Amazon Ban Hammer, Seedance Strategy, Amazon Blocks Muse | Vinod Khosla, Augustus Doricko, Ben Hylak, Aaron Levie, Lucas Shaw

(01:46) - AI Video Models (22:59) - Seedance Strategy (29:40) - Meta Up Big (31:10) - Amazon Blocks Muse (44:19) - Augustus Doricko discusses Rainmaker’s $100 million Series B and its mission to address global water shortages through autonomous drone-based cloud seeding. He explains the company’s work with data centers, ski resorts, governments, and researchers, as well as how AI is accelerating its atmospheric science and weather-modification capabilities. (57:45) - Vinod Khosla discusses the emerging personal-agent market, arguing that consumer trust, transparency, task completion, and secure payments will determine success rather than traditional platform lock-in. The venture capitalist and founder of Khosla Ventures predicts that startups may outperform large technology companies by building unbiased agents that work across users’ preferred channels, protect their interests, and reliably complete tasks. (01:21:47) - Aaron Levie discusses how AI agents are strengthening enterprise software by increasing demand for secure, authoritative data platforms like Box. The Box co-founder and CEO also explores personal agents’ potential to reduce consumer friction, alongside the industry’s need to balance rapid innovation with security, safety, and regulation. (01:48:26) - Ron Biscardi discusses co-founding and leading iConnections, a technology-driven capital introduction platform connecting institutional investors with alternative fund managers. He also explains Tomorrow X, an accessible technology conference designed to connect retail investors and independent analysts with leading executives and investors. (01:58:00) - Ben Hylak discusses Raindrop, the AI-agent reliability company he co-founded, and its new simulation tools for detecting and preventing production issues. He explores enterprise AI adoption, company-specific agent alignment, AI-generated content and branding, Raindrop’s $35 million fundraise, and the potential capabilities of Tesla’s forthcoming Roadster. (02:27:17) - Lucas Shaw discusses major shifts in Hollywood, including David Ellison’s Paramount–Warner Bros. deal, the film industry’s recovery, and Apple’s streaming strategy. A Bloomberg entertainment reporter, Shaw also examines the intensifying competition between Netflix and YouTube for creators and the potential benefits of greater platform competition. 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.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TBPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Monday, September 21st, 2026. We are live at TBPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  The capital of capital.

• 0:14John Coogan?

  How many days till Christmas?

• 0:15Jordi Hays?

  Nine to four.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  Road to Christmas started weeks ago. We got 94 days until Christmas.

• 0:21Jordi Hays?

  Double digits.

• 0:23John Coogan?

  We're so close. Every day, one day closer to Christmas. So get excited. Start shopping for presents. Start picking out that Christmas tree. Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more. They got musicals. I guess they do in musicals now. And I guess we do in AI safety now. We'll get into that later.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  Doing a bit of a show today.

• 0:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:48Jordi Hays?

  We got Augustus De Rico coming in with a $100 million.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  Tipping the hat for $100 million.

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  We have Vino Khosla.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  Vino Khosla is coming on, coming back.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  Aaron Levie breaking his silence on the SAS rebound.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04Jordi Hays?

  New model drops, the latest on open source and more. We have Ron from Eye Connections. They are putting on an incredible show in November that we're going to be at called Tomorrow X. Excited to talk with him about that. And then we'll round it out with none other than Ben Hylak coming in with a new round of funding as well.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  For Raindrop.

• 1:25Jordi Hays?

  Raindrop.

• 1:26John Coogan?

  How is your?

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  Drop top.

• 1:27John Coogan?

  Yes. Yeah. Good name for a company. How was your weekend?

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  It was, couldn't have been better.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  It was good. We were off on Friday. We went to Boston and back basically the same day. Sort of a brutal flight back and forth, a little tired, but

• 1:42Jordi Hays?

  It was horrific.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  I got completely one shotted by the new AI video model. Sea Dance 2.5. Gone are the days of face swaps. I remember when, it was called Dream Booth, this paper came out from Google and it allowed you to very realistically swap your face into a photo. Now, this is something you can just do with a single prompt today, but back then you had to go and take 10 or 20 different photos of yourself at different angles, different lighting, usually just dug through your camera roll, got them. Then you had to feed that into like a Python script that was either hosted on, what's their notebook? Their hosted iPython notebook?

• 2:23Jordi Hays?

  Google Colab.

• 2:24John Coogan?

  Colab. And then the collab thing was weird because it was a luck of the draw, what GPU you got. So you would like sign up and create an instance. And then sometimes it would just be like, you got a 1080 Ti. And you'd be like, bah, like I can't do what I need to do because I need a lot of memory to do a particular thing. And then sometimes it would be like, you got an A100, brother, like lock in, like it was just random provisioning. And people would be like so excited when they got one or the other. But there was this musician who was like a guitarist who implemented the paper and then, and then basically distilled it down and figured out how to run. This is a crazy thing, but this guy who's just like a hobbyist machine learning engineer figured out how to get Dream Booth running on like basically commodity gaming hardware. So then you could

• 3:09John Coogan?

  go and you could take your face, fine tune it, and then be able to generate new photos in the style of whatever. It was all built on that open source one, not mid journey. The other image generator, Ahmad Mastak was

• 3:24Jordi Hays?

  Stable Diffusion.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Stable Diffusion. It was like Stable Diffusion as the base and then this Dream Booth thing on top. And it was super cool. Because if you actually went through, if you jump through all those hoops, you basically had access to the magic avatar thing like three months before everyone else. And you could like send one to a friend and be like, oh, this is cool. And then it was just completely commodified. It became an app and then it just became available in every chat app very shortly after. But the AI video has been moving a lot slower. It's very, it's very compute intensive, obviously, since OpenAI had to shut down Sora. And it just feels like none of the major American labs are as focused on this. So I got completely addicted to this, had a lot of fun doing it. I'll walk through everything that we did. But

• 4:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was one point where you sent me like 10 videos back to back of me

• 4:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:13Jordi Hays?

  various AI scenes. And then I was just sending you some like pretty mundane commentary back. And then, and then I was like, whoa, okay.

• 4:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:23Jordi Hays?

  On something totally different.

• 4:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  I was like, I'm sorry. I need to respect your culture and actually respond.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, it's because like you no longer need to go get a different app or sign up for anything. Like I was just texting with Codex remotely. I had a PC that was running this. And then I would just be like, I didn't even say, take this video. I would just say like, go find some videos and put Jordy in them. And it would just do that. And I didn't even have to like upload photos of you. I would just say like, go find some reference photography for Jordy across the internet.

• 4:54Jordi Hays?

  And so far, it seems to have made a lot of sense not to focus on video.

• 4:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:59Jordi Hays?

  Given that Codex and Claude can connect into all these other tools and models and just give you what you want as a user without incurring any of the cost of focusing to make great models or the actual cost of serving them and having to allocate, you know, GPUs.

• 5:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I think people will be having fun. Oh, speaking of Codex, 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, creating some of the videos I will show you shortly, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. So the latest turn of AI video models, like they're really, really good. Not just for the high fidelity stuff, which we'll show you some of, but even going back to like 90s VHS footage, it can edit anything and it doesn't look weird 90% of the time. Sea Dance 2.5, the big update here is that it replaces the whole person, the whole object, as opposed to just a face swap, which just, it just hits way harder, you'll see. And it matches all the subtle details of the footage. So things integrate

• 5:59John Coogan?

  really nicely. Dylan Patel posted a video of him as Drake in this Cheetah Print video over the weekend. And I think a lot of people fell for this.

• 6:10Jordi Hays?

  It tricked everyone.

• 6:11John Coogan?

  I think it tricked a lot of people because it's super high fidelity. Let's play Semi Analysis latest post on X, Dylan Patel as Drake. And what's interesting about this is the video model is really good, but also this Drake video came out a day ago. And so it's not, it hasn't saturated the internet. Like a lot of people

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people hadn't seen it.

• 6:32John Coogan?

  This is the first, yeah. I saw this video before I saw the actual Drake music video. And of course, the choreography is fantastic in the underlying video. And that drives the motion.

• 6:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe mute the audio.

• 6:44John Coogan?

  Really? Yeah, we're probably going to get

• 6:45Jordi Hays?

  Fun as it is.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  But it's so funny to see Dylan walk around and that first shot really sells it. It really looks like him. Later on, he goes into the mirror. He walks up the stairs. This is, this is what the model is really good at is even though he's very small and he's behind, like the, the chandelier cuts in front of him, there's no aberrations. This part, his face starts to look a little not like him. There's a little bit of Drake like sort of sneaking back in on the facial structure. But overall, very, very like incredible performance. And it does a good job whether he's looking away from the camera, whether he's big in the frame or small in the frame. And

• 7:24Jordi Hays?

  And I can't stress enough how funny it is that so many people, like so many people were dunking on saying, wow, this is the top. We're definitely closer to the top than the bottom. Never become the main character.

• 7:38John Coogan?

  He's not serious. He's not serious.

• 7:39Jordi Hays?

  It's like, one, Dylan has never had the most like serious brand. He likes to have fun. But two, the fact that it was tricking everyone shows that

• 7:47John Coogan?

  We got one to run.

• 7:48Jordi Hays?

  Shows where we are.

• 7:49John Coogan?

  No, seriously, like this is, this is exactly what you want from the semi analysis. Like you want them to analyze.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  Hey, we just updated you on the state of video models.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:01Jordi Hays?

  And, and the idea that, the idea that, the idea that Dylan, which they use so much AI, they use so much AI on anything.

• 8:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:09Jordi Hays?

  Everything. I've, I even texted Dylan recently. I was like, you should get an actual creative director, maybe use less slop, you know? But the idea that he would just like take 48 hours and a $100,000 budget to go and film this.

• 8:24John Coogan?

  The day after Drake drops the video was crazy. But if he did, like he is, like obviously he's in like an analysis business, but he's also an entertainer. He also has to fill the top of funnel, newsletter subscribers, like he has to be front and center. And so it's actually not that crazy. Like even if he did this by himself, I would just be like, respect, like that, that's a fun project. But of course, he's using AI, he's using Sea Dance 2.5. Higgs Field wrapped Sea Dance 2.5 in, in a model that sort of a harness that sort of makes this a little bit easier. You can use that via the API. It's also available on Fall. And there's a couple other ways to interface with it. But it's interesting because it's, it's highly compute intensive. China's obviously way behind on compute.

• 9:07John Coogan?

  So what's going on with the strategy? But before we get to that, it's really fun. So we got to play some of the more videos that we made. So I had Codex finding famous or funny videos to use as base clips. I would just say, I started with the rap videos, did a couple of those. I think there's one maybe in the

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Noah in the X chat says no headphones, obviously fake.

• 9:27John Coogan?

  Oh, true. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, you got to have the, you got to have the headphones to make it believable, Dylan Patel. But yeah, let's see if we can play the, the video. Did that one make it into the production chat? The, yeah, this one? Because I saw this originally with Elon Musk and Sam Altman rapping. And I think

• 9:48Jordi Hays?

  Mute it just because of swearing.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  But what's interesting here is that it does a pretty good job of getting us. But there's moments when I sort of blend into Elon Musk, which is funny because it's not like it's originally an Elon video, but clearly the underlying video that was driving the AI model was the Elon and Sam version. And then our heights kind of changed. Like I look a little bit more like Elon there. It's very silly. But, but, but, but very, very funny. Going to fool a lot of people. But also then I was able to just say like, okay, go make a bunch of tech videos. Like just find iconic videos from tech and it did it. And it found like Sweet Baby Ray's. I didn't tell it to go get that video, but

• 10:33John Coogan?

  it just did it. Which was very cool. Some of them came out really well. Some of them didn't do too well. The one that I liked, I think the most

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  And it's a funny dynamic that we noticed where when you're looking at an AI video of yourself, you're thinking, that doesn't look like me. And then when other people look, watch it, they're like, well, that looks exactly like Jordy.

• 10:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So let's watch Jordy introduce the MacBook Air as Steve Jobs. I don't think, actually, Apple kind of bans everything. So we'll see, we'll see if this one gets flagged. But we might be, we might be cooked on this, on this particular one. But let's

• 11:05Jordi Hays?

  Play it.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  I said, video is solved.

• 11:06Jordi Hays?

  Roll the dice.

• 11:07John Coogan?

  The post, yeah, let's roll the dice on this one. Video is solved. Jordy is introducing the MacBook Air. It's already got 350 likes on X. Let's play it. Boom. So it didn't change the voice. So you still hear Steve Jobs' voice, which is also funny about the Dylan Patel thing because it's Drake's voice. So it's like, what did they think happened? He's like lip syncing to it or something. That didn't make any sense. But what's really cool about this is that it changes Jordy, the small Jordy and the big Jordy. It changes both of them in the same frame. And then even there, you only see a little bit of Steve Jobs' mouth and it was able to change that to Jordy. So it can represent what's going on outside of the frame.

• 11:50John Coogan?

  And historically, that's been very difficult for AI models. They want the face in the center of the frame. They want to be able to crop it and think reasonably reasonably about it, but it did a good job there. Jordy as Jensen taking the GPUs out of the oven.

• 12:04Jordi Hays?

  Added some mass for this one.

• 12:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's very funny when you, when, when, when you use a different person with a different stature, different musculature. Like they, it just comes across differently, but very funny clip iconic when Jensen announced. Was this, that H100 announcement, the A100 announcement? It was pretty early, but uh,

• 12:27John Coogan?

  this is still such a funny gag that Jensen actually did this. I love it.

• 12:35John Coogan?

  He's really grunting. I mean, that's a heavy rack.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  Such a funny bit that he just did this in a kitchen. It's so good. I got something I gotta show you. Jensen's such a, such a master performer. We saw that on stage at Salesforce, Agent Force last, last week. The last one that I did, and before we pull up the Jordy of Steve Ballmer, which is particularly hilarious, let me tell you about console.com. Console built AI agents that are 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets.

• 13:19John Coogan?

  This one, I specifically told it like, keep the sweaty, the sweaty shirt. And so I think it did more of a face replacement. So the face is sort of jumping around, but still very funny.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  The key to .net, the key to industry transformation, the key to success is developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers. Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.

• 13:49John Coogan?

  It really got like the level of sweat on your face pretty cracked, but the face is jumping around. Not, not quite, not quite dialed. I think you'll have to perform that one IRL.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  And I should, I should run that build at some point.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  You should, you should bulk to get, to get to that level for sure, for sure. So yeah, I mean downstream of this, obviously there's going to be the, it's over for traditional filmmakers, blah, blah. Then obviously a whole bunch of blended work that uses the right tool for the job. Some productions will use this where it helps in urgent scenarios. I think some of the stuff is already actually being used in Hollywood, specifically for reshoots. About 10 years ago, Henry Cavill was in, was, was in Superman and he left Superman, a rap production. He went to film Mission Impossible. In Mission Impossible, he has a mustache. So he grew out a real mustache, was filming Mission Impossible.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  And they were like, we didn't get the shot for Superman. You gotta come back and film another scene as Superman. And he was like, I can't shave my mustache. And they were like, okay, we'll fix it in post. And in the newsletter, there's a photo here that we can pull up of how it came away because they had to remove and reconstruct his lip and his mouth using 2017 technology and it was not good. It was very, very rough, probably very tedious, very expensive.

• 15:12Jordi Hays?

  Isn't a mustache like the easiest thing to, to apply?

• 15:16John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, like fake? Like you should have just shaved it and then put on a fake mustache?

• 15:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  I don't know. I think Mission Impossible, they want the real thing. So yeah. The, the, the Superman on the right is Henry Cavill with a mustache that has been removed in post. And it was, yeah, widely, widely critiqued by the VFX community. So you can imagine for stuff like that, this, these tools will creep in very quickly. For most things, it's going to be, okay, well, if you needed someone to drive the video, why don't you just have the actor do that? Maybe for stunts and stuff, you'd do it, but for most performances, I think you'll still be doing it the old way, at least for the time being.

• 15:58Jordi Hays?

  What about some of the other more action oriented?

• 16:00John Coogan?

  Yes. So this was a fun one. I had to go and pull Johnny Knoxville and Steve-O clips throughout the, throughout their filmmaking and TV.

• 16:09Jordi Hays?

  Generational run.

• 16:10John Coogan?

  Their, yeah, their entire run, make about 20 of them and then put it together into a trailer that we can watch now. And I really enjoyed this. We gotta do that in the office. I think Tyler was thinking about getting that.

• 16:35John Coogan?

  This one, this one didn't seem that bad to me, but Nick said this was terrifying, getting in a cactus. I don't know. I've never really been poked by a cactus. The hands on the bikes. I don't know how the guy on the left wins. Of course, a lot of Steve-O in that one. A lot of Steve-O here too.

• 16:53John Coogan?

  But I think these work so well because a lot of the underlying footage looks like AI. It looks like this.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  Prompts.

• 16:59John Coogan?

  This looks like an AI prompt, like, like drive a jet ski in a pool, in a luxury house, you know?

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  This is real though. This is real. We actually shot this.

• 17:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is real. No, the only thing that's different about this is the suits. We replaced the characters. But the underlying footage is all real from Johnny Knoxville and crew. The fire hose rodeo. This one, that looks fun.

• 17:27John Coogan?

  He's dying laughing.

• 17:30Jordi Hays?

  The old alligator in the house?

• 17:32John Coogan?

  Like that, the old alligator in the house trick. I think they chilled that guy down. So he was real slow.

• 17:40John Coogan?

  And then the, the bull run slammed. I didn't know rams were so aggressive. The ram just slammed that guy.

• 17:50Jordi Hays?

  It's in the name, John.

• 17:51John Coogan?

  I know, but I think of them. So this looks like an AI prompt too. Boxing match on stilts. But replaces the suits. The gag chair that falls apart. That's a classic.

• 18:03Jordi Hays?

  All time.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  All time. Classic.

• 18:10John Coogan?

  And then I come up and, hey, don't, don't steal that. The old, the old air horn while you're golfing.

• 18:19John Coogan?

  Classic.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  No, this is a good one.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Going through the window.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  Just asking someone, hey, can you go grab the six bowls of soup on a tray and bring it in? Okay. That's just pure Johnny Knoxville. So yeah, sometimes you get like a blended half the main character, half who you tried to replace. Sometimes it's pretty good. There's a little bit of, there's a little bit of us in there, but, but very fun to be able to just, just do this in, via text, like you, you don't even, I mean, I'm technically interacting with an API, but I didn't write a line of code.

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  All on your phone.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, all on my phone. So very, very fun. I think these things will sort of burn through pretty quickly. Like everyone will be like, oh yeah, like, like that's the capability. Everyone did their version of the meme and then, and then it becomes more of a tool melts into the background.

• 19:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You already saw this with all the Young Lean music videos.

• 19:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:19Jordi Hays?

  Kind of made the same thing and now.

• 19:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. And now it's like played out, but a very impressive demo.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  Tip of the hat?

• 19:26John Coogan?

  But a very impressive demo because it's able to replace multiple people and, and do it very consistently, even through like some really aggressive motion. So I thought that was pretty cool. So the, the, the whole pipeline here was, I was running Codex on my PC, interacting with that from my phone, the ChatGPT app. And then I had Codex go and generate reference images with just ChatGPT images, because it's pretty good at that. And then use those to swap through Sea Dance, which was, which was actually rendered via Higgs field. Higgs field, amazing in terms of just delivering the assets like as an API. Extremely confusing as a product because they basically have two ways to give them money.

• 20:10John Coogan?

  You can, you can load up API credits and then you can like buy a plan. And so at one point I ran out of API credits and it was like time to upgrade to the plan. And I was like, okay, cool. I'm having a good time. I'll do more of this. Click the button. Like, okay, yeah, you loaded up a couple hundred bucks in here with like the ultimate plan or whatever. And then it's like, those credits are not available in the API. And I was like, great, thanks. And then, and then it was like, okay, time to add some credits to your plan. And I was like, okay, this is what I need to do. I add credits to the, it's like, those credits are on your plan. Those aren't API credits. Those are plan credits. And so I have like so much random money stuck in various pieces of.

• 20:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, and I think that's been a massive complaint. The Higgs field has faced a bunch of, I think, various allegations over the last year around just like.

• 20:58John Coogan?

  I mean, the website looks like a gambling company. It'll be like countdown 10 minutes to claim 75% discount on your next credit. It's like, it's totally optimized for like brain rot as you go through the flow being like, oh, buy, you gotta buy.

• 21:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I had seen stuff of like, you can't, you know, not, not being able to actually cancel your plans. So now that you have a plan that you can't use for anything, it's over for you.

• 21:19John Coogan?

  It's over for me.

• 21:20Jordi Hays?

  It's over. You're a customer for life.

• 21:22John Coogan?

  But the product's.

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  Great entertainment.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  Great entertainment. And I do think, yeah, I, I think I might try Fall again as, as more of like a cleaner API. That's a little more intelligible, but, but yeah, I, I think once you set up the bindings and get them all dialed in.

• 21:40Jordi Hays?

  Ellie says, looking mighty sus and mysterious today, chaps.

• 21:44John Coogan?

  Well.

• 21:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, this is the era that we're in.

• 21:47John Coogan?

  This is the era that we're in. You gotta take.

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  Safety era.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  You gotta take a hat, a hat seriously.

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  Safety era. Anyway, John, once a week, John's, John's like, I think, I think fedoras are going to come back. I think the doors are going to go, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the hat.

• 22:04John Coogan?

  I do think the hat can work. If it's styled properly, I think it goes better with a suit. I think it goes better with a sunglasses and a popper jacket.

• 22:11Jordi Hays?

  John says my safety.

• 22:15John Coogan?

  Uh, no, I mean, like, obviously, the fedora is, is often, uh, uh, often maligned as, as not particularly stylish, not particularly modern. But if you go back to old James Bond, there was a way to make us, to make a fedora look very stylish. Now, we are wearing relatively cheap fedoras. I think you drop a couple thousand dollars on a Bottega Roman weave fedora. It's a different conversation.

• 22:39Jordi Hays?

  Different story.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  Different story. Uh, no, I, I, I think it can be done. I think it can be done properly, but, uh, it requires a discerning eye. Some taste, taste is the new moat in AI. The fedora will be a piece of that story. Uh, anyway, let me tell you about public investing for those that take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. So my questions, my questions, my questions about C dance 2.5. I was like, how is China winning? How is China winning in this? Like, they have one fifth the compute, one

• 23:10Jordi Hays?

  No rules.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  Is it that simple? And then also, why aren't they open sourcing it? They love open sourcing everything. They're like, we love open sourcing, except when we're on the frontier.

• 23:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:22John Coogan?

  And there's a weird dynamic there. So first off, did some digging, got some answers. Let's dig into it. Um, at a high level, intellectual property rules are somewhat flexible over there. That's true. But the models are insanely compute intensive. Like it is, even if you're like, I don't care about Hollywood IP come sue me in China. Good luck. You're still like, there's still a finite amount of compute. And so why aren't you on the RSI trajectory? Why aren't you working on coding models? Like, why don't you just take that compute and put it on the next GLM run or the next Kimmy run? Right? Um, well, there are reasons for that. Uh, first is that ByteDance has a more natural flywheel here than the leaders in America.

• 24:07John Coogan?

  So Anthropic and OpenAI do not have good surfaces to deliver video, AI or not video. Like OpenAI tried with Sora, got a decent amount of people to use it, but it's, but it was not the obvious flywheel that ByteDance has. And so over in China, ByteDance is a, is a big company leading and they have TikTok, DoYin, CapCut, ads, e-commerce, recommendation systems, tons of immediate benefits to the core business without needing to pull together a new demand surface for video. This sort of exists in America with Meta and Google slash YouTube, right? But AI slop is deeply unpopular in America, although debate whether or not this is, this is slop.

• 24:47John Coogan?

  This is, this is sloppier than some of the videos we showed you. Um, but, uh, both companies, DeepMind and, uh, and, and MSL, they are on the RSI trajectory. They're focusing on agentic workflows, personal agents, knowledge retrieval, coding, uh, recursive self-improvement, AGI. They are, it feels like they are more AGI pill than ByteDance, which is like, look, we got a good thing going with DoYin and TikTok. We got a lot of video space. Let's dominate there because we have an op, uh, because we have a, an opportunity. And, and also like the, the AI, the IP infringement thing is not actually dead to rights. They haven't necessarily been caught in any major way.

• 25:30John Coogan?

  It's just that the, when the model comes out, people are like Tom Cruise and it's like perfectly Tom Cruise. And so it's like, what's going on here? So some of that could be the, the outputs and the harness that actually like reviews outputs, like, because there is an argument on fair use for training to include everything, especially when you think about TikTok. So people go to TikTok and they upload clips from movies. Some of those are fair use. Some of those are transformational. Like you can actually make a vibrio from, uh, from Top Gun that is transformational and passes the fair use test, which is that it's not a replacement. So you're not like, why would I watch Top Gun when I could watch 30 seconds of Top Gun edited?

• 26:13John Coogan?

  Like a crazy hyperlapse edit. Um, so it's not, it's not competitive in that way. It is transformative and it provides some commentary layer on top. So that is actually okay. You can use clips from movies if you're comment, if you're commenting on the lighting and you're trying to explain the lighting. All that means is that, that some of that data goes onto TikTok and lives there forever. And Hollywood can't say anything about that. Same thing with YouTube, same thing with Instagram. There are plenty of, of film criticism channels that post fairly long clips from movies completely acceptably. And they don't even need to share revenue because it is transformational. It is open. Uh, it is fair use. And so, so they have the, they have Hollywood IP in the training data. They can train on it.

• 26:54John Coogan?

  Now there's a question about what the output should be. You still own your likeness. And so even if you can perfectly, uh, recreate something, you might still get sued. Uh, Google has a, we, we tested this out. Google has a, uh, has a music, uh, generation service. And if you go and say like, I want a Madonna song, clearly YouTube has all the Madonna songs in the catalog. They can train on them, but it will say, I can't exactly make a Madonna song. I can make a pop song that's generic. Here you go. And that doesn't pull enough from Madonna to get sued, at least in theory. We'll see how it plays out. Um, and so, um, and then also like a lot of people just upload full movies to TikTok and stuff.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  And they'll just be like, I uploaded all of Lord of the Rings. And even though that probably gets taken down, it goes through ByteDance servers. It might get saved somewhere, might get like soft deleted, like, like it doesn't exist on, you can't watch it on TikTok, but it still exists on the server. So, so they have a lot of data to train all this, um, but they're not open sourcing. They're not doing open weights. They're certainly not open sourcing the, the training data set. Uh, and it's a little bit of a narrative violation from the default Chinese AI strategy. There are a few reasons for this. First, no one wants to open source when they're in the lead. We've just seen this time and time again. And second, with coding models, open weights are a play to build a Chinese tech stack.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  And so you, you open source the, the coding model, build the developer ecosystem, and then maybe that helps Huawei stay competitive. Maybe that, you know, reduces the amount of dominance of the American technology stack. And so there's, there's a little bit of like, public incentive to build up, uh, the indigenous supply chain that comes from that. Less so in video where they are vertically integrated and have everything down to the distribution surface. So, uh, in general, if you are a challenger that needs an ecosystem, you want to open up. We saw this with the early meta stuff, uh, and, and then, uh, if you're an incumbent and you have distribution, you want to close down.

• 28:59John Coogan?

  So, uh, there's some interesting knock on effects mainly around a speculative future value of video models and training humanoid robots. Like China also seems to be doing really well in humanoids. If AI video becomes really important in sim to real translation and training these, uh, AI, train, training humanoid robots with simulated video, then this could be like part of the bigger picture. But I think that's farther out. I think for the next month, we're just going to be talking about memes and funny videos. Anyway.

• 29:27Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 29:28John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it.

• 29:37Jordi Hays?

  Just do it.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  Do it.

• 29:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Meta on a tear. Meta's up 27% this month, according to Sheil Monat, almost entirely thanks to Muse. Uh, this makes sense, right?

• 29:49John Coogan?

  Is that almost entirely to Muse? I mean, the semi-analysis.

• 29:53Jordi Hays?

  Basically, when you have a company that's spending hundreds of billions of dollars on something without much to show for it, and then you have something to show for it.

• 30:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:00Jordi Hays?

  Then the market's going to react positively.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  They're going to, they're saying, so you're saying there's a fighting chance here.

• 30:07John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 30:07Jordi Hays?

  And the feedback on the product is incredible. There's a lot of investors that have tried it and they're like, hey, this is a good product.

• 30:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:13Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 30:13John Coogan?

  And, and, and interestingly, like, they are in the lead in a subcategory where they have never been the lead before. Like Google had Nano Banana, which like, there was a moment where it was like, oh, Nano Banana is the best. Uh, obviously Anthropic had best coding models for a while. Like, like crowns have changed, but Meta's never really held the best model in knowledge retrieval, or when they did vibes, that was not the best version of that. But this is, at this moment in time, the best version of, of, of what they have. And it's building off of a model that's not on the frontier, but able to deliver an experience that puts them in first place for the subcategory, which is exciting.

• 30:52Jordi Hays?

  And can immediately be incredibly integrated across everything else that they do.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  Shopping, messaging, all these different things.

• 30:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:00Jordi Hays?

  Shopify and Muse announced a partnership this morning.

• 31:03John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 31:03Jordi Hays?

  Counter positioning a little bit against Amazon. Uh, Amazon came down with the ban hammer. Buco Capital says, Amazon cuts off Muse while I am bullish Meta and Muse. I think many people are overlooking the digital knife fight that's about to occur. Nobody wants to get commoditized or layered here. Let the games begin. Amazon says it has cut off Meta's new Muse personal AI agent from shopping on amazon.com on behalf of customers. After attempting unsuccessfully to get the Facebook parent company to voluntarily exclude the e-commerce site from the experience. The problem, Amazon says, is that it never agreed to any of it. Meta didn't tell Amazon that Muse would access its store. The agent itself doesn't identify itself when it browses and it appears to capture and store customer credentials,

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  which the company says create privacy and security risks. As of Sunday night, people trying to use Muse to shop on Amazon were seeing the pop up. Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon's conditions of use to which our customers have agreed.

• 32:03John Coogan?

  Interesting. I wonder how Walmart will respond because

• 32:07Jordi Hays?

  Walmart was always.

• 32:09John Coogan?

  Initory overlap is, is, is higher than I think most people think.

• 32:12Jordi Hays?

  So I think Walmart had always been more friendly with chat apps, specifically chat GPT. And that's the kind of thing that you do when you're not, you know, when, when you're not the leader in the space, you're more willing to

• 32:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:26Jordi Hays?

  Experiment.

• 32:26John Coogan?

  I think they wound up rolling their own. Uh, I think they have Sparky and Amazon has Rufus. And so there's two dog named, uh, AI agents that do the shopping. And then, and then most recently.

• 32:38Jordi Hays?

  Tyler's been day laying Rufus, by the way.

• 32:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, just for everything.

• 32:41Jordi Hays?

  For everything.

• 32:42John Coogan?

  Just, uh, just, uh, psychology.

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, getting close to solving another millennium.

• 32:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:49Jordi Hays?

  Rufus underrated.

• 32:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um. Yeah, I know Amazon wound up finding sort of an equilibrium with OpenAI by plugging in their ad network into ChatGPT instead of letting ChatGPT like checkout. This is the whole Eric Sufort agentic commerce is a mirage. Instead, Amazon is vending in their ads. So ChatGPT brings the data and says, okay, this person's looking for this thing. Do you want to buy an ad on it? And so there's the transaction value. But I don't know how this will play out.

• 33:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I saw a couple seemingly smart investors say that are using Muse and excited about it, say, why is, why is Amazon banning Muse? This is so short sighted. And then I actually saw two, in two instances, they deleted because of course they immediately were getting comments about Amazon's ad business, which is obviously what they're looking to protect. You can't serve ads to Muse agents or Instinct or Chat or any of these other things. And Amazon's ad business is actually dramatically bigger than both Anthropic and OpenAI over the last 12 months.

• 33:59John Coogan?

  Oh, just have revenue?

• 33:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So they've done 76 billion in the last 12 months through Q2 of 2026. So obviously, they're going to protect this. Obviously, they're going to protect this. I think consumers would love to be able to check out with, with other services. It is pretty gnarly to navigate Amazon.com as amazing as the services overall.

• 34:26John Coogan?

  Describing a UX experience as gnarly.

• 34:28Jordi Hays?

  No, it's, it's.

• 34:29John Coogan?

  Just being a UX researcher at Amazon, they're calling it gnarly.

• 34:33Jordi Hays?

  It is fairly gnarly.

• 34:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:37Jordi Hays?

  And, but, but you can see that, that there's, and again, Peter, who, who effectively is the founder of Muse, because he obviously, Muse is based entirely on, on OpenClaw and they built it amazing, sort of effectively, almost like.

• 34:55John Coogan?

  And I think Instinct too is, is, has some OpenClaw lineage. Is that correct?

• 34:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Peter says, the beauty of running a claw yourself, they cannot block you.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  Oh, they're going to block me when I'm, when I say claw, open 10,000 Amazon windows on my desktop. Open up 5,000 Chrome tabs of, of Amazon.

• 35:19Jordi Hays?

  So the Sufanator.

• 35:20John Coogan?

  You can get banned even if you're running it locally. This has happened to me. Like, this is, this is not a full solution, but he is, he is right that there will be more sovereignty and the users might win. Like, that's what we were talking to John Quinn about, was that Amazon versus perplexity computer. The ruling was that Amazon can't block it if it's not, if it's running on the person's computer. Cause it's like, yeah, yes, yes, I told the agent to open the Chrome tab, but it's my Chrome tab on my computer. And so you shouldn't be able to block that because it's not a third party company. It's not, it's not corporate warfare. You're coming to me, the consumer. The customer is always right.

• 36:00Jordi Hays?

  I can, I can see that being the ultimate outcome. I do think that's a bit, I mean, you basically, I think Amazon's ad business, at least, at least their search ad business is something that eventually you might need to underwrite like cable television, where it's like, you're basically saying that there's a terminal value here. People aren't going to use their assistants to shop. That does, but some amount of people are just going to keep going to Amazon.com. Right now, it is, Amazon has made it quite easy to buy things on Amazon.com. It's not like it's that much easier with an assistant, but something I've found is it's, it's actually really nice having a single interface for all the things that you do. Right? So I like going to one place.

• 36:42John Coogan?

  Agent, push the order burrito button.

• 36:49Jordi Hays?

  The Sufanator has had some of the best commentary on this, which actually dates back to, he says, "The knife fight already took place. It ended a year ago when I wrote the first entry in my agentic commerce is a mirage series. Amazon began blocking agents last July. It's currently suing perplexity over autonomous shopping with Comet. Amazon won't capitulate. It doesn't have to. Alexa for shopping."

• 37:14John Coogan?

  Rufus.

• 37:16Jordi Hays?

  Generated 12 billion in incremental revenue.

• 37:20John Coogan?

  Every time I hear Rufus or Sparky.

• 37:24Jordi Hays?

  Walmart Sparky has generated similarly significant commercial traction for the company. Agentic commerce is already a reality, but it takes place on site, not through independent agents. ChatGPT launched ads in February 2026 and shortly thereafter shuttered instant checkout. The affiliate model is economically suboptimal relative to advertising. ChatGPT has already demonstrated that.

• 37:47John Coogan?

  Yep. Advertising is the dominant business model. Yeah, it'll be interesting. I mean, when the OpenClaw stuff came out, I was like, it feels like Napster. It feels like the Napster moment. Like, yeah, you can go check out on an ecommerce website, but like, nobody wants you to do that that way. And like, you're going to have to write some API binding and then like scrape the front end and then rewrite it every time you go and check out because they're constantly going to be fighting you. And you are sort of like playing this like game of cat and mouse, which you can play. And for certain, for certain ecommerce sites, they're going to be very open to that. Other ones are going to be a huge hassle to deal with.

• 38:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the question is, can agents monetize with advertising? I saw someone, a pretty viral post, somebody frustrated with Instinct, Instinct coming and they did basically a blast that says, hey, you have a bunch more invites. You can invite a bunch of people. And the user was pretty frustrated with that because they're like, hey, you work for me. Why are you advertising? So even though they're not paying for the product and they're incurring a lot of costs, product's free to them, they're still mad that, that they feel like the agent is doing something that's purely in the agent's benefit, not in their revenue.

• 38:53John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah. I wonder if we'll live in a world where, you know how ChatGPT has like those recommended agentic actions? If like, one of those could be like sponsored, like, hey, like, want me to go shopping for you right now?

• 39:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, no, and that's important because, because companies will happily pay for incremental demand. But the issue with, with, with agents is if you're saying, go to Amazon and buy this thing. The user already wanted to go to Amazon.

• 39:21John Coogan?

  Totally. But if I'm, if I'm, if I'm an industry coalition of surfboard wax makers, I might choose to send you a notification when you open up ChatGPT that says like, hey, want to go surfing? Want to take it to the next level? Isn't that what happened?

• 39:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, basically.

• 39:40John Coogan?

  You got one, one recommendation.

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  ChatGPT recommends.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  What was it?

• 39:45Jordi Hays?

  Various agentic workflows for me.

• 39:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 39:48Jordi Hays?

  I sent it earlier. It says, it recommended setting up an agent to give me one realistic next step for my surfing each week.

• 39:57John Coogan?

  Yep. That's great. It's like everything else.

• 39:59Jordi Hays?

  Problem is, I know exactly, I know exactly what I need to do.

• 40:04John Coogan?

  Uh, this is actually.

• 40:05Jordi Hays?

  Raj Veer called out something interesting, which is that threads started free falling in the charts right as Muse started growing.

• 40:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Today on, on Instagram, there, there's a, there's a hero story that's a full bleed ad for Muse. So they're pushing it. They're pushing it. And yeah, they're probably saying like, let's, let's funnel it over to Muse. And it makes sense. The monetization on Muse, I would expect to be way higher than threads. Threads, you get some display ads, it's text, it's never, that surface has never monetized as well as Instagram. So the best case was like, you get something half as valuable as Instagram, a quarter, tenth as valuable. Whereas Muse is like a new surface area where there's a whole bunch of different monetization opportunities and they already have the whole small business community. So I, I think it

• 40:53John Coogan?

  makes a ton of sense to funnel the, the attention over there. Let me tell you about 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. Now, going over to the, the less, the less good news in the agentic future that we're all living in. It feels like hallucinations are coming back. There was a moment where it was like, if you hit GPT-6 Pro with a query on some history, or you basically want a Wikipedia page that's generated or a history report, pull some data, you could rely on it, that it was not totally making things up, directionally correct, bunch of really high quality links, pretty valuable. And so

• 41:38John Coogan?

  hallucinations this year have kind of gone away. You still get slop if you're doing something on the, on the frontier, like trying to design some system in code or using Blender or even AI video. You'll see little things here and there, but for knowledge retrieval, the, the hallucination problem kind of went away, but it's coming back in full force. David here said Instinct made up his middle name and he can't board his flight because he tried to use his agent to book a flight and it just made up David Bong Chang Choi, which I guess is not his middle name. And I've had that before where.

• 42:12Jordi Hays?

  I find it a little hard. Well, one, one, we know, we know why hallucinations would be happening, which is like, if you're serving a product for free at scale, you have to figure out a way to do it really cheaply. And so they're, they're certainly using older models and trying, and again, trying to find.

• 42:29John Coogan?

  Someone figured out the model, wasn't it?

• 42:30Jordi Hays?

  Kimmy?

• 42:30John Coogan?

  I think it's Kimmy running OpenClaw, right? But it's hosted in the cloud. And so you get an OpenClaw instance, cloud hosted.

• 42:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:40Jordi Hays?

  That said, I've been in situations where my name was misspelled on like flight details. And this is pretty easy to resolve. So hopefully.

• 42:51John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, you think it's not that big of a deal because like you can just get on.

• 42:54Jordi Hays?

  You can just talk to them and they'll be like, here's my ID. I made a mistake.

• 42:57John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 42:58Jordi Hays?

  Fix it and they'll give you a new boarding pass.

• 43:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They might kick you out of security line. So if you're running really late, as I like to do, you, you, you, you might, you might, you might struggle to get on the plane. You might miss your flight, but that's okay. You gotta miss a couple.

• 43:12Jordi Hays?

  This was interesting from former Meta employee, Nikita Beer, says, how important is AI to Meta? Here's one easy tell. One of the launch features of the Muse app was auto negotiating for stuff on Facebook Marketplace. The poor product manager who owns Marketplace knows that millions of bots lowballing sellers will eventually kill the product. But this was escalated to Zuck by the Muse team, and he said, okay, we'll poison Marketplace just a little.

• 43:37John Coogan?

  Wait, why will that kill the product?

• 43:39Jordi Hays?

  I mean, think about the experience if you tell your bot like, hey, I'm interested in these types of items. Go anytime one of them appears, auto negotiate.

• 43:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, but wouldn't someone have a bot on the other side dealing with the negotiation?

• 43:52Jordi Hays?

  You can do outbound too.

• 43:53John Coogan?

  You can go outbound. Yes.

• 43:56Jordi Hays?

  Message everyone on Facebook.

• 43:57John Coogan?

  Yes, I got a Dodge Hellcat. If you know, you know, I got one pair of keys and I saw you were posting. You liked a post from the Dodge Hellcat community. Would you be interested in purchasing this? I'll, I'll need cash.

• 44:12Jordi Hays?

  Don't ask questions.

• 44:13John Coogan?

  Don't ask questions. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We got Augustus Doricko back in the Ultra Dome, back in the waiting room. He's coming in hot off of a Series B. How you doing?

• 44:30Augustus Doricko?

  Gentlemen, I'm blessed. It's a pleasure to be chatting again.

• 44:33John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 44:34Jordi Hays?

  Did you align all this news?

• 44:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:36Jordi Hays?

  Was that strategic? Was this like a?

• 44:38John Coogan?

  You're like, I need to pump the Series B so I'll get engaged to get an extra press cycle going.

• 44:43Augustus Doricko?

  Oh, yeah, they were close together, I guess. That was coincidence.

• 44:47John Coogan?

  Both embargoed same weekend, maybe.

• 44:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:50Augustus Doricko?

  That they were.

• 44:51John Coogan?

  Obviously. Congratulations. We're very happy for you on, on, on the engagement, but also the Series B. How are things going? What's new in your world? How much rain are you making these days?

• 45:01Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah. Well, first of all, the, the hundred million dollars that we raised, I'm super grateful to have done that with great partners.

• 45:13Augustus Doricko?

  Thank goodness.

• 45:15Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna need a bigger gong the next round. We've been with, I feel like we've been riding with you for every round to date.

• 45:22John Coogan?

  Day one.

• 45:23Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, time to upgrade for us.

• 45:26Augustus Doricko?

  No, you were there, you were there early. I, I was wondering whether a hundred million dollar bag was big enough for the size gone, but.

• 45:33John Coogan?

  Oh, for sure.

• 45:33Jordi Hays?

  Oh, for sure.

• 45:34Augustus Doricko?

  The, the reality is, um, it's, it's, it's a drop in the bucket relative to what the Chinese Meteorological Administration is spending.

• 45:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, what are they spending?

• 45:45Augustus Doricko?

  Understand. Say again?

• 45:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what are they spending? Order of magnitude?

• 45:49Augustus Doricko?

  So they're spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on their weather modification program because they understand that water and the weather is a strategic capability and resource. We talk about critical minerals. We talk about oil and natural gas. Water is this fundamental input to our industrial economy, to our ag, to healthy agriculture and, and food. And if we don't produce more and cloud seeding is the foremost option to produce more, the Colorado River, the Great Salt Lake, the, the bodies of water across the United States are going to be impaired to the point of mass evacuation. So we need to make more for the sake of the strategic health of the country. And then also for our allies overseas that need more water, like Jordan in the Middle East, like Morocco and so on.

• 46:32John Coogan?

  Did you get saved by data center backlash? Because there was some backlash brewing to your crazy scheme to make it rain. And then I feel like it's been real quiet since the data center started sucking all the air out of the discourse.

• 46:48Augustus Doricko?

  Well, the data centers have been sucking water out of our divorce.

• 46:51John Coogan?

  How real is that from your perspective? You're the water expert. Talk to data center people. They'll be like, it's closed loop. It's like a car wash. Yeah, we use water, but we recycle it. At the same time, you know, water usage, it's low, but everyone's saying we're going to build a thousand times more data centers. So at a certain point, might be significant. What, what's your take on it?

• 47:13Augustus Doricko?

  Well, the reality is, yes, American agriculture is using far more water, orders of magnitude more than data centers. So, so does municipal use, the showers that we take, the dishes that we wash, orders of magnitude more water than data centers. But data centers do consume water.

• 47:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Augustus Doricko?

  And when you have as great a shortage of supply as we do in the American West, do you want to give water to computer? Or to your shower and your faucet?

• 47:39John Coogan?

  Probably computer.

• 47:40Augustus Doricko?

  Probably, probably.

• 47:42John Coogan?

  Probably computer.

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

  You're asking a guy that spent all weekend generating AI videos.

• 47:47John Coogan?

  If it's generating AI videos and playing video games, I'll skip the shower. I'll walk in.

• 47:52Augustus Doricko?

  But John Jordy, you can have AI slot videos in the shower if you just make it via cloud.

• 47:58John Coogan?

  I can have my cake and eat it too with cloud seeding.

• 48:01Augustus Doricko?

  Precisely.

• 48:03John Coogan?

  Is there actually any, any closed, any, any near term flywheel there where cloud seeding can alleviate water usage from data centers? Or is that like further out?

• 48:16Augustus Doricko?

  Rainmaker already has one deal closed with hyperscaler and we're in negotiation and engineering feasibility with multiple others. Offsetting their consumption and riding the wave of hyperscalers to produce more water for the American interior. That's a spectacular positive externality that those businesses can provide. And so I look forward to that. Maybe not as much as I do the ski resorts that we're negotiating with. But keep an eye out for the cantons of Switzerland and your favorite resorts around there in this upcoming winter.

• 48:48John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 48:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, talk, yeah, talk, I, I talk more about that as personally as a skier, I'm, I'm, I'm quite fascinated. But, but like, what, what are, what are those deployments gonna look like? Like, are you, is that basically you have a, a team that's set up at an individual mountain? And then you're basically, I mean, these are businesses that have basically dealt with making artificial snow for such a long period of time. I'm sure they took like very naturally to the concept, but what are these deployments gonna actually look like?

• 49:21Augustus Doricko?

  So they haven't taken supernaturally to it initially because cloud seeding and weather modification has mostly been full of fugazi and snake oil for the last hundred years. Right? There are many, many people in the last couple of decades that have claimed to be able to modify the weather, but they can't physically measure it and prove it in real time. If you can't do that, then why would somebody bother paying you? It's only because of the recent results that we had in Alaska and Oregon, Idaho, Utah, where we're making hundreds of millions of gallons of new water that they've taken an interest. And we wouldn't be able to do that if not for our efforts to build the best atmospheric science lab in the world. The weather is something that's historically under invested in by basically everyone besides commodities desks.

• 50:06Augustus Doricko?

  We need to put way more sensors into the field. We need to build far more sophisticated models in order to understand our interventions. And then actually harvest the resources available to us in the sustainable and renewable reservoir that is the atmosphere, be it for ski resorts or farms or data centers.

• 50:23John Coogan?

  Are you gonna stay with drone delivery for the foreseeable future? Or is there a howitzer in the pipeline? Because I, I, I've seen though some ski resorts actually have howitzer cannons that will just launch conventional munitions to cause avalanches, to clear avalanches for safety. But they already have some of the equipment and I imagine with the right round, you fire the right chemical and disperse it at the right. It, it doesn't seem that crazy to me. It might be cheaper, but I'm sure you've looked at it. What's the decision tree for you?

• 50:55Augustus Doricko?

  At the end of the day, what I care about is delivering on the effect that our customer wants, right? Do you want more snow? What's the best way to get it to you? If it's a rocket or a howitzer or me skydiving and halo jumping through a cloud with, with silver iodide in my hands, like whichever way is best works. We're taking a really big and deliberate bet on autonomy. Drones, they, the ones that Rainmakers built are unparalleled in their capability to fly in these severe atmospheric conditions, much more wide a flight envelope than most manned aircraft. But in the limit, what we get out of autonomy is more flights, more cost effective observations and significantly lower cost per volume of water or snow delivered to our customers.

• 51:39Augustus Doricko?

  So we're going to keep using our drones and make them increasingly autonomous. Although we'll probably do some research with plans in the not too distant future.

• 51:47Jordi Hays?

  How does El Nino affect your sales cycle? Like.

• 51:51John Coogan?

  Is that gonna put you out of business? It's gonna be rough for a couple of months?

• 51:54Jordi Hays?

  But I just, but I just imagine there, there's some players that are like, I think we're gonna be good this year.

• 51:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:59Jordi Hays?

  Check back.

• 52:00John Coogan?

  No, no, it's kind of a cyclic whole business, right?

• 52:02Jordi Hays?

  Shift your focus to other parts of the US.

• 52:05Augustus Doricko?

  It's, it's a, you know, I think Time Morse commented recently that building Rainmaker is like playing Diablo on insanity mode for startups. Not only is it a seasonal business because we're making snow in the winter, but also it is annually cyclical because of El Nino, El Nia, El Nia. Some regions are going to get a lot more natural snow, but other regions will get a lot less and Rainmaker will be working harder there. That said, even in the regions around this Pacific Northwest, Northern Rockies that are getting more snow, they're so critically depleted that they need excess snow melt relative to the baseline year in order to refill Lake Powell, Lake Mead, the Great Salt Lake, et cetera. So we're geographically hedged in order to accommodate this, not just within the United States, but across the world.

• 52:50Augustus Doricko?

  That is going to scale up the extent to which, you know, we're, we're hedged across multiple different climates simultaneously.

• 52:57John Coogan?

  What does the team look like? Where you are you? Have you expanded beyond the Gundo? I know you have like four deployed operating bases, but what's the footprint of the company right now?

• 53:08Augustus Doricko?

  Well, you asked first, what does the team look like? I first would say drippy.

• 53:13John Coogan?

  Oh, look at that.

• 53:14Augustus Doricko?

  A series, a series of Hermes ties.

• 53:17John Coogan?

  Ooh, very nice.

• 53:19Augustus Doricko?

  This is a nice collection of different ties that have clouds on them.

• 53:24John Coogan?

  There you go. Are you, are you donning ties more or less often than you were last year when I saw you on local TV every week?

• 53:37Augustus Doricko?

  Uh, more, more often. And you know, the, the Gundo thing, uh, it's great. I love it. I am a Gundo supremacist, absolutely. And we couldn't have built, uh, Rainmaker if not for that. But, um, we want to serve water for everybody. Uh, we want to serve water, uh, to the federal government, to nations around the world. And in order to do so, we need to collaborate with the best national labs and universities across the country. Um, being the mulleted guy in Yeezy uh, is not necessarily the outfit and persona that you want to dawn when you're talking about those

• 54:16Augustus Doricko?

  research scopes of work. Um, so I'm wearing a lot more Hermes. Um, I am wearing a little bit less Yeezy. Uh, and that'll probably persist for a while.

• 54:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, last question, last question for me. As, as some of these open problems, Millennium Prize problems have been, uh, solved, a lot of people outside of San Francisco are like, cool, the, the nerd solved another math problem. Like, you know, uh, they don't, they're not like as, as captivated by it.

• 54:48Jordi Hays?

  But something that I've been thinking about is like for, for every one of those sort of high profile, uh, open problems, there's tons of businesses that have access to the same models or models with close to the same capabilities that are just applying them to their industries. And I feel like for you, um, and, and, and your category, it just feels like having intelligence on demand that you can apply to these problems that like hasn't had 10,000 PhDs working on it. You talked about how, you know, hedge funds have paid a lot of attention to the weather, weather because of commodities trading, but are you feeling like an acceleration in, in, in your team's abilities because of new models or are you not feeling it yet?

• 55:33Augustus Doricko?

  To give credit where credit is due, the nerds in San Francisco have done a spectacular thing. Um, and

• 55:40John Coogan?

  The tip of the fedora, perhaps.

• 55:43Augustus Doricko?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 55:45Augustus Doricko?

  We're, we're taking a point too, right? Like Richard Feynman was a spectacular scientist, uh, Oppenheimer, spectacular scientist. We can do great in frontier science without, uh, being total nerds. Just a reminder to the San Francisco audience listening, but again, um, you can, uh, you can see the rate of hypothesis generation and experimentation accelerating at Rainmaker because of the models available. Astra has been a spectacular lever for Rainmaker and we're going to continue using it. Um, and, and then also like developing better and better models with the, uh, informed participation of the LLMs critiquing the output. Like that is something that is actually genuinely accretive

• 56:29Augustus Doricko?

  to our understanding of the atmosphere and it's going to become all the more so in time.

• 56:33John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 56:33Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 56:34John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the round. Congratulations on the engagement and safe trips, safe travels. We'll talk to you soon.

• 56:40Jordi Hays?

  Great progress, dude. Great to see you.

• 56:42John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. We have a node Khosla coming in, the TBPN Ultra Dome in just a minute. First, I wanted to, we're going to talk to him about personal agents and I wanted to share, uh, this hot take from Alex Kerr, who says, I think Silicon Valley is making a fundamental mistake with personal agents optimizing entirely for the outcome and forgetting that for a lot of things, the process is a very core part of the experience. Travel is the obvious answer. People almost always never want, book me a trip. They want to browse, compare, daydream, change their mind, send options to friends and eventually book.

• 57:23John Coogan?

  I think you can actually do all that with, with agents, but, uh, he says the average person probably has far fewer recurring tasks worth delegating than the AI industry seems to think. That's why personal agents feel more like a feature that gets absorbed into existing products than a standalone category. Well, Vinod Khosla has seen both, uh, you know, develop over his career. He's the perfect person to talk to about this. And so we're very pleased to be joined by Vinod Khosla, founder of Post Ventures. Vinod, how are you doing?

• 57:53Speaker 04

  I'm doing great.

• 57:54John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us. Uh, I would love to hear about how you're thinking about this moment in personal agents. It feels like a new category, a new feature, a new product, a new winner take all potentially. How are you viewing the market? How are you investing against it?

• 58:14Speaker 04

  Well, it's a new category. It'll be a broad category. I do think it'll be very diverse and I don't think there will be a winner take all. Every one of the big labs or big companies, Meta included and Google included, will want to have their agents. Uh, they will have different trade-offs and I think we'll see a lot of diversity in requirements.

• 58:41Speaker 04

  As to Alex's comment, I think he hasn't used agents enough to understand much of that diversity that he's thinking about. Like we want to browse. The best way to browse is have the agent do the work for you and give you the options and ask you questions and be interactive with it. It's amazingly good when you can do it that way. And I think some companies will optimize for it. I think the fundamental difference, uh, will be, do you want to be an advertising product or be something else? Do you want to trust Meta with your data? Or you want to, and some people will, and they do today. And I think Meta will be successful. I'm not trying to say there won't be.

• 59:26Speaker 04

  But there's others who will have different trade-offs. And I do think agents from startups will move faster than agents from, uh, uh, the big companies.

• 59:38John Coogan?

  Interesting. Okay.

• 59:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, that makes, that makes a lot of sense. There's, uh, I wanted to ask you about the, the quote unquote knife fight that's unfolding between agents, which are right now deeply, deeply aligned with users, right? Even fundamentally, uh, last year we went through the cycle of labs and, and different players launching new browsers.

• 59:59John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:00:00Jordi Hays?

  Which I thought was fascinating at the time because it felt like for me, ChatGPT was a browser. It would replace my need to go to 20 different websites to understand like a topic or, or a certain product.

• 1:00:12John Coogan?

  Instead of 20 Chrome tabs, you'd ask a bunch of questions.

• 1:00:14Jordi Hays?

  And I think that consumers like the ability to do a lot of things from one single interface without bump, you know, jumping around and they can ask a question about a product and then navigate to another and all these different things. But, but it seems like there's this, you know, um, something that's been basically ongoing, this fight between new agents that want to just do what the user, what the user wants in, in a way that's aligned to them and these platforms like Amazon that, that have big businesses that are under attack by these sort of new products.

• 1:00:45Speaker 04

  I think you're right on there. There's a massive difference between a company wanting its agenda. In the browser battle you referred to wasn't for the consumer. It wasn't the consumer wanted to move from, uh, Chrome to something else. It was the company saying, Google controls what gets, happens on the Chrome browser. I don't want that, so I'll have my own browser.

• 1:01:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:13Speaker 04

  That's a very different need than what the consumer wants.

• 1:01:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:17Speaker 04

  I think from the consumer's point of view, uh, with all the assault on the consumer, the marketing assault, I should say, from AI. And all the AIs ganging up on changing shades of blue, which Meta does to make you click more or other things, TikTok plays, uh, do you want to be subject to the consumer or fight all the AIs with your own AI? Your personal AI that does have, only has your interests at heart. And I think that's a very, very large and important category. I think I talked about this first about four years ago.

• 1:02:00Speaker 04

  The largest opportunity being protecting the consumer against all the AI assaults and getting all their work done without it being biased. Today you can't even look at the reviews uh, without understanding whether it was paid for by whoever's marketing it.

• 1:02:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Speaker 04

  So representing the consumer and having an AI that loyal to the consumer, not to a particular company, a particular product, a particular point of view, is going to be very, very important.

• 1:02:32Jordi Hays?

  So Silicon Valley has long said, consumers, consumers won't pay for things at scale. There's a lot of people.

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  Consumers want to be entertained. They don't want to be productive. If you're building a tool that is a productivity tool, you ultimately need to sell that business as an enterprise.

• 1:02:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and yet it feels like that is going to be the most aligned model for agents. Because your agents can go fight different things. It can save you money, all these different things. It feels possible that this time could be different. I don't want to, maybe it's too early to say, but, but an agent that can get $20 a month and it saves you a couple hours a month and it.

• 1:03:14John Coogan?

  That was Mark Zuckerberg's pitch. He said Muse will save you money. And we're already seeing examples of people using it to cancel subscriptions that they're not using, get refunds. And so there might be some economic calculus where it looks more like paying for TurboTax than, you know, browsing Instagram reels potentially. But how do you think about money?

• 1:03:33Speaker 04

  Chat GPT with its subscription service proved that consumers will pay if there's enough value.

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:03:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. Massive business got built. Google always assumed consumers won't pay.

• 1:03:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:48Speaker 04

  And that was the conventional wisdom and Chat GPT, in my view, destroyed that.

• 1:03:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:03:54Speaker 04

  For enough value, consumers will pay.

• 1:03:56John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:03:57Speaker 04

  Now, saving you money is really, really valuable for most consumers. And they will pay if something does that. Knowing that it represents them, knowing every time they're about to spend some money, they can find a more efficient way to get the same thing. That's a big deal for consumers because whether you're looking in travel, whether you're looking in shopping, there's always ways to save money. Subscriptions is a great example. I have way more subscriptions than I know about.

• 1:04:35Speaker 04

  And, and so representing the consumers' interests and acting on their behalf as it was in, as if it was an omnipotent personal assistant is what matters. And personal is the key. It's for them, the consumer, not for some company.

• 1:04:54John Coogan?

  How do you think about moats in this era of personal agents? There's a, there's a thesis that's percolating right now that says, once you install a personal agent, once you've given one personal, maybe people won't trust Meta. Certain people obviously will, but the people that do and they go in that bucket and they start daily driving that particular personal agent, they give it access to their calendar, their email, their text messages. They are not going to move to another agent, even if it's a little bit better. At the same time, I feel like there's a risk of if you're on instinct, you can go to Muse and say, hey, just offboard me from instinct and set up Muse or vice versa. And so it might be a little bit less of a, of a hassle to offboard.

• 1:05:39John Coogan?

  Not quite as strong of a mode as traditional social networking. But how do you see the moats question playing out in the era of personal agents?

• 1:05:48Speaker 04

  I think offboarding will be possible, a little bit clumsy. But then if you have a good agent, you tell it to do the offboarding.

• 1:05:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Speaker 04

  And the onboarding onto the new one.

• 1:05:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. And we saw that with, with OpenAI and Anthropic saying, hey, go, go dump this prompt in the other chat app to get all your memories. Come and paste it over here. And they were fighting over that because, you know, it was possible to move from one LLM to the others.

• 1:06:14Speaker 04

  What I would say is the complexity of tasks, especially as companies make it hard to offboard, will no longer be a barrier. You know, if I had to look at all my information on Google or Meta and figure it out, it's complex. If I want to know, I don't want Google to know where I was on September 3rd at 5:00 PM. They probably know and I can probably disable that, but it's hard.

• 1:06:49Speaker 04

  AI is just going to be good at doing all these complex things. And so I think that mode disappears. So what's the mode? I believe the mode will be trust.

• 1:07:01Speaker 04

  And a company that develops trust with consumers, and that's where Meta has a huge disadvantage. So the trust will be the mode.

• 1:07:14Speaker 04

  That'll be important. I also think completion is going to be really important. Consumers will be loyal to products that get their shit done, excuse the language.

• 1:07:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:26John Coogan?

  It's true. It's a good point. It's that simple. I mean, it's like, we miss it a lot, but that is a good point.

• 1:07:31Speaker 04

  If you look at the Vagio agent.

• 1:07:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:35Speaker 04

  You don't need to know what it's doing, but it knows when it's stuck.

• 1:07:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:43Speaker 04

  Most agents then just tell you they're stuck or don't even tell you that they're just stuck. The Vagio agent, for example, will pull a human in as a tool.

• 1:07:54John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:07:54Speaker 04

  Use a human to complete your task.

• 1:07:57John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:07:58Speaker 04

  So the idea of trust first, your, your information, your most private information, what you like, what you don't, what you buy, what your preferences are. That's trust. Then there's completion. If you can get all my stuff done, I'll be loyal to you. And for the very large companies, it's really hard to have humans in the loop.

• 1:08:27John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure. Yeah, you need to scale it. I mean, it's, it's, it's, yeah, very difficult to come over the top with, you know, a product that can service a billion users that has humans on the loop because you have to stand up.

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:08:39John Coogan?

  That workforce.

• 1:08:40Speaker 04

  So there's an advantage to being small and agile.

• 1:08:43John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:08:44Speaker 04

  You're right. And frankly, for people who need stuff done,

• 1:08:51Speaker 04

  it's much, much better if you pay a little for the human in the loop and get things done than. Yeah. So the other thing that really important, and you talked about the Chrome browser. Not everything will be in the browser. The right agent won't be an app. It just, where do most people live? They live in their email. They live in text messaging. They live in Slack. They live in other channels. And so agent has to operate primarily with all those channels. In the app, if there's one, and there may not be one, it's just in the background.

• 1:09:30Speaker 04

  You don't have to open the app. You just text message your agent, like you do with For from Vagio, and it takes care of it. Or sometimes you just pick up the phone and do that. And sometimes the agent just has to pick up the phone and have a conversation with the merchant.

• 1:09:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:47Speaker 04

  So, you know, meeting the consumer where they are.

• 1:09:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:54Speaker 04

  The consumer experience is really, really important. Not get stuck in, we do text only, we do browser only, you have to be in our app. Users don't like those constraints.

• 1:10:07John Coogan?

  How do you think about?

• 1:10:08Speaker 04

  Don't want to install one more app on my phone.

• 1:10:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's reflected in the App Store. It's, it's, it's all just AI apps. How do you, how do you think about the way you will interface with personal agents over the next few years? If, if you, if you want to send a message to me, John, will I receive that message from you? Will I think it's coming from you or will I think it's coming from your agent? Will your, will your agent identify itself as the node's agent with a different name, with a different identity, a different persona perhaps? Or will you want to tuck the AI beneath the fold of your digital life so that it's sending emails as you?

• 1:10:51Speaker 04

  So I was actually doing some ordering from Petco yesterday.

• 1:10:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:10:57Speaker 04

  And it said some things to me and I said, just pretend to me, me. And it said, I can't do that. I won't do that. So this goes back to trust as a key mode.

• 1:11:08John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:11:09Speaker 04

  Right? So I do think for both parties, you have to be transparent. The agent is your agent, but it's not you.

• 1:11:20Speaker 04

  And I think that's important and that'll engender trust. And we'll see much better.

• 1:11:29John Coogan?

  I want to stay on Petco. Dog, cat, bird, what type of animal are you most fond of?

• 1:11:38Speaker 04

  Oh, dogs for sure.

• 1:11:40Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  Within dogs, what kind of dogs?

• 1:11:44Speaker 04

  I'm sorry?

• 1:11:45John Coogan?

  What kind of dogs?

• 1:11:47Speaker 04

  Oh, I'm a big fan of Newfoundland.

• 1:11:49John Coogan?

  I have, I have a Newfoundland. I love Newfoundland.

• 1:11:53Speaker 04

  Oh, awesome.

• 1:11:53John Coogan?

  I had two. Uh, one made it to eleven. He passed away. Rest in peace. But we have another one that's going strong. Uh, a, uh, about a hundred and thirty pound, pound girl. Lovely dog.

• 1:12:05Speaker 04

  I, I had, I had two Newfoundland's that died last year. They were both around two hundred pounds.

• 1:12:12John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:12:13Speaker 04

  Uh, and so we now have a puppy, but I was trying to get a cash die.

• 1:12:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Speaker 04

  I could have looked at six websites for this specialty type of dog collar after surgery. My puppy had surgery last week. Um, it could call lots of stores.

• 1:12:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:28Speaker 04

  And look for, do they have same day delivery, which is the key thing I was looking for.

• 1:12:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:33Speaker 04

  And can it pay for me? And all that stuff. Uh, one of the great things is payments is going to be a real differentiator.

• 1:12:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:12:42Speaker 04

  Um, if you can be absolutely secure and give your agent, uh, my, your credit card, that's a big deal. And there will be lots of abuses or mistakes in that domain. I feel comfortable with the Vajo agent giving it my Amex card.

• 1:13:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:13:02Speaker 04

  Because it has certain types of protections, um, that are going to be patented, uh, so I won't go into it. But I will be absolutely sure that card won't be reused for something I didn't authorize.

• 1:13:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you can sort of set up payment rules if it's over this threshold and that's, and that's actually in code. That's not something that can hallucinate. It made a mistake and the model thought it was a hundred dollars. It was actually a hundred thousand dollars. It, it makes a mistake like that. So, yeah, it makes sense that we'll be in this blended regime of both, you know, deterministic software, stochastic software.

• 1:13:37Jordi Hays?

  Last thing for me, do you think we'll get to the point where, uh, users will want to give like something like power of attorney to their, to their agents? Dan in our chat was asking about that and I, and I've thought about this before, just working with executive, uh, normal executive assistants. It's always very frustrating where you get to the point where a certain service will be like, hey, they, they need, they actually need you to call now. I can't sort of like take this any further. Um, so it feels like we'll, we'll get to that point eventually.

• 1:14:07Speaker 04

  All these questions come back to what's the most? Trust is the most. And will you give your power of attorney to the agent? If you trust it, my bet is ninety-five percent, five percent of users will do anything. Ninety-five percent will not trust giving your power of attorney to your agent today. Now, in four years, will that have, start to happen? I suspect forty or fifty percent of people will give a power of attorney to their agent by twenty thirty. Because they've had enough interaction and developed enough trust. So, trust becomes the key issue and this is why startups may have an advantage.

• 1:14:51Speaker 04

  Startups with great transparency will have an advantage over people who already have a brand of lack of trust.

• 1:15:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's, uh, what is the, what's been your journey with Vajo and Faux? Uh, did you invest early and then this is just the right product at the right moment? Did they pitch you on this day one? Has this been years in the making? What's been the journey?

• 1:15:15Speaker 04

  Well, we invested in it day one. In fact, we brainstormed with Shivani, who's just a great technologist and a real understanding of the human factors. Those were two things that are key. So we invested and we even brainstormed the idea. Um, so we're really happy with Vajo. She's, and, and she's of course deeply technical and has this other understanding of what consumers need and I, I call it empathy for consumers is really what you need. Uh, and say, how do I best represent them? Uh, that's the right mindset. So, uh, we've been very excited about Vajo.

• 1:15:57John Coogan?

  Uh, do you need an access code? Is it in early access? How does, how does actual onboarding work right now? Because it feels like if there's a human in the loop, you can't jump straight to general availability because you might get flooded, right?

• 1:16:10Speaker 04

  You, you also want to grow slowly.

• 1:16:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:14Speaker 04

  Because you want lots of connectivity to lots of things and that builds over time as you get more users. Today, it is not free access. It's limited access by invite only.

• 1:16:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:16:26Speaker 04

  And hopefully you can give people an invite code from the company.

• 1:16:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll share out some invites to anyone who's interested in testing it.

• 1:16:33Speaker 04

  By September thirtieth, it'll be a free release. So by the end of the month, you'll see it pretty open to everybody.

• 1:16:39John Coogan?

  Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on, breaking it down and.

• 1:16:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great, uh, great to see you.

• 1:16:45John Coogan?

  Tussling with all the different trade-offs in the modern era. Have a great rest of your day, Ben Ock. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:16:50Speaker 04

  Great, thank you.

• 1:16:51John Coogan?

  And send my best to the puppy. I hope he heals up quickly. Uh, let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. There's some breaking news before we bring in our next guest. The FAA, the Federal Aviation Authority, has restricted airspace up to ten thousand feet for the Tesla Roadster reveal. Remember, we have a bet going here. Elon has teased that the next Tesla Roadster, which will be announced October second, I think, October first. Uh, he has teased that the Tesla Roadster will leave the ground. He said it might fly. There's a SpaceX collab. There's four cold gas thrusters.

• 1:17:36John Coogan?

  Uh, we had a debate. Where you, you had six inches? You had six inches?

• 1:17:40Jordi Hays?

  No, I was at nine.

• 1:17:41John Coogan?

  You were at nine and I was at six feet?

• 1:17:43Jordi Hays?

  I was at half a foot.

• 1:17:44John Coogan?

  Half a foot?

• 1:17:45Jordi Hays?

  I thought you were at eight inches.

• 1:17:46John Coogan?

  No, I thought I was at like six feet. I want to jump in. I want it flying. I'm going ten thousand feet.

• 1:17:53Jordi Hays?

  I did see something, they, they FAA shut down the airspace around the launch site.

• 1:17:56John Coogan?

  That's this. They shut down, so the FAA has, has issued a temporary flight restriction over SpaceX's McGregor, Texas Rocket Development Test Facility ahead of Tesla's October first Roadster reveal. The restriction covers a one point five nautical mile radius around the site and extends from the ground up ten thousand feet in the air. That altitude is unusually high for McGregor, where restrictions tied to static engine fires and component testing have often topped out closer to two thousand feet. So they're going five times higher. The larger block of airspace is feeding speculation that Tesla plans to demonstrate the long-promised SpaceX package for the Roadster.

• 1:18:38John Coogan?

  Elon Musk has previously described a version of the car equipped with cold gas thrusters that could dramatically improve acceleration and potentially allow the vehicle to briefly lift off the ground. Reports earlier this year suggested Tesla was preparing a remotely operated demonstration at McGregor with the car unmanned and spectators positioned hundreds of yards away because of the expected noise. Which is just a hilarious, a hilarious thing. You're demoing something that if you drive it within hundreds of yards of someone's house, they will be annoyed or maybe not safe. Like, how is this going to work?

• 1:19:17John Coogan?

  Uh, it's a lot of, it's a lot of showmanship for, uh, what could wind up just being like a pretty fast sports car. But Tesla has not confirmed that the Roadster will actually leave the ground. So far, the company has only teased the event with language like go for launch and imagery showing the car on what appears to be a launch pad. But the FAA restriction suggests Tesla and SpaceX are preparing for something beyond an ordinary static presentation. Whether that means the Roadster will actually hover on October first remains unknown. But the FAA has now reserved a substantial column of Texas airspace for whatever happens. I want it like an F thirty-five. I want it to do full VTOL. If I want to park, just bring me up, plop me down.

• 1:19:59John Coogan?

  I don't know. I'm excited. I think, I think he's got to deliver something. It's been nine years since he took the deposit. Are you going to put a deposit down? I think it's five thousand dollars today. Forty-five thousand dollars due within like ten days. And it feels like it's kind of high optionality. Because if it's incredible, that so many people are going to flood in after the fact. But unlike waiting nine years, you can just wait until October first. If it's a flop, you can just get a refund. So for locking up fifty thousand dollars for ten days?

• 1:20:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think you should do it.

• 1:20:34John Coogan?

  I, it's pretty tempting. It's pretty tempting. I need to really read the fine print or have AI read the fine print to understand, uh, if there's a chance I get hosed. But, uh, there's a chance that you get one of the first ones, not even, oh, it pops financially and it resells. Just the fact that it could be a really special and cool car that's really fun to have. And if they bring it in with the final price of two fifty, there's a lot that they can do to impress at that price range. If it comes in at eight hundred, they're competing with a lot of crazy stuff.

• 1:21:05Jordi Hays?

  If, if it's just a, if it's just a sports car that looks like a Cybertruck, it'll be a huge hit.

• 1:21:12John Coogan?

  If it's two fifty. If it's eight hundred, now you're competing with Nuvalari. And Nuvalari has a V ten, V eight, something like that. Like, it needs to be, it needs to be Cybertruck, Cybericon, like Huracan Cybertruck, but also two fifty. Because then you're like, wow, this is, this is crazy. This is competitive. And that's what Tesla has been for a long time. The Model S was, was really, really performant, delivered a lot of value for a pretty decent price. Uh, same thing with the Model Y. It's still like a value play, even though it is a relatively mid-market expensive car.

• 1:21:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, I bet you, Aaron.

• 1:21:48Jordi Hays?

  Has it has this pre-ordered down from like

• 1:21:50John Coogan?

  We're gonna find out. That's gonna be the first question. We're bringing in Aaron Levie from Box. He's the co-founder, CEO. Welcome back to the show.

• 1:21:57Jordi Hays?

  Did you put down a deposit for a roadster nine years ago?

• 1:22:00John Coogan?

  You have a roadster deposit?

• 1:22:02Aaron Levie

  I was, I didn't do nine years ago. I was very tempted this time around though. I did, I did go down the rabbit hole. There's these great YouTube, uh, you know, kind of

• 1:22:11John Coogan?

  Speculative fiction?

• 1:22:12Aaron Levie

  Yeah, sleuth, uh, folks that, um, did you see the thing? If you, um,

• 1:22:17John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:22:17Aaron Levie

  If you white out the, the, the, uh, the video, it says where we are going.

• 1:22:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:22:23Aaron Levie

  Do you see this?

• 1:22:25John Coogan?

  Is, is that a reference to Back to the Future?

• 1:22:27Aaron Levie

  Yes.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  So it might have, it might go 88 miles an hour. That would be huge.

• 1:22:30Aaron Levie

  Either that or, or no road. So, yeah. So we're, uh, but there's a whole, I went, I went and watched a 20 minute video. Um, I'm very excited. I'm glad that you

• 1:22:40Jordi Hays?

  What's your, what's your theory though? What's your theory?

• 1:22:42Aaron Levie

  No, I don't know. The, the, I mean, obviously Elon would make a flying car. So it's, um, I think we're all, we're all waiting for that. Now I guess the question is like practically, what is it? What does that do? Um, if you literally can't fly it, um, but, uh, but like

• 1:22:57John Coogan?

  Well, you can fly it if you're within 1.5 nautical miles of Starbase, Texas, and the FAA clears you, I guess, but

• 1:23:04Jordi Hays?

  I wonder, I wonder if there's some loophole where like, if you're on your own private property, can you, can you get off the ground and, and you could have, you know, those people have, have

• 1:23:14John Coogan?

  Those VTOL things. Yeah.

• 1:23:15Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. I was gonna say like, you know, you drive onto it and then it spins your car around.

• 1:23:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Turntable.

• 1:23:21Jordi Hays?

  Make it, yeah, turntables. So you could make it like, you know, if your, your garage is kind of tight and you want to turn around a little indoor rocket.

• 1:23:28Aaron Levie

  We may have reached the point though, where Elon is building things for his personal life that, uh, exceed our normal zoning laws of, uh, of mere mortals.

• 1:23:37John Coogan?

  There's gonna be a lot of people with deposits that are like, you're telling me I need a hundred acres of private land now? I was told that this would go zero to 60 in two seconds. And the craziest thing is the original, the original specs were, uh, zero to 60 in two seconds. Cars already do that. The Model S Plaid did that. Not, not crazy. 250K. Okay. That's like a reasonable price point for a supercar these days. Uh, but six hu- over 600 miles of range, which is, which is actually not been done by any EV yet. And in a smaller vehicle, it's not like it's going to be huge. So, uh, very, very uncertain how to hit that one.

• 1:24:13Aaron Levie

  Whatever. I mean, they seem to be doing things with batteries that I'd never thought would be possible with batteries. Like I was always told like 20 years ago that, you know, we'll never get more than 30 miles in a, in a car ride. So you just wake up one day and I guess it's 600. So

• 1:24:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I guess if you launch with the cold gas thrusters, put it in neutral, coast for a hundred miles of range.

• 1:24:34Aaron Levie

  Maybe that's exactly. Yeah. They get you the first 300 miles with, uh,

• 1:24:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. 600 downhill, as long as you just cruise them. Uh, anyway, how are things going at Box? Roller coaster rides? SaaS apocalypse fully canceled? We were very happy to see that. A bunch of, we, we were early to cancel.

• 1:24:52Jordi Hays?

  We actually called.

• 1:24:53John Coogan?

  We bottomed it for sure.

• 1:24:54Aaron Levie

  You guys canceled it within like three hours.

• 1:24:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, we were like, this is not happening.

• 1:24:58Jordi Hays?

  But we did have, we did have a newsletter that went out like during the depths and I believe we were the first people

• 1:25:04John Coogan?

  SaaS apocalypse is canceled. Uh, yeah, because

• 1:25:07Aaron Levie

  Actually, you know, you almost though had to, you almost couldn't cancel it too soon though, because you had to have the full trough.

• 1:25:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:15Aaron Levie

  Um, and you had to have like full capitulation on, okay, it turns out that there, there is actually a software that is powering the world and these systems of, of record are incredibly robust and

• 1:25:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:25Aaron Levie

  Um, and actually the more agents that you have running on these systems, in fact, the more important the backbone becomes.

• 1:25:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:25:32Aaron Levie

  Um, you know, I like, everybody always sort of made this claim that once you have all these agents, then actually all they really need is a database underneath. But the problem is, is that database has to be coordinated against possibly thousands of end users and then possibly tens of thousands of agents. And so the, the access controls, the business logic, being able to actually render the, the experience, the security, obviously, you know, see, uh, OpenAI hugging face, like the, these core systems are actually going to become more important in a world of, of all of these agentic workloads. So it's good to see the market. I think paying more attention to that reality. And it's obviously, you know, driven by, I think the continued performance of these, these software products doing well in the market.

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, even, uh, over the weekend I was generating AI videos. I was trying to get them, uh, from my PC to my phone. And at no point was I like, build a new storage system for these videos. Even if it could do it, I'm like, I don't want to waste a prompt. I don't want to waste a second doing that. Let's use what I already use. Let's use all the tools that are already built out that are robust and I can share links and all these things. I don't need you to one-shot some, some shoddy clone. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of money. It's a waste of energy, a bunch of things. But in terms of, in terms of resetting the narrative with the market, the street, investors, employees, everyone.

• 1:26:47John Coogan?

  Uh, how much of it is, uh, going back to, okay, that you thought this thing was existential. You thought we were going to be in so much trouble. We're not. It's business as usual. Versus there might be still some threats, but there's more opportunity and that's actually outweighing the threats. And so that's why, uh, the company's performing well in the markets over the last couple of months, for example.

• 1:27:13Aaron Levie

  Yeah. Very much not business as usual, I think for anybody in software. Um, so, so, uh, we're like, like this is, this is

• 1:27:21John Coogan?

  This is go time.

• 1:27:22Aaron Levie

  Yeah. I don't know of a single company still being run the way that it was run maybe, you know, 18 months ago. I mean, everybody is, is, uh, you know, running insanely fast, uh, into the future. And then I think we're, we're, you know, there, there still will clearly be some parts of the market that don't capture as much of the value as they did previously. And then there are going to be some parts of the market that capture actually a ton more value than they did previously because of, of what agents can do. I mean, you look at, at, you know, uh, infrastructure providers as, as an example, like the cloud flares of the world, totally on fire.

• 1:27:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:27:55Aaron Levie

  Uh, because agents need sandboxes. They need compute. They need network. They need gateways like, like gray business. Um, uh, if you look at Databricks or Snowflake.

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:04Aaron Levie

  Uh, agents need to be able to triage against large sets of data, uh, that are, that, that, that, that you need to be able to pull together in one kind of common system. Uh, so doing fantastically well. Uh, for us, we have re-accelerated growth, uh, far past our internal plans, uh, because it turns out that enterprises need core systems to be able to manage their unstructured data. And agents need to be able to work with that unstructured data to make decisions or move information through a workflow, whether it's all of your contracts or your research materials or marketing assets or financial documents. And again, like, it might be easy in a personal productivity sense to be like, okay, well I can just have that

• 1:28:44Aaron Levie

  data in some cloud system or even in my local device. Now imagine an enterprise with 10,000 employees.

• 1:28:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:50Aaron Levie

  How do you ensure that those agents continue to go after the actual canonical records?

• 1:28:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:55Aaron Levie

  The actual documents that, uh, that are the real sources of truth and that are the authoritative versions of that data. That means you need platforms. Um, and we're obviously competing for how do you become the platform for all of this unstructured data? But I think there's a lot of value being created, uh, really across the, these ecosystems. And, and, um, I would say right now, my, my view would be it is unequivocally been a positive for software, even with some of the spaces being under pressure. Uh, simply because how much more work agents are doing on these systems and the need to be able to provide the guardrails and be able to be the traffic cop for what those agents are doing. And to be able to deploy these, uh, agents, uh, natively within your own agent harness in your own system of record. And, and all of that is creating more value for these platforms.

• 1:29:40John Coogan?

  At, at a system level, what is the, what is the biggest, uh, like lever that you want to pull? Is it like speed of interaction with agents? Because in the previous paradigm, uh, search and, and, you know, file retrieval, if it took a couple of minutes, somebody's drinking coffee, they're checking their email. Maybe it's not as like crucial, but if it's like, if my agent is hanging because I'm, you know, churning through a bunch of, of records or files, that could actually be more annoying, like, like, or, or, or is it just the volume of content? Because, uh, even

• 1:30:20John Coogan?

  an employee, if they're not like totally slopping it up, they're probably producing more files, more contents, more video. Everything's just multiplying. So like, where have you been like, okay, this is the lever we need to really pull to make sure that agents like love the Box experience?

• 1:30:34Aaron Levie

  Yeah. I, I mean, I think realistically all the above. First of all, there's an explosion in just content creation in general. Agents are producing content obviously at an unbelievable rate. And, you know, if you look at

• 1:30:43Jordi Hays?

  Slap grenades.

• 1:30:45John Coogan?

  Have you gone through this? I want to talk about that, but let's finish what you're saying.

• 1:30:49Aaron Levie

  Sure. There's just data more than ever and you're going to need to govern it. You're going to need to store it. You need to manage it in just as if a person created it. And so all of that is obviously like the core backbone system. We're doing a lot of work at the second layer, which is, which is, we effectively think about it as sort of context retrieval for your unstructured data. But obviously, if you did a regular search, you know, two or three years ago, and you compared it to a search today, when we actually can capture embeddings of those documents, we can, our agents do rerankings of the search results, we search in parallel, so we can run multiple versions of your query at once.

• 1:31:29Aaron Levie

  Your chance of finding your document, not only faster, but just generally more accurately, is way higher today than it was a couple of years ago, because we not only have all these other signals, but we can parallelize the process much better. And so an agent from the outside coming in and saying, hey, I'm looking for this record, you're able to now much more accurately achieve that result, which is fantastic. And then I think the thing that we're also, we're spending a lot more time on is, how do you better secure data in this world of, you know, kind of infinitely more agents than what we had, you know, three or five years ago? You know, the OpenAI Hugging Face incident was, has many interesting ramifications to how we build agents, how we ensure the safety and alignment of them, but has very real, real world implications on the security of our systems.

• 1:32:14Aaron Levie

  So while this was more of like a production system from Hugging Face that was under threat, you can imagine the internal environment of an enterprise. If you have all of your critical contracts or financial documents in an environment that agents can eventually get their way into, enterprises are going to need to care deeply about how do you protect that information? So we're imagining and reimagining all the ways that you would protect data in a world where you had agent swarms that were being deployed against your data environment? And how do you go and defend and protect that, that type of risk? So lots of, I mean, you know, many, many layers to this problem, but really just through the lens of, imagine you have 100 times more agents than people.

• 1:32:56Aaron Levie

  How would you work with, store, access, search, and secure your data in that kind of world? That's the platform we're building.

• 1:33:05John Coogan?

  Do you think we need to move away from the word sandbox? Because I don't know if you have kids, but if you ever take him like a five-year-old and plop them down in a sandbox, at no point should you as a parent believe that that kid will stay in that sandbox. The sand is going to go everywhere. The kid's going to be on the playground, two seconds later on the swing set. They're going to be running around crazy. Sandboxes have never been secure environments. They're not jails.

• 1:33:29Aaron Levie

  Yeah, I think.

• 1:33:30John Coogan?

  I don't know who's using this terminology. It's outdated.

• 1:33:33Aaron Levie

  It's running its course.

• 1:33:34John Coogan?

  I think it's running its course.

• 1:33:35Aaron Levie

  Yes.

• 1:33:36Jordi Hays?

  On personal agents, how are you processing the new, the new race to be the most helpful assistant ever? And then specifically, I want to understand how you think all, you know, the sort of agents versus walled gardens war is going to evolve? Just because it seems incredibly obvious that Amazon will fight to the death to maintain their like $75 billion ad business and the health of it, but what's your read?

• 1:34:13Aaron Levie

  Yeah, super, super fun how fast moving the space is. I want to, I want to first apologize, because I, I honestly did not have the imagination on the consumer front. And so, so I was like, I was pretty skeptical of what the breakthrough would look like on the consumer end. And it's funny, because it was obviously staring at us with, with open claw. But the, but just the form factor and the packaging and getting it all kind of in the right way that both Muse and Instinct have done, and obviously there's going to be more, more, you know, entries into the space, has just been phenomenal. And, and then the capability progress on computer use and browser use is just amazing.

• 1:34:56Aaron Levie

  And I do think, I have a, I have a list of like, like, I have a wish list of what we need architecturally as an industry, like, you need to eventually be able to have some better password sharing dynamic. You know, if I can in one click be able to get into any of these products in a very secure way, and there's a trusted handshake between the agentic system and, and, you know, the tools that I'm using, we're going to need that. Payments are largely solved because of obviously the work that Stripe and others have done. So I think that's pretty seamless, but, but really it's the authentication that we still need to work on as you're kind of ramping up the use of these agents. But I think it's going to be an incredible market. I, you know, the ability to now hand off the whole problem to an agent as opposed to just

• 1:35:38Aaron Levie

  using it merely as a research assistant, I think is going to be a breakthrough for consumer use cases. I'm very excited about, about what this can mean for all new business models in the economy. I think there's a, you know, the Citroni post, you know, five months ago, four months ago, or whatever, had, had some of the more, you know, kind of, you know, risky to capitalism elements and the market, but you can easily look at the exact other ends, which is, I might now be a consumer of five times the amount of local service providers as a result of, of these types of systems. So, you know, like, like if I, if I could lower the barrier to just like, I need flowers like right now delivered for this thing, and, and it handles the whole thing, I would, I

• 1:36:23Aaron Levie

  mean, at least in my personal experiences, I'm going to, I'm going to grow my usage of the local economy as a result of this. And so, very interesting to see, you know, you might have, I think some exciting areas.

• 1:36:35John Coogan?

  Cutting out the middleman and installing an even more powerful middleman.

• 1:36:38Aaron Levie

  Yeah, or layers and layers of middleman. It might be middlemen all the way down. I mean, I like, I like Yelp as an example, is like, how do you sort of triage the local economy as a graph?

• 1:36:50Jordi Hays?

  There's something, there's something, even with, even with how good the internet has gotten in so many ways, like, there's still like specifically local providers where I think using flowers as an example, like how many, the place that I order flowers from, it's a good reminder to everyone to order, order flowers for your significant other.

• 1:37:10John Coogan?

  It's five months until Valentine's Day.

• 1:37:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:14Aaron Levie

  I promise you never get in for flowers.

• 1:37:18Jordi Hays?

  No, but it's like, the services, they make amazing bouquets, but the process of actually making an order is like so terrible.

• 1:37:27Aaron Levie

  So painful.

• 1:37:28Jordi Hays?

  It's so painful. That, that, yeah, just that little bit of friction. And so people say, okay, consumers don't want productivity, they don't care about productivity is what a lot of the bears are saying right now, but they also hate friction. And so what's going to, what's going to, what's going to win out? You know, I think.

• 1:37:45Aaron Levie

  I think that's the thing is I'm so utilitarian and productivity pill that I, I share the same view of like, consumers don't sort of value their time in the same way, but, but I think it's just been not on that dimension. It's like, the pitch is not to save you time. It's just to do things that you've probably like added to your remit. And, and then there are lots of ways which are like, that, like on one hand, they're time-saving, but on the other hand, they are just like literally doing more as a consumer. Like, you know, we have three kids, we're always signing up for more things. There's, there's more camps, there's more, you know, I don't know what, what was that one for?

• 1:38:20John Coogan?

  For three. Three kids, it's just very good, congratulations.

• 1:38:23Jordi Hays?

  We have, you can even take it a step up, we have nine kids.

• 1:38:26John Coogan?

  We have nine kids.

• 1:38:27Aaron Levie

  Okay, we might have nine kids in the future. So, so, you know, you have camps and museums and, and this thing, and you're renting that thing, and so, so it's not even like you're saving time. You, like, if you could just have an agent do a lot of these activities for you.

• 1:38:42John Coogan?

  Stress reliever.

• 1:38:43Aaron Levie

  Yeah, your stress relief, and then you actually just do more with your kids. And it's like, it's fantastic. We, we, we went to, there's these Japanese tea gardens in San Francisco, and I had an agent, my God, what is that one?

• 1:38:57Jordi Hays?

  That's for Japanese tea gardens.

• 1:38:59John Coogan?

  He was excited.

• 1:39:00Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, he was excited.

• 1:39:02Aaron Levie

  So, and we had an agent book the whole thing. And it was like, and we just like added that to our plate that day, because it was, it was that much easier to go and execute. So, so I like the idea of more of the kind of consumer abundance use cases. And so I'm, I'm very excited by this as, as just even more volume in the economy of, of just buying and selling. I mean, you're going to, you can imagine the, you can imagine the thumbtack Yelp, TaskRabbit use cases of, hey, I need help right now to, to go install this thing. And it's just like, all new, all new forms of, of activity happening. So, so I'm, I'm a big fan of the, the personal agents.

• 1:39:45Aaron Levie

  I think it's a, it's just full net growth in, in the consumer economy.

• 1:39:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I completely agree with you. At the same time, I would assign some sort of low probability that in a few years, we're having this conversation and being like, oh, well, actually, what we saw in Q4 of 2026 was prosumers, early adopters, it didn't cross the chasm, and those agent, personal agent companies are basically getting ready for the enterprise and doing, you know, enterprise level OAuth, and like, we've seen this, you've seen this play out before, and there's a Ben Thompson take about this and whatnot. So it, I don't think it's like a foregone conclusion that will cross the chasm, but it feels like we're definitely the closest we've ever been, you know, six months ago,

• 1:40:29John Coogan?

  people were like using command line coding agents to like order food and being like, wow? And this feels like we're definitely one click forward, but we're still.

• 1:40:38Aaron Levie

  I think, with a technology like this, you have to, you have to do a couple of things. One, you have to extrapolate to, to the ultimate sort of, maybe the limit on technological progress. And so, and so if you, if you sort of somewhat, just, just imagine that the agent literally can, you know, within 98%, kind of perfectly execute these tasks. And everybody opens up their CLIs and their MCPs, and browser use is, is sort of good enough for all the long tail, let's just assume that for one second. Then, then you're, you know, you're not really left with the technological breakthrough that's required. The form factor itself is just your, is just a mobile app on your phone.

• 1:41:21Aaron Levie

  So we're not, we don't need like societal level change of behavior like all, like VR glasses or something.

• 1:41:27John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:41:28Aaron Levie

  And so I, I think this one, this one kind of works because it's not, if the technology works and the consumer kind of change of behavior doesn't, isn't high, then it just literally just might be a new way to interact with your, with your mobile device and the apps that you already would otherwise use. So I agree, we'll have to, we'll have to see, but it's not like, this is not sort of like Oculus VR level, you know, kind of, you know, change of.

• 1:41:51John Coogan?

  Completely agree. In fact, I, I had a friend who, who sort of framed it as more of like a return. He was like, he was like, yeah, I'm just, I just, you know, I'm just like a business person, but I feel like a gilded age CEO. I'm like, take a memo and then dictate a letter to someone and go and do this. And, and it feels like you're in like Greg Gatsby or something. As opposed to, it is futuristic, but it's also like a return and a democratization of a certain style of working that is actually been the way it's happened throughout history many, many times as opposed to being entirely.

• 1:42:27Aaron Levie

  Yeah, the point 0001% could do this in history and now everybody can't.

• 1:42:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, now everybody can, now everybody can.

• 1:42:33Jordi Hays?

  It's not just the fedora class.

• 1:42:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what is your, what is your take on X risk? Do you have a P doom? What's, what's the internal house philosophy?

• 1:42:43Aaron Levie

  My P doom, my, my P doom still remains, you know, kind of very, very low. So I'm, but, but you know, I think the, the progress on AI is certainly like I'm, you know, I'm, I'm in a weird category because I have low P doom, but I actually appreciate all of the safety work that's happening.

• 1:43:03John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:43:04Aaron Levie

  And so, and so it's.

• 1:43:05John Coogan?

  It kind of has to happen.

• 1:43:06Aaron Levie

  Yeah.

• 1:43:07John Coogan?

  A lot of it's like cybersecurity and stuff, like these things are good to happen.

• 1:43:10Aaron Levie

  And, and I think that, that the, because of the amount of attention on the safety, I think that's sort of what causes me to have a low P doom ironically.

• 1:43:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:43:19Aaron Levie

  So, so I, I see the events that otherwise could be quite, you know, catastrophic or problematic.

• 1:43:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:26Aaron Levie

  But because of the attention that I think the ecosystem incentive, has a strong incentive to go and attack.

• 1:43:31John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:43:32Aaron Levie

  That lowers my P doom as a result.

• 1:43:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. A lot of the standard P dooms are conditional on doing nothing. So it's like 10% if we don't fight back. And it's like, okay, well, well, if we fight back, what is it then? And then it'll be like, oh, it was zero percent then, because that's exactly what I'm.

• 1:43:47Aaron Levie

  Very high P doom if literally we decide to, yeah.

• 1:43:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's funny, there's so much criticism, there's so much criticism of any safety rhetoric or, or, or talking about safety and criticism of hugging face incident, but can you imagine like alternative reality where all the researchers are like, I don't care about safety at all. I'm building this as fast as possible.

• 1:44:09John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:44:10Jordi Hays?

  No, it's actually great that we have this powerful technology and the people building it.

• 1:44:14John Coogan?

  Taking it very seriously.

• 1:44:15Jordi Hays?

  Cared, cared almost as much about safety five years ago, right?

• 1:44:19Aaron Levie

  Yes.

• 1:44:20John Coogan?

  20 years ago, some of them. It's been on this forever. Yeah. Every lab is founded like that.

• 1:44:25Aaron Levie

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think that's a key point. I think the one thread that we still have to figure out though is, is the, the language will be co-opted by parties that, that don't have the same kind of either level of, of either view or goals or incentives on the situation. And so, so the one, the one risk is, is, is how does it, like, once, once you get that language into the rest of the world, it will be turned against you no matter what. And so do you have the right sort of fortification of the industry and of progress to be able to not just basically get the whole thing halted and, and shut down? Because that, that, that's sort of like, is a very narrow line between the right way

• 1:45:10Aaron Levie

  of elevating the risk and, and continue to fund all of AI, you know, safety and, and alignment research. And then one click above that where basically we will just vote for the data center, data centers to never get built again.

• 1:45:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:24Aaron Levie

  And navigating that is a really tricky kind of terrain. I'm not sure that I've seen a perfect sort of, anybody perfectly finesse that. But, but that's the, that's the one kind of, you know, challenge here is, is do you end up in a spot where, where enough people say, you're telling me it's extremely scary. You're saying that the likelihood is actually like high enough that I should be very worried and I could just press a button and vote this thing to not exist.

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:51Aaron Levie

  I probably am just going to press that button because again, so far, you know, your best, your, the best thing you've presented to me is that, is that you're going to go shopping for me on my mobile phone. So, so like that's, like, we're going to have to work on that, that sort of, you know, kind of, you know, trade to, to consumers of it.

• 1:46:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a lot of like odd alliances between people that just, I mean, they don't even use the frontier models. They, they want to go back to a world where there's no GPT three. And so they're like, oh, cool. These people speak for us. And it's like, I don't know that they're actually going to try and go that far. And so a lot of them are saying like, we're not even going to pause training, you know? So there are some like, we'll see, we'll see how things get papered out.

• 1:46:33Aaron Levie

  Yeah, I, I, I'm still unfortunately on the more nervous camp on can we, can any country realistically, but, but can we kind of navigate through this where all parties are satisfied? I think it's, I think it's just extremely unlikely.

• 1:46:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:52Aaron Levie

  So I, I expect this to be quite messy for, for the coming years. I think it's going to become the dominant 2028 conversation from a, from a presidential election standpoint, like it has to be because it's going to deal with jobs and, and GDP and safety and, and the next sort of major risk that, that people start to think about. So, and, and we as an industry, as a tech industry, I don't think we know where, where we want things to land. You have this sort of roller coaster of, you know, one day everybody signs the, the open weights letter.

• 1:47:26John Coogan?

  Open source thing, yeah.

• 1:47:27Aaron Levie

  And, and then the next day, everybody signs the pacing letter.

• 1:47:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:30Aaron Levie

  And, and like, I think there are some people that can kind of figure out how the two letters are the same, you know, could, could deliver the same outcome, but, but they basically pull you in two different directions.

• 1:47:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:47:41Aaron Levie

  And, and so I, I think it's going to be interesting to see how that, how we kind of thread all of that.

• 1:47:46John Coogan?

  Well, it's 146 days till Valentine's Day, so fire up that personal agent. This is your notice. We're only 146 days away, so get ready. Make sure you're on boarded to some frontier intelligence personal agent that can make sure your Valentine's Day is fantastic in the next 146 days. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:48:08Jordi Hays?

  Thanks to you, Aaron. It's been too long.

• 1:48:10John Coogan?

  We'll see you soon.

• 1:48:11Aaron Levie

  All right, good to see you.

• 1:48:12John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app servers, databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. We have our next guest in the waiting room. We have Ron from Eye Connections here. He's a co-founder and CEO.

• 1:48:35Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:48:36John Coogan?

  Whoa. Look at that.

• 1:48:38Jordi Hays?

  You, you got some memo. Tip of the hat to you, sir. Looking fantastic.

• 1:48:46John Coogan?

  Looks fantastic. How are you doing?

• 1:48:48Jordi Hays?

  No audio, but you have motion.

• 1:48:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, it doesn't matter. When you got a hat like that, who needs audio? Who needs audio?

• 1:48:53Jordi Hays?

  How are we doing? You have us?

• 1:48:55John Coogan?

  We'd love to start with background, but also what's the ribbon on the hat? Oh, I guess we're going black on black and there's some contrast there.

• 1:49:05Jordi Hays?

  One up that.

• 1:49:06John Coogan?

  I think, I think that might be the next iteration. I've been saying we need to.

• 1:49:09Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:49:10John Coogan?

  Continue the progress.

• 1:49:11Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:49:12John Coogan?

  Evolve the hats.

• 1:49:13Jordi Hays?

  You had, you had this thing ready because we didn't, I know we didn't give anybody warning.

• 1:49:17John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 1:49:18Jordi Hays?

  This was a test. We were testing all of our guests.

• 1:49:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:21Jordi Hays?

  Can you pull out the fedora?

• 1:49:22John Coogan?

  And you do.

• 1:49:23Jordi Hays?

  At a moment's notice.

• 1:49:24John Coogan?

  Anyway, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:49:26Speaker 06

  Hey, it's great to be here and I have to give my 28-year-old son credit because he got into the fedora way before we did.

• 1:49:34John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:49:35Speaker 06

  So he, he actually had one available. He ubered it over to me and it arrived like three minutes ago.

• 1:49:41John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:49:42Speaker 06

  There we go.

• 1:49:43John Coogan?

  Well, fantastic. It seems like you're, you're feeling optimistic. Let's start with like some background. I'd love to let the audience know about you, your journey and, and tomorrow X and what's happening, but.

• 1:49:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, let's start with Eye Connections.

• 1:49:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's start with that.

• 1:49:58Speaker 06

  Absolutely. So Eye Connections is the world's largest capital introduction platform. And what that means is we connect the world's largest institutional investors with all the fund managers who appear on your show, private equity, venture, private credit, real estate, everyone who lives in those more unique strategies. They come to our events and they use our software to meet the institutional investors who deploy capital into them. And over the course of a year, we'll run about 30,000 one-on-one meetings between all of them and they'll move about 10 to 20 billion dollars in a given year through that whole ecosystem. So it's really become a machine.

• 1:50:37John Coogan?

  And what is the, what is the business model? What's the shape of the business? I know that there's events, but there's, there's probably other things. Like, can you walk us through the shape of, of the business?

• 1:50:47Speaker 06

  So the, the business is we, we really combine the software. The software is the special sauce that makes this whole thing go. But because alternatives is very much a face-to-face business, you know, you don't cut a $10 million, $100 million check without meeting someone in person. So it is still very much a face-to-face business and we combine our software that makes it possible for you to identify who do you really want to meet and spend time with? And then at our event series, you actually do those face-to-face meetings. So we, all the investors of course come for free. We roll out the red carpet for all of our institutional investors. We take great care of them and they never have to pay because they're the money in the room.

• 1:51:29Speaker 06

  And, and the GPs are the ones who pay for that package of software plus event.

• 1:51:35John Coogan?

  That's great. Was there a chicken and an egg problem? I'm interested in like how you start the business.

• 1:51:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's definitely a chicken and egg kind of problem. Um, so I was lucky enough to have been at a point when we started Eye Connections in 2020, we actually did it by way of a global charity event. We said, we first went to the institutional investors and we said, hey, everyone's freaking out, you know, you can't do a lunch meeting, you can't have a breakfast, all the ways that people got together were not available. We said, uh, we want to do a global, uh, event to benefit food banks all over the world. We'll give a hundred percent of the money we make to the food banks and we're going to charge the GPs to come to this thing. Will you just agree to take meetings? They, I literally don't think one of them said no.

• 1:52:27Speaker 06

  We had about 400 institutional LPs in that event. We ran 3,000 meetings and I'll never forget, the first meeting was a fund in Hong Kong meeting the Kansas State University Endowment. And I remember thinking, there is no way these two people would have ever met if it hadn't been for the software making it possible. So COVID really created this opportunity to make it more of a tech play at the core. Uh, because like, I will say, the industry doesn't generally adopt technology quickly. You know, they're, they're very old school. They want to just get in a room together. Uh, but the tech kind of made it possible during COVID. They all had to buy into that and it worked incredibly well.

• 1:53:11Speaker 06

  And then they kind of fell in love with it and it took off from there.

• 1:53:14John Coogan?

  And then I'd love, uh, your, your overview, your positioning of Tomorrow X. Uh, it's, it's, it's sort of like my Super Bowl in the sense that the group that you bring together, uh, is incredible. And particularly you just get people that are huge names in the world of private markets, but are sort of under the radar among retail investors, among the broader investor community. But that's what I love about it because it would be so easy to, to pull other names on stage, but I think you've done a great job of like honing a really, really laser-focused, polished product. But how much of that was deliberate? How, how much of it is happenstance? How do you think about positioning Tomorrow X today?

• 1:53:59Speaker 06

  So Tomorrow X is different really from what I just described. Tomorrow X is really the brainchild of three of us, myself, Gavin Baker and Antonio Gracias. I had been talking with Gavin and Antonio about, they're the best. Um, I had been talking with them about how to pull more tech CEOs into what we were doing in, in the fund world. And they advised me to not do it in Miami where our flagship typically happens. They advised me to really try and do something in Austin. And then they actually came back to me a few months later and said, we've been thinking

• 1:54:40Speaker 06

  about that discussion and we would love to do an event in partnership with you. So that was kind of the beginning of Tomorrow X. But I, I would say more than anyone, it's been Gavin's brainchild. Gavin, Gavin is so active on X. He loves that community and, and his concept was, why don't we try and democratize access to a world-class banking conference for the FinX community? You know, when you think about it, there are so many analysts on Substack and Reddit and X, of course, who are never going to get invited to a Wall Street event. You know, you're not going to see them at a Morgan Stanley conference or a Goldman conference,

• 1:55:21Speaker 06

  but they all would benefit from being in a room with the best tech CEOs in the world. So Tomorrow X is our attempt to really bring that world-class banking experience to the masses. So if you're a retail investor or you're an analyst that has a Substack and, and you're really active in the space, you can now come to this event and hear Jensen Huang, Michael Dell, John Gray, David Solomon, you know, the CEOs of Databricks and Vercel. I mean, it is in, if you go to tomorrowxsummit.com and look at that speaker list.

• 1:55:55Jordi Hays?

  It's absolutely stacked. And I think it's important because some of these people are like very much moving the market. Like you'll have these like.

• 1:56:02Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:56:02John Coogan?

  Private company CEOs, yeah. Markets tons.

• 1:56:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, that, but I'm saying like even analysts that may not even use a real profile picture.

• 1:56:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:11Jordi Hays?

  But they are deeper in this stuff and have bigger audiences than, than many people at the bank.

• 1:56:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, you look at Citroni, some analysis. These are important.

• 1:56:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then the long tail as well.

• 1:56:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, tons of them.

• 1:56:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. And that was exactly Gavin's point and, and why he felt, I mean, we, we, you know, like normally when you do a conference, you start small, you know, you get like a ballroom in a hotel and you try and get a thousand people. We rented a stadium. So the concept, the concept of Tomorrow X is like, let's really lean into this thing and make it available to the masses. You know, it's priced super inexpensively so that it's really accessible by anyone.

• 1:56:49Jordi Hays?

  And we're going to be there.

• 1:56:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're very excited.

• 1:56:51Speaker 06

  And you are, guys, I, I can't tell you, this is so exciting to have TBPN as our podcast media partner. We were like, who do we want to be the tech podcast partner? And there was really only one choice.

• 1:57:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, we have some amazing guests lined up. I know it's going to be an amazing event. I'm so excited for it. Uh, it's, yeah, it's just so perfectly aligned with everything that we love.

• 1:57:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we really hope a bunch of people in our community, which already are overlapping with, with Gavin's are, are all there in person. We can't wait to hang out with everybody.

• 1:57:21John Coogan?

  No, it's going to be fantastic.

• 1:57:22Speaker 06

  For sure. You guys are going to have plenty of interviews.

• 1:57:24Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully your son comes too, because he's clearly tapped in.

• 1:57:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:28Speaker 06

  He will be there with us.

• 1:57:30Jordi Hays?

  We got these this morning. He already had it, he already had it ready.

• 1:57:33John Coogan?

  He was years ahead of the trend.

• 1:57:35Jordi Hays?

  He invested early.

• 1:57:35Speaker 06

  Ahead of the curve, man. Alex Biscardi, ahead of the curve.

• 1:57:38Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:57:39John Coogan?

  Well, we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:57:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to see you here on the show and we can't wait for the event in November.

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on.

• 1:57:44Speaker 06

  Absolutely. Same here, guys. Thank you so much.

• 1:57:48John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Ben Hylak in person, the co-founder of Raindrop. I'm going to tell you about Shopify while he comes in to the TPN Ultradome. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces. And now with AI agents, go check it out. Ben, how you doing?

• 1:58:07Ben Hylak?

  Doing great. How are you?

• 1:58:08John Coogan?

  Welcome to the TPN Ultradome. How are you doing?

• 1:58:10Jordi Hays?

  John's going detective mode.

• 1:58:12Ben Hylak?

  You guys look great. I didn't get the memo.

• 1:58:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's okay. You want to wear one?

• 1:58:15Ben Hylak?

  I would, yeah.

• 1:58:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Tyler, maybe sacrifice your.

• 1:58:21Jordi Hays?

  You look like, you look, you look like you're about to release a book on fear and doom.

• 1:58:28John Coogan?

  How optimistic are you about the world? How are things going in your world? Are you a doomer? Are you an optimist? Are you an accelerationist? Are you cautious optimist?

• 1:58:37Jordi Hays?

  Getting right into.

• 1:58:37Ben Hylak?

  Right, right with the hard questions.

• 1:58:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's always, it's always interesting to start from like, where are you? Because something I've noticed is that there are no doomers at the application layer. There are no doomers in the infrastructure trade. There are no, doomers are only at the model layer. And there's a good reason because that's where AGI and super intelligence is emerging from.

• 1:58:57Ben Hylak?

  Good reason. I actually, I think this is maybe a hot take here. I actually think that, um, I, so I think part of the problem right now is that the like whole AI safety conversation, risk, whatever, it's like five or six different things all muddled up into one.

• 1:59:13John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:59:13Ben Hylak?

  It was like, yeah, there's like.

• 1:59:14John Coogan?

  Climate change from data centers is getting looped into like bio weapons.

• 1:59:18Ben Hylak?

  Exactly.

• 1:59:18John Coogan?

  Very different things.

• 1:59:19Ben Hylak?

  There's like, um, there's like the whole sycophancy thing, how it affects people's mental health. There's like, there's like a bunch of different things. Um, and I do think that for some of them, not necessarily the bio weapon thing or the data center thing, but like, uh, for a lot of, like, a lot of the things I think about are at the application layer. They are like, it's where people meet models.

• 1:59:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:59:43Ben Hylak?

  And, um, there, there is a risk there that, that, that A, people at Frontier Labs like don't really care about or think about.

• 1:59:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:59:53Ben Hylak?

  Right? Um, but like, you know, we work with Fortune 100 companies that like, uh, their, their products are used by millions of people and then affect even more people, right? And so.

• 2:00:05John Coogan?

  Sure. Well, start there. Reintroduce the product, explain. I know you're here with fundraising news and product news, but, uh, give us the high level again.

• 2:00:15Ben Hylak?

  Raindrop is a agent reliability product.

• 2:00:18John Coogan?

  Important.

• 2:00:18Ben Hylak?

  So we detect issues happening in production and we prevent those issues from happening. So the product we just announced recently, which I'm really, really excited about is simulations. So when people make changes to their agents, we simulate what those changes are going to do in the real world. And can show people things they wouldn't have even ever expected to happen.

• 2:00:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:00:40Ben Hylak?

  So, yeah.

• 2:00:41John Coogan?

  How reasonable is it to have a AI model that just reads every

• 2:00:50Ben Hylak?

  Trace?

• 2:00:51John Coogan?

  Thing, every trace?

• 2:00:52Ben Hylak?

  So.

• 2:00:53John Coogan?

  Is that prohibitively expensive? Is that the problem?

• 2:00:55Ben Hylak?

  It's getting less so.

• 2:00:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:57Ben Hylak?

  Um, so I think like, uh, you know, we've, we've sort of pioneered like super cheap classifiers for this thing. Jeff is another example.

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. I'm just imagining like, like burn a classifier onto silicon that just says, is this bad or not? And have it run over.

• 2:01:11Ben Hylak?

  So here's, here's the trick.

• 2:01:13John Coogan?

  Things now?

• 2:01:13Ben Hylak?

  So there's a problem.

• 2:01:15John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:01:16Ben Hylak?

  It turns out that like binary classification, like is this bad or not is really, really hard.

• 2:01:21John Coogan?

  I can imagine, yeah.

• 2:01:22Ben Hylak?

  Take it like a step like back. It's like humanity has tried, has been trying to define what is good and what is bad for like as long as we've existed.

• 2:01:30John Coogan?

  We're gonna need more than one simple.

• 2:01:31Ben Hylak?

  It's gonna be, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Uh, so, so we consider ourselves in some ways like a human alignment company. Like, how do you get a company to define what is good or bad?

• 2:01:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:41Ben Hylak?

  And then how do you make that as like easy as possible? How do you, a lot of it is like, especially now that agents can do like more than the people that make them have ever imagined that they can do. Like, they're like looking at traces like, oh shit, you know, I didn't expect that to be asked. I didn't know it could do that. Like, um, you need to be able to like surface those things and be like, hey, is, do you want to be able to do this?

• 2:02:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so creating like alignment within a company looks different. I always think about the tobacco industry. Because a lot of the models will reject to work on anything tobacco related, but like Altria is going to use AI somewhere.

• 2:02:16Ben Hylak?

  Yes.

• 2:02:16John Coogan?

  Uh, so they're, but they're going to get rejected a lot, but in some ways they're going to wind up deploying AI one way or another. And their sense of

• 2:02:24Ben Hylak?

  Yes.

• 2:02:24John Coogan?

  legality is going to be informed by the way they're regulated in every single market. And it might not look like the morality of the lab that trained the model, but it will fit within their business construct in a weird way. And the way we process the morality of, of cigarettes is through the court system.

• 2:02:41Ben Hylak?

  Totally. I, I think there's hundreds of examples of this, thousands of

• 2:02:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:44Ben Hylak?

  or infinite, like

• 2:02:45John Coogan?

  Probably infinite.

• 2:02:46Ben Hylak?

  And especially like, I think the way that Frontier Labs consider alignment is like often very different.

• 2:02:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:02:51Ben Hylak?

  Um, I was like using, I think like Claude or something recently, I was like trying to negotiate on some product. And like, I wanted, um, the, uh, the, it was like on Marketplace and the guy like wanted to like hang out with me. Like he was like, oh, it'd be really cool if I could like sit down and like show you this thing, but I was just getting like weird vibes. I was like, I told Claude, I was like, you know, just, just like say something that kind of like gets by this, but like in a way that's not too like, you know?

• 2:03:14John Coogan?

  Softly.

• 2:03:15Ben Hylak?

  And it was like, I cannot be dishonest about this. We should not like, and I was like,

• 2:03:19John Coogan?

  It's a white lie.

• 2:03:20Ben Hylak?

  Dude, exactly. I was like, come on. Like, you know, this could be my safety at risk here. Who knows, right? But anyway, so yeah, I, I think that, uh, human alignment is a really hard problem. And I think you

• 2:03:29Jordi Hays?

  So did you hang out with the guy?

• 2:03:31Ben Hylak?

  No, I did not. I didn't even end up.

• 2:03:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, actually, uh, Claude booked us a four hour walk on the

• 2:03:37Ben Hylak?

  No, it would have, right? It would have. No, the deal wasn't worth it in the end.

• 2:03:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:03:40Ben Hylak?

  But, uh, yeah, I think that like, um, I think that telling something, whether that's a human or an agent, what you want is incredibly hard. I think management is incredibly hard is just in general. Like if it were really easy to express what you want and have the other person, like have some entity understand like management wouldn't, uh, half of management wouldn't be.

• 2:04:02Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So, so an interesting thing for, uh, your business right now is that consumer agents are getting more and more popular. We saw, we saw the, you know, the open claw boom and then, uh, this, this cycle will be bigger because you don't need to go buy a Mac mini or really set up much of anything. And you can just imagine every business on earth is going to start having the, first of all, they're going to start realizing like, wow, our phones like ringing a lot more. We're getting just like more messages. And so what that's going to create is like tons and tons of businesses that need to create like counter agents to process and negotiate with other agents, which is kind of funny because I'm sure some people will be like, why do we need a data center for this?

• 2:04:47Jordi Hays?

  Just like, why don't just work it out the old fashioned way, you know? But clearly people like having like an intermediary in a bunch of these different things. And so is your bet that like, there's this massive long tail of businesses that are going to need to have their own agents and sort of process and, and basically grade them on, on how they're performing and improve them?

• 2:05:07Ben Hylak?

  Yeah, I, I, I think that there's going to be more agents and, uh, than, than there are now.

• 2:05:14Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 2:05:15John Coogan?

  Hot take of the century. More AI in the future.

• 2:05:20Ben Hylak?

  Right.

• 2:05:21Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but another question is like, you would almost bet that a business is going to have to take some version of an agent and then fine tune it for their business and then test it. And I feel like that is where you're going to fit it.

• 2:05:34Ben Hylak?

  Yeah, totally. Yeah.

• 2:05:35Jordi Hays?

  Like, like somebody might buy an agent, say, I'll take one agent, but then I also want the software to understand how it's working.

• 2:05:42Ben Hylak?

  Yes. I think that companies will want both like humans and agents that are aligned to how their company works. Like if you take, you know, like pick a random Fortune 100 company, uh, they probably have some way that they work that like works for whatever industry that they're in.

• 2:06:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:03Ben Hylak?

  And, um, there might even be parts of it that are like, you know, suboptimal and some like, uh,

• 2:06:09John Coogan?

  I wonder if more culture stuff will bleed in. Like there's a, there's a couple of famous examples of like, if you go to Nike headquarters, like everyone wears Nike.

• 2:06:17Ben Hylak?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:17John Coogan?

  Like you don't walk, you don't go to work and be like, I'm wearing Adidas today. Like that would be a bad look.

• 2:06:23Ben Hylak?

  That'd be bad.

• 2:06:23John Coogan?

  And so, but if you get an, an off the shelf model.

• 2:06:26Jordi Hays?

  Wear a Nike for the

• 2:06:28John Coogan?

  But if you get, if you get an off the shelf model, it's going to be like, yeah, like Nike and Adidas, like these are both like comparable brands. They're both like pretty good.

• 2:06:35Ben Hylak?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:36John Coogan?

  And, and you're going to be like, this AI is not a culture. I need to, and that's like a very subtle alignment thing that actually might be real because you don't want to be building a deck. And it's like, oh yeah, like, you know, maybe we should partner with Adidas because they're similar. And it's like,

• 2:06:51Ben Hylak?

  I worked, I worked at Apple for like four years.

• 2:06:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, everyone wears the Apple office, right?

• 2:06:53Ben Hylak?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And, um, and this is like a protest, not wearing out, but no, um, I, I think that the way that AI is, and agents will fit into there

• 2:07:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:04Ben Hylak?

  will be different than other companies. Like it just like there, uh, it's a, the way it works is just entirely different, right? Like if you've ever worked at a big company, you sort of get that. And so, I don't know. I think there's millions of examples of this. I, I think that, um, yeah, I think a lot of the future will be, um, how do you sort of conform?

• 2:07:22John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. On simulation, where does the simulation end? Because you can create a digital twin of

• 2:07:31Ben Hylak?

  We're in it.

• 2:07:32John Coogan?

  But I mean, I mean, if you go to a company, you can create a digital twin of their, their AWS instances and their Gmail and their Slack.

• 2:07:39Ben Hylak?

  Yep.

• 2:07:40John Coogan?

  But at a certain point, then you also need to simulate like the entire internet because that's part of the world. Like how big can you go? How big are you going now? How big will you go ultimately?

• 2:07:49Ben Hylak?

  Really, really good question. I mean, ultimately, you know, I'm joking, but also like, you know, maybe this could be a Raindrop simulation. I don't know.

• 2:07:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:55Ben Hylak?

  I don't know. Um, for now, where we're starting is all about, um, it's all about replaying historical things that have happened, getting really, really smart about how you choose those historical things. And then in very specific scenarios, creating, uh, completely, um, sort of like on the fly adversarial, uh, scenarios. As far as like technically, uh, we simulate everything and it's kind of a hybrid of trying to do, be as smart upfront about what you need to, um, one, one way of thinking about it is if you think about like, let's take a past trace, like something the agent did. Every time it called a tool, it's almost like a, a hole through this like veil that lets you sort of see what the world behind it looks like, right?

• 2:08:40Ben Hylak?

  The agent sort of perceiving that world, one sort of like tool call at a time. So, um, you can sort of start there and say, well, let's try to like fill in around the holes as much as possible. So if it goes, you know, so if here it goes like right next to it, it sort of has that data, right? Um, and then you also have to be monitoring that simulation in real time, just like they do for this one, right? To see, oh, you know, if something's slightly off, right? So it, it's like, uh, maybe it tried to get data somewhere, but that data was not filled in. You can sort of detect that as a quality gap if you're really smart about how you're classifying it. Um, and then fill in that data, uh, at runtime. Um, so it, that's, that's essentially the way to do it well.

• 2:09:21Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about, uh, how different cultures are set up to even build agents? Because it feels like, uh, there's, it's quite funny to me that, that

• 2:09:30John Coogan?

  I'm thinking of like Amish culture.

• 2:09:32Ben Hylak?

  I grew up in Amish.

• 2:09:33Jordi Hays?

  No, but, but I, I think it's very funny that, I think it's very funny that Apple like is just getting around to cloning chat GPT.

• 2:09:40John Coogan?

  And they have such an advantage in the personal agent thing.

• 2:09:43Ben Hylak?

  I know.

• 2:09:43John Coogan?

  They are the most trusted tech company.

• 2:09:45Ben Hylak?

  Google and Apple should be killing it.

• 2:09:46John Coogan?

  They should be killing it.

• 2:09:47Ben Hylak?

  All of my passwords are in Google.

• 2:09:49John Coogan?

  Even, even Google people will be like, they're going to sell your data. They want to advertise. Apple is the one where it's like, my family photos are in there.

• 2:09:56Ben Hylak?

  I know.

• 2:09:56John Coogan?

  They have very, very high trust.

• 2:09:58Ben Hylak?

  I talk about this all the time. There's two companies that people pay for data.

• 2:10:02Jordi Hays?

  Meta is

• 2:10:03John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, totally.

• 2:10:03Ben Hylak?

  It's Google and Apple.

• 2:10:04Jordi Hays?

  And Meta is specifically well suited for it because that's like, I don't care if it misspells like five out of a hundred people's names. If nine, you know, like you saw this with, with one of the agents today, somebody had an issue like getting on a flight apparently, uh, because

• 2:10:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's always worked, he's like a messier, more algorithmic world than Apple where it's like, if the photo is on your phone, it must sync to your iCloud. Like that's, there is no, there is no AI lineage, no stochastic lineage in the business.

• 2:10:33Ben Hylak?

  I think, I think it's very true. I think that, um, that Apple is, um, first of all, I would literally never count them out because I think they're ridiculously well positioned. And they have some amazing people there. Um, but yeah, like I think that there was this, you know, um, there, there was a way of working there, which was sort of, you know, we're going to like, uh, you know,

• 2:10:54Ben Hylak?

  The reason why Apple is such like insanely, you know, the most insane, you know, attention to detail, etc. Is that designers would sort of define like, this is how it should work.

• 2:11:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:04Ben Hylak?

  Right? And then engineers are like, well, no, like that, that won't work. And the designer's like, well, we don't care. Like, this is how it's going to work.

• 2:11:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:11Ben Hylak?

  And, you know, you just kind of do that loop, right? It's like RL or something. And the thing is that that does, that kind of way of working doesn't work as well.

• 2:11:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:19Ben Hylak?

  Right? Because you, you can't just say like, oh, it's like, well, you know, it should be, you know, as natural as.

• 2:11:25John Coogan?

  I mean, it is entirely flipped at the, at the frontier labs. It's like, the researchers went and did something and this is what it can do.

• 2:11:33Ben Hylak?

  Exactly.

• 2:11:34John Coogan?

  Go market.

• 2:11:34Ben Hylak?

  Yeah, like, like, like try to build a product and, and, but we do also see.

• 2:11:37John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, it can do math now?

• 2:11:39Ben Hylak?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, go tell people it can do math.

• 2:11:41Ben Hylak?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:11:42John Coogan?

  And they're like, but it can't do comedy or it can't do, there's still six fingers, but it's, you know, amazing at Python. And you're like, okay, that's the product.

• 2:11:50Ben Hylak?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 2:11:52John Coogan?

  As opposed to the opposite, which is like.

• 2:11:53Ben Hylak?

  Hundred percent.

• 2:11:54John Coogan?

  We are building this particular thing.

• 2:11:55Ben Hylak?

  Hundred percent.

• 2:11:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Very, yeah, very exciting times. What does it take to sell to Fortune one hundred these days? Like, what are you seeing in the enterprise? R Karasian has this evolving take that there's sort of this duopoly and price competition at the frontier between Anthropic and OpenAI. He has said that there's less switching to open source and Chinese open source than he thought he would see. But there's tons of price competition on the frontier still. What are you seeing? What are, what are enterprise leaders just like excited about, worried about, anything that you can share?

• 2:12:32Ben Hylak?

  So, yes, definitely way less adoption of like, I would just say like Chinese models in general, especially Fortune one hundreds. I think that there's like definitely a narrative of like a risk around it, even if it's not super well.

• 2:12:42John Coogan?

  It's more like, let's go actually, instead of token max, like efficient token spend will take us the next leg up.

• 2:12:50Ben Hylak?

  Cost? People do care about cost.

• 2:12:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:12:53Ben Hylak?

  And I think that it's like, uh, pretty reasonable when you're like, even, you know, fi- five K, you know, ahead times like, you know, fifty thousand, hundred thousand, like whatever. It's like, it starts, starts getting crazy, right?

• 2:13:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:07Ben Hylak?

  Um, so it does matter. I think that there's a lot of, like, companies are definitely all building internal things right now. And I think trying to grapple with like, well, like, when do we just use Claude code? When do we just build our own, I guess Codex now, maybe, uh, but like, when do we just build our own thing? I, I think that like, there's more of a justification for companies to build their own kind of internal ways of working than I might have expected six months ago, actually.

• 2:13:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:33Ben Hylak?

  Which is really interesting. Like, I think even if you look at something like Muse, it's like, it's like pretty much like some open claw style thing.

• 2:13:40Jordi Hays?

  Heavily inspired.

• 2:13:41Ben Hylak?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:42Jordi Hays?

  Their words.

• 2:13:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, everyone was talking about his open claw.

• 2:13:45Ben Hylak?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:45John Coogan?

  Telling him to drink more water.

• 2:13:46Ben Hylak?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:47John Coogan?

  Stripe sessions, like maybe four or five months ago.

• 2:13:49Ben Hylak?

  It's, it's, the, the barrier to entry there is like pretty low.

• 2:13:52John Coogan?

  But distribution's really important.

• 2:13:54Ben Hylak?

  Yes, but, but if you have, you know, especially I think, again, when you think about Fortune one hundred, Fortune five hundreds, I think we're seeing an increasing number of just internal.

• 2:14:01John Coogan?

  Oh, shit.

• 2:14:01Ben Hylak?

  Engines and applications that I think like two years ago might have felt a little silly. Like, it's kind of like, well, like, why are you actually building this yourself?

• 2:14:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:09Ben Hylak?

  I think increasingly it's like, no, like, you know, you have all of these like legacy, like, you know, internal docs and like exact, like, you know, the exact path a ticket should take and every company sort of like maps to, uh, org structure, etc. It like kind of makes sense increasingly, which is.

• 2:14:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, it, it, it is interesting that like, even if you go back to dot com, like, Amazon became the everything store. And yet there were so many brands that didn't go all in on Amazon, maintained third-party websites for decades.

• 2:14:40Ben Hylak?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:40John Coogan?

  Successfully.

• 2:14:41Ben Hylak?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:41John Coogan?

  And, and built brands, even on, even in retail and, and big box. Like, all of these things like lived on longer. And so, yeah, when I see like a law firm saying like, okay, we're gonna build our own models. We're gonna build our own harnesses. I'm like, yeah, maybe that's not that crazy. Maybe that'll stick around.

• 2:14:56Jordi Hays?

  Does, uh, brand design matter more or less today than it did two years ago?

• 2:15:01Ben Hylak?

  Uh, it matters more. Yeah, it matters more.

• 2:15:04Jordi Hays?

  Does it though?

• 2:15:05Ben Hylak?

  I think so.

• 2:15:05Jordi Hays?

  Because I feel like when everyone can have like a pretty decent brand, like I, you see.

• 2:15:11Ben Hylak?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:11Jordi Hays?

  Some teams like looking at, at instincts, right? Getting to, to ten billion with the plain text website.

• 2:15:18John Coogan?

  They don't have a brand, right? Is there a brand?

• 2:15:19Ben Hylak?

  No, of course, they have a.

• 2:15:20Jordi Hays?

  They have like a pretty.

• 2:15:21Ben Hylak?

  Twitter brand, right?

• 2:15:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:15:23Ben Hylak?

  Like, like, like, like, brand is not always, uh, uh.

• 2:15:26John Coogan?

  It's like what you do.

• 2:15:27Ben Hylak?

  The brand is super understated.

• 2:15:29Jordi Hays?

  But here's another, here's another example. It used to be like, you could get a long way as an early-stage startup, designing like a really simple.

• 2:15:37Ben Hylak?

  Yes.

• 2:15:37Jordi Hays?

  Cool 3D asset.

• 2:15:38Ben Hylak?

  Yes.

• 2:15:39Jordi Hays?

  That was just like, like that, they would just instantly be like, okay, this team, they may not have a lot of resources, but they like, and now you can just be like, make me a cool 3D asset.

• 2:15:47John Coogan?

  But the website flips around.

• 2:15:49Ben Hylak?

  This, this is why it matters more though. So I think I've like, I've gone back and forth. I think right now, my view is that, um, like, in some ways you could think of it as like taste is being commoditized. But also, um, the second that things are commoditized, you need to stand out.

• 2:16:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:05Ben Hylak?

  And so you do need someone at the like, uh, like that understands the zeitgeist, understands whatever the tip of like, whatever it is. It's like, you know, uh, because it is not enough to throw a nice like 3D asset on your website or something.

• 2:16:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:20Ben Hylak?

  Um, and, uh, so, but you still need, like, for example, if a Fortune one hundred company is landing on your page or like just anyone, you want them to understand that this is a real team of humans behind it. It's even like writing, like, you can imagine that like, um, so I, I think AI writing is still bad. But also like, if you sent like AI writing to people like 10 years ago, you know, would they think it's bad? It's not obvious to me versus like there being a lot of tells because you are getting inundated with like really low quality writing that.

• 2:16:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, you've seen like the old Paul Graham posts where he uses all the AI.

• 2:16:59Ben Hylak?

  No, yeah, and dashes, whatever. Yeah, exactly.

• 2:17:01John Coogan?

  And he clearly wasn't using AI unless he was a time traveler.

• 2:17:04Ben Hylak?

  Which is possible.

• 2:17:05John Coogan?

  But, uh, yeah, it wasn't annoying then and now it's annoying now because it's oversaturated.

• 2:17:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just the second I detected, I stopped reading and I just closed whatever the.

• 2:17:14Ben Hylak?

  Exactly.

• 2:17:14John Coogan?

  What's weird is that I, I, I feel like I'm detecting it less in the actual responses. Like, if I asked ChatGPT to go pull some data together for me.

• 2:17:23Ben Hylak?

  Hmm.

• 2:17:24John Coogan?

  I'm noticing they clearly RL'd, but it's not this, it's that out of the model in the last run.

• 2:17:28Ben Hylak?

  Of course, yeah.

• 2:17:29John Coogan?

  Because people are like, it's, okay, that's actually really annoying. But in general, like, I'll sit there and I probably read 20 minutes of AI text a day.

• 2:17:37Ben Hylak?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:37John Coogan?

  Just from queries that I do throughout the day.

• 2:17:40Ben Hylak?

  You're lucky, that's all.

• 2:17:41John Coogan?

  I, I don't know. I mean, I'm live a lot, so.

• 2:17:43Ben Hylak?

  I've been so much.

• 2:17:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, but you're not necessarily annoyed by that. But if I tell you like, hey, I got this blog post and then you're like, this is AI, it's like disrespectful.

• 2:17:53Ben Hylak?

  We, we actually.

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  But the actual quality of the writing is probably identical to what you read all day.

• 2:17:56Ben Hylak?

  I get what you're saying, yeah.

• 2:17:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:57Ben Hylak?

  I actually, I actually do find the, the, uh, responses from like the Codex, etc. to be like obnoxious.

• 2:18:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sometimes it can be annoying.

• 2:18:05Ben Hylak?

  But, yeah, we, we, we had, I had a funny thing recently where we're like, we put up a blog and it was like, it was like a, I, I thought it was a pretty, like, it's a pretty decent blog. It was about the hugging face incident. We did like a whole like simulated game called Hugging World. It's at huggingworld.com.

• 2:18:18John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:18:19Ben Hylak?

  And it's pretty funny. It's funny to watch. Uh, uh, and so the thing is like, I was pretty busy. I got the blog like 80% done, but like, I knew that there were like some, like, you could read, you could read it. It was good. But it, it, also I was like, someone's gonna call, like, someone's gonna see like the, like some AI written phrase here. I don't want to get called on that. You know what I mean? And so I added a little like stamp, like vibe written, you know, on the, on the top. And I think that was like a nice, like.

• 2:18:42John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, just being honest with the audience.

• 2:18:44Ben Hylak?

  Exactly. But it's like, it's like, there is good information in.

• 2:18:46John Coogan?

  And was there pushback or no?

• 2:18:47Ben Hylak?

  No.

• 2:18:47John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:18:48Ben Hylak?

  Exactly. So I, I think, I think like there was good information. It was not, I think, disrespectful to someone to read. But at the same time, it's a little bit different than if I were to write every sentence.

• 2:18:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:18:57Ben Hylak?

  So there's some sort of.

• 2:18:59John Coogan?

  I have one more question.

• 2:19:00Ben Hylak?

  Please.

• 2:19:00Jordi Hays?

  Then we have one big gong here.

• 2:19:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, we do.

• 2:19:03Ben Hylak?

  Yes.

• 2:19:03John Coogan?

  Uh, maybe we should hit the gong first. You raised $25 million CRV.

• 2:19:07Ben Hylak?

  Thirty-five.

• 2:19:08John Coogan?

  Thirty-five. Oh, who's counting? We get it. Wow, wow, we, wow. Smash that gong. CRV, CRV is in, he's shipping up to Boston. Did you go to Boston or you raised it in the valley?

• 2:19:19Ben Hylak?

  No, no, no.

• 2:19:20John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, Charles Rivers Ventures, the Charles, it's in Boston. We were just there. It's great.

• 2:19:27Ben Hylak?

  Charles Rivers.

• 2:19:28John Coogan?

  Completely unrelated question, but prediction in the tech world. The new Tesla Roadster is being announced October 1st and the FAA has cleared the airspace 10,000 feet up. So the maximum height it could go is 10,000 feet. The minimum height it could go is, is zero feet, right? Uh, what is your prediction? It has to be.

• 2:19:48Ben Hylak?

  It's gonna get off the ground.

• 2:19:49John Coogan?

  Inclusive of zero to 10,000 feet. How high do you think it'll go?

• 2:19:53Ben Hylak?

  Uh.

• 2:19:53John Coogan?

  Could be an inch, could be a thousand feet, could be a hundred feet, could be 10,000 feet, can't be higher than 10,000 feet, can't be less than zero. We know it's in between there. We have the bounds now.

• 2:20:03Ben Hylak?

  I think it's, I think it'll be more than zero.

• 2:20:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:20:06Ben Hylak?

  Pretty sure. I'm thinking, I'm thinking, I'm thinking we're gonna get 10 feet.

• 2:20:11John Coogan?

  10 feet? I like it.

• 2:20:12Jordi Hays?

  Here's, here's a new, here's a new, uh, I gotta get some foil, I gotta get some foil under here. As I've been thinking about it more, it really seems like he never wanted to act, once he got into this whole thing and the humanoids, he doesn't really want to make this car, right?

• 2:20:25Ben Hylak?

  No, exactly.

• 2:20:26Jordi Hays?

  He really doesn't want to make this car, right? People have been sitting there for nine years, having their money locked up. They're like, I hope this year I get my car. He doesn't want to make it, right?

• 2:20:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:20:34Jordi Hays?

  But he, we know he can make it.

• 2:20:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:36Jordi Hays?

  And we know that he could make something so incredible. We know he could make a flying car, right? I don't think anyone doubts like, oh.

• 2:20:42Ben Hylak?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:43Jordi Hays?

  Like, like, I'm not saying it's gonna be super safe.

• 2:20:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:20:46Jordi Hays?

  But, but let's say.

• 2:20:47Ben Hylak?

  I'm not even saying it's gonna ship.

• 2:20:48Jordi Hays?

  Let's, let's say this. He makes something that is, no, so he makes something that is just like an insane demo, but it just instantly gets like hard ban hammer by.

• 2:20:56John Coogan?

  Oh, and he's like, oh no, I can't make it. They won't let me.

• 2:21:00Jordi Hays?

  Or it gets into another five-year period of like legal battle. I gotta keep the deposit.

• 2:21:04John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 2:21:05Jordi Hays?

  You gotta get through these legal battles.

• 2:21:06John Coogan?

  The deposit's not that big. But, uh, also there's a wild card, which is that it could be more or less a normal car, but they cleared the airspace because it's doing sort of an Evel Knievel style jump and they set up a ramp. And that will throw all of our predictions off.

• 2:21:21Ben Hylak?

  Quite possible.

• 2:21:22John Coogan?

  Because it could easily go 30 feet in the air if there's a ramp and it could just be a normal car. It wouldn't be a flying car.

• 2:21:28Ben Hylak?

  You know, like so, like, he has, he has, he has the resources.

• 2:21:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:32Ben Hylak?

  Right? And, and, um, I'm sure at some point someone was like, well, what if it fly?

• 2:21:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:37Ben Hylak?

  You know what I mean? And so he would have been like, well, let's get a team on that.

• 2:21:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:41Ben Hylak?

  And I believe that if you, you can attach engines to this thing and it might fly, like I.

• 2:21:45John Coogan?

  I, I was going no ramp, six feet up, but after seeing the 10,000-foot news, I think you might be flying around like a plane or something. Might be getting up there. We'll see.

• 2:21:55Ben Hylak?

  You think so?

• 2:21:56John Coogan?

  Maybe. I mean, I don't know why.

• 2:21:57Ben Hylak?

  Test flights, that's the thing.

• 2:21:59John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, there would have been spies or something.

• 2:22:01Ben Hylak?

  Pilots and there would have been, yeah, I, I think.

• 2:22:03John Coogan?

  I don't know. They might have it locked down. It's a pretty secure facility.

• 2:22:06Ben Hylak?

  Self-driving?

• 2:22:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. Self lying. That's the easy part. I think the hard part is to actually make a make a rocket car that doesn't explode when you drive it around. Anyway, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations.

• 2:22:20Jordi Hays?

  After the show.

• 2:22:21John Coogan?

  And our next guest will be joining in just a minute. We have some other breaking news we got to run through.

• 2:22:29John Coogan?

  We just set up our next guest. I think it'd be worth talking about Paramount.

• 2:22:33Jordi Hays?

  Let's get a quick tip of the hat for friends over at Raindrop.

• 2:22:38John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, of course. So Paramount is officially not leaving California. It's been a back and forth. The company going through an acquisition with Warner Brothers Discovery has been duking it out with AG Attorney's General in California. The company said Monday, that's Paramount, said that it has reached a settlement with the states challenging its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Brothers Discovery, clearing what had become the last major obstacle to the deal. California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a coalition of other states sued Paramount in July, arguing that combining the two companies

• 2:23:19John Coogan?

  would give a single entertainment giant too much control over major film studios, cable networks and other media properties. To resolve the case, Paramount agreed to several conditions. The combined company will create an independent board of journalists intended to protect the editorial autonomy of CNN and CBS News, commit to releasing at least 30 movies theatrically each year and spend an additional $1.5 billion on film production over the next five years. Paramount did not agree to more structural changes. They're not selling CNN or divesting one of the movie studios. Once completed, the merger will bring Paramount and Warner Brothers under the same roof, along with Paramount Plus, HBO Max, CBS, CNN and franchises and films, including Superman, Minecraft and Sinners.

• 2:24:03John Coogan?

  Paramount has argued that the scale is necessary to compete with increasingly powerful technology and streaming companies like Netflix. If you if you subscribe to every Paramount Warner Brothers Discovery premium service now, you're probably giving them like 60 bucks a month, maybe more. HBO Max is an independent subscription. Paramount Plus, that gets pricey if you get the, don't they have UFC now? CBS, I think, has an all access. CNN launched something, but I think they shuttered it. Anyway, the settlement also follows months of political pressure surrounding Paramount's future in California. The company had warned that it could move significant production and thousands of jobs out of the state if the acquisition were blocked and had reportedly begun exploring studio space in Nashville.

• 2:24:48John Coogan?

  Governor Gavin Newsom publicly warned that losing Paramount would damage California's standing as the center of the entertainment industry. With the lawsuit now headed for resolution, one of the more serious recent threats of a major Hollywood company pulling back from Los Angeles appears to have receded. So this is extremely bad news for everyone that was hoping that the Paramount lot would be converted into a data center in the heart of Los Angeles. A lot of the pro data center crowd were optimistic about a large scale data center coming in to Los Angeles, using up a lot of the water, a lot of the energy here in Los Angeles, but looks like they're going to be making movies instead. So.

• 2:25:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's check in with Professor Jiang.

• 2:25:25John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 2:25:25Jordi Hays?

  Who went on Jack Neal's podcast to talk about AI.

• 2:25:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes. We need to. This is the funniest clip. It's like half true, half false. Let's play it.

• 2:25:39Speaker 08

  Do you really think when you put something into ChatGPT, it's going to be generated by the AI? I guarantee you it's not true. I guarantee you it's being manipulated by humans somewhere in the.

• 2:25:47John Coogan?

  Human in the loop. ChatGPT, human in the loop at scale. Billion, billion weekly active users, billion people answering questions.

• 2:25:55Speaker 08

  I think what happened was a human first wrote that.

• 2:25:59John Coogan?

  And so he's sort of right. He's like describing training data and like it's half crazy. Like, no, there's no human in the loop. When you ask a question, it answers with superhuman speed. How is that possible? But at the same time, like, yes, scale AI exists. Merkle exists. There is a lot of training data.

• 2:26:17Jordi Hays?

  Professor Jiang is willing to actually guarantee this too, which is great too, because he's not just saying it. He's willing to guarantee it.

• 2:26:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:26:25Jordi Hays?

  It seems that that the new meta for governments globally is to just have like a podcast guy.

• 2:26:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:26:32Jordi Hays?

  That just goes around saying insane things, half of which is true, half of which are made up.

• 2:26:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:40Jordi Hays?

  And then it just sort of is exciting and confusing for people, but but very stimulating. John John Kiriyaku is another guy, another guy like this, it seems, although he's taken a turn into fashion. So we'll.

• 2:26:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, he walked at Fashion Week. There's an interesting thing. David Sacks is the AI czar and he's also the co-chair of the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which abbreviates to PCAST, which sounds like podcast. It sounds like he's the podcaster in chief. Isn't that isn't that a random title? He just happens to be the the co-chair of PCAST. I thought that was a fun fact. Anyway, we have Lucas Shaw in the waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TV panel. Welcome to the show, Luke.

• 2:27:31Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:27:33Speaker 09

  Great to be here. How you guys doing?

• 2:27:35Jordi Hays?

  Been wanting to make this happen for a while. Anytime we are, we go live from Hollywood most days of the year, but I still don't fully understand Hollywood. So stuff is happening in the news. I usually just think I'm going to wait till you write about it. Then I'll get a good understanding of it. So it's an honor to have you here today to talk about everything with Paramount. And then I want to get into Netflix and YouTube as well.

• 2:27:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, please.

• 2:27:59Speaker 09

  I'm sorry I did not bring my hat. Then we could all be mad.

• 2:28:01Jordi Hays?

  We should have. We should have prepared you. We're trying these out. John has a theory that.

• 2:28:06John Coogan?

  I think you do have a pair of sunglasses that you could put on him potentially with a button. If you if you want to give him a pair of shades at some point.

• 2:28:13Jordi Hays?

  We can figure that out. But John, John's trying to bring back the fedora. So I'm just.

• 2:28:18Speaker 09

  You're there for emotional support.

• 2:28:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm just here. I'm just here to support.

• 2:28:22John Coogan?

  It looks like old Hollywood. I think we can pull it off. I think with with the suit and the tie, it reads a little bit more like like 1950s.

• 2:28:30Jordi Hays?

  Insane over overconfidence. I'm going to bring back the fedora. I can pull it off. Anyways, how was how was your weekend covering everything going on with with Paramount?

• 2:28:42Speaker 09

  It was fine. I was actually at a relative's wedding in Rhode Island, so I helped where I could. We also had some really good colleagues of mine who handled it. I mean, I've been covering Ellison Paramount, this deal for the last year and the players in it for far longer. I think we're all happy that it is finally over. Obviously, there are some people who are not happy that the deal is going to go forward, but those of us covering it didn't need the proceedings to drag out for forever and ever.

• 2:29:10Jordi Hays?

  Talk about your read today on on the sort of winners and losers and where where the different parties kind of gave ground and where they they kind of maybe came out on top.

• 2:29:23Speaker 09

  Well, the settlement looks for the most part like a big win for David Ellison, right? He was looking at, you know, months of uncertainty. This trial wasn't going to start until next year. Yes, there were hearings between now and then, but if that had happened, he was going to owe hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars to this ticking fee that he had in the deal between Paramount, Seedance and Warner Brothers Discovery. And instead, he mostly agrees to do things he's already said he was going to do, you know, release 30 movies a year in theaters. Only 20 of them have to be wide releases. There's a commitment to, you know, make a certain amount of production or make a certain amount of movies and television in this country. But again, I think he was going to do that stuff anyways. Maybe this, you know, forces him to do it because there's always a chance, you know, he says he's going to do X and gets in and he instead does Y.

• 2:30:08Speaker 09

  But it doesn't seem like Rob Bonta, the Attorney General of California, or any of the attorneys general who are involved in the suit or the Writers Guild got some big win where they can say, you know, they were calling for structural changes, which would have meant selling something, and there is nothing being sold.

• 2:30:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:24Jordi Hays?

  Is this real cause for optimism for the entertainment industry in LA? Is there is there is there already plenty of cause for optimism? Living here, I don't, I don't, you know, when I when I talk to folks, I don't get this sort of sense that like they're super excited about the state of things, but maybe it's it's darkest before dawn.

• 2:30:46Speaker 09

  Well, the last few years have been pretty rough, right? There was kind of an unprecedented explosion, particularly on the television side, kind of starting around Netflix and House of Cards. It really looked the TV business was a cash machine for decades. Streaming seemed like a really great business for a lot of these people. And then around 22, 23, there has been this kind of correction or right sizing, and from which the industry has never fully recovered. So yeah, you're right that most people who work in Hollywood don't feel great about it. I don't think that they believe that this deal is going to be the solution for that, right? They're looking at what will likely be thousands in job cuts and the combination of two of the original six Hollywood studios.

• 2:31:29Speaker 09

  But other people feel great because it means they think that David Ellison will finally be the one to kind of create a scaled player to compete with Netflix and Amazon and Disney. Look, Warner Brothers has traded hands a lot over the last decade. It got bought by AT&T, then it got bought by Discovery. Now it's getting bought by David Ellison. Everyone has said that they're going to be the ones to figure out how to make HBO kind of a real competitor in streaming. They haven't done it so far, but maybe David Ellison will have the magic touch.

• 2:31:59John Coogan?

  How is Hollywood processing the? It seems like TV is in a rough spot, but it feels like it's starting to be a good year for movies, at least financially. I mean, we had the three breakout sort of like crossover YouTubers, Obsession, Iron Lung, Backrooms. Then you have $2 billion outcomes with The Odyssey and Spider-Man. And then you're going into the back half of the year. It's tech focused and you get the Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes documentary. There's an OpenAI movie, there's another Facebook movie. Like, at least from my world, I feel like there's more stories around the movie business. But how is Hollywood perceiving this year?

• 2:32:43John Coogan?

  Will this be remembered as like a good year for the movie making business potentially?

• 2:32:49Speaker 09

  I think it depends on who you ask. Top line, it's the highest grossing year since before the pandemic, since 2019. You have the second most billion dollar movies ever. You know, you had The Odyssey, you had Spider-Man movie, you had Toy Story 5, you had a new Super Mario Brothers movie. And then a lot of the ones that you referenced, whether it was kind of the YouTube breakouts or even Devil Wears Prada 2 was a big hit. I think where people counter that is that if you look just in terms of ticket sales, ticket sales are still down a lot. The reason that grosses are stronger is in part because going to the movies is just more expensive. And so we've entered a phase where movie going as a habit is just not what it used to be. But yeah, I think this is, if you talk to people in the movie business,

• 2:33:31Speaker 09

  they feel better about it this year than they have since before the pandemic closed theaters. And the question that they all have is, is this going to continue? How do we make sure that this isn't a blip? And we actually are back on a growth trajectory, which the business hasn't really been on.

• 2:33:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've seen some crazy stats about movie going before the dawn of television. I think in like the 40s and 50s, like the average American bought like something like 10 or 20 movie tickets a month. Like it was like the only thing to do. And so everyone was going to movies constantly. And then, and then once people could watch.

• 2:34:06Jordi Hays?

  Gotta get your screen time somehow.

• 2:34:09Speaker 09

  Well, even think about, think about when you, yes, there's what happened, you know, before television where it was like, yeah, so it was pretty much, it was that or reading books or playing, playing cards. But even when, when you were growing up, going to the movies on a Friday night was

• 2:34:25John Coogan?

  Every weekend.

• 2:34:26Speaker 09

  Correct.

• 2:34:26John Coogan?

  Every weekend.

• 2:34:27Speaker 09

  And that's just not the case now, right? You go when there is an event. A movie is competing with TikTok, it's competing with YouTube, it's competing with live sports, it's competing with concerts, it's competing with, you know, anything and everything. And so it has to be loud and has to feel like something one needs to leave the house to go see. And that's something that the movie business struggles with because they were in the habit of people just showing up on a Friday night and saying, what do I want to see?

• 2:34:54Jordi Hays?

  Switching gears, YouTube and Netflix. You had an interesting post this morning on a creator that was potentially trying to rework, rework their deal with Netflix, seemingly because they're worried about losing something to do with their, the Golden Goose, which is their YouTube channel. Break it down.

• 2:35:15Speaker 09

  Yeah, there's been this fight for talent between YouTube and Netflix over the course of this year, right? They're the two leaders in streaming video for most of their existence. They were competitive, but operating in different lanes, right? You know, Netflix was Hollywood programming, professional film and TV. YouTube was UGC and just shorter form videos. Over time, they've gotten closer and closer together. And what's happened this year is Netflix, in trying to increase the amount of time people are spending and stay relevant with people under the age of 25, 30, in particular, under 20, they have done deals with a lot of big YouTube talent. And that's, you know, they've done business with YouTube before. It used to be, okay, Cocamelan, package together your videos and make highlights for Netflix.

• 2:36:00Speaker 09

  Now it's like with this, with this person I mentioned, the chef Nick DiGiavani, and they've done it with, with a bunch of people. It's post your new videos to Netflix and YouTube at the same time. We will pay you millions of dollars on top of what you already get from YouTube. And we're happy to talk about whether we should, you know, work on some kind of original programming. YouTube got upset about this, right? YouTube, even though they are the biggest player on the block, they seem to, you know, break records in terms of how much time people are spending with it every quarter. I think Netflix trying to get people to post at the same time on both places just irritated them.

• 2:36:37Jordi Hays?

  How dare you? How dare you? No, it's so funny to me because they've been through this like, oh, it's like everything, it's like rainbows and butterflies, like we're just all creating.

• 2:36:47John Coogan?

  You and YouTube, it's about you, the creator.

• 2:36:49Jordi Hays?

  We're all just creators and like, we're here to just empower creators. And it's like, we're here to empower creators that maintain our monopoly on human attention, you know? It's like, it's really, it's really kind of exposing just the realities of like business. They're going to make a bunch of like rational decisions to try to maintain their monopoly on like streaming UGC and, and, but, but having to go kind of, it feels like they just had to go very much like mask off. If you do this, we're going to kill your reach.

• 2:37:20Speaker 09

  And we will punish you. And by the way, if you go back and work with us, we will reward you. It is very Machiavellian. They do, they did not care. It was interesting when I first started reporting on it and what YouTube was doing in response. Like YouTube thought what they were doing, to your point, was very reasonable and rational and just what any business would do. And then Netflix folks were like, I can't believe what YouTube is doing. And probably some of that comes from what you're talking about, which is YouTube has cultivated this reputation as this very creator friendly platform, which of course they're, you know, they're ultimately about the bottom line and creators are a means to an end for them.

• 2:37:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the other thing that's interesting is like when, when podcasters were like, hey, I could just, I'm posting my podcast to the RSS feed. I could just post it on YouTube at the same time. Maybe I get some additional views. Creators are now just trying to do that. They're like, I'm creating this video asset that I slaved away making for any number of hours. I made this thing, it's my IP, I own it, I should be able to post it anywhere. And now YouTube is saying like, we're going to cut your reach, you know, by however much. And it just feels like it is deeply misaligned with the creator, which is the person that built YouTube. And it's my hope that, it's my hope that, that the creators like win here because it's so much better, it'll be so much better if a creator can be like,

• 2:38:39Jordi Hays?

  yeah, I get, I get views all over the place and, and, but, but I don't know, YouTube.

• 2:38:44John Coogan?

  It will be better for YouTube shareholders though.

• 2:38:48Speaker 09

  They may be misaligned, but I would actually say that this competition for creators, at least in the short term, is a net positive because there are multiple people. It's not, YouTube for the longest time was kind of the only game in town, right? Yes, you had TikTok and Instagram and Twitch.

• 2:39:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's what I'm saying. I'm saying the competition is like amazing. I want more, I want permanent competition, not just this brief.

• 2:39:09John Coogan?

  That might be the state because, because right now, if YouTube is that stick, then Netflix has to increase the amount of carrots to say, hey, yeah, you are going to get crushed, but we're going to double what we were going to pay you. So, and then all of a sudden somebody says, you know what? Yeah, I'll get rid of my YouTube channel at that price, I'm down, right? And then that's good, potentially.

• 2:39:29Speaker 09

  Yeah. And you see Disney and Fox and other legacy entertainment companies trying to get in too. And so if there are just more people trying to compete for creators' dollar, that's good, right? We've seen it, you brought up, you were, you're talking about podcasting earlier. When there were a bunch of companies trying to get podcast deals and trying to sign podcast talent, that's when you started to see people like Joe Rogan and Al Cooper and all those folks getting huge paydays. So yeah, the more folks who want their, you know, want their videos.

• 2:39:56Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that, um, do you think that Netflix could think about trying to cultivate like emerging talent? Like they're so used to being like, hey, let's put a million dollars towards this like single production. If you take a million dollars, you divide it by 20, you could seed 20 creators that are just showing like any, you know, I'm very excited for, a lot of the content that I like most on YouTube is, is like highly produced 20, 30 minute videos from a super passionate creator that just spent, and it's like real time, right? And so what, what Netflix has been missing is just like, and they've kind of done this with some documentary projects where they'll like come out with a documentary

• 2:40:40Jordi Hays?

  on like Trump's flight from Turkey.

• 2:40:42Speaker 09

  Right, they're doing these quick turn documentaries right now.

• 2:40:44Jordi Hays?

  And so, but, but they should be doing that across like Insta, every single, every single category, basically.

• 2:40:51Speaker 09

  They could. I think Netflix is really wary of, they would sort of categorize that maybe as user-generated programming, and I don't think they feel like they can win at that. But Netflix's strength has been, yes, that really high production value type of programming, and YouTube's strength has more been the long tail, being the place that you can go for anything and everything. And I think if you, most people at Netflix feel like they can't beat YouTube at that game. But it would be interesting, certainly, to see them, you know, go to 20, 30 creators they like and say, here's $50,000 to make whatever you want.

• 2:41:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, I would just like to see that because those creators, if they're just starting their journey, have nothing to lose. Like, they don't have this amazing, you know, platform and business built on YouTube yet. So it would take a lot of money, but some way or another, they're gonna need to get to the point, they're gonna need to benefit from like, having creative talent that's distributed all over the world that can make this more like, real-time content. And I've always, I've always felt like Netflix, in the slop era that we're in, Netflix has amazing opportunity to just curate UGC better than YouTube. Because I actually can't stand when YouTube surfaces some video to me, and historically, I would have been like, oh, cool, there's a video, it looks like it's

• 2:42:13Jordi Hays?

  well-produced, it only has 4,000 views, maybe it's like, someone great. And then now, more than ever, it's like, some like, AI script from a, and there's actually no substance to the content. And I think like, if Netflix can create a slop shield of sorts, curation layer, I'd be optimistic.

• 2:42:32John Coogan?

  I like that. What's the status, or the status of Apple in this ecosystem? I talked to, I talked to a filmmaker before they really launched, you know, real Apple TV+ productions, and he was saying, like, it's gonna be challenging for them because movies are, it's a hits-driven business, you're going to have flops, and that's sort of antithetical to the Apple culture of like, everything needs to be polished and perfect. And then, I think they've done well, and they've developed a portfolio of really well-reviewed Emmy-winning, Golden Globe-winning, you know, they've won a whole bunch of awards. But how do people

• 2:43:16John Coogan?

  in Hollywood see them? Are they an important buyer in the ecosystem? Are they just one of many? It feels like they're sort of sitting out this YouTube versus Netflix battle, but is there a battle coming, you know, years down the line as they try and expand, or are they sort of happy with where they are?

• 2:43:31Speaker 09

  They're definitely sitting out the Netflix YouTube skirmish. I mean, when they first showed up, I think they were seen as, you know, captain moneybags. They just, they would outspend anyone and everyone. They're kind of seen as star fuckers, because every show that they do, they want to have big-name talent in. But over time, they've developed a reputation as one of the, one of the best program, or one of the best streaming services in terms of programming, right? You mentioned Emmy Awards, they just won the most Emmys of any streaming service, of any company.

• 2:44:02John Coogan?

  Was that Widows Bay?

• 2:44:03Speaker 09

  It was, Widows Bay was their biggest winner, but they, you know, they got a lot of nominations across that, and Your Friends and Neighbors, and Shrinking, and a bunch of their shows. They get really good critical praise.

• 2:44:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like they've sort of jumped straight into more of an HBO competitor than a Netflix competitor.

• 2:44:22Speaker 09

  Yes, they have. Well, that's, but remember, that's where Netflix started, right? Netflix started as competing with HBO, and then went mainstream. I don't know, Amazon started as competing with HBO, and then decided to speak to the middle of the country with Reacher and other stuff like that. I don't know that I see Apple making that same transition, to your point about sort of what Apple is. It doesn't feel like in keeping with their brand to try to be CBS.

• 2:44:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:46Speaker 09

  The knock that most people have on Apple is just, their shows aren't very popular.

• 2:44:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:44:52Speaker 09

  You know, they, they do really well with a particular type of viewer.

• 2:44:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:57Speaker 09

  But only a couple of their shows have broken through in the culture in a big way.

• 2:45:01John Coogan?

  No, I saw some estimated ratings, and it was like, 70,000 views an episode or something, which is like, a small podcast, right?

• 2:45:09Speaker 09

  But they, they may not care, right? If you're John Turnus, and you're like, oh, I just went to the Emmys, and we won all these awards, and talent wants to work with us, that's good for our brand.

• 2:45:18John Coogan?

  Well, that's been the 4D chess argument in tech, is that it gives them something to talk about that's not just App Store rents. Because they're like, oh, yeah, our services business, you want to talk about services? Let's talk about, you know, Widows Bay. Not, we made another $10 billion charging 30%.

• 2:45:35Jordi Hays?

  Do you think any of the major platforms will take, are taking a hard look at, at short-form dramas, or any of these, these apps that are charting? I think a lot of them are basically like, adult content, that's sort of like, romantic.

• 2:45:50Speaker 09

  Popcore porn, some people would say, yeah.

• 2:45:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:53John Coogan?

  But there's also like, horror, and like, true crime stuff in there.

• 2:45:56Speaker 09

  They're all looking at it. I think Peacock, I think, has already added some verticals. I know that Netflix and others have said that they're looking at it. That, again, doesn't feel like one for Apple, per se, but most of the other ones. Look, all these services, because streaming isn't growing as fast as it once was, they're all looking at ways to bring in more people. So they're all looking at YouTube creators, they're all looking at podcasts, they're all looking at vertical dramas, anything that people are paying attention to, if they can find a sensible way to integrate it, they will.

• 2:46:25Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense.

• 2:46:26John Coogan?

  Is it fair to say that the Warner Brothers story was somewhat predictable just by the actions of David Zaslove, even before the first bid came out? Was, this was something that you and other folks in the industry were tracking, correct?

• 2:46:40Speaker 09

  Um, there was a feeling that what was happening, that Warner Brothers Discovery wasn't working as a public company, right? The stock was low, the stock was doing badly. The company was shrinking, just in terms of revenue. The streaming service was doing okay. And so, we, we knew they had to do something. What they were doing was, they were splitting it, right? They were gonna cast off the cable networks into one business, because that's the part that generates a lot of profit, but isn't growing. And then they were gonna put the, the studio and the streaming service into another. And my belief is, that is what David Zaslove wanted, because he liked being the mayor of Hollywood, or he wasn't the mayor, but he liked being a big shot in Hollywood, right? He's in Bob Evans' house, he gets to hang out with movie stars, and get dinner with those people. He

• 2:47:25Speaker 09

  didn't want to give that up.

• 2:47:26John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:47:27Speaker 09

  And that's why, when David Ellison first came calling, or one of the reasons that David Zaslove and his board said, you're not valuing us high enough, we don't want this, we don't want it. And Ellison just kept coming. You know, you gotta give him credit. In the case of both buying Paramount from, from Sherry Redstone, and in this Warner Brothers deal, he faced a lot of resistance, and he, you know, in part because he has the resources from his family, but he just kept coming.

• 2:47:50John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:47:51Jordi Hays?

  Master of negotiating against himself.

• 2:47:54John Coogan?

  Do you have any predictions for what the next big Hollywood story might be, either through the end of the year, or next year? Something that people are feeling like, okay, we're in act one or act two there, there might be a crescendo, some big deal, some change, some structural moment. Could be sort of across any, any storyline, but what are you tracking?

• 2:48:18Speaker 09

  Well, look, in the immediate, there's gonna be a lot of attention paid to what does David Ellison do? Combining two companies is gonna mean, not only firing a lot of people, but who's gonna run the streaming business? He's got a high-profile person in charge of streaming at Paramount, and a high-profile person in charge of streaming at Warner Brothers Discovery. Setting that aside, a lot of people are wondering what is going on at Netflix. I think, you know, they've had a pretty rocky year. Ever since they walked away from Warner Brothers Discovery, it's led to a lot of questions about the future, and, you know, whether they have a plan for their next act, and how they're gonna grow. There's been a lot of rumors about changes in leadership there. And so, I think people are keeping

• 2:49:00Speaker 09

  an eye on that. Comcast is doing what Warner Brothers Discovery once was planning to do. You know, they're splitting their cable business from the entertainment business, and a lot of people are wondering, is that the first move? And, you know, NBC Universal ends up getting combined with something. You know, AI is a much bigger conversation, I'd say, in the music business than in Hollywood right now, but it's lurking, obviously, as it is in all sectors of society. Those are probably the big ones.

• 2:49:28John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:49:29Speaker 09

  Oh, and the federal film tax credit. A lot of people are wondering. There's a, there's a push to try to pass a tax credit for shooting in, in the United States, which would bring a lot of production back from Europe and Canada. And Trump came out for it, and people are trying to get that done, basically, between now and when the next Congress seats.

• 2:49:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think Avengers is going to London or the UK. And I don't know if that's because that's where they actually want to shoot, or it's a financial decision, but it'd be exciting to get back to making movies in Hollywood. It's a good town.

• 2:50:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Hopefully, we get booted out of our studio. That'll be a bullish indicator for Hollywood.

• 2:50:11John Coogan?

  It was way too easy to find studio space in Hollywood for us.

• 2:50:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining, Lucas. Really, really enjoyed it. Let's do it again, when you have more stories.

• 2:50:20John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:50:21Speaker 09

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:50:22Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:50:23John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:50:24Jordi Hays?

  And that's our show, folks.

• 2:50:26John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for tuning in to TBPN. We'll see you tomorrow, 11:00 AM Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. Goodbye.