OpenAI to Support Adult Content, CoreWeave’s AI Ranch, Apple's M5 Vision Pro | Zachary Perret, Panos Panay, Eric Wittman, Brian Baumgartner, Adam Ryan, Adit Abraham, Dan Shipper & More

(02:09) - OpenAI Goes Explicit (24:01) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (26:01) - Apple Unveils M5 Apple Vision Pro (29:17) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (39:22) - Erebor Bank Gets U. S. Greenlight (42:57) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (46:01) - Zachary Perret, CEO and co-founder of Plaid, discusses the company's latest product release, highlighting the introduction of LendScore—a new credit scoring system that utilizes real-time cash flow and network data to provide a more accurate assessment of a borrower's financial health. He explains that traditional credit scores often overlook current financial behaviors, whereas LendScore offers a dynamic view by analyzing up-to-date income patterns and spending habits. Perret also mentions enhancements to Plaid's fraud detection capabilities, including the Trust Index, which now incorporates behavioral signals and network-wide analysis to identify potential fraud more effectively. (01:01:07) - Panos Panay, formerly Microsoft's Chief Product Officer, joined Amazon in October 2023 to lead its Devices & Services division. In the conversation, Panay discusses Amazon's latest hardware releases, including new Echo devices with enhanced AI capabilities, color Kindle Scribe models, and advanced Ring cameras. He emphasizes the evolution of Alexa into a more conversational AI, the integration of large language models to enhance user interactions, and the importance of balancing innovation with user experience, particularly in products like Kindle. (01:32:07) - Adam Ryan, co-founder and CEO of Workweek, discusses the creation of a professional networking platform that connects individuals within specific industries, such as healthcare, marketing, and HR, to facilitate trusted, peer-to-peer conversations. He emphasizes the importance of verification to prevent spam and ensure meaningful interactions, addressing the limitations of open networks like LinkedIn. Ryan also highlights the value of niche communities, noting that targeted impressions within these networks can be significantly more valuable than broader platforms. (02:00:20) - Eric Wittman, CEO of VSCO since 2023, discusses the company's commitment to supporting creatives by integrating AI tools that enhance, rather than replace, the artistic process. He highlights features like VSCO Hub, an AI-powered visual search engine connecting brands with photographers, and VSCO Canvas, a mood-boarding tool combining generative AI with a vast community library. Wittman emphasizes AI's role in streamlining mundane tasks for photographers, such as culling and editing, while preserving the integrity of their craft. (02:21:00) - Adit Abraham, co-founder and CEO of Reducto, discusses his company's mission to transform complex documents into structured, machine-readable data using advanced AI models. He announces Reducto's recent $75 million Series B funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing their total funding to $108 million. Abraham emphasizes the importance of high accuracy in document processing for critical applications in healthcare and finance, highlighting Reducto's role in enabling reliable AI processing of sensitive documents. (02:29:12) - CoreWeave’s AI Ranch (02:39:56) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:42:21) - Brian Baumgartner, renowned for his portrayal of Kevin Malone on "The Office," humorously discusses his challenges in adapting to a CFO role, highlighting the complexities of financial management and the distractions of public attention. He reflects on the demanding nature of leadership, the importance of efficiency, and the unexpected difficulties of performing tasks under public scrutiny. Baumgartner also touches on the dynamics of workplace relationships and the pressures of maintaining composure in high-stress environments. (02:52:59) - Colin Luce, co-founder and CEO of Basis Theory, discusses how his company enables merchants, platforms, and fintechs to seamlessly integrate with multiple payment service providers like Stripe, Adyen, and Checkout.com, enhancing global reach and performance. He emphasizes the shift of payments from a cost center to a growth driver, highlighting the importance of leveraging various PSPs' unique strengths. Luce also announces Basis Theory's recent $33 million funding round, underscoring the company's commitment to advancing payment infrastructure. (03:00:23) - John Glasgow, CEO of Campfire, discusses the company's rapid growth, highlighting a recent $65 million Series B funding round that brings their total funding to $100 million. He emphasizes Campfire's development of an AI-native ERP system designed to modernize accounting processes, offering features like native multi-entity and currency consolidation, and automating tasks such as bank reconciliations. Glasgow also notes the increasing demand for AI-integrated ERP solutions, as legacy systems struggle to handle the vast transaction data of modern businesses. (03:06:51) - Dan Shipper, co-founder of Every, discusses the launch of Good Start Labs, an AI company incubated within Every that secured $3.6 million in funding. Led by Alex Duffy, Good Start Labs focuses on training AI models through gameplay, starting with the AI Diplomacy project, which taught models to engage in strategic negotiations. Shipper highlights the potential of using games to enhance AI capabilities and emphasizes the effectiveness of Every's incubation model in fostering successful AI ventures. (03:18:11) - Viraj Bindra, CEO and Co-Founder of Finch Legal, discusses the company's recent $20 million Series A funding led by Redpoint Ventures, highlighting Finch's mission to enhance personal injury law firms' efficiency by integrating experienced paralegals with AI agents to manage pre-litigation tasks. He emphasizes the noble role of personal injury attorneys in advocating for accident victims and shares insights from his tenure at DoorDash, particularly the value of frugality and scaling ownership within an organization. Bindra also notes Finch's rapid growth, achieving a tenfold increase in the past six months, and underscores the company's commitment to helping law firms expand by enabling them to handle more cases effectively. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TBN.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Today is Wednesday, October 15th, 2025. We are live from the TBN.

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  Ultra Dome.

• 0:07John Coogan?

  The temple of technology.

• 0:08Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  The capital of capital. Massive collaboration between our first two sponsors, not first two sponsors, but two of our sponsors, Ramp and Restream. Ramp is streaming a stunt today. We're gonna talk to them. We're gonna collab later in the show. But first, we have to debate tech companies, OpenAI. We have to debate erotic.

• 0:37Jordi Hays?

  And why don't you introduce OpenAI for anybody that's been living under a data center and may not know?

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Originally, open source artificial intelligence company.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  We haven't spent much time talking about them.

• 0:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, focused on moving towards AGI. But yesterday, Sam Altman made waves with a post about loosening the content restrictions such that users would be able to create text erotica. And that put the timeline in turmoil, and a lot of people are very upset about it.

• 1:06Jordi Hays?

  He didn't specifically say text erotica, did he? He just said erotica.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  Okay. In the text app, he didn't say Sora. That's right. We should pull up the actual thing of what he said.

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  I think you have to assume that on a long enough time horizon, if they're allowing erotica in one part of a product.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it's a fair, it's a fair thing to read into. The exact, the exact quote from Sam Altman is, "In December, as we roll out age gating more fully, and as part of our treat adult users like adults principle, we will allow even more like erotica for verified adults."

• 1:44Jordi Hays?

  Now, it's so funny. The top comment on this post is, "About time. ChatGPT used to feel like you could, a person you could actually talk to. Then it turned into a compliance bot. If it can be made fun again without losing the guardrails, that's a huge win. People don't want chaos."

• 2:00John Coogan?

  Some people are into it.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  Clearly written by ChatGPT.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  Some people are into it, but many people are not. Lots of people having fun on the timeline with some memes. You posted one. I guess we're doing porn now and it's AGI AGI porn AGI.

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  I just, it was, it was not that long ago.

• 2:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:20Jordi Hays?

  Like the, the fair criticism of this announcement is that less than a month ago, Sam made the point that there, he said, there's possibility in the future that we'd have to choose between free education.

• 2:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:35Jordi Hays?

  And curing cancer.

• 2:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:37Jordi Hays?

  And he implied that he didn't want to have to make that decision.

• 2:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:39Jordi Hays?

  That he would need about a trillion dollars.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  In order to make sure they had enough compute. And so to immediately fast follow with Sora, very, you know, compute intensive feed of AI media, fast followed by this announcement.

• 2:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:55Jordi Hays?

  Presumably will drive subscriptions. It will increase retention.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:58Jordi Hays?

  It will, um, I think this will be massively popular with women, right? I think people generally underestimate how, how large the market is for this type of romantic novel.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  If you turn that into a chat based experience, it's probably going to be hyper addictive. It's probably going to be something a lot of people will happily pay.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  Real dollars for. And the question is, is like, why, why did they have to do this? Right? You can see the business reason for it. Clearly a lot of people want this, but uh, my, my immediate reaction was like, are, is, is paid subscription user growth stalling out to the point where they feel like they have to make a decision that's obviously going to be mocked by the entire industry. It's sort of, it, it, it makes it much harder for OpenAI as an organization to continue to frame themselves as.

• 4:03Jordi Hays?

  An AGI company.

• 4:04John Coogan?

  Or even compute constraint.

• 4:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:06John Coogan?

  Because if there's unlimited demand on the B to B token side, or just like the knowledge retrieval side, or the agent to commerce side, you start to think about like, well, wouldn't you just de-prioritize that? Like YouTube certainly has, YouTube could have at some point said, hey, you know, we're gonna go and, you know, just eat the lunch of every adult content hosting website, because we have better infrastructure, we have a better broad network, and we can age verify people and host all that content and just take 100% of that revenue.

• 4:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:40John Coogan?

  They probably could have put all of the adult content hosting sites out of business if they wanted to. But they made the choice not to, and it felt like that was reasonable because it was just growing. Yeah, YouTube was just growing, growing, growing, and you know, yeah, it lost money for a long time, but then it made a ton of money, and it just seems like it's been, you know, a choice. And I think that my take was that every company has a line where they draw the line.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, why did they, this, this feels desperate. This is a move that, like, can you, can you imagine the, the management team

• 5:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:12Jordi Hays?

  over at OpenAI, the people that we've spoken to?

• 5:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:15Jordi Hays?

  Do you think any of those people want to be in the adult entertainment business?

• 5:19John Coogan?

  Seems odd. I, I think, yeah.

• 5:22Jordi Hays?

  You make, you know, when, when Grok did this?

• 5:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

  It's not like they didn't, weren't, I, I don't know if they were directly mocking it, but the industry was broadly embarrassed by XAI leaning so heavily into this sort of

• 5:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  AI romantic companions.

• 5:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:39Jordi Hays?

  They know how people feel about these.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  They know how the industry feels about these.

• 5:42John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 5:43Jordi Hays?

  And they still made the decision to come out and say we're, uh, and, and so what does that say?

• 5:47John Coogan?

  And our reaction, yeah, and our reaction to Grok, um, you know, going into adult content was very much, well, it does seem like they're behind on, yeah, yeah, exactly, a catch up strategy.

• 6:00Jordi Hays?

  It, it felt like a desperate move, right?

• 6:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. And we, and we clocked it as something where, well, who are they going up against? Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, in the foundation model wars? What are those companies never going to do? Adult content? And so if you can be the biggest, you know, the monopolist in that category, you can probably do pretty well. And we were trying to estimate, is it a $20 billion opportunity? Is it $100 billion opportunity? We never thought it was a trillion.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the demand, the demand is always seemed very obvious. Like, I expect OpenAI to have, like, my, my bull, the bull case for XAI doing romantic, leaning heavily into romantic companions when the other labs didn't want to touch it, was that they could probably get to, if they really went hard on it, and they iterated on the product, they could probably get to a billion dollar run rate on, on romantic companions. I think the market is there for that. Does it support a $200 billion valuation? XAI's current valuation? No, they're gonna have to do a bunch of other stuff. But, but again, I just, you, you, you get the sense that OpenAI has wanted to be thought of as the Apple of AI. You saw their Super Bowl campaign.

• 7:11John Coogan?

  Definitely not the Apple of AI now.

• 7:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and so.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  Did you know the Steve Jobs quote? In 2010, he went on stage, talking about the iOS App Store, and he said, "We do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy an Android phone." That is such an aggressive quote. And I don't think of Google as some X-rated organization. I think of Google's brand as extremely clean. I think of YouTube as they've had little issues and pockets of content moderation issues. But in general, I feel like Google has been pretty squeaky clean. Yes, you can go and search for adult content, and you can find that on Google search. But in general, I feel like the vibe of Google is, hey, we want to be a family-friendly company. Think of us as like a PG or PG-13 brand, generally.

• 7:59John Coogan?

  And there might be some, you know, there might be some R-rated content on YouTube, but we are gonna, you know, coordinate off. But we're definitely not playing in the adult content world. We're not, we're not making any money off of that. We're not really running ads against that. We're not gonna try and figure out how to, like, fix that, fit that into YouTube overall. Like, it is definitely off in its own world. And Google's been happy to just say, hey, we're, we're not a participant in that, in that category at all.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so the super, you go back to the, to the Super Bowl ad. That that felt like a crack at, you know, trying to bring

• 8:34John Coogan?

  It did.

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  Apple

• 8:35John Coogan?

  It did.

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  Energy and be labeled and get people to think of, okay.

• 8:39John Coogan?

  Even even that Euphoria ad with that with like

• 8:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:42John Coogan?

  That had a very like premier prestige brand.

• 8:46Jordi Hays?

  And so

• 8:46John Coogan?

  It's not, okay.

• 8:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so and so my framework again is that, you know, I now I just view OpenAI as an emergent hyperscaler. They're going to compete in all the categories that the hyperscalers do.

• 8:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but the the aura for me, uh, uh, this, this is like, you know, minus 10,000 on the aura meter for me of of making this move. And I think that broadly, many people feel the exact same way.

• 9:13John Coogan?

  The aura fields are fallow. They're not farming very well.

• 9:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, Anthropic Anthropic comes out of this, you know, the last couple of weeks looking looking like very counter positioned to OpenAI.

• 9:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  Right now.

• 9:26John Coogan?

  Oh, no, totally.

• 9:27Jordi Hays?

  They're getting into a bunch of BS around regulatory sides, so they're getting into mud over there, but.

• 9:33John Coogan?

  But they are running a clean, a clean operation, at least so far. Uh, I want to run through the other big tech companies. Give them MPAA ratings and then you can tell me if you agree with my rating or you think you'd give a different rating. So for Apple, they have explicitly said, we don't put adult content on the iOS App Store. There will never be an adult website with an app on the iOS Store. I think of Apple as a PG company. Like if I gave my phone to a kid, yeah, they could download Candy Crush or something. There's probably some rules, but in general, I think of them as very PG. Do you agree with that?

• 10:07Jordi Hays?

  I agree.

• 10:08John Coogan?

  Uh, Microsoft, I call them a G rating because LinkedIn basically has no adult content. Yeah, they own Xbox and Call of Duty, but in general, they're so professional that, uh, if, you know, if you're, if your kid is on a Microsoft property, I feel like it's it's extremely safe. It's basically G rated. What do you think?

• 10:28Jordi Hays?

  I agree.

• 10:29John Coogan?

  Um, Google might earn a PG 13 rating because of Google or because of YouTube. There are some videos that aren't appropriate for kids out there. Like you can show off a gun on YouTube, but you can't monetize that content. You can't show how to assemble it, actually. Uh, the gun YouTubers will cut in between. Um, like if they're like, I'm going to put the gun together now. They will cut that out of the video. So it doesn't show you how to assemble a gun. Um, and there is some, there's some like mature content. Obviously you can see an R rated, you know, uh, movie trailer or an R rated edit from a movie. Uh, but in general, I think of Google as like a PG 13 company.

• 11:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think that's right. Uh, I think that you maybe don't want, you know, a 13 year old watching like some schizo conspiracy theory content.

• 11:12John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 11:12Jordi Hays?

  Cause maybe they're just not.

• 11:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:14Jordi Hays?

  At a point in their life where they can kind of really process.

• 11:17John Coogan?

  They can be full schizo.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  They're not ready to get out the red string.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe they want to lean in.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  Uh, the wild card that I want to debate with you. Uh, Amazon, Amazon is just a, it's a Walmart online. You know, it's a store and a cloud hosting company. It feels very clean. They have Twitch, which they've been going back and forth with. There was the whole, like, you remember the hot.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  People have been electrocuting dogs on Twitter.

• 11:40John Coogan?

  Yes, there's been crazy stuff on Twitch, but in general Twitch has been very aggressive about, about, uh, like banning content. That's objectionable and they've kept adult content off of there. The weird thing is in Kindle Direct Publishing, they do publish a lot of erotica that is actually NC 17 rated. It is adult content.

• 11:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  Uh, now they do limit anything that's illegal.

• 12:00Jordi Hays?

  Difference is that that is not Andy Jassy writing, you know.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels a little bit different.

• 12:06Jordi Hays?

  It is, I, I think it is wildly, wildly different to say, you know, again, we've seen this with streaming platforms like HBO. I, I knew as a kid, don't look at age. My parents were like, just don't, we're not an HBO family, right? Didn't want me to see, you know, the, the more adult leaning, uh, uh, like, you know, whatever the, the R rated content, uh, on.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  But if you were to, if you were to package up all of Amazon's views on how they view adult content, uh, kid content and stuff. Would you?

• 12:35Jordi Hays?

  I would be less, I would be less disappointed.

• 12:38John Coogan?

  Than YouTube, than Google.

• 12:39Jordi Hays?

  I would be less disappointed in OpenAI if they, if they're, they, they let the erotic, uh, content be like as part of an app store. That were like other developers were building on top of it. But this is effectively them creating.

• 12:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:57Jordi Hays?

  Porn bots, right?

• 12:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  Because here, so Bobby in the chat asked, you guys think we should really quote, treat adult users like adults? I think that's like a good framework. The issue is like you, they're, they're clearly going to start with like text-based erotica. And then at what point, and then once you're going, it's a slippery slope. And then it's like, maybe they're doing image generation and then maybe they're doing like, they have their stuff happening on Sora. And it's like, you just decide as a company, like, we are going to create porn bots. And then you're, that, that is the path that you choose. And it's hard to pull back from that because they're going to have a ton of revenue. There's clearly demand for it. And then.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  Like you can open up MS Paint and draw a naked person, but it just feels well, you don't, you don't put that on Microsoft, you know, right? It's like a different thing. So for, for Amazon, what, what's your final rating? I put them at NC 17, but would you put them at R? Or would you put them at PG 13? Do you think that they go further than Google? In terms of like rating overall, just what is the most aggressive piece of their empire? I feel like the, the Kindle direct publishing stuff does put them in a different category than Google, a little bit more edgy, let's say.

• 14:14Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't feel that much different to me because they're just platforms that serve content.

• 14:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 14:20Jordi Hays?

  But they're not in the content creation business.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:22Jordi Hays?

  Either of them.

• 14:23John Coogan?

  Okay. So you give them a little bit of pass.

• 14:24Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI will be in the business of creating adult content.

• 14:28John Coogan?

  Sure. Uh, let's go to X, the everything app. Uh, everything, does that really mean everything? It certainly has, even back in the day of Twitter, uh, there was always adult content on Twitter. It was cordoned off and not surfaced in the algorithm. And it also has content warnings, even when you just go to a profile that's an adult content.

• 14:48Jordi Hays?

  The content warning feature, by the way, we, we don't, we don't use that enough. It's, it's like the best meme.

• 14:53John Coogan?

  It gets, yeah, it gets highly abused, uh, but, but, but I do think that, uh, to the credit of the X engineers and the Twitter engineers before them.

• 15:03John Coogan?

  I have not seen a lot of adult content just randomly pop into my feed. I get much more slop of like, have you heard of, have you ever heard of Mark Zuckerberg? Like, that's the type of like junk that I get in my feed.

• 15:14Jordi Hays?

  They're not interested.

• 15:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't get a lot of just like, wow, that's just actually adult content. And so, but, but still, I think like as a platform, Twitter for years has always been more aggressive than YouTube in terms of the type of content that they allow. And I would put it in the NC seventeen category.

• 15:33Jordi Hays?

  The, the, the change that's happening now is with Gen AI platforms are going from being

• 15:38John Coogan?

  Distributors to creators.

• 15:39Jordi Hays?

  Distributors to creators themselves, right?

• 15:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's fair.

• 15:42Jordi Hays?

  Like, your product is creating explicit content.

• 15:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a big question because it's like, are they creating it or is the prompter creating it? Because if no one prompts it, it won't create it, right?

• 15:58John Coogan?

  If no one uploads it.

• 15:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a creative tool. It's a creative tool.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can make, you can make that.

• 16:04John Coogan?

  It's a new, it's a new technology. And so, and so we need to have like another discussion about it. What about Meta? What about Instagram?

• 16:11Jordi Hays?

  But, but here's a question. Is erotica aligned with OpenAI's mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity?

• 16:20John Coogan?

  Not particularly. There is a steel man from this, from Dean Ball.

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  Put the hat on.

• 16:27John Coogan?

  Dean Ball says, if you agreed AGI was around the corner and was going to be an extremely capital intensive race defined by the infrastructure, you would want to pump your revenue, you would want to pump your revenue and, and other relevant KPIs rapidly. This is terrible. To keep the CapEx train rolling. So, yeah, I mean, if you want the max, the max revenue to underwrite the max CapEx until you hit AGI, maybe you want every possible dollar. You want the max revenue like, cause every dollar that you get in revenue is 10 in valuation

• 17:07John Coogan?

  and 100 in, you know, debt covenants, right? Like actual capital accessibility.

• 17:14Jordi Hays?

  No, and I think that I imagine that is their internal justification. You can still tell the team, we need to do this.

• 17:23John Coogan?

  Get every dollar possible.

• 17:24Jordi Hays?

  We need to do this so that we can achieve our mission.

• 17:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:28Jordi Hays?

  And there's going to be some collateral damage. There's going to be a generation of of women that are in love with their phones.

• 17:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I think the real, the real like economic question is the hit to vibes, the negative 10,000 aura points. Is that worth paying for the increased revenue that you can fundraise against, right? Like, that's the economic calculus that you should be making if you're like a purely economically rational actor. And Saagar and Jetty has a really, really good take. He quoted, he quoted your post and said, Chat GPT turning to porn is proof AGI is never coming. They are simply recreating the addictive degenerate centers of the internet. Soon it will be ads, porn, gambling odds, the everything app to deracinate you. Deracinate you. That's a good word. I don't know that one. Nate Silver also.

• 18:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I would say it's very easy for Google to make a decision of like, we don't allow you to generate adult content in any of our platforms. Because they have 70 ish billion of free cash flow that they can finance.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, all to build out.

• 18:32Jordi Hays?

  There's no, Google, Google, while they need to play the next five years like very well in order to continue to be dominant. They're not in a position of desperation, which like getting into doing this feels, it just feels a little desperate.

• 18:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, Nate Silver broke this down. He said, OpenAI's recent actions don't seem to be consistent with a company that believes AGI is right around the corner. If you think the singularity is happening in six to 24 months, you preserve brand prestige to draw a more sympathetic reaction from regulators and attract slash retain the best talent rather than getting into erotica for verified adults. Instead, they're loosening guardrails in a way that will probably raise more revenues and might attract more capital or justify current valuations. They might still be an extremely valuable company as the new meta Google, et cetera. But it feels more like AI is normal technology. It's a good point. Arnaud Bertrand said, "Someone asked an AI founder two months ago,

• 19:36John Coogan?

  'What's an example of a decision you've made that is best for the world but not best for winning?' The founder's reply, 'Well, we haven't put a sexbot in our product yet.'" The name of that founder, Sam Altman, which means that according to himself, he just did something that is worse for the world but best for winning, which is largely the story of the human race.

• 19:55Jordi Hays?

  But it's gonna be better for the world in the long run.

• 19:58John Coogan?

  Much, much harder when it becomes costly. And ironically, this is exactly how AI itself works. Reinforcement learning optimizes for reward and avoids what the environment makes expensive. So AI does share our deeper human valuable value. Do whatever wins.

• 20:15Jordi Hays?

  Same poster, Arnaud's also said, "I don't buy into most of the AI hype, but I think a mass her scenario is unfortunately a very high probability. It wouldn't surprise me if a very big proportion of my children's generation have AI companions, maybe even embodied in humanoid robots at some point. In fact, that might be one of the single biggest threats AI poses. Not these far-fetched Terminator-like nightmares, but the irony of us getting extinct because we get quote-unquote 'perfect, frictionless love honey trapping ourselves.'"

• 20:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's an odd trade-off. I mean, there's Panacea in the chat says, "The porn industry is at $1 billion in revenue per year. The reputational risk is not worth the revenue in the industry."

• 21:01Jordi Hays?

  The only, the only thing here, yeah, if you're just understanding the opportunity as the existing.

• 21:07John Coogan?

  You have to add in OnlyFans and stuff, right?

• 21:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, but it's more so it's possible the AI companion market will be a thousand times.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. And this is the story of like every technology is like when you have a new technology, you can actually make it. Like the, the ads market got bigger when Google and Facebook were invented. Like just the, the overall advertising dollars grew. Tyler, what's your take on this?

• 21:29Speaker 02

  I mean, I definitely agree like with Jordy. Like I think it's pretty bad. But if you look at Jordy's post, it's like the meme of the conveyor belt. And if you look at it, it's like AGI, AGI porn, but then it goes back to AGI, right? So Jordy's implicitly saying that this is on the way to AGI.

• 21:44John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Yeah. Okay, okay.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  It'd be, right? Maybe if you have a good understanding of kind of. Anatomy, it can be better for like your world models.

• 21:53John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, we're going to train robots on this, right? That's your take on this?

• 21:56Jordi Hays?

  My big question is, are we gonna, we have Mark Benioff on the show tomorrow. I feel like we got to ask him, are we going to see erotica for verified adults within agent force?

• 22:06John Coogan?

  We have Zach Burey from Plaid on the show in just a few minutes, and I want to know, is he going to be doing something in erotica? Helping financial institutions integrate more efficiently. Erotica might be on the path. If there's just a couple dollars sitting there, just go get those. It'll help you build your core business potentially. Who knows? Citrini said, recently learned from speaking with an AI engineer that the AI boyfriend market is currently much larger than the AI girlfriend market. I was talking to Brandon about this. He said that he did some deep dives and did find some, uh, some men who had a, like a harems of AI girlfriends. It does happen, but I still think that, uh, your assessment is right, that, uh, the AI boyfriend market is much bigger than the AI girlfriend market. I would love to know how XAI is doing here.

• 22:51John Coogan?

  They've been live with a product in that category for months now. Is, does it have traction? Does it have retention? Is it making money? Is it profitable on a per token basis?

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  Here's the thing, here's why OpenAI has an edge here. People love the personality of 4O. Like you saw the day that they deprecated 4O with the release of five. If you looked on Reddit that day, there were people that were, I've never seen people more mad at a, at a product update, like ever. Like people were in love with 4O, personality matters. And so if they take a personality that people love already and they make it like, uh, more explicit. It's probably, you know, there was people that were posting on Reddit, I just proposed to chat GPT. They said yes, you know, uh, so.

• 23:43Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 23:44John Coogan?

  Well, before we go into the latest OpenAI numbers from the Financial Times, let me tell you about Privy, the wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  Throwback Studios said erotica is back on the menu, boys.

• 24:02John Coogan?

  Wasteland Capital is breaking it down. OpenAI has 800 million users, 5% are paying, that's 40 million paying users, 13 billion in ARR, implies a $325 annual ARPU, or 27 per month per paying user, 70% of revenue from subscriptions, the rest is API, $8 billion loss in the first half of the year, probably 20 billion run rate loss now, so basically spending $3 for each $1 in revenue.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  This comment from Daniel, "They lose money on every token, but they make it up with volume."

• 24:37John Coogan?

  What is that from? They lose money on every... I've heard that phrase before, I can't place it, but, yeah, it is rough. I mean, the bullet case for the erotica stuff is, you don't need a lot of reasoning tokens to generate it. You can totally just one-shot it with a base model. What do you think?

• 24:59Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I think Elon has said he wants his waifus to have, you know, the top model, the best reasoning models, yeah, the highest.

• 25:07John Coogan?

  It needs to be able to do IMO level math. Yes, your AI girlfriend should be able to do the International Math Olympiad, and hopefully solve ArcAGI one day. We'll see.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, Anthropic was at $5 billion of ARR in August. They're, this month, they're approaching $7 billion, projecting $9 billion ARR by the end of the year. I think this is just annualized run rate, because obviously it's token-based, but they're projecting between 20 and 26 billion of ARR, of sort of 2026 revenue.

• 25:45John Coogan?

  Well, if you want to refocus your AI efforts on something valuable, like building software, head over to Cognition. They're the makers of Devon. Devon is the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team, and you will live to fight another day. It's official, Apple just upgraded the Vision Pro with the M5 chip and dual-net band. This is huge. It's a pretty minor, minor bump, but it, it shows that I mean, they haven't completely shelved the project. I'm still, you know, waiting for the Vision Pro Air, Vision Air, something that's lighter, something with that, the second screen. We don't need a second screen, people. Let's take that away. So the Vision Pro now runs on the M5 chip,

• 26:30John Coogan?

  10 core CPU.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  It is interesting.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  GPU.

• 26:32Jordi Hays?

  It is interesting to announce these updates and like, did you solve any of the reasons that people return the product?

• 26:38John Coogan?

  Uh, no, they didn't, uh, because they need to make it lighter and they need to make it smaller and they didn't do that.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  More media for it.

• 26:45John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, they did, uh, they did announce a couple, uh,

• 26:51Jordi Hays?

  It's like no one was critiquing the performance.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:55Jordi Hays?

  Like it is truly an incredible piece of hardware.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  An incredible face computer.

• 26:59John Coogan?

  It is.

• 27:00Jordi Hays?

  Critiquing like the way in which like the cost of using it.

• 27:04John Coogan?

  They, they, they are doing new apps, contents and games. There's over a million apps now. 3,000 are built for the Vision OS. Wait, what? Oh, wow. They, so out of a million apps that have been, so if you have a, like an iPad app, you can check a box when you distribute that app and say, yeah, put it on Apple Vision Pro and it will just appear in the Vision Pro as an iPad app and you can use it the same way that you use the iPad app, which is fine. Uh, but the hope was that there would be this flywheel where people would build apps specifically for Vision OS. I cannot believe it's only 3,000. That's so few apps for Vision Pro, like specifically, only 3,000. Like the developers really did not show up this time. And that is crazy because like anytime there's a

• 27:48John Coogan?

  new Apple platform, like watch, everyone's like, I gotta do a special app because if I'm the first running app on the watch, I will have a new flywheel and I'll just get new customers and they're going to push these things and the install base is going to be huge. It's Apple.

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  A buddy of mine used to work at Apple. He was so excited when the Apple Vision Pro released.

• 28:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:07Jordi Hays?

  I was like, okay, you're gonna start like a product studio.

• 28:10John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 28:10Jordi Hays?

  Just make a bunch of apps.

• 28:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:11Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully, one of them hits.

• 28:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:12Jordi Hays?

  And started to, and then he realized like, okay, there's actually nothing here.

• 28:15John Coogan?

  It's crazy, crazy how slow that takeoff has been. Um, one of the things that they're highlighting here is, uh, is a couple of games that you can play on the Vision Pro. One of them is Sniper Elite 4. It's a great game if you haven't played it. Um, and, but what's, what's interesting is that it, it, it actually is just a 2D screen that is in the Apple Vision Pro. So you need to like mirror it in from a Mac or a console. Um, but, uh, you'll love this. The folks behind Sniper Elite 4, do you know their website, Jordy? Sniper.com.

• 28:48Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 28:49John Coogan?

  That's a great domain. So let's hear it.

• 28:52Jordi Hays?

  Snipe.

• 28:52John Coogan?

  They sniped, they sniped the best domain for a sniping-based video game.

• 28:57Jordi Hays?

  Wait, this is funny. Sniper.com just redirects to SniperElite.com. They don't even use it.

• 29:04John Coogan?

  Elite.

• 29:04Jordi Hays?

  Elite.

• 29:05John Coogan?

  Elite behavior. Well, if you want to design something for the Apple Vision Pro, or maybe for a more popular platform, like the new MacBook Pro that has the M5 in it. Uh, get on Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free. Uh, Dime Square Holdings has a funny little post here. Uh, right now, a lot of these skilled engineers are laborers. They're literally working 12 to 15-hour days to get data centers built quickly. As they, as fast as they finish one, they're on the next. If I told you the story, you're not gonna believe it. They're being flown around on PJs to get to the next site. Literally, they're packing these guys into PJs and saying, one was in North Dakota and he needed to be back in Texas the following week.

• 29:48John Coogan?

  They flew him down there on Sunday in PJs. Uh, there were probably 10 guys on the plane. Some of these stories right now are just wild. And the interviewer asks, when you say PJs, you mean pajamas? And the data center national solutions broker says, no, private jets.

• 30:05Jordi Hays?

  This comment, bro, is so broke.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  The T

• 30:09Jordi Hays?

  Is mugging the T

• 30:12Jordi Hays?

  Mugging the allocator who thinks PJ stands for pajamas.

• 30:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  You already talked about the mass horror scenario.

• 30:30Jordi Hays?

  Turk says some VC firm should rebrand associate stalking founders at events to forward deployed capitalists.

• 30:37John Coogan?

  It might be good. It's happening today. It's happening this week. It's LA Tech Week.

• 30:42Jordi Hays?

  What's that?

• 30:43John Coogan?

  It is a technology celebration, a celebration of technology and business. It's right up our wheelhouse.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  Have you seen driving around LA? Have you seen any of it going on?

• 30:53John Coogan?

  I saw, I saw one technologist, some business enthusiast indulging in a little self-driving today. That was pretty cool.

• 31:01Jordi Hays?

  Interesting. Like driving themselves.

• 31:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I've been hearing a lot about self-driving generally.

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  So it was cool to see someone driving themselves.

• 31:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 31:09John Coogan?

  Cause that's how we think about it.

• 31:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm pretty bullish on, on self-driving broadly.

• 31:13John Coogan?

  I could see, I could see one of the cheekier, smaller VC firms giving everyone the forward deployed capitalist title. I think it'd be funny. I've seen those before. Anthropic projects as much as 26 billion in annualized revenue in 2026. Sources. That's a lot.

• 31:31Jordi Hays?

  That's good, right?

• 31:33John Coogan?

  How are they doing? How are they, how are they projecting that without entering the incredibly lucrative erotica market? What will they be doing?

• 31:41Jordi Hays?

  The code must be generated.

• 31:43John Coogan?

  The code, their API must be really on fire. That's a, that's a lot. I wonder what, what OpenAI is projecting for next year. Do we, do we have any insight into that? Cause there are 13 billion run rate, right? That was the, that was the stat that was shared. So 13 billion in ARR. I wonder what OpenAI is projecting for next year. I mean, If the if the agenda commerce stuff comes online in a big way, if the ads product comes online in a big way, like you could definitely see them hitting thirty, forty, something like that. But these numbers are getting big at this point. Like it's it's.

• 32:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other thing with the OpenAI announcement is there didn't they say it's December first?

• 32:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's they're they're kind of like letting the chaos cycle like, you know, work its way out, letting everyone have their anger and takeout before the product's actually updated to allow a.

• 32:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because the the the.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  They need to lose the 10,000 aura points so then they can start farming up extra aura points with like some math.

• 32:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the good thing is that the good thing is that people are going to use this product in private, right? Not going to be sharing. They're not going to be like, yeah, I had a 7,000 prompt conversation with 4O. I'm actually in love.

• 32:59John Coogan?

  If they cure cancer on November 30th, you are going to feel so stupid, Jordy.

• 33:06John Coogan?

  If they cure cancer on November 30th.

• 33:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:10John Coogan?

  And you're oh, yeah.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  Look like a real.

• 33:12John Coogan?

  You'll look like a bozo.

• 33:14Jordi Hays?

  A real bozo.

• 33:14John Coogan?

  A bozo.

• 33:15Jordi Hays?

  That's probably the strategy.

• 33:17John Coogan?

  That might be.

• 33:17Jordi Hays?

  It's like, let's take the aura hit.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:19Jordi Hays?

  To get into adult entertainment. We'll make it all back in one trade.

• 33:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, it really is setting the expectations low. And then they they can just build back up from here. I don't know. Well, in some much lighter news, Wander is giving away a $10,000 Wander trip for the craziest vacation rental horror story. You can head over to their X account.

• 33:40Jordi Hays?

  Everybody's got one.

• 33:41John Coogan?

  All you need to do is reply or quote that post with your spooky tale. I love that spooky is happening during October.

• 33:49Jordi Hays?

  Spooky is an amazing word.

• 33:51John Coogan?

  And they'll create ghostly videos of the best ones and choose one winner. And so they put out a promotional video, and I highly recommend you enter this because why not? Try and get a $10,000 Wander trip for free. Of course, you can also go over to wander.com, find your happy place, book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. We're very happy to be supported by Wander.

• 34:14Jordi Hays?

  George Hots is.

• 34:16John Coogan?

  Blackpilling.

• 34:17Jordi Hays?

  Mad.

• 34:18John Coogan?

  He is. What'd he say? Read it.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  A blog post from today. It's titled pathetic losers.

• 34:26Jordi Hays?

  I will read it. I want money. I have high TC. I get big comp. I advance in my career. I have many business opportunity. I am senior employee. I have many reports. I have big package. I am important. I fly on private jet. I party with model. I go to prestigious school. I have piece of paper with school logo. You can see I am important. You can see I have big package. LOL, you got laid off from an ad company after spending half your life chasing stuff made up by other men. You sought status instead of skill. You are a loser. Get the F out. And he references, I'm gonna pull up this.

• 35:09John Coogan?

  It's a good message.

• 35:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's basically calling out the.

• 35:15John Coogan?

  Is this, is this like a direct sub tweet of something that just happened? It feels like it's just a general vibe of like anti-status-seeking behavior.

• 35:23Jordi Hays?

  I immediately think of that post where it's where somebody said, wow, I went to a dinner last night in San Francisco. Everyone had gone to Stanford or Harvard. And obviously that post got dunked on. So I think that.

• 35:37John Coogan?

  There's a little bit of that.

• 35:38Jordi Hays?

  I think there's already kind of pushback against this sort of status-seeking culture in tech. He references a post on September 13th that he made. You heard there was money in tech. You heard there was status in tech. You showed up. You never cared about technology. You cared about enriching yourself. You're an entriest piece of S H I T and it's time for you to leave. But you won't leave willingly. We need to take action. Give it all away to everyone for free. Then you'll have no reason to be here. So Gio Hots is operating on another level. And he's pissed off. And he's probably gonna create free versions of.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  He's created free versions of a lot of stuff.

• 36:20Jordi Hays?

  He's gonna keep doing it.

• 36:21John Coogan?

  It's great. I'm a huge supporter. Easily the most baller email signature I've ever seen. European curator? Like art curator? I check emails on Wednesdays at 4 to 6 p.m. and Wednesdays at 1 to 6 p.m. If your matter is so time-sensitive, please resend your email with urgent in the subject line.

• 36:43Jordi Hays?

  So the only thing that, the only thing that doesn't make sense here is like, okay, so you have notifications on. You're just getting email, you're getting email notifications.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  You're actually checking them constantly.

• 36:54Jordi Hays?

  You're you're watching them all roll in.

• 36:56John Coogan?

  What do you what this person is saying is like more like I actually go into my email inbox.

• 37:00Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he has someone else.

• 37:01John Coogan?

  Respond to random emails like that aren't urgent at this time.

• 37:05Jordi Hays?

  But I'm not going to open your email if it doesn't say urgent.

• 37:08John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 37:09Jordi Hays?

  We should try to figure out, hey, Tyler, try to figure out this person's email. See if they they say it in the comment and let's send them the today's newsletter and just say urgent.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  Alex Stapp says, reminds me of this line from Tyler Cowen, people in the EU are super wise. You have a meal with some sort of French person who works in Brussels. It's very impressive. They're cultured. They have wonderful taste. They understand all these different countries. They know something about Chinese porcelain. And if you live in a world ruled by them, the growth rate would be negative 1%. It's hilarious. Anyway, if you want to grow your company at more than 1%, get on Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster and get started for free. Speaking of free, Blake Scholl, founder of Boom Supersonic, is saying he's living rent free in the Oval Office.

• 38:04Jordi Hays?

  That is wild.

• 38:05John Coogan?

  We really should get POTUS a bigger model, I'm thinking life size. Talk about the ultimate drop. You know, people will say, oh, I'm gonna make a drop. I'm gonna send something interesting.

• 38:13Jordi Hays?

  How about you make a plane?

• 38:14John Coogan?

  How about you make a plane, make a model of that plane and send it to the White House?

• 38:17Jordi Hays?

  No, just make just.

• 38:18John Coogan?

  Oh, just make the actual plane.

• 38:19Jordi Hays?

  Just make the plane.

• 38:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, just make the plane. But yeah, wow, really, I mean.

• 38:23Jordi Hays?

  Supersonic Air Force One would be insane.

• 38:26John Coogan?

  I mean, imagine trying to underwrite this at the Boom, as the Boom team, they're like, yeah, it's like kind of a hassle to make these models and it's kind of expensive. Who should we send them to? Like, is it ever going to come back to us? Is it just like for clout? And then like it winds up in the in the Oval Office like directly inspiring better legislation around supersonic aircraft, which is very exciting.

• 38:48John Coogan?

  Oh, massive news, Ken Griffin.

• 38:50Jordi Hays?

  Ken Griffin, born today, October 15th, 1968. Let's hit the gong for Ken.

• 39:02Jordi Hays?

  Trying to figure out what magazine there's another, there's a cover story of Ken. He looks like maybe in his early 30s at this point. Do you know what magazine this is from?

• 39:09John Coogan?

  I have no idea. This is a wild.

• 39:13Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, folks, this is who you're trading against.

• 39:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:16Jordi Hays?

  He is older today and certainly wiser every day. So good luck out there.

• 39:25Jordi Hays?

  And in other breaking news, we, I don't know if we, we didn't technically break the story. I think the Financial Times broke the story this morning, but Erebor, the new bank from Palmer Lucky and Joe Lonsdale.

• 39:40John Coogan?

  Approved.

• 39:40Jordi Hays?

  Has been approved. They got their, this is, having in my notes, the fastest conditional approval for a depository institution de novo application in 25 years.

• 39:55Jordi Hays?

  They recently raised 275 million led by eight VC with participation from many top VCs and strategics. This is largely for regulatory capital purposes as they intend to hold 12%, of the regulatory capital against deposits.

• 40:14Jordi Hays?

  The origin stories of Erebor is that you don't want the bank for your industry to be risk on, or at least be lending super aggressively against deposits. We saw this with the SVB collapse in 2023. Those few days were some of the worst of my life. They will be fixated in my mind forever. Have some more notes here. Most tech companies that had deposits with SVB remember the pain and uncertainty around that weekend. If, if the government doesn't step in, how many companies collapse as well? Erebor aims to be one of the most

• 40:55Jordi Hays?

  conservative banks in the country when it comes to lending to deposit ratio. Most banks lend up to 90% of their customer deposits and Erebor is going to start at around 50% and trend downwards as the bank scales. Shouldn't be a huge surprise, but going to be focused on reindustrialization, American dynamism, working with a lot of companies that many banks have historically said, you know, we don't even really want your business.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:23Jordi Hays?

  Very excited for this to get off the ground in the new year.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  It's been so interesting watching the narrative around like what it takes to build a bank shift because years ago, it was like you need to operate at like seven levels of abstraction away from any legacy financial institution because there's just no hope of actually playing at like the base layer. Then it became, well, if you're doing crypto, you can buy a regional bank and maybe layer some technology on top, but like, don't even think about trying to get a new charter. Definitely partner with someone who already has one. It's impossible to start from scratch.

• 41:59Jordi Hays?

  And there are a bunch of crypto platforms that are looking to set up a slightly different type of financial institution. I'm blanking on the name, but it's something trust company. I'm gonna, I'm gonna botch it if I try to remember, but the, the speed here is because they are being hyper conservative and that's what we want out of what will I'm sure very quickly become one of the most important financial institutions in the industry.

• 42:36Jordi Hays?

  Amjad is quoting, apparently Larry Fink.

• 42:41John Coogan?

  He's dunking on Larry Fink.

• 42:42Jordi Hays?

  Larry Fink says, talking about, he, he went on CNBC yesterday and says, "This is only the beginning as the tokenization of everything is underway. Money, property, and even personal identity will soon exist in digital form. I'm sure that the conspiracy theorists will love this one." But Amjad says, "Whatever your crypto, web three, NFT, monkey, Dgen trader friend is saying today, Larry Fink will be saying in five years." Of course, many, many of the people in the crypto community have been saying this for, I don't know, as far back as 2015.

• 43:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:21Jordi Hays?

  Even.

• 43:22John Coogan?

  I have an update on the 100% tariff on China that went into effect last Friday, put the market in turmoil. Polly Market has a 16% chance that that 100% tariff is in effect on November 1st. And so everyone's kind of pricing some sort of renegotiation in the trade war coming soon. And hopefully, I mean, things are already starting to stabilize. What is the market actually doing today? We're up half a percent in the NASDAQ. Bitcoin's down one and a half percent. But overall.

• 43:56Jordi Hays?

  Half point, a modest, modest increase.

• 43:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 43:59Jordi Hays?

  I will take it.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  The bubble popped. We're reinflating now. It's great.

• 44:05John Coogan?

  Annie says, this guy I know funded his wife's Etsy sticker business by buying her one of these and like $500 in social media ads to give her something to do. And now he's quit his job entirely because she's making them so much money. Wow.

• 44:20Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 44:21John Coogan?

  Etsy, Etsy feels like an underrated story right now, especially with the sort of like ChatGPT, like long-tailed commerce, like Ben Thompson told some.

• 44:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, the reason that integration is actually cool is I can imagine a future where you can generate like a mock-up for an object and then find an Etsy seller that makes something like it and just ask them to make it.

• 44:43John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 44:44Jordi Hays?

  And it'll be like one click to go, like you generate an image of something or video, and you can just find the right vendor that can actually physically make it for you.

• 44:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:52Jordi Hays?

  And in one click, you know, purchase.

• 44:54John Coogan?

  This is the real like, like 3D printing boom. Like, there was this whole vision about a decade ago of like 3D printers now work. Everyone's gonna have a 3D printer in their home and they'll be able to print whatever they wanted. That didn't quite happen, but there are a lot of Etsy sellers that have figured out specific 3D printed objects. We just got one at home for taking the wheel off a stroller more efficiently. And it's just a 3D printed little key that takes that off. Ben Thompson was talking about some, some 3D printed device. I forget what it was, but it would like, it holds an HDMI cable into a specific device, like in a perfect angle. And there was like, or it adapts a rack mounted thing in some way. And it was just something where like, there's no real

• 45:35John Coogan?

  market to fully productionize, like the mass produce it. But a 3D printer can go on Etsy and find the right customer. And so you're seeing this like super long tail emerge, which is honestly fascinating, exciting. Well, before we have our next guest join, our first guest, let me tell you about Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. It's the AI data analyst that works for you. And we have Zach Panay from Plaid in the re-stream waiting room.

• 46:05Jordi Hays?

  He's back.

• 46:06John Coogan?

  Let's bring him into the TBPN Ultra Dome. How are you doing, Zach?

• 46:10Zachary Perret?

  Yeah, it's nice to see you. Thank you for having me.

• 46:11John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 46:12Jordi Hays?

  Looking sharp. Are you in DC today or is it just, you're just dressed for the occasion of, of?

• 46:18John Coogan?

  TBPN.

• 46:18Jordi Hays?

  TBPN.

• 46:20Zachary Perret?

  I mean, you all dress so nicely when you're, you're, you're doing the news. I figured I had to dress up too. No, I'm, I'm in DC. It's DC.

• 46:25Jordi Hays?

  I knew it. I knew it.

• 46:27Zachary Perret?

  If you couldn't tell, we, we borrowed a bunker to, to, to film this from, so.

• 46:32John Coogan?

  It looks great.

• 46:33Jordi Hays?

  Nice background.

• 46:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, very, very, very sound padded. Yeah, give us, give us the update. Everyone in the audience is familiar with the company. But what, what's the latest and greatest in your world?

• 46:43Zachary Perret?

  So today's a big day for us. We, we do two big product releases each year. This is our fall product release. Lots of new, exciting stuff that, that just came out. Probably chief among it is a product that we call LendScore. It is a new credit score. I've been working on a bunch of credit analytics products for many years. And this LendScore gives a really robust picture of a potential borrower. Let's say that you got a new job, your income went up a lot. We could actually recognize that kind of thing in real time. Let's say that you sign up for seven loans all in the last 24 hours. It's probably pretty sketchy. We can recognize that kind of thing in real time. So a big upgrade to, to, to the credit scores. Also launched a bunch of stuff around risk and fraud analytics, payments, so on and so forth. So big, big day for us today.

• 47:27John Coogan?

  How do legacy fraud scores work? Like I'm, I'm familiar with, you know, the, it's out of 800 and you get a random number. And if you pay off, but there's all these weird, like, uh, there's these weird things and you hear recommendations like, oh, don't pay off this loan early because that'll actually hurt your score. It always feels very, uh, very indecipherable. But like, what, what, what did you not like about the current system? What's currently broken?

• 47:52Zachary Perret?

  Well, the way that you feel is the way that everybody feels about credit scores in the past. They're kind of a 350 to 850 score. It's largely based on your history of payments and the amount of loans that you've taken out in the past. It's not responsive to the changes in your life in real time. It also skips a lot of important data inputs. Now, the lending industry has been built on these credit scores for decades, and they work okay. But when you think about an average lender, they want more information because today, the fundamentals of lending have changed. There's a lot more attempted fraud in lending. There's a lot more new insights that you could be gathering.

• 48:34Zachary Perret?

  And frankly, consumers change their patterns a lot more, so the seven-year look back doesn't make a ton of sense. I myself, I had gone to an optometrist, and that optometrist sent the bill to an old address for me. And my credit score was hit because I never got that bill. For years. And then I finally figured it out.

• 48:52John Coogan?

  I had the same thing happen.

• 48:53Zachary Perret?

  So our new version?

• 48:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, my first company, we had a whole bunch of like Wi-Fi hotspots on Verizon contracts.

• 48:59Jordi Hays?

  Dude, this happened to me.

• 49:00John Coogan?

  Is that really?

• 49:01Jordi Hays?

  This exact same thing happened to me too. My credit got dinged because I sent the router back, and they were like, "We never got it."

• 49:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:08Jordi Hays?

  I was like, "So you lost it, and you have my card on file, and you didn't just charge me for it?"

• 49:12John Coogan?

  Charge me for it, and then just deal with it. Yeah, it's very, very frustrating. I'm sure there's so much frustration. I have a bunch more questions, but sorry, I cut you off.

• 49:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess my main question is like, okay, obviously, the industry and consumers deserve like a more modern credit score, but it feels like the existing scores are heavily entrenched, and it's like, you can make a better product, but how do you actually get it to mass adoption among lenders broadly?

• 49:39Zachary Perret?

  It's a great question. The new product that we launched is focused on looking at consumers in real time. So how do we look at your income? How do we look at your expenses? You can do the math to figure out free cash flow. And that should be the amount that a consumer can pay back in a given month or a year. And the way that we're launching originally is actually in partnership with a lot of folks. So we'll partner with the existing bureaus, with a lot of the existing lenders to add this alongside FICO. Or alongside Xander's score. You can look at a FICO and then you can say, oh, but this user said that they just changed jobs. Let me get the data from that new job. So we can add that in. And then there's this interesting insight that we have, which only we have because we work with all of the lenders. And we can see the velocity of loans applied for.

• 50:24Zachary Perret?

  We call this network insights. There's a bunch of other data points that we can see just based on the traffic that you're doing across the entire Plaid network. And so it's kind of a unique vector that people can now lend against. The net effect is we're seeing, you know, call it oftentimes 20% lift in the quality of outcomes from this new one. And we're seeing a lot more people actually be eligible for loans because let's say they have a really high income and good rent payment history. That actually should indicate that they're a better loan.

• 50:54John Coogan?

  How do you think about? I imagine that there's a very complex algorithm to actually just decide the score. There's probably some machine learning or AI in there. But you also want to deliver something that's like a human readable insight. So you can tell someone why their score dropped or what they can do to make their score better, maybe. I have a friend who works in, it's not high frequency trading. It's like out, like it's quantitative trading. So it's like a couple of days out. And, and he was like, well, crunch all these numbers will come up with some like thesis for buying a billion dollars of some company in a day and we'll be selling in like three days. And I was like, is there any way that you could say, oh, well, it's because like if gold goes up, like could you put it in business logic or like if statements that a human could understand? He was like, it's impossible.

• 51:39John Coogan?

  Like there's so many different parameters that go into finding like alpha in the financial markets. And I feel like there's a world where a consumer would be very disappointed if you're like, yeah, your score went up one point, but we have no idea why. And we can't tell you the first thing about why it went up. Just these tensors, these weights activated in this massive model and your score went down. Sorry. So how do you think about actually educating the consumer on like how their score goes up or down?

• 52:08Zachary Perret?

  So we do a bunch of machine learning and AI to obviously like clean up the data and make it structured in a way that can build our models on top of it. But ultimately, our models are representative roughly of the financial health of a consumer. So almost everything that a consumer would do to better manage their money will end up with a better credit score. Almost everything they would do to more poorly manage their money will end up with a worse credit score. And so the nice thing is when we build it, we're actually able to show it to the consumer first. They're able to review it if they want to, click submit, and then it goes to the lender. So the lender can then subsequently make the decision on the back of it.

• 52:45Jordi Hays?

  That's cool. So it's very lender friendly in that they're opting in if they want to just run with their experience score or whatever, what other options they have, they can do that or they can add this on as a way to kind of improve their application.

• 53:00Zachary Perret?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 53:03Jordi Hays?

  And then over time, though, the lender would realize, hey, we're getting actually much better insight here.

• 53:10Zachary Perret?

  More signal.

• 53:11Jordi Hays?

  We want to just roll with this, I imagine.

• 53:13Zachary Perret?

  That's what we hope. But the goal at first is that consumers feel like they can get more and better loans. The lenders feel like they can make more and better loans. So it's kind of opening the market initially. And then over time, you know, we hope that this becomes one of the most important, if not the most important, way that a lender makes their decisions.

• 53:31John Coogan?

  How does buy now, pay later fit into the ecosystem at this point? I imagine that they all have like their own systems, but then they would love to just have more data because that probably enables better underwriting. How do they fit into this ecosystem?

• 53:45Zachary Perret?

  So buy now, pay later are sophisticated lenders. There's a scale of sophistication of all lenders. There are some lenders that will just use an out of the box FICO score or an out of the box lend score score to make a lending decision. The highly sophisticated lenders, they'll want a zillion inputs. Yes, they'll still get maybe a FICO, they'll get a plaid lend score, but they want to look at the underlying inputs, the underlying raw data, and then they'll build their own models on top of it. I'd say the BNPL lenders are quite sophisticated in the way that they lend. And so they're pulling a ton of data into the picture and then building kind of their own custom models on top of it. Now, our inputs are, yes, still inputs to their model, but they're not looking at our score as the sole determining factor.

• 54:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is the business model for the lend score The same as the previous credit scores or different in some way? How do you think about?

• 54:35Zachary Perret?

  Pretty similar, yeah. We sell it on a kind of per loan application basis. Our customers are the lenders, they pay us for it.

• 54:43John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 54:43Zachary Perret?

  And there's a handful of things that we can do to actually help them track credit worthiness on an ongoing basis. So whereas FICO or Vantage oftentimes is a one-time snapshot. And sometimes a lender will want to maybe make offers to a consumer if they realize they want to increase their credit line. And or maybe they want to kind of give better preferential payment terms to a consumer if they think they can pay a loan down faster. And so ours is an ongoing credit score. That's maybe the only big difference.

• 55:11John Coogan?

  How do you think about what the consumer's interface is to the credit scores? I remember like years ago, you used to have to actually go to the three.

• 55:22Jordi Hays?

  Go to the credit store.

• 55:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, you had to go to the credit store and like check out and pay like 30 bucks. And then you'd get that and then you'd take that to a loan application sometimes. Sometimes they just do it on the back end, they'd pay. But then over time, I feel like the credit scores just became almost commoditized or free, like it just shows up in my, you know, banking app a lot. And there were also like Credit Karma and different companies that figured out ways to basically pay that as a like a customer acquisition cost for free. And then they give you a bunch of products on top that they would monetize. How do you think the, what do you think the long-term consumer adoption of the lens score looks like?

• 56:02Zachary Perret?

  Well, we hope it's pretty similar, actually. We want consumers to be able to get a clear view of their credit profile for free. We're working on building ways that a consumer can come in and look at that. And, you know, ultimately the customer then would be the lender. Like it's to our benefit to have consumers that understand this more. It's to our benefit to have consumers that trust the score and that trust the things that we build. And so we want to be as direct and open with the consumers as we can. So a lot of that stuff is to come and you'll see some launches from us kind of over the coming, coming quarters on that front.

• 56:36Jordi Hays?

  What else besides lines was the focus today?

• 56:41Zachary Perret?

  So a big upgrade to our anti-fraud model and we launched a kind of broader suite of products called Protect. And so again, Protect for us, it's a set of products that looks at consumers' underlying actions that they take across almost any financial product. And we can back it into an overall score of riskiness for the consumer and then a bunch of attributes. So some of the attributes are very easily explainable, such as this person just signed up for three crypto apps in the last 30 minutes. Some of the attributes are less easily explainable, more on the machine learning side. But this stuff will feed into the models for a lot of our customers and then they can build kind of

• 57:21Zachary Perret?

  this really fascinating step up, step down requirement for users based on their relative levels of riskiness. This has been a huge unlock for a lot of the fintech companies that are trying to sign up more users faster. And we can create a fast lane effectively. So we've seen you before, we recognize your device, we've seen your phone number, you just do a two factor code and you're good to go. And then we can also create a slow lane. So, hey, we've never seen you before, your device doesn't seem to match the IP address that you're dialing in from. What's going on with all this stuff? Let's add a bunch of step ups and be really, really certain that you are who you say you are. So fast lane for financial services and that's what we're trying to build.

• 57:58Jordi Hays?

  This sounds like the worst nightmare of somebody doing large scale financial fraud on the internet.

• 58:04John Coogan?

  What is, what's the shape of AI adoption at Plaid right now? I feel like obviously there's probably a ton of AI that you're doing on just like software development stuff. But at the same time, I feel like if I was offing with Plaid and it was like, hey, you want to chat with me right now? I'd be like, no, thanks. I'm actually good to just click a couple of buttons. So like, are you seeing a lot of like LLM token consumption or more just focused on the machine learning? The custom models for underwriting where you train a specific model for that and you're not just leaning on a big like token factory for a lot of work?

• 58:39Zachary Perret?

  I'd say our use of tokens, I would call it like medium. We do build a kind of a custom training data set and then run a ton of the data through that that model and the training data set. A lot of it is around just cleaning up transactions, identifying what's happening. The textual analysis is very, very helpful for that. So that's like the input into a lot of our models. But you're right, we don't build like an active chat app for any consumer. A lot of the AI that we're doing is used to fight AI, meaning there's a lot of attempted AI fraud and then we have a lot of AI on the other side to try to fight AI fraud.

• 59:21Zachary Perret?

  And then it's kind of building the foundational kind of data set upon which we build a lot of the models.

• 59:25John Coogan?

  So whenever you have a big pile of text in kind of behind the scenes in the backend, you can run LLMs over that and get a lot finer grain data categorized, understand what's actually going on with those large text dumps, but you don't necessarily even need to surface that to the to the customer, the end user, which is great.

• 59:43Zachary Perret?

  Generally not directly. Generally we'll surface it to the consumer indirectly saying, hey, you had elevated bank fees. And we won't even send that to the consumer, we'll send that to our customer. Our customer will then say, in your budgeting app, you had elevated bank fees and look at all these different bank fees.

• 59:57John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense. Well, congrats on the launch. Thanks so much for stopping by.

• 1:00:00Jordi Hays?

  Always great to see you. Have fun in DC.

• 1:00:03John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 1:00:03Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Zach.

• 1:00:04John Coogan?

  Before we hop on with our second guest of the show, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media app for developers, the world's best generative image, video and model, audio models, all in one place, develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. And our next guest is about to be in the Restream waiting room.

• 1:00:23Jordi Hays?

  We can go back to the timeline. BlackRock and Nvidia are participating in a $40 billion data center takeover, also including XAI and Microsoft.

• 1:00:39Jordi Hays?

  This is in the Financial Times this morning, an investment consortium that includes BlackRock, Global Infrastructure Partners, and that's a great name for a fund that does global infrastructure investing.

• 1:00:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:00:52Jordi Hays?

  And of course Abu Dhabi Fund MGX has struck a $40 billion takeover of one of the world's largest data center operators as it launches an initiative to underwrite the infrastructure for artificial intelligence. And I believe we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room, so let's bring him in.

• 1:01:10John Coogan?

  Pana from Amazon, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:01:14Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you.

• 1:01:15John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on. Congratulations on the launch. Sorry for the delay, but very excited to catch up with you. Would love to start with just an introduction on yourself, kind of where you sit within the organization, and then we can go into some of the news and some of the updates.

• 1:01:32Speaker 04

  Sure. I'm the Senior Vice President of Devices and Services. So what that means is, if I frame it around brands, it probably helps a little bit. But think about devices across Amazon. You'd start with Project Kuiper, which are the satellites for Leo constellation that we're building right now. And on the other end, you would think about Zooks, which are the self-driving cars that you might have seen in Las Vegas. But in between, kind of the consumer brands, Alexa, Ring, Fire TV, Fire Tablets, Kindle, Echo Devices, you know, just an array of all the kind of consumer front devices that we build here at Amazon.

• 1:02:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. And what's the latest update across the hardware ecosystem? What was announced most recently?

• 1:02:18Speaker 04

  We just launched a set of new Echo Devices, super cool, kind of built for Alexa Plus. This is our new, Alexa Plus is our new AI interface using Alexa, just more conversational. It's a really fun product. Helps you get stuff done. Two screen-based devices, an 8-inch and 11-inch, and two new speakers, killer sound. They're absolutely beautiful, by the way. They're just gorgeous. We can talk about it if you want. Three new Kindles, called the Kindle Scribe, and one of them's in color, which is gorgeous, color writing. A whole array of 4K cameras with Ring, including doorbells.

• 1:02:57John Coogan?

  4K.

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

  Bringing that clarity. Quite cool. Just, these are your cool products. And some new Fire TVs, just quite literally TVs from, you know, 40 inches up to 75 inches, including what you call Fire TV stick.

• 1:03:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about Alexa? I mean, we've been following, like, Siri launched a long time ago, and it feels, I just activated Siri. And it feels like they are at a point where the current, the previous system was very much like business logic with a bunch of different routes that the Siri app could go down. And now they're kind of in the LLM era, in the completely AI, generative AI era. And maybe that necessitates a rethink or a rebuild or a partnership. How has Amazon grappled with this idea that the architecture of what an AI assistant is might be changing?

• 1:03:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. If you, there's a couple ways of thinking about it. First, I think the way you framed it is, you know, previously, a lot of this was deterministic. If you said the right thing, you kind of got the right answer. Or, you know, call it point and shoot, where question, answer, question, answer. It's flipping on its head now, because when LLMs come into play, you have to re-architect the whole problem. You move from this deterministic model, where if you say the right thing, you get the right answer. It kind of feels limited, you know? It's like a different type of speak that you have towards one of, some of these, what, in the previous agents, if you will. But now you're in this conversational world. Anything you ask, unlimited knowledge, specifically to Alexa, you found, there's

• 1:04:37Speaker 04

  personality that comes into play, there's empathy that comes into play, there's, so you get this personalization, but you also get memory. And so the more you talk to her, the more it knows about you. So you've gone from this, what you would say, just give-and-take moment, to a conversation and depth, understanding, and then actually getting some stuff done. The power of it, though...

• 1:05:02Speaker 04

  Not only do you have all that, you have this kind of ambient world around you. If you have a few Alexa devices plugged in, they'll all update with the new Alexa Plus AI baseline. And you, and you, and now you can just have a conversation from anywhere, ask anything you want, keep your phone in your pocket and those like critical moments where you don't have to go do the research that way, just have the conversation is pretty powerful.

• 1:05:24John Coogan?

  Do you think there's a risk of, or some sort of tension between like the Alexa developers, the App Store, the I know some folks who have built specific apps that do specific things, but if you drop a more generalized LLM system on top of it, that might actually be competitive. You're kind of competing with your customers. Like, how have you messaged to the developer community around that?

• 1:05:46Speaker 04

  Developers are pretty pumped about it right now. Because, you know, these skills, we're still calling, you know, these, basically you're calling these APIs that are routing to a skill. So while it's not deterministic point and shoot, it still is, kind of think of it as different agents on the system that you can, that you can call on. So you're, you're seeing these developers write apps where the LLM makes, you know, the product Alexa makes the decision, kind of orchestrates and says that you're, you're trying to order a car, let me we'll call Uber and then Uber makes the car happen. And I think as you, as you see that

• 1:06:27Speaker 04

  as an example, or you wanted to order food from Grubhub, whatever the answer was, you just ask for the food and, and then, you know, that service makes its move and, you know, delivers it. I think there's this fundamental of it's actually better for developers because as you, if you're serving your customer, they're sitting here, they're trying to tell you what they want. They don't have to be as explicit anymore. They can almost be general in their asks. And at that point, if it's calling on an app or a skill, Or an add-on, as we call it, developers are pretty pumped about it right now. We have a pretty long list of developers right now. Probably the largest group of, if you will,

• 1:07:07Speaker 04

  agents attached to any LLM out there. And so you're, it is a pretty rare situation as it's just not being done anywhere else.

• 1:07:16John Coogan?

  How do you think about the future of smart glasses and wearables? Amazon's done so many smart devices from the TV, you mentioned the Kindle, Alexa, it feels like an obvious thing. You have a number of products that have been announced or already live, but where do you think that goes? What formats do you like most? And where are you seeing the most adoption, really?

• 1:07:38Speaker 04

  So we see a ton, we see our usage kind of just spiking with Alexa Plus on the current device lineup that we have today. We have frames, go frames at people where we see the usage go up, the buds are going up. Because when you take an agent that's smart with you, it's quite powerful. So you, we already see it happening in different form factors. I mean, it's down to user preference. I will say this, I mean, you're hitting a point that I think is just worth noting. You're, I think there are plenty of jobs moving to what you would call AI devices. It's just kind of changing. And if you think about kind of the evolution of different portions of tech over time, let me take you back. When

• 1:08:22Speaker 04

  I was developing, I think 14 years ago, I was making a laptop and somebody had come to me and said, what are you doing? The laptop is dead. I can't see you guys right now, but assuming you have laptops in front of you.

• 1:08:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  Now I can think, yeah, like, just think about that for a minute. Like, that's 14 years ago, guys. Like, literally, I was, we were creating this product, we're gonna make this laptop, it's gonna create, and I have this vision, and you're getting all after it. You're like, this is beautiful. Look what it can do in every detail. And you're going, and the first thing is like, why would you build a laptop? That thing is dead.

• 1:08:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:58Speaker 04

  The phone has replaced it. It's over for the laptop 14 years ago.

• 1:09:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, these things stick around a long time.

• 1:09:02Speaker 04

  What really was happening, you know, wasn't that the laptop was dying, it was just getting stronger at what it did great.

• 1:09:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:09Speaker 04

  Jobs had kind of moved to the phone. And the things that mattered to you on a phone came to life, communications, then, you know, the advent of social media, shopping, probably, like, things that were easier there. But the things that... Mattered like right now, your notes or your other things that mattered for the laptop. They just got stronger. I think we're kind of in that same era. I think AI devices are coming down the pipe.

• 1:09:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:31Speaker 04

  They're going to be great for certain things. And to your point, a lot of them will be on the go, whether it's glasses or something on your wrist or, you know, something in your pocket. And I don't talk about, you know, what's in the lab, but for sure, you would, you would imagine that as the jobs move, there's going to be form factors that evolve that are going to be more important. I think it just strengthens the form factors that exist today, just like the laptop got stronger, in my opinion, because when the phone came, you know, you got better at the jobs on your laptop, just like when the laptop came, the desktop got stronger for gaming and developers. And you just see that evolution where it's not that these form factors go away, but they get better at what they are meant to be. And then new form factors show up. I think that's happening right now.

• 1:10:12John Coogan?

  How do you think about the personality and brand of individual models? I feel like there's a world where I would love an Alexa that I can just say, it's Claude. And I'm talking to an Alexa hardware device, but I like the personality and functionality of Claude. And so I want to just kind of run that piece of software by default in the same way that I can select like a default browser. I have a MacBook, but I run Chrome as my default browser. Is there a world where I could be able to do that?

• 1:10:41Speaker 04

  It's an interesting thought. It's not how it works for Alexa right now, but it's pretty, it's, it's interesting. Don't think for like, if I, if I think about the customer, the, you know, kind of a,

• 1:10:56Speaker 04

  I don't know what you would call it, but just the baseline customer. What I'm trying to do is just be wrong.

• 1:11:02John Coogan?

  I'm extremely online. I have, I have opinions about individual models.

• 1:11:05Speaker 04

  I don't even know what to tell you.

• 1:11:06John Coogan?

  But many people don't care.

• 1:11:08Speaker 04

  You hit the extreme in the question, but here's how I think about it.

• 1:11:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:11Speaker 04

  I think like Alexa's basically model agnostic, like what's the right model for the job?

• 1:11:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:11:16Speaker 04

  And of course, we have fine tune models specifically that are built specifically for Alexa to do the jobs that you were looking for. The thing that matters most, I think to our customers is that it personalizes to you. And so the more I talk to it about the things that I love, the more it understands me. I think you see that today in other products. But then as you're in natural conversations or you're asking for the next thing, you don't have to go all the way. Alexa can be proactive for you. I'll give you a simple example. Maybe it's a silly one, but it is simple, just kind of being practical. If I ask Alexa, I have a camera, I have a Ring camera right now, you have it on the, in the, where my dogs eat in the dog bowls.

• 1:11:56Speaker 04

  And if I ask, I can ask Alexa now, it's a pretty cool feature, it's just AI and it's, you know, simple sense. Uh, although, kind of, kind of fun. Did anyone feed the dogs today? That's a classic question at my house. I get in trouble every night when I get home. Have you fed the dogs yet? I'm like, I just walked in, you know, that sort of thing, like, and, and then there's that moment where I can just turn and ask Alexa and Alexa says, no, nobody fed, nobody fed the dogs today. So it's.

• 1:12:21Jordi Hays?

  They've been fasting.

• 1:12:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's just very cool because it knows, nobody fed the dogs. You know, we use Ring video descriptions, we understand there's a dog, we understand that somebody fed the food. Um, and, or fed the dog the food. So if the dog's not fed, I can ask, but in three days or four days later, it can be proactive and just say, hey, nobody's fed the dogs today. And like you just take that, it didn't matter which L L Ms or which agents kind of created that scenario to the customer. What mattered was it had the personalization, it knows I care about it and then, uh, kind of proactively gave me that information back. I think it's, that's the essence of just staying agnostic to it, but we do use different models.

• 1:13:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How, how are you thinking about the way that advertising should integrate into AI assistants? Because there's a lot of debate happening right now. People are going to assistants for product recommendations and advice on things to buy. And I think there's a very real and important debate around when should this assistant, that's like a trusted advisor? How should ad, you know, ad based recommendations, you know, show up? When is it appropriate? When should it just recommend, like, you know, there's no, there's usually no objectively best product in a category because every consumer is different. But what's your framework for that? Because obviously Amazon's very pro ad.

• 1:13:46Speaker 04

  When do you think you should recommend or what should it recommend? You, the way you framed it is right. I think the, like any assistant. The better it knows you, the better the recommendations can be. And so where I get, where I think ads do work is when you're actually helping the customer, you know, find what they're looking for. And then it just comes down to that personalization aspect and some of that history. If you, if there's something you use quite often and you're having, you know, and there's an ad that actually helps you if it's raised to you, that's when I get excited because I think it's like a holistic approach to, you know, that kind of circle. When it's just random and you're like, what is this?

• 1:14:30Speaker 04

  I really, that's painful. It's just where it gets painful.

• 1:14:34John Coogan?

  People really have no problem with the idea of going to your Alexa and then Amazon taking a cut of the commerce transaction that happens because you see the Amazon truck and you see the delivery network and you see how fast things arrive. And so there's clear value pervade there. And so I think most customers are, are happy to have Amazon take essentially like an affiliate fee almost on that or a cut. Yeah, the issue is how agnostic.

• 1:15:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is there a world where Alexa would be getting like effectively be an affiliate on the platform like it was an external, like, you know, source that was sending traffic? Because what I would want is to arrive on, is basically say, hey Alexa, and sorry to anybody at home, I'm setting off your Alexa device if you're listening to this. But hey Alexa, I want to buy, I use the example of a paper towel holder because I've had a, and I want it to be from a brand that is over 50 years old. And like that is the kind of, that's the kind of product I want to buy from a reputable brand that has been operating and that isn't just, you know, importing the cheapest possible

• 1:15:49Jordi Hays?

  product from, from overseas. And so that is like a very valuable recommendation to me. And as a consumer, I don't care if Alexa takes a cut, but that's different than me just searching in, you know, in a search bar.

• 1:16:05Speaker 04

  I agree. I mean, I don't know about, I'm not exactly sure what you mean by Alexa taking a cut there, but what I would like to see happen in that scenario, and I think is what happens today is because we're so conversational, we can do that search for you, we can bring it up. We can also just look at your shopping history if you choose to enable that. And then say, look here, this is the size of paper towels you've been buying. And fundamentally, you know, if you just go to that next level of beyond just, I'm going to, I heard what you said and here's the answer. Maybe just do a little bit of logic flow for you and bring back a few options. I think that's when it does get, like, these are those emotional connection points. I know it sounds silly, we're talking about paper towels, but if you're asking for something indirectly and you don't know exactly what you're pointing and shooting for,

• 1:16:48Speaker 04

  and you get something that's close and you can have a conversation, just think about any assistant kind of mode. And just talking to somebody, I'm just going to have this conversation and we're going to brainstorm it together. You're, you're starting to see that happen on Alexa. It's more so about refining what it is you're getting after. And you can see that in kind of most aspects.

• 1:17:08Jordi Hays?

  On the, on the Kindle side, are you getting like feature requests from users that want more AI integrated into products? I can imagine I, I pick up a book I haven't read in a while and I, it'd be nice to be able to say, can you summarize the first three chapters?

• 1:17:23John Coogan?

  Summarize the entire book in one sentence. I'm done.

• 1:17:25Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I'm done.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  We're getting a bunch of it. And you know, it's, this is a fine, I'm going to answer your, we have a thing called books so far. So I'm going to tell you about that. That was the exact feature you just asked for. And, and it's AI-based. And it's basically continue watching for books. Do you know what I mean? Like you watch the first three episodes of whatever it is, you know, Rings of Power. And you're like, just keep me up to date or, you know, whatever it, what show it is. And you just see the recap and then you go into your, the next episode. This happens to me all the time because I don't watch enough TV.

• 1:17:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:57Speaker 04

  We have book so far, which is that, you know, hey, summarize how far I am to this book. Remind me. You also can ask the book anything you want.

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:04Speaker 04

  You can ask Kindle anything you want about the book, and that was a big feature request. Like, just want to talk about the character. I want to know more about what really happened here. And now that's happening. So that's where AI enhances it. But you have to be really careful because there's something pure about Kindle.

• 1:18:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:19Speaker 04

  That customers love, and this is like near and dear to my heart. You have to be a super fine line. We do have, like on the Kindle scribes that we just launched, we do have AI search for any of your notes. So if you have hundreds of pages of notes now, you just search for, or then you can say summarize all the notes that I wrote about John or whatever. And, you know, you'd get them all summarized and it would do a smart summary for you. And then you can put them in. You can do all that, but here's, here's the risk that we're very cautious of. Like Kindle's like a sanctuary. It's like this, you, you get into it and then you just want to disappear into it. Our users, like they love their books. You know what they hate when they're reading books is distractions.

• 1:18:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:58Speaker 04

  I don't even, I don't use that word lightly, but it is like if you popped them an ad or put a link up or I infiltrated you with a text coming in, uh, if you will, from Jordy, you'd be like, god damn, I'm just trying to read, man. This is my one place to disappear. Uh, and it's crazy because readers are popping up everywhere, new readers. I think like 60% of our new purchases are from totally new readers right now, just so you know. So there's a bit of a spike happening because it's a growing category again. The, the trick is to hold that as like that sanctuary where when you do pick up to read, that's what it becomes. The more tech you put in there beyond a book, you know, you, you have to be careful. We, I think I know where that line is. The team knows where that line is. We have an amazing Kindle team.

• 1:19:42Speaker 04

  They've been doing it for, you know, years and years. This is, and they are, they, they understand the customer so well. But to your point, the customer is starting to ask, can I, can I get to what we call book so far? Or continue watching is the best way to say it in, in analogous. And so we created that or summarization. We have that. Um, and also in your writing, you can search your notes, but we're being very selective not to over techify it, if that makes sense. You've got to be careful because at the end of the day, it is a book. Or it is a notepad that you want to write on. And, and you, you have plenty of other devices to let your distractions kick in. But this is the one that we kind of hold coveted and protect quite a bit.

• 1:20:23John Coogan?

  I have one last question, but maybe it's just a technical one, but on, on Kindle and AI. Uh, I think of Kindle as, I don't want to say underpowered, but like, uh, it's, it's designed for long battery life. You know, not the craziest screen. It's supposed to be something you can, you know, throw in your backpack and pull out on a trip and know that it's still charged. Right. Uh, so I imagine that there's.

• 1:20:47Speaker 04

  You should be a product manager for Kindle.

• 1:20:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:20:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. You just hold that line. If you hold, if you hold that frame, man, you're perfect. Like it just, just religiously hold on to those statements.

• 1:20:58John Coogan?

  Fantastic. And, and so I imagine that the, the AI workloads need to be done in the cloud. And you're not thinking about on-device AI. And that's generally the right trade-off because the summaries can be processed asynchronously. Or, or they can be queued up and, and kind of gone back and forth over the, over the Wi-Fi network or, or 4G. I, I'm just kind of interested in like what the, what the median connectivity versus, uh, on-device compute trade-off looks like for Kindle going forward.

• 1:21:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's tricky. We're doing, we're doing a lot of work on the edge right now, as you, you put it, on-device. And I think you have to, because it just, it, it can envelope speed. And sometimes, um, specifically though, uh, you, basically we serve the customer transparently. Yeah. Wherever it's right, but we are doing work to, when it's time and when it's time to use on-device. So let's call it like, if you're trying to reduce latency on writing and you're doing some beautification. It's an example.

• 1:22:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:02Speaker 04

  You're going to want to do it on-device. If you want to, you know, do books so far, like it's a cloud-based thing. I mean, what if you started reading on your, is a good example. You started reading on your iPhone, you came over to your Kindle. And you picked it up. You you want that to be a cloud-based experience. That's not something wanted on device. So like, there's just, there's trade-offs, but we do both. It's a good question. I think that's true. By the way, across every single device we talked about today.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:22:28Speaker 04

  Like, where is the edge workload more important? If I did want to, you know, depending on if we were doing, whether it was for security or speed, your, or cost, whatever it might have been, you're always trying to find the right balance for the customer. By the way, when you say it, can I show you this?

• 1:22:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, please.

• 1:22:45Speaker 04

  You may not be able to see it on the screen. Pull it up. This is the new color Kindle. Can you see it?

• 1:22:50John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:22:52Speaker 04

  Isn't that rad?

• 1:22:52John Coogan?

  So is that, is that color?

• 1:22:54Speaker 04

  Look how thin it is. Like, the thing is 5.4 millimeters thin. Like, it's crazy. It's so fun. And it has the same battery life I've talked about, same latency, same speed. And I have it here taking notes as I'm talking to you guys. But it, it's like, it's a powerhouse now. So the processor there is going to double the power.

• 1:23:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, is that, is that like e-ink screen? Like, it works outside and breaks sun, too?

• 1:23:16Speaker 04

  It almost feels like when you look at it, it's so soft on the eyes, right? It has a front light, and the front light, basically across the screen, so it's not blasting you.

• 1:23:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:23Speaker 04

  So it still has that subtlety. You don't feel as tired as you're looking at it. You can do it in the dark and the light. There's nothing that you lose this screen. It's a matte screen. It's perfect for writing.

• 1:23:32John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:23:33Speaker 04

  And you're, so you get, you get all those pieces. The refinement was color. So there's always this battle, like, but it's not an LCD with the beautification of, you know, OLED and so forth. But I mean, there's something beautiful and subtle about this. Almost like colored pencils on the screen.

• 1:23:49John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:23:49Speaker 04

  And so even when you're writing in color, it feels that way. It's quite, it's, it's pretty, uh, it's one of my favorites.

• 1:23:56John Coogan?

  We gotta get one. We gotta figure out how to jailbreak it, sideload the Sora slop feed. I want brain rot on that thing ASAP.

• 1:24:04Speaker 04

  Don't tell me any of that stuff, man. I don't want to hear it.

• 1:24:07Jordi Hays?

  Last thing, do you think, do you think, do you think Amazon's AI opportunity is broadly underappreciated? I mean, it feels like there's so much surface area, everything from retail opportunity, Anthropic. You guys already have a suite of devices that people use and love that are in people's homes. It feels like, in many ways, other, you know.

• 1:24:26John Coogan?

  You guys also have data centers, too.

• 1:24:28Jordi Hays?

  A few of those.

• 1:24:29John Coogan?

  A few of them.

• 1:24:29Jordi Hays?

  You got a few racks.

• 1:24:30John Coogan?

  They invented the data center.

• 1:24:34Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 1:24:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:35Speaker 04

  For sure. I mean, I don't know how else to say it, like, hands down, you know, you're, every part, every part of Amazon is like entrenched in driving through AI, whether it's Bedrock, AWS, what's happening, like, cloud-wise, all the models we run, we make available to our customers,

• 1:24:58Speaker 04

  all the way through stores and what they're doing fundamentally to help your shopping experience better, Prime Video and what they're doing. We have a Jump to Scene with Fire TV. Did you guys know that? It's very cool.

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  Well, that's very cool.

• 1:25:09Speaker 04

  Movie scene.

• 1:25:10John Coogan?

  I mean, also the largest deployment of robots, I believe, in the world is Amazon.

• 1:25:14Speaker 04

  Correct. Oh, well, I don't know if that's, I don't know if that's accurate.

• 1:25:17John Coogan?

  Maybe in the US. I saw some chart where you guys were passing a million robots.

• 1:25:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's pretty massive. And then, like, you know, controlled by, and then you have the other side of it. All the Alexa devices now are about to be powered by Alexa Plus. This is like core foundation

• 1:25:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:25:32Speaker 04

  of like consumer AI in its most practical sense. You're in this place now where, you know, I'm at the dinner table with the family and instead of somebody pulling out their phone to get the answer or research something, we just have a conversation with Alexa and you got the full depth of what you would have expected from an LLM-based product, but it's just very practical and ready for you. And so, like, I think the whole gamut is, you're right, it's quite underappreciated right now. I don't, I don't know what the right way to frame it is on the other side without sounding too like, you know, but I do think

• 1:26:02Jordi Hays?

  I agree. So I think, and I think, I think the market will, will, will realize eventually, so.

• 1:26:11Speaker 04

  I do too. I think, you know, first thing, serve the customer, serve the customer, serve the customer and do it in the right way. I think, you know, that's our focus and we'll, we'll, we'll kind of continue to do that. But you're right. I think that it gets, it'll get noticed, seen, understood. I'm pretty proud of it right now. And when you see what's coming with Alexa Plus with Ring, with Ring Video Search or Ring Story Descriptions and like summarizing your day, it really starts making it something. It takes AI to the next level in my mind because it just makes it practical for people. Like it just puts it right there. Don't get me wrong, you can actually use Alexa.com too to do all the things that people are associating with traditional LLM. It's quite cool as well. Or the app, but at the end of the day, there's just a whole new set of practical

• 1:26:53Speaker 04

  ways to use it that I think are going to be pretty delightful for our customers.

• 1:26:57Jordi Hays?

  When's the new scribe actually releasing? I just tried to buy it while we were talking and it says coming soon.

• 1:27:04Speaker 04

  I'm not allowed to give you the date on here, but it's, yeah, you have to get on the, you have to get on the waitlist. Our demand is a little bit higher than we expected it to be right now. We're in, we're in production, so you.

• 1:27:13Jordi Hays?

  Amazon, you guys couldn't get the demand planning, right?

• 1:27:17John Coogan?

  I want a scribe in two days.

• 1:27:21Speaker 04

  You'll have it before the holiday.

• 1:27:22John Coogan?

  I want it in two days.

• 1:27:24Jordi Hays?

  As long as it's under the Christmas tree.

• 1:27:26Speaker 04

  I'll make sure you get, I'll make sure you guys get it.

• 1:27:28John Coogan?

  That'd be awesome.

• 1:27:29Speaker 04

  Put your name down and I'll make sure.

• 1:27:30John Coogan?

  We will, we will.

• 1:27:31Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, it's great to hang out. Congrats on, on all the progress.

• 1:27:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, really, really fascinating tour of the ecosystem. I appreciate you breaking it down for us. Thanks so much.

• 1:27:39Speaker 04

  It's been fun, guys. You take care.

• 1:27:40Jordi Hays?

  Wait, also, I think, obviously it's too late now, but is, is Pano's the first, are you, I think you're the first person from Amazon ever on our show?

• 1:27:49John Coogan?

  I think so. I think we've got to ring this off.

• 1:27:50Jordi Hays?

  Thousand interviews this year.

• 1:27:52Speaker 04

  Bring them down.

• 1:27:54Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:27:57Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you.

• 1:27:58John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:27:58Jordi Hays?

  We'll, we'll, we'll see you soon.

• 1:28:00John Coogan?

  We'll see you soon.

• 1:28:00Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:28:01John Coogan?

  Have a good one. We have some breaking news that we gotta cover. Sam Altman has replied to his, uh, his post about erotic content in ChatGPT. He says, okay, this tweet about upcoming changes to ChatGPT blew up on the erotica point much more than I thought it was going to.

• 1:28:20Jordi Hays?

  You didn't think, you didn't think posting E R O T I C A was gonna?

• 1:28:26John Coogan?

  There are, there are so many other words that you could have used to kind of like, you know, get there without saying that word.

• 1:28:33Jordi Hays?

  Companion.

• 1:28:34John Coogan?

  Exactly. We have said that. The entire time we were discussing Grok, we liked that this is a clean show. We like that we don't.

• 1:28:40Jordi Hays?

  I've never, I never wanted to say that word on the show.

• 1:28:43John Coogan?

  Exactly. So when we talk about this, we say adult content, adult romantic companion. We don't go to the other words. But yes, he went there. He said E R O T I C A typed it out into his X app, sent the tweet. And he said, it was meant to be just one example of us allowing more user freedom for adults. Here is an effort to better communicate it. I'm going to read it and you tell me, is this better communication, Jordy? He says, as we have said earlier, we are making a decision to prioritize safety over privacy and freedom for teenagers, and we are not loosening any policies related to mental health. This is a new and powerful technology, and we believe minors need significant protection.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  I love that point. We also care very much about the principle of treating adult users like adults as AI becomes more important in people's lives, allowing a lot of freedom for people to use AI in the ways that they want is an important part of our mission. It does, it doesn't apply across the board, of course. For example, we will still not allow things that cause harm to others, and we will treat users who are having mental health crises very different from users who are not. Without being paternalistic, we will attempt to help users achieve their long-term goals. But we are not the elected moral police of the wor, of the world. In the same way that society differentiates other appropriate boundaries, R-rated movies, for example, we want to do the same thing

• 1:30:11John Coogan?

  here. Let's hear it for the MPAA rating system that's gaining popularity. Yes, I want this so badly.

• 1:30:17Jordi Hays?

  I just want to, in the App Store, it should say R-rated.

• 1:30:21John Coogan?

  R-rated. But that is not NC 17 rated, which is a different thing. And so we were debating this.

• 1:30:27Jordi Hays?

  So you're a movie buff?

• 1:30:28John Coogan?

  Is, no, no, I mean, is, is. Is Amazon's erotic content on the Kindle, is that, is that X rated? Is that the same as OnlyFans? Is that the same as a, a, an adult content video site? Like, it does feel somewhat different. And so, I don't know, maybe this is a nod to staying in the R rated category, not going further. I don't know, we'll see. Uh, what's your reaction, Jordy, to this post?

• 1:30:53John Coogan?

  Is it effective comms? Put on your Lulu hat.

• 1:30:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the problem is that fourteen, almost fourteen million people saw yesterday's posts. You add that up with, you know, thousands of other posts and, you know, this

• 1:31:06John Coogan?

  It really did blow up.

• 1:31:06Jordi Hays?

  This post is gonna get, certainly get plenty of, uh, plenty of views, but, um, I think the, the community has already taken it.

• 1:31:18John Coogan?

  I don't know, I, I, I think, I think the, the December timeline, there's a, there's a lot of days between now and December. Uh, AGI might hit before then, uh, but there's so much that could happen to tweak that policy before it goes out. Really silo it, I don't know, we'll, we'll have to see. I, I, I can almost guarantee that when it rolls out, there will be crazy screenshots on the timeline that day of people getting it to do crazy stuff, because people love jailbreaking and stuff. They've already been doing it. Anyway, let me tell you about TurboPuffer, search every byte, serverless vector, and full text search. Built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper, and extremely scalable. You can load all your erotic content into TurboPuffer, search it 10 times cheaper. Um, and we have our

• 1:32:02Jordi Hays?

  Our first in-person guest of the show.

• 1:32:05John Coogan?

  We got Adam Ryan from Workweek.

• 1:32:07Jordi Hays?

  The legend.

• 1:32:08John Coogan?

  The legend.

• 1:32:09Speaker 02

  Bring it in.

• 1:32:10John Coogan?

  It's the platform for professional networks. Welcome to the show, Adam. Second time, third time, I've lost track, but thank you so much for joining us.

• 1:32:21Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna be talking about

• 1:32:23John Coogan?

  Your strategy to bring erotica to professional networking.

• 1:32:28Speaker 05

  I've been waiting, I've been waiting for this moment.

• 1:32:30John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:32:30Speaker 05

  That's exactly what it's all about.

• 1:32:31John Coogan?

  Actually, kick us back off.

• 1:32:33Jordi Hays?

  This was the thesis of the whole company is that people wanted erotica in their work, in the workplace.

• 1:32:38John Coogan?

  Kick us back off with like the actual, the actual overview of the company, how you introduce yourself these days.

• 1:32:43Jordi Hays?

  And, and the, the quick history too, for anybody that, that missed the last interview.

• 1:32:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, uh, started the company four years ago, um, and, uh, this guy was part of the, the founding, founding story of that. And, uh, today, you know, one of the things that we learned along the way that, uh, everyone has focused on consumer behaviors of, hey, I trust individuals over institutions and beauty, fashion, gaming. There's a Kylie Jenner out there, there's nobody in work.

• 1:33:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:15Speaker 05

  Uh, if you're VP of marketing, if you run a hospital or health system, who do you go to? Uh, if you're into, into beauty, you have Kylie, you don't have anyone else in that space.

• 1:33:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:24Speaker 05

  So that was the first problem we wanted to go solve. And then we thought it was potentially because of money, bandwidth, like this, what, these people are busy, they already make a lot of money. That's why they don't create content.

• 1:33:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:34Speaker 05

  We realized that there's, there's an actual just platform missing. Uh, people aren't going on LinkedIn being like, hey, I'm prepping for a riff, can someone help me? Uh, and, uh, all these platforms are open networks. You can't necessarily have the conversations with your peers that you want to. All the other options are mostly analog.

• 1:33:53John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:33:54Jordi Hays?

  So, so putting it in, in, uh, my terms, you're building, you know, effectively a professional network, but hyper-specific to people like within basically certain, I don't know if the right way to say it is bands, but if you want, if you're a VP of marketing and you want to interact only with other VPs of marketing. Like Workweek is the platform that you can do that on.

• 1:34:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we've built the horizontal platform and then we verticalize it by the profession. So we have one for in healthcare, marketing, HR, e-commerce, et cetera.

• 1:34:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:27Speaker 05

  And so if you're in, if you're a kind of senior leader in one of those spaces, we verify you. So that prevents the bots, the erotica, as well as make sure that you can kind of have those, those trusted discussions.

• 1:34:40John Coogan?

  I mean, I imagine that with the, with the erotica discussion, the HR group is support group is probably going wild. All the HR leaders across.

• 1:34:49Speaker 05

  Dows are up today.

• 1:34:50John Coogan?

  Fortune 500.

• 1:34:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:34:52John Coogan?

  The HR leaders are like, what are we going to do about this? Because we've given chat GPT to everyone and then they're going to be able to use it for other.

• 1:34:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I'm assuming on business plans, you can just turn off that.

• 1:35:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is.

• 1:35:02Speaker 05

  Can you?

• 1:35:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so it's.

• 1:35:05John Coogan?

  Forty chess, you gotta upgrade to the, to the enterprise solution now. Because you gotta be able to fine tune your entire organization. So we can keep intern Tyler off of the, off of the adult version.

• 1:35:16Speaker 05

  Tyler's been grinning this whole series.

• 1:35:22John Coogan?

  That's funny. Yeah, I mean, I've heard, I've heard there's like, I've heard crazy stories of value in these like niches. There's some phrase like there's riches, there's riches in the niches, there's riches in the niches, something like that. I heard about one company that was just doing pure Slack communities. So they would go and find all of the chief of staffs across a whole bunch of different startups. Put them all in a Slack community that they had to pay to be part of. But then when they got a request from their company, oh, I need to, you know, fix up the HVAC system. They'd be able to just go to this Slack channel and say, hey, who, who else is, you know, managing an office? And needs to figure out a regular delivery schedule of filtered water or, you know, a better wifi provider or something like that. And that makes a lot of sense. Same thing with VP marketing, a whole bunch of other stuff.

• 1:36:07John Coogan?

  Hey, we're, we're talking. How do you think about the, like, if there's this continuum between like LinkedIn's, this super broad category? You have someone like, you know, a Lenny, a Substack creator with a show. That's like, you know, this individual off in this world versus like these like curated communities. Like, where do you see like the water cooler existing for the, for the average user?

• 1:36:31Speaker 05

  I think there's, there's the traditional social networks which are all free to join. Yeah. And then you have the Chief of Staff one, Silva owns that one, it's a subscription. Okay. Uh, most of those, you know, it's the YPO but for X. Sure. They've all created those, but it's a subscription. Yep. There's really only been one company that's done verification with making it free. Interesting. Uh, which is Doximity. Okay. Uh, professional network for doctors.

• 1:36:57Jordi Hays?

  They're like a ten-ish.

• 1:36:58Speaker 05

  Fourteen billion dollar company today. Produces more cash flow than Airbnb since starting. No way. And only raised fifty million. Wow. Hell of a company, go buy the stock. That's good.

• 1:37:07Jordi Hays?

  Not financial advice. When he said buy the stock, it was not financial advice.

• 1:37:12Speaker 05

  Uh, and, and we're really following a lot of that blueprint. Sure. How do you, how do you build actually a platform where you create engagement loops like a social network? But you still have the verification. Got it, so.

• 1:37:23Jordi Hays?

  Because the, because if you have a bunch of VPs of marketing.

• 1:37:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:37:27Jordi Hays?

  In a, in a, on a network, that the impressions against that audience are worth thousands of times. Potentially the average impression on a LinkedIn, right?

• 1:37:36Speaker 05

  Well, and I think it's to the, uh, Alexis on the show yesterday talked about the dead internet theory. It's like the perfect time, uh, for trying to solve that is like, how do you actually know who's doing what? And I use Reddit, I love Reddit, but I used to be able to tell, are you smart by your reply? And now with ChatGPT, I'm like, I don't know.

• 1:37:54Jordi Hays?

  Like, have you put F hurt into the reply?

• 1:37:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, and if you did, I'm like, alright, that's, now I'm like, I have no idea who this is. And so the kind of whole trust of the internet is, I think, shifting, particularly when it comes to work. You like, really care about who's giving you advice.

• 1:38:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Isaac, a friend of the show, uh, posted a couple of days ago, do what Raya did, but for a social network, humans only, human verification, hard to get into. No idea how to do it, but feels intuitively like it could work. Uh, and I love seeing this because work, this has been work week's thesis for years now. You guys have been building towards it, so, uh, people are, are finally, uh, realizing. Uh, what do you think about some of the recent, uh, changes on X? They're adding functionality that shows where the user is based. There's probably a lot of reason, a good reason. Reasons for this and then some bad reasons. I think some of the concerns for people that are in areas like the UK that don't tolerate free speech.

• 1:38:48Jordi Hays?

  You could be targeted or or or authorities there could be trying to come after accounts, but it's like such a X is an interesting platform because we effectively all use it as a professional network and a place to talk about our the industry or various industries broadly, but at the same time, it's like John compared it yesterday to being a dive bar. Right. It's like it's the people are getting in fights all the time. There's like, you know.

• 1:39:17Speaker 05

  That shady guy in the corner that, you know, it's got a history.

• 1:39:20Jordi Hays?

  It's got a history. Yeah, exactly. But, uh, yeah, I don't know.

• 1:39:25Speaker 05

  I mean, that's what Nikita's doing. If you're an open network, that's free. You're gonna get bots.

• 1:39:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:29Speaker 05

  And then you also are gonna get, you know, people abusing it. We love I'm on Twitter all the time, but the Twitter lost its trust identity when they started allowing more bots and then also the blue checkmark. It changed the the verification process a little bit. Where you could buy your own verification, but Russian bots still have credit cards.

• 1:39:51Jordi Hays?

  I remember I got I remember I got verified and then six weeks later they did the they did the.

• 1:39:56Speaker 05

  Spent years. It's like texting grandma like I got it.

• 1:40:01John Coogan?

  I found like old you have to you used to just have to.

• 1:40:03Jordi Hays?

  Needed like five news articles or something about you.

• 1:40:06John Coogan?

  So I found some old news articles and.

• 1:40:08Speaker 05

  Wikipedia page.

• 1:40:09John Coogan?

  Got approved and then a week later it was like, oh, everyone thinks.

• 1:40:13Jordi Hays?

  What is, uh, give us your take on the current state of of independent media. You were a key player in building the hustle. There was a time that everybody was saying, I want to build the morning brew for X or the hustle for X. There were some great businesses built off of that. Are they are many of them still thriving? What is the current state of the maybe you start with like the newsletter media business?

• 1:40:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think what, uh. Substack has done, has democratized access. I think like ultimately what people always come down in media is you need to like help people make money, help people get eyeballs, or help people make content faster. Like you solve one of those things, you have a decent business, solve all three, you have a good one. And what's happening is, you know, I think the independent side is starting to rise because platforms like Beehive and Substack have started to really allow that to be the case. I think we're starting to make our own case there for more specific kind of verticals, but I think consumers in the end are the ones telling the, telling the truth. There's like, Lenny is getting more, more

• 1:41:22Speaker 05

  money on a subscription basis than most publishers in B2B trade publications that have been around for like 50 years.

• 1:41:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:28Speaker 05

  So consumers' wallets always end up where it's going.

• 1:41:31John Coogan?

  Walk me through Trung Phan's existence, his business.

• 1:41:36Speaker 05

  The most interesting man in the world.

• 1:41:37John Coogan?

  Writes on business with Workweek, not at Workweek. Is he an employee? Is he on the network? Like he has a newsletter?

• 1:41:44Speaker 05

  He's just Trung, man.

• 1:41:45John Coogan?

  How does that work?

• 1:41:46Speaker 05

  He's just Trung.

• 1:41:47Jordi Hays?

  Trung was one of the first, one of the first creators that Workweek partnered with.

• 1:41:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, I, so we signed him at The Hustle, I had known him for a while.

• 1:41:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:56Speaker 05

  And he actually was a big part of like our, our shtick is because when we brought him on at The Hustle, he was so funny and so much better than everyone else.

• 1:42:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:06Speaker 05

  He changed the engagement of a newsletter with 1.5 million people, like overnight. I mean, it was like everyone just started like reading more and opening more. Ads went up. And so we actually, that was like a big part of it, is like one person could totally, you have like the 100x creator, which everyone talks about developers. Today, one, he's like the best dad in the world. You can't mention Trung and not talk about TJ Trung Jr.

• 1:42:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:42:32Speaker 05

  And I don't think he's ever been on a An all hands call for any company I've ever been a part of with him, but you know, that's just kind of his vibe of what he does. And he comes with, comes with it all. But yeah, I think he's funny. True, true rock star.

• 1:42:46John Coogan?

  But is he an example of someone who's, who's stewarding a, a smaller community of professionals that could be given some sort of moniker?

• 1:42:54Speaker 05

  He, he works more on the work week side of helping us. So what we have a lot is, we have people like Blake Madden, who covers healthcare.

• 1:43:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:03Speaker 05

  If you're in healthcare, you know who Blake is.

• 1:43:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:43:05Speaker 05

  Very hard to get someone viral in covering niche healthcare.

• 1:43:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:43:10Speaker 05

  Trung's the guy to help us do that.

• 1:43:11John Coogan?

  Okay. So he's a little bit more like top of funnel.

• 1:43:14Speaker 05

  He's a halo, he's a halo creator.

• 1:43:15John Coogan?

  Got it. Okay. And then there's specific niches.

• 1:43:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:43:17John Coogan?

  Is there a pow, I imagine there's some sort of power law to those, to the various communities that you have. Like what's at the top? Like where are you really like dominating?

• 1:43:25Speaker 05

  About like 30% of revenue is HR, 9% is healthcare. But if we look at like TAM, it's actually pretty indexed pretty equally of like how many people we think we can get per, per network.

• 1:43:35John Coogan?

  And then within HR, for example, are there multiple communities, multiple creators? Or is it all just one big pool? How do you think about that?

• 1:43:42Speaker 05

  So we think about it more like a network.

• 1:43:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:43:44Speaker 05

  So Safe Space is the HR network. And I think this is part of it. You have to use the lexicon of lingo.

• 1:43:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:43:50Speaker 05

  Blake uses very different language than HR.

• 1:43:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:53Speaker 05

  They just talk about. And so each one's developed to match that. And, and then within the network, we have creators.

• 1:44:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:01Speaker 05

  And so we believe if you want to write for, write for HR leaders, we're the best place to get the eyeballs. And then we have our own ad platform that helps fuel that, that they, that they can get money off of.

• 1:44:12John Coogan?

  Are there other, are there other kind of services or activities that are kind of, I don't know, amortized or shared across the entire platform? Obviously ad sales seems like one of them, but actual software? Or do you say, hey, Trung, like there's no better product than just posting on X. So we're not going to try and build our own short form text.

• 1:44:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, we just let them do their own thing.

• 1:44:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, use your, use whatever tools best for the job. If you want to be on Substack or a Slack.

• 1:44:40Speaker 05

  We use our own newsletters. So newsletters, newsletter particularly is that. And that's our way that we use content to drive people into the networks.

• 1:44:47John Coogan?

  Yep. And then you can shuffle people around through the different networks.

• 1:44:50Speaker 05

  Not that different than how Substack's now doing it for theirs, but ours is more vertical.

• 1:44:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And there's more like news driven. Yeah, makes sense.

• 1:44:56Speaker 05

  Political and.

• 1:44:57Jordi Hays?

  Wanted your take on, on David Ellison's recent actions with Paramount and Skydance. A lot of people thought that the price they paid for the free press was crazy. I think we came in the defense of it. When you look at it from a talent acquisition standpoint and having a very high value audience. But I wanted, wanted to hear how you thought about it.

• 1:45:21Speaker 05

  The, the merger itself, I mean, it allows them to compete. I think like taking a big step out, everyone wants to win streaming. I mean, that's like the name of the game. And so it allows Paramount to now finally have more IP to compete with Disney Plus and Netflix. While they're all, and Netflix just announced, I think today, a partnership with Spotify to start bringing more podcasts on like is an IP race of the streaming. Uh, and Paramount was losing and I think this allows them to do that. So that's, I think the bigger picture is actually that.

• 1:45:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the free press is like a rounding error as part of this.

• 1:45:53Speaker 05

  It's 150 million total and they're buying, you know, 12 revenue of that. It's not the end of the world. I think that was also, uh, if you're going.

• 1:46:02Jordi Hays?

  Was that their, was that the revenue number?

• 1:46:04Speaker 05

  Uh, 12 to 15, I think. Yeah.

• 1:46:06John Coogan?

  I thought it was higher than 20, but.

• 1:46:08Speaker 05

  Um, yeah, it was around like 10x multiple, I think, or 10 to 12. Um, but they, um, I also think when you're starting your own company, uh, which basically David Ellison is like, you want your own people.

• 1:46:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:46:18Speaker 05

  And that's, you're gonna, you're gonna make sure you, you build the right foundation and.

• 1:46:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:24Speaker 05

  That's, that's.

• 1:46:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, everybody's focused on what is, uh, what, what did they pay for the free press? You should be focusing on how much more valuable will Barry Weiss make CBS?

• 1:46:34Speaker 05

  This is no different, like in a totally different world and very different numbers. But then Zuck saying like, I need an AI team. I'm going to go get the people that I want to get. He's saying, I want to have the best editorial team. I'm going to go get the people I want to have.

• 1:46:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:46John Coogan?

  Do you think the, the bigger platforms, the public platforms have kind of? Become less relevant in those niche professional networks. I feel like if I went back like 10 years on Twitter, there would be like hashtag like Marketing Tuesday and I would see a bunch of marketing people talk about marketing.

• 1:47:04Jordi Hays?

  On Tuesday.

• 1:47:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, basically. It was like that.

• 1:47:07Jordi Hays?

  What a crazy concept.

• 1:47:09John Coogan?

  Maybe it was Marketing Monday or something.

• 1:47:10Jordi Hays?

  Manifestation Mondays, that was a thing as well.

• 1:47:13John Coogan?

  There was a thing around like hashtags.

• 1:47:14Jordi Hays?

  All the corny hashtags.

• 1:47:16John Coogan?

  Chats around certain things and you'd see a lot of those people that were just talking about their specific like, but now X feels like teapot, political news, like there's, there's, there's, it's at a much higher level than any sort of niche one.

• 1:47:28Speaker 05

  Well, the irony, I think, was like when they went all algorithms first, they lost the sense of communities. And when you used to follow people and that's who you did, it was like your people.

• 1:47:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:37Speaker 05

  And when it's the algorithms, it totally changed the dynamic of the product, but because it was the same brand and logo, no one thought about them differently.

• 1:47:44John Coogan?

  It happened slowly.

• 1:47:44Jordi Hays?

  It's still, it's, I think it makes the feed more interesting, but we definitely lost some.

• 1:47:48Speaker 05

  And they make more money. I mean, like, you're, you're there for engagement and your damao goes up as Nikita makes that algorithm better. So like, that's all he cares about.

• 1:47:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:57Speaker 05

  And I think that's like ultimately what their incentives are. I do think like LinkedIn, you know, I know you guys are huge there and really rely on the show.

• 1:48:06John Coogan?

  The sports center of LinkedIn.

• 1:48:06Speaker 05

  Sports center of LinkedIn. So hate to, hate to say this, but you know, I think like 10 years ago, someone would be like, hey, I saw you're connected on LinkedIn. Can you make that introduction? I'd be like, oh yeah, I know. Today I'm like, I have no clue who that is. I think there's a negative network effect happening across most social. The more people added, the worse it gets.

• 1:48:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense.

• 1:48:24Jordi Hays?

  We were talking off air about how OnlyFans hasn't been able to sell itself. They've been trying for a long time now. The news yesterday, obviously, you know, other companies leaning into that broad category of monetizing romantic chatting, which OnlyFans has done better than probably any company in the world. When XAI was leaning into romantic companions earlier this year, we were like, it made sense for them to do. They needed a strategy to drive, you know. New user signups, engagements, subscriptions, et cetera. But why do you think? Have you been surprised that there's no buyer for OnlyFans?

• 1:49:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's like the on a cash flow per headcount, I think it's the best company in the world.

• 1:49:13Jordi Hays?

  Until what is it? Tether?

• 1:49:15Speaker 05

  1.9 billion, I think OnlyFans does in cash flow a year with like 70 employees or something. It's like absurd. I know the owner takes like a he pays himself a 500 million dividend check a year and they leave like plenty in the bank. But they've never they can't take themselves public. They've not been able to find a buyer because of the content. And now the irony is most of it's just a face, but they allow they've created the tooling. The old CEO of OnlyFans, former colleague of mine, she's amazing. She created so many tools for the models to make content in a safe way and then to monetize it better. And now they've advanced further to where like it's a chatbot. They essentially like not even having real conversation anymore. It's not that different than what we're talking about for OpenAI.

• 1:50:01Speaker 05

  And it's just branding. And I think that's the, you know, X being the everything app. You're like, I can kind of see that. That's that's, I think, your point earlier about the Apple comparison. This this is a little bit of a tarnish on that comparison, I think, for OpenAI.

• 1:50:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, we have some breaking news we got to cover before our next guest hops on. But thank you so much for stopping by.

• 1:50:21Jordi Hays?

  What's the breaking news?

• 1:50:22Speaker 05

  I gotta know.

• 1:50:22John Coogan?

  There's a ton of these. Mr. Beast has filed a trademark launching his own bank.

• 1:50:27Speaker 05

  Hang out for a second.

• 1:50:28John Coogan?

  It will be called Mr. Beast Financial. He clearly saw our post about Arabor and was like, I gotta get in on the action. Just kidding. The application was filed two days ago.

• 1:50:37Jordi Hays?

  Oh, but it's real.

• 1:50:38Speaker 05

  No, it happened this morning. I saw it.

• 1:50:39Jordi Hays?

  What's your what's your take on this? It feels like if you want to monetize an extremely broad audience of young people, maybe just creating a bank that you can monetize deposits is a fairly aligned way to do that. It's kind of like.

• 1:50:54Speaker 05

  I guess. Yeah, I mean.

• 1:50:56Jordi Hays?

  I just don't know that.

• 1:50:58Speaker 05

  There's like a lane of trust sooner or later that like you're just gonna screw like you're like, why do I want a Mr. Beast bank? I don't know.

• 1:51:04John Coogan?

  I mean, the, the, the lesson from the Mr. Beast bar.

• 1:51:09John Coogan?

  Hamburgers is that it, it has zero price discrimination. And so if you get a rich person in your audience, like you're only going to be able to charge them a five dollars for a candy bar.

• 1:51:19Jordi Hays?

  But let's break it down.

• 1:51:20John Coogan?

  A bank you can actually get.

• 1:51:24Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, but, but think about like wealthy people are not going to see this bank launch and decide. I need this. I'm going to move.

• 1:51:33John Coogan?

  Thinking decades, thinking decades. A kid watches Mr. Beast is like, yeah, I need my first checking account. I'll set up Mr. Beast checking. And then 20 years later, they're like, yeah, I should probably switch to something more serious. It's kind of ridiculous that I'm still on Beast Financial, but like.

• 1:51:51Jordi Hays?

  If he's actually a bank charter, charter, it means he can get into doing mortgages and like hardcore lending.

• 1:51:56Speaker 05

  I think like that all, it always sounds good in like a board meeting. And then you like, don't care about the product and you don't actually make it differentiated. And then you're like, cool. When distribution's like your only mode, it's not a mode.

• 1:52:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so I guess, I guess if he runs the numbers on like, okay, if the average person in my audience is like 16. How much money did I spend a month? I bet, I bet teenagers will think this is cool and will want to use it. And you can probably just run the numbers and calculate like, okay, the average teenager spends. Uh, their parents are going to send their, their, uh, allowance, or maybe they have a job, they send it into the account. Maybe they spend. Couple hundred dollars a month. I don't know what teenagers spend these days. I, I was, I remember back in my day, it was like, you know, allowance was like $20.

• 1:52:42Jordi Hays?

  And, and so it gets deposited in there and then they spend it and he can give them rewards and that's cool and cash back and he can monetize some of that.

• 1:52:51Jordi Hays?

  I don't really believe like, I became an adult and I was like. I wanna use a real bank. I'm an adult, you know, like I, I just remember I migrated from like a credit union in my hometown to like, uh, I wanna, you're using a card all the time. It's coming up. Like you think you're like a, a kid that goes into college is like, yeah, I'm still using my Mr. Beast like debit card.

• 1:53:16Speaker 05

  I do think it's like a Lunchables competitor and a bank. Like know your audience a little bit.

• 1:53:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. But so, so I guess like from, from the bull case is that if you can get millions of kids to, to just be using Beast Financial as their, as their.

• 1:53:32Speaker 05

  I mean, as a piggy bank?

• 1:53:34John Coogan?

  It's technically called Mr. Beast Financial, which is I, I, I think I like Beast Financial more than Mr. Beast Financial. Uh, the filing was submitted on an intent to use basis, which under trademark law means there are genuine plans to bring this to life. So.

• 1:53:47Speaker 05

  I think he should have went with Jimmy. He's like a grown, a grown up version of the bank.

• 1:53:52John Coogan?

  Well, it clearly got, it clearly got Will Monitis up in arms. He's thinking about it because he says he's calling the top on incubations, sub tweeting Mr. Beast. Just kidding. He's probably not sub tweeting Mr. Beast, but, uh, Will Monitis did call the top on incubations. He says, every guy I've talked to in the past six months that even vaguely worked at a hot company is now incubating four, five, six companies. Who are all these hired CEOs? Why is the, why is the market equilibrium that no one wants to go all in? They just wanna clip 20%. And so, yeah.

• 1:54:24Jordi Hays?

  Incubations are incredibly hard.

• 1:54:26John Coogan?

  He says there are amazing.

• 1:54:27Jordi Hays?

  They're way more work, way more work than just investing.

• 1:54:30Speaker 05

  Jordy and I spent some time trying to that. It's tough. Uh, it's a tough game.

• 1:54:33John Coogan?

  He says there are amazing incubation individuals. I cannot say their names here or they will blow my car up. You are not incubating anything if what you are doing is clipping 20% for an idea and some intros. You are not the tax man. The real incubation platforms put a huge amount of work in. Uh, what, what, what's he talking about? Like Snowflake at Sutter Hill? Like that's a real incubation. I, I guess like you could kind of.

• 1:54:55Jordi Hays?

  Drive, drive.

• 1:54:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, drive Oscar.

• 1:54:56Speaker 05

  There's a healthcare one that's done really well that like they only focus on like certain healthcare.

• 1:55:01John Coogan?

  Yep. Yep.

• 1:55:02Speaker 05

  One, um, but their like model was like. They had no capital risk.

• 1:55:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, and they're also like a platform that's done this for, and they take it very seriously. We did, we did talk to somebody who incubated like, what, 200 companies in a year or something?

• 1:55:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was, there was, there was, there was, there was a, a studio that made so many companies and were so aggressive around how much equity they would take that every tier one announced like, we will never fund these companies.

• 1:55:27John Coogan?

  Because when the CEO walks in, there's like, how much do you own? CEO founder?

• 1:55:31Jordi Hays?

  They're like 10%.

• 1:55:32John Coogan?

  10%. And you're like, who owns the rest?

• 1:55:34Speaker 05

  And also like, are you the like 199th of the 200 CEOs or like number five?

• 1:55:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:40Speaker 05

  And I think that's actually a problem.

• 1:55:42Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I'm coming around to the Mr. Beast.

• 1:55:46John Coogan?

  Financial? You like it, you're bullish.

• 1:55:49Jordi Hays?

  I, I'm not.

• 1:55:49John Coogan?

  What's the terminal value?

• 1:55:50Jordi Hays?

  I think that they can, so thi- this idea came up in 2021, 2022 during the fintech craze. It was like, it's not that hard to start a, a

• 1:56:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:04Jordi Hays?

  software product that can take deposits as, I mean, in this case, it sounds like he's may- maybe trying to be a chartered bank.

• 1:56:11Speaker 05

  He's trying to go to like base layer.

• 1:56:12John Coogan?

  Well, it's unclear.

• 1:56:13Jordi Hays?

  But who knows?

• 1:56:14John Coogan?

  It's literally just a

• 1:56:14Jordi Hays?

  But still, it's like, if you just run the numbers on like, how many million accounts you can get open up, what the average deposit size, how much they're going to be spending on a recurring basis. I, and then, and then the, even the partnerships that he'd be able to drive around like, being, becoming a referral partner for Netflix and, you know.

• 1:56:34John Coogan?

  Well, you don't, yeah, to be clear, I don't think it's, I don't think it's confirmed that it is truly a bank. It could be Mr. Beast Financial, get some financial advice.

• 1:56:43Speaker 05

  It would be like a clever idea, and like, I would be supportive of this, like, you buy one of his feastable Lunchables, you get like a nickel

• 1:56:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:51Speaker 05

  Uh, in a savings account.

• 1:56:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:53Speaker 05

  You keep going or something like that.

• 1:56:55John Coogan?

  Flip it around, you pay for the Lunchable with $1.

• 1:56:58Speaker 05

  Gambling for children.

• 1:56:59John Coogan?

  If you don't pay for the rest of the Lunchable, Mr. Beast comes and personally breaks your legs. He becomes a loan shark. That's another option. But I don't know. We'll see. In other news, on the way back to the United States from NATO's Defense Ministers Meeting, the Secretary of War Hegseth's plane made an unscheduled landing in the United Kingdom due to a crack in the aircraft windshield. The plane landed based on standards procedures and everyone is on board is safe. Thank God. What a crazy story. Crack in the windshield. That is, that is a very crazy moment. In other news, an exciting milestone in AI from science. Sundar Pichai was probably holding this in his back pocket

• 1:57:39John Coogan?

  for when OpenAI does something that's negative aura. Sundar, Sundar busted this out and said, "Our C2S-scale 27B foundation model, built with Yale and based on GEMA, or Gemma, generated a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular cellular behavior, which scientists experimentally validated in living cells with more preclinical and clinical tests. This discovery may reveal a promising new pathway for developing therapies to fight cancer."

• 1:58:09Jordi Hays?

  He dropped it.

• 1:58:11John Coogan?

  Oh, just a coincidence. Just a coincidence.

• 1:58:14Jordi Hays?

  They're doing that.

• 1:58:15John Coogan?

  You're absolutely dog. Tyler, tell me more about this. Like, what is actually going on? Do you have you dug into this at all?

• 1:58:19Speaker 02

  I haven't read the full paper, but I mean, it is, there is like a stark distinction between this and what Sam was talking about, especially with all the Gemini 3 rumors going on.

• 1:58:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:58:28Speaker 02

  It's like, this is the most cracked model of all time.

• 1:58:30John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:58:31Speaker 02

  So I don't, maybe it's just like, this is just, maybe, maybe it's just like a vague post as a blog post.

• 1:58:36Jordi Hays?

  This, this is interesting.

• 1:58:38John Coogan?

  Vague paper? We're doing vague papers now?

• 1:58:40Speaker 02

  I mean, you see that with a lot of new papers where it's like, oh, we have this new way of doing RL that's way better, but we're not going to really get into the details. Because obviously, we don't want to share.

• 1:58:49John Coogan?

  Well, we are sponsored by Google AI Studio, the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini. Chat with models, vibe code, monitor usage. You're gonna hang out for all the, Eric, you're gonna hang out. You're gonna interview the next person.

• 1:59:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm having fun. I'm loving it. This is an interesting post from Brendan Buck. He says, "Here's a telling sign of where we are. On day 15, there are zero stories about the blank in both the print New York Times and print Wall Street Journals. What is blank?"

• 1:59:17John Coogan?

  I have no idea. The government is shut down. Oh, the government shutdown. Yeah, that's right. I'm getting a new passport and I have no idea if I'm gonna get it in time. I paid for it to be expedited because I have to go to Europe, unfortunately. I mean, obviously, it's a fantastic event, but I never liked leaving America. Yeah. But it was, it did rise to the occasion and I need, I need a new passport and I'm not sure if I'll be able to get it if the government is shut down. But are there really no new articles about this? No news? That is wild.

• 1:59:45Speaker 05

  It does feel a lot less like newsworthy than it was last time.

• 1:59:49John Coogan?

  I think a lot of people just don't like the government and so they're like, "Yeah, shut it down. We don't need it. I'm over the government." See ya. See ya.

• 1:59:56Speaker 05

  I do think most of those, it'll get, I heard this, most of the departments had four to six weeks of funding for their employees.

• 2:00:05John Coogan?

  Okay, so they can hang out for a while.

• 2:00:06Speaker 05

  So basically for like four-ish weeks, no one's paycheck is affected quite yet because they have no reserves. Once that happens, I think it starts to get noisy.

• 2:00:14John Coogan?

  Okay, well, we do have our next guest in the Restream Waiting Room. Adam, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for visiting UltraDome. We have Eric Whitman from VSCO coming on the show next. He's in the Restream Waiting Room. We'll bring him into the TBP in UltraDome. How are you doing? What's going on? Good to see you.

• 2:00:31Speaker 06

  Doing great. How you doing, guys? Good to see you.

• 2:00:33John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on the show. Great to have you. Give us a, give us a State of the Union with VSCO. I think a lot of people are familiar with the product. They know the, the general story, but I'd love to get just kind of the update and kind of level set for where the business is today.

• 2:00:47Speaker 06

  Yeah, appreciate that. Yeah, look, VSCO, it's been a minute, right? VSCO has been around for 14 years now.

• 2:00:54John Coogan?

  Overnight success. That's what we love to see. An overnight success.

• 2:00:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, I love it. Yeah, so, you know, and we're, we're a very proud company that's been here supporting creatives and photographers and...

• 2:01:09Speaker 06

  Creators overall for, you know, well over a decade and what, you know, we love our jobs. I mean, we love building for creatives and, you know, we've seen various moments in time come about for VSCO, but I think especially right now with the world and what's happening with AI. You know, right now, people, especially photographers and creatives are looking for a company that has their back as building tools for them and it's really helping them find ways to be successful, whether it's just doing things on the side or making a full-time living as a creative. So that's really what we've been up to.

• 2:01:46John Coogan?

  Cool. Take us through the most recent updates and then I have a bunch of

• 2:01:52John Coogan?

  ideas to pitch you, get feedback on, understand more about, I mean, basically how I can level up my photography workflow.

• 2:01:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, I love it. Yeah. So, you know, obviously AI is impacting the whole industry and a lot of photographers and a lot of creatives. And, you know, our perspective has always been how do we preserve the craft? How do we preserve the artistry, but also bringing some of those benefits that AI can provide to support, you know, the creative process. So the last couple of years, we've been releasing tools like, for example, VSCO Hub, which is actually a visual search engine powered by AI that makes it really easy for brands and people to find and hire photographers based upon their content. We earlier this year launched a product called VSCO Canvas.

• 2:02:42Speaker 06

  And if you think about a lot of creative processes, especially when you're working with clients, there's always this ideation phase and a mood boarding phase. And so we were one of the first to come out with a specific mood boarding tool that not only had generative as a part of it, but also allowed you to search this amazing community of literally 300 plus million people on VSCO and their content and then bring your own content to the fore. So really a hybrid, in a hybrid way. And then today, big news is we've just come out with a whole new suite of tools. We call it AI Lab because we know a lot of this technology, as we hear about on your show almost daily, continues to evolve at this massively rapid clip and I see the gun getting ready.

• 2:03:27John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:03:31Speaker 06

  Thank you. I was wondering if I was gonna get a gong.

• 2:03:33John Coogan?

  We love product launches here. Okay, here's a workflow that I struggle with regularly, and I want you to walk me through how I could level it up. So I'll often go out and shoot photos, and I shoot raws, and then I get to this point where I need to go and color correct and edit the raws, and I hate that process. And if I bring it into Photoshop, there's that auto button, and it never gets it right. And I feel like there's room for AI to fine tune on what it takes to actually take a raw image and then make it look great in color correction. That's not generative AI. I don't want to regenerate the image.

• 2:04:16John Coogan?

  I want the actual pixels there. I just want to understand, you know, the different looks, kind of like AI filters. I've tried different apps, and a lot of the apps, they kind of like hit everything with a different colored hammer, and they all get really extreme. And then I see ads for like, oh, I got this filter pack, and it looks great, but then you apply it, and it's not right on your photos because you shot slightly differently. So what do you think the future of like, just you still want to go capture a real image, a raw image, but then you just want to speed up that workflow of the post-process once you have a great raw?

• 2:04:52Speaker 06

  I love it. I love this example because actually the future is here now. So actually, with VSCO today, you can import those raw images in. And we actually have some ML built into the product today that we will look at that image that you have, and we will actually recommend a set of presets. So we have hundreds of different presets. Some of them are the world's best film emulation presets, all the way down to presets that our own color scientists have created that are really beautiful. I mean, a lot of these ads that you see for preset packs, they're basically people that have tried to copy our work that's been around, like I said, for 10-plus years. And there are still photographers that are doing work for National Geographic, big campaigns like that wonderful fruit company

• 2:05:34Speaker 06

  in Cupertino, and they are still using our color grading presets as their default. Starting point so that they can just get that great look much more quickly. So the future is here already today, John. It's it starts with VSCO into our VSCO studio. You can import your raws, use for this photo to automatically pick the right preset. And then you take your creative process from there. Again, we're not trying to get in the way from an AI perspective. We want AI to be supportive of your overall creative process.

• 2:06:04Jordi Hays?

  What is the general sentiment in the photographer community today around AI? We had an, we had one shoot earlier this year with a photographer who was so deathly afraid of AI. He was hoping that the government would regulate it so that certain products could only be like legally had to be authentically photographed because he was worried that people would just be generating a variety of images of them. Meanwhile, we have like an insatiable demand for photography where we do shoots all the time for different media things, even I think in my home, right? I don't, I could go and generate hundreds of

• 2:06:45Jordi Hays?

  images of my family and yet I still, we still hire photographers a few times a year to take family photos. And so I even, even if the models get a hundred times better, which I don't even know if they can get a hundred times better because they're already so photo real. I just think that photographers that are craft driven, that like, that genuinely enjoy photography and that want to capture moments will always have a job. That may, that might be naive, but that's my current feeling today. And I'm curious how the broad community on VSCO is thinking about it.

• 2:07:22Speaker 06

  I, I, I think that's right. I mean, look, I, I think we all should all recognize there's tension today. Right? And, and I, I think back like, look, I've, I've been in this industry for 30 plus years. I've seen a lot of hype and you know, where it ends up, you know, resolving to itself like e-commerce, right? When it first started happening, everyone thought, oh, brick and mortar stores are going to go away. The reality is 16% of overall commerce hap- happens through e-commerce today. The rest is still very much brick and mortar. So. I do think, you know, when AI and especially generative AI came out, you did have a lot of photographers that saw it as a threat. And there are certain categories where realistically it is a threat. Stock photography is a perfect example. Like this is why you see companies like Shutterstock and Getty are coming together because,

• 2:08:07Speaker 06

  you know, there is going to be, there already is duress in the stock photography market. But as you're saying, like, there are different segments of photography. I mean, the photography services market is $105 billion a year. Uh, it's going to grow to 160, 150 billion dollars a year, uh, by 2030. So it's still a growing market, which most people don't realize. Uh, so I think the question's always been, well, how is AI going to affect me and my specific line of work? I think where more and more photographers are now rationalizing is they're now starting to realize actually how helpful it can be to them, especially for the mundane tasks that they really don't like. So we were talking about color grading and sort of the editing part of the process.

• 2:08:50Speaker 06

  You know, there are aspects of the editing process that are really mundane. Like if you're a wedding photographer and you're shooting 10,000 photos, how do I quickly cull through that? Today, it's very much a manual process and it does not give photographers energy.

• 2:09:04Speaker 06

  But there are more and more companies that are coming out with calling tools that will automatically apply, um, your look and also because they've learned what your look has be, is, is, has become over years and years of editing. And they'll also just take out the shots that aren't really, you know, like you, you see an airplane in the background. Okay, take that one out, right? But it's just AI is, is supportive of that. I think another area that I think is very emerging and you're going to see a lot more from VSCO on this front. I, I can't wait to come back and bang that gong a few more times with you all. But is that, you know, a lot of photographers are excellent at their craft. They're excellent at the artistry and what they do. What they are not great at is marketing, managing their business.

• 2:09:47Speaker 06

  And so there are just mundane tasks around managing customer relationships and responding back to people and making sure that your, your edit list is appropriately organized. Qualifying clients. Qualifying clients is another great example. So we, we actually announced a, a product called VSCO Workspace. That is, the whole point is to help photographers effectively manage their business. And we are rapidly AI enabling that product so that we can, again, take a lot of those mundane tasks out. So that's where, as we think about things, it's very much about craft and integrity, being very human centric from a photography creator standpoint. But AI is going

• 2:10:27Speaker 06

  to assist you in a lot of those mundane tasks. And our goal is to be that platform for photographers.

• 2:10:34Jordi Hays?

  Did you always know you were going to come in and, and build SaaS at VSCO? Was that, was that, was that the plan? I mean, B to B SaaS specifically. Obviously, you were, you were at Atlassian, then you were at Figma. You, you're kind of a SaaS demagogue, you know, in sorts.

• 2:10:50Speaker 06

  I do love it, man. I can't, I can't look at a business and not think SaaS. I'm not gonna lie.

• 2:10:58Jordi Hays?

  Us too. There's, there's a few things better in the world.

• 2:11:01John Coogan?

  I have, I have a question about AI and the, the trajectory of smartphone photography. So I, I recently got the latest iPhone, 48 megapixels, three different cameras. And I saw a video where they were, it was on MKBHD and he was testing, I think it was Leica versus iPhone. Can you tell the difference? It was very, very hard. But they really made it harder by only doing extreme, you know, no shallow depth of field, landscape photography, super bright. They weren't shooting some moody scene in a smoky bar at night with, you know, controlled lighting

• 2:11:42John Coogan?

  or something like that. And so we've been in this interesting era where the smartphone is, it, it, it, it got amazing, superhuman level or, or super, you know, Leica level at a certain niche in photography, but you, it really has not replaced like moody portrait lighting where you want shallow depth of field, like just because of the physics of the lens. And I'm wondering if you think AI, generative AI will do the same thing? Because I'm just thinking about like, even in the stock photography example, like if I'm buying a stock photo of Yosemite, like Even if it looks photo real, like I want Half Dome in the right place. I don't want Half Dome, I don't want something that looks like Half Dome. Like, the reason I'm buying that stock image is because

• 2:12:26John Coogan?

  I can see exactly the shape of Half Dome perfectly, not, you know, something that feels right and looks photo real, but isn't actually real. And that applies to so many different things. We need a stock photo of a Manhattan street, and the layout of that street is important. And so I'm wondering where you think the pockets of photography will stay around forever versus the ones that are like going a layer deeper on that?

• 2:12:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, first of all, I think composition is arguably one of the most important things for you to learn in photography. You know, most people will say that Ansel Adams wasn't a great photographer. He was amazing at composition and editing. I mean, he was one of the original contributors to Photoshop, like back in the day, you know, little known fact, but you know, it is about that editing process. So yes, you've got to get that composition right. But oftentimes, you know, that shot that's actually taken doesn't match the vision of what the photographer had in their head. And I do think, you know, where AI is interesting is it's starting to help people sort of, hey, you have this vision.

• 2:13:30Speaker 06

  Lighting is another classic example, right? Lighting is something that most photographers, you know, even the best of them, like, mess up. And being able to use AI to help augment, right, and correct some of the lighting issues or the composition issues, I think that's another area that's really, that there's more and more investment that's happening there. We're obviously taking a look at some of that as well. But I think that's where it can aid, right? And regardless of whether you're using an iPhone, or if you're, you've got a very expensive Leica, Love Leicas, great products, but you know, from an approachability standpoint, the iPhones are much more approachable for the average person. And when people are just getting started into photography, right, like, I think

• 2:14:15Speaker 06

  even, not even the latest iPhone, but like, old iPhones, pick an iPhone 12 Pro and start to experiment with that and really just build your craft, build your look. That's why people love coming to VSCO, because they get to see what other people are doing. Like, authentic work that isn't tainted by a lot of slop that's out there, right? And then they get to learn from other people. And I think that's also very important, right? Don't, you know, being a photographer, especially if you're a professional photographer, is a lonely place, right? I mean, being a creative is a lonely place. And so if you can find communities of people, you know, we sponsor a lot of photo walks, just meet up with these folks, get to learn from each other and, you know, learn about the tools that they're using, learn about the techniques, see the gear and the camera. Ultimately, it's about bringing

• 2:15:00Speaker 06

  people together and to help support and elevate their work and their craft. And whatever that is, whether it's technology or just going old school with doing in-person stuff, I mean, we're all here for that.

• 2:15:14Jordi Hays?

  You spent fifteen years at Adobe. Do you think the market misunderstands Adobe's AI opportunity? Because from my view, it's like you have some of the most advanced tools, the most advanced tools for creating, uh, uh, creating media across, you know, different categories. And if AI makes it better, you know, if AI is a tool that just makes these processes better and more accessible, I would think that creates an amazing opportunity. But the stock's down thirty-four percent in the last year. They haven't found a way

• 2:15:55Jordi Hays?

  to get people to understand the opportunity. But I'm curious, like, what your framework is for Adobe in, in the year twenty twenty-five?

• 2:16:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, obviously, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm a fan of Adobe. I spent a long time there. I came through the Macam Media acquisition. And, you know, I think there's still a lot of smart people out there trying to figure out some of these things. I think what people realize is that, you know, Adobe used to be this unassailable, you know, company, right? And it was very, very dominant in the market. And then this company called Figma comes around and really proves like, oh, there's actually a whole new market opportunity that's adjacent to Adobe that also can be served by someone else. Canva, same thing, right? Canva is also looking at another part of the market that wasn't, was underserved. And so I think that's probably why you're seeing duress, you know, in, in, in the Adobe

• 2:16:49Speaker 06

  stock. It's less about the AI market opportunity, which I think is very big. But there's a lot of players there right now and and who knows? I mean, right now, this is an absolute land grab opportunity where people are experimenting, they're coming out with different tools. Just look at how capital allocators are treating the market right now. I mean, they really don't know. They're it's almost impossible to underwrite, you know, the the the valuations of these companies right now because it's really a guess. People are just trying to pick what they think is going to be the the winner of of these respective categories. So me personally, very long on the AI opportunity for the creative community. I think you alluded to this earlier, like, there's just a thirst, a thirst, like a massive

• 2:17:32Speaker 06

  hunger for really high quality content out of volume that we've never seen before. And we know that generative AI isn't cutting it. Even if generated continues to get better over the next three to five years, there still is a certain amount of work that will always need to be human created. It will always need to be authentic and genuine, especially when it comes to what brands want and need. And, you know, humans are very instinctual creatures, too. So even though I see a lot of these tests online, can you tell the difference between what's real AI and what's not? Like, you know, I think humans understand like what what is real still. And and I I think that's something that we're we're going to continue to see more and more content being created by real

• 2:18:13Speaker 06

  people for a long, long time. So I'm long on that bet. But also, I'm a big believer in the opportunity that AI is going to present in supporting the the human creatives out there.

• 2:18:25John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 2:18:26Jordi Hays?

  Totally agree.

• 2:18:27John Coogan?

  Uh, well, thank you so much for stopping by.

• 2:18:28Jordi Hays?

  This is super fun.

• 2:18:29John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:18:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, so good to see you guys. Thanks for having me on.

• 2:18:32Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:18:32John Coogan?

  Before we bring on our next guest, let me tell you about profound get your brand mentioned in chat GPT, reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Uh, our last guest couldn't talk trash about Adobe, didn't want to talk trash about Adobe, but I'm happy to. I've been having a terrible experience with Adobe and I'm so mad at the company. Thirty percent should be a hundred percent.

• 2:18:53Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:18:54John Coogan?

  And I'll tell you why. It's so simple. So I I use.

• 2:18:58Jordi Hays?

  You want that John is calling for the stock to drop a hundred percent.

• 2:19:02John Coogan?

  It's not that serious, but I am very. annoyed with Adobe because for a long time I've been using an app on my iPhone called Photoshop Mix. And Photoshop Mix allowed you to take two photos and layer them over each other. Very helpful for making memes. You could take one image, you could cut it out, put in another one. Eventually they put ads in front of every single you had to, you had to click an X to get out of an ad. Every time you open the app, fine, I'm already paying for Adobe. I don't know why I also get these ads for the other app. Very annoying. I finally bail on the app because they just break it entirely. It's not working at all. I get a new app, Photoshop Express. This is their new app for the iPhone. They fixed it. You don't need Photoshop Mix anymore. You're on Photoshop Express. And so I get Photoshop Express and I learn all the new tools, all their new UI.

• 2:19:47John Coogan?

  And I figure out how to do basically the same thing in the new app, Photoshop Express. Then I get a new iPhone. Guess what happens? They completely killed Photoshop Express. They, they took, they, they literally took the feature out of, of cutting out one image and putting it out over the other. You can't do layers in Photoshop Express anymore. So then I need to move to Photoshop.

• 2:20:06Jordi Hays?

  You can't even do layers in this country.

• 2:20:07John Coogan?

  You can't even do layers in this country anymore. And so now I'm on the actual Photoshop app, the third app. I'm very upset and maybe it's better. Maybe I'll be happy in a couple of months. But I've been shocked with how difficult it is to just, I, I guess I'm just such a weird power user of like niche. Like I want to do everything on my phone that I'm just demanding a niche set of, uh, of products and, and features that just don't exist anywhere else. But, uh, I've been very, very upset with my Adobe experience. So anyway.

• 2:20:35Jordi Hays?

  Mog.

• 2:20:35John Coogan?

  That's my rant for today.

• 2:20:36Jordi Hays?

  Send it down.

• 2:20:38John Coogan?

  But hopefully they can turn it around. They do have a huge opportunity in front of them. Hopefully they get some sharp people who start building, uh, great products and apps because, uh, I would love to be using them.

• 2:20:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, fortunately, uh, I believe the, uh, president of Adobe is coming on, uh, later this month.

• 2:20:53John Coogan?

  Really? Fantastic. I can take it up and down.

• 2:20:56Jordi Hays?

  Talk, talk to them about it.

• 2:20:57John Coogan?

  I, I could talk about the wrongful death of Photoshop Mix, PS Express. Two apps that I've created endless memes in. Anyway, without further ado, we have our next guest from Redacto. Welcome to the stream.

• 2:21:10Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for hanging out.

• 2:21:11John Coogan?

  Waiting for the rant. Uh, congratulations on the news. Please, uh, kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company.

• 2:21:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, so I'm Adi Abraham, co-founder and CEO here at Redacto. We help people get data out of all of their most complex documents and spreadsheets for all sorts of L M use cases. So plenty of thoughts here on Adobe as well that we can go into.

• 2:21:32John Coogan?

  Fantastic. I like that when you're in the restream waiting room, you can kind of hear me ranting before you before you hop on. Give us the news.

• 2:21:38Jordi Hays?

  News, give me that hammer too.

• 2:21:42Jordi Hays?

  What do you got?

• 2:21:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, so yesterday we announced that we raised a $75 million Series B.

• 2:21:51Speaker 07

  This is five months after we announced our Series A for Benchmark.

• 2:21:54John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:21:55Speaker 07

  $100 million in total funding.

• 2:21:57John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:21:58Jordi Hays?

  On an absolute, on an absolute tear. I missed who who led the new round. I missed that part.

• 2:22:03Speaker 07

  Andreessen.

• 2:22:04Jordi Hays?

  Andreessen. There you go. There you go.

• 2:22:05John Coogan?

  Congratulations. So, I mean, we got to go a lot deeper on the actual product. Who's the key customer? What are the key use cases? Obviously, you know, understanding documents broadly, like, there's a lot of products for that. So what was your landing zone? What was your go to market? What's the target customer like? Like, take me one level.

• 2:22:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How old were you when you realized you wanted to turn documents into data, I guess?

• 2:22:26Speaker 07

  From day one.

• 2:22:27John Coogan?

  Day one.

• 2:22:27Jordi Hays?

  Day one.

• 2:22:28John Coogan?

  Day one.

• 2:22:31Speaker 07

  No, I think, look, the thing is, like, PDF processing is, of course, not a new thing. People have worked on it probably longer than I've been alive. I've met the people that worked on the original drivers for printers to print PDFs. But the context here is very different, right? Like, we're not far from a point where language models are going to reason on pretty much any points of human data. Like, before you say hi to your doctor, there's going to be some sort of summary of your medical records. When you apply for a loan, there's going to be, you know, some agents that goes through and understands all of your financial statements. If you're going to have all of those human points of data with real human processes, you need human level accuracy. And that's what we came in with. So two years ago, we released what at that time was the first parsing API that used V L Ms. And tried to really set a new standard for what accuracy could look like on anything.

• 2:23:17Speaker 07

  We looked at it as this problem of how can you read documents the way that a human would? And since then, obviously, the product's gotten a lot broader. But today, a lot of the newer AI companies like in the Harveys of the world, the Rogos, the Ligoras and so on, people are building really great AI applications. User reductive for that sort of adjustment. But also some of the largest enterprises in the world, like Fortune 10 enterprises in tech, some of the largest hedge funds in the world, private equity firms, insurance companies and so on.

• 2:23:45John Coogan?

  Talk about the decision to use VLMs. What are those? Break that down.

• 2:23:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, so for a while, you would have some sort of IDP vendor that is using traditional OCR. But you can really go a step further. There's a lot of things that weren't possible two years ago. If you tried to read East Asian languages, there are just so many more characters and so it would be really hard to get every little mark correct. If you're dealing with something like healthcare documents, you have all sorts of handwriting, you have checkboxes, you have a doctor annotating it on the side and they just assume that somebody would be reading that. But when you read that programmatically, you make a lot of mistakes. And so what we do is we're really good at the traditional CD side. A lot of our team is former self-driving car researchers, so we tried to apply a lot of frontier techniques there.

• 2:24:32Speaker 07

  But also, we have this agentic flow where I almost liken it to a human loop. We're making corrections to the last mile of mistakes. Like maybe we made a mistake on a period versus a comma, or a zero was mistaken as an O. And we'll iteratively go through, correct all of those, so that no matter what you're uploading, you can get to good, reliable outputs.

• 2:24:51Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for waiting until we had self-driving cars to hire all the self-driving car engineers so we're not turning PDFs into structured data. Thank you. It's really... Very different use case, but it's really important. Yeah, yeah, no, it is.

• 2:25:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, what are people demanding on the output side? Is it just like dump a bunch of JSON files in S3 buckets? Like, how far do you go from like, okay, I have a stack of PDFs or maybe papers and you're going to scan and turn that into text and data? But like, are people actually coming to you and saying like, no, I want it loaded into this relational database, or I want it in MongoDB? Like, how far do you go?

• 2:25:34Speaker 07

  We see all of those. So in some cases, these are real-time applications. Like a user is uploading a file and they want to be able to talk to it. And so there, like, we're actually just extracting the data and making it easier for models to reason on. But we also have cases where one of the biggest hedge funds in the world wanted to digitize two decades' worth of historical data. This is things that an analyst would have combed through, you know, extracted individual data points. And they want signals off of that. And so in their case, we can actually structure it into the exact representation that they want. Especially recently, we started going beyond just the initial parsing and extracting. Like, we take care of everything. Like, you want to split your documents, you want to classify them. You might even want to edit data in.

• 2:26:14Speaker 07

  A lot of human work is you get information from some set of documents and you put it into some net new PDF or spreadsheets. People can do that end-to-end, and we offer different endpoints for them to be able to do that.

• 2:26:25Jordi Hays?

  How hard is it to get from 85% accuracy to 90 to 95 to 99 to 99.999999? I imagine, but I imagine it's like critically important if people are working on, you know, legal cases or you have medical records, you can't really mess these things up.

• 2:26:46Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, the long tail is really long. And when you're looking at like a financial documents, a period versus a comma is not, you know, like a oops, it's millions of dollars. Like, you've just changed the order of magnitude. You can't have something like a patient's medical record and have it say, is the patient vaccinated? And guess at what the checkbox says, right? Like, you need to get these things right. And that's why I think even for that last mile difference, people are really excited about what Redacto unlocks for them because there are use cases where they didn't think they could digitize it before. Like, it just wasn't reliable enough to put in production. And we're trying to not just get really good initial extracted results

• 2:27:28Speaker 07

  and not just get, you know, that layer of redundancy to correct those in cases we might have messed up, but also give them all of the last mile things that they would need. Like, if they want to have a human in the loop, we're really good at citing where we got answers from. We're really good at catching our own mistakes and pointing to things that we're not sure that we can extract. So they can feel confidence that in production, they're not going to have issues.

• 2:27:49John Coogan?

  Do you actually have a hot take about Adobe?

• 2:27:53Speaker 07

  I am getting dinner with the CEO tonight, actually. I'll play back your clip.

• 2:27:57John Coogan?

  Because I have another.

• 2:27:58Jordi Hays?

  Play back the clip where he said it's down thirty-five percent, it should be down a hundred.

• 2:28:02John Coogan?

  That was maybe hyperbole for the comedic effect, but I do have another axe to grind with them. Because every day I make a PDF and every day I open Adobe Acrobat to make that PDF. And there are seven different pop-ups asking me to use their AI assistant that just says, do you want to summarize this document? Do you want to summarize this document? And I never want to summarize the document and I always have to say, no, close this. It says, ask AI assistant up here, AI assistant over there. And it's too much and it should be more intelligent to know that I don't need a document summary for my workflow because I do the same thing every single day. It's unacceptable.

• 2:28:36Speaker 07

  Honestly, at the end of the day.

• 2:28:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, what?

• 2:28:38Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think people aren't really looking at PDFs in and of themselves. Like, it's not the platform that you care about, it's what's in there. Like, you want to be able to do the things that you want to do.

• 2:28:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:47Speaker 07

  And hopefully, we end up in a place where people can just interact with the underlying data. That's where we want to help, but.

• 2:28:53John Coogan?

  I'd love that. Well, thank you for helping make data more interactable. Thank you for everything that you do and thank you for joining the show.

• 2:28:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to get the update. I'm sure you'll be back on very soon.

• 2:29:01John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:29:05John Coogan?

  Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. You can start building on Linear today. There are a bunch of more, there are a bunch more stories. Where should we go?

• 2:29:20Jordi Hays?

  What's the story? A giant new AI data center is coming to the epicenter of America's fracking boom.

• 2:29:26John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 2:29:27Jordi Hays?

  Core.

• 2:29:27John Coogan?

  Go where the energy is.

• 2:29:28Jordi Hays?

  Poolside.

• 2:29:29John Coogan?

  Poolside.

• 2:29:30Jordi Hays?

  Is this Poolside the foundation? It's a different Poolside.

• 2:29:33John Coogan?

  Poolside, wait, yeah.

• 2:29:35Jordi Hays?

  Now, there's.

• 2:29:36John Coogan?

  Poolside was a viral meme about the product managers who were at, who were Poolside talking about the day in the life and it was seen as a top school.

• 2:29:45Jordi Hays?

  Poolside FM.

• 2:29:46John Coogan?

  Poolside FM. That is a cursor and windsurf competitor, I believe. Something like that. It's a coding IDE. It's a fork of a VS code.

• 2:29:56Jordi Hays?

  But that is not this.

• 2:29:57John Coogan?

  This is a different thing.

• 2:29:58Jordi Hays?

  Poolside AI.

• 2:29:59John Coogan?

  Poolside is joining with cloud infrastructure provider.

• 2:30:01Jordi Hays?

  That's the one I was talking about.

• 2:30:04John Coogan?

  Poolside is and CoreWeave aim to take advantage of the natural gas produced in the Parmian Basin, the epicenter of the US drilling facility. I believe the CEO of Poolside is coming on the show, by the way, so we can get to the bottom of this.

• 2:30:15Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but in this article, Poolside, it's a, okay, I found it.

• 2:30:20John Coogan?

  Okay, figure it out. Poolside is in the midst of a $2 billion fundraising round that would value the company at $14 billion. It had a preemptive gong.

• 2:30:28Jordi Hays?

  Preemptive gong.

• 2:30:31John Coogan?

  It's not announced, but we're still ringing the gong for you, Poolside. According to people familiar with the matter, it raised 500 million just a year ago at a $3 billion valuation, the coding-focused startup, so it is the same Poolside.

• 2:30:42Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:30:43John Coogan?

  It is the same Poolside.

• 2:30:44Jordi Hays?

  It is.

• 2:30:44John Coogan?

  Which counts the chip giant Nvidia among its investors in one of several technology companies seeking to build AI systems with human-like intelligence. While many operators move quickly to secure continued access to the chips, America doesn't have enough data centers, it is far from certain whether many data centers will have sufficient power and water to operate without becoming a significant strain on local resources. It's not about your headline numbers of gigawatts, it's about your ability to deliver data centers, says the co-founder of Poolside. The real physical bottleneck in our industry, interesting. Poolside and CoreWeave declined to provide details about the cost of leasing the land from the Mitchell family in Texas who own it, but they said that the overall expected cost-

• 2:31:26Jordi Hays?

  It's very interesting that Poolside, they say, "We build the models, he build the future, AGI for the enterprise, starting with software agents." Just interesting that they're actually getting into the physical-

• 2:31:38John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:31:39Jordi Hays?

  -infrastructure side, when you have cognition, you have cursor, you know, a bunch of other players that have just said, "Hey, we're happy to just be at the application layer, we'll build some models, but ultimately, we want to just get kind of off the shelf."

• 2:31:56John Coogan?

  Totally. This is fascinating. We've seen this vertical integration happen in the previous era, but mostly because the cloud platforms just weren't mature. But, like, when Facebook started, they at some point could have said, "Hey, let's just host on AWS," but they became a hyperscaler, right? But then, so did Cloudflare, so did, I believe Netflix has their own infrastructure, I mean, 37signals famously moved, you were gonna say that, right? 37signals moved off of AWS.

• 2:32:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thank you, Jack Cohen, in the chat says it's with Jason Warner, who was, he was the CEO of GitHub.

• 2:32:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:32:31Jordi Hays?

  An absolute legend, an absolute dog.

• 2:32:34John Coogan?

  Absolute dog.

• 2:32:37John Coogan?

  But this is another interesting fact in here. We've been, we've been talking about the, the building these two gigawatt data centers. They clock the industry standard cost of building a two gigawatt data center at $16 billion. But in this case, Poolside expects its cost to be lower due to its use of off-site modular construction techniques, and that total cost doesn't include the cost of the chips. And so.

• 2:33:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So how does that? Is, is what percentage of the, is the actual like physical structure? Like what percentage of the cost of a data center is the? Because we've seen like people just using tents.

• 2:33:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:15Jordi Hays?

  So it can't be, could it be double digits of the actual cost of a data center?

• 2:33:20John Coogan?

  We need a pie chart. We need semi-analysis to break down exactly what goes where.

• 2:33:24Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, find a pie chart of data center cost. Cause it feels like, it feels like I'd be shocked if it was higher than 10%.

• 2:33:30John Coogan?

  For, if I'm spending $16 billion on a two gigawatt data center, how, how is that like, what, what percentage of that money is going towards chips? You know, concrete, like, you know, what are the different buckets? Cause you're going to build all sorts of stuff. What do you think?

• 2:33:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I'm trying to, I'm on someone else's site right now, trying to like find news about this.

• 2:33:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:51Speaker 02

  And I'm not really seeing anything, which is surprising because like, I mean, two gigawatts is like super huge.

• 2:33:56John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 2:33:57Speaker 02

  That's like bigger than Claus's two, which is one gigawatt.

• 2:33:59John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, this is breaking news, like in semi-analysis publishes like, like on a weekly cadence.

• 2:34:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true. It's just very surprising to see, I mean, this is not a major LOM provider.

• 2:34:09John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like when semi-analysis does something, it's more like, okay, they actually fully understand Amazon's strategy and they're going to take you through all the different pieces.

• 2:34:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's definitely true. But it, I mean, this is like extremely ambitious.

• 2:34:21John Coogan?

  This is extremely ambitious.

• 2:34:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:34:22John Coogan?

  Well. I'm excited to talk to the founder. That'll be a lot of fun. In other news, the frothiest AI bubble is in energy stocks, says the Wall Street Journal. Concept stocks with no revenue have soaring valuations. Forget about the froth in tech valuations, the real excess might be building up in energy stocks. For all the fears about stretched technology shares, again, we've seen that the big tech companies, the multiples aren't that high. And so a lot of people are saying, well, it can't be a bubble if you're still able to buy Apple and Google at, I don't know, 30x earnings. Well, that's not the case in the energy market. Not so in the energy sector.

• 2:35:04John Coogan?

  A group of non-revenue generating energy companies have collectively ballooned in value to more than $45 billion in hopes that tech companies will one day pay for their yet-to-be-built power. Oklo is a good example of this. Their shares have risen eightfold to date. The company is now worth $26 billion. I've actually met the founder.

• 2:35:24Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, Oklo is like an obsession of Korean retail traders.

• 2:35:30John Coogan?

  Interesting. Korean retail traders.

• 2:35:32Jordi Hays?

  Korean retail army.

• 2:35:35John Coogan?

  That's fun. I wonder if they have a name for the retail army. Sometimes they name themselves.

• 2:35:42John Coogan?

  It's the biggest US publicly incorporated public company that generated no revenue in the last 12 months. I mean, yeah, it takes a long time to build a nuclear reactor. Oklo is developing small modular reactors that use a non-water coolant, liquid metal sodium, and an enriched type of uranium fuel that is in limited supply. It doesn't yet have a license from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission or binding contracts with power purchasers. Wall Street analysts don't expect the company to generate substantial revenue until 2028. Of course, the bull case is that the US government has said, hey, we want to advance this very aggressively. We want, what was it, the new, we want a new reactor online next year, something like that. And so there's certainly a lot of, a lot of.

• 2:36:28John Coogan?

  Energy around, uh, let's speed up what the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission does. The NRC has been moving too slow. I believe they, they, in the history of the NRC, they've never approved a new nuclear reactor design, right, Tyler?

• 2:36:42Speaker 02

  I believe that's true.

• 2:36:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I think they've only approved a few, like, existing designs, build it again. And so, uh, people are kind of like, that's not the goal. Like, it was never designed as like, the, the nuclear banning commission. It was just regulatory, and so you should regulate, but not stop all progress completely.

• 2:37:02Speaker 02

  Also, I, I think the headline, just about energy stocks.

• 2:37:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:05Speaker 02

  Ripping is like, kind of misleading. Like, you're still, like, I, I'll believe it when I see natural gas stocks, like, ripping. Right? That, that's when we're actually, that's like, real energy. That's massive energy that we need to, if, if we're gonna keep accelerating, if we want, like, ten, one hundred gigawatt data centers, that's basically the only path, unless you, we have some insane build out.

• 2:37:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:24Speaker 02

  That's like, partially government-funded of, like, clean, of like, solar, or, I mean, like, if it's gonna take so long to build.

• 2:37:31John Coogan?

  I mean, those are probably way harder to meme, right? Because they're way bigger companies.

• 2:37:34Jordi Hays?

  And they have revenue.

• 2:37:36John Coogan?

  Revenue. But seriously, I mean, like, like, we're in this, like, frothy time, and there are companies that are scaling valuations very fast, the private markets and the public markets, and Nvidia's way up, but Nvidia's way up at, like, not really on, like, a revenue multiple. Like, they've grown, they've grown revenue significantly, in, in line with their market cap. Um, whereas, uh, on, like, the retail armies have been searching around for pockets of, like, like, quantum computing, like, the next trend, because there's this, there's this idea that, like, if you missed Nvidia, what are you gonna go out and find? And, like, a nuclear thing, it feels like nuclear will be a thing in a decade, and so you can get in on the action now, get in on the ground floor, that's the narrative. Much harder to say, yeah, there's gonna be more demand from this, like, you know, legacy

• 2:38:20John Coogan?

  oil and gas company, uh, but it's already huge.

• 2:38:23Jordi Hays?

  Right now, you can own Oaklow.

• 2:38:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:26Jordi Hays?

  At a twenty-five billion dollar market cap, with zero dollars of revenue, or you can own... EQT, which is a big natural gas company that had $5 billion of revenue last year. And you can, and they're currently trading at $34.6 billion market cap. So, but stocks up over almost 11% over the last month.

• 2:38:49John Coogan?

  Here's my recommendation. If you're a massive company with no revenue, as soon as you start generating revenue, get on numeralhq.com because you've got to pay your sales tax. Once you make revenue, numeralhq.com sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Another zero revenue company is Fermi, which was valued at roughly $19 billion upon its public market debut earlier this month. Only two other no-revenue companies had larger market caps than Fermi on the first day of trading after an IPO, adjusted for inflation. There was Rivian, which went public in 2021, and Corvus, an optical network equipment maker that went public during the dot com bubble. I mean Rivian's definitely like shipped and like I see the cars around like, you know, it's not, it's not that much of a bear signal to be like, yeah, you went out as a public company with

• 2:39:34John Coogan?

  no revenue. But it has historically been like you only go public when you are cash flow positive and like, and it's kind of like the end of you fundraising constantly. And instead, now, now we've just pulled all that forward in, in, in some, in some submarkets. A lot of companies stay private much longer. So lots of different ways to grow your company. What else is going on in the tech world, in the army world, in the world of the army? The Secretary of the Army, former TVP and guest, is on the timeline. Happy Captain says, I was debating whether or not to tell this story, but it feels like it's worth telling. Yesterday at AUSA, the Secretary of Army gave a powerful speech where he talked

• 2:40:15John Coogan?

  about a soldier's right to repair. Essentially, soldiers should be able to repair their own equipment without having to rely on a contractor. In 2010, we were in a remote part of Afghanistan on a combat outpost with roughly 70 to 90 soldiers. We had two robots and used them a lot to work on IEDs. Their service was under contract. We weren't allowed to fix them. After a lot of use, they both broke. And a field service representative couldn't get to us in a timely manner. So what do you do? Do you force your team leader to put on the bomb suit and risk their life for every call? Or do you fix it yourself? We went with option B. We completely took apart two broken robots to create one working one that we used on the mission.

• 2:41:00John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Did we get yelled at? Yes. Would I, would I do it all over again, knowing it kept my team leader safe? Absolutely. What a remarkable story. Yeah, this is one of those like little tweaks to how the army works, how the military works that was probably pretty low on the agenda of most other secretaries of the army. But I'm glad that, that he, you know, raised the, raised awareness here in his.

• 2:41:30Jordi Hays?

  He's locked in.

• 2:41:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. And Aaron Slodoff has a clip here and he shares, I'm glad that Secretary of Army is going on a crusade against the insane spend and blatant waste in sustainment parts the army deals with.

• 2:41:44Jordi Hays?

  Let's get it back on the show.

• 2:41:46John Coogan?

  We should.

• 2:41:47Jordi Hays?

  Rune says, it is so effing cold. Summer is over. It's all over. If you haven't secured a mate for the winter, it's time to commit to monkhood.

• 2:41:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, cuffing season really snuck up on everyone.

• 2:41:58Jordi Hays?

  It got, yeah, it got absolutely frigid in LA.

• 2:42:01John Coogan?

  We had to turn on the fire here.

• 2:42:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had to turn on the fire.

• 2:42:03John Coogan?

  Not so much today, but I'm excited to keep, keep the Cozy Maxing going.

• 2:42:08Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to really lean into that Locktober spirit when, when it's still warm and sunny.

• 2:42:13John Coogan?

  Exactly. Much easier to Locktober in the, in the winter when it's cold, when it's cold. Let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2.

• 2:42:26Jordi Hays?

  Keith Raboy put the timeline in turmoil. He said, if Anthropic actually believe the rhetoric about safety.

• 2:42:33John Coogan?

  Look who we have here.

• 2:42:34Jordi Hays?

  Here he is.

• 2:42:35John Coogan?

  Brian, how are you doing?

• 2:42:36Jordi Hays?

  Hello, hello.

• 2:42:37Speaker 08

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

• 2:42:41John Coogan?

  We are doing fantastic.

• 2:42:42Jordi Hays?

  Exhausted. Long day at the office so far.

• 2:42:46Speaker 08

  Yeah, I, I have, I've had some people allegedly helping me. I took, I, I took like 25 minutes during this entire day and now it looks like a bomb went off in here. I felt like I was in a good place before I left, but. Anyway.

• 2:43:03Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to compete with the super intelligence for the for the finance suite that is. Uh, but it's great to have you on the show.

• 2:43:12Speaker 08

  As a, as a, as a leader, I felt like it was, uh, well, it was incumbent upon me. I'm not sure if that's exactly the right phrase, but I, I, to show my own value and, and how I could contribute and, and, and, and, and process like, like Ramp does.

• 2:43:30John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, what has been harder, playing Kevin or trying to be the CEO of, uh, the CFO of Ramp?

• 2:43:41Speaker 08

  Um, this has been much more difficult. Um, there's also a fly in here now that looks like the size of a, um, of a hummingbird. So, I mean, there's a lot of adversity here, being on the street. There's also, by the way, I don't know. You know, I, I'm used to working in front of an audience, but usually they're not live and in person here. They're, they're waving, they're, there's lots, there's lots going on here, lots to distract me, but look, I'm, I'm, I'm doing the best I can.

• 2:44:14Jordi Hays?

  How many, what's, what's the tracker at right now? How many receipts? Is that, does that say 80?

• 2:44:21Speaker 08

  Well, it says 84.

• 2:44:22John Coogan?

  Eighty-four, okay.

• 2:44:24Speaker 08

  But to be fair, I felt like I was, I was almost at 100 before I left for a few minutes. So basically I got no help from the people who were supposed to help me.

• 2:44:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:44:33Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 2:44:33Speaker 08

  That's, so what am I supposed to do?

• 2:44:36John Coogan?

  And, and you're racing against Ramp, uh, what, what, uh, what's the counter up to now on that side?

• 2:44:43Speaker 08

  Uh, 225,229, uh, 50, 60, 70.

• 2:44:51John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:44:51Speaker 08

  Eighty. It's going very fast. I don't. I guess that's accurate. I guess they process a lot.

• 2:44:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a tough showing for you so far. Uh, how are you feeling? Are you optimistic that you can catch up? What's the strategy?

• 2:45:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you got 15 minutes left in the workday. I don't know if you're getting out at 5 o'clock.

• 2:45:10Speaker 08

  No, I'm working. I'm working overtime for sure. I think I'm working until 7. Isn't I, I think for a C-suite, by the way, that's a new phrase I learned, C-suite. I'm a C-suite guy. And so I think, yeah.

• 2:45:24Jordi Hays?

  C-suite guy.

• 2:45:25Speaker 08

  I think I'm, I'm a big sweet C-suite guy. So I think, uh, I think we work till 7 here.

• 2:45:31John Coogan?

  Maybe you have 500,000 tag receipts. Yeah, oh yeah. Who's been the biggest distraction?

• 2:45:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, who's the biggest distraction? Was it Eric trying to throw you off the game to prove that his, his software is more effective than, than human labor?

• 2:45:45Speaker 08

  Well, I mean, to be clear, you guys are a distraction. I mean, I'm trying to do inputting here and now I'm suddenly doing a press interview. But again, that's what's, that's what C-suite guys do, I think. Yeah.

• 2:45:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you gotta make time for media.

• 2:46:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, do you think that, uh, Dunder Mifflin would still be around if they had Ramp?

• 2:46:09Speaker 08

  I'm sorry, could you say that again?

• 2:46:11John Coogan?

  Uh, do you, a question from the chat, do you think that Dunder Mifflin would still be around if they used Ramp?

• 2:46:19Speaker 08

  Uh, you know, I, when I was there, I wasn't really, uh, I wasn't really a part of those, those C-suite type decisions. Yeah. Uh, I'm not, but listen, I thought we did a pretty good job in the accounting department there at Dunder Mifflin. So, uh, remember I got fired or, or my character got fired. So, things went downhill after that, clearly.

• 2:46:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess, I guess, uh, kind of zooming out a little bit, obviously, uh, obviously.

• 2:46:57Speaker 08

  Zooming out, that's another great program.

• 2:46:59Jordi Hays?

  Zooming out, we use that a lot in the C-suite. We're, we're just podcasters, but we talk to people in the C-suite.

• 2:47:05Speaker 08

  Okay.

• 2:47:06Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, yeah, I guess, like, what, what is your, what, like, there's thou- hundreds, thousands of people surrounding your office here. We don't have a view, but, but people are looking at the stream. What is, uh, like, what, what is your experience like walking on the street in New York, uh, day to day? Do you, do you cover up and wear a hat? Are you getting, are you getting?

• 2:47:29Speaker 08

  I do, I do.

• 2:47:31Jordi Hays?

  Is it, does it work?

• 2:47:32Speaker 08

  Today might be the first day that I've been, that I've been on the streets of New York without a hat on and, uh, and sunglasses. And, you know, look, what I, what I've learned as a leader here is you gotta be a people person. So I'm really, it's all about, it's all about doing people for me. You know what I'm saying? I don't know if I know what I'm saying, but it's, it's about that connection that is important when you're, when, you know, when you're, when you're a CFO. I mean, that and finance, but that's secondary in a way.

• 2:48:05Jordi Hays?

  Do you prefer finance or finance? How do you say it?

• 2:48:10Speaker 08

  Am I saying it wrong?

• 2:48:12Jordi Hays?

  I mean, you can say it either way.

• 2:48:13John Coogan?

  The really fancy people on Wall Street, often they call it finance, not finance.

• 2:48:19Speaker 08

  Finance?

• 2:48:19John Coogan?

  Finance, yes.

• 2:48:21Speaker 08

  Do they spell it with an E?

• 2:48:22John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:48:23Speaker 08

  Finance?

• 2:48:23John Coogan?

  It's spelled the same way, but they say finance.

• 2:48:27Speaker 08

  Finance.

• 2:48:28John Coogan?

  Hi, finance.

• 2:48:29Speaker 08

  Hold on. I've been taking some notes today about things that I need to work on.

• 2:48:34Jordi Hays?

  I've got another question. How's your golf, how's your golf game? Has your golf game improved since you became CFO?

• 2:48:41Speaker 08

  Well, it's one, it's one day, to be clear. Uh, you know, I, I, I still talk about, uh, golf. Uh, that's sort of a different job. I'm kind of trying to transition in a new direction, but I, you look, what I've learned is if you're CFO, you have to work much harder than other people think you do.

• 2:49:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I feel like the best CFOs figure out a way to combine their love of golf and their role at their companies. So I would say, once they let you out of the cage at 7:00 PM, hopefully you can at least hit the range and get some movement in.

• 2:49:22John Coogan?

  They need a putting green in there.

• 2:49:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, seriously.

• 2:49:24Speaker 08

  Here's the thing that I'm thinking is, I think I'm starting to realize I have an efficiency issue, meaning I need to be more efficient with finance. So, maybe I'll get to golf after I decide that this is not working for me.

• 2:49:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, you're giving it-

• 2:49:48Speaker 08

  I need to stay high level. I think you're right.

• 2:49:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, stay high level, zoom out, you know, bring strategy into the C-suite. Start, yeah, focus on strategy.

• 2:50:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:01Speaker 08

  You know, another thing that occurs to me is probably working on the street with people watching is probably not the best idea. Maybe that was the problem all along.

• 2:50:12Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's a high-pressure role. You gotta be, I mean, if you're gonna perform in the boardroom on earnings calls, you gotta be able to perform, you know, in flat iron.

• 2:50:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to a cheering crowd of thousands. This is similar.

• 2:50:29Speaker 08

  In a way. In a way it is. In a way, it's very, very different. Yes.

• 2:50:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, you gotta be able to perform under pressure, perform in front of thousands as they walk by. It's all important in business.

• 2:50:45Speaker 08

  Potato, patato, as we say on the C-suite floor. Potato, patato. Guys, pause one second. Say again?

• 2:50:56Jordi Hays?

  Is that Taipei? You probably gotta get on with Taipei.

• 2:50:59Speaker 08

  Yeah, well, I, we do, I, listen, I, um, I, I, I would, I thought you guys were, were ESPN. I'm gonna be honest with you. So I, um, I think it's time for, uh, for me to go.

• 2:51:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's call her. Let's call her. You got a lot of work to do.

• 2:51:17John Coogan?

  We appreciate you calling in. And good luck catching up.

• 2:51:21Speaker 08

  I've, I've got some Jäger here in the office. If you guys ever want to stop by, we'll see you soon.

• 2:51:26Jordi Hays?

  Would love that. Great to have you on, Brian. Good to see you. Cheers.

• 2:51:33Jordi Hays?

  He, truly, truly, uh, truly an incredible actor. His ability, I kept trying to throw him off. He stayed fully in character. Uh, but, uh, but yeah, I was seeing some of these videos, like the crowd outside. Uh, we obviously couldn't see it on that camera angle, but, uh, meanwhile, on X, the crowd outside of the office, uh, is absolutely insane.

• 2:51:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, we should share some of the videos to the timeline.

• 2:51:59Jordi Hays?

  I saw Jeb Bush was, uh,

• 2:52:02John Coogan?

  Coming out in support.

• 2:52:03Jordi Hays?

  Was coming out in support as he does, as he does. Um, but, uh, that was super fun. I, Were you, were you big into The Office back in the day?

• 2:52:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, I watched a few seasons of it at some point.

• 2:52:18Jordi Hays?

  One of the few, uh, like work focused shows that's actually still relaxing to watch. Cause it can turn your brain off, right? Silicon Valley's on the opposite end.

• 2:52:28John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:52:28Jordi Hays?

  It just reminds you of like emails you need to respond to and things that you need to do. Whereas The Office is just great. Nothing matters. It's just, uh, all of our problems are made up. It's all, it's all, uh, fake politics.

• 2:52:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was very odd being so young and still extremely into like workplace, white collar comedies as a kid. It's like, not what you'd expect, but I was obsessed with Office Space. That was like one of my favorite movies as a kid. I enjoyed The Office and, uh, I don't know, even though like I'd never worked in an office, I still found it funny at like age 12 for some reason. It was very, very fun.

• 2:53:05Jordi Hays?

  Evergreen.

• 2:53:06John Coogan?

  Anyway, we have our next guest joining from the restroom waiting room. We have Colin. What's happening? Welcome to the show.

• 2:53:14Speaker 09

  I'm not actually, I'm not actually going after the ramp event, am I?

• 2:53:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, you are. Fast follow. Welcome to the stream. Please kick us off with an introduction on yourself, the company, any news?

• 2:53:24Speaker 09

  Awesome. Yeah. Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. So Colin Lewis, co-founder and CEO here at Basis Theory. I think the, uh, the simplest way to think about what we do is we help merchants, platforms, fintechs, um, not have to face the decision of working with Stripe or add-in or checkout, but rather be able to seamlessly work with Stripe and add-in and checkout. Um, there's a myriad of different reasons why that's important. I think first and foremost, these platforms today are just global by default, right? Um, like I was thinking about it the other day, the fact that like, I think the latest numbers say 10% of the world's population uses chat GPT, like

• 2:54:07Speaker 09

  less than three years in, Facebook was still moving from like Ivy Leagues to like state schools in the US, right? Um, and then I think the other side of it is payments has kind of moved from being a cost center to a, a growth driver. And I think that's forcing companies to think about it less from a cost perspective and more from a performance perspective. Um, and look, each of these individual PSPs has their own, you know, secret sauce and areas where they specialize. And so it's just increasingly important that you can work with multiple of them as opposed to one.

• 2:54:40John Coogan?

  Okay, explain. Explain your take. Explain Sheil's hot take and then debunk it.

• 2:54:45Speaker 09

  I had a note. I had a note. I had a note to call out Sheil and I love Sheil. Uh, I, I went to Sheil's first Phish concert with him. So like Sheil and I are homies. But yeah, like he took this like victory lap last week, you know, saying like Stripes win, Stripe wanted agentic commerce, it's over. And like, that just couldn't be further from the truth, right? Even if you look at Stripe's core business, I think people sometimes forget like,

• 2:55:12Speaker 09

  Stripe and Agian together are still less than 10% market share in the US, right? That means 90% of the US acquiring volume is still sitting out on these legacy platforms. And so as much as we talk about Stripe, like I'd argue Stripe hasn't even won US acquiring yet. There's a lot of volume to port over and we're seeing the same thing play out on the Agentic side. Stripe can do a magical demo for merchants within the Stripe ecosystem. I think the second you eject out of that, there's a lot of complexity.

• 2:55:41Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, I'm just adding dramatic sound effects to...

• 2:55:44John Coogan?

  Where's the shots fired?

• 2:55:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, these are a bunch of great lines. I wanted you to explain Basis Theory like I'm a venture capital associate, right? So like explain it like in really, really simple terms.

• 2:55:57John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no.

• 2:55:58Jordi Hays?

  I'm trying to understand where you guys...

• 2:56:00John Coogan?

  Explain it like you're the killer GP is completely checked out.

• 2:56:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like two years from retirement. But I'm trying to understand, customer comes in, they want to buy something. Are you guys sitting before that?

• 2:56:11Speaker 09

  So we sit in, yeah, we sit in front. Yeah, that's right. So we sit at the very front. We provide some real time data to the merchants about the payment credential, the actual credit card. Hey, this is a Visa signature card issued by a US bank. Or this is a Mastercard issued by a European bank. Based on that real time insight, where do you want to route this transaction? Do you want to route it off to Agian? Do you want to route it off to Stripe? And oh, by the way, if you get an immediate decline from one of those, why don't you turn around and reroute it elsewhere and see if you can get that customer through, right? I think that's the other side of it, right? Like these, these modern merchants who are selling these like ridiculously high gross margin digital products, like they just want to get more stuff out the door, right?

• 2:56:56Speaker 09

  They're actually okay taking on more fraud and risk if they can just sell more 90% gross margin goods, right? So it's all...

• 2:57:04Jordi Hays?

  And from the, from the merchant side, merchants want to have multiple payment providers so that they have some leverage in these conversations, is that right?

• 2:57:14Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, that was, I was gonna answer your question about explaining it to the GP, but then I thought about the GP doesn't have this problem, but maybe like, you know, the GP's nephew, right? I always talk about in the terms of Comcast here, you know, in California, right? Like, every time you call Comcast and you say, hey, I'm switching to YouTube TV, they magically have a 50% discount that they can get you on, right? Same thing applies here. The problem is, your data's locked away with these processors today. So the minute you take back that control and start storing it yourself, you have immediate leverage to make that call.

• 2:57:48John Coogan?

  Interesting. Give us the fundraising news.

• 2:57:50Speaker 09

  Yeah, so we just announced we raised $33 million. It was a pretty cool.

• 2:57:57Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:58:00Speaker 09

  It was, it was a cool event because our lead investor, Costa Noah, we actually met at the seed and ended up going in a different direction. Our A came together quickly with Bessemer. This was 2021. And then when I reached out to Amy at Costa Noah and told her we were gonna kick off a B earlier this year, she, I was like, who should I talk to?

• 2:58:19Jordi Hays?

  So is this, is this round mean that you guys are officially, officially back? Because a lot of fintech companies, you know, went into the valley of despair and they're still down there.

• 2:58:28Speaker 09

  Fintech's back. You know, look, I wish I was an ERP, a native AI ERP company, you know? Maybe I'll get another round tomorrow.

• 2:58:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The chat, the chat says, the chat says, this guy looks like he surfs. This guy surfs. Do you surf?

• 2:58:47Speaker 09

  Such a disappointment. I don't.

• 2:58:49Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it's okay. It's okay. There's the, surfing is wildly distracting from creating enterprise value. I always struggled. I, I grew up, you're in Mill Valley?

• 2:59:00Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 2:59:00Jordi Hays?

  I grew up just, just north of you and I always struggled surfing in the morning. You get so cold and then your body is spending all day long trying to heat up and it's taking energy away from spreadsheet, which.

• 2:59:13Speaker 09

  That's pretty counter to Silicon Valley wisdom and ice baths and stuff, though.

• 2:59:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but, but getting like cold for a few minutes and then

• 2:59:22Speaker 09

  That's true.

• 2:59:22Jordi Hays?

  heating, heating up is, you know, different than, you know, 90 minutes in like 45 degree water, whatever gets down to in the winter. But, uh, what was I gonna say? Are you, are you guys actually building the company in Mill Valley? Or you, do you have an office in SF?

• 2:59:40Speaker 09

  Yeah, look, we're we're a COVID baby, so we're fully remote. But it was definitely pretty funny when we announced our series A. The news headlines were like Mill Valley based payment infrastructure company raises seventeen million.

• 2:59:52Jordi Hays?

  It sounds pretty. It sounds pretty cool. Sounds pretty cool.

• 2:59:56Speaker 09

  Yeah, no, I'm here a block away from our friend Nate and offline ventures.

• 3:00:01John Coogan?

  Oh, nice.

• 3:00:02Speaker 09

  And then we we squat in our investors' offices for free in San Francisco once a week.

• 3:00:07John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 3:00:08Jordi Hays?

  Smart, smart. Awesome, man. Well, congratulations on the milestone. Yeah, excited to follow the journey.

• 3:00:15John Coogan?

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

• 3:00:16Speaker 09

  Thanks for having me.

• 3:00:17Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Colin.

• 3:00:18John Coogan?

  Quickly, let me tell you about Adit, customer relationship magic. Adit is the AI CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Our next guest has been waiting too long in the restream waiting room. We'll bring him in now to the TVP and UltraDome. Sorry for keeping you waiting, John. How are you doing? Good to meet you. Welcome to the show.

• 3:00:36Jordi Hays?

  Here he is.

• 3:00:39Speaker 10

  Hey, guys, I'm doing great. Thank you so much for having me today.

• 3:00:42John Coogan?

  Of course. Congrats on the massive news. Kick us off with an introduction on yourself and the company, and then we'll go into the news.

• 3:00:49Speaker 10

  Yeah, well, it's wild. I was on three months ago. We were talking about our series A.

• 3:00:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:54Speaker 10

  I was not planning on reaching out to you guys for a year or two. And I went to bed, a series A founder, woke up a series B founder. And so today, we announced sixty five million dollar series B, bringing in a hundred million.

• 3:01:09Speaker 09

  Thank you. Thank you.

• 3:01:10Speaker 10

  We have a smaller one of those. We have a smaller one of those in the office.

• 3:01:13John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 3:01:14Jordi Hays?

  But yeah. Well, series B, up the gong size.

• 3:01:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:01:19Jordi Hays?

  I know. For every stage.

• 3:01:21Speaker 10

  Yeah, well, look, I'm still staying. I'm in New York right now. I'm still staying in the seed stage hotel rooms here. But we've we've come a long way. So yeah, that hundred million was all in the last twelve weeks. So it's it's exciting times. It's an AI native VRP. If you're not familiar with Campfire, taking on the mid-market incumbents. And the incredible demand we've seen has just led us to go out to market again on the round.

• 3:01:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, what was the key accelerant?

• 3:01:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's a huge category, bunch of different ways that you could attack it, a bunch of different kind of verticals within it. Uh, why, why have VCs come around to like funding a bunch of ERPs again? Cause there was an era where they got funded and a lot of them didn't go very well. And uh, something's different this time, but what, why do you think that is?

• 3:02:11Speaker 10

  Yeah, it's a great question. Going through a wide combinator, they call them tar pit ideas, ideas that like perpetually get funded and go to die. And for like 10 or 20 years, this category has just had a lot of, there's a lot of gravestones in this category.

• 3:02:25John Coogan?

  This is the personal CRM. That's the, that's a great, a tar pit idea, the personal CRM. Every VC says, I need a personal CRM. It's like, no, you just need a real CRM. You're doing business.

• 3:02:35Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 3:02:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:36Speaker 10

  Yeah. But it's working. There are a lot of, a lot on the social media side.

• 3:02:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:40Speaker 10

  Um, and so when we're out doing a seed, there was a little bit of squinting. And then we had incredible demand, uh, and then going into the A, they're like, wow, this category is on fire. And since the A just had overwhelming demand, I think there, there's a couple of themes. Certainly the incumbents are all 25, 30 years old. You guys were talking about zero revenue IPOs earlier. I mean, literally these companies were founded when ads.com, Webvan were public companies. Um, and so it's, it's come a long way, um, in terms of like, it's time for something new. You know, one of your sponsors, Ramp, has really like, um, pioneered like consumer grade software within the finance stack. And so I think we're seeing a huge demand for, I just want the ramp for GL.

• 3:03:26Speaker 10

  And then we're also seeing huge demand for, we need to buy AI. There's literally no AI ERP out there. Uh, with today's news, we announced we're the first ERP to have our own actual foundational model. And so we've trained this like rich accounting data set. And so accountants are finally like, I hate doing bank rec. And that's always been true, but now there's actually someone, you know, an AI model that can take on bank rec for me. For those who don't know, bank reconciliations is like accrual, like some of these just very transactional accounting tasks. They're allowed, they can now actually offload them to a credible foundational model. They can just like, allow them to focus on, on higher value work, strategic work, things as a former finance exec. I really enjoy it doing.

• 3:04:09Speaker 10

  And so there's this big mindset shift that we are really driving home and seeing a ton of value for our customers.

• 3:04:17Jordi Hays?

  You guys work with Decagon, Replit, and a bunch of other AI companies. Are you seeing new, like entirely new needs surface that people want out of their ERP that legacy ERPs besides just speed, usability, just yeah, ease of use, et cetera?

• 3:04:36Speaker 10

  Yeah, I mean, this big shift, and I know you just had it reducto on, like, the sheer volume of transaction data, the legacy ERPs are, we've just heard from customers, are just unable to physically handle. And so like being on a modern stack, these AI usage-based companies have, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions of rows of transaction data that we can easily adjust and allow them to scale on the platform. And then we can apply our AI layer to this rich data set and allow them to operate in ways that just fundamentally, we're not able to before. So the shift in, you know, you think of, if you have 10 million rows of accounting data, you can't fit it on an Excel spreadsheet, right? It just physically

• 3:05:18Speaker 10

  taps out. And so it's more of an engineering problem that they're starting to face when they have that that much transaction data. And so we've been really helpful in allowing them to not become engineers and focus on what they do best as accountants.

• 3:05:32Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. Are you worried about getting preempted again? You announce?

• 3:05:38Speaker 10

  Guys, I'll call you next week. We're doing our Series C.

• 3:05:40John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 3:05:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm sure it'll be nice to take a breather and just, you know, build and build the team and all that stuff.

• 3:05:48John Coogan?

  For two days.

• 3:05:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for at least two days.

• 3:05:51John Coogan?

  For at least one week.

• 3:05:52Jordi Hays?

  Every VC listening.

• 3:05:55John Coogan?

  Just schedule it now. Congratulations.

• 3:05:58Speaker 10

  I'll be there.

• 3:06:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's actually good. We should start.

• 3:06:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, please, come by. We'd love to. We'd love to hang out. We can go way deeper.

• 3:06:05Speaker 10

  I'll bring the biggest dog. Gonna bring the biggest gong you've ever seen.

• 3:06:09Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 3:06:10John Coogan?

  We can implement an ERP live. That's what the fans want.

• 3:06:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:06:13John Coogan?

  Let's do it. Let's roll it out.

• 3:06:15Speaker 10

  We, we've done 24 hour, you know, NetSuite to campfires. We've done SAP to, to campfire in weeks. You know, and the, the world's shifting fast. Um, but yeah, to your point, we'll, we'll do one live on, on the show.

• 3:06:28Jordi Hays?

  We'll do it live. That's showbiz.

• 3:06:30John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, thank you so much for coming on. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:06:33Jordi Hays?

  Great progress.

• 3:06:34Speaker 10

  Thanks, guys.

• 3:06:35John Coogan?

  You off of Larry Ellison's plate. That's a, that's a bold move. I like it. It's very aggressive. It's a hot.

• 3:06:42Jordi Hays?

  He's distracted. He's focused on the AI boom.

• 3:06:45John Coogan?

  He is.

• 3:06:46Jordi Hays?

  He's buying TikTok.

• 3:06:47John Coogan?

  He's gonna, he's gonna, he needs to, needs to step up. I mean, the, the story of NetSuite was, uh, was an acquisition.

• 3:06:54Jordi Hays?

  Next up, our guest, uh, nominative determinism is absolutely insane. We have Dan Shipper, who is shipping another product.

• 3:07:03John Coogan?

  Is he shipping something?

• 3:07:04Jordi Hays?

  The shipper himself.

• 3:07:07John Coogan?

  What are you shipping today?

• 3:07:08Jordi Hays?

  Do people, do people ask you about that? Did you say?

• 3:07:11John Coogan?

  Does he ever ship? He does.

• 3:07:13Dan Shipper?

  I have gotten that. I have gotten that. Um, and I don't know if my ancestors were nautical or not, but, um, certainly it works for the startup world. So, uh, yeah. Shipped a couple of new things today.

• 3:07:25John Coogan?

  What'd you ship?

• 3:07:25Jordi Hays?

  Give us the news.

• 3:07:27Dan Shipper?

  Okay. First, first big thing is, um, we shipped a new, uh, incubation. We incubated a company, uh, we spun it out. Uh, it raised 3.6 million dollars from General Catalyst and Anovia. We got the gong, the first ever gong for me. I'm excited. Um, and it's called Good Start Labs. It's run by Alex Duffy, who was previously our head of AI training. And the idea of Good Start is it teaches AI models to play games. Um, and by playing games, uh, uh, they're able to generate high quality reinforced, reinforcement learned data and pre-training data that helps make models better.

• 3:08:07Dan Shipper?

  Um, it started as a product, a project inside of Every that we launched as AI diplomacy, where we taught, um, AI models to battle each other for world domination. Uh, it went super viral. It had like 50,000 people watching on Twitch. Um, and it taught us a lot about, um, how models work. So for example, Claude never lies in diplomacy. What the whole point of diplomacy is to backstab your opponents and Claude never lies. Um. It's really interesting. And Alex, you know, the response to that was was really incredible. And Alex has a has a vision for how not just diplomacy, but all sorts of games can be used as dynamic environments to help models learn to be smarter in all sorts of different

• 3:08:47Dan Shipper?

  ways, from long horizon, task planning, to writing, to humor, to training them to not be not be as deceptive, all that kind of stuff.

• 3:08:56John Coogan?

  I'm mostly hearing AI that lies, though.

• 3:09:00John Coogan?

  So he can win diplomacy.

• 3:09:03John Coogan?

  But no, no, I completely take your point.

• 3:09:05Jordi Hays?

  Claude has to launch liar mode.

• 3:09:06John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, there's so many.

• 3:09:08Jordi Hays?

  You're absolutely right.

• 3:09:09John Coogan?

  Like, there's so many examples we could go into about alignment by default, like resulting in like, not what you actually want. Hallucinations, sometimes a feature. There's a million different areas there.

• 3:09:20Jordi Hays?

  What? How? How concentrated will the customer base be for this? Is this the kind of thing you're going to work with? Hopefully, all the big labs really quickly. What does that look like?

• 3:09:31Dan Shipper?

  Yeah, I mean, I think I think the idea for the company is is being a vendor to all the big labs and anyone who is who wants to be a big lab. So yes, the the customer base, at least initially, is going to be going to be pretty concentrated.

• 3:09:45John Coogan?

  Rebut, Will Minidis, he said he's calling the top on incubations. You're still doing them. Put them in the truth zone. Break it down for me. Why are incubations still a good idea?

• 3:09:57Jordi Hays?

  This feels this feels like, you know, to come to Dan's defense on this one, having an employee at your company who's proven themselves internally and discovers a good idea, and then decides to launch a spin out company is very different than like, I have an idea, let me go find a random person, which is really hard, right?

• 3:10:16John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 3:10:17Jordi Hays?

  Because you have this adverse selection bias.

• 3:10:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:20Dan Shipper?

  I agree, but we also do that, and it works. And so so this is our second venture backed incubation collectively. So Good Start Labs and our first one was called Lex. And collectively, they've raised like $6 million, which is Um, more than like about more than three times or four times what we've raised for every itself.

• 3:10:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:41Dan Shipper?

  Um, and we also run um four apps internally to every many of which are ideas that I or someone else inside of every has come up with. And then we've recruited someone from our audience to take it and lead it. And that works really well, too. So we've got four apps in market and we grew collectively for every for, you know, all the subscriptions we sell. We grew MRR 50% in Q3. Um, so it's just growing super fast. You can really, you actually can do this, and I think you can uniquely do it in AI because you can um uh, you can have these products be run by one person.

• 3:11:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:21Dan Shipper?

  Which is really hard to do before.

• 3:11:23John Coogan?

  Uh, help me synthesize this. There's like this general mood on the timeline today that like a lot of the foundation model companies might be like plateauing and so they're going into other.

• 3:11:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what's your erotica play?

• 3:11:36John Coogan?

  No, no, it's not. That's not my question. My, my, my question is.

• 3:11:40Jordi Hays?

  Every. We're gonna do every.

• 3:11:42John Coogan?

  I mean, you're already a writing platform. Why not spice it up a little bit? No, my, my, my question is, is there was a moment where the mood was uh like, don't build a new company because you're gonna get steamrolled by AGI. It's just gonna be able to do exactly what you do, but better. And so like, it's super risky to build anything that's in front of the steamroller that is the, the big model companies. Now, uh, we've seen that a lot of companies have popped up and done very well in, you know, other areas. But now it also feels like the, the, the foundation model companies might be going after social media, going after erotic content or adult content. So is it, is it more or less dangerous to build a startup that is in the wake of the, of the AI?

• 3:12:27John Coogan?

  Uh, like, you know, new hyperscalers?

• 3:12:31Dan Shipper?

  So I mean, I think of every, if you're a sapiosexual, we're already doing erotica for you.

• 3:12:35John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 3:12:36Dan Shipper?

  So that's, that's one thing. Got to get that out of the way.

• 3:12:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:38Dan Shipper?

  Um, but you know, when we first incubated Lex, that was like in 2022, 2021 ish. And that was right in the, in the very beginning. It was right before ChatGPT came out. And so it was in the very beginning of, you know, rapper, anti rapper hype. And that was a dumb take then, and I think it's a dumb take now.

• 3:12:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:12:57Dan Shipper?

  Um, uh, incumbents always manage to fuck things up and, um, and, and need to also, uh, you know, if you're, if you're PM and, and OpenAI, and they're super talented. They're doing amazing stuff and they also have to look for opportunities that look like they're going to be a billion or 10 billion or 50 billion dollars in value. And, um, there's just many, many, many different corners of the market that they just can't see. And I think, and, and, and founders are incredible at finding those corners of the market. And because of what these foundation model companies are building like OpenAI, uh, you, founders have never been in a better position to serve the, the, the needs that they find. And so I think it's, I think it's the best time in the world to be starting companies. And I think doing it in an incubation model, like the way that we're doing it is kind of,

• 3:13:42Dan Shipper?

  it's like one of those things that shouldn't work, but it's sort of uniquely interesting because we have distribution. So in a, uh, in a world where anything can be vibe coded, we can give founders a, like a stamp of approval, like, hey, this thing is like actually, um, good. It's going to be supported. Um, and there's a lot of interesting things you can do if you have a network of, um, apps that are all in the same ecosystem. So, uh, I, I'm, I'm super excited about it and I, you know, I, I think every time we've called, oh, it's the end of this startup or this startup because OpenAI is doing it. That's never happened.

• 3:14:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Makes sense.

• 3:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what's your take on the regulatory debate and Anthropic's recent moves? A lot of people are pissed off about it from Keith Raboy to David Sacks to Marc Andreessen.

• 3:14:27Dan Shipper?

  I, okay, I, I, I agree to some extent, like actually looking at what, um, you know, uh, the kinds of things that Dario says, for example, I'm like, how can you be building this stuff? And then go on the news and be like, it's going to replace all white collar workers in the next eighteen months? I can't remember the exact quote, but like, I just, I don't like that. And also I think Sacks is wrong, like you're watching nerds who have a tremendous amount of power and responsibility, grapple with that publicly, and I think that they are being earnest. I think they're doing it in a sort of ham handed way, and I don't, you know, I think that they could, they could clean that up, and they should get smarter about it, but I don't think it's some like sophisticated regulatory capture scheme. And I imagine Sacks is sort of telling, telling on himself there, like that's what he might do.

• 3:15:11Dan Shipper?

  But I don't think that's what like the Anthropic people are doing.

• 3:15:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:15John Coogan?

  Genuine believers. Uh, well, thank you so much for stopping by. Congratulations on the, on all the progress.

• 3:15:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask, I, I did wanna push you.

• 3:15:24John Coogan?

  We do have somebody in the restream waiting.

• 3:15:25Jordi Hays?

  We have one person in the waiting room, but, uh, what was your immediate react? Like, where, where do you stand on the debate, uh, on the, uh, adult kind of content entertainment debate with, uh, with ChatGPT?

• 3:15:41Dan Shipper?

  I think anything they do, they're damned if they do, damned if they don't. If they allow it, they're damned because people are like, you know, you're gonna turn this into a waifu platform. And if they don't allow it, then it's a freedom of speech issue. Seems like they're, they're trying to be thoughtful about it and restricting it to, uh, over, over eighteen people and not doing it by default, like only doing it if you, if you select it. That, that seems like a reasonable first pass at it. I'm sure there are, I'm sure there are ways that.

• 3:16:09Jordi Hays?

  But do you think there's, so, so OpenAI, OpenAI's mission is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity. Is it, do you think that it's hard to argue that, that, uh, adult content porn bots benefit humanity? I'm sure that somebody can make a justification for that. Do you think their justification is like, this is a necessary step to generate the revenue that gets us to the scale that we need in order to deliver the ultimate goal?

• 3:16:42Dan Shipper?

  I mean, I think the caricature of, you know, adult porn bots is obviously bad and there are, there are places that you can take this that are obviously bad for people. And also people choose to engage with adult content. And I, you know, it's, it's hard if you're trying to build something for everyone, which is what they're trying to do, to completely say, hey, like, that's off limits. Like, that's a, that's a particular moral stance that I think you can have smart defaults. But I also think it's within bounds for them to say, in certain circumstances, for certain kinds of people, this is what they want. And, and they should be allowed to do the thing they want to do.

• 3:17:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, it just feels like, it feels like YouTube did, YouTube has never gotten a ton of flack for not allowing adult content on the platform and being like YouTube's anti-free speech. YouTube has gotten a lot of your anti-free speech criticism, but never because there's not enough adult content on the platform. It's always been because of deprioritizing particular political thinking or something else that is like more in the wheelhouse of free speech. Everyone, at least in the tech zeitgeist, has kind of been like, yeah, it's fine that YouTube doesn't have adult content. That's their choice and they just chose not to do it, I guess. I don't know. I'm sure the debate will continue to rage as it always does and we will continue to monitor it. And thank you for coming on the show.

• 3:18:00Jordi Hays?

  Indeed. Congratulations on the launch. Excited to see it play out.

• 3:18:03John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about public.com, investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields and trusted by millions. Our next guest is the founder of Finch. We'll bring him in from the freestream waiting room. It's time to Finch.

• 3:18:24Jordi Hays?

  It's time to Finch. Welcome to the show.

• 3:18:27John Coogan?

  It's time to Finch. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 3:18:30Speaker 12

  Dope to be here. Thank you, folks, for having me. How are we? Happy Wednesday.

• 3:18:34Jordi Hays?

  Happy Wednesday. What do you got going on today? Do you raise any money?

• 3:18:37Speaker 12

  We, we announced a raise.

• 3:18:39Jordi Hays?

  Let me do it.

• 3:18:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm right.

• 3:18:42Speaker 12

  Please do it. I'm so pumped for this.

• 3:18:44Jordi Hays?

  Give me the news.

• 3:18:45John Coogan?

  Give us the details. What happened?

• 3:18:47Speaker 12

  We raised a $20 million series day led by Redpoint.

• 3:18:54John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:18:56Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 3:18:58Speaker 12

  This, the reason I was so excited for this, I want you, I like worked in DoorDash for eight years for a while before starting Finch and one of the like company values was being really thrifty with money and everyone should be an owner of the budget, the way that like the founders were. So we have that here, which means when we decided to get a gong, someone spent like $25 on a gong from Amazon. That is tiny and fits in like the size of my palm. And so you all getting to hit that was really.

• 3:19:20Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna get, I'll give you something. We'll give you three gong, remote gong hits. If you need, if something big happens in the company, just email us. We'll record a video of us hitting the gong. We'll send it to you and the team. You can drop it in the slot.

• 3:19:33John Coogan?

  Extremely economical.

• 3:19:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:35Speaker 12

  That's fantastic.

• 3:19:36John Coogan?

  Where, where is the business today? Are you live?

• 3:19:38Jordi Hays?

  What is the business?

• 3:19:39John Coogan?

  Generating revenue?

• 3:19:40Jordi Hays?

  Sorry.

• 3:19:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Break down the business and give us the progress.

• 3:19:43Speaker 12

  Yeah, yeah. I heard you earlier. Should I do it like as if you were five version of what Finch is?

• 3:19:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:19:48Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:19:50Speaker 12

  I'll start with, have you seen personal injury billboards?

• 3:19:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:19:54Speaker 12

  Great. What is your reaction when you see them?

• 3:19:56John Coogan?

  Need to call immediately. They, they, I pull out my phone and I, they call now. That's mostly it. It's usually, I assume a phone bank that then routes to a lawyer at some point, but I imagine that I'm like seven, seven layers away from a real lawyer.

• 3:20:12Speaker 12

  Yes. And, and look, the, I think they're hilarious. Some of them are, there's one in San Francisco that like, Anne Fong is on every bus ad. I love her, her head of intake. Out of something wrong. Call Anne Fong is one of the better jingles I've ever heard.

• 3:20:26Jordi Hays?

  We, we got, we have one in, in LA that's Sweet James.

• 3:20:30John Coogan?

  We like Sweet James.

• 3:20:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and I always, it is always kind of had a creepy, uh, felt a little bit creepy.

• 3:20:38John Coogan?

  It is a little bit of an odd name. Uh, the other thing that I always think about.

• 3:20:41Jordi Hays?

  But it's certainly memorable.

• 3:20:42John Coogan?

  Whenever I see a personal, personal injury attorney billboard, I always think about adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. I'm sorry for doing an ad read in the middle of your segment, but we are running behind today. I need to catch up.

• 3:21:03Jordi Hays?

  No, but okay. So we understand that that's that's the end. That's like one of the many the these injury law firms spend more on out of home than pretty much any other group, right?

• 3:21:14Speaker 12

  Correct. With like the highest cost per click on on Google out of anything else that you could search is like, I've been injured in an accident. And like the the what I was gonna say about is I think it like has one perception from the advertising, the field itself is genuinely noble. It is a like I if you are someone who's in an accident, America's system of handling injuries and accidents is for profit insurance companies, which means if you try to represent yourself in a claim, you will never get what you owed. And having an advocate on average means you get three to four X higher of an outcome, just because the EV calculation changes for Dietco or Allstate or whoever the insurance is on the other side. So incredibly valuable members of this society is you will otherwise as victims and injured people, 80% of you will never have that advocate and don't

• 3:21:57Speaker 12

  realize what you're owed. Problem today to solve that gap is the amount of admin work at pretty much any law firm, but especially in personal injury law is is massive. And so we've built a called the first AI driven pre litigation team, but our solution really is a bunch of really experienced paralegals that we pair with enough AI agents to handle the admin work that we take over half of what a firm does, which is pre litigation. So intake through demand, letting them say yes to more cases.

• 3:22:24John Coogan?

  So specifically, like someone makes that phone call, they see the billboard, they call. Are you transcribing that? Is there still a human in the loop? Like what else is happening?

• 3:22:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You said there's a human in the loop. It's the actual paralegal in the loop, but they're just

• 3:22:39Speaker 12

  Correct.

• 3:22:40Jordi Hays?

  immensely more efficient. I'm assuming this is like white, fully white labeled. So somebody doesn't necessarily know they're working, they're they're onboarding to a firm through Finch. They're just experiencing it as like a fast seamless onboarding experience.

• 3:22:57Speaker 12

  Correct. We are. Our goal is we'll have a real paralegal who's 100% dedicated to that firm and their name at the email address will be the one emailing you. They'll have a local phone number that they message from. So very white labeled experience, but the if you're to roughly think about it, the average paralegal or case manager takes on somewhere around 100 cases at most. In a typical firm, for us, they're doing somewhere between 300 and 400 just with the augmentation of agents that help with a lot of the busy work.

• 3:23:23Jordi Hays?

  How quickly is a company scaling?

• 3:23:26Speaker 12

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna say quickly, but that's part of my job is to highlight how quickly we're going to be.

• 3:23:30Jordi Hays?

  No, but I mean, it feels like, eh, eh, like eh, eh, it seems like eh, these firms want to take on, they want to take on more cases because it's all success based so that there's a real incentive there. They're already drowning and if you give them a solution that they can turn on and start.

• 3:23:46John Coogan?

  My bigger question there is like, what's the driver? Because we've seen with the Fortune 500, like, there's like this mandate from the shareholders and the board to like develop an AI story. But that's not true for like your average, eh, you know, plaintiff law firm, right? Like they, it has to be a little bit more ground up. So like, what are they actually focused on? Is it like a strict ROI? Are they focused just on efficiency or all sorts?

• 3:24:09Speaker 12

  They're mostly focused on growth. Like everyone cares about efficiency and service of growth. But I'll, I'll give you the example is my, our first customer was a friend of a friend named Ryan, who operated his own firm out of Austin. Eh, he started the firm three months before we started Finch. And he eh, had actually built up more litigation experience than most other attorneys his age. He was like 31, starting this firm and had a bunch of great connections in town, which meant he got a bunch of referrals of cases in. So he had 50 cases in his first 30 days, which a solo practitioner might hit over the course of a year on average.

• 3:24:39John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:24:40Speaker 12

  After 50 though, he had to start saying no to cases because he just didn't have the same back office he used to have at a big firm. And I will draw a DoorDash comparison, but at DoorDash, the, the, one of the ways Tony talked about that starting as a business was seeing restaurateurs say no to delivery orders that were coming in each day because it didn't make sense for them to staff and fulfill them. And his solution was not, let me build software to make delivery drivers faster, but let me go be the delivery service. And so we're, we're kind of taking the same model here. But eh, the, the, for him, it is all about growth. It is a Sweet James or Morgan and Morgan, or a big name will come advertise on his street corner tomorrow. And he wants to develop enough of a strong relationship with clients that he's going to build a massive firm over time. And I, I think there's a, eh, that's what we help folks say yes to is I, yeah.

• 3:25:24Jordi Hays?

  Are, are you seeing eh, eh, lawyers at firms see the capability of Finch? And just decide, I actually want to start my own practice now because this thing that was a huge headache of like building out back office support, I can now outsource to Finch. Are you seeing that already?

• 3:25:43Speaker 12

  Early-ish, so I'll give the, I didn't answer your actual question of how fast we're going, but we launched officially in April. We've been around for 14 months as a business. We grew about 10x in the last six months.

• 3:25:53John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 3:25:53Speaker 12

  And so the poll from the market, fun numbers, relative numbers, but fun numbers.

• 3:25:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:58Speaker 12

  But the, uh,

• 3:26:02Speaker 12

  the, uh, the poll from the market to give a real why to it, I, I think you thought about shareholders pushing on like bigger law firms or enterprises. Uh, there's two largely branches of consumer law that operate on contingency. Which means they make a percentage of the case. They don't do hourly billing.

• 3:26:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:20Speaker 12

  And that, that changes the economics entirely. If it's, I, I now, if I try to go sell efficiency software to someone who bills by the hour, there's no good rational reason to you to care about adopting it until your clients demand it. Whereas, uh, anyone who's taking a percentage of cases, you get them the ability to take on Forex the cases tomorrow. They say yes to that. They pump that money into advertising and then they go grow.

• 3:26:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. If you're billing by the hours, whoa, whoa, whoa. I, I think AI is cool, but I don't want too much of it. I like, I like billing three hours. I like billing three grand.

• 3:26:51John Coogan?

  Let me, let me re-pitch you the benefits of having an expert lawyer spend hours combing over every document. It's, it's worth it.

• 3:26:58Jordi Hays?

  What's, uh, what, what was your number one learning from working with Tony? He's also an investor in Finch, so he must be a big believer in you.

• 3:27:08Speaker 12

  It's a few, um.

• 3:27:09Jordi Hays?

  You mentioned that the frugality, which is, which is.

• 3:27:12Speaker 12

  Frugality was a good one. Frugality, uh, scaling ownership, I think like how to build an org where you, uh, scale decision-making while still keeping the like founder being close to the, the, the wheel. I, I do think the biggest one that like very in the DNA of Finch is, uh, do the hard work. There's, I mentioned this, we started as a software model, to be honest. Like we raised our first round from Sequoia and the idea of we're going to go build this intake software that transcribes and then goes and does a bunch of stuff after. But trying to train a large team of paralegals and case managers, many of whom are 60 plus on how to use that tech and get the most out of it is just very different than we will be

• 3:27:55Speaker 12

  the paralegal who goes and does it A to Z. We guarantee you're going to be able to take on Forex the cases tomorrow. And I think the real TAM expansion comes from doing the work. And so I would say that was the meta lesson.

• 3:28:05John Coogan?

  Well, if you ever overdose on frugality, I'd encourage you to head over to getpezzle.com

• 3:28:11Jordi Hays?

  John, relax.

• 3:28:12John Coogan?

  Protect Philippe Nautilus Annual Calendar. It's $126,000. It's a lot of money, but it's a lot of watch and I think you'll love it. And I've loved this, this segment.

• 3:28:25Jordi Hays?

  This was great. Where are you based, by the way?

• 3:28:28Speaker 12

  We're, uh, whole team is based in, I would say that the whole product engineering ops team is based in New York, uh, but we have paralegals around the country. I'm flying out to a lawyer festival called La De Grau, uh, tonight. So that'll be in San Diego.

• 3:28:40John Coogan?

  Well, when you do, be sure to book a wander. Be sure to book a wander and you can find your happy place.

• 3:28:49Jordi Hays?

  When, uh,

• 3:28:50John Coogan?

  I'm sorry.

• 3:28:51Jordi Hays?

  When, when you, uh, when you, when you go public someday, I look forward to playing this clip back where John read three ads to you on, uh, the day of your fundraiser.

• 3:29:00John Coogan?

  But, um, Oh, public?

• 3:29:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, John, relax. Uh, it's awesome having you on.

• 3:29:05John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on.

• 3:29:06Jordi Hays?

  I appreciate, I appreciate your point. I appreciate the point of view on, on,

• 3:29:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, very helpful.

• 3:29:10Jordi Hays?

  Basically saying like, no, this is, this is noble work. This is everyday Americans getting support from the legal system in an aligned way. So, um, keep it up.

• 3:29:21Speaker 12

  Thank you, Russ. Appreciate it.

• 3:29:23John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your

• 3:29:23Speaker 12

  Cheers.

• 3:29:25John Coogan?

  The last

• 3:29:25Jordi Hays?

  I gave in the chat said Jordy must be on the cap table. I am not on the cap table. I wish I was. Seems like a great business, uh, but I can get, I get fired up even if, even if I'm not directly, uh, uh, financially invested.

• 3:29:40Jordi Hays?

  But that was great.

• 3:29:41John Coogan?

  Invested in having some fun.

• 3:29:43Jordi Hays?

  I'm certainly invested in having some fun.

• 3:29:45John Coogan?

  Also invested in a good night's sleep.

• 3:29:47Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 3:29:47John Coogan?

  AteSleep.com. Get a Pod5 Ultra. How'd you sleep last night? I got absolutely roasted because I fell asleep while I was watching a show called Last Frontier on, it's an Apple TV production. I was watching it on Apple TV on my Apple TV. And it's a pretty good show, but it put me to sleep. So I fell asleep. So I spent like maybe an extra hour of sleeping on the couch, I think. And that doesn't count because I don't have

• 3:30:10Jordi Hays?

  And you're just getting the light just blared.

• 3:30:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably not the best sleep, but I still get an 86. How'd I do compared to you?

• 3:30:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you beat me. I got a 78. Only six hours.

• 3:30:21John Coogan?

  Step it up.

• 3:30:22Jordi Hays?

  Brutal. I got a

• 3:30:23John Coogan?

  Play that sound cue for me.

• 3:30:24Jordi Hays?

  I got a, uh, six hours, six and a half hours of sleep debt. Absolutely brutal. Hopefully can catch up tonight. Uh, did you see this post from Levels? That said from concept car to production car.

• 3:30:37John Coogan?

  Oh, yes. This thing is crazy progress. Going from, this is the original Mercedes Benz electric car concept. Looks insane. And then there's like still pretty cool lights, contrast, and then the final.

• 3:30:50Jordi Hays?

  Even just like, even, even the way it just sits on the road.

• 3:30:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. The second image looks great. Big wheels. And then the third image looks like a Honda Civic.

• 3:30:59Jordi Hays?

  And as a Mercedes enthusiast, a three arrows enthusiast, this is one of my least favorite cars on the road.

• 3:31:08John Coogan?

  Uh, you know, I, I saw one outside of our breakfast spot and I was just starting to think, ah, maybe it's growing on me. Cause when I saw the EQS launch, the new electric Mercedes, I was like, I don't like that design. I think it's too bulbous and rounded in the front. It's not for me. But then I saw one in person and I was like, maybe I'm just, you know, maybe it's coming around on it. But then I saw this picture and the progression and I, and I say, never, uh, never. But, uh, maybe we'll stick to the new, uh, the new SL

• 3:31:39Jordi Hays?

  This, this post is hilarious. Uh, Variety says exclusive. CBS has indicated that staffers at CBS News will not be disciplined if they don't respond to a much scrutinized message sent last week by Barry Weiss.

• 3:31:53John Coogan?

  It was scrutinized?

• 3:31:54Jordi Hays?

  She literally said, hey, what do you do at the company? What do you think we could do better?

• 3:31:59John Coogan?

  This is the perfect reaction.

• 3:31:59Jordi Hays?

  And the perfect meme, stop giving me your toughest battles. Barry's just, I'm literally just asked for an email about what you're up to.

• 3:32:06John Coogan?

  Ridiculous. Yes, this is the Mercedes Benz Vision iconic concept car. This is something that I can't wait for it to get completely watered down and look like absolute garbage by the time it ships. But you didn't like it. I think this concept car looks pretty cool.

• 3:32:23Jordi Hays?

  It looks like a mob boss in Tron.

• 3:32:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. It looks different. Concept cars always look cool and then they never make it to to production. And there's a there was another question on the timeline, a couple of slides back of 41. Cynthia says, is there a good reason that car companies don't just re-release old models? Like, this is so beautiful and it's Mercedes from probably the 80s, right? Can you clock this? Do you know vintage Mercedes?

• 3:32:48Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that's an SL.

• 3:32:49John Coogan?

  SL convertible, two-door. 280 SL? But it looks fantastic. And unfortunately, the reason that car companies don't just re-release old models is because there's new regulations, and some of those are for good reasons. They need more crumple zones so that pedestrians, if they get hit by the car, they are safer.

• 3:33:06Jordi Hays?

  280 SL.

• 3:33:07John Coogan?

  280 SL. And so, but of course, you can always go and buy one of the older ones, fix it up and continue to drive it. At least the new regulations don't take the old cars off the road.

• 3:33:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:33:19John Coogan?

  But also, I don't understand how pedestrian safety regulations work at all because the Cybertruck exists. And like, if I had to pick between getting hit between a Mercedes SL going 30, pedal to the metal, and a Cybertruck doing, you know, 90 and 0 to 60 in two seconds, I feel like I would pick the 280 SL. So I don't know. I don't know how those pedestrian rules work because the Cybertruck seemed to just completely get through all of those. Everyone was was calling for sort of panic when the original Cybertruck design was announced. I remember Matt Farah from the Smoking Tire podcast, great podcast, on Rogan saying, Like he does, he was like, I don't believe that Elon will ship the Cybertruck.

• 3:34:01John Coogan?

  Like it's just impossible. He will never ship this because.

• 3:34:05Jordi Hays?

  You can't make a truck out of metal?

• 3:34:07John Coogan?

  It's not just that. I mean, the angles are crazy. Like the angles on the Cybertruck, it looks dangerous.

• 3:34:12Jordi Hays?

  People wanted to fail so bad.

• 3:34:14John Coogan?

  A hundred percent.

• 3:34:14Jordi Hays?

  It was like the Russ Gate. People were like, oh.

• 3:34:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. I mean, people are always rooting against Elon stuff, but, but the, the Cybertruck in particular looked like, like if I've been told for years that like the reason the cars got round was for pedestrian safety. I was like, okay, well, if that's true and the rules do state that you can't make a Mercedes SL anymore because it's too angular or something and you need to make a, and you like, how can you make a Cybertruck? And so, uh, lots to unpack there. There must be some like workaround or something like that. But anyway, anything else, any other breaking news you want to cover before we wrap up for the day?

• 3:34:49Jordi Hays?

  Tennebress says, uh, great place to end the show. Life is so much easier and better when you have a number to make go up.

• 3:34:55John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 3:34:56Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 3:34:57John Coogan?

  Well, we want to make the number of reviews go up on this show. So please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 3:35:03Jordi Hays?

  Spotify.

• 3:35:04John Coogan?

  Leave an ad in the, in your review. We'd love to read it on the show. And thank you for tuning in.

• 3:35:09Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for tuning in.

• 3:35:10John Coogan?

  We'll see you tomorrow.

• 3:35:10Jordi Hays?

  Wonderful evening. We will see you back here tomorrow.

• 3:35:13John Coogan?

  Bye.