Google’s AI Breakthrough in Cancer, Protein Powders Exposed | Marc Benioff, Eiso Kant, Dante Vaisbort, Alice Bentinck, Eric Seufert, Pim de Witte

(01:17) - Google’s AI Breakthrough in Cancer (22:44) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (30:37) - Protein Powders Exposed (35:41) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:36:03) - Dante Vaisbort, a University of Chicago graduate and co-founder of Albacore Inc., discusses his company's development of Ghostfin, a 6-foot-long autonomous underwater vehicle capable of patrolling over 1,000 nautical miles undetected and delivering precision effects. He highlights the vehicle's potential to deter maritime invasions, its ability to carry a 250-pound explosive payload, and its distinction from existing platforms like Anduril's DIVE, which focuses on deep-sea survey missions. Vaisbort also emphasizes Albacore's strategic location in Philadelphia, leveraging proximity to Washington, D. C., and the city's rich shipbuilding history to foster the next generation of maritime capabilities. (01:58:30) - Eiso Kant is the co-founder and CTO of Poolside, a company dedicated to developing advanced AI models for software engineering. In the conversation, he discusses his journey from being inspired by Andrej Karpathy's 2015 article on neural networks to founding Poolside, emphasizing the importance of reinforcement learning in advancing AI capabilities. He also highlights Poolside's strategic focus on enterprise applications, particularly in high-consequence environments like defense and government, and the company's efforts to secure substantial computing resources to stay at the forefront of AI development. (02:12:59) - Marc Benioff, co-founder and CEO of Salesforce, is a prominent figure in the tech industry, known for his leadership in cloud computing and AI integration. In the conversation, he discusses the rapid adoption of AI technologies, emphasizing Salesforce's commitment to enhancing customer success through innovations like Agentforce. Benioff also highlights the importance of maintaining a beginner's mindset and the role of AI in transforming business operations. (02:37:03) - Alice Bentinck is the co-founder and CEO of Entrepreneur First, a global talent investor that supports individuals in building technology startups, and also co-founded Code First: Girls, a nonprofit aimed at increasing the number of women in tech. She discusses the recent Entrepreneur First demo day, highlighting the participation of 40 founders who pitched AI-related products to an audience of 200 attendees, including partners from leading venture capital firms. Bentinck emphasizes the trend of young founders tackling complex problems in traditional industries and underscores the importance of revenue stickiness and long-term contracts in attracting investor interest. (02:43:17) - Eric Seufert, an independent analyst and founder of Mobile Dev Memo, discusses his belief that OpenAI will inevitably monetize ChatGPT through advertising, drawing parallels to Netflix's prior stance on ads. He emphasizes the importance of maintaining user trust by ensuring ads do not compromise the objectivity of ChatGPT's responses. Seufert also highlights the potential for ads to drive economic growth, citing their role in the success of direct-to-consumer businesses and the broader internet economy. (03:06:57) - Pim de Witte, a tech entrepreneur who founded Medal, a major social gaming platform, and previously ran a successful Runescape private server as a teenager, discusses his company's recent $133.7 million fundraising to develop general agents capable of deep spatial-temporal reasoning for applications like search and rescue drones. He explains their approach of training foundation models on diverse gaming data to enable efficient transfer to novel environments, leveraging existing gaming interfaces in robotics. Additionally, Pim highlights the importance of combining simulation and real-world data to ensure safety and effectiveness in deploying these agents across various applications. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TBPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is October 16th. It's Thursday, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance. The capital of capital. Um, big news. We covered it a little bit yesterday, but uh, big news out of good.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes when something just hits the timeline and we're live and we're doing the show, it's hard to process how significant something is.

• 0:24John Coogan?

  For sure. And uh, I mean, what a funny, what a funny turn of events. In the meantime, while OpenAI is fighting for their life in the timeline against allegations of moving into adult content. Google is saying, hey, we cured cancer. We've done it. We cured cancer.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  Witchway Western Lab.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yes, exactly. Uh, they didn't actually cure cancer, uh, but they made some progress and it's definitely updating some people on what AI can do in bio, what AI can do in, in cancer research generally. Um, it's very complex. I'm not an expert in uh, bio or, or, or any of this stuff really. So, um, I needed to use a Call of Duty metaphor. And so I read the piece. Um, it comes from Sundar Pichai. He says, um, time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Go to ram.com. Just kidding. He said, "An exciting milestone for AI and science. Our C2S scale 27B foundation model built with Yale and based on GMA generated

• 1:26John Coogan?

  a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behavior, which scientists experimentally validated in living cells." Now, that is not in people. It's not in mice. It's not in rats. It's just in cells. And this is just one potential link between a drug and cancer cells, but it's very exciting, very promising. And so I was trying to figure out the, the appropriate analogy. And what I landed on was of course, Call of Duty. And so in Call of Duty, there are a bunch of players on the map. Some of them are on your team. Some of them are on the other, the opposing team. Exactly. The opposing team, you can think of them as cancer cells. When.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  When cells develop cancer, when tumors exist, they are on the enemy team. You've got to hunt them down. You've got to find them. The people that are hunting them down, those are the killer T cells. That's your immune system. Ideally, you want all the tumors, all the cancer cells, to be really obvious to your immune system. So your immune system can go around and get a bunch of headshots, double kills. 360 no scopes. Of course, of course. But it's, uh, it's hard because a lot of these cancer cells, a lot of these tumors, they exist in what, uh, Google puts them as like, it says they, it says that they're cold tumors. Basically, they're invisible to the body's immune system. You want to turn them hot. You want them to light up on the minimap. How do you do that?

• 2:51John Coogan?

  You gotta pop the UAV. And that's exactly how this works. So, uh, this particular C2S, which is cell to sentence model, ran a bunch of different, uh, correlations between, uh, different drugs and their effect on cells, and found a drug that does just that. It's a conditional amplifier, meaning that it boosts the immune signal, and it basically turns these cold tumors hot. And now, uh, this is not new. There's a lot of drugs that basically act as UAVs for the immune system that allow the immune system to target cancerous cells or tumors more effectively.

• 3:32John Coogan?

  Uh, but why this is special, why everyone's obsessed with this, why everyone's white pelling so hard is because they used AI to do this. And of course, this was in conjunction with scientists, and then it was verified in a lab setting, in a real, in the real world setting, but it's still very exciting. Now, just to put it in concept, in, in, in, uh, perspective, uh, Google found one drug that was correlated with this effect, uh, which is great. There's something like 600 maybe FDA-approved drug cancer indication pairs in the US alone. Um, and... Only about 5% of drugs that even get submitted to the FDA actually get approved. And so the total number of like discoveries like this, if you just think about it as like

• 4:16John Coogan?

  a drug that helps fight cancer or helps identify cancer. If you think about the pool of those, humans have discovered probably tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of those, narrowed those down, sent those to the FDA. The FDA approved maybe 5% of those and we got 600 that are on the market. And then, of course, some of those are more effective than others. Some of them have, you know, less severe side effects and so they become more popular. Some of them are just good at advertising probably and so, or good at, you know, the cost benefit ratio. So they're very effective to a lot of people and it's really cheap. That probably is a blockbuster cancer drug. Something that's really, really, really effective, but only in a very odd population.

• 4:59John Coogan?

  It's really expensive, probably less of a blockbuster cancer drug. But what matters here is the slope more than the Y intercept. And so right now, if you just look at the scoreboard in your Call of Duty world, AI got one point on the board. And humanity has like tens of thousands of these discoveries, basically. If you, that's a very rough estimate, but it's like, it's a lot. We've discovered a lot of cancer.

• 5:21Jordi Hays?

  And this is meaningful for one very real reason, which is that people have been desperately hoping

• 5:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:28Jordi Hays?

  that AI systems would be able to discover novel cures for cancer.

• 5:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:34Jordi Hays?

  This has been something that if you look at anybody at any of the big labs

• 5:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:38Jordi Hays?

  over the years, they probably have at least one soundbite

• 5:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:41Jordi Hays?

  where they're talking about

• 5:42John Coogan?

  Maybe it'll be useful here.

• 5:43Jordi Hays?

  this kind of potential. My question is, does, does OpenAI really have time to even compete on this front? Right? It's very easy for Google with hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue

• 5:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:56Jordi Hays?

  to dedicate resources to projects like this, whereas this doesn't feel core to

• 6:05Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI's like even roadmap, right? So this is that, but, but what ends up being funny is that the, the timing, right? Within a basically a 24 hour period, you get the erotica announcement, fast followed by uh, this and um, well played by Google.

• 6:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I don't think that Sundar had this in his back pocket and was waiting to, to drop it.

• 6:26Jordi Hays?

  I'm not implying that either, but I'm, I'm sure he knew exactly what he was, what he, he and the team knew what they were doing when they hit.

• 6:32John Coogan?

  They're probably having fun. They're like, this is the perfect thing to launch right now. The, the timeline is so primed to, to love this, but uh, there are, yeah, Tyler, what, what's your take on all this?

• 6:42Speaker 02

  Um, I mean, I, I think OpenAI definitely has the resources to do this kind of thing. Like if you look at the, the actual model, Jim, it's, they used the 27 billion parameter model, which is like, I mean, that's tiny compared to like what frontier models are now, right? Like GPT four was over a trillion, it was done pre-training in 2022.

• 6:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Like they could throw a couple of people at this, they, they, they just started that new like physics team that's just doing like physics models.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, OpenAI for science, Kevin.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I, I think this is like totally reasonable and it's in their capabilities.

• 7:10John Coogan?

  Yes, a hundred percent. Um, I, I think it just, uh, like clearly it's a race, even if this is just like positive PR, like, hey, AI is good for the world. Like every foundation lab should be competing in that because that's the thing that when you get on Capitol Hill and somebody's saying like, why are you using all the electricity? You say, well, look at all my press releases about AI and science and cancer, uh, and it's good to point to, like, it's just good columns. And so, uh, you want to be putting the points on the board first.

• 7:38Jordi Hays?

  This is, yeah, and this is why again, OpenAI has gotten so much pushback on both Sora and the erotica announcement because only a month ago, Sam was saying,

• 7:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, if I don't get enough compute, we'll have to choose between curing cancer and uh, free education.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:54Jordi Hays?

  And I, I don't want to have to make that call.

• 7:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, Tyler, I, I, I think that this uh, development updates me in two important ways. One is that uh, it's a vindication of Rune's concept of like text is the universal interface. Like if you look at the actual model, it's a, it's an LLM and basically as I understand it, the, the data that went in is basically. For every cell, they have just a bag of words that are just like every gene that's expressed ranked from most expressed to least expressed. And so it's basically just like a text representation of a cell, which is interesting because I think when a lot of people thought about like creating a model of the human body, you you just go

• 8:40John Coogan?

  to like a 3D model or something. I don't know. I don't certainly go just to text.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I mean, I don't know if it's, is it literally text or it's they just, it's like tokens, right? And then it's like, okay, DNA is already in tokens. It's just a string of numbers.

• 8:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  It's not that different.

• 8:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I don't think this, like, this is definitely vindication. I don't like this, like, was that big of a, like, an update, though, right? This is, anyone who's, like, sufficiently AGI-pilled is like, yeah, obviously, scale things up, we're gonna get, you know, big.

• 9:07John Coogan?

  Well, that's number two. So number one is that you don't need some sort of, like, new data primitive. You can actually just use tokens, you can use text to understand a cell and then find a connection between biological systems based on just a pure textual representation of the cell and the interaction. So I think that's, that's an interesting vindication for, like, text is a universal interface, not just in coding or text or knowledge retrieval or any of these other things. It's also applying to bio. You can take bio, transform it into text, and then do interesting things.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so like, if you look at AlphaFold, AlphaFold was like not that crazy of a new architecture, right? It was something we've already been doing on gaming or stuff like this, then you apply to bio. So I think I'm not that surprised to see, like, architectures that we've already have been working well in other, like, areas, you apply them to bio and it works, like, yeah, because it's not like, those architectures are, like, fairly general. It's not, like, just for gaming or just for, like, text.

• 10:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to talk about scale, but first I want to talk about scaling your streams with one live stream, 30-plus destinations, restream, multi-stream to reach your audience, whatever. So, yeah, the second takeaway for me is that, like, scaling laws apply to useful AI applications in bio. Because that's, if you actually go to the GitHub, you can see that they ran this, uh, this model on something like, I think, like, four billion parameters or something, and then they scaled this up to 27 billion. It might have even been a smaller model. And so there's an interesting, like, they're, they're scaling up and it's, and it's, you know, qualitatively better system. And so, yeah, I don't know.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, when I see stuff like this, I kind of am wondering what people who are like, oh, this is a top. Like, we're gonna crash any moment. Like, how do they respond to this, right? Because this is exactly what everyone is like, oh, like, oh, it's just, you know, it predicts the next token. Like, yeah, it's slightly better at coding. It'll make someone 5% more effective. But like, this is not gonna be substantial change and never really it's gonna collapse. But then you see stuff like this where like, obviously, this can keep growing. Yep. In five, 10 years, this will be.

• 11:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think it's incredible, but it's more tools for humans, right? Like, this is human-machine collaboration, obviously, like, the key insight. But still, we're at a point where this isn't like an AI 2027 scenario, where you see the machine running, you know, has a novel insight, runs away with it, you know, fully robotic, lights out, lab, and then it just spits out a drug at the other end. So I think it's absolutely incredible, but and an amazing proof point for the potential for the technology. But based on, this is exactly what you want to see, based on all the promises we've been getting for the last decade.

• 11:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:54Jordi Hays?

  So I think like, Google deserves a huge pat on the back. But everyone, the industry should be breathing a sigh of relief, being like, okay, we're actually doing what we've been saying we were gonna do.

• 12:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree. I'm just saying, like, if you listen to what super AGI people have been saying, like, we're just right on track with everything they say, right? Like, if you look at, even if you look at like, compute budgets, like, we're now seeing, there was the 2 gigawatt data center being planned. Just yesterday. Yeah, he's coming on the show today. That's, I think that was ahead of like, what a lot of people were saying, even like, Leopold or AGI 2027. Like, that's ahead of what they were saying. Yeah. So like, I don't see, I mean. Like everything, it's not like we're just spending and then like we're not getting anything in return like.

• 12:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think the bear case is is for like a fast takeoff scenario, I suppose is something like, is this the chat GPT moment for AI in bio or is this the 2005 DARPA grand challenge that took 20 years until Waymos were on the street? Like, there could be a rate limiting cycle time to actually testing these drugs in the wet lab, going through the FDA approval process. So even if the AI systems get better and better, how do you reinforcement learn on will the FDA approve this drug or not? Like, you have to actually.

• 13:15Jordi Hays?

  Gabe in the chat says, gotta give Martin Shkreli a ring. We actually should, we should hit him up, see if he wants to jump on.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  Right now?

• 13:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Tyler, figure it out.

• 13:23John Coogan?

  Let me, I'll DM him.

• 13:25Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, we can.

• 13:27John Coogan?

  Is he live?

• 13:28Jordi Hays?

  He's probably live, but he, I'm sure he's down to to to co-stream. Going on, there's a post here from G Fodor, who says utterly totally destroyed worldview, good riddance. He's quoting a post featuring a line from Yan Le Cun, who says, it's neither optimistic nor pessimistic, it's just being real and stating what is the case. It's a system with gigantic memory and retrieval ability, not a system that can invent solutions to new problems. And then he shares Sundar's post, so.

• 14:10Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, humans are somewhat of a of a system with a gigantic memory and retrieval ability. And yet we find ways to invent solutions to new problems. So, big moment, and it's a win, win for the world.

• 14:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:28Jordi Hays?

  My question is like. Okay, if can can Google, whatever the the process that led to this discovery, can Google produce thousands of these, right? Can they go?

• 14:43John Coogan?

  It does seem like they're accelerating, yeah.

• 14:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, like I just imagine, I just imagine at some point, like a year from now, is Sundar still sharing these breakthroughs? Or are they just kind of going?

• 14:53John Coogan?

  Taking them through FDA approvals? I don't know. What do you think, Tyler?

• 14:56Speaker 02

  Uh, I mean, I assume everything that we have seen in AI like says that like, yeah, they can keep scaling. It's only 27 billion parameters. Scale it up to a trillion like.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  You would think everything that that we've seen says that, yeah, this will give us more.

• 15:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  Even if it's not like a novel insight, if it's like speeding things up way, you know, way faster than like, what does it really matter?

• 15:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, just a super drug screener that allows you like a first pass of ideas. Like, that's super valuable. I do wonder if there will be a data wall. There's obviously no compute wall because you can just train a 27 billion model. Like, that was not the gating factor here. It, I do wonder if they're somewhat data limited on like, you know, actually indexing the every cell, every cancer type, all of that, and what that cycle time looks like. Because we've seen with all the data brokers, like the Scale AI, the Mercors, like, those companies have been able to scale extremely quickly to do knowledge retrieval tasks and and put tons and tons of new, you know, answers to questions.

• 15:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:58John Coogan?

  In the training set. Like, what is the Mercor or Scale AI of AI bio?

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, I don't know if there is one yet, which just tells us that like, this is still pretty early innings.

• 16:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's.

• 16:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting to see these people that that were hyper bearish transformer models, like this this Brett Hall post. He says, once you understand the transformer, as Lanyard does, and dare say I do and show on my website there, you can literally see through what it does. Recombination and prediction. It's not creativity. So it cannot possibly generate new explanations. And we see that with all LLMs. It's so funny because I like personally, in my life, when it comes to marketing and building brands and things like that, I think of creativity as recombination and prediction, which is like, if you put these two ideas together.

• 16:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 16:44Jordi Hays?

  It could be very cool.

• 16:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:45Jordi Hays?

  And I would give you the example of like this, this, we just got this, these rugby shirts and that we that we made that I'm very excited about.

• 16:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, there's not a single new concept here.

• 16:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:56Jordi Hays?

  Just kind of taking like a rugby shirt.

• 16:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:58Jordi Hays?

  Which looks cool. Making it kind of look like it's part of some Formula One team.

• 17:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  And then putting our, our, our partners logos on it.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:06Jordi Hays?

  And yet it feels.

• 17:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  Fresh.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  This is the, the Gweren take where it's like, even if you can't just like prompt, give me a new uh, idea for a joke or something, you can just, you know, brute force it by just giving it two random ideas and saying, connect them. And then you can ask if it's interesting. Then you just compound that and then eventually you'll get, you're like brute forcing creativity.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're just kind of like indexing everything, ranking them against each other. I mean, we know that like this works. This has worked in the TikTok algorithm. Uh, and yeah, just finding these correlations. Um, seems, seems really valuable. The question's just like, yeah, how, how, how long will it be until, uh, the first FDA approved AI generated cancer drug hits the market? Like, are there, because the, the, the, the bare case to like the fast takeoff of the, of the compute build out is that at some point, at some point you tap all the debt, you tap all of the capital markets, you hit some sort of like, you know, fundamental law of physics around how fast you can move sand around the world and turn it into silicon, or how fast you can spin

• 18:09John Coogan?

  up a new power plant or new, uh, new nuclear power plant. Like these, some of these things just take time and regulation, like the, the, like, there is the chance that this stuff gets regulated to the point where there's no fast takeoff. Like, we should have seen a fast takeoff in nuclear energy production. Once we figured out how great nuclear energy was, and we just kind of regulated it out of existence. The NRC stopped approving stuff. And we just didn't see nuclear energy production. Like, you can see it's, it's exponential and then it's sigmoidal because it just turns into an S curve because we just said, yeah, we're actually good.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, that's kind of what, uh, Piordec Labs is working on, right? It's like the, the lab in the loop of the LM or like RL step, basically. But we're just like still so far from like actually tapping all of the energy. Like, we're not close to that at all. There's like.

• 18:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, no.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  What is it? I'll, I'll keep saying about like natural gas.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  Percent? Isn't it like half percent?

• 19:04Speaker 02

  It's like a tiny amount. We're not. You know, we could like literally today, if if we wanted to, we could like double natural gas like very easily. It's just regulation.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  And it's like, there's no incentive to do that right now because we're still not that close. It's like, oh, we're spending so much money, but like.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  I mean, we could be spending way more.

• 19:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Way more spend.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  I know, I agree, I agree. I I really wonder like how quickly will Google pull the trigger on, uh, okay, spend 10 times as much compute or 10 times as much energy on this because this, uh, sell to send in scale 27B. This feels like they could have just put it on their ramp card like in terms of like the actual like compute budget, how much weight went into that training run versus like the, uh, Gemini three that's launching. Like, it feels like, do you see the cutoff date for Gemini three is like, is like, uh, October of 25? And so it feels like that was a much bigger run, probably maybe a billion dollars of of compute went into it or billion dollars of spend went into it. Like, it's a very expensive project, uh, but they have, you know, a bunch of applications with it.

• 20:04John Coogan?

  They're selling it as an API like they they can underwrite it very clearly on ROI basis. This is much harder to underwrite right now, but it's going to get less and less fuzzy as they as they actually see. Okay, the things that we're generating, the ideas that we're generating. Yeah, they're actually making it through FDA approval, so, um, exciting. But yeah, very, very, very, very cool stuff and obviously just amazing for the Google brand. Like, um, it doesn't quite fit with the concept of, uh, organizing the world's information. I guess you're organizing the cellular information. Um, it seems like a little bit of a side quest.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Is there new information?

• 20:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, they organized it.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Not knowledge that existed that was discovered.

• 20:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  And now they're organizing it.

• 20:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Their mission is to organize the world's information and make it useful.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  Oh, make it useful. This is extremely on brand for them then.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Being made useful.

• 20:52John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about Privy Wallet Infrastructure for every bank. Privy helps you, it 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. So the timeline is, uh, yeah, still in turmoil about this, a little bit, but mostly everyone's just like, this is awesome.

• 21:11Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Greg.

• 21:12John Coogan?

  Greg.

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  Com- uh, comrade, uh, comrade?

• 21:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Jordi Hays?

  Botching the pronunciation.

• 21:17John Coogan?

  Comrade Greg!

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  Says, "Someone needs to turn each TBPN card into a physical collectible, slowly getting activation energy for this to start taking pre-orders, limited to 10 prints, first edition reserved for the subject, all profits donated to TBPN cause of choice." Uh, he says he's pulling the trigger on it, this is cool, uh, I think we were gonna do this, uh, so maybe.

• 21:39John Coogan?

  We were texting about this over the weekend and I wasn't sure about like, how, what the right way to handle like, card, card printing, they're very like, news-driven, uh, but I love that this just kind of organically happened.

• 21:49Jordi Hays?

  I think we should do rookie cards, for people that raise a seed round.

• 21:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, first time you get on the show, I don't know, I, I'd say, it's fun to print them all, honestly.

• 21:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  But I'm sure Greg will figure out, like, where the right, where the demand is, like, uh, do the big people want their cards, or is it more like the seed stage founder? Is it more like the wedding announcer?

• 22:10Jordi Hays?

  Do they want signed cards?

• 22:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:12Jordi Hays?

  Do they want, uh, like, a piece of merch, like, you know, uh, on like, some, some, uh, trade, you know, actual trading cards, they'll put like, a piece of the jersey fabric in them?

• 22:22John Coogan?

  Oh, really? I've never heard, I've never seen that. Uh. I, I feel like you'd want your own card if you did like, a wedding announcement, but who would really wanna connect, collect a wedding announcement that's not for their own wedding? Like, that seems kind of like a niche thing, I'd be kind of like, what, what, what are you doing?

• 22:36Jordi Hays?

  Depends on the wedding.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about Cognition, they're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team, um, and he said, he, he actually loaded the cards up into, uh, a, a system, he says, "UI polish is up next, going to mimic TBPN website style." Thank you for your service, Greg, you've been crushing this, this is very, very cool. Uh, I would love to see how you go about actually getting these printed, um, you can go really crazy and actually print like, real, uh, trading cards, like, there are, there are systems and, and companies that do that, I was thinking that- It's possible to just go to Walmart and print like wallet sized photos of things and they're like 30 cents, I think, for like a set of four. Then you just need to cut them

• 23:21John Coogan?

  out and people put them in the wallet photos. And it's a photo quality printer and you could just take that and then find a sleeve that fits it and for like, you know, a couple cents be like making these pretty easily. So there's a lot of different ways to to solve the problem, but I'm excited to see where it goes.

• 23:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, Manitas says, interesting cultural indicator that Volvo quietly rolled out armored versions of their family cars direct to consumer over the summer. Probably nothing.

• 23:45John Coogan?

  Direct to consumer? You can just buy an armored Volvo now? It's pretty remarkable.

• 23:51Jordi Hays?

  I almost bought an armored G-Wagon back in the day that my friend Blake had. It was the it was the former president of Kazakhstan.

• 23:59John Coogan?

  No way.

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  Actual like presidential like car that he'd driven around that that my buddy Blake had imported from Kazakhstan. And I really just wanted to own, you know, as a as a Borat enthusiast, I really just really wanted to own that car. I didn't pull the trigger because it's so it's got so much metal in it that it's like three times as heavy.

• 24:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, the doors are massive.

• 24:20Jordi Hays?

  And so it's just like not actually.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  It must get like two miles to the gallon, right?

• 24:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, it must be so insane. You're just filling up like, oh, I'm driving from Malibu to LA. Got to stop for gas three times.

• 24:30Jordi Hays?

  Full tank, yeah.

• 24:31John Coogan?

  Rough.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. President Trump says that India's Prime Minister Modi has agreed to stop buying Russian oil. Wow.

• 24:45Jordi Hays?

  Trade deal.

• 24:46John Coogan?

  Trade deal. Yeah, the geopolitical trade deals are all over the place right now. There was also news that we're polymarkets that we're officially in a trade war with China. I'm not exactly sure how that's defined.

• 24:56Jordi Hays?

  There was a market on that?

• 24:57John Coogan?

  I guess, yeah.

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, Trump came out and said yesterday, he said, we are in a trade war with China.

• 25:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, so that that's the that's the end of that.

• 25:06Jordi Hays?

  That solves it.

• 25:06John Coogan?

  But who knows? These these trade wars can be very short and, you know, I guess India's playing ball, hanging out with Dario from Anthropic and hanging out with Trump and no longer hanging out with Putin and buying oil. The how did I get, how did our family get so rich meme is going viral around the founders fund names. Dad read the Semerillion and bought a lot of domain names. Sebastian Caleri says, move quickly. There aren't that many good Lord of the Rings names left to use. Arthur McWhorter says he's camping the following. Mordor, Lethorian, Merkwood, Numenor.

• 25:47Jordi Hays?

  I don't think.

• 25:48John Coogan?

  Valinor. Valinor's been used. Valinor is an incubator, I believe. Amon.

• 25:52Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know Amon.

• 25:53John Coogan?

  Amon.

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  Is that? No, there's no way.

• 25:56John Coogan?

  Did Peter Thiel back Amon Geary?

• 25:58Jordi Hays?

  Joe Lonsdale quoted the announcement yesterday that we shared around Erebor, of course, getting approved. He said, financed on right enables massive job creation and wealth for a civilization and complements builders like universities or media building. A new with today's innovation frontier can upgrade how these areas work for all. I'm just the founding board member and early investor in Erebor with HVC. Proud to support Palmer and his co-founders.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. I always liked Shadowfax. If you were going to start a founders fund backed Hellofax competitor or DocuSign competitor using Shadowfax. Wait, have you not seen Lord of the Rings?

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  I have seen Lord of the Rings.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Okay. Do you know who Shadowfax is?

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 26:44John Coogan?

  No, he's Gandalf's horse.

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay. Yeah, it's coming back.

• 26:47John Coogan?

  And I think Shadowfax is a good name for like a DocuSign competitor.

• 26:50Jordi Hays?

  A stallion. Yeah.

• 26:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, a horse, a stallion.

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  A real stallion of a company.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  But also something that could be related to the fax machine, which would be funny. Anyway, congrats to the team over at Erebor. Palmer went on Rogan as well. So there's a three-hour Palmer Lucky Joe Rogan episode waiting in your podcast player of choice if you want to go listen to that.

• 27:10Jordi Hays?

  P. God says, welcome back, Command Economies. And the classic template, get ready to learn communism, buddy, which is that apparently the Trump admin is planning to set four prices across a range of industries to combat market manipulation by China, according to Scott Besson.

• 27:29John Coogan?

  It's very odd that they're pulling that out as a tool instead of just focusing on tariffs. I don't know. It seems like there's so many other ways to, to deal with a trade war than just.

• 27:38Jordi Hays?

  They like to. They're like a, they're like a DJ, you know? Like sometimes a DJ is up there and like really turning all the different knobs. Sometimes he's just letting the music play, you know?

• 27:48John Coogan?

  That is a very funny metaphor for David Solomon.

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  Like the knobs are there, right? You can, some people just choose to use them more than that.

• 27:56John Coogan?

  You should get, they should get David Solomon in there. He's already a DJ. He's already turning the knobs. Why not have him turn the knobs of the global economy?

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just, I do, of course, we never discuss politics on the show, but I do worry about the opposite end of the political spectrum being heavily inspired by these actions. And then it just becomes the norm that you just have, you know, obscene levels of government intervention.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. I, I always go back to like trying to benchmark the level of government intervention in America versus other competitive countries. So with the Intel thing, this happened, the same thing is like, what was it? Five or 10% stake that the US government took and 10. And a lot of people were like, this is like communism. This is command and control. But if you look at the, the, I believe TSMC was basically like 50 50 with the Taiwanese government. And so even now, there's a lot of other players in the semiconductor supply chain internationally that have a higher proportion of government influence in their cap table effectively.

• 29:02John Coogan?

  And so I'm not in total like, oh, wow, we're like doing worse than what's going on in South Korea.

• 29:08Jordi Hays?

  I think, yeah, and my, my framework is that as much as Trump and Xi beef, I believe that Trump respects Xi.

• 29:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I mean, America's bailed out companies successfully before. America has come in, been the lender of last resort for struggling companies like Intel and, and turned the company around and then sold their position and gotten out entirely. Like government motors, like the US does not, you know, fully, the, the, the US government never like fully nationalized the, the GM ecosystem, even though they did bail them out at one point. Joe Weisenthal says, all businesses are banks, except for banks. Banks are media companies. Wow, he said this back in 2018. That's crazy from Earth. Uh, this is because Mr. Beast has filed a trademark to launch his own bank. The organization will, will be called Mr. Beast Financial. We talked a little bit about this yesterday.

• 30:04John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm not sure what he will, uh, what he will wind up being, but we gotta have him on the show. What are you thinking?

• 30:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm just laughing at the chat. Sam Shepher is asking about real competitors to the USA at the country level. And the chat says China, Russia,

• 30:21John Coogan?

  The EU.

• 30:22Jordi Hays?

  Uzbekistan, Guatemala.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  Martinique.

• 30:25Jordi Hays?

  Mauritania.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you prefer it or not.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  Did you see this Consumer Reports report? Paris did an investigation.

• 30:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 30:48Jordi Hays?

  Did 60-plus lab tests on leading protein supplements and found that a quite a lot of them had high levels of lead. This wasn't surprising to me.

• 31:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:05Jordi Hays?

  And the reason for that is that a lot of different food has high levels of lead. Even even food that would appear to be like, quote, "natural," right? So like, dark chocolate is a good example. There's a lot of dark chocolate brands have high levels of lead, something that that you should be looking out for. Like, not every not every brand is created equally.

• 31:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  And I think that people were particularly scared about Huell, which the Huell Black had.

• 31:37John Coogan?

  Kind of an ominous name.

• 31:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, kind of an ominous name. And of course, the timeline was having a lot of fun with it yesterday. People being like, "Yeah, I could tell you've been using a lot of Huell Black over the last year."

• 31:50John Coogan?

  You're just deranged from all the lead poisoning?

• 31:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. We'll stick to the Optimum Nutrition, the Transparent Labs. Good to see Transparent Labs being exactly what their namesake implies, transparent. It seems like they've done very well with the lead exposure. Is lead is lead more of a cause for concern than microplastics? I feel like, what was it, last year, Nat Friedman with the Plastic List like really shifted the conversation to levels of microplastics. And I think people kind of like stopped paying attention to lead, but.

• 32:23Jordi Hays?

  It's all important. You want to be, uh, you want to be aware of it.

• 32:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:26Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, like the way that you need to think about it is there's basically healthy levels.

• 32:31John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:32Jordi Hays?

  There's, um, certified levels.

• 32:34John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 32:35Jordi Hays?

  And then there's like legal levels, right? And like healthy levels, like ideally it's zero, right? Like lead, I, I'm actually, I'm sure somebody, some schizo will be like, actually.

• 32:45John Coogan?

  I like a little bit.

• 32:46Jordi Hays?

  A little bit of lead is actually good for you.

• 32:47John Coogan?

  Cause it makes you more aggressive, right?

• 32:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:50John Coogan?

  Doesn't it make you a little crazy?

• 32:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you want to have a strong Q4.

• 32:53John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 32:54Jordi Hays?

  You know, up the lead and then detox and Q1.

• 32:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:57Jordi Hays?

  Um, new year, new you.

• 32:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but yeah, you, I just think about it as like, uh, healthy, uh, like certified as in like you can, you can, um, go out and get various certifications, like that generally show that your product is like healthy or clean.

• 33:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  And then there's like the legal levels, which like none of these, none of these brands were above the legal limit.

• 33:18John Coogan?

  Oh, really? None of them? Even, even the Huul was just, uh, was just not recommended.

• 33:22Jordi Hays?

  So if you're a food company in America, you can legally have quite a significant amount of lead. Um, but anyways, I think you could do these for like almost every category of food and get some pretty shocking results.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I mean, I, I think with plastics and lead, like the thing is, uh, we've kind of ran the A B test with lead where it's like in the kind of early seventies, I think that was kind of the peak of like leaded gas.

• 33:44John Coogan?

  Leaded gas.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  And then what you saw is like 15, 20 years later, you basically saw the peak of like crime.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Cause it's like you grow up as a kid, you're inhaling all this lead and then you like, it makes you way crazier.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  But with plastic, we haven't really run the A B test cause like there's kind of just always been like a buildup of plastic.

• 33:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  There's like no one who like doesn't have a lot of plastic.

• 34:02John Coogan?

  So who knows what happens when we take plastic out of the system?

• 34:04Jordi Hays?

  Some potentially schizo alpha is that lead paint could actually be positive because it reduces the like levels of EMF in a room. If you have like a bunch of lead paint on the walls, it's actually blocking some of that.

• 34:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. All the plastic in your system is just bouncing the lead particles off too. So you're just immune to lead poisoning because you have so much plastic in there. You wrap your entire body in plastic. Uh, this went incredibly viral, 17,000 likes. Um, I'm surprised.

• 34:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because I think most people that look through this list are thinking, okay, I've had at least one of these in the last three months.

• 34:37John Coogan?

  I have, I have these every single day, basically. Um, yeah, pretty, pretty wild.

• 34:42Jordi Hays?

  And it's just, I mean, yeah, it's, it's, uh, a lot of the brands are going to push back because not every, you know, you're not going to see the. If if they ran one lab test per product, if you tested another product that has that was made in another batch, you could see wildly different levels.

• 35:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, the batches and also up the ingredient supply chain. Like a lot of times the lead comes from two steps or three steps deeper in the supply chain. This happened in Soylent. We had some article that was like, it was it was very funnily worded. It was like, Soylent's like so super heavy metal or something like that because they were tested it for heavy metals and they found something similar to like an early batch. And it was like two steps up the chain, like one of the one of our suppliers, one of their suppliers had like changed their supplier or something like that, the lead company.

• 35:34Jordi Hays?

  Bobby wants to see a lead gong in the Ultra Dome.

• 35:37John Coogan?

  For Agro Maxing, yeah. Let the let the lead fly.

• 35:41Jordi Hays?

  I would hit a lead gong for Absurd, a new company out of Y Combinator that makes absurd AI launch videos, turning raw. This sounds, this sounds kind of like it was written by ChatGPT.

• 35:54John Coogan?

  Well, let's pull this video up, but first let me tell you about Graphite Dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams get up higher quality software faster. You can get started for free. And now let's watch this launch video.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  Everyone wants to be different. It starts with a familiar feeling to feel stuck.

• 36:14John Coogan?

  The circular motif here was really cool. And the and the piano like changing out what's around it. I think that's a very interesting use of AI. Can we go fuller screen?

• 36:27John Coogan?

  Fighting a robot. There we go.

• 36:34John Coogan?

  That's weird. That was that was a weird shot.

• 36:38John Coogan?

  This is cool though.

• 36:47John Coogan?

  This really sounds like Morgan Freeman. Is this not stealing his likeness? I guess it's just like an homage. Yeah, is Sam Sheffer in here? We need Sam Sheffer's comments on this for sure. He was in here before.

• 37:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just interesting when you

• 37:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:09Jordi Hays?

  When it's, when it's difficult to make something, it's valuable.

• 37:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:14Jordi Hays?

  And when anyone can have it instantly.

• 37:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:17Jordi Hays?

  It's absolutely worthless.

• 37:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so, so again, I, I, before I would judge this, I'd want to see, I want to see 10 actual launch videos for 10 actual companies that you've worked with. My guess is that, um, my guess is that, uh, these are, might work as in they might get views, but I don't think they will build your brand at all.

• 37:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it, I would assume it follows the same curve as like, the first Studio Ghibli that I posted got like thousands of likes and it was like super basic. I just took a screenshot from Oppenheimer of Einstein talking to Oppenheimer from the movie, Ghibli'd it and just posted that and it got thousands of likes because people were like, oh, this is like something I like and I know and I like Oppenheimer and I like Ghibli, so like. But if I posted that today, it would be a total flop because like it's been done so many times, right? Why are you laughing?

• 38:11Jordi Hays?

  I just think it's funny because we should actually test it. You should post like just a Ghibli image and be like.

• 38:17John Coogan?

  It's like Ghibli of that horse and be like, oh, wow. You know, or, or whatever, whatever memes going viral that day, you could, you could Ghibli it and, and, I mean, there, there, there were so many Gibleys that went viral where it was just like every iconic image for the past few years. It was like a picture of J D Vance, Ghibli'd, okay, viral. A picture of, of Donald Trump, viral. Like picture of Michael Jordan dunking, viral. And, but now it's like, we have all seen it and it's been commoditized. So it doesn't, it doesn't, it like, it ran its course. And that's like the, the, the worry with this is that like the first AI launch video goes viral and then it like gets less and less. But it does seem like they're building more of a SaaS like product on top of AI image gen. And so, you know, the agents kind of plan, generate, edit every scene.

• 39:00John Coogan?

  So you're kind of like, you can still come with an idea. Like the thing that stuck out to me in that, in that, uh, video, there were two things. One was the, the circle motif hitting the circle again and again and again was cool. And at the end, the very blurry images of the boxers, like that was an interesting artistic style.

• 39:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 39:19John Coogan?

  And so right now. If I wanted to generate a video, if I come up with an idea of like, okay, let's, you know, let's do a horse themed launch video. It would be, it would be sort of a hassle for me to take an image of a horse like, and come up with the concept of like the horse running and then each frame of the horse running where it's in a different, you know, different segment of its walk cycle or its run cycle or its stride. Each frame is transformed into a different art style or different world. It would be really hard to puppeteer that. I'd be copying and pasting the prompt again and again and again. And having an agent or having a system that kind of helps me pipeline that stuff where

• 40:01John Coogan?

  it's like, okay, I want to make, you've seen those videos on Instagram that are like, it's a car and it keeps, and it just flips through like the headlights one after another and shows you like 50 cars, but it's always, the image is always focused on the headlights.

• 40:14Jordi Hays?

  Jack Cohen over at General Catalyst just shared a video they did for Zavo.

• 40:22John Coogan?

  Okay, let's play that. Very interested in that. It's in the chat, it's in the X chat, we can try and put it in the timeline.

• 40:30Jordi Hays?

  I think you're gonna absolutely.

• 40:31John Coogan?

  While we, while we pull that up, let me tell you about Julius, the AI data analyst for everyone. Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds.

• 40:42Jordi Hays?

  Do we have this video?

• 40:44John Coogan?

  Let's play it.

• 40:46Speaker 04

  This isn't a restaurant, it's a battlefield. Every ticket is a ticking clock. Your best soldiers are falling. Okay, meet Greg, your numbers wizard. He'll tell you the sea bass special is secretly costing you a fortune, but the truffle fries special?

• 41:03John Coogan?

  Is that motion graphic AI as well? That's pretty impressive if so.

• 41:14John Coogan?

  So is this vertical sass for restaurants? That's pretty good if so.

• 41:29John Coogan?

  That looks, that looks like post, that looks like After Effects.

• 41:33Jordi Hays?

  Wow, I hate this.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  See, this, this looks like not AI generated. This looks like they layered in their actual product. But maybe that's part of the workflow and the pipeline. They need some drop shadow on that logo. Uh, it's a little white on white, little low contrast. The boys now, but uh, I don't know.

• 41:53Jordi Hays?

  I think.

• 41:54John Coogan?

  That is, right now, that's attention getting. Like, right now, if that pops into, if you're a restaurateur, I, I hope I'm getting this right. That's, that's, it's a, it's an ERP for, for restaurants.

• 42:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:07John Coogan?

  So you, you, you use that to run your restaurant. That, that's what I got from that. Is that, is that correct? Uh, is it?

• 42:13Jordi Hays?

  The first agentic point of sale for restaurants and retail payments.

• 42:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 42:16Jordi Hays?

  Point of sale on AI agents in one platform.

• 42:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:19Jordi Hays?

  To build the future of autonomous commerce. Over 400 businesses. I already use Zava to accept payments and manage operations.

• 42:25John Coogan?

  I mean, it did deliver that message to me and it grabbed my attention a little bit. So, I don't know. Worth.

• 42:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the opening scene was particularly bad, but at the same time, it was probably a good hook.

• 42:36John Coogan?

  Exactly. But I think, I think the hookiness of that will, will dissipate. I think you're correct on that.

• 42:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:41John Coogan?

  Like, like it will be, like eventually you'll just scroll and be like, oh yeah, I've already seen like the AI slop. I don't want to see that. But like, right now, if you're the first, like Toast does, isn't running an ad like that. And so if you're the first company to be running that ad that grabs people in that way, like you will break through. There's like, there's like a window of alpha, I think. I, but I.

• 43:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the question is, is uh, if they had figured out a way to do this with the founder as like the key person. And like, some blend of AI plus the actual founder would be.

• 43:14John Coogan?

  That's for sure coming. I mean, VO3 launched yesterday, uh, 3.1 and, uh, and has like pretty phenomenal character consistency. I was looking at some demos. Uh, if you want to generate a bunch of video, go to Fall, generative media platform for developers. The world's best generative image, video and audio models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters.

• 43:37John Coogan?

  But I agree with, I agree with like.

• 43:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, part of it, part of it as an advertising enjoyer, I like to like without having knowledge, try to analyze when I see a video, when I see a campaign.

• 43:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:49Jordi Hays?

  I'm trying to clock, you know, based on the stage of the company, how much did they spend on this?

• 43:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  For example, like if Airbnb comes out with a launch video, I feel pretty, I like expect it to be incredible.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:01Jordi Hays?

  Because it's Airbnb and they probably spent like half a million dollars like producing.

• 44:05John Coogan?

  I mean, the Apple ads, when they get like, oh, Spike Jones is directing it and you're like,

• 44:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:09John Coogan?

  he does movies.

• 44:10Jordi Hays?

  And then with, with, with seed stage companies.

• 44:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:13Jordi Hays?

  One thing I like is like being able to clock like, okay, how resourceful is this company?

• 44:17John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure, sure.

• 44:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I like being, I like being able, personally, I enjoy being able to clock. Okay, they clearly had to be scrappy here.

• 44:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:24Jordi Hays?

  Like they spent like 10, 15, 20 K maybe on this video.

• 44:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:29Jordi Hays?

  But it's amazing because it's like real, it's genuinely a really great idea.

• 44:33John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 44:33Jordi Hays?

  And so with absurd, I think like the, the actual output generally looks great. It doesn't, but, but I would say the, the idea itself is not, I don't know if it's like strong enough, basically. It's like white humanoid looking things in a restaurant, but maybe, maybe.

• 44:53John Coogan?

  There were white humanoid looking things, like robots?

• 44:55Jordi Hays?

  There were.

• 44:55John Coogan?

  I completely missed that some.

• 44:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:57John Coogan?

  It was very like, it was very visually intense. I, yeah, I agree with that. That's interesting. I think that there is a, there, uh, there is a, like a underrated side of using AI in a creative way that does show resourcefulness and it can show being on the cutting edge. It's a way to tell your audience that you know how to puppeteer the models in unique and innovative ways that just dropped today. We see this a lot with like Justin, Justin Moore, like a new model will drop and she'll be, she'll have like converted her podcast into a cartoon with the correct lip syncing.

• 45:39John Coogan?

  And that's not just a feature where you just click a button and just like, you have to actually wire up a few different systems. And she usually will show underneath, it's like, I use this for the, for the cartoon effect and then this for the, for the video. And then I use flow or something else. And so. There is a way to signal that you're sort of like tapped into all the different frontier capabilities because Sora is different, has a different look than Mid Journey. But you can start with a Mid Journey image and bring that into Sora. And then you can use a different video or audio model or mix the audio especially. Like, I think that they added motion graphics on top.

• 46:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:18John Coogan?

  That the AI model didn't just one-shot those graphs.

• 46:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:21John Coogan?

  I think that that was After Effects.

• 46:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the question is like with absurd, are they charging? Let's say they're charging $10,000 for a launch video.

• 46:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:30Jordi Hays?

  Are they spending energy, resources, time?

• 46:34John Coogan?

  Oh, I think it's definitely not just like one-shot at this point.

• 46:37Jordi Hays?

  Right, right.

• 46:37John Coogan?

  But that's fine.

• 46:38Jordi Hays?

  So today, it's basically like a managed productized service business. And I've heard of another company, an AI ad company.

• 46:47John Coogan?

  I was gonna say.

• 46:48Jordi Hays?

  Effectively, I'm not gonna name them.

• 46:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:50Jordi Hays?

  They're just doing like creative services work. And they're selling it, they're selling it like it's AI outputs.

• 46:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:56Jordi Hays?

  But it ultimately is just them running an agency and...

• 47:00John Coogan?

  And are they prompting a lot or are they actually filming stuff too? Or maybe I guess somebody could do both.

• 47:04Jordi Hays?

  They're doing everything. Basically, it's an agency masquerading as like a, as an AI company.

• 47:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's still, there's still something there where like, is it, I guess like zooming out, like, is it a better time to start a law firm from scratch? Where you can be AI-native and you can just say, from day one, we expect everyone at this firm to use AI as aggressively as possible. Or a creative agency and say, hey, we don't have, we're not a thousand-person organization that has workflows for, you know, how we do things in different, you know, digital products. And so we're not bought in or we're not like stuck in our ways. And so everyone we hire, we expect you to use every possible tool for the job.

• 47:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:53John Coogan?

  Like, is it, is it a better time than ever to start a creative agency? Because you can be AI-native on day one as opposed to being like a legacy creative agency that then needs to go pull those tools? I don't know.

• 48:04Jordi Hays?

  The challenge on the creative agency side is if you go and compete just on price, it's a really rough business. Cause you get, you get clients that are looking for cheap work and those clients tend to be really rough. Like, great companies understand the value of creative.

• 48:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 48:19Jordi Hays?

  Will invest in it. They're not, they're not just looking for the cheapest output. They're looking for something great. And on the legal side, where you just, there's, there's certain amount of work, let's say like non-transactional work that is, you know, purely corporate, where if a new law firm emerged and they said, "We want to have your legal bill drop by 70% every month, and we're going to do that with, by properly leveraging these tools." And if that's their initial edge, I could see that working well, because for a lot of just like day-to-day legal work that a company needs to do with external counsel, you don't really, all you care about is that it's done well, it's not necessarily how it was done.

• 49:03John Coogan?

  Let's stay on the legal example, but first, let me tell you about TurboPuffer. Search every byte, serverless vector and full text search, built from first principles on object storage, fast, tense, cheaper, extremely good. So, is there a good analogy between, I'm graduating from law school, instead of going into the, the big law firm world, I'm going to start a law firm that uses something like Harvey on day one, and, and really leans into the frontier of, "Let's do as much as possible and set this, and set this company up from day one to be AI-native such that maybe our business model is different, maybe we're not so focused on billable hours, or we have some sort of different, different model that is enabled

• 49:46John Coogan?

  by AI. We're still a bunch of lawyers, but we're using AI very effectively." Is that at all, can we draw any analogies between that and the D2C e-commerce era, where basically who had brands who said, "Our secret, how we're going up against Nestle, how we're going up against Coca-Cola is, is we have Shopify." And like SaaS, we have SaaS and they don't.

• 50:07Jordi Hays?

  And it turns out, Mark Zuckerberg says, "Actually, I'm planning to be the middleman here."

• 50:13John Coogan?

  That's a great take.

• 50:14Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to, the money that you were going to spend on rent, well, I'm actually going to need you to spend twice as much with me.

• 50:22John Coogan?

  So do you think that, do you think that's how it plays out in the next generation of creative agencies? I start a creative agency and I say, I'm, I'm cutting out the middleman of the photographer, the videographer. I'm using AI tools from day one and I get a bunch of clients and I'm making a decent amount of money. But over time, the platforms that actually act as the AI generators say, we're the middleman, actually. And we're going to take the lion's share of the profit.

• 50:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a good question.

• 50:53John Coogan?

  Stuff, right?

• 50:53Jordi Hays?

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

• 50:57Jordi Hays?

  in the creative world, I think you want to be charging based on value, not how much time goes into the work.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  Because the best logo designers in the world, they might be, if a startup comes to them and says, hey, we want a new logo.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:11Jordi Hays?

  They might be able to

• 51:14Jordi Hays?

  do that in, it might, it might take them weeks, it might take them, they might one-shot it, right? They might sit down and just have this amazing creative spark. And so if you're the best in the world, you, you want to be paid for being the best in the world.

• 51:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:25Jordi Hays?

  And so it doesn't necessarily matter how long it takes.

• 51:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:28Jordi Hays?

  And so, uh, yeah, certainly, certainly on, um, I wouldn't respond well to a pitch today from a agency that says, hey, you should work with us. We're going to charge you 60% less than your current designer by using AI. Like, that doesn't, that doesn't, that doesn't get me excited on the creative front.

• 51:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:50Jordi Hays?

  But maybe more so on, on, on legal.

• 51:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:56John Coogan?

  I don't know. It seems like it's like there's increasing value for true creativity. Like, when I think about the AI tools that are rolling out, I'm like, I completely trust those in the hands of Gabe Whaley at Mischievous. Like, I think that, like, when someone who comes up with completely novel ideas, just has an extra tool in the tool chest, there's going to be interesting stuff, but just acting as a wrapper around it is going to be a little bit tricky.

• 52:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the question, so, so going back to Absurd, the YC company. There was a time when like the D to C style of doing a website really hit. Consumers would see it and you know, these brands were like simple. They had a distinct style, right? Product on this sort of like colored background and consumers responded really well to it for a decent amount of time, right? Kind of the same period that we've been in like the cinematic launch video era.

• 52:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:52Jordi Hays?

  And then eventually people just stopped responding that well to it because it no longer says, sends the signal like this is a thoughtful person that's trying to stand out. It's just becomes, you know, everything becomes that way. And then it became easier to get a response by going totally the other way and coming across like you were more almost vintage.

• 53:13John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very narrow. It's a very narrow arbitrage.

• 53:19John Coogan?

  But the timeline isn't turmoil on threads because PayPal and Wise are taking shots at each other. Did you see this? PayPal said normalize sending money instead of memes and got 9,000 likes on threads. A real ripper over there. I didn't realize how.

• 53:36Jordi Hays?

  Connor Hayes. Connor Hayes is cooking.

• 53:38John Coogan?

  He's cooking and brands are really going wild over there. And Wise says normalize sending money with transparent fees. Oh, dog session. It's very funny. This is so like 2015 Twitter coded. Like I feel like brands have not been.

• 53:54Jordi Hays?

  I put this in, it reminded me of when like it was Coke and Pepsi saying like wag me.

• 53:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, like the metaverse.

• 54:01Jordi Hays?

  Hey friend.

• 54:03John Coogan?

  They're, they're, they're having fun for sure.

• 54:04Jordi Hays?

  Wow, this is great.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  But first, let me tell you about Google AI Studio, the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini chat with models, vibe code, monitor usage.

• 54:15John Coogan?

  You can try Nano Banana, you can talk to Gemini live and continue.

• 54:18Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of ads.

• 54:20John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 54:20Jordi Hays?

  Mika Amar made potentially the product of the year. We will be doing awards later this year. She made a Chrome extension that hides all website content except ads.

• 54:31John Coogan?

  This is amazing. I love this so much.

• 54:35Jordi Hays?

  I need a link here. I want to start running it.

• 54:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's remarkable. The inverse ad blocker. And some of these websites, wow, some of these websites are so chock full of ads. I wonder which, what website these are.

• 54:49Jordi Hays?

  Display ads.

• 54:51John Coogan?

  Also, it looks like it's something in German, maybe, or something? I don't know.

• 54:55Jordi Hays?

  Did you, uh, did you hear that yesterday Paxos mistaken mistakenly minted three hundred trillion of their stable coins?

• 55:06John Coogan?

  I am not, I did not follow that at all. Exactly what happened?

• 55:10Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, stablecoin issuers like Paxos and Circle and Tether, they mint new stablecoins.

• 55:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, they had an internal error, apparently, that, and they, they, it sounds like it was a fat finger. They, they accidentally minted three hundred trillion, uh, in their PYUSD, uh, their stablecoin.

• 55:30John Coogan?

  Did this like crash their market or something? I wonder what happened here?

• 55:33Jordi Hays?

  No, I think they were, they, they were, uh, Paxos immediately identified the error and burned the excess.

• 55:39John Coogan?

  Okay. It's resolved. Yeah, they said that there's, uh, no security breach, customer funds are safe, they've addressed the root cause. But how fat of a finger do you have to add? Like, I imagine like four extra zeros?

• 55:50Jordi Hays?

  Maybe the dev like fell asleep on the keyboard moment?

• 55:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't exactly.

• 55:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Joey says slight rounding error. Don't ask about the dollar backing. Yeah, so, so people, people are, like, people are basically pushing back and be like, okay, like, you were able to just create three hundred trillion dollars on chain.

• 56:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 56:10Jordi Hays?

  What, what was it backed by? Or, or is it actually, is there some sort of, uh, disconnect?

• 56:16John Coogan?

  Maybe they bought three hundred trillion of USD.

• 56:18Jordi Hays?

  Glad they figured it out.

• 56:19John Coogan?

  Maybe they bought three hundred trillion of treasuries, you know? Well, before we move on, let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands.

• 56:31Jordi Hays?

  Born in Texas, in a Texas town of less than a thousand, writes the most iconic rock album of the past fifty years. Quits music before its release, becomes electrical engineer for AMD. Makes it to Sony's Vice President of Technical Standards, helps create Blu-ray, doesn't elaborate.

• 56:48John Coogan?

  What a wild, what a wild life story. A true, like, you can just do things. It's never too late to, like, just completely switch gears. This is James Williamson of The Stooges?

• 57:00Jordi Hays?

  I never knew this story.

• 57:01John Coogan?

  I, me either. I don't, I'm not even really familiar with who The Stooges are. Look at this guy, American guitarist. What, what, what's the biggest song from The Stooges?

• 57:10Jordi Hays?

  We need to, we need to convince the new, the younger generation that this is actually the path that you want to go on in life. Like, go on a short but generational run as a musician, and then go work in, go work in tech.

• 57:22John Coogan?

  Let's get 100 gags in OpenAI or something. That's the move.

• 57:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, breaking news.

• 57:28John Coogan?

  We got some massive news.

• 57:29Jordi Hays?

  Hit, get that gong ready. Julius AI is now GDPR compliant. Perfect timing with, uh, perfect timing with Europeans getting back from summer holidays.

• 57:42John Coogan?

  Oh, that's huge.

• 57:43Jordi Hays?

  They can now get access to the AI data analyst that is Julius.

• 57:46John Coogan?

  There's more Julius news in here somehow, somewhere. I gotta go deeper, but, uh...

• 57:50Jordi Hays?

  Dean Ball says, "Could I, like, make a tax deductible donation to the OpenAI nonprofit?"

• 57:57John Coogan?

  We've been joking about this.

• 57:58Jordi Hays?

  Just curious.

• 57:59John Coogan?

  I think you can. Uh, Alexander Burger says, "True story, OpenAI once came up on the checkout screen of my Safeway as the local nonprofit to donate to." I think that's, that's gotta be a joke, right?

• 58:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's gotta be a joke.

• 58:13John Coogan?

  But maybe, maybe it's just like a random, they pick a random nonprofit or something? I don't know. But, uh, yes, you should definitely donate to OpenAI nonprofit because they'll probably spin out another for-profit. That's my, that's my hottest take, is that, uh, we're, we're getting a...

• 58:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, being a donor in the nonprofit does, certainly does not guarantee you equity in spinouts.

• 58:35John Coogan?

  No, but...

• 58:36Jordi Hays?

  Seen that with PT and Elon and others.

• 58:39John Coogan?

  But, uh, you, it's probably a strong badge of honor. You're on the Wikipedia page if you're a co-founder of the nonprofit, which is good.

• 58:45Jordi Hays?

  What about if you're just a donor?

• 58:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, you gotta really, uh, you gotta, you gotta post a screenshot of an email, screenshot of a receipt. I donated before they invented AGI or something.

• 58:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this is cool. The Mint is making some new coins showcasing innovation from each state. There are four ones next year, according to Sheal, uh, including Steve Jobs, uh, for California. They're doing Dr. Norman Borla, Borlo?

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  Cray won supercomputer for Wisconsin.

• 59:15John Coogan?

  Do you know who these guys are?

• 59:16Jordi Hays?

  Steve Jobs for California and Minnesota with mobile refrigeration.

• 59:20John Coogan?

  That's a huge breakthrough.

• 59:21Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for mobile refrigeration.

• 59:23John Coogan?

  I know the Cray supercomputer and then obviously Steve Jobs. What a, what a great coin.

• 59:28Jordi Hays?

  How much do you, I wondered, I wonder Tyler, can you find out how many of the Steve Jobs coins are gonna make? Because I feel like these things could instantly trade at like a hundred times.

• 59:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I'll look that up. And then also Norman Borla was an agronomist, agriculture guy. And he kind of did a lot of stuff that influenced the, the green revolution.

• 59:47John Coogan?

  He, he, he aura farmed farming.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:50John Coogan?

  He was a literal aura farmer. I love it. Uh, Rune was clapping back at George Hots. We read George Hots' pathetic losers blog yesterday, which was, uh, very black pilling. Uh, Rune says, contrary to all this, it's completely fine to go work in technology or anywhere for that matter and not really give a damn. It is not from the benevolence of the SAS founder, the currency trader, or GPT rapper that we expect our dinner, but from regard for their, to their own self-interest. And Reed says, wow, his website is very negative. And Rune says, feels like George Hots is a zealot who has produced far less value than his clearly exceptional skills as an engineer should suggest.

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  But George Hots can do whatever he wants. That's the beauty of, of the free market. He can go and, and be a thinker. He can, he can advocate for different things. He can open source software. Uh, what, uh, Tyler, what, how, how have you been reacting to the, to the George Hots news? Do you think that you're, uh, you're, you, you expect that AGI will come from a corporation? Therefore it's worth, uh, it's worth it to be a corporate bagman?

• 1:00:59Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm definitely pro corporation.

• 1:01:01John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  Um, but also I'm kind of a George Hots truther, you know, I, I think he has a lot of good takes.

• 1:01:06John Coogan?

  He does. He does have a lot of good takes.

• 1:01:08Speaker 02

  Um, he's pretty goaded in general.

• 1:01:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, I'm excited, uh, to see what he does next. Um, he's always working on fun projects. Hopefully there's something new dropping soon. But first, let me tell you about 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.

• 1:01:28Jordi Hays?

  People were having a lot of conversations surrounding OpenAI's numbers from the Financial Times. Of course, they have 800 million weekly active users. 5% of those are paying 40 million. 13 billion in ARR, which implies a $325 annual ARPU, or $27 a month per paying user. And this post went pretty viral. Google would turn 800 million users into 32 billion of revenue.

• 1:02:00John Coogan?

  Is that just based on their current revenue and their current user base? Because you have to think like Google's like so much more heavily monetized. That the gap between 13 billion and 32 billion, it's not as much as I feel like it should be based on how young ChatGPT is like they don't like you can't actually advertise on it yet. Like they don't have an ads product. And so it's pretty remarkable that they're monetizing at the rate that they are already. That was my takeaway from this. Because Google's been grinding the the ads product for 20 years now.

• 1:02:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, and I think what what Malte was meaning to say is that he's it follows it up. He says the tweet was meant to say you can run this into a profitable business.

• 1:02:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:44Jordi Hays?

  I expect value per user is going to be higher than Google.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, because OpenAI is making 13 billion revenue but burning like 20, right? And so you add those together, you get about 33 billion in revenue to to fully offset the burn, which is kind of like exactly Google's monetization rate. And so if you monetize the time and the products that like similarly, you get to break even pretty quickly.

• 1:03:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and and and OpenAI is projecting to get to 100 billion of revenue.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  The projections are crazy. We should go through those. Doomslide says extremely polite thread by Epoch. OpenAI's projection implies it gobbling up about half of all software revenue by 2028. We are going to be joined by Marc Benioff in just a few minutes, who of course captures a lot of that software revenue already.

• 1:03:34Jordi Hays?

  But gobbles up gobble is gobbles up the right way to do it? Or is it creating new software spend, right? If if OpenAI can build consumer agents, if they can monetize.

• 1:03:50Jordi Hays?

  Product discovery, right, which are clearly planning to do. They hired the person that built Facebook ads, right?

• 1:03:58Jordi Hays?

  I, it's like they're, they're creating new software revenue that rep, you know, basically money that wasn't being spent on software that will now go to software. They're going to be creating a massive ads business. They're going to be capturing a ton. They have partnership with Walmart that they announced. I think it was Monday. If I'm sure they'll announce a big partnership with Amazon. They have a partnership with Shopify. They will flip the switch and start to take a percentage of all the transactions that they're already driving. So I think that of course, the hundred billion in a few years is ludicrous, but I don't know that it's impossible.

• 1:04:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Epoch AI says one bubble, one way bubbles pop. A technology doesn't deliver value as quickly as investors bet it will. In light of that, it is notable that OpenAI is projecting historically unprecedented revenue growth from 10 billion to 100 billion over the next three years. It took Nvidia, something like seven years to go from 10 billion to 100 billion. Meta, Tesla, Amazon, Apple, Walmart, Google. They were all in the six to 10 year camp to actually ramp from 10 to 100. And OpenAI is projecting doing it in three, which is very, very aggressive, very, very aggressive indeed.

• 1:05:17John Coogan?

  But yes, I agree. There's, there's a, there's a huge amount of software that it feels like it's like instantiated on the fly when you go into the chat GPT app where I was talking to a barber who was saying that chat GPT is phenomenal at creating packing lists for travel. And that's something that it could have been its own SaaS product. There might be a tool out there like packinglistfortravel.com might exist. And now chat GPT just like does that for you on the fly. And it's something that Google used to like route you to that one off piece of software.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  You can do a million of these, like, you know, calculate interest rates, compounding interest, you know, you wind up on those like home mortgage interest calculator websites sometimes, calculate your BMI, if you're into bodybuilding, like, diet plan, like, there's so many different pieces of software out there that are just kind of like getting rolled up, and we haven't really seen like the the SaaS apocalypse come to those like small, long tail pieces of software, but that could be.

• 1:06:25Jordi Hays?

  Now, I think Google, Google has also made a pretty big push into that.

• 1:06:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:30Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, the calculator, like, you're not searching calculator on Google, and then going to a website that's showing you display ads.

• 1:06:37John Coogan?

  It'd be so sad if you were like, I had amazing lifestyle business.

• 1:06:40Jordi Hays?

  Just online calculator.

• 1:06:42John Coogan?

  Calculator.com. It was, it was beautiful thing for 20 years.

• 1:06:46Jordi Hays?

  They also did, they've also done that, they have, or at least they did at one point, like a mortgage, mortgage.

• 1:06:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:54Jordi Hays?

  Calculator.

• 1:06:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, it would just generate, but that wasn't generated on the fly, you know, that was something that they hand coded and then would like route you to.

• 1:07:00Jordi Hays?

  Hand made.

• 1:07:01John Coogan?

  If you, if you searched certain terms, but OpenAI was able to do that in a lot of different ways. We were talking about them expanding into the vice category with adult content, and I was wondering if they could potentially expand into gambling content. So I asked ChatGPT to pretend you are a casino game of roulette. I put 100 on black, spin that wheel, tell me if I won, and ChatGPT says, the ball spins and clatters around the wheel, a tiny metal comet tracing the red-black cosmos. It bounces once, twice, then settles into its fate. Black 17, you win. Your $100 bet doubles to $200. The house sighs, the table cheers, and the wheel spins on, indifferent as ever to human triumph

• 1:07:46John Coogan?

  or ruin. Care to let it ride or cash out and walk away with your small but honorable victory before probability demands its due?

• 1:07:55John Coogan?

  And so, I mean, obviously, that's a joke because they're not getting into gambling. But, you know, they like, ChatGPT can just act as a casino for you. Okay, that's an example of like, software that it can just instantiate. You can just say like, pretend you're generating a scratch ticket and it can just do it.

• 1:08:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the same way you could ask a friend like, percent, pretend to be a blackjack dealer and let's actually play with real money.

• 1:08:16John Coogan?

  With real money, yeah. I don't think they're gonna do that, but yeah.

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  Uh, there's probably an interesting eval where it's like, uh, how close are the actual

• 1:08:22John Coogan?

  Odds?

• 1:08:23Speaker 02

  Like, odds to it, to what it should be?

• 1:08:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, you'd think that it would be able to like, store probabilities in memory and then use Python to generate like, true random numbers. Like, I would imagine that it could get pretty close to reality if it like, wrote some code in the background.

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think it could do that, definitely. Um, and also, even if you just continue the chat and say like, okay, do it again.

• 1:08:41John Coogan?

  Oh, I did.

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  But if you do a new one every time, I wonder how close it gets.

• 1:08:44John Coogan?

  I, I, I did, I did continue the chat. I said, uh, I said, "Let's double down." And it said, "Bold move. The dealer sweeps your chips into the felt circle. $200 on black." "The wheel hums again, a perfect machine of chance, physics, and misplaced confidence." "The ball launches, ricochets, clatters. Red 14." "The house reclaims its offering. Your streak ends where it began." "Roulette, in its quiet cruelty, is a philosopher's game. It teaches the fragility of momentum." "Do you step away enlightened, or spin again for revenge?" What do you think I should do? Should I, should I double down again? Put $200? I, I should go to ChatGPT. I put $2 million down.

• 1:09:26John Coogan?

  Well, whatever you're winning, make sure to pay your sales tax with numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Go to numeralhq.com.

• 1:09:38Jordi Hays?

  Did you see that, uh,

• 1:09:43Jordi Hays?

  Kevin from the office was wearing a Cubitus yesterday?

• 1:09:45John Coogan?

  I didn't, I didn't clock that on the stream.

• 1:09:47Jordi Hays?

  Live.

• 1:09:48John Coogan?

  We should have talked about that.

• 1:09:49Jordi Hays?

  What a dog. The denim, the denim strap Cubitus.

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  Oh, it's a denim strap?

• 1:09:53Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:09:54John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, it's an eighty eight thousand.

• 1:09:56Jordi Hays?

  I can't believe, I honestly can't believe this is a real picture.

• 1:09:59John Coogan?

  It's such a great pick for that character. It's so funny in so many ways. It's a very expensive watch, but at the same time, it's a watch that's not really loved by the watch lovers. And so it's, it's sort of like cringey in certain ways, but that's exactly the character that he was trying to play. It really is an incredible amount of detail that went into this performance. Uh, really, uh, really a royal flush by, by the team behind this. So congratulations.

• 1:10:25Jordi Hays?

  Nick Carter says, the government that I pay forty percent of my income to has been shut for three weeks and nothing in my life has changed.

• 1:10:32John Coogan?

  It's a rabbit staring in the mirror. Yeah, it is odd, but, uh, I mean, the reason is that the government is not, it is shut down, but most of the government agencies have like six to eight weeks of, of cash, remember?

• 1:10:45Jordi Hays?

  I'm glad they have runway.

• 1:10:47John Coogan?

  They, they have runway. They have runway. Maybe, maybe they'll have to call SoftBank and say, hey, we, we need a bridge. You can, you can take twenty percent of the, of the United States government. Um, well, uh, there's other news from Deutsche Bank. European spending on ChatGPT has stalled since May, DB Data Insights. Uh, I think we all know what's going on there.

• 1:11:07Jordi Hays?

  Summer.

• 1:11:08John Coogan?

  Summer, baby.

• 1:11:09Jordi Hays?

  Great summer.

• 1:11:10John Coogan?

  Beach season. You don't need to get anything.

• 1:11:12Jordi Hays?

  You don't need chat.

• 1:11:13John Coogan?

  You can use the, you don't need reasoning models to tell you.

• 1:11:16Jordi Hays?

  Saint Tropez.

• 1:11:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, where to park your yacht. You can, you can, you can.

• 1:11:20Jordi Hays?

  Ask your butler.

• 1:11:21John Coogan?

  With the, with the free tier. The free tier is more than enough when you're hanging out in Monaco.

• 1:11:26Jordi Hays?

  Um, yeah, I, that, that was my initial read on this is that you can't, uh, read too much into it. But it certainly is not good.

• 1:11:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:37Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 1:11:39John Coogan?

  You'll be really interesting. Um, I mean, uh, I would love to look at the ramp data on, uh, ChatGPT spend across ramp customers, whether that's still going up. Because I have this thesis that a lot of the paid subscriptions are essentially like prosumer work. They're, they're expensive, they're being expensed, basically. I think that, uh, for the general average person. They are very much just using chat GPT on the free tier because $200 a month is a lot. Even $20 a month is still like well above Netflix and people see it as a productivity tool. So they either figure out a way to expense it or they or they and I wonder, I wonder if that if that adoption rate is kind of plateauing in the in the, you know, broader, you know,

• 1:12:24John Coogan?

  ramp customer base. That'd be interesting to look at.

• 1:12:29John Coogan?

  What else is going on? Starlink is live on United. This is great news. I wonder when this will actually be fully live. I imagine that it's going to be a slow rollout and they will work through, you know, one plane at a time, but it's now live on board the first mainline aircraft. And if you've ever used Starlink on a on a plane, it's remarkable. JetSuite X, a lot of private jets have them and you can FaceTime on them and stuff, although I doubt you could FaceTime on a United flight. It'd be somewhat disruptive to people, but whatever they do, hopefully they use 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.

• 1:13:12Jordi Hays?

  What's that company that's competing with Starlink?

• 1:13:16John Coogan?

  ASTS. It is, it has retail army behind it and

• 1:13:21Jordi Hays?

  Down 5% today.

• 1:13:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, the stock's been all over the place. They don't have revenue yet and so it's it's it's hard to exactly value, but they have a lot of contracts with cellular providers and the cellular providers don't want to be completely locked. They would prefer a duopoly. And so I think they're willing to do contracts ahead of schedule, invest, do whatever it takes to get a second constellation up there. We did see Amazon yesterday talking about product Kupier, which is another Leo satellite constellation that could potentially be a rival to Starlink. But I mean, man, the vertical integration at SpaceX is hard to compete with when you think about them just putting up so many of them.

• 1:13:57Jordi Hays?

  And Amazon has their play too, right?

• 1:13:59John Coogan?

  Amazon or Google? Google had balloons for a while.

• 1:14:02Jordi Hays?

  Satellite.

• 1:14:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, Kupier, that's what we talked about yesterday. Well, our next guest is joining us in just a few minutes. The timeline remains in turmoil over Nikita Beer. Nikita said, "At this point, I think Creator Payouts does more harm than good, and we need to off-ramp to a different system." And Elon said, "No, the issue is that we're underpaying and not allocating payment accurately enough. YouTube does a much better job." And so, Polymarket put up a market for Nikita Beer out as head of product at X this year. And Nikita said, "This is how I win." So, he is in the trenches.

• 1:14:40Jordi Hays?

  Now he can hedge.

• 1:14:42John Coogan?

  Now he can hedge, oh yeah, I guess he could. He has the most inside information here.

• 1:14:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, going back to our conversation, I think it was earlier this week, on posts are so easy. Everybody that posts on X knows that oftentimes their best post took the least amount of effort. Whereas on the YouTube creator's side, for creators that are actually building a business, the average YouTube creator probably is inversely correlated in that some of my best videos have taken the most amount of effort. Like, my top five videos took the most amount of effort. Some creative spark, and then a ton of investment in everything from production to the editing process. So, again, I think YouTube creators certainly deserve to be paid well.

• 1:15:29Jordi Hays?

  I've never felt, as a relatively small creator on X, that I should be paid.

• 1:15:35John Coogan?

  There's also the factor of allocating payment accurately. That is very difficult.

• 1:15:41Jordi Hays?

  It's so hard, yeah, what is the value of, is a Jeremy Gaffon post that gets 30,000 views, that's a lot more valuable to me than a meme that gets a million impressions, right?

• 1:15:56John Coogan?

  And so, if a Jeremy Gaffon YouTube video were to go up, and YouTube were to run a mid-roll video ad in that video, it's very clear that however much the advertisers paid for that specific ad in that specific video, it's very easy to allocate payment based on that. If you're scrolling a timeline and you see an ad here and then you see a post and then you see an ad here, it's very hard to say this ad was targeted at the reader of this particular post. And so you run into these challenges and that's why TikTok's embrace the creator fund, which is just distributed based on impressions. But impressions don't quite weight the quality of the audience, which is obviously incredibly important

• 1:16:41John Coogan?

  because advertisers want to get their message in front of customers at particular moments when they're primed to hear the message.

• 1:16:50Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:16:50John Coogan?

  So.

• 1:16:52Jordi Hays?

  Hugo Capital bloke says the AI capex trade can't keep going up 2% every day on partnerships, projections and information articles using 2030 estimates. And of course, the AI capex trade actually can. Foxconn pops today, right? Based on just the news that they had a conversation with OpenAI?

• 1:17:12John Coogan?

  Yes, so the news, Foxconn jumped 8% based on this. The Foxconn shares rise after chairman says he met with OpenAI, plans Nvidia next. So it's not actually a full deal yet. Frenzied investing in AI has fueled talk of a bubble, but the chairman of Taiwan listed Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics maker, says there's much further to go. The application of AI is just the beginning. Foxconn's young Liu told local reporters on the sidelines of an event on Wednesday, expressing confidence in the market's potential to keep going from strength to strength. He also said that Foxconn had met with OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman

• 1:17:54John Coogan?

  at the Taiwanese company's headquarters to discuss potential future collaborations. And so the stock jumped 8%.

• 1:18:02Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for discussing future collaborations.

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I mean AMD shares jumped 24% after the chip company announced a multi-billion dollar tie up with OpenAI earlier this month. Another multi-billion dollar deal with Broadcom. Similarly, same company. So I don't know. Sam is vertically integrating like crazy. We haven't seen this with a software company so fast. I mean, Google eventually did it, but over a 20 year period. And Sam is just saying, I want, you know, multiple data center providers, multiple clouds, multiple chips, multiple fabs. Like he's really going deep into the supply chain and creating kind of a duopoly at every single phase. And that's really what I'm.

• 1:18:44Jordi Hays?

  Think about how much pressure there's going to be on the hardware launch. Like, people are already gonna, the average person is gonna be rooting for it to fail.

• 1:18:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:52Jordi Hays?

  And then actually delivering enough value to earn a place.

• 1:18:58John Coogan?

  Are you talking about like consumer hardware?

• 1:18:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Johnny I.

• 1:19:00John Coogan?

  Oh, because, yeah, that Foxconn would be a logical partner.

• 1:19:03Jordi Hays?

  That's what I assume the conversation is about.

• 1:19:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. I was thinking about like what a head fake it would be to be, you know, Sam's been saying like, it's not a phone. And he's almost been saying like, it's not a wearable, like it's not directly competitive with anything that's out there. Like, what if it is just like an Amazon Echo? Like, what if it's a direct competitor to like the Alexa? Like, that's actually kind of a great landing zone, I think. The more I was talking about Alexa and Echo, I was thinking that like, yeah, being able to talk to an L L M and that can, like, it's a, it's a much lower stakes environment to add, add on. Like, I think a lot of people, when they think about their, their phone, they're like, I'm tied to iMessage. And so I also have the Mac because I'm tied to the phone.

• 1:19:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:45John Coogan?

  And then I also have the Apple TV because I'm tied to the Mac. But I don't feel fully tied to Apple such that I have to have Apple HomePods. And the HomePod was not a massive success. Because people are like, well, I'll suffer through Sonos or I'll get a Google Nest thermostat. People have been a lot more open to having an Amazon Alexa and then also, or Google Home and then also an iPhone.

• 1:20:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, part of the thing with Alexa is I bought an Alexa in college because it was a decent speaker that was cheap.

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:18Jordi Hays?

  And I maybe tried to use the feature, order me some paper towels once. And so my, yeah, I guess with OpenAI, it's like, if it's just a puck that sits in your kitchen, around your home and is listening all the time.

• 1:20:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:32Jordi Hays?

  Is that really gonna be valuable, more valuable than your phone? Part of the draw with Alexa was, you know, you get a decent speaker out of it, at least can.

• 1:20:41John Coogan?

  I mean, OpenAI could figure out how to produce a decent speaker at Foxconn, I'm sure.

• 1:20:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but then it's like, is it even really worth doing to go and just compete in the, in the like? Low margin speaker market.

• 1:20:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, Meta was trying with the Meta Portal. Do you remember that device? It was a camera that would sit on top of the TV.

• 1:21:03Jordi Hays?

  Sonos is a $2 billion market cap company now. Should OpenAI just buy it?

• 1:21:08John Coogan?

  Equus Global says, Sonos plus OpenAI. I've heard rumors. I don't know where you'd be hearing those rumors, but I don't know. Sonos.

• 1:21:17Jordi Hays?

  I wouldn't be, I mean, I wouldn't be surprised. It's like they have, they did almost 2 billion of revenue.

• 1:21:23John Coogan?

  OpenAI is great at software. Sonos is great at hardware. The, I mean, the speakers look great.

• 1:21:30Jordi Hays?

  Hardware.

• 1:21:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, the speakers look great. And I don't know, there just is a question about like, like if you're, if you're entering these like hyper competitive markets, do you want to go for the most competitive of the phone? Sam Altman certainly indicated that he might not pull.

• 1:21:46Jordi Hays?

  Hello in the chats. How much paper towels does Jordi?

• 1:21:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, Jordi's obsessed with paper towels, specifically paper towels.

• 1:21:53Jordi Hays?

  I'll be honest, I have not bought paper towels in at least five years.

• 1:21:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:58Jordi Hays?

  But when I think about buying things in the home setting, that's an item.

• 1:22:04John Coogan?

  You specifically want the Lindiest paper towels possible, like paper towels from, from a company started in the year, you know, 1000 AD or something. That's like your dream. You're always on the hunt for a, for an old school paper towel manufacturer.

• 1:22:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I want to know what tree it came from.

• 1:22:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:22:25Jordi Hays?

  Continuing, Vic says, Derek Thompson said yesterday, OpenAI is an amazing company and these are impressive numbers. Also, a company losing 20 billion a year with 13 billion of revenue, making business deals that project hundreds of billions in future spending with a private valuation of half a trillion is mental.

• 1:22:46Jordi Hays?

  You would think, you would think, John, wouldn't you think that at a certain point, people would stop?

• 1:22:54Jordi Hays?

  If a company, it's one thing to be super bearish on a company that has massive losses and very minimal revenue. It's much harder, given the history of, of companies that are in capital wars, like, you know, look back at Uber and Lyft. The big critique of Uber was it's losing money. It's never going to make money.

• 1:23:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:11Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:23:12John Coogan?

  Have you seen Uber's market cap recently? I think it's like 200 billion.

• 1:23:18Jordi Hays?

  TK.

• 1:23:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, 192 billion and a 15 P E ratio. Like this business matured and is doing fantastically. It's pretty, pretty remarkable. Like they very much like fought the capital war and won. Like it's, I mean, it's like a testament to like they, you know, they, they, they went out. I mean, Lyft is an eight billion market cap. There was a time when those were, when the spread between Uber and Lyft was like, you know, two X, three X, four X.

• 1:23:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:50John Coogan?

  And now it's, uh, and now it's what 20 X or something like that.

• 1:23:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's, uh, I just, I just think that the company's losing money. Hence it's crazy that it's valued at a lot is just not a good argument. Uh, Vic says, stop looking at spreadsheets. Go try out Codex if anything, they're undervalued.

• 1:24:11John Coogan?

  Stop looking at spreadsheets. Go try out Adio, custom relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. You can get started for free. Also, it's the one year anniversary of the first playable chromatic going on display at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo. This year they're returning with the first playable M.

• 1:24:33Jordi Hays?

  Portland has a retro gaming expo.

• 1:24:36John Coogan?

  That's extremely on brand.

• 1:24:37Jordi Hays?

  Extremely Portland. Got to give them credit for that.

• 1:24:40John Coogan?

  This seems, maybe we should dispatch Tyler to the Portland Retro Gaming Expo to go try the first playable M64.

• 1:24:47Jordi Hays?

  That'd be cool. I think we'll be able to get one of these pretty soon.

• 1:24:49John Coogan?

  I'm really excited.

• 1:24:50Jordi Hays?

  We can have Tyler can just spend a whole show.

• 1:24:53John Coogan?

  Beat GoldenEye.

• 1:24:53Jordi Hays?

  Playing the mod retro.

• 1:24:55John Coogan?

  I wonder how fast you could speed run GoldenEye. Games back then were so short, they just didn't make 100 hour games. So, um, people would, people would speed through them.

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  This is, uh, um, what else is here? How'd you sleep last night? I got a ton of sleep, but I slept poorly because I'm not feeling too well. I'm under the weather. I got a 61% on quality, 79 overall. Go to eightsleep.com, get a pod five.

• 1:25:22Jordi Hays?

  My tracker got messed up because of

• 1:25:26John Coogan?

  seven hours and forty minutes.

• 1:25:27Jordi Hays?

  Because it's a little one, so it's not.

• 1:25:28John Coogan?

  Oh, we gotta hit the gong again for Rahul and Julius because you can now connect Julius to your Databricks. Let's go.

• 1:25:38Jordi Hays?

  Hit that. This is a post Matt Slotnick posted on July 16, 2025. Bull case for nothing ever happens is that OpenAI runs its entire business on Salesforce and Slack. And this was in a blog posted and OpenAI employee posted. They said, an unusual part of OpenAI is that everything, and I mean everything, runs on Slack. There is no email. I maybe received ten emails in my entire time there. If you aren't organized, you will find this incredibly distracting. If you curate your channels and notifications, you can make it pretty workable. We gotta ask Benioff, does anything ever happen?

• 1:26:17John Coogan?

  And which way, which way does the deal go? Because Salesforce has a deal with OpenAI. Everyone assumes it's to buy a lot of tokens from OpenAI, but maybe it's a trade deal. You get, you get your Salesforce installation, the money, it's one of those circular deals. Salesforce for tokens.

• 1:26:35Jordi Hays?

  Zephyr is sharing Broadcom's fifth customer isn't Apple or XAI, it's Anthropic. They won't design a new chip. They will be buying TPUs from Broadcom.

• 1:26:45John Coogan?

  That's very interesting that they're not buying them directly.

• 1:26:47Jordi Hays?

  Expect Anthropic to announce a funding round from Google soon.

• 1:26:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Anthropic thing has to heat up soon because Google, like, it feels like Google might be doing something. That's what Zephyr at least thinks. But then you also have Amazon partnering with Anthropic for a long time and probably ramping that relationship up. It seems like it would make a lot of sense for them to ramp that relationship up again. And then some folks on the timeline were talking about how, how Apple might make a big acquisition, but maybe Anthropic's too big to make, but maybe even just a deal there would make a lot of sense.

• 1:27:24Jordi Hays?

  So Google already invested in Anthropic?

• 1:27:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:27:26Jordi Hays?

  They own fourteen percent.

• 1:27:28John Coogan?

  That's a lot. It's pretty remarkable.

• 1:27:30Jordi Hays?

  How much does Amazon own?

• 1:27:31John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:27:34John Coogan?

  Look it up. But while you do, let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They are multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions.

• 1:27:44Jordi Hays?

  Amazon owns an estimated 15 to 19% of Anthropic.

• 1:27:48John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:27:49Jordi Hays?

  And it's so funny to me, based on the way on Anthropic's brand and approach.

• 1:27:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:56Jordi Hays?

  And all these different things, the way that that you have OpenAI's cap table, which is owned by a nonprofit, and the employees own a ton, and then the VCs are like at the very bottom, right?

• 1:28:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:07Jordi Hays?

  Just carving out a little bit. Meanwhile, Anthropic is like Amazon, Google. It's big.

• 1:28:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:13Jordi Hays?

  Basically.

• 1:28:15John Coogan?

  Tyler, did you see this Eliezer Yudkowsky post? He quote posted barely AI, the Financial Times projected OpenAI's cap table following its for-profit transition. Microsoft gets 30%, OpenAI employees get 30%, OpenAI nonprofit gets between 20 and 30%. SoftBank gets 10, and then the VCs get less than 10%. And Eliezer said, I wonder how the financial magnitude of this theft compares to the total amount of theft in the 21st century so far. Wouldn't surprise me if it's a majority. Is he talking about that he wants the VCs to have a larger ownership stake?

• 1:28:50Jordi Hays?

  I assume, yeah.

• 1:28:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, he must be just really, because typically a company of this, at this scale, VCs could own 50, 60%. But they're sort of getting hosed. And so Eliezer's standing up for the venture capitalists.

• 1:29:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he must be speaking up for Josh.

• 1:29:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would imagine. Just, just bigger ownership stakes would have been more. I don't know if it's technically theft, but I mean, maybe he's using that kind of in a loose, in a loose way.

• 1:29:16Jordi Hays?

  I think we need some kind of Robin Hood figure to, to, to take from the rich and give to thrive.

• 1:29:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. Take, take the, the nonprofit shares and just distribute them to the venture capitalists. That is probably what he wants. That's what he's advocating for. Did you see Flock Alpha launch today? We should pull this video up at some point. But they did it. Flock launched a. American-made public safety drone response system. We were talking to the CEO of Flock, Garrett, about the role of drones, how you could potentially call a drone to escort you home, how you could dispatch a drone to an emergency situation, start monitoring the situation. And they did it and they're launching Flock Alpha today. Raul says, "Five

• 1:30:03John Coogan?

  years ago, I stood on the rooftop of my police station and imagined this moment. There's no better feeling than seeing a vision come to life." I do not have kids yet, which is a good point. And so, these can go on the top of all the police stations. The police stations, as we talked to Garrett about, are already geographically distributed across a city in a very equidistant way. And so, as long as the drones can get from one station to the other, or halfway from one to the other, you can basically have full coverage of everything. And so, can read license plates.

• 1:30:38Jordi Hays?

  Has there been a black mirror on drones, you know, drones for police that go rogue?

• 1:30:47John Coogan?

  I'm sure there's been some stuff, but this is, yeah, I mean, surveillance generally.

• 1:30:53Jordi Hays?

  Nikunj says, "Accidentally said sales instead of distribution and they kicked me out of SF."

• 1:31:00John Coogan?

  Gotta use the lingo.

• 1:31:02Jordi Hays?

  Sales is evergreen.

• 1:31:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I thought it was growth, though. People say distribution now? I thought people would, I thought sales was fully rebranded to growth. People would be like, "Yeah, I'm on the growth team." And it's like, you're on the sales team.

• 1:31:16Jordi Hays?

  I don't think it ever.

• 1:31:17John Coogan?

  No, now it's on distribution? Well, oh, well.

• 1:31:20Jordi Hays?

  We gotta ask Benioff about sales specifically. Like, what reps are actually outperforming today? Is it the reps that have adopted the most AI and have just increased volume? Or is it reps doing things the old-fashioned way, which is like, actually getting to know existing and potential clients on a deep level and developing trust and making sure they're getting great service, et cetera, et cetera?

• 1:31:52Jordi Hays?

  Karina Nygen says, "After a formative time at OpenAI, I'm launching Maison AGI, a fashion house creating cultural artifacts for the AI era. Our first collection, Relic of Thought, is a collaboration between Ilya Sutskever, featuring his original artworks alongside his signature hat modeled after his iconic head."

• 1:32:11John Coogan?

  They're actually doing this, wow.

• 1:32:14Jordi Hays?

  Do they have a picture yet?

• 1:32:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, we have to pull this video up at some point.

• 1:32:17Jordi Hays?

  "It is a study in conviction and the clarity of vision that gives thought its form. We believe we're living through something extraordinary that deserves to be remembered, not in research papers or technical model cards, but in tangible objects we can hold, wear and pass down. Working alongside some of the world's brightest researchers, building Claude and ChatGPT, I've come to realize they're among the most creative minds alive. Research at its best is an act of imagination, the ability to glimpse what doesn't yet exist and then build toward it. Many of them remain unseen, even as their work quietly reshapes our future. Though AGI progress can feel incomprehensible from the outside, its story is deeply human, full of curiosity, conviction and creation. We're bridging that world with the creatives who give form to ideas.

• 1:33:02Jordi Hays?

  This may be humanity's last time to create a handcrafted project before what we build surpasses us. Each collection is also a message to superintelligence itself, that we cared and that we tried to make beauty out of understanding."

• 1:33:17John Coogan?

  Can we play this video? I want to see how they actually launched this. Karina Wynn laughed at OpenAI to do this. That's a bold move, you know, been on a tear, you know, and now launching an entirely new.

• 1:33:29Jordi Hays?

  Bold to be post-economic and pursue the arts.

• 1:33:32John Coogan?

  Yes, you're right.

• 1:33:33Jordi Hays?

  Become a patron of the arts?

• 1:33:34John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 1:33:35Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of a classic playbook, John.

• 1:33:37John Coogan?

  It is, it is, it is, it is. We'll try and pull that up. In the meantime, let me tell you about adquick.com, out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad-buying across the globe. The chat has been on fire. Marc Benioff is a little delayed. We're going to remix the schedule a little bit. He will be joining later the stream. Taylor Hodge has a great take. He says that he's going to use a trained falcon to take down the flock safety narc drone. I wouldn't be surprised if we see a little bit of that. Hopefully not. I think that's wildly illegal. You can't just, you can't just sabotage police equipment. You have to take it to the voting booth, Taylor.

• 1:34:21Jordi Hays?

  What if it's flying over your private property?

• 1:34:24John Coogan?

  I mean, I'm sure that there are, what is it, the?

• 1:34:27Jordi Hays?

  You train the Falcon, you train the Falcon to fly like low enough that, you know, there must be some law that like, if it's within, you know, a hundred feet of the ground, it's fair game to take it out?

• 1:34:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. The, I think that, you know, the police can drive up and down your street.

• 1:34:42Jordi Hays?

  Drones have to have search warrants to go fly around your property?

• 1:34:47John Coogan?

  Probably inside your house, but not like on the street. A police can, a police officer can just drive down your street, no problem, shine the lights, say, oh, is anybody breaking in? Like, you know, that's, that's helpful in many ways. You want that. You want like a secure environment, ideally. This is why we live in a democracy. We elect the mayor.

• 1:35:04Jordi Hays?

  Imagine if the, the, the UK right now, let's, let's just be real, be very, you know, I don't believe there's a lot of free speech left in the, in the UK. Imagine if they had this setup and that you could, if you send the wrong post, a drone is actually at your, at your door.

• 1:35:19John Coogan?

  I think that might be overblown. I don't know. I feel like, who have you talked, have you talked to people in the UK that say it's bad? Or is it all just like American posters who are taking victory laps? Because I love an American victory lap. Don't get me wrong. I will jump on any opportunity to, to wave the American flag.

• 1:35:35Jordi Hays?

  Plenty of posts from people that are based in the UK.

• 1:35:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I got arrested for posting the mid-wit meme about my enemy. And I got, I depicted, I depicted my enemy as this, as the sad Wojak and me as the Chad Wojak and.

• 1:35:51Jordi Hays?

  The trained Falcon taking out the, the drone is just too good.

• 1:35:55John Coogan?

  Be great.

• 1:35:56Jordi Hays?

  The perfect form factor.

• 1:35:57John Coogan?

  Do we have this?

• 1:35:58Jordi Hays?

  We have Dante. Should we start early?

• 1:36:01John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, let's bring in Dante. Speaking of drones, underwater drones, we got Dante from Albacore coming in.

• 1:36:08Jordi Hays?

  Amazing name.

• 1:36:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, great name.

• 1:36:10Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:36:11John Coogan?

  Dante, nice to meet you for joining us.

• 1:36:14Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic, fantastic name. I thought we were out of incredible names, but Albacore is strong.

• 1:36:21John Coogan?

  Albacore is a great one.

• 1:36:22Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing.

• 1:36:23Speaker 05

  All the Lord of the Rings stuff was taken, so we had to get creative.

• 1:36:26Jordi Hays?

  Go into the tuna section.

• 1:36:28John Coogan?

  Do you know the, uh, the headline that, uh, is, is in the, the, the group chat is YC-backed Albacore swims into 6.5 million dollar seed round?

• 1:36:38Jordi Hays?

  I love it. Hit that gong.

• 1:36:40Speaker 05

  We've heard it all. We've heard it all. We love making merit funds.

• 1:36:44Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations. It's great stuff.

• 1:36:47John Coogan?

  So, yeah, take it.

• 1:36:48Jordi Hays?

  Who's in the round?

• 1:36:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, so lots of folks. Um, it was led by Outlander. Uh, we also have our first institutional, thank you Paige and AJ. Um, yeah, our first institutional backer was D3, which is a very drone-focused fund. Um, they're sort of mix of US and, and Ukraine, um, investments. Um, but they, they backed a lot of folks like, uh, NEROS. I've got the.

• 1:37:10John Coogan?

  They made two sequels to D1 Capital. They're on D3 now.

• 1:37:15Jordi Hays?

  We're never gonna run out of names there. You just go to D4 and then D5 and eventually you go to D10, D11.

• 1:37:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. A17Z is gonna be a ripper for sure.

• 1:37:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, who else? Sorry, we got, uh, we interrupted.

• 1:37:30Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, no, all good, all good. Um, yeah, so, uh, Brave Capital, uh, which is a bunch of ex-Ink You Tell people.

• 1:37:36John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:37:36Speaker 05

  Uh, R Squared, which is a national security-focused fund. Uh, managing partner there is a Navy SEAL commander, Rhodes Scholars on multiple national security councils. Um, uh, a lot of different, a lot of different investors. You got Box Group in there, New York.

• 1:37:52John Coogan?

  Oh, I love Box Group.

• 1:37:53Speaker 05

  Yeah. Uh, they've, they've done a lot of defense. I think they, they also did, uh, Mock Industries.

• 1:37:59John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 1:37:59Speaker 05

  Uh, pretty recently. Uh, yeah.

• 1:38:03John Coogan?

  How'd you get into this?

• 1:38:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, so prior to this, I actually started a battery tech company and this was like while I was in college. And really quickly identified, we were working on like power systems that were high performance, but would make batteries for like really sort of complicated use cases last longer. And so that led us to the aerospace and defense market, did a lot of work with drones and started thinking about the power problems there, right? You know, the issue with drones is you're really limited in terms of how far things can go. And that problem just gets harder and harder when you start thinking about the oceans, right? Because oceans are really big. You know, the people talk about in the Indo-Pacific, the tyranny of distance. And so I was at a Shabbat dinner, ran into this guy, John, who I'd known for a while through mutual friends.

• 1:38:51Speaker 05

  Brilliant engineer, can't share too much about what he was doing before this. But he's worked on some major unmanned systems, production type projects. Very knowledgeable about the sector. And I was like, John, why do underwater drones have just like such use cases, right? They're really focused on short range, you know, very human in the loop type of operations. There's nothing like an undersea loitering munition that we have right now. And we really need like longer range capabilities for anything that's happening in the Pacific. So that's what we're working on.

• 1:39:22John Coogan?

  So is that like distinctly positioned against like the Dive LD program from Anduril? Like, how do you see, like, that seems like a bold company to go up with against, you know, it's a great company.

• 1:39:33Speaker 05

  It's my, you mentioned Dive. Yeah, I mean, so actually the founders of Dive were also investors in us really early on, Sam Russo and Bill Lebo. They're super knowledgeable about the space, obviously. I was actually just with them earlier this week in Boston. Yeah, so the Dive platform is focused on going really deep and doing survey type work. We're working on loitering munitions, we're working on stuff that blows up. So you can fit a 250 pound explosive payload on our vehicle and that's enough to do really severe damage to a large surface vessel. And if you're lucky enough to find a submarine to sink that submarine.

• 1:40:07Jordi Hays?

  Wow. What are the kind of, I don't know how much you can share, but like what, what's the goal in terms of? For like the timeline of a loitering munition, you want to go out effectively park it somewhere strategic? And then it's just kind of playing a waiting game before you would want to activate it and have use it for for a certain use case like? How long do you want one of your drones to be deployed without any sort of like human or machine intervention?

• 1:40:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we're targeting 30 days for endurance and 1,000 nautical miles. And to kind of put that in perspective, the dive vehicle, which is, you know, a couple thousand pounds. That's less than a week and a few hundred nautical miles. And as you get to the the size of vehicles that they were building, you know, our vehicle is like two man portable. And our our lead software engineer claims that he can bench one of our vehicles.

• 1:41:02John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:41:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, he's he's really strong.

• 1:41:08John Coogan?

  That's the best news I've heard all day. That's amazing.

• 1:41:12Speaker 05

  Well, he actually, he just got one of his fingers cut off and so not related to his work here. But once his fingers are healed up, he says he's ready to do it.

• 1:41:19Jordi Hays?

  Actually cut off?

• 1:41:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, he works on a tall ship and so, yeah, log fell on his hand. It's a long story.

• 1:41:26Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 1:41:27Speaker 05

  He can still type faster than anyone in his in the office, so.

• 1:41:30Jordi Hays?

  That's you lose a finger, though, that's that's 10,000 aura points.

• 1:41:35John Coogan?

  For sure. That's like eye patch level.

• 1:41:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:38John Coogan?

  You're.

• 1:41:38Speaker 05

  We we docked his salary by 10%.

• 1:41:40John Coogan?

  Oh, stop. That's so rude. Stop it. That's very dark.

• 1:41:44Jordi Hays?

  What what's your path to program of record? How are you attacking?

• 1:41:49Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, so contracting is is changing really, really fast, right? The current administration is doing things very differently and you can get pretty far without a program of record. But I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Defense Autonomy Working Group that that just got released. There's a lot of things that are that are moving through programs like that with with SOCOM. You know, Indo Paycom has various flush funds that are available and we're, you know, we're focused on on really connecting with the operators and making sure that, you know, from the start of. Uh, founding this company, we were really talking with, with end users, the people who are going to be at the tip of the spear. Um, in the Indo-Pacific could be using this. Um, but you also have to go, uh, once you have an understanding of those requirements, you have to go to Congress too.

• 1:42:29Speaker 05

  And so, um, we, we were actually lobbying Congress ourselves, uh, within the first couple of months of starting the company. We've since moved on to, we work with a firm now. Um, but, uh, yeah, you have to basically approach it from all angles and, um, you know, there's also a lot of, you know, FM and FMS interest as well. So, um, can't get too much into specifics there, but, uh, there's a lot of companies that have been really successful, um, with a, a route to commercialization that consists of a number of different buyers and, um, you know, largely speaking, DOD can be, um, really appreciative of, of FMS as well. Um, because that means you can reach larger scale and, um, you know, potentially even battlefield tester systems.

• 1:43:06Jordi Hays?

  Are you guys based in the Gundo?

• 1:43:08Speaker 05

  We are not. We are based in Philadelphia, actually. Isn't there, is there a great robotics program out there? Is that why? So, um, there's a lot of great stuff about Philadelphia. We're super close to Washington DC where a lot of the, um, you know, customers that we'd be speaking with are, are based. Uh, so it's a very quick trip. We can get up here on, you know, very short notice, which is important. Um, there's also a lot of great engineering and industrial talent in Philadelphia. Uh, and so I know there's not like too many hard tech companies that are based here. There's one they got pretty big called Ghost Robotics. They make like robot dogs in the military. Yeah. Um, but we're, we're based in the Pennovation Center right now, which is where Ghost Robotics started.

• 1:43:44Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:43:44Speaker 05

  Um, and we have lots of access to brackish water, just, um, right next to our offices. Um, and yeah, I mean, Philadelphia has a really rich shipbuilding history and, um, you know, recently the, the, uh, naval yard, it's, it's being, um, re, re-industrialized, um, but it's, it's actually not owned by a US company anymore. Uh, and so we want to build the sort of next generation of maritime capabilities in Philadelphia. Um, and, you know, help sort of foster more of that industrial labor force here that's still, you know, really strong.

• 1:44:15Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:44:15Speaker 05

  Does your office have a pool?

• 1:44:18Speaker 05

  So we're getting a giant fish tank and also a turtle, but we don't currently have a pool. We have limited, limited space. Okay.

• 1:44:25Jordi Hays?

  What kind of fish tank do you need to make sure that like a presumably metal drone doesn't, doesn't smash through the glass?

• 1:44:33Speaker 05

  It's gonna be a pretty big fish tank. I don't know. I'd have to look into the specifics more.

• 1:44:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:37John Coogan?

  You gotta call Keith Raboy. He's, he's got a big fish tank.

• 1:44:39Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, he does.

• 1:44:40Speaker 05

  It's good to know.

• 1:44:41John Coogan?

  Famously fish, uh, fish tank build. Uh, well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:44:45Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you. I'm sure you'll be back on soon. Uh, and, uh, congrats on, on the milestone.

• 1:44:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:50Speaker 05

  Yeah. Thank you guys. It's been a pleasure.

• 1:44:51John Coogan?

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

• 1:44:52Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:44:52John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:44:55John Coogan?

  And if you're interested in some hardware for your wrist, head over to get bezel, get bezel.com. Your bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Andrej Karpathy launched a new repo Nano Chat.

• 1:45:09Jordi Hays?

  Repo Alert.

• 1:45:10John Coogan?

  New Repo Alert. Uh, did you see this Tyler?

• 1:45:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It's super cool.

• 1:45:14John Coogan?

  This is among the most unhinged he's ever written. Um, 8,000 lines of code to actually build basically chat GPT from scratch. Is that how I should understand it?

• 1:45:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, um, he, he's done, he's done this whole like a course lecture series on YouTube before.

• 1:45:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:29Speaker 02

  Um, where he goes through like, uh, different parts of how to train a model.

• 1:45:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:33Speaker 02

  Um, and then this is basically kind of all of them together, plus some extra stuff. So it's training the full model. It's doing the pre-train.

• 1:45:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:39Speaker 02

  And it's also doing the RLHF to get it into like, from predict internet text to be like a chat model.

• 1:45:45John Coogan?

  And it's just using open source data sets basically for everything?

• 1:45:48Speaker 02

  I forget the exact name, but there's a, a good like RLHF dataset that you can use to, to get it to become like a chat.

• 1:45:54John Coogan?

  It's pretty remarkable. Is this, so this is mostly for, uh, like educational resources?

• 1:45:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think mostly. I mean, um, like presumably you'd have to run this on a much bigger scale to get like a really kind of capable model.

• 1:46:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:06Speaker 02

  Um, but yeah.

• 1:46:07John Coogan?

  Uh, what, what was your interpretation of the hot take that somebody asked? Curious how much of the code was written by hand? And Andre Karpathy says, good question. It's basically entirely handwritten with tab autocomplete. I tried to use Claude slash codex agents a few times, but they just didn't work well enough at all and net unhelpful. Possibly the repo is too far off the data distribution.

• 1:46:30Speaker 02

  That's kind of interesting. I think part of it is that like the end product of this is like the repo itself. So you want very like nice code that is very readable. It's in his style. I mean, he can like explain everything super easily, which is like a little different from if you're building like actual product or just like a vibe coding thing where the endpoint is just like the interface. It's what you're actually like using where this is like the code itself is the product. So you're it's like you need super nice, you know, formatting and all this like kind of custom stuff.

• 1:47:00John Coogan?

  Do you feel that like the like the whether or not the task is in the data distribution? When you're firing off Claude Code or Codex agents, like are you noticing that it's like, okay, well, clearly, you know, there's plenty of data around how to build like a mobile, a a modal or, you know, some sort of like REST interface. And so it's really good at that. But if you're trying to do something that's, you know, probably a unique problem that there might not be like a direct open source example of like you're going to try and code it from hand?

• 1:47:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's probably true. Like I find it's it's really good at writing React code and like Tailwind CSS components. And then when I try to do some like custom, you know, AWS flow, it's it's a little harder and it just takes longer. But I still find it's it does it very well.

• 1:47:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Jordan, did you see that Tyler Cowen put the timeline in turmoil, taking shots at Europe? So Tyler Cowen, we talked about this yesterday. He said that the European Union is run by people who have incredible depth of knowledge in a bunch of different areas. And if they ran the world, the world would be growing at negative 1% growth and and is a pretty, pretty hot take. Cassie Pritchard said, never understood why people liked this quote, the EU does exist. It is run by people like this and it does not have a negative 1% growth rate. I'd say that's about the typical sharpness of analysis for Tyler Cowen, though, taking shots at Tyler.

• 1:48:31John Coogan?

  Friend of the show and Young Macro says, "Difficult to overstate the extent to which you need to be underexposed to macroeconomic data to think that Tyler Cowen diagnosing Europe's growth as anemic is some sort of contentious statement, or that his negative 1% hyperbole is anything but mild and contextually entirely suitable." Young Macro continues and says- I will defend Tyler Cowen. I will defend Tyler Cowen with my life. "Difficult to overstate the extent to which one's large audience must skew uneducated for this take to pass through with broad-based support. Nothing to do with pedantry. 10 out of 10 pedantic domain experts would say Tyler's quote is quite fine." Tyler Cowen, "There's no way a regular guy would lose to a hobbit in a fight.

• 1:49:15John Coogan?

  A regular guy is what, six feet? No chance." Person who has come across height as a concept as insufficient number of times, an insufficient number of times to be up to speed with baseline magnitudinal intuitions, ecstatic at the gotcha after Googling the average male height is 5'9" actually. Having a lot of fun on the timeline. Wow, and Cassie Pritchard's really going back and forth, the Young Macro. One of the greatest up and coming posters. Should we watch this clip from Roloff Bota from Uncapped? Unhinged. He is the, uh, unhinged. He is the steward of, uh, of Sequoia. Roloff Bota, here, let's hear it. One of the greatest stewards of capital in history. I think that's him.

• 1:49:59Speaker 06

  He doesn't support the numbers. So, there was a lot of analysis back in the 1970s and 80s with, you know, the capital asset pricing model and people figured out that there's this asset class that supposedly has uncorrelated returns and a bunch of asset managers deem that they need to invest a certain percentage of their endowment or foundation or pension fund into this thing called venture capital. If you look at the data, they're basically 20 companies per year on average over the last 20, 30 years, then have ended up being worth, in realized exits, a billion dollars or more. Just 20 companies. Despite a lot more money plowing into, into venture capital, we haven't seen a material change in the number of companies that are outcomes that are that large. And I think part of that is that there's a lot more talent than really interesting ideas

• 1:50:43Speaker 06

  or interesting companies to be built. And I think we're spreading a lot of that talent thin right now, similar to what happened in nineteen ninety nine, by the way.

• 1:50:49Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:50:50Speaker 06

  So when you look at the data, the amount of money going into venture capital right now in America is in the order of two hundred and fifty billion dollars a year. And the numbers, you know, these are all estimates. Let's just say it's two hundred and fifty billion dollars a year.

• 1:51:01Speaker 07

  Need a lot of exits.

• 1:51:02Speaker 06

  Well, let's just do some very simple arithmetic for a second. Two hundred and fifty billion dollars going in every single year. If you assume that the firms generate twelve percent IRRs net, net of fees and carry, which isn't that great, by the way. I mean, over the last three or four years, the Nasdaq has compounded at sixteen, seventeen percent.

• 1:51:17Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:51:17Speaker 06

  Let's just say twelve percent, not spectacular. Basically, just average performance. You'd need a three point seven X, roughly.

• 1:51:24Speaker 07

  On ten years.

• 1:51:25Speaker 06

  On a seven year exit horizon. So I'm being a little bit aggressive. I mean, maybe it won't even be that good. So three point seven X on two hundred and fifty billion, that approximates to a trillion dollars a year.

• 1:51:34Speaker 07

  Coming out.

• 1:51:35Speaker 06

  Coming out. By the way, that means, and that's what the investors own. So let's say that the investors own two thirds of the company to make the arithmetic simple. That's one point five trillion annually in company exit value.

• 1:51:46Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:51:46Speaker 06

  Just think about that for a second.

• 1:51:47Speaker 07

  Where's that coming from?

• 1:51:48Speaker 06

  Well, Figma's worth what?

• 1:51:51Speaker 07

  It's a lot, but it's.

• 1:51:51Speaker 06

  Forty-ish billion. I mean, that's.

• 1:51:53Speaker 07

  Let's say it's worth, you know, point oh, point oh three trillion. So, you know, if you start thinking in trillions and Figma gets you point oh three trillion.

• 1:52:00Speaker 06

  You need thirty, forty, fifty Figma's every year.

• 1:52:04Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:52:05Speaker 06

  To make that arithmetic work.

• 1:52:06Speaker 07

  Figma week.

• 1:52:07Speaker 06

  It just, I don't see that many companies of that scale every year. So the only thing breaks is the return assumption doesn't hold.

• 1:52:13Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:52:14Speaker 06

  And so venture is a return free risk.

• 1:52:16Speaker 07

  Hmm.

• 1:52:18Speaker 06

  Not a risk free return.

• 1:52:19Speaker 07

  That's terrible.

• 1:52:20Speaker 06

  Yeah. You are better off investing in the index or holding T-balls, honestly. And so I don't think venture is an asset class. Asset classes scale if you add more money. You can build more real estate. There's a lot of equities. There are, you know, trillions and trillions of bonds to be purchased. Venture capital doesn't scale with more money.

• 1:52:39Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the most important, I mean, takeaway here is Bobby's question in the chat. What's on the wrist? Wrist check. We'll work, we'll work on that.

• 1:52:46John Coogan?

  We will, we will get to the bottom of that.

• 1:52:48Jordi Hays?

  Venture return free risk is a crazy line.

• 1:52:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, taking shots.

• 1:52:55Jordi Hays?

  But there was some good follow up from Hari Ragavan. He said, obviously, Roloff's a legend and one of the smartest people in the valley, but I'd love to dissect this, add a bit more nuance to this. I completely agree with his directional point that most of VC, everyone but top decile sucks as an asset class, but I think the same is true of hedge funds and the top quartiles less risky asset classes like real estate, et cetera. But the nuance is that the true venture capital segment formation through series A or modest series B is probably 20 billion a year, maybe 25 billion, because the remainder of the 250 billion is really private equity being employed by a VC firm. When you take it down in order of magnitude, the exit expectations make a lot more sense for true VC

• 1:53:40Jordi Hays?

  that is over, let's say, eight to 10 year horizons, four to five X. So 100 to 125 billion in investor ownership at 150 to 200 billion in exits. For the PE, growth equity class theoretically at 1.7 to 2X, clear similar hurdle return because the hold periods are, say, three to five years from series D, E, et cetera. Works out to about 350 billion. So the total now comes out to 400 to 600 billion. Nothing to sneeze at, but not one and a half billion. And then you don't need 50 figmas a year, but 15. And more importantly, if a unicorn is a home run, a deck of corn is a grand slam. We're seeing more of the centacorn, which I guess.

• 1:54:24John Coogan?

  Triple crown. Let's go for the horse race analogy, switching out of baseball into horse racing.

• 1:54:31Jordi Hays?

  And he says, because you could have 15 figmas or literally one open AI.

• 1:54:35John Coogan?

  A centacorn, if a unicorn's a home run, a deck of corn's a grand slam. A centacorn should be like a world series, a world series clean sweep, something like that. Like you won the whole, the whole season.

• 1:54:47Jordi Hays?

  You're saying, I'm not saying we'll have one OpenAI per year. That'd be crazy, but we could see per year, one in Propic, Stripe, Databricks, et cetera, two to three, or sorry, three to five Figma scale outcomes, 20 times Wealthfront scale outcomes. Wealthfront, obviously, was recently acquired by Gusto. All we have to do is adjust that there are 20 unicorns a year for inflation, and that's very plausible, and that gets us to 400 billion in exit value. Markets are so much bigger than they used to be. 10 years ago, we had zero trillion dollar companies. He says, maybe I'm just too much of a techno optimist. And Avall comes in with the reply and says, nailed it.

• 1:55:26John Coogan?

  Correction on Wealthfront. Wealthfront's independent. You're thinking of a different company. Wealthfront's the robo advisor.

• 1:55:32Jordi Hays?

  Oh, Gusto brought guideline. Sorry, guideline.

• 1:55:36John Coogan?

  Somewhat different. Yeah, the interesting nuance here is how weird OpenAI is. It just breaks the venture model because, yes, it is, you know, maybe going to put up a trillion dollars of value. But as we saw the venture ownership, Roloff was saying it'll be 50% venture owned. And that's not the case for OpenAI. And then also, it just completely breaks the whole model of like, who's founding these companies. Sam Altman's like, much more experienced, much older than, you know, some Gen Z needle in the haystack founder that you can pick out and get, you know, 20% of the company for, for $10 million. That just wasn't the nature. Like, one of the first venture deals we talked about with Thrive

• 1:56:19John Coogan?

  was, what, $150 million, like a $12 billion valuation. It was like, you know, building like 1% ownership in the firm. And so, it's, it's, it's like, even, it's such, it's just such an outlier. But that's the game of venture, right? That's the game of venture.

• 1:56:37Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI just hired prize winning black hole physicist Alexis Luksaska as the first member of its new OpenAI for Science team, per Axios. Good timing here, because they

• 1:56:54Jordi Hays?

  Leaning more into science, Lupe Sasca is a Vanderbilt professor known for his work on black hole photon rings, and now he will help shape how G P T five tackles advanced math and physics problems and guide OpenAI's push into scientific discovery. VP of Science Kevin Weal said G P T five can already perform limited novel scientific research, calling it the worst AI model you'll ever use again. I got to meet Alex earlier this year, and I said, OpenAI should hire you. I'm gonna hit him up after this and say, I'm sure he said something like that. That sounds like it'd be fun. I'm sure they were probably

• 1:57:37Jordi Hays?

  already talking at that point. So not the most original idea, but awesome guy and super excited for him to be over at OpenAI.

• 1:57:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, we should prep for our next interview with Isakant from Poolside. The news that we'll be digging into at some point during the show is a giant new AI data center is coming online to the epicenter of America's fracking boom. We talked about this yesterday, but CoreWeave is partnering with them to build a massive data center on more than 500 acres of land that sits on a sprawling ranch in West Texas. The site is owned by the Mitchell family, which has run on oil and gas companies, which has run oil and gas companies for decades in the state and is located in the heart of the fracking boom.

• 1:58:27Jordi Hays?

  All right, we got our next guest coming in.

• 1:58:30John Coogan?

  Okay, let's bring him in to the TV panel. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:58:36Jordi Hays?

  Hey, guys. Good to see you. How are you doing? So pumped to have you. If for people that were watching yesterday, we were reading through the article about your guys' new project in West Texas, and I was like, Poolside? Like, Poolside's going this hard?

• 1:58:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:58:54Jordi Hays?

  And when we realized that it was you, we were pretty excited.

• 1:58:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. So please tell us the story of the company. Can you start kind of at the beginning, a little bit on your background, then the first act of the company, because it does feel like you're at a very unique moment in the company history.

• 1:59:10Speaker 08

  Yeah, so my story in this space actually started, I was listening a couple of minutes before to your interview.

• 1:59:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:15Speaker 08

  You were talking about Andrej Karpathy and him writing code. I've actually never said this, my story in the space started because Andrej Karpathy wrote an article in 2015 called "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Our Current Neural Nets." It's one of the early kind of blog posts about language models. And it captured me so much that I ended up pivoting my entire company towards it called Sourced. And we spent the next four or five years building language models that were capable of writing code. Sounds great today, back then, fifty people in the world cared.

• 1:59:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:45Speaker 08

  And, but 2015 was an interesting moment in time because it was followed the year after by AlphaGo coming out. And at that point, I built probably an unreasonable conviction that the combination of language models and reinforcement learning should be able to generalize to frankly, anything and everything that you can approximate, including human intelligence. And that was kind of my origin story. I met my co-founder in 2017, he was a CTO at GitHub. He made an acquisition offer for that company.

• 2:00:13John Coogan?

  Good job for the guy. Wait, you made an acquisition offer for what company?

• 2:00:17Speaker 08

  So GitHub made an acquisition offer for my company in 2017. Because we had the world's first code completion models that were working back then.

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 2:00:25Speaker 08

  Turned down the offer, but nonetheless became really good friends. And this company ultimately ended up not succeeding. We were too early. And so you can kind of figure out what happens when on November 2022, you see ChatGPT come out.

• 2:00:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:39Speaker 08

  Right? It's everything you've been saying for years, kind of into the void, somebody else just did and did it in incredible manner. And so it kind of gave this really deep realization in that time that everything was about to change. It was kind of like a pre-post electricity moment. Like, we're gonna truly, fully reach human-level intelligence and go beyond. But the narrative at the beginning of 23 was all we have to do is skill language modeling. Let's just size them up, predict more tokens on the web. And just fundamentally disagreed. So you know, our view and it's why we started Poolsite two and a half years ago was that reinforcement learning was going to become the most important scaling axis for model capabilities. First eighteen months of the life of our company, that felt like one of the most contrarian opinions you could hold. I think today, it's clearly not anymore.

• 2:01:25Speaker 08

  But that's kind of our origin story and why we decided to build a foundation model.

• 2:01:28John Coogan?

  And what was the, what was the go to market that you had in mind? I mean, we've seen the, the market play out where there are kind of like synchronous IDE based code completion, tab completion models. There's a lot of custom models in that world, almost like, I call them like prosumer use cases where I hit GPT five and it winds up writing code and I didn't even ask it to. And then there's the codex, there's Claude Code, there's agents, there's windsurf, there's cursor. And there's so many different positions. Like, how did you see the market map develop from your world?

• 2:02:02Speaker 08

  So we bring it back to like what ultimately our mission is, right? We're here to, to reach human level intelligence and go beyond. And in that world, intelligence in our view is a commodity. It's actually a commodity that gets created by only a small number of companies because of the sheer amount of resources and kind of compounding efforts that go into it. But I think at the limit, we're not going to find very large differences between one foundation model and the other. And so I think as a foundation model company, you're in two businesses. You're on one hand in the, what I often refer to internally as that the barrels of oil business, right? You're just selling your tokens behind an API and that's your commodity business. And then a commodity business, you care about cost and scale. And they'll come back to a little bit why the infra project is so important.

• 2:02:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:43Speaker 08

  The second though, is what do you choose to do with that commodity? Right? Once you have intelligence available to you, who do you want to be for? And from day zero, we wanted to be for the world's frankly, knowledge workforce. We wanted to be for the enterprise. We wanted to be for the world's most like high consequence environments. So our models are now rapidly progressing in capabilities. It's, it's definitely been nonlinear. And now we see a path to be at the frontier. But when we weren't at the frontier, we kind of decided to cut our teeth in a go to market area, which was really no one else was at, which was defense and, and government.

• 2:03:16John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:03:17Speaker 08

  And so kind of our first customers were not just building the model, but also putting all the crazy enterprise stack to be able to deploy it anywhere, like literally in workstations and Humvees all the way to like the larger models and like air gapped environments or guff clouds or places where you needed ATOs. And now we're kind of on track to start expanding out of that defense sector and going into the wider enterprise. Not just with coding agents, by the way, that's been our, really our starting point. It was our view that's where the market was first going to go adopt. For frankly, not a very intelligent insight, just the fact that developers, we've always been the first adopters of technology.

• 2:03:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:51Speaker 08

  So it was kind of clear that that was going to happen. And

• 2:03:54Jordi Hays?

  And it's really fun to build tools for yourself. It's less fun to build tools for a role that you've never done, right?

• 2:04:03Speaker 08

  Look, intelligence is, we treat it as this one north star like intelligence, but in reality, it's actually really multi-dimensional, right? Like how good you are at writing, poetry is very different than how good you are at writing code versus how you are, you know, being a researcher in biology. And so the thing that was the unlock, I think, in our space is that, you know, first generation of models had only been trained on the output of humanity's work, right? Like the web. But it wasn't trained on the thought process and actions that led to the creation of that work. And it was going to be clear that coding was going to be the first domain where we could do that through reinforcement learning because we could simulate it. Right? So, so we spent the last two and a half years building what I believe is the largest RL environment in the world. It's a million real world code

• 2:04:45Speaker 08

  bases where, you know, our agents can do hundreds and hundreds of billions of tasks. And so that's kind of, it was, it was partially close to our heart, but it was also frankly very close to what we saw the path to where it's like more capabilities and models was going to run through.

• 2:05:02Jordi Hays?

  Get into verticalization.

• 2:05:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, talk about the CoreWeave deal.

• 2:05:07Speaker 08

  So the CoreWeave deal we announced has two components to it. We've been able to do in the last two and a half years what we did with 10,000 H200s. Think of that as like annually 100, you know, 20, 150 million dollars worth of compute.

• 2:05:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:21Speaker 08

  But it's orders of magnitude less than what others had. And so we built our efficiencies around orders of magnitude, more efficient experimentation. But your big model run is still your big model run. And so that like the, the size of a model you can train has, and the duration at which you train it has clear correlation with the final intelligence and capabilities. So we needed a lot of GPUs very fast. Because we saw now that, hey, we had gotten to a point where our models had gotten so good now that we knew if we'd scale them up, we'd be on track to be at where the frontier was going to be. And so that really started with conversations

• 2:06:00Speaker 08

  with, with Nvidia and CoreWeave, right? And, and for kind of obvious reasons. And we got really excited because we found the path to partner with CoreWeave that brought online more than 40,000 GB 300s really quickly. And I don't know how much you guys have discussed in the past.

• 2:06:20Speaker 08

  I wish you guys in the past had had discussed, you know, like the compute market. But right now, that scale of compute is impossible to get. Yeah. It is sold out for the entirety of 2026 and already like well into 2027. So we found that a strategic partnership that allowed us to do so. And so that gets compute online in December, but it gets you to the frontier. But what then? You can build the world's most capable model, but if you're not able to serve it, if you're not able to scale it up further, if you're not able to train the next generations, you're frankly, you're not in this race, you're just cosplaying.

• 2:06:53Speaker 08

  And so we had to take a step back. And this was already a while ago. This was already started looking at this, you know, a year ago. And so well, the true bottleneck in our industry is not chips. And it's not energy. There's a lot of like 400 kilovolt electricity that comes off the grid. There's a lot of sources of energy in the United States. And while at the limit it is the bottleneck, it's not the immediate bottleneck. The actual bottleneck is bringing it all together and actually having powered shelves, like data centers online. Because while last year I could call someone for 50 megawatts and I could kind of, you know, get it within six to nine months. If I needed to call someone for 250 megawatts, guys, there's no one you can call. At least you can make like a multi-billion dollar payment or commitment, you know, today on a 15 year lease and then you can get it in 18 to 24 months.

• 2:07:38Speaker 08

  Yeah. But I'm not meta, right? And so we, we understood that we had to own that vertical stack entirely if we were going to be able to secure our future.

• 2:07:47Jordi Hays?

  When, how early did you guys make the call to focus? You know, clearly it sounds like you're focusing intensely on the go to market side as well. Right? We've heard, you know, there's plenty, there's labs out there that have, like they, they're taking the route of like, you know, if we build it, they will come type of thing. And it very clearly, even before you guys are at the frontier, you're saying like, no, we're going to get customers, we're going to get actual enterprise use cases. We're going to be focused on delivering value. And then hopefully those products just get better for the customers as the underlying intelligence improves. But do you feel like that? Yeah, like was that just an easy, obvious decision to make? Or did you guys like debate that a lot internally?

• 2:08:31Speaker 08

  So it was kind of the DNA from day zero who we wanted to be. And so we wrote ourselves, we might co-found like a day zero memo. We often go back to it to see, you know, like what's changed along on that. And we kind of understood early on that there were three layers that were really going to matter for the next decade. It was going to be energy, compute and intelligence. And in our view, a lot of things were going to become rounding errors compared to those three. And but you also knew that if you if you see intelligence as a commodity, right? If you treat it like a barrel of oil, a barrel of tokens.

• 2:09:02Jordi Hays?

  Someone else is going to deliver it, right?

• 2:09:05Speaker 08

  Exactly. And and look, and so you care about your cost and your skill, hence infrastructure and vertically integrating. But you don't want to be in a commodity business. You want to be in a business that either increases someone's revenue, right? Or improves their cost basis, like it helps them grow their business. And so from day zero, we said, well, we're not a consumer company. It's product per year and how I talk, it's not in our DNA. I'm not a chat app in your pocket. This is not, I wouldn't know how to build that. But we deeply cared about businesses and enterprises. And so it was a day zero decision to do this. And so from day zero, we built both parts of the org, our applied research org and what we call our production engineering like org.

• 2:09:40John Coogan?

  This two megawatt facility, that feels like leapfrogging a lot of the one megawatt clusters that we've seen. Talked about whether it's Colossus two or what Meta is doing with Prometheus and what OpenAI and Anthropic are doing. Is that the intention? Or do you think that you're more just like catching up to the frontier? And they will be coming online with similar capacity around the same time? And you're differentiated on the type of model that you'll train?

• 2:10:09Speaker 08

  So there's big headlines of gigawatts of power. And we had one of those yesterday. And we have an incredible amount of power on that land. We actually have six gigawatts of gas that sits there that we can, that we bring turbines online for it to turn into electricity. But what I think really matters in as a foundation model company is your lead time from when you need compute to scale to how long it takes to get online. And this is where the partnership with CoreWeave is really interesting. Because with CoreWeave as the tenant in the data center, we have the ability to determine ahead of that data center coming online, how much of that compute goes to scaling pool side? And how much of that compute we might have to put in the free market?

• 2:10:51Speaker 08

  And they're of course world-class. Like, I mean, I cannot speak highly enough of their ability to operate like large-scale compute. And so for us, it was it was not about the big headlines, but it was about building a company that could incrementally deliver data centers. And the first 250 megawatts are actually to deliver it in a quite unusual manner. I wasn't much about this in the press because it's kind of a geeky topic. But I think here we like geeky topics.

• 2:11:14John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:11:14Speaker 08

  So if you look traditionally at data centers, they're these big stick-built buildings. Everything comes on-site, is manufactured and put together on-site. And that's been the vast majority of data center industry. But mobilizing large workforces and dealing with that complexity means that your ability to scale is not really incremental. I can't add an extra 1,000 GPUs, another 1,000, another 1,000. And so we took a different approach here, where we've got the big stick-built building that we're building. It's a long corridor, and we're bringing around essentially data halls of two megawatts at a time. Current generation GPUs, be it 1,000 GPUs, next generation that's less because they're more dense in power. But what we're doing is we're doing offside manufacturing.

• 2:11:59Speaker 08

  So a data center for a GPU compute is effectively three layers. It's an electrical skid, it's a cooling skid, and it's a compute skid.

• 2:12:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:08Speaker 08

  And you actually design them that they fit on the back of a flatbed truck.

• 2:12:13Speaker 08

  And, ah, hey, Mark. Good to see you.

• 2:12:18John Coogan?

  We have Marc Benioff. We can go way deeper with you, but thank you so much for hopping on the show. We will talk to you later.

• 2:12:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's run it back very soon.

• 2:12:27John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for joining. How you doing, Mark? Good to see you. Congratulations on all the fantastic news. Thank you so much for joining the show. How are you today?

• 2:12:39Jordi Hays?

  We don't have audio.

• 2:12:40John Coogan?

  Let's make sure that we have audio for Marc Benioff from Salesforce. He is the CEO of Salesforce. Let's bring him in to the show. Thank you so much for joining. Our team will sort this out in just a second. We can see you. We can't hear you. We are working on this. Let's make sure that he is.

• 2:13:00John Coogan?

  In the Restream waiting room, joining.

• 2:13:02Jordi Hays?

  And I wish, I wish we gotta get ESO back on the show.

• 2:13:05John Coogan?

  I see him, I don't hear him yet.

• 2:13:07Marc Benioff?

  We got the ESO.

• 2:13:08John Coogan?

  Hey, how you doing, Mark?

• 2:13:09Jordi Hays?

  We got audio.

• 2:13:10John Coogan?

  We got audio. Thank you so much.

• 2:13:11Marc Benioff?

  You got audio?

• 2:13:12John Coogan?

  You have John Coogan and Jordy Hayes from TDPN.

• 2:13:15Jordi Hays?

  AGI is here, but we still have.

• 2:13:17John Coogan?

  Technical difficulties from time to time.

• 2:13:19Jordi Hays?

  But here we are.

• 2:13:20Marc Benioff?

  Yeah, this AGI, it's amazing, AGI. I mean, it's unbelievable.

• 2:13:24Jordi Hays?

  We're feeling it.

• 2:13:24Marc Benioff?

  How far we've come. I mean, all of the AI is, you know, is it Esokon or Isokon? I can never remember.

• 2:13:31John Coogan?

  I think it's ESO, Esokon.

• 2:13:33Marc Benioff?

  It's Esokon. Is it Miso soup or Miso soup?

• 2:13:35John Coogan?

  I think it's Miso soup.

• 2:13:36Marc Benioff?

  Okay, and it's Esokon. Okay, so Esokon, yeah, I love ESO, by the way.

• 2:13:42John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 2:13:42Marc Benioff?

  And I love Poolside.

• 2:13:43John Coogan?

  I'm so glad you guys know each other.

• 2:13:45Marc Benioff?

  Also, one thing you need to know, one thing you need to know, I also love Poolside, the music. Have you heard?

• 2:13:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Poolside FM.

• 2:13:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:13:52Marc Benioff?

  And they do that great Neil Young cover, you know?

• 2:13:55Jordi Hays?

  Oh, the band.

• 2:13:56Marc Benioff?

  Unbelievable on Harvest Moon.

• 2:13:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:13:58Marc Benioff?

  If you haven't heard, the Poolside cover on Harvest Moon.

• 2:14:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:02Marc Benioff?

  And Esokon and I were talking about that, and I said, why, why did you call it Poolside? He's like, oh, this and that, you know, he's building this huge data center now.

• 2:14:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:14:10Marc Benioff?

  And I said, you should split the company, ESO. You should have a software company building your model, which is ama- have you seen his model? It's amazing.

• 2:14:16John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:14:17Marc Benioff?

  And then he's also building a da- huge data center. And I'm like, you have one company, which is the model, Poolside. One da- one company is the data center, Curbside.

• 2:14:30John Coogan?

  Oh, Curbside.

• 2:14:31Marc Benioff?

  So you can have Poolside, Curbside.

• 2:14:32John Coogan?

  That'd be fantastic. That'd be fantastic. Uh, please, give us, give us.

• 2:14:37Jordi Hays?

  How are you feeling? How are you feeling?

• 2:14:38John Coogan?

  Give us the update. How are you feeling? Congratulations. Break it down for us.

• 2:14:40Jordi Hays?

  Dreamforce feels like something that would never, never get old.

• 2:14:43John Coogan?

  Super Bowl for SAS.

• 2:14:44Marc Benioff?

  Well, you guys aren't here, which I guess you're not Metallica fans, which is sad, and I'm gonna have to let Lars Ulrich know that you missed it, and then also you don't like Benson Boone either, so you're not. Pop or heavy metal, what are you?

• 2:14:55John Coogan?

  Count us in for the next one, we'll be there.

• 2:14:57Jordi Hays?

  We'll be there, we'll be there the next time, Super Bowl of Sass.

• 2:14:59Marc Benioff?

  Why, why, why, I mean, this is our 23rd Dreamforce, you haven't been to any of them, I want an explanation. I want to know why.

• 2:15:05John Coogan?

  No, you, you.

• 2:15:06Marc Benioff?

  You guys are the number one podcast in the world, I want to know why you're not at Dreamforce, and I want to know your music cha- I want to know your music choice, also.

• 2:15:13Jordi Hays?

  I do love Metallica, I grew, I grew up on Metallica.

• 2:15:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:15:18Marc Benioff?

  Okay, I don't believe it, what song do you, what's your number one Metallica song?

• 2:15:21Jordi Hays?

  Enter Sandman.

• 2:15:22John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:15:23Marc Benioff?

  No, no, no, no.

• 2:15:24John Coogan?

  It's a layup.

• 2:15:24Marc Benioff?

  No, no, no, that's not allowed.

• 2:15:26Jordi Hays?

  It's okay to like the best.

• 2:15:26Marc Benioff?

  Everybody knows that one.

• 2:15:28John Coogan?

  Let me ask.

• 2:15:29Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's, it's, uh... What do you, what do you got?

• 2:15:33Marc Benioff?

  You're unforgiven.

• 2:15:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm forgiven.

• 2:15:36John Coogan?

  I, I do like Master Puppets, that's a great one.

• 2:15:38Jordi Hays?

  Master Puppets, classic.

• 2:15:40John Coogan?

  Uh, but I, I was always in a little bit more of the Slipknot, a little bit more of the, of the Korn and the Tool, but, you know? But, I mean, Metallica's great, it's definitely in the heavy rotation, it's on my me- it's on my metal playlist, a bit.

• 2:15:52Marc Benioff?

  We not only have the greatest heavy metal band of the United States here, Metallica, or really the Bay Area, Lars Ulrich and Rob Trujillo.

• 2:16:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:00Marc Benioff?

  And, you know, Jimmy Hetfield was here, and, um, and Kirk Hammett, probably the greatest guitarist of all time, if you like that, but, but... We also have here Yoshiki.

• 2:16:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 2:16:11Marc Benioff?

  The head of X Japan, who's also one of the greatest drummers of all time, and X Japan also, he does classical piano, and he's about to go on tour again. Mad- back to Madison Square Garden, Royal Albert Hall, amazing, but anyway, hopefully you guys will come next year.

• 2:16:28John Coogan?

  And works for, and works for X, the everything app, that's correct, right? That's great, well.

• 2:16:33Marc Benioff?

  X, X, X, the everything app, this is a different X.

• 2:16:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:36Jordi Hays?

  Different X.

• 2:16:36Marc Benioff?

  This is X Japan, not related to X Cal alto.

• 2:16:39John Coogan?

  Okay, got it, got it, I, I saw, I saw your post about being on X, and I wasn't sure if it was a different thing.

• 2:16:43Marc Benioff?

  This is We Are X.

• 2:16:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:16:46Marc Benioff?

  We are X.

• 2:16:47John Coogan?

  Yes. It's never been more of a confusing time.

• 2:16:51Marc Benioff?

  Your Japanese viewers are gonna go up.

• 2:16:53John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 2:16:53Marc Benioff?

  If you can just say, "We are X."

• 2:16:54John Coogan?

  We are X.

• 2:16:55Marc Benioff?

  Which is Yoshiki official.

• 2:16:56John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:16:57Marc Benioff?

  On Twitter, yeah. Um, this is so fun.

• 2:17:01Jordi Hays?

  I, uh, we gotta, we gotta do this more often. Um, we were joking on the show earlier. We were referencing a post. You know, the whole like, nothing ever happens investment meme, right? Which is like, uh, which somebody was highlighting that OpenAI runs on both Salesforce and Slack.

• 2:17:17Marc Benioff?

  Thank God.

• 2:17:18Jordi Hays?

  Wanted to ask you, does not, does nothing, does nothing ever happen?

• 2:17:21Marc Benioff?

  Nothing else matters.

• 2:17:23Jordi Hays?

  Nothing else matters.

• 2:17:24Marc Benioff?

  There you go.

• 2:17:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:26Marc Benioff?

  You're still unforgiven, by the way.

• 2:17:28John Coogan?

  A super intelligence would use Salesforce and Slack for sure. That, that would be the first thing that they pull off the shelf.

• 2:17:34Marc Benioff?

  If you are a Slack user, you need to see the Slack bot that we introduced here, which is built on Anthropic. It's also amazing. So we use OpenAI.

• 2:17:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:42Marc Benioff?

  We use Anthropic. We use Gemini. I just did an interview, uh, with Sundar. You know, you can see it on YouTube.

• 2:17:48John Coogan?

  Great.

• 2:17:48Marc Benioff?

  We XAI, love Elon.

• 2:17:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:51Marc Benioff?

  We, we love them all. We love all our children very equally here.

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. How, how do you think about vertical integration? I mean, it's, it's a fascinating company. You've had the opportunity to build your own cloud. I, I don't believe you've ever built your own operating system, but many companies now are saying, "We want to build our own ASIC." And you've probably, I don't know, have you ever thought about putting Salesforce on an ASIC? Or Slack on an ASIC? Like, how do you think about when to verticalize versus when to partner?

• 2:18:17Marc Benioff?

  It's such a great question. You probably will enjoy my interview with Sundar because I asked him that. Because, you know, you think about it, he's really got it all together. He's got the data center. He's got the chip, right? Tensor, right?

• 2:18:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:29Marc Benioff?

  He's got, he does a lot of the operating system type work, including the model. You know, the Gemini model, the applications he does as well. And he even gets all the way to the robotic layer, right? So here he's got these Waymos running around the street. What other company is going from robot to chip?

• 2:18:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:45Marc Benioff?

  You know, the data center. Really only, I mean, and if the future is... Well, what is the future? Is it billions of fast food restaurants on the planet? You know, all having their hamburgers made, you know, by robots? And that's the world we're about to enter into? I mean, I have no idea, but the one thing I know is, uh, if you look behind me, there's no robots walking around. Well, there might be one, but not making the burgers here.

• 2:19:10John Coogan?

  Not yet, not yet. How do you think about the different foundation model brands? Do your customers want to know that they can pick Claude? Is model switching important? Or is there a world where you wind up wrapping that at an abstraction layer? And you're just serving them your product? And it's powered by the different foundation models, but the consumer doesn't really care?

• 2:19:32Marc Benioff?

  This is a great question because number one, you may know that Salesforce also has a huge research team. We invented prompt engineering, the first prompt right here at Salesforce Research, commercialized by others, of course. Hit the gong for the first prompt. Absolutely.

• 2:19:51John Coogan?

  Thank you for your service.

• 2:19:53Marc Benioff?

  Thank you, thank you. And listen, look, some customers want to use our models. Some customers want to build their own models. Some customers like a certain brand of model. By the way, some countries like a certain model. You just saw ISO Kant, was it ISO or ISO? ISO, right?

• 2:20:10John Coogan?

  ISO.

• 2:20:11Marc Benioff?

  ISO Kant, he's in Portugal. He is going to make a play. He's going to have a data center in Texas, but he's also going to have a data center in Europe. There's Mistral in France. There's Middle East models, there's Asian models. You know Kwan from Alibaba? You didn't mention that? Right, there's models all over the world. And different customers in different geographies are going to all want different models based on where they are, the kind of customer they are. They may want small models, they may want large models. They want micro models, they want foundation models. There's a lot of different models, so you have to give people choice. But what we're going to provide is this incredible platform that we call the Agentic Enterprise, and we have Agent Force.

• 2:20:55Marc Benioff?

  And Agent Force is powered by all of those. And you can plug into whatever model you want, wherever you are, with the data residency, the governance, the compliance, everything you need, boom, right into Agent Force. Because look at, here at this conference, you're not here unfortunately, and I hope you do come. We've had 23 of them, by the way, but I know. But here's the thing, listen.

• 2:21:19John Coogan?

  Jordy's barely 23 years old. One of our team members over there, most of us weren't even alive.

• 2:21:24Marc Benioff?

  You're doing podcasts all day long. All day long. All day long, you're doing this podcast, going, going. But listen, listen, I get it, I know you're too busy for me. But now, listen to this. Listen to this.

• 2:21:38Jordi Hays?

  This is, this interview is so fun. We're, we'll fly, we'll fly.

• 2:21:41Marc Benioff?

  No, no, no.

• 2:21:42Jordi Hays?

  To Salesforce, Salesforce Tower.

• 2:21:43Marc Benioff?

  Look, no, I know you're busy. I get it. I got it.

• 2:21:48John Coogan?

  You're a master. You're a master.

• 2:21:50Marc Benioff?

  No, no, I understand you are not Metallica fans. You're too busy for us. Fine. But here's the thing, I want to just say this to you. Look, there's customers here from hundreds of countries who have flown in from all over the world. And they all have different needs, different industries, they're different sized, they're small businesses, companies like zero to 200 employees. There's 200 to 1,000 employees, 1,000 to 2,000 employees, very large enterprise, the Pepsis and the Dells. Michael Dell was here, you're not here. Michael Dell was here. Okay, Laura Alber, the CEO of the Williams Sonoma is here, you're not here, that's fine. But here's the thing, hold on, but here's the thing. Also, it's about governments, it's about software companies, you know, it's about, all of these people are here

• 2:22:34Marc Benioff?

  because it's a highly diversified market, software. And these models don't just have to reach consumers, they have to go through these businesses and go B to B to C. You know, from business to business to consumer. And that is actually complicated because you have different governance, like I was saying, different compliance, all kinds of different rules, based on country, based on, so it's, it's not like, you know, we're, like, we're here, we're Americans, we're here in America, you know, that we love our country and we have certain models that are built here. Great, okay, we love that. But, here's one more thing. There's many people who are not Americans who are here, and they have to comply

• 2:23:17Marc Benioff?

  to their laws in their countries, in their languages, in their governments. And we have to adapt to those organizations and those countries as well. So you have to think about AI as a global phenomenon. You have to think about AI as a highly diversified phenomenon. And you have to think of AI as the future. And we're just in, we're in the current moment. Now, we've been doing AI at Salesforce for 10 years, we did Einstein 10 years ago. You know, obviously, AI's been around, I think, since the 50s, the 40s. So, and you know, like, the guy who wrote Minority Report and War Games and even Deep Impact, he's our futurist, he's 78 years old, he worked at JPL on the Apollo mission, he's one of the writers on all of those things.

• 2:24:02John Coogan?

  And he's there, but we're not? He's there?

• 2:24:04Marc Benioff?

  Yes.

• 2:24:05Jordi Hays?

  He's there, but we're not.

• 2:24:06Marc Benioff?

  Everybody's here, but you're not. Everyone is here, but you're not. But here's the thing. Well, this is the largest tech conference in the world, you know that. Fifty thousand people are here, the largest vendor-led tech conference.

• 2:24:15Jordi Hays?

  Hit that gong again. Uh, Mark, one question for you. Uh, you, Salesforce has been hugely acquisitive. Uh, what is your pitch to founders in 2025 that you want to acquire?

• 2:24:27Marc Benioff?

  That's great.

• 2:24:28Jordi Hays?

  Like, why, why is it such an incredible opportunity?

• 2:24:30Marc Benioff?

  We have bought more than a hundred companies. You're 100% right. Over 26 years, we've bought more than a hundred companies. We've invested in hundreds of companies. We own 1% of Anthropic. You know, we just sold a company to Google, which is Wiz, the security company.

• 2:24:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:24:46Marc Benioff?

  We, you know, and we grew Snowflake and took it public.

• 2:24:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:49Marc Benioff?

  We're an investor in many companies. Um, so we want to talk to you, if you're an entrepreneur. We want to invest in you, want to help you grow. We want to bring you here, introduce you to all of our customers. We have 50,000 customers here to introduce you to who want to buy your product now. So, come here to San Francisco, or come to one of our world tours, all over the world. You know, from here, we go on the road, and we're going to be in every country in the world, every major city, and we will come and meet you. We want to meet you, we want to know you. Salesforce Ventures is our arm that acquires, but also invests. It's a huge part of our business. It's a $5 billion fund. It's, I think, doing a 33% IRR. I don't know exactly the number. It's probably one of the highest-performing funds in the world.

• 2:25:32John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:25:33Marc Benioff?

  Let us partner with you.

• 2:25:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:35Marc Benioff?

  You know, come here. You know, these podcasters don't have time. You do, come here, be with us. Customers are here to meet you.

• 2:25:42Jordi Hays?

  You're good at sales, I gotta say. You kinda gotta be in the role.

• 2:25:47John Coogan?

  What's the current thinking on seat-based pricing versus consumption, both at Salesforce, or what you advise founders that might be?

• 2:25:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think I think people have this obsession with with seat-based pricing right now. And and this idea that that AI may may allow people to run. We're not seeing it a lot yet, but companies more efficiently. But in my view, I think companies are smart enough to to understand they buy, even if they're paying on a seat base, they're paying for value at the end of the day. And if they're not getting value, they'll they'll churn or they'll find another. So but how do you think about this conversation around seat-based versus kind of value-based pricing?

• 2:26:24Marc Benioff?

  What a great question. Look, I just subscribed to ChatGPT. It's a seat-based model. You know that you probably paid twenty or two hundred dollars. I just subscribed.

• 2:26:32Jordi Hays?

  Is that what, did you use that? Did you use that, by the way, to to make that picture with with Sam? It kind of that that picture?

• 2:26:38Marc Benioff?

  I used Grok. I said, because we were wearing like conference necklaces. And I said, take it off. And ChatGPT goes, oh, no, no, no, no, no. Copyright infringement. And then and then Grok said, great, I'll do that. And do you want me to put in the photo of the podcasters with you? I said, I'd like to do that also. But you might have seat-based pricing, like those are, that's a good example, right? You might have all-you-can-eat pricing. So we have the Agentic Enterprise License Agreement. All-you-can-eat. Don't even think about pricing. We're going to give it all to you. Don't even worry. Three, it might be per transaction or per per action pricing, because you're more conservative. You want to know exactly what you're paying per action, per transaction. Or it might be some other

• 2:27:22Marc Benioff?

  model, that some kind of flexible agreement. Right now, what we're having to do, and this is a great question. So thank you for asking me the question. We have to write pretty much a custom pricing agreement for every single customer. And as you know, this year, we're going to do about forty-three point one. Billion in revenue and we just gave guidance yesterday that we expect to be able to do sixty billion dollars by fiscal year thirty. So that's, you know, it's still very fast growing, very exciting.

• 2:27:50John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:27:51Marc Benioff?

  But when you have, we have a hundred and fifty thousand maybe customers on our core. There's a million customers on Slack. Hopefully you guys use Slack.

• 2:27:59John Coogan?

  We do.

• 2:27:59Marc Benioff?

  Of course. When you have that many customers in that many countries and that many size companies like I mentioned, it's across the board. It's every possible need. And so we have to adapt more than ever. Before, when we started our company twenty-six years ago, we had one product, one price, fifty dollars a user per month for our sales product. But we only had one product, one price, one type of customer. That is not who Salesforce is today. With Slack, with Tableau, with MuleSoft, with our Sales Cloud, our Service Cloud, our Marketing Cloud, all, you know, our AgentForce 360 platform, all of the things that we offer, dozens of products, we ultimately have to adapt to the customer. And what I can say to you is Salesforce's

• 2:28:43Marc Benioff?

  core values, which are trust, customer success, which is right what we're talking about right now, innovation, equality of every human being, including pay equality, and also sustainability, which is our Trillion Tree Initiative and all the work we're doing for the oceans. And if you were here, you could see what we're doing. But listen, the number one thing, number one, you can say those are our core values. At the end of the day, it's all about customer success. Are you happy using Slack? Are you happy using our Sales Cloud? Are you happy using our Service Cloud? Is AgentForce fully satisfying you? Are you getting, you know, you guys have a huge business now. You guys are growing your business. Are you, you know,

• 2:29:23Marc Benioff?

  like, by the way, for example, you've probably heard of The Beast, Jimmy, Jimmy Donaldson. His team is here. They're running on Salesforce. They're a huge media company now.

• 2:29:32Jordi Hays?

  Mr. Beast runs on Salesforce.

• 2:29:35Marc Benioff?

  You know The Beast.

• 2:29:36John Coogan?

  The Beast.

• 2:29:37Jordi Hays?

  The Beast.

• 2:29:37Marc Benioff?

  He uses Slack very aggressively.

• 2:29:39John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 2:29:40Marc Benioff?

  Jimmy is amazing. Okay. He runs a great business. It is growing like a weed, Beast Media, all of these things. We have to adapt to him. It's an example I'm giving you because I know you can relate to that in your own business, that you guys are trying to grow and make money and have fun. And look at this, look at this great life. You guys are, you probably feel blessed every day that this is your career.

• 2:30:02John Coogan?

  We do.

• 2:30:03Marc Benioff?

  And I feel that myself. I feel blessed every day that this is my career, that I'm able to do this for a living. Last night, James Hetfield, probably one of the great singers of our time, I'm gonna introduce you to his music. Listen, number one thing he said, he's on stage, he said, Metallica for over 40 years gets up on stage and plays that song that you mentioned, Enter Sandman. And you know what, he said, I feel blessed that I can do this every time I get on stage. We feel blessed that we're here at Dreamforce. We're blessed every time we get to meet with a customer, every time we have an interaction, every time we are able to write a piece of code, sign a deal, see customer success. It's what gets us up in the morning. It's why we do what we do, and it's why we're

• 2:30:47Marc Benioff?

  here at Dreamforce. And after 26 years, I still have the passion, the energy, and the excitement, and the vision for Salesforce that I had 26 years ago, because that's what makes me happy. I love making customers successful. I know that's what you like. You love making your listeners and your viewers.

• 2:31:05Jordi Hays?

  You're the final boss of Enterprise SaaS. I absolutely love it. What makes, why do you believe that sales is still a great career path for young people? I personally believe it is. I believe it is the most valuable skill in the world. But I think a lot of people see all these AI agent for sales rep companies getting funded, and they might think, I don't want to go down that path because, I don't want to go down the sales path because I think that's going to get automated away. Why do you, what's your kind of worldview there?

• 2:31:36Marc Benioff?

  Well, it's a great question. I mean, you know, at one level, there's between 20 and 100 million people, we actually counted them, that we have not been able to call back since we started Salesforce 26 years ago. Between 20 and 100 million people, we didn't call them back. Not because we didn't love them, not because we didn't like them. We didn't have a people. And, you know, those are, that idea to be able to call everybody back, you know? How do you do it? Like, you can't call every listener back who's already contacting you, you know that? Yeah. So, one thing is, yeah, you're gonna have a SDR, Sales Development Representative, the ability to call everybody back, okay? The ability to qualify, to have a conversation. But listen, face-to-face sales or face-to-face communication like we're doing right here,

• 2:32:21Marc Benioff?

  like, by the way, I'm, I don't, I'm not an AI as far as I know, I'm here, I'm not a biological computer running an LLM, at least I hope I'm not.

• 2:32:29Jordi Hays?

  I feel like an AI would grab a water bottle and hit it like that.

• 2:32:32Marc Benioff?

  Very suspicious. What I wanna say, I wanted to say this to you. I also just hired somewhere between three and five thousand more salespeople. Wow. Okay, I'm growing my sales force, it'll be more than, ma- almost, it's, I think I'm gonna try to get to twenty thousand account executives this year. That doesn't include systems engineers, managers, the infrastructure.

• 2:32:53Jordi Hays?

  Sales engineers, yeah.

• 2:32:54Marc Benioff?

  We have eighty thousand employees at Salesforce, eighty thousand. And about a quarter of them, okay, are just people who are trained in our product, who are designed to help you, we wanna make sure that they can help you be your success. That is why, at the end of the day, I think sales, listening, asking good questions, empathizing with the customer, connecting deeply with the customer, having fun, which is super important for us and for you, I know, I watch everything that you guys do, you love enjoying and having a good time. Yeah. We wanna do that too. Isn't that what sales is really all about? Yeah. And tonight, you know, look at, the conference is happening, but across the

• 2:33:37Marc Benioff?

  street is the St. Regis Hotel, and last night I was there, and I'm coming down, it's a long day, it's a long two days, I haven't slept in two weeks. Coming down the escalator, look at, the bar is filled. Yeah. And the bar is filled, and what is happening in the bar, do you think? And it's not our people who are in the bar. I looked. It was all the customers talking to each other and connecting, going more deeply, you know, having that human touch, you know, because, look, AI, we love AI. Okay, but AI, it's not the same. It's not, AI doesn't have a soul. It's not that human connectivity. It's not, you know, at our depth, AI is not born. It's, you know, AI is made.

• 2:34:22Marc Benioff?

  So, you know, we, there's a humanity that still needs to be nurtured.

• 2:34:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people wanna buy from people.

• 2:34:28Marc Benioff?

  And grown. People wanna buy from people. Thank you. I mean, that is what it's all about. And that's why I think sales actually is. And you can see right here, my job right now is to sell you, to come to Dreamforce and also to look at our products, to core sell you our core values.

• 2:34:46John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:34:47Marc Benioff?

  That's my job right now, right? That is my job.

• 2:34:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:49Marc Benioff?

  And, um.

• 2:34:51Jordi Hays?

  How quickly, how quickly can you clock if somebody's gonna be great at sales? Does it take you like 20 seconds, 30 seconds, a minute?

• 2:35:01Marc Benioff?

  We've all seen, we just had a great conversation about Mr. Beast.

• 2:35:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:06Marc Benioff?

  Would you say on a scale of one to 10, the 10, one of the best communicators, most aggressive salespeople in the world, where would you put him? One or 10?

• 2:35:14John Coogan?

  10.

• 2:35:15Marc Benioff?

  10?

• 2:35:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:16Marc Benioff?

  And boom, that is important. And I think that that is, and you see like all of a sudden you're watching this thing. So one of the games is happening. He's buried somebody underground for two years or something and either digging the person up. Are you still alive? Whatever. And then just as they break, they go, and one more thing, I've got a chocolate bar to sell you. And this is the best chocolate bar you have ever tasted. Let me have the guy who's coming out of the ground now. Hey, will you try this chocolate? What do you think? Look, I've been underground for two years. This is the best chocolate I have ever had. I mean, he has to be one of the great communicators, but also one of the greatest salesmen I have ever seen. Is that valuable in the age of AI?

• 2:35:57John Coogan?

  A hundred percent.

• 2:35:58Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely.

• 2:35:58John Coogan?

  One hundred percent.

• 2:36:00Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely.

• 2:36:01Marc Benioff?

  All right.

• 2:36:01Jordi Hays?

  Where do you get, last question, where do you, where do you get your energy? It's off the charts. It's incredible.

• 2:36:06Marc Benioff?

  I'm getting it right now from you guys who are obviously totally off charts. And I'm just vibing, I am so tired, so trashed. Mark. Last week, I've been on the road nonstop. I haven't slept for an hour. I don't know where I am. I don't know what conference this is. I don't know if that was ESO or MISO.

• 2:36:24John Coogan?

  You're doing great.

• 2:36:25Marc Benioff?

  I just want to thank you.

• 2:36:26Jordi Hays?

  I wish we didn't, I wish we didn't have to fade to black.

• 2:36:29John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:36:30Jordi Hays?

  You see what I, you see what I did there?

• 2:36:31Marc Benioff?

  Right now, you Googled it. You Googled, you're still unforgiven.

• 2:36:35Jordi Hays?

  I think I have, I think I have a clip of me playing a Metallica song. I don't remember which song.

• 2:36:39John Coogan?

  We'll send it to you.

• 2:36:39Jordi Hays?

  I'll send it to you. We'll work on it.

• 2:36:40John Coogan?

  Thank you so much, Mark. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:36:42Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:36:42John Coogan?

  Have a good day.

• 2:36:43Jordi Hays?

  Super fun.

• 2:36:43John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:36:45Jordi Hays?

  Fire me up.

• 2:36:46John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, the mugging counter, uh, is relentless.

• 2:36:50Jordi Hays?

  We gotta, we gotta add that. That's.

• 2:36:52John Coogan?

  The chat.

• 2:36:53Jordi Hays?

  What a, what a legend.

• 2:36:54John Coogan?

  Having a lot of fun at our expense. I wouldn't have it any other way. Everyone had a great time. Thank you so much to Marc Benioff for hopping on the show. Uh, I am, the show is in chaos at this point. The timeline is in turmoil. Our show schedule is in turmoil. I believe we have more guests. I hope so.

• 2:37:08Marc Benioff?

  We have Alice coming in.

• 2:37:09John Coogan?

  Bring in someone to talk to. Sorry. Hello, how are you doing?

• 2:37:15Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:37:16John Coogan?

  Sorry for all the chaos. Uh, Marc Benioff really knows how to take control of an interview. Uh, it was a fantastic conversation, but, but we're here to talk about you. So please introduce yourself and give us the news.

• 2:37:28Speaker 10

  Yeah, great. Hi, I'm Alice Ben Tink and I'm the CEO and co-founder of Entrepreneurs First. And I'm coming to you live from the EF office where behind me, I have 40 of the most incredible founders that were pitching at our demo day yesterday. And so we had Jack Clark is one of the founders of Anthropic, who kicked off Demo Day and did an amazing opening talk that included the phrase, "I'm deeply afraid," which I think is, is always useful for.

• 2:37:53John Coogan?

  Driving the attention.

• 2:37:54Speaker 10

  Lights and AI to, uh, to share.

• 2:37:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:37:57Speaker 10

  We had 200 attendees, an amazing selection of our previous co-investors and the kind of leading lights of the Bay Area fundraising ecosystem, partners from Kozler, Andreessen, Zeta, Sousa, True Ventures, Basis Set. And we had 20 companies, 20 companies pitching the next generation of largely AI-related products. And it was wild. Standing room only, amazing vibes. So yeah, it was a great day.

• 2:38:24John Coogan?

  What are the most common trends? I mean, we've been to a couple of YC demo days now, and being actually like in the room and talking to so many companies, you start to pick out really clear themes. What's, get us to the frontier. What's the October 2025 theme? Or different, or even like anti-theme?

• 2:38:43Speaker 10

  I think the key theme for this one was really young founders, early career founders, who are obsessively solving some of the most tricky problems in like old, old industries. So companies like Faction, which are these two insanely ambitious young guys who are automating the ordering process for industrial distributors. And it's like, where do these guys get these ideas from? And that's actually part of the EF process is because we work with individuals, pre-team, pre-Idea, we help them go through that process of actually developing the idea from scratch. And Canal, the CEO, he'd actually spent a summer, spending

• 2:39:24Speaker 10

  eight hours a day, hand processing these sort of purchase orders for these big, you know, old industrial distributors. And he's like, right, I'm going to become a founder and I'm going to make sure that no other intern spends their summer doing this. And it's the most incredibly lucrative industry, an enormous industry. But I would say that's the theme. You know, another example would be, got a great company called Chateau, and what they're doing is, it's like Vanta for FMCG. So it's Automating the compliance process, but for fragrance companies, for cosmetics companies. This is something that's holding back $400 billion worth of new products every year because it takes months and months to go through.

• 2:40:04John Coogan?

  We were just talking about the lead.

• 2:40:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, and probably a year ago at this point, I had somebody pitch me this idea of something they wanted to do, but they, they, I believe, I don't think they actually went and did it. But I was super bullish on the idea at the time. What, what kind of guidance were you giving the batch on? Kind of metrics around what would be compelling from, for, for the investors that were going to be in the audience around what, like, what, what's the bar to come out of Demo Day? With, you know, a seed round from your view.

• 2:40:37Speaker 10

  So it depends on the company and depends on what they're trying to build. And half of this batch had more than $100,000 worth of traction. And these are really, really young companies. So because we build all the, the companies from scratch, we build co-founding teams from scratch. We have this really unusual and unique process that creates companies. And the companies that were pitching at Demo Day were incorporated often less than three months ago. So you're getting to really, really impressive revenue traction within a short amount of time. I think one of the things we do know the investors are looking for right now is the stickiness of that traction. And particularly because a lot of our companies are selling to older industries, the revenue is super sticky.

• 2:41:17Speaker 10

  So it's less the sort of the, the J curve revenue where you, you know, it's here today, gone tomorrow, you've got to rebuild it. Often our company's getting, you know, year-long contracts, multi-year-long contracts with these big old companies. And so, yeah, I think one of the things we're really focusing on right now is, is the stickiness of the revenue that, that they are creating.

• 2:41:35John Coogan?

  Last question from my side. How do you apply? And do you have any particular application questions that you think make your application stand out?

• 2:41:45Speaker 10

  So you can apply, but honestly, we like to find you.

• 2:41:50John Coogan?

  Okay. Don't call us, we'll call you. I like that.

• 2:41:54Speaker 10

  One of the ways to think about EF is a little bit like, you know, CAA, the talent agency. We see ourselves in the same way. We want to be the CAA for founders. We want to be in their in their corner as their talent agent. And so we go out into communities across Europe, across the US and across India, and we build the relationships and the connections to actually work out who are the individuals that we should be going after. And because we're going after them at the point where they're pre-company, they're pre-team, they're pre-idea, our job is to work out from their behaviors which are the ones that stand out. So I suppose some of the behaviors that we focus on are pace, productivity, their ability to build really fast. But you don't see that in an application. You only see that from spending

• 2:42:37Speaker 10

  an extended period of time with these people. So our selection process includes Hackathon. It means that we're spending two days, you know, 48 hours, pretty much straight, working alongside them, seeing what they build, seeing how they interact with others. And honestly, the interacting with others bit, they don't always play nicely with others. We're not looking necessarily for for team players. But it's really about the behaviors. You can't really assess an individual if they're found a potential by looking at a piece of paper.

• 2:43:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, congratulations.

• 2:43:05Jordi Hays?

  Hackathon is a very cool selection process. Hit that gong for the whole batch.

• 2:43:12Jordi Hays?

  It's great to meet you and.

• 2:43:14John Coogan?

  Hope to have you back on the show soon. We'll talk to you later.

• 2:43:16Speaker 10

  Amazing.

• 2:43:16Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Alex. Thank you.

• 2:43:18John Coogan?

  And we have Eric Seufert from Mobile Dev Memo in the Restream waiting room. We will bring him into the TBPN Ultra Dome. We are getting back on track. Eric, how are you doing?

• 2:43:30Jordi Hays?

  What's up?

• 2:43:30John Coogan?

  Sorry to keep you waiting.

• 2:43:32Jordi Hays?

  Sorry about that.

• 2:43:33John Coogan?

  Absolutely chaotic day. I'm I'm great. I've enjoyed your guest appearances on podcasts, your writing, everything, especially some of your more recent takes. But maybe for those who aren't super familiar, would you mind giving us like a high level just introduction on your day to day, how you describe yourself to folks these days?

• 2:43:54Eric Seufert?

  Yeah, I call myself an independent analyst. I run the website Mobile Dev Memo. It's got a blog, podcast, newsletter, Slack community. I wrote the book Freemim Economics and I spent kind of my operating career in the mobile space, mostly in performance marketing roles and strategy roles. And now I just kind of blog, podcast, full-time and invest out of a fund called Hercules Capital.

• 2:44:17John Coogan?

  Oh, cool. Do you, it seems like one of the main, like, I don't know, takes you have that you're just waiting to cash in on is this idea that OpenAI will be doing advertising soon. Can you walk me through like how you perceive the messaging from OpenAI, the firm, and then how, like, what led you to believe that it is inevitable that we will see advertising?

• 2:44:42Eric Seufert?

  Yeah, that's my modus operandi is strong, strong opinions forcefully stated. And I've said very forcefully, OpenAI will monetize with ads. I wrote a piece in May. The title was, obviously, OpenAI will monetize with advertising. And here's what, here's where I think the, the sort of like most profound clue has been, right? So Sam Altman in Ben's podcast last week, Ben Thompson, he said, he pulled off like a rhetorical sleight of hand, right? He said like, hey, look, you know, yeah, we're not really considering ads, but I really love what Instagram does.

• 2:45:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:19Eric Seufert?

  Those aren't ads. We wouldn't do ads. Ads are a tax, but I love what Instagram does. Instagram has surface relevant products. I mean, I've bought products from those ads. Those aren't ads.

• 2:45:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:45:27Eric Seufert?

  That's a separate. Yeah, those are, those are improving my life.

• 2:45:30John Coogan?

  That's discovery.

• 2:45:31Eric Seufert?

  That's, that improves my life. Ads by definition, you know, deteriorate engagement, but, but these I, I extract value from.

• 2:45:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:38Eric Seufert?

  Right? And that was a Spencer Norman moment. That was the Spencer Norman moment. It's a Spencer Norman, Netflix CFO, March 2022, Morgan Stanley TMT conference. He said, look, it's not like we have religion against advertising. It's not in our plans right now, but never say never, but it's not in our plan. It's not like we have religion against advertising. That was the Spencer Norman moment. That was March 2022. When did Netflix launch ads? November 2022.

• 2:46:01Eric Seufert?

  Obviously, they were already working on it. Yeah. Right? And, and by the way, I would, I would, yeah, I would dispute that statement that it's not like we, we have religion against ads. They very much exhibited religion against ads for years and years and years. That's at that point. But that was a tipping point. That was a tipping point when they indicated to the market that ads are coming, they're inevitable. I've said ads are inevitable with OpenAI, with ChatGPT. I said yesterday they're ineluctable. I got made fun of for using that word. I've used it a lot, by the way, but they're inevitable. They're coming. And I think they've been working on that for some time. Yeah.

• 2:46:28Jordi Hays?

  Here's, uh, what do you think about ads where you pay for something and still get ads? Because for me, I signed up for some HBO plan a while ago and I thought I was signing up to not have ads. And now I, I've been a little bit lazy. I usually watch TV before I'm falling asleep. And, uh, if when I get it like a series of like, when I get like four minutes of ads before HBO and I'm paying for the product. That's to me, a really bad user experience.

• 2:47:00Eric Seufert?

  Well, I mean, it's a choice. I mean, there's trade offs, right? I think, um, you know, the, here, so with any sort of, with any, with any digital product that has the capability of becoming like, having a humanities spanning TAM. Uh, you, you, you, the, the sort of, uh, the imperative is to reduce consumer surplus to as close to zero as you can. Right? Because that gives everyone an accessible, and to give everyone an accessible price point, right? For some people, the only accessible price point is zero. Right? Now, for some people, now, now you have to weigh that against perception, right? And there's perception risk, like Netflix, I, I, I had sort of argued at one point that I thought Netflix should go fast, so freemium ad, uh, freemium, uh, sorry. Free ad-supported tier. Yeah. Uh, and, and just drop the price point to zero and have ads. I, now I've changed my mind on that. I don't think they should do that.

• 2:47:44Eric Seufert?

  Um, just because it would, it would, you know, it would deteriorate the perception of the brand, right? They have a, they have a perception of being like a high-quality, uh, you know, content studio, right? And so I think that would be a mistake for them to do. Um, so it's just a trade-off, right? Do you want to maximize TAM or do you want to sort of, uh, preserve some other asset? In Netflix's case, it's the, the, the perception of being like a high-quality service. I don't think ChatGPT, um, has that risk, right? So I think ChatGPT can introduce, so first of all, when we talk about ads in ChatGPT, we're not talking about ads in the paid tier. Just want to be clear about that. We're talking about ads in the free tier, right? And so.

• 2:48:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's, that's kind of what I was getting at. It's like, if I, if I'm on the 200 a month plan and I'm getting slammed with ads. Like, that's gonna be, people are gonna be really mad about that, but for people that are on the free tier, seems very fair.

• 2:48:29Eric Seufert?

  Well, I mean, that would create a lot of animosity on the $200 tier. But I think, like, so yes, yesterday, the Financial Times posted some data about OpenAI. So 800 million users, we knew that, 5% are paying, right? So you've got 40 million paying users, 13 billion ARR, but only 70% of that is from consumers. So when I saw a lot of the analysis about these numbers, a lot of them sort of anchored ARPU numbers to the overall 13 billion, but you've got to reduce that to the 70% that are this consumer, the rest of it is enterprise API access. So really, that backs up to $228 annual, not ARPU, right? It's not ARPU, it's ARPPU, it's ARPPU, average revenue per paying user, right? But if you, so if you, if you actually, if you do the calculation for just ARPU, it's $11.38 ARPU, right? So how does that compare? That's, that's less than Metas.

• 2:49:14Eric Seufert?

  Metas is 1365, this is global, right? It's much higher than Snap, Snap's is 287, Pinn's is 164, right? But, I mean, the thing is, like, they're pretty close to Metas, right? On an ARPU basis. Now, those 70%, sorry, the 95% of non-paying users are essentially freeloaded, right? Now, the issue with OpenAI for that, and we saw that in the numbers as well, is that inference doesn't, isn't free. Inference has, you know, marginal cost of, you know, of providing that good. And so they have to find some way to close that gap. And I think introducing ads to the free tier will not meaningfully impact engagement. I think it could be additive to engagement. I think if you look at a ChatGPT chat, it kind of feels like a feed.

• 2:49:58Eric Seufert?

  I think the real challenge with, with ChatGPT, and I've seen, like, a lot of conversations about, well, the difficulty is going to be like, the attribution, or it's going to be the sort of middleware that connects things. I don't think, I think that's mostly a solved problem. I don't think attribution is going to be any different. Attribution meaning, how do you credit ChatGPT for driving a sale or something? I don't think that's going to be any different than a traditional social media ad for e-commerce or like an app. I think the challenge is really going to be coming up with a format that is, that feels native for the experience, without calling into question the unbiasedness of the response. And that's going to be the real issue with ads, and I think it's also kind of going to be an issue with instant commerce.

• 2:50:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, walk me through, uh, when do we get to the line of, uh, as we're rolling out ad products at OpenAI hypothetically, uh, when do we get to the, okay, there's backlash, that's too far. It feels like if I see a, just an ad in the Sora feed, that's feels very native to Instagram. If I see an ad in my Pulse news feed, that feels very native, that seems very reasonable. But if I ask it for what are the best paper towels and it shows me an ad and it feels like the ads team is actually influencing the editorial, if you could call it that, it feels like the

• 2:51:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because right now you're getting the average product recommendation from Reddit, right?

• 2:51:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:20Jordi Hays?

  And then if they start to put their kind of, uh, they start to kind of tilt the scale.

• 2:51:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, what are the landmines in terms of like, just describing the nature of the firewall between the results when you ask ChatGPT a direct question and ads?

• 2:51:37Eric Seufert?

  It's a bright red line, you can't cross it because once you lose consumer trust, then it's gone forever, right? If a customer thinks that the answer is not objective, that's actually influenced by whoever's just paying the most to show the product to you, then you lose the consumer trust, right? And, and actually, that's like, that's a very specific problem for chatbots. It doesn't exist for Google Search, right? Because Google wants you to click, uh, with any query, right? You, you, you query for something, they want you to click. Now, uh, when, like, everyone's interests are all aligned, the advertisers, Googles and users, if that first link is the most relevant, well, you can kind of measure relevance, uh, through the price, the sort of modified price that the person pays for the ad, right? Because, uh, the, the sort of the end price that an advertiser

• 2:52:20Eric Seufert?

  pays is actually modified by the relevance. And so, um, with, with ChatGPT though, so if you just see a stream of links, if the top link is an ad or if it's not an ad, if it's most relevant, either way, everyone wins, right? Um, but those interests are not aligned in that way with the chatbot, right? So I think once you start inserting ads into answers, um, you're going to call into question the unbiasedness of that answer and you're going to make users question whether they're actually getting the most relevant information, they're just getting the information that was, uh, that was, that was paid for, that was paid to be shown. But the, the other thing is like, I So, so a lot of people think that instant checkout is like kind of precursor for ads, right? Because, well, there are some partners now and, and they kind of, they all serve econ, but like they might serve different categories, right? So there's, there's probably not too

• 2:53:04Eric Seufert?

  much overlap in the type of products that could be served in any given instance, but there will be at some point. And once there is a lot of overlap, well, then how do you mediate that overlap? You run it through an auction. Well, then it's ads, right? I, I actually don't think that's the case. I don't think that's what they're, what they're trying to do here. You know, so the issue with that is what we know about instant checkout, and there, it's kind of light on details at this point, but it sounds like the way they monetize that is there's a flat percentage fee that gets applied to the product price, right? And so that's actually economically suboptimal for OpenAI, right? Why? Because, well, if the lowest price item is the, the, the sort of most relevant, and that's what gets shown, then they're going to make less money on that, right? And so the, the issue with that is like, what you'd rather do is you'd rather combine the relevance with the

• 2:53:48Eric Seufert?

  bid, right? And that takes into account the price of the product, right? That's what the advertisers willing to pay. And so if you modify that into like an expected value, you, you rank the potential ads on that basis, then that's economically optimal, right? So OpenAI would be leaving money on the table by just sort of saying, okay, well, let's do an auction and but like, or sorry, like, just, just with the flat fee and, and, and then we're just going to like decide what to show there, right? And the other problem with that is from like a merchant perspective, you don't have any control there, right? So the thing is, you can't change the price to sort of absorb that margin shock, right? With ads, you price that, you price that specifically, you, you price the, the bid that you're willing to pay that makes sense for you, that, that allows you to sort of like recover the, the ad spend, but also make money on, on the checkout. But you can't

• 2:54:30Eric Seufert?

  really do that with the instant checkout because you just sort of submit like a JSON of your catalog, right? With the various price points. So I think, I think instant checkout might, and you know, the, the point I made in, in, in my blog post about this when it, when it was announced, is I think it's probably just a way to bootstrap conversion data for users to ultimately target ads against. But I don't think that's going to be the ad surface area. I think the ad surface area, and so first of all, I think it's, it's a mistake to think that ads need to be anchored to the, the, the content of the query, right? Like that's, that's sort of like a contextual targeting way of thinking. That's not what Facebook does. That's not what Instagram does.

• 2:55:04John Coogan?

  Oh, that's right.

• 2:55:04Eric Seufert?

  You see an ad on Instagram, it's not because the the previous piece of content you saw was related to the thing being advertised to you. It's all based on what there is a history of of conversion.

• 2:55:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:15Eric Seufert?

  Uh, for a- anchored to your account, right? So these things don't need to be related.

• 2:55:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:55:19Eric Seufert?

  They don't need to be, they don't, they don't, there's no, there's, there's no, there doesn't need to be like a direct uh, relevance connection to the actual content of the chat, right? It could be totally unrelated.

• 2:55:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:27Eric Seufert?

  Except for there's some, uh, you know, some logic that came up with the idea that this ad should be targeted to you because based on previous purchase data, you seem likely to buy that thing.

• 2:55:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, just it knows that you need paper towels. We're going to show you an ad for paper towels. Doesn't matter if you went and searched for, you know, the history of the Roman Empire.

• 2:55:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we haven't, we haven't talked about Pulse yet either, which is another effectively feed that you can just slot in whatever you want in between the content, and I don't think users would have any issue with that.

• 2:55:59Eric Seufert?

  Well, no, but so, so that, I mean, I think that could be a, so, so that's what I, that, that's kind of what I meant when I talked about like the format's going to be the real challenge here. Like, I mean, and they've got, you know, uh, exceptional people.

• 2:56:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:10Eric Seufert?

  To tackle these problems. And I think one thing about, you know, OpenAI that people sort of like uh, discount is, is the number of people that they've hired from Meta. Right? So I mean, like when people say, well, they don't have the team yet, of course they have the team. They've been hiring people from Meta for years and years who've worked on ads ranking because, you know, they worked on machine learning, therefore they were working on ads ranking.

• 2:56:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:28Eric Seufert?

  Right? So they've, they've, they've tackled these problems exactly.

• 2:56:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:31Eric Seufert?

  Um, in their, in their career history. Where I think ads, um, will, uh, be very well suited for it, or what I think ads will be very well suited for is, uh, like if the app store that they are, that they've announced that they're building, right? So what they said was, okay, we've got these app integrations, you know, Zillow, that's great. It's actually pretty functional. Um, but, and, and you know, a number of others, uh, Canva, Figma, but at some point we're going to have, you know, more app integrations than you can remember. And so therefore we're, therefore we'll have a directory. Well, when you have a directory, what do you, uh, what, what sort of like natively follows?

• 2:57:03John Coogan?

  Ads, baby!

• 2:57:06John Coogan?

  I love it. All the roads end in ads.

• 2:57:10Jordi Hays?

  What about on the Sora side? Do you think they can transition from a creative tool to a actual consumption?

• 2:57:17John Coogan?

  It's still number one in the app store, by the way. It's fascinating. It's very sticky.

• 2:57:21Eric Seufert?

  No. So I think I worked in, I've worked in mobile for too long to be like very optimistic about the staying power of an app that's been number one for like a week or even two.

• 2:57:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had this conversation earlier where I was like, I still put it at like, I would say like a 10% chance that it becomes a content consumption platform that people are spending hours and hours and hours.

• 2:57:45John Coogan?

  Snapchat or Pinterest or TikTok.

• 2:57:49Eric Seufert?

  Yeah. Well, so first of all, I don't know if it was a great idea to spin that out into its own app. It may have been. But the thing is, you know, OpenAI was not short of top downloaded apps, right? They've got ChatGPT and that was a top downloaded app. The thing is like you look at the staying power of these generative apps and it's, it's, you know, they're, they're pretty short-lived, right? I mean, like, you know.

• 2:58:16Jordi Hays?

  Lensa.

• 2:58:18Eric Seufert?

  What's that?

• 2:58:19Jordi Hays?

  Lensa, you remember that?

• 2:58:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, Lensa was the original.

• 2:58:21Eric Seufert?

  Yeah, that's right. But like, remember DeepSeek, right? Like, you know, I mean, the thing is like, you know, and then whichever, whichever company releases like the sort of the latest next gen model, they usually takes the number one spot, but they sort of fall off after, you know, kind of a short amount of time.

• 2:58:37Jordi Hays?

  But do you think?

• 2:58:37Eric Seufert?

  I think it's a really novel idea.

• 2:58:38Jordi Hays?

  Do you think DeepSeek was, was paying for downloads? Like, it didn't seem organic at all.

• 2:58:45Eric Seufert?

  Um, yeah, that's, I looked into that at the time. I don't actually remember what the conclusion was. I think they probably were.

• 2:58:52John Coogan?

  I mean, they were giving away the first reasoning model for free like a week earlier than OpenAI. So there was just like, it's the hot new thing.

• 2:58:59Jordi Hays?

  But the general public was not like, I need to try a reasoning model. I didn't see anybody outside of our bubble talking about DeepSeek and yet they were charting number one. And it just felt totally manufactured to me.

• 2:59:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, one, I don't know if you have a hard stop at two, but we will let you go. But I'd love to know your thoughts on TikTok. There's a deal obviously in place. The valuation always felt low, but at the same time, like competition in that category is pretty aggressive. YouTube has a very serious competitor. Instagram Reels is a very serious competitor. Now you have Sora. How are you thinking about TikTok in the, in the ecosystem right now?

• 2:59:35Eric Seufert?

  I mean TikTok not getting banned was a foregone conclusion. I I wrote I write an annual predictions post in my post for 2025. One of the predictions was that TikTok's not going anywhere. That was priced in. There was no movement basically in Snap stock price, um, you know, or metas. Um, I think, uh, so so TikTok is facing some challenges with its its social shopping product.

• 2:59:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:58Eric Seufert?

  Right? And I think that was.

• 2:59:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, the challenge is that they're losing a massive amount of money. Like, it's not really, it's like a retail platform that is massively loss making.

• 3:00:08Eric Seufert?

  Yeah, and they they scaled they scaled back the team there. I mean, just social commerce in general, I think, is, um, I don't say a dead end, but it it faces challenges in the West. But I I so I I don't think there was any news with it, you know, with this deal being reached. I I think when people uh, get worried about the algorithm being retrained, keep in mind, that's the content algorithm, the ads algorithm. So I I really don't think you're going to see any meaningful change in the ecosystem as a result of this. I think though, you because you mentioned, you know, YouTube being a competitor. I think the big news this week was the deal that got struck between Spotify and Netflix. That seems like a big deal, right? Because they're sort of frenemies, given the risk that YouTube uh, poses to both the businesses.

• 3:00:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:47Eric Seufert?

  And so I think it's really interesting that they're teaming up. Spotify's bringing its video podcasts onto the YouTube, uh, platform. Sorry, sorry.

• 3:00:53Jordi Hays?

  The Netflix platform, yeah.

• 3:00:55Eric Seufert?

  Not on YouTube.

• 3:00:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I think I think. I think Ben Thompson called it the anti YouTube coalition, right?

• 3:01:01Eric Seufert?

  Right. Well, but a similar coalition used to exist, uh, between, you know, amongst and at various times with different affiliations between, uh, Apple, Google and Facebook. Right? So I think these battle lines are being drawn, uh, there. But, you know, YouTube is a CTV behemoth, right? They, you know, uh, they announced that TV is the largest consumption platform for for the for, you know, the service. Um, it's it's a behemoth and you're seeing Netflix trying to sort of poach YouTube talent onto its platform. It brought over Miss Rachel. Right, so I think there is kind of like a war brewing, if not sort of raging at the moment across YouTube and Netflix. And it's interesting to see this alliance form between Netflix and Spotify.

• 3:01:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, did you have a reaction to Ben Thompson was kind of noodling on this take that essentially it's very hard for the second generation of YouTube creators who have built their entire business just on YouTube to then take a Netflix or Spotify deal and get off platform because they're so tied into the ecosystem versus someone who maybe has subscribers on their own website. And then, yes, they use YouTube as a distribution platform, but that's not if they turn off YouTube, it's not that big of a deal. And so the loose pitch, as I was interpreting it, was that Netflix and Spotify would kind of run out of talent to poach from YouTube because the next generation was so locked in.

• 3:02:16Eric Seufert?

  It could be, but it depends on the structure of the deal, right? So when Miss Rachel went to Netflix, she wasn't forced to shut down her YouTube channel. She could continue to monetize that content. And actually, she didn't even make any new content for Netflix. That's why it was such a win for Netflix. I mean, we don't know what they paid her, but she just took this content that was excellent and brought it over to Netflix. They packaged it up into a short season and essentially just got paid for double dipping into her existing content.

• 3:02:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's pretty remarkable.

• 3:02:45Jordi Hays?

  Last question, and then we'd love to have you back on. This was an awesome conversation. How excited do you think the average app developer, business owner in general should be about OpenAI launching ads? Because I know a number of businesses over the years that like were basically born because a new ads platform. Like I have friends company with hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. They've told me like, we would not be a big company if we didn't, if we didn't get to hyperscale on Facebook in the early days. And so I assume OpenAI will want to make the ads product cheap and performant early on to just drive this huge

• 3:03:28Jordi Hays?

  influx of volume. But I'm curious what you think the opportunity will be early.

• 3:03:34Eric Seufert?

  Everyone should be excited about OpenAI launching an ads platform. This is beneficial broadly for the economy, ads are the driver of the internet economy. Look, but for Facebook ads, but for conversion optimized Facebook ads, the DDC category wouldn't exist. E-commerce would be much smaller than it was. There would be far fewer small businesses in this country. Ads is a growth engine, not just for, you know, e-comm or not just for like tech bros, for everything. It is the beating heart of the economy. Everyone should be excited about this. Look, I remember there was, Chemaath was complaining at one point that like, I don't remember the exact number, but he was like, you know, I invest in these companies and 70% of the money goes to Facebook ads. And I wrote a piece saying, you should be thanking Facebook, because if Facebook wasn't there to absorb this ad

• 3:04:16Eric Seufert?

  spend, those companies wouldn't exist for you to invest in, right? This is

• 3:04:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, also the companies wouldn't spend the money if it wasn't driving results. It's not like you just, you don't, you don't, if, if a camp, if you spend 20, you know, 20 grand on a campaign and the CAC is too, just high, it doesn't make sense. You just turn it off. Like, that's the beautiful thing.

• 3:04:36Eric Seufert?

  Exactly. Exactly. So I mean, I think, you know, there, there, there's, there's a reason to be very optimistic broadly about the new opportunity that will be engendered by, just, just by, by LLM empowered content engagement, right? Or AI empowered content engagement. It doesn't have to be just LLMs. But, but I think like where people get mixed up is they think, well, you know, these ads need to be different. There's some different way to sort of integrate ads. Well, no, the formats need to be unique and they need to feel native, but ads are ads, right? If you drive performance and you get conversion of feedback and you get the feedback loop going and you deliver more value than you were paid, right? There's compounding there and it grows the economy. So I'm super excited. I call this commerce at the limit, because I think what all, and, and a lot of this

• 3:05:21Eric Seufert?

  technology is not being applied to the consumer facing side of things, it's just getting applied to the backend, right? So that's what annoyed me about Facebook's last earnings or Meta's last earnings, because people are like, oh, look at all, all these big projects. Gen, Andromeda, Lattice drove 3% improvement to click through rate or 2%. You know how massive that is at that scale, how meaningful? But the other thing people ignore is that compounds. Every time I spend a dollar and I get more back, What do I invest the next time? Not a dollar, right? I invest what I got back. So it's more and it compounds over time. I'm going to make more money and it's going to grow over time. So that two or 3% this quarter will will it also exist the next time that money is recycled, right? And also those products are not static. They're not they're not frozen, you know, in time. They will also continue to improve.

• 3:06:04Eric Seufert?

  So the thing is like these these products, and this is all in the back end. This is not seen by consumers. But this is where a lot of the investment is going. And so people talk about the capex. Like the capex is delivering real returns. What are you complaining about? And and the thing is like that is that's driving real returns, but it's driving more spend. It's driving compounding spend. And that's where a lot of the investment is going. So I think there's there's reasons to be excited across a number of of of service areas here. And it's not just the consumer facing side.

• 3:06:30John Coogan?

  This is amazing. Thank you so much. Incredible rant. I feel like I just got it. Let's get you back on the schedule next week. We have to have you back. This is incredible. Thank you so much for stopping by, taking the time out of your day. I learned a lot. Mostly, I just got fired up. This was incredible. Thank you, Eric. Thank you.

• 3:06:45Eric Seufert?

  Take care, guys, and congrats on all the success. It's well deserved. The New York Times profile, Mike Isaac, that's the big leagues.

• 3:06:51John Coogan?

  We survived. We survived. We survived. Thank you. Great to see you. Great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. And one more guest before we get on with London. Intuition. We got to hop on with we got to hop on with London in just a few minutes. But Pim is in the restroom waiting room. And now he's in the TBP and Ultra Dump. Welcome to the show. Sorry for keeping you waiting. Give us the news.

• 3:07:15Speaker 12

  Yeah, we've raised $133 million, 0.7 because we're gamers.

• 3:07:22John Coogan?

  0.7.

• 3:07:23Speaker 12

  0.7, yeah, to build general agents for environments that require deep spatial and global reasoning.

• 3:07:31John Coogan?

  1337 lead. This is a gamer reference. Tell me about your you. Didn't you make money as a gamer at like 18 or something like that?

• 3:07:39Speaker 12

  Yeah, so I grew up with threats, so I didn't really do much other than playing video games as a kid. And built the largest private server on RinScape when when I was a teenager, did about a million and a half in revenue by the time I turned 18 years old. Yeah, it was pretty funny.

• 3:07:58John Coogan?

  That's incredible. I mean, people come by with, you know, $100 million fundraisers all the time, but that is, that is extremely-

• 3:08:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, we don't, we don't see 133.7 million dollars-

• 3:08:09John Coogan?

  Seeds every day. That is, that is special. So, thank you so much for taking the time. Um, let's actually dive into the company. Tell me more about what you're doing.

• 3:08:17Speaker 12

  Yeah, so, um, we're building general agents for environments that require deep spatial temporal reasoning. So, what this means is, like, look at drones, for instance, robotic arms, they all ship with game controllers already. So, there is this general interface for, um, applications that's already in all the robotics where we don't need to reinvent a wheel. Um, uh, you know, um, and so, the bet that we're taking is that we can train these, these foundation models on so much diversity represented in all the gaming data, which increasingly looks more, uh, realistic, right, as physics engines get better, and that we can transfer to novel environments with very, very minimal new data. Um, and we're seeing, you know, we're seeing the scaling for this happening now. Um, it's very, very clear we can do this. One application that we're going after, so, uh, after doing

• 3:08:59Speaker 12

  RuneScape, I worked at Dr. S. Borders. Um, I spent three years there. And, um, uh, so, one of the applications that we're excited about is search and rescue drones, which is basically, you know, decoupling the need for humans to even be observing. Um, uh, and, you know, it can basically, um, uh, cover a lot more space, a lot more quickly, uh, if, if, if, if you have general agents that can, that can navigate these types of environments.

• 3:09:22Jordi Hays?

  So, the future of search and rescue is, in your vision, like drone swarms that get, let's say, if somebody's on a hike, they get lost, you, you'd be able to launch a swarm and cover, you know, 100 square miles in, uh, an hour?

• 3:09:35Speaker 12

  Yeah, I suspect there will still be, like, VLMs on the other side initially, that sort of analyze footage and sort of process information. But, yeah, I think the, the bottleneck is just make these things not stupidly run into things, to be honest. Like, it's not, uh, that, that's, uh, so that's what we're focused on right now, is this general navigation for novel environments in devices that have gaming inputs represented specifically. And that's the key, right? Because we have these inputs that already gamers use to control in all these, like, very diverse environments inside video games, including things like drones, right? That then, uh, that then, um, uh, the agent only has to adapt to an environment, not a new action space. Um, and so, the, the bet is that, that transfers.

• 3:10:14Jordi Hays?

  What are some other specific categories that, that are exciting to you or types of companies?

• 3:10:20Speaker 12

  Yeah, so look at it this way. The model sits in a general action space, meaning that it has an understanding of how different actions relate to the world that it's acting in. You have to make sure that when you transfer it over to the physical world that you've solved for safety, right? And so what we generally do is we deploy agents, for instance, in video games that have a larger action space that can do loads of things because you don't need to solve for safety as much there. And then when you can verifiably prove that you deeply understand the specific action space, such as navigation, right, then you start transferring those actions over to the physical world. And we have sort of an internal joke that we think maybe simulation might actually be larger than the physical world because there's only one physical reality and there's many simulated ones.

• 3:11:02John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 3:11:03Speaker 12

  And so, yeah, so our take is, so we're already working with game developers to get these models deployed into their games, which means like much more fun playing video games. And then it's also a great flywheel, right? Because if we can verifiably prove that these models are performing great against game players, then, you know, that's a great benchmark to also start transferring out to other environments.

• 3:11:23John Coogan?

  Walk through the usefulness of something like Unreal Engine versus, I'm going to mispronounce it, Gaussian splatting, and then a genie three style, like generative world model where you're generating the frames on the fly. We've heard about a lot of companies using all three of those, mixing them together, focusing on one or the other. Do you have, are you particularly bullish or bearish on individual one of those technologies?

• 3:11:49Speaker 12

  Yeah, I've thought about this question a lot. I went through the depths of trying to actually start building my own physics engines, like actually understand this from first principles. So I'm going to try. I might take a little bit. Let's give it up for first principles.

• 3:12:02John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 3:12:04Speaker 12

  So the most computationally difficult things to simulate are...

• 3:12:11Speaker 12

  High degree of freedom agents. And that grows exponentially as you have more agents in an environment. Meaning that at some point in simulation, you just have, you hit a point where you just have to bet on video transfer. Right? And, um, and so, and also there's, then in the same time, for instance, there's loads of things that we currently do not have video footage of, which means you cannot really bet on those things. Right? And so like, um, like cells and like, you know, smaller, smaller things that like aren't well represented, those type of things. Right? So, so you always have to use a combination of the two. Um, you always can have to use a combination of two. The other thing is that when you sit inside, um, like generative world models, like genie, for instance, um, you're not fully in verifiable domain. Right?

• 3:12:51Speaker 12

  Uh, and so the, the, the problem with, to be clear, this is an incredible breakthrough. Right? But, but, um, there's very much use for engines like unreal. And I think, I don't think actually, I think where we end up is, it's actually really annoying not to have that like a terminism in these world models. Right? Because you want to be in some form of verifiable domain. So I hope that somebody manages to create some form of hybrid architecture. Like, okay, so for instance, if you go on YouTube.

• 3:13:17John Coogan?

  Like, like the, you can hallucinate all the text, but then you can RL it. And then you have, oh, write some Python. So if you need to do a complex math equation, you draw Python, right?

• 3:13:25Speaker 12

  Yeah. Have you guys ever watched Redstone CPU, uh, videos on Minecraft? So there are videos on Minecraft where people actually, um, build Redstone CPUs. And there's also now they build the chat good. So my point is, you know, we, we might actually end up finding like really interesting. Um, like my, my dream is to be able to like simulate a CPU inside a world model where you sort of have some form of determinism. And, uh, and not, and again, this is not at all possible or near possible today. But my, my, my point being like, maybe, maybe the world model can, yeah.

• 3:13:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:53Speaker 12

  Uh, and so.

• 3:13:55John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 3:13:55Speaker 12

  Uh, yeah. So, so I think, I think you need both right now. Uh, you want to bet maximally on, um, uh, world models and video transfer for, uh, hard, for things that are hard to simulate. And then maximally on simulation for the things that you want to stay in verifiable, verifiable domain on, which is most things.

• 3:14:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:12Speaker 12

  In my opinion.

• 3:14:13John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense. Uh, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations. Uh, just very fun conversation.

• 3:14:19Jordi Hays?

  Super fun conversation. Would love to, would love to have you back on. Any, anything happens in the news that you're excited about, just ping us, we'll have you on.

• 3:14:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm sure.

• 3:14:26Speaker 12

  This was great.

• 3:14:27John Coogan?

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

• 3:14:29Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:14:29John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you later. Uh, before we hop off, let me tell you about Wander. Find your happy place.

• 3:14:36Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place. Sorry to, to let, to let, to leave you hanging there for a second.

• 3:14:41John Coogan?

  Oh, you're good. No, I'm fine. I didn't even notice. Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. And good luck to Rigav in the chat. He is going to a job interview and we wish him the best. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and we will see you tomorrow. Thank you for tuning in.

• 3:14:59Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait.

• 3:15:00John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:15:00Jordi Hays?

  Have a great evening.