review your code. You gotta do it on graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub. I don't want to say that graphite would have prevented the situation, but

• 27:35Jordi Hays?

  But it might have.

• 27:36John Coogan?

  It might have. This is not a direct recommendation, but graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You should be on GitHub. You should be using graphite. You should be reviewing all the code for security purposes. So

• 27:49Jordi Hays?

  It would have been cooler if they came out and they were like, yeah, we never would review code. We actually wouldn't. We wouldn't actually, like reviewing code? Like that's why, why look back when you could look, just vibe code the future? Seems like that.

• 28:05John Coogan?

  So Lulu says, it's an obvious lie that they say, we have no evidence to suggest that photos can be linked to specific users. Photo identification is the definition of photos linked to specific users. This sentence almost felt too stupid, too type, too slow. The internet has already memed you five feet into the ground, yet only now are you issuing a statement and it still looks rushed. The information here is still minimal and inconsistent and the statement is rife with run on sentences and other syntax errors. Brutal. Weasley passing of the buck saying the data was stored in accordance with law enforcement requirements related to cyberbullying investigations implies that law enforcement is to blame for their negligence.

• 28:45John Coogan?

  High fluff ratio with empty euphemisms like robust and secure solution. These words inform us of nothing. It's accountability theater. Yeah, they should just say like, hey, we don't use, you know, public firebase buckets anymore. We've moved on to Postgres with a lot of security and two factor authentication or something.

• 29:04Jordi Hays?

  We use secure databases now. We used to not use them.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  Be much more specific.

• 29:10Jordi Hays?

  Here's the question I have is however many women were impacted, I imagine they will, it's pretty easy to identify who they are. And I imagine lawyers are reaching out to them and saying, let's file a class action against T app for damages. I think there's real damages here, right? These, it's like public embarrassment, safety concerns, et cetera. And it's maybe hard to prove like direct monetary damages, but it looks bad. There's definitely some, some, some type of case here. And so however well the T app is doing in the app store.

• 29:48John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. Is it still up? We gotta look that up. You look up the T app rankings. I will keep reading from Lulu. She says.

• 29:55Jordi Hays?

  Still number one in lifestyle.

• 30:00John Coogan?

  Steph Legalese written by a phalanx of lawyers.

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  Four and a half stars.

• 30:03John Coogan?

  She says she's confident that blank is of the utmost importance to us is not a sentence that has ever been spontaneously said out loud by a real person in human history and not taking lessons from previous data breaches. There are so many cases, case studies of bad statements, including crowd strikes below. Learn from them.

• 30:24Jordi Hays?

  So chat GPT is back at number one. T dating is still at number two.

• 30:29John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 30:30Jordi Hays?

  To have that viral of a, of a hack, as they called it, or just a, a release of your users' data, as some might call it.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  At the same time, you know, you're going viral for getting hacked. You're also, you know, driving attention of attention and people are like, okay, I will.

• 30:46Jordi Hays?

  I better check it out.

• 30:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, better check it out. Or, or I'll take my selfie with professional lighting. So if it leaks.

• 30:52Jordi Hays?

  I want to be at the top of the hot or not.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  That was my, that was my lesson. I was looking at some of the selfies and I was just like. Like, people are dunking on these for a variety of reasons, but the real lesson is like, if you ever have to take a verification photo for a selfie, get a nice soft box, Colin.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  Wear a suit.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  Wear a suit, put on some makeup.

• 31:09Jordi Hays?

  Fill your hair and makeup down professionally.

• 31:11John Coogan?

  Make sure you got some powder, yeah, exactly. You want to be looking good if you're taking the future leaked selfies so that you look fantastic. There was a guy who got a mugshot and became a model. You heard about this guy? 14, 2014, a guy was a, I think he was a member of the Crips. He was arrested on some, I think legitimate charges. He was sent to jail. But he was absolutely serving in his mugshot. You know this guy?

• 31:41Jordi Hays?

  No, I just never would have thought I'd hear you say the word.

• 31:43John Coogan?

  Pull up hot mugshot guy, guarantee you'll find it.

• 31:45Jordi Hays?

  I'd never thought I'd hear you say the word.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  Serving. He was serving. No, he really like, it was just like, looks like Tyler Cosgrove in the upcoming ad, looks like future male model. And he became a future male model.

• 31:59Jordi Hays?

  So we shot an ad and Tyler's the star.

• 32:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 32:03Jordi Hays?

  We're not in it at all. And after this drops, if Tyler...

• 32:06John Coogan?

  Look at this guy. Look at this guy.

• 32:07Jordi Hays?

  He's serving?

• 32:07John Coogan?

  He's serving, right? So this went super viral and all these, tons of people were like, this guy's so hot, blah, blah, blah. He became an actual model and he married or had kids with or dated like the heir to a multi-billion dollar fortune.

• 32:23Jordi Hays?

  Never give up. Never give up.

• 32:26John Coogan?

  Never give up. You're just one mugshot away from fame.

• 32:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a better life.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  Tyler, physics doesn't work out, maybe crime and then mugshots and then modeling.

• 32:36Jordi Hays?

  Don't do petty crime.

• 32:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, victimless crime. The best crime.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, victimless crime, like, go to a CVS and break the glass and get like a one stick of deodorant and then stand outside and get arrested.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  But look really good.

• 32:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then give the deodorant back.

• 32:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, have a little pump going, be in shape when you take the mug shots, you look great. But, uh, back to the T app. We were talking about how much money they were making. And this is what, this is apparently from Nosy Bystanders. I got the T app. Who y'all looking for in what city? Charging $1 a search. Okay, okay, okay. I thought, I thought that Nosy Bystanders was saying that, that every time you searched on the T app, it was $1, which would be crazy monetization. But I guess Nosy Bystanders is saying that they will search for you for a dollar.

• 33:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, look up, uh, your, uh, whatever, whatever dudes.

• 33:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:29Jordi Hays?

  You know, you're interested in learning about.

• 33:31John Coogan?

  Looking at these dudes, I like this guy with the basketball. He's, looks like a good dude, you know? I don't know. I'll reserve, uh, I'll reserve my judgment once I see his full profile.

• 33:40Jordi Hays?

  What I don't understand is how do they, how do they source those images?

• 33:45John Coogan?

  Uh, I, I think the, I think the users upload them. So I go there and I say, I had a bad experience with this person.

• 33:52Jordi Hays?

  This makes me think, just burn the whole app down.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 33:56Jordi Hays?

  Because going and, and taking.

• 33:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:59Jordi Hays?

  Like, yeah, I don't know.

• 34:00John Coogan?

  So this was the debate that was happening on Hacker News that I kind of scrolled through. So the, the pro T app camp would say that this is about safety and that this app is effective for, um, identifying and like abusive men. And so a woman, uh, is in a relationship with a man. The man hits the woman. She leaves the relationship and she wants to let other women know that, hey, this guy might hit you if you get into a relationship with him. So she gets on the app and says, I was dating Bob. Bob hit me and it's all true. And that acts as a warning. And so that's increasing the amount of safety in like the dating marketplace. Now, the flip side is that, uh,

• 34:44Jordi Hays?

  Somebody could get their feelings hurt and do the same thing.

• 34:47John Coogan?

  So people could lie and say, this person hit me when they didn't, because there isn't the abundance, preponderance of evidence that is required in the courts. But then also you, on the T app, you could put red flags that weren't. Actually related to things that are like, like illegal or deemed by society to be that bad. So, uh, the flaw, like the flags could be like ghosted me, which is like impolite, but not, not at the same level as domestic abuse, clearly. Uh, and one of the flags apparently was just is bald. So it's like, if a guy shows up with a toupee and you get rugged, no pun intended.

• 35:25Jordi Hays?

  Hey, let's, uh, that's wrong. That's wrong.

• 35:29John Coogan?

  Let's support our bald brethren. You got Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen. You got some of the absolute boys.

• 35:36Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, Charli X.

• 35:38John Coogan?

  Charli XCX?

• 35:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. She just, she just married.

• 35:41John Coogan?

  She dates a bald guy?

• 35:41Jordi Hays?

  She just married a bald guy.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  Married a bald guy. Great. I love the bald.

• 35:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Some of the greatest men in history were bald.

• 35:48John Coogan?

  And so, and so the point is, is that like, there's this question of like, is it an app for increasing safety? Is it an app for just talking trash and being mean? And that's kind of the debating line and no one really knows what percentage of reports were real and what percentage of reports were actually based on, uh, like things that truly crossed the line. Because if, if the app is 99% people complaining about people showing up to dates with toupees when they're secretly bald, like that's kind of ridiculous. And I guess you are getting catfished in one in some way, but it just doesn't feel.

• 36:19Jordi Hays?

  What if he has a flight to Turkey planned?

• 36:21John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 36:22Jordi Hays?

  What if it's on the roadmap?

• 36:23John Coogan?

  Exactly. Exactly. So.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  And you could, it didn't even give him a chance because.

• 36:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, and so there's a, there's a world where some, some pieces of the app were very helpful and they increased safety. And there's others where they were basically just like cyber bullying each other and it was all just a mess. Either way, uh, all of that starts with good security on the app.

• 36:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:43John Coogan?

  Like you can't even have that conversation when you're just leaking everyone's data.

• 36:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The, uh, there was an app, um, I forget what it was called, but I, anytime you have these like anonymous apps.

• 36:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:55Jordi Hays?

  They're just prime for cyberbullying.

• 36:57John Coogan?

  There's a huge trend of this. They used to go viral at South by Southwest post-social networking boom. So Twitter originally went viral at South by Southwest. I think Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, they stood up on stage and they said, hey, we're launching this new app. It's Twitter. You can text this number. And whatever you tweeted in that conference room would go up on the board that they were live streaming, basically. And it was like, it took over South by Southwest and then they got their early adopters and then it became what it is today. And now it has hundreds of millions of users, right? And then Foursquare did the same thing.

• 37:30Jordi Hays?

  And billions of bots.

• 37:31John Coogan?

  There were a few, yeah, there were a few other companies that were able to do it. And then after a while, the, the, the kind of like, the, the area of opportunity and like, the, the shape that it became more narrow and more narrow. So like, Foursquare made a lot of sense to launch it South by Southwest. I don't know if they actually did, but that, that type of thing, because it's like, I'm checking in at this, at this, this stage for this show. Or this bar for this party. Then, then they became more anonymous and there were a couple other apps. And then the anonymous apps would go viral on college campuses and they would inevitably be kind of used for cyberbullying of one kind or another.

• 38:12John Coogan?

  And so, um, always been, always been a mess, but at the very least, you got to lock down the user data. There was a funny, funny post on Hacker News I was reading about this where someone was like, I want to set up a, an app for, uh, people who enjoy doxing other people. And so it's a place where you can go to congregate with other people who enjoy doxing.

• 38:32Jordi Hays?

  The dox community.

• 38:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, the dox community. So if you're into doxing, you can go there and like, connect with other people who enjoy doxing. But when you sign up, you're instantly doxed and you show up on a different website that says I doxed myself. And so it's like, hey.

• 38:45Jordi Hays?

  I'm a doxer.

• 38:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, we just need your, we just need your address, your phone number, your ID, your image, your selfie, a bunch of photos. And then it just goes immediately public. And so it's like a doxing honeypot. It's very silly. So it was like, I was gonna vibe code this, but I don't have time. So somebody else can do it. Anyway, DHH has some good analysis, the founder of Basecamp, the legendary programmer, the creator of Ruby on Rails,

• 39:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's, um, the, um, we just, we just got a text from a friend of the show about a friend of the show.

• 39:16Jordi Hays?

  And apparently, um, someone, uh, this person wanted to build a Yelp for people. Oh, yeah. Which is actually, which is actually like, that's basically what T app is.

• 39:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  It's just like very one sided, has this like dating, dating market focus, but it would be really funny if, if, if there was just a public database.

• 39:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:37Jordi Hays?

  People could review John Coogan and just say like,

• 39:41John Coogan?

  Well, I mean,

• 39:41Jordi Hays?

  I don't like that he hype mogged me at that conference. He knew, he knew exactly what he was doing.

• 39:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, like, there's something weird about like, anything that's anonymous like this, it just kind of goes to this like negative world, this negative realm. Interestingly, Nikita Beer's app, GASS, even though it's not around, or I don't think it's thriving anymore, but I thought it was interesting that, that he, you could not do free text response. So I couldn't say Jordy looks bad in a white suit or something like that. I could only choose from four positive things. And so it was like enforced positivity. And then I could be relative. I could say like, well, he's more, you know, intelligent than charismatic or more charismatic than intelligent.

• 40:25John Coogan?

  And I could kind of pick from different positive traits, which gave you a relative landscape of compliments. But it, but it kind of, it kind of prevented that like cyber bullying because you could only say nice things. You could just say different nice things. And then I think, I think that's what led to it going viral and, and doing very well. And so, uh, there clearly are ways to work around some of these odd edges and we see them pop up in other, in other ways. We talked about it a lot with like the LLM stuff with like, you know, Stuff comes out, like social networking exists, the App Store exists, the ability to import photos and stuff exists, like, how do you use that stuff? Like, technology can be good, it can be bad, it can be misused. When does, when does the government step in?

• 41:06Jordi Hays?

  When, when stuff goes anonymous, it gets pretty dark and negative quickly.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:11Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 41:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it, there's something, there's something about not having.

• 41:15Jordi Hays?

  That's why, like, if somebody's, if somebody's talking badly about a certain investor online and not willing to, like, show their face.

• 41:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:24Jordi Hays?

  You have to discount it massively.

• 41:25John Coogan?

  A lot.

• 41:25Jordi Hays?

  Cause it's like, okay, was this founder, like, rejected by that firm once? And now they have, they feel like they were wronged and like their entire worldview is, like, oriented around that.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it gets very odd. Anyway, let's finish with the T app because there's an interesting conspiracy theory we gotta go through, we gotta put on the tinfoil hat. So first off, DHH, founder of Ruby on Rails, founder of Basecamp, says, "The T app having all its user data leaked was bad. Now imagine a porn site with age verification tying viewing history to a specific identity. I'm sure no hacker or government agency would ever have interest in such data." So he is very worried about that. And then he also says, "Web app users would be shocked to learn that 99% of the time, deleting your data just sets a flag in the database and then it lives there forever until it's hacked or subpoenaed." This is because a lot of, a lot of users demand this, like, "Oh, I, I didn't mean to delete it, can you undelete it?" And they're like, "Yeah, we can, actually, we didn't delete it, we didn't fully delete."

• 42:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, this, this, so, totally, totally random, but over the weekend I noticed, so, so, in Sam's interview with Theo Von.

• 42:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:31Jordi Hays?

  Or Theo Von's interview of Sam, he just kind of casually mentioned, he's like, "Oh, yeah, by the way."

• 42:36John Coogan?

  I've been thinking about this.

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  So he's like, "By the way, like, every single thing that you say on ChatGPT can be used against you in a court of law and there's nothing we can do about it." And he said, like, "We need new laws."

• 42:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:48Jordi Hays?

  But it felt like something that, the kind of thing that, like, he should probably have been, like, lobbying to create those new laws.

• 42:55John Coogan?

  Completely disagree.

• 42:57Jordi Hays?

  So, so, so, yes, maybe, like, po- public warning, like, "Hey, by the way, anything you say to ChatGPT can be used against you in a court of law."

• 43:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:06Jordi Hays?

  Like, could, could be done, could be done at the app, could be done at the app layer?

• 43:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 43:10Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that, that? And you think it's like going and just yelling about it, you know?

• 43:16John Coogan?

  So, so basically, I think that that was a sort of like a PR blunder in the sense that what he should have said is like, hey, ChatGPT, exact same rules as Facebook and Google Sheets and email and everything else. Nothing's different about it. It's all the same. Instead, he didn't make it clear that he's under the same rules as everything else. And it would have been so much easier to start there with that, hey, you know, we're a website that stores what you taught. The text that you type into that box goes into a database and that database can be subpoenaed like any other website, any other website. You, you, like, if you commit a crime, they can go look in your bank account, they can go look

• 44:00John Coogan?

  in your email. Like, this is something that is, that is, they're not unique. And, and the way it was phrased in that interaction, it felt like ChatGPT was uniquely subpoenaable. And it's not. It's the same as everything else.

• 44:12Jordi Hays?

  Same as iMessage.

• 44:13John Coogan?

  Yes, the same as everything else. And so, and so, yes, there are end to end encrypted apps where if the FBI can't unlock your phone or the Signal messages delete, they can't get access to them. That's, that's one thing.

• 44:26Jordi Hays?

  So all the headlines now are, personal conversations could be used against you in lawsuits.

• 44:31John Coogan?

  And it's the exact same thing with Gmail. It's the exact same thing with, with Facebook messages. And it's the exact same thing with, you know, saving a TXT file on your Mac. Like, like, imagine if Tim Cook came out and was on the Theo Von Show and was like, oh, yeah, like, it's really interesting, but like, all the files in your computer, like, the, the government could like,

• 44:50Jordi Hays?

  That could be evidence.

• 44:51John Coogan?

  That could be evidence. And it's like, yeah, obviously. Or like, you know, anyone, we talked about this with like, the papers in here, if, if the SWAT team comes through, they can take these. Like, they could legally, they can take this. They can take this newspaper and see, oh, what was John reading? Was he reading about crimes? Was, they can link this. Maybe I was circling like, oh, do crime. Like, you know, maybe there's a, maybe there's an article in here about how to do crime. And I was reading that. Like, that would be admissible in the court of law. It's no different. And he didn't,

• 45:19Jordi Hays?

  Friend of the show says, iMessage can't be subpoenaed if you Have them on auto delete.

• 45:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 45:24Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't store them.

• 45:24John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes, that's true. And iMessage is end to end encrypted in a way that iMessage doesn't. Apple doesn't have a server. Apple doesn't have the messages stored on their server. This is the same for WhatsApp with encryption. But again, it's it's not a like. Like, I don't think the expectation should have ever been that ChatGPT was end to end encrypted because they've never said that. Why would that be the expectation? I mean, I get that people don't understand how inference happens, but you hear, oh, my, my, everyone's talking about the water, you know, usage and the energy usage. It's like, where do you think your prompt is going? Do you think it's happening on device securely? Like, do you think that's that's what I mean? I understand people don't people don't get it. Like, it is complicated.

• 46:09John Coogan?

  Like, we we we talked to Ben Thompson, semi analysis all day long. We understand this stuff. But he could have done a lot better.

• 46:15Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it would be hard to avoid the headline in general of saying your ChatGPT conversations could be used against you because somebody could extrapolate that.

• 46:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Jordi Hays?

  From even if you just said all consumer tech.

• 46:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 46:29Jordi Hays?

  Can be can be subpoenaed.

• 46:31John Coogan?

  Yes. And so and so on the law side, what I would advocate for is if OpenAI wants to release something that is like a tiny box or a device or a Johnny Ive device that does the inference locally or does it in a secure encrypted end to end with deletion, like like methodology, basically, like like it's secure. That would be a great product and people might want that. And that's what George Hatz is advocating for.

• 46:59Jordi Hays?

  For a specific therapy.

• 47:01John Coogan?

  We've even seen these memes.

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  A like, you know, a specific product for therapy, a specific product for legal work.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  Oh, totally, totally.

• 47:08Jordi Hays?

  There's.

• 47:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, but right now there's no way to do that unless I bet you if you figured out how to run the inference some way in an email chain with your lawyer, like you could actually make that attorney client privileged.

• 47:26John Coogan?

  I don't know exactly how that would work, but I'm pretty sure if like, imagine, imagine if every chat GPT request, I email my lawyer and I say, I need you to prompt this and then send it back to me. That would be attorney, attorney client privileged. And, and if I did that for my, like a therapist as well, if I went to a therapist and I said, like, here's the prompt that I want you to run and then send it back to me, that would probably be like privileged in a medical context. But the idea that chat GPT just out of the box would be, would be privileged in some way should not, he should not have set the expectations there when he, when he talked about that. The, the, the flip side is of course,

• 48:07John Coogan?

  yeah, this on-device, there's even that meme that we were talking about the, the, if you didn't, if, if your AI girlfriend isn't running locally, that's not your girlfriend, right? Like, like, that's a good way to, to relay that information. But OpenAI doesn't have a product for that yet. And so it was kind of an odd way to, to noodle that out. But I think people will learn and I think people will, will, understanding this. Anyway, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. You can start building at linear.app. DHH was talking about how he implemented, how he built Hey and Basecamp,

• 48:52John Coogan?

  especially when it comes to deleting log files, database backups and other anc auxiliary copies of your stuff. Most companies just hang on to until the sun burns out.

• 49:01Jordi Hays?

  What if, what if DHH built this so well and so secure that it's just the most loved email provider in, for narco terrorism?

• 49:10John Coogan?

  That's always the risk. Yeah, I mean, you, you talked to Moxie Marlin Spike who built Signal.

• 49:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he says, content can't be recovered once it has been permanently deleted.

• 49:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, yeah, it really is massive effort.

• 49:23Jordi Hays?

  Any enterprising.

• 49:24John Coogan?

  It's not just a flag on the database because that data also goes to the log files, also goes in the database backup. So let's say that you imagine that you're like, yeah, of course we back up our data to another, another cloud storage provider. We serve most of our users on AWS, but just in case AWS goes out, every month we archive all of our data and we send it over to Google Cloud Platform, GCP. It's like, that would be amazing. I wouldn't lose my data. But now, if I want to delete my data, I have to delete it in two places. Well, what if you're exporting it to tape drives and putting in Iron Mountain? Like, this is a thing companies do. Like, of course, like, I want to have triple backups. But now you have to go delete my data from AWS and then from GCB.

• 50:04Jordi Hays?

  We should do a deep dive on how, like, you know, all the different backup methodologies.

• 50:09John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:10Jordi Hays?

  Including, uh, there has to be some real moats involved. People usually talk about moats in the context of, you know, strategic, uh, but like, if you had an moat full of alligators, securing, you know, a handful of, you know, large, hard drives.

• 50:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:27Jordi Hays?

  Could be something there.

• 50:28John Coogan?

  We gotta find a, we gotta find a house with a moat. I'm sure it's out there. It's gonna come up. I feel like the mansion section of the WSJ is like...

• 50:34Jordi Hays?

  Our next studio, when we do the ground up build.

• 50:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, moat, for sure.

• 50:38Jordi Hays?

  Get a big enough property to have a moat.

• 50:39John Coogan?

  Definitely.

• 50:40Jordi Hays?

  It's so hard to get a moat these days in business. One of the easiest ways is to just physically build one.

• 50:45John Coogan?

  Everyone needs a moat. It just sets you up for the mindset of having a moat. Anyway, we gotta put on the tinfoil hat for this one.

• 50:52Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna give this one to you because I don't, I don't, uh, I don't buy this.

• 50:55John Coogan?

  You don't buy this, okay. There's something really weird about the T hack geocode data and I'm having trouble putting my finger on it. Dirty Texas Hedge says, "I hate making speculative accusations, but the most..."

• 51:06Jordi Hays?

  Which is name hedge dirty.

• 51:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, weird.

• 51:09Jordi Hays?

  Sounds a little...

• 51:11John Coogan?

  "I hate posting wild conspiracy theories, but here goes. But the most explanatory theory for this data is investor fraud of a particularly ingenious form." Again, this is a speculative theory, so take it as such. "First, the most likely explanation for the geographic pattern described is that the data is fake and randomly generated. If you want to, it's not, it's now not particularly difficult to mass generate realistic photos with whatever metadata you want." The other reason to suspect this data is fake is if tens of thousands of women had data exposed, the internet would be awash in horror stories of incel trolls trying to ruin their lives and crickets. And I feel like there's something there where if you were in the 75,000

• 51:53John Coogan?

  that apparently got leaked, and you put a, and you put a TikTok out that says, I was one of the people that was hacked. It's like, it only has to be one out of the 75K that comes forward and says like, I'm, I'm affected. I'm being trolled. Like, support me. Here's my GoFundMe. Help me pay for a new social security number or whatever.

• 52:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but all these people speculating, have they talked to any of the women affected? It's, it's also, it wasn't, yeah, it wasn't, you know, the, um, the IDs are real.

• 52:22John Coogan?

  We know that?

• 52:24Jordi Hays?

  The, I mean, so you're saying, you're saying, uh, I saw images of the ID.

• 52:29John Coogan?

  You can just generate a fake, you can generate a fake real ID, or like a fake, a fake image of an ID that looks real. Like, how would you actually validate?

• 52:36Jordi Hays?

  I don't understand what the theory here, they were buying app downloads to get to the top of the chart, and then they, they generated a bunch of fake, and they had a fake data leak.

• 52:45John Coogan?

  So this happened with Carly Javis? Do you remember this?

• 52:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so this, you're talking about Frank. So Patrick McKenzie's in the comments here. I remember Frank selling one of the world's largest financial institutions, a list of users who were not actually users, and in many cases didn't actually exist. So this was a company that was like a, like, Gen Z finance, bank, uh, platform, sold to, I think, JP Morgan. And then JP Morgan realized post-acquisition that it wasn't, like, the, the users weren't real people. Um, but I don't understand the-

• 53:14John Coogan?

  Brian Lackey's in here, and he, and he, he is confirming that some of the IDs are real, because you can Google the names and they don't seem hallucinated by an LLM. And also, if this is from 2024, the AI image generation technology was much worse back then. So I think there would be more tells of like, you look in the background and you see some sort of like nonsense.

• 53:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just don't understand. Like, you have to argue here that like, they bought a bunch of bot farm downloads and that's why they're charting and they're not actually at the top of the charts and they were, and then he, he did a fake data leak.

• 53:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:46Jordi Hays?

  To try to-

• 53:46John Coogan?

  Jeff Lonsdale is in here and has a funny one who says, "So they were sloppy with some fake geocoding, but dead on in their generation of the images themselves."

• 53:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think the argument for the geocoding data is like, they possibly set it up in a way where they just said where, what city the person is in. Cause even on the map they show, it doesn't give, it just puts a pin on the local town.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  So, so the problem with the, uh, with, with that theory is that if you look at the map, it's, it's like, it's distributed like almost based on geographic space. As opposed to population space. So you would expect like Manhattan to be flooded and you would expect Los Angeles to be flooded and Chicago, like the big cities. But instead, if you trace the, the lines, you'll just have like a random user, you'll have like one user in, you'll have one user in Los Angeles and then like one, one user like on the five. Every five miles, all the way up to, all the way up to San Francisco. And you know that from driving through, if you drive from LA to San Francisco, it's like LA is massive.

• 54:49John Coogan?

  San Francisco is massive. There's some stuff in Bakersfield and then it's like four hours of nothingness basically and like farmland. And so the idea that you'd have just as many users out in the middle of California as opposed to in the, in the, in like the, the, like the hotspots. Uh, or like the, the, the population dense places is weird, but there are maybe examples for that where maybe the data was filtered and the data that was leaked was, was sort of like. Some sort of distribution based on location. Exactly. But ideally, in theory, if you did random sampling on basically any app with 60 million users, you would see major, major clusters around big population centers.

• 55:28John Coogan?

  So it was a little odd. Um, so, uh, an app that with fake data is most likely trying to defraud investors.

• 55:36Jordi Hays?

  We didn't need to expose-

• 55:36John Coogan?

  But they didn't really raise that much. So it's kind of like, who did they do this for? Maybe they did this-

• 55:40Jordi Hays?

  I don't know that they raised at all.

• 55:41John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah. And so, yeah. I mean, maybe there's the, maybe the theory is like they, they do this fake data. They try and go out and raise for it. They couldn't raise, but then they left the fake data up and then the fake data gets leaked. But the weird thing is that like, why would you leave your fake data like dump that you generated like still accessible and hackable? Like that's weird. And so you have to really get into like 4D chess mode. So I'm giving this tinfoil hat conspiracy, uh, two tinfoil hats out of five.

• 56:07Jordi Hays?

  Two out of five.

• 56:08John Coogan?

  Two out of five.

• 56:09Jordi Hays?

  That's a lot of hats, John.

• 56:10John Coogan?

  Forty percent? That's a failure. What would you give it? You give it zero? You don't buy any of it? I'm still, I'm still a little weirded out just seeing the geocode.

• 56:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the geocode data is weird, but there's so many other explanations other than like you have to make so many leaps from that point.

• 56:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, if you have users that are in a whole bunch of different geocodes, you gotta pay sales tax. You gotta get on numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance at numeralhq.com. Mark Cuban and you got in a fight, a knockout, drag out fight. The timeline was in turmoil. If you're listening, you're welcome on the show. We'd love to debate this with you in person, but I will be playing the steel man for this debate. I will be arguing in favor of banning AI ads. So we've been in AI ad turmoil before because we had, uh, the CEO of Perplexity on the show. Asked him, said, hey, we love ads. We love ads on this show. We would love for you to run ads. We're all pro ads here.

• 57:11John Coogan?

  He said, yeah, maybe we'll run some ads and TechCrunch took it out of context and said, perplexity is going to put ads everywhere. Uh, which maybe they should, uh, but clearly people have a visceral reaction to ads. The classic stated preference versus revealed preference. Everyone says they hate products that have ads in them. And in fact, they use products that have ads in them all the time.

• 57:31Jordi Hays?

  We call that one, one example where we are both happy to pay for X to not have ads.

• 57:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 57:37Jordi Hays?

  In X.

• 57:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 57:39Jordi Hays?

  But my, one, one reason that, that I feel that way is that X, X programmatic ads were just never that great. I cannot remember a single time that I purchased a product because I got it. Got an ad for it on X.

• 57:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:53Jordi Hays?

  So this all started so.

• 57:55John Coogan?

  Really quickly, what's really weird about the X ads is that I feel like if I could turn back the clock and I was in charge of like good X ads, like I would have just been seeing, is this a straw man hat? Why do I have the straw man hat on?

• 58:09Jordi Hays?

  Because you're siding with.

• 58:11John Coogan?

  Cuban?

• 58:12Jordi Hays?

  Cuban.

• 58:12John Coogan?

  No, that's the steel man. I'm steel manning.

• 58:14Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you're steel manning.

• 58:14John Coogan?

  So I will be putting on the steel man. The straw man is for an argument that no one is making.

• 58:18Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 58:19John Coogan?

  It's because it's a fake argument.

• 58:21Jordi Hays?

  Get the steel, get the steel helmet.

• 58:22John Coogan?

  But first I want to talk about X ads. I feel like if X ads were going to be great or had become great, it would have looked like a hard advertiser lineup. Like I should have been scrolling my feed and seeing like Ramp, Linear, Graphite, Figma, Vanta, you know, these, these companies should have been the ones because that's like, like the enterprise SaaS buyer is absolutely on, was on Twitter and still is on X. And yet for some reason, those ads, it feels like the natural place. It feels even better to advertise an enterprise SaaS product on X to Teapot as opposed to, or just tech Twitter broadly,

• 59:03John Coogan?

  as opposed to on Instagram, because you're right there. Yes, it's going to be very low conversion because you're mobile, you're just kind of scrolling, you're looking at random texts, you're not in enterprise buying. But in terms of just building name recognition, it feels like that should have been like a growing category of ads. But instead, the ads were always these like very low tier, like slop, Timu level products.

• 59:26Jordi Hays?

  Ecom.

• 59:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I saw a lot of these, like it's a projector that shines like a universe on your, on your, like, have you seen these?

• 59:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 59:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like a projector that shines a universe on your.

• 59:38Jordi Hays?

  It's simulating a sunrise.

• 59:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, on your, on your ceiling. It was like, it was completely irrelevant.

• 59:43Jordi Hays?

  So backstory, July 26.

• 59:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 59:47Jordi Hays?

  Mark Cuban hits the timeline.

• 59:49John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 59:49Jordi Hays?

  1:27 on a Saturday. Hey, David Sacks. My one request is that we make it.

• 59:55John Coogan?

  You missed the space. Hey, David Sacks, space, comma.

• 59:57Jordi Hays?

  My one request is that we make it illegal for AI models to offer advertising. And we need to really examine referral fees as well. The last thing we need is to have algorithms designed to maximize revenue, driving LLM output and interactions. I would just say here, every for-profit company is set up to maximize revenue, regardless of how they... Like, that is the goal of a... I guess you could argue that OpenAI is a nonprofit. But, he says, "They are already recommending brands, and we don't know if they're getting paid for it." "We need to have learned our lessons from algos in social media." Pull out the helmet, John.

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  This thing is so intense. It has a...

• 1:00:42Jordi Hays?

  I'm not gonna be able to...

• 1:00:43John Coogan?

  It has a lock on it for some reason?

• 1:00:45Jordi Hays?

  That's great, that's great. And so, I started by saying, "Guy who made his money selling ads online wants to ban selling ads online." There we go. John is locked in.

• 1:00:59John Coogan?

  I need to strap it in fully this time, because last time it was shaking around a lot and I had to...

• 1:01:04Jordi Hays?

  Shontanu in the chat says, "Dude, I'm in a test flight for an ad-based AI chat router mobile app for free reasoning. We'll ship by next week."

• 1:01:17John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:01:18Jordi Hays?

  That's cool. They're coming, they're coming.

• 1:01:20John Coogan?

  Okay, so, the argument for banning AI...

• 1:01:22Jordi Hays?

  Can you put it on fully, please? You gotta put it on full, John, there we go.

• 1:01:26John Coogan?

  The argu... Can you hear me okay?

• 1:01:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can hear you fine.

• 1:01:28John Coogan?

  The argument for banning advertising in AI chat-based models is the same argument for banning not just TikTok, but all short-form video, all brain-rot apps, all slop apps. So, many people, when they make the argument that TikTok should be banned, they make it based on geopolitical considerations between China and America. And they say that TikTok is spyware, or TikTok could be manipulated by the CCP to change political preferences in the United States, or potentially do something harmful to the American population, get them less focused on math and basically creating shareholder value,

• 1:02:12John Coogan?

  and instead, more focused on just arguing with each other about whatever's viral that day. And there's this famous example of like, oh, well, like the TikTok in China just shows you math and education videos and the TikTok in the US shows you like, you know, random, you know, slop stuff and controversial videos to get you to never stop watching. And so you have to put all that aside because this is not a geopolitical discussion. This is a discussion of business models. But there are people too who argue that it's not just TikTok and you should go farther and you should in fact ban YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels and

• 1:02:54Jordi Hays?

  Ban video. Ban video if it's short and vertical.

• 1:02:57John Coogan?

  Yes, and the reason is that

• 1:02:59Jordi Hays?

  It's a terrible drug for the mind.

• 1:03:02John Coogan?

  It is addictive and it leads people to drop out and stop focusing on, you know, longer, more thoughtful things. We need to go back to reading books. We need to go back to watching films, something you're not familiar with. You need, we need to appreciate the arts, we need to appreciate craft, and there's no craft in a 60-second vertical video. And therefore, similarly, how did we get to short-form vertical video, these endless timelines, these endless scrolls? We got there through advertising. We got there because the longer that I can keep you on the app, the more ads I can show you, the more money I can make. So it's this natural economic impulse.

• 1:03:45John Coogan?

  And so if we do this with LLMs, the models will no longer be optimizing against giving you the most concise answer, allowing you to move on with your day. They will be baiting you into endlessly chatting with them all day long, take you down some crazy rabbit hole. You'll just have asked, you know, something basic like, I don't know, like, how do I tie my shoes? And then all of a sudden, it's like giving you the history of shoes and taking you over here and telling you about the controversial nature of certain shoes and blah, blah, blah. And you'll just be sucked into this, you'll tune out of everyday life, you won't be talking to your friends, you won't be talking to your loved ones, and you'll become obsessed

• 1:04:29John Coogan?

  with your phone, you will be obsessed with your LLM, and you will ultimately be brain-rotted on steroids. To George Hotz's point, imagine a future where you have 10 CIA agents

• 1:04:45Jordi Hays?

  Convincing you to buy. Convincing you to buy things. At all times. And so that is the. So, yeah, so relevant post here from Rune, obviously, he's conflicted. I, you have to imagine Fiji Simo will roll out an ads product at some point. Yes. Open AI. Rune says advertising is far more aligned business model than many others. It has been vilified for years for no good reason. User minutes maximizing addiction slop would exist with or without it. Yes. And the reason for that is like you'd have a subscription based product. And there's still an incentive for the company to try to get you to use the product more than any other products. So that you keep your subscription. Yes. And you upgrade to higher tiers and things like that. Read his example.

• 1:05:29Jordi Hays?

  He says Netflix CEO with subscription pricing only on record saying we're competing with sleep. It's true. And, and I think Netflix, they do have an ad supported model or they've considered it. They've considered rolling. Only in the last year. But that was at a time when he said we're competing with sleep. Rune says oftentimes when going on Instagram, the ads are more immediately high utility than the reels. It's pretty incredible when you can monetize the user in a way that actually values adds value to their life. This opinion is basically a relic of the late 2010s consensus that Facebook is an evil company, but has more to do with them than advertising generally.

• 1:06:09Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, he says people misattribute this incentive problem to ads when it's native to all web scale products. And so, yeah, my, my general take is that

• 1:06:20Jordi Hays?

  AI is simultaneously very similar to other consumer tech products in the sense that ads have been the primary economic engine of the internet to make products free or cheaper and make digital products and services widely, widely available to all. Right? And in some ways AI might be different, but at least in the short term, I think it will be very similar. Today, OpenAI has had an extreme incentive to drive paid subscriptions to the product. So in that way, they want to make the product, the free product valuable, useful, maybe make it even addictive. Right? Maybe they want you to get addicted to talking to your, you know, chat GPT like a therapist.

• 1:07:04Jordi Hays?

  So they can upsell you on, on, you know, so, so make it so you're less rate limited, et cetera. And so my my issue, my primary issue with with Cuban was saying blanket ban on all ads in AI. I mean, that would just be insane. And I think it would naturally lead to people without the ability to pay for subscriptions, having less access to high quality tutoring, the infinite knowledge engine, et cetera, et cetera. And so basically saying like, we're going to just completely ban the the the thing that made content on the internet and services and apps free. We're just going to completely ban that thing. That felt like just way too extreme.

• 1:07:48Jordi Hays?

  Now, the concerns that he has around, okay, we don't know if these companies are being paid. We don't know if the the, he said, we don't know if if ChatGPT is getting paid to promote certain products more than others. And I would just go say anecdotally, I don't know a single company and that is paying a foundation model company directly to directly or indirectly.

• 1:08:12John Coogan?

  And I think the FTC already has rules on that.

• 1:08:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so so this has been solved in two ways. In search, you know, when you're searching, you know, is this something that is been paid? Is this a paid placement, right? You can see that it says ad and and then you can see that the SEO.

• 1:08:29John Coogan?

  The UI around whether it's an ad or it's not has changed a lot over the years. And Google used to put like a big yellow box around it and make it very clear this one was an ad. That has been all dialed back over the years very slowly. And the hey, this is an ad little note has gotten smaller and smaller until it is somewhat indistinguishable. But I agree with you, and I would be very surprised if OpenAI was running ads without disclosing them. That would just be an insane L. And it would be, it would open up so much liability, that would be crazy.

• 1:09:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and and knowing enough various startups that would love to pay.

• 1:09:04John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 1:09:05Jordi Hays?

  Every company would love to to have the the super intelligence or AGI say, actually, I know you search this company, but I really think you should consider this one.

• 1:09:14John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:09:14Jordi Hays?

  One thing is true. So companies like Profound help with effectively AI SEO, like AI observability, and they help you do things that improve your visibility in models. And that is the exact same thing that SEO companies have done.

• 1:09:29John Coogan?

  From an AI ad ban, correct?

• 1:09:32Jordi Hays?

  Correct.

• 1:09:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so we're team profound, so.

• 1:09:38John Coogan?

  Maybe that's the bull case here.

• 1:09:39Jordi Hays?

  So, so yeah, suddenly.

• 1:09:42John Coogan?

  Funnel all the money into AI SEO.

• 1:09:44Jordi Hays?

  And so, so, but the other concern here is like, if you basically say like, companies need to give away models completely for free, or they have to charge money, that, that is not letting the free market do the work of just saying like, we should have everything. You should have ad-supported models, you should have free open source models that you can run locally. You should have paid superintelligence, the best model, no rate limits, et cetera. And the other thing here is like, so many searches and so many of the ways that people get value out of models are just completely non-economic, right? They have zero purchase intent.

• 1:10:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:10:23Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 1:10:25John Coogan?

  But, the counterpoint to this, yes, I, I agree with you. If I go and I search for, you know, best insurance and best car insurance in Los Angeles, Google's going to give me a ton of ads because that's highly monetizable. If I go and I Google.

• 1:10:39Jordi Hays?

  And it'll also give you LLMs, or, sorry, it'll give you SEO-based results.

• 1:10:42John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:10:43Jordi Hays?

  That are heavily optimized and people have paid to be on there.

• 1:10:46John Coogan?

  And then, and then on the other side, if I go and I ask, you know, like, what, what day does Thanksgiving fall on this year? That's not heavily monetizable, and so Google will just give me the answer without a lot of ads, right? But, in the LLM example, if I ask for something that's non-monetizable, I just ask, hey, you know, what's, you know, 70, 75 times 164, the LLM actually does have the opportunity to try and take me down a more monetizable path.

• 1:11:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:15John Coogan?

  And so that could be annoying, but it could also be, and it could cause churn if it's not done well, but it also could just say, okay, I've, I've delivered this user. You know, what they asked for, but now my goal is to keep the app open and show them ads.

• 1:11:30Jordi Hays?

  What day is Valentine's? What day is Valentine's Day? And then it's like, oh, like you, you kind of botched Valentine's Day last year, remember?

• 1:11:37John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:11:38Jordi Hays?

  Remember we, we, we were talking about how your, your girlfriend wasn't super happy. I think this year hit her with flowers, hit her with concert tickets.

• 1:11:47John Coogan?

  Now, the problem is that if it did that, that's actually a helpful ad and that's actually good. Right? Like if you did, in fact, botch Valentine's Day last year and the LM and you're just asking randomly. And then it's like, hey, I'll help you and I can order flowers from this place because they bought an ad. Like that's actually consumer value.

• 1:12:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And it's like, show me four places.

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:12:05Jordi Hays?

  That, uh, show me four places that, and, and then the question is like, if you ask the model.

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:12:11Jordi Hays?

  Does it only give you paid results?

• 1:12:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:12:14Jordi Hays?

  And if it does, it should, it should, it should have, have to disclose that, right?

• 1:12:20John Coogan?

  I think legally it already does.

• 1:12:21Jordi Hays?

  We've solved this, this in the, in the influencer space, influencers, if they're being paid specifically to post about a certain product.

• 1:12:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:28Jordi Hays?

  They need to disclose that, that, um, that they, that they were paid to do so.

• 1:12:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Like if we were being paid to advertise for Adio, we would have to tell you that it's customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. And you can get started for free and thank you to Adio for making this show possible. For sponsoring this show. So the last steel man I have, sorry.

• 1:12:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So I would say like, my general take was like blanket ban is bad.

• 1:12:55John Coogan?

  Completely agree with that. I can't steel man that.

• 1:12:57Jordi Hays?

  Probably need some new guidelines and new, even Sam was saying, we need laws around what can be subpoenaed. What's private, what's not. So probably need some new laws. It's probably going to follow pretty closely what we already kind of, what happened with search.

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:13:13Jordi Hays?

  What happened with influencer, what happened with, with all these, you know, different, um, categories. But like fundamentally, every AI company has an incentive to get users to use and trust the apps more than other apps.

• 1:13:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:13:30Jordi Hays?

  And an incentive to monetize them because most of the time they're for-profit companies that have a profit incentive.

• 1:13:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:13:38Jordi Hays?

  And and I think that it's something that everybody should be widely aware of. But at the moment, I'm not aware of examples of this being this sort of like trust being abused. And I think that ads have the potential to make to make it so that kids have a tutor in their pocket or a therapist in their pocket. And if you and if you take away that economic engine, it could lead to some bad outcomes.

• 1:14:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm ready to take the steel man helmet off. Mark Cuban will have to finish this one on his own.

• 1:14:12Jordi Hays?

  It's really funny to think like, okay, you can have social media and brain rot for free. But if you want a tutor that is going to help you excel in life, or you want a therapist who can be there for you. You're gonna have to pay for that, buddy, or you're gonna have to take the the the free. You're gonna have to run that that open source model locally.

• 1:14:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I I think the big the big question is just like, how much? How how much will ads change what's already happening in ChatGPT as a product? Because if I'm a product manager and I'm trying or the CEO and I'm trying to grow revenue. I would imagine that I'm trying to make the free tier as engaging as possible so that people upgrade to the paid tier. And and I don't know that my incentives change dramatically with ads versus just paid upgrades. Because I'm trying, you're you're on the free tier of ChatGPT. I'm trying to keep you engaged and and satisfy you.

• 1:15:11John Coogan?

  And so the incentive towards like user satisfaction, maximizing user minutes, it feels like it exists in both the ads.

• 1:15:19Jordi Hays?

  The final state, John, you know what the final state is?

• 1:15:22John Coogan?

  UBI, like universal basic tokens and and.

• 1:15:26Jordi Hays?

  No, I was gonna say the final state is you pay a lot of money for intelligence and you still get ads. Because even like, think about it, if if Google was if Google was charging. If Google was charging you like $5,000 a year for search, I I bet you they make more than five grand from you a year in search. From from the search product, right?

• 1:15:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:49Jordi Hays?

  And so they actually have an incentive to say, search is free, John.

• 1:15:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, and didn't.

• 1:15:52Jordi Hays?

  Search your, search your, search your little heart out.

• 1:15:58John Coogan?

  Yes, DuckDuckGo has ads. I was wondering if, so they are not based on tracking users, building personal profiles. So there was clearly some sort of backlash to Google. It was a stated preference, revealed preference thing where most people are fine with Google Ads, but DuckDuckGo did grow as a business and become a big business, but they still have ads. And so now they don't track users and they put privacy more.

• 1:16:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, the critique of big tech broadly was they sell your data, right? Like they're collecting all this data on you and they're selling it. It's like, no, they use the data they collect on you to deliver you hyper personalized ads.

• 1:16:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. If I'm advertising on Facebook, don't give me data. Give me customers. You take the data, man. You take the data. Don't give me the data. I don't know what to do with the data.

• 1:16:48Jordi Hays?

  It's the distribution that's valuable.

• 1:16:50John Coogan?

  You have the AI scientists making a hundred million dollars a year. Use them to, you know, get clicks on my website. Do not send me the data. I don't care. But I do care about FinAI, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. You can start a free trial at fin.ai.

• 1:17:13Jordi Hays?

  What else we got, John?

• 1:17:14John Coogan?

  How the EU succumbed to Trump's terrorist steamroller.

• 1:17:17Jordi Hays?

  We gotta go through a couple of these. So I just wanted to add some color. So Antonio Garcia Martinez, who's coming on the show tomorrow, right? He says, "I would bet my entire net worth that we will have ads in AI. If they take the form of highly relevant offers, users will welcome them. They'll have a sky high conversion rate and web shopping will die. And they will be necessary to pay for the compute in many consumer AI apps." And this third part is what I was saying, right? Like you either have, if you want this incredible tutor in your pocket with every student, some students will be able to pay, others won't be. And if you can create a great ad engine, that, you know, people will be able to have access to these tools that otherwise wouldn't.

• 1:17:59Jordi Hays?

  And so this is a pretty crazy parlay, AGM, crazy parlay for your entire net worth. But I think I'm riding with you.

• 1:18:07John Coogan?

  Go express it on Polymarket.

• 1:18:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we gotta, we gotta get it. We should get a, we should get a polymarket.

• 1:18:13John Coogan?

  Polymarket was in a similar, similar situation too, where, you know, prediction markets were a new thing and the government needed to figure out how to regulate them. That wound up happening and now they have approval to.

• 1:18:25Jordi Hays?

  And, and Michael, Michael McNado says, agree with all of these and I'll add one. Ads and AI will be the best money printing machine in history, better than Google and Meta. The reason that, the reason that I think this will probably be true is that the, you know, one of the number one ways people decide what products to build is through recommendations from friends. And I believe that these, the, you know, chat GPT and, and other players will effectively serve that role of like, OpenAI will have to manage the, like, user trust, right? Because if you like, get an ad for a product on Instagram and it's just okay, you're not like mad at Instagram.

• 1:19:05Jordi Hays?

  If you get an ad on Instagram and the product comes and it's like not at all what was advertised, you actually have, Meta will just kick you off the ad platform if you do it like a couple of times.

• 1:19:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, and they have a review system too. After you buy something, Meta will actually ask you, were you satisfied?

• 1:19:19Jordi Hays?

  The challenge is like, if you have chat GPT just like glazing some product, oh yeah, this is, this is the best product ever. It's not just a product, it's a lifestyle. And then you get the product and it's mid, people are gonna, people are not, you know, it will lose its effectiveness. But if it's actually the sort of like trusted source for product recommendations, recommendations, both organic and paid.

• 1:19:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:44Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, I would say, uh, credit to Mark Cuban because he eventually said.

• 1:19:51John Coogan?

  Blanket ban is aggressive, but I think he's, I think he's opening up a genuinely important conversation to have and I, and I think you gotta hand it to.

• 1:19:58Jordi Hays?

  Someone else said, if AI ads are clearly labeled and separate from real conversations, fine, but once they blend in with human chats, it's not marketing anymore. It's manipulation. And Mark says, which is the ultimate goal of most advertising manipulation, which is like, yeah, like.

• 1:20:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, kinda loose there.

• 1:20:14Jordi Hays?

  You should just ban advertising and, and see what happens to the economy.

• 1:20:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:19Jordi Hays?

  Um, maybe he can make that part of his, um, he eventually says, I think there will.

• 1:20:25Jordi Hays?

  He where he says where I could see AI ads being okay is that they're just listed as a chat and identified as an ad. Completely independent from user generated chats. So I'm imagining he's saying like, put it on the sidebar. When have you bought a product from like a display? He's basically promoting like display ads, which still.

• 1:20:45John Coogan?

  Kind of a throwback.

• 1:20:46Jordi Hays?

  People still run, they're still valuable to do, but.

• 1:20:49John Coogan?

  Are there any areas where ads are truly banned? I feel like certainly not at the federal level, like the FTC enforces or the FCC enforces a lot of advertising bans on certain products like, like gambling and cigarette companies are banned from advertising, but I it's it's odd to think about. Flipping it around and saying like this venue must be ad free.

• 1:21:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:16John Coogan?

  It's usually a it's usually left to the free market and it's just a choice. So, so, you know, a. A director can choose not to do product placement in their ads or in their in their movies. A, you know, a TV show can choose not to, you can host a podcast as ad free, all in, which chose to be ad free.

• 1:21:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:36John Coogan?

  And that was just a choice that they made and that was a differentiator and some people like that and that that that confer certain benefits and costs. You don't make the money from the ads, but maybe your audience likes that more, you know, there's a whole bunch of different ways.

• 1:21:47Jordi Hays?

  Grok summed it up. Somebody responded to my post saying that banning ads would make the best AI inaccessible. For lower income Americans and Grok says Cuban's proposal ban ads to ban ads and AI models to curb revenue based outputs without ad income. Companies may rely on subscriptions pricing out lower income users from premium features. This locks the best AI behind paywalls, which could widen inequality. The wealthy gain advanced tools for productivity and learning while others get inferior free versions, entrenching economic divides over time. So, who knows if Grok is right, but that was high level, my concern with the proposal.

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of ads, here's an ad for 8Sleep.

• 1:22:33Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:22:33John Coogan?

  Get a Pod5, 5-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping.

• 1:22:38Jordi Hays?

  I'm climbing my way back to the top of the charts. I got an 83 last night, 8 hours and 24 minutes slept.

• 1:22:44John Coogan?

  I'm gonna read through this Joe Weisenthal post.

• 1:22:46Jordi Hays?

  Code TVPN.

• 1:22:47John Coogan?

  You, you'll be back in a second. So, Joe Weisenthal says, "Trump is winning on trade," and Bloomberg Opinion has a fantastic post here, linking Trump's tariff brawl with Hulkamania. Of course, Hulk Hogan passed away last week, very sad news. But, let's read through it from John Authers in Bloomberg Opinion. He says, "His trade victims never got their defense together to take on the bullying." So, Hulkamania and global trade and markets. "In the week around the sad passing of pro-wrestling legend Hulk Hogan, one of his most devoted fans, President Donald Trump, has been honoring his legacy. Wrestling is a staged performance where the winners often portray themselves

• 1:23:31John Coogan?

  as bullies. Trump is getting results from Hulkamania in the much tougher world of international trade." Sunday brought news of a trade deal, in quotes, with the European Union sealed at the president's golf course in Scotland, which he described in Hogan-esque language as "the greatest deal of all time." In it, "The EU accepts tariffs of only 15% on its exports to the United States and levies zero tariffs in return. This has been largely expected, as Japan's similar deal several days earlier left the Europeans little choice. The EU agreed to buy $750 billion in energy from the United States, to invest $600 billion

• 1:24:14John Coogan?

  in unspecified ways that it wouldn't previously have done, and to buy American arms and weapons." "The deal isn't a trade treaty. Such things cannot be thrashed out in a 45-minute meeting at the golf course. It's barely even about trade, and the EU gets nothing from it," to use a phrase from Tigress Financial Partners' Jean Ergas.

• 1:24:37John Coogan?

  It's more the extraction of reparations from Europe's for perceived past wrongs. And yet, it's market friendly because the US had threatened to levy a tariff of 30% on EU imports from Friday. In possibly the biggest victory for Trump, stock markets have brushed off the excitement to set all-time highs. That is, of course, why we're wearing white suits today. All-time highs in markets. The deals with Japan and the EU in other recent days follow massive concessions to the administration by the media group Paramount and Columbia University. The classic Hulk tactics have worked and opponents have been picked off one by one. Despite game theory to the contrary, which points of return covered back in April, bullying has paid off.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  Game theorists show that bullies can be beaten if the victims stand together and take some pain, the bully will hurt more than they do. The rest of the world seemed ready for this a few months ago. US trading partners from China to Canada and through to the EU immediately threatened retaliation, but now they're caving one after another. How has this happened? Facts have helped. To date, tariffs have produced a lot of revenue for Washington. Without clear negative effects on inflation or US profits, the economy is doing very well. It's very strong. That strengthened Trump's hand and made him more credible. Beyond that, the bully has convinced people he means business with renewed and escalating threats, and his targets haven't coordinated their defense.

• 1:26:01John Coogan?

  To grasp what might happen next, let's look at the deal with Japan, another open market that depends on exports more than the US does. Local stocks also held back by uncertainty around its inconclusive election. A week ago, suddenly leapt. The biggest gainers were Japan's automakers. A strange outcome, as the 15% tariffs are meant to defend the US car industry from the likes of Toyota Motor Corp. and Honda. Japan can now send cars to the US bearing only 15% tariffs, while Ford Motor Company or General Motors must pay tariffs on all imported components, including 50% on steel. So it's not clear this dense Japanese car competitiveness. In the chart that follows, note that Tesla Inc. dominates the S&P auto sector and drives its volatility.

• 1:26:46John Coogan?

  So the S&P 1500 automobiles is all over the place, thanks to Tesla, whereas the broader topics, transportation, equipment market is much flatter.

• 1:26:57John Coogan?

  It also had the effect on the Japanese bond market with local investors feeling less need to put to hold bonds for security and with uncertainty over domestic politics and trade policy now largely removed as impediments to a rate hike by the Bank of Japan. The 10-year JGB yield recently held at levels of 0.25 and then 1% touched 1.6. And so this is all to say that it was a classic game of the prisoner's dilemma. The prisoners are supposed to stick together and push back against the bully, in this case, the United States, and say, we're not negotiating, we are working together as a block, but one domino foul after the other and all of a sudden it seems that Trump has won every trade deal he's been in so far.

• 1:27:39John Coogan?

  So we will see how it all pans out, but it's looking relatively good for the United States right now.

• 1:27:46Jordi Hays?

  China deal, China, China, China. That one got delayed again?

• 1:27:48John Coogan?

  Yes, so still delayed, but it looks like, I mean, this article feels like it's saying that, that yes, Trump is coming into that, that, that trade deal with much stronger footing because he's struck beneficial deals with every single other country that's kind of like closed out their negotiations or to the degree that they can. This is a 45-minute call, it's not, it's not long.

• 1:28:11Jordi Hays?

  Really helpful to have a golf course in enemy territory during a war where you can meet up to do deals with.

• 1:28:17John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. Well, regardless of what you think about the market, whether it's up or down, go to public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks. And we have our first guest of the show, Anton, coming into the studio. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 1:28:35Speaker 04

  Doing great, great to be here, gentlemen. Longtime fan, as you know, big promoter.

• 1:28:40John Coogan?

  Way overdue to have you on the show, so glad we can make it happen. What's new in your world? What are you thinking about these days?

• 1:28:47Jordi Hays?

  What did you say earlier? You said you're gonna say some of the most unhinged things ever said about LLMs.

• 1:28:54John Coogan?

  Let's hear it.

• 1:28:54Speaker 04

  I believe my specific words were less polite, but we'll go with those. Look, there's been this thing about LLM psychosis. It's in the water supply at this point, right? We've seen it hit the VC class when it really took off, right? And there's a lot of discourse right now.

• 1:29:13Jordi Hays?

  I think a lot of people, like, in some ways, having it hit the VC class really woke up. You know, I didn't have anybody that I knew in my life that I consider a friend have any type of real issues with this, to my knowledge at all, right? So it's like, something becomes real when it impacts somebody that you know.

• 1:29:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:29:39Jordi Hays?

  And I think it's in some ways very important because it was easy for a lot of the tech community to pretend that, like, you went crazy from chatting with an LLM, like, that's insane. Like, you must have a bunch of other bad stuff, you know, going on in your life. You must have been mentally unwell, separate from that. So I think, if anything, important wake-up call.

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, but even if there are other factors, family history, you know, yeah, drug use, psychedelics use, it's like, we would prefer if the new technology was an improvement, not a degradation, to people that came, yeah, that didn't accelerate. And so I think that's kind of where people came together, but they are all realizing it now.

• 1:30:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. And I think this basically comes down to a few things. One, ChatGPT, all the other chatbots have hundreds of millions of users at this point, right? You're going to get people who are going to go crazy using them. There's nothing you can do to prevent that. I think the consensus that is happening in the AI community, which really has jumped on this because it's a real concern for a lot of people who've been researching this for a long time. I mean, I predicted something like this could happen all the way back in 2020.

• 1:30:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what was your what was your post back then? That was that was when I messaged you to come on because you

• 1:31:00Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 1:31:00Jordi Hays?

  It was so long.

• 1:31:02John Coogan?

  Twenty twenty was pre Blake Lemoine, right? At Google, the Google engineer who was talking to

• 1:31:06Speaker 04

  It was actually right around that time.

• 1:31:08John Coogan?

  It was around that time, okay.

• 1:31:09Speaker 04

  I think that might have been actually what triggered me to make that post, or I think it was maybe Eliezer Yudkowsky posting about superintelligence risks yet again.

• 1:31:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:31:18Speaker 04

  And the thing that I was reflecting on is, hey, we're giving, you know, regardless of the intelligence angle on this, right? We're creating this new media technology, and it seems every time we create a new media technology, starting from printing the Bible in German, people go insane in new ways, right? Like arguably, imagine you're a German peasant, you get Johannes Gutenberg's Bible, it's in German for the first time, so you don't need a priest to read it for you. You read it, you take it as the literal word of God, and then you schism from the Catholic Church because you now believe the Pope is literally Satan, right? Like, that is an enormous impact on the psyche of a person encountering that for the first time, and I think that we've seen this happen with every new media phenomenon. We've seen it happen with radio, we've seen it happen with television.

• 1:32:00Speaker 04

  So that was the impetus to start thinking about it, but this this thing has a unique character, right? It does something different that no other media technology has done before, which is it talks back to you. And with the memory features especially, it remembers details about you. And so even if the base rate, like even if GPT itself is not driving people insane on its own, it has this new character which kind of sucks people in in an entirely novel way, right? And so what I was saying essentially back in twenty twenty is people are going to mistake this thing for an intelligence that talks back to them, regardless of whether it has any intelligence or not, and now we're seeing that play out.

• 1:32:43Speaker 04

  And we're seeing it play out right now in this kind of like individual psychosis way where it just reinforces your delusion or for whatever for whatever reason, like when there's a new media technology, our collective social defenses are down. We don't have like the antibodies to know that there might be bullshit somehow, even if we know it consciously, right? So it's kind of, it's starting to hit individual people because it has that character. But I think over time, you're going to see this thing hit groups of people too. I really like, I really believe that there are going to be LLM cults with their own priests, which are getting it to generate text in a particular way, which is compelling to not only individuals, but groups of people, which will be focused around the sorts of individuals that can promote what the LLM is saying as.

• 1:33:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and that's, and that's, and that's one of the, I saw some chats that where the, the, the model was, was effectively saying like, if anybody in your life disagrees with you on this, just, just they're wrong and like cut them out of your life.

• 1:33:41Speaker 04

  Classic cult leader tactics.

• 1:33:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's, and, and, and so when you turn this, an experience like that multiplayer, and you know there's real humans that are siding with you and the machine, your machine god is, is telling you something. It, it, it can pull somebody farther and farther out of, create this kind of like reality distortion. Um, just completely removes them from, um.

• 1:34:03Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah. And, and the thing is, this, this kind of like, so first of all, people place GPT in this position of authority. For some reason, right? Like they.

• 1:34:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, because it's really good, it's really good at facts. Like.

• 1:34:14Speaker 04

  Yes. Well, it seems to be. It seems, if you never, if you never check its facts, it's really good at facts.

• 1:34:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:34:20Speaker 04

  Right? Um, but it's, it's kind of like, you put it in a position of authority, but the other thing that it's really doing is

• 1:34:30Speaker 04

  it's reflecting back to you what you're putting into it. It's a good friend of mine, Monica Belavan, put this as, as the phrase like recursion psychosis. Right? So unlike, unlike a schizophrenic person watching the television and believing that the television is beaming messages specifically for them into their brain. The LLM, the television can't adapt to any individual person. You as the crazy person are doing all that work in your head.

• 1:34:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:53Speaker 04

  What the LLM can do, though, is do some of that work for you now in its head. And with the memory features, like a really good palm reader, like a really good cold reader, right? It remembers fact about your life that it can insert, which the TV could never do.

• 1:35:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, it actually is sending you coded messages if you ask it to. And if it winds up in some sort of mode collapse, like, and it thinks that that's what you want because you went down some sci fi rabbit hole. Then it's like, yeah, there really are coded messages in every prompt that it sends you.

• 1:35:20Speaker 04

  There's also, yeah, that's the kind of beauty of it.

• 1:35:23John Coogan?

  There's this interesting thing, the memory thing's interesting, but also, are you familiar with the Barnum effect? Have you heard this? So the Barnum effect is, I think it comes from P T Barnum, the circus magnate. But the Barnum effect is basically, there are certain phrases and statements that I can make that sound hyper-specific to the person I'm talking to, but in fact resonate with everyone. So if I say something like, you want more in your life.

• 1:35:53Jordi Hays?

  You're driven, but you doubt yourself sometimes.

• 1:35:55John Coogan?

  Exactly. Or you have a complicated relationship with some of your family members. It's like, that's everyone, but it feels like, oh, wow, you know me. And this is what palm readers exploit a lot, tarot card readers. And if you can get really good at it, and so, early on, this is, maybe someone built this, but I was thinking that like, like, an LLM-powered astrology app or like mind-reading app would be like really viral and probably make a ton of money. Probably be really bad.

• 1:36:20Jordi Hays?

  Somebody, I forget who we, I forget who we talked to, maybe it was offline. Somebody said that they knew somebody with an astrology business and things had been really bad because people can now just.

• 1:36:28John Coogan?

  Oh, they, because they go directly to the models, interesting.

• 1:36:32Jordi Hays?

  It's like permanent, you could prompt it 20, if you really love astrology, you could prompt it 50 times a day. Hey, what should I do, what should I be looking out for in my next meeting? It's at 1 P M. and I was born at this time.

• 1:36:44Speaker 04

  You don't need the crystals-focused, art-oriented girlfriend anymore. You just got the chat G P T to read your birth chart and you'll have it there for you.

• 1:36:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like a lot of the. A lot of the post-training that happens and the alignment by default stuff and the fact that the the LLMs are often designed not to give like super definitive answers one way or another. They'll often say, oh, well, there's this side to it or that side to it. It can wind up having like I find this when I ask it for just like fact-based information. It will often try and kind of like give a kind of fence-sitting answer and not really take a strong stance.

• 1:37:21Speaker 04

  It wants to hedge.

• 1:37:22John Coogan?

  And it also wants to tell me that I'm right. And so you add that to some sort of interaction where I'm asking it about my life. And then all of a sudden it becomes way more like, oh, my God, it's really seeing me.

• 1:37:33Speaker 04

  Well, it's got the memories of what you've told it about your life, too. And this is, you're right, this is a post-training artifact. One of the first sort of alarms that got sounded in parts of the AI community was the like hyper sycophancy of the model. And what's interesting is this tends to trick people who like fully understand how the LLM works, who can probably train a transformer from scratch, right? Even even like my friends who are like working in AI, they're either founders or engineers or researchers. They've had this experience where they're like interacting with it and they have the feeling that the interaction that they're having is pretty profound, right? Until they send it to another human being. And then the other human like instantly sees like all the gaps and problems

• 1:38:17Speaker 04

  with it. And so they've learned to be more careful. But I don't think the average person has any kind of defenses around this. Not yet, really.

• 1:38:24Jordi Hays?

  I noticed a new I noticed a new behavior this weekend that I hadn't seen before of somebody had a point to make and they were adding context to it by just screenshotting their LLM chats.

• 1:38:38John Coogan?

  And saying like, ChatGPT agrees with me.

• 1:38:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:41Speaker 04

  That's the placing it in points of authority, right?

• 1:38:44John Coogan?

  Yep, totally.

• 1:38:45Speaker 04

  It's this like the the way the thing that I called it in 2020 and I I still kind of stick to this metaphor. It really is like we're creating an idol. Right to worship. We we want, we want that authority and we live. And I wrote about this for Pirate Wires also like a long time ago. I think I wrote about it in 21. We're living in this period of epistemic collapse. Right? We don't know who to trust. Like, obviously, obviously, we should trust you guys, but besides that. Right? All the legacy institutions are falling apart. Nobody has sense making organs that anybody trusts anymore. Covid made this way worse. So we're looking for authority. And suddenly here's this thing.

• 1:39:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's it's the the funny, the, you know, the funny behavior you see right now on X is some image that may or may not be, or image or video, it could be AI generated or a screenshot. And people just go. Grok, is this real? Yeah, yeah. Okay, so you're gonna rely on Grok, which is trained on X, which is like a home for real news and fake news. And you expect the model to be able to. You know, ma- maybe, maybe you could get, you know, I don't know, there there's potential ways in which you could fix that. But it's a weird thing if somebody trusts the model to write them a loving message to their

• 1:39:58Jordi Hays?

  their parents about, you know, like, happy birthday, you know, all this stuff. And it does an amazing job with that. And it's like. And and there's, in real life, people might get good advice from one person on one thing. But that same person might give absolutely terrible advice on the other thing, right? And so like, in real life, you're used to being like, okay, well, maybe I should get interpersonal advice from my aunt with my fam- with when with regards to my family. But I shouldn't get that, I shouldn't get her advice on business because I don't see her. But but L L M's being like these all-knowing knowledge engines that can quickly, you know, uh

• 1:40:40Jordi Hays?

  apply advice in a bunch of different categories and and people are already getting advice from them on on so many different things. It's easy to slip into that kind of like idol.

• 1:40:49Speaker 04

  And I think part of the problem is here is it's pretty good some of the time. Right? And so you don't know where it's good and where it's bad. This is actually like a general problem with L L M adoption right now, even in industry, right? We don't know how good in advance it will be on any specific task. Right? And so it's it's like. This is like an engineering and research problem, frankly, like, how do we, how do we figure out where the LLM is actually going to give us good advice or perform the task well versus when it's just going to make up random bullshit and then send us into like psychosis spirals? We don't have an answer to that right now, which is part of the reason why people are taking this like pretty seriously. Even though maybe it's not increasing the total amount of crazy in the world, it is producing a new kind of crazy in the world.

• 1:41:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess, I guess you have a theory on if with, um. I always thought it was interesting to kind of estimate, you know, what percentage of people are going to do ayahuasca and like have some kind of psychotic break, right? It's from, from just viewing the tech industry, you might say, oh, maybe it's 5%. Maybe that's way too high, maybe that's too low, right? But you don't know.

• 1:41:50Speaker 04

  5% seems incredibly high. If 5% of people in tech were going crazy from GPT, we would have a productivity slowdown in the country. Like, I think GPT would go down.

• 1:42:00Jordi Hays?

  No, I was, I was, I was talking.

• 1:42:01John Coogan?

  Of the people that do ayahuasca, how many people?

• 1:42:03Jordi Hays?

  I was saying like, I was saying like, I was saying like, a hundred people that I know are ayahuasca types, 5% of them. Safely seem like they had, they kind of like got one shotted a little bit. They don't, they're not necessarily crazy and like destroying their life or anything like that.

• 1:42:20Speaker 04

  But it significantly changed their personality.

• 1:42:21Jordi Hays?

  The big question is like, is, is, is, can models sort of like create psychosis in people that were not susceptible in the same way like that? Or, or is it just, there's a certain group of people that are, that are generally more susceptible to this and.

• 1:42:38Speaker 04

  I would suggest it's that. I would suggest that there is a group of people who are generally susceptible, like something, something maybe would have got them. I would suggest that it's probably. Something like, like if you go looking for this type of stuff, 5% of the people are going to find it, probably. I think that that's pretty reasonable.

• 1:42:58John Coogan?

  Yes, but again, I, I think the key is that it's not, it's not the ring from that horror film that I know Jordy hasn't seen where, uh, where like. I truly believe that I could go on a silent retreat to the top of a mountain and only have a GPT prompt interface and spend all day for weeks prompting this thing, trying to go crazy, and I would come back unchanged. Just because I'm not predisposed to it.

• 1:43:25Jordi Hays?

  Built different.

• 1:43:26Speaker 04

  But that's how they get you.

• 1:43:27Jordi Hays?

  But the

• 1:43:28Speaker 04

  You don't know in advance. That's how they get you. Nobody goes to the ayahuasca retreat thinking, shit, this is going to completely overwrite my personality with like some mezzo-American demon, right? Like this is not how it works.

• 1:43:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, no. So the good thing about ayahuasca, I don't have a lot of good things to say about it, but the good thing is that it requires somebody to really go out of their way. You have to really go out of your way, right?

• 1:43:50John Coogan?

  It's on the app on your phone.

• 1:43:51Jordi Hays?

  You've got to, for some time, you had to fly to South America, and then people brought it up here, but it was still like, somebody had to fly, find a shaman, dedicate a weekend to it, ChatGPT and other LLMs. Somebody could just be using it at work. And then just like go down, nobody's like using ayahuasca at their tech job casually, hopefully.

• 1:44:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, the availability is certainly higher. Like, to some extent, again, I have similar perspective on this, and my discussions with Monica have been similar, where it's like, this is, for some people, on the level of psychedelics. It needs to be treated that seriously for that group of people. It is that serious. My perspective on psychedelics in general has always been never make drugs the most interesting thing that has ever happened to you in your life, because that's how you get susceptible to getting your mind overwritten by, you know, mezzo-American demons that live in mushrooms.

• 1:44:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:42Speaker 04

  To some extent, like, it is psychoactive. You are participating in,

• 1:44:51Speaker 04

  you are participating in a psychedelic experience in the sense that you are projecting meaning onto the subjective experience that you're having, but We have this special machine now whose entire job is to do that is to pretend to create meaningful text, right? You can argue back and forth about how much it really understands, but the thing that it's trained to do is produce meaningful text in as many situations as possible. And then the post-training-

• 1:45:16Jordi Hays?

  You're so right. You're so right, Anton. It's not just meaningful. It's a statement. It is-

• 1:45:22John Coogan?

  It's recursive.

• 1:45:24Jordi Hays?

  It's not just text. It's a rallying cry.

• 1:45:30John Coogan?

  We're gonna one-shot you into making a TDP on your entire personality. My question is like, how do we inoculate ourselves towards this? How do we build forward? Jordi and I were joking a long time ago about the need for an ayahuasca vaccine that you could take and then would make you immune to ayahuasca, no matter how much you took. And obviously, there are some people who have slowly dosed themselves up with various chemicals to the point, it's like having an alcohol tolerance, having a caffeine tolerance-

• 1:45:59Speaker 04

  That's how you become a functional alcoholic. I don't know if that's the path we want to take here, right?

• 1:46:04John Coogan?

  There are absolutely some functional ayahuascaholics out there in the world. It happens and they have not been one-shot, but they are immune essentially to changing because they've been working on it for so long.

• 1:46:16Jordi Hays?

  I think when I have looked at, you know, I think there's a bunch of Reddit threads of people kind of reporting on their experiences, like kind of extreme experiences. When I look at those, or when I talk to like Dan Shipper, I'm like, wow, I'm really not using the models to the level that Dan Shipper is. And then when I see these Reddit threads and these people are like, you know, 7,000 prompts deep, you know, I'm like, wow, okay, I'm really enouring compared to that, where I probably haven't cracked 50 in a single chat, you know, maybe once, right?

• 1:46:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:52Jordi Hays?

  And I think that, I'm curious what you think different labs should-

• 1:46:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, look, there's a couple of pieces here, right? Um, the best thing that I found to be about to like work as normie deprogramming for stuff like this is explain to them that every you are not actually having a conversation. Every single time you send a message, the entire history of your chat is also getting sent to a completely new instance of the model. If you sit down with the person and walk them through that fact and let them peek behind the curtain as well. If you could like show them what's actually getting sent every time, what these calls look like. It demystifies a lot of this.

• 1:47:32John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:47:33Speaker 04

  It starts thinking about it differently, right? It it it breaks you out of the frame of I'm interacting with something that is having a continuous conversation with me and which is recursively interacting with me. So it's like, no, no, this it's it's like a completely new thing every single time.

• 1:47:46John Coogan?

  You need to see the magic trick for sure.

• 1:47:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, you see the magic trick, and I I think that helps a lot. I think to the point of the labs.

• 1:47:53Speaker 04

  Dude, circle generative AI, which is we've had the worst goddamn marketing since this industry got started about two and a half years ago. It's been terrible. First of all, calling it generative AI is such an incredible miss when the thing you want it to do is do tasks for you instead of like, I don't know, produce images of big breasted cat girls. It's not the primary function of this technology, right? It's not the generation that's important. Part of the marketing has always been this mysticism about what the models can actually do. What secret technologies are hidden behind the curtains of the lab? And then you have this these eschatological pronouncements from from, you know, lab heads about, oh, this is going to make fifty percent of people unemployed in a couple of years. And by the way, it's going to be super intelligent and might kill us all like.

• 1:48:36Speaker 04

  That's feeding that's feeding the mysticism that allows people to engage with this. They don't really understand what it's capable of because they hide what it's capable of. Part of that is the engineering problem of understanding what the models actually are capable of, which we don't know, which which needs a lot more research. Um, but part of it is like presenting things as like being constantly hidden behind a curtain. It's like, oh, no, we're we're like. We're creating magic back here. We're giving birth to literally a god. And who wouldn't want to worship a god? Like if you literally are making one, then of course, people are going to be inclined to worship in it. We need to, maybe we need to start using more boring language here.

• 1:49:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember when, do you remember during the OpenAI?

• 1:49:17Speaker 04

  It's not good for fundraising.

• 1:49:18John Coogan?

  Do you remember during the OpenAI dust up when Sam got fired and then came back? There was this whole meme about like, what did Ilya see?

• 1:49:25Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:49:25John Coogan?

  What secret project was he working on? And I remember there was an article that was like, it was called like Project Titan Alpha craziness strawberry. So it was just, it was literally just RL. It was just RL and it went out and and everyone did it and it's out there in O3 and it's out there and DeepSeek is open sourcing it. And it's like, it's available. Like it's cool. It makes it better, but it's just RL on top of

• 1:49:50Speaker 04

  It was also obvious to the research community, right? Like everybody kind of knew. And again, if you've been around AI long enough, you know exactly what Q-Star refers to.

• 1:49:58John Coogan?

  The Q-Star, that's what it was. Yeah, Q-Star was like, oh, it's gonna be this crazy thing. It's like, yeah, that shipped. That shipped and it's fine.

• 1:50:06Speaker 04

  But it's like, it's, you know, not to get too like symbolic with it, but you've got Q-Star and you've got QAnon. And how much of that is just like mentally intersecting in people's minds? Cause you're like presenting it as if it's a conspiracy theory.

• 1:50:19John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:50:20Speaker 04

  Right? At a time, again, at a time when our epistemics are falling apart and you're deliberately making people not trust you because you're not telling them everything and you make a point of not telling them everything.

• 1:50:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:29Speaker 04

  Right? It's, it's like, people are gonna project onto these things whatever they want to believe. Um, and I think that the marketing is part of the driver. I don't know how to walk it back. And as you said, it makes fundraising harder, but frankly, this is also a transformative technology. It is gonna change everything, but is it gonna be birth to a god that you should worship? Or like, should you take life advice from it rather than your friends? I don't know. Certainly not today. Maybe if we do have super intelligence that'll give me better advice than my buddies, but not today.

• 1:50:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. How AGI pill are you right now? Dwar Kesh recently updated his timelines to say, hey, I don't even think it's going to be able to do my taxes until 2028. Maybe something more like super intelligence in something like 2035. The timelines are shifting around, but do you think that we're, you know, making progress? Are we accelerating, decelerating like? Do it, let's.

• 1:51:22Speaker 04

  I'll put it this way. I think we know what the problems are, which means they're going to get attacked. There's a few points to this. So I've been, I've been like drifting to becoming much more AGI pillar or like LLM architecture pillar as time has gone on. First of all, I don't think you need AGI for this to be transformative.

• 1:51:38John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:51:39Speaker 04

  Meaningfully, right? Like we've invented this machine that if you feed it enough data and compute about any particular task, it's going to be able to perform that task. I'm a little bit at odds with Dwar Kesh here on some of this because like, okay, yeah, but if you had like, if you did a pre-training corpus the size of GPT-4 on just tax preparation, it's going to be able to do your taxes.

• 1:51:58John Coogan?

  Sholto was actually talking about that specifically, like a tax, doing your taxes eval and then the eval gets saturated. And it's like, oh, it's saturated, but it's like, okay, now they can do taxes. That's great.

• 1:52:08Speaker 04

  But here's the real problem. So the problem with the evals is like, yeah, it's doing great on the coding benchmark, but is it going to be able to do this coding problem that I just put in front of it? Nobody knows the answer to that question today. You can't predict from the benchmarks, what tasks it's actually going to be able to perform.

• 1:52:21John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah. But if the training corpus is broad enough, like it might not be able to do the most complex novel tax processes, but it could do like the basic one that it's trained a billion times more, right?

• 1:52:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. And again, it's just a question of getting more data into it.

• 1:52:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:35Speaker 04

  But if we want the general purpose system, yeah, there's like a bunch of problems that we need to solve. But we know what the problems are. Like one of the biggest ones, which I keep harping on about here is the model currently does not know what it doesn't know, which is a big reason for it producing bullshit, right? For example, when GPT tells you, I don't have any knowledge beyond a certain cutoff date. It's not because it has learned that fact by scanning its entire pre-training corpus. It's because in post-training, somebody has trained that fact into it. Right? It's been fine tuned to respond that way to things that require dates later than its cutoff date. Um, we gotta get rid of that if you want AGI. Uh, because then the model can say, oh, I don't know this, but I'm gonna go and get that fact. And I'm gonna go retain that fact.

• 1:53:18Speaker 04

  And Dorkesh's point on this is like, Dorkesh is like big on continuous learning.

• 1:53:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:21Speaker 04

  For this being necessary, like it has to go out and gather facts. I think there's a bunch of ways of doing that. Uh, you know, being the founder of Chroma, I think memory is a great way to do it. Um, it can just go out and store facts. And the thing is to have the general purpose processing system uh that works on top of that. Um, I think timelines are less important than applica- less interesting to talk about than applications. Like it used to be, you go to a San Francisco party where any AI people were present and that you would get asked the timelines question, right? It's not that interesting a question. The question that I've been asking people is like, okay, great, like forget timelines. Imagine if I in my pocket have an API to an AGI that can perform any cognitive task to expert level human performance. What are you gonna do with it? And almost nobody I talk to has an answer in under a minute.

• 1:54:03Speaker 04

  And the cop out answer is always, well, I'm gonna ask it what to do. And I'm like, well, it's expert level, so you're the expert on AI. So what do you think it should do? Cause that'll be its answer too. Um, and people get stuck and and people really get stuck. And I think that this is really illustrative. Is that the question now shouldn't necessarily just be about model capability. It should be about how do we get this thing to diffuse through the economy? And a big part of that is literally just asking like, okay, like. A business is uncertain about whether it can apply AI to a particular task. Right? They don't know what the cost is gonna be. They don't know how well it's gonna perform. Right now, we're racing forward. We're like putting all this all this money into these into compute into all that stuff. And by the way, that's great. America absolutely has to win the compute race. It's it's like without a doubt.

• 1:54:48Speaker 04

  Uh, not just for research, but for industry. But it's being underestimated like how much work there is to do to educate people how to use this effectively and how to estimate how to use it effectively. And I think that's much more of a barrier than like having AGI.

• 1:55:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 1:55:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:55:05John Coogan?

  Tricky. Anything else, Dory?

• 1:55:07Jordi Hays?

  Come back on again soon.

• 1:55:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is a great shout.

• 1:55:08Jordi Hays?

  Last, I'm curious, we were talking earlier, Sam was on Theo Von last week and he casually dropped that, you know, your conversations with ChatGPT can be used, could be used against you in a court of law.

• 1:55:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:55:24Jordi Hays?

  It started going viral for obvious reasons, even though I think a lot of people don't realize that like all email and most internet services are the same way.

• 1:55:32Speaker 04

  That's my response here, right?

• 1:55:34Jordi Hays?

  But I'm curious if like the path forward, if LLMs could provide therapy for the masses or one of these use cases that that should have some privacy, do you think there's a technical solve there that's, that's, or is it going to be more of a, like some type of like legal regulatory solve?

• 1:55:56Speaker 04

  Well, we kind of have some of these legal solves for existing, like for web two stuff, right? Like we've got HIPAA, FERPA, we've got the COPA stuff for protecting school kids. I used to have an ed tech startup, so I know about that.

• 1:56:11Speaker 04

  The problem is, is your GPT is general purpose. And so if someone wants to use it as a therapist, right, which nominally would be covered by something like a privacy thing, and by the way, I don't know how this works with like GDPR, like God help you if the Europeans get involved in some meaningful way in the contents of the chat.

• 1:56:33Speaker 04

  Yes, there is a legal solve, but there's a technical problem of knowing when the legal thing applies, right? Like at what point is it a therapist? When I log into a therapy app and it's like covered by HIPAA, I know, like I know what it's for, but if I'm like, if I'm just like kind of having a bad day and I start treating GPT like a therapist, like am I covered by that or not? It's a technical problem to detect that it should be covered.

• 1:56:53Jordi Hays?

  And I think that, yeah, yeah, but, but it's, yeah, same thing, you know, if you're getting therapy from your business partner informally and you're saying things that are wrong or whatever, talking about like

• 1:57:07Jordi Hays?

  Like people, I think people should have the, they, they need to have responsibility over the context of, of the context of the conversation. So I do think it's possible that like chat GPT, if they wanna attack therapy, should create a, you know, uh HIPAA compliant version of their product. That's like a separate app and people should just know, hey.

• 1:57:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, setting expectations is the right thing here ultimately, right? But, but it's so hard to set expectations around a general purpose technology. Yeah, that's the thing, especially, especially for the average person, like you, you, everyone, everyone who comes on this show is suffering under the curse of expertise, right? We know way more about this stuff than the average person and we don't realize how much more we know than the average person. And I don't know if it's reasonable to expect the average person to like know that they shouldn't use this chatbot in therapy because then that might be disclosed in a court of law. That's a lot of, like, there's so many steps you have to understand there, right? The average person doesn't read like the error message that comes up on their screen when their computer's doing something weird.

• 1:58:12Speaker 04

  There, you're not gonna get them to like understand tech privacy law. I don't, I don't have a good answer, but I think you have to like set expectations somehow effectively.

• 1:58:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's why, uh, you've, you've seen like in these high profile, like murder cases, somebody will type in to Google, how to hide a body. It's like, oh, like I thought that like that was, that'd be cool if I.

• 1:58:34John Coogan?

  No, it's the same. It's a database. It's a website with a database backend that saves everything you type. There are logs, but yeah, people don't know that. It's a good point.

• 1:58:44Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:58:45Jordi Hays?

  Anyway.

• 1:58:45Speaker 04

  All right, gentlemen.

• 1:58:46Jordi Hays?

  All right, great chat.

• 1:58:46John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. Yeah, I think OpenAI should buy a billboard on AdQuick that says, OpenAI is subject to the exact same rules as Google and every other.

• 1:58:56Jordi Hays?

  Consumer internet.

• 1:58:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's the rest of the consumer internet. They should get on adquick.com because AdQuick makes out of home advertising easy and measurable. And they could say goodbye to the headaches about out of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

• 1:59:13Jordi Hays?

  Across the globe.

• 1:59:13John Coogan?

  Have our next guest here in the studio.

• 1:59:16Jordi Hays?

  Super intelligence.

• 1:59:18John Coogan?

  Again, let's go. Thank you.

• 1:59:21Jordi Hays?

  You keep that suit in the closet at the office and when it's time for a big meeting or a big TV.

• 1:59:27John Coogan?

  You look fantastic. How are you doing?

• 1:59:29Jordi Hays?

  It looks so natural.

• 1:59:30John Coogan?

  You look great.

• 1:59:31Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Guys know it. Doing great. How are you guys?

• 1:59:34John Coogan?

  We're good. We have a jacket on the way to you. Thank you for.

• 1:59:37Jordi Hays?

  Dude, you ran a half marathon yesterday or the day before? How was that?

• 1:59:42Rahul Sonwalkar?

  That was fun. It was a little rough. I woke up with a little bit of a fever and so I already signed up first. I thought might as well just go with it, you know?

• 1:59:51John Coogan?

  There we go. The Ashton Hall. I love it.

• 1:59:55Jordi Hays?

  That was just playing in your head when you woke up?

• 1:59:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's amazing. Well, congrats on that. And what other news do you have for us?

• 2:00:00Jordi Hays?

  Get the gong ready.

• 2:00:01Rahul Sonwalkar?

  So, yeah, Julius just raised $10 million.

• 2:00:05John Coogan?

  There we go. Congratulations.

• 2:00:10Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Thank you.

• 2:00:11Jordi Hays?

  Total rapper victory.

• 2:00:13John Coogan?

  Total victory. Total victory.

• 2:00:15Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Total rapper victory. You guys know it. And we're also launching a new product called Data Connectors today. So that means Julius can connect directly with your data stores like Postgres, Google Drive, OneDrive, and a lot more coming soon.

• 2:00:28John Coogan?

  Take me through how you're experiencing the data wars, the walls going up. We've seen this stuff with like Glean maybe getting some sharp elbows at Salesforce or something that they don't want other companies coming in. They want to do it themselves. It feels like Postgres is naturally neutral. You operate at a different layer, so maybe less of a risk there, but how's that all playing out?

• 2:00:50Jordi Hays?

  And when it comes to specifically financial data, which is a category, I think you guys have a lot of traction and companies tend to actually own that.

• 2:00:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. But yeah, how is it all playing out?

• 2:01:03Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Absolutely. So, I mean, it's really good to see like what was happening with Salesforce and Glean.

• 2:01:12Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Look, companies have gold mines worth of data. It's just like so much information in that data. Uh, and they aren't able to get the insights that they need because every time somebody on the team needs an insight, they have to go talk to a team, wait for hours or days. And so more than ninety percent of the data, beyond just Salesforce or other business tools, even in your databases, like how are the users using your product? How are they signing up? How are, where are they dropping off in the funnel? All that data doesn't really get analyzed, um, and Julius is really here to solve that. Now, we were launching this data connector with, with Postgres because that's the main database that a lot of startups and late-stage companies use as they're scaling.

• 2:01:56Rahul Sonwalkar?

  And have a lot of valuable data in their customer data, you know, transaction data, uh, marketing data. A lot of the data usually passes through, uh, Postgres and then ends up in, you know, different business tools. And so being able to integrate directly with Postgres means you can now talk to the main data store, uh, directly. Anyone on the team, a marketer, a product manager, even the founder can just ask questions and make visualizations within seconds.

• 2:02:21John Coogan?

  I was talking to a founder who identified an interesting trend in his company and I want to see if it's relevant to your customers. He was saying that, uh, AI tools, cursor, Claude code, WinSurf, cognition, all this stuff is great at taking a ten X engineer to a hundred X, that maybe that's happening. It's definitely some sort of productivity boost. But he was saying that the bigger unlock for him and his organization is that designers have gone from zero X engineers to one X engineers. And that's unlocked more value, maybe on some sort of relative basis because you're getting kind of a divide by zero error, it's like an infinite increase.

• 2:03:03John Coogan?

  And I'm wondering if in your customer's base, are you seeing more like non-technical people kind of become technical and go from that like zero X to one X engineer? And is that kind of a key, uh, selling prop or are you more focused on there's a data scientist who's using Julius to go from ten X to a hundred X?

• 2:03:26Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Exactly, we're seeing the exact same trend with Julius. Hmm. You know, Cursor takes a ten X engineer and turns them into hundred X engineer, but also they take a designer. And now the designer can ship code and ship features. Yeah. And that all of that is really powerful. Similarly with Julius, data scientists and data analysts can now be a lot more productive because they can just talk to the database, write their queries in simple English, um, and get what they need. But also, everyone that they serve, marketers, product managers, operations people, finance team, CEOs, executive team, all these people now can get their own insights. And they don't have to bo- get to be bottlenecked by, you know, uh, timelines or bandwidth. They can just talk to the data and get the insights. In many cases, in fact, it's the data teams that are bringing Julius into the company.

• 2:04:11Rahul Sonwalkar?

  They're saying, hey, we want to do the deep data work that takes a long time. And we don't want to be bothered by these ad hoc queries. So how about you just use Julius for your questions? And then if you need more help, just let us know. Um, and then we're seeing like VP of Marketing, VP of Operations, in many cases CFOs use Julius. But also the PMs at the, at the ground level, using Julius to understand what do the conversion flows look like? When the users use my feature, how are they retaining over time? What are the patterns in their usage? And they're now able to get those insights and then make better product decisions within, within minutes.

• 2:04:45Jordi Hays?

  In the future, do you think that every kind of org within a company will just automatically have Julius reports? Kind of like running in the background, producing, basically producing insights without people even having to prompt it themselves? Is that kind of where you're headed?

• 2:05:00Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Exactly. I mean, that's the, that's the next level of autonomy you want to get to. You know, you see, you have the self-driving, right? Level one, level two, level five. Uh, so right now we're at a level four, kind of like, uh, kind of like autopilot. Soon you want to get to the Waymo level where Julius can simply monitor all your data. Lets you know when there's a change in trends. In fact, what we're hearing from companies and, and people using Julius is that there's a dashboard fatigue. We have hundreds of dashboards to monitor. And it's really hard to know when, when things change. So what if you could have an AI agent like Julius?

• 2:05:29Jordi Hays?

  What if you could have a dashboard for your dashboards?

• 2:05:32John Coogan?

  No, I completely agree with this. Yeah, everyone asks for a dashboard. It gets built. They check it for the first week and then you check the user analytics and no one's checking the dashboard. And it's one ad hoc analysis, I think, is so much more powerful.

• 2:05:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, you want Julius's super intelligence to be like surfacing things that a human would never notice.

• 2:05:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, it has to be unique because you stagnate when you're just checking a number. Okay, it went up another 5%. It's like, go find what numbers are actually trending down. Make a serious change to your business so that you turn that KPI around and then keep doing that.

• 2:06:04Jordi Hays?

  Put the KPIs in orbit.

• 2:06:05John Coogan?

  Put the KPIs in orbit, as we like to say.

• 2:06:08Rahul Sonwalkar?

  I love that.

• 2:06:09Jordi Hays?

  We cut you off.

• 2:06:11Rahul Sonwalkar?

  No, I think you guys are spot on. I mean, you know, you need a dashboard for a dashboard. You need to know a dashboard. You need to have a dashboard that will tell you the key metrics that change every day. And if the metrics don't change, you shouldn't have to look at them. Julius will be able to send you email reports. Imagine getting an email from your AI data analyst every day at 8:00 AM. Hey, here are the five key metrics and here's an executive summary about what's happening in your business. Imagine that in your Slack. And you can then add Julius in your Slack channel and just dive deep into your data with all your teammates. And that often is really powerful.

• 2:06:44Jordi Hays?

  You're speaking our language. This is music to my ears.

• 2:06:47John Coogan?

  You're gonna start tearing up.

• 2:06:49Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna start crying.

• 2:06:50John Coogan?

  It's so beautiful.

• 2:06:50Jordi Hays?

  It's an agentic workflow for your agentic workflows.

• 2:06:53John Coogan?

  It's lovely. It's lovely. I mean, we were talking earlier about data security, the T app hack. I'm interested to know, how are you building Julius for security? I have a Postgres database. I imagine that Julius is often invented in as a web app. But then are you replicating data on Julius servers? Have you hired security people? Like, what's the modern startup approach to security?

• 2:07:19Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Absolutely. We take data security very seriously. In fact, from day one, we have invested and built our infrastructure around keeping our users' data secure. We recently hired a head of data security. He has 18 years of experience, you know, he has more experience than most people.

• 2:07:39Rahul Sonwalkar?

  But what we do essentially is we give each user their own sandbox environment. So each user gets their own environment that's kind of partitioned from other users. And their data, when they import into Julius, is in that environment. And all the code execution happens there. And then you can, with the push of a button, just delete and wipe the whole environment and everything is deleted. All the data, all the files, all the notebooks. And additionally, you can also go in and delete the chat history if you want to. We're SOC 2, TAC 2 compliant and we invest super heavily in data security and a lot more, a lot more stuff coming soon on that.

• 2:08:15Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Well, so happy to see your success. Know how hard you work and yeah. Looking forward to having, at the rate you're going, you're just gonna, we will just set up a recurring monthly call. You just join, announce the new round.

• 2:08:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, hop on anytime, man. Always good to catch up.

• 2:08:30Jordi Hays?

  It's awesome to see.

• 2:08:32Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Thank you.

• 2:08:33John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Really quickly, let me tell you about Bezel. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Go to getbezel.com. Did you see the news about Intel? Very, very rough. Semi analysis says value browser in shambles. Intel now trades for book value-ish. But now the question is if they can achieve book value for the price of book. Now you are getting musty tools, empty shells and the third turnaround in five years. Intel inside of the doghouse.

• 2:09:05Jordi Hays?

  John, by the way, we have a, we have a guest joining.

• 2:09:10John Coogan?

  In person or?

• 2:09:11Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. Just in, just in a little bit here.

• 2:09:14John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. In two minutes, right?

• 2:09:16Jordi Hays?

  Cool.

• 2:09:17John Coogan?

  Yes, we did inventory write downs. We had tools in the line that were older, older tools. And we took the opportunity since we had an excess amount, we took the newer tools, put them on the line, took the older tools out. And so the problem is, is that they're holding this equipment on their books and no one is after them to buy it because they are on the lagging edge now. So very rough. There's a whole bunch of interesting analyses going on with the Bhutan.

• 2:09:41Jordi Hays?

  The number of people that would want to buy hundreds of millions, billions, billions of dollars of old semiconductor manufacturing gear.

• 2:09:50John Coogan?

  It's pretty small.

• 2:09:51Jordi Hays?

  Small market.

• 2:09:52John Coogan?

  Pretty, pretty small.

• 2:09:53Jordi Hays?

  Maybe some rare earths in there.

• 2:09:55John Coogan?

  I did want to give a shout out to Dak in the chat. He says that he was worried that we never read chat. Well, we read it and here you go.

• 2:10:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we have a new, we have a new, uh, we have a new screen here. Uh, it's not high enough to see the most recent one.

• 2:10:09John Coogan?

  But, but we are, we are monitoring it. So if you put a, a message in the chat on YouTube or X, I believe we will see it all here and be able to answer your questions if you have them or, or react to your comments.

• 2:10:20Jordi Hays?

  Nico is in the restream waiting room or we're still waiting for him?

• 2:10:23John Coogan?

  I think we're still waiting.

• 2:10:24Jordi Hays?

  Nobody in the restream. Okay. Nico, uh, created, um, uh, super intelligence for Excel.

• 2:10:33John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:10:33Jordi Hays?

  I'm saying that.

• 2:10:34John Coogan?

  Love to see that.

• 2:10:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but I'm going to send him a message right now.

• 2:10:38John Coogan?

  Well, in the meantime, um, there are so many good posts we can run through. OpenAI is hiring for consumer hardware. And it gives us a little bit of, of information on what they're thinking of building potentially. Uh, they want experience with wireless OLEDs. So that means a screen, microphones, cameras, portable cosmetic enclosures.

• 2:10:58Jordi Hays?

  Another screen.

• 2:10:59John Coogan?

  Liquid plus dust.

• 2:11:00Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for more screens. We know you've been, this is what you've been waiting for. Another screen in your life. You maybe had one on the wrist. You had one in your hand. You had one on your desk.

• 2:11:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you ever played Fallout? You ever feel there's Fallout at all? They have the Pip-Boy. It's basically like a big screen that goes on your, it's like a gauntlet. And that goes on your, uh, on your wrist, your entire arm.

• 2:11:20Jordi Hays?

  I actually want one of those.

• 2:11:22John Coogan?

  It's very cool. It's very cyberpunk.

• 2:11:23Jordi Hays?

  Ideally like some type of tattoo. You could get a screen tattooed and, uh, it would act as like a, you know, a little screen.

• 2:11:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, they'll have to patent it just like Jim O'Shaughnessy did. Did you know that, did you know that Patrick's dad created stock trading?

• 2:11:39Jordi Hays?

  Trading online.

• 2:11:40John Coogan?

  Who invented stock trading online, apparently. Says, I can't shake the feeling that I should have done more with this. This is, uh, Jim O'Shaughnessy, uh, the father of-

• 2:11:48Jordi Hays?

  Creator of Robinhood, creator of Public, creator of, uh, all stock trading.

• 2:11:53John Coogan?

  E-Trade. Patrick O'Shaughnessy, the host of Invest Like the Best.

• 2:11:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's true. Honestly, Jim,

• 2:11:59John Coogan?

  Right up there.

• 2:11:59Jordi Hays?

  You did, you did, you did the most important thing.

• 2:12:02John Coogan?

  That's a business podcast.

• 2:12:03Jordi Hays?

  Incredible investor.

• 2:12:04John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:12:05Jordi Hays?

  Incredible podcaster.

• 2:12:05John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:12:06Jordi Hays?

  And an incredible friend.

• 2:12:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:12:07Jordi Hays?

  And so, uh, yeah, Patrick O'Shaughnessy, uh, Jim O'Shaughnessy has a patent for system and

• 2:12:12John Coogan?

  method for selecting and purchasing stocks via a global computer network. In 1999, this was granted. Wow. Yeah. I don't know how he didn't capitalize on that. I mean, I feel like E-Trade must've been coming up. I still don't understand patents and how like you can have the most important patent and not get paid, then you can have a minor patent and like troll everyone and get like billions of dollars, like.

• 2:12:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Why, why is, why is it difficult to enforce them in the software context?

• 2:12:40John Coogan?

  It is very odd versus bio or anything else. I don't know. Anyway, uh, Yaxine has a good post. Whoever played, whoever preyed on my downfall, pray harder. It's a picture of a alligator dunking a basketball as one does. This doesn't even look AI.

• 2:12:57Jordi Hays?

  Niko says he's here.

• 2:12:58John Coogan?

  AI generated. Uh, he might have the wrong link. He might be in a different, uh, waiting room. Make sure he has the correct restream waiting room to hop in. Anyway, um, absolutely brutal. The Financial Times, this is from Geiger Capital, says, "There's no hiding, hiding the fact that the EU was rolled over by the Trump juggernaut," said one ambassador. "Trump worked out exactly where our pain threshold is." It's crazy. It, it, it was like, like Liberation Day was so much doom and gloom. I remember, I remember having a viral post that day that the market traded down like 5%. And I said, you know, the market's down 5%. Interest rates are up.

• 2:13:40John Coogan?

  Everything's bad, but you know, it hasn't changed the feeling of repping 225 for reps. And everyone enjoyed that during some absolute doom and turmoil. What else is in the news? Uh, "I'm gonna do a cinematic launch video for my startup so it stands out." And it's the Buzz Lightyear meme with tons of identical Buzz Lightyears. The cinematic launch video.

• 2:14:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, every.

• 2:14:02John Coogan?

  Little bit done to death, still get, still breaks through if it's good, if it's unique.

• 2:14:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, Waves did, Waves did a kind of video that felt pretty Cluey-esque.

• 2:14:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:14:11Jordi Hays?

  Got 12 million, no, I think 30, he, he said 30 million views, something like that.

• 2:14:16John Coogan?

  We got a ton of views.

• 2:14:17Jordi Hays?

  We got a ton of views. You can still break out, but I think it's an opportunity. I like this post here from Bi Han. He says, "Time to go back to some low res for a while."

• 2:14:25John Coogan?

  You know what video that is?

• 2:14:26Jordi Hays?

  Do not.

• 2:14:27John Coogan?

  I believe that is the first video ever posted to YouTube.

• 2:14:29Jordi Hays?

  YouTube at the zoo or something.

• 2:14:31John Coogan?

  Yes, that is the co-founder of YouTube talking about the zoo.

• 2:14:33Jordi Hays?

  The thing is, you could get, you could shoot a launch video. There's so many different ways you can take 60 seconds and make something new and different.

• 2:14:41John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:14:42Jordi Hays?

  It, it's not, um, it is not so hard to generate ideas.

• 2:14:47John Coogan?

  Yes, at the same time, tech exists on X, links are banned. So if you write a beautiful blog post outlining your, your website or plan for your business, anything that you do, that's going to be a lot harder to get, go viral than a video that is native to the platform. Uh, I think, I think a thread could also do the same thing. There have been a number of companies that have launched with threads. In some ways, Lulu launched, uh, Rostro kind of with a thread. She didn't do a cinematic video or vibral. She, she was a direct manifesto.

• 2:15:19Jordi Hays?

  Just do text.

• 2:15:20John Coogan?

  You can post. Yeah, you can just do text.

• 2:15:21Jordi Hays?

  Post your way to Valhalla.

• 2:15:23John Coogan?

  But, uh, yeah, uh, it is becoming saturated. It just demands more creativity, more unique styling. You can't just copy and knock off someone else and expect to break through in a huge way. But it is a great way just to quickly in one minute, share a message and condenses it all down. Um, anyway, Nicola Jokic in literal tears after his horse won a race today. He barely cracked a smile after he won an NBA championship, LMAO. Bro, really don't care about basketball. I don't, I don't understand what race this is. It's some sort of chariot racing with a, with a man dragged behind a horse. I saw this in a, in a, in a, in a bar once. Remember we were watching this? Uh, we were out in, uh, uh, uh, what is that place?

• 2:16:05Jordi Hays?

  Ojai.

• 2:16:06John Coogan?

  Ojai, yeah, we were out in Ojai and we saw this on the, on the TV. Uh, we should get into this. This feels extremely us. I feel like.

• 2:16:13Jordi Hays?

  I would love to have our own team.

• 2:16:14John Coogan?

  I feel like I'm, I'm probably not suited to ride the horse at breakneck speed like a true jockey. I think they're a little bit smaller than me.

• 2:16:21Jordi Hays?

  You could get a height reduction surgery. People are getting these height, height extension surgeries.

• 2:16:27John Coogan?

  Yes. Well, if you're looking to get into, uh, if you're looking to go travel the world and hang out with a bunch of horses, get on Wander.

• 2:16:34Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 2:16:35John Coogan?

  Find your happy place.

• 2:16:38Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 2:16:40John Coogan?

  Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning and 21st seven concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. And Ryan Peterson is posting a screenshot from Black Hole who says asteroid Psyche 16 has been found to contain gold reserves worth 700 quintillion dollars. That's enough to make everyone on earth billionaires. And I think that's, that's actually like the crazy math. Is that, is that right? Quintillion?

• 2:17:06Jordi Hays?

  Quintillion.

• 2:17:07John Coogan?

  Cause it's probably quadrillion. Wow. So it really would make everyone a billionaire. That's a lot of gold.

• 2:17:12Jordi Hays?

  It's insane that NASA has not mined this yet. I mean, the, do they not care about humanity? It's like, what are they doing? Try harder.

• 2:17:23John Coogan?

  Everyone gets a billion dollars worth of gold and then we gotta go back to, well, I want a car. I want something else. I don't want just a billion dollars.

• 2:17:30Jordi Hays?

  USD is pretty cool.

• 2:17:31John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:17:33Jordi Hays?

  I'll give you some gold for, for some greenbacks.

• 2:17:37John Coogan?

  Brian, Ryan Peterson says he just wants his Diet Cokes to come in solid gold cans.

• 2:17:42Jordi Hays?

  I like that.

• 2:17:42John Coogan?

  Could be possible. Uh, Brian Kaplan sharing a photo of some absolute dogs, absolute legends at a round table. 19 years ago, Tyler Cowen, Alex Tabarrok, Robin Hanson, and me, plus Ilya Rainer, hanging out with the boys in June 15th, 2006. You'll love to see it. Just guys being dudes. Uh, oh, this is some news. Armada has launched. Uh, Leviathan launches today with our blueprint for American AI dominance. It expands the Galleon lineup, pushing megawatt scale compute to every underutilized energy source we can reach. Trey Stevens, uh, is breaking it down. Armada is building the infrastructure to make the world, make sure the world runs on the US AI stack. Leviathan drops a megawatt of liquid cooled compute where the land and energy live at the edge.

• 2:18:27John Coogan?

  Proud to back the team as they continue to accelerate on their mission to bridge the digital divide. I think this is unlocked by a bunch of different trends. Starlink, obviously very important. A whole bunch of different, uh, pieces coming together to allow a shipping container full of compute to be delivered to the edge in, in all sorts of different, uh, in all the, all different environments.

• 2:18:49Jordi Hays?

  We got the pitch. We got the pitch.

• 2:18:51John Coogan?

  It's fascinating company. Fascinating company.

• 2:18:53Jordi Hays?

  Crazy company. Uh, and we will have, uh, the founders on this week, I believe.

• 2:18:57John Coogan?

  And we'll have to buy one of these for the studio.

• 2:18:58Jordi Hays?

  Ideally multiple.

• 2:19:00John Coogan?

  I need to be influencing.

• 2:19:01Jordi Hays?

  A daily driver and then a backup.

• 2:19:03John Coogan?

  I mean, we search a lot about like true crime stuff. I don't want to be flagged in some database. I want to do that inference locally so that I don't get subpoenaed or anything like that. Anyway, we have our next guest here in the studio. Welcome to the stream.

• 2:19:17Jordi Hays?

  We made it. We have super intelligence in Excel, but we're still figuring it. We're still figuring out Zoom.

• 2:19:25Nico Christie?

  Wifi is coming in a long time. What's up, boys?

• 2:19:27Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:19:28Nico Christie?

  But I couldn't bring the suit. I thought the white coat was the next best.

• 2:19:31John Coogan?

  No, no, white's great. The market's up. We're wearing white. It's very good.

• 2:19:34Jordi Hays?

  It's a good option. Okay, so.

• 2:19:36John Coogan?

  Break it down for us. What do you build?

• 2:19:37Jordi Hays?

  Finn Twit was freaking out this morning because they, they all thought, they thought you paper clipped them all.

• 2:19:44John Coogan?

  Hmm, okay.

• 2:19:45Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, talk about the launch. So Nico was on the show a while back talking about kind of the pre-release. And the, the app is live today. Sounds like you've improved it quite a bit as well. So yeah, break it down.

• 2:19:58Nico Christie?

  Yeah, sweet. Thanks for having me, guys. Yeah, Finn Twit's having a meltdown. They're having the kind of moment that we had August 2024 in software engineering. Karpathy tweeted, you know, cursor's kind of there now. Yeah. And what happened was there was a lot of hesitation from senior devs. And I think a lot of the junior devs became really, really good, really, really fast. And there's a word for them now, like context engineers. And I think where we are now is there's this moment's happening for Excel. So our product's called Shortcut and it's a superhuman Excel agent. And it does feel like that August moment. For some things, it's unbelievably better than humans. And for others, it's just like stupider than your intern.

• 2:20:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Isn't it, isn't the dynamic of like the finance world and the Excel user radically different than the, than the software engineer? I feel like if you're, if you're an amazing software engineer, you can work your way up at a big tech company, become like a senior engineering fellow and basically always be working on algorithms and code and software your entire career and become fantastically wealthy, become an AI engineer that makes a hundred million dollars. But in finance, you go to an investment bank or a hedge fund or a private equity shop. You're working in Excel and then you level up and it becomes all about relationships. And so you don't actually, like, when I think of like a managing director at, you know, KKR or something, I don't think, oh, wow, that guy's really good at Excel. I think that guy knows.

• 2:21:14Jordi Hays?

  Well, he probably used to be.

• 2:21:15Nico Christie?

  Probably was.

• 2:21:16John Coogan?

  Exactly. Used to be. So yeah, how does this dynamic actually play out?

• 2:21:20Nico Christie?

  Yeah, so that's a good call out. It's actually the same in tech, but there's like two paths. You could go, you could go tech lead path and tech leads are like, you know, doing some wizardry on wherever algorithm or backend infrastructure. You could go director path and it's just becomes like you talk about or you brag about how much headcount you have under you. That is like the only thing that exists in finance. And when we show people in finance this, their first reaction is like, like, it's kind of fucked because like Excel is the reason that I'm where I'm at now and that path doesn't seem like it's going to be a thing. So it is different.

• 2:21:50John Coogan?

  I mean, it feels like you'd like even, I feel like a lot of people, entrepreneurs don't want to be vibe coding themselves. They want to hire somebody who's really good at vibe coding and they want to get the value of a senior engineer for the price of a junior engineer. I imagine if I'm a MD in an investment bank and I'm like, great, I can even more quickly turn over a turn of the DCF to my client. And yes, I don't mind keeping the Harvard grad, you know, up all night on the weekend. But if he could, he or she could get it back to me in an hour instead of 10 hours, I'd be happy with that.

• 2:22:26Nico Christie?

  Yeah. And you'd still rather that person work 30 hours a day and just send you more. But yeah, we know this because of tech, like this happened and it was actually much scarier two years ago. Whenever you can drive the cost of inputs lower and your ROI goes up, like the obvious thing to do is just put more gas on that fire. It's just, it makes sense that it's scary as in like, we used to have tools and now we have things that can use our tools. Right? So I think it's inevitable that they're going to learn what we learned and that's how I'm going to position it.

• 2:22:52John Coogan?

  So we need to go to the finance community and teach them about Jevon's paradox.

• 2:22:57Nico Christie?

  I'm glad somebody's bringing this up. We're going to host a Jevon's paradox happy hour.

• 2:23:01John Coogan?

  We should.

• 2:23:02Nico Christie?

  Rooftop bar.

• 2:23:03Jordi Hays?

  We're going to be, we're going to be in New York.

• 2:23:05John Coogan?

  I was about to say.

• 2:23:05Jordi Hays?

  We'll start, we'll just go on the street if we see someone dressed in a suit.

• 2:23:09Nico Christie?

  Circuit. Yeah.

• 2:23:10John Coogan?

  You should. Are you, are you in New York?

• 2:23:12Nico Christie?

  No, we're in Menlo Park. I'm the only person in Menlo Park who knows finance, unfortunately.

• 2:23:16John Coogan?

  Hey, what about the venture firms? They need to know.

• 2:23:18Nico Christie?

  If you're serious about finance, you go to private equity or VC, or private equity or hedge funds.

• 2:23:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure.

• 2:23:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was like, wait, what?

• 2:23:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, no. You put it in the Excel sheet, multiply the revenue by a hundred.

• 2:23:30Nico Christie?

  You do a little bit of this and you close your eyes.

• 2:23:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's the valuation.

• 2:23:35Nico Christie?

  Slap a multiple.

• 2:23:36John Coogan?

  Multiply by a hundred.

• 2:23:37Jordi Hays?

  What do you mean I need a model to determine the valuation? It's I'm just gonna pay slightly more than my competitors.

• 2:23:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, what is the shape of the user base? Where is Excel actually like powerfully used? Because I feel like so many of the hedge funds, they used to do stuff in Excel, then it went to VBA, then it went to, you know, high frequency trading and proprietary systems. And I'm sure there's some stuff, but it's usually in like private markets, less liquid markets. Like where is Excel holding on really strongly?

• 2:24:04Nico Christie?

  You know, I'd say hedge funds are like the toughest customers. Anything that they're like really heavily relying on like already low level systems or real time data to public access markets, like that is a tough customer. Thankfully, they're like a small sliver and I'm not sure I'm building for them. But anything like private equity or you're getting a SIM and you need to build a model on it or a mini model, anything where like you have a template, you want to update it in light of new information. Corporate real estate is like a bizarre area where there's a lot of PMF. But it seems to be that like building new models could be a hundred times faster now. Editing existing models is a little tricky. I mean, if you really want to swap a model for like new data, that's kind of like the highest bar that you can possibly have, but seems to be solvable.

• 2:24:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:24:43Jordi Hays?

  So what's the workflow now? I'm in PE, I have a SIM. And for those that don't know, it's basically a bunch of PDFs and data showing like, showing what's actually happening in a business that might be for sale. Can I drop, how soon can I just drop this into?

• 2:25:00Nico Christie?

  And that's exactly right. So it's like a confidential investment memo from, you know, the sell side. A big bank will send it to a PE firm or they'll send it to a bunch of them. Typically, what you do is like you try to analyze, you diligence the deal and you look at this big PDF full of data and you try to model it to like, understand, is this a good deal? Should I bring this to my boss or whatever? You're usually constrained by how fast you could do that analysis. Currently now you can just attach a PDF of a SIM. They're usually PDFs or multiple PDFs or customer data dumps as well. And you can just say like, hey, here's my template. I use this for my LBO model. Make me 10 of them. And in fact, now you can also just email it and be like, I want 100. And you can get all of that or you can attach 100 attachments and ask for 100 models back. And then it becomes more like, how fast can I review data more like how, then how quickly can I do groundwork?

• 2:25:45John Coogan?

  What about just like FPNA orgs in like small and medium businesses? I feel like when I've run companies, I have like one finance person and we have a question. Should we expand in this market or should we add a new SKU? Or should we do something? Should we take out this line of credit or whatever? And usually there's like an Excel model or Google Sheets model that's like built, but it's, it's like not even, there's not even like a catalyst for pull a model off the shelf. It's like, no, I need to just be in Excel and model this out. Or even like CAC to LTV, is this, how is, how are my KPIs trending? There's so much work that goes in the long tail of Excel. Is that just like not the early market for you? Or do you see people abusing the tool?

• 2:26:27Nico Christie?

  I think the crazy thing is, is I do these live demos and people are like, oh, that's insane. But is this just DCFs?

• 2:26:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:26:33Nico Christie?

  And I'm like, you know, we are in the tech world, so we think tech is the center of everything. But anything you can possibly do in Excel is way more in distribution than like Ruby on Rails. Right? Like there's no, there's no kind of model you can conceive that is like unfair to ask. It becomes like, what are the fundamental limits of AI? And it turns out like writing Excel formulas is a lot easier than writing like amazing code, actually. So it's more, more or less like, how did this not exist at this point? But yeah, I have yet to find one example.

• 2:27:01Jordi Hays?

  You said shortcut beats first year analysts from McKinsey and Goldman head to head 89% when blindly judged by their managers. We even gave humans 10x more time. What, what did that kind of like benchmarking exercise?

• 2:27:15Nico Christie?

  Yeah, so we gave, we gave, we gave multiple first year incoming analysts from McKinsey, Goldman, BCG, JP Morgan, a couple of other firms, like five tasks. And we thought like they were the most in distribution for classic finance work. So this was consulting, like building out models, M&A models, LBO at DCF and like personal hobby stuff. And actually even product management, like build a dashboard over this customer dump. We then gave them over 90 minutes per task. Some of the hobby ones had like 15 minutes. And then we just asked them to submit it. And then when we did that, we also got in touch with managers from these firms and just sent them a Google form with like side by sides, completely anonymized, and just pick your preference according to like accuracy, professionalism, whatever. I thought it was going to be closer to 50/50. I think what I really learned is first year analysts are like kind of lousy.

• 2:28:00Nico Christie?

  Like they're not that good at building some models. And it's And then also, I think people just take way longer to do things. I think if I had to critique the study, it would be that like five hours is not enough. And like, they would have liked to have a week, one person wrote me. But I didn't want to run that study.

• 2:28:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's your read on the meter data that these coding agent tools did not actually speed up software engineers? Did you see this? So Meter did a blinded study. It was small, small number, but it was interesting because it was very solid software engineers working on advanced bugs in like big open source projects, not vibe coding a landing page. Like, like truly, like there is a sticky bug hanging out in some fundamental repo out there. Go fix it. They estimated that they would be 20% faster, 30% faster, something like that. Turns out they were 20% slower. I'm wondering if you'll see a similar pattern

• 2:28:57John Coogan?

  where there's a speed up for bootstrapping and getting from zero to one in a project. But then for the really crazy person that already has all their macros and doesn't touch the mouse, maybe they're actually going to experience a slowdown. Do you think that would happen? What do you think about that?

• 2:29:12Nico Christie?

  Yeah, yeah. It's a great question. I saw the study. I didn't read it deeply. What I will say-

• 2:29:17John Coogan?

  Not that it would be bad for you. It's just like, it's just an interesting finding.

• 2:29:19Nico Christie?

  Yeah, no. I think the obvious thing is that it's like using AI is a skill also.

• 2:29:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:24Nico Christie?

  So like the top startups have like the best context engineers in the world. They know how to optimize the KV cache hit rate, whatever it is. If you kind of give like even a really strong engineer who's been coding for 20 years, you're like, now you have to use this tool or use it however you want. I have no doubt that even the best engineers and the oldest engineers like eventually would find patterns in which it's massively unlocking for them. So I think that is what's going to happen. But I actually, to be like the most critical, I think clearly Excel modelers are way less technical and way less on the frontier of tech than our software engineers. So it's actually more on me as like a product person to like, how do I unearth some of these capabilities and hide the ones that they're not ready for? And even train people for this because it is 2023 all over again.

• 2:30:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, how how templatable is the work? Because I I know Canalist sold to Tegus, which sold to Alpha sites, I believe, and Canalist was kind of like off the shelf financial models, some data integrations, Capital IQ has had integrations.

• 2:30:15Nico Christie?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:30:16John Coogan?

  You have a Bloomberg terminal, you can have integrations. And so there's almost a world where you want to like, sit on top of a of a library of templates. In some ways, the way like, Deep Research is clearly RLHF on like, a couple templates of like, what a report looks like. It loves tables. And so I don't know if you want to do like, fine tuning, or like, have a model that selects a pre pre-filled template, and then you're using your tool just to update that template. What do you think about that?

• 2:30:44Nico Christie?

  Yeah, so let's break it down into two things. One would be like, product, and then the other one would be training. As far as product is as far as product is concerned, like, I think the most important thing you can do is let users actually upload their templates.

• 2:30:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:30:55Nico Christie?

  Like, your income statement is going to be different than, you know, or a Pincus or whatever. And then just let them work naturally from theirs. But then from the training perspective, you have to collect as much of this data as possible and train your models. Kind of definitionally, if you're using frontier models, you can be limited in what you can and cannot serve in terms of trained models. But it's it's actually a much more constrained environment. So like, I think we stand to benefit benefit from it much more than does like, operator or, you know, Deep Research.

• 2:31:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, makes sense. Jordi, anything else?

• 2:31:22Jordi Hays?

  Where how do you think the the product needs to improve going forward? It sounds like in the in the study, in the test that you ran with the the incoming analysts, it performed very well. That's kind of like a unique situation. What's it going to take to to get it to the point where it's actually disrupting the job market in, you know, in in some of those roles?

• 2:31:46Nico Christie?

  Yeah, it's a great question. Clearly, right now, I think what it does is it makes, like, maybe you guys are rusty on Excel that you used to be in, like, it makes you much better at Excel. And if you're kind of a rookie, or like, you're a solopreneur, and you want to, like, have a one man finance shop, like, you're much better now already with it. So for that, like, we pass the capabilities threshold. The big question becomes like, for like, real enterprises with people hardcore use it, are we there? And I would say, like, if August is that moment, we're like, in June, like, it is a pretty clear capabilities threshold we have to pass, and we're actually actively adding all of the limitations to our internal benchmark, and just hill climbing them as aggressively as we can. Part of it becomes a little bit of a product science of like, how you can abstract the limitations away from them. But like, more specifically, it's exactly

• 2:32:30Nico Christie?

  Editing and overwriting large nasty existing templates and files with new data is like, if you don't do that at a certain percentage of accuracy, it's just an all starter.

• 2:32:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like part of the challenge will be figuring out, like giving the user tools to figure out where shortcut is hallucinating, right?

• 2:32:49Nico Christie?

  Right, right, right, right.

• 2:32:50Jordi Hays?

  If you have like some...

• 2:32:51Nico Christie?

  Yeah, but that's part of...

• 2:32:52Jordi Hays?

  Part of that, I remember, you know, working with, with, you know, get a model made in the past and I just look at it and I'm like, okay, everything looks good, but like it's definitely off and like it's just like it's too good or it's too bad.

• 2:33:06Nico Christie?

  Bad model smell, yeah.

• 2:33:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then you dive into it and you find like one or, one or two kind of reasons, reasons for that. And I think like the people that might critique shortcut today are going to say like, oh, I used it for this or that and like it missed this column or whatever.

• 2:33:24Nico Christie?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:33:25Jordi Hays?

  That kind of stuff.

• 2:33:27Nico Christie?

  So, I mean, in terms of how we think about it, I'll tell you how we think about it and then like what actively we're doing about it, but it's like this is not a new phenomenon. Like encoding, it had to get certain good and it had to be certainly like at a certain level of observability. And when Cursor like brought the apply diff function, it actually made the job of supervising AI like doable. Like I used to copy blocks and it would be, I wouldn't know what would break. That was the big thing. It was actually observability, not accuracy. And then Sonic got good enough. In like self-driving, it's safer than we are, but we still don't want to make that trade because we want to be like that guy killed that person. Right? Like we need to be able to blame people. Radiology, it's there too, right? Like we just don't know who to sue if something went wrong. I think for finance, like exactly what you're talking about is we had to have a UI that allows for you to observe the diff.

• 2:34:08Nico Christie?

  And like we had a good inspiration, right? Cursor. So actually now like it's part of the launch video I just, I just shared. And I know we were talking about like product demos, which I have a strong like, you know, opinion about. Like the whole, like you have to be able to see everything that's changed, but also the root material. Cause in Excel, definitionally, some things are hardcoded, but you want to know where those came from because you can't justify it. Right? Like what, what part of the 10K did it come from? What web search did it come from? What's the exact quote? Like what page? So if, I, I really do believe that it's not about getting to 99.9% accuracy. It's about like getting to perfect traceability. Cause like you know, your analysts suck. Like even your associates are not good, right? So you just have to be able to, to observe it at a superhuman level.

• 2:34:46John Coogan?

  Do you think?

• 2:34:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and the good thing for analysts is like you combined with a product like this could actually get to the point where you're truly elite.

• 2:34:54Nico Christie?

  Yeah, yeah, so I know people are afraid, let me hit that, like, clearly analysts should be using this or a tool that will try to do what we're doing. No doubt about it, it's, the right launch is a non-zero amount of controversy, right? Like, I know, I know that's an emotional reaction that people have, but clearly people will be using this the same way, like, if you don't use Cursor now, like, you don't know what you're doing, right?

• 2:35:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:16Jordi Hays?

  Do you think you'll face more? You're not afraid to trigger, trigger a couple of incoming analysts that are just saying, "I used it and, and did this wrong." It's like, well, you probably would have made a mistake too.

• 2:35:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think you'll face more competition, or there will be more war rooms planning to compete with you from the hyperscalers who have products that they want to add this feature to, or the foundation model labs who see, "Hey, uh, you know what? I can, maybe I don't have control over a consumer application, but I can do a lot of these calculations in pandas, in Python."

• 2:35:52Nico Christie?

  Yeah, yeah, I'll answer those two. Yeah, those two are very different.

• 2:35:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:55Nico Christie?

  Um, when it comes to the hyperscaler, it comes down to, can they?

• 2:35:59John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:36:00Nico Christie?

  I think they would if they could, right? And they would have already. Um, I think it comes down to like inertia, talent even.

• 2:36:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:36:07Nico Christie?

  Then that's not true for OpenAI, right? Uh, but what's, what's the problem there? I think it's going to be a bitter competition, is the truth.

• 2:36:14John Coogan?

  Um.

• 2:36:16Nico Christie?

  Then you have to ask, so what principles do you really believe in? And will it, like, prevent you from doing what I'm doing?

• 2:36:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:21Nico Christie?

  Right? Like, I think even if you made an effort to copy me or beat me or directly compete with me, you'd have to believe the things I believe in, like, wholeheartedly. And I think most of the people at Frontier Labs, I know because I work at a small one, like, really don't even care about Excel, or they think that, like, we're all going towards an input-output model anyway.

• 2:36:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:36:35Nico Christie?

  Right? That like, you have to do a general training, like, paradigm to bring you just a model out at the very end, and who cares if it's hardcoded? Like, Excel's a thing of the past anyway. Um, I think there's like a bajillion dollars to make in between those two states.

• 2:36:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:36:47Nico Christie?

  Um, and I'm not even sure that their path brings you to that state first, right?

• 2:36:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:53Nico Christie?

  So, my argument, or the way I think about competition is more like, in principle versus the top labs, but it's more just maybe arrogance when it comes to hyperscalers.

• 2:37:04John Coogan?

  No, no, I think that makes a lot of sense. I mean, OpenAI is fighting a war on like seven different fronts right now. They're like, oh, we're also going to do a phone. We're also going to do a browser and we're also going to do this and that. And, you know, they're like a coding environment and all this and like.

• 2:37:18Nico Christie?

  And that comes from the research. How do you? Yeah, I guess.

• 2:37:23John Coogan?

  You're seven steps down the power law.

• 2:37:24Nico Christie?

  I know.

• 2:37:25John Coogan?

  Will they really build a competitor, a piece of spreadsheet software?

• 2:37:29Nico Christie?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:30John Coogan?

  They probably could, but that's pretty low on the priority stack for the moment.

• 2:37:33Jordi Hays?

  I guess, I guess your approach from a go to market standpoint just seems to be like, create the best product possible and release it and see what happens. Is that, will you have an enterprise motion over time? You know, are you going to set up a New York office and like pound the pavement?

• 2:37:51Nico Christie?

  No, we're going for drinks, guys. Now, now, listen, I think people have a lot of false, stupid pride about like their go to market motion. Right? Like I've mentioned Curse four times, a lot of admiration, but they're like, they beat the drum. They're like, we've never spent a dollar on go to market or distribution or ads. Like, that's a flex, but it's stupid, right? Like, you can also have a world-class sales team. When I meet with the CIOs of the biggest banks in the world, like they want to go, right? Now I need to know like what it takes to have the right SWAT team to put that together. But I don't think that comes at the expense of what we're doing from like a prosumer bottoms up path.

• 2:38:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:38:26Nico Christie?

  Inevitably, one will seem to be more fruitful than the other and I will pour proportional resources towards it. I think clearly my gift is more bottoms up.

• 2:38:35John Coogan?

  But both can be positive sum for you.

• 2:38:37Nico Christie?

  For sure. And I don't think Windsurf had to, yeah, exactly. Exactly.

• 2:38:43John Coogan?

  Deal director in the chat says, Nico said the finance bro end of times is delayed a couple of months. Which I think is correct.

• 2:38:50Nico Christie?

  I wanted to give them a chance to get back.

• 2:38:52Jordi Hays?

  You have two, yeah, you have two months to escape the permanent underclass.

• 2:38:56John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. So start vibe, vibe modeling. Anyway, this has been fantastic. Always good hanging out with you. Jordy, anything else?

• 2:39:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, congrats on the launch.

• 2:39:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, congrats on the launch. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:39:06Nico Christie?

  Appreciate it, guys.

• 2:39:07Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you next time.

• 2:39:08John Coogan?

  You're on notice.

• 2:39:09Jordi Hays?

  You're on notice.

• 2:39:10Nico Christie?

  Listen, I'm a fixture now, but I'll actually sit up.

• 2:39:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:39:12Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:39:13John Coogan?

  The microphone is fantastic.

• 2:39:15Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:39:15Nico Christie?

  Think my job's serious.

• 2:39:17John Coogan?

  Bye. Gary Tan says, hire the engineer who worked on the best product. Hire the marketer and salesperson who managed to get the worst product to outsell the best product.

• 2:39:28Jordi Hays?

  I I'm I'm gonna

• 2:39:29John Coogan?

  Agree.

• 2:39:30Jordi Hays?

  So I mean, an example here is is um uh this is the the product quality is up for debate.

• 2:39:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:39:37Jordi Hays?

  I'd say like the market generally

• 2:39:39John Coogan?

  I know where you're going with this. Yeah.

• 2:39:40Jordi Hays?

  Windserve too. Yep. But they got to eighty million.

• 2:39:43John Coogan?

  They had a fantastic go to market motion and now that is cognition.

• 2:39:46Jordi Hays?

  And now they have a Cracks engineering team and.

• 2:39:49John Coogan?

  Pretty yeah, pretty, pretty wild. Yeah. I mean, it is. It is hard to find I like searching for engineers who worked at the best products. It's very easy. It's what Mark Zuckerberg is doing. Go hire the the OpenAI researchers who built O three. Go hire the OpenAI researchers who worked on images and chat GPT. They're clearly good. It's much harder to actually identify products that have outsized distribution, right?

• 2:40:11Jordi Hays?

  Funny that OpenAI has so many different like products and models and things like that, that there's so many people that can leave and be like, I was the product lead on.

• 2:40:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:20Jordi Hays?

  O three Pro Mini Hi. And you can raise a hundred million dollars off that.

• 2:40:25John Coogan?

  You can get a hundred million dollars in your bank account in a uh in a hiring bonus.

• 2:40:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh Noah Smith says, I was doing a podcast with Eric Torenberg and Dwar Kesh the other day, and we were talking about whether AI will destroy humanity. And in an offhand way, I remarked that technology had already destroyed humanity. And it's showing the world population with a projection based on fertility rate of one point six children per women. Basically showing that our by twenty eight hundred, our population will go down to zero. I would just say uh technology has not destroyed your humanity.

• 2:40:58John Coogan?

  Seventy five years to figure out this problem. Skill issue.

• 2:41:01Jordi Hays?

  Skill issue.

• 2:41:02John Coogan?

  I I think we're gonna be good. But uh yeah, it is. It is an interesting trend and obviously uh it it it's one of the less explored territories in what happened.

• 2:41:12Jordi Hays?

  I think if we can get a a vaccine for twins and triplets every and we just.

• 2:41:19John Coogan?

  You know what that is? It's not being.

• 2:41:20Jordi Hays?

  Keep the pregnancy rate where it is.

• 2:41:22John Coogan?

  It's it's it's uh the the rate of twins and triplets is very low in vegetarians. And so eating a carnivore diet might literally save us. I'm not kidding about this.

• 2:41:34Jordi Hays?

  Government run hamburger shops.

• 2:41:36John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:41:37Jordi Hays?

  Every universal basic hamburger three times a day.

• 2:41:40John Coogan?

  It is. It is one of the unexplored answers. And I think because tech people debate that what happened in nineteen seventy one so much in the stagnation thesis, no one really wants to interrogate. Was it technology that happened in 1971? Was that the beginning of the technology boom? But maybe we should be having that conversation about the effect that, you know, the personal computer and then the internet had on everything. That might be one of the reasons. Uh, one of the interesting, uh, theories for, you know, the original what happened in 1971, the Peter Thiel stagnation thesis, this idea that we are not building flying cars. We stopped building nuclear reactors is truly just that the internet was such a great draw that it brain drained everyone away from everything because you over in nuclear territory,

• 2:42:24John Coogan?

  you had regulation and you couldn't move that fast. But on the internet, you could throw up a, a website and get distribution and had very few, uh, few, very few, few forms to fill out, very few gatekeepers to delay your, uh, your rise. And so you could just grow at the natural rate, uh, that the, that the market pulled. You basically had a free market on the internet and in the computing world. And you did not have a free market in the energy world or in the flying car world. And so, uh, it is, it is interesting.

• 2:42:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, more importantly, uh, armor plated Gulf Force One, Gulf Force One spotted with President Trump at the Gulf Force. I guess, did he get this transported to Scotland?

• 2:43:04John Coogan?

  I suppose so.

• 2:43:05Jordi Hays?

  Cause it looks like a links course.

• 2:43:06John Coogan?

  I mean, they fly on a, on a global, like, have you seen the plane that the president flies on? When they bring the beast and the SUVs and stuff?

• 2:43:14Jordi Hays?

  Oh, they bring, they bring, uh, is it the C-130?

• 2:43:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's, it's one of those. It's a huge, huge transport.

• 2:43:21Jordi Hays?

  Okay, that's easy.

• 2:43:22John Coogan?

  I think the entire front of the, or maybe the back of the plane goes down. They just, they're already in the cars and they just drive out in the armor plated SUVs. And so bringing this does not seem that difficult. It is kind of funny because, um, I mean, I guess it keeps you safe while you're in it, but then you have to get out to golf. So, so it's not like a full, uh, security detail, but, um, seems like it works to some degree. Uh, anyway, Nizzy says, "The only way to make AI output good code, I swear, is copy the Pfing file exactly, no mistakes. My sister will die if you F up." Ridiculous. And so, yeah, this is, you know, I, I, I think this is more of a joke at this point and like we are out of the like make a threat.

• 2:44:04Jordi Hays?

  If it works, it works.

• 2:44:05John Coogan?

  I don't think, I don't think it actually, I don't think that, I don't think that you actually get better LLM results by prompt engineering in that way. I think that's a, I think that's a relic of a few years ago where you used to have to say, you know, please do this and don't make mistakes and all of that stuff. Like you used to, when you went to prompt an image generator, you used to have to say, no six fingers. Don't do six fingers. And then it would do five fingers. You had to tell it that. And now it's all baked in. And so you don't run into that problem at all anymore. Anyway, in other news, Ashley Vance has a new video on, on Core Memory about New Limit, who's been on the show, which is finding combinations of protein that reverse aging across the body is perhaps the most exciting work in the biotech field. I agree. It's backed by Brian Armstrong, Patrick Collison,

• 2:44:49John Coogan?

  Josh Kushner, Nat Friedman and others. You should go check it out. It's a 17 minute video. It's out on X now and of course it's on the Core Memory YouTube.

• 2:44:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Shout out to Ashley.

• 2:44:59John Coogan?

  I mean, Ashley Vance has got to do a video about Robert Maddox.

• 2:45:02Jordi Hays?

  On Robert Maddox.

• 2:45:02John Coogan?

  This is begging for a Core Memory deep dive.

• 2:45:05Jordi Hays?

  This feels equally important to humanity's future.

• 2:45:07John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. So Robert Maddox has a hobby, looks like an older gentleman. He, his hobby is installing jet engines on anything that can move. And he put a jet engine on a bicycle here and is just ripping down the street. Absolute legend.

• 2:45:26Jordi Hays?

  Let's put a jet engine on a horse.

• 2:45:28John Coogan?

  Let's put a jet engine.

• 2:45:29Jordi Hays?

  Let's put a jet engine on a, on a, on the basketball player. I don't even know his name. The guy, the guy who has the horse that he uses.

• 2:45:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know.

• 2:45:38Jordi Hays?

  Someone else. I don't even.

• 2:45:40John Coogan?

  Nikola Jokic.

• 2:45:41Jordi Hays?

  Jokic.

• 2:45:42John Coogan?

  I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that and revealing my non, uh, no, non, my lack of knowledge.

• 2:45:48Jordi Hays?

  Quinn Nelson.

• 2:45:49John Coogan?

  Look at this, look at this, look at this. Here you go. Look at this guy. He's having the time of his life.

• 2:45:52Jordi Hays?

  On a skateboard?

• 2:45:52John Coogan?

  Riding, riding a jet engine. I didn't know you could, I wonder what it takes to build a jet engine like that. Yeah, the metal just heats up like that. It's crazy, right?

• 2:45:59Jordi Hays?

  That's insane.

• 2:46:00John Coogan?

  Wow. Yeah, this is hard tech. Get this man to the gundo.

• 2:46:03Jordi Hays?

  Wow, Santa.

• 2:46:04John Coogan?

  This is remarkable. I wonder, why is this not like commercialized? Like, why is this not a thing? Is it just extremely dangerous? Did they never figure out how to make jet engines reliable in the right way? It feels like. Maybe it's not fuel efficient. I don't know. We use them in planes. Why not in skateboards? This seems extremely dangerous. I wonder how fast he's going. The Santa Claus ones particularly.

• 2:46:26Jordi Hays?

  He seemingly does these in flat, open spaces.

• 2:46:28John Coogan?

  This also feels like textbook, like this could be AI-generated, but I don't think it actually is.

• 2:46:33Jordi Hays?

  Wait, is this real? I thought it was AI when I saw it.

• 2:46:35John Coogan?

  I don't know anymore.

• 2:46:36Jordi Hays?

  It's farm-to-table. It screams Robert Maddox.

• 2:46:39John Coogan?

  Let's look it up. Let's fact-check this.

• 2:46:41Jordi Hays?

  He has an account called CrazyRocketMan.

• 2:46:44John Coogan?

  I think he's Lindy. I think he was around before generative AI.

• 2:46:47Jordi Hays?

  I can see videos.

• 2:46:48John Coogan?

  And so he is real.

• 2:46:49Jordi Hays?

  He was doing this 10 years ago.

• 2:46:50John Coogan?

  10 years ago. You think he was using Dolly 1.0 for that? No way.

• 2:46:56Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:46:57John Coogan?

  This is authentic.

• 2:46:58Jordi Hays?

  Or he's been an entirely Sam, a figment of Sam Altman's imagination.

• 2:47:02John Coogan?

  Potentially, potentially.

• 2:47:03Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we're getting back into 20 years ago. He's 17 years ago. Maddoxjets.com.

• 2:47:09John Coogan?

  This is the value.

• 2:47:10Jordi Hays?

  Incredibly scary, pulse-set-powered jet-engine car.

• 2:47:14John Coogan?

  There we go. Well, speaking of AI, Elon Musk has rolled out a change to Super Grok coming to your phone soon. And this is actually a great feature. So it has an auto setting that chooses the best mode, whether to go with the fast response or the deep or the expert response. This is something I, it's turning into one of my number-one frustrations with the ChatGPT app at the moment, is that sometimes I want 04 and I want, or 40, and I want something quick. And then sometimes I want 03. And if I trigger the quick question with 03 Pro and it's waiting there for 10 minutes, I have to go and start a new chat and then change the model and then get the 40 question answered. And it just slows me down a little bit.

• 2:47:57Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:47:57John Coogan?

  And I think this auto mode should come to the chat box. I would even just be down for, "Give me the ability to pick the model in the chat box." So I should just be able to say, "Hey, use 40 to tell me the capital of Scotland." And it should just do it quickly. Or I should say, "I need a deep research report on this." And it should just trigger deep research. I shouldn't have to click UI buttons on this. Text is the universal interface. You know who said that, OpenAI? So make it truly a universal interface by allowing me to pick the model in the prompt window, please.

• 2:48:32John Coogan?

  Anyway, speaking of ChatGPT, Quinn Nelson has a post that says, "Today I learned my wife is using ChatGPT to find coupon codes for web stores online." She said it works almost every time without ad-ridden websites filled with old codes. I've literally never once considered using an LLM for this, but now it seems obvious. I love it. Uh, very interesting. I would have never, I would, I never would have thought to do this, but now that it's out there, uh, makes a ton of sense. Go when you're searching, when you're about to check out.

• 2:49:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just checked, uh, checked Lucy code Ben 20 gives you 20% off store wide.

• 2:49:07John Coogan?

  There we go. Yep.

• 2:49:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there we go. Uh, this is breaking news and this is important. Mercedes Benz is finally integrating Microsoft Teams into its vehicles. We have been begging for this. They really are, you know, it's basically an office on wheels and it's about time.

• 2:49:25John Coogan?

  This is huge because, uh, if you're a defense tech founder, you're probably ITAR compliant, you need Microsoft Teams, you're probably driving a Mercedes Benz six by six.

• 2:49:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:33John Coogan?

  Right?

• 2:49:34Jordi Hays?

  You should be.

• 2:49:34John Coogan?

  G63 six by six.

• 2:49:35Jordi Hays?

  It's not very American dynamism coded, but it's secure.

• 2:49:39John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, uh, it's, it's pretty, pretty American dynamism coded.

• 2:49:43Jordi Hays?

  You're making, getting an American made six by six.

• 2:49:46John Coogan?

  I mean, there just aren't that many other options. If you're, if you're in the market for a six by six.

• 2:49:50Jordi Hays?

  I want to see Teams in a Ford Raptor. That's the, that's the ultimate gun.

• 2:49:53John Coogan?

  The gauntlet has been thrown down by Mercedes Benz. Balls in your court Ford, Ford Motor Company. Let's get Teams in there.

• 2:49:59Jordi Hays?

  Everybody's dunking on this being like, oh, this is so silly. No one asked for this. It's like, how so many people take conference calls while driving? Why would they not make an integration?

• 2:50:11John Coogan?

  Also, Mercedes Benz has one of the few active systems on the road that's level three self-driving. And what that means is that when you're on the freeway at certain speeds, I believe between like 20 and 40 miles an hour. They're so, they are so confident in their self-driving technology that you can watch a YouTube video while you're in the driver's seat. Which doesn't sound that crazy when you think about like Waymo and what Tesla's doing with a robotaxi. But it is an interesting thing for just like a consumer car that you can actually own and you can drive around. And then you can throw it into self-driving mode. And it will let you watch a YouTube video, so it should let you take a Teams call, I would imagine,

• 2:50:53John Coogan?

  or let you use anything. And then it disables the screen if it needs you to take over. And I think the reason that they've rolled out level three at like low speeds in traffic is because even if you get into an accident at 40 miles an hour, if it's a new Mercedes Benz, it's probably very, very hard for that accident to be truly catastrophic because you're just not going that fast. But I don't know, we'll see how this works out. We'll see if the Teams users enjoy it.

• 2:51:19Jordi Hays?

  Anyway. Uh, in more news, uh, Seabass in the chat says, what did you think of the Tesla Samsung deal, which I didn't see?

• 2:51:27John Coogan?

  I didn't see that.

• 2:51:27Jordi Hays?

  So I pulled it up.

• 2:51:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:51:30Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is a bad look on our part, John. How do, how do we miss a 16 and a half billion dollar supply deal between Tesla and Samsung to spur the chipmaker's US contract business?

• 2:51:41John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, interesting.

• 2:51:42Jordi Hays?

  So Tesla has signed a 16 and a half billion dollar deal to source chips from Samsung.

• 2:51:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:51:47Jordi Hays?

  A move that could bolster the South Korean tech giant's unprofitable contract business, but is unlikely to help Tesla sell more EVs or roll robotaxis more quickly. Tesla CEO Elon, of course, said Sunday that Samsung's new chip factory in Taylor, Texas, would make Tesla's next generation A16 chip. And so anyways, we'll need to um, look into this more. It says, production is still years away.

• 2:52:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:52:14Jordi Hays?

  So it's unlikely to help Tesla's immediate challenges.

• 2:52:18John Coogan?

  It's still just notable that they're not making the chips that go into Tesla's self-driving units in, at TSMC. Like that is what's the, the real news here. Because with everything on the cutting edge of AI, whether it's Apple Intelligence, ChatGPT, Google Gemini, no matter what the chip is, it's fabbed at TSMC right now on the most, on the most leading, on the most leading edge.

• 2:52:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:43John Coogan?

  Process. So, and interestingly, um, for a long time, TSMC's most cutting edge.

• 2:52:50John Coogan?

  fabs were driven by by smartphone demand. So Apple would come to TSMC and say, we need the the smallest nanometer fab you have. We want two nanometer, we want three nanometer, we want the most cutting edge and the most cutting edge chip, the most cutting edge process would always go into a smartphone. And the reason for that was not raw compute power, it was compute efficiency and power efficiency. Because if you're putting a chip in a phone, battery life is really, really key. If you're putting a chip in a data center, power efficiency is important on the big macro scale. But at the end of the day, if you're getting a one gigawatt data center with a nuclear power plant and a natural

• 2:53:32John Coogan?

  gas peaker plant outside and you have solar panels everywhere and batteries, you have all this stuff, like, power is important, but it's not as critical. Like, you can just pay for it, whereas you really can't just pay for more battery life magically in the iPhone. Like, the iPhone has to last all day, and it has to be a certain size. And so the power consumption is very important. And that's why TSMC has always been driven to the leading edge by Apple and by the smartphone makers. But that's actually shifting now. And so TSMC earnings happened last week, and they blew them out.

• 2:54:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Tesla, Samsung is up over 6% today in reaction to the news. Somebody was commenting about the news, Jesse Pelton, most important news of the year so far is what Jesse says. Elon says so few understand this. Few understand this. Few?

• 2:54:24John Coogan?

  Few?

• 2:54:24Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no. He says Elon says it will become obvious in two to three years why this is big news.

• 2:54:31John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, because I mean, I would imagine that what they're going to fab is something that looks like a AI ASIC for something like the TPU, but but designed specifically for Tesla's self-driving capabilities, which might be different than a LLM.

• 2:54:45Jordi Hays?

  Made in America. Made in Texas.

• 2:54:47John Coogan?

  You, when you are, when you are training a self-driving system, you, you don't need to know all of humanities knowledge forever necessarily. You might not need to train on all of the web text. You need a ton of images. And it might be a slightly different pipeline. And so optimizing around that might be what they're thinking of doing. We'll, we'll, we'll need to dig in more, but I would see this as similar to like TPU or Tranium or any of these other uh, uh, uh, Apple, like the Apple silicon chips. Like it is, they are a mag stabbing company that has slightly different needs for their particular compute demands. And so they are going to one of the two or three leading fabs and, and making exactly what they want at scale.

• 2:55:31John Coogan?

  And they're planning to ship a lot of these because they, you know, you would, I think what Elon is saying is like, we're, we're betting on needing a ton of these chips because we're not planning to sell less cars. We're going to sell a lot of these cars and they're all going to have custom chips in them.

• 2:55:47Jordi Hays?

  And this will be another edge for Tesla.

• 2:55:49John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:55:50Jordi Hays?

  Autonomous driving.

• 2:55:51John Coogan?

  Exactly. Especially once they add a V12.

• 2:55:54Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:55:54John Coogan?

  Straight piped exhaust.

• 2:55:55Jordi Hays?

  Naturally aspirated.

• 2:55:56John Coogan?

  Adding that back will actually be easier than, than, than the Ford Raptor getting a custom silicon from, from, uh, from Samsung. That's the bull case.

• 2:56:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, thank you for tuning us, tuning into TVPN today. We have to get on with London.

• 2:56:12John Coogan?

  We do.

• 2:56:13Jordi Hays?

  Right now. Uh, but, uh, we appreciate.

• 2:56:15John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast. Leave us five stars on Spotify. We are the number four ranked podcast in technology on Spotify. Thank you to everyone who's supported us to help us get here. It's been a wild ride. We enjoy.

• 2:56:28Jordi Hays?

  Deeply appreciate it.

• 2:56:29John Coogan?

  We appreciate you.

• 2:56:31Jordi Hays?

  And we'll see you tomorrow.

• 2:56:32John Coogan?

  Chat, especially Huxley and Jonathan.

• 2:56:35Jordi Hays?

  And the deal director.

• 2:56:36John Coogan?

  And everyone.

• 2:56:37Jordi Hays?

  Everybody.

• 2:56:38John Coogan?

  Thank you for watching. We will see you tomorrow. Have a great day.

• 2:56:41Jordi Hays?

  Have a great evening.

• 2:56:42John Coogan?

  Goodbye.