Elon Doubles Down, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Andrew Yang, Ishan Mukherjee, Tony Holdstock, Tomer London, Andrei Serban, Tim Higgins

(00:30) - TBPN in the WSJ (21:13) - "Daddy is very much home" says Elon (01:29:33) - Ishan Mukherjee, co-founder of Pixie Labs and former Senior Vice President of Growth at New Relic, discusses the launch of Rocks2GA, achieving $25 million in revenue, and securing major clients like Saudi Aramco. He highlights their focus on delivering ROI within 90 days through agent-based pricing and full-service deployment, differentiating from competitors like Salesforce. Mukherjee also emphasizes their lean team structure, with 25 engineers and 10 field and sales personnel, enabling rapid product development and customer integration. (01:37:00) - Tony Holdstock, co-founder and CEO of Ingest, discusses the company's recent $21 million Series A funding round led by Altimeter Capital, with continued investment from Andreessen Horowitz. He explains that Ingest offers an asynchronous execution platform enabling developers to build durable workflows as step functions, simplifying infrastructure management. Holdstock highlights the platform's applications in AI and AI agents, emphasizing its role in accelerating product iteration by abstracting complex infrastructure tasks. (01:47:20) - Tomer London, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Gusto, leads the development and execution of the company's product vision, focusing on modernizing payroll, benefits, and compliance for small businesses. In the conversation, he discusses Gusto's new features aimed at improving cash flow for small businesses, including faster payroll processing options like next-day, same-day, and instant payroll, as well as a partnership with Paraffin to offer Payroll Bridge, a solution to help businesses meet payroll even when funds are short. He emphasizes the importance of addressing cash flow challenges to alleviate the stress small business owners face when they can't meet payroll obligations. (02:05:05) - Andrei Serban is the Founder and CEO of Console, a company that automates IT support using AI agents. In the conversation, he discusses Console's recent $23 million Series A funding led by DST Global and Thrive Capital, and explains how their AI agents integrate with organizational systems to handle tasks like password resets and access requests directly within Slack, aiming to reduce the support. (02:17:40) - Andrew Yang, an entrepreneur and former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, is known for advocating Universal Basic Income (UBI) to address job displacement due to automation. In the conversation, he discusses his new venture, Noble Mobile, a mobile service provider aiming to reduce costs for consumers by offering unlimited data plans with potential cash-back incentives for lower usage, and highlights the ease of switching carriers using eSIM technology. (02:36:30) - Tim Higgins, a business columnist at The Wall Street Journal and former Apple beat reporter, discusses his new book, "I Wore," which explores Apple's dominance in the digital world and the challenges posed by rivals like Epic Games and Spotify. He highlights the ongoing debates over Apple's App Store policies, including the 15-30% commission, and the broader implications of antitrust scrutiny on the company's future innovations, particularly in AI. Higgins also notes the potential distractions these legal battles pose for Apple, drawing parallels to Microsoft's past antitrust issues. (02:52:40) - Alexander Embiricos, the product lead for OpenAI's Codex, discusses the recent launch of a new Codex model, highlighting its integration across various coding environments and its evolution into an AI teammate capable of independent task execution. He emphasizes the model's adaptability in dynamically adjusting response times based on query complexity and notes a significant increase in usage due to continuous improvements. Embiricos also addresses the importance of prompt engineering and the challenges in steering AI agents effectively. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai/ Privy - privy.io Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, September 16th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN UltraDome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Good morning to everyone who's watching. We see you. We appreciate you. Welcome to the Tuesday stream. We have a ton of news to go through. First up, ramp.com, time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Uh, second, we made it to the print edition of the Wall Street Journal. We made it to the print edition. This is really, really huge. If you're not familiar, uh, not every article that goes out on WSJ.com makes it to the print edition.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  You gotta pass the second hurdle, the second test. Uh, you gotta be newsworthy. Thank you to everyone who clicked on the link. That probably helped. I don't know.

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  Sent a signal.

• 0:51John Coogan?

  I mean, we got a lot of views on the screenshots that we shared, which was crazy.

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  People were excited about Dylan joining.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, people were excited. It, it, it's a, it's a fun time. It's a big, it's a big moment, and we're happy to, uh, make it into the Journal since, uh, the Journal has very much in, in the same way as X, it's the backbone of the show.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  As much as the timeline is a backbone.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  The timeline might be the femur of the show, but, uh, the Wall Street Journal is the, is the backbone and, and our sponsors are the, are the tibias of, of the show.

• 1:20Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  Uh, anyway, we, we made it to the actual print edition of the Wall Street Journal. This is really, really big. Um, we're very happy about this and-

• 1:28Jordi Hays?

  We've been waiting for this moment since we started the show.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  Another bit of Wall Street Journal lore you might not be familiar with. The headline that they use online is often different than what they print in the paper because it's a slightly different audience.

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  Liked the-

• 1:43John Coogan?

  I liked the print edition. So-

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  Print.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  In, uh, so on, in the online version, they said, "This podcast is 11 months old. It just hired a president to manage ad revenue." Fact check, true. But then in the print edition, they needed to kind of tighten it up. They didn't have as much ink to work with.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  So they shortened it to "Young Tech Podcast Hires President", which I like a lot.

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  I think they could have shortened it even more to just "Young Tech".

• 2:11John Coogan?

  Young tech.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  Or "Young Technology".

• 2:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, "Young Technology". So, so we've been very, very happy with this. Anyway, you can go check it out if you're, if you're interested. And people have been really, really supportive of the show. Thank you to everyone in the chat. Thank you to everyone who's been engaging with posts on X. Of course, tomorrow we are, we are interviewing Mark Zuckerberg live.

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  And who else are we interviewing?

• 2:33John Coogan?

  We're interviewing Alexander Wang.

• 2:35Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:36John Coogan?

  I've interviewed him twice. He's a phenomenon. He is probably the greatest entrepreneur of Generation Z. And he's the chief AI officer at Meta.

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  This photo doesn't get shared around that much.

• 2:48John Coogan?

  It doesn't.

• 2:48Jordi Hays?

  But it's surprising because he looks so good.

• 2:50John Coogan?

  He looks fantastic. He looks fantastic. He's been lifting the weights and training the weights.

• 2:56Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:56John Coogan?

  He's all over the place. It's great. So we're very excited to, to sit down with Alexander Wang tomorrow.

• 3:02Jordi Hays?

  He really put New Mexico tech on the map.

• 3:05John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Not much going on there before in Los Angeles.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  Until he showed up.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  Until he showed up. But he's been on a generational run and is continuing to build a whole team at Meta as their chief AI officer. We're gonna have him break down the structure of the team, how he's thinking about hiring folks. Obviously, he's been on a talent acquisition spree. He got something like 20 to 30% of the Meta's list together in one room and said, "Start cooking". Also, Cryptox has been, has been posting about us. I have a printed post, a little throwback to Cryptox. Cryptox says-

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  He never stopped printing.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  Cryptox says, "The rise of TVPN has to be studied." They, how did it happen? They were printing my posts and now they're hosting "The Zuckerberg", not Zuckerberg, not "The Zuck", "The Zuckerberg". Well, it's a-

• 3:57Jordi Hays?

  A little lore, we still love to print.

• 3:59John Coogan?

  We still love to print.

• 4:00Jordi Hays?

  We print so much that we've, we've been running through-

• 4:04John Coogan?

  We've been pushing printering technology to its limits. Familiarity with the Hewlett Packard or Brother printing system is a prerequisite for employment at TBPN Incorporated.

• 4:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, underrated that we ran the show on Brother printers.

• 4:22John Coogan?

  Brother printers did, they took us a long way.

• 4:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  The first, the first 10,000 subscribers were probably built on the back of the Brother printer.

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  Which served us well.

• 4:34Jordi Hays?

  Real brand, we're not joking.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is a real brand, it's called Brother printers and they're pretty reliable. We got the black and white version, so it'd print faster.

• 4:42Jordi Hays?

  They have a great domain.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, some folks in the chat say, "Bring printing back." We're going to. There was a, we got to a point where we had so many posts that were in, you know, color and black and white and like, this is a lot of ink. And we would hit print and it would take like 25 minutes to actually print the full run of show. And then we'd want to look things up and we want to play videos. And so I think there's a world for printing posts. We want some printed posts. We want to keep the lo-fi vibes, but then also every once in a while it makes sense to pull up a video for everyone or pull up some audio and play it. And of course, share it all and Restream. One livestream, 30+ destinations, multi-stream, reach your audience wherever they are.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  If you're streaming, gotta get on Restream. Anyway, tomorrow, obviously, everyone has seen the leaks at this point. Metta's announcing some new glasses. We're gonna be hands-on with them, take you through reactions to the keynote and then interview a bunch of folks from Metta's leadership team, which we've shared. We shared Boz, we shared Zuck, we shared Alex Wang, of course. But I wanted to get a state of the union on what's actually going on in the VR/AR market.

• 5:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:55John Coogan?

  I've tried the Apple Vision Pro. One of our first shows was talking about the Apple Vision Pro. I had it for two weeks. I watched Citizen Kane in it. I experienced some of the demos, wasn't able to really stick with it and so wound up returning it.

• 6:09Jordi Hays?

  At any point did you say, "This is the future, this is it."

• 6:15John Coogan?

  There were pieces of the future that I liked. I liked the external battery pack.

• 6:21Jordi Hays?

  Some of the other people that came out and said, this is it and then retracted it.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  I remember because we had, I don't think we'd started the show yet, but you called me and you were like, do I need to get one of these things? Like my timeline is just flooded with like insane, like the future is here. Like you're missing the boat. It was like FOMO around Apple Vision Pro for a couple of weeks and then it sort of died off. But, but I thought that there were a few things that they did really well. The screen was fantastic. It really was a step above anything else in the category. And the, and the external battery pack was smart. Of course, the overall headset was still really heavy. And I liked it, even though I, I liked Oculus for gaming. I played all of Robo Recall, the shooting game.

• 7:09John Coogan?

  I have a funny story about this too. Uh, did I ever tell you about the first time I went skeet shooting with shotguns?

• 7:14Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 7:15John Coogan?

  So I go to my friend's ranch in California, avocado farmer.

• 7:18Jordi Hays?

  That's actually impressive because eventually we're going to run out of stories that.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  I know. Yeah. Yeah. You'd think I'd run out of them by now, but, uh, so I, I go to the ranch, uh, my buddy's ranch.

• 7:28Jordi Hays?

  Also at some point we had to explain.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. We will be taking you through, uh, the.

• 7:34Jordi Hays?

  A simple, we made a simple.

• 7:36John Coogan?

  We cracked the code on OpenAI by the way.

• 7:38Jordi Hays?

  Get a wide angle, please?

• 7:39John Coogan?

  So we will, we will be sharing.

• 7:42Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 7:42John Coogan?

  The full breakdown. Tyler will be breaking it down for us.

• 7:45Jordi Hays?

  It's quite simple if you actually, uh, just, you know, look at all the.

• 7:49John Coogan?

  And, and, uh, and we will be calling, uh, we will, thank you for the zoom in. We will be calling, uh, Dylan Field to help us, uh, create a red string mod for FigJam. Of course, if you want to, uh, take this level of design to a little bit more professional level, head over to figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. So anyway, I was going out to my buddy's ranch and as one of the activities on the ranch, they had skeet shooting. So shotguns, uh, the over, under two shells and I'd never, this is the first time I'd ever shot a shotgun. Never really shot a gun. And, uh, and they were playing this game where it's kind of like knockout and everyone goes. And if you miss one, you lose. But if you, i- if you, if you miss and then someone else hits it, they get you out.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  And it's a competition and the best shooter wins. And I don't know if there was a prize, but, um, I'd never shot, completely new. But I'd been playing like four hours a day of virtual reality shooting in Robo Recall. It's a fantastic game.

• 8:48Jordi Hays?

  How old are you at this time?

• 8:49John Coogan?

  Oh, this was like 25 years old, 26 or something like that. I don't know. I, I was, I was a man. I was an adult.

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 8:55John Coogan?

  Um, I wasn't kid. Um, uh,

• 8:57Jordi Hays?

  Four hours a day of Robo Recall.

• 8:59John Coogan?

  Something like that. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I might exaggerate.

• 9:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, you can still put in 996 and play Robo Recall and,

• 9:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. We, we, we, we know this.

• 9:07Jordi Hays?

  Eat while you're playing Robo.

• 9:08John Coogan?

  We know this. Yes.

• 9:10Jordi Hays?

  And then, so.

• 9:10John Coogan?

  Um, but I, uh, so I, I believe I had one of the highest scores in the world at the time. I was going up against like a friend of mine who was like actually a developer at Meta. And, and we were like setting different scores and there were like little tricks that you could do to get better scores. But basically the whole conceit of the game is that, uh, there's a whole bunch of robots that are like running at you and you have to like shoot them. So, so you're, I'm practicing in virtual reality and I'm shooting all these robots. And I get out to the real world and I'm phenomenal. And I win and I beat everyone in this shotgun shooting competition. And it actually transferred.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  Sim racing.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  It was sim racing. It was,

• 9:45Jordi Hays?

  Transfers.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  It transferred.

• 9:47Jordi Hays?

  Robo Recall.

• 9:47John Coogan?

  It transferred. It was fantastic. It was, it was, it was like a remarkable moment. And I think that, uh, Quest, even though some of the hype has died down, everything's moved over to AI. Um, there's still a massive opportunity to win gaming. There's also a massive opportunity, I think, to win just replacement for your TV. We were talking about this, like the TV is maybe, maybe goaded, maybe going to be around forever. But I, I, when I watched Does and Kane in, in Apple Vision Pro, I was like, this is cool. I, I could see doing this if it was lighter and cheaper and, and a little bit cooler. And it also didn't work in the dark.

• 10:21Jordi Hays?

  We can wait to talk about the implications of Meta's new releases until tomorrow. Because, um, there's, there's been some leaks.

• 10:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, uh, we've also been able to demo the products a couple of times now. And can't share, can't share.

• 10:37John Coogan?

  But what we can share is the X Real One Pro, which is a augmented reality. I don't even know.

• 10:45Jordi Hays?

  I'd never heard of this until this morning.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  Okay, so, so this has been pumped very heavily online. They do a lot of sponsored content. They do a lot of ads. And it's a, it's an augmented reality glasses. We got them. They're on Tyler's face over there. He's looking, give, give us a little review. Jordy, how do you think the, the styles, the style looks?

• 11:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I mean, Tyler's just a cool dude.

• 11:10John Coogan?

  He looks pretty cool. It looks like he just has a pair of sunglasses on.

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  You do, you do look kind of like a, like an old man, kind of old man coded.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Um, they're very far away from my face, like the lens.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Like offset.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is. It is a little bit farther. So, uh, describe what you're seeing.

• 11:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, um, it's, it feels basically like I'm wearing sunglasses.

• 11:32John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  Um, I don't know if you'd be able to see if I turn them around, but, um, there's like the main lens, which you can see from like looking at me. And then on the inside, there's like a smaller lens that doesn't cover the entire thing.

• 11:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  So I'm, I'm looking through that. Um, so my, the field of view of the actual like screen area is, is, is not actually that big.

• 11:50John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:51Speaker 02

  Um, but it's basically just like I'm wearing like pretty dark sunglasses.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  And then, um, I can just like see, I, I have like a screen pulled up. It's just mirroring from my laptop right now.

• 12:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  So it's over here.

• 12:02John Coogan?

  So, yeah, so basically if you unplug these, there's no battery on board that I can tell. You have to plug it, you have to plug in the, the end of the, the end of the, what, what's the arm on the, on the sunglasses arm? I don't know, the side little bar. You plug a USB C cable into that and you plug that in your phone and it mirrors your phone. Or he's plugging in his laptop. Is it a second screen or it's mirroring?

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Uh, right now it's like extended, so it's like a third screen.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  Okay. Oh, because you have two screens?

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:30John Coogan?

  Well, there we go.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, you don't need to rub it in. I mean.

• 12:33Jordi Hays?

  So that's. That's pretty, that's pretty.

• 12:35John Coogan?

  So, so how much can you see? Can you see how many fingers I'm holding up?

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, three.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  I mean, I can see pretty well.

• 12:40John Coogan?

  You can see pretty well.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  There's three, um, like, levels of darkness.

• 12:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  So I'm on the lightest one right now.

• 12:45John Coogan?

  You're in the lightest one.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  It's still pretty dark. Like, it's basically like I'm wearing dark sunglasses.

• 12:48John Coogan?

  I think I had it on the, on the darkest setting. And I was using it at night last night and I couldn't see.

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  Tyler Gold in the.

• 12:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, and the chat says.

• 12:56Jordi Hays?

  Looks like he belongs in the Blues, brother.

• 12:58John Coogan?

  I think, I think it's a pretty good look. Uh, I watched a full YouTube video on it, about fifty minutes last night. And it truly was full HD. Like, I, I was not seeing pixels. I thought, I thought the visual resolution was high, quite high. What's your, what's your review?

• 13:13Speaker 02

  I just turned on, like, the darkest setting and I cannot see you guys at all.

• 13:16John Coogan?

  You can't see us all.

• 13:16Speaker 02

  I can see, um, the lights we have.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  Okay, that's it.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Like, very faintly, but I, I can't see you guys at all.

• 13:21John Coogan?

  So it's really, oh, it's actually changing the, the darkness of the glasses, too. That's pretty cool. I can, I can see the change when you change those. That's pretty cool, yeah. Wow. There we go. Yeah, it goes dark. I don't know if you'll be able to see that on the video, but, uh, I can certainly see it from here. Um, anyway, uh, so, uh, what have you, what have you demoed?

• 13:38Jordi Hays?

  What do you think about the user experience of having the screen on your face have to connect to the screen in front of you?

• 13:45John Coogan?

  I don't think it's that crazy. I always thought that, like, I, I want a very concrete, uh, like, first, like, killer app. And so, for the iPhone, you know, I was debating this with Mark Andreessen, um, I think the killer app for the iPhone was just the phone. And then, yeah, it had some problems later, but, uh, most people bought it just to be able to make phone calls.

• 14:07Jordi Hays?

  Chat's asking for a wrist check. That's a Seiko, right?

• 14:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, Seiko SKX. There we go. Not really a hitter, yeah.

• 14:13John Coogan?

  Oh, you're getting there.

• 14:14Jordi Hays?

  It's a, it's a college hitter.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  It's a college hitter.

• 14:16Jordi Hays?

  It's a tasteful, it's a tasteful choice.

• 14:18John Coogan?

  And so, so I thought that there could be a future where, uh, this is a six hundred and fifty dollar product. It's in the range of an external monitor. And so I think that maybe it's not gonna be today, but if you have a college student who has a laptop and they want a second monitor and they're judging between these glasses that are portable, they can bring to the library if they're going there and have a nice big second monitor, or a physical second monitor from Apple or Samsung or anyone else. They might be able to compete on that, even if you just have to plug it in. But what do you think Tyler? How close are you? What, what, how, how cheap, how much cheaper than a, than a true external monitor?

• 15:01John Coogan?

  Would these have to be for you to choose this over an external monitor?

• 15:06Speaker 02

  I think they'd have to be a lot cheaper than $750.

• 15:09John Coogan?

  They're not close.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're also like, I don't think I would wear these not sitting down, like if I was moving around.

• 15:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  They're like a little too clunky.

• 15:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  When you have it, so there's like two modes, you can have it on like the world tracking or just like face tracking where it moves with your face.

• 15:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  And it's like pretty clunky.

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  So it's like a little bit, I would, I could see someone getting like motion sick.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:31Speaker 02

  In VR, I don't really get motion sick ever, but like my dad does a lot. So I could see him like not using this.

• 15:38John Coogan?

  Comp the visual fidelity to the, to the Quest 3S that you tested.

• 15:46Speaker 02

  I would say it's very close.

• 15:49John Coogan?

  It's close.

• 15:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, so it's definitely worse than the Apple Vision Pro. Like I can still see kind of, like I can like, do essentially like pixel peeking.

• 15:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:59Speaker 02

  And if I, if I move my head like this, it gets blurry.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:03Speaker 02

  But overall, like I could, I mean, you know.

• 16:05John Coogan?

  The field of view is a little narrow. Like it's pretty easy to cut off the edges if you use your head.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  It's a little narrow, but like text is totally readable. Like I could easily read or.

• 16:13John Coogan?

  So far, I'm on the, I'm on the train of if I'm, if I, if I was on a plane and I was leaning back, I would watch a movie on this over just holding my phone like this and watching it there. But outside of that, there aren't that many occasions that I would select this. And even though it is AR and it is pass through, it's still socially isolating.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  I would just say, I would just say this seems much worse than having your laptop on the tray table.

• 16:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 16:46Jordi Hays?

  It's like, when are you on a plane and you don't have your laptop?

• 16:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  It's like, would you really use this?

• 16:50John Coogan?

  The tray table.

• 16:50Jordi Hays?

  So I, I, I, I give these, uh, uh...

• 16:54John Coogan?

  What's your review?

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh...

• 16:55John Coogan?

  Two thumbs down.

• 16:56Jordi Hays?

  Two thumbs down. That's my official review.

• 16:58John Coogan?

  Brutal. What about you?

• 17:00Speaker 02

  I, I think it's pretty cool. I, I've never used AR glasses before. I've only ever used VR that has pass-through.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 17:05Speaker 02

  And, I mean, it's like, you know, infinitely better because in pass-through, you can't really like, you can obviously walk around.

• 17:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:11Speaker 02

  But it's like, you, it's a little jarring still. You have to walk a little slowly.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  Like with this, you can actually use your laptop. You can, you can move your, your hands around and, and it doesn't, it, it's real time because it's just actually, you're seeing the real light rays instead of them re-projected.

• 17:24Speaker 02

  I would say, I would say one thumbs up.

• 17:26John Coogan?

  One thumbs.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  One thumb up.

• 17:28John Coogan?

  One thumb up. One thumb down.

• 17:30Jordi Hays?

  Are you being honest with us, Tyler?

• 17:32John Coogan?

  Are you being too honest?

• 17:32Speaker 02

  No, I think this is really cool. Yeah.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  Yeah?

• 17:34Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Really cool, really cool doesn't mean that you're gonna use it.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  It's a cool demo. I, I would not buy these.

• 17:40Jordi Hays?

  Okay, one thumb up on the demo.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  I would not buy these for $700. I would buy them for like $150 maybe.

• 17:46John Coogan?

  The question, the, the, the, the age-old question here is we're always trying to get to a churn rate?

• 17:53Jordi Hays?

  Yancy. Goldman in the chat says, "Rippin' analog bogies. Glad the youth are keepin' it going."

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  I don't think, I think he missed the part where they're like, eh...

• 18:04John Coogan?

  Oh, there's cigarettes in his pocket.

• 18:06Jordi Hays?

  Oh, oh.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  There's cigarettes in his pocket.

• 18:08Jordi Hays?

  I thought you were calling the, the sunglasses.

• 18:10John Coogan?

  No, no, no.

• 18:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:11John Coogan?

  Uh, and...

• 18:12Jordi Hays?

  Tyler's got some heaters in the pocket.

• 18:13John Coogan?

  Yancy here saying, "Wish I had a third thumb to give it three thumbs down." But, so, uh, let's assume that they're free. Let's assume that you, that, that, that you have won them in a TVPN, uh, Gap Semester Challenge.

• 18:29Jordi Hays?

  You're not even, you're not, you're not using these ever, even if they're free.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  Do you think you'll be a DAU in a month? Because we've tried to make you a DAU of Cluli. We failed. We tried to make you a DAU of the Quest 3S. We failed.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  So I, on the Quest, I actually have used it...

• 18:43John Coogan?

  Oh, you did?

• 18:43Speaker 02

  I, I've used it in the past month. I've used it maybe like three times.

• 18:47John Coogan?

  Okay. What, what'd you use it for?

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Uh, I was playing... I think I was playing Call of Duty.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  Okay, back in the, back in the trenches. The, the new Call of Duty? The new Call of Duty is dropping soon. Maybe.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't know which one it was. Black Ops 6 or something.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  Oh, well.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  Um, I would, I, I don't.

• 19:04Jordi Hays?

  I mean, uh, Call of Duty needs to do the same thing as Apple at this point.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  What is that?

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  Black Ops 2025.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, they really should.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Well, there actually was Modern Warfare 2020, I think.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, they did that, right? Yeah, well, no, it was because they, they reset the whole counter. So it, it was Modern Warfare 1, 2, 3, 4, and then they just were like, let's start over. Let's do Modern Warfare again. And so anytime that you would, you would need to confuse the old Modern Warfare and the new Modern Warfare, people would be like, Modern Warfare, but the 2020 edition. It wasn't Modern Warfare.

• 19:37Jordi Hays?

  Dan, Dan Ratliff in the chat has an idea. He says, get the chat ripping an inch from Tyler's face.

• 19:43John Coogan?

  Ooh, I like that. Yeah, can you pull up chat?

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  Plug the chat into.

• 19:47John Coogan?

  You can just see the chat, right?

• 19:49Speaker 02

  So I, I'm looking at myself right now and it, they, they're really dark. It looks like I'm like blind.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does. Well, I, I mean, that's mostly because you're indoors. Like, if you were, if we were outside and you were on a sunny beach or something, I feel like you would look a lot more normal.

• 20:04Jordi Hays?

  To be clear, that is incredibly sub, like, that's not what you want. You want, you want glasses that look like normal glasses.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. I, I agree. And, and so, uh, like, the Meta Ray-Bans, just the, the, the, the current ones that are already out. If someone is sitting at their office with those and they have them in, in their clear frames, you would just be like, it's as weird as having headphones in. Like, it's just like, oh, yeah, they're, they're wearing glasses, like.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, you can immediately clock these as like, something is going on with your glasses.

• 20:33John Coogan?

  Totally. They're coming out of your, coming down your, your chest, really. Uh, there's a nice accent. You might have to thread that through the tie or something.

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  You're like, yeah, something, something's going on here. You look like an intelligence asset, you know? You're just like, ah. If you're in an SF party and a, you know. And someone's wearing these.

• 20:52John Coogan?

  Pulls out this, yeah. That's great. Anyway, Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Okay, the current thing. Elon, he posted, daddy is very much home. He's burning the midnight oil with Optimus Engineering on Friday night. Then red eye overnight to Austin, arriving at 5 a.m. Wake up to have lunch with my kids and then spend all day Saturday afternoon in deep technical reviews for Tesla's AI five chip design. Then he flies to Colossus two on Monday, walks the whole data center floor, reviews transformer and power production. Excellent progress there, he says. Departes midnight, then up to 12 hours of back-to-back meetings across all Tesla departments,

• 21:36John Coogan?

  but particular focus on AI autopilot, Optimus production plans and vehicle production slash delivery. 16,000 likes. He is back in it. He's in wartime mode.

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's, it's a, no, it's great to see. Like clearly you add politics into his current responsibilities and it's too much.

• 21:56John Coogan?

  It's too much.

• 21:56Jordi Hays?

  Like it's just too much.

• 21:57John Coogan?

  It's too much.

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  So it's great to see that he's out of that, focused on what he does best.

• 22:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Like the context switching between, between SpaceX and Tesla always seemed like, wow, how does he do SpaceX and Tesla? But like, at the end of the day, you are talking to an engineer in one place and then an engineer in the other place. And it's fundamentally the same conversation, like, how can we design the parts, get them made, put them together, and then do the thing with the parts? At least it's that instead of politics is like completely different.

• 22:24Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy to, to be an entrepreneur and think to yourself, I gotta focus more, but then still have like six companies.

• 22:32John Coogan?

  It is crazy.

• 22:33Jordi Hays?

  It's like, I have to work harder and I have to focus more.

• 22:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 22:35Jordi Hays?

  And normally if you're running one company, you can say like, all right, we're gonna like deprioritize this product.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  Like shut this down. We're not gonna do that acquisition.

• 22:43John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 22:44Jordi Hays?

  Do this or that. But he doesn't have that luxury. He just has to.

• 22:47John Coogan?

  This was the, this was the odd take. Daddy is very much home. You got a lot of houses, brother. You've got a lot of houses. But at the same time, House Elon, as I'm calling it, does, does have some synergies between it and a lot more now that you take politics out of the mix, like you've mentioned. So I was thinking, and I don't know if I want to dox them, but I was visiting two friends of mine who run a design consultancy together, pulled into their Los Angeles office space, which they had designed from the ground up. These guys are super into design. They have custom furniture, custom tables, everything is custom. And I noticed they had two identical Tesla Model Y's parked in front of the building. And I was like, that's kind of a funny choice for guys who pride themselves on finding

• 23:32John Coogan?

  like unique and creative design ideas all day long. Like, everything they do is

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  Considered.

• 23:37John Coogan?

  Considered, unique. I would have expected some bespoke car, like the bespoke office building. And when I talked to them, they had a good, they had a good rationale behind their decision. They said, what true luxuries are left in the automotive world? It's just self-driving, and nothing comes close to a Tesla. That was their take. You can disagree, but for a lot of people.

• 24:01Jordi Hays?

  We've had self-driving. It's called having a driver. That's the truth. That's the truth. That's the last, clearly, if you could make the argument that that is the final.

• 24:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:13Jordi Hays?

  Because we drove with them to dinner and both cars

• 24:16John Coogan?

  I wasn't in there, but yeah, you were.

• 24:18Jordi Hays?

  I drove with them to dinner and both cars made an extremely illegal left turn.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, so, so a human driver would never do anything illegal in a car?

• 24:26Jordi Hays?

  I would fire a human driver that made that turn.

• 24:29John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 24:30Jordi Hays?

  It was egregious. But, of course, I agree, I agree with the point broadly.

• 24:35John Coogan?

  Yes. Sure. Maybe it's not superhuman level. Maybe it's not the best self-driving, better than an actual professional driver, but it's on the path. And it's clearly a notch above the rest of the OEMs. And so. Tesla's always been a bit of a wild ride. Company wasn't founded by Elon Musk. He sort of refounded the business. He joined the company seven months after two other co-founders started the initial incorporation. It's been a wild ride in the public markets. There's a barrage of skepticism the whole time, pressure from short sellers. The stock's never traded like a traditional carmaker, but it's also never operated like one. So on November 6th, Tesla shareholders, in just, what, two months or so, Tesla shareholders will vote on a very

• 25:19John Coogan?

  non-traditional pay package. It's $1 trillion for Elon. And Elon's already restating his commitment to the company with this post. Daddy is very much home. He wrote on X this morning. I was debating whether or not the post was ghostwritten. And where do you sit on it, Jordy? You've read the post. Do you think this is written by Elon?

• 25:42Jordi Hays?

  The, the original one we covered.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  The daddy, not the Tesla. So the Tesla's secret plan V4, that felt like it was not written by Elon. It wasn't really in Elon's voice, from what I know about him. It seemed like it was sort of written by a team or a committee, or there were like multiple people at the table. There were a lot of M dashes. So maybe there's like a ChatGPT pass or a Grok pass at some point, LLM pass on top of it.

• 26:04Jordi Hays?

  I could have seen him just talking into his phone.

• 26:06John Coogan?

  Sure. And then it instantiated it into a, into a multi-paragraph essay. But this, this post, "I am burning the midnight oil with Optimus Engineering on Friday night, then red eye overnight to Austin arriving at 5 a.m." Does this feel like Elon's voice to you?

• 26:22Jordi Hays?

  I mean, his voice to me is reposting on timeline, reposting a meme.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  Crying emoji.

• 26:29Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 26:30John Coogan?

  Crying emoji. So true. Yeah. I, I don't know. I thought this, this did feel like him. It felt like he just fired it off. But I don't know. There's people debating it. I don't know. I think the more interesting thing is just like, just like, does this reflect rational prioritization at Tesla generally? And so-

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  Looks up 20% in the last-

• 26:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so he's prioritizing Optimus, which Optimus feels like this sci-fi project that's far off. It feels like the demos that we've seen have been very tele-operated. It's not, there aren't these crazy demos. It's certainly not shipping. But if you just think about like, what is technically possible right now? And we've seen these videos out of China with companies like Unitree. It doesn't seem that far off, right? Like, even if, even if you assume that like, he hasn't, Tesla hasn't done any like quantum leap, done something that no one else can do, just catching up to Unitree with great execution and engineering should be possible, right? Like, they already make tons and tons of cars. It's a somewhat similar project.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  And there's also certainly investor demand for an American humanoid robot play. Today, Figure Robotics raised a billion dollars at a 39 billion post-money valuation. When was that announced?

• 27:45Jordi Hays?

  That was announced this, well, so.

• 27:48John Coogan?

  Months ago, right? Or leaked?

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  Like, leaked, teased.

• 27:51John Coogan?

  Six months ago?

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  It felt like something that was designed to generate interest.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 27:55Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 27:55John Coogan?

  And there were screenshots and emails and stuff.

• 27:57Jordi Hays?

  At the time, I was like, I was pretty blown away because, because that round was being, what it was rumored to be getting done at was larger, greater than the market cap of Ford Motor Company.

• 28:06John Coogan?

  That's right. Where's Ford today?

• 28:09Jordi Hays?

  Ford is at 45 billion today.

• 28:10John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 28:11Jordi Hays?

  And so I was, I saw the news today.

• 28:14John Coogan?

  Age like milk, Jordy.

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I said to John, I said, you might not like this, John, this might trigger you, but Brett Adcock has created more enterprise value than Henry Ford. That actually proved to be true. Henry Ford, as of current marks, has generated about a billion dollars more.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, yeah.

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  We don't need to get into revenue or really try to get too into the math.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's skip all that.

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, the question.

• 28:38John Coogan?

  I mean, my read on this is just like, this is like, Figure is nowhere near as like in the zeitgeist as Tesla, and there are clearly investors who want to bet on humanoid robots in America. They can't even buy Unitree stock. I don't know how you would. And so if you just, if you just believe that robots are going to be a thing, like, investing in Tesla doesn't seem like that crazy of an idea, right?

• 29:03John Coogan?

  But, I mean, he's not just focused on that, he's also focused on the next Tesla chip design called AI.

• 29:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, one thing too, Unitree is planning their IPO around the $7 billion mark.

• 29:13John Coogan?

  Sure. Oh, that's low. Wow. That's low. Where are they in Hong Kong, maybe?

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  I wonder what it'll do.

• 29:23Jordi Hays?

  And given that they are.

• 29:25John Coogan?

  They're shipping a lot of those robots.

• 29:26Jordi Hays?

  They're selling a lot of pups.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, they're selling the pups, robo pups. Anyway, worth a big deal.

• 29:33Jordi Hays?

  I want, I, I, I think a Tesla robo pup would crush.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  That would be good.

• 29:39Jordi Hays?

  I would.

• 29:39John Coogan?

  What would you use it for, though? Would you not churn from that?

• 29:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, so, so I pitched you on an office dog and you said, that's insane. And, and I thought about it.

• 29:50John Coogan?

  It's a tragedy of the commons situation.

• 29:52Jordi Hays?

  But, but a Tesla pup that, that Elon would just be able to zoom into at any time and kind of bark at us if he had announcements. I would, I would be pretty interested in that.

• 30:03John Coogan?

  What about a Tesla puffer fish, a turbo puffer fish?

• 30:08Jordi Hays?

  Turbo puffer.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  You'd search every byte, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Check out Turbo Puffer. He's also prioritizing AI five, the new chip. He's partnering with Samsung on that. Makes sense. You need edge computing in a self-driving context. You can't do all the inference in a data center. Colossus, you can do inference in the data center. You're probably training a big model. Regardless of what XAI is doing with Grok, train, having a bunch of, being GPU rich seems valuable to Tesla, right?

• 30:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:43John Coogan?

  And, and you know, there's rumors that maybe those companies merge at some point. But the plan overall, like how he's actually spending his time, it seems in line with the opportunity in front of Tesla. It doesn't seem like wildly, wildly like off base.

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  He's managed to almost 2X the stock there since April.

• 31:02John Coogan?

  He certainly like got, got the flow back.

• 31:05Jordi Hays?

  And I remember, I distinctly remember mid-curving it around April.

• 31:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:10Jordi Hays?

  Thinking, just looking at the. Looking at Tesla earnings, look at them losing market share globally. Look at the quarters that they had had, just in the core business of selling cars.

• 31:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  And it was just looking really, really, really abysmal.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, Cybertruck was rough, the Roadster 2 was delayed, there just wasn't-

• 31:31Jordi Hays?

  Model 3 is not selling well, none of the cars have been renewed.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  And then there was all this political stuff where, were conservatives gonna pick up and start buying Teslas?

• 31:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, you think about it, he lost the left.

• 31:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:42Jordi Hays?

  And then he was losing the right by fighting with, with Trump.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:46Jordi Hays?

  So who's, who's the base?

• 31:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was like losses on both sides, but I, I think that, I think that the car buyer has a shorter memory for these things. And, and will-

• 31:59Jordi Hays?

  When you're selling, when you're leasing cars for $299, less than an Equinox.

• 32:03John Coogan?

  And it, and like it does perform well on all the benchmarks essentially.

• 32:08Jordi Hays?

  It is great value.

• 32:10John Coogan?

  Great value.

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  Compared to any other car in that price range.

• 32:13John Coogan?

  Yep, totally. And so the, the bare case here for, for Elon bringing it back and returning home is that he has multiple homes. SpaceX, Neuralink, Boring Company, X, XAI. It can't be easy to juggle everything, but at least he's been able to pull back time spent in DC.

• 32:30Jordi Hays?

  Forgotten Neuralink?

• 32:31John Coogan?

  No, I said Neuralink, yeah. And it seems like there are new plans in the works to consolidate House Elon down to fewer entities, so it's easy to manage. Overall, his current Tesla plan outlined in his post is a lot clearer to me than the Tesla's secret plan V4. That felt written by a committee, or even worse, an LLM. Even if you're seeing, even if you're seeing signs of being stretched too thin, it's very hard to root against someone who's already built such a large automotive company in America and is taking a serious run at a self-driving network and a humanoid robotics play. There's lots of froth, but I like Elon being home at Tesla and focused on making science fiction reality. So that's my take on, on Elon's latest pay-per-dish.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  John.

• 33:12John Coogan?

  Anyway, whatever they're building, they gotta do it on Graphite. Graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 33:23John Coogan?

  The, uh, we didn't really talk about the Sam Altman, Elon, uh, Sam Altman Tucker Carlson episode that went out. It was a crazy news day, of course, with the Kirk assassination. But Christman went viral, who's a friend of the show. He said, after spending seven minutes very politely accusing his guest of murder, Tucker just resumes a normal conversation to round out the interview. Incredible. Best to ever do it. And so it goes straight from suspicious death to thoughts on Elon Musk? What jobs will be lost to AI? What are the downsides of AI? Is AI a religion? The dangers of deepfakes. I love it.

• 33:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Do you, do you think, uh, this was a, not, not a win for Sam? Kind of went into...

• 34:03John Coogan?

  Every, I think every PR person thinks it's a, it's a own goal, or it's like a mistake to do. Um, I don't know. It was so bold. It was just, it was so unexpected. Like, it was...

• 34:15Jordi Hays?

  Remember Tucker had Souchere's parents.

• 34:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, you know that that's what's gonna happen. So you're going into the arena. You're going into the lion's den. You're, you're, you're, you're debating like the most critical critic possible. Uh, and there's something brave about that. I don't know.

• 34:30Jordi Hays?

  Shows you're not afraid.

• 34:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I, I took it as, as...

• 34:33Jordi Hays?

  Where you're able to overcome your fear.

• 34:34John Coogan?

  As bullish. Uh, the, uh, I think Luke Metro had this post where he was saying that, uh, he, his fear of the going direct movement

• 34:43Jordi Hays?

  Is a great...

• 34:43John Coogan?

  Was that, was that CEOs would never do a hard interview ever again because there was always someone who is willing to do an easy interview with you. There was always, oh, just do your own podcast. OpenAI has their own podcast. Sam Altman's brother has a podcast. He is friends with tons, tons of people. He can come to us and we'll talk to him just about AI and tech and the core business and stuff and have like a business conversation. Uh, to go to Tucker, uh, is a, is a very, very aggressive, bold move. And, um, I, I, I think it's, I think it's good leadership. I don't know. I think it's, I, I think it's like, it's, it's hopefully closing the book on that very sad and tragic saga, but, uh, who, who knows? I haven't really dug into like the actual response.

• 35:25John Coogan?

  Were people in Tucker's community swayed? That's the real metric, probably. Cause you don't want to come out of that and be like...

• 35:31Jordi Hays?

  Tyler?

• 35:31John Coogan?

  Wow, I have more.

• 35:32Jordi Hays?

  You're going to middle America. You're gonna interview thousands of Tucker Carlson, uh, super fans.

• 35:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:40Jordi Hays?

  And ask them, did he do it?

• 35:41John Coogan?

  Just ask them.

• 35:43Jordi Hays?

  Did he do it? No.

• 35:44John Coogan?

  No, no, no. Explain them, explain to them this. Explain to them the full history of OpenAI, all the connections, and see if they're bullish on the stock. That's what I want to know. Do they think 500 billion is, is undervalued or overvalued in middle America? That's what I care about. So, we have our chart of the OpenAI and all the connections. Tyler, you were late here last night. You didn't leave last night? You were here all night?

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Kind of an all-nighter? Yeah. I, I was basically, the goal was try to, you know, I want to explain kind of in an easy, simple way, like, how to think about OpenAI broadly.

• 36:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  How to think about people who are influencing it.

• 36:24John Coogan?

  I think you nailed it.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  In a, as clear of a way as possible.

• 36:27John Coogan?

  I think you nailed it. So, who do we have here at the center?

• 36:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I, I think it's obviously best to start here.

• 36:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:35Speaker 02

  Is right here in the middle.

• 36:36John Coogan?

  OpenAI.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Okay, so obviously, Sam Altman, OpenAI, this is the core.

• 36:40John Coogan?

  Yes. And so, every, every line of string here is a real connection, correct?

• 36:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:46John Coogan?

  Okay, take us through some of it.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so, um, we can see over here, these are some of kind of the main deals, right?

• 36:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:52Speaker 02

  So, we have Larry Ellison, Oracle.

• 36:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  We have Microsoft.

• 36:55John Coogan?

  300 billion dollar plan to

• 36:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:58John Coogan?

  build da- uh, data centers. And then, uh, Broadcom is obviously doing chips, custom chips for OpenAI now. SoftBank is bankrolling some of it with Stargate. Microsoft has the

• 37:10Jordi Hays?

  What's the connection between Johnny Ive and growing Daniel?

• 37:14John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Okay, so, so this is, this is actually, uh, you know, double, so, so, this is, uh, most people on Twitter, they see this picture, they think growing Daniel.

• 37:22John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  But, I mean, who, that's

• 37:24John Coogan?

  It's actually Steve Jobs.

• 37:25Speaker 02

  That's Steve Jobs, yeah.

• 37:26John Coogan?

  It's Steve Jobs.

• 37:26Speaker 02

  So, it's really, you know, double.

• 37:28John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 37:28Speaker 02

  So, so you see, this is, yeah, this is pretty good. I want to talk about this. So, we have Marc Andreessen.

• 37:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  You know, famous kind of interplay between growing Daniel and Marc Andreessen.

• 37:37John Coogan?

  Okay, yes.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  But also, you know, with Steve Jobs.

• 37:40John Coogan?

  Steve Jobs and Johnny Ive. Okay, got it.

• 37:42Speaker 02

  And then

• 37:42Jordi Hays?

  You're saying that this goes deeper than

• 37:44John Coogan?

  This goes

• 37:45Speaker 02

  It goes really deep here.

• 37:46John Coogan?

  How deep does it go? Let's find out.

• 37:48Speaker 02

  Um, okay, so then, let, let's just keep moving. So, so let's go from, let's go to some investors.

• 37:53John Coogan?

  Please.

• 37:53Speaker 02

  Um, so we can go from OpenAI, let's see Josh Kushner.

• 37:57John Coogan?

  Josh Kushner, of course.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  Okay, but who's Josh Kushner's brother? Jared Kushner.

• 38:02John Coogan?

  Where's Jared?

• 38:02Speaker 02

  First Trump administration.

• 38:03John Coogan?

  Okay, yes.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Okay, now we're, now we're in, you know, politics. Let's go down PT.

• 38:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 38:08Speaker 02

  Right? You can see a lot of strings coming out of here.

• 38:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  This is a core player.

• 38:11John Coogan?

  Core player.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  So, I mean, there's so many directions we can go here, but let's go to Delian, right?

• 38:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  Delian, where does Delian work, founders fund? Who is?

• 38:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  You know, it's obvious, okay?

• 38:20John Coogan?

  Yes, it's obvious. You're putting it together.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Okay, Delian's first company.

• 38:24John Coogan?

  Yes, Varda.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  No.

• 38:26John Coogan?

  Oh, first company.

• 38:26Speaker 02

  His first company, YC company.

• 38:28John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, it wasn't YC company, that's right.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  What was another YC company? Alexander Wang.

• 38:33John Coogan?

  Oh, wait.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Scale AI.

• 38:35John Coogan?

  Scale was a YC company, okay. Where does Alex work now?

• 38:38Speaker 02

  Where does he work? Mark Zuckerberg, Meta.

• 38:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:41Speaker 02

  Okay, Nat Friedman. They work together, MSL.

• 38:43John Coogan?

  Okay, it's so clear now.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  Who did Nat Friedman sponsor?

• 38:47John Coogan?

  Who?

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Luke Ferretor.

• 38:49John Coogan?

  Oh, Ferretor.

• 38:50Speaker 02

  And where does he work? Doge, Elon.

• 38:52John Coogan?

  Elon.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  It's all connected. And who did Elon start a company with? PT, it goes back.

• 38:56John Coogan?

  There we go, okay, okay.

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Okay. And I see Will Manitis. So Will Manitis.

• 39:00John Coogan?

  Always Will Manitis connected. This is just a joke? He's not actually involved, right?

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Well, Will Manitis was a, a what kind of fellow?

• 39:05John Coogan?

  Oh, a teal fellow, that's right. This does go pretty deep.

• 39:09Speaker 02

  So, and then we can go from Will Manitis, he's obviously, you know, very popular on X.

• 39:13John Coogan?

  He is.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  Um, this is another kind of, well, I, at some point, there were too many strings. I didn't want to cover too much.

• 39:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  But there's a lot of connections here. Obviously, we can go down to Dworkesh.

• 39:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  So, he, he's kind of a, another superpower.

• 39:26John Coogan?

  He's a super connector, yeah. He's interviewed most of these folks.

• 39:29Speaker 02

  So let's go to, let's go from, from Dworkesh to Guern, right?

• 39:33John Coogan?

  Okay, yes.

• 39:34Speaker 02

  Guern, obviously connected scaling hypothesis, very influential on Ilya.

• 39:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  This obviously goes back to OpenAI.

• 39:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  Um, it also goes to Karpathy.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  Yes, one of the co-founders of OpenAI.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Yes, also Tesla, co, um, autopilot.

• 39:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Back to Elon.

• 39:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Um, okay, let's go to this side of the board here.

• 39:53John Coogan?

  Yes, who we got?

• 39:54Speaker 02

  So, let's, um...

• 39:56John Coogan?

  How is Scarlett Johansson involved?

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's a couple ways she's involved. So obviously, the first one, she was in Her, right?

• 40:03John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 40:05Speaker 02

  Famously, when OpenAI Voice Mode was coming out, they wanted to do her voice because that's like the movie. And then she was maybe suing.

• 40:13John Coogan?

  And was it Sam or the official OpenAI account that just tweeted "Her"? And that was seen as maybe...

• 40:18Speaker 02

  I believe it was Sam.

• 40:19John Coogan?

  Yes, and it was unclear if the licensing was proper at that point. So there was maybe some backlash, maybe some legal letters traded.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  Who else was in Her?

• 40:30John Coogan?

  Who else was in Her?

• 40:30Speaker 02

  Joaquin Phoenix.

• 40:31John Coogan?

  Yes, Joaquin Phoenix plays the...

• 40:32Speaker 02

  And he was also the Joker. This is not related to other things, but...

• 40:36John Coogan?

  We're getting Jokerfied. It will happen.

• 40:39Speaker 02

  So let's go back to ScarJo.

• 40:40John Coogan?

  In a fast takeoff, we all become Jokerfied.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  So she was in a movie with another actor.

• 40:44John Coogan?

  Yes, who?

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

• 40:45John Coogan?

  What movie?

• 40:47Speaker 02

  Don John, I believe it's called.

• 40:48John Coogan?

  That's right, Don John, yes. I remember that film.

• 40:51Speaker 02

  So who is Joseph Gordon-Levitt's wife? This goes deeper than I...

• 40:54John Coogan?

  Whoa, this does go deeper than I thought.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  Joseph Gordon-Levitt's wife was previously a board member of OpenAI during the ousting.

• 41:01John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  And took Sam Altman out.

• 41:02John Coogan?

  Wow, it's all connected.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  How can you not see this?

• 41:06John Coogan?

  It's so clear now.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  Okay, so now we're in kind of this, you know, outing, safety. Yes, this is all connected here, obviously, to Eliezer. It gets really jammed up in there. Yeah, because we can go from here to EA and then to Eliezer.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  Eliezer, of course.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Right, and here's, you know...

• 41:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  Eliezer's first organization, MIRI, Machine Intelligence Research Institute.

• 41:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  That was, I believe, early on funded by PT.

• 41:33John Coogan?

  Okay. How is Eliezer connected to Grimes? Is that Grimes on there?

• 41:38Speaker 02

  Well, okay, do you not remember this famous picture between Grimes, Eliezer, and Sam?

• 41:42John Coogan?

  Oh, I do remember this. Good sound cue. I completely forgot that image. That is lore.

• 41:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, so then, Eliezer, very influential on this famous book about safety, Superintelligence, by Nick Bostrom.

• 41:58John Coogan?

  Okay, Bostrom, yes.

• 42:00Speaker 02

  He is kind of this online...

• 42:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, philosopher.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  Almost part of the blogosphere a little bit.

• 42:05John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  And connected to Scott Alexander, right? Uh, who was on Dorkus's podcast.

• 42:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, he was AI 2027, part of that crew, right?

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Um.

• 42:14John Coogan?

  Or loose.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  No, he, he, he was a commentator on, oh, I guess he, I think he was actually an advisor on.

• 42:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  I don't know if he was a co-author, but.

• 42:20John Coogan?

  He was involved.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, he, he was involved.

• 42:21John Coogan?

  He's implicated. He's a, it's never been clear that there's a connection.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  So, so let's go, um, okay, let's go back to our cash from here. He was on the podcast.

• 42:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:30Speaker 02

  Um.

• 42:30John Coogan?

  How did Will, how did Will catch, uh, catch a red string just from being a poster on X? Oh, he also works at Open.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  He was just through, oh, uh, Will.

• 42:38Jordi Hays?

  The Pew.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  Oh, Will the Pew.

• 42:39John Coogan?

  The Pew.

• 42:40Speaker 02

  Oh, well, he's, yeah, I mean, he's at XAI, he, you know.

• 42:42John Coogan?

  No, no, he's, he's on X, he's at OpenAI, right?

• 42:45Speaker 02

  Uh, yes, yes.

• 42:46John Coogan?

  Okay, we're getting things mixed up here, got it.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  Um, okay, but, okay, we're at Dorkus.

• 42:51John Coogan?

  Yes, at Dorkus, back to Dorkus.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  Yes, an early guest of Dorkus was Tyler Cowen.

• 42:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Now.

• 42:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Tyler Cowen runs the, the Progress Studies Institute.

• 43:00John Coogan?

  Yes, that's correct.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  I think that's what it's called.

• 43:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  With Patrick Collison.

• 43:03John Coogan?

  Whoa, this does go, dude.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  Now, Patrick Collison, famous for being Irish.

• 43:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, oh, okay.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  And, and we see here, we see here, this is linked with a lot of, you know.

• 43:13John Coogan?

  Yes, who else is Irish?

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Irish cabal, some kind of.

• 43:16John Coogan?

  Interesting, the Hibernian conspiracy, yeah, Will O'Brien, of course.

• 43:19Speaker 02

  We see Will O'Brien, uh, we see Jordy John.

• 43:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're both Irish.

• 43:23Speaker 02

  Joe Lonsdale, I believe he is Irish.

• 43:25John Coogan?

  Oh, he's Irish? No way.

• 43:26Speaker 02

  I, I believe that's true.

• 43:27John Coogan?

  Did you?

• 43:28Speaker 02

  I have to fact check that.

• 43:29John Coogan?

  I have no idea.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  I think that's true, but, um, I mean, the, the main connection here is Ireland to the Illuminati.

• 43:36John Coogan?

  The Illuminati are Irish? Why are they Irish?

• 43:39Speaker 02

  Well, it's just, you know, general conspiracy. Um, and then here we get a little off the rails. You see George Soros and Fauci connected with, uh, the Illuminati as well.

• 43:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  Okay, so you're saying, you're saying we're one degree away.

• 43:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. We're not beating the allegations here, okay?

• 43:53Speaker 02

  Um, but, well, let's stick with Illuminati, let's go up to Brian Johnson, right?

• 43:56John Coogan?

  Okay, how is he connected to all this?

• 43:58Speaker 02

  Well, there's some sense, rumors about, um, you know, blood of, of children, maybe.

• 44:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Transfusion or something, but, but really Brian Johnson is part of this kind of health movement.

• 44:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  So who else is part of that? Obviously Andrew Huberman.

• 44:10John Coogan?

  Yes, Andrew Huberman, of course.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  Um, and so he's a, you know, health influencer.

• 44:14Jordi Hays?

  And then once you're, now you're kind of in the category of just experts broadly.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:17Jordi Hays?

  So that takes you over to Joe Rogan.

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Yes, obviously, because, you know, he's a he- health influencer, but really he's a podcaster at heart.

• 44:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 44:23Speaker 02

  Um, so, so now we're in this kind of manosphere. We see Theo Von, who's obviously connected in many ways. To Alexander Wang, to Zuck, to Sam.

• 44:34John Coogan?

  Theo Von's really, I mean, he could potentially be at the center of this whole thing.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 44:38John Coogan?

  Potentially, given how many connections he has.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  Really, in the past year, he's become kind of a tech power player.

• 44:41John Coogan?

  That's the point of all this, all this red string. You have to see who has the most connections. Mas has got two, TBPN has like 12.

• 44:49Jordi Hays?

  And I see raw milk up in the left corner.

• 44:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, how does raw milk fit in?

• 44:53Jordi Hays?

  You're kind of dancing around that. Are you afraid to talk about raw milk?

• 44:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, how does raw milk fit in?

• 44:57Speaker 02

  So we were at Joe Rogan. Let's go back to Andrew Heimann.

• 44:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  Another kind of person in the health, you know, area, Justin Mayer's.

• 45:04John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 45:04Speaker 02

  I believe.

• 45:05John Coogan?

  Former guest.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  He is a fan of raw milk.

• 45:07John Coogan?

  He's a fan of raw milk.

• 45:08Jordi Hays?

  He certainly is.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, but then we see the second string here. Let's just follow this down.

• 45:12John Coogan?

  How does raw milk?

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Jordy.

• 45:14John Coogan?

  Oh, Jordy implicated.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  Not feeding the raw milk allegations.

• 45:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  But then.

• 45:19Jordi Hays?

  Cuban was taking.

• 45:21John Coogan?

  Cuban was anti, but he's not on the.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  He didn't make the board.

• 45:24John Coogan?

  He didn't make the board because he's not implicated.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  He would have made the board. I think the next iteration is 3D board.

• 45:29Jordi Hays?

  What's going on with Larry up there in the center?

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Larry's.

• 45:34John Coogan?

  Who is he connected to?

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Larry's implicated in a lot of ways, so let's just stay here for a second. So we're in this kind of, you know, podcasting space. Obviously, David Senra.

• 45:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  James Dyson.

• 45:43John Coogan?

  James Dyson, yeah. Latest episode.

• 45:45Jordi Hays?

  Look, I mean, this is a very pure, that's the most pure placement on the board, right?

• 45:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 45:49Jordi Hays?

  Hanging out on his own, just connected to Senra.

• 45:51John Coogan?

  He's connected to, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. James Dyson's just in his lane, just hanging out and found his podcast.

• 45:56Speaker 02

  Exactly. But let's go from Senra to Larry Ellison, right? There's been, I think.

• 46:02John Coogan?

  Three episodes.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  I think three episodes, yeah, on Larry Ellison.

• 46:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  Larry Ellison is also connected in a lot of ways to Sam because of the, you know, the deal, but also to Elon.

• 46:13John Coogan?

  Elon.

• 46:14Speaker 02

  Right, this famous.

• 46:15John Coogan?

  He wrote a billion dollar check.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I think, I recommend 2 billion, but whatever you think, you know.

• 46:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Help fund the buyout. I see Rahul Sunwoker on there.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah. So Rahul is kind of an interesting person here. So he's connected to. Growing Daniel, obviously, because they did this famous stunt.

• 46:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  His company is in YC.

• 46:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  Which, again, I think we covered YC before, but obviously Sam.

• 46:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it all adds up now.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's pretty obvious there. Delian, YC. YC is also, I mean, there's not a lot of strings here, but you can, you could, you know, pull a lot of strings.

• 46:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 02

  Just from YC.

• 46:50John Coogan?

  Now, take me through the chessboard. What's going on over there?

• 46:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So, so let's go, um, let's just start with PT again, right? So, famous chess.

• 46:56John Coogan?

  It all comes back.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  Famous chess player.

• 46:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  So, obviously, connection there. David Sacks also.

• 47:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, they played chess together.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's that famous photo where, where Sacks is beating him.

• 47:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  And then, yeah, we see from chess, we see two other famous chess players.

• 47:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 47:10Speaker 02

  Botas, Sisters, and Magnus Carlsen.

• 47:12John Coogan?

  Clearly related to this.

• 47:14Speaker 02

  They were, I believe they were speaking at the All In Summit.

• 47:17John Coogan?

  Oh, they were.

• 47:18Speaker 02

  I don't know about this most recent one, but in the past, they certainly have.

• 47:21John Coogan?

  Puzzle pieces are starting to fit together.

• 47:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so chess is, is, is a board game, right? What's another board game? Go. Lee Seedol.

• 47:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 47:28Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Famous, let me, let me go over here.

• 47:31John Coogan?

  Also cigarette smoker.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah. Lee Seedol go to smoke. During the, the famous DeepMind AlphaGo.

• 47:38John Coogan?

  That's what happened, yeah. I remember.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  So, so then, obviously, Dennis. Yep.

• 47:42John Coogan?

  DeepMind.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Then we, we see the rest of, of Google here. We see Eric Schmidt, again, connected to PT.

• 47:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  And, you know, their famous debate.

• 47:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  You know.

• 47:50John Coogan?

  Is that Will Brown?

• 47:52Speaker 02

  Will Brown.

• 47:52John Coogan?

  How is he connected?

• 47:53Speaker 02

  So, so Will Brown is.

• 47:54Jordi Hays?

  I think you're letting him off easy here.

• 47:56Speaker 02

  Will Brown is teal-backed.

• 47:57John Coogan?

  Okay, yes.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  Because it's prime intellect.

• 47:59John Coogan?

  Prime intellect, of course.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  He's also frequent, um, engager.

• 48:03John Coogan?

  Reply guy?

• 48:04Speaker 02

  With, reply guy.

• 48:05John Coogan?

  That'll get you on the board these days. If you're a reply guy into Rune.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:09John Coogan?

  If you're going back and forth to Rune, you're on the board.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  There's also a lot of strings coming out up here. He's, he's, has his hands in a lot of, a lot of places.

• 48:15John Coogan?

  Yes. Fingers in a lot of pies.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 48:17Jordi Hays?

  Donald Boat.

• 48:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, how's Donald Boat linked?

• 48:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, so Donald Boat was also one that I, I could have had a lot more strings coming from. But the main one, I mean, Donald Boat's real, recent rise to fame was, was asking, um, Sam for a GPU.

• 48:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  Which was sent.

• 48:34Jordi Hays?

  And he also just offered Sam some rice. I think he's.

• 48:37John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 48:38Jordi Hays?

  He looked, he got about 600 pounds of rice on some, uh, online arbitrage, and he was offering it up.

• 48:45John Coogan?

  Symbolism will be his downfall, potentially. Let's figure it out.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  And then obviously, Will was also

• 48:51John Coogan?

  shook down.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  heavily implicated in these kind of Donald boat sagas.

• 48:54John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. I believe he sent him a CPU case or something.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  I think, I mean, those are, I would say those are mostly the broad strokes.

• 49:01Jordi Hays?

  I think you're close to figuring it out.

• 49:03John Coogan?

  I think it's pretty clear now. I think I understand.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that's kind of like, if you want to think about OpenAI in like, an easy way, like who's kind of, who's, who's kind of, you know, making a lot of the decisions? How are they being influenced?

• 49:13John Coogan?

  This is the simple, simple way to understand OpenAI.

• 49:16Speaker 02

  I would say this is kind of a good picture. It's a good place to start.

• 49:19John Coogan?

  Who the, who the players are.

• 49:20Jordi Hays?

  Mas, you didn't cover Mas, but he's, he's sitting, you know, sort of quietly, confident, you know?

• 49:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:25Jordi Hays?

  Not totally in his own lane, but not, you know?

• 49:28John Coogan?

  So he's the connection between Sam Altman and Donald Trump on Stargate. Because he was, he was announcing the Stargate project at the.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  Obviously, Trump has linked to a lot of these people like, you know, Sergey.

• 49:39John Coogan?

  David Sacks.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  Just because of the, the recent dinner.

• 49:41John Coogan?

  Oh, yes. They had dinner together. That merits some string.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Here's the sheik of UAE.

• 49:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Uh, I think there is some Stargate development going on in UAE.

• 49:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're working on it.

• 49:52Speaker 02

  Um.

• 49:54John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for taking it, taking us through it all. It's pretty crystal clear to me, Jordy. What do you think?

• 49:59Jordi Hays?

  I mean, yeah, I mean, it's surprised it took people this long to kind of crack the code.

• 50:04John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 50:05Jordi Hays?

  It's all been, it's all been out there in the open.

• 50:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:07Jordi Hays?

  Symbolism will be their downfall.

• 50:09John Coogan?

  Pretty, pretty easy, pretty easy to figure out. Well, thank you for the hard work, Tyler.

• 50:13Jordi Hays?

  Well done, well done. All it took was one intern and an all-nighter.

• 50:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:18Jordi Hays?

  And I guess a gap semester.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  We got to load up all this into Julius and analyze it, find more connections. What analysis? Do you want to run chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds? We saw Raul up on the board. They're loved by over 2 million users and trusted by individuals at Princeton, BCG and Zapier. Let's continue. Rune, also on the board, was on the timeline, talking about, making the argument that we are currently in the fast takeoff scenario. Very fun post. He says, "Right now is the time where the takeoff looks the most rapid to insiders. We don't program anymore. We just yell at Codex agents, but may look slow to everyone else as the general chatbot medium saturates."

• 51:03John Coogan?

  And so, Prinz, there's a bunch of reactions to this. We'll go through it. Prinz says, Fast takeoff does not require automation of AI research. The loop starts when AI researcher's productivity starts accelerating due to availability of better and better AI models, including coding agents. Super Dario says, this is a little bit of confusing post, but he says, "Dario was wrong about 90% of coding being done by AI boys in shambles." So if you were thinking that 90% of coding would not be done by AI, you are in shambles because 90% of coding is being done by AI.

• 51:41Jordi Hays?

  And we have Alex, who's running Codex at OpenAI, coming on later today.

• 51:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, we will press him on, are we just writing 10 times as much code? Or are we writing the same amount of code, just 90% more efficiently? What's actually going on?

• 51:58Jordi Hays?

  Are we replacing engineers yet? Or are we just, now that engineers can do 10 times as much?

• 52:04John Coogan?

  Is it just more leverage? Yes. What abstraction layer are we operating in? And then also just how much is just raw coding a gate to better and better superintelligence? Is that the critical path? Is it just an engineering problem where you need to write a lot of code? Or is there something where we need a vast amount of? I was listening to Mark Zuckerberg on Dorkesh this morning, and he was saying that he's not a believer in fast takeoff because he thinks that at a certain point, it just takes time to marshal the resources to build all the chips and a certain amount of time to build all the infrastructure to generate all the electricity, and that that will act as a natural slowing function. But there's some good economic news.

• 52:49John Coogan?

  There's a variety of different data points that we've been looking at to track. How fast of a takeoff are we in? Are we going exponential? Or are we on our sigmoid grind set? And will we be plateauing at some

• 53:01Jordi Hays?

  That'd be a good name for somebody's alt account.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  Sigoid Grindset. I mean, it's a progress historically has been a series of sigoid functions. And overall, progress looks smooth when you zoom out. But if you go inside of a of a chip company, inside of Intel, like the creators of Moore's Law. Moore's Law looks very smooth. But if you actually interview the people inside of Intel, they'll tell you that there were tons of little gains that then plateaued. They added all those up to get incremental gains. And when you zoom out, you see the the the density of the transistors and the cost per performance increasing exponentially. But it was a lot of hard fought wins along the way.

• 53:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:44John Coogan?

  And we're probably seeing something similar in AI. Well, if you need a generative media platform, if you're a developer, go to Fall. The world's best generative image, video and audio models, all in one place, develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on demand clusters.

• 54:00Jordi Hays?

  Look at those logos, John. Adobe, Shopify, Canva, Core, Perplexity.

• 54:04John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 54:04Jordi Hays?

  Gen Spark and many more.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  Dean Ball is replying to Rune. He says, if this mirrors anything like the experience of other frontier lab employees, and anecdotally it does, it would suggest that Dario's much mocked prediction about AI writing 90% of code was indeed correct, at least for those among whom AI diffusion is happening quickest. And and Mark Zuckerberg's been on the record saying that he thinks that Meta will write 90% of code with AI as well. And Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has also said that the amount of code that's being written by AI is growing exponentially and is probably on the path to being 90% AI written.

• 54:45John Coogan?

  Certainly haven't laid off 90% of the engineers, and so there's some interesting dynamic going on there. But we'll continue to monitor it.

• 54:53Jordi Hays?

  On Janey at Andreessen.

• 54:55John Coogan?

  He's been on a tear. He's posting.

• 54:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's been posting it up. He says AI models with consumption, consumption, usage-based pricing are decimating seat-based pricing in ways most teams don't understand yet. SaaS apocalypse in full swing. He had some good supporting charts on that yesterday showing a bunch of, you know, seat-based SaaS companies down and to the right.

• 55:18John Coogan?

  Yep. Yeah, very tricky. We've seen some of them reposition. I mean, Salesforce, I think like over a year ago, Marc Benioff was saying like, we're going to outcomes-based pricing on AI agents. We're gonna, we're gonna charge per resolution, per value. But it feels like some of these models are really sticky and some, a lot of the clients are like, we like our current setup, or we're gonna go somewhere else. And it certainly allowed other people to kind of eat off their.

• 55:47Jordi Hays?

  Outcomes-based pricing, when you're providing software to manage a process, is difficult.

• 55:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:53Jordi Hays?

  Because if somebody's selling, for example, like coding agents and the agent can do something, and there's a certain economic value to that, and somebody's saying, well, if I had an engineer do this, it would have taken them this much time. It has like a clear value. But if somebody's using Salesforce to close a $20 million deal, are they gonna want to pay Salesforce some percentage of that just because they had that when it could have been, you know, one, sales rep, just like grinding to get that deal done?

• 56:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, lots of, lots of questions for the public company SaaS CEOs. A lot of them will have to set up new narratives for how their pricing works going forward. They should be able to bring their products in line with consumption-based models, but I wonder how difficult it will be for them to actually convince their customers to switch over to something that's more.

• 56:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, which the, the alternative is, I mean.

• 56:54Jordi Hays?

  You know, Palantir specifically has said, you know, we're doing value-based pricing, right? You're gonna get this much value from what we're doing for you.

• 57:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:05Jordi Hays?

  And we're gonna charge you this much.

• 57:06John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:06Jordi Hays?

  And you can run the calculus.

• 57:07John Coogan?

  Prices are high.

• 57:09Jordi Hays?

  So prices are high, but the example, I think we were covering yesterday, said, if somebody's willing to pay $10 million to do something that's gonna make or save them $100 million, that's a trade that, you know, people will take.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does seem, it does seem highly aligned when it can work. And so, I mean, it makes sense that so many of these companies that have the new business model are kind of ramping so quickly. And that's certainly the, the result of the, like, those crazy revenue ramps that we've been seeing. Anyway, get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT with Profound, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Get a demo. David Senna has some sage advice from David Ogilvy.

• 57:51Jordi Hays?

  Investor in Profound.

• 57:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 57:53Jordi Hays?

  He rarely invests.

• 57:54John Coogan?

  Rarely. David Senna says, quoting David Ogilvy, "I admire people who work with gusto. If you don't enjoy what you are doing, I beg you to find another job. Remember the Scottish proverb, be happy while you're living, for you're a long time dead." It's a good message. Find something that you love doing and stick with it. Work with gusto. And he's not talking.

• 58:19Jordi Hays?

  What's going on here with World Labs?

• 58:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. If we can pull this video up. So this is one of the latest persistent generative 3D world. So World Labs is Fei-Fei Li's project. She's hiring generative AI model optimization engineers, biz ops folks, research engineers, lots of different folks. But they have a new world model that we can play the video for and see this. This is generated in real time. I think they upload a single image and then you can move around it. And all of this is, he like the music.

• 58:59John Coogan?

  It's pretty remarkable. Yeah, I mean, it does feel like a video game.

• 59:03Jordi Hays?

  It's very pleasant.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  I have a big question about how this product ties us still. I was noodling on it months ago, or maybe it was a few weeks ago, when Google came out with their model. Tyler, do you remember that?

• 59:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so this is, were you talking about like the the video model that you can control around?

• 59:25John Coogan?

  Yep, yeah, this is the same thing, right?

• 59:27Speaker 02

  Uh, no, so this is different. So this is, you can actually go on, if you go to marble.worldlabs.ai. Yeah, I'm on here right now. It's pretty...

• 59:37John Coogan?

  You can play with it?

• 59:38Speaker 02

  Yes, so if you move it around, it's basically, it's a Gaussian splat.

• 59:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  So it's like, looks really good, and then if you keep going, you'll you'll start to notice like the little artifacts and stuff. And then if you go far enough away from like, kind of the center spot where the world was originally generated, you'll notice it's like, you know, completely like random, like.

• 59:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 59:59Speaker 02

  Yes, this is a different, completely different architecture than the Google thing.

• 1:00:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, because that was basically just a video model.

• 1:00:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  But it would have the overlay of the keyboard, and then when you would interact with the keyboard, it would overlay like the keystrokes onto the video, and then it would continually be like rendering new frames.

• 1:00:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  So this is just like, this one, it generates the world, the Gaussian splat once, and you can just like move around in it, but it's not like a video that's constantly being rendered.

• 1:00:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, oh, it looks really weird. This is bizarre. Yeah, I remember Gaussian splats being popular like a year or two ago.

• 1:00:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  And then they sort of fell out of favor. It felt like they were very compute intense just to generate a single one, and we never got to like the one-click app that people can just download and then play with. There was no like game mechanic built around it. It was very much like tech preview mode.

• 1:00:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I am... The the big thing that came out with Gaussian splats like, yeah, probably a year ago, was that it became very easy to render your own. So like, I made one, I think it's on my website, but it's basically like my room that I made. And if you have like a, if you can shoot on RAW, you basically take a ton of pictures of your room from all different, or whatever it is, from a bunch of different angles, then you can like

• 1:01:19John Coogan?

  Load those up.

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  You load those up, you you basically train a model to figure out where the images were taken.

• 1:01:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  And then from there, you you can train a model from that, which you can do on like,

• 1:01:26John Coogan?

  It replicates everything.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I trained it locally on my on my PC.

• 1:01:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  So it's not that comput-

• 1:01:30John Coogan?

  Do you remember like roughly how long the training run took on?

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  So I have a 40 90, it took like 45 minutes.

• 1:01:37John Coogan?

  So it's not that bad?

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, not bad at all.

• 1:01:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  But this-

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  So you can, you imagine with some, with some optimization, you could wind up, and if you're running on server quality hardware, you could imagine an iPhone app where you take some pictures, upload it, and then it's like push notification in five minutes or 10 minutes.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:01:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  But this is the first kind of thing, at least I've seen of where it's like totally like generated. Like, I mean, usually when you see a Gaussian splat, it's of like a real physical location that someone's taken like drone shots of or something. But like, I mean, these are very clearly like AI generated in some way, like they're, maybe they trained on video games or something like that. But yeah, usually when you see a Gaussian splat, it's of like a physical location.

• 1:02:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you think of any like practical application for these? Everyone always says like, oh, you'll use it to train robots or robotic models or something. Like, this is like synthetic data for for training robot, like robotic systems. But I I feel like there's a consumer app in here somewhere, whether it's like generating video game levels or something, or like using this as some sort of pipeline for creation of some video game. I I keep, I keep wondering, and this is a question we'll have to talk to the meta team about tomorrow. I keep wondering about the-

• 1:03:02John Coogan?

  Like, we're, we're getting close to a point where someone should be able to make a game as easy as they make a meme and post it on Instagram. But there isn't really a place where that lives right now. We've talked to a couple of YC companies that are like, we will vibe code an app for you that you can put in the, in, straight to test flight. But I feel like they're, like, we're, we're, we're gonna do a deep dive on Roblox at some point, but I feel like there's like, something that's going to happen in like, AI-enabled Roblox world, where you, you can, you can kind of like, describe and be leveraging a lot of AI tools to describe a world.

• 1:03:45Jordi Hays?

  Do you think the Roblox for AI will be Roblox?

• 1:03:47John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:03:48Jordi Hays?

  Cause they're definitely not asleep at the wheel here.

• 1:03:50John Coogan?

  They're definitely not.

• 1:03:50Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get some of their updated numbers. I, I think they were pulling.

• 1:03:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Brandon sent me the, the, the data. We're gonna do a whole deep dive on it. It's, it's pretty remarkable.

• 1:04:01Jordi Hays?

  We should probably...

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  It's in, it's in the deck at some point, but...

• 1:04:03Jordi Hays?

  We should probably set up an UltraDome in Roblox that people can watch the show to get the next generation, you know, hooked on.

• 1:04:10John Coogan?

  Yep. So, Dextero has a post here, so that says, "Steal a brain rot game has broken all-time high concurrent player records. Roblox topped out at 23.4 million, well Fortnite reached 542,000?" Are these similar products?

• 1:04:29Jordi Hays?

  So, the platform-wide record, I guess, was August 23rd. Roblox hit a record of 47.4 million players simultaneously across the platform.

• 1:04:39John Coogan?

  Wow. That is a ton. "Roblox by itself has more monthly concurrent users than all of Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation combined." And Jeremiah Johnson says, "Even the most chronically online people have no idea how staggeringly unfathomably big Roblox is right now." Is Roblox a public company?

• 1:05:01Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:05:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, right, they got out.

• 1:05:03Jordi Hays?

  They, they, they had a Hindenburg research.

• 1:05:05John Coogan?

  Whoa, Hindenburg got blown out then because Roblox is way up. Uh, it's a ninety-four billion dollar company now. Uh, there's, uh, isn't there, I think, I think there's a VC that, uh, David Senra did a sh- did an episode about, or at least like met, uh, and, and kind of did a deep dive on, um, who, uh, who invested very early and did very well. Um, fantastic. Do you, do you have any more context to add?

• 1:05:32Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, not about Roblox specifically, but I think broadly, like for, for gaming, I think there's kind of like two ways to think about like how, how we can have AI gaming. So, so one is like the Google kind of strategy of what they've been doing where it's like the frames are literally like rendered realtime.

• 1:05:48John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  Um, where everything is like all the mechanics, all the, you know, the person, the, the setting, it's all completely like generated on the fly.

• 1:05:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:57Speaker 02

  And then there's like this kind of strategy, which is where like the world is generated, but you're still gonna have, um, like the, the mechanics of the game is still gonna be like written normally.

• 1:06:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:07Speaker 02

  Um, so like i- if you, if you play around with this, you'll notice like there's no mechanics at all. You just, you can move around, but there's no interaction or anything. Um, I assume they're, they're working on like.

• 1:06:17John Coogan?

  Inventory, health bar.

• 1:06:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, or, or even just like you can't go through the wall.

• 1:06:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:23Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, so, yeah, I, I guess we'll see, um, but.

• 1:06:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I wonder, i- it feels like it'll be really slow, like I haven't even heard about a.

• 1:06:34Jordi Hays?

  Gabe says IKEA has a Roblox store that they pay employees a real wage to work at.

• 1:06:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's hilarious. So you can go shop in, in Roblox. You can buy stuff in the, in the metaverse, this is the metaverse.

• 1:06:45Jordi Hays?

  I wonder what kind of sales that drives or if it's just.

• 1:06:47John Coogan?

  It's just seventy-five percent of Roblox revenue or something, just printing for IKEA. It's probably, Roblox has got to be bigger than IKEA. What's IKEA's market cap? IKEA market cap, let's see. Oh, it's wait, not, it's private. Interesting. Okay. Private company. Um, anyway, um, I.

• 1:07:08Jordi Hays?

  John, I don't know, their IKEA's revenue, I think, is well beyond.

• 1:07:12John Coogan?

  Roblox.

• 1:07:12Jordi Hays?

  Way, way beyond.

• 1:07:13John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. How, how big is it?

• 1:07:14Jordi Hays?

  Her twenty twenty four was forty five billion euros.

• 1:07:17John Coogan?

  Okay. But, you know, it's not SaaS margins here. Like, there is a marginal cost to making a table and shipping it. Um, but yeah, I mean, it's a fantastic business.

• 1:07:28Jordi Hays?

  Order magnitude more.

• 1:07:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, I, I do wonder, um, like, it feels like even the basic L L Ms, like, we've passed the Turing test. We have the ability to just, like, talk to an N P C in a way that's more convincing than the pre-scripted chats that go into most video games. And yet I still haven't at least heard like a successful story of just a game that broke through that's really leveraging like G P T four level technology.

• 1:07:57Jordi Hays?

  So interesting.

• 1:07:58John Coogan?

  And even, and even the generated images, like, just being able to use a, you know, older mid-journey model to generate textures on the fly. There's this game called No Man's Sky. Are you familiar with this? Probably not. Uh, are you familiar with No Man's Sky?

• 1:08:13Speaker 02

  I've never played it, but I.

• 1:08:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. So i- it's a space exploration game. You, you, you move around from, from, uh, from planet to planet. And all the planets are procedurally generated. So they're, they're generated somewhat randomly. Um, but then they are like baked down into a database. And so there's a whole bunch of different variables that are randomly like different sliders for like the size of the creatures on this particular planet. The color of the plants on this planet.

• 1:08:40Jordi Hays?

  How much water?

• 1:08:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Uh, and all of that's generated and then saved into the database and then, uh, but it, but it creates this like kind of unlimited canvas to explore. You could do that in a much more aggressive way with generative A I, but, um, I haven't seen anyone break through. I think it just takes time to actually implement this stuff.

• 1:09:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I, I mean, that's kind of what like Genie three is.

• 1:09:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Speaker 02

  I remembered what it was called.

• 1:09:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, Genie three.

• 1:09:05Speaker 02

  But it's just so compute intensive. I mean, they still are like, it's very much a research preview that like, they can't run because it's so expensive.

• 1:09:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, you would just think that there would be a, uh. Like, uh, like, if you go two versions back, you get a model that can actually be baked down to the point where it can run on an Xbox or run on a PC and can generate-

• 1:09:27Jordi Hays?

  All right, gamers. I've got some breaking news for you.

• 1:09:30John Coogan?

  Give us the breaking news.

• 1:09:31Jordi Hays?

  TikTok's US business, uh, details are starting to emerge. One, the deadline for the ban has been pushed back.

• 1:09:39John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:39Jordi Hays?

  Um, and details are coming out. The Journal has some reporting-

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  What's the poly market at? Let's pull that up.

• 1:09:45Jordi Hays?

  Poly market is-

• 1:09:47John Coogan?

  Must be crashing, right?

• 1:09:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so right now, there is a 24% chance that a sale will be announced by September 30th.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:09:55Jordi Hays?

  60% chance that it'll be announced by, uh, the end of the year.

• 1:10:00John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:10:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, the Journal is reporting that, uh, TikTok's US business would, uh, may be controlled by a consortium including Oracle, Silver Lake-

• 1:10:12John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 1:10:13Jordi Hays?

  And, guess the last one.

• 1:10:16John Coogan?

  Larry Ellison, personally.

• 1:10:18Jordi Hays?

  Andreessen Horowitz.

• 1:10:18John Coogan?

  Andreessen Horowitz.

• 1:10:20Jordi Hays?

  Under a framework, the US and China are finalizing as talks shift into high gear-

• 1:10:24John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:10:24Jordi Hays?

  The arrangement discussed by US and Chinese negotiators in Madrid this week, remember, we talked to Bill Bishop yesterday about the meeting in Madrid, uh, would create a new US entity to operate the app, with US investors holding a roughly 80% stake and Chinese shareholders owning the rest. The people said, "This new company would also have an American-dominated board with one member designated by the US government." Existing users in, I wonder if Trump ends up with a, with a stake for Uncle Sam.

• 1:10:52John Coogan?

  For the Uncle Sam.

• 1:10:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, "Existing users in the US would be asked to shift to a new app, which TikTok has built and is testing." People familiar with the matter said, "TikTok engineers will recreate a set of content recommendation algorithms for the app, using technology license from TikTok's parent, ByteDance."

• 1:11:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:11:11John Coogan?

  Ify?

• 1:11:13Jordi Hays?

  U.S. software giant Oracle, a longtime TikTok partner, would handle user data at its facilities in Texas. Both sides are still working out the final details of what the proposed deal and terms could change. Negotiations over TikTok came as both Washington and Beijing lay the groundwork for potential meeting between President Trump and Xi, with Beijing pushing for a Trump visit to China. That would be, that would be crazy. They said, "Thank you for..." They want to be, they want that meeting to happen somewhere where Trump can't fly the raiders.

• 1:11:43John Coogan?

  The Alaska shot, that was wild.

• 1:11:46Jordi Hays?

  TikTok plan to comply with U.S. law tech industry executives argue its algorithms must be created and maintained by an American engineering team insulated from Chinese influence. Beyond the financial terms, deciding how to handle TikTok's algorithm has been a tricky part of the deal because it is seen as arguably the most lucrative part of the company. We've got a deal on TikTok. I've reached a deal with China. I'm going to speak with President Xi on Friday to confirm. Trump's set out of the White House Tuesday morning before leaving for a trip to the UK. These are very big companies that want to buy it. Framework of the arrangement came together. Anyway, it's starting to just repeat itself here. But this is big.

• 1:12:26John Coogan?

  Well, if they want to manage their software development process in the new American TikTok, they 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. I think if Andreessen's buying it, it's got to be all Mark and Ben show. The whole feed, 100% of TikTok content should be the Mark and Ben show.

• 1:12:49Jordi Hays?

  They saw Elon, the attention he gets on X.

• 1:12:51John Coogan?

  A16Z, it's a media company that monetizes through venture. Put the Andreessen content, put your thumb on the scale. Brent, Eric Torrenberg, we want your thumb on the scale.

• 1:13:01Jordi Hays?

  Every other post.

• 1:13:03John Coogan?

  Give TBN a little bit of a snack in the new TikTok, but I want mostly Andreessen Horowitz content with a couple American dynasties and vibe reels, please. That will make America great again. This is the plan.

• 1:13:14Jordi Hays?

  One A16Z portfolio company launch video, one Mark and Ben clip.

• 1:13:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:13:19Jordi Hays?

  One regular.

• 1:13:20John Coogan?

  Just make the whole feed, every single TikTok user, they'll love it. There won't be any backlash. I want the thumb on the scale. Truly, I would, I would, I would, that would get me to use TikTok. I enjoy the Mark and Ben show. I enjoy Andreessen's content. It'd be a lot of fun. Anyway, our buddies over at public.com launched a new account on X that you can use to just tag like Ask Grok. Grok is this true? You can tag at underscore, at Jen underscore assets. And you can tag it in any thread that mentions multiple tickers and this bot will automatically run a back test on their performance against the S and P 500. So I went to a post that was about Tesla and Google and I asked, how are they doing as a pair? And it immediately told

• 1:14:05John Coogan?

  me that I massively missed out because over the last 10 years, those two stocks, the tech titans, as they're called here, had 10 year returns of 7,548%. Of course, you'd have to, you'd have to deal with a max drawdown of 56%. But if you held, you did very well with a 70% annual return. And it gives you the, it gives you the, the link right there if you want to jump in to that. So if you're interested in investing, head over to public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously.

• 1:14:36Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:14:36John Coogan?

  Ashwin, who is, we, we've featured him on the show before. Ashwin says he's opening a coffee shop in Southern California. Here's how he's going to win. He's going to open at 5:00 AM. He'll have baristas from New York, so it doesn't take eight minutes to make your cortado. I don't know what a cortado is. That must be some sort of coffee beverage, but I like the idea of opening early. We were running into this earlier. We, we left the gym and there's this, there's this cool new cafe on the corner that's making a big push into breakfast. They don't start serving breakfast till 9:00 AM. And we were, we were like, they're, they didn't get the memo about the great lock-in. Like you can't, how can you compete in the great breakfast wars?

• 1:15:15Jordi Hays?

  I've always thought it's funny. Have you, have you, have you tried to get a coffee early in Manhattan?

• 1:15:20John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:15:20Jordi Hays?

  It's terrible.

• 1:15:21John Coogan?

  It is.

• 1:15:22Jordi Hays?

  If you're a true-

• 1:15:22John Coogan?

  I thought, Ashwin is saying that it's the best in New York.

• 1:15:26Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, I've had a rough, I mean, if you wake up at 5:30 in New York, good luck getting a coffee that's not, you know, something, something pre-made at Whole Foods or whatever.

• 1:15:37John Coogan?

  Gotta bring a, bring up a case of the Matteina, I'd cast in a can.

• 1:15:41Jordi Hays?

  This post was funny, that Zoolander-ification of Kyle Simoni should be studied.

• 1:15:45John Coogan?

  He's looking great.

• 1:15:46Jordi Hays?

  He's looking absolutely fantastic. Called a glow up.

• 1:15:49John Coogan?

  It's a glow up.

• 1:15:50Jordi Hays?

  I think this happens, I've seen this happen to other people that make billions of dollars. It tends to happen, but it's not always, and I love to see it.

• 1:15:59John Coogan?

  He locked in, he's clearly hitting the gym, he's looking fantastic. I think this last image is from his guest spot on our show, too.

• 1:16:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the very last one on the right.

• 1:16:07John Coogan?

  Uh, so I'm glad that we're, uh, we're helping people understand the Zoolander-ification.

• 1:16:13Jordi Hays?

  Bro sold buccal fat to fund, uh, the Treasury company.

• 1:16:16John Coogan?

  I think he's just working out, he's just getting in the gym.

• 1:16:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:19John Coogan?

  We'll have to get his routine, we got Alex Karp's workout routine, we'll have to get everyone's workout routine.

• 1:16:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Geiger Capital here, S and P 500, all-time high, NASDAQ, all-time high, gold, all-time high, bitcoin, all-time high, home prices, all-time high. Time to cut rates.

• 1:16:38John Coogan?

  Time to cut rates, cheers. Geiger Capital was on a tear, another post, uh, the Atlanta Fed is now projecting the Q3 GDP will be 3.4% a massive expansion. The US economy is running hot. Uh, I mean, GDP growth is, is, is good, I wouldn't really call that running, I mean, it's running a little hot, but you don't necessarily want to pull that back if you're, if you're gone.

• 1:16:58Jordi Hays?

  So hard now, it's, it's, uh,

• 1:17:00John Coogan?

  We're in a fast take-off scenario.

• 1:17:01Jordi Hays?

  All data is, all data is, uh, is either real or fake, that's all I'll say.

• 1:17:07John Coogan?

  I know what's driving the, the higher GDP growth, for sure. It's businesses spending less time on sales tax compliance.

• 1:17:14Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 1:17:15John Coogan?

  Uh, they got on numeral, numeralhq.com. They put their sales tax on autopilot. They're spending less than five minutes a month on sales tax compliance and now they're growing their businesses. They're growing the US economy. It's all great.

• 1:17:25Jordi Hays?

  Like crazy.

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  America empire continues. Uh, the most extraordinary Fed meeting has yet to be kicked off or has yet has just kicked off. This is from CNN. Uh, Federal Reserve officials are convening Tuesday and Wednesday for a pivotal meeting under unprecedented circumstances on Wednesday. At the conclusion of their two-day policy meeting, central bankers are expected to announce their first interest rate cut since December to support America's slower, slowing labor market, um, with hopes that President Donald Trump's expensive tariffs might only have a limited impact.

• 1:17:57Jordi Hays?

  So the Fed decision in September on polymarket has 163 million of volume.

• 1:18:03John Coogan?

  Betting on it.

• 1:18:03Jordi Hays?

  They're currently pricing, that's total volume, but they're currently pricing, uh, 95, 95% chance of a 25, uh, uh, basis point decrease. So.

• 1:18:16John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I mean, the market's at all time highs, gold's at all time highs, bitcoins at all times, all time highs, but, uh, drop growth during the summer was anemic, says CNN business. Employers added an average of about 29,000 jobs in three months ending in August, according to Labor Department data, slightly higher than July's average, which is the weakest three-month pace since 2010 outside of the pandemic. There are now more unemployed people seeking work than there are job openings. New applications for jobless benefits in the week ending September 6th rose to the highest level in early, nearly four years. Uh, if the Fed cuts, maybe that will stimulate investment in business, new,

• 1:18:56John Coogan?

  uh, uh, you know, take on extra debt. That works its way through the economy. You wind up levering up and then hiring.

• 1:19:05Jordi Hays?

  You know something crazy? Martin Shkreli shorting open door.

• 1:19:08John Coogan?

  Oh, he is.

• 1:19:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, right.

• 1:19:10John Coogan?

  Is this happening?

• 1:19:10Jordi Hays?

  Going into a rate cut is crazy.

• 1:19:12John Coogan?

  That is bold.

• 1:19:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he said, "I shorted open today at $9.36. This is the first rate I've made in the stock. I will be doing diligence calls with former employees, customers, competitors, and hopefully management, too. I will send invites to the calls or anonymous transcripts as appropriate." So.

• 1:19:30John Coogan?

  He's becoming a provocateur. Yeah, I mean, he's, he's taking up the mantle of so many short sellers before him. Not, won't be making a lot of friends, but good luck to him.

• 1:19:45John Coogan?

  We already covered TikTok. You put this post in here in Brazil, an Australian pilot.

• 1:19:51Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you know, you know why I put this in here, John?

• 1:19:53John Coogan?

  Yes. Why did you put this in here? Well, tell us the story and then explain why you.

• 1:19:57Jordi Hays?

  Yes, this popped up. In Brazil, an Australian pilot Timothy James Clark died in a plane crash with 180 kilograms of cocaine onboard.

• 1:20:07John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:20:07Jordi Hays?

  Drugs packaged with SpaceX branding.

• 1:20:10John Coogan?

  Yes, why SpaceX branding?

• 1:20:12Jordi Hays?

  No idea. That's why. I just thought it was totally true.

• 1:20:15John Coogan?

  It's a tech story.

• 1:20:16Jordi Hays?

  It's really, yeah.

• 1:20:17John Coogan?

  You, you, you saw SpaceX and you were like, this is business news.

• 1:20:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, you know, I like following the.

• 1:20:22John Coogan?

  You love the traffickers. You love.

• 1:20:24Jordi Hays?

  It puts me to sleep and I can't, I can't, when I'm trying to fall asleep, I can't listen to, I can't watch tech content and my brain's gonna start working.

• 1:20:30John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:20:31Jordi Hays?

  I have to just follow the.

• 1:20:34John Coogan?

  So the drugs were packaged with SpaceX branding. They were recovered from the wreckage of a sling aircraft.

• 1:20:39Jordi Hays?

  I just, I just need to know the mindset of somebody who's like packaging, making, making drugs look like they're SpaceX branding, thinking, okay, if the authorities find this.

• 1:20:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:51Jordi Hays?

  They're just gonna be like, oh, this is, this is something from SpaceX. I don't need, I don't need to dig in here at all.

• 1:20:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. What were they thinking?

• 1:20:58Jordi Hays?

  This is, this doesn't look sketchy at all.

• 1:21:00John Coogan?

  This is blatant trademark infringement. You did not license this logo. I wag my finger on this. I do not like this. And a very odd photo of the culprit, the Australian pilot Timothy James Clark. He has a very odd photo with some scantily clad women, but dark story. Hope they prevent future drug trafficking. Since we do not endorse anything of the sort on this show.

• 1:21:29Jordi Hays?

  We do endorse any, any members of our audience trying to get, trying to give tips on Nicholas Maduro.

• 1:21:37John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:21:38Jordi Hays?

  And on that reward that we've talked about.

• 1:21:40John Coogan?

  Stop the narco trafficking. We also got to get on fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. Number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. We also endorse chess, which was on the, on the OpenAI board earlier. Joe Lee has a story here. My friend was a chess grandmaster at 14. By 15, government officials invited him to dinners and he was giving talks to thousands. Every other type of nerd has gotten their pop culture recognition, except researchers. We're lucky to live in an era where the weird nerd is celebrated. Chess GMs post their moves on Instagram and it's cool, not weird. Tech founders are household names. Youtubers get invited to the Met Gala. Poker players have TV shows. Gamers have become Twitch millionaires.

• 1:22:25John Coogan?

  Researchers get maybe two celebrity moments, winning their state fair at 10 and a Nobel at 70. Unless you're Demis. Demis got a Nobel. What? How old is Demis? Uh, he's not 70. Beyond that, the people working on the world's most important problems are invisible to everyone outside their niche. Demis, the founder of DeepMind and the Nobel Prize winner, is 49 years old. Wow. What a run. He's got another 50 years in front of him, just researching, easy.

• 1:22:56Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully he's on Xi's timeline, 150.

• 1:22:58John Coogan?

  150. He could be, he could be, uh, you know, uh, 20 years out from a midlife crisis. He could be at 75. Uh, does that mean, how old is Xi Jinping? Because if he's gonna live to 150, he's, he's in his, he's 72, so in three years, he'll be half, he'll be at half-life expectancy. We should expect to see him picking up some sports cars, maybe, you know.

• 1:23:22Jordi Hays?

  Crashing out a little bit.

• 1:23:23John Coogan?

  Crashing out as a, as a, going through a midlife crisis at 75, if he's gonna live to 150.

• 1:23:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe he decides, I don't wanna be in the party anymore. I wanna do something else.

• 1:23:32John Coogan?

  I wanna, I wanna just be an entertainer or something. Maybe I wanna be a musician. Maybe he turns into a DJ.

• 1:23:36Jordi Hays?

  Or he wants to create a social network like Trump.

• 1:23:38John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. Beyond that, the people working on the most important problems are invisible to everyone outside their niche. Researchers are the final boss of nerd culture that we haven't figured out how to celebrate. Time to change that. Tyler. What's your job here?

• 1:23:53Speaker 02

  What is he talking about?

• 1:23:55John Coogan?

  She, uh, Jolie.

• 1:23:57Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 1:23:57John Coogan?

  Yes, we, we are, we are.

• 1:23:59Jordi Hays?

  We're celebrating.

• 1:23:59John Coogan?

  We have, we have figured out how to celebrate.

• 1:24:01Jordi Hays?

  We celebrated so hard, we had researchers emailing us saying, please take me off the meta list, I don't want the attention.

• 1:24:07John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, it's true.

• 1:24:08Jordi Hays?

  Which we obliged.

• 1:24:09John Coogan?

  And the traded cards, we need to continue to celebrate the final bosses of nerd culture, the researchers.

• 1:24:15Speaker 02

  I think they are being celebrated, and I feel like in SF, if you see, um, like, if you see Ilya walking around.

• 1:24:21John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:24:22Speaker 02

  It's the go right there.

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  You're taking paparazzi photos of him.

• 1:24:26Speaker 02

  People go to the, the OpenAI, that, that cafe that Johnny and Sam were at.

• 1:24:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:31Speaker 02

  They're like, oh, I'm at the OpenAI cafe.

• 1:24:33John Coogan?

  Give us an update on hype.tbpn.com. How's that going?

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, the video completely flopped.

• 1:24:41John Coogan?

  It did. We, maybe the vibrio meta is off, maybe something is, uh, is tricky. We also, it's very hard to, to, to draw attention to a URL in general, but if you're interested in participating in our little questionnaire, where are we in the AI hype cycle, you can go to hype.tbpn.com, uh, and we have the full Gartner hype cycle there. Starts with the innovation trigger.

• 1:25:09Jordi Hays?

  So we should, we should screen share this.

• 1:25:11John Coogan?

  Goes to the, the peak of inflated expectations, then of course, the trough of disillusionment, and finally, the plateau of productivity. And Tyler has shared some of the results, we're still collecting results, uh, and the, I believe that the, uh, the consensus estimate of where we are in the AI hype cycle.

• 1:25:33Jordi Hays?

  People are putting their hands up, they're putting their hands up.

• 1:25:35John Coogan?

  People are putting their hands up. There, I think there, so the yellow dot is where Tyler is, just past the peak of inflated expectations, you're cooling off, is that correct?

• 1:25:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I.

• 1:25:43John Coogan?

  Justify what?

• 1:25:44Speaker 02

  So, I, I don't know if I'm exactly there, I mean, it's very rough, I, I would say I'm near the peak, I don't know if I'm, if I'm on the left or right side of the curve.

• 1:25:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25:52Speaker 02

  I don't know if we're going down yet.

• 1:25:53John Coogan?

  Okay, what about you, Jordy? Where are you?

• 1:25:57John Coogan?

  You're not in the trough yet? It's hard to be in the trough, given all the good news. The market's at an all time high. Products are shipping, like products are getting better.

• 1:26:06Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I'm like effectively in where, where the yellow dot is.

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:11Jordi Hays?

  But that doesn't mean things aren't hyped. It's just people realize like, wait, it's just like better search, you know?

• 1:26:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:19Jordi Hays?

  We don't have like.

• 1:26:20John Coogan?

  There was, I mean, if you were, if you were following the Eliezer Udikowski crew, it was like in next year, there's not going to be any jobs and you're going to be fighting for your life in a Terminator scenario, right?

• 1:26:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:33John Coogan?

  And it's like, if I'm not holding a gun mowing down robots, I'm in the trough of disillusionment because that's where my expectations were.

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. You can see the bulk is, is basically where, where my dot is.

• 1:26:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:26:45Speaker 02

  It just passed the peak. Um, but you can see all the way on the left, there, there is one dot.

• 1:26:48John Coogan?

  Yes. Did you see this, Jordy?

• 1:26:50Speaker 02

  All the way on the left. So.

• 1:26:51John Coogan?

  Did you see this? I don't know. Can we go full, full screen on this? Yes. So there is one person who says, when, when it comes to AI hype, we haven't even started yet.

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  Okay. So I made a tweet about this.

• 1:27:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:27:01Speaker 02

  And then friend of the show, Jacob Rinamaki.

• 1:27:04John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:27:04Speaker 02

  That's him.

• 1:27:05John Coogan?

  That's him.

• 1:27:05Speaker 02

  He's all the way on the left.

• 1:27:06John Coogan?

  He's all the way on the left.

• 1:27:07Speaker 02

  Okay. His rationale was basically, you know.

• 1:27:08Jordi Hays?

  No technology trigger yet.

• 1:27:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:27:10Speaker 02

  We're, we're at, you know, one 10,000th of, of, um,

• 1:27:15John Coogan?

  How crazy is that?

• 1:27:15Speaker 02

  Solar, uh, you know, usage of the sun.

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:27:18Speaker 02

  We're not even close. I mean, we're like, we're not even close to, to what AI could be.

• 1:27:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:27:23Speaker 02

  Um, so he's just mega AGI pilled.

• 1:27:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:27:26Speaker 02

  We're not even close to.

• 1:27:27John Coogan?

  We're not even close to being, like, the hype hasn't even started.

• 1:27:30Speaker 02

  I mean, how can we be going down if we don't even have a Dyson sphere?

• 1:27:33John Coogan?

  That's a great take. I, I love Jacob. He's so much fun. Uh, I also like that there's someone on there. There's a few people that said, yeah, we are, the hype cycle's done. I'm in the plateau of productivity. We went through it. They experienced the full, and I, and I would love to know from those people, maybe we should have some of the show or ask them to write out a little bit more of their rationale for where they are. Maybe that's in the V2. We could have put your point and then write a little free, free text response on why you said that. Because for that person, what is, what is their hype cycle? Like? Obviously, is the innovation trigger GPT one? Is it GPT three? Is it chat GPT? Like, the default assumption is probably innovation triggers chat GPT, then peak of inflated expectation.

• 1:28:15Speaker 02

  No. Transformer architect.

• 1:28:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe you go back further.

• 1:28:18Speaker 02

  It's neural nets, it's something like that.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:28:21Speaker 02

  Like, GPTs are probably a little bit higher on the curve.

• 1:28:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, so maybe, maybe the trough of disillusionment was like year five of OpenAI as a nonprofit. And you're like, yeah, like, they, they, okay, they did okay against Dota, but they haven't really created anything. I was so excited about this. My, my expectations were inflated a year or two ago, and now I'm really disappointed. But now chat GPT comes out, slope of enlightenment, plateau of productivity is, hey, we're, we're, we're building in codex. We got Claude Code, we got different products coming together. We're actually delivering value. That, then they're in the plateau of productivity. I don't know.

• 1:29:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think in that scenario, it's like early, less wrong posts. Those were the peak of inflated expectation.

• 1:29:06John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 1:29:07Speaker 02

  You see actual people building.

• 1:29:08John Coogan?

  Well, we'll have to ask the folks who responded. And if you want to play along, go to hype.tbpn.com and vote for where you are in the AI hype cycle. One thing that's underhyped, customer relationship magic from Adio. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. And we have our first guest of the show coming in to the TPN Ultradome from the Restream waiting room.

• 1:29:36Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 1:29:37John Coogan?

  Look at this, how you doing?

• 1:29:39Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:29:40John Coogan?

  Ishaa.

• 1:29:41Jordi Hays?

  We're hitting the gong for all you guys.

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  We're hitting the gong.

• 1:29:44Jordi Hays?

  What's the news, folks? What's the news?

• 1:29:49Speaker 03

  I'll bring the hardcore team out. We launched Rocks to GA.

• 1:29:53John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:29:54Speaker 03

  We crossed 25 million Rocks revenue agents running in the 2000s.

• 1:30:00Speaker 03

  It's real, there's real ROI and we're coming. So we're ready for business and we're ready to go.

• 1:30:08Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:30:09John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:30:10Jordi Hays?

  What else? Yeah, what else? Give us the update since the last time you were on.

• 1:30:14Speaker 03

  Um, we, we came on February, uh, we come back and launch. Uh, we've, we've landed, obviously we still have RAM, cognition and some of the biggest AI companies, but we've landed the number one for kind of global 2000 in banking, construction, also Saudi Aramco.

• 1:30:35Speaker 03

  We've got a sales team, which is amazing. They're, they're now kind of going head to head with some of the big incumbents.

• 1:30:43John Coogan?

  Wait, so how are you positioning the product? Shouldn't you be dog fooding? Why do you have salespeople?

• 1:30:47Speaker 03

  Exactly. So we ran up until recently without a sales team, but now we've got to go for market share. So you have a small elite sales team, uh, who can go, um, basically work with boards who are rolling out kind of rocks revenue agents after the coding agents. So every customer's rolled out coding agents over the last year. Now, now they're rolling out revenue agents and it's a game of market share and delivering ROI and, and we're the fastest to it.

• 1:31:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:14Jordi Hays?

  What's the, yeah, what's the competitive dynamic like? I, I don't, I don't know a bunch of other companies in, in your guys' kind of like category broadly. Meanwhile, because of how quickly coding agents have got to market, I know, I can name a bunch.

• 1:31:27John Coogan?

  The big question is like seat based versus consumption based. This is the debate that a lot of people are having on the timeline these days, the SaaS apocalypse or something. Uh, how are you thinking about pricing as a durable advantage against incumbents?

• 1:31:39Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So incumbents are obviously, uh, Salesforce. I saw the CARP episode. We're team CARP here. Um, we focus on time to value, like we deliver ROI in 90 days instead of nine months. Um, we focus on pay for agent actions. So the agents do work and customers only pay when the agents do work. It's not seat based pricing. And the last is we do the parent tier style, full service, forward deployed model, right? So you don't need consultants and professional services firms to implement the software. We do the whole, whole lot. So competitive dynamics is boards want ROI in a quarter or two so that they can change the hiring plans for next year. And we're just trying to basically pedal downhill and deliver ROI fast.

• 1:32:23Speaker 03

  And it's only possible because of the team. We can outship the market and have built product that that works. And now's the time, so.

• 1:32:31Jordi Hays?

  How big's the team today?

• 1:32:33John Coogan?

  I was about to ask.

• 1:32:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, so kind of obviously competing with a multi thousand, thousand employee organization. So core applied AI is about twenty five and and kind of field plus sales is about ten more, so about thirty five people.

• 1:32:48John Coogan?

  Wow, that's a crazy balance. I like that. That's great.

• 1:32:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, we try to keep engineering as much as possible.

• 1:32:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, and then what what's the feedback cycle like from the sales folks that you have that are actually using the product? I feel like, are you hiring folks from product management into sales roles or vice versa? Or are there some product management skills that are uniquely useful?

• 1:33:10Speaker 03

  It's a great question. One of our sales leaders is actually a pseudo PM. So we have no PMs, no product managers, no project managers. We have engineers who ship and then we have salespeople who ship ship revenue. So the feedback cycle is, once we land customers, we are pretty much embedded with these with these customers. We have field engineers, we have cloud engineers. They feed it back to all engineers and our engineers, all everybody here, they're all founders. They are customer facing and they take all the signal and we try to ship in days. So we ship multiple times a day. We have major release every week and and that's kind of been the the five.

• 1:33:48Jordi Hays?

  What is the typical forward deployed engineer process look like for your guys' product? I imagine it's not quite as complex as some of the build outs that Palantir is doing for different companies. So is it down to like you need to land an engineer at a company for or or a small team for a couple of weeks, a week, a few days? What does that actually look like?

• 1:34:11Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So we try to do ROI 90 days with the first three weeks is essentially set up. So we don't do any core engineering out in the field. So that's all done in San Francisco.

• 1:34:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:21Speaker 03

  What our four different engineers do is deeply understand the domain. So the number one global 2000 in the construction vertical is different than healthcare is different than than kind of the military. So we try to really understand the domain. How do they do customer acquisition and success? And code that into our agents. And then we actually build training content to reskill the whole org, right? So our core mission, if you remember, is to to build agents that makes the best better. And then reskill the rest to give them a path to be kind of AI native. So that's kind of what our field is doing. So supercharging and then reskilling.

• 1:34:58John Coogan?

  Well, I feel like the opportunity cost of having everyone on your team stand behind you for this interview is

• 1:35:03Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna hit the gong one more time.

• 1:35:04John Coogan?

  is insane. We're gonna hit the gong and let you get back to the important work that you do.

• 1:35:08Jordi Hays?

  For you guys.

• 1:35:08John Coogan?

  But thank you so much for coming on TVP and today.

• 1:35:12Speaker 03

  Thanks for having us on and

• 1:35:14John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:35:14Speaker 03

  We're all huge fans. Thank you.

• 1:35:16Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on all the progress, guys. Super impressive.

• 1:35:18John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:35:19Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:35:19John Coogan?

  Bye. Let's go to this post on the timeline from Jerry Howell quoting the Internet Hippo. This screenshot looks aged. Have you seen this screenshot? It looks like it's it looks like it's been screenshotted multiple times. It has like lore to it.

• 1:35:37Jordi Hays?

  It's vintage.

• 1:35:37John Coogan?

  The Internet Hippo says, I stepped away from my computer for a moment. When I returned, it was building something. I did not ask it to do this. We're not ready for what's coming. Tyler, do you have any idea what this image is in reference to?

• 1:35:53Jordi Hays?

  I I don't know.

• 1:35:55John Coogan?

  You've never seen that? Wow, Jordy, do you know?

• 1:35:57Jordi Hays?

  It's a screensaver, right?

• 1:35:58John Coogan?

  Do you know, like, from what machine or what era?

• 1:36:01Jordi Hays?

  Not a Mac.

• 1:36:02John Coogan?

  No, I believe it's like a Windows 95 screensaver, maybe Windows

• 1:36:07Jordi Hays?

  I just remember this like from like computer lab. Do you remember a school would have class?

• 1:36:11John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:36:12Jordi Hays?

  Imagine.

• 1:36:13John Coogan?

  For sure. That was one of the coolest

• 1:36:14Jordi Hays?

  It's actually underrated to just think that

• 1:36:15John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:36:16Jordi Hays?

  There used to be a class called For us, it was computer lab.

• 1:36:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, you learn how to type on the computer. You know, you get your, your, your words per minute up. Anyway, how did you sleep last night?

• 1:36:28Jordi Hays?

  Actually, I put up the best night in a long time.

• 1:36:31John Coogan?

  You got me beat. I got like a 54. It was a rough night. But if you want to get Aidsleep. Whoa, 99. Let's go. Play some sound effects for yourself. Go to Aidsleep.com, get a Pod5, 5-year warranty, 30-year risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping.

• 1:36:45Jordi Hays?

  You know what I did yesterday?

• 1:36:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:36:47Jordi Hays?

  I reduced my caffeine intake by about 120 milligrams.

• 1:36:52John Coogan?

  Okay, that's good.

• 1:36:53Jordi Hays?

  I think I might have done something.

• 1:36:55John Coogan?

  Dialing it back. That's good. Well, we have Tony from Ingest joining the stream. He's in the restream waiting room. We'll bring him in. Welcome to stream. How you doing?

• 1:37:03Speaker 04

  Hey, thank you so much for having me. How's it going?

• 1:37:06John Coogan?

  It's going great. Kick us off with just a brief introduction on yourself and then give us the news.

• 1:37:12Speaker 04

  Cool, yeah. I'm Tony, one of the founders and CEO of ingest.com. I'm here just to talk about our series day with Altimeter. We, we closed the 21 million round with them. Thanks, thanks. Yeah, they're, they're great people. Jammin's a, Jammin's a really, really smart guy.

• 1:37:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:27Speaker 04

  And we also had the follow-on and the continued investment from Andreessen, Notable and the four, which is, which is great. So, yeah, fun times, you know?

• 1:37:36John Coogan?

  Love it. Jordy, you want to hit that?

• 1:37:38Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about, I'll, I'll wait till the end.

• 1:37:39John Coogan?

  Okay, we'll hit the gun at the end.

• 1:37:41Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about what the company does. What are you guys up to?

• 1:37:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So we're, we're an async execution platform, driven execution. We, we allow you to build workflows as step functions. Make it really, really easy so that you abstract all of the infrastructure. Essentially write a couple of different things like step run, step run, step run. We make sure they execute durably. You can write any code in those step functions. And a lot of people use this for AI and AI agents because turns out that, you know, that's a, that's a really big thing, as you've heard all the time.

• 1:38:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. How did you pick the level of abstraction that you're operating at? There's so many other, like there's companies that they just do the inference, or they just do fine tuning, or they, or they go at an even higher level and they sell a complete SaaS solution with an agent wrapped in it. You're in this kind of in-between zone. How'd you land there? Do you see yourself moving up and or down the stack? It feels like such a flexible time right now in the market.

• 1:38:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, super flexible, super flexible. Maybe I'll talk about the origin stories and then I'll talk about.

• 1:38:45Speaker 04

  So I used to run engineering for a healthcare company and healthcare is like, dude, healthcare is so hard. I would not recommend it. Really nice to help people, but the engineering is crazy. Super workflow driven and it would take months to build out what should take days. You know, when a patient does this, if they do do something in a certain amount of time, X, Y, and Z. And so those are, those are workflows. So we initially built the SDK to make it really easy for your product engineer that might be full stack to build these workflows without mucking around with infrastructure. So you don't want to have to create workers. You don't have to create queues. You don't want to terraform new, new things on Kafka. You just want to write some code, deploy it in your existing code base and have it work basically in a minute. And that like, that level of abstraction is really key. Because I think if everyone has access to the same models

• 1:39:29Speaker 04

  and if everyone has access to the same sort of compute, what really matters now is how fast you can iterate on your product, how fast you can actually build the experiences on top of those models. And it turns out that like, yeah, you can build agents for other people, but this particular layer that executes the AI that runs the workflows is really tough. And you have to have it done right in order to iterate fast. And so it's sort of this interesting sort of layer on top of the infrastructure that allows people to build and execute. So that was kind of always the plan. I think like, one of the things that we talked about is, you know, just. Infrastructureless infrastructure so that you can just write code, deploy it and have it work,

• 1:40:09Speaker 04

  which is sort of, I think, like a modern version of what Terraform should be.

• 1:40:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:16Jordi Hays?

  What what categories of agents are you most bullish on today and over the next year? We just.

• 1:40:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:23Jordi Hays?

  Because because, you know, again, on the consumer agent side.

• 1:40:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:40:27Jordi Hays?

  Felt like deep research was the first breakout killer app, consumer agent. Before that, everyone was excited about agents, but weren't necessarily daily, even weekly active users of a lot of them.

• 1:40:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's interesting. And you were just talking about with the with the with the person number four, you know, like the whole.

• 1:40:44John Coogan?

  Sales.

• 1:40:45Speaker 04

  Stuff. Right, right. Forward deployed stuff. And you see a lot of like support. I think like for the day to day things that everyone uses internally, you know, like it's kind of the the stuff that you'll probably use in day to day. Claude, Codex, that sort of stuff is like killer, you know? I use it for tests. It doesn't do distributed systems well enough for us right now.

• 1:41:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:03Speaker 04

  But it's pretty, it's pretty good.

• 1:41:06Speaker 04

  And then like in the future, you know, I think it's really interesting to see people craft experiences inside their own products. You know, like Decagon and whatnot have done that for support for some time, which is super interesting. And I'm really, really curious where we go with context engineering and how people can build their own custom agents, which are essentially workflows. So I'm like, day to day, for sure. The everyone, the average ones that people are using, but you're like, you take Nano Banana, you throw that in a workflow and you have this really sick agent experience on top of that. It's like, it's pretty good. The world is changing pretty fast and it feels like everything will end up becoming this, which is craziness.

• 1:41:41John Coogan?

  Uh, how does, how is SoundCloud using this? I think that's an interesting case study you have there. I'd love to understand more about how a company that just does, you know, I think of it as like a music player, a library of music, like, what's their strategy?

• 1:41:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So music is tough. It turns out that every industry has a lot of depth that you wouldn't realize when you go into it, you know? Everything from like making sure that there's no. I guess piracy, making sure that there's no terrorism, making sure that if people want to produce their albums and send it out to Spotify, iTunes, that time, music distribution is also kind of insane.

• 1:42:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:16Speaker 04

  Um, it requires a lot of workflows too. So there's a lot of stuff that you have to do to operationalize music, either distribution, production, content. Um, and essentially they were trying to hack together this for, for nine months. Um, the CTO at the time, found us somehow and he had a lot of stuff up and running within a week.

• 1:42:36John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:42:37Speaker 04

  And their time to production was like insane from like nine months to one week. They ended up pushing us out to production relatively quickly. Um, within like the first few months and uh, I think, I think they were alive in maybe, maybe like the first six weeks. Um, so they use this for a ton of their stuff. I think they just shipped the ability to create vinyls for your own music that you upload to Spotify.

• 1:42:56John Coogan?

  Wait, like physical vinyls?

• 1:42:58Speaker 04

  Like physical vinyls. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:00Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna hit the gong for physical vinyls.

• 1:43:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:43:03John Coogan?

  I want some.

• 1:43:07Jordi Hays?

  We need, we've been looking to make vinyl.

• 1:43:09John Coogan?

  Uh, we want to press the show onto vinyl, of course.

• 1:43:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we've, we've had people reach out and complain that they, they want to listen to the show every day, but they only listen to audio.

• 1:43:16John Coogan?

  They've listened to the whole catalog, but they want to listen at the highest possible fidelity.

• 1:43:21Speaker 04

  Do you remember, do you remember there was that Stripe thing? They made that physical magazine back in the day?

• 1:43:27John Coogan?

  I don't actually.

• 1:43:28Jordi Hays?

  Like with paper?

• 1:43:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was like, it was like, it was like a Stripe magazine.

• 1:43:32John Coogan?

  This is from Stripe, the payments company.

• 1:43:34Speaker 04

  Hmm, hmm, hmm.

• 1:43:34John Coogan?

  Wow, I know, I somehow missed this. I, I know Stripe Press, I know the books. They are print maxies. Um, I, I gotta get a copy of that. That, that probably trades at a premium, probably uh, in, in the musi- it should be in the business hall of fame, the business uh, museum. Uh, that, yeah, that, yeah, that's fantastic. Uh, well, we don't want to keep you too much longer. Thank you so much for hopping on the screen. Congrats on the round.

• 1:43:55Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you, we'll see you at the B.

• 1:43:56John Coogan?

  Say hello to all the folks at the altimeter. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:44:00Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:44:00John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:44:01Speaker 04

  Okay, bye.

• 1:44:02John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Emmett Shear has a post, "The way that ChatGPT and Claude, etc. are all trying to be the portal for the entire internet reminds me a good deal of the first internet boom in Yahoo. I think the ultimate winners will wind up specialized just like last time. Shopping, entertainment, search." So he's thinking Amazon, Netflix, Google, and we'll have similar breakouts. It's interesting. I don't know that I completely like.

• 1:44:39Jordi Hays?

  In this comment, kind of puts them in the truth zone. To be fair, Google, Dwayne says, control alt, Dwayne says, "To be fair, Google did become the portal for the entire internet. Yahoo tried, but Google executed better. ChatGPT has already won for the moment, but whether they're the next Google or Yahoo AI remains to be seen. They're doing a lot of things right."

• 1:44:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I, I wonder how much consumer AI or like.

• 1:45:03Jordi Hays?

  Emmett fires back, just to, to close it out. Google's not a YouTube Yahoo style portal. They're still way behind on shopping versus specialists. For example, they are search first and foremost, and then also have extended into portfolio of adjacencies. It's not one interface to everything.

• 1:45:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know. I, I, I do, I do wonder how the consumer AI apps will fragment. We're obviously going to talk to the meta folks about personalized superintelligence. And we saw this chart that went up just recently about how people actually use ChatGPT. And there are some pretty clear buckets, like there are, there are different people using different modes of ChatGPT from practical guidance, tutoring, teaching, seeking information was 21% of searches, writing was 28%, multimedia, creating an image, that was 6%. And so you could imagine some of those getting peeled off.

• 1:46:01John Coogan?

  And kind of becoming their own, their own, their own apps that are highly specialized. I tend to believe in aggregation and like Ben Thompson has this point about Google. There was a moment when everyone was saying, Google's cooked because of vertical search. So there's going to be Yelp for restaurants, the Google of restaurants. They will do it better than Google can.

• 1:46:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:24John Coogan?

  There will be travel sites, there will be mapping sites, there will be different sites for searching specific things that people will remember to go to. And Google really did change their entire model. They adapted, they improvised, they overcame.

• 1:46:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:37John Coogan?

  And Google was not ultimately damaged by vertical search.

• 1:46:41Jordi Hays?

  The question, I mean, you have to kind of ask yourself how bullish you are in agents, right? Because historically you would search something in Google and then you'd go to a standalone, maybe you'd go to a website or an application. Yet, there's a lot of websites and applications that I only maybe use once in my life, once a year. Do I actually want it? Do I, do I, oftentimes I'd prefer to have an agent, for example, like book me a hotel, right? These are classic examples. And so I think that, I think the paradigm is, is shifting. But without further ado, we have Tomer.

• 1:47:17John Coogan?

  Our next guest.

• 1:47:18Jordi Hays?

  Gusto coming in.

• 1:47:19John Coogan?

  From the re-stream waiting room. Welcome, Tomer. How you doing?

• 1:47:22Speaker 05

  Good, guys.

• 1:47:23John Coogan?

  We're great.

• 1:47:24Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:47:25John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on.

• 1:47:26Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:47:27John Coogan?

  I'm such a huge fan because I went through YC in 2012. I believe you were in the 2013 batch, correct?

• 1:47:33Speaker 05

  We were in winter 2012, yeah.

• 1:47:36John Coogan?

  Oh, winter. So is that, I think winter at that point was after summer or maybe just before?

• 1:47:40Jordi Hays?

  It's usually after summer.

• 1:47:42John Coogan?

  It is.

• 1:47:43Speaker 05

  It was March.

• 1:47:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, it usually does come after summer. But, but I remember that I was running, I, we, the first, the first payroll we ran for our YC company was just literally a $5,000 wire, like from one account to the next. And we were like, yeah, like, everyone needs to figure out what to do with the taxes. And then we got on Gusto, which was then, I believe, Zen Payroll, right?

• 1:48:10Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 1:48:11John Coogan?

  And, and it solved a ton of stuff and it was, it was amazing experience. And yeah, Jordi and I have been using Gusto for a long time since.

• 1:48:19Jordi Hays?

  Ever since. Big, big launch today.

• 1:48:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, take us through it.

• 1:48:23Speaker 05

  Thank you. Yeah, yeah. Well, very, very excited to be here. I'm also a big fan of yours. In fact.

• 1:48:30John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:48:31Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:48:31John Coogan?

  There we go. Thank you. That's fantastic. And sorry, I need to stop you for a second. Before we get into launch, where are you? The office behind you is teeming. Is this just your HQ?

• 1:48:40Jordi Hays?

  This is the same place that Josh was calling in from.

• 1:48:42John Coogan?

  It's remarkable.

• 1:48:44Speaker 05

  Thanks. Yeah, we're in Pier 70 in San Francisco. We actually have our office here.

• 1:48:48Jordi Hays?

  Right next to the YC.

• 1:48:50Speaker 05

  Right in front of YC. Exactly. And today, actually, we have this showcase conference. We're doing it for the first time live, and it's really, really cool because you have hundreds of small businesses here, accountants who are all coming in, and we're unveiling a bunch of new products to them. So, you know, we have showcases twice a year. We've been doing it for a while. It's kind of our big, big two product moments of the year, telling the world about all the new stuff you can do with Gusto. We started with payroll, expanded to benefits. We, you know, announced a couple of weeks ago about the guideline acquisition, pending approval.

• 1:49:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:49:25Speaker 05

  And, you know, all the different things that we've been doing over the year, time tracking, HR, and, you know, tax credits, compliance, and other things. But yeah, today we're launching a bunch of really, really important functionality around cash flow. So, you know, when I speak with small businesses, often what I hear is that, you know, in the context of Gusto, is that the hardest thing, where they get frustrated the most and feel like most anxious and kind of unhappy, is when they can't make payroll for their employees. They don't have enough money in their bank account, right? And when you dig into it and learn why and what's going on exactly, it's not that they don't make enough money as a business. The business is growing. They're doing really well. They're doing better than ever. So how can that be, right? And it's all about cash flow. It's all about this tricky thing of like, when does money come in?

• 1:50:09Speaker 05

  And when money goes out. So often, you know, think about, like, I talk with a customer who's like a...

• 1:50:16Speaker 05

  You know, they they do like equipment for um um, you know, different uh, you know, conferences and things like that, right? Like, uh, you know, lighting and A V equipment and stuff like that. So guess what? They need to buy the equipment and buy the stuff before the event and they get paid thirty to sixty days after the event, right? So you have all this money going out, you payroll going out, all these expenses going out, or you didn't get paid yet. And this is like not a random like one-off story, like this happens all the freaking time for small businesses. Um, you know, and and that's true, like for consultants that work before they get paid and many other type of businesses. So um, that's what this showcase is about. I'm really happy to share more about like, you know, this the the features functionalities.

• 1:50:54Jordi Hays?

  No, I I we're one of the few shows on earth that actually want to understand.

• 1:50:58John Coogan?

  I'm super interested.

• 1:50:59Jordi Hays?

  Because, you know, we we've run businesses our whole life. I've been in that position, you know, early on with my first business, where it's just like, oh, like, you know.

• 1:51:06John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:51:07Jordi Hays?

  It's like every two weeks, it's like, you know.

• 1:51:09John Coogan?

  They're draining the account.

• 1:51:10Jordi Hays?

  Public companies, they got the quarterly reporting, maybe maybe it's gonna switch to every six months soon. But with a with a with a small business, you know, it's like every every couple of weeks, it's like that crazy.

• 1:51:20John Coogan?

  So I mean, where where I want to start is like, uh, this sounds like you're going to be lending money or bridging on on a short-term basis with small businesses who are on the platform. Uh, where does the money come from? I feel like when we usually hear about a fintech company or a or business-to-business company starting to offer some sort of credit-like product, uh, we usually hear, oh, well, they they have a facility on the other side. They raised money for this. They're not maybe funding it off their balance sheet. Like, what structurally, how does the the money flow to the actual customer?

• 1:51:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly. That's a that's a really, really great question. So listen, there's a few kind of products here that come together in order to get people to have better cash flow. So they they're they're not late for their payroll. One is just like a set of functionalities about making faster payroll. So payroll, if you remember, often people need to run like the the historical standard is four days. So you run it on Tuesday for people to get paid on Friday. Well, that's four days of cash that could could be in your bank account. And that makes a really big difference because payroll is often the biggest expense of customers that, you know, small businesses have. So, you know, we are launching a next-day payroll. We're launching same day payroll and we're also launching instant payroll. So these are three new products all about making sure you have enough money in your bank account at the last moment.

• 1:52:38Jordi Hays?

  How do you actually do that? Because payroll companies forever have loved, probably loved to say, like, people ask, can you make it instant? And they say, ah, it's not possible.

• 1:52:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, we've heard like, oh, it's the ACH system. It's the government regulation. What's the unlock?

• 1:52:54Speaker 05

  Exactly. Okay, so for these set of products, it's all about actually our relationship with the bank. So you know, the nice thing about being, one side, we're a tech company. We're still a startup. We look at ourselves as a startup. On the other side, we've been around for 12, 13 years now. Over 400,000 small businesses use Gusto every day. And, you know, I knew you'd do that. I love it. I want a gong too today. Tell me when the gong is coming. But yeah, over 400,000 small businesses use our product every day. And, you know, with that scale, we now have the ability to work with each individual bank and kind of create partnerships. So in the end of the day, we're actually not taking credit risk on it.

• 1:53:36Speaker 05

  And it just uses the, you know, the kind of some of the newer rails that banks have. I can't go into all the specifics, but it's not like us. But we didn't need to raise any money for this.

• 1:53:45John Coogan?

  But it's a technological solution, which is exactly what you want. You don't want just like, oh, wow, now we have this great massive liability that's growing on the balance sheet forever.

• 1:53:54Speaker 05

  No, that's not happening. There is one thing though, which is Payroll Bridge. So Payroll Bridge is a different product. And that's like, not about making payroll faster, but that's like, even if you still don't have the money in your bank account, even on payday, and you still need somebody to finance that payroll, we can come in and help.

• 1:54:12John Coogan?

  Or maybe even just a piece of it, because it's totally possible that I have $100,000 in payroll going out, but I'm just 10K short and I don't want to hold up everyone. And so I could maybe take a smaller amount.

• 1:54:24Speaker 05

  Exactly. Yeah, so, so um um that happens more often than you would think. You know, again, it's that kind of cash coming in, cash going out. So we partnered with a company called Paraffin as an embedded um um partner. Um who's helping us with the loans here. So what happens here is, again, as a customer, you come in to run payroll. Let's say it's a Friday, you need to pay instant payroll on Friday. And then, oh, gosh, I'm missing 10K, I'm missing $20,000, $50,000, whatever that is. Um, you know, um, with our partnership with Paraffin, we take a look at all of your history and we figure out like, hey, can we help you? Um, kind of basically make that payroll on us, um, and then we're going to pay a spot later on. So that that's kind of that uh piece. And I think, you know, honestly, it's the biggest, biggest, biggest pain point in the world of payroll. It's funny, like, we've been doing it for 12 years.

• 1:55:09Speaker 05

  You would think like, oh, you're already innovated in everything around payroll, there's nothing else coming in. That's not true, even 12 years later, there's more.

• 1:55:15Jordi Hays?

  This asset's forever.

• 1:55:16Speaker 05

  Kind of basic payroll stuff. Um, we're also doing it on the international payments, by the way. That's another um fast payroll, um, um, faster international counter store payments using stablecoin. As again, now techno- technology that is available now was not available when we started.

• 1:55:31Jordi Hays?

  What percentage of of the businesses on Gusto do you think are like? I'm I'm sure you looked at the data, right?

• 1:55:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, was this a big COVID boom?

• 1:55:39Jordi Hays?

  There would have been opportunities to to to launch this feature. You could have launched this a while ago. I'm sure you guys wanted to wait until there was regulatory clarity on stablecoins. But was this something that customers were asking for? Because it's one of those things that that is it's it's helpful. I mean, it's helpful to both sides, like the freelancer benefits, because like, they're like, okay, I got when the person hit pay, I got paid. I don't have to wait for, you know, it's it's ends up being more than four days, it can be longer than that. And the companies too, historically, would just be using these like, you know, random, either like dedicated international payroll platforms or um, you know, special freelancer payments platforms, things like that.

• 1:56:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, so totally. I think, you know, the past couple of years, again, there's new technology. So we can, we can use now, and that's both on the banking side domestically as well as on the stablecoin side. That's why we were able to do it today. It takes time until you, you know, we work with these partners and often we're the biggest kind of partner they work with. And the reason is, you know, you may have a bunch of startups, technology, fintech companies that are using stablecoin payments or using, you know, kind of instant payments through banks, but they usually have small amounts. Payroll is huge amounts, right? Tens of thousands of dollars, sometimes millions of dollars per transaction. So, you know, you really, a lot of these kind of protocols, fintech protocols, when they come out, they have like a maximum limit. So we need to kind of work with the providers and

• 1:57:06Speaker 05

  get there. And then, yeah, you're right about the compliance side of it. Like, you know, we, we work really, really closely to figure out that. You know, one of the things that we do is, is, you know, I think that was a little buzzword before, you know, AI came in and like took away all the buzzwords. But compliance, compliance technology, you know, so there's financial technology, fintechs, compliance technology. And in that world, you know, that's kind of what we do every single day. We think about how do we take all the compliance worries and anxiety that small businesses have, that they don't want IRS knocking on their doors. And then help them, you know, kind of figure out all the compliance for them. There's a couple more features that I wanted to talk about. So one is just Gustal Money. It's a new platform. It's a new area for us. You know, when you think about Gustal, you always think about people, right?

• 1:57:50Speaker 05

  Pay your people, onboard your people, benefits, all that stuff. Gustal Money is us entering and expanding into a new world. So that's the world that's just really focused on cash flow. So, you know, one of the things when we talk with customers is like, hey, you know, I get paid so much later. Wouldn't be like, can you help me get paid faster? Or, you know, when I pay my bills, like, oh, gosh, that takes, you know, that, you know, they need to be paid immediately. Can you delay that payment for me? And that's why we brought in invoice payments as well as like bill pay into Gustal. And we're going to keep investing in that area because it's all connected. You know, payroll is your largest expenses, but you have a bunch of other expenses in the business. So if you bring it all together to one platform, I, I think that we can really, really help people with that big anxiety around not having enough money to run payroll and, and kind of run their business.

• 1:58:36John Coogan?

  Does that change, are a lot of these different products feel like they might have different underlying economics? Do you think that they're like the structure of the economic model of Gusto is going to change over the next few years? Or is this sort of like purely additive? Like, how are you going to think about actually underwriting like the core business? I don't know what your plans are for the future, but it does feel like some of these are, you know, exchange fees or interest rate based or volume based, others might be seat based. There's a variety of different financial models or economic models. Is any of that changing like the overall structure of where you think the business will be driving value in a few years?

• 1:59:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. I think for us, you know, I would say number one, we're really, really focusing on understanding what are the biggest pain points for business, for small businesses and figure out how we can help them. Now, sometimes it means, you know, business models for different products are different and we're okay with that. However, if you still zoom out at Gusto and you look at Gusto as a product and where we're going, by far, like really our majority of what we do is in terms of business model is software. Software as a service, you pay per employee, you pay for services, very high margins. This is not like a, like a fintech sort of, you know, play. And as you notice, we're using a lot of partners on the embedded side when we do things and

• 2:00:03Speaker 05

  you know, that are those type of kind of fintech businesses. And we really obsess and focus on the user experience to make sure that for the customer they don't feel like they're being moved from one, you know, one system to another. It's all behind the scenes, all API. So for you, it's just one service, it's Gusto. But, you know, that's kind of the core of what we do. We're really, really focused and are really strong on the user experience side for small businesses.

• 2:00:26John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:00:27Jordi Hays?

  What's the most exciting thing in tech to you outside of payroll?

• 2:00:31Speaker 05

  In technology at all. Um, let's see. You know, I, I know.

• 2:00:36Jordi Hays?

  And it's okay to say that, that your, your eyes never stray and that payroll.

• 2:00:41John Coogan?

  The compliance.

• 2:00:42Jordi Hays?

  Compliance, payroll compliance.

• 2:00:44Speaker 05

  I love compliance. Listen, I love compliance every single day. That's what I'm living and breathing. Um, and you know, but jokes aside, like the truth is that when you talk with customers, um, this is not a cerebral sort of like analytical kind of, um, question and like, you know, world for them, like for them, it's, it's missing Friday night with their kids because of this sort of stuff, right? For them, it's like, you know, the pain of, you know, the embarrassment of like needing to, to call every single employee and tell them they got, they, they can't make payroll on time and then the employee on the other side, sometimes, you know, uh, you know, needing to manage all of that, what that means to your family. So, you know, for me, it's, you know, I love technology. I live and breathe technology every day. I love your show that always keeps me up to date what's going on, uh, in, in the world of tech.

• 2:01:28Speaker 05

  But, you know, I think the, the biggest connection for me and it gets me going is that, um, customer, um, pain point and see what software can do to help them.

• 2:01:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. Fantastic.

• 2:01:38Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:01:39Speaker 05

  Hey, I want you guys to come in here next time though. By the way, we have, we have the, again, the showcase.

• 2:01:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:44Speaker 05

  Uh, uh, here will be really cool. In six months when we do the next one, it'll be cool to have like a live, live performance here from Glasto.

• 2:01:50John Coogan?

  How many people are there?

• 2:01:52Jordi Hays?

  How many people?

• 2:01:52John Coogan?

  Let, let's ring the gong for the total attendees. How many?

• 2:01:55Speaker 05

  Oh, I think there's around, around five hundreds of small businesses.

• 2:01:58John Coogan?

  Woo!

• 2:02:00Speaker 05

  All right.

• 2:02:00John Coogan?

  That's a lot of small businesses to show up to.

• 2:02:04Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:02:05John Coogan?

  You love it.

• 2:02:05Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:02:06John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Thanks so much for hopping on the show. We'll talk to you soon, Tyler. Have a good one.

• 2:02:11Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:02:12John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:02:14John Coogan?

  And let's.

• 2:02:14Jordi Hays?

  We, no one loves software for small businesses more than, more than me.

• 2:02:20John Coogan?

  I don't think so.

• 2:02:21Jordi Hays?

  I don't think so.

• 2:02:21John Coogan?

  Don't go.

• 2:02:23Jordi Hays?

  Daniel Tenraro says the core political divide today is pickleball Americans versus letterboxd Americans.

• 2:02:30John Coogan?

  I would, I'm in neither camp. I don't really participate in either, but I would put myself in the letterboxd American camp. Tyler over there is a pickleball American, right?

• 2:02:40Speaker 02

  I guess, but I'm also, I would say I'm more of like a cinephile than a pickleball player.

• 2:02:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:02:44Speaker 02

  But I've never used letterboxd.

• 2:02:45John Coogan?

  You've never used letterboxd?

• 2:02:46Speaker 02

  It's just like, it's like Goodreads for movies.

• 2:02:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's Goodreads for movies. I feel like there's an opportunity to do a stunt there.

• 2:02:52Jordi Hays?

  Underrated that Tiny snapped this up.

• 2:02:53John Coogan?

  Oh, Tiny owns it?

• 2:02:54Jordi Hays?

  They bought a 60% stake.

• 2:02:56John Coogan?

  Whoa, I had no idea. That's fascinating. Well, the Antichrist lecture is in full swing up in San Francisco. The private jets have-

• 2:03:07Jordi Hays?

  Did they find the guy yet?

• 2:03:08John Coogan?

  Did they find him? The hunt for the Antichrist continues, and it has spawned a ton of fun posts on the timeline. Pablo Panish says, Peter Thiel talked about this at the Antichrist lecture. No, he didn't. Did you attend the lecture? No. Did you? No. People memeing Daniel. Grown Daniel says Peter Thiel announced the name of the Antichrist, but I'm not telling. And people are having a lot of fun. Will Manaya said that-

• 2:03:35Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy. I saw some of the protesters showed up disguised as Satan.

• 2:03:41John Coogan?

  I needed to put some of the protesters in the truth zone because one of the protesters said Peter Thiel's latest acquisition, the US government. If you know anything about PT, he doesn't buy whole companies. He believes in founder-led firms. He doesn't do private equity deals. So, little bit of a misunderstanding of the financial markets there protester. Anyway, Tyler, are you bummed that you're missing out on the Antichrist lecture series?

• 2:04:07Speaker 02

  I was just gonna say the protesters are like pretty hilarious, some of the signs. I sent them in the-

• 2:04:11John Coogan?

  So, the protesters, it's easy to get riled up by the images of the protesters and see the protesters as like, this like, oh, they're really over the top. They must really be aggressive. But for the most part, like I've seen, there were protesters at just some random FAI conference I spoke at. I actually interviewed Alex Wang there, who we're talking to tomorrow. Tune in. And this is just like Foundation for American Innovation, like a very vanilla tech conference. And-

• 2:04:42Jordi Hays?

  Being able to protest things is important.

• 2:04:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so the protester was outside with a funny sign, but people were taking photos of each other. Like, it was very, very friendly. I, when I first heard like, oh, we're being protesting, I was like, oh, what does this mean? Is this like, serious? Are they gonna be really adversarial?

• 2:04:56Jordi Hays?

  I was gonna be protesting outside of Gusto if they didn't roll out instant payroll.

• 2:05:00John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. Anyway, we have our next guest in the restream waiting room. We have Andre from Consol. Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

• 2:05:11Speaker 06

  Hey guys, doing good. How are you?

• 2:05:13John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining. Kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself, what you do, what the announcement is.

• 2:05:19Speaker 06

  Sure, thank you for having me. Big fans here, actually. The whole team. I don't know if you can see them.

• 2:05:24John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:05:25Jordi Hays?

  Watching.

• 2:05:25Speaker 06

  Like, huddling around, watching.

• 2:05:26John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 2:05:26Jordi Hays?

  Hey, turn around, guys. We can see you. There's a little bit of a time delay.

• 2:05:29John Coogan?

  Wave.

• 2:05:31Jordi Hays?

  Say hello.

• 2:05:32Speaker 06

  There's some delay, maybe. Yeah, so, yeah, I mean, today we're here to kind of, you know, talking about a Series A announcement. We just, uh...

• 2:05:41Jordi Hays?

  There they are.

• 2:05:42Speaker 06

  They're there. A little delay.

• 2:05:42John Coogan?

  What you got?

• 2:05:44Speaker 06

  We just raised our Series A, DST Global and Broad Capital.

• 2:05:50John Coogan?

  How much? How much you raised?

• 2:05:51Speaker 06

  Twenty-three million dollars.

• 2:05:52Jordi Hays?

  There you go, there you go.

• 2:05:56John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:05:58Jordi Hays?

  All right, all right. What do you do?

• 2:06:00John Coogan?

  What do you do?

• 2:06:00Jordi Hays?

  What do you do? I gotta know. You gotta tell us.

• 2:06:04Speaker 06

  I'm not gonna tell you.

• 2:06:04John Coogan?

  Stop burying the lead. Stop burying the lead. Tell us what you do.

• 2:06:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, we automate IT support using AI agents that understand how your organization works.

• 2:06:16John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:06:17Speaker 06

  I know.

• 2:06:18Jordi Hays?

  We're fired up.

• 2:06:18Speaker 06

  We're not just a chatbot, you know. Under the hood, we're basically plugged into all your systems, your apps, your devices. We understand how everything's laid out. So we know, you know, this is, this is John, this is title department manager, the direct reports, the apps he has access to, the permissions in those apps. So like, all this data's flowing into Consol from all these different systems. And then, we let you build company policy and processes above that layer in natural language. So, we call these things playbooks, but essentially you're able to say, you know... When someone needs a password reset, first ask them this question, then run this action, then do this thing. So that's not converted to code. It's just natural language instructions. Uploads the agent, just handles that directly in Slack.

• 2:06:56John Coogan?

  How modern is the wheelhouse customer for you? Because I, when I started my first company in 2012, we were late enough in the rollout of SaaS that we had no on-premise servers whatsoever. We had no local network. We just had, you know, Google Cloud apps and Gmail accounts. And so everything was managed in various dashboards and it was an immense hassle to de-provision and provision. But there is a whole other world of companies that have much more complex IT policies. Where are you seeing the most value? What does the wheelhouse customer look like?

• 2:07:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we, we've started with the kind of more like modern tech companies to get started. So a lot of our customers, Ramp's actually one of our customers. There you go. You know, shout out to them. They're a great customer. Scale AI, Flock Safety, Webflow, these are all customers that are, you know, they're kind of like internally looking to, they're starting to think about what does it look like, what does IT look like in the age of AI, right? And I think kind of what happened was we got it right in the seventies, the eighties, right? Where computers started being a thing and, you know, IT was really this department that was coming in and showing people like, look, get off your typewriters. Here's how computers work. Here's how you can be more efficient. And they were like

• 2:08:19Speaker 06

  kind of optimizing business process. And somewhere along the way, kind of like you mentioned, right? We started adding too many apps and too many, there are too many things that were being kind of managed, right? And, you know, IT kind of lost focus from being this kind of driver of innovation in the organization to just like stuck in, you know, they're like on this ticket treadmill, right? You come in, you've got 10 tickets, you log out, you've got 15. So you're kind of just like always just handling tickets. And so our kind of mission here is, you know, how do we take IT back to where it was, where, you know, take, take off the support load from them, handle all of those tickets for them using AI that again, works the way they do. And then

• 2:09:01Speaker 06

  Get them back to, you know, working with other teams and finding ways to like optimize their their process essentially.

• 2:09:08John Coogan?

  How does security fit into all this? I feel like the the the IT professional is very much the unsung hero, the enemy of the fisherman, the fishing scams. I mean, every place I've worked that's like professional or had a professional email, you get these fishing scams and I feel like Sherlock Holmes when I clock it and send it to the IT guy, hey, we're getting a fishing scam. And he's like, I set that up. I sent that to you. I was testing you. It was a test. But yeah, talk to me about security and how that fits in. It feels like I really don't want my IT professional to be able to be prompt injected. There needs to be a human in the loop still, maybe, but maybe you know something else.

• 2:09:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, um, yeah, I guess you hit on a couple of things. So first, we obviously spend a lot of time internally on security, making sure things work really well. This is my second company. First company, we were doing application security company. We're selling to US government Fortune 100. So very familiar with, you know, building secure software. And so that's like the first thing I think, you know, next we think about, well, how do we actually kind of like give the LLM and the AI agent control over the process and like the order that things get done and like, kind of like, you know, this this ability to flex with the user and work with the user, but then build more deterministic processes for things like API calls and actually, you know, the things that are more sensitive, right?

• 2:10:31Speaker 06

  And so our sensitive actions are actually quite locked down and you have the ability to, you know, get approvals on them, do MFA checks, um, you know, honestly, just lock them down. Some companies say, hey, we don't want to reset any passwords with console, right? Like, we just don't have to, right? So you can kind of adopt it as you're comfortable. And then lastly, yeah, if you don't support, you know, let's say password resets, your company, you decide that's too risky, we will loop in a human when those requests come through. So the way, you know, the way kind of console works high level is we sit in Slack instead of having to go to, you know, like a JIRA ticket form or something and you have to fill out, you know, the subject line and you're answering, you know, the laptop you have and you're like, shouldn't I already know what laptop I have? And you're kind of just going through this list and you hit it and you wait for, wait for some response.

• 2:11:17Speaker 06

  You go into console, you type in your issue, just like you're messaging a coworker, that request goes in. Fifty to sixty percent of the time, we handle it entirely with the end user. And then when we can't, we actually loop a human in. So on the backend, we'll, you know, basically message them and say, hey, like, you know, John is having this issue. Here's everything you need to know about John. And they can jump in and then the end user stays in Slack, right? They don't have to go to a separate portal or anything like that.

• 2:11:40John Coogan?

  Makes sense. What's the go to market?

• 2:11:42Jordi Hays?

  Did you share any numbers related to the fundraise outside of the headline number? Anything on the, on the business side? Or we stay?

• 2:11:51Speaker 06

  I, I don't know that we're sharing too much yet. We're doing really well. So we are hiring.

• 2:11:56Jordi Hays?

  Sign that, sign that the company's ripping.

• 2:12:01John Coogan?

  The, the number that I got, like, kind of off the record, but I'll share is, is one. And that's, and then, and that's a contract with Ramp. So that's the really the headline KPI. It's more of a binary metric for success. But it's the, really the only metric of success that matters in Silicon Valley these days. So congrats on, on passing that binary test. Talk to me about the go to market. Based on the size of customer, I'm super interested to know, is this like steak dinners, hand to hand combat, phone calls, you know, just direct response? Are you G2 hacking? What's going on?

• 2:12:38Speaker 06

  I mean, we are very flexible. We'll do what it takes, right? I think the, the standard process is actually, you know, we'll connect with some, you know, some folks, you know, some on the IT team, usually some, you know, head of, head of IT, director of IT. And we'll give them a demo. Usually they have some AI initiative internally where they're, you know, looking at, again, how do we make IT more efficient or kind of like rethink how we do this? We do a demo. Usually they're sold. We do a POC right after that. So to get into a POC, we do like an on prem, sorry, we do like a full, full product deploy into their systems. We'll do things like, you know, company, uh, security review, legal, um, whatever.

• 2:13:20Speaker 06

  Then we'll go live about three weeks is usually how long we do like a POC for. So usually within the first week, what we like to say is you're actually in a good enough spot to go come live company-wide.

• 2:13:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:13:32Speaker 06

  We spend the rest two weeks just kind of like dialing it in. But we go live pretty very, very, pretty quickly. I think Scale actually went live in about three weeks during the POC company-wide because they were just seeing so much success with it.

• 2:13:45John Coogan?

  Are you positioning the product as like purely additive to the existing IT systems, plug-in with everything? Are you seeing folks rip out legacy systems that they maybe develop themselves or legacy competitors? What's the, what is the trade-off that the buyer is making at the moment?

• 2:14:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, shouldn't be any trade-off. We, our goal when we started the company was like, look, you're already managing a bunch of systems. If we come in and we say, well, if you want to use console, you want to use AI, you have to replace half your systems. Like, that's just going to be a non-starter for really busy teams. And so what we do instead is we actually build really deep integrations into, you know, as much of your tool stack as possible. So we integrate very deeply into like Okta, Google, you know, Slack, you know, even your Jira, right? Like, we don't have to replace your ITSM. So your ticketing tool, you can actually keep that. You've spent a lot of time configuring it and building it out. You can actually build, you can basically put console in front of that and act as like your first line of defense. And the reason we're able to do that, you know, I know it's kind of like a nod situation. What do you mean, you're not replacing any core system?

• 2:14:48Speaker 06

  Is, you know, we're actually like doing work. So we don't need to replace your, your ticketing tool because we act actually do 50, 60% of your, you know, the requests that you're getting, again, without human involvement. And so that's often

• 2:15:01Jordi Hays?

  Do you just try to generally charge for the value? Obviously, if you're doing 50 to 60% of the work, that's saving, that's at least, like, sounds like one to many people's time. But how do you, how do you charge for it?

• 2:15:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we we just charge per end user per month, basically. So the number of employees you've got in the company, we kind of have like a base price that we use and we discount as as a company gets gets larger. But we try to keep pricing pretty static. I know there's this trend to, you know, look at usage based pricing and so on. What we found is, you know, one, that can be a little confusing, you know, credits and things are hard to like estimate, especially upfront. And so what we found is like IT teams actually really like the predictability of knowing, okay, for this year, I'm going to pay this much money for this tool. And, you know, we kind of think of it as if you feel like you're getting a, you know, you're getting more value out of it than you're paying than, you know, great, that's good for you. So.

• 2:15:56Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, thank you for driving efficiency in the enterprise.

• 2:16:00John Coogan?

  This is something we need. I don't want to share. I don't want to dox anyone. But, you know, we definitely have some interns running wild with access to systems that I would love to be able to just fire off an agent to go clean up because you can't trust Tyler with these the access to the root keys to this kingdom. Anything could happen. I want to be able to snap my fingers and de provision him, turn off his ramp car before he buys more.

• 2:16:25Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 2:16:26Speaker 06

  We know where to find him.

• 2:16:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much for hopping on. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:16:30Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang and congrats on the round.

• 2:16:31John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:16:34Jordi Hays?

  What else we got going on?

• 2:16:35John Coogan?

  We got bezel, we got get bezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Also, we got a new news from Donald Boat. He's been traded.

• 2:16:45Jordi Hays?

  Big trade deal.

• 2:16:47John Coogan?

  Trade deal. He's going over to Substack. He says he's unless he's granted a retainer on a favorable contract from Nikita and Elon Musk, he will be taking his talents to Substack. He's been having some fun. Is he really six, seven feet tall? That's really very tall, if that's true.

• 2:17:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I didn't meet him in person, but I knew I know someone who did meet him.

• 2:17:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:10Jordi Hays?

  He's apparently super tall and very, very slim.

• 2:17:14John Coogan?

  He says the low.

• 2:17:16Jordi Hays?

  A John sized man.

• 2:17:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, in order to get him on the team, you got to give him a low mileage used Corvette Z06, C5 or C6. It's funny. He's funny, funny guy.

• 2:17:27Jordi Hays?

  How much is a low mileage ZO?

• 2:17:31John Coogan?

  Probably $30,000, I would estimate. I mean, Z06 is like the performance package. I believe we have our next guest in the restream waiting room.

• 2:17:40Jordi Hays?

  Do we?

• 2:17:40John Coogan?

  Andrew Yang is joining. Oh, thank you so much. Welcome to the stream.

• 2:17:46Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:17:47John Coogan?

  Good to meet you.

• 2:17:48Speaker 07

  Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. Great to be here.

• 2:17:50John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on early. Great to meet you. Wanted to have you on the show to get an update on you and everything going on. But then also, there's so many questions about AI, AGI, UBI, so many acronyms. I'm sure we'll go through all of them. But why don't you just give us a little bit of a reintroduction for those who might not be familiar, what you're up to these days?

• 2:18:14Speaker 07

  Sure thing. People remember me from my 2020 presidential campaign, saying that AI was going to come, it was going to eat the jobs, and that we should shift to putting money into people's hands more quickly and broadly. Imagine making that case in Iowa in 2020 at truck stops before AI had actually arrived on the scene. But now, here we are, five years later, and I dare say, a lot of the folks who are watching this are running their heads, being like, oh, yeah. We're gonna do a number on a lot of rank and file entry level workers. So, over the last number of years, I've been trying to figure out how to get money back into people's hands. I was inspired by my friend, Mark Cuban, who started Cost Plus Drugs. You guys had Mark on recently, right?

• 2:18:56John Coogan?

  We did, a couple of weeks ago. He was great.

• 2:18:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I thought, can we cost plus anything else in American life? And I realized that we're spending 170 billion or so on our cellphone services and data. I was paying Verizon over $100 a month, 140 a month, to be precise. And meanwhile, Verizon and AT&T paid out 18 billion in shareholder dividends in the last 12 months. So you can kind of start doing some math and realize that Americans are paying twice as much for data as people in other countries. So today is the kickoff of Noble Mobile, where we try and put money back into Americans' hands, and hopefully have people doomscrew a little bit less, live a little better. We're having a big party in New York City on Thursday night. You guys are not in New York, right?

• 2:19:43Speaker 07

  And have you guys come as VIPs and hang out?

• 2:19:46Jordi Hays?

  We'll be there spiritually. But break down, break down. I know kind of the mechanics of Noble Mobile, but break it down for the audience. How does, what's the, how does it actually work?

• 2:20:02Speaker 07

  Well, but before I get into this, I'd actually love to put you guys on the spot and ask who you use for your wireless provider. So I said I was

• 2:20:09John Coogan?

  I use Verizon. They've been fleecing me for years.

• 2:20:12Jordi Hays?

  Verizon.

• 2:20:13Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:20:15John Coogan?

  I actually have a, I actually have a iMessage here. Your bill is ready. This is not a joke. 11:45 this came in.

• 2:20:23Jordi Hays?

  Your bill is ready.

• 2:20:24John Coogan?

  I just, I just pay it and I, and I don't, I don't think too much about it, but I'm sure I'm getting fleeced because I probably signed up on some like super cheap contract about a decade ago and it's gone up every month. And, you know, it's

• 2:20:37Speaker 07

  Dude, the recent ads are like locking the price in parentheses because we're just gonna keep on raising it. But the craziest thing is when you guys travel abroad, when I was on Verizon, I went to Europe with my family this summer and the travel pass costs 10 bucks a day to put yourself on the, the foreign carrier's towers. You know how much Verizon, AT&T are spending to put you on their partner's towers? About $2.50. So why on earth would you charge us $10 or $12 a day if it's gonna cost you $2.50? Like the entire industry, when you start digging in, there's just a lot of profiteering.

• 2:21:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So you guys pay, you guys pay people to use their phone less. Does that mean I start out with a like, but, but break down the actual mechanics of how that works on a, on a month to month basis.

• 2:21:27Speaker 07

  Sure thing. So check it out. I'll use myself. I, I know I use my phone for doom scrolling and social media a little bit too much, but at the same time, I consider myself an effective in touch individual and kind of need my smartphone and, you know, don't wanna count how, how much data I'm using. So the way Noble Mobile works is that you pay a $50 flat fee for unlimited data. And if you use it up the wazoo, then you paid 50 and that's the end of it. But if you use less than 20 gigs per month, then we'll give you cash back in the form of an end of month payment, data dividend, we call it. Of up to 20 bucks and then any money we give you will then grow at a 5.5% interest

• 2:22:11Speaker 07

  rate annualized so that your cell phone plan becomes like a mini savings vehicle without you having to think about it or do anything. And so this way you get to

• 2:22:20Jordi Hays?

  Do you guys hold on, do you guys, do you guys hold on to those funds as long as somebody's like a customer? Is that how that works? Or like?

• 2:22:28Speaker 07

  You can take the money out anytime you want. It's your money. But if you leave it with us, we'll grow it at a higher rate than you're going to get someplace else risk free because we wanted it to be a set it and forget it savings plan. One of our first investors was a guy named Scott Galloway, Prof G, who you guys probably know. Has he been on the show?

• 2:22:47Jordi Hays?

  Not yet. Not yet. We gotta, he's gotta come on sometime.

• 2:22:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, I'll try. I'm seeing him later this week.

• 2:22:53John Coogan?

  That'd be amazing. Yeah, please let him know.

• 2:22:55Speaker 07

  In your direction. But Scott's very passionate about trying to help young people in particular, young men, save money in a set it and forget it way. And so Noble Mobile, we want to do three things at once, which is a lot, or whatever. Number one, we want to see you actually pay closer to what you should be paying true value for your data. It's about half what you're currently paying. Number two, we want to incentivize you to doom scroll a little less and look at your family's faces a little more. And number three, you want to make it easier for you to save money without having to think about it. So those are the things that we think we can accomplish.

• 2:23:28John Coogan?

  That's a really cool flow.

• 2:23:29Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what's the customer acquisition strategy besides you telling as many people as possible about it? You're starting there. But, but what's the GTM look like?

• 2:23:39Speaker 07

  Sure thing. So one of the things we figured out was that I've got a following, Scott Galloway's got a following, Charlamagne's got a following, a lot of people have followings. And so if you want to help them save money and live a little better, you can tell them about Noble Mobile. And for every person you tell you help them, but then we also will reward you. So what you're going to see is that there's going to be something of a collective that's now helping acquire customers and let people know about this. The model that everyone's familiar with is Ryan Reynolds in mobile, Ryan Reynolds shows up on commercials and whatnot. And so one of the jokes I tell is I'm talking to

• 2:24:21Speaker 07

  Various celebrities or influencers like, look, instead of one Ryan Reynolds, there are going to be like thirty of us or fifty of us or whatnot. And then when I tell them Ryan Reynolds made three hundred million dollars, then they're, you know,

• 2:24:35John Coogan?

  He did fantastically well on that deal, right?

• 2:24:38Speaker 07

  And people are like, okay, I'm definitely ready to, to, you know, tell my people. So we're in conversations right now with some very, very fun, fascinating figures with followings. That's a lot of F's. But this is like a consumer-centered, human-based movement to try and make this industry work better for us.

• 2:25:00John Coogan?

  That's very cool.

• 2:25:01Jordi Hays?

  What does it take to actually build a new telecom company like this? You guys obviously aren't setting up your own towers, but are you partnered with some bigger existing players? Or what did that look like?

• 2:25:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, it was a lot of work setting up our own towers. You know, I had to like get out the tool belt now. So you're obviously right. We did as we licensed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of data from one of the big carriers. And the point I want to make to your incredibly savvy audience is like, look, you talk about you chose Verizon ten years ago. I chose Verizon twenty-five years ago. And we chose it based on something that we thought was like network quality. Like, I'm an important person.

• 2:25:44John Coogan?

  There's a map and Verizon map was more red than the other maps.

• 2:25:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, it was like in little towns where you were cities. It was like, well, this network's better than that one. This one, it was just vibes, vibes based, basically.

• 2:25:57Speaker 07

  Yeah. So over the last ten to twenty years, what happened is all three carriers bulked up their networks to the point where they're all pretty excellent. And then now you have some satellite data that's getting piped through the network. So what happened is that we made a buying decision X years ago. And then in the time since, it kind of got leveled up and became commoditized. So what we're, what we're doing is we licensed hundreds of millions of dollars worth of data from one of the carriers, T-Mobile. And then now we can make it available to people in a way that's really going to, again, accomplish multiple goals. And the great thing is that it's in this day and age too, because check this out, guys.

• 2:26:42Speaker 07

  Like, you're like me, I bet, and have approximately zero experience actually switching carriers.

• 2:26:48Speaker 07

  Maybe you've done it zero times. Yep. Um, I was the same way. I've been on Verizon for 25 years. Every device manufactured from 2018 on now has an eSIM where you can direct it to another network. You keep your number, keep your phone, takes five minutes and you can just bingo, bango, switch to another network. Most consumers do not understand this. Um, and even I knew it technically, but then when I actually switched from Verizon, even I was like, holy shit. I just ended a 25 year relationship in five minutes and now I'm saving myself, you know, $1,200 a year like that. This is like magic. That's crazy. So, so now in many ways, the goal is to, to spread the magic to as many Americans as possible.

• 2:27:32Jordi Hays?

  Are you guys, uh, like, how does, uh, what's we're, what's T-Mobile's or Noble Mobile's integrations with the actual hardware manufacturers? Are you guys working on deals with, with, uh, like, uh, with companies at the device level?

• 2:27:50Speaker 07

  You know, so we, we think most people are happy with their device, uh, and will just bring their own phone. Uh, there are some people that are under a contract with their carrier. Uh, and obviously there was like a new iPhone launch just last week. Um, so there are some folks who, and by the way, this is true of you guys too. I love talking to people like you because we're, we're on the same boat. So there was a period when every time a new iPhone came out, we were like, oh my God, I need that. You need to line up and camp out. Yeah, yeah. The moment of the lines. Yeah. And then that stopped being true like a number of months ago where we're like, what's the difference with this one? You know, the camera's a little better. Like, I'm not even really seeing it. This one's orange. And, and you can see that the, the device replacement cycle has just gotten longer and longer.

• 2:28:33Speaker 07

  So I talked about before about how the networks have become at parity and commoditized. Our devices have kind of converged around a level that we're perfectly happy with. Um, and so most people we think don't want a new phone necessarily. They just want like, you know, the, to not be getting gouged every month. If you do want to get a new device and you decide to go through the carriers, by the way, I've done this. So I get a new iPhone of Verizon and like the device is free, but I'm tied up in a two-year contract where I'm paying Verizon a certain amount over this period. And I want the folks listening to this just to think about it for a second. The carriers' contracts with us are so profitable that they can zero out and subsidize

• 2:29:15Speaker 07

  a $1,200 device or $1,000 device and be like, hey, it's free to you because we're making so much money off. You were gonna pay. I mean, obviously, Apple's not giving them that device for free. Apple's like, you know, getting paid a lot of money. So it would be more cost efficient for someone who really wants the iPhone 17 to buy one unlocked and then sign up with Noble. If you did the math, you'd actually save money on that versus getting it for free from a carrier. But most people are perfectly happy with their current device and might just want to try a different network.

• 2:29:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, congratulations on the launch. Super exciting. I'm excited to see the different partners that you put together. And I feel like you just can hit the campaign trail again, but this time for Noble.

• 2:29:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, you know, the playbook.

• 2:29:57Jordi Hays?

  Hang in, just go truck stop to truck stop and just like help people switch over.

• 2:30:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:03Speaker 07

  You guys just read my mind. You know, I'm coming to a truck stop near you in a hot minute. It might not just be me. It might be Scott Galloway. It might be someone else in the Noble collective. But this is going to be a really fun company to grow because, Noah, it's it's an industry that's really past due for some modernization and some humanization.

• 2:30:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:26Jordi Hays?

  Last question. Did you, did you raise a bunch of money for this already?

• 2:30:30Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think you guys get to do a sound effect. But yeah, we raised, we raised 10.3 million from.

• 2:30:38Jordi Hays?

  Not just a sound effect, an authentic.

• 2:30:39John Coogan?

  We have a real gong in the studio.

• 2:30:41Speaker 07

  I did enjoy that. I want to bang that gong in person.

• 2:30:45John Coogan?

  You're welcome.

• 2:30:45Jordi Hays?

  Anytime.

• 2:30:46John Coogan?

  Anytime you're in LA, let us know.

• 2:30:48Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah, I'll let you know. I'll be in LA before you know it. But Scott's an investor. A lot of other fun people are investors. Shout out to Corazon Capital for leading the round. And, you know, we're, we're gonna grow like a weed. It's gonna be fun.

• 2:31:01Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Great. Great to get the update and we'll see you soon.

• 2:31:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon, Andrew. Thanks so much.

• 2:31:08Speaker 07

  Thanks, guys. See you in LA. Appreciate you having me.

• 2:31:10Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:31:11John Coogan?

  Bye. And if you're thinking about going to his event in New York, you need a place to stay, book a wonder with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Find your happy place on wander.com. Hey, there's some folks that are traveling, some folks that are going to be in LA, some folks wondering.

• 2:31:33Jordi Hays?

  John Exley says Scott Galloway appearing on TBPN would be a milestone for me, the very first time I force-crep my YouTube app.

• 2:31:41John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I was about to, I literally am about to DM John Exley to know, like, is he that anti-Scott? Because I feel like we have some, we have a wide breadth of guests here. We can have a conversation with all sorts of people. But if he's, but if he's...

• 2:31:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm interested. We gotta, we gotta, we gotta let John weigh in on key decisions like this.

• 2:32:03John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 2:32:04Jordi Hays?

  But, but yeah.

• 2:32:06John Coogan?

  Anyway, what else is in the news? Someone's hosting a website on disposable vape. Did you see this on Hacker News? Taylor Ottwell says, "Me stressing about how we're going to build the best back-end infrastructure for the future of agentic workflows and quantum MCP."

• 2:32:23Jordi Hays?

  Are they making internet-connected vapes now? Is that?

• 2:32:26John Coogan?

  They are. I've seen these, I've seen these in person.

• 2:32:29Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, finally.

• 2:32:30John Coogan?

  The LCD screens, the actual screens have gotten so cheap that you can run an entire computer on them, basically. And these are disposable.

• 2:32:39Jordi Hays?

  Can you run an AI factory or a supercomputer?

• 2:32:41John Coogan?

  I don't think you can mine Bitcoin effectively. I don't think you can inference the most cutting-edge frontier AI models, but you can do a lot more on a disposable vape. We should, we should get Tyler to build something.

• 2:32:54Jordi Hays?

  Bobby Cosmic, our lone soldier on our TBPN Twitch.

• 2:32:59John Coogan?

  Yes, thank you.

• 2:33:00Jordi Hays?

  What if I want to stream TBPN for three hours a day on 5G? Would Noble Mobile be a good fit?

• 2:33:05John Coogan?

  That's the benchmark. You can't have a carrier. They can't support three hours of live streaming a day.

• 2:33:11Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think, I think, it's interesting. So Noble Mobile, I think, I think the messaging is like a bit, you know, they're trying to do a bunch of things at once. I think, I think just a $50 phone plan that helps you use your phone less is like enough of messaging. And I'm, I think that they can get... A bunch of people to sign up for that?

• 2:33:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:33:32Jordi Hays?

  Um, is it going to be a competitive bloodbath? Yes.

• 2:33:35John Coogan?

  I don't know, there's something about saving, saving money that can create these interesting fly, flywheels. Remember Acorns? Didn't that company do very well? It was a, I believe it was a consumer credit card that every time you swiped it, it would round up to the nearest dollar and put the cents in a savings account and compound. And so it was a way to save money. And I believe they got to maybe a billion dollar valuation. It felt like it was.

• 2:34:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they, they almost spacked, it got canceled. They had a hundred and twenty million of revenue. This, this was one of those things like early fintech company that was like winning, but then didn't, I don't think they've ever gotten out. I'd be interested to see what happens with that business. But yeah, the, just save money on your mobile plan is like a simple message. I think Andrew building a coalition of celebrities that are, that feel good about promoting this. Use your phone less. Um, but again, I mean, it's going to be, uh, uh, like, like you said, you, you don't think that much. There's, we're not the target audience, I think, for Noble Mobile.

• 2:34:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:38Jordi Hays?

  Um, but there's a bunch of people out there that.

• 2:34:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think I like the savings concept. Um, I'm worried about the revealed preference of, people say they don't want to scroll. People like to scroll.

• 2:34:49Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, I think his argument would be even at fifty dollars a month, it's still cheaper than.

• 2:34:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Um, well, if you're scrolling X, you're going to be treated to a somewhat tweaked algorithm that Nikita's been working on. Peter Yang breaks it down. He says, he hasn't seen a quote, it's so over, RIP product, or this changes everything cringe tweet on here in days. The algorithm must be working. And so Dylan Field put it to the test. Founder of Figma, of course, he said, "It's so over. RIP cringe tweets. New ex algo changes everything." And as funny as that post is, it didn't go viral. And so I think, I think that they might've nerfed that meta. We're seeing a new meta emerge already with the

• 2:35:38John Coogan?

  be, be Jeff Bezos, be Sam Altman, be Elon Musk spawn in like the, the, the 4chan style.

• 2:35:46Jordi Hays?

  When one meta dies, another is born.

• 2:35:48John Coogan?

  Yes, there is always a new meta. Never lose hope.

• 2:35:51Jordi Hays?

  Actually, I've been liking, I've been liking the, the, the new ones. I think it's a, it's a funny way to tell a story and I've actually been learning something.

• 2:35:58John Coogan?

  Yes, and it is more in-depth, like it, it has more to unpack. It's typically hard to get a lot of text to go viral. Uh, the, the viral posts tend to just be like one or two sentences, but these longer stories, when they're told in this format, seem to do quite well. Um, at the same time, they're, uh, they're rife with misinformation a lot of times as we've, as we've learned from actually reading them. Um, but you gotta go to the, you gotta go to the source sometimes.

• 2:36:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think we have Tim Higgins.

• 2:36:27John Coogan?

  We have our next guest from the Wall Street Journal. Tim Higgins, welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 2:36:32Speaker 08

  Hey, thanks guys for having me.

• 2:36:35John Coogan?

  We were, I believe we were just reading some of your reporting about Elon Musk and the pay package. I believe you, you authored that, correct?

• 2:36:42Speaker 08

  Yeah, you know, I write a lot about Elon.

• 2:36:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:46Speaker 08

  Uh, and it's the trillion dollar man.

• 2:36:48John Coogan?

  The, assuming if he pulls it on.

• 2:36:51Jordi Hays?

  You have trillion dollar hair.

• 2:36:52John Coogan?

  Fantastic hair.

• 2:36:54Jordi Hays?

  So it's fitting that you would, that you would write.

• 2:36:57John Coogan?

  Um, but I mean, we don't need to wade into Elon territory. Give us the update on the book.

• 2:37:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Congratulations on the launch.

• 2:37:04Speaker 08

  Well, thank you. Thank you. I wore, it is out today. It's a great corporate drama about Apple, about. All of these rivals who want to displace Apple as the gateway to the digital world, the gateway being the iPhone, the App Store that really changed the world almost 20 years ago.

• 2:37:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:37:23Jordi Hays?

  The ultimate toll booth.

• 2:37:24John Coogan?

  We were feeling the power of iMessage and the lock-in there and how hard it is to build other products that want to deal with communication in your life. If you're in the iMessage world, Apple has you.

• 2:37:36Jordi Hays?

  I mean, there's so many, there's so many, there's so many different angles.

• 2:37:39John Coogan?

  And people, yeah, people think, oh, you just switch the phone and then you're in a different ecosystem. Like, there's, there's a lot of threads holding on. So, yeah, walk us through the inspiration, the reporting process. How much was FOIA'd? How much was reading through, you know, leaked tech emails versus original reporting, talking to sources? What is your process?

• 2:37:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when did you start writing this book, by the way? Because this is a story that's been unfolding.

• 2:38:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:04Speaker 08

  Yeah. Well, you know, it's, to your point, it's been a 10-year fight for Apple. I mean, people started complaining about that power almost from the get-go, but you really started to see the seeds of what I think of as a rebellion, almost like a Boston Tea Party moment of these colonists in the new world that Apple created kind of rising up over that Apple tax, what they call that Apple tax, the 15% to 30% commission that Apple takes on digital services and sales, right? And also more so the rules, right? Exactly. And so when I, so I'm a business columnist at The Journal, but I had been the Apple beat reporter at The Journal, had been the Apple beat reporter at Bloomberg. So I'd

• 2:38:44Speaker 08

  written about Apple for many years. And I followed the Tim Sweeney epic lawsuit against Apple very closely. And it paid attention every day during that lengthy trial in 2021. It just was struck by the scale of the drama. You know, in one way, Tim Sweeney is a very interesting protagonist. He's started the company from scratch, had this vision. He's a world builder beyond just being an entrepreneur. He's thinking about the future, whether it's the metaverse and how Fortnite might play in that. And he was looking at Apple as, as going too far, you know, taking too much, really kind of against that idea of

• 2:39:27Speaker 08

  the, the open internet, right? Then you have Apple, which is also a storied US company, which had really built something. Very important to everyday life, the iPhone, clearly the center of many people's digital lives, digital experience. And their kind of argument is, we built this, we keep it running, we're giving you all of these customers, you kind of owe us a little, and isn't that fair? And so you have these kind of, this really great clash of, of what is, how should this play out? And so it just, it struck me as interesting. And as I started kind of thinking about it in a bigger way, it really seemed as if it wasn't just Tim Sweeney.

• 2:40:10Speaker 08

  You've got the Spotify element, you've got the regulators in Europe, you've got other tech companies in the US and around the world, really kind of rising up in this kind of interesting moment, which I thought, in a lot of ways, was surprising, right? If you went back several years ago and talked about monopolies in the US, and Microsoft, the old Microsoft, of course, was attacked by the DOJ and fought those allegations, but in the more modern era, Google, Amazon, those were the big tech companies that were painted with that monopoly brush, fairly or not. But Apple, in a lot of ways, especially in Washington DC, was seen as, you know, something to aspire to.

• 2:40:54Speaker 08

  And, you know, what we've seen in the last few years, because of Epic, because of Spotify, because of others, has changed the conversation around the power of Apple, and the power it has, not just with that tax, if you will, but about the control they have on the digital, the digital world.

• 2:41:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. How did you?

• 2:41:17Jordi Hays?

  Is, is Apple good or bad? I'm kidding. I'm not gonna make you, I'm not gonna make you condense it down. I did have a, so, you know, we're extremely sympathetic to the, to the startups, businesses, building in the Apple ecosystem and creating a value for Apple users, and then obviously paying the tax. I had a funny, funny experience, John and I, the other day. I was like trying to download an app, I realized I downloaded a fake app.

• 2:41:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:41:46Jordi Hays?

  And then I got to get the benefit of the Apple toll booth, because I just immediately went into my subscriptions and canceled it in one click. And I was just thinking at that time, if this was just some regular app on the internet... It would have just, they would have made it harder. They maybe would have like tried to not let me.

• 2:42:02John Coogan?

  And that's Apple's argument. They say, you know, this isn't a tax. This is, you're licensing our software.

• 2:42:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, and it's, and it can be oftentimes. It's fair, right? They're providing a service. They're providing security. They're providing an ecosystem that the user wants to be part of.

• 2:42:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Were you able to uncover any special deals that Apple has brokered with big companies?

• 2:42:24Speaker 08

  Yeah, and.

• 2:42:25John Coogan?

  I feel like 30% sometimes, they certainly don't want to mention that that's ever been, you know, negotiated down, but.

• 2:42:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, there's also like the way, like the way in which Audible does their pricing. You can't just like buy books. You gotta subscribe to that.

• 2:42:40John Coogan?

  Credits.

• 2:42:41Jordi Hays?

  Part of their weird, is their system like designed to like get around?

• 2:42:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:47Jordi Hays?

  These rules. I'm curious, I'd be interested to know about like, what are the weird edge cases?

• 2:42:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:42:52Jordi Hays?

  What are the special deals?

• 2:42:54Speaker 08

  So, one of the things about Apple, and you compare it to the Android system, Google's operating system, is that Apple likes to pride itself on not doing special deals. Now, you know, its critics would point to some edge cases that they feel are leaning towards helping others, but generally, that's kind of the deal. Is that Apple has some rules and wants everybody to kind of follow them. Now, they, it's confusing because sometimes there's categories and, you know, we can get into that. Sometimes Roblox is perhaps treated differently compared to Epic Games in the old way, but that, just kind of put it under the category of they don't like to do special deals.

• 2:43:33Speaker 08

  Whereas Android does do special deals, in part because they feel that they have to compete against Apple to win those hot apps, right? The hot video games that drive so much of the sales in this ecosystem. If they're seeing the games go into the App Store and Apple, they feel at a disadvantage. So they're always trying to create an Apple-like experience in the Google, in the Google world, if you will. And it creates an interesting dynamic. Out there and kind of shows how these kind of things play out, right? And so, one of the things you see in the book is, well, why did Tim Sweeney,

• 2:44:15Speaker 08

  why did he go to war against two of the most powerful companies at the same time? And when I mean say the most companies, I mean, Apple and Google. It's because he first went to Google and tried to do, uh, tried to get his app so you could go outside of the App Store in the Google world, in the Android world, and download it that way. And he didn't get a lot of success. And part of that was, he would find out later, was that phone companies and some of his competitors in the video game world, who he was trying to partner with to create an alternative App Store that would be available on the Android system, they were getting deals from Google not to do stuff like that. Now, they could do that, but they didn't have any incentive to do it, right?

• 2:44:58Speaker 08

  So he figures this out, and then he's like, you know, he's got to go after them both at the same time, because Google is accusing him of, of basically not complaining about Apple's deal when it's, he's got a lot of complaints about that. So it really, he gambles that he can take to the courts this case that, that Google and Apple are out of line. And it, it doesn't go very well for him at the beginning. You remember, his lawsuit against Apple, he basically lost most of it.

• 2:45:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:45:26Speaker 08

  Now, he would be successful against Google later on. Uh, but Sweeney essentially loses most of the case. And in Apple, the way they handled it, uh, probably pushing too far, angering the judge over the one thing that she was upset about, this idea of, uh, that Apple wouldn't allow developers to steer users to, uh, other websites to make payments. And she wanted them to be able to do this. And Apple made it so difficult, uh, that she really came down hard on them earlier this year. And essentially, very cleverly, uh, these companies now are able to do that. And you see Spotify and Epic take advantage of it immediately, uh, directing users right outside of the, the walled garden of Apple,

• 2:46:09Speaker 08

  uh, to make their, uh, upgrades to the apps or pay their, or video game stuff that... It's pretty remarkable crack in the Apple ecosystem.

• 2:46:18Jordi Hays?

  Have they been super effective at driving the majority of users to pay outside of the ecosystem? Or is it more like half of the users are opting for these alternative payment rails and half? Or are they just saying like the only way to buy is now outside of the Apple walled garden?

• 2:46:37Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. What I understand is that the early data is pretty good for companies that are doing this. One of the other kind of data points that I look at is that Spotify several years ago, as it was thinking about how it could fight Apple in this regard, essentially started doing A/B testing in Europe with its Android app just to kind of run a testing that was essentially like if this was Apple, this would be the Apple rules and without the rules and kind of a variation of all that to see how much of that was hurting them. And the data, according to the records that I've looked at, was pretty significant that it was, A, considered a bad user experience and B, they were losing out a lot of upgrades.

• 2:47:20Speaker 08

  And so the early suggestion is that users like to do that.

• 2:47:25Jordi Hays?

  Like to go outside?

• 2:47:27Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:47:28Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 2:47:29John Coogan?

  Bullish.

• 2:47:30Jordi Hays?

  Bullish.

• 2:47:31John Coogan?

  Well, bearish for everybody but Apple. That's exciting.

• 2:47:34Jordi Hays?

  What else are you following going, you know, I don't want to, I want people to buy and read the book?

• 2:47:41John Coogan?

  I just bought it on Audible. I'm looking forward to listening to it.

• 2:47:44Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but did you just pay the Apple tax?

• 2:47:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, how much do you get? They charged me 16 bucks. Are you gonna get?

• 2:47:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, we don't need to break it all down, but what is Audible's deal? I'm actually curious. Do you have any idea?

• 2:47:58Speaker 08

  You know, it's one of those, it's interesting, just take a step back to Amazon and Apple and how they were some of the early fights in this kind of war you go back several years ago and this was back when Steve Jobs was alive. And Amazon is advertising that you can buy your books and not have to, you can read it on the iPhone and you don't have to pay for it, it doesn't go through Apple's system. And Apple was just steaming over this. And essentially, they came out with these rules that if you were selling it in the digital world, you had to basically use Apple's system.

• 2:48:37Speaker 08

  And so that's why you would see on the Apple, on the Amazon app, you couldn't buy through the app, you couldn't buy books through the app because they didn't want to pay the Apple tax, if you will. And one of the first companies after this rule earlier this year was changed because of the court ruling was Amazon. You can go buy your digital books now through the app because it's directing you outside the Apple system.

• 2:49:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember. I would click and wind up in a web browser even though I had the Amazon app installed.

• 2:49:09Jordi Hays?

  What should people be paying attention to going forward? I know a lot of these cases, Apple has an opportunity to kind of fight, you know, even after the judge decides one thing, they can come back and say, you know, continue to fight it, but what else is working its way through the courts?

• 2:49:27Speaker 08

  I mean, Apple's appealing, they feel the judge got it wrong in the US. They have been fined in Europe where regulators there find them over their conduct of how they treated music apps like Spotify. Spotify behind, along with other tech companies, pushing for that, the DMA, that landmark tech bill that was passed a few years ago that aims to limit big platforms like Apple. Apple's already been fined for that, but they are working to make rules that they think are fair, but that the folks that are against Apple would say, don't kind of take the spirit of the law and really kind of an example of how Apple fights this stuff tooth and nail.

• 2:50:09Speaker 08

  So that's to watch. The bigger issue here, perhaps, is just the way that Apple has been kind of painted as a monopolist fairly or not, it overshadows or it kind of tails them now as they go forward into new technologies. Everything they do is looked at as, is Apple abusing its power as they move into new spaces. So in AI, for example, I think investors would say, Apple's behind in AI right now. There's a lot of frustration out there. And so even when they do a deal with OpenAI to help kind of bolster their chat capabilities with Siri, you see Elon Musk come in and sue and say, wait a second, this is monopoly behavior. Apple

• 2:50:50Speaker 08

  is using its power to hurt other AI companies with this kind of deal, right? So put aside the merits of the lawsuit, you got, Apple's getting this position where it's having to defend basically everything it does against the idea that it is a monopoly. And that is a distraction that the company has to deal with. And that makes me remember a generation ago where Microsoft had a very similar situation as the DOJ went after it and regulators in Europe went after it. And Bill Gates and others at Microsoft have talked about how that period was a massive distraction and contributed in them falling behind as the new edge technologies took over. They missed out on mobile, if you will, and some other

• 2:51:32Speaker 08

  things. And, you know, there's some similarities here as you look at AI and where Apple is at this moment.

• 2:51:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's fascinating. It is such a distraction because, yeah, with these high stakes lawsuits, the CEO has to go. Like, you just can't delegate it fully. I mean, I'm sure there's teams of lawyers and whole legal departments that handle 90% of it, but it's still something at the top.

• 2:51:52Jordi Hays?

  They haven't done any big M&A, right? They're doing these little, they're doing a bunch of little deals, but nothing.

• 2:51:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's hard to get locked in and focus on the next generation of technology.

• 2:52:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, congratulations, Tim.

• 2:52:02John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the book. The book is I War. It's available everywhere books are sold. Please go.

• 2:52:06Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to read it and come back on anytime.

• 2:52:09John Coogan?

  Leave a review if you buy it. Leave a five-star review.

• 2:52:12Jordi Hays?

  We said earlier on the show, we made it into the Journal for the first time ourselves yesterday.

• 2:52:16John Coogan?

  It's a full circle.

• 2:52:17Jordi Hays?

  I read that. Congratulations, guys.

• 2:52:19John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:52:20Jordi Hays?

  The Journal is the backbone of TVP.

• 2:52:22John Coogan?

  It really is. The reporting is fantastic and we appreciate everything you do. Thank you so much for helping out.

• 2:52:26Speaker 08

  Cheers. Thank you both. Have a good day.

• 2:52:28John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Bye. And up next, we have Alex from OpenAI coming out of the Rooster Room waiting room into the TVP and all for going. I'm gonna let you start it, I'll be right back. I will kick it off with Alex from OpenAI. We are bringing in Alex. How are you doing? Good to meet you.

• 2:52:47Alexander Embiricos?

  Hey, how's it going? Nice to meet you too.

• 2:52:49John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Thanks so much for joining. Would love to get a brief introduction on yourself, your role within OpenAI, and then the update today.

• 2:52:57Alexander Embiricos?

  For sure. So hey, I'm Alex, I'm the product lead for Codex. And yeah, actually, it's been a pretty fun morning. We've spent the morning like looking for GPUs because we shipped a new model yesterday and demand was a little bit too higher than forecasted.

• 2:53:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:53:13Alexander Embiricos?

  And so we were running the model actually a lot slower than we were hoping, and luckily we just fixed that. So the update, we just shipped a new model for Codex. Codex is our coding agent.

• 2:53:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:53:23Alexander Embiricos?

  It's an agent you can work with everywhere you code, so like in your terminal, your IDE, GitHub, even your phone, which is actually a crowd favorite.

• 2:53:29John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:53:30Alexander Embiricos?

  The goal for Codex is to build it into an AI teammate. So you know, just like a human teammate, you start out working together with it, eventually you start delegating tasks to it. And then eventually you just give it a laptop, some permissions and a job, and you just say like, please prompt me with tasks that you think are worth doing.

• 2:53:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:45Alexander Embiricos?

  So, go ahead.

• 2:53:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have so many questions. I mean, first, I'm interested, you running the model slower actually helps you if you're in a GPU crunch? Is that just because you're spreading the amount of inference across like a broader user base essentially?

• 2:54:00Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah, just think like if you, you know, on your laptop, like if you open like way too many programs, they all just kind of run a little slower.

• 2:54:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:54:07Alexander Embiricos?

  So that the solution, you know, you could close programs on your computer, but we don't want to do that.

• 2:54:11John Coogan?

  No, of course, because you have other clients and other users and businesses and stuff. Where, like, take me through some of the use cases. I mean, we were talking to Doug O'Laughlin over at Semi Analysis, Fabricated Knowledge, and he was saying that he'll use what is traditionally like a coding agent to actually go and do something that looks like a deep research report. I had a sort of magical result where I used a coding agent to do a deep research report, but then instantiate it in HTML. And then I was able just to open an HTML page locally, and it was this amazing thing because it just has different set of UI that it can pull from that's not native to just the ChatGPT app. And so-

• 2:54:54John Coogan?

  That's one world, but then I'm sure there's people that are using this in the business context, deploying it into like large code bases. Where are people having the most success these days?

• 2:55:04Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah, totally. I mean, coding agents are really flexible. The primary use cases for coding agents and, you know, in Codex as well are to write code, answer questions and review code as well. And that's really what's been sticking. So we've seen like well over 10x growth in usage just over the past month. And most of that is improvements in how people use it to write code and answer questions. But we're now starting to see.

• 2:55:27John Coogan?

  You said 10x growth in the last month?

• 2:55:30Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah, over, over that. It's, yeah, it's growing like crazy and, and most of this is just because we've been improving a ton.

• 2:55:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:37Alexander Embiricos?

  So like, you know, if you go back, rewind a little bit over a month ago, we had the Codex CLI, which is a coding agent in your terminal.

• 2:55:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:55:42Alexander Embiricos?

  We've landed a ton of improvements to that. You know, some people like buttons, so, and they like using, you know, the coding agent next to the code that they're editing themselves.

• 2:55:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:55:51Alexander Embiricos?

  So we shipped the VS Code extension. VS Code is a, you know, really popular IDE.

• 2:55:54John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:55:55Alexander Embiricos?

  And, you know, that's quickly becoming a super popular service as well. And, um, you know, one of the special things about Codex is that it doesn't only run locally on your computer. Like a teammate, it can also run on its own computer and we call that Codex Cloud Tasks. And so we've landed a bunch of improvements there as well to make it like way faster, you know, and other things. So that's.

• 2:56:12John Coogan?

  That's a huge unlock for mobile, probably, right?

• 2:56:14Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah, yeah. It's a huge, I mean, you basically can't really code on mobile unless you have that. And so a lot of the work we've been doing is just like making those like fundamental surfaces where you use Codex better.

• 2:56:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:56:24Alexander Embiricos?

  And, you know, that kind of started that growth curve, uh, which we're really excited about. And then yesterday, um, sort of building on the success of GPT-5 and listening to a lot of the feedback we've been seeing around how people use GPT-5 specifically for coding in Codex, uh, we shipped a new model, which is GPT-5 Codex, uh, a version of Codex that's like basically like further optimized specifically for the Codex type use cases. And that's been really cool. You know, for example, one of the the big areas of feedback people had was that,

• 2:56:53Alexander Embiricos?

  you know, they sometimes G P five would think a little longer than they were hoping, specifically when they asked the coding question in Codex.

• 2:56:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:56:59Alexander Embiricos?

  When they were just asking a quick question, but it's sometimes they wanted it to work longer. And so one of the things we did is we made it so that with G P five Codex, we can actually more dynamically change how much time we're spending solving users' question. And so, for instance, if you ask a quick question, you just get an instant answer. But also, we're seeing people, you know, using this thing, just like letting it run for over seven hours. And that's an arbitrary number. I'm sure you can get it to go longer depending on the problem. And yeah, we're seeing a lot of feedback like that, that people are really excited about. The model is also, you know, because we had the opportunity to really go deep on on software engineering and train for those use cases. The model is also a little better at things like code quality, front end, sterability via agents dot M D. And some other things like that.

• 2:57:43Jordi Hays?

  I saw a post earlier from Theo. He said G P D five Codex is as far as I'm, as far as I know, the first time a lab has bragged about using fewer tokens. Hope this becomes a trend. Do you think that's going to become a trend?

• 2:57:57Alexander Embiricos?

  I mean, I guess like tokens are not tokens. Like really, the thing is like fast. Speed is really important, and I think we're going to brag a lot about speed. It's kind of fun. We want to brag about both sides of it, right? We want to brag about being really fast for the interactive use cases. And we also want to brag about being able to do a ton of work independently.

• 2:58:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:16Alexander Embiricos?

  So yeah, that that graph got mixed reactions on Twitter. I don't know if you guys want to pull it up, but it's it's a little hard to read, but I think it's a really fun graph where you basically see the skew of like, well, I don't know how mirrored here, but basically on easy queries, we're using like ninety percent fewer tokens to answer your your query. And then on hard tasks, complex tasks, we're like basically using like double.

• 2:58:36John Coogan?

  Are you using the term model router? Is is there something that you can share on the architecture there that that is actually driving that? Because that feels like a huge unlock. It was, of course, magical the first time you went to chat G P T and got it to dump out, you know, pages and pages of coherent text, and you get to the bottom and it's all coherent still. And you're like, if you're if you're coming from the G P T three world, you're like, wow, this is a huge breakthrough. But then quickly you realize like, I don't necessarily always need twenty pages of response. I can have a smaller output. And so are is there anything that you can share there?

• 2:59:10Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah, I mean, the team really cooked here and I expect us to it's like part of the exciting stuff that we're doing with Codex is like these like very bespoke interventions.

• 2:59:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:59:18Alexander Embiricos?

  But no, it doesn't have a router.

• 2:59:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:59:20Alexander Embiricos?

  But there's a little bit of secret sauce there that we were not going to go too much into.

• 2:59:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, of course. What how are you thinking about like model naming conventions and model numbering conventions? There was a time when when model number correlated to like big circle and then GPT-5 was like a much more almost holistic set of improvements. You've brought those to Codex with Codex 5. But is there is there a world where Codex diverges? Are you always building on top of the same like release cadence now? Is there anything about how you think about messaging? What actually changed to the actual user to know? Hey, it's time to dip back in if you tested this or you want to go deeper in a certain area?

• 3:00:05Alexander Embiricos?

  Totally. I mean, so our goals with with Codex are just to build an amazing coding agent. And if you think about what an agent is, it's a combination of like the model and what we call the harness, which is kind of like the set of tools that the model has and then an interface for the user around that. And so the reason we put Codex in the name is because basically we wanted to just like we're really investing in Codex and like in software engineering generally. And so we wanted to have the opportunity to go like much deeper and push harder on things that like might not benefit like sort of general users of a model. And in fact, we wanted even the ability to like make certain things worse. So not that I've gone and checked, but like GB5 Codex, if you're not using it for Codex, it's probably going to do worse at like a bunch of general tasks than GPT-5 will.

• 3:00:46John Coogan?

  Sure. React to this Rune post. Right now is the time where the takeoff looks the most rapid to insiders. We don't program anymore. We just yell at Codex agents, says Rune on X, but may look slow to everyone else as the general chatbot medium saturates. People have been saying, oh, this is the 90% of code being written by AI agents. And there's this debate on are we just writing 10 times as much code? Are we doing 10 10 times less work? Like, give me a little bit more color on how you're using Codex internally to build the actual product.

• 3:01:19Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah, I mean, we use Codex internally a ton or a lot.

• 3:01:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:25Alexander Embiricos?

  And, you know, we're, I think we're at the point now where, you know, for like writing code, these coding agents are like massively adopted.

• 3:01:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:33Alexander Embiricos?

  And, you know, it's kind of a stylistic choice, like how much of the code it's writing, but it's like the vast majority.

• 3:01:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:38Alexander Embiricos?

  You know, I will say that our goal isn't to like, we don't actually have a goal of like, yeah, let's like make sure the maximum amount of code is written by agents. It's like really what matters is like your velocity as a team, right?

• 3:01:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:49Alexander Embiricos?

  But sort of my like maybe slightly spicy take here is like actually one of the greatest limiting factors on the utility of coding agents right now is not like the model's ability to write code, but it's actually the human ability to like just prompt it and like make use of the agent. So for example, we shipped a code review feature that's like, you know, doing really well a few weeks ago. And, you know, the model is capable of doing code review. We actually did a ton of work to make it even better at code review. So when Codex does a code review for you, it'll like actually get a whole copy of the code base, it can like go read everything, even outside of your PR, it can even execute code to validate, which like a human is probably going to be a little too lazy to do normally.

• 3:02:29John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:02:29Alexander Embiricos?

  But the big unlock isn't, isn't even necessarily that. Like even G P T five is a great code reviewer. But the limiting factor is like, are you going to go prompt the model to code review every single PR that you get? And the answer is no. So what we did is we just like automated that, built it in a nice way, like integrated with GitHub. And now we're seeing, you know, it's just reviewing the vast majority of PRs in the B and open, OpenAI repos and catching like serious bugs. It's actually kind of become a meme when, you know, so we ask people internally like, hey, react with thumbs up if it's good, just so we can like kind of see. And whenever, and like reply with what's wrong with this review, if it catches an issue that the engineer disagrees with. And, you know, often it'll be the case that an engineer will kind of see this issue, reply and say, yeah, I disagree.

• 3:03:12Alexander Embiricos?

  And then like two days later, it'll be like, actually, this was a mistake and we need to, we need to actually follow the model's catch.

• 3:03:19John Coogan?

  What does it take to make it on the OpenAI Codex team these days? I mean, it feels like the skill set of just someone who's a programmer is changing. Now you're prompting, designing. What is it, give me some advice for young people or people entering the workforce?

• 3:03:40Alexander Embiricos?

  I think the thing I would say for OpenAI Coding Team, and by the way, we are hiring both folks externally, and then also, you know, see people can transfer internally.

• 3:03:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:49Alexander Embiricos?

  Probably the two most important things is kind of a you can just do things attitude and speed. And I think those are pretty general things that I would recommend. You know, if you you mentioned like advice for young folks, like I think it's like a a sort of crazy time now to be early career because so much is just possible to do and possible to learn quickly. But at the same time, because of that, everyone else is like just doing a lot of stuff and learning a lot of stuff quickly, right? So I think to like really make the most of that, the the key is is to just like really do stuff, especially like if you're in a technical field, start doing stuff beyond your coursework, but actually start building things.

• 3:04:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, increasing returns to like high agency. It's funny, we're in the era of agents, but then also high agency people seem to be doing better than ever. It's kind of a paradox, but it's a good time to be able to have a positive attitude and actually go and just just try and build things. It's a good time.

• 3:04:44Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah, and I think this is this is true. Go ahead.

• 3:04:47Jordi Hays?

  No, go for it.

• 3:04:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:48Alexander Embiricos?

  No, I was just gonna say, I think this is true as well at work, right? Like maybe before you would have a number of like very specialized role, like PM, designer, front end engineer, backend engineer, like, you know, SRE. And now because of all these coding agents, like everyone is able to just do a lot more and so you can have people like owning like entire problems end to end.

• 3:05:08Alexander Embiricos?

  You know, one one fun example, actually, leaving up to to yesterday's launch is our designer built this like really cool ASCII animation of a coin that's rotating. And you know, that's like kind of a hard thing to get right.

• 3:05:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:05:20Alexander Embiricos?

  And so over the weekend, he just like vibe coded an ASCII animation editor. Like he vibe coded an app that lets him like edit the, you know.

• 3:05:30John Coogan?

  That's wild, yeah.

• 3:05:31Alexander Embiricos?

  And like, that's like such like stack compression.

• 3:05:34John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:05:34Alexander Embiricos?

  And it's awesome.

• 3:05:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there used to be a time when it was like you're a front engineer, you know JavaScript, but you don't know Ruby on Rails or Python in the backend and like the backend guy doesn't know or gal doesn't know JavaScript or whatever, and they got to talk to each other and there's loss in translation stuff. So, yeah, it's an entirely new era. Very exciting.

• 3:05:53Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah, and it comes with problems too, right? Like if you have all these folks, like the the ASCII animation viewer I mentioned, like that's throwaway code. So I guess there's not much tech debt. It's just like pure acceleration. We actually write a lot of throwaway code, like different kinds of dashboards, editors, mini tools. But then, you know, sometimes you have folks who are like specialized the one thing now like able to write code for a different thing. And you know, that actually creates a different kind of problem, which is like code review and expertise. And so that's why like what we're trying to do with Codex now is like we're investing in making like the fun, you know, fundamental like code gen experience great and just writing code. But we're also starting to like reach out now. So we're really investing in code review because that's like actually becoming the bottleneck, like having qualified people be confident in code.

• 3:06:37Alexander Embiricos?

  We're really investing in validation. So like before you review the code, like can you assert functional correction correctness? Uh, one thing that Codex can do now is like take screenshots. It'll like actually write a playwright script. To like manipulate the website and then take the right screenshot of it. So you can actually look before you read the code.

• 3:06:53Alexander Embiricos?

  And then we're, we're thinking about, you know, where else can we make it really easy to, to engage the agent, uh, before it actually like gets to you on your computer doing work?

• 3:07:01John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Congratulations.

• 3:07:03Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for the update.

• 3:07:04John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for hopping on the stream. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:07:06Jordi Hays?

  Good luck out there.

• 3:07:07John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 3:07:08Jordi Hays?

  GPU is on fire.

• 3:07:09John Coogan?

  Good luck. Well, uh, that concludes our guests for the day.

• 3:07:14Jordi Hays?

  Basically.

• 3:07:15John Coogan?

  We gotta jump. We gotta catch a flight. I got to listen to Iwar, which is in my Audible now by Tim Higgins. You can go find it in Audible, find it on Amazon. We will see you tomorrow live from Meta Connect.

• 3:07:28Jordi Hays?

  Later show tomorrow.

• 3:07:29John Coogan?

  Later show tomorrow, 4:30 where I think we're starting. Uh, we'll be posting updates on X, keeping you updated and stay tuned. Thank you so much for tuning in.

• 3:07:38Jordi Hays?

  Have a wonderful.

• 3:07:39John Coogan?

  Thanks to Bobby Cosmic for holding it down in the Twitch chat the whole.

• 3:07:42Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 3:07:42John Coogan?

  Thank you to John Exley in the YouTube chat. We'll see you guys.

• 3:07:45Jordi Hays?

  The team's like un, unfading it out. We love you guys. We'll see you tomorrow.