Inside ChatGPT’s Uses, NVIDIA Pours $100B into OpenAI | Kimbal Musk & Shervin Pishevar, John Shahidi, Laura Deming, Steven Glinert, Austin Petersmith, Ethan Barajas & Jamie Palmer

(01:21) - Inside ChatGPT’s Everyday Uses (35:28) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (58:21) - John Shahidi is an Iranian-American entrepreneur and content/media executive based in Newport Beach, California. He co-founded Shots Studios (formerly Rock Software / RockLive) with his brother Sam Shahidi, originally doing mobile games and celebrity apps before shifting into talent management, content production, and podcasting. He also serves as President of Happy Dad Hard Seltzer & Tea and leads the Shots Podcast Network. He’s known for his ability to pivot from apps to multimedia ventures, working with influencers and creative talent, blending media, marketing, and branding in youth-oriented digital culture. (01:45:43) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:00:30) - Laura Deming, a venture capitalist and founder of the Longevity Fund, discusses her work at Until Labs, where she aims to develop hibernation pods akin to those in science fiction, with the immediate goal of cryopreserving human organs to improve transplant logistics. She highlights the challenges of scaling cryopreservation from embryos to human organs, emphasizing the need to prevent ice formation during the freezing process. Deming also touches on the potential future applications of this technology, including long-term space travel and extending human lifespan by pausing biological processes. (02:27:05) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:31:17) - Kimbal Musk, an entrepreneur and philanthropist, co-founded The Kitchen Restaurant Group and the nonprofit Big Green, focusing on sustainable food systems and education. In the conversation, he discusses the success of Nova Sky Stories' Vatican show, which attracted 300,000 attendees, and highlights plans for future large-scale drone art performances worldwide. He also emphasizes the importance of expanding their drone fleet to meet growing demand and maintaining a 100% safety record. (02:49:01) - Steven Glinert, CEO of Sphere Semi, announced the company's successful $12 million funding round led by Acme Capital and Future Ventures, bringing their total funding to $20 million. He emphasized Sphere Semi's focus on revolutionizing analog semiconductor design through AI, aiming to automate the traditionally manual process and enhance efficiency. Glinert also highlighted the company's strategic expansion into the defense sector, particularly in developing RF components, and plans to venture into mixed-signal chips to meet the growing demands of data centers. (02:57:29) - Ethan Barajas, co-founder and CEO of Icarus Robotics, is leading the development of dexterous, free-flying robots designed to perform routine maintenance and logistics tasks aboard spacecraft, thereby allowing astronauts to focus on scientific research and manufacturing. These robots, which can be controlled from the ground, aim to reduce the high costs associated with astronaut labor, estimated at $135,000 per hour. Icarus Robotics has secured a $6.1 million seed funding round and plans to launch their robots to the International Space Station by late 2026 or early 2027 for a year-long testing phase. (03:06:10) - Austin Petersmith, co-founder and CEO of Howie.ai, discusses the company's recent $6 million seed funding and the launch of their AI-powered scheduling assistant, Howie, which combines advanced models with human oversight to optimize meeting arrangements. He explains the product's pricing tiers—$35 per month for the base version and $145 for the Pro version, which offers white-labeling and advanced preferences—and addresses the challenges of balancing AI automation with human verification to ensure accuracy. Petersmith also shares insights into the competitive landscape, emphasizing the complexities of developing such a product and expressing confidence in Howie.ai's ability to stay ahead by continually enhancing their offerings. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  Sunday, September 22nd, 2025. We are live from the TVP and UltraDome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Sam Altman and Matthew McConaughey defined the weekend in my world on my timeline. Two former Joe Rogan guests. Interestingly, only Sam Altman has done Theo Von and only Sam Altman has done Tucker Carlson. Matthew McConaughey has gotten snubbed by those two. But hopefully we'll get we'll get McConaughey on Theo eventually, but until then, Sam is the lone of the pair to do those shows.

• 0:44Jordi Hays?

  McConaughey on Theo Von.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  It feels like a match made in heaven. Sam obviously did well on the show and but they both were talking about AI and caused, you know, a stir, predictions, debate, and I thought it'd be interesting to weave through it. So Sam Altman kicked off with a post here. He says, "Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payment, how many a whole lot more on the place." He said, "Go to ramp.com." Now he didn't. That's fake news, but we love ramp.com and so head over to ramp.com. No, what Sam actually said was, "Over the next few weeks, we are launching some new compute-intensive offerings."

• 1:25Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  Because of the associated costs, some features will initially be only be available to pro subscribers. That's me. That's me. And some new products will have additional fees. Ooh, interesting. Extra monetization. "Our intention remains to drive the cost of intelligence down as aggressively as we can and make our services widely available, and we are confident we will get there over time, but we also want to learn what's possible when we throw a lot of compute at today's model costs at an interesting at interesting new ideas."

• 1:55John Coogan?

  There were lots of debate over what he's going to launch. Meanwhile, Matthew McConaughey was over on Joe Rogan saying that he wants a private LLM fed only with his books, notes, journals, and aspirations. So he can ask it questions and get answers based solely on that information without any outside influence. Can we play the Matthew McConaughey clip? Because he had a very interesting phrase. I thought it was very funny. He doesn't say, he doesn't say, "Fine tune on this."

• 2:24Speaker 03

  He wants to log.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  He wants to log it in. We'll hear it from him. Let's go to Matthew McConaughey.

• 2:28Speaker 03

  I'm interested, though, in a private LLM where I can upload, "Hey, here's three books I've written. Here's my other favorite books. Here's my favorite articles I've been cutting and pasting over the 10 years," and log all that in.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  Log all that in.

• 2:45Speaker 03

  And here's all my journals, whatever, the people I, and log all that in.

• 2:48John Coogan?

  Log it in.

• 2:48Speaker 03

  So I can ask you questions based on that.

• 2:50John Coogan?

  Right.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  And basically learn more about myself.

• 2:53John Coogan?

  Right.

• 2:53Speaker 03

  I stand on the political spectrum.

• 2:55John Coogan?

  Right, right, right.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  I'd like to, no, that's, that's what I'm, would like to do, which is sort of a glorified Word document, but it still would hold a lot more information than just, "Oh, can you find this term?"

• 3:07John Coogan?

  Do not write this off. This is, this is an important consumer. This is the next big market of consumers.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Loaded with the information I'd like to load it with.

• 3:16John Coogan?

  Right. Yeah.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  Maybe even like I'm saying, in this, in the words of belief, in, in the, in the man I'm working to be, the man I want to load it with.

• 3:24John Coogan?

  He doesn't feel like the current state of LLMs are meeting his needs, and that's really, really important. If you're OpenAI, you want to become the biggest company in the world. You want everyone to use your products.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's slowly learning about me through conversations, then going, "Oh, I think this is what you like based on a conversation." No, I want the answers based on what I've uploaded it with only, not from the outside world.

• 3:43John Coogan?

  And he probably uses, he probably uses Instagram and has, has, and Instagram is personalized, does give him a, a unique view on things he likes and has become very good at, at servicing exactly what he wants. Well, if he wants to log in, he should log into Restream, one livestream, 30-plus destinations, multi-stream to reach your audience wherever they are.

• 4:05John Coogan?

  But, so I took this as just this, like, there's this interesting battle going on between how much personalization and how is personalization actually surfaced to the user? Like, a lot of people in the replies were saying-

• 4:20Jordi Hays?

  Are you getting value out of memory function today?

• 4:23John Coogan?

  It, no. I don't feel like I am. I feel like it remembers little facts about me and then weaves those in, basically in awkward moments. But it's, it's still ChatGPT. Like, it's still the voice of ChatGPT.

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  Memory feels like it's been broadly overhyped, right? This is what people were saying was ultimately gonna be the moat for LLMs. It's like, why would you switch LLM?

• 4:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:45Jordi Hays?

  The new LLM doesn't know anything about you.

• 4:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, but to date, I, I haven't, I, I'm, same with you, I have an experience feeling like I am so locked into this LLM because it knows everything about me.

• 4:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  It just knows me better than the next product.

• 4:59John Coogan?

  Yes, it remembers facts. So if you asked it to fix your car and you told it what model car you have, and then you just mentioned, like, my car won't start, it'll remember what car that is. But it doesn't develop a unique personality. It's always the same and, and that lends itself to a specific flavor of using M dashes, using bullet points, i- i- it's not this, it's that, that type of syntax. And some people love that. Like, we saw that Reddit loved 4O very clearly. And a lot of us were surprised. We were like, really? Is this real? Is this fake? Like, what's going on? People are really upset that 4O's going away?

• 5:33Jordi Hays?

  It was real enough that they changed course.

• 5:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, and, and they brought it back. Uh, and the same thing happened in Teapot with, uh, Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Everyone was saying, oh, Sonnet is the best. Tyler, did you like Sonnet 3.5? Were you a Sonnet head?

• 5:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, and, and, I mean, there was the funeral for Sonnet.

• 5:49John Coogan?

  There was a funeral? Wait, wait, did they deprecate it?

• 5:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:52John Coogan?

  Oh, I didn't realize that.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  Well, actually, it was, uh, Claude 3. That was like the original one that people were like, oh my gosh, I love Claude.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that it had a very specific personality. And I feel like the future and like the goal with personalization should be, everyone gets that experience. Everyone gets their own, over time, the model- Shapes and morphs into something that has a personality that you really vibe with. Very much like if you go around in the world, like, how many people do you meet before you find someone who like you want to start a show with or a podcast with, right? Like, it takes a lot to be like, this person really gels with my personality. And their personality is changing a little bit as I interact with them and vice versa. Like, that type of interaction, it happens over a very long time of meeting a lot of people

• 6:42John Coogan?

  and deciding who is, who's the best fit? Who do you vibe with, right? And so, two years ago, Sam Altman stood on stage at OpenAI Dev Day. This was in 2023, which feels like a decade ago at this point. And announced custom GPTs and a GPT store. And the idea was, fine tuning was going to be done by a creator. And I was going to be able to do exactly what Matthew McConaughey is describing. Go in, load up Matthew McConaughey's books, load up the Bible, load up a bunch of other interviews with him, everything about his worldview, notes, journals, all of that stuff. Create a custom GPT, it could be private or it could be public, and then other people could choose to interact with it.

• 7:26John Coogan?

  And over the past two years, that just hasn't happened. I looked at the top of the ChatGPT App Store, and it's, the number one is Astrology Birth Chart GPT. Number two is Scholar GPT. It builds in Google Scholar, PubMed, Bio Archive, Archive. Then there's a fitness workout diet coach. Yes. Humanize AI that's trying to write more human-like content, an image generator and an image generator pro. And so, I'm sure these are, you know, great, but they certainly haven't broken through to where they are the default by, in general, when I want to use. AI or ChatGPT, I open the app, I open my phone, I start talking to it. I might throw in a link to an article to give it a little bit more context.

• 8:11John Coogan?

  I might add some flavor on how, what level of depth I want to go to. But I'm not going and creating custom GPTs. I'm satisfied with the current results, but at the same time, I don't feel like it's personalized. Like, I feel like if I picked up your ChatGPT right now and said the exact same thing. Give me a deep dive on the new CEOs of Oracle. I was interested in that. I wanted a deep research report. I feel like if I take my prompt, I put it in your ChatGPT, I'm getting the exact same result.

• 8:36Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 8:36John Coogan?

  Basically, even though obviously it's, it's, it's not fully deterministic. It, it might be slightly different words, but I feel like the flavor, the personality will be the same. Because we are, me and you, even though we, we, we speak to ChatGPT differently. We are interacting with like the same personality. And it's, and personalization just means remembering a few facts. So it might address you as Jordy and me as John, but it's not fundamentally going to be a different, a different style. And I was wondering about like, how does that actually like, like, at what level do I want?

• 9:08Jordi Hays?

  I'm still at a point where I'm, I'm, I'm testing.

• 9:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're testing everything.

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  Models and I can get the same value out of a bunch of different deep research.

• 9:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:18Jordi Hays?

  Like products.

• 9:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Jordi Hays?

  And that says a lot because I think, I think ultimately the value of, I think, deep research products have already stabilized to the point where yes, if you were to compare two line by line.

• 9:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:32Jordi Hays?

  It'd be, one of them would be objectively the best.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:35Jordi Hays?

  You're getting the core value out of it, which is just a great summary of events or whatever you're researching.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. So a lot of it comes down to like speed and user interface. I, I tend to like the current ChatGPT voice mode more than Gemini. But Gemini's deep research product is fantastic and it's faster. And so I'm going to close my phone for 20 minutes, but I like being able to just pull up the voice mode. And I feel like the Gemini app currently kind of jumps the gun on ending the voice note. Whereas with ChatGPT, I feel like I can ramble a little bit more, add more context and then, and then end it. And then edit it if I need to. So like, I've just kind of baked into that flow, but I agree with you. Like they both feel like the same personality. They might have memorized a few facts, but they're not really creating.

• 10:24John Coogan?

  A person, a different personality where, oh yeah, my, my chat GPT is like, is like a particular, particular character that's very different from yours. And I think, I think the future and what, and what would be sort of like, you know, inference heavy or, or GPU compute intensive might be every time, like really doing thoughtful rollups and developing that personality over time for every user. So that you don't just have Reddit loves 4.0 and Teapot loves Claude 3.5 Sonnet. You have every single person loves their individual chat GPT instance and would be, would be distraught if it changed because they're very satisfied with it. And as a function,

• 11:07John Coogan?

  you don't, you can't leave. You don't want to leave because everyone has that feeling of like, well, I've invested all this time. It knows, it doesn't just know things about me because I can go to a different model and say, here's the car I drive. Here's my age. Here's my, here's some data, like, you know, I, I could just import, you know, all sorts of podcasts I've done and stuff like, it's easy to like, get the facts.

• 11:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  But it's not that easy to understand the flavor of LLM interaction that I'm looking for, what actually is sticky. And that feels like it all feeds into lower churn. So I think that's, I think that's sort of the, sort of the goal. I don't think you will.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  It also just, I mean, again, the, the bigger dividing line is, are you using AI for knowledge retrieval and like purely functional tasks?

• 11:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:54Jordi Hays?

  Or are you using it as a friend like product?

• 11:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 12:00Jordi Hays?

  And, and I still, I still believe that if you're in the first camp and it's function and knowledge retrieval, that the personality just doesn't matter that much, right?

• 12:10John Coogan?

  I, I still think that there's a little bit of personality that I think is, it's somewhat important in the sense of like, of like knowing where I like to dive deeper in the deep research, where I like to stay at a high level. Like if I'm doing a deep research report, I'm, I'm often, I'm often prompting it with, uh, write it like a New Yorker article. Try and pull real quotes, real anecdotes. Show me who the people were behind this decision. I don't like just a fact, fact, fact. I, I actually really, really detest when you, you, and you ask for the history of a business and they say,

• 12:50John Coogan?

  Microsoft launched this. Apple launched the iPhone. Like, I don't believe that Apple exists. Apple didn't launch the iPhone. Like, Steve Jobs and a group of people who operate within a structure called Apple launched the iPhone. And I want to hear the story of the people that did that thing, not the abstract press release machine that you get from like, you know, the corporate entity.

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  You know, you know, chat GPT announced a personalization tab last week.

• 13:16John Coogan?

  Tab? No, I didn't know about this.

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  This is in buried in the settings page.

• 13:19John Coogan?

  Okay, yes, I've seen that tab before.

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  You can enable customization so that you can customize the model effectively in the chat.

• 13:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:31Jordi Hays?

  And then you can set different personalities. So there's default, which is cheerful and adaptive, cynic, critical and sarcastic.

• 13:37John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 13:37Jordi Hays?

  Robot.

• 13:38John Coogan?

  Robot.

• 13:39Jordi Hays?

  Blunt, clanker, listener, and which is thoughtful and supportive of a nerd, exploratory and enthusiastic. And then you can do custom instructions to make it sound Gen Z, I guess.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  I had, I have, I have some custom instructions.

• 13:55Jordi Hays?

  Shooting.

• 13:55John Coogan?

  Years ago, someone posted like, here are, here are the best things to clean up your chat GPT. But they were all like these prompt injection things like mistakes erode my trust. So be accurate and thorough. Provide detailed explanations. I'm comfortable with lots of detail. Value good arguments over authorities. The sources are relevant. And I don't know if I, no moral lectures. No need to disclose you're an AI. Some of these are useful. I don't know. I'll probably take these out of there. What should GPT call you? So they're definitely working on this. I just wonder, I, I think I turned this off after, after I asked it to tell me a joke and the joke was like hyper specific about

• 14:34John Coogan?

  my particular car. And I was like, this is kind of cool, but it's not really funnier. I don't know. Let's see. I'm going to turn, I'm going to turn personalization back on, but clear out those custom instructions and see, see how my, my chat GPT experience is. But there are obviously much more, there are many more. Just like down the fairway features that people are expecting. So Sora 2 with audio and 4K. People kind of expect that Sora, I've comped Sora to VO3. VO3 is dramatically better. Sora 2 is still very, or Sora 1 is still very hallucinatory, but it's like a year old at this point. So they probably should be catching up to the frontier there. Of course, that's extremely-

• 15:18Jordi Hays?

  And you would expect Google to be in the lead here purely because of the YouTube.

• 15:23John Coogan?

  I would think so too. Hopefully, hopefully the OpenAI team has figured out a way to get up to the benchmarks. I've seen other companies that aren't Google produce VO3 level results. So I would expect that Sora 2 is is close to VO3 quality somehow. I don't know how they got the data. Might have bought it from somewhere, might have done a whole bunch of different things. There's a lot of ways that they could have gotten a ton of video tagged data. But that is something that I wouldn't be surprised if it's some new products that have additional fees. I wouldn't be surprised if if the Sora 2 generations are so expensive that they actually just tell you like, hey, it's two bucks every time.

• 16:03John Coogan?

  Because they should have learned from the Google situation, which was I paid $250 on a $500 a month plan. I signed up for a $500 a month plan. I haven't churned. And you're still capping me at these crazy rate limits and you're just not taking my money. And you're a huge company, like, there's got to be a way. And there was a way. It was like, go to the API and do all this. But I was like, I want it in the app. I want to be just consumer, prosumer level. And at least have the option to just continue prompting and light the GPUs on fire. Just find the fair market price. Find the market clearing price for what the value of those GPUs are right now. Maybe it's 50 bucks a prompt. And then, and then I can decide. I can decide, yeah, I'm using this for work. This is going out on my, my professional-

• 16:42Jordi Hays?

  On your ramp cart.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, on my, on my TV show. And like, it's worth 50 bucks. Maybe, maybe the market clearing price is much lower, but it should be above the value of running those GPUs, in my opinion. Image two, they currently have GPT image one and they're expecting like an answer to Nano Banana edits. Better text rendering. The text rendering is already fantastic in images in ChatGPT. But I wouldn't, I wouldn't be surprised if that comes out. Nano Banana for video in Sora two, so the ability to upload a video, change it, or kick off a frame and change that. ChatGPT agent two, this is interesting. Agent is something that I feel like should get baked into the model router at some point.

• 17:24John Coogan?

  Like you should just be able to, like, right now, if you hit ChatGPT with a query, it will say, oh, I'm thinking longer for a better answer.

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  I really want to get a better sense. Has, has operator been a total flop?

• 17:37John Coogan?

  Operator is gone. Operator doesn't exist anymore. It's now agent. But agent mode uses, uses operator. I use agent, yes. I've used it a few times.

• 17:46Jordi Hays?

  But it's for deep research.

• 17:48John Coogan?

  You could think about it like deep research, but instead of just pulling a bunch of text together, actually go and navigate, actually go try to navigate a bunch of websites. So I was looking for a new breakfast spot for us. This is real. I wanted high protein options. I, I said, here's where I work. Here's where I go to the gym. I'd like a survey of high protein options. So go look on a map, figure out what's in the area, go and pull the actual menus and build me the perfect diet plan to get me fully bulked this season because it's bulking season. And ChatGPT, oh, we know it's bulking season. Don't have to tell us. We're, we're super intelligent.

• 18:29Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't born under a data, living under a data center.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  Of course you're bulking. It's September. But, uh, so, so I've used it, but not a lot. And it's never been something that's been able to be triggered just from the default prompt.

• 18:41Jordi Hays?

  And it's not taking actions. It's still just collecting information.

• 18:44John Coogan?

  I mean, what's an action? It takes the action of opening a webpage and scraping out the data. It takes the action of like defeating captcha's very clearly. It's clearly at war with the captcha. But yes, I think you're right. Taking actions, ChatGPT agent two. What we would expect, I don't know if it's coming in the next weeks.

• 19:02Jordi Hays?

  They gave.

• 19:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:04Jordi Hays?

  They were booking flights.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  Wait, when?

• 19:07Jordi Hays?

  Weren't they booking?

• 19:08John Coogan?

  In the demo?

• 19:09Jordi Hays?

  In the demo on GPT five day or was one before that?

• 19:12John Coogan?

  I don't know if they've ever showed a demo of them actually booking a flight, but it's clearly coming. I think it'll be with their specific partners that have opted in. And so if you look at the the OpenAI partnerships list, there are a few companies that have said, yes, we'd love to partner with you. And so I wouldn't be surprised if something like DoorDash is is fully integrated in a way that you will be able to order through ChatGPT. And I think that'll be very interesting.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  Yep. So July seventeenth.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 19:42Jordi Hays?

  They said introducing ChatGPT Agent, bridging research and and action. And they specifically said, in your personal life, you can use it to effortlessly plan and book travel itineraries, design and book entire dinner parties, or find specialists and schedule appointments. So all I'm saying is like, we haven't, like, that's not really happening yet.

• 20:06John Coogan?

  No. And so we might see something there. It's unclear how much of this is like Dev Day, because if if Sam is really saying over the next few weeks and he's really just teasing Dev Day, Dev Day could be much more oriented around companies that are planning to build on top. But again, if you want to integrate with ChatGPT Agent, maybe there's an agent update. And then that flows into how your company can integrate with with ChatGPT Agent. There's other, there's other predictions that we might get the model that won the IMO. And there might be an enhanced voice mode. Clearly.

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  Is Diego predicting enhanced voice mode twenty four seven?

• 20:45John Coogan?

  I don't know what that means. You just leave it on all the time?

• 20:47Jordi Hays?

  Just leave it on.

• 20:48John Coogan?

  People are already kind of doing that. I have noticed that some of the voice modes, if you leave them running for a long time, they get kind of crazy. Yeah. Like even just having having the voice mode try and read you a full deep research report. I've had a lot of problems with where after a minute of it reading, it just kind of like gets lost and it can't stick with it. And I don't know if it's just like the internet connection that I'm on or something, but I've I've I've struggled many times to actually get it to to read it. And then also it gets really confused by the the citations and stuff. Uh, it's been, it's been ups and downs, but Greg Brockman posts that OpenAI has released a large scale study on how people are using ChatGPT. Consumer adoption has broadened beyond early user groups and lots of economic values.

• 21:32Jordi Hays?

  This is the one that leaked.

• 21:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 21:34Jordi Hays?

  Like more than a week ago.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  It's cool because he's, he's using the leaked image, which I, I don't know if it's leaked. I think it's like from a court case or something. But it's, it's interesting because it's not, that image is not in the blog post that he links to, but it is in his post on X because he knows that this is the one that people want to dig into. So I thought it was a good, good, uh, good use of, uh, of, you know, posting. And so we, we've talked about this before, but it is really, is really evenly split. Practical guidance, 28%. Seeking information, 21%. Writing, 28%. Like there are very.

• 22:09Jordi Hays?

  Multimedia at 6%.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  Unknown at four. That's ominous.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  What are you doing?

• 22:15Jordi Hays?

  Self-expression at 4.3%.

• 22:17John Coogan?

  Tyler, you know, that's Tyler getting weird in ChatGPT.

• 22:20Jordi Hays?

  Technical, games and role play.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  Stay away from that. Stay away from that.

• 22:28John Coogan?

  Data analysis, mathematical calculation, computer programming. Computer programming is 4.2%. Of course, we are partnered with Cognition, the makers of Devon. Devon, the AI software engineer, crush your backlog with personal AI engineering team, with your personal AI engineering team. Anyway, uh, it'll be fun to see what they actually launched. There's so many different directions that they can go. They have a lot of territory carved out, a lot of different irons in the fire.

• 22:55Jordi Hays?

  I wish we could see their just overall usage chart now that school's back in session. Cause you remember it just like fell off a cliff.

• 23:04John Coogan?

  I don't know. I, I, I don't know how much to read into that, the falling off the cliff.

• 23:08Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, dude. I mean, they're saying 28% of ChatGPT activity is just writing. So obviously that's a lot of professionals.

• 23:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:15Jordi Hays?

  It's a lot of students.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe now that summer's over is better than schools back in session. I don't think that you can get to the ChatGPT numbers, the DAUs purely on the back of college students. Like I think a lot of people are using this at work and a lot of people aren't working during the summer. And so.

• 23:31Jordi Hays?

  Writing less emails.

• 23:32John Coogan?

  People didn't get the memo about locking in in August and they had to wait until September. It's embarrassing.

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  I feel bad.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, one of our newest sponsors, Privy. Wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on CryptoRail securely. Sign up white, spin up white label wallets, sign transactions that integrate with on-chain infrastructure, all through one simple API.

• 23:52Jordi Hays?

  I, uh, next little, little, uh, what do you call it? Hit it, hit it, Nick, hit it.

• 23:57John Coogan?

  The bike horn, it's a bike horn.

• 23:59Jordi Hays?

  Brandon, Brandon, let's get the, let's get the bell and the horn. I need them together, I need them together.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 24:07John Coogan?

  So, uh, Rune is talking, uh, there's, there's a ton more going on in, in, uh,

• 24:12Jordi Hays?

  Rune, this guy's got his fingers in a lot of pies.

• 24:14John Coogan?

  He does have his fingers in a lot of pies, a ton of pies, this guy Rune. Uh, he says, "The jump from GPT-4 to 5 Kodak's is just massive for those who can see it. Kodak's is an alien juggernaut, just itching to become superhuman, feeling the long awaited takeoff. There's very little doubt that the data center capex will not go to waste." And Nick Carter says, "You heard the man. Data center capex is justified. Thank you for your attention to this matter."

• 24:40Jordi Hays?

  Huge relief, huge relief.

• 24:43John Coogan?

  We, I was worried.

• 24:44Jordi Hays?

  We were worried.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  We were calling the top, we did it prematurely. We're, we're still, we're still at the, at the early stages. We're so early.

• 24:51Jordi Hays?

  We didn't call the top, we just said there were top signals.

• 24:54John Coogan?

  There were, there were some top signals.

• 24:55Jordi Hays?

  There were signs.

• 24:56John Coogan?

  But we kept riding on.

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  We ride on.

• 24:59John Coogan?

  We ride on. Uh, Accelerate Harder says, "Place your bets." We, of course, will be betting. Um, we need to get some poly markets up on what OpenAI launches. We are, of course, powered by PolyMarket, you can see them down in the ticker. There's some other, a lot of people are, a lot of people are, uh, are kind of coalescing around GPT Image 2, Sora 2 with audio/video, improved memory as a separate paid add-on. I wonder if that would be the separate paid add-on. I would switch and say, "Sora 2 will be a separate paid add-on?" Because that's really expensive? The improved memory, I feel like they can't.

• 25:34Jordi Hays?

  They can't, that's, doesn't feel like a, a pro, pro feature.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  It's so unclear what you get. Like, the beauty of VO3 is you go and get three of them and you're like, "I need more of this." But personalization's something that you're gonna feel over a long time, it's gonna be very, very slow, like, it's not gonna be like a wow moment on day one, right? So I don't know why you'd be like, I pay for it.

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  What they need is to retain people at $200 a month.

• 25:58John Coogan?

  A hundred percent. And so I feel like the personalization, knowing, knowing what shoes you want to buy, that's just, that pays for itself. The hard thing is if someone's going there and being like, I'm going to generate a two hour movie and it's going to cost $10,000 in GPU credits, they need to charge you for that. And then, yeah, there is a question about how, how much of this will hit plus users over what time period? Zephyr says multi-agent RL systems for consumers. I, I, I, I think we're starting to see that with some of the ordering APIs, some of the, some of the codex and agent stuff. I'm very interested. I was playing around with codex earlier today a little bit. I'm interested to see how it gets to the phone.

• 26:40Jordi Hays?

  The vibes have been.

• 26:42John Coogan?

  I mean, I was just watching a, an interview with Dylan Patel and, and a podcaster and, and this particular individual was extremely bullish on codex and had moved, had moved a ton of work from Claude Code over to codex. And so I'm starting to see it.

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  We never watched the, did you see the Claude, Claude ad?

• 27:00John Coogan?

  We should pull up that.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up. I put it in the timeline. Let's watch it.

• 27:05John Coogan?

  Andrew Curran, the last prediction here. Compute intensive almost means, almost certainly means Sora 2, which would mean Sora 2 will be pro exclusive at launch. Google similarly offers full VO3 for ultra subscribers only. These models are insanely expensive to run. Prediction native sound 15 second clips. Yeah, that would be an interesting way for them to differentiate would be go a little bit longer on the clip. VO3 is at eight seconds. If they do, it's 15 seconds. It's almost twice as long. Could be a little bit of a wow moment.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  VO3 do sound?

• 27:32John Coogan?

  VO3 does do sound and it does, it does it pretty well. And they had a little bit of a pop moment and I could imagine the OpenAI team really, really popping on Sora 2, some cool new features, especially if they figure out how, what is the killer use case? What's the really iconic thing? What's the prompt that anyone can do and get a great video out of? With, with VO3, a lot of creators came with cool ideas and then wound up getting great results. But with DALL-E or with images in chat GPT, it was like the Studio Ghibli moment. And so. If if OpenAI can work backwards from like, what is something that every single person could do? Like, upload your profile picture and turn it into a video of something like that? Something where everyone has to go and do it for themselves to see what it looks like?

• 28:16John Coogan?

  That could be a really big viral moment for them. Anyway, we are going to be monitoring that. And in the meantime, let's watch this new video from Anthropic.

• 28:38John Coogan?

  Fast-paced cuts. I like the color editing, color grading.

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  Never been a better time to have a problem.

• 28:56John Coogan?

  It's kind of true.

• 28:59John Coogan?

  Robots are useful. The clankers are helping you solve your problems.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  Anthropic really has developed like their own brand world now. When they started doing those billboards in London or something, we were very confused. But this is getting to a point where-

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  They went from having some of the worst ads to now this is a great ad.

• 29:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  And this really stands in contrast to the OpenAI Super Bowl ad, which was very, it was like this black sun thing, and it was like this pointillism, black circles. This is very rich colors, warm tones, feels very human, actually. It does not feel cold. This does not feel clanker-coded.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  Apple evolved.

• 29:46John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah, a little retro.

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  Even I feel like that shot of the piano-

• 29:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  That was exploding.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  But it's backwards.

• 29:52Jordi Hays?

  And it's going backwards.

• 29:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're solving the piano. They're recreating the piano. I like it.

• 29:56Jordi Hays?

  They're crushing it.

• 29:56John Coogan?

  So hats off to everyone at Anthropic for-

• 29:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but does this, this tells me not giving up on consumer?

• 30:05John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 30:07John Coogan?

  Is that, I mean, that could work for, for a B to B ad. You know, that, that could just be like, the vibes are good at this company. Let's continue working together in the enterprise to drive shareholder value. You know, you can watch that and be like, be like, okay, yeah, the Claude Code bill came through this month and I'm happy with it. Let's, let's keep it up. What do you think?

• 30:27Jordi Hays?

  But it's very, it's very positioned as like, don't just think of us as a.

• 30:31John Coogan?

  Those were consumer use cases. Yeah. What, what, what do you think, Tyler?

• 30:34Speaker 04

  Um, yes. So, uh, over the weekend, my roommate said, I, I, so I live at UCLA. Um, with much students there, um, they were telling me at a.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  We get it. We get it. You don't need to like, make a big deal out of it. We get it. You live at UCLA. It's not that big of a deal.

• 30:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. So, um, so at the football game, um, they said, uh.

• 30:53John Coogan?

  We, we get it. You went to a football.

• 30:55Speaker 04

  No, I didn't know. I was not there.

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  You're a college student.

• 30:57John Coogan?

  You're a college student.

• 30:58Speaker 04

  I was not at the football game, but there was.

• 30:59Jordi Hays?

  Hey, round of applause for Tyler.

• 31:01John Coogan?

  Wow. Okay. Yeah. Living the college dream. I'm like these washed up podcasters over here just rubbing it in so young. He's got his whole life ahead of him.

• 31:11Jordi Hays?

  Such a bright future ahead of you.

• 31:13Speaker 04

  Okay. But so there was an ad for Anthropic at the football game.

• 31:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:16Jordi Hays?

  Wait, what do you mean? Like?

• 31:18Speaker 04

  Like on.

• 31:19John Coogan?

  Like on the jerseys?

• 31:20Speaker 04

  No, it was like on, I think it was on like the, um, like the big screen. What are they called? I don't know.

• 31:25John Coogan?

  Big screen. Yeah.

• 31:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, and, and they were like, oh, what is this like company? Like, none of them had ever heard of it. They were like, oh, it's like slept on like Claude. Like they don't want you to know about this.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:33Speaker 04

  So I think there's some like consumer thing going on, at least among students.

• 31:37John Coogan?

  The war for the consumer maybe isn't over.

• 31:39Speaker 04

  Um, last semester, uh, Anthropic was pushing pretty hard. They have like a student, um, some kind of like plan that's like super cheap. They're giving out like free subscriptions.

• 31:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:49Speaker 04

  So I think they, they might be like aiming towards like that demographic a little bit.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  I wonder if they'll, if they'll find a point of differentiation somehow. I mean, Google, like Gemini has such a great point of differentiation in consumer in the sense that like, you're already on Gmail. You can plug in there. Like the plugins have been slow, but like you can bootstrap a ton of personalization. And just a ton of extra functionality from saying, from properly integrating Gemini to the rest of your, of your Google apps. Are you watching the chat?

• 32:17Jordi Hays?

  The chat says, Mr. Morales says, let me guess, Tyler had a beer. Hopefully not, he's not 21.

• 32:25John Coogan?

  Anyway, but Claude doesn't seem like they have the ability to bootstrap personalization. I mean, the, the, the real killer, I feel like the killer use case or in consumer would be if, if there's a, if there's a flow where you download the app and when you go to prompt it, it's more willing to write code and it's more willing to write better code. I feel like that could be something that would actually break through. I keep thinking about when I hit deep research, like we talked to Doug O'Laughlin about this and he said that he's getting sometimes better results out of Claude code than deep research just for actual research tasks.

• 33:08John Coogan?

  And so I tried this and I said, go build me a, I went to Claude code and I said, go build me a deep research report about a topic, but then instantiate it in a HTML webpage. And so it gets the ability to use it, to, to, to use all the different HTML5 building blocks. So it can create a table if it wants, it can create a pie chart, it can pull, pull in JavaScript, it can create bar charts, it can do everything that you can do on HTML. It was very cool. And I, and I felt like I saw a glimpse of the future where if I go to Claude and I ask it a question, hey, teach me, you know, econ 101, it could build software that's actually interactive to teach me that topic on the fly. And that might be something that leverages what Anthropic seems to be very good at, which is coding.

• 33:52Jordi Hays?

  Give me a deep research report, but as I scroll, give me the maximum amount of dopamine.

• 33:59Jordi Hays?

  Give me flashing lights and, and sound effects.

• 34:03John Coogan?

  I don't know. What do you think?

• 34:04Speaker 04

  I think there's something else where like Claude is basically the only like company or it's Anthropic, but like Claude is like very personified. Like people think of like Claude as like a person almost, like at least on, on like Twitter and like.

• 34:16Jordi Hays?

  You know SF people.

• 34:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:18Jordi Hays?

  It's like Claude is like a person.

• 34:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:19Jordi Hays?

  Where ChatGPT is like a tool.

• 34:22John Coogan?

  Which is fascinating because it's it's it's such a throwback because in the previous era of voice interfaces or like AI, we had Siri, Alexa, there were a few others.

• 34:32Jordi Hays?

  There's Ask Jeeves.

• 34:33John Coogan?

  Ask Jeeves. Ask Jeeves. Uh, even Samsung, I think, has Bixby, which was.

• 34:38Jordi Hays?

  Bard.

• 34:39John Coogan?

  Bard, which was very much supposed to be like a person. And then a lot of the companies pulled back from that. And OpenAI just said, it's just ChatGPT. We're not giving it a name. And then Gemini came out and Gemini doesn't feel like a, you're not supposed to say, hey Gemini, really? Like, it's just kind of, it's it's just a model, right?

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  You don't say Jemmy, Jemgem?

• 34:58John Coogan?

  No, and it certainly hasn't caught on. And so, anyway.

• 35:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I do. I do think this this ad for Anthropic, like, around problem solving.

• 35:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:08Jordi Hays?

  They've earned, they've earned making that a pillar of their marketing by having so much success in Coogan.

• 35:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:14Jordi Hays?

  So, I like the ad. We like the ad.

• 35:16John Coogan?

  If you want to develop some software, if you want to design something, head over to figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

• 35:25Jordi Hays?

  What was this post? Shoot at the server room during evacuation.

• 35:29John Coogan?

  Oh, this is just best practices in case, in case the AI is.

• 35:33Jordi Hays?

  Is this something like Vanta recommends?

• 35:35John Coogan?

  Yes. If you're not compliant and the and the feds are coming to bust you. Because you don't have, you don't have SOC too.

• 35:43Jordi Hays?

  Send this rocket into your.

• 35:44John Coogan?

  Go to Vanta, automate, automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with uh, continuous automation. Um, yes. And so I, I think this is from a war zone where there is a lot of data stored in the server room. And so if you are evacuating, uh, shoot this rocket launcher at the, at the server room so that the enemy combatants can't steal your data, can't steal all the.

• 36:12Jordi Hays?

  All your plays.

• 36:13John Coogan?

  All your plays, yeah. Pretty crazy. Um, but imagine how good it would feel to fire that bad boy off at a server room. Just take that clanker.

• 36:22Jordi Hays?

  Especially, especially if you were the, the engineer that had to like maintain it over time and it was giving you a lot of problems.

• 36:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:28Jordi Hays?

  You could, you could take out the clankers without. You know, for good reason.

• 36:32John Coogan?

  It feels like that scene in, uh, in, uh, if you haven't seen the movie, in Office Space, where they smash the, the printer.

• 36:39Jordi Hays?

  I have seen.

• 36:40John Coogan?

  You've seen Office Space?

• 36:42Jordi Hays?

  I, that's one of my dad's.

• 36:43John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 36:43Jordi Hays?

  My dad's favorite movies.

• 36:44John Coogan?

  First time ever.

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic film.

• 36:46John Coogan?

  Jordi's third movie.

• 36:47Jordi Hays?

  My, uh, the equivalent of my, the equivalent of my stapler is my headset.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 36:53Jordi Hays?

  When I, when I got here and.

• 36:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. You need your headset. Yeah, yeah.

• 36:56Jordi Hays?

  You put it on and.

• 36:57John Coogan?

  So, uh, ranking Jordi's movies, we've seen Borat, we've seen Mountain Head, and we've seen Office Space.

• 37:03Jordi Hays?

  The three. Those are the three films.

• 37:05John Coogan?

  The, uh, Mike Judge is a genius. Uh, and you know what else is genius? Graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Um, we're also monitoring the situation of private tech markets. It's never been better to be a show focused on the private markets. OpenAI leads private markets. Surge as seven tech startups reach combined 1.3 trillion dollar valuation.

• 37:33Jordi Hays?

  What are the other, what are the other?

• 37:35John Coogan?

  It's gotta be OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, uh, XAI, um.

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  Andro.

• 37:40John Coogan?

  Ramp, Vanta, Julius, Fall, all of our sponsors, basically. We need the combined market cap of all of our sponsors. We need, that's a key, that's a, that's a KPI for us. We gotta get those numbers up.

• 37:54Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get those.

• 37:54John Coogan?

  We gotta get those numbers.

• 37:55Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, new project. Uh, by the way, last, last Friday, I, I, I jokingly told Tyler, build a soundboard.

• 38:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Did he?

• 38:03Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and he did.

• 38:04John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 38:05Jordi Hays?

  And it's fantastic. He, he had a working version by the time the show was over on Friday.

• 38:09John Coogan?

  Incredible.

• 38:10Jordi Hays?

  He took my, he took my ask very literally. I said, just get it done in like, I don't know, like 15, 20 minutes.

• 38:15John Coogan?

  And he did it.

• 38:15Jordi Hays?

  And he basically did it.

• 38:16John Coogan?

  What was your toolset?

• 38:17Jordi Hays?

  But we're gonna release it soon, uh, and it looks fantastic. So you guys will be able to, uh, use our sound, uh, soundboard in your own meetings.

• 38:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 38:26Jordi Hays?

  So if, if, um, you know, somebody announces a couple of positive things, you can personally go.

• 38:34Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be a lot of fun.

• 38:36John Coogan?

  Uh, your boss announces layoffs. Boo, keep us on staff.

• 38:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep. It's good to have, good to have.

• 38:46John Coogan?

  Oh, we raised a growth round?

• 38:48Speaker 00

  Friendly IPO inbound.

• 38:51Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's, it's highly functional. It's highly functional.

• 38:54John Coogan?

  Oh, uh, uh, our new fundraising round's leaking?

• 38:57Speaker 00

  Large journalistic force headed towards you. Stand by.

• 39:02Jordi Hays?

  And we're gonna be adding a lot more.

• 39:03John Coogan?

  Oh, uh, oh, we're struggling paying, uh, we're struggling to pay our sales tax this quarter?

• 39:07Jordi Hays?

  Sales tax AGI.

• 39:10John Coogan?

  Sales tax AGI. I actually want to talk about the numeral thing. Let me find that in, in here. It's deeper. Uh, but we gotta get to this. So numeral came on the show, their partner. I love them. I use them. Sam.

• 39:22Jordi Hays?

  Absolute Chad.

• 39:23John Coogan?

  Put on a, put on a clinic. Uh, interestingly, uh, so there's, there's been a debate. The timeline was in turmoil. Uh, is, is sales tax boring? We obviously think no. Uh, I think Sam put on a great performance and just kind of took us through like what it's like raising right now in the market and, uh,

• 39:42Jordi Hays?

  He was also honest about his cloud costs going up dramatically.

• 39:45John Coogan?

  Totally. And so, uh, he, he shared, uh, the announcement. He says, uh, I'm thrilled to share that numerals raised the $35 million Series B, led by Mayfield at a $350 million valuation. Turns out, sales tax and VAT have gotten so complex that we need AI and millions of dollars in VC to, funding to make it simple again. This brings us to $57 million in funding. And so, uh, he, he tags the investors. He went on a press story, came on our show, talked about this. And, and Levels IO, uh, got a little snippy with him, quote tweeted it and said, you can often predict a company's course if their announcements talk more about how much investment they got than their product. If I'd raised $50 million, maybe I'd not even tweet it, just to use it to improve the product and get more users and talk about that.

• 40:29John Coogan?

  Having money in the bank tells me absolutely nothing about why I should use your product. It's not my money. It's your money. And so I, I think there's-

• 40:37Jordi Hays?

  And I, and I just, I- I disagree with this on multiple levels. Like one, if you're building software for businesses,

• 40:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 40:44Jordi Hays?

  it's very helpful to communicate that we have a lot of, you know, a lot of funding doesn't guarantee anything.

• 40:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 40:51Jordi Hays?

  But it, but it's a, it's a vote of, it's, it's showing that, that, uh, smart people

• 40:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:58Jordi Hays?

  have confidence that you're going to create a lot of value in the future.

• 41:01John Coogan?

  And just be around for a long time.

• 41:02Jordi Hays?

  By delivering great products for customers. Two, as a business, your job is to take anything that you do and make it newsworthy.

• 41:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:09Jordi Hays?

  Fund raises are, are, are easy.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  Hires, trade deals.

• 41:13Jordi Hays?

  Hires, yeah, trade deals.

• 41:14John Coogan?

  Partnerships.

• 41:15Jordi Hays?

  Job is to just take anything that's going on and make it, uh, make it newsworthy, make, uh, you know, take another opportunity. The most bearish thing is as a company, a company that launches once, right?

• 41:26John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:26Jordi Hays?

  The best companies launch over and over and over.

• 41:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:29Jordi Hays?

  They're not like, oh, I'm going to launch and then I'm just going to be quiet and do my thing.

• 41:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:32Jordi Hays?

  And just make the product a little bit better every day. It's like, you have a new feature, you have a new hire, you have a fundraise, you have a profile, right? It's like, launch, launch, launch, launch, launch.

• 41:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:41Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, Levels, obviously, you know, a, a, a great, uh, builder.

• 41:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:48Jordi Hays?

  And we should have him on the show. But it's, it's, you know, he just is like, hates venture capital, you know, so much. Uh, and I think before he knocks it, he should try.

• 42:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the, the other thing that, uh, Levels launches, like, like the most recent product that he got to go really viral was this like amazing vibe-coded game in the browser that anyone could just click and try. Like massive TAM for that product, right? Anyone can be like, oh, I know Flight Simulator. I've been on a plane. I want to fly around. I'll click this button, right? And it was an interesting business story and it was an interesting product and it looked cool and it was a demonstration of vibe coding. He's done a few other products that have been like visual. One was an interior design product that you could take a picture of your empty apartment and then put furniture in it. And that is something that also will naturally sort of go more viral than. Okay, we, we, we launched VAT compliance, right? Like, like, sales tax is not as sexy.

• 42:44John Coogan?

  It's not as something that people just, even if you do improve the product, it's not inherently viral. And so you, if you're in B2B software, in enterprise software, like, you do have to take advantage of fundraising announcements to drum up a bunch of support and just make people aware of you. Because there isn't, there isn't that natural virality that comes from, okay, you, you put, uh, uh, you know, you landed a rocket. That's just something that everyone wants to see. You built a, you built a humanoid robot. You built a drone. You blew something up. There's an explosion. There's something beautiful, an image, that people want to see. And so, I, I agree that you should focus on the product, but to, to not take advantage of fundraising milestones as a B2B company is, is a mistake and you should actually definitely run the playbook.

• 43:29John Coogan?

  Uh, Ajnani Midha over at Andreessen had a different take. He said, uh, true for the median startup, but it's dangerously wrong for frontier technology companies. Capital is the weapon. He's just making the case for raising money. But I think the, I think the, the other case is just that, uh, when you're in B2B, you need to be taking advantage of the business story and the business story is the fundraising story. And so you have to deliver on that very.

• 43:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And, and Levels is just playing a totally different game.

• 43:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, which is fine.

• 43:53Jordi Hays?

  He makes hundreds.

• 43:54John Coogan?

  There's nothing wrong with playing that particular game.

• 43:56Jordi Hays?

  I think he probably makes a hundred, couple, few hundred thousand dollars a month in like profit.

• 44:02John Coogan?

  It is great.

• 44:02Jordi Hays?

  From his businesses. But he's not really creating enterprise value.

• 44:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:06Jordi Hays?

  Right? A lot of his businesses would probably sell for maybe like a one, one, one X revenue or something like that, which is, which is great. But he's just playing a totally different game.

• 44:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:16Jordi Hays?

  Sam is playing a game where he takes a modest salary and he built, and he's, and he's trying to build a company that will one day be worth billions of dollars.

• 44:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:23Jordi Hays?

  And, and, uh, capital, um.

• 44:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:27Jordi Hays?

  You know, again, even the best businesses in the world end up tapping the capital markets and, and just being like default against using financing in any form.

• 44:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:37Jordi Hays?

  It's just silly.

• 44:37John Coogan?

  Great tool for the job. Uh, well, Apple's foundation model running on an iPhone 17 Pro has demoed. I don't know how this got out, but, um, it seems like maybe this is already shipping? I don't know if this is a developer preview or something, but it looks very fast. Adrian Grandin says, "Apple was not joking. The A19 Pro chip is really good for running LLMs." Let's, uh, let's look at this video. I think we have it pulled up. So he types in a prompt and it just spits this out. And I apparently this is on device. This is on device inference. And so a lot of people were saying like, Apple's gonna win. I don't know that this is what does it for them to get them to like win, you know, AI, but it certainly seems like.

• 45:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what is, what is Apple foundation? Do we know?

• 45:25John Coogan?

  Apparently, I mean, it sounds like it's some sort of foundation model that they've trained internally and they're running locally on their device, some sort of distilled model. Do you have any insight on this, Tyler? Like, have you, have you been tracking this at all?

• 45:37Speaker 04

  I don't know exactly. I mean, it must be a super small model. Cause even, I mean, the like RAM is still like only like 12 gigs or something.

• 45:44John Coogan?

  I thought it was more. I thought they went up to 16 on this last one.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  Oh, really? I thought they went from eight to 12.

• 45:49John Coogan?

  Eight to 12?

• 45:49Speaker 04

  That could be wrong. Maybe the max is 16.

• 45:51John Coogan?

  iPhone 17 Pro memory. Let's see.

• 45:55Speaker 04

  But I think also like, it's hard to say that like, oh, Apple is gonna win because like, if you look at the median person using LMS, they're not optimizing for like, speed of the LM, they're using like, optimizing for the intelligence.

• 46:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're right. 12, 12 gigs. Yeah, that's not that much. Um, tricky. I, I still think that the end of the road is some sort of partnership with OpenAI or Gemini, taking a cut, just getting the actual, because I.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  I think it makes sense to do some kind of router where for like, if you can kind of figure out how like difficult a task is, then you run it locally and then for complex things, you send it off to OpenAI.

• 46:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:27Speaker 04

  I think that makes sense.

• 46:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, right now, there's supposed to be a router in Apple Intelligence and, but when I hit it, it's rough. It's not, it's not tuned up properly. Like, it, it, it seems to go all over the place. And then also they have this weird modal that even if you go to Apple Intelligence and you say, I'd like you to go to ChatGPT and, and ask this deeper question. You have to click a button and say, yes, actually send that to ChatGPT. It's like a privacy thing, but it's clearly just like an extra barrier to adoption. And so I wind up just opening the ChatGPT app, uh, which is fine, I guess, but I'd like a deeper integration there. I don't know. We'll keep monitoring it.

• 47:10John Coogan?

  Julius, what analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. And to ask Julius to analyze your data and then loved by over 2 million people and trusted by individuals at Princeton, BCG and ZEP.

• 47:23Jordi Hays?

  Soon.

• 47:26John Coogan?

  The 3D world models, Paki has a post here, he says, "After watching a bunch of the 3D world demos this week, the thing that struck me walking around this morning is how shockingly high resolution the world is. You can zoom in, your attention on any little thing and find an astonishing amount of detail." This, of course, is a fully generated model. This is from World Labs. This is Fei Fei Li's project.

• 47:46Jordi Hays?

  Except for this turbo puffer fish. I mean, this thing is pixelated to death.

• 47:52Jordi Hays?

  Zoom in on this.

• 47:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, can we go to Jordi's wide?

• 47:55Jordi Hays?

  Way less, way less detailed.

• 47:56John Coogan?

  What's going on here? Yeah, this is not rendering.

• 47:59Jordi Hays?

  Not rendering, fully, but we're working on it. We're trying to get a real puffer fish.

• 48:05John Coogan?

  Love turbo puffer. We, yeah, this world model, the fully generated one, the other one that was cool was the, at the MetaConnect event, they launched the ability to create a, is it a Gaussian splat? Is that what it is?

• 48:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's Gaussian, right?

• 48:25John Coogan?

  Gaussian?

• 48:26Speaker 04

  Gauss.

• 48:26John Coogan?

  Gauss, yeah.

• 48:27Speaker 04

  It's named after Gauss.

• 48:28John Coogan?

  Gaussian splat. I want to have Tyler create one of the UltraDumps.

• 48:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can do it with the Quest.

• 48:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can do it with the Quest 3.

• 48:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's very, it's very cool. You feel like you're, you very much feel like you are, when you're wearing the headset, you feel like you're in the actual room.

• 48:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, it was, it was very cool. Yeah, I was, because I looked over and there were two sets of pancakes for kids, and I have twins, and so I was like, wow, like, this makes me, this actually makes me miss my kids, which was remarkable.

• 49:01John Coogan?

  At the same time, like, there was no game mechanic, and I don't know that there's that many places that I'd actually want to go and see. Like, I liked in Apple Vision Pro that there were multiple, really scenic, like, you could go and watch a movie on the top of a mountain, or you could be in the desert and be using your computer, but I very much wouldn't just want to hang out on the top of a mountain. I would want to be watching a movie on top of a mountain. It was like a cool environment, so... The environments need to be really cool. I feel like there'll be there'll be some sort of power law of like the best environments and there'll be a few, but I like the idea of people being able to scan and share their rooms and walk around, but I would be surprised, even if we put up on the Meta Quest, I don't know if you can actually share your scans yet, that's clearly coming, but even if we scan the Ultra Dome and share it with people,

• 49:45John Coogan?

  the audience members that have a Quest 3 or Quest 3S that would, they'd probably go poke around in it for like two minutes and then be like, okay, I'm done.

• 49:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was cool.

• 49:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was cool. Okay, I'm back to it.

• 49:54Jordi Hays?

  Been there, done that.

• 49:55John Coogan?

  Been there, done that, right?

• 49:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, speaking of Meta, Buco Capital says, got a laugh from Zuck talking about the AI infra bubble. He's basically like, quote, "Yeah, history shows we can't help it. We'll overbuild, use too much debt, then it will explode, which proves to be a great time to buy distressed assets." Wink. Maybe AI is different, though. IDK.

• 50:16John Coogan?

  This is a great interpretation of Alex Heath's interview with Mark Zuckerberg.

• 50:20Jordi Hays?

  Again, Mark isn't a good position in that he can, you know, he could, he could misspend a couple hundred billion and be...

• 50:32John Coogan?

  The business will churn on for sure and continue to generate tons of cash flow.

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  We didn't even cover Nvidia plans to invest $100 billion into OpenAI.

• 50:42John Coogan?

  Yep, this news broke today.

• 50:44Jordi Hays?

  And Nvidia, Sophie, NetCap Girl, says Nvidia up a billion percent on the news that it'll invest in a company that will use the money to buy more GPUs.

• 50:54John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 50:55Jordi Hays?

  Nvidia is up three, almost 4% today. Broadcom is down.

• 51:04John Coogan?

  I mean, this is, this feels like just we're one step down the path to the original Stargate plan. Like, the original Stargate plan was very much Sam Altman. Creating a multi-year plan to spend something like 500 billion and there were going to be a number of parties involved. Obviously, you need a lot of chips from Nvidia, you need a lot of Oracle infrastructure, you need a data center, you need energy. And so, all of those partnerships are coming together. Interestingly today, it's not like Nvidia wired some money or sent some chips or anything like that. This is a letter of intent, which is funny to see at this scale because it's like a famous YC thing is that you say like, oh, we got a huge letter of intent for this thing. But at the same time, like, I think

• 51:49John Coogan?

  at this scale, like, letters of intent are like, pretty serious and you should take it pretty seriously that everyone's planning. And as long as, as long as all the different pieces fall into place, like, everything should, should work. Like, as long as the investors say, I'm good for my 100 billion, and Oracle says they're good for this 100 billion, and Nvidia says they're good to produce 100 billion of chips, like, you're gonna get the 500 billion together. Like, the capital will form.

• 52:15Jordi Hays?

  I gotta get graphic for you.

• 52:16John Coogan?

  This is a game of...

• 52:17Jordi Hays?

  Pull this up.

• 52:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, we're pulling that up. 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.

• 52:33Jordi Hays?

  Look at this, look at this beautiful graphic. Wall Street loves, Wall Street loves this kind of...

• 52:37John Coogan?

  This is like the fifth time I've seen this graphic. We saw this exact same graphic yesterday with, or last week with Oracle.

• 52:43Jordi Hays?

  It's widely applicable in the current state of technology.

• 52:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:48Jordi Hays?

  I give you money, you give it back to me.

• 52:50John Coogan?

  It is, it is crazy. I mean, there were times when, when Mark Zuckerberg was a LP in a venture fund that would invest in a company that would buy Facebook ads, but it was like six degrees of separation and the economy was not nearly as circular. These deals are very much like, I hand you money and you hand it directly back to me. But... I mean, at the end of the day, like, what really matters is like, usage. I mean, we should be tracking like, how much, like, if ARR starts to slow, if DAUs start to slow, like, then all bets are off. But if we, if we continue to see acceleration in Anthropic's enterprise numbers and, and OpenAI's consumer numbers, like, it's all justified, I think. I don't know.

• 53:32Jordi Hays?

  This, uh, this account, Sully Omar says, so let me get this right. Oracle says OpenAI committed $3 billion for cloud compute. Oracle's stock jumps 36%, best day since 1992. Oracle runs on Nvidia GPUs, has to buy billions in chips from Nvidia. Nvidia just announced they're investing $100 billion in OpenAI. OpenAI uses that money to pay Oracle, who pays Nvidia, who invests in OpenAI.

• 54:01John Coogan?

  It's a little circular.

• 54:02Jordi Hays?

  Good fun, good fun.

• 54:04John Coogan?

  It's a little, it's a little circular. We'll see. But, uh, Carlota Perez, the GOAT of financial bubbles, has weighed in. She is quoting a post from, uh, Colossus, Patrick O'Shaughnessy's publication. Carlota says, "A brilliant tour de force about AI from the investor's point of view." And the author compares AI with a personal computer and container ships, fully understanding the life cycle of all revolutionary technologies. We will have to dig into this article. It's called "AI Will Not Make You Rich." If you're not subscribed to Colossus, head over and get a physical copy. It's by Jerry Newman in the September 2025 issue, in issue four of Colossus Mag. "The disruption is real. It's also predictable," he says.

• 54:48John Coogan?

  So, this is a longer article. I want to read through it. We don't have time today. We will get to it in the future. We might come back to it later in the show today. Who knows? But, uh, let's skip through that and, in the meantime, tell you about TurboPuffer. You saw the pixelated TurboPuffer fish. Search every byte, serverless vector and full text search. Built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 55:10Jordi Hays?

  By Linear Notion.

• 55:13Speaker 04

  A bunch of other great companies to build AI products.

• 55:16John Coogan?

  We also have a post from Elon Musk. He says Grok can now read aloud in a beautiful voice. I'd love to pull this up if possible.

• 55:26Speaker 04

  Test it.

• 55:27John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm, it's so funny. The brand of Grok is so chaotic at this point that I don't know if I'm expecting a girl's voice or a German's voice. It could be any.

• 55:37Speaker 04

  What, what, what is it called when people like talk into the mic, you know?

• 55:41John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, ASMR.

• 55:42Speaker 04

  It's just like an ASMR.

• 55:44John Coogan?

  Is hydrogen fuel good, a good idea? Let's play this. I want to hear what it sounds like.

• 55:49John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 55:51John Coogan?

  Do we have it?

• 55:52Speaker 05

  Is hydrogen fuel a good idea? Hydrogen fuel is clean, zero tailpipe emissions and useful for niche cases like heavy industry or long haul transport, but it's inefficient.

• 56:02John Coogan?

  This actually just sounds good.

• 56:03Speaker 05

  25 to 40% round trip efficiency.

• 56:05Speaker 04

  A normal voice.

• 56:06John Coogan?

  The normal voice. It's like completely smooth, like.

• 56:08Speaker 05

  And lacks infrastructure.

• 56:09Speaker 04

  You can definitely tell it's AI still.

• 56:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can tell it's AI, but.

• 56:12Speaker 05

  It's not ideal for widespread.

• 56:13Speaker 04

  Definitely not the best voice I've heard.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  What's the best voice you've heard?

• 56:16Speaker 04

  Uh, probably something from 11 Labs.

• 56:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:20Speaker 04

  They seem to still kind of be.

• 56:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I was, I was very uncertain on like how, I mean, we talked to Matty about this, but

• 56:29John Coogan?

  I was very uncertain on like how 11 Labs would maintain any sort of moat around the foundation model companies, but it feels like they're being, they're basically trying to be the, the mid journey of voice where it's just this, this opinionated artistic vision that leads to something that you can't quite just instantly optimize against. You know it when you see it. You try a bunch of things. What do you think?

• 56:53Speaker 04

  I think another thing is, um, I believe they have a product where you can like clone a voice.

• 56:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:58Speaker 04

  Um, which none of the other labs seem to do, I think because of like legal stuff.

• 57:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I mean, Siri was initially cloned. Like there is a, there is a woman whose voice is the voice of Siri. You would think you would just hire someone with a good voice and then just say, hey, we're going to license this and we're going to pay you a royalty and let's get a contract in place. And there's some, some voice actor out there who's like, I would love to be the voice of Claude or the voice of.

• 57:22Speaker 04

  No, I, I mean that like, um.

• 57:24John Coogan?

  Why don't you think this is?

• 57:25Speaker 04

  You can make, like on 11 Labs, I can make my voice.

• 57:28John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. And, and, and that's, and you just want to listen to yourself that much that you have?

• 57:32Speaker 04

  Okay, not, I'm not, I don't do that for me, but I could make someone who is like a good speaker and read something who has like a nice voice.

• 57:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 57:38Speaker 04

  Like, I don't think other labs do that because

• 57:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:40Speaker 04

  There's like, there's the whole thing about her with Scarlett Johansson.

• 57:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, but I would just think that if, if, if the Grok team wants a particularly beautiful voice to read things aloud, that they would go and find a particularly great voice artist and then clone it. You don't think that's what they're doing?

• 57:54Speaker 04

  Uh, no.

• 57:55Jordi Hays?

  Somebody should hire David Sendra.

• 57:57John Coogan?

  That'd be very good. That'd be very good.

• 57:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, without further ado, let's bring in our first guest.

• 58:03John Coogan?

  Who you got?

• 58:05Jordi Hays?

  John Shahidi.

• 58:07John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Good to meet you in person. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Good to see you.

• 58:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, good to see you too.

• 58:17John Coogan?

  Welcome.

• 58:18Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  We have a podcast mic for you. Why don't you kick us off with an introduction? Uh, tell everyone who you are.

• 58:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 58:24John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 58:25Speaker 06

  Well, it's good to meet everybody.

• 58:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:26Speaker 06

  And, uh, yeah, I'm John Shahidi. I created, uh, the Shots Podcast Network, which is a podcast network, uh, that hosts a number of different podcasts. And then we also incubate and create different brands. Full Send brand, Happy Dad brand, Ranger Cut Jerky.

• 58:42Speaker 06

  And I think our business model really now moving forward is just to, you know, create brands and treat brands like we treat creators. So.

• 58:51John Coogan?

  What's the methodology for deciding what categories are ripe for a new brand?

• 58:57Speaker 06

  I think you gotta look at, I have a lot of thoughts on that, actually.

• 59:00John Coogan?

  I talked to a guy who said he literally walks through, he's more of a scientist, doesn't, doesn't do any creative partnerships, but he will walk through the grocery store and just look at the aisle and be like, okay, this aisle's dominated by Unilever and P&G. I don't want to play in it.

• 59:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 59:14John Coogan?

  But when he finds a spot, he found the popcorn aisle, which is, there's a little section of the grocery store popcorn. And Orville Redenbacher is the only player. It's like a 200-year-old company.

• 59:24Jordi Hays?

  He's like, I'm coming. I'm coming for your lunch.

• 59:26John Coogan?

  He knows that they're gonna be a little bit sleepier. He's gonna be able to play in that category. And he launched a product and got it to like, I think like 10 million ARR, did pretty well. Um, but anyway, how do you think about, um, like, white space in brands?

• 59:37Speaker 06

  I think you could also, um, go after the big boys. I mean, we did that with Happy Dad.

• 59:41John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 59:42Speaker 06

  You know, like, we went after some-

• 59:43John Coogan?

  White Claw, High Noon, right?

• 59:44Speaker 06

  White Claw, High Noon, the big beer companies who still, to this day, haven't been able to figure it out.

• 59:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:48Speaker 06

  Bud's and Corona's.

• 59:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what, give people a sense of the, it's funny because I think people see Happy Dad everywhere, but maybe don't have a sense of like the scale and, and kind of the velocity even.

• 1:00:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, um, I'll get into that. I want to just answer this one real quick. So I think the big thing you have to do is look at a category that could use disruption. Um, yeah, with Happy Dad, you know, we looked at, you know, back in 2021, um, people wanted better for you drinks. But most of the better for you drinks that were coming out, like the White Claws are truly were really catering towards women. So it wasn't necessarily cool to drink a hard seltzer if you were at a party or um, whatnot. So we said, all right, so how do we go after this category? But bring a different demographic into the category.

• 1:00:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:00:37Speaker 06

  And I think that's where you could also go back where we were just talking about was, you know, even getting into these other spaces, whether it's popcorn, pizza. How do you bring a new uh, customer into that category, which is what we did with Happy Dad? We partnered with Nelk and we said, all right, now how do we make this cool amongst men? The branding of it, um, you know, the liquid in it is, you know, one gram of sugar, 100 calories a can. It's a seltzer, it's a seltzer. But then when you look at the Happy Dad can, which I'm surprised you guys don't have here, you have every single brand in that fridge.

• 1:01:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, we don't, we don't.

• 1:01:07Speaker 06

  You have my boys company.

• 1:01:08Jordi Hays?

  We actually don't, we don't.

• 1:01:09John Coogan?

  We don't drink a word.

• 1:01:10Jordi Hays?

  No alcohol in the champagne infrequently, but uh, you guys.

• 1:01:14Speaker 06

  This is light alcohol. We could send some here.

• 1:01:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:16Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:01:17Speaker 06

  We'll send some here.

• 1:01:17John Coogan?

  I'm sure the boys would take you up on it on a Friday.

• 1:01:20Jordi Hays?

  On a Friday, Friday afternoon.

• 1:01:21Speaker 06

  Um, yeah, not a Monday 12pm.

• 1:01:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, a little bit early.

• 1:01:25Speaker 06

  No, no. Um, but yeah, I think that's what we did. We said, all right, how do we uh, how do we look at this seltzer category? And how do we bring males into it? Uh, the branding of the product looks like a beer, feels like a beer. It's in, it's in, in regular 12 ounce can. Um, you know, doing those tours amongst, you know, um, different bars, towns, or even, you know, different colleges. And just catering towards the male audience. So I think you could get into these different businesses if you could bring a different profile uh, person into that category. Whether you want to go against Unilevers or Nestle's or in our case, you know, Coors and Anheuser-Busch and Constellation Brands or Boston Beer. So.

• 1:02:07Jordi Hays?

  Talk about, um, I think it, it's a lot of people that have like a creator audience will think, okay, I have a bunch of people that watch my content online. I'm going to create a product that I can sell to them via e-commerce. That seems like it hasn't really been the approach to date for shots and full send and Nelk broadly.

• 1:02:30John Coogan?

  Feels like you went retail early.

• 1:02:31Jordi Hays?

  Retail first, basically.

• 1:02:34John Coogan?

  You kind of have to do with alcohol, though, right?

• 1:02:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, alcohol, yeah, alcohol, but I mean, in general, like, a lot of people would say, okay, Nelk should launch a product that they can sell online to as many people as possible, and going retail first is just a lot harder.

• 1:02:46Speaker 06

  These are all live?

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, these are live.

• 1:02:47Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Rigob says, "Bro, this guy is one of the most legendary managers of all time."

• 1:02:53Speaker 06

  What is it, it's on X or Discord? What is it?

• 1:02:54Jordi Hays?

  It's all, we get all the chats into one.

• 1:02:57John Coogan?

  Uh, YouTube's the primary chat place.

• 1:03:00Speaker 06

  Okay, cool.

• 1:03:01John Coogan?

  You can say what up to them.

• 1:03:04Speaker 06

  So, yeah, Happy Dad, we can't sell online, unfortunately. I mean, through third parties.

• 1:03:09Jordi Hays?

  But even if you could sell online, it'd mainly be marketing because selling liquid online is not super profitable.

• 1:03:16Speaker 06

  Yes, yeah, that's something we talked about, too. You know, we've looked into getting to other categories of beverages, and, yeah, selling, you know, energy drinks or water, it's very expensive, you know, even you look at, like, Amazon and all the different, you know, Amazon fulfillment center fees and all that stuff, it gets pretty pricey, but, yeah, I think the one thing I do, I don't want to say with Happy Dad, you know, the challenge has been, my expertise has been online marketing my whole life, you know, marketing a YouTube channel, a YouTube video, a Spotify link, Instagram, Snapchat.

• 1:03:56Speaker 06

  The challenge with Happy Dad has been, we can't do that, because, you know, I mean, you could buy it on GoPro for Instacart, third parties, but, yeah, there's no Shopify, there's no Amazon store.

• 1:04:08Speaker 06

  But it's also, and I got this bit of advice from Dana White when we first launched the product. He said, you know, with Happy Dad, there's a multi-tier system where you have to use a third-party distributor to distribute the product.

• 1:04:22Speaker 06

  He said that distributor, you know, this is back in 2021, he told me that distributor is going to want to own the relationships with all the retailers. He said, I'm gonna give you and your brother Sam a bit of advice. Don't let any third party own that relationship. Treat these retailers like you've treated these platforms. So like, we have like the best relationships with YouTube and Snap and Meta and Spotify, Apple. You know, all the different platforms. Uh, he said, treat Walmart like you treat YouTube. Treat Krogers like you treat Meta. Treat seven.

• 1:04:53Jordi Hays?

  So even if you're selling through distributor, you're still building a relationship with the end retailer. And like spending time with them and you're not, you don't care that at the end of the day when they're signing a purchase order.

• 1:05:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, then we tell the distributor like here. We actually did the work. We, we, the Circle K guys, we spent the weekend with them, great guys. They're in, they want to bring all these different SKUs into your store. Here you go. They're like, well, you know, we know people, no, no, no. It's a done deal. Like you just deliver for us, please.

• 1:05:20John Coogan?

  How, how do you think about the, are you familiar with the term NIM cell, right? Niche internet micro celebrity. This idea that you can be running a profitable business full time. Like have a, you know, the thousand true fans, have a business, but not be so broad that you're like a Tom Cruise level celebrity. And there's been this like trend of like smaller and smaller nichefication. Like I know someone who has, I think they have a million followers on YouTube. I can't even remember his name because he's so like niche, just and all he does is talk about Notion. Using Notion to manage your life. And he sells Notion templates and he makes a fortune.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  And I'm wondering about how you think about, um, like the smallest brand opportunity. Whether you think like you have to be able to go national at some point, or there's like room for, uh, smaller, more niche creators to still create some sort of brand that breaks through. Or like what the trade offs might be for a creator that has a really, really dedicated audience of like 50,000 people. So you're never going to be in Kroger with that product and really, or they're not going to really bootstrap Kroger. Unless, unless your audience is like, you know, VP it. Unless you're like the, the vice president of purchasing podcast or something like that.

• 1:06:40Speaker 06

  Well, I think, um, you know, I always say, I mean. Nelk was very niche at the time, right? I mean, they've obviously become more of a household name since.

• 1:06:49John Coogan?

  Just like in that college demo?

• 1:06:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, they were, most people, when we launched Happy Dad, we said, hey, we partnered with the Nelk Boys, we're launching a seltzer. And I would say, uh, nine out of 10, maybe 10 out of 10 retailers say, who the hell's Nelk?

• 1:07:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:02Speaker 06

  You know, um, yeah, so that, that was, you know, they were niche. I think my thing is, I, I, I don't ever look at the size of the creator, whether it's someone as small as what you were referring to, or Taylor Swift. Um, you know, um, if the product is great, it'll sell itself.

• 1:07:20John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:20Speaker 06

  I, I've always said this is a fan of any creator, influencer, celebrity will try anything once.

• 1:07:28John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:28Speaker 06

  Now, the question is, will they buy it again?

• 1:07:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:30Speaker 06

  They will buy, they will try it once.

• 1:07:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:32Speaker 06

  Um, no matter what it is.

• 1:07:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:34Speaker 06

  You know, there's celebrities have launched ice creams and they've come and gone. The biggest celebrity, I don't want to say their names, but, you know, the biggest celebrities have launched ice creams and, um, yeah.

• 1:07:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a, a, a recent celebrity brand that didn't work was Travis, it was Travis Scott's seltzer company.

• 1:07:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's launched at the same time we did.

• 1:07:51Jordi Hays?

  And, and I think that, uh, you would think that Travis is enough of a superstar that anything he did and put his brand behind would, would at least get to like-

• 1:08:01John Coogan?

  Can he pull like a million people into Fortnite to watch him play?

• 1:08:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:03John Coogan?

  Like, he is massive.

• 1:08:05Jordi Hays?

  That might make it hard to sell alcohol.

• 1:08:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe, maybe.

• 1:08:07Jordi Hays?

  Pulling, uh, but anyways, being, you know, ha, being a global superstar and launching a product does not guarantee success. And I think what you're saying is like, the actual quality of the product matters a ton.

• 1:08:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I always look, so Travis Scott's seltzer didn't do good, but like his collabs with Nike are fire, you know?

• 1:08:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:26Speaker 06

  People go crazy with that. Yeah, but, you know what I mean? Like, you know, and, and that's the thing, Travis Scott's not gonna stop, but yeah, I mean, the seltzer's a good example. It launched literally the same time. I think it launched a month before us.

• 1:08:36Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 1:08:36Speaker 06

  Um, yeah, so-

• 1:08:37Jordi Hays?

  And just wildly different trajectory.

• 1:08:39Speaker 06

  It just, it wasn't, it wasn't good, you know? Um, it, it wasn't good. He had the right idea of bringing a new demo into the category. Like, he was going, like, the branding was cool. Like, I remember it was coming out, we were ready to go. We're like, shit. We're, okay, we're this, toast, you know, like?

• 1:08:56John Coogan?

  Head to head against the bay.

• 1:08:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, I remember, I was like- That's a rap on us. But you know, but then we then it was it had just come out and we tried one, right? Never mind, we're gonna win. You know, that's all we had to do is try it.

• 1:09:10John Coogan?

  What do you think about taste, not just literal taste of the beverage or the product, but just taste broadly? Is that something that a creator can actually bootstrap or do they just have it? Do they have to have it innately? I feel like I've run into creators that have had incredible audiences and they've even kind of picked the right category. But I taste their product and I'm just like, this doesn't taste good. Like you just didn't nail it and maybe it tastes good to you, but it doesn't taste good to enough people that I think people will stick around and this will actually have, you know, exponential takeoff. Is that something creators can just like brute force? Or do you think that they need to partner with somebody?

• 1:09:50Speaker 06

  They need to find the right partner that that has the expertise that that's not gonna settle. That's not gonna be excited about the creator. Not gonna say like, you know what, you're so and so like whatever you throw your name on is gonna work. You know, like they're excited. There's there's been people, I've seen it in the world of different people I've worked with. They just get excited and they're so excited and and sometimes they get celebrity excited where like they're just like, you know, like I'm so excited to be in a room with them. I don't want to piss them off. I just want to go and I want to go tell my friends that I'm partner, you know, I'm partners with this person. And, you know, and that's always the the kiss of death is when you don't have the right partner who doesn't want to be honest with you and is just more excited to have your name and go be able to tell some people

• 1:10:35Speaker 06

  that they're in partnership with you.

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  Do you think there's any, I don't know if it's risk to your business or just like like potential future where one of the major companies like AB InBev or Unilever just figures out that they could potentially go to the next generation of incredibly high growth creators and say,

• 1:10:57John Coogan?

  Look, normally, we would just buy ads from you, but that doesn't give you any economic upside. So instead, let's do a joint venture. Let's make it 50/50. We will handle all the logistics, all the capital. So instead of just raising 20% dilution from a VC, you're also getting our supply chain. You're also getting our distribution, but you're going to be the face of this brand. And instead of just, oh, you're in a Super Bowl ad, here's a million dollar check. You get real upside in the performance of this. And then maybe we spin this out, maybe we buy the whole thing at some point. But they're just getting in much earlier to a more complete extent. Do you think that that's a model that we could see happen in the future? Or do you think there's something about the big companies that just don't want to do it?

• 1:11:38Jordi Hays?

  I feel like all these big CPG companies have innovation divisions whose job is kind of like-

• 1:11:42John Coogan?

  They certainly spend a lot of money.

• 1:11:43Jordi Hays?

  They spend a lot of money, like kicking these ideas around and they'll make a bunch of different concepts. And you just don't hear them ever going from zero to one and breaking out. And I feel like they're also in a position where they can sit back and be like, let's let the market create hits. And we'll just-

• 1:11:59John Coogan?

  And just cherry pick.

• 1:12:00Jordi Hays?

  Cherry pick the best one.

• 1:12:01Speaker 06

  Well, you know, I don't know why we're still talking about Cacti. I've been reading comments about Cacti.

• 1:12:07John Coogan?

  Cacti.

• 1:12:08Speaker 06

  But Cacti was that. Cacti was a partnership with Anheuser-Busch.

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  Oh, no way.

• 1:12:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was exactly what you said.

• 1:12:13John Coogan?

  So maybe that was-

• 1:12:14Speaker 06

  I don't know what the exact split was, but it was owned by, co-owned by Travis Scott and Anheuser-Busch, distributed by Anheuser-Busch.

• 1:12:22John Coogan?

  Interesting. You would think that that would be, I totally understand why you were so worried, because that feels like they have all the advantages against you. And yet, maybe they lack the entrepreneurial talent and like, they need to win. You needed to win.

• 1:12:32Jordi Hays?

  Big problem here is I don't know the actual guy who is running Cacti.

• 1:12:36John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:12:37Jordi Hays?

  It's like some person in a big organization. Meanwhile, like Happy Dad, regardless of how great Nelk is, how great the product is, like, I'm sure Happy Dad, like, wouldn't be a hit if you weren't, like, step by step, like, making plays.

• 1:12:50John Coogan?

  And it's just like-

• 1:12:50Jordi Hays?

  And betting your personal brand.

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, personal brand. And also, like, you probably have taken unlimited phone calls on Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday night. Whereas, like, if you're just some corp dev person at a big company, like, are you really going to push that extra mile, take that extra flight?

• 1:13:06Jordi Hays?

  It's aggressive marketing too, right?

• 1:13:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:09Speaker 06

  You know, having different podcasts and having the placement, you know, like, you know how many of those podcasts with Nelk?

• 1:13:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:14Speaker 06

  I've been there, like, while they're interviewing, putting the happy dad right next to everybody, creating towers. Like, when they interviewed Elon, like, we were struggling finding happy dads in Austin. We had to, like, delay him to from coming just to make sure that, uh, that, that we had product in there. I was like, he's, we're not going live until there's happy dads in front of him, you know, so, like, you know, those are the things.

• 1:13:35John Coogan?

  Doing things that don't scale.

• 1:13:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, like the grassroots, you know, type of things as well. So I think that's the other problem. I actually think partnering, well, also, like, there's no innovation on their side, too, on those big brands. I think that's where they need people like us or you guys, like, you know, forward thinking. There's not, no guy in a boardroom is gonna think of, you know, Unilever or whatever is gonna think like, oh, wow, like, let's build this with Taylor Swift. Now, they'll, they'll.

• 1:14:01Jordi Hays?

  Or, or I think this ingredient that's not popular today is gonna be super popular in five years.

• 1:14:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the energy drink companies right, right now, like, none of them, how come none of the big energy drink brands, Red Bull, Monster, Celsius, have come out with a stevia or monk fruit, um, uh, sweetener replacement, right? Like, they're just not thinking about it, but somebody will and will end up selling their company to one of those three.

• 1:14:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:27Speaker 06

  You know, or, or, you know, Dr. Pepper.

• 1:14:30Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, give us a lay of the land of like the platforms today and your view from TikTok, uh, you know, potentially going through, uh, some type of acquisition or restructuring, uh, to YouTube, to Spotify? Like, how are you advising the, the creators and, and, uh, stuck kind of like talent that you work with on, um, getting the most out of the different platforms?

• 1:14:52Speaker 06

  Um, well, this will probably give me trouble on this podcast, cause I know everyone from all these platforms probably watched this, but I'm a YouTube-first guy. I, I think, you know, uh, I'm a YouTube-first guy for, uh, video. Um, when live, I'm a X, you know, I like X for live a lot, um, but, you know.

• 1:15:14Jordi Hays?

  Which is crazy, because I think they have like one person that works on the live product.

• 1:15:19Speaker 06

  That's my buddy.

• 1:15:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, an absolute legend.

• 1:15:21John Coogan?

  But it's a special, it's a special thing that was, I mean, certainly underutilized, like, X live streams were basically. You watch the SpaceX launch there and then you get off.

• 1:15:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:15:30John Coogan?

  And that was it. And now there's a number of shows, ours is one of them, that's put X live streaming front and center and kind of realized that no one was really taking that seriously and like, it's a pretty decent product.

• 1:15:39Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, no, I love, I love YouTube. I love for the discoverability.

• 1:15:43John Coogan?

  Totally. You can actually go viral, get millions of views. If you have good content, you show up there, it's gonna get shown. It's gonna get seen and, and it has a longer tail, longer half-life. Like you can let a video simmer for a month and it can just grow to a million views. On X, it's gotta be like that day or nothing, right? So it's a little bit different.

• 1:16:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, we talked about that when we first met was like the clips, like your clips. Yeah, like even this interview, someone's probably gonna watch in two years, three years. I mean, I get it now from older interviews. People say, hey, I watched your interview. I don't, I don't do a lot of interviews. I do maybe two or three a year. But like, you know, say, hey, I watched that interview. I'm like, which one? Like I did that three years ago, you know, where the discoverability is not quite there on anywhere else. Um, Instagram, TikTok and whatnot. So that's why I really like YouTube.

• 1:16:26John Coogan?

  YouTube's like the library, for sure.

• 1:16:27Jordi Hays?

  Spotify feels like they're trying to, to solve discoverability, but, but it seems like they have very limited inventory in terms of how it shows up. They have that one placement that's like on the homepage that I see every now and then. It's not super dialed in yet. Would you see them ever doing live video?

• 1:16:46Speaker 06

  I think they have to. I don't know if they are. I haven't heard anything, but I think they, they kind of have to. I mean, live video, I mean, you guys, you guys actually, like you guys are gonna change the game with live. There's gonna be a lot of copycats, like after what you guys have been doing, especially on X, like you guys are gonna change the game. It's gonna be a lot of people now because of you guys and your guys' growth has been insane. Um, let me ask you guys something though.

• 1:17:07John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:17:07Speaker 06

  Because you guys talk to a lot of, um, different AI, you know, all these different, um, L M, L M M's. Um, what do you think they're gonna do with social? Like what's Chat GPT or, I mean, Grok, I guess has X, but like Chat GPT or Proplexity.

• 1:17:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think OpenAI is gonna allow you to share. There was already a share button in Chat GPT. So if I go, I mean, this happened just earlier today. I was pulling up some research and I shared it with somebody on my team, shared a link. He can see not just the result, but what I prompted, what I followed up, have a whole discussion. And I think that people, the most basic form of sharing within an OpenAI social network, if you call it that, would just be. I go and explore a topic and then I can share it out and you can just see what I'm interested in. So I did a whole deep research report I fired off. It took twenty minutes to pull up all this stuff on the new CEOs of Oracle. And if you follow me and you're interested in Oracle, well, I just saved you twenty minutes because I did the deep research.

• 1:18:06John Coogan?

  Now, you don't have to do one and you could say, oh, well, if John's interested in this, John's acting as a curator on top of the infinite knowledge engine that is ChatGPT. And I think that would be kind of like the, the, the, the, the first like text based nerdy social network that could sort of bootstrap. I can think of a few people where I want to see what they're searching as they, as long as they opt in to share, I don't want to see everything.

• 1:18:30Jordi Hays?

  My, my read is that the L L M's are a threat to the social platforms, but not because they're going to launch like social products. But because time that you're spending with an L L M or spending with like a voice model, if somebody's becoming best friends with some model. We saw this with like ChatGPT four O when OpenAI announced G P T five and deprecated the model. The ChatGPT Reddit threat forum was just going crazy, people just freaking out, being like, I feel like you just killed my best friend.

• 1:19:02John Coogan?

  They're hanging out with it.

• 1:19:03Jordi Hays?

  And so it's less that I see the, you know, the OpenAI's or the anthropics of the world actually competing in social. Because if you're, you, even if you're using AI to create media, right, using it to create images, video, et cetera, or like stories, whatever it is. You're still better off going to YouTube, the platform that has a massive, massive audience and sharing that content there. I backed a, um, I backed a, a social platform years ago that, that pivoted and is now doing some, doing enterprise SaaS. And they had got, they were building a, a, let's, let's hear for SaaS.

• 1:19:37John Coogan?

  You like SaaS?

• 1:19:38Jordi Hays?

  We love SaaS here.

• 1:19:39John Coogan?

  To SaaS, baby.

• 1:19:41Jordi Hays?

  But, but they, they built a basically Twitter, but just for, just for anon's.

• 1:19:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:47Jordi Hays?

  And it was cool because people that didn't have an anon could go on there and just like start like sharing and create this whole kind of new personality. And they got like some traction, but then people just realized like, hey, if I'm like, if I want to post under this identity, I'm still better off just going to X.

• 1:20:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:03Jordi Hays?

  And sharing there. So they never reached a, a critical mass. And so I just think they are already competing with the social platforms, but in, um. Entirely entirely new ways. So you could imagine a world where like somebody's AI friend is like generating them content. That's that's in in chat GPT, for example, or in Gemini, or in one of these apps. And just saying like, hey, I thought you'd like this. And it's like a video that the model generated itself.

• 1:20:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:28Jordi Hays?

  For the user because it knows the user so well. And so but that's different than like a UGC platform. So.

• 1:20:34John Coogan?

  The other place that I think the models will eat off of YouTube's plate a little bit is in knowledge retrieval. So I gave that example of like, I wanted to learn about the new CEO of Oracle.

• 1:20:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:44John Coogan?

  And there was a time when I would go to YouTube and pull up, I might still pull up an interview with them, but there was also a whole series of channels that were just sort of like the history of Microsoft. And you could go there. I ran one of those channels for a while. I was doing sort of like these these video essays. And and you can see that you can just hit chat GPT, get a full script and just have it read it to you. And that will eventually be instantiated with pictures and you'll be able to watch it. And so a lot of the, you know, how to knowledge retrieval tasks that happen on YouTube. How do I fix my, you know, my washing machine? That people will migrate over potentially. And I but I wouldn't necessarily call that like social media, but it was certainly like content creation.

• 1:21:26John Coogan?

  And so chat GPT is certainly like eating off of that. And yeah, and Gemini too, because Gemini can scrape all the YouTube data. And then they can actually point you, hey, watch this. They're already doing this in search years ago, where you say, how do I fix this particular washing machine? It says, go to this video and go to minute three. Go to minute three, because you don't want to skip the intro, click right here. And this is exactly your problem. Because they talk about five different.

• 1:21:48Jordi Hays?

  Have you gotten a bunch of crazy pitches from like AI companies that want to like use use the the Nalk Boys for like? Every hour. Every hour? Every hour. Yeah. Well, I every. And not a lot of not none of them are that compelling, right? No, nothing. Nothing. Which is. Yeah, my LinkedIn is.

• 1:22:05John Coogan?

  What do you think about what do you think about influencer led software companies? There was like a story, I think Mr. Beast was talking about this a little bit, that he was thinking about doing a mobile game studio. And that felt like potentially an extremely valuable. Thing if he can do it, but making a great mobile game is really, really hard. I was on the My First Million podcast pitching.

• 1:22:28Speaker 06

  That's how we started. That was our first business.

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  Really mobile games, no way. I was pitching Beast VPN because if you look at who's buying the most ads on YouTube, it's always the VPN providers, right?

• 1:22:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:22:38John Coogan?

  And why is that? International audience, you put a video on YouTube, people are watching it all over the world. And so anyone can use a VPN anywhere they are, anywhere they're in the world. It's much harder if you're like, yeah, I'm only available in stores in America. Well, you just got 30% of your audience or something if you're just a broad channel. And so I was always sort of bullish on the idea of creators launching software products. But at the same time, software is really, really hard to get right and actually build a great product. And so I understand why.

• 1:23:05Jordi Hays?

  It's not something that you can build like once. Or in CBG, you go through these product development cycles.

• 1:23:10John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:23:11Jordi Hays?

  You create a hit product.

• 1:23:11John Coogan?

  And then you scale it.

• 1:23:12Jordi Hays?

  Sell that a billion, a billion times.

• 1:23:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:14Speaker 06

  I think there's, um, I think there's some plays in software. I think about it a lot because we also have so much data on everything. Like we have, you know, from our Shopify stores because of our, our, our merch business. And this is why, yeah, it kills me that we can't sell Happy Dad online. Cause you know how much data I would have.

• 1:23:36John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:23:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think we just went through, I don't even remember. I should have had some of our numbers, but you know, I think like a couple hundred million can sales. Couple hundred million.

• 1:23:48Jordi Hays?

  Watch out.

• 1:23:53Speaker 06

  We got more stats. I wonder if my brother's in this chat, he can send us some, uh, my brother was supposed to watch. But, um.

• 1:24:02John Coogan?

  Keeps ringing.

• 1:24:02Jordi Hays?

  Still rings.

• 1:24:03John Coogan?

  It's a good gong.

• 1:24:04Speaker 06

  This is the best show. You guys are crushing, man. I was so excited when you guys hit me up. I was so, I don't like interviews.

• 1:24:10Jordi Hays?

  You found us early.

• 1:24:10Speaker 06

  I did find you early. Yes. Yeah. And then you guys have been blowing up. Jordan Golden, I talk about that all the time. Like we're always sharing clips.

• 1:24:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. You know how many times people have tried to sell me your handles? Mine?

• 1:24:22Jordi Hays?

  Oh, John gets hit up.

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  I'm John Coogan. You have at John and people always hit me up, oh, I'll get you at John. And I'm like, I know John J E D. I know you don't have his.

• 1:24:30Speaker 06

  I have, I have at John on YouTube.

• 1:24:32John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:24:33Speaker 06

  I've had John on Snapchat.

• 1:24:34John Coogan?

  Is that just because you're the first person on these platforms? Or is that, is that you, you find him early and you, you get the right hand?

• 1:24:41Speaker 06

  I, I wasn't the first.

• 1:24:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:24:44Speaker 06

  But I was the second.

• 1:24:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:24:46Speaker 06

  So like, you know, these platforms, like I got one, my Twitter one, like I think whoever got it and whatever your Twitter went.

• 1:24:52John Coogan?

  Two thousand and seven or something?

• 1:24:54Speaker 06

  I think like someone got the name, didn't use it.

• 1:24:57John Coogan?

  And then you were like.

• 1:24:57Speaker 06

  Within a year, like, you know, cause I think the rule is on some of these platforms.

• 1:25:02John Coogan?

  Using it.

• 1:25:02Speaker 06

  No one's used it. If it's inactive for a hundred and eighty days, um, that includes no one logging in. So literally someone got the name and said, this ain't for me and bounced. And then I went and claimed the name right away. So those names I got within like the first year. Uh, so I wasn't, I was never the first, but I was always the second.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:25:18Speaker 06

  Um, so yeah, that was like my mission last like fifteen years.

• 1:25:23Jordi Hays?

  You've done fantastic. Unite, unite the great houses.

• 1:25:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, TikTok, at John, all of that.

• 1:25:27John Coogan?

  You're at John on TikTok too.

• 1:25:28Speaker 06

  Every platform.

• 1:25:29John Coogan?

  Every.

• 1:25:29Speaker 06

  Every platform. Kick, I don't even use kick, but I just got it.

• 1:25:32John Coogan?

  Hey, hey, you gotta, you gotta log in every one hundred and seventy nine days.

• 1:25:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:36Speaker 06

  You know what?

• 1:25:36John Coogan?

  Do not leave that.

• 1:25:37Speaker 06

  I actually almost lost.

• 1:25:39John Coogan?

  Oh, you did?

• 1:25:39Speaker 06

  One of them. I forgot which one for that reason. I think my TikTok I almost lost. Yeah. So, yeah.

• 1:25:44John Coogan?

  Never log off, never touch.

• 1:25:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's, there's an army of like high school kids that are like, no, like, oh, I'm gonna claim this.

• 1:25:50Speaker 06

  Black market. Yeah. They always, they always try to resell me my names.

• 1:25:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:25:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, or they, they get like some of our names or like, they get like at Nelk, you know, cause we did, we got at Nelk on Instagram. And, but they use Nelk Boys and now they tried it like, and we, we never logged into Nelk and someone gets it and tries to like extort me. All right, but listen, if you're watching, you're gonna try to extort me. It'll never happen. Like, never.

• 1:26:12Jordi Hays?

  You're not, not gonna be fun. What's, uh, what's going on in, in music? Cause you work with, you work with some artists, like what, what is the state of things? How's the industry reacting to? I mean, it still feels like-

• 1:26:24Speaker 06

  I mean, the only person I know in music that I care for is Justin Bieber. And he's crushing it.

• 1:26:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, new album.

• 1:26:29Jordi Hays?

  Has he, do you feel like, and I don't know how much you can speak to this, but it seems like the new way to make a hit song is you think about the hook. Like, what hook is going to go viral in a Reels, TikTok format and then build the song around that? Is Justin a big enough star that he does, he can just make his music the old fashioned way? Or is there still this kind of-

• 1:26:51John Coogan?

  Do you do like one for the album?

• 1:26:52Jordi Hays?

  You kind of have to, yeah.

• 1:26:54John Coogan?

  One for me.

• 1:26:55Speaker 06

  Someone said that you have John, at John in the Bible.

• 1:27:00Speaker 06

  That's funny.

• 1:27:03Jordi Hays?

  Is he John from the Bible? The original?

• 1:27:08Speaker 06

  So, one thing with Bieber is I have no say or input in the creative. But if, what I could tell you, just by knowing him, if that's a trendy thing other people are doing, I could assure you, he's probably not.

• 1:27:22Jordi Hays?

  Going in other directions.

• 1:27:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, like, I don't think he needs or even thinks, or he probably even knows that's a thing. Like, I think he's, when he's in the creative mode, he's in a different, on a different level, so.

• 1:27:32John Coogan?

  Can you take me through some of the other growth hacks that artists in music are doing? I heard about this one where, because of the nature of Spotify, the fact that you can fit unlimited songs on an album. For a while, artists were just shipping like forty-five songs on an album, just throwing it up, seeing what the algorithm likes. There seems like there's been a whole bunch of different, make the song shorter, make the song longer. You've seen this on YouTube where, for a while, the meta was like, you know, ten minutes because you get two ad reads. Then it was like twenty minutes, then it was fifty minutes, and it just got longer and longer. Like, the algorithm does shape the content a little bit. Is that happening in music?

• 1:28:06Speaker 06

  I don't know, because the only person I-

• 1:28:07Jordi Hays?

  He only works with Justin Bieber.

• 1:28:09John Coogan?

  Who doesn't care.

• 1:28:09Speaker 06

  No, he's just like, doesn't think about that. It's not even a conversation.

• 1:28:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's important to admit, because some people will work with like a massive creator, and then they'll think that they're God's gift to the algorithm, because they just worked with a superstar, but really, that just kind of warps their-

• 1:28:23Speaker 06

  What I just advise these artists, you know, what I tell everybody, quite honestly, whether you're an artist, or podcaster, or influencers, like, make a product, you know, like, I think, but, but don't, going back to what we were first talking about, don't make it just any product. Like, think of something that could use disruption, find the right people, and make it. Like, I truly- Mr. Beeson, I talked about this. He said he didn't agree with me, but I, you know, I truly believe every creator of any influence should own some sort of product or be a partner in one. You know, I think right now, you know, these retail stores, what I, from what I've

• 1:29:06Speaker 06

  seen, and now with America going healthy and, you know, people just being more conscious of what they're eating, you know, I think, you know, a lot of these shelf spaces in these retail stores could use something new and different, you know, like these guys are doing it.

• 1:29:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, Chris Williamson, Brutonic.

• 1:29:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, you know, they're doing it. You know, I think, and I don't think just because a big player in the game is own, you know what I do know is when nicotine's a good example.

• 1:29:37John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:29:39Speaker 06

  What is this, like eighty percent of the market share is Zen?

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:42Speaker 06

  Retailers don't like that. They don't like when a big company owns the category. Yeah, they get bossed around. They get bossed around, you know, they, on price, on placement, on everything, like, you know, so it's like, don't be afraid just because Zen owns eighty percent, or Nestle owns ninety percent of the frozen foods section, like, don't be afraid to go against them. The retailers will actually support you.

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:04Speaker 06

  So if you've got influence, you know, just think of building a product, find the right people, don't settle, and go and go give these big guys a run for their money.

• 1:30:13John Coogan?

  On the influencer side, what do you think the, is there an optimal structure, like, because you could, it's the Nelk Boys, that's plural, there's multiple characters in the world that are promoting the same product. There's also single influencers who, you know, take a, you know, huge slug and it's their brand, the personal person, singular. And then there's other brands that say, okay, yeah, we're a group of founders, we're building a product, we're gonna go and give significant equity to five influencers, ten influencers. And then you have big brands that are saying, hey, we're gonna go spend with five hundred influencers on day one to try and promote this. Like, is there a natural structure that you think is best?

• 1:30:54Speaker 06

  Something else I think about a lot, too.

• 1:30:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:57Speaker 06

  Now, so now, we keep talking about, if you're an influencer, go find the right product, create it, drop it. Now it's the marketing of it, too.

• 1:31:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:04Speaker 06

  Right? Like... Like Chris does not flex this all the time, right? Like, we know, because we're in your business, and this is Chris's business. But there's people in my office that drink this, and I'm like, oh, you watch Chris Williamson? They're like, who's that?

• 1:31:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:15Speaker 06

  Like, we just like this drink. Oh, yeah, there's people in my office.

• 1:31:17Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be, you gotta be, the cultivating the ability to promote your products aggressively. Like, this is why Dylan on our team is such a huge addition. We just hired.

• 1:31:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, I met him.

• 1:31:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's a different, we have two Dylan's.

• 1:31:34John Coogan?

  We have two Dylan's.

• 1:31:34Jordi Hays?

  Dylan Abreskado is our new president, but he is like, has this uncanny ability to like, ask, go for these extra asks and, you know, get, like, he got the Journal to write about him joining TBPN, right? A podcast hiring a president after 11 months.

• 1:31:55John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:31:55Jordi Hays?

  It's an interesting story, but it takes a lot to like, go out and make that happen. Whereas Chris Williamson, like, is not promoting this at the level that you are. He's not holding up Elon, you know, Musk, being like, we're not starting this show until we can get Happy Dad on the set, right? And that, you kind of, even, I think, something I've realized throughout my career is like, even products and people that have incredible momentum, like, still keep that, like, focus on like, no, we need to keep pushing, we need to keep promoting the thing that we're doing over and over and over, and it never stops.

• 1:32:28Speaker 06

  Well, so let me tell you why Chris is not. Because I've spoken with him and his team. It's a mistake that we made with Happy Dad, and, you know, I know I shared what I used to do with Happy Dad, but it's actually something that if I had to do it again, I wouldn't have pushed it so hard. Because what's the point of Chris promoting this right now on here and on every podcast he's on, every podcast he does, if it's not available everywhere?

• 1:32:53John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:32:54Speaker 06

  Right? Like, you know how many people we sent into that category when we launched in 2021? But just two months ago, we just launched our 50th state. It took us four years to launch nationwide. We just launched Utah. How many people, for four years, saw Happy Dad?

• 1:33:07John Coogan?

  I love Nelk, Nelk loves seltzer. I become a White Claw customer. That's a lot.

• 1:33:12Speaker 06

  Exactly. How many, you know how many people, I mean, how many, I mean, we made... I don't want to take full credit for this, but we'd helped make the seltzer category cool amongst men, which led to now it's not as shameful to drink a White Claw now as it was four years ago. High Noon, you know, did a deal with Barstool, you know what I mean? All these things were, you know, so if I were to do it again, I would focus on distribution first and be available everywhere so people don't run to the store and say, hey, do you have Happy Dad here? No, we don't, but we have this, we have that. Well, I'm here, I might as well just get that. Oh, wow, this is good, I'll just become a customer for this brand.

• 1:33:47John Coogan?

  You gotta rewin that.

• 1:33:48Speaker 06

  Happy Dad, yeah, which is nearly impossible. So what they're doing is, because I met with him and his team a few months ago, is they're focused on their distribution. They want to become everywhere, they're available more places now. Um, I don't even, I don't-

• 1:34:02Jordi Hays?

  But it's such a, it's such a chicken and egg thing, because if you're not promoting something aggressively-

• 1:34:06Speaker 06

  Then the retailer's like, why should I? Or Walmart, Walmart's like, wait, what are you doing? I've never heard of you, why? You gotta find that balance, right? Because Walmart did eventually bring us in, because they saw us on all the podcasts and all those things. You gotta find that balance. If you could, if it could be in sync and you could hurry up and build one team that's just doing marketing and one team that's like, hurry up and be available everywhere, whether it's the regular independent liquor store down the street or the thousands of Walmarts, like you've got to not get caught up on the marketing so much. But yeah, find that balance of also like, get the marketing so you could tell why Walmart or 7-Eleven or the independent guy, yeah, I know there's 10,000 other brands out there, but put mine up, get mine and put mine up front too. It's not even like be available, don't, not in a corner. Build me a display up front as well.

• 1:34:52Jordi Hays?

  How do you, uh, how do you advise, uh, the talent that you work with around like reinventing themselves over time? Because I think like Nelk Boys are a good example, like living like kind of a party lifestyle, going from a college lifestyle, young adult, et cetera. Eventually, they're going to get to the point where their own interests are no longer-

• 1:35:11John Coogan?

  I had this question about Mr. Beast, like, is he going to become, he has a very young audience, will he become Mr. Rogers? And, and at 80, he will be still talking to children or young, young adults? Or will he age up and we'll be seeing him makes, make content about being a dad? You know, I- It's such a fork in the road for creative.

• 1:35:28Jordi Hays?

  And I feel like Bieber is a good example.

• 1:35:31Speaker 06

  He's the best example.

• 1:35:32Jordi Hays?

  Who is just like constantly reinventing himself. So the people that listen to him fifteen, it's not like I'm sure. I'm sure teenagers listen to Justin Bieber now, but it's the people that when I was, you know, when I was a teenager, like people listen to Justin Bieber and those same people now are like consuming the music in the like just as much.

• 1:35:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, he's a, he's the best example of aging up, right? Because you know, when, yeah, the person, that thirteen year old girl that loved Justin Bieber thirteen years ago is now twenty six years old, you know, so.

• 1:36:03Jordi Hays?

  Still probably wants to go to the concert.

• 1:36:04Speaker 06

  Still wants to go because his music, right?

• 1:36:06Jordi Hays?

  Now has the ability to like make the personal decision like I can just buy.

• 1:36:09Speaker 06

  But listen to his music now, right? Like his music is like stuff that like adults listen to. He's not making, you know, like, you know, some of these other pop stars that, you know, but let's just say these young pop stars in the past that never really made it because they just stuck to that, you know, making that same song for that thirteen year old over and over and over again. Where like he's making songs for people in their thirties and forties and you know, the way he looks and the way he dresses is, his, his clothing brand now is like, you know, it's not merged. It's actually a fashion brand like, you know, Skylark. So I think that's the thing. So going back with Nelk is the same thing, right? Like the podcast was a big step towards that.

• 1:36:50Speaker 06

  You know, like they, they do the occasional pranks here and there to, you know, stay true to the audience. But most of their stuff is podcasting, serious stuff, um, you know, um, you know, interviewing CEOs, the, you know, uh.

• 1:37:06John Coogan?

  World leaders.

• 1:37:07Speaker 06

  World leaders, yeah. Yes. Yeah. So, you know, so those, you know, all, all that, all those things. So that, you know, why? Because that Nelk fan who loved the pranks ten years ago is now in their late twenties, early thirties. So, um, so I think that's what you've just got to age up, but it's not easy to age up too, right? Cause like, you know, you're gonna have to take the risk of like, is this gonna perform as well? It might not. The podcast was not doing that good at first, right? It just took a while for people to understand, wait, how'd you go from prank videos to podcasting? So, you know, you gotta understand, like, you know, you gotta take that hit, you know? Maybe if you were getting five million views of Nelk video, your podcast might get one million at first. You know, it might get 20% of the views that it had before.

• 1:37:52Speaker 06

  But, you know, eventually it'll pick back up. So, don't, you know, don't panic if you're not getting the views that you used to.

• 1:37:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:58Speaker 06

  So, that's the same thing with Mr. Beast is like, you know, maybe, you know, I don't, yeah. I don't know if I would, what I would do if I were Mr. Beast, because I think what he's doing right now is working. But for the long term, yeah, he's gotta think. And I know he does it, he's thinking about it, because you guys watch him on other podcasts? Like, he drops F-bombs and stuff like that. Like, he's trying to like, figure out how to like, cater towards older people.

• 1:38:21John Coogan?

  Totally, and if you zoom out and you just think about him as like, this generation's game show host. You can see what he's doing with Beast Games on Amazon. And clearly, game shows as a category, what he does really well is not uniquely young. You can do an American Ninja Warrior, you can do Who Wants to be a Millionaire? He'll put his own twist on it, of course, but you can, you can make a game show that has the Mr. Beast touch and production value and pacing and editing and all the things that he does really well for a much older audience.

• 1:38:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, he could probably be a Brian Seacrest, like, way bigger than Brian Seacrest.

• 1:38:53John Coogan?

  Totally, yeah, yeah, yeah, he could definitely get there.

• 1:38:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:55John Coogan?

  When you think of, like, these IRL activations, it feels like Pat McAfee's done WWE, Logan Paul's done WWE. There's something interesting about when these online, online influencers, these people that you only see between the screen, like, wind up going and doing something live. Podcasts often go on the road, like, how thoughtful are you about that these days?

• 1:39:23Speaker 06

  I think, um, well, you're talking about Logan Paul being in the WWE or and Paul's that being on the W.

• 1:39:28John Coogan?

  Uh, just Logan Paul like fought in WWE and he does boxing, right?

• 1:39:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:39:33John Coogan?

  And so, and so there's this something interesting about like, like he can be so big online, but there's something that makes you even bigger when you go into something that's legacy or something that's, there's something that makes it more real. I mean, Jordy gave the example of us going in the Wall Street Journal and, and like, that's very much like us crossing, crossing over into a different world almost. And it feels like that's something that creators need to be thoughtful about, but there's maybe something still underrated there if you can get it right. Similar to launching a great brand, if you can have like, what is the interaction with the fans or the people who are just meeting you for the first time in the real world that then can become something that makes you more of an institution than just something that they see on their screen.

• 1:40:15Speaker 06

  Well, I think with Logan and WWE, I think that's a really good example of like, he entered this platform. Well, one, you've got to be good at it. Like it has to make sense, which in my opinion, I think it makes sense for Logan. Like, I think it's hilarious.

• 1:40:27John Coogan?

  So funny, right?

• 1:40:28Speaker 06

  I think it's so funny. I can't get enough of him and his WWE content.

• 1:40:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:32Speaker 06

  And then you got to think like, what is my core thing and is it going to help that? Like in his thing, you know, if you were to ask Logan Paul, I have never asked him this, but I'm sure if we did, you know, what, what matters to you most is his online presence, right? Like his YouTube, his podcast and, and Prime.

• 1:40:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:50Speaker 06

  So like, does going into the WWE help the core businesses? And I think it does. I think it's kept him relevant on YouTube. I think it's definitely helped Prime. So if, if it, if it's helping the core thing, and I think the same thing with you guys and Wall Street Journal, does Wall Street Journal help this versus like leaving this to do Wall Street Journal?

• 1:41:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:41:13Speaker 06

  You know, like if it, if it helps this platform and brings more validation to this show and more eyeballs and awareness to this show and all the things you guys have done with this show. So you guys had Zuckerberg last week? I haven't watched it yet, but like, I thought it was a joke. I was like, wait, did they use him for?

• 1:41:27John Coogan?

  We had him sign a gong.

• 1:41:29Speaker 06

  I was like, whoa. And I watched like 10 seconds. I didn't have time to watch the whole thing, but I want to watch. Like, whoa, they had Zuckerberg. That's crazy.

• 1:41:35Jordi Hays?

  How do you advise your talent on startup investing, private markets investing? Because I feel like this can be a good way for talent to just like light millions of dollars on fire if they're not careful, but at the same time. If they're really strategic about it, they can end up, you know, getting access to the best investment opportunities in the world.

• 1:41:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think they need to be surrounded by the right people, right? Like, you gotta be surrounded by a, like, someone at Andreessen, or I think you guys have Shervin on here later.

• 1:42:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, we do.

• 1:42:13Speaker 06

  Like, be surrounded by Shervin Pishevar, you know what I mean? Like, be surrounded...

• 1:42:17Jordi Hays?

  Somebody that can ident...

• 1:42:18Speaker 06

  Not some guy you met at Tao, you know, in New York, you know what I mean? Like, you know...

• 1:42:23John Coogan?

  We had Saquon Barkley on the show, and he has been...

• 1:42:25Speaker 06

  He's around smart people.

• 1:42:26John Coogan?

  He's around very smart people, and he's been investing in companies that have been backed by tier ones. It's not just taking a flyer on a friend's business, "Oh, you're gonna start a restaurant." It's okay. Everyone in Silicon Valley's piling into this company. I should get in as well.

• 1:42:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, 100%. I mean, Ashton Kutcher's a good example in the past. Now, Saquon's doing that. I mean, I think MC Hammer, who got into Twitter early or something like that, right?

• 1:42:50John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:42:50Speaker 06

  Like, I think...

• 1:42:51John Coogan?

  Nas has a fantastic...

• 1:42:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, Nas has a crazy... Nas got the Coinbase. He was like seed round or like Series A or something Coinbase.

• 1:42:58John Coogan?

  That's such a wild...

• 1:42:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, MC Hammer got, I think through, what was that guy's name? He was a legend back in the day. Ron Conway?

• 1:43:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, Conway. Yeah, that's right.

• 1:43:05Speaker 06

  A grade? I forgot. It was like a... But through him, I think he got into like Twitter early, you know?

• 1:43:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, SV Angel was...

• 1:43:12Speaker 06

  SV Angel, yeah.

• 1:43:13John Coogan?

  Ron Conway's fun. You said A grade?

• 1:43:16Speaker 06

  No, A grade was Ashton Kutcher. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, SV Angel. But, um, but yeah, I think you just have to be surrounded by the right people. There are good people out there. There's good people out here. Speaking of A grade, Guy O'Seary, you know what I mean? Like, if you're around right people, but I've seen it so many times where guys will be like, "Yeah, I met this guy at, you know, at a restaurant in New York." And like, you know, not to bash New York and random person, but it's like, "What's he done?" He's like, "Well, you know..."

• 1:43:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. He's promising a 20% return.

• 1:43:46Speaker 06

  No, you have to get, like, I think that's the thing. When I lived in San Francisco, I always felt that that was some, a problem that needed to be solved. And there are guys like Shervin, like, brought in like the Roc Nation people, a lot of other people into deals. I think he brought in like a gang of people into Uber early. So, you know what I mean? Like, there are people out there.

• 1:44:09Speaker 06

  You just have to have the right person. I don't know if you guys know Chris Lyons from.

• 1:44:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:13Speaker 06

  Like, he's always been doing stuff like that, like, you know, like, um, you know, so, you know, I think you just need to find that Chris Lyons or a Shervin or a Guy O'Seary or someone like that. Somebody who can pipeline for you. Yeah, which I think what the Ashton did, I think Ashton had Ron Conway was his guy. Yeah. So, um, so, yeah, I think that's a big opportunity that I think they should be doing, but I don't think they should go and invest in something like real estate development and, you know, because their cousin is doing it in Alabama. I've heard that's, it's a true story.

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

  Who knows? Who knows? Elon's building the whole Colossus two data center over there, so.

• 1:44:47Speaker 06

  Well, that, yeah, but I'm talking about someone that invested like 25 million into a house, like a scam in Alabama, lost that 25 million.

• 1:44:54John Coogan?

  It's dangerous territory.

• 1:44:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, but.

• 1:44:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, lots of risk out there. Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:45:00Speaker 06

  Of course, yeah.

• 1:45:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to finally hang.

• 1:45:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, thank you.

• 1:45:03John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming.

• 1:45:03Speaker 06

  Of course.

• 1:45:06Jordi Hays?

  We come by anytime. You know, we're here every day.

• 1:45:10Jordi Hays?

  And, uh.

• 1:45:12John Coogan?

  I know, I'm sorry. We're gonna, we're gonna pull that. You're one of the first interviewers who's, uh, who's been able to see the chat. We're not sure if that's distracting. Yeah, I think maybe it's the social media and me. Yeah, yeah, you're locked in on that.

• 1:45:25Jordi Hays?

  All right, great to see you.

• 1:45:27John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for hopping on. Uh, we will go back to the.

• 1:45:30Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 1:45:30John Coogan?

  We have our next guest in about 15 minutes, but first let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands at Profound.

• 1:45:42Jordi Hays?

  We, uh, people should no longer be able to name their, their children John.

• 1:45:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:47Jordi Hays?

  Final John. He's got all the usernames.

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  Well, uh, over the weekend, there was a beautiful memorial for Charlie Kirk and Autism Capital has some interesting lore. Charlie Kirk was a hell of an operator, what an entrepreneur. Even if you don't like him, just look at the organization he built. Look at the way he brought high performance out of people so young. Uh, he represented a standard of excellence and discipline you don't often see anymore. And Michael Gibson, who was running the Teal Fellowship, says, uh, not many know, but he was an application to the Teal Fellowship way back in 2013 or 2014. We passed on him because we didn't think a media company had the scalability of a tech startup. Our mistake, but Charlie kept coming to our events for a long time. So what an interesting piece of, uh, of tech lore there. Um, and so, uh, very, very interesting, very, uh.

• 1:46:34Jordi Hays?

  This, um.

• 1:46:36John Coogan?

  Uh, Unitree.

• 1:46:36Jordi Hays?

  Unitree robot, they are.

• 1:46:38John Coogan?

  Video of the Unitree G1.

• 1:46:40Jordi Hays?

  Watching, watching these guys beat up on this robot.

• 1:46:42John Coogan?

  It is a Unitree G1 has mastered more quirky skills. Unitree G1 has learned the anti-gravity mode. Stability is greatly improved under any action sequence. And even if it falls, it can quickly get back up. Let's watch this horrifying video.

• 1:46:59John Coogan?

  Wow. Someone didn't read the parable of Rocco's basilisk.

• 1:47:06Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:47:06John Coogan?

  This is not what you should be doing to a robot. You should be nice. You should be encouraging the robot and.

• 1:47:12Jordi Hays?

  This is so, this is gonna lead to grave consequences for the human race.

• 1:47:17John Coogan?

  How does it respond to, uh, some?

• 1:47:20Jordi Hays?

  You realize every, every robot is gonna be trained on this video?

• 1:47:25John Coogan?

  Both the video and the actual training data from this robot. It is fighting for its life here. It's really good at getting up, though. This is remarkable. And of course, wow.

• 1:47:38John Coogan?

  It really feels like.

• 1:47:39Jordi Hays?

  That thing with the.

• 1:47:39John Coogan?

  Whoa, okay, it can do a barrel roll. That's remarkable. Wow.

• 1:47:44Jordi Hays?

  I do not want to see that thing with two guns in it.

• 1:47:46John Coogan?

  What is Unitree's valuation again? This feels deeply valued at seven billion. If this were in America, this would be trading at 150 billion. This is.

• 1:47:56Jordi Hays?

  At least.

• 1:47:56John Coogan?

  Incredible technology.

• 1:47:57Jordi Hays?

  What is, what is the premium that Tesla gets based on the humanoid?

• 1:48:01John Coogan?

  This is, yeah. This is, uh, this is top tier operations out of, out of China.

• 1:48:10Jordi Hays?

  Backflip?

• 1:48:10John Coogan?

  We've seen flips before. This one looks less scripted than what Boston Dynamics does. Boston Dynamics must respond to this, by the way. I, I need a new Boston Dynamics video on the timeline ASAP. I need a new figure robotics video. I need a new Tesla Optimus video. I need a response from America. We will not, we will not go quietly into that good night. Finn.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance, Ben Smarx, number one on competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. Christian Horner, you want to talk about Red Bull?

• 1:48:44Jordi Hays?

  I want to talk about Jimmy Kimmel is apparently coming back on the air Tuesday.

• 1:48:49John Coogan?

  Okay, yes. It was an indefinite suspension. It was not a full cancellation. There was a debate over what indefinite means. It can mean two minutes. It can mean two years. It can mean 20 years. It can mean forever. What do you think, Tyler?

• 1:49:00Speaker 04

  Do you guys think this was planned all along?

• 1:49:03John Coogan?

  Yes, it was.

• 1:49:04Jordi Hays?

  Conspiracy, put on the.

• 1:49:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, the conspiracy is that this was all planned to drum up ratings.

• 1:49:08Jordi Hays?

  This was Nathan Fielder.

• 1:49:09John Coogan?

  Nathan Fielder.

• 1:49:10Jordi Hays?

  Came up with an idea, he said.

• 1:49:12John Coogan?

  Get canceled.

• 1:49:12Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna make a, a, uh, we're gonna make an indefinite suspension look like a targeted political move.

• 1:49:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:49:19Jordi Hays?

  In order to increase the overall, uh, uh, attention that late night television is gonna get.

• 1:49:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I had sort of a hot take.

• 1:49:27Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the.

• 1:49:27John Coogan?

  Everyone's dunking on Kimmel for only getting 160,000 viewers in that 18 to 45 demographic every night, which is low and Chamath said like, you know, more people hate watch All In in that demo every day that they go live. Uh, uh, but, but I was looking at the actual numbers and yes, the Jimmy Kimmel audience is very old, but Jimmy Kimmel's still pulling, I think, a million views a night, which is a lot. Like, I, I feel like that's a lot. Like, that's what, uh, 0.3% of the US population, if you assume it's mostly Americans that are watching, like, uh, pretty, pretty significant numbers. I'm also interested to know what happens to late night as shows get taken off the air. Colbert

• 1:50:08John Coogan?

  was canceled, but, uh, but is still on the air. Kimmel's coming back. What happens? Like, there's been a, there's been a, like, the V2 of the late night programming schedule feels like it's gonna be a lot more reality TV. Will Fallon pick up crazy and will Fallon just have all that attention? Or is the late night viewer more, I only like, I only like, uh, Colbert, and if Colbert's not on, I'm not turning on the TV and I'm gonna go be, I'm gonna go listen to Jon Stewart's podcast or Colbert's new podcast, which I assume Kimmel and Colbert will both launch podcasts or live shows or something in the lower production value that, that still allows them to have a voice and obviously, you know, continue

• 1:50:53John Coogan?

  to communicate with their audience that they've built up over decades. Um, but it will be interesting. Regardless, both Kimmel, if he's off the air permanently, if Colbert's off the air permanently, he's gonna need to sell some ads on his new podcast, he's gonna need a CRM, he's gonna need Adio, he's gonna need customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. Uh, Aura Ring, raising nearly $900 million. Jordy, can you read this post from Mark Gurman while I ring the.

• 1:51:18Jordi Hays?

  I will.

• 1:51:23Jordi Hays?

  Aura Ring is raising nearly $900 million, making it an over $10 billion company. It sold 3 million rings in the last year or so and is on track for over $1.5 billion in revenue next year.

• 1:51:37John Coogan?

  And you didn't miss this, right? You got in early?

• 1:51:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I did not. So I knew Aura Ring when they were, when the founder was just bouncing around podcast, like niche health podcasts. It wasn't a thing. You would never see it out in the world.

• 1:51:53John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:51:54Jordi Hays?

  There, you know, I, you know, the founder was very active, like I said, on the podcast.

• 1:52:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, it felt like a weird, weird thing.

• 1:52:02Jordi Hays?

  I wasn't even aware that it had, I'm actually gonna look up.

• 1:52:06John Coogan?

  3 million rings last year, so it was on track for over $1.5 billion in revenue. I mean, they've, wearables, like we're finally, it's weird to say it, but it feels like we're finally in the era of like wearables actually getting traction and oddly, they're all, they're all classic form factors. Everyone, people, people have been wearing rings for hundreds of years.

• 1:52:29Jordi Hays?

  This started as a Kickstarter campaign.

• 1:52:30John Coogan?

  That's crazy. This has to be the most successful Kickstarter of all time. 10 billion, that's more than Oculus, which was a Kickstarter. So remarkable. Oh, let's check in with Tyler and his fashionable wearables. How you doing over there? Give us the, give us the two week review. How much have you used those? Those are the XREAL One Pro, technically AR glasses, although I don't believe that you can see me through those. You look blind.

• 1:52:54Speaker 04

  I can, I can barely see you. So I haven't really used them at all, except on the plane.

• 1:53:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:53:01Speaker 04

  And they were actually like, no, these are like, these are actually really cool on the plane. I was just playing a game on my phone, but then I would just have it like be really big in front of me. And it was like a very good experience. So I'm like, I would not buy these for $700. I would buy them for like, maybe like 50 bucks.

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  50 bucks, okay.

• 1:53:18Speaker 04

  But they are like really cool.

• 1:53:20John Coogan?

  We gotta, we gotta wait.

• 1:53:20Speaker 04

  And I think if they were more see-through, like the new, like Meta glasses.

• 1:53:25John Coogan?

  Do you think you'll, do you think you'll actually use them anytime other than on a plane?

• 1:53:31Speaker 04

  Probably not, because most of the time I can just use my laptop instead if I need like a bigger screen to do stuff.

• 1:53:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, so is there any scenario where you would use it as like a secondary screen on a laptop or anything like that?

• 1:53:43Speaker 04

  Not really, because um.

• 1:53:45John Coogan?

  Do you have a TV in your luxurious apartment at UCLA that you are so proud of?

• 1:53:51Speaker 04

  I do have a TV. I, it's hard to see the screen. Like, you can't really use this as a second screen. It can only be the kind of main one, because you can't, it's like a little too dark to be like comfortably viewing your laptop.

• 1:54:03John Coogan?

  So you can't use both at the same time, so it's not really like an extended monitor solution?

• 1:54:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. But I think the future generations, I say I'm likely to become like a DAU.

• 1:54:13John Coogan?

  DAU? But when would you use it? Daily? That doesn't make any sense to me.

• 1:54:17Speaker 04

  I would use it as another monitor, if these were more see-through.

• 1:54:20John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah. I guess that could make sense. Well, I mean, the resolution is pretty good, right?

• 1:54:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can very, like, you can read very easily. It's like usually, sometimes I have a hard time. It like makes me sick.

• 1:54:32John Coogan?

  Jordy, how'd you sleep last night? Speaking of health tracking, monitoring, connected devices, the connected bed from Eight Sleep, of course, is our partner. Go to eightsleep.com, get a Pod5.

• 1:54:44Jordi Hays?

  Code TPN. I got an 88.

• 1:54:47John Coogan?

  I got a 90. Let's go.

• 1:54:49Jordi Hays?

  How many hours did you sleep?

• 1:54:51John Coogan?

  Seven hours and 56 minutes. Pretty good.

• 1:54:54Jordi Hays?

  Solid. I got seven hours and 28.

• 1:54:58Jordi Hays?

  Not my best, not my worst.

• 1:55:00John Coogan?

  You know, there's news.

• 1:55:00Jordi Hays?

  Back tonight.

• 1:55:01John Coogan?

  There was a reuniting of Elon Musk and Donald Trump at the Charlie Kirk Memorial. There were a couple posts that went out about this. They shook hands, they sat next to each other, and it seems like.

• 1:55:14Jordi Hays?

  They're incredibly back.

• 1:55:15John Coogan?

  They have, this has been the unifying event for them. So it'll be interesting to see where this goes in terms of actual movement on, you know, partnerships and subsidies and investments and who does what. There was the movement over Tesla's electric car subsidies that of course was a staple of the Trump admins, you know, push away from electric. Cars generally and that potentially hurt Tesla. Maybe that comes back. We will have to continue.

• 1:55:45Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this chart of the green, green line test.

• 1:55:48John Coogan?

  Yes, the green line test. Trump did lean in, it appears, although just barely. But Danish says BRB going all in on Tesla stock because Elon had the straight green line.

• 1:56:01Jordi Hays?

  Tesla is up 2% today.

• 1:56:03John Coogan?

  Oh, well, maybe there's something to the green line test. We'll see. Well, if you want to get in on Tesla, maybe you think it's overvalued, maybe you think it's undervalued, head over to public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, they're trusted by many folks. Speaking of investing, River Road Partners shares, you're not going to beat Ken Griffin Citadel Securities uses a physical goalbook that includes more than 5,000 discrete goals contributed by nearly 1,800 employees to guide planning and ops. The goalbook is part of a meticulous month, months-long planning ritual.

• 1:56:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was an entire article, I think, at Bloomberg about this printed book.

• 1:56:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:56:45Jordi Hays?

  Worth going through.

• 1:56:46John Coogan?

  Matthew is putting in the truth sound says, "Sounds like some PR BS you tell to the Wall Street Journal."

• 1:56:52Jordi Hays?

  River Road Partners says, "It's okay. They didn't call you back."

• 1:56:55John Coogan?

  In other news, Radia is, I've never heard of this company before, but Radia is going to build the Windrunner for defense. Build is the world's largest military cargo aircraft and announced at the Air, Space and Cyber Conference in 2025. The ultra-large transport is aimed at closing the airlift gap for US and NATO forces. And if you look at the, the scale of these planes, I think that's a 747 there or something like it. And this plane is much, much bigger. I'm excited for the big planes. I want, I want bigger and bigger planes. I've always wanted something, you know, just as big as a cruise ship in the sky and hopefully we'll get it.

• 1:57:36Jordi Hays?

  Calamaz says, "Something about Valve is very forever 2000s coded, a masterclass in business. It's a type of company that doesn't really exist anymore, that does whatever it wants, whenever it wants, because Steam prints so much money. And they continue to do exactly that. Do you buy games on Steam anymore? You used to?"

• 1:57:55John Coogan?

  I don't buy any games really because I don't have time to play games, but I, I had a, yes, I'm in recovery. I had a Steam Deck. I enjoyed it a lot and I bought a lot of games on Steam. And they also bought one Counter-Strike skin on Steam. It was probably 50 bucks.

• 1:58:11Jordi Hays?

  I love that. I love the account Zoomer is discovering.

• 1:58:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:58:15Jordi Hays?

  Josh.

• 1:58:16John Coogan?

  Wait, can you guess what this is?

• 1:58:17Jordi Hays?

  I knew right away.

• 1:58:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:19Jordi Hays?

  Discovering Josh Kushner.

• 1:58:21John Coogan?

  Yes. Holy bullish.

• 1:58:23Jordi Hays?

  He says A24, Affirm, Anduril, Airtable, Cursor, Databricks, GitHub, Hims, Instagram, Kickstarter, Lemonade.

• 1:58:30John Coogan?

  Kickstarter is a throwback.

• 1:58:32Jordi Hays?

  New Bank.

• 1:58:32John Coogan?

  That's an older deal.

• 1:58:33Jordi Hays?

  Open Door. Oscar.

• 1:58:35John Coogan?

  Stripe, Ramp.

• 1:58:36Jordi Hays?

  Patreon.

• 1:58:37John Coogan?

  Twitch, Unity, Warby Parker.

• 1:58:39Jordi Hays?

  Robinhood, Scale, Skim, Slack, Spotify, Stripe, Twitch.

• 1:58:43John Coogan?

  Josh Kushner has gotten in a lot of great deals.

• 1:58:45Jordi Hays?

  Buying Fifth Avenue.

• 1:58:46John Coogan?

  He's buying Fifth Avenue. He gets into every good company.

• 1:58:49Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting. Do you think he'll generate more, more, more of a total dollars from OpenAI than the rest of these deals combined?

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  I mean, that's the goal of venture. I don't know the actual ownership percentages, but that's certainly the way venture works, always.

• 1:59:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:09John Coogan?

  It's like there's one that makes more than the rest combined and it makes the rest look really, really silly because you can be in some great, great companies, but that one hyperscaler that you got drives everything. You look at Excel with Facebook. I mean, they had a bunch of other great companies in that portfolio, but they owned, what, 20% of Facebook at IPO or something like that? It was like worth $10 billion off of like a, you know, 100 million something dollar fund. Fantastic performance. The other news, oh, there's a question in the chat about the H1Bs. We'll cover it more later. People are still debating it back and forth.

• 1:59:47John Coogan?

  The Silicon Valley was very up in arms over the H1B things. Reed Hastings actually chimed in in favor of the decision to raise the, the tax on H1Bs. He says, "I've worked on H1B politics for 30 years. Trump's 100K per year tax is a great solution," which is, I think, not what it wound up being. It wound up being 100K one time. But Reed says it will mean H1B is used for just very high value jobs, which will mean no lottery is needed and more certainty for those jobs. So a little bit of a debate. I'm sure there's a bunch of people covering it very well, but.

• 2:00:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, without further ado.

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  We have our next in-person guest.

• 2:00:25Jordi Hays?

  Second in-person guest.

• 2:00:27John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show, Laura.

• 2:00:36Jordi Hays?

  And, breaking some news today.

• 2:00:38John Coogan?

  Yes, some news, I'm very excited.

• 2:00:40Jordi Hays?

  Get that, get that call ready.

• 2:00:41John Coogan?

  Get the microphone as close as you can. And introduce yourself, for those who might not know.

• 2:00:46Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Laura, I run Until Labs. So we are trying to make the hibernation pods that you've seen in interstellar reality. But to get there, we want to help transplant patients get the organs that they need by reverse cry preserving organs.

• 2:00:57John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:00:58Jordi Hays?

  Start with something easy.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Give us a little backstory, like what actually set you up to be in a position to start this type of company? It seems incredibly difficult from a scientific perspective.

• 2:01:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, so my backstory is like I spent a decade working in longevity, it's a long time adventure, and I think it's just really frustrating to think spend that much time trying to solve a problem. And you really want to find like one critical lynch point, like one thing where you can solve it and it helps everything else. And so to me, it's like, wow, it'd be so cool to make a hibernation pod, where you're like, if you had a terminal illness and you needed a critical cure, like you could sort of wait, let's say, one to two years to make it to the point where a therapy for your disease comes out. And of course, the key step to get there is showing that this sci-fi technology, which works for millions of IVF, you know, embryos. There's people walking out today who are cry preserved for 30-plus years.

• 2:01:43John Coogan?

  Whoa, I hadn't thought about that, that's crazy.

• 2:01:45Jordi Hays?

  Three?

• 2:01:46Speaker 07

  30-plus years.

• 2:01:48Jordi Hays?

  30.

• 2:01:49John Coogan?

  Three, three, three.

• 2:01:50Speaker 07

  30.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  30?

• 2:01:52Speaker 07

  Yes, yeah, actually, the record for the longest cry preserved human embryo just came out.

• 2:01:55John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:01:56Speaker 07

  And it was 30-plus years.

• 2:01:57John Coogan?

  So this person's born and they're kind of 30 on day one, in some ways.

• 2:02:00Speaker 07

  Yeah, and they're twins that were preserved at the same time and then they're rewarmed at different times.

• 2:02:03John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:02:04Speaker 07

  So it's really interesting.

• 2:02:05John Coogan?

  That's very sci-fi.

• 2:02:06Jordi Hays?

  We have the tech.

• 2:02:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, but just scaling that up to human organs and showing like in the clinic for transplant patients that we can actually, actually help.

• 2:02:12John Coogan?

  Wait, so I mean, I imagine you don't go straight from embryo to human, is there an animal step in the mid, like?

• 2:02:18Jordi Hays?

  Laura's saying the mid step is you, you, you take like, I don't know, a lung or a kidney or something like that, that, that is...

• 2:02:25John Coogan?

  But why not, why not mouse?

• 2:02:27Speaker 07

  So actually, the really cool thing is the field of cryobiology has been around for decades, and you know, there's been incredible scientists, shout out to University of Minnesota, who already published, you know, showing that, for example, we can reverse cry preserve mouse kidneys. So, you know, the field of cryobiology is already incredible, incredible work, and we're just working to scale that up to a human organ scale. But the mouse POC is done, like you can take a mouse kidney, totally cry preserve it, rewarm it, put it back in a mouse that does not have another kidney, and that mouse will be, you know, good to go.

• 2:02:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, what, what's the state of the art in just freeze the full mouse? Are we making any progress there?

• 2:02:59Jordi Hays?

  Somebody must have tried it by now.

• 2:03:01John Coogan?

  We have this funny interaction with Zach Weinberg. He came on the show and was like, whenever you're testing a drug, you do all this research in the lab, but then it's time to make a decision. What was it? Rat or monkey? You're gonna do a test in one of them, and then you'll get to human trials. And it feels like that's a natural progression. Is that not the natural progression here?

• 2:03:20Speaker 07

  So, people have been trying to cryopreserve whole organisms for a long time.

• 2:03:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I imagine.

• 2:03:26Speaker 07

  There's some pretty crazy studies that came out in the 50s that worked on this. But I think, like, basically, it's just, it's like, if we can't reversibly cryopreserve, we just got the kind of studies that did the cryopreservation of organs really well, like, to the point where you could bring them back and show that they were fully functioning, you know, like, in the past couple of years. There've been some public in the past decade, but kind of, I think that, like, really kind of nailing, like, the protocols is pretty recent. And so, and I think you want to get that right before you try going after, you know, a whole organism.

• 2:03:55John Coogan?

  Sure. What are the levers that you pull in cryopreservation that aren't just temperature? Like, I imagine we've tried just make it really, really cold.

• 2:04:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, so actually, also, one cool fact, I don't know if you know, once you get down below minus 130 degrees Celsius, you can keep, like, an animal there indefinitely, basically. The time basically stops, kind of, in that temperature range.

• 2:04:12John Coogan?

  Wait, how cold again?

• 2:04:13Speaker 07

  Below minus 130 degrees Celsius.

• 2:04:15John Coogan?

  130 Celsius, okay. That's pretty cold.

• 2:04:18Speaker 07

  But, yeah, the molecules basically aren't moving, so, like I mentioned, you know, like, 30-plus years for human embryos.

• 2:04:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:04:24Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:04:25John Coogan?

  But are there other, are there other decisions and trade-offs to make besides temperature?

• 2:04:31Speaker 07

  Yeah, so, it's really, so, one of the things I love the most about this, so, I know, I worked in deep tech for a long time. One of the cool things with this problem, it's a trade-off between biology and engineering. So, you have this danger zone, and basically, the thing you want, basically, the thing, like, our enemy in cryopreservation is ice. Like, you think that we love ice, but we actually hate ice.

• 2:04:47Jordi Hays?

  You like cold, but you don't like ice.

• 2:04:48Speaker 07

  We love cold, but we don't like ice. Because when ice forms, it expands, and it breaks the tissue around it.

• 2:04:53John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:04:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, so, what we want to do is we want to make glass.

• 2:04:56John Coogan?

  Wait, so yeah, I mean, if I have blood in my organ and that expands, that's bad, it's breaking the tissue. How do you freeze something without creating ice out of the blood?

• 2:05:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, if you're, if you're doing an individual organ, I'm assuming you take-

• 2:05:08John Coogan?

  Drain everything out, is that right?

• 2:05:10Speaker 07

  No, so there's two different things you can do. It's very close. So one is you can replace the chemicals in the organs. You can replace a lot of the blood with a chemical that prevents ice formation.

• 2:05:17John Coogan?

  Okay. Is that just something that freezes below 130? So it's not freezing and it stays a liquid?

• 2:05:22Speaker 07

  It's a couple of things. So it'll turn to a, basically if you, if you cool fast enough, it'll turn into a glass. And it does this through kind of decreasing the number of water molecules and also kind of like, there's a couple of chemicals that might be involved.

• 2:05:33John Coogan?

  Okay, so you don't just have to get cold, you have to get cold fast. That's part of the goal.

• 2:05:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, so it's like, it's like, can you make good chemicals that do that and can you get cold fast? And basically like, can you traverse this danger zone of ice formation down to like, because once you get to 130, you're good. Like below that, you're totally fine, but going through there as fast as possible.

• 2:05:48John Coogan?

  How fast is fast? Are we talking like minutes, seconds, milliseconds?

• 2:05:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, current protocols work on the order of, you know, maybe hours. Ideally, you want less than that.

• 2:05:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. I imagine if I put water in the fridge or in the freezer, it's pretty cold, like it still takes a couple of hours. But I imagine if it's negative 130, it probably turns into ice a little bit faster. Obviously, if it's a smaller amount of liquid, it's going to freeze faster. There's a whole bunch of different trade-offs there.

• 2:06:15Jordi Hays?

  What's it like fundraising for a business like this? Because I imagine some of the backers are kind of thinking like, I want this for myself. You know, I've always, I've always wanted to go in the cryogenic chamber and be able to-

• 2:06:26John Coogan?

  Well, do you remember that famous Sam Altman interview where there was a YC company that was doing something along cryopreservation? And as part of his, he was running YC at the time, and he said like, I'm on board, I will sign that, that you can freeze me after I die. But part of theirs was that they, I think they technically had to kill you. And so the headline that was like the twisted- Version of what he said was like, Yeah. Sam Altman agrees to be killed by this portfolio company. Yeah.

• 2:06:54Jordi Hays?

  And that's value add.

• 2:06:55John Coogan?

  It's value add. What other VC is willing to die for your company? But yeah, what's it been like fundraising?

• 2:07:02Speaker 07

  Yes, it's an interesting difference between like there's companies where they're kind of like, we'll cry preserve you and we're not sure whether we can bring you back. And I think what was really compelling to us is like, let's make this like a real deep tech company. Like let's, let's go and like our bar is reversible cry preservation. Like when we take an organ, we have to show that the whole, you know, it's like, you wouldn't buy an IV of product where it's like, oh, we'll cry preserve it. We're not sure you can bring your embryo back. We want to show the whole thing works. And that's a bar where it's like, okay, if we're raising from deep tech firms, right? Like they're going to want to talk about like, what's the business? That gets you there, you know, like if you can cry preserve an organ reversibly and help, you know, like thousands of transplant patients, you know, who are otherwise losing organs. I mean, a hundred thousands were on the waiting list and like millions who might use an organ, but just don't have access to them. Like, you know, that, that kind of forces you, I think, to hit this bar of, you know, showing you can be warm with function.

• 2:07:40John Coogan?

  Walk me through the current state of organ transplantation. I mean, I, I feel like most people probably know that they have a, you know, a little thing that they can check on their ID. If they're unfortunately, you know, killed, they, their, their organ might be transplanted, might be frozen for a little bit, but we've.

• 2:07:55Jordi Hays?

  They can pass away too, John. They don't have to be killed. Murderous podcaster.

• 2:08:00John Coogan?

  But, uh, but, but, but I, I feel like we've heard this story of like, the, the organ was put in a helicopter and, and traveled and it was moved from one body to another very, very quickly. Yeah. What's the current like, like shelf life of organs? It sounds like that's the most low hanging fruit is just extend that, even if you just double it, that's going to be really, really positive for the organ transplant market.

• 2:08:21Speaker 07

  It's, it's the craziest logistical process I've ever heard of.

• 2:08:24John Coogan?

  Explain it to me.

• 2:08:24Speaker 07

  So like, you know, some organs have a four to 12 hour, you know, shelf life, others might have like 24 to 6, but you know, it's like, it's, it's a very short time period. And you have no idea when the donor is going to pass. And so basically like a medical surgeon gets a call, maybe in the middle of the night, go charter, like at the last minute, a private plane. To fly to like the place where the person has just, um, donated the organ, pick it up, bring it back. You know, transplant patients wait within two hour radius.

• 2:08:47Jordi Hays?

  And then go back to the, the patient that's getting the transplant.

• 2:08:49Speaker 07

  And if you're a transplant patient, like you have to wait. Like right next to the hospital where you might get the surgery for months. You know, in some cases, a lot longer than that.

• 2:08:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:57Speaker 07

  You know, just waiting to get the call in the middle of the night. You have to have a pager on you at all times. It's just like this crazy logistical process.

• 2:09:02John Coogan?

  Because it's like, like your organ, if you need this particular organ, you're going to get a call and you need to go to the hospital because it's coming on a private jet that day.

• 2:09:10Speaker 07

  Exactly. Yeah. And like, I don't know if you know that company Blade. Um, it's like, I think they did like a couple hundred million.

• 2:09:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:14Speaker 07

  It's like medical transport.

• 2:09:16Jordi Hays?

  Did they, did they recently spun a business out?

• 2:09:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:09:19John Coogan?

  They've actually developed a business.

• 2:09:20Jordi Hays?

  And so, so your initial product is like focused on solving that like, like you don't even need to be able to freeze an organ and bring it back over, over a decade. It's more, it's more like just solving this logistical nightmare. Is that kind of the idea?

• 2:09:36Speaker 07

  Well, the cool thing is once you're in the temperature range, you could preserve the organ for as long as possible. But yeah, and then you're determined it's like, let's get that organ to the patient as soon as possible. But like, let's not have to have a surgeon get on a private plane. You're like, like, yeah, yeah.

• 2:09:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so do you, I mean, we, we, we track artificial intelligence progress a lot on this show. Uh, all the AI labs are trying to just see exponential growth in the amount of time that AI can think. We went from one minute to deep research can do 20 minutes. GPT five is doing more. Do you think that the progress of your business will track sort of a smooth exponential where we'll go from four to 12 hours to one day to two days to four days to eight days, 16, and just kind of expand from there? Or do you think there'll be some sort of like binary unlock? There's a new technology and now it's five years.

• 2:10:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, to me, to me, it sounds like the bigger jump is like, like you said, once you get the temperature down, you can go basically forever. The bigger jump is like, how do you go from a single organ that you can, you can swap? It sounds like swap out the blood for another chemical that allows it to, to stay really cold without having the ice expansion. But it's like, how do you go from an organ to a system, right?

• 2:10:43Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:10:43Jordi Hays?

  And how do you go from a system to a bot, a whole body, right? Because if you replaced all the blood in yourself with some chemical, like is your brain going to function the same way when you take, you know, like, there's a lot of unknowns, right?

• 2:10:55Speaker 07

  Yeah. So the thing we track is scaling size. Like that, that's the big thing, right? So we, we know we can reverse a cryopreservation embryos, you know, like a couple hundred cells. We have previously cryopreserved like, you know, worms, that's a thousand cells. You know, now rat kidney that massively scales up like number of cells, but just, yeah. It's basically scaling size because as you get larger, it's way harder to cool something quickly. You know, like imagine you put a snowflake on your hand, it'll like, be warm very quickly. But a large turkey for Thanksgiving takes, you know, maybe a day or more to defrost.

• 2:11:19Jordi Hays?

  So you're.

• 2:11:22Jordi Hays?

  What is, one, I kind of want to get a sense of timelines for the company specifically. Raise $58 million, you want to deploy that effectively but quickly to show progress. What kind of milestones are you looking at and what is the actual, I'm assuming the hardware that you're developing is focusing on cooling things quickly, consistently. And then is it a machine that you're trying to scale up over time? What does the actual hardware look like and then what are the milestones that you're trying to achieve?

• 2:11:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, so the cool thing with this new round that we just are announcing today with Funders Fund, really excited to have them on board, also Lux is joining and Field Ventures. Shout out to all of our investors, they've been awesome. Basically, the goal is to get organ products into the clinic. So right now, we're working on developing a lot of the protocols. We build new chemical formulations, we build cooling systems, we build rewarming systems. So basically, just iterating as quickly as possible. One of the things I love about this problem is the speed of iteration pre-clinically. It's very unlike a lot of biology where you can just test in whole, human-sized organs, a lot of protocols weekly. Yeah, we're just working on getting that product to the point where we can bring it to patients.

• 2:12:33John Coogan?

  Take me into sci-fi world. Sleep pods for space travel. What are the implications? What are the trade-offs of that? Is it just like, I go to sleep, I wake up on Mars? Are we going to be going to Alpha Centauri? When you really, really play out the future, I've always had the mind that if we're going to places that are light-years away, the speed of light holds, the laws of physics hold, and so you're embarking on thousands of years' journey. You're going to have these colony ships where the people that arrive are completely different than the people that leave, but it sounds like there might be an alternative path.

• 2:13:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and even here on Earth, the scenario we were talking about offline

• 2:13:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:13:20Jordi Hays?

  was this sense of, let's say you're an 80-year-old billionaire, you've experienced everything there is to experience in life in the current era. And you, your technology exists and I, and I go, I want to just be, you know, put to, I want to hibernate for the next 50 years and I'm going to just be placed on my little doomsday ranch in New Zealand and I'm going to have a staff whose job is to just protect me effectively, hang out and make sure nobody messes with me while I'm asleep. And in 50 years, I want to wake up and so this 80 year old can go from being 80.

• 2:13:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:58Jordi Hays?

  They can just effectively like go to sleep for 50 years and wake up and suddenly they get to experience something completely novel. And even though they're 80 years old, they get this experience of being in an entirely different era of human history. And I think a lot of people would get to the point.

• 2:14:12John Coogan?

  They can watch all the Avatar sequels. They don't need to wait.

• 2:14:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, a lot of, a lot of people would get to the point in their life where they're like, okay, I've seen enough. I've done enough.

• 2:14:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:14:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I, I, while I still have life in me, I want to be able to see something, you know, completely new. And there's a risk that the, you know, global collapse happens, my, my doomsday ranch gets raided and everything gets, but, but like, there's the multi-planetary future and possibility, but there's also just life here on earth. If life here on earth is going to look wild and different, if you're obsessed with the future today and you're impatient and you're not, you're not necessarily believe that you're going to live another 50 years, you could teleport effectively.

• 2:14:49Speaker 07

  Yeah. So I mean, like one thing to your point is like, if you want humans in space, like you, I, I think someone said to me like, if you want humans in space, you need like AI, plausibly, you need like definitely, you know, spaceships, but you also need cryo, like, you know, it's, it's the best way to allow for like long-term transportation. I'd be like, even in the near term, one thing that we really care about, just like helping people who would otherwise not get therapies, kind of like make it to the critical point. So my co-founder Hunter, his father-in-law was diagnosed with like metastatic mesothelioma. He missed a critical clinical trial by like a couple of months, you know, wasn't eligible because of the severity of his disease. That could have given him, you know, extra time with his family, might've given him a short remission. And I think it's just like, Really, or like, I don't know, for me, it's like much more near term. Like, let's just like help people who are like literally not, and like, I knew somebody who got metastatic melanoma.

• 2:15:33Speaker 07

  And like, because he got it, the year that he got it, got like 10 plus years of prognosis. The year before would have been six to nine months.

• 2:15:38John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:15:39Speaker 07

  Right? Like that 2014 to 2015 was like a really, really crazy time to be in that, like, to be a patient for, yeah.

• 2:15:44John Coogan?

  Uh, what, what about the, the pure sci-fi thought experiment of like cryo as a time machine that jumps you forward? If, if, if a device existed right over there, you walk through that door and when you walk out in a blink of an eye, it's 30 years later.

• 2:15:58Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:15:58John Coogan?

  Would you do it? Jordy, would you do that? It's such an interesting thought experiment because there's all these like risks, bad things could happen, but great things could happen. It's kind of a proxy on like your overall view on optimism over, over some period of time.

• 2:16:13John Coogan?

  I mean, I would want to take my family and stuff. I don't know.

• 2:16:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can, I can easily envision the, the scenario of, of like being, being towards the end of your life. And, and just being like, one more year of being in this retirement home.

• 2:16:26John Coogan?

  But what if you're young? What if you're 20 and you're just like?

• 2:16:28Jordi Hays?

  Young, I'm not doing it. I love the present.

• 2:16:30John Coogan?

  I want, I, I want to see, I, I'm impatient for my flying car. I'm just going to jump forward to 2050 and just be the most out of the loop person in the world.

• 2:16:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think the question comes down to like how resource is it, resource intensive, right?

• 2:16:43John Coogan?

  Assume it's free for this thought experiment.

• 2:16:44Jordi Hays?

  Okay, assume it's free. I'm not doing it. I, I like surfing the present.

• 2:16:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:49Jordi Hays?

  I don't need to, I don't need to teleport, but I can easily imagine.

• 2:16:52John Coogan?

  Certainly, certainly in the medical case, like it makes tons of sense.

• 2:16:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you're like incredibly AGI build and you believe that like, uh, you know, abundance is around the corner.

• 2:17:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:00Jordi Hays?

  Would you, would you freeze yourself in, if, if the alternative was working at McDonald's?

• 2:17:05John Coogan?

  There's no risk. Yeah. I mean, like even, even in the medical scenario, like there's no risk that you just get hit by a bus. Or less in this thought experiment. So you get to jump forward to the post scarcity AGI future.

• 2:17:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

• 2:17:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:17Jordi Hays?

  Some people might just.

• 2:17:18John Coogan?

  Some people might take it. I wonder what the, I wonder what, yeah, I'll see you on the other side. Be fascinating. Have you seen Passengers?

• 2:17:24Speaker 07

  Passengers know.

• 2:17:24John Coogan?

  No one's seen this. Yeah, you're familiar. It's a good movie about this exact, about this exact topic. You said you're building this company as a hard tech, deep tech company. What does that actually look like?

• 2:17:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, this is a perfect blend of like crazy sci fi.

• 2:17:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, but applications.

• 2:17:42Jordi Hays?

  Extremely pragmatic.

• 2:17:43John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:17:44Jordi Hays?

  Here's a problem that is solvable. We know we can do it already. We need to apply it to a new domain like kidneys or like these other organs.

• 2:17:52Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 2:17:52Jordi Hays?

  And that's helpful with like recruiting because it's like, hey, like somebody that is more risk averse could be like, I'm working at a medical device startup. And someone else can be like, I'm working on cryotherapy.

• 2:18:04John Coogan?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 2:18:04Jordi Hays?

  And you're both working on the same technology.

• 2:18:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, exactly. I think that that's one cool thing about it. I think also for deep tech means like we do almost everything we can in-house. So we like build every part of the system that we can in-house. Like we have a team of like amazing engineers, neuroscientists, microbiologists, you know, chemists. It's like, we try to like, it's like, just like move full stack in-house. It's like the thing that if you run a deep tech company, just like your iteration cycle is the main limiter on your progress.

• 2:18:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:18:25Speaker 07

  So the more that you can like do in-house is.

• 2:18:28Jordi Hays?

  And it's good that you talk fast because you talk like fast with us. No, it's good. It's good. You can just, you're, you're, you know, a one minute for you is like two minutes for us.

• 2:18:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:37Jordi Hays?

  What are some crazy, have any other countries done anything? Do you believe like Russia or China?

• 2:18:44John Coogan?

  How many humans do you think are frozen right now?

• 2:18:48Jordi Hays?

  Fully frozen.

• 2:18:50John Coogan?

  Humans anywhere in the world or, or interstellar.

• 2:18:53Jordi Hays?

  She sends, sends a Slack message off. How many, how many we got?

• 2:18:57John Coogan?

  How many we got?

• 2:18:58Speaker 07

  I mean, I mean, like for context, it's like, I think that there are these products where it's like you cry preserve someone, but like you're just really not sure if the procedure you use to cry preserve them is going to bring, it's possible to bring them back. And I think we don't, like, we just don't really know, like, how to think about that.

• 2:19:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:13Jordi Hays?

  But it, but it, but is it like a hundred?

• 2:19:15John Coogan?

  Because we've heard lore about like, oh, this person had their head frozen. This person had their body frozen.

• 2:19:19Speaker 07

  I would say a lot of those stories are not true.

• 2:19:20John Coogan?

  They're just not true.

• 2:19:21Speaker 07

  Yeah, or like a lot of the really popular ones I think are incorrect.

• 2:19:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:19:25Jordi Hays?

  What about, what if, what if, what, what countries are, are investing outside of the US or kind of care about this problem area or opportunity?

• 2:19:38Speaker 07

  I think China might be, like, I'm not on the ground there at all, like not to know, but that's, that's something that, yeah, I've heard a little bit about.

• 2:19:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:45John Coogan?

  Do the printers work in your office?

• 2:19:47Speaker 07

  What do you ask?

• 2:19:48John Coogan?

  Uh, there's this, there's this funny interaction, uh, where, uh, in the, in the early 2000s, Peter Thiel went to tour a, uh, a, a freeze your bodies type of startup. And the contract that he had to sign, he was like, he was like, I'm all in on this technology. Print up the contract, I'll sign it. I think he was there with Luke Nosick. And, uh, the printer wasn't working. And he was like, that wasn't very, didn't instill a lot of confidence. That like, if they couldn't get their printer working, they, like, I wasn't, he was like, I wasn't, uh, I wasn't ready to, you know, trust them with freezing my entire body if their printer doesn't work. So, you know, it's like how you do anything is how you do everything.

• 2:20:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think that's our, like, organs are a good bar. It's just like, it helps with transplantations, you know, like, yeah.

• 2:20:31John Coogan?

  Exactly. Uh, what?

• 2:20:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Uh, there, there's, it feels like, uh, what, what you're doing is, would be very disruptive to the traditional organ transplant business that is...

• 2:20:43John Coogan?

  Would it be? Or would it, is it very like, uh, synergistic, actually?

• 2:20:46Speaker 07

  I, I, I think for companies like Blade, where it's like, they're getting a hundred mil, a couple hundred million revenue off of like, literally just helicopters transporting organs. Like, I think that's the part that we want to take on.

• 2:20:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's, it's like, super time sensitive.

• 2:20:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:20:57Jordi Hays?

  It'd be much cheaper to just put it on like a FedEx truck.

• 2:20:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:00Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 2:21:01Jordi Hays?

  Or, or, or just, yeah, just some type of...

• 2:21:05Speaker 07

  Exactly. But like, almost, yeah.

• 2:21:06John Coogan?

  Falling down the stairs.

• 2:21:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but she's gonna make, uh, she's gonna make the...

• 2:21:09John Coogan?

  Have you ever had anything delivered by FedEx?

• 2:21:11Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the system's gonna be indestructible, right? You're gonna be all thrown off of the building, right?

• 2:21:15John Coogan?

  Does she, did she say that? Did she promise an indestructible device?

• 2:21:18Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I, I believe. I believe in the sci-fi.

• 2:21:21John Coogan?

  Add it to the, add it to the to-do list. Make product indestructible.

• 2:21:25Speaker 07

  Well, yeah, we'll get right on that. But yeah, I mean, I think like most people in transplant, like, you know, the patient, way better for patients. You know, they don't have to get a last minute call. Like, for surgeons, they don't have to do like, an overnight where they're like, doing, you know, like, literally like an all-nighter to do a surgery. Like, that's, yeah.

• 2:21:37John Coogan?

  And that probably, uh, it makes it harder to actually be alert. Like, there's a ton of examples of like, the night shift, just quality and even in manufacturing, uh, the night shift often performs slightly worse. And you can tell in quality assurance, just for making widgets. Because people are tired and it's harder to get the best people to show up in the middle of the night. And so you could imagine, uh, just, it just unlocking the... Ability for surgeons to be well rested is probably another value add.

• 2:22:00Speaker 07

  We would all love for surgeons to be well rested.

• 2:22:02John Coogan?

  Of course, of course. Well, what's the interaction with the FDA like? What's the process like? I was talking to the Neuralink team about that and the FDA feels extremely difficult to deal with, like very slow, but then they've figured out how to move very quickly and have a great relationship. So how are you thinking about the FDA relationship?

• 2:22:19Speaker 07

  I mean, I think one thing the FDA, and I can't speak on their behalf, obviously, we just like take them seriously as partners. Like, okay, like, you know, when we kind of are going to engage with them, like, we want to bring them all the data that like we would want to see. You know, for part, I think a lot of the reason the FDA is often portrayed as, you know, bad is that like, there's not a lot of drugs that actually work. And so like they're, you know, like looking at very difficult evidence analyzed. It's like, we just want to bring them evidence that the technology works and like have them give us feedback. Like that's, yeah.

• 2:22:42John Coogan?

  Do they, would they view this as like a medical device and take you through like the medical device approval process?

• 2:22:48Speaker 07

  Um, that's, that's like the default designation likely, but you know, like, yeah, up to them.

• 2:22:53John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:22:54Jordi Hays?

  It could create a cool sci-fi path.

• 2:22:56John Coogan?

  They should. Anything's possible today. Anything's possible.

• 2:22:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. One executive order and there's now the FDA is like, we got a cool sci-fi.

• 2:23:05John Coogan?

  I mean, we've got Space Force, we're going to the moon.

• 2:23:07Jordi Hays?

  If you've been in a blockbuster sci-fi film, just come over here.

• 2:23:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 2:23:12Jordi Hays?

  Where else, where else are you most excited in longevity broadly? You've invested in a bunch of companies.

• 2:23:20Speaker 07

  Yeah, so it's.

• 2:23:21Jordi Hays?

  You can, a good opportunity to, to pump your bags and talk about sectors broadly.

• 2:23:28Speaker 07

  I mean, speaking of the FDA, one really, one thing I'm just really excited about is that like the FDA gave a F, like acceptance of efficacy data for life extension, like for the first time in the past, like shout out to Loyal. Yeah. I mean, like that, I think people outside of Loyal don't get, like that was a huge deal. Like the FDA has never, you know, like sort of thought about lifespan extension, the possibility of that on the label for a drug, for dogs to start.

• 2:23:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:23:50Speaker 07

  You know, but like that, that's just, yeah, it's, it's really exciting. So like they, that, them kind of accepting that concept is a really big deal. So you know, shout out to Celine and, you know, Loyal for kind of making that, getting that through. I think that's really interesting.

• 2:24:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It is interesting that like a precursor to getting a drug approved is a problem that they've defined. And how do you define that? Yeah, that's, that's very good. What, what do you make of declining life expectancy in the US? Do you have a thesis on it or do you think it's going to turn around? Any predictions?

• 2:24:18Speaker 07

  That's a good question. I mean, I, I think like for context, my field of expertise is like, can we make small molecule or like sort of. I guess, larger drugs that like predictably extend human lifespan by like some amount, you know, in a clinical trial. And like, I, I think that it's hard, like, I, I'm not an expert in things that are not that.

• 2:24:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, not being an expert on something has never stopped any much.

• 2:24:44John Coogan?

  So, so yeah, so what's next? What was the total raise, 50 something?

• 2:24:48Speaker 07

  So 58 million.

• 2:24:49John Coogan?

  58 million?

• 2:24:49Speaker 07

  Yeah, it was, yeah, well, 52 technically in the current round, including about 6 million of saves.

• 2:24:53John Coogan?

  What's on the, what's on the to-do list over the next couple of months? Is it all hiring? Do you need to find a facility, build out a facility, buy equipment?

• 2:25:01Speaker 07

  I mean, we just moved into a huge lab. We're hiring, you know, looking for great neuroscientists, engineers. That, that's kind of the, sort of, the main, the main focus right now. Neurobiologists as well, yeah.

• 2:25:13John Coogan?

  You said neuroscientists?

• 2:25:15Speaker 07

  For, for one part of the company, yes.

• 2:25:17John Coogan?

  Can you talk more about that?

• 2:25:19Speaker 07

  Maybe in the next time.

• 2:25:19John Coogan?

  Okay, next time. There's always leaks in the, not, not on the PR release, but you dig into who they're hiring.

• 2:25:27Jordi Hays?

  30 minutes on the show.

• 2:25:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, the career stage really tells you a lot.

• 2:25:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, the career stage always tells you more about what's the priorities of the company.

• 2:25:33Jordi Hays?

  No, it really does.

• 2:25:34John Coogan?

  Oh, 100%.

• 2:25:35Jordi Hays?

  Because if a company is, is worth a lot of money, they're not hiring at all.

• 2:25:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a question.

• 2:25:41Jordi Hays?

  Bearish, you know?

• 2:25:42Speaker 07

  Good question. But my team said that we definitely had to give you guys organ plushies, so I just wanted to give you.

• 2:25:46John Coogan?

  Ooh, fun.

• 2:25:47Jordi Hays?

  A little kidney.

• 2:25:48John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:25:49Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:25:49John Coogan?

  Oh, thank you.

• 2:25:51Jordi Hays?

  Look at this. Very cute, very cute.

• 2:25:54Speaker 07

  Just to, yeah.

• 2:25:55Jordi Hays?

  I almost had to get a kidney transplant when I was

• 2:25:59Speaker 07

  Oh my god, I'm so sorry.

• 2:26:00Jordi Hays?

  five years old. I had, I got an insane E. coli. And so I was on, like, full dialysis for a long time, and I was looking really bad. My mom was ready.

• 2:26:12John Coogan?

  And you're still going ahead with the calf implants, right?

• 2:26:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:26:15John Coogan?

  So those will be frozen?

• 2:26:16Jordi Hays?

  Those are, yeah, not, not even just implants, calf transplant.

• 2:26:19John Coogan?

  Calf transplants.

• 2:26:20Jordi Hays?

  It's the new level.

• 2:26:21John Coogan?

  From the biggest, the biggest mass possible. I want Ronnie Coleman's calves on my

• 2:26:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, that could be a good way to test, you know, like, people, there's a lot of people that would like pay to get bigger delts.

• 2:26:32John Coogan?

  Bicep transplant, hack transplant.

• 2:26:34Jordi Hays?

  It's lower stakes than like an organ that needs to really function.

• 2:26:36John Coogan?

  Just throw, I've been trying to gain 20 pounds of lean mass. It sounds like I could just get that transferred in in a weekend.

• 2:26:43Jordi Hays?

  These are, these are great. You gotta do it for the whole, for the whole body, too.

• 2:26:46John Coogan?

  You gotta throw your logo on here or something.

• 2:26:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true. Next time. Next time, next time. Well, thank you so much.

• 2:26:52Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Super exciting.

• 2:26:54John Coogan?

  Do we have, do we have a guest bring the gong?

• 2:26:56Jordi Hays?

  Let Laura hit it. Let Laura hit it. Give it the hardest back.

• 2:27:02John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:27:04Jordi Hays?

  That was one of the best hits we've seen.

• 2:27:07John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:27:08Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:27:10John Coogan?

  Back to the show.

• 2:27:12Jordi Hays?

  That was awesome.

• 2:27:13John Coogan?

  Adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe.

• 2:27:22Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of out of home advertising, I saw that Avi launched, Avi launched.

• 2:27:28John Coogan?

  Friend.com billboards?

• 2:27:29Jordi Hays?

  Friend.com billboards in LA. I was thinking we should do it.

• 2:27:32John Coogan?

  I told you, I saw, I saw one on the way in. It was, they were putting it up when I came in. We interviewed him that day. I've seen them everywhere now. He really wasn't kidding about it being a massive campaign. Still want to put him in the truth zone on it being the biggest billboard campaign of all time, but he's winning me over. It might be pretty big.

• 2:27:47Jordi Hays?

  But I was thinking we take the team on like a field trip, like advertising.

• 2:27:52John Coogan?

  Intern challenge. Tell her what you think.

• 2:27:54Speaker 04

  There's one super close to where we usually get breakfast. I've seen it passing.

• 2:27:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. We gotta go take some pictures, put them on the timeline.

• 2:27:59Jordi Hays?

  The chat says, holy gong. That was an amazing hit. I love that she did.

• 2:28:03John Coogan?

  She sent it.

• 2:28:04Jordi Hays?

  She had her bag in one hand and just back.

• 2:28:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, the backhand, the different gong techniques. They really, they really bring out the personality. You can tell a lot about a founder by how they hit the gong at the TVP and all that.

• 2:28:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Avi has a massive billboard. It's like covering like three stories of a building.

• 2:28:21John Coogan?

  Love to see it. Anyway, Nick says, it's amazing how much better September is than its evil calendar twin March. Instead of a winter that just won't go away, you have a wonderful toned down encore of summer.

• 2:28:33Jordi Hays?

  September in California, best month.

• 2:28:35John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 2:28:36Jordi Hays?

  Name a better month.

• 2:28:37John Coogan?

  It's kind of gloomy out these days.

• 2:28:38Jordi Hays?

  It's, there's been, but that's because there's tropical storms.

• 2:28:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:28:41Jordi Hays?

  It's been, it's been pushing up, but it's still warm. The water's warm. September undefeated, undefeated.

• 2:28:48John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's move over to Delhi and Asparu Hav.

• 2:28:50Jordi Hays?

  One of the hardest periods of my life was the summer of 2016. That summer, my first startup ran out of cash and we had to shut down. YC, the Teal Fellowship and our investors bet on us and we weren't able to deliver at the time.

• 2:29:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, that sound effect is now going to be on our website. So if you're going through a similar phase, you can go hit it for yourself. Everybody's been through this before. It's absolutely, well, not everybody, but many, many successful people.

• 2:29:18John Coogan?

  But most successful entrepreneurs, I mean, every entrepreneur has had hard times.

• 2:29:21Jordi Hays?

  I've been there.

• 2:29:21John Coogan?

  It's been very rough.

• 2:29:22Jordi Hays?

  John's been there. We've all been there.

• 2:29:24John Coogan?

  But he built back.

• 2:29:24Jordi Hays?

  It's brutal. You gotta go.

• 2:29:25John Coogan?

  It's a comeback story, baby.

• 2:29:27Jordi Hays?

  I love 442 saves on this. People are just like, yeah, I'm in a dark place. That's, that's the, I'm in a dark place button.

• 2:29:33John Coogan?

  I gotta lock in. Gotta lock in. Love to see it. So he said, almost exactly four years later, after meandering journey through another startup, my early, my early years of investing, I met Will Brewery and we decided to start Varda together. So if you had a summer in 2025 that was like mine in 2016, my advice is to you is just one step at a time. You got it. Lock in. It's time to build. Good stuff. In other news.

• 2:29:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 2:29:58John Coogan?

  Jiro.

• 2:29:59Jordi Hays?

  Jiro.

• 2:30:00John Coogan?

  Jiro Ono, the famous sushi chef is turning 100 and he says, the secret to longevity is to continue working. That's one option. I also try to walk every day. Even after I turned 100, I want to continue working. That's the best remedy. Completely agree. People need purpose. Look at how old he is. What a beast. He's been on the run.

• 2:30:22Jordi Hays?

  Nelson AirPods Pro 3 impressions, ANC significantly better than.

• 2:30:26John Coogan?

  Active noise cancellation.

• 2:30:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, APP 2, Fit is more comfortable, transparency mode is weirdly silent and scratchy.

• 2:30:34John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:30:36Jordi Hays?

  Not a fan of the sound signature too, Basie. I'm a wired guy.

• 2:30:40John Coogan?

  Little mixed. Well, they might, I mean, that's what I was thinking. An opportunity would be make a version of AirPods Pro with wires. That would get you over there, over the hill. You could do it. Anyway, Bezel. Getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. And we have our next guests in the restream waiting room, hopping in the TBP and UltraDome. We have Shervin Pishevar, Michael Musk. Welcome to the show. How are you guys doing? Good to see you.

• 2:31:09Jordi Hays?

  What's going on, guys?

• 2:31:10John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:31:13Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you both back on.

• 2:31:16John Coogan?

  Good to have you back on the show.

• 2:31:18Speaker 08

  It's been a busy few weeks since we last spoke.

• 2:31:20John Coogan?

  I know, I know. We saw, we saw the, the, the display at the Vatican. We were blown away. Jordy didn't think it was real. I think the first time he saw it, then we saw more images.

• 2:31:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just.

• 2:31:30John Coogan?

  It's very hard to tell on the internet these days.

• 2:31:31Jordi Hays?

  That's your problem. It's like people just assume like.

• 2:31:33John Coogan?

  Oh, it's AI, it's AI. But it was real.

• 2:31:35Speaker 08

  There's no way this is real. Exactly.

• 2:31:37John Coogan?

  Exactly. It's unbelievable. But anyway, give us the update. What's new in your world?

• 2:31:41Speaker 08

  Well, it's just been extraordinary, you know. We, we closed our round as we discussed last time I was on the show. And then made it to Burning Man, survived.

• 2:31:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:31:52Speaker 08

  Went to Vatican and we had just the most incredible show. It was just a time when, you know, we had Charlie Kirk being assassinated that week. We were able to just be sad with the world for a little moment. And then to also be joyful, to go and celebrate the fact that we are in this place as a, as a human species. Not, not really Catholic Church, really just about, about everyone. And grace for the world.

• 2:32:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:25Speaker 09

  So inspiring. I had my father and my daughter there and there wasn't a dry eye in there. There were 300,000 people there. When Pope Francis's image went up, it was just so emotional and beautiful.

• 2:32:39Speaker 08

  We did a memorial for Pope Francis. It was, the original idea for this was, it came, came back in June of 2024. We did a show in Cannes, France. It's actually the same show that Shervin sold. And the chairman for the Jubilee, Olivier Francois, found me in this conference and said, we just have to do something for the Jubilee. Didn't really believe it. And then one thing led to the other. But actually, that was also when, when Shervin got involved. And Shervin and I have known each other forever, for like 15 years. But what I love about Shervin, we just, we just spent time together traveling the world. And back in May or June, I think we were, we were with Pharrell Williams in Madrid for

• 2:33:24Speaker 08

  a show to, to explain to him what we were gonna do at the Vatican, because he, he wanted to do it with us, but we hadn't figured out what to do yet. And Shervin said, hey, let's find a way to work together. So he led the round, Jeffrey joined, and he's also joined us, Shervin has joined us as our global expansion advisor. So we are, we're taking one country at a time.

• 2:33:47John Coogan?

  Very exciting, very exciting.

• 2:33:49Jordi Hays?

  How quickly do you guys want to scale? Because as, as an American, I want you guys doing like, you know, at least a show a day here in the US before we give too much.

• 2:33:59Speaker 08

  Yeah, you'll, you'll be amazed. We now, this past weekend, we did five shows around the world.

• 2:34:06John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:34:06Speaker 08

  Uh, one in, two in Australia, two in Europe, two in the US. And, uh, we're really, we're really constrained by the number of drones we have. So we are building drones as fast as humanly possible. And we have incredible artists like Andrea Bocelli or Pharrell Williams that want to do amazing things with us. And then the more countries we open, which is what Shervin is helping us with, the more attractive this becomes. Because if you're, if you're Andrea Bocelli, for example, his tours are global. It doesn't really help to do just the US.

• 2:34:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can't plan a, plan a tour and think, oh, I only have this tech, technology for these shows, right?

• 2:34:48John Coogan?

  Uh, someone, someone in the chat is asking, where can people get tickets for the next one? I imagine they're all over the world, but is, do you have an email list, something to?

• 2:34:56Speaker 08

  Yeah, so the, the place to go is go to Fever. So there's a, uh, amazing company called Fever. It's like a Ticketmaster for the world. So Ticketmaster's focused on the US, Fever's all around the world. And, uh, we, the show we're doing right now is called Drone Art Show, just very simple. They can search for Drone Art Show, they'll see what cities we're in.

• 2:35:14John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 2:35:15Speaker 08

  Uh, this past weekend, we were in Chicago.

• 2:35:18John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:35:19Speaker 08

  Uh, Madrid, Brisbane.

• 2:35:22Speaker 08

  And Orlando, and I mean, so it's just so many.

• 2:35:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can't be tracking, or you can't be at every show.

• 2:35:30Speaker 08

  The idea is actually like, kind of like Cirque du Soleil, we want people to get excited when Nova comes to town.

• 2:35:35John Coogan?

  Totally. Did anything from the, sorry, what was that?

• 2:35:39Speaker 09

  I just want to say how excited we are to be, and honored we are to be able to lead the round, the $50 million round in Nova Sky Stories. And I think the world of Kimball, I think he is one of the greatest hearts and one of the biggest visionaries that I've seen. And he always talked about cracking people's hearts open and inspiring people. And one of the great pieces that we have is that the world, AI is never going to replace the human heart, uh, human emotion. The algorithms are going to rationally try to explain it. But, uh, human emotion and feelings are going to grow in value.

• 2:36:18Speaker 09

  And what he did at the Vatican really did crack the hearts of all the people that saw it and the millions of people that saw it around the world. And so.

• 2:36:26Speaker 08

  And it's actually available on Disney Plus. It's going to be there forever.

• 2:36:29Speaker 09

  Yeah, everyone should watch it. It, it, it gives you a peek of a completely new medium in entertainment uh, that's combining human creativity and, and AI and drones and automation. So, uh, for Sofa Capital lead it, it's a big honor to be able to work again with Kimball and, and also work with people like Katzenberg and others. It's, uh, it's a great honor. So we're very excited.

• 2:36:53John Coogan?

  Did anything about the Vatican show, and I'm sure you got a ton of inbound interest from customers. Did anything update you about, um, the shape of the business? What interesting pockets of opportunity might exist for future shows? Did you have any learnings coming out of the Vatican show?

• 2:37:14Speaker 08

  I think, I think the biggest learning we got is that. Three hundred thousand people came out of their homes. It was a free concert, so not ticketed.

• 2:37:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:25Speaker 08

  But not really well promoted because the Vatican, they don't really know how to promote their own thing.

• 2:37:30Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:37:31Speaker 08

  And we had three hundred thousand people come to the show live. So I, I think that we've not really opened up our eye, our eyes to shows that have that level of scale in, in the audience. And we've now gotten, you know, we, we're very busy doing regular shows. The Vatican is not a regular show. That is a, that is just absolutely next level and you just have to watch it to understand. But we now have interest for people, whether it's America's two hundred and fiftieth or repeating a Catholic oriented show in Brazil or doing something about the history of the UAE.

• 2:38:12Speaker 08

  We, we, these are, these are hundreds of thousands of people will come to see the show. We might ticket them.

• 2:38:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you guys have a problem where when you get into that scale of an audience, it's hard to ticket that many people because you're talking about just putting it over a city, right?

• 2:38:27Speaker 08

  I don't, I don't even know how to do it. Now, I believe that, I believe that when our, our ticketing partners say, no, it's, it's possible. But I don't know how to do it. So thankfully that's not gonna be our problem.

• 2:38:37Jordi Hays?

  The ticket dealers say that anything's possible.

• 2:38:39Speaker 08

  Yeah. Right.

• 2:38:41Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I mean, it's cool to think about, you know, a city, like a city, for example, or a town saying, we want to do this to celebrate something and we're just gonna pay for it because it's almost a public benefit, right?

• 2:38:52Speaker 08

  Right, and, and many countries want to do that. Obviously, you, the United States wants to do that for America's two hundred and fiftieth. We, we're gonna do, what we're, we're doing, we'll do many, but we're gonna do a very big one in, in North Dakota for Teddy Roosevelt's library being opened on July fourth for the two hundred and fiftieth. And it's, I would say that's North Dakota, it's gonna be less people, but it will be open to the public and it'll be tens of thousands of people.

• 2:39:15Jordi Hays?

  Are there any stadiums?

• 2:39:16Speaker 08

  What opened our eyes is how, how much the public wanna be in the live show, the live experience. Because they could just easily have watched it on TV. That's what, really what they wanted.

• 2:39:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but then you can just watch CGI, you know, you can just watch, you can watch animations on your computer.

• 2:39:35Speaker 09

  Seeing it in the sky, three D around you, it's the visceral experience of it. You see the, you hear the who's and ah's and, and people are excited, so.

• 2:39:45Speaker 08

  It's something physical that. The drones bring, and it truly are, there are drones. I mean, they're, they're used as weapons in other, other parts of the world. I think that physicality gives a visceral alertness that you don't get whether you, if you're watching it on TV or on Instagram. And, and it's still awesome on TV and it's awesome on Instagram, but it's, it's just nothing like in person.

• 2:40:10Speaker 09

  I also want to just touch on how fast this is growing, just as an investor, like to be able to see a founder and a company and a team, really gigascale this idea, better than anyone else in the world. When, when I got involved late last year, how many tickets last year was?

• 2:40:27Speaker 08

  In 2024, we sold 6,000 tickets to our show, our shows. We could have half a million sold this year.

• 2:40:35Speaker 09

  Half a million, point a million. So it, it, you know, I've been traveling around the world with them and talking to sovereigns and, you know, around the world and closing deals and hand-to-hand combat and, and, and you're just seeing the reception, the excitement of, of the sovereigns and the partners around the world. This is one of the fastest growing businesses that I've ever seen. And going around with them has felt like, the way I used to, you know, go around with Travis, gigascaling from a tiny company with 1 million revenue to, to multiple billions and.

• 2:41:09Speaker 08

  And it actually does matter going country to country. You actually have to get on a plane, you have to

• 2:41:14Speaker 09

  Get on the plane.

• 2:41:14Speaker 08

  Work with the aviation authorities in that country. You have to navigate the bureaucracy. These are actual flight vehicles. So if you, if you, for example, we, we have, we, we work in Mexico, but every drone we transfer over to Mexico is the same paperwork as transferring a 747 to, to Mexico.

• 2:41:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, from, from a, from an investment standpoint, you know, if I was underwriting this, it's like you look at the mode. It's like the regulatory mode of like being able to fly, having government, having these relationships, the technological mode of just like being able to coordinate, you know, thousands and thousands of drones simultaneously, the IP, just the IP itself, right, is getting partnering with, with IP in different categories. And then obviously the relationships with even the individual venues to be able to like support and put on these. There's so many different layers to it.

• 2:42:12Speaker 08

  Funny you say the venues. The venues is a. Is one of the greatest modes out there and I mean it because it is hand to hand combat figuring out each venue, you know, what is the weather like, what's the size of the audience, what's the ticket price you can charge, what's kind of a show, is this the Vivaldi Four Seasons show with a live orchestra, or should this be more of a choir with Pharrell Williams? You know, it's, every venue is different and so that's just, it's just almost like a real estate play, you just go one after the other and you now all of a sudden have a portfolio of venues or real estate that you can use when it makes sense.

• 2:42:56Speaker 08

  This time last year, we might have had, I don't know, 20 venues under our belt and now we have a thousand.

• 2:43:04Jordi Hays?

  Do you guys, are you guys limited at all physically, like being able to have enough drones to be able to put on?

• 2:43:10Speaker 08

  We are absolutely limited by number of drones, we are building them as fast as we can and it's not near fast enough. We are, we are, we are constantly surprised, it's a six month supply chain, right? So you order everything, you've got battery chemistries to sort out, you've got all of the, all of these nuances to the supply chain that change over time. And so if I were to predict our business now, it's September, what is it going to be like in March next year? I'm going to be so wrong, it's just, there's just no chance I get it right. And so we've just decided to just make as many drones as we possibly can, that's the

• 2:43:52Speaker 08

  reason we took the fundraise, so that we're not, we're not keeping that in our back pocket as an issue. Like, oh, well, what about the drones? Right now, we literally, if someone said to us, you know, here's a gazillion dollars, we want you to fly a show like the Vatican, we just don't have the drones. We have to plan for March and onwards for next year and it's going to be great, but it's.

• 2:44:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then now you get the, you get the benefit of having to manage fleets already on different continents.

• 2:44:25Speaker 08

  In a sense, the drone shortage enables us to train the teams in different countries. So we're not just scaling so fast that, you know, safety is our, at the end of the day, number one priority and we've, we've got a hundred percent safety record and plan to keep it. And I do think there's some value to being forced to to go a little slower. But we are definitely being forced to go slower. Well, congratulations on the fun race.

• 2:44:50Speaker 09

  It's a three sided marketplace is what we realize as we analyze the businesses that you have the uh there are three sides of the venues. Dominating the venues around the world and and you get pretty creative with with the kinds of venues you can do outdoors. Um, and then you have the consumers uh who are coming and buying the tickets and. And coming to it as the venues grow, you have larger and larger people. There were five thousand people that got ticketed to. The show in Madrid and there was three hundred thousand people that showed up showed up to the free. Free show in in in Rome. And then you have the IP on the on the third side of the marketplace. So you get more and more content. And you get more more and more uh beautiful content that he's creating is that. Basically building like a Pixar and a Disney all in one inside of a technology company. So.

• 2:45:34Speaker 08

  I love I love the Pixar analogy and and actually Disney back in the early days was they were they had to solve the technology as well. Yeah. And I I read Walt Disney's biography. It's fascinating how. It took them ten years to add sound to Mickey Mouse uh. And well, Mickey Mickey Mouse came out with sound. It was the first form of sound. Ten years. Ten years. And it took us. The it's gonna sound crazy, but Intel was building this company ten years before I acquired it. Probably took us twelve years to add uh sound. It's remarkable. And it's just like, why? That's just crazy. Well, actually, this is really hard. And then uh our shows are now becoming ninety minutes long, but that is a twenty twenty five invention. That is not. Pretty twenty twenty five. And now you have to create content that's ninety minutes long.

• 2:46:18Speaker 08

  Just because you can technically do it doesn't mean you actually can do it well. And so that's where the Pixar comes in. Really the creatives working with the engineers back and forth. And pushing each other.

• 2:46:28Jordi Hays?

  I love businesses like this that are just such a simple idea, but incredibly incredibly difficult to execute. But when if you can do it, it's just, you know, the value is just.

• 2:46:39Speaker 09

  The invention of new form factors and new mediums of communication are some of the most exciting things to invest in. And the analogies I was using, I love the movie Babylon, which is like about the history of Hollywood and movies going from silent to sound and what a transformation that was. And that's what Kimball's really doing with Nova Sky Stories. He's invented a new type of medium for creative expression and entertainment, and then applied sound to it, live sound. So the Fever shows are

• 2:47:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, choreographed to live sound. Drones are, he might, these are thousands of drones choreographed to the beat, to the songs that are performed live.

• 2:47:18Speaker 09

  An orchestra.

• 2:47:19Speaker 08

  That's really hard.

• 2:47:20Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:47:21John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the fundraiser. Let's ring the gong.

• 2:47:24Jordi Hays?

  One more time.

• 2:47:27Speaker 08

  I love it. We got the gong. I love it.

• 2:47:31John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:47:32Jordi Hays?

  Amazing stuff. I can't wait to see, let us know when the first, or we'll get on the email list, but excited to have the first show.

• 2:47:40Speaker 08

  Yeah, just go to Fever and then for the show, go to Disney Plus.

• 2:47:43John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:47:44Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:47:44John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Congratulations.

• 2:47:46Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:47:50John Coogan?

  Did you see Chinese automaker BYD's U9 Extreme EV just broke the top speed record at Germany's ATP Proving Grounds? They beat the Bugatti Chiron, which went 304 miles an hour, 0.77. They went 308 miles an hour. The car has almost 3,000 horsepower.

• 2:48:12Jordi Hays?

  You saw that Berkshire Hathaway sold out entirely. They own zero

• 2:48:15John Coogan?

  Well, I know why. Because, oh, this fancy car, everyone's so obsessed with it. Track grade battery, blah, blah, blah. You know it's Nürburgring time? 659, 10 seconds slower than a Chevy Corvette. What are we doing here? 3,000 horsepower and you can't even get around the green hell in under 655? What are we doing?

• 2:48:38Jordi Hays?

  Straight line speed.

• 2:48:38John Coogan?

  It's ridiculous. Not impressed. Go back to the drawing board, China, try again. Because if you're getting laughed by a Chevy Corvette on the old Nordschleife, what are you doing? Anyway, if you wanna hop on a wander, find your happy place, book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service, it's a vacation home, but better, maybe you book a wander next to the Nordschleife and take a couple laps around the old Nürburgring. But we have our next guest, Steven. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing, Steven? Good to see you.

• 2:49:14Speaker 10

  Good afternoon. How are you?

• 2:49:16John Coogan?

  Give us the news. What's the fundraising announcement? Let's ring the gong at the start of the segment, then we'll get into the details.

• 2:49:22Speaker 10

  Yes, so, big announcement. We have just raised $12 million in our

• 2:49:33Speaker 10

  Thanks for the gong.

• 2:49:36Speaker 10

  We've just raised $12 million, led by Acme Capital, and with a co-lead was Future Ventures, and this adds on top of the already $8 million we've raised from Construct, and Abstract, and Generation Partners, and Village Global, and X-Fonds. So that brings us to about $20 million raised, and we're very excited for the, after this financing round, for the firepower it gets us to move forward.

• 2:50:03John Coogan?

  Talk about the state of the business, talk about the semiconductors, and try and put it in terms like relative to what else is going in the market. People have a high level of understanding of like, you know, GPUs and CPUs, but what are you doing specifically in semiconductors?

• 2:50:20Speaker 10

  Yeah, so, that's a good way to put it. CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, these are the things that people usually think about when they think about semiconductors. They tend to be the things that come top of mind, and they are indeed 2/3 of the chip industry. So the trillion-dollar chip industry, they're 2/3 of that. But there's this other 1/3, which is analog. And analog tends to be overlooked, but it is unbelievably important. You have, the way we are communicating today, and the way you are beaming out your show to everyone who is watching, that this is all done over analog digital signals processors, and many,

• 2:51:03Speaker 10

  many, many, many different bouncing signals across the planet. And I think it tends to be overlooked, but it's unbelievably important. It's unbelievably important in military warfare, it's unbelievably important in communications, and that's where we've really focused.

• 2:51:20Speaker 10

  Big picture sphere is a chip and product company. The difference in us and everyone else on the planet is that

• 2:51:30Speaker 10

  we at the base of what we do have an AI engine that allows us to from concept all the way to fabrication, produce, you know, produce chips that are entirely AI designed. Philosophically, we we think that chip design by humans is coming to an end. It already has mostly ended in the world of digital. So CPUs and GPUs and FPGAs, they're not designed, the layouts of those chips are not designed by hand. You you actually have TSMC basically do the layout for all the logic gates and things like that for you. But

• 2:52:10Speaker 10

  in analog, it's still done by hand and we think that the thing we are conquering today is we're putting that to an end. And we are in doing so, building a product company around that where everything is designed by AI, which

• 2:52:25John Coogan?

  So is it correct to characterize you as a as a fabulous chip design company? I come to you with a something that can be done in math, digital signal processing. I have some stream of information that's coming in. I need to transform that with math. You're going to use AI to design a chip and then you're going to call an actual fab to go and make those chips. And then you send me the completed chips.

• 2:52:48Speaker 10

  Yeah, so just a bit about what we do today. We found an interesting niche in the defense sector as a good starting point where we, companies like like Andro actually, specifically Andro and some others, come to us and they say, hey, I have an electronic warfare system or I have a Sigint system and I need an analog front end for it, right? I need a bunch of chips at the analog front end. And these are, you know, pretty critical. They come to us, they give us a custom spec and then we go ahead and we go on to our fab. You know, and we say, hey, we're, you know, this is the design. Our AI came up with actually hundreds of possible designs. And these are their performance characteristics, et cetera, et cetera.

• 2:53:31Speaker 10

  We work between the customer and the fab and then we fab it out, we package it, we ship it off.

• 2:53:38Speaker 10

  We're actually, you know, actually the big thing we're, you know, we've, we've done over the last, you know, year and a half since starting the company is, is, is, is build up this capability around these small RF components. And we're actually going to start, uh, building a joint venture with one of the big defense primes. One of the big four, I guess, uh, to allow, what?

• 2:53:59John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:54:00Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:54:00John Coogan?

  We love, let's see, give it up for the defense primes. I know, I know we like Andrew here, but.

• 2:54:04Speaker 10

  They don't get enough love.

• 2:54:05John Coogan?

  They don't get enough love.

• 2:54:07Speaker 10

  Um, I, uh, I, I told the, an executive at Northrop about the D2 bomber meme.

• 2:54:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:15Speaker 10

  Where it's feed me the three words.

• 2:54:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Have they seen it?

• 2:54:18Speaker 10

  And he really, he thought it was really funny.

• 2:54:21John Coogan?

  That's maybe good, maybe bad. I don't know.

• 2:54:23Speaker 10

  Like, oh, it was designed for that.

• 2:54:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's actually intended purpose. Um, yeah. So, so, so, so what is difficult about scaling the business now? You're raising more money. Uh, it doesn't sound like you're deploying that capital to build a fab. Are you just hiring more software engineers or AI scientists to build more efficient AI systems that can actually design better chips, even are we beyond superhuman capabilities, but there's still a frontier where we can continue to advance? Like, what, what is the longer term goal?

• 2:54:53Speaker 10

  So we have this business that we've, we, we've really started that we're going to build a joint venture around in, um, in these, I guess, these RF components, which are, it's, it's a bit of a niche business. And the, the few things we're going to be doing with this capital is, uh, one, actually, you know, investing in expanding out that joint venture, et cetera. There's going to be some capital investment from us. We, we do pay for fabrication, things like that. But also we're going to be moving into what you might think was the more high value area of the analog world, which are mixed signal chips. Broadcom and Marvell have made a lot of money over the last, uh, you know, since the AI boom started. And a lot of that is because you need to communicate between two GPUs.

• 2:55:35Speaker 10

  These mixed signal components that Broadcom and, and, and Marvell and all these guys make. Um, you know, and that's where we're going after next. These mixed signal components or IP blocks. And that's, that's the next area we need to conquer. Um, that's going to take quite a bit of hiring. It's going to, you know, whereas our fabrication for the defense stuff was in, uh, More reasonably, you know, less expensive nodes. Some of the stuff is going to be in much lower nodes. So any fabrication we do is going to be much more expensive. But in general, that's the next area we want to conquer. This mixed signal area, which is the, you know, the core of what data centers are really using when they think about analog.

• 2:56:18Speaker 10

  It's a lot of hiring, some fabrication, might be some test equipment. Though we're not sure about that, whether we want to borrow it or buy it. And, you know, we're hiring software engineers, AI engineers, chip designers, a lot of chip designers. And then obviously I need some, I need, you know, some business operations people to really come and.

• 2:56:42John Coogan?

  Do deals, get steak dinners. Well, we are rooting for you. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congrats on the round.

• 2:56:50Jordi Hays?

  Congrats.

• 2:56:50John Coogan?

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

• 2:56:53Speaker 10

  Thank you. All right.

• 2:56:54Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Steven.

• 2:56:56John Coogan?

  Up next, we have robots in space. But first, a startup idea. Bulletproof silk, charmeuse, American streetwear. Are you familiar with this at all? You can.

• 2:57:07Jordi Hays?

  Silk that's tough.

• 2:57:07John Coogan?

  They modified silkworms to make a material that's stronger than Kevlar. You can make a whole jacket out of it, which I think should be bulletproof, maybe? I have no idea. I feel like I've been hearing about this, like, make a bulletproof vest that just looks like normal clothes for like decades and no one's ever figured it out. But I have no idea if it's actually possible. It sounds very sci fi. I would like to, I would like.

• 2:57:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, speaking of sci fi, we have the founders of Icarus Robotics.

• 2:57:35John Coogan?

  Let's bring them in from the re-stream rating room in.

• 2:57:40John Coogan?

  TVP and Alfie Don. Welcome to the stream.

• 2:57:42Jordi Hays?

  What's going on, guys?

• 2:57:42John Coogan?

  How are you guys doing?

• 2:57:43Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:57:44Speaker 11

  Hey, guys. How are you?

• 2:57:45John Coogan?

  We're good.

• 2:57:45Speaker 10

  Hey, how's it going?

• 2:57:46John Coogan?

  Kick us off with an introduction. Who are you? What are you doing?

• 2:57:51Speaker 11

  I'm Ethan Ross, co-founder, CEO of Icarus Robotics, and we're building the labor force for space.

• 2:57:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:57:57Jordi Hays?

  Finally.

• 2:57:59Speaker 11

  We're lucky enough to be partnered with some of the commercial space stations and be sending robots to space.

• 2:58:04Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, I was talking over you. You said you're partnered with NASA. Is that correct?

• 2:58:09John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:58:09Speaker 11

  We're lucky enough to be working with some of the most amazing teams over there.

• 2:58:13John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:58:13Jordi Hays?

  Incredible.

• 2:58:14John Coogan?

  What do you want to do in space? Because labor in space, there's so many different things. Repair a solar panel, plug a hole after an asteroid smashed into the side of my spaceship. Like, what are the tractable problems that you need labor for in space?

• 2:58:29Speaker 11

  Let Jamie jump into that. He's the labor guy.

• 2:58:31John Coogan?

  Let's see it.

• 2:58:33Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah. Well, look, we always say, um, half of the world's GDP is labor, and I think it's going to be a similar makeup in space. So one of the big things we realize is that essentially we're hyper reliant on astronaut time when we're in space. And, you know, an hour of astronaut time costs $135,000 an hour. What these people are doing, they have PhDs, you know, they're amazingly skilled, they've all been, you know, Air Force pilots, all this kind of stuff. But ultimately, what they end up doing is the logistics and the maintenance that keeps a lot of these habitats and platforms alive.

• 2:59:05Speaker 12

  So what we're actually doing is building these dexterous mobile robots, these free-flying drones with robotic arms that can essentially go and be controlled from the ground and do a lot of the work, the boring and, yeah, maybe tedious work that the astronauts don't want to do. So that they can focus on the revenue generating stuff. So that's the experimentation, the science, the manufacturing.

• 2:59:26Jordi Hays?

  That's cool. It's funny to think about astronauts being like, uh, yeah, I'm worried about losing my job to Icarus Robotics. And they're like, you guys are like, no, it's fine. You're going to be free, your time's going to be freed up to do higher leverage things.

• 2:59:38John Coogan?

  And they're like, but I bill at $135,000 an hour. That's my rate. And I don't want to see any wage compression. I'd like a raise next year. Inflation's going up. I want to be at 140K an hour next year.

• 2:59:51Jordi Hays?

  Unfortunately, I don't think that astronauts are taking home 135 an hour. Otherwise, otherwise, the average, you know, JZ kid would be like, I want to be an astronaut.

• 2:59:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not doing the creator thing. I'm going astral all the way. So what does testing look like? I remember seeing all these videos of astronauts in pools. Can you test in water? Is that useful at all?

• 3:00:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you guys just raised 6 million. I'm assuming you don't have hardware in space yet, but this round will help you get there.

• 3:00:19Speaker 11

  Yeah, so that's great. We're um, we're actually on launch coming up uh by the end of twenty six, early twenty seven to the ISS. So this is full scale testing. We'll be up there for a year. Right now, we have an entire week of crew time to test. But you're a hundred percent correct. Testing on Earth is really, really tough. And the way that you do that is a few modes. You know, one, you can set up an air bearing facility, which gives you kind of like a frictionless environment. So think about this like a really scientific air hockey puck. Where, you know, the way that there's a thin film of air between the air hockey puck and the actual table. Well, we do that with nitrogen, high, high compressed nitrogen and these things called the air bearing. And that gives us really great movement in an X Y plane.

• 3:01:02Speaker 11

  But you're entirely right. We were just down in Johnson checking out the neutral buoyancy pool, which I think is one of the largest pools in the country. And you can test there as well. But the most exciting test before you get to the ISS is actually the parabolic flight. So you might have seen those videos of people on the planes. And these planes go up and down in parabolas and they go at the same speed of gravity downwards. And that gives you free fall. And people misconstrue space in orbit. And that zero G feeling you actually get is actually free fall. And so we'll be doing one of those in the new year, which will be super exciting.

• 3:01:37Jordi Hays?

  So your uh, your robots, will they be primarily like inside the International Space Station? They're gonna put them outside? That dial then go outside or are they multipurpose? How do you think about the kind of uh, two use cases? And are they even that different at all if you're a robot?

• 3:01:55Speaker 12

  Yeah, so uh, our plan is initially to start off by uh, having these robots do essentially what we call I V A operations. So that's inside the vehicle. So our robot is designed uh, basically to be propelled uh, by fans and some other uh, sort of like niche push mechanisms that will uh, maybe show a little bit of layer push. Uh, yeah, so ultimately what we wanted to do is deploy here first because it's actually an amazing place where you have the kind of guardrails of having humans in the loop. Uh, you have humans around it. So if anything goes really, really wrong, you know, it's not just gonna float out into the middle of nowhere, so we can recover it. So uh, that's kind of the big reason why we went uh, you know, to go to the I V A uh, first because most people are looking over this really.

• 3:02:35John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for stopping by the show. We will talk to you later.

• 3:02:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:40John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:02:42Jordi Hays?

  Let us know. Let us know if there's a, we have a pretty harsh environment here in the UltraDome. If you need some testing, just let us know. There we go. Big gong hit. 6.1 million? Yeah, 6.1.

• 3:02:56Jordi Hays?

  Nice work, guys. Love it, love it.

• 3:02:58John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:02:59Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on the raise.

• 3:03:01John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:03:01Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you at the Series A.

• 3:03:05John Coogan?

  Innocent Bystander says Tim Cook could secure his legacy with one move. Can you guess what it is, Jordy? A home printer that works.

• 3:03:12Jordi Hays?

  A home printer that works.

• 3:03:13John Coogan?

  Home printer that works.

• 3:03:15Jordi Hays?

  Simple stuff.

• 3:03:16John Coogan?

  It's crazy. Do you think that the reason-

• 3:03:17Jordi Hays?

  Brother printer prints like 5 billion USD a year.

• 3:03:20John Coogan?

  I found a paper company, this is deeply ironic because we are of course partnered with Ramp.com. Save time and money. Get rid of your paper receipts.

• 3:03:29Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 3:03:30John Coogan?

  But I found a paper company that's worth the same amount in market cap as Ramp.

• 3:03:34Jordi Hays?

  Not for long.

• 3:03:34John Coogan?

  Not for long. We're gonna take them down. You're gonna hear some really negative investigative journalism. Some short reports about this paper company.

• 3:03:42Jordi Hays?

  It's funny, so Julie Chang in this reply says they're called Brother Laser Printers.

• 3:03:46John Coogan?

  Yes, we love a brother.

• 3:03:48Jordi Hays?

  We run on brother.

• 3:03:49John Coogan?

  We love Brother Laser Printers.

• 3:03:50Jordi Hays?

  Technology brothers.

• 3:03:51John Coogan?

  It's true.

• 3:03:52Jordi Hays?

  Run on brother.

• 3:03:52John Coogan?

  Do you think that Apple's never done the home printer because of environmental concerns around like, don't print, don't waste paper?

• 3:03:58Jordi Hays?

  It's always, obviously, not the future.

• 3:04:01John Coogan?

  Also, I feel like this is one of those things where if I look way back over the past like 40 years of Apple history, I bet they did a printer at one point. Remember they did, didn't Apple do a camera? Like a handheld digital camera at one point? That was its own device? So Apples dipped their toes in here and there, but I would love, I would love a proper home printer from Apple.

• 3:04:21Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wait, so according to Gemini, while it may seem surprising to many today, Apple was once a significant player in the computer printer market. For nearly two decades, the company designed and sold a range of printers from early dot matrix models to groundbreaking laser printers that played a pivotal role in the desktop publishing revolution. They started in the late 70s with the Apple Silent Type, a thermal printer. However, it was the Image Writer series produced in the early 1980s that became a popular companion to the Apple II.

• 3:04:56John Coogan?

  Hmm, and then they got out of the business?

• 3:04:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can find these on eBay, Apple Writer II Printer.

• 3:05:02John Coogan?

  It probably works fine. What's wrong?

• 3:05:04Jordi Hays?

  It looks...

• 3:05:05John Coogan?

  Tim Cook should come out with a statement, "Hey, they're out there."

• 3:05:08Jordi Hays?

  It's got the rainbow, uh, Apple logo.

• 3:05:09John Coogan?

  If you want it so much, if it's not just stated preference, if it's revealed preference, go get yourself an Apple printer, I guess it exists. In other news, UFC is happening on the south lawn of the White House, and they, uh, they took a page out of our set design. I see an Ultra Dome.

• 3:05:28Jordi Hays?

  It's time to trust.

• 3:05:29John Coogan?

  It's time to trust. They're trussed up.

• 3:05:31Jordi Hays?

  They're trussed.

• 3:05:31John Coogan?

  Their trust is huge.

• 3:05:32Jordi Hays?

  Don't go trust for trust with the White House.

• 3:05:34John Coogan?

  No, you do not want to go trust for trust with them.

• 3:05:37Jordi Hays?

  They gotta, they gotta get a...

• 3:05:38John Coogan?

  Is this a real photo, or is this CGI or something? Like, what's going on here?

• 3:05:41Jordi Hays?

  They gotta get...

• 3:05:42John Coogan?

  Is this artist rendering?

• 3:05:43Jordi Hays?

  It's CG. I was looking at it for a while.

• 3:05:45John Coogan?

  Right, because like, they're...

• 3:05:46Jordi Hays?

  I was scoping out their trust.

• 3:05:47John Coogan?

  This has not happened yet, but...

• 3:05:49Jordi Hays?

  Are you guys kidding? This is like the most obviously CGI I may have ever seen in my life.

• 3:05:53John Coogan?

  I can't tell anymore. I don't even...

• 3:05:57Jordi Hays?

  You think they just set up a bunch of, uh, 10,000 people?

• 3:06:00John Coogan?

  I don't know. I'm not a political person. I don't follow politics that closely, so, I don't know. This might have happened. I'm also, it's double bad because I'm not into politics and I'm also not into sports. So you could have told me, "Oh yeah, UFC happened at the White House last weekend." I'd be like, "Oh yeah, I guess, I guess it did." Anyway, we have our next guest in the restream waiting room. Austin is coming into the TVP in Ultra Dome. Welcome to the show, Austin. Good to finally have you.

• 3:06:24Speaker 13

  What's up, guys?

• 3:06:24John Coogan?

  We've reacted to many posts on this here show. Thank you for your service to the timeline. Uh, good to see you.

• 3:06:30Speaker 13

  Long, long time listener, first time caller.

• 3:06:33John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on. Uh, give us the news. Big day. What's going on in your world? What you got for us?

• 3:06:38Speaker 13

  Um, yeah, we just announced our $6 million seed round. That is gong worthy.

• 3:06:43Jordi Hays?

  Gong worthy.

• 3:06:44Speaker 13

  I don't know if this is gong worthy also, but as of, as of three days ago, we're officially a ramped customer.

• 3:06:49Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 3:06:54John Coogan?

  Let's go. That's amazing.

• 3:06:58Jordi Hays?

  There we go. He is fired up. Let's go. Love it.

• 3:07:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that is amazing.

• 3:07:06John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:07:07Jordi Hays?

  And, and, uh.

• 3:07:08John Coogan?

  Extremely bullish for your business.

• 3:07:10Jordi Hays?

  You had launched the product. This is another launch. We were talking earlier. You, you gotta always just be launching. So, and, and launched again to.

• 3:07:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, take us through the story of the company.

• 3:07:18Speaker 13

  We've had a waitlist. We've kind of had a waitlist since the beginning. And so we've been a little constrained on how quickly we can add customers. We still are a bit, but we've been adding a ton of customers all day today. And, um, so we are launching to general availability for the first time today. And we had about 15,000 people on the waitlist who all got invited in today. And we still don't have free trials. So everyone has to pay to use the product. But, uh, but, but yeah, we're adding customers really quickly. And, and I guess I should talk about the product. So how is the people's secretary? So, um, it is a secretary that is part human, part AI. So we have really sophisticated models that do all the things that a great assistant does on scheduling. It knows where you take your meetings, when you take your meetings, how you want buffers, how many meetings you want to take per day, um, subtle hints on priority of different types of meetings and, um, can follow up to make sure meetings get scheduled and all of those types of things.

• 3:08:10Speaker 13

  And, um, and so it's powerful AI models that do all these things in a simulation. And then we have humans who are checking because our customers are founders, VCs, um, all sorts of folks who have a really low tolerance for mistakes on this type of scheduling. And so, um, so when our model, they're not confident enough. We have a 24/7 team of humans who are checking these simulations and approving them before they go out or correcting them in this kind of like cursor for EA's system that we've built. So it's an extremely over engineered product to solve a relatively or seemingly simple problem, but it's actually like pretty hard to get it as good as a, as a phenomenal, um, executive assistant would. And so that's the product.

• 3:08:48John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about pricing? I feel like they're, you know, hiring a full-time EA is expensive and we've seen the rise of these offshore services that are still like very expensive compared to like even a chat GPT pro plus giga subscription. Um, where do you want to play? Where do you think that there's opportunity to create, you know, a delta between what people pay and get value from?

• 3:09:14Speaker 13

  Yeah, the framing is kind of interesting because it's like we have people who say they're switching from like a virtual assistant service that costs $3,000 a month to Howie because they're mostly using that for scheduling and Howie's better at scheduling and it's 24/7. But then there's also people that are like, well, Calendly is $12 a month. Why would I pay you guys more than that? And so, um, so it's been kind of interesting, but we, so our pricing is $35 a month for our base product and then, and then 145 for Howie Pro and you, the main thing you get there is, um, white label. So you can rename your Howie and give it an email at your domain. And, um, Turner Novak named his Chamath. I was about to say, was that you? I remember seeing that funny.

• 3:09:52Jordi Hays?

  That was a joke, but it's.

• 3:09:54Speaker 13

  Yeah, no, he has Chamath scheduling his meetings. Um, and yeah, and then you can do like more sophisticated, like, um, complex preferences for, on Howie Pro. But the white label is the main thing people pay for and, um, and so, yeah, we've gotten definitely some pushback, especially without free trials. But overall, we have, we, for the right people, our product becomes instantly indispensable. Um, and it's primarily people who schedule a ton of external meetings who just like immediately cannot live without it once they start using it.

• 3:10:22Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, how long do you think it will take for like your internal software and the models to get good enough to never need that sort of like human verification layer?

• 3:10:36Speaker 13

  So I think about it like self-driving cars. It's like we, the things like the, a couple of years ago, every Waymo on the street had a person in the car holding the steering wheel. Now, for the most part, they don't, but if you see a Waymo on an icy road in Lake Tahoe, there's someone holding the steering wheel. And so we will keep pushing farther out and always be, uh, bringing tech, bringing like a product experience to the market that is not possible with today's technology, where we have humans holding the steering wheel on the, the kind of next bleeding edge things and more and more goes back to the model. So we are already giving more to the models than we were even like a month ago, but, um, but we'll keep, kind of keep adding complexity. So whether that's like travel booking, anything that like an EA does, and then a lot of things that EA's don't do, but that people could use in terms of like meta work about help, helping like,

• 3:11:21Speaker 13

  pay attention to how you're spending your time and what your priorities are. And, um, so there's a lot of things we can do that are going to be error prone. And we will always be like willing to lean on humans to push out a little farther than, than would be possible with just the models.

• 3:11:34John Coogan?

  Have you thought about an even higher tier? I feel like there's maybe an opportunity to add human in the loop and at that multi thousand dollar price point, but what do you think that's just like, doesn't make any sense for the business would take you away from the the the true goal here? What are you thinking?

• 3:11:55Speaker 13

  So we use humans in the loop and they so when we started doing that, it was me doing this. And I was like typing in Google Calendar API calls into the browser myself and and basically, and that was like in January and it would take me 30 minutes or so to complete many of these tasks. And now we have 24 17, we have 60 people that do this and they can do it and do these tasks in like 90 seconds. So it's like they're quickly seeing the reasoning notes and all these things and the entire simulation of what happened and then they can chat with it. So they can say like, oh, you got the time zone wrong. Like Dordy is normally in Pacific time, but he said, he said, this is for like the when they're doing the New York Stock Exchange thing, so it needs to be on Eastern time and then and then it'll like resimulate in front of your eyes.

• 3:12:37Speaker 13

  So we've leaned a lot into speeding up the humans in completing these tasks to where we don't really need a steeper for what we're offering today. We don't need to charge more than we do, but it is totally possible that we will have something more advanced. But really, it's just like, how can we on the scale of hundreds of dollars a month or even less, give millions of people the experience that is as good as what the top kind of 0.01% of people who have a great EA have been getting?

• 3:13:06Jordi Hays?

  And for scheduling, because somebody that like, somebody could be on the other side of the world, when if you had an EA, they'd be sleeping, they can be messaging and scheduling time, they get that instant booking and confirmation and you get that 24 7 like live experience that no EA today can offer. You need a rotating crew of EA. So I think. Yeah, it's, it's, uh,

• 3:13:34Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 3:13:34Jordi Hays?

  And the other thing too is like, if you're like, need to clear your schedule, if it's like 11 at night and you realize, okay, I need to do something in the morning. I'm not going to be able to do these meetings. You can like instantly just like hit a button and clear out the schedule and have it done in a way that's like thoughtful for the people on the other side. Uh, how was, uh, on the fundraising side, uh, I mean, I'm a small invest, uh, angel. But, and, and when I, when you first pitched me this, I was like, that makes sense. It's like a simple idea, big TAM. I think you can use AI to create something that is just remarkably better than like the current SaaS offerings, but in some ways it's like an obvious idea.

• 3:14:17Jordi Hays?

  So, and that can be a double edged sword. Sometimes investors are like, oh, this is a no brainer. I would, I would use this. I know a bunch of people that would use this. But then on the other side, I'm sure you got the question of like, what if OpenAI does this or questions like that? So how is it navigating those kind of conversations?

• 3:14:35Speaker 13

  Yeah, I mean,

• 3:14:37Speaker 13

  earlier on, I was more concerned because I've realized how unbelievably hard it is to actually execute on this product. And, um, and so, and I think that like, there's a challenge. We spent all of last year, which you know, Jordy, like, the thing was making mistakes. We were, I was apologizing. I spent 50 hours a week apologizing to customers for mistakes that we were making. But, but during that time, we learned, we saw all of the kind of mistake patterns. And we were able to kind of build our first version of a map of what we think the EA needs to do in all these different scenarios. And that doesn't exist in publicly available training data. It's like what happens in the assistant, the executive assistant's head as they're doing scheduling?

• 3:15:15Speaker 13

  And that's not publicly available anywhere. There's lots of training data that's calendar data and email data, but the kind of like what happens in the, in the EA's brain isn't. And, um, I think you have to put a pretty bad product into market in order to get a good one in this category. And that's tough for bigger companies like OpenAI to actually do. And, um, and then to deliver a product as good as ours. With human in the loop, like that's, that's also just, they want to, they want to bring something to, to a million customers on day one. And that's pretty tough to do, even for us, it's been hard to scale this kind of human in the loop approach. And so I, I think it's like a valid question, obviously, like scheduling is one of the use cases that comes up all the time.

• 3:15:55Speaker 13

  But I think by the time other folks start to get interested in it, we will be moved on to a lot more beyond just scheduling. So, uh, so it's not overly a concern, but, um, but yeah, there's, I mean, there's competitive products of ours. And then, and then lots of bigger companies that are trying to build things like this. There's one popular CEO that was tweeting about it just today, right after our announcement about, about their assistant. And so it's, there, there are people trying to solve this problem and we think it's a problem that's worth solving, so.

• 3:16:24Jordi Hays?

  A secretary for the people, finally.

• 3:16:27John Coogan?

  We love it.

• 3:16:30Speaker 13

  The, the last thing I want to say is this, the name secretary, I, I, I think you remember this, John, because I DM'd you about it. But a very early episode of TVPN, Jordy mentioned Howie and John, you were saying like, it, it should be called secretary. They should buy secretary, secretary.com.

• 3:16:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:47Speaker 13

  That planted a seed in my brain because a couple of months later I was thinking like, I mean, you, you made a whole case for it. But for me, it was just like, there's 10,000 products out there called AI assistant. And there's a word that everyone in the world knows that describes the thing that we do and we could be one of one. And so, yeah, so we're, we're.

• 3:17:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the actual response been? Cause I remember it was, it was just a funny like counter.

• 3:17:09Jordi Hays?

  Secretary also means keeper of secrets, right?

• 3:17:12John Coogan?

  Means keeper of the secrets. We have a secretary of the war, secretary of the interior. Like it's a very high status position in DC. But yeah, not many brands are using it. Have any of the, have any of the customers been like, I don't, I don't get it? Or does it actually land pretty?

• 3:17:27Speaker 13

  No, I mean, yeah, cause like Jordy, there, the, the, some people said that they thought we'd get canceled for using it, that it, because it's like two.

• 3:17:34John Coogan?

  But that's different than actually getting angry messages. Like, somebody can say, I think you will get angry messages, but did you get angry messages?

• 3:17:42Speaker 13

  Yeah, no, so far, like, and yeah, honestly, like, it's been all positive. And we leaned into it. The launch video is like showing is kind of starts out in the with a sort of 1950s style secretary. By the end, she's kind of modernized and she's a boss, which is kind of the same arc that Christina Hendricks character goes through in Mad Men, where she's like a secretary who's not treated well. And by the end, she's like equity holder in the business and is a boss. And so, um, yeah, so so far it's been extremely positive and we're really excited.

• 3:18:11John Coogan?

  Cool. Yeah, always room to carve out like a different, a different, uh, like define the category. I mean, cognition did this, didn't they like kind of create the like the the initial like coding agent? Like the AI software engineer was like when super viral.

• 3:18:27Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 3:18:27John Coogan?

  Because people were like, this, it doesn't count. And they're like, okay, well, at least you're talking about us. And then they debated it. And now people are like, yeah, of course, coding agents exist. It's a category. Uh, anyway, thank you so much for hopping on the show.

• 3:18:37Jordi Hays?

  Awesome progress.

• 3:18:38John Coogan?

  Great catching up with you.

• 3:18:39Jordi Hays?

  Excited for more people to get access.

• 3:18:40John Coogan?

  Love to have you back soon. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:18:42Jordi Hays?

  You're the man, Austin.

• 3:18:43Speaker 13

  Bye.

• 3:18:43Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:18:44Speaker 13

  See you guys.

• 3:18:46John Coogan?

  Um, did you see this, this, uh, image of the monks in orange robes at the iPhone 17 Pro launch?

• 3:18:56Jordi Hays?

  Yes, I did. I thought this was so good. They're like, finally.

• 3:18:59John Coogan?

  What did you think was good about it? Did you think it was a real photo?

• 3:19:03Jordi Hays?

  Is it AI?

• 3:19:04John Coogan?

  It's AI, baby. Oh, holy John falls for UFC AI.

• 3:19:08Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this is on another level. This is, this is, this is great. This is great.

• 3:19:13John Coogan?

  This is a remarkable AI image, honestly.

• 3:19:15Jordi Hays?

  It looks very.

• 3:19:16John Coogan?

  I honestly can't really clock it. The only reason I.

• 3:19:18Jordi Hays?

  They were like, finally.

• 3:19:19John Coogan?

  When you shared it, I was like, this is real.

• 3:19:20Jordi Hays?

  You think that.

• 3:19:21John Coogan?

  And then I saw a community note on it that said, the picture is clearly AI generated. When you look at the bottom left, the, the, the community note could be wrong.

• 3:19:27Jordi Hays?

  They're like, orange iPhones, huge sign of respect.

• 3:19:29John Coogan?

  It's really cool. It's a really cool idea that they'd be into the orange iPhone. But it does seem like fake news. Um, in other news, tomorrow is D-Day on X. If you're a bot, if you're a, if you're a spammer, uh, and you're running a bot network on X, the key to beer is coming for you. Tuesday is D-Day. Nikita Beer will be wiping out 50 to 60% of all bots algorithmically. Then, two weeks after that, we will reduce it another 25% with changes to account requirements. Very exciting news.

• 3:20:00Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 3:20:00John Coogan?

  X is getting cleaner and Nikita continues to be on an absolute run over there. I've been very pleased with the algorithm.

• 3:20:07Jordi Hays?

  You see, closing, closing kind of a black pill, but Patek will be raising their prices by 15%.

• 3:20:15John Coogan?

  This is rough.

• 3:20:16Jordi Hays?

  Today.

• 3:20:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:17Jordi Hays?

  Omega Cartier will be going up by 8 to 15% as well.

• 3:20:21John Coogan?

  Well, head over to

• 3:20:23Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely brutal.

• 3:20:23John Coogan?

  getbezel.com and

• 3:20:26Jordi Hays?

  Before this gets priced in, because unfortunately, this, these kind of price changes get priced into the secondary market

• 3:20:31John Coogan?

  They do.

• 3:20:32Jordi Hays?

  pretty quickly.

• 3:20:32John Coogan?

  But

• 3:20:33Jordi Hays?

  So, the price of the brick

• 3:20:34John Coogan?

  Make a move. There's never a bad time to pull the trigger on an Aquanaut. Thank you so much

• 3:20:40Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 3:20:41John Coogan?

  for tuning in today. We had a great show. We enjoyed hanging out with all you in the chat. Thank you to John Exley for hanging out.

• 3:20:47Jordi Hays?

  The chatroom channel.

• 3:20:47John Coogan?

  Thanks to Conor PS for the feedback about the, about the gong hits. I'm working on it. I'm getting better every day. And thank you to Gold Rock AI for hanging out. Gold Rock, I didn't realize this, it's an ad. I saw Gold Rock in the X chat with a full, full tagline of what the company does.

• 3:21:05Jordi Hays?

  Nice.

• 3:21:05John Coogan?

  Underrated strategy. If you're a company and you want to promote your business, make it your tagline. Hop in the TVPN live chat. Make some good comments. We're going to have to say your name out loud. We'll be saying your brand name

• 3:21:17Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 3:21:18John Coogan?

  on the show.

• 3:21:18Jordi Hays?

  It's the new ad.

• 3:21:19John Coogan?

  Bobby Cosmic, as always, thanks for holding it down over at Twitch. We appreciate you. And thank you to Turbo Popper.

• 3:21:23Jordi Hays?

  See you guys tomorrow.

• 3:21:25John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow. Goodbye.

• 3:21:26Jordi Hays?

  Have a great day. See ya.

• 3:21:27John Coogan?

  Bye.