Sam Altman on Codex 5.3 Launch, Anthropic's Sholto Douglas, Alphabet Beats Q4 Estimates | Sam Altman, Sholto Douglas, Daniel Barcelo, Mandy Fields, Ivan Burazin, Scott Rogowsky

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (01:21) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:58) - Anthropic's Trust Nuke (18:36) - OpenAI's Frontier Model for Enterprise (39:02) - Alphabet Beats Q4 Estimates (52:25) - NVIDIA to Skip New Gaming Chips in 2026 (56:16) - Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, discusses the launch of Codex 5.3, highlighting its enhanced coding capabilities, increased speed, and improved interactivity, allowing users to guide the model during tasks. He emphasizes the importance of integrating AI agents into workflows, suggesting that managing a team of agents will become a standard practice, and notes the need for companies to adapt quickly to AI advancements to maintain competitiveness. Altman also touches on the evolving role of software development, predicting significant transformations as AI continues to advance. (01:33:10) - Sholto Douglas, a Member of Technical Staff at Anthropic, specializes in scaling reinforcement learning and agentic AI. In the transcript, Douglas discusses the release of a new model that excels in tackling complex problems through extended reasoning and test-time computation. He highlights the model's advancements in digital tasks, such as coding and knowledge work, and emphasizes the importance of developing AI systems that can function as capable coworkers. (02:00:32) - Daniel Barcelo, CEO and Chairman of T1 Energy, has over 25 years of experience in international energy finance and emerging markets. He discusses T1's efforts to build a domestic solar and battery supply chain, highlighting the acquisition of a 5-gigawatt solar module facility in Wilmer, Texas, and plans for a 2.1-gigawatt solar cell plant near Austin. Barcelo emphasizes the importance of advanced manufacturing and an integrated U. S. supply chain to meet the growing demand for scalable, reliable, and low-cost renewable energy. (02:24:41) - Mandy Fields, Chief Financial Officer of e.l.f. Beauty, discusses the company's impressive 38% net sales growth and 79% increase in adjusted EBITDA, attributing this success to their value proposition, innovative marketing, and the acquisition of Hailey Bieber's brand, Rhode. She highlights e.l.f.'s balanced marketing spend across digital platforms to stay connected with their community and emphasizes the importance of Super Bowl ads for building long-term brand awareness. Fields also notes the company's focus on expanding their existing portfolio, including e.l.f. Cosmetics, Naturium, and Rhode, while remaining open to future acquisitions. (02:32:56) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:35:53) - Ivan Burazin, co-founder and CEO of Daytona, has a rich background in cloud development, having previously founded Codeanywhere and the Shift developer conference. In the conversation, he discusses Daytona's mission to provide secure, scalable infrastructure for AI agents, emphasizing the necessity for these agents to operate in isolated computing environments to perform tasks like code execution and browser-based activities. He also highlights Daytona's rapid growth, noting a significant increase in customers, including Fortune 100 companies, and announces a recent $24 million Series A funding round to further advance their platform. (02:43:01) - Scott Rogowsky, renowned for hosting HQ Trivia, discusses his new venture, Savvy, a live interactive word puzzle game where players compete against him in real-time to solve puzzles and win cash prizes. He reflects on lessons from HQ Trivia, emphasizing the importance of player engagement and accessibility, and highlights Savvy's design to ensure all participants can play through entire games, enhancing user experience. Rogowsky also shares his commitment to the project, having recently relocated to Los Angeles to focus on its development, and expresses excitement about building a dedicated community around the app. 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 Kalshi - https://kalshi.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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Thursday, February 5th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money saved, both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, counting and a whole lot more all in one place. We have a quite the lineup today. Let's pull up the linear lineup. Meet the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprises on enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents. And we have a lineup for you today. We got Sam Altman from OpenAI joining Sholto.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  If you're not familiar, Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI. They are the makers of ChatGPT.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  Yes, I did actually explain to someone, I was like, oh, do you know, I was explaining the show to some random person. I was like, oh, they were like, what do you do? What do you talk about? And I was like, oh, do you know like OpenAI? Yeah, I was like, oh, we're having Sam on the show today.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  Are they like who?

• 0:52John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no. They were like, oh, that's cool. Like, that's good. Like, like, I understand what the show is. But then we have Dan Barcelo from T1 Energy, talking about building solar panels in America. And of course, our lightning round, which I'm very excited for. So we've been thinking more about the Super Bowl that's coming up. We've been thinking more about ads, the response to the ads, the back and forth with the ads. Rune had a good post here. He said, putting on my media observer, putting my media observer hat on. Anthropic ads are pretty brilliant because they're dishonest in a way that's only going to rage bait OpenAI heads and certain industry insiders, but are funny and striking to everyone else.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  When you're a call, when you're a call option, calling them a call option, kind of a diss. Not fired. Variance is good. Mario Kart Blue Shell. Are you familiar? Have you ever played Mario Kart?

• 1:46Jordi Hays?

  Not enough to get the reference.

• 1:47John Coogan?

  So I played Mario Kart, I think so long ago, Blue Shells didn't exist, but I've been playing with my kids. And I've since learned the importance of the Blue Shell. The Blue Shell, it targets just the first player. Just whoever's in first. It's a great metaphor for what's going on here. When you're in, when you're not in first place, you get the Blue Shell, you can take a shot at the leader without even needing to call them out. So you can just say, the category is bad. And everyone assumes you're talking about, you know, who. Uh, so I thought that was a interesting thing.

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  Trey says Sam Altman, the Konigsegg collector.

• 2:21John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:22Jordi Hays?

  Yes, that one.

• 2:23John Coogan?

  Yes, deep dive.

• 2:24Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so, so every, everybody had a take on this yesterday. Uh, it, it was, uh, perfect in how much kind of controversy it generated. It was wildly entertaining. Uh, I wanted to kind of, I'll, I'll read through kind of like my updated take.

• 2:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I got a little bit of.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  Processed.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, I got a little bit of pushback. I, I said they were playing dirty.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45Jordi Hays?

  Signal responded to me and said, not dirty at all. So I wanted to address that.

• 2:50John Coogan?

  Okay, dig in, but first let me tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests.

• 2:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, anyway, so, yeah, I was processing this more. We obviously watched some ads yesterday. We watched the get, get a Mac campaign. We watched the Bud Light special delivery one, which is about, uh, uh, Bud Light.

• 3:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:10Jordi Hays?

  Is in a castle, they get an order of corn syrup. They're like, we don't use corn syrup. That must be for Coors Light and, and, and other, other competitors. Uh, and so like, I was processing them and like, the difference there is that those advertisements are truthful, right? Like.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  People, people that have had a PC have probably gotten a virus, right? So when Mac is like riffing on that, it's like, it's truthful, right?

• 3:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, and they had some data to back it up.

• 3:35Jordi Hays?

  It's not deceitful.

• 3:36John Coogan?

  I would, I would say if I'm putting on my, my steel manning Microsoft in 2007 hat or 2003, I would say, hey, we do have Windows PC Defender. We're fighting viruses and, and is it possible to get a virus on a Mac? Probably is it, is it, is it possible to not get a virus on a PC?

• 3:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and on Microsoft's side, people are like, yeah, no one makes Microsoft, or no one makes viruses for your computers because you don't sell very many. It's not very ROI positive.

• 4:02John Coogan?

  That's a good point.

• 4:03Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, and Bud Light's campaign was like truthful, even though it was aggressive in that you could look up the ingredient list of their competitors and see that they did in fact use corn syrup.

• 4:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, and you can make your own decision on whether or not you like that ingredient, but they were just drawing awareness.

• 4:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and so, and so my point is that I think that anthropics ads are like closer to political attack ads and that they're sort of intentionally taking, kind of trying to be deceptive, right? They haven't broken any laws.

• 4:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know.

• 4:31Jordi Hays?

  They don't name chat GPT. They're just sort of like throwing mud at the whole category. I asked, yeah, so anyways, I said they were playing dirty. I got some pushback on it. I asked Claude, I said Claude, how would you define playing dirty? And Claude said, playing dirty generally means achieving your goals through tactics that are deceptive, unethical, or that violate the understood rules and norms of a given context, even if you're not technically illegal. It's a, it's a, it's the gap between what you can do and what you should do. A few dimensions to it. It goes into deception, misleading others about your intentions, hiding information, or creating false impressions to gain an advantage. These campaigns do an amazing job creating a false perception or, or impression of, of

• 5:15Jordi Hays?

  what ads in, in LLMs are going to be like.

• 5:18John Coogan?

  I do think the response, just to chime in with some random stuff, but the, I think the response to the ads, we were wondering like, you know, outside of the, you know, the, the TBPN, we love ads, ads are fine, and, and they're not going to do anything weird, we're, we're, we're strong supporters. What will the public's reception be like?

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:37John Coogan?

  Claude skyrocket to the top of the charts because these ads are so effective? Will, will general consumers buy the line? That yes, you're, the, the, the chat apps are going to get weird with the ads or not. And I was scrolling on Instagram reels last night, completely randomly. I was not looking for anthropic content. I think I followed the Claude account, maybe, maybe not. It just targeted me. It hits me with a vertical version of. The ad, it's called deception, I think, something like that. No, violation. Violation is the one.

• 6:08Jordi Hays?

  It's not called deception. It'd be a little too on the nose.

• 6:10John Coogan?

  I think there is one called deception. There's a bunch. They all have different names. Anyway, it's called violation. And there's a screen grab here.

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, I remember. So people were like, the anthropic deception ad is deceptive?

• 6:23John Coogan?

  So violation pops up and it's this, and it's Claude AI, and it has almost 6,000 likes, even when it just got served to me. I, my interpretation was like, this is working, this is popular, this is, it's not just beautifully shot, it's well edited for vertical.

• 6:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's either, it's either really resonating, or they're putting a massive amount of spend behind it, or both.

• 6:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, so this is what it looked like vertically. And then, this is the funny thing. So, in this ad, you see the guy struggling to do a pull-up. He asks, you know, what's supposed to be an LLM, create a fitness plan for me. And then the fitness bot says, hey, you know what else can help? One inch insoles from Heightmax, or something like that. And it's like, this looks maxing thing. It's very funny. But, it's a, it's a one inch insert that would go in your, in your shoes. I scroll up. What's the next ad that Meta serves me? An ad for three inch inserts. Three inch inserts. And the ad is actually deceptive. It says, it says the guy can go from 5'9" to 6'1", that's four inches. And so these are full shoes that have the inserts built in. And for some reason, I got in, even though

• 7:28John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm not in the market for, for, for insoles, the, the algorithm just knows that I love these ads, because they're very funny and they're very on trend with the looks maxing thing. And so, I get served these ads constantly. This is all Meta shows me, is, is these, is these height enhancing shoes. Because I think I actually clicked on them and was like digging in.

• 7:47Jordi Hays?

  So you, you bought them, right?

• 7:48John Coogan?

  Of course, of course. To send, to send to my enemies.

• 7:50Jordi Hays?

  You're trying to get to seven feet. You're trying to get to seven feet.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  That would be, that would be good. That would be good. Tyler, do you have something on this?

• 7:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was just gonna say, so I, I saw on Instagram as well, I saw some of the Claude ads. And in the comments, I mean, people were riding with Claude.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  They are.

• 8:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  It was like normies.

• 8:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, totally, totally.

• 8:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:05John Coogan?

  Like, like, like, they're winning the vibe war. They've been winning the vibe war with developers, and they've been winning the vibe war on X, and now it feels like they're about to win the vibe war in the public, uh, in the public square.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  So I said two-

• 8:16John Coogan?

  Really quickly, let me tell you about Figma. Figma makes, 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-backed prototypes, and apps fast. Sorry.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  I said two things can be true about the campaign. It's brilliant, well timed, and incredibly strategic for a few reasons I'll outline below, and it's designed to plant a false impression of ChatGPT's forthcoming ad product in the minds of hundreds of millions of Americans.

• 8:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:39Jordi Hays?

  They could argue, oh, we're not trying to do that, but, uh, you can't really kind of argue with the effect. So, uh, Anthropic accomplishes a lot. The campaign entertains America, right? It's wildly entertaining.

• 8:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:52Jordi Hays?

  It's hilarious, truly. Like, the, the perfect, like, sycophancy that you can hear. You can hear the M dashes, the pauses.

• 8:59John Coogan?

  Pause is really good.

• 9:01Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing. Mother, uh, Mother is the name of the agency that did it. They, they-

• 9:04John Coogan?

  Crushed it.

• 9:05Jordi Hays?

  Crushed it. One, uh, they're also putting themselves on the map ahead of the IPO. I think in some ways, like, certain audiences would know more about Anthropic than Claude, right?

• 9:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:14Jordi Hays?

  Even if you're just, like, generally interested in investing in AI, you're probably hearing about Anthropic more than you're hearing about Claude.

• 9:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:20Jordi Hays?

  Um, it builds their aura with insiders. Uh, if, I said, if they spend a hundred million dollars on this campaign and all it does is help retain a couple of, like, truly elite researchers, it's worth it. What are you laughing at?

• 9:31John Coogan?

  I love it. And I was saying Anthropic is campaigning to get themselves banned.

• 9:36John Coogan?

  Just like, with misinformation, just going way too far and it backlashes. That's just funny to me. Sorry, we can go back to that.

• 9:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it, it, it somewhat continues their, like, fear-based messaging that they've been, they've been kind of riding with in general.

• 9:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 9:50Jordi Hays?

  At the essays.

• 9:51John Coogan?

  More nuanced.

• 9:52Jordi Hays?

  Effectively rage baits OpenAI. Like, they got, they got, they got fully baited.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  Completely.

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Sam switched out of his, like, you know, lowercase typing and was like, I gotta go into uppercase for this one.

• 10:03John Coogan?

  Lots of responses.

• 10:04Jordi Hays?

  Um, it increases, like, the public's, like, general scrutiny of the ads rollout, and then Washington, too, is another factor.

• 10:10John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, maybe, yeah.

• 10:12Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I just think, I just think it'll come up.

• 10:14John Coogan?

  Totally, yeah. I mean, yeah.

• 10:16Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then-

• 10:16John Coogan?

  You have to ask Mark Zuckerberg, what do you, how do you make money? Like, anything's on the table these days in Washington.

• 10:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and so, so- And then the other thing is like, it's going to broadly damage consumer trust in LLMs.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  That does feel right.

• 10:28Jordi Hays?

  Some people will just be like, wait, like, they've been kind of like making money on me without me knowing, right? Or how can I, can I trust every output as, as like actually good advice? Or am I being monetized?

• 10:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, and this is the one that you think could come back to bite them. The other five are pretty good.

• 10:45Jordi Hays?

  Potentially, right? But it depends what their consumer strategy is. Cause right now, they're saying, we don't care about consumer.

• 10:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:52Jordi Hays?

  They've said that a lot.

• 10:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:54Jordi Hays?

  But their actions kind of speak differently in some ways.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:59Jordi Hays?

  I said, Anthropic has consistently told the market they don't care about consumer. But I'm not sure. The argument for ads is that they'll make LLMs free for people that can't afford to pay a subscription. But Anthropic has already lost the race to serve billions of people, right? I don't think that they're, when you look, when you look at Gemini's sort of traction, OpenAI's ChatGPT traction, like it seems like the race to get to three billion monthly actives is kind of over. I don't believe that, I don't believe that Claude's going to come behind and get there. And they wouldn't be able to do that without doing ads, right? Cause there's, like, you can kind of run the numbers.

• 11:33John Coogan?

  The blue shell. They gotta take out the guy in front.

• 11:37Jordi Hays?

  So, so the question, the, kind of where I was taking this is, can they, can they deliver a luxury product to a smaller cohort in the hundreds of millions to kind of iPhone numbers? Right? There's like roughly like one and a half billion iPhones that are like active in the world. Those people could all buy a cheaper Android and, and just cheaper devices. But they've paid a premium for the iPhone because they can. And for many people, it delivers a better experience. So I said, the iPhone was not the first smartphone. Claude was not the first consumer LLM. The iPhone did differentiate on specs early, not unlike a model card. But Apple did eventually pivot to more emotional arguments for why you should be seen with an iPhone. It tells people you care about the environment, that you don't have adult apps flooding your app store,

• 12:22Jordi Hays?

  and that you take privacy seriously. These have had varying levels of success. Every tech company was able to tell an ESG story. And I can't imagine an Apple exec even saying the word porn today, even though Steve Jobs was very pointed about it back in 2010. He said, you know, there's a porn store for Android. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That's a place we don't want to go, so we're not going to go there.

• 12:44John Coogan?

  Calling out the competition by name and dropping that is like.

• 12:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the key thing here is that it was factual.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  It was true.

• 12:51Jordi Hays?

  Right? Like, it wasn't deceptive.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 12:54Jordi Hays?

  And so I don't think, I don't think that was, that was edgy, but he wasn't playing dirty.

• 12:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  And so, Apple did, however, carve out a solid messaging strategy around privacy and allowed them to put the screws to advertisers, the market adjusted, and the ad industry obviously survived, but average Americans still feel that Facebook is listening to their conversations to target ads. Consumers deserve choice, it's great if they want to pay for ad-free tiers, most don't.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  1% in Europe for Facebook, by the way. That's the stat.

• 13:20Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 13:21John Coogan?

  They all have the option to pay for Facebook, for ad-free Facebook, and only 1% pay.

• 13:25Jordi Hays?

  So, consumers deserve choice, but they should not be misled about how ad platforms work.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 13:29Jordi Hays?

  Android has generated an immense amount of value for the world, so has Google broadly. Let consumers choose, but let them choose intelligently.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  Yes, I have a rebuttal, but I'm going to tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the superintelligence cloud-building AI supercomputer for training and inference at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. So, my rebuttal, my steel man is that...

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, I'm not saying Anthropic shouldn't have done this.

• 13:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:52Jordi Hays?

  I'm just saying that it was a little dirty.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're rolling around in the mud, it's good. They're in the trough. We love the trough. We live in the trough. We live for the trough. My steel man is that they didn't cross the line, they didn't play dirty because they didn't call out ChatGPT directly. Okay, you can take that whatever you want, but will something like this happen?

• 14:14Jordi Hays?

  They are punching up.

• 14:14John Coogan?

  They're punching up.

• 14:15Jordi Hays?

  They are punching up.

• 14:16John Coogan?

  Yes. But, third, there, there is a world where something like this will happen. There is a world where the ads do get integrated in such a seamless way. If you look at the evolution of Google's 10 Blue Links, it started with 10 Blue Links, no ads. Then it was a very clear yellow box with ads, and it was very clear that it was an ad. And over time... The UI evolved to be a lot less aggressive about telling you that it's an ad. And the ads on Meta platforms do get creepy sometimes. You talk about something and then you see the ad. And maybe that's just confirmation bias or some sort of cognitive. You only notice the ones that are weird. So they all feel weird. You see a lot of stuff that you weren't talking about.

• 15:01John Coogan?

  That doesn't trigger anything. But when you see the thing that you were just talking to your friend about. I was just talking to you about sweaters and I see an ad for sweater. I'm like, how did it know? And realistically, it knows because you just went on Facebook. You found that sweater. You bought it. It knows that we're friends, we're DMing, we're talking. We're literally friends on the platform. And so it's like, well, Jordy likes this and they're hanging out all the time, sending each other DMs. Why don't I just show John what I just sold to Jordy? That makes perfect sense. That's something that can be done with just stock vanilla machine learning. At, you know, core AI in, inside Facebook and Meta. And they do that very effectively. But it can feel sort of creepy sometimes and some people get creeped out by it and they talk about it.

• 15:41John Coogan?

  And so the idea that an interaction like that might happen is not complete science fiction. It is possible. And so they are sort of warning that, hey, if you, if you want to make sure that this never happens, it's our pledge that that won't, that's not even on the table.

• 15:59Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 15:59John Coogan?

  Now, the big question is, when's Anthropic launching ads? We gotta get them, we gotta get them to launch ads.

• 16:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, I don't think they can now.

• 16:07John Coogan?

  No, they have to. It's okay. I give them permission. I will say, if you, everyone's going to be dunking, oh, you, you, you went back on your promise. No, I will be your strongest soldier. I will be your strongest soldier and I will say it's the right thing to do. Put ads in Claude code, put ads in Claude, put ads in the comments of the code that you write. So if someone reviews the code, they're seeing an ad. That's what I want. That's the future I want to live for. Anyway, TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Oh, and you know I gotta tell you more about ads. Vibe, where D to C brands, B to B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  We love ads here and we love doing ads for ads.

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  Zach Kukoff says, every time I see Anthropic and OpenAI try to distinguish themselves with comms marketing, I realize how much we are replaying the PC wars from the 90s. Anthropic, tasteful, elegant, opinionated, prosumer, expert, enterprise. OpenAI, populist, broadly appealing, low consumer, low consumer plus typical enterprise. Yeah.

• 17:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, so Anthropic is the Apple and OpenAI is the Microsoft. And they're also aligned with Microsoft, owned in part by Microsoft.

• 17:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it would be, it would be interesting to hear Dario just talk for an hour purely about just the risks of advertising in AI.

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:34Jordi Hays?

  Right, because that would be powerful. Certainly wouldn't have been as effective as, as dragging OpenAI in front of hundreds of millions of people.

• 17:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  But.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  I mean, doesn't Anthropic have a podcast? Anthropic podcast? I think they do.

• 17:49Jordi Hays?

  TJ, TJ was helping Sam with some comms. He said Anthropic might think more serio-, he said, fix it for you. Anthropic might think more seriously about adding ads if they had any consumers using their product.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  Just, just, just taking a very tactful response to a situation and just being like, what if you amped it up, brother?

• 18:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, you've already lost if you're just dropping a massive word salad.

• 18:12John Coogan?

  Maybe, I don't know. I think that there's a lot of nuance here and it's, and it's good. I, I, I do think it's, it's, it's important to not mauled, to not be, you know, like angry and made, made mad and let you.

• 18:23Jordi Hays?

  Don't let people spike your cortisol.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Exactly, like they're going to be gesture maxing at the Super Bowl and you can't let it, you can't let it affect you. You gotta focus on the new models, the, which are, which have launched today. There's a bunch of new stuff. So GPT 5.3, Codex launched today and there's a very, very cool.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  There's a very, very cool update to or new product Frontier, which is a product for building AI coworkers that I'm very excited to talk to Sam about. Because it feels like the first glimpse of an orchestration product, which we talked about yesterday, Gastown has been taking off.

• 19:01Jordi Hays?

  I mean, let's give some credit to John.

• 19:05John Coogan?

  By the skin of my teeth.

• 19:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, it would, it might seem like John had early insight on today's OpenAI launch. He, we did not.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  We didn't.

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  We actually didn't.

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but in hindsight, you called it perfectly. Crystal ball.

• 19:18John Coogan?

  Crystal ball.

• 19:19Jordi Hays?

  Elite.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  Alpha, one day of alpha.

• 19:21Jordi Hays?

  One day of alpha. Yeah, if you had launched a enterprise focused orchestration platform yesterday.

• 19:27John Coogan?

  Yes, you could have raised money, got, sold secondary.

• 19:30Jordi Hays?

  All right before OpenAI immediately launched a very.

• 19:34John Coogan?

  Are you going to get Steve from OpenAI? They're not even thinking about this until they launch it the next day. Who knows, who knows? Anyway, let's move on to Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that lets you grow, that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

• 19:51Jordi Hays?

  Matt Turk says, regular startup. We closed a few customers and shipped some new features. Good week so far. Anthropic, we destroyed our main rival with our Super Bowl ads and tanked the entire software category in public markets by announcing some plugins. Good week so far.

• 20:06John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, we barely even talked about this, but Anthropic launched a lawyer in your pocket. They, they launched a legal tool or they announced it. I don't know, is it actually available in the app yet? Because this, this, it feels like, okay, maybe this competes with Harvey. I'm not seeing it yet in the cloud app. But there.

• 20:25Jordi Hays?

  I don't really think it competes with Harvey.

• 20:26John Coogan?

  No, no, no. So I don't think it does because they're selling it direct to consumer. I, I believe at least. But it seems like an amazing product. Like, it seems like the demand for this would be incredible.

• 20:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it will compete with LegalZoom. Like, LegalZoom is down 15%.

• 20:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  At, since this announcement.

• 20:42John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 20:43Jordi Hays?

  It's now a 1.38 billion dollar company.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's sort of in the chug, chug mode. Uh, yeah, and. Not just for, I mean, LegalZoom is a little bit different because it can actually file you incorporation documents and they've been, they face pressure from Stripe, Atlas for a long time on that front.

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and a bunch of other.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  LLCs and whatnot. But, I mean, truly, like, if you're getting a job and your employer gives you an offer letter, like, taking that to a lawyer can be really expensive if you're, if it's your first job. You're probably not going to review it. A lot of people are probably just copy pasting it into.

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  Or asking their parents, like, take a look at this.

• 21:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, a little bit of that, and then they can't. But just being able to just forward the email in or integrate your Gmail and just say, "Hey, I got this offer letter. Like, does anything in here look weird? Is there anything I should ask about? I don't have a ton of leverage, but I want to understand this document." Claude should be able to do that, and it makes a lot of sense. And I expect OpenAI to launch this product, like, ASAP. Anyway.

• 21:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, so I think all that was actually launched for the Claude Legal thing was just a plugin in Claude Co-Work.

• 21:40John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  Which means it's basically just like .md files, right?

• 21:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 03

  It's like skills.

• 21:45John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, okay. But it feels like it goes beyond skills because they probably had to do some legal work of their own to make sure that they're, like, not giving legal advice and that they're couching things properly. I think that's also why ChatGPT Health is in a different area, because they don't want any risk of, like, pre-training on your testosterone levels. And then I go into the next version of ChatGPT and I say, "What are Tyler Cosgrove's testosterone levels?" And it just knows it because it learned it from the chats that you were sending it. There's a whole bunch of private information beyond testosterone levels, of course. Anyway. Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security automatically.

• 22:27Jordi Hays?

  Key over on X says, "TBH, the Anthropic ads are good, but I think they're a bad idea. Normies are not going to think, 'Wow, this is what ChatGPT is going to be like. I better subscribe to Claude.com.' They're going to think, 'Wow, this is what AI is going to be like.'" Rune agrees. He's not biased at all. He says, "Suicide bombing strategy, it's bad for them, but worse for OpenAI. You almost have to respect it."

• 22:48John Coogan?

  What was the text I sent you? Is that? Quote, "I don't know how to get on Anthropic."

• 22:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, John was asking, asking a friend that's outside of tech and they were like, "What's Anthropic? How do I get on it? I don't know how."

• 23:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's go to Eric Sufer. He said, "The Anthropic, this Anthropic ad is simply obnoxious." And then we'll move on to other stories. Anthropic generates most of its revenue from enterprise business, so it can afford to not, to maximize its consumer revenue opportunity. But the sanctimonious moralizing here presents advertising as a cynical business model choice. It's neither cynical nor a choice. The freemium digital advertising supported model is the only repeatedly proven pathway for a consumer technology product to reach humanity at scale. There are just folks who can't pay $20 a month. OpenAI's advertising revenue will enable it to offer access to larger models for free tier users. To the extent Anthropic thinks chatbots powered by frontier models are valuable to society, it should aspire to provide access to as many people as possible.

• 23:47John Coogan?

  Now, they'd probably say, "Hey, we're freemium. We do give, we do give access to chatbots powered by frontier models to free users." They just only get a certain amount and then they have to upgrade. But Eric's point still holds here for sure. Ads allow for that to an extent that no other consumer technology business model demonstrably can. This kind of condescending attitude toward digital advertising is economic chauvinism and it represents a desire for technological gatekeeping. And the idea that ads will necessarily influence chatbot content is overstated, borderline anachronistic. Anachronistic because you don't do it that way anymore. You wait until, hey, this person's buying, you know, insoles or lifts and they're asking about the Roman Empire and this is the perfect time

• 24:30John Coogan?

  because they're just chilling, reading the Roman Empire and they're thinking, "Okay, yeah, I did need to buy that." And then they switch gears. Like, you don't need to put the ad right next to the content that relates to it. That's just, that's just an antiquated way of thinking about online advertising.

• 24:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:42John Coogan?

  It ignores functional.

• 24:43Jordi Hays?

  Again, I think Sam Altman did say in October of 2024, "I kind of think of ads as a last resort for us as a business model."

• 24:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 24:53Jordi Hays?

  So, again, he, he's gonna, you know, has to eat his words on this one.

• 24:57John Coogan?

  They get to take a little bit of a victory lap.

• 24:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so in that sense. Criticism is fair.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  Anyway, before we move on, CrowdStrike, your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So Claude also announced a new model from Anthropic, of course, introducing Claude Opus 4.6. We have Sholto coming on the show at 12:30 to discuss that. They say it's our smart, it's the smartest model and it got an upgrade. Opus 4.6 plans more carefully, sustains agentic tasks for longer, operates reliably in massive codebases and catches its own mistakes. It's also our first Opus class model with a 1 million token context window in beta. So, very exciting. They put a number of, they put the model, model

• 25:42John Coogan?

  card together. They did particularly well. What was the, what was the, the benchmark that stuck out to you, Tyler? You said-

• 25:52Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I think it was Arc AGIV 2. It's now at like 69%. I think previous was, I believe it was 5.2, which was at, I want to say 55 around. So like pretty sizable upgrade. But I mean, with these things, it's always so hard to tell. Like, it's really just like qualitative differences at this point, where the models are like, you have to use it for like an hour or two and then you, you can kind of tell what the differences are.

• 26:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and, and also like in new contexts, like in terms of just the vanilla, go and ask a question. It's been able to get you a pretty good answer for like years now. But it hasn't been able to go and pull a bunch of financial data together, fact check it all, put it in an Excel sheet. This is what they're pushing and this is what Clouseau Investments is so excited about. Ooh, says Clouseau. Anthropic updates AI model to field complex financial research. So Opus 4.6 is designed to carry out financial research and other work-related functions. The company's expansion into new areas, including legal service, has rattled Wall Street and sparked concerns about which companies and services will be disrupted by AI. The SaaS apocalypse is upon us. We will be asking, Sam Altman, is software dead? Or-

• 26:59Jordi Hays?

  Are we back?

• 27:00John Coogan?

  Are we back? Who knows? Claude 4.6 Opus is still best, it still has the best SVG results out of all the models, just incredibly high taste, says Lisan Al-Ghaib. And these are some pretty beautiful pictures. Are you familiar with SVG programming? So you basically, you draw each square and line in code. So you have to say, I want a square that goes from this pixel to this pixel, to this pixel, to this pixel, and you add and layer all those up. It can be extremely time consuming if you do it by hand, but Claude can just sort of one-shot it. And it looks pretty beautiful.

• 27:34Jordi Hays?

  On-brand.

• 27:34John Coogan?

  And it's an interesting benchmark, because this isn't something you'd necessarily ask. These are not generative images in the diffusion sense. This isn't the Mid Journey model. This isn't what Sora uses. This is a different thing, asking the model to basically write code that generates an image. So it really has to understand the back and forth between what it's building. So, cool benchmark. I like that. I enjoyed that. I also like the New York Stock Exchange. Do you want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange, then. As easy as that. Anyway, the Anthropic handle being owned by a guy who only posts his favorite form of AI, say, Wordles. He only posts Wordles. Oh, and he just has @anthropic. That's very funny, from Paul Rambles.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  So this is a strange thing with X.

• 28:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:20Jordi Hays?

  They have policies around their handles that they really stand by, in that Ramp is, @Ramp is not owned by Ramp.

• 28:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  @anthropic is not owned by Anthropic.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  And when you look at the accounts, you think, is this really the best use

• 28:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:36Jordi Hays?

  of a handle like this?

• 28:37John Coogan?

  Paul, Paul Jankura, who is @anthropic, says, emphatically not an AI company. Ohioan, liberal bookworm, news hound, CLESP, Anglophile, many R T's.

• 28:51Jordi Hays?

  If he's a bookworm, if he's a bookworm, he probably loves sitting on the Anthropic handle.

• 28:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:56Jordi Hays?

  Given that Anthropic has been...

• 28:58John Coogan?

  Warming their way through some books.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  Chewing through some books.

• 29:00John Coogan?

  Much like a worm.

• 29:01Jordi Hays?

  We didn't get to that article.

• 29:03John Coogan?

  That was a funny, funny article. You gotta feed Claude. It's okay. The books, the, the, the books gotta feed.

• 29:08Jordi Hays?

  And they have to, yeah.

• 29:10John Coogan?

  This is actually potentially bigger than the water thing. Like, it's just so visceral. People love books and watching them be destroyed.

• 29:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you didn't see, uh,

• 29:18Speaker 03

  It's just one version of each book.

• 29:19John Coogan?

  Yes, I agree. But people don't like destroying books. They're sensitive about that. Um, the very funny thing is that, uh, Paul, uh, at Anthropic on Twitter, on X, has, uh, has migrated to Blue Sky for many things, but he didn't get the Anthropic handle on Blue Sky. He's Anthropic42 over there. So shoot him a follow if you're hanging out, looking for wordle progress.

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  People are playing around with the nominative determinism.

• 29:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:47Jordi Hays?

  Say Google's CEO is named Pichai. His purpose is to pitch AI. Uh, Dario's last name is literally AI model.

• 29:57John Coogan?

  Hmm. Maybe I should change my name to Pitch MongoDB. John Pitch MongoDB. Choose a 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.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Dylan Patel is sharing some data. He says 4% of GitHub public commits are being authored by Claude Code right now. At the current trajectory, we believe that Claude Code will be 20% of all daily commits by the end of 2026.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  That feels low to me. I, I, I was expecting 99%. Sorry.

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, so, so I, I think the way you can see this is because like whenever you actually do a commit with Claude Code, it adds itself. So, so this is like, there's a ton of people that are like using Claude Code, but then not attributing back to, to Claude.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  Yes. And, uh, we also have some news. Doug Olafman from Semi Analysis will be joining the show tomorrow to break down Claude Code. We might have to pull him out of his psychosis. He is addicted to Claude Code. He's running multiple instances at all times and, uh, his, has updated his, uh, his profile picture in the Semi Analysis Slack to reflect his devotion to the, uh, the show Goth, I suppose. Um, anyway, um, so OpenAI unveils Frontier, a product for building AI coworkers. This is in the Wall Street Journal. Uh, and OpenAI also posted about it. The new platform launched and marketed, uh, launched amid market fears over AI's disruption to software is aimed at helping businesses develop AI agents that work alongside humans.

• 31:25John Coogan?

  And so there are some interesting questions here about.

• 31:27Jordi Hays?

  Think of these as like AI coworkers that are actively trying to take your job.

• 31:33Jordi Hays?

  Like they're trying to help, but they're also like want, they want your title, they want your comp.

• 31:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 31:38Jordi Hays?

  They want to learn everything about what makes you great and they want to do it themselves.

• 31:41John Coogan?

  Or maybe they're just trying to empower you, Jordy. Maybe they're just trying to make you a better you. I don't know.

• 31:45Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they're just coming over, just cracking jokes, trying to distract you.

• 31:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:50Jordi Hays?

  While learning so that they can take your job.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  They can literally do both. They can literally do both. Uh, before we dive into this, let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. So, uh, Frontier works with OpenAI's previously announced AI agent building tools. It makes it easier for businesses to combine sources of data that agents need to perform tasks. The AI company said, "The agents will be able to process information from various sources and complete tasks like working with files and running code," OpenAI said. So no more copy paste everything into your, oh, into your ChatGPT Enterprise Edition. It should have access to your network, plug into all your different systems. You'll be able to write API bindings, I imagine. And there might be some forward deployed engineers or some associates from OpenAI that are helping you actually onboard fully

• 32:36John Coogan?

  to the agentic workflows that have been promised.

• 32:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're hiring how many consultants to help with this go to market?

• 32:43John Coogan?

  They are hiring hundreds of AI consultants to boost enterprise sales. This is from the information.

• 32:50Jordi Hays?

  Job creation.

• 32:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. This is, this is a great gig. Like I would highly recommend jumping on this if you're in this, in, if you're in this market. Uh, OpenAI is hiring hundreds of new staffers to expand a technical consulting team that helps large corporations develop custom AI applications and agents to automate employee tasks, according to a person knowledgeable with the company's plans. The hiring effort could help it beat back a competition from arch rival Anthropic, which has also upped its game in catering to enterprises. It comes as OpenAI prepares to launch a new enterprise offering that would unify businesses' efforts to use AI. The ChatGPT maker is expanding its number of technical consultants, also known as forward deployed engineers, who can customize OpenAI's model using a client's own data, a person said.

• 33:35John Coogan?

  These engineers can, for example, help T-Mobile develop AI to respond to customer service requests or help Intuit provide its customers with tax preparation services. So you have all this data. You want to do long context reinforcement learning on it. Long context reinforcement learning has been very, very successful in the coding world because Git has a complete history of every line of code that's been written, every comment, why it happened. You have this perfect record of everything that happened when you built a piece of software. And there's a ton of open source repositories. You can download all of GitHub, basically, and see how software is developed. So you can train the model on that. Well, you can't really get the same level of free data with enterprises. A lot of this data is locked up and a lot of it's specific to a specific business process, business.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's pull up an image. There's a little graphic here that they made.

• 34:24John Coogan?

  From OpenAI's frontier, openai.com/index/introduce.

• 34:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and if you can zoom in a little bit, at the bottom, you have your system of record. You have business context, agent execution, evaluation and optimization. Your agents, OpenAI agents, third-party agents. That feels significant, right? They want to be the orchestrator, right? And if you want to bring in some other folks in to help out, great, at least for now.

• 34:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  And then they have interfaces, which they're ChatGPT Enterprise, OpenAI Atlas and other business applications.

• 35:00John Coogan?

  I'm a little upset that they didn't go with a Mad Max theme like Gastown. I like the pole cats. I like the mayor. I like the deacon. I thought that was a fun metaphor. They went with something a little more enterprise-y, but I think Frontier is a good name. I don't know. It flows, of course. It's not Frontier 5.2 high, so we got to count our blessings here. But I think Frontier works. You know, are you, are you working on a Frontier integration project? Oh, those consultants from OpenAI, they're getting us on board to Frontier. It sounds good. Why is Tyler laughing?

• 35:34Jordi Hays?

  Tyler's laughing.

• 35:35Speaker 03

  I'm getting flamed in the comments.

• 35:36Jordi Hays?

  What's up with Tyler's hair today?

• 35:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, what happened? Did you, did you use shampoo nor conditioner?

• 35:42Speaker 03

  I need a haircut.

• 35:43John Coogan?

  I need a haircut. Maybe, maybe you need a hat. Maybe you can grab one of those TVN hats over there. You'll be good. Don't worry. Let me tell you about Apple. And profitable advertising made easy with Axon and AI. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

• 35:59Jordi Hays?

  We'll get more from Sam on Frontier.

• 36:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:03Jordi Hays?

  I think we can move on.

• 36:04John Coogan?

  So the last thing on 5.2, the last benchmark that's interesting is GPT 5.2 with high, not extra high reasoning effort, has a 50% time horizon of around 6.6 hours on our expanded suite of software tasks. This is the highest estimate for time horizon measurement we have reported to date, and it's right on track, doubling every 128 days. It depends on what you're looking for, but the implications of this are, you know, more and more tasks are suitable for these models. Although, I do think we're going through a shift with the orchestration thing where we might need a new benchmark, because what happens if, you know, the individual model, GPT 5.2 high, can do one six-hour task, basically, but

• 36:49John Coogan?

  you can deploy five that talk to each other, and when you combine those, it adds up to 20 hours of work. You just get a jump in the graph, but it's not technically the model, so you need sort of a new benchmark, supposedly. Jessica Lessin likes Sam Altman's post. She says, "This is excellent comms from Sam Altman, an eye-popping stat in an easy-to-understand claim. And I hate, though, this budding movement to frame the business model debate as elitism versus anti-elitism. When chatbots launched with subscription business models, I thought it would be a great new era of consumer tech blended with ads and subs, much as we've seen with Netflix and Spotify. It would be a shame if the OpenAI versus Anthropic rivalry

• 37:30John Coogan?

  wipes that away and makes it seem like subscriptions are only the domain of the elite. So many other consumer businesses show otherwise, and they are better off for the balance." I like that.

• 37:40Jordi Hays?

  Signal says, "Either you or I have lost the ability to process reality."

• 37:45John Coogan?

  Wait, did you respond to this?

• 37:47Jordi Hays?

  In response to that.

• 37:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 37:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, a lot of people didn't think this was great comms at all.

• 37:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:53Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I would say, like, most of the posts I saw were like, hey, like, this feels like you got baited.

• 37:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, because you could have just not responded, I guess.

• 38:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or you could have said, he said later in the day, "I'm excited to share that Codex has 1 million users."

• 38:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:07Jordi Hays?

  Which is a product they launched this week, right?

• 38:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, just focusing yourself, maybe. I don't know.

• 38:12Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, over in Silicon Land.

• 38:14John Coogan?

  Silicon Land.

• 38:15Jordi Hays?

  Greg says, "GB200 has really been enabling us to do some amazing things."

• 38:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. It is remarkable how You know, relatively slow the rollout has been, obviously it's been very quick, but but it does take time from the time that Nvidia announces these chips to actually fabbing them, racking them, wiring them up, getting ready to train new models. And so.

• 38:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think Dean Ball had a new post today and he said, like, you know, companies don't even have Blackwells yet. Like, we've even seen, there's no models that have been trained on Blackwell.

• 38:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:47Speaker 03

  So it's like, it's gonna get ready to see some AI progress.

• 38:51Jordi Hays?

  We got Mike Isaac in the chat. He says, not good comms.

• 38:55John Coogan?

  Not good comms.

• 38:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm with Mike.

• 38:58John Coogan?

  Expand, Mike, expand.

• 38:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm with Mike on that one.

• 39:00John Coogan?

  Give us your full take. We'll see.

• 39:02Jordi Hays?

  Let me, I'll look up Mike's.

• 39:04John Coogan?

  And I will tell you about Google earnings because we we touched on this, but it's important in the context. So Alphabet's sales hit record, spending to double. They're going all in on AI. Google parent Alphabet reported an 18% jump in fourth quarter revenue driven by growth in digital advertising.

• 39:23Jordi Hays?

  Before we go into this, I did, Mike had a banger yesterday. He said, by the number of OpenAI employees I see tweeting about Anthropic, Super Bowl ad, Anthropic should be paying OpenAI earned media fees.

• 39:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was a good take.

• 39:34Jordi Hays?

  Got him. Got him.

• 39:37John Coogan?

  Sales reached nearly $114 billion ahead of analyst expectations. Net income, $34.5 billion, a 30% increase compared with the period a year earlier. The company reported a record $403 billion in sales for 2025. Profit, $132 billion. Not too bad. Alphabet shares were sort of all over the place. The Wall Street Journal printed that they went down 1% after our trade, but there's a lot going on. Google, like other technology companies, plans to spend tens of billions of dollars to develop AI models and build the data centers needed to train and run them. The company said it expected to spend between $175 billion

• 40:16John Coogan?

  and $185 billion in CapEx in 2026, up from $91 billion to $93 billion in 2025. So they're like doubling, which is. It's exponential growth, baby. Get ready for some AI progress.

• 40:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, somebody, I don't have it pulled up, but somebody was saying that the 2026 projected capex will be more than the lifetime capex for Google up to 2021. So in a single year, they're going to eclipse that, which is just insane. Bucow had a good take. He said, Google capex on purpose. Tell the market this is what it will take to defeat us before IPOs hit. Yeah, certainly nerve wracking if you're competing with them, but they have the edge on the capital side and the capital war over Anthropic and OpenAI, but the race is still real.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen and spend with a Phantom card. The Wall Street Journal had some more context on Google. Google leans hard into its AI winter status, AI winner status, not AI winter. Ad and cloud growth acceleration justify the recent surge in Alphabet stock, but blowout capex forecast still takes one's breath away. The motto for the artificial intelligence race today should be, if you've got it, spend it. That's a message that Meta Platforms took to heart during its fourth quarter report last week when the Facebook and Instagram parent announced plans to spend up to 135 billion on capex compared to about 72 billion last year. Google managed to up

• 41:53John Coogan?

  the ante Wednesday with its own plan to spend as much as 185 billion this year, which would be about doubles last year's outlay. Google's annual revenue has now topped 400 billion, about twice as large as Meta's. Still, that new spending target, even for a company that has been firing all cylinders lately, takes one's breath away. The stock price slipped in after-hours trading after its fourth quarter report and conference call. Google has both the political and financial capital to lay such a bet. The company's Gemini 3 model has put it on top of a heap of performance for AI models. While the unmatched distribution of its search engine and products like Gmail have quickly driven adoption, Google said Wednesday that it has more than 750 million monthly

• 42:34John Coogan?

  active users just on its Gemini app, which only represents a portion of Gemini's actual users because it's vended into all the different products. What's going on in the chat?

• 42:43Jordi Hays?

  4O Army has entered the chat.

• 42:46John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 42:46Jordi Hays?

  They're hitting the chat with hashtag keep4o.

• 42:49John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 42:50Jordi Hays?

  They want to be heard by Sam Altman.

• 42:52John Coogan?

  Well, it's not, it's not keep4o, it hasn't 4O been deprecated and so

• 42:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they want it back.

• 42:57John Coogan?

  Shouldn't they upgrade the, update the hashtag to say like bring back 4O?

• 43:01Jordi Hays?

  Revive 4O.

• 43:02John Coogan?

  Revive 4O?

• 43:03Speaker 03

  It's actually not leaving till February 13th.

• 43:05John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, so there is time to, to reverse the decision. I am interested to know about the, the operating cost of keeping 4O alive because it feels like if it runs on old hardware...

• 43:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, that was clearly something people were willing to, willing to pay for.

• 43:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, can't you just kind of like just leave it in the corner and just like a hand of runs? It was, you know, maybe more of like a user behavior decision than a financial one, because it seems like, like running legacy models gets really profitable.

• 43:31Jordi Hays?

  Hunter Rice has canceled 4O.

• 43:32John Coogan?

  Okay. The strong reception of Gemini along with Google's victory over the federal government's efforts to break up the company have cheered investors when sentiment on technology and AI is faltering. Alphabet's stock price has jumped around 20% in the last three months. Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon.com and Broadcom have all lost ground during that time. But capital matters too. And here's where, and here is where's where Google's business model pays off the most. The company's advertising arm has long been a lucrative cash cow that is still managing double-digit growth rates. Growth has actually accelerated with ad revenue up 14% in the fourth quarter compared to 13% in the previous year. That's exactly what we saw at Meta. The ads are getting better, baby. The company's cloud

• 44:16John Coogan?

  computing division was even more impressive with, with revenue growth jumping 48% year over year to hit 17.8 billion. Google Cloud hasn't seen growth like that since early 2021 when the business was still less than a third of its current size. Google Cloud turned in a record 5.3 billion in operating profit in the last quarter, a figure that was 45% higher than Wall Street's targets. The company's booming business produced nearly $165 billion in operating cash flow in...

• 44:45John Coogan?

  In 2025, the highest in the S and P 500. These strong results will help investors digest the latest investment plan. But spending could be spending what could be 40% of annual revenue on AI chips and related infrastructure is still a sizable gamble. Such investments will sharply elevate depreciation charges, which in the latest quarter reduced net income by 18%. Google isn't in the isn't the bargain it was less than a year ago when breakup fears had the stock trading at less than 16 times projected earnings. My question is, like, when does the AI build out stop? Because if you're constantly investing more and more, where does the cash flow come from?

• 45:27John Coogan?

  As an analyst, you look at this and you say, OK, they're spending, you know, 50% of their revenue or 40% of their revenue on the AI build out on data centers. But how long will they need to do this? Like, if they have to do this forever, then you just permanently have a worse business because you're just constantly buying.

• 45:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I mean, you get a massive capability increase, lots of labor, moves into data centers. And eventually.

• 45:57John Coogan?

  The revenue has to spike a lot.

• 45:59Jordi Hays?

  You can enter a scenario where it makes sense to continue to increase capex because revenue is accelerating even faster.

• 46:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, notable that Nvidia is still, you know, trading down today, even even after that update on earnings. Like, you would expect people to look and see like, hey, you know, Jensen had pretty given some pretty kind of wild projections, right, looking out over the next couple of years.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  And you have to imagine.

• 46:27Jordi Hays?

  Google updating here makes it a lot more.

• 46:28John Coogan?

  I mean, they'll spend a lot on TPU, but still they will be buying a lot of Nvidia chips for sure. Really quickly, 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.

• 46:42Jordi Hays?

  Richard says Google is a company that doesn't do hype for them to go and increase capex from 90 billion to 180 billion is probably the most bullish thing long term investors can see as it shows the scale of future revenue growth. I'm shocked that at this stage, most still don't understand this.

• 46:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, so excited about it. What did Doug say over at Fabricated Knowledge? He said, "Google made 130, 163 billion in CFO last year and is now planning to spend 180 billion in CapEx next year. Now, Deaf think acceleration is coming, but wowza. I'd rather go bankrupt than lose the race." Quoting Sergey. The trailing 12 months of free cash flow is staggering over there. "Gonna make 200 billion in cash flow this year, still less than CapEx for now. Also gonna have 80 billion in net cash and probably 100 billion in myriad minority illiquid equity stakes." So yeah, they own like SpaceX and a bunch of-

• 47:39Jordi Hays?

  Waymo.

• 47:39John Coogan?

  Waymo. "With current rates of growth, they can raise 300 billion in 2030 without even going into debt." Totally agree, but this feels pretty close to the pedal to the metal to me, says Doug. So.

• 47:50Jordi Hays?

  Joe Weisenthal says, "The average person on Earth is watching 25 YouTube Shorts every single day. YouTube Shorts average 200 billion daily views."

• 48:00John Coogan?

  That's a lot.

• 48:01Jordi Hays?

  That's just insane.

• 48:03John Coogan?

  That's a lot. I mean, you can watch a YouTube Short in like, what, 5 seconds on average, right? Because you skip one, you watch one for 5 seconds, one for 15 seconds. So, I mean, 25 YouTube Shorts, that feels like maybe 5 or 10 minutes of browsing, but still like, pretty staggering.

• 48:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I haven't migrated any, like, I don't scroll on YouTube Shorts yet. I find if I search for something, like, let's say I'm looking up a car, it's nice to get a 60-second explanation of it if I don't have time to like, watch a review. But I'm not like, sitting there scrolling.

• 48:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, it still serves-

• 48:37Jordi Hays?

  But clearly, a lot of people are.

• 48:38John Coogan?

  But I rarely scroll through, whereas on Instagram, I will scroll the feed of reels. Yeah. Staying in the content world, Kalshi shared that Just In YouTube generated over 60 billion last year, more than Netflix. And Polly Mouse says, "YouTube is beating Netflix with this really sneaky content strategy in which their creators make stuff people want to see and are then rewarded for it with views and money." And it is a simple encapsulation of the YouTube.

• 49:06Jordi Hays?

  Netflix hates this one.

• 49:07John Coogan?

  One weird trick. UGC. UGC is a big, big business. Who would have thought? But yeah, the, the, the scale of the quality. I'm, I'm, I'm hoping we're going to talk to Mr. Beast about his outlook on, on YouTube and how it's changing soon because he's, he's taken it in such a incredible direction where the content is Netflix quality. I mean, he sells it to Amazon. So he's certainly, certainly there. In the, the antitrust division of the Department of Justice posted an update today. The DOJ antitrust division filed notice that it will cross appeal from the remedies decision in its case against Google's unlawful monopolization of internet search and search advertising.

• 49:51John Coogan?

  So there's, there's still hashing that out. Let me tell you about Labelbox, reinforcement learning environments, voice, robotics, evals and expert human data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. So big tech is, is throwing cash into India in its quest for AI supremacy. We talked about this story a little bit yesterday. We couldn't get to the bottom of.

• 50:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Bloomberg, yeah, Bloomberg had a story that.

• 50:15John Coogan?

  It's about the facts.

• 50:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, effectively Google's scaling square footage.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 50:20Jordi Hays?

  In India pretty dramatically.

• 50:21John Coogan?

  Yes. And, and the question was, you know, why are they scaling it up at all? They're, they're, they're investing so much in capex and servers and digital workers. But of course they need humans as well. So American tech behemoths are racing to establish leadership in artificial intelligence, not just in the US, but also around the world. India is welcoming them with open arms, says the Wall Street Journal. India is becoming one of the hottest markets globally for AI, for US AI titans, looking to cater to the country's massive and digitally savvy population. Looking to attract more tech investments, the Indian government announced plans over the weekend to give tech firms a 20-year tax break on overseas revenue gleaned from global data services based in India.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  So you go and you set up a data center or you set up a business, a tech business, you're making money off of that. Whole, you know, data center or whatever you're selling in terms of software and you don't have to pay taxes to India for 20 years. That's a long, long time.

• 51:20Jordi Hays?

  Techno chief called this out yesterday.

• 51:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. The move is part of the Indians, the Indian government's push to make the country a major provider of AI services, including low-cost tools to solve local problems while leaving cutting-edge innovation to deep-pocketed firms in the US and China. This will give India the opportunity to become a major AI hub, said India's technology minister. In the past few months, US tech companies have unveiled tens of billions of dollars in investment in Indian data centers as they race to build AI infrastructure around the world. In October, Google announced a $15 billion investment in data centers in southeast, southeastern India, as well as undersea cable links in what the company describes as its largest single AI hub outside the United States. In December, Microsoft unveiled its largest

• 52:03John Coogan?

  ever investment in Asia with a $17.5 billion pledge to develop the country's cloud and AI infrastructure. Amazon also pledged $35 billion across its operations in India up until 2030. The US's big, the big US data center firms, known as hyperscalers, are drawn to a country whose 1.4 billion consumers are some of the most prolific users of data and AI chatbots. Very interesting. Anyway, there's more news from Nvidia in the information. Nvidia is delaying a new gaming chip due to memory shortage. This is the line you don't want to cross. The gamers are going to rise up and they're going to storm the data centers and they will, they will be, they will be putting the screws.

• 52:45Jordi Hays?

  They will get their, they will get their chips one way or another.

• 52:47John Coogan?

  They will. They'll be calling their representatives, calling their senators. Pause AI has a new cohort. If you don't give me a new gaming graphics card to play the latest games.

• 52:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So it's the first time in 30 years it won't release one in the calendar year.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Every year the

• 53:05Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 53:06John Coogan?

  1080 Ti, 2080, 3080. These were great graphics cards and now no longer. Just delaying it. I, I mean, I guess you can use cloud gaming or something, but also it does feel like a lot of video games have sort of maxed out what they can do with stock graphics cards and so there isn't as much, as much need to upgrade every year. What do you think?

• 53:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, also with, with Genie 3, it's like we're getting new enhancements in gaming.

• 53:34John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 53:35Jordi Hays?

  So they should be happy about this. You'll, you'll own nothing and be happy.

• 53:38John Coogan?

  How much Genie 3 did you play yesterday, Tyler? It's fun, right? It's fun, so you play it?

• 53:43Speaker 03

  Uh, I thought about playing it.

• 53:45John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, you thought about playing it. But the mechanics weren't there, right?

• 53:49Speaker 03

  The next Genie 4, Genie 4, I'm gonna beat DAU.

• 53:51John Coogan?

  That's the, that's the, that's the goalpost currently. I want mechanics, I want tire changes, gas refill as I'm driving the Nürburgring in my Genie 3 car simulator, race simulator. Anyway, uh, memory chips are a key component of GPUs. Very excited to ask Sam Altman about the various pieces of the AI bottleneck since-

• 54:12Jordi Hays?

  We should ask him about world models, too.

• 54:13John Coogan?

  That would be interesting. I, you know, Sora-

• 54:15Jordi Hays?

  He's not, he's not one to not launch-

• 54:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's launched a lot of stuff. And, yeah, Ben Thompson has had this take for a while that AI-generated video is the metaverse. And, and that's what you're seeing with Meta Vibes, that's what you're seeing with Sora. This is sort of where things go. Nvidia is also slashing production of its current line of gaming chips, the GeForce RTX 50 GPUs. Because of the memory shortage, one of the people said. Prices of Nvidia's latest gaming GPUs have already risen at retail stores and websites doing, due to their scarcity over the past year. I wonder how much it costs to actually build a modern gaming PC these days because, um, it's been a while. It used to be like a few thousand dollars would get you sort of like a top-tier setup.

• 55:00John Coogan?

  And I wonder, I wonder how, uh, what it's looking like now with all the shortages. It's possible to be sure that Nvidia executives could still change their mind and release a gaming chip if the market improves, as the company is known for being flexible and moving quickly, says the information. Demand for commuter memory chips has skyrocketed due to the AI boom as they are needed in large quantities to train and operate machine learning models. Memory chips act as warehouses for storing data. The memory chip shortage is expected to lead to higher prices in consumer electronics. Last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the rising prices of memory chips would have an impact on the company's March quarter margins. He's also saying that he's having trouble getting line time at TSMC to some extent.

• 55:42John Coogan?

  And so, there's a lot of bottlenecks that are working their way through all the technology markets. He hinted that the impact would be greater in the future, noting, "We do continue to see market pricing for memory increasing significantly. As always, we'll look at a range of options to deal with that." Gaming AI chips use different types of memory, but both are made of the same raw materials coming from one of the three main suppliers, Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix, and Micron Technologies.

• 56:11Jordi Hays?

  Well, we have our first guest to the show.

• 56:13John Coogan?

  Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. He's in the restroom waiting room. Welcome to the show, Sam. How are you doing?

• 56:18Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 56:19Sam Altman?

  Good. Thank you, guys, for having me back.

• 56:20John Coogan?

  Thanks so much.

• 56:21Jordi Hays?

  Big day.

• 56:22John Coogan?

  Big day. Kick us off with, where should we start? Should we start with the model or Frontier?

• 56:28Sam Altman?

  Can we start with the model just because I'm?

• 56:29John Coogan?

  Let's do it. Yeah, absolutely. Break it down. What did you launch?

• 56:32Sam Altman?

  So we launched 5.3 Codex. It is, I think, the best coding model in the world. We took a lot of the feedback that people had about 5.2, 5.2 Codex and got it into one model. It is much smarter at programming, but it's also way faster. You can interact with it mid-turn. I think it's got a much better personality. It's really good at computer use. So it feels like a very big step forward. It was funny as we were deploying it this morning, a couple of very, like, extremely experts using these models noticed and said, man, something's really different with Codex. And they like caught it mid-deploy. So I think you can really feel it quickly.

• 57:07John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 57:07Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you're saying people outside of OpenAI, just everyday users?

• 57:10Sam Altman?

  Yeah, like the half hour that we put it out before we, you know?

• 57:13John Coogan?

  Talk about interacting with it mid-turn. How does that work? Why is that important? What does that unlock?

• 57:19Sam Altman?

  So people are starting to use these, these tools for very long pieces of work at one time, you know, multi-hour tasks. And sometimes you don't specify it correctly, right? Sometimes something's not set up right. Something, the model just screws up. The ability, they can do amazing things with no steering, but they can do much more amazing things if you steer them along the way. So this has been, this is one of the things I felt most new about this model.

• 57:41John Coogan?

  So talk about orchestration, how this fits into Frontier? Because I imagine that.

• 57:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one second. It's notable, like, if you see a coworker making a mistake

• 57:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:50Jordi Hays?

  and you don't interrupt them, that's rude, right?

• 57:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:52Jordi Hays?

  Like, it's deeply inefficient.

• 57:55Sam Altman?

  It is incredible what these models can do without any feedback. Like, if you think about a new coworker especially, you know, you train them and you give them a lot of feedback early on and they learn the job and you correct them and they, they kind of get practicing. The models, they will soon do that, but right now they don't do that. So we just rely on either they get it right one shot or we collect them, correct them along the way.

• 58:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, you know, I think there's a lot of people that are running multiple agents and multiple tabs. They're starting to think about orchestration. It feels like Frontier is a piece of that. But if you're interacting with a model that's running midterm, like, how does the user experience change for developers with 5.3? And then what will it look like in the Frontier world?

• 58:38Sam Altman?

  I think we will be heading towards a workflow where a lot of people just feel like they're managing a team of agents. And they'll keep, as the agents get better, they'll keep operating at a higher and higher level of abstraction, which at least watching what's happening so far is a, is a jump that people are going to make pretty well. The, the models are so good now. There's such a capability overhang that building better tools to let people do that, which the Codex app that we launched on Monday was a great step forward for, will be very, very important. But you will be managing very complex workflows. The agents will keep getting better. So you'll keep working at the maximum of your management bandwidth or cognitive ability to keep track of all the stuff. And the tools to make that

• 59:23Sam Altman?

  easy to do will matter, I think, more than intelligence for a little while because there's such an intelligence overhang already.

• 59:31John Coogan?

  What's the role of a forward deployed engineer today at OpenAI towards the end of the year? Capability overhang that feels like raw meat for a, for a forward deployed engineer. It's like the, like they solve that problem, right?

• 59:44Sam Altman?

  Yeah. I mean, look, eventually, the models will get so good that they'll help companies deploy themselves. And the forward deployed engineers will again get to work at a higher level of abstraction. But for now, you go into a company that is not AI native and say, okay, you've said you want us, you know, they say they want to deploy AI. They really are not sure what to do. How do I hook this up to my systems? Do I need to fine tune a model on my code base? How do I think about orchestrating agents and using things from different companies? Most of all, or at least what we hear most frequently is, how do I think about security of my data? And how do I know that these like AI coworking agents are not going to go access a bunch of information and share it in ways they shouldn't, or get, you know, a context exploit or something like that?

• 1:00:29Sam Altman?

  So the forward deployed engineers take this incredible new technology and a platform like Frontier and say, we will connect your company to an AI platform so that you can use all these agents and workflows and everything else you want.

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  How important are these metaphors or how temporary are they? I was very interested in reading about Gastown and you have these pole cats and it's this whole Mad Max world and that feels like maybe just a temporary aberration where you're setting up agents for specific tasks, but also that could be incredibly valuable in explaining to a large corporation of how they're going to integrate AI across the whole organization.

• 1:01:06Sam Altman?

  Yeah, I suspect like everything else that's happening when an industry is moving so fast, all of this is somewhat temporary on like a long enough time scale. And you, as these models become more capable and these agents are operating on very long time horizons with the ability to just kind of figure it out and our trust in their robustness keeps going up, then maybe you don't need a lot of the abstractions we need today. You know, maybe you just like have a, a single AI bot that runs at your company and you can say, hey, I want to like launch this new product and it does everything an ambitious person would do. But that's not where we are today.

• 1:01:49Sam Altman?

  So today we have to put in a little more work to get the pieces put together.

• 1:01:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about the, the meter benchmark for long task horizon? You're at the top of the charts. At the same time, it feels like we might need a new chart if we're talking about agent swarms because they'll be able to do things that go for weeks, but they will subdivide the work. There's some subdivision that happens within a reasoning model, but it doesn't truly parallelize, at least that I'm aware of. So what does it look like in a world where you go to a model, but now it's spinning up a whole bunch of different models underneath?

• 1:02:24Sam Altman?

  I think there's two of the key insights of the whole field are in this question. Number one, the implication that no chart in AI lasts more than a few years is right. And like this one, kind of, you know, we'll see how much longer it's really useful. The second is a lot of people thought that, okay, we're going to just need a super long task and a super long task horizon. So we need a super long context. And definitely what people have already seen with coding agents is by agents breaking up work, orchestrating it well, farming it off to subagents, even with the current limitations of the technology, we can do something, which should not be surprising because it's similar to how people do things and get amazing amounts of work done. So that's been cool to watch. I think that will keep going.

• 1:03:12Sam Altman?

  A joke that some people at OpenAI make is that soon the chart that matters is just going to be GDP impact. And then the question is, what's the one that comes after that? But everything else, these, a lot of these proxy metrics, there's now so much economic value in what the models are doing.

• 1:03:25Jordi Hays?

  What do you think could come after?

• 1:03:27Sam Altman?

  I have no idea. Do you have an opinion?

• 1:03:29John Coogan?

  Happiness?

• 1:03:29Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. When you look, when you look back at some of your, when you look back at some of your blog posts from 10 years ago, your predictions were usually pretty on point.

• 1:03:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:38Jordi Hays?

  Maybe it's harder to predict.

• 1:03:39Sam Altman?

  Thank you. Thank you. I, uh.

• 1:03:41Jordi Hays?

  Specifically, specifically the merge.

• 1:03:43John Coogan?

  Merge, yeah.

• 1:03:44Jordi Hays?

  Like basically calling, I mean, like right now, we're getting, you know, thousands of messages in the chat about 4.0 and you predicted in 2016 that people could, uh, would, would become, uh, you know, very attached to a chatbot.

• 1:03:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:58Sam Altman?

  I'm working on like a big prediction blog post for the next 10 years seems too far, but the next five. But on, because it's like, I'm sure a lot of it'll be wrong and it, you know, it's, it's still fun to try. The, the, the sort of like relationships with chatbots, clearly that's something that we got to worry about more and is no longer an abstract concept. The, even the question of what comes after GDP, like,

• 1:04:28Sam Altman?

  one reason I think that's interesting is the way we measure GDP now could start going down, even though quality of life goes way up.

• 1:04:36Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:04:37Sam Altman?

  And we don't have a lot of practice with things like that, but the, the massively deflationary.

• 1:04:41Jordi Hays?

  Isn't that just Europe?

• 1:04:43Sam Altman?

  Not just Europe. We want quality of life going up too, not just going down, you know?

• 1:04:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:50John Coogan?

  Switching gears, uh, what do you think about the work that, that the NeoLab boom, the research efforts that are happening all over Silicon Valley? It feels like there's, there's an acknowledgement that there's research breakthroughs that need to happen and everyone's taking different, uh, shots at those. Do you think that those companies will just find a breakthrough and join a lab or launch their own products?

• 1:05:13Sam Altman?

  I think it's fantastic, first of all. Um, one of the meta things that we wanted to do when we started with OpenAI is when we started OpenAI is like. There had been a period where the technology industry and Silicon Valley in particular was amazing at new research labs or just doing new research in industry in general. And then it kind of fell apart and there hadn't been a good one in a while. And part of what we hope to show, and this was not only us, like a lot of people were excited about new research labs, is that industry could do research again. So seeing that now become fashionable in all of these new labs, I think it's totally awesome. Some will succeed, some will fail, some will go into some other effort, but having industry support research in startup style, I think it's wonderful.

• 1:05:55Jordi Hays?

  Over the next two years, would you expect to acquire more individual product companies or more research labs?

• 1:06:05Sam Altman?

  Good question.

• 1:06:08Sam Altman?

  I don't have a strong opinion there. I would bet, well, I'd say the very best ones will often look like a mixture of both. Like the one that I have in mind right now is something that very much looks like a mixture of both. So maybe that's, maybe the shape of things to come is that really truly extraordinary product work will have more and more of a research component and it'll be kind of a more of a hybrid thing.

• 1:06:33John Coogan?

  Is data the new oil? Is there value?

• 1:06:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were joking a couple of days ago.

• 1:06:37John Coogan?

  A bunch of data, but they don't understand AI, they don't know how to monetize.

• 1:06:41Jordi Hays?

  Well, and that phrase was effectively wasted a decade ago.

• 1:06:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Jordi Hays?

  And so to say it now sounds really silly.

• 1:06:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:46Jordi Hays?

  But it feels like it could be more true now than ever.

• 1:06:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:51Sam Altman?

  You know, certainly, yeah, man, they really did waste it a decade ago. I was just thinking of the kind of people that used to say that.

• 1:06:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:57Jordi Hays?

  TED Talks.

• 1:06:58John Coogan?

  You're not supposed to call them out. They're nice people over at TED.

• 1:07:04Sam Altman?

  You know, definitely like the sort of the magic relationship of this last eight years, whatever you want to call it, has been like, you know, that we can put in more and more resources, compute data.

• 1:07:21Sam Altman?

  New ideas, whatever, into creating an artifact. And it gets like, the log of it gets better. So you can throw in, you know, that's why we have this huge exponential increase in resources. But we keep getting better and better models. And for all of the concern people have about it's, it's gonna like top out or it's slowing down or whatever. Like, no one's been right about that. I mean, sometimes they, it looked like they were for a couple of months as we digested a new model or came to a new form factor. But it has been incredibly smooth last six or eight years of this. What those resources are, there can be some trade off between. You know, sometimes it's better to spend your money on better data, sometimes on more compute, sometimes something else.

• 1:08:04Sam Altman?

  On the whole, compute power is the new oil is the statement that feels closest to true to me. But there will be other parts too.

• 1:08:15John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Is software dead?

• 1:08:19Sam Altman?

  It's different. It's definitely not dead. But what software, like how you create it, how you're going to use it? How much you're gonna have written for you each time you need it versus how much you'll want sort of a consistent UX? That's all gonna change. You know, there have been a number of these like big sell offs of SaaS stocks over the last few years as these models have rolled out. There, I expect there will continue to be more. I expect there will be big booms in software. I think it's just gonna be volatile for a while as people figure out what this looks like. The statement that someone said to me that has stuck in my mind most of these last couple of weeks is that every company is an API company now, whether they want to be or not.

• 1:09:04Sam Altman?

  Because agents are just going to be able to.

• 1:09:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had, we had Dara, we had Dara from Uber on yesterday and he had a pretty refreshing kind of approach. We were asking about integrating agents with Uber and, and he recognized that, yeah, the ad business could potentially be threatened. If you can order an Uber and chat GPT, but he basically said, like, you have to think of the consumer. The consumer wants to order an Uber via their preferred agent, you should let them. Otherwise, you're, you're gonna have other problems.

• 1:09:34Sam Altman?

  Yeah, that, that is the right take for sure. And I don't, or I think so at least. And. You know, we've been through platform shifts like this before where you, I mean Uber wouldn't have existed without one. It wasn't until iPhone where you could like have it make sense to order an Uber to write where you were as you're out in the world. So I think there will be totally new things that happen, other things you'll use in new ways, but definitely as I've started using Codex, my excitement about having agents go off and do things for me and still use other services, pay other services. I'm sure we'll need to figure out new business models and how revenue gets shared around, but that will happen.

• 1:10:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, talk more about Codex Desktop.

• 1:10:12Jordi Hays?

  One more question on SaaS. Have any public market SaaS companies tried to get a soft landing with OpenAI? And do you think there's any, there's, there's any value? Just let's say.

• 1:10:26Sam Altman?

  No one has, no public SaaS companies that I'm aware of have tried that with OpenAI.

• 1:10:31Jordi Hays?

  But some of them, some of them, some of them will certainly be durable and are on sale right now and potentially just need new energy and, and need kind of a new, an entirely new approach and maybe OpenAI could provide that.

• 1:10:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:46Sam Altman?

  Yeah, I think some will be incredibly valuable. Some do feel like a thinner layer now.

• 1:10:52Sam Altman?

  But I don't know, like I was talking recently to a bunch of SaaS companies and they do not, they do not feel unexcited. Like they're like, we're going to go through a big transformation here and you know, yeah, sure. Other people can instantly write software now, but so can we. And we got a great system of record and seems reasonable. Some will make it, of course.

• 1:11:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Talk more about the, the Codex Desktop rollout. It feels like

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  you know, successful amount of downloads, but, but key, like a shift for, you know, people who are maybe lightly technical, but don't have time to set up an IDE and configure an environment to actually start writing software. I want to know about plans to integrate to the phone. That was a big moment, I think, for a lot of people with the, the Claude bot, Molt bot, open claw thing was like, oh, I can text something and it will go and write code and that's valuable and that unlocks a new agentic experience. Like where do you see the Codex Desktop ecosystem going?

• 1:11:54Sam Altman?

  I am so Codex Desktop has been a somewhat of a surprise to me in terms of how much people love it, including how much I love it myself. You know, the I think it's a great example of 10% of polish of the experience of using these models, especially when there's so much capability overhang, goes an extremely long way to what you can build and how you interact with this stuff. Of course, we should have an ability to kick off new tasks from mobile and we'll do that. I mean, really what you want is like your single AI that's working for you on a unified backend, access to all of your data and your ideas and your stuff and your memory and your all the context and the ability to work across a lot of surfaces.

• 1:12:36Sam Altman?

  And often you'll be at your desktop. Often you'll be on your phone and you just want to add something in. But it is a pretty profound shift in my own workflow, not just for coding tasks, but more general purpose tasks. It's still kind of hard to use if you're not at least reasonably technical, but obviously we'll find a version of this product that can do other knowledge work tasks and control your computer and things like that, where you don't have to be. And it'll bring the magic of building stuff really to a lot of people, because even if you never look at code, you'll be able to build something reasonably sophisticated. One of the things that I have built when I was playing around with the new Codex app is this thing I had always wanted, just like

• 1:13:19Sam Altman?

  this magic auto completing to do list. I really work with to do lists and this idea that I could just put tasks in and it would try to go do them. If it could complete them, it could complete them. If it needed questions, it would ask me questions. If it needed, you know, if I had to do something, I could still do it the old fashioned way. But an interface like that where, you know, all the stuff you want to do, you just sort of explain to a computer or your AI and it tries to go off and do them. And sure, if you're on your phone, you're gonna just add it. A task on your phone, or you know, if you want to easily import something from email, you're going to do that, like, felt, feels really good. So I'm excited about all of the ways that this will just become a general knowledge work agent.

• 1:14:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:00Jordi Hays?

  Were you unsurprised to see a product like OpenClaw come from open source? Because it's certainly that kind of user experience is not, I would imagine this is something that you knew would be a thing. And yet, I think, part of the, the magic of OpenClaw is that it would be very, very difficult for a large tech company.

• 1:14:22John Coogan?

  Peter didn't make many phone calls to hyperscalers to say, hey, I'm going to be integrating with your API.

• 1:14:27Jordi Hays?

  Do you mind?

• 1:14:28John Coogan?

  It just went out.

• 1:14:29Jordi Hays?

  And you guys, you know, and, and when I think back on like the Sky acquisition,

• 1:14:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:33Jordi Hays?

  this, this kind of experience was probably very top of mind and things that you're working towards internally.

• 1:14:39Sam Altman?

  I love the spirit of everything about OpenClaw.

• 1:14:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:43Sam Altman?

  And you are totally right that it's much easier to imagine a one person, open source project doing something like that than a company who is going to be afraid of lawsuits, data privacy and everything else. Um, you know, they're like, I think this is kind of how innovation works. There, there's something like that starts, it's clearly amazing. There will be a way to make a mass market version of that product, but letting the builders build the equivalent of the homebrew, homebrew computer club spirit go here is so important.

• 1:15:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. Uh, can we switch to social? I feel like, if I Google Sam Altman's social, I get pure AI and Sora, and then also demand or, or predictions about a human only social network. Where do you see social going broadly? How do you want to integrate it with it and power it in the future?

• 1:15:31Sam Altman?

  I, the Molebook thing was like a very interesting social experiment to watch, uh, and I think points to. Agents interacting in some sort of social space, hopefully on behalf of people, at least in some degrees, could be quite interesting. I don't think we know what to do there yet, but it feels like social is going to change a lot. And I am interested in the space of what a social experience can look like when your agent is talking to my agent and coming up with new stuff. Clearly, putting like a lot of AI bots on the existing social platforms is just making everyone crazy and not that fun. So that's not the right answer. But I

• 1:16:13Sam Altman?

  think we can design something new for what this technology is capable of that will feel good and useful.

• 1:16:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is there, is there a solution to the bot problem that's just all the labs sort of integrating with all the other platforms? And even if you can't detect it's AI-generated, you can literally say, we just, we just generated those tokens. Like those exact tokens are in our database.

• 1:16:37Sam Altman?

  You probably can't do that because their open source models are like good enough to write tweets at this point.

• 1:16:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:44Sam Altman?

  I am excited about sort of like assertion of humanity instead of trying to like detection of AI as a, as a thing here. I don't know if the social platforms, it's like in their interest to solve this. It is caused, it's creating like, at least in the short term, it creates like a lot of engagement and increased usage. So I believe they could solve it if they wanted to. I'm not sure it's in their interest. I'm actually not even like, it is, I don't like it, but it is, some people do seem to enjoy it.

• 1:17:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about where Sora as, as a video generation model is going? It feels like tool use is maybe under discussed, you know, adding, adding reasoning. It's not just the diffusion model. It's giving these models the ability to make linear cuts and overlay motion graphics. And when I scroll the Instagram reels that I see, they're like vibe reels with cut, cutouts and it flips negative and it's all color graded and stuff that like, yeah, you could probably diffuse it all, but it's pretty cool just to teach a model to also use After Effects or whatever video, you know, motion graphics suite you want to use. Is that an interesting unlock? What do you see going on?

• 1:17:55Sam Altman?

  So all of that stuff will happen, and I agree with you, the models will get really great at doing that. People love generating videos.

• 1:18:02Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:18:02Sam Altman?

  I would say people, we have not yet found a way that people really love watching other people's videos. This is true for a lot of other AI, like they love to, you know, people love talking to ChatGPT or whatever. It's not that compelling, but for most people to like read other people's ChatGPT generation. So I think there is something.

• 1:18:18Jordi Hays?

  But isn't that for all writing and all video?

• 1:18:21Sam Altman?

  Yeah, it seems stronger to me in this case than the general case, but maybe you're right. Maybe this is.

• 1:18:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but if, but if, if somebody says, hey, I generated a 15 minute video, I'm, I'm really excited for you to watch it. And you watch the first 10 seconds and you're not that captured by it. I don't care that it was human made.

• 1:18:37Sam Altman?

  Yeah, yeah. May, maybe you're right. And this is, it's not, it's not a special case.

• 1:18:42John Coogan?

  Do you see that in the data with, with Sora downloads? Because I've noticed that I'll generate stuff on Sora, download it and share it to a group chat. And then it's this little in-joke that me and five other people get. And we see this like family group chats of, oh, it's our dog and our kids. But like, there's not really like, okay, yeah, this is a business. You know, everyone likes this.

• 1:19:02Sam Altman?

  Absolutely. I would say that the most common use case is something like that.

• 1:19:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:19:06Sam Altman?

  You know, like memes on group chats is a real killer use case.

• 1:19:10John Coogan?

  How is the Disney rollout going? I was super excited about it. Jordy was extremely bullish on it from a business strategy perspective.

• 1:19:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when you look at how image models have grown various LLMs historically, and now you're going to have an image, image and video model that can do something that no other LLM can do, at least legally.

• 1:19:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. And here's Bob Iger joining OpenAI.

• 1:19:32Sam Altman?

  Bob Iger, I love it. No.

• 1:19:35John Coogan?

  Because he's going to be looking for a job in.

• 1:19:37Jordi Hays?

  Free agent.

• 1:19:38John Coogan?

  He's a free agent. You gotta pick him up.

• 1:19:39Sam Altman?

  Hit him up for us, you know, do some recruiting. That'd be, that'd be great. The, I think that generating characters in images and videos is going to be very important to people and they really like that. Like other, like we were saying, otherwise, I don't think many people like want to watch me and some Star Wars character doing something together, but I might think it's cool.

• 1:20:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:02Sam Altman?

  It's, you know, there, there's like a real trend going on right now with ChatGPT, where it's make a caricature of me and my job based off of everything you know about me.

• 1:20:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:10Sam Altman?

  And those kinds of things, people actually do like looking at other people's.

• 1:20:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:15Sam Altman?

  Media.

• 1:20:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's almost like a like a face filter or something. There's like enough of it. It's the Studio Ghibli moment. Like, there's enough of the humans still in there that it's not. It's not. You can't. Yours is not the same as mine. So it's still personalized.

• 1:20:28Sam Altman?

  It's personalized and it says something about you and, you know, the like, a lot of these things. A lot of what's gone viral before with ImageGen, I think it's like if you can make people look a little bit more attractive or cool than they look in than they are in real life.

• 1:20:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:43Sam Altman?

  Without sort of having to ask for that.

• 1:20:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about the actual the actual rollout? We were we were debating between like, open the floodgates, you can generate any Disney property versus like, it's one character at a time. Spider-Man week and everyone's posting Spider-Man and then it's it's, you know, Mickey Mouse week and there's another viral moment.

• 1:21:01Sam Altman?

  I'm not sure what the team is planning there. I know Disney's had some different opinions about how they what they want to do and try to be a good partner there. But I'd be excited to open the floodgates personally.

• 1:21:09John Coogan?

  Oh, that'd be fun. Cool. Talk about your first, speaking of videos, your first Super Bowl ad. It felt like not generated, lots of motion graphics, the black dots coming together. Like, what was the what was the goal with that ad? Who were you trying to speak to? It didn't feel like a direct response QR code, download the app.

• 1:21:29Sam Altman?

  No.

• 1:21:30John Coogan?

  What was the mission?

• 1:21:31Sam Altman?

  Um, I love that ad. I think that was such a cool one. It was clearly not meant to be like a mass market or direct response ad.

• 1:21:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:40Sam Altman?

  But, you know, speaking to the like,

• 1:21:44Sam Altman?

  people who are at the center of this revolution and just trying to like, celebrate everything that has come before and everything that will come after.

• 1:21:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:54Sam Altman?

  It, we didn't hear a lot about it from like, average users of ChatGPT, but we heard a lot about it from like, researchers in the field and a lot of resonance there. It was definitely not generated. It was done the old fashioned way. And, you know, it had like, a lot of people loved it, a lot of people hated it. And then many people in the middle didn't get it and I felt okay about that.

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  That's a great analogy.

• 1:22:15Sam Altman?

  I like our ad for Sunday.

• 1:22:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:17Sam Altman?

  It's about Codex, no surprise, but.

• 1:22:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about the evolution of the advertising to be more just clear about the actual use case, the value. Like, what are you trying to say with your advertising strategy now as it refers, as it relates to like, video?

• 1:22:34Sam Altman?

  Um.

• 1:22:38Sam Altman?

  Well, the thing I would most like us to say, and I think this is a new challenge, given where the models are, is to teach people what they can go do with AI.

• 1:22:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:49Sam Altman?

  I mean, AI is now unbelievably capable in most of the world. It's still like asking it basic questions on ChatGPT. Everyone can go build amazing things now. Everyone can go do all kinds of work. Scientists are going to make new discoveries. And I'd like to, you know, to the degree that advertising we do can teach people how to use this, I think that'd be awesome.

• 1:23:08John Coogan?

  Yes, the KPI is like reduce the capability overhang broadly.

• 1:23:13Sam Altman?

  I think that's should be a general KPI for us, not just of our ads.

• 1:23:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:18Sam Altman?

  The products that we build, how we teach people to use those products, like the that feels very important.

• 1:23:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anthropic also has a bunch of ads in the Super Bowl. Seems like they run a ton.

• 1:23:29Jordi Hays?

  Damn, heard.

• 1:23:29John Coogan?

  What do you think that they're getting wrong about about their characterization of how ads will roll out in chat apps?

• 1:23:41Sam Altman?

  Well, it's just wrong. Like the the main thing that I think is in, we're not stupid. We respect our users. We understand that if we did something like what those ads depict, people would rightfully stop using the product.

• 1:23:56Sam Altman?

  No one, like our first principle with ads is that we're not going to put stuff into the LLM stream. That would feel crazy dystopic, like bad sci fi movie. So the main thing that's wrong with the ads is like using a deceptive ad to criticize deceptive ads feels, I don't know, something doesn't sit right with me about that.

• 1:24:17Jordi Hays?

  I asked I asked Claude what if if what the definition of playing dirty? And it said, what did it say? Misleading others about your intentions, hiding information or creating false impressions.

• 1:24:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:34Jordi Hays?

  Thought it was a little dirty. I thought it was well played, but it was.

• 1:24:37Sam Altman?

  It was it was well played for sure. And it was a funny ad and and they, you know, like the sort of the stuff about the chat GPT personality that most annoys me, which we'll fix very soon. I thought they nailed in the ad. So that part was funny.

• 1:24:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:51Sam Altman?

  Um, but I don't know, you know, like, I also, like, I think it's great for them not to do ads. We have a different shaped business. I did notice that they said in their thing, like, we may later revise this decision and we'll explain why. So.

• 1:25:05Jordi Hays?

  Um, yeah, the the

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  We're pro ads.

• 1:25:08Jordi Hays?

  The blog post was a kind of did a good job of disarming the pro ad people gave themselves an out

• 1:25:15John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:25:16Jordi Hays?

  in the future. Uh, do you think they care?

• 1:25:18Sam Altman?

  I think it doesn't matter. Like, I think it's a sideshow. You know, people are excited for a food fight and uh, between companies, but like the the amazing capabilities of these models, the product, the kind of like, the groundswell of excitement around Codex, that feels way more important to me.

• 1:25:37John Coogan?

  How do you stop the pausing that happens in voice mode? Do you need new hardware for that? Or is it a model capability thing?

• 1:25:44Sam Altman?

  We need a new model. Uh, we may need some new hardware too, but mostly we just need a new model. I think we will have a great voice mode.

• 1:25:52Sam Altman?

  By the end of this year.

• 1:25:53John Coogan?

  What's the bigger bottleneck? Energy or chips?

• 1:25:56Sam Altman?

  It goes back and forth. Uh, right now, again, it's chips.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  Chips. Is there anything?

• 1:26:00Sam Altman?

  But it, you know, be different, different times.

• 1:26:02John Coogan?

  Is there anything we, like, society, America, should be doing more aggressively to increase the supply of fabs?

• 1:26:09Sam Altman?

  Um.

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  A fab could ask.

• 1:26:11Sam Altman?

  Yeah, I think it is.

• 1:26:15Sam Altman?

  Well, it may get solved on its own. It may, like, normal capitalism may solve it, but I think somehow deciding as a society that we are going to increase the wafer capacity of the world and we're going to fund that. Uh, and we're going to get, you know, the whole supply chain and the talented people we need to make that happen would be a very good thing to do.

• 1:26:34John Coogan?

  Do you think there's an upper bound on model IQ? Like, the the race right now is is you're smart, but you're not smart for days. You're smart for hours. Can you go much farther and get much smarter?

• 1:26:49Sam Altman?

  It seems certain. Upper bound, I don't know. I don't know how to think about that question yet.

• 1:26:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I can't even reason about what 2000 IQ looks like, you know, like I don't know what that means.

• 1:27:01Sam Altman?

  It's funny you say, I mean, I can't reason about what it means to think about a problem for like 10,000 human years.

• 1:27:07John Coogan?

  That's another good one.

• 1:27:09Sam Altman?

  Yeah, but maybe IQ is gonna feel even weirder. I

• 1:27:15Sam Altman?

  I don't know. I feel like I somehow feel like this isn't going to feel as strange as it sounds. And the, like, for a bunch of reasons, we're so focused on other people, we're so focused on our own lives, we're so focused, we have such a human centric nature that like, okay, this thing is really smart. It's inventing new science for us. It's running companies for us. It's doing all the stuff. And that sounds like it should be impossibly weird, and I think it'll just be very weird.

• 1:27:42Jordi Hays?

  Do you think space data centers will provide a meaningful amount of compute for OpenAI in the next two to three years, five years?

• 1:27:51Sam Altman?

  No.

• 1:27:52Jordi Hays?

  10 years?

• 1:27:54Sam Altman?

  Um.

• 1:27:55John Coogan?

  You just keep going. 10,000 years.

• 1:27:58Sam Altman?

  I I wish you good luck.

• 1:28:01John Coogan?

  Okay. The funny thing about the whole like back and forth about ads is that in our world, the criticism is that you didn't launch ads early enough. Is there a world where you wish you launched earlier? How is the actual rollout going? Are advertisers happy? Do you have like a really long roadmap? Or do you think you'll be faster at catching up to sort of what's frontier in ad?

• 1:28:24Sam Altman?

  We haven't even started to test yet. We start the test soon. But, you know, we're gonna it's gonna take us some number of iterations to figure out the right ad, you know, the right kind of, the right way this all works. Do I wish we had started earlier?

• 1:28:39Sam Altman?

  We have gone from like not a company, you know, three years and three months ago, or something like that, we were like a research lab. And now we are like a pretty big company with a lot of products. So there's many things I wish we had done faster. I think we were correct on the trade off here of how we balance things that we need to do. I wish, you know, we launched this very cool enterprise platform this morning, which we had done earlier too, but had to like deal with the monstrous growth of chat GPT and Codex and all this other stuff.

• 1:29:05John Coogan?

  Good problems to have. Last question for me. What happened to that internal writing model that you use to write the essay? That feels like something that was really cool, but we never really saw the light of day.

• 1:29:20Sam Altman?

  We're going to get a lot of that spirit into a future model. Again, it's like, there's so much stuff happening.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:28Sam Altman?

  We have to make these hard prioritization decisions.

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:29:30Sam Altman?

  I would love a cool writing model, not as much as I would love a cool coding model. And it's what is possible now for coding for science, that's the thing I'm most excited about, for accelerating all kinds of research, AI and otherwise, for really accelerating the economy. I think that's like the right thing for us to most prioritize in terms of new capabilities. But yeah, well, like you want, you want a model that can write beautifully because it means it, well, you want to write a model that can write beautifully if it can also think very clearly and express that very clearly. That's just useful in normal work.

• 1:30:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Last question for me. How, how have conversations been with the broad OpenAI leadership team? You guys are in a position where any single word or sentence you say in any situation can be spun into a headline immediately, and then you guys have to go on damage control, kind of correcting the narrative. But of course, the original message is often, or at least the original news is often seen more broadly than the, than the correction. It seems like an interesting challenge.

• 1:30:36Sam Altman?

  It, it is a strange way to live. It, and I don't like, I don't know of any private company that has ever like been so in the news and so under a microscope. And it, you know, at some level, it's frustrating and, you know, we're so squarely in the sights of everybody's anxieties and every competitor trying to take us down. And everybody's like, just what is going to happen with AI to their part of the business or their own lives? That there's like a lot of.

• 1:31:09Sam Altman?

  Plasma looking for an instability to collapse on. In some other sense, though, the the subjective experience of it is we are so busy on so much exciting stuff that it often feels like there's this crazy hurricane turning around us. And when we sit, it's like fairly calm, you know, the media or Twitter goes insane about something one day, they're talking about a crazy meltdown. We're like, that is insane. Like, OK, and people talk about it all day and then later find out it's wrong. Sort of seems like a lot of wasted energy, but we're just like, we have this great new model coming. People are building incredible stuff. Companies are transforming. We're trying to like, figure out how to get more compute and deal with this compute crunch. And we just kind of like, keep going and we're busy. And then if we like, open Twitter,

• 1:31:54Sam Altman?

  pop up our heads and look at the news, it's like, wow, that is an insane, crazy thing happening, completely divorced from reality, or 99% divorced from reality. And like, OK, someone will correct it, but then we get back to work and people flip out again. It's, it is much, it is weird to watch when we look outside, but it is a,

• 1:32:16Sam Altman?

  it is less chaotic internally than I think you would imagine from reading the media reports.

• 1:32:21John Coogan?

  Yep, makes sense. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the launch. Thank you for having me.

• 1:32:27Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to see the Codex ad.

• 1:32:29Sam Altman?

  Please try it. The app and 5.3 have been like, I think, the coolest thing we've done in a while.

• 1:32:34John Coogan?

  Yes, with one prompt, I rebuilt the tbpn.com homepage to look exactly like Berkshire Hathaway. And it was just immediate. It was very fun.

• 1:32:42Sam Altman?

  Interesting choice.

• 1:32:44John Coogan?

  Plain text. It was very easy. Immediately one shot. I did not really push it to its limits, but I'm having fun. So thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:32:51Sam Altman?

  Thank you.

• 1:32:51Jordi Hays?

  Great to catch up.

• 1:32:52John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:32:52Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:32:53John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. And I'm also going to 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. And without further ado, we have Sholto Douglas from Anthropic. He's a member of technical staff and he's here in the TBV Ultra. Sholto, how are you doing?

• 1:33:17Sholto Douglas?

  Hey, guys. How are you doing?

• 1:33:18John Coogan?

  I am doing great. Seems like you're doing better. Tell us the news. What'd you release? What happened?

• 1:33:22Sholto Douglas?

  All right. Well, once again, we've got a new model. It's really fantastic. The camera's a bit laggy, a bit strange, but you know.

• 1:33:28John Coogan?

  Should be good.

• 1:33:29Sholto Douglas?

  Should be good. This model is really, really, really fantastic. So I think people have been comparing the previous generation of OpenAI and Anthropic models. And they've noticed there's some differences, right? The OpenAI models were a bit better at trying really, really, really hard on tough problems. But the Anthropic models were much faster and so forth. And so they worked on speed, while we worked on making the models much, much better at really, really tough problems. And so that's, that's, I think, where the model really shines, is it's able to think for a really, really long time. It's able to expend a lot of test and compute on dingy hard problems. It's also a massive step towards the coworker that we've been working on. I think I mentioned last time that we're seeing this continuous progression towards models that are as capable at the rest of knowledge work as they are at coding.

• 1:34:13Sholto Douglas?

  And I think I'm really, really excited about that as well. You can see it's a lot better at computer use. We've got Claude for PowerPoint. Claude is starting to become actually quite capable at Excel. You know, it's not perfect there yet, but huge steps, huge progress.

• 1:34:27John Coogan?

  Do you have internal benchmarks for things like PowerPoint now?

• 1:34:30Sholto Douglas?

  We have benchmarks for everything that we work on.

• 1:34:32John Coogan?

  Then, but what makes it to the model card?

• 1:34:36Sholto Douglas?

  What makes it to the model card? Oh, the model card is typically only publicly released benchmarks.

• 1:34:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:34:40Sholto Douglas?

  Because for our internal benchmarks, we usually hold them out for internal testing.

• 1:34:44John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure.

• 1:34:45Jordi Hays?

  What's the process for, for bench, what's the internal process for benchmarking a PowerPoint? Because it's not.

• 1:34:51Sholto Douglas?

  I can't talk too much about benchmarking PowerPoint, but you know, I'm not sure if you know, but a couple of years ago, I did work at McKinsey.

• 1:34:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:34:58Sholto Douglas?

  So you know, sometimes maybe they just need to put it in front of me.

• 1:35:00John Coogan?

  So they show them to you and you say, oh, it's good or it's bad.

• 1:35:02Sholto Douglas?

  Exactly. Good, bad.

• 1:35:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably a lot of people involved. Yeah. Well, talk to us about like what a, what a difference between 4.5, 4.6 means. You know, people might be familiar with pre-training, the different buzzwords that go into changing a model. Like what technically happened at Anthropic over the last few months to enable this?

• 1:35:25Sholto Douglas?

  Yes. So we actually, we decorrelate the model release versioning from any specific technical details.

• 1:35:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:35:30Sholto Douglas?

  It's more about the overall capability level that we're excited about. And actually, some like, I've been asked by many people, why wouldn't just name 4.5 as five? Because it was such a step up. And I think maybe we under anticipated. I mean, when I was last on here,

• 1:35:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:35:43Sholto Douglas?

  I don't think even I fully appreciated

• 1:35:45John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:35:45Sholto Douglas?

  how much of a jump it was from four to 4.5.

• 1:35:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. It was great because, because by the time there was the 4.5 hype cycle, we could repost a bunch of clips of you talking about it. And people were like, wow, they covered it today. It's like, no, we actually had them on the day it launched. And so I'm sure we'll be doing the same thing with 4.6. Talk about Task Horizon, the meter survey. Is that important? Obviously, it's a public benchmark. We've talked about it before, but is that something that is a different trade off to the other? Because I see it as like, there's the IQ and then there's how long something can stay focused, like the locking in like. And is there any tension between those? Do you ever get a model that's like, oh, it's really smart, but it can't stay coherent for that long or vice versa? It does, you know, dumber but longer tasks?

• 1:36:32Sholto Douglas?

  I mean, I think the meter eval is possibly the best eval currently out there, right? But you're right in saying that different parts of the chart measure different things. Initially, it was just testing IQ, but then as time goes on, it starts to test things where humans fail at tasks, not because they aren't smart enough, but because actually persevering on a task for six, seven, eight hours is really hard. And you're right that these come apart. There's a sort of like models you should almost expect to have superhuman perseverance. But at the same time, maybe context coherence or something like this, like fights against that. And that's a different access from raw intelligence or knowledge and given domains. So meter eval is the eval that I usually use when I'm referencing AI progress to people.

• 1:37:16Sholto Douglas?

  Recently, we held this physics conference where we invited a whole bunch of physicists with Google DeepMind. We invited a whole bunch of physicists to try and convince them that AI was really big deal. And that was the chart that resonated most deeply with people. And I think it's just quite conceptually graspable as, oh, okay, things that would take me X hours. The models are now capable of semi reliably.

• 1:37:35Jordi Hays?

  Also interesting is it's an interesting. Benchmark, considering that so many types of knowledge workers will never actually work on a task for seven hours straight. Like, it's just like, "Oh, I worked on it for 20 minutes, and I jumped into a meeting, and then I took a look at it again, and then I had lunch, and then I went for a walk, and then I came back, I worked on it, then I got somebody called, I had to work on something else." So it's like, very possible that a lot of people listening to this, you know, maybe outside of some software engineers, have just never, even in their career, worked on something for six hours straight.

• 1:38:04John Coogan?

  The flow state is great.

• 1:38:06Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah, I mean, you chain things together and so forth. But yes, I agree. It's interesting to hear that in that respect. And what does even a week-long task mean? Surely, that's sort of inherently composable into, you know, a year-long work in progress. I mean, I certainly don't think of myself as doing a year-long task when I'm at work, right? I'm doing these day or week-long time horizons, usually which feed into a several-month-long time horizon.

• 1:38:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. So talk about orchestration. It feels like there's a moment happening. I really like the Gastown analogy and the world that he's built there. You see it all over. I have four Clog Code instances running at the same time. It feels like there needs to be a new layer of abstraction. How do you think that gets solved? Is now the time to start learning those things? What metaphors will be valuable going forward?

• 1:38:54Sholto Douglas?

  Yes. So, right now, the agent's still at this point where you need to manually multiplex across them. You know, when I'm working, the stark thing about going from four to 4.5 and now 4.6 was that I went from maybe like 10% of my lines of code being written by me to 0% of my lines of code being written by me. And, but the thing is, I need to actually sit there and constantly switch between these windows to make sure they're on track and give them guidance and feedback. And, you know, I'm multiplexing maybe five at once or something like this when it's going really well, but...

• 1:39:28Sholto Douglas?

  You still need to be in there in the details. And I think the long term right way to think about it is constantly moving up levels of abstraction. So ultimately, you only want to be talking to one agent that's maybe synthesizing the feedback from models as they come back and say, I got stuck or I was unclear on this. And that model can act as the, as what I was doing before, and I can take a step back and sort of act at an even higher level of abstraction. It doesn't feel like we ultimately want to be playing, you know, Age of Empires or Starcraft with the models, right? We shouldn't be APM bound. Instead, it should be the model surfacing information as you need it. So that you can, so that you constantly act on whatever the most important thing is and that you context which you're pursuing.

• 1:40:09John Coogan?

  Speaking of gaming, do you have an update for us? When is the game shipping? Tell us about the game. What inspired this? Give us the backstory and then tell us what's going on.

• 1:40:18Sholto Douglas?

  Well, I think like many other people, I really wanted to test the limits of the models over the holidays, right? I mean, we saw all of that from people saying, I spent three to four days doing X. And I think that's really where almost the hype cycle for the most recent generation of models started in some respect, when people got the chance to properly test their limits.

• 1:40:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Tells you a lot about adoption and how.

• 1:40:37Sholto Douglas?

  Tells you a lot about adoption.

• 1:40:38John Coogan?

  And how like diffusion takes time because you need to have the space.

• 1:40:42Jordi Hays?

  We need more long weekends.

• 1:40:43John Coogan?

  Seriously? That's the bottleneck.

• 1:40:46Jordi Hays?

  Long weekends are the bottleneck.

• 1:40:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, good for GDP, I guess, holidays. Take a long thought.

• 1:40:51Sholto Douglas?

  Play with coding models.

• 1:40:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry, anyway.

• 1:40:53Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah. Anyway, so Dylan's been getting us all into Age of Empires with these five-a-side matches on the downstairs table. And I wanted to see if I could make an Age of Scaling, where you know, you build solar panels and data centers, you train AI models and drones and so forth, instead of, instead of farms and mining and all this. You start in industrial area, you go all the way up to Kharteshv. I'm only, I only got like 70, 80% done and all the mechanics work, but it turns out it's actually really hard to make a game that's fun.

• 1:41:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:41:23Sholto Douglas?

  Like actually just clicking make solar panel 100 times is not fun.

• 1:41:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:41:27Sholto Douglas?

  Surprise, surprise.

• 1:41:29John Coogan?

  It's fun for some people. There are some of those crazy clicker games where you do that and it's just like a brain rot game and they're pretty successful. But, but I think you should stay away from that. Not, not even Factorio, these are like mobile games that are like really, really bad. Anyway, I don't think that aligns with your mission.

• 1:41:44Sholto Douglas?

  There's an art to it.

• 1:41:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:45Sholto Douglas?

  But we talk about the grand geopolitics and strategy of this era that we're going into, right, where the most valuable resources on earth are, you know, well, basically the economy is in some respects reorienting around compute.

• 1:41:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:58Sholto Douglas?

  And so I wanted to capture some of that dynamic, the late night discussions of San Francisco in a game.

• 1:42:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love it. How are you processing the work that's being done in world modeling and generative worlds? I know that you're not generating images, but Claude can take in an image and process and that has value. You text a screenshot and have them implement it or have him implement it or it implement it. But what do you think about world models? Is that going to play an important piece, a link in the chain of where you're going?

• 1:42:30Sholto Douglas?

  Yes. So I mean, I think there's two different things here. There's the direct path to AGI, which I think is very much coding and then AI research and general science and so forth. And I don't think that requires world models. But I do think that world models are incredibly exciting for a number of other things. I think they're very exciting from a gaming perspective. I mean, we all saw those demos, they're incredible, they're genius, it's just truly mind blowing.

• 1:42:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:52Sholto Douglas?

  And I also think they're probably the unlock to training robotics properly. It feels to me like there was this era of, oh, we're just going to need to fill, like basically do incredible amounts of behavioral cloning of people teleoperating robots. And it feels actually perhaps like the scalable way to get robots to work is world models, but unclear. I'm not, I don't think it's on the critical path to AGI, basically.

• 1:43:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you unpack the concept of a software-only singularity?

• 1:43:22Sholto Douglas?

  Yes. So in this world, it's one where the models are far better at digital tasks than they are at physical ones. And so we see rapid change in the digital world with relatively little change in the physical world. So information and software changes dramatically. And this ends up having some pretty weird effects. It means that maybe like the drivers of what have been the last, you know, couple decades of progress in the economy turn around, like, you know, sort of get constantly get changed very rapidly. And I think we'll see that flow on into the physical world, but at a delay. So you get much better at doing chip design, you get much better at training AI models.

• 1:44:06Sholto Douglas?

  AI models get a lot faster, chips get a lot better. The general economy gets a lot more efficient because the sort of information and message passing that is much of the rest of the economy ends up, you know, becoming much more efficient.

• 1:44:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:18Sholto Douglas?

  Uh, but at the same time, you don't yet have robots providing limitless physical abundance.

• 1:44:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:44:22Sholto Douglas?

  Um, science probably progresses really fast up to the degree that you need interaction with labs or larger particle colliders or something like this. And then you go, okay, well, I need to build the robots to.

• 1:44:32Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, automated automated labs feel more near term than unlimited robots in the real world manipulating, you know, the earth.

• 1:44:39Sholto Douglas?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:44:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:40Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah. Um, I think maybe they actually arrive at similar ish times. I think you need pretty competent robots for the labs. Um, or at least like no one's yet managed to figure out how to automate a lab without. Turns out there were all these really weird little tasks that require a lot of manual human dexterity that are currently part of biological protocols. Um, and so a lot of biologists will say, no, like you just actually need something that's capable of, uh, human level dexterity. Um, maybe not for all experiments, but for, for enough that it becomes annoying.

• 1:45:09John Coogan?

  And in this software only singularity, like, how are you defining singularity? You know, the, the, uh, the Kurzweil formulation of like more computing power than human brains. That's like one, you know, equation. Uh, there's also just like this point beyond which we cannot see. Uh, how do you think about singularity in that context?

• 1:45:29Sholto Douglas?

  I, I think there is a pretty tricky event horizon, but I at least haven't found anyone that's made incredibly strong or good predictions.

• 1:45:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:38Sholto Douglas?

  It just feels like at that point you have as many digital intelligences or more, and they're as smart or more smart than human intelligences. Um, what does that even mean for the world? It's incredibly hard to predict. It's something we spend a lot of time trying to think about and trying, trying to sort of prepare the world for all of the eventualities, but it's, uh, I think difficult to make sort of top line predictions of, of what exactly that looks like.

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. In the original Kurzweil formulation, like that was almost the definition of the singularity was that you can't, you can't make predictions beyond it. And so, you know, that like, like once the predictions break down, then you're there.

• 1:46:12Sholto Douglas?

  Uh, yeah. I mean, I think in the near term, um, you know, uh, I went down with Dworkesh to his Elon interview in Austin.

• 1:46:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:46:20Sholto Douglas?

  Um, and I, I think a lot of the sort of reflection of that in the physical world perhaps is, is what ends up happening. Like you do end up basically trying to climb the Kardashev scale and capturing more of the energy of the sun and so forth. Um, but, but I think that takes some time.

• 1:46:32John Coogan?

  What, is your current takeaway, we're more chip constrained, energy constrained? What's the biggest bottleneck to AI progress?

• 1:46:40Sholto Douglas?

  I mean, I think right now, where I think I agree with Sam's earlier answer that we're more chip constrained in air progress. But I think it like is sort of like interesting to roll forward two years and be like, okay, well, if you want 100 gigawatts or, you know, in four years, and you want terawatt, what does that look like? Where do you put that? And this is why Elon's going after the data centers in space, right? He thinks it's going to be the easiest way to get a terawatt in space in 2030. And and maybe it's space, maybe it's the, you know, a giant desert somewhere. It's the Atacama Desert, the Australian Desert, somewhere in Texas, you know, maybe Texas has a lot of solar panels. Hard to know.

• 1:47:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Trudy?

• 1:47:21Jordi Hays?

  How are you guys thinking about free usage limits ahead of the Super Bowl?

• 1:47:27Sholto Douglas?

  It's really tough. I mean, like, one of the one of the struggles of this is that like, compute is so constrained. And so.

• 1:47:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I noticed you guys didn't say, download the Claude app. There was no there was no direct call to action.

• 1:47:46Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah, I mean, I think the the purpose of the ad was very much one for provoking like, thought and discussion. And.

• 1:47:53Jordi Hays?

  It was certainly successful already.

• 1:47:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:56Sholto Douglas?

  It did provoke a lot of thought and discussion. And I think, I mean, I don't think you need to do an explicit call to action for people to to download things or to consider things.

• 1:48:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:48:07Jordi Hays?

  But but but again, it sounds like, yeah, it will be the GPUs will be on fire Sunday is the expectation.

• 1:48:14Sholto Douglas?

  The GPUs will be on fire, as has been as has been the case for the entire industry for last year. I mean, I think we've all had to make incredibly difficult trade offs on on exactly how computers used.

• 1:48:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you can you like, zoom in on your experience? Because I feel like, you know, everyone's sort of seen like, rough growth curves for Anthropic on the revenue side, or on the tokens generated side, or whatever. And it feels exponential, but smoothish. And then simultaneously, you have these, you know, constant worrying about bottlenecks. Is there enough capital? Are there enough chips? Are there enough data centers? Energy. Are we in an age of research? Are we in a plateau? How have you balanced those two narratives out? Your experience of smooth growth, even though it's exponential, with constant fear around something like a cloud hanging over the industry and maybe a slowdown?

• 1:49:11Sholto Douglas?

  I mean, I think to note on the smooth or exponential growth, I think one of the things that really blew me away was when Semi Analysis did that analysis and found that, I think what we went from like 2% a month ago to, or six weeks ago to 4% of GitHub commits

• 1:49:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:28Sholto Douglas?

  done by Claude code.

• 1:49:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:30Sholto Douglas?

  And for the amount of GitHub commits done by Claude code to double over a few weeks is truly ludicrous, right? Like, and there's no real visceral way to feel that. You almost feel like it feels like a number on a screen, but you can't viscerally feel it.

• 1:49:46Sholto Douglas?

  For us, we've always had a very, very, very strong conviction. And in many respects, Anthropic is a bet on this being true, that scaling is continuing. And that progress continues unabated. So in many respects, the external numbers are only a reflection of the conviction that we've had internally for a long time about how we, exactly how we expect all the trends to go. I mean, I think we're broadly on trend for like, if you look at situational awareness, you know, I think pretty sure the power and like energy and flops, predictions are bang on. It kind of feels more like we're just, we're hitting each milestone as we expect.

• 1:50:28Sholto Douglas?

  And roughly, yeah, roughly what we expected to have happened has happened so far.

• 1:50:33John Coogan?

  In terms of diffusion of the technology, do you think that there's a role for forward deployed engineers to go in and change organizations? We saw some news that OpenAI is hiring a bunch of folks. Obviously, a lot of enterprises are using Claude now. But at the same time, that phenomenon of if you don't have a free weekend or a long weekend, you might never get around to implementing it. And so having a little bit of extra horsepower and knowledge around the office might actually pull forward capability. Is that something you could see growing at Anthropic?

• 1:51:08Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah, I think it's a great idea. I think it's like very clear that people don't know how to hold these things. And also the fact that it's ludicrous. Three months ago, we didn't have this most recent generation of models. We didn't have a 4.5. And like you're meant to adjust your business strategy over the course of the holidays, basically, because the models are suddenly capable of doing things that they couldn't do right before you enter the end of the year.

• 1:51:32Jordi Hays?

  Are you saying we could see new white collar job creation?

• 1:51:36Sholto Douglas?

  Maybe.

• 1:51:41Sholto Douglas?

  I mean, I would look, I think these are really valuable jobs. Yeah. I think that there's clearly a hell of a lot of value to be unlocked with them.

• 1:51:49John Coogan?

  We asked Sam this, but I'm interested in your take. Is data the new oil?

• 1:51:55Sholto Douglas?

  Or is it, you know, is it the fossil fuel, as Ilya said?

• 1:51:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Is it, but the more pointed question is just like, are there organizations out there that have data that's locked away? And it requires a business development deal or an acquisition or some sort of, you know, AI leadership to add that capability? Because there are effectively secrets, sometimes trade secrets. I don't know if the Coca-Cola formula is in 4.6. But it will be if the Coca-Cola company calls you, right? So how do you think about that question and that phrase, even though it's been beaten to death, maybe it's making a comeback?

• 1:52:32Sholto Douglas?

  I think it's maybe like there's two kinds of data and one of them is dramatically more useful than the other. And there's the kind of data which is like the kind of analytics that a company might have collected in the past. Or artifacts of that company's operation, internal documents and so forth. And there's the other kind, which is like the actual work that people did to produce those documents. And that's not recorded. And so I think that like, to the degree that I'm not certain it's data is the new oil so much as like the expertise of people.

• 1:53:10Sholto Douglas?

  And like models being able to understand and learn from people. You almost want the models to like be an intern in an organization and and get coached and feedback and learn about how how to do the job. And you learn, I guess, maybe what I'm analogizing to here is as a human, when you join a company, you mostly learn the job from your colleagues rather than from reading all the documents in the company.

• 1:53:36Sholto Douglas?

  It's just much more informative, and I think I broadly expect that to be true of models as well. I expect them to learn in a quite human-like way from their colleagues.

• 1:53:45Jordi Hays?

  Have you thought about a scenario where a company's maybe revenue goes to zero and all the remaining value is just in their historical data?

• 1:53:57Sholto Douglas?

  I guess in this analogy, it would be it would be the people.

• 1:54:02Sholto Douglas?

  That I think the values would regress with.

• 1:54:05John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:54:08Jordi Hays?

  How, when you guys are thinking about new opportunities, verticals, categories, how, what is the thought process around UI? There's a lot of, a lot of people building AI-native tools today. They functionally look like traditional enterprise software. And it's hard for me to imagine like Anthropic building out, you know, infinite surface area of traditional software to do things like orchestration. But like, what is the specific framework when thinking about interfaces for new products?

• 1:54:44Sholto Douglas?

  We mostly want to build something that fits in where the humans fit in and can do it and can help like, you know, it's sort of like interacts with you like a colleague. And so we want something that can fit in and, and yeah, rather than like absorbing interfaces, join in and use the same interfaces that you do and stuff like that. I think that's how.

• 1:55:02Jordi Hays?

  And I think that's what companies want. If you, if you ask any company in the world, hey, we can, we can get you the best executive in this function in the entire world. They will usually say like, we will pay almost any price for that or we will pay an extreme premium for that. And yet, if you tell them a software solution, hey, this software solution can help you do this other thing, maybe they want to use it, but it's not as, it's not as enticing as some, something that can just do the work.

• 1:55:28Sholto Douglas?

  Right, exactly.

• 1:55:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, I mean, there's, yeah, the UI evolution seems very, very underrated. I was processing the open claw development, how important mobile was to that. Just this idea of, somebody shows up and says, you're a busy business executive. You're in meetings and phone calls all day. You're on flights. We got a great software engineer for you, but you gotta talk to them over the terminal on your desktop. It's like, I'm not going to give that many commands because I'm on the road and I'm on my phone. And you see people walking off planes with notebooks now because they need to get one more prompt in.

• 1:56:03Sholto Douglas?

  I have done that. I am so guilty of that.

• 1:56:06John Coogan?

  And so I imagine that there's a lot of work that will be done on the, on the mobile side. How do you think about it?

• 1:56:12Sholto Douglas?

  I think that's broadly true of like all AI interfaces, right? I don't want to look at a screen. I don't want to have like, I don't even want like a terminal window or a chat window. I just want to ask my computer to do something or maybe like, like sort of like ask the world around me to do, for something to happen and for that to happen.

• 1:56:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:29Sholto Douglas?

  And so I think that there's like focusing too much on the interfaces of today. Versus how would you interact with an incredibly competent colleague is the right thing. Like, you know, I just want to text Claude and be like, hey, you know, can you fix this up for me? Can you help me sort this out or book this trip? Or yeah, I just want to, yeah.

• 1:56:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Everyone has that ability to text from a variety of devices. People have AirPods, Apple Watches, phones, laptops, tablets. Do you think we need any more new hardware?

• 1:57:02Sholto Douglas?

  I think new hardware is pretty exciting and interesting. I like that people are placing bets on it.

• 1:57:08Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah. I mean, I feel like something which can capture a bit more of the context that you go, that you have in your day to day life and that you can, that you can talk to. I mean, one thing that. Voice is higher bitrate than typing for most people.

• 1:57:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:22Sholto Douglas?

  Right? But at the same time, we like in most of our environments, it's actually quite annoying to mention talking to your devices in crowded public space or at work or so forth. So maybe something that captures that automatically would be great. Like, you know, you've seen those like.

• 1:57:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:37Sholto Douglas?

  Uh, I'm not sure if you've seen the YouTube videos.

• 1:57:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:57:39Sholto Douglas?

  Where people like sub vocalize.

• 1:57:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:40Sholto Douglas?

  That would be cool.

• 1:57:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, Apple just bought a company that sort of looks at the skin movements and maybe can re-engage.

• 1:57:48Sholto Douglas?

  Right, exactly.

• 1:57:49John Coogan?

  There's a number of companies in the space.

• 1:57:50Sholto Douglas?

  That's.

• 1:57:51John Coogan?

  It seemed like it's coming and you'll just be able to plug into that as the hardware evolves.

• 1:57:55Sholto Douglas?

  Exactly, that seems cool. Um, but also just my natural environment absorbing more of my context and, and, and being able to just like talk to.

• 1:58:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:02Sholto Douglas?

  You know, like having speakers around my house or something like this, rather than having to bring my phone around me. That would be cool as well.

• 1:58:07John Coogan?

  Do you see any, any world where on-device computation becomes more important? I feel like Anthropic as a whole is so backend heavy, like none of the computation is done on the, on the device.

• 1:58:19Sholto Douglas?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:20John Coogan?

  But that could change in theory. I don't know what you think about the future.

• 1:58:24Sholto Douglas?

  I mean, I think our general perspective is that a given level of intelligence, you know, I mean, we've seen this trend, right?

• 1:58:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:28Sholto Douglas?

  Intelligence gets 10 to 50x cheaper for a given level of intelligence every year.

• 1:58:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:58:32Sholto Douglas?

  Massively democratizes access to that level of intelligence. It's literally in my Twitter bio, it's like intelligence too cheap to meter.

• 1:58:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:38Sholto Douglas?

  Because this is in large part, one of the things I worked on at Google and I've also worked on it with it. Yeah. Um, and, uh, and one of the ways that happens is that that level of intelligence goes on device.

• 1:58:49John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:58:50Sholto Douglas?

  Um, but then there's always, because scaling keeps continuing, there is this exponentially greater set of use cases, which the models then get applied to. So it's totally plausible to me that like, you know, some sub swarm might exist on your computer or you might get a laptop that has like better memory bandwidth and so it can, you can, you know, have little models complete stuff. But at the same time, then you also want the, uh, the much greater intelligence going out there and, and sort of like planning and farming things out to swarms and, and really like munching on, on the intensive and intellectually difficult work.

• 1:59:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Jordi, anything else?

• 1:59:19Jordi Hays?

  Have, uh, have the market sell offs due to various Anthropic releases been generally predictable? Or have there been any that have been surprising?

• 1:59:30Sholto Douglas?

  I mean, I've honestly, I didn't even notice the last one because I was just heads down on the launch. But look, in this case, I think it's a little bit much to ascribe it to an anthropic launch. I mean, there've been legal, legal tools released with AI for, we have many, many customers with legal tools that have, do, you know, work for lawyers. I don't think this is crazily different to any of those. And I think this is, you know, as part of just a continuing trend that we've seen.

• 1:59:55John Coogan?

  Yep. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us on launch day.

• 2:00:00Jordi Hays?

  Great to get the update.

• 2:00:01John Coogan?

  Can't wait to talk to you the next time. We'll see you. Have a good rest of your day. Let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And I'm also going to tell you about Vanta, automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And I'm very excited for our next guest. We have Dan Barcella from T1 Energy, the chairman and CEO, he's in the restream waiting room. Now he's in the TV.

• 2:00:29Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:00:29John Coogan?

  How are you doing, Dan?

• 2:00:31Speaker 00

  Hey, I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

• 2:00:32John Coogan?

  Thanks so much. First time on the show. Would you mind introducing yourself and the company? And then I'd love to know about the journey to the company. And then I have a bunch of questions about energy, but we can start with an introduction, if that's okay.

• 2:00:43Speaker 00

  Sure. Great. Dan Barcello, I've been doing energy all my life in native New York, or now a proud resident in Texas. And we're building a lot of different energy systems. You know, my journey took me a lot through different parts of the world, building oil and gas systems. And now we're really focused on building solar in America. It's exciting time to be doing it when everyone knows we need a lot of electricity, a lot of energy.

• 2:01:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. How did you wind up with T1?

• 2:01:08Speaker 00

  So T1 was a company, we, we, we saw the need for particularly utility scale, grid level type of energy systems to be, I don't want to say disrupted, but needed to be impacted in a large way, whether it's on grid level storage, or whether it's on solar. We were doing quite a bit on the grid level battery side and the battery side quite frankly had a wall of competition from you look left it's Samsung you look right it's LG you look this way it's Panasonic and you got CATL behind you and then oh my god here's Tesla.

• 2:01:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:39Speaker 00

  But when you look at solar it was very different in the United States. It's predominantly was by Chinese companies. The American technology of solar was something we kind of almost forgot how to do in the US and build it out. But we had an opportunity to buy assets, buy the technology, buy the know-how. Now we run it. We bought a 5 gigawatt asset in Texas late 24 and we're building a second part of the plant which I can get to in a second. So for us it was really about.

• 2:02:07Jordi Hays?

  You should have seen our initial reaction to the T. We saw our first interaction with T1 was seeing the video of your facility.

• 2:02:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:15Jordi Hays?

  And John and I were like high fiving.

• 2:02:16John Coogan?

  This is amazing.

• 2:02:17Jordi Hays?

  We're like, America's got it.

• 2:02:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:19Jordi Hays?

  We can build solar and scale and then of course we figured out kind of you know the history of the company and.

• 2:02:24John Coogan?

  But we're very excited for the project.

• 2:02:25Jordi Hays?

  But we're excited that it's an American asset now.

• 2:02:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:30Speaker 00

  And look, we have a million square foot facility in Dallas that is, you know, we brought that from producing zero.

• 2:02:36John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:02:36Speaker 00

  We commissioned that and brought it up to producing over 5 gigawatts in annualized runway in November. So that was a lot of work, a lot of robots in the factory but a lot of humans, you know, so you know, we'll unfortunate.

• 2:02:50Jordi Hays?

  What is the, yeah, talk about, maybe talk about the scale of the operation in the context of overall US solar panel production because I think people hear 5 gigawatts and maybe they can wrap their head around that but it's a meaningful percent of overall production. Is that right?

• 2:03:08Speaker 00

  The US is about 50 gigawatts so this alone is about 10% of American production.

• 2:03:13John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:03:13Speaker 00

  It's extremely automated, it has 1,200 people, it's running 24/7 except of course during those ice storms that people don't know how to deal with in Texas, you know. It's more about the people driving the work than the factory. But it's of significant scale. It's one of the most modern in the world.

• 2:03:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, how does that 50 gigawatts of capacity in the United States compare to China? Can you lay the sort of geopolitical backdrop and get me up to speed on how much the American government is doing to support this effort?

• 2:03:47Speaker 00

  So look, China, China is up to over a thousand gigawatts, 1.2 terawatts of capacity. China's adding, from last year, probably close to 350 to 400 gigawatts. That's close to the American grid. So it's almost like China can add an entire grid just in solar. So the numbers are wild. I don't think, I don't believe China's doing it to do, you know, lower carbon. I think China's doing it because they need to grow very, very, very, very fast. And I think that's what you're seeing last two, two or three years in the United States, where solar and storage is also taking 75, 80% plus. You asked about like what the US aspect's for. I think, you know, the US, both Democrats

• 2:04:29Speaker 00

  and Republicans have done a lot of disincentives and a lot of incentives for advanced manufacturing. You know, whether it was the IRA in the past or the O triple B A now, those incentives are in place, there's a lot of tariffs in place. I think a lot of those create an ability for the US to be a level playing field with other competitors. Quite simply, I think America lost a lot of its manufacturing muscle. You know, we're building a new facility outside, it's about an hour north of Austin in Rockdale. It used to be an old Alcoa plant. Now it's just a piece of dirt. We're building a 2.1 gigawatt solar facility there. That's going to make the cells that go into our plant in Dallas.

• 2:05:08Jordi Hays?

  So what are the main, what are the main bottlenecks? Is it purely capital? Because ideally, T1 could just copy and paste the Dallas facility, you know, a thousand times. But what does it take to actually do that?

• 2:05:21Speaker 00

  The solar chain's really cool because it has like, it's almost like four different parts. It's got the digging out silicon, making polysilicon, the rocks, then you're going into ingots and wafers. And those wafers are also very similar in the semiconductor industry. Then it kind of splits, the high-grade stuff goes to semiconductors, the low-grade stuff goes to solar. Then you take a solar cell plant. The solar cell plant is basically a low-grade semiconductor plant. You're making, you know, making the cells, making a fab. And then those cells go to the low-tech part, which is in Dallas. Dallas is where I always, I always joke about it. It's a five gigawatt site with 50 trucks a day bringing in glass. Put in the cells in between and glue them together. And then you get 50 trucks a day going out with glass.

• 2:06:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:03Speaker 00

  So it's like Dan's Glass Company. You know, we're just moving around. But, but the cell, the cell part's really interesting. And that's where a lot of the advances come from specialty gases to process equipment engineers, to process equipment that's very specialized. That's the higher-tech part.

• 2:06:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:19Speaker 00

  So for me, it's very interesting as we go backwards and integrate. To answer your question on how do we get more of it? Starts with contracts. You know, we, we, we, we're a smaller company. We're not the scale of like what Elon's doing in terms of his announcement with solar, right? I don't have unlimited capital and funds, nor do I want a lot of dilution on the, on the, as a public company. We need contracts. Those contracts then allow us to get the risk capital that we need to build these plants. Uh, but the building part is not the hard part. I'd say the building part in America is more about navigating through certain regulations, navigating through certain delays there. Texas, I think, is very conducive. But as long as I have power, as long as I have access to water and we go full recycling on the water, but as we go into water and power and low-cost inputs, we, we feel we're

• 2:07:04Speaker 00

  in a great place in Texas to build.

• 2:07:06Jordi Hays?

  Who are, who are the like main buyers? Like who are, who, uh, is it, is it, uh, you know, traditional energy companies? Like who, who, who are you spending the most time with?

• 2:07:16John Coogan?

  Or will you actually sell to like an Amazon Web Services or Google? Who's like building out a, a new data center?

• 2:07:23Speaker 00

  So we focus on utility scale. And that, that's capturing largest utilities, but it's also capturing all the big tech companies that, that you'd mentioned too. We're usually selling directly through developers that then face those customers.

• 2:07:36Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense.

• 2:07:36Speaker 00

  Uh, some of them don't, for confidentiality, don't want to be disclosed. One of them, Treaty Oak, we recently announced, they're a large developer based in Austin. So I imagine that they'll have a lot of their customers, exactly what you just said. The demand for data centers, uh, is surreal. The demand for power is surreal. A lot of the, you know, everyone knows we're waiting for turbines until 29 to 30. So you're not going to get that there. So if you want to start scaling power fast, you need, you need solar and storage right now. So that, that's a big, big driver and that's the bulk of what's driving the demand. Behind that, some smaller utilities are looking to add to the grid and capacity. But by far, the other big trend, though, is as you're running out of spaces to connect power and interconnections, a lot of things are shifting to behind the meter or distributed

• 2:08:21Speaker 00

  generation. This is where you're building first power islands, you're building data centers with power islands that can later connect to the grid. Because affordability is a big issue. Nobody wants a data center that's going to raise prices of electricity. And you know, DeSantis was very vocal about that in Florida, like data centers, yeah, and bring good jobs and things, but then, you know, what are they going to do to electricity prices? So I think it's really important that we, that the industry gets a handle on how energy can, can also be in an area that's not going to put more stress on the grid.

• 2:08:53John Coogan?

  So if, just to restate the current status of the business, G1 is the first facility up and running, G2 you're building. What does the future look like? How far into the future? Obviously, you need the contracts to unlock new plans, but how do you want this to scale? Where else do you want to build? How quickly do you want to copy paste these facilities?

• 2:09:15Speaker 00

  If I had the contracts, I'd love to copy paste Dallas like that, you know, whether it's, you know, six to, six months to a year.

• 2:09:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:23Speaker 00

  Those are, those are fast.

• 2:09:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:09:25Speaker 00

  Uh, we publicly said that we're, you know, on track to build G2 this year. And that's already started constructions, started construction. We started that in December and, and we're tracking to continue to build that. So, so that's our, our main asset, our main focus. G1's operating, G2's in build. And then if I go to the next part of the supply chain, we get our polysilicon and our wafers from Corning and Hemlock. So that we, we've completed the entire chain.

• 2:09:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:51Speaker 00

  Uh, to be an American chain.

• 2:09:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about the data centers in space? Elon's notorious for vertically integrating, but there's going to be a lot of players. It's probably a slightly different solar panel than what you might put on the ground, I imagine. Uh, is that something where you're interested in talking to folks about a contract to deliver solar panels that would wind up on satellites in space?

• 2:10:14Speaker 00

  I'd love to. I think when you look at silicon-based and probably more on the perk side than the top con side, there's quite a bit of demand for low Earth orbit in particular rather than deep space. So this silicon wafers do work in space. So the question really becomes, are we going to use it for terrestrial demand or space demand? Obviously, we're not sending up modules with glass up to space, but at the cell level or at the wafer level, we'd love to have and feed into that as a customer base. Love to do that.

• 2:10:45John Coogan?

  What do, I mean, being a public company CEO can be stressful. What do the short sellers get wrong about T1 Energy these days?

• 2:10:53Speaker 00

  You know, being an ex buy side or an ex sell side or writing research reports about it, I know the journey to be a portfolio manager or to be a sell side analyst and get a lot of things right, get a lot of things wrong. I think for the most part, short sellers as competitors like to say like, oh, they're not going to make this or they're not going to do it the right way. Compliance with US law in terms of being a FIOC, foreign entities of concern. There's always concerns about the solar industry and misunderstandings about how China's influence is. That's something that I think is an old story. We're an American company, American public company, New York Stock Exchange listed, and we bought an asset

• 2:11:38Speaker 00

  and we're running it and building it now, but let's go for this. That's one of the biggest parts. I mean, the other part, I get stressed because sometimes my IR guy goes, don't read Reddit today. I'm like, okay, but I want to. And I'm like, no. And then someone says, hey, go kill yourself or go to this. I'm like, Jesus, you know?

• 2:11:55John Coogan?

  Well, fortunately, some of your fans have come over to our chat and they want to know, when are we getting merch? They want T1 merch. Any plans?

• 2:12:06Speaker 00

  We will put that site up as fast as possible and get the hat and get these things maybe without this logo here or this one here, but you know, get that there. But no, we're excited to get the merch. We love our shareholders. We're thankful for that. And I think we have a good feeling for all those parts.

• 2:12:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, Jordi, any other questions?

• 2:12:29Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, it was great to meet you and come back on as you have new announcements.

• 2:12:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have one more thing. Just, I'd love to know the shape of the company. It feels like a, you know, an American re-industrialization process. How big is the company? It feels like you're a job creator. What roles are you hiring for? If this really, really scales, as I hope it does, and I hope we're talking in a couple of years and we're talking with a terawatt

• 2:12:53Jordi Hays?

  With a T.

• 2:12:54John Coogan?

  With a T instead of a G. Um, what, what does the shape of the workforce look like?

• 2:13:00Speaker 00

  We're 1,200 already in Dallas.

• 2:13:02John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:13:02Speaker 00

  We're gonna be 1,500 in, in Austin.

• 2:13:05John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 2:13:05Speaker 00

  Uh, Austin headquarters, we're gonna be over 100.

• 2:13:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:08Speaker 00

  Uh, you know, if I can do my recruiting call, go to t1energy.com/careers. We need engineers.

• 2:13:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:14Speaker 00

  Uh, the more rogue you are as an engineer, the better. Uh, this has to be a new style of manufacturing. And I know I see you guys always, uh, you know, Ramp is your big sponsor. We start, our whole thing is our corporate policy for expenses is very simple. Do not buy anything illegal, either good or service. Two, it's corporate money. Be careful with it. Three, we can watch everything you buy with your Ramp card, and we do with AI, and it's awesome. And the fact that no one has to do T and E reports or something, it's just about accountability to people. And we just have to build as fast as we can, as quick as we can, you know, so throw some of the old, uh, rulebooks out. But that's part of the reason we wanted to be in Texas and in Austin. There's a lot of engineers there. Uh, we need them from the semiconductor sector. We need them from the manufacturing

• 2:13:55Speaker 00

  sector, from the robotics sector. So it's all about that growth. And, uh, more contracts, maybe some contracts for space one day, who knows? But, uh, the more contracts we get, the faster we can grow.

• 2:14:05John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Well, thank you so much for everything you're doing. Thanks for taking the time to come chat with us. Uh, congrats on the progress. I'm rooting for you. I, this is an amazing project.

• 2:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you should. At some point, I think we were live, the, between the first time we talked about T1 and the second, the stock was up like, I think, 150% and, uh...

• 2:14:24John Coogan?

  That's why we're podcasters.

• 2:14:26Jordi Hays?

  That's why we're podcasters.

• 2:14:27John Coogan?

  Not PMs. We'll leave this on the by-side to someone else.

• 2:14:30Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, thank you for the work.

• 2:14:31John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:14:33Speaker 00

  And the message is loud and clear, merch. That's the priority, most priority, right?

• 2:14:37John Coogan?

  It's priority number two after re-industrializing America and we're saving the solar industry, but it's a close second. Anyway, thank you so much, Dan.

• 2:14:46Speaker 00

  Guys, thank you.

• 2:14:47John Coogan?

  This was fantastic meeting you.

• 2:14:48Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:14:49John Coogan?

  You're welcome back anytime. We'll talk to you soon. Let me 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.

• 2:14:59Jordi Hays?

  Checking in on Amazon.

• 2:15:01John Coogan?

  Yes, what happened?

• 2:15:02Jordi Hays?

  Amazon's reported earnings down seven and a half percent. I'm trying to find a good summary of the results.

• 2:15:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:11Jordi Hays?

  While I work on that, maybe we head back to the timeline?

• 2:15:14John Coogan?

  We can head back to the timeline. We can also do this Wall Street Journal, your sort of trend piece about your AI habits. Obviously, we saw a lot of the 4-0 folks in the chat. The new family intervention, we need to talk about your AI habit. People are getting clingy with their chatbots. This is a knock on effect of relationships between artificial intelligence and humans. And the Wall Street Journal says it's giving their loved ones pause. So I want to read some of this and you can give me your reactions. Tell me how you're using AI in your daily life with your family.

• 2:15:44Jordi Hays?

  Before I do that.

• 2:15:46John Coogan?

  Please, give us more details.

• 2:15:47Jordi Hays?

  Amazon's projecting 200 billion of capex.

• 2:15:50John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:15:51Jordi Hays?

  That's at the gong. Can we get the mallet?

• 2:15:55John Coogan?

  Let's begin the Lambda Lightning round now. We have three great guests joining over the next half hour and it's Lambda Lightning round time. So let's bring down the mallet. You can take this one, Jordy. You're ready. Unhook the Lambda mallet and hit the Axon. Hit that Aplav and gong during the Lambda Lightning round.

• 2:16:16Jordi Hays?

  The market doesn't like it.

• 2:16:18John Coogan?

  But we like it.

• 2:16:19Jordi Hays?

  We like it.

• 2:16:20John Coogan?

  We like it.

• 2:16:21Jordi Hays?

  We like big numbers.

• 2:16:22John Coogan?

  We like it. We like capex. We're very excited to see that. Anyway, let me tell you about Okta first. 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 and we will go into this Wall Street Journal article about how people are interacting with AI. So it started as an innocent hobby to entertain and distract herself while going through a divorce. Erica Atchison used Anthropic's Claude to build a bot that generates images based on prompts from her and her friends. Soon, she promoted Claude to an advisory position in her personal life. It didn't take long for her kids to think she might need a break from her new friend. These days, there are two kinds of people, those who using AI for everything and well, everyone else. Super users are

• 2:17:07John Coogan?

  contracting out their work to groups of agents, amping up their productivity. They're dropping advice from ChatGPT, aka chat, as if the OpenAI bot is their most trusted consigliere. Counseling on everything from business strategy to whether or not you should let your friend get a perm. Interesting question. Everyone else is wondering if their loved ones may be taking things a bit too far. Maybe some tasks should be reserved for humans. Maybe there's dignity in that. Maybe some of us like the way things are. Atchison says Claude was particularly helpful as she navigated a relationship she suspected wasn't going to go anywhere. He was like, quote, this is Claude talking, hey, I don't think you're going to be able to extract yourself from this if you don't stop talking to this person

• 2:17:49John Coogan?

  for a while, says the Portland, Oregon resident who works in operations for a tech company. When she was later, when she was later, when she was later tempted to rekindle contact, Atchison would check in with Claude. Stick to your guns, it told her. AI hasn't been beneficial for every relationship, though. While her kids watch TV, Atchison likes to tinker with Claude. Her sons don't approve. It's a waste of her time, says Grayson11. She puts a lot of time into AI just to make boring old pictures. Wait, how is she making pictures with Claude?

• 2:18:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm very confused by this.

• 2:18:20John Coogan?

  They don't have an image model.

• 2:18:21Speaker 03

  Must be calling some API under the, under the hood. I don't know.

• 2:18:24John Coogan?

  Is she like, she's like on Claude code harnessing Nano Banana Pro?

• 2:18:29Speaker 03

  Maybe she's talking about the SVG images.

• 2:18:31John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, maybe.

• 2:18:32Jordi Hays?

  No, but there's an image in here that's her image and it looks like a Grok Imagine image.

• 2:18:37John Coogan?

  Maybe she's on Grok. This is, this is an odd article. I'm very confused by this. Anderson8 has a different complaint. The technology's accuracy. ChatGPT couldn't, couldn't correctly identify a Pokemon. Another time, he's just like, this is unacceptable. Zero on Pokemon Bench. I'm, I'm sell the stock. It's going to zero.

• 2:18:56Jordi Hays?

  Undescribed.

• 2:18:57John Coogan?

  It's over. It's over, says Anderson, age eight.

• 2:19:01John Coogan?

  Another time Anderson struggled to get it to generate a suitable picture of himself. Once I only had one leg and once I had three legs, he said, this is so cute thinking about this eight year old being like, this is slop, this is slop, says eight year old Eric David of startup founder in Brooklyn, uses AI for recipe planning, workouts, business strategy and vibe coding with his son. The 42 year old also uploads recordings of his executive coaching meetings to chat GPT to analyze his progress. I've done some, I asked, I asked chat GPT about a workout plan at one point. I don't go back to it that often. Recipe planning, I'll have a do, I did have a do a deep research report all around where we could go to food.

• 2:19:42Jordi Hays?

  Do you think it's actually good for, do you think, do you think LLMs are good for workout planning? It's just taking like the app, like I typically want a workout plan that is, I mean, I don't, we don't, we work out every day and we kind of do a vibes based approach, I would say. Try to push it hard and not, we're usually talking about technology and business during our workouts. But I, you know, historically, let's say when I was starting to work out, I would find a plan, but I wanted it to be from a specific person that was making that plan with, with general, with, with an intention around it for somebody in that state, which was maybe like I've been weight training for six months at the time.

• 2:20:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a huge.

• 2:20:26Jordi Hays?

  And so if you just take like, and the reason I ask is like, I've had terrible luck doing recipes, getting recipes from LLMs, because I think it just takes the average of every recipe for a certain item on the internet and just kind of gives it to you. And you can end up with like, I think we tried to make waffles once and it just, the waffle, it was like, clearly the recipe was just wrong because they were like really runny, you know, it just wasn't, it wasn't working. It was like, it had botched the different.

• 2:20:53John Coogan?

  Well, you haven't used the latest models. You throw, you throw a codex 5.3 at that.

• 2:20:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's, no, but it's obviously not an IQ, it's not an IQ thing. It's just, it's just.

• 2:21:04John Coogan?

  We're creating waffle bench, we're moving the goalposts. Needs to be able to make waffles. Great waffles. Anyway, let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Let's.

• 2:21:20Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, the wife of this, of Eric, the startup founder says.

• 2:21:26Jordi Hays?

  His wife is reluctant to use AI, especially for any writing-related tasks. A freelance journalist, she doesn't believe the technology can replicate her 20 years of professional experience. Her husband's use can annoy her, like when she asked him to write an important email to her son's school. As she read it over, something seemed off. I was like, "This is basically the same paragraph repeated three times," says the 45-year-old. She asked him, "Did ChatGPT do this?" She says he admitted to it. "He's probably not lying," he says. "I don't remember the specific instance." I love how they're just like cross interviewing.

• 2:21:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's very funny because I leaned the complete opposite way on like preschool applications once. And I was like, "Okay, I know that everyone else is going to be using AI slop, so I need to write extra conversationally." And so I'm in the application being like, "Hey, what's up? My name's John." Just like completely, just completely organically writing like flow of state. And then I was like, "I probably need to polish this up a little bit, but I'm definitely not giving it the LLM flavor because I think that that's going to be a tell for a lot of people on the other side reading these." They're like, "Another thing that's, it's not that, it's not this, it's not that." A lot of another hyphens, like people are getting sick of this slop. But what do you think, Tyler?

• 2:22:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just like don't resonate with this article at all.

• 2:22:38John Coogan?

  Tell me more.

• 2:22:39Speaker 03

  Over like a Christmas break, I think I on-boarded my dad to Claude Code.

• 2:22:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:43Speaker 03

  Like I'm like, "Yeah, you need to be using the best model." Like, "You haven't tried four or five yet, like what are you doing?"

• 2:22:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But what was the killer use case? Did you tell him like, "Write software, get on GitHub, did you just get him set up?"

• 2:22:54Speaker 03

  Just like anything.

• 2:22:55John Coogan?

  Anything?

• 2:22:56Speaker 03

  Like any task, just have Claude do it.

• 2:22:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:58Speaker 03

  And it like, it'll probably work. I mean, I don't cook much, so I don't know about the, you know, recipe stuff, but...

• 2:23:04John Coogan?

  I mean, the funny thing is that like, there are recipe, you can just take a recipe book and open it. You can just Google a recipe, but you're like, "I need Claude go to work for six hours to get me a recipe for waffles." It's like, like, that's not actually the promise, that's not actually like advancing. Like, the advancing is like, is like, "Build me a piece of software that will generate me a new waffle recipe based on all what's happening in the news and what my kids are in do and generate the images." Like, do a lot more that would take a long time. Say, like, you're not actually going to be saving time if you're using LLMs for something that's Google-able, so.

• 2:23:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:23:37John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 2:23:37Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, it's, we're in a really weird moment right now where the models are good at so many things. They are also incredibly confident even when they're wrong.

• 2:23:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:47Jordi Hays?

  And sometimes you're making, I had a friend that got a ticket for,

• 2:23:53John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:23:53Jordi Hays?

  They were dictating a text into their phone while driving and they got pulled over and they were given a ticket. And they were trying to figure out, okay, uh, they were trying to figure out, okay, am I going to get a point? Uh, are they going to get a point on their license? For this infraction? And I, and the model was saying one thing, but I've had other experiences very recently with models where they get it completely wrong. So I was like, okay, like you kind of got like an indication.

• 2:24:21John Coogan?

  Good thing you had me. Good thing you had me.

• 2:24:25Jordi Hays?

  That was something, that was something else.

• 2:24:27John Coogan?

  You texted me and I was like, I know more than ChatGPT about this topic. Anyway, let me tell you about public investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. And our first guest of the lightning round is here. Should we bring in Mandy Fields, the CFO of Elf Beauty? Welcome to the show.

• 2:24:45Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:24:46Speaker 06

  Hello. Thanks for having me.

• 2:24:48Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you. Uh, would love a quick introduction on yourself since it's your first time.

• 2:24:54Speaker 06

  So yeah, I'm Mandy Fields. I'm Chief Financial Officer at Elf Beauty. Uh, I've been here seven years, my 28th consecutive quarter of reporting the results for Elf Beauty.

• 2:25:06Jordi Hays?

  Amazing, amazing. Uh, and what is, what's the latest? What's the news?

• 2:25:11Speaker 06

  Well, the news is we just reported another tremendous quarter, 38% net sales growth, 79% adjusted EBITDA. Oh, hey, yeah, I love that. Um, and so we're really having a lot of fun over here at Elf Beauty. Um, and that's the results.

• 2:25:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what, what's driving that? Right now, I feel, right now, I feel like there's so much uncertainty around the strength of the consumer broadly. Where there's so many different, like, you can look at government data and see one thing that might give you one signal. And then you look at, uh, report, you know, quarters like you guys are putting up and it says something else. But what are you guys seeing?

• 2:25:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, it really comes down to three things. Our value proposition, and so 75% of our portfolio and on the Elf brand is at $10 or less, and so that really speaks to that consumer seeking value. You pair that with our incredible innovation, the marketing engine that we have, who by the way, I heard that you all are going to be at the big game Super Bowl ad, so congratulations on that.

• 2:26:14Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 2:26:15Speaker 06

  We will be as well.

• 2:26:16Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. I think we'll be at a smaller, our buy is, we'll be at a smaller scale than yours, I'm assuming.

• 2:26:21Speaker 06

  I saw that. I saw yours was about $50,000.

• 2:26:24Jordi Hays?

  Something like that.

• 2:26:25Speaker 06

  Something like that, yeah.

• 2:26:26Jordi Hays?

  But, yeah, well, anyways, I want to get into the Super Bowl too, but continue.

• 2:26:31Speaker 06

  So, and then we also have the incredible addition of Road to our net sales performance. And so Road is an acquisition that we did, we closed in August, that's Hailey Bieber's brand, and it has just had tremendous performance. And so you take all of those things together, that's how you get to that 38% net sales growth for the quarter.

• 2:26:51John Coogan?

  How is the marketing mix changing over the last few years? I mean, Meta had blowout quarter, it seems like ads are performing very well on that platform, the influencer economy is still growing, how much, what does the mix of marketing spend look like?

• 2:27:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, so our marketing spend is pretty well balanced. We allocate 24 to 26% of our net sales to marketing and digital, and we are there on every platform where our community is present. And that has really been a key differentiator with Elf. I think that we are so close to our community, we keep our ear to the ground, and so that really comes through in our innovation and the marketing campaigns that we decide to put forward are really culturally relevant and connected to our communities.

• 2:27:35John Coogan?

  And how are you thinking about the agentic commerce question? Is this something that you need to do anything special for? Does it just naturally happen? It's still so early, but it, these things in AI, they take off so fast.

• 2:27:49Speaker 06

  I think it is still early. We're making sure that we have the back end correct so that we can participate in agentic commerce. But you know, AI is just one of those things where this is kind of one of those technologies that can help on both the revenue side as well as the efficiency side. And so I think it's pretty incredible from that perspective.

• 2:28:08John Coogan?

  Is it possible to build a direct to consumer brand from scratch these days without a huge celebrity partner? It feels like more and more of the deals that I see that actually go the distance, get to big revenue numbers, they got somebody attached.

• 2:28:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's interesting that you say that because I think that's actually pretty rare for a celebrity brand to make it to this. Like if I think about Haley's brand, Rhode, you know, very rare to see a company go to $200 million in sales in less than three years on 10 products. I mean, you usually are seeing multiple products, multiple SKUs, categories to get there. And so I think what we found in Rode is pretty rare.

• 2:28:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much.

• 2:28:53Jordi Hays?

  I wanted to, before you, before you jump off, I wanted to ask, kind of, what, as CFO, how you think about Super Bowl ads? I'm sure this isn't your first rodeo. What kind of goes into it? You know, there's so much, there's, there's so many different ways to approach a Super Bowl ad. But, but what's, what's kind of your logic going into it or kind of framework?

• 2:29:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, so, Super Bowl ads are really about building awareness behind your brand. And so this is not our first rodeo. I think our first time was four years ago. We came with an ad with Jennifer Coolidge. It was a lot of fun. This year, we have Melissa McCarthy as the, as the actress in our Super Bowl ad. And it's fantastic. So, I really think it's about building brand awareness. If I think back, you know, five, six years, our overall awareness was around 13% as a brand, and now we're over 40%. And I credit that to a lot of the collaborations and the things like Super Bowl that we've done over the years.

• 2:29:52John Coogan?

  So, so in terms of measurement?

• 2:29:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so your, your, your CMO and your marketing team are not coming to you, and you're saying like, cool, I'll give you the budget, but like-

• 2:30:01John Coogan?

  I want to see a move in top line the next week. It's more about-

• 2:30:04Speaker 06

  I always say that. I always want to see-

• 2:30:07John Coogan?

  Show me the money now. Yeah, okay.

• 2:30:11Speaker 06

  But in fact, it is sowing the seeds for a longer term investment. There are other things that we look at that are more direct revenue drivers, but Super Bowl investments like that are for the long term.

• 2:30:21Jordi Hays?

  What is, last question for me, what's your kind of M and A outlook for the next couple of years? I'm sure in a perfect world, there'd be a new road every single year that you could roll in, but obviously that's not the way, you know, great brands don't get, you know, started every single day or even year sometimes. So how are you thinking about it?

• 2:30:42Speaker 06

  Well, we have a great portfolio of brands with us today, and so that's really going to be our focus on the existing portfolio and building those brands out even further, whether it be elf and cosmetics and skincare, nutriment, or road. We have some really great brands in our portfolio, and so that's what we're going to be focused on. If somewhere along the way, we found another road, be happy to bring it into the portfolio, but stay and focus on what we have for now.

• 2:31:08John Coogan?

  Makes a ton of sense.

• 2:31:09Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 2:31:10John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:31:11Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you. Excited to see the ad on Sunday.

• 2:31:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, very excited. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:31:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, congrats on the quarter. Cheers.

• 2:31:17John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Cisco. It's critical infrastructure for the AI era. Thank you to Cisco, partner in TVP and.

• 2:31:25Jordi Hays?

  We had a lot of fun on Monday.

• 2:31:27John Coogan?

  At the Cisco AI Summit. Truly, just great interviews. If you haven't already gone and seen them, go check them out. Back to the timeline. There is other news as always. The number of horses per county, I didn't see this chart. And Chadson says, these are rookie numbers, should be double, even triple this. Horses everywhere, wall to wall horses.

• 2:31:53Jordi Hays?

  I, I am.

• 2:31:55John Coogan?

  Should be way more horses.

• 2:31:56Jordi Hays?

  I totally agree. I found out, as you know, in escrow on a new property and I was talking to somebody very enthusiastic about horses and I was getting the breakdown on what kind of horses I'll be able to support on the property. So they were giving me the lay of the land. So I hope to contribute to, it's going to be on everyone to get these numbers. Is up, right? It's not enough for

• 2:32:22John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:32:23Jordi Hays?

  One of us.

• 2:32:23John Coogan?

  I mean, Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, yesterday came on and said that, you know, 75% of all land in cities is parking lots or something. And that's not the real number, but there's a lot of parking lots. What's going to happen to them when we don't need them because of autonomous cars? Stables! Yep. You take your Waymo or your autonomous Uber into the city. You hop on a steed and you go from place to place.

• 2:32:48John Coogan?

  Excellent execution, jury. Excellent execution.

• 2:32:53Jordi Hays?

  I love horses.

• 2:32:54John Coogan?

  I do love horses. I also love Gusto, because horses have gusto. The unified platform for payroll, benefits and HR. Built to evolve with small and medium sized businesses. It is the backbone of TVP.

• 2:33:06Jordi Hays?

  According to the information, upcoming avocado model for Meta is referenced as the most capable model to date internally. I, this doesn't tell you that much.

• 2:33:17John Coogan?

  It doesn't. It's the most powerful iPhone ever. We get it, we get it, we get it. But it happens to benchmark.

• 2:33:22Jordi Hays?

  Not even that. It's like, this is like some, you know, like, they could make the most capable model for Meta.

• 2:33:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:29Jordi Hays?

  Could be the least capable if you compare it to the other lot.

• 2:33:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:33:33Jordi Hays?

  So, so.

• 2:33:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, but, but, but it's the same thing that, that happens in W W C where you stand on stage and you say it's the most powerful iPhone yet. It has the most battery life of an iPhone ever. And it's like, well, if it was a less powerful iPhone, you probably wouldn't launch it. Um, but it's very exciting to see that they're making progress and they're sending out memos and they're leaking to the information and they're excitement building. And I think that, I do think that we are going to get something pretty powerful.

• 2:33:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, I'm excited about it.

• 2:33:58John Coogan?

  Based on the team.

• 2:33:59Jordi Hays?

  And it's a great name.

• 2:34:00John Coogan?

  Everything, like avocado is a good name. And based on the team and the compute and the money, like, they're gonna jump to the frontier. Like, there's just no question that they'll be really, really close to the frontier.

• 2:34:09Jordi Hays?

  We gotta go back to the horses. Al, Al in the X chat says they have two horses doing their part.

• 2:34:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:34:15Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 2:34:16John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, thank you, Al. And full circle.

• 2:34:18Jordi Hays?

  Get those numbers up, though. Don't just say, oh, I'm doing my part. I don't, like, if.

• 2:34:22John Coogan?

  You gotta be growing exponentially. You gotta go to four, then eight, 16, 32, etc.

• 2:34:28Speaker 03

  Okay, just on the, on the Meta model thing for a second. Historically, food-based models with the name, with food in the name have done really well, right? You have Nano Banana.

• 2:34:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:34:37Speaker 03

  You have Strawberry.

• 2:34:38John Coogan?

  Strawberry.

• 2:34:39Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:34:40Jordi Hays?

  That's all I can think of. I mean avocado, it's a good sign.

• 2:34:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay, okay, it's good, it's good.

• 2:34:47Speaker 07

  Wasteland Capital is doing posting.

• 2:34:49Jordi Hays?

  A black pill.

• 2:34:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:34:51Jordi Hays?

  Tech has now entered a liquidation spiral where people, e.g. hedge funds, are forced to sell good, cheap, accelerating assets like semis to cover their losses and expensive, decelerating, high P E S H I T, like SaaS and AI victims.

• 2:35:06John Coogan?

  AI victims.

• 2:35:07Jordi Hays?

  Not sure how long this will take to play out.

• 2:35:10John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 2:35:10Jordi Hays?

  It's been a brutal week. We needed, we needed the red suits this week.

• 2:35:14John Coogan?

  We did. But fortunately, our guest who's in person has a very special suit that I'm very excited to show you after our next guest, who is in the restream waiting room.

• 2:35:23Jordi Hays?

  Last post, Joe Weisenthal says the sell-off in everything that is not canned soup is relentless.

• 2:35:30John Coogan?

  How's Caterpillar doing? Probably doing pretty well.

• 2:35:33Jordi Hays?

  Campbell's is up today.

• 2:35:36John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:35:36Jordi Hays?

  Up 6% in the last five days. Flight to safety, flight to Campbell's.

• 2:35:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, buy some soup. Buy some soup. Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state-of-the-art reasoning, next level vibe carrying, and deep multimodal understanding. Our next guest is in the restream waiting room. We have Ivan from Daytona.

• 2:35:55Jordi Hays?

  Great name.

• 2:35:57John Coogan?

  Great name. We love Daytona.

• 2:36:00Jordi Hays?

  All right, we gotta, we gotta talk about this. You had one of my favorite interactions on X. This was like a month ago. You remember, you were, you said something like, I'm working late on a Sunday, and somebody commented like that, why are you even doing that? Nobody knows who you are. And Ivan was like, that's exactly why.

• 2:36:19John Coogan?

  That's so good.

• 2:36:22John Coogan?

  That's a great response. That's a great response.

• 2:36:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, so it was basically, the reason was like, it was just for the holidays and everyone was talking about, oh, no one, no one took a break on the, during the summer. So we're all taking breaks on, you know, winter, like founders and investors or whatever. And I'm thinking like, are we serious? This is like a once in a generation opportunity. And like, if you go rest, like you won't probably make it, right? And I just tweeted that. And then to your point, someone was like, I've never heard of you. Like, exactly. That's why we have to work. So, yeah.

• 2:36:54John Coogan?

  Well, hopefully people hear about you now. Why don't you introduce yourself and the company?

• 2:37:00Speaker 07

  Sure, so I'm one of the co-founders and CEO of Daytona. Daytona is on a mission, basically, to give every single agent a computer, or a sandbox, as it's popularly called, right? And so, the team has been working together, the founders, for almost 20 years. So we're quite old, and we've always been in for people. Everything from screwing together servers to creating orchestrators and whatever.

• 2:37:21John Coogan?

  Interesting. Orchestrators, tell me more about where you're seeing the orchestration market going. I'm a big fan of Gastown and the metaphors, and it feels like it could be like the hot new trend, but I don't know if it's too early, or where we'll see all that go.

• 2:37:37Speaker 07

  I mean, trends keep changing, as you've seen. Like, every, you know, two months, things change. But one thing is for sure, and this is what, I mean, I love what Gastown is doing and all these others, which is basically the ability to spin up multiple of these agents. Each of these agents needs a computer. And I don't think we stop here with like 2, or 4, or 10, or 50. Like, this will go exponential. And so that's why we're doing what we're doing. So we really love what Steve is doing at Gastown and all these other people that are creating this.

• 2:38:04John Coogan?

  Talk about, talk more about where the product is, the evolution, where the team is, kind of the current state of the company, and where you want to go.

• 2:38:13Speaker 07

  Sure, so, the company's almost 3 years old, but we actually like hard pivoted and like fired all our customers and everything. And we decided, so yeah, that was a hard one. And we saw what was coming. We weren't actually a first, but we did see that agents would need these computers. And so we actually rebuilt the product from zero, launched it 8 months ago. And since then, we've got, the number of customers has been insane, the growth has been insane. We've everything from YC companies, growth companies, Fortune 100 companies. Everyone building agents either internally, or as, you know, as products, are using us or someone like us, so yeah.

• 2:38:51John Coogan?

  Talk about why an agent needs a computer. You know, there's been this debate over Open Claw, formerly Claude Book, around like, oh, should you host it virtually? Or should you run it on a MacBook Mini? And if you do run it locally, that's a security risk. But then, you talk to the people, and they're like, okay, yeah, you're running in the cloud, but you still gave it access to your email. And so, like, you kind of let the fox in the hen house. So what does it mean to actually provision a computer versus just APIs to other compute resources?

• 2:39:24Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. So I think that's the most interesting part where originally agents were like these use like rag based systems. They could connect to APIs and they can usually like consume information, analyze it, give you some feedback and fire off some tasks. But if you actually think about that, if that is a way a not digital knowledge worker would work, the two of you wouldn't have laptops in front of you, right? Like there's, it's, it's not that ideal. It's, you know, it's messy. You have to download things. You have to install things. You have to analyze things. And if we think of AI agents as digital knowledge workers, it actually makes like super sense that they do need these computers. The open Claude, or whatever it's called right now, and Claude code and whatnot. I can't, there's like three names. It's open claw. Open claw, yeah, open claw.

• 2:40:07Speaker 07

  Yeah, so this just shows that everyone buying Mac Mini's, I think this just made people understand why it needs computers. But if you think of, if you look at our use cases and what people use, they want it to build for, we basically have three, which is code and command execution, computer and browser use and RL. And so the first one, like the canonical, these are not our customers. I'll just say the highest brands, just so people know, is like if you think of like lovable. And do you think of lovable, you as a human type with lovable, and then it spins up a sandbox to write the code, preview the code and run the code. And so lovable has how many users? And so it needs like hundreds of thousands of these sandboxes to be run so their agents can get there, right? The second one is like if you need your agent, you know, do QA testing of booking.com's website.

• 2:40:51Speaker 07

  Like it needs a computer to be able to run the browser to be able to do these things. And the most, the newest sort of use case for us is just like the RL environments. And I think Dylan Patel, who was a guest yesterday on your show. And also, I'm gonna also, we're doing a conference next week and so he's one of our guests. He's going. Yeah, he's going. So at the Chase Center, rented out the Chase Center to do the conference called Compute. So you're very, you're very invited if you guys want to join. And so he has this article about RL environments and how most of the models have now over the last 18 months become better because of post-training and spinning up these RL environments. And these companies to spin up these RL environments, they need not only fast Computers or sandboxes, they need them, they need them in concurrency.

• 2:41:35Speaker 07

  So they need 100,000 or 200,000 to be spun up in an order of like three minutes. Right. This is not a trivial thing and not something that you can really take off the shelf. And so when you think about why agents need computers, like when you really think about the market of AI agents and software, that's where that fits in.

• 2:41:52John Coogan?

  I want Dylan Patel doing the Lil Yachty walkout that he's, he's made fake AI versions of it so many times and now he's at the Chase Center, 100, 1,500, 1,500 builders there. You gotta get the Lil Yachty playing so he can do the walkout. I saw first mark in the chat. Give us the news. What happened?

• 2:42:10Speaker 07

  Yes, we raised a $24 million Series A.

• 2:42:17Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 2:42:19Speaker 07

  Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

• 2:42:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very impressive progress and I'm sure he'll be back on very soon. And have a great time at the, at the conference, pulling together 1,500 people.

• 2:42:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're excited.

• 2:42:33Speaker 07

  Thanks so much.

• 2:42:33Jordi Hays?

  We'll talk to you soon. Great to meet you, Evan.

• 2:42:35John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. And without further ado, we've been keeping our next guest waiting. He's live in the TVPL Trudome. It's Scott.

• 2:42:47Jordi Hays?

  He's suited up.

• 2:42:55John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming.

• 2:42:58Jordi Hays?

  Look at this suit. Is that game worn?

• 2:43:01Speaker 08

  Someone's gotta bring some swag to this show. No quarter zips here. No half ass. It's custom suits only.

• 2:43:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What's the origin of this suit?

• 2:43:12Speaker 08

  No, Shinisty. I gotta prep. You know, you guys got your sponsors.

• 2:43:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:43:16Speaker 08

  I got my sponsors. Shinisty.com. They make all my custom suits. By the way, it's a shame the sports card company Fleer isn't still in business.

• 2:43:24John Coogan?

  Fleer?

• 2:43:24Speaker 08

  Remember Fleer? Sports cards?

• 2:43:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:27Speaker 08

  Cause then they could have called us the Fleer Ultra Dome. You've been giving out gold medallions. I had to do the for Dylan. Dylan needed a Fleer Ultra.

• 2:43:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. He's a big, he's a big. Yeah. How'd you, how'd you, how'd you meet Dylan?

• 2:43:37Speaker 08

  Dylan and I met at HQ.

• 2:43:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:43:40Speaker 08

  When he came on board, I was hosting it. He came on board as a partnerships guy.

• 2:43:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:44Speaker 08

  Absolute wizard.

• 2:43:45John Coogan?

  He is.

• 2:43:45Speaker 08

  You guys are so lucky.

• 2:43:47John Coogan?

  We are.

• 2:43:48Speaker 08

  With Savvy, if we were just a little earlier market, maybe we could have hired him first, but.

• 2:43:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:43:52Speaker 08

  You guys, we'll poach him one day.

• 2:43:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Introduce Savvy.

• 2:43:56Speaker 08

  That'll be a good, that'll be a good talent war. That'll be a good day.

• 2:43:58John Coogan?

  And then, and yeah, yeah. Introduce Savvy, get us up to speed. And then of course, we'll go back and talk a lot about HQ.

• 2:44:03Speaker 08

  Sure. Yeah. So Dylan and I met, met at HQ where if your viewers aren't familiar, um, was this live, interactive, mobile game show, viral phenomenon.

• 2:44:11John Coogan?

  We have.

• 2:44:12Speaker 08

  In 2017. You guys play?

• 2:44:13John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:44:14Speaker 08

  HQD's here?

• 2:44:15John Coogan?

  Of course, we're at HQD's.

• 2:44:16Speaker 08

  All right, all right.

• 2:44:17John Coogan?

  I never won. I don't think I ever won.

• 2:44:19Speaker 08

  Neither did I, man.

• 2:44:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Well, you were playing.

• 2:44:20Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:44:21John Coogan?

  That would be insider trading.

• 2:44:22Speaker 08

  Uh, it was tough though. Honestly, part of like the journey to Savvy is, you know, taking a lot of the learnings and insights from HQ, which tremendous success at first.

• 2:44:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:33Speaker 08

  Viral international hit.

• 2:44:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:35Speaker 08

  But when you think about it and in hindsight, you go, oh, maybe it was a flawed product.

• 2:44:40John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:44:41Speaker 08

  Because it was this really impossible game to win, right? Very few people actually won it. And a lot of very smart people, including Stephen Colbert, when I did his show, he told me be, behind the curtain, he didn't do this on the camera. He goes, "I played your game a couple of times, didn't win, stopped playing." Yeah. And it's like, oh, interesting. Cause if you're a smart person, you don't want to feel stupid. Losing over and over and over. Yeah. It's not a good feeling. So from that perspective, it was maybe not the best.

• 2:45:04John Coogan?

  Cause yeah, if you play Fortnite or Call of Duty and you're not doing well, they will pair you with other people that are at your skill ceiling. Like the skill-based matchmaking happens in most, you go to chess.com, you'll be matched with someone at your level. So you can get a couple of wins under your belt. With HQ, it just gets more and more competitive, more and more competitive.

• 2:45:22Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 2:45:22John Coogan?

  And then the company obviously has to raise the bar or else everyone wins.

• 2:45:25Speaker 08

  Yes. And iterating on the products, adding features, adding new formats, they just never quite got there. So with Savvy, one of the things, one of the takeaways is we want to make this game something that everybody can play all the way through because with HQ, if you got out on question two out of 12, you were done. That's it.

• 2:45:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 2:45:40Speaker 08

  Yeah. So now you could play all five rounds of Savvy, which are word puzzles.

• 2:45:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:45:44Speaker 08

  Uh, we thought about trivia, but I think AI has put a kibosh.

• 2:45:48John Coogan?

  Oh, shit.

• 2:45:48Speaker 08

  On trivia for cash.

• 2:45:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:50Speaker 08

  Because it's just too easy with these bots, man. But with tech savvies, they understand.

• 2:45:55Jordi Hays?

  Somebody would have just like the biggest bot farm in the world, just trying, just winning every, every single time.

• 2:46:00Speaker 08

  I mean, they were already doing that eight years ago. So just imagine what you can do now.

• 2:46:03Jordi Hays?

  You guys were dealing with bots?

• 2:46:05Speaker 08

  Yeah. I mean, I don't know if it was AI back then, but there were, you know, Discord farms and bot people. I don't know. I'm not a tech guy, so I don't really know how that stuff works. But with, with Savvy, I mean, we're doing word puzzles. So it's basically like a live Wordle meets connections on if you play those games. So it's a version, our version of that, five rounds, timed rounds. You can score points. And the key differentiator, you're playing against me.

• 2:46:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's you.

• 2:46:30Speaker 08

  It's, it's, it's the host.

• 2:46:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:46:32Speaker 08

  The host plays too. So imagine HQ if I was just, if I was asking the questions and answering them. And if you answer more than me, you won. Imagine that. That's how HQ works.

• 2:46:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:46:41Speaker 08

  That's how Savvy works.

• 2:46:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:43Speaker 08

  So if you score more points than me, if you, if you solve the puzzles quicker, if you get, you beat the host, you're a hostbuster.

• 2:46:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, hostbuster. I like that.

• 2:46:52John Coogan?

  What's your, uh, what's your, what's a day in the life like then?

• 2:46:55Speaker 08

  Right now?

• 2:46:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:56Speaker 08

  Well, guys, I just moved to LA last week. So I'm trying to get.

• 2:46:59Jordi Hays?

  What do you think?

• 2:47:00Speaker 08

  Day in the life. Oh, I love it. I mean, I, I was here a few years ago.

• 2:47:03John Coogan?

  New York guy before?

• 2:47:03Speaker 08

  New York my whole life. But no, I spent about 21 to 24 in LA, moved back to New York for some relationships. And came back here for my new relationship, my new commitment is this app because frankly, the time.

• 2:47:17Jordi Hays?

  Married, married to the game.

• 2:47:18Speaker 08

  I'm not married to anyone else, but this game, I'm committed like Kurt Russell to Goldie Hawn, you know, I'm, and that level of commitment.

• 2:47:24John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:47:25Speaker 08

  Arizona iced tea, 99 cents. That commitment, that's my commitment. That's my commitment. But, uh, no, I'm here for a week. So I really haven't gotten my day of the life routine yet, but I'm trying to, I walk the dog in the morning. I'm still getting up early with that time zone difference. You know, having my coffee, making a breakfast, doing a great.

• 2:47:41Jordi Hays?

  Are you gonna stay, stay on New York time?

• 2:47:44Speaker 08

  I thought about that. It might happen. I mean, you guys are up early for the show, I know. So it actually helps, right? Kind of staying in that.

• 2:47:50John Coogan?

  We do the workout. We go get breakfast, prep the show, go live at 11:00. How important is going live at a particular time, the iteration, any of this recording? Like, how are you thinking about just rotating another host? Like, your workflow and your involvement? Because I feel like the unlock is the talent, is the host, right?

• 2:48:10Speaker 08

  For sure. And we're gonna definitely find other hosts. We have to. I mean, I already just talked today about doing a gig in Miami on March 18th. So I'm like, alright, I gotta find... So we're gonna have other hosts. We're gonna have other shows. That's all gonna happen. But, look, this is so cool being here. First of all, watching you guys grow the way you have. I've been following along and watching. It's very cool to see. And it really brings...

• 2:48:28John Coogan?

  There's a lot of HQ in here.

• 2:48:29Speaker 08

  There's a lot of HQ in here.

• 2:48:30John Coogan?

  There's some Clubhouse. There's a lot of different stuff that has been tried and we just sort of pieced it back together.

• 2:48:35Speaker 08

  And you realize the importance of cadence, of going live every day. For you guys having that long show, for us, it's a short burst of tight attention span. But, you know, a whole different thing. We're playing a game. But it really is like, so for example, we were doing beta shows weekly in New York, okay? And I knew going in, like, weekly isn't gonna really do it.

• 2:48:52Jordi Hays?

  Never do anything weekly. Always do it strongly.

• 2:48:54Speaker 08

  Ah, I like that. Is that Lao Tzu? That's good.

• 2:49:00Speaker 08

  So we started doing daily shows now. We're going live five times a week, Sunday to Thursday, school nights. Live on school nights at 9:00 PM Eastern. But doing them here, so last Thursday, we had 1,200 peak concurrents. About 1,500 total entered. Last night, less than a week later, 3,000.

• 2:49:16John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:49:16Speaker 08

  So we've had doubling growth week over week. There you go.

• 2:49:20John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:49:21Speaker 08

  Monetization, um, we sold one T-shirt on T-Public, got three bucks for that.

• 2:49:25John Coogan?

  Ching!

• 2:49:26Speaker 08

  So our first three dollars is in the door.

• 2:49:28John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:49:28Speaker 08

  And I think we made four cents on TikTok Live, our simulcast. So we are monetization, post-monetization.

• 2:49:34John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:49:35Speaker 08

  Post-revenue.

• 2:49:36John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:49:36Speaker 08

  But no, we're, listen, I'm bootstrapping this thing to talk business.

• 2:49:39Jordi Hays?

  Okay, yeah, I was gonna ask. So you talked about some of the product challenges with HQ. Just if every, if the average user's losing every single night, that's rough. But, yeah, what about from a business standpoint? It also feels like HQ is in this position where, once it had real venture dollars behind it, you just have to go for scale. And when you're bootstrapping, as long as the business is sustainable, there's no reason to stop. You don't, it's, you can reach a point where you're like, okay, we've hit a ceiling and that's okay. Maybe, maybe there is no ceiling, maybe there is, but it doesn't really matter either way.

• 2:50:11Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, I, I don't have a very sanguine view about VC culture and the whole thing. Based on my experience with HQ, I mean, look, you give a bunch of young people a lot of money and just say, "Go scale a company, go lead a team, go manage people." Not very many people.

• 2:50:27John Coogan?

  Go compete with Facebook, go compete with Google.

• 2:50:31Speaker 08

  But really, even just like personnel, I mean, also in a business sense, and you know, most of these people didn't go to business school. Uh, anyway, my point is, we have like a, a, a philosophy here where we're really trying to just bring as much as we can to this as a full team. I'm putting my money in, one of my other co-founders is putting money in, and we are really trying to commit to doing this ourselves for as long as we can. We did take a couple of meetings with some like stay, uh, early-stage seed, uh, guys, just to kind of validate the product.

• 2:50:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm not like the other VCs, I won't tell you to grow at all.

• 2:51:00John Coogan?

  The other, the other question is like, is this almost more suitable for someone who is in the entertainment industry? And not thinking about this as, okay, this is going to be a tech company and AI company, blah, blah, blah. But more like the values and the talent, the values in the community, the values in the, the product and.

• 2:51:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like, I feel like in Hollywood and entertainment, it's very much calculus of like, hey, if we can spend $20 million to make this movie and it makes $80 million, that's a win.

• 2:51:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:29Jordi Hays?

  And in VC, if, if a company says, "We're raising $20 million and we only ever want to make 80 million."

• 2:51:35John Coogan?

  And then we're wrapping it up and moving on to the sequel, maybe in 10 years.

• 2:51:39Speaker 08

  Which also is insane to me because 60 million is not bad. Like, I'm, I'm, I'm very happy, give me a quarter of that.

• 2:51:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:46Speaker 08

  Um, so, no, I mean, listen, I get it, there's a whole ecosystem of, of, of the, of the investors. And listen, we, we, we were certainly open to it. Listen, we'll be open to it if we need to go there, um, but thankfully, we're in a position, although I don't know after the market today, might have to, might have to reevaluate some of that.

• 2:52:03John Coogan?

  We'll see.

• 2:52:05Speaker 08

  Yikes. Bad day.

• 2:52:08John Coogan?

  How do you, how do you originally get the job at HQ?

• 2:52:11Jordi Hays?

  You're just, you check your portfolio, you're looking in the mirror.

• 2:52:13Speaker 08

  In fact, I'm getting a text, I'm getting a text like, yeah, we actually do need a check right now, so if any VCs are watching.

• 2:52:22Speaker 08

  No, you're sorry.

• 2:52:23John Coogan?

  How'd you get the job at HQ?

• 2:52:24Speaker 08

  Oh, that was an audition, man.

• 2:52:25John Coogan?

  An audition? So, yeah, even though it was a tech company, they held full auditions? Like, did you see it on like a talent casting website? Or just a Craigslist ad? A flyer?

• 2:52:35Speaker 08

  It was purely like a, you know, a friend networking thing. Yeah, I mean, a guy used to work at The Onion.

• 2:52:40Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for networking.

• 2:52:41John Coogan?

  Oh, I love The Onion.

• 2:52:42Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 2:52:43John Coogan?

  The Onion, you worked there?

• 2:52:45Speaker 08

  So in 2008, I interned there.

• 2:52:46John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:52:47Speaker 08

  And this guy Nick was the photo editor.

• 2:52:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:49Speaker 08

  And we became friends, you know?

• 2:52:50John Coogan?

  Hilarious.

• 2:52:50Speaker 08

  Couple of young guys, funny guys, hanging out in New York. And we stayed friends throughout, you know, on Facebook mostly. But like, I got my roommate a job at the company that was HQ, it turns out, because Nick had put out a message on Facebook saying, "Hey, I'm looking for an animator." My roommate was an animator, so Russ got the job there.

• 2:53:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:53:05Speaker 08

  And then lo and behold, a few months later, Nick calls me and goes, "You know, we're casting a host for this game show on your phone." I'm like, "I was about to move to LA." This was 2017, I already moved out of my apartment in Brooklyn. I was ready to go. And I'm like, "I guess I'll do one more audition." I've failed every audition. Just flunked them left and right. For shows like Broad City and Search Party. I remember there was a Delta commercial with Noah Syndergaard. I was going to take my shirt off. And I was like, excited to do that.

• 2:53:28Jordi Hays?

  You were dice.

• 2:53:28Speaker 08

  Because I love Thor and the Met.

• 2:53:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:53:32Speaker 08

  And I'm actually a JetBlue guy, to be honest. But, uh, listen, I failed all those auditions. And this is the one audition I got, the last one I took. And it changed my life, and what can I say? It's just, um, but you know, you mentioned like the whole media and tech hybrid. And that's what makes, that's what made HQ very unique. But also what makes Savvy unique, because, look, HQ had interest from NBC, Disney, Fox, also Facebook, also, you know, the venture capital. You know, founders voluntarily put in 15 million.

• 2:53:59John Coogan?

  I remember.

• 2:53:59Speaker 08

  But, um, you know, very few companies have that type of dual interest and attraction from those major, major spheres of influence and money. And, um, it's about managing those types of investment partners, but also just managing the product and understanding that, you know, when you're doing a live, interactive game show on a phone, on your own app, just like what you guys are doing in terms of building your own network, you got to think about, yeah, there's technology involved. Look at what's happening with the streaming and everything. But it's a show, it's entertainment. And you guys are doing it all, just like we're doing it all. It's exciting, it's very heady, it can be scary at times. Very few people are doing it. So give ourselves some credit for doing the media tech hybrid-ish.

• 2:54:37Jordi Hays?

  They said it was impossible. Uh, how soon do you think Zuck will clone Savvy?

• 2:54:44Speaker 08

  I would love for him to try.

• 2:54:45John Coogan?

  Someone else.

• 2:54:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, break down. Yeah, no, no.

• 2:54:47Speaker 08

  That was, that was up.

• 2:54:49Jordi Hays?

  Break down how you process that.

• 2:54:51Speaker 08

  Listen, man, I mean, they say flattery is the, I forget what they say.

• 2:54:54John Coogan?

  Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

• 2:54:57Speaker 08

  Right, right.

• 2:54:57John Coogan?

  We like to say imitation just sucks.

• 2:54:59Speaker 08

  Imitation, especially imitation crab.

• 2:55:01John Coogan?

  It's for losers.

• 2:55:02Speaker 08

  You ever that imitation crab meme, those garden, those California rolls?

• 2:55:05Jordi Hays?

  Disgusting.

• 2:55:06John Coogan?

  It's disgusting and despicable and you should be ashamed for imitating me.

• 2:55:10Speaker 08

  And, and you say this.

• 2:55:11John Coogan?

  Not flattered at all.

• 2:55:11Speaker 08

  Right, exactly. And, and, and nobody at CNBC would have any issue with that.

• 2:55:17Speaker 08

  We all imitate, we all remix each other, but that's the thing. It's like, you don't, what you guys are doing is like, oh, I don't need a job on CNBC. I can create my own goddamn CNBC. Make your own squat box.

• 2:55:28Jordi Hays?

  We love CNBC.

• 2:55:29Speaker 08

  Of course you do.

• 2:55:30John Coogan?

  But I honestly would have never even thought like, oh, I should apply for a job there. Like, I don't even know how to get into that world. It's just like, they didn't come naturally.

• 2:55:36Jordi Hays?

  What you're right is like, yeah, if you ask John and I even a year and a half ago, hey, would you ever think about, could we?

• 2:55:42John Coogan?

  Doing business television.

• 2:55:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a news anchor.

• 2:55:44John Coogan?

  No, like, we're like, let's have a podcast with two microphones, just talk to each other.

• 2:55:48Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 2:55:49John Coogan?

  And it turned into a TV show, kind of, but streamed online.

• 2:55:52Speaker 08

  But you know, someone, someone asked me when I was hosting HG, you know, get interviewed, and they say, well, where do you want to be in five years? What's the next move for you?

• 2:55:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:55:58Speaker 08

  And I go, I'll be here for 20 years if this thing stays on. This is the future, right? Unfortunately, it didn't last very long, but with Savvy, I'm, like I said, I am in this to win this for the long haul. My skin's in the game.

• 2:56:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:10Speaker 08

  My face is, again, you know, front and center, for better or worse. I don't think America, I don't think 100% of America loves this face, but enough people do.

• 2:56:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:20Speaker 08

  Enough people do.

• 2:56:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, what was chat back like that?

• 2:56:22Jordi Hays?

  You don't have to.

• 2:56:23Speaker 08

  Chat, chat can be a little rough, you know? You know, there's always.

• 2:56:27John Coogan?

  We've been there. We've been bombed by all sorts of, just today. I don't know if you saw.

• 2:56:32Jordi Hays?

  I guess word leaked that Sam was coming on to the.

• 2:56:34John Coogan?

  Leaked, we promoted it everywhere.

• 2:56:37Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm saying it leaked to the part of the internet where there's a lot of people that are really frustrated that 4O, the model from OpenAI is being deprecated. A lot of people fell in love with the model, have a very close relationship with the model.

• 2:56:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:56:48Jordi Hays?

  And so we basically couldn't even look at the chat at one point because there was, you know, a message every second from somebody saying.

• 2:56:54John Coogan?

  I didn't realize how big that army is. I, I've seen a couple posts. I thought mostly maybe fake AI generator or something like, they were there, they were real and like, and, and they had points to make.

• 2:57:03Speaker 08

  Yeah. This is the problem with people who can't.

• 2:57:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:06Speaker 08

  Fall in love with the fashion model, they fall in love with AI models and. It's a whole different type of person, unfortunately.

• 2:57:12John Coogan?

  We have like a really core community that's really positive and everyone gives each other feedback, like the core group is really, really solid.

• 2:57:19Speaker 08

  Of course, no, I mean, I'm just screwing around. Like, obviously, every chat's gonna have a few trolls in there.

• 2:57:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 2:57:24Speaker 08

  But no, we welcome everyone and there really are, like HQ, the community of HQ was so tremendous, HQ-ies, I mean, millions of people playing. I've heard from people who got married because they met someone playing HQ, you know, strange families coming together again.

• 2:57:39Jordi Hays?

  How many, how many people of the early user base for Savvy are just people that were waiting for it to be reborn and some...

• 2:57:46Speaker 08

  A bunch. I mean, what we noticed was, again, live interactive, not all people are doing it and platforms aren't built for it. So even on like TikTok and Twitch, when people are going live, they're finding hacks to make interactive gaming.

• 2:57:59John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:57:59Speaker 08

  But no one's doing this one-to-one interactive, the host versus the audience, streamer versus audience, very unique. And that's kind of the thesis behind building our platforms. We want to make this streamer-to-audience interaction that no one else is doing, live, appointment-based, games, cash prizes, the whole shebang.

• 2:58:16John Coogan?

  So how do you think about syndication and marketing, like, turning the show that's live, interactive? That's a very high bar. I mean, we see it with like, the number of people that show up live and watch the whole show is way lower than the people that watch our RSS feed or YouTube videos or shorts or clips. And so, how do you take something that, you gotta be there, but if you see it, you might be like, I want to be there for the next one.

• 2:58:37Speaker 08

  Exactly. Well, that's, that's the marketing, right? I mean, we haven't spent any money on marketing, it's really just been my social media posts that have gotten us to these 3,000 people or so.

• 2:58:45John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:58:45Speaker 08

  And then, of course, you know, coming on shows like this, I'm hoping we get the TBN bump tonight.

• 2:58:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:58:51Speaker 08

  I want to crack brief that, 3,500, get to 3,500.

• 2:58:54John Coogan?

  If it happens, we're taking credit. We're taking credit.

• 2:58:56Speaker 08

  You should, you should.

• 2:58:57John Coogan?

  If it's happening.

• 2:58:58Speaker 08

  You should. I mean, how about, even Sam Altman's trolls, we'll take you too.

• 2:59:01Jordi Hays?

  Tell them, tell them that 4O's hosting.

• 2:59:03Speaker 08

  4O's hosting.

• 2:59:05John Coogan?

  That is a dangerous proposition.

• 2:59:06Jordi Hays?

  4O co-hosts.

• 2:59:08John Coogan?

  Forever. They can never, never stop.

• 2:59:11Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so you touched on monetization earlier, but is this the kind of thing you get? If 10,000 people, 20,000, 100,000 someday showing up every single night, they would happily pay some amount of money for that experience, right?

• 2:59:27Speaker 08

  Absolutely. And again, to bring it back to Dylan, who was the one responsible for getting those deals on board. I mean, we had, ultimately, we were doing million dollar deals for single shows.

• 2:59:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but why wouldn't, why wouldn't a player just subscribe to?

• 2:59:40Speaker 08

  Oh, well, we have subscriptions also.

• 2:59:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, paid subscriptions. So you have that, like, because I think if you're running, yeah, I mean, I can just imagine if you have 100,000 people that play the game all the time, why would they not play? There's a lot of value there.

• 2:59:52Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah. No, yeah, we're gonna do subscriptions. We're rolling that out for our season one premiere, March 1st. Subscriptions, and of course, sponsorships could be a part of that, too. But no, absolutely. I mean, the, you know, when we see people on Twitch donating $10 a month to their streamers for nothing really in return, it's like, well, if we can offer, you know, I mean, it's just donate. It's like, it's, you know, Patreon. It's support. No, it's support. And that's, it's an amazing community of support out there, like, from fans to artists, right? Fans to content creators. So we don't have that mechanism yet, but when we roll out the subscription, it's like, hey, if you love Savvy, if you love Rock with Me, throw us some cash, and then we'll give you your digital rewards, your customizations.

• 3:00:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Fortnite skins.

• 3:00:29Speaker 08

  Exclusive games, though, maybe higher prize amounts.

• 3:00:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, talk to me about a million dollar HQ show. Like, what does that feel like for you? What's an example? Walk me through sort of like how those big shows, those big monetization moments came together.

• 3:00:43Speaker 08

  How they came, I mean, how they came together was we were able to get a million people playing in the game live. If you get a million live devices, and it turns out, guys, if Dylan only knew this when we were making those deals, he probably could have doubled money. Because later on, we hired Nielsen, the ratings company, to come in and do a study, and they put like a 1.7% multiple on our viewer. So frankly...

• 3:01:04John Coogan?

  People are looking over your shoulder.

• 3:01:06Speaker 08

  Exactly. If there's one person holding a phone, maybe there's an office all playing together, family playing together. So honestly, two and a half million connected devices was our peak with The Rock.

• 3:01:14John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:01:15Speaker 08

  When he hosted.

• 3:01:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:16Speaker 08

  That was Warner Brothers sponsored event.

• 3:01:17John Coogan?

  Sponsored for Warner Brothers for a movie.

• 3:01:19Speaker 08

  To promote Rampage.

• 3:01:20John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 3:01:20Speaker 08

  Was the movie at the time.

• 3:01:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:22Speaker 08

  Instant classic.

• 3:01:23John Coogan?

  Instant classic.

• 3:01:24Speaker 08

  Modern classic Rampage, of course.

• 3:01:25John Coogan?

  Okay, of course. Still getting paid?

• 3:01:27Speaker 08

  Still talking about that movie.

• 3:01:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:30Speaker 08

  Two, but 2.5 million connected devices, really, yeah, close to like 5 million.

• 3:01:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:34Speaker 08

  Viewers.

• 3:01:34John Coogan?

  And then, and then what's your interaction with the Warner Brothers team on that? Like, are you, are you stop? Yeah, during the show, are you, is it just overlays, graphics? Are you stopping doing ad reads? Like, what do they want to really make that pop?

• 3:01:47Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 3:01:47John Coogan?

  For a million bucks?

• 3:01:48Speaker 08

  It was, I mean, we showed the trailer.

• 3:01:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:01:50Speaker 08

  We put the trailer in the, in the lobby.

• 3:01:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:01:52Speaker 08

  And we, and we, I definitely talked about it.

• 3:01:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:54Speaker 08

  Uh, you know, probably rolled a whole script around.

• 3:01:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:56Speaker 08

  We did a Ready Player One.

• 3:01:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:01:57Speaker 08

  Uh, deal.

• 3:01:58John Coogan?

  And maybe some questions that are linked.

• 3:02:00Speaker 08

  Some questions linked to it. A lot of, you know, you know, graphical integration, the UX UI. But I think it were like the, the Ready Player One goggles on air even.

• 3:02:07John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 3:02:08Speaker 08

  So that kind of stuff. And live product reads are gonna be part of Savvy as well.

• 3:02:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 3:02:11Speaker 08

  And then, again, we're taking the live podcast.

• 3:02:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:13Speaker 08

  Ecosystem of ads, as you guys well know. You guys are like NASCAR drivers over here.

• 3:02:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:02:18Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that, uh, energy or compute will be a bigger bottleneck for Savvy?

• 3:02:23Speaker 08

  Great question, and I don't know what either one of those words means. No, um, uh, you know, yeah, it's gonna get expensive.

• 3:02:30Jordi Hays?

  But I expect you guys to train your own foundation model.

• 3:02:33Speaker 08

  Our own, our own replicants.

• 3:02:35John Coogan?

  We, we got a foundation model right here.

• 3:02:37Speaker 08

  Does there go AI?

• 3:02:38John Coogan?

  You're a foundation model of a man.

• 3:02:40Speaker 08

  I'm a foundational element. I'm a, I'm a fundamental aspect of consciousness. Live on your screen.

• 3:02:46Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 3:02:46Speaker 08

  You know, real humans are gonna be a scarce commodity in the near future, so.

• 3:02:51Jordi Hays?

  How, how are you thinking about building the team?

• 3:02:54Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's important, obviously, you know, you know, I'm, I'm CMO, co-founder technically. So we've got our COO, Josh, our CTO, Ben, and CEO, Johan. Uh, Johan and Ben are based in Europe, actually. Most of our team is, is in Europe. We're distributed across the globe. And, um, they're doing a lot of the hiring decisions there for the key roles, backend stuff. We're looking, but we are looking, you know, animators, um, social media manager, actually. Community manager's key. Um, and, and really, we're looking for just, you know, it's like the be, do, have way of thinking.

• 3:03:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:25Speaker 08

  We just want people who are gonna be their best, bring their best self to the job. And if they're. Doing that, then they're gonna have success and we're gonna do well.

• 3:03:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Did you get any inbound from companies that wanted to dip their toe in live? Post HQ, people that wanna, like, what was the, what was the post HQ sort of like? Idea maze for you?

• 3:03:45Speaker 08

  Oh, it was wild, man.

• 3:03:46John Coogan?

  Cause I imagine you could just go and say like, I'm gonna be an actor, put me in a TV show or whatever. There's game shows, you can compete in that. There's also a lot of tech people that were aware of you. How'd you, how'd you navigate that?

• 3:03:57Speaker 08

  Well, I mentioned the failed additions before. I'm not much of an actor, turns out. So I wasn't gonna go that route.

• 3:04:02John Coogan?

  Play yourself well.

• 3:04:03Speaker 08

  I do play myself, and that's, you know, that's all I really need to know how to play, just me.

• 3:04:09Speaker 08

  I, the way I look at it is like, there was probably two dozen people that contacted me over the last seven years. You know, I had this baseball show, I went from HQ to this baseball show called Change Up on Dzone.

• 3:04:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:04:20Speaker 08

  Supposed to be a three-year deal.

• 3:04:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:22Speaker 08

  Covid killed that. The major leagues became the force majeure leagues, is the joke I like to make. And they killed, it's a contract joke.

• 3:04:29John Coogan?

  Because, yeah, because, because baseball went on hiatus.

• 3:04:32Speaker 08

  Baseball was on hiatus. There was no need for the show and they used it as an opportunity to pull the plug.

• 3:04:36John Coogan?

  Brutal.

• 3:04:37Speaker 08

  So I lost that gig. But look, I had like dozens of people reaching out about all sorts of things. I even tried to start a company back in 2019, 2020, pre-pandemic with a guy and that, that had its issues. But, you know, the thing about these guys who, who hit me up, and it was Benjamin and Johan, these two randomly on Twitter. They messaged me over a year ago now and said, hey, we have this idea.

• 3:04:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:00Speaker 08

  Interaction, host versus streamer. And I'm like, I've heard a lot of pitches. I took the meeting, they showed me their demo. I was like, these, these guys are on, they're like 27, 28 years old. And I've, I've met with lots of people, lots of ideas, some fly-by-night stuff, some really earnest people, but just didn't have the right team, right product. These guys seem like they had the experience with mobile gaming. That's what they pitched me on. They go, we work at mobile gaming companies here in Europe.

• 3:05:22John Coogan?

  That's what we need, yeah.

• 3:05:23Speaker 08

  That's what we need. So they know the retention mechanics.

• 3:05:24John Coogan?

  They don't necessarily have, have needed to do the exact same thing, but having done something, the, the scale, the interaction, the engagement, all these things.

• 3:05:33Speaker 08

  Something else lacking from HQ, by the way, I don't think a single person on the team had mobile gaming experience or Hollywood production experience. It was wild.

• 3:05:41Jordi Hays?

  No one had any experience.

• 3:05:42Speaker 08

  No, seriously.

• 3:05:43Jordi Hays?

  Does anyone here have experience?

• 3:05:46Speaker 08

  I mean, very talented people. I'm not taking away them, but you know, coming from Twitter, coming from Uber, coming from, you know, big tech companies and but but I really don't think, I mean, maybe I'm wrong, some engineers, maybe, but mobile game is a very specific field. And again, entertainment and Hollywood media is very specific. So I brought that entertainment side of things. These guys have the mobile gaming tech side of things. We've married together. Our CEO, Josh, is kind of the glue guy who's really, you know, keeping the company running and taking care of all that. And also our production manager, helping set up the streams. He just did a whole overhaul of our new studio here in LA. Shout out Forever Dog Studios, our version of the Ultra Dome. But no, we're, I mean, it takes, as you know, which one's this?

• 3:06:26Jordi Hays?

  That's a dog panting.

• 3:06:29Jordi Hays?

  You said Forever Dog.

• 3:06:30Speaker 08

  Oh, Forever Dog. So you play Dog's. I like that. Okay, Forever Dog. There we go. The dog. Forever Dog Studios. Thinking of my guy right now. Just left my dog at home. But no, man, it's a unique, like, it's a unique entity, what we're doing. I say we because you guys are doing it too. How do you, how are you going about it?

• 3:06:48Jordi Hays?

  I love, I love media. I love that it's a business that doesn't exist if you don't show up and make it every single day. And that scares a lot of people. And sure, there's like downsides to that. A lot of people want to say, you know, the idea of SaaS, it's beautiful. You build this thing one time, you sell it, you know.

• 3:07:05Speaker 08

  Cash flow, passive income. This is not passive. I heard you talking about UGC. Yeah. And this is the classic dilemma for me because what HQ did, I think, amazingly, the most innovative aspect of HQ was the fact that it was an app that worked for 15 minutes a day. Yeah. And it was not UGC, it was PGC, producer generated. There was a single show, a single purpose on this customized platform. What a concept, right?

• 3:07:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:07:32Speaker 08

  Because you could say, well, let's open up to everybody. And the funny thing is, the twist on this is that HQ derived from a previous iteration of an app called Hype. So these founders, they had a company called Intermedia Labs, and it was about building apps. They built some kind of dance app for Instagram. They built an app called Hype. And it was, we're going to allow people to make their own talk shows from their bedrooms, give them templates, give them music, almost like TikTok talk show thing. And I don't know, maybe a few thousand people downloaded it. One woman was doing a trivia show from her bedroom.

• 3:08:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:02Speaker 08

  And they saw the show, they're like, let's just do our own show.

• 3:08:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:06Speaker 08

  And that's how they got the idea for HQ Trivia. So they tried UGC at first, it wasn't working. The PGC model.

• 3:08:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the challenge is it's a very small market of people. Even Twitch is still so power lot driven in that you take away the top 30 creators in the platform is probably worthless.

• 3:08:25Speaker 08

  It's very true. So we are basically kind of gatekeeping the creators on our platform, very, very highly curating it is probably a better way to say it. Curing it to just me right now, but we'll open up. If you guys want to come on. Scott's gatekeeping. That's a negative word. I can't say gatekeep anymore. But you guys, I want to bring you guys on the show.

• 3:08:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great.

• 3:08:41Speaker 08

  You'll co-host with me.

• 3:08:42John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 3:08:42Speaker 08

  We'll do cross promo, we know how it works.

• 3:08:44John Coogan?

  The app is in the App Store and I want to read this review, it's amazing. HQ done right. This app is so much fun. I've missed the live game shows of the 2010s, and this app delivers on the best of those. Not only is QuizDaddy back, but there's also new features that reward you just for playing the game. Excited to see how Savvy grows from here, but they're off to a promising start. Five stars.

• 3:09:05Speaker 08

  Sounds like ChatGPT.

• 3:09:08Speaker 08

  No, that's, that's very nice. I mean, and really, the feedback has been phenomenal. The community's been phenomenal.

• 3:09:13Jordi Hays?

  Can we sponsor a suit?

• 3:09:15Speaker 08

  Yeah. Do you want your own costume?

• 3:09:17Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. Yeah, I want to do a TVPN suit that you wear during the game.

• 3:09:20Speaker 08

  Ooh, I like that.

• 3:09:22John Coogan?

  Oh, you have stickers.

• 3:09:23Speaker 08

  And what about, I'll give you some stickers, some Savvy stickers.

• 3:09:25John Coogan?

  We're going to trade here.

• 3:09:26Speaker 08

  Put on your app up there.

• 3:09:27John Coogan?

  I like it.

• 3:09:29Speaker 08

  And yeah, for sure. I'll wear a TBN suit.

• 3:09:31Jordi Hays?

  Let's get the custom TBN suit. Love it. I'm super, I'm super excited for you. Sounds like you have a fantastic team.

• 3:09:39John Coogan?

  This is a fit.

• 3:09:39Jordi Hays?

  Taking the right.

• 3:09:41Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 3:09:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you gotta, your, your, our friend Jeremy Giffon talks about this idea of everyone is like pre or post fall. Like you've like, like, there's people that are doing really well and yet they haven't, you know, been like deeply humbled by life yet.

• 3:09:55John Coogan?

  They've never suffered a setback.

• 3:09:57Jordi Hays?

  You've, you've, you've gone, you've gone through that. Now, now.

• 3:10:00Speaker 08

  Daddy knows. Daddy's, daddy's eaten a help, a helping of humble pie or two over the years.

• 3:10:08Speaker 08

  Tastes pretty good, actually.

• 3:10:09Jordi Hays?

  More than, kind of more than your fair share.

• 3:10:11Speaker 08

  You know, look, I'm not, I can't complain or anything. I'm, I've been so blessed, but even, even these last seven years of, you know, kind of wandering the desert to get to this point. But I'm so excited for this launch and, and truly, if we can get the TBN community on board tonight, download the app, playsavvy.live, unload the cameras, playsavvy.live.

• 3:10:28John Coogan?

  Do it.

• 3:10:29Speaker 08

  Android, Apple, tonight at 6:00 PM Pacific, 9:00 PM Eastern. Let's get over 3,000 encouraged and I'm going to give you guys credit.

• 3:10:35John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, I think it's time to plant the bomb and get out of here. Thank you so much for coming on. We'll close out the show with you on here. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and.

• 3:10:48Jordi Hays?

  Fun show today.

• 3:10:49John Coogan?

  The newsletter, tbn.com. Yeah, we did have range. We went all over. It's fun.

• 3:10:53Speaker 08

  Sam's a savvy.

• 3:10:54John Coogan?

  Sam.

• 3:10:54Jordi Hays?

  Sam's a savvy.

• 3:10:55Speaker 08

  Nice book, guys.

• 3:10:56John Coogan?

  It's good stuff.

• 3:10:57Jordi Hays?

  Living legends.

• 3:10:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, and we will be back tomorrow at 11:00 AM Pacific. We have Doug O'Laughlin joining. We have a bunch of other fun folks joining the show and.

• 3:11:07Jordi Hays?

  It'll be a great day.

• 3:11:08John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 3:11:09Jordi Hays?

  Have a wonderful afternoon and evening. We love you.

• 3:11:12John Coogan?

  Bye.