Meta Releases Muse 1.1, GPT-5.6 Sol Reactions, New Robot Hand Alert | Eric Seufert, Bernt Børnich, Josh Lindgren, Jeffrey Morgan, Thibault Sottiaux, Sean Frank

(00:52) - Meta Releases Muse 1.1 (02:01) - GPT-5.6 Sol Reactions (14:49) - Meta Prices AI to Win (29:24) - Eric Seufert, a prominent analyst and founder of Mobile Dev Memo, discusses Meta's strategic use of AI in advertising to enhance ad performance and address investor skepticism. He emphasizes the importance of Meta's proprietary data in training AI models to create ads that are uniquely effective, thereby demonstrating the tangible benefits of their AI investments. Seufert also highlights the potential for AI-generated creative to alleviate bottlenecks in ad production, ultimately driving significant revenue growth for Meta. (55:53) - Bernt Øivind Børnich, founder and CEO of 1X Technologies, has led the company since its inception in 2014, focusing on developing humanoid robots like NEO for consumer use. In the conversation, he discusses the launch of NEO, emphasizing its advanced, human-like hand design achieved through in-house development of miniaturized motors and tendons, and highlights the importance of creating robots that safely and effectively interact with the world to enhance AI capabilities. He also touches on the company's commitment to vertical integration, enabling rapid iteration and production scaling, and expresses excitement about the imminent shipping of NEO to consumers. (01:08:39) - Josh Lindgren, Head of the Podcast Department at Creative Artists Agency (CAA), began his career as a music agent before transitioning to podcast representation in 2014. In the conversation, he discusses the exponential growth of the podcast industry, the increasing integration of video into podcasting, and the evolving definitions of media formats. He also highlights the importance of creators having a clear purpose for their podcasts and the potential benefits of live shows in strengthening audience relationships. (01:29:05) - Jeffrey Morgan, CEO and co-founder of Ollama, discusses how their open-source platform enables developers to run large language models locally, facilitating rapid adoption among Fortune 500 companies due to enhanced security and compliance. He highlights the $65 million Series B funding led by Tamash Tungas, emphasizing plans to expand the team and invest in secure, US- and Europe-based hosting solutions. Morgan also addresses the evolving landscape of open-source models, noting the narrowing gap between open and frontier models, and the importance of providing developers with the right tools to deploy and manage these models effectively. (01:39:32) - Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI's Head of Core Products and Platform, discusses the recent launch of ChatGPT Work, highlighting its enhanced capabilities in coding, cybersecurity, and long-context understanding. He emphasizes the model's improved efficiency and its ability to comprehend human intent with shorter prompts, making it more accessible to users without technical expertise. Sottiaux also notes the development of multi-agent setups, introduced as Ultra mode, where multiple agents collaborate to complete tasks more efficiently. (01:54:03) - Sean Frank is the CEO of Ridge Wallet, a company specializing in minimalist wallets and accessories. In the conversation, he discusses Ridge's expansion into products like travel gear and men's wedding rings, the impact of AI on advertising and inventory management, and the evolving landscape of e-commerce, including the challenges faced by luxury brands and the rise of platforms like TikTok Shop. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/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 and today's Thursday, July 9th, 2026. We are live from TVP and Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital, capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. I need some soundboard. Here we go. Yes. Today on TVP and we're talking about model mayhem. Everyone's launching new models. Slow summer, but not for the AI race. You got XAI unveiling Grok 4.5, the first model built specifically for coding and AI agents developed in collaboration with Cursor. Talked about it a little bit yesterday, but we have some more benchmarks, some more discussion on

• 0:42John Coogan?

  the timeline about where this model fits in on the Pareto Frontier. Also, why it might be outperforming so well on Cursor Bench. Lots of debates there. Meta announced Muse Spark, a new agentic coding model with Mark Zuckerberg returning to X for the first time in basically a decade. Three years ago, he posted one joke post about launching threads, but he has not been an active user, but the AI vortex sucked him in and he's got a post.

• 1:10Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I think he's an active user, John.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 1:13Jordi Hays?

  He's just not an active poster.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  He's just not an active.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  He's not an active contributor.

• 1:16John Coogan?

  You're calling him a lurker.

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  I'm calling him a lurker.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  You're calling him a lurker?

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  I'm calling him a lurker. I think he's absolutely glued.

• 1:22John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 1:23Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  You really think so?

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 1:25John Coogan?

  I feel like, I don't know, so busy, so much other stuff going on. I feel like he, I feel like most

• 1:32Jordi Hays?

  The busiest people I know

• 1:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:35Jordi Hays?

  are not active on X.

• 1:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  But they, they are on X a lot.

• 1:41John Coogan?

  Sometimes, but there are, there's a different class of person.

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  You can just quiz, you can just quiz them.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  Screenshots come to them via Slack or via text message because they have a team that's monitoring the timeline and then is delivered. This is the important, this is the important stuff.

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  They're calling him Mark Lurkerberg.

• 1:57John Coogan?

  Lurkerberg. But the other big news, OpenAI just released GPT 5.6. Let's go.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  A new general purpose model with expanded coding and agent capabilities alongside GPT Live, which we talked about yesterday, a new real type, interactive voice experience. Reactions are great to 5.6. Bunch of interesting details here. You had, people have been identifying that while there is a frontier and there are just a few companies that are actually on the frontier, the, the frontier is spiky and they have different flavors to them and different, different reasons to pull different tools off the shelf. People are drawing analogies between Fable 5 being some, you know, recluse genius and, and 5.6 being a, you know, collaborative coworker that you love chatting

• 2:52John Coogan?

  with or something like that.

• 2:54Jordi Hays?

  I said, I don't know how else to describe it, but Fable 5 is like Kendrick on Good Kid Mad City and 5.6 Soul is like Chief Keef on finally.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Now it makes sense. Thank you.

• 3:04Jordi Hays?

  So I just wanted to put it into, you know, 2010 hip hop, like terminology.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  Really, really clear there. Thanks for clearing that up.

• 3:13Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the funny thing is that will be very explicit for like a hundred people in the whole world.

• 3:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  This one's for you.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  The fun, the, the, the most interesting benchmark to me has always been Arc AGI V3. We've interviewed the team over there many times and had a lot of fun understanding what goes into that, that benchmark and 5.6 Soul scored a massive 7.78%, which is tiny, considering that the whole point of Arc AGI is that a human should be able to get 100% on it and basically any human. So it is a true test of AGI in this sense of, you know, can you give this test to just actually anyone? Not, you know, the, the crazy math projects, the crazy hard programming projects, the hacking, all of that stuff is very economically valuable, of course, but there's a more interesting

• 4:07John Coogan?

  question where, you know, when there's less of a spiky frontier and there's just this question of, what is something that anybody can do that AI can't? Because we've been searching for those and the Arc AGI team has done a fantastic job building out these puzzles that AI has historically struggled with. Arc AGI, one, the model sort of climbed, two, became a little bit more complicated. And now, three, we're starting to see glimpses of progress, although 7.76% isn't 99%. We're nowhere near saturation, but it's still a huge jump. Opus 4.8 had 1.5%. So GPT 5.6 Sol is showing more generalization, more spatial reasoning, more puzzle solving abilities.

• 4:50John Coogan?

  So fun, fun stuff. I am trying to refresh my timeline, but the blog post is also very, very fun because it includes games. I'm a big fan of the, the GPT 5.6 launch games. I got immediately sucked into the, to the, the sailing mini game, which is like very high fidelity, but also delightful to actually play.

• 5:18Jordi Hays?

  Should we play it?

• 5:18John Coogan?

  Yes, we should definitely play it. Yeah, Saltwind, you, you, you guys play it. I want production team to see what they can get. I think my time was 25 seconds.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

  And is this hosted on a, on a site?

• 5:28John Coogan?

  I think this is, I mean, this is hosted on the OpenAI blog, but I think the, the idea is that you could vibe code this in the latest GPT 5.6 in the app, in ChatGPT, and then deploy it and have someone, are you trimming the sails appropriately? Because it looks like you're losing speed, you're losing wind. It's not working. I'm going to smoke you. I got 25 seconds. Wow. Amateur hour over here. Look at this. Yeah, yeah. Well, you, well, the whole, the whole game, which you probably missed is that there's a little bar there where you have to trim the sails to be in the sweet spot of the wind while you're turning. So as you turn, see the bar? There's a recommendation for where you put the sails. You got to keep that line in, see? It's moving over. You got to, you got to press the

• 6:14John Coogan?

  down.

• 6:14Jordi Hays?

  I see, I see.

• 6:15John Coogan?

  Pass. Yeah, exactly. Keep trimming those sails while you steer the ship. This stuff is very, very fun. I am trying to open.

• 6:25Jordi Hays?

  One interesting data point from the live stream, which was just an hour ago. They said, already Soul has been transforming our research program. As one example, GPT 5.6 Sol autonomously post-trained 5.6 Luna.

• 6:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 6:39Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people are having fun with that. Dylan Field says, a lot of people want to compare Fable versus 5.6 Soul. This is a mistake. They're apples and oranges. Despite all the research achievements, we are still very, very early in exploring the tech tree for model training.

• 6:59John Coogan?

  Cool. Sorry. I'm just getting set up again. What else is in here? Oh, yes. I, I, I do think that, didn't Dylan Eberskaya write something about this? What, what was the, the, the, the essay he wrote about interactive memes and this idea of like generative AI enabling these vibe coded mini games? Like we've been seeing a bunch of them with like the Copy Bear Simulator, the Coconut Simulator, where it's something that's just a joke that's funny for like a few people, but, and normally you would instantiate that in a, in a tweet, or maybe if you were getting really crazy,

• 7:39John Coogan?

  you'd do a Photoshop edit of a meme, but now you can go and create a full mini game, something that runs in the browser and soon something that runs in Unreal Engine and can actually be distributed on the Steam Store. We're already seeing that with like the data center simulators and all these funny simulator games that are going on Steam. All this, all the, all the advances in the coding models certainly speeds up the ability to actually deliver polished software. I'm particularly excited for like.

• 8:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Dylan's title was, the future of entertainment is interactive.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 8:10Jordi Hays?

  But, but yeah, that, that's part of what I honestly love about AIs. There's a lot of things you can make now that never would have made sense to make because they would have taken you four days and it was good for like a small laugh. Now you can do it in four minutes and it's just fun.

• 8:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I, I think there's going to be, there's, if you have some sort of like small custom, some sort of custom functionality in your business, it feels like there's.

• 8:37Jordi Hays?

  Is this the David Senra simulator?

• 8:40John Coogan?

  Why is this David Senra?

• 8:41Jordi Hays?

  Late nights in a Miami abandoned apartment complex.

• 8:45John Coogan?

  Backrooms.

• 8:46Jordi Hays?

  In 2015, just recording podcasts and reading.

• 8:50John Coogan?

  This is very creepy, like horror backrooms, liminal space game.

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  Stanley Tang, co-founder and CPO over at DoorDash says, I have an insane magic trick that so far none of the models can figure out, including Mythos. It's a bulletproof trick that I've shown to a hundred plus people, including magicians that couldn't figure it out. It's not anywhere on the internet. Only way to know it is through first principles reasoning. Told everyone I'll believe in AGI when it can crack this trick. Well, GPT 5.6 just did.

• 9:21John Coogan?

  How?

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  I want him to, I want him to actually open like, okay, like give us, now that, now that a model cracked it.

• 9:26John Coogan?

  Because I feel like a lot of magic tricks are like sleight of hand. So is he uploading a video or something like?

• 9:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah. So John Palmer says, I have a hilarious joke that so far none of the models think is funny. It's a bulletproof joke that I've told to a hundred plus people, including comedians, and no one laughed. It's not anywhere on the internet. Only way to know it's funny is a first principle sense of humor. Told everyone I'll believe in AGI when it tells me a joke. The joke is funny. Well, 5.6 just did.

• 9:53John Coogan?

  Huge, huge news, huge news.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, people are going back and forth. GPT 5.6 is a Porsche. Fable's like Warp Drive. I had a different experience. If Fable is an F1 car, 5.6 Soul at Ultra is a Tesla Model X Plaid. Does it find things that Fable misses during plannings and coding? Yes, most of the time, but for the hardest problems, does Fable routinely find things that Fable, that 5.6 doesn't? Also, yes, some of the time. Is 5.6 way faster and affordable? Yes. With an unlimited token budget, what am I currently using? 95%? 95% plus of the time? GPT 5.6 from Cikicheng. So interesting take that the, the Pareto Frontier is alive and well, and everyone's duking it out for their slice of the,

• 10:38John Coogan?

  the AI opportunity. Very interesting seeing how the, how the market share is shifting while, during a time of acceleration, you have multiple companies that are growing revenues, even accelerating revenues while market share is declining because the overall market's growing so fast that, that if you're only growing at 300% and someone else is growing at 400%, you're losing market share, but you have like one of the greatest businesses by modern metrics. Very, very interesting dynamics in AI.

• 11:04Jordi Hays?

  It's also funny because yesterday with Ben Thompson, you were like, it's some slow summer. And then in the, in the span of 24 hours, you get 4.5 Muse 1.1.

• 11:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, this. I don't know. This isn't, this isn't as dramatic as the AI talent wars. It's not as dramatic as

• 11:24Jordi Hays?

  Rippling deal.

• 11:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, this is, this is new technology. Um, and, and there's only so much to, uh, there's only so much of a take to be given around these things. Although, uh, AI 2040 launched today, the sequel to AI 2027, that's something that's more of a thought provoking piece that you can debate and interrogate and, and talk through. I'm sure we'll go through some of it because they pose a couple interesting, um, a couple interesting ideas of where, where AI might go and where they want it to go and how they want, uh, the industry to develop, uh, sort of advocating for a slowdown generally, but, uh, it's an, it's an interesting, uh, way they puzzle piece all the different

• 12:05John Coogan?

  geopolitical, uh, uh, chips on the table around. Um, what else? Uh, of course, people are joking about the lead is widening because, um, the, the anthropic and open AI version numbers over time, GPT six is predicted. And, uh, it is, it, the, the, the model numbering, we were talking about this, this morning, that, uh, the numbers, they sort of don't mean anything anymore. Do the model numbers mean anything in particular? It used to be the, the model number was the pre train and then the, and then the version number was the post train, but then that sort of got flipped around. And now it's just like, are you, do you feel like you're competing at a four

• 12:47John Coogan?

  class or a five class? So I wouldn't be surprised if we saw like Muse Spark not, not release Muse Spark two, but Muse Spark six or five and jump straight. I mean, Samsung wound up doing this where they jumped to the year, like sort of like the car manufacturers where, uh, you know, there's a five series BMW, but then there's also just the 2027 because that's the actual model year that's relevant.

• 13:14Jordi Hays?

  Twenty twenty seven five series.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Which is sort of odd. Uh, and, and we're sort of like duking it out between those.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I think post reasoning models, um, you just have like a different way to scale the models besides just pre-training.

• 13:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  So it's hard to bake that all into one number.

• 13:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Like is, uh, you know, evocative of, of both those like two ways.

• 13:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. So the number is, is becoming closer to the year in the, uh, in the second decade of the 21st century, basically. It's just like, i- i- i- is this on the frontier in 2026? You'll probably see a six by the end of the year, uh, in front of the models that are leading in, uh, in the year 2026, something like that. Uh, I'm very interested with Google strategy because the, the rumor is that 3.5 Pro will be coming out, uh, this, uh, net, next week, I believe. But, uh, I, it was, i- it's very odd going into the Gemini app right now and seeing that there's, uh, 3.5 flash, but then you have to go back to 3.1 Pro. I think 3.1

• 14:15John Coogan?

  Pro is the most advanced model, but they default you to 3.1 flashlight. And I would expect them to jump just forward to four, but I think that they're going to do 3.5 Pro, but it's been a little bit of a slower cycle there. Uh, as silly, I mean, all the, obviously all these numbers don't really mean anything. They're marketing terms. Um, but they, uh, they, I still think they do actually stick in people's mind. And so there should be some strategy around them. Um, but anyway, before we move on to our next story, let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Um, so, uh, Mark Zuckerberg is on a press tour. He's talking to the legacy media for the first time in a long time. Uh, Andrew Bosworth, the CTO of Meta, also did an interview, uh,

• 15:01John Coogan?

  with the, uh, head of the Atlantic, uh, dug into, uh, some of the launches around the glasses and then also had a whole, uh, discussion in that podcast around, um, the goals of the keystroke logging thing. And, uh, uh, it was, it was interesting. I mean, it was framed as like, you know, like a tough interview around, uh, surveillance in the workplace. And it certainly, the headlines were very scary. I don't know where I sit on it because I've, I, I kind of always assumed that everything you do at work is logged in the sense that like, if you're on a work computer and every webpage you visit is, uh, is going through the network and monitored

• 15:44John Coogan?

  for traffic and security purposes and all the code you write and all the emails you write and all the documents are stored in the shared document. It's like, it's, it, it doesn't seem that crazy to go to keystrokes, uh, because everything is already so monitored. Um, but he was framing it as more of an experiment, something that they weren't sure was going to pan out. Uh, something that they allowed everyone in, everyone at Meta. So there were, there were certain sections of the workforce that were by default opted out. So anyone who was working on, um, uh, like confidential or sensitive information was opted out of that program by default. Uh, he said he himself, Andrew Bosworth, was opted out of that program

• 16:26John Coogan?

  because, uh, he has a bunch of legal holds because they're getting sued all the time. So, uh, so they can't be recording everything, I guess, that he's doing because then that would be admissible in court. And so all of a sudden the, the lawyer, uh, who's suing him would be, would say, okay, great. In the email you said, uh, you know, we, we don't want to do this, but before you typed that.

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  Let's see the, well, let's see your writing process.

• 16:49John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. Let's see what you, what sentence you typed and then deleted. Like, what word did you use before? Minimal impact. Did you say medium impact or whatever? Yeah. So, uh, so he was opted out and apparently I, I think all of the Meta employees who were part of that program were able to, uh, were, were, were able to just turn it off indefinitely. Like you could toggle it on and off. Um, and, and the idea was that they wanted to collect information on, uh, how work plays out over, uh, like a, a 12 to 18 months, a 18 month period. And they couldn't get that from any sort of, uh, data labeler because they needed to have, uh, very high skilled workers actually chopping wood on projects for a long, a long

• 17:33John Coogan?

  time to see how projects, uh, go from start to finish. Uh, so, so basically like, how do you compact the longest possible rollout? Not just a, uh, like a single chain of code, but an actual series of, of meetings and decisions and trade-offs and everything that goes into making a decision in a white collar workplace. Like, how do you actually, uh, reason through all of that? Uh, it's, it's hard to, to distill that from just, oh, well, the code got written this way. So that's the right way to write the code. That, that might, the code might've gotten written that way because a lawyer said, hey, oh, we have to do this. And then the marketer said, oh, well, well, you know, we have an activation with this person. So we need to integrate it this way. And then the business people came in and said, oh, well,

• 18:15John Coogan?

  like the margins will be better if we write it this way. And so, uh, it's not entirely first principles, software engineering all the time when you're actually building real products. So, uh, interesting to see him sort of, uh, step into the, you know, a, a, a tough interview and, and, uh, and, and sort of lay out his, his side of the story. But Mark Zuckerberg is in Bloomberg today, uh, pledging aggressive pricing with Meta's first pay to use AI, which is a funny framing for just an API for a model. Um, but that's the way Bloomberg put it. Uh, in a crowded market for AI tools, Mark Zuckerberg wants to win on price. Meta Platforms unveiled a version of its most advanced artificial intelligence model, Muse Spark 1.1, that includes

• 18:58John Coogan?

  a new paid tier for developers, marking the first time Meta has charged businesses for access to its models and providing a new revenue stream. It'll be among the most affordable options on the market, Zuckerberg said in an interview ahead of the release. Uh, quote, "Since this is not an open source model, this is, I think, the first time that we're doing a real serious API," uh, referring to the API, uh, used to access Meta's AI. And the pricing is going to be very aggressive and attractive. Makes sense. I mean, they own the data centers. They're very efficient at building data centers. They should be able to serve a model efficiently. Um, the new model standout improvement is, is, is in its agentic capabilities, the Meta chief executive officer said. Agents are a big theme of AI

• 19:40John Coogan?

  this year with the label applied to systems that can, can complete multi-step tasks on behalf of the user. Zuckerberg described Muse Spark 1.1 as having, quote, "state of the art or very close to it agentic reasoning and tool use. The model is also greatly improved when it comes to coding and Meta employees are using it internally to build products and features for various apps."

• 19:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. My big question is how, how quickly do they move all of their internal workloads onto their own models?

• 20:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:07Jordi Hays?

  So they're buying, uh, they're buying, uh, they're getting access to models through Google, Anthropic and OpenAI.

• 20:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think that, uh, a lot of companies will look to Meta's own actions as a way to basically validate whether or not they should be using this model themselves, right? Cause it was just, you know, within the last month that Google had said like, hey, we don't have

• 20:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  capacity. We don't have enough capacity for all of Meta's demand for our models.

• 20:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:37Jordi Hays?

  And so, um, yeah, they can't, they, they can't get enough AI elsewhere, at least from some providers. And so how much of their workloads will they be able to run themselves is a big question.

• 20:48John Coogan?

  There are a bunch of bull cases. First, I'm going to tell you about Figma. Agents meet the canvas. Your AI agents cannot create and modify your Figma files with design system contacts. So yeah, Meta was one of the first companies to sort of reportedly be token maxing and have a leaderboard and all of that. If you have your own model and your own data centers, the incentive to token max is much, much higher because you're just paying the electricity on the cards that you're already depreciating. So you should sort of lean a little bit back into that. Not that you want to be fully token maxing, but you do want your employees using the tools that you've built as efficiently and as effectively as possible. It's just

• 21:29John Coogan?

  way cheaper to explore when you're not paying margin on another closed source model and you're not paying anything else and you're actually improving the model. So it makes a lot of sense for them to roll this out broadly. The interesting take that Ben Thompson had, which we didn't get to yesterday because we wound up spending the whole interview talking about Xbox, but the interesting dynamic is that when you are willing to sell API access, you're willing to sell compute directly, and then you're also using your own tool internally. It creates this economic incentive internally that you have an incentive to always go with

• 22:09John Coogan?

  the most profitable, the most economically efficient outcome. That can be very good for business, very good for the investments that they made. The trick is that you can wind up in a little bit of a situation where your business team or your enterprise sales team goes and sells all your compute capacity or all your chips, and then internally your team is frustrated that they're not making enough progress. So there's a little bit of a dance there, but in general, it's a forcing function on the internal use of their tools to say, hey, why is someone willing to pay five times as much than what we're willing, with the value that we're creating here? Like, we spent a billion dollars on

• 22:53John Coogan?

  energy, consuming our own LLM, and someone showed up and said, wait, we'd pay you $5 billion for that same compute power to run a different model and do a different task. It's like, why is their model not economically valuable internally? That would be the question. The flip side is that they do have low costs, so they should be able to say, oh, yeah, we actually did, we, yeah, we inference Muse Bark 1.1 internally, and we improved the ad model, and boom, we made a bunch of money.

• 23:22Jordi Hays?

  And these are the same trade-offs and decisions that every lab is having to make, is how much compute do we allocate towards research, towards internal use, towards the API, subscriptions, to free plans, et cetera.

• 23:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was that funny semi-analysis, deep dive into Anthropic's forecast, and in there, I mean, some staggering numbers, really, really optimistic. But the flip side was, who was it? Ed Zitron was taking shots at the fact that they had

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  EBTIT.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  EBTIT, earnings before

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  Training.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Training.

• 23:59Jordi Hays?

  Interest.

• 24:00John Coogan?

  No, training inference and everything. No, earnings before training, interest, and taxes. And what was odd about it was that Ed Zitron was saying it's like the new community adjusted EBITDA, and it is always odd when a new non-GAAP metric pops up. In this case, I think it makes a lot of sense because training runs do fit a depreciation profile. It's a little bit different. I don't know why you wouldn't just put it in depreciation, though, like, just figure out how to account for training runs through a depreciation schedule. And then maybe it's like a non-GAAP depreciation metric, but it's still in there instead of

• 24:41John Coogan?

  trying to get everyone up to speed on a different sounding phrase entirely. Also, you could just do EBITRA instead of EBITDA, like earnings before interest, taxes, and training, TRA.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:55John Coogan?

  And that might be a little roll off the tongue, a little bit easier.

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  But I think semi-analysis likes to be a little cheeky.

• 25:00John Coogan?

  That's true, that's true. But the other funny thing is that Ed Zitron is taking shots at this, like, oh, like, the EBTIT is like so ridiculous, but like, in that forecast, they had like net income of $1 billion in the quarter. So it's like, it's like, okay, well, yeah, you have this like funny metric that you could value the business on to get crazy in valuation, but if the business is making money and actually like generating net income, you're not in a disastrous financial position. So, you know, you could debate about the valuation, but you shouldn't, the whole idea of like this, oh, it's like, it's a very, very different discussion than WeWork, which was not cash flow positive,

• 25:42John Coogan?

  which was not net income profitable, and was using those terms to sort of skirt around the losses that were accruing from the business. So.

• 25:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was looking back at Ben Thompson's earnings transcript, or a script that he wrote for Mark Zuckerberg. He has a good segment on why AI matters. Ben writes, forgive the long preamble, but this is necessary context for me to properly explain why AI is so important to Meta and why I'm making the right choice to invest so heavily in both talent and infrastructure. And he goes on and on and on, but he says, what I've come to realize as I've embraced our status as an entertainment provider and ad purveyor is that our nature as a digital business, notwithstanding, we are remarkably well-placed to thrive in an AI era. Remember what we learned about humans. They are obsessed with

• 26:34Jordi Hays?

  other humans and they want to connect with them. That obsession and desire only going to increase as we interact more and more with AI. AI is going to make our properties more essential, not less. Moreover, AI is a productivity tool, but productivity is not the end-all, be-all of the human experience. I've talked over the last year about building superintelligence that helps you get things done, but that's a business story. What we can do uniquely is give people the experiences they want, from connection to entertainment to shopping, when they are off the clock. The fact that we are investing in AI but not selling solutions to businesses is actually one of our business's biggest advantages. So of course, this is just a sort of fan fiction for an earnings transcript. Meta is

• 27:14Jordi Hays?

  in fact selling to businesses now. But who knows over time how big will the API business be relative to how much value they can unlock across their broader business with all of their infrastructure.

• 27:30John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We have the perfect guest to talk about all of this with because Eric Seufert from Mobile Dev Memo is with us today in the TVP and UltraDome. Let's bring in Eric. How are you doing? Good to see you again. And congratulations. Is it Dr. Seufert now?

• 27:57John Coogan?

  No, Masters, right?

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  Can you hear us?

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Can you hear us?

• 28:04John Coogan?

  Okay, let's bring him back in in a second because I want to hear his take about Meta's vertical integration, specifically with regard to their image model, because their image model has the potential to feed back in the ads product where they are getting a signal from what ads are performing, generating new images, and then using that as fine-tuning data and reinforcement learning data for the image model. And it's a very different cycle than what you see in ChatGPT images, where, you know, they're trying to be useful, educational, sometimes funny, same thing with Nano Banana. But Meta has a different job to be done, a different process and a different goal, because that model, although

• 28:46John Coogan?

  it might wind up being something that people use just to post on Instagram, and people might just use it like any other image model, the real killer application of that is in the Ads Manager. And we also have Sean Frank coming on later in person to tell the more business side of that story. He's built Ridge into a nine-figure D2C brand, obviously has been deeply ingrained in the Meta ecosystem for probably over a decade now, and can comment on everything that's happening in AI-generated advertising. But I believe we have Eric Seufert lined up now with audio. We'll bring him in to the TVP and UltraDome. Eric, how are you doing?

• 29:27Eric Seufert?

  Hey, guys. Thanks for having me. It's good to be back. Sorry about the technical mishap.

• 29:31John Coogan?

  No problem. It happens, it happens.

• 29:33Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you here. Question, did you rebrand Mobile Dev Memo?

• 29:39Eric Seufert?

  What, no, I didn't.

• 29:40Jordi Hays?

  To Heracles, to Heracles, or is this, is this an error on our side?

• 29:43John Coogan?

  This is an error on our side. It's mobile dev memo. Hercules is the fund, is that right?

• 29:49Eric Seufert?

  Yeah, the font, yeah.

• 29:50John Coogan?

  Yes, got it. Anyway, we were just talking about Meta. They just launched Muse Spark 1.1, their LLM. They're selling that over API. They're also selling some compute, but I want to, I want your take on the image model specifically, and why that is an important technology for them, why vertical integration makes sense there? Why specifically is, is their image model, like, it, it feels like it has a different business case around it than a Nano Banana or a ChatGPT Images?

• 30:21Eric Seufert?

  Yeah, so I think this is brilliant, right? Like, this actually gives them the narrative firepower that they need to, to sort of undermine the skepticism that investors feel about the AI investment, right? So like, I was at this dinner, I do these dinners a lot, like these ideas dinners, like a, a research company will bring me in and talk to like much their hedge fund clients. And like, I was talking about, you know, why these investments that Meta is making right now are bearing fruit right now, like 33% advertising revenue growth last quarter on $55 billion in revenue. That's incredible. Like, you look at Google search was 19%, Amazon, which is much smaller, was 24%. They're outgrowing everyone except for AppLovin and Reddit. And people don't believe it. And I asked somebody, okay,

• 31:03Eric Seufert?

  what would it take to convince you that these investments are actually productive in this moment in time? And they said 40%. 40% growth on $55 to $60 billion in revenue. Where did that number come from? This is pulled out of thin air. This is what they need to do. They need to be able to point to something and say, you see that ad? That was created by our AI investments. When you talk about GEM, GEM is a foundation model. Meta trained a foundation model for ranking. That's important, but you can't see it. It's hard to convince. First of all, the research, like, you know, a lot of the research analysts, they're really smart people, but they operate in this paradigm of like, spreadsheet says this. I get it. I can understand why ranking investments would actually be really beneficial for the company, but I put a number in the spreadsheet and it spits out something. That's the tool I have to work with.

• 31:48Eric Seufert?

  And like, these are really smart people. I think they conceptually get why these are good investments, but they have nothing to sort of tie it to that's quantitative. I think when you can point, you can point to the ad that was created and you say, look, this ad was created with data that only we have. It's the image model that we built, the foundation image model that we built that is trained, trained, not fine tuned, but trained on our own data, can be verified against that. We've got our own custom evals. Everything about the training was built with data that only we have. No other frontier lab can, can, can fine tune their own models for this use case. Only we can do that. And then I think if they can point to the output and they say, that ad that you saw in your Facebook Instagram feed was created only as a result of our ability to train on this data that only we have,

• 32:31Eric Seufert?

  then I think you can kind of make the case. So I think bundling those two, integrating those two things together is like the really smart move. And I, I, I kind of, you know, I understand, like, they, you know, they restarted the AI efforts and this is the whole, you know, this is the MSL rebrand. But my sense is like, this might be more convincing than anything that they've been able to say with the ranking infrastructure and the transfer learning infrastructure. I'm talking about Lattice, I'm talking about GEM. So we'll see, but my sense is like, if you can actually point to some output and say, look, this only exists as a result of our ability to train this model on this proprietary data that no one else has, my sense is you can make the argument more robustly.

• 33:08Jordi Hays?

  And if you ask advertisers, what is the bottleneck to spending more on Meta, they will almost always say it's great creative. And so there's, there's a, there's a path to sort of just like unlocking removing that bottleneck so that the constraint just becomes how much revenue do you have? And that will just become a proxy for how much you can spend with us.

• 33:32Eric Seufert?

  Yeah, it's like, what's your bid? Well, your bid should be the value that you get back. I mean, that's like, the whole point of a second price auction is that you should build your bid, your true value, because you're gonna, you're gonna make money if you win. But like, the thing is, like, they've built, like, a lot of their initiatives, right? So GEM, foundation model for ranking, Andromeda is, is, is a whole system for doing retrieval, and then Lattice, which is transfer learning. But like, the whole point of Andromeda was they were reacting to a lot more creative being deployed. Now, the creative being deployed, though, was created with third-party tools, right? This creative being deployed is being built without the benefit of the actual performance data. If you actually want this to work, you need to train it on the ROAS. You care about the end result. You care about what the person does when they go to your website or your app. And that, no one has that except for Meta at that volume, because they get it passed back to the capy and the pixel, right?

• 34:17Eric Seufert?

  And so their ability to build this foundation model, I think, really unlocks a lot of value. And, you know, I think you'll probably see that show up in, you know, in the, in the revenue growth. Now, do they hit 40% to satisfy these, these needs of these hedge fund people? I don't know. But like, my sense is if you can point to the output and you can say, look, this addresses the core bottleneck, which is we need a lot of creative, but it needs to be built with the knowledge of what actually drives the outcomes and not just a bunch of variations that clog up the system.

• 34:44John Coogan?

  I want to push back on that idea that no other lab can do anything like this. What about DeepMind? What about YouTube, Nano Banana, VO3 video generation? It does feel a little bit farther off. And also, it feels like the hedge fund analysts that you're talking to aren't asking the same questions of Google's investments in AI because they have such an incredible business with Google Cloud Platform and they're able to strike these massive compute deals, so they have some off-take there. But how is, how is the situation different in Google?

• 35:21Eric Seufert?

  Because they don't have a history of tilting at windmills. They don't have the, they don't have an albatross around their neck, which is Metaverse. That was a misadventure. It cost a lot of money. It never resulted in anything meaningful, right? Now, I would actually make the point that that whole rebrand was just a distraction. It was a smokescreen. They had to get away from the whole Facebook files thing. And that took everyone's eyes away from, you know, that, that scandal. And was it worth it? I don't know. If you achieved that, which they kind of did, they kind of did that with the Meta rebrand. Maybe it was worth it, right?

• 35:50Jordi Hays?

  Also, also the name, even if you ignore like the actual investments they made in, in Metaverse and like Horizons and things like that, like Meta Platforms is, is the Metaverse. Like, it is the place that people exist online. So like, the name makes sense, even if you ignore that, and it makes sense for the strategic reason, like you said, to get away from the Facebook files. So like, they could have just rebranded and never done the Metaverse and they'd be in a much better position, right? They'd have that sort of.

• 36:17John Coogan?

  But you can't really do the rebrand unless you tell the story, or else everyone accuses you of what you just described.

• 36:23Eric Seufert?

  Right, yeah. I mean, you gotta put your money where your mouth is.

• 36:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. But on, on video generation in particular, do you feel like we are further out, just further away from that? I was, I was demoing the latest VO model and it's good, but it's still clockable. As AI-generated, there's still, I had some cars spinning around and, you know, it's three cars and then it's four cars and then it's two cars and they're sort of melding into one another. It's an incredible video model, definitely state of the art. But I don't know that, that that's ready to be deployed in YouTube across a ton of video ad impressions. So do you have a timeline for that? Or do you have some thoughts on when that will actually be important to the business?

• 37:08John Coogan?

  Because you have to imagine that Instagram video ads perform better than just image ads. And so they'll try and do this, but what, how are you seeing the AI video advertising model evolve?

• 37:20Eric Seufert?

  Here you gotta look at ByteDance. What ByteDance is doing is incredible on this front, right? So they put out this paper a month ago. I did a summary on Twitter and LinkedIn. But what they're doing with TikTok Shop is these real, like, you know, basically photorealistic 3D avatars that are selling stuff, right? Like, so infomercials. And they've, they've built custom models to build those ads. And those are all ads. A lot, like, I mean, not all of it, but like, if you go on TikTok and you're looking at the TikTok Shop stuff, a lot of it is AI-generated. And so what they, in this paper that I summarized, like, they invested in, you know, in essentially like fine-tuning this model to make sure that there was no collision with the hands. What they were finding is that, like, so when you get in that uncanny valley situation where people can tell it's AI, then they turn off. Like, there's a lot of research that's been done into this.

• 38:04Eric Seufert?

  If people know that it's AI, they penalize the ad. But when they don't know it's AI, the AI ads outperform the human creative ads. It's really fascinating. But so what they found was like, when you saw the collision between someone holding something in their hand and the object, then people, the, the click to rate drop, the conversion rate drop. But so what they did was they fixed that. So they built this whole, like, visual interpretability model that just focused on that with it, with, with an expert, like, in the model. And so it just addressed the hands. And so like, if, but that's use case specific. You needed a general purpose model that's gonna build photorealistic video. We're probably pretty far off of that for like all ads of all types. But I think with something like, you know, okay, well, we need human photorealistic kind of like infomercial style. I think you could get to that point now. And maybe we were there now, and maybe ByteDance is there now.

• 38:48Eric Seufert?

  But I think it, it takes a lot of investment, right? I mean, they had something, if I remember correctly from the paper, it's been a while since I saw it, like 12,000 hours of live human product interactions. So I mean, it takes a lot of data to do that, right? And so, you know, it's just, it's whatever you want to invest in. I think if YouTube wants to do that for a general purpose photorealistic video ad tool, we're probably pretty far off.

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  How do you think that the market will react if Muse 1.1 is like a, very much like a base hit on the API, where they, they get some, you know, big companies move over some workloads, but it's not, you know, this runaway hit. And, and I say that because so many models that have been good, not great, have a little demand, just because there's a lot of demand for AI, but, but they don't sort of like have these sort of breakout revenue charts.

• 39:41Eric Seufert?

  Well, you know, they clearly are going to be very aggressive on the pricing. I mean, they talked about that today, right? And so my sense is like, what you're gonna start seeing is that people don't need to operate at the frontier. And you have a lot of use cases that work just fine with, and basically are just good enough, right? With some legacy model. And so it just comes down to then, okay, well, that's commodity. And so are you gonna price like a commodity? Like, if you think about like, and also like, I think we're gonna see a lot more, um, uh, like, uh, people relenting from needing to be on the, on the frontier when they've built stuff using a model that then gets upgraded. And the whole idea there is like, well, am I gonna upgrade this tool? Because I have to adapt it to the new model, right? Like, if I'm, if I, if I, you know, because essentially like the model name, like if you, if you use like Vertex AI, right?

• 40:23Eric Seufert?

  You, you just got a model name as a variable. Like, you're sending this, you know, system prompt to, to, you know, Google. But like, it's just a variable. You could swap that out in 30 seconds. But the fact of the matter is you're sampling from a new distribution if you do that. And it's gonna change the output. It's gonna qualitatively change the output. And it might change it in quantitative ways, like with retention and engagement. And so the thing is like, okay, well, now we're talking about this big cycle. It's a new product development cycle because I have to adapt this product that I built to this new model and the output that it provides, right? And maybe it was working perfectly. It was working exactly as I expected it to before. Now I've got to invest a bunch of hours, a bunch of engineering time in adapting it to this new model. So even if it's just a swap of a variable name, it's still a whole lot of testing, QA, determining like how that impacts long-term retention. They're gonna do A B tests. So my sense is like, you're gonna see a lot more people just saying, no, this works fine.

• 41:08Eric Seufert?

  This is perfect. And, and getting more, getting like more robust output. Let's say the token price is exactly the same. Getting more robust output wouldn't benefit me. And why am I gonna invest the resources into adapting to the new model?

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but isn't that?

• 41:22Jordi Hays?

  So, so if they're going after workloads that are running on old models that are working fine, and it's a lot of work to switch over.

• 41:30John Coogan?

  It's not a lot of work to switch over.

• 41:32Jordi Hays?

  Not.

• 41:32John Coogan?

  It's, it's some risk, but it's not a lot of work.

• 41:34Jordi Hays?

  It's fast to switch, but then again, you have to go through this process of like QAing and running it through your own benchmarks and all this stuff. Like, the question is like, how, I, I, I just don't know. Like, I, I'm, I'm thinking about a scenario where like a year from now, we're sitting here and like Meta has a $3 billion AI API business. And the analysts that you're talking to are like, that, like, to me, they're like, that doesn't get you to 40% year-over-year revenue growth on the, on the business overall. So it like, doesn't solve at least what those analysts in particular were talking about. And like, zero to 3 billion on like a new business line would be crazy. And is like, you know, only been done a handful of times throughout history over the last few years, right?

• 42:19Jordi Hays?

  So, um, I'm just saying like, we're, we're, there's such big numbers now that there's possibility where you have like, this incredible breakout revenue growth, but it doesn't actually move the needle enough that, that the market still says like, hey,

• 42:35Jordi Hays?

  we're, we're not super confident about, about, about like the next capex cycle, right? This 2027 numbers that are coming up.

• 42:42Eric Seufert?

  Well, that's, and that's the problem with this whole business line in the first place. Like, I think it's a mistake. I think it's a capitulation. I think you're gonna get much more value out of that compute if you apply it to your own core business, which is advertising. My sense is you get better growth, but like the problem is the investors don't buy that right now. Like, they've got a narrative issue. It's not a, it's not a productivity or a competency issue. It's a narrative issue. And like, the problem is like, you know, and, you know, you, you cited Ben's brilliant essay from yesterday or the day before about like what Zuck should say. He should say that. Like, Ben is totally right. He should say that. He should come out and say, look, we, like, Senator, we run ads. Senator, we run ads. When he said that, I was at F8. It was like the next month. Every Facebook employee is wearing a shirt that said, Senator, we run ads. They know what business they are in.

• 43:25Eric Seufert?

  Zuck seems to be confused about it. Like, I don't understand why he doesn't come out.

• 43:29Jordi Hays?

  Here's, here's a big question that'll be interesting. This year, they're gonna spend, I don't know how much they're gonna spend on external models. Like, I would say, I would, I would expect them to spend like, maybe like $10 billion, right?

• 43:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:39Jordi Hays?

  Like, something in the range of $10 billion from, from Google, Anthropic and OpenAI. If next year they can say, we're not spending money on any external models, then, then that could help them with the narrative issue of saying like, hey, like, we're, we're invested. We're basically getting, instead of having to give this money to other businesses, we're just using our own infrastructure. It's a lot more efficient. We can like token max. We can use way more tokens. We can do way more workloads. And so that's potentially, it's potentially setting, but, but the question is, can they actually move all the workloads that are on these other models to their own models?

• 44:17Eric Seufert?

  Well, so that's where you actually do need the frontier, right? Like coding tasks, like you actually benefit from having the frontier. But if you're talking like customer support stuff, right? Like, that doesn't need a frontier model. That could use like a three or four, you know, sort of like, uh, release back model. And it'll be, it'd be producing reliable results that you know work. Like, you've measured, you've tested, and you don't need to upgrade like the customer support or like the chatbot, you know, for customer support integration to the, to the bleeding edge model every single time. But like coding, yeah, if you're actually using these models to build models, you probably want the best of the best, right? And like what Meta is doing is really actually at the frontier with like integrating, um, agents into the coding workflow. If you look at like their system they built called Confucius, it's like a self-learning agent.

• 44:58Eric Seufert?

  Like, that actually helps them deploy better. They've got a whole pipeline for, uh, data science and machine learning tasks that helps them decide like, okay, which, which, which, where should we even apply this? Where should we even do testing, right? Because essentially it takes a lot of time, like you just figuring out what kind of experiments, what kind of tests you wanna run. They built a whole pipeline around that. That's all driven by agents, right? So my sense is like, there's where you want the, the top of the line. And maybe their own models don't perform best there. But like also, I don't know how, how excited investors are gonna get when you say that we cut expenses. I think they really need to see the revenue growth at the top line. And so my sense is like, you get, you get more of that by just making the ads platform better. And they've done that. All they need to do is say, look, we can, if they could forecast out that growth and say, look, we're really dedicated to this. This is what we're pointing everything at. My sense is you could get investors excited over time.

• 45:42Eric Seufert?

  You keep printing 33% or whatever every quarter, like you're gonna get investors excited after some time. If you start saying, we're gonna compete with Call C, we're gonna build an AI pendant hardware, like they're not gonna get excited. They're gonna think you don't know what to do. And they're gonna think you've got all this compute capacity. You don't know how to use it.

• 45:57Jordi Hays?

  Help, uh, help us understand the, the prediction markets play. Is that, I think the, the answer that we landed on was it is just in Meta's nature to copy the new hot thing. So regardless of what it is, we're just gonna do it, right? And you can see the history of like, these shots on goal with like every new hot thing in consumer. They just build a version of it or they try to buy it. So I think that's the most simple explanation. John was trying to explain it as like, maybe there's some way to do it with like, there, there, there is no dollars. Uh, and it's just for like social status, you know, who, who can be, you know, an oracle. Uh, I think that, that was, we got more news that maybe showed that that wasn't the case.

• 46:38Jordi Hays?

  But then when you look at, again, you look at the market, like you look at the total market for like gambling. And again, even if they got a meaningful amount of that market, they would not really move the needle in the way they need to on the core business. And they would invite all these new regulators that are now saying like, you're not only trying to harvest, you know, my teenager's attention and making them, you know, sad about their life. You're also getting them, like, it just feels like it opens up this huge can of worms for no reason.

• 47:07Eric Seufert?

  It's just a totally misdirected move. Is that really the space you wanna go into right now? That is so politically fraught. That is such a political hot potato. Why do you even wanna touch that? I would steer clear that, I would say, look, Facebook apps, it's time well spent. You connect with friends. All this gambling, you're getting addicted to that. Don't spend time there. Spend time on Instagram. This is more wholesome. Why are you gonna touch that at all? Are you just gonna open the door to more scrutiny? That's insane. I really have no idea why they're even talking about that. It doesn't make any sense. But they've got like, you know, look, they said, we're gonna, we're gonna publish a lot more apps. They've got the new Pocket app. I mean, it seems kinda interesting. Maybe some of this stuff sticks. I think they could just try a bunch of stuff. But why would you touch the most politically toxic area right now? Like, when you could just be touching anything else?

• 47:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, take us through the prosperous society. I wanted, that's why, originally why I wanted to bring you on. I want the thesis. I wanna dig into it, uh, because I, I, I found the, it's a three-hour, four-part podcast series. You've written a lot about it, but, uh, introduce it for those who haven't been following along.

• 48:05Eric Seufert?

  Yeah, Prosperous Society, I started out, I wanted to write, um, an economic bull case for AI. We've heard all of the, you know, bear cases. We've heard all of the, you know, doom narratives around the, around the economy. It's gonna just basically displace all white collar work. You know, you're gonna get DoorDash created with a vibe coding session. And so all these companies are gonna go out of business. And I wanted to make the case that's probably not gonna, that's probably not gonna happen. And actually, there's a lot of reasons to be optimistic, right? And I think, you know, in writing that, it ended up becoming, you know, we live in a, in a sort of like very pivotal moment, I think. You know, if you look at the elections, um, you know, in the sort of the, the House primaries in New York, you look at what's happening with the, the, you know, the New York City, uh, mayoral election. You look at what's happening in the LA, um, mayoral election, like, there's, there's this, this, this sort of moment where these sort of like, um, impulses against capitalism have become a lot more popular, right?

• 48:50Eric Seufert?

  Like, there's reasons for that. And, you know, I, you know, I'm, I'm not an expert on those reasons, so I won't delve into them. But I think, you know, ultimately it's a mistake to go down that path. And the thing is like, my sense is a lot of the AI or the anti-AI narratives are actually, have nothing to do with AI, right? That's just seen as an avatar or like a bogeyman for capitalism. And so what I wanted to do was sort of like anchor this economic defense of AI, this economic, uh, bull case of AI in, you know, the sort of like liberal tradition of, of, of the Western world. And, and, and in doing so, like, you could say like, you know, you could anchor it to these, these sort of like, these, these great thinkers. You know, this sort of like enlightenment thinkers and, and sort of the economic giants that have built, you know, built this sort of intellectual framework that our, that our Western civilization is, is based upon. And people could say like, well, look, you've, you've misinterpreted them. And so, okay, well, maybe.

• 49:34Eric Seufert?

  But, but if, if that's not the case, and they, you're gonna make them drop the mask. You're gonna make them drop the mask and say, no, that's not my problem with AI. I just don't wanna live in a liberal economic society based on these Western thinkers. And I think if you actually kind of force that to be articulated out loud, you make a lot of progress against the anti-AI narratives. But the whole point of the prosperous society is my sense is, you know, a lot of these AI investments, they're going to push the economic constraints, um, away from production and towards just distribution, right? They're gonna make distribution the binding constraint. And so, could you just get this, this, this flourishing of, of content creation? And, and, and so when that becomes the actual problem with distribution and these AI investments go into.

• 50:17Eric Seufert?

  Things like ads platforms, digital advertising, you know, REXIS, recommendation systems, then actually commerce, the economy becomes much more efficient. And it's a really good thing. And you generate a lot of value by pushing that binding constraint to the distribution layer. And you get, then as a result, you get a lot more heterogeneous product development because you can actually reach those people economically, right? So like, what is the constraint now? It's like, well, can I reach a big audience? Right? Can I reach a big enough audience to support a business because, well, I've just got this kind of like blunt tool. But if these AI investments go to making recommendation systems better, digital ad systems better, reaching these, these, these, these pockets of people that have these very specific interests that were totally unserved before, then you enable a lot more commerce,

• 51:02Eric Seufert?

  right? And, and then, and then, you know, you support this like flourishing of people making this wide diverse variety of goods. You get rid of this idea of like the Pareto principle. We have to serve, you know, the, the 20% that supply 80% of the commerce. Well, no, now you can serve everybody and they can pay what they're willing to pay for these things. You reduce consumer surplus, sorry, you reduce consumer surplus, you just, you create this flourishing of, of, of everyone getting exactly what they want.

• 51:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:27Eric Seufert?

  Right? And that's the prosperous society. And so the way I frame it is kind of a reaction or like call, call it a conversation with John Kenneth Galbraith. He wrote The Affluent Society, right? But this was written in the post-war economy. It serves kind of as the degrowth or handbook. And my sense is like, you know, John Kenneth Galbraith is a brilliant man. I'm not saying he's wrong or he was wrong when he wrote the book, but I'm saying it just doesn't apply anymore. Right? He was talking, he had this idea of the dependence effect. Advertising actually is a way to whip up demand so we can maximize production because that was what he called this conventional wisdom at the time. You should be maximizing production. But the, the reality is in the time he wrote this book, 1958, you had people move into the suburbs, getting big houses, they, you know, the GI bill helped them buy these homes. You had the suburb, the, the idea of the suburbs was, was being deployed. And so, you know, people needed washing machines.

• 52:12Eric Seufert?

  They needed cars. They needed refrigerators for the first time. And so you had these big companies that made these mass market goods, they advertised in mass market media and they, and, and, and John Kenneth Galbraith's idea was like, well, that's just creating demand. The, the, there is no actual inherent demand for these things. It's creating it through advertising. And my point is the opposite.

• 52:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:30Eric Seufert?

  You know, we don't have this homogenized society anymore and we don't have people that need these homogenized goods anymore. And we have a lot more particular, specific media now. And we can reach people and advertise to them the things that they have demand for, for products that, that weren't economically viable prior to these systems, these distribution systems. And that is the prosperous society is being able to reach people to meet the demands that they have with the products that they couldn't access before with ads that they wouldn't otherwise see absent these systems. And so I think it's, it's, you know, I think it's a very, it's, my sense is like, you can make a very credible bull case that that's what AI delivers to us. And it's not about wiping out white collar labor because the reality is like, uh, that's going to create more jobs. And we're seeing that now.

• 53:13Eric Seufert?

  Like there's no, there's no justification for that skepticism. It just doesn't exist. We're seeing an increase in hiring, maybe not at the entry level. And you could discuss if there should be some intervention there, but my sense is like AI actually, if you look at the data, and there's a Financial Times article about this the other day, if you look at the data, it doesn't support that bear case. And so that bear case should be absolutely eliminated as something that even enters the conversation.

• 53:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I completely agree. That was an amazing speech. Yeah, no, I, I, I love this idea. We've been talking about it a bunch, just more customization, the long tail of commerce getting even longer. And it feels unfathomable because it's already like, you know, specific shirts that are just for you, designed and targeted to you on Facebook. We've seen that, but like it can in fact get more personalized.

• 54:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I mean, we've, we've seen this with like content and these platforms, right? They're very good at, they're very good at like find, they're, they, they, they are very good at serving you. They can serve you a video that has 50 views from a new channel on YouTube and you'll be like, that's interesting. I will watch this, right? And it, and it's a niche that is like so small, it never could have existed in the era of, you know, radio and television and, you know, seeing that, seeing that trend accelerate. It reminds me, I was, um, I, I was wanting, you know, that, you know, these like kids RC like ride on cars. I got like incredibly frustrated with these because I've tried a bunch of the different brands. I've tried spending like $800 on them and, you know, $400 and all of them just suck.

• 54:45Jordi Hays?

  Like the kids, even when you have the, you're driving the kid on the controller, the kid can still hit the gas and just like run into stuff. And, you know, it's just absolute chaos. I'm like, what is the version of this that is like, you know, uh, you know, the, the top of the line version of this? Cause I want to get it. I, I use these things a lot. And I searched around, couldn't find it anywhere. And then John just like.

• 55:05John Coogan?

  Within 24 hours, I got served exactly what he was looking for. I don't even know how, how it got served to me, but, uh, it was fantastic. Uh, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  Electric.

• 55:16John Coogan?

  Always, always a great time.

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  My favorite, my favorite conversations. Then when you're on, it makes me feel like we're on, we're on, we're actually, you know, on SportsCenter.

• 55:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:25Jordi Hays?

  Because most people that have talked about this stuff are not high energy. You're just like full on SportsCenter.

• 55:29John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 55:30Jordi Hays?

  It's amazing. I love it.

• 55:32John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations, all the progress and, uh, and the prosperous society. Go listen to it. It's a three hour, four part series and sign up for Mobile Dev Memo if you haven't already. Of course you should, but thank you so much for coming on the show, Eric. We'll talk to you soon.

• 55:44Eric Seufert?

  Take care.

• 55:45John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Let me tell you about public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They've got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. And our next guest is Bert from 1X. He's the founder and CEO. How are you doing? What is that behind you?

• 56:00Speaker 04

  Good.

• 56:01John Coogan?

  Welcome back to the show. Thank you so much. That is incredible.

• 56:04Speaker 04

  It's like my hand and then it's like Neo's hand.

• 56:05John Coogan?

  Yes. Introduce, uh, the launch today. What happened? Tell us about it.

• 56:10Speaker 04

  I mean, we've been cooking on this for quite a while, so super excited to finally show this to the world. And also it's just so exciting because we're so close to shipping now.

• 56:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:20Speaker 04

  So everyone's going to pick this apart anyway.

• 56:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:22Speaker 04

  So we don't need to be careful anymore and we can just like open it up. And to me, it's this beautiful machine that becomes almost more art than engineering, right? At this point. And, uh, yeah, we're, we're excited to show people what we've been cooking and, uh, excited to put it in people's hands. And I think also, uh, it has a special place in my heart because we're working on this problem for more than a decade. And, uh, one thing that Neo and 1X has really been pushing is how to use highly miniaturized, high-power motors and tendons to create these machines that mimic humans. And the hands is the kind of culmination of all that work, right? It's, uh, it's where all of the complexity comes together to, to meet the world.

• 57:04Speaker 04

  And hopefully we've created something here that can really remove that final barrier for how intelligent our models can become, right? Like so much of human, uh, intelligence comes from our ability to, to probe the world for truth and to really figure out how the world works through our hands.

• 57:20Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Take us through the full journey of developing hands for Neo. Uh, a lot of people in tech love to, you know, follow an Elon style playbook, just make the most simple version of something, simplify, simplify, simplify. This looks incredibly beautiful, but also incredibly complex. And so I want to understand like how you, how you got here, basically like version by version.

• 57:47Speaker 04

  So it is a very complicated hand, but in my opinion, it is the simplest version of it that exists that is good enough to do what needs to happen. So, uh, first of all, 1X is fully vertically integrated. So we do absolutely everything in-house and in our factory here in California where I'm sitting right now, uh, we do everything from designing the production processes to producing our own motors, our own tendons, the entire system, right? Sensors, electronics, everything in-house. And that allows us to iterate very, very fast because I do really believe in like, you have to have this first principles approach, right? To start with like, what, what am I trying to solve? Uh, we're quite lucky in that we have, uh, humans to look at with respect to how you solve this problem.

• 58:31Speaker 04

  Uh, nature did a pretty good job.

• 58:33John Coogan?

  So when you say you're, you're, you're looking at humans, uh, what type of training data are you using? What's useful? What are you discarding from just, there's a lot of hand videos on the internet, I'm sure, people doing all sorts of things. You can do tele-operation. You can have people wear gloves and do motion capture. You can do simulation.

• 58:51Jordi Hays?

  And X-ray.

• 58:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, X-ray. I mean, there's so many different ways, like you're using everything. Is there one, uh, one path that you found specifically, uh, valuable?

• 59:00Speaker 04

  So I think, um, actually it starts from like, starting with first principles, right? So, uh, 1X has always been about, we want to design robots that are safe so they can live and learn among people. But also because safety is what allows us to learn. So we probe the world for truth. And of course, if our fingers break while doing that, or we break whatever we're trying to touch, it doesn't work. So you need to design these beautiful, kind of like compliant, soft, um, systems that force can flow both ways because you're both seeing with your hands and acting with your hands. And that's really what this is all about. So like, how do you create that? And you kind of have to look at how nature works, like our muscle, nothing really moves fast. There's no gears, no nothing like this.

• 59:42Speaker 04

  So you've designed this from these first principles, but we go way deeper than that. I think what we haven't talked enough about yet, and we'll share more about this later is like how incredibly.

• 59:54Speaker 04

  Seriously, we take closing the gap towards the human. And it's not to look like a human. It's because we want the work system to work like a human. So even like if you look at Neo's hand behind me here, we worked so deeply on how do you make these fingers non-linearly just like be compliant exactly like a human finger? Because if you get all these details right, you can take all of the video that's out there on the internet. You can train huge world models based on this and it just works on a robot. And that's what the Von X World Model Lab is about. So to enable that general intelligence for robotics, you need to design the robot so that it interacts with the world exactly like a human. And then you want to do that with the least amount of complexity possible. And that's essentially what we have here. But of course, the complexity of that is pretty high because you're mimicking a human head.

• 1:00:38John Coogan?

  Let's talk about grip strength. We got grip strength testers here in the studio. Uh, is this an important benchmark? Clicking these together? How strong is the hand currently? Where do you want to go? Because it feels like there's a trade off there where if the hand, like the stronger you make the hand, the heavier, the more uh, the more dangerous it could potentially be at the same time. There's certain tasks that you expect a certain level of grip strength.

• 1:01:02Jordi Hays?

  Also, yeah, yeah, yeah, it'd be interesting to understand how often tasks come up in your daily life where you need like insane grip strength, right?

• 1:01:12John Coogan?

  It's pretty rare, I think, but certainly in, you know, industrial capacity or even around the home, picking things up, moving a chair. You need to be able to grab it without dropping it. It's a safety issue at the end of the day.

• 1:01:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it actually appears quite often, but you don't think that much about it because you don't do it for a long period. Like, yeah, you're not grasping that hard, but then something starts slipping and you tighten your grip or like you're actually using quite a bit of force. So the hand is roughly the same. Yeah, that's a good one. Uh, the hand is roughly the same strength as an average human. So, um, and that's, so you, I mean, it needs to be able to do the full capabilities for a robot, right? So the robot can deadlift 150 pounds. So the hands need to hold the bar of 150 pounds. Not because deadlifting is useful in everyday life, but because it's a good metric for like how capable we are. So we really worked hard to make that kind of power to weight ratio also about the same as human.

• 1:02:04Speaker 04

  So if you look at the general hands in the market right now, this thing is roughly three times uh, as high force as the other hands. And that is really also something that's going to enable a lot of new applications, right? Because in the end, your AI will be as smart as the diversity of the experiences that you have lived and experienced. Like diversity of data is directly correlated with uh, the intelligence of your model. And if you are as a third as strong as a human in your hands, there's a lot of tasks you just can't do.

• 1:02:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, I have one more. Um, it feels like you have jumped to the frontier of hands specifically. Uh, is, uh, I saw people joking, can I just buy the hand? Obviously they're making probably rude jokes, but um, is there a world where you partner with other robotics companies to sell a piece of your hardware, maybe just the hand to someone else that already has a wheeled robot, but it needs a hand? Is there a world where you're selling parts of your technology? Or do you want to be vertically integrated from end to end, the full experience?

• 1:03:11Speaker 04

  I think there, there is a world like this. Uh, I do think it's very important though that like, we wanna, we were, we're about to also launch Neo as a platform. Where we, we're going to invite everyone in to build on this. And having like a homogeneous platform that everyone is building on is so incredibly powerful because that doesn't exist today. And that really allows you to do benchmarks across systems like you have in the rest of the AI community. Um, but that being said, it's not a hill we're gonna die on. Like if the, if the collaborations are the right talks of collaborations, uh, we just want to make sure we can scale our manufacturing and get as many out there as possible and build the ecosystem and really give robotics all the love it deserves, right?

• 1:03:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:03:49Speaker 04

  We just want to accelerate the path.

• 1:03:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:51Jordi Hays?

  Amazing, uh, timeline around uh, shipping. What, what's, what's the, what's the update there? I know a bunch of people that are, that are in line that have, that have ordered, so uh, everyone's very eager.

• 1:04:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'll be kind to my team and not give you a specific date, but we have promised that we are going to ship this year and we will ship this year. So we're gonna keep that promise and it's gonna be incredibly exciting. And like I said, like the reason we can be so open, right? So you can just read into that. Like I said, the reason we can be so open is that this is about to ship. So people will pick it apart anyway. And I do think uh, this is going to be so big, right? Like as AI now becomes physical, it's really hard to understand what kind of impact that will have. Um, we're getting so much interest from, let's say, uh, wet labs that want to have their AI for science actually design, manufacture and run their experiments. Um, there's like hospitality, elderly care. You have the home that we're already working towards, like this is enormous surface area.

• 1:04:48Speaker 04

  And uh, it's going to happen a lot sooner than people think. And I think uh, right now it's just about really growing the pie and making sure that everyone has uh, platforms that they can work on to, to solve these hard problems.

• 1:05:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:02Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:05:03John Coogan?

  How will, I mean, the last question I have is like, like this, this feels like a uh, a technology that even after you solve development, design and the, the AI, the powers of all this, like it is much more gated by the real world and thus we would see like a slower takeoff. Like what we've seen with Waymo, it's, it's, you know, everywhere in San Francisco, but as you go around the world, you don't realize that cars can drive themselves. Um, whereas, you know, chatgpt.com was available in every country. And it was just like, the touring test is passed for everyone at the exact same time. And that's, that feels impossible in robotics in the physical world.

• 1:05:44John Coogan?

  But do you have a different view of it or am I roughly correct with that prediction?

• 1:05:50Speaker 04

  The ramp is going to be slower, but the total uptake is going to be way, way, way higher.

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:05:55Speaker 04

  Right? So like, if you think about, and I'm, I'm very bullish on this, like, um, I think it's just a couple of, two to three years away. But even if it's a decade away, like robots will build robots.

• 1:06:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:05Speaker 04

  And we're already working on this in a factory, but they won't just build the robots. They'll build the data centers, the chip fab, the energy infrastructure, get into mining and refining. And this full automation of the physical substrate that enables everything, including intelligence. That can only happen with robotics.

• 1:06:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:21Speaker 04

  And that's going to look like this, right?

• 1:06:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:22Speaker 04

  So you, you need, you need to kind of like enter that curve. And I think the uptake ramp is going to be slower in the beginning, but way, way, way higher as you kind of like hit vertical on the curve.

• 1:06:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Speaker 04

  And I think this is also where it gets extremely interesting, right? I'm back to like, how, how are we going to solve some of the remaining problems in science? How are we going to create an actual true abundance of labor across society?

• 1:06:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Speaker 04

  Um, this is only possible if you automate the physical substrate. So it's going to take slightly longer, but it's also worth it because the impact is so tremendous.

• 1:06:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it's, it still should be an exponential curve because once you get to the point where uh, you know, five robots can make one more robot in a month, then you wind up compounding and the exponential just grows and grows and grows. Fascinating, very exciting times. Congratulations and thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:07:13Jordi Hays?

  I'm super excited you guys shared this. You guys continue to have the, the best aesthetics in robotics by, by a hundred X.

• 1:07:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, it makes me feel more, much more C3PO than uh, Terminator, which I think is the right, the right direction to go.

• 1:07:28Jordi Hays?

  The hand's a little Terminator.

• 1:07:30John Coogan?

  The hand's a little Terminator, but yeah.

• 1:07:32Speaker 04

  What should not underestimate how important it's going to be to do this together with people in the sense of like, adoption needs to uh, come through making everyone used to this technology, right?

• 1:07:43John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:07:44Speaker 04

  Uh, we, we want to make sure everyone understands how helpful this can be and really make sure that we don't, don't hit any barriers where like this becomes something that people don't want because it's such a great opportunity. And we want to make sure we can accelerate the path.

• 1:07:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, VR, uh, you know, VR was useful in, in certain pockets, but it was awkward and it was never adopted. And it was always seen as like this, this like, uh, yeah, very like uh, niche technology. And I, I think the, uh, the aesthetics are underrated, so congratulations on nailing them. Thank you so much for coming on the show. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:08:15Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff.

• 1:08:16John Coogan?

  Have a great day.

• 1:08:17Speaker 04

  Awesome. Thank you guys.

• 1:08:17John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. And we have Tebow joining in just 40 minutes or 30 minutes to give us the update on 5.6 and what's going on in Codex, of course. But first we have Josh Lindgren from CAA. He's the head of podcast development here to give us an update on all things.

• 1:08:44Jordi Hays?

  Suit it up.

• 1:08:45John Coogan?

  Podcasting, suited up, looking good, Josh. How are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:08:49Speaker 05

  I'm doing well. You guys are always looking good as well.

• 1:08:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:08:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, great to have you on the show. Great to hang in France just a couple of weeks ago. Um, give uh, an introduction on yourself, how and when you got into podcasts and then we'll talk about where we are now.

• 1:09:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's been a wild ride. Uh, 12 years for me, I started representing podcasts 12 years ago. I was a music agent at a boutique music agency in Seattle booking tours for indie rock bands. And I used to listen to podcasts all day while I was routing tours and had the idea that maybe podcasts could have agents. Started cold emailing podcasters and uh, was surprised to discover that there was a business there for me. Uh, and very surprised in that time to discover that there wasn't really much of a business infrastructure yet. Uh, so there was a lot of opportunity. Um, spent the next several years signing podcasters uh, within that agency. Uh, and then in 2018, I met with 11 different agencies and ended up joining CAA.

• 1:09:49Speaker 05

  Uh, started the podcast department here. Uh, and we have a great team, uh, people focused on podcasts. Uh, the podcast department is within our greater um, creators department. Uh, that works with all kinds of different creators like yourselves. Uh, and um, it's been a really wild ride. And when I got into podcasting, the estimates I've seen is that the global podcast advertising industry was worth about $45 million. And Owl and Code has put out a report that last year it was worth 9.2 billion, so. You know, I I I expected there was going to be a lot of growth in this space. It seemed like a great growth area. Thank you. But I never expected this level of growth. I mean, it's been a really tremendous wild ride.

• 1:10:30Jordi Hays?

  I had started working with some podcasts around the same time, a little bit later, I think. You were 2014, is that?

• 1:10:39Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:10:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I I probably started working with with podcasts in like 2016. But even then, I would meet a show that today was probably like a $10 million a year business. And they would have zero revenue. But they would have this like rabid fan base and maybe they'd have one sponsor, which was just someone in the audience that reached out and was like, hey, can I send you some some free stuff if if you talk about it? And they'd be like, OK. And then and then, you know, fast forward to today. Those kind of properties are are super valuable. What what are you seeing? What are you seeing now? Like, what's coming down? What's coming down the pipeline? Net net new shows? You know, we've covered a lot of the evolution of, you know, formats, how podcasting obviously

• 1:11:24Jordi Hays?

  interacts with with live streaming in our case. But what do you see coming down the pipeline?

• 1:11:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, you know, it's been clear for a few years now that video is going to be a bigger part of podcasting, and we're really seeing that come to fruition in the past year. It's like a major inflection point right now. Now, to be clear, like, it's not that videos replacing audio. Both can continue to exist together. There was a recent study from Edison that said that the majority of podcast consumers do both. Sometimes they do audio, sometimes they do video, which that's my experience. I live in LA, so I have a long commute. And so I I like listening to podcasts in the car, but I also like watching podcasts at home and in the office, you know? But it it's created a really interesting moment in podcasting where there are some things that are fundamentally different about digital video versus digital audio.

• 1:12:13Speaker 05

  For one thing, advertising looks really different, right? The ways you can integrate with brands looks very different versus the audio space tends to be much more dominated by your 30-second pre-rolls and your 60-second mid-rolls and so on. The video space tends to have a lot more custom integration with advertisers. And it also, discovery looks really different in video. You know, in the audio space, in terms of breaking stuff through, there's a lot more spend that is required in sort of the same way that you might market a TV show or a movie, right? Whereas in video, there's a lot more clipping, there's really seamless integration into social media. And so if you're trying to break through with a new podcast in 2026, you should have

• 1:12:57Speaker 05

  a really strong reason why you're not a video podcast, or else you should probably have a video podcast.

• 1:13:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Somewhat related to the video podcasting thing, a big trend out of Cannes that Colin Samir and others were talking about was that many podcasts are sort of reformulating as shows. We we we've done this, where we think of this more as a show than a podcast, because it's a live show, there's a lot else going on. Of course, like, it's available as a podcast. And then you also think of like Subway Takes, it's Emmy nominated now, and it's a it's very much a show, but it's also an interview that's sort of like a podcast. And I'm wondering how you're perceiving the definitions changing, evolving, just this idea of what does it actually take to to deliver a show as opposed to just a podcast

• 1:13:47John Coogan?

  in the modern era?

• 1:13:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm with you. I think that's the right thinking, to not try and put it too much in a box, right? Because the lines are just getting so blurry between what's a podcast, what's a TV show, what's a series of reels, right? What's a YouTube channel? And your case, a live stream? I do think that the word podcast is a bit of utility for me, just because it's sort of like, I know it when I see it, right? People talk about podcasts, people like podcasts, but I mean, truly, the line is really blurry. I mean, you know, I think we talked a bit in Cannes about Oprah's podcast, which just moved over to Amazon, right? And, I mean, Oprah is the queen of television, right? And and this is where she's putting her energy. And, you know, who's to say, like, if you're watching it on Prime Video versus if you're

• 1:14:33Speaker 05

  watching it on your phone, is it a podcast if you're watching it one place and it's a TV show if you're watching it the other? I mean, I don't know if it necessarily matters, but I think that it's an amazing time to be a media consumer, because media is meeting us where we are.

• 1:14:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about the landscape of these podcast distribution deals that are happening. Pat McAfee with ESPN, Oprah you mentioned is doing one. There's Netflix is entering the space. Spotify went with Joe Rogan very early on. Some of these platforms just sort of get the video podcast for free, like YouTube is, you know, the default for most creators. But what are the larger companies looking for when they want to go deeper with a creator who might just not be ready to graduate from the self-serve options? Or maybe they don't have a self-serve option if it's linear TV or a platform like Netflix?

• 1:15:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's funny. I mean, it's a really unique marketplace, because, as you kind of overview, the different buyers in my space are just drastically different in terms of their business models, you know? So it's really hard to compare apples and oranges when you're looking at one of our major buyers, say, is Sirius XM, right? Has a really significant satellite radio business. Comparing them to Amazon, right? One of the biggest companies in the world and primarily, you know, doing e-commerce, right? They both have drastically think different things they need out of it, let alone now you have Netflix and Hulu entering the space, right? That they have different KPIs in terms of what they're looking for. So I think part of the the challenge and the joy of representation in this space is understanding who the different buyers are and what their needs are, and understanding

• 1:16:11Speaker 05

  your client, the talent, right? And what they want, you know? And it's just, there's no one deal that makes sense for everyone, and there's no one-size-fits-all in podcasting, which I think is great ultimately, because it means we can paint with different paintbrushes for different types of shows.

• 1:16:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:27Jordi Hays?

  Can you, do you feel like you can identify if somebody's going to be a star based on their first-ever episode?

• 1:16:35Speaker 05

  Well, I think that I I think that taste is really important, you know? And for me, like, I will take bets on stuff that I think is fundamentally good. I mean, when I was a music agent, I was picking bands based on the bands that I liked, and I just had to hope that other people would like those bands as well at some point. And I I still believe that, you know, in podcasting. I think that there there is room for taste. There's certainly stuff that I don't represent that has that does good business, but it just wasn't right for me, and that's fine. You know, I think that as soon as you divorce, as soon as you divorce your love of the medium from the business, then what's the point, right? Like, if we're if we're just here to make money, maybe we should be working in finance or in tech or something, right?

• 1:17:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe we should all be wearing suits.

• 1:17:20Speaker 05

  There you go.

• 1:17:22Jordi Hays?

  Look, look at me, I'm just here to have fun.

• 1:17:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are you thinking about live streaming and maybe more pure-play live streaming? I'm thinking about the video game creators, the ninjas, the the shrouds, the folks who spend 12 hours, eight hours a day, live streaming, political commentary, business analysis, anything. It's such a different business model, such a different community, sometimes much tighter audiences, but incredibly engaged. Is that a muscle you want to build? Is that something you're thinking about, growing? What what trends are you seeing there generally?

• 1:18:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think the live streaming space is fascinating, right? And obviously, this has been happening for a while, but I think the moment we're talking about of the merging of all the different things is really playing out for live streaming, too. For yourselves and for other shows, you mentioned political shows, where people need real-time news. I don't think your fans want to wait an entire week necessarily to get your take on something when it develops. It's a lot of work. I think you guys know the amount of time and energy you have to put into doing this, right? It's really impressive, and I applaud you for it. But it really creates a lot of different opportunities. I think something else that you guys are doing really well is that you do the live stream, but you also cut this up into audio episodes and video episodes on YouTube and so on.

• 1:18:45Speaker 05

  So there's so many different ways to reach your audience. And I think as a creator today, the more that you can be flexible to meet your audience where they are, the better chances you're going to have of succeeding and breaking through. So I I love to see what you're doing, and I think that you're on the tip of the spear right now in terms of the new type of experimentation that's happening in the streaming space.

• 1:19:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10John Coogan?

  Talk to me about how you're thinking about working with a celebrity or group of celebrities that wants to get into podcasting. It feels like there was this crossover moment where podcasting was a backwater, then it became cool. Maybe it was around COVID, but we got a whole bunch of celebrities crossing over. Some of them did extremely well, won awards, Smartless is huge. But it feels similar to celebrities launching brands where there's still going to be a power law. It's not just, it's obviously a huge advantage to have an audience already, but not every celebrity is going to have a hit podcast and vice versa. Not every podcaster

• 1:19:51John Coogan?

  is going to work on TV or wind up starring in movies. How are you assessing the reverse transition from Hollywood or TV or films coming over into the podcasting world successfully?

• 1:20:07Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think there needs to be a reason to be for any given podcast. There was a level of experimentation, like you mentioned around COVID, where a lot of folks launched podcasts that maybe didn't pan out. And I think maybe some of those had to do with the reason behind the podcast and the idea of the podcast wasn't as sought out, right? I think a good example of it working would be Julie Weidreif's Wiser Than Me, where that was driven by her desire to hear from older women that are largely ignored in our culture, right? So she had a reason that she wanted to make it. It wasn't like she would just come into this space because, you know, some enterprising agent, myself, told her that she should make a podcast and

• 1:20:49Speaker 05

  she could make money, right? She was there for a different reason. The things I see succeeding have that reason behind them. I mean, you mentioned Smartless, right? Another COVID, you know, project that began of COVID and it came together because the three of them wanted to hang out, right? And they wanted to create something for people who were locked at home, you know, and that like genuine friendship between them is the basic building block of what it is, you know? So a lot of what I do when I talk to celebrities about podcasting is try and get to the core of what it is that they want to create and what their purpose is for coming. And then they can craft all the business and everything else around that like central seed of an idea.

• 1:21:28John Coogan?

  What's the secret to a successful podcast tour? I mean, back to Smartless, I feel like they've been extremely successful at engaging the community off of the internet, which is interesting because they started off the internet, they went to the internet, then they go back into the live tour. But what makes for a successful podcast tour?

• 1:21:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think that your relationship with your audience is so strong in podcasting. And it depends a little bit by format. You know, I think the level of engagement for more format-driven shows, maybe a little bit less than more personality-driven shows. But something that I saw really early on getting into this space and coming from a touring background, I was booking tours for podcasts. And, you know, one of the first live podcasts that I went to was an early client of mine, Stuff You Should Know, which I signed by emailing info@stuffyoushouldknow. It was a really different time. But then I went and saw them do a show in Vancouver and they had a Q and A at the end of the show. People were getting up to the microphone and this woman gets up to the microphone. She's like 22, looks normal and nice. As soon as she gets on the mic, she is bawling

• 1:22:33Speaker 05

  because she is talking to Josh and Chuck from Stuff You Should Know. And it was a real like lightbulb moment for me, right? Because that's an educational podcast, right? But for her, she was explaining on the microphone that they spent so much time in her ears that she has this relationship with them. And it was like she was finally meeting these friends that she's had for so long. And I think that's, that's when you get people who are not just willing to buy a ticket, but to travel four states over to make it to a live show. And, you know, we, we look at data for download performance in a market before and after a live show. And we see, you know, in some cases, like a niche show can have a really solid touring business because they're converting like 50% of their listeners in the market are turning out for these live shows. And we've done analysis

• 1:23:18Speaker 05

  too, where we look at zip codes of ticket buyers. And the number of people who are traveling long distances to come to these is pretty incredible. So, you know, I think that's the key thing is if you have that relationship with your audience, if you let your personality be a part of the podcast, people are going to want to come out for that.

• 1:23:38John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about international, just like the puzzle? Because if your business is, if your podcast is aligned to specific products that are maybe only sold in the United States, it can be hard to monetize. You might need to go on a tour and the international tour can be more expensive. At the same time, I'm sure from musicians that you've worked with, you've solved the puzzle of what an international world tour looks like that is successful. So how do you think like the, the, the future eras tour of the podcasting world will play out?

• 1:24:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think that the international touring is, I mean,

• 1:24:20John Coogan?

  It feels like it's early. Am I right in that? Or am I just not aware of, there was already the eras tour of podcasting and like Smartless did it and I just wasn't paying attention to their, their trip to Japan or something?

• 1:24:30Speaker 05

  I would say there's only one eras tour, but you, but you are seeing a bit of international touring happening already. I mean, you know, many years ago, we sent Stuff You Should Know to Australia and it was such a wildly successful tour. We see a lot of American podcasts doing the UK, a little bit in Europe. I mean, one of the challenges is when you're crossing over into markets that are primarily not English language speaking markets where you might have listeners, but you might have a different type of relationship with them. That can be a real challenge, but especially going from one English language market to the next, it can really work. But you do see audiences becoming really segmented between different markets. If you look on any given day at the charts in the UK and the charts in the US, they're probably going to look pretty different. There's going to be crossover

• 1:25:13Speaker 05

  for sure. But a lot of different stuff changes out, even though we speak the same language and understand each other very well. It's just different sensibilities from one market to the next, you know? But, I mean, you mentioned advertisers, right? The US ad market is a big leader in podcasting, right? Because this is a consumer that a lot of brands want to reach. And so, you know, as we've built our business internationally and signed podcasters from all over the world, you know, there's still at this point a real value into having a foothold in the United States in terms of reaching audience. I think one of the most exciting future change areas in podcasting is going to be some, seeing more of these markets come alive. And if I was, you know, an investor looking for a place to start

• 1:25:56Speaker 05

  up, I would be looking at India right now, for instance, you know, right? Whereas there's just a little bit less saturation and more opportunity for extreme growth. Australia, I think is a really interesting market. I made it out to Sydney last year for South by Southwest Sydney. And it reminded me a lot of the podcast market in the US 10 years ago, 12 years ago, when I got started. And so I think there is a lot more that's going to come online for those markets as the brands locally and the advertisers in those areas start to realize that this is a great way to spend money and to reach audience. But it was an education process in the US to get brands to spend here and trust this market. And it'll be an education process at a market by market basis.

• 1:26:41John Coogan?

  Last question. How are you talking to, or I don't even know if you can talk about this, but folks who work for large media companies, they have been around for the pivot to video. We're going to put you on camera. We're going to set you up with a podcast. They build an audience and they're ready to venture out on their own. We've had Ashley Vance on the show, Joanna Stern, Eric Newcomer. There's been a whole host of these folks who sort of grew audiences and learned the skills of content creation, whether it's at Vice or Vox or any of these platforms. And then they go independent. If you're having

• 1:27:22John Coogan?

  a conversation with them, what, how are you talking to them about why they might want to do that or why they might not want to do that?

• 1:27:30Speaker 05

  Yeah. So every podcaster, every creator is an entrepreneur, right? Which can be really scary if you're used to getting a paycheck every single, you know, bi-weekly from a big media company. But it's high risk, high reward, right? Because once you launch your own show, you own that audience. And no longer are you at the whims of, you know, the executives that you work for. And actually capturing a smaller audience can be more lucrative for you because you're capturing more of the revenue that that audience drives, right? This is a conversation I have with folks all the time who are at legacy media companies trying to decide what their next steps look like, especially in this really fast changing landscape where some folks are forced out necessarily when they necessarily want to

• 1:28:13Speaker 05

  make that choice right away. So it can be a really scary transition. I'm very empathetic for people who are going through it. I don't begrudge anyone who decides that they want to keep working in legacy media. I don't think that it's doom and gloom for legacy media, right? I think that there's still room for great journalists on television and on radio, print journalists and so on. But for folks who are entrepreneurial and want to build their own thing and own their audience, there's incredible upside and opportunity.

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's exciting times. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 1:28:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to have you on.

• 1:28:46John Coogan?

  Have a great rest.

• 1:28:46Speaker 05

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 1:28:48Jordi Hays?

  The godfather of podcasting.

• 1:28:50John Coogan?

  It's true. It's true. We will talk to you later. Have a good one.

• 1:28:53Speaker 05

  Thank you so much.

• 1:28:54John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Up next, we have Jeff Morgan from Ollama. He's the co-founder and CEO. It's his first appearance for the massive series B. Jeff, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:29:13Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. Doing great. So excited to be here. Big fan of the show as well.

• 1:29:16John Coogan?

  Thank you. Please introduce yourself and your company. I want to get to the bottom of how the hell you got 85, 450, 500 using your product. But first, introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:29:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm Jeff. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Ollama. Ollama is the largest network for developers to access open models. You can download Ollama, get connected right away to open models like GLM5.2. Or you can download them locally and run them right on your laptop for more kind of edge, low latency use cases.

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  Okay. Tell us about the round. Jordy's warming up the gong. How much did you raise? Who from?

• 1:29:49Speaker 02

  65 million. The lead was Tomasz Tungus and he had existing investors participate too, like

• 1:29:57John Coogan?

  Awesome. Fantastic. So, tons of GitHub stars. Why, how does this fit into like the, the value add to businesses versus just downloading the model themselves from, from an open platform, getting the, the actual, the weights themselves, deploying things, or just going with an API? Like, how are you talking to Fortune 500 customers about how you will actually improve their experience with something like GLM 5.2?

• 1:30:31Speaker 02

  You know, the power of open source is how fast it can build trust with developers around the world. And it ends up a large number of developers work at, work at companies that work at, you know, a lot of those in the Fortune 500 or Global 10,000. And open source has a special, you know, capability where you can deploy it in your own environment and not have to think about a ton of security and compliance. And what that means is, look, like you can take an open model, which already has open weights, and that's kind of why open models are perfect for these use cases, and run them without any approval really as a developer, and, and get real successful results, all without, you know, having to expose your data, or, you know, even incur big costs. So, you know, that's really been the driving force of being able to get into these large businesses.

• 1:31:15Speaker 02

  And to your point, look, like, you know, just the weights being open isn't enough. You need a way to deploy them, to run them, to make sure it works on your hardware. For the cloud models, you know, you really need to make sure that you're running them in a secure environment where your company can access them. You know, a lot of, a lot of businesses we talk to, especially Fortune 500, they need these open models hosted in the US and in Europe. And that's just a requirement, and it's, it's a need they have. And so, you know, put, put that all together, it's so surprising and incredible how fast it can get adopted.

• 1:31:43John Coogan?

  So what does, I mean, you say you're, you're talking to these Fortune 500 companies, but I imagine that the fact that you have so many GitHub stars means that there's a lot of self-serve activity. When does a customer cross over to an enterprise relationship with you?

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, generally, it starts with the individual dev, right? They bring it, they bring it to work. A lot of them use it, you know, for personal productivity, and they bring it to their team. And once you're using a team, it's not a one, one-person story anymore, right? There, there's a team there, right? And everything from security to technical architects, IT teams, you know, and, and these folks, they, they need not just a product that's really, you know, easy to use and self-serve, but they, they need a solution that really kind of end-to-end covers things like safety and monitoring and logging and data, uh, storage and protection. Like, these are all components of a successful, you know, agent deployment. And so, you know, that's when it becomes a multi-party environment. And, you know, as we know, like, that's when you need a solution. And, and on our side, you know, we need a team to be there to help, help those customers.

• 1:32:39Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what set of models are you most excited about for the back half of this year in the open weights world?

• 1:32:47Speaker 02

  I mean, I think with GLM 5.2, we just had another massive moment in open models. And, you know, Alama by far, at least from what we know publicly, is the highest token volume of accessing GLM 5.2. And so I'm excited for that, because I think there's going to be a series of new models that are long horizon, they're focused on these really hard agent use cases, and there's going to unlock so many use cases in enterprise that, you know, the prior generation of open models couldn't. You know, and the gap between open models and the frontier models is shrinking. And so, you know, I, I think at that point, you were able to get to these incredible use cases that just weren't there, you know, three or four months ago.

• 1:33:23John Coogan?

  Take me through some of the game theory in the open source community around those rumors that we heard that there might be export controls on open weights models coming out of China soon. If, if, if we stop getting frontier or, or near frontier, uh, open source models from China for free, uh, is, is the next step that you would see an American company step up, Nvidia, or maybe Meta changes their strategy? How are you thinking the, uh, the open source ecosystem would evolve if China changes their strategy?

• 1:34:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, we like to work backwards from, from our customers. What are they trying to do? And they, for, by and large, you know, they may have preference on specific, you know, geographies where the models are from, but by and large, they're adopting both, right? They're in some mix of open models and frontier models as well. And to your point, like, I think the US models are absolutely stepping up. They're incredible. The Nematron 3 Ultra model is just amazing and is able to accomplish some of these long-running agent tasks. Um, and then also, you know, one of the most downloaded models on Alama is a US model. It's the Gemma models. And, you know, this is like a super amazing team at DeepMind that's putting them out. The new ones are, you know, agent-ready, like, they can run coding agent loops, they can accomplish much harder tasks. And so, look, I think it's really up to the customer.

• 1:34:44Speaker 02

  If they want a US, uh, entirely US-built model designed from scratch, that's there. Um, if they want a Chinese model, which is often the case, they, it's less about where the model's from, it's like, where does it run? And is it running next to your data, which, you know, a lot, you can deploy it locally? And then are you able to deploy with safeguards? And it ends up, a lot of customers, they're not looking for like where the model's from, they just want to make sure that they're running it properly and safely. So I think, you know, they can have an understanding of what's going, you know, what could go wrong, but what could go right. And, and, uh, there's a lot of safety tooling that can be deployed to help with that. They have tons of appetite for that.

• 1:35:19John Coogan?

  What do you see your role as in terms of benchmarking, reality checking, vibe checking, uh, different models, helping enterprises that work with you to make the right decision, pick the right tool for the job?

• 1:35:34Speaker 02

  You know, our job fundamentally is to connect the nine million developers on Alama to the right model for the right task. And that's, that's step one. And so just by having that sheer volume and that, this critical mass of devs, we're able to already understand just from, you know, our community, which models are performing right for the right tasks. That, that's a starting point. I think from there, it's really collaborating with the model labs, and we're launching partners with every major model lab, and just making sure that, you know, the best parts of the model are shining through, through Alama, um, including what are they capable for, what are their benchmarks, how can customer, customers benchmark it for their own use cases? It all comes down to a lot of software tooling and, and, and, you know, a community and a network, and that's, you know, what we've built, and, and it's what makes Alama special

• 1:36:19Speaker 02

  for developers.

• 1:36:20John Coogan?

  Got it. $65 million raised, is this, like, what are you using the money for? Because you don't have the crazy training costs, because you're more of a gateway. Is this headcount office?

• 1:36:31Jordi Hays?

  2,000 BDRs.

• 1:36:33John Coogan?

  Is that what you're hiring?

• 1:36:35Jordi Hays?

  No, it feels like you have also like bottoms-up adoption with developers, so you maybe need a lighter sort of like sales force to, to actually capitalize on that.

• 1:36:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, what, what do the next 12 to 18 months look like for you?

• 1:36:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. Look, we, we put out a, you know, on our site, hey, we're launching a Teams plan. We were inundated with thousands of teams that want to use Alama. Yeah. And, you know, that's going to, that, that's the core mission. It's like, look, we've got this critical mass of devs, how do we go solve problems for businesses? Back to what we were just talking about. And, um, that takes a team, so obviously we're expanding. We got here with 14 people, uh, to, to a company of this magnitude. But there's a much bigger team to go around the market. And then, um, of course, you know, one thing Alama does very special for the larger open models is we host it on US and European servers.

• 1:37:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:37:21Speaker 02

  A lot of the consumption of open models is going to China or is going to servers where it's, there's, there's no data retention guarantees, and that's so important for companies. And so that's a compute, uh, investment we're making and really enabling, you know, every business in the world to access the most powerful models on compute that's secure and safe in the US or Europe.

• 1:37:41Jordi Hays?

  Will we ever settle the debate on whether the gap between, uh, open and frontier models is closing or widening? Because depending on what sort of group somebody is a part of, they tend to have one, one view or, or the other. But, but I think in, in reality, it's probably always kind of going like, going like this to some degree, but what's your view?

• 1:38:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you're right. It's oscillating. I mean, I'm a daily GLM 5.2 user through Alama right now, and it's replaced 80% of my coding work. And I think a lot, that's going to be true of a lot of customers. As for the gap, like, to your point, I think it, it may widen, it may shrink. I think overall, it's shrinking. But, but ultimately, customers are going to use a mix. And, you know, for the bulk of their use cases, they're going to reach for these open models, because they can tune them to be much faster, they're obviously much cheaper. Um, and there's always going to be use cases where you need the frontier. I don't know if we'll ever settle the debate. I think ultimately, the gap will, will continue to shift. I think that's what makes it exciting, right? It's like, every, every three months, we're able to do something new, we're able to run better agents, and quickly, open models will catch up and really enable a whole wave

• 1:38:50Speaker 02

  of customers that want to run open models to do that, you know, in their own environment, or to customize it to the point where like, they can even make it more, more powerful. The last thing I'll say too is, you know, customers are readily taking these open models and customizing them, and they're actually getting better results often than, you know, just a, a stock frontier model. And, you know, I think we're just at the beginning of that transformation.

• 1:39:10John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, congratulations on the progress.

• 1:39:12Jordi Hays?

  Awesome to meet you.

• 1:39:13John Coogan?

  And the round.

• 1:39:13Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the team.

• 1:39:14John Coogan?

  For coming on the show. And have a great rest of your week. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 1:39:18Speaker 02

  Awesome. Thanks.

• 1:39:19Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:39:20John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows your business, lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Jordy, there is a story. Oh, wait, we actually have our next guest.

• 1:39:34Jordi Hays?

  Guest of honor.

• 1:39:35John Coogan?

  Right now. Tebow from OpenAI, he's the head of core products and platform. Tebow, how are you doing? Congratulations on the launch.

• 1:39:43Speaker 06

  Hey, thanks. Doing well?

• 1:39:45John Coogan?

  Give us the highlights.

• 1:39:46Jordi Hays?

  How'd you sleep last night?

• 1:39:49Jordi Hays?

  Do you sleep? Do you sleep at all?

• 1:39:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, I do sleep. Currently, we have like, you know, maybe five to 10 war rooms going. So, you know, it's like a little bit, uh, it's intense. It's a sport.

• 1:39:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:39:59Speaker 06

  Uh, you know, but we heard you.

• 1:40:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, and, and you guys like to make it hard on yourselves by launching every, every time there's a launch day, it's like, you know, 15 new things. So it makes sense that there's, you know, as close to equal amount of war rooms.

• 1:40:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's start with 5.6 Sol, though. I want to, uh, I want, I want you to identify for me, like, what is sticking out? What are the most, uh, cutting edge capabilities that really stuck out to you? The latest unlocks from the frontier of the actual model. Then we can go into, uh, Codex and Voice Model and everything else, and how things come together and how these are used. But first, just from the raw model capability, uh, what was most impressive to you? What was most exciting?

• 1:40:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's, it's, it's actually really hard to answer that question, Chris, because when we were looking at the benchmarks, trying it, you know, we were just like blown away by it all. It's just better at coding, better at cyber, better at everything like long context, producing documents, better at, you know, having taste, website generation. Um, and then for the first time, we also really cracked, I think, uh, multi-agent setups, uh, which we shipped us, uh, the Ultra mode. And when you just see that going and, you know, you've got like eight agents collaborating together, communicating, and, you know, getting the same work done like faster, it's just, you just feel like, wow, you know, this is like another way to scale, test time compute. Um, but overall, just amazing workhorse, feels way, way better than 5.5 and anything else we've used so far.

• 1:41:23John Coogan?

  So, uh, in January, there was a project that was getting some attention called Gastown, uh, talking about all these different sub-agents. You had Polcats and all sorts of different abstractions. It felt, uh, highly technical, and it seems like Sol Ultra is a way to abstract that away. Is that, is that deliberate? Is, is there, uh, I guess the question more broadly is like, is the level of like prompt engineering, are we, are we leaving that era? Or, or will there always be some cycle of, uh, you know, uh, if you get really good at using Sol Ultra, you'll have a better experience because you'll be able to give more fine-tuned, fine-grained, uh, prompt and, and direction to the model?

• 1:42:07Speaker 06

  So one thing that you see as well with Sol is its uncanny ability at, you know, understanding human intent. And, you know, you need shorter prompts. You don't need to explain yourself in that much detail. And it's sort of like, you know, just gets it. And then goes and like, does like a very complex thing. Um, you know, you saw the prompt for like post-training, the Luna model, which is like super crisp, uh, and then it does that, like, but it actually worked for many days.

• 1:42:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:29Speaker 06

  Um, and this is also like with us launching ChatGPT work. It's, it's about making it accessible for everyone. And, you know, you don't need to have like a PhD to use this model. It's just like, it should just behave like, just like another, a super, super smart human and, you know, just kind of get you in the moment. And that's what we're striving for. Of course, if, you know, you really push it to the limit, you're always going to find new setups. And this is like also a very exciting space. You know, we continue to develop like also Codex in the open source. Um, and then we're seeing like, you know, all sorts of, um, all sorts of novel ways to set up these agents and models so that, you know, you can get results in like cybersecurity and like, you know, all these other more nuanced and complex things.

• 1:43:12Speaker 06

  But for everyone, you know, you should just feel like, you know, a ton of power out of the box.

• 1:43:15Jordi Hays?

  Mm-hmm. Talk about what was important at the product layer. Fundamentally, what I think people want out of products is to just be able to talk to their computer like a really smart coworker and be able to get things done. But then you're dealing with, you know, so many users over here, millions of users over here, trying to combine it and condense it into something that's simple. And obviously, simple things end up being, you know, exceptionally complex to actually, uh, create.

• 1:43:43Speaker 06

  Yeah. So if you look at it, it's deceptively simple. You can open it on your phone. It's ChatGPT work. You just toggle it. And then there you go. You connect it to the things that you already have, your email, calendar, you know, your docs. Um, and then suddenly you're like, okay, wait, I can ask it to process all of this information that I had over there, that I had to manually, you know, like do all these things myself, and it can just do all of that. And it's just like on the go and it's like on your phone in the ChatGPT app you already have installed. I mean, that's the, that's the beauty of keeping it very simple. At the end of the day, we want it to be just a normal conversation, uh, between you and the agent. This is also why we decided to, you know, ship it like just in ChatGPT.

• 1:44:24John Coogan?

  Uh, talk about progress in computer use. Uh, what is actually driving progress there? Is this just something that sort of comes for free with scale and, and model advances? Or is there deliberate data collection that's happening and some sort of flywheel that's unlocking new capabilities in computer use?

• 1:44:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, we've done a lot of effort, bespoke effort on Windows, Mac and like mobile computer use, also like phone use as well. And so there's an entire team working on this. It doesn't just come for free. But what does come for free is like every time we push the efficiency frontier and the model gets like, you know, more efficient, like at thinking and acting, and it just, you know, costs less tokens and it gets compressed in time, it also gets better at computer use because it reduces the latency and reduces the cost. And so the two compounds, like, you know, we have a lot of gains that we're getting from, you know, also like visual understanding. And every time, you know, it improves, like the model just gets more precise. So it doesn't have to correct itself. And it's like, maybe it misclose the button and they're just like, oh, it's like, wait, I have to redo that. So every time it's like more accurate and, you know, more token efficient, computer is definitely benefits from it.

• 1:45:29Speaker 06

  And when you compare it to 5.5, it's like, you know, it's just really like three times faster. So, you know, we're not at all hitting a wall here in like how fast we can do computer use.

• 1:45:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can you talk about how the role of member of technical staff is evolving? Because you're, you're, you're talking about, uh, Sol Ultra going off and working for days at a time. And at a certain point, your job sort of evolves to, if you have a launch tomorrow, don't kick off a task that takes four days, even if the model's capable of it and will deliver something great in four days, you need it tomorrow. And so you have to size your workloads appropriately. How is the, how, how are you thinking about, uh, sizing work and, and actually delegating the right, the right chunk of work at this stage?

• 1:46:19Speaker 06

  Yeah. I find your question very interesting because, um, it actually highlights like a shift in our thinking over, you know, since we had 5.6es. You don't really instruct it necessarily, you know, for a task that's going to take four days. It's like, you know, you tell it all the information that you have. So, you know, you're like, hey, I have a launch tomorrow.

• 1:46:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:36Speaker 06

  Right? And then it's like keep track of the time and like understand that, you know, the PR needs to land like, you know, by midnight or like by 2:00 AM. It will just like reason over it.

• 1:46:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:46:43Speaker 06

  You're not the one that needs to manage like, you know, all of that extraneous like complexity.

• 1:46:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:47Speaker 06

  Um, and so that's it. What you're seeing as well, it's like, you know, your relationship with the agent like changes over time as it gets more intelligent. And you're just like, oh yeah, I can just talk to you like, you know, another, like, you know, super smart, super smart human.

• 1:46:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:46:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, talk about the efficiency of the model, what work went into that, why, why it matters? You know, what kind of conversations you're having with, you know, big customers, all that stuff?

• 1:47:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. So what matters a lot right now is sitting at the frontier and, you know, getting the max capability when you want it. But also for your normal, average day-to-day task is like, you know, being super efficient. And not just for latency, just because also we're seeing, also like we had this era of token maxing. And then, you know, we've been talking a lot with, you know, all, all the companies and enterprises that we're working super closely with. And then they were like, oh, it's just a little bit, you know, maybe out of control. It's like, you know, what we want is like, you know, we were in a highly efficient model that is, you know, steerable, controllable. We want the right, you know, spend control dashboards. And so we also have all of that. Um, you can, you can look at your spend, understand ROI. But also you can, uh, rest knowing that, you know, this is actually like a super, super efficient model.

• 1:47:51Speaker 06

  And so it gets the job, job done, uh, with, you know, way, way, um, with fewer tokens, which, you know, to you, uh, you know, means that, you know, you have to pay less, uh, for the same results, which is super important. And this is really the theme, I think, of the year is that, you know, that, um, being on the efficiency of like, you know, performance, um, and, and, and cost.

• 1:48:11John Coogan?

  What about if you want to spend more for faster, uh, performance? What does the future of, uh, either ASIC-enabled, cerebrus-enabled, uh, Spark and, and Fast Mode? What do you want to see develop there, uh, either immediately or over the next couple of weeks?

• 1:48:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think what we are, um, truly working towards like is a buffet of options, right? So, um, for, for your normal, like, you know, interactive tasks is that, you know, you're going to use 5.6 Sol like on medium or in high, and you're going to have like an amazing time. If you have a really hard problem and you're trying to, for example, find a cyber vulnerability in something, and so you're going to run Ultra and you're going to run it like for two days. And it's just going to like, leave no stone unturned and like, you know, invent novel techniques. And, you know, you're going to be like absolutely blown away by what it comes up with. Um, and, but a lot of times you also just need speed, you know, like for some of the stuff that we're dealing with is like, you know, we love working off of like the cerebrus version of this, which is like at, you know, about like, you know, 750 tokens, uh,

• 1:49:10Speaker 06

  per second, which is an order of magnitude faster, uh, than the, the default version that we have on, uh, on the API and in the product today. And this is just really situational, or, um, if you just want the very best, uh, and, um, you're like absolutely no compromise. It does come at a cost.

• 1:49:27John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:49:28Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people were feeling left out this week, uh, that weren't in the early access program. What makes a good early access partner? I'm sure your DMs are just filled, making, you know, people that want access to the next set of models. But, uh, what makes a good partner to the, to the, to the product and the research team?

• 1:49:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, we really try to go as broad as possible. Um, it is quite a bit of effort to manage. And then also like we're getting all that feedback and incorporating it. And we work very closely with, uh, the, the folks in early access. For us, it's just really about, um, Realizing whether it is as good as we think it is, right? You know, you're like so close to the model, you train it, you know, you've incorporated like all that feedback, all your dreams, visions into this model, and then you've played with it for a little bit. And then when we give access to, you know, folks outside of OpenAI, it's like, you know, the first time where we have like a, an unbiased look, you know, where people are using all sorts of models and different, different harnesses every day. And so it's just kind of like this awesome, um, you know, is it actually as good as we think it is?

• 1:50:29Speaker 06

  It's like, you know, what are the things that we missed? And so it's that, you know, high, high bandwidth engagement, good feedback. Um, and then, you know, that should, um, people who have shown to be unbiased in the past. Uh, and, you know, talked honestly about, you know, all sorts of models and all sorts of harnesses.

• 1:50:45John Coogan?

  Uh, how, how do you, how are you thinking about the trade off between, uh, mobile, cloud, desktop, the Mac mini, uh, that went mega viral last year? Um, do you think that we'll stay in a hybrid pattern for the foreseeable future? Is it a person by person basis? Do you have a grand unifying theory of how, uh, agentic work happens in the future?

• 1:51:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, the, the way that we think about it is no compromise. So you want to be able to use the same, your same AI partner, you know, like on your phone, uh, on, you know, like on the go, it's just like, you know, I go walk in the park, I want the exact same thing. I want it on my laptop, I want it, you know, at home, maybe like running in a Mac mini. And it is more that it needs to be able to have access to all the things that are important in my life. And, you know, not be constrained by the physical, you know, boundaries of like, you know, it's just like, hey, I started this prompt or I started this conversation on my phone and it's just like, now it's stuck on my phone.

• 1:51:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:41Speaker 06

  But, you know, we want it to be uncompromising. And so your AI, your ideal AI partner, I think, just, you know, has access to everything all the time and just, you know, processes the information as needed. And then, you know, can act in a safe way and controlled way, you know, so that, you know, you always understand like what it's trying to do. And, you know, if there is like something risky, you can, you know, approve it or, you know, ask it to change tack. And there, I also think, you know, like the mobile has like a big role to play, right? So if you're, uh, if, you know, five, six hours, you know, busy, like, you know, working on something and then, you know, you just go out to dinner, it's like, you know, it should ask you for permission to do something.

• 1:52:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:52:15Speaker 06

  Uh, when you're there, you know, you don't need to be stuck on your laptop.

• 1:52:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:18Jordi Hays?

  Fast forwarding six or 12 months, how is, how, how, how important is voice to someone's day to day experience with chat GPT work slash codex?

• 1:52:30Speaker 06

  I don't think you would need to fast track like, you know, we shipped activity voice yesterday.

• 1:52:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, no, I know, I know, but, but, you know, you assume like, you know, oftentimes like something ships, you know, and it takes a little.

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  Everyone has to go on holiday break.

• 1:52:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we need a three day weekend.

• 1:52:45John Coogan?

  We need a three day weekend and then everyone can test out the latest and, and integrate it into their workflows.

• 1:52:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, you know, open a chat with the app, like using it latest voice. We also demoed it in the live stream, uh, this morning. And, um, it's very, sort of super enjoyable, like magical experience when you first experience it, but also like, you know, on the fifth time as well. It's going to be part of like, you know, day to day experience, you know, of like how you work with these systems. Uh, we don't, we don't have it yet in the desktop app, um, but this is something that we're working towards. And when, when you experience it, is it, it's like a modern day like Jarvis, right? It's like, you know, you just talk to it, you just walk in your room and, you know, suddenly it's just like doing things on your computer, you know, with the same level of like precision and power, you know, that you currently have over text.

• 1:53:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 1:53:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, fantastic.

• 1:53:33John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Thank you so much. Hopefully you can get some sleep.

• 1:53:36Jordi Hays?

  Many, many big days to come.

• 1:53:38John Coogan?

  Back to the one of five war rooms, whichever one you'll go to next. Uh, have a great rest of your day. Congratulations and we'll talk to you soon, Tiva.

• 1:53:45Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:53:46John Coogan?

  Have a great one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. And while we bring in Sean Frank, I'm also going to tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real time experiences and new value with Cisco. Sean, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:54:10Sean Frank?

  Great to see you guys.

• 1:54:10John Coogan?

  First time, first time in the actual studio, right?

• 1:54:13Sean Frank?

  Second. I did the Shopify episode.

• 1:54:14John Coogan?

  Oh, that's right. That's right.

• 1:54:16Jordi Hays?

  He took the time out of his Black Friday.

• 1:54:18John Coogan?

  That was great. Yeah. But we, yeah, we bounced around a lot. It was, it was a big, it was a big day. That was a good one though.

• 1:54:23Sean Frank?

  Hopefully we'll do it again.

• 1:54:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, uh, and Black Friday was a record for you, right?

• 1:54:28Sean Frank?

  Of course.

• 1:54:29Jordi Hays?

  Have you, have you had a Black Friday that wasn't a record?

• 1:54:32Sean Frank?

  No, every year it's gone up.

• 1:54:33John Coogan?

  Every year.

• 1:54:34Sean Frank?

  And it's not going to stop this year.

• 1:54:35John Coogan?

  Up only, up only over here at the Ridge Wallet. A Ridge broadly, right? The portfolio is growing still?

• 1:54:41Sean Frank?

  Yeah, the wallet business is, it's a great business. It's like a hundred million plus a year.

• 1:54:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:45Sean Frank?

  But the growth is now like all the other stuff we do.

• 1:54:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:54:48Sean Frank?

  So we have, um, like a travel line, we have.

• 1:54:50John Coogan?

  Luggage.

• 1:54:51Sean Frank?

  We do like 10% of all men's wedding rings in America. So we have like a huge.

• 1:54:55John Coogan?

  10%.

• 1:54:55Sean Frank?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:54:56Jordi Hays?

  Double digits at the TAM.

• 1:54:57Sean Frank?

  Yeah, it's like a very boring monopoly. We sell a ton of like men's wedding rings.

• 1:55:01Jordi Hays?

  And they're coming for it all.

• 1:55:02Sean Frank?

  Oh, yeah, dude, soon.

• 1:55:04Jordi Hays?

  You won't be able to get married. They're actually going for regulatory capture. You won't be able to get married if you're not planning to use a Ridge ring.

• 1:55:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:12Sean Frank?

  I'm like a big pronatalist now because I'm like, get married, have kids, buy a Ridge ring.

• 1:55:16John Coogan?

  So you're behind all of that.

• 1:55:18Sean Frank?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:18John Coogan?

  Every time I see some podcaster, yeah, about the, the fertility crisis, it's you.

• 1:55:23Sean Frank?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:23John Coogan?

  You're behind in funding it all.

• 1:55:24Sean Frank?

  And the big thing now is like the tech business for us.

• 1:55:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:26Sean Frank?

  So like, we do like, uh, phone cases, that type of stuff.

• 1:55:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:29Sean Frank?

  It's like 12 months old and it's like already like a hundred million dollars a year.

• 1:55:32John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:55:33Sean Frank?

  It's adding a bunch of new random little, little widgets to sell.

• 1:55:36John Coogan?

  That's insane. Uh, okay. So take me through the, uh, demand generation side of the business. Like what is actually changing? Uh, obviously there's AI generated advertising, AI enhanced targeting, there's all sorts of different stuff. But like from your day to day, from the platforms you're advertising on, like what has been the most material change over the last 12 months?

• 1:55:57Sean Frank?

  Well, it's a big day to be here, right? Because the big meta announcements.

• 1:56:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:02Sean Frank?

  People were like dancing on Meta's grave like three days ago and, and now everyone's stoked on it.

• 1:56:08Jordi Hays?

  And now you have a 1% god candle.

• 1:56:10Sean Frank?

  Totally.

• 1:56:12John Coogan?

  Is that specifically about the LLM or, or the image generation model? Because the image generation model seems much more impactful to the advertising business than the agentic coding capabilities.

• 1:56:22Sean Frank?

  Well, yeah.

• 1:56:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:25Sean Frank?

  Well, I would say the manis actually like, uh, really helped unlock like a lot of, um, like stuff inside the ad account.

• 1:56:31John Coogan?

  Using the ad manager more.

• 1:56:32Sean Frank?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:33John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 1:56:33Sean Frank?

  I think like it just democratized a lot of tools that like the best ad managers are already using.

• 1:56:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:56:38Sean Frank?

  Um, but really we just want Meta to continue to get better.

• 1:56:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:43Sean Frank?

  Right? Over the past three months, they've rolled out a lot of changes of like the actual ad algorithm.

• 1:56:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:47Sean Frank?

  And it was really bad for a lot of people. We just had like the best Q2.

• 1:56:50John Coogan?

  It was good for you.

• 1:56:51Sean Frank?

  Oh, it was awesome. Yeah.

• 1:56:51John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:56:52Sean Frank?

  I think they're getting way.

• 1:56:53Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, do you think that it was actually bad for some people? Or they were just going through a slump in their business overall? They had like business problems that they wanted to blame on the ad changes?

• 1:57:06Sean Frank?

  Well, dude, yeah, I mean, what's new, right? It's like, if, if your business is going bad, it's everyone else's fault. Um, but really like, you know, they do like the meta performance summit every May and they've just rolled out so many great changes to the ad algorithm that like, I think you're getting better impressions with better people.

• 1:57:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:22Sean Frank?

  And I, the more compute and AI they throw out, I think it's just going to get better and better. And like, we're getting to like a future where like the perfect impression at the perfect time, with the perfect ad that's like customized to that person with AI, that's coming.

• 1:57:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:35Sean Frank?

  And click through rates will go up, conversion rates will go up and CPMs will go up with it. But I think, uh, there'll be like a moment of arbitrage there.

• 1:57:42John Coogan?

  Do you think, do you think Zuck is doing enough to actually message that to customers like you? Because Ben Thompson put out this piece on Monday, sort of, uh, an earnings call transcript that he wrote in the voice of Mark Zuckerberg. And his pitch was to investors, telling the investors, hey, look, we are investing a lot in AI, but it's all in service of the ads business, which is great, which we do take seriously. We have taken some side quests, done some metaverse, uh, some VR stuff. But this investment that we're making right now, you shouldn't beat us up in the public markets because it's going to come back huge. We're growing really fast on the ad side. Uh, 33% is massive at that scale and it's going to continue to double down.

• 1:58:25John Coogan?

  But I'm wondering if, uh, if advertisers are, are receiving that signal from Meta that it is going to get better, it is someplace that they should be spending more time and more dollars.

• 1:58:34Sean Frank?

  Yeah, we're a captive audience, so I don't think he has to message to us.

• 1:58:36John Coogan?

  He doesn't. He, he can just ignore, yeah.

• 1:58:38Sean Frank?

  Yeah, like the best thing he could do is get people to spend more time on their app, right? And then better understand who those people are and what they're in market for.

• 1:58:44John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:58:44Sean Frank?

  And if he delivers those things, the ad dollars will come.

• 1:58:46John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:58:47Sean Frank?

  Um, because besides that, like where else are we going to spend money?

• 1:58:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:49Sean Frank?

  Like TikTok shop's actually doing great, but it's still a really small business, right? Like the GMV this year in America might be 20 billion.

• 1:58:56John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:58:56Sean Frank?

  And Amazon does that like every four days or something. So it's like, it's still a very, very small business.

• 1:59:01John Coogan?

  Why is TikTok shop so small? Is it, is it a separate panel or something? I feel like TikTok still has so many, so many impressions, so many videos that are being served. Do you, do you have an idea of why that business is falling out?

• 1:59:13Jordi Hays?

  I think it's, it's not necessarily, I think it's primarily that content platforms have been a place you discover products, but not where you transact.

• 1:59:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:59:22Jordi Hays?

  Like Meta has done a lot of, had a lot of efforts in shopping in app. They never, you would have thought that they would have clicked harder, right? It's like you have this captive audience that uses your product for an hour a day to discover things to buy. And they're not. Buying that many products in the app.

• 1:59:40Sean Frank?

  Yeah, and TikTok Shop is delivering way more value than 20 billion in GMV. Like, a brand is like Comfort Hoodies. I'm sure you guys have seen them. They're doing a billion a year right now. They're four years old.

• 1:59:51Jordi Hays?

  Last time, last time you told me about them, I think it was like 400 or something like that.

• 1:59:55Sean Frank?

  They've more than doubled. Yeah, it's crazy. And all it is, is like TikTok Shop affiliates. So people posting thousands of videos a day. They take those, the best videos of it. They put it into TikTok Shop GMV Max. They run that. And their TikTok Shop business might do, might do 100 million a year, but the spillover is crazy. Everyone goes to Amazon. Everyone goes to your website.

• 2:00:14John Coogan?

  Oh, got it.

• 2:00:15Sean Frank?

  So like, they've just done a horrible job actually capturing the value they're generating.

• 2:00:19John Coogan?

  Interesting, but they're getting a lot of impressions. They're driving a lot of purchases. What's the sweet spot for price point on TikTok Shop? That hoodie company, is that a $70 hoodie?

• 2:00:28Sean Frank?

  It's cheaper, right? So like, a successful product for TikTok Shop is female-focused, impulse buy, so like, you know, $20, $30, $40, something like that. And then you have people to make outrageous claims, right? And so Comfort Hoodies is like, it's a hoodie that cures anxiety. So like, that's pretty good. Like, it's a pretty good value prop.

• 2:00:47John Coogan?

  Claim the FDA might wake up to that one at some point.

• 2:00:50Sean Frank?

  All the affiliates are making it, so who cares?

• 2:00:53John Coogan?

  Somebody should care, but we'll see. Yeah, a little bit of a gray area. Interesting. Are there any, I want to know about when you're using AI personally in-house or someone on your team is using AI? Like, the models or the products, like ChatGPT, Claude, et cetera, versus you feel like you're getting AI for free? Because you're using MailChimp and MailChimp-integrated AI, or you're on Shopify and Shopify gave you an AI feature for free?

• 2:01:25Sean Frank?

  Yeah, you know, I don't want to talk too bad about any sponsors. I don't know if Notion sponsors you guys, but, okay, great.

• 2:01:32Sean Frank?

  You would actually hope that more of these companies would be rolling out AI faster and better and more useful? Because like, you know, we're using it internally a ton, directly with the models, and like, inventory planning and buying is a solved problem. That is like the biggest problem that is plagued, like.

• 2:01:47John Coogan?

  Like, demand forecasting?

• 2:01:48Sean Frank?

  Yeah, like, all of that is like.

• 2:01:49John Coogan?

  And then sending up, sending a proposal to a supplier, or in your case, like the actual factory, to, to understand how many you're going to sell by month? When they need to be delivered, what with the shipping timelines? All of that's just a bunch of Excel work normally.

• 2:02:02Sean Frank?

  Yeah, and it was huge teams, and if you got it wrong, it bankrupted your company, right? Like, you had bad inventory, or you get like shorts in December, right? Like, it ruined a bunch of businesses. AI has totally solved that, working directly with codexes of the world, right? And just putting in all of your, your business information.

• 2:02:18John Coogan?

  Such a huge unlock for the global economy. That's crazy to think about.

• 2:02:22Jordi Hays?

  We gotta tell, we gotta tell consumers that don't like AI, your favorite brands are doing perfect forecasting. And that means that you are going to get the perfect article of clothing right before your trip to Hawaii, even though you waited until three days before to order it.

• 2:02:38Sean Frank?

  You'll always have the right sizes in stock. That is coming because of codex.

• 2:02:42John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 2:02:43Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is, this is like part of what the Sufanator was talking about, right? Like, the, one of the, Eric Seufert, mobile app memo.

• 2:02:54Jordi Hays?

  He was just talking about, like, actually, if you have, like, better advertising because of AI, it will create a, like, like, it will drive economic growth. Purely because you have more and more of these, like, niche businesses that might have an audience of 50,000 people in the whole world. Historically, you couldn't build that business because it would have been impossible to find that 50,000 people out of billions. Now you can. And then this is, again, an accelerant of, like, so much revenue is lost every day, so much purchasing activity doesn't happen? Because people just can't buy the stuff that they want because the brand didn't properly forecast, and, and is still kind of doing, like, fly-by-wire.

• 2:03:34Sean Frank?

  Totally. The wrong sizes, the wrong things at the wrong time, like, with how expensive it is to get stuff on shipping containers and how long it takes. And there was a lot of companies spent a lot of money trying to solve this. There was demand software that did billions a year in revenue. As long as you have, like, a system of records, like a clean data warehouse, and you have your, all of your sales from Shopify, Amazon, whatever else? You port all of that into a codex, and it will, it totally has it figured out. And if you have to make those small tweaks, like, oh, actually, last year we were on a promo, this year we're not going to.

• 2:04:03John Coogan?

  Oh, so the multi-platform thing is big here, because I would have, I was just about to ask you, like, should Shopify roll out a demand planning tool for Shopify merchants? But they probably, Amazon has sharp elbows and won't give them all the data just via a simple integration.

• 2:04:18Sean Frank?

  Yeah, it all has to roll up into the harness. It all has to go into codex.

• 2:04:21John Coogan?

  And so, and so you have to get into a data warehouse, and then you have to point an L at that.

• 2:04:25Sean Frank?

  Yeah, so like, you know, we're not, like, we're not like a large buyer of software. You know, we, we have Shopify, we have a data warehouse, whatever else, but as long as you have those, like, basic things, and you put it into a harness, it's like.

• 2:04:38John Coogan?

  But your IT spend's like, yeah, probably like less than 1% of revenue.

• 2:04:41Sean Frank?

  Totally, yeah.

• 2:04:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly, which is, which is the, the good benchmark. You don't want to be, like, building every system custom from scratch.

• 2:04:48Sean Frank?

  Yeah, and people are so excited because they can vibe, vibe code everything, right? But like, you know, judge me reviews is like $5 a month, so I'm not going to vibe code my own reviews thing, right? I'm just going to do this.

• 2:04:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, just pay that, yeah.

• 2:04:58Sean Frank?

  But, um, but yeah, so.

• 2:04:59John Coogan?

  There's some review plugins that are very expensive, so.

• 2:05:01Sean Frank?

  Yeah, Bazaarvoice, Horrible, like, yeah, Yapo has a better reputation.

• 2:05:06John Coogan?

  I've gotten, I've gotten fleeced a couple times.

• 2:05:10Jordi Hays?

  What's new in manufacturing land? You know, you, you guys were trying to develop US manufacturing, like, way before, like, American dynamism was like a category? Like, this is something that you guys have been, like, exploring and dabbling with for a long time, but what's, what's the latest?

• 2:05:30Sean Frank?

  Yeah, so, like, we actually worked with the government in, like, 2022 to get something called, like, a general exclusion order. So like, we have a, we can, we can very easily now get people to get banned from importing, like, if we, if they validate RRP. But to do that, you have to prove that you're like a important part of the American economy. So to do that, we actually bought the largest independent watchmaker in America. It's called like, it's called FTS, Five-Timpy Solutions. They're in Arizona. So we own them. So if you ever buy an American-made watch, I probably made it. But it's a really hard business.

• 2:06:02John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 2:06:03Sean Frank?

  Watches, watches suck. So we do wallet production there. You know, we probably spent two or three, four million dollars, like, getting that whole thing set up to actually produce wallets there. But then, like, the Trump tariffs made it really hard to get steel, because there's a huge global tariff on all non-American steel. That means everybody wants American steel, so now it's really hard to get it, and we have to wait for those things to work themselves out, but, um. Look, most manufacturing is already very automated. Like, you guys have spent time in China. I'm going back through next month. It's like, they don't have that many people in factories. It is robots and assembly, and that can be done basically anywhere. And then it's just getting the raw goods to wherever you actually want to manufacture stuff, and with steel and batteries, we can't do that in America, yet.

• 2:06:47Sean Frank?

  So we have to build a supply chain. It'll be like a 10-year thing, but the future is going to be hyper-local manufacturing, for sure.

• 2:06:54John Coogan?

  I like the idea of you getting into steel manufacturing. That'd be electric. Just make your own steel, fully vertically integrate.

• 2:07:01Jordi Hays?

  Is now the best time in history to start a consumer brand?

• 2:07:06Sean Frank?

  Well, I would say probably, like, January 2012, when Facebook ads just sold out. That was probably the best time.

• 2:07:13Jordi Hays?

  But now is the second best?

• 2:07:14Sean Frank?

  For sure. I mean, one, it's modded from AI. Like, I would hate to be trying to sell software right now, right? And a lot of services, I'd hate to be in that business. People are going to buy stuff forever, right? You have birthdays, you have Christmas. The, the American consumer is still incredibly strong. We really just had the best Q2 of all time. And that's with a war in Iran, like, in.

• 2:07:36John Coogan?

  And inflation and all sorts of stuff.

• 2:07:38Sean Frank?

  Yeah, and like, it all actually, like, looking at.

• 2:07:39John Coogan?

  Consumer confidence is so low, even though consumer spending is, is holding, you, you, you, there's always nervousness about, will there be a pullback?

• 2:07:48Sean Frank?

  Yeah, there's been nervousness for like six years, but I'm telling you, the Ukraine war in 2022, there was a noticeable decrease in e-commerce activity. And right now, it's not happening. Things are actually ripping, so I think it's a great time.

• 2:07:59John Coogan?

  Total vibe session.

• 2:08:00Sean Frank?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:01John Coogan?

  Total disconnect between what people say in the Pew research and then what people actually do.

• 2:08:05Sean Frank?

  If I had my Shopify notifications on, I would just be chiming all day right now. I think people are, yeah, it's, it's definitely a vibe session.

• 2:08:14Sean Frank?

  So it's a great time to be selling stuff.

• 2:08:15John Coogan?

  That's great. What are you thinking on the creative side? Are you Higgs field maxing with like all these workflows to generate endless AI videos? Are you seeing progress in AI images? What's working? We just talked to the Sufanator about this study that showed that when AI is clockable, it underperforms, but when it's not identifiable as AI, if it's just a product image and it just looks indistinguishable from CGI or a photo, it overperforms sometimes.

• 2:08:46Sean Frank?

  Oh dude, pull up my Facebook ads library and it is tons and tons of AI generated static ads, right?

• 2:08:52John Coogan?

  Static.

• 2:08:53Sean Frank?

  Yeah, because the statics are actually like, you can build like ad factories, like totally automated. So you know, you take a Higgs field, you use an MCP, you bring it into like your harness of choice, like a Codex, and you can generate 10,000 static ads if you wanted to, right? And we just have that running 24/7. They get pumped into a Facebook ads library to test it. And then the winners go to a different ads library to like a different ad account to actually scale those up. So the static stuff is totally solved and I would hate to be trying to do ads without it right now, right? I actually built a spreadsheet yesterday or like a presentation slide by hand and I felt like I was a caveman. It's like, that's like we're working with like the ads of like the past where we're like. Video, we still do a lot of it. It's mostly just like cutscenes and like a hypercut.

• 2:09:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:09:37Sean Frank?

  So like, we want to add motion or somebody talking or whatever, we'll do a lot of that. But it went viral yesterday, the Seinfeld fully AI episodes. That is really, really good. It's getting very close to actually being indistinguishable.

• 2:09:50John Coogan?

  I thought it looked really good. I thought the editing pacing was wildly off.

• 2:09:53Sean Frank?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 2:09:54John Coogan?

  I thought there was like the gaps in the humor, like the pacing is so key to that. It was like, but from a fidelity perspective, it looked indistinguishable from the show.

• 2:10:03Sean Frank?

  Yeah, so it's like, it's very inhuman in like the way they talk or whatever, but like that's going to be fixed. Like that's coming in two more model updates, I'm sure. And then, and then it's like, yeah, all video will be fixed.

• 2:10:13John Coogan?

  What about using AI either to write deterministic scripts that can assemble hypercuts in different? Because if you have a picture of the wallet, a picture of a person putting in their pocket, a person stepping out of a car, a person on a beach, you might want to sequence those 1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 1, 3, 4, 3, 2, 1, 4, and get every possible variation on those different video clips. Are you using AI? Do you already have a system for that? Is that already automated? Is there, what's the future of that?

• 2:10:44Sean Frank?

  Yeah, that's still very human in the loop, right? So we have like, you know, two amazing editors who would do all the hypercutting themselves. And now they are using Higgs field and just getting, you know, hundreds of more variations.

• 2:10:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:54Sean Frank?

  Going through those in the up and loading to the app.

• 2:10:56John Coogan?

  Got it, got it. And they can probably even do some like style transfer and filtering on top of the raw footage that they have to like.

• 2:11:01Sean Frank?

  Yeah, and sometimes like, you know, it's a robot. It'll make stupid decisions. It's like, it'll, it'll go like, you know, wallet, something, you know, falling in the ocean. It's like, what the hell are we doing here?

• 2:11:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's just complete hallucination.

• 2:11:11Jordi Hays?

  5.6 people are reporting that it's, it's working on video editing workflows now in a way that a lot of other models haven't, so.

• 2:11:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder how that will actually play out because there's one world where you're just literally opening Premiere Pro and saying like, move the mouse cursor and make the cut in the footage. And then there's another one where you're like editing the underlying file and then you're watching it in Premiere Pro because most of these video apps, they sort of represent the file as like a structure of folders or, you know, a bunch of JSON or something. So you can manipulate things multiple ways, but it will be interesting to see where that, where that goes, even if it's just for like the reconfiguring sequences and whatnot. Are there any vibe-coded e-commerce plugins or add-ons or tools or software that have stuck out to you as,

• 2:12:04John Coogan?

  wow, like this thing, it was in the $1,000 a month category, now it's in the $5 a month category? Or, or this is a new capability that's unlocked that's still something you wouldn't roll your own, but you would buy outside?

• 2:12:21Sean Frank?

  You know, not really, but like a lot of the playbooks that people share, it's like, you know, how to build landing pages in one prompt or whatever.

• 2:12:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:12:27Sean Frank?

  And like that is going, that's like going to one-shot companies like Shogun or like there's all these like landing page builders. And it's like, they're just, you know, drag and drop tools, but you're getting way faster, way more responsive, way better stuff just out of Codex. And it's like, it's completely on brand with your assets. And it's like, look, that is vibe-coded, right? And we are, we're going to launch 50 landing pages next week and it's all vibe-coded stuff like that.

• 2:12:48John Coogan?

  What's the value of landing pages these days? Is that, is that critical to the funnel? Is that critical to the?

• 2:12:53Sean Frank?

  Oh, for sure.

• 2:12:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:54Sean Frank?

  Dude, you guys had Hermosy in here like two days ago. I listened to the thing. It is a.

• 2:12:58Jordi Hays?

  He's got 1 billion, now he's going to get a landing page for every human on earth. That's actually where we're going.

• 2:13:04Sean Frank?

  Basically, right?

• 2:13:05John Coogan?

  Census records.

• 2:13:06Sean Frank?

  But it's like, you need the offer to get the click, right? And then you need the landing page to inform them. And then the like, as fast as you can get them to make the purchases possible, right?

• 2:13:16Jordi Hays?

  In sales, they tell you to use the person's name a lot. But I'm really happy that you're here, Sean, because I want to talk to you about this. Do you think we get to the point where like digital platforms end up, you know, and ads and landing pages are like using the individual's name to an extreme degree? Like, because you get down to targeting one person.

• 2:13:36John Coogan?

  Facebook blocked that a long time ago.

• 2:13:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, but would, would eventually there's like a, there's a, there's a flipping point where maybe it just is so effective that it makes sense for Facebook to enable.

• 2:13:48Sean Frank?

  Well, all AI-coded email right now already puts your name in there. And there's been beta tests rolled out where they're using people's faces in the ads. It's like, like.

• 2:13:57Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, we saw that on, remember?

• 2:14:00Sean Frank?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:00Jordi Hays?

  Like they, I think they were trying to sell a pair of the Meta glasses where it's like showing like you calling your, you know? And they can tell like who your significant other is just based on your activity on Instagram.

• 2:14:13Sean Frank?

  Yes, Facebook has all that information. It has your face. It has who you're talking to. It has who your wife is. So it's like, they, look, hyper-personalization is coming for the entire web. And, you know, if you're going to be shopping, it's going to show you what you're going to look like in the clothes or what your dad's going to like when he gets the wallet. I definitely think that's happening.

• 2:14:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, if the price of a cold call goes to a penny, do you think you'll be cold calling people? Something just came across my desk. I got a wedding ring here for you.

• 2:14:38Sean Frank?

  We've talked about it. Yeah, there's a thing called like ringless voicemails.

• 2:14:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:43Sean Frank?

  Where like, you know, they'll just mass drop those off and they put people's names in there. It's like, hey, John, we got this thing for you, right? And it's like, you know, it's no, it's one way, but yeah, the two ways definitely coming.

• 2:14:53John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:14:54Jordi Hays?

  What's happening in luxury? LVMH and Kering are down like 25 and 20-ish percent.

• 2:15:02Sean Frank?

  Well, we talked about it last time I was here. I was like, I'm like, oh yeah, Gucci's getting crushed. And, and it's like, yeah, it's going to continue to happen.

• 2:15:09Jordi Hays?

  Why is that?

• 2:15:10Sean Frank?

  You know, it's, I think it's just a generational change is really what it comes down to. Like each one of those brands have good assets, but like Richmont is still tearing, right? Hermès is doing great. Coach is on like a generational run, like the best performing stock of the past like two years, right? I think last year it beat Nvidia in performance.

• 2:15:29John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:15:30Jordi Hays?

  Coach?

• 2:15:30Sean Frank?

  Yeah, so it's a public trade under tapestry. You should pull them up. They own Kate Spade too, but Kate Spade's like a nothing business. So it's just, it's just a generational rotation, right? Ralph Lauren also on a tear. So you have like American dynamism, there's American luxury. Like America wasn't old enough to have luxury brands, but like LVMH bought Tiffany's and now it's like, look, Ralph Lauren's crushing, Coach is totally crushing. And I think the old stodgy LVMH's of the world, the Gucci's of the world, one, they got overexposed. Like they really rely on the middle class. And if you ever look at like their sales demographics, it is like 80% of their revenue will come from people making under $120,000 a year. And it's like, that's just a big disconnect when you're trying to sell whatever, right? So there's going to be a shift towards like, you know, true luxury.

• 2:16:14Sean Frank?

  There's also some concern that like El Catterton is just personally investing in all the great assets and not bringing them into the portfolio. Like they own Crumb Heart and they, they haven't brought that into LVMH.

• 2:16:25John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:16:26Sean Frank?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:27John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, but when you say personally investing, it's El Catterton is investing. Got it. Okay.

• 2:16:31Sean Frank?

  And El Catterton is the investment vehicle.

• 2:16:33John Coogan?

  Of LVMH. Yeah, that makes sense. And I know that they do a lot of deals in the private equity world, but.

• 2:16:37Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah. Why, why doesn't LVMH, like you imagine the R knows are like, yeah, we want to own the hottest. Like you would think they would do everything they possibly could to own Crumb Heart.

• 2:16:50Sean Frank?

  There's a divestment in brands right now. They're actually trying to push stuff out of their portfolio. I think they just liquidated Off-White, right? And Off-White ended up being like a target, like Costco brand. Like there's, yeah, there's like photos of like Costco, Off-White, like big pallets and delivered. So they're actually doing a divestment right now from brands. And, you know, Tapestry just divested from Stuart Weisman. So like they're actually trying to go like bigger down on winners. But yeah, then there's just like a whole, like, you know, Mad Happy's a great brand. It's invested via El Catterton, not inside of the portfolio.

• 2:17:21John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:17:21Sean Frank?

  And the whole idea was there was supposed to be a scout fund to then bring it into the main portfolio. But if you're, there are no family and you own 90% of El Catterton and only 45% of LVMH, it's like, what's the incentive?

• 2:17:33John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:17:35Sean Frank?

  But you look, I mean, you could like Richmont owns Cartier. Cartier's having a great time. You know, they own Van Cleef. Van Cleef's still having a great time. But those are, both of those are way more true luxury brands than an LVMH. So.

• 2:17:46John Coogan?

  Have we hit peak Timu and Shein?

• 2:17:49Sean Frank?

  Oh yeah, dude. I mean.

• 2:17:52Sean Frank?

  Trump got rid of section 321 de minimis. That totally crushed those brands. It's like, I, I mean, you know, T-Mu-

• 2:18:00Jordi Hays?

  Where do you go if you want to shop like a billionaire? There's nowhere else to go.

• 2:18:07Sean Frank?

  Fuck, you're right, man. I don't know. Bridge.com. No, uh, look, I mean, they, they're still huge. They, they run a lot of ads and like, uh, T-Mu's publicly traded under like, uh, PDD or whatever. So like, they have a huge business in Latin America. They have a huge business in, uh, Southeast Asia. But like, their whole arbitrage was just flooding into America with, with low cost goods.

• 2:18:28John Coogan?

  Direct from the factory.

• 2:18:29Sean Frank?

  Yeah. And it just kinda, that kinda blew up.

• 2:18:31John Coogan?

  It's gone. Interesting. Uh, have you been surprised that live shopping has been slow in America?

• 2:18:39Sean Frank?

  No.

• 2:18:39John Coogan?

  We're always predicting this from China. Oh, if it's big there, it's gonna be big here in a year. And it feels like it's been very slow, but what, what have you seen on the live shopping?

• 2:18:47Sean Frank?

  Yeah. Look, people are very excited about whatnot.

• 2:18:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:51Sean Frank?

  And they are putting up impressive GMV growth, but it is very much dependent on like the trading card bubble. It's like, that's, that's what it is.

• 2:18:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:59Sean Frank?

  So it's live shopping in America-

• 2:19:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is what I was saying yesterday. It's like, it's effectively, I'm not gonna call it gambling, but there, there's some speculation happening on- Uh, there's a, there's a massive, I would say spec- You would want to figure out what percentage of GMV is driven by speculation. And I would expect that it's significant.

• 2:19:21Sean Frank?

  Yeah, like, people aren't going on there to buy their everyday essentials, right? They're going on there for the excitement. Like, it is an auction-

• 2:19:26John Coogan?

  Whereas in China, there's live shopping where you can buy a tomato. And that's just not happening.

• 2:19:30Sean Frank?

  And women are buying dresses and it's the whole thing.

• 2:19:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course, the whole person, uh, picking up one piece of clothing, putting it down, the next one. Like, we've seen that video, uh, and we have yet to see that in America.

• 2:19:40Sean Frank?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:41John Coogan?

  Why is that?

• 2:19:41Sean Frank?

  I think, I mean, dude, Americans can't watch anything at the same time, right? Like, we are also like, uh, consumption based and like, on demand, everything, right? Um, everything is catered to us all the time. I just don't think there's any value to it actually being live. We're, we're doing TikTok shop lives and we drive like three to $400 in, in revenue per hour that we're live. So it's like, some people are buying stuff when it's live, but the real value is like getting all that content and just running it whenever you have four hours at night to, to go log on to something.

• 2:20:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:12Sean Frank?

  Right? And I really just think it comes down to, there's a lot more people in China and they're spending a lot- Like, the, the screen time per person is still way higher over there.

• 2:20:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:21Sean Frank?

  And just, you know, it developed over there. It's more of like a native sport.

• 2:20:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you looked into advertising on Netflix?

• 2:20:28Sean Frank?

  Uh, we have looked at it. Uh, the CPMs are not very good.

• 2:20:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:20:32Sean Frank?

  And here's the thing is, we buy a lot of TV ads and we buy them like, um, like directly through the networks. So like, you know, Fox will have something, like, we just got an email for the World Cup. And it's like, you could run a 30 second spot during the World Cup, the USA game, and it was like a $25 CPM, right? And Netflix, they, you'll get a lower tier of consumer because it's price gated, right? It's the lowest tier of consumer gets the ads and they want a $45 CPM, right? It just, it does make a lot of sense.

• 2:20:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What about, um, uh, infomercials? Have you ever thought of running one? It's like a full hour, middle of the night type of thing. I've-

• 2:21:11Jordi Hays?

  That's the new meta.

• 2:21:12John Coogan?

  Wanted to get, I wanted, it feels like a bucket list item on an entrepreneur.

• 2:21:17Sean Frank?

  Well, you have the studio, bro. Let's shoot one.

• 2:21:18John Coogan?

  We should shoot one.

• 2:21:21Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I'm down to be-

• 2:21:22John Coogan?

  One hour pitching you a three hour livestream. I interest you in hitting the subscribe button, potentially leaving us five stars.

• 2:21:30Jordi Hays?

  I, I wanted a hyper personalized infomercial though. Where somebody's just like, falling asleep on their couch, it's 1 a.m. and you're like, hello, Sean?

• 2:21:38John Coogan?

  I, I feel like I've seen some of those YouTube experiments ads where, uh, they, they, they didn't gate it. And so if you didn't click skip, you'd wind up watching like 12 minutes of an advertisement.

• 2:21:48Sean Frank?

  Oh, did you know Ikea did that, but it was like 12 hours. Ikea's like, we're gonna read every product we have, but please click skip, right?

• 2:21:55John Coogan?

  Fantastic. But you've never done an infomercial?

• 2:21:58Sean Frank?

  No, but I, I met a guy one time who made like, you know, his whole business, $80 million a year was selling hoses on infomercials.

• 2:22:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:03Sean Frank?

  And he's like, yeah, I have a great hose and I just sell it on infomercials.

• 2:22:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:06Sean Frank?

  Then he gets it into Home Depot or whatever. So, look, you can make a lot of money in a lot of different ways.

• 2:22:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:22:11Jordi Hays?

  But you gotta, you gotta focus a little bit. You gotta get things going.

• 2:22:13Sean Frank?

  Yeah, right now I'm trying to sell like a bunch of random accessories to men. And my goal is to get to a billion a year in annual revenue.

• 2:22:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:20Sean Frank?

  I'm like, three or four years away. And if I do that, my life's good.

• 2:22:23John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:22:26Jordi Hays?

  You wanna close it out with us?

• 2:22:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:22:28Sean Frank?

  All right.

• 2:22:28John Coogan?

  We got one last advertisement. It's for MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. And we will see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp. Goodbye.