Microsoft, Meta, & Tesla Earnings, Google DeepMind's Project Genie, SpaceX & xAI Merger | Anton Osika, Christian Garrett & Delian Asparouhov, Eric Seufert, Kevin Weil, Mehul Nariyawala

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (02:23) - Apple Acquires Audio AI Startup Q. AI (12:05) - Microsoft, Meta, and Tesla Earnings (25:37) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (36:27) - SpaceX & xAI Merger (41:02) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (54:23) - Google DeepMind's Project Genie (01:06:51) - Chrome Debuts "Agentic Browsing" (01:10:41) - TikTok Uninstalls Surge 150% (01:15:21) - Anton Osika, co-founder and CEO of Lovable, an AI-powered platform enabling users to build applications through natural language prompts, discusses the company's rapid growth, including reaching 300 million annual recurring revenue (ARR) within two months. He highlights how Lovable empowers non-technical users to create and deploy software solutions, citing examples like a restaurant owner developing an AI phone-answering system and a pet owner generating AI-crafted dog portraits for sale. Osika emphasizes the platform's focus on simplicity and security, aiming to democratize software development and unlock human creativity. (01:44:48) - Christian Garrett & Delian Asparouhov is a venture capitalist and co-founder of The Hill & Valley Forum, a bipartisan community bridging Silicon Valley and Washington, D. C., to address national security challenges through technology. In the transcript, he discusses the upcoming third annual Daytime Forum, emphasizing its focus on strengthening ties between the technology sector and government, expanding into industries like biotechnology, and increasing international participation to foster collaboration with U. S. allies. He also highlights the forum's evolution into a platform for developing and endorsing joint policies that align public and private sector incentives for national benefit. (02:00:03) - Eric Seufert is a mobile growth strategist and analyst best known for his writing on advertising, user acquisition, and platform economics. He runs Mobile Dev Memo, a widely read industry blog, is the author of Freemium Economics, and previously led user acquisition at Rovio, where he worked on scaling mobile games in a post-IDFA world. (02:36:46) - Kevin Weil, OpenAI's Chief Product Officer, discusses the transformative impact of AI on scientific research, highlighting how advanced models like GPT-5.2 are now capable of solving complex, open problems in mathematics and other scientific fields. He emphasizes the importance of integrating AI into scientists' daily workflows through tools like Prism, which enhance scientific writing and collaboration. Weil envisions a future where AI accelerates scientific discovery by automating routine tasks and enabling researchers to focus on more complex challenges. (02:55:26) - Mehul Nariyawala, co-founder of Matic, discusses the company's recent $60 million funding led by Sutter Hill Ventures, the challenges and insights gained from various pricing models for their autonomous home robots, and the strategic focus on building consumer trust and data collection through their initial product to pave the way for future advancements in home robotics. (03:06:19) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://Ramp.com AppLovin - https://axon.ai Cognition - https://cognition.ai Console - https://console.com CrowdStrike - https://crowdstrike.com ElevenLabs - https://elevenlabs.io Figma - https://figma.com Fin - https://fin.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Graphite - https://graphite.com Gusto - https://gusto.com/tbpn Labelbox - https://labelbox.com Lambda - https://lambda.ai Linear - https://linear.app MongoDB - https://mongodb.com NYSE - https://nyse.com Phantom - https://phantom.com/cash Plaid - https://plaid.com Public - https://public.com Railway - https://railway.com Restream - https://restream.io Shopify - https://shopify.com Turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Vibe - https://vibe.co Sentry - https://sentry.io Cisco - https://www.ciscoaisummit.com/ai-virtual-summit.html Okta - https://www.okta.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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today's Thursday, January 29th, 2026. We are live in the TVP and Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Port of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money.

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  Save both.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more. They got Super Bowl ads too in just a few days. We're counting down the days to the ramp Super Bowl ad. Very excited for it.

• 0:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not the Super Bowl. Counting down the days.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, I I I learned I learned a fun fact. I think I put it in here. Apparently, they they had a Super Bowl back in 2001.

• 0:35Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  Have you heard of it?

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  Tell me more.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  So I got followed by this account that's called 2001 Live. 2001 Live. It's 25 years ago live. It's a cool account. And in here, they they flashback to like what was happening, you know, 25 years ago. Every day they post what happened 25 years ago. It's a kind of cool account. Followed me. I followed it a while ago, but it followed me. And I saw a post in here that said, 25 years ago, they did a Super Bowl in Tampa, Florida. The Baltimore Ravens beat the New York Giants 34 to 7. This is the Ravens' first Super Bowl title. I guess people are not happy about that. I don't know. But anyway, very excited for the Super Bowl. In other news, let's run through the linear lineup.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  Meet the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. And we have a fantastic show. We have Anton from Lovable coming in studio in the Ultra Dome. Then we got Christian Delian from Hill and Valley, breaking down what's going to happen at the Hill and Valley Conference in just a few weeks. And then we got Eric Sufer.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  We need a nickname. No, we love Eric, of course, from Mobile Dev Memo, Heracles Capital. And he's coming on at 1. We're going to talk about ads, ChatGPT ads, how's the rollout going? Also, obviously, earnings makes a ton of sense. And then Kevin from OpenAI is coming on again, returning to talk about science.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  AI and science.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  AI and science. And if we're seeing a Claude bot type moment, feeling the AGI in science, what we should be looking for there in 2026. In other AI news, of course, we will go into earnings and whatnot today. If you're tracking earnings, make sure to head over to public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service.

• 2:21Jordi Hays?

  So in the news today, Apple said this morning that it has acquired Q.ai, an Israeli startup working on AI technology for audio.

• 2:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33Jordi Hays?

  Apple didn't disclose the terms. The company was backed by Matter Venture Partners, Kleiner, Spark, Exor and GV. So wow, that's a good lineup and great outcome. The Financial Times reported it was worth nearly $2 billion. So pretty meaningful deal. Apple is not known for really paying up on a lot of different M and A that they're kind of folding in to their roadmap. We had Mark Gurman on yesterday talking about how Apple uses M and A effectively to accelerate their roadmap. So according to Reuters, Apple did not say how it will use QAI as technology, but said the startup has worked on new applications of machine learning

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  to help devices understand whispered speech and to enhance audio in challenging environments. QAI last year filed a patent to use facial skin micro-movements to detect words mouthed or spoken.

• 3:28John Coogan?

  This is, this is, we've seen a couple startups that are, you know, doing like the whisper, like what do they call it? It's like telepathy almost. It's, it tracks your, your mouth movements. So you can just, and then it like will track what's happening. Really, really crazy.

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  So facial skin micro-movements will be used to identify a person and assess their emotions, heart rate, respiration rate and other indicators. Very sci-fi. QAI has 100 employees, including the CEO and co-founders will join Apple. So. The founders, Aviad Mizel founded three dimensional sensing firm PrimeSense and sold it to Apple in 2013.

• 4:08John Coogan?

  Absolute dogs.

• 4:09Jordi Hays?

  They call it a double kill. The PrimeSense deal eventually helped Apple move away from fingerprint sensors on its iPhone and toward facial recognition technology.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 4:18Jordi Hays?

  Mizel said, "Joining Apple opens extraordinary possibilities for pushing boundaries and realizing the full potential of what we've created." So, very, very wild to be going back to Apple for a second time.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  And pop quiz for Tyler, why does Apple acquire companies?

• 4:35Speaker 02

  I mean, why questions are usually pretty open.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  Okay, good answer. But Mark Gurman told us, "Why does Apple acquire companies?" To accelerate their roadmap. Accelerate the roadmap, yes. And it's funny, because I asked him, like, "Why are we gonna hear Tim Cook say that?" And he was like, "Oh, because of earnings." But, we're basically hearing him say it today with this surprise acquisition. That's obviously the line from Apple. And it makes sense. This is something that is uniquely acceleratable because of the Apple hardware ecosystem. They can deploy this through AirPods, they can deploy this through the phones, just like they did with Face ID. If you have that technology, and you're like, "Oh, well, in order to log into your computer with your face, you're going to need a third-party device that you plug into the USB."

• 5:23John Coogan?

  Like, no one's gonna do that. But if you're just like, "Yeah, it's gonna get baked into the hardware, we have the patents, we have the technology."

• 5:28Jordi Hays?

  And haven't you been wanting them to make more moves in specifically audio and transcription for a while?

• 5:33John Coogan?

  I've been like an audio interface bull forever. Like, since I worked at a startup that competed with Siri in 2010 or something like that. It was actually a good outcome. I didn't get any equity because I was just an intern. But it was actually a great outcome. They sold the dragon, naturally speaking, and everyone made a bunch of money. But Siri, kill the cow.

• 5:57John Coogan?

  But Siri was like the hot kid on the block back then. And Siri came out of Stanford, so they were much closer to Cupertino. These guys came out of MIT. Very similar natural speech recognition. You know, machine learning pipelines for understanding speech, doing dictation. Their main platform was BlackBerry. Because BlackBerry was really, really big. They had BlackBerry App Store. They did a deal so that you would get like pre-installed. So you'd get a big check from RIM. They did a very interesting out-of-home campaign where they bought billboards right outside of Research in Motion, the maker of BlackBerry's headquarters. Because they were advertising, yes. Adquick didn't exist then, but they should have used Adquick.

• 6:39John Coogan?

  They, they, because they were basically, they only had one customer, effectively. I mean, they had every customer that could go buy the app. But then all the other apps that were on either Google and Android quickly rolled out competitive features with Google Assistant. Siri got acquired. And so it was very clear that like, Apple was not going to be a really fertile ground, playground for them. And so they, they needed to get sort of like the attention of the BlackBerry execs. And so they put up a billboard right outside their, their headquarters. I still like as a strategy. I think it's very fun. But yes, I've been, I've been very bullish on this. I, I was thinking back then that, you know, people get their wisdom teeth out. This is very weird and cyberpunk, but if you got your wisdom teeth out, you, you could

• 7:21John Coogan?

  potentially like create, like add a, like a port for storing a microphone.

• 7:28Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, do you have any of these? I should have got that.

• 7:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Because a lot of people get them out. And then you could just put a port there and, and you could, and you could insert basically the tip of an AirPod, very, very small device that you would charge and then you put it in. And then when you're whispering, you can just hear, it can only hear that and it goes dictation straight to your phone. Obviously, that's unnecessary because you can, you know, do bone induction. You can just also just have a, you know, an AirPod in and just talk out loud and not care what people think. There's those crazy muffled things. You've seen that where you put on the headphones and then it puts like a cover over your mouth so you can talk in public.

• 8:08Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:08John Coogan?

  It's silent around you.

• 8:10Jordi Hays?

  Cantor says, I want my iPhone to unlock only if I silently mouth the words, "open sesame."

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  I think could be in the future.

• 8:18John Coogan?

  I was wondering about.

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  That would actually be nice if there was some other element because you still have this like wearing sunglasses trying to unlock your phone. Sometimes some pairs of sunglasses I have it one shots it others it's it's like, you know, pretty annoying.

• 8:33John Coogan?

  I was wondering about the the quality of whisper transcription these days like if I just open up whisper on the chat G P T app. Put my app, put my, put my phone in my pocket and just talk. Can it just hear through my pants pocket and just dictate perfectly now? Because like A I is so good at transcription that it can be really muffled like you can have music playing in the background and talk to whisper and it just won't.

• 8:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:58John Coogan?

  It just won't mess up so there is a world where you don't actually need like a separate pin. You just have something anywhere on your body and it knows, okay, this is what John sounds like. The let's kill all the background noise, let's kill all the other people talking, let's isolate that with A I like it seems pretty, pretty good for that.

• 9:16John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about Lambda Lambda is the super intelligence cloud building A I supercomputers for training and inference at scale from one G P U to hundreds of thousands.

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, one more thing on this Q A I.

• 9:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, acquisition, they're using, going back to their patent, using facial skin micro movements to assess emotions, heart rate, respiration rate and other indicators. You could imagine where a world in the future where you have Apple smart glasses that effectively have like health monitoring.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:46Jordi Hays?

  It's tracking respiration, heart rate, all these different things. Uh, and uh, just basically integrating the features you're getting from the Apple watch today.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, seems.

• 9:55John Coogan?

  But I I wonder what it's really unlocking that the watch can't do. There's always the question when you, when you, when you pitch a new device, it's like, well, your phone does have a camera on it, so you're not, this is like the smart glasses aren't the first.

• 10:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's a new device, but it's a Lindy form factor, right?

• 10:11John Coogan?

  True, true, true.

• 10:11Jordi Hays?

  Like this is something we've, we've talked about in the past, it's like the, you know, the, the new hardware that's taken off is an existing form factor. It's like headphones.

• 10:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 10:19Jordi Hays?

  Eyewear.

• 10:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you have watches, right? Creating these pendant things so far hasn't hit, right?

• 10:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's fair. I just think like on the heart rate issue specifically, there was an app before the Apple Watch existed where you could put your finger over the camera of the iPhone and it would use the light, the flashlight, which was right next to the camera at that point, to light up your finger. So your finger would turn red and then it would take the sensor data from the camera and measure the pulses of the red and give you your heart rate just from touching your camera. It's pretty cool. Like it was completely outside of the Apple ecosystem, just an app that you could download or pay for. And so the phone can take your heart rate, the watch can take your heart rate. If you give me glasses and you say,

• 11:07John Coogan?

  those glasses can also take your heart rate. I'm like, I got enough heart rate measurement. I can also just go like this and estimate it. Like there's a bunch of ways to know that your heart rate's spiking. Maybe tracking it's in different, but it feels like they need to go farther and the real opportunity is is something more around audio interfaces, link it to Siri, have more ways to triangulate what the person's trying to say, what they're saying in a noisy environment, whether they're trying to be quiet and you still want to isolate what they're saying, having a back and forth, reducing latency. All of those things are very critical to success in that category. Anyway, we are going to be in San Francisco on February 3rd, next week for Cisco's AI Summit. It's bringing together leaders from

• 11:51John Coogan?

  Nvidia, OpenAI, AWS and more to discuss the future of the AI economy. The whole thing will be live streamed and we'll be there for a gig stream. Did the fireworks get longer?

• 12:01Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 12:02John Coogan?

  I think they got longer today.

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot to celebrate, John. Let's go into.

• 12:07John Coogan?

  To earnings, Microsoft. So Microsoft shares have taken a dive as data center spending overshadows earnings surge. Let's give some numbers here. So. Microsoft's Q4 revenue was eighty one point three billion dollars, which was higher than the consensus estimate of eighty point two three billion. So they're making money. There's no, there's no lack of demand for Microsoft services. Q3 2025 revenue was seventy seven point one billion, up almost five percent. And year over year group growth was seventeen percent for Microsoft as a whole. But the stock sold off for by twelve percent and Microsoft is now just, just a tiny little three point one five trillion dollar company. Not bad, but.

• 12:52Jordi Hays?

  Still only down, what, six percent over the past five days?

• 12:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was a rise. Yeah, I mean, people have been excited about the OpenAI investment, which did show up in earnings. So OpenAI owns roughly twenty five, twenty seven percent of the new for-profit entity.

• 13:08Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, Microsoft.

• 13:09John Coogan?

  Microsoft owns twenty seven percent of OpenAI's new for-profit entity. And that value was actually reflected in Microsoft's earnings. And of course, more importantly, the GPT, the GPT models are truly frontier. Like, we've seen it again and again. There's like this horse race over this model's better at this thing. This model's better today, but it's just very clear that, that OpenAI is on the frontier and in the conversation for pretty much every application possible. And so you can just imagine, you take GPT five point two pro, you then that into knowledge work pipelines for Microsoft users, that sounds really useful. They aren't behind on coding. We've heard great stories about how Codex is a great model.

• 13:51John Coogan?

  Maybe it's a little slow, maybe they need to speed it up, but people are having a lot of luck with Codex. And so you can imagine that Microsoft is capable of integrating Codex into all sorts of different pieces of the Microsoft empire to create agentic workflows. And, and then they also have a deal with Anthropic. They also made, made a, made an investment. So they, they are multi-model, multi-platform, but.

• 14:14John Coogan?

  The problem is that Microsoft seems to be constrained on the data center side. So the CFO, Amy Hood, said on the Microsoft earnings call that limited availability of artificial intelligence hardware is affecting how quickly Microsoft's cloud business can grow, and it's capping Azure's revenue potential. Not good. They need to take another trip to Abilene. They need to build more data centers. But it's tricky. It takes time. And right now, maybe it's just a data center capacity issue. What's next? Is it going to be an energy bottleneck? Is it going to be a chip bottleneck? These are stories that we're tracking. Ben Thompson is starting to sound the alarm bells around TSMC capacity constraints. And what is TSMC doing on the capex front?

• 14:59John Coogan?

  Are they investing enough? Are they at risk of holding the bag if AI stalls out? Are they taking enough risks so that if the AI boom continues, that they can continue to deliver and ramp up? Or will Samsung and Intel need to step up? And will companies like Microsoft need to put pressure on those companies? That's another point of debate.

• 15:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so David in the chat is referencing this, but basically, obviously, it's amazing that Microsoft owns such a big slug of OpenAI. That's great. But the challenge is so much of their backlog is OpenAI. And they're actually getting less credit for that, right? Same way that Oracle had gotten punished for it. Now it's Microsoft's chance to actually get punished. And Microsoft, if you actually zoom out a little bit and just look at the last six months, down 17% in the last six months and down 4% over the last year. So it's funny, like, in a year where it feels like the last year Satya and Microsoft have just been on this insane run, they've fully, you know, round-tripped.

• 16:05John Coogan?

  Totally, totally, yeah. Before we move on to Meta, let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So Meta also reported earnings yesterday. 59.9 billion in revenue in Q4 of 2025, beating expectations of 58.5. Revenue's up 16% from Q3 of last year, which was 51.24. The company's growing its revenue 21% year over year. That's higher than Microsoft's 17% top line growth. Stock popped 10% after hours and the market cap is now 1.84 trillion.

• 16:45John Coogan?

  So Mark Zuckerberg told analysts on the earnings call, "In 2025, we rebuilt the foundations of our AI program." That should be obvious. There's so many acquisitions, so many hires, so many experiments, so many different strategies and discussions and changing of the guard and restructurings, layoffs and reality labs. It's the compute desk. There's been so many stories about Meta really rethinking their AI platform, re-architecting the foundations of it. So he continued to say, "Over the coming months, we're going to start shipping our new models and products." Very excited for that.

• 17:29John Coogan?

  He says, "I expect our first models will be good, but more importantly, they will show the rapid trajectory we're on." And I think that we all have high expectations. I don't think anyone's expecting them to jump way, way out in front of everyone else, but they can just be in the conversation with DeepMind, Anthropic, OpenAI. I think that will quell a lot of the concern.

• 17:54Jordi Hays?

  That, but also what are they doing with them? I think that matters more.

• 17:59John Coogan?

  Really, really important, yeah.

• 18:01Jordi Hays?

  You just look at, you look at, this is why I'm excited to talk to Eric later today. But you look at Meta's business and the way in which Gen AI can accelerate everything from generating more content on the platform to having better ads, to better targeting, all these things, right? And not to mention like where they can just vend it in at the product level, right?

• 18:22John Coogan?

  The product level stuff is tricky.

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  I mean, like I've bumped into Meta AI in Instagram many times and you do get reasonable, you know, natural language responses, but it's, it clearly still has the knowledge cutoff. It's not searching the web as effectively. It's not pulling together the, it doesn't feel completely native to the platform. Like if you go into Meta AI in Instagram and you ask it to go and hunt around in Instagram for a specific creator or reel based on some clues. It's, it doesn't feel like it has the hooks to really go in and understand, okay, based on what you've watched and what I've showed you in the past, this is probably what you're thinking of.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  Like that is sort of a superpower where, you know, there's so many times when you're on the timeline and you're like, I saw this post, I didn't bookmark it, didn't like it. What was it? And, and you want the search products to be empowered magically. What are you laughing at? What are you thinking? You gonna flashbang me again?

• 19:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, close. Continue.

• 19:32John Coogan?

  Anyway, I, I, I think that there's, there's the basic case of they gotta get, you know, an LLM that's frontier, that's, you know, has the big model smell, fun to talk to, good vibes. Then they need video and audio models that are rock solid and then they do need to vend those in. I think just having an API or just having a place where people can, can generate, you know, photo reel videos or even things like Sora where it has the aesthetics and pacing and cuts of an Instagram reel. That doesn't feel like it's enough. It feels like to really empower like the Instagram creator, it needs to be built into the platform like the, you know, like the captions are or those like, you know, the, the, the face filters on Snapchat that started there.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  Augmented reality stuff or placing backgrounds, just letting people still bring what's personal to them, their, their family, their experiences, their car. But Take a couple of photos of their car and turn it into a really, really awesome drone shot of them driving their car. I've seen a lot of really sweet edits where people will fly a drone over a car. Then they'll have a first-person GoPro on their chest while they're driving their car. And then they'll use AI to interpolate between the drone shot and their first-person view.

• 20:51Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  Because they can't actually, like, if you have a multimillion-dollar Hollywood budget, you actually can fly the drone into the car, have someone sitting in the car, they grab the drone, and then they hook it on a crane, and the crane takes it out and does a different shot with it. But that's like a multimillion-dollar, experts, tons of equipment. There's all these crazy things where someone will be on a Steadicam, on a cherry picker, this crane comes down, then they start walking into it. You can do these really elaborate shots. But with AI, you can interpolate and make those transitions. And so even just like AI-powered transitions would be a really, really cool thing to bring to mind.

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not to mention they own Manus now, which is a fantastic product team. They've built some great agents. You could imagine them integrating, like, basically like prompt to short-form video, right? Where you can just describe the video that you want to make, insert reel, like, basically like, generate B-roll for this, pull footage from around the internet, whatever. And so there's so many things that they can do. And again, they've just been using Meta AI as a sandbox for the most part. But I'm just excited for them to start shipping across.

• 21:55John Coogan?

  The remixing thing is so underrated, because there's a lot of people, like, the number of people that have, like, true inspiration for new formats is pretty low. People always do the stitches.

• 22:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, think about the remix functionality. If you see a funny video, and you can just, like, basically do a character swap in there, right? And it's like, that's the new piece of content that's going to be shared and a bunch of people engaged with, so.

• 22:20John Coogan?

  Tyler, what's your take on Meta's new plans for 2026?

• 22:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I definitely think the image and video models are much more important to get right than the LLM. Mainly just because, like, it seems like very natural them to vend it into everything compared to OpenAI or Google, who are, like, right now finding it out in image or in video. So it seems like if they can kind of do really well, you can get OpenAI and Google out of that, basically. And then the LLM, it's like, it's unclear what the actual, like, use case will be in the short term. Eventually, you want some cool, like... You know, Claude bought Style Agent somehow, bended in, but it's unclear how that's gonna work out. So I think in the short term, I'm very excited on the video model.

• 22:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I could, I really like that model of like the LLM going around and just like seeping into the cracks of all the different product experiences, but in these like really subtle ways. Like YouTube now has AI-generated summaries on videos and you can chat with a video. So if you're watching a, someone build a PC, you can ask Gemini on YouTube, "Hey, just print out the exact list of parts that the person used to build the PC." And there might be a parts list at the end of the video. There might be a parts list that's randomly mentioned throughout. Sometimes a creator might actually link to a real parts list, but Gemini allows you to scrape the transcript and then just get that however you want and then transform it

• 23:41John Coogan?

  or, you know, add prices to all of it or see if it's available in Japan, because I'm in Japan. All these interesting things. And I can imagine on Instagram, being able to go to a post that has like thousands of comments and just say, "Hey, I want the LLM to kind of summarize the sentiment." Like, what are the facts? Like, you know, people were debating whether or not this is AI. Is there a consensus? Or people were adding context. What was the key context that people were adding? There's a lot of posts that are basically like rage bait or click bait where it's unclear what's going on in the video. And so you go to the comments, people are like, "I don't get it." Or like they put up that sign like, "Context needed, please," right? And so you can kind of do that.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I feel like that stuff can just like, I'd rather just have that be in the like recommendation algorithm.

• 24:23John Coogan?

  Like sorted in the comments.

• 24:24Speaker 02

  If everyone in the comments is saying this is clickbait, just don't put it in my recommendation algorithm, right? It's like, also on X, there's Grok, right?

• 24:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  On every post, you can ask Grok. I don't think I've ever used that.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  You've never used that?

• 24:35Speaker 02

  I like never.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  I use that.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  I find the little like, you know, where you add a little bit of AI here and there, I like basically never use anything.

• 24:41Jordi Hays?

  Maybe that's just, you know.

• 24:43John Coogan?

  I'm a fan. I do see posts where there's, there's, you know, a list of companies that someone's talking. Oh, here are all the cool companies that I like and I can click and just get a little summary of each company. And I don't need to pull it out, go to a different model. I don't know.

• 24:57Jordi Hays?

  I feel like once a day, Grok will share context on something that is actually valuable.

• 25:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally, totally.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  Like in general.

• 25:04John Coogan?

  You mean in the comments, because somebody will add it.

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  Somebody added it. Like I remember Eric Sufer yesterday was responding to something. Somebody was basically saying like shareholders voted against the Tesla XAI investment.

• 25:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:17Jordi Hays?

  And then obviously they went ahead with it and Eric responded and he was like, hey, was this real? And then Grok just shared kind of the history on it.

• 25:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:24Jordi Hays?

  It's like, somebody else could have shared that.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  And provided the context, but yeah, I can do it instantly.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  Just helpful to have a little bit of extra context there. Interesting. App loving, profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

• 25:39Jordi Hays?

  Suspended cap says, I got to really respect Zuck, willing to spend over 50% of revenue next year when they still haven't delivered a single compelling AI product. Hell, yeah.

• 25:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the capex is crazy. So Meta did $200 billion in revenue in 2025. That's so huge. So much revenue. It's a lot of ads. But now they're going to plow 135 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. New York Times said 115, but either way, it's like more than half of the revenues.

• 26:08Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think posts like this are funny. And I think you can definitely agree that Meta has not shipped a, a super compelling, you know, AI product.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:18Jordi Hays?

  Yet, even though Meta Vibes has traction, not necessarily in our world, but certainly has some traction. But you have to, like, this is the guy that owns the world's largest trough or one of the world's largest troughs, right? And so he has, he knows that it's working.

• 26:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:36Jordi Hays?

  He knows, he can see the future, right? He has all the data.

• 26:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:39Jordi Hays?

  He knows that people say they don't like AI content, but

• 26:42John Coogan?

  They do.

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  in reality, they actually do. They're cagey with that. They watch it, they make it.

• 26:46John Coogan?

  The engagement must be growing exponentially, even though it's very small. It started at a base of zero and then you got Harry Potter, Balenciaga. And now you have 10 videos a week that are going so.

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  So I look at this different than, than some of the metaverse bets, just because

• 27:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  Zuck is one of the biggest beneficiaries of Gen AI.

• 27:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

  And so it's totally warranted to say like, hey, we should invest. An obscene amount of money in this. This is clearly the future.

• 27:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's so many different ways that no matter how you play out the AI future, Meta is a beneficiary of that. So it makes sense that they're investing so heavily. But it is like a remarkable shift in the financial structure of the business. If you think, if you go back to thinking of previous years, spending more than half of revenue on capex feels like a lot for a software company, right? It's like high margin and whatnot. Anyway, vibe.co, where D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences, measure sales, just like on Meta.

• 27:46Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about Tesla.

• 27:48John Coogan?

  Tesla reported revenue at 24.9 billion, and this beat the consensus estimate just slightly. Consensus was 24.78 billion.

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  But down.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  11.4% from the previous quarter, when revenue was 28.1 and 3% decline year over year. And Tesla's down 2% this morning. There was also a 61% drop in profit, and they're shuttering the high-end models of production. So they're stopping producing Model S's and Model X's, which I think the Model S and Model X features will be sort of rolled into trim levels. Like, we've already heard about the, so I was debating Jordi about this earlier. I thought that the Model Y and the Model X were the same length. The Model X is, in fact, almost a foot longer. So it is a bigger vehicle. They both have the option to have

• 28:42John Coogan?

  three rows. They both have very similar specs, but the Model X is bigger. But in China, we've heard that they're working on the Model YL, which is a long-wheelbase version that will be, I believe, longer than the Model X. So you have the ability to get a big Model Y, and then they're already doing different trim levels with long range, plaid. So if you take the plaid badge and you put that on the Model YL, and then you add different specs, and you say, oh, I want to spec my Model Y with. Gold wing doors, maybe all of a sudden you're back in Model X territory and you're dropping 100K. But there's just no, there's no denying that the Model S and X sales have slowed and

• 29:24John Coogan?

  there's a whole bunch more competition at the high-end EV market from Lucid, Rivian.

• 29:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:29John Coogan?

  And, and so Elon is fully thinking about what's next. He broke out subscriptions for autopilot self-driving for the first time. He's talking a huge amount about cyber cabs and robot taxis. He's making that cash investment in XAI. And of course, he's really focused on optimist humanoid robots. And it seems like he could be scaling up production there very, very quickly. And so analysts-

• 29:54Jordi Hays?

  He has a million, million subs of full self-driving.

• 29:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, not bad.

• 29:58Jordi Hays?

  And it's what, 89?

• 30:01John Coogan?

  I actually don't know.

• 30:01Jordi Hays?

  I think.

• 30:03John Coogan?

  You can look it up.

• 30:04Jordi Hays?

  I think I remember it's $89 a month.

• 30:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, but analysts, how much is it?

• 30:09Jordi Hays?

  I guess $49 a month for vehicles with enhanced autopilot.

• 30:13John Coogan?

  There are a few tiers, but yeah, I mean, if you, if you build up the subscription-

• 30:18Jordi Hays?

  What is it?

• 30:18John Coogan?

  How much is it?

• 30:19Jordi Hays?

  I think it's 100.

• 30:20John Coogan?

  100 a month?

• 30:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, you know, you got a billion dollars a year coming in from that. Not bad. And of course, very high margin because you don't need to manufacture it. Analysts thought Tesla was going to be cash flow negative for the quarter, but they actually were positive. They generated 1.4 billion dollars in free cash flow and this was down just 30%. So there's plenty of cash to keep the aggressive investments going, especially as Elon shifts the business towards autonomy. He's not shy about making the change aggressively. He said, "We would expect over time to make far more cyber cabs than all of our other vehicles combined." So he's, he's fully, fully going all in on the-

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a little, I think it's a little jarring for some people just because historically car companies have thrived by creating the perfect car in each category for every different consumer. And Elon is basically saying, actually- I know, I know what you want and I'm gonna give you it.

• 31:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:11Jordi Hays?

  It's, uh, you know, you don't need that many options.

• 31:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:15Jordi Hays?

  Where you're gonna be able, like you said, to just leverage the different trim levels.

• 31:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:19Jordi Hays?

  And spec out the car to satisfy.

• 31:22John Coogan?

  And probably, you know, I, I, I do think over time, like less and less trim levels and then, and then eventually it's just cyber cabs and no one's buying cars anymore. If, if it really goes that way. I, I think this rollout will be slow. I mean, the original rollout of the electric car was 20 years, right? For Tesla to actually get to saturation where you're seeing electric cars all over the roads. It'll probably be the same with people giving up their cars and, and going all in on, I, I only drive, I only use Waymo and Tesla Cyber Cab or maybe I just use one. But Elon's certainly thinking in decades and, and not afraid to cut an entire business line that is, is still popular with a lot of people. I mean, I was just talking to somebody yesterday who was seeing the praises of his Tesla Model X

• 32:04John Coogan?

  and how much he loves that and how he would never get a Y because the X is so much more premium. Everything about it's better. It costs a lot of money when he bought it, still loves it, but, uh, you know, Elon's thinking to the future. Anyway, Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding and deep multimodal understanding. I love that sound so much.

• 32:26Jordi Hays?

  I know you do. Tesla also announced a $2 billion investment.

• 32:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:33Jordi Hays?

  Into XAI.

• 32:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Didn't they, they just did 20, is this part of the 20, I wonder? I don't know.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, so there was a non-binding Tesla shareholder vote on authorizing an investment in XAI that, XAI that failed, although 1.06 billion votes were in favor versus 960 million against. Abstentation, abstent, abstentations? Abstentions.

• 32:56John Coogan?

  Like, like, like abstaining.

• 32:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:58John Coogan?

  Not voting one or the other.

• 33:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh, counted as no under Tesla bylaws leading to rejection. So they had run this as a vote, it got rejected, but Elon said, we're doing it anyways.

• 33:11John Coogan?

  Doing it live. Let's go to some timeline reactions.

• 33:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, pull up this.

• 33:14John Coogan?

  Here, I, I don't know where you want to start, but Take Him has a good one, if you want to start there with Microsoft.

• 33:20Jordi Hays?

  I wanted to pull up this video of Optimus learning it has to make up for S slash X sales after they were canceled.

• 33:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, this one's, this is such a crazy video. Taking off the VR headset and just smashing that.

• 33:34Jordi Hays?

  I love.

• 33:34John Coogan?

  This is really a Tesla, Optimus, isn't it? At the same time, like the, the, the motion's remarkable and the force with which the Optimus just smashes a water bottle open is crazy.

• 33:45Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing. This thing is going to be super powerful.

• 33:47John Coogan?

  The insurance business that will be built around having a humanoid in your home is going to be remarkable, remarkable. You're also going to need to secure these things. So let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

• 34:04Jordi Hays?

  This was one of the standout moments of the earnings call for me.

• 34:09John Coogan?

  Please.

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

  Elon and Tesla are transitioning their Fremont facility to make Optimus.

• 34:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:15Jordi Hays?

  And they plan to scale that facility up to be able to make a million, a million of these things a year on a relatively near term time horizon. So very, very significant. He talked about how the robot would be able to basically learn on the job. It's going to be able to do a number of valuable tasks. And yeah, I think, I mean, the big question for me is like, what is?

• 34:39John Coogan?

  Will it have ads? That's a good question for me.

• 34:41Jordi Hays?

  Will they have an ad supported?

• 34:42John Coogan?

  You have the Tesla walking around your house and it sees you pull out some sort of random credit card and it's like, are you not on a ramp? Like, what's going on here?

• 34:51Jordi Hays?

  Or it sees you like having like eating vegetables.

• 34:53John Coogan?

  Sir, would you like a smoothie from Athletic Greens?

• 34:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 34:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:57Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, we'll see. So the question I have is at what point will humanoids actually be like ROI positive for consumers in the home or even just everyday businesses?

• 35:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:11Jordi Hays?

  And I would just judge that based on like, okay, you're buying this thing upfront.

• 35:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:15Jordi Hays?

  Maybe a business finances it. Maybe somebody finances it or they just pay cash. But is it valuable? Is it valuable enough to actually replace a human? Cause you're competing with, the Optimus is going to be competing with jobs that are maybe like 40, 50, 60 a year, like somewhere in that range.

• 35:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:34Jordi Hays?

  And so that's a pretty high bar to clear.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 35:37Jordi Hays?

  So we'll see.

• 35:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, and and and the risk reward calculation of, okay, you have this thing, it has cameras and audio, it's on all the time, is it safe if it falls over, is it going to crush my dog or hurt someone or smash something, even just like doing the dishes, we've seen some incredible demos of humanoid robots doing the dishes, but you have to imagine that every once in a while, it's going to break a dish, if it's breaking dishes at 10 times the rate of humans, like it needs to be superhuman at not breaking dishes, because if it smashes a wine glass while it's doing the dishes, that's, and can I clean that up, is that, is it going to be able to do that on day one, there will be, you know, like a slow ramp of people feeling like, okay, it's good enough, I'm getting a lot of value, obviously, there'll be a lot

• 36:23John Coogan?

  of novelty, there's already a lot of novelty, like the optimist is deployed in in most of the Tesla showrooms.

• 36:29Jordi Hays?

  Some breaking news from Reuters 21 minutes ago, exclusive Musk's XAI merger talks with XAI ahead of planned IPO.

• 36:37John Coogan?

  SpaceX and XAI?

• 36:39Jordi Hays?

  SpaceX and XAI ahead of planned IPO. So this was something that we obviously were talking about predicting months ago at this point, but so no, no huge surprise here, this always felt like it made sense, I'll read through the article, I don't know how much context it actually has, so they're in discussions ahead of a blockbuster IPO planned for later this year, the combination would bring Musk's rockets, Starlink satellites, and X's social media platform, and the Grok AI chatbot under one roof, imagine, imagine owning X, the internet's dive bar, and space in one ticker.

• 37:17John Coogan?

  I mean, the company's launched like a couple of years apart, I think like 2007 and 2005 or something, like flashing back to 2007, 2010, being like, yeah, Twitter and that space company that hasn't successfully launched anything. They're going to be part of the same company one day. That is a wild.

• 37:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I am curious to see if they end up at some point just spinning X, the social platform, out again, like, does it really need to live?

• 37:44John Coogan?

  I don't think so. I think, I think, I think Musk holding companies just gets bigger and bigger and bigger and it all goes together into one because there's a lot of efficiencies there. Sean Purry from My First Million had a post about this, how, how he thinks Elon should IPO his personal holding company. So you get, you get stakes in everything that he has stakes in and he was proposing it like a Berkshire type structure. But instead of Berkshire Hathaway, it would be like Musk Holdings or something, Musk's initials. I think a lot of people would be, would be buyers of that. But it'll be interesting to see the S1s getting more complicated by the day as the, as the investment banks

• 38:25John Coogan?

  prepare for the June IPO for SpaceX now. Is June the?

• 38:30Jordi Hays?

  That's the target.

• 38:31John Coogan?

  But it's late in June, it's June 29th or 19th or something.

• 38:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, we'll, we'll see. I mean, expected this to happen.

• 38:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:39Jordi Hays?

  I think it builds a, you know, again, some people will be frustrated with the narrative, the data centers in space narrative.

• 38:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:47Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 38:48John Coogan?

  No, it's real, it's real.

• 38:49Jordi Hays?

  We saw this sort of like, sort of organized narrative shift around SpaceX being the data centers in space play.

• 38:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was the bridge. Like, without that, it didn't make any sense. And then, and then once, if you can get behind, okay, data centers in space is maybe possible, maybe.

• 39:05Jordi Hays?

  Maybe you want some on land, too.

• 39:07John Coogan?

  Then, then it starts to make sense that the merger fits a little bit more. The, the other, the other interesting data centers in space thing, XAI, SpaceX thing, I just, I don't know, I, I, there is a, there is a fair, like, odd history of. Of telecom companies owning media companies. So Comcast, NBC, Universal, right? Comcast was the owner of that.

• 39:39Jordi Hays?

  History, rhyming.

• 39:41John Coogan?

  And so like, there is this world where you have the, you have the pipes. And then you need something to push through the pipes. And so you own a media company that pushes content through that pipe. And it, it sort of rhymes, right? It's like you have Starlink internet connections. And then you need something to go over those internet connections. So X, the social network pipes over those. It's, it's, if you squint, it's not the craziest thing. The other interesting thing that I want to do, or we should talk to some of the folks who have done some of this data center and space analysis is, is how powerful are the Starlink satellites right now? Like they have some onboard compute. They don't have, you know, Nvidia GPUs.

• 40:24John Coogan?

  They don't have whole racks in space, but they, they probably have some compute just to run the network. And I'm wondering like in terms of energy draw, are they one order of magnitude off? Two orders of magnitude off? Like how, how, how underpowered are the current Starlink satellites? Because that could be an indicator of, okay, well, they need to scale them up by this much. They need to add this capability. They need to do X, Y, or Z. Really quickly, 11 Labs, build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs.

• 40:57Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of 11 Labs, 11 Labs is the new sponsor of Audi F1.

• 41:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:02Jordi Hays?

  John, you sent me a picture the other day of, of Audi out, I think, testing. And you were like, it's insane.

• 41:09John Coogan?

  That they don't have an 11 Labs logo on there.

• 41:12Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. They, they, the sponsors were looking pretty sparse, but I think they're just adding them kind of in, in real time.

• 41:17John Coogan?

  Cause it's fun to roll them out.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  Super, super exciting and exciting. I, I love the Audi, the new Audi livery. It looks very unique.

• 41:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:26Jordi Hays?

  MKBHD responded to the news that Tesla is discontinuing the Model S and Model X and said, oh, Roadster is so cooked. Elon just responded a little bit ago, said new Roadster will be incredible. And MKBHD is in the process of getting community noted. Elon said on the earnings call, they are aiming to unveil in April and production will commence in 12 to 18 months. The shareholder deck notes the Roadster is in design development. Lars, VP of Vehicle Engineering, said the Roadster was definitely in development. So it will be pretty funny to be in like, you know, something that hopefully will look like a hype, look and feel like a hypercar.

• 42:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:05Jordi Hays?

  But then you're just self-driving in traffic. It's like effectively, like depending on like pricing, it's not going to be like priced. I think I'm hoping it looks like a hypercar, but prices like, you know, a Turbo S.

• 42:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think, I think the, the secret to success is probably $200,000 to $300,000. But it looks like a cyber car or cyber truck Huracan, like low to the ground, super insane performance, self-driving, but it has like entirely new aesthetics that turn heads. Like the Cybertruck is kind of.

• 42:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, what, what was he saying on Joe Rogan? He was talking, he was like, wasn't he alluding to the Roadster potentially being able to take flight?

• 42:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 42:51Jordi Hays?

  Some sort of.

• 42:51John Coogan?

  That's exactly it. Yes. And, and we were debating with Doug G. Murrow from Cars and Bids and his own YouTube channel, what does the definition of fly mean? Like, we've seen the Xiaomi car jump. It can jump over a pothole. It can jump a couple inches off. There's that Mercedes Maybach GLS that can bounce. So what does fly really mean? Fly a foot, fly 10 feet? I, I don't think anyone's expecting that in the next year, it will just actually take off and fly you from LA to San Francisco or something. That would be.

• 43:26Jordi Hays?

  Never bet against Elon.

• 43:28John Coogan?

  I, I mean, I would, I would want that so, so badly. But there are a lot of other cool things that we could do. I think the one that I, it wasn't the one that I predicted, like basically it, you'll be able to pull up to a parking spot and it will be able to use like fans or something like that to like lift off the ground and slide into a parking spot or some, it'll have some like gimmicky.

• 43:50Jordi Hays?

  It'll shoot the battery out so hard that it sends the car.

• 43:54John Coogan?

  Shoots the battery down, which pushes the car up into the air and thus, and then you, there's an ejector seat. You will be flying, the car will not be flying. Who knows?

• 44:04Jordi Hays?

  Insane.

• 44:05John Coogan?

  Hopefully it's available on Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI.

• 44:14Jordi Hays?

  Rounding, rounding out.

• 44:16John Coogan?

  Sorry, really quickly, Tyler.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  I mean, this is about the question of like, can you run GPUs on Starlink?

• 44:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  So like a current satellite, if you're looking at the V2 mini satellite, the peak power draw is like around like 3,000 watts.

• 44:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 44:29Speaker 02

  So if you're running an H100, right? So this is, I mean, maybe a couple of years old, it's only like 700. So you could actually put, you could put a few H100s on a Starlink right now.

• 44:38John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, wait, sorry, sorry. 300 watts currently and an H100.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  3,000.

• 44:43John Coogan?

  3,000, oh, okay. Yeah, you could put a couple of H100s in theory, but you wouldn't be able to do anything else, but like.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I mean, like three H100s, H100s is like not useful really at all for like any, for serving any big model, but.

• 44:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, but we're not four orders magnitude off from doing something. I mean, you can do inference on just a laptop, right? And that doesn't have the power draw anywhere near an H100 rack. Granted, it's going to be slow, it's not going to be functional, but like we are in the ballpark.

• 45:09Jordi Hays?

  Somebody just gonna put, somebody should put a Mac mini on a weather balloon.

• 45:14John Coogan?

  The first.

• 45:15Jordi Hays?

  Just send it.

• 45:15John Coogan?

  You really could.

• 45:16Jordi Hays?

  First space data center.

• 45:18John Coogan?

  Have you ever seen those trends of like, we sent X to space? It's like a proven viral format on YouTube. I think someone sent pizza to space. People send like a piano to space and it plays a song. They're basically YouTubers figured out that you could get a weather balloon that you could just buy for like, I don't know, not that much money and just release it and it would just fly up, up, up, up, up. And then you would reach the sky and you would take pictures and time lapse photos or video automatically.

• 45:47Jordi Hays?

  You can get a weather balloon, a 22 foot scientific weather balloon on eBay for 220 bucks.

• 45:52John Coogan?

  What should we send to space? It's kind of played out, but maybe, yeah, garlic bread to space. Bobby, thank you. Yeah, the garlic, the garlic bread went to space. I don't know why. I don't know why, but yeah, the sending multi bot to space, multi bot to space on a, on a. I, I, yeah, also I don't know if you can get Starlink working.

• 46:13Jordi Hays?

  I think, I mean, ideally, Tyler.

• 46:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:15Jordi Hays?

  What if we got a handful of weather balloons and we sent you up there with a parachute?

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, that Red Bull video, yeah.

• 46:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:23Jordi Hays?

  Just one shot it.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  Just do it.

• 46:25Jordi Hays?

  Just one shot it.

• 46:27John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 46:27Jordi Hays?

  Last thing on Elon.

• 46:30Jordi Hays?

  Looking at prediction market on Kalshi, when will Elon become a trillionaire? He's had a 65% chance before 2027, just in time for the midterms. It's not like that will be used, it's not like that will be used against him at all.

• 46:46John Coogan?

  There's still a chance that it takes the pressure off the billionaires because like, oh, there's a new thing we got to focus on. Like, no one's focusing on billionaires right now.

• 46:52Jordi Hays?

  All the billionaires start ganging up on Elon.

• 46:54John Coogan?

  They're like, hey, let's actually just do a trillionaire tax. There's only billionaires, why are we focusing on billionaires? Trillionaires have so much more.

• 46:59Jordi Hays?

  Waste of time.

• 47:00John Coogan?

  Waste of time. Let's just narrow it down to trillionaires. Just the trillionaire tax. Anyway, console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Where else do we want to go? Do we want to go more reactions to earnings? There's a whole bunch of other stuff in here.

• 47:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 47:22John Coogan?

  Microsoft is on sale, according to Jamie Katzby, because Joe Weisenthal said incredible day, according to Barclays, Alexander Altman, Microsoft has lost $441 billion of market cap today, marking it the second largest drop ever since Nvidia lost nearly $600 billion after DeepSeek. Wow. Yeah, it was the worst day for Microsoft since 2020, since, since like the COVID sell-off. Absolutely remarkable, but I mean, I don't fully, I don't fully get it. It seems like Microsoft is very well positioned. I mean, maybe they're facing the same like implementation question as Meta, but it seems like they, they have all the key ingredients.

• 48:02John Coogan?

  I mean, they don't have, they don't have, they certainly don't have like the crazy team that Zuck just went and poached, but they got OpenAI, they have the partnership. And so they have access to the models where, in a way that Meta does not. And so Meta does need to build the team to build the competitive models, so.

• 48:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, worse sell-offs in Microsoft history, the crash of 87 than in 2000, April, 24th, 15th.

• 48:26John Coogan?

  30% in one day in 87.

• 48:28Jordi Hays?

  We don't know how to, we don't know how to create sell-offs like that anymore. Hopefully we don't.

• 48:34Jordi Hays?

  Famous last words.

• 48:35John Coogan?

  Just like everything candles down 40% teach you a lesson.

• 48:39Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 48:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is some, this is an interesting history here.

• 48:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, Microsoft is unfazed.

• 48:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, when you look at it this way, it is truly, you know, the, the what 15th worst sell off in, in, in Microsoft history. I think they're going to get through it, but not, but Stan disagrees. Stan says it's over. Thanks for playing to zero likes. How did this even get, I'm going to like this.

• 49:05Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna like it.

• 49:06John Coogan?

  Good Stan. I don't agree, but very funny post. Andrew Curran is sharing a post from the information. Nvidia, Microsoft and Amazon are all ponying up.

• 49:18Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for talks.

• 49:20John Coogan?

  60 billion, as much as 60 billion in OpenAI.

• 49:23Jordi Hays?

  We don't know what kind of talks they are. Are they early?

• 49:26John Coogan?

  Medium.

• 49:26Jordi Hays?

  Medium.

• 49:27John Coogan?

  Late stage talks.

• 49:28Jordi Hays?

  Stream.

• 49:28John Coogan?

  Dance talks.

• 49:30Jordi Hays?

  Intense.

• 49:30John Coogan?

  Preliminary talks. There's lots of different talks. But this is in, this is on top of the 30 billion that SoftBank is in talks for, which means that the 100 billion target for the next round is all, is our almost, is already almost met. And of course, this is going to go back to, is this circular, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't know. I, it, it, it feels like the circular, the circularity narrative, we're just at a scale where if you want to raise 100 billion dollars, like who are you going to? Who, who would be okay? Like it's, it's, it's governments and the hyperscalers. Like there just aren't that many funds that are saying like, yeah, I'd love to lead 100 billion dollar round. I don't have the money. Like it's just, it's just impossible.

• 50:15Jordi Hays?

  They're tapped out.

• 50:16John Coogan?

  Like, yeah, all the, all the traditional financial players are very much tapped out.

• 50:21Jordi Hays?

  And so. Let's go to, let's go to company market cap.com.

• 50:25John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, we pull that up. Let me tell you about Figma. Figma make isn't your average vibe coding tool. It lives in Figma. So outputs look good, feel real and stay connected to how teams build, create code back prototypes.

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So at the 830 billion that this round is being discussed at, JP Morgan is slightly, we're slightly more at 832 billion, but then below that, OpenAI will be valued more than Samsung, Tencent, Visa, ExxonMobil, ASML, Johnson and Johnson, Mastercard.

• 51:00John Coogan?

  Data is the.

• 51:00Jordi Hays?

  Costco.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  A lot of them. Yeah, you start being able to add up some of the biggest companies in the world and still not be worth more than.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  Zero Hedge had some extra context. Q3 2025, Meta crashes on surging CapEx forecast. Q4 2025, Meta soars on surging CapEx forecast.

• 51:20Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 51:21John Coogan?

  Research and Invest pushed back though, said no, it soars on growth acceleration guide. CapEx held it back or could have opened, or it could have opened at around 880 and it's because of the profit. A lot of people are chiming in. So we'll talk to.

• 51:34Jordi Hays?

  Buco, Buco has continuously had great calls on Meta. He, I remember very distinctly when he would, he shared multiple times over a few day period, like Meta will start touching 600 and you need to develop the mental fortitude to buy, even though everything, even though everything in your mind will be telling you not to do it. Just hit the button.

• 51:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. Suspended Cap says, I gotta really respect Zuck willing to spend over 50% of revenue next year when they still on CapEx, when they still haven't just delivered a single compelling AI product. Hell yeah. But Pythia Cap chimes in and says, the ads are the compelling AI product. And this has been the, the under discussed narrative with their CapEx. They do break it out and for a long time, you know, 50% of CapEx, more than 50% of CapEx was going towards core AI, just workloads for Instagram reels, recommendations, ad recommendations, running the core product. Different, I mean, there is a specific chip for YouTube, like there's CapEx that goes into just running YouTube or just running

• 52:38John Coogan?

  Instagram. And so it's, it's, you know, not all AI, but it'll be interesting to see how that shifts. How much of this is, okay, this is generative AI workloads going forward? Is it more than 50% of this new, of this new boost in.

• 52:51Jordi Hays?

  Brother Joe Weisenthal shares, one of the best headlines that I've ever seen, which is Blackstone nears deal to become New World's largest shareholder.

• 53:01John Coogan?

  Just in general?

• 53:02Jordi Hays?

  No. New World is a company.

• 53:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 53:07Jordi Hays?

  Blackstone is in advanced talks to become the single largest shareholder of New World Development Company, according to people familiar with Matter, a move that would see one of Hong Kong's richest families relinquish control of a major asset. Under the proposed deal, the US company would be able to restructure the embattled developer. New World could continue to try to offload assets to shore up liquidity. The family of Hong Kong tycoon Henry Chung currently holds about a 45% stake in New World. We need to bring the word tycoon to the West Coast. Sam Altman is an AI tycoon.

• 53:41John Coogan?

  Tycoon is good. We should do a list of the the top tycoons.

• 53:45Jordi Hays?

  Jensen is a chip tycoon.

• 53:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, tycoon's a good one.

• 53:49Jordi Hays?

  Satya is an enterprise tycoon.

• 53:52John Coogan?

  We had tycoons during the railroad barons. It got, uh, it turned into a bit of a pejorative, but I think we can turn it down or turn it around. I think we can turn it around.

• 53:59Jordi Hays?

  It's such a fun word. Why should it be negative?

• 54:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, it sounds like Yahoo or like, uh, you know, it's, it feels like you're wearing a cowboy hat on a horse. You're a tycoon.

• 54:09Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 54:09John Coogan?

  You're, you're, you're, you're running all over the economy. You're a tycoon.

• 54:13Jordi Hays?

  Cowboy hat on a horse.

• 54:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, you love it. Well, let me tell you about MongoDB. Choose the database built for flexibility and scale with best in class embedding models and re-rankers. MongoDB has what you need to build what's next.

• 54:25Speaker 02

  We have to talk about.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  Genie.

• 54:28Jordi Hays?

  Genie.

• 54:28John Coogan?

  The genie is out of the lamp.

• 54:29Jordi Hays?

  Logan says introducing project genie a frontier world model product powered by genie three and available to G1 ultra users in the US starting today.

• 54:38John Coogan?

  Are you a G1 ultra user?

• 54:40Jordi Hays?

  This morning, we were playing around.

• 54:42John Coogan?

  This got.

• 54:43Jordi Hays?

  We were playing around with this this morning. It is absolutely wild. You can basically prompt an entire world. It instantly turns into effectively a simple video game.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and you can create some really funny scenarios.

• 54:58John Coogan?

  And.

• 54:58Jordi Hays?

  We will show you.

• 54:59John Coogan?

  They added the jump button. They added the jump button. You get to pick if it's third person or I guess what if you don't check that it's first person. But sometimes you, even if you do check, even if you don't check that, you can still wind up in a third person game if it's obviously a third person request.

• 55:13Jordi Hays?

  To add this.

• 55:13John Coogan?

  But look at this dog.

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  They need to add the crouch button.

• 55:16John Coogan?

  Crouch button next, and then the flashbang button probably.

• 55:19Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 55:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, you're jumping. This is so, it's so fast. I mean, the, the, the previous genie launch was still called genie three, right?

• 55:29Speaker 02

  Well, no, I mean, yes, this is not like a new product. This is just making it public.

• 55:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  Like, so, so I think it was in August when genie three was like originally released.

• 55:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  But it was basically just the paper and there were some demos, but no one could.

• 55:40John Coogan?

  So, so cool. Yeah, I mean, it feels like more directable than VO3 in some ways, and it's certainly more stable as you move around.

• 55:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's just way cooler, too, because it's a world you can move around in. It's not like VO3 where you're just creating a video.

• 55:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, the memory is really good, too.

• 56:01John Coogan?

  Oh, you can upload an image?

• 56:02Speaker 02

  And turn back.

• 56:03John Coogan?

  You can upload an image. That's, I mean, get ready to play dinosaurs as kids.

• 56:06Jordi Hays?

  Do you have the clip of?

• 56:07John Coogan?

  So we got access, we generated some. Now, it's in such high demand that you might not be able to generate these worlds for yourself immediately. There might be some rate limits going on. I'm sure the GPUs are on fire. It is going to be genie three day on the timeline for sure. People are going to get crazy creative with this.

• 56:28Jordi Hays?

  Do you have John's first prompt?

• 56:30John Coogan?

  You can't access the videos?

• 56:32Speaker 02

  No.

• 56:33John Coogan?

  Oh, no, we didn't download them?

• 56:34Speaker 02

  No, because I think the site is being overloaded so much.

• 56:36Jordi Hays?

  Shame. Hey, Tyler, take some responsibility. Take some ownership. You're 21 years old now. Take some ownership. You could have downloaded the video.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  As the show goes on, I'll try to make a new one.

• 56:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah, this is a good point by Noah in the chat. Wait, can we just take a GTA 6 leak and generate the game so we don't have to keep waiting?

• 56:57Jordi Hays?

  Pretty much.

• 56:58John Coogan?

  So, like, first, I mean, it's incredible that even a product at Google scale, they knew that there was going to be demand, that they are, like, seeing rate limits. That's wild and incredibly bullish for AI and shows that there's so much more demand, and we need more chips and energy and data centers and GPUs, obviously. But on the flip side, we are going to move the goalposts. This is AGI, but it's not sufficient AGI because my definition is not just the jump button. I want mechanics. I want, we generated a video of my Bach driving on the Nürburgring. It was remarkably high fidelity. It was a little sluggish, but that might just be the driving dynamics.

• 57:37Jordi Hays?

  I think that was just the driver.

• 57:38John Coogan?

  Oh, you think it was the driver?

• 57:39Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, Tyler could not keep this thing on the road. There was some body roll.

• 57:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 57:44Jordi Hays?

  I was like, just put it in a straight line, Tyler.

• 57:46John Coogan?

  Yes, but I want, I want, I'm waiting, I'm moving the goalposts because I want. Genie three or Genie four to be able to generate game mechanics. If I say I'm racing on the Nürburgring, I want a track timer. I want to be able to stop, change my tires. I want to be able to get a refuel overtakes. I want overlays. I want boost pedals. I want, I want DRS. I want shifting. I want the whole Forza simulation, the whole, I want, I want, what was, what's the one that people actually use for the simulator? I forget what it's called. Aseto Corsa. I want to be able to generate Aseto Corsa in two seconds. So mechanics are clearly next. This is obviously in the process. Tyler said six months. We'll see.

• 58:29Jordi Hays?

  So pull up this video from.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  I think we'll review in six months. You'll have full games.

• 58:33John Coogan?

  This is the new AGI benchmark for.

• 58:36Jordi Hays?

  Move it, move it, move it.

• 58:44Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Pull up this video from Ethan Malik. He had early access to Genie three world modeling, hugely forward in modeling physics, but some issues remain. Here is a bit of an otter airline pilot, airline pilot with a duck on its head, walking through a Rothko inspired airport and an otter in a wingsuit, flying through a city of Gothic towers. So this is why, this, this video is why we have two and a half, two trillion dollars of capex for AI. We just simply, before AI, we would need, you know, a team of, you know, advanced motion graphics artists to work for, you know.

• 59:22John Coogan?

  You could probably vibe code something like this in Unreal Engine in a day if you were, if you were strong.

• 59:28Jordi Hays?

  John, don't try to pop the bubble.

• 59:31John Coogan?

  You could. I like the wingsuit though. This is fun. In a, in a Gothic tower. It looks sort of like a Harry Potter world. Wow. It's really a full city of Gothic, Gothic towers.

• 59:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so, so the thing that's wild is that it takes.

• 59:48Jordi Hays?

  Twenty seconds.

• 59:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:50Jordi Hays?

  To go from idea to this world.

• 59:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, super cool.

• 59:53Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 59:54John Coogan?

  Super, super cool. And you're just gonna see this like unlimited, like the people are gonna go and just generate Mario and you'll just be like, well, I could just download Mario. Like it's not like I'm okay with that. It's like when you go to, you know, mid journey and you say, make me a picture of a dog or Nano Banana. And it's just like, that's just a picture of a dog. You just find a picture of a dog. What's cool is when it's like your dog in your house doing the specific mechanic that you wanted. And it's a reenactment from a film that your friends that you're in love with and your mechanic and you're creating this in unique thing. And you're mixing together these interesting ideas. We're gonna see a ton.

• 1:00:31Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so Tyler took full ownership.

• 1:00:34Speaker 02

  It just, I just got it back. Yeah.

• 1:00:35John Coogan?

  Okay, well.

• 1:00:36Speaker 02

  I made a new video.

• 1:00:37John Coogan?

  Well, we pull that up. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending. Now with AI.

• 1:00:47Jordi Hays?

  All right, look at this.

• 1:00:48John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, this is, wait, this is a new one?

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I just made this.

• 1:00:51John Coogan?

  The original was not two-tone.

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, this is a new, I just made this.

• 1:00:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:55Jordi Hays?

  Look at you barely keeping it on the road.

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  It's really hard.

• 1:00:58John Coogan?

  It's really hard. Skill issue. You gotta, so if you zoom in on this, the license plate does look a little AI-generated. There are some artifacts, but at this, at this distance, this looks, this looks.

• 1:01:09Jordi Hays?

  Can he hit the apex on the next turn?

• 1:01:11John Coogan?

  This looks photoreal.

• 1:01:12Jordi Hays?

  Can he hit the apex?

• 1:01:14John Coogan?

  Can he hit the apex? The body roll. The body roll. You're actually going pretty fast. You're getting some speed on this thing.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  I think I fall off, I get off.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  Oh no, on the grass. Oh no. Wait, what happened to the, you're, oh no, you're destroying the side rail. How'd you get on the other side of the side rail?

• 1:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Ian says, dude looks a knee-breed. Yeah, crazy timing. Tyler turns 21 and he can't even keep a car.

• 1:01:37John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:01:39John Coogan?

  That was very, very cool.

• 1:01:40Jordi Hays?

  I don't see any happy dads over there.

• 1:01:43Speaker 02

  But it does like when it was working so earlier, I think there were just too many people using it.

• 1:01:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:48Speaker 02

  This took like maybe 15 seconds.

• 1:01:49John Coogan?

  That's remarkable.

• 1:01:50Speaker 02

  First it like makes an image and then you can edit it.

• 1:01:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  And then from there you can make the actual world.

• 1:01:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:55Speaker 02

  And it's like a minute long.

• 1:01:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  It's like, yeah, incredible.

• 1:01:59John Coogan?

  Josh Woodward has another clip he shared. Nano Banana Pro, he's the VP at Google, Google Labs, Gemini AI Studio. Nano Banana Plus Project Genie Low Poly Cowboy Dreams, They've Been Fulfilled. Let's take a look at what Josh Woodward over at Google built with Genie 3. So he takes the image, he's generated with Nano Banana Pro, drops it in, summarizes the environment, summarizes. And it's interesting seeing like, what does prompt engineering look like in this, in this, like how, how, what type of prompt do you want to put in? Cause I think we just put in like two words. We put in like Nürburgring, track, Germany.

• 1:02:40John Coogan?

  What happens if you add a little bit more there? How, how far can you push this current state of the art? The horse can jump. AGI achieved.

• 1:02:48Jordi Hays?

  AGI achieved. Do you think this is bullish for platforms like Roblox and Fortnite that have the existing network? And they can integrate world models so that the players can, that are already a part of these ecosystems and these economies can generate new worlds quickly, generate new games, new characters, et cetera? Or, or is it as these world models get better, do they become

• 1:03:10John Coogan?

  Competitive.

• 1:03:10Jordi Hays?

  A bigger threat because anybody can just, I'm sure there's infrastructure providers that can say like, yeah, we're going to handle everything from account creation to in-game currency to things like that.

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, definitely competitive in the long term. In the medium term, like super good for prototyping and communication. And this is a key flow to, okay, you have an idea and you don't just want to, you know, generate a basic image of the game that you're trying to build. You generate a demo, a prototype. And then you go from here into, okay, let's wire it up in Unreal Engine or Roblox or Minecraft or whatever we want to do. And then, and then you have the full game.

• 1:03:51Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think, I think Roblox and Fortnite will prove that they have real network effects.

• 1:03:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:56Jordi Hays?

  And it's going to still make sense to create new games

• 1:03:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59Jordi Hays?

  within these existing ecosystems.

• 1:04:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But it is, it is a very different architecture if you. But yeah, I don't know. I don't know how it how it how it interact like if you're in Roblox and then you want to go into a fully generated experience like the persistence doesn't exist. You're not you're not in necessarily the same world, just building like multiplayer capabilities in here seems very difficult. That seems like a real research challenge.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think broadly like the the world model like world labs seems much more easy to integrate, at least in the short term to something like Roblox. Because I mean, this is literally just like generating frames on the fly. You're not actually making a, you know, 3D like rendering.

• 1:04:35John Coogan?

  But it seems like it would be useful for your training data as well.

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:40John Coogan?

  Lots of lots of opportunities there. Well, speaking of training data, let me tell you about Labelbox. RL environments, voice, robotics, evals, and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI labs.

• 1:04:53Jordi Hays?

  Well said, John.

• 1:04:55John Coogan?

  There are a lot of those. Google DeepMind created this short film. AI is going to disrupt Hollywood sooner than most might expect. It's their short film, Dear Upstairs Neighbor. It's previewing at Sundance Festival. It's a story about noisy neighbors, but behind the scenes, it's about solving a huge challenge in generative AI control. Developed by Pixar alumni and an Academy Award winner, researchers and engineers. Here's how it came together, says DeepMind. And there's a community note on here. Let's see what they said. The quoted video explains that the short film was driven through human-made art with AI assisting and speeding up the process. OP is engagement. Poor Chubby, always getting community noted.

• 1:05:37John Coogan?

  We've seen a number of these. I think that's like, at a certain point,

• 1:05:41Jordi Hays?

  Maybe that's his bit.

• 1:05:42John Coogan?

  some people assume that things are happening. But, you know, the the point still holds that, you know, this is disruptive. Who knows if it's completely disrupting? There certainly, I mean, there's demand for movies that are shot on film still. So how how quickly will all this roll out? But if you if you have a vision these days for, you know, an animated movie, you should just go try and make it at least. You have to imagine that even if you want to use a more traditional process and go through the traditional Hollywood pipeline, showing up to a pitch meeting at an agency with a Pretty much polished AI version of your film is going to resonate in a way that a script might just get sent back in the mailroom.

• 1:06:26Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:06:27John Coogan?

  So, I don't know, I could, I could imagine this in like the, the prototyping, the, the, the storyboarding phase really, really taking off.

• 1:06:34Jordi Hays?

  Staying in Google land.

• 1:06:35John Coogan?

  Please.

• 1:06:35Jordi Hays?

  Addy Osmani over at Google Cloud, uh, shared some big changes to Gemini in Chrome, agentic browsing with auto browse, Nano Banana and more. Uh, let's pull up this video. Uh, if you can see it here.

• 1:06:52John Coogan?

  It's a huge day for tech news today. We got so much earnings.

• 1:06:55Jordi Hays?

  I mean, all, all week.

• 1:06:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, all week.

• 1:06:57Jordi Hays?

  All week.

• 1:06:57John Coogan?

  There's been a lot of stuff.

• 1:07:00John Coogan?

  But the other stuff was like planned. Uh, the, the, the Claude bot stuff earlier was not. Is this, is there audio on here? Can we play this, this audio as well? Let's see.

• 1:07:12John Coogan?

  Let's see. This is Gemini in Chrome, agentic browsing with auto browse, Nano Banana and more.

• 1:07:21John Coogan?

  Does it work? Let's see.

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  It's a new state of the art model for in-context image transformation. And traditionally, if you wanted to see how furniture would look in a room, you'd have to download a photo, upload it to an editor and hope for the best. Here with Nano Banana, you just point Gemini to an image already on your screen.

• 1:07:36John Coogan?

  Oh, Tyler.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  And in this demo, the prompt says, show me this room with light.

• 1:07:39John Coogan?

  You don't want AI in every feature? You, you actually like downloading the images and round tripping them. That, yeah, that's your preferred workflow. And everyone, every consumer is just like you, right Tyler? Right?

• 1:07:49Jordi Hays?

  Stunned and excited.

• 1:07:50John Coogan?

  All right. I mean, I. Hit him with the flashbang.

• 1:07:52Jordi Hays?

  Oh, no.

• 1:07:53John Coogan?

  Hit him with the, going flashbang. Flashbang.

• 1:07:57John Coogan?

  Surprised? There's now big changes to Gemini in Chrome. We got flashing lights over here now.

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  Okay, but this is still like, like making the product from like a very like AI first view. It's not just like taking your, the, the normal thing and then just adding one extra AI button.

• 1:08:12John Coogan?

  I mean, I'm not a product manager at Meta, but you have to imagine that there's, there's little features like this that can seep their way into Facebook and Instagram where you see a photo of like. Like you see a photo of a restaurant and you're like, I think that'd be great for a team offsite. Let me just not download the photo and put me, you and Jordy at the dinner table at the restaurant. You know, envisioning what we're like, I just hit share and then I say, hey, put, you know, put the group chat that we're in on Instagram DMs in this video, in this photo, that'll be funny. It'll be, it'll be more inspiring for them to be like, yeah, we should go to dinner there. Right?

• 1:08:52Jordi Hays?

  I guess the question, yeah, this feature, the feature in the video that actually got shown.

• 1:08:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:56Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if that should actually live, like, so in that example, you're looking at an apartment online and you're in your browser being like, make it look like Kelly Wersler.

• 1:09:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:07Jordi Hays?

  Styled it.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:08Jordi Hays?

  And it adds a bunch of furniture. Should that live at the browser level? Or should it just live in Zillow or Redfin or Compass, right?

• 1:09:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:16Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of a question on where this.

• 1:09:17John Coogan?

  With the OS layer. I know what you're gonna say. You're like the OS layer. You're OS pill now. Right?

• 1:09:22Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean, in this case, I feel like it should be like actually in Redfin.

• 1:09:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Jordi Hays?

  And you should be able to cycle through a bunch of different.

• 1:09:29John Coogan?

  And it will be.

• 1:09:30Jordi Hays?

  Interior design.

• 1:09:30John Coogan?

  I, I, I, we have seen that every single layer of the stack is adding AI features.

• 1:09:36Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:09:37John Coogan?

  From top to bottom.

• 1:09:37Jordi Hays?

  Interesting context here from Compound 248. Uh, Google with an absolutely murderous response to OpenAI's app browser.

• 1:09:44John Coogan?

  Just killed that.

• 1:09:45Jordi Hays?

  Highly strategic for Google. Launching a browser was a mistake by Sam and the OpenAI team. OpenAI was never going to gain big browsers' share, but launching gave Google the needed cover to launch its Chrome AI embedding without violating antitrust because now it's a competitive response. Would they have had?

• 1:10:01John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:10:02Jordi Hays?

  I, I can't, it's hard for me to believe that, that Google would be allowed to add AI features.

• 1:10:08John Coogan?

  I don't necessarily buy that, but it's an interesting take and, uh, you know, it's, it's one position. Google's, Google's using its browser incumbency as a distribution and learning angle for AI is going to be exceedingly powerful. If you allow it, the browser is going to learn from everything you do online, creating differentiation for its position, for its position as a personal AI.

• 1:10:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, big day today. We're not getting any fines from the chat because we're both suited up.

• 1:10:31John Coogan?

  Yes. No fines today.

• 1:10:34John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 1:10:35Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for, thanks for holding us accountable.

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  Turbo Puffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles and object storage, fast 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 1:10:45John Coogan?

  There's, there's so much new. TikTok uninstalls surge 150% after app's US takeover? That is a crazy surge.

• 1:10:54Jordi Hays?

  Okay, yeah, so there's a new king of the app store.

• 1:10:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:10:57Jordi Hays?

  It's called Upscrol.

• 1:10:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:10:58Jordi Hays?

  It is a TikTok Instagram clone?

• 1:11:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:11:04Jordi Hays?

  Competitor, uh, just getting off the ground. But, uh, I guess, yeah, people, uh, I think people had the perception that TikTok was immediate, immediately censoring a bunch of different topics.

• 1:11:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, political topics and then, uh, just decide Upscrol like use that as an opportunity to say like, hey, we're the alternative.

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. It was interesting because I, I know people were tracking the TikTok changing ownership. Is TikTok going to get banned? There were a lot of TikTok creators that took that as an opportunity to diversify to reels and shorts. And it just became obvious that you should be a multi-platform creator around that time. But I wasn't aware that the TikTok community was going to be tracking like when the servers actually shifted over to Oracle. It feels a little wonky and not something that would go super viral, but I think-

• 1:11:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but people noticed because videos stopped being served.

• 1:11:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So there was an outage and, uh, and, and, uh, that certainly drove, uh, deletions.

• 1:12:02Jordi Hays?

  And Sean, Sean highlighted something-

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, but again, to be clear, uh, it's, it's like there is a base level of TikTok uninstalls and then that surged 150%. That doesn't mean that they're declining by 50% or anything like that. Like there's still, there's still new installs happening.

• 1:12:18Jordi Hays?

  They're calling Upscrol-

• 1:12:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:12:20Jordi Hays?

  The, the rumble of TikTok.

• 1:12:21John Coogan?

  Really? The rumble of TikTok?

• 1:12:23Jordi Hays?

  Sean Franks says TikTok views are down. People are blaming the new owners. I think this is just proof that TikTok was botting views the whole time. Your 100,000 view video is probably reaching 25,000 real people. So, uh, no, no surprise here for me. I always felt like it was always obvious that there were very real people on TikTok. I know people that went over to TikTok.

• 1:12:47John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:12:47Jordi Hays?

  They'd start making videos about startups. They'd start getting real inbound from people on LinkedIn.

• 1:12:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:12:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so they, very clearly was always a bunch of real people there, but- TikTok had every incentive to just bought all the views because what happens if somebody's getting way more views on TikTok versus Instagram, they're gonna lean in. They're gonna say like, I have more followers on TikTok. I should be creating content there and that created a flywheel.

• 1:13:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:11Jordi Hays?

  And so you can imagine as things shifted over, uh, who, who knows, right?

• 1:13:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:16Jordi Hays?

  Like the, the, the new, basically the new, the new product.

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean,

• 1:13:20Jordi Hays?

  The new owners, they had some system that was.

• 1:13:22John Coogan?

  I, I, I like different formats. I liked Vine back in the day. At one point I did set up a TikTok and I uploaded like two or three videos. I was just trying to see like what it felt like to use that platform. And I noticed even though I came to the platform with zero followers, the three or two or three videos that I uploaded immediately got 500 views each. And I thought that the model was you get more of an opportunity to like sort of audition your content in the algorithm. And then if it works, it can blow up very quickly. And I think that that's somewhat true. Like when I started my YouTube channel, the first videos that I put up got a hundred views. And for like a year, if I broke a thousand views of video, I was like, this is amazing. Like crazy.

• 1:14:05Jordi Hays?

  You're really grinding in a purity.

• 1:14:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, but on TikTok, you, you post and you immediately get 500. And I, I've talked to some folks years ago who would set up a new TikTok account for a brand and they would launch one video that was so polished and so designed to be, go viral, like they'd blow up a car and they'd spent all this money shooting this. And it would actually just, they knew that it would go viral and it just immediately go viral, even though it's a fresh account and there were no followers. Cause they just knew it was good content. It would get shared. TikTok would audition it to like a hundred people.

• 1:14:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Remember when TikTok launched, it was a period where it was so difficult to grow on Instagram.

• 1:14:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:43Jordi Hays?

  Like that, there was a huge challenge. If you're a new creator, you go on Instagram and be really frustrated because your stuff just wasn't getting shared with people that didn't already follow you.

• 1:14:51John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:14:52Jordi Hays?

  There's some comments under here. There's, there's last, last thing on the TikTok front. Turner Novak commented, maybe they were views from Chinese users which are gone now. It's also could be international users. Remember there's like, if you have a new US app under US ownership, is it getting shared with, with, uh, with international users that are using other versions of TikTok?

• 1:15:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11Jordi Hays?

  Unclear. So.

• 1:15:13John Coogan?

  Well, let's bring in our first guest of the show, Anton from Lovable. While he comes on, I'm going to tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits and HR, built to evolve with modern, small and medium-sized businesses. Welcome back to the show, welcome to the TDP and UltraDome. Thanks for taking the time to come and hang out with us.

• 1:15:30Jordi Hays?

  West Coast tour.

• 1:15:31Speaker 04

  It's cool to be here in person.

• 1:15:33John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:15:34Speaker 04

  It's been like more than six months, but it feels like much more shit has changed. The business is doing better than ever.

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  I can imagine. Every time I see a post about you, from you, there's a new biggest number. How is growth going? Is it still accelerating? How's the business doing?

• 1:15:52Speaker 04

  We are doing great on the growth side. We hit 300 million AR two months after our 200.

• 1:15:59Jordi Hays?

  The dog is even louder in person.

• 1:16:07Speaker 04

  But more interestingly to me is the builders are doing real things. I was in the airport from San Francisco here and Adam at own.com, who helps tens of thousands of restaurants, he was like super excited and raving about he had built out a new product line over the weekend in eight hours, where he was solving a new problem, where all the customers were saying like, we keep getting these phone calls, it's not always someone picking up. And he built an AI who answers the phone for the restaurants. And it was all working, you could configure it just like you were training a human. And he was now building it, releasing it next with his team. And we're seeing all of these new opportunities where people who use Lovable as their technical

• 1:16:50Speaker 04

  co-founder can build businesses. And maybe you saw, I was super shocked when someone was shipping AI-generated dog pictures in frames to pet owners. And they were making $300,000 per month on building that out without any technicals.

• 1:17:07John Coogan?

  How are they actually doing that? Obviously, I think, maybe you can describe like the technical co-founder process of building a new application that someone takes payment, but then I want to know about the top of funnel for that.

• 1:17:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but part of, I mean, I always saw Lovable's growth as millions of people out in the world that historically were just perpetually searching for a technical co-founder. Problem is, a lot of people that are technical have a bunch of great ideas, they don't necessarily need an idea guy. And so there's all this like sort of... Pent up, creative, entrepreneurial energy that just never really goes anywhere because somebody doesn't take the time to actually learn to code and never find that that right partner.

• 1:17:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what we're seeing and our mission is about human creativity, which is very fun to empower, but it's not just new businesses. There is a lot of companies and I keep hearing from how they build out AI applications and agents using Lovable. And once you get into it, especially if you look back compared to six months ago, this feels like to me when I use it, there's no limits almost of what you can do. And the thing where Lovable, what I'm hearing is that it's a bit unique is that there are a lot of tools that are coming from kind of developers and then more people keep using them. We started with the non-technical people and that makes it just super simple, but it

• 1:18:30Speaker 04

  still has the same capabilities that more sophisticated users are looking for.

• 1:18:35Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about working with companies like Owner that I'm not super familiar with Owner, we got to have Adam, the founder, on, but my understanding it's somewhat of like a system of record for a restaurant owner, is that right? And so in theory, he could also offer Lovable as like an integration so that individual businesses that are using Owner can expand kind of and just build products that they themselves want, not necessarily have to rely on Owner. Is that right or are you seeing opportunities like that with other companies?

• 1:19:05Speaker 04

  I think we have these partnership programs and that's a good idea. I'm going to bring that back to talk to Adam specifically. But what we're seeing-

• 1:19:14Jordi Hays?

  Theoretically, somebody is on Owner, they have a feature that, there's a feature that they want that's not being offered and they can just build it, they don't even have to request a feature.

• 1:19:24Speaker 04

  I mean, that's what the future looks like and what we've seen is that Lovable is first used by as a communication medium and there are a lot of people that have stopped using Google Slides and PowerPoint and they now they just prompt it away because it looks so nice.

• 1:19:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:40Speaker 04

  And I think it's a better medium than the animated videos you were talking about previously. But then- Now, a lot of companies, and us is one of those, we're running, we're switching out SaaS providers to using tools that we use, build ourselves. Sure. And we connect, we tell Lovable, can you connect these two different SaaS tools, internal tools that we built, and add AI in between of those? And that, I think, is more of the future of how companies are going to be run.

• 1:20:09Jordi Hays?

  Okay, let's talk about, let's talk about kind of vibe coding debt and tech debt, because we've gone through this where we'll build a product. We built, we built like a guest directory, very simple product that would basically, every time an episode would get published.

• 1:20:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:24Jordi Hays?

  We had an app that would effectively scrape the episode, figure out who was the guest, link everything out, and publish it. And it, and it, we, it was built in, in a day by, by one of our interns last summer. And then he had to spend like the entire summer, just like maintaining it and like shipping incremental updates. So are you seeing any changes on that front? Like, obviously, if it's easier to make products, maybe it's easier to maintain them. But I think the concern is like, if you've created, you know, 200 different SaaS tools and internal tools as part of your organization, then you end up spending really valuable resources at the company, you know, human labor, time, just kind of maintaining these systems and making sure they keep running.

• 1:21:10Speaker 04

  Can I talk a bit about the recent updates we did yesterday? Please. Lovable, so there's a much more advanced planning mode that helps asking the, you or your intern questions about what it is that you're trying to achieve. And that makes the AI be able to, you know, find a better solution that doesn't need that type of maintenance. And that's one of the many improvements that we shipped yesterday. Another big one is...

• 1:21:36Jordi Hays?

  So basically, like, if you, if you vibe code poorly, or if you prompt poorly, you're adding a bunch of kind of like vibe coding debt. And if you spend a little bit more time, like prompting...

• 1:21:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think people should just move fast and be, not be like, oh, I have to think through this, so it's maintainable. They should move really fast to get something that works and that's like useful. And, but then you should sit down and you should reconsider talking to... Loveable and asking, should I restart from the beginning? I'm having these problems with the maintenance. Is this, should I just be keeping shipping incremental updates? Or is there something else that could actually solve this on a deeper level? And keep having that conversation and be creative in terms of what could be the right solution for this?

• 1:22:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:17Speaker 04

  Because the systems are, they're extremely intelligent now and they're just getting more and more intelligent. So that should be your status quo. Explain your situation so that which the AI doesn't know.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27Speaker 04

  And then it will help guide you through what's the best path.

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like the, the, the solution to vibe coding is more vibe coding or more code, right? And so, but, but the question.

• 1:22:37Jordi Hays?

  Says the vibe coding dealer.

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  He's like, actually, you need more. But I believe that, I believe that. But my, I, I think the, the, the interesting question is the shift to mobile. And I want to know how you're thinking about that transition because if you go and vibe code an application and you sit down, you really think about it, you work with the tool to plan and, and test and you're giving feedback and you spend, you know, a full day or a couple of hours and you got it in a good spot, but then there's like that one little, oh, actually this button isn't quite working. Can you just go check out? It doesn't work in this scenario. That winds up just being normally like you text a developer, you Slack them. How are you thinking about like long-term integration with end users who might not be jumping into the tool themselves? And might not even be, you know, have the time to actually sit down and vibe code.

• 1:23:25Speaker 04

  I think the future of how teams operate is of course changing. And I think there, there should be someone who is like ultimately responsible for the quality of the application. And that might, that might not be you, even though you, you can throw in ideas of changes and then someone looks at it before it goes out to your customers.

• 1:23:43John Coogan?

  Got it, yeah.

• 1:23:43Speaker 04

  So that's high level, I think about it. And there's a lot of new capabilities that we are looking at to make sure that quality is always maintained. And we, over the last nine months, we've been super focused on security, which is this, like if you're putting something in production, that should be your first, your first priority. And, and there's a lot built in that makes applications secure from the ground up in, in how we approach it.

• 1:24:08Jordi Hays?

  The challenge right now is if you have a hit product, you could go to a hundred million users in forty eight hours. We saw this. What was the company that was like Palantir for dating?

• 1:24:20John Coogan?

  They really go that big?

• 1:24:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, no, they went the T dating app.

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:24:24Jordi Hays?

  They, they, they went.

• 1:24:26John Coogan?

  They don't call it Palantir for dating, but yeah. Yeah, the T dating app really did scale.

• 1:24:29Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, they.

• 1:24:30John Coogan?

  They have a security issue.

• 1:24:30Jordi Hays?

  Went to the top of the chart.

• 1:24:32John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, to be fair.

• 1:24:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but, but yeah, the founder was just kind of bud coating.

• 1:24:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think he had some team members too.

• 1:24:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sure, but like clearly they were moving very quickly and uh, some, some mistakes were made.

• 1:24:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, what it, what, has anything changed in your mindset about the level that you want to operate at or integrate with versus being a web app with cloud hosting, operating into the browser level, into the OS level, launching a dedicated app on a phone or on a, on a Mac uh, or command line tools? How are you thinking about the, the different unlocks that you get at different levels?

• 1:25:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, great question. So first of all, I, I use lovable on the phone all the time and it's really like a good mobile experience. That's why we, uh, we are seeing usage there.

• 1:25:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27Speaker 04

  I, I know that a lot of entrepreneurs, they're building out complete work OS systems.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:34Speaker 04

  I talked to Gwyneth Paltrow yesterday and she, they're building a lovable brain that accumulates all the information that they need just running their company.

• 1:25:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25:43Speaker 04

  And what that gets some more capabilities from is that it can connect to your local file system.

• 1:25:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:50Speaker 04

  And it can connect to, I mean, in the future, I don't know exactly what the mobile device is going to look like, but it's going to, the AI has to have context on everything you do on your phone for it to be fully unlocked, for all the capabilities unlocked. And that's something we're looking at, exactly how does that future look like? As we are building towards the best interface for humans to use technology and use AI. And that, because that's the vision we're on.

• 1:26:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about the trade offs between? Consumer and enterprise, obviously you can use it to make something that replaces a slide deck, just communication, external marketing materials, landing pages. You can also use it for building an internal tool and just spin something up internally to a company that's never going outside. Both are very interesting markets. Do you want to serve both? Do you think that there's a value to focusing on one over the other?

• 1:26:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, great question. So, Lovable started out from the early AI adopters. And that's where we're seeing now growth in all directions because people love how there's maybe some Swedish design sensibility, like things just works. And then we put a lot of hard engineering in making it simple, right? And one of the directions it's spreading is in the enterprise. People come to the work and they show like, look how much we can get done using Lovable at work. So now we have all of these required features for enterprises, so S C I M and so on. And specifically, what we're, like, I'll tell you an example of a really large company. They have 80,000 plus real estate agents globally, dozens of countries, hundreds of

• 1:27:27Speaker 04

  websites. They had the offer to replatform all of these websites because there's always this pain for marketers changing website. And the VP of Marketing there, that would take a year. The VP of Marketing found Lovable and he was like, wow, I can just build one of those websites in a few minutes. And then they sat down and they looked at how can we.

• 1:27:47John Coogan?

  These are websites for individual homes?

• 1:27:49Speaker 04

  For different brands, brands for real estate agents across different geos.

• 1:27:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:56Speaker 04

  And then over three weeks, they replatformed and then they saved $2 million on a solution, which was part paying for AI chatbots on the website. And their chief innovation officer just says like, this is the biggest change that a company has experienced in how fast they can move, how they could build out an AI chatbot just by prompting Lovable. And that's a large company and that's them building product lines that are facing their end customers. What they're seeing even more volume of is, of course, internal applications and applicant tracking systems built from the ground up by the people who are using those applicant tracking systems with AI, with thousands of people being served.

• 1:28:38John Coogan?

  How are you, how are you thinking about headcount planning?

• 1:28:42Jordi Hays?

  Specifically on the engineering side.

• 1:28:44Speaker 04

  Yes, it's a good question. I was at the Anthropic office and I think they're hiring a lot of people, just like we are doing, because what you're actually seeing is that if you use AI correctly as a business, which is one of my personal top goals or the entire company's top goal out of three goals, is us learning how to use AI as productively as possible. And that means that each human has more output, right?

• 1:29:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:10Speaker 04

  If you do that really well. And as we are learning that and figuring that out, we're putting that into the product and giving our users all the best practices in how to connect all the internal tools that your company is running on and share context across everything you're doing. Like when you're doing research on a podcast, you should all be able to just ask an AI, what question should I ask Anton? And all of that infrastructure, all that tooling, you should be able to build on Lovable or just get someone's else's tool and copy it into your workspace.

• 1:29:43Jordi Hays?

  How much do you guys pay attention to job descriptions at various companies in terms of understanding market pull? I could imagine people, companies that wouldn't necessarily hire software engineers saying like, we want engineers that are, can, you know, use Lovable and other relevant tools. Because I think one of the, one of the interesting things that we're trying to understand from just kind of understanding like how job, how we'll see job growth in some areas, maybe job reduction in other areas, is I think people are underestimating how many companies there will just be a net new role where somebody or multiple people are creating and maintaining software that the company is creating. And we're an example of that, right? Historically, a media company, like if you, if you had a fledgling media company, we brought

• 1:30:28Jordi Hays?

  Tyler on last, I think like Q1 of last year, we'd only been in market for a handful of months. And normally if somebody was building a media company and they were telling me they were hiring, or a podcast, right, and they were telling me they were hiring a software engineer in their, you know, second quarter in business, I'd be like, dude, you should focus on like a million other things, right? Just make good content. But in our case, we realized, hey, we can build quite a lot of internal tooling for what we're doing to make the show better. And so I think we're going to see a lot of job growth from companies that, again, wouldn't normally hire anybody internally doing software engineering.

• 1:31:05Speaker 04

  It's a good question. I don't look at the external other people's job offers. My background is in physics, so I just break things down into like, what is it that, what are the governing principles for making a team work really well and people work, humans working well together and getting output as a company? And what I'm seeing is that you want a team of people who, they don't have to be software engineers, but they're very curious and they get it, they get new things, understand them very quickly. And that's one of the things that we're fundamentally, fundamentally hiring for. I mean, I can take another example because I love, I'm so inspired every time

• 1:31:45Speaker 04

  I meet someone who's, has like, we've changed their lives, we love about, so it's a guy, Alan, he built a healthcare AI staffing company. In five months, there is a million dollars in ARR and he couldn't have been able to build something like this. And then-

• 1:32:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's so many niche labor marketplaces. These were, they used to be like more popular, like venture-backed businesses. And then a lot of VCs figured out like, hey, you can build a great business here, but you end up kind of capping out. There's some software component to do with like matching and kind of booking, payment, stuff like that. But ultimately, a lot of these businesses should just remain like somewhat niche, right? You could have a $10 million a year business doing staffing and have it, you know, like the people running it, right? You have a lean team, but now, but historically it was a challenge because there was a number of companies that would build like out of the box, like marketplace software. But usually they were like, it was, you had to do so much work to like actually adapt the software that it was kind of this trade-off of like,

• 1:32:46Jordi Hays?

  do I build it in-house? Do I use some-

• 1:32:48John Coogan?

  People used to abuse WordPress like crazy. They'd build a whole social network on WordPress or try and modify it with e-commerce stuff. And it would take a year and millions of dollars to build something that now it takes a weekend.

• 1:33:01Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you lead the team around dealing with competition? And, you know, every, you guys are now competing with pretty much every company in the whole world, it seems like, you know, from hyperscalers, right, that are building vibe coding tools to other startups. Like, what's your philosophy around dealing with, with competition? Just kind of like- Emotionally, like in the organization.

• 1:33:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:29Speaker 04

  First of all, what we're seeing is that people who come back to lovable and compare it with other tools. They say like, wow, this is such a wonderful, simpler experience that works better for them. That actually work and it's more capable in many, many dimensions. So that is, it just gives us a lot of belief in what we're doing. And the way we think about it is to not look at what others are doing. It's just to look at what do our customers want us to do. And being very grounded in that and that.

• 1:34:00Jordi Hays?

  Have you banned the like competition Slack channel? People, because it would literally be every day. It's like, hey, like we have a new venture back.

• 1:34:08John Coogan?

  This person did this, yeah.

• 1:34:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. But it's a sign that, it's a sign that.

• 1:34:11Speaker 04

  But yeah, we fundamentally to say we're building the best product based on first principles. What we think is the best way to do these things. And it often means not adding new features, adding new capabilities, but thinking very long term. How is this whole experience going to be for us humans as we interact with super intelligence? Basically in the future. And that's what we're, that's what we're driving us. Building that product is the motivator for everyone.

• 1:34:36Jordi Hays?

  What about international expansion? You're obviously in Europe here already. Are you opening offices in other continents?

• 1:34:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, we haven't announced more offices than Stockholm and then a great go to market.

• 1:34:50Jordi Hays?

  Have any to announce?

• 1:34:51Speaker 04

  What's that?

• 1:34:53Speaker 04

  I can't come back. We have more announcements, but we have people hired, a few people are hired remotely, including here in the US in various cities. So that's what it's like. But we getting a lot of value of being in person. People who were very like long-term thinking, very, very bought into the mission that we're on in, in based in Stockholm.

• 1:35:12John Coogan?

  How do you think about retention? There are so many amazing tools that come out. Like I remember those, it was Lensa, Magic Avatars. Everyone had to take their photo and do the Studio Ghibli precursor like a year earlier. The style transfer on their image. And then people sort of like, they tried it and then they churned out. But at the same time, like website builders have incredibly low churn because once you build your website, even if you're not using the tool every day, you're using it as hosting and you might be dumping, be jumping back in to make changes. How are you thinking about the different retention dynamics, the different cohorts? How are things looking?

• 1:35:50Speaker 04

  We're seeing very, very healthy retention. Net dollar retention has been more than 100%.

• 1:35:57Speaker 04

  But we're also, of course, seeing some AI tourists that are just trying a lot.

• 1:36:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, they must exist and they just stop by and then they move on to something else.

• 1:36:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, and what we're doing is that we're splitting up into different segments and seeing like, what are the jobs to be done for the different segments that we could do better? And fundamentally, what we're noticing is that for most things we're adding, which is about making the whole experience to do more things, more seamless, like more capabilities, more seamless without making it a more complex experience. That's helping the retention across the board.

• 1:36:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, and less of a point solution, less of, yeah, I use that for slides this week, but then there's a new one over there, I gotta try the new thing. More of like, actually run your entire business, build a new business on this and then stay with that for a long time, that makes a ton of sense. What about recommendations for other software products, databases? I've seen a bunch of charts where the default recommendation for Superbase, for example, is just climbing like crazy because it's recommended by you and by a backend and by a number of the models. What does that, does that business evolve into an affiliate model? Do you have, do you have demand from your customers to educate them about the different trade-offs?

• 1:37:19John Coogan?

  When they're building, when they're picking something? Or do you want all of that to be abstracted away so that the end user doesn't even know what a database is, for example? And database is just one example, there's a million things that you probably plug in with, right?

• 1:37:31Speaker 04

  This is a great question. We have some really good product integrations and you mentioned Superbase is one of them. And we are covering more and more, I have payments, email and communications. We want those, we want more of those amazing partnerships. I think.

• 1:37:49Speaker 04

  Like there shouldn't be any limit of those integrations. You should be able to ask Lovable to get cleaning for your podcast studio or whatever. And that shouldn't be done by us. Sure. It should be a partnership where we're currently just making more of those partnerships successful. And there are multiple companies that have been seeing absolute majority of their growth coming from us, actually. Sure. And then, but then at some point, yeah, I mean, we need to let our users get the best product integration if there are many ones.

• 1:38:21Jordi Hays?

  I feel like other companies should be a little bit worried if the majority of their growth is coming from you guys, given that your whole, the whole purpose of the, of the company is to make it easy to build software.

• 1:38:31Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:38:32Jordi Hays?

  Eventually, you guys will just naturally do some, do some of those things.

• 1:38:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, the integrations, I'm happy to not do them. We want to focus on the interface, the app creation layer. And then underneath, there needs to be a lot of things that connect to very, very technically challenging systems to build the infrastructure and so on that we don't need to put like our, our efforts into building. So it's, we want to do a lot more partnership this year. Yeah, makes sense.

• 1:38:59Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the dynamics between Lovable and all the different labs. I'm sure that you have very open dialogue with them around just like integrating with new tools, getting previews of models, all that kind of thing. And I'm sure part of why you're on the West Coast is just to spend time with, with the different teams.

• 1:39:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, those relationships are really good. We are fundamentally listening to the users more than them. We're building for the 99% while they're building developers.

• 1:39:29Jordi Hays?

  They're like, please, listen to your users less. You really want to, no, I'm kidding.

• 1:39:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, no. And what, like, they have to spend so much of their focus on the strategy on like building these models and making like pumps, squeezing out more and more juice from those models. And we're in this place which is very favorable, favorable for the end users where we're not tied to a specific model. We use a combination at Lovable of different models and that serves, that gives a better user experience in the end with the trade of speed and the high quality for each specific task.

• 1:40:04Jordi Hays?

  How, how did you and the team react to Claude Bot? Was there any kind of like new kind of? User paradigms that you were inspired by, anything to take away and kind of integrate? I mean, we had Peter on the show Tuesday, a couple of days ago, and he was very open. Like, he's just like in it, he's not, he's clearly not in it to make money. Like, he's in it for the love of the game and just kind of, we asked him, you know, do you, do you think that people will clone what you're doing, or, or copy it, or, or build on top of it? And he was like, "Yeah, I do." It's cool. So, kind of unexpected answer, but I'm curious if there's anything that you thought was particularly interesting that you can bring back to Lovable?

• 1:40:46Speaker 04

  Yes. I love Peter. Happy you had him on the show. I, I think, like, me and many people in the team have been building our own versions of this personal assistant that you just talk to, record audio to, and-

• 1:41:00Jordi Hays?

  Talk on your phone?

• 1:41:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, in my case, on my, my computer. And then, what we're, of course, thinking about, which is like the other top goal for this year, is to provide the best workspace, or the best way to collaborate as a team. And that, of course, a big part of that is being able to talk to an agent that has access to all of your different tools that you, once you're building with Lovable, and can collect, can pull out the data when you need it. And I think, I'm very happy about this open source project, in particular, getting a lot of traction. It's been my roots as well.

• 1:41:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like it's just waking everyone up to what's possible. It was real, like, feeling the AGI moment, generally, and maybe not everyone reaches for open source and all that's entailed with that, but it's sort of just like a new call to action for everyone to try new tools. So, overall, good, very bullish.

• 1:41:54Speaker 04

  Twitter, Twitter likes this, say, completely new things that you can try out. In the end, what users want is something that's simple, and that's very, very trusted, high-security, high-reliability. And when you're building your strategy like us, that's what we're focusing on. What is it that most people want? And what's the sustaining product that you want to build?

• 1:42:14Jordi Hays?

  What social platform is most important to Lovable's growth at the moment?

• 1:42:21Speaker 04

  I think, I'm not sure if my team likes me sharing data here, but Twitter and LinkedIn is what the ones I know are the big ones.

• 1:42:30Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 1:42:31Speaker 04

  And we're also seeing Instagram.

• 1:42:32Jordi Hays?

  Cause I, cause I, yeah, cause I feel like products when they actually go mainstream, like going mainstream looks like nav, like going over to Instagram.

• 1:42:40John Coogan?

  Three hundred million AR, it feels like beyond a niche, which I think of LinkedIn and X as. But yeah, I mean, it's a big community. So it makes a ton of sense, especially with some of the, some of the larger enterprises that you're working with at the business side. That makes a ton of sense. What does the top of funnel look like and growth function look like? Is there a flywheel where someone builds and then shares and then, I mean, I imagine that there's, you know, links built with lovable in the footer, but is that a real engine of growth? Or is, or advertising, like what, what's driving growth overall at the high level?

• 1:43:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so we're seeing about 300 million visits to lovable applications per month.

• 1:43:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:43:19Speaker 04

  So that is a real effect.

• 1:43:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:22Speaker 04

  People are like, oh, this is this great website. And most of the time that leading to conversion is they're just talking to the person like, oh yeah, you built it with lovable.

• 1:43:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:43:30Speaker 04

  And that, that is a part of the biggest channel, which is just word of mouth.

• 1:43:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:43:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that continues to be like absolutely.

• 1:43:36John Coogan?

  They see something cool, even if it's just a small demo, even if they're not paying for that business, they see it and they're like, I want to do that, but for me or my tools.

• 1:43:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. They, they hear, I mean, they hear about us from the friends.

• 1:43:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:43:48Speaker 04

  Or they see about us on the internet somewhere.

• 1:43:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:50Speaker 04

  And yeah, I'm looking at investing more into growth, of course. And then I think Instagram and getting growth marketing really, really strong. It could be the next big channel.

• 1:44:04John Coogan?

  Super Bowl's coming up. It's not too late to throw something together.

• 1:44:07Jordi Hays?

  You roll, you roll out, anything, anything?

• 1:44:09John Coogan?

  Maybe next year.

• 1:44:10Speaker 04

  We'll see.

• 1:44:11John Coogan?

  TV of TV.

• 1:44:11Jordi Hays?

  Oh, we'll see. It's not a now.

• 1:44:12John Coogan?

  It's not a now. Breaking.

• 1:44:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, awesome.

• 1:44:15John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show. This was fantastic.

• 1:44:18Jordi Hays?

  Have a great day.

• 1:44:19John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your trip. We really appreciate you coming by.

• 1:44:22Jordi Hays?

  Come back soon.

• 1:44:22John Coogan?

  And we will tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai. And up next, we have.

• 1:44:33Jordi Hays?

  I'm expecting a Super Bowl ad.

• 1:44:34John Coogan?

  I, I want a Super Bowl ad. They could do some really fun stuff. I mean, even some of the customer testimonials would be great, even if it was something. More they they should build the entire ad in lovable dog food. The product. We have Christian Garrett and Delian Asperu have in the restream waiting room. We will bring them in to the TV and Ultra down. Delian Christian. How are you doing? How are you feeling?

• 1:44:56Christian Garrett?

  There they go.

• 1:44:57Delian Asparouhov?

  Ready to go, baby. Live from New York.

• 1:44:59John Coogan?

  You guys look fantastic.

• 1:45:00Delian Asparouhov?

  Boys.

• 1:45:01Christian Garrett?

  Good to see you guys.

• 1:45:02John Coogan?

  Take us through the news, break it down for us. This is year four, correct?

• 1:45:07Delian Asparouhov?

  Year five.

• 1:45:08John Coogan?

  Year five.

• 1:45:09Christian Garrett?

  Whoa.

• 1:45:10Delian Asparouhov?

  Third year of doing the daytime forums. So we started it back in the day, just as like a small dinner series. And then three years ago, kind of experimented with daytime forum. That went great. And then this could be our third time doing it.

• 1:45:21John Coogan?

  Okay, what's special about this time? Who's on the lineup?

• 1:45:25Christian Garrett?

  I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I mean, obviously, the 250th is is great timing for us to have another event here. We're very excited about that. I think the key focus this year outside of continuing to build on what the forum has always been about, which is building bridges between technology and government, the technology sector and government. Is going to be increased focus, not just on technological leadership, but industrial leadership. And then as well as looking at having leadership among our allies. So I think this year you'll see a bigger expansion of the industries where technology is having an impact and playing a critical role. And you'll see leaders from companies that are leaders in those industries. And you'll also see a lot of folks coming from abroad and participating as well. And so I think you're just seeing that the relationship of the bridge between technology and government is actually a key framework

• 1:46:09Christian Garrett?

  for building deep relations between the US and our allies, as well as building deep relationships and strengthening other industries.

• 1:46:15Delian Asparouhov?

  And we didn't say, but March 24, Washington DC. For now, we've only announced some of the like the private, you know, basically speakers. We haven't announced any of the gov speakers yet. But it's folks like Trey Stevens from Andorl Founders Fund, Vinod Kozla from Kozla Ventures, Brad Lightcap from OpenAI, Shyam Sankar from Palantir. A bunch more that will start to, you know, basically release. But yeah, what I like about this year is we're also going to start to expand themes a little bit. There's going to be a strong, basically biotechnology, you know, sort of focus and some folks both within the administration, within private industry, talking about basically how we need to make sure that we don't lose that entire like supply chain and industry to China, the same way that we have with like consumer electronics or humanoids. You're starting to see some like. Early signs towards that and there will even be some joint policy put out that HBF will be you know sort of endorsing and so what's been cool is as the like forum has been around for

• 1:46:59Delian Asparouhov?

  several years where we're now not just like acting as a gathering place but it's even a place for people to start to think about you know not just meeting but even like publishing policy together that aligns sort of like private public incentives in a way that is like best for the nation and then throughout all this you know we like I said we started this five years ago obviously under the Biden administration continuing to maintain I think you know some true bipartisanship you know Vinod Kostel obviously has a certain set of you know sort of thoughts about you know sort of policies regulations etc I may not necessarily agree with all them but we try to throughout both the you know sort of forum the events that we host everything is pretty consistently you know sort of you know even and across the aisle and we try and stick with the you know sort of centrists on you know sort of both sides that can actually you know sort of reach across the aisle and you know you know produce productive policy together yeah you won't see a ton of the you know sort of extremists from either you know either party there

• 1:47:43John Coogan?

  That's great I noticed Young Liu from Foxconn is attending interesting company obviously everyone's very familiar do you think there's going to be more energy about let's bring more Foxconn manufacturing to America or just startups trying to work with Foxconn there was this leak that that OpenAI might be working with Foxconn

• 1:48:05Christian Garrett?

  To make Sweet Pea

• 1:48:06John Coogan?

  Sweet Pea earbuds and it feels like more and more companies as they think about hardware they're going to be wanting to establish relationship with Foxconn that's sort of the beauty of this at least from the business side what what's interesting about Foxconn why is he important to the conference?

• 1:48:22Christian Garrett?

  Well I think first off you know you have Foxconn Qualcomm you'll have some other names that will be announced across these other kind of categories of companies that have maybe been in industries that weren't viewed as technology industries but now increasingly are and I think a lot of leaders that are coming there are really just representing a trend that you've seen which is once again technology industry is a great way to build deepening relationships and partnerships with our allies and to your point it works both ways right yes you'll see just like TSMC has made a huge investment in the state of Arizona and you're seeing that from other companies as well here domestically you're also seeing companies abroad continue to invest in other countries and Scale there through partnerships like these.

• 1:49:04Christian Garrett?

  An example in another country, you know, we've seen Androl, for example, invest heavily. And Androl is a portfolio company for Founders Fund and 137 for us, respectively. And Androls invest heavily in countries like the UK, Australia and Japan. Just recently, uh, opening their office there. Japan is another country, as well as many others like South Korea and Europe, that are increasingly opening their doors to become manufacturing hubs for the reindustrialization here in the US, as well as supporting their own reindustrialization efforts. And I think, you know, you're going to have to see many companies like Foxconn play a critical role as the West tries to shift off of reliance on Chinese capacity across critical industries.

• 1:49:39Delian Asparouhov?

  We, as much as possible, obviously try to make it so that it's bipartisan from the elected officials and, you know, sort of Congress. But we do try to, as much as possible, whichever administration basically is in office, try to reflect some of their priorities. And what you've obviously seen under this administration is, you know, them leaning into, you know, making sure that our allies are, you know, sort of contributing their fair share, but also reestablishing their own reindustrialization efforts. And so I think a significant theme of this year's forum is going to be having a lot more international presence and there to both, you know, sort of learn from how the US is reindustrializing, but also partner with some of these companies to bring those technologies locally, partner with some of their local, you know, sort of primes and reindustrialization efforts to accelerate those, in some ways, these trends that you're seeing in the US. The United States is much better off if France, if Germany, if the United Kingdom,

• 1:50:24Delian Asparouhov?

  if Australia, if Japan are mimicking basically those same technological patterns. And so that's definitely going to be a major, you know, sort of topic of this year's forum.

• 1:50:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know you haven't announced the government attendees, but is there a desire to have international leaders attend as well? Is this going to be the next Davos in a couple of years? Or do you want to keep it focused on domestic policymakers, US policymakers, senators, representatives?

• 1:50:49Christian Garrett?

  I mean, obviously, the event being in DC and the core focus is on the technology sector and the government sector in the US. But the event's always been international. You know, from the beginnings, we've had foreign ambassadors from other countries attend. We had the VP of Taiwan speak multiple times. I think you will see a lot more international leadership attend as well. I think it's reflective, to Delian's point, that this really is about the West being successful and... You know, the concept of it's not US alone, right? And so I think, yes, you will see that represented. Most of the leadership, of course, is still going to be heavily domestic, right? And so leaders from Congress, leaders from the administration, et cetera. But you will definitely see a lot more leadership from countries abroad and our allies. And that's gonna be very exciting.

• 1:51:29Christian Garrett?

  And that's gonna be from the Middle East, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Taiwan, and Europe.

• 1:51:36Delian Asparouhov?

  You'll see like in the long term, I think the way that like this will always break down is it'll probably be like 85%, 90% domestic focus, but there'll always be like a twinge of international. And so I think that's what it's been probably historically on the attendee side of things. And this year, for the first time, there will be a few more sort of like internationally focused panels. But it's not gonna, I think, quite go to like Davos level, which is like, kind of global elite in some ways. There's always gonna be primarily sort of United States focus with a twinge of international.

• 1:52:00Jordi Hays?

  What are all the ways that people can participate, view, you know, watch from home? Be a part of it, whether as a sponsor, all that stuff?

• 1:52:10Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, so the, you know, event is invited only to participate during the day in Washington DC. But, you know, it is gonna be about 1,000 people, so it's a relatively, you know, sort of broad audience that will be, you know, sort of bringing in there. We'll also be live streaming all of the panels on our YouTube, you know, and X accounts. And then there will be, you know, a couple of media groups that are live streaming from there. Some traditional ones like Bloomberg and some super exciting novel ones like TVPN onsite, you know, there. So there'll be a variety of different live streams to tune into that I think will give you a feel of the event, both the official panels as well as obviously the side conversations that you guys will be doing.

• 1:52:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. What is the business structure of Hillen Valley now? Is it its own nonprofit?

• 1:52:50Delian Asparouhov?

  We are officially a 501(c)(3). So this is the first year ever. We are, welcome to the board of the Hillen Valley Forum Foundation, 501(c)(3).

• 1:53:02Jordi Hays?

  Are you guys just being memetic with OpenAI?

• 1:53:04John Coogan?

  Are you considering a for-profit conversion? Because I feel like the ads, really, we could do a lot with each other here.

• 1:53:11Christian Garrett?

  There's a lot more to be announced, like Delian said, so just stay tuned.

• 1:53:14Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, but we do have full-time staff, which is really exciting.

• 1:53:16John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:53:17Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, you know, Chris and I were starting to get a little too stretched thin between, you know, both of us having too many jobs. So it is nice finally.

• 1:53:23Christian Garrett?

  And we lost a key leader as well, so we really are stretched thin.

• 1:53:26Delian Asparouhov?

  The, you know, I believe now the youngest undersecretary in United States history.

• 1:53:30Jordi Hays?

  And most handsome.

• 1:53:31Delian Asparouhov?

  And most handsome, goddamn, some of those photos on the Twitter.

• 1:53:34Jordi Hays?

  The most looks max.

• 1:53:35John Coogan?

  I wish I looked like that. Yeah, yeah, it's true. Maybe I'll be his undersecretary then. I'll be his undersecretary. So, yeah, talk more broadly about the 2026 calendar, 2027 calendar. People know the annual event in DC. There was that one-off event with All In. There was a special Hill and Valley sort of collab. Is there a plan to do a quarterly series, have other dinners, go off the hill and have something in the valley? What are you thinking?

• 1:54:03Christian Garrett?

  I think it's something that we're open to opportunistically. It's not something we're committed to or it's part of the plan. We very much are focused on the main event every year. But absolutely, you know, we actually just did something recently with FII, who is also, they do an incredible job. Their conference is right after the Hill Valley, so I recommend most people, which a lot of us are, will end up flying straight to that right after. And, you know, Richard T. has done an incredible job at really gathering a lot of world leaders and running an incredible event in Saudi. And they've done events globally. We did a collab there and brought a lot of Silicon Valley leadership. You know, Ruth Porat from Google attended, Sriram right from the White House and the administration attended and spoke, and a bunch of other folks. And so I think, you know, we will look at these opportunities where we can try to help bring more of really Silicon Valley to these other events internationally, particularly,

• 1:54:48Christian Garrett?

  you know, when it aligns with countries that are our allies and are focused on building deep bridges between technology and government. And so, you know, I think you'll see some of those maybe internationally or potentially, obviously domestically, the one-off event with the All In guys with J. Cal Chamath and Freeburg and Sacks, obviously, in his role organizing that along with Jacob. That was incredible. We would love to do more things like this, just opportunistic. So if it happens multiple times in a year, great. If it doesn't happen, also great.

• 1:55:13Delian Asparouhov?

  I think one of the ambitions that I have for the event is starting to become, you know, sort of more deep in particular industry sectors, like, you know, this year very intentionally trying to go a bit, you know, sort of deeper into biotech. I could imagine eventually where, you know, you have the marquee event, you know, on a particular day of the week, but there may be some like subsector tracks, you know, over time where we do like Hill and Valley space, Hill and Valley biotech, Hill and Valley, you know, industrialization, Hill and Valley rare earths. And those may be like subtracts. And again, with the goal of this being like, I don't want to just gather people for gathering people's sake, like, maybe that's what they do in Davos, but like, you know, the goal is like, I would like to actually make sure that like policy comes out of this.

• 1:55:45Jordi Hays?

  I thought your whole brand was I'm the networking guy. Here's a 20-point thread on how to network.

• 1:55:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, this is a mastermind, right? We should reband this as a mastermind.

• 1:55:55Christian Garrett?

  Neither of us were at Dallas, so that probably isn't.

• 1:55:57John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:55:58Delian Asparouhov?

  Look, my favorite types of venture investing to do is just follow the heat. That is how you generate returns. You just identify the heat and invest into the hottest deals and other people are marking it up. You've just got to mark it up even faster at higher prices and chase momentum.

• 1:56:12John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of exciting deals, Bridget Mendler was on the show yesterday. The chat, we just want to relay this. The chat is pulling for a Bridget Mendler attendance, a speaking and invite, something like that. We'd love to see her there.

• 1:56:22Christian Garrett?

  Bridget's a veteran.

• 1:56:24Delian Asparouhov?

  Bridget's been there.

• 1:56:24John Coogan?

  Oh, fantastic. Okay, chat should be satisfied.

• 1:56:27Christian Garrett?

  Kevin Whale, also I have to shout him out. He's been a veteran. I know he's coming on later. He's been, he's attended every single forum.

• 1:56:32John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:56:33Christian Garrett?

  And has been an incredible partner for us. And obviously now, you know, alongside opening up, been great partners. And so, you know, the stuff that he's working on, on science, by the way, is awesome. I'm very glad he gets to talk a bit more about that later. So, yeah, it's, it's, Bridget's actually a veteran. So we need to find a poll for someone that has not attended before.

• 1:56:49Delian Asparouhov?

  Okay, yeah. What I like is like, there's some pretty, we have like a, just a really solid veteran squad. It's like Alex Karp, been there every single year. Vinod Khosla, been there every single year. Trey Stevens, I think, went to the second one, coming back this year to speak. And so I think what's nice.

• 1:57:01Christian Garrett?

  And that's a big deal for Trey, by the way.

• 1:57:03Delian Asparouhov?

  I know. Trey's hard to, you know.

• 1:57:04Christian Garrett?

  He's into the social.

• 1:57:05John Coogan?

  He's busy.

• 1:57:06Christian Garrett?

  He's not.

• 1:57:06Delian Asparouhov?

  Exactly. I just peer pressured him a lot this year, thankfully. So, you know, got him up there.

• 1:57:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, you mentioned a bunch of different categories. Is energy top of mind for you? How are you thinking about the, all the work that's going on? We see a lot of energy or a lot of excitement around nuclear. Been tracking a little bit less since solar, but who are you interested in? What conversations are you excited about in energy?

• 1:57:26Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I think there'll be like two major areas that you'll see energy come up at the forum. The first is there is going to be like a nuclear, you know, sort of focus panel. I haven't announced those, you know, sort of, you know, panelists yet, but, you know, let's just say there may be one that's a general.

• 1:57:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:38Delian Asparouhov?

  As one of the panelists. And then other one, I think where you'll see an angle on it is a little bit in relation to basically like the build out of the physical infrastructure behind AI and how much of, you know, energy is a limitation there. So those would be kind of the two, you know, topic areas that we focus on there. And again, with both those. Trying to make sure that by the time we get to the forum, there's particular sort of policy and things there coming out of those panels that aren't just discussions, but you know, ideally legislation that's going to be passed. So we always try and make sure the forum is in a week where both Senate and the House are in session. And so, you know, in some ways, Congress basically chooses the dates of the forum more so than we do. But as much as possible, try and make it so that you know, sort of policy immediately, you know, sort of comes out of it. And sometimes we also react live, right? You know, in one of the forums years, it was the, you know, the, you know, main event was the day before

• 1:58:19Delian Asparouhov?

  the TikTok CEOs, basically, you know, what's called briefing in front of Congress. And so obviously, there's a lot of discussion, you know, to that year and, you know, policy papers and recommendations from that, you know, sort of group around, you know, what needs to be done with TikTok.

• 1:58:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, dress code. Dress code. Should people wear different colored shoes? Dalian suit? What do you guys recommend?

• 1:58:39John Coogan?

  T-shirt and jeans.

• 1:58:40Christian Garrett?

  It is DC, so you know, probably not full Silicon Valley casual, maybe more business casual or suit and tie, definitely.

• 1:58:49John Coogan?

  No, it's the best dressed, it's the best dressed event in tech. On the tech circuit, it's the best dressed one. It's fantastic.

• 1:58:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we went last year. We're like, you guys wear this?

• 1:58:58Christian Garrett?

  It is the best dressed event in tech.

• 1:59:00John Coogan?

  It is fantastic.

• 1:59:01Delian Asparouhov?

  I have been told that my head of, the head of comms at Hillen Valley is unhappy with the fact that I keep wearing the same damn gray suit every single year. And so I was taking, he's taking me shopping, you know, later today to get a new suit.

• 1:59:15Jordi Hays?

  It's also the, you also wore the shirt last time you came on the show.

• 1:59:17Delian Asparouhov?

  I don't know if you know, I actually wear this specific quarter zip every single time I'm on TVPN.

• 1:59:23Jordi Hays?

  I know, because it's the green. It's a green.

• 1:59:25Delian Asparouhov?

  I make sure that it's washed every single week so that I make sure that I can wear it for TVPN.

• 1:59:29John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, we appreciate it. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:59:33Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait to be there.

• 1:59:34John Coogan?

  And congrats on the list. Everyone will be staying tuned to the new guests.

• 1:59:39Delian Asparouhov?

  See you in Washington, boys.

• 1:59:40Jordi Hays?

  See you there.

• 1:59:41John Coogan?

  See you later. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent with Okta. And up next, we have Eric Seufert from Heracles Media. He's been on the show before from Mobile Dev Memo, if you're not familiar. He got us absolutely fired up about advertising. We're huge fans of him. We're huge fans of advertising. And he's in the Rooster Room waiting room. So we will bring him in to the TVPN Ultra Room. Eric Seufert, how are you doing?

• 2:00:13John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 2:00:13Eric Seufert?

  How's it going, guys? Thanks for having me.

• 2:00:14John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping back on. We've been following the ChatGPT ads rollout, the story. You've had a ton of great analysis. We've talked about it a little bit on the show, but we wanted to, you know, hear it from you and dive way deeper. So maybe you could set the table for us on what the launch is looking like right now, what the product is looking like, what your expectations were. Just maybe begin at the beginning of this saga for the ads in ChatGPT.

• 2:00:42Eric Seufert?

  Well, the saga begins where ChatGPT begins. We all knew we were gonna end up here. We all knew ads were coming. I mean, I wrote a piece in May 2025. I said, obviously, ChatGPT will monetize with ads. Why did I feel so confident in that? Because they just hired Fijisimo. She's kind of known for having led the mobile newsfeed ads product to Facebook. That's obviously been one of the most successful ads businesses in the history of mankind. And so it seemed natural that they would, they would bring, given the domain expertise they had acquired, that they would bring ads to bear for ChatGPT, and they have. Now, the launch looks like the launch of Netflix ads, right? And if it remains that way, it's probably, doesn't bode well for the, for the business. But I think they're going to evolve it over time.

• 2:01:26Eric Seufert?

  What they've said now, or what's come out, the information has had a lot of good reporting on this. They're charging on a CPM basis, which is, you know, not standard for kind of direct response ads. It's more like a brand advertising formulation, but so it's $60 CPM, which is exactly what Netflix came out of the gate charging. They're asking for commitments of less than $1 million. So this is clearly like a testing phase. And they're gonna offer very little in a way of measurement or targeting. So this feels like a very sort of primitive MVP, but you know, the question is like, how quickly can they evolve it into something that looks more like the Facebook ads platform?

• 2:02:03John Coogan?

  So what do you think? Like, what do you think got us to this place where you get Fijisimo? She's done this before. She has massive connections and skill set, but it still takes, you know, eight months to roll something out that feels not as mature as something else? Is it a talent issue? Are there other regulatory concerns? Or do they, do they need to worry about certain edge cases that people might not be aware of? Or is it specifically strategic to actually, is there some secret reason why they're, they're taking this approach?

• 2:02:37Eric Seufert?

  So here's my hypothesis, right? And so it's not just about, you know, Fiji Simo, she's the CEO of Apps. But they acquired Statsig, which is, you know, staffed by a lot of ex-meta people. That was an experimentation platform. That's the exact kind of talent that you'd want to ingest into a company if you're going to roll out an app platform. She needs to be aggressively experimented on. Here's what I think happened. I think, you know, ChatGPT. So OpenAI kind of evolved over time. It was a research lab, then, you know, obviously they've had the drama around trying to pivot into a for-profit corporation. My guess is the investors wanted them to bring in somebody that was a little bit more sensitive to, you know, their commercial sensitivities, right? And so, you know, Fiji Simo would be a very good fit for that profile.

• 2:03:21Eric Seufert?

  They brought her in and my sense was there probably was a little bit of animosity internally towards the idea of this being an ads, an ads-driven business, right? Primarily an ads-driven business, which I think it ultimately will be.

• 2:03:34Jordi Hays?

  Only like two years ago, Sam said, "I look at ads as like a failure state for..."

• 2:03:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, and then he started pivoting the rhetoric and started saying, "Well, I like some of the Instagram ads. When they're targeted well, they're actually delightful and in the right context, they can be good." And he was coming around to the three of ours worldview, which is that advertising is great. But he did have to message that externally and then obviously had a whole bunch of work to do messaging it internally. And maybe that's why there was a little bit less energy internally to really push towards that. That makes a lot of sense.

• 2:04:06Eric Seufert?

  Well, he may have been the one that was messaged to. He may not have been the one controlling the message there. He may have been the one that was messaged to. We need ads because ads are inevitable. It's not that ads are great, ads are inevitable. If you want to reach what I call humanity's scale, ads are inevitable. If you want to monetize that at the scale it can be, at its total potential, you need ads. That's how you do it, right? And so he may have been the one that was convinced. And, you know, bringing someone external in who had been there, done that, may have been part of an investor strategy. But putting aside my hypothesis, look, I think this has the potential to be an incredibly successful initiative. The question is, how quickly can they pivot into something that looks like the meta-model, right? So if you look at it right now, it's, you know, and I think, look, to everything you just said... Said mirrors what happened at Netflix for years. Netflix said we would never do ads.

• 2:04:51Eric Seufert?

  Ads are offensive. They're an affront. They're an affront to to to my sensibilities as a consumer. That's that's what the leadership said. And then one day they weren't right. The exact same thing happened with OpenAI.

• 2:05:02Jordi Hays?

  And all in, all in, yeah. Don't forget all in, all in was anti ad and and we we beg them.

• 2:05:08John Coogan?

  We beg them.

• 2:05:08Jordi Hays?

  We beg them.

• 2:05:09John Coogan?

  And now.

• 2:05:10Jordi Hays?

  And I, you know, I think they made the decision independently, of course, but they're running ads now. They always.

• 2:05:16Eric Seufert?

  Yeah, I've been, yeah, I've been banging the drum for for since May 2025.

• 2:05:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:20Eric Seufert?

  Um, but I think the question is, is it six months? Is it 12 months? Is it 18 months to get something that looks like meta ads? Right. And that means targeting, right? Based on behavioral profiles. Uh, that means measurement. That means allowing, that means explaining to advertisers the the sort of impact of what that you've delivered on their behalf.

• 2:05:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:37Eric Seufert?

  Um, and that means like a whole lot of tech that needs to be built out, right? And that means, you know, creative optimization, all these things, just conversion optimized advertising is very different from what they're offering. Is it six months? Is it 12 months? Is it 18 months to get there? That's the big question, right? But that'll determine the success. And if if you say, look, this mirrors what Netflix did. Well, that's not really a playbook that you want to draw inspiration from, right? I mean, they had to pivot. They had to do a hard pivot. I mean, the the ads tier has been alive for three years. They did 1.5 billion in 2025, right? So, uh, you know, it's it's not a significant chunk of the revenue yet. I think it could be a much larger chunk of the revenue, but Netflix has other concerns, right? They've got quality concerns. They've got, um, you know, consumer sentiment concerns that where they can't just like fully embrace ads. I don't think ChatGPT is limited in that way.

• 2:06:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Take me back to the that initial launch of Netflix. You said similar CPM $60 per thousand views, but what uh, what was the response like? Like, were there any advertisers that were like, yes, this is great. I got my money's worth. It worked out. Was it just vague and unattributable?

• 2:06:36Jordi Hays?

  My my per my perception is like great performance marketers.

• 2:06:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:40Jordi Hays?

  Are always excited to try new channels, especially a channel that's driving high intent traffic, right? So if you tell a performance marketer, hey, I've got a billion users and I'm going to let you advertise to them. They're going to be excited no matter what the general setup is because they just want to get in there with a test budget. And like, you'll talk to marketers and at a certain scale, they'll they're they're like, yeah, let's try 100K here. Let's try 100K there. It's just like, you're just kind of throwing around money and then you're going to double down on on what really works.

• 2:07:09Eric Seufert?

  Right, for the initial rollout, this is how you launch an ads platform. Don't get me wrong, this is how you launch an ads platform. That's why I'm talking about six months versus 12 months. This is how you do it. This is how you bootstrap the data. This is how you get people on boarded. This is how you get feedback. You have to launch it like this. There's no other way. You can't launch a conversion optimized ads platform because by definition, you don't have the conversions data yet. Right now, that's another reason why I think they they launched Instant Checkout. I think Instant Checkout is a stalking horse. I think that's a method of gathering conversion data that they can use to then target against with ads. I think that was the whole purpose of that, right? I don't think that was seen as a long term revenue opportunity. I think that was seen as a way to bootstrap the data. But this is how you launch in an ads platform. I mean, it's got to evolve into a conversion optimized ads platform, but you can't be that at the start. You can't intuit the settings.

• 2:07:53Eric Seufert?

  You can't intuit the tuning that you need to implement to make this work. But but the question is, how long does it take them to get there? Right? And and so that, you know, that we'll just see. But my sense is they've got the DNA. They, you know, the information report, they have 700 ex Meta employees. Like essentially everyone at Meta is working on ads, whether they're working, you know, as an account rep or they're working as an ML engineer. They're all sort of growing in that direction.

• 2:08:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What was, what's been your reaction to Instant Checkout? There's been a lot of debate on on the fee structure. Some people saying, no retailer can afford this. We were pushing back on that in a number of different cases. There's plenty of brands where you say like, would you spend like 4% of AOV to acquire a customer? I can also see the other side of it, a concern that I have is like, you know, you're running an ad on a Meta platform to find a customer. The customer then goes to ChatGPT if that's where they're searching for products. And then the the brand is effectively paying twice to like actually find the customer, drive them, get them interested. And then and then at the bottom of the funnel, they're paying like another 4% fee. That feels like not great, but what's been your reaction?

• 2:09:01Eric Seufert?

  Yeah, so I was in the former camp. I said that that's not a that's not a workable fee. Let me let me come back to that, though, because you asked a question about what happened when Netflix offered ads. They had too many advertisers sign up. They had too many. They were demand. They were supply constrained, not demand constrained. They had to return money. I think that's exactly why OpenAI is saying, no, look, we're setting an upper limit on this. A million is the max. Right? Because they won't have enough people to advertise to. This is just a way to test it out and to start scaling. And the problem Netflix made was they never act. So the problem that Netflix had from day one was they had the partnership with with Microsoft with Xander. They were using external tech to run the ads, right? Xander is an ad platform. And so that's the problem. They couldn't implement, you know, custom placements. They couldn't do a lot of measurement stuff. They couldn't do a lot of targeting stuff.

• 2:09:41Eric Seufert?

  Because they weren't operating the actual pipes, the actual plumbing that was delivering the ads. There's a lot of like data, data issues, just access to data issues. That that's not what OpenAI is doing here. OpenAI is starting out by building their own tech. And Netflix, by the way, pivoted to that. But they pivoted to that very late. That's why I think the ads initiative at Netflix was not successful. And and and, you know, hasn't really delivered that much revenue. But going back to the 4% fee, first of all, here's what I think is going to happen. I think they're going to drop that to zero. Or very low. It'll be tiny, because I think the whole point of this is to just drive conversions. And the whole thing is like, when you see performance in ChatGPT as a retailer who's just basically paying for the conversions essentially with the fee. You're going to want to actually advertise against that. You're going to want to control it, because you have no control if it's just surfaced based on

• 2:10:24Eric Seufert?

  what ChatGPT believes is relevant. And at some point, you're going to have too many retailers to place into a single placement, so you're going to have to mediate that by bids, right? So ultimately, I think this gives way in in in the main. This gives way to advertising. But whether the 4% is sustainable or not, actually comes down to how you view what those purchases are, because it's not user acquisition. You're not acquiring a user. If you were, then you'd compare that to LTV. But since it's not user acquisition, you're not acquiring that user as a sort of like with a long term relationship in mind. You're essentially trading a percentage of the checkout for the checkout, but that user doesn't interface with you. Right? And in a lot of in a lot of

• 2:11:05Jordi Hays?

  So there's going to be no, there's not going to be passed through to the underlying vendor, you're saying?

• 2:11:10Eric Seufert?

  Like I mean, look, you're the merchant of record, right? And you get their information because you have to fulfill the order. But ChatGPT or OpenAI specifically says in the terms that you can't use their email address for like remarketing. Right? And you know, Amazon says this too. So so the thing is, you're not capturing the customer. You're just getting, you're giving 4% for that one-off transaction, but you have no control over whether you reach that customer again, whether that customer is brought into your orbit. There's very, that's a very different proposition from advertising to someone and acquiring a customer. You acquire that customer, you get a whole stream of opportunities to remarket to them. If you're just, you know, trading 4% for the transaction, that's all you get. So it's not actually customer acquisition. If you think about 4% per transaction, now consider that if if you thought about the people talk about,

• 2:11:52Eric Seufert?

  you know, when that when that number came out, they talked about, well, some people spend, you know, 50%, 60% on Facebook ads. Why is that different? Because that's over the life cycle of that customer, not for the

• 2:12:01Jordi Hays?

  Or even or even just or even one time, they pay for the customer one time and then they come back, you know, 15 more times or they end up subscribing and they've actually they actually own the customer relationship. Yeah.

• 2:12:11Eric Seufert?

  Exactly, exactly. And and and and think, you know, think about it also this way. Um, you know, that that 4%, that might be all the margin you're getting as an e-commerce, you know, as an e-commerce, you know, operator, right? And the thing is, that's not preventing you from advertising. That's not saying, okay, you could save your entire advertising, but you're going to still have to advertise everywhere. This is going to be a tiny sliver of your orders that you're not in control of. You can't control it. This could be lumpy. This could be up one month, down the next, right? You can't control that. You're going to have to continue to advertise. Now, you have no idea, to your point, whether this is cannibalizing uh purchases that would have happened from the people that you advertise on other platforms, right? So this ends up just being a cost on a drag, probably on your advertising expenditure elsewhere.

• 2:12:50John Coogan?

  Can you explain attribution and the evolution of Netflix's ad product? Because if I'm sitting on my couch watching a movie and I see an ad and I go to my phone, it feels really disconnected. Even in a pre ATT world, it feels extremely hard. How do they do attribution? How how good can this get? And then and then with ChatGPT, what what's the upper bound on attribution for OpenAI, given that we are in a post ATT world?

• 2:13:20Eric Seufert?

  Upper bound is basically what you see with Facebook because it's going to be direct response, it's going to be click based, right? With Netflix, it's a little different. So with CTV, the way that companies do measurement and attribution in CTV is traditionally they set up what's called a clean room. So I set up this environment, it's a centralized environment. I push all the ad interaction data that I have. So basically, when I know I showed an ad to someone, I push all the data into this clean room. A lot of times, it's IP address and device information. And then the advertiser pushes that information into the clean room and I match it up. That's attribution for CTV traditionally. Now, there's other ways to do it. There's other ways to do measurement that's just totally probabilistic. This is like media mix modeling and stuff like that. But with attribution, when you want to use that term, traditionally it's done with a clean room like that. So I'm just like linking the data sets together based on some key.

• 2:14:05Eric Seufert?

  A lot of times, it's the IP address. But if you think about clicks, like clicks out, right? So that's like I'm viewing, I'm on second screen, I can look at time, like there's time elements, you look at temporal elements too to do attribution. But if I'm clicking out, I've got the click, right? I've got the click. And so that carries a lot of information. I can still look at temporal aspects of that, but I can do a lot with the IP address too. And so that's, you know, if you look at a CAPTCHA, that's what CAPTCHA is. CAPTCHA is just a way to get this data on the backend, so it bypasses the apps, you know, it bypasses the mobile device, it bypasses the browser. So there's no way for, you know, Apple to interfere with that with ITP or ATT. And so you're able to get, you know, it's still probabilistic in that way if you consider, you know, the decay of the validity of the IP address over time to induce probabilistic measurement.

• 2:14:50Eric Seufert?

  But that's traditionally outside and then a pixel as well. But, I mean, that's what OpenAI has at its disposal. It's got the CAPTCHA and the pixel because it's going to be click based. So there's a high degree of fidelity that'll come with the measurement there, the attribution. That's way higher than what you can do with CTV.

• 2:15:07Jordi Hays?

  What do you think the prospects are for the number of companies that are trying to build LLM ad networks? I got pitched at least a few companies that were, you know, maybe a year or so ago saying like, hey, LLMs are going to be free, they're going to insert ads, we're going to build this kind of network to serve ads across a bunch of different apps. I was super bearish on those, specifically just because I thought that OpenAI would want to own the full stack. Obviously, Google would own the full stack and I think we're heading towards, you know, an oligopoly of sorts in consumer AI and where's the scale really going to come from? But any kind of takes on that front?

• 2:15:47Eric Seufert?

  Well, there'll be a long tail of agents that are going to want to monetize with advertising. So I think there might be space for an ad network to exist that services them. I don't know why that wouldn't be an existing ad network. I don't know why that wouldn't be, or, you know, just sort of DSP. Like, I don't, I don't, I don't know why that wouldn't be the trade desk, say. But, but, yeah, I mean, I think there's probably an opportunity to monetize some of those long tails of agents with, with ads. But if you think about like a chat GPT, of course, they're going to build their own. I would, you know, perplexity is apparently restarting its ads initiative. I, I think these companies, it would be silly to not build their own. I mean, you want to have that ad stack so you can make everything bespoke, right? And, and, and maximally perform it, right? If we look at Meta earnings, I mean, that's exactly what delivered that big beat.

• 2:16:29Eric Seufert?

  And, and I think what people forget about the, the prospects of, of, of this sort of like AI enablement with advertising in, in digital advertising is that these effects compound over time, especially when you're talking about direct response based ad platforms, right? So like with, with Meta, I've been banging this drum since Q1 2025. These effects compound, like people point to like, oh, 3.5% or 5% or whatever in, increasing click through rates or increasing conversion rates from, from Andromeda or from Gem or from Lattice, who cares? These are tiny. No, but they, first of all, that's every quarter they're, they're noting these performance improvements, but also they compound over time. If I'm targeting 90% and 90 day recoup on my ad investment and, and, you know, 120 day, 110% ROAS, what am I doing after 120 days? I'm reinvesting 110% in advertising on your channel.

• 2:17:14Eric Seufert?

  And so if you're giving me 3.5%, 5% bumps every quarter, that's just going to end up getting reinvested. That's why we're seeing the growth reaccelerate. Growth is re-accelerating going into Q1 2026. That's amazing. That's why Facebook was up 10% last night because growth is re-accelerating. They're going to see growth rates they haven't seen since the post ATT doldrums. That's incredible. That's incredible growth and anybody who doubted the capex going, historically, has to accept that reality now, and they did, they did yesterday.

• 2:17:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, what, what, uh, people like the, the criticism is like, Zuck is being so ballsy with the capex.

• 2:17:50John Coogan?

  Specifically on Gen, Gen AI.

• 2:17:52Jordi Hays?

  On Gen AI specifically, and the criticism is like, hasn't launched a hit Gen AI product yet. Our take earlier on the show was like, look, this guy is serving more Gen AI content than almost anyone on earth. Even if he doesn't have like a breakout net new product, his product has massive tailwinds because of all this. Like, he's in a perfect position to decide, yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be, you know, one of the biggest spenders in this category and, and plan, you know, however many years out in advance.

• 2:18:21Eric Seufert?

  They're making more money on AI than anybody except for Google. Look, the, the, the idea that they're not, they're not utilizing generative AI. Have you seen the ads on Facebook? Those are all generated. There was a revolt. There was an advertiser revolt. There, there was a scandal recently because Meta was being too aggressive with the ads generation. The, the idea that they're not implementing generative AI is absurd. I mean, first of all, generative AI is not just what you see on, in the output. I mean, they talked about pairing L L Ms with ad ranking. That's really fascinating, cutting edge research in, in advertising, using L L M to sort of give you feedback on the ad. Does this resonate? Is this something that someone would click on? Like, pretend you're this demographic. There's already research that shows that that has a, a really beneficial impact on advertising.

• 2:19:04Eric Seufert?

  It, it's not just like what you see in your feed, but also the stuff that you see in your feed is generated. The idea that they're not utilizing generative AI in advertising, that's absurd. You can see it. Just go on Facebook right now.

• 2:19:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes a lot of sense. Yeah, I, I want to move on to other companies, but I want to have one more question about OpenAI. Do you think that there's any, um, any sort of risk to like pushback of like the creepy ads, like being too well targeted? Uh, Facebook went through that with like the T-shirts that said your name on them, basically, and like your whole career path.

• 2:19:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my, my assumption is that eventually, like, you're only getting ads that were specifically generated for you. Like, this idea of, like, historically, you'd have, you know, one ad that a brand would make and they'd run it at the Super Bowl. They're like, we're gonna send this to all of America. And then eventually with- You know, on platforms like Meta, I would assume that every ad is like a one-off generated and it knows it knows exactly how to position a product, what color, what environment to put it in. And it'll be insane that we used to have ads and we'd make one piece of creative and then run it to like 10 million people because it was like good. And it's like, no, this will all just niche, niche, niche, niche, niche down more and more.

• 2:20:14Eric Seufert?

  Yeah. What do you think? Look, I mean, it's like the idea that everyone would see the same feed when they opened up Facebook is absurd now, right? I mean, like, look, if if people truly hated creepy ads, Facebook user numbers wouldn't, you know, monotonically increase every quarter. Right? And, uh, you know, Europeans would be lining up to to buy the subscription in Europe. And when in fact, only 1% of users in Europe has, uh, taken that offer, right?

• 2:20:41Jordi Hays?

  And is that an offer to eliminate, is that like an ad-free, like Meta offer? Is that what you're talking about? Because I know they're talking about rolling out this.

• 2:20:49Eric Seufert?

  So they've got the the less personalized ads option in Europe as a result of the DMA compliance. So they have three options. They have the full-on subscription, no ads, if you get the less personalized ads, and they get the normal experience. 1% of people opted into the subscription. Like, people hate ads. They just hate them less than every other monetization model, right? People love ads. And if you look at, you know, demonstrated behavior, it people love ads, people love access to free tools, people love access uh, to to to to sort of like endless, uh, endless capacity, right? You start capacity constraining things or you start putting up paywalls, you know, obviously by definition, those are going to get used less. Right? Or, you know, most likely by definition. And so the the thing is like, uh, the idea that like ChatGPT is going to run into this problem that's unique to chatbots.

• 2:21:31Eric Seufert?

  I just don't buy that. And first of all, maybe they will, because maybe they'll design this the wrong way, but I give them the benefit of the doubt. I think they can do it in the right way. And one way to do it is to just not tether the ad at all to the chatbot context. You could just say, look, this is a display ad for what we know you're in market for, based on Cappy, based on the pixel. And we're going to make sure it has nothing to do with what you're talking to the chatbot about. So you never have to even question whether the chatbot has your best interests at heart. That's a very easy way to sidestep that problem, but I think they've got very skilled people there. They know exactly what that trap is and they're going to avoid it. Yeah.

• 2:22:04Jordi Hays?

  Do you think we're going to get ads in Siri in the next 24 months?

• 2:22:10Eric Seufert?

  No, because of, just because of Apple's, because of the optics of Apple doing that. I think Apple would probably love to do that. I think there's probably people inside Apple that are pitching that, but they won't because it's not in alignment with their optics around advertising. But, but nonetheless, Apple is also increasing.

• 2:22:24Jordi Hays?

  We were talking, like, I think people will be normalized to ads in Apple products. They obviously are in the App Store today. German was talking about ads in Apple Maps coming in the near future. And then I think from that point, if people are starting to use Siri as a search engine, there will be ads eventually. It will just be to, to, to be able to serve ads, like basically natively in the UI to iPhone consumers will just be too tempting.

• 2:22:54John Coogan?

  They gotta do ads in the alarm clock app. I want to wake up to a different ad every day. Get out of bed and start buying. Get online, it's time to check out.

• 2:23:05Eric Seufert?

  Yeah, morning to night, you should be, you should be consuming. I don't know, maybe, I think Maps, Podcast for sure, but the thing is like, I wrote this piece when, when Apple introduced ATT, I said, "Apple robbed the mob's bank." I said, "Look, this is just an opportunity for them to, to shift some of the budget that's going to Meta into their own ad ecosystem." They did that because they expanded their Apple search ads. They just doubled the number of impressions per search. They've got two placements now in Apple search ads, and they're also blurring the lines between ads and organic results there, right? So the idea that Apple hates ads, I think, is mistaken. I think what Apple needs to do is they need to sort of walk this tightrope of appearing to hate ads while also benefiting from ads because they are such a, you know, an accretive,

• 2:23:49Eric Seufert?

  sort of margin expansive way to make money, right? So Maps for sure, I think Podcast is another, like, prime piece of real estate for ads to be inserted into. I don't know about Siri. Siri, that, that feels like maybe a little bit too on the nose, but who knows?

• 2:24:02John Coogan?

  What about Gemini? Did you, what was your reaction to Demis talking about ads in Gemini?

• 2:24:08Eric Seufert?

  That makes total sense because they're already monetizing Gemini with ads. They're doing it with AI overviews and AI mode. They're monetizing ads and AI overviews at parity with search. Why would they rush to put ads in Gemini, the chatbot? Keep in mind, Gemini is two things. Gemini is the family of models and Gemini is the chatbot. Why monetize with ads in Gemini, the chatbot? You never need to. You could just drive adoption of that. They're already monetizing Gemini, the family of models through AI overviews and AI mode. AI overviews reaches 2 billion people a month. That's the biggest single LLM output ad surface that exists. They're already monetizing Gemini through there.

• 2:24:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. And is that product, just, what's the shape of that product? Is that just the exact same as just branded keyword search on Google? Like, is there, are there anything different or any learnings from the ads in AI search overviews or AI-powered search?

• 2:25:03Eric Seufert?

  So AI mode is essentially the chatbot. AI overviews is the, is the result that's basically takes up now the whole above the fold on Google search, but it's better. It's better than search. You know why? Because the whole point with search is, I want this to be one-shot. I want to type in my keyword and I want to get the best possible result in that first list of results. And if I don't, then I think your product is bad, right? And so Google is incentivized to make sure that there was one click and that's it. So you get one chance to show ads. With AI overviews, the whole point is to then prompt further queries, right? So you get a bunch of opportunities to show ads, right? So if that's monetizing at parity, it's probably also driving impressions up. I think that's a much better ad surface area than traditional search.

• 2:25:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:44Jordi Hays?

  How should startups, business owners be thinking about TikTok under new ownership?

• 2:25:53Eric Seufert?

  TikTok is funny because they're going all in on commerce again, it seems. Like, they had a really big, kind of Black Friday, you know, whatever event, you know, revenue pop. Revenue spike, but you know, they seemingly had, were walking back the TikTok commerce opportunity. Now they seem to be leaning into it. I'm not quite sure what to expect there. I think, you know, TikTok, I think they were in a little bit of the stasis for a while just because of the uncertainty around what was going to happen with the, with the spinout. My sense is now that they have the certainty, they'll probably lean into where they feel like their best position. And that might be commerce now that Meta has completely abandoned it. You know, and I, but I think like, I just don't think that that's the right approach. I don't think Western audiences really appreciate that as much as just the ads driven model. And so, you know, the pure play ads driven model.

• 2:26:38Eric Seufert?

  So we'll see if that ends up working for them. But yeah, I mean, I think TikTok, you know, it, if Meta can do what they did to snap with TikTok, they're going to be in a pretty difficult position. And they may have to just adapt in ways that, that Meta won't. And that would be leaning into commerce more heavily.

• 2:26:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, I always assumed maybe naively that they would lean out from commerce because it seemed like it was just a money pit. They were just lighting money on fire and the new owners would say like, okay, we just bought this. We have to pass back 50% of our revenue to ByteDance. Like the, the whole like economic model of the business seems like super upside down. Let's just serve ads and try to run the business lean and maintain the user base. But leaning into commerce just feels like, I don't know, I, there's so many brands that, that I've heard about over the last 12 months that are scaling into the hundreds of millions of revenue and, and it's almost all on TikTok shop. And it just feels like that was, you know, basically subsidized by ByteDance for a long time.

• 2:27:40Jordi Hays?

  And will the new owners want to subsidize these brands that are driving real volume? But ultimately, I don't know if they, they would be able to stand on their own two feet.

• 2:27:49Eric Seufert?

  Yeah, I mean, they did walk it back. I mean, they did two rounds of layoffs in the, in the, in the commerce division. Yeah, I mean, the thing about, so one thing you have to remember about TikTok and the, and the ByteDance and the, the whole, like the parameters of this deal is that they're, they're still licensing the algorithm. Right? So like, I think that impacted the kind of the, the valuation. And that, and that may impact some of these other economics. But yeah, I mean, I, I just, I just feel like they may be, they, they may be sense that that's an area where Meta retreated. And so that's where they could potentially flourish. But it was odd because they did walk that back and now they seem to be, you know, embracing it again.

• 2:28:21John Coogan?

  What's your current thinking about the Netflix Warner Brothers deal? It's, it feels like we're in a lull, it's moving forward, but would be interested to see.

• 2:28:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm also interested, just how do you think about Paramount's prospects as an ad platform without all of that IP?

• 2:28:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:41Eric Seufert?

  Yeah, well, so it's interesting. So like, the thing is like, the IP is so, so important, right? So like, one of the aspects that I found really interesting about the Netflix deal was that they essentially valued WB Games at zero. Right? So WB Games makes, remember their big hit games, it makes their Game of Thrones game on mobile, and they've got Mortal Kombat games, and a lot of different console games, Batman, Arkham. And at one point, it was for sale in the multi-billion's price range, right? And so Netflix essentially valued it at zero. Why? Because ultimately, there'd have to be like an IP licensing agreement that allowed them to continue to monetize those games, right? So I think the same is probably true on the IP side, just generally with WB. My sense is like, what this indicates to me is like, you know, and this was just, I mean, this was said explicitly in the earnings call.

• 2:29:25Eric Seufert?

  It's like, you know, we're going to pay for content one way or the other, and like, we need this high-end IP, right? And like, you know, if you look at, I mean, everyone saw the Joe Rogan clip with Matt Damon and Ben Affleck talking about like, Netflix makes us restate the plot of the movie like every couple of minutes in dialogue, because if people don't hear it explicitly, they just lose interest. Because they're on their phones. Like, you wonder, okay, well, is that a result of like, people's attention spans, you know, declining? Or is that just because of stuff you're pumping out, isn't that interesting? And people are not really paying attention because they're kind of bored, right? And so I think maybe it's the latter. And so if you bring in a bunch of top-notch IP, maybe that keeps people more engaged.

• 2:30:07Eric Seufert?

  And then, hey, maybe that boosts the ad CPMs, or maybe, you know, and ultimately boosts subscription numbers. But my sense is like, they're going to pay for content one way or the other. And like, you know, maybe just buying a lot of it in bulk at once is the best way to do that.

• 2:30:20John Coogan?

  What else are you tracking this week across earnings? You know, Microsoft and Tesla, I don't know if you follow those stories, but what else is interesting to you this week?

• 2:30:31Eric Seufert?

  Well, we got Apple. Yeah. Right now. Yeah.

• 2:30:36Eric Seufert?

  Yeah, I mean, I think like, you know, you had German on yesterday and, you know, he's just always an amazing wealth of leaks. It's pretty impressive that he's able to get those. Apple's pretty buttoned down. It's remarkable. But, but yeah, I mean, I think just the AI story there is is kind of embarrassing. Yeah. And, you know, like I wrote this piece a while back, Apple's besieged on all fronts. And I was talking about like, look, if you look at AI, if you look at some of the threats to ATT in Europe, you know, there's a lot of issues that they face. I think, you know, one of the big questions for me when they announced the deal with Google to use Gemini for, you know, Apple Intelligence, you know, which among other use cases include Siri,

• 2:31:20Eric Seufert?

  was how they would just manage the privacy aspects of that because they were so adamant, right? They talked about the private cloud compute. They were so adamant that when we do this, we're doing it the Apple way, we're doing it the privacy centric way. And then they do the privacy washing thing, which is just then to partner with Google and allow them to do all the dirty work of sourcing the data, right? Sourcing the data to train the model, right? Or of just monetizing with ads like, and they just get a cut on the backend. And in this case, Apple's paying, but at some, but at some point, Google will be paying for penetration into iOS and the exposure. And I think, you know, that's just a question of like, is that really the reason? Is that part of the reason why they never invested here? Because they couldn't really do it in the Apple privacy centric way. And if you want someone, you know, if you understand that the dirty work of sourcing

• 2:32:03Eric Seufert?

  this data in ways that maybe are not completely above board or just monetizing with ads. I mean, Apple makes so much money from advertising, they just don't do it directly, right? They do it through the partnership with Google. Now they're going to be making money through AI interactions, but they're not actually the ones training the models and sourcing the data in ways that could be questioned, right? So I think that maybe plays a part in it. And I think maybe when you get to a point where all of this can be done on device, right? When the device is actually powerful enough to service most of these use cases, maybe have smaller models, you don't have like foundational models, we have smaller models that can all run on device and maybe Apple will be more interested in that. But I mean, like you have to look at the AI thing as either as a massive whiff, which seems to be what German's take was.

• 2:32:41Eric Seufert?

  Or it was just a sense of like, look, this is actually going to be really difficult for us to reconcile with our brand imagery and the sort of messaging that we've, you know, we've relied on for years and years like, you know, privacy, that's Apple. Um, maybe we'll just outsource this in the same way that we outsource search, right? And advertising to Google, um, until we're able to all process everything on device. Um, and ensure that we can maintain that messaging.

• 2:33:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, I mean, my take is like, I agree with the whiff narrative, but, uh, also it does feel like there's the seeds of a rebuild between this new acquisition that they're doing. They're starting to open the pocketbook a little bit. The hardware really is best in class. We saw that with, you know, the Mac mini boom to some degree. People are excited about the silicon, Apple silicon and, um, and then, and then just the partnership with Gemini, like they're going to have access to something frontier. So they can start to vend it into different places, but, uh, it's, it's just on Apple's timelines, which have been slow lately. So, yeah.

• 2:33:39Eric Seufert?

  Yeah. But the iPhone air was, the iPhone air was a flop, right? I mean, you know, we'll see what happens with the foldable, but like, I mean, I think they are facing, you know, they're obviously the, the replacement cycle is really long now. I think one thing that's like kind of under discussed is like, I wrote this piece a while back, like years ago, um, where I said, you know, what, what, what are the implications of a billion iPhones? And this is well before there were a billion iPhones in circulation. And my point was the implications are that a lot of those are in the developing world, right? They're, they're secondhand, thirdhand, uh, iPhone devices. And that's kind of like, there's this strange dilemma that Apple faces, like the more powerful the devices get, uh, obviously the, the, the longer you can go without replacing them.

• 2:34:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:15Eric Seufert?

  Right? Because the demands of Spotify aren't changing. The demands of Facebook and Instagram aren't changing from like a hardware perspective, right? And so the question is like, how, how, how central can you make AI to the core use case, um, which is a lot more compute intensive? If you do everything on device, how central can you make that to instigate, um, a need to replace the device more frequently, right? Not just like the, because the power of the device at some point doesn't even matter. Like, okay, you tell me like the compute capacity of the next iPhone is 10x what I have now. Okay. Well, are the demands of Spotify 10x? Because that's the, that's the, the only app I use. For hours and hours every day.

• 2:34:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:52Eric Seufert?

  Right? And so that's kind of the question. And so it's like, if all of that functionality can sort of like percolate down to like the iPhone seven. Right? And no one really sees a difference in sort of like the in sort of like lifestyle. Between like the brand new iPhone and the iPhone seven with their only using Instagram and Spotify. How do you actually convince people to to upgrade on every cycle? Right? Because keep in mind like that, that as that sort of installed base that like, you know, iOS installed base grows, most of that's going to be through like secondhand.

• 2:35:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, German, it was interesting yesterday. He shared that a lot of Apple's advantage on the hardware side in AI is because of the self-driving. Push of the car that ultimately failed. Allowed them to do the R and D that that is now being rolled out of devices. Apple had a had a huge quarter beat. Beat estimates on the revenue side by. Four billion with China.

• 2:35:51Jordi Hays?

  Specifically. And up after hours. The other news that's kind of interesting, I'd be curious before you leave, Eric. Chat GPT is retiring for oh, as of today.

• 2:36:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's interesting.

• 2:36:04Jordi Hays?

  Putting putting it to bed. I'm sure that'll make a lot of people mad.

• 2:36:09John Coogan?

  But simpler process for them.

• 2:36:11Eric Seufert?

  Well, yeah, but they also launched. Go.

• 2:36:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:15Eric Seufert?

  Right? Which is the sort of like lower price point. Subscription tier. So my sense is like, you know, if you're trying to push people to adopt that, which I think they are, you maybe have to get rid of some like the. The older models that the free tier relied on.

• 2:36:27John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join. This is also the last.

• 2:36:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, really enjoy it, Eric. Come back on soon.

• 2:36:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Goodbye. Cognition, they're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer crusher backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And I'm also going to tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And without further ado, we have Kevin Weil from OpenAI, Chief Product Officer. In the stream waiting room now.

• 2:36:58Speaker 08

  Hey, what's up, guys?

• 2:36:59John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 2:36:59Speaker 08

  Great to see you. I'm good. It's good to see you again. Thanks for having me on. It's been a minute.

• 2:37:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's what's new with you? Since we've had you on the show, you've changed duties, you've changed focus, like reintroduce yourself, I guess.

• 2:37:10Speaker 08

  Yeah, by the way, I love that we are talking about science today. I think we need to bring more of the this kind of coverage to science and get people excited about science. Because, you know, there are a few more important factors in all of our lives. And AI is going to is in the process of fundamentally changing science, so.

• 2:37:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, what is your focus? Because science and health can mean a bunch of things. It can mean D to C, you know, advice. And, you know, one of the ways to cure cancer is just to get a lot of people to stop smoking cigarettes. That's something they could learn by chat GPTing, should I be smoking? And it makes a very convincing case for why you should not, and maybe it helps you not smoke. At the same time, there's researchers that are going to spend decades developing cancer drugs, getting them through FDA approvals. There's a whole bunch of different ways that, you know, even Microsoft Word and PowerPoint and Excel helped the previous generation of biotech companies. You can imagine LLMs vending in there, and then you can imagine the fully automated AI scientist.

• 2:38:10John Coogan?

  What's been your focus? Where do you think, where do you think we're going to see the most progress in 2026?

• 2:38:15Speaker 08

  Yeah, the mission of our team is to accelerate science. And the reason that we are starting to do this now, I mean, it's obviously been something that OpenAI cares about a lot. But when you go back a couple of years, we were all amazed that GPT, you know, 3.5, 4, whatever, could do well on the SAT. And then you start seeing it solve graduate level problems, and then it does OK on math competitions. And then you fast forward a bit, and our model can win a gold medal at the IMO, the top, you know, math competition in the world. And now we're seeing it solve open problems in mathematics. So things that humans have not solved, suddenly AI models are contributing solutions to.

• 2:38:57Speaker 08

  And it's not everything. It's not every open problem. Science is not as far from done, right? But but the fact that that AI models can now contribute at the frontier of science and actually push beyond where humans have gone before is incredibly exciting, because if we can, if you can replicate that across math, physics, biology, chemistry, material science.

• 2:39:20Speaker 08

  And you can do the next, say, thirty years of science in five years instead. If we can be doing, you know, the science of the 2050s in 2030.

• 2:39:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:30Speaker 08

  The world is a better place.

• 2:39:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:32Speaker 08

  And the models are there now, and so this is a huge focus for us.

• 2:39:35John Coogan?

  So, yeah, talk a little bit more about your work specifically because, uh, not to like discredit you, but I feel like this part of the magic of these large AI models is that you get a lot of this stuff for free. Like oftentimes, you don't need a specific SAT model. You just build an amazing model and it learns how to code and also learns how to write poetry and tell jokes and it can do some science too. So what, how are you working on fine tuning? Is there a reinforcement learning project? Is there specific compute allocated towards this? You have a team? Are you listening to certain customers?

• 2:40:07Speaker 08

  Yeah, I imagine my, my guess was just working really closely with customers, understanding, making sure they're not just signing up for ChatGPT off the shelf and using it, but actually, you know, building a bunch of specific functionality for them and innovating on the products.

• 2:40:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. How do you think about that?

• 2:40:22Speaker 08

  Yeah, well, it's, it's not, uh, it's not about building offshoot models. This is still, this is still about improving our core models. But there is, i- i- if you think about science, science has a huge surface area, right? Uh, so you want, there's a lot that we can teach models at the frontier that, um, you know, there's, there's work that we can do to make, to make our models even better at performing frontier science. Um, and that crosses from pre-training into post-training and reinforcement learning. Uh, and so we get to solve, you know, frontier problems in science to make our models better. There's also a whole lot of work that we can do on the tooling front, you know?

• 2:41:04Speaker 08

  Scientists use a lot of different tools and you wanna bring those to bear so that the model is, is using the same kind of advanced scientific tooling that scientists are, because then it can be an even greater force multiplier for the work they do. So there's, there's a whole bunch that we're doing on the pure model front.

• 2:41:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:25Speaker 08

  That's not the only thing, though, because I think if there's anything that we've learned from the way that AI has completely revolutionized coding over the last year is it's two things. It's great models and it's also integrating AI into the environment where engineers operate, right? You don't you don't spend your time going to ChatGPT and copying and pasting back and forth. You use Codex in your IDE.

• 2:41:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:41:49Speaker 08

  And bringing the model into the environment where you're working is a huge part. That's why we launched Prism yesterday. The idea is, or I guess on Tuesday, but the idea is to bring great models that can that can help with AI into the workflows that scientists are using every day. In this case, Prism is about scientific writing and collaboration. And if you can help people communicate their ideas faster, if they can use AI to express the research that they've done, collaborate with other scientists, that's its own form of acceleration. So we both want to make models smarter and we want to bring AI into the environments that scientists are operating in day to day. Both of those are parts of accelerating science.

• 2:42:30John Coogan?

  So talk about some of the integrations. ChatGPT at one point just got access to a Python REPL and could sort of write code and execute it in the in the in the query for just a GPT five pro query. But ChatGPT also has an integration to Gmail and there's a like some sort of business development relationship. What is your as you're bringing more tools to bear in the scientific workflow, is there some sort of balancing act? Do you just need to integrate with everything? How do you think about actually wiring up and like unhobbling the models?

• 2:43:05Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think it's about both a handful, a set of tools that we think are going to be broadly useful that we can integrate ourselves. As an example, if you're in the process of trying to solve a hard scientific problem, you need to solve a differential equation.

• 2:43:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:23Speaker 08

  Models are actually smart enough these days that they can solve a differential equation just by reasoning through it. But you also you also can integrate a computer algebra system, a system that will deterministically and very quickly solve differential equations. Why not let the model use that? And you know, go back to doing what it does best, which is reasoning broadly about how to solve hard problems. So you have that, you have like protein databases in biology, you have so many tools like this. Yeah. And I think it'll be important because I I might be a scientist studying, you know, the evolutionary biology of snails. And I might have my own set of tools that I use, or maybe small models that I've trained, they're good at doing very specific things.

• 2:44:06Speaker 08

  So it'll be both about us teaching the models to use certain tools that'll be broadly helpful. And enabling scientists to bring their own tools to bear so that the models can very deftly adopt them into the process.

• 2:44:19Jordi Hays?

  What does a ChatGPT moment look like for Prism within the scientific community?

• 2:44:27Speaker 08

  Oh, that's a good, that's a good question. Um. You know, I I think it's going to be a, I I think it's going to be a more like

• 2:44:38Speaker 08

  process of incremental compounding where you've got a a product that helps people work and operate faster. You've got models that are going to be increasingly useful. And we're gonna see kind of two, um, you know, exponentials, if you will. One is just the exponential that the models are on and their ability to help any scientist who's adopted them. Do what they do faster, right, to aid in their thinking. I was just talking to a scientist earlier today who called uh GPT five point two a metal detector for hypotheses. Right, so he's thinking about, he's got so many different ideas in his head, you can only run so many experiments, you only have so much time.

• 2:45:17Speaker 08

  And he uses GPT five as a thought partner in helping him hone in on the most valuable ways to test his ideas. So you've got that exponential. And then there's a separate one that comes from scientists beginning to adopt these tools. Because a lot of scientists still haven't adopted them. And the more that they do, the more that they individually move faster, and the more that the entire field of science accelerates. So I think there's a lot to be excited about here.

• 2:45:44John Coogan?

  A couple of weeks ago, we talked to Andrew from Cerebras and I was asking him about where wafer scale computing is most exciting to him and he actually cited science as a particularly valuable place and I was wondering if you had thoughts on the value of speed or the value of different chip architectures in the scientific workload. I was kind of coming to it like, well, you know, developing drugs takes a long time. It's probably fine if the model goes off and cooks for an hour. But he was sort of pushing back on that and I'm wondering how you think about the different parameters. Obviously, we're on an exponential

• 2:46:25John Coogan?

  with intelligence and capabilities, but there's also latency and usability and flavor and there's so many other knobs that are being turned as the models progress and as the projects progress.

• 2:46:36Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think one of the interesting things about scientific problems in particular is that when you're solving the hardest frontier science problems, you need to do a lot of thinking, right? If these problems were easy, really smart humans would have solved them long ago. And so the kinds of problems that are left often involve the model thinking not for, you know, five minutes or 20 minutes, which would be a long, a long time if you're inside chat GPT, but maybe an hour, two hours, 12 hours, two days. And that is where we're going. And if you have really fast inference that can take that two day rollout and turn

• 2:47:16Speaker 08

  it into a six hour rollout or an hour thing only takes 10 minutes, then again, that just is more opportunity for you as a scientist to maybe instead of testing two hypotheses, you're testing 20 in the same period of time. Again, it's acceleration.

• 2:47:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. To go back to the chat GPT moment, how are you thinking about actually seeding your work into the scientific community? Because there's, there's one angle where it's just, it's just chatgpt.com. It sort of goes viral. Everyone's playing with it. That's part of what the chat GPT moment was, was just anyone with a web browser could use it. At the same time, there's only so many real scientists. A lot of them are in labs or in academic institutions and I could imagine you doing partnerships or deals or anything to actually get something deployed into the most elite scientific environments. Have you thought about the different trade offs there?

• 2:48:12Speaker 08

  One of the cool things is we're seeing so much organic adoption.

• 2:48:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:16Speaker 08

  You go on Twitter these days, as you do, and you're like every day, I feel like I'm seeing new examples where someone will say, you know what, I just solved this problem with GPT-5. Or I gave this problem to my grad student and they were busy, it took them too long. I just, you know, I wanted to make more progress, I just gave it to GPT-5 and now I have a solution. And so there's, there's this incredible organic adoption because of course, when other people see that, other scientists see that, they go, oh, wait a minute, you know, maybe the last time they tried the models was a year ago, when they weren't at a place that they were going to really meaningfully contribute to scientific research. They could help with other things, but they weren't going to help with your hardest problems. Now they can.

• 2:48:58Speaker 08

  And so there's this groundswell of scientists that are adopting, GPT-5.2 especially, I think, has been kind of an inflection point. So it's, it's exciting to see and there's a lot happening, you know, even without us, with people just discovering this and talking about it.

• 2:49:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of people experienced that with like Andre Karpathis' journey with vibe coding and a lot of people were like, okay, yeah, like if it's good enough for him, I gotta jump back in.

• 2:49:25Speaker 08

  That man is an incredible communicator.

• 2:49:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, really.

• 2:49:30Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what's the update on how like forward-thinking labs are thinking about integrating with a product like Prism? Ideally, there's a future where, you know, a scientist could be at home, have an idea, maybe they're working in, you know, pharma or something in biology and they can just like start running. You can imagine somebody starting to run an experiment just based on a prompt and then somewhere in the physical world, uh, there's actual, you know, the biological process is actually happening. How, how much progress is there on that front?

• 2:50:03Speaker 08

  Yeah, I'm super excited about, uh, the world of robotic labs. I think it is 100% likely to be the, the future that, um, that we're moving towards because you can do so much more in parallel, again, to the idea of accelerating science and moving faster. The world where you can have a hypothesis, maybe that you've honed with, you know, back and forth with chat GPT. In, in this case, it may also be running simulations, you know, take, if you're doing something like Fusion where you want to do heavy simulation before you run an experiment because your experiments are expensive, then you have the model thinking. Running a fusion simulation, looking at the results of that, refining its thinking,

• 2:50:44Speaker 08

  running another fusion simulation, and you do as much with the compute that you have in advance, so that when you do something in the real world, it's like that much more likely to be successful. You can look at the same thing with respect to biology. There's no reason at this point that you need to have grad students, you know, pipetting one thing into another thing.

• 2:51:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the idea that I think like a scientist in a lab coat could easily fade away, where they're just like in a normal office, you know?

• 2:51:14Speaker 08

  Or at the very least, doing the kinds of things that are incredibly hard for models for robots to replicate.

• 2:51:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:22Speaker 08

  But there's a lot of science that can be totally automated, and the idea of robotic labs that are, you know, 24/7 online, that you can scale in parallel as far as, as you know, you can make it efficient, and you have models thinking, you know, reasoning for two days to find the most efficient experiments to run, maybe running simulations to test that, and then, once they get to a good point, passing that to a robotic lab, which can experiment in parallel at high volume, the results pass back into a model, which reasons about the results, and then goes out and runs a different set of experiments. You know, you're doing reinforcement learning with a loop through the real world, and that is absolutely.

• 2:52:04Jordi Hays?

  Are robotic labs something that that OpenAI would ever do, or is that best suited for an external partner? How do you think about that that point of the stack?

• 2:52:13Speaker 08

  I think it'll be both. We want to partner broadly with with scientists that have their own labs that are already doing anything. Like I said, science is an extremely broad, has huge amounts of surface area. There's no way that we can do even a tiny fraction of all of science. And I think there will be a lot of opportunity for us to learn from things like robotic labs, to make sure that we're working really well with those scientists. So I think it will be both.

• 2:52:41John Coogan?

  Can you clarify the business model? There was some confusion about how this might be monetized in the future.

• 2:52:46Jordi Hays?

  Poor Sarah Fryer. She keeps getting.

• 2:52:49John Coogan?

  I'm pulling for ads in science. I want a pill that I take, it helps me lose weight, but then I wind up loving Ford F-150s. I'm willing to take that trade. Ad-supported medicines, that's what we need. But no, what are you actually thinking? Is anything changing?

• 2:53:03Speaker 08

  This is why I love you guys.

• 2:53:06John Coogan?

  We're your strongest defenders, whatever you do.

• 2:53:09Speaker 08

  Yeah, Sarah said something, when Sarah was talking about, oh, maybe, maybe there are ways to like monetize IP. She was speaking specifically to the idea of us doing partnerships with large companies, you know, pharma companies, people like that. Where there would be a specific partnership that was developed with the idea of sharing royalties in the future. It was not meant at all about a normal. Somebody signing up for some signing up.

• 2:53:37John Coogan?

  And this already happens at the OpenAI Investment Fund, there's startups that take, that take capital from OpenAI, they build something on top of ChatGPT or GPT APIs and like, I, I think most people inside sort of understood that, but thanks for clarifying. So in general, most people will just be on sort of some sort of like API consumption based pricing or subscription fee, like mostly the normal.

• 2:53:58Speaker 08

  The nice thing about Prism is you log in with your ChatGPT account, so it just, you just bring your existing ChatGPT account along with you. Or this is not, you know, there are not a billion scientists in the world. This is not an effort to like build a brand new business model. This is about accelerating science because I think it's one of the most impactful and mission oriented things we could possibly do.

• 2:54:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Give us the update on detachment 201. How's it going? Are you sold?

• 2:54:23Speaker 08

  Oh, it's been a blast.

• 2:54:24John Coogan?

  You've been working out a lot.

• 2:54:25Speaker 08

  It's been an absolute blast. I've been in DC to various spaces, things like that. I, I think it is massively important that we bring Silicon Valley and, and DC closer together because we have an incredible tech community, we have a country and a set of values that are worth defending. And, you know, it's a dangerous world out there. The more that we can do to, you know, to strengthen who we are and what we do, the better.

• 2:54:52John Coogan?

  That's great. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us. Very fascinating stuff.

• 2:54:58Speaker 08

  Yeah, thanks so much for having me on, guys. Good to see you again.

• 2:55:00John Coogan?

  Good to see you too. We'll talk to you soon, Kevin. Goodbye.

• 2:55:04John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security.

• 2:55:19Jordi Hays?

  Up next.

• 2:55:19John Coogan?

  Up next, the New York Stock Exchange. Wanna change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. And yes, we do have a surprise guest who wasn't on the lineup, but he's joining. We have...

• 2:55:33Jordi Hays?

  Mehul Dramatic.

• 2:55:34John Coogan?

  Dramatic!

• 2:55:35Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:55:37Speaker 09

  Hey guys, thanks for having me.

• 2:55:39John Coogan?

  Robotics mastermind.

• 2:55:40Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna, you're gonna love this. I, uh, the other, I think it was two nights ago, uh, my youngest, uh, one and a half, walked in the other room, uh, and I was pretty quick to, uh, chase after her, you know? Cause she's very, very active. She can destroy a lot of things. And I go in, uh, the other room and she has the, the like, you know, soap dispenser of the matic and she has it fully, fully vertical, fully vertical, trying to drink out of it. And I was so appreciative of your design because nothing came out.

• 2:56:15John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:56:15Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, but I was so worried for a second cause it like looked like she was just trying to chug.

• 2:56:21John Coogan?

  No, that could end up very messy, potentially harmful, who knows?

• 2:56:25Jordi Hays?

  Uh, anyways, so, so excited to have you back on. Uh, we've been loving our matic.

• 2:56:28Speaker 09

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:56:29Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, I know you have some big updates.

• 2:56:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's new in your world?

• 2:56:34Speaker 09

  Uh, well, we just announced today that we've raised, uh, $60 million in the next round, so, so led by, yeah.

• 2:56:46Jordi Hays?

  Led by who?

• 2:56:48Speaker 09

  Uh, led by Southern Hill Ventures and Vic Miller, who is joining our board. And we've had, thank you, and we've had some amazing investors in Gavin Baker at Critis, uh, Antonio Gracias at Valor, a bunch of other joining on their own. So it's great. And then for us, this is sort of the output of the product we built and shipped. Um, yeah, I don't think this would have happened without us shipping. So that's been the good part of it, that it's not about the demos, it's more based on real product, real usage, real customers.

• 2:57:16Jordi Hays?

  Real, real robots, thousands of them.

• 2:57:18Speaker 09

  Real robots.

• 2:57:19Jordi Hays?

  Out in the real world, doing, doing real work.

• 2:57:22Speaker 09

  Uh, yeah, we've... We've dead sorry jump in. We've shipped more than 6,000 now and have cleaned about 110 million square feet.

• 2:57:31Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 2:57:31Speaker 09

  Which results in 80,000 miles travel. So part of it.

• 2:57:34John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:57:35Jordi Hays?

  That's wild.

• 2:57:36John Coogan?

  Uh, talk to us about, uh, pricing and willingness to pay. Obviously with modern AI robotics, everything that you're doing, you're creating more value for the customer and

• 2:57:47Speaker 09

  Correct.

• 2:57:47John Coogan?

  I mean, the sales show people are willing to pay more than the previous generation, which I feel was like more of a three-digit price point. Um, and we were, we were talking about like, will people really pay $50,000 for a humanoid? A hundred thousand? Like, that feels like a big jump. But what are you seeing in terms of just willingness to pay for robotic processes amongst consumers?

• 2:58:10Speaker 09

  So, so a great question. Um, we actually launched first time in April of 2023. No one cared, but we started as a robotics, as a robotics as a service.

• 2:58:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:20Speaker 09

  Um, and, and we tried to, uh, launch it as a subscription and that was like an organ rejection. That didn't work at all. Uh, so people are definitely not interested in paying yet another subscription. That's another one thing we learned. Then we priced it at about $1,500 plus subscription as an attachment in November 2023 and learned again that that didn't work as well. That that was the price point at which a lot of people weren't yet convinced that at least the robot, uh, vacuum or, or, uh, this could do a job. So we really took that feedback to heart and then eventually priced it much, much lower introductory price of what 995 and now it's because of tariff, we've had to raise it a little bit. But really what we learned, and this was our thesis to day one, that if you take a step back and

• 2:59:04Speaker 09

  think about it, there is literally zero ubiquitous consumer electronics device priced higher than $2,000. Beyond $2,000, it's prosumer or you pay for cars, right? There is literally nothing.

• 2:59:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so, yeah, that's why, that's why. Yeah, that's why I think the humanoid robot rollout is going to be just really brutal because you're trying to get adoption of a new product that is still in very much like going to be in an R and D phase.

• 2:59:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:33Jordi Hays?

  And you're asking people, you're asking people to pay

• 2:59:36John Coogan?

  The price.

• 2:59:37Jordi Hays?

  Car money.

• 2:59:37John Coogan?

  But counterpoint.

• 2:59:39Speaker 09

  Exactly.

• 2:59:39John Coogan?

  Piggyback rides, you could take it to work. Replace your car. You hop on the back.

• 2:59:45Jordi Hays?

  It's a car that can clean your house. It's a car that can do the dishes and.

• 2:59:49John Coogan?

  I'm hopping on the back. Give me a piggyback ride to work and then while I'm working, you're going to go around and clean. Do all sorts of.

• 2:59:56Speaker 09

  Well, AGI is coming. Maybe it will just do the work for you. Maybe we'll go there. They will be teaching when I'm on TV.

• 3:00:02John Coogan?

  No more commutes, but you will need a clean house. So you will buy a Matic robot in the future.

• 3:00:07Speaker 09

  That's exactly right.

• 3:00:08John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, talk about the AGI process, the process and the models. And we're seeing like incredible advancements all over image, video models, reasoning models, agents. Are you seeing just or natural improvements to the performance of your fleet? Is that just something that rolls out for free? Are you doing your own training runs? Like what have you learned or integrated from the progress in just just fundamental AI research over the past year?

• 3:00:38Speaker 09

  That's a great question. We started with this idea that AI is coming and AI would make progress. And and that has always been part of it. And we are taking advantage of VLMs and SAN3 and all the open source model that are available to us. But at the same time, one of the things that we had realized on day one, that at least when it comes to home, getting data, given the privacy that consumers want, especially at this price point, was going to be a challenge. So we knew, so we knew that just like Tesla sold a car, collected data and now is moving on to autonomy and and robotics in the same exact way. The robotic vacuum was our veg.

• 3:01:19Speaker 09

  That's the way we wanted to get inside home, earn customers' trust, build a brand and also a data veg. And we knew that if we build it the right way by doing everything on the device and earn customers' trust, they will share data. And that's actually one of the most interesting thing that the long tail with which we actually need. All that data is coming in and customers are willingly sending it to us and they are curating it for us as well because we know this data is actually error oriented. So that's incredibly helpful. And if you take a step back and think about it, even for humanoids, if you had humanoid in your home, you don't want it to step. Step onto that dog poop or cat vomit or get tangled up in wires or ruck tassels. Or, you know, uh, maybe uh, uh, um, squeeze your or break your kids toys or dolls, right?

• 3:02:04Speaker 09

  So every single thing that we do actually directly leads into it. So our thought was always that hey, instead of sort of building a humanoid in day one, let's grow a robot, let's grow uh, Rosie the robot and we'll solve perception first just using floor cleaning space and then we can worry about manipulation and kind of think about what would kid be able to do it between five to 10 year? And can we enable that sort of functionality and make product useful?

• 3:02:27Jordi Hays?

  It's also kind of It's also kind of insane to think about like the actual reality of a humanoid using a regular vacuum, you know, just like dragging around a vacuum or using a Dyson. It's like, is that really the most efficient way to like clean a floor is to have this huge robot, like human sized robots?

• 3:02:46Speaker 09

  Actually, it was in that movie by Centennial, man, I remember that with Robin Williams and, and he was using the regular newspaper and he was doing it. And we're like, wait, that doesn't make sense. Like, you know, do you like we have this humanoid, really amazing intelligent robot, but it our appliances never change. So there was always this idea that it has to evolve in both ways.

• 3:03:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Any, uh, any traction or plans on the enterprise side? I'm thinking like hotel rooms, they need to be incredibly efficient. Every minute that a, uh, someone is in there is a minute they couldn't be somewhere else. Uh, do you have plans there or is that just a total distraction?

• 3:03:24Speaker 09

  At the moment, hardware that we've built is really just for homes.

• 3:03:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:29Speaker 09

  Um, I did put one in hair salon and it works fine. We did put some in hotels and everything. So perception and algorithms wise, it is working across the board. We do have people using it in their uh, daycare centers, churches, schools, uh, animal hospital is another one uh, that we've seen use cases. So there is an opportunity there, but I think that would require a little bit of a hardware tweak. And then we just have to question, is it really about savings time, which is really what we want to do? Or is it about just saving costs? And if it's saving costs, then it may not be as interesting of a problem. But if it turns out that it's a labor shortage oriented one, then we really need to go and look into it.

• 3:04:04John Coogan?

  What about lawn mowers?

• 3:04:07Speaker 09

  Lawnmowers is something, we want to stay inside home for a while.

• 3:04:11John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 3:04:13Jordi Hays?

  The reason lawnmower, think about it, it's like, you guys would make it a fantastic lawnmower, but I've never once thought, like in between when the landscapers come to my house, I've never once thought like, I wish my grass was just like, a little bit shorter today.

• 3:04:29John Coogan?

  Perfect every day.

• 3:04:30Jordi Hays?

  Cause they're just coming every week, whereas in the home, it's like, your house can always be cleaner.

• 3:04:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, every day, every day. What about, what about an ad-supported tier? It says, hey, I'm on linoleum, why don't you upgrade to hardwood? We'd love to connect you with this local contractor.

• 3:04:45Jordi Hays?

  Have you considered NordVPN? I see, I see you're spilling, you're spilling a lot of vegetables on the floor, why not Athletic Green?

• 3:04:51John Coogan?

  We've been talking to Eric Su for too long today, he got us thinking on ads and everything.

• 3:04:55Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what, what's the plan for, what's the plan for this year? Like, just scale, sell a lot more robots?

• 3:05:02John Coogan?

  Do you need to be in Best Buy and retail distribution at some point?

• 3:05:06Speaker 09

  Uh, not at the moment, luckily for us, at the moment, we're still supply constrained, so we would keep selling and doing build-to-order model that allows us to keep working capital low. And, and the goal is really to scale, we scaled about 20x last year, selling from 200 to 6,000 robots now. We're, thank you. And, and try to go another 10 to 20x this year, that's the goal at the moment. And, there is a second product in the works, I won't be able to go into much details yet, but there will be some exciting stuff.

• 3:05:36John Coogan?

  We tried to guess it, and all of our guesses were way off. A robot that you can take a picture of, an ad-supported robot, he's like, no, you guys are not even close. Anyway, thank you so much, congratulations on the ground.

• 3:05:49Jordi Hays?

  Great, great to get the update.

• 3:05:50John Coogan?

  Always great to have you on the show.

• 3:05:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I love, I love, uh, nothing, you know, we talk about robots a lot on this show.

• 3:05:56John Coogan?

  This is a good one.

• 3:05:57Jordi Hays?

  Love a robot company that's shipping.

• 3:05:59John Coogan?

  With a fleet, yeah.

• 3:06:00Jordi Hays?

  With a real fleet out there.

• 3:06:01Speaker 09

  And I think Dalian's joining today telling him that we're still growing without advertisement, although we will need some at some point.

• 3:06:07John Coogan?

  Okay, we will, yes. Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:06:11Jordi Hays?

  Great to get, great to catch up. Cheers.

• 3:06:13John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with the Phantom card. And I'm also going to tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. The other news today is, of course, that rare metals are absolutely spiking. Gold's up 4%, silver's up 7%, copper's up 10%, platinum's up 7%, palladium's up 5%, oil is up 4%. Geiger Capital says, "Don't worry, pal. Said it means nothing."

• 3:06:45Jordi Hays?

  He looks worried.

• 3:06:47John Coogan?

  A photo that looks very worried. We will be monitoring that. It is an odd, it is an odd, you know, dislocation in the market. Boring Business is posting a meme saying, "Realizing that our collective retirements now depend on whether digital gold coin created by an anonymous founder goes up or down." Is that Bitcoin is returning? Wait, but...

• 3:07:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no. So, so retirement accounts will be able to directly buy.

• 3:07:13John Coogan?

  This is from Call Sheet, uh, from the SEC chair. "Now is the right time to open 401k retirement market in crypto." Um, and so more, more push into that.

• 3:07:23Jordi Hays?

  One update, some, some more updates on the Apple numbers, Apple earnings. Mark German says, "Massive Apple revenue beat, 144 billion in overall revenue, 85 billion in iPhone revenue, 25 and a half billion China revenue, and 30 billion in services revenue. Tim Cook gets to keep his job." Obviously, obviously a joke, but, um, uh, and we can close out.

• 3:07:48John Coogan?

  We, we gotta do some of these timeline posts.

• 3:07:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, let's close, let's, let's pull up this video.

• 3:07:52John Coogan?

  Okay, let's pull up.

• 3:07:53Jordi Hays?

  AI is gonna, AI is gonna take your job? What job?

• 3:07:57John Coogan?

  This is great. Uh, we will pull this up while I tell you about graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 3:08:07Jordi Hays?

  All right, pull this up.

• 3:08:08John Coogan?

  And let's go to AI taking your job.

• 3:08:11Jordi Hays?

  Check in with the job market.

• 3:08:14John Coogan?

  Just drinking and driving is the entire job?

• 3:08:19John Coogan?

  I've seen this meme template. I have not seen this exact video, but the jump in that car, you have to be going so fast.

• 3:08:26Jordi Hays?

  This makes me want to buy a beater so bad. Just wait for a rainy day.

• 3:08:31John Coogan?

  Drifting is next up on the bucket list. You gotta, we gotta learn how to drift like that. Maybe stay off the bottle.

• 3:08:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, stay off the, stay off the bottle, but maybe close down a road somewhere.

• 3:08:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:44Jordi Hays?

  Delicious tacos with a fantastic post says, AI CEOs are like if Henry Ford said, these cars are going to run over all of your children.

• 3:08:54John Coogan?

  They're getting.

• 3:08:55Jordi Hays?

  I appreciate, I appreciated this one, just going back to, you know, the, where's our, where's our AI Steve Jobs?

• 3:09:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:02Jordi Hays?

  You know, we can't have every lab founder saying that everyone's going to lose their job and, you know, AI is going to, you know, kill everyone on a long enough time horizon.

• 3:09:11Speaker 02

  I, I do think Dario has done like a reasonably good job. If you're like pretty tapped in, right? He has this great essay.

• 3:09:18John Coogan?

  All watched over by machines of loving grace.

• 3:09:20Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, yes. I, I feel like he's, he's not that public yet. He like, he's starting to do a little bit of a press tour right now.

• 3:09:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:28Speaker 02

  But I, I think if he was more in the public eye, I think he could be that, that person definitely.

• 3:09:33John Coogan?

  I mean, Demis has also done a fantastic job and, and, and is one person that's like not really highlighted with those questions. But I mean, this delicious tacos post, like Dario is definitely in this crowd because, you know, he is talking about job displacement.

• 3:09:46Speaker 02

  I guess his more recent essay was about the, the catastrophic risks. Yeah.

• 3:09:50John Coogan?

  Exactly. Which are important and, and it's good that, it's good that he is talking about, but it is a very different, it's a different world than, than other innovations.

• 3:09:58Jordi Hays?

  Jeremy Fawn says, the best way to evaluate a VC is by picking the one with the least bad podcasts you'll be forced to go on. Of course. If you raise from a VC, you're probably going on their podcasts. Just face it, you may as well pick the one with the best podcasts.

• 3:10:15John Coogan?

  Buckle up.

• 3:10:16Jordi Hays?

  There are some, there are some good.

• 3:10:18John Coogan?

  The Jaco Willink Venture Capital Fund. That's what you gotta do. You gotta do Jaco's pod. That would be amazing. GPT-5 apparently serving it is profitable. According to Epoch AI, gross margins were around forty-five percent, making inference look possible profitable. But after accounting for the cost of operations, OpenAI likely incurred a loss. Of course, they have a huge staff. There's a lot of the CapEx. There's all sorts of different stuff. But just on the actual inference, this confirms what a lot of people were saying yesterday about just comparing the open source models to the, the, the private models. Inference, uh, gross margins seem healthy, which is of course, good news.

• 3:10:55Jordi Hays?

  We, uh, we went on Colin and Samir's show.

• 3:10:58John Coogan?

  We did.

• 3:10:59Jordi Hays?

  To talk about TBPN and media and John Palmer didn't just listen, he studied.

• 3:11:05John Coogan?

  Studied.

• 3:11:05Jordi Hays?

  And he had a great take here. He said, on the Colin and Samir show, John Coogan laid out a barbell thesis in media. Value either accrues to the platforms or the individual personalities, platforms being YouTube, Spotify, X, et cetera. Or the individual people creating the content. He says, I'm guessing that software is headed to the same place. Value goes to the platforms with monopoly distribution, Google, Stripe, can think of, you know, system of records, et cetera. Or the individual vibe coders shipping one man businesses at a thousand X lower cost, not much value in between.

• 3:11:41Jordi Hays?

  What happened to the media business is now having a new software. When production costs drop a thousand X, remember to make a show like this historic and distribute it historically, we would have needed to be on a major television network. Now we can do it with a, you know, tiny fraction of the cost.

• 3:11:57John Coogan?

  And restream.

• 3:11:58Jordi Hays?

  And restream, of course, but anyways, interesting, interesting take. And I think we'll see, certainly see some of this play out.

• 3:12:07John Coogan?

  Gary Vaynerchuk rebranded his agency for enterprise clients.

• 3:12:11Jordi Hays?

  Chuck.

• 3:12:11John Coogan?

  Chuck Media.

• 3:12:12Jordi Hays?

  Chuck Media.

• 3:12:13John Coogan?

  He's been, he's just reinvented himself so many times. He's, he was Gary Vaynerchuk. I think that's his full name. Then he was Gary Vayner or VaynerMedia. And then Gary Vee and now just Chuck. Which is very interesting. I've talked to some people who have worked with them. The, oh wait, this is a different agency. Oh, interesting. Vaynerchuck Small Business Agency, the Sasha Group, is being repositioned for enterprise clients as Chuck Media. I think that's separate from VaynerMedia, which is its own thing. Fascinating. In other news, Treehacks at Stanford is looking for new judges. If you have experience building a notable project, building a major company, you're a journalist, a creator, et cetera, please

• 3:12:57John Coogan?

  reach out to, I'm gonna not pronounce that, FISH, Coding Dev. He's a 19-year-old CS at Stanford. And I was thinking about this, like, hackathons were huge in, I don't know, 2010, 2015, and then they sort of fell off or just became sort of like background noise. Like, they would happen, but nothing was that exciting. And this feels like the best time to go to a hackathon, because people are gonna be vibe coding like truly, fully functional products. And there's something about the pressure of a meeting a bunch of people, spending two days, you know, staying up all night grinding, it's really, really fun.

• 3:13:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know if hackathons have necessarily declined. Like, when I was at school, the hackathons were like massive. It just kept getting bigger.

• 3:13:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess just the novelty wore off and they just became background noise. Yeah, that's right. But it's gotta be the best time ever. I remember the first hackathon I went to, it was like, oh, cool, like Twilio exists. So you can like build something that texts you. And now it's like, okay, like, you can use agents to just code you everything. And you're, and the pool of people, the first hackathon I went to, I was, I didn't really know programming at all. I learned a bunch, was able to build some things, but it took a long time. And by the end of the hackathon, you sort of just had a landing page that barely worked. Now you can definitely leave with a fully fledged product if you lock in for two days at a long hackathon.

• 3:14:18Jordi Hays?

  Unicorn valuation, potentially.

• 3:14:20John Coogan?

  For what? Oh, yeah, for the company, for sure. And, yeah, this seems like a lot of fun. So, head over to Treehacks.

• 3:14:28Jordi Hays?

  I have to get, we both have to get on with Sydney.

• 3:14:31John Coogan?

  Oh, we do. Okay. Well, we will have to talk about sticker packs tomorrow.

• 3:14:36Jordi Hays?

  We can talk about this for a second.

• 3:14:38John Coogan?

  Plant the bomb.

• 3:14:38Jordi Hays?

  Dom from, Dom, founder of VAST, the payments company, launched a new company called Stick Year. And I was super confused because he's selling stickers with the TBPN logo.

• 3:14:54John Coogan?

  This is very weird.

• 3:14:55Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 3:14:56John Coogan?

  It's supposed to be a way to like short, overhyped startups.

• 3:14:59Jordi Hays?

  But you're just buying stickers with other people's IP.

• 3:15:02John Coogan?

  Very questionable where this will go, but we'll have to check it out more in the future. Anyway, leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Thank you. Goodbye.

• 3:15:13Speaker 08

  Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.