Tech Earnings Recap, Beautiful Data Centers | Mike Isaac, Kyle Harrison, David Marcus, Turner Caldwell, Everette Taylor, Puneet Mehta & Justin Wexler, Alexander Embiricos

(01:29) - Tech Earnings Quad Kill Recap (28:44) - Mike Isaac, a technology reporter at The New York Times and author of "Super Pumped," discussed his experiences covering high-profile tech trials, including the Apple vs. Samsung case and Mark Zuckerberg's testimony in the ZeniMax lawsuit. He shared insights into the challenges of attending these trials, such as early morning courthouse arrivals and the competition for press seating, and highlighted the public's growing interest in tech industry legal battles, noting the presence of Elon Musk fans in the courtroom. Isaac also reflected on the dynamics of jury selection, emphasizing the importance of selecting jurors with varying levels of familiarity with the tech industry to ensure a fair trial. (01:07:20) - Kyle Harrison, a General Partner at Contrary, discusses his 300-page book, "The Anduril Thesis," which explores the history and strategy of defense technology company Anduril Industries. He highlights the company's unique position in the defense sector, emphasizing its counter-positioning against decades of military-industrial history and its innovative approach to defense production. Harrison also touches on Anduril's recent product developments, including autonomous systems and partnerships, and reflects on the broader landscape of defense technology investment. (01:19:06) - David Marcus, CEO of Lightspark, discusses the launch of Grid Global Accounts, a platform offering global dollar accounts with real-time money movement across 65 countries, integration with Visa's network for spending at over 175 million merchants, and support for stablecoins and Bitcoin. He highlights the platform's ability to delegate payments to AI agents, enabling users to authorize agents to perform transactions on their behalf while maintaining control. Marcus also notes that recent regulatory advancements and improved wallet technologies have made such innovations feasible. (01:26:57) - Turner Caldwell, co-founder and CEO of Mariana Minerals, discusses the company's focus on automating mining operations to enhance efficiency and productivity. He explains their approach to integrating autonomous systems across the entire mining and refining process, aiming to double productivity through better orchestration and logistics management. Caldwell also highlights the potential for autonomy to fundamentally change mining operations, enabling more selective mining methods and reducing costs. (01:36:13) - Everette Taylor, CEO of Kickstarter since September 2022, has revitalized the platform by focusing on the creator economy and forming strategic partnerships. He discusses the launch of the Next Wave Fund, a collaboration between Kickstarter and Google, aimed at supporting early-stage tech startups and small businesses in hardware, software, gaming, and connected technology. This initiative offers selected applicants $10,000 in non-dilutive capital, guidance from Kickstarter's Design & Technology team, and access to Google's training programs to help them launch and scale their products. (01:45:51) - Puneet Mehta, founder and CEO of Netomi, an AI platform for customer service, discusses how his company leverages agentic applications to proactively enhance customer experiences by addressing issues upstream, rather than reacting to problems after they occur. He highlights Netomi's recent $110 million funding round, emphasizing partnerships with Accenture and Adobe to deploy their technology across Fortune 500 companies. Mehta also shares his background in automated trading and event correlation systems, underscoring his enterprise-focused approach to solving complex customer service challenges. (01:52:37) - Timeline Reactions (01:58:54) - Alexander Embiricos, the product lead for Codex at OpenAI, discusses the rapid growth and diverse applications of Codex, highlighting its expansion beyond coding to assist various professionals, including sales, marketing, and finance. He emphasizes the importance of Codex's ability to autonomously perform tasks across different applications, enhancing productivity by allowing users to delegate complex tasks. Embiricos also underscores the significance of user experience in AI interactions, noting that thoughtful design elements, such as natural cursor movements, build trust and improve usability. (02:20:55) - The TBPN Simulator Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today's Friday, May 1st, 2026. We're just barely live from the TVP and UltraDome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortune's Finance, the Capital Capital. We had to rush back from Stripe Sessions, fantastic interview with the Collison Brothers, many others yesterday. Go check it out if you haven't already. Fun stuff. We didn't go nearly deep enough on the whole Kosian Singularity. There's a debate on the timeline about it. We can get into it later. We need to have some more economists on the show to break it down for us. But this is their big pitch. Firms get smaller and the future, the coast theory of the firm. Anyway, if you studied economics, you might be familiar, but it's jargon and you're going to be hearing a lot more of it.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  Whole lotta mumbo jumbo.

• 0:47John Coogan?

  I'm not even gonna try. I'm not even gonna try. Well, here's some, here's some less mumbo jumbo. Tech earnings, Quad Kill recap, four in one day. Last time this happened, I think it was 2020, four big tech companies all same day. It is random. No one really knows why. It just sort of lines up. It's like a solar eclipse.

• 1:09Jordi Hays?

  Can you use astrology to predict the next one?

• 1:11John Coogan?

  Potentially, potentially.

• 1:14Jordi Hays?

  You would have to imagine it's some, something around the alignment of the planets that causes hyperstalers.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  More like the holidays, because books close, then certain things line up. Also, like Nvidia is never in the competition. They're always like two or three weeks later. But anyway, let's go through what actually happened. Google was the big winner. They absolutely crushed. The stock's up 10% in the last couple of days, really successful. And there's a few reasons. So the core business is still growing. Google search, this was the question of is AI, are chatbots going to be eating into the core Google search revenue, the core business that drives all the other investments? The answer is unequivocally no. Google search and other revenue was 60.4 billion. Yeah. Up 19% year over year. I mean, two years ago, there was the whole like Google search is dead thesis that has

• 2:05John Coogan?

  not been borne out at least this year. Very, very strong results there. Then Google Cloud is like the major story, so much so that take him when he did his earnings recap, he didn't even talk about top lines at Google, Amazon and Microsoft. He just says Google Cloud revenue, sixty-three percent year over year. Amazon Web Services, twenty-eight percent year over year. Azure, forty percent year over year. And then Meta overall revenue, which we'll get into, thirty-three percent year over year. So he's not even looking at the at the rest of the business. All that matters for the three major public clouds are are those cloud businesses. Not even anything, anything specific within the within the overall business.

• 2:48John Coogan?

  So, long story short, higher capex at Google, totally justified in a world of cloud acceleration. Backlog growth is huge. Cloud backlog nearly doubled to more than four hundred and sixty billion dollars. And importantly, this isn't like a five-year, ten-year contract type thing. Half of that, more than half of that backlog is expected to be recognized in the next twenty-four months. So really good news there. Google Cloud hit twenty billion, up sixty-three percent. Now, it is smaller than Amazon and that's why AWS is is, you know, people are hunting for high twenty growth rates, maybe it begins with three. In Google, it's smaller, so it can grow sixty-three percent, but that's still fantastic.

• 3:30John Coogan?

  And cloud operating income was six point six billion, which is very strong margin. So everything is looking good. Search durability, demand for AI infrastructure. It's the full stack AI play right now. Microsoft showed solid execution, but they didn't dramatically change any particular narrative. I think a lot of this goes to like the the just naturally slow deployment of enterprise AI. But this is the focus for Microsoft. They are the enterprise AI play.

• 3:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one thing was notable is they weren't they weren't heavily teasing anything related to the next Gemini release.

• 4:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wouldn't tease that at earnings.

• 4:08Jordi Hays?

  No, no, they have, they have historically. So anyways, maybe that maybe they want to let the model speak for itself.

• 4:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably announced Gemini four, I would imagine, announced it.

• 4:21Jordi Hays?

  Or a coding specific model.

• 4:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, something there. I mean, there's certainly demand for it. They have the capacity, there's lots of opportunity. We'll probably be following that in three weeks when Google I O happens. So, Microsoft, investors wanted to see Azure growth.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  Copilot adoption and a solid justification for all the capex. Uh, the stock's down 2%, nothing crazy, but uh, Microsoft beat on headline numbers. Revenue was 82.9 billion, up 18% year over year. Uh, and from an analyst perspective, it was a clean beat. But there's more nuance here. So in terms of AI adoption, Microsoft added about

• 5:01Jordi Hays?

  Look at this beautiful LED wall.

• 5:02John Coogan?

  Million. Yeah. Let's give it up for the

• 5:04Jordi Hays?

  Still underrated. We ordered this bad boy maybe like six months ago.

• 5:09John Coogan?

  Six months ago.

• 5:10Jordi Hays?

  It's been quite a while.

• 5:11John Coogan?

  But it is fun. We, we need to figure

• 5:12Jordi Hays?

  Worth the wait.

• 5:13John Coogan?

  More things to do with it. We, uh, so, uh, on copilot adoption, this is the big question. So for Microsoft 365, like total seats, you know, you think about Microsoft Teams, Outlook, like the standard Microsoft enterprise seat. I think it's about $30 per user per month, competes with uh, Google Apps Enterprise, right? But Microsoft's been doing this for much longer. They have 450 million paid seats. So in terms of copilot, they added 5 million, which is great. They're at 20 million now, so that's a solid adoption, but it's still small compared to the 450 paid seats. Ideally, like every seat would have a copilot alongside of it. That, I mean, that's the idea, right?

• 5:58John Coogan?

  Uh, and so the question is, how quickly can they get that 20 million copilot seats up to 200 million, 400 million? You know, ideally everyone has one of these add-on subscriptions and that's lifting the overall business. Uh, market reaction was a bit choppy. As the new OpenAI relationship gets digested. And so there's two sides to the Microsoft OpenAI deal right now. Of course, uh, OpenAI is no longer limited to selling just through Azure. Azure no longer has exclusive access to OpenAI models. OpenAI is now available on AWS as well. And it's, and it cuts both ways. So on one hand, uh, Microsoft, you know, they used to be the exclusive provider.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  If you're a sales guy at Microsoft on Azure, you're probably really excited to call somebody up and say, hey, you want to use GPT 5.5? We're the only place in town like, like you should Come over here, you should migrate more of your infrastructure, you should be using Azure. But it was probably frustrating because a lot of people say, no, we're locked into AWS. We are stuck in that cloud and we'd love to, but we'll just use the API directly or we'll do, we'll figure out some other workaround. But we're not moving for this.

• 7:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or people could be like, yeah, we're, we're, we're open to trying it, but it'll take, you know, a couple of quarters realistically to get, to get ramped up.

• 7:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so from an Azure perspective, losing exclusivity is a negative, but from a business perspective, the more growth for OpenAI is good for Microsoft's equity stake in the company. And so these two tensions, like the, the capital balance sheet side of the business versus the Azure sales and acceleration side of the business, like these two.

• 7:34Jordi Hays?

  Not to mention Copilot versus Codex.

• 7:36John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah. And so these two, these two sides of the business are sort of butting up against each other. And Satya Nadella ultimately has to go and, and, you know, renegotiate the contract and they did. And it seems like they're in a good place because a lot of people were, were sort of saying like, oh, well, is this going to get messy? Is there some, going to be some lawsuit here? It seems like there was a very clean negotiation, renegotiation. And they, OpenAI got rid of the AGI clause that allows them to, to stop sharing models, but they are sharing revenue. And there's like, like the, the overall deal.

• 8:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, basically the, the, I think 2032 end date.

• 8:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, is just.

• 8:12Jordi Hays?

  The IP share.

• 8:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:13Jordi Hays?

  Instead of this like arbitrary.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  AGI.

• 8:17John Coogan?

  Uh, so over at Amazon, Amazon still, of course, the capex king, they top the capex forecast. But as scary as that would be, AWS is re-accelerating and so that's very good news. So, uh, the stock moved slightly upwards. Uh, Q1 2026 sales for Amazon overall were 181.5 billion for the quarter, for the quarter. They're, they're like on track to make a trillion in revenue soon. Up 17% year over year, beating expectations. AWS is expected to see 25% growth. That was the expectation, 25%. That's sort of where they've been. They came in at 28%, so they beat on AWS growth and that's really, really important, especially for their scale.

• 8:58John Coogan?

  This was very good news. The ads business is still cooking, churned out $17.2 billion in revenue, and the chips business just crossed $20 billion run rate, which is very, very good. And they have big deals. AWS is in this interesting position, less of this like Google pure play, full stack, and more focused on working with both OpenAI and Anthropic at this point. And so that all justifies more investments in trainium and AI infrastructure broadly, and the market seems to like it. Huge capex numbers, but reasonable response from the market and the stock. So Meta, Meta had a rough go. Huge drop, nearly 10% down following earnings, sort of jumping up and down now. But the core business was extremely

• 9:40John Coogan?

  strong. So Q1 revenue was $56.3 billion, up 33% year over year. So high growth for the overall business. Ad impressions rose 19%, average price per ad rose 12%. They raised the capex outlook from, they have this range, it's within $10 billion of 125. They added $10 billion to both. So instead of saying, hey, we'll be between 115 and 135, now they're saying we're going to be between 125 and 145. And now, will they actually get more compute for that? Or is that just a reflection of rising prices for all the inputs that go into compute spending? That's a big debate, because there's one bull case where, oh, they're optimistic, they're going to buy more compute. But it's like, no, there's a possibility they're just spending more to get the same amount

• 10:24John Coogan?

  of compute as they thought. But the big problem for shareholders, the big answer is it's not as clean of a story.

• 10:32Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine, just take one second, and imagine that Meta's a private company, and their pitch is that we make AI agents for selling products, and they're doing $200 billion, they're at a $200 billion run rate, growing 33% a year. How's it priced? Twenty trillion?

• 10:53John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 10:54Jordi Hays?

  With those operating margins?

• 10:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:56Jordi Hays?

  Joking. It truly is one of the most incredible businesses

• 11:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:01Jordi Hays?

  of all time, but

• 11:02John Coogan?

  They don't have the cloud.

• 11:04Jordi Hays?

  People are, yeah, yeah, they don't have the cloud thing. People are, he's, he's kind of acting like the most AGI-pilled CEO, like, like hyperscaler CEO, right?

• 11:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:16Jordi Hays?

  He, he was talking about like, basically talking about like RSI on the earnings call. He's like, it's not just about like coding, you know, coding. Like, he really seemingly believes and he doesn't want to be in a position where someone else has actual superintelligence and he does not.

• 11:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so

• 11:36Jordi Hays?

  And, and that's just like a little bit too fuzzy because when you look in the rest of the market right now, it's like productivity tools.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  Right? And so the market just like can't really read into it.

• 11:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:47Jordi Hays?

  And they're just kind of like not even giving him full credit for the business that he has.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I forget if he's ever mentioned the idea of, of selling tokens, selling AI infrastructure, getting in the cloud market, but it's way easier for an AWS.

• 12:01Jordi Hays?

  He kind of loosely mentioned that last year when he was like starting to ramp stuff up, like basically saying like, maybe we could do this

• 12:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:10Jordi Hays?

  at some point.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Because it's way easier to justify the, the capex at Amazon when you say, oh, well, like, you know, if, you know, regardless of how this market plays out, maybe Anthropic takes some of their compute, maybe OpenAI takes the compute, maybe there's a whole bunch of new AI labs that take compute. Maybe we'll use it for our services, our own models. If models commoditize, it's still valuable. If they don't, it's still valuable. There's a whole bunch of different ways to, to shift that capex around and justify it. Meta, it's got to show up in the AI figures. It's got to show up in the ad business, at least right now. And so there's, there are questions about how the big capex spend feeds back into cash flow. When the company doesn't have a platform with big enterprise AI contracts, massive RPO figures,

• 12:56John Coogan?

  there's not an easy place to just like stuff compute necessarily and at least Get, you know, a market standard like return on investment. Of course, they could spin up reselling. They could become a NeoCloud or something like that. But at their scale, it's a it's a whole new host of challenges if they go that direction. And I think that that's not the plan. I think you're you're dialing into it that they are in fact recursive self improvement pilled at this point. And so the other the other sort of tremor in the system was the fact that daily active people, which is something that they were it's not users anymore. It's DAP, daily active people, declined sequentially since the first time that Meta began reporting the metric.

• 13:38John Coogan?

  So less people were using Meta Platforms this quarter than previously. But they had some good explanations for it. They said that there were internet disruptions in Iran and WhatsApp restrictions in Russia. And so this was not representative of a real change in internet user behavior. And I think we all recognize that that is reality in the sense that there's not some up and coming social network that's eating Meta Platforms family of apps lunch, right? Like the TikTok threat came and sort of went. The Snapchat threat came and sort of went.

• 14:14Jordi Hays?

  Sora.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  Sora came and went, right? And so there there was a different post I saw that social media use is declining, especially under young people, but it was already so high. It's not really showing up in the data.

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  It will truly be insane if we get this new alien technology. We get LLMs, which in digital form can convince you that they're a person.

• 14:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:39Jordi Hays?

  And we would and and and we end up getting no new big social platforms like.

• 14:45John Coogan?

  That just strengthened the current ones.

• 14:47Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, yeah. No, I mean, I think that's the base case right now, but it's still wild. I think you would expect. I think again, if you rewind to like 2020 and you said, hey, we're going to have this technology where you can effectively have a digital twin. Of yourself, you would think that somebody would figure out some new.

• 15:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe, I don't know. I continue to think it just strengthens the incumbents. Roblox, Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, like these platforms will just get more content on them. That will probably be LLM generated, LLM enhanced, even if it's not LLM written or developed. It's, it's, you know, a creator taking less time doing other boring things and spending more time on their core output. So we'll keep tracking it. So overall, what did we learn this earnings season? One possible takeaway is that there's a little bit of a fracturing in the overall AI narrative.

• 15:40John Coogan?

  So the AI narrative over the last 12 months has basically been like, say, the biggest number, biggest capex number, biggest deals, just grow, grow, grow. Now, every hyperscaler reports a big capex number. But each company does have a different story. So Google's the full stack platform. Microsoft's focused on enterprise adoption and distribution. Amazon's most aggressive on infrastructure and partnerships with OpenAI and Anthropic. They have the cleanest, less, it's a less competitive relationship with Anthropic and OpenAI, because they don't have the DeepMind equivalent necessarily. Meta is all about ad optimization and Meta is also this, this interesting like high risk option on Frontier AI.

• 16:25John Coogan?

  Like it's possible that if TBD Labs, MSL, if that pays off, you wind up getting an OpenAI sized or Anthropic sized business out of it in the oligopoly world, where they have a breakthrough, they get to something that's 5.5 or 4.7 level. And then they're competing in an equal level and they're playing in that oligopoly. And so you, like the Meta traders are sort of, or the investors are sort of weighing both of those sides. You have a very solid ads business and then you have this call option on potential Frontier AI, which is still early, but showing some really solid signs. So the market likes short-term revenue evidence right now. And there's still many strategies that will play out over the rest of the year.

• 17:07John Coogan?

  But this quarter was focused on, can you justify your capex this quarter? And so we'll keep following it. Let's go over the timeline and see what people were saying. The headline numbers, of course, were huge.

• 17:24John Coogan?

  Cloud growth, AWS 28%, GCP 63%, Azure at 40%, absolutely massive numbers. Remember, people were hoping for GCP to be at 40% and it went up 63%, absolutely massive. AWS, people are hoping for 30, they got 28, not too bad. Take Him, we mentioned, you can go subscribe to his Substack at takehim.substack.com. He has a write-up on the state of AI after Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft earnings.

• 17:56Jordi Hays?

  Take Him's been right a lot lately.

• 17:59John Coogan?

  Been doing well. And there's some people reflecting on, you know, crazy run-ups, crazy numbers, crazy hype. Is this the dot com bubble? Always fun to go back and comp to previous bubbles. The dot com one is still fresh for a lot of people because some people in tech were alive during it. Many people in tech were alive during it. But this poster Ren is comparing the price to earnings multiples today versus the dot com boom. So today's mag 4 PE ratios, the companies that reported earnings. Meta's at 16x price to earnings, Google's at 17x, Amazon's at 24 and Microsoft's at 25x price to earnings ratio. Compare that to during the dot com.

• 18:44John Coogan?

  Microsoft is at 73x, Cisco is at 200x plus, Yahoo is trading at 800x earnings. The NASDAQ as a whole traded at 200x earnings during the peak of the dot com bubble. Today's bubble is trading at 16 to 25x earnings on companies generating hundreds of billions of dollars in real cash flow. Now they're drawing down on that cash flow, but even in some bizarre world where, you know, AI is a bubble and it's fake and we all go back to pencil and paper, we'll probably go back to digital advertising and spreadsheets in the cloud and, you know, SaaS and all of these companies will still benefit and be in fantastic positions.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the only thing that's, you know, or one thing that's imperfect with these comparisons is.

• 19:31Jordi Hays?

  When you look at like the peak, you can say like, okay, Meta, Google, Amazon and and Microsoft have relatively reasonable P ratios.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  But if you look at the rest, you look at all the companies that have been started in the last like five years, especially in the private markets that have been marked up from, you know, 20 to 100, 500 to a billion and beyond. Many of them have absolutely no earnings.

• 19:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:57Jordi Hays?

  And, and are, and are, and so you have to look at like, maybe something more like a Yahoo as like a decent comp, right? Where Yahoo was trading at peak at 800X.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:08Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  And there is some, there is some pushback in the, in the replies here. Reasonous forces, AMD is at 130, Tesla is at 350, Palantir is at 220, and Intel is at 900 times earnings.

• 20:22Jordi Hays?

  I know. So it's like very, very convenient to just take the four of the greatest companies ever in the history of the world and say like, there's no bubble. Like they're, they're reasonably priced.

• 20:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think it is, it is, it is useful to go back to the fact that like there, there's, there's a lot of hype in tech, but what's driving the vast majority of the market cap right now is still fairly low P E companies. Like Intel is so much smaller on a market cap basis than Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, that even if you're overpaying on earnings for that, you, like the, the overall market is anchored to a pretty decent earnings engine still. And that's like the bull case here. What else is going on?

• 21:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, George, George Hots is back with a white pill.

• 21:13John Coogan?

  What'd he say?

• 21:14Jordi Hays?

  May 1st. He says, AI will create jobs. Says, it's nice to see Jensen talk about this and it's super obvious when you think about it, AI and immigration are fundamentally the same. There's new people showing up and hopefully everyone understands how and why immigration creates jobs. Wants are effectively unlimited. It's classic Jevons paradox that if we make something more efficient, we end up using more of it. Or a cool aphorism I learned at Facebook, if you make the site 10% faster, people spend 5% more total time on it.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  He worked at Facebook for, he was like an intern.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  He's part of the machine. Now, just like you get the wah-wah crying people about how immigration lowers wages for native-born Americans, and we gotta keep the hard-working immigrants out because you have some right to be lazy or something, you'll get this about AI. AI will outcompete some humans at some jobs. But protectionism is for losers. The important thing is that the overall pie grows and inequality stays somewhat in check, not by redistribution, but by design. There will be more to do than ever before.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  More to do than ever before?

• 22:15Jordi Hays?

  Can we pull up this video, Jensen?

• 22:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 22:18Jordi Hays?

  In the production chat for you.

• 22:21John Coogan?

  Yo, you have it?

• 22:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we can play it.

• 22:23John Coogan?

  Great. I'm excited for Eric Sufer's deep dive here. We'll get into that later.

• 22:28Jordi Hays?

  The Suferator?

• 22:30John Coogan?

  And reminder, we have the Isaacinator coming on in just seven minutes. Mike Isaac has been covering the Elon Musk versus

• 22:38Jordi Hays?

  Do they do?

• 22:39John Coogan?

  Trial.

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  Is it like a four-day work week with trials?

• 22:42John Coogan?

  It is.

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  Are they living in the future?

• 22:44John Coogan?

  It is. Wait, wait, wait. So can we pull up this screenshot? Because, did you read Mike Isaac's full thread on his experience covering the trial? Did you read the whole thing? Because he's been live tweeting it, and it's very funny because he will post, so we gotta zoom in here. This is a

• 23:03Jordi Hays?

  Did you turn this into?

• 23:04John Coogan?

  I turned it into an infographic. So this is a, this is a minute-by-minute chronological log of off-topic slash personal slash minor inconvenience moments. Because Mike Isaac will talk about, oh, Elon Musk just said this on the stage. Oh, the lawyer fired back with this. The jury said this. The judge said that. Right? But then in between that, he has been logging very, very minor inconveniences that he's, that he's experienced. So he talks about his, his lunch, the roasted tomato and corn pizza. He says, he forgot a pillow for his, to sit on.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  Wait, corn?

• 23:42John Coogan?

  I don't know. He said he bought.

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  That's a very Oakland thing.

• 23:45John Coogan?

  At sixteen oh seven forty-five, this is transcribed from X, I think the Times or Times or UTC or something, he brought a water bottle but forgot to fill it in the rush for a seat. Now he's increasingly thirsty during an intense moment of testimony. Someone's laptop suddenly blasted a loud YouTube video in the gallery. This is a garden hose nozzle, it said, courtroom mishap. So he's going through it all. It's very fun to to track his and we'll and we'll dig into his experience, both in the court and actually with what's going on with the case. But let's play this Jensen clip. This sounds fun. Jensen is insisting that jobs will be created in the future. Let's see it. What does he have to say?

• 24:30Speaker 02

  There's the things that the things that are said are very counterproductive and in fact hurtful. On the one hand, maybe

• 24:37Jordi Hays?

  Wonder who he's talking about?

• 24:38Speaker 02

  Maybe a scientist thinks that by warning people that AI is going to completely permeate and proliferate across radiology and therefore radiologists are going to get wiped out. On the one hand, that might be considered warning and therefore helpful, but in fact, the counter would have been hurtful. If we convinced everybody not to be radiologists and we now need radiologists, that actually is hurtful to society. It is hurtful that we convince all the young college graduates to not be software engineers and it turns out United States need more software engineers than ever. That's hurtful. And so we have to be mindful of how we communicate the importance of this technology and what it's able to

• 25:23Speaker 02

  do to advocate for policy and advocate for guardrails on the one hand, on the other hand, scaring people with things like saying nonsensical things, which are not going to happen, that this is an existential threat to humanity. There's 20% chance that is existential. That's ridiculous, that it's going to wipe out 50% of of of new college grad jobs. That is going to completely destroy democracy. I mean, these kind of comments are not helpful. They're not based, they're they're

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  Trying to think who?

• 26:00John Coogan?

  He's sub tweeting in real life. He's not vague posting, he's sub tweeting. Uh, I, I do think the 50% numbers are so funny because it's like 50 50 is like the most neutral you can be about some prediction. It feels like, I mean, I get that it's not in, in that case, it's like 50% of jobs. But whenever you issue like a 50 50 proclamation, it sort of tells you nothing. Like we were looking at like the prediction markets on the trial and we were like, oh, it's 50 50. Okay. So that actually doesn't give me any information about what's going to happen in the future. And it's very easy to make a prediction that's like, oh, I predict this will happen 50 50. And then if it doesn't happen, you can be like, well, yeah, 50% chance it wasn't going to happen. Like I had it really high that it wasn't going to happen. And then you can also say, you know, I predicted it.

• 26:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's so, it is, it is truly universal when we talk to these companies that are building AI, AI products or selling AI, AI products.

• 26:54Jordi Hays?

  It seems like the ambition level in every single industry is just going up. Even, even Gabe from Rogo was saying, yeah, there's an opportunity to cut costs or there's an opportunity to get aggressive and like take market share. And, and he said, like a lot of firms are saying like, let's just do more work. Let's grow, let's grow our revenue. Let's take on more clients, right? And so it is, um, it's harder and harder to, to doom about the job market.

• 27:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you need to doom about the task market?

• 27:26Jordi Hays?

  It's over for tasks.

• 27:27John Coogan?

  Tasks are getting automated. No, it's serious. Like there are tasks that like the reading of the X-ray or whatever it was, the, the radiologist scan. What, what do they actually read? Is that an X-ray that they're looking for tumors in? You know what I'm talking about, right? The famous Hinton.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. I don't know if it's technically an X-ray.

• 27:45John Coogan?

  It's not, right? It's a CAT scan.

• 27:47Speaker 03

  It's some scan where you can look.

• 27:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. They use a scan and of course image generation and image models are very good at detecting cancers. But that is just one of several tasks, many tasks that a radiologist does throughout the day. And so radiologists are currently making more money than ever, and they are in more demand than ever. And I was telling you before the show about, uh, truck drivers. They don't just drive the truck. There was a survey that said 70% of them carry weapons because they are effectively, they are security guards for the truck as well as probably a bunch of other things that you don't think about. Light repairs on the truck, you know, stopping for different things, rearranging things in the back, making sure that the load is like balanced.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  If you're driving with kids in the car.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  It's not purely just, yes.

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  If you're driving with kids in the car and you drive by a big truck on a road trip, you can go like this.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 28:35Jordi Hays?

  And then.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  That's another thing that the, that the self-driving truck needs to do.

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  A computer could never look out the window, see some kids in the car and honk.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  But, well, yeah, I mean, we'll, we'll see. Anyway, we have Mike Isaac in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TVP in Altrudome. He's at the New York Times. Mike, how you doing?

• 28:53Mike Isaac?

  Yo, what's up?

• 28:55John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 28:55Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 28:56John Coogan?

  So.

• 28:57Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so what's up with, yeah, so four-day work week? Are they living in the future?

• 29:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is this universal basic vacation days?

• 29:05Mike Isaac?

  It's quarters incredible in that I got to sleep until like 9 a.m. today, which is, which was great, but I made up for it because like literally every day this week, I've gotten up at 5 o'clock in the morning to get my cold ass down to the Oakland courthouse and stand outside for two hours. So I don't know, but it's fun.

• 29:25Jordi Hays?

  How does it, how does it work? Who gets priority? Is it first come, first serve? Like if some random person, if some random person shows up before you?

• 29:35John Coogan?

  They can just get it and you're just out?

• 29:37Jordi Hays?

  Or, or you get to like show some sort of like press, like, how does it work?

• 29:42Mike Isaac?

  Yeah, I wish I was cool enough to like cut. Well, here's the thing.

• 29:45Jordi Hays?

  You should get an artist pass.

• 29:48John Coogan?

  VIP pass?

• 29:49Jordi Hays?

  No, not VIP, artist pass. It's a level above.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:54Mike Isaac?

  So there are 20 reserved seats in the front row for press, but the issue is only one person per outlet gets it. And we are doing like live blogging for like the big moments, like opening statements and for Elon. And so myself and my colleague Cade came on the first, the whole first week. And so, so we've had a trade-off. He's gotten the like press skip the line thing. And I've been with the other folks in the 30 unreserved seats in the back.

• 30:26Jordi Hays?

  That are watching YouTube videos.

• 30:28Mike Isaac?

  Yeah, yeah. Oh, my God.

• 30:30Jordi Hays?

  Or Stripe sessions.

• 30:32Mike Isaac?

  Literally, one dude fell asleep. I was actually impressed.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  Fell asleep?

• 30:37Mike Isaac?

  Yeah.

• 30:38Jordi Hays?

  It seemed pretty entertaining. It didn't seem like you were falling asleep. I was keeping up on the, through the live blog.

• 30:45Mike Isaac?

  You reading my Nightmares Twitter too? I, it's been fun, honestly. Have you guys ever done like court case things? Or have you ever been sued or been in court?

• 30:55Jordi Hays?

  I've never been in court.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  I, I went to a mock court in high school where everyone picks a role. I think I was

• 31:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we LARPs in court.

• 31:05John Coogan?

  Literally LARPing.

• 31:06Jordi Hays?

  In high school.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  But other than that, never.

• 31:08Jordi Hays?

  I, the whole, this whole time, it seems, it seems insane. Like with, with, with the, with the recent NASA, uh, the moon mission. I was like, this should be a live stream, plus a pay-per-view for the key moments for this trial. It's like, we have huge budget deficits and we have these incredible media products. Why are we not doing pay-per-views, right?

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  But, uh,

• 31:29Mike Isaac?

  That's the funny thing. Oh, I was just gonna say, that's the funny thing about like federal courthouse stuff. Like, there's a lot of different rules around filming and electronics. I covered some cases in DC. And I can't even bring a laptop or phone in those courthouses. So like, this is actually a very permissive judge. Just because she believes in like press access and stuff. And we've had, there's way more access than you would normally get in federal court cases.

• 31:57John Coogan?

  Okay, so you, you've been to these court cases before, but if I follow your Twitter, it feels like you're making a bunch of rookie mistakes. You, you, you only had egg bites at 5:30 AM. Your bite energy's wearing off. You forgot your butt pillow. You forgot to fill your water bottle. Like, is this amateur hour or are you a professional? What's going on?

• 32:17Mike Isaac?

  I think, I think that you, you guys might know me well enough that that is kinda how I operate most of my life. Like, kind of chaotic, but it is,

• 32:26Jordi Hays?

  Focus on the important stuff.

• 32:28Mike Isaac?

  That's right. Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, I can file. I may be like bleeding and hungry, like limping across the finish line, but we're getting, I'm tweeting for you.

• 32:38Jordi Hays?

  What, what is your, what, what is your, what are some like high-profile cases that, that stand out that you've covered in the past?

• 32:46Mike Isaac?

  So I got to do, let's see, my first one was insanely boring, but important. The Apple versus Samsung thing back in the day and like them suing for Samsung copying, like literally everything they do. Um, I did, uh, Dallas, actually Zuckerberg's like, I think maybe one of his first testimonies on the stand when Zenimax was suing Meta for the Oculus acquisition. You remember that?

• 33:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:14Mike Isaac?

  And that was in Dallas. That was super fun. Uh, that I almost got kicked out of the courtroom for tweeting.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 33:20Mike Isaac?

  Um, and then I did, uh, the DC FTC Meta one and I almost got kicked out of the courtroom again. Actually, I did get kicked out of the courtroom for wearing the Meta Ray-Bans. These are not it, but I wore the Meta Ray-Bans. And then they started putting, I was, I was fucking super stupid for doing it, but then they started putting signs up saying, do not wear these glasses in court.

• 33:42Jordi Hays?

  But you weren't, you, you were just using them as glasses or you were being sneaky and you were recording?

• 33:46Mike Isaac?

  No, I was like, look, I can't record. I won't record. I was trying to play by the rules and like they were, they are my prescription glasses. Yeah.

• 33:53Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 33:54Mike Isaac?

  But the bailiff, the bailiff was like-

• 33:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's too much, it's too high risk for them.

• 33:58John Coogan?

  Cause you could just-

• 33:58Jordi Hays?

  Cause you could have like turned off the, the light or whatever, something like that.

• 34:02John Coogan?

  Uh, talk about the, the, the fans. Are there really Elon Musk fans in the courtroom? Like what, what motivates someone to go and watch that live? Is this their UFC front row ticket? Like why are they there?

• 34:17Mike Isaac?

  Uh, so you guys would have fun. Like it actually is, a lot of court cases are boring to people who don't care about this stuff, right? Like you and I may be super into, like the FTC trial was super fun for me because it's like, oh my God, Mark Zuckerberg emailing Sheryl Sandberg and talking about path. Like this is incredible.

• 34:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:36Mike Isaac?

  And like the average person has no idea what we're talking about, but this is like a circus. There are people who genuinely love Elon or are genuinely worried about the end of the world happening. And I think it's a really good thing that there's public access to these courts. Like, I think like the average person can come in and show up. And that's what I think after the buzz of Twitter and like people seeing that this is an event, we got a much longer lines and like folks who are local, like just like I know a PM in tech from Meta that came, I know like a guy from Box made it in. Just if you get a seat, if you get there early enough and you can get a seat and you can just hang out. It's like, and I think it's really great.

• 35:20Mike Isaac?

  I think it's great that people are, yeah, are there for it, you know? It shouldn't just be me.

• 35:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What about the, what about the jury? Does the jury seem excited and honored to have the opportunity to be a part of a case like this? Or are they, are they nodding off? It'd be so funny, it'd be like so out of just like off the internet. To make selection, you can't be super biased. Sam, who? Who? Like Sam, this guy Sam and Greg and this guy who makes cars and I don't even know what they're talking, a bunch of, a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo. Like, there's gotta be one person on the jury that was just so not tapped in that, that they're just confused.

• 36:02Mike Isaac?

  I think jury selection was super interesting for that. I can't say, it's actually interesting. I can't say too much about the jury right now because like there's all these rules about,

• 36:11Jordi Hays?

  Oh, sure.

• 36:12Mike Isaac?

  Like some random person could go up to them if you identify them or try to alter it. Totally. But I will say like during jury selection on Monday, it is an incredible slice of life and you get like how familiar unfamiliar people are with the tech industry despite being here, you know? Like some folks are like, I have no, I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't know what AI is. I don't know what AGI stands for. So it really. It really played and voir dire and jury selection is so important for cases like this. Just it makes the dynamic of the facts don't necessarily always matter, but the vibe can really matter, which I think is a benefit for Elon, honestly.

• 36:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, were they, were they trying to weed out, they're trying to weed out people that are a little bit too excited about the case, right? You want the people that are like in order to have a, uh, but, but then talk, I, I didn't understand why, why is the jury just like giving like an advisory decision? What is the history of like, why do you, why do you have a jury when the judge is ultimately going to make the final call? It feels like just kind of putting on like a show because like theoretically the judge could just sit through a bunch of depositions and make a call.

• 37:31Mike Isaac?

  Sure. No, I, I think, um, so I do think they want more often than not, want a jury of these CEOs and companies peers to be the deciding factor in what they feel like is good for a civil claim like that I think is fairly standard. But to your point, um, the judge can throw out their verdict, which is like, is, and judges, I don't think tend to want to do that because like they want to have reliance on, this is the public, the public should have a say in what goes or whatever. But, uh, the judge can do that. I will say also she is responsible for, uh, if they're, if Elon or, or sorry, if OpenAI

• 38:13Mike Isaac?

  is found liable, judge decides on remedies, damages and things like that. So she still has an active role in that regard and in steering the case. But I really do think that, uh, courts often prefer or often appreciate a peer, a jury of your peers making some of these decisions. So I don't think it's going to be like completely disregarded is what I would say.

• 38:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, how has Judge Rogers done so far in your view? Just reading, reading the live blog, she seemingly has like zingers, pretty, pretty like good, like one liners, the time, I'm just like kind of imagining what it's like in there because obviously I'm just reading text, but she's had like seemingly like some pretty good comedic timing.

• 38:59Mike Isaac?

  Yeah. Oh my God, she's so funny. She's like real like. As you might imagine, there's like a number of different types of judges and how they handle their court or whatever. And she just takes no BS from anyone, including the lawyers. And like, when they try to like tap dance, or break the rules, or whatever, she's like, no, shut up. Or like, get back on track. Or, no, no, no. Actually, the best part, or the most insane part. So one woman in the overflow room, who is just a, not just, it was a civilian going to attend and watch it, started recording, which is, again, against the rules, if not the law, in a federal courthouse. So, the judge brings her

• 39:42Mike Isaac?

  in, and in front of a room of like, 100 people, just like dresses her down, yells at her, saying, did you not see any of these signs? What are you doing? I will kick you out. I will, it was like, I, I would have like, peed my pants and started crying if she had done that to me. It was deeply, deeply intense.

• 40:00John Coogan?

  It's, it's teacher, you know, berating a student. Yeah, classes in session. Glasses in session here.

• 40:07Mike Isaac?

  It was brutal.

• 40:08John Coogan?

  Uh, how, how, how do you, how have you been processing Elon's positioning? It feels like the two, uh, the two stories that I've heard him sort of telling are, one, about his commitment to technology, humanity, uh, saving the world through, you know, Tesla, and the electrification of the internal combustion engine, and SpaceX making, you know, humanity multi-planetary. And then, and that's like a very high level, uh, you know, high concept, uh, pitch. And then he also sort of brings it down and starts beating this drum on like, you can't steal a charity, you can't steal a charity. Uh, is that the correct framing? That he's trying to go like, high and low there? How much have he's been beating each

• 40:53John Coogan?

  of these drums? And how useful is that?

• 40:57Mike Isaac?

  So I totally agree. That's the framing. And I think this really goes to the point of a lot of these trials are, pageantry is the wrong word, but let's say theater in that you are, this is a jury trial, and it's a different thing than just convincing a judge who I would say is much more attuned to the facts and merit of the case and like hammering in on the evidence and like, uh, something that may be boring to you or me or whatever, or the jury is going to be more important to a judge. Elon, I think from day one, has leaned into the persona of Elon and just from him being on the stand and saying, I care about humanity. I mean, he, he says he does whatever he does or doesn't, but like, just leaning

• 41:41Mike Isaac?

  into this, like, I'm a world-changing entrepreneur and this stuff is existential and I'm the one who has cared about it. And like, that may work on a jury, you know, like, there are people who still love him and, you know, OpenAI is really hammering the facts of what they feel are their side of the case and saying Elon has known about, uh, Elon has never been in the dark. He quit in a huff. He, uh, he's made it very clear. He hasn't been there. He's trying to sue now, or he's trying to file this claim now because he's catching up because he's behind as an ex-AI competitor. But like, again, this is all stuff that maybe it doesn't play. Like, this is why jury trials are so risky for companies a lot of the time, you know? It's really, it's fun for me. It's probably not fun for,

• 42:26Mike Isaac?

  for everyone in there, but it's fun to see it play out, if that makes sense.

• 42:30Jordi Hays?

  How did the distillation, uh, comments come up?

• 42:35Mike Isaac?

  That was like, that was the news of the day yesterday. You guys obviously returned to it.

• 42:40Jordi Hays?

  You, you, you broke it, right?

• 42:42Mike Isaac?

  I think I did. Yeah. I think it was one of those things where I was like, holy shit, this is news. And I think like, folks like started figuring it out, but I was like, gotta put it on Twitter. And, uh, uh, so the point, uh, so Bill Sabat is lead counsel for OpenAI. He was sort of talking about, the, the point was made in the context of they want to hammer home. Elon is creating a competitive product and also he keeps stressing that this is doom world ending technology, but at the same time, he's, he's, he's ripping off the toss and using the technology to improve his own technology in an explicitly for-profit company. And so

• 43:27Mike Isaac?

  the, the point is like hammering him as a hypocrite. And I think, look, like, I think Elon has a history in his businesses. It would not be controversial to say to like, say one thing and do the other. And I think he sees it as like rules of engagement. That's the game in the, you know, no holds capitalism land. But like, that is how it came up and that they didn't go super deep into it, but they wanted to make the point. He's using open eyes tech. He's breaking the toss and he's partly distilling it. And I want to say also that Elon went out of his way to say, everyone kind of does this. It's like an open secret in the industry, which I think is like also kind of true, but that doesn't make it. There's like, it's, it's fraught, I guess is what I would say.

• 44:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's a, there's obviously a continuum there, which is why he tried to hammer that it was like partly, I imagine most car companies have taken a rival car for a spin. Have they taken the car apart? You know, there's a line there and there are laws, but that's a separate issue, of course.

• 44:27Jordi Hays?

  Has, um, has anything come up with a jury around prediction markets? Because I was thinking we've now seen insider trading across every possible prediction market, right? From, uh, you know, I'm sure from like,

• 44:41John Coogan?

  That's very interesting.

• 44:42Jordi Hays?

  You know, even, even the Maduro thing was, was, was interesting because a lot of people were like, oh, he's just betting on himself. But then I saw that I was like, hey, that's sending a signal to the entire world that an attack could be happening, which puts your entire team at risk, right? So like very, very clearly like US military personnel should not be able to trade against. Our own military's actions ever, right? And that they need to come down really hard on that.

• 45:09Mike Isaac?

  Are you just trading on this? Are you just trading on this crazy? Are you gonna retire off this?

• 45:16Jordi Hays?

  The reason, the reason that the jury thing is, is, is bad is it creates a potentially an incentive for the jury to basically work together and say like, hey, like, we all have to be here for like a month. Like, we could at least make some money on it. And then you only need to get like four, you only need to get like four or five of these people to.

• 45:35Mike Isaac?

  The chat is saying monetize jury duty. Oh, my God.

• 45:40Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but, but like, it seems like very important that this does not happen, right? Because, because there's very, like, they, they tried to select a jury that just doesn't care about the AI race. They don't care about this or that. And, and, but if they are self-interested in some capacity, they could be like, well, my, my decision is not, is not even really legally binding. It's just advisory. Like, I may as well, you know, I don't know, right?

• 46:08Mike Isaac?

  I, I think that's a great point. And like something that I imagine like court systems aren't even prepared for fully yet because like.

• 46:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, there hasn't been a big, there hasn't been a big trial. Like, there's been, I'm sure some like epic Apple stuff that was slightly big, but, but nothing where, nothing, nothing, anything at this scale with this much, even just this much volume already from people that are generally interested in

• 46:36Jordi Hays?

  in, in the story.

• 46:37Mike Isaac?

  Yeah. And like, I think the other thing you should know is like, they're not sequestered. Like, they show up kind of like before.

• 46:45Jordi Hays?

  Like anyone else.

• 46:45Mike Isaac?

  Right before they, yeah, like they literally like, we see them walking in and that the marshals, there's like a ton of like US marshals there. They're like, is anyone a juror in this line? The juror gets to go in. So, and at the end of every day, the judge is like, goes back over the rules saying, do not discuss this case with anyone. Do not watch it on TV. Do not look at it on your phone, which is like a verbal. Command, right?

• 47:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, don't go on your phone. Just don't.

• 47:12Mike Isaac?

  Exactly.

• 47:12Jordi Hays?

  Hey, don't use the most addictive thing that has ever been created in human history. Don't use the thing that you use for six hours a day.

• 47:20John Coogan?

  That you probably can like turn your lights on and adjust your thermostat.

• 47:24Mike Isaac?

  Totally. I mean, it's, that's a, it's something I had not thought of, Jordy, but it's a really good, like, when does that come up at some point, you know, like, that's very worried, not necessarily here, but just ever.

• 47:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it seems, it seems like something that,

• 47:40Jordi Hays?

  that, that the court should be paying attention to, heading into a, a, a, a decision from, from the jury.

• 47:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how much is the history between, uh, OpenAI's counsel, Bill, uh, who represented, he represented Twitter when Elon was trying to get out of the, the, the Twitter buyout. Uh, and ultimately it feels like the X slash Twitter acquisition has worked out pretty well for Elon. He's made a number, a number of plays, so hard to, hard to imagine him like, you know, deeply regretting buying it, even though at the time he was happy to get out until Bill said, no, we're, we're doing this.

• 48:23Mike Isaac?

  I, you know, it's funny, um, he is,

• 48:28Mike Isaac?

  I, I can't underscore enough how different the tenor chain, I mean, look, it's like, it's opposing counsel, so it's always going to be different, but Elon went from like, I'm a entrepreneur, sort of like rosyly explaining to you what I think the future should look like and like very concerned for the future of the human race. So like openly antagonistic to Savitz questioning and like, and the, the thing that I'm very curious how this plays with the jury is like Elon was very, he's like, I'm a literal guy, like the questions you're asking me are like too complicated or like they're not yes or no questions, which is like, Fair, like as a grievance, but also the thing he either doesn't understand or doesn't

• 49:10Mike Isaac?

  care about understanding is that that's just lawyers. Like, that's the whole point of a cross-examination is to ask these questions as, as reductively as possible to, to get a type of answer they're looking for. And his job, or his, uh, you know, pre-trial sort of discussions with his own lawyers is to know how to navigate those essentially while also telling the, the truth. So, I don't know, they, they just don't like each other, or at least Elon doesn't like Savit. And you can very, it's very clear that he's just like mad at that. And whenever Elon gets sassy, I would hear like, clearly people who are fans of, of Musk like laughing behind me or being like, yeah, you got him. Like,

• 49:51Mike Isaac?

  blah. It's just, it's very, it's very funny. It's like kind of a, it's different than the usual vibe is what I'd say.

• 49:58John Coogan?

  That's very interesting.

• 49:59Jordi Hays?

  Outlook, what's going on Monday? What's the outlook?

• 50:03John Coogan?

  It feels like this week was the Elon side for the most part. Are we gonna flip to, uh, Sam and Greg and, and some other OpenAI folks? Or is there a, an intermediate step? Like, do you, do you have a clear view of what the next couple of weeks look like?

• 50:18Mike Isaac?

  Yeah. So it's a little rough because we, we have witness lists in full that they presented and are in evidence, but they, you don't really learn who's coming until like very soon that week. It's actually a giant pain in the ass for me and for reporters who are trying to schedule. But like, so we, Jared Burchall, who's like Musk's family office guy, just finished testifying. Uh, we're gonna get, uh, this guy Stuart Russell.

• 50:45Jordi Hays?

  That's today?

• 50:46Mike Isaac?

  No, no, sorry, that was yesterday.

• 50:48John Coogan?

  And, and you said Burchall was very dry? Like, was that intentional? That feels like that does not work in favor of like swinging a jury. Was that more for the judge? Like, what was the goal of that, uh, of that, uh, testimony?

• 51:01Mike Isaac?

  I think it was to really just sort of show how Musk was trying to set up this like, like, structure things as a nonprofit and like hammer home, like he's always wanted it to be a nonprofit and he's not sort of like, so it was, it was, I believe it was Musk's witness who OpenAI then cross-examined and OpenAI used the occasion to show an email that had like a proposed equity structure for Musk and so like, they both kind of used him differently, but I think like, Burchall is like a, essentially an accountant, books guy, like, behind the scenes. So I think it was like,

• 51:42Mike Isaac?

  here's the peek behind the curtain, here's how they were dealing with the finances, here's how Musk was like, this is only a charity and then OpenAI's lawyers were like, actually, check this shit out. So, but I think like, I don't, I honestly don't know. They also struck some of his testimony because, this is a little complicated, but if you remember last year, OpenAI, or Musk made a bid with Ari Emanuel and some other companies.

• 52:10John Coogan?

  To buy the whole company.

• 52:11Mike Isaac?

  And that opened the door, or that sort of complicates things for Musk's side because there might be some of those discussions around that bid admitted into evidence and that may not be good for Musk because if there's like weird compromising emails in there, so like, it's gotten complicated. But next week, we're getting Stuart Russell, safety researcher, we got Greg Brockman, maybe Sam Altman, maybe not. It's four days a week in court only, so we may not have time, but I gotta be ready. I'll be there most of the time, but I'll be there for Sam for sure and then, I don't know.

• 52:53Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, rewinding a second. Did, did they bid, did they bid on the PVC, like the, the for-profit arm?

• 53:00Mike Isaac?

  Yeah, it was the, yeah, and they, they wanted to just sort of. I don't actually know what their plans were afterwards, but like it was like trying to take over the asset, those assets, basically, and then, you know, morph it into what they, I mean, and they knew that it wasn't gonna get accepted as a bid, basically, but it was like, and then Burchall, sorry, Burchall in court was saying, this was us trying to sort of establish a pricing mechanism to like value the actual entity itself, and that was gonna help them somehow. I actually am not quite sure how that would help them somehow, but uh, someone in the chat is probably smarter than me on that. But like,

• 53:43Mike Isaac?

  it was them trying to sort of take that over. And I think OpenAI said publicly at the time, this is like a stalling tactic. They're trying to like, slow us down while also using this in court in this concurrent lawsuit later, basically. So it's all like really messy, and I think even Musk's side took a risk there if those emails get into discovery, but it's unclear to me if that's gonna happen. If we, if they are, then we may see them next week.

• 54:13Jordi Hays?

  Why would, why would that, that kind of discovery process around that bid be coming up now when everyone involved was well aware that it had happened quite a long time ago?

• 54:26Mike Isaac?

  So I think because of a line of questioning with Burchall yesterday about the bid, that like, if that happens on the stand, and again, like a lawyer gut check me here because I'm a stupid tech reporter, but if that happens on the stand, then it gives an entry point for OpenAI's lawyers to be like, okay, well, we need to, you know, now admit, basically the judge said to Musk's side, you opened this line of questioning, now it's fair game to go into this, and then you can start calling new evidence in around that, like, to open up discovery. It's like really like strategy, and like you have to be careful in your strategy when you're asking certain questions in court. I've been learning a lot about it. So maybe

• 55:09Mike Isaac?

  it's a strategic misstep by Toboroff, Elon's lawyer, but it's not quite clear yet.

• 55:14John Coogan?

  Do you have a idea of the purpose of the AI safety researchers testifying? What the goal is there like? Is that aligned with one particular side? Like if there's more nonprofits, like you still probably wind up with Anthropic, DeepMind, XAI. Like having one like, you know, more focused nonprofit going on for a long time doesn't necessarily lead me to like, oh, then we wouldn't be in an AI race. Like it's not a clear solve for me, but I imagine that there's that some one side is trying to position this as important. But do you have any predictions for what that goal is?

• 55:53Mike Isaac?

  Totally. So this is Musk's witness and your point is well made, which is like, okay, if even if you kneecap one, like good luck on literally everyone else. And like, there's been a lot of time spent Elon talking smack about Larry Page and how he like, doesn't trust him anymore. That's actually been really fun to hear. But the point I believe is this is actually a point of contention. So the judge does not, the judge prohibited like going too far into like doomerism into the world stuff. And she's like, look, that's kind of a sideshow distraction, like extinction, humanity stuff is not the point of this case. But Musk side called this guy because they want someone.

• 56:35Mike Isaac?

  And this is my, my understanding is that Stuart is like very aligned with the idea that AI is super dangerous and going to harm us all. And so if you get this guy in there, make that point.

• 56:45Jordi Hays?

  How does that not like? If this guy's going to come on and say that AI, like the most insane like doomer point of view, which I think is everyone's going to have their own opinion around this debate. It's worth completely worthy of having and talking about. But, but how does Elon square that with like, I'm trying to build the biggest cluster possible and you know, distill on the rest of the industry's model and you know, create tens of gigawatts of space compute? And like, how, how does that? How does that like, can't this kind of witness potentially?

• 57:30Jordi Hays?

  Backfire in some capacity?

• 57:32Mike Isaac?

  No, I mean, you're, you're, you're exactly right in that squaring that circle is pretty hard and like exactly what um

• 57:40Jordi Hays?

  I should be, I should be, I, I, I should be trusted with the, you know, all powerful.

• 57:47John Coogan?

  We're gonna be in the Terminator situation, situation, no matter what. Do you want me in charge of the Terminators? Not some other guy, not some nonprofit, not some shareholders.

• 57:57Jordi Hays?

  He is, he is, he's basically making, he's, he's, he's pivoting Tesla production to uh

• 58:04John Coogan?

  Terminators.

• 58:04Jordi Hays?

  The Terminators, basically.

• 58:05John Coogan?

  Optimus. Yeah.

• 58:07Mike Isaac?

  Great. No, I, I, and like, can I just make one last point is that I just think he, he misunderstood the Terminator because like we still survive and we fight back in that world. Do you, do you remember?

• 58:20John Coogan?

  I've been saying this, people haven't seen the movie. Jordy actually hasn't seen the Terminator, but in all of these

• 58:25Mike Isaac?

  Are you kidding me, dude?

• 58:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. In, in, in all of these movies, like it completely leaves out that there is a problem and then humanity overcomes it. And so it's like, if there is a Terminator scenario, like I just want to know that you're on my side as the resistance fighting back. And like, whether the Terminators come from, yeah.

• 58:44Mike Isaac?

  John Connor.

• 58:45John Coogan?

  Hopefully, I mean, I, I would, yeah, it's, I don't know. I don't want to get into the, the, the full Yudetaski thing, but like, like it is reasonable to be, to, to, to, to sort of steel man that like, if it is bad, right now it's not, it's sass.

• 58:59Jordi Hays?

  As I have to watch Terminator, I've got to watch Terminator tonight.

• 59:02John Coogan?

  You gotta watch Terminator.

• 59:03Mike Isaac?

  Okay, so literally, I just saw this on Twitter, Terminator 2 is coming back into IMAX pretty soon. Like you can go see it in the theater. So you have to go see it, Jordy. Like it's, it's required viewing.

• 59:14Jordi Hays?

  Let's go together.

• 59:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:15Mike Isaac?

  I'm down, I'm down.

• 59:16Jordi Hays?

  Do you, do you have any, I would say that so far the trial is less, I mean, it, it's hard for the trial to go very viral because there's no audio, video, and it's just like live blogging. And you could imagine, you can imagine some of these scenes, like just the stuff that you're typing. I'm like, if that was on video, that gets like 50 million views in like, you know, in a few hours on, on, on X, you know, across a bunch of these different aggregator accounts. Um, but part is, is maybe part of the, like,

• 59:49Jordi Hays?

  My, my feeling is like, it's just so, it's just so like, I feel like the entire tech industry is like, it's just kind of depressing to see, to see these groups like fighting in this way. When we have so much bigger prob, like we have so many bigger problems as an industry, right? The big problem being like, public perception of AI is like already so bad. Like people, you know, don't, don't like, you know. Hmm.

• 1:00:15John Coogan?

  I, I saw some protests that were like, no matter who wins, we all lose. Or something like that. Like there's some very negative stuff.

• 1:00:24Mike Isaac?

  I mean, that, so I, I totally agree. And I do think actually, um, everyone, not everyone, but like many in the AI industry have started realizing, oh, we have, like, not everyone loves us. Like this is a perception problem in a lot of ways. Which like, to me is funny because like, I, I, not that I'm smart, but I feel like I've known that for a little while. And, but it's, the, the, the issue is, the, the industry is coming around to that, or at least certain folks are, and know that they want to change that perception. But this case has been in the system for like three years now. And sort of like actually happening at a time where they wouldn't want it to necessarily happen if they're trying to change it.

• 1:01:05Mike Isaac?

  So the timing just sucks for, for folks who don't like that, if that makes sense.

• 1:01:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's so many different like little tidbits. And I don't know if they're going to be exact quotes, but you can just imagine plenty of things that are going to happen on the stand, winding up on a Bernie Sanders poster and being like, stop it, pause AI, right?

• 1:01:21Mike Isaac?

  Oh my God.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  It goes like, you know, it's always like, give the tech people enough rope to hang themselves. And like, and there's a lot of rope going out the next couple of weeks.

• 1:01:29Mike Isaac?

  Oh my God. It's totally, you gotta, one of y'all, both of y'all should just show up to the courtroom at some point. And like, experience it because, I mean, you have an actual day job, but it's like literally, it's really interesting and like an experience.

• 1:01:44John Coogan?

  So you, you can't record video, you can't record audio. But is there a world where you have like five of your own stenographers there taking a perfect transcript?

• 1:01:56John Coogan?

  Would that be possible with enough resources?

• 1:01:58Jordi Hays?

  And then we could do a table reading on the show.

• 1:02:00John Coogan?

  That's what I'm thinking is that is that you could use voice cloning? I don't know if you noticed this, Tyler, what was it? Grok launched voice cloning today or something?

• 1:02:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:09John Coogan?

  Which is, why is that controversial again?

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  Well, for like, I mean, we've had this technology for like five years and then no one released it because like you don't want people to make deep fakes of other people's voices.

• 1:02:17John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, because it's like textbook, like I could.

• 1:02:19Speaker 03

  It's like, oh, I call you John, I need, I need, I need like, I need 500 bucks.

• 1:02:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:25Jordi Hays?

  Can you give me your credit card for a second?

• 1:02:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, so obviously there's a bunch of risky uses of that. The good use is the comedic table read in the voice of Sam Altman, in the voice of Greg Brockman, in the voice of Elon Musk. That we can all enjoy.

• 1:02:39Jordi Hays?

  I was thinking more of like doing like a, like basically, end of the day.

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:43Jordi Hays?

  There's like, we do a play here.

• 1:02:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's probably best.

• 1:02:46Jordi Hays?

  A bunch of different actors.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  Full makeup, full costumes.

• 1:02:50Mike Isaac?

  So, you know, there are transcription services and even like.

• 1:02:54Jordi Hays?

  You could do, you could be Mike Isaac by, like played by Mike Isaac.

• 1:02:58John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:02:59Jordi Hays?

  No, no.

• 1:02:59John Coogan?

  You're there, hot tweeting.

• 1:03:00Jordi Hays?

  No, it's like, it's a cameo, he's playing himself.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  Okay, nah. I think you gotta go full Nathan Fielder.

• 1:03:06Jordi Hays?

  And the whole, the whole time just crashing out like, I forgot my lunch, I forgot to fill up my water.

• 1:03:13John Coogan?

  I had a banana.

• 1:03:14Mike Isaac?

  Completely imploding.

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  I had a banana.

• 1:03:16Mike Isaac?

  Oh my god. Okay, so. Can I just say, there is an attorney there that looks exactly like Nathan Fielder, that I'm like, almost like, is this Nathan Fielder?

• 1:03:24John Coogan?

  Just looks like Nathan Fielder, okay.

• 1:03:26Mike Isaac?

  I, every time I see him, I'm like, is this like a bit, like I'm, am I gonna be on TV in some way? It's very intense. I mean, you're gonna ask him next year.

• 1:03:34John Coogan?

  I mean, Elon Musk says the funniest outcome's the most likely, and that might be it.

• 1:03:38Mike Isaac?

  Seriously.

• 1:03:39John Coogan?

  What is, what is the funniest outcome? The funniest outcome is like Elon wins and the penalty is like, is like 50 bucks or something like that.

• 1:03:46Mike Isaac?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:46John Coogan?

  Like that, it's like, it's like Elon, like, you win, here's, here's $150, enjoy.

• 1:03:53Mike Isaac?

  It would be very, oh my god.

• 1:03:55John Coogan?

  Just the most like inconsequential fine for the AI industry, which is flush with cash at all times.

• 1:04:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, I find that like, fine, like there's so many, anytime a company in tech gets, that gets fined, or not every time, but often it's like.

• 1:04:10John Coogan?

  Sometimes it's a fine for ants.

• 1:04:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like they, they, they did something that was bad, they generated 100 million of revenue and the fine is like 1.5 million dollars.

• 1:04:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:19Jordi Hays?

  It's like, did that?

• 1:04:21John Coogan?

  I think the current Meta YouTube lawsuit was like, uh, maybe a $10 million settlement. Of course, there was like knock on of a potential for

• 1:04:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, that was for one, that was for one individual.

• 1:04:31John Coogan?

  That was one individual, but still it was like, you, you, you have this like landmark case, this big build. And then you're like, oh, how, how, how damaging is it going to be? It's going to be like five minutes of revenue, but

• 1:04:43Mike Isaac?

  The stock actually in Meta earnings is as far, I mean, there was a lot of shit that took the stock down, but like, I think one of them was them saying like, this might have a material impact on like these cases. Like may have a material impact in the future if it opens the door. So like, yeah, I agree. Like it's always remedies are always like, it can be existential from a financial point of view, but also just from a guess what? This is about to become your whole fucking life for the next 10 years or whatever, if that makes sense.

• 1:05:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. We talked to a, a, a law professor who, uh, said like, the question is, does social media exist in the future? Like this is an existential moment. I'm not sure that we're quite there, but, uh, it is, it is, it is, there's definitely a risk and you need to consider that if you're an investor.

• 1:05:25Mike Isaac?

  Totally.

• 1:05:26John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, what's the game plan for next week? What's going in? Are you doing trail mix? So you're doing protein bars. I want you fueled up, ready to go.

• 1:05:36Mike Isaac?

  I blog and

• 1:05:39Jordi Hays?

  You should be able to do like a sponsored camelback, you know?

• 1:05:44Mike Isaac?

  Did you ever watch Jerry do the show Jerry?

• 1:05:46John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course.

• 1:05:47Mike Isaac?

  I, I want to be the guy with like the chair pants and the like, the water thing attached to my back. And like, I need, I'm gotta, this is blogging. This is back in my blogging, all things digital blog days, man. This is, this is it. So I will be more prepared.

• 1:06:04John Coogan?

  This weekend, you should go sit in a chair for eight hours straight.

• 1:06:09Jordi Hays?

  Are you gonna do all four days? Are you doing all four days?

• 1:06:12Mike Isaac?

  I think we're gonna switch off a little more. I apologize. I will not be my like disastrous falling apart self every day of the week, just maybe two days of the week. So, uh, Kay, you should follow Cade Mehta, my other colleague who's there. Um, although he, he is much more put together and does not tweet like a person off their meds like I do. So, uh, it'll be a different vibe each day, but I will be there next week.

• 1:06:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Last question. Is this book material? Is it, does it rise to that quality, this drama?

• 1:06:41Mike Isaac?

  I feel like someone's got to write a book.

• 1:06:43Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would write a book on your coverage of this trial.

• 1:06:46John Coogan?

  Yes, that's what I want to read.

• 1:06:49Jordi Hays?

  And then I would do a podcast about it. I would do a podcast about it and then someone would make a book about the podcast, about the book, covering my guy's covering.

• 1:07:00John Coogan?

  We'll create a content orborus here.

• 1:07:01Mike Isaac?

  That's right. Just keep it going. Someday. I don't know. We'll see.

• 1:07:05John Coogan?

  Anyway, thank you so much for taking the time to come to us.

• 1:07:08Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you, Mike. Thanks for the update.

• 1:07:10John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:07:11Mike Isaac?

  Thanks, guys. I'll see you soon.

• 1:07:13John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Uh, we're running late, but we got Kyle Harrison in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the CBP and Elton Dump. He wrote a book about the Anduril thesis. 300 pages of defense, tech, lore, history, knowledge. You know what's more valuable than any of these cars up here in the Hollywood Hills? Knowledge. And you wrote a book. Tell us about it. What was the process? What was the thesis of the book, The Anduril Thesis?

• 1:07:38Speaker 05

  It was an incredible experience. I would say, I think the thing that I came to appreciate the most was, everybody talks about Anduril like it's just any other company. Um, all these high growth companies that are defined by an awesome team chasing a big idea. Market turns out to be bigger than you possibly expect. You know, Ben Horowitz has to tell Databricks that they're underselling themselves at 10 billion. It's 100 billion. It's 200 billion. Like those stories are very common. The Anduril story is so underappreciated because it is counter positioned to, there's like over almost 100 years of military geopolitical industrial history

• 1:08:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:14Speaker 05

  that really define the company that people just, they just, they don't know. Like they think about, oh, this is an interesting strategic choice. And it's like, no, this is actually because of things, decisions that people made in the 50s and 60s that we literally have to do things this way. That was the biggest takeaway.

• 1:08:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like Shom Sankar at Palantir with the first breakfast is done a good job shining a light on the Last Supper. So many people in tech are familiar with that sort of key moment of industry consolidation that led us to this moment. Were there any anecdotes or historical stories that you discovered that were more under the radar, more like less discussed as like, you know, the founding moments of this whole journey?

• 1:08:57Speaker 05

  The biggest appreciation that I got was for this sort of like dual pairing of people pushing forward a specific project. So in The Kill Chain, which is Chris Bros, who now is the kind of co-president and chief strategy officer at Anduril, but at the time was coming off the Armed Services Committee. He wrote this book, The Kill Chain. He talks about this idea of like military mavericks. And I kind of combined this with this kind of founder, founder mode energy that people bring. And so you have this like founder plus military maverick pairing where you have folks like the, the team, so Bernard Schreiber, I think is the name of the guy who basically led the team inventing ICBMs. He absolutely needed Eisenhower as his kind of military maverick

• 1:09:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:09:41Speaker 05

  to like pair that effort. There's countless stories of this, the modernization of the Navy. There's all these different things that were like that one-two punch was kind of required. Once you get away from like, you know, one point, the DOD was 36% of global R and D.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:55Speaker 05

  They had a pretty good handle on the cutting edge. Once you, the further away you get from that, the more you need founder mode people digging in to figure out the solution.

• 1:10:05John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:10:05Speaker 05

  And, and it's heartbreaking because you see these like countless examples of like prophets of urgency throughout time where like, once we lost that, that sort of like desire for founders to come in and solve problems. And you have all these people who are like throughout the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, they're releasing reports and writing white papers and talking about how, hey, this is going to be a problem. Warfare is changing. China is going to school on how we do conflict and that's problematic. And none of them had sort of founders to be able to come solve problems because no one was willing to pay attention to the actual problems. And so we lost that pairing.

• 1:10:41John Coogan?

  There's reports of Anduril raising a new round, $60 billion potentially. Is this book a financial thesis? Is this financial advice? Is this something that investors, potential investors, maybe future investors?

• 1:10:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's four chapters dedicated to price targets.

• 1:10:59John Coogan?

  Price targets, multiples, cash flows.

• 1:11:02Speaker 05

  Entertainment purposes only, right across the, right across the, no, this is, this does not constitute financial advice. Entertainment purposes only. You know what's crazy is, I think, if I remember correctly, in secondary markets, if, if there's any secondary volume that, that Anduril's founders haven't already gone to war on, I heard somebody say that it was like 100 billion indication. Like even just tracking like what people are willing to pay because of Matt Grimm's War, there may be no, no supply for the demand, but the demand is priced at 100 billion. So it's not, you know, where the new round ends up, whatever, the appetite continues.

• 1:11:38John Coogan?

  Sequel, sequel, the Anduril financial thesis.

• 1:11:41Speaker 05

  That's right. This is investment advice.

• 1:11:44Jordi Hays?

  Anduril's been very, very acquisitive and it feels like the, some of the most like meaningful innovation and like founder mode behavior in the last 20 years has come out of like Ukraine and what, what they've been doing to basically figure out how to like innovate and create these like R and D loops around drone warfare.

• 1:12:11Jordi Hays?

  Like, do you, any, any, I don't know if you can make predictions, but like, does Anduril end up buying any of these companies? Is that, is that, have you, have you uncovered anything on that front? Is that even, is that even a possibility? It just feels like they've done some very impressive work to protect their, their country and a lot of it seems relatively aligned to Anduril's own efforts.

• 1:12:38Speaker 05

  Yeah. So there's a couple of pieces of the puzzle. So first, like, in terms of how acquisitive Anduril has already been, you know, our good friend, Paddy McCormick, has described it well, I think, like, calling it an API into the DOD, where Anduril is effectively enables this like plugin mechanism of somebody can go very deep into a very specific capability in a way that like, like, companies like the company that may dive, like, it'd be very difficult for them to sort of become a standalone large company, but by being acquired by Anduril, immediately they're able to plug in and get a hundred million dollar contract with the Australian Navy and something like that. So I think, like, the acquisition muscle plugs in a lot of this stuff pretty capably. The second

• 1:13:23Speaker 05

  piece of that puzzle is, I think that a lot of times, we do a disservice, like, the venture capital industrial complex does a disservice by focusing everybody on this sort of like neo-prime North Star of everybody needs to be the 10, 20, 50, 100 billion dollar outcome. I think that there are a lot of opportunities for companies to be very, very good at a very specific thing, capability, and then to plug into some of these, these systems, whether it's through partnership or through acquisition. And what's funny, probably the most frustrating part about the book is we wrote it over the course of, of two years, in part because we, you know, it's, it's difficult to sit down, we all have day jobs and stuff. But in part, too, because the world is constantly changing, right? When we started, when we originally sat down thinking about what this would look like...

• 1:14:09Speaker 05

  You know, none of the things that happened in Israel, like Ukraine was sort of just continuing to evolve, Venezuela happens, all these different conflicts happen over time. But then on top of that, Anduril as a company continues to ship. And so even six months ago, I would have said, you know, what is the kind of like signal? And what's interesting is you look at some of their product launches, some of these are acquisition, some through partnership. But I don't know if you guys have seen their like anime style product launch videos, right? So I don't know if everybody has noticed this, but the last two videos had teasers of their future products. So I think it was the video that where they talked about Fury and then it was maybe Fury or their Barracuda.

• 1:14:53Speaker 05

  And then at the end of the video, it kind of went under the water and you started to see these assets moving, but then it cuts away and you don't know what it is. Couple of months later, they announced Copperhead, which is their like torpedo product and that paired with Dive and stuff. And then they have a video about that. And at the end, it pans above the water and you start to see this thing kind of come out of the corner of the shot and it cuts away. And then just whatever was last week or so, Anduril announced a partnership with Hyundai about building autonomous surface vessels, right? So it's like kind of going into all these different surface areas. I think that that is indicative of like where the signal is, is that whether it's through partnership, whether it's through acquisition, a lot of the stuff that's happening in Ukraine, what you're kind of exposing is that there is significant opportunity for like networked

• 1:15:38Speaker 05

  assets and Anduril is absolutely has this mindset on becoming the sort of networked everything, the military, military internet of things is what Chris Bros calls it.

• 1:15:48Jordi Hays?

  Where can people find the book?

• 1:15:51Speaker 05

  Amazon.com. Our own Jeff Bezos is hosting it for us. We're not in the book printing business, so.

• 1:15:57Jordi Hays?

  They're gonna do an audiobook version? Oh, they print, they have a print on demand?

• 1:16:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's sick. It's great. It's you put in the thing, it takes a lot of tweaking.

• 1:16:05Jordi Hays?

  You thinking what I'm thinking, John? I'm hearing what you're thinking.

• 1:16:07Speaker 05

  It's pretty good. I'm telling you what.

• 1:16:09Jordi Hays?

  It's time to, it's time to ship books. You gotta write a book about this.

• 1:16:12Speaker 05

  TPN, the novelization.

• 1:16:13Jordi Hays?

  We want to make, we want to make ad-supported business books. They're free, but they come with ramp ads.

• 1:16:20John Coogan?

  Yep, that's great.

• 1:16:21Speaker 05

  You get yourself a good designer, it's as easy as it can be.

• 1:16:23Jordi Hays?

  Last question from my side. Do you, have we reached peak early-stage defense tech investing boom? Has it already passed? Is it, are we still on the app? Like, what is your feeling at this moment?

• 1:16:40Speaker 05

  There, I think that it is going to take, to take the air out of the balloon is going to require some type of black swan, hopefully, hopefully micro swan, micro black swan event. And we don't want it to be too bad and too.

• 1:16:58Jordi Hays?

  Wait, you said to take the air out of the defense tech investing sales, you would need a black swan event? So you're saying like, we declare global peace?

• 1:17:09Speaker 05

  So I think it's gonna take, I think it's more about the capability. I think it's gonna take like, either there is a company that has been highly valued, highly sought after, kind of held up as one of the golden children of the neo-defense industrial wave, that just something, it's terrible. It's really bad. Like, something very bad happened. And so then investors start to say, oh crap, wait, you're telling me not every company I invest in that does defense is gonna be the next Andorol? I can't underwrite to every company, maybe they're not 60 billion, but at least they'll be 20 billion. Like, if that underwriting muscle goes away, you have a whole swath of carpetbagger VCs that suddenly get very panicked, like, something like that happens.

• 1:17:49John Coogan?

  In social, there were a whole bunch of, like, fifth wave social companies that didn't get the Instagram acquisition. They didn't get the WhatsApp acquisition. They raised a couple hundred million bucks and they just sort of burned it down and just went away and nothing really happened. And the VCs sort of woke up and they were like, okay, we gotta be much more careful if we, if we're investing in that category. So, yeah.

• 1:18:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, because I think it's like, I think the problem is like, there are sort of like three varieties of VCs are in and around like defense tech more broadly. And it's like, the people who invest and get it and they're actively built, they understand the like moral implications of the types of technology they're investing in. Then there are still people who have said, we will not invest in weapons. We don't want to invest in defense, whatever. It's this middle ground tier that is problematic. It's these people who they have no real philosophical weight behind why they do what they do. They just see big number and pursue shiny object regardless of consequences.

• 1:18:44John Coogan?

  Line go up. Well, we hope that the line goes up on your book sales. Head over to amazon.com and buy The Anduril Thesis by Kyle Harrison of Contrary. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Can't wait to see you soon.

• 1:18:58Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you. Congrats, dude.

• 1:18:59John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:19:00Speaker 05

  Thanks.

• 1:19:01John Coogan?

  Up next, we have David Marcus from Lightspark. He's the co-founder and CEO and he's launching Grid Global Accounts, a Bitcoin-powered system enabling global USD accounts, cards, and cross-border payouts. We talked a lot about crypto payments yesterday. We'll let you introduce the business yourself. Again, welcome back to the show. Give us the update and what's going on in your world. Great to see you.

• 1:19:25Speaker 06

  Thanks for having me back, guys. Well, look, so the the big announcement we had this week, so Lightspark has been around for about four years. And, you know, in the last four years, we've been building connectivity into payment systems all around the world, like 65 countries now. And the announcements that we added this week is Grid Global Accounts, which is basically a global dollar account that any platform can issue and give to their stakeholders. And a dollar account is what I think is the most powerful money account ever created, because you can move money in real time to 65 countries, payment systems, like really at any time of the day or night. You can move money on any chain with any stable

• 1:20:05Speaker 06

  coin you want. You will have a Visa debit card that can allow you to spend that balance at 175 million merchants around the world that Visa supports and Lightspark is becoming a principal member of the Visa network. As part of that process and it's got like this nice feature that enables those platforms to actually be ready for the the complete change of interfaces as we move from websites and apps to conversational interfaces driven by agents. And so this idea that you can delegate safely money to agents so they can buy things or send money around the world for you is really part of that whole grid global account platform that we've announced and launched this week.

• 1:20:47Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool. So how like when when did you guys start thinking about this opportunity? Obviously, you know, everyone's thinking about stable coins. We have more regulatory clarity than ever. Was this always on the roadmap? Or did you guys start to get customers saying like, hey, we want support for stables and not just BTC related products?

• 1:21:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, look, I think, you know, we so we've been working on stable coins for a long time. But the this concept of a global dollar accounts that can actually live everywhere is really novel. And like that, there was no chance of us like actually doing that like even 12 months ago, because like the prerequisites, the stars were were really not aligned, right? And right now, with the Genius Act here in the US, with MICA in Europe, and similar legislation all over the world, plus really, really great embedded wallets, like, you know, the self custodial wallets of like, two years ago, where you had a seed phrase that you could lose, and you would never give that to a family member, because like, they would lose

• 1:21:54Speaker 06

  money almost invariably. All of that is gone, right? Now you have really great wallets that you can log in with Google, with Apple, with a pass key, with any login that's familiar, and never lose your your keys or or your money. And the last part of it is actually really stablecoin backed debit cards, where the networks have really leaned in hard on, and like now, gives us an opportunity to really basically connect those dollar accounts to 175 million merchants around the world, making that balance really useful for anyone receiving money on them.

• 1:22:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very cool.

• 1:22:29John Coogan?

  Is the pivot from crypto miner to AI Neo cloud that's happening across the industry?

• 1:22:38John Coogan?

  Having any sort of effect on crypto markets? Or is that a, because we, we talk to companies all the time that are compute constrained. There's this CPU crunch, there's GPU crunch, there's backlogs for power and data centers are delayed. And that's what's going on in the AI world. But Bitcoin as a network needs compute as well. Many other chains need compute. And is compute scarcity bleeding over in any way to the upside or downside? I, I just, I don't know the effect at all. Does it matter? Or is there enough compute for crypto to do everything that they want to do as a community?

• 1:23:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, proof of work is definitely, and so, you know, more, more specifically for the Bitcoin network. Proof of work is definitely using the, the level of energy that at times will compete with like AI data centers.

• 1:23:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:28Speaker 06

  But, but, you know, the hardware is like, you know, started GPU based, but it's very ASICs driven now. But on the energy side, definitely, definitely competes for the, the same source of energy. But I, look, I am personally an acceleration maximalist. Then I actually think that we're actually going to unlock unbounded energy in the next, like, you know, 10, 15 years. So I, I actually don't think that we're going to have these types of issues of like actually competing resources with like massively, like, you know, forward deployed amounts of capital on Bitcoin miners being replaced with, you know, GPUs.

• 1:24:07Speaker 06

  And, and also like those data centers for, for Bitcoin mining are, are so specific. Like, you know, a lot of those miners are, you know, liquid cooled in a certain way and like operate on certain grids that, you know, they're able to actually like turn on and turn off the, the mining capabilities really easily.

• 1:24:26John Coogan?

  Whereas like, you know, harder for. You don't necessarily want to do that if you're like actively serving inference or even just like training. You might not want to bring the, bring the train down. Interesting.

• 1:24:36Jordi Hays?

  Where, where are you expecting to see the first real hockey stick growth? When it comes to agents leveraging stable coins? It's like right now it feels like there's, like it's a lot of like potential early experiments going on. But at least to me, it's unclear where we'll see that, you know, really breakout use case.

• 1:24:56Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, I can share a little bit more about like, you know, my thoughts and my experience. Like, you know, the first thing is I think that everyone competing to build like an agent to agent protocol standard is kind of like, you know, really future forward. And there's not much happening there, right? It's like, there's a lot of like, big news and big announcements and very little volume. And that's normal because like, you know, agents are not moving money at scale by any stretch of imagination. We took a little bit of a different stance, right? Which is that we want to build a mass market money account that suits the needs of people and businesses all over the world. And then we've built a safe scoped delegation framework that enables those agents to actually

• 1:25:39Speaker 06

  use the debit card, use the 65 countries reach of moving money around, use like the multi-chain support for stable coins. And then you can delegate that. And so what I've done with mine, and I've lived with it for the last like, you know, five weeks or so. So I have my GridGlobal account, and then I have an OpenClaw running on a Mac mini at the office, and I connected both. And, and, and so it just takes a scoped debit card, goes buy things online, which is actually more difficult than I thought, you know, starting this, but like, it now works. It, it can message people on WhatsApp that I need to send money to and offer them like, you know, seven or eight different ways to pay them, and I don't have to worry about it. And it really works real time really, really well.

• 1:26:22Speaker 06

  And it's been, it's been so much fun to actually build on OpenClaw and have like a money account that, that, that Lobster could use. It's been, it's been a lot of fun.

• 1:26:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's awesome.

• 1:26:33Jordi Hays?

  Lobster accounts.

• 1:26:34John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the progress.

• 1:26:38Speaker 06

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:26:39Jordi Hays?

  Great, great to get the update. I'm sure we'll, we'll see you back in the next, hopefully in the next one or two quarters.

• 1:26:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Fantastic.

• 1:26:48Speaker 06

  Sounds good.

• 1:26:49John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Have a great weekend. Up next, we have Turner Caldwell from Marina Mariana Materials. Mariana Materials, like the Mariana Trench? We'll get into it with Turner Caldwell, the co-founder and CEO.

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  Help me understand how to pronounce this company's name. I don't want to get it wrong.

• 1:27:06Speaker 07

  Mariana Minerals.

• 1:27:08John Coogan?

  Mariana. Okay, where's the name come from?

• 1:27:11Speaker 07

  Comes from the Mariana's Trench.

• 1:27:13John Coogan?

  Mariana's Trench.

• 1:27:14Speaker 07

  But that's because we're looking at-

• 1:27:15Jordi Hays?

  I may guess they've got some crazy minerals down there. Or do we even-

• 1:27:19Speaker 07

  There are some minerals at the bottom of the ocean. That's right, that we are looking at.

• 1:27:24Jordi Hays?

  So you're saying you yearn for the trenches?

• 1:27:27Speaker 07

  That's right. There you go.

• 1:27:29John Coogan?

  Okay. The business is an autonomous copper mine. Can you take me a layer deeper? Explain the history of the business, the current, uh, current shape of the business, where you're taking it all?

• 1:27:40Speaker 07

  Yeah, sure thing. So we just restarted a copper mine that we acquired at the end of last year with a major focus on autonomy across the entire stack. So that includes, um, the kind of orchestration layers around mining operations as well as autonomous execution, which we'll do with partners. Um, and, and then also autonomy around the refining processes. So the, the site is a mine and a refinery.

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. But in, in, in practice, what does that look like? Like you go into the mine and there's, and there's some like ERP system or maybe just some like manual paper-based workflow? And you're saying like, let's go vibe code a software solution for it? Like-

• 1:28:17Speaker 07

  Yeah, a little bit more than vibe coding. But basically, the way to think about mining is that you have a whole bunch of different disciplines that have to collaborate. It's a big coordination problem. You have geologists, you have a geologic block model. You'll have a mine plan. Uh, you'll usually have multiple mine plans, like a long range, medium range, and short range mine plan. Uh, that has to be transferred to the mine operations teams that are running like large scale, not autonomous, large scale manual mining equipment. Um, then the, uh, like what is actually in the ore usually shows up on a piece of paper to the refinery saying like, get ready to process this. Uh, and then the refiner, the folks who are running the refinery have to figure out like kind of the optimal process conditions to maximize recovery of copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, iron, graphite, kind of the whole thing.

• 1:29:02Speaker 07

  All of the different metals, uh, uh, through the processing circuit. And so what we're doing is we're kind of integrating everything into one, uh, like integrated data frame, uh, first. And so there's a lot of work that goes into, um, kind of bringing all of the data feeds back into one, um, like kind of, uh, aggregated architecture. Um, and then we'll build world, world models. Of the mines, of the refineries that we then use to kind of do a reinforcement learning training that we feed up into a reinforcement learning training pipeline. And then you want to close the loop between what reinforcement learning agents are recommending on the policies that are developed to the actual thing that's happening in the mine. And so we'll bring autonomous haul trucks in, we'll bring autonomous drill rigs in,

• 1:29:45Speaker 07

  we'll bring in autonomous loaders and dozers and graders and water trucks, kind of like all the assets that are being used to run a mine that today, you know, 99% of mines are manned. And we want to go full closed loop between kind of the world models and the reinforcement agents and determining what the autonomous assets actually do. And then actually you map to the refinery.

• 1:30:05Jordi Hays?

  What do you think the potential efficiency gains are from going from legacy copper mine to the kind of end state, you know, fully autonomous system?

• 1:30:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think it'll happen in two phases. I think the first phase is going to double productivity through just like better orchestration and better logistics management and better utilization of all the equipment. That's productivity and unit costs. Diesel is a good example for heavy haul machinery, like half of the diesel consumption, up to half is from like idle time in the pit on the equipment. And so there's a lot of kind of like short-term potential gains, but I also think that autonomy is going to fundamentally change, it's going to unlock a lot of like operating modes that can't really be done with humans. And so the way that the mining industry has kind of driven down cost over an extended period of time has been through scale. So the haul trucks are getting bigger, the shovel is getting bigger, and it's all focused

• 1:31:01Speaker 07

  on kind of reducing your labor intensity. So, you know, maximizing tons of ore, tons of ore moved or tons of material moved per unit of like labor hour. But as you move into like autonomous systems and eventually kind of like design the mines themselves to be autonomous, I think we're going to see things get smaller. And like swarm mining is going to get unlocked and that's fundamentally going to enable you to actually kind of like be more selective in how you mine, your roads get smaller, which means you can maximize kind of recovery of the ore from the pit. So I think it'll all happen in two phases. It's like take the existing architecture, make it autonomous and maximize utilization and availability of equipment. And then there's going to be this like, once autonomy is kind of like fully demonstrated

• 1:31:43Speaker 07

  across the stack, there's going to be this opportunity to actually attack like fundamentally how our mines mine.

• 1:31:48John Coogan?

  You started the company in 2024?

• 1:31:51Speaker 07

  Yep, end of 2024, raised a seed round in August. We're at 220 people now across the company. We have, we have two projects. One is a lithium refinery.

• 1:32:03Speaker 07

  One's a, one's a lithium refinery in, in East Texas that's extracting lithium from oil and gas wastewater and the, and the others are kind of first large scale commercial mine.

• 1:32:12John Coogan?

  Another one. He's got two.

• 1:32:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:32:16John Coogan?

  I have a question.

• 1:32:17Jordi Hays?

  Pitch for you. Robotic canaries. Do they?

• 1:32:22Speaker 07

  Well, we have, we have, we have, we have a Boston Dynamics spot that is basically like mobile sensing system. You know, instead of the canary in the coal mine. And we, and we use them mostly for like undercarriage inspection. So like you want to keep humans away from like heavy haul machinery. The closer they get to it, obviously the more hazards that are present. But also like the chemical refineries, ideally humans aren't walking through your chemical plants all the time, kind of doing thermal inspections. There's a lot of stuff that's like auditory. So you're like listening for sounds of the motors sounding weird.

• 1:32:57Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. And then that all, that all needs to feed back into, into like, again, the integrated, kind of like sensing, integrated like data frame that tells you like how, what's the healthier systems.

• 1:33:09John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, did you start with copper 2024?

• 1:33:13Speaker 07

  We started with lithium in 2020.

• 1:33:16John Coogan?

  Because, because it feels like, it feels like, you know, there's this whole autonomy story, more efficiency, all of that makes sense, but the price of copper has doubled since you started the company. And I feel like that just makes bringing a copper mine back online just wildly different from an economic perspective. And, and it's very interesting that you're sitting at the tailwind of like two AI trends, which are just demand for copper for data center development, wires, circuitry, all this other stuff. And then you can actually be more efficient, but you can be as, you can be as efficient as they were a couple of years ago and just reap twice the price. It, it feels like the oil dynamic, right?

• 1:33:51Speaker 07

  Yeah, that, that's right. But I, I, I don't think, so the reason you want to be diversified is because like all these metals are cyclical and you can't really like live and die by a single commodity. And so the plan was always to diversify and the plan is to continue to diversify into nickel and cobalt and uranium and graphite and rare earths. And, you know, as we, as we kind of work to build 10 projects in the next 10 years. But, you know, we started working on this project kind of like well before copper had its like little explosion and, and run that it's on. Because you don't really want to jump into projects in the middle of the hype. Like, that's when you're going to pay the most for an asset. That's when you're going to, like, the labor pool is most constrained, is like most in demand.

• 1:34:32Speaker 07

  The equipment suppliers that make the equipment that is specific for a specific metal are going to have longer lead times and, and have higher pricing. And so you really do want, like, we jumped into lithium when lithium was like at the bottom of its recent trough and jumped into copper, you know, before it started to go on this run. So the, generally, we want to work on metals that we think have a long-term, like, supply demand imbalance. And for copper, it very, it's like very much felt, like grades are dropping or, or deposits are getting deeper, mineralogy is getting more complex. And it just means it's going to be a lot harder to make copper in the future. And that's, that's what we want to work on.

• 1:35:07Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing before this?

• 1:35:09Speaker 07

  I was at Tesla for about a decade. Most recently was running our minerals and metals team. So I was building our lithium refinery in Corpus Christi in Texas and running a lot of our battery recycling work.

• 1:35:20Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Kind of like the absolutely most perfect background for a company like this. That any, any, a VC couldn't, a VC couldn't dream of a more perfect resume for this business.

• 1:35:31John Coogan?

  What, uh, well, what's all the text in the Gulf behind you for that map?

• 1:35:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what does that say?

• 1:35:36John Coogan?

  I understand that it's a map of America, but what's in the, what's all the text for?

• 1:35:40Speaker 07

  So these are all, um, uh, it's basically calling out like things that don't have space for the words on map.

• 1:35:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:35:48Speaker 07

  So it's just, it's a, it's a legend you got.

• 1:35:51John Coogan?

  Crazy detailed legend.

• 1:35:53Speaker 07

  Yep. Well, our project is right on the border with Louisiana. So that's the, uh, that's why we got in the background on the lithium side.

• 1:35:59John Coogan?

  Well, you're a legend and thank you for coming on the show. Legendary appearance.

• 1:36:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great, great to meet you.

• 1:36:06John Coogan?

  Have a fantastic weekend. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 1:36:13John Coogan?

  We got another guest Everett Taylor. He's the CEO of Kickstarter coming in the Ultra Dome. He's in the waiting room right now. Everett, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:36:25Speaker 08

  I'm good. I'm twenty twenty four right now, so I'm escaping the cold in New York right now. So I'm feeling good.

• 1:36:32John Coogan?

  Amazing. I I'm very excited to talk about the next Wave Fund, but first I'd love to know a little bit about your journey to Kickstarter. Where the business is today, what your day to day is like, how big is this company? Sort of set the set the ground for us.

• 1:36:48Speaker 08

  Yeah. So I mean Kickstarter, you know, started in in two thousand nine. I've been here about four years now. Yeah. And and you know, we're the largest creative crowdfunding company in the world. We still are today. When I came into the company, though, the company was in a bit of decline. We were down twenty percent year over year.

• 1:37:09John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:37:09Speaker 08

  And since then, you know, we've grown dramatically year over year. Last year, we had another record breaking year. This year, we're already up fifty two percent year over year over last year. So the company has been scaling and growing. As we are transitioning just from a crowdfunding company to more of a creator economy company.

• 1:37:27John Coogan?

  How has the AI boom, the gen AI boom benefited or changed Kickstarter projects? When I think about the, you know, catnip of Kickstarter project, it's like a board game that probably took a lot of time to to to build. And if the if the idea is great, I might not care if somebody used an image gen model to speed up the, you know, the graphics for a tree on the back of some playing card. I could see this being a bit.

• 1:37:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not at all. I mean, I'm sure a lot of Kickstarter creators historically were spending a ton of money on renders.

• 1:38:01John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. But at the same time, there's, does this exist at all? Or is this just AI slop? And there's a community dynamic and there's an artist displacement dynamic. And so how have you grappled with the pros and cons of the last two years crazy boom in AI?

• 1:38:16Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's a it's a it's a it's a great question. On the AI side, funny enough, gaming is where it's probably the most controversial, right?

• 1:38:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:25Speaker 08

  Gaming tends to be very artist-forward, right? And so we've gotten probably the most pushback and some of the most negative pushback on the AI side from gaming is they really want to see artists be able to have jobs and do their thing. And so, you know, we were one of the first major tech companies to have our own AI policy. Every Kickstarter creator, if they're using AI, they actually have to say upfront how they're using AI, crediting the artist, if they're using another artist, et cetera, et cetera. But on the design and technology side, these new AI-powered, you know, tech products, especially in the hardware side, it's booming, right? So both categories are growing, but you you see the differences in how people are accepting of AI.

• 1:39:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Talk about the partnership with Google. What's the news?

• 1:39:12Speaker 08

  Yeah, so this week we announced the Next Wave Fund with Google to power the next generation of tech innovation. I'm a, you know, founder myself. I saw the struggles, you know, being an early-stage tech founder, struggling to get funding. And so what we really wanted to do was give early-stage tech startups and small business owners the funding they need, the tools to be successful, the guidance that they need, and also be able to leverage Kickstarter's audience of millions of people to really get their first customers and scale their product. So this fund is focused on innovative products and hardware, software, gaming, and connected technology. And people will get $10,000 upfront, non-dilutive capital from Kickstarter and Google

• 1:39:56Speaker 08

  to launch their products and their companies on Kickstarter. And we wanted to focus on these areas because Kickstarter has just a natural product-market fit for technology and gaming. There are two largest categories, and we also have a a large audience for both.

• 1:40:11Jordi Hays?

  So you're gonna have a huge portfolio.

• 1:40:18Speaker 08

  Well Kickstarter doesn't take Kickstarter doesn't take any equity. I mean I have an Aura ring right now. I wish we did take some equity on that. But uh, but uh, yeah, we don't take any, we don't take any equity. And so this is really uh, as a way to support, support people, give them the tools that they need to be successful. Um, and also build a relationship with Google, right? These people will have an opportunity to uh, to apply to uh, Google Accelerators for their business as it grow and scales. They'll get access to our team that, you know, has decade plus of experience in uh, scaling new products. So it's a great opportunity for a lot of people.

• 1:40:53John Coogan?

  Where can people get started? Uh, take us through the, is there an application process? Where does the, where's the journey start for someone who wants to participate?

• 1:41:03Speaker 08

  Yes. So uh, you can go to our, to our website and, and, and check out the next wave fun. You can apply. This is for entrepreneurs or small businesses with uh, fewer than 20 full-time employees. Um, like I said, your project has to be focused on technology or digital gaming. Um, and uh, unfortunately, uh, we, we've been hearing this and we gotta, we gotta shout out to our international uh, creators, but this uh, this is for the US only. So uh, at least one member of your team has to be a citizen of the US and be 18 years old. So.

• 1:41:34John Coogan?

  Well, lots of opportunities. Uh, and thank you for taking us through it. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us. And great to meet you. And great to meet you. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:41:43Speaker 08

  Cheers Everett.

• 1:41:44John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Uh, there are many more conversations going on in the timeline today. One was kicked off, I think, uh, by Josh Kushner. I think he sort of started this. There were some other people talking about data center beautification. Uh, and he summed it up, uh, perfectly. He says, make data centers aesthetically beautiful. And so people have been quote tweeting, posting, riffing on this, uh, sharing different ideas. More people would be pro data center if every data center had a beautiful open to the public heated pool. That's an interesting twist.

• 1:42:21John Coogan?

  Uh, full water slide. I think, uh, half pipe is a big idea. Monster truck rally constantly going on. These are ways to, you know, win people over, sort of a nitro circus going on.

• 1:42:33Jordi Hays?

  Monster truck rally on the roof of a data center.

• 1:42:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, sort of a universal basic nitro circus. So you get, are you familiar with nitro circus? Are you, are, are, is this a three fingers moment for you? Are you like, ah, I'm familiar?

• 1:42:46Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm just imagining that.

• 1:42:47John Coogan?

  Just say you've never actually been to nitro circus.

• 1:42:50Jordi Hays?

  I'm imagining they're building the like dirt bike ramps over the data center.

• 1:42:54John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:42:54Jordi Hays?

  Backflipping over.

• 1:42:55John Coogan?

  Exactly. Um, uh, Julie Young shares a trick, this one neat trick that Los Angeles uses to hide oil deckers. Uh, we have a few oil derricks in LA that are disguised as synagogues. They are literally just sitting in the middle of the city, lol. Surprisingly few people are aware. There's a number of data centers that are disguised in Los Angeles as well. Usually you can tell because there's no windows in the building, but these exist in downtown, usually for edge computing, for, uh, like the content delivery network, you put store on your Netflix videos there, that type of stuff. Not doing training runs, not gigawatt clusters. I did look up how, how energy intensive, uh, uh, Bitcoin is relative to

• 1:43:40John Coogan?

  what we think of, of AI. I think the numbers are, uh, OpenAI and Anthropic are around two gigawatts in terms of capacity, something like that. You know, we've heard about the Colossus data center, the average meta camp is around half a gigawatt. Zuck's building something in the one gigawatt range. There's gigawatt a week plans, but, uh, if you were to put the Bitcoin network current sort of estimates, using between 120 and 170 terawatt hours per year, what is that in average power in gigawatts? It's between 14 gigawatts and 19 gigawatts. And so that's where you should sort of comp Bitcoin too, if you're putting it in AI terms and, and, and the numbers that we throw around, which are usually like a one.

• 1:44:24Jordi Hays?

  Before our next guest, Palmer Lucky has been getting into it with someone on the timeline. He says. Responds to someone named Clifford by saying dumb tweet, Toto has been fabricating advanced ceramics for semiconductor manufacturing for many years. They make more money from that than toilets. Strong technical moat in a rapidly growing industry. Clifford says, perhaps fair point, but call me dumb under your real name or STFU coward.

• 1:44:52Jordi Hays?

  Just like not realizing that he's talking.

• 1:44:56John Coogan?

  But isn't Cliff Asness like a big deal? I think he's an author. He's of his papers. I've heard of Cliff Asness before.

• 1:45:03Jordi Hays?

  Funny because.

• 1:45:04John Coogan?

  And so it is funny that they just like didn't over. Oh, he's a co-founder of AQR Capital Management. Hedge fund manager. If is this the right person? Forbes estimated net worth of $3 billion.

• 1:45:15Jordi Hays?

  I believe.

• 1:45:16John Coogan?

  I think this is accurate. I think he, he, yeah, global alpha started career in 1990, 20.

• 1:45:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:23John Coogan?

  Worked at Goldman Sachs, AQR.

• 1:45:25Jordi Hays?

  Think he missed the, the like and roll.

• 1:45:28John Coogan?

  He just has seen the SVP, uh, SPVs or something, uh, stable asset management. And other institutions in the aggregate made commitments of several hundred million dollars to a new multi-manager hedge fund. He's published in academics. Uh, he's done a bunch of stuff. I've heard of it. I've heard of him before. So this is very funny.

• 1:45:45Jordi Hays?

  He runs, he runs, he has, he has, he has AQR.

• 1:45:49John Coogan?

  Oh, AQR. Yeah. Interesting. Anyway.

• 1:45:52Jordi Hays?

  Very funny.

• 1:45:53John Coogan?

  I believe we have our next guests in the waiting room. Let's bring them into the TVP and Ultra Dome. Natomi Wonderco, welcome to the show. Uh, would you mind both kicking us off with some introductions on each of you?

• 1:46:07Speaker 09

  Yeah, of course. Hey, Jordy, John, great to see you both. So Justin Wexler, one of the general partners at Wonderco, working closely with Jeffrey Katzenberg.

• 1:46:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:16Speaker 09

  And, uh, and you've met all of us. Yeah. Suje, Chin Li, Jeff, Anthony. So it's been an amazing run. I've been with the firm since, uh, early 2017. Uh, and also on the board of Natomi.

• 1:46:30John Coogan?

  Okay. So yes, please introduce Natomi. Yeah.

• 1:46:34Speaker 10

  Adam, great to see both of you. My name is Poonit. I'm the founder, CEO of Natomi. We are an agentic application tier company focused on the customer experience use case.

• 1:46:46John Coogan?

  Okay, what specifically in customer experience, is that different than customer service? Or are we doing surveys to understand how companies and products are being received? All of the above, what's the shape of the business today?

• 1:47:00Speaker 10

  Yeah, we look at customer experience a little bit differently than how most companies in AI have looked at this. So if you think about it, historically, businesses were designed as a sale, as marketing, as customer service.

• 1:47:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:13Speaker 10

  Because that's how the customer journeys were created and they had to keep those silos to keep cost efficient. But with the agentic, now there's a resource that has become abundant. You could apply it through the journey. That's what we are doing. And also, one of the key factors is if you think about traditional customer service, it looks at customer journey, then it says, we wait for something to break and then fix it after the fact. And then hopefully we regain that trust. We are saying, hey, you can address this upstream. You can address this in digital experiences. You don't even have to wait for the problem to occur. So that's what we are doing and that's why we are excited to partner with Accenture and Adobe in this financing that we just announced and we're going to do this for all the Fortune 500.

• 1:47:55John Coogan?

  Talk about the decision to go with enterprise versus small business. Was it ever on the table to go broad or self-serve? Or is this, is there something unique about the technology where it's actually more suitable for enterprise use cases right now? Or is that just your personal DNA where you flourish?

• 1:48:15Speaker 10

  Actually, all of the above. So my personal DNA, I grew up in automated trading, building event engines for different firms on Wall Street.

• 1:48:24John Coogan?

  You're born in the enterprise. I like it.

• 1:48:26Speaker 10

  Born in the enterprise, exactly. Born in the enterprise, born in low latency systems, born in event correlation, all of those things that just came together for this. But also, we looked at where is money getting spent for this problem? So if you look at customers broadly, human capital spend is about $500 billion. A year about seventy five percent of that comes from the world's largest enterprises, literally under a thousand companies, right? So that's how fragmented the market is. And now with the Tommy's technology, you know, you could run the autonomous front office. So when you do that, not only is that a cost efficiency which more than pays for itself, it really transforms the entire company because you can connect all the systems processes

• 1:49:08Speaker 10

  right in those agentic flows and in that sanctioned architecture presented safely to your customers. Um, so yes, love that medium to high complexity, love the enterprise complexity comes in the DNA. That's what we are the world's best at.

• 1:49:21Speaker 09

  Yeah, and just to add to that, yeah. Um, so at Wonderco, uh, as you all know, we invest in consumer, we invest in different areas of technology. Um, but a big focus for us is enterprise and how enterprise is going to evolve with technology, particularly AI technology. Uh, I'm fortunate that I work with Jeffrey, who has a lot of great relationships across enterprise and um, thinking through how to apply agentic capabilities in these organizations is very top of minds. We invested in Puneet actually before the um, this AI paradigm of, you know, chat GPT and everything that we know today. Um, and so we've been a little early to this, uh, but knew Punish DNA

• 1:50:06Speaker 09

  as uh, these advances became uh, more prominent was really the right leader to build for large enterprises. Uh, and so with Puneet, we sat down with leaders at Delta, United, MetLife, who have all had huge success deploying the Tommy. Uh, a big proud moment for us was when the, yeah, no, it's, it's pretty incredible. Anyone could go on the United mobile app and see powered by Natomi uh, interacts with uh, with Natomi. Uh, and then earlier this year, OpenAI recognized Natomi uh, on one of the case studies, calling it the blueprint for deploying large scale agentic AI. Um, so it just had a lot of great moments um, over the last couple of years. Uh, and that's what inspired Puneet and me to really sit down and think about, okay,

• 1:50:51Speaker 09

  this has been proven at scale, but what's the coalition around? This technology that would really allow it to be in the hands of many, many more millions of consumers. And so that's why this rounds brings together Accenture. No one knows enterprise complexity better than them and their seal of approval on this company is is a huge sign to enterprises that this is what they should be deploying. Yeah, absolutely. And then with Adobe, the idea with Adobe is, you know, many times chat interfaces sit on top of websites. And while it's a step above prior technology, the next generation is going to bring those capabilities into the digital layer itself. So not having the website and then the chat disconnected on

• 1:51:32Speaker 09

  top, but fusing these two layers. And the work that Nitomi and Adobe are doing together, and we can talk a bit more about it, is going to bring about agentic digital experience.

• 1:51:41John Coogan?

  Sure. Tell us about the round. I want to hit the gong. How much came together for this deal?

• 1:51:49Speaker 10

  We raised $110 million.

• 1:51:55Speaker 10

  Awesome.

• 1:51:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, that shook the whole room, John.

• 1:52:01Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah, we are here to shake the room. So yeah, all focused towards enterprise deployment, all focused towards the last mile of AI. You know, we think AI really needs a big enterprise win. That's ROI positive, where large companies can go on their earnings call and say, this is what AI did for me. That's what we want to deliver for the entire community.

• 1:52:22John Coogan?

  I love it. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come break it down for us. Congrats on the round coming together and the progress.

• 1:52:28Jordi Hays?

  At this rate, I'm sure you'll be back on this year.

• 1:52:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're excited. We'll talk to you all soon. Have a great weekend. Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:52:35Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 1:52:35John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Goodbye. We have an update from the chat. Cliff Asness has been on Patrick O'Shaughnessy's Invest Like the Best. You know who else has been on Invest Like the Best? Palmer Lucky. They've both been on the same podcast.

• 1:52:51Jordi Hays?

  Have them back on.

• 1:52:52John Coogan?

  Didn't know about each other. They got to do a crossover episode, back to back. If you're looking to get up to speed on both Palmer and Cliff Asness, head over to Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy. You can listen to both episodes. Although Cliff was on in 2018, almost a decade ago, he's got to go back on, set the record straight on who he knows, who he doesn't know. Anyway, there's, there's more debate over the data center thing.

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  Some very cool renders, some very cool ideas. I think the, the, the problem is that the, the, the plans are delayed, plans are set years in advance. Uh, any, any move to actually make data centers beautiful is going to take a long time. Hopefully, uh,

• 1:53:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this, this feels like one of those things where data center operators would, would say, I would love for my competitors to focus on making their data centers beautiful.

• 1:53:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:42Jordi Hays?

  And really make that a part of their strategy.

• 1:53:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:45Jordi Hays?

  While, uh, while the, the zucks of the world, you know, throw up like REI tents, throwing GPUs.

• 1:53:51John Coogan?

  Exactly. People will do, uh, what, what the minimum viable beautification potentially, but, uh, Dan Lincoln Harris has some comments here. Love that we are having this conversation. The questions that flow from Josh comment, comment are why and what we should aim towards. These should be places of wonder that we can marvel at modern cathedrals for the Silicon Age, not to worship them, but to stoke our aspirations. Square gray boxes do not inspire. Speak for yourself. I like a square gray box every once in a while. Given the epicenter of this technological revolution was California, the light and space movement seems a fitting direction. James Terrell is the, is the most well-known for this movement and he shares some James Terrell, uh, images which are absolutely beautiful.

• 1:54:35John Coogan?

  Good inspiration if you're a data center builder. Um, you can also just throw some trees, do some AI imagery here. Perhaps people wouldn't be so against data centers if they were built in the style of the elf city Rivendell. That'd be kind of cool. Greco-futurism. They do look cooler this way, but it looks a lot more expensive than just some walls. So who knows?

• 1:54:58Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this video.

• 1:55:02John Coogan?

  Progress. What?

• 1:55:03Jordi Hays?

  Just in. Skin exams are getting automated.

• 1:55:06John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:55:07Jordi Hays?

  This is a very cool product.

• 1:55:09John Coogan?

  Okay. Break it down for us. Let's pull it up.

• 1:55:11Jordi Hays?

  We have video here.

• 1:55:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:14Jordi Hays?

  I think anybody that's been to a dermatologist, it's like looking for potential, you know, skin cancers, things like that, abnormalities, has had the experience of like the, you know, the, when you're, you know, that video or the meme where the, the guy's like walking through security and the, and the security guy's just like, you know, does this like really pat down? It's like, that's basically what like a lot of dermatologists are doing where they just like, take a quick glance and they're like, oh yeah, like, looks good.

• 1:55:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, they might be busy, they might be sleepy.

• 1:55:44Jordi Hays?

  Come back in like a couple of years.

• 1:55:46John Coogan?

  But this robot.

• 1:55:46Jordi Hays?

  A robot that just does it like really, really precisely, consistently, ideally, hopefully, hopefully a lot more excessively, I can see this making a lot of sense. And then you actually, it doesn't even replace the job of a doctor. It just helps them speed up the process.

• 1:56:04John Coogan?

  Uh, where is this company? What stage are they? Do they have to go through FDA medical device approval process? That could be a couple of years maybe, but this seems like once you get it through, it's going to be massively successful. I wonder, I wonder where they are in the FDA process. Hopefully they can move along quickly. Um, Arc Prize put out an update on Arc AGI V three, which Tyler, are you still on the human leaderboard for that or?

• 1:56:31Jordi Hays?

  I don't think I'm on the leaderboard anymore. That was still early on. Like I think there's actually more games now.

• 1:56:37John Coogan?

  Roasted. Uh, well, Arc AGI V three has been very tough for even the most frontier AI models, but the good folks over at Arc Prize have benchmarked the two latest and greatest AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic. GPT five point five scored zero point four three percent. Opus four point seven scored zero point one eight percent. It is, it is state of the art. This is the weird thing about these, uh, these Arc AGI tests is that they, they start with such a low baseline, zero percent, one percent. And then they start, they start shooting up as the models get more capable. But it is very interesting and reassuring

• 1:57:19John Coogan?

  to see these powerful models that you sometimes hear these narratives, it can do everything. And then eh, there's something that, you know, to continue working for, to look forward to in the future. There's more, uh, there's more applications here. And so they found three total failure modes. Uh, true local effect, false world model, wrong level of abstraction from training data. Solve the level but didn't reinforce the reward. And so the arc prize account goes through a little bit of what's going on when an AI model tries to play Arc AGI V three, which is basically a 2D video game, uh, simple enough for any human to progress through, but increasingly difficult for AI models.

• 1:57:59Jordi Hays?

  Okay. We gotta talk about one of the most exciting new products created in the last hundred years.

• 1:58:05John Coogan?

  Tell me.

• 1:58:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, according to Katie at Business Insider, uh, Amazon will now create an AI podcast about their products where two AI hosts discuss the products and take your questions as if it's a call in show.

• 1:58:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:58:19Jordi Hays?

  Let's play.

• 1:58:20John Coogan?

  We don't need to play this one. This one is so rude, but you can imagine the type of products that people are generating AI podcasts for. Only the silliest things will be generated. Uh, I don't know if people want to listen to a full podcast about every product they buy on Amazon, but you have had some very strong opinions about, uh, paper towels. You wanted paper towels from like the 1950s or something. Remember this whole thing?

• 1:58:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, I, I just wanted a filter to be able to buy, only shop for things on Amazon.

• 1:58:50John Coogan?

  Now, instead of a filter, you can listen to an hour long podcast about every possible SKU. And then you can make the most determined, uh, decision available. Well, we have Alex from OpenAI. He's a member of product staff here to talk about Codex and GPT 5.5. I believe he's in the waiting room. So let's bring him to the TV pin. Alex, how are you doing?

• 1:59:10Jordi Hays?

  Hey, doing great. How are you guys?

• 1:59:11John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastically.

• 1:59:13Jordi Hays?

  Close to the camera. You make me wanna, you make me wanna scoot up.

• 1:59:16John Coogan?

  Some people come on and it's standoffish.

• 1:59:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, you're locked in. You're locked in.

• 1:59:21John Coogan?

  Okay. So, uh, give us some updates, uh, on Codex. I mean, we've seen some crazy numbers, things that seem like they're going well. But what I'm most interested in is, uh, applications, usages, just as I'm talking to friends and folks that are, you know, outside of the most intimate tech community, uh, what are the magical experiences? What are the prompts, the usages that are seeing adoption? How should people even be thinking about Codex and ChatGPT these days?

• 1:59:53Alexander Embiricos?

  Totally. I mean, it is such an exciting time. I feel like last year was the explosion of agents for coding. Yeah. You know, now we bring it to everyone else. Codex now is becoming this like amazing tool for just like general work or honestly, anything you can do on your computer. Yeah. So the model launch, was it, was that only last week? I think it was last week. I think it's really fast.

• 2:00:12Jordi Hays?

  It really feels like a month ago.

• 2:00:14Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah. Yeah, honestly, I lose track of time, but like, you know, API revenue for that model is growing 2X faster than any prior release. Like Codex revenue actually doubled in the last week. So, so it's just like the growth is insane. Yeah. And what's cool is that obviously the growth in usage and the way people are using Codex for coding is, is just like getting way better. But I think this is kind of what you're asking for. There have been, we're, we're making Codex great for everyone. That's all the way from like what the agent can do and also just like how simple it is to use. Yeah. And so now we have, you know, Codex being used by like salespeople, marketing people, finance people, data science people, whatever you have, whatever you're thinking. Yeah. It's like 85% of the company uses Codex and we're seeing this happen outside as well. So yeah, I'm happy to jump into some fun use cases if you want.

• 2:00:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I wanted to ask about like how you feel the, the perception around computer use has been like, it felt like there were so many things that, that got released at one time that, that kind of was quite magical and you see some posts popping up here and there, but do you feel like that's getting the attention that it, that it deserves now?

• 2:01:17Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah. I mean, like so broadly, what we have is we have this amazing, amazing agent that can write code. And if we wanted to do more work than just coding work, it needs to be able to do anything you can do on your computer. And so computer use is this big step because it's like, hey, well now it basically can do anything you can do on your computer. But the magical part of computer use and that the team really cooked here is that it can use applications in the background. Um, so you could be doing something in one app and the agent can be doing something in the, in another app. And that's important because it means you can actually delegate, which means you can give the agent hard tasks that take us some time to do. So yeah, I mean, the reception around that was actually awesome. I, I thought we got, people noticed sort of just how hard and magical that is. Uh, more so than I even expected. So yeah, we've been really happy with that.

• 2:01:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I I've noticed that Codex puppeteering a mouse cursor has gotten good. It feels like it crossed some sort of like Turing test where when I see a video of Codex moving a mouse around, it doesn't read to me like, oh, that's a jittery, like the AI is using it. It just looks like, oh, somebody just recorded themselves moving the mouse. Is there a benchmark? Is that is that something that just comes from the new model or work that's being done on Codex? Like, what is going on with the progress there?

• 2:02:28Jordi Hays?

  To the Sky team acquisition.

• 2:02:30Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah. Yeah, so there's kind of like three things going on there. Like, first of all, G P T five point five is our best model ever for like general work or knowledge work.

• 2:02:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:38Alexander Embiricos?

  And so it's really good at using computers. Um, the next thing is, well, what harness do you give the model? Or like, what information is the model seeing? And like, what tools does it have to use the computer? Um, a lot of early versions of giving a model access to a computer, we're just giving it screenshots of the computer. Uh, but there's a lot of secret sauce in our implementation, where the model actually gets text representations of what's on screen from like frameworks like accessibility.

• 2:03:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:03:02Alexander Embiricos?

  Uh, and so the model is like much more efficient when it has access to all this information. Um, and then the last bit that I I honestly think, well, I don't know if I would say it's underappreciated because I feel like people really appreciated it. But it's the level of craft that was put in to how it feels when the agent is using the computer. So for instance, you could totally just have the agent like click around on your screen and just have that be invisible. And and, you know, you wouldn't even, it just like, the computer is updating as clicks happen. But the team put a ton of care into like exactly the animation that this like mouse cursor takes as it goes between the different click positions. And, yeah, I was, it was really fun, uh, to talk about that and jam on that with them. Like, we actually made some interesting trade offs.

• 2:03:44Alexander Embiricos?

  Like, having this animation actually slows down how quickly the agent can work by just a tiny bit. But it means that it's so much easier as a human for me to understand the system and therefore to trust the system.

• 2:03:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's interesting. That sort of goes back to, I remember the the initial ChatGPT app launch on iOS had haptic feedback as the token streamed in. And so it felt like it was typing and that could have easily just been generate the full response, give you a little waiting wheel and then boom, it loads like a webpage. Like when I go to, you know, the New York Times, like the whole page loads, it doesn't stream in. But that streaming made it feel more like a conversation, those little like UX cues help like create this more like interactive motion back and forth. That's very interesting.

• 2:04:36Jordi Hays?

  Someone's trying Codex for the first time. What are, you've got one minute to explain the three things that they should do to get the most out of it. What do you tell them?

• 2:04:46Alexander Embiricos?

  Okay, cool. Is this person an engineer or are they like a knowledge worker?

• 2:04:49John Coogan?

  Let's say non-engineer, because I feel like-

• 2:04:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, let's do, let's do both.

• 2:04:52John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah, let's start with engineer.

• 2:04:55Alexander Embiricos?

  Okay, start with engineer. If someone's using Codex for the first time, I just say, download Codex, you know, attach, connect it to your project, whatever you've been working on. And then ask it a question about your code base, like a hard architecture question. And it's just going to give you an amazing answer. Then the next thing you do is you say, cool, like give it a bug that you've been trying to track down.

• 2:05:16Alexander Embiricos?

  And ask it to solve the bug. And like I hear this all the time, like on Twitter, etc. Like people will be like, hey, I was trying to solve this bug myself, couldn't do it. I gave it to like all the other coding agents, they couldn't do it, but Codex could do it. And then maybe as a final thing to like experience a little bit of the magic that is shipped in the last week or two. If you're working on like something that's like, has a web view, like maybe a website or something like that. Ask Codex to make a change and then like, watch it just like iterate on that change by opening the in-app browser. And sort of observing its outputs, clicking around and then like naturally just like fix and improve the changes it made. It's like, it's super magical because you just realize, when you see it like work in that loop, you just realize how powerful it is now.

• 2:05:54John Coogan?

  Okay, speaking of loops, explain Ralph loop, explain slash goal.

• 2:06:00Alexander Embiricos?

  Okay, so basically, we've had this interesting thing for a long time where people, this is like months ago, people would tell us that they- Knew the codecs are super powerful, but it felt annoying to work with because they had to like constantly tell the agent, you can do this, keep going, right? So you have this like brilliant model, but you have to like encourage it constantly.

• 2:06:22Alexander Embiricos?

  We then shipped a feature called queuing, which you can use to give the agent a message that it will like receive whenever it thinks it's done. And people use that to say, do this, then do that, then do that. But actually, a lot of people started using that to just say, keep going. So like they would just queue like 10 messages like keep going, keep going. Yeah, exactly. And so, you know, now at this point, we have these amazing models that if you know how to use in the right way, you can have them do hours of work or even days of work, just like independently, autonomously.

• 2:06:51Alexander Embiricos?

  However, you know, the average person doesn't necessarily know how to do that. You have to do like all this contrived harness setup. And so with goal, uh, which is a feature that we shipped into the, into the command line interface and we'll come to the app soon. We wanted to make that super easy. So now you could basically describe to like, hey, like, I want you to keep going and until you achieve this goal. And then codecs will just take care of working for however long you need until you can do that. And so internally, this is something that people have been really excited for, for a long time. When we do a lot of like long running work. So for example, when you're like babysitting, like a training run for a model, you don't want to just like tell codecs to do something and then have it return in five minutes. You actually want it to pay attention like all night. So that's what, that's what goal is. Do you want, yeah, go ahead.

• 2:07:34John Coogan?

  I was wondering about the, like, what is, for, for the non-engineer use case? The thing that gets you to move from ChatGPT to Codex, like the first, the first, the first like more complicated query, more complicated project that you would recommend someone say, oh yeah, like ChatGPT can do a decent amount of research, but for this, you should spin up Codex and, and, and start working with that as your primary workflow. Like, what is the entry point? What is the, the appetizer into the Codex workflow?

• 2:08:14John Coogan?

  For someone who's non-technical, not writing code, wouldn't mind if code was written behind the scenes, but really just is interacting with typical knowledge work suites. So email, spreadsheets, Word docs, generating graphics, research. There's a lot of stuff and ChatGPT satisfies a ton of that. And so when are they jumping over to Codex?

• 2:08:37Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah, so I kind of think about the way that you can do general work when Codex. There's maybe three categories of work. There's like just very easy tasks. And that's not to dismiss those. Actually, most of my usage of Codex is like easy tasks. And those are the first things you try. Then there's like hard tasks that are like really cool demos. But actually, if you start trying to do a hard demo, you might you might just like waste a lot of time. And then there's automating. So everyone should kind of go through this progression. It's like easy, hard, automated. And if you think about it, it's kind of like a human teammate, right? Like if you hire someone onto your team. You know, you don't usually, well, maybe at OpenAI we do, but you don't just say like, hey, just like figure out what you want to do. Maybe what you do is you say like, hey, like, why don't you do this like small starter task or something? And then from there, give them a harder and harder task. And then eventually you say, okay, just like go figure it out and work automatically.

• 2:09:20Alexander Embiricos?

  So, okay, easy tasks. The thing I always recommend people do is like wherever your company works at OpenAI, that's Slack, maybe for you, it's Teams or it's email. Connect Codex to that tool and then just ask it like, hey, like, am I missing any urgent? Like, do I need to reply to anything urgently? Just like draft some answers for me. Or maybe like I get tagged on these really long threads all the time. It's like, hey, just summarize this thread. What am I supposed? What am I being asked? What should I? What should I answer? You're just asking these like these questions. Or maybe someone mentioned something you don't know what it is. And you're just like, hey, like, search all my company information and tell me what is XYZ, you know, the thing. So those are really basic, easy queries that Codex is amazing at. And I have found that even though those may not sound that hard,

• 2:10:02Alexander Embiricos?

  people just get hooked on doing that all the time. And then from there, once you're hooked, then you kind of become fluent in using this tool to answer any even small question, use it for harder things. So for example, one of the use cases that I do a lot that tends to like really get other people excited when they see it is I, you know, we, we don't like meetings, try to keep meeting attendees to a minimum here. So often, instead of adding people to a meeting, I'll post in a channel and say, if anyone wants to talk live about this, just reply. And this is something I used to do from before. But now what I do is I tell Codex, post in this channel, see who wants to join and add anyone who wants to join to the meeting. Sure. Super basic thing, right? Yeah. But the fact that you can ask an agent to do a thing and then monitor that post and then like just keep it up to date. Sure.

• 2:10:47Alexander Embiricos?

  Is actually really powerful. And then when people reply to the post and then the agent replies back saying like, cool, you're in the meeting. It's at this time. Here's the link. That always mind blows people. And then you start, people start trolling, you know, people like add Sam to the meeting. The agent knows not to.

• 2:11:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, cuz that's just like functionally what, what, uh, if you're lucky enough to have an EA, you get something like that where it's like, hey, I need to get this thing done. I'm gonna kinda set it, I'm gonna, I, I wanna set off the process, but then someone else monitoring it, kinda backfilling it.

• 2:11:19Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah, I think any, any work that requires like a lot of work, like a lot of time from you, but is not hard, those are good starter tasks. Um, you know, same for like managing tasks, you know, tracking issues coming out of a bug bash or like pre-launch, we do this thing where, um, I'll have Codex monitor all, a bunch of channels I'm in, uh, with internal and external users, and I'll just say, hey, if anything comes up, put this in, in linear, which is where we track our bugs and like make sure it's deduplicated. Um, and then let people know that we're tracking the bug. Um, so, you know, very, very simple task, but actually incredibly useful time-wise. Uh, last thing I'll say on this is we have, uh, executive assistant, kind of like plugin internally that I would love to ship externally, we should get on that.

• 2:12:05Alexander Embiricos?

  And it's really taken off internally, like people basically have this thing, uh, that is like keeping track of all their information and just like helping them organize their day and like stay on top of things. It's, it's pretty cool.

• 2:12:14John Coogan?

  So then, yeah, talk to me about automation because I, I, I understand from integrations and computer use, how a single prompt could go into Slack or go into your email or pull some documents together, write code, do whatever it needs to on the internet APIs. I understand all that, but then, uh, what is the workflow to get Codex to do something every morning at 7:00 AM to prepare me a digest or take the same actions to really get rid of that rote work that I've, I've demoed and I've seen the results, it's working, and now I just don't wanna think about it ever again forever.

• 2:12:50Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah, I mean, it's it's honestly super simple. You just tell Codex, hey, do this every morning. Right? Well, like in my case.

• 2:12:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, that's kind of an interesting thing with these kind of products that have effectively unlimited potential is like, where's the line between like a feature and just a prompt? And when when should as a company, when should you just launch something and make a big moment out of it? Or when should you just let people? Just understand the full potential of it. And then when they want something, they can just ask it, right? They don't need to like, request a feature. It's just like, literally just request it.

• 2:13:25Alexander Embiricos?

  Totally.

• 2:13:25Jordi Hays?

  With the agent.

• 2:13:27Alexander Embiricos?

  It's really interesting as we design the product, like, I like to think that we need to keep sort of all the rules and like sort of the heavy UI and stuff around the agent to a minimum, because it kind of constrains how much better the product can get when we have a smarter model. So the more things we can kind of like, let the model decide, you know, it's like it's AI soon, AGI, the better. And then sometimes you just need UI so that people can learn that this thing exists. But even that, the model can suggest things. So I'll give you the most powerful, I think, example of a use case I heard recently was this person on the growth team needs to figure out like what experiments to run, and they need to write code to run the experiment, and they need to analyze the experiment.

• 2:14:07Alexander Embiricos?

  And it turns out they were using, they started using Codex individually for each separate thing. So they would have it like, run a bunch of analyses and they would sort of interrogate the data, you know, they would just talk to Codex about the data. And then they would pick an experiment and then they would like write, ask Codex to write the code. Then they would run the experiment and then they would ask Codex what the results of the experiment were, and then they would like produce a deck. Right? So all steps they were doing individually and they they didn't start by saying, I'm going to automate this entire thing because that's like hard and scary, right? They just started with using Codex like to accelerate themselves, individual productivity for each task. Then they started basically.

• 2:14:41Alexander Embiricos?

  Connecting all these things together into a giant skill. And then one day, they just said, hey, why don't you do this every morning? And they gave it a name. It's called Lord Bottleneck because it's like solving the bottlenecks of friction for new users. And basically, this is the thing the team does now. Every morning, Lord Bottleneck evaluates past experiments, looks at data, looks at new things, proposes some experiments, and offers to the team like, hey, like, let's run these experiments. The team like picks like, let's do this one or that one. Then Lord Bottleneck is like, okay, cool. Here's some code or whatever config that needs to be done, runs the experiment. And at the end, they like, they go and do the same loop the next day and analyze the results. And so that's actually like really serious value in automation. That's like, I forget the numbers, but it's produced like, you know, significant company value, uh, just automatically through Codex.

• 2:15:25John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about game development? It feels like all of these tools are super useful and could really accelerate game development.

• 2:15:35Jordi Hays?

  Especially with images too.

• 2:15:37John Coogan?

  Totally. Uh, I think there was a time when like everyone had an idea for a meme, but not everyone knew Photoshop. Now everyone can go and use images and chat GPT to sort of make the exact meme that they want very quickly, very easily. And there's this takeoff in like, everyone can create the thing. Now everyone can vibe code a Python script pretty easily. And it feels like the next thing is like going and shipping something. And we're starting to see these like simulators and these little one-off like web games. Uh, it's still a little bit like prosumer, I would say, but is this something that you think just, uh, is like a natural outgrowth?

• 2:16:14John Coogan?

  Or something where, uh, you might actually spend some cycles thinking about that as a particular like workflow?

• 2:16:24Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah. I mean, I think I'm really just excited about how easy it's becoming for everyone to bring their ideas to life. Image Gen, you, you bring up Image Gen. That was actually a really big deal in a way that I still think people don't really realize like having an agent able to just generate images as it's working is massive. I mean, image in itself is actually really popular and is great even outside of Codex. Like I think, um, let me see here. Yeah, like. I think we are like, people are making like 50% more images with ImageGen 2, just like a few weeks after launch than they were before. So it's like, we're really taking off. And it was already popular. But then with ImageGen, we see all these cool use cases where people will have the agent, let's say, we'll take a development and a non-development use case. For development, they'll have it like, build a bunch of sprites.

• 2:17:07Alexander Embiricos?

  Sprites is like a term for like, the image that you use in your game.

• 2:17:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:12Alexander Embiricos?

  So for, so like, one cool example of this is like, in the GPT 5.4 blog, we have some example prompts to try. And one of them is like, I forget, it's like, um, build like an art, uh, roller coaster simulator or arcade simulator or something. And you can just copy paste that prompt into Codex now, and it's just like, even better, because Codex will like, create all the assets for the game using ImageGen, and then like, build a game using it, and then play the game for you to test it in the in-app browser. So, yes, this is happening very naturally, and I suspect it would be quite interesting to lean into it to make it even better.

• 2:17:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:44Alexander Embiricos?

  A cool like, non, um, non-coding use cases, we're seeing people use ImageGen to create slides, or like, slide templates, or assets to go on slides, and then produce the slide deck, which again, you can iterate on just inside the Codex app. So, yeah, images are massive for us.

• 2:18:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes tons of sense. Jordi, anything else?

• 2:18:03Jordi Hays?

  This is great. Appreciate the update. Uh, I'm sure there will be

• 2:18:09John Coogan?

  Many more?

• 2:18:09Jordi Hays?

  A ton more news by this time next week.

• 2:18:12Alexander Embiricos?

  Yeah, we're joking about like, how many Thursdays can we ship in a row, you know, like?

• 2:18:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, the more, the more you ship, the easier it is to ship, so it's a, it's a good feedback loop.

• 2:18:23John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Uh, thank you so much for taking the time.

• 2:18:26Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, dude.

• 2:18:26John Coogan?

  Great to see you. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good weekend. Goodbye. Uh, should we show everyone the game that we made? Should we show everyone TDPN simulator? Do we have that pulled up? Can we play that? Would now be a good time? It's a late Friday.

• 2:18:39Jordi Hays?

  We might not have enough time.

• 2:18:42John Coogan?

  We can have them pull it up while we, while we read through the.

• 2:18:45Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this packaging of the Neo robot over at 1X.

• 2:18:51John Coogan?

  The Neo robot over at 1X?

• 2:18:53Jordi Hays?

  Have you seen this?

• 2:18:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, I did see this.

• 2:18:54Jordi Hays?

  They got a suitcase.

• 2:18:55John Coogan?

  They got a suitcase that is remarkable. Let's pull this up.

• 2:19:01Jordi Hays?

  This packaging is so cool.

• 2:19:03John Coogan?

  This aesthetic, this warm tone, it's welcoming.

• 2:19:07Jordi Hays?

  I gotta say, it's really cool until it's 2 a.m. and you hear shaking in your house and you go and you turn on the lights and this little like, you know, suitcase thing is shaking and then Neo pops out and goes Terminator mode. I wouldn't know what that, what that actually is like, but I'm gonna watch Terminator this weekend and report back.

• 2:19:28John Coogan?

  Ridiculous. Wow. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta collectively are spending more money than the Manhattan Project every single month. That's insane. Wow. Wild. Anyway, in the mansion section, there is a record-breaking home in Los Angeles with a question. Will a Los Angeles area mega mansion become America's most expensive residential property? $400 million, they're asking. 70,000 square feet. The guest house is 30,000 square feet. It's absolutely insane. 39 bedrooms, 8 acres, 3 pools. It has an x-ray machine. This is in the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal. Fascinating because Tyler was unimpressed and I was wondering

• 2:20:13John Coogan?

  like, what could possibly be better than a $400 million mega mansion in Los Angeles? But you found something. What, what absolutely-

• 2:20:22Speaker 03

  I was comparing it to, you know, some kind of palatial manor, right?

• 2:20:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:20:26Speaker 03

  So clearly it's like Versailles. Versailles is, you know, 10x bigger. It's like 700,000 square-

• 2:20:31John Coogan?

  700,000 square feet.

• 2:20:32Speaker 03

  That's just the indoor space. Obviously with the gardens, it's like millions of square footage.

• 2:20:35John Coogan?

  Millions of square footage.

• 2:20:36Speaker 03

  You're kind of just getting brutally mogged.

• 2:20:38John Coogan?

  What about on bedrooms? This one has 39. You certainly can't go higher than 39 bedrooms.

• 2:20:43Speaker 03

  I think it would, yeah, 2,300.

• 2:20:44John Coogan?

  2,300.

• 2:20:46Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no. That was just rooms, actually.

• 2:20:47John Coogan?

  Those rooms, okay, okay. So not all bedrooms. But, I mean, if you need a buddy who crashes, like, they can crash in any room, right? Like, you know, have you ever slept in a kitchen? You've never had, we don't have any room.

• 2:20:59Jordi Hays?

  I've never slept in a kitchen.

• 2:21:01John Coogan?

  You gotta sleep in the living room. You gotta sleep in the dining room.

• 2:21:03Jordi Hays?

  Lucky. Alright, let's pull up the trailer for TBPN Simulator.

• 2:21:06John Coogan?

  Oh, we have a trailer?

• 2:21:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, we got the trailer.

• 2:21:08John Coogan?

  Oh, let's go. Let's watch this.

• 2:21:10Jordi Hays?

  I think TBPN needs a game.

• 2:21:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, we definitely need to build some sort of game.

• 2:21:19John Coogan?

  This, this project has evolved so, so much to the point where you can move the goalposts. I don't know that you can interact with the horse. You can definitely hit the gong. And then any team member is now playable. Okay, oh wait, so there is a mechanic. You have to gain the most subscribers.

• 2:21:38John Coogan?

  Interesting, yes. You have to... Puzzle piece, everything. You can watch the stream in the game. You can explore the UltraDome. It's a full replication. tbpn simulator.com. V2.

• 2:21:54Speaker 12

  What's that sloppy?

• 2:21:56John Coogan?

  That was image gen 1. Image gen 2 would never do that. But can we pull the actual game up? Hope so.

• 2:22:03Speaker 12

  Yeah, here it comes.

• 2:22:04John Coogan?

  Didn't pop up. Um, if we can pull up the actual, the actual game. Uh, let's, uh, let's see. There's a whole bunch of good stuff on here. Okay, so this is TBPN Simulator, the latest and greatest version. A remarkable... How, Ben, how did you actually get this? Like the geometry in here, was this all described via prompt?

• 2:22:26Speaker 12

  We've got intern Ben here to talk. Yeah, so basically the whole process is kinda like, I'm like, okay, look at that wall right there.

• 2:22:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:33Speaker 12

  I need that to be taller.

• 2:22:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:22:35Speaker 12

  I need to place a desk right at that wall. So the whole idea is that I labeled every single object. So I was able to like talk about it.

• 2:22:41John Coogan?

  Is there someone else in the game?

• 2:22:43Speaker 12

  Wait, it's multiplayer?

• 2:22:44John Coogan?

  It's multiplayer, right, so we're getting other people in the game right now? Oh no, people are coming in! There's Mark! tbpn simulator.com! I can't believe it's multiplayer! I can't believe you created a multiplayer game. Okay, so we got the bathroom. Okay, this is incredibly... No, no, no, no. Get out of there, get out of there. Okay, so, uh, there's a chessboard, which was gifted to us.

• 2:23:07Speaker 12

  Ring the gong.

• 2:23:08John Coogan?

  You can ring the gong.

• 2:23:09Speaker 12

  To the actual studio.

• 2:23:10John Coogan?

  Okay, oh, gong cooldown! And then the, those are the, the, the photos that we take. And there's the UltraDome.

• 2:23:18Speaker 12

  It's a one-to-one LiDAR-scanned measurement studio.

• 2:23:21John Coogan?

  Did you, wait, did you actually LiDAR-scan?

• 2:23:22Speaker 12

  I LiDAR-scaned it.

• 2:23:23John Coogan?

  Wait, no. Okay.

• 2:23:25Speaker 12

  Yeah, the measurements, and you could play as any character, so yeah.

• 2:23:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay, so what, yeah, what does it take to, to make it in TBPN Simulator?

• 2:23:31Speaker 12

  Camera cut.

• 2:23:33John Coogan?

  Okay, so you're watching the show and you need to cut between, oh, so you get a current cue and you have to cut between different cues on, at the right time to produce the show live. Okay, we have Tyler, we have Mark in TVPN Simulator, okay. What else can you do here?

• 2:23:53Alexander Embiricos?

  How much activity, like 35%?

• 2:23:55John Coogan?

  Is this from yesterday? Oh, this is yesterday's show is playing currently, okay.

• 2:23:59Alexander Embiricos?

  So they're using the wallet.

• 2:24:00John Coogan?

  And if you're Jordy, you play as, you have to do a mini game, which is Guitar Hero but with soundboard, basically, is that the game? Let's hear it. Overnight success.

• 2:24:16John Coogan?

  So you have to, you have to hit the soundboard at the right time as the blocks come down, okay?

• 2:24:22Alexander Embiricos?

  Things like?

• 2:24:23John Coogan?

  I think I was doing some ad reads for a while, there's a gong, of course, we're really hacking the doldrum. We'll see if this thing has high throughput networking. You can play as the guest, what do you play as the guest? You just see what it's like to be a guest on TVPN? Okay. You get, someone's moving the goalposts, okay, we got a new definition for artificial general intelligence.

• 2:24:45Jordi Hays?

  I didn't realize that.

• 2:24:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, the chat has joined the game. Oh yeah, someone says make it a Roblox game. This does have some Roblox aesthetics, but this is not, this is vibe coded. And so this is creating the daily newsletter. You have to stack the different blocks, the strips, it says, "perfect alignment, published clean." That's Brandon Gurrell's job. Nick has to, of course, fix the schedule, get everyone to come together. We're watching some Tetris.

• 2:25:15Jordi Hays?

  Calendar Tetris.

• 2:25:16John Coogan?

  You're trying to calendar Tetris. How are you gonna get Patrick Collison and Brian Chesky on the show with Alex Karp and Mark Benioff all at the same time? How will you do that?

• 2:25:26Jordi Hays?

  Paul Coogan.

• 2:25:28John Coogan?

  There we go. And then this is, uh, this is Tyler organizing the show, figuring out how to get different posts into the show, okay? Oh, there you go, you're moving the different, oh, you're jammed up there, you're jammed up there, you gotta keep working on that. What else is this? What is Jackson up to, making cards? What are we doing here? What? Oh, whack a clip. Okay, the timeline sniper. There's breaking news. You gotta turn, you ramble, you don't want to cut that. Okay. You want to, you want to hit the good hot takes at the right time. That is fantastic. I cannot believe the number of mini-games here. This is insane. What a remarkable... Oh, this is me. Okay.

• 2:26:09John Coogan?

  So I have to read different phrases. It's a, it's a typing game. Because I have to read without a teleprompter. Live from the TBPN UltraDome. Uh-oh, someone's typing incorrectly. Phrase deck, okay. Well, we got a whole bunch of people. You can go enjoy it. Hopefully, people are playing TBPN Simulator all weekend long.

• 2:26:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, I expect people to put up...

• 2:26:33John Coogan?

  I mean, if you're launching a TBPN-type show, this is a great way to get your reps in. Get some practice in before you go live.

• 2:26:41Jordi Hays?

  Until we get our mastermind.

• 2:26:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is, it is the path to financial freedom for a lot of folks, so we recommend it, we endorse it. Uh, get your reps in on tbpn simulator.com, and we will see you on Monday. Anything else, Jordy?

• 2:26:55Jordi Hays?

  Is it actually live?

• 2:26:57John Coogan?

  I think it's live, yeah. Oh, yeah, people are in there. They're playing.

• 2:27:00Jordi Hays?

  We gotta, we gotta change, we gotta change the, the slop, uh, images.

• 2:27:05John Coogan?

  Okay, we'll work on this.

• 2:27:06Jordi Hays?

  But incredibly well done, Ben.

• 2:27:09John Coogan?

  Our first video game shipped.

• 2:27:12Jordi Hays?

  Truly hilarious, and...

• 2:27:14John Coogan?

  People are asking for a wave pool.

• 2:27:16Jordi Hays?

  That's true. We do need a wave pool.

• 2:27:18John Coogan?

  We don't have a wave pool in here. That's not a simulation.

• 2:27:21Jordi Hays?

  But we, if, if we make it in the simulator, it's probably increases the likelihood.

• 2:27:25John Coogan?

  I think, I think the key is you have to be able to sit down on one of those laptops and play an even rougher version of TBPN Simulator two layers deep.

• 2:27:35Jordi Hays?

  That's how you simulate Ben.

• 2:27:36John Coogan?

  That, you know, no, no, yeah, yeah. When you simulate Ben, it should go into a 2D version, top-down, low, even lower res graphics, pixel art.

• 2:27:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:27:44John Coogan?

  A pixel art version of TBPN Simulator, two layers deep. And we can see how, how, how deep, how deep the rabbit hole goes. But will you break out of the matrix? We certainly hope you do this weekend. Go enjoy your weekend, enjoy your Friday. We will see you on Monday. Goodbye.

• 2:28:04Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 2:28:05John Coogan?

  Flashbang!