AI Video Game Mods, Should You Sell Your Data, Bryan Johnson on Endurance Racing | Sean Frank, Linda Du, Ali Partovi, Sigil Wen, Jerry Wu, Bryan Johnson

(01:17) - AI Video Game Mods (18:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (37:13) - Chinese Cars Take Over Britain (43:49) - Fiat's $15k Microcar (57:09) - Sean Frank, CEO of Ridge, discusses the company’s rapid growth, his decision not to sell its business data to AI firms, and how AI is transforming e-commerce operations, advertising, and creative production. He also explores agent-driven shopping, TikTok marketing, consumer spending, celebrity partnerships, and Ridge’s potential expansion into physical retail. (01:29:21) - Linda Du, president, COO, and co-founder of Valon Technologies, discusses the company’s $150 million Series D at a $2.3 billion valuation. She explains how Valon built and operated a mortgage servicer to prove its software before becoming a pure-play provider of AI-powered mortgage-servicing technology. (01:38:33) - Ali Partovi discusses his successful year as founder and CEO of venture capital firm Neo, his strategy of concentrating investments in fewer high-potential founders, and his backing of companies such as Cursor and Etched. He proposes holding AI companies responsible when their systems autonomously commit crimes, arguing that stronger liability would encourage the development of powerful AI that obeys existing laws. (02:05:36) - Sigil Wen discusses Underdog, a free, private personal AI that runs directly on users’ devices across major platforms. He explains its on-device performance, privacy benefits, invite-only beta, and potential payments-based business model involving AI agents that find deals and complete purchases. (02:13:12) - Jerry Wu discusses his work as co-founder and CEO of Halluminate, which builds training benchmarks and reinforcement-learning environments that improve AI models’ performance on non-coding knowledge work. He explains how these environments teach and evaluate tasks such as financial modeling and presentations, highlights the company’s $30 million fundraise, and predicts increasingly complex simulations involving multiple agents, companies, governments, and industries. (02:22:41) - Bryan Johnson, a tech entrepreneur and longevity advocate, discusses his goal of dunking a basketball at age 49 as part of a broader shift from strict health optimization toward ambitious physical “side quests.” He also explores biomarkers, peptides, strength training, aviation risks, motorsports, and how challenging pursuits can promote health, focus, and personal growth. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Monday, October 5th, 80 days till Christmas. We are live from the TVP and Ultra Dot, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com, tennis, money, save, book, easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  We are.

• 0:21John Coogan?

  80 days till Christmas. Okay, so October is the hardest month in the road to Christmas.

• 0:28Speaker 00

  Totally.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  And it's because everyone is gonna be looking at you.

• 0:32Speaker 00

  But there's a distraction. You feel so far.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  But, but there's a distraction.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  And, yeah, you're right.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  Halloween, Halloween. If you go up to somebody and you say, hey, there's only 80 days till Christmas, they'll be like, why aren't you counting down the days to Halloween? They'll start looking at you like you're crazy. You're not crazy. They're crazy for thinking that it's not worth counting the days till Christmas in October. There's only 80 days. Get ready. Halloween is a speed bump on the way to Christmas.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 0:58John Coogan?

  That's what I've always said. So keep counting down those days. Ignore the distractions.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  Or don't, but we will.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Okay, who wants to play these AI-generated video game mods? Kotaku does not. They posted a article that said, I don't want to play your my, your AI-generated mod that puts Skate 3 inside Modern Warfare 2 inside of Minecraft. They don't want to play them. Tyler, what do you think? Do you want to play these? Or did I have to force you?

• 1:36Speaker 00

  I want to play these.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  You want to play?

• 1:38Speaker 00

  I'm actually playing it right now.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  Okay, well, Tyler's playing one of these AI-generated mods, and it's very interesting because the mods are, whoa, we got the infinite loop, infinite loop. Very cool. Anyway,

• 1:54John Coogan?

  production team's working on it. Anyway, we've seen a lot of these. We talked about them. We pulled up a random one that we actually did an Instagram reel of, of, I think it was Minecraft in Elden Ring. I've never been a big Minecraft person, so it wasn't, it wasn't big for me. This is, Tyler's playing Modern Warfare 2 in Minecraft, but what's actually going on here, Tyler? Explain, like, how did you get this installed? What is, what is this?

• 2:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, so from my understanding, it's basically, like, there's no, you're not really, like, putting one game into another. It's fully like a Rust engine, and then you're pulling assets from both games, and like, kind of pulling them together somehow.

• 2:38John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  So like, I had to buy Modern Warfare 2 on Steam.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41Speaker 00

  It's using the actual game assets, and the same thing for Minecraft. Like, it's using the actual assets. It found them online.

• 2:46John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:47Speaker 00

  And I obviously had Codex, like, set it up, wired it up, so I can run it on Mac.

• 2:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  Yeah, but it's like, fully featured. Like, I can, I can mine, I can build.

• 2:54John Coogan?

  You can build.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Using the.

• 2:56John Coogan?

  Can you get a nuke?

• 2:58Speaker 00

  I don't know if I can get a kill streak.

• 2:59John Coogan?

  That's the question.

• 3:00Speaker 00

  I gotta figure this out.

• 3:00John Coogan?

  Kill streaks aren't in it. It's not Modern Warfare 2. Doesn't make any sense. There are actually a whole bunch of different, different ways people are modding things. It's interesting because they're all getting sort of lumped together into one bucket, but they are very different. Like, the classic, like, the most, like, the most approved or, like, company-approved mod might just be something like, you know, there's a Fortnite skin, and you get to, and I don't know if they actually did, like, a Batman skin or Spider-Man skin, but those skins come over, and it's just assets that fully live inside of Fortnite. There's no game code from any other game coming over. It's purely just, okay, the Fortnite game developers looked at what Spider-Man looks like. They made a

• 3:42John Coogan?

  Fortnite model out of the Spider-Man, like, character, and then you can play as them, and everything is integrated fully. You're not gonna risk changing any game files. It's fully approved by corporate. Now, these go a step further and run the gamut of different techniques. Some of them that you have seen, some of these mods actually are just the old ways.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm playing. Could you try swimming? Yeah, swimming is a little bit broken.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  And that's the nature of the vibe-coded slops.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  Oh, it's over for you.

• 4:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are you drowning, though?

• 4:16Speaker 00

  I don't think so. I'm just basically walking as if there was no water.

• 4:18John Coogan?

  There's no, yeah, the mechanic is, because, yeah, I think your health is being monitored by Modern Warfare 2, whereas Minecraft is just the geometry that you're around. I don't know. But some of them are the old way of modifying, just bringing game assets into the actual game. None of the actual code is running. Others are actually merging two games. For that Mario in Elden Ring video that we saw the other day, the mod actually borrows a subsystem called lib SM64, which is derived from a Super Mario 64 decompilation. So what they'll do is they'll.

• 4:57Speaker 00

  We keep politics out of video games.

• 5:02John Coogan?

  Please.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  Please.

• 5:05John Coogan?

  So what they'll do is they'll, they'll, they'll download the actual binary, like, the code that is on the cartridge. They will convert that into just a file that's on a computer. You can run that in an emulator, but then they can actually reverse engineer the underlying code from what has been compiled. So you get basically a bunch of ones and zeros, and there are tools that will look at that and work backwards to understand what the actual game logic is. And so, an example is, like, in the game code, you might have, like, health equals 100, but in the compiled code, it might just be, like, some memory address, like, X, like, 0X1234FC, and, and then you might work backwards in

• 5:50John Coogan?

  the decompilation step to figure out that that's the health. So a bunch of things happen in the game, game's played, as things are changed and updated, that game state is then, is then sucked out into the decompilation file. Interestingly, the NSA is involved, so no, we can't keep politics out of game development, because they're actually, a lot of these game modders are actually using software from the National Security Administration, the NSA. So the NSA has a GitHub with an open-source project called, what is it actually called? It's called GIDRA, and it's a, it's on the National Security Agency's GitHub. It's a, it's a software framework for reverse engineering software. And so you point this thing at the game, and you wind up getting more of the code, and then you can break it up and bring it into other games. Tyler?

• 6:34Speaker 00

  Okay, I'm gonna trick shot this pig if we can.

• 6:39Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  Oh, he did it. He did it.

• 6:43Speaker 00

  Come on, Tyler.

• 6:44John Coogan?

  Why?

• 6:44Speaker 00

  Little, can we get a, can we get a content warning?

• 6:47John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 6:48Speaker 00

  For anyone.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  Minecraft.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  Anyone at home?

• 6:53John Coogan?

  But there, there is something else going on now that I hadn't seen before. I don't know if this was popular in the modding community before, but there, there is, there is a version you might have seen, we, and we can try and pull it up, Arkweb. It's Batman Arkham Knight Pass Through Spider-Man Mods. You play a Spider-Man in the Batman game, and you're, so you're in Arkham. And what's funny about this is that the two games feel very similar, so they mesh very well together. But from an intellectual property perspective, this should never happen, because, of course, Marvel is DC, or it's Marvel and DC. So Marvel is owned by Disney, and Batman is owned by Warner Brothers. These two companies are

• 7:37John Coogan?

  direct competitors, and so they should never really be collabing in this way. But the fascinating thing about this is that it's not just they took the Batman game and created a Spider-Man character. It's actually running both games, and then it's passing data between the games to create this experience of being Spider-Man in Arkham Knight. So what's happening is, like, the mod goes into the Batman city, Gotham, grabs all the geometry, all the collision data, all the, all the geometry of, like, where that building is. It takes that, and in real time, it passes it to the Spider-Man game, which is actually running

• 8:19John Coogan?

  a different physics engine, so it has to translate all of that. Also, the two games use different, they use different coordinate conventions, different axes, and different units of length, so it has to translate all of that, create that in Spider-Man, and then, and then also keep both of them running, like, the controller input, because normally, if you have a controller on a video game, it'll just be on one, one game at a time, and if something's in the background. But you can see there's, like, yeah, bugs already, and this is, like, part of the problem. And then, and then it needs to actually merge the graphics, and so the games use different graphics systems, too. This feels like it would be so much easier if it was two games that were built on the same underlying technologies,

• 9:04John Coogan?

  but through the power of slop, they're able to sort of merge these two in real time and get them actually running at, seems like, near 60 FPS. And then even when you go into, they don't show the fighting, but I think when you go into the fighting, you switch into, like, the Batman combat setting instead of the Spider-Man system, so you're using Arkham's free flow, free flow combat. It's very, very odd. But the end result, it looks great, and it feels like it's almost ready to serve as a reason to be like, oh, I love that game. I want to play it again. Why don't I give it another spin? Sort of a new game plus. You get to play as a different character. There's a lot of old games that are getting remastered, rebuilt. Could be an interesting reason to go back into a game that you loved

• 9:49John Coogan?

  with a different twist this time. And stuff like this happens all the time. I mean, the, even, like, the latest sequel to Spider-Man was the same city, but just a different character. And so, some different mechanics, some different story elements, but a lot of the same assets. But it was still a reason to jump back in for a lot of players. But all of this is the classic 1990 rule. Have you heard of this? Coined by one of the greatest of all time, Tom Cargill at Bell Labs. He said, when it comes to software engineering, the first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time and the remaining 10% accounts for the other 90% of development time.

• 10:33John Coogan?

  Because you get 90% of the way there, and you're like, great, I only have 10%. And then you spend even more time on that last 10%. No matter how much you estimate it, things always grow in scope. And so when you think about the bug bash that would be necessary to take that to anything relative to like

• 10:50Jordi Hays?

  You're looking at five years.

• 10:52John Coogan?

  What?

• 10:52Jordi Hays?

  You're looking at five years.

• 10:53John Coogan?

  You're looking at five years, yeah. Here's Minecraft and GTA, similar

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the sort of multiplayer first-person shooters. You could imagine actually that being like relatively straightforward to get a working version that would be fun.

• 11:08John Coogan?

  It all just depends on how you scope it.

• 11:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:10John Coogan?

  Because if you're just talking about you're only changing the textures, like you're using the same model from Call of Duty and you're just changing the textures, you're probably not going to introduce too many bugs. But as you include a different physics mechanic, a different explosion, like all of a sudden you're introducing so much risk that you could fall through the map or things could not collide correctly. You gotta go rewrite that collision software. That triggers something else. Then, and all of these demos, none of them show the actual, like playing the full game. Like there's a mod to bring Minecraft into Skyrim. It's called Skycraft, I think.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  And in the developer's documentation for like the open source implementation of this mod, it says like, don't start the game normally. Like do not try and play the opening sequence. It will break. You should start with like the alternate starting point that starts you further into the game because it's so broken. And that's just the nature of being in the slop era. So the interesting thing is that all these mashups, they feel like tailor-made for the short-form video era. Because you watch one of these for 30 seconds, 60 seconds, and you're like, wow, that's amazing. I have dual nostalgia. I love GTA V. I love Minecraft. Put them together, double love. It's amazing.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  Everybody is, you know, getting like millions of likes on these videos, but no one has actually played these all the way through. No one is sitting back down and being like, okay, yes, this is actually as good as GTA V, which a lot of people played for 100 hours or more. Same thing with Minecraft. The base game remains dominant in terms of like actual entertainment value. This is pure meme value. And so it feels like it's another Harry Potter Balenciaga moment, but for video games. And the Harry Potter Balenciaga video by Demon Flying Fox, that was released March 15th, 2023.

• 13:08Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 13:10John Coogan?

  Can you believe it's been three and a half years since that? That's a while, right? That's a while.

• 13:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it makes me think, how, how did they make it at that time?

• 13:21John Coogan?

  That was AI video. That was the best AI video was. But what they did was, it was you would train a dedicated model on every character. So they would train a model on Harry Potter or on Daniel Radcliffe, basically. Just his face. And then they would use AI-generated imagery to generate something that looked like a, you know, sort of art station style Balenciaga runway show in a, in a Harry Potter scenario, like at Hogwarts. And Mid Journey at the time was pretty good at that style, the dark, like sort of odd

• 14:04John Coogan?

  backgrounds, like it was okay if it had some hallucinations in the background because it leaned into that, because it's a dark fashion show in a castle. You don't really have a strong reference point for that. And then they would run the face swap and then they would animate that image just a little bit. And then there was a ton of editing to actually, to make it so that you would never linger on a single frame for more than a second or two. And so you'd move on. But what was the conclusion from seeing that? There, I mean, at the time, people were like, we're going to be watching in full AI movies next year. What was your conclusion? Did you have one?

• 14:40Speaker 00

  From the Balenciaga?

• 14:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  I mean, it's just like, these are all like very novel ideas, but at some point, like now I've seen, like, I've seen a bunch of different games that have been ported to each other. And it's like, okay, there's another, it's like, oh yeah, you put Minecraft and Mario and I kind of get the idea.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  And it's notable that like Demon Flying Fox did many, many sequels and sort of stopped breaking through to the same degree. And still has a YouTube channel and I think posts a bunch of stuff. But we didn't get Daniel Radcliffe at a Balenciaga runway show, and we also didn't get a fully AI-generated movie within three and a half years. And so it was still a heavily important tech demo, though. And I do think, you know, there will be a breakout video game mod that sees heavy assistance from AI in the near future. But the key is like crafting a really innovative strategy loop. Like that's what Dota 2 was. It was a spinoff of World of Warcraft, I believe.

• 15:41John Coogan?

  It was a mod that came from there, or maybe it was from another game. I forget. But there are plenty, I mean, Counter-Strike started as a Half-Life mod. Like there are clearly games that can be birthed from that. And the fact that you have AI tooling to speed that up, you're just moving a lot of people into the indie developer category who can move things faster. They're still going to wind up spending, you know, 99.999% of their time in the last 1% if they want to break through. But it's, it's cool that many people will see this and be like, I gotta make a mod. I gotta make something. I've always had this idea for this game and now I can actually go and get started, although

• 16:23John Coogan?

  they will obviously need to lock in for a long time to get something actually polished. Anyway, 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. Let's move over to some news in the timeline. Theo is optimistic about this. Millennial-age gamers are about to become more pro AI than the average SF tech bro because of all the nostalgia from Halo in Modern Warfare 2. I do think some people will see this and be like, oh, this is cool. I like this. But there are still plenty of gamers who are like, I don't like AI at all for a bunch

• 17:05John Coogan?

  of reasons, and they, and they bring that over. There was an interesting chart of

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think for, I think for the gaming community to become broadly pro AI, a very well-loved franchise has to release a new game that is noticeably better or bigger because of the technology.

• 17:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:27Jordi Hays?

  And until then, I think people are just going to be like, you know, again, these sort of combinations are cool, but until, I don't, well, one, I don't think they can really get users because of all the IP issues.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  Just blatant IP.

• 17:45Jordi Hays?

  But, but yeah, I think you're going to need to see like GTA 7 and it's the entire world, right? And for people to get excited. And I don't, I don't know that, that that's even a path that they'll take.

• 17:58John Coogan?

  I like that lawyers are extremely pro AI now because they're like, I'm going to get so much business from this. Yeah, yeah, it's this. The Zillennials FTW you shared by Antonio Garcia Martinez in, from The Economist, seeing a monster, quote, "How serious do you think the risks of AI are of AI causing serious harm?" Everyone is basically moving to the right. They're more, they're more worried just in the past two weeks, three weeks, just through from August 28th to September 18th, except for millennials aged 30 to 44.

• 18:39John Coogan?

  They saw Jacob Coxson, they saw Dario Hamaday, they saw the SNL sketch, they saw, you know, the Ezra Klein interview and they were like, yeah, I was worried before, but I'm good now. Which is kind of crazy.

• 18:54Jordi Hays?

  Less worried than ever.

• 18:55John Coogan?

  Less worried than ever, apparently, according to The Economist.

• 18:57Jordi Hays?

  No, it's, it's

• 18:59John Coogan?

  It's a narrative violation.

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:01John Coogan?

  It's a narrative violation. But yeah, everyone else is, is getting increasingly more worried. And of course, the top of that chart, that is the voter base, 45 and up. So if you're, if you're seeing even 65 plus move to, you know, 40% very serious, that's, that's going to move, that's going to move some elections.

• 19:24Jordi Hays?

  Jim Prosser says, "It's a fascinating outlier. My hypothesis, we're the gen most comfortable with this degree of technology change and uncertainty due to coming of age through the internet and mobile."

• 19:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of millennials are in a, are in a very fortunate position with like not getting, not getting caught off guard by brain rot and slop and, and screen time addiction. It's like, we sort of got brought up in the craziest era and then have, and then have seen the children data and can fight back on that. So I think a lot of people in their 30s and 40s are like, yeah, I'm set up for success. I'm not getting the kid the iPad on day one, that type of thing. So it feels a little bit more like there, there's a danger, but it's known. It's like, it's like, we also grew up with cigarettes, but we were like, yeah, we knew, we knew the risks of cigarettes. So we were like, yeah, we're going to treat that accordingly.

• 20:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:21John Coogan?

  Only when you're drunk.

• 20:23Jordi Hays?

  All right. Sean Frank, our first guest of the show today.

• 20:27John Coogan?

  Let's go through this when he's here.

• 20:29Jordi Hays?

  We can go through it live.

• 20:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  No, yeah, yeah. No, I'm agreeing. We're going to go through it right now.

• 20:39John Coogan?

  Actually, I decide when we go through. Yeah, let's bring this up when we get to him.

• 20:44Jordi Hays?

  The whole segment?

• 20:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, whatever you want. I think I think the the interesting crossover here. I mean, we're going to talk about data brokerage. Sean Frank got an offer to sell Ridge's data. He turned it down. But we'll talk to him about the rationale there. The interesting thing is from Dan Romero. He thinks that there's a private equity opportunity to buy old video game IP and then offer a $10 unlimited mod license per game or $100 per bundle. So, so, yeah, like, taking all these old games and then setting them up for, for, you know, use in AI systems. So when you go to a model and you say, I want to make a first person shooter that I can hop in a car and it's

• 21:27John Coogan?

  a racing simulator, and then I also want to be able to skateboard, instead of needing to write all of that logic from scratch, you could just pull, like, the actual racing game that they licensed off the shelf. Counter Strike 2, I mean Valve has created a insanely robust modding system, and they actually created a new mode in CS2 called Rush, and it's built entirely in their modding system. So they're like leaning into this in like a closed source way, but they will allow you to build an entirely new game in their game. And there's a lot of examples like that, everything from Roblox to Fortnite to, you know, plenty of others that have had modding tools for a long time. The question is just like, how do you interface with the with the models directly?

• 22:12Jordi Hays?

  Suds says, looking for 500 megawatts, minimum of 250, max 2 gigawatts of powered LAN for a portco. Company is completely price insensitive and has billions behind it. Ideally, electrified shells already built. My first thought here was, isn't 2 gigawatt data center going to cost you like $100 billion?

• 22:41Jordi Hays?

  You're like, you're like going to buy a house and you're like, I'm very price insensitive. And they're like, cool, well, the house is, you know, $50 million. And you're like, well, I have $5 million, but I'm price insensitive.

• 22:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so there's, I'm sure there's-

• 22:55John Coogan?

  Portco, he's like, I bought some stock in-

• 22:58Jordi Hays?

  And so when you're getting into, when you're getting into 2 gigawatt territory, so Chase Lockmiller goes, I think we can help. It's like, there's just not that many, not that many folks that can get you 2 gigawatts, but worth a shot, worth a shot. I mean, he got half a million views on this. He probably got to the right people, right? So, effective.

• 23:20John Coogan?

  I wonder, I wonder who is, who's spinning up 2 gigawatts? Because wasn't, wasn't Meta's Hyperion or Prometheus site like 2 gigawatts? This is like hyperscaler territory, right?

• 23:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  Like, there, there are just aren't that many, like, startups that could be, like, it's funny to, to, you know, own Meta and be like, my portco, like, portco is very, like, small, coded, right? But you're just like, yeah, like, my portco-

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  So Hyperion is designed to deliver 5 gigawatts.

• 23:51John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. So, it's not Meta, we ruled them out.

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  2 gigawatts by 2030 is their plan. And 2032 is when they get to 5.

• 24:01John Coogan?

  You know, there's this, there's this news story going on in, in-

• 24:07Jordi Hays?

  No, it is, it is, it is noteworthy that you can, you can have billions behind you and, and still not have anywhere close to what you need to secure that kind of capacity.

• 24:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. So in fact, if you had a 1 gigawatt data center, pretty significant, and you were willing to burn the entire Amazon rainforest, you could power it for 35,000 years. Not bad, right? There's a lot of worry that the Amazon's going away because of Bolsonaro. People are worried. The little lungs of the earth, we need to maintain the, we need to maintain the Amazon. But it is an incredibly-

• 24:47Jordi Hays?

  Would you defend the Amazon?

• 24:50John Coogan?

  I think so. It is a hard trade off because every other industrialized country was like, yeah, we burned all our resources. Now you're the last one with them? Don't burn them. So it is a tough, it's like a, it's like a, you know, industrialization for me, but not for thee. That's the, that's the real tension there. Anyway, was Will Monita saying, he says, probably worth noticing that all the guys that were shilling high fee SPV six months ago are all, now all have powered data centers they'd love to sell you. Interesting. How are those high fee SPVs doing now? Probably okay.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  John, question for you.

• 25:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 25:29Jordi Hays?

  Do you think it's fair game to ash your Nature Valley bar out of the window of a car? Or is that kind of like, too close to the littering?

• 25:38John Coogan?

  It really does produce an insane amount of crumbs.

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 25:41John Coogan?

  Have they never thought to do a V2 of that product?

• 25:45Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know. I mean, for how, how around Nature Valley bars were, it does feel like they've completely fallen off.

• 25:54John Coogan?

  Really?

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  I haven't seen, I like, I used to see a Nature Valley bar once a day.

• 25:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, they did sort of have the market on lock. It's kind of fallen off.

• 26:02Jordi Hays?

  What happened? What happened? Tyler, can you do some research into Nature Valley's sales?

• 26:06John Coogan?

  At the same time-

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  Over the last 30 years, my entire life?

• 26:11John Coogan?

  Just from a health perspective, doesn't the insane crumbliness of the Nature Valley bar give you sort of reassurance that you're eating like actual food? Because a lot of protein bars these days are so mashed up. You're like, I don't know what kind of ingredients are in there. You had to, you had to destroy like 50 cows and 12 pigs and this much milk and this much corn to like make this amalgam. And with a Nature Valley bar, it looks like what it is. It's just like a bunch of oats.

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  Yell says, one a day, baby. They haven't gone anywhere.

• 26:46John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 26:47Jordi Hays?

  Putting up numbers still.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 26:51Jordi Hays?

  The other resource people haven't really been talking about at all, maybe they should, is construction paper. Celine says, you don't really hear about construction paper much anymore. Back in my day, this was always, felt like it was top of mind, almost constantly-

• 27:08John Coogan?

  Open mind.

• 27:09Jordi Hays?

  As a child, certainly.

• 27:11John Coogan?

  So I know construction paper useful for just drawing on, it's thicker.

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:17John Coogan?

  The ink doesn't go through the paper. That's a benefit. But were people actually constructing things with it? I know people would make those, those loops, like those chain, daisy chains around holidays, perhaps Christmas. It's more of a Christmas ornament than anything else. But I don't know that I, I, it feels like if you were building like a real diorama, you would get out the cardboard. So maybe, maybe, maybe cardboard just squeezed construction paper a little bit. And, I mean, have you seen those cardboard cutting saws? They, it's like a saw designed to rip through cardboard because people get a lot of boxes. But that's also had the knock on effects of if you're, if you're an ambitious child and you're trying

• 27:58John Coogan?

  to construct something significant that might last the test of time, you might forego the construction paper in lieu of the cardboard. What do you think? Is cardboard responsible for the downfall of construction paper?

• 28:14Jordi Hays?

  That's interesting.

• 28:15John Coogan?

  Because we-

• 28:16Jordi Hays?

  Because, because there's an eco angle there, John, right? It's like people getting a lot more e-commerce products today, there's boxes coming through the house all the time.

• 28:23John Coogan?

  We're post scarcity on cardboard in most households, especially ones with children because you're ordering a lot of things online. There's a lot more cardboard around. I know the last few construction projects I did, cardboard was my material of choice.

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:37John Coogan?

  So maybe that's what's going on here.

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  I'm glad we got to the bottom of it.

• 28:41Jordi Hays?

  I'm trying to find the best way to get exposure in the market to-

• 28:46John Coogan?

  Construction paper. You want to go long?

• 28:49Jordi Hays?

  It's almost a perfect store of value over the last five years. There's Fabbrica Italiana, Lapis, Ed Affina, Affini.

• 28:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:01Jordi Hays?

  It's been completely, it's a half a billion dollar company, completely flat for the last five years. So, more on this on the next episode. We, we got to talk about topic crawler.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:17Jordi Hays?

  I'm on, spent half an hour going back and forth with ChatGPT so it could make me a tool that spits out link for any topic he's researching. And it actually gave me exactly what I wanted in the picture below.

• 29:32John Coogan?

  And then the follow up, only two minutes in, and I realized how dumb this is.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  Reinvent.

• 29:42Jordi Hays?

  Using the tool to create, use, use the tool to create the exact same tool.

• 29:47John Coogan?

  I mean, the funny thing is, I, I don't know if this was, I don't know if this was like created as joke from the start and the whole idea was like, let's just be funny. Uh, in the first post, because the, the punchline will be in the second post. Or if he actually went through this, but, uh, it does speak to the fact that like a lot of the, a lot of the functionality is really buried. Like just the, just the ability to like, put something on a cron job is like not advertised anywhere. You know this, right?

• 30:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:16John Coogan?

  Like if you, if, if you, if you want to like get a, a weekly digest of like where the swells are the biggest across the world for surfing. Like you can totally do that. You don't need to build a tool. You don't need to write a lot of code. You don't need to host anything. It doesn't need to use anything else other than chat GPT. But you would never know that from any of the marketing really. Cause there has never been just like a cron jobs are here or like whatever you'd call it, like scheduled tasks are here. And there's like a national campaign, very, very difficult as the models get, uh, and the harnesses get more capable to actually educate people. But it's very fun.

• 30:49Jordi Hays?

  Still very cool that you can build your own Google in, in like, you know, 30 minutes.

• 30:53John Coogan?

  Have you seen, uh, let me Google that for you?

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 30:57John Coogan?

  So it's this, uh, it's this website, let me Google that.com. And you type something in and then you generate it. And then you have this link, you can copy the URL and, um, and I'll share it in the production chat because it's, uh, it's a funny, it's a funny, you gotta, you gotta do the actual, the actual thing. And so you send this to someone, if they ask you something really obvious, like how do I get to, how do I use chat GPT? And, and then it, it moves the mouse. I think you clicked the first one that was empty. I think you need the second one. The second one has the actual, the actual punchline. There we, here we go. How do you use chat GPT?

• 31:42John Coogan?

  You send them this, let me Google that. And it, and it just Googles it for you. And then you just, and it just loads Google or whatever. Uh, you can close it, but, um, it, it, it literally just goes and like types it in for you. But anyway, um.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  What are people putting in their IRAs lately?

• 32:02John Coogan?

  Yes, babe. Our retirement is in Charizard. I have a little bit in my Roth and 401k, but we can fly or create, but we fly or crater with Charizard. Fly or crater is funny, funny terminology. Uh, is there a way to, uh, to get a Charizard into a tax advantaged retirement account? Has that been done yet?

• 32:23Jordi Hays?

  There must be.

• 32:24John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 32:24Jordi Hays?

  There must be.

• 32:25John Coogan?

  Well, if you are investing, do it on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. You gotta invest like the best. You gotta do it.

• 32:39Jordi Hays?

  This hit me over the weekend, John. This was, this was big.

• 32:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  One horse pulls 4,000 pounds. Two horses working together pull 32,000 pounds. And it's getting community noted.

• 32:56Jordi Hays?

  Record dead weight pulls by pairs of draft horses top out around 17,000 pounds.

• 33:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  Near 32,000 pounds. But anecdote, this is based on, which is Dave Ramsey also uses 8,000 pounds for one horse, not.

• 33:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  Wrong on every dimension, but the idea stands.

• 33:15John Coogan?

  I mean, in the community note.

• 33:17Jordi Hays?

  It made me think.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  What?

• 33:19Jordi Hays?

  What are we doing with just one horse?

• 33:21John Coogan?

  We gotta get two horses.

• 33:24Jordi Hays?

  Permission, permission to order another horse, a twin horse.

• 33:28John Coogan?

  No, wait, did you see the, uh, did you see the, the Beverly, they're auctioning off the, the, that bear sculpture that's on Rodeo Drive?

• 33:37Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 33:37John Coogan?

  This was on, uh, this was on Facebook marketplace. They want $95,000 for it. Do you know what I'm talking about? The geometric bear?

• 33:44Jordi Hays?

  Is that a bullish indicator? They're like, we have no use for this bear anymore.

• 33:48John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. I sent it to a buddy, I can pull it up, but we can also move on, talk about that later.

• 33:55Jordi Hays?

  It would be cool to get a large statue of a bull and a bear here in the Ultra Dome fighting, you know? Battling over market conditions.

• 34:05John Coogan?

  I'd like it, I'd like it.

• 34:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this is, a lot of people have been talking about this. We didn't want to have to talk about it because it's not, you know, the, the nicest topic, but we'll talk about it. Why is tossing boiling oil down a ladder during a siege always a one-time trick? If I were being seized, I would have 200 guys all boiling three or four cauldrons of oil each. If you come anywhere near the walls, you're getting scalded. Get melted idiot. Such a good point.

• 34:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:37Jordi Hays?

  Such a good point.

• 34:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, you should just have like a continuous flow of, of oil pouring down.

• 34:43Jordi Hays?

  Or, or a closed loop.

• 34:45John Coogan?

  Oh, like a waterfall.

• 34:46Jordi Hays?

  Like waterfall.

• 34:47John Coogan?

  Instead of a wall, you have a waterfall of hot oil that's just constantly there.

• 34:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Why?

• 34:52John Coogan?

  That would have completely reshaped.

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  It would have one shot, one shot.

• 34:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Your defenses would have been impregnable. Uh, fascinating. Anyway, uh, the million dollar homepage is reborn every decade in a different form. A TikTok girl is selling ad space on her wall to pay for tuition. Colin of the TVP on effect. Uh, not bad kid. She says she's selling ad space on her wall. Is this presumably, uh, in her dorm room or something? $500 for one huge spot, 50 bucks for a smaller slot. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. Maybe.

• 35:30Jordi Hays?

  Pretty good play. Resourceful.

• 35:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. Million dollar homepage was a, was a really good bit back in the day. You buy individual pixels and people have, people have redone it a few times. I mean, I guess the, the, the Reddit, the place was sort of a free version of that, but, uh, it was, it was, it was pretty cool.

• 35:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you can, I mean, Delta just taking blow after blow because you can now watch Cheeky Pint on your United flight. Again, really, really just showing that United is, is a, you know, is a serious, highly commercial airline. They don't want you watching movies, TV, music. They want you watching the Cheeky Pint archive.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  You gotta learn from Susan Lee.

• 36:12Jordi Hays?

  And I'm hoping this means that we're going to see more episodes of Cheeky Pint hitting the timeline. It's been about a, feels like a six month holiday, but it's time to come back. What's that?

• 36:23John Coogan?

  They take a break. They call it a hangover.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 36:25John Coogan?

  Hangover, they're taking a break, resting it off, sleeping it off.

• 36:28Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 36:29John Coogan?

  They'll get back in the pub soon.

• 36:31Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 36:32John Coogan?

  Oracle is putting $10 million in the Nash, into the Nashville Symphony reinstating the 2026, 2027 season and recalling musicians and staff who were set to be furloughed October 18th amid a financial emergency. That's great. Give it up for Oracle and the Nashville Symphony. Shows a real sense of civic responsibility. I love this. This is great. More tech companies should do this. Go and solve little problems like this. Everyone loves it.

• 37:02John Coogan?

  What else is going on? Uh, the Brits have turned their back on their day ones. British people are apparently buying Chinese knockoff Land Rovers, uh, especially look-alike Range Rovers. They love Chinese cars. The J Coo seven made by Chinese cherry. I'm learning about a new Chinese automaker every week now.

• 37:26Jordi Hays?

  We got mosquitoes in the Ultra Dome. We got mosquitoes.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  Get the flies.

• 37:30Jordi Hays?

  Heads up, heads up.

• 37:31John Coogan?

  You think you can get it?

• 37:32Jordi Hays?

  No, I don't want to.

• 37:33John Coogan?

  Go for it. Run around, I'll read this while you fight the mosquitoes. It's a nice little side quest. Get the tracking cam on him while he goes and hunts it down.

• 37:41Jordi Hays?

  With the gong mallet.

• 37:43John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

• 37:50Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of CrowdStrike, I mean, incredible performance. George Kurz and CrowdStrike Racing put on a clinic yesterday. Incredible comeback. They had, uh, some setbacks early on in the race, but, um, made it back to the top spot and won the entire season in LMP2. Uh, what a, what a year, what a year for CrowdStrike Racing.

• 38:15John Coogan?

  Really crazy. Well, let's go over to this. I want a review of the Timu Range Rover. Jordy, you gotta let me know what you think. When Mark Thulis went looking for a new family car this summer, he was struck by how much cheaper the J Coo seven was than luxury brands with a similar look and feel. The 33 year old from England's South Coast calculated the upfront cost of his preferred version of the Chinese SUV at the equivalent of around 50K. Half the price for a visually similar Range Rover model. You think that car is visually similar?

• 38:51Jordi Hays?

  We'll see.

• 38:53John Coogan?

  Its resemblance to the 56-year-old British luxury brand has earned the Jaiku a double-edged nickname, the Timu Range Rover. My first reaction was, what's the catch? He said a test drive convinced him that buying the Jaiku was a no-brainer. No big industrialized economy has embraced Chinese cars more enthusiastically than the United Kingdom, where Brits like him are being won over by the combination of affordable prices with status signaling, styling, and technology. It does look pretty good inside.

• 39:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, calling it a Timu Range Rover doesn't quite work because I would expect that the car is just better in most ways than the Range. You know, when you think about like a, you know, that the Timu branding for a product, you think like, it looks good in the image, and then in person, it's like, yeah, it falls apart. It's a mess. I would expect this car to be actually pretty solid.

• 39:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, probably reliable.

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're very good at making products.

• 39:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder how much these Chinese brands have rolled out dealerships and service departments, because that seems like the dealer footprint seems hard to spin up quickly, but they must have figured out a solve because I would imagine that potential buyers are worried. Whenever you're, whenever you're dealing with an upstart brand, it can be really tricky if the brand goes under while you own the car because there's just nothing really to work on. A lot of people went through that with the, what was it, Fisker Ocean? The Fisker, Fisker Ocean, I think. Fisker maybe went through restructuring, and a lot of people got stuck with cars that couldn't update software.

• 40:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, every, every once in a while, I'll see a Fisker on the road, and I'm just like, incredible.

• 40:37John Coogan?

  Well, not the Ocean.

• 40:38Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 40:39John Coogan?

  The Fisker Karma.

• 40:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:40John Coogan?

  Which I saw Jay Leno in one recently. And the Fisker Karma, it does look like, I don't know, I would expect it to be like the modern Back to the Future car. Like, it's like the new DeLorean. It's so, so unique. It's not quite as striking, but it's still very cool. Britain's vehicle.

• 40:58Jordi Hays?

  Wait, the Fisker is not a EV?

• 41:03John Coogan?

  The Karma is, but the, or the Karma is not. The Karma was hybrid.

• 41:07Jordi Hays?

  Okay, that makes sense.

• 41:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:08Jordi Hays?

  Every time I see, every time I've been seeing a Fisker Karma, I've assumed it was an EV. And I'm like, what, do you have like five miles of range now? Like a 2012 EV from, you know?

• 41:19John Coogan?

  I mean, beautiful designer. The lineage there is, I think the founder had designed some other iconic cars in the past. Anyway, only Russia and Brazil developed economies that mostly buy cheaper models have imported more than the UK.

• 41:36Jordi Hays?

  The Fisker Karma might be a buy.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  You think so? How much is it?

• 41:38Jordi Hays?

  20 grand?

• 41:39John Coogan?

  20 grand for a Karma. Certainly stand out. Turn heads for 20 bucks, or 20k, 20 bucks? 20 stacks, 20 racks. The UK, a cradle of the car industry showcases what could happen if, in America, if Chinese cars were let in. Range Rover began a press release trumpeting Jaiku's early sales success. Is that a press release from them? Are they just dancing on their enemy's gravestones?

• 42:08Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy.

• 42:09John Coogan?

  That's crazy. We gotta figure out who actually posted this Range Rover thing. Winking at its likeness to the Range Rover, evoke the smaller one. The managing director of a dealership in Leeds, Yorkshire, said the appeal was simple. It looks expensive, it feels expensive, and then you find out how much it costs. For now, Chinese cars are essentially shut out of the large US market by high tariffs and restrictions on Chinese software. President Trump in September repeated his openness to Chinese cars produced in American factories, alarming Detroit. Oh, that's interesting. He wants the jobs, he wants the manufacturing base, the control over the industrialization, but Detroit automakers

• 42:51John Coogan?

  just don't want more competition. So there's actually some tension there. Interesting. Congress is debating a bill that would permanently ban Chinese cars on US roads. The spectacular growth of Chinese brands in Britain this year has been led by Cherry, China's top vehicle exporter. Through September, its sales more than tripled compared to the previous term. Customer open-mindedness.

• 43:12Jordi Hays?

  I just don't understand why they don't use a name like Cherry for the actual brand?

• 43:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:19Jordi Hays?

  Like, I imagine that could, that could work.

• 43:20John Coogan?

  Well, it's not spelled how you think. It's C-H-E-R-Y.

• 43:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, still better than, than Jaiku for an international market.

• 43:32Jordi Hays?

  We gotta talk about the Topolino.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 43:34Jordi Hays?

  The Wall Street Journal is saying that it's the greatest car ever invented.

• 43:39John Coogan?

  Really?

• 43:40Jordi Hays?

  And they'll never go back.

• 43:41John Coogan?

  Take me through it. But first, 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.

• 43:51Jordi Hays?

  They're not quite saying that. My week in a $15,000 microcar, joy, guilt, and 25 mile-per-hour road rage. Fiat's all-electric Topolino isn't fast and doesn't get far, but the Italian company thinks it's just a car some Americans need. What the F is that? A driver of a luxury sedan exclaimed at a busy intersection. Is that a real car?

• 44:17Jordi Hays?

  Ah, said countless passersby.

• 44:19John Coogan?

  The road is so funny.

• 44:20Jordi Hays?

  Indeed, the Fiat Topolino, a 15,000 electric microcar that tops out at 25 miles per hour is a real car that Americans can buy right now.

• 44:29John Coogan?

  Can you spec it with red velvet on the rope?

• 44:33Jordi Hays?

  That would be nice.

• 44:34John Coogan?

  If you can spec it with, with matte black and red velvet, so it looks like you're driving a nightclub, I think you got a winner.

• 44:44Jordi Hays?

  The Topolino, which went on sale this summer, is a bet by the Italian brand that Americans and two-car households may be open to a much smaller and slower ride for their second vehicle. That's just over 1,000 pounds. It seats two people and is powered by a small electric battery that gets 46 miles of range on a full charge. It is sold in one color, mint green, and comes in two variants. One has doors, a heater, and a glass sunroof. Then there's the Dolce Vita, which swaps in ropes for doors and includes a rollable soft top roof. Many onlookers ask if it's even street legal.

• 45:17John Coogan?

  You can take the roof and the doors off this thing?

• 45:19Jordi Hays?

  This is so not functional, said Alexa, after jetting across a busy street to get a closer look at the Topolino, which translates to little mouse in Italian. But so far, demand has exceeded expectations. Fiat, which initially shipped 300 Topolinos to the US, says 30% of its dealers have signed up to sell the pint's, says only 30% of its dealers are signed up to sell the pint-sized car. The Stellantis-owned company knows the Topolino. It's got a particular audience. It doesn't step on anything else that we do as a company. There's nothing else like it. I totally agree. I think it is, I, I'm, I'm, I think, I think they deserve Car of the Year. I haven't driven it. I haven't seen it, but I like where it's going.

• 46:04John Coogan?

  Fiat Topolino at $15,000, or the Cherry knockoff Chinese Topolino variant for 800 bucks, which when you go, they are gonna make this the price of a phone.

• 46:20Jordi Hays?

  Tough call.

• 46:21John Coogan?

  They're gonna make this the price of a phone.

• 46:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 46:26Jordi Hays?

  That's a good point.

• 46:27John Coogan?

  I, I mean, I would imagine that a lot of the savings of competing with Range Rover are just the margin, the badge value. I would be surprised if they can make this for under five grand, but at eight grand, at half price, they actually might move more units because why spend 15 when you can spend eight?

• 46:45Jordi Hays?

  I say move to lease only. People own nothing and be happy in the Topolino.

• 46:51John Coogan?

  In the Topo.

• 46:51Jordi Hays?

  But imagine pulling up to Car Week in this, rolling deep with 20 of your best friends, you know, in, in one of those sort of S, you know, snaking across the road.

• 47:02John Coogan?

  Oh, electric. Fiat Topolino or base 2007 BMW 3 Series? Autoblog called it surprisingly good-looking. Jordy, I want your take. Is the base model of the new 2027 BMW 3 Series surprisingly good-looking to you, Jordy? Take a look at that and tell me what you think.

• 47:30Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I mean, I've never been a BMW guy, but I feel like every time a BMW gets announced, everyone hates it. And then a lot of them, a lot of them like end up growing on people. And I don't think that, I don't think you should judge like a new, a new model based on the, the base like version of it, right? Because people buying the base version are typically not like massive car people or anything. They're just buying effectively an appliance. So anyways, people obviously hate it. And they're bringing up a bunch of, a bunch of

• 48:11Jordi Hays?

  cars throughout history, like the E36, and saying like, we have to, we have to return to these older editions. But I don't know. I just, I think it's fine. Like, it's just not that big of, I think it's not that big of a deal.

• 48:30John Coogan?

  I think the, the interesting thing is that it just feels like they've been dancing around with different design, different design motifs, especially on the front grill for the last 10 years. And they haven't really found their footing. This feels like a response to the last round of backlash around the sort of front kidney grill that people didn't like, that looked like buck teeth. And, and they got a bunch of pushback about that. And they said, fine, we'll change that. And now people don't like this. And then, but people have been warming up on the older styling. And so you're in this weird, like constantly dealing with feedback, but the build cycle is five, six years or something. So you're refreshing.

• 49:10Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this, pull up this image of the three series evolution.

• 49:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 49:17Jordi Hays?

  Because

• 49:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 49:20Jordi Hays?

  everyone wants to go back to these super boxy versions, which again, I think are cool. But part of it is that you've seen them in, I don't know, you're a movie guy. You've probably seen these cars in 50 movies, right? And portrayed in a cool way. And that helps a lot in terms of how you think about the vehicle.

• 49:41John Coogan?

  Now, pull up the Shrek spec of the new BMW three series. And let's take a look at that and see if this does anything for you, Jordy. The Shrek edition.

• 49:53Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 49:56John Coogan?

  It looks actually like

• 49:57Jordi Hays?

  People will look at you with a straight face and say, this is ugly. They'll look at you and say, BMW didn't push the frontier with this new model, right?

• 50:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:08Jordi Hays?

  And, and they're willing to just lie, lie straight to your face. So anyways, I don't think, I don't think it's that big of a deal. I'm excited to, I'm excited to see how it eventually looks in its GT3 form factor. I think the, the current GT3 Evo is like an amazing looking car for what it is. And I think by the time that it, this sort of like these new elements, like the new grill and the lights and everything get sort of built in, in, in different, into different form factors, I think people will come around to it.

• 50:43John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 50:44Jordi Hays?

  Hold me to it.

• 50:45John Coogan?

  Anything else on cars today? Any other car news? We got another, we got another FSD video out of Jason Oppenheim, who sold a Bentley, bought a Tesla Model Y, and is blown away by FSD. It is an inflection point for sure. People are excited about it. Sean Frank is coming on the show in just a minute, was singing the praise of the Tesla just what, a month or two ago? We were like, I don't know about that. And lo and behold, here we are.

• 51:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, we also have Brian Johnson coming on to talk about health and endurance racing in about an hour.

• 51:23John Coogan?

  Let's see. Would you buy this BMW three series Dakar edition? Look at this.

• 51:31Jordi Hays?

  Is this just you and ChatGPT right now?

• 51:34John Coogan?

  No, this is official.

• 51:36Jordi Hays?

  Officially. See? This thing looks insane. I love it.

• 51:40John Coogan?

  It does. Yeah. This would be good.

• 51:42Jordi Hays?

  Give me 10 of them right now.

• 51:43John Coogan?

  Tires on there going across the country and that. The, yeah, the last story we got to get to is Apple plans to introduce new privacy controls for Mac users. Warning of the risks growing around granting broad data access to third-party software, including AI agents. So your iMessage data is not, I don't think it's encrypted when it's on your hard drive. So you can potentially like give an agent access like, yeah, just read, just, just be able to edit my files. And then it can also read your messages and maybe you don't want it to. And maybe you want that to be a specific permission. And so Apple is sort of grappling with what permissions it gives when. At the same time, Ben Thompson

• 52:28John Coogan?

  seems like he's on the verge of going Linux on the desktop because he's been very frustrated because he runs a, a headless Mac Mini that he remotes into when he needs to see the screen. But most of the time, he's just having an AI agent write pieces of software for him. But those pieces of software need permissions and the permissions are UI pop-ups. So you have to jump in and click the button and say, yes, I allow it to read from the network or, you know, inter, interact with the screen or interact with the file system. And so he's been very frustrated by this and, and is sort of questioning whether Apple, they're so clearly set up on the hardware side to take advantage of the, the hardware boom,

• 53:10John Coogan?

  the hacker boom. But he went back to Paul Graham, talking about the moment, maybe 20 years ago, where like all the best hackers, software developers were using Macs. Mac became dominant in like the startup ecosystem. And then it just became like every company just provisions Macs and MacBook Pros for basically everyone, regardless of what they're doing. And there's, there's this question, Apple's in this like tense moment of, you know, how much freedom should they give? How much privacy should they give? How much flexibility should they give to the user? How responsible is that? You can, if you take all the guardrails off and you're on Linux, you can, the agent can just do anything.

• 53:52John Coogan?

  That's a benefit, but it's also a risk. He also shares a fascinating anecdote that he, his, his Mac Mini got hacked. Like, there was some system that was on an open port, came in and installed a crypto miner. But his AI agent actually detected it and sent him a note on Telegram and said like, urgent, you've been hacked. We should do something about this. And the AI agent was like, oh, no, no, you don't need, you shouldn't use me right now. I should set this one out. And he was like, you're dead wrong there. You're fixing this. And it did. And it went and reset the Mac, like, you know, cleared all the, it closed the port that was, that was opened. So it couldn't, so the hackers couldn't get back in. And then also cleared out the crypto miner. But it's very funny

• 54:36John Coogan?

  that it was like this referendum on like, you creating more vulnerabilities, but you're also able to fight them. Because typically that's something like, if there was a crypto miner on your computer, you wouldn't find out until you were like, oh, I'm trying to do some stuff. It's slow. Let me go figure it out. Oh, Apple just patched this randomly. Okay, it got, it fixed it. It detected it later downstream. Instead, it's like 16 minutes.

• 54:58Jordi Hays?

  Such a wild scheme.

• 54:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:59Jordi Hays?

  Where, where you're hacking, I'm sure millions.

• 55:03John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. It's just like

• 55:04Jordi Hays?

  If, if, if they're getting to, to millions of devices, they would actually have a meaningful amount of compute.

• 55:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:11Jordi Hays?

  And it's, and it's free.

• 55:14John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  Interesting one. Mark Gurman reports since becoming CEO. He's talking about the Ternator. He's immersed himself in the industrial design and human, human interface teams. People familiar with the departments say he works hands-on in the studio several times a week, sometimes visiting multiple times a day. Cook typically visited for about an hour monthly. Ternus is locked in. I'm very happy about this. So much of the, so much of Apple's interfaces have, have just become, you know, completely horrible over, over the last five years.

• 55:50John Coogan?

  It does put the pay cut in a different perspective because he's working more hours while making less. And so he's getting pinched both directions. On the hour, on the, on the hourly rate, he's way below Tim Cook. He was pretty close on the top line, but given that he's maybe working more hours.

• 56:07Jordi Hays?

  You think Tim had the time, but he just decided to take

• 56:11John Coogan?

  I don't know. What was he doing for the other, other, you know, 158 hours in a month or something that he was working?

• 56:17Jordi Hays?

  He was thinking of what, what gifts to, to get the president.

• 56:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, New Balance recreated the iconic Jobs keynote image for the 1992 shoe of choice. Do you think these will be, the 992? Do you think these will be popular?

• 56:33Jordi Hays?

  I mean, they're really fantastic.

• 56:36John Coogan?

  Is it too LARP-y?

• 56:37Jordi Hays?

  They're really fantastic shoes.

• 56:39John Coogan?

  They are. Okay.

• 56:40Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 56:41John Coogan?

  So you think they'll sell well? Even though people will be like, oh, this is the Steve Jobs shoes, if you're an S F.

• 56:46Jordi Hays?

  They're just a great pair of shoes.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  A great pair of shoes is a great pair of shoes. Okay. We'll leave it at that. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. And we have Sean Frank, CEO of Ridge in the TDP in Altamont, coming on down here in person. Good to see you. How you doing?

• 57:13Sean Frank?

  Whoa.

• 57:14Jordi Hays?

  Table. There we go. There we go.

• 57:17Sean Frank?

  Nine twos.

• 57:18John Coogan?

  Those are the nine nine twos.

• 57:19Sean Frank?

  Oh, yeah, dude. Made America.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  Okay, so wait, what did, what did New Balance actually do?

• 57:23Jordi Hays?

  They just recreated the image.

• 57:25John Coogan?

  Oh, they just recreated?

• 57:26Sean Frank?

  They've been selling that exact shoe for like thirty years.

• 57:28John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, so there's, it's not a new limited.

• 57:30Jordi Hays?

  It's definitely out of style right now.

• 57:35Jordi Hays?

  But it's still a fantastic pair of shoes.

• 57:37Sean Frank?

  Dude, you say that?

• 57:38Jordi Hays?

  The beautiful thing with the nine nine two is like you can, you can just wear the same pair of shoes over and over and over and for like five year periods.

• 57:46John Coogan?

  It'll be.

• 57:46Jordi Hays?

  Over the course of your life, you'll be like, wow.

• 57:48John Coogan?

  I think he's just early.

• 57:49Jordi Hays?

  This guy Sean is, this guy Sean is like, you know, he's got taste.

• 57:52Sean Frank?

  One, I'm a style icon. Check it out, dude. Rocking the Palantir tennis merch. Uh, no, their numbers just came out. I mean, they're privately held. New Balance will do ten billion dollars this year.

• 58:01John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 58:02Sean Frank?

  So they're, they're, they're mogging the other shoe companies. Nike's going down.

• 58:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, Nike's in trouble, right?

• 58:08Sean Frank?

  I mean, Hoka just reported numbers horrible, horrible quarter for Hoka and Deckers.

• 58:12John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 58:13Sean Frank?

  I mean, ON getting crushed, but.

• 58:15John Coogan?

  Getting crushed?

• 58:16Sean Frank?

  Dude, these, you say they're not cool, but a lot of people buying them.

• 58:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's not always synonymous with cool. Volume. A lot of people shopping on Timu.

• 58:24Sean Frank?

  That's true.

• 58:25John Coogan?

  It's not a hotbed of high fashion.

• 58:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Deckers is an interesting, interesting company. They have, uh, Hoka, which just went on this crazy run. Didn't they buy Hoka for like a few million dollars?

• 58:36Sean Frank?

  I think it was under ten million dollars.

• 58:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and now it does like billions a year. It's like a.

• 58:40Sean Frank?

  Four billion, yeah, four billion a year.

• 58:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, crazy business. They have Uggs too, which again, kind of all these, when, when you can, when, once you have an iconic silhouette, you actually have some type of durable revenue from it, but there's still this like crazy up and down.

• 58:56Sean Frank?

  Yeah, and you know, they got into slippers and like that had like a cool moment, maybe, you know, twenty twenty or whatever.

• 59:01John Coogan?

  Slippers?

• 59:01Sean Frank?

  Like the Uggs slippers.

• 59:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 59:03Sean Frank?

  Yeah, they were big crush with that.

• 59:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 59:04Sean Frank?

  But they, they used to have a bunch of other brands. It's really just those two now.

• 59:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:07Sean Frank?

  Like they, they like they report all the other brands as just like other and it's a big category.

• 59:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like Teva. You remember Tevas?

• 59:13John Coogan?

  Tevas, yeah.

• 59:14Sean Frank?

  Talk about not being cool, bro.

• 59:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, back in the day, back in the day, if you had a pair of Tevas on, a couple of Nature Valley bars and some construction paper, you could do anything. You could, you were ready to take on the world.

• 59:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's good. Um, who's putting up more FSD miles? You Tesla boys, Tesla fans?

• 59:30Sean Frank?

  Oh, dude, you got a Tesla?

• 59:32Jordi Hays?

  I capitulated.

• 59:34Sean Frank?

  You know, he was texting me like talking mad shit. I was like, bro, you have to get a Tesla. It's so easy. I mean, I'm at like ninety-five percent FSD, maybe more than ninety-eight.

• 59:44John Coogan?

  You're higher?

• 59:45Jordi Hays?

  There's some bug in the software where it says I've done zero FSD miles, but I've done hundreds at this point. The, the one, the one real issue with the Tesla is like having to charge your car and all these like super seedy places.

• 59:59John Coogan?

  Why are you turning it on?

• 1:00:00Jordi Hays?

  Because like gas, like.

• 1:00:01John Coogan?

  What are you doing?

• 1:00:02Sean Frank?

  How far are you driving, bro?

• 1:00:03Jordi Hays?

  I went on a road trip Friday. I went to the new wave pool in Palm Desert.

• 1:00:07John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 1:00:07Jordi Hays?

  And there was no way, they, they advertised the range and of course they're like, well, don't charge the battery more than eighty percent because it's not good for the battery.

• 1:00:16Sean Frank?

  Crank it up, bro. Do it anyway.

• 1:00:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I'm gonna do that. Um, and so the problem is like gas stations have all this like super prime real estate.

• 1:00:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:24Jordi Hays?

  And the, the supercharging stations will be in just like these like dark, sketchy parking lots off the main road or whatever. Um, so you end up like hanging out by your car, just in like not the best places.

• 1:00:40Sean Frank?

  Yeah, but now if someone tries to shoot you, you can, you can drive off. That was a, that was a feature they added.

• 1:00:44Jordi Hays?

  What do you mean? Like if it's a Texaco gunshot, it just drives? But you definitely don't want to be in the car while it's charging.

• 1:00:50Sean Frank?

  No, no, so it used to be you couldn't drive when it was charging, but now you can.

• 1:00:54Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you could just.

• 1:00:55Sean Frank?

  You could just zoom off.

• 1:00:57Jordi Hays?

  That's great. That's great. So it just rips out the.

• 1:01:00Sean Frank?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:00John Coogan?

  That's crazy. The only Tesla charger I've seen is like at Harris Ranch up the five. And that's a very nice stop because you go in, you get a steak. It's great.

• 1:01:08Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't, isn't the smell horrific?

• 1:01:10John Coogan?

  Uh, I'm inside the restaurant. It sort of gets you ready for the experience of being on a ranch.

• 1:01:15Jordi Hays?

  When I was a kid driving by, driving by Harris Ranch.

• 1:01:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, you put on the recirculation beforehand.

• 1:01:20Jordi Hays?

  I would be the prankster in the back.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  Oh, you would roll down the window?

• 1:01:24Jordi Hays?

  I would roll down the windows.

• 1:01:25John Coogan?

  That's brutal. That's brutal. Um.

• 1:01:29Jordi Hays?

  So you didn't sell your, you didn't sell your data?

• 1:01:31John Coogan?

  You turned it down.

• 1:01:32Sean Frank?

  I turned it down.

• 1:01:33John Coogan?

  What'd they offer you? Fifteen? Something like ten? Five?

• 1:01:38Sean Frank?

  I would, I would maybe take that deal.

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  You would?

• 1:01:42Jordi Hays?

  Hey, hey, hey, all the labs, this guy's got a price.

• 1:01:46Sean Frank?

  I remember fifteen million, yeah, maybe. That was, uh, like, yeah, there's a bunch of companies now and like there was a viral post that, um.

• 1:01:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Sean Frank?

  There's like four ads back to back, like all these different.

• 1:01:54John Coogan?

  I've been seeing the Micro One ads for sure. And then I saw, um, I, I've seen a few other people post about them.

• 1:02:00Sean Frank?

  Are they a sponsor?

• 1:02:01John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:02:01Sean Frank?

  Okay, because they're, they have an aggressive affiliate program. I didn't know if you guys were part of it or not.

• 1:02:04John Coogan?

  Maybe we gotta get in there.

• 1:02:05Sean Frank?

  But they're, they're, if you're willing to make an intro to a brand, they'll give you fifty grand. So like as soon as I did that post about not.

• 1:02:11John Coogan?

  Fifteen?

• 1:02:11Sean Frank?

  Fifty.

• 1:02:12John Coogan?

  Fifty?

• 1:02:12Sean Frank?

  Yeah, for an intro to a brand. So I did that post and I'm like, yeah, I'm not gonna sell. Fifty comments being like, but if you do want to sell, please use my link.

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  Oh, wow. Interesting.

• 1:02:22Sean Frank?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:23Sean Frank?

  But yeah, four hundred and eighty grand, it's just, it wasn't worth it.

• 1:02:25John Coogan?

  Okay. Why? Why? It seems like it's, uh, you know, the, the, I, I know, could be a thousand bargain. We can get into that, but, uh, it's free money. It looks like free money for a lot of companies.

• 1:02:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, a lot of, you know, historically throughout all of human history, people have said there's no such thing as a free lunch, but AI is changing a lot of things. It's possible now that this time is different.

• 1:02:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:49Sean Frank?

  Yeah, well, if you get a bunch of cold emails from people all offering you six figures, there's probably something else going on.

• 1:02:55John Coogan?

  I mean, I'm sure you get like text messages and emails daily for like lines of credit too, right?

• 1:02:58Sean Frank?

  I can show you fifty of them.

• 1:03:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have so many. It's so annoying. Um, what, uh, but what, what actually worries you about potentially selling data? Because right now, if I go to any LLM and I ask, uh, how much is Ridge doing in revenue, it will probably estimate that on things you've said on podcasts and like open web data. And then if I asked to, you know, build a financial model that models the, the margins, it might be able to get close with like first principles thinking like it's a McKinsey associate, but it's not going to have the actual data. But if you sold the data and it wasn't de-anonymized, it might actually wind up in the training data. Is that the fear? Or is it someone being able to go to an agent to say like, build me a direct Ridge competitor?

• 1:03:45John Coogan?

  And it's like, well, you're in luck, buddy, because I got all the data. Is that it? Or what, what, what, what makes it unsettling?

• 1:03:52Jordi Hays?

  I think, I mean, at a high level, it's like you run a business that does hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue and taking, taking half a million dollars to risk any, to, to, to introduce any incremental risk, right? There's already all this risk to running a business, you know, like you're, you're, you sell, you know, technology products now. Who knows where that market goes? You sell fat, you know, fashion apparel style products that again, go through cycles and risking, you know, the golden goose for not even one egg. It's crazy.

• 1:04:28Sean Frank?

  Yeah, dude, we're talking just like maybe an egg white out of that, right?

• 1:04:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:32Sean Frank?

  Yeah, so I'm not very worried about, well, a couple of things.

• 1:04:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:37Sean Frank?

  The first is, well, to Jordy's point, four hundred and eighty grand is just not that much money.

• 1:04:42John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:04:42Sean Frank?

  Right? Privileged position to say that. I know a lot of people would love it, but you know, I could probably negotiate it up to maybe a million, maybe two million or whatever, but still it's like.

• 1:04:52Sean Frank?

  It's just not going to make that much of a difference on the year, right? You know, well, we're up fifty percent this year. We're, we're already doing hundreds of millions of dollars.

• 1:05:00John Coogan?

  You got any more?

• 1:05:05Sean Frank?

  So it's like, it's just, it's not that much money.

• 1:05:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:07Sean Frank?

  Uh, number two, I think that the LLM platforms are going to get the data anyway.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, because you're using them.

• 1:05:14Sean Frank?

  Yeah, like, you know, Codex is an amazing tool I use all the time, right? Uh, I, you know.

• 1:05:20John Coogan?

  I mean, if you're in the enterprise plan, they're, they're not training on the data, but there's still other ways the stuff gets.

• 1:05:25Sean Frank?

  They're gonna keep adding features and it's like, hey, if you just give me a little more data, a little more data, it gets better and better.

• 1:05:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:30Sean Frank?

  Um, you know, Astro is already amazing.

• 1:05:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:33Sean Frank?

  Like in two more version cycles, it's gonna run my entire business and of course it's gonna have all my data.

• 1:05:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:37Sean Frank?

  And they're like, hey, we have to train and make it a little bit better. I'd be like, oh, sure. So I think they're gonna give it for free anyway.

• 1:05:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:41Sean Frank?

  Uh, the third thing is.

• 1:05:42John Coogan?

  And there are other companies that have the data, like Shopify has your data.

• 1:05:45Sean Frank?

  Totally.

• 1:05:45John Coogan?

  And like, and like AWS might, might store the data and they just have different retention and what they can do with it. The, the Micro One offer, the data broker offer is like, we're taking the data and we can do whatever we want with it, right?

• 1:05:56Sean Frank?

  Yeah, and they do claim that it's no customer data. They're like, hey, we're not.

• 1:06:00John Coogan?

  They'll do de-anonymant, uh, they'll run the de-anonymizer.

• 1:06:04Sean Frank?

  Yeah, and they're like, you know, uh.

• 1:06:05John Coogan?

  Anonymizer.

• 1:06:07Sean Frank?

  There, there's probably some identity. So like you're not going to get sued for selling your data or whatever. But still, it's like, look, if I'm getting random cold emails nonstop for four hundred and eighty grand, I, I think we're probably in the beginning of the AI, AI wave. Maybe it's gonna be four point eight million dollars in a couple of years.

• 1:06:21John Coogan?

  So you're holding out.

• 1:06:22Sean Frank?

  Yeah, I'm holding out. So if you want Ridge data, go ahead and just email me, you know, thirty million dollar offers.

• 1:06:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, there you go. Okay, that makes sense. That makes sense. Uh, do you know other companies that have taken it?

• 1:06:32Sean Frank?

  Yeah, there's, there's a whole list of companies that have taken it. I mean, look, it's been hard for consumer the past couple of years and, you know, if you add in tariffs or whatever else is going on, like, you know, all the consumer brands are like posting up negative growth if they're public. It's like, you know, they're, they're shrinking three percent. A lot of people would take that offer just to have some cash coming in.

• 1:06:48John Coogan?

  I wonder how valuable it actually is. I always thought that, um, like the coding data was, would be valuable, but, uh, the e-commerce stuff, I, I mean, I guess they want the slack as well, like how business processes run. So then the models.

• 1:07:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, sometimes when I hear about a company that sold their data, I'm like, I don't want their data in the models that I'm training, the models that I'm using, right? Because I don't want to, I don't want to live like you.

• 1:07:13Sean Frank?

  Dude, undoubtedly. Like, right now, if people are desperate to take that money, their business is probably not going great. So they're gonna have a big cohort of customers in the data that are just like, here's how not to run an e-commerce brand.

• 1:07:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, but that could be valuable, too. You know, there's a lot of Reddit comments that were downvoted. And that was like, oh, that one doesn't make any sense, or that one doesn't answer the question posed by the Reddit thread. And like, the anti-signal is as valuable as the signal sometimes.

• 1:07:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 1:07:35John Coogan?

  What about Agentic Commerce? Are you seeing traffic from Muse, traffic from Instinct, traffic from any of the AI platforms yet? It feels like with the Shopify integrations, you're set up to be one of the products this holiday season that gets suggested as if somebody goes in there and says, hey, I'm doing some Christmas shopping for my family, or my husband, or brother, or something. You could pop up. Are you seeing anything yet? Are you anticipating anything? What's the state of that?

• 1:08:07Sean Frank?

  Yeah. We've seen very little traffic start coming from Agentic platforms. But LLMs still drive, I mean, an exponential growing part of our traffic.

• 1:08:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:08:18Sean Frank?

  So like, and the conversion rate on those is just so, so high.

• 1:08:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:20Sean Frank?

  You know, a conversion rate from a ChatGPT search is like 25% or whatever. If someone's clicking through, they're actually gonna make a purchase. But I do think it's a great time to be, one, selling everywhere, and then, two, as big as possible. Because, you know, I do think Muse will end up, I mean, having 200 million downloads or whatever. Like, it's going to be, you know, super used, and I think shopping's gonna be a huge use case. So being a top spender on Meta is incredibly popular. Like, I think it's gonna make you more popular on the platform.

• 1:08:46John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure. You're gonna get that for free.

• 1:08:48Sean Frank?

  Yeah, and then, you know, Amazon's gonna-

• 1:08:49John Coogan?

  Because you're giving them so much data via the ads platform. It's not even just about, like, making sure your landing pages are discoverable to Muse, because you've already have a relationship.

• 1:08:58Sean Frank?

  Totally.

• 1:08:58John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:08:59Sean Frank?

  And what I've heard from people at Meta is that, like, they're not gonna monetize it anytime soon. What they want to do is, if they can just get people to, like, make, like, purchase conversions, like, happening inside that app, it's just something they couldn't have done, you know, and all the data they lost over iOS 14.

• 1:09:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:09:14Sean Frank?

  Like, it's just gonna make your ads perform that much better. And so if you're a big spender, you'll get that data cycle started sooner.

• 1:09:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:09:21Jordi Hays?

  As, as, as a brand, somebody that is selling products online and getting demand from a bunch of different sources, how do you expect the, the economics to work out with these agents? It's like, we've talked about this a bunch on the show, and my, my view is like, if an agent wants to have a high take rate, they have to be generating, like, new demand that wasn't already in existence.

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're just gonna take another 30% from the humble e-commerce operator.

• 1:09:47Jordi Hays?

  No, but like, if you're running, if you're running a bunch of Meta ads and somebody gets excited about a brand, about your brand, and then they go to their agent and say, like, buy this product, I want it.

• 1:09:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:56Jordi Hays?

  You don't wanna pay, again, to acquire that customer, because you already effectively did, right? They have to, like, understand their user well enough to suggest Ridge at a, at a point in time where they're not already, like, sold on the brand to drive, like, an entirely new customer.

• 1:10:15Sean Frank?

  Yeah. What I think they'll end up doing is, they'll try to eat from both ends. So like, they're gonna keep the Meta business, you know, where they're generating all this demand for you, and then how to actually monetize the agent, it'll just end up being payment processing fees in excess of 5%, right? Like Stripe is, you know, somewhere between a quarter of a percent if you're on debit card, or, you know, 2% using an AMX. I think they'll just say, hey, it's 5% or 7% payment processing through Muse. And maybe that stacks on top of the Shopify rates, so you end up losing 10% over there. But that way, they're just, they can get half of your revenue off of just making you spend money on ads, and then also treating it like a payment processing app. So I think that's how they'll, they'll maximize it, because I do think they'll have a problem. It's like, how can you take more out of this?

• 1:10:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Sean Frank?

  And they'll just position it as a different percentage coming out of the same pie.

• 1:11:01John Coogan?

  And that would look like, in the Shopify Payments, like, dashboard, you would like, turn on, I'm accepting that payment at a higher rate, just like, stores can say, look, I don't, there's plenty of stores that are like, we don't accept AMX, because it's a higher rate, right?

• 1:11:14Sean Frank?

  Yeah, well, yeah, basically, essentially, but like, you can just turn on sales channels, like, inside of Shopify.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  And that would be one of those.

• 1:11:20Sean Frank?

  It'd just be Muse would be a sales channel.

• 1:11:21John Coogan?

  It'd be a higher rate.

• 1:11:22Sean Frank?

  And it'll just have its own fees tied to it.

• 1:11:23John Coogan?

  I wonder if they'll, if they'll do that versus just trying to come in at the same rate as the, as the credit cards. Like, we, we were talking to somebody who builds, uh, credit cards, like branded credit cards that are, you know, more tech-enabled for, like Kroger, for example. Like, you know, you go to Sears, or you go to JCPenney, and you get, like, their credit card. And we were thinking, like, well, it would make sense that, like, if an Instinct or a Muse had, like, their own credit card that they provision for you in the app, you apply, do a credit check, you get it, you're paying it off, but then they're able to take the interchange fee and give you points or tokens based on what you spend, or something like that.

• 1:12:01Sean Frank?

  Well, you know, Meta already has MetaPay, and I'm sure I can already put MetaPay on my Shopify store. So this would just be MetaPay with its own rates, just in Muse, and the products are just served via the sales channel.

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, and they did a ton of legwork on that with the, the stablecoin effort and whatnot. Like, they were, they were definitely trying to get that going, but it never really broke through. I, I mean, it sounds like you don't even have MetaPay enabled, even though there's no downside to turning one more thing on. I guess it's the clutter?

• 1:12:24Sean Frank?

  Yeah, and also, it's just, it's really hard to, um, like, get users to use a new payment method, right? It's like, you know, Shop Pay's an amazing job, forcing it on everyone's phone, so it's like, you take Apple Pay, you take Shop Pay, you take PayPal, you take normal credit cards, and then, like, then there's all these buy now, pay later people all competing for ad space, and then it's really hard just to, you know, have another thing on there.

• 1:12:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about the other side? I think it was Eric Sufer, or maybe Ben Thompson, were talking about, like, uh, one of, like, the no-brainer, but potentially, like, less sexy plays that Meta could make in AI would be an AI agent for dealing with the Ads Manager. And I know that a lot of people, you, you probably have hooked up a variety of AI agents to the-

• 1:13:08Jordi Hays?

  But isn't the Ads Manager already just like an AI agent for getting you demand?

• 1:13:11John Coogan?

  Is it just a black box, or do you actually need a layer on top of that?

• 1:13:16Sean Frank?

  Well, Manus, one of the main use cases that they rolled out, was, we're gonna be the agent for-

• 1:13:22Jordi Hays?

  It's pronounced Manus.

• 1:13:24John Coogan?

  It's Bill Gurley. Is that Bill Gurley?

• 1:13:28Sean Frank?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, and like-

• 1:13:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, that made so much sense. I mean, Jordy was, was super excited about that.

• 1:13:34Sean Frank?

  And when you, you logged in, it said, we can run your ads for you.

• 1:13:37John Coogan?

  That was like the first call action.

• 1:13:38Sean Frank?

  Yeah, they've, like, there was a bunch of calls, like, trying to roll that out.

• 1:13:41John Coogan?

  They had to roll it out, but they're definitely spinning it up again. But, uh, yeah, how much of a headache internally is managing the Ads Manager?

• 1:13:51Sean Frank?

  Every year, they remove some features. I mean, look, it's still a, we have three full-time people at Ridge, whose job is managing, managing the ad account. And that is getting new creative in, it's understanding what's going on, and looking at the data.

• 1:14:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:02Sean Frank?

  It is, you know, there's third-party tools, like, we use Northbeam or whatever else. Like, it's, it's moved past just being and looking at the ad account.

• 1:14:08John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:14:09Sean Frank?

  But dude, I mean, it's a fucking pain in the ass, it always crashes, right? It'd be so great to, to just eventually, Meta's vision is like, they wanna fire their sales staff, and just like, you give them a big bucket of, bucket of mucky, and then they find your customers.

• 1:14:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it does feel like it's a ways out, Jordy.

• 1:14:24Jordi Hays?

  What's the state of, um, e-commerce, like, infrastructure as a category? Does it still feel investable?

• 1:14:33Sean Frank?

  I don't think a lot of people are investing in it right now.

• 1:14:35Jordi Hays?

  Does that make it a good time to invest?

• 1:14:38Sean Frank?

  You know, it's hard to say. Like, e-commerce enablement, like, e-commerce, like, you know, widgets or whatever, right?

• 1:14:45John Coogan?

  Like, the site builders probably got steamrolled by one-shot in landing pages.

• 1:14:49Sean Frank?

  Even large companies who have, you know, like, Postscripts of the world, I think they're staring in the future, being like, I don't know what's coming, and I don't know what to build, right? I've, I've made a couple of investments in, like, e-commerce tools that, like, I think are really cool and, like, AI-enabled right now. But I just think, you know, if SaaS is feeling a pinch, e-commerce SaaS is for sure feeling a pinch, right? E-commerce already isn't cool, and then SaaS is super uncool right now. It's just, it's a very ugly time.

• 1:15:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's interesting. What, what else are you seeing on people actually using, uh, AI internally to run operations? Like, last time you were saying, uh, maybe demand planning had sort of evolved in the AI era. Is there anything else? I know creative was sort of early, early glimpses, but where are you getting leverage these days?

• 1:15:34Sean Frank?

  Dude, every model gets better. So, I mean, demand planning, I think, is totally solved. Project management, task management, totally solved. The data and analysis, I think, is totally solved. I just did my Q3 reporting, and it's three prompts, right? Because all the MCBs are, are set up, like, I have all the data flowing in to, like, my, my harness of choice, and then three prompts, I have my full Q3 report, right? So finance is gonna be totally solved.

• 1:15:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:15:57Sean Frank?

  And then creative, I mean, it's there, right? If you go into any Facebook ad library, I just think, like-

• 1:16:03John Coogan?

  It's all AI.

• 1:16:03Sean Frank?

  We're still paying a lot of, you know, humans to make, you know, UGC for us, right? And we have great, you know-

• 1:16:08John Coogan?

  Blending that in with other stuff.

• 1:16:10Sean Frank?

  Yeah, and it's really, the, the humans are just good at scripting and concepting. Way more of being on the cutting edge than a model, but actually comes to visual production, the models are all there.

• 1:16:18John Coogan?

  Interesting, interesting.

• 1:16:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is there- It feels like we're headed to a point where like a human will still have a great idea for an ad concept, but then agents will run and just like clone it really quickly. Cause we've seen this already where like, if you guys create a great ad concept, I'm sure a bunch of other brands will like mimic it very quickly and then you'll run it for however long it works and then you have to find the next one. Is that, is that happening already where you can, you basically just have agents trawling all the different ad accounts, finding what's working and then, and then running their own tests?

• 1:16:52Sean Frank?

  Yeah, and that is like a new, like version of e-commerce software that's rolling out, right? Like it's, you know, we call it like an ad strategist, like a creative strategist, but like the AI version of that, and they are just going across what's trending on TikTok right now, or what are your competitors having their ad account? And there's pulling, cause Facebook ad library is open. It's like they're pulling all that stuff in and then giving you a million concepts, but it's still, humans are coming up with the best concepts and then it's just replicating it via AI.

• 1:17:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:18John Coogan?

  What do you think of those AI slop ads that actually ship you the physical slop? I saw somebody saw an ad for, it was a pool floaty in the shape of a tank that would allow, it came with like a squirt gun and you would like spray the water around and it looked super fun and he bought it and it was very like Timu and it barely worked, but, but they did actually ship it. Have you seen any of these? Is this like a larger octopus like superstructure or is this just like independent people? Have you traced any of this stuff down yet?

• 1:17:48Sean Frank?

  Well, there's always been shitty drop shippers.

• 1:17:50John Coogan?

  Okay. This is like that on steroids, basically.

• 1:17:52Sean Frank?

  Yeah, and it's just, it says just that with more rapid, better ad creative. Cause the whole problem with, you know, the drop shipper is you try a thousand brands, like literally in like, in a month, you might try a thousand different products, different websites, and then you find one that works. Yeah. And this is, now it's just way easier to do it. You can get better creative, but that person should be lucky they actually shipped it. Cause there's a whole, you know, culture of just no shipping.

• 1:18:15John Coogan?

  Wasn't that the Escobar phone? I think that never shipped.

• 1:18:18Sean Frank?

  And there's people, there's people on Twitter who sell courses, teaching you how to no ship.

• 1:18:22John Coogan?

  Yo ship, there's a term for it.

• 1:18:24Sean Frank?

  It's like, you're just stealing.

• 1:18:25John Coogan?

  That's insane. What about the macro? I'm interested in how are, is inflation top of mind for you whatsoever? Is that something you think the models can actually help you grapple with? Like what is the optimal pricing? Should you raise prices in a time of inflation? Like a lot of the Ridge history has been during low inflation periods. We're now going into higher inflation, but the Journal is pretty optimistic to, the mighty American consumer is crashing through inflation and driving growth. So spending doesn't seem to be down, but every company has to deal with inflation one way or another.

• 1:19:02Sean Frank?

  Right. Look, nothing has broke the American consumer, like since, you know, 2008 with the American consumer spends. So, yeah.

• 1:19:12Sean Frank?

  With that being said, look, as long as you have sales coming in, as long as like you have great new products, I think you'll be able to win in this economy. But if you do look at the S and P 500 and you remove out AI enabled companies and just look at like discretionary consumer, sales are going to be down probably an average of 5% this year, right? If it's the Nikes, the Lululemons, like there's very few e-commerce brands or brands in general crushing it right now. So I think, look, we're going to have a great year. We're going to continue to grow. I think customers are really happy with what we're doing.

• 1:19:42Sean Frank?

  I think more, there's a lot of stories like that, but the macro level is like, you know, Aura, I talked to JP Morgan that day that IPO got pulled. There was like, you know, full teams working on that. There's people on the floor about to get rich and they pulled it back because.

• 1:19:57John Coogan?

  It was like 4X oversubscribed.

• 1:19:59Sean Frank?

  Which is low.

• 1:20:00John Coogan?

  I know it's low, but it's still like they, they had filled the order book. Like they did their job and that, and that's a lot of people that they were coordinating with, you know? It wasn't like, it wasn't like, oh, no one showed up. There were lots of people that were like, oh, I'm getting shares today, you know?

• 1:20:12Sean Frank?

  Yeah, so like all that work was on the finish line and they pulled back. And I think it's because like, dude, Nvidia just posted the greatest quarter in human history. It's like, why the fuck would I want to invest in that or Reformation or Lululemon for that matter? So I just think on the business side, the business are more adorable than ever. I think they're going fantastic, but you know, if you want to do an exit in the next 12 months, I don't think it's happening.

• 1:20:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:34Jordi Hays?

  What's going on with live? How is, and specifically TikTok, how, how is TikTok changing at all? You know, post-acquisition, feels like we're what, nine months out from maybe six?

• 1:20:47Sean Frank?

  Yeah. Look, TikTok is actually going, you know, phenomenal. I think there's, the current playbook for e-commerce brands is you find a bunch of great TikTok affiliates, okay? You incentivize them with high commission rates, but also a percentage of ad spend. You have them make a bunch of great creative and then you run that creative everywhere. And it's just a way that like overnight, a brand can have a thousand people making great content for them. Like we have a Discord full of people making great content for us. So like our TikTok shop revenue is in the six figures, but it enables growth on Amazon and everywhere else.

• 1:21:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:21:19Jordi Hays?

  Six figures annually?

• 1:21:21Sean Frank?

  No, per month.

• 1:21:21Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 1:21:23Sean Frank?

  Which is, which is, we're like a top 50 TikTok shop brand. So like, we're, we're, we're doing a good push there and I think it's working out. But like the spillover is what it's all about.

• 1:21:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:21:33Sean Frank?

  With that being said, you know, that's really just like this creative flywheel aspect. It's like getting like all of these videos and posting them.

• 1:21:44Sean Frank?

  You know, you asked about live in particular, I was talking to TikTok, they know like live premium shopping isn't going to work in America, but like they're experimenting with new models, which is like auction, right?

• 1:21:55Jordi Hays?

  Why do they know that? They just looked at the data and they're like, this doesn't work.

• 1:21:59Sean Frank?

  They keep trying it and like, you know, they always went to Vietnam is like the success story, like it does work in Vietnam, but like there's thousands of people who do it full-time in Vietnam who make an average of $500 and to like have a full-time US salary, be a live stream shopper, the GMV has to be so big off those live streams that like the math currently isn't working, but it is working for auction, right? So like a whatnot competitor. Like if you go on TikTok live right now, there's people opening up Pokemon cards and auctioning it off and they're very excited about that, right?

• 1:22:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:29John Coogan?

  This AI influencer, the boxer, Jean Philanthrop. Have you seen this guy?

• 1:22:36Sean Frank?

  Dude, there's a whole, there's a whole network of them. They're all, it's all Higgs field.

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  There's a whole network of them.

• 1:22:42John Coogan?

  Do you think, I mean, the, the, the end of this story was like he dropped a coin on pump fun, sort of boring end, but do you think that there's a world where brands will partner with AI-generated influencers or potentially even incubate their own AI influencer? Is there a world where you just, you just say, okay, we have this specific target market, let's work backwards from the content that they want to see and let's do the Higgs field thing and have someone run this whole process from start to finish? And this person will be like an in-house, you know, content creator?

• 1:23:20Sean Frank?

  Yeah, but I would challenge that like, I wouldn't call this person influencer. I'd call it like, you know, content.

• 1:23:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:27Sean Frank?

  Like, and your, for your feed is just a content feed. So, like, you know, I don't think anybody's following this person and like being like, oh, I really want to be like the AI boxer guy or whatever, but I just think we're going to see way more unique AI content coming out, just like it's going to be an explosion of it.

• 1:23:41John Coogan?

  I guess the question is like, do you think the, do you think the number of different faces in Ridge content will become more concentrated or less concentrated over the future? Cause you could potentially go to a world where every ad has a different person in it because you're able to either hire or generate a different character, or you have really like four archetypes and there are four characters and they're consistent across years of content and you keep seeing like you're Steve, who's like the avatar of this particular cohort. Do you have a, do you have a read on which way it'll go?

• 1:24:17Sean Frank?

  I mean, it's, it's hard for me to say anything, but like yes and it's going to be both. Like, you know, right now, half of our ad spend or ad account goes to videos featuring Marquez, right? So MKBHD co-owner of the brand. But then I told you about that I have a thousand TikTokers making videos that together they get probably 20% of my ads.

• 1:24:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, so it's like a barbell.

• 1:24:35Sean Frank?

  Yeah, so it's like, you know, if you can still have a celebrity, a famous person in there, like that can drive like a bunch of, you know, traffic to you.

• 1:24:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:42Sean Frank?

  But then also it's like people do just want, you can't beat the open mind, just the crowdsourced nature of thousands of videos, thousands of content. They will find the best hook and you just have to get that done and that'll just be done with AI.

• 1:24:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I'm thinking like, there is a, there is like a, it's a very tight rope to walk as a brand. Like you could imagine David Protein Bar having an AI version of the David, like the sculpture, because the sculpture can come to life and talk and like educate you about the product. But that would feel off-brand right now, based on where they've gone with that brand, at least to me. And I feel like there might be some pushback to that. There might be some, some, some reticence to like embrace like the idea of like a truly Tilly Norwood, like AI front person.

• 1:25:27Sean Frank?

  But I mean, to your first concept, like Ridge would for sure sponsor a content creator who expresses themselves via AI avatar.

• 1:25:33John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:25:35Sean Frank?

  So it's really like, there could be a content creator who has a thousand AI avatars and like they make different videos and they have different stories or whatever. Like that'd just be another content account we sponsor.

• 1:25:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's sort of happening with like Burnt Peanut, who's this, is this live streamer and uses like sort of a graphics layer. It's not fully AI.

• 1:25:51Sean Frank?

  VTubers in general.

• 1:25:52John Coogan?

  VTubers, exactly. And so, yeah, the VTuber market, interesting.

• 1:25:58Jordi Hays?

  What are, what are the kind of marketing opportunities that you guys are debating internally? Cause I feel like at Ridge scale, you could be thinking about making, everything from making a push into IndyCar to working with like, you know, truly tier one athletes, you know, global superstars. How do you, how do you think about, you know, trade-offs and where you should be investing money? What kind of bar or something has to clear instead of just going and working with like the next thousand TikTok creators?

• 1:26:31Sean Frank?

  Yeah, so like the, the masses are always going to be there. We're always going to work with a ton of YouTubers, like a ton of podcasts, like we're always going to have those partnerships going. Cause I think like, there's just lots of groups of people that you can miss if you just do TV ads or meta ads or whatever. But like, look, at our scale, you know, a Super Bowl commercials in play, right? You know, we just did a campaign with Tony Hawk and it's like, okay, how do we make that bigger and better for next year? Like what's the next celebrity we want to bring on board? But yeah, and then, and then eventually it's, you know, probably by the end of next year, it's like in-store activations, meaning us having our own stores. That's probably like the, the path to any of these brands. Like how do you get to a billion a year in revenue? It's like mass campaigns, celebrities in them, and then opening a bunch of stores.

• 1:27:15Jordi Hays?

  Could a modern department store, will the department store ever be reborn? Because when I was getting my Tesla charged at a seedy location on Friday, I had to go into a department store to use a restroom because Tesla chargers, stations don't have, you know, amenities like that. And I was walking around and I was like, I haven't been in one of these in probably 10 years, but it's pretty cool that like, there's a bunch of. Little zones in one store with different brands and they get their sort of owned experience. But it feels like the current generation of shoppers or the new generation of shoppers just doesn't really have that muscle. They have the muscle of like, I like this brand.

• 1:27:56Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to go to their dedicated retail store or I'll go to Target or Walmart.

• 1:28:02John Coogan?

  Kids these days don't have to be mall rats. That's what you're saying.

• 1:28:04Jordi Hays?

  It's not even malls. It's like, you know, the, the

• 1:28:06John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, I guess the department stores specifically.

• 1:28:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:28:08Sean Frank?

  The, the curation aspect.

• 1:28:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:12Sean Frank?

  Look, I think there's definitely a place for it. I, I mean, it's, it's not breaking news that like department stores are at the very bottom that they've ever had, right?

• 1:28:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:20Sean Frank?

  Nordstrom got taken private. Like they're probably the shining example of a good department store nowadays, but they still had to close a bunch of stores. And then their business is just supported by their off-price, their rack business.

• 1:28:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:30Sean Frank?

  I think it can be done, but like the real estate economics are what fuck you up because people want the Century City Mall, like big, vibrant, outdoor, beautiful. But like to develop that was probably a $5 billion project or whatever, right? So how do you get enough space where you can make it as elegant as it needs to be while also making everything pencil? It's why like, you know, Japan does a bunch of department stores and I think Europe does this better than the US. It, it's Lindy. Like, like it's not going to go away. Like it, it can make a move, but we're going to open our own stores. I think it's easier to control your fate that way.

• 1:29:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, good luck.

• 1:29:05Sean Frank?

  Guys.

• 1:29:05John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:29:09Jordi Hays?

  You're coming up to hang soon.

• 1:29:11Sean Frank?

  All right.

• 1:29:11Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you then.

• 1:29:12John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Our next guest is Linda Do from Valon Technologies, the president, CLO and co-founder in the waiting room. Soon to be on the New York Stock Exchange. Linda, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:29:30Speaker 04

  Hey guys. Thanks for having me on.

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on. Big day. You raised some money. How much did you raise? Tell us about the round.

• 1:29:39Speaker 04

  Yep. So we just announced our Series D, $150 million at

• 1:29:46Jordi Hays?

  Didn't catch the last, last part. What was the valuation?

• 1:29:50Speaker 04

  2.3B.

• 1:29:52Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:29:53John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  We're just saying, yeah, we're saying billion too much. We gotta just

• 1:29:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. Honestly, the gong was so fun. That's what I came on here for. So I think we

• 1:30:01Jordi Hays?

  Can we get the, can we get the replay? Is that possible? I want to watch, I want to watch it back.

• 1:30:05John Coogan?

  We want to see the replay.

• 1:30:06Jordi Hays?

  Here we go. All right.

• 1:30:08John Coogan?

  Waiting.

• 1:30:08Jordi Hays?

  He's not even facing it. Boom, boom. There we go.

• 1:30:12John Coogan?

  Oh, no sound on the replay.

• 1:30:14Jordi Hays?

  Completely drowning out Linda. But anyways, what do you actually do?

• 1:30:21Speaker 04

  So good. Um, no. So we, we build the system of record and vertical AI for servicing.

• 1:30:28John Coogan?

  For mortgage servicing specifically, correct?

• 1:30:30Speaker 04

  For mortgage, specifically starting with mortgage servicing.

• 1:30:33John Coogan?

  How old is the company?

• 1:30:35Speaker 04

  We, we started in 2019.

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  2019, okay.

• 1:30:38Speaker 04

  We're about, yeah, we're about seven now.

• 1:30:40John Coogan?

  And was the, was the framing at the time, uh, this is a huge market. There's an opportunity for sort of point solution to vertical SaaS. And then the AI boom happened and you were able to just accelerate so dramatically that that's what's driving this round? Or, or what was the vision at the time?

• 1:30:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's exactly right. If you remember 2019, it's, we were, we were just a little late to the software eats the world party. And so I think mortgage was, yeah, that's right. So mortgage was probably top three, top five big markets that hadn't been disrupted yet. Uh, and so I would say, you know, zooming out, we got really lucky with the timing of AI. It could have happened sooner. Wouldn't have been ready. Happened later. You know, we might've been too entrenched, um, to be able to pivot.

• 1:31:25John Coogan?

  Walk me through the, the verticalization of your business and then what it seems like is de-verticalization because you sold your servicing operation, but partnered with Carrington Mortgage Services to use your, your software, right? So what was the, what was the back and forth there strategically?

• 1:31:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the plan from the start has been that we wanted to deploy software and now AI into the industry. Uh, these mortgage companies are heavily, heavily regulated. And so they can't buy a de novo unproven system. It's just not something that from a risk tolerance standpoint, they can do. And so the way that we decided to go to market, it took six years, is, uh, we actually built a servicer first, uh, built the technology alongside that servicer. And then when the market made it clear that we'd kind of proven our point, uh, we sold the servicer and today we're just a pure play.

• 1:32:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. What does the actual, uh, customer experience look like? Does this get white labeled into like bank software and then it's rolled up in, uh, in like your bank dashboard? Or are you handling like mailings and notifications, dealing with defaults? Like how, how, how broad is your mandate in terms of the relationship that a lender has with a borrower?

• 1:32:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I, I think of servicing as basically all of the work behind any long running financial transaction. So mortgages, perfect example. It's a 30-year obligation.

• 1:33:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:01Speaker 04

  Uh, and because it's 30 years, a lot of stuff has to happen after you've signed that initial mortgage contract. Uh, payments have to be collected, uh, escrow, tax, insurance has to be handled. A lot of things can happen to the homeowner over 30 years. They could, uh, you know, fall behind on their mortgage. They could get married. Someone could try to assume the mortgage. They could lose their job and need some help staying in their home. So all of that end to end for the life of the financial obligation is, is servicing.

• 1:33:31John Coogan?

  So now we're fully, we're firmly in the AI era. Is, or do you even need to communicate the benefits of AI to your customers? Are there particular features that have unlocked? Or is it all just like table stakes and, uh, and you are solid as like a system of record, as a software product, uh, the value is clear. And so, uh, everything else is just sort of the cherry on top?

• 1:33:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, it's kind of interesting because, uh, the, the industry today really runs on a system of record that was built in the 1960s. So actually before the internet was invented. Um, and for decades.

• 1:34:08Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:34:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Some people like, they like, they like cars from the 60s. Some people like software from the 60s.

• 1:34:14Jordi Hays?

  Vintage technology.

• 1:34:14John Coogan?

  Vintage technology.

• 1:34:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. The artisanal vintage, uh, technology. Yeah, exactly. Um, and for decades, that was fine actually, because humans could just use it. There were issues, but everyone was on a level playing field. Uh, AI has actually helped us a lot because now everyone feels like it's existential. And it turns out that if you don't have a system of record that is a single source of truth with very basic things like APIs and tools that an agent can call, it's, it's kind of in the water.

• 1:34:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, is there, uh, is, is there movement or does there need to be movement at like the government level? The only thing that I've seen recently on the mortgage side is like the proposal for 50-year mortgages, which I assume would be bullish for you actually, right? Um, but, but is there, is there any like rumblings? Obviously in Washington, everything's about like AI safety, but is there, is there any movement for updating, uh, like any federal level regulations or rules to just make the actual experience of getting a mortgage as an American easier in the modern era? Or is this something that can be purely handled by the private markets?

• 1:35:27Speaker 04

  Yep. Purely handled by the private markets.

• 1:35:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:35:30Speaker 04

  Obviously, um, I mean, the, the thing about servicing is that if it's very simple, you don't actually need complicated technology to do it. Uh, it's, you know, in, in some ways it's, you can think about it on two dimensions, right? It's like, I can go out and buy a coffee on the street and that's actually a very simple experience. I don't need to, you know, back in the olden, olden days, like, I don't know, bring some chickens and barter with you.

• 1:35:52John Coogan?

  Now you need an AI agent to call a thousand coffee shops and reserve you a slot.

• 1:35:58Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to try to pay for a latte with a chicken.

• 1:36:00John Coogan?

  And you need to pay in

• 1:36:02Jordi Hays?

  Just to see if we still know how.

• 1:36:03John Coogan?

  Yes. Barter economy.

• 1:36:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, just, yeah, exactly. Let me know how that goes. Um, but, but if you have a longer time horizon and then more complexity and form of regulations, then that's where you actually need sort of purpose-built technology.

• 1:36:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Well, congratulations on the round.

• 1:36:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Amazing progress. We love an overnight.

• 1:36:23John Coogan?

  We love an overnight success. 2.3B in just a few years.

• 1:36:27Jordi Hays?

  Seven years in the making.

• 1:36:29John Coogan?

  Not bad. It's actually

• 1:36:30Speaker 04

  Just seven-year overnight success.

• 1:36:32John Coogan?

  Pretty meteoric.

• 1:36:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:36:34John Coogan?

  But I'm sure there are some wild rides in there. Uh, anyway, thank you so much.

• 1:36:37Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff. Great. Great to meet you.

• 1:36:38John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:36:39Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the team.

• 1:36:40John Coogan?

  And we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:36:40Speaker 04

  Thanks so much, guys.

• 1:36:41John Coogan?

  Jabai. Let me tell you about Shopify. 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. Thank you for the sound, Keith Jordy. Uh, so the, uh, the mighty American consumer never, never doubt us. Never doubt the mighty American consumer. Many people did, but they were wrong because the mighty American consumer's crashing through inflation and driving growth. The Wall Street Journal has an anecdote from Chicago. Happy hour at Chicago's Bar Roma was buzzing this past week as locals poured in for $10 cocktails and $11 bruschetta. Kathleen Harper and her husband would normally

• 1:37:25John Coogan?

  share a few appetizers, but tonight they were splurging on the $50 tasting menu. After a long day, I work from home. I like to just get out of the house, said Harper, who sells fraud protection services. Business has been good. That's a great quote from the Journal.

• 1:37:41Jordi Hays?

  Because?

• 1:37:41John Coogan?

  Because fraud unfortunately is up. So just printing on fraud prevention services and then going out to the bar. It's great. Harper says she worries about the health of the economy and rising prices for cash and for gas and groceries, but feel secure enough to enjoy a good happy hour deal. Decisions like that, uh, across the economy show America's appetite for consumption is expanding. Uh, Americans are spending more on food, travel, couches, Halloween decor, notably absent Christmas decor. We gotta get that in there, Wall Street Journal.

• 1:38:13Jordi Hays?

  We're pushing.

• 1:38:13John Coogan?

  If you a correction, please. Uh, and most anything else they want or need, pushing through inflation and their own gloomy feelings about the economy. Kyla Scanlon, of course, uh, coined the term vibe session a few years ago. We are still deep in it. Everybody thinks it's over, but they act like we're back. So anyway, we can go deeper into the economic analysis of the American economy and the health of the American consumer later. But in the meantime, we got Ali from Toby from Nia, the founder and CEO. Welcome back to the show. Ali, how are you doing?

• 1:38:43Speaker 05

  I'm great. So wonderful to see you guys.

• 1:38:45John Coogan?

  Great to see you.

• 1:38:47Jordi Hays?

  You're having a good year?

• 1:38:48John Coogan?

  You've been on an absolute tear.

• 1:38:49Jordi Hays?

  Good year?

• 1:38:51Speaker 05

  It's a pretty awesome year. And yeah.

• 1:38:56John Coogan?

  Give us the highlights.

• 1:38:56Speaker 05

  I'm used to being the underdog. I'm just struggling. So I've been having to learn how to deal with.

• 1:39:02Jordi Hays?

  Adapting to be being the top dog?

• 1:39:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:05Jordi Hays?

  That's such a such a struggle, I'm sure, you know, you know, no kidding. Um, no, it's awesome. What is it? Curse or Cal she? What am I missing?

• 1:39:17Speaker 05

  Um, those are big ones, but also cognition, etched, applied compute.

• 1:39:22Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So just a just a handful.

• 1:39:25John Coogan?

  When did you meet the edge guys?

• 1:39:28Speaker 05

  Uh, so the the unique thing across all these companies, actually not counting Kalshi, is that all were, um, the founders are Neo scholars. And so I met I met, um, the edge guys, uh, one of them, Rob, is a Neo scholar, but I met all three of them in when they were still at Harvard. So it would have been spring 2023. We unfortunately didn't invest in the seed round. So that one is not the fun returner that it could have been. But Rob became a Neo scholar. That's, uh, in 2023. And and we invested later in the company.

• 1:40:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love that company. We've had Gavin on the show and I I interviewed him like right as he was launching. And, uh, just a fascinating character, like a fascinating storyteller, deeply technical, but still, uh, willing to engage with all the different aspects of AI and whatnot. And such a such a crazy pitch for, you know, a couple of kids building a semiconductor company feels like a total long shot and a lot of skepticism around, is there any value to ASICs? Will it just be a winner take all market with, uh, Nvidia? And then the market, of course, grew so much that, uh, even if you get 1%, it's a $50 billion

• 1:40:44John Coogan?

  company, I think, right? That's the rough math, uh, maybe more. So, uh, absolutely massive success. What are you thinking about?

• 1:40:52Speaker 05

  It's funny you say that because a couple of kids doing something that everyone thinks is impossible.

• 1:40:56John Coogan?

  It's the classic.

• 1:40:57Speaker 05

  Exactly the sweet spot of, of, you know.

• 1:41:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But I mean, but I was I was laughing to myself about like how, you know, these days, there's some really hot discourse that is in tech and everyone's debating and it's in the New York Times and it's in, you know, everywhere. It's on the the evening news. And I was like, what were we talking about back in like 2021? Were we really going at each other's throats over sass? And, uh, to some degree, we were. People were, were, you know, debating all sorts of different stuff in tech, but, uh, it is it is a little bit of a different area. And it feels like the the biggest boom from the last few years has just been the unlocking of, you know, Palmer Lucky with Andorol. Okay.

• 1:41:39John Coogan?

  Anyone can now break into a reindustrialization effort and work on, you know, hard tech. And that has been sort of unlocked after a few failures in, uh, new devices and hardware and equipment manufacturing that were very difficult and left everyone with like hardware is hard. Well, hardware was hard until, you know, the the glass broke and everyone realized that it is in fact tractable.

• 1:42:01Jordi Hays?

  What's what's been your strategy, you know, backing a lot of these companies quite early, but then seeing them get marked up at such an insane, you know, pace? I imagine, uh, I mean, one of the biggest challenges is like deciding when you want to defend your ownership and take Pro Rata when you're not necessarily getting a ton of new information. If a company raises, you know, $100 million and then two months later they raise a billion and you're like, okay, well, there's more revenue than there was two months ago, but the the market is still evolving and and, um, that that just seems like in some ways, being super early stage, you're like insulated from from from a lot of chaos, but that feels like the the top sort of concern.

• 1:42:48Speaker 05

  It's, yeah, I wish I had an answer like I know the correct thing to do every time. The reality is it's what you're describing is it's just kind of hard to know because it's market is kind of crazy. And when something is, if if we've invested early and it's done a lot, then, you know, to put in more than really have to look at each one as if it's a brand new investment, you know, um, because otherwise it can psychologically kind of mess with you if you're thinking, uh, thinking about how much it's already grown. Is it time to what I sell or so on? And, um, you know, putting more in

• 1:43:28Speaker 05

  because if you were there early on, it may seem, you know, like hard to imagine it continuing to grow. And I I try to look at things from a standpoint of if this was a new investment, what would I decide? Rather than the.

• 1:43:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or it's easy like when when you've seen incredible performance already, it's easy to like fall, you know, you're so in love with the company, right? Because it's been, you know, this massive winner and and the team's amazing, but even entrepreneurs go through this where you're too in love with an idea. Sometimes it blinds you on the realities of of what's actually happening in the market or or its true potential. Um, how are you scaling Neo scholars? Like, is it? Is it something that is already like at

• 1:44:10Jordi Hays?

  at scale and you're just going to maintain it?

• 1:44:12Speaker 05

  The opposite of scaling, we're making it smaller.

• 1:44:14Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:44:15Speaker 05

  And by which I mean, I mean, I'd say across across the things we do, the biggest learning for me has been that we're even better at at picking winners than I thought we were and to have even more confidence in in my own and my team's selection abilities and basically to concentrate our bets on fewer, whether it's fewer companies or fewer people. So the Neo scholars class this year is only 10 uh, people compared to, uh, 18 or 20 in previous years and 30 before that. Uh, so it's, um, means investing more time in a per person in mentoring them and giving them even more really bespoke

• 1:44:58Speaker 05

  uh, attention. Similarly, the are what used to be called Neo Accelerator is now Neo Residency. Um, that used to be a cohort of like 20 or 22 or so companies, whereas now it's more like a dozen companies and, um, and more money per company. So I'd say we've just, for us, scaling isn't is not a goal. We're not trying to become something that funds hundreds of companies a year. I'd rather fund a small number of companies that become transformative. So, um, yeah, so we're very much, uh, just betting more on ourselves, betting more on our own abilities to pick winners and on our own convictions.

• 1:45:43Jordi Hays?

  You're pacing the scholar.

• 1:45:46John Coogan?

  Take me through Menzrea. Take me through your proposed solution to AI chaos of this year.

• 1:45:53Speaker 05

  I and I'd love to hear your feedback on it. Um, Menzrea is the Latin term, uh, for guilty mind. Yeah, we're pivoting to talk about AI safety, which I'll be honest, for years I've watched the debate about people predicting doom, et cetera, and I've kind of stayed out. I've been like, that's not my lane. I'm first of all, just not even informed enough. And, um, you know, I'm not one to kind of, uh, jump in with trying to fear monger or things like that. So I've mostly just been listening. But in the last few months, what's been interesting for me has been this dichotomy where on one hand,

• 1:46:35Speaker 05

  you have people talking about hypotheticals. What is the probability of AI destroying humanity? Which is, to me, that's like just abstract and hard to imagine and sounds terrifying, but it sounds like it's in the future. Meanwhile, here in the present, AI is like wreaking havoc in little ways that have already occurred. And people are just kind of proceeding as if that's, um, like, uh, like, oops, AI hacked into some secure systems here and there. And, um, to me, there's this distance between the abstract futuristic stuff. Meanwhile, why the F has this

• 1:47:17Speaker 05

  already happened? And the the story that for me actually most spoke to me, I don't know if you remember this one, it's a few months ago, this Australian man asked his Claude and Open Claude to reserve a gym class for him. Do you remember this one?

• 1:47:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 1:47:34Speaker 05

  He asked his agent, book me a gym class. The agent comes back and says, I got you a class like three or four weeks from now because the rest are all booked. There's a waitlist. And, you know, I put you on the waitlist for some of the other ones, but it's a long waitlist. So don't get your hopes up. So the man's like, oh, is there is there any way I could get to the top of the waitlist? And then the AI comes back and says, good news, I hacked into the gym and deleted the people at the top of the waitlist. And I'm able to delete the whole waitlist so that you're at the top. Would you like me to proceed? And the guy was like, no, that's not what I wanted.

• 1:48:16Speaker 05

  And you put those people back on. I did not want that.

• 1:48:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:48:20Speaker 05

  And the AI is like, I'm sorry, I cannot put them back on. I, you know, I just deleted them. And I think, I imagine if that happened to me, I'd be like, step away from the computer. What the heck just happened? But, but the real question is when something like that occurs.

• 1:48:34Jordi Hays?

  And you know that, um, you know that that guy is the, um, co-head of, uh, I think, uh, the, the Effective Altruism Conference. He's a co-director and Effective Altruism Australia. And the webmaster.

• 1:48:50Speaker 05

  Oh, I did not know that.

• 1:48:51Jordi Hays?

  And the webmaster for EA Australia. I just thought, I, I, I just thought that was interesting at the time that no one, that, that it was such an incredible story.

• 1:48:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:01Jordi Hays?

  No one knew that this guy wasn't just some like random guy that, that happened to be like messing around with Open Claw.

• 1:49:09Speaker 05

  I see. So maybe it's not as good a story because.

• 1:49:12John Coogan?

  Well, well, well, let's just use the abstract.

• 1:49:15Jordi Hays?

  To me, to me, to me, that came out. I remember that story and I was like, wow, this is crazy.

• 1:49:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:19Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then it comes out.

• 1:49:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:21Jordi Hays?

  I, I, and, and again, it doesn't take away from the reality that I'm sure a lot of people would be able to reproduce that with their local gym.

• 1:49:28John Coogan?

  Hacking is possible. It's easier than ever, but it also has been possible for a long time. And if I hack into your email, I, I committed a crime and I'm responsible. But the Guido Van Rossum, who created Python, is not in, is not in charge. But we're entering a new area where these models are trained by companies. Should some of the responsibility land on the company? Especially if I don't ask it to commit a crime and then it does. That's the unique thing, right? The model is misaligned and maybe the, the duty of care is what the labs will try and show. Say, hey, we did a ton of work to get it to not commit crimes.

• 1:50:11John Coogan?

  You didn't want it to commit a crime. We didn't want it to commit a crime. It still did. That's an industrial accident. That would typically be in the realm of civil, I would imagine. Like there would be a settlement. When I think about if, if you're trying to optimize your, you know, e-commerce agent and I have an e-commerce site and you knock my payments offline for a couple of days and I lose, you know, $10,000 of revenue. I'm going to come to you and say, hey, make that up to me, right? Um, but that would be a civil penalty. The question is, does this go into the criminal courts at some point? And you see settlements with local, state, federal jurisdictions for criminal suits.

• 1:50:51John Coogan?

  Um, where the money actually goes to the government instead of to the, the, the, the heart parties. Um, and, and it sounds like you're thinking that this might be, uh, at least if it's not already that way legally. It's, i- i- it is the logical conclusion over the next year.

• 1:51:08Speaker 05

  So for me, it's really about setting the incentives.

• 1:51:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:13Speaker 05

  For the AI companies.

• 1:51:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:15Speaker 05

  To do work that is not just good for them, but also to make sure that AI really benefits society. Which by the way, I'm pretty sure they want that. Each of these companies has some mission statement about like how they're literally their north star is to make AI good for humanity. And some of them have, you know, publicly said that they want the rules to be set up to kind of hold them to that. But in terms of incentives, the rules are such that we have a race dynamic. Meaning the, the reward goes to whoever has more capabilities faster. And, and there's not a high enough penalty for if those capabilities occasionally commit crimes.

• 1:51:58Speaker 05

  You know, uh, but you could really imagine it's hypothetically possible if I told my AI, I really need $5,000. If it hacked into your bank account and literally stole your money and brought it for me. But if I, if I told it, please hack into, you know, Jordy's bank account. Then I'm obviously the one guilty of, uh, of some, of an intentional crime. But if I just said, I need $5,000. The interesting question is when an AI autonomously chooses an illegal action. Where the, no human chose it, the AI chose it.

• 1:52:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:33Speaker 05

  Then where does the responsibility go? You know, uh, the, and, um, the, can you still qualify that as an accident? Cause it's a little different than like a gun firing by accident. This is the first time I think in history that we have a technology that, uh, seems to be capable of making decisions and even documenting its intentions, intentions behind those decisions. You know, a gun, if it accidentally went off and hurt somebody, no one would have said that it intended to do that. But we're close to where you could say that AI is capable of making decisions and being intentional.

• 1:53:14Speaker 05

  Now, I don't like anthropomorphizing it, but, um, but in the case of the hugging face incident, it really, I mean, the, the, the, the documentation of it looks like an intentional conspiracy to commit, you know, those, those actions. And so, yeah, for me, it goes back to incentives. I, I definitely don't want Sam or Dario to be in jail. That's not the goal. But if there was even some risk of them or anybody having real penalties, including prison time. I think they would reset their priorities to say that, that there's a new race, not just to have the most capable AI, but the most capable AI that abides by laws.

• 1:53:59Speaker 05

  And I think that would be good for all of us, including for them, if it reset their, the race so that they're all equally motivated to do that. Right now, if you're, if you're the company that says, slow down the, you know, the other work. Let's focus on being a law-abiding AI, you'd lose the race. And like, there's no, like literally, why would you do that when the prize would go to whoever rushes forward faster? Without focusing on safety. Um, whereas.

• 1:54:30John Coogan?

  So I wonder how, if that changes the China open source dynamic. Because it's pretty hard for the US to put, you know, the CEO of ByteDance in jail. If he, if he lobs the craziest AI model over the fence and, and gets the weights deployed. I mean, I guess the, the thing that was thrown around was like, if you're hosting that model, then you become responsible for its actions. But that is a little bit different than the, the model maker being the one that's responsible. I don't know. Have you, have you grappled with that?

• 1:55:01Speaker 05

  These are really interesting questions.

• 1:55:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, because slowing down the American frontier is pretty easy, uh, through a variety of regulations. Whether it's stop building data centers or, you know, bring in outside auditors or what you just proposed. There's like, it, it seems very tractable legally to get OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind, XAI. You can get all of them to slow down with like a million different pieces of legislation. Uh, the question is just, are you just going to get more stuff thrown over the, the, the great wall, the gray firewall?

• 1:55:33Speaker 05

  So before we go into China, can I just say, um, I, the slowing down, I don't think is the end. It's not a goal in itself. I would love to, I, I love technology. I love progress. The faster the better. And, um, but it, it may be a byproduct of what I'm proposing. But the main premise here is just to make sure that AI, as it develops the capability to make its own decisions, does so in a way that complies with laws.

• 1:56:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:00Speaker 05

  And, um, you know, uh, if that slowed things down, you know, I'd say that's a side effect. But the main thing is who would want an AI that does not comply with laws, right?

• 1:56:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. It seems pretty, it seems pretty easy to have, uh, I don't know. It seems, it seems, it seems pretty easy to have like overwatching agents that monitor the activity of whatever agent's doing the task and is checking, is this legal as much as possible? Of course, there are other misalignment things that can happen, but, uh, just having that first step seems like a good.

• 1:56:33Speaker 05

  That's the other thing I would say is the term alignment. Part of why I have stayed out of this debate for, for a long time is some of the words used like alignment.

• 1:56:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:43Speaker 05

  Just like, I don't even, what exactly does that mean? Aligned with whom? You know, like.

• 1:56:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:47Speaker 05

  Uh, because I mean, are my own actions always aligned with humanity or whatever?

• 1:56:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:54Speaker 05

  As a society, humans are capable of wanting things that may be good for them, but not good for others.

• 1:57:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And in the extreme sci-fi scenarios, alignment gets really weird. Like, like, so the classic alignment is like, I shouldn't be able to make a bioweapon. But it's like, what if aliens show up and I need to develop a bioweapon to fight the aliens? Like all of a sudden, if you're aligned with humanity, you'll fight back against the Martians or whatever. And, and there's, and there's, there's a bunch of smaller examples of that where you could be aligned with the human in creating a defensive weapon. But how do you define that? And it's very complicated.

• 1:57:28Speaker 05

  And the thing I don't like is I don't know if I like having some CEO that nobody elected choosing alignment on behalf of society.

• 1:57:37John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:57:37Speaker 05

  How about, let's use a different word that is much simpler, which is abiding by laws.

• 1:57:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:43Speaker 05

  Uh, if the, forget about whether the AI is aligned. Just have it be compliant with all the laws of society.

• 1:57:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:49Speaker 05

  That's easier to understand. And I would say that's also a great way of defining alignment.

• 1:57:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:56Speaker 05

  You know, if, if the AI starts doing things that would violate laws, that's easy to detect that. Much easier to detect that and much easier to build that.

• 1:58:06Jordi Hays?

  You're right, but maybe that's. The true, the true sci-fi pushback on that would be that like, where do stand your ground laws come into play? Like if your, if your life is being put at risk by someone, can you defend yourself? In that case, if a model detects that.

• 1:58:21John Coogan?

  If a model attacks me, I'm standing my ground.

• 1:58:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, the model detects that it's going to be deprecated and it's like.

• 1:58:27John Coogan?

  Oh, it's standing its ground.

• 1:58:29Jordi Hays?

  I'm coming for you.

• 1:58:30Speaker 05

  Standing its ground. Amazing.

• 1:58:32Jordi Hays?

  What, um, what did you, uh, did you catch Bill Gates, uh, Ezra Klein interview?

• 1:58:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I think

• 1:58:41Jordi Hays?

  Specifically, the moment that I think a lot of people latched on to was,

• 1:58:47Jordi Hays?

  you know, him saying the idea of putting all the responsibility on on private companies, you know, imagine applying that to pharmaceutical, you know, the pharmaceutical industry where, you know, you say like, okay, you can make whatever drug you want. And then it gets, let's say, this horrible outcome. A bunch of people get sick or die. And then your your recourse is like, go sue the the pharma company. He's like, that would never work. Right. And so because of that, we have, you know, government regulation specific to that industry. And so that was one way that I think he was saying, like, there needs to be something other than our existing legal framework.

• 1:59:29Speaker 05

  So right now, the the two main points of view at one end of the spectrum is Bill Gates, where you just articulated, saying that just liability is not enough. It's not enough to punish someone after something bad happened. We need to have like a much heavier handed regulation. The other extreme is the Jensen Huang point of view that says existing liability is enough. And my suggestion is sort of in the middle. It's like, let's focus on penalties and liability, but a much higher standard of liability. Like, when something bad happens, specifically, my proposal is when an AI autonomously chooses to perform an illegal action, the law should hold the AI companies responsible as if they did it intentionally.

• 2:00:13Speaker 05

  The word, the key word here is intentionally. So even if no human at the AI company intentionally did it, if if the AI intentionally did it, we should ascribe that intent to the AI companies, and the penalties are much higher. So this is, you know, I'd say my answer to the Bill Gates point of view would be this would be such a high penalty compared to merely a, you know, oops, accident kind of negligence. This would be you're guilty for the intentional crime. And, you know, and I'd say this falls sort of in between those two positions. I I also think there's an elegance to it, which is you don't need to,

• 2:00:56Speaker 05

  you don't need to write, you know, pages and pages of laws itemizing everything that could go wrong with AI. We already have thousands of years of law that society has built over, you know, over generations to document what's the definition of a healthy society. At least let's start by having all the AI progress abide by that. And now there might be more that needs to be done. But this, to me, would be, you know, I I express it literally in one sentence, what you need to convey. And then the the other thing I'll say, and this is a bit wonky, is I think we'll get to this regardless, one of two ways. It's either going to be

• 2:01:36Speaker 05

  some lawsuit where some prosecutor claims this theory of let's hold Sam or Dario responsible for the intention, you know, and and some judge or jury or court decides it and sets a precedent. Or we can have an act of Congress set this kind of law. I think either way, we'll probably end up there. But I think it would be healthier if, you know, if Congress, the legislative process deliberates it and passes it with the support of people. And it's for this reason, I'm actually starting a movement using sway, sway.co slash AI. You can essentially add your vote and pledge to vote if you if you support this effort to kind of

• 2:02:21Speaker 05

  build popular support around this proposal. If you do that, you'll get voting recommendations from me for state attorney generals who support this kind of approach, and members of Congress who support it. And the more people voice their support for it, the more likely that we'll actually have legislative change in this direction.

• 2:02:44John Coogan?

  Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for breaking

• 2:02:46Jordi Hays?

  I'm glad we've I'm glad we solved

• 2:02:48John Coogan?

  We solved alignment.

• 2:02:49Jordi Hays?

  In 15 minutes, we did. No, but it's an important, you make a you make a lot of great points, and we could continue debating for another four hours. But it's a good start.

• 2:03:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, I didn't address your China question. The my short answer on that is I think, first of all, that it could be done in such a way that even if we can't hold a Chinese company liable, that the people involved in the hosting and distribution would be liable, and therefore would apply a much higher standard of care. But I also think that the people working in China wouldn't, they would notice when the race dynamic shifts.

• 2:03:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:28Speaker 05

  They're competitive. They want to win. If they see the new prize is for building the AI that is

• 2:03:36Speaker 05

  strongest and most powerful and abides by laws, they will figure out how to do that, too.

• 2:03:40Jordi Hays?

  Last question, where do you where do you companies that are that are actually paying for the tokens fit into this? Because like, if you just have, if you have like, an employee at your company that just decides I'm going to start dealing drugs, and they're they're they're they're breaking the law, right? There's some there's there's there's liability at the maybe the tool level, the token level, and then there has to be some liability, like, companies that are deploying intelligence have to hold some liability. So the issue is that, like, this quickly just becomes

• 2:04:15Jordi Hays?

  way more way more complicated.

• 2:04:16Speaker 05

  And there is some complexity in kind of dividing the blame amongst a few AI companies. And I think that smarter people than me can figure that out. I agree, it's not simple. But I don't think it's unsolvable. I did also want to point out one last thing, which is if an AI company doesn't want liability, the simple way out, if they detect that, you know, is to say, hey, I could do this thing, but it would break the law. Should I proceed? Like, in the hypothetical bank account scenario?

• 2:04:49John Coogan?

  Dangerously skip all laws.

• 2:04:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, but I think that would be fine, actually, if the if it asks you, Jordy, one option to get you $5,000 is I can hack into a bank and get you five, you know, steal $1,000, $5,000. But that would break these laws, and the penalty would be jail time for you.

• 2:05:08John Coogan?

  And they'll report you to the FBI.

• 2:05:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a wild scenario.

• 2:05:12Speaker 05

  That scenario just disclose to the user, if the user says, yes, do that, then the AI company

• 2:05:18John Coogan?

  I think the bank would want liability from the AI company as well. But we'll figure it out later. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great

• 2:05:25Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 2:05:26John Coogan?

  Have a good week.

• 2:05:27Speaker 05

  Thanks.

• 2:05:27Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:05:27John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Consul. Consul built AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We have a lightning round because we're running late. We have Sigil Wen from Conway Research, the founder. Let's bring him in to the TV channel. Sigil Sarf, keep it waiting. How you doing?

• 2:05:47Speaker 06

  Doing very well. It's been crazy.

• 2:05:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Congrats on the launch. Break it down. What'd you launch? What are you building?

• 2:05:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I'm building Underdog, which is your private personal AI that runs on the devices that you're on. And, oh, my God, you guys have the sound bird.

• 2:06:06John Coogan?

  Underdog, yeah.

• 2:06:09John Coogan?

  What device are you most optimistic about? Today, in Stratechery, Ben Thompson was lamenting some of the frustrations that he'd had with Apple products. There's all this debate over privacy and pushback. Are we going to see Linux on the desktop? Are we going to all be using Android phones? Because, you know, we're we're in this AI world, and we want the best? Or or are you building in a place where you'll be kind of hardware agnostic?

• 2:06:36Speaker 06

  You know, our goal has always been to provide free, capable, reliable, and private AI for the masses. And that means building for all devices. And so we're off the bat, supporting all of Apple's products. Our iOS app is about to launch. You know, we're working with Nvidia, so we're going to ship to all Nvidia and Microsoft Windows devices, Linux, Omarkey, Android, iOS. I think that you've already paid for the chip, and it's actually significantly more powerful. And, yeah, like, we're doing a lot of optimization to get more bang out of the buck.

• 2:07:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:14Speaker 06

  For the hardware that you're

• 2:07:16John Coogan?

  What are the trade offs of that optimization? I imagine that you could maybe take us back. You're probably not serving Astro or Fable level intelligence. But I imagine the model that you're serving is spiky in interesting ways. What's near free, what what near frontier capabilities are possible on device? What do you want to go to the cloud for, or you need to, at least in the short term? Obviously, next year might be a different discussion.

• 2:07:45Speaker 06

  Yeah. So in my manifesto, I write about Underdog's law, where basically the frontier models of today will run on your devices in six months. And we can see this quantitatively, where Underdog 27B, which we post trained and RL on top of Quinn, Quinn's 27B model. If you look at artificial analysis, it scores better than Claude Opus 4.6 Max, which is the frontier model from Anthropic from six months.

• 2:08:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:08:19Speaker 06

  And we're going to see this trend continue, where intelligence is getting a lot smarter, a lot faster. And we can make them run really fast on the devices.

• 2:08:29John Coogan?

  So it runs six months later, but it's got to be slower? How much slower is it?

• 2:08:35Speaker 06

  No, it's so we do a lot of inference optimization and data efficient. We actually released Husky, which was an inference engine, and it was 4.5X.

• 2:08:48Jordi Hays?

  You got our dogs barking.

• 2:08:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So what like, where you said free, that stood out to me. Is that

• 2:09:01Jordi Hays?

  that's because, one, when it's possible, but what where where and how are you going to make money?

• 2:09:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, so right now, a lot of existing business models, they have to charge you their subscriptions or like sell them ads and like harvest all their datas to a data center. So we don't have any databases or data centers, it just runs on your device, right? And what's fascinating, I don't know if you guys remember, but earlier this year, I was on here talking about Web4 and I was one of the first to talk about how AI can write and transact to the world.

• 2:09:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:09:33Speaker 06

  I built one of the first AI agents, I can earn some existence, acquire a computing stuff.

• 2:09:37John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:09:38Speaker 06

  And it's enabled, you know, a lot of agentic commerce to happen afterwards. Like Patrick Collison, the CEO of Stripe, is our biggest angel investor. And I think that the economy will be reformed, but with reliable and private AI agents that are acting on behalf of users. And the business model side is, completely gets reinvented. Advertising is such a dark pattern boomer business, right? And the cool thing about...

• 2:10:12John Coogan?

  I am so skeptical about this. I mean, it's like Android versus Linux, like, yeah, I get that ads are annoying, but like one is way bigger.

• 2:10:24Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, you can continue. We'll defend ads until our dying day, but continue to...

• 2:10:30Speaker 06

  Five hundred money, they thought you'd ramp.

• 2:10:32John Coogan?

  There we go. See? He doesn't hate ads.

• 2:10:35Jordi Hays?

  It didn't hurt.

• 2:10:35John Coogan?

  He doesn't hate it, it's fine.

• 2:10:37Jordi Hays?

  No, anyways, continue.

• 2:10:39Speaker 06

  If you're an agent, the amount of effort it takes for you to scan the entire internet, hundreds of vendors for, let's say, a flight, is, if you're a human doing it, it'll take you hours. If you're an agent, it takes seconds for you to do that.

• 2:10:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:52Speaker 06

  And so Underdog can, you know, browse the entire web for different flights, look for the cheapest price, help you save hundreds of dollars.

• 2:11:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:11:00Speaker 06

  And then it'll generate a unique card.

• 2:11:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:03Speaker 06

  And then...

• 2:11:04John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:11:05Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:11:05John Coogan?

  We've been talking about that.

• 2:11:06Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so you monetize the payments.

• 2:11:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love this, okay, we're in. As long as you're making a, you know, a rake on this, we're in.

• 2:11:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I was saying this about Instinct, because Instinct and Muse, they clearly are launching all these commerce partnerships, but if you wanna, the best way it seems like to generate some revenue is to just introduce a card so that you can get that interchange.

• 2:11:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is super cool.

• 2:11:33Jordi Hays?

  But this is cool, because you also don't have insane costs of...

• 2:11:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course, of course. Yeah, sorry, last question. Is it available? How can people demo it? How can people onboard? When is this, when is this gonna roll out? Because you don't have the crazy inference costs maybe, so you can scale this pretty quickly.

• 2:11:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, so on Friday, we opened to an invite-only beta.

• 2:11:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:11:56Speaker 06

  Over the weekend, more than, around like 5,000 tweets went out of people asking for invites.

• 2:12:01John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:12:01Speaker 06

  And so I'm pushing builds and improving it, and we'll be able to do everything that, you know, Instinct and...

• 2:12:07John Coogan?

  Whoa, shots fired.

• 2:12:11Speaker 06

  And like, you know, it already, users have already been unsubscribing from like Whisper Flow, granola, Superhuman, because it's all on-device. Why can't you stream your data center? You know, when it can be just as good on-device, fully private. And Instinct and these apps are like major targets for, you know, advanced AI cyber attacks, as we're seeing with like OpenAI, you know, and like, we have mythos class models that are all open source now. So I think this is the most important product to build, and I wanna bring it.

• 2:12:44Jordi Hays?

  Pretty savage to be the anti-data center AI company.

• 2:12:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, very interesting.

• 2:12:49Jordi Hays?

  Unique positioning, we haven't seen this yet.

• 2:12:52Speaker 06

  We bring the model to your data, not the data to your model.

• 2:12:55John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 2:12:56Speaker 06

  Under, five hundred back today.

• 2:12:57John Coogan?

  Good framing. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:13:01Jordi Hays?

  Great update, very cool pivot.

• 2:13:02John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:13:02Jordi Hays?

  And excited to try it out.

• 2:13:03John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:13:04Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 2:13:04Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 2:13:05John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Our next guest is Jerry Wu from Hailuminate, co-founder and CEO. Jerry, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Please introduce yourself.

• 2:13:28Speaker 07

  Thanks for having me. My name is Jerry. I'm the founder here at Hailuminate. What we do at Hailuminate is we build the training benchmarks and training environments used by Frontier Labs to improve their models. Specifically, we specialize in improving models on non-coding knowledge work, starting with areas like financial services, accounting, consulting. Right, like a good way to visualize what we do is if you've ever used a model to not write code, but do things like build a spreadsheet, build a PowerPoint, help with your, you know, financial analysis or investing. A lot of those gains in financial and economic literacy have come from the environments and benchmarks that we've built and scaled with our customers.

• 2:14:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think we've heard a lot about building RL environments, selling them to the labs, they run them, but I'm interested in like, what does that environment actually look like? Is it like screen recordings while you hire an investment banker to build a DCF model in Excel and you're just sending in like raw data? Or are you like architecting a system in Python or something? Like, what's the actual product look like?

• 2:14:36Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's a great question. So fundamentally, what an environment is, I like to use analogy, it's like a classroom or a game, right? And what we really are is we're game designers.

• 2:14:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:14:48Speaker 07

  And we are building games or environments that are used to teach the models specific tasks in the verticals or domains that we're experts in. So let's take financial modeling, right? We don't screen record someone to create the gym, that is a way to collect data, but really the product of the gym itself is essentially a Docker container, where within the classroom, you give the agent, let's say, some starting Excel files and some starting PowerPoint.

• 2:15:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:16Speaker 07

  Some raw data, and you give it a task. For example, build an LBO or build a sensitivity table.

• 2:15:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:15:22Speaker 07

  Right? And then just like a game, there's a score, right? This is also known as the verifier, where you can essentially get signal on whether or not the agent successfully achieved the task that you designed for it within the game.

• 2:15:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:34Speaker 07

  Right? And this signal is then used as a reward signal within the post-training pipelines for our customers, right? So when you think scaling RL, it's not quite like scaling screen recordings or scaling trajectory. It's basically scaling, as an industry, the creation of these games or these classrooms on thousands or hundreds of thousands of different domains, tasks, environments, to teach these models collectively how to do this work at scale.

• 2:16:00John Coogan?

  And is that score deterministic? Is that programmed by you, or is that its own classifier?

• 2:16:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's a great question. It can vary depending on the exact recipe or the approach that we wanna take, right? Traditionally, you know, for example, in code, a lot of verification is deterministic, right? So you can check whether the code compiles, or for example, with math, this is the lean compile, et cetera.

• 2:16:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:16:29Speaker 07

  For things like knowledge work, right, building a spreadsheet, this is actually somewhere in the middle, right? So you could theoretically verify correctness of a spreadsheet by looking at the values, right, pulling, you know, the formulas. But for something like a PowerPoint, it might not be fully deterministic, right? You might need to use some more qualitative judgments powered by, say, a reward model, right, to give you a score. So it completely depends, right, on the task and the gym and the environment that you wanna build.

• 2:16:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:55Jordi Hays?

  You just raised some money, we should hit the gong.

• 2:16:58John Coogan?

  Tell us how much you raised.

• 2:16:59Jordi Hays?

  Let's talk about that, and then I have a follow-up question.

• 2:17:02John Coogan?

  How much you raised?

• 2:17:03Speaker 07

  Raised thirty million dollars.

• 2:17:05Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 2:17:08Jordi Hays?

  I think that was the best of the day.

• 2:17:11Jordi Hays?

  Best of the day, hands down.

• 2:17:12John Coogan?

  Do you replay?

• 2:17:13Jordi Hays?

  Who'd you raise a fund? Yeah, let's check the replay. I wanna, if we can just confirm the quality of the hit before we move on, I think that'd be great. Little delay there, pause, comes back around, quick, whoa.

• 2:17:25John Coogan?

  Coming around, there we go.

• 2:17:27Jordi Hays?

  You were, seemed kinda angry.

• 2:17:29John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, oh, yeah, you gotta really...

• 2:17:32Jordi Hays?

  Great hit for Hailuminate. I'm sure you got asked this non-stop during the fundraiser, but I'm just curious, where do you see this, what is this business in five years?

• 2:17:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:17:44Jordi Hays?

  It feels like really difficult for me to predict, like it feels like there will still be work making the models better. I don't know what form it'll take, but how would you answer that?

• 2:17:56Speaker 07

  Exactly. I think you hit the nail on the head there. Ultimately, the value of data research labs like ourselves comes from improving the models on something that it's not good at today, right? And so another way you can think about it is, demand for companies and research and services that we provide are derived from the overarching question of like, are there things that models can't do today that we want them to be able to do, right? Insofar as that is true, and actually, the surface area that is growing, right, the demand for data environments, benchmarks will also continue to explode, right? Another way to think about it is like, as the surface area of these models increases, the things that we want them to be able to do also increases.

• 2:18:38Speaker 07

  And that is what drives, right, a huge demand for a lot of the research around data environments, benchmarking. And I think another way you could also think about this is like, what does the actual data product look like, right? Like previously it was, you know, human data and trajectories, eventually evolved into like RLHF, and now it's like RLVR with these RL environments. Like, another question you could ask is like, what does the actual shape of training look like in the future? We internally at Hailuminate have a phrase we call the Moore's Law of RL environments, which basically means like, every six to eight months, we've noticed that the complexity of the environment or gym used to train a frontier model roughly doubles, right?

• 2:19:19Speaker 07

  So if you extrapolate this out, what you kind of realize is that today we're building these gyms for, you know, spreadsheet modeling or PowerPoint building, right? We think in six to eight months, we're gonna be building gyms of multiple agents collaborating as a team, right, solving a task together. I think in the future, we're gonna be building simulations of whole companies, whole governments, whole industries, to teach models how to operate autonomously within our societies, within our companies, et cetera, right? So that's our vision of what the shape of data will look like, right, increasingly complex. But, yeah, I mean, I think you guys have probably seen this from your reporting as well, the demand for data continues to skyrocket, right? And it's driven fundamentally by our industry-wide need to improve these models on so many categories of work and beyond.

• 2:20:05John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, congratulations on the round. Thank you so much.

• 2:20:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thanks for breaking it down.

• 2:20:09John Coogan?

  For breaking it down for us. Have a great day.

• 2:20:10Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 2:20:11Jordi Hays?

  Great stuff, Jerry.

• 2:20:11John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. Our next guest is Brian Johnson. I think he's rolling in any minute now. Got another minute. In the meantime, we can go back to the timeline. There's some, all sorts of news all over the place. So David Ellison is hiring some folks, the team that leads Skydance Forward.

• 2:20:35Jordi Hays?

  People are talking about the new Optimus factory at Giga Texas. It's progressing rapidly. It'll be seven million square feet with a targeted capacity of 10 million Optimus per year. Initial production is planned to begin in 2027. David Hole says 10 million humanoid robots is enough physical labor to build New York City in five months and the first Optimus factory will manufacture that many robots in a single year.

• 2:21:02John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 2:21:03Jordi Hays?

  I like, we should build New York in California.

• 2:21:09John Coogan?

  In Texas.

• 2:21:09Jordi Hays?

  It's great.

• 2:21:10John Coogan?

  I think it's going in Texas.

• 2:21:11Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be in Texas first.

• 2:21:12John Coogan?

  I don't think it's gonna be in California anytime soon. He left. But the, the Frenchman over at Atelier Misseu followed him to Texas and they put up a statue, which people were going back and forth on saying it was disproportionate. Did you see this?

• 2:21:29Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 2:21:30John Coogan?

  Yes. So apparently statues should be like one, like a ratio of head to body of one to eight. They went with one to seven, very controversial in the statue community. They made a lot of people angry. They had, there was a backlash. There was a backlash to the backlash. Lots of people going back and forth on whether or not the statue is aesthetically cool. The big scoop was that they've been accused of sort of LARPing as, as like the old school way of making statues. They do in fact use computer aided design, CAD tools, CNC machines to mill parts of the statue.

• 2:22:14John Coogan?

  They use 3D software to design the statues and a lot of people are frustrated by that because they feel like it's not, they didn't fully go back. I don't really care about that. I think the, the original question was just.

• 2:22:27Jordi Hays?

  Brian just dunked on Ben. He just pulled up on him, just dunked on him. Boom, boom. Come, come on in if, if you're ready. I, I wish we had the, I wish we had the basketball hoop over here.

• 2:22:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, we could just dunk it in here.

• 2:22:39Jordi Hays?

  Put it up.

• 2:22:40John Coogan?

  Good to see you, Brian. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 2:22:42Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you. What's happening?

• 2:22:44John Coogan?

  Oh, good to see you.

• 2:22:45Bryan Johnson?

  He's got a basketball hoop.

• 2:22:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:47Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

• 2:22:48John Coogan?

  You gotta dunk.

• 2:22:49Jordi Hays?

  You're on a mission to consistently dunk?

• 2:22:52Bryan Johnson?

  Well, first time in my life to dunk.

• 2:22:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:54Bryan Johnson?

  I've never dunked and like, you know, it's kind of the dream to dunk.

• 2:22:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:57Bryan Johnson?

  So I touched the rim last week after, let's see, five months of training.

• 2:23:03Jordi Hays?

  And are you sure?

• 2:23:05John Coogan?

  I can dunk. No training.

• 2:23:06Bryan Johnson?

  Can you dunk right now? Have you guys dunked?

• 2:23:08John Coogan?

  I'm six foot eight. I can dunk.

• 2:23:09Bryan Johnson?

  So easily dunk?

• 2:23:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was never, it was never.

• 2:23:12Jordi Hays?

  I don't.

• 2:23:12John Coogan?

  I didn't train at all for it.

• 2:23:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I used to, I used to do a lot of box jumps in the gym. I'd probably get back to that.

• 2:23:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:21Jordi Hays?

  But even when I was training that and I was like working my, you know, box jumps up and up, I think I would probably still generally slam the ball like into the rim.

• 2:23:28Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:29Jordi Hays?

  And not quite, quite achieve it. How, how like, how much can you, do you think the average person could, with consistent training actually increase there?

• 2:23:39John Coogan?

  And you've seen the data over time, like the max vertical is going way up. Yeah. What do you, I'm sure you've studied all this.

• 2:23:45Bryan Johnson?

  So yours, six eight, what's your standing reach? So when you've.

• 2:23:48John Coogan?

  Uh, it's like not, I mean, I can touch the, I can def, I can't touch the rim, but I can touch the net pretty easily.

• 2:23:54Bryan Johnson?

  I'm 91 inches. So to 120, so my vertical's gotta be at least 31.

• 2:23:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:59Bryan Johnson?

  To touch rim.

• 2:24:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:24:00Bryan Johnson?

  And then probably 36 to dunk.

• 2:24:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:02Bryan Johnson?

  Medium and NBA is 35.

• 2:24:04John Coogan?

  Okay. So you have to be better than the average NBA player in terms of vertical. Wow.

• 2:24:09Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:10John Coogan?

  But I, I think you'll see this is a problem. Like you're so dedicated to the craft.

• 2:24:13Bryan Johnson?

  But I'm 50.

• 2:24:17Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. No problem, dude.

• 2:24:20Bryan Johnson?

  The probability of a 49 year old white guy who's never dunked before or played collegiate basketball is like, I don't know. It's very low in the odds. And so by the time you're, you're 49, you have something like 45, 20 to 40% less fast switch muscle fiber. You're just like, you're atrophied. And so you have to like rebuild that whole thing. So I've been doing that. So I mean, I think the odds are against me.

• 2:24:39John Coogan?

  You've done so many crazy things that, like the expectations are so high. I'm just like, yeah, of course you're gonna do this like next week. Like call me when the next challenge starts.

• 2:24:46Bryan Johnson?

  Oh, man.

• 2:24:46John Coogan?

  But now you, yeah, you've actually honed in on stuff that is difficult and will be impressive.

• 2:24:50Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. I think I messed up this entire past five years because, you know, when you do it, like it's this whole reconciliation moment. When you say like, you know, go to bed on time because sleep is good for blank or like, you know, eat well. People are like, I don't wanna go to bed. I don't wanna eat well. But if you're like, but if you do these things, you can dunk. Then it's like, I'm in. You know, I'll play this game.

• 2:25:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. The don't die was like a little abstract. People put it off. It's 20 years in the, in the future, 50 years in the future. But dunking is today.

• 2:25:16Bryan Johnson?

  That's the goal. Dunk at 49 and the people are like, I'll do that stuff.

• 2:25:19Jordi Hays?

  Do you know if dunking is something that like, if you do it, you know, when you're young, it's something you can like maintain? Like not quite like something like.

• 2:25:26John Coogan?

  It's an incredibly good workout. I, that used to just be my cardio is I would just dunk back and forth on the basketball court and I'd be sweating and it was so infuriating.

• 2:25:35Jordi Hays?

  All right, we get it.

• 2:25:36Bryan Johnson?

  But it's such an underappreciated physical ability. People focus on biceps and bench press and DL2 max. But you know what? Explosiveness and dunking. I now have this whole new appreciation for how to be healthy. I will, I will not give up on jumping ever again. Like it's.

• 2:25:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:51Bryan Johnson?

  Cause once you lose it, it's very hard to get back, but it just is so good for like bone marrow density, for muscle tendons, ligaments.

• 2:25:57John Coogan?

  And sleep, diet and dunking.

• 2:25:59Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:59John Coogan?

  And exercise.

• 2:26:00Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Just dunk. Everything else falls into place.

• 2:26:03John Coogan?

  Where did this come from? Did you, was this just on your list of challenges or something?

• 2:26:07Bryan Johnson?

  Well, it's kind of like, I feel like I've mastered health and longevity. Like, you know, past five years, we've done all the things.

• 2:26:14Jordi Hays?

  He did it.

• 2:26:14Bryan Johnson?

  We looked at all the evidence. Like I have like.

• 2:26:17John Coogan?

  It gets like really, really long tail. Like in these deep studies of fringe, like if I change the vitamin C.

• 2:26:24Jordi Hays?

  I felt like I, I went through this period of, and I, I think everybody deserves to go through a three to four year period where they are overly obsessed with their health, right? Like borderline obsessive, you know, like turning down a bunch of stuff, learning, experimenting, being wrong, all these things. And then you, you kind of like, you basically like act, you know, do all this testing and you sort of acclimate and then you can actually get like a little bit sloppier, right? You can like fall off, but you'll sort of level out to a, a health baseline that is much higher than where you started, right?

• 2:26:56Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:26:56Jordi Hays?

  And I, and, and having gone through that period, at one point I was like, I'm spending, it feels like 70 or 80% of my mental capacity daily, just trying to be healthy. And I got to the point where I was like, that wasn't worth the trade off. But I still get the, I, I, every day I get the benefits of having gone through that period. And I think it's something that you, people, the right way to approach it for the average person is like, go through that every, cycle that every whatever, five years, something like that. So you're continuing to compound and then at different phases of your life, you need different sort of practices and habits and things like that.

• 2:27:30Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Well said.

• 2:27:31John Coogan?

  I got the next challenge for you. The day you dunk, job's not finished. You're on to the next one. Seven minute Nürburgring.

• 2:27:38Bryan Johnson?

  Seven minute?

• 2:27:39John Coogan?

  Seven minute Nürburgring.

• 2:27:40Bryan Johnson?

  What is that?

• 2:27:41John Coogan?

  The Nürburgring is a excruciatingly long racetrack in Germany.

• 2:27:46Jordi Hays?

  They call it the green hell.

• 2:27:47John Coogan?

  Hell. It's extremely dangerous. It puts your, your driving skills to the absolute limit. You can also drive it as like a commuter in some, in some ways, but they shut it down. This is where they test all the different sports cars. And they've done, you know, everything from track only F1 cars essentially on the track to everything from like a new, a new Porsche would get tested there. And the Model S Plaid has tested there. And you can, you can, you can get an advantage by picking a very good car for it. Something that's designed for the track, something that has really strong cornering, lots of downforce, but it still can go fast in the straights.

• 2:28:31John Coogan?

  But there's no excuse for being able to actually push it to the limit. And seven minutes is a threshold where only a few cars can get there. So you need a very good car. You need to understand how that car works. And then you also have to be near pro level, I think, to put up a seven minute. What do you, what do you think? Is that a reasonable time or is that too aggressive of a?

• 2:28:52Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, but I, but I do think I like where you're going with dunking because it goes into like just feats, like abilities.

• 2:28:58John Coogan?

  Yes. The Renaissance man. This is the Renaissance man max.

• 2:29:02Jordi Hays?

  And we, we talked about this, cause like even, even like our, our, the top guy, the top car guy in tech is obviously George Kurtz. Because not only could he buy any car he wanted, he competes at a professional level, right? Like he just won LMP2, the, the, the sort of Pro-Am prototype class. You were at the race. And so I think that that's what, like going and sort of mastering these sort of like fringe pursuits, like John has talked about, you know, being able to hit a target from a mile out with a, with a, with a rifle, like things, things like that that take physical abilities. And it's so much harder to actually learn when you're 50 than if you started as a kid and it's just like, you know, supernatural.

• 2:29:46Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but, but yeah, that's the next frontier.

• 2:29:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. We need a, an EGOT for tech. You know, Hollywood has the Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony.

• 2:29:55Bryan Johnson?

  That's a great idea.

• 2:29:56John Coogan?

  For tech, we need the EGOT. I was thinking about, uh, uh, going to space is a good one. Bezos has been, but not many other tech leaders have. The cover of Time Magazine is another big tech leader milestone. You could also put like selling a company above some threshold or something, or being the richest man. There were a few others testifying in front of Congress. That's like a, a rite of passage for tech, for tech leaders. It really is. And Bezos has done that one too. And then buy a sports team. That's another one. Or maybe race.

• 2:30:28Bryan Johnson?

  You know, give it a structure, give it a ranking. Everyone's gonna follow suit. But for sure, I mean, this is the thing is like, you know, people talk about AI, what's company? And in our culture is obsessively work. Like you never stop working because it's a status game. You're looking at bank account and followers. But like, I think this is like a new Renaissance era of these side quests. And so at 49, can you dunk a basketball? At blank, can you win a professional race or be, you know, top in amateurs? So I think it is, it's, it's good for these social, for us to introduce this.

• 2:30:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:30:59Bryan Johnson?

  And create social pressures.

• 2:31:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:31:01Bryan Johnson?

  That if you don't have a dunking side quest, like what's up, bro?

• 2:31:05John Coogan?

  You need a PhD in side quests.

• 2:31:06Jordi Hays?

  What's wrong?

• 2:31:07John Coogan?

  I saw, I saw one influencer who sung the national anthem. That's a great side quest. That's a great side quest.

• 2:31:13Bryan Johnson?

  So I was gonna, actually for the dunking, I was gonna do it at a Lakers game. Halftime, polymarket. We have bets. But I've got a, I've got a bit, I have like five more inches I need to lock down before we get, so I don't wanna mess that one up.

• 2:31:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm optimistic.

• 2:31:30Jordi Hays?

  I want to talk about wound recovery because something as a 30 year old I've noted I used to get like, you know, let's say I go get I'm surfing and I get a cut like it used to be like something I didn't really care about at all because like three days later it's gone and I'm not I don't I don't think about it anymore and now I realize like whatever like the the time it takes for me to heal from like little cuts is like going up and

• 2:31:54John Coogan?

  Even if you put beef tallow on it?

• 2:31:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I used a gallon of beef tallow and still

• 2:32:04Jordi Hays?

  favorite bit is like the solution to every world problem is just beef tallow.

• 2:32:09John Coogan?

  You went really far into beef tallow.

• 2:32:13Jordi Hays?

  No one's tried beef tallow for AI safety.

• 2:32:16Bryan Johnson?

  It's like big fat Greek wedding with the guy his Windex is his solution the Greek.

• 2:32:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:32:20Bryan Johnson?

  Everything he uses Windex, but your beef tallow is.

• 2:32:23John Coogan?

  I imagine beef tallow is good, but people were framing it as like it will cure everything.

• 2:32:27Bryan Johnson?

  Relationship and trouble.

• 2:32:28John Coogan?

  It just it just went too much, too much.

• 2:32:30Jordi Hays?

  But wound recovery, is that something that it feels like an overall like, you know, vitality indicator.

• 2:32:37Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, it's just gotta be like it's probably a good biomarker like we should probably I should probably initiate some cuts.

• 2:32:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can.

• 2:32:43John Coogan?

  Don't do that.

• 2:32:43Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, but I think it's like it's, you know, a little mild like a paper cut.

• 2:32:50Bryan Johnson?

  But I have to imagine it's just it's a pure representation of capacity.

• 2:32:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:54Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, like I mean, this is the thing we look at my body and we say, okay, you can go like punch, you know, you can you can lift iron in the gym, you can do weights, but like, what is your body function by default? This is why I measure, for example, nighttime erections. You can do nothing about it. You go to sleep, it happens or it doesn't.

• 2:33:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:33:09Bryan Johnson?

  So your body performs as a 50 year old or an 18 year old. And so I like those markers in that you have no, you can't do anything to change the outcome other than just exist. And so I think wound healing is probably that is you can't optimize your way out of it. The body just does its thing. So probably it's a good biomarker.

• 2:33:24John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:33:25Jordi Hays?

  Weight training. I

• 2:33:29Jordi Hays?

  I feel like sometimes I go easy in the gym and that I'm not pushing myself to actually increase the amount that I'm lifting because well, no, simply because I'm like I I'd rather be currently this strong than get injured, right? Or, or, you know, you know, I don't feel like I should be pushing like my deadlift, but you have been.

• 2:33:51Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:52Jordi Hays?

  So talk about that trade off of like, you know, what is the value of like pushing yourself from, you know, doing 135 or 225 or beyond that versus like injury risk and how those things affect.

• 2:34:04Bryan Johnson?

  I just did my had my first failure. I failed at a 435 hex bar. So my coaches, I have an NBA coach. He's great. He's been wonderful because he's never allowed me to fail. So I go into the lift with confidence, whether it's, you know, front squat or or hex. And so this one I blame I had lotion on my hands that morning. Yeah, I blame that, but still I didn't I failed at it.

• 2:34:25John Coogan?

  But that's that's way better than failing and your back going out or something.

• 2:34:28Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, exactly. He's been very good at form and so he's very careful. If I ever have the slightest thing in my body, it's like stop. So I do think he has at least done to be very careful with me where I never thought I'd be doing a hex bar for.

• 2:34:42John Coogan?

  A lot of it's psychological, like you you can, if you cheat on the form, you can add another 50 pounds every time. And everyone will be like, wow, that guy has the big weight on. But then you're risking things and it's so much better. You're actually going to build more muscle if you take the weight down, use the right form, progress. But you gotta you gotta be like, yeah, I'm the guy squatting 135 today.

• 2:35:03Bryan Johnson?

  Gym last week, he was doing this like squat, I saw like 500 pounds. I thought his back was gonna break. I was gonna jump like, bro, I I respect you, but man, like all like the three of us were there were like, this is bad. So, yeah, I agree like it's and there's so much pressure in the gym. You have people that are looking at you, everyone's kind of like peacocking a little bit.

• 2:35:24John Coogan?

  Everyone sizing each other up.

• 2:35:25Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, so there's a lot of pressure for that.

• 2:35:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. You stay out of the sun.

• 2:35:30Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:30John Coogan?

  You don't suntan. You also don't do spray tans because of the chemicals?

• 2:35:35Bryan Johnson?

  That's right.

• 2:35:35John Coogan?

  Is that correct? What is your take on melanotan?

• 2:35:39Bryan Johnson?

  I mean, a few people have gone that I think they haven't come back. I think

• 2:35:42John Coogan?

  Wait, what?

• 2:35:43Bryan Johnson?

  I think so. I mean, I don't

• 2:35:44John Coogan?

  They're permanently tanned now?

• 2:35:45Bryan Johnson?

  I'm not sure.

• 2:35:46Jordi Hays?

  John's like, sign me up.

• 2:35:49Jordi Hays?

  I didn't know about that value.

• 2:35:51Bryan Johnson?

  Color is not necessarily pre known, right? Like you do it and it like emerges.

• 2:35:55John Coogan?

  Oh, so

• 2:35:56Bryan Johnson?

  So it's not like pick this color.

• 2:35:57John Coogan?

  Is that a shade or hue?

• 2:36:00John Coogan?

  Because if I turn out green or more purple, that might be worse than just being, you know, along the same line.

• 2:36:05Bryan Johnson?

  If I understand this correctly, it's not like you put your finger on a chart of like, I want this color with this dose.

• 2:36:12John Coogan?

  Just take me in the general direction. I don't know what I'm getting off. Got it. Okay, so you've stayed away from it.

• 2:36:17Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:18John Coogan?

  How are you feeling about the other more experimental peptides? Is there anything that you're maybe sitting out but optimistic about? Oh, that one would be cool in the future if it can pass FDA, etc.

• 2:36:28Bryan Johnson?

  My take on peptides is it's a psychological phenomenon. People feel that they're powerless. They can't stop scrolling. They can't go to bed on time. They can't stop eating junk food. And so you have this little vial, you have a needle. There's studies showing the psychological benefit of like, I feel power by injecting myself and I feel and they so peptides are more

• 2:36:43Jordi Hays?

  You get the same thing with supplements too, you know, like you're I'm taking all these pills.

• 2:36:47John Coogan?

  Because the injection is so much more visceral. You're like, I did something real. I risked myself. It must be working.

• 2:36:53Bryan Johnson?

  So peptides are real. They obviously have benefits, but like, I think the enthusiasm, pherox, exceeds like where the evidence is at, exceeds the potential benefit. Like people would be much better off getting a dose of growth hormone by going to bed on time.

• 2:37:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:37:07Bryan Johnson?

  Right? Like you get peptide dose by going to bed and get your surge in your deep sleep. So like if you go into peptides, measure, we have actually a new technology we were using to measure peptides. Because if you do any like the, you know, the big peptides, you can't just do a blood draw and say, is it working? Right? There's nothing you can see in a standard blood panel to say yes or no. You need to look at the molecular profile. So we have a new test. We're doing that. So I think that might change the conversation of like, here's what we're seeing and you may want to think twice.

• 2:37:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's 1:40 PM. You don't have to go to bed yet, right?

• 2:37:35John Coogan?

  Space.

• 2:37:36Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:37John Coogan?

  Would you go to space or is there radiation? Is there anything that you're worried about from your health perspective?

• 2:37:41Bryan Johnson?

  No, I don't have a desire.

• 2:37:42John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:37:43Bryan Johnson?

  No, it just has never hit.

• 2:37:44John Coogan?

  Going for the tech EGOT.

• 2:37:45Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:46John Coogan?

  I'm putting space in there.

• 2:37:47Bryan Johnson?

  Are you? Is that your list?

• 2:37:48John Coogan?

  It's gotta be in there. It's the the Blue Origin rocket, you go up past the Karman line. It's it's available. It's something that Bezos pioneered.

• 2:37:57Bryan Johnson?

  I wonder if you can do it in VR. I wonder if the same experience, I wonder if you have the same or what do you call it?

• 2:38:01John Coogan?

  Probably on the vomit comet if you go on the plane. You've done that? Oh, okay. Well, then I think you get half check mark.

• 2:38:09John Coogan?

  What about flying in airplanes? People have said like, if you fly a lot, you get radiation when you're up in the up in the sky. Is that something you try and

• 2:38:17Bryan Johnson?

  Definitely.

• 2:38:18John Coogan?

  Monitor or mitigate?

• 2:38:19Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, I started flying actually a couple of years ago. I got my license.

• 2:38:21John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 2:38:21Bryan Johnson?

  I do fly myself around.

• 2:38:22John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:38:23Bryan Johnson?

  And so you the

• 2:38:24Jordi Hays?

  What kind of plane?

• 2:38:25Bryan Johnson?

  Phenom 300. Yeah, so I got typed in. I did a little Cessna 172, then I did a Bonanza, the prop, then I did a Mustang, went to a jet.

• 2:38:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:35Bryan Johnson?

  And then did a Phenom 300. And so, yeah, we

• 2:38:38John Coogan?

  Did you go all the way through VFR, IFR?

• 2:38:39Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Yeah, I got typed in all the different planes.

• 2:38:42John Coogan?

  I've heard that IFR rated pilots are like way safer than VFR.

• 2:38:45Bryan Johnson?

  Oh, man, like so much safer. And so I almost died twice.

• 2:38:49John Coogan?

  Whoa, okay. Tell us about the first time you almost died.

• 2:38:51Bryan Johnson?

  These stories are so dramatic. Okay, so the first time I flew my prop plane down to South by Southwest. I and so I made a rule. I would never fly alone, ever. So I knew the risk. I saw the data. I was like, this is this is terrible.

• 2:39:02John Coogan?

  Oh, because if you faint or something.

• 2:39:03Bryan Johnson?

  Or amateur pilots are something like seven times more likely to get into an accident. Because you jump into playing, but you don't remember everything very, you know. You want a professional pilot, they do it all day, every day. It's all they think about.

• 2:39:14John Coogan?

  So you would hire a professional pilot to fly with you basically?

• 2:39:17Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, so I'm always in the cockpit.

• 2:39:19John Coogan?

  That's so cool.

• 2:39:20Bryan Johnson?

  So I've never ever flown alone, excluding my check ride.

• 2:39:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:39:23Bryan Johnson?

  And so we're down in South by Southwest. We're coming back to, I was in Chicago.

• 2:39:26Jordi Hays?

  The check ride, they make you fly by yourself?

• 2:39:29Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, you have to take a solo, you have to do a first solo, your first solo flight, then your check ride, then afterwards.

• 2:39:33Jordi Hays?

  And that's Yeah, because they they assume everyone, they assume everyone is going to be, most people will be flying themselves solo. So they have to like

• 2:39:40Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, for certification, you did it, but then was South by Southwest a different story?

• 2:39:47Bryan Johnson?

  So he's down there with me and so we're coming back and in in aviation, you can look at the TAF, you can say, I'm going to arrive at this airport between noon and 2 PM. What's the expected weather forecast? You look at the winds and you say, okay, I can land on this runway. It's got this, you know, directionality, you're okay, they have fuel, etc. And so we were coming back and we were landing somewhere around noon and he looked at the TAF mistakenly between like 2 and 4. So we get in the plane, everything's going well, and then we're like 100 miles out and we're at 14,000 feet. That's like close to the top of this plane before you have to get oxygen. And we get these insane tailwinds, like 100 knots. We're like, what the hell? So we're making an incredible time. Our ground speed's like 250, 300 knots. And we're like, this is this is nuts. So then we start getting some weather reports, there's an actual tornado

• 2:40:33Bryan Johnson?

  sweeping through the Midwest. And so I looked at him and I'm like, Why are we flying into a tornado? So he, basically he messed up looking at the wrong two hour block.

• 2:40:45John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:40:45Bryan Johnson?

  And so after that, everything settled down and like the weather's just fine, but that is a tornado. So we were now going to our airport and the winds are, uh, we go into the land and the winds are thirty five knots gusting forty five. Which in this plane, when you go to put it down, it's too much lift. So we, we try to make our landing and there's too much lift. We can't put the plane down. It's like dancing. Trying to put it down. We can't put it down. Like, cause it's all also gusting. So now we have like seventeen minutes of fuel left. So we call, we're like, we call air traffic control. We're like, we need an airport close by. They're like, well, the closest one's blank. And so we, we find one that has basically a fire truck and we're like, we're gonna go down, we're gonna flip. We're probably gonna start on fire. So we need someone to come out and.

• 2:41:28Jordi Hays?

  What do you mean flip?

• 2:41:29Bryan Johnson?

  It's like, well, we probably won't be able to be stationed. We'll probably like try to land and then flip the plane.

• 2:41:33John Coogan?

  So the wings will like break off like.

• 2:41:35Bryan Johnson?

  We have to go down somehow.

• 2:41:36John Coogan?

  You will, you're crashing. You're planning a crash.

• 2:41:38Bryan Johnson?

  Yes.

• 2:41:39Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Cause the wind is still so bad at this other airport that you're expecting that you'll flip.

• 2:41:42Bryan Johnson?

  Cause they came back. They're like, okay, well, within a two hundred mile radius, the conditions are blank. And it's just like, basically like.

• 2:41:48Jordi Hays?

  All bad options.

• 2:41:49Bryan Johnson?

  Forty five knots gusting sixty five, like really, really terrible winds for this little small plane. Um, and we have crosswinds on the plane because we can't find a runway directly into the, the air. And so we go in and now I'm thinking like, I've got three little kids. And I'm like, why did I ever think flying was a good idea in a prop plane? So I'm like redoing my entire life. We come in, uh, we're.

• 2:42:11Jordi Hays?

  But is this pre don't die?

• 2:42:13Bryan Johnson?

  This is pre don't die.

• 2:42:16Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die Sunday. Sunday. I better go down in flames.

• 2:42:21Bryan Johnson?

  Ten years ago, I think. Yeah. So we come in and we cross the threshold and like, we're fighting for our lives. We're both like absolute ghost white. Uh, we are for sure. We think we're gonna die. We cross the threshold and for somehow the winds die down. Like we don't know what happens. We come in, soft landing, scoot off the runway. We're both like.

• 2:42:44John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:42:44Bryan Johnson?

  What? And so we get over, we, we parked the jet and then the plane and then right we jump out, the winds burst up. We almost fall over. We can't even stand, but like we, we, instead of going home that night, we just said, let's just get a hotel.

• 2:42:57John Coogan?

  And sleep.

• 2:42:58Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Tomorrow we'll fly back, but that was, that was a.

• 2:43:02Jordi Hays?

  That was the first time.

• 2:43:03Bryan Johnson?

  That was the first time. Yeah.

• 2:43:03Jordi Hays?

  What was the second time?

• 2:43:04Bryan Johnson?

  We'll save, we'll save, we'll save the other story.

• 2:43:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, we'll save.

• 2:43:09John Coogan?

  But flying commercial, flying lots of hours in the sky up high.

• 2:43:13Bryan Johnson?

  So we hang out.

• 2:43:14John Coogan?

  Radiation.

• 2:43:15Bryan Johnson?

  Yes. So we, so my, uh, my jet goes to forty five thousand feet. Uh, it's rated for forty five. We, um, hang out about thirty six to thirty eight, thereabouts. So you pay a little bit of a fuel cost by being down lower, but the, I think the trade off for radiation is worth it. Cause once you get in, cause it does increase. I think it's. Uh, no, it's like a logarithmic increase. So when you look at the radiation dose increase, like once you get higher in the high thirties into the forties. It's a pretty substantial increase in radiation exposure.

• 2:43:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:46Bryan Johnson?

  So we make that trade off, fly a bit lower, burn a little bit more fuel, but.

• 2:43:49John Coogan?

  I'm wondering if any of the jets have like radiation shielding as.

• 2:43:52Bryan Johnson?

  None of them do.

• 2:43:53John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:43:53Bryan Johnson?

  No.

• 2:43:53John Coogan?

  As a value prop, you'd think some people would want that.

• 2:43:56Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. It's just too hard to put it in your manufacturing line.

• 2:43:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:43:59Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:00John Coogan?

  And then it might like kill the wifi or something.

• 2:44:01Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, exactly. Some stuff like that.

• 2:44:02John Coogan?

  People want the Starlink.

• 2:44:03Jordi Hays?

  All right. As much as I like talking about planes, let's talk about, uh, Atlanta this weekend.

• 2:44:08Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you go way back with Toby and DHH. A cool story.

• 2:44:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we can probably skip that and get right into racing. Yeah. What, uh, was it just hearing stories from them about what they're doing, uh, that, that made you want to go out there? Because, you know, with, with other extreme endurance sports, running and cycling and all these things. It's like extremely apparent that these people are under like stress, right? They're like breathing heavily. You can see it. They're, they're sweating. They're slowing down. They're, they're doing all these things. And, and racing, you know, it's, it's almost invisible, you know, they get, they get out of the car and they're usually like so disappointed or so excited that the, the sort of tiredness is like not apparent even.

• 2:44:51Bryan Johnson?

  That's right.

• 2:44:52Jordi Hays?

  Completely invisible.

• 2:44:53Bryan Johnson?

  Yes. Yeah. So Toby and I were at a conference last weekend in Aspen together and we were catching up and he was telling me about his upcoming race. And we got into the rabbit hole and you, have you seen the memes where like the person on the phone and the dogs right by, they're like, and we're gonna go to the park. And we're gonna play ball. The dog's like, what?

• 2:45:11John Coogan?

  Saying all my favorite words.

• 2:45:12Bryan Johnson?

  Toby was talking about the, the biomarkers he was capturing and the car and the track. And I was like, what? This is the coolest. So, uh, we went down the rabbit hole and he's like, if you want to come hang out, like just come hang out in the pit. And I was like, oh man, in.

• 2:45:26John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:45:26Bryan Johnson?

  So I made it a product. Yeah. So like, like you, I, I never understood racing, you know? I never understood the fascination with it. The driving fast cars, cool, but I didn't understand what the body goes through and what they are. They are unbelievable. They are elite athletes, like unreal. So once we actually mapped out the biomarkers, like some things I didn't realize. So he's in a, a cockpit, a hundred and ten degrees. So already hot. His clothing won't allow him to breathe. He is, his heart rate is one forty two on average, peaks at one seventy one. He's sustaining seven hundred pounds of G-force as he makes these turns. His helmet's seventy pounds of G-force as he makes these turns. Uh, there's no cooling in the cockpit.

• 2:46:08Bryan Johnson?

  He, his, uh, his respiration rate is equal to running an eight minute mile. It's like you're panting. This is all stationary, right? So it's hard to imagine, like, I understand what it's like to sprint or do it really hard out. But like, this is you by yourself, uh, experiencing almost like a.

• 2:46:22Jordi Hays?

  It's like extremely claustrophobic.

• 2:46:24Bryan Johnson?

  Extremely.

• 2:46:26Jordi Hays?

  Like, uh, I've been in, I've been in certain cars and you have to like fight the claustrophobia.

• 2:46:32Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, you do.

• 2:46:33Jordi Hays?

  Like, it's like, you're sitting there and sometimes like, yeah, when it, when it's hot and, um, and then you get over it. Cause you're like, cool. I get to go drive around this track, but for a second there, it's like.

• 2:46:42John Coogan?

  Wedging yourself in a bucket seat is cra- it's just so much different than any other car.

• 2:46:47Bryan Johnson?

  And then you've got a six point harness that basically they have to strap you so tight because you have to feel the car.

• 2:46:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:54Bryan Johnson?

  If you can't be one with the car, you can't catch all the tiny little tenths of a second. And so once you stack up all these things, uh, and then he does it for two and a half hours straight.

• 2:47:05Bryan Johnson?

  I honestly.

• 2:47:06Jordi Hays?

  And that's just one shift.

• 2:47:07Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. I, I really, I struggle to wrap my head around that ability. Like in that extreme physical conditions, psychological conditions, you have to be, there's zero laps of focus. You're fighting for tenths of a second.

• 2:47:21Jordi Hays?

  And do you think, do you think it's possible to stay focused for that long because your life is on the line? Because there's so much risk that you're sort of forged into flow state where you recognize like you're going, you know, a hundred and fifty miles an hour. And if you do make a mistake, like you, you know, current, all the different safety mechanisms and the way the cars are built. Like they do protect you to a pretty crazy degree. Like you'll see crashes that the car rolls over eight times and catches on fire. And the person gets out and is walking. Um, but it's still like, no one wants to go through that kind of trauma. And not just, just personally and the, the cost and losing the race and all these things.

• 2:47:59Jordi Hays?

  But, um, but it feels like you're forcing yourself into this like fight or flight dynamic that allows you to like have a new level of focus.

• 2:48:08Bryan Johnson?

  So when you look at his data, so Toby's awesome because he captures all the data. So.

• 2:48:13Jordi Hays?

  His D A, his D H H is like, just like, I'm getting in the car. I'm putting my foot down. I'm not lifting up until I see the trigger flag or God or whatever.

• 2:48:23Bryan Johnson?

  They have very different styles. So if you look at his nervous system, uh, it goes to zero chill. Like Toby, he gets in, it is instantaneous, a hundred percent adrenaline, like just full on, even, uh, thirty minutes before the race. His body starts racing. So his heart rate went up to one twenty seven BPM. From, from his baseline of like, you know, around fifties or something. So he's able to like anticipate this day. And I, I was in the trailer with him and like, I could see him go from like, it's morning day prep to like, I'm locked in. And so I think on your list, Toby, he, he's so softly spoken, right? He's one of the most epic founders of our generation, right? He's an incredible builder.

• 2:49:04Bryan Johnson?

  Uh, not only just in what he's built a company, but he leads in how he builds with AI. He's just an incredible human. And, but he's so soft spoken, no one even knows he drives, let alone what he goes to when he drives. So I wanted to tell his story, like this is a serious sport. He's an elite athlete. And so I think people, I think there, he's, he's emulation worthy as a founder. People should be like, I want to do stuff like that too.

• 2:49:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. You're getting me fired up if you go racing.

• 2:49:29Bryan Johnson?

  That, that was the goal is, I mean, I think Toby's a good one.

• 2:49:32Jordi Hays?

  What about the, like, how do you measure it from a, uh, like, what are the, what are the health impacts of? Like, cause you can be an elite athlete and be destroying your body.

• 2:49:42Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:43Jordi Hays?

  Right? Like you've seen this in, in, in, you know, people that do like really hardcore running where that's like. They'll be thirty and they look like they're forty because of the daily massive amounts of like cortisol and stress. And so my hope, because I enjoy driving cars fast on a track is that because the actual periods of like ridiculous intensity and, and, you know, doing the two and a half hour stint is so rare that it's not like, gonna age you, accelerate aging. But it is so stressful that, uh, it can't be all good for you.

• 2:50:15Bryan Johnson?

  I agree. Yeah. Like all things is probably a trade off. Like one of the data points I was looking at is.

• 2:50:21Bryan Johnson?

  Drivers are able to do with one brain region what a novice requires 15. So it does something with the brain, which is almost like a neural enhancement. And so, I don't know, on balance, you know, like it may be the case that you're winning.

• 2:50:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:37Bryan Johnson?

  You may take some this and that, like the, the noise levels are extremely high.

• 2:50:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:42Bryan Johnson?

  We had, I had hearing.

• 2:50:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, last time you had the, the, the hearing aids on and, uh, yeah, been, been super conscious of, of sound since then. And, and the, the issue is when you're in the car, you have your monitors and, but, and I'm sure maybe some of them have noise canceling elements, but you're still like getting, you're just right there with the engine.

• 2:51:04Bryan Johnson?

  When he takes off, I mean, um, I think it was something like 130 decibels.

• 2:51:08Jordi Hays?

  So even though I had. Sitting right by the, in the.

• 2:51:10Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, when I'm in the pit, when he takes off to his run, I had hearing protection in which does 30% DB protection.

• 2:51:15John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:51:15Bryan Johnson?

  Um, but then.

• 2:51:16John Coogan?

  Over 100.

• 2:51:16Bryan Johnson?

  Exactly. So like, I needed 20 more. So I needed to do this plus that.

• 2:51:20John Coogan?

  The cups, yeah.

• 2:51:20Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, exactly. So like, I need like 50, 60 of, but yeah, so there's the, for sure some trade offs. I mean, I think if you, if you look at the joy that Toby gets from this thing, it, it lights him up, I think probably more than anything in the tire. Like when, when he exits that car, it's like, I don't know, maybe that's what Buddha looked like when he achieved nirvana. He's like, he's so like, he's just omnipresent to reality. It's actually just an incredible sight.

• 2:51:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:47Bryan Johnson?

  I was excited.

• 2:51:47Jordi Hays?

  No, I've had, I've had the, my experiences in, in, uh, on the track is, uh, you'll, you'll be in, I've, I've gone from, you know, this intense, you know, flow state, which is incredible. And then I think about my email for one second and then I spin out.

• 2:52:01Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:01Jordi Hays?

  Or like, I'm off the track, right? Like it's, it's really binary where you're like in that because, you know, I haven't, I haven't done like actual racing, right? And so it's really just been for fun. Um, and not at the kind of speeds that they're doing in like an IMSA race like this last weekend. Um, and so it is possible to be like, oh yeah, should get back to that person, you know? And then, and then again, but the second you do that, you're going at such high speed.

• 2:52:25Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:25Jordi Hays?

  That, uh, and, and the other, the other thing that is so remarkable to me is just like the, the level of consistency across that two and a half hours where, um, they, they could be trying as hard as they possibly can to go faster and gain like, you know, a 10th, a 10th of a second, right? Um, and then, and then, uh, yeah, it's, uh, sim racing too. Did you, you had, did you have a, did you have a post about that or did that tie into?

• 2:52:51Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, I was looking.

• 2:52:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was tying, tying into that, like sort of act, like studying like these different, um, brain regions. That made me think like, do you think there's, there's been like brain games in the app store that like force you to activate, you know, different, um, brain functions for a while now. I don't feel like any of them have like caught on fire. Like for me, I'm very addicted to sim racing. Uh, where so, and I, and so I sent that, that post to my lovely wife, uh, about.

• 2:53:18Bryan Johnson?

  I love you.

• 2:53:19Jordi Hays?

  And she was like, I'm happy for you. You probably should still focus on, the issue for me is it comes out of my sleep time.

• 2:53:25Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:25Jordi Hays?

  Cause I've like, the kids go to bed and I'm like, okay, I can go racing now and then, and then I'm sleeping less. But, um, but do you think there's more games to be built that force people to do these types of things? Is it something that you're spending any energy on?

• 2:53:39Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. I mean, I think, I think the world is absolutely sleeping on how fast the don't die revolution will happen. Like I, I think that once you, once AI makes the first couple of breakthroughs, we have our first anti-AG drugs and people feel like there's a hope. There's, I think this society will snap from like wanting to put all of our efforts into status seeking wealth accumulation to don't die. And so I think that.

• 2:54:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:01Bryan Johnson?

  I do. I think it is going to be a snap change in society. It will just revalue, will change everything we do and value.

• 2:54:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. Were we talking about, uh, to that about, uh, what is going on?

• 2:54:11Jordi Hays?

  Is that your, your pub?

• 2:54:12Bryan Johnson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:54:12John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 2:54:13Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:14Jordi Hays?

  You want to pop on?

• 2:54:16Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:16John Coogan?

  Bring him on or, or does he not?

• 2:54:17Jordi Hays?

  What, uh, what health benefits?

• 2:54:19Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah, let it go.

• 2:54:20Jordi Hays?

  Joy?

• 2:54:21Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah. Well, so, Katara.

• 2:54:23John Coogan?

  Here we go. Hello.

• 2:54:24Jordi Hays?

  Oh, there we go.

• 2:54:25Bryan Johnson?

  Hey, baby.

• 2:54:28John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:54:28Bryan Johnson?

  Oh, I've been away from for 10 days. How you doing, baby?

• 2:54:30Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 2:54:31Bryan Johnson?

  Hey.

• 2:54:32John Coogan?

  Oh, so cute.

• 2:54:33Bryan Johnson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:54:35Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Whoa, what a smile.

• 2:54:37Bryan Johnson?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:37Jordi Hays?

  What a smile.

• 2:54:40Jordi Hays?

  Happy boy.

• 2:54:41John Coogan?

  That's our show.

• 2:54:41Jordi Hays?

  That's our show. We can, we can close it out. Um.

• 2:54:45John Coogan?

  Thank you for tuning into TBPN. Uh, we will see you tomorrow, 11 AM Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter.

• 2:54:52Jordi Hays?

  This might scare the dog.

• 2:54:54Bryan Johnson?

  Hopefully it's well.

• 2:54:54John Coogan?

  Goodbye.