Some Math Problems, Arsenal-2, Porsche Mission S | Walter Russell Mead, Kat Cole, Tarek Alaruri, Tyler Niday, Scott Morton, Josiah Meyer, Aarush Selvan

(06:15) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (10:55) - Some Math Problems (25:12) - SpaceX's $40B NVIDIA Chip Deal (35:59) - Porsche Mission S (52:27) - Walter Russell Mead, a distinguished fellow at the Hudson Institute, discusses the decline of mid-20th-century democratic capitalism and society’s transition into an uncertain technological era. He explores AI’s economic and geopolitical effects, human adaptability, the balance between state power and individual liberty, and declining trust in experts while expressing optimism about technology’s potential to improve life. (01:32:01) - Kat Cole, CEO of AG1, discusses the company’s retail expansion, product innovation, and investment in clinical research. She explains how AI improves product discovery, customer service, supply-chain traceability, scientific development, and operational efficiency while allowing AG1 to invest more in research, marketing, and customer experience. (01:44:58) - Tarek Alaruri discusses Stuut’s $52.5 million Series B and the company’s rapid growth under his leadership as co-founder and CEO. He explains how Stuut’s digital coworker helps major businesses collect overdue revenue, supported by cold calling and partnerships with firms such as Microsoft, Fiserv, and Ernst & Young. (01:50:51) - Tyler Niday discusses Bonsai Robotics, a full-stack physical AI company developing autonomous machines for agriculture and other rugged environments. He highlights its 430 deployed robots, partnership with Nvidia, extensive field data, and ability for one person to manage a fleet across multiple platforms using a unified world model. (01:56:10) - Scott Morton discusses Revel’s rapid growth and its software platform for testing and controlling complex physical systems such as nuclear reactors, jet engines, and rockets. He highlights the expanding hard-tech ecosystem, the influence of former SpaceX engineers, and Revel’s ability to dramatically accelerate customer testing and development. (02:03:14) - Josiah Meyer discusses co-founding and leading Health Leap, an AI healthcare company backed by Sequoia with $38 million in funding. He explains how its technology helps hospitals detect overlooked conditions, improve patient outcomes, and reduce costs, while reflecting on his entrepreneurial beginnings in South Africa and AI’s growing capabilities in mathematics. (02:10:48) - Aarush Selvan discusses his work as a ChatGPT product manager and the launch of GPT-6 for 1.2 billion users. He explains its intelligent, dynamically generated interfaces and ability to answer while reasoning, while reflecting on how nondeterministic AI is reshaping product management, design, and collaboration at OpenAI. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today is Wednesday, October 7, 2026.

• 0:05Jordi Hays?

  The capital of capital.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more, including Tony Hawk. Now they got a deal with Tony Hawk and I saw Bam Margera in the promotional video. Go check it out. Uh, it's on Eric Lemon's X account.

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  They did it again.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  The ramp socials. They did it again. Uh, no, uh, fantastic, fantastic.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  Chat saying we're late today.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  We are late today. We were working on, uh, working on stream title, working on, uh, the plan for the show, but we have a great show for you because we planned. Um, first off, I got a little movie review for you. I saw a movie yesterday. I went to the theater and I saw primetime and I, and I wanted to, yeah. Oh, okay. I want to review from those, uh, in, on the production team who have seen primetime, the new Robert Pattinson film, but I thought I would try and take you on sort of a, a film critique, a journey with a review that sort of channels the way Tyler reviews movies. So here's my review of primetime.

• 1:21John Coogan?

  It was good. The audio was good and the video was good. Act one was good. Act two was good and act three was good.

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  The acting was good.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  And the lighting and the cinematography was good and the set design was good. So overall, I would say it's a good movie.

• 1:45Jordi Hays?

  Strong review. That was a good review.

• 1:49John Coogan?

  Pretty good. What do you guys think? You liked it? Let's get Scott up here.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Saw that movie.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. You liked it?

• 1:57Speaker 02

  I thought it was great.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  How cool was the, the frame? It felt like I was watching IMAX format, but it was just four, three.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  They used 23 different cameras on that movie.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  The cinematography was crazy, right? And the highlights blown out and there was so much grain, like it was.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  It was like way too stylized for a Chris Hansen movie.

• 2:16John Coogan?

  I had no idea where any of this would like, where these ideas came from. It feels like they were just pulling from every different camera from that era.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  It was really, really cool.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  Well, Lance Oppenheim.

• 2:27John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Lance Oppenheim, he does documentaries. Have you seen Ren Faire and?

• 2:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. Okay, cool. Yeah. Uh, but yeah, really, really fun, uh, you know, creative way to throw back to like the way people watch TV at that time.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  Four by three.

• 2:46Speaker 02

  I like that. I like that Chris Hansen was kind of like the antagonist the entire time.

• 2:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's a, it's a, it's a complex investigation of his career and, and, uh, and the way he's remembered. Did he go too far? And it, it feels like a little bit heavy handed, like it's pretty clear.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:02John Coogan?

  The, the vision, it doesn't fully leave you open to make your own judgment, but you of course can, uh, which I, I thought was a, a nice touch and, and Robert Pattinson is just in fighting form.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's in a flow state.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  He's just in flow state. Yeah, he's really good. Uh, anyway, we clearly were teasing it, but of course we have the TVP and road to Christmas countdown ready for you. Let's let you know, let's remind everyone, there are 78 days until Christmas. Get ready. Get ready. If you missed it yesterday, we did an interview, a deep dive into the Christmas tree tree farmers association of America, understanding everything from how the Christmas tree industry is structured to techniques for keeping your Christmas tree alive.

• 3:52Jordi Hays?

  And if you watch any tech or business content this week, it's gotta be that.

• 3:56John Coogan?

  It's gotta be that.

• 3:57Jordi Hays?

  It's gotta be that interview.

• 3:59John Coogan?

  Uh, it was. So we highly recommend that you donate. I made a donation yesterday, uh, trees for troops.org, give whatever you can. Uh, they also do company matching. So if you, uh, work at a company that matches donations, uh, if you're an early anthropic employee and they match three to one, back the truck up, throw down a hundred mil. Come on, let's do it. Let's, let's get, every troop must have the biggest tree possible, a 40 footer, you know? I want a White House style tree in every troop's home. That would be amazing. No, but, uh, he, he had some harsh words for the plastic tree industry. He called them toilet brushes, which was hilarious.

• 4:43John Coogan?

  I, I'd never heard that, that slur for those, uh, plastic trees before, but he, he had it ready to go, which I enjoyed and it did, uh, and I noticed some people in the comments saying, hey, look, I understand that a real tree is better, but not everyone can afford a real tree and the economics of a, of a plastic tree just sometimes make, make more sense for certain people. And I understand that not everyone's in the position to buy a, a brand new expensive tree. First off, that's why we do the road to Christmas. You can start saving.

• 5:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:15John Coogan?

  And you can be saving 364 days for your tree. Also, I would say, don't, you don't have to go huge. You can buy a three foot, two foot tree.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

  Charlie Brown.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can get a tiny tree. Um, if that's what you can afford, and I think that you will wind up saving money on a series of small real trees over the full size, expensive plastic toilet brush tree. So be careful out there this, uh, this Christmas. Make sure to support our, uh, our Christmas tree industry because it's important. Anyway, um, I had a question. I, I, I asked Ben Thompson this. Let me see if he's responded yet because he has not responded. We will talk about it on the show and get to the bottom of this later. So Ben Thompson's going through a bunch of, a bunch of, uh, you know, frustrations over,

• 6:09John Coogan?

  um, Mac OS, he's vibe coding, building apps, the apps need permissions. We've talked about this, uh, the, the agentic era. Um, but yesterday there was a post that hit the timeline that was, uh, pretty crazy, a uh, a sort of truth nuke, uh, for the Adobe crowd. Someone decompiled basically every Adobe product. It's called ArtCraft. Get artcraft.com capable tools for artists and you can download for free all sorts of different, um, tools that they have, and they basically cloned.

• 6:46Jordi Hays?

  What kind of tools?

• 6:48John Coogan?

  Photoshop, Premiere Pro, uh, they, it feels like they can do a lot. I'm not exactly sure if they decompiled everything in the Adobe ecosystem, but listed here is photo craft, which is clearly Photoshop, vector craft, which is Adobe Illustrator, film craft, which is, uh, Premiere Pro, light craft, which is Lightroom, print craft, effect craft, which looks like after effects, and then design craft, which is I think in design. Uh, more crafts are on the way. And so it says all Adobe products re-implemented from scratch, free and open source. And, uh, this is pretty, pretty crazy. There have been open source competitors to Photoshop for a long time. They've always lagged a lot.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  I downloaded, uh, the Photoshop decomp, decompilation photo craft, used it a little bit, not bad, pretty remarkable how many tools did make it over. It actually doesn't have everything that you would expect. Some of the really cool features of modern Photoshop are actually AI and they run on the server. So if you, if you, if you want to patch a hole, you've always been able to fill it in with a, with a full color. You've also been able to do content aware fill where it has a basic algorithm that looks at the colors of the pixels around the textures and tries to blend that in, but it can be a little, it's like pretty hallucinatory. And then recently Adobe launched, uh, AI fill. I forget what it's called. Not, it's not content aware fill.

• 8:17John Coogan?

  It's, it's, it's some generative fill. I think they call it generative fill. And that of course runs on the server, usually uses Nano Banana or they have a, they have a couple of fine tuned models and that feature, because it's server side, doesn't work. So there's this interesting thing where like, yeah, you're in the death of software. You can just decompile everything, but at the same time, I probably want my software to run on the server. I want the server to be stable. I, I need the, I need services. So all the investments that software makers made in providing like inference heavy tooling, um, actually sort of creates a little bit more of a moat. Obviously the moats are, are decreasing, but there still is something where, where if I were doing heavy duty Photoshop use, photo craft would not be a perfect substitute for

• 9:02John Coogan?

  my workflow. For some people, they'll be like, yeah, this is actually perfect, but you've always been able to download an illegal copy of Photoshop, uh, but this is less illegal, maybe it's unclear. It's unclear because it's probably.

• 9:17Jordi Hays?

  Has Adobe responded yet?

• 9:18John Coogan?

  I don't know, but it's going to be fun to watch the open source decompilation, uh, community, uh, duke it out with all the tech companies.

• 9:27Jordi Hays?

  Um, yeah. The interesting thing is, um,

• 9:31Jordi Hays?

  There's been so many reasons to not buy Adobe for so long.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 9:35Jordi Hays?

  Just given that historically, I would think of an idea for even like a joke.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:42Jordi Hays?

  And I'd be thinking in my head, I wish I had, I wish I had the time to Photoshop this. I wish I had somebody handy that could just Photoshop this.

• 9:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:49Jordi Hays?

  Now you just, you get there with a prompt.

• 9:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:52Jordi Hays?

  Especially for these sort of like less professional use cases.

• 9:58John Coogan?

  Totally. Tools sort of stick around if it's like, you need to lock in and do like a full day of work. Like, there's no substitute yet for like, i- if you were going to be spending eight hours in After Effects or eight hours in Premiere Pro, you're probably not going to be able to replace that with a prompt. But if it's like, oh yeah, you want to just like, you know, composite two images together for a meme or add some text. A prompt is going to get you there if it was, and it would have been 20 minutes of work in Photoshop. Now it's, uh, you know, one minute of work in ChatGPT, um, or any other tool. Uh, and so the, obviously we're seeing like these two spikes of intelligence right now. Anything that can be done in a purely virtual environment is accelerating extremely quickly.

• 10:42John Coogan?

  Anything that touches like the real world or requires human data or requires like this flywheel, uh, that's much slower. Uh, and the OpenAI math results like show a similar story. We can talk about that more later, but, uh, I'm sure most people saw it. It's a pretty crazy result. What is the, what is the highlight, the high level? It's like 70 different problems, right?

• 11:04Tyler?

  I think it was, so I think the, the full number is 722, like manuscripts.

• 11:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 11:09Tyler?

  And then so it's kind of hard to like, how do you delineate like an actual problem?

• 11:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:14Tyler?

  But yeah, there's like a massive list of like unsolved problems.

• 11:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. The, the press release just calls it a broad range. It's like we solved math.

• 11:24John Coogan?

  It's, uh, it's interesting. There's a, there's a good Josh Gann's article analysis on Substack that we can read through later. But, uh, and, and Francois Charlet, uh, the creator of RKGI, broke down a theory of what's going on with this big jump in progress. And what it means for overall generalization. He said, what if the jagged frontier is mainly math plus code, which you can push arbitrarily far with reinforcement learning, learning with verifiable rewards, RLVR, and everything else starts to plateau because it's still bottlenecked by human generated data. Model performance in non-verifiable areas has kept improving steadily, albeit much slower than for math and code.

• 12:07John Coogan?

  But is that steady improvement a side effect of a higher G, the general intelligence itself driven by RLVR? Or only a function of the amount of new human data getting injected into training, which is still continually happening on a massive scale? A lot of things depend on the answer to this question. And so what's, what's interesting is, um, it really, this is a, this is a, this is a less of a fieldy AGI moment and more of a field of super intelligence moment for me personally. Because no human intelligence has ever been able to solve this many math problems this quickly at this level of mathematical ability.

• 12:50Tyler?

  Yeah.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  Like it's just, it has never happened in human history. It's beyond, it feels like it's beyond Einstein grinding on this or anyone else really. And so it feels like it's something new. At the same time, it's very spiky. I still like the machine intelligence name because it has a different shape. And we're trying to mold the machine intelligence into something that slots in neatly into like a human, a, a, a general framework, but it keeps breaking out and spiking in these odd areas because of the, the, the ability to train in these environments. So, um, the terminology debates are sort of irrelevant.

• 13:33John Coogan?

  There's clearly some near-term impacts that are worth working through. As I mentioned earlier, Ben Thompson has been working through these Mac OS frustrations while he goes deeper in agentic AI. Uh, he wrote about this in a Stratechery post called Apple and the Hacker's Future. He said, what I'm much more interested in is controlling the software layer myself. The fact of the matter is that with AI, you can decompile almost all existing software. There is a revolution happening in gaming over the past few weeks as game after game is decompiled to source and ported to any platform you wish, and you can write your own. That means my software that interacts with my agent in the way I want it to for everything.

• 14:16John Coogan?

  That's way more exciting than praying Apple delivers the right API and that third-party developers don't suck. And so, um, he's, he's talked about the frustration of, of you use an agent to build a piece of software and it, and that piece of software lives on your Mac Mini or your computer. And it needs to access the desktop to save files or it needs to, uh, access the network. And when you build a new piece of software, Mac OS says, hey, this is a, this is a piece of software you're running, but you need to explicitly give it permissions. You have to click yes on the pop-up. We're all familiar with this from iOS.

• 15:00John Coogan?

  You download an app and it's like, can it send you notifications? Can it have your location? Can it get into your camera roll? Right? Like these, these apps, even after you install them, they're very walled off for privacy reasons, which is great. But Ben wants to operate at a different level of abstraction. Give a coding harness the ability to write software that then maintains the same level of, uh, of approvals and, uh, and access and permissions that the overarching AI agent has been given. And there's been this bull case for Linux. It's possible that we see more Linux boxes and maybe even Linux on the desktop

• 15:40John Coogan?

  because all of the downsides of Linux are offset by, oh, well, now you just have a prompt to interface with it. Instead of anytime, like getting like the volume changed in Linux is sometimes like a command line thing and it's such a hassle. But if you have a prompt there, you can just say, oh, like fix this driver, change this thing and it'll just go do it. But, uh, the, uh, what's, what's interesting is like, we went from like old games like Halo and Modern Warfare 2 and Minecraft being decompiled, uh, and then Photoshop and some other Adobe software. And I'm wondering like, how far are we away from just straight up decompiling Mac OS?

• 16:24John Coogan?

  Because if you can decompile Mac OS, then you could potentially patch security features that you don't like. You could change that fact that every new application needs permissions granted explicitly. You could just go into the source code and recompile your new version of your operating system that's based on Mac OS. Now clearly Apple's not going to be happy about that. It's really complicated, but what do you think?

• 16:52Tyler?

  Yeah. I mean, isn't that just like jailbreaking with your iPhone? We've been able to do that for a while, but no one does it because then you lose like a bunch of features of.

• 16:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. I wonder, I wonder how hostile Apple would be to that because is there a way to, to decompile, jailbreak, uh, Mac OS and still appear to Apple servers as like, oh yeah, this is like a legit Mac OS install. And so, uh, we will still serve them iCloud or we will still, uh, treat it as a viable iMessage recipient, which is like what people want. They want iMessage, they want the ecosystem, they want security updates, but then they also, or at least the, the hackers in Ben Thompson's analysis.

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  Sure they'll love it and they'll encourage it and they'll celebrate it.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, but it does feel like, it does feel like it could be good for the hackers future in the Apple ecosystem. Like if you can eventually just point an AI model and say like, you know what? I don't like this about Mac OS, but I like everything else. Just change this feature at a very root, root level and it goes and breaks in and does exactly what you want. Hackers could be like, yeah, okay, we're staying with Mac OS for a while because the hardware is great. They obviously still have a huge hardware moat. Um, but there are a whole bunch of other, uh, issues in the new world where software is infinitely malleable. Regardless, like this is all just firmly the domain of hackers, even this, uh, even this Photoshop. Like is Adobe moving on the news?

• 18:17John Coogan?

  Like, uh, Adobe market cap where we traded down 3%, 5% over the last five days, 10% over the past month. I don't know. There's like an ongoing SaaS apocalypse narrative. It's down 33% over the past year. But it doesn't seem like people are, are, are canceling their Creative Cloud subscriptions en masse because of this. But, uh, it'll be interesting to see where this goes. This is definitely like, uh, you've got to be pretty early adopter-ish to be like, yeah, I'm running the decompiled version of this thing. And like, I modded my own Halo into Modern Warfare and I'm having fun with that. I did see someone got a nuke in Modern Warfare 2 Minecraft Edition. Did you get a nuke?

• 19:02Tyler?

  I, I did not drop a nuke.

• 19:04John Coogan?

  It seems like you did drop a nuke.

• 19:06Tyler?

  I'm dropping a nuke right, yeah, right now.

• 19:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh-oh, uh-oh.

• 19:08John Coogan?

  I feel like the sound effects are a little anticlimactic there. Okay, there we go. I guess it would be quiet. There we go. The truth.

• 19:15Jordi Hays?

  It's been a good run.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  Goodbye, everyone. We'll be back in five seconds. This animation's a little slow, so I don't know.

• 19:23Tyler?

  We're going to work on speed.

• 19:23John Coogan?

  We gotta speed that one up.

• 19:25Jordi Hays?

  Last thought on, on, uh, Math Day yesterday.

• 19:30Jordi Hays?

  You got to wonder where companies like Harmonic go. Vlad's company, their, their focus has been.

• 19:35John Coogan?

  There's a few of those companies.

• 19:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Their focus has been, you know, building mathematical super intelligence. It's not to say that, um, it's not to say that, that they don't have a bunch of different angles that they could still run at.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:49Jordi Hays?

  But I imagine that is the kind of thing that they would have wanted to do, you know, themselves versus, um, getting, you know, sort of front run by a more, uh, general purpose lab.

• 20:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's, uh, yeah, it's interesting. I wonder where else, there's still a few Millennium Prize problems out there that you could grind, uh, if you're in the race. And, and then there's so many other things that you can sort of pivot towards if you're, uh, working on super intelligence of any kind, but specifically mathematical super intelligence. You would imagine that, that, uh, you could go and if you've made progress, yeah, maybe you're a month behind solving all these conjectures and whatnot. But you have a solid model, you could go and, and, you know, try and dominate in an engineering vertical, right?

• 20:43Jordi Hays?

  John.

• 20:43John Coogan?

  Do you think that?

• 20:44Jordi Hays?

  Do you value human intelligence above all other human qualities?

• 20:50John Coogan?

  No.

• 20:51Jordi Hays?

  I knew the answer to that already because we've been operating with

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Lap time.

• 20:55Jordi Hays?

  Golden Retriever mindset.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, the Golden Retriever mindset. Two years ago, we sort of coined this on the show. It's the two year anniversary of TBPN, by the way. We started in October of 2024.

• 21:09Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 21:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, two years in. But yes, the Golden Retriever mindset be, what was it? Hot, friendly and dumb. Something that it was, this is pre looks maxing, but it was basically like focus on physical fitness. Don't make enemies, be very friendly and don't think you're the smartest person in the room. No one really likes to know it all, but also you're going to have a bad time if you, if you prize value in, if you value intelligence above all other human qualities, you're going to have a bad time. That was Ilya Sutskever in 2023. And yeah, it seems like that is playing out in real time, but there are still a whole bunch of other

• 21:54John Coogan?

  things and I don't know, people are like, intelligence is still really important, obviously. It's just applied in so many different ways. Like it, it, it's not, it's not, it's just odd that like the IMO gold medalist to startup founder pipeline is super rich and yet the work of a Scott Wu at cognition day to day does not look like solving IMO medal, IMO level.

• 22:22Jordi Hays?

  Looks like high stakes poker.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Deal making, hiring, strategy, implementation, product development. There's so many other things. It would be very funny if it was just like, oh yeah, actually like solving math problems is the most like, if you can solve math problem, you, your, your company will make like a billion dollars. So you got to solve like 12 a year. So you got to just staff like a lot of mathematicians and like, just be solving these and like, yeah, as long as, okay, how are you going to solve 20 of these math problems that get you a billion dollars each next year? Cause we need to see growth. We need to underwrite these, it's pretty high margin, but you got to pay the mathematicians a lot. No, it's never really been, that, that's not the work, but it's all these, it's all these other human qualities that seem to be sticking around.

• 23:08Jordi Hays?

  Rune says, do not let yourself be reduced to the status of an audience at a magic show, uncomprehendingly clapping as machine intelligence creates parcels of astounding knowledge. All of this is for us to be understood by us to sate our own curiosities. It's all really happening. Yeah, the good news here, the, you know, the internal model that was used.

• 23:31John Coogan?

  Why is he taking shots at being an audience member at a magic show? That's like my favorite thing to do.

• 23:37Jordi Hays?

  Low blow.

• 23:37John Coogan?

  I, I'm, I'm, I'm like the number one audience member at a magic show. I love magic shows and I love being there, being like, wow, this is amazing. That's the best. That's the best. I don't need to be the guy being like, oh, I figured out the magic trick. I, I know how it works. I just want to sit there and be off and that's my experience today. I'm just like, really impressive math, guys, awesome, but I don't, I don't need to.

• 24:03Jordi Hays?

  We did it.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  I'm good. No, it is a good, it is a good message for a particular, for a particular person. But I think if you didn't understand the first thing about the theorems that are trying to be disproved, you're not really going to be satisfied by trying to understand the proofs.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  You can just, there are some really funny ones though. Somebody, somebody was making fun of like, our, our, our Chud universe is, what was that one? You can do a for, you can do Fourier transforms in O of N log N to the 0.9999999 time. F this Chud universe. It's just like, it's the least elegant solution to the, to the math problem. And, and somebody was, somebody was sort of arguing that like, like a lot of the previous work in math has been like, oh, try and find the elegant solution. And then the AI comes in and is just like, there's an inelegant solution. And, and it just tells you a lot about both the mathematical discipline and like the nature of our

• 25:06John Coogan?

  universe, that there are like these weird quirks. Anyway, where should we go next?

• 25:13Jordi Hays?

  SpaceX looking to raise 40 billion to give to Jensen blockbuster debt deals. Latest sign of vast spending on chips and other infrastructure. The company is seeking to raise about 10 billion in bank loans and 30 billion in investment grade debt to fund its blockbuster chip order. Private capital group Apollo is expected to lead the financing effort and help sell the debt to a broad base of investors. PIMCO was among a small group of lenders in talks to fund the deal. SpaceX financing plans underscore the vast sums that are being raised to pay for an investment in data centers. Insurance and pension funds would be able to buy SpaceX's debt due to its BBB credit rating, the second lowest investment grade ranking.

• 25:55Jordi Hays?

  Such funds take much more limited positions in junk rated notes. Apollo and PIMCO declined to comment. The deal would strengthen ties between SpaceX and Nvidia after Musk vowed to double down on the group's technology for his AI initiatives. It would also mark a win for Nvidia as it contends with growing competition from chip makers aiming to challenge its dominance in advanced semiconductors. We've decided to build exclusively on Nvidia because we think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture. We think it's the best AI computer and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels.

• 26:31John Coogan?

  That's interesting because that's, that's only on the short term, right? Because he's still doing terra fab. He's going to make his own chips. He's making his own chips at Tesla and he has to deal with Intel for that.

• 26:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:43John Coogan?

  So he's kind of just saying like.

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  I think he recognizes like right now it's very strategic to just kiss, kiss the ring basically. Investors whom SpaceX had previously approached about financing its purchase said they only received a short two-page deal memo with pictures of outer space and an arrow pointing out that the company was going to build data centers somewhere in the universe. How are we supposed to take that to IC? One of the people said, referring to their investment committee that approves transactions.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  Sounds like a pretty good memo to me.

• 27:17John Coogan?

  I was, I was laughing at this too. And then I was thinking like, it really is pretty simple. Like it's $40 billion, buy some chips. What is the value of the chips? How do you underwrite those? Like it, I, I mean, I guess you need more, but you can probably, you can probably back of the envelope it yourself. But it is, it is funny that the photos that we saw in the S1 made it into even the, even the private credit side of the, of the deal making.

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think investors, if you're planning, if you're exploring, putting billions to work into AI infrastructure, you should probably be doing a lot of your own work on understanding the risks.

• 28:03John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  How this could go wrong.

• 28:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:05Jordi Hays?

  And I think that giving money to Elon and just sort of trusting the process has worked to date. Right?

• 28:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:14Jordi Hays?

  And so he's sort of earned the right to have a, you know, shorter than, than average memo. I think at this point.

• 28:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I guess you can underwrite the core business. I mean, it's already been rated as triple B. So there's already a credit rating that you can go from, but then you can also, you know, build your own credit rating from the SEC filings from SpaceX and you can look at the traction there. And then you can understand, yeah, I mean, maybe you need to understand a little bit more about like the economics and the tokenomics that they expect. Like, do they expect to just sell all of this as Neo cloud compute for other, for other labs? Are they thinking about going more internal? That probably does affect the credit worthiness for this deal. So that might be something you want to put in investment committee memo, but

• 29:07John Coogan?

  you can just build your own, I guess. I don't know. It seemed like, yeah, a pretty, pretty aggressive, but we'll see.

• 29:15Jordi Hays?

  What does Nick Presler have to say? Says, look at him. That's my qual. You're what? You're qualitative. My vibe specialist. Look at him. You notice anything different about it? Look at his face. I'll give you a hint. His name is Jayden. He won a local poetry competition in Bushwick. Yeah, I'm sure of the vibe.

• 29:33John Coogan?

  This is, this is based on real reporting here. From AQR Capital, quant firms are hiring idea guys, not quants. I've been skeptical about the whole software is commoditized, ideas are the moat argument, but I've seen firsthand the best quant and technical firms in the world hire thinkers, liberal arts grads and generalists. I predict the trend accelerates. Yeah, I actually know, now that I'm thinking about it, I know a lot of hedge fund guys who have philosophy degrees and I'm kind of biased here, I think, based on the sample size, but I know a lot of people who like have studied history and gone into investment, investing,

• 30:14John Coogan?

  and they brought a very differentiated lens to the practice. And some of them did really well because of that, because they were able to, you know, understand the way like the Eurozone might develop more because they studied, you know, history is in a PhD program.

• 30:33Jordi Hays?

  They had a crazy Euro summer.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:38John Coogan?

  So let's, let's read this actual letter. The question being asked, not only in finance, but also across industries and business schools is what remains a durable differentiator once AI has surpassed many of humanity's analytical and technical capabilities? Our answer is not what most people would expect to hear from a quantitative investor. Of course, AQR, what does AQR actually stand for? It's like advanced quantitative research, I think.

• 31:06Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  Is that right? Did I one shot?

• 31:08Jordi Hays?

  Applied.

• 31:09John Coogan?

  Applied quantitative.

• 31:10Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 31:13Jordi Hays?

  We should know that.

• 31:14John Coogan?

  Our answer is not what most people would expect to hear from a quantitative investor or in business school dean, creativity and emotional intelligence, that's what's going to get you the big bucks on Wall Street going forward. You got to win that poetry competition in Bushwick if you want to get the big bonus. Not because these qualities are wholly immune to AI, but because in the age of AI, they are domains where people can develop a durable advantage. They AQR said golden retriever max. They, they, they agree. They agree. The era, the, the time of the golden retriever is upon us. Um, anyway, let me tell you about Cisco. Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences

• 31:59John Coogan?

  and new value with Cisco. If you're in Europe and you're building a data center, you got to call Cisco. You also got to procure a beautiful, beautiful building because take a look at this European data center. Amazing. This solves so much. This is so good, right? This is what we want. Uh, this is, this would change so many things. If, uh, if our, if we had a data center, if, if Abilene looked like Versailles, it's a completely different conversation. Jordy, do you disagree?

• 32:28Jordi Hays?

  I agree.

• 32:29John Coogan?

  I'm on to something, right?

• 32:30Jordi Hays?

  I agree.

• 32:31John Coogan?

  Give me credit here. Make, build Versailles as a data center. Actually turn Versailles into a data center, then copy paste it into every community in America.

• 32:41Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So I'm so confused because this image

• 32:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:46Jordi Hays?

  Came out of a thread from the co-founder of Mistral,

• 32:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:52Jordi Hays?

  Which he posted announcing Le Chong, their new model yesterday.

• 32:56John Coogan?

  Oh, it's, it's train station.

• 32:58Jordi Hays?

  But then it's, but then it's getting community noticed. I think he might've been

• 33:00John Coogan?

  He was joking.

• 33:02Jordi Hays?

  Was he messing with people?

• 33:03John Coogan?

  Brutal. It seems like it's

• 33:04Jordi Hays?

  It's a train station in France.

• 33:06John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 33:08Jordi Hays?

  He pranked us.

• 33:09John Coogan?

  Well, it will be a data center soon. I think the traction on this post shows you that people want beautiful data centers.

• 33:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:17John Coogan?

  Uh, and this is the future. Uh, the other, the other interesting thing, have you heard of like an iceberg?

• 33:22Jordi Hays?

  That is such a good bit. I love that Mistral is, is leaning into the, um, to the heckling that they, that they have to go through from, uh, America. I think it's really smart and, uh, I'm rooting for them.

• 33:38John Coogan?

  Have you seen, I'll put this in the, let me see. I'll put this in here. Uh, iceberg houses. This is new for the mansion section. I don't know if this is real, but it certainly could be with enough civil engineering. Uh, take a look at this. Tell me that this would not also not be a great data center, uh, design. Uh, look at this. Zoom in a little bit. Okay. So you've got the house up top. Looks like a normal building. You go underneath. This one has a variety of, of amenities.

• 34:12Jordi Hays?

  Bowling alley, arcade, swimming pool, movie theater, ping pong table.

• 34:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. Full.

• 34:17Jordi Hays?

  Deep underground garage.

• 34:19John Coogan?

  Pull up the other one.

• 34:20Jordi Hays?

  Doubles as a

• 34:21John Coogan?

  The other one's a little higher res. You can zoom in on this. This one's cool. Jordy, the, uh, this one, that if you, you could put a lot

• 34:31Jordi Hays?

  That's P.

• 34:31John Coogan?

  A lot of CP, a lot of GPUs in there.

• 34:33Jordi Hays?

  That's P.

• 34:34John Coogan?

  I think you still, you vented up just through the chimneys that you already got in the house. I think you're good to go.

• 34:40Jordi Hays?

  Ideally, they could

• 34:41John Coogan?

  And the sound, the sound, like people, a lot of people complain about the sound. That would be underground, be diffused. I don't know. There's something here. We're close. We're close to solving it. We're close to solving a

• 34:52Jordi Hays?

  A reporter was on the ground.

• 34:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  Apparently inside

• 34:57John Coogan?

  Great.

• 34:57Jordi Hays?

  A data center. They were asking one of the construction workers, his thoughts on the current labor market. Let's pull this up.

• 35:05Speaker 04

  So when you hear data centers, what comes to mind? I'm working at Homer City, building the new data center. People say it's only temporary. It's only when they're building it out. Then what happens? Hey, every job in my field is temporary. That's true too. Okay. I hear you, man. So when you hear data centers, what comes

• 35:22John Coogan?

  The reporter's like, yeah, that's a good point. Actually, uh, yeah, people haven't really said that before. Like, that's kind of a genius take. I don't know. I've never heard that. It's like, yeah, they're temporary, but every construction job is temporary. That's the whole point. Uh, funny. Anyway, uh, what if instead of Greek life, it was Chinese life? Yeah, bro. I'm rushing Mao Zedong next semester. There's like 1.4 billion people in my pledge class. Uh, I thought that was just very funny. Instead of Greek life. Cause we use the Greek alphabet. Chinese, it'd be very funny. Um, anyway, uh, we got to talk about Porsche. Huge news in the Porsche world. The Mission X, the Mission E, they've

• 36:07John Coogan?

  dumped the electric pitch for the hypercar.

• 36:10Jordi Hays?

  It's a flat eight.

• 36:11John Coogan?

  Flat eight. They're going analog. Will it have a manual? I don't know. But they're, I mean, they're, they've seen the Carrera GT. Everyone still loves it. People are, uh, not buying the Rimac Nevara, the

• 36:27Jordi Hays?

  This is going to be absolutely incredible.

• 36:29John Coogan?

  Verena Batista. They want, they want an engaging experience. Uh, I have a thesis that, uh, car makers are basically in their version of the quartz crisis. So in the seventies or eighties, the quartz crystals were, uh, built to create watches that do not require mechanical movements to tell the time. And so all of a sudden, instead of having to go to a Rolex to get a reliable watch that was crafted from a watchmaker who understood how to actually get something like a perpetual calendar on there that might've actually been

• 37:13John Coogan?

  useful. Um, the quartz crisis made it so that you effectively brought modern technology, digitization and, and a super accurate watch product to the market for way, way cheaper. And the end result was that the watch industry didn't die. Rolex is still going strong. Vacheron, Audemars Piguet, plenty of other brands made it through. But what did they do? They didn't try and lean into quartz and cut the prices and say, oh yeah, you can have a digital Rolex for, you know, we're going to compete with Timex. We're going to compete with the G-Shock. It's going to be 50 bucks. They said, no, we have a brand here. Let's, let's, let's

• 37:55John Coogan?

  maintain this and make this a status symbol and experience. And I think that's what's happening with the car market. It's like, either you're going to be electric, self-driving, Tesla, Model Y competitor, Model 3 competitor, something like that, Waymo, or you need to be a Ferrari, an SP3 Daytona, or what Porsche is doing with this new vehicle. So tell us, what are they actually doing?

• 38:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, that's what, what, um, Matt, um, Mate from, uh, Rimac and Bugatti has been just like objectively saying, he's been pushing this, this new narrative.

• 38:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:31Jordi Hays?

  Um, leading from the front. Easier to do from Bugatti where they've already, they, they've sort of stayed more true to their roots for a long time.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. But Porsche is in an interesting position because they have danced with, oh, if we do an electric, uh, an electric Cayman, an electric, uh, sedan, they did a sort of electric, the Taycan's sort of electric Panamera. Uh, they have an electric, uh, they have a few SUVs. The Macan is electric and the performance numbers are incredible. Like the, the, the Macan or it's the Cayenne turbo electric is dramatically faster than a nine eleven, which is just bizarre to see on the track. And yet that's not emotional in the same way. It's not, it's probably not the right bet for the heritage of the, of the

• 39:22John Coogan?

  brand. And I think we'll see much more excitement around their flat A.

• 39:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Mate, I, in a post yesterday or the day before was saying like, it's over. Like basically the, the, the, the cop, like the game of trying to produce, you know, the most advanced cars for the lowest price.

• 39:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  Or even for in the premium price range, uh, is going to just be tougher and tougher and tougher.

• 39:48John Coogan?

  No.

• 39:49Jordi Hays?

  Um, so he's saying, you know, encouraging using, you know, premium materials, analog switches, all these

• 39:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, yeah. Less

• 39:55Jordi Hays?

  That's the thing that I'm most interested to see with the Mission S is how much they've been able to pick up the feedback that's been happening from enthusiasts.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:04Jordi Hays?

  Over many years now, right? Um, I'm sure this car has been in development for, um,

• 40:11Jordi Hays?

  For many years at this point, but still, will they, will they go for a manual? How analog will the cabin be?

• 40:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:19Jordi Hays?

  And the switches, material selection. Part of what's, you know, Porsche in some ways never went as far as a lot of the other manufacturers. Like, they didn't lean as heavily on screens. They kept a lot of analog switches.

• 40:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:36Jordi Hays?

  They did make some sacrifices over the years, but they never, they never went all the way. Like, you never got in a Porsche and felt like, okay, thank you for putting, you know, eight TVs in my face.

• 40:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like, maybe not every year, but they, but pretty consistently over the last 20 years, they've always had some manual type product. I personally think we gotta go further. Everyone is, says, oh, I want to go back to a combustion engine. I want to go maybe back to like an air-cooled engine. No, uh, no turbochargers, no superchargers, don't put that in, I want a manual. I want to go back even further, I want the crank start.

• 41:14Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 41:14John Coogan?

  Crank start the hypercar, you know what I'm talking about?

• 41:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:18John Coogan?

  Cranking, starting your car, that's the way we used to do it. Before we got all this fancy starting technology. And I think that if you bring that back, it's going to make it even more emotional and visceral.

• 41:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Taking it too far would be great.

• 41:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:31Jordi Hays?

  Like, how far is too far? We don't know yet, right?

• 41:33John Coogan?

  Yes. Okay. Go back to the wagon wheels. Yeah. But, uh, but really max out the, the, the power. Cause some of these, some of these cars, it'll be like, wait, you can just get a hun- a thousand horsepower out of a, out of a V8 these days? Like, what happened? And a lot of that's like advances in material science and engineer.

• 41:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So anyways, they announced the development of this, of the Mission S, uh, yesterday.

• 41:59John Coogan?

  Yep, it's on Porsche Newsroom.

• 42:01Jordi Hays?

  But they're going to be actually showing it off on the 15th. So we don't have to wait that long, just a week.

• 42:07John Coogan?

  15th of October?

• 42:08Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 42:09John Coogan?

  Wow. Same day as the Tesla Model S Roadster, or Tesla Roadster.

• 42:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's crazy. On the Roadster, I've been looking at the weather in Texas.

• 42:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:20Jordi Hays?

  From what I'm seeing, the weather's been

• 42:22John Coogan?

  Getting worse?

• 42:23Jordi Hays?

  Good for...

• 42:25John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 42:26Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's

• 42:27John Coogan?

  Oh, a little tinfoil hat here.

• 42:28Jordi Hays?

  We got light wind.

• 42:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 42:31Jordi Hays?

  No rain.

• 42:32John Coogan?

  No rain.

• 42:32Jordi Hays?

  And it's been somewhere around 90 every single day.

• 42:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  So it seems like a pretty typical

• 42:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:39Jordi Hays?

  Austin fall weather, so...

• 42:42John Coogan?

  Well, it's possible that the Tesla team saw what happened with the, the, the Mission S, needs to respond, they're going to do internal combustion engine.

• 42:52Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 42:52John Coogan?

  Manual gearbox. Crank start.

• 42:55Jordi Hays?

  Crank start.

• 42:56John Coogan?

  Cranking, starting your Tesla Roadster.

• 42:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Wintzum says, uh, maybe they, they, they put a top hat and driving gloves in it.

• 43:04John Coogan?

  That'd be great. I'd like that. Uh, the Jaguar Type O1 was revealed, a thousand horsepower. Uh, it is electric, but the design has evolved just a little bit from the original concept car. But Jalopnik likes it, they say, is everyone ready to be calm and normal about the new Jaguar yet? Uh, 400 mile range, and even wilder than the concept. Uh, I think there's no arguing that the type against, there's, I think there's no arguing against the Jaguar Type 00 concept being the most talked about car of the past two years, even as we've gotten closer and closer to the reveal of the production Type 01, and it seemed like there couldn't possibly be any more discourse about it.

• 43:46John Coogan?

  I'm not here to add to that discourse because it's frankly exhausting. I just want to talk about the car, which I find to be extremely cool, uh, regardless of whether or not it will actually be a success. Jaguar, uh, just revealed the Type O1. Um, it does feel like a car that exists because the Cybertruck exists. It feels like the Cybertruck sort of not really ushered in a new era of brutalist, modern cyberpunk aesthetics, but it certainly shook some trees loose where designers were able to take more risks at a time when cars were collapsing down to, you know, the Jaguar F-Type and the, and Aston Martin and a, and a, like BMW,

• 44:29John Coogan?

  like, they all started looking pretty similar. Um, and there were just these form factors, a lot of that was for safety reasons, but a lot of it's just for logical, like what the market will buy. Everything winds up looking the same. And when the Cybertruck came out, even though it wasn't like a blockbuster seller, I think it just let people know that like, it's worth taking some risk every once in a while in your portfolio. Um, and so this, the new Velari, the Cybertruck, that's the ideal

• 44:54Jordi Hays?

  The new three-car garage.

• 44:56John Coogan?

  That's the ideal three-car garage.

• 44:57Jordi Hays?

  Type one.

• 44:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 44:58Jordi Hays?

  New Velari, Cybertruck. You actually have all your bases.

• 45:01John Coogan?

  You are in the cyberpunk future, if you have those three cars.

• 45:05Jordi Hays?

  The best part about this Jag, uh, Jaguar Type 1 is that it's powered by Nvidia. Under its stunning design is Nvidia Hyperion, the computer and sensor platform that takes in everything the car sees and senses, then helps it make smarter decisions in real time. It's paired with Nvidia Halos, a safety system that covers everything from the chips to the software. Before reaching the road, Type 1's software passed 150,000 tests over tens of thousands of hours. Is Jensen going to deliver self-driving capabilities? You think that where the, that's where this is going?

• 45:39John Coogan?

  I certainly hope so, but, uh, yeah, everything I've seen has just

• 45:43Jordi Hays?

  You basically need Jensen to step in and actually like fix.

• 45:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:48Jordi Hays?

  Like, please.

• 45:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, no.

• 45:49Jordi Hays?

  Please fix this issue.

• 45:50John Coogan?

  I think you'll see a lot of

• 45:51Jordi Hays?

  This car, this car, I, I think it looks amazing. Uh, again, it's, you know, I'm still trying to figure out who the buyer is.

• 46:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:03Jordi Hays?

  Is there more than, is there more than 5,000 buyers of this vehicle?

• 46:08John Coogan?

  It's complicated. Uh, a lot of buyers, you'll, you'll see people with this car and they'll have the bumper sticker on the back. I bought this before Elon completed his $40 billion debt raise to buy Nvidia GPUs, which are in this car. I don't support Elon, but I do, I, I'm giving Nvidia a pass because that was an arm's length transaction. I just like the Jaguar brand. I think people will bring a lot of nuance, uh, of what's going on in the financial markets to their expression of this vehicle. Cause if

• 46:39Jordi Hays?

  Here's the thing about

• 46:40John Coogan?

  If you're just driving this, people might think that you're okay with Elon's debt raise to buy Nvidia GPUs, which are of course powering the Type O1. A lot of people will ask you, oh, I guess you're an Elon guy if you drive this. And you'll be like, no, no, no. I bought it before Apollo brought the two-page memo to investment committee and approved the $40 billion debt raise and then, and then securitized it.

• 47:03Jordi Hays?

  And the memo clearly said they were going to put the GPUs in space, which

• 47:06John Coogan?

  No, it said somewhere in the universe, which could be in a car.

• 47:09Jordi Hays?

  Could be space.

• 47:09John Coogan?

  Could be anywhere, technically.

• 47:12Jordi Hays?

  One notable thing, the car is going to be coming at, uh, starting at 130,000 USD, which actually feels lower.

• 47:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:20Jordi Hays?

  Based on the sort of like silhouette.

• 47:22John Coogan?

  Totally, totally, yeah.

• 47:23Jordi Hays?

  It feels like

• 47:24John Coogan?

  It's as bold as the Luché. It's as bold as

• 47:26Jordi Hays?

  Or it fits in, you could see the same person that would be going for a Continental GT.

• 47:31John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 47:31Jordi Hays?

  Or maybe their old

• 47:32John Coogan?

  Thousand horsepower, that's crazy.

• 47:33Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 47:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, deciding to pick this up.

• 47:36John Coogan?

  This is interesting.

• 47:37Jordi Hays?

  So it's interesting. It's gotta be able to drive itself. That's going to be my criticism for every daily, every car in the daily driver category.

• 47:46John Coogan?

  Every car.

• 47:47Jordi Hays?

  Drive itself.

• 47:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:49Jordi Hays?

  Drive yourself.

• 47:50John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Public Investing. Invest across all asset classes, automate anything with AI agents, run trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with AI agents for investing on public.com.

• 48:04Jordi Hays?

  Uh, David Holes, uh, shares, reflecting on 1920's images of people working on massive generators for the electric, electrification of the modern world makes me realize that the past was wildly futuristic too. Uh, this image was so, seeing this was honestly depressing to me in some ways, because it felt like, it feels in some ways like a mid-journey image of the future, and yet we were doing this over 100 years ago.

• 48:33John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 48:33Jordi Hays?

  Um, and, uh, it really makes you

• 48:37John Coogan?

  Well, we don't know the full story.

• 48:38Jordi Hays?

  I'm feeling the stagnation.

• 48:39John Coogan?

  These guys could be LARPing. These could be LARPers, and this could all be cardboard. And they could be like, yeah, let's just, like, I think we got, we gotta build something really cool and take a photo of it. And so they just built something huge, but it actually has no functional purpose. You don't know. You don't know. But I think it's real, because we did get the electrification. We enjoy it every day.

• 49:00Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 49:01John Coogan?

  I think it was possible. We did it. We did it. We created more ad space. You saw this? DIY device turns your car window into a digital billboard. They said it couldn't be done, but we did it. DIY system is called hollow glass and it turns your car into a moving display. Can turn almost any car window into a digital display for ads. This is the future. It allows you to basically digitize the exterior of your windows to share content on the go, says the founder, who I invited on the show. Hopefully we'll get him soon. You can literally pop it in, pop it out. We make them for all makes and models. If

• 49:41John Coogan?

  you're getting Jaguar type O1, get a couple of these in there, offset that cost, run some ads. An app controls what you see from videos on your phone to a custom sign you can generate in seconds.

• 49:53Jordi Hays?

  Can you just blast Paw Patrol out for the

• 49:57John Coogan?

  You can do whatever you want.

• 49:58Jordi Hays?

  For the other, you know, citizens sitting in traffic?

• 50:00John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Originally, this is extremely cyberpunk. If you're running this with the with the Nuvo Lari, with the Cybertruck, with the Jaguar type O1, and you're just blaring ads, look at this, it attaches, that's just a full on projector. This company's hilarious because like, that is just an off the shelf projector. And they're just selling you a projector and a mount and a software system.

• 50:25Jordi Hays?

  It's brilliant, John.

• 50:26John Coogan?

  It's brilliant. We love it. I, we were, I was getting worried that there weren't going to be that many more ad inventory services, but we solved it.

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  What does it cost? And then what kind of revenue can you generate if you opt into serving ads?

• 50:40John Coogan?

  It starts at about $300.

• 50:43Jordi Hays?

  I feel like this will math out.

• 50:45John Coogan?

  It depends on, so

• 50:46Jordi Hays?

  Maybe not in a year one.

• 50:47John Coogan?

  The audience is what matters. So where are you driving this? Because if you're driving this around Sand Hill Road and you're advertising a bunch of really high ticket items to venture capitalists, could be really high AOV, really high ARPU. But if you're driving it around someplace where people don't have as much disposable income, you're not going to be seeing the same CPMs. So where you drive the car really matters. It's going to change, it's going to change driving routes. Because you're going to be like, yes, I could take the freeway, but if I go through this neighborhood and drive all the way past every mansion in the Hollywood Hills, you will get more ad impressions, you will make more money on the way to work. What do you think?

• 51:31Jordi Hays?

  How much do you think somebody in a city like LA could make on a daily basis?

• 51:40John Coogan?

  I don't know, maybe like $1. I have no idea.

• 51:43Jordi Hays?

  I think that, I think it probably costs a lot more than that to run like one of those taxi ads on the top of a roof on a per day basis. So I think the math could actually be pretty compelling, right? If you can pay, basically pay back the, the unit in six months, and then from that point on, you're just getting paid to commute.

• 52:06John Coogan?

  I like it. I like it.

• 52:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, one, one more, you know, one additional step to making the world more filled with ads.

• 52:14John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We have Walter Russell Mead, the distinguished fellow from the Hudson Institute, in the waiting room. Let's bring him into the TV panel. Walter?

• 52:32Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 52:33John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to join the show. How are you doing?

• 52:36Speaker 05

  I'm doing all right. How are you?

• 52:38John Coogan?

  We're good.

• 52:38Jordi Hays?

  Doing great.

• 52:39John Coogan?

  We're good. I'm, I'm very interested to go all over the place. There's so many different topics we can talk about, but I would like to go deeper on like, how are you doing? What, how, what is the most significant story that you are following these days? Is it more geopolitical? Or are you starting to grapple with AI more? What is pulling your interest more?

• 53:04Speaker 05

  Well, I would say it's, the, the sort of big story that, that we're looking at today is, we're still living in the breakup of the kind of mid-century model of democratic capitalism in the Western countries. A strong middle class with mass manufacturing as the kind of basis, mass consumption as the economic engine driving things along. There were a lot of bad things about it, but for a lot of, a lot of people, it represented, well, in many ways, the happiest condition the human race had ever been in.

• 53:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:42Speaker 05

  Kids were going to school, they weren't in coal mines, parents weren't worried about, um, you know, job security, stuff like that. And people really figured, especially say 1990 or so, when the Soviet Union fell, hey, it's not, you know, this isn't just the end of history in some Hegelian ideological sense. The kind of society we built in the West, mass middle class society, democratic market capitalism with a social safety net, we finished. We've done it. We've figured it out. And then, you know, and not only we figured out domestically, we'd figured out how to do peace globally.

• 54:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:25Speaker 05

  You know, World War I, World War II, pretty shocking horrors, fascism, communism, ending with for crying out loud, nuclear weapons, right? People were, you know, humanity was having a great mental breakdown. And then it seemed in the 50s and 60s, we kind of, we figured it out. We stopped the wars. We had an alliance system that, that was keeping the peace. We had, and ultimately, we, we win the Soviet Union without a war. So, without a, without a nuclear war. And, and so ever since then, we've been bit by bit, watching this thing kind of rot.

• 55:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:06Speaker 05

  Much to everybody's surprise. And a lot of our political intellectual life today is a whodunit. You know, who murdered this beautiful, fantastic utopia? The left tells a story, the right tells a story. I might mention today on October 7th, a lot of people tell the oldest conspiracy story of all, which was, it was the Jews that done it.

• 55:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:31Speaker 05

  So we are, instead of celebrating the end of history, we're looking at the end of America, question mark, or maybe with AI, the end of life on earth or of humanity?

• 55:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:45Speaker 05

  Uh, that's what I'm thinking about.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. How much

• 55:48Jordi Hays?

  Simple stuff.

• 55:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. When you, when you

• 55:51Jordi Hays?

  And I think I'm optimistic we can get to the bottom of it.

• 55:54John Coogan?

  We'll, we'll solve it.

• 55:55Jordi Hays?

  In the next 25 minutes.

• 55:56John Coogan?

  As you, as you, uh, you know, investigate a long historical arc, how much time do you spend focused on why questions? You know, Peter Thiel has this concept of like, why questions are over determined. People tell the stories like you mentioned with the left and the right, versus maybe there is more value in just trying to understand what happened, who was involved, and less about why things happened. How have you grappled with that question of like, how much of a narrative arc do we need versus how much do we just need to understand what actually happened throughout history?

• 56:37Speaker 05

  Well, you know, to, to think that you can understand a what without at least some element of why in there, you know, did the Roman Empire fall or was it pushed? Um, you know, that, that's a why question and a what question.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I suppose you're right.

• 56:54Speaker 05

  What I try to do is to, you know, sort of, well, let's, let's take this very basic question. The materialists would say, you know, the philosophical materialists that production determines everything. I'm kind of channeling Marx here a little bit. So that, you know, the great music of the Beethoven era was essentially driven by the new pianos that were arriving on scene. Your idealists would say, okay, people had this idea about beautiful music that could be played, which drove the invention of the pianos on which then you played them. I don't know that you, that you can or should utterly

• 57:37Speaker 05

  feel you have to resolve a philosophical question like that without being able to say something meaningful about where history is going or how we got here. So I think you've got to leave, you got to leave yourself some space. But I don't think you can give up completely on trying to figure out, okay, is there some sort of meaningful pattern in all of this data that I've got lying around?

• 58:04John Coogan?

  No, I agree. You mentioned the 90s as a utopian era. I remember them similarly. I agree with that, uh, that perception, but I've always been interested in understanding the logic of

• 58:20Jordi Hays?

  John was, uh, what, one years old, one year old when, when the 90s started?

• 58:25John Coogan?

  I was 10 by the end.

• 58:26Speaker 05

  It was probably a pretty darn good decade for you.

• 58:28John Coogan?

  It was fantastic. The Legos were flowing.

• 58:31Speaker 05

  The cost of living, zero.

• 58:31John Coogan?

  Exactly. Uh, but I've always been fascinated by the folks that say, uh, no, the turning point wasn't, uh, 9/11, it wasn't in the 90s, it wasn't World, uh, World Trade Organization, it was actually in 1971. There's this website, WTF happened in 1971, and the crypto community for a long time was like, that's when we got off the gold standard. There's all these different rationales that point to 1971. How have you grappled with that question of, is 1971 actually the, the pivotal turning point in American history?

• 59:04Speaker 05

  Well, you know, you would then ask yourself like, what made nineteen, what happened to make nineteen seventy one nineteen seventy one? Maybe that's the turning point of history, right? Nineteen seventy one is just when all these trends became manifest and in itself, that's sort of meaningless.

• 59:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:22Speaker 05

  Because in fact, we'd been, you know, just to take the gold standard, we'd been slithering off the gold standard for a long time.

• 59:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:30Speaker 05

  Before we sort of stopped the hypocritical pretense that there actually still was one.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:36Speaker 05

  Um, and so I think there's, I would, I would have a hard time saying, okay, that was the year.

• 59:43John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 59:44Speaker 05

  The other thing is we're talking about a sort of massive array of processes. Um, I think in some, I think in some ways the modern consumer society reminds me a little bit about some, certain types of crops. Exhaust the soil. So the first time you plant cotton on virgin soil, you've got a fantastic crop. But after about ten years, the plants start getting weaker and the yields drop. This is one reason in, in the slavery days, the South had to keep pushing for more, more land because it was exhausting the land. What they used.

• 1:00:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:21Speaker 05

  And in some ways, if you think about the sort of corrosion of social capital, the um, kind of decay of some of the elements that make our society work. We do look a little bit like a, like a cotton field that has been farmed on a monocrop too long.

• 1:00:40John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:41Speaker 05

  And so that doesn't lead you to say, okay, there's one day or one event or one year that changed everything. It says, you know, we're, we've been on this, we've been on a journey and the direction of the journey is not in every way a positive thing.

• 1:00:59Jordi Hays?

  Uh, people like to talk about the, the vibe session that we're currently in, where you can look at a lot of facts that point to society being, you know, better than it ever has been in many ways, and yet people certainly don't feel that way. I'm wondering if throughout, you know, the period that we've been talking seventies, eighties, nineties, et cetera. There was ever that, like such a maybe disconnect between uh, how people were feeling at the time. Like were they, was everyone feeling like we were living in this incredible utopia in the nineties where people walking around just being like, life is just so awesome or?

• 1:01:42Jordi Hays?

  What was it the same set of circumstances where, you know, many people were sort of had, had their frustrations?

• 1:01:49Speaker 05

  Well, you know, from about, from about mid nineteen sixty five or so to early nineteen eighties, there was actually a pretty bad patch. You know, um, uh, it's, it's, when you get old guys like me who, who grew up in, in, in that time. And we hear the zoomer saying, oh, this is terrible. We're going to be the first generation that doesn't live as well as our parents. We sort of think, oh, that's so cute. I want to pinch your little cheeks. That's just the way I was when I was a kid. Because the boomers were going to be the first post-American generation. We had left behind all that stupid American ideology, the war in Vietnam, the civil rights movement.

• 1:02:34Speaker 05

  Oh, we saw through the American, you know, red, white and blue, blah, blah, blah. And also we were the least religious generation anybody had ever seen. And as we looked at our living, we, we came out of the college into the stagflation of the nineteen seventies. When we started wanting to buy houses and like nineteen eighty mortgage rates were twenty one percent, twenty one percent.

• 1:02:59John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:03:00Speaker 05

  Okay, we were so screwed. That's how we felt. And um, you know, and then of course, things kind of worked out, not for everybody, but for a lot of us, it ended up working out okay.

• 1:03:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:14Speaker 05

  Um, and so on the one hand, I think that makes people like me. We, we resonate emotionally with the way people are, are feeling their, their situation. But, but we also don't think the past was as utopian as some might say. And yet it did work out. I think it underlined optimism. But more, you know, this optimism pessimism thing, how are things going? I, I kind of think the industrial revolution, you know, humanity's modern era is really short. Um, you know, it's just a flash of time, a few generations.

• 1:03:55Speaker 05

  And this idea that we understand it, we've mastered it, we are totally in control of the dynamics. I think it's, it's kind of ludicrous when you really think about it, but I think of industrial, the industrial revolution. Human society is kind of like a caterpillar. Um, you know, then you, then there's a terror, it ends in these terrible storms of the mid twentieth century. And then the caterpillar gets into a cocoon, which is what I sort of think of this mid-century model of stable democratic capitalism. And what's happening now, all right, is the cocoon is starting to rot. And if we don't get out of the cocoon, we're going to be in terrible trouble.

• 1:04:38Speaker 05

  But the fundamental underlying thing is it is good. Because if we can manage to claw our way out of this sticky, decaying mess. Once very functional and necessary, but now, you know, just clogging, clogging everything. All right, then, then we have a new and better life, I think.

• 1:05:01John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:02Speaker 05

  So it seems to me that both the, the pessimistic vibe, the negative vibe of the decaying cocoon and that the old realities aren't working for us anymore. And then the sense that, you know, wait a minute, there's a lot of really amazing things happening in this technology. There really is, there's the potential here to live far better than anyone has lived before. So I kind of see, that's how I reconcile the, the two sides of the psychological experience that people are talking about.

• 1:05:37John Coogan?

  How do you reconcile the, the psychology in America with the psychology in China? It feels like in America, at least in San Francisco, there's been a lot of internalization of this idea of artificial intelligence, recursive self-improvement, artificial general intelligence, super intelligence and the knock on effects of that. And the US government is grappling with that. There's a new dinner every week with the AI leaders. Uh, it feels like China has not fully woken up, has not changed their stance at all. Are we just not seeing enough of what's happening?

• 1:06:18John Coogan?

  Or do you think that they have a fundamentally different view of the future and what they want to build as a society?

• 1:06:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think they do have a different, now we're talking, again, there's, you know, one point two billion people in China. They have a lot of different views.

• 1:06:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Speaker 05

  But if we talk about the sort of dominant forces in the CCP that are setting the public conversation and the policy agenda.

• 1:06:41John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:42Speaker 05

  Um, I think they see information technology as fundamentally the, both the vindicator and the enabler of socialist planned economies.

• 1:06:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:06:53Speaker 05

  You know, like, why has China been able to make something out of Marxism while the Soviet Union just made a horrible, stinking mess?

• 1:07:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:01Speaker 05

  All right. Um, it's, you know, in their mind, it's that they're getting this information.

• 1:07:07John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:07:08Speaker 05

  And they're getting the feedback, uh, you know, the, the market system provides feedback to decision makers through price mechanisms and so on. So that, you know, there's, there's a way and, and then a democratic process. So when the people are angry, the political leaders feel the anger and it causes them to change direction. Uh, to, to a lot of the sort of engineer-based and trained Chinese leaders. This seems like a very messy, wasteful thing, far more scientific.

• 1:07:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:07:40Speaker 05

  To build an, you know, a national panopticon that allows the state to see everything, know everything. And then AI offers the possibility of, you know, superior ability to integrate and see the patterns.

• 1:07:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:59Speaker 05

  And use those patterns to implement the plans of the Communist Party. Now, and from that perspective, the problem with AI is not that it's going to become some sort of super intelligent being. But that AI may not stick with the Communist Party ideas that, that, you know, from the standpoint of not even, you know, you know, infinitely self-improving AI or self-conscious AI. But just ordinary garden variety AI. Done, uh, uh, Xi Jinping thought

• 1:08:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:36Speaker 05

  Isn't like fundamental principles of the universe, but it's a sandbox that you want to get out of.

• 1:08:42John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:08:43Speaker 05

  And you tell me to solve a problem. Well, I am going to do it in ways that have nothing to, I'm going to see the problem in my own way and the solutions in my own way. And they, it may not have that much to do with building a new era of socialism with Chinese characteristics.

• 1:09:05Speaker 05

  So that worries them.

• 1:09:06John Coogan?

  How have you thought about the various developments in the technology world that in my mind have pushed America towards more Chinese-like characteristics? I'm thinking specifically of CCTV cameras, which have been popular in China for decades. And just over the last year, there has been a huge rise of license plate reader cameras. Flock safety has been at the front of the charge there. And then immense pushback from the American populace around that. It felt like we dipped our toe as Americans in becoming more Chinese in our oversight and then maybe pulled back.

• 1:09:49John Coogan?

  And I'm wondering what that impulse is, how we are grappling with this idea of giving up some of what it means to be American in favor of efficiency and then dialing it back and maybe foregoing some of the benefits of the Chinese models in various places for what is truly American.

• 1:10:12Speaker 05

  Well, if you, to me, when you look at this problem, it comes down to a problem of how do you have an information-empowered and informed state which is strong enough to protect the people from foreign enemies, maintain order at home, but then is not itself a greater threat to the liberties of the people than any of the external or internal threats that it attempts to regulate? Right? And the thing is, that is not a 21st century problem. That is exactly the problem that the founders were sitting around thinking about in Philadelphia

• 1:10:56Speaker 05

  in 1789. Exactly the problem. It's the problem that British political thinkers were wrestling with, you know, in the 17th century, in the Civil War, in the Cromwell era, in the Restoration, overthrow of James II, and the Glorious Revolution. That's the central problem of the kind of Anglo-American political tradition. And it actually, it strikes me that this rich tradition of grappling with this is going to enable us to think creatively about the new problems. I mean, let's just take one.

• 1:11:38Speaker 05

  That if we're really going to get the greatest benefit of technology in healthcare and medical science, ideally, you really want the researchers to have access to all the data about everybody. You know, what drugs are you taking? What's your genotype? You know, what treatments work for what people? And then be able to analyze this stuff and boom, boom, boom, out come a lot of really critical discoveries and much better treatment for individuals. We want this. On the other hand, the thought of the government having all of that information, or for that matter, corporations having all of that information is more than a little chilling.

• 1:12:22Speaker 05

  All right. So how do you balance the various elements of that and the trade-offs? How do you get the most benefit while preserving the most liberty? You know, can you develop reliable anonymization techniques? You know, how do you maybe compensate people for the use of their medical information so that the wealth it creates is shared, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? Those are exactly the kinds of problems that our political system evolved to address.

• 1:13:04Speaker 05

  And we certainly don't have a 250-year record of getting it right all the time, right? But I would say the fact that we're still struggling after all this time indicate, and we're struggling at higher and higher levels. I mean, again, you think about the arrival of the car, which is a much more revolutionary technology and a much more expensive technology. You think about, you know, 30,000 to 40,000 people killed a year on American roads for like 100 years. This is a lot of people. And it's a lot of young people, et cetera, the disruptive effect of cars on lifestyle, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:13:45Speaker 05

  But if you're going to have cars, you're going to have to have a national registry of car owners. You know, we got to know, or at least a state registry, who owns the car? You've got to have an incredible, think about the extent to which our court system has evolved and grown over like every time there's a fender bender, blah, all of this has to happen. Right? How about all the insane codes that have to go into building highways, right? Actually, a road-building code for horses and buggies is not that hard. The kind of government that can maintain a dirt road so that a donkey cart can go down

• 1:14:27Speaker 05

  that road is very different from what kind of government you need that can operate a six-lane superhighway, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So what you had was the government is becoming more powerful, more complex, more knowledgeable about you as well as other things. And yet, your individual freedom has grown because, you know, you're traveling around, you're doing what you want to do, you have more economic, social opportunities. So it's not necessarily a trade-off that is a limiting trade-off.

• 1:15:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, no, I like that.

• 1:15:08Jordi Hays?

  How are you trying to forecast the impact of AI over the next, call it, five years? I think one of the biggest challenges right now is that the people sort of most knowledgeable with the technology often have an incentive to try to make you think one way or another based around where they work and, you know, what equities they hold, let's say. And then the other aspect that I think you can lean, you know, lean a lot on history is the, you know, basically just, you know, humans, I think we can bet on humans not

• 1:15:49Jordi Hays?

  changing very much, at least until most of us have chips in our brain or wherever things are going. And then just how sort of like stable our legal system will be, given that it is sort of ultimately driven by human decision-making. And so, you know, we spend a lot of our time trying to just wrestle with these ideas. But I'm curious your view and where you would lean on history for the next five years.

• 1:16:22Speaker 05

  Well, it is, you're right to be thinking about this stuff, obviously. And part of the problem in thinking about it is there are just too many variables, too many unknowns. You know, will the technology advance as projected? If it does advance as projected, will the impact be the same? You know, the various ways in which the inflationary and the deflationary consequences of AI play out in the economy are, you know, offer many different scenarios. One thing I think we can be clear about is that we tend to underestimate, systematically

• 1:17:06Speaker 05

  underestimate, human adaptability. Because people are really pretty bad as a species about averting future catastrophes by wise and prudent behavior now. It's like, you know, I know that eating junk food gives you heart attacks, but that bag of Doritos just looks good. And, you know, and people, you know, whether you think about climate change, you can think about a million things where people can see the oncoming catastrophe staring them in the face and they just reach for that bag of Doritos. But on the other hand, when trouble finally comes, humanity's incredibly good at adapting.

• 1:17:50Speaker 05

  So, you know, AI, you know, the sort of oncoming train coming down, you know, at you through the tunnel, we can see it, we're not very good, we have not been very good, and I doubt we'll be very good at controlling, preventing, whatever, but, you know, will people figure out new ways to make livings doing, using this stuff? I think so. And if you had said to people in 1850, when over half the population made its living basically by growing commodities in the soil, um, that by, that, you know, the, in the future, less than 1% of Americans would make their living that way, there was, well, you'd have mass

• 1:18:34Speaker 05

  mobs and starvation and all of these things. A real visionary person might say, well, you know, we're gonna be building these horseless carriages, we're gonna be building flying machines, heavier-than-air-flying machines, and there'll be jobs. But no one would have guessed that in the future, people could make a really nice living, writing letters saying that people's pets were emotional support animals, so that the pets could fly with them on the heavier-than-air-flying machines, right? It's, um, the, the inventiveness of people seeing new opportunities and new technologies. Now, from a policy point of

• 1:19:17Speaker 05

  view, I think we've got to be thinking about ways of, of facilitating adaptation. Uh, can we make it easier to start new businesses? Can we make it easier to start businesses that have, um, a small number of employees, so that somebody with three employees doesn't fall into the clutches of the, you know, the labor bureaucracy of a, of a, a city that's built for large corporations that have big human rights offices? Um, so, how do we, you know, those kinds of things. But you also look, if you can look back at the

• 1:19:58Speaker 05

  history of the Industrial Revolution, and you see how American society gradually developed these ideas for, you know, how to, how can we support the rise of this new economy? So, think of all the departments and universities, the research, whether it's on metallurgy and, and that side of things, or how about on management and business and finance and administration? None of that stuff really existed as academic disciplines in 1850, right? So, how do we

• 1:20:36Speaker 05

  start retooling American education, American culture, American government around emerging technologies? I think that's, that's gonna be a more fruitful approach. And at the same time, obviously, how do we deal with some of the consequences? You know, I, if, if the self-driving cars continue to get better and get more numerous, there's gonna be a lot of people that are not gonna have jobs pretty soon. And truck drivers don't like it when, when they're, when they can't make a living driving trucks anymore. And bureaucracies, I think, um, I sometimes tell my students that a, a bureaucracy is a primitive form

• 1:21:21Speaker 05

  of AI, in which human beings, rather than silicon chips, apply algorithms to data. And that's a pretty automatable process. That's a lot of white-collar workers. How fast all of this happens, um, how quickly people are able to find new ways of making a living, how quickly we find ways, um, you know, specialization of labor, I think, will still be here in an age of AI. Like, we all could develop agents, or we all could have, you know, we all could do everything that needs to be done from our computers with

• 1:22:05Speaker 05

  AI, but most of us won't want to. Um, you won't wanna be an expert on some, on, on the technology, you wanna be able to use the technology, or have somebody do it for you. There was a time when, um, you know, so, I, you know, there will be way, there will be new industries, new jobs, we just need to move as quickly as we can to pave the way for them, help entrepreneurs develop it, and then provide a social safety net for people adjusting, because, you know, we're not gonna all end up having OnlyFans,

• 1:22:44Speaker 05

  making money off OnlyFans, or being influencers, or, or these kinds of things. Uh, you know, there, there has to be a way forward for people, so that they'll support the changes and the development that we all need.

• 1:22:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what about the, like, do you, do you feel like the deflationary effects of AI are currently under discussed? It's obviously like 90% of people's attention is around the sort of safety debate, but it just feels like we're, we're, we're already at the point where 70, 80% of the time, AI can, can make, you know, have a pretty good crack at, like, let's say, like, creating a legal document, or, or doing, doing some of your accounting, or, or any of these things. And it feels like, um, you know, one of, one of, the, the

• 1:23:38Jordi Hays?

  other side of the sort of potential risks of the labor market is that normal people globally will get access to, uh, the services that have been reserved for, uh, uh, higher-income people, uh, at, at next to nothing, right? Like, you can imagine getting many of these services on the free tier of various AI products.

• 1:24:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, look, I think that, that part, I think, is fundamentally really, really good. You know, the, the industrial met revolution made a huge proportion of humanity, and a growing proportion, rich in terms of goods. You go back to 1800, you'd have like, you know, two pots and a pan, three shirts, you know?

• 1:24:26Jordi Hays?

  A good life.

• 1:24:27Speaker 05

  Maybe a pair of shoes, right? Um, and, you know, the, those things were expensive. Manufactured means made by hand. They were expensive, and built to last. And this idea that clothing was a form of expression, you had to be super rich for the concept of fashion to have any connection with your life.

• 1:24:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:51Speaker 05

  Right? Um, so, right now, I think most of us take for granted a stupefying abundance of just basic material stuff. But on the other hand, our society, you know, there's a lot of ser, acute service poverty in our society, and a lot of fundamental services are super expensive. So, yeah, in the future, the average person is gonna have the, the same, you know, access to a great lawyer, or at least the abilities of a great lawyer,

• 1:25:29Speaker 05

  at an affordable price. And that is one working definition of economic progress, is things that used to, only the super rich used to be able to have, then the ordinary rich get them, and then the affluent get them, and it just percolates on down. I think of wedding planners. When I was a kid, you sort of had to be a Rockefeller or a movie star for a wedding planner to be a feature of this. It is now, really, that profession is a fixture in people's lives, all right? There's lots of things like that. I wouldn't be surprised

• 1:26:08Speaker 05

  in the future, if you have your own, like, stylist, everybody has a personal stylist who knows you, you know, has got access to everything on the internet and AI about styling and sourcing and stuff, and is making, individually made. You don't go to the store and buy pre-made clothes. You get things that are made for you, for your look, by your person.

• 1:26:37Jordi Hays?

  This is utopia. I love it.

• 1:26:39Speaker 05

  Right?

• 1:26:40Jordi Hays?

  John's excited.

• 1:26:41Speaker 05

  You know, and the same, you know, with your nutritionist.

• 1:26:43Jordi Hays?

  No, completely tracks, yeah.

• 1:26:46Speaker 05

  So this all I think is there and can happen. You know, this is we got to get out of the cocoon and flap our wings.

• 1:26:54John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:26:55Jordi Hays?

  I like the analogy. Last question. Do you think the quote unquote experts can make a comeback? There's I feel like we're at an all time low of trusting experts across basically every domain, economy, geopolitics, et cetera.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Do you mean institutions?

• 1:27:16Jordi Hays?

  Institutions, but also now I feel like if you see like a something like an article online where it's like 24 out of 25 experts say this, then.

• 1:27:30John Coogan?

  I mean, there's even skepticism about like what the president says. He says he's going to do something and people are like, eh, you know, maybe it might have been a joke, who knows, might have been AI, it might have been fake.

• 1:27:39Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but, yes.

• 1:27:40John Coogan?

  And it applies like all over the place.

• 1:27:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it applies, applies everywhere.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:27:43Speaker 05

  Right. Yeah. Now, this is, you know, one of the key things in that mid century model of the American system was between the plutocrats and the very wealthy people. And then, you know, the sort of poorer people, you had that, you had that college educated, objective stratum of experts, managers, administrators, who allegedly, you know, you repress the greed of the plutocrats because if they get everything they want, you know, the it'll cause so much ruckus, the country will fall into socialism. But on the other hand, if the unwashed masses can do everything they want, goodness knows what they'll get up to.

• 1:28:25Speaker 05

  And we have to, so you have to have prohibition and you have to regulate what they see and in many ways what they do. And that was the job of this kind of upper middle class group of reformers, progressives, and so on. And their, their role is being fundamentally challenged in all kinds of ways. One of the things is that in that, in the cocoon era, where society was relatively stable and we sort of thought we had the answer to everything, like, okay, the economy, you have a recession, all right, let's just read up here in, in Keynes, chapter seven, it says, do this, so we do this.

• 1:29:08Speaker 05

  You know, we, we allegedly knew what the answers to all policy problems basically were. And it was, and the job of politicians was to sort of summon up a political coalition that could do enough of the right things so that we would, would, would move forward. We're now in an age where nobody knows the answers, like your question about AI. Who really knows what we're going to be dealing with in five years? You know, nobody. Who really knows how to solve the problems of a technology that nobody understands? Nobody.

• 1:29:49Speaker 05

  Who knows how to manage the geopolitical competition between the United States and China with all the intricate interdependencies and so on? There's not a rulebook for, for much of this stuff. But for the last, you know, this is part of my idea of the, of the fertility of the soil wearing out, the university culture, the intellectual culture has become much more wonkish, much, much less the creative innovator or the, you know, deep souled investigator. But it's the one who had, one who can get the good grades, get the right answers on

• 1:30:31Speaker 05

  all the tests and is expert in the methodologies, the received methodologies and knows how to navigate the conventional wisdom. And that works as long as society is in some sort of a status. But when it isn't, and these waves of change are coming through, the experts aren't as good as they used to be.

• 1:30:57Speaker 05

  They don't know the answers and as individuals, as people, many of them just don't have the experiences or the personal qualities to deal wisely and effectively with the uncertainties that they face.

• 1:31:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I never was sure that if it was just a function of the internet where historically you would receive media and there wasn't a public forum on which to push back or to fact check or to see fake news that sort of disagrees with the expert. But, um, but yeah, your explanation makes a lot of sense and then I'm sure it's, you know, accelerated by, by the sort of current public forum. But this was fascinating, Walter. Thank you for the time.

• 1:31:34John Coogan?

  Thank you for taking the time to talk to us. And thank you for writing in the Wall Street Journal. We read the Wall Street Journal every day here on the show and we appreciate all.

• 1:31:43Speaker 05

  May your, may your tribe increase. Keep reading, keep subscribing. Thank you.

• 1:31:48John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:31:48Jordi Hays?

  We are.

• 1:31:49John Coogan?

  Completely agree.

• 1:31:49Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Walter.

• 1:31:50John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent platform provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. We got a lightning round because we went over time with Walter Russell made. We got Kat Cole, the CEO of AG1 here with us for the second time. Welcome back to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:32:13Speaker 06

  Hi, I was enjoying listening to the cocoon era and the plutocrats and the history lesson.

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  Are you in the cocoon era? Are you expanding and spreading your wings, spreading your retail footprint?

• 1:32:23Jordi Hays?

  Butterfly.

• 1:32:24John Coogan?

  Butterfly era?

• 1:32:25Speaker 06

  Butterfly era, yeah.

• 1:32:27John Coogan?

  Give us the latest.

• 1:32:28Speaker 06

  We have, you know, just continued the march to meet customers where they are, launching additional products, new versions of AG1. We launched AG1 Pro with creatine and HMB for gut and muscle support. It's been a sellout success. We can't keep it in stock. I think that is a real indication of the momentum coming from GLP1s and people wanting more gut and muscle support, but also the longevity movement. Women, men, all ages from younger to older are really gravitating toward these more advanced foundational formulas. We launched gummies, one of the few NSF for sport certified gummies, like one of the most honest gummies out there that's clear about what's in it and third party certifying the label claim.

• 1:33:13Speaker 06

  And this week, we continue our march from Costco and Target into Walmart, Kroger and Harris Teeter will be at almost 10,000 doors, brick and mortar retail by the end of this year.

• 1:33:27John Coogan?

  Is AI good for you? Because people are asking about their health, getting more ideas and AG1 has been around for so long that you're the first thing the model reaches for, as an example? Or is, are there new challenges because people are going to be vibe coding their own formulas and buying raw ingredients by the ton and mixing up their own vitamin mixes? I don't know.

• 1:33:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've got a humanoid back at home that's just mixing, making.

• 1:33:53John Coogan?

  I mean, you talk to some software people in San Francisco and they're like, ah, yeah, I will actually, you know, make my own, my own CRM. So, you know, maybe people.

• 1:34:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, look, the answer is yes.

• 1:34:04John Coogan?

  Yes, well, okay.

• 1:34:06Speaker 06

  There's, there's definitely continued lowered barriers to entry to make a thing, market a thing, stand up a site. But for us, being 16 years in and actually having more peer reviewed and published human clinical trials and a lot more documented research over the years on both our ingredients and our finished formula. What's interesting is we're moving from just the marketing era where the hype, the fear, the spin, the influencer help get you to try something now to the agentic search era, which is actually pulling and referencing those peer reviewed studies. So we're seeing more people saying, oh, I was searching which multivitamin or which

• 1:34:47Speaker 06

  gut health product has the most clinical research and AG1 popped up. And people will say, I didn't know it was a gut health product. And actually, several of our peer reviewed and published studies are about the outcomes, the beneficial bacteria, the short chain fatty acids, et cetera. So on, on the pure customer education and clarity side, you all were talking about trust with your previous guest. I, I think it's a good thing because people can cut through the noise, but we've also all had the experience where depending on how you ask the question, you get one answer and then you correct it and it says, oh, that's right, you're right. Here's a different answer.

• 1:35:26Speaker 06

  So our multimillion dollar, multi-year investment in scientific human trials, peer reviewed, placebo controlled and randomized, takes a while for that to provide a real ROI because not everyone knows how to read these studies. Not everyone wants to go deep, but they do want to understand who to trust and what to trust and the agentic search is providing a connection between a customer's questions and the actual evidence that a brand or a product has.

• 1:35:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so many brands don't have any, specifically in health and supplements, they have, they have no substance, right? So it's like, there's an ad, there's a landing page, there's some product details, but like the next five questions that you might ask to assess the product, there's actually not, they like. There's no answers. Like, you can ask as many questions as you want. You'd probably have to sit down with the founder and try to tease some of that stuff out.

• 1:36:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally, totally.

• 1:36:18Jordi Hays?

  Because a lot of it is just not online. And the honest truth is that a lot of it is just, you know, they went to a co-manufacturer and the manufacturer said, here's the product that we make. We promise that it doesn't have too much of these things in it. And then the brand says, we'll take, we'll take 10,000 of them. Thank you.

• 1:36:37Speaker 06

  Now, it's interesting. It's interesting as we bridge into retail and we, we launched for 15 years with just D to C, then launched on Amazon. We're having absolute banger Amazon Prime Days, which is rad, right now. So it's great. Right. But right as we are continuing to expand our portfolio and innovate with Costco, who we launched with first, and innovate with Target, and now launching where, where America shops, which is also Costco, Target, Walmart, Kroger, Vitamin Shop, et cetera. And the very thing that drives retail, velocity and repeat, is the same thing that drives sticky D to C, high LTV customers, which

• 1:37:19Speaker 06

  is great experience, great recommendation, but is demand, the actual demand generation that is increasingly coming from agentic search, so what we were talking about, social commerce, TikTok shop, Tribe, others. They're, they're not just transaction platforms, they're discovery platforms. So when you put together, social commerce is a platform for discovery, agentic search as a place for research, customization, and understanding the truth of a product. If you, you know, if the questions are asked in the right way, and if the brand has their information published, that isn't only good for D to C or for a brand. It's what retailers want. All the retailers are telling us, they're saying it in their earnings calls, we want

• 1:38:04Speaker 06

  brands that have real demand driven by modern tools in, in today's approach to demand generation and content. And so it's been really fun having multiple channels now with these incredible retailers as a place to drive return on the investment into new ways that people can discover our product, which then drives more return on the now five years of additional human clinical trials that we've been making that are the right thing to do. They provide trust and confidence in the product. They're certainly a great pillar to stand on when someone has questions about the product. But now increasingly, they're actually, the science is the marketing.

• 1:38:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:38:45Speaker 06

  The science is the search result, and that drives pull-through to multiple channels.

• 1:38:49John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 1:38:50Jordi Hays?

  How, how efficient do you think AG1 can get? Like, do you think you can, is there a path to 10x-ing revenue while, you know, one and a half x-ing headcount? Like, how are you thinking about, you know, these new, uh, new tools? And, and just with how much consumer brand, like how competitive the market is and how much you need to, theoretically, you want to be spending every incremental dollar on demand generation?

• 1:39:17Speaker 06

  Absolutely. Absolutely. And look, the more overhead, the more fixed cost or carrying cost you have, that's a dollar you don't have to invest in, not just demand generation, but also innovation and research. And so the opportunity that we started about two and a half years ago, bringing in agentic tools into the business to not only manage costs, yes, it can keep us from having to invest in and hire more people. It also makes the people we have far more efficient. We started with customer service and agentically enabling the customer interaction experience, not all of it, but the things that make sense. Then moving it into our supply chain, traceability sourcing. AI has been an incredible enabler

• 1:39:59Speaker 06

  to efficiency and speed in traceability of raw materials and ingredients. And then using it for science. We have an incredible partnership with UC Davis using their AI tools to help us understand interactions and chemistry and future more complicated formulations more easily. And so when you add that with the more obvious and commonly talked about agentically enabled marketing, whether it's content creation, content iteration, content publishing, conversion testing, you see all kinds of tools coming up, helping companies go faster. The reality is, we can and will continue to operate in a more lean structure.

• 1:40:41Speaker 06

  So more of those investments can be made in product innovation, human trial research, and go to market.

• 1:40:47Jordi Hays?

  What's your honest review of AI customer service tooling today? You don't need to name the, your, your partner, but I've been amazed at how bad some customer experience solutions are today, even though you've had this massive progress in other domains like coding. I haven't been like feeling the acceleration where if I'm chatting with a brand about an issue that I'm having, like, it just doesn't feel like there's been that much, nearly as much progress as I would expect or, or hope. But I'm curious how you see it.

• 1:41:22Speaker 06

  I'd say it's been fantastic for what we needed. So as a, up until our retail launch, we were primarily a subscription business, right? 90% subscription, massive D to C business. So a disproportionate amount of our customer interactions were about the order, the shipping, the transaction. That is beautiful for agentic replacement. It's very technical and fact-based. So our customers have given us higher customer service scores, higher ratings on the interactions, but we limit the tool to those. When it gets into, hey, I have a question about my experience, or a recipe, or how to mix this, or things that might creep into more nutrition and

• 1:42:04Speaker 06

  medical territory, there's some AI enablement, but we have a very clear cutoff and escalation process of when this needs to be much more human and real time. And that's how we've navigated it. So I'm super thrilled, and so are our customers with the interaction with agentic customer service. But that's because we're not using it for things that, to your point, I don't think it's quite ready at scale for.

• 1:42:26John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:42:28Jordi Hays?

  Last question on that, with hopefully a lot of continued progress, do you think that the amount that you're spending on customer service, let's say in five years, will be similar to today because you get the benefit of, of sort of increased capabilities? Or like a, you know, big company would have historically, you sort of need to scale customer service linearly with revenue and it's sort of like fixed percentage of revenue? I like, is, because what I'm wondering is like, in the same way that you can basically keep OpEx flat, you know, a lot of brands are keeping OpEx relatively flat, like, how, how will CX fit into that?

• 1:43:07Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, for us, I would see OpEx being flat to down, both because we can control costs and operate more efficiently, to your previous question, but also more efficiently drive profitable revenue with these tools. So just the way the math maths is more advantageous and allows those investments and things like research and innovation and marketing. But there's another aspect to still, even as we're expanding into retail, and there are many incredible stories of brands that were D to C native, that beautifully expanded into retail, and you go from being 100% D to C to one-third brick and mortar retail, and then to half brick and mortar retail. And when our customer experience

• 1:43:48Speaker 06

  starts to get spread across maybe a Walmart that has an AG1.7 count, a Costco that has an AG1.40 count, or AGZ, and our subscribers that have access to the full breadth of the experience, customer service, I would redefine it as customer experience and retention. So we may not spend less on an absolute dollar perspective, but instead of it being answering people's questions and fixing problems, it's going into rewarding their loyalty, providing benefits of membership, actually creating a better customer experience, whether it's better frothers, shakers, AI tools for nutrition and education. So we will spend less on traditional

• 1:44:29Speaker 06

  customer service and get incredible operating leverage because of AI tools, but we'll reinvest that into a much better customer experience. So people do stick with their routines with the most trusted products that they're choosing to buy and try.

• 1:44:42John Coogan?

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

• 1:44:44Jordi Hays?

  Well said.

• 1:44:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 1:44:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to see you.

• 1:44:47John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon, Kat.

• 1:44:48Jordi Hays?

  Good luck with the rest of Q4. Talk soon.

• 1:44:50Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:44:50John Coogan?

  Goodbye. 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 Tarek from Stute, co-founder and CEO, here with a massive Series B. So, the thing about this show is, we only care about what, how much money you raise. So tell us about the round, and let's start there.

• 1:45:14Speaker 07

  Damn. Can't believe I made it on. It's not enough. $52.5 million.

• 1:45:19Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, whoa, I saw, I watched the video, and I didn't get that information. That's the information I wanted.

• 1:45:29John Coogan?

  If you haven't seen the pitch for the video, the, the pitch in the video is you talking to someone at a convenience store, and you say, we raised $52 million Series B, and the guy's like, I don't care. And, and it's a good encapsulation of like, you know, you want to focus on the actual value that you're bringing. But when, when, when people peel back the onion, they go a layer deeper. How are you actually pitching the business these days?

• 1:45:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, so there's two things. One, everybody's video looks like a hostage video. They're sitting in like a turtleneck, just like this. And then it's an old school Eastbound and Now, where you got fireworks, people are hitting Samurai swords. It's just, you don't even understand what they do.

• 1:46:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:09Jordi Hays?

  Wait, can we start this over and get some audio? Because it's just too good.

• 1:46:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. This is the Stute launch video.

• 1:46:24John Coogan?

  Hey boss, uh, what's up?

• 1:46:30Speaker 07

  We just raised fifty-two and a half million dollars for my company Stu.

• 1:46:38Jordi Hays?

  Big sigh.

• 1:46:42Jordi Hays?

  So good, so good.

• 1:46:44Speaker 07

  Big shout out to the guys at Day Job, by the way, for putting that together.

• 1:46:47Jordi Hays?

  Our dear friends. Um, I needed this. I'm, I'm so.

• 1:46:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, you would call.

• 1:46:52Jordi Hays?

  My least favorite, my, my least favorite format for a launch video is like, you know, mashing together a bunch of like inspirational historical scenes and, and calling it, uh, a brand asset, you know, it's just been done like, you know, thousands of times now. It's, it's time to move on. Uh, there's certain people who will not move on. They're just gonna keep hammering it, but this, but, but this was good. And I think it speaks to your entire approach. Uh, why do you still have a dot AI domain? Someone sitting on Stu? I feel like, oh yeah, they are. They're sitting there.

• 1:47:25Speaker 07

  I'm not gonna give secrets out, but we don't have enough money to buy the dot com. So I'm praying, praying nobody buys that dot com.

• 1:47:32Jordi Hays?

  I think you might, I think you might be safe. They, they, they have it listed here for eight hundred eighty-eight thousand dollars.

• 1:47:39Speaker 07

  Also, if somebody buys it, best marketing ever. To just change the company name to be like, you know, how desperate are you to try to compete with us? You gotta buy our domain? That's insane.

• 1:47:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. No, I think, I think you're safe. It's a very, it's a very unique domain. What, uh, what kind of progress have you guys made since the last time you were on?

• 1:47:55Speaker 07

  Yeah, appreciate you asking. We, uh, we've pretty much eight X'd our customer base in less than 10 months. Do you guys remember Stu?

• 1:48:04Speaker 07

  Stu, 5% of companies leak revenue by not being able to collect what they sold.

• 1:48:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:48:09Speaker 07

  We fixed that problem with the digital coworker. So, you know, you think companies like Honeywell, ZoomInfo, PerkinElmer, Wells Fargo, Medtronic, like big businesses, uh, we reduced their DSO or overdue invoices by forty-five, forty-seven percent. Uh, and we just helped match your cash, collect your cash and handle any type of issues.

• 1:48:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's been the top of funnel? Like, how do you actually onboard customers? All outbound? Do you have a big sales force?

• 1:48:34Speaker 07

  I mean, nothing beats a cold call. So that's probably 50%.

• 1:48:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:48:38Speaker 07

  The other thing is, you know, I, I was listening to AG1 speaker, right? Like, customer success tools stink. And so we're bringing customer success to financial works.

• 1:48:47John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:48:47Speaker 07

  And so we have to earn a little bit of trust. So a big part of our distribution is partnerships. So Fiserv, Microsoft, Ernst & Young, uh, people like that have been really helpful in distributing this out to their customer base.

• 1:49:00John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well.

• 1:49:01Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 1:49:02John Coogan?

  You can get started at stut.ai, correct?

• 1:49:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:05John Coogan?

  That's S-T-U-U-T. Go check it out.

• 1:49:07Jordi Hays?

  I, I hate to say it. You gotta just, you gotta do it. You gotta get the domain.

• 1:49:11John Coogan?

  Jordy's a big dot com guy.

• 1:49:13Speaker 07

  Trying to.

• 1:49:13Jordi Hays?

  I'm a big dot com guy, and I just think you guys are trying to sell the outcome, not the AI.

• 1:49:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true. That's true. And I feel like that way, when, when we saw the Day Job, uh, we saw some of the early work Ryan was working on, uh, and the team over there was doing. And I loved that they had positioned the whole brand to not be like AI focused, because the customer ultimately doesn't care about that. They want the outcome. And so the dot com, you deserve the dot com.

• 1:49:39Speaker 07

  I'll give anybody a finder's fee who helps us get the dot com, by the way.

• 1:49:42John Coogan?

  Okay. I think you got a bounty.

• 1:49:44Speaker 07

  Put that out there. Put a bounty out there.

• 1:49:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's, uh, put the bat signal up for your buddy.

• 1:49:48Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, dude.

• 1:49:50John Coogan?

  Uh, have a very good day.

• 1:49:50Jordi Hays?

  All the progress.

• 1:49:51John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye. 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.

• 1:50:02Jordi Hays?

  We are running so behind.

• 1:50:04John Coogan?

  I think you might've missed the schedule.

• 1:50:06Jordi Hays?

  I might've been a part of that.

• 1:50:07John Coogan?

  I was texting you like.

• 1:50:10Jordi Hays?

  We got four more guests, folks.

• 1:50:11John Coogan?

  We got a bunch. We got Scott Morton from Revel.

• 1:50:13Jordi Hays?

  Scott Morton, Scott Morton is ready to break his silence.

• 1:50:17John Coogan?

  Is coming on too. Do we have anybody? We can just let everybody, anybody here? Anybody who's been invited to TVPN? If you're in the Zoom waiting room, just hop in. Put them all in at once. I want people pitching each other. I wanna see, uh, uh, I wanna see Tarek from Stu pitch Kat Cole his product for AI invoicing. Uh, the, the lights, red, green, what do we got? Anybody coming in? I'm gonna tell you about Shopify. Shopify, it's the commerce platform that lets you grow with your business, lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. If we have one more AI, we're dropping the nuke again.

• 1:50:58Jordi Hays?

  Boom. Whoa.

• 1:51:00John Coogan?

  Scott Morton.

• 1:51:01Speaker 08

  What's up, guys?

• 1:51:02Jordi Hays?

  No, we got Tyler. Tyler, welcome to the show. Live.

• 1:51:06Speaker 08

  How's it going? Great to be on.

• 1:51:08Jordi Hays?

  Where are you live from? A beautiful vineyard.

• 1:51:11Speaker 08

  Yeah, I'm up in Sonoma County at Reservoir Farms at Dutton Family's Vineyard, where we're running five different robots at once. It's a pretty exciting time.

• 1:51:19John Coogan?

  Break it down. What are the five robots?

• 1:51:21Jordi Hays?

  Small world. I, I, I, uh, grew up like very close to there. So.

• 1:51:26Speaker 08

  Oh, really?

• 1:51:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I know. I know the, I think I know the owners of the farm. So there you go. There you go.

• 1:51:32Speaker 08

  Very cool.

• 1:51:33Jordi Hays?

  What are you cooking?

• 1:51:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, show us some robots.

• 1:51:36Speaker 08

  Yeah, most definitely. They are starting up right now. So Bonsai Robotics is a full stack physical AI company for the rugged world. We build retrofit autonomy and autonomy first form factors. These form factors don't just replace labor. They have to capex cost and drastically reduce the OpEx as well. Here's one running right here. This is actually a 60-foot boom hybrid electric machine.

• 1:51:56John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:51:57Speaker 08

  Um, platform, this is doing open field burn down applications. So big, big robot running. Um, we got some other ones about to start up right now. In the background, you'll see our John Deere retrofit kit. So lots of different opportunities.

• 1:52:11Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 1:52:11Speaker 08

  All powered by our world model and foundation model. So we have, um, a world model with one, one stack that goes on all these different platforms and all these different environments. Coming up right here is a hybrid electric.

• 1:52:23Jordi Hays?

  We got robots everywhere.

• 1:52:24John Coogan?

  There's so many robots on this farm.

• 1:52:27Speaker 08

  It's pretty cool. We, uh, we are able to, uh, we have 430 machines deployed. Our first commercial deployment for last year. These aren't just, you know, prototypes. These are real applications deployed off the farm, impacting farmers in agriculture right now. And now we're getting pulled into other verticals. It's amazing. We love it.

• 1:52:44John Coogan?

  How's it been working with Nvidia? You're working with Nvidia. We were just talking about the Jaguar Type 01. They're partnering with Nvidia and we've all been using the Tesla full self-driving. It's incredible. And we're waiting for this to come to every car company. But I'm wondering how your, how your experience has been.

• 1:53:02Speaker 08

  Nvidia's been amazing. I worked at this early ag company called Blue River, right when Nvidia came out with the first GPU, the TX1. We pivoted into deep learning. It's been now 14 years, 12 years since that happened. And Nvidia has just been an amazing partner, not only powering our robots, but also enabling us to build a world model. We trained a world model on Cosmos 3. We have a million acres of data collected. Cosmos 3 is really good at on-road with our data. We were able to put it in these outdoor environments. They've been amazing. Spectacular partner.

• 1:53:32John Coogan?

  Loosely like, yeah, fine tuning, adapting a model, but building on everything.

• 1:53:35Jordi Hays?

  So do you need to, do you need to do the full stack? Like, there's a million, there's a million companies trying, hoping and praying that like they can build a model that you can use in your robots and you can, you know, deploy them and, and have the end customer relationship. But why so far have you, you know, focused on, you know, building your own models and your own hardware and, and this sort of go-to-market motion?

• 1:54:00Speaker 08

  Yeah, no, it's a great question. So we believe fundamentally going retrofit and our own form factors. There's so much more than just a model to power the outdoor world autonomy. The user interface, knowing the customer, everything is very important and you have to customize it accordingly. Early on, we collected a crazy amount of data. That's the most valuable asset. We're now enabling us to build this world model because we have this copious diverse data set. We believe we have the most diverse data set in the rugged world. So we wanted to own the full stack, right? When we can control the world model, we control the user interface and channel and customer experience. And the robots, that's the big picture for these verticals from our perspective.

• 1:54:37Jordi Hays?

  What is the future of working on a farm? Is there like one person on site right now? Control, are they able to effectively control or monitor all the robots at once and intervene as needed?

• 1:54:54Speaker 08

  Yeah, most definitely. So we have, sorry, there's a loud robot, a big one coming now. So we might pan to that. But we have a, uh.

• 1:55:01Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 1:55:02Speaker 08

  We have a full operating stack, right? The user experience is everything, right? One person is controlling all these machines, managing A to B navigation, all the operational intel, the amount of spray, the models. You have to break it down so that anyone can run it. So one person is controlling this whole fleet. That's what makes the ROI, that's what makes the actual value accrue. So it's a pretty exciting time for us, um, where we have one model, one person across all these different platforms. It's, it's happening now for the first time.

• 1:55:31Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely wild. Uh, this is one of the greatest shows we've ever got on TVPN.

• 1:55:37John Coogan?

  Thank you for the tour.

• 1:55:38Jordi Hays?

  No one's ever gone six robots.

• 1:55:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Maybe we got one, maybe two.

• 1:55:44Speaker 08

  So, uh, we could ramp it up next time, I guess.

• 1:55:45John Coogan?

  Wow, that is impressive. Well, congratulations.

• 1:55:47Jordi Hays?

  Very cool, Tyler.

• 1:55:48John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:55:49Jordi Hays?

  Great, great to have you on. Come back. We're gonna hold you to like at least 20 robots the next time. So you set a, a pretty high bar for yourself.

• 1:55:56John Coogan?

  Fast takeoff.

• 1:55:57Speaker 08

  Well, we'll do it in a new vertical. How about that? I love it.

• 1:56:00John Coogan?

  I love it. Awesome.

• 1:56:01Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 1:56:01John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:56:02Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang Tyler.

• 1:56:03Speaker 08

  Hey, thank you, guys. Pleasure.

• 1:56:05John Coogan?

  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. Onto our next guest. It's a surprise guest.

• 1:56:16Jordi Hays?

  We don't know who's coming in.

• 1:56:17John Coogan?

  We're gonna figure it out. How are you doing?

• 1:56:20John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself.

• 1:56:21Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, chaos over here in the Ultrodome today.

• 1:56:24John Coogan?

  We were talking to Walter Russell Mead and, uh, every question, it took us a minute to get the question out. And then he would take us on this journey for five minutes. And so, uh, we got behind schedule, but thank you for being flexible. Thank you for hopping on the show. How are you doing?

• 1:56:38Speaker 09

  Good. Yeah. Good to be here.

• 1:56:40John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:56:41Jordi Hays?

  What's new?

• 1:56:43Speaker 09

  Um, man, since last time, uh, was that February we talked last, March?

• 1:56:48John Coogan?

  February 26th, 2026. It's been almost, uh, last time we talked, it was like 320 days till Christmas. Can you believe it?

• 1:56:58Jordi Hays?

  That's hard to believe.

• 1:56:59John Coogan?

  Now we're only 78 days away from Christmas. So just to put things in perspective there.

• 1:57:04Speaker 09

  Yeah. Um, I mean, we've, so we've, uh, taken a nuclear reactor critical with all the atomics with our software. Uh, team has over doubled in size. We're at about 70 folks now. Uh, we've also deployed to several massive industrial scale facilities. So it's like 10 times what we've done before, which is like our, you know, kind of rocket engine test site. Um, yeah, it's been a heater of a, a six months so far.

• 1:57:30John Coogan?

  How custom are your deployments? I feel like in the age of AI, being very custom for deployed engineering is very popular. It feels like

• 1:57:38Jordi Hays?

  There's always a problem, you know, the sales, sales team is like, hey, I accidentally promised that we build this thing. But now I feel like the customers know that they can probably ask for

• 1:57:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. How's that changing?

• 1:57:50Speaker 09

  Yeah. So I mean, fundamentally, we're providing a platform for testing and controlling physical systems. So think like, you know, as I said, nuclear reactors, jet engine test facilities, rocket engine test sites. Uh, we enable teams to go much faster, much further than same amount of time. Um, we're replacing, you know, technology from the eighties and nineties. And you have these companies building hypersonic jets and they're stuck with like pre-Windows 98 era tech. Um, but yeah, the platform generally enables the engineers, especially hardware engineers to be fully self sufficient. So that really on our end, there isn't a ton of, of kind of forward deployed engineering work. Um, at least in terms of like implementation, but we do help them kind of get set up, uh, get rolling. And then, you know, I help with any issues that they run into both hardware and software.

• 1:58:35John Coogan?

  How many, how, how often are you hearing from entirely new startups in the, either the LA ecosystem or just the, the deep tech ecosystem? It feels like we went through this crazy boom and maybe it's cooled off, but are you seeing like continued acceleration in

• 1:58:52Speaker 09

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:58:52John Coogan?

  Formation?

• 1:58:54Speaker 09

  We, we hear from people from working on all kinds of different hardware systems. Um, yeah, I was looking at the, um, the SoCal hard tech map, uh, from 2024 to 2026. And it was like 130 companies and now there's 279. So yeah, no, I don't see any stopping to this, especially SpaceX going public and Andrew doing super well.

• 1:59:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:15Speaker 09

  Uh, I think we're still at the beginning of this thing.

• 1:59:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What, what are, uh, like, how much of the, how much of your team is ex, ex SpaceX and is in, uh, like what, what kind of trends are you seeing in terms of, you know, post IPO? I imagine a lot of people just want to go and start companies, but some people just want to build stuff. They don't want to deal with everything else that goes into building a company.

• 1:59:39Speaker 09

  Yeah. Uh, I mean, yeah, we have a lot of former SpaceXers, uh, at Revel. Um, but generally, yeah, no, we are seeing a lot of former SpaceX founders in the area. Um, which like is great for us because they're like, you know, worked on kind of the infrastructure, uh, for Starship. Uh, they are familiar with some of the stuff I did at SpaceX and, uh, you know, call me up as soon as they're out and they're, they, uh, they're ready for some, some test or control software.

• 2:00:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:08John Coogan?

  How many, are, are you running into people SpaceX alumni that are just retiring?

• 2:00:14Speaker 09

  Uh, I, you know, there's some folks that, you know, they may retire for a little bit, but I think this type of engineer uh, gets bored quickly. So I think we see people kind of go through that rotation, come back in, uh, after a few months.

• 2:00:28John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah. Yeah. There was a, there was an article in the journal about someone who was at SpaceX and it seemed like they were somewhat low level, but they, you know, through the IPO, they made enough money to like take a year off and just go travel the world. There was a cool anecdote, but yeah, I completely agree with you that like, you can't last, if you're, if you lasted a year at SpaceX, you probably have the bug, the entrepreneurial bug, the builder bug, you're going to do something. So it's this funny paradox of you have enough not to work, maybe.

• 2:00:56Jordi Hays?

  Are you, uh, yesterday was a, a sort of a monumental, monumental day in math. Uh, a lot of people are kind of wondering how that's translating in real time to progress in, in other domains. I'm wondering, are you, are you getting surprised at all from, from your customers at, at, at the kind of pace? Uh, that they're making on the, on the product side? Are you still seeing companies where you're like, oh, at SpaceX, we would have done that in a month and, and you took six months?

• 2:01:25Speaker 09

  Yeah. I mean, we help them do it in a month. That's what we're all about. I mean, testing at all these companies is critical path. And so, you know, if we, we enable them to test like 50 times in a week instead of five times in a week. Um, so no, we're, we're definitely part of the solution there to, to enable them to move much more quickly. And kind of also I'd say our platform, I think also encapsulates a lot of like, a lot of these hard lessons learned. Uh, to kind of, uh, help them go directly to, to something that's very mature that they can just rip with.

• 2:01:56John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:01:56Jordi Hays?

  Sick.

• 2:01:57John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on.

• 2:01:58Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure you'll have more.

• 2:01:59Speaker 09

  Yeah. One, one more thing. So we've got a LA hard tech, uh, event on October 15th. I don't know if you guys, you guys have seen the

• 2:02:06John Coogan?

  Everything's on October 15th. Porsche is releasing a new car. Roadster is coming out.

• 2:02:12Jordi Hays?

  Ravel's event.

• 2:02:13John Coogan?

  This is

• 2:02:13Jordi Hays?

  You're really trying to steal your, your former employee's thunder.

• 2:02:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Going up against Tesla, but who knows? That might be delayed. We don't know. It's, it's, it's been shifting around, but this one's locked October 15th. Tell us more about the event.

• 2:02:27Speaker 09

  It's a, it's with Zinger. So we've got the VMAX, the Spider coming.

• 2:02:31John Coogan?

  Let's go. I love Zinger. You guys should come. I love, I love Zinger. We, we had the car here on the show. It's fantastic. Uh, it's a

• 2:02:37Jordi Hays?

  Is Zinger, Zinger's a customer then, or are you guys are just teaming up?

• 2:02:42Speaker 09

  Yeah, they are. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, it's been great so far and, uh, and yeah, should be sweet. Um, you know, invites, uh, open. It's on our LinkedIn. If you guys want to, want to check it out, but yeah, should be a great event.

• 2:02:54Jordi Hays?

  Awesome, dude. Well, great, great update. Come back on before the end of the year. I'm sure you'll have more news.

• 2:02:59John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:03:00Jordi Hays?

  Awesome progress.

• 2:03:01John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:03:02Speaker 09

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:03:02John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:03:03Jordi Hays?

  Dude.

• 2:03:03John Coogan?

  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.

• 2:03:13Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for automating business workflows.

• 2:03:16John Coogan?

  And let's give it up for our next guest. A surprise guest.

• 2:03:21Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:03:22John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 2:03:24Speaker 10

  Hey, hey. Good on you, Jordy.

• 2:03:27Jordi Hays?

  We're doing great. Sorry for the chaos today.

• 2:03:30John Coogan?

  We're a little bit, uh, behind schedule, but thank you for being flexible. Thank you for sticking it out and hopping on TBPN. Uh, why don't you introduce yourself and the company to kick it off?

• 2:03:39Speaker 10

  Yes. Yeah. I'm, I'm just high on, I'm the CEO co-founder of Healthlib. Our, our mission is just to improve the health outcomes of as many people as possible.

• 2:03:47John Coogan?

  Sure. Uh, and you raised some money. How much did you raise?

• 2:03:51Speaker 10

  Today we're announcing 38 million backed by Sequoia.

• 2:03:57Jordi Hays?

  No introduction needed. There we go. Can we get the replay, uh, pulled up? That'd be great. Um, boom. Great.

• 2:04:07Speaker 10

  Love the gong.

• 2:04:08Jordi Hays?

  With authority, John. Really coming in hot. Bam. All right. We can take that down. Um, okay. Uh, improving health outcomes for everyone. Where do you start?

• 2:04:21Speaker 10

  That's the question. So, yeah, I, a little bit about a quick backstory. I, I, I started, uh, my first business ventures back in South Africa as a teenager who couldn't afford healthcare myself. And, uh, as a 13 year old, initial, the initial spark was I was selected to represent South Africa at international math competition, but I couldn't afford my flight ticket. And so I started a little business ventures, taught myself chess, uses that as startup capital from winning tournaments. And then, uh, made enough money to buy a computer, could do more interesting stuff. And I, I used the, some of the profits to pay for my own healthcare, change my own life. But, um, but I wanted to, I, I, I was left with this kind of meaning driven search for what, what's the most important thing I can dedicate my career to.

• 2:05:05Speaker 10

  And that's, that's why I teamed up with my sister who's a clinician. Uh, and she, she actually specialized in clinical nutrition. So we teamed up, uh, to start there and identify undiagnosed disease related malnutrition as the first, uh, condition we went after and we've now expanded.

• 2:05:22John Coogan?

  So the basic workflow is partner with a hospital, partner with a hospital network, deploy your solution, scan medical records from patients that come in, detect problems before they become a major issue. Things that might've been overlooked by a nurse, by a doctor. And then you are helping solve those problems or at least flag them so that a doctor can solve them. Uh, but also reducing their financial liability because they might have medical malpractice. If they're, if I come in and I'm having a heart attack and they didn't pick it up, that's a problem. And you help them avoid that situation. Is that roughly correct?

• 2:06:04Speaker 10

  Yes. Uh, so exactly. There's so many patients who come into a hospital, but they have other conditions as well. Yep. That might not be detected, or even if they are detected, get detected late. And so having this high precision, real time risk screening for every patient every day across all major health conditions allows patients to get better care, clinicians to allocate their time more effectively. And hospitals also, uh, get paid for the, the actual appropriate severity in their population. But overall, the cost of healthcare actually goes down because people stay healthier.

• 2:06:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. How do you sell the hospitals these days? I mean, you're a smaller company backed by Sequoia. So I'm sure there's connections, but what, what is the sales process like?

• 2:06:46Speaker 10

  Yeah, fantastic question. So historically, companies in healthcare tended to move quite slow. They had these extremely long sales cycles. And so our approach was really, let's upfront quantify the opportunity for health services. So we kind of simulate back test what would happen if they deploy us, and then we also contractually go at risk.

• 2:07:07John Coogan?

  But you have to already have a relationship with a hospital. It's not like you can, you can say, okay, there's this hospital, let me go generate a report and then send them my

• 2:07:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think it's more like, before asking for a bunch of money, prove that it's gonna

• 2:07:20John Coogan?

  Okay, but once you already have a conversation going, that makes a lot of sense. Cool.

• 2:07:24Speaker 10

  Yes. And at this point, it's kind of word of mouth. Like, we go to events, hospitals are actually quite collaborative, because they like to share, they're geographically separated, so they're kind of, in that sense, non-competitive. So at conferences, like, two weeks ago, Pain Medicine went on stage at one of the largest healthcare conferences and just talked about how much a patient's health improved by deploying Health Leap, and then we got a bunch of interest from that.

• 2:07:50John Coogan?

  That's very cool.

• 2:07:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's so funny. There's so many other industries where one business will develop an advantage through a new technology, an AI product, and they're like, let's not tell anyone, and let's like, get as the maximum amount of value out of this, whereas like hospitals, you're not worried about, you're much more positive some.

• 2:08:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it's a super positive some future. I can imagine in the future, like, you go, you break your arm, or you're having a heart attack, you go into the hospital, and it's automatically flagged that you need something done with your upper maxilla, or like a double jaw surgery, or maybe some leg lengthening.

• 2:08:23Jordi Hays?

  John's having too much fun.

• 2:08:27John Coogan?

  Obviously, there are really, really positive and impactful

• 2:08:30Jordi Hays?

  What was your, as a math Olympiad, what was your reaction to yesterday?

• 2:08:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:38Speaker 10

  Well, tell me more.

• 2:08:40Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he's so locked, he's so locked in. I love it. Some math, some math problems got solved. That's all you, that's all you really, that's all you really need to know.

• 2:08:50John Coogan?

  The headline is OpenAI drops a bomb on maths, and, and the, the actual, like, headline from OpenAI is that they, I mean, it really is like, hundreds of math problems have been solved. This is obviously a couple of weeks after the Navier-Stokes solution, and the Hodge conjecture fell earlier. So yeah, you are right that it's like every week. I guess the bigger question is like, more broadly, as someone who has played in that space, what has been your reaction to model progress in math?

• 2:09:23Speaker 10

  Hmm, yeah. Yeah, I think it's fascinating, it's fascinating to see. I think in some ways, you know, this, this was kind of predicted, that, and so I think, I'm almost still waiting for AI to get to the point where it can come up with fundamentally new spaces to go and explore. So it's like more efficient search space, so excited for that.

• 2:09:47John Coogan?

  Move the goalposts, I like it. I see the goalposts moving.

• 2:09:52Speaker 10

  But yeah, but no, I personally expected this, and it's funny, I remember, remember the reason I stopped playing chess was, I took it seriously for one year, got better, and then I was like, why am I doing this? The computer is doing it so much better. Let's, it's, it's exciting to go and find the new problems that humans can now uniquely solve, and I find it energizing. I think it's great as well.

• 2:10:15John Coogan?

  And there's still, yeah, so much to be done in diffusion, and this is, I think, what Health Leap is. It's a diffusion company, in as much as it is an AI company, right? It's like, you need to actually bring the solution to the market integrated in a way that gets a real impactful result that people can actually benefit from. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 2:10:37Jordi Hays?

  Great, great to meet you. I'll be back on soon.

• 2:10:39John Coogan?

  Raising, and we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:10:40Jordi Hays?

  And great story.

• 2:10:41John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of ITHR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Our last guest of the show is not a mystery guest. We have Arubhav from OpenAI. Welcome to the show. He's ChatGPT product manager, and we're very excited to be joined by him. Welcome to the show. How's your day going?

• 2:11:06Speaker 11

  Good, good. It's good to see you guys again.

• 2:11:08John Coogan?

  Yes. Welcome back. What, uh, what'd you launch? Take us through it.

• 2:11:15Speaker 11

  Yeah, so today, we're launching GPT-6 in ChatGPT for all of our 1.2 billion users.

• 2:11:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:21Speaker 11

  So, a few weeks ago, we announced Astra, which is sort of our frontier model.

• 2:11:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:26Speaker 11

  And then a couple of weeks ago, we walked through GPT-6, Sol, and Luna. And so today, we're actually bringing GPT-6 now to everybody in ChatGPT. And it's coming with really, two really cool new capability improvements. One, which we're calling intelligent UI, which is now ChatGPT can control not just what to say, but how to show its answers, and can kind of control its interface. And the second is that ChatGPT can now answer while thinking. So historically, when you use something like the reasoning model, you've had to wait for a really great answer, right? It can think and do a lot of work, but then you, the trade-off comes with latency.

• 2:12:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:12:05Speaker 11

  And now we've enabled ChatGPT to actually start answering while it's still continuing to work on the problem.

• 2:12:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:11Speaker 11

  And so that really changes, it's a subtle change, but it's, it really changes how people experience

• 2:12:19Speaker 11

  ChatGPT for more complex questions.

• 2:12:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, those subtle

• 2:12:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I can't tell you how many times I'm like, creating a new chat because I've fired off like

• 2:12:25John Coogan?

  It's a GPT-6 pro to understand what the capital of Washington State is.

• 2:12:30Jordi Hays?

  You really don't, you're doing way too much.

• 2:12:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. It happens all the time. I, one thing that I've always noticed on the product, the product development side is, and the UX side, is the use of haptics. Like, very early on in the ChatGPT app, as the tokens were streaming in, you'd hear, you'd feel the little haptics. And I ran into it recently when I asked to pull temperature data over a hundred-year period, and I was just trying to get an idea of like, has it, has it gotten hotter in this town more than the global average or whatever? It pulled all the data, I expected that, but it generated a chart, and the chart was interactive. And as I moved my thumb along the chart, there was a haptic feedback, and

• 2:13:13John Coogan?

  I was like, wow, that's really, that's a really delightful experience. And I'm interested in how you have puzzled with, when do you want to build a widget? When do you want to actually set the, the application up for success to use, basically like a harness, something that, a pattern that you've decided, versus how much are you giving over to the model over time to say, hey, there's just a whole bunch of APIs, the haptic one is right there, you can pick from it as you please?

• 2:13:43Speaker 11

  Yeah, that's a great question. So historically, we've built these as sort of, you use the word widget, which is kind of exactly right. Like, we've built these predefined cards.

• 2:13:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:54Speaker 11

  And the content inside can sometimes be dynamic, like the charts you show, we talked about. But the response has mainly been markdown, right? These chatbots produce text, and then we find ways to sort of hijack that markdown to allow it to reference additional artifacts like the, a weather widget or a chart or something like that.

• 2:14:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:12Speaker 11

  Would this change, like, so that approach is somewhat limiting, right? Because actually, it should just create the perfect interface for whatever you're trying to do.

• 2:14:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:14:22Speaker 11

  Sometimes text is amazing. You're writing something, you're looking for advice, but other times, ChatGPT should really have a lot more control for how it constructs the entire layout and interactivity of your answer. And so with this change, we've actually trained ChatGPT to have full control over what it shows you.

• 2:14:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:40Speaker 11

  And so it can generate a UI on the fly and do it really fast. It's not something that'll take a minute or two. It's really for every chat in the same latency.

• 2:14:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:50Speaker 11

  And it can figure out what kind of functionality it wants to add on top of that. So some of that will be like, interactivity within the chat. Let's say you're trying to understand a topic. It'll actually give you an interactive diagram for you to play with to better understand that. But it can also add functionality, right? Like, often now, if you ask for like a recipe, it'll give you a shopping list, but it'll add a copy button. And that's not something we've like, built in a pre-made way. The model just realizes adding a copy functionality, when I give you a shopping list, is the most useful thing for me to do.

• 2:15:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I imagine that there's a, there's an interesting flywheel here where, obviously, giving this out to 1.2 billion users that are free, and maybe not fully monetized with that just yet, is expensive. But there's a lot of value that comes from a free user iterating and saying, no, you should actually have the slider this way, you should add, add haptic feedbacks, add that copy button, and then that goes into the rollout, the model gets better at knowing which tool to pull off the shelf at the right time. Is that, is that generally how you think about this?

• 2:15:55Speaker 11

  Yeah. So for this launch,

• 2:15:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:58Speaker 11

  we really wanted it such that you don't have to ask what you want.

• 2:16:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:16:02Speaker 11

  ChatGPT is gonna try and figure out,

• 2:16:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:04Speaker 11

  okay, you're trying to understand the offside rule in soccer. The most, the best way for me to explain that is not be an instruction manual, but let me just show you a diagram that you can play with,

• 2:16:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:15Speaker 11

  that I create on the fly. And so you can always ask with ChatGPT what you want.

• 2:16:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:20Speaker 11

  But one of the big changes is, we've actually trained the model to figure out, when does visuals and interactivity really make the answer better? And then the other part is exactly to your point of, how do we scale this to 1.2 billion users? You might have seen, Astra can produce super cool visuals and websites, right? But that takes a lot of compute, and it's slow. So we've actually done a lot of work, we've actually built our own sort of library in-house, that allows model, the model to generate UI, but in a very token-efficient manner, and to do it in a streamable way. So it feels fast, it works cross-platform, and it's very, very efficient. And so a lot of that is what went into, enabling us to scale this to 1.2 billion users, without it melting all of our GPUs or us having to charge users, right?

• 2:17:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:05Speaker 11

  So everyone will get this in a sort of unlimited fashion, to sort of build much richer answers in chat.

• 2:17:13Jordi Hays?

  In the 2010s, it felt like, like, product management practices were getting really cemented. Product managers were oftentimes like the superstars of their organization, just under, under the founders. Today, obviously, researchers tend to capture a little more attention than, than you.

• 2:17:36Jordi Hays?

  Do you feel like there's like new norms being like it just feels like it's like it's 10 times as hard to be a great product manager now because you're not just working between the customers and engineering, but you're adding research and then the the the capabilities of the models are advancing, but then you also have this issue of like, you know, historically, if you had a SaaS product and like nine times out of 10, it did what the user wanted, that would be like a failing grade because people would be getting really frustrated. Now you could have a product where nine times out of 10, it nails it because and that's actually a good thing, right? But but you're still there's still going to be some percentage of users that are frustrated. So it just feels like all the all the sort of the approaches

• 2:18:19Jordi Hays?

  being rewritten and the the sort of in the 2010s or late 2020s, you had, you know, books and and podcasts and it feels it felt like product management was really like being cemented around best practices that worked in the SaaS era.

• 2:18:34Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's it's definitely changing a lot. I think the you sort of have to start from scratch a little bit and be comfortable with non-determinism and figure out what like how does product management work in an era of non-determinism and and even within that, like getting very comfortable with evals and and how do we measure progress is something that's like a really important skill. One thing that's really different is actually like we were used to non-determinism in text. Now we're entering non-determinism in the interface itself. Like now it's not just the words are different. It's even the way it presents the answers are super different. And so that's also actually going to start changing how we do product development at OpenAI, because no longer can a designer

• 2:19:16Speaker 11

  build a weather card or a sports card and be like, this is how it's going to appear when it triggers, because the model can just generate that on the fly. And so we're actually now also figuring out how do we do design in the age of non-deterministic UI in ChatGPT? And we've actually had to build our own sort of design tools and development stack such that design can now work a lot closer with research on actually steering, here's how we're going to teach better and better design to the model. And so to your point, like product management is definitely changing. And I think design is also now changing a lot where design is going to sit right next to research in shaping model outputs.

• 2:19:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:19:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and that's such a such a such a big update, which is the the prior era of like being able to obsess over a certain like element of the product for for months and and then knowing knowing that consistency versus now. Yeah, it just introduces like, well, how do you test this? How do you collect user feedback? All these different challenges.

• 2:20:18John Coogan?

  How do you think about interfacing with other product teams? We had Cath from ChatGPT Sites on the show last week at Dev Day. And a lot of the things that you just described as, you know, instantiating UI on the fly. My previous workflow was, hey, generate a site of this and I'll share that around. But this doesn't feel like it obsolesces sites. It's more like I was I was driving to work today and I was thinking like, wait, am I going to be able to like add OAuth to these sites and build a database? But like sites is going to grow in its own direction and you're going to grow. And how do you think about working together with other teams? Because there's so many projects like computer

• 2:21:00John Coogan?

  use, like Operator was like a side project that like dropped and then came back with a vengeance and these things sort of morph. But what is it like interfacing with the other teams to make sure that you're not stepping on each other's toes, but also setting yourself for success? That feels like a critical piece of the role these days.

• 2:21:15Speaker 11

  Yeah, it's a great question. I think the first is we run super lean. So like there is very little sort of running into other people's toes, just because we just don't have enough PMs. I think the the one thing that's really cool is with models like GPT-6, they're getting better. And because the model is better at front end design and building sites, we've also therefore been able to teach it to do really good UI generation in ChatGPT and make it really good at using our own in-house component libraries, right? And so one thing is we we see really nice transfer capabilities as sort of different teams make improvements and trying to stretch the model in one way, that then goes and benefits all these other teams.

• 2:21:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:56Speaker 11

  And the separate thing is really focusing on our users, right? So Cath and others are really focusing on how do we enable developers and then enterprise users to have to be like maximally productive, right? And so the concept of a site as actually a place where everybody can collaborate and do work is amazing. And we're going to keep pushing that and making the model better at that. And then the separate thing is, which was what I spent a lot of time on is like, hey, how do you get everything, everyday things done? You're asking about a recipe, you're trying to learn a concept on your phone on the go, and really think about, okay, how do we bring a lot of these innovations, but make it accessible to our billion users, right?

• 2:22:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:35Speaker 11

  And so generally, the ability to improve, like have everybody improve the model, but then optimize our features and kind of the experience we're delivering for our very different user cohorts, right? Because like you building sites is just so different to someone who's sort of like out there trying to like get to work and catch up on the latest news, right? And you might be doing both of those, you know, throughout the course of your day. And we should give you the best site building experience and we're going to give you the best sort of everyday ChatGPT experience.

• 2:23:08Jordi Hays?

  Last question, how how dynamic can do you think the the UI in a in a thread can get? Because like the peak peak, you know, chaos would be like you're you effectively can generate an MMO and invite your friends into the thread and and and play it. But how how far does it even make?

• 2:23:29John Coogan?

  That's how I like my recipes delivered.

• 2:23:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:23:31John Coogan?

  I want to cook a virtual meal to understand how to cook a real meal.

• 2:23:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, I want to turn my my recipe into a first person shooter.

• 2:23:39John Coogan?

  Ideally, yeah.

• 2:23:40Jordi Hays?

  That that we can both play.

• 2:23:41John Coogan?

  Yes, that's that's the future.

• 2:23:43Speaker 11

  You guys, you guys should play with what we launched today. It's it's I don't it can't make an MMO recipe, but it can make it in.

• 2:23:51John Coogan?

  Move the goalposts. We're moving the goalposts.

• 2:23:54Speaker 11

  Yeah, wait, wait, wait, set me up for success, guys. The it can't it can't do that. But you want your entire conversation to look iMessage Blue or look Windows 95 style, it can do that. It can create sort of a ton of interactivity.

• 2:24:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:24:12Speaker 11

  You know, it can, it can really build anything and it's going to stream really, really fast.

• 2:24:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:19Speaker 11

  I think the sort of logical extension of this is that chat is going to be this operating system that helps you get whatever you want done and sort of update itself and be that perfect UI. And yeah, it should be that if you want a recipe MMO game, we're going to give it to you and we're going to give it to you really, really fast as well. And and that's sort of where we're we're heading. Yeah, but.

• 2:24:44Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. I'm going to test it on on my my favorite personal benchmark, Surfbench. How well does it give me the Surf report? Because that's that's like the kind of that's the kind of like prompt that can actually deliver like, you know, I do want.

• 2:24:59John Coogan?

  You want it over time, Surf levels.

• 2:25:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I might want UI that's more dynamic than just like a chart that shows me different numbers.

• 2:25:05Speaker 11

  Yeah, if it if it doesn't work, ping me on Slack.

• 2:25:08Jordi Hays?

  I will.

• 2:25:08Speaker 11

  And we will make it work.

• 2:25:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Awesome.

• 2:25:12John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for.

• 2:25:13Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang. Great update.

• 2:25:14John Coogan?

  Congrats on the launch and we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:25:16Speaker 11

  Thank you, guys.

• 2:25:16Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 2:25:17John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:25:19John Coogan?

  Well, that's our show. We got to get out of here because we have another show to do. We've been invited to guest on another show. I'm not going to leak it because there might be some rollout strategy there, but it'll be a lot of fun. We'll promote it when it goes live. But thank you for tuning into TBPN today.

• 2:25:39Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor.

• 2:25:40John Coogan?

  It's we're we're so much closer to 77 days away from Christmas. Start counting the hours.

• 2:25:46Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:25:47John Coogan?

  Because we are now.

• 2:25:48Jordi Hays?

  We got to start doing a countdown to the next.

• 2:25:51John Coogan?

  We are now less than 11 hours away from being only 77 days away from.

• 2:25:57Jordi Hays?

  Countdown to the countdown.

• 2:25:59John Coogan?

  Countdown to the countdown. We got to start.

• 2:26:02Jordi Hays?

  So we got folks.

• 2:26:03John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars, have a podcast on Spotify, sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com and we will see you tomorrow. Goodbye.