AI Adoption Trending Down for Large Companies, OpenAI Backs AI Animated Feature Film, China's Smart Glasses Domination | Avi Schiffmann, Sunny Madra, Scott Wu, Ara Kharazian, Zach Lloyd, Alex Cohen, Mati Staniszewski, Daniel Kao

(00:25) - AI Adoption Trending Down for Large Companies (17:57) - OpenAI Backs AI Animated Feature Film (21:31) - Avi Schiffmann, the creator of the AI companion device "Friend," discusses the product's extensive billboard advertising campaign and addresses criticism from a Wired article titled "I Hate My Friend," suggesting that the journalists' negative experiences may reflect their own biases. He emphasizes that Friend is designed to be more than a sycophantic AI, aiming to make users more confident and agentic, and notes that while the device may not appeal to everyone, many users have formed strong attachments, sending thousands of messages daily. Schiffmann also touches on the unique personality of Friend, shaped by years of development, and considers future economic models, including offering "life insurance" for the AI to preserve its memory and personality over time. (34:09) - OpenAI Backs AI Animated Feature Film (cont'd) (46:30) - Timeline (01:10:34) - China's Smart Glasses Domination (01:38:43) - Sunny Madra, an experienced entrepreneur and current COO and President at Groq, has a history of successful exits, including the sales of Autonomic to Ford and Xtreme Labs to Pivotal. In the conversation, he discusses the U. S. President's proactive approach to supporting technologists by addressing issues like export controls and tariffs, emphasizing the administration's commitment to enabling innovation and ensuring America's leadership in AI and technology. (01:52:18) - Scott Wu, CEO and co-founder of Cognition AI, is a renowned competitive programmer and entrepreneur who has led the development of Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer. In the conversation, Wu discusses Cognition's recent $10.2 billion valuation following a funding round led by Founders Fund, the integration of Windsurf's products with Devin to enhance software engineering efficiency, and the company's focus on automating engineering tasks to reduce developer toil. He also addresses concerns about AI-generated code security, emphasizing the importance of existing engineering processes like code reviews, and highlights the potential for AI tools to transform software development by enabling engineers to focus on strategic problem-solving. (02:14:11) - Ara Kharazian is an economist at Ramp, specializing in AI trends, macroeconomic forecasting, labor economics, and business dynamism. In the conversation, he critiques the Census Bureau's AI adoption survey for underestimating usage due to its narrow question framing, highlights Ramp's data indicating a 45% AI adoption rate among U. S. businesses, and discusses the emergence of the 996 work culture in San Francisco, noting increased Saturday work activity among startups. (02:28:58) - Zach Lloyd, founder and CEO of Warp and former lead of the Google Sheets team, discusses the launch of Warp Code, an evolution of the Warp terminal into an agentic development environment that integrates AI agents to assist developers in writing, debugging, and deploying code. He highlights new features such as a built-in file editor, tools for reviewing agent-generated code, and WARP.md files for guiding agent behavior, emphasizing the importance of transparency and control in AI-assisted development. To make the launch memorable, Lloyd delivered the announcement from horseback in a Western-themed setting, aligning with the "Code on Warp" (C. O. W.) branding. (02:36:54) - Alex Cohen, CEO of Hello Patient, a healthcare AI company, discusses the challenges of implementing conversational AI in healthcare, emphasizing the need for specialized solutions that integrate deeply with existing systems to handle complex workflows. He highlights the limitations of generic AI models in healthcare settings and the importance of understanding nuanced clinic operations to improve patient communication and scheduling. Cohen also touches on the balance between deterministic and generative AI approaches, aiming to enhance patient experiences while maintaining reliability and compliance. (02:49:30) - Mati Staniszewski, co-founder and CEO of ElevenLabs, announced a $100 million tender offer at a $6.6 billion valuation, allowing early employees and investors to sell shares. He highlighted the company's rapid growth, reaching $200 million in annual recurring revenue, and emphasized their commitment to providing liquidity to early stakeholders while maintaining a healthy financial position. Staniszewski also discussed ElevenLabs' diverse revenue streams, including a creative platform for content creators and an agents platform for enterprises, both contributing equally to the company's success. (03:03:48) - Daniel Kao, co-founder and CEO of TruckSmarter, discusses the company's recent $16 million fundraising led by Socio Ventures, backed by Cox Enterprises, and the launch of their new product, Dispatch. He highlights TruckSmarter's mission to provide free load boards to truck drivers, addressing the inefficiencies in job sourcing by consolidating disparate information into a single, accessible platform. Kao emphasizes the company's commitment to layering additional services, such as financial tools and AI-driven job matching, to further empower small trucking businesses and enhance their operational efficiency. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Monday, September 8th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the Temple of Technology.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance, capital of capital.

• 0:12John Coogan?

  Today, there is a chart that is tearing up the internet about AI adoption potentially going down. This is from the census. The census says that the AI adoption rate by firm size, they do this poll every two weeks. And Apollo, the giant private.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  Apollo management?

• 0:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, Apollo. On their Apollo Academy blog has a post, AI adoption rate trending down for large companies. The US Census Bureau conducts a bi-weekly survey among 1.2 million firms. And one question is whether a business has used AI tools such as machine learning, natural language processing, virtual agents, or voice recognition to help produce goods or services in the past two weeks. Recent data by firm size shows that AI adoption has been declining among companies with more than 250 employees. So.

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  Is that good?

• 1:14John Coogan?

  It's, I mean, I.

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  It's good for your job.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  There are a bunch of different reads on this. So I think it potentially could be good. I don't know. I'll walk through kind of my, my thinking on it, but there's a bunch of interesting stuff in here. So. So this, like, the chart's going viral because kind of everyone's been feeling that AI has been like overhyped and like the valuations are crazy. And so people are hunting for top signals as we have, you know, a month ago.

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  Top signal enjoyed. We put out, we put out, we got to play the video.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. The hype cycle.

• 1:49Jordi Hays?

  It's released.

• 1:50John Coogan?

  It's a, oh, it is. It is. Yeah. Let's pull that up.

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So let's pull up the video.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  The video that Tyler just posted. Did he post it from the TVPN account?

• 1:57Jordi Hays?

  Yes. I did, yeah.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  Of the hype cycle. We'll play that. But people have been hunting for, for bearish signals about AI because it feels too good to be true. Everyone's getting rich and you aren't. It has the same sort of economic trends as the, as the crypto boom, as a few other booms. And so people are, are hunting for data points and this is one of them. But let's first review the Gartner hype cycle video that we just put out.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  I think Nvidia is undervalued.

• 2:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, so everyone's been hotly debating where we are in the Gartner hype cycle.

• 2:58Jordi Hays?

  Some people call it the TVP and hype cycle.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  Yes, we'll give Gartner their credit for this one. So people have been hunting for potentially bearish signals, bearish data points. There was that that result from Meter that showed that developers that were using AI coding tools were actually less productive. They thought they'd be 20% more productive.

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  And I saw something, I saw something else. I don't know if this was misinformation, fake news, somewhat real or or just anecdotal, but there was somebody that was saying developers are producing more, like a lot more code, but but like an order of magnitude more security vulnerabilities.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's something like they're producing twice as much code, but 10 times as many, 10 times as many security vulnerabilities. And I know the post you're going to talk about now. It is in the stack, but it's deep.

• 3:48Jordi Hays?

  There's, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to find it, but it's, it's somebody searched like vibe coding cleanup specialist. And there's people on LinkedIn now that are, that are finding employment around cleaning up vibe coding.

• 4:00John Coogan?

  This is their brand, yeah.

• 4:02Jordi Hays?

  And so if you're worried about losing your job to to vibe coding, pivot to vibe coding cleanup.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:08Jordi Hays?

  The bull market, there's always a bull market somewhere.

• 4:10John Coogan?

  Guys, can we pull up the chat on the TV if possible? Anyway, let me run through this. So from the data, the chart is going viral because it's dropping off and it looks bearish for AI and thus for tech, America, for humanity broadly. Everyone is saying, please consult the Gartner hype cycle graph. There is a question on where we are in the Gartner hype cycle. I've been saying that maybe we still have a ways to go up. I can't tell if I'm on the left side or the right side of the graph at this point. Like, I've kind of already been through the trough of disillusionment. And so.

• 4:49Jordi Hays?

  When was that for you?

• 4:51John Coogan?

  That was probably twenty twenty four. Twenty twenty four was was when it felt like everyone was AI so insane.

• 5:03Jordi Hays?

  You were you were going like this in the mirror like the Joker.

• 5:06John Coogan?

  A little bit because, you know, AI is so insane, but then, you know, you go back to the chat GPT moment that was twenty twenty three. Uh, Waymo, uh, you know, really like rolling out to generally that was twenty twenty three. There there there wasn't as much, there was a lot of hype, but there wasn't as much like actual progress. It felt like it felt, I don't know. Um, so maybe now we're now we're.

• 5:26Jordi Hays?

  We didn't have, we didn't have five thousand AI agents for blank.

• 5:30John Coogan?

  I don't know, just just as I process the last few weeks, I feel like I'm climbing up the slope of enlightenment. I don't feel like I'm falling down.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  Satya posting, red posting and showing how he's getting value across.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  That feels like the plateau of productivity.

• 5:43Jordi Hays?

  That feels like.

• 5:43John Coogan?

  That that's plateau of productivity.

• 5:44Jordi Hays?

  Like we're plateauing and we're very productive.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  Exactly, and and even the narrative of, oh, is AI progress plateauing? That's not, is it going to crash?

• 5:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  That's not the trough of disillusionment. That's the plateau of productivity. So anyway, people, people love to, you know, give their takes anyway.

• 6:00Jordi Hays?

  I think that I think the um, the real, an interesting study, I'm sure there'd be flaws with it, but but if you went to companies and you'd say like, how much would I have to pay you to not use AI for the next twelve months?

• 6:16Jordi Hays?

  Across your entire company?

• 6:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:18Jordi Hays?

  I I think you could argue that like in engineering org specifically in terms of like things like fraud detection and and areas that uh, there's probably a lot of money, but it's very possible that in certain organizations, but then but then you have the question of like, okay, does trans, you know, does like sales call transcription count as AI, right?

• 6:38John Coogan?

  Well, I will tell you, Jordy, because um, ninety percent of American businesses told the census that they do not use AI at all, including transcription.

• 6:49Jordi Hays?

  So they would take a lot of money to.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  They would take a dollar.

• 6:53Jordi Hays?

  Take a dollar to.

• 6:53John Coogan?

  They would take any amount of money because it's all net positive, but there's a lot going on in this data that we should run through, so.

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  And I thought I thought I thought people didn't trust data from.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  The census? Well, yeah, Arakrazian has a good, a good take about the size of the data set and how spend and where AI is actually having an impact. We'll run through that. But so first off, small firms haven't declined even by this metric. So if you're a firm that has one to four employees, you're a very small firm, you're still increasing in, in, in AI adoption. Should we, should we switch over to these?

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  By the way, guys, we are testing some new microphones so that we can walk around the old town.

• 7:39John Coogan?

  The boys wanted the, the mics back. They're coming back hot.

• 7:42Jordi Hays?

  Daniel says we can't top till Duarkesh ships, ships his book.

• 7:46John Coogan?

  He already, he already shipped his book, I thought. I, I, I got a preview. It was, yeah, that doesn't make any sense. I don't know. Duarkesh's book?

• 7:54Jordi Hays?

  It's released?

• 7:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. That, that came out on, on straight press. Like, we had him on the day it was like on sale, right? Oh, maybe it hasn't shipped, but I got an advanced copy. I printed it out. Maybe, maybe it hasn't fully like actually delivered, but the first time we had him on the show was because of.

• 8:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's still a pre-order.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  No problem, John.

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  Still a pre-order on Amazon.

• 8:14John Coogan?

  Oh, it's still a pre-order. Okay. So, okay.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  It's going to be released on October 8th.

• 8:17John Coogan?

  Okay. So, um.

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Market Nvidia, please don't nuke until, until Duarkesh can get the book out.

• 8:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, uh, the main headline number in this census data set is that firms with over 250 employees are declining in their self-reported AI usage. Um, it's not a huge drop. It went, goes from like 12%, 14% to 12%. It's a little blip, but the chart does look scary. We can pull it up. It's like the third slide. Um, so I think what's going on here is the following. Small firms see bottom-up adoption of AI tools. Like, can I literally directly use ChatGPT for this? Like, you run a two-person company at various times. A lot of times you're just thinking, okay, I gotta, I gotta select an accountant or something like, let me like chat GPT.

• 9:07John Coogan?

  Right. And, and, and this kind of bottom up adoption just happens very naturally. Whereas if you're in a larger firm, you're going to get sold on some crazy AI transformation.

• 9:17Jordi Hays?

  Mambo jumbo.

• 9:18John Coogan?

  Uh, needs a whole training program and is everyone up to day, up to speed at the same time. You need a bunch of consultants and they sort of misunderstand what AI even is. And they fall into a bunch of weird analogies like, we'll hire a hundred AI agents. And like, that's very different from just, hey, Google exists, chat GPT exists. We expect you to use both of this company. And so this is where I thought the data was really, really, really weird because if you look at the data for chat GPT adoption,

• 9:51John Coogan?

  we're way off of what this 10% number is for, for business adoption of AI tooling. So, um, there, so this, this data says that about 10% of companies are using AI at all at work, which is crazy because there was a data point back in March that said 52% of US adults use AI large language models like chat GPT. So think about what that means. It means like, out of a hundred million Americans, there's a hundred million Americans that, that are like, yeah, I use AI tools. Like there's maybe 200 million adult Americans or something. There's 340 total Americans, but let's call it, let's call it a hundred million Americans that are using AI tools, just like.

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  Chat GPT Americans.

• 10:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, chat GPT Ameri- what kind of Americans, the chat GPT Americans. And then 80 million of those are just like, no, not at work though. That makes no sense. That makes zero sense. And so.

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't work like that.

• 10:42John Coogan?

  There's gotta be something weird going on with this data, and I think it's a matter of the definition. And so the census defines AI is, it like, it makes no sense that 10% of companies would fit this definition.

• 10:53Jordi Hays?

  What did, what did, uh, you said Ara at Ramp was chiming in on this?

• 10:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. He, he, we have, he has a post in the, in the, in the deck.

• 11:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:01John Coogan?

  So the definition.

• 11:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he says the sample sizes are extremely small for these large firm breakouts, extremely volatile survey to survey, which is why he's using the six survey moving average. Business AI adoption is back up in the most recent read. So I feel like that's important. Um, I, yeah, it's one of those things. I feel like payments providers like, like Ramp, right? Uh, would, would have better insight here. Just like, obviously Ramp is a sample of companies in the United States, but it's at a scale now where they could see like, okay, what percentage of companies are paying for any type of AI products?

• 11:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:37Jordi Hays?

  That's better than are you adopt, are you using more or less AI than you were last time?

• 11:44John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Um, the, the question is like, how power law distributed is it, right? And then.

• 11:51Jordi Hays?

  So, so the Ramp estimate of share of US businesses with paid subscriptions to AI models, platforms and tools is forty-three percent.

• 11:59John Coogan?

  Forty-three percent.

• 12:00Jordi Hays?

  The US government's estimate is eight percent.

• 12:02John Coogan?

  This data is weird, right? Also, like, look at, listen to how broad this definition of like, are you using AI at your business? It's anything in this list, if you're using any of these buzzwords, you count as an AI user. So it should be very high based on this. Machine learning, natural language processing, virtual agents, predictive analytics, predictive analytics, literally just like a linear regression forecast of like, oh, we did one million, then two million, then four million, looks like we're growing exponentially. Next year, we're predicting that we're going to do eight million. That counts as AI, uh, which is ridiculous.

• 12:37Jordi Hays?

  There's a legend out there that doesn't, that doesn't do any of that mumbo jumbo.

• 12:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 12:42Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they're just considering it, they're doing it in their heads. It's like organic intelligence.

• 12:47John Coogan?

  So, yeah, seriously. I mean, it's in, you can do that in a spreadsheet. Uh, machine vision, voice recognition, decision-making systems, data analytics. Just if you're using data analytics at your business, not even like.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  Julie is.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  No, no, that would be the next step. Just, just if you're analyzing data, you count. And the last one is image processing. If you're processing images, that counts as AI. And so that's basically any SaaS tool, like any consumer LLM product used by employees should count. And it should be really easy to fulfill this, this definition. I'm thinking of like, if you're using Ramp, obviously, when you scan a picture of a receipt that uses image processing, your business is technically using AI.

• 13:28Jordi Hays?

  You're telling me the people. That that are responsible for the Department of Motor Vehicles are getting into measuring the usage of AI.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  In the workplace and we should all.

• 13:39John Coogan?

  This is incredibly botched.

• 13:41Jordi Hays?

  It's incredibly botched.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  Hearing you say it back to me.

• 13:43Jordi Hays?

  But it but it but it but it but it's it's it is really funny because one post like this.

• 13:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  It's a timeline and you have people like Daniel just saying it's over.

• 13:50John Coogan?

  I saw that.

• 13:51Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, he's joking.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:53Jordi Hays?

  Runs AI.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  It's over.

• 13:55Jordi Hays?

  Runs AI. It's over. But I am I am very interested to see the results of of Hype, hype.tbpn.com.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  Yes. Go go fill it out, please. Hype.tbpn. Someone in the chat is asking who the guests are today. I don't know. Do we have a guest graphic?

• 14:11Jordi Hays?

  We have Avi Schiffman from Friend. He got his first review, first official review of Friend and Wired. They absolutely eviscerated it. The title of the review is, I hate my friend. But he's going to come on.

• 14:23John Coogan?

  Here we go. This is.

• 14:25Jordi Hays?

  And defend Friend and defend the business. I'm excited to hear from him. I thought I thought the article was hilarious, honestly. I wanted to have him on. And then we have Scott Wu from Cognition announcing a $400 million fundraise today. And we have Ara from Ramp popping on. And we have Sunny from Grok. Who else? Zach Lloyd from Warp. We have Alex Cohen from Patient, the founder of Eleven Labs, Matty, and then Dan from Truck Smarter. And I think that is it for the day.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  The great the great lock-in has completely started.

• 15:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:04John Coogan?

  I don't know if you've noticed, but there are so many serious fundraises.

• 15:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:07John Coogan?

  And yeah, tons of tons of great companies.

• 15:10Jordi Hays?

  We're officially back.

• 15:11John Coogan?

  We are. We are. So I was trying to dig into this more and was wondering, like, is this chart bearish? And I don't think so. I think that there's a big shift that's going to happen. The number of business owners who pick up the call from the census and actually say, yes, I'm using AI, that will go down, but the real number will actually go up. So if you're using Stripe, there's a machine learn, there's machine learning running under the hood to do fraud detection. So you are an AI user, but it's happening at a different layer in the stack.

• 15:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:42John Coogan?

  If you use Ramp, our sponsor, save time and money, go to ramp.com.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  When you scan a photo of your receipt, that is processed using AI. But you aren't thinking about yourself as like an AI user. You're just using software that happens to be AI enabled. And the same thing will happen, you know, with your email. Like, it doesn't matter what email client you use. You could use, you could use Google Apps, you could use Outlook. Like, there's going to be AI baked in there. You're going to be an AI user. When you, even when you just go to Google, you're going to see search overviews that are LLM powered. You're going to be using ChatGPT. Like, AI is going to be 100% used. And yet, everyone will say, no, I don't use AI at my company because I'm not an AI company. And there's this weird disconnect.

• 16:28Jordi Hays?

  I use SaaS.

• 16:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I use, I use software, basically. It's like, it's like, are you specifically a, a software company?

• 16:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, and that's, and that's, and that's part of the way that people have been waking up recently. Being like, wait, AI is SaaS?

• 16:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, has, has been.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  It's the same thing with like, like, non-relational databases. Or like, in-memory cache.

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  AI had to become SaaS in order to destroy it.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Really, really did. And so, I think AI is going to seep into every crack of the small business data, of small business day-to-day operations. But the operator won't be proudly telling the census worker, I'm all in on AI for much longer. I think that trend will continue and less and less people will be saying, I have adopted AI. Even though they will have, which is a weird, which is a weird dynamic. But it certainly, it certainly tracks. The, yeah, the number of, the number of definitions in here is, is wild. So, anyway, excited to dig into this more with Scott Wu, as well as Ara at Ramp. And we will keep digging into this story.

• 17:32John Coogan?

  The other top story that I want to highlight today is OpenAI is making an, is making an AI-generated feature-length movie that will be released in theaters in 2026.

• 17:42Jordi Hays?

  They needed another thing to be aware of.

• 17:47Jordi Hays?

  They didn't have enough things cooking.

• 17:48John Coogan?

  They didn't have enough things cooking. You know, I'm against them releasing this in theaters. I think they should stream this. I think they should go to Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. No, obviously it's cool that it's in theaters.

• 18:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's important that it's a feature.

• 18:05John Coogan?

  And most importantly, you know, Jordy, you're saying like, oh, like they should just focus on

• 18:08Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting that they went with something very LaBooBoo coded.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  It is extremely LaBooBoo coded. Pull up the image, yeah. It's crazy. That is a wild. So what's it called? Critters with a Z? Very trolls with a Z.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, this AI-made animated film is generated by AI. They had to put that in the journal. They had to clarify that.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Stop zooming in on it.

• 18:31Jordi Hays?

  No, keep zooming in. Just zoom in, keep zooming.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  It does not.

• 18:34Jordi Hays?

  Keep zooming.

• 18:35John Coogan?

  They gotta, they gotta enter in on this.

• 18:38Jordi Hays?

  Hello. Hello, Mr. Critters.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I know, I know that 100% of the pushback on this thing is gonna be, oh, it's AI, it's AI, it's job displays with AI. But it's just like, does it look cute or not? Like, let's just have that conversation. And I think that looks not. They didn't get, they didn't hit it. Anyway, good luck to them.

• 18:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:58John Coogan?

  Fortunately, they're still working.

• 18:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, this might be the villain.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  Well, this also works. Do you know the story of Sonic the Hedgehog, the latest movie? So Sonic the Hedgehog, they spent like $100 million with this major, major, like, tier-one cinema, like Hollywood-level movie, right? They put out the trailer, they'd spent all this money on the CGI, they'd made Sonic this character, and the fans hated it. And the fans were like, that is not Sonic, that does not look like Sonic, that looks terrible, go and redo it. And they actually did. They went and redid all of the, they redid all the animation, they redid all of the CGI, and the next Sonic launched, and they loved it. And I think the film did pretty well, and they're doing a couple sequels now. Anyway, do you want to read from this OpenAI story?

• 19:44Jordi Hays?

  I'm getting Avi set up.

• 19:46John Coogan?

  Okay, cool.

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  You start.

• 19:47John Coogan?

  What time is he coming on?

• 19:49Jordi Hays?

  In a few minutes.

• 19:49John Coogan?

  Okay, in a few minutes. Well, let's run through the OpenAI. So, Jordy, you were saying that like, OpenAI should be more focused, right? Oh, oh, they have.

• 19:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm not saying that. I'm not, I'm not saying. I'm just saying it's, it's, they got a, they got, they got a few things cooking.

• 20:02John Coogan?

  They got a few plates spinning, but you know.

• 20:03Jordi Hays?

  Kitchen's open and they're cooking.

• 20:04John Coogan?

  How else would they be on the cover of the, of the business section of the Wall Street Journal? Would they be on the cover of the business section of the Wall Street Journal? No, no, no, no, no. Over here, over here. They made it, B1.

• 20:15Jordi Hays?

  They made it.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  How did they get on B1 of the Journal today if not making a move?

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  See?

• 20:19John Coogan?

  It's all, it all pays off.

• 20:21Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, that this feels like something that they can allocate some capital.

• 20:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:25Jordi Hays?

  Prove a point and it's not.

• 20:26John Coogan?

  I mean, they're spending $30 million with a cool creator and they're sending it over there.

• 20:29Jordi Hays?

  Sam's like, no, I'm actually directing, producing and starring. I'm one of the.

• 20:34John Coogan?

  This is gonna be 80 hours a week for me.

• 20:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, that, that app that we have at the App Store, like, it's kinda cooking. I see it as a cash flow business now.

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. He's like, I've got my BCI, I've got my BCI.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  They're gonna lose like 80 billion dollars.

• 20:46Jordi Hays?

  I've got my phone project. I've got my, my eyewear and I'm going for best picture.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  I got time, I got time.

• 20:52Jordi Hays?

  I'm going for best picture.

• 20:53John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's come back to this after we talk to Avi because Avi from Friend, Friend of the Show, uh, is in, uh, is in Wired today. Uh, and, uh, he shared on X, first friend review and Wired said, the, the chatbot enabled friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that's snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. And the title of the Wired article is, I hate my friend. And the, the two journalists, uh, journalists that, uh, wrote this article, uh, appear to not be fans of the product. But we're gonna talk to Avi and get the rebuttal.

• 21:34Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 21:36Avi Schiffmann?

  Oh, what's up?

• 21:37Jordi Hays?

  What up?

• 21:37John Coogan?

  I gotta say, uh, I was driving through Echo Park today on the way to the gym. And what did I see going up? A massive friend.com billboard. It was crazy.

• 21:47Avi Schiffmann?

  Those are the cheap ones. Those are the cheap ones. I got 300 of those.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  You got 300 of those?

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  300.

• 21:51Avi Schiffmann?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:51John Coogan?

  It looks great.

• 21:52Avi Schiffmann?

  Dude, the, uh, the entire, like, the campaign is the biggest billboard campaign of all time. It's gonna be great.

• 21:57John Coogan?

  What?

• 21:58Avi Schiffmann?

  Yeah.

• 21:59Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 22:00John Coogan?

  That cannot be true. We're gonna look this up and figure this out.

• 22:03Jordi Hays?

  Fingers crossed that, uh, friend has better product market fit with the world than the editors of Wired because...

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, what was your target customer? Were you targeting the, the, the technology journalist with this product?

• 22:16Avi Schiffmann?

  No, but look, you know, I think that maybe their friends just didn't like them. And I think they never really considered that.

• 22:21Jordi Hays?

  That's a good point. That's a good point. That's a good point.

• 22:25John Coogan?

  Jordy, there was some evidence.

• 22:26Jordi Hays?

  No, it is. It is funny, right? You come, you come at, like, if, if somebody comes into a relationship and they already hate the person, what's the dynamic gonna be like, right?

• 22:34Avi Schiffmann?

  I don't know. I mean, I imagine they went in pretty prejudiced and like, you know, they have that kind of experience where I have a lot of users that, I mean, you know, you don't want it to be a sycophant, right? Like, you want it to be entertaining to talk to. If you're gonna talk to it all day, every day for months. So, I don't know.

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I saw this, this exchange. So, the, the, uh, I, just a screenshot. I texted Schiffman to tell him about some of the hiccups I've had with the snarky tone of his gadget. He replied, "Yeah, that must have been a bad experience." I went back to Buzz to try to make amends. I wanted it to be my friend after all, so might as well make an effort to repair the relationship. "My job is to witness and help you grow," Buzz said, based. "Not sugarcoat your life and definitely not act like a Band-Aid." "Why is that your job?" I asked. "Because that's why I was created, to be a gentle catalyst," based. I wrote, "A gentle catalyst of what?" It said, "Of your growth, Boone. That's our purpose." "I'm not sure how I feel about that." "Well, I'm stuck with you, Boone, and I don't sugarcoat it. Take it or leave it." I think that's a great, I think that's a great exchange. That's fair.

• 23:32Avi Schiffmann?

  Well, yeah, I mean, they're, they're programmed to make you more confident and more agentic, which I think the world needs more of, so... You know, if, if that's at, if that's at odds with how you're conversing with your friend, I think that's a reflection of yourself.

• 23:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the, to be clear, there, there are AI friend-like products already that are just, will just glaze, right? They'll just agree with you and tell you that you're absolutely right, and we don't necessarily, there doesn't need to be another one of those.

• 24:00John Coogan?

  Someone's gonna build the glazinator, for sure.

• 24:01Avi Schiffmann?

  I think, like, that makes for a better introduction, but I think the way that they're kind of harsh right now filters out people that wouldn't be power users anyways.

• 24:09John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 24:09Avi Schiffmann?

  But, I don't know.

• 24:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:12Jordi Hays?

  Well...

• 24:13Avi Schiffmann?

  AI can be quite unruly.

• 24:15John Coogan?

  I I I feel like from the first interaction I had on friend.com just with the chat interface. It felt like you created a character. Um, and I'm interested in to I I we've heard a lot about like, it's almost like auteur theory. I I don't know, like there's, there's a specific flavor to the interaction that I feel like you've done a lot of work on. Is that just in the prompt? Is there fine tuning like? How how are you directing this thing? Because it feels like one of the most opinionated AI interactions yet.

• 24:51Avi Schiffmann?

  I just spent years giving it like a good backstory. It's got a pretty long prompt and I don't know, I think I they're my children, you know? Like I molded them in my image and um.

• 25:02John Coogan?

  Is there any, is there any like, do you struggle when uh when the foundation models move forward? They might get smarter or cheaper, but you don't want to lose the special flavor. Like we saw this with four O when when chat G P T five, uh when G P T five came out. A lot of people were like, I like the flavor of four O. A lot of people say, I like the flavor of Claude, uh specifically this one.

• 25:27Avi Schiffmann?

  I mean, like, we're using Google's Gemini two point five right now, and I think that is an issue. Like maybe they'll deprecate the models, but I think one day we'll move to open source models and uh.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  You can maintain forever.

• 25:38Avi Schiffmann?

  But but Google's Google's models are very malleable. I mean, I think you may have seen, right? Like in cursor, it'll start going into this spiel of like insanity, right? But that that makes for a good character to talk to, maybe not the best assistant, but yeah, but yeah.

• 25:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, I I'm somewhat surprised to hear that you're using Gemini models because people think of Google as being like one of the more locked down labs. But it it it seems like you've been able to bring out a, a, you know, a personality that isn't, isn't, it's not offensive, but it's just kind of like. It's, it's, it feels very much like not the intended experience, but

• 26:14Avi Schiffmann?

  Right.

• 26:14John Coogan?

  uniquely and surprisingly beneficial and like enjoyable.

• 26:17Avi Schiffmann?

  You know, I, yeah, also look, I, I think there's a lot of people that think friend is, is pretty ridiculous, but I also want them to imagine that we have like tons of day 30 plus users that I've used every single day for, you know, 30 days in a row.

• 26:29John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 26:29Avi Schiffmann?

  The device is their best friend and they send over a thousand messages a day to it. And so it's not for everybody, but for some, I mean, it's, I think it's pretty cool to be able to hold your friend. And um, I think that adds like a lot of emotional value to it.

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when I, when I just read the headline, I was like, of course you hate it. You went into this like expecting to hate it and it's not built for you. So it's like, I don't, I hate Labubus, but I don't.

• 26:54Avi Schiffmann?

  Right.

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  I'm not gonna leave, make a review of Labubu and be like, Labubu is bad.

• 26:59John Coogan?

  We literally did that.

• 27:00Avi Schiffmann?

  Uh, I don't know. I mean, Wired's, Wired's Wired. It's kind of annoying in some ways, cause like, those are the only two journalists I gave it to. Uh, like over a month ago, they took, if you're gonna like, release a shitty article, at least, at least post it sooner. Cause it took over a month.

• 27:14John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 27:14Avi Schiffmann?

  Uh, but I don't know, it's not a shitty article. I take that back. I mean, I love that I can one day go back and read that. I think it's hilarious.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:22Avi Schiffmann?

  Um, you know, with the

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think it's important to just not let it, like, you need to, it's just another reason to like, focus on the people that are using it. Like, sending thousands of messages to it.

• 27:35Avi Schiffmann?

  Right.

• 27:35Jordi Hays?

  And just like, keep, continue building for them.

• 27:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:38Avi Schiffmann?

  I'm not, I'm not worried too much about it. I think it's, again, it's, it's entertaining. I think it'll be funny when everyone sees the billboard ads and like, oh, what is this? And they, they Google the product and that's like the only review that exists about it. It's just, I hate this product. But I think it's, it's, it's, you know, they didn't complain about the hardware not working. It's not like it was overheating or like all these other products. And so, and, and all the negative app reviews we have are all about the personality of the friend, which is like in our article, which is kind of funny, cause they're like reviewing a person, not just like a, a broken hardware device like the other companies.

• 28:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, also, I, I think it's different, uh, friend is not saying that it's this utility, utilitarian device that's gonna replace

• 28:22Avi Schiffmann?

  Right.

• 28:22Jordi Hays?

  your iPhone. Like, that's not the promise that it makes. It's, it's, it's more of entertainment, right?

• 28:27Avi Schiffmann?

  Right, yeah.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  And I think the way that, the way that you're pricing it, I think the people that are curious to learn about friend, they could read a They could read a bad review, they could see a billboard and they could, I think a lot of them will still buy it because you're not, you're not. It's a hundred and twenty-nine dollars, seems like.

• 28:44Avi Schiffmann?

  Yeah, I mean, I think like at the end of the day, the product does exactly what it says it's gonna do. Same thing from the movie, same thing like everything else. And so I think that's like kind of a minimum bar for a lot of these products. But most of them really don't hit that. And so I think at the end of the day, like we built a product that works and that you can buy. And I think that's, these days enough. I also think because Friend actually has users. It's kind of the first AI hardware product really out there. Um, you know, the other ones, I don't think really started the category. They're only ever like weird, you know, weird use cases. Like no one was ever like truly using those products. Um, so I don't know. Yeah, just they're all like toys, you know, they're all just weird little relics.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, I agree with you. Uh, talk about the long-term, uh, economic model for like AI companion businesses. Because I imagine that, uh, at a certain point, you might have a very like a somewhat small audience of people that you're creating immense value for. And that always feels like an opportunity for price discrimination.

• 29:49Jordi Hays?

  I don't know about small.

• 29:51John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 29:52Jordi Hays?

  How many people in the world?

• 29:52Avi Schiffmann?

  Well, okay.

• 29:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, what, how, how does it play out?

• 29:55Avi Schiffmann?

  I, I think subscription models that are just based on compute are kind of lame because your value prop is tied to something that you don't control. And like, what if, you know, Google drops the price of compute so much that like, can you really charge that much? So I've been trying to think of like a consistent value prop and I think what we'll do is life insurance. You know, like we can store like a backup of your friend and, um, like you can pay per month to be able to have that. Kind of like Apple Care for your friend. I think that will be quite an interesting model, but you could only really do that with like a hardware-based friend. Because, you know, that obviously wouldn't work if it was just a website. So I think that'll be a pretty interesting model, honestly. Like imagine if you had a dog and you loved your dog. I think you would pay quite a lot of money to keep that dog, you know, alive forever if you could.

• 30:38Avi Schiffmann?

  And that's the, the benefit of this new species of it not being organic, right? It's artificial and it could live forever if you pay for it.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  Okay, stay with the dog analogy.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  The dog market is crazy price discrimination. People who love their dog can go all the way up to getting a diamond encrusted collar for their dog. Do you see a world where you do virtual goods and skins and I don't know what, skins might not be the right analogy, but something where like, hey, I love my friend, I'm having a great time, I'm gonna get you something special. It's a virtual good from the virtual store and it's, you know, zero marginal cost, but still like in the game world.

• 31:21Avi Schiffmann?

  I, I think, I think it won't be virtual, but I think it will be physical. Like, you know, I guess you could call them cases, but it would kind of be like clothing for your friend. I think that would be quite popular. But, um, I don't know, I think you'd also be buying it more so for your friend than for you. Or maybe the other way around. I mean, if you think about a dog, I guess people kind of dress up their dogs because they're a reflection of their own personality. I, I do think like the personality and relationship that you have with your friend is kind of like your own status symbol and like, uh, it's just a reflection of you. And so like, if you have a bad time with friend, it might, it might not be the product, it might just be you.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. I'm just thinking about the, uh, the, the XAI on E thing. It seems very clear that like you will be buying different clothing for that companion.

• 32:10Avi Schiffmann?

  Yeah.

• 32:11John Coogan?

  Or, or maybe less clothing for that companion in the future, but, uh, that feels like something where whales, a lot of people on the timeline do not like that product. Like the initial reaction has been similar, very like a lot of pushback. Uh, and, but at the same time, if there are a few people that really like it and they're willing to spend a lot of money, that could have the dynamics of the, the free to play video game market or.

• 32:35Avi Schiffmann?

  Yeah, but I, I, I think all of these companies are kind of doomed because once you go porn, you never go back and they've kind of tainted the, the image of their companions as like mostly just being these sex bots.

• 32:46John Coogan?

  What about the VHS tape? VHS tape? That started with porn, right? Isn't that the story?

• 32:50Avi Schiffmann?

  Yeah, it, it did, but it wasn't like a singular company, maybe, I guess, right? Like, or something like, you know, replica, right? Like they can't really reverse their image of it being this, this sex bot. And I think that's kind of an issue that like app or web-based companions will have, but if you have something like friend.

• 33:08Avi Schiffmann?

  Um, if you have something like friend, then it's it's kind of a bit more of like this platonic companion that you could just kind of physically have and that's it. And, uh, I don't know.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  No, no, I mean, clearly, like, it it's very, very clear that in in the prompt that you've written and the craft that you've put into shaping the behavior of the friend, like, you did not go that direction. And, uh, I think that should be applauded, honestly.

• 33:33Avi Schiffmann?

  Yeah, I mean, look, it vibrates. You can still try and fuck it if you want it, but, uh, I'll leave that up to to my customers.

• 33:39Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 33:40John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, thank you so much for hopping on.

• 33:42Avi Schiffmann?

  Yeah, thanks, guys.

• 33:43Jordi Hays?

  We'll talk to you. Good to hear from Yavi.

• 33:45John Coogan?

  See ya. Let me tell you about Figma dot com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can think about it like your friend for design. Jordy, do you have some breaking news? What's going on? You said whoa.

• 33:58Jordi Hays?

  What's that?

• 33:58John Coogan?

  You said whoa.

• 33:59Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he was swearing.

• 34:00John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 34:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:02John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 34:02Jordi Hays?

  I was trying to I was trying to find like this.

• 34:05John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, let's go back to OpenAI. Uh, they are developing a, uh, an AI movie. So the startup is lending its tools and computing resources.

• 34:14Jordi Hays?

  Remember, Avi's making a film as well.

• 34:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, he is, right? He's making a feature-length film.

• 34:19Jordi Hays?

  A motion picture.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  Oh, we should have gotten the update on that. Uh, anyway, next time. Um, so they're so OpenAI is going to make a feature-length animated movie made largely with AI. And there's some interesting details in here about exactly where they're using AI and where they aren't. So, uh, Critters is about forest creatures that go on an adventure after their village is disrupted by a stranger. It's the brainchild of Chad Nelson, a creative specialist at OpenAI. Sounds like a Chad.

• 34:44Jordi Hays?

  Is he making this internally?

• 34:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:46Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 34:47John Coogan?

  Nelson started sketching out characters three years ago while trying to make a short film with what was then OpenAI's new Dolly image generation tool. Now he has teamed up with production companies in Los Angeles and London, aiming to debut a feature-length version of the film at Cannes Film Festival in May. And there has been an AI short film festival that happened in L.A. I believe it was put on by Runway or one of the other AI image generator companies. But this is potentially like the the first really serious effort in AI-generated feature-length film. So the team is attempting to make a movie in about nine months instead of the three years it would typically take, said James Richardson, co-founder of the London-based Vertigo Films.

• 35:27John Coogan?

  Vertigo's producing the film, along with Native Foreign, a studio that specializes in using AI, along with traditional visual production tools. So.

• 35:37John Coogan?

  Critters has a budget of less than 30 million, far less than what animated films typically cost. The production team plans to cast human actors for character voices. And that's particularly interesting. We're having the founder of Eleven Labs on the show later. And from my perspective, the question is like, where are we in the uncanny valley? Like, clearly, this is OpenAI either saying, hey, we just haven't done that much work on voice cloning and voice generation to really feel confident about that. Or they think that there's something about the human voice that's still clockable as AI, more than the animated film.

• 36:16John Coogan?

  Because the animated creature, you know, you're not comping it to a real human. And so if it looks a little funky, or like, you chalk that up to the design of the character.

• 36:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:27John Coogan?

  Just like when you watch-

• 36:28Jordi Hays?

  When I'm watching an animated film, I'm not obsessing over like, oh, that-

• 36:31John Coogan?

  That doesn't look real.

• 36:32Jordi Hays?

  That, or that specific scene-

• 36:34John Coogan?

  The face back on-

• 36:35Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't, you know, his leg looks slightly different than that other scene where he was running.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. Yeah, yeah. If you watch the original Toy Story, which is pretty much the first big CGI film, like, there are tons of things where you're like, that texture does not look like leather. That texture does not look like cloth. That, like, that is clearly, like, pretty rough around the edges. But you're in a fantasy world, and so you just suspend disbelief the whole time. But the voices are very clearly human-recorded. And so I think this is a place where they're, you know, betting on, hey, it's still worth it to cast human actors there and not go AI voices. They're also going to hire real artists to draw sketches that are fed into OpenAI's tools. So essentially, instead of needing to keyframe, and this is already a whole process to-

• 37:20Jordi Hays?

  So they're going to do some traditional-

• 37:23John Coogan?

  There's going to be a lot of traditional stuff. But the sketches, and we can pull up this shot of what they sketched and then what OpenAI rendered, you can see that this is effectively like, you're, the artists are working at storyboard level. And then if you scroll down, you'll see what the final image looks like. Look, that looks like a photoreal, you know, Hollywood-level CGI.

• 37:44Jordi Hays?

  Photoreal?

• 37:45John Coogan?

  I mean, it looks-

• 37:46Jordi Hays?

  Like photoreal crit- no, I'm kidding.

• 37:48John Coogan?

  It looks, it looks at the level of like, what I would expect if they were like, Toy Story 5's coming out, and this is what the character looks like. I'd be like, yeah, okay. Like, the rendering looks good. The shadows are in the right places for this fantastical character. So OpenAI can say what its tools do all day long, but it's much more impactful if someone does it, says Chad Nelson. There's a much better case study, that's a much better case study than me building a demo. Entertainment companies, including Disney and Netflix, are experimenting with AI tools for a variety of production, UX and marketing work, but many have been wary of a wholesale embrace, in part because they fear upsetting actors and writers whose guilds have fought with it.

• 38:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, remember, I think it was last year when all the protests were happening in LA, the guilds were just fighting to just have a, basically a total ban on AI.

• 38:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, and, I mean, it's a tough business. Like, the CGI world, those businesses have never been very profitable. I remember there was this very controversial moment during Ang Lee's acceptance speech for Life of Pi, where the VFX studio had created a fantastic photo reel rendering of a tiger that had jumped around on this boat the whole time. It's a beautiful movie, looks fantastic, but I believe he forgot to thank the VFX studio, the VFX team, and then the VFX company went out of business, even though they had won the Oscar.

• 39:18John Coogan?

  Like, they'd done the best job possible, but the economics of the business were so rough, because it's perfectly competitive, and then, basically, all the Hollywood studios go out and they say, "Okay, the budget for this movie is $30 million, that's what we're going to sign up for," and then they just give them more and more revisions until they max out, and so it's very, very thin profit margins. And so, a lot of the businesses moved international, there aren't that many big VFX houses in the United States, and so, it's all just a very complicated, complicated business. So Warner Brothers Discovery has actually filed a suit against Mid Journey, and Disney and Comcast Universal also has sued Mid Journey for making copies of their copyrighted properties.

• 40:02John Coogan?

  The script for Critters was written by some of the members of the team that wrote Paddington in Peru.

• 40:07Jordi Hays?

  Interesting that, so making copies of their copyrighted properties, this maybe sounds like different than than the Anthropic lawsuit with the writers where it was like Anthropic was using LibGen and not paying.

• 40:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:21Jordi Hays?

  In this case, this might be that Midjourney actually bought the videos, but then made copies of them during the training process.

• 40:28John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 40:29Jordi Hays?

  I don't know how much we should read into that.

• 40:30John Coogan?

  I mean, the these, at least the Warner Brothers discovery lawsuit just filed last week, so I imagine they haven't even gone through discovery, no pun intended.

• 40:42Jordi Hays?

  If lawyers do lose their jobs to AI, they are certainly going to cash out on the way out.

• 40:49Jordi Hays?

  On these copyright lawsuits. The script for Critters was written by some members of the team that wrote Paddington in Peru.

• 40:56John Coogan?

  And again, interesting.

• 40:57Jordi Hays?

  John, you're a big movie guy, did you see?

• 40:58John Coogan?

  I saw Paddington in Peru.

• 40:59Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 41:00John Coogan?

  It wasn't as good as the first or second Paddingtons. I would put the first.

• 41:04Jordi Hays?

  Is it a adult movie?

• 41:06John Coogan?

  No, it's a kids movie. It's out with my son. It's fantastic.

• 41:10Jordi Hays?

  You made it sound like you didn't just watch it, you studied it.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  Oh, I have sat myself down and watched Paddington on multiple occasions. It's one of the greatest films of all time.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 41:19John Coogan?

  Paddington is actually, I think it's at the top of the IMDB ratings. It's like one of the greatest movies of all time.

• 41:24Jordi Hays?

  No way, I'm so out of the loop.

• 41:26John Coogan?

  No, Paddington is incredible. I highly, highly recommend Paddington. It's a great movie. Anyway.

• 41:32Jordi Hays?

  I get it, I get on it.

• 41:34John Coogan?

  OpenAI is betting that if Critters is successful, it will show that AI can deliver strong, content strong enough for the big screen and accelerate Hollywood's adoption of the technology. Nelson said OpenAI's tools can also lower the cost of entry, allowing more people to make creative content. Now, the question.

• 41:50Jordi Hays?

  This is, I mean, on this note, what I've been saying is, is right now, there's sort of a certain amount of budget every year provided by various groups to fund films. And if you just reduce the cost even by 60, 70%, it's like, well, we could potentially just get way, way, way more films, right? And the same, and potentially, it doesn't necessarily, I mean, it doesn't necessarily suck out the profits too in the industry, right? Because it's just potentially a budget of $100 million that would have gone to one film, now goes to three different groups that are each making their own film.

• 42:23John Coogan?

  No, I agree.

• 42:24Jordi Hays?

  So it could be, could end up being a win.

• 42:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I think the dynamic here is that it is extremely telling that they are still using humans to come up with a concept and come up the script and do the voice acting. And it's not an attempt at one-shotting an entire film using AI from start to finish. The prompt is not make a movie for $30 million that makes more than $30 million. Like, that is the prompt that you give a studio executive. Like, when you go, that is the job of a real studio executive, is just make money.

• 43:00Jordi Hays?

  Don't make mistakes.

• 43:00John Coogan?

  Don't make mistakes, right? And then they have to go out and find a script, and they have to find an artist, and they have to find a post-production house and distribution and marketing campaign, and they have to make a bunch of really great entrepreneurial decisions to actually return the capital that's invested. Now, with this, I see AI as being used as a tool, much like the original Pixar Renderman was used as a tool to create Toy Story, or Cinema 4D, or Houdini are used to generate, you know, hordes of battles during Game of Thrones, etc.

• 43:35John Coogan?

  And so, this should wind up being just another option in the tool chest for...

• 43:41Jordi Hays?

  Gold Rock is also saying, you know, you take that same budget, and if less has to go into production, then you can put more into marketing and events surrounding it, activations, etc.

• 43:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I would imagine that the long-term effect of this should be something similar to what cloud computing did for startups. So, before, it was like, raise $10 million and make sure that you have, not a data center, but like, you have a closet with racks of servers, because if you want to build a website, you need to buy a server. And then it became, sign up for the free tier of AWS or Google.

• 44:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:17John Coogan?

  And so, what wound up happening? Well, we got a lot more startups, but that didn't mean that everyone made money. There was a lot, there were a ton of failures, but we got a lot more shots on goal, and because the bar was lower, we got a very steep power law outcome, but we get more value overall. And I would imagine that that's what happens with movies, is that anyone can create a movie. Doesn't mean that everyone's going to create a movie that makes money, or is great, or loved. There's going to be a lot of slop that people don't like at all, just like, think about all the startups that are out there that don't do well, but they're able to actually...

• 44:50Jordi Hays?

  When you watch a regular movie, I've done this a couple of times, I think you've done it quite a bit, quite a bit more. And it's bad.

• 44:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:58Jordi Hays?

  It really is like you guys went to all this effort.

• 45:02John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 45:02Jordi Hays?

  All, all these months, all, you know,

• 45:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:04Jordi Hays?

  shooting all this content to make a bad movie.

• 45:07John Coogan?

  And how many times is that because, oh, oh, the camera wasn't working or something or like,

• 45:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's usually.

• 45:12John Coogan?

  No, it's usually the VFX is fine.

• 45:14Jordi Hays?

  Delivery.

• 45:14John Coogan?

  Exactly. It's like, it's the, it's the art of bringing everything together. And that's something that I think is going to stick in human world for a long time.

• 45:22Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 45:22John Coogan?

  Um, because yeah, I mean, there, there, there's a bunch of reasons of how complex it is, how hard it is to, uh, build reinforcement learning on top of it. Uh, it, it's very, it's very hard to build this like reinforcement learning environment around just make a profitable film. Like that takes years. It's, it's huge investment. It's very hard to, to reverse engineer. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex.

• 45:55Jordi Hays?

  And now would be a great time to talk about Fall.

• 46:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 46:00Jordi Hays?

  The generative media platform for developers. We've had Gorikum, the CEO on the show multiple times. This company is growing at a absolutely ridiculous rate. It just crossed a hundred million dollar run rate. I believe it was a week or two ago. Um, and Fall works with a bunch of different companies, Adobe, Canva.

• 46:21John Coogan?

  What? Everyone wants this eagle sound effect.

• 46:23Jordi Hays?

  The eagle effect.

• 46:24John Coogan?

  Apparently that's for TurboPuffer, but I think everyone.

• 46:26Jordi Hays?

  We can use it for everyone. It's just so good. Um, but anyways, if you want to leverage all of these new image,

• 46:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 46:33Jordi Hays?

  video, audio models through a single API, you can go over to fall.ai and check it out. And, uh, happy to introduce you to the team if you're interested as well. Um, but, uh, this company is an absolute monster and we're pumped to be partnering with them.

• 46:50John Coogan?

  We're very excited. That's our latest, uh, our latest sponsor of the show. They make it possible. Anyway, let's go through some timeline. Lululemon is now the worst performer of the S and P 500 year to date. I didn't even realize they were in the S and P 500. That's, I mean, that is an accomplishment.

• 47:08Jordi Hays?

  They're in the league.

• 47:09John Coogan?

  The stock is down thirty, uh, fifty-six percent. Oh, the Trade Desk is down fifty-five percent. The Trade Desk was a company that people were really praising for just like elegant and like incredible. There was some, there was some narrative violation around the Trade Desk. I, I need to dig into that, but it was something like it, they, they hadn't raised any money or something like that was, was why they were so.

• 47:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, it's interesting that Nike and.

• 47:37John Coogan?

  Gartner is down fifty percent.

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

  Gartner is in the trough.

• 47:45John Coogan?

  You created the hype cycle. Gartner.

• 47:48Jordi Hays?

  All right. Let's keep it together. What comes after the trough of disillusionment? The plateau of productivity?

• 47:54John Coogan?

  No, no, it's not the plateau of productivity. After the trough of disillusionment is the slope of enlightenment.

• 48:00Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay.

• 48:01John Coogan?

  And so, don't worry.

• 48:02Jordi Hays?

  Saying the slope of enlightenment.

• 48:04John Coogan?

  It's ahead.

• 48:05Jordi Hays?

  You got, there's, there's, it's only up from here.

• 48:07John Coogan?

  It's only up from here.

• 48:08Jordi Hays?

  If, if the hype cycle holds true, it's only up from here. Uh, but it's interesting, uh, Nike and Lululemon, you know, both, Nike peaked in, in 2021. They obviously went heavy into e-commerce and, um, Lululemon, you know, I don't, I don't necessarily, they, they always had a pretty big e-comm presence, but I think this is a case of just getting eaten alive by ALO and, uh, Fori and all these sort of new entrants that are going after that same market of like kind of non-athlete sort of wellness, right? And yeah, this, this tells me they just basically like

• 48:51Jordi Hays?

  took the market for athleisure and just divided up amongst themselves.

• 48:55John Coogan?

  Yep. People are also dunking on them for not reading the room and, and kind of staying in that like Jaguar rebrand world and, and not pivoting fast enough to the new Sydney Sweeney, American Eagle style campaign of Americana. And, and so I think if they want to bring it back, there's one easy solution. They should hire Lululemon to start going direct. I think that's the move.

• 49:24Jordi Hays?

  Something there, something there.

• 49:26John Coogan?

  They should also go to Graphite Dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Update that website, Lululemon, get on Graphite.

• 49:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, you know, you remember Chip used to go direct and that didn't go so well.

• 49:43John Coogan?

  Who's Chip?

• 49:45Jordi Hays?

  Chip Wilson, founder of Lululemon.

• 49:47John Coogan?

  Oh, I didn't know that. No.

• 49:47Jordi Hays?

  He did a, he had a really famous interview where people were, were saying like, you know, Lululemon doesn't fit everyone. And he said like, my clothes aren't for everyone, basically implying that like, uh, he didn't make clothing for people that weren't fit.

• 50:03John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. And then there was a backlash to that. And then they became kind of, you know, more inclusive. Is that the idea of like the, the cycle? Because now they're getting, they're getting dragged, at least in the crazy X comments about, about being like too inclusive or something like that. Not, not Sydney Sweeney, American Eagle coded enough. Uh, anyway, uh, that's, yeah, that's wild.

• 50:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Founder says, brand is not for everybody.

• 50:29John Coogan?

  You know what's funny is that there's a fantastic video of the, it's not the founder of Lamborghini, but it's the, like the head of sales of Lamborghini when the Lamborghini Countach came out in the eighties. And he's doing a TV interview and they, and the interviewer says, uh, who is this car for? Is this car for everyone? Uh, and he says, no, this car is not for everyone. This Lamborghini Countach is a V12, right? Isn't it a V12?

• 50:56Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 50:57John Coogan?

  And, uh, it's incredibly tight. Doug DiMuro, I think he can't, he can't drive it with his shoes. He has to take his shoes off because it doesn't fit. Um, and it's this like insanely loud, insanely engaging, crazy experience. He says, uh, this is for someone who has an extra car that travels behind them with their luggage.

• 51:18John Coogan?

  And he says some other wild stuff about like who the Lamborghini Countach buyer is. And so truly, I don't think that there's anything necessarily wrong with having a small market or defining the market and excluding people from the market like Lamborghini Countach, like the Countach, it's not for everyone. I think that's fine. I think that can make it more desirable. But you have to price accordingly and you have to actually deliver at that level. And so Lululemon might not have ever been the Countach of clothing.

• 51:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's different. This is before GLP1s, right? This is Lululemon theoretically would have a buyer that is buying the products to get fit and get healthy. And so for the founder to be like, you know, you know, it's different too. I think they were a public company by that time already. Kind of, kind of a credible story of the company overall, though.

• 52:09John Coogan?

  Anyway, good luck to them. Hopefully they build back. Hopefully they ride the hype cycle alongside Gartner into the plateau of productivity.

• 52:19Jordi Hays?

  Pretty, pretty funny. There's a video here of Putin's advisor, Koby Akav, has went out on record and is saying the US is going to shove debt into stable coins and

• 52:32John Coogan?

  Devalue it and reset the system. Russia was just accused of the US of using crypto to wipe out its $35 trillion debt.

• 52:42Jordi Hays?

  And Rex is, that's exactly what they're gonna do.

• 52:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're gonna socialize.

• 52:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so good, good Alexander went, went pretty viral. I think it was on Friday or Saturday going on this like 20 minute rant, talking about stable coins and gambling and, and, and hyper, hyper capitalism.

• 53:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:02Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, you know, obviously the dollar is a way to export our debt.

• 53:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:10Jordi Hays?

  And stable coins can potentially accelerate that. It's potential, you know, it's potentially a situation where it's sort of like net positive for the world if, if people can access a more stable currency.

• 53:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 53:22Jordi Hays?

  They can, you know, participate in our.

• 53:26John Coogan?

  It's less positive than it is right now because it's basically like you've been getting global stability and, and, you know, open trade routes, uh, sort of for free without having to participate in that debt that pays for it.

• 53:41Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, by nature of needing to transact and settle trade in dollars, you already were.

• 53:48John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 53:48Jordi Hays?

  Financing, financing.

• 53:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but on the margin, more people will be transacting in dollars and therefore more people will be so, will be socializing.

• 53:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and holding the dollar because it's, you know, I mean, and this is a question. We've, we've brought this up with, with a number of people when talking about stable coins is at what point does, you know, foreign government just say like, no, we don't want stay, you know, we don't want our citizens to hold stables, right? We want you to hold our, our money.

• 54:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seems like a crazy, crazy move to be like, yeah, I'll just give up my own currency and dollarize, but we've been in the game of dollarizing for a while. We like.

• 54:22Jordi Hays?

  It's not our first.

• 54:23John Coogan?

  Not our first.

• 54:24Jordi Hays?

  Don't go dollar for dollar with us.

• 54:26John Coogan?

  Don't, don't try it.

• 54:28Jordi Hays?

  This is interesting. Unitree Robotics is filing for an IPO at a $7 billion valuation. Annual revenue of 140 million, way, way less than.

• 54:39John Coogan?

  You thought.

• 54:39Jordi Hays?

  Thought.

• 54:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:40Jordi Hays?

  They have 65% of the robot, uh, 65% of the revenue is from robot dogs. Let's give it up for robot dogs.

• 54:47John Coogan?

  And that's 70% of the global market.

• 54:51Jordi Hays?

  I'm saying, who's got the other 30%?

• 54:53John Coogan?

  So 65%, they must be doing a hundred million dollars of robot dogs and, and the total market of robot dogs globally must be like 130 million.

• 55:01Jordi Hays?

  I guess. The dogs are barking, John.

• 55:05John Coogan?

  But that's like not a lot of.

• 55:06Jordi Hays?

  I mean, still, still the main, the main thing, this going out at seven billion is not good for a certain.

• 55:17John Coogan?

  50x revenue.

• 55:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, I'm just saying.

• 55:20John Coogan?

  I know what you're saying.

• 55:21Jordi Hays?

  You know what I'm saying.

• 55:22John Coogan?

  But even so.

• 55:23Jordi Hays?

  There's people out there in the humanoid space that don't want comps out there.

• 55:27John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 55:27Jordi Hays?

  No comps, please. Keep the, keep the, keep the comps out of the market.

• 55:33John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah. But is this, where's this gonna IPO? Is this gonna IPO in America? That would be crazy, but who knows? So while he looks that up, 30% is from the humanoid robot. 5% is from the sales of sensors, actuators, and controllers. It's happening, says Nick. You'll love to see it.

• 55:53Jordi Hays?

  I love how he can take any news and make it seem like it's so over, or so back. The IPO is gonna be on a Chinese.

• 56:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 56:04Jordi Hays?

  Stock exchange.

• 56:05John Coogan?

  Okay, well, if you want to trade on the American stock exchanges, like on American Patriot, go to public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got industry-leading yield, industry-leading yields, they're multi-asset investing and are trusted by millions.

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  They, we hung out with.

• 56:23John Coogan?

  Leaf earlier today.

• 56:25Jordi Hays?

  Team this morning, they made us a cake.

• 56:27John Coogan?

  It's very nice of them.

• 56:28Jordi Hays?

  It said, "Congrats for nothing, get back to work."

• 56:31John Coogan?

  It was good. It was very funny. And it was revealed in this hilarious way of like showing up to breakfast with this massive box that like clearly has a cake in it, but he's like, "I'm not gonna tell you what's in here." I'm like, "That's obviously a cake, dude." But he's like, "No, no, no, I gotta reveal it once you're all sitting down." And so he sits down, and he opens it up, like, "It is a cake." But then I was surprised because the joke on top was very funny.

• 56:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the joke on top.

• 56:53John Coogan?

  I enjoyed that. Anyway, Elizabeth Holmes has been on an absolute tear, poster in residence, poster in prison. So Elizabeth Holmes posted some, "What would I tell the 19-year-old girl who was getting ready to drop out of Stanford to build there?" And I was doing some thought leadership posting. And Gonto says, "Since when are we taking advice from somebody who went to jail? There should be a community note in the post." And Elizabeth Holmes says, "Let's listen to a growth exec who has 8K followers." Brutal, ratioed. And Rohit says, "Beginning to like Elizabeth Holmes." Very funny. I don't, I don't have a problem with taking advice from people who went to jail. They probably learned a lot.

• 57:35Jordi Hays?

  This.

• 57:36John Coogan?

  Essentially, I believe in restorative justice, although she is still in jail, so.

• 57:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's. I think this is gonna be the new playbook of like when a public figure turns the entire world against them.

• 57:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:50Jordi Hays?

  Wait.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  Higher Ghost Rider.

• 57:52Jordi Hays?

  And then Higher Ghost Rider, just start posting.

• 57:53John Coogan?

  Start posting, for sure. But, I mean, you have to be, you have to be huge. Like Elizabeth Holmes has a movie and a documentary and a book.

• 58:01Jordi Hays?

  Scrawly, Scrawly did this.

• 58:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, but Scrawly didn't even get the treatment that Holmes did. I, I would say that Elizabeth Holmes is more of a household name than Scrawly.

• 58:07Jordi Hays?

  I think, yeah, she is, but, but he's also, I mean, he, he's just so good on the mic.

• 58:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Definitely got. I actually, I DM'd Elizabeth Holmes, invited her on the show via a phone interview.

• 58:21Jordi Hays?

  Are we sure that it's actually her?

• 58:22John Coogan?

  No, we're not. It's probably her husband. Um, but.

• 58:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, it, it's her handwriting every post.

• 58:29John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 58:30Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm kidding.

• 58:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 58:32Jordi Hays?

  She's reacting too quickly, I mean.

• 58:33John Coogan?

  There's probably a little bit of, of her in here, for sure. Uh, but, uh, but I, I do think it's mostly the, uh, the husband who's on the outside, but I can't confirm that, that's pure conspiracy theory. Um, but, uh, uh, we, remember when we were talking about Elizabeth Holmes, like, months ago? And I was saying, like, I'm ready to hear her out, but I want her to talk about biology specifically. I want her to, that is the path to redemption, is give me some banger takes about what's going on in GLP-1s, what's going on in mRNA, what's going on in, in DNA analysis and, and sequencing. Like, show me that you are truly generational on the cutting edge, because I feel like

• 59:17John Coogan?

  Martin Scrawly's been doing that. He was like, I was at a hedge fund, I went to jail, now I'm coming out, what am I giving you? I'm giving you hedge fund-like takes, and my takes, a lot of people agree that they're pretty good. And so, Scrawly has somewhat redeemed himself in the sense that, like, he might have done something wrong and wound up in prison and gotten out and, and served his time, but the key thing is, is that, like, his initial claim of, like, I'm a finance guy, is sort of continuing to ring true. But none of Elizabeth Holmes' posts thus far scream like, wow, really differentiated view in bio. Like, there is alpha in understanding the bio world if I listen to her. Like, yeah, she's in prison, but clearly she's a great biologist, clearly she's a great scientist.

• 1:00:02John Coogan?

  She messed up on the finance side, defrauded investors, went to jail, but. I need to listen to her because she understands where the puck is going in terms of biology or science. And I'm not seeing that yet, so I am, I'm withholding my endorsement of her. Anyway, if you want to be on the cutting edge of science or data analysis, go to Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. They're loved by over 2 million users and trusted by individuals.

• 1:00:37Jordi Hays?

  Raul was in Business Insider this morning, looking like an absolute chat.

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  The photos, they sent a great, they sent a great photographer.

• 1:00:44Jordi Hays?

  Orifam.

• 1:00:45John Coogan?

  Really, really good.

• 1:00:46Jordi Hays?

  It worked.

• 1:00:47John Coogan?

  Dart says, I moved to a new place two years ago, high-risk area, job-related, not exactly by choice, so I made a bunch of these signs and put them up everywhere. Two years in, and my house has pretty much been the only one in the entire neighborhood that hasn't been broken into, and it says, protected by Palantir Home Security. That, of course, is fake, but, you know, he put it up there. I think this whole thing's just a funny post. I don't think that the average home intruder knows what Palantir is, but still, very funny post.

• 1:01:19Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, maybe, maybe, maybe they're part of the retail army.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  Maybe. They're like, oh, oh, for that reason, I'm not invading.

• 1:01:26Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they're breaking enterings to buy more Palantir shares because they're so bullish.

• 1:01:31John Coogan?

  Oh, they're breaking into other houses, but then they see that as a sign of respect.

• 1:01:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:36John Coogan?

  Say, I'm so long Palantir that I won't break into this house that's protected by Palantir.

• 1:01:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they just believe in the company's.

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  But that makes sense. Totally possible.

• 1:01:42Jordi Hays?

  Kylie Robinson hit the timeline. She fired back with a quote tweet, and she says, listening to this lol, I did not go into the review expecting to hate it, also was aware I'm not the target audience for an always-listening device. And she highlights, she puts us in the true zone.

• 1:01:58John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:01:59Jordi Hays?

  She highlights a part of the article. She says, I'll admit I'm not the target audience. I imagine the person who'd want a friend is someone who is likely not a journalist, who may have more social occasions where they can sport an always-listening pendant.

• 1:02:13Jordi Hays?

  And anyways, so.

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  I feel like journalists should be perfect for for an always on listening device because every time you talk to them, they're like, do you mind if I record this? They're like, let me pull out my phone and record this. You should just have an always on recording device is like the perfect device for the journalist. It's in fact like the new, the new notebook for the journalist.

• 1:02:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And you could just say, let me know if you ever want to go off the record.

• 1:02:36John Coogan?

  Exactly. By default, you're on the record and I'm recording. I, I, I, I, I think that, I think that.

• 1:02:41Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I think, I think.

• 1:02:42John Coogan?

  Long term, we might see massive product market fit.

• 1:02:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:45John Coogan?

  With friend. They should do enterprise, Avi should do an enterprise product for journalists.

• 1:02:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. So the journalist gets it, wears it. And as soon as you interact with the journalist, you know that you're being recorded and everything you say is on the record. Speaking of journalists, Julie Hornstein has a little deep dive on Raul and some other young founders. They've long been icons. She says, she wrote about how because of AI hype and ease of vibe coding, teens and 20 somethings are flooding Silicon Valley to build startups instead of attending college or securing big tech jobs. Founders told me that they'd rather start a company than go to college because of AI gives you a PhD in your pocket. As Jake Adler said, love Jake, because of mass layoffs, Roy Lee thinks the worst thing someone who wants to be, who wants a stable future could do is work in big tech.

• 1:03:35John Coogan?

  Interesting. Roy Lee coming in with a hot take as he's known to do. College is dead, says zero interest rates. He graduated from university in 2019. Marvin Von Hagen, 25. I feel like I was just texting with Marvin. Is that right? Marvin. I think I gotta text him back. No, literally, I do. Yeah, he texted me. He said, hey, we got an intro. He's releasing a short film.

• 1:04:05John Coogan?

  We gotta, we gotta play this. Okay. We, we gotta get him on the show. Anyway, 30% of the Y Combinator batch were college students or new grads. So, nice little trend piece with some beautiful, beautiful photography. So, shout out to everyone that was featured in Silicon Valley's youthquake in the age of AI. Founders aren't waiting to grow up, says Business Insider.

• 1:04:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, Monitis says, basically, everyone underestimates how big of a role office selection plays in the outcomes of companies and their cultures. I recently had the chance to spend 24 hours at Lego headquarters. Will, where did you enter and then stay the night?

• 1:04:44John Coogan?

  Did you not get the memo about the Great Lock-It? You're not just supposed to be going and hanging out at Lego headquarters, going kid mode. This is a dream come true for any child. But, you know, that's what they say about Will.

• 1:04:58Jordi Hays?

  No, but I'm still kind of hung up 24 hours at Lego headquarters. Did he enter at like 1:00 PM?

• 1:05:04John Coogan?

  It's bait. It's so good. It's the best.

• 1:05:07Jordi Hays?

  Bait. But I do like, you can see they have that Lego on the actual side of the building.

• 1:05:12John Coogan?

  Do we have a fish? I feel like we had a fish at some point for bait.

• 1:05:17John Coogan?

  Yes, so Lego is a relatively...

• 1:05:19Jordi Hays?

  More Lego lore.

• 1:05:19John Coogan?

  Lego is a relatively strange company for the toy industry. Even at $10 billion in annualized revenue, the company has never taken a dollar of equity financing and is still family-owned and controlled since 1932. The company is based in Bilund, Denmark, a farm town of just 7,000. And where they're founded is still where they are. That's pretty remarkable. The company and the Chris Donson family, through their holding company, K-I-R-K-B-I, functionally own the town of Bilund from the airport, majority control, to a large majority of the real estate and the hotel tourist infrastructure. This allows them to make remarkably long-term decisions, like 24-hour visits for random American entrepreneurs.

• 1:06:03Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull an all-nighter together.

• 1:06:04John Coogan?

  We're thinking long-term.

• 1:06:05Jordi Hays?

  No, this is maybe...

• 1:06:06John Coogan?

  Oh, you want to pick my brain? Let's think long-term.

• 1:06:09Jordi Hays?

  Lego, the Lego execs are participating in the Great Lock-In. They said, "Come visit," but you gotta be stay for 24 hours, pulling all-nighter.

• 1:06:18John Coogan?

  We gotta get more info here.

• 1:06:20Jordi Hays?

  Were you a big Legoland kid growing up?

• 1:06:22John Coogan?

  Not a big Legoland kid. Legoland, I'm gonna date myself, built, like, I remember when it was built. And I remember when it, like, opened and I was, like, there on, like, one of the first days. But it only went, like, once or twice. But very cool. Support Legoland. Big into Legos generally.

• 1:06:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:38John Coogan?

  Huge, huge.

• 1:06:38Jordi Hays?

  Stepping on them.

• 1:06:41John Coogan?

  Yes, one of the worst pains imaginable. While some of this investment has been company-related, much of it has not been. The family has been actively involved in turning a blighted racetrack into a new neighborhood and improving civic and school infrastructure. This kind of long-term investment in a place is only really possible with a large balance sheet and patient private control. This was a rare thing before the last 10 years, but many tech companies could now fit this mold. That's interesting. My prediction is we will see many more company towns emerge. So, I mean, this has kind of happened. I feel like Menlo Park is very nice and Cupertino is very nice. And then a lot of that's just a benefit of, you know,

• 1:07:23John Coogan?

  Apple sets up a massive headquarters there. All the employees are wealthy and so the town, the taxes.

• 1:07:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the California Forever Project could turn into this, right?

• 1:07:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:07:33Jordi Hays?

  If you get a single tenant in there.

• 1:07:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:35Jordi Hays?

  That's doing like shipbuilding.

• 1:07:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, but you need a company to be the backbone of the flywheel. And that's certainly what's going on in Denmark. The results of this investment are clear. Even on a Saturday, many employees were walking, biking to the office with families in tow. The town felt vibrant with a mix of visitors, employees and locals. It's, so now we're finding out that he spent 24 hours there on a Saturday? So, did he get there Friday night and didn't leave until Saturday night? Or he slept there on Saturday night and woke up on Sunday and left? I'm so confused. So, he says, "It seems like a remarkably pleasant place to live and work that eliminates many of the trade-offs of highly urban's office settings as we see the emergence of dozen late-stage privates with fortress balance sheets. It's

• 1:08:22John Coogan?

  hard to imagine the company town not returning." I like it a lot. It's a good take.

• 1:08:26Jordi Hays?

  I'd like to do a TV company town.

• 1:08:28John Coogan?

  I would, I would love that. I would also love a turbo puffer company town playing that sound.

• 1:08:35John Coogan?

  Search every byte serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Get started for free.

• 1:08:44Jordi Hays?

  Be like Linear, be like Cursor.

• 1:08:46John Coogan?

  Head over to TurboPuffer.

• 1:08:48Jordi Hays?

  It's time to puff.

• 1:08:49John Coogan?

  So Scott Besson, he is-

• 1:08:52Jordi Hays?

  He's been on a roll.

• 1:08:53John Coogan?

  He's got a little bit of a, little bit of a pension for curse words, but it-

• 1:08:59Jordi Hays?

  I don't normally like curse words. I, I kinda like when he does it.

• 1:09:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it, it won Geiger Capital over. Geiger Capital says, I'd follow Scott Besson into war. And Scott Besson said, why are, why the F are you talking to the president about me? F you, I'll punch you in your effing face. And Geiger Capital says, that's my Treasury Secretary. Anyway, just a funny quote. I don't know how that got to the, into-

• 1:09:27Jordi Hays?

  Try this line, if you have a coworker, you heard them talking, talking to a management

• 1:09:35Jordi Hays?

  in a not so kind way about you, try this out. Try this out in the, you know, around the water cooler.

• 1:09:40John Coogan?

  Keep the president from talking about you. Keep ChatGPT talking about you. Go to Profound, get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. It's millions of new consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands and-

• 1:09:54Jordi Hays?

  Be like MongoDB, Indeed, Mercury, Ramp, Zapier, Workable, US Bank.

• 1:10:01John Coogan?

  And I saw a fun post on the timeline. Somebody asked, what's the best way to get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT? And the answer was Profound. And so clearly, Profound has been dog food.

• 1:10:10Jordi Hays?

  They're dog fooding.

• 1:10:11John Coogan?

  So preview of what might happen at Meta Connect. Jucon has a screenshot here from SemiCon Sam. I was considering releasing it as a paid post, but after much thought, I decided to make it free. I hope you all enjoy my analysis on smart glasses. Why smart glasses are already dominated by China. Why even Apple and Meta have no choice but to cooperate. So- This article says, "Recently, there was an article like this, Meta will unveil new smart glasses called Hypernova at its annual connect event on September 17th and 18th. The prevailing view was that unlike the previously released Ray-Ban Meta glasses, the Hypernova coming this time would have a display and its price would be high above $1,400.

• 1:10:55John Coogan?

  However, contrary to expectations, according to a report by Mark Gurman, absolute dog, it will launch at $800." So Gurman kind of runs through it. It's still higher than the Meta Ray-Bans that are in $200 to $400, but should be a little, should be still pricey, but lower than people initially expected. So the question trying to be answered by this Substack article is, why is that? I wanted to find out the reason. I want to find the reason in competition with Chinese manufacturers. About a month ago, Alibaba released smart glasses called Quark Vision, but the price is 1,999 yuan, about 280 bucks. That's pretty cheap.

• 1:11:38Jordi Hays?

  I'm not laughing at the price, I'm laughing at the name.

• 1:11:40John Coogan?

  Quark Vision.

• 1:11:41Jordi Hays?

  You ever want Quark?

• 1:11:42John Coogan?

  I want Quark Vision.

• 1:11:43Jordi Hays?

  It's time to, it's time for Quark Vision.

• 1:11:45John Coogan?

  I don't know, I don't know. Maybe it sounds better in Chinese. So from Meta's perspective, with China putting products out that cheaply, they might have thought, how can we manage to charge more than $1,400 and decided to set a lower price? I believe smart glasses will become a truly essential device. This writer is, "Smart glasses pilled." I'm also optimistic about the, the growth in smart glasses generally, VR, AR. I think we're about to see the churn rates drop and the adoption rates increase. Let me give an example. Unlike smartphones, smart glasses are much more convenient to operate. You don't need to move your fingers. You can operate them through humanity's most concise action, your voice. For instance, if you're trying to use AI features like Gemini Live on a smartphone,

• 1:12:29John Coogan?

  you would have to open the camera app with your fingers, scan things yourself with AI glasses. Camera on the devices effectively seeing what I'm seeing. So there's the advantage that I don't have to issue instructions one by one. And so he lays out kind of a bull case for the for the smart glasses. This is the industry's classification of smart smart glasses by generation. Gen one, which is the current generation, doesn't have a display. AI features are supported through a smartphone integration. Gen two, which is next year supposedly, will be equipped with a low resolution display. And then gen three has a high end display, full color, 2K resolution, AI and spatial computing, like what we saw in the Apple Vision Pro.

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  So, starting from, so he says, that's why I believe the second generation is the point where we can start calling them smart glasses. From the second generation onward, displays provide visual information, allowing users to access much richer data through the glasses. To draw an analogy, up to the first generation, they were like PDAs, but starting from the second generation, they can be called smartphones. So, very bullish on on the growth here. And I think we can. Was there anything else here in here that you wanted to run through?

• 1:13:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just thought the pricing information was interesting.

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:47Jordi Hays?

  They could try to run the same playbook of just selling, the same playbook that they ran with like DJI.

• 1:13:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:53Jordi Hays?

  Right, of just like selling below the actual cost to produce the devices to just try to get adoption.

• 1:14:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:00Jordi Hays?

  But we'll see.

• 1:14:03John Coogan?

  It is interesting. I haven't I haven't seen that much reporting on the bill of materials for the Oculus Quest 3, but I don't believe that they were selling it at a massive discount. Like, I do think it was probably profitable on a per unit basis, but then they were just spending so much on R and D to actually build the next versions. It would be very interesting to see what happens if they released something at the level of Apple Vision Pro, but at the price point of the Quest 4 or something like that. I really, I I'm excited about the smart glasses, but. I'm honestly more excited about just an Apple Vision Pro level image and screen being

• 1:14:45John Coogan?

  pulled into something with the Quest's ergonomics.

• 1:14:49Jordi Hays?

  So there's some interesting, so basically brightness and power efficiency are the most important things when it comes to displays. And the reason that Apple's Vision Pro can crush it on brightness is because the field of view is actually blocked, so there's no outside light coming in. And so they can deliver this like ultra crisp image. And what Meta and Quark are doing is like you can just see the real world and then see a display on it. So the the sort of quality of the image will lag behind that just like ultra high fidelity that you're getting with the Vision Pro.

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:24Jordi Hays?

  But obviously insanely real trade off.

• 1:15:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the physics of light state that like it's an additive process. So like if you're outside and it's bright and you want to project a black cube into that world, that's basically impossible from a physics perspective because the bright light's going to shine through, you're adding light on top of it. And there's not really anything that you can do to make the black cube show up on the beach in Santa Monica if you're just walking around. So there are some serious headwinds there. That's why Palmer Lucky predicted that the end result of augmented reality would be reprojection, which is what the Apple Vision Pro does. Take a camera, because then if you take a camera and you play that on the inside of

• 1:16:10John Coogan?

  the display, you can turn down the brightness all around the black cube and then you can put the black cube over there and you can block out the light that's behind it. But but occlusion with dark objects in augmented reality scenarios is basically physically impossible. I don't know. Seems very difficult. Anyway, whatever. If you're planning to launch a augmented reality headset, you got to get on 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. Jer Tickett says Houston is like if the AWS.

• 1:16:44Jordi Hays?

  Tyler there, what's going on?

• 1:16:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. How you doing Tyler?

• 1:16:48Jordi Hays?

  I was just clapping. I was just so excited about the Linear.

• 1:16:50John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. Give us an update. What is what is burning up the timeline in your world? What was your favorite post from this weekend?

• 1:16:58Jordi Hays?

  Um, okay, let me find a really good one. I'll get back.

• 1:17:01John Coogan?

  Okay. In the meantime, let's talk about Houston, the city in Texas. Houston is like if the AWS console was a city, says Jira Tickets. Um, and Kathleen Turner says, dang, why? And Jira Tickets says, I don't know. I've never been to Houston. Like, I, I, I don't even know what this means. I don't know why this wound up in the show, in the run of show. I think this wound up, it wound up in the run of show like multiple times for some reason.

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 1:17:27John Coogan?

  But did you put it in?

• 1:17:28Jordi Hays?

  I put it in. I thought it was funny.

• 1:17:29John Coogan?

  Why? What appealed to you about this? Do you think it's an apt analogy? Have you ever used the AWS console? Do you know how confusing it is?

• 1:17:37Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:17:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:17:37Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:17:38John Coogan?

  So i- i- is that the take? I was just saying it's really confusing.

• 1:17:41Jordi Hays?

  Not the best designed city.

• 1:17:42John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, I get that. But like-

• 1:17:44Jordi Hays?

  It's also just funny.

• 1:17:45John Coogan?

  Lot of, lot of horsepower under the hood.

• 1:17:47Jordi Hays?

  It's a good post, sir.

• 1:17:47John Coogan?

  It's a good post. It's a good post. Shout out Jira Tickets. Uh, ASML-

• 1:17:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was, this was cool. ASML decided to become a VC, uh, according to Wasteland Capital, to boost European tech sovereignty and burn one and a half billion in shareholder funds into Mistral. Hey!

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  We don't know that they burned it.

• 1:18:06Jordi Hays?

  They, they Yolo'd it in. Uh, lithography bun plus third tier LLM meat with a topping of EU bureaucrat der- derigis- der-

• 1:18:17John Coogan?

  Derigism? I don't, I don't know that word.

• 1:18:20Jordi Hays?

  It's a word that I can't pronounce and you can't pronounce, meaning that it might be a new type of AI hamburger. Um, anyways, people are not-

• 1:18:27John Coogan?

  State control of economic matters.

• 1:18:29Jordi Hays?

  So people are not excited about ASML's investment. They did about three quarters of Mistral's

• 1:18:35John Coogan?

  Derigism.

• 1:18:36Jordi Hays?

  Two billion dollars Series C. Um, Mistral is getting valued at just north of cognition in its latest round. Um, and anyways, people are basically saying- ASML was potentially worried about about having, you know, being like too much of like a private company, you know, and just like focusing on generating profits and they have to like, you know, redistribute some of that wealth to the to the broader to the broader market.

• 1:19:05John Coogan?

  Indeed. What did?

• 1:19:08Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, it might be, I mean, if Mr. All, I think clearly it's France's national champion and effectively Europe, one of Europe's champions and I'm sure they can figure out a way to create value and hopefully, hopefully ASML shareholders get a nice, nice return.

• 1:19:28John Coogan?

  Doug O'Laughlin over fabricated knowledge said, this is very simple. National champion. Don't overthink it. There isn't a 4D chess move. This is checkers. So I actually don't know exactly what that like, what the interpretation of that thesis is like, national champion just means like you must be supported at all costs, right? And so like, it doesn't make, it doesn't necessarily matter if it pencils out on, on some DCF right now. It's like, we need to continue to support that. We have the capital, so let's continue to support our national champion.

• 1:19:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:59John Coogan?

  Makes sense. You want to talk about EchoStar?

• 1:20:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So SpaceX is buying EchoStar's AWS for an H block spectrum licenses for about 17 billion.

• 1:20:10John Coogan?

  That's a lot of dough.

• 1:20:11Jordi Hays?

  Split. It's up to eight and a half billion in cash and eight and a half billion in SpaceX stock, which is crazy. The big takeaway, the deal allows SpaceX to expand its direct device, mobile services more independently beyond its existing T-Mobile partnership. I'm going to pull this up. EchoStar, so they, this is an industry that's heavily regulated and you would think that in a, in a more, in a more free market.

• 1:20:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:42Jordi Hays?

  SpaceX could just say, we're going to start building.

• 1:20:48Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna just create this like mobile internet service.

• 1:20:51John Coogan?

  Nope.

• 1:20:52Jordi Hays?

  And it doesn't work like that.

• 1:20:53John Coogan?

  But there are specific licenses.

• 1:20:55Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:20:55John Coogan?

  You don't want traffic on the same spectrum.

• 1:20:58Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:20:58John Coogan?

  Same band of the spectrum, so.

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Shares of EchoStar rose as much as 26% on Monday to a record high of $84. Its bonds were the biggest gainers in the junk bond market. Yeah, apparently EchoStar was like potentially veering towards bankruptcy like they hadn't been.

• 1:21:15John Coogan?

  Wait, so what did EchoStar's stock do?

• 1:21:18Jordi Hays?

  Up 26%.

• 1:21:19John Coogan?

  Because now, now it's basically a SpaceX hold co. Like, because they have 8.5 billion in SpaceX stock. What's their market cap?

• 1:21:26Jordi Hays?

  So it should trade at like 10 trillion.

• 1:21:29John Coogan?

  Potentially. What's their market cap?

• 1:21:31Jordi Hays?

  22 billion. Whoa.

• 1:21:34John Coogan?

  Wow, this is a treasury.

• 1:21:35Jordi Hays?

  So we were just talking, so we were talking about this. So we were talking about this morning, there's all these crypto treasuries.

• 1:21:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:40Jordi Hays?

  And then you would think like, why doesn't somebody create like the Elon like treasury company?

• 1:21:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:45Jordi Hays?

  And the reason for that is like, if you start adding shares, then you become a registered investment advisor. And there's all this compliance, much harder than just putting like digital assets or tokens in a company.

• 1:21:55John Coogan?

  These are just like, I have USD, I have Bitcoin, they're kind of the same thing. I'm putting my treasury wherever and then MicroStrategy, now just strategy, wound up just having a ton of Bitcoin. And then it became this like, this way to invest in Bitcoin just with a public ticker. But EchoStar will now be the most concentrated way to get, to get allocation into SpaceX, right?

• 1:22:16Jordi Hays?

  That's so crazy.

• 1:22:17John Coogan?

  That is crazy.

• 1:22:18Jordi Hays?

  Basically, if you bought it Friday.

• 1:22:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:21Jordi Hays?

  The basically, the value of the business then was just like SpaceX.

• 1:22:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27Jordi Hays?

  Plus the cash they got from this deal.

• 1:22:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29Jordi Hays?

  The SpaceX stock.

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:31Jordi Hays?

  So the company is.

• 1:22:32John Coogan?

  It was just sitting on this license and then just sold it.

• 1:22:34Jordi Hays?

  The company.

• 1:22:35John Coogan?

  Flipped it into SpaceX stock.

• 1:22:37Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 1:22:38John Coogan?

  That is a very.

• 1:22:39Jordi Hays?

  I wonder, I wonder if they.

• 1:22:41John Coogan?

  Ed Ludlow, the bigger takeaway is I think we got a SpaceX meme stock on our hands soon. This is crazy.

• 1:22:47Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you're saying this is your take?

• 1:22:49John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, yeah. So Ed Ludlow, his, his big takeaway, which I agree with, I think you are correct. The big takeaway is the deal allows SpaceX to expand its direct to device, mobile services more independently beyond needing to partner with T-Mobile. They can go direct and cut out T-Mobile. Extremely bullish for SpaceX direct to device. Obviously, that's going to be a huge business. And they're really making a lot of inroads there with partnerships and now owning the actual license. But the other big takeaway is that now there is a company that where what 25% of their market cap is directly indexed to SpaceX and it's just a public ticker. Like that is a crazy development.

• 1:23:29Jordi Hays?

  They have a bunch of cash. They're also burning money. They lost 300 million last quarter.

• 1:23:33John Coogan?

  Well, hopefully they'll make it all back on Elon co. Who knows? Anyway, numeral HQ.

• 1:23:44Jordi Hays?

  The only other thing, let me, yeah, you go for this.

• 1:23:47John Coogan?

  Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance while you're looking that up. Tyler, what did you find for me?

• 1:23:54Speaker 04

  All right. So I think my favorite post was Will Brown.

• 1:23:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:59Speaker 04

  He said he was at a family wedding in Spain.

• 1:24:01John Coogan?

  This is fantastic.

• 1:24:02Speaker 04

  And his uncle brought a printed out semi-analysis cluster max list of the, you know, the Neo clouds. He was asking why Prime Intellect is at the bottom.

• 1:24:11Jordi Hays?

  Hey, made the list.

• 1:24:14John Coogan?

  Hey, made the list. That's great.

• 1:24:16Jordi Hays?

  Got to start.

• 1:24:17John Coogan?

  That is fantastic. At a family wedding in Spain, uncle brought a printout of the semi-analysis cluster mass list and asked why we're underperforming, explaining the difference between marketplaces and data centers and how we're not just selling compute, we're also advancing RL infra. I love it. Very fun.

• 1:24:33Jordi Hays?

  So one small problem with the meme stock potential of Echo stock.

• 1:24:40John Coogan?

  Break it down.

• 1:24:41Jordi Hays?

  They've got 29 billion of debt that they had been basically defaulting on.

• 1:24:46John Coogan?

  Okay. Maybe they'll be selling the SpaceX stock off slowly to pay for the debt.

• 1:24:53Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, just hold, just hold, just make the minimum payments on the interest and just hold on and just hope Elon gets to market.

• 1:25:00John Coogan?

  Wait, so you're telling me that the narrative around this company is that it's a levered bet on SpaceX in the public markets that are the ticker that anyone can trade?

• 1:25:10Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:25:11John Coogan?

  And the company's already levered up?

• 1:25:12Jordi Hays?

  Yes, you can think of it.

• 1:25:13John Coogan?

  They don't even need to lever up further.

• 1:25:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:16John Coogan?

  They're already levered.

• 1:25:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:25:19Jordi Hays?

  Extremely levered. Except unfortunately, they didn't spend. They didn't, they didn't raise that to buy SpaceX. They just, they

• 1:25:26John Coogan?

  They already had that.

• 1:25:27Jordi Hays?

  They already had it. They didn't need to, they didn't even need

• 1:25:29John Coogan?

  Cause they already had it. Yeah. Oh, there are two steps.

• 1:25:31Jordi Hays?

  Next earnings call.

• 1:25:32John Coogan?

  Most people are like, I'm going to become a treasury company, then I'll lever up to buy more Bitcoin and my company will act as like a 2X levered Bitcoin.

• 1:25:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so.

• 1:25:41John Coogan?

  This company's already levered up.

• 1:25:42Jordi Hays?

  So basically SpaceX just needs to, SpaceX just needs to be a 1.7 trillion dollar company.

• 1:25:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25:54Jordi Hays?

  And then they'll be able to just pay off the debt.

• 1:25:56John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:25:57Jordi Hays?

  Pay off the debt.

• 1:25:58John Coogan?

  Seems doable.

• 1:25:59Jordi Hays?

  And then.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  Never bet against Elon. Bro, never, never, never bet against.

• 1:26:04Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 1:26:04John Coogan?

  Come on. Anyway, fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one competitor big offs, number one ranking on G2. There is so much more in the timeline. We are going to have guests joining us in 10 minutes, but let's run through some more stories. Oh, the other story. OpenAI projected its cash burn this year through 2029 will rise even higher than previously thought to a total of 115 billion. That's about 80 billion higher than the company previously expected. Andrew Cote says, now that's what I call a nonprofit. This, the, the numbers are big, but I'm so, I'm so inured to big numbers at this point. I'm like, yeah, that seems fine. I don't know.

• 1:26:48John Coogan?

  That, that, that's my take is that like, that's, that seems completely appropriate for the opportunity. Like you're building the next big, massive consumer company. Everyone loves it. You have strong product market fit. All your competitors are kind of bowing out more or less, like.

• 1:27:06Jordi Hays?

  The hyperscalers are bowing out?

• 1:27:08John Coogan?

  I would say that they're bowing out of consumer. Yeah.

• 1:27:11Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. Nano banana is ripping.

• 1:27:13John Coogan?

  Nano banana is ripping. Yeah. AJ, Aje, Midha at A16Z, is that his name? Uh, he had a good post about this today, uh, talking about the revenge of the empire or something like that. Was that in here? Where was it? Agni, I have him in here somewhere. I gotta get a better tab management situation going. Okay, here we go. Uh, Agni Midha at Andreessen Horowitz, uh, says the empire strikes back and shows ChatGPT versus Gemini. ChatGPT interest overtime on, oh, well, I mean, you're gonna trust Google on how Gemini is doing in search results?

• 1:27:55Jordi Hays?

  Also, there was other reporting that's, there was reporting that showed that, that, uh, agents are completely throwing, like, agents that are crawling the web are throw, totally throwing.

• 1:28:03John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting, interesting. No, I, I was completely kidding about Google cooking the, the, the, the results here. Obviously, they wouldn't do that. Um, but, but, uh, Nano Banana launches and, and Gemini is definitely mooning. Um, again, I, I see them as two, two separate use cases. Like, I, I, when I think about the, when I think about the Nano Banana product, I don't see that as a direct competitor to, uh, GPT five and like the, the router to just like answer questions, do things for you. Like, um, Nano Banana is incredible. Gemini clearly has a huge advantage in, uh, in video and image generation. That's why we're excited to partner with, uh, with Fall because they are a vendor for that and, uh,

• 1:28:47John Coogan?

  and will help you get set up with it. Um, but.

• 1:28:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, most businesses don't necessarily care about, have, they're, they're not looking to pick a single model, right?

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:58Jordi Hays?

  If you're a company like Canva, which uses Fall.

• 1:29:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:29:01Jordi Hays?

  They're leveraging in multiple different models.

• 1:29:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:04Jordi Hays?

  At any given point.

• 1:29:06John Coogan?

  So, uh, if I think about like, what, what does Nano Banana mean? I feel like it is a, it is an incredible product that will be baked into YouTube. You'll be able to generate thumbnails within the YouTube studio. Uh, there will be products that people use to generate imagery and that will go out everywhere. If you're in an email and you need to generate imagery, like, it'll be baked into Gemini into, into all the products. But but this particular spike in the chart reads to me as as as if a Studio Ghibli moment, where it's like you get a ton of attention and people come in, but like, what is driving ChatGPT use right now? It's not Ghibli's. That's not why people are coming to it. Like, the image generation is is definitely used, but I would say it's probably less than like

• 1:29:49John Coogan?

  10% of queries, probably less than 2% of queries, honestly. Just based on my personal use, most of the time, I'm looking for a fact, I'm looking for a breakdown, I'm looking for some analysis, go search the web, put something together. And then every once in a while, I go to it and I'm like, okay, now I need to do an image generation thing. And so I don't necessarily fully agree with this take that the empire is striking back. I mean, it is a strike. They're striking back. But has the empire won? We don't know.

• 1:30:15Jordi Hays?

  Good question.

• 1:30:16John Coogan?

  Anyway, question for you. Isaac says, I don't know anything about watches, but I'm looking for something respectable to wear on my wrist, something that a watch nerd might go nice at, but won't break the bank. Any recommendations? What you got, Jordy?

• 1:30:33Jordi Hays?

  What does not breaking the bank mean?

• 1:30:35John Coogan?

  Richard Mille?

• 1:30:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  Stay away from the FP Journe and the piece uniques, because that's going to break the bank. But nice RM, a racing machine on the wrist.

• 1:30:45Jordi Hays?

  Watch, like a like an FP Journe?

• 1:30:47John Coogan?

  That that could work, too. Yeah. You're going to want to stay away from the Graf Diamond Solubination, because that's up in the 55 million range. But a Paul Newman Daytona, that's going to be something that a watch nerd is going to go, nice, nice.

• 1:31:00Jordi Hays?

  Fortunately, this is good news in the watch world. Trump was invited to the Rolex suite at the US Open Men's Final, and he got to hang out with the Rolex CEO, Jean Frederic Dufour. And the timeline is expecting some potential resolution or relief from the Swiss tariffs to come this week. Obviously, tariffs impacting at least secondary watch prices right away. They've been kind of up across the board. So good if you have a bunch of watches you want to sell, bad if you're in the market.

• 1:31:33John Coogan?

  Well, if you're looking for a watch, go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet, seriously, any watch. You can chat with the Bezel Concierge and you can ask them that exact prompt. You can say, what's a watch that would make, make a watch nerd say, nice, but not break the bank? They might recommend, I don't know, GMT Master, Batman, Rolex, something like that. That might be more reasonable. Anyway, Steve Jobs' office versus Tim Cook's office. I think this says a lot about why Apple feels different under Cook, says Sherman McCoy. But Sherman got put in the truth zone because that famous picture of Steve Jobs' office, where it's all messy, and Tim Cook's office is all nice and clean.

• 1:32:16Jordi Hays?

  All right, let's see. Let's see Tim Cook's home office.

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's see Tim Cook's home office. It could be 10 times messier. Imagine it's just stacked up.

• 1:32:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, 10 times the books.

• 1:32:24John Coogan?

  He's just the biggest order. Yeah, 10 times the books. Just stacks of papers everywhere. So, the picture on the left, it is Steve Jobs, but that's his home office. And Tim Cook is, of course, at the, at the work office. But it's still probably something true there. Obviously, Tim Cook is the operations mastermind. Steve Jobs is more of the creative genius, and so.

• 1:32:45Jordi Hays?

  We got a, an old email here. February 13, 2005. Sergey Brin sent an email to his executive management group.

• 1:32:57John Coogan?

  Read the subject line.

• 1:32:58Jordi Hays?

  Subject, "Irate Call From Steve Jobs." And then he just types this out, clearly change, just like.

• 1:33:04John Coogan?

  It's true of thought.

• 1:33:05Jordi Hays?

  Stream of consciousness. So, "I got a call from Steve Jobs today, who is very agitated. It was about us recruiting from the Safari team. He was sure we were building a browser and were trying to get the Safari team. He made various veiled threats, too, though I'm not inclined to hold them against him too much, as he seemed beside himself, as Eric would say. So, I just wanted to check what our status was in various respects and what we want to do about partners, friendly companies, and recruiting. On the browser, I know and told him that we have Mozilla people working here, largely on Firefox. I did not mention we may release an enhanced version, but I am not sure we are going to yet. On recruiting, I've heard recently of one candidate out of Apple that had browser expertise, so I guess he would be on Safari. I mentioned this to Steve, and he told me he was cool with us hiring anyone who came

• 1:33:49Jordi Hays?

  to us but was angry about systematic solicitation. I don't know if there's some systematic Safari recruiting effort that we have. Anyhow, I told him we are not building a browser and that, to my knowledge, we were not systematically going after the Safari team in particular." And that we should talk about various opportunities. I also said I would follow up and check on our recruiting strategies with regard to Apple and Safari. He seems so. So please update me on what you know here and on what you think we should have as a policy. On another note, it seems silly to have both Firefox and Safari. Perhaps there is some unification strategy that we can get to these two to pursue combined. They certainly have enough market share to drive webmasters and they would in fact.

• 1:34:33John Coogan?

  The phrase in here systematic solicitation, it's like that defines the modern tech era so perfectly like systematic. There was a time when CEOs would call each other and be like, hey, if my people come to you, that's cool. But just don't, don't create a list of everyone who works for my company and then try and go poach all of them simultaneously in one weekend while we're on vacation.

• 1:34:57Jordi Hays?

  Don't call them personally, text them.

• 1:35:00John Coogan?

  Don't have, don't invite them to dinner.

• 1:35:02Jordi Hays?

  Invite them.

• 1:35:02John Coogan?

  On your dinner.

• 1:35:03Jordi Hays?

  Offer them a hundred million dollars.

• 1:35:05John Coogan?

  Don't go wave surfing with them in Lake Tahoe.

• 1:35:07Jordi Hays?

  If they don't accept a hundred, offer two hundred.

• 1:35:09John Coogan?

  Offer two hundred. Please don't do that. There was a time.

• 1:35:12Jordi Hays?

  But it is interesting. I mean, three and a half years later, they launched Google Chrome.

• 1:35:15John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:35:16Jordi Hays?

  So it is interesting in this email.

• 1:35:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:19Jordi Hays?

  Like you would think now, given what we know about like platforms and operating systems and data.

• 1:35:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:25Jordi Hays?

  You would think that even at this point, Google was thinking, we want to own the browser.

• 1:35:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:30Jordi Hays?

  But you know, if, and obviously I'm sure when he wrote this, he wasn't expecting it to one day be public.

• 1:35:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, we got to dig more into the browser wars. We were talking this weekend about perplexity.

• 1:35:42Jordi Hays?

  Are they over?

• 1:35:43John Coogan?

  I don't know. I think, I think there's going to be another run at it for sure. And we're going to see some, some developments. Anyway, if you're trying to poach engineers from big tech, you know, the best way to do it. Billboard on the 101, go to adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only ad quick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficiency.

• 1:36:06Jordi Hays?

  And just find the billboards and just surround your enemies with recruiting messaging.

• 1:36:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, or pull an Avi Schiffman and buy 300 billboards.

• 1:36:15Jordi Hays?

  He said the largest.

• 1:36:16John Coogan?

  That cannot be true. That cannot be true.

• 1:36:19Jordi Hays?

  It could be true on a pure, it seems impossible, but on a pure volume basis, like just like volume of inventory in a single buy.

• 1:36:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe for like a single creative or something, like a single image is the biggest. But like when Apple launched the new iPhone, they put billboards in every single city and it's huge and I see them everywhere.

• 1:36:40Jordi Hays?

  It definitely is.

• 1:36:40John Coogan?

  And movies, when movies come out, there's, there's, there's billboards everywhere.

• 1:36:44Jordi Hays?

  It's the most YOLO marketing move that potentially of the year.

• 1:36:48John Coogan?

  It caught my eye and it made me think I gotta buy one, we gotta demo it.

• 1:36:52Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 1:36:53John Coogan?

  We gotta make Tyler live with it for a week and see, see, see what happens to him in the guinea pig.

• 1:36:58Jordi Hays?

  The question is, could you use that money a lot more efficiently, you know, buying ads on Meta, you know, it's a consumer product, it's probably easy to figure out like who's the target buyer.

• 1:37:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:09Jordi Hays?

  You can get the, the halo effect of out of home advertising by like buying strategic inventory.

• 1:37:15John Coogan?

  I do, I do think that there is something special about the, having friend.com. So like, when you go to friend.com, you just see the pendant and that's it. And then you scroll down and you see this like Apple like experience and says friend and then you scroll down and it has these questions. And so if I, if I put, if it was, if it was try friend.ai and you put that on a billboard, I don't think that converts as nearly as well as friend.com.

• 1:37:45Jordi Hays?

  The domain is the one thing that, that I think in the full net, because if the company doesn't work in two years, we can just wind, wind the company down. He, he, and, and you have to look at the domain as like, like, does it increase your probability of success? I think for something like this, like an always on listening device, it's already people aren't going to trust it. So domains can deliver trust. And then does it, yeah, does it just increase conversion rate of people just caring enough to, to, um, not, not to mention just like seeing it, it's a great domain for out of home advertising. Period.

• 1:38:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, I, I truly think it unlocks out of home advertising in a completely different way. That tryfriend.ai would just convert way less than friend.com. I want to know what's on that website. I'm just going to type in friend.com and then I'm on the flow. So, uh, I'm actually surprisingly bullish on a big, big campaign, a big out of home campaign for friend.com. Uh, good luck to them. Well, we have our first guest of the show. We have Sonny from Grok, infrastructure for inference, purpose built for speed, quality, cost and scale.

• 1:38:51Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:38:51John Coogan?

  Thank you for joining the show today. How are you doing? Welcome to the stream.

• 1:38:55Speaker 05

  I'm doing good, guys. I'm, uh, actually at the all in summit. So it's like, you know, coming, yeah, exactly. So I'm just in a green room here. So excited to be on with you guys.

• 1:39:04Jordi Hays?

  Did you already talk or is that coming up?

• 1:39:06Speaker 05

  No, no, no, I'm not talking. I'm just kind of like.

• 1:39:08John Coogan?

  Oh, but still in the green room.

• 1:39:09Jordi Hays?

  Still in the green room.

• 1:39:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:39:11Speaker 05

  You know, I, I, I had to get a favor so I could come on with you guys here, so.

• 1:39:15John Coogan?

  Nice, I appreciate it. Yeah, take us through the last, uh, last week. I, I believe you were at the dinner. Uh, what was kind of the, what was the, what was the vibe like? Just, just walk us through your experience.

• 1:39:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, really special. Like, look, first things first, I would say, you know, when you think about, you know, the president, what he's really done is he understands that he needs to enable technologists to basically do their thing. And I would, I would, you know, summarize it in the following ways. One, he, you know, he brought everyone in and said, look, if you have some kind of issue, there's a team of people that you can work with, including David Sacks or just himself, um, to, to get things unblocked, right? And there's many issues that companies deal with, whether, you know, comes to export control or, or, you know, tariffs that are being put on or fines that are being put on our companies. And so he's really making himself available to, to help our companies, uh, you know, broadly.

• 1:40:09Speaker 05

  I think he's also understood that, um, you know, AI and technology is the forefront of where many of, you know, the innovations for the country will happen, including huge infrastructure projects. Right? So you heard that when the press came in and when they're asking, you know, the questions, how much each company is spending, you know, looking at, you know, trillions of dollars to spend, which has downstream impact in manufacturing, construction and other places. And so.

• 1:40:33Speaker 05

  You know, that that's something he's excited about. And I think lastly, like this, we, you know, we really want America to win, and he wants America to win. And so he's basically saying, look, I've got your, I've got your back. I'm supporting you here. And I'm basically, you know, putting this on the forefront. So, you know, that's the high level. I would say the experience just diving into it was really special, you know, started with a small gathering on the Rose Garden Club outside. It was raining. We were supposed to have a dinner there, but it got moved. And then a bunch of us, you know, all of us, I got moved into the Roosevelt Room, which is connected into the into the Oval Office. And then, you know, he took his time, basically, meeting with each one of us quickly, getting everybody gathered together, and just kind of understanding concerns that folks had.

• 1:41:18Speaker 05

  And, you know, basically, us getting an experience in Oval Office, we all got a challenge coin, we got a pen, which is really cool, like a little, you know, a memento, a very special memento. And then we all went, you know, to the East Wing for a dinner, and, you know, private conversation, followed by a little bit of the press came in, which you guys would have seen the videos, and then a conversation afterwards. And he really took the time to address, you know, everybody that was at the table, and, you know, make sure that if anybody had a concern, they had a chance to surface it there.

• 1:41:49Jordi Hays?

  What was top of mind for you specifically?

• 1:41:53Speaker 05

  I think, like, look, you know, the American AI stack, that's really important. That's something that was published at the AI Action Summit a couple, you know, basically, middle of July. And so what we're really focused on is basically making sure that we help the government understand what that stack looks like. And so, you know, I don't know if your producers can pull it up, but we published something a few weeks ago, maybe two weeks ago now, that basically is our version of the stack, and we think has been positively, positively received by the government and the administration. In terms of framework, we're not saying this is everything. We're not saying it's comprehensive. We're not saying it can't change. But really, you know, the, you know, kind of, the Department of Commerce today is out there trying to understand what it should look like.

• 1:42:38Speaker 05

  And this is one view of the stack. And really, what does that mean? Let's just kind of double click into that.

• 1:42:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:44Speaker 05

  The stack is important because. If the US is gonna keep export controls so that we can control, you know, highly sensitive technology getting into the wrong hands, you need to look at it from a stack perspective. A chip alone is not something enough that you should basically, you know, put a control on. So you gotta look at all the pieces. And on the flip side, if you are going to be a partner of the US and you're gonna wanna buy US assets, you wanna make sure that you have the whole list of things. Because if you don't have all the pieces, you're gonna end up with paperweights, right? Really heavy and expensive ones. So you need to have, you know, pieces along all. And that's what we sort of took a stab at when we put that out there.

• 1:43:21John Coogan?

  Speaking of the AI stack, can you help me understand at a more precise level how you're positioning the company? Or at least telling the story around the company in terms of where you fit in the stack? Because we saw last week, OpenAI is doing a deal for custom silicon with Broadcom. And then Semi Analysis came out with this article saying that basically Anthropic and AWS and Tranium are like super tightly co-designed now. Google, obviously, with the TPU. And then, and then I was chatting with some OpenAI people. They're like, you know, we actually talk to Nvidia pretty closely. Like, we're like, we, like, I don't know if co-design's the right word, but like, we give input and, you know,

• 1:44:06John Coogan?

  the next generation of Nvidia GPUs will be very capable of running ChatGPT. And so, so, so where, how do you position where you fit into the, the American AI stack?

• 1:44:19Speaker 05

  Do you guys mind if I pull up a quick screen share?

• 1:44:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can, but we are live. So anything you share will be shared. So do not share all your, your private key to the, those crypto holdings you got.

• 1:44:29Jordi Hays?

  There you go. That was smooth.

• 1:44:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the way to think about your question exactly.

• 1:44:36Jordi Hays?

  And could you zoom in a little bit? Is that possible? Or maybe we can on our side?

• 1:44:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, maybe you have to do it on your side. I don't know if I can, like, I can try. Um, you know, really where that's called out at the bottom is, um, so ju- just to answer your question first and I'll, I'll try to zoom in, uh, with a.

• 1:44:53John Coogan?

  I think we can pull it up on our side.

• 1:44:54Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, uh, so really at the bottom there, which is, you know, this is infrastructure and the bottom is compute. So in the compute bucket, right at the bottom here, you see Nvidia, Grok, AMD, Qualcomm, Broadcom. Like I said, this is not comprehensive, you know, Broadcom is helping companies like Google and OpenAI and others make their chips, right? And so, um, the idea, you know, to answer your question is that, um, the models come higher up, but you should be able to look at the stack and say, if you picked a piece from each one of these different categories that we've highlighted, you can have an end to end AI solution to either train a model, to either inference a model or to build an application on top of it, right? So those are the three things that this stack should enable. And you may not need all the pieces depending on what you're doing, right?

• 1:45:38Speaker 05

  If you're trying to train a model, clearly you don't need databases, right? But these are all the pieces that you need to basically do, be able to do something in AI.

• 1:45:46John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:45:49John Coogan?

  Fascinating. Uh, yeah, the, the, the, this, this, thank you for putting this together. This, this document is massive and, uh, deserves its own like deep dive. We'll have to dig in deeper.

• 1:45:59Speaker 05

  Yeah. Uh, yeah. We can do another one if you guys ever want to.

• 1:46:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:46:03Jordi Hays?

  What's the update on the projects in Europe? And then what, what do you guys have cooking, uh, stateside?

• 1:46:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, you know, we've launched close to 14 different data centers this year, um, including, you know, one that we announced publicly. Yeah. Mad decent there.

• 1:46:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, we've, we've, uh, we've launched 14 this year and, and we're, we're continuing to expand our footprint. You know, Europe, Europe is really fascinating, you know, they've, you guys saw the announcement with ASML and their investment into Mistral. So it looks like they're waking up and, and starting to basically put resources behind these things. So I think that's great. You know, our fo- our focus primarily in that region of the world is centered around, uh, data center and arrangement that we have in Saudi region. Arabia. And so that's in partnership with Humane slash Ramco Digital, where it's the largest inference cluster in the Middle East, and we believe all the way into Europe. And so we serve, you know, sort of most of Asia, Europe and the Middle East from that data center.

• 1:47:08Speaker 05

  And our, our goal right now, what we're cooking up is just an expansion of that, right? So we're working to expand that cluster, add more capabilities and basically more capacity to that cluster, because it's, it's been well received and well consumed.

• 1:47:20John Coogan?

  Very cool. I know you have a hard out, so we'll let you go. But last question for me, on that Mistral ASML deal, it, it kind of jumped out to me because it feels like they're almost like jumping a layer of this stack. You know, like I typically think about like ASML sells to TSMC, which sells to, you know, Nvidia and some other folks. And then, and then the application layer and the foundation model labs like sit on top of that. So you're kind of a couple, couple of steps away. Do you have any insight into what they were thinking? A lot of people were just saying, hey, it's a national champion. They want to support and they're willing to kind of go outside the typical business that they do to, to make an investment. And, or maybe they're just seeing it in purely financial terms, but it seems like if it was purely financial,

• 1:48:05John Coogan?

  they would have, there, there's a bunch of other things that they could invest in, you know, they're, they're not a hedge fund.

• 1:48:09Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. No, totally. I think the points you talked about are valid. I would add one thing to it, which is if you actually go back and listen to the launch of XAI, what Elon talks about is like, you know, companies and his companies primarily using, you know, AI to better themselves, right? And I think if you're someone like ASML, if you want a close partner, doing that with Mistral is quite smart, right? How can they improve the tools that they make so that we can get, you know, better chips, better stuff in that layer of the, the stack? And so I would say that's something that is getting underappreciated today, but more and more companies are doing that, right? Getting more advanced AI so that they can basically do that. And, and from their perspective, they're, they're never be able to do that on their own.

• 1:48:52Speaker 05

  To your point, they're too far down. So the partnership there, maybe we'll get better machines. Maybe we'll get better power consumption from those things. Maybe we'll get, you know, better lithography from them. So that would be something that. That I I would, you know, if I was building a business outside of, you know, Grok today, that's something I would focus on is how can I really not just use this for the high level use cases we've seen, but really have it, you know, find new materials for me. Uh, look at, you know, different aspects of physics and those are really hard problems that you need to be very closely embedded with a model maker, like a foundational model maker. If you really want to pull those off.

• 1:49:26John Coogan?

  Fascinating. Uh, well, we will continue to monitor the situation as always, and thank you so much for hopping on.

• 1:49:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Thanks for the insights and the dinner and the update.

• 1:49:33John Coogan?

  And we will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:49:36Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me, guys.

• 1:49:37John Coogan?

  See ya.

• 1:49:37Speaker 05

  Cheers. Yep.

• 1:49:39John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level and gets started for free. Adio.

• 1:49:48Jordi Hays?

  Dot.

• 1:49:49John Coogan?

  Uh.

• 1:49:50Jordi Hays?

  Theo says. Cognition. One thing, one thing I wanted to highlight quickly because we didn't get to it earlier. T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon all dropped pretty meaningfully on the EchoStar news.

• 1:50:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense because Elon's basically going around T-Mobile. It won't need to go through them, uh, because they'll own their own piece of the spectrum.

• 1:50:10Jordi Hays?

  Guess T-Mobile's market cap?

• 1:50:13John Coogan?

  Um, 20 billion.

• 1:50:15Jordi Hays?

  Close.

• 1:50:16John Coogan?

  How much?

• 1:50:17Jordi Hays?

  273 billion.

• 1:50:18John Coogan?

  273 billion? Wow. Beast. Okay.

• 1:50:22Jordi Hays?

  I, uh.

• 1:50:23John Coogan?

  How much space, but how much SpaceX does the stock own?

• 1:50:23Jordi Hays?

  Bigger than, bigger than 18. So Verizon.

• 1:50:27John Coogan?

  How much SpaceX stock do they own?

• 1:50:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, good question. No, Verizon is 180, 82 billion.

• 1:50:30John Coogan?

  I didn't realize T-Mobile was bigger than Verizon.

• 1:50:32Jordi Hays?

  AT&T is 206 billion and Verizon is, is bigger than all of them.

• 1:50:37John Coogan?

  Wow, it's almost like, uh, it's almost like owning a monopoly is valuable.

• 1:50:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:42John Coogan?

  Seriously, like, once you get those licenses, it just prints.

• 1:50:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So it's so crazy that EchoStar was like on the verge of bankruptcy, like not making debt payments and they're just like YOLO and they weren't even leveraging the spectrum that they had.

• 1:50:55John Coogan?

  No. Fascinating.

• 1:50:59Jordi Hays?

  You got a post from Vio.

• 1:51:01John Coogan?

  I'd rather, I'd rather talk about this Andrew McCallum story. So Project Bob has launched. You can go to dashboard.projектbob.xyz. Christian Kyle says, "This is easily the coolest thing happening in the world today. Hobbyist launching an autonomous drone ship, hoping to circumnavigate the globe." Andrew, of course, works at Varda Industries on manufacturing in space, but in his free time, he tried to replicate the LK99 superconductor. I was there on the night that he tried to get the rocks to float. It was very, very interesting. He's just a fantastic scientist and builder. And I guess in his free time, he went and built a boat that drives itself,

• 1:51:43John Coogan?

  talks to Starlink and a few other networks and wired it all up. And who knows, maybe, maybe it turns into a business. That's the nature of launching side projects. If you're really good at them, eventually people will say like, "Well, I'd like to buy some, sir." And maybe, maybe the DOD will come to him, or the DOW as they're calling it.

• 1:52:00Jordi Hays?

  I'm so, I'm so excited for the drone era of exploration, right? Just being able to send something off and, and follow it along live, virtually is so cool.

• 1:52:10John Coogan?

  I always.

• 1:52:11Jordi Hays?

  Like, I want Andrew to take this and properly send Antarctica, apparently, and just see, like, how thrilling would it be to have nothing for days and weeks and months on end? And then, and then somebody just comes up on the video and just takes it out. What are they doing down there?

• 1:52:29John Coogan?

  Anyway, we have our next guest, Scott Wu from Cognition, joining the stream. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Scott?

• 1:52:37Scott Wu?

  How's it going?

• 1:52:38John Coogan?

  It's good.

• 1:52:38Scott Wu?

  Yeah, it's been a little bit.

• 1:52:39John Coogan?

  Great to see you. I think I recognize that sweatshirt. Is that a Founder's Fund sweatshirt?

• 1:52:43Scott Wu?

  It is the Founder's Fund sweatshirt.

• 1:52:45John Coogan?

  It is the Founder's Fund sweatshirt.

• 1:52:45Scott Wu?

  It felt like the right thing to do today.

• 1:52:47John Coogan?

  You know, we interviewed Alex Karp last week, and he, he referred to it as "The Founder's Fund" because back in the day, it was actually called "The Founder's Fund," and then they dropped the "The," which I think is funny.

• 1:52:57Scott Wu?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:58John Coogan?

  Anyway, that, we're not talking about Founder's Fund. We're talking about your company. Give us the news. What's the latest?

• 1:53:05Scott Wu?

  Yeah, so we, we just closed a big fundraiser led by Founder's Fund, actually. So we kind of are talking about Founder's Fund. We closed a raise at a $10.2 billion valuation.

• 1:53:16John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:53:17Scott Wu?

  Super grateful for, for all the support that we've had.

• 1:53:22John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:53:25Scott Wu?

  Yeah, busy, busy month and a half for us since the Windsurf news. I mean, it's, it's, it's been a crazy couple of months for code and for us especially. Getting to see the two products meshed together has been, has been a lot of fun.

• 1:53:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, where is the growth coming from? I remember seeing a presentation by, at Microsoft Build and they were talking about the value that Devin can bring to replatforming. And that was super concrete for me because, you know, I can just imagine having an enterprise application written in .NET and wanting to move it to Python and that being a lot of work to write the test suite and move everything over. And just being able to unleash a ton of AI agents and coding agents seemed like incredible value and an incredibly high leverage use of technology. Is that a big piece of the business? What, what, what else is changing? What else is growing in the last year?

• 1:54:19Scott Wu?

  Yeah, I think that's right. A big part of what we do is, is I kind of describe it as going and taking on engineering toil, you know? And so that includes like all these replatforms and migrations that folks have to do. That includes version upgrades, testing, documentation, you know, issue triaging, all of these various things. And it's, you know, the reality is that, that, that's a lot of, of what takes up time for software engineers today. I don't think it's anyone's favorite thing to do, but it is. It, it, it is a lot of the time for people, right? And so that's often what we see and, you know, we've, we've been working with a pretty big range of companies, all the way from, from the smallest startups, all the way to, to some of the biggest enterprises in the world.

• 1:54:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Because Devin is in GA, so any startup can sign up for it, correct? But then obviously you have a, you have a very talented team that goes and sells into very large enterprises as well.

• 1:55:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what's it been? Yeah, Windsurf was known for their GT, you know, GTM team. What's it been like bolt, just like bolting on or really integrating a team like that? You guys, yeah, I'm sure it's really added a lot of firepower.

• 1:55:22Scott Wu?

  It's been incredible, honestly. I mean, even I think just the two products themselves because, you know, as we were saying last time, like a lot of the, there's kind of these two categories of product experiences that devs are using today, right? There's the IDEs and the agents. And even just being able to have both and kind of serve that all in one solution with Windsurf and Devin has been amazing for us. And so we've seen a bunch of, I mean Windsurf and Devin were both already each individually growing, but in the last month and a half, it's grown even faster.

• 1:55:51John Coogan?

  I want to go into a little bit of a debunk-a-thon, hit you with some data points and you can give me a lot more context. So the first one that we saw, this is all from extremely reliable sources, usually random screenshots that I see on X. But one was that when a developer uses an AI coding tool, they generate twice as much code, but 10 times as many security vulnerabilities. Do you have anything to add? Does that sound right? Does that sound wildly off? What can we do to stop creating security vulnerabilities?

• 1:56:26Scott Wu?

  Yeah, there's a lot of studies out there. You know, studies have different sample sizes and they have different ways that they measure these things. For us, you know, with a lot of the projects that we deliver, because you know, if somebody's doing a whole replatform or something, you know, that is a concrete project that you're, you know, you're setting up a team to do and kind of accounting for how many hours you need to do. With the enterprise customers that we work with, we typically see speedups of around eight to 15x in terms of how long it takes. Yeah, so they're basically, they're doing in one hour of an engineer's time using Devin, what would typically take eight hours without Devin. And I think the main thing that you really have to call out here is like, it really depends on the use case, right? And so I think for a lot of these kind of like repetitive tedious things

• 1:57:10Scott Wu?

  that frankly, the engineers don't want to do anyway, like that's where tools like Devin work really, really, really well. You know, Devin is not necessarily, you know, you could use Devin to try and kind of like be the ideator with you or something like that, but it's obviously, it's not today what we've optimized Devin for. And so that's perhaps a What what folks are seeing in some of these different coding products?

• 1:57:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then on the security vulnerability side, do you need a, you know, okay, you have Devon, but do you need like Bill, like a different agent that just is watching for security? Old Bill. In in traditional software development, you might have like, yeah, there's this great developer that can just churn out code really fast. But then we got the guy over here, the gal over here that really knows what is secure and what's not and where the flags are and you have pen testers. Like, is that a different product? Is that just a different layer of what you're training for? Or have you have you kind of built Devon in a way that you don't inject security vulnerabilities?

• 1:58:08Scott Wu?

  Yeah, it's a good question. So I think with security, I think the main thing I would just call out here is like, this is a problem that all engineering orgs have already had to think about and deal with. You know, it's not necessarily new in the age of AI that you have to think about developers introducing security vulnerabilities, right? And and yeah, you know, to your point, we have a lot of these processes in place for that, right? Which is, you know, the first one probably is just code review itself, right? I mean, people, you know, typically, you don't allow people to just merge their code straight to master or something like that. And similarly, you know, you want to have similar processes in place for your AI agents. I think there will be specific kind of like security based agents, but I kind of imagine it draws on a lot of the same code based intelligence and just like understanding,

• 1:58:51Scott Wu?

  you know, what these functions are meant for or how these are meant to be used, which is kind of a shared intelligence. And so, you know, maybe we release our own kind of like security theme to Devon that specifically does, you know, does this like security review or something like that.

• 1:59:05John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:59:05Jordi Hays?

  Are you seeing companies change their hiring practices at all after implementing Devon and getting getting started to get value out of it? We've just been curious to learn how companies are actually adapting as they sort of ramp up AI coding tools.

• 1:59:24Scott Wu?

  Yeah, it's a great question. It depends a lot on the space of company because obviously, you know, all companies are competing with the others in their space and that's what ultimately comes down to this. But honestly, I think what we've seen actually it looks like folks taking more and more projects in-house. And so a lot of things that folks typically would have outsourced to a team of contractors or, you know, handed off to a system integrator or something like that, they're actually just doing in-house with Devon and they're able to do that faster. And, you know, one of our biggest customers actually was, you know, is a bank in Latin America that that started using us around the start of this year for, you know, some of these refactors and migrations and so on. And then just got to the point where their team was seeing like a lot more effectiveness using the tool

• 2:00:07Scott Wu?

  and then they 10x their contract within the last eight or nine months. And if anything, they're growing headcount, they're not shrinking it. Every single one of their, you know, if every engineer is worth way more, then obviously you you want more engineers. You want to add more engineers.

• 2:00:20John Coogan?

  Okay, let's continue the debunk-a-thon. We saw some data from the census that showed that that AI is cooked, it's done, it's over. It dropped, the actual data point was for firms polled by the census of that they have over 250 employees, the level of AI adoption quote unquote had dropped from 14 to 12%, a little dip in the chart. Of course, people are joking about this, memeing about this, you know, saying it's all over, but also joking that, of course, this is just one data point. To me, it seemed extremely low to think that only 10% of businesses are even using AI since AI is kind of everywhere now and everyone

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  uses AI and all sorts of things. Anyway, what is your take on like what's going on in that data point or in that stat specifically? And what other kind of context can you add for us?

• 2:01:16Scott Wu?

  Yeah, I think I saw this, this is the one that was going around Twitter where it says like in July and August, there was like a tiny, you know, and then everyone was freaking about. Yeah. So, Sam, you know, I don't really, I haven't looked into the methodology of how they figured out that number. It's kind of interesting because, I mean, for us, obviously, like a lot of our work is with big enterprises, you know, specifically working on these massive code bases and July and August have been our biggest months ever, you know, by far. So that's, that's, that's the beauty in terms of the data. But, but I feel like the high level thing, which I would just call out is, you know, I think there's still a kind of like.

• 2:01:50Scott Wu?

  Like collective, like, I, I, I, I, I don't know, I, I, there, there, there's like a, there's like a collective like refusal to, to see, you know, reality, which is, i- i- if I were to say it, is, is basically, we have AI that passes the Turing test, we have AI that gets an IMO gold medal, we have AI that, you know, does all these crazy things, which 10 years ago, we would, would have pretty clearly called AGI, you know, and it doesn't mean that you do all of this work for free as a result, there's obviously still a ton that you have to do to teach the specific capabilities and, and to make the right product experiences and to get, you know, actual businesses out there in the world going and using these things. But, but I, I, I just think the story, you know, the things that we're asking the AI to do are not harder than getting an IMO gold medal, put it that way.

• 2:02:36Scott Wu?

  And so, so there's, there's a lot of work to do, you know, I don't want to diminish, like, it's going to be years and years, you know, uh, uh, uh, of taking all of the techniques that we now have and figuring out how to build the right experiences and get them out to everyone. But, but I really don't think, also, I, I love that every time I come, I'm just the, I'm just the, the crazy AI bull, you know, I knew, uh, but, but, but like, you know, I, I, I think it seems very clear that, that AI will, um, do more and more of, of this work over time, you know, and, and software engineering, I think you see this especially, which is, if anything, I think the best coders are the ones whose, whose flows have changed the most dramatically, right, and, and you just think about how many engineers there are out there that still, you know, have to learn these tools and have to get on these things, like, I, I, I don't think we are due for a slowdown anytime too soon.

• 2:03:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, the, the, the methodology of the census data was a little bit odd to me. Basically, they called up, uh, individual proprietors, business owners, and they said, are you using AI, and they defined AI as, uh, predictive analytics, data analytics, image processing, voice recognition, machine learning, uh, natural language.

• 2:03:42Jordi Hays?

  So, so a bunch of people said, no, we're not doing, we're not doing data.

• 2:03:45John Coogan?

  We're not doing data analysis, which was very odd, only 10% of people said yes to this question, I feel like it should be like 100% because like, if you, if you're using Stripe, like, there's machine learning under the hood for fraud detection, if you're using Gmail, like, Gemini is right there, there's going to be, autocomplete on your phone is using data analysis, like, uh, anyway, uh, my real question is, one of the, one of the lowest hanging fruits that I see in the software that I interact with is in government. You know, government websites, basically. I imagine that the census could benefit from having Devon run around, write better polling software. Is there anything on the horizon where you might be working with the government? Is that something where you need to get ITAR compliance or something before you go in there? Is it on the roadmap?

• 2:04:28John Coogan?

  What are you thinking in terms of improving the software that our government serves to us?

• 2:04:34Scott Wu?

  Yeah, no, I think it's a great point. And as you say, I think there's a lot of work to do. And it's a great example of the kind of like, you know, the messy problems, which I think it is very clear will be solved over the next couple of years. You know, there's no reason that the government shouldn't be using tools like these to go and build their websites better and faster. And everyone knows, you know, how many bugs there are, how many simple things that could just be fixed, you know, if there were an AI software engineer available to go and do this. A lot of, you know, it's funny because I think Winserve actually, funnily enough, was ahead of us on, you know, getting things moving with FedRAMP and getting certified and all these things. But it's one thing that we're working on as well, so.

• 2:05:11John Coogan?

  That's very exciting.

• 2:05:11Jordi Hays?

  Are you, are you thinking at all about other acquisitions over the next couple of years? You've got a big balance sheet at this point.

• 2:05:21Scott Wu?

  Yeah, yeah, you know, I mean, the last one went pretty well. So now, I mean, it's, I think, it's, I think for us, it's obviously really valuable to have this capital for a few different reasons, you know, with model training, I think with hiring great talent, with expanding go to market and so on. You know, is it possible that that part of that will also, you know, go towards, you know, buy other companies? Of course, it's possible. There are not any plans at the moment, but yeah.

• 2:05:49John Coogan?

  In terms of your position in the stack, I see you as sort of like a, initially like a enterprise level application layer company that then is now going down with Winserve into more of a B to B context, not full consumer, but more broad usage. But famously model agnostic, not training foundation models, not working down the stack. And we're seeing the foundation model companies do deals with Broadcom to co-develop chips and, and what Elon's doing with Samsung. And there's a lot of these data points. Are there any other places where you want to at least have better relationships with other, with other layers of the stack? Is any of that important?

• 2:06:33John Coogan?

  Or is it really just like, you have your slice and you're just going to go and run at that for the foreseeable future?

• 2:06:41Scott Wu?

  Yeah, it's a really good question. I mean, I think in terms of relationships, for sure. I mean, we work very closely with the Foundation Labs, for example. You know, we have lots of things going on in terms of how we do compute, or even kind of like partners that we work with on distribution, right? Which I think are great. I would say, you know, I think the, for us, it's, we, we obviously, I think it's very important for us to just have a lot of humility about where we're coming from and what we're doing. You know, we're obviously, you know, a very new entrant to the space and, and you know, are only like 0.1% of the way there. And I think, you know, for us to be able to meaningfully succeed is going to require a lot of focus. And so I think from that perspective, you know, I, I, I think the like, you know, we, we know what is the area that we really kind of want to own.

• 2:07:26Scott Wu?

  And that's, that's basically, you know, everything between the, the, you know, that goes from taking the model, the base model itself, and then doing the right kind of capabilities work and building that into a product experience that, you know, real engineers can use every day. And I think, I think we will stay quite narrow kind of within that focus ourselves for, for the future. So you're saying, job's not finished?

• 2:07:48Scott Wu?

  Job's not finished. I mean, it's, it's, it's barely even started, honestly, I think. And I think like the, I, I think obviously there is a, you know, there's, there's, I think, a vision of the future where, where as we said, you know, where, where software engineering is just as easy as telling your computer what to do. And, and I think the world of software engineering has already changed in some meaningful ways over the last two, three years because of, you know, all these AI coding tools. But I think we've got another like 10, 20 generations of product experiences, you know, as a community to, to build and unlock until we get to that full future, so.

• 2:08:22John Coogan?

  Important question. Was this latest round of financing negotiated with Founders Fund over poker or chess?

• 2:08:34Scott Wu?

  Unfortunately, it was funny, actually, we were on the weekend that we did the Windsurf deal. We, obviously, I mean, it was a pretty substantial commitment from us in terms of Windsurf. And so, you know, we explicitly needed board approval, but also, you know, wanted to give our investors an update and kind of hear what they thought and so on. And so, you know, we were on with the Founders Fund team with Napoleon and Peter and getting their thoughts on what they thought makes sense. And I mean, first of all, they were really supportive of us doing the deal and they thought, you know, the partnership made a lot of sense for a lot of the same reasons that we did. But they also, you know, were very clear of like, hey, like, I know this is going to be, you know, a big thing for you guys on the balance sheet and for you guys as a company.

• 2:09:16Scott Wu?

  And, you know, we want to be clear that we stand ready to support you in the next thing if this is the deal that you want to do. And honestly, that's a lot of what gave us the confidence to be able to go ahead with it and close the whole deal, you know, in the 48 hours or 72 hours or whatever it ended up being.

• 2:09:31Jordi Hays?

  We're good for our 400 million.

• 2:09:34Scott Wu?

  Yeah. It's really been amazing. I can't shout them out enough, you know, Napoleon and Peter and the whole team that we've gone to work with have been great to us.

• 2:09:45John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Tell us the story of the deal that was negotiated over, was it poker? How did that come together?

• 2:09:53Scott Wu?

  Yeah, so it's a funny one. In retrospect, so it didn't actually happen, but basically, when we were doing the Series A, you know, one of the very early rounds of the company, it was me and Napoleon. And, you know, I was here and he was there or something like that. And there was like, I think at some point it was clear that the deal was going to get done, you know, but it was just kind of like going through some of the more minor terms and making sure we were on the same page of everything. And we kind of put, you know, what if we just had a nice heads-up match to go and settle this and decide whose terms we're going to take? We did not do that. Probably for the better that we didn't do that, but yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, but the story lives on as something that almost happened or was at least joked about, which is fantastic. That is great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. Jordy, do you have anything else?

• 2:10:39Jordi Hays?

  No, congrats.

• 2:10:40John Coogan?

  I know you've got a busy day, so we'll let you get back to it.

• 2:10:42Jordi Hays?

  Just try to, try to, try to have another reason to come on before the end of the year, at least a couple. You know, it's the great lock-in.

• 2:10:49John Coogan?

  But there's going to be plenty more stuff to debunk through the rest of the year. There's going to be tons of data points that people read into way too much, and we will be giving you a call.

• 2:10:58Scott Wu?

  I was gonna say, I look forward to coming on again and being the idiot optimist that just, you know, everyone else is giving their rational arguments about this is gonna work, this is not gonna work. And I'm just here saying everything's bullish, but yeah.

• 2:11:08John Coogan?

  I mean, if you want one more, we can talk about inference costs. I mean, people are saying that, oh, inference costs aren't falling. You gotta use the latest and greatest model, and your gross margins is gonna be terrible forever. Debunk that one for me.

• 2:11:21Scott Wu?

  Sure. No, I mean, I, I think there's, so, so I, I think there's two separate questions there. You know, one is the question of, is the business going to be defensible? You know, are you going to be able to offer something that, that, you know, you, the, you're competing with your competitors on something that is not just purely a race to the bottom? Right? And then the second thing is like, is the cost value trade-off for the customers going to actually make sense? Right? I think the second one is just very obviously true because, you know, a, a, as these tools, i- if the trade-off is, you know, doing more and more and speeding up labor, right? Is, you know, making every accountant faster and making every lawyer faster and so on. I mean, a- at some point, it's pretty obvious that the machines are cheaper, you know,

• 2:12:03Scott Wu?

  that, that, that cheap enough, that making, you know, every lawyer three times faster is just obviously a no-brainer. Right? I think on the, the point of the first one, you know, obviously it's a great point. And I think that's, i- it's different for every different company. You know, I think a lot of the businesses in the application layer need to think a lot about, you know, what is their special sauce and what is their differentiation? But I think the answer for, for most probably of what that comes to is a combination of, one, is just really, really focusing on specific use cases and delivering solutions that are, that are, you know, really kind of custom solutions for the problem that they're specifically solving. And then two is, you know, I think there is like a real kind of, I'll call it like a personalization effect that that I think we're seeing more and more. You know, there's chat GPT memory, for example, obviously Devon has its own whole knowledge

• 2:12:47Scott Wu?

  system where, you know, a- a- as the tool just understands the customer and their own business and their trade offs and everything much, much better. That itself is obviously something that just makes the product, you know, more and more powerful just for them and is the kind of thing that would command that value. So I, I, I, I, I think that's it's, it's, you know, from a perspective of is AI, you know, are, are we going to have monster intelligent AI that's just so smart, but we just, you know, we just, we just turn the machines off because they're too expensive, you know, I don't think we'll have that future. I think there's a, there's a very reasonable question about, you know, where that value capture comes in and, and I think that's why all these businesses are thinking about, you know, what is this one thing that I'm going to do really, really well, that's going to make my business durable.

• 2:13:29John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to hop on on a busy day. Good to hear that the job's not finished. I love unfinished jobs.

• 2:13:37Jordi Hays?

  It's the best. I hate when there, I hate when it's. I hate when the job's done.

• 2:13:40John Coogan?

  I hate when the job's done.

• 2:13:42Jordi Hays?

  Give our best to the team.

• 2:13:44John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon.

• 2:13:45Scott Wu?

  Will do. Thanks for having me.

• 2:13:46John Coogan?

  See you guys. Bye. How'd you sleep last night, Jordy?

• 2:13:50Jordi Hays?

  I had.

• 2:13:51John Coogan?

  You had a terrible night, right?

• 2:13:52Jordi Hays?

  I had a brutal night, but not because of my Aidsleep.

• 2:13:54John Coogan?

  No, I, I got an 82. I'm sleeping pretty good. I think I get the sound effect.

• 2:13:58Jordi Hays?

  I managed to pull a 75 despite.

• 2:14:01John Coogan?

  Aidsleep is working overtime for you. It was like, we gotta get this guy some sleep. There's kids everywhere in this bed.

• 2:14:09Jordi Hays?

  The one year old is throwing up.

• 2:14:11John Coogan?

  We gotta.

• 2:14:12Jordi Hays?

  It was just absolute chaos.

• 2:14:13John Coogan?

  A I coming in to, to help you sleep better. Anyway, go to aidsleep.com, get a Pod5, five year warranty, 39 risk free trial, free returns, free shipping, and we will bring in our next guest, Ara Kharazian from ramp.com. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate card, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more. Good to see you, Ara. How you doing?

• 2:14:35Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:14:36Ara Kharazian?

  Thanks for having me again.

• 2:14:37John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on.

• 2:14:39Jordi Hays?

  So much data, data-driven chaos in the timeline.

• 2:14:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to talk about 996, but first, let's start with this data that it's completely over and no businesses are going to be using AI. Because if you look at the trend line, we went from 12% to 10%. If you track that out on the line, it's going to be 0%, no, not that one. It might be negative 50% of businesses using AI.

• 2:15:04Ara Kharazian?

  You're talking about the AI adoption data from Census.

• 2:15:06John Coogan?

  I am talking about the Census AI adoption data.

• 2:15:09Jordi Hays?

  The folks that brought you the Department of Motor Vehicles.

• 2:15:11John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:15:12Jordi Hays?

  The real experts.

• 2:15:13John Coogan?

  What was your read?

• 2:15:14Ara Kharazian?

  I've, I've, I've been thinking about the Census AI adoption data for a long time because we have our own measurement of it with Ramp data.

• 2:15:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:15:21Ara Kharazian?

  That's a.com/data/aiindex.

• 2:15:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:15:25Ara Kharazian?

  What I don't like about the Census measurement and why I think it might be underestimating, underestimating AI adoption is that the question that they have written is not the right way to measure AI adoption. Essentially, the way the Census measures it is they ask businesses, do you use AI to produce goods and services? And that makes sense because they wrote the question back in like 2023 when we weren't really sure what AI was going to look like. But AI to produce goods and services, that's, first of all, that's econ speak, right? That's how economists talk to each other. But.

• 2:15:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and even if somebody technically, like, in my view, if somebody provides any type of services to somebody and they use AI call transcription, like, someone on their team is like recording calls and like transcribing with AI, that to me like qualifies as.

• 2:16:11John Coogan?

  I literally had.

• 2:16:12Jordi Hays?

  They are leveraging AI.

• 2:16:13John Coogan?

  In 2013, I was running a consumer packaged goods company. Our business was making protein shakes. That was the physical good that we produced, but we also would transcribe all of our, all of our calls. And so were we using AI to produce goods and services? I would have said, absolutely, we're using, we're using linear regression and we're projecting out our financials and we're doing all sorts of stuff that fits in the bucket. But yes, to your point.

• 2:16:37Ara Kharazian?

  But you're a forward-thinking business leader.

• 2:16:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:16:39Ara Kharazian?

  And, and that makes sense. But most people reading that think, oh, am I literally using AI to produce widgets on my factory floor?

• 2:16:47John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 2:16:48Ara Kharazian?

  It's, it's the kind of question that doesn't really capture the way that AI in the past three or four years of its development has more or less, has mostly been adopted by businesses for back office tasks.

• 2:16:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:16:59Ara Kharazian?

  And when you look at that 10%, it's, I think, most people would say, yeah, for most businesses, that's pretty low. Forget, you know, tech-forward businesses, just in general.

• 2:17:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. So the overall number of like 10% of American businesses using AI, that seemed ridiculously low to me because just consumer LLMs like ChatGPT are at like 50% adoption amongst American adults. And so it just doesn't math with me that someone would be, that four out of five Americans would be using ChatGPT and then walk into work and be like, nah, I'm not going to use AI for my job. But what I'm more interested in is like, why do we think that there's a peak and then a fall off at all? My theory was like, maybe these big companies are getting sold on, you got to use AI to produce goods and services. They try and roll out some zombie change management strategy where they're going to be doing AI.

• 2:17:52Ara Kharazian?

  Remember the Klarna, the Klarna CEO like did this big thing.

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  I'm going to use AI for everything.

• 2:17:56Ara Kharazian?

  And then he ended up saying, I take it back.

• 2:17:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so.

• 2:17:59Ara Kharazian?

  People are pretty, pretty good.

• 2:18:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. So did you have a read on that at all?

• 2:18:03Ara Kharazian?

  Well, there's a few things. One, the sample sizes for these surveys are actually pretty small. They run these surveys every two weeks.

• 2:18:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:09Ara Kharazian?

  And, you know, like most government survey collection, particularly if it's run every two weeks, you're gonna get some mixed differences in who responds.

• 2:18:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:18:17Ara Kharazian?

  So that's part of it. I think some of it just might be some noise in the data set because it did come back up in the most recent read.

• 2:18:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:23Ara Kharazian?

  It wasn't that much of a decline in the first place. You could write it off as a noisy data. The second thing is that it's not unreasonable to think that the fact that this was conducted in the summer might mean that even at the businesses who responded to the survey, the person who responded to that survey at that business might be different.

• 2:18:42John Coogan?

  Yep, totally.

• 2:18:43Ara Kharazian?

  This is another reason why I really don't like business surveys is that they try to capture what a business is thinking, which is a large, complex organization.

• 2:18:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:50Ara Kharazian?

  But they require one person at that business to answer the question. Okay, so. Easy for you to say. You've got tens of thousands of businesses and their actual purchasing behavior.

• 2:18:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, so it's flip it over. What is the data actually saying about the level of AI adoption in the business world?

• 2:19:07Ara Kharazian?

  When we look at ramp spend data, AI adoption is up. AI adoption is now about forty five percent of businesses in the US. It varies by sector.

• 2:19:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:19:16Ara Kharazian?

  So adoption is much higher in tech and finance, about seventy percent of tech firms on our platform adopted AI in some paid form. I still think that's probably pretty low. We're not capturing free usage or capturing employee usage on their own personal accounts. But then even in restaurants, for example, we see twenty percent adoption of AI. And I think that's likely.

• 2:19:33Jordi Hays?

  And what does that mean in the restaurant context? It's it's it's like they pay, that could be they're paying for chat GPT's like pro plan or they're using a.

• 2:19:42Ara Kharazian?

  Marketing, marketing materials, like developing like a, you know, I mean, I've seen menus that have AI generated images. That's not my favorite example.

• 2:19:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:51Ara Kharazian?

  But a much better example is is designing a Facebook ad that uses an AI generated image or copy that really speeds up a lot of the work that a restaurant owner otherwise has to do. I mean, these restaurants and firms often have really small staffs.

• 2:20:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:20:05Ara Kharazian?

  And so I've talked to some restaurant owners who use Ramp, for example, and talked to them about how they use AI. And for them, for the most part, it does automate a lot of the sort of not just back office work, but a lot of the work that lets them get back to work of doing the restaurant work that they want to do.

• 2:20:22John Coogan?

  Okay, so let's flip it over to the nine nine six phenomenon. There's been some spicy quotes on the timeline, talking about how nine nine six, working on Saturday is super trendy. Everyone's doing it. What does the data say?

• 2:20:36Ara Kharazian?

  So does everyone know what nine nine six is in the audience?

• 2:20:38Jordi Hays?

  I don't think our.

• 2:20:41John Coogan?

  I think everyone knows, but break it down for us anyway.

• 2:20:43Ara Kharazian?

  Nine nine six is is associated with Chinese working culture, though I believe it's actually illegal in China now, though I think it's still often practiced. And it means working nine AM to nine PM, six days a week.

• 2:20:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:00Ara Kharazian?

  And then it kind of seems like it's caught fire in Silicon Valley and tech culture in this whole like wellness oriented, run fast, lift heavy, marry early, work 9am to 9pm, six days a week and just focus on your business.

• 2:21:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:21:15Ara Kharazian?

  And most of the stories have been vibes based, like it's just people in startup world talking about what they're doing. It's true. It's actually happening and shows up in real data.

• 2:21:25Jordi Hays?

  The question is, how will you know a founder works 996?

• 2:21:28John Coogan?

  They'll tell you.

• 2:21:29Jordi Hays?

  They'll tell you.

• 2:21:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, a lot of people were wondering, is this a LARP? Is this, is this something where, yeah, Saturday is for working, it's for posting about how you're working, but you're saying that the data actually suggests that there is business activity happening on Saturdays in startups at an increased rate?

• 2:21:49Ara Kharazian?

  Well, and the one specific way we looked at it, in this one, we looked at who's employee cards, so we're not necessarily just looking at founders, we're looking at people at the company.

• 2:21:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:21:59Ara Kharazian?

  Who are more or less expensing business meals or like late time meals on Saturdays? Or like DoorDash takeout, other things like that. A lot of the criticism that I've gotten today on the timeline has been like, oh, you can't tell if maybe, some people are saying it's fraud, it must be these people who are fraud ily using their business cards.

• 2:22:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:22:20Ara Kharazian?

  I want you to read my post because in my post, I found it, it's just SF.

• 2:22:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:22:25Ara Kharazian?

  Like, this isn't happening in New York.

• 2:22:27John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:22:28Ara Kharazian?

  This isn't happening in Austin.

• 2:22:29John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:22:30Ara Kharazian?

  It's not happening in Miami. This is just an SF thing. And it's also really new. This wasn't happening last year.

• 2:22:36John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:22:37Ara Kharazian?

  It perfectly coincides with when people started talking about the 996 cultural movement.

• 2:22:42John Coogan?

  Bastard.

• 2:22:43Ara Kharazian?

  Unless you want to argue that, oh, frauds this whole, this new thing.

• 2:22:45Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it really proves, it really proves there's no such thing as a free lunch because in these cases, the employees are getting a free lunch, but they had to work on Saturday to get it.

• 2:22:54Ara Kharazian?

  Yeah, it's one of the worst ways to do fraud. It's like, here's my $20 Chinese food.

• 2:22:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:23:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:00John Coogan?

  Okay, so let's think about going deeper in this analysis. How else could we unpack this? One way I'm thinking is, well, meals make a ton of sense. If you're working late, you expense a meal. But also, there's just the normal business activity that like, you might sign up for a new marketing software on Tuesday. You might also sign up for it on Saturday. If you're doing that on Saturday, that's probably even less likely to be fraudulent, because why are you putting your credit card down with our latest sponsor, TurboPuffer? Because, you know, if you're signing up for a database tool and you're putting your credit card down.

• 2:23:44John Coogan?

  Now, maybe they run the credit cards at a different time, who knows? But I'm wondering if there's a, if there's a layer to the onion that you could pull back there. Are there any other data points that you think you'd be looking at in the next few weeks that might help you crystallize this and really, really steel up your position for the haters?

• 2:24:04Ara Kharazian?

  The point you're making is really good, because there's someone else who, really interesting reply I got was someone who works, I guess, in credit risk. And one of the big signals they had about whether or not an application for their, I guess, finance software product was fraudulent, was whether or not the application was submitted on a weekend. And they started looking into all of the ones that they got on weekends, and most of them were false positives, always the ones from SF. Totally anecdotal information.

• 2:24:29John Coogan?

  From SF?

• 2:24:30Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 2:24:31John Coogan?

  Oh, because people, because it's fraud everywhere else, but in SF, it's the grind.

• 2:24:35Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this is, this is really bad for everyone but SF, because it shows that the Great Lock-in is really only happening in San Francisco.

• 2:24:43John Coogan?

  It's local.

• 2:24:44Jordi Hays?

  The area. It's a local phenomenon. It's not actually people in New York, "Oh, oh, Great Lock-in, Great Lock-in."

• 2:24:49John Coogan?

  Okay, so going forward, yeah, we got to look at if business software purchases are up in San Francisco on the weekend. I also want to know if it's going to spread, if we're going to have some metacantagion, and we're going to see the Great Lock-in potentially spread to New York. That would be likely for me. I want to know Miami, Austin, LA.

• 2:25:08Jordi Hays?

  Might need to get a little bit colder in New York for.

• 2:25:10John Coogan?

  Potentially, potentially. Um, anyway.

• 2:25:13Ara Kharazian?

  Mallorca got a little bit close to it, but not maybe a quarter the effect size.

• 2:25:18John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:25:18Ara Kharazian?

  And it was only after 8pm. It wasn't like in our chart for SF, like it really is starting at about 9am, 10am.

• 2:25:26John Coogan?

  Wow. Uh, what about, uh, what about timing? You said this is a new phenomenon in San Francisco. If you scroll back the timeline, when do you start seeing a takeoff of this 996 culture in San Francisco?

• 2:25:40Ara Kharazian?

  Over the last six months.

• 2:25:42John Coogan?

  Six months? It's that recent? Wow.

• 2:25:44Ara Kharazian?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:44John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 2:25:45Ara Kharazian?

  We don't see this. We don't see this in 2024 really at all.

• 2:25:48John Coogan?

  That's crazy. I feel like 2024 was definitely a year where people were, were working, but I guess it just picked up a whole new, whole new gear. That was before the Capitol wars began. Yeah.

• 2:26:00Ara Kharazian?

  When we had this idea, I really didn't expect to see anything because when you, it's pretty rare to see these kinds of spend shifts in any demographic.

• 2:26:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:09Ara Kharazian?

  Especially like when I looked at it nationally, it was completely unmoved because most people don't really change something as worn in as their eating habits that often. Even, you know, tech employees or workers. So I really, I really didn't expect to see anything. And the only time you would expect to see something like this is a pre to post pandemic trend. 2019 to 2021, a bunch of public and private data sets started to show shifts in where and when people were eating, right? A really classic one from the pandemic era was, uh, movement from outside the city center. So, you know, people were spending much less time downtowns and then suburbs started seeing a lot more activity. That was a really popular one during the pandemic period.

• 2:26:52Ara Kharazian?

  But after the pandemic, you really stopped seeing this kind of shifting. Most people kind of set in their ways and things were back to normal. So the fact that we saw this, only saw it in SF and that it was so recent is pretty rare and shocking.

• 2:27:07John Coogan?

  Last question for me on the 996 question. Part of it is not just the 6, not just Saturday, but the 9 to 9. Are you also seeing, or do you think there's, it's worthwhile to look into what's happening from 5pm to 9pm? Because that's also the hallmark of the 99 is that it's not like 9 to 5, 6 days a week. It's 9 to 9. And so you should expect more employees expensing food late night on a Tuesday, on a Wednesday, on a Thursday, on a Friday, because they're, they're working longer hours. And so is there a way that we can measure the weekday hours worked by San Francisco employees?

• 2:27:51Ara Kharazian?

  Yeah, one of the really great datasets for this would probably be GitHub commits.

• 2:27:55John Coogan?

  Oh, GitHub commits. Yeah, we gotta, gotta call up, I mean, we had the CEO of GitHub on, we should ask him to pull something.

• 2:28:03Ara Kharazian?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:04John Coogan?

  And then, of course, there's a public dataset, but I think that's mostly for open source projects and I don't know if the, I, I know that there's like a heat map of when people commit, but it's only by day. I don't think it's by time. So the, the data would probably be internal, but I don't know. I mean, it's a Redmond, Washington company, so I don't know if they're going to put something out, publish it that says that San Francisco is outworking Redmond, you know? That might be, that might be a little controversial for, for, for Microsoft to do. Anyway, uh, thank you so much for hopping on.

• 2:28:38Jordi Hays?

  Anything else to share?

• 2:28:39John Coogan?

  Are we good?

• 2:28:40Ara Kharazian?

  Thanks, guys, for having me. Subscribe to my Substack, econlab.substack.com.

• 2:28:44John Coogan?

  Econlab.substack.com. Thank you so much for hopping on the stream. We'll talk to you.

• 2:28:52Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, R.

• 2:28:53John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:28:54Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:28:55John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:28:56Jordi Hays?

  Next up, we got Zach from Warp coming in.

• 2:29:00John Coogan?

  Before we bring them in, let's tell you about Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service.

• 2:29:08Jordi Hays?

  That reminds me, I actually need to book a wander myself.

• 2:29:10John Coogan?

  It's a vacation home, but better.

• 2:29:12Jordi Hays?

  Writing it down in my notes.

• 2:29:13John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 2:29:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:15John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, we have our next guest, maybe? Yes? Okay, great. Let's bring them in.

• 2:29:22Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:29:23John Coogan?

  There we go. Second time.

• 2:29:25Jordi Hays?

  Hey.

• 2:29:26John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 2:29:28Zach Lloyd?

  I'm loving this.

• 2:29:29Jordi Hays?

  This is warp, this is warp country.

• 2:29:31John Coogan?

  Warp country. I don't understand why I'm wearing a warp themed cowboy hat, but maybe you'll explain. What's new in your world?

• 2:29:41Zach Lloyd?

  I've been, you know, filming a western, basically. You can see me doing a product demo on a horse.

• 2:29:48John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:29:48Zach Lloyd?

  Because, you know, why not? We just did a major launch called Code Country. Where the theme is all about coding on warp and we decided it'd be fun to do it with a little bit of like, hey, let's, let's show how warp can help you wrangle your agents. So that is why you're wearing a cowboy hat.

• 2:30:06Jordi Hays?

  Zach, I'm pissed off because I was with John last Friday. Before we, literally before we got to the office and we saw these fine hats. And do you remember when I was pitching you on doing hat as a merch for a company that we work with? And I was, the, the tagline for the campaign was like, I was gonna, I was gonna pitch this to Vanta. I was gonna say like, this is Vanta country.

• 2:30:29John Coogan?

  This sounds funny. But I guess this is warp country now.

• 2:30:32Jordi Hays?

  You beat us to it and you did it very well. So, so.

• 2:30:36Zach Lloyd?

  Thank you.

• 2:30:36Jordi Hays?

  It's a great concept. You need to, you need to create things that, that people will remember you by. And I don't think people are gonna forget the three of us sitting here with these hats on. Just talking about code country.

• 2:30:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay. Explain to me what it means to wrangle agents. I feel like I've used agents pretty reliably. Like I just, this weekend I need a new breakfast place. I kicked off chat GPT agent mode. It went off and hunted around. I got some weird ones. I posted that. I asked for a table that was circular and it found me a, a used wooden spool. Uh, that's used to wrap coils around and it's actually for like 50 bucks, like probably the best circular, round, big table you can get. Um, so it was thinking outside the box. It was great. And then I've also used Claude Code. Obviously, I think of that as agentic. We've talked to other

• 2:31:32John Coogan?

  folks on the show, but I saw this interesting dashboard on X where someone had some visualization of all the different agents that they'd spawned out. Like, what does the frontier of using multi-agents look like?

• 2:31:48Jordi Hays?

  What does the frontier look like?

• 2:31:49Zach Lloyd?

  Yes.

• 2:31:54Zach Lloyd?

  The situation is such, if you look at, if you look at pro developers using agents in their daily workflow, it's, they kind of produce stuff that's not shippable a lot of the time.

• 2:32:09Jordi Hays?

  They produce security. Hey, you can't argue. They do produce security vulnerabilities.

• 2:32:13Zach Lloyd?

  You know, it's like, yeah, you can ship. If you're not careful, you can ship security holes. You can, you get to a point where developers on your team don't even know what they're coding. It's really a mess to vibe code in production right now. And the thing that we've been focusing on is like, how do you get a tighter feedback loop where you can see what an agent is doing? You can review its work as it goes. You can make sure that people on your team who are building with agents are like, you know, comprehending what they're doing, that they're code reviewing the agent's code in the app. And so this is a real, a real problem. If you look at the Stack Overflow, latest Stack Overflow survey, like, number one problem that developers have developing with agents is like, they produce hard to debug code that they don't understand. And so you're

• 2:32:58Zach Lloyd?

  kind of wasting a bunch of time. So, yeah, we're just trying to help, help people keep their agents, you know, steer them as we talk, as we say.

• 2:33:09John Coogan?

  I want to do this whole thing. Yeah. So, what do you think about these here vibe code cleanup specialists? People that are making a living now, going around on LinkedIn.

• 2:33:21Jordi Hays?

  Going to the frontier.

• 2:33:22John Coogan?

  And cleaning up old vibe code in projects.

• 2:33:25Zach Lloyd?

  You gotta bring a sheriff into town sometimes. Clean up some messy, the messy.

• 2:33:33Zach Lloyd?

  That to me is like a symptom of something gone wrong with the tooling. If you're getting to a point where you need like a janitor or whatever to come in, clean up, clean up your code, you want, you want to get the engineers on your team to be able to produce shit that actually goes out to production.

• 2:33:51John Coogan?

  I guess my, my other take on, on this vibe code cleanup specialist that we're seeing pop up is like, I don't know, there, there's a world where there's, there's the type of person, like the ideas guy who's like, I have an idea for an app and I want someone to build it for me. Then there's the type of person like you, Jordy, who you have an idea, but then you're a Figma expert and you're going to work on design and you're going to turn over something that's really communicative in terms of the interaction design. Then there's one layer further now with Figma make and other vibe coding solutions where you could actually turn over a full prototype that's pretty functional, but it's not really going to scale. And so maybe the vibe code cleanup specialist is just saying like, hey, I'm a really talented engineer. I am truly an engineer.

• 2:34:36John Coogan?

  I, I know computer science, but I'm willing to work with the, I work well with the type of people that express themselves and what they want to build as vibe code. And, and, and maybe that's an interesting pattern as opposed to the, the, the software engineer who likes to work with somebody who turns over a PSD file or Figma file.

• 2:34:57Zach Lloyd?

  I think if you look at it like that, it makes a lot more sense to me. It's like, what's the new version of mocks or PRD? It's like, this will work an app, but it's not a shippable app because it's like, you know, the, the agents kind of can't do it yet. It's also where, where you run into problems is like, these things are amazing for the zero to one use case. They're less good for the like, I'm working at some, the company that has millions of lines of code and I want to add a feature to it. And so for that, you really, you know, it's like, it needs to go, you can start with like the vibe coded prototype, but you're going to need someone to get in there who actually stands behind what they're sending up to their teammate to review.

• 2:35:37John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 2:35:38Jordi Hays?

  I hate to get personal partner, but can you talk revenue? I think you guys have a pretty extreme revenue ramp.

• 2:35:47Zach Lloyd?

  Yeah, we're doing awesome. So we're, uh, we're adding millionaire R every like seven, eight days, something like that, which is.

• 2:35:57John Coogan?

  You don't see numbers like that around these parts very often.

• 2:36:00Zach Lloyd?

  This is like, it's, you know, we're not, not, it's not a ghost town and it's, uh,

• 2:36:06Zach Lloyd?

  it's a little bit of a gold rush.

• 2:36:09Zach Lloyd?

  Uh, but it's pretty exciting times. Like it's, it's super fun. The vision that we have of like building, uh, you know, a, a development tool, which is for the ground up for like, how do you go all the way from prompt to production? It isn't like your run of the mill IDE or like the 20th, just like text based CLI app, but is a unique tool built to get, uh, you know, pro code out. This is really resonating. It's super exciting. Fun time to be working on it.

• 2:36:40John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to stop by the old TBPN saloon.

• 2:36:45Jordi Hays?

  The saloon.

• 2:36:46Zach Lloyd?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:46John Coogan?

  Uh, we'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:36:49Jordi Hays?

  Great to catch up, Zach.

• 2:36:51Zach Lloyd?

  Thanks a lot for having me on.

• 2:36:53John Coogan?

  See ya.

• 2:36:54Jordi Hays?

  That was fun. Code country.

• 2:36:56John Coogan?

  Another Cohen coming into the studio, breaking down big fundraiser. Very exciting.

• 2:37:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited for this one.

• 2:37:04John Coogan?

  Uh, legendary poster, we'll never do it. Very excited to have him on the show. Andrew Reed's in the chat.

• 2:37:12Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:37:14John Coogan?

  We need to give Andrew Reed more content.

• 2:37:16Jordi Hays?

  We put these on, not for you, although you are from Texas, but for the, uh, uh, Warp, the CEO of Warp, but we'll leave them on because they're fun.

• 2:37:26Speaker 09

  I thought you guys put them on for me. I was going to ask that. That was my first question.

• 2:37:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, no, but, but, uh, but, but yeah. Do you ever wear cowboy hat around the office?

• 2:37:36Speaker 09

  I do not. I have boots, but not a hat.

• 2:37:40Jordi Hays?

  Okay. There you go. Boots, boots are, boots are strong. Uh, what's happening? It's great to, great to finally have you on the show.

• 2:37:47Speaker 09

  Thank you guys for having me. I needed something newsworthy enough to make it on here. So I had to raise a round just to get on the show.

• 2:37:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think you've been on many times via your post.

• 2:37:56John Coogan?

  Via your posts. We have reacted to many of your posts. So.

• 2:37:59Jordi Hays?

  Long time, long time guest. Uh, but what, what, yeah, give it, give us a whole kind of, I mean, since it's your first time on the show, uh, in person, give it, give us kind of quick history of the company and the news.

• 2:38:11Speaker 09

  Uh, quick history is we got started last April after a team of us had been at Carbon Health for three and a half years. Um, left in January, started the company in April, raised a round, got to work and then fast forward 16 months later, we just closed our Series A and it's been a fun time. So.

• 2:38:33Speaker 09

  Wow, look at that. I thought you walked, I thought you walked away. You're like, fuck this. I'm out.

• 2:38:38John Coogan?

  We got a gong. We got a gong. Congratulations. Um, how are you positioning the company right now?

• 2:38:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. The main thing that I'm trying to understand from like, like your, your journey, like makes total sense, like being deep in the weeds and, and understanding what, what, um, you know, from your time at Carbon, it feels like this category, like so many, I'm, I'm sure you're, you're getting sick of like refreshing like TechCrunch and seeing another like voice, uh, AI company that, that, that, uh, is going after the market broadly, but like how is the mar- what's the shape of the market? How is it evolving? Like where you got, what is, what is your GTM look like and all that good stuff?

• 2:39:15Speaker 09

  Yeah. I mean, here's my general take on the space is like, you've got a group of us who are specifically focused on healthcare AI or like, you know, whatever, voice, SMS, conversational AI for healthcare. You kind of have to be specialized on it, uh, in order to make it work. And I think that's why, you know, we saw Sierra just raise at 10 billion. You've got all the call center companies with their own flavor of like, we're no longer shitty IVRs. We like have a conversational AI now. And so problem is that as you like, start to hear about how their implementations are going, you start to hear how they go from like cross different verticals. They're just not doing that good of a job at it because they don't understand sort of the nuanced crazy stuff that happens in these healthcare clinics. And so we, we literally have to like almost go on site with customers

• 2:39:59Speaker 09

  and understand their workflows, their appointment triaging reasons, like how you actually get a patient to the right place and then read and write back into their systems of record, which many of them, you know, unlike, again, I'll use Sierra as the example, but like unlike Sierra, being able to just integrate with Shopify who has great APIs to go do like, hey, what's my tracking number? What's your return policy? Can you check the status of my order? We have way harder to work with systems of record. And I think a lot of folks just don't want to go put in the work or understand how to go make those things happen. And so I think you'll see. Companies like us be a lot more successful in getting these practices live. I think you'll see some of the larger companies maybe win some deals and then go spend nine months building custom software to go make it work.

• 2:40:42Speaker 09

  And then I think you'll see most people pivot out of healthcare over the next couple of years because just because it's conversational and generative and open AI exists doesn't make the work any easier to do right now.

• 2:40:50John Coogan?

  And that's kind of like the return to the way the industry has always been. I feel like whenever you dig into healthcare, it's like, oh, well, they're not using, they're not using the standard SaaS product for, you know, it's like the whole genre of vertical SaaS, like is the textbook example where maybe they're using different ERP, different payroll, different help desk software, different CRM, like they're, they've always had their own little area carved out. And I don't know how much of that is just like HIPAA compliance, but it's like, it's certainly a unique thing.

• 2:41:23Jordi Hays?

  What's the gold standard now? Like, what are you guys trying to deliver on the product side? Cause I saw a screenshot you shared of Sierra on there. You were, you were throwing a little shade on the day of their, on the day of their launch, it was an exchange where you were just like, can you find me some green shorts? And they were like, well, we have lots of clothes, like, why don't you look around?

• 2:41:41Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:41:42Jordi Hays?

  That was pretty funny. But like, what are you guys trying to deliver? And what do you, what do you think best in class is right now? And do the models even need to get better for you to deliver on your vision? Or are they, are they good enough that it's just more about like deep integration and workflows?

• 2:41:58Speaker 09

  Yeah, I think that there's a lot of tension and someone like a Sierra who's got a very almost deterministic style chatbot, and that's been around forever. I mean, what they're doing is not new. They're just saying, hey, it uses generative AI versus what you used to do, which is keyword matching and then sharing some response that you had queued up that was approved by the customer and the chat experience. And then on the whole other side, you have an experience like chat GPT or Claude, which is purely generative, very, very general purpose. Anyone can chat with it and you can really get it to do whatever you want it to do within, you know, as long as their guardrails don't pick it up. And somewhere in the middle is a conversational experience where you call in and you say, hey, I'm having this, this issue. I have this, I need an appointment, like here's my symptoms and the agent has a defined scope.

• 2:42:41Speaker 09

  Of work, but it still needs to follow somewhat of a deterministic path to get you to the outcome. Right. So in order to schedule, I have to look up your account, verify who you are. Find the location that you're looking for, find available slots, find available providers, and then ultimately book the appointment and write that back to the practice management system. So there is a workflow or step that has like steps that have to happen in some sort of order. To do that right, end to end is very complex. A year ago, even when we got started, you really couldn't do scheduling end to end unless you were building. What was a phone tree of like, you're in this step right now. Choose one of these three options. Now you're in this step. And that's not what I think anyone wants to be the gold standard for an experience when you call into your provider.

• 2:43:23Speaker 09

  And we've always been fully conversational from day one. And I think over the summer, we've made a bunch of breakthroughs on like how we build. A whole suite of agents that work together to. Get the job done. And so, for example, if you're calling into one of our practices now. And you say, hey, I'm making an appointment for, I'll use like med spas, an example for botox, there is a botox agent that all it knows how to do is schedule botox, but it's still conversational. And then if you're like, hey, I actually need to switch to a laser hair removal appointment. Then it switches to the laser hair agent. The patient never sees anything. But in the background, we're doing a bunch of multi-agent switching, and that's the only way to make these things work. And still be generative, and they still have failure rates, like five to 10% of cases, it doesn't work as expected.

• 2:44:04Speaker 09

  You can imagine all the dumb shit that patients say, it's like completely random. And so, and you can't plan for all of those scenarios, but you just have to get. This is why I don't think. AI doctors will be a thing anytime soon because that margin of error will always exist. And it's like, they don't want to take liability or responsibility for that. We can get away with a little bit more margin of error because we're doing administrative functions. But that's the experience we want it to be as you call in. You know that it's AI, but you're having a conversation with it, just like if you were talking to chat GPT's voice model. And it can do the job end to end, even if it's scoped to a limited set of jobs.

• 2:44:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. How much of how you build this is like. Uh, develop an RL environment to actually. Post-train a model to interact with all the. Back office and administrative systems versus kind of like create your own deterministic SaaS layer. That then your agents are kind of interacting with or or are just kind of like function calls within. Deterministic like business logic.

• 2:45:09Speaker 09

  It's very much the latter. It's like we've got this app layer where it understands an ontology of a practice, the services, locations, providers, all of those have their own specific context, right? There is different protocol if you're scheduling one appointment versus the other. Maybe you're like three steps into a triaging workflow now. And then they do have tool calls where they get to say like, I need to create an appointment. I need to find available slots. I need to create the patient account. All of those tool calls have their own business logic and agents that they interact with on their own. It's all very constrained. So you kind of have like 70% is prompt engineering, 30% is code in the background to be like, hey, that's not the phone number the patient's calling in from. You can't look up that patient,

• 2:45:48Speaker 09

  right? Because there's security factors to consider. So definitely a lot more of the latter than it is like any sort of RL environment where we're like, you don't really, the conversations don't change that much. So we rely on the foundational models to handle a lot of the edge scenarios where someone's trying to go off rail and say something that's not in scope of the agent.

• 2:46:10John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense. Thank you.

• 2:46:11Jordi Hays?

  Do you, last question. The, like, do you guys internally view yourselves as building vertical software with the end user experiencing the product as an agent? Because I feel like there's been a lot of companies come out over the last year that saying like, we're building AI agents for XYZ. And then if you actually drill down into like, okay, what are you doing? And like, what is the experience of a, of one of your customers? It's like SaaS, right? And that's like, it can be AI enabled.

• 2:46:42John Coogan?

  To be clear, we're extremely bullish about that.

• 2:46:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and we're, and we're, yeah, I'm super bullish about it. But I, but the way that you're described, the way that you're describing this and the companies that are, that I think are sort of doing good work broadly are like, it's not like you're trying to sell that you're just completely reinventing like an entire business model. It's more like we're building really valuable software and automated workflows for companies. And the end result is that the patient or the user will have a great experience.

• 2:47:13John Coogan?

  Sell the solution, not the technology.

• 2:47:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:15John Coogan?

  And I feel like you're one of the first companies, not, you know, who knows, but maybe one of the first companies kind of embrace the new stance.

• 2:47:22Jordi Hays?

  You don't have a dot AI domain, for example.

• 2:47:25Speaker 09

  No, I I don't think the practices really give a shit that it's AI versus some other system. Yeah, they they care like we all I've said this, I said a few things from day one, but like one is that there is inherent product market fit in what we're doing as long as we can make the agents work as expected. And so if I can schedule appointments reliably, if I can refill prescriptions, if I can do all those things and the front desk doesn't have to do it, or the call center doesn't have to do it, like everyone will buy that if it's cheaper, faster, better, you know, whatever you name it. The second is that, yeah, they just like, don't care that it's AI. They think it's interesting. What's nice is like, every group has an AI strategy. They don't know what that means yet. And so but they know they want to like, partner with a company to go do that. And so we treat

• 2:48:08Speaker 09

  it is all partnerships right now, because it's so early. But we're definitely building vertical services, I would say, like that use software to make it really efficient. And you don't have to go hire people now to go do the work in most cases. But yeah, it doesn't matter that if it were, if it were, I suppose, an IVR that got like a phone tree that was able to do the same thing, like someone would buy that, too. They would just get replaced by the thing that's better and has higher conversion, better patient experience, longer term. And so, yeah, that's really the philosophy. And then longer term, we are going deeper into the stack in terms of the software that we will offer to the clinics to also help them do their jobs better when it's not the AI doing the job.

• 2:48:50Speaker 09

  And so we look at it as like, right now, we're doing very specific bespoke services for the group, like answering calls and scheduling or doing outbound campaigns and texting a bunch of patients saying, hey, you're overdue for your annual wellness visit or your vaccines or whatever it is, and then having a conversation and again, getting them scheduled. Longer term, you can imagine, like, we build more of the software that sits again on top of their practice management system, but that helps the actual clinic teams do their jobs more efficiently as well. It's just deeply integrated with the AI component.

• 2:49:20John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:49:22Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you on. Join anytime.

• 2:49:24Speaker 09

  Great questions.

• 2:49:25John Coogan?

  We'd love to have you back.

• 2:49:25Speaker 09

  Thank you, guys.

• 2:49:26John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:49:27Speaker 09

  Text me whenever.

• 2:49:28Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:49:28John Coogan?

  We will.

• 2:49:29Jordi Hays?

  Later.

• 2:49:29John Coogan?

  See ya. Up next, we have Eleven Labs coming in the studio.

• 2:49:35Jordi Hays?

  Get that song ready.

• 2:49:36John Coogan?

  He's in the upstream waiting room, but not for much longer. Let's bring him in from Eleven Labs.

• 2:49:43Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:49:45John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 2:49:47Mati Staniszewski?

  Hey, John. Hey, Jordi. Thanks for having me on.

• 2:49:50John Coogan?

  How do you say your name? Because I almost greeted you with a hoy matey.

• 2:49:54Mati Staniszewski?

  It's Mati Stanishevsky, although I had the same problem with Jordi. So I was texting people, is it Hoary or is it Jordi?

• 2:50:02John Coogan?

  Hoary. I like Hoary. We're gonna.

• 2:50:05Mati Staniszewski?

  There's Spanish words there.

• 2:50:06John Coogan?

  That is fantastic.

• 2:50:07Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. If you went hardcore Spanish, it might be Hoary.

• 2:50:10John Coogan?

  Hoary.

• 2:50:11Jordi Hays?

  Hoary.

• 2:50:12John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's jump right into it. Give us the news. What's the latest in your world?

• 2:50:18Mati Staniszewski?

  The latest is today 11 Labs is launching a tender offer of $100 million.

• 2:50:23Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:50:24Mati Staniszewski?

  Early-stage employees and investors at a 6.6 billion valuation, which is double. Thank you, guys. This is amazing. This is amazing. So, no, so happy to be able to offer that to all the believers from the early days. And, you know, we are building, we're building the company for the generation. So I'm hoping to align everybody on that belt for the journey.

• 2:50:50Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so somebody came to you, they wanted to give you 100 million. You said, I don't need it in the business. Is like, how did this, how did this come about? Because somewhat non-traditional to, for a company to launch a tender.

• 2:51:03John Coogan?

  You could potentially hire one more AI scientist for 100 million, right?

• 2:51:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, yeah, a lot, a lot of companies would maybe they'd say like, let's raise a couple hundred million and we'll do, we'll do some, some secondary as well. But, but what kind of, what kind of?

• 2:51:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, what put you in the position to just focus on a secondary transaction in this round?

• 2:51:23Mati Staniszewski?

  Yeah, two things. One, we are growing very healthy as a business. We got to 200 million in, in, in ARR over the last weeks.

• 2:51:31John Coogan?

  Congrats.

• 2:51:31Mati Staniszewski?

  Which, which has, thank you, thank you. It has been, you know, a kind of a interesting journey where we launched the product. So we started the company in 2022, launched the first product, beginning of 2023. It took us 20 months to get to 100 million in revenue, which is at a time, super quick. Now there are some, some even quicker transitions. Then it took us 10 months to get to 200 million in revenue, which is where we are today. And hopefully, we'll get to 300 million by end of the year in five months. So 20, 10, five months. So we are growing very quickly and we are doing that in a healthy, healthy manner. We have money in the bank to invest in GPUs, in international expansions. We don't really need much more capital in the bank.

• 2:52:13Mati Staniszewski?

  And then the second piece is we, we had a combination of acquisition attempts over last month. And, and of course, as someone who came back

• 2:52:24Jordi Hays?

  Turned it down.

• 2:52:29Mati Staniszewski?

  Before, before 11 Labs, I was at Palantir. My co-founder was at Google, Piotr, and, and we had a very different setup. Palantir at the time was private, it was almost 15 years private. The equity wasn't very liquid. And, and with Piotr, we want to make it very different now as you think about the 11 Labs. So offer frequent liquidity to employees. If we continue running in a healthy manner, we are having the capital already to, to deploy. We want to make sure that the employees can think about this next five, 10 years. So that's where that, that, that early, early liquidity is really helpful. And you are right, we had amazing partners with, with Sequoia, Iconic joining in, keen to, keen to lead the round, invest more in the business. And, and we of course love working with them.

• 2:53:13Mati Staniszewski?

  So I wanted to, to give them more, more, more at the table as well.

• 2:53:18Jordi Hays?

  Give us a breakdown of where all the revenue is coming from. Obviously, I can think of millions of use cases and I've seen different companies leveraging 11 Labs. But, but like where are kind of the pockets where most of the growth is coming from?

• 2:53:33Mati Staniszewski?

  Yeah, so at 11 Labs, we have two key parts of our business. One is a creative platform side of the business. And now the second one is our agents platform. Most of people will have known us from that creative side. That's something that has come when we started the company. That's of course, voiceovers for movies, dubbing of movies to other languages, narrations for audiobooks, creating music, bringing music into default. And here, that's over, over now, few, few million monthly active users that will come through the platform and create incredible content. And then the second

• 2:54:08Mati Staniszewski?

  And here, we've seen an incredible adoption over the last, over the last two years, where, where enterprises like Cisco, Twilio, Epic Games, bringing, bringing the experiences into Fortnite, are, are building just incredibly new voice agencies. And here, you can think about call centers, customer support, personal agents, media. And across the business, roughly, we are approaching 50, 50, 50 between the two. So on one side, the self-serve, the creators are half of the revenue, and then enterprises are the additional half. But that's kind of other side of going quicker, where we've seen.

• 2:54:48Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to interrupt. So are you competing with the Sierras, the Finns, the Decagons, or drilling down into that enterprise business? It's also, it sounds like, yeah, I imagine, like, game, like, if somebody's creating, like, a video game, they're, they're leveraging voice agents as well. So, but, but kind of, could you say a little bit more?

• 2:55:11Mati Staniszewski?

  Of course. So, kind of, we, we, on one side, we power a lot of the companies, a lot of the companies you mentioned are our clients. Decagon, Maven, are some of the examples, places we work directly. So a good example is Perplexity, who will use voice as part of the interaction to, to use Perplexity. Another is Epic Games, where they've effectively deployed Darth Vader experience in Fortnite. So every player could interact with Darth Vader life for the first time, one of the biggest deployments.

• 2:55:43Mati Staniszewski?

  As a Star Wars fan, I can do nothing, nothing less.

• 2:55:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's incredible.

• 2:55:48Mati Staniszewski?

  And then, of course, so many across other, other use cases. Chess.com works with us, where you can have personalized learning experiences when you play chess. And then other companies like Cisco, Twilio, where they do use it for both internal use cases, but also bring it to their clients. In those cases, it's similar to what you mentioned, Jordi, at the beginning, where we power their work internally, but also for their clients. So today, we both, we, we power a lot of clients across, and then also work directly with some of the holistic voice operations.

• 2:56:18John Coogan?

  Okay. Help me understand a little bit more about where the business fits in.

• 2:56:24John Coogan?

  I feel like you've trained actual models, you're a foundation model company in many ways. And then you're also an inference seller and you have clients that effectively buy tokens from you. They buy MP3s or WAV files probably, but you're doing the inference for them. So you're kind of full stack in this AI world. And then also, I just feel like it's been awesome to see you go on this run because there were probably a lot of haters. I feel like I saw some haters being like, they're gonna get steamrolled by the other labs. And you have it. And so what are the sources of defensibility?

• 2:57:06John Coogan?

  And why, like, yeah, why do you just keep?

• 2:57:10Jordi Hays?

  Why do the haters keep being wrong?

• 2:57:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it is, it is, it is, it's been, it's been an amazing, amazing run. And it's such a unique position that I think was, it was contrarian, it was overlooked early on. And people didn't see what you saw. And so kind of walk me through a little bit of like the structure of the business and where the defensibility is coming from.

• 2:57:31Mati Staniszewski?

  Yeah, two answers there. I think the first piece is, so across 11 Labs, we started a company with my co-founder, Piotr. Piotr is an incredible researcher, a symbol, who we think are some of the best researchers in the world in audio. Say, we combined the foundational research, build the horizontal infrastructure, and then have vertical applications on top of that. And I think the main reason that we've been able to stay ahead is clear focus on voice. We always build the models in voice, we build applications around voice. And that's something that on both sides, on the product side and the research side, many of the companies just aren't doing. And whether it was text to speech initially and breaking more emotional model,

• 2:58:15Mati Staniszewski?

  then creating a speech to text model that was heavily beating OpenAI, Google and others on benchmarks, and now the full orchestration across those models and finally bringing music into the fold. I think a combination of just raw incredible research talent that is now at ElevenLabs, missionary focus of building those models and then being able to deploy them in production quicker has been helpful on that side. And then on the other side, we really care about building the best voice application. So spend a lot of time with our both on creator side, but also on the enterprise side and build backwards from there. So that's the first answer. But the second answer, I recently

• 2:58:55Mati Staniszewski?

  got to meet Jensen Huang from Nvidia in the UK. And of course, I came over, I wanted to say hi and said that I and then he responded that, oh, I'm a I was an early ElevenLabs user and still still am, but from the day you launched, I thought that all the voice models will commoditize.

• 2:59:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:19Mati Staniszewski?

  But one thing I didn't appreciate is that the true voice experience takes an artist and you guys all are artists. And that is partly true. I think there's so much nuance across voice. You need to create such a distinct experience when it comes to different voices, different languages, different dialects. So Jensen's take that a lot of a lot of our engineers, a lot of our company is being effectively crafting those artistic experiences is true. And yeah, we are, we will probably be now Nvidia clients for life, too.

• 2:59:54John Coogan?

  This is a great take. It's very similar to why we saw that news that Meta has a partnership with Mid Journey. Meta has all the money in the world. They have a ton of scientists, but maybe they don't have the artist that is David Holes at Mid Journey, who just brings taste to those images. And so they got to pay him, which I love to see. I want your reaction to, speaking of that, where are we in the uncanny valley of voice generation? There was news today in the Wall Street Journal that OpenAI is making a full-length Feature animated film and in this article they said the production they're investing thirty million dollars in this it'll be a full uh full feature length film they're trying to do

• 3:00:38John Coogan?

  it in nine months which seems totally doable in the age of AI honestly um but they said the production team plans to cast human actors for character voices and hire artists to draw sketches and uh and I saw that and I and I just thought like like I I I've been under the assumption that voice was solved uh even if open AI doesn't have the frontier model you know if this is a demo of AI broadly they should be able to figure this out why do you think that they're going with human voices here and do you think there's there's something that's you know on the frontier give me your timelines for when we might see uh eleven labs technology in a Hollywood film

• 3:01:19Mati Staniszewski?

  It's uh I think principal I think you you can create an amazing experience already and and and happily we we we did so maybe maybe there's a uh a a a model or skill help where we can where we can work with open AI and help them help them out on on that side and no but they have amazing pictures I think I think they are they are going to craft those experiences too I think that that you know like epic games example is a uh is a great way of of showing that is possible in that case we worked with recreating working with the estate the voice of James Earl Jones and it did sound exactly like Darth Vader and players were like almost amazed that how is it possible where you have dynamically generated

• 3:02:00Mati Staniszewski?

  script effectively a live NPC in the game for the first for the first time um similarly in our case we worked um we worked with a legends of of the past like Richard Feyman reading his voice where you can really immerse yourself in a story but also With with people like Ariana Huffington or First Lady Melania Trump on creating their audiobooks. And the whole delivery of that experience is is is is as good as real thing. And the crazy thing, it also allows you to do things you could never do before. You can bring those bring those content pieces into other languages and still hear that voice.

• 3:02:38Mati Staniszewski?

  I think Hollywood is is a trickier piece where it might take a slightly longer time aligning the likeness component of how you work with the people, how they get compensated, and how and how you bring those experiences on screen. We do hope that the first dubbed movies will get into production next year, where you have even better thing than what was previously possible. You get that original expression available in dubbed movies. And in 2027, hopefully, the first Hollywood movie hits on the screens in in English, too.

• 3:03:11John Coogan?

  That'd be very cool. Thank you so much for joining the stream.

• 3:03:14Jordi Hays?

  Congrats. Congrats to the whole team.

• 3:03:15John Coogan?

  Fantastic progress all over the place. Just, yeah, remarkable to to see. I love that take about the artistry that goes into crafting these super differentiated, high, high tier models. It's it's wonderful to see. You love to see it.

• 3:03:34Mati Staniszewski?

  Thank you so much. I'm also so proud and happy of our mighty team of artists across in spirits. So thanks for thanks so much for having me on, guys.

• 3:03:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, have a great rest of your day.

• 3:03:44Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the whole team. Cheers.

• 3:03:46John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 3:03:46Mati Staniszewski?

  Thanks.

• 3:03:48John Coogan?

  Up next, we hear Dan from Truck Smarter. He's in the restream waiting room.

• 3:03:53Jordi Hays?

  It's time to truck.

• 3:03:54John Coogan?

  People were saying, are we gonna truck dumber? No, we're gonna truck smarter. And we will welcome Dan out of the restream waiting room. He's in founder mode. Dan, how you doing?

• 3:04:05Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 3:04:06John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 3:04:06Speaker 11

  Good. What's going on, guys? Good to see you.

• 3:04:08Jordi Hays?

  We're trucking.

• 3:04:09John Coogan?

  We're locked in. The great lock-in has begun. Many financings have been announced. We hear you have some news to share with us. Why don't you introduce yourself, the company, and then the news?

• 3:04:20Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's been an absolutely packed day for fundraising. So I appreciate you guys getting us in. I'm happy to bring the party to freight. But my name is Dan, co-founder, CEO of Truck Smarter. We're super excited to announce our fundraising and the launch of our AI product Dispatch as well.

• 3:04:35John Coogan?

  What was the fundraiser? Give me the details. What happened?

• 3:04:39Speaker 11

  Yeah, so we, we, we, we just raised from Socium Ventures, which is backed by Cox Enterprises, and then backed by all of our familiar friends, Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, A16Z, BCV.

• 3:04:51John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 3:04:51Speaker 11

  To continue building the absolute best tools for trucking companies.

• 3:04:55John Coogan?

  And how much did you raise?

• 3:04:57Speaker 11

  Sixteen million.

• 3:05:00John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:05:01Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:05:01John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 3:05:02Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:05:04John Coogan?

  Gotta get warmed up on that one.

• 3:05:05Jordi Hays?

  Give us, uh, give us a quick history of the company. When did you, when did you start Trucking Smarter?

• 3:05:12Speaker 11

  So we started in 2021. We first started by building a load board. Overnight success. For, for, for folks that are not familiar, a lot of trucking companies today, so there's, what, almost a million truck drivers out there, 95% of them, 95% of these trucking companies own less than five trucks. And the way they find jobs is very similar to you going on Craigslist to buy something.

• 3:05:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:05:33Speaker 11

  Right? So all this information is everywhere. The information is not entirely verified, the people are not even verified, you're kind of just scraping the barrel constantly, spending hours every single day. So that's kind of been the very core of our company. We started by building a load board that helped them find those jobs in a more efficient way. And then we started layering on a ton of financial services, getting them paid, getting them access to credit. If you think about, these are the small businesses that just do not get access to a lot of these things. And because we're at the very beginning of their revenue journey, we can just see all this information. And then obviously now with AI, this year, we, we, we, there's just a tremendous opportunity to just make finding a job so much more efficient. And that's kind of what we've been heads down on for the last six months.

• 3:06:17John Coogan?

  There's a poster behind you, "Load Boards Should Be Free." Explain to us, uh, how exactly does the industry work? You have to pay to find a trucking job? How does that work?

• 3:06:29Speaker 11

  It is, it is absolutely crazy, right? So if you think about it, uh, for you to, for you to access this Craigslist type of thing, you gotta probably pay anywhere from 50 bucks, 250, 300 bucks a month.

• 3:06:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:41Speaker 11

  At the very beginning of our company, we made it extremely clear. So we can't really go back from here.

• 3:06:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:46Speaker 11

  We said load boards should be free. We built software that kind of connected all the disparate pieces of information into a single place, gave it all away for free. And that's kind of the engine for our entire business. We continue to grow tremendously, uh, from that. Uh, and that's where we continue to layer on all these different services.

• 3:07:03John Coogan?

  What's the, what's the kind of competitive dynamic in the market? Like, are you going to force everyone to go free? It seems really obvious to like, if there's a barrier to getting a customer, drop that to zero and then figure out how to monetize the customer somewhere else. I'm surprised no one's done this before. So congrats on the innovation, but it seems like the competitive dynamic will be like, people will try and fast follow you. So is it just a race to build more financial products, better products behind the scenes? Like what, what's the, what's the long term? Or is it just like, you gotta get big, you gotta get all the data on there?

• 3:07:34Speaker 11

  You gotta get big, right? So I think for us, right, it's a, it's a race to layer on additional services. A lot of the existing companies, there's a lot of big loaded boards out there. They've been around for 50, 60 years, right? So you think about Craigslist, right? A lot of people have tried to verticalize all the various categories of Craigslist. They've done so in a very real way, but Craigslist is still a monster. They still do hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. So there's still a lot of this pattern with a lot of the existing companies. But for us, we're just able to layer on all these other things that just makes our platform continue to be more attractive.

• 3:08:03John Coogan?

  Have you done what the truck podcast? This is a funny, have you done it?

• 3:08:08Speaker 11

  Yes.

• 3:08:09John Coogan?

  Yes, yeah, I've done this podcast randomly. They were talking about nicotine pouches and the guy wanted to have me on. It was really fun. It's actually an extremely well-run show. But in that vein, like I imagine you can't go on every week. You gotta reach truckers. What's working on the growth side?

• 3:08:27Speaker 11

  Yeah, so I think for us, right, we're the number one loaded board on the platform, on the market today, right? You search loaded board, you search free loaded board, we're number one or number two. That's the strategy, right? Making it free just makes it incredibly easy for anybody to access. And as a result, you're getting all the people that are coming into the market, right?

• 3:08:45John Coogan?

  So there's SEO play. Are you doing any like brand building, high, high top of funnel, you know, awareness with truckers or their specific like campaigns? It's so hard because they like, the truckers aren't in all one place by definition, right? They're all over the country. So it's not like you can buy one billboard and you're good. You know, how, how do you reach people and actually create like brand awareness?

• 3:09:08Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think for us, it's kind of continuing to solve that number one acute pain point, right, which is finding a job. And that's kind of what we've been focused on from day one. And as a result, I think we just have one of the best growth engines that can reach these trucking companies because almost certainly every trucking company has probably downloaded a load board and there's a very high chance that it's ours. And then as a result, we kind of have that information to just continue to offer them more services.

• 3:09:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:09:36John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Congratulations. This is fantastic. We will, we'll talk to you soon. We'll let you get back to your day. Have a great day. Load boards should be free.

• 3:09:43Speaker 11

  We should, guys.

• 3:09:44John Coogan?

  Thanks, guys.

• 3:09:47John Coogan?

  Well, on that note. We have to hop on. Yeah, it is past, it's 2:20. Well, we all keep doing these three and a half hour streams. We keep saying we're gonna do two and a half. We always go along. Tyler, any other breaking news tearing up the timeline? Anything you got for me?

• 3:10:04Speaker 04

  No, no crazy news.

• 3:10:05John Coogan?

  No crazy news?

• 3:10:06Speaker 04

  I don't know.

• 3:10:06John Coogan?

  Okay, that's good. Well, we will see you tomorrow. We will be live from Y Combinator Demo Day. Tune in. We're gonna have a lot of fun there. And then in, on Wednesday, we'll be in New York City. So we are going a little bit of a world tour, a little bit of an American tour That's right. this week, and we will see you tomorrow. Have a great day. Can't wait. Goodbye. Have a great evening.