Meta Connect Recap, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Louis Mosley, Brendan Foody, Darren Mowry, Kayvon Beykpour, Mukund Jha, Noah Löfquist, Dan Lahav, Ben Milne

(00:30) - Meta Connect Reactions (05:25) - The Timeline Reacts to Meta Connect (40:13) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (47:51) - Louis Mosley, head of Palantir's UK and European operations, discusses the company's first billion-dollar deal outside the U. S. with the UK Ministry of Defense, marking a significant milestone. He highlights Palantir's $2 billion investment in the UK over the next five years, including the creation of 350 new jobs and establishing London as the European defense headquarters. Mosley emphasizes the UK's unique talent pool and the importance of interoperability among Western allies, drawing lessons from the war in Ukraine. (57:48) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:14:46) - Brendan Foody, CEO and co-founder of Mercor, discusses the company's rapid growth from a $1 million to a $500 million revenue run rate in 17 months, attributing this success to their AI-driven platform that connects specialized global talent with AI development opportunities. He highlights the shift in AI model evaluation from academic benchmarks to professional domains, emphasizing the need for human-defined success criteria to train models effectively. Foody also touches on the importance of staying at the frontier of AI advancements and the challenges of predicting future demand in a rapidly evolving industry. (01:31:08) - Darren Mowry, Managing Director for North America at Google Cloud, discusses the rapid evolution of AI and its impact on startups, highlighting the increased demand for AI infrastructure and the swift consumption of Google Cloud credits by startups. He emphasizes Google's commitment to supporting these startups through advanced AI models like Gemini and partnerships with companies such as Anthropic and Meta, enabling seamless integration and innovation. Mowry also notes the significance of Google's AI Builders Summit, bringing together founders and builders to explore AI's transformative role across various industries. (01:38:14) - Kayvon Beykpour, co-founder of Periscope and former Twitter product leader, discusses the evolution of Periscope from its initial concept as "Bounty," a platform for requesting photos from specific locations, to its transformation into a live video streaming service. He highlights the challenges of building a live-focused social network and emphasizes the importance of integrating live streaming features into existing platforms. Beykpour also introduces his new venture, Macroscope, an AI-powered tool designed to help developers and product managers understand codebases, track changes, and identify bugs, aiming to enhance productivity and reduce time spent in meetings. (02:02:37) - Mukund Jha, co-founder and CEO of Emergent, discusses the company's AI-powered platform that enables non-technical users to transform ideas into fully functional, production-ready applications. Since its launch three months ago, Emergent has attracted over a million users who have built more than 1.5 million apps, with a significant portion being monetizable. Jha highlights the platform's unique ability to support web, mobile, and backend development in one integrated system, catering to a diverse user base from business owners digitizing their operations to entrepreneurs launching startups. (02:08:57) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:19:23) - Noah Löfquist discusses his work on developing computer use agents—software designed to automate tasks by training foundation models to operate computers like humans. He emphasizes the importance of high-quality data, noting that much of it can be synthetically generated, and highlights the initial focus on automating monotonous tasks such as managing emails and scheduling. Lfquist envisions a future where these agents seamlessly integrate structured outputs and APIs to efficiently perform a wide range of computer-based activities. (02:24:13) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:31:24) - Dan Lahav is the co-founder and CEO of Irregular, an AI security company that recently emerged from stealth with $80 million in funding. In the conversation, Lahav discusses Irregular's mission to collaborate with leading AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic to proactively identify and mitigate potential security threats posed by advanced AI models. He emphasizes the importance of developing high-fidelity simulations to test AI systems under various scenarios, aiming to build the next generation of defenses ahead of potential attacks. (02:39:58) - Ben Milne, founder and CEO of Brale, has been a fintech innovator for over a decade, previously establishing Dwolla. In the conversation, he discusses Brale's mission to simplify stablecoin creation, reducing the process from a costly, lengthy endeavor to an affordable, rapid one, enabling businesses to launch custom stablecoins efficiently. Milne emphasizes the benefits of stablecoins in reducing costs, generating revenue, and offering customization, while ensuring interoperability across various blockchain platforms. 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 - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai 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 Thursday, September 18th, 2025. We're back in the TVPN Ultra Dome. The Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Hello to everyone. Hello to Bobby Cos.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  Long since we have podcasted.

• 0:15John Coogan?

  It has been. We had a bit of a dry spell. We fixed it. We're back. Thank you to everyone in the chat who's committed to never missing a stream.

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  All of you, Andrew Miller, Bobby Cosmic, Parker, Burr.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  Good to see you guys.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  Greg.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  We, yesterday, we were at Meta Connect 2025 and they launched the Meta Ray-Ban Displays. 12 years since the launch of Google Glass. Google Glass was 2013.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever get a pair?

• 0:43John Coogan?

  I never owned them. They were $1,500 at the time. I was dead broke, could not afford them. Probably would have bought them if I had the money, but.

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  That would have cut your runway by like 15%.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. It would have been rough. But I did get to try them in San Francisco at the time and it was, it was cool. Very small screen, very limited interaction. Some of the same demos, honestly, messaging, maps, music, the usual, but way less stylish. Way, way less stylish and very quickly the world was not ready for the glass hole. The, the Google Glassware. Are you familiar with that term? It was, one of my friends, actually, I think he got, I think he got assaulted or something.

• 1:29Jordi Hays?

  For wearing them?

• 1:31John Coogan?

  I don't know if he actually got like punched, but he definitely got accosted at a bar in San Francisco for wearing them. He was an associate at Andreessen Horowitz at the time.

• 1:39Jordi Hays?

  Would they be perpetually recording?

• 1:41John Coogan?

  No. So it was the same thing where you would turn them on and record, but they had this vibe to them in the, like in the world where it was like, oh, this is like the surveillance state, like every, there's going to be a camera everywhere. And this is before, I mean, 13 years ago, people were 12 years ago, people were not. Have their phones out taking photos constantly. And so all of a sudden, this idea that like you could be in a bar and someone would be taking a video or photo of you like automatically was pretty rattling to people. And so it was, it was like a pretty severe like rejection of the.

• 2:13Jordi Hays?

  It's a terrible feeling to be filmed by a stranger, just in general. I was at a restaurant a week or so ago on a date with my lovely wife. And this person was basically doc- documenting like the entire outside of the restaurant. We were sitting at an outdoor table and like repeatedly like panning over us.

• 2:34John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:35Jordi Hays?

  While we're just sitting there.

• 2:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's suspicious.

• 2:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just, it, it is a violation.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  It, I, I'm all good if I'm in the back of the picture or the video that you're taking. But if you're like panning over and I become the subject of the video.

• 2:49John Coogan?

  It is a little odd.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  You haven't, and we don't.

• 2:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, because it could be that you're, the rest of the video is just window dressing for an excuse to actually be filming you for some reason. You're like, why, why do you want to?

• 2:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what's going on here?

• 3:00John Coogan?

  Just ask. Um, yeah, at the same time, I've been on the other side. Like we were at the airport and I saw this guy absolutely crushing sales calls with a full on headset on. Instead of just Bluetooth. Most people wear the AirPods or the wired headphones. This guy had a full headset with the microphone down in front of his mouth.

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  He was locked in.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  Barking orders locked in.

• 3:19Jordi Hays?

  He was a LinkedIn general.

• 3:20John Coogan?

  This is a champion. I love this guy. I'm so into this dude. I should have just asked and gone up and said like, can I do a professional photo shoot with you? Like I, I love, I respect your culture.

• 3:31Jordi Hays?

  Check out your rig.

• 3:32John Coogan?

  Can I, yeah, can I, can I, can I check out your rig and, and enjoy that? But I, I restrained myself and I didn't take a photo. I did, I did go up to you and say, hey, you gotta check out this guy, this killer. This, we, maybe we gotta recruit this guy.

• 3:45Jordi Hays?

  We, we, we did take a pop and.

• 3:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and then kind of.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:49Jordi Hays?

  Investigate.

• 3:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, he had, uh, he had, he had his fingers in a lot of pies, much like Rune. We printed a post today. We got Rune.

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  We printed a post of our own quote.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  Yes, Rune. Rune says, uh, Rune has got his fingers in a lot of pies from the God Whispers of TBPN by Jordi and John. And I, I remember saying this, but I don't remember what pies I was referring to. I mean, he has a job.

• 4:16Jordi Hays?

  We don't even know what, what it means, but it is, uh, it is certainly provocative.

• 4:20John Coogan?

  But I'm glad he enjoyed it and, and quoted it on the timeline. And, you know, now it's printed forever. Um, anyway, uh, ramp.com. Save time and money. Time is money. Save both. Use corporate cards, bill pay.

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  It was absolutely fantastic watching you at your absolute best.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:39Jordi Hays?

  Doing a ramp ad right, walking up, I'm watching Zuck walk up the stairs, his feet away from us and you're just ripping.

• 4:47John Coogan?

  Barking ramp.

• 4:48Jordi Hays?

  Just bark and ramp.

• 4:49John Coogan?

  I love it. Like a carnival barker. Of course, yesterday, uh, the stream was only made possible by Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. Thank you.

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  We were actually everywhere. We were over on Instagram.

• 5:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, we did our first Instagram.

• 5:03Jordi Hays?

  At TBPN.

• 5:05John Coogan?

  We're gonna do a lot more there, build out a full vertical layout. I, I think it's gonna make a lot of, uh, distribution a lot easier.

• 5:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:11John Coogan?

  Get on reels, get on TikTok, all these different things. Uh, glad that everyone showed up for Return to Form, TBPN Classic, just, uh, just a couple of good boys hanging out.

• 5:22Jordi Hays?

  TBPN at its best, right here in the UltraGum.

• 5:24John Coogan?

  Technology brothers. Well, let's go through reactions to Meta Connect 2025. Uh, TJ Parker had a post, Meta execs are 20 years younger than Apples and still willing to do live demos. Unfortunately, very bearish for Apple. It's a good take. There were a few.

• 5:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the wild thing, uh, from, from the interviews, obviously you could find this out, uh, from. Just doing a little bit of research, but if you were just watching and realizing how young the Meta executive team is and how long they've been working together.

• 5:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, because they all were like, they were like 22 and they started the company and they joined like most of the people, the average tenure of person we interviewed was probably 15 years and they were all like in their 40s at most. But the drama on the timeline was around the failed demo. I don't know if we want to play the actual video. We were, we were reacting to the keynote live, but we were talking and we kind of picked up on one of the demo fails. I didn't realize the second demo fail happened. Very bold, but.

• 6:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. By the way, we're going to figure out how to do better keynote, sort of like.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  Reactions. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of crazy.

• 6:33Jordi Hays?

  We were struggling with the audio.

• 6:35John Coogan?

  Like we want to give, we want to give you the facts. We want to let you hear what's happening in the keynote because that's when the news actually breaks. Like they, like they don't want anyone talking about the fact that the new Reda Meta Ray-Ban display is 799.

• 6:49Jordi Hays?

  We kept almost leaking.

• 6:50John Coogan?

  Until Mark says that on stage. So you gotta wait until he says it. So you might as well just watch along. So anyway, a bit of a, bit of something to practice in the

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  Future. It was, it was obvious. I mean, we were surprised, especially re-watching the keynote afterward and seeing the moments where, where the demos failed. We were surprised because we got those demos.

• 7:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:12Jordi Hays?

  Multiple times.

• 7:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:13Jordi Hays?

  And they worked.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:14Jordi Hays?

  And so we were kind of trying to, we were trying to figure out why that might've been. I think our, our theory for why Zuck's demo wasn't working on stage is that the glasses were simultaneously live streaming.

• 7:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:30Jordi Hays?

  And trying to carry out the regular functionality.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  The video call.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  So we were, we had done the video calling functionality with WhatsApp.

• 7:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:38Jordi Hays?

  Multiple times.

• 7:39John Coogan?

  Didn't have a problem at all.

• 7:39Jordi Hays?

  Had no problems at all. And so, and, and the first demo that we did was months ago.

• 7:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:45Jordi Hays?

  Right? So. Surprise that that that happened. But also just the like real time live streaming from first person is like very cool functionality.

• 7:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, although that's not something that they're launching.

• 7:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  So it's very odd that

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  But you could imagine.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  They successfully live demoed a product that doesn't exist or a feature that's not live yet, which is live streaming from the glasses.

• 8:10Jordi Hays?

  And you could tell the OS was like thought that the video was already pulled up.

• 8:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:15Jordi Hays?

  As it was streaming or something.

• 8:16John Coogan?

  So so I I think that one of the stories is like they clearly went super hard on weight reduction. The the display glasses, the the Orion demo that launched last year, which actually also had failed a botched demo as well. It was it was it was chunky, but still very thin and light. And when you try it on, it feels great.

• 8:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  But this is like remarkably lighter, like 69 grams. Carmack, I thought Carmack's quote was 100 grams for a headset and $100. Turns out he was saying 250 grams and $250, which is, I mean, 69 grams is way less than 250. So you you really can't wear these all day without any serious strain. They're like just slightly chunkier than just normal Ray-Bans. And so, yeah, let's pull up the actual demo and and see exactly what happened here.

• 9:13Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  So he's trying to kick off a WhatsApp video call is to Boz.

• 9:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:17Speaker 02

  Well, I let's see what happens.

• 9:20John Coogan?

  This is so bold. And you can't see it because we have our ticker there.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  That's too bad. I don't know what happened.

• 9:28John Coogan?

  At this point, he's done this so many times.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Maybe Boz can try calling me again.

• 9:33John Coogan?

  Whatever, they're having fun.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  All right. Well, I got a missed video call. Okay, there's the actual video call.

• 9:39John Coogan?

  And in the top corner, when he does the live demos, they put this like massive bubble. This is like, this is a live demo. This is live. We're not faking this.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  You know.

• 9:49Jordi Hays?

  It happens.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  Well, at least you know he didn't think it. So anyway.

• 9:51Jordi Hays?

  It's 4D Chess, the next demo. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think? Will be pre-recorded.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  They want to train. They want to. No, I'm kidding.

• 9:59John Coogan?

  No, no. The real 4D Chess is that this sets expectations low. It makes you go into it thinking, I'm getting a dev kit-like experience and then they can over-deliver. So if you put on a, if you put on a pair of these, you're like, okay, yeah, like, I'll probably be able to listen to some music, but the WhatsApp video call functionality is probably not going to work.

• 10:18Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 10:19John Coogan?

  You try it, it works and you're delighted.

• 10:21Jordi Hays?

  So, so it's a hard product to like demonstrate, right?

• 10:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:26Jordi Hays?

  It really is something that you have to experience.

• 10:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  Because like even when we were talking to Boz, Boz had the display up the whole time.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  That's crazy, yeah.

• 10:34Jordi Hays?

  He said he got a message from Zach like right as he was walking up.

• 10:37John Coogan?

  You really can't see it at all.

• 10:38Jordi Hays?

  And you cannot see the display at all from the outside.

• 10:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, there were some, there were some good reactions in the timeline to

• 10:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Mark.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  the failed demos. But first, let me, let us tell you about our newest sponsors, Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on CryptoRail, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on-chain infrastructure, all through one simple API.

• 11:03Jordi Hays?

  Of course, we had the Privy team on, that they announced their acquisition with Stripe.

• 11:09John Coogan?

  Part of Stripe now.

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  And we are happy that Privy is the official wallet infrastructure provider of TBPN, of the UltraDome.

• 11:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  And, uh,

• 11:20John Coogan?

  And we also have a new sponsor that the sharp-eyed viewer might have noticed. They jumped in the ticker during the stream yesterday. Cognition, the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with personal AI engineering team, with your personal AI engineering team. We're huge fans of Scott Wu and the team over at Cognition. We've had him on the show a bunch.

• 11:42Jordi Hays?

  Organic superintelligence. Scott Wu.

• 11:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 11:46Jordi Hays?

  Productized it.

• 11:46John Coogan?

  Yes. Yeah. He's had some fantastic calls about AI achieving an IMO gold medal. He's been ahead of the curve on tons of this stuff. Obviously went viral with the initial Devin launch. And he's been

• 11:58Jordi Hays?

  He's saved.

• 11:58John Coogan?

  A friend and now a partner.

• 12:00Jordi Hays?

  With the Wind Surf acquisition.

• 12:01John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that was legendary.

• 12:02Jordi Hays?

  He saved the social contract.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, really. He saved Silicon Valley. And so we're proud to support cognition and Devon. So go head over and sign up. They're in GA. So let's go to Mark Gurman. Remember Face ID failed demo, but essentially flawless for users. I wish Apple would go back to live, but I don't think it'll ever happen. Much more reach now and they definitely see taking risks for this type of thing is pointless. I don't think they're wrong. But on the flip side.

• 12:32Jordi Hays?

  Then you have the Elon Cybertruck demo.

• 12:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, the Elon Cybertruck demo. That was a crazy one. And you haven't heard about, I mean, there's been a lot of, you know, varying responses to the Cybertruck, but no one's complaining about their winds, their, their, their windshield's breaking or their.

• 12:47Jordi Hays?

  Fortunately, you don't have to use, you don't have to test your windshield as much as you have to test if your device can handle video calling.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 12:56Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, certainly.

• 12:58John Coogan?

  So, yeah, on the, on the flip side, Sharuya says, it takes a lot of courage for someone in Zuck's position to go live and make a fool out of himself. Everybody gangsta in their comfortable, controlled environments. It's true. And, and you can see here the red pill for live demo in red there, letting you know this is not fake. And there's been a lot of demos that have been sort of faked. I mean, we were coming off the, the Apple Intelligence where there were a lot of demos that, that shipped on varying timelines. There were ads that went out and features were promised. And Mark Gurman wrote that big article, there's something rotten Cupertino, really put his whole reputation on the line to, to kind of take a shot.

• 13:38Jordi Hays?

  Every Apple, every Apple focused journalist basically put their.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, to say anything. It was rough. It was bold. And, and, and then Google had something similar where they demoed an AI, a, a, a real time video model that would interpret what you were seeing and then run through Gemini, but they, but they sped up the, the wait time for the LLM, which some people were like, oh, that's not fair. Although, you know, with that, it's like, they're going to speed it up over time. But there's always been, there's always been like. You know, criticism of the various trade offs of keynotes and I feel like, I mean, this is not as bad as it could have been. It's pretty good. And overall, it just felt like being there on the day, it felt like we weren't watching a movie or like an ad

• 14:28John Coogan?

  or a video. We were like part of a play. Because like you, Mark Zuckerberg and Diplo go running by you and then there's like the skateboarders and there's like this, this like demo with the crowd happened in one place and they move, they're moving around and like while we were on stage, we could see Mark going from one thing to the next, like actually.

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:47John Coogan?

  Very much participating in like the keynote or the, you know, the event, but in a very like moving around.

• 14:54Jordi Hays?

  It's just, yeah, it's tough. It's, it's failing, failing on stage is tough because no matter what we say, right? When I was using, when I was demoing the display glasses, I could say, hey Meta, find me restaurants. What are, what are some restaurants that are nearby? And on the heads up display, it would pop up some options. I'd be able to select one with the neural band, like super, super easily.

• 15:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:19Jordi Hays?

  And, and it would just pull up a map and then it would give me perfect navigation. I could just walk. It would just guide me to it, right? And so having this experience, like what, what they're selling is there's a lot of moments that you need to pull out your phone.

• 15:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:32Jordi Hays?

  And what if you didn't, what if you didn't have to sort of like take yourself out of the moment?

• 15:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:36Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, you know, go, go like this. Uh, I think it's very telling that The Verge wrote this this morning. Uh, they said, I regret to inform you, Meta's new smart glasses are the best I've ever tried. Uh, the new.

• 15:52John Coogan?

  Really know your audience. Total old audience capture. Just like somehow.

• 15:56Jordi Hays?

  Like, I'm sorry, guys. I tried a product.

• 15:58John Coogan?

  So tech optimist and such a tech native blog and Mulya Patel, I believe is like still running it. I think he started it. And so like, I, I don't think of The Verge as like having this adversarial relationship with tech and yet like they had to frame it this way. It was very funny. Uh, Dylan Field, founder of Figma, had a more positive take. He said, congrats to Meta, to the Meta team on today's launches. I saw some of the tech while it was still in, it's still in development. The glasses, AR interface, neural band and overall capabilities are extraordinary. And yes, live demos can fail. We've all been there. The tech is still awesome onwards. Dylan is of course the CEO of Figma. We're partnered with Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together and get started for free.

• 16:42John Coogan?

  Ben Thompson also had a positive take. He said, "Live demo fails are good tech karma." Because if you-

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  You get rewarded.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  You get rewarded-

• 16:50Jordi Hays?

  For taking the risk.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  For setting the bar low. There is a world-

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  There's also something to be-

• 16:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:55Jordi Hays?

  It's, you also have to understand like how confident you have to be in a product to go do a live demo.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  Like Zach, Zach didn't go out there being like, "Oh, there's a, there's a coin flip, like 50% chance-

• 17:07John Coogan?

  It's shipping in two weeks. It's crazy."

• 17:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just like, I can't, I can't say it enough. It's so painful that like we used this functionality months ago-

• 17:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:17Jordi Hays?

  At this point, and so-

• 17:19John Coogan?

  It's the way it goes. Well, I, I was trying to break down like, we, we talked to a lot of the Meta team.

• 17:26Jordi Hays?

  Wait, did you, did you see the screenshot too?

• 17:29John Coogan?

  Which one?

• 17:29Jordi Hays?

  Of, of inside the, they're doing the Gaussian splatting-

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  With-

• 17:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:36Jordi Hays?

  And you can see the Lucy logo-

• 17:38John Coogan?

  This was super cool. So-

• 17:39Jordi Hays?

  In the octagon.

• 17:40John Coogan?

  3D Gaussian splatting is cool, and now you can capture real world, real world spaces just by walking around in your Meta Quest headset. We did this demo as well. You walk around in the headset, it scans everything. They actually make it into this like kind of fun game. It takes about six minutes, so you can recreate your room, recreate anything. Tyler made a version of this, just using his phone camera. It looked really good. It actually runs in a browser. And, but you can imagine this being really fun. But this was such a funny Easter egg that they put my nicotine pouch brand, nicotine gum brand in the octagon. And I don't think this was intentional. I think this is literally just, they went and scanned one of the octagons and like our logos there, which is cool. But, but fun to see, and it made me do a double take in the moment.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  The real time feedback ensures you don't miss a spot. Apple needs to get on this ASAP. I agree. At the same time, like I was standing in the, in the octagon and it was like, it was cool to feel like, okay, if I was here, how high would it be? It gave me a sense of scale, but there, there wasn't really like a game mechanic to it or anything.

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to me, to me, this is what I brought up. I just care about what kind of, why would I, why would I want to do this other than pure novelty?

• 18:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  The best example I could think of is, is a real estate agent, they go, they scan a property.

• 18:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 18:56Jordi Hays?

  That they're, that they're marketing for, for lease or sale.

• 18:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  And then people can just drop in and experience the home.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  Like actually from.

• 19:05John Coogan?

  I see it, I see it probably more as like a pipeline to traditional 3D games and like traditional 3D geometry. Years ago, decades ago now, there was this game called True Crime, The Streets of L.A., I think it was called. And it was like Grand Theft Auto, nowhere near the level of game mechanics, nowhere near as like fun of a game, but they did a full scan of Los Angeles. And so you could go and find like the TBPN Ultra Dome because it was a street by street replica of, of L.A.

• 19:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:36John Coogan?

  And I imagine that if you're able to do Gage and Splatting, you could bring that through to a generative 3D geometry pipeline and then create a game out of it. Seeing how these two technologies kind of merge, I think will be, will be pretty important. I, I had a lot of fun with it and, and it was, yeah, it was, it was, it was cool, but yeah, it's definitely in like the novelty demo. I think overall, I tried to synthesize like the takes that I was pulling out of the meta team and I had three.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  One is just that wearables are underhyped because of how much focus there is on AI and so they, I feel like they're all, the entire meta team is like very happy to swim in that lane where they're like doing something cool. That's not like, oh, it's gotta be fast takeoff, gotta be God in a box, like the expectations are so high, AGI, ASI, it's like, it's like, do they look nice? Are they affordable? Do they, the cameras work? Like it's pretty, it's pretty low stakes.

• 20:38Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday, the, the display, head up display is getting more hyped than live AI.

• 20:43John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 20:43Jordi Hays?

  And, and even though every gen AI product today is not.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  A hundred percent reliable and can have issues. The fact that you're just gonna be able to walk around with this perpetual intelligence humming along, getting to experience everything that you're experiencing, building that context in your life, is underrated and it says a lot that even in the current state, they can run that, you get like an hour of battery life for like the truly live AI where it's processing everything in real time, doing the translation functionality.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  I didn't realize that was a full hour.

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 21:18John Coogan?

  The other takeaway, we were digging into personal superintelligence, trying to understand what that means. This wasn't really a full AI event, this isn't LamaCon, but it feels like personal superintelligence will definitely be a personal shopper. You'll be able to take a picture of something, say, order that, it'll go straight to the brand, maybe a Shopify integration, something like that, check out for you, ship it to you. Or if you just see something on Instagram, you're gonna be able to fire that off. Like, we've seen the agentic commerce, like, outlined in semi-analysis. We've also seen, just yesterday, or the day before, Sam Altman shared a screenshot where in the dashboard for your ChatGPT app, one

• 22:00John Coogan?

  of the tabs was orders. And so, they're clearly thinking about helping you order things.

• 22:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  It's a huge way to take a cut of commerce on the internet, extremely valuable, extremely monetizable. So, it would be truly shocking if Meta was like, oh yeah, all of our customers, every brand that advertises, yeah, we don't want to continue the relationship in the AI age. Like, obviously, they're gonna do that.

• 22:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:25John Coogan?

  So they didn't share too much there, but it's, but, nothing, nothing, you know, nothing was shared that felt like, that was not on the immediate roadmap. It felt like it was. And then, the last, the last thing that I was taking away was that, basically, like, Lindy Pieces of Cinema will be the first real killer app for VR. I think your prediction a year ago will wind up being correct. Multiple glasses, you will have Something for action sports that plays in the in the GoPro realm.

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  Outdoor, physically.

• 22:56John Coogan?

  The Vanguard.

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:57John Coogan?

  The surfing, the the the ski goggles, that type of stuff will be action sports. Then there'll be the heads up display that you're maybe using when you're, you know, walking around, driving, doing whatever, answering messages, listening to music. Um, and then if it's time to sit down, watch a movie, there will be an alternative to the to the TV on the wall at a similar price point. Right now you can get sixty five inch TV probably for like five hundred bucks. Um, I think you'll be in that same territory pretty soon. We talked to James Cameron about this. Um, the like, the level of fidelity of watching his films Avatar in three D is just better in VR.

• 23:42John Coogan?

  He was talking about the Quest three. I think he's seen a demo of the Quest four. I think the Quest four is gonna have a screen that is at the level or beyond the level of the Apple Vision Pro, which was phenomenal. But they're gonna bring all of their engineering prowess to, they're gonna take the battery out, they're gonna make it plastic, it's not gonna have a screen on the outside, it's not gonna have all this extra stuff. Maybe they'll do a neural band. So because if they do the neural band, the big thing with the neural band is that it takes, it's distributing the compute across your body. You don't want all the compute right on your bridge of your nose. That is terrible, that's painful. So take the battery, put it in the back, you know, are they called crokeys? The things like this, is that right?

• 24:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. So like, I could imagine crokeys going over your Meta Ray bands or your Oculus where the battery is actually kind of hanging, dangling it from the back of your head. And you're getting extra battery life out of that. And and maybe that runs down down your back, you throw it in a pocket like what you do with the Apple Vision Pro. I think that was a good paradigm. I think the Apple Vision Pro uses hand tracking as input, but that means it has to have cameras.

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was smart that the charging case for the display like folds up flat.

• 24:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  Can act as a as a regular case.

• 24:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was cool.

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  If you have it at the right angle, like those kind of iPad.

• 25:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:01Jordi Hays?

  iPad screen protectors.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, neural band is also underhyped from yesterday. Everybody wants to focus again on like

• 25:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:09Jordi Hays?

  the actual glasses and the display, but

• 25:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:12Jordi Hays?

  I said it before and I hope people, you know, you go to a retail store and demo these, try them out, but like trying the neural band, realizing how quickly you adapt to this interface. It's like this, pretty much the same motions you're used to on an iPhone. You just don't have a phone and it takes a little bit of getting used to.

• 25:32John Coogan?

  Their pitch for it was, was, well, because it's not using a camera, you can, you can use it out of view of what the camera would be if it was on your face. You can use it behind your back. I don't actually care about that. I think it's fine to put my hand in front when I'm adjusting the volume. I don't really see a value of putting it behind my back. I think the value is that all, that like you need, you need some input sensor to capture what's going on with your hand and it makes sense to just put that right next to the hand. And I think that if, even if it's just a couple of grams, taking that off the face and putting it on the wrist is way better, way more natural. I do think it was interesting that Boz was saying that long-term, the neural band could be an input device for other applications and eventually they could open that up to developers.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  So you could have an app that uses the neural band as an input, or it could be a little bit more platform agnostic at some point. Very unclear where that actually goes. We were debating a little bit. We didn't get our firm percentages down, but between voice input, just speech to text versus handwriting, I think most people will be doing speech to text. But I don't know if that's just because I've been so, I dictate like a ton these days. I open up the ChatGPT app, I click on the audio mode and I just talk and talk and talk. And then even if I'm not, a lot of times my prompt is just like, clean this up and make sure it's grammatically correct. Like, don't change it, don't rewrite it, just reproduce it. And then I can just copy that into

• 27:01John Coogan?

  wherever I need to go. If it's a longer thing, I think that long-term people will just be comfortable talking and, and you're able to talk in a very low whisper and it picks it up just fine.

• 27:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:13John Coogan?

  The, the secret handwriting, I don't know how, I don't know how popular that, that's going to be. Maybe like 20% of total input.

• 27:20Jordi Hays?

  I think it's going to be popular for short responses.

• 27:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 27:25Jordi Hays?

  You just need to be like. Like, hey, do you want me to grab you a sandwich?

• 27:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, there's also just-

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  You want me to grab you a coffee? Yes.

• 27:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, there's also like the thumbs up, it dynamically selects emojis there. So you can just swipe and be like, heart, or thumbs up, or thumbs down. So, I, it is like in between, just like, send an emoji response, dictate something longer, handwritings for something in the middle. I don't know how popular it's gonna be, it's definitely like a lift, people are gonna have to learn, it's like an entirely new input medium, but then again, speech to text is somewhat of a new input medium, and people have figured that out, so, uh, maybe, maybe over the few years, people, people bring that back, but I, I'm not sure, I'm not sure if I would be leaning on that all the time. Maybe I'm just a terrible, uh, terrible handwriting, so I don't know. Um, anyway, it was a fun, uh, fun event, and thank you all for watching. Let me tell you about Vanta, automated compliance, manage risk, prove trust, continuously dangerous,

• 28:17John Coogan?

  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. Tower of Babel?

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, let's start there.

• 28:29John Coogan?

  So, we were talking to Chris Cox, the chief product officer at Meta, and he said that AI translation is Tower of Babel level. Uh, and it was a very funny, he used a very funny word, a judgment. He was like, with AI, you can take a judgment and, and-

• 28:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, that was in a different context.

• 28:47John Coogan?

  It was in this clip, it was in this clip.

• 28:49Jordi Hays?

  Oh, really?

• 28:49John Coogan?

  AI can be used to scale a judgment. And I, and I forgot what word he used, and I asked him, and he didn't remember, and we kind of just moved on in the conversation, but, um, I was, uh, but Skooks is saying me when I don't know what the story of the Tower of Babel was about. Um, the Tower of Babel story, of course, is, is humanity, in, in the Book of Genesis, used to all speak one language, and then God fragmented the languages, um, but, uh-

• 29:16Jordi Hays?

  And so I think he was, he was generally alluding to going back to-

• 29:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, like, is it hubris for humanity to try and speak all the same language? That, that, there's always these, uh, Meta loves these nicknames for projects that have-

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  Or, or-

• 29:32John Coogan?

  That can go either way.

• 29:32Jordi Hays?

  A, a, a massive project that collapses under its own weight.

• 29:36John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 29:37Jordi Hays?

  The other way to interpret that is, okay-

• 29:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:40Jordi Hays?

  The glass, you know.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Every, every meta code word is a

• 29:45Jordi Hays?

  Double edged sword.

• 29:46John Coogan?

  Is a double edged sword. I mean, every, every, you know, Greek myth is a double edged sword. Like, just the Orion headset, their full augmented reality headset. Orion is the story of the hunter who has, gets so cocky, so much hubris. He decides he can kill all the animals and he's struck down by God and then sent to, sent to the, the heavens to exist as a constellation. The, the, the, the, the new data center is called Prometheus, which of course is stealing fire from the gods. And, and there's another hyperion in, in one of those, the, the perpetrator of the hubris is sentenced to

• 30:27John Coogan?

  have his kidney or liver eaten by an eagle every day forever. There's a lot of like bad endings in these stories, but they all also are like very powerful and cool names. Tyler, what's your favorite meta code word?

• 30:42Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot, but I think there's, there's some Strassian reading where maybe Zuck is actually a doomer.

• 30:48John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. He thinks, yeah, he thinks that, that Prometheus, he will steal fire from the gods and be smited. Perhaps, I mean, the behemoth thing was crazy because it's, it's like behemoth llama. And do you remember the AI generated image that they used to promote it? It was like this very like demonic, like, like beefy, bulky llama. It was crazy.

• 31:09Jordi Hays?

  Guys, how did this one get out?

• 31:10John Coogan?

  And then, and then it didn't get out. And then it was actually like, it was, it was too big to tame. And like, that is the story of the behemoth.

• 31:16Jordi Hays?

  Simply the image.

• 31:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, the image was crazy too. And so, yeah, maybe just stick with like the version four, version five. I don't know. But then we get into numerology. Who knows?

• 31:28Jordi Hays?

  I gotta try to find this. I, I have this, I'm, I'm putting this image in the chat, guys.

• 31:35John Coogan?

  Tyler, do you think that they're subsidizing the cost of this thing? So Joanna Stern said, wow, $7.99 for Meta's new screen equipped Ray-Bans and the neural wristband. I thought that was shocking when they told us on Friday. Ben Thompson was shocked by this as well. Everyone's been reacting to just how cheap that is. The Orion headset, when they demoed it last year, the rumor that was going around was that it cost $10,000 to produce those. And so people were like, okay, yeah, so they'll get, they'll get twice as, twice as cheap every year for five years or something, and then we'll be in the 750 territory. But this has a lot of the same tech and it's 799. It's half the price of the, of the original Google Glass, which is crazy. Do you think they're subsidizing it?

• 32:16Speaker 03

  It definitely seems like really cheap. I was surprised that it was under $1,000. I don't know enough about the actual technology to tell like what the price would be, but it does seem like really cheap.

• 32:24Jordi Hays?

  There's so many reasons to make it as cheap as possible.

• 32:29John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 32:29Jordi Hays?

  Right? Just like, one, user feedback. Two, it can help them improve.

• 32:35John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, there's the Lama 4 Behemoth preview.

• 32:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is a picture. Hey.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  It's a big Lama.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  I'm glad they transitioned.

• 32:41John Coogan?

  It's kind of fun. I, I think it's kind of funny, but it is crazy.

• 32:44Jordi Hays?

  You think that's fun?

• 32:45John Coogan?

  It's kind of funny, a jack Lama. That's something I would do.

• 32:48Jordi Hays?

  You think somebody's sleep paralysis monsters?

• 32:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. It was kind of crazy.

• 32:54Jordi Hays?

  It looks cool. It definitely looks metal.

• 32:56John Coogan?

  If they chipped it and it had great vibes when you chatted with it, it was goofy and laughing about the fact that it was goofy.

• 33:00Jordi Hays?

  Extremely metal.

• 33:01John Coogan?

  But yeah, it is very, it's heavy metal. It's hardcore. Anyway, much like Graphite, graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster and get started for free. So on the subsidization thing, I mean, they're like, they're, they're saying like, Metaraveans are the best selling product, but they're at the $300 mark, $400 mark. And I don't think they're selling tens of millions of those. They're thinking they're selling like millions. So if you sell a million and you're subsidizing by 200 bucks a pop, it's like, okay, that's 200 million bucks. Like, that's fine. Like Meta has no problem with that. In fact, they can.

• 33:36Speaker 03

  That's only two AI researchers.

• 33:37John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. So what they can do is they can say, even if they're, even if they're like, let's subsidize this by a thousand dollars and let's sell a million pairs. It's like, okay, they're going to lose a billion. They probably can't sell 10 million or, or 50 million pairs, but they could just do a run of a million pairs at a huge loss and then just cap it and be like, yeah, we're out of stock. V2's coming. V2 comes. And then they raise the price and they say it's even better and even lighter and even thinner. And then they slowly creep together, but.

• 34:04Jordi Hays?

  They never need to make money on hardware.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  No, I don't think so.

• 34:07Jordi Hays?

  Like they never need to make money here. I'm sure they will if they keep executing like this.

• 34:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:12Jordi Hays?

  Ultimately, it's just about, it's about owning, owning the next platform. Signal screenshotted the stream and said Meta is so rich, they have a VP for just fashion partnerships. And Michael Miraflor, I don't know if he's in the chat right now.

• 34:29John Coogan?

  Miraflor, put it in the truth.

• 34:30Jordi Hays?

  Ava Chen has been at Meta since 2015 and is the primary reason why Instagram is Instagram.

• 34:35John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 34:35Jordi Hays?

  This should be common knowledge. You do not know ball if you do not know this, especially if you've ever tweeted about tech and taste. I thought, I mean, I thought, I thought the, the post was funny. Signal's post was funny, obviously he's a friend of the show, but I thought it was funny purely because Instagram is the most influential platform in the world. For fashion, they generate billions of dollars a year from fashion brands. Advertising on the platform. Like, of course, they should have somebody.

• 35:07John Coogan?

  And you don't have to be that rich to have a VP. We have a VP of logistics, a VP of production, a VP, we have a chief intern officer.

• 35:13Jordi Hays?

  We do, CIO.

• 35:14John Coogan?

  And so, you know, you could, titles are free. I don't know if you need to worry about that.

• 35:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I would be, I would be bearish if they didn't have somebody that was just focused on building. Because it's, it's on both sides too. It's not just companies. It's, it's the creators, right?

• 35:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 35:30Jordi Hays?

  The most, the biggest creators in the world, many of them are, are advertising.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, think about the fashion partnerships they've done. It's like a multi-billion dollar deal with Luxottica. They've taken a position, a major equity position in the, it's, it's serious business.

• 35:45Jordi Hays?

  We had Rocco on. We can make, we're gonna make face computers.

• 35:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:49Jordi Hays?

  But they have to look good, otherwise people won't wear them.

• 35:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:52Jordi Hays?

  Should we have somebody that understands the world?

• 35:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, al- also, also just in terms of like the VP title, like, you, you want like a fashion partner analyst showing up to do a multi-billion dollar deal with like the number one sunglasses brand in the world? Like, no, you want to send a VP, you want to send someone with a real title. Anyway, very silly, but, but fun. Everyone's having fun on the timeline, we'd love to see it.

• 36:16Jordi Hays?

  We're promoting Michael Mirflor to Vice President of Taste.

• 36:20John Coogan?

  Yes, Vice President of Taste. Mark Gurman gave his take. He says he has a strong feeling these will be popular. I wonder if this will cause Apple to speed up its timeline. Right now, I'm not anticipating Apple glasses with displays for a few more years. Their first non-display model is likely being announced late 26, early 27. That is slow. That's a lot of time for Meta to iterate on this and actually get through. It's gonna be a big, it's gonna be a big fight. Google's talking about doing display glasses.

• 36:50Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so Gurman is saying they'll do a pair of glasses that just have a camera in them?

• 36:54John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, a competitor to Meta Ray-Bans. Yeah, I know. What do you get? Not that much. You do get slightly tighter integration with Bluetooth, so you will, you'll probably be able to pair them and unpair them a little bit more easily because AirPods are a little bit easier to pair reliably than the Meta Ray-Bans. But as a competitor Meta Ray-Bans, it's camera, headphones, access to AI. Okay, so you get the Apple Ray-Bans, which won't be Ray-Bans. They will look like Apple products, and they will have maybe a better camera, because Apple's fantastic at cameras, maybe better Bluetooth

• 37:36John Coogan?

  connectivity and reliability there, but you don't get any other features.

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  They're already very light.

• 37:41John Coogan?

  And then instead of talking to Meta AI, which is probably gonna ship something really sick out of MSL soon, like you're dealing with Siri and Apple Intelligence, which we don't know the timeline for the V2 of that. They're kind of moving slow on Anthropic partnership or something like that, but even though they have the ChatGPT integration, like I have not become comfortable using the Siri button to reliably query ChatGPT. I still open my phone, open that app every time.

• 38:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:07John Coogan?

  And so there was also a rumor that they might partner with Gemini, which actually would be great, because that model's fantastic. And so it'll be interesting to see where they pencil out on that, but Meta seems to, I would be surprised if Apple can just come from behind and dominate.

• 38:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you have to look at Meta's advantages, which is like, we own the platforms that you share content on, too, right?

• 38:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, julius.ai, what analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights.

• 38:43John Coogan?

  Julius, we love Julius. The AI data analyst that works for you. You can join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions.

• 38:51Jordi Hays?

  We should have had Raul show up at MetaConnect and then just like hop on the screen.

• 38:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great.

• 38:56Jordi Hays?

  In the background.

• 38:57John Coogan?

  Surprise. What else?

• 39:00Jordi Hays?

  Aaron Slodov was saying, "Start collecting training data right now. Put these on every manufacturing worker in America." Good.

• 39:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:10Jordi Hays?

  Probably, probably smart. May as well. You could just do that. You don't need the display either.

• 39:15John Coogan?

  The...

• 39:15Jordi Hays?

  But again, Amazon is already saying, "We're putting the, they're developing their own pair of glasses to put on their workforce."

• 39:22John Coogan?

  Hopefully, it's not a death knell. When, when Google Glass pivoted to B2B, it was sort of like going out to pasture because they, they were doing Google Glass for consumer. They thought it was going to be this massive, like, consumer adoption moment. There was a ton of hype. Didn't go anywhere. And then, pretty soon, it was like, "Google Glass for enterprise. We'll use it in manufacturing contexts." That's not what Aaron's saying. But, but I would be personally worried if, if Meta started talking about, "Oh yeah, these are going to be really great in enterprise use cases. They're not ready for consumers." Like, no, they need to be ready for the, the Instagram crap. Like, it has to, it has to integrate with Meta platforms in order for it to be successful, in my opinion.

• 40:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:04John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers. 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.

• 40:15Jordi Hays?

  We should do a soundboard partnership with Fall.

• 40:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:19Jordi Hays?

  So that anyone can, uh, can generate TVPN-like sound effects.

• 40:24John Coogan?

  Well, we talked about Scott Wu earlier. He's in the timeline, showing some love to Mark Chen over at OpenAI. Mark, he said, "So insane. You have, you guys have no idea how hard this is." Mark Chen said, "We wrapped up this year's competition circuit with a full score on ICPC after achieving sixth in the IOI, a gold medal at the IMO, and second at the At Coder heuristic context."

• 40:46Jordi Hays?

  I never, I never see you at the heuristic contest, John. I was at the heuristic contest and they didn't know your name.

• 40:54John Coogan?

  No, yeah, we, yeah, we gotta send Tyler to, to be our on the ground correspondent at the IMO and the IOI next year. I think that'd be great. Do some post-game interviews for the, for the contestants. And then get them directly routed into the tier one VC firms. They're already getting calls from, from, from investors.

• 41:14Jordi Hays?

  This was probably the biggest news of yesterday, but it went under the radar. There is a Rolex oyster that, that's Domino's Pizza branded and.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  Andrew Reid says he's not a watch guy, but he might get this one. It's a 1970 vintage Rolex oyster. Precision classic men's Domino's Pizza watch, and we have the story behind it. The Domino's Rolex Air King in 1997. They've done a few of these apparently. So Domino's Pizza founder, Tom Monaghan, began incentivizing franchisees with Rolex watches. When a high earning franchise owner earned the watch off his wrist by hitting a $20,000 sales week.

• 42:02John Coogan?

  Monaghan wrote in his 1986 biography, Pizza Tiger. What a great name for a biography. Send it straight over to David Senra. I wore a Belova with our Domino's logo on its face. A franchisee asked what he had to do to get that watch from me. I told him, turn in a $20,000 sales week. He did it. And so he won the watch off of his wrist. After that.

• 42:28Jordi Hays?

  I wonder what the, what do you think the market value of that watch was at the time? Because he might've, might've been an arbitrage, just realizing, hey.

• 42:36John Coogan?

  Well, we're about to find out. After that, Monaghan started rewarding top performers with Seiko watches. And later up the stakes by giving away hundreds of $800 Rolexes. So in the eighties, we're talking a couple hundred bucks for these, but that's still a lot of money back then. Initially, turning in a $20,000 sales in a week at Domino's would earn a Rolex. However, as Rolex prices increased, so did the challenge. Domino's cult, Domino's continued.

• 43:04Jordi Hays?

  Would you get it every time? So theoretically you could get 52 Rolexes a year?

• 43:08John Coogan?

  I don't know. Yeah. I imagine if you just like pick the right locations, set the right prices, have good traffic. Like you should be able to put up, you know, fantastic numbers.

• 43:18Jordi Hays?

  It's very motivating.

• 43:19John Coogan?

  The Domino's and like Times Square has got to do tons and tons of revenue, right? Domino's continued to give out branded Rolex's, but a franchisee eventually needed to achieve $25,000 in sales per week for four consecutive weeks.

• 43:33Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  To win the watch, but the Air King and these, apparently there is one available on bezel. Go to getbezel.com, your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. You can ask them for a Domino's pizza.

• 43:46Jordi Hays?

  Meta, Meta exec team had some tasteful.

• 43:49John Coogan?

  Absolute hitters.

• 43:50Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday I clocked.

• 43:51John Coogan?

  Boss had a great watch on.

• 43:53Jordi Hays?

  Adam Mosseri.

• 43:53John Coogan?

  Adam Mosseri had a Nautilus.

• 43:56Jordi Hays?

  Vintage Aquanaut.

• 43:56John Coogan?

  Aquanaut, the Aquanaut. It was good.

• 43:58Jordi Hays?

  Gold on a black strap.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  It was great.

• 44:01Speaker 03

  What do I have to do to win a TVPN Air King?

• 44:04John Coogan?

  Ooh, I don't know. We'll have to figure that out. Chat, let us know if you have any ideas for, for Tyler.

• 44:10Jordi Hays?

  We were, we were actually debating whether or not we should do Q4 bonuses in watches. And John's, just for the record, John's point of view is that you guys would probably just want cash, but.

• 44:23John Coogan?

  It might be delivered in watches. We'll figure it out.

• 44:25Jordi Hays?

  We'll see, we'll see.

• 44:28John Coogan?

  In, in other news.

• 44:29Jordi Hays?

  The guys are clapping, see?

• 44:31John Coogan?

  They want Rolex's. Okay, maybe Jordy's on to something.

• 44:34Jordi Hays?

  I think I might be on to something.

• 44:35John Coogan?

  Well, we have our next guest joining in just a few minutes, but first like there was big breaking news yesterday. Disney's ABC is pulling Jimmy Kimmel indefinitely after late night, after the late night host's recent remarks about Charlie Kirk. The move comes as ABC affiliate groups told the network they would be dropping the host. So this didn't come from top down from Disney. It came from the, from some of the affiliates. Nextar Media is one of the largest, the nation's largest TV owners, said it would stop airing the program.

• 45:03Jordi Hays?

  We talked about OpenAI having a complex corporate structure, but.

• 45:06John Coogan?

  I had no idea.

• 45:07Jordi Hays?

  They have nothing on media companies, right?

• 45:08John Coogan?

  And then Sinclair is also involved. So Sinclair put out a statement. Mike Solana says, so this didn't have anything to do with the FCC. There was a lot of debate over what the FCC's role was in this. Who was really putting pressure on there? There was a viral video, a clip of.

• 45:27John Coogan?

  Of Kimmel's monologue that went viral on Tuesday after he delivered it Monday night. There was a lot of backlash to that, and then this came up. Jason Calacanis, the host of the All In podcast, said executives at ABC, like those at CBS, wanted to fire these money-losing late-night franchises for years. Trump has even given them cover. Trump has given them the cover they needed when it was wildly profitable to back these same comedians a decade ago. The networks had no problem letting them mock our wonderful, amazing, tremendous, beautiful, brilliant, and astute President Trump, wink, every single night. And so, I, we got a little bit of detail on Colbert's financial situation.

• 46:10John Coogan?

  I have no idea what the financial situation was like at Kimmel.

• 46:13Jordi Hays?

  Viewership ratings were dropping, though.

• 46:15John Coogan?

  We did hear that like-

• 46:16Jordi Hays?

  It had a downhill. I think it probably tracked the, basically, that the, I mean, that the audience on these networks is like retirement age, right? And so, these audiences-

• 46:28John Coogan?

  Sixty-seven was the median age at CNN, and that was like the lowest or something.

• 46:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:34John Coogan?

  It does feel like it gets harder and harder to monetize an older audience, just because they're not as, they're not as profligate with their money. They're not just going and spending money on all sorts of things. They're not building AI companies. They're not using TurboPuffer. They're not even in the, they're not even in the ICP for TurboPuffer. They're not using-

• 46:53Jordi Hays?

  They had a better start.

• 46:54John Coogan?

  -SeriousSpecter and Full Text Search, built from first principles in object storage, fast, 10x cheaper-

• 46:59Jordi Hays?

  Used, loved by Cursor-

• 47:00John Coogan?

  Extremely scalable.

• 47:01Jordi Hays?

  Linear. And our friends over at Readwise, too. Some very important breaking news. Chinese Joe Weisenthal has hit the timeline.

• 47:11John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 47:12Jordi Hays?

  Chinese Joe says-

• 47:14John Coogan?

  Familiar with American Joe Weisenthal.

• 47:15Jordi Hays?

  "When we first started raising awareness about Chinese Joe Weisenthal just a few months ago, the legacy media and the corporate establishment laughed in our faces. Something tells me they aren't laughing any longer." Chinese Joe Weisenthal. So, I-

• 47:28John Coogan?

  And Geiger Capital says, "Very bullish, China."

• 47:31Jordi Hays?

  It is. It is.

• 47:32John Coogan?

  They're catching up to the US much faster than anyone anticipated.

• 47:37Jordi Hays?

  Every country should have a Joe Weisenthal. They would be lucky to have one.

• 47:41John Coogan?

  Yes, and every every country needs a profound get your brand mentioned in chat GPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. And we have our first guest of the show from Palantir coming into the studio. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Louis? Good to see you.

• 48:02Speaker 04

  Very good to see you guys. Thank you for having me on.

• 48:04John Coogan?

  Thanks so much. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself? A little bit of your backstory, history at Palantir, and we'll go into the news.

• 48:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure. So I'm Louis. I run Palantir out here in the UK and Europe. You can tell probably from my accent that I'm British. And I've been at Palantir like almost a decade. So seen a seen a seen a lot of change, a lot of growth out here in the UK and Europe. That journey from a business that was very focused on defense and intel with a tiny bit of corporate to now a business that's serving every bit of the public sector and every corporate sector you can think of.

• 48:47John Coogan?

  And what's the news today? Or yesterday?

• 48:50Speaker 04

  Well, the big news is, well, technically, no, technically, it was early UK time this morning.

• 48:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 48:57Speaker 04

  So you're not out of date.

• 48:58John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  We announced a big, big deal with the UK Ministry of Defense. Billion dollars.

• 49:05John Coogan?

  A billion dollars.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  First billion dollar deal.

• 49:07Jordi Hays?

  A billion dollars.

• 49:12Speaker 04

  Thank you. Thank you, guys. Well, it's the first billion dollar deal that Palantir has done outside the US. So it's a big, significant milestone. And alongside that deal, we also announced a big investment into the UK. Two billion dollars over the next five years. The creation of 350 new jobs. And our European HQ for Defense will be in London.

• 49:36John Coogan?

  What does the two billion dollar investment look like? Is that just the investment in the team, OpEx, CapEx? Like, how are you thinking about that?

• 49:47Speaker 04

  It's all of those and London is already, little known fact, it's already home to about twenty percent of Palantir's headcount.

• 49:55John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 49:55Speaker 04

  It's uh, so it's actually our second largest office globally. So we do a lot more than just support, you know, British customers from this office.

• 50:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  We do a lot of product development and it serves as a, as yeah, as like the European and broader EMEA headquarters.

• 50:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:11Jordi Hays?

  When did you realize that billion dollar deals were possible? Was it ten years ago when you started? Was it five years ago? Was it more recently? It's a big number.

• 50:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, I, I think I always believed. And, and I, I think we're only just getting started. You know, this is, you know, we'll look back in five years' time, I think, and, and we'll think, yeah, those were small deals. Um, you know, the power of the software is such and it's meeting its moment. Uh, you know, the significance of this deal is, is it's, you know, we are the operating system for the modern battlefield. And we've seen the US make that move and the significance of the news today is, is the US's closest ally, the UK, making the same move.

• 50:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what's the mood like in the UK relative to the rest of Europe? We talked to Dr. Karp, uh, was that just last week? Or was it the week before?

• 51:08Speaker 04

  Week before, I think.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  Uh, about, uh, the reception and what's going on in Germany. He, of course, studied in Germany and he was, uh, kind of joking about the lack of entrepreneurial talent and adoption and, uh, kind of getting with the program in Germany, but it seems like the UK might be a little bit more forward thinking. Walk me through sort of the view in Europe technology right now.

• 51:32Speaker 04

  I think, I think that's spot on. I think the UK is an outlier. Um, we've got, uh, especially here in London, an incredible talent pool, uh, especially in the computer science, software engineering domains. You know, that's why Palantir has so many people here. It's why we do product development here. It's, it's really access to the talent. And you've got DeepMind, you've got, you've got a key, key parts of the, of the broader AI supply chain ecosystem are, are here. And I think it means UK is, is like the only country in the West broadly defined outside the US that does have that kind of talent pool.

• 52:12Speaker 04

  Uh, and obviously the language helps, speaking English, the connection to the US. And, uh, you know, we weren't alone, right? Today, Palantir is not the only company to have announced a big investment in the UK alongside, um, President Trump's visit. We saw Microsoft, we saw Nvidia, we saw OpenAI, we saw Google, a whole raft of big tech make big investments.

• 52:34John Coogan?

  Uh, how are you thinking about the work that you'll actually do? How, how concrete is it? How much can you share about, uh, what's actually in scope for this contract?

• 52:45Speaker 04

  I, I can share bits of it. Obviously a lot of it is sensitive operational details, but, um, a key part of it will be what the UK is calling the digital targeting web. Uh, we, we Palantir will be a component of that. It'll involve many, many other companies and players. And you could think of that a bit like what the Maven Smart System does for the US. So it's really your targeting infrastructure, how you connect up all your sensors, your satellites, your drones, all of your various data feeds with your effectors, you know, the stuff that you're going to use to shoot airplanes, tanks, missiles. And, uh, it's that data infrastructure that sits in between that. It's, it's the harness in which you then run all of the sophisticated AI

• 53:28Speaker 04

  and computer vision algorithms and, and so forth. And, uh, a lot of it is inspired and frankly, lessons learned from the war in Ukraine, where the same technology, our, our platforms have been, as you'll know, deployed by the Ukrainians day in, day out now for nearly three years. And those lessons have been learned and, you know, we're seeing the future of warfare play out in real time. And, uh, you know, and the significance of this is, is, is the UK government making a multi, multi-million pound investment in, in that.

• 54:02John Coogan?

  What was the precursor technology to Maven? I remember when I dug into it, I mean, it was like controversial program here in the United States. And when I looked into it, it seemed like the precursor to using image recognition and computer vision to identify objects and images was thousands of Air Force airmen manually tagging and basically doing something that you would expect like a data labeling firm to do. And it's not like the government wasn't trying to identify images, objects and images. They just weren't using technology. Is it the same thing over in the UK? Like what lineage of this?

• 54:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly right. And if anything, the problem is more severe because the UK is smaller and has fewer resources than the US. So, you know, you're never going to have enough eyeballs to watch all of those feats. So you need to find some way of automating that and surfacing something of interest to the human when that occurs, when that matters. That's how you're going to scale up.

• 55:08Jordi Hays?

  Does this type of deal make the next five deals with other Western allies easier? Right? I'm assuming that it would be, you know, given, it just becomes much more difficult to coordinate if allies are operating on different systems, but I don't know if I have the wrong framework for that.

• 55:28Speaker 04

  I think, no, I think that's, I mean, obviously, I'd hope that's a likely scenario, but it's, you know, it's critical. And again, this is a lesson from Ukraine, right? The interoperability is everything.

• 55:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:40Speaker 04

  The ability to pass targets seamlessly between units, between allies. That is, that is the way we're going to confront and deter the adversaries that we now have in the West.

• 55:54John Coogan?

  When we talked to Dr. Karp, he mentioned that because of the current structure of Palantir, because of where we are in the technological adoption curve, artificial intelligence, he did not expect headcount to grow significantly. Does this deal change anything for Palantir's UK office? I imagine it's like a whole lot more business. It might justify some hiring. Are you hiring? How do you think about actually supporting the-

• 56:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you said 350 new hires, but that didn't feel like a huge number in the con- I mean, it just showed the efficiency of the platform.

• 56:33Speaker 04

  It will, it will mean we hire. We will be creating jobs, but the output per head is going to grow even more significantly. You know, I think, you know, Ted Mayberry, my colleague who runs, runs the US, the global commercial business, was just tweeting today about AI FDEs. So the forward deployed engineers we had that have historically been human beings are starting to, to, to replace some of the work they would have done manually in the past with AI. And you can just see a path now where like 90% of what used to be the day-to-day job can be done by AI. So then suddenly you've got 10 FDEs for every one

• 57:16Speaker 04

  you used to have. I mean, the, the exponential here is crazy.

• 57:21John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Well, congratulations. Thanks so much for coming on and staying up late to join the stream.

• 57:26Speaker 04

  Not at all.

• 57:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, billion dollar deal. We have to hit this button for you.

• 57:34Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 57:34John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

• 57:36Speaker 04

  Love it, guys.

• 57:36Jordi Hays?

  Congrats.

• 57:37Speaker 04

  Thank you.

• 57:38John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 57:41John Coogan?

  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. Head over to Linear. The bond market has completely rejected the Fed's rate cut. We talked about this a little bit yesterday. Yields have ripped higher following an initial drop on the rate cut announcement. The rate cuts had the opposite effect.

• 58:01Jordi Hays?

  We need to set up a prayer circle at this point.

• 58:03John Coogan?

  Yes, mortgage rates will now spike. Mortgage rates were creeping down. This is not very good news. We're still talking about 0.1% of a move over the last day, but not in the right direction. So not fantastic, but of course, that account is from QE infinity, which is quantitative easing, of course.

• 58:23Jordi Hays?

  No bias there. Our post earlier for on August 10th, Leopold.

• 58:32John Coogan?

  Aged like a fine wine.

• 58:34Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 58:35John Coogan?

  We went, we were extremely bullish on Leopold and situational awareness. Back in August 10th, his fund topped $1.5 billion and posted 49% gains just for the first half of 2025. This was from filings. Whenever you're running a fund, you need to.

• 58:53Jordi Hays?

  Remember at that time, there were some people saying like.

• 58:57John Coogan?

  Long Intel. What could possibly happen?

• 58:59Jordi Hays?

  Is his fund already blown up?

• 59:00John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. And so Swix shares a screenshot of what Intel has been doing over the past year. They're up 28% and Swix says, oh my God, he's going to destroy H2 2025 too.

• 59:15Jordi Hays?

  Good.

• 59:16John Coogan?

  And Nat.

• 59:17Jordi Hays?

  Good year to have some situational awareness.

• 59:19John Coogan?

  Macalise says, everything reminds me of him. And it's all green lines up and to the right with a variety of stocks up 50%, 100%. He has fully nailed the AI trade. Will Brown says, you could buy so much Diet Dr. Pepper with $2 billion. I don't know if that's like Leopold's favorite drink or something. I don't get the Diet Dr. Pepper reference, but.

• 59:41Jordi Hays?

  This stat was insane and a little disheartening.

• 59:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 59:46Jordi Hays?

  The top 10% of US consumers now account for half of all consumer spending, which is a record high, up from about a third in the early 1990s.

• 59:57John Coogan?

  Okay, creeping up over time.

• 1:00:00Jordi Hays?

  Different way to understand wealth inequality.

• 1:00:05Jordi Hays?

  And it just goes to show if you're, if you're building consumer products, you probably want to be building for that, that top 10% that are spending half of all dollars.

• 1:00:15John Coogan?

  For sure. And you gotta pay your sales tax on Numeral, Numeral HQ. Sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax.

• 1:00:21Jordi Hays?

  Numeral just announced a new round today.

• 1:00:24John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, congratulations.

• 1:00:25Jordi Hays?

  At $350 million. Up from their series B, uh, earlier this year, or series A, earlier this year. And, uh, we're gonna have Sam on tomorrow, live from the studio for his, uh, first, uh, first ever guest appearance, and it'll be.

• 1:00:45John Coogan?

  Won't overdo.

• 1:00:46Jordi Hays?

  Pumped for that.

• 1:00:47John Coogan?

  Uh, still on Intel, funny journey. If you bought $10,000 worth of Intel 25 years ago, it would be worth $10,000 today. Uh, absolutely zero movement over the past 25 years, basically. It's a store of value, I guess. Uh, it, there has been movement, of course.

• 1:01:04Jordi Hays?

  You gotta, you gotta factor in inflation.

• 1:01:07John Coogan?

  And then it actually sort of ripped from 2010, uh, up to 2021, but then it fell and went back up. But now it's climbing back up. And, uh, the, the, the, the big news on Intel world is that Nvidia invested $5 billion.

• 1:01:24Jordi Hays?

  They marked Trump up.

• 1:01:26John Coogan?

  They marked up Trump. They marked up the US taxpayer, uh, since now we all own Intel shares. Uh, but this could be the start of something cool. Um, this was what, uh, uh, who was it? John at, uh, at Asianometry was proposing the idea that, uh, Nvidia would second source the CPUs from Intel because.

• 1:01:50Jordi Hays?

  Nvidia's up 22% today.

• 1:01:52John Coogan?

  Today? Wow. What, is there China news?

• 1:01:58Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. Not Nvidia. Intel.

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  Intel's up 22%.

• 1:02:01Jordi Hays?

  I'm so used to saying Nvidia.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  No, Nvidia can't be up 22% today. It's so big. It went down 3% yesterday on the China news.

• 1:02:09Jordi Hays?

  Back up 3%.

• 1:02:10John Coogan?

  It's back up 3%?

• 1:02:11Jordi Hays?

  3.7%.

• 1:02:12John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:02:13Jordi Hays?

  Back to where they started.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  Market thinks they're going back into China, baby. That Blackwells are gonna be shipping to B30s. It's happening. Um, Bobby Cosmic is rooting for Intel and says he loves.

• 1:02:24Jordi Hays?

  Of course we're rooting for Intel. We're all rooting for Intel.

• 1:02:27John Coogan?

  We haven't packed Kelsinger on the show soon.

• 1:02:29Jordi Hays?

  This post is hilarious. Every AI app today.

• 1:02:34John Coogan?

  It's a box truck with a Sprinter van inside and then inside the Sprinter van is a subcompact car. And this is just the nature of recursively calling various API abstraction layers, probably. The agent that calls the underlying LLM.

• 1:02:54Jordi Hays?

  So, South Park delays new episode hours ahead of airtime because creators didn't get it done in time. They say, apparently, when you do everything at the last minute, sometimes you don't get it done. Do you think this is because they were about to do something that was gonna get them taken off the airwaves?

• 1:03:12John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:03:14Jordi Hays?

  I think.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  It's high stakes right now.

• 1:03:15Jordi Hays?

  I think a lot of people that are used to joking around are understanding that, at least in this period of time, jokes can have consequences, blowback.

• 1:03:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:31Jordi Hays?

  Cancel culture's back.

• 1:03:32John Coogan?

  Cancel culture's back. It is remarkable that they ship an entirely new episode. It's a produced, animated show, but it's created around the news cycle.

• 1:03:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, real time.

• 1:03:48John Coogan?

  I believe when the Obama election happened, I think they prepped two different episodes. And then they were able to air the one that corresponded with the correct winner or something like that. Because they had that episode up like the same day that Obama won, which was crazy. But hats off to them. Considering their track record, it's impressive this doesn't happen more often.

• 1:04:12Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying. You really, you got a.

• 1:04:16John Coogan?

  Tinfoil hat moment.

• 1:04:17Jordi Hays?

  Tinfoil hat moment.

• 1:04:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, they, yeah, I don't know that they've ever missed, uh, have they ever missed an episode? They must have at a certain point and they do, and they do go off air for a little bit and I'm sure they have, uh, stuff in the backlog, but it's crazy how long they've been at it. This has been what 20, 30 years on the air? Um, it's, it's one of those shows that I keep forgetting about and then somebody shares like, oh, they did one about AI. You gotta, you gotta watch this. They do this about the thing that you really focus on. So you gotta do it.

• 1:04:42Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:04:42John Coogan?

  Bin.ai, the number one AI agents for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2.

• 1:04:52Jordi Hays?

  I'm only able to find one other instance where they had a official production delay for a new episode.

• 1:04:59John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:04:59Jordi Hays?

  It was in 2013.

• 1:05:03John Coogan?

  Well, um, Bryce Roberts says, don't wait for more resources to have kids. John Woo, uh, broke it down. Got nine thousand likes almost.

• 1:05:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this post went super viral.

• 1:05:14John Coogan?

  Said, uh, my only regret in life is not having kids earlier. When I was 27, I was going out four nights a week, working 12 hour days, six days a week, waking up at 5:00 AM daily for CrossFit. Kids would have been a breeze. Don't wait for more resources to have kids. Energy is scarcer than money. It's a good take. Thanks for blowing this up, guys. Follow me.

• 1:05:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other, the other thing here is if you have kids younger, it just means you're younger when your kids are fully functional and independent, right?

• 1:05:43John Coogan?

  Also, I mean, there's just this idea that you like, oh, you need to like, like you, you don't, you actually don't get to stop working when you have kids. Like you actually do go to work and, and make more money. And so it's, it's, you know, it's not just like, oh, you need to be retirement age or have like retirement money before you.

• 1:06:02Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I think it's entirely a fixation of people have had in their mind forever. This idea of like you buy your first, you get married, you buy your home.

• 1:06:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Jordi Hays?

  And then you have kids and that's so ingrained in the culture that people just don't even consider having kids.

• 1:06:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, because of the house.

• 1:06:18Jordi Hays?

  Because.

• 1:06:18John Coogan?

  House prices are so high.

• 1:06:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're not in a position to buy a house, but I think, uh, yeah.

• 1:06:25John Coogan?

  Well.

• 1:06:26Jordi Hays?

  Kids are nothing more, nothing to motivate the grind set like, uh,

• 1:06:30John Coogan?

  Indeed.

• 1:06:31Jordi Hays?

  Couple of pups.

• 1:06:32John Coogan?

  Deeply motivating.

• 1:06:36Jordi Hays?

  We got you on soundboard finally. He's uh, he's trigger happy.

• 1:06:39John Coogan?

  Uh, Amit, who we uh, met at Palantir uh, Dev Day, said uh,

• 1:06:44Jordi Hays?

  Number one Palantir retail soldier.

• 1:06:47John Coogan?

  Yes, uh, he's an imagine-

• 1:06:49Jordi Hays?

  He's a brigadier general.

• 1:06:50John Coogan?

  Trump told Jensen that if he didn't pump his intel bags, then he wouldn't be able to sell to China. Then Jensen saw the 60 billion they had in cash and was like, screw it. Put 5 billion into intel so we can ship to China.

• 1:07:00Jordi Hays?

  Do you think this solves Jensen's China problem?

• 1:07:03John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:07:04Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if they're, I don't know if that's a-

• 1:07:05John Coogan?

  Because it's not a Trump issue anymore. It's a Beijing issue, right?

• 1:07:08Jordi Hays?

  It's a Beijing problem, so.

• 1:07:09John Coogan?

  So, um, yeah, I don't know what, I don't know what Trump has left.

• 1:07:14Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Trump up 36% on his first real trade size.

• 1:07:19John Coogan?

  Pretty good.

• 1:07:20Jordi Hays?

  Makes you wanna let, you makes him wanna get him set up.

• 1:07:23John Coogan?

  But there's a lot of uh, th- th- th- there are a lot of other like chips on the table that Trump can pull. There's Rare Earth, there's TikTok, there's all sorts of what? What'd you say?

• 1:07:34Jordi Hays?

  Chips on the table.

• 1:07:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Uh, it was an accidental pun. Um, but uh, th- there are other places where i- if Nvidia rises to this, to this top of the stack and becomes one of the most important American geopolitical issues and the mood around exporting chips and chip bans just kind of completely cools and China hasn't asked, well then, Trump can art of the deal and say, hey, uh, you gotta let, and you gotta unban Nvidia locally. It is funny that we split from, from America banning Nvidia selling to China to China banning Nvidia selling to China. And it's like they both were at one point were banning, but at different time, time horizons and we're kind of going back and forth.

• 1:08:16John Coogan?

  But, anyway, uh, I think Jensen will, will figure something out. Uh, I, this is not the end of that story for sure. There's gonna be, there's gonna be chips flowing, flowing, flowing, flowing. Um, uh, Nir shares that you can just copy trade Leopold's fund and triple your money in a day. The forums are public. It's crazy. The January 16th, 2026, $24 call that Leopold put on is up 200%. So triple.

• 1:08:47Jordi Hays?

  Is that good?

• 1:08:48John Coogan?

  It's fantastic. Nir says, absolute king, Zainil, gratz on the extra billion.

• 1:08:55John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:08:56Jordi Hays?

  The Coachella lineup dropped two months early and over 60% of attendees were on payment plans last year.

• 1:09:04John Coogan?

  What does that mean that it dropped early?

• 1:09:08John Coogan?

  I don't understand.

• 1:09:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just, I think, I think they maybe anticipate it's gonna take longer to sell out.

• 1:09:13John Coogan?

  Sell all the tickets, okay.

• 1:09:14Jordi Hays?

  It used to be, back in my day, in the heyday, it was, Weekend One was always fully sold out.

• 1:09:21John Coogan?

  Fully sold out.

• 1:09:22Jordi Hays?

  The, the tickets would be selling at a pretty significant premium. Uh, to retail pricing. And so, and I think last year, if I remember correctly, you could just basically buy, you could basically buy a Weekend One ticket at below retail.

• 1:09:38John Coogan?

  I wonder if that's a, I wonder if it's like a dynamic around like who is actually playing Coachella, who's hot, like are there, are there as many?

• 1:09:46Jordi Hays?

  They dropped the lineup, you have.

• 1:09:47John Coogan?

  Is the lineup crazy?

• 1:09:47Jordi Hays?

  Sabrina Carpenter is headlining day one, Justin Bieber, day two.

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  Okay, but it's not Taylor Swift and the Backstreet Boys, they're over at the Sphere. So maybe the Sphere sucking the energy out, because the Sphere tickets are selling great and they're, they're super expensive. So, maybe people want, want something new, maybe Coachella's washed up.

• 1:10:05Jordi Hays?

  Should we do a live show from the Empire Polo Club this year?

• 1:10:11John Coogan?

  I don't even know what that is.

• 1:10:12Jordi Hays?

  That's where Coachella takes place, on the polo field.

• 1:10:16John Coogan?

  But not during Coachella, just like at a different time or during Coachella? You want to be on stage next to, you want to be going up against Sabrina Carpenter?

• 1:10:22Jordi Hays?

  I just want to be ripping the timeline.

• 1:10:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, next to.

• 1:10:29Jordi Hays?

  Interesting, Dario went out on stage and said he does not think we should be selling AI chips to China. Quote, "I think it's completely nuts, it's very important that we defeat China in this technology." Well, you got what you wanted because Beijing decided to make that decision themselves.

• 1:10:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:51John Coogan?

  Anyway, Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. He just goes for free. Also.

• 1:11:00Jordi Hays?

  The team just went absolutely wild in here.

• 1:11:05John Coogan?

  Max Siegel over at Privy, our latest sponsor, says, wow, OG Privy customer won an Emmy. Shout out Dylan Abrosgado and People Pleaser, doing some serious damage, getting on-chain projects represented at the pinnacle of media accomplishment. White Rabbit just became the first crypto project to win an Emmy. Imagine telling 2021-

• 1:11:27Jordi Hays?

  They won the outstanding innovation in emerging media programming.

• 1:11:31John Coogan?

  It's cool that they have a new for, like, a new award. There has to be a new award, right? That wasn't, that award can't have been around for that long. But People Pleaser says, imagine telling 2021 crypto Twitter that in a few years, our producers and ETH would get a shout out onstage at the Emmys. Pretty remarkable.

• 1:11:50Jordi Hays?

  All right, let's pull up this video.

• 1:11:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's play the-

• 1:11:53Jordi Hays?

  Let's check in with Europe.

• 1:11:54John Coogan?

  Let's, yeah, let's play the Emmys-

• 1:11:55Jordi Hays?

  Check in with Europe.

• 1:11:56John Coogan?

  Wait, why Europe?

• 1:11:57Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I was, I was on to the next post.

• 1:11:59John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. I wanted to watch the Emmys video, if we have that one. I want to see, I want to see exactly how they frame this, but we can watch the-

• 1:12:05Jordi Hays?

  I don't think that's the right video.

• 1:12:07John Coogan?

  I think that's just a different humanoid robot.

• 1:12:08Jordi Hays?

  Got the wrong guy.

• 1:12:10John Coogan?

  Let's pull up the People Pleaser Max Siegel post, and I'll tell you about Eight Sleep. Eightsleep.com, get a Pod 5, 5-year warranty, 39 risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping.

• 1:12:20Jordi Hays?

  You know why I'm smiling?

• 1:12:22John Coogan?

  Because you're home and you get to sleep when you're Eight Sleep tonight, I know.

• 1:12:24Jordi Hays?

  Finally.

• 1:12:25John Coogan?

  It's always hard being away. Anyway, can we pull up the Emmys video from the timeline?

• 1:12:33Jordi Hays?

  I think that might have just been a screenshot.

• 1:12:35John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:12:36Jordi Hays?

  Am I off there?

• 1:12:37John Coogan?

  People Pleaser? Okay.

• 1:12:39Jordi Hays?

  We'll circle back. Let's pull up this video. I put it in the chat of this humanoid.

• 1:12:42John Coogan?

  This is Calvin40, the humanoid developed by the French company Wandercraft. And Chris says, Europe is cooked, lol. I don't know why they're cooked, they're cooking if they're making robots.

• 1:12:54Jordi Hays?

  Let's see.

• 1:12:55John Coogan?

  Is it bad? I didn't actually see the full video. I hope it's not bad. It doesn't, okay, it's picking up a tire. This seems fine. This is good. This is good performance. What's not to like? Picks up a tire. It seems useful.

• 1:13:12Jordi Hays?

  Headless.

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  It is weird that it doesn't have a head.

• 1:13:15Jordi Hays?

  I mean-

• 1:13:16John Coogan?

  It's not exactly Pixar-level cute.

• 1:13:19Jordi Hays?

  It's a little shake.

• 1:13:21John Coogan?

  Literal clanker. It's clanking around.

• 1:13:24Speaker 03

  One of the comments is, was this trained on folks over 40?

• 1:13:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does seem very slow.

• 1:13:31Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I swear, almost every humanoid company today has just been training on like Biden.

• 1:13:36John Coogan?

  They haven't been training on that at all. They're trying to train on Usain Bolt, but you know, it takes time to integrate all that.

• 1:13:45Jordi Hays?

  Maybe Bolt is holding out and saying you can't train, you can't train.

• 1:13:49John Coogan?

  I'm locking up my training data.

• 1:13:51Jordi Hays?

  He's like, you gotta pay up.

• 1:13:52John Coogan?

  What do you think, Tyler?

• 1:13:53Speaker 03

  I mean, the difference between this and the Unitree demo, or the demo on the Unitree, I don't think it was Unitree that did that where

• 1:13:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:00Speaker 03

  it was fighting and then it fell down and immediately got back.

• 1:14:01John Coogan?

  Yep, that was crazy.

• 1:14:03Speaker 03

  It's like pretty crazy, the difference.

• 1:14:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, and someone was saying that that robot was like, was being teleoperated, like there's someone in the background with like a controller controlling it. And Rune had a good point that was like, well, like telling it to move forward is like the easiest part. Like, the hard part is like actually having a button to press to like pop up. Yeah.

• 1:14:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're not manually controlling that motion.

• 1:14:26John Coogan?

  No, no, it clearly has some incredible, incredible ability, like respond and understand its position and hop back up. It's pretty good. Well, I don't know. We'll have to check in with Wandercraft, see how they do. I, you know, this is better than nothing. I don't know. I think they're

• 1:14:42Speaker 03

  It's a good start.

• 1:14:43John Coogan?

  They could keep going. We have our next guest, Brendan from Mercore, coming in the studio.

• 1:14:51John Coogan?

  Brendan, welcome to the stream. How you doing?

• 1:14:54Brendan Foody?

  I'm doing great. How are you?

• 1:14:55John Coogan?

  I'm great. Sorry, we couldn't link up on Tuesday. You have some massive news. Introduce yourself, break it down for us. What's the latest and greatest?

• 1:15:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm glad you finally, you know, it's good. You get to the $500 million revenue mark and you decide, all right, I'll do some podcasts.

• 1:15:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:15:12Brendan Foody?

  Exactly, yeah. So I'm Brendan, the CEO and co-founder of Mercore. Started the company with my best friends from high school when we were 19. Scaled up a little bit to a million dollar revenue run rate, dropped out of college, started working with all of the AI labs and scaled from one to 500 million in revenue run rate in 17 months. Which has been pretty wild. Yeah, no, and super, super exciting and surreal as you can imagine. So very excited about all of the progress with the business and the best is yet to come.

• 1:15:50John Coogan?

  What was the first task you did? What was the first data you labeled? What was the first project to get from? How did you go from zero to one, basically?

• 1:15:59Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, name every piece of data. Well, so I remember the very first, oh, let's see, there were a few, but the first meeting that really jumped out was when we were hiring Olympiad medalists because everyone was interested in how the models could become superhuman at Olympiad Math. And so we turned around 25 Olympiad medalists in 24 hours. And I bring up this example because I wasn't completing the task successfully. I was obviously haven't, don't have an Olympiad gold medal in math, but it was, it was incredible to just see like how capable the models are.

• 1:16:39Brendan Foody?

  And this indication of the huge trend underway in the market away from low and medium skilled talent towards this super high skilled sourcing and vetting paradigm ranging from Olympiad Math all the way to the thank software engineers and top investment bankers and consultants that helped to push the frontier of models.

• 1:17:00John Coogan?

  What was the, what was the onboarding process for those 25 medalists? Was this just like cold outreach or something? Like, how did you actually meet these folks?

• 1:17:07Brendan Foody?

  Largely through referrals because we have a big pool of people that we've already hired on the platform. And so the largest sourcing channel by far is that people we've previously worked with will send the link to their friends and we'll pay them 250 bucks as for a successful referral to help grow the talent network.

• 1:17:25John Coogan?

  It feels like most of the labs are, I mean, we saw this with OpenAI. Mark Chen was just posting that they basically dominated every hard programming and math competition this year. What are the labs interested in next?

• 1:17:43Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, I think the largest transition is, and we'll share more about this in one of our product releases soon, but it's away from academic evals like Olympiad math or GPQA for PhD-level reasoning and moving towards all of these professional domains. How do we measure what it means to be a great software engineer to build products? How do we measure what it means to be an investment banker that can do thoughtful financial analysis or a consultant that can help to segment a market? And these end-to-end evals over all of the professional capabilities, I think, will be one of the largest, most exciting trends in the market over the next year or two.

• 1:18:25John Coogan?

  What's the shape of that task, then? I mean, it's so vague. It's so much less quantifiable than what your score was on the IMO, although that's incredibly impressive if someone can do that level of math. Go build good software feels really unverifiable, feels really broad.

• 1:18:44Brendan Foody?

  Exactly. And so that's why you need humans to define the stasis points. It's so much more difficult to measure. And so one way of doing it could be to build a rubric where the model can use the criteria to score the deliverable that's being produced. Like, imagine you want the model to be really good at building a web app that looks beautiful. You could have rubric criteria for all of the different elements of said web app or whatever you're ultimately building. And so having humans define the success criteria and using that, those verifiers, as part of an RRL environment to train models iteratively to learn how to optimize for those criteria

• 1:19:27Brendan Foody?

  is one of the enormous trends that we're seeing across all of the frontier labs.

• 1:19:32Jordi Hays?

  How do you sort of plan with the team when you have overwhelming demand for a current product, yet simultaneously need to try to predict future demand in a way that I think normally when companies are doing traditional demand planning, it's very clear of just how many customers can we reach with our current set of products and future products? But in your business, it's not always entirely obvious what the needs are going to look like, even a couple of years out.

• 1:20:04Brendan Foody?

  Totally. I think that the most important thing is always working on the frontier and understanding what are the leading indicators of what the entire economy is going to be doing soon and adopting soon. And emphasizing that frontier in all of our product development and all of our investments is one of the most important decisions that we've made historically as sort of a framework for resource allocation.

• 1:20:31Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense.

• 1:20:32John Coogan?

  We were just watching a video of a French company Wandercraft making a humanoid robot. People were kind of joking about it. I thought it was pretty impressive. I haven't seen any humanoid robots out of France. But can you talk about like what the data collection process for humanoid robots looks like now?

• 1:20:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, specifically, a lot of, you know, we were at MetaConnect yesterday, talking with Zach and Boz and the team. And a lot of people saw the announcement and they said, okay, a lot more people are going to have cameras on their faces soon.

• 1:21:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:03Jordi Hays?

  How valuable is this? Should frontline factory workers be, you know, be collecting data today? Or is that not necessary?

• 1:21:12Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, it's interesting. The key thing for the models to learn is having a clearly defined reward. And so I'll give like a couple of examples of that and sort of the role that humans can play. The first one, actually, without humans, is that I was at the, this like robotics office where they had robots that were folding laundry. And then they would have a vision model look at the laundry to see if it was folded properly as the reward. So we're having that stasis point where you can have 100 different model trajectories, see which five trajectories are right, and then reward those trajectories so that the model increases its probability of doing that correctly in the future is very powerful. All the way to another example where models are proposing scientific experiments. And

• 1:21:57Brendan Foody?

  then we need humans that we hire as contractors to run those experiments in the physical world, report on the results and say how they did. And so I very much believe that models will learn from their experience and interacting with the real economy. But so much of that experience, similar to the way that you or I learn, is curated by humans and the way that, you know, we help models with running the experiment in the physical world and giving feedback, et cetera.

• 1:22:24Jordi Hays?

  You tweeted the letters IPO a while back. What did you mean by that?

• 1:22:31Brendan Foody?

  Well, I did. I did comment in parentheses below that kidding.

• 1:22:34Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay. I missed that part. I missed that part. Okay.

• 1:22:38Brendan Foody?

  It's all good. Well, people, people took it seriously because I remember that.

• 1:22:42Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure you got a lot of frantic calls from bankers being like, Brendan, you told me you'd tell me.

• 1:22:50Brendan Foody?

  Well, it's funny because last year when we were a seed stage company, I tweeted IPO by end of year. And everyone thought I was, you know, a little bit crazy because we'd raised our forty million dollar seed round. Uh, oh, sorry. I tweeted, yeah, unicorn by end of year and uh, we, you know, ended up making it happen. And so people thought maybe this time was, was real, but I was, I was just kidding about the IPO.

• 1:23:11Jordi Hays?

  Got to keep.

• 1:23:11John Coogan?

  What's the uh, what, what's the shape of the business now? Obviously, there's a huge amount of focus on, on these expert networks and, and these really high skilled specialized talent.

• 1:23:24John Coogan?

  Getting data from that and working through different problems and all the examples that you gave. Is there still a need from big labs for just the more traditional RLHF? Is this good? Is this bad? Thumbs up, thumbs down? Or has that been completely absorbed by just?

• 1:23:42Jordi Hays?

  Users of the, of the.

• 1:23:43John Coogan?

  The users or also just the models themselves? Like is, is, are GPT five or, or, you know, any of the other models, the frontier models? Are they able to deliver the, the, the thumbs up, thumbs down? If you need to do some sort of fine tuning on a specific problem?

• 1:23:58Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, it depends on the lab. There's definitely still large investments that are happening in RLHF. However, it seems like it's more efficient to collect those via data flywheels in real world. And where you really need expert human involvement, that's incredibly valuable is someone that will think about a problem for five hours and come up with this like very structured framework for how to evaluate model success in a way that it's difficult to expect users of products to do in a reliable way.

• 1:24:30John Coogan?

  Is that the, is that like a reasonable way to think about a task, a single task, like five hours of?

• 1:24:37Brendan Foody?

  That might be one way, but one thing I'm very excited about is that the time horizons of agentic trajectories will go up dramatically.

• 1:24:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:24:45Brendan Foody?

  Right, and so I think a lot of people initially think about AI in the context of what can they see on their screen on ChatGPT at any given time. But over time, it's and maybe using one tool with like online research. But over time, we're going to have the models working on problems that would take a human thirty days to do or ninety days to do, that are using ten different tools, are interacting with various employees in the companies, and we need environments for all of that. Right, we need ways to eval and to measure success to define the rewards. And that's going to be a very exciting problem space to continue pushing the frontier of.

• 1:25:22John Coogan?

  How do you or just humans generally fit into solving the problem of like booking a flight or or, you know, ordering DoorDash? We've heard about these simulated environments, RL environments, verifiable rewards, like, is it is it mostly designing the environment with the reward? Or is there actually a process for someone who's just a fantastic travel agent to, you know, create a rubric or create a or just actually do a ton of tasks to generate data?

• 1:25:57Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, it could be. So one way you would do it for those kinds of browser use workflows is that you could have a simulated application and then a unit test that measures if the model effectively, you know, completed the task, it changed the state and like booking the flight or whatever the action is. And ultimately, you do need a human expert to help write what is that unit test. But my guess is that computer use will be solved relatively quickly in the next like or at least in the next like two or three years. And then there's going to be this much longer tail of sort of the broad space of knowledge

• 1:26:42Brendan Foody?

  work and everything that we want to do of how do we get the model to build a startup or help help prep for a podcast episode or whatever the workflow is.

• 1:26:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, how do you think about solving problems that take like decades? Like, I always go back to like, you know, health, there's certain things where, you know, the FDA does a lot of work to try and understand, you know, if you're consuming this particular ingredient for 50 years, how does that affect you? It feels like until we can simulate the entire human body and run it at a faster clock rate, like, that seems like something that you just can't really short circuit. We're already getting to like longer and longer rollouts, and that feels like that might be some sort of like damping function on how quickly we can compound. But are there any promising strategy that you've heard for dealing with problems that

• 1:27:36John Coogan?

  just take a long time to actually understand the reward or understand the did pass fail?

• 1:27:43Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, the concern I would have with that scenario is it's so difficult to perfectly simulate like the human body and how that would play forward. And so my guess is that for a very, very long time, models will more so look at empirical analysis. However, models might survey people that took certain, you know, vitamins or whatever drugs when they were a certain age and see the impact that that's had in their analysis. But it'll, it'll be difficult to simulate in that case. There are other cases where it's like a well scoped physics simulation of how well does, you know, this like ball roll down the plane or whatever we're modeling out, that'll be

• 1:28:28Brendan Foody?

  easier to simulate and therefore for models to have an accurate understanding of how things will play out in the real world.

• 1:28:37Jordi Hays?

  What's, are you guys naturally 996?

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:28:43Brendan Foody?

  I always get this question.

• 1:28:44Jordi Hays?

  But I, but I, but I feel like you guys are probably more on like a... Like 997, like six is almost for the week. You guys are 20, 21, like what else do you have to do besides, besides this?

• 1:28:59Brendan Foody?

  Well, it's funny because we have actually never really mandated hours at the company.

• 1:29:04Jordi Hays?

  That's what I figured, but there's like, if you're ramping revenue from one to 500 million and

• 1:29:09Brendan Foody?

  It's a lot of work, yeah.

• 1:29:11Jordi Hays?

  A little bit of time.

• 1:29:12Brendan Foody?

  Exactly. So I think the way it started was our initial core team was working like seven days a week and everyone was in the office like super late, all this stuff. And so we initially gave that rough guidance because we wanted people to have a little bit more balance and going home earlier, et cetera. But obviously, as the company's developed, I think it's important to be able to hire people that have families. And even though they'll work hard on the weekends, they might still be at home. And so there's, there's some of that as well, still emphasizing a lot of intensity and, you know, moving mountains for customers, but at the same time, not necessarily being as input oriented and much more focusing on outputs.

• 1:29:56John Coogan?

  How big's the team now, like the full-time core, not the network?

• 1:30:01Brendan Foody?

  Relatively large. We're 250 people now.

• 1:30:03John Coogan?

  Wow, congratulations.

• 1:30:04Brendan Foody?

  Yeah, exactly. Across the US and India, and then a little bit across Latin America and the UK as well. But yeah, it's, it's been exciting. Certainly a crazy feeling to start having all of these people on our new SF office and new faces that I have to meet. So.

• 1:30:26Jordi Hays?

  What kind of predictions are you gonna make? Any numbers you're throwing out? You said unicorn by end of year last year, but what about, what about going forward? Anything you're willing to, willing to take a guess?

• 1:30:39Brendan Foody?

  We could say decacorn by end of year this year, so.

• 1:30:41Jordi Hays?

  That one feels like you might, might already have it in the bag, but.

• 1:30:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll have to call R for Rock to get this later. Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon, Brendan. Thanks so much for dropping on.

• 1:30:54Brendan Foody?

  Cheers.

• 1:30:55John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Up next, we have Darren Mowry from Google Cloud coming in. Big Google announcement today, big event over at Google in the global startups at Google Cloud World. Let's bring in Darren. How you doing, Darren? Good to see you.

• 1:31:19Speaker 02

  Cool spot here in Mountain View, so it's great to be able to spend a few minutes with you.

• 1:31:22John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on the show.

• 1:31:23Jordi Hays?

  I'm looking sharp as well. Thank you for wearing a suit.

• 1:31:26Speaker 02

  Thank you. I had to brush off the suit. I had to kind of dust off.

• 1:31:29John Coogan?

  It looks fantastic.

• 1:31:30Speaker 02

  I had to show up somewhat presentable today, guys.

• 1:31:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, it looks great. Take us through the event, what's going on today, what's been announced, who's there, everything.

• 1:31:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's great. So we're actually in a couple hours is going to be kicking off our first global AI Builders Summit. And so we're going to have a couple hundred founders and builders here in this room, which I can tell you about if you're interested.

• 1:31:50John Coogan?

  Please do.

• 1:31:50Speaker 02

  A little bit of cool Google history here.

• 1:31:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be awesome.

• 1:31:52Speaker 02

  And then we're going to have a few, actually tens of thousands of startups and builders around the world joining us digitally as well. And so today, we're having customers like Lovable, Reflit, Fireworks and others onstage talking about, you know, the problems they're trying to solve, but how AI is actually helping them completely revamp the industries that they're in. We also have some Google Cloud and some DeepMind folks joining us as well to talk about kind of how quickly we've seen the evolution, where we are now, and we'll look around a few corners into what's coming. So some really great sessions today over the next few hours. So we're excited about that.

• 1:32:26John Coogan?

  That's great. Tell me about the history of the building. You said that there was something special about it?

• 1:32:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we're actually in this place called Charlie's Cafe, believe it or not. And you guys probably know, Google has been known for having good food, good cafeterias for a long time. This was our first cafeteria named after our 57th employee, Charlie Irs. And so in all seriousness, although it is a little bit of an urban legend, we actually do deeply believe in creating great spaces for people to come together and challenge each other, have good conversation, and eat a little bit of good food too. I'll definitely admit that. But we're here in this space. We thought it's a perfect spot to kind of bring everybody together, talk about building and innovation. So it'll definitely be a great few hours.

• 1:33:06Jordi Hays?

  What, give us a high level on what the last year has looked like in your role specifically around, you know, supporting startups that just have an insatiable demand for inference and, you know, all the other infrastructure needed to scale these types of applications.

• 1:33:25Speaker 02

  No, it's a really good question. You know, you guys should know I've been in cloud computing for a while. I was at another hyperscaler for a long time at the early days of cloud. And I thought we were moving fast then until we've entered this AI revolution, right? Which I think the compression and the speed is like nothing I've ever seen before. Over the last 18 months, we've definitely felt what I think we would really call like a seismic shift, frankly. The old school way of thinking about cloud through the lens of infrastructure as a service. All of a sudden, people talking about all layers of AI from chips and infrastructure, right? Are we going to use Nvidia chips? Hey, Google, what's up with this TPU concept that Anthropic is relying on? Kind of what does that mean? When you get to the model level, you know, the fact that Gemini and what we're releasing with Vio,

• 1:34:10Speaker 02

  these are first-class citizen models, as I think you guys can see in terms of performance, cost, efficiency. But the fact that we're building and going to continue to innovate on our models, but also partner with, you know, folks like Anthropic, folks like Meta, to make sure Llama and Sonnet and others are also first-class products that startups that are building on Google are able to use in a super-integrated fashion. And then this concept more recently, right, which is this Agentic, this Agent AI. This is not a theoretical pursuit. I think it's interesting that when we talk to founders and they give us some feedback, the feedback they're telling us is the agent capability from Google Cloud is a real capability. It's not a planned release of products, hopefully, in the future, right?

• 1:34:52Speaker 02

  It's a fully-integrated stack where startups have an SDK and an 80K. They can build these agents, as I said, using first-party and third-party models. They can publish them, distribute them, and we can even help them go to market, right? So to this, to your point, the last 18 months, breakneck speed. I think we're all learning quite a bit as we go. But I would say the feedback that we're getting from founders and builders especially are, A, telling us we're on the right track, doing the right things. And frankly, they're saying, go even faster, right? Help us do even more, even more quickly. So with Nano Banana, you guys may have seen that was released recently. These are things that are coming out of our DeepMind team. And there's going to be further announcements, again, around agents and new models fairly shortly

• 1:35:34Speaker 02

  that are going to keep us very top of mind and very much a part of what startups are building every day.

• 1:35:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's fantastic. Google's always been very, is a great partner to the startup ecosystem, giving out credits. Do you feel like startups are burning through credits faster now in the AI age? I feel like I remember going through Y Combinator and getting some huge amount of credits and not really knowing what to do with them. Exactly. Yeah, they usually expire after a year. But I feel like with AI, like you can, you can actually accelerate much faster. What's the mood been like from startups that you work with?

• 1:36:12Speaker 02

  That's a really good point. When you think of our Google Cloud for startups program, which does have a credit component, an engineering component, a support component, training, etc. We definitely have had a dramatic increase in the amount of startups coming to the platform. So that's first and foremost, a really good signal. To your point, though, which I think definitely shows you understand this space, is getting into these programs is one thing, even being approved for credits is another thing. But actively consuming the credits and building value, that's what the startups care about, and that's what we care about, right? So what I've seen now over my almost five years at Google Cloud is, in the last 18 months, not only do we have more startups than ever in the program, they're consuming the credits extremely quickly. And more importantly, for us at least, and I think

• 1:36:55Speaker 02

  for these startups, they're staying with us, right? This concept of, I'm going to jump from one platform to another to use credits, worked in a commoditized cloud world, where you could go from a virtual machine to a virtual machine to a virtual machine. Now that I'm able to come to these startups and do what we talked about a moment ago of GPU, TPU, Gemini, Claude, Sonnet, Llama, agents wrapped in Google Cloud, we're finding these startups are using the credits, but then they're like, I'm not going anywhere, right? And so I think that is the true business case and value proposition behind these credit programs.

• 1:37:29John Coogan?

  That's great. Anything else, Jordy?

• 1:37:31Jordi Hays?

  No, thank you for joining and have fun out there. Wish, wish we were going to be able to catch some of the talks ourselves, but we'll have to be there next time.

• 1:37:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll catch up with you soon. Thanks so much for taking the time.

• 1:37:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's all right. Great seeing you guys. Have a good day.

• 1:37:43John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 1:37:45Speaker 02

  You.

• 1:37:45John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Kayvon from MacroScope coming in the studio, also the founder of Periscope.

• 1:37:53John Coogan?

  We will bring him in in just a minute. In the meantime, let me tell you about public.com investing, for those who take it seriously, multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields are trusted by millions. I like a couple of words, thank you, Jordy. What were you about to say?

• 1:38:08Jordi Hays?

  Periscope was acquired by Twitter.

• 1:38:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:38:13Jordi Hays?

  And did that become?

• 1:38:15John Coogan?

  Live streaming.

• 1:38:15Jordi Hays?

  Live streaming.

• 1:38:16John Coogan?

  We'll get it from Cave on directly. Let's bring him in to the TVP and Ultra from the restream waiting room. Cave on, how you doing?

• 1:38:24Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:38:25Speaker 06

  Hey guys, great to meet you.

• 1:38:27John Coogan?

  Clarify Jordy's question. Did, tell us the story of Periscope. We'll work through to Macroscope, but I'm super interested in, in some of the Silicon Valley lore here. Yeah, just kick us off.

• 1:38:37Jordi Hays?

  By the way, huge opportunity for somebody to buy up all the.

• 1:38:40John Coogan?

  Every scope.

• 1:38:40Jordi Hays?

  Ends with scope at the end, just every English word. So your next company, you're gonna be like, ah, I gotta, I gotta double down.

• 1:38:47Speaker 06

  I might have, I might have already done it. You never know. I gotta, I gotta tell you actually, funny, funny thing. Nine years ago, almost to the day, nine years ago, we launched a feature called Periscope Producer, which is the same infrastructure that is powering this very broadcast right now.

• 1:39:03John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:39:03Speaker 06

  And our, our dream when we built Periscope Producer was literally for a show like TVP and ToX. It's sort of like the, the perfect blend of high production, live streaming content blended with the conversation of what's happening on Twitter. And you know, it took a while for that to, to come to fruition, but it just like makes me so happy and proud in a very emotional way to see everything you guys have done and to see it happening on, on Twitter slash X.

• 1:39:29Jordi Hays?

  That's awesome.

• 1:39:30Speaker 06

  It's awesome. Congrats on everything you guys have done.

• 1:39:31Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for, for building the bedrock.

• 1:39:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I, I want to get to Macroscope, but tell me more of the lore. What was, what were the early days of Periscope like? What was the first like go to market motion? There's, there's all these famous, back then there was the era of like, go to South by Southwest. This is the story of, of a bunch of social apps, including Twitter, where you get the early, you kind of create a ground swell of tech, early adopters. What, what was the first product build? What was the story back then? How'd you launch the product?

• 1:40:04Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, if you want to go way back, the very first version of Periscope, A, it wasn't called Periscope, it was called Bounty.

• 1:40:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:10Speaker 06

  And B, it wasn't, it wasn't actually live streaming. Our first prototype was essentially, um, I, I sort of think of it as like a reverse marketplace for, for Google Maps. Like you would, you would drop a pin somewhere in the world and someone would take a photo. You would, you would, you would have some prompt, like you would put a bounty on, you know, what's happening at the Tokyo Fish Market right now?

• 1:40:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:40:27Speaker 06

  And someone would respond with a photo. Um, and that to us was like a really cool way of trying to attempt to build like a teleportation device.

• 1:40:35John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:40:36Speaker 06

  We didn't know how to, we didn't know how to actually build teleportation.

• 1:40:38John Coogan?

  There were so many fascinating, like, social app, social, mobile, local apps at that time. It was a big, it was a big trend and there were a whole bunch of different ideas that were experimented with. It was such a fascinating time.

• 1:40:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, and it's, yeah, interestingly enough, like Instagram has like delivered effectively that functionality now, or Snapchat, where you can teleport and see how, what's the vibe at this restaurant right now?

• 1:40:59John Coogan?

  And if you click on the location that you tagged, I can see who else put pictures there if they're public. So, yeah, those features, you were clearly very early.

• 1:41:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think Snap Map actually was like probably one of the best manifestations of that early on. The R Stories feature really brought that use case to life. For Periscope's journey, you know, we, we, when we built that prototype, we realized it just wasn't really interesting. And B, you have this like liquidity problem if you're just dropping pins randomly in the world. And C, it didn't really feel like teleportation because the static photos by definition old by the time you see it.

• 1:41:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:29Speaker 06

  So that's, that's when we were like, let's flip this and make it, press a button, go live and, and rather than not using static photos, let's try making it live video. And so that was one key thing that we did. And then the second key thing that we did that really made Periscope click was the, the floating hearts. I don't know if you guys remember, but like,

• 1:41:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:48Speaker 06

  it was the first social network we had seen where you could have an infinite form of expression. It wasn't just like pressing a button to like it. It was sort of an infinite, infinite amount of love.

• 1:41:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:57Speaker 06

  And you know, we had this beta of 20 users, just like our friends, basically, and some, you know, family and investors. And when we, when we shipped that version of the, of the build that had live video with the floating hearts, it just, it just was so clear to us that there was something here. And one of the early beta users happened to work at corp dev at Twitter. She invited Jack and Dick, who was the CEO at the time. And that's sort of like, put us on the radar with Twitter. And so we actually ended up getting acquired before we launched the product. Like, there was no go to market motion that got us. And it was just like a beta of 30 people and Twitter was like the 31st user.

• 1:42:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. That team was crazy about the early acquisitions. I mean, Vine had launched, but they acquired Vine as well. They were very aggressive about picking stuff up early.

• 1:42:44Speaker 06

  Top tier picking companies, not top tier at landing the plane on the integration. That's my TLDR.

• 1:42:51John Coogan?

  Someone called it a clown car, but we're not gonna get into that.

• 1:42:55Speaker 06

  Someone you met with yesterday called it a clown car that fell into a golden mine.

• 1:42:58John Coogan?

  Gold mine, which is a great, a great quote. Anyway, I want to know, like, what do you think about live stream monetization? Like, we've, we have, we have ads running on a ticker. We've, we've, we've, we've brought through a bunch of like the TV era aesthetics. But then we also do just host read ads. We don't really, that I'm aware of, get a big share of like programmatic ads. We don't do, I know Twitch, you can do like, I'm going to an ad break and it will play programmatic ads. We haven't done that. We've heard a ton of stories about TikTok shop and the live streaming sales stuff. We've joked that we want to be like that for enterprise SaaS.

• 1:43:39Jordi Hays?

  Live commerce for macros. I got one license. I got one license.

• 1:43:42John Coogan?

  You got one license. Here, pick it up. All right.

• 1:43:44Jordi Hays?

  I got five seats left. Five seats left.

• 1:43:46John Coogan?

  Buy now. I got 25 credits over here. I got an SDR on the line.

• 1:43:52Speaker 06

  I think you guys are an interesting place where you can you can sort of benefit from all of these models, right? You can do the pre-roll, you can do the mid-roll. You've got obviously incredible brand placements from some of the best tech companies in the world. And then I think also you have a unique vibe going where you can benefit from a lot of the monetization techniques that like have been become popularized on, you know, Twitch and TikTok and, you know, even Periscope. Early on, we had this thing called Super Hearts, which was like people could pay for in-app purchases to, you know, fly Ferraris off the screen on the screen or whatever. And like, I think you have enough super fans that watch the show that there's like an end-user monetization component on, you know, in addition to what you're able to do with the big brands.

• 1:44:33Speaker 06

  I don't think there's many types of content that can benefit from all of those forms of monetization.

• 1:44:39Jordi Hays?

  Did you, uh, did you feel like you were at, at, at what point? Like now it feels like Periscope was like extremely early.

• 1:44:49Jordi Hays?

  Even though, even though like, like I think people anticipated live streaming would be big. But I feel like only in the last few years, people, at least the tech world's like woken up to how big live streaming is even outside, more, more so outside of tech, right?

• 1:45:01John Coogan?

  And on mobile too. I mean, that, that was one of the unique insights. Like there, there, there was, there was a, there was a host of companies that were really focused on solving like, I mean Flickr existed and then Instagram, it was huge. And then, uh, there were a whole bunch of video apps. Vine, one of them, like YouTube existed, but no one had cracked it on mobile. And it required actual deep insight into the user experience and also the engineering to understand how to get it to work on a phone, which wasn't as powerful as a laptop back then. But yeah.

• 1:45:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot of tech, there were a lot of technological problems to making mobile-based live streaming work well at the time. A lot of those problems are just solved now and, and somewhat commoditized. I mean, there's just like SDKs that let you do this really easily. I think my, my big takeaway, and you know, call me somewhat jaded on this. But I, I, I think what we learned the hard way is that a live-focused social network on mobile that's like short-form live video isn't tenable, right? And that's what Periscope was. It was live only. From like Instagram or Facebook Live at the time that was live was a feature amongst the social network that let you communicate and keep in touch with people asynchronously.

• 1:46:10Speaker 06

  And I think it took us longer to build async forms of connection than it did take Instagram and Facebook, building all of our features into their existing platforms. And so that was our sort of like hard lesson learned. Cause you know, we had a parallel track where we were trying to make Periscope integrate into Twitter. It was the whole thesis of the integration. And it just took us way too long for, for reasons that we can get into if you're interested, um, to, to make that integration come to life. And so as much as we, you know, we grew from zero to a hundred million users in like a year and a half is insane, but just everyone else built all the feature.

• 1:46:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:44Speaker 06

  Everyone else built all the features, um, you know, uh, quickly.

• 1:46:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what, what do you think about the lack of, uh, sorry, last question on Periscope, uh, just.

• 1:46:54Jordi Hays?

  I want to talk about.

• 1:46:55John Coogan?

  Periscopes, I know, but, uh, uh, lack of screen sharing API on mobile. I felt like, uh, during the clubhouse era, that was something that was sort of missing was, uh, like you go to Twitch. Yes, you're watching someone live stream, but a lot of the work is done by the video game that they're playing or the video that they're reacting to. And being able to put something else on the screen so that someone doesn't need to just stand there and do an eight hour stand up routine with no support for eight hours straight. That helps. And I felt like Apple kind of nerf that or never really, and maybe it was just a hardware thing. But, uh, what was your take on like, like how important that was? Am I misunderstanding that? And, and like, how, how, how would it have played out if it was easy to screen share?

• 1:47:41Speaker 06

  Um, I don't know the state of the current APIs, but I know at the time in this is probably like 2018, I want to say. We did a lot. We, we actually built a bunch of integrations that let you share your screen, including from mobile. I think the reality is it's such an edge case relative to what like the vast majority of the use case for our product was people just was people talking to people, right? It was like 98% was that type of broadcasting and 2% was what you guys are doing, which is like professional broadcast, whether it's from the NFL or TVP or anything in between. And so I just, I don't think that would have had a material impact for us as a use case. But I don't know if the, if, if Apple, if Apple did indeed nerf those APIs, that's news to me.

• 1:48:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I talked to a YC company once that was trying to do mobile Twitch, so you would screen share from the phone. Now, people do that with like, you take the video feed out of USB C, you write it through a PC. There are huge mobile gaming Twitch streamers, but they basically like are screen recording with a third-party device. It's very complicated. It's not something they can do on the go. Anyway, sorry, I want to move on. Jordy, what do you got?

• 1:48:47Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I want to continue that conversation.

• 1:48:50John Coogan?

  It's fascinating.

• 1:48:50Jordi Hays?

  Limited time. Let's, yeah, let's switch gears to Macroscope. What, give, give us the, I don't know, give us a hybrid investor slash customer pitch. I want kind of a bit of both, kind of long-term vision as well as like why somebody should sign up today.

• 1:49:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, totally. So I'll start with the like, the sort of customer-focused angle, because it's, it's I think what resonates the most with me. You know, we think of Macroscope as X-ray vision for your company. You know, we help you understand what's happening. How's the product changing? How's the codebase evolving? What's everyone working on? But just answered automatically and answered via the source of truth, which is the codebase. If, for any company that builds software, the source of truth is the codebase. If it's not in the codebase, it hasn't happened yet. And if it is in the codebase, we, you know, AI and state-of-the-art alums can do a really good job of articulating how things work, who did it, when it happened. And sort of our observation, having worked at many companies, both small startups that we've started and, you know, very large companies like Twitter,

• 1:49:49Speaker 06

  is it's actually extremely hard to answer these basic questions, like the classic, what did you get done this week, which is ironically Very relevant to Twitter's history is something that every leader thinks about constantly. Like so much of my job as the head of product at Twitter was literally just understanding what the fuck people were working on.

• 1:50:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:06Speaker 06

  Um, and usually it's like the state of the art solution to this problem is meetings, issue management systems, spreadsheet trackers, just bugging engineers and asking them and sort of multiply that out by an organization that's hundreds, if not thousands of engineers. There's a lot of human capital waste that goes into this problem. Um, and so our thesis is that this is silly, like in a world of L L M's, um, you know, there's a lot of amazing AI tools, tools built for engineers, not a lot of great AI tools built for leaders. Um, and so that's what MacroScope is trying to do. It's trying to be an, be an, an, an understanding engine for your company that simultaneously gives leaders clarity while saving time for engineers, right? It's sort of this interesting hybrid where we're solving problems that are paper cuts that engineers, you know,

• 1:50:50Speaker 06

  feel 50 times a day, whether it's automating their PR descriptions, doing AI code review, avoiding them having to go to status updates or write status updates, which like there's nothing an engineer hates more than, you know, getting distracted from building something and instead reporting status through some game of telephone. Um, and so we are simultaneously helping the leadership team get automated visibility while saving engineers a bunch of time. And we think that like, I mean, we're obviously biased, but like there's just no way, every company in, in five years, like every company is going to have a tool like this, whether it's MacroScope or some other tool. It is just complete insanity to imagine that we are doing this the old fashioned way.

• 1:51:27Jordi Hays?

  So. So when, when did you actually start the company? Cause you announced around yesterday with Lightspeed, our friend Michael, but uh, imagine and you've been at it for a while.

• 1:51:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, we started the company in July of 2023, raised a seed round from um, uh, our mutual friends at Thrive Capital and Adverb and GV and some amazing angels. Nice. Uh, and then, and then, yeah.

• 1:51:51Jordi Hays?

  And so just to, but, but to go back at that point in time, at that point, the, the, the, the AGI pilled folks were saying, AGI by 2025, SaaS is not going to matter, fast take off. So did you always, did you never lose faith in enterprise SaaS? It feels, feels like you had, you had conviction that this type of thing was going to be important for a long time.

• 1:52:18Speaker 06

  I think there's a lot of dramatization that goes into like the shifting of the, you know, landscape and they make for great headlines and all that. I actually think that as every engineer gets turbocharged by AI and as like coding agents completely revolutionize how software gets written, I think this problem, the problem that Macroscope is solving only becomes more important, right? Like if companies are writing 10x more code and humans are writing less of it and humans are reviewing less of it, then it becomes even more challenging to understand what's happening. And ultimately, like, humans are still accountable for the outputs of what a company is shipping and building. And so I think having this AI air traffic control system and understanding engine for what's happening in your company becomes even more imperative.

• 1:53:04Jordi Hays?

  So the company is built, like, assuming that agents will get better and better and better, and that humans will just stay at this, like, more and more at this global level of just kind of witnessing, okay, what are all my, what is my whole team doing? What's this player doing? It doesn't really matter if they're a person or an agent?

• 1:53:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, today, it's like 95% of the use cases are what are my humans building assisted with AI. And tomorrow, five years from now, it might be, you know, 90% of it might be, what have all my agents produced? And maybe 10% of that is like, what have humans produced? But I think the problem that's being solved is still fundamentally the same, which is what changed? What impact did it have? And, you know, and where do we go from here? Like, that's a never-ending thing that is the highest leverage thing a leader, whether you're an engineering leader or a product leader or a CEO, like, those questions are always on your mind.

• 1:53:58John Coogan?

  How do you think about the level of integration to the systems that you want to pull data for? Like, I could imagine, like, a Slack bot that talks to every, effectively acts as a middle manager, literally asking people, what did you do this week? And then they write their little status update and that gets rolled up and then that can be queried. I could also imagine something like, you know, a screen recorder, super integrated into everything the employee is doing. And you can query, did my employee do send this email? You have full transparency. And then a wide swath of trade-offs in between for the level of abstraction and integration you want into the systems.

• 1:54:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, the first thing I'll say is like, we're not, we're not big fans of the, there's a surveillance state. Panopticon. Yeah, we're not fans of that angle. And like, the last thing we want to build is a spy tool. So we don't, we don't imagine, you know, doing screen reporting or anything like that. Yeah. But I do think having sort of extensive integrations with the stack that a company uses to build and manage their product is really important. Like today, we've started with a few systems. We integrate with GitHub. GitHub. We integrate with your issue management system. So when I've used your linear, we integrate with Slack. Yep. And we think that those are the critical starting points, but it's just the beginning because, you know, the code base can tell you what you did and how it works. Like, how does our billing system work? Yep.

• 1:55:17Speaker 06

  The code base can answer that question. It can't tell you why you did something. Like, what customer problem were we solving with this feature is not in the code base, but it's probably in a Google Doc or a Notion. It might be in a linear ticket. Yeah. Likewise, like, who can see this feature is not necessarily in the code base, right? You might have a launch darkly fat flag or a static flag that tells you, oh, this is available to 1% of users in Japan. But like, the code base can be the glue that then stitches into all these other systems. And we're building Macroscope in a way that allows it to be a conversational interface to all those questions and answers. Like, today, we have a Slack bot that lets you ask a question, like the one I asked, like, have we launched this feature? If so, who can see it? And we imagine over time, building all these other integrations that let you essentially get more insight into what's happening and how things work.

• 1:56:03Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how are you kind of setting goals with the team and forecasting with Periscope? You built like a viral consumer app. And so, and today, even in developer tools, like, there's this intense, like, you know, a lot of companies are growing ridiculously fast, pretty unprecedented for, for B2B products. And so there's this intense pressure to like, you know, show massive traction and adoption quickly, but Macroscope feels like a pretty complicated product that you're still going to need to be like iterating around and figuring out where

• 1:56:41Jordi Hays?

  different types of companies are getting value. So how do, how do you, how do you kind of like set, set goals with the team and what does success look like over the next 12 months?

• 1:56:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. It's obviously early days for us. If you really sort of simplify our product down into two components right now, there's really two pieces. We have a code review feature, which is relatively speaking, it's a more mature space. We are not the first code review tool, but code review is an enormously important problem for companies to solve. And I think that the sort of like heuristics around whether our product is working well for them are much easier to quantify, right? Like, we released a benchmark as part of our launch yesterday, which sort of is one indicator of what we use to evaluate whether our code review tool is working, like, what percentage of bugs can we detect in a customer's pull request? And so like, we think about goals very differently for a product area

• 1:57:36Speaker 06

  like that, where we can measure ourselves very, in a very quantifiable way relative to competitors. Then we do the other part of our product, which we sort of refer to as status, like, we help you understand the status of anything happening in your product development process. That's way more greenfield, right? Like, it's, we're not aware of really any other products, like technological solutions to that problem. And so both our roadmap and how we think about goals for that part of the business is a little bit more greenfield. We're just sort of excited to push the envelope on where this goes and how we can solve bigger and bigger problems for customers.

• 1:58:09John Coogan?

  Talk to me about where the budget is coming to buy MacroScope. It feels like with even zooming out broader to just the AI-enabled SaaS market, there's, there's a lot of products that don't neatly fit in with, okay, I'm going to rip out this and replace. It's a lot of adding something on top. We're seeing a lot of like the SaaS apocalypse, the seat-based models going away, but it feels like it would be hard to quantify this with like value-based pricing. Like, how are you thinking about justifying a budget internally if you're dealing with a larger customer who's trying to kind of underwrite the value that MacroScope brings relative to the cost?

• 1:58:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, so our buyer is, I would say, half the time it's the engineering leader. So this would be like a CTO or head of engineering and the other half of the time is the CEO. And, you know, I think, I think from a, from a value standpoint, like if you're an engineering leader, you want your team spending as little time reviewing code and as little time dealing with production issues as a result of shipping bugs into production as possible. And so like the value of even catching one production incident from an AI code review tool, I think is intuitively very easy to understand. Like, we don't, we don't see customers asking the question of, is a code review tool valuable? What they want to know is like, why is this tool better than all the competition?

• 1:59:34Speaker 06

  So I think, you know, and that's just going to become, that's going to be more and more true over time, just given what's happening in the AI coding landscape. I think for the other aspect of our product, which is the sort of understanding layer, it is, you know, relatively speaking, it's, it's, it's greenfield, right? There is no product solutions that are ripping out with ours. And so what we've seen resonate with, with our customers is you can, you have an intuitive feel for how much time your team is spending in meetings and dealing with all the bullshit work around the work. And so I think the, the value proposition really is, do I, do I buy that this tool is going to help my team focus more on building and less on doing that work around the work? And is that, is that worth the, you know, the price of entry? Which from our standpoint, like again, the, the questions that our customers are asking

• 2:00:19Speaker 06

  is not like, is this valuable? The question is, does it work the way you say it does?

• 2:00:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:24Speaker 06

  And obviously that's where we have to do our job well. But I think anyone who's worked at a big company and has, you know, invested in solving this problem the old fashioned way, knows that it's like the worst part of working at big companies and they would gladly pay any amount of money to solve the problem if it actually works.

• 2:00:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about generative UI? Or actually like, I could imagine some people want a text result of they want to chat and ask, you know, how are things going? Someone in the chat said, uh, this is more of a progress bar. And I could imagine someone wants to see a dashboard, a progress bar, stats. Like, do you think in the future you'll be able to like instantiate exactly what the particular manager wants to see kind of like a dashboard of what's going on in the organization?

• 2:01:09Speaker 06

  I think there's lots of interesting vectors here. One is just oftentimes we're describing in words how a product is changing and there's nothing more powerful than just showing how the product is changing. Right? So whether that's like integrating with Figma and showing you the intended mockup that just got shipped, or whether it's actually running the code. Like a lot of time, like think about what an engineer does when they ship a feature. They ship the feature, they go into Slack and they literally record their local branch and like a mockup of the product and they post it in Slack and say, hey, I just shipped this thing, it merged into staging. We should just automate that, right? We should literally automatically run the product and show you the thing that just got shipped and save the engineer the time from having to do all that. So that's like one angle that this can take.

• 2:01:50Speaker 06

  And the other is sort of what you were saying, which is kind of like in the appropriate time, generating dashboards or some other visual manifestation of some status update. I think all of these things are possible. We have to sort of pick our punches in terms of where we start. But, but yeah, humble beginnings.

• 2:02:09John Coogan?

  Well, thanks so much for coming on the show. Let's come back on again anytime. Yeah, I love Silicon Valley lore and I'm very excited about what you're building. Congratulations.

• 2:02:19Speaker 06

  Thanks for having me, guys.

• 2:02:20John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. See you. Public.com, investing for those that take you seriously. I already told you about public, so I'm going to tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. I timed the double call button perfectly. You did. Say goodbye to the headaches of ad of home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, ad of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. We have our next guest in the Restream waiting room, Mukund from Emergent AI. How you doing?

• 2:02:47Speaker 07

  Hey, I'm doing good. How are you guys?

• 2:02:48John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. How you doing? What's happening?

• 2:02:51Speaker 07

  Super excited to be here.

• 2:02:53John Coogan?

  What's going on today?

• 2:02:55Speaker 07

  We actually launched a product three months back and one of our goals was to be on TBP and so I'm super. Yes, I love the show.

• 2:03:03John Coogan?

  Thanks so much. Break it down for us. What are you building?

• 2:03:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I'm Akun. At Emergent, we are building world's most advanced vibe coding platform for consumers, for non-technical users. They can come in, prompt an idea, and get a fully-built live app that they can take to production. And we launched a few months back. Over a million users have tried the platform. More than a million and a half apps have been built so far. We're growing pretty crazily right now.

• 2:03:26John Coogan?

  How do you think about sub, like beachhead markets and like sub-markets? There are platforms that focus on get an iOS app in test flight, build a game, vibe code, a website. Like, are the people that are signing up saying, "I'm gonna start a business. I'm gonna build an app that will be the foundation of like, you know, some monetary thing?" Or is it, you know, are we in the era of like vibe coding apps as memes, somewhere in between? Are you still exploring? What do you think?

• 2:03:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I mean, we are the only platform that supports web app, mobile app, and backend all integrated in one. And we have consumers coming from all parts of life. We have business owners trying to digitize their business. We have entrepreneurs building their startup on Emergent right now. A lot of people are building apps that are monetizable right now, and they are shipping them. And so it's a crazy spectrum of ideas on the platform right now.

• 2:04:21John Coogan?

  It's amazing. A million users is a lot. Like, what's the acquisition funnel? Like, how do you actually get people? It's a buzzy space. It's a cool tech, but I imagine it's hard to get people to go to your specific website. Like, what's working?

• 2:04:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I think people really, really love our product. I think that's what's sort of working really well for us. A lot of the acquisition is word of mouth today for us. The people are referring each other on the platform. As they get successful app, they refer each other. We also do a bunch of influencer marketing. So we use TikTok, Instagram, X to promote our brand. And we partner with influencers, and they are able to sort of create stories which resonates with their audience. That's something that is working really well for us as well.

• 2:05:02John Coogan?

  That seems to be working really well these days. I feel like there's this interesting flywheel where Maybe for the first time, we're seeing influencers drive software adoption, software downloads. I mean, we've all seen like VPN ads, but we're in a new age where people are pushing like

• 2:05:17Jordi Hays?

  What is, what, how, what, what's good retention in your view? Cause obviously a bunch of people are going to come in, create stuff and then, but you know, 12 months from now, how many of these people, what does success look like in terms of

• 2:05:31John Coogan?

  So now I'm a, now I'm a real business.

• 2:05:33Jordi Hays?

  I think you can have a relative, I think, I think the beauty of these things is somebody can come in in 20, 30 minutes, an hour, they can create something very cool.

• 2:05:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05:41Jordi Hays?

  You don't need to retain all of them. You don't even need to retain the majority of them, but how, how are you thinking and kind of planning around that?

• 2:05:48Speaker 07

  Yeah. So we, we have a good retention on the platform. With month three, like roughly 40, 50% of users are still on the platform. We have a very strong power user behavior where top 10% of users are spending a lot more money on the platform, who are building serious apps, they're taking them to production and there our retention is north of like 80% right now. So, so we think it's still early days, but I think what's going to happen is like a lot of people are going to come on the platform, a lot of, because we also take care of deployment. We host these apps on our platform. They're going to stay with us on, on the platform. And what's also happening is as they build more, they, they want to add more feature, as they get more feedback from their users, they come back to build more on the platform. Still sort of early sort of days, but, but we think that, you know, like you can build a pretty large business around these power users

• 2:06:30Speaker 07

  who are trying to launch their app, launch a new business or a new idea to the world.

• 2:06:35John Coogan?

  What do you think for business model? Consumption based? Do you want to get people to spin up an app, subscribe? And then you're acting as their hosting provider long-term. A lot of people build websites and then they're happy with them and they don't actually have a lot of feature requests. We've seen Squarespace and a bunch of other companies, you know, they're, they're not, they're templated based, but they, they wind up being great businesses because people are happy to continue managing on WordPress or Squarespace. What, what, what business model makes sense in the, in the vibe coding AI era?

• 2:07:06Speaker 07

  Yeah. So for us, like almost, most of our apps are actually like full stack web apps, which has backend databases on some mobile apps. So what we are seeing, you know, is a lot of users coming and adding, adding features to them and building them. I think in a steady state, like a lot of these users, you'll have a power law where like, you know, top, top X percent of users are going to deploy big apps, have big out success on the platform and those are going to be continuing to be on the platform and the business is going to get built around those people.

• 2:07:35Jordi Hays?

  Do you expect enterprise vibe coding or consumer prosumer vibe coding to be more competitive in the long run? And do you think that companies should try to do both or pick a lane?

• 2:07:47Speaker 07

  I mean, we are very focused on consumer. We think these are two separate markets, require separate, separate sort of personal. For example, like a lot of our users, they call GitHub, GitHub, right? So we have to really, you know, like think, think through like who we are catering to. We have a lot of education baked into the product, which tells them what is API, like, you know, how to sort of, you know, look through errors and things like that. So I think these are two different sort of swim lanes. And of course, there's an intersection in the middle where like small teams use us as well. But, but largely like, like we are very focused on consumer market right now.

• 2:08:18John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 2:08:18Jordi Hays?

  That's refreshing to hear because we've had a number of, of other platforms on the, on the platform. And they always say, oh yeah, we're, we're doing consumer, but we're really like, you know, a lot of, you know, basically not, not really admitting that they're two separate markets.

• 2:08:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:34Jordi Hays?

  My feeling.

• 2:08:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a lot of growth masking, like a lack of actually understanding what the product will be when it's mature.

• 2:08:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what the long-term market looks like.

• 2:08:42John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:08:43Speaker 07

  Yeah. I mean, when we started, we, we, we thought like, I mean, a relation that we had that like a billion people have ideas in their head, like, you know, how do we sort of bring that out? How do we sort of help them launch? And we think it's going to usher a new sort of economy. And we just want to, you know, be part of that.

• 2:08:57John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations. Thanks for

• 2:08:58Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you on.

• 2:08:59John Coogan?

  coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:09:01Jordi Hays?

  Keep us posted on progress.

• 2:09:02John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:09:03Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:09:04John Coogan?

  Vittorio has a post here. It's happening. For the first time in history, AI designed a complete genome, and it has been proven functional in the lab. Many of the most complex

• 2:09:16Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:09:16John Coogan?

  Samuel King. Yes, this is going to get a lot of people going. Many of the most complex and useful functions in biology emerge at the scale of whole genomes today. Samuel King is presenting the pre-print generative design of novel bacteriophages with genome language models where they validate, validate the first functional AI-generated genome. Fascinating.

• 2:09:36Jordi Hays?

  In other news, Dylan Field

• 2:09:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:09:39Jordi Hays?

  shared a leaderboard of ranking a bunch of different vibe coding tools. Figma Make came in second place, number one in our hearts.

• 2:09:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:09:51Jordi Hays?

  But also featuring lovable at three, bolt at five.

• 2:09:57Jordi Hays?

  Base 44 at 8 and V0 and Replit, of course.

• 2:10:01John Coogan?

  This is so interesting. I didn't know that you could do rankings here, but I guess they did blinded pairwise matches. So I guess they're human judged as an eval. They sent them out to lots of people.

• 2:10:16Jordi Hays?

  Give it the same prompts or something like that?

• 2:10:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it's like, how much do you... Yeah, so various prompts and then show two results to...

• 2:10:25Speaker 03

  Yep. This is just like how LM Arena works.

• 2:10:27John Coogan?

  It's LM Arena for vibe-coded websites.

• 2:10:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:10:31John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, congrats to Dylan Field over at Figma. Rune has a great post here talking about the Anthropic mea culpa. Shulto posted, "We're sorry and we'll do better. We're working hard on making sure we never miss these kinds of regressions and building trust with you." And Rune says, "Shulto has a Japanese sense of honor to his customers." I love it.

• 2:10:55Speaker 03

  Love it.

• 2:10:56John Coogan?

  Such a funny...

• 2:10:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the comments...

• 2:10:58John Coogan?

  You were saying that people were really, really upset about Anthropic. And it's interesting because Anthropic's got...

• 2:11:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was hard to suss out. Was it like extreme power users or was the average user actually mad?

• 2:11:08John Coogan?

  What was your take, Tyler?

• 2:11:10Speaker 03

  I think it was definitely like power users, like API.

• 2:11:14John Coogan?

  So if you like kind of built a business on top of Anthropic and then there's regression and you have downtime.

• 2:11:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's just like kind of unreliable.

• 2:11:21John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:11:22Speaker 03

  Sometimes it's like really slow. Sometimes responses are just like...

• 2:11:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, and they did not say that this was like they ran out of GPU capacity, something like that, right?

• 2:11:32Speaker 03

  Um...

• 2:11:33John Coogan?

  This was more in like they shipped a new version and it resulted in downtime, right? So it was very much like not on the capex side of the business. It was more on the actual like development that they did.

• 2:11:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so. I mean, they made it very clear like, "We will not degrade performance of the model just to serve more people." So I think there might have been some aspect of there being like not, like just not enough GPUs.

• 2:12:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's certainly been like demand's been skyrocketing. Brown Paper Bag in the chat says, "Claude Code's subs are mad."

• 2:12:09Jordi Hays?

  Big mad.

• 2:12:10John Coogan?

  Uh, big, big mad. Well, you know what's not down? Wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy guys, top-tier cleaning, and 24% concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better.

• 2:12:24John Coogan?

  Also, in other news, LimeWire has acquired the Fire Festival brand for $245,000. And liquidity said, "My phone got a virus from reading this tweet." That is, I have no idea what's going on here. We need to do a deep dive on LimeWire. We need to get the red string out and figure out if we're, like, what is LimeWire still doing? What is their business? Why are they acquiring the Fire Festival brand? What are they gonna do with that? I feel like there's something to be done with the Fire Festival brand. Like, Fire Festival is a big enough brand, there's been a documentary at this point, people know it, that like, if you were able to buy the brand for 245K, you could potentially do a marketing stunt with it that would generate half a million dollars in value, maybe?

• 2:13:09John Coogan?

  But it does seem like it's gotta be really, really inspired because-

• 2:13:12Jordi Hays?

  Fire Festival, the tech conference.

• 2:13:15John Coogan?

  The brand is pretty bad. The brand is associated with-

• 2:13:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's one of those things, like, if you're gonna put all the effort into getting, into creating a real-world event that's not embarrassing, why not just kind of create a new brand that-

• 2:13:29John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:13:30Jordi Hays?

  That's not, uh-

• 2:13:32John Coogan?

  I don't know, maybe, I mean, you could-

• 2:13:34Jordi Hays?

  It's attention-getting.

• 2:13:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:35Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, the, I mean, this had been on the market for a while. It was like-

• 2:13:40John Coogan?

  Wait, the brand?

• 2:13:41Jordi Hays?

  Fire Festival.

• 2:13:42John Coogan?

  Oh, I had no idea. It was on the market.

• 2:13:44Jordi Hays?

  Billy McFarlane-

• 2:13:44John Coogan?

  Did you, did you go to Fire Festival, Tyler?

• 2:13:47Speaker 03

  I did not. But I think the main, like, whenever I see stuff like this-

• 2:13:50Jordi Hays?

  He was too poor and then he was too rich.

• 2:13:54Speaker 03

  But I think you could see some kind of, like, Enron thing where it's like-

• 2:13:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:59Speaker 03

  It's a marketing thing and then it's-

• 2:14:00John Coogan?

  A coin.

• 2:14:00Speaker 03

  crypto.

• 2:14:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:14:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:14:02John Coogan?

  Oh, be careful out there. Watch out for Fire Festival coin. How is Enron doing?

• 2:14:07Jordi Hays?

  The meme coin?

• 2:14:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, the meme, it was meme coin. It was a publicity stunt. Taylor Lorenz did some crossover video production with them. The team behind it seemed like genuinely great, like, comedian videographers, but then it took a really odd turn, as things always do when they turn into meme coins. And it was a funny bit for a little bit. It was a funny idea, you know? Leaning into Enron, certainly fertile ground for jokes. Everyone's familiar with Enron. I saw people having like buying old Enron merch like years before this like brand revitalization. You could see them doing something funny with Fire Festival. Or you or you could honestly see the value of that brand just being like producing more content about

• 2:14:52John Coogan?

  the failure of Fire Festival, like instantiating that. Like, there's been a documentary, but maybe you buy the brand, you get the rights to do more with it. And so you can you can monetize that way and not and and actually lean into the fact that it's a it has a it has a lot of baggage. It's like a negative. It's a negative association.

• 2:15:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you you would have hoped they could have done something more with this this iconic brand.

• 2:15:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Did you see this comparison of the thickness of recent iPhone cameras next to each other? We are really in the bulky iPhone era. The iPhone five completely flat, no bump. The iPhone six gets.

• 2:15:27Jordi Hays?

  Bulking season.

• 2:15:28John Coogan?

  The iPhone six, they called they they said it was a camera bump or something. And we didn't know what we were in store for. This is a well, now it's called the plateau. That's the official term.

• 2:15:40Jordi Hays?

  The plateau.

• 2:15:40John Coogan?

  I don't think Apple comms wants you to call it a bump.

• 2:15:43Jordi Hays?

  I just ordered. I just.

• 2:15:45John Coogan?

  You ordered it.

• 2:15:45Jordi Hays?

  I just ordered.

• 2:15:46John Coogan?

  What color?

• 2:15:46Jordi Hays?

  Pro. I I just got the silver.

• 2:15:48John Coogan?

  You got the silver.

• 2:15:49Jordi Hays?

  I I think I think that the orange.

• 2:15:52John Coogan?

  If it was in ramp yellow, it would have been done deal.

• 2:15:54Jordi Hays?

  Done deal.

• 2:15:55John Coogan?

  Orange is a lot.

• 2:15:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I kind of liked the orange less and less as time went on.

• 2:16:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:00Jordi Hays?

  Unfortunately, I ordered it late. Now I have to wait till like mid October.

• 2:16:04John Coogan?

  Oh, they're they're selling out. That's bullish for Apple.

• 2:16:08Jordi Hays?

  Bull.

• 2:16:08John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 2:16:09Jordi Hays?

  Like, we like it for the stock.

• 2:16:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that seems good. What about you, Tyler? You itching for one or are you satisfied?

• 2:16:14Jordi Hays?

  He just got a new.

• 2:16:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just got a new phone.

• 2:16:16John Coogan?

  So you're happy?

• 2:16:17Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I was at I was I had an eleven before. So this is.

• 2:16:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, you jump forward in the future like seven years.

• 2:16:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:23John Coogan?

  That was great. Seventeen Pro looks pretty good. Did you see the the latest on the OpenAI brand exploration?

• 2:16:30Jordi Hays?

  This isn't the latest. This is from February of twenty twenty three.

• 2:16:33John Coogan?

  That's a decade ago in AI terms.

• 2:16:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I like.

• 2:16:36John Coogan?

  Area. I've never heard of this firm before, but really, really cool work.

• 2:16:40Jordi Hays?

  John Palmer's.

• 2:16:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:41Jordi Hays?

  Firm.

• 2:16:42John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:16:43Jordi Hays?

  He had a has has a crypto company.

• 2:16:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:16:46Jordi Hays?

  Backed by.

• 2:16:47John Coogan?

  So. Area says, brand exploration for OpenAI with Sam Altman, February twenty twenty three. Two logo concepts, a circle and a monogram alongside broader exploration for ChatGPT across brand and product. And. This just like threw me back to the 90s. Like, it's just remarkable. It feels like old Microsoft, old Apple, old Mac. I kind of get why they didn't go this direction, but like, sort of beautifully nostalgic. And Sam Altman commented on it. He said, "Fun to look back at this exploration with Aria on the OpenAI brand. This work partially inspired the circle that we use and love in our products.

• 2:17:27John Coogan?

  The serif OpenAI font just feels like a boxed piece of software. This feels like, throw this logo on it, sell it at Best Buy. One ChatGPT, please. I'll take version five and I'm good for the next two years. They got a CD key in there. Lock it in. But the OAI logo on the right there, on the top right, is wild. This is like, it's a very loud design.

• 2:17:55Jordi Hays?

  I think they should re-release these as like merch for the team.

• 2:17:59John Coogan?

  That'd be great. Yeah. Yeah, it's a little like of like, yeah, it's just so retro, in my opinion.

• 2:18:06Jordi Hays?

  You see this post from Kaz over at Open Door.

• 2:18:08John Coogan?

  Kaz cooking.

• 2:18:09Jordi Hays?

  This morning, we filed an 8K to say that my and Open Door's X accounts would be used to talk with our investors. We've also parted ways with our former external PR agencies. When we want to talk, you will hear from us, not paid professionals who don't share our mission.

• 2:18:24John Coogan?

  I didn't realize that you had to actually disclose that in the 8K that you're planning to post. Should be God-given right. But yeah, Kaz is on a tear. I'm excited to hear more from him and his plan.

• 2:18:36Jordi Hays?

  The top comment, "You're a god." He says, "I'm not. There's only one god. I'm just praying very hard that he gives me the power and the perseverance so I can fulfill his will."

• 2:18:45John Coogan?

  Let's go, Kaz. Good job.

• 2:18:47Jordi Hays?

  Rallying retail. Did you have an, did you see this?

• 2:18:52John Coogan?

  What else?

• 2:18:52Jordi Hays?

  This movie coming down the line.

• 2:18:54John Coogan?

  Oh, I haven't seen the movie. I saw the news that it broke. Jackson Dahl said, "Ladies and gentlemen, we have what seems to be an absolute banger on our hands. The movie is called One Battle After Another. It stars Leonardo DiCaprio. It's in theaters September 26." That's what I was thinking. It's in IMAX, so.

• 2:19:15Jordi Hays?

  Get the tuxes ready, boys.

• 2:19:16John Coogan?

  Little task for the team, guys. Figure out when we can all go see this movie together in IMAX. Get the tickets today. Get us.

• 2:19:24Jordi Hays?

  Without further ado, we have our next.

• 2:19:26John Coogan?

  We have our next guest in the restream waiting.

• 2:19:28Jordi Hays?

  Got carried away.

• 2:19:30John Coogan?

  To the. VPN.

• 2:19:33Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to keep you waiting, Noah.

• 2:19:34John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream, Noah. How are you doing?

• 2:19:36Jordi Hays?

  Lost.

• 2:19:37John Coogan?

  We got lost in the timeline.

• 2:19:38Speaker 08

  Good.

• 2:19:39John Coogan?

  Uh, are you going to the Google event today? Break it down for us.

• 2:19:44Speaker 08

  Oh, not right now. I got busy with work, but.

• 2:19:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:19:46Speaker 08

  I'll be at a dinner tonight.

• 2:19:48John Coogan?

  Oh, fantastic. Fantastic.

• 2:19:49Jordi Hays?

  Too locked in.

• 2:19:50John Coogan?

  Locked in. Well, what, what, what are you locked in on? What are you building?

• 2:19:54Speaker 08

  Um, so software, we're building computer use agents.

• 2:19:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:19:58Speaker 08

  So we're training foundation models on how to use a computer like a human.

• 2:20:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:02Speaker 08

  To really automate any type of work.

• 2:20:06John Coogan?

  What's, uh, what's the secret sauce? How do you differentiate? It's a, it's a, it's a complicated industry.

• 2:20:11Jordi Hays?

  You train the model and then you say, hit the keys in the right order to make me a hundred million dollars. Don't make mistakes.

• 2:20:16John Coogan?

  Don't make mistakes.

• 2:20:18Speaker 08

  Yeah, exactly. We don't allow it to make mistakes.

• 2:20:21John Coogan?

  That's the secret.

• 2:20:22Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's big consequences.

• 2:20:24John Coogan?

  Uh, but I mean, right now is, is the, is the barrier to computer use to scale? Is it algorithms? Is it data? Like, what are the key inputs to getting good results?

• 2:20:35Speaker 08

  Um, it's really a mix from what we've seen. A lot of these things kind of combined, but a big, uh, part of it is actually the data. There's not a lot of like really good data to use.

• 2:20:47John Coogan?

  Where do you get more data? Who are you going to call?

• 2:20:50Speaker 08

  Well, I think a lot of it can be synthetically generated. Like we, we worked on these pipelines back in April for our first model release where, uh, like pretty much our entire data set was just synthetically generated.

• 2:21:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:02Speaker 08

  And then I think like, obviously you have things like you can label your own data. Um, you can collect it or you can get it from products. So you need to use a combination of everything.

• 2:21:12John Coogan?

  Computer use is so broad. I mean, it can mean everything from like, you know, ordering DoorDash to playing a video game. What's the low hanging fruit? Like what, what, what is the next step that, you know, feels solvable in like the 12 to 18 month time horizon?

• 2:21:29Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think the first few tasks that you really need to solve are these monotonous type of tasks, which are like pretty easy for a human to do, like cleaning up your email inbox, to like scheduling your calendar.

• 2:21:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:21:42Speaker 08

  Um, to finding all of your receipts in your email. Like things that are very low level, which like cognitively, it's not like super advanced.

• 2:21:50John Coogan?

  Why do you need a, why do you need a computer use agent for that? I feel like, uh, email, calendar, these products have existed for decades. They have APIs, like they can be interacted with via JSON.

• 2:22:02Speaker 08

  Yeah, there's actually a lot of like software out there, which like either has really bad APIs or things or, uh, different types of products where you need to use computer use to really interact with it efficiently. Uh, usually because they might just have broken APIs straight up.

• 2:22:16John Coogan?

  So do you expect in the future, people will be like, uh, oh, off thing into their email on a virtual machine and then letting you hang on to the, the, the cookie or the login in, in some VM for like a long period of time? Because it feels like, uh, Apple's not going to let an AI agent run on my app. And that's how I use email mostly.

• 2:22:40Speaker 08

  You know, I think like, um, I think what we're going to see is like, uh, we're going to see a mix between like the current LLM paradigm, where it's like you use things like structured outputs, you use APIs together with computer use. And like in the future, I think like you're going to, like models are going to jump between both and they're going to do like really efficiently. So it will just kind of depend on what the input is.

• 2:23:06John Coogan?

  How do you think about, uh, your place in the stack? Do you want to partner with Google? I know you're, you're talking to them is, is, uh, is the goal to build applications on top or, or stay as this like point solution, work with foundation model companies? Like how, how do you see your customers developing over time?

• 2:23:27Speaker 08

  Um, the way I view it is that like computer use is still very new.

• 2:23:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:32Speaker 08

  So there hasn't been like any product that has really taken off in the space like there was chat GPT operator.

• 2:23:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:23:38Speaker 08

  There was a cloud computer use, but like none of these have really taken off like immensely like just normal chat GPT. And I think like initially it's going to just be that you provide an API to a very good computer use model, which you sell to enterprises, you sell to startups that are working on in different industries really across with different customers and different vendors. And then eventually like what we're looking at is like if this can somehow transition into a more consumer facing product as well.

• 2:24:07John Coogan?

  Well, it sounds like the dinner tonight will be a steak dinner, a sales dinner. Hopefully you can get some customers. Thank you for stopping by.

• 2:24:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thanks.

• 2:24:15John Coogan?

  We'll let you get back to your busy day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:24:17Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:24:18John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Did you see the Arizona Iced Tea account posted legendary link up Arizona founder? And the Costco CEO and then it just inflation what? Because Arizona is always 99 cents and then the Costco hot dog is always 99 cents. Look at these two. The founder of Arizona is still cooking too and the Costco CEO, they're just boys.

• 2:24:42Jordi Hays?

  Inflation literally doesn't exist.

• 2:24:44John Coogan?

  It doesn't. It's fake.

• 2:24:45Jordi Hays?

  It's made up.

• 2:24:46John Coogan?

  It's in the computer.

• 2:24:47Jordi Hays?

  You're making it up.

• 2:24:48John Coogan?

  You can just not print a sign that says the hot dog costs more.

• 2:24:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:52John Coogan?

  And it will stay the same, the same cost.

• 2:24:54Jordi Hays?

  Just hard code the pricing into the, into the register.

• 2:24:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, look at this Costco, Dawn, Dawn and who, and Rob, Dawn and Rob. Dream guests. If you know them, introduce us. We want to have them on the show.

• 2:25:10Jordi Hays?

  Had you ever seen this picture before Tracy Alloway?

• 2:25:13John Coogan?

  This is iconic. I had no idea this existed.

• 2:25:15Jordi Hays?

  Financial crisis, crisis most iconic picture.

• 2:25:19John Coogan?

  This is a fantastically iconic picture.

• 2:25:21Jordi Hays?

  Is she like? Like, like, uh, like.

• 2:25:24John Coogan?

  Hamming it up a little bit. I think a little bit. I mean, it's not like she lost.

• 2:25:28Jordi Hays?

  But the chart, everything's looking red.

• 2:25:30John Coogan?

  If anything, you know, crises are, are, are pretty good when you're in the news business, but we love to see Tracy in an iconic photo. What a fantastic, what a fantastic insight with the Dell computer, rocking the Dell.

• 2:25:45Jordi Hays?

  She was in the trenches.

• 2:25:47John Coogan?

  And the stapler, got the papers. And it's unclear what, she's looking at some sort of Bloomberg terminal, but it's just all red, but I have no idea. It doesn't look like a stock chart that's red. It just looks like a lot of red cells in a spreadsheet or something. I have no idea. We'll have to ask her what she was actually looking at and, and how real this was. I mean, it was a stressful time for everyone, even if you're in, even if you're in media and you have more to report on as the financial crisis is unfolding. Like, I remember reading the Wall Street Journal every day during the global financial crisis, trying to understand what was going on. And like, the, the, there was no, there was no, there was no lack of news. There was tons of interesting things happening as people understood what was going on at Bear Stearns, what was going on at Lehman Brothers. Like, these are storied institutions that are collapsing. You want to hear about what was, what were the decisions made by the board members? Who was, who was involved?

• 2:26:31John Coogan?

  Like, what was the plan for the bailout? What's the government's response? Um, but it's still stressful, no matter what job you're in. But what an iconic picture. What do we have next? Ryan Peterson is in Arena Mag. You gotta go subscribe to Arena Mag.

• 2:26:46Jordi Hays?

  Iconic. I first saw this, I thought I was looking at the cover of GQ.

• 2:26:48John Coogan?

  It looks fantastic.

• 2:26:49Jordi Hays?

  Looking at the cover.

• 2:26:51John Coogan?

  Max Meyer stepped in to write Ryan's World's Flexport CEO, Ryan Peterson, on the craziest year for global trade. Uh, with trade chaos and the rush for companies to implement AI, there are few executives in higher demand than Ryan Peterson. Flexport builds technology for logistics freight forward. He's been on the show a bunch. The Flexport office is full of curios from the worlds, from the world of logistics. I love a curio. We have a lot of curios in our museum of business.

• 2:27:18Jordi Hays?

  We do.

• 2:27:19John Coogan?

  The hallways are decorated with posters that Ryan Peterson himself generated by ChatGPT on the engineering floor.

• 2:27:26Jordi Hays?

  We gotta, we gotta.

• 2:27:27John Coogan?

  Cardboard model of the ever given, that, that, you remember the ever given story?

• 2:27:30Jordi Hays?

  It's back, back to your point on, uh, on, uh, relics. Uh, Dylan was saying that the, a friend of his, the only Zuck signature signed object that he's aware of that traded hands traded at, at a hundred K. So.

• 2:27:47John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:27:48Jordi Hays?

  So some, there was a Zuck signature.

• 2:27:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:27:51Jordi Hays?

  Went for about a hundred K, uh, which would put the, the game hit gong probably in the eight.

• 2:27:56John Coogan?

  Seven figures, eight figures. I'm thinking for sure.

• 2:27:58Jordi Hays?

  But you never sell it.

• 2:28:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:00Jordi Hays?

  Cause it's going, it's going in the.

• 2:28:01John Coogan?

  We did have a plan, uh, to, uh, to engrave on the gong, a contract and not show him that. So when he was signing the gong, he would accidentally be signing a contract to onboard ramp. That would be the real goal. I don't think that would go over well, but, uh, Nathan.

• 2:28:22Jordi Hays?

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

• 2:28:22John Coogan?

  Keep it, keep it in the comedy sketches, I suppose.

• 2:28:25Jordi Hays?

  We'll have, have much problem there.

• 2:28:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:27Jordi Hays?

  Um, Built Rewards built, uh, their own TV show, short form series called Roomies. They release on Tik Tok and Instagram. I'm going to guess that, uh, Adam Faze did this.

• 2:28:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:28:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, cause he does, he does these types of things for different companies. I'm going to message him.

• 2:28:44John Coogan?

  I gotta, I, yeah, I gotta meet him. I'd be, he's named Keeps coming up and, and I, and I want to know more.

• 2:28:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we should, we should actually.

• 2:28:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'd love to have him on the show and meet him. Uh, but yeah, Built, Built Rewards founded by Anker Jane. Um, cash back or, uh, what, uh, credit card points on paying your rent is the pitch.

• 2:29:01Jordi Hays?

  Um, but, uh, pretty, pretty remarkable to actually get, uh, get a, uh, like a scripted series actually running.

• 2:29:09John Coogan?

  Uh, it's pretty hard to do. Uh, most people that can, they can do this level of content.

• 2:29:13Jordi Hays?

  All right. Just, we'll see, we'll see how quickly he gets back.

• 2:29:16John Coogan?

  Get him on the show right now. We'll see.

• 2:29:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Derek Thompson says AI is overrated. Uh, he says, my baseline case is that the AI being built right now is overrated. Soon it will be a disappointment, then it will be a bubble and by the 2030s, it will be world changing. Self-driving cars are a model for this. In 2015, I heard autonomy was five years away from taking over the roads. In 2020, they were nowhere. Even in 2022, you could say they were a huge disappointment. Now they're quietly a revolution. Driverless taxi usage in California grew 8X in one year and Waymo is expanding to other cities.

• 2:29:49John Coogan?

  Truth zone. Tyler Cosgrove, what do you think?

• 2:29:52Speaker 03

  He's not just wrong, he's unpatriotic.

• 2:29:55John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:29:57Jordi Hays?

  Shots fired.

• 2:29:58John Coogan?

  Where, where are the shots fired? Do you know how?

• 2:30:05Speaker 03

  Amateur over here.

• 2:30:08Speaker 03

  First time, first time.

• 2:30:09John Coogan?

  First time.

• 2:30:10Speaker 03

  First time on the decks. Yes, you're now you're just hitting random stuff. That's, that's, that's, that's offensive.

• 2:30:15John Coogan?

  Hey, hey, easy. Don't go.

• 2:30:21John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, it's not that crazy. It does feel like we're in some sort of like the last, the last 1% takes 99% of the time. You know, we got 80% of the value and, but that's not enough. And so the, the last 20% is going to take 10 times as long.

• 2:30:37Speaker 03

  I don't, I mean, we, we don't have a Dyson sphere. How are we getting 80% of the value? We're, we're only getting like a 10,000 something.

• 2:30:44John Coogan?

  So, so what's your timeline for a Dyson sphere? You think we're gonna have a Dyson sphere in, in two years?

• 2:30:50Speaker 03

  Two is a little close.

• 2:30:51John Coogan?

  He's saying 2030. That's only five years away. I guess he said the 2030s.

• 2:30:56Speaker 03

  Yeah. So that's a whole.

• 2:30:57John Coogan?

  What's your, what, what's your Dyson sphere timeline?

• 2:31:00Speaker 03

  In my lifetime?

• 2:31:01John Coogan?

  In your lifetime?

• 2:31:02Speaker 03

  I, yeah.

• 2:31:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:31:04Speaker 03

  Well, yeah.

• 2:31:05John Coogan?

  Oh, so, so if you lose the bet, you won't be around to make do? You won't be?

• 2:31:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, in my lifetime.

• 2:31:12John Coogan?

  In your lifetime?

• 2:31:13Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 2:31:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I could see, I could see it by 2100 potentially, but it's a lot of work, a lot, a lot, lot, lot needs to happen to get, to get the Dyson sphere up there. It's gonna be a lot of rockets going to the sun.

• 2:31:26Speaker 03

  Well, we have Dan.

• 2:31:28John Coogan?

  Let's bring in our next guest.

• 2:31:30Speaker 03

  From Irregular.

• 2:31:36John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

• 2:31:38Speaker 09

  Hey, it's such a pleasure to be here. I've asked Sequoia what to prepare for, and they've told me that this should be the most fun, exciting, fast-paced interview. So I'm, you know, it's like, shoot at me.

• 2:31:49John Coogan?

  Let's keep it quick. Introduction. What do you do?

• 2:31:52Speaker 09

  We are Irregular. We just came out of stealth yesterday. We are the first frontier AI security company out there. Our goal is to be the counterpart to the Open AIs and Anthropic and GDMs of the world. We're already working with all of them into create the security strike of the future.

• 2:32:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, what does that mean? I mean, there's already a ton of security companies out there. I see them when I walk through the airport. They're all thinking about AI. How are you positioned differently?

• 2:32:19Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's a great question. So the thing that we're actually building is a high fidelity simulator that allows you to put in any model in it. And essentially just like see how different scenarios in order to attack the model or whether the model can attack other targets. So for example, we were the first in the world to see jailbreaking that AI was doing to another AI. Or alternatively, just like seeing how AIs can bypass things as Windows Defender in order to just like hop from one endpoint to the other. What is different about us is that we're working very closely with the labs out of the assumption that what AI is doing right now is simply not a story. And security is about to have a huge paradigm shift moment, which if you think about it, it makes sense, right?

• 2:33:04Speaker 09

  Because enterprises are probably going to look very different in the next five to 10 years. So naturally, the security stack is also going to look very differently as well. So we are using this high fidelity simulator to find the novel attacks and to build the next generation of defenses a few years in advance.

• 2:33:21John Coogan?

  Why do labs don't want to do this internally? It feels like something that they have responsibility for. They have tons of, I mean, they get questions on Capitol Hill about this, like if they outsource it, that seems like a very tricky thing.

• 2:33:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I mean, it's not entirely outsourcing it, like they have to care about these things. The same thing that, you know, I think every company does. It's like you want to have your own security practices and protocols, but simultaneously have partners that can help you see things in a different way. But what do you think?

• 2:33:50Speaker 09

  Exactly. It's a great question. If you think about it, you know, there is a thriving security industry already that is very mature. And, you know, most companies are using, you know, the great of the security world right now, the palos, you know, just like the clouds, like et cetera, even though they're external to the companies. And the reason is that we're about to encounter what is potentially the greatest security challenge ever, just because we're innovating at such a fast pace. And there's so much work to do. So we kind of think about it in terms of like differentiation from the inside to the outside. Is that there are some defenses that you would want to put on the models themselves, bake into the neural nets. And that's clearly lab territory. But some defenses are going to happen on the AI agent side and some defenses will have to be in the environment.

• 2:34:33Speaker 09

  Just because if you believe that we won't be able to do secure by design to AI. That means that some of the defenses will have to be implemented on the enterprise side in the environment. Otherwise, you won't have any defenses beyond what the frontier companies are going to bake into the models. And because there's so many different verticals and scenarios and contexts that you need to put in. There is a lot of effort that needs to be created in order to create defenses across the entirety of the stack. And we're working side by side in order to make sure that whatever the labs are not doing. We are going to do in order to create the next powerhouse of security.

• 2:35:09Jordi Hays?

  What is this, uh, what does a regular look like over time? Is it, is one way to think about it is like a, a, a network to like detect like, uh, like rogue agents, right? I- i- is that, is that a potential kind of scenario that, that you guys would be, uh, helpful in, in preventing? Or, or what, what is like the surface area of the product look like, uh, over time?

• 2:35:34Speaker 09

  Yeah, thanks for the question. So I'd say that's indeed one of the scenarios that we are covering. Already today, uh, we are doing things as understanding and monitoring AI network systems in order to see if they go out of bounds. But our view is that something deeper is going on here. And that the entire infrastructure will need to be replaced. I'll give a concrete example around that. So, you know, just like anomaly detection, that's a huge part of the security stack right now, right? But how does it work? You have a baseline. And you're seeing whether a model is, or just like whatever you're trying to monitor, is doing something which is outside of what you would expect as the normal behavior. But if you don't know how an attack is going to look like, you don't have a proper baseline.

• 2:36:18Speaker 09

  And as an outcome of that, our view is that the first order thing to do is to create a strong research infrastructure that would allow you to essentially figure out and map the novel attacks that are unique to AI, see what are the gaps in the current security stack, and start to fill them in from where, and just like build a new platform that's going to be the platform to secure the agents of the future. So our hope and our ambitions are high. We believe that there is a place to create a huge company that is new around security, very much like, you know, we started as part of the transition to the cloud. And you know, Checkpoint started early on, just like a few decades back, when people started to implement, and it's like networks in enterprises. And usually when infrastructure is changing, you have a, just like a window of opportunity

• 2:37:02Speaker 09

  to create the company that's, is going to be able to create a platform to secure that infrastructure end to end, and that's our goal and that's what we want to do around AI.

• 2:37:11John Coogan?

  Do you think it's more, are you more worried about the like rogue AI, the AI that just randomly decides independently to try and break out of its environment, or more bad actors thinking that if they can get an LLM to do something inside of an OpenAI environment, or inside of a Google DeepMind environment, that they can extract some sort of value, like who is inciting the attack?

• 2:37:37Speaker 09

  So ultimately, it's both. I think in the near term, it's the latter. So it's much more likely that we'll need some human interaction in order to elicit AI capabilities to push them in more dangerous scenarios. And I'm much more concerned right now about, you know, it's like terror organizations getting access to advanced AI system that are already, you know, if you look at like the system cards of OpenAI and Anthropic, they put the capabilities of around bio and chemicals, like models being able to just like actually help in order to produce them at higher risk levels over time, which makes me personally just like, you know, concerned about what happens if some bad actors are going to have access. That's also true on the commercial side, that the more that we delegate to AI, if malicious

• 2:38:20Speaker 09

  actors are going to gain access, there is potentially going to be a whole new wave of viruses. And I think the near future is AI augmenting attackers and being used as part of, you know, just like the attack surface.

• 2:38:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:34Speaker 09

  Over a longer horizon of time, we need to also make sure how we take care of just like rogue actions that are done by the AI itself.

• 2:38:40John Coogan?

  Sure. Well, good luck to you. Thank you so much for hopping on the show.

• 2:38:44Jordi Hays?

  Let's come, come, come back on. I, I expect in the next, at least in the, you know, the next two years, probably the next year, there's going to be some type of event and we're going to think we got to call Dan to break this down. But hopefully you prevent it before it ever happens. So.

• 2:38:58Speaker 09

  It would be, it would be my pleasure both to prevent it, but also to come back on the show.

• 2:39:02John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:39:03Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 2:39:03Speaker 09

  Thank you so much.

• 2:39:05Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Dan.

• 2:39:06Speaker 09

  Bye bye.

• 2:39:06John Coogan?

  Jensen Wong is a huge Nano Banana fan. Love to see that. And Sundar Pichai quote posts him and says, mine too. I, it made his day. They're both very happy. Also, Joe Gebbia is, is shouting out Breathe Realm.

• 2:39:23Jordi Hays?

  Yes. I threw this in here. New air freshener company. The team, when we moved into the studio, bought a bunch of air fresheners. I said, throw those away. They release a bunch of, you know, toxic chemicals in the air that you then breathe that then go throughout your body. Sarah, my wife, actually invested in this company years ago. So it took her a while to get out to launch. But cool to see.

• 2:39:51John Coogan?

  The new standard of air care. Go check it out. Saffron citrus and Verbena Santal.

• 2:39:57Jordi Hays?

  Sounds delightful. Well, next up, we have Ben from Braille coming in the studio, working on stablecoin infrastructure.

• 2:40:11John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream, Ben. How you doing?

• 2:40:13Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:40:15Speaker 10

  I'm doing good. Good to see you guys. Thanks for having me.

• 2:40:18Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 2:40:20John Coogan?

  Kick us off with an introduction.

• 2:40:21Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you again. Actually, I think the last time we spoke was probably 2022. It feels like a decade ago.

• 2:40:28Speaker 10

  Yeah, I think I might've been trying to like, shill you on doing something with stablecoins and we were trying to get started, to be honest. You know, like, it also takes a minute, as you know.

• 2:40:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Catch us up. I mean, since it's your first time on the show, quick history on yourself and then we'll get into Braille and everything you've been working on.

• 2:40:47Speaker 10

  Yeah, cool. Well, hey, guys, I've been building fintech companies for, I think, longer than fintech's been a word. I worked on one for about 10, 12 years. Took a couple of years off, kind of went for a long walk in the woods and then kind of started trying to think about what's next. And when we were workshopping ideas, it became pretty obvious that, you know, like blockchains were going to surpass traditional databases in terms of like speed and cost, which is great for financial transactions. And stable coins were the obvious way to fill the space, but they were just super expensive to actually create. And so when we started, it was kind of like the litmus test or the baseline was like 100 million bucks in two years to create one of these things. It took us two and a half years to do it, but we got it down to a dollar in a minute.

• 2:41:30Speaker 10

  Where any business or anyone that wants to go launch a stable coin can go launch it. And basically, the reason people love these things is because it reduces costs and makes revenue.

• 2:41:39Jordi Hays?

  Okay, first question, why, why do we need infinity stable coins? Sure you have a good answer.

• 2:41:48Speaker 10

  I mean,

• 2:41:50Speaker 10

  it's, why do we need anything? It's like, there are lots of different types of T-shirts in the world. Why do we need so many different types of T-shirts? People like to customize things. And I think that we now live in a world where customizing your own type of money is possible. Some group of people are going to do it because it's just fun. Other people are going to do it because it's a good business decision to reduce costs. Other will do it because it's a good business decision and they're going to make a bunch of revenue. And so generally speaking, the reason people I think are going to create more of these things, once the bear comes down to actually create more is just that they're fun, they reduce costs, and they make money.

• 2:42:26Jordi Hays?

  What, what is the actual mechanics if somebody goes to braille.xyz today and creates a stable coin? Like what's happening, what's happening under the hood?

• 2:42:37Speaker 10

  You know, it looks and feels a lot like using like a traditional fintech product. It's almost like you're just depositing money. If you've ever used PayPal, if you've ever used Venmo, if you've ever used Coinbase, if you have a Circle Mint account, it's the same for all these tools. You just put money in and in our case, you get a custom stable coin back out. And then you can go use that in your business. You can exchange it with any number of other stable coins. You can use it on. I don't know, like 10, 12 different blockchains and it's compatible with our assets, Circle X assets, Paxos assets. So it's like it just works with all the popular stablecoins.

• 2:43:11Jordi Hays?

  And so, and then, once it's created, let's say somebody creates a thousand dollars worth of a new stablecoin. How does like swap functionality work when you have these sort of like new pairs?

• 2:43:26Speaker 10

  So it's all actually built in. So when a new stablecoin gets created and deployed, it's all reverse compatible. So let's say that you go create your own stablecoin. We've got a thousand bucks sitting there. You can use the APIs to swap it in between, you know, 50 other stables, again, some even that we don't issue at really no cost. And you can swap it at the speed of basically the chain confirmations. So there's no slippage. And it's, you know, like, we, we think pretty ideal in that way. And then obviously, as these programs start to grow out into DeFi, there's a need to work with customers to set up different liquidity pools and things like that to make sure that they maintain peg, work with them on on-ramps and off-ramps for building into fintech apps and all that good stuff.

• 2:44:09Speaker 10

  But, you know, all solvable problems, all these things are like impossible to imagine five years ago. And now all the tech is sort of like right there off the shelf to use for people.

• 2:44:18Jordi Hays?

  What are the, what are the key kind of customers that you're excited about working with today? Kind of, what are the categories?

• 2:44:27Speaker 10

  We work a lot with blockchain ecosystems. So we just launched Lightspark. We're doing a lot of work right now with Canton, which is like an institutional privacy focused blockchain. And, you know, there are like eight more of these in development. I think we've done another 12. And then there's, there's kind of like a fast follow. Once the chains are implemented to what are the use cases on the chain? For us, a lot of that is like payments. People love these things because reduces costs, increase revenue. It's like a revenue source they never had had access to in a pre-stablecoin world. There are embedded finance applications, which is just like building on blockchain infrastructure instead of kind of the last version of things. And then there are all these other kinds of trailing use cases, but right now we see a ton in the blockchain ecosystems, a lot in payments and a lot in embedded finance.

• 2:45:12Speaker 10

  Financial institutions as well, but let's be honest, those are a little bit more hypothetical, I think.

• 2:45:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:17John Coogan?

  What's the status of those like state based stable coins?

• 2:45:21Jordi Hays?

  And you mean like US states?

• 2:45:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Wasn't it Montana that launched one? And it seemed like, well, America already has a stable coin USD. I was kind of confused.

• 2:45:29Jordi Hays?

  Wyoming, I think.

• 2:45:30John Coogan?

  Wyoming, maybe?

• 2:45:32Speaker 10

  Yeah, you got it. It's it's I think it's F R N T in Wyoming. And, you know, it's even like it. Once you can launch these things, states want to launch them themselves. Banks want to launch them themselves. Fintech companies wants to want want to launch them. And the rationale for it is always the same, like reduce costs, make money, you know, and maybe the fun side is customization. Um, you know, developers like to customize. And so I I think that's why we really believe like there's just going to be a number of these things. And one of the challenges is just making it interoperable between the deployments and then making it easier for developers to build it into their app. And, you know, our our sort of like value add is we just take care of the regulation and we just take care of the tech so that you can build whatever product you want to build on top of the new stablecoin.

• 2:46:16Jordi Hays?

  What? Any any predictions on on uh stablecoin market caps over the next few years? Every I mean, there's a lot flying around from, you know, TradFi trying to just understand the opportunity to people that are, you know, more crypto native that are that are super bullish themselves. But but how are you thinking about it?

• 2:46:36Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, I think the number goes up, gentlemen. It's like you you guys know how big certain like name brand fintech apps are. As these name brand fintech apps roll out their own blockchains and their own stablecoins, the market cap of crypto generally is going to move. And so suddenly these new like corporate chains, they're going to be top 10, top 20 chains the day they're rolled out. At least in terms of like AUM and stablecoins deployed on that chain. And so in a world where most of the world is still off chain, it's like, imagine what happens when the repo market comes on chain. Like you can't even compare what's possible in in terms of where we're at. At least I don't think so.

• 2:47:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:47:19John Coogan?

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

• 2:47:22Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on the lunch. It's great to see you.

• 2:47:24John Coogan?

  Have a good day.

• 2:47:25Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you, Ben. Thanks, guys. Good to see you.

• 2:47:28John Coogan?

  Bobby Cosmic in the chat has a point that I think I agree with. All these different coins remind me of pre-1863 currency in the US. Before the National Banking Act of 1863, banknotes were issued by thousands of different state-chartered banks, which often had weak oversight and issued notes that could lose value or be difficult to exchange outside their local areas. And I do, I do wonder if there's some sort of like, you know, network effect. I mean, it's like, everyone spins up their own stablecoin and then you need interaction between all of them. So then, like, someone's trying to take an extra cut at some point and you would, and maybe like it all trades through and everyone gets lower cost.

• 2:48:11John Coogan?

  But if there's one standard for like interchain exchange, then they could take a, then they could take a cut. It is, it is odd that we're in this like explosion of stablecoins at this point. But no one wants, everyone's sick of paying high transaction fees, I suppose.

• 2:48:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think the, you know, my immediate thought is I can understand why every institution and company wants a stablecoin. If you're a fintech company and you're moving a lot of money, I can understand that.

• 2:48:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, at the same time, it's like...

• 2:48:44Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of, there's a lot of different types of companies where, of course, they would want a stablecoin, but are they providing value to the users, right?

• 2:48:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The, the, the, the promise of many stablecoin projects, though, was like, hey, use ours. It's low fees. So it's like, are we, is, is that the arbitrage? Do you go even lower fees? Below, because it's not 3%, right?

• 2:49:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:06John Coogan?

  So, and I know that, I mean, that was the original pitch for Bitcoin, was like, it should cost nothing to, it's electronic money, it costs nothing to move.

• 2:49:14Jordi Hays?

  But they're definitely, they're definitely going lower, you know, Braille's going lower in the stack, right?

• 2:49:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:19Jordi Hays?

  It's like Circle was like, here's, we're gonna, we're gonna issue the stablecoin and we're gonna give you infrastructure to, to leverage them. And then this is going, you know, a layer deeper and just saying, we'll just make you the, the stablecoin itself.

• 2:49:31John Coogan?

  In other breaking news, Cluli mentioned us in their blog on going viral and shared some stats about TBPM posting a lot of clips with views ranging from 5K to as high as 500,000. There's a reason for this. Some of the content does not deserve to go viral. Roy Lee is stressing the idea that you cannot inherently make an undeserving tweet go viral. Viral sense gets you from 1 to 100, not from 0 to 1. He's stressing like the importance of being able to identify viral concepts. Obviously, they put a ton of work into the content that they post. But the interesting takeaway here is, what are the

• 2:50:14John Coogan?

  benefits of going viral? There are only two: top of funnel for your users, two, to get your mission seen by potential hires. Importantly, virality does not equal top of funnel. Only converting content will get you downloads, and you must make sure your viral bets are converting, or at least have a chance to be in the future. Which is interesting with Cluli because it's a two-step act. They go, they need to go viral and entertain and create something that's like funny, or controversial, or something that everyone watches. But then they also have to get you to go to the website, download, and pay for the product.

• 2:50:46Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure.

• 2:50:47John Coogan?

  And that, and that's hard.

• 2:50:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so he gives an update here, where does Cluli stand? Cluli has more than enough consistent usage that we can reliably test every single one of our new features against a pool of users and know where the product is retentive and where it is not. Cluli is post PMF in a few areas: interviews, certain quizzes, and homework that require an undetectable AI. Students, that's, that's, um, enterprise, clients who've spent time building out custom workflows for, but conquering any of these will not end in the grander vision. We have our eyes on the ultimate computer interface for multimodal AI. Same, uh, same. Vision that Zuck has his eyes on.

• 2:51:24John Coogan?

  Yes. With AI mode for the.

• 2:51:28Jordi Hays?

  Always on live AI.

• 2:51:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:30Jordi Hays?

  We need faster, Roy says, we need faster magic moments and larger tangential consumer markets. To that end, we spent the last few months working on making sure the product works for our more general users.

• 2:51:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:40Jordi Hays?

  There's a magic moment that exists with Clouly, but does not exist for all the markets that interest us yet. The truth is, it is actually quite hard to build software that feels truly magical to everyone. It takes a lot of time and.

• 2:51:51John Coogan?

  That feels honest.

• 2:51:51Jordi Hays?

  That feels honest and I don't think anybody would would.

• 2:51:54John Coogan?

  There's an interesting stat in here, it says, in fact, some of our meme viral videos, the most views, 50 million views, generated almost zero downloads despite being viral. So conversion, if you're using viral marketing, conversion actually matters. There's probably a question about, you know, Built Rewards did that big TikTok campaign. They have 88,000 followers, 1.4 million likes on their Roomies series. And and and the headline numbers look really good. This could be extremely high converting. It could be extremely low converting. It's an it's an open question as to, and when you're doing viral marketing, you have to understand that

• 2:52:34John Coogan?

  the the the the bottom of the funnel matters just as much as the as the actual views and top of funnel.

• 2:52:42Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:52:42John Coogan?

  Any other breaking news you want to cover?

• 2:52:44Jordi Hays?

  I don't think so. I think everybody's relaxing after a busy day yesterday.

• 2:52:50John Coogan?

  Yes. Well, we will see you tomorrow.

• 2:52:54Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait to get back on the mic.

• 2:52:55John Coogan?

  Fantastic day.

• 2:52:57Jordi Hays?

  Been.

• 2:52:57John Coogan?

  We'll see you on Friday.

• 2:52:59Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, folks.

• 2:52:59John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:53:00Jordi Hays?

  Great to see all your names. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 2:53:02John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:53:02Jordi Hays?

  Bye.