OpenAI Uncovers Spy Device, Apple x LG, Home Devices Tier List | Thomas Neckel, Kabir Jain, Danielle Axman, John Urschel, Nicolas Sharp, Jason Ballard, Erik Bernhardsson, Josh Tyrangiel, Aida Baradari

(01:46) - OpenAI Uncovers Spy Device (08:41) - Are Your Devices Listening to You? (20:13) - Apple x LG (24:59) - Home Devices Tier List (37:45) - XBOX Labs (40:46) - Inside The World of GTA 6 (43:38) - Kelly Clarkson's Bird Store Drama (52:27) - Thomas Neckel discusses co-founding Fragment, a New York fintech company building financial infrastructure designed for AI agents. He explains how Fragment translates contractual rules into deterministic financial workflows, enabling agents to automate complex processes such as payments, refunds, accounting, and insurance claims while preventing costly errors. (01:02:17) - Kabir Jain discusses his role as Erewhon’s Chief Growth Officer, overseeing technology, e-commerce, data, membership, and other growth initiatives beyond opening stores. He explains Erewhon’s disciplined expansion strategy, commissary-based operating model, influence on emerging consumer brands, celebrity collaborations, and focus on delivering a premium customer experience. (01:22:02) - Danielle Axman discusses founding Wilder Market, a premium neighborhood grocery concept opening in Midtown Miami, inspired by her search for thoughtfully sourced, high-quality food for her family. She highlights the market’s expert-developed product standards, Michelin-star culinary partnership, hospitality-focused experience, and potential expansion across South Florida and the Southeast. (01:30:45) - John Urschel, an MIT assistant professor of mathematics and former professional football player, discusses how AI is transforming mathematical research, education, and problem-solving. He argues that human understanding and creativity remain essential, predicts that mathematics will expand rather than be “solved,” and considers AI’s potential to improve football analytics. (01:44:48) - Nicholas Sharp discusses Attio’s new hybrid architecture for agentic revenue, which lets AI agents work with customer data while maintaining governance and security guardrails. The Attio co-founder and CEO also highlights how leading sales teams use AI for highly personalized customer experiences, his excitement about decision models, and Attio’s extensive use of its own products. (01:55:50) - Jason Ballard, co-founder and CEO of construction technology company ICON, discusses its $200 million Series D and mission to address the housing crisis using robotic 3D printing. He explains ICON’s cost-saving construction system, expansion into licensing its technology to builders, and work with NASA to develop lunar infrastructure using local materials. (02:05:41) - Erik Bernhardsson, co-founder and CEO of Modal, discusses the company’s rapid growth and its platform for simplifying AI infrastructure across numerous cloud providers. He highlights soaring demand for inference, training, and sandbox tools, along with opportunities in low-latency applications, alternative chips, and broader enterprise adoption. (02:14:59) - Josh Tyrangiel discusses how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are racing to vertically integrate the space economy through reusable rockets, satellite networks, orbital data centers, and AI. Drawing on his experience covering business and technology, he explains SpaceX’s commanding lead, Blue Origin’s efforts to catch up, and Bezos’s long-standing ambition to make space infrastructure central to Amazon, robotics, and advanced AI. (02:31:03) - Aida Baradari, founder of Dvalence, discusses Spectre, a device designed to prevent microphones from making unauthorized audio recordings. Baradari explains its privacy-focused technology, planned enterprise applications, current pricing and size, and the company’s efforts to launch and improve the product. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Wednesday, October 14th, 2026. We're live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:14Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:14John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place. Ramp also donated a thou- uh, maybe more, uh, they donated to Ben Wilson.

• 0:28Jordi Hays?

  One hundred thousand dollars.

• 0:29John Coogan?

  Or a hundred thousand dollars, very generous for them. Jordy, can you get us up to speed on what's going on with Ben Wilson, the creator of How to Take Over the World, the podcast?

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Ben Wilson is on David Senra, by David Senra today. Ben, very unfortunately, has stage four cancer and four kids under the age of five. Senra says, I want to help him as much as possible, so I invited him on the podcast to talk about his work studying history's greatest leaders and what it's like getting told he's going to die at 38. He's a good friend, he's a good guy, a close friend and one of my favorite podcasters. His work has benefited millions of people all across the world. Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine, introductions or donations. So we just want us to share this at the top of our show.

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  And I've only met Ben once, but really, really amazing thinker and incredible show. And I recommend checking out the show as well.

• 1:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, moving on, thank you to Ramp for supporting and you should as well. 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. The, we covered at the end of the show yesterday, but I mean, pretty huge news in the world of corporate espionage. OpenAI caught someone planting a bugging device by having a hidden camera behind one of its TVs. And so this was all over the timeline. We discussed it at the end of yesterday's show, but Abdul Rahman Al Fazan, the alleged OpenAI spy, used an AI-generated image of himself speaking at Stanford University as

• 2:13John Coogan?

  his LinkedIn X and LinkedIn and X profiles despite having no documented connection to the school. So, but there's a community note on this. There's a lot of people going back and forth. Apparently his actual profiles now show the real information, but there's a whole bunch of back and forth, but it seems like it was a pretty simple device. I saw some reports that it was a cheap Chinese-made recording device wrapped in toilet paper and inserted in the back of television in an executive conference room. And folks are saying that it cost maybe 15 bucks, something like that. And so there's also debate over, you know, is he's, is he an American citizen? Is he a Saudi national?

• 2:58John Coogan?

  There's a picture of him alongside Saudi prince, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2018, but you know, anyone can stand in line for a photo, for a photo op. But this story is developing. The FBI is truly investigating this. And so it'll be interesting to see what comes of this, what the motivation was.

• 3:19Jordi Hays?

  Kylie Robinson called it amateur hour. Chatbot account associated with the engineer's spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts about building and concealing a continuous audio recorder, adding Wi-Fi connectivity, listening remotely and encrypting its memory card, according to the complaint. The account also submitted questions containing details specific to the recovered device, including its unique network identifier.

• 3:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, pretty simple, like, how do I commit a crime? Like typing that into the computer? And so not discovered preemptively, oddly enough, but seems like a pretty smoking gun if you're searching, how do I spy? How do I create a recording?

• 4:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the whole thing, the whole thing is just very confusing. Like this would, this would make it seem like he's a lone wolf, right? As if there was any type of like sophisticated operation.

• 4:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:14Jordi Hays?

  You would think they'd be like, don't worry about learning how to spy, lil bro. We got you.

• 4:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. That is weird for sure. And then the other thing that's odd is that the AI safety world, the general AI companies will be spying on each other. It's usually around nation states, usually around like stealing the weights or, and using the weights for the frontier model for bad purposes or stealing the intellectual property. There's been a lot of back and forth in lawsuits around intellectual property, but you don't get that from eavesdropping on an executive conference, right? An executive, like, there's no, there's no meeting between like Sam Altman and Greg Brockman where they're just like, let's read off the weights to GPT-7, starting at the

• 5:02John Coogan?

  beginning, zero, seven, five.

• 5:05Jordi Hays?

  They're doing a table reading.

• 5:06John Coogan?

  Two.

• 5:07Jordi Hays?

  They're doing a table reading.

• 5:08John Coogan?

  Seven, nine. No, like they don't, that's, you're not going to get anything. You're going to get like strategy, like corporate strategy, which is maybe valuable if you're like trading the stock market, but it's not, it's not like you're going to listen in on a conversation and be like, okay, I know how, I, I just, yeah, I can just reverse engineer the next model, which is very odd. So the motivations here are complicated. Like it could be purely financial, could be something more nefarious. We'll let the FBI investigate. I think that's the photo of David Senra that just slammed down. We got a new one in the Ultra Dome.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 5:49John Coogan?

  Looking good.

• 5:51Jordi Hays?

  Always with us.

• 5:53John Coogan?

  Anyway, the, the OpenAI spying spy listening device story, I mean, it's all over the timeline. People are having fun with it. People are worried about it. I'm sure the FBI will investigate and will have more information, but I don't really have a strong take other than like, it's bad, don't spy.

• 6:11John Coogan?

  And it reinforces the stakes, like security is really important. We know this, we've been talking about this. But it was weird because yesterday I was talking to somebody and they were, and they were saying, oh yeah, the Instagram meta ads are so good, you know, because they, you know, obviously because they listen to my phone.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny, covering up, covering it up with toilet paper.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  Toilet paper.

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  Like, would that not, if you're looking behind a TV and you're like, what's that electronic device covered up with toilet paper? Like that to me is much more interesting and concerning than just like.

• 6:44John Coogan?

  If it was just a USB stick, I would be like, oh, somebody left a USB stick because they were looking at photos on the, on the, or if they just put like a fire, an Amazon Fire Stick back there or Chromecast.

• 6:54Jordi Hays?

  You wouldn't know, you wouldn't notice it.

• 6:55John Coogan?

  You wouldn't notice it.

• 6:56Jordi Hays?

  You would only notice it if you were actually sweeping.

• 6:58John Coogan?

  And you're just like, go back there, it's like glue and tongue depressors and Lincoln Logs and some Legas back there. It's like, what, yeah, it's going to draw your eye because you're like, toilet paper should never be in an electronics cabinet, period. Like there's no reason for it to be there as opposed to like USB, USB cables are, they belong back there.

• 7:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's something that looks like an HDMI.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, anything. Put, put a, put an Xbox back there. I mean, you could literally put like a, something in the shell of an Apple TV or in the shell of, of a Nintendo Switch and somebody would just be, oh, it's a Nintendo Switch. And you could put something inside of the device. Sorry, we're giving spies like ideas now. This is bad. Forget what I said. Don't do this, don't spy. You're going to go to jail. It's really, really bad. Anyway, yesterday I was just laughing because somebody was like, oh yeah, like, you know, the Instagram ads are like so good now, but and like, you know, obviously like they're listening to, they're listening to the audio around my phone like ambiently, and that's why it's so good. And they weren't like alleging this as like a conspiracy theory that needs, needed to be uncovered. It was just like a given.

• 8:06John Coogan?

  It was just like, oh yeah, that's like one of the strategies and one of the features. Like, it's like, of course they like listen to everything you say, and then they target ads and the ads are better. And it was just like, it wasn't, it wasn't like, and I'm mad about it. It was just like, and it obviously happens.

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  Just business.

• 8:21John Coogan?

  This has been debunked many times. It was investigated by Wired in 2017. Antonio Garcia Martinez talked about it on Joe Rogan in 2022. His, his reaction is actually funny. We should pull up the video that I put in the timeline of, of Antonio Garcia Martinez on Joe Rogan. I think it starts a couple of minutes into this clip, but at around like one minute, 20 seconds, something like that, because he like just sort of laughs and then explains like his position on like, do they need to actually listen to you? But let's play this because it's a fun clip from tech history. Let me ask you about this because we've talked about this multiple times in the podcast. Sometimes you're having a conversation about something. The microphone thing. Is that real? No. It's not real?

• 9:07John Coogan?

  No, no. I mean. I don't believe him. Do you believe him?

• 9:11Speaker 02

  I haven't searched for it at all.

• 9:13John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  And I got an ad for it. Something me and you were talking about.

• 9:16John Coogan?

  What was it?

• 9:17Speaker 02

  If I remember right, I couldn't remember, but it was something we were talking about after the show.

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  Six hours later, I'm getting an ad for it.

• 9:23Speaker 03

  Here's what I'd bet on. One of you two either searched or went to some website, not only that. One of us. So if I do, he gets an ad? Yeah, that potentially, yeah. How?

• 9:32John Coogan?

  It has your geolocation, which is also kinda crazy, but if it has your geolocation, your friend's geolocation, there's so many times when someone will recommend a product to me and then I'll see an ad for it and I'll be like, it was listening. And it's like, no, it has the receipt from the person that I'm connected with on Instagram. And then it saw that we were both in the same place. So clearly, we talked about that. Like, it just inferred that. And then it shows you like 10,000 ads a day. And so, five of them are gonna be like creepily accurate. Are you gonna put on a tinfoil hat? Are you a truther on this? Or are you a plan truster?

• 10:04Jordi Hays?

  Plan truster.

• 10:05John Coogan?

  Plan truster, okay, okay. Well, Facebook like straight up has on their like about page, like, we don't use your microphone unless you've given us permission and are actively using a feature that requires the microphone. So sometimes, like, if you are in a meta product and you turn on the microphone, like, yes, it is listening then. And so, there are instances where people have like accidentally left that open and then, obviously, it does have that data. And like, if you, if you upload a bunch of video of you talking about all the products you love.

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you turn on the microphone for a split second, there's an alert that goes off in Meta HQ. Ten people run into a room and they just listen and then they sort of brainstorm ads that they could, that they could, you know, deliver based on that.

• 10:53John Coogan?

  I would, I would like a social network that was like handcrafted ads. Like, there's a guy who's like, you know, a Don Draper. He like sips a couple martinis, smokes a cigar, and then really thinks about like, okay, what would be the perfect ad for this person to see? And they pick it. Curation, that's the future. But I, I was wondering, like, how far are we from this actually happening? Because I know Meta will hold the line on it and they're not just gonna like go in the background of the phone, because it would be such a scandal. And like, after seeing the social reckoning, like, the, like, the opportunity to whistleblow is just so huge that you could be just like a rank and file Meta employee.

• 11:34John Coogan?

  If you find out that they're actually doing the, the ambient voice recording and using that for ad targeting, it's just quit your job immediately, get the whistleblower status, Netflix doc, book, tour, like, you're gonna make way more money. Like, the incentive to whistleblow on that is just so high. I think that it's probably...

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  Power of capitalism.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I think it's probably, like, that's, that's a huge pushback. But I was wondering, like, is it possible that ambient voice recording does wind up influencing your meta ads somehow? And I found a chain that actually can make this happen. So there is a company that handles, that handles business phone calls. So if you're on the call with a, with a particular company and they use a particular AI, AI system, they will actually transcribe that. And then they put that data, I think through LiveRamp, which can actually get into Meta Ads Manager as an audience. But this is a little bit, it's not quite what you think, because it would be like, if you're on the phone with Bottega Veneta

• 12:39John Coogan?

  and you're talking about products that you like, then that could wind up getting retargeted. Which you normally wouldn't think it would be retargeted, because you're like, there's no pixel on the phone. But they are transcribing that. But it's, it's direct to that particular, that particular brand. And so, it wouldn't be the really like, whoa, like, I wasn't talking, I wasn't even talking to a company. It's like, you are talking to a company. But, do you remember the LG drama that happened like last month?

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  Do you remember this? Okay, so Palmer came on our show, I think last year, and was like talking about how terrible smart TVs are. And I think everyone sort of agrees that, at the very least, they're like clunky and they have too many features and they wanna be like updated every, every like five days when you use the TV. It's like, we need a software update. And they have so many different like things and they wanna show you ads. And it's all very annoying, even though the TVs like look nice these days. But last month, Gamers Nexus, they put out this two-hour YouTube video showing that LG TVs are like aggressively using spyware effectively. That's the allegation. So, they scanned the local network for third-party phones and other devices.

• 13:44John Coogan?

  The LG G5 crawled the entire network and found dozens of unrelated devices, including smartwatches and phones of the staff who didn't even know we were working on this investigation. Even when the TV wasn't online, the LG TV they tested was able to record sound around it. Quote, "We were even able to capture microphone audio while the TV was unplugged from the network." This is because there's enough Wi-Fi hotspots in most neighborhoods now that are just like, public basically through like a Comcast or a Spectrum, like, network sharing, that it can like hop on something and just say, oh, okay, I got access to the internet. It's crazy. And so...

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  I don't even think we need to go down the whole, like, you can see through walls with Wi-Fi.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  That's crazy too, yeah. So, Burke said the audio was reportedly stored locally via plain text, which could potentially allow the data to be sent to LG if the TV connects online again. And so, like, hard drives and memory have gotten so, so cheap that you can basically be recording, recording the audio, transcribing to text using like, basically like a local transcription model. It's not like running a big GPU. It's just transcribing text pretty easy. And then it's just storing that as plain text. And it can store like years and years of ambient text on like, you know, like, one gig drive, basically. It's, it's just so small. And so, LG responded and said like, look, we, like, we're not really doing all of that.

• 15:16John Coogan?

  But they said, "We don't do continuous conversation recording." Now, if you push the button...

• 15:23Jordi Hays?

  Don't worry, we take a break when you're not talking.

• 15:29John Coogan?

  If you're, if you do active voice session, which is where you like press the button to talk to the TV, so you, so you actively wanna do it, it will pick up conversations that are happening in the background. So, you know, the, the, the privacy implications are like, your, you know, your roommate is pushing the button and saying like, put on Red Bull TV or something, or the X Games. And, and in the background, you're talking about, you know, your plans for the weekend, and then that gets saved in the, in the data. But that seems kind of obvious, like, you've turned on the microphone. They did deny supplying ambient audio data.

• 16:06Jordi Hays?

  GR in the chat, by the way, says, "Xfinity has a feature that turns your home Wi-Fi router into a motion sensor."

• 16:15John Coogan?

  That's interesting. They actually productized it. That's kind of, I don't know. Yeah, if you're away, why not just have your Wi-Fi, see if there's motion in your, in your, in your vicinity? Can it detect aura too, or just motion?

• 16:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that, I mean, that's the most important question.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  So, so LG has this ad solutions product, which can potentially feed into meta ads and make your Instagram ads scarily accurate. But they say they're not doing the full chain yet. But, so there's still a confirmation bias, where you see a bunch of ads, but you see one ad for the thing that you were talking about, and you're like, oh, it's so scarily accurate.

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  Wait, rewind.

• 16:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:56Jordi Hays?

  Saying that your LG TV might be listening, and then they might be passing that?

• 17:02John Coogan?

  They say they're not, but they are listening. They have an ads product and it can connect to Meta. So like, we're like, the technology exists, but they haven't turned it on, I think is like the claim.

• 17:17Jordi Hays?

  Or they could have stopped doing it while they responded to that article, saying, "We are not currently doing this," and then re...

• 17:24John Coogan?

  Potentially. Personally, I don't really mind it that much. I kinda just don't care if the ads are scarily accurate. I'm used to it, but, but it is, it is odd. And also, it's just like, TV, stay in your lane. Just show me the thing. I don't, I don't want, I don't want a bunch of other junk. Just charge me what it costs to make the TV. The dumb TV that Palmer has, has kinda gestured towards, I think will be really successful. And, but what's interesting is that amid all this like privacy concerns around LG and it potentially listening to you and some backlash there, I think they fire, I think they did the crisis PR effectively. I think it is like pretty clear that they're not actually just full open channel all the time, piping it everywhere.

• 18:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so, on that note, how likely are you to purchase an LG TV going forward?

• 18:15John Coogan?

  I already did. They're the best. Like, I just don't want to mind it. It's just gonna know that it's just gonna listen to my, my, you know, voice recordings and be like, wow, this is sick. Like, this guy's awesome.

• 18:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, motion detected.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  Motion detected, exactly. No, uh, yeah, uh, uh, LG, uh, the, the LG G5 that they, that they tried is actually like the best looking TV, I think.

• 18:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:41John Coogan?

  Um, but I would love a dumb one. I would love one without all those annoying features. It's really, it's really annoying. Like, the software is the worst part. Uh, I actually think that, uh, pretty soon I'll be able to jailbreak it and then I'll just have the panel and I'll, and I'll take off all the software. And so I think that will be the great trade is that I bought the version that they think they're subsidizing all their spyware.

• 19:02Jordi Hays?

  There's no way they can make a TV that good for that cheap.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:06Jordi Hays?

  You are the product.

• 19:07John Coogan?

  I mean, truthfully, this is, this is the Amazon model, right? Uh, half of the, half of the profit comes from ads. And so like, if there's a world where you can get the product and rip out all the spyware and junkware and, and adware, uh, you're getting it for basically half off. Or like, you're, you're taking half their margin, which they will hate. But, um, I don't know. I'm, I'm bullish. I need to figure out how to actually go and, uh, and revert. I need, I need a million agents. I need a million dollars to compute to, to get this $3,000 TV to perform the way I want.

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  To not listen to every conversation.

• 19:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I need, I need to marshal a million dollars of compute. Um, but, uh, what's interesting is that LG has this drama. And then like last week, we touched on it briefly, Apple partnered with LG and Apple has this like, you know, really solid brand. And yesterday on the show, I had it wrong. We were talking about how Google has Nest, Amazon has Ring, Apple doesn't really have enough smart home stuff. They finally solved that. So they did this really deep partnership with LG and like two other manufacturers where the products, I mean, uh, let me see if we can actually pull up the images because the products look sort of, um, Apple-esque, like they, they, they fit within the Apple ecosystem, I think.

• 20:29Jordi Hays?

  Let's see, let's see about that.

• 20:32John Coogan?

  He's gonna judge. Uh, I think they look nice and I think if you are an iPhone user, there's probably a benefit to going all in on one, on one system. And I think if you went with these devices, the integration into HomeKit would be solid. Um, I don't know if I can, there we go. What do you think?

• 20:55John Coogan?

  What tier are you putting it in? Should we go one by one?

• 20:59Jordi Hays?

  C tier.

• 21:00John Coogan?

  C tier, okay. But compare that to the Home View.

• 21:07Jordi Hays?

  Why don't we compare to this ad of this new ad for the Apple Home View?

• 21:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, the ad was, was a little rough. We can pull it up and play it. Um, but the Home View is less exciting as a product and more just exciting about like, it feels like Apple has had a bunch of irons in the fire around home and internet of things and like, they finally have a strategy. But let's play the ad and see if it's, if it's attractive. So I didn't realize this, but you can just, is this version?

• 21:40Jordi Hays?

  We need audio.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:42Speaker 04

  What was that? What was that? Like, that was a shot or?

• 21:45Speaker 04

  Is that a shot? Well, yeah, I'm the guy that does food. You're the guy that what? You, you, uh, you start 100 different businesses and have zero followers? I need you to check the brancino. I feel like that was a shot, Tom. This is why, this is why I didn't want to come home. This is why. Oh, fuck you. What the fuck? What? What the fuck would you say?

• 21:59John Coogan?

  You have a censor button?

• 22:09John Coogan?

  That's so annoying.

• 22:16John Coogan?

  That is such a good, such a good.

• 22:21John Coogan?

  Uh, remarkably annoying, but great edit by whoever put that together. Very, very funny. Uh, no, but, uh, I mean, the critique and a lot of people have been saying this is like, uh, if you're, if you're trying to get the family out the door in the morning, like, do you really want an extra screen in the mix that's following you around? Uh, you were saying that like around kids, like this is just gonna be a complete disaster. They're gonna be either like fingers all over it or like toppling it over. You can get a wall mounted version, which I think actually makes more sense in terms of like, you might already have like a home security thing mounted or thermostat mounted. Just mounting that and then at every point you can.

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  I meant it's like an iPad that's attached.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  It's basically an iPad that's attached to the wall. Yes. Yes.

• 23:02Jordi Hays?

  Insane.

• 23:02John Coogan?

  But it's cheaper and it's smaller. And so maybe that's good. I don't know. And it's designed to be like hardwired in, like it's, it, it, it, it thinks of itself as like more of an IoT device as opposed to like, it needs to go on the plane and perform on the plane too. So it needs a battery and it needs all this and that. So like, you're probably getting something of potentially better value. But I think that like Home View aside, whether you want that product or not, I agree. It's probably the least exciting Apple launch in recent memory for me.

• 23:32Jordi Hays?

  In decades.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  In a while. Um, but I like the strategy. Like, I think, I think they're actually starting to crack like, okay, we have a doorbell, a thermostat, a camera and a few other.

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm sorry, partnering with LG does not count as having a.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  It does if it works as well as an Apple product. If it works like Beats where like it's actually.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  What are they, what are they like? Either, either take the category seriously and deliver an amazing product.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  Buy Sonos, buy a bunch of stuff.

• 24:06Jordi Hays?

  You're telling me Apple can't make like a doorbell?

• 24:10John Coogan?

  They don't know how.

• 24:12Jordi Hays?

  They don't know how. They don't know how anymore.

• 24:15John Coogan?

  I don't know. Is it intellectual property? Why don't they just buy a doorbell or build one?

• 24:21Jordi Hays?

  Who knows? But I, like, I would be the biggest fan of them actually taking the category seriously and going all in and making something that would, was amazing enough that you would wanna rip out whatever you had in your home.

• 24:35John Coogan?

  Okay, so.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  But it doesn't seem like they.

• 24:39John Coogan?

  Let me give you four options for a theoretical smart home. You can put them in a tier, tier list. Everything must be a tier list. Okay. So the first option is going the, the, the cornerstone of your, the, the, the first option is just chaos. The first option is just, you get whatever. Somebody gives you an Amazon Echo, it goes on the countertop, you got an Amazon Echo. Then you buy a Nest thermostat, you got Google over there. Then you got an iPhone in your pocket, you got an iPad over here. It's just chaos. It's just random. Uh, what, what, where does that sit for you tier, tier wise? That, that life? That's B tier?

• 25:18Jordi Hays?

  B tier.

• 25:19John Coogan?

  B tier? That's not so bad. You like the chaos.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, uh, whatever's below F.

• 25:23John Coogan?

  Below, okay. F tier is the chaos mode, random chaos. Okay, now, let's, let's do, you're going all in on Google. You get the Google Nest thermostat and then you have to go get whatever their, their Google Nest home thing is and you, you can't have a Home View. You can't have a, uh, an Apple HomePod speaker system. You're, you're buying from Google when you want an IoT thing in your house. You got the Google lock.

• 25:49Jordi Hays?

  A tier.

• 25:50John Coogan?

  A tier, okay. Even though you carry an iPhone, you like the all Google product. Now, Amazon, you get the Ring camera. You can get the little drone that flies around your house. You know that one? They have a drone that is like for home defense inside. That's a plus. You get Amazon Echo though. So you're talking to Rufus a lot. How are you feeling about the Amazon ecosystem? Where does that go?

• 26:14John Coogan?

  We're getting the dog sound effect.

• 26:16Jordi Hays?

  S tier.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  S tier for Amazon. Okay. And then the last one is Apple. Apple, you already carry an iPhone. But you're going all in on Apple and that means an LG lock. You don't get a Ring camera. You get an LG. You get a thermostat. You're not getting Nest. You're getting the LG, but it all connects to Home, Home.

• 26:34Jordi Hays?

  I'm not signing up for global spy services.

• 26:37John Coogan?

  It's all global spy services. It's all global. They're all global spy services. The, Apple is maybe the least.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  We just spent 20 minutes talking about how LG is absolutely the worst.

• 26:49John Coogan?

  LG is the worst, but Apple's the best. And so it averages out to like Google and Amazon quality, in my opinion.

• 26:54Jordi Hays?

  That's a good point. That's actually a good point.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  And, and specifically, Apple, Apple came, they brought their sterling reputation, crystal clear messaging, and they said, data is encrypted end to end in Apple Home. So your, your, your voice, your, your secretly recorded voice is encrypted and then it's transferred to the data broker who unencrypts it for him now. No, it is encrypted. I, I have faith in Apple's security, but, but how do you feel? I don't want to influence you too much.

• 27:20Jordi Hays?

  Trey says Apple LG is Hublot tier.

• 27:24Jordi Hays?

  Shots fired.

• 27:25John Coogan?

  Oh no. Xiaomi is the real spy service.

• 27:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. All right. So Amazon, actually pull Amazon down into A tier.

• 27:32John Coogan?

  A tier?

• 27:33Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, a fully.

• 27:35John Coogan?

  Echo guy.

• 27:36Jordi Hays?

  A fully analog home is S tier.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  Okay, fully analog, no devices, the wifi goes off at bedtime.

• 27:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 27:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 27:44Jordi Hays?

  Light switches, light switches.

• 27:46John Coogan?

  So living the old way.

• 27:47Jordi Hays?

  Doorbells.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, light switches, actual doorbells.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  Home security on film.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  Cuckoo clock to tell you what time it is. Yes. The, I completely agree with you. A grandfather clock, maybe a cuckoo clock and a grandfather clock.

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Yes, this is the actual correct thing. I think the fact that that's S tier, every, uh, Google and Amazon need to move down to B tier. They cannot be that close to fully analog. Right? Doesn't that feel more accurate?

• 28:12Jordi Hays?

  No, I think you're right.

• 28:12John Coogan?

  But now, the final question. Apple LG, spyware meets privacy company. The best of both worlds. Where are you putting it? Is it better than Google and Amazon? You would go Google or Amazon over Apple and LG?

• 28:32Jordi Hays?

  I I like I want to buy American here, even if it's made overseas.

• 28:38John Coogan?

  Which one does that mean?

• 28:39Jordi Hays?

  Google, Google, Amazon.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  They're all made in China. Literally every company makes everything in China. What are you talking?

• 28:47Jordi Hays?

  Isn't isn't LG?

• 28:49John Coogan?

  Life's good. LG. I think that's fake news, actually. LG. They're all they're all made abroad.

• 28:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, LG is a South Korean multinational.

• 28:57John Coogan?

  That manufactures in China.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 28:59John Coogan?

  Pretty sure they sold TV fans. They sold the windshield to China.

• 29:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm going, I'm going, I'll give him one up from random chaos.

• 29:10John Coogan?

  You you would go Google Home Nest Thermostat, Amazon Echo and Rufus over the thing that's on your phone that you carry everywhere?

• 29:20Jordi Hays?

  I just don't see the it's like the the most mid collab of all time.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:26Jordi Hays?

  Apple and LG, Apple Home Products and LG.

• 29:29John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  That's horrible.

• 29:32John Coogan?

  It's horrible.

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  I'd rather stay, I'd rather keep it in the Amazon family. Or keep it in the Google family.

• 29:38John Coogan?

  In the mix. You got that, too. I don't know.

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  And fully analog, you also have cans with string attached to them.

• 29:48John Coogan?

  Instead of an aircom system that you electricity.

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  Like if you have, if somebody's like at like if you have a gate outside your house and someone's at the gate like to deliver something. And you can just talk to them through through the can and it'll run through the string.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  The audio is crisp.

• 30:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay, I I have the A tier suggestion. I think A tier is is somewhat random chaos, but puppeteered by your agent, your AI agent. Because I do think that there are specific products that are better. But if you bring them all together in one interface that you control, I think that that will be within time, people will be like, yeah, I just talked to GPT and it goes and writes an API binding to Google's thing.

• 30:35Jordi Hays?

  Apple could do to win me over.

• 30:36John Coogan?

  What?

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  Dirt says a laundry chute. If Apple came out with the Apple Home View Smart Laundry Chute.

• 30:43John Coogan?

  Okay, what is smart about it?

• 30:50Jordi Hays?

  It use it has a Palantir integration to track your laundry.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  It could do biosecurity and see if you've been infected with a bioweapon.

• 30:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  Could scan your clothes on the way down. It could also, it could also be running a constant inventory of your clothing and the value of your clothing on the secondary market to see if you've lost money or gained money on the rare pieces of Chrome Hearts that you've been collecting. So as you take off your Chrome Heart, your head to toe Rick Owens and Chrome Hearts outfit at the end of the day, you throw it down your smart laundry chute and it looks on Vinted for what the value is. Is that what Vinted does? I don't know.

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 31:29John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, it goes on Vinted and says, you you just gained $500 in market value on this outfit today.

• 31:36Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 31:37John Coogan?

  Maybe that's the future.

• 31:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what would be the ideal home product collab? Could it be like a Monster Energy GoPro collaboration? Like, once you're talking about Apple and LG, I think you've got to expand into other other consumer electronics brands and just imagine what what a GoPro Monster Energy.

• 31:57John Coogan?

  So it's like a fridge that has a GoPro inside. And if you're out of Monster Energy, it orders more. So you're always in stock. That seems completely reasonable.

• 32:05Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 32:05John Coogan?

  I love it. Anyway.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  Very, very fun. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. 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. I got a fun business idea, a way to make a little extra money this Halloween. So with the power of artificial intelligence, it's easier than ever to file a lawsuit. So here's what you're going to do. You're going to go to popular places where trick or treaters are. You're going to find the kids that have handmade costumes from characters that are not in the public domain yet.

• 32:53John Coogan?

  So Iron Man, that's still Disney intellectual property.

• 32:56Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 32:56John Coogan?

  So you show up and you act like you're doing one of those TikTok like man on the street. Oh, I love your costumes.

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  Serve the parents.

• 33:02John Coogan?

  Homemade. And they're like, yeah, I did make it myself. I didn't buy this. I didn't pay the royalty. And you get their name and then you generate a lawsuit and you say, like, I'm I'm here to serve you with intellectual property theft, small claims lawsuit.

• 33:21Jordi Hays?

  So, John, LG actually makes a pocket photo printer.

• 33:24John Coogan?

  Really?

• 33:24Jordi Hays?

  So why not generate the lawsuit on the fly?

• 33:27John Coogan?

  And print it there, exactly. Serve them.

• 33:29Jordi Hays?

  Serve the parents.

• 33:30John Coogan?

  Serve them, right?

• 33:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:31John Coogan?

  And so then they're gonna be, oh, no, I don't I don't want to get sued. You know, do you work for Disney? And you have to be like, oh, don't worry about that. And then so then you you offer to settle the lawsuit on the street over Venmo or something. Wildly illegal. But then there's a second step. So once you have all of these, you know, adorable kids with their homemade but intellectual property infringing

• 33:56Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 33:56John Coogan?

  costumes, you go to the studios, you take the meeting with Disney and you say, look what I've done. I've found so many instances of intellectual property infringement, we can clean up here. And they're gonna look at you like, are you insane? You're gonna ruin our brand. Homemade costumes are the lifeblood of our fandom. If this gets out, it will destroy our brand. We will look like an evil corporation. And then you'll say, yeah, it'd be a shame if this got out.

• 34:23John Coogan?

  Let's settle. Over Venmo. So you can Venmo me to make this go away. I won't release the footage of lawsuits for the kids who are wearing intellectually.

• 34:33Jordi Hays?

  Sitting there like this, like you got you got them pinned over here.

• 34:36John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Easy money this Halloween.

• 34:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:41John Coogan?

  Couple of extra bucks for you if you're trying to be entrepreneurial. Anyway, let me tell you about Shopify.

• 34:46Jordi Hays?

  Beautiful mind.

• 34:47John Coogan?

  Shopify is a commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

• 34:56John Coogan?

  There was something else that I wanted to talk about, but we can run through some other stuff. Let's see. Oh, yeah. The other thing with the IOT discussion is just like Anthropic is warning that rogue AI agents may self replicate and hijack every everyday devices. Like, they did some studies that show that like inference can run on commodity hardware, think like a PlayStation, an Xbox, even a doorbell. It'll be really slow, but it could potentially self replicate. And so it's another vector of like, you might not think security is important. You might only think like the Neo cloud, the GPU cluster is is important.

• 35:35John Coogan?

  But the Financial Times put it in a very funny way, very different language from what Anthropic said. They said, self replicating AI worms will be able to hijack smart homes, Anthropic says. So yeah, maybe maybe the analog home is the future. Maybe you do need to have no smart doorbells because it'll just be ringing doorbells constantly, trying to communicate with the other agents in swarm or something. Who knows? The other funny thing today is that KKR bought the front of the Wall Street Journal.

• 36:06Jordi Hays?

  They sold the windshield, folks.

• 36:08John Coogan?

  Sold the windshield. I go to open up the Wall Street Journal today and the entire front page is just a full page ad for KKR's 50th anniversary. It's a beautiful ad. It says, people are counting on us. We say it every day at KKR. Because behind every investment are people counting on what comes next. A teacher counting on her pension, an investor building for the future, a portfolio company employee sharing in the value they create, a business shaping its next chapter for nearly 50 years. That responsibility has shaped how we invest. And they go on to talk about the what they do at KKR. So happy birthday to KKR. Very exciting. What a better, what a great way to celebrate 50 years in business, the business of private equity than with a full page spread in the in the Wall Street Journal.

• 36:51John Coogan?

  Of course, there is a real first page that that appears behind the the front page ad. But I thought that was a funny ad unit. Underutilized. More people should be running the full page Wall Street Journal ad. But there's a whole bunch of other stories. Anyway, I thought that was just a funny funny way to advertise your 50th anniversary.

• 37:13Jordi Hays?

  Crazy that they also have another ad. They still have the normal ad on the back of.

• 37:19John Coogan?

  Oh, inside?

• 37:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a full wrapper.

• 37:23Jordi Hays?

  Blanketing ads.

• 37:24John Coogan?

  It's the it's the front of the journal and it looks like the front of the journal. So when you go and you pick this up from a newsstand, it will look like this. And then the back is a KKR ad and then on the inside you get the full page spread. Very cool. So yeah, is somebody in your in your in your life turning 50? What a better way to celebrate than this.

• 37:44Jordi Hays?

  I like it. What's going on over at Xbox?

• 37:47John Coogan?

  Xbox, they started a lab to lean into vibe coding and decompiled games. They recognize that it's good for players, but it might challenge the business model. But they're in a unique position, being owned by Microsoft, to potentially change their business model and not be so reliant on quarterly earnings. And so Asha Sharma over at Xbox is winning accolades. A lot of love on the timeline for her. So she said, today we're standing up Xbox Labs, labs.xbox.com. And you should pull up the website because it's very, very cool design, showing all the different Xbox intellectual property in some fun things that you can like click buttons to change the the style.

• 38:31John Coogan?

  But she sent this note to the team. Yeah, look at this, Jordy. So and then click the different, not not the email signup, but at the bottom, there's like keys that you can click. You can click like, yeah, you can make it dark mode, light mode, color, black and white, green, and you can cycle through all these things. It's a pretty cool design and it looks like you can like draw on it and stuff. It's fun. The first video games emerged some 75 years ago. In the time since, there have been booms and busts, but every year there are more great games to play, more devices to play them, and best of all, more people playing than ever. That growth has made Xbox what it is today. In recent weeks, we've seen games rapidly decompiled and rebuilt to run on hardware they were never originally intended to support. Windows PC builds have been translated to run on Apple silicon, ported to run inside

• 39:14John Coogan?

  of a web browser using Web Assembly. But perhaps more surprisingly, we've seen many of the biggest games in the world have been remixed into the source code of another. We've saw this with Call of Duty and Minecraft, right? These experiments challenge long-held assumptions about our industry. The tether between software and hardware, the boundary between creation and play, and how people discover and experience games. While it's hard to predict the future, it's easy to see the possibilities in making great games easier to access. So, these are unmistakably good outcomes for players, even when they challenge our existing business models. To explore these possibilities, they stood up Xbox Labs, a small group of game makers, engineers, and scientists whose job it is to turn emerging ideas into things our players

• 39:59John Coogan?

  and developers can experience, will build in the open, learn from what people can do. And so, people are excited. John Palmer said, "If Xbox launched an official version of decompiled Halo with a Forge mode and a marketplace/discovery of mods akin to how Roblox works, they would make $1 trillion." Okay, maybe a little hyperbolic, since you can do a lot of these mods for free, but it is, it is very interesting that they're at this threshold of, do you want to completely burn down the old business model in favor of something new? Or do you want to try and fight it out and squeeze the last egg out of the golden goose that is the traditional model? I don't know.

• 40:40John Coogan?

  Well, there's a deep dive on GTA 6 in Bloomberg. It's pretty fun. Should we go through it?

• 40:46Jordi Hays?

  Read the highlights.

• 40:47John Coogan?

  Let's read the highlights. GTA 6 has been in development for eight years. I thought it was longer. I thought they started it like right after GTA V, but I guess it's only been eight years. It's still a really long time. "The original version included large areas of North and South America, but the scope was eventually reduced to Vice City, Miami, and its surrounding regions. Rockstar initially planned to develop GTA 6 alongside Red Dead Redemption 2, but RDR 2 required most of the company's resources, delaying GTA 6's development. Rockstar shifted from developing multiple games simultaneously to focusing most of its workforce on one major game. Rockstar's workforce nearly doubled, growing from 2,441 employees in 2018 to 4,711 in 2026, spread across 12 offices.

• 41:31John Coogan?

  Rockstar's three heads of development, has three heads of development. The game's basic story was established by 2019." Wow, they locked the story seven years ago. That's crazy.

• 41:41Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  I mean, they probably iterated a bunch, but pretty, pretty cool how much they worked on this. "The developers experienced a difficult early development phase described as a dark period, when the game's overall vision remained unclear. By 2022, though, enough of the game's system had come together for developers to begin seeing the complete vision. GTA 6 features Rockstar's most realistic and detailed open world yet, building heavily on systems introduced in Red Dead Redemption 2. They invested heavily in making NPCs feel believable, rather than simply populating the world with generic characters. The developers struggled to balance realism and entertainment, debating how interactive everyday activities should be, such as purchasing drinks or preparing food.

• 42:25John Coogan?

  Jason and Lucia can spend time together throughout the open world, rather than interacting only during scripted missions." Very fun. There's a whole bunch more. Wow, there are so many, so many takeaways. This, this synth potato thread is really, really long. Anyway, I'm excited to play when it comes out. Also, Xbox introduced a new controller, the Xbox Nano Controller for $49.99. The controller works on Xbox consoles, Windows PCs, mobile devices, and TVs.

• 42:55Jordi Hays?

  This looks like it's for casuals?

• 42:56John Coogan?

  It does. It's for casuals.

• 42:59Jordi Hays?

  And I'm a casual. I'm potentially the most casual player.

• 43:02John Coogan?

  It is.

• 43:03Jordi Hays?

  And even I look at this and I think, nah, it's not, I don't know if that's for me.

• 43:07John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, I'm sure people will hack this to work with everything, and probably run everything as well. I saw, I saw some people vibe coding different controllers. There's a Star Wars pod racing game, and someone had really sweet controls that mimicked the actual movie pretty effectively. Whatever your vibe coding, do it with Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents when you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. A Brooklyn store employee prevented Kelly Clarkson from buying an animatronic bird, and the post hit the timeline like a thermonuclear explosion.

• 43:50John Coogan?

  Did you follow this? You said you were getting a lot of fake news. We got a truth nuke coming here, no?

• 43:55Jordi Hays?

  I have no idea what happened here, other than what you've already told me.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  It's pretty aggressive. It's still not fast enough. Still not my tempo. So Pablo Torre actually went and did a deep dive on this. I don't know where we should start, but it's a, it's a, it's a pretty wild, wild story. So Kelly Clarkson started with a post on October 10th that kind of put this on the timeline. So she said, "Just drove all the way to Brooklyn to check out this store I thought looked really rad and had a few things in mind to buy, and literally was looked at as if I couldn't afford it, and was told he could find something comparable for me."

• 44:44John Coogan?

  Wow, dude, you're an idiot and just lost a huge sale. But y'all should go check out Art of Play in Brooklyn, and she name drops them. "If you enjoy being treated like Julia, like Julia Roberts' character in Pretty Woman, for sure, check it out. Thumbs down." And Eliano from Palantir says, "Kelly, you would never be treated this way in the Palantir pop-up shop in Seoul, South Korea." That's very funny. And so, Art of Play fired back. They said, "Yesterday, Kelly Clarkson visited us in Brooklyn and inquired about buying Molly, a one-of-a-kind singing and dancing bird automaton who plays an important role in the magic shows we host here.

• 45:28John Coogan?

  Molly is permanently attached to the wall and isn't for sale. However, the negative experience Kelly described on Twitter would resonate with anyone who has felt judged in a shop. At Art of Play, whether someone comes in to make a purchase or simply look around for a while, they are equally welcome. We greet everyone who walks in the door with the invitation to pick things up and play, and they do. Many stay for hours enjoying our puzzles, games, and toys. Imagine our surprise when our small local business was suddenly attacked by 8 million people who have never visited our store." Yeah, they're getting review bombed and like, a lot of, a lot of negative messages. "It's been a surreal experience to be the focus of such widespread outage, outrage after just one mention by a celebrity. Thanks to all our friends for their support and welcome to all the curious folks who have discovered us amidst the drama. We're going

• 46:13John Coogan?

  to keep our heads down, and hopefully we can clear things up with Kelly someday." As a talented popular singer once said, "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Clever response. Hot take, I think if you go in a store, everything should be for sale. I think you should be able to buy the point-of-sale system. If I want that square reader, you got to sell it to me. Now, it's going to, might cost me a pretty penny.

• 46:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:34John Coogan?

  Because what happens if I buy your Toast device? You're going to be out of business for that day. It might take you a couple days. That's lost revenue. That's lost profit.

• 46:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 46:42John Coogan?

  I want you to build a discounted cash flow analysis. Think about all the different inputs. It's not just that you're going to be offline, not taking any revenue in, not earning that margin over the days while you're waiting for your next Toast reader to come in the mail. You also might suffer brand damage. You might be closed on a day that you're not, and your, your best customers might be upset. All of that is quantifiable. Put it in the spreadsheet, discount it with a cost of capital, and get me a number. I want to be able to buy it if I want to buy the chairs.

• 47:10Jordi Hays?

  There's always a number.

• 47:10John Coogan?

  The countertops, the ceiling tiles. I should be able to buy anything when I go in a store, whether or not it's something that people normally buy. Let me tell you a story.

• 47:18Jordi Hays?

  More simple solution from Alexander in the X chat. Just don't go to Brooklyn.

• 47:23John Coogan?

  That works too. Let me tell you a story. I had a buddy from the old country. He was from Eastern Europe, Middle Eastern area. And he said, "Oh, man, clubs are different."

• 47:33Jordi Hays?

  Most, most.

• 47:34John Coogan?

  Very general area.

• 47:35Jordi Hays?

  Least descriptive.

• 47:37John Coogan?

  Opposite side of the world, okay? And he said, "Oh, man, like, clubs where I come from are very different. You can do anything in the clubs." And I'm like, "Okay, what?" And he's like, "Uh, like bottle service?" And I'm like, "Yeah, yeah, they'll, they'll bring out bottle service with the sparklers." And he's like, "But they go further." "There's one club that will allow you to burn the club down." And I was like, "Oh, what does that mean? Like, you can just go crazy and like have the bottles spraying everywhere?" He's like, "No, you can literally burn the club down. They have figured out how much it costs to rebuild the club from the ground up. So if you have the money, at the end of the night, they will evacuate the building, and you can start a fire that burns the club to the ground." And it's going to cost you a ton of money, because the club's going to be out of business

• 48:21John Coogan?

  for six months while they rebuild. But they have thought of that, and they have priced it, and it's an option.

• 48:26Jordi Hays?

  It's on the menu.

• 48:27John Coogan?

  And this is the way business should be done.

• 48:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 48:29John Coogan?

  Right?

• 48:30Jordi Hays?

  I agree.

• 48:31John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Pablo Torre has gotten to the bottom of the Kelly Clarkson bird story. He got the camera footage from the security camera footage for the bird encounter. It, it's a pretty busy moment. It's a pretty busy store at the moment. It's actually sort of hard to tell. I didn't come away being like, this is really bad on one side or another. I don't know if I just didn't watch the video closely enough. Do you have a take on this, or are you okay?

• 49:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I don't understand why this is a story at all.

• 49:13John Coogan?

  Well, it's a story fundamentally about humanoid robotics and robotics, because she's buying a bird automaton. This is AI demand. This is demand for artificial intelligence. I, I insist that animatronics should be included in the artificial intelligence boom. You go to Walt Disney World and you see, it's a small world, you're looking at AI.

• 49:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:37John Coogan?

  You're welcome. You're welcome.

• 49:39Jordi Hays?

  Agreed.

• 49:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I think people just like it because she's such a big celebrity, and she's, you know, sort of having this like, you know, minor conflict with this local store, and they're going back and forth, and going, and, and, you know, trading, trading shots across the, across the internet. I thought the bird was $5,000. Now it's allegedly $15,000.

• 50:05John Coogan?

  But it's a pretty cool bird. Have you actually seen the video?

• 50:07Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 50:08John Coogan?

  It's awesome.

• 50:08Jordi Hays?

  Oh, no, no, I haven't. I still am not.

• 50:10John Coogan?

  It has a bunch of wires. It has a bunch of wires and it actually dances around. It looks, it looks incredibly accurate. It sings. It's fun and you crank it. It's, it's the original I O T. It's the solution. This is

• 50:22Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 50:22John Coogan?

  For your, your

• 50:23Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 50:24John Coogan?

  You're not going to get a little speaker that plays a cute little noise. You need an animatronic bird. She said, she, she literally just put Apple, Google, Amazon, D tier. She was trying to go.

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  Do you think she was trying to build a analog cuckoo clock?

• 50:38John Coogan?

  Maybe. It's basically that. Yeah, it's basically, but I guess you have to crank it. So it's timed up, but.

• 50:44Jordi Hays?

  Have you, have you gotten any cold emails lately?

• 50:47John Coogan?

  No.

• 50:48Jordi Hays?

  No?

• 50:49John Coogan?

  No.

• 50:49Jordi Hays?

  Powerful. I've been getting a lot of cold emails, A I cold emails.

• 50:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 50:53Jordi Hays?

  Ryan Hoover describes one that he received. Hi, Ryan. I saw your podcast interview from 2016. You talked about your morning routine at Phil's Coffee and Investments and Deal, Mindbloom and Passport. Well, we're building Instinct for cats.

• 51:09John Coogan?

  Is that real?

• 51:10Jordi Hays?

  No, I've actually been getting emails that are formatted like this.

• 51:14John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 51:14Jordi Hays?

  The format is basically like, um, show the recipient that you've done your research on them. And then it just sort of like states a bunch of random facts, like clearly pulling from LinkedIn and, and, you know, media and all these things.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  Maybe email.

• 51:30Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then just like serves up just like something completely, effectively completely unrelated, but it's like, okay.

• 51:36John Coogan?

  Should we become physical mail guys? Just get P O boxes and just give people that if they ask?

• 51:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:42John Coogan?

  And then it's just like, send me a

• 51:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Send a calendar invite to my physical address.

• 51:46John Coogan?

  No, just write me a letter and I'll see, is the wax stamp legit? If it's not, I'm not really opening it. I want it to be embossed with your seal. And then I will open it at a time that's convenient for me, perhaps on a, on a Sunday evening with a, with a cup of hot cocoa by the fire. By the heart. Um, th- th- this is the way to communicate in the future. You can't be getting, can't be getting cold email slop. That's not, that, that, that's, that's going to make me churn from email. I'm just going to turn off email.

• 52:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:18John Coogan?

  If this is what's going to happen. So.

• 52:20Jordi Hays?

  Back to paper.

• 52:20John Coogan?

  Letters, back to letters. Anyway.

• 52:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think we're way, I think we're way over.

• 52:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, way over.

• 52:25Jordi Hays?

  It's time to bring in our first guest.

• 52:28John Coogan?

  From Fragment.

• 52:28Jordi Hays?

  Of the show.

• 52:29John Coogan?

  The co-founder.

• 52:30Jordi Hays?

  Dear friend.

• 52:31John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 52:31Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 52:32John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 52:33Speaker 05

  Good luck, guys.

• 52:34Jordi Hays?

  What's up, dude? It's only been a few years. It's great to see your face.

• 52:38Speaker 05

  You too. Looking good, Jordy.

• 52:41Jordi Hays?

  Looking good.

• 52:42John Coogan?

  So you two know each other, but I don't know if the audience does. So why don't you kick it off with the introduction?

• 52:49Speaker 05

  Me or Jordy?

• 52:51John Coogan?

  Yes, you, the guest. Tell the audience.

• 52:53Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, there's

• 52:54Speaker 05

  Jordy and I go back, we, uh, Jordy ran a company called Party Round back in the day. And, uh, I had a company called Cove. Cove was a, kind of like a, an automated fund admin for private investments. And we took on the task of, uh, administrating, uh, Party Round's deals. Yes.

• 53:16John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 53:17Speaker 05

  Um, well, along the way, we are actually, so Party Round was one of them, but we, we administered a bunch of real estate deals and private equity deals. And that's, uh, doing that with two people, uh, was, was a pain, a super big pain. And, uh, that is the catalyst for, uh, building Fragment.

• 53:39Jordi Hays?

  All right. So catch us up to speed. You go from, from Cove, it evolves into Fragment. You raise, if I remember correctly, a seed round from, from Stripe. Was this in 2022 or, or maybe 2021?

• 53:53Speaker 05

  We raised a, a pre-seed from, from, uh, from Box Group.

• 53:58Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 53:59Speaker 05

  And then a seed from Stripe. Yep.

• 54:00Jordi Hays?

  There you go. Uh, and then, yeah, catch us up to speed on the last, on the last couple of years.

• 54:07Speaker 05

  Uh, we, we built a, a ledger API, which is basically a system of record for fintech companies. Um, and fintech companies built all the products that run those companies on this system of record. So companies like, uh, WAP and Ramp and, um, Bill.com, uh, run on that infrastructure. And over the course of the last six months or so, we saw that those, those, those folks were really pushing the system with different types of transactions and these agentic transactions. So they were using the system, uh, using agents to actually run a lot of the back office work

• 54:50Speaker 05

  for these fintech companies. Um, and so we started following those, uh, that track very closely. And, uh, have built now a financial system that's purpose built for agents and just announced a funding round with, with First Mark.

• 55:06Jordi Hays?

  John, why don't you hit the gong as hard as you possibly can?

• 55:10John Coogan?

  I would love to.

• 55:10Jordi Hays?

  And then I have the follow up questions.

• 55:11John Coogan?

  I would love to.

• 55:13Jordi Hays?

  Bang.

• 55:16Jordi Hays?

  Oh, and it shook, shook the room. Um, um, all right. So go, I, I, I would love if you could get more specific around how this actually works today and how you think it'll work in the future. Because, uh, we've been getting agentic, various like agentic payments pitches for a while now. And none, none of them have been that compelling, at least to me. What I'm not hearing you say is like, we're going to, we're going to replace Stripe because Stripe couldn't possibly be, uh, good at, at, at, at moving money. It's more, it, it's like a different layer of the stack. Is that, is that?

• 56:00John Coogan?

  I, I, I mean, I, the, all the sustaining innovation pitches that I've heard have been like a hundred percent, I'm on board. Like Stripe saying like, yeah, agents are going to be moving money over Stripe rails. I'm like, I'm in, uh, Plaid. I, you know, I've, I've, I've used Plaid in Chat G P T to authenticate a bunch of bank accounts. It's great.

• 56:18Jordi Hays?

  Or even with personal agents, the, the, the most compelling pitch on how they're going to make money, at least in the short term is like, yeah, interchange fees.

• 56:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 56:27Jordi Hays?

  But, but you're talking about working with these enterprise companies that are using agents to like basically run processes on the backend and then update a ledger, trigger payments, things like that.

• 56:40Speaker 05

  Yeah. So we want to automate commerce and, uh, we're going to do that by outsourcing the, the work of finance to agents. And agents can't really do that work by operating all of these sort of human operated financial systems. Why? Well, so to automate commerce, you kind of need to know what commerce is. Commerce is a set of, of promises. It's, it's like these instructions for who owes what, to whom, when, and money, money is the system that settles them. And so where do these, where do these instructions exist? Well, in B two B, they're like contract terms. They're, they're buried in PDFs and docs and whatnot.

• 57:23Speaker 05

  And what, what do those terms include? Well, they're, they're like invoicing terms and S L A's and payment terms and refunding and return rules and billing and accounting rules. And in existing, in, in traditional commerce, those instructions for settling them are, are distributed across all these different systems. And that makes it really hard, if you're an agent, to go across all these systems and, and settle. Each system sort of has a portion of the story and each system plays its own part. And humans sort of carry the context across them. And it's that human bit where the humans are, are, are part of that story that, you know, once transactions exponentiate, creates economic strain. That's, that creates a problem.

• 58:11John Coogan?

  Is that true? I'm, I'm so confused about like agents can't go across different systems. Cause it feels like the narrative over the last couple of months has been like, the agents are in too many systems. Like, it's like the opposite. It's like, like they're reading PDFs they shouldn't read and they're in the system that they weren't even supposed to be in. It feels like agents are like really good at like reading rules and then like interacting with different systems, like writing A P I code on the fly, using M C P, using computer use. Like, I, I, I understand that like, there's a lot of problems with that, but it feels like it's like firmly in the path. But I still think there's like a lot of value here, but I'm wondering like, like, how does the, how does the company interface with like the model capabilities getting better?

• 58:56Speaker 05

  So the model capabilities are going to get better at intelligence and reasoning. The modeling capabilities are less likely to get better at deterministic stuff that are the rules of money, invariance and the instructions that exist in these contracts.

• 59:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 59:11Speaker 05

  So, let's just like, take, take an example. If, if you're an agent and you are trying to like disperse a claim, for example, an insurance claim, well, one system is going to have the, the balance for the claim. Another system will have like what's already been paid. Another system will have what you've accounted for. All these rules exist in different systems.

• 59:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 59:36Speaker 05

  And the, in, in order for the agent to know what to disperse or what to account for, it doesn't have, it doesn't have all the context. It doesn't have a, a clean view of the instructions across all these different systems.

• 59:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:50Speaker 05

  So you're basically telling an agent to go into each of these systems and operate the flow that the, that the, the application prescribes. What we want to do is let the agent go nuts, like let them actually, let them, let them, let them be intelligent. Let them be intelligent. We're going to constrain them from doing anything stupid, but we want them to be intelligent so that they can refund what they need to, if, when you're solving a problem, you need, you need to refund what you need, you need, you want to account for the, the way the, the deal is supposed to be accounted for, you want to pay maybe a little bit now and a little later on, you might want to use credits. There's all these different ways that you're going to easily solve the problem.

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:00:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:37Jordi Hays?

  To put it more simply, like there's a lot of stuff with money that you want to be deterministic. Is that, is that another way to think about it? And like have, you don't want the model like reasoning through, you want it to be reasoning through, like maybe like a certain parts of the process, but not.

• 1:00:52John Coogan?

  And probably not every time. Like you don't necessarily want your, like every time you, you, you get a transaction on your e-commerce, so you don't want like, you know, G P D six pro to like figure out if it's the right amount of money.

• 1:01:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:01:04John Coogan?

  Just use a calculator, right?

• 1:01:07Speaker 05

  Well, you want the agent to take the rules out of all these contracts.

• 1:01:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:13Speaker 05

  The, the rules in these contracts are what programs the money.

• 1:01:17John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:01:18Speaker 05

  You take the rules from all these contracts, you put it next to the balances that those rules need to update.

• 1:01:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:25Speaker 05

  And now you have, now you have programmed money. And the agent will execute the, those rules and update those balances accordingly.

• 1:01:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Speaker 05

  That's, that's, that's the system we're building.

• 1:01:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's very cool. Awesome. Well, thank you.

• 1:01:40Jordi Hays?

  You hiring anybody?

• 1:01:41John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:01:42Jordi Hays?

  Got a bunch of new, got a bunch of money. Where are you guys building the team these days?

• 1:01:47Speaker 05

  Uh, we're in New York. Uh, we are hiring like crazy go-to-market folks, engineers.

• 1:01:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:53Speaker 05

  Don't know anyone.

• 1:01:55John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:01:55Jordi Hays?

  Crushing it, dude.

• 1:01:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, New York is, New York is crushing. It's been, uh, it's been awesome to watch. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:02:02Jordi Hays?

  Great to get the update, dude.

• 1:02:03John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:02:04Jordi Hays?

  Congrats.

• 1:02:05John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 1:02:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:07John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. Our next guest, Studio Jane, here with us in person in the studio. When you spend as much money as Air One, as, at Air One, as Jordy does, they send down the chief growth officer to check in. Is that what's going on?

• 1:02:34Speaker 06

  Yes, I brought you guys some personal gifts too.

• 1:02:36Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:02:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:37Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Nice hat. This is a nice, nice material.

• 1:02:40John Coogan?

  Uh, but yes, introduce yourself and explain.

• 1:02:43Speaker 06

  Good to meet you guys.

• 1:02:44Jordi Hays?

  I'm pulling up my app right now.

• 1:02:46Speaker 06

  I already looked, I already looked you up before coming in here. Don't worry. You're up there.

• 1:02:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've never met anyone that can pull up the app.

• 1:02:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, you're up there.

• 1:02:53John Coogan?

  I imagine, I imagine there's a whole slide on him in the board meeting.

• 1:02:56Speaker 06

  There is, there is.

• 1:02:57John Coogan?

  It's like, let's project out Jordy, what does that do for the platform?

• 1:03:00Speaker 06

  I also thought of the whole conversation where everyone thinks they're the top spender at Air One and no one's ever even remotely close to being the top spender at Air One.

• 1:03:05John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:03:06Speaker 06

  That's part of it.

• 1:03:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I'm just saying, I've never met any, I've never gone app for app with anyone.

• 1:03:12John Coogan?

  That's hilarious. Uh, but yeah, uh, introduce yourself, talk about the day-to-day, talk about the, the challenges and the.

• 1:03:19Speaker 06

  Chief growth officer of Air One. Uh, if you don't know, if you're not from L A, you may not know what it is. Some people probably do. We're a, we're a chain of grocery stores at its core. Uh, we've got 14 stores across the Los Angeles market today.

• 1:03:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Speaker 06

  We are premium in everything we do. Um, we're top of the market in terms of the brand, the food, the store build-outs, the retail experience, and we just try to push the bounds in everything, retail and food and beverage. I've been there eight years. Uh, it's been a ride. I worked in the back of a grocery store when I started.

• 1:03:45Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:03:46Speaker 06

  Yeah. I went from the, the Beverly Hills private equity world to going in the back of the dairy cooler at the Grove to my office.

• 1:03:51John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 1:03:52Speaker 06

  And we've grown up.

• 1:03:55Jordi Hays?

  Did you like getting a bunch, like how did, how did that series of events happen? You were just going in for lunch every day and seeing the guy, seeing the guy?

• 1:04:04Speaker 06

  No, and the truth of it is, I was, I was in the private equity world for a long time and wanted to transition and learn how to run a business and wanted to be a G M one day and I, I met everyone.

• 1:04:13John Coogan?

  You wanted like true operations.

• 1:04:14Speaker 06

  Yeah, I met, I met people in U N L A and I got very lucky to meet our owner and C E O Tony.

• 1:04:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:18Speaker 06

  Who was looking to bring someone on to help them grow.

• 1:04:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:21Speaker 06

  And, uh, we're still a family-owned business, but we were a much more mom-and-pop business back then. We only had four stores, no corporate offices.

• 1:04:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:27Speaker 06

  And we've just grown since then.

• 1:04:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:29John Coogan?

  What's, what, what is the overarching thesis on 15 stores in one?

• 1:04:33Speaker 06

  14.

• 1:04:34John Coogan?

  14 stores in one region? I guess the 15th store opened in Thousand Oaks?

• 1:04:38Speaker 06

  That might've been 14.

• 1:04:39John Coogan?

  August.

• 1:04:40Speaker 06

  Palisades closed, it's reopening, so.

• 1:04:41John Coogan?

  So, anyway, uh, all the stores right in one locality. What's the benefit? What, what, what's the thesis around expansion?

• 1:04:49Speaker 06

  We run out of a commissary model.

• 1:04:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:51Speaker 06

  That's the reason. So we have a commissary kitchen in downtown L A.

• 1:04:53John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:04:54Speaker 06

  We call it Air One Disneyland.

• 1:04:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:04:55Speaker 06

  It supports all of our stores.

• 1:04:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:04:57Speaker 06

  So any normal cafe can't do what Air One can do without the support of a central kitchen.

• 1:05:01John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 1:05:02Speaker 06

  That allows us to do sort of this hub and smoke bottle and grow.

• 1:05:04John Coogan?

  Got it, okay.

• 1:05:04Speaker 06

  Um, and it lets us do what we do.

• 1:05:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, so you've got to be really, really big until you can do the second hub.

• 1:05:09Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 1:05:10John Coogan?

  Because you can't just jump one store in every key market.

• 1:05:12Speaker 06

  So everyone talks about.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  Because there's a world where it's like, oh yeah, there's one in San Francisco, one in Manhattan, but that wouldn't work.

• 1:05:17Speaker 06

  Doesn't work. It works for grocery stores.

• 1:05:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:19Speaker 06

  It doesn't work for food.

• 1:05:20John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:05:20Speaker 06

  And the prepared foods will make Air One, Air One, at least we think.

• 1:05:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, 100%.

• 1:05:23Speaker 06

  We think about growth in terms of everywhere we can drive from our commissary kitchen. So further south's in play, the Bay area is in play, but as soon as everyone talks about Air One New York City, which would be a smashing hit, we know that.

• 1:05:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:05:35Speaker 06

  You got to have the supply chain to support it.

• 1:05:36John Coogan?

  Got it, okay. Uh, what is the, uh, what is the model for platforming or accelerating new and upstart brands? Like there was, there was a while ago where I believe maybe a decade ago or two decades ago, before the Amazon acquisition, Whole Foods had like regional buying. So like if you could get in one Whole Foods, you could use that as a toehold as like a C P G company. And I'm interested in like, what role do you see Air One playing in being a curator, a tastemaker, an important pillar in the growth story of modern C P G companies?

• 1:06:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's been organic, but we are, uh, the top of funnel for every C P G brand, or we try to be, right? Whole Foods was it at some point.

• 1:06:20John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:06:21Speaker 06

  Uh, I have a background in C P G before this and every brand wants to be in Air One.

• 1:06:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:25Speaker 06

  We like to remind people, you can't make a business on 15 stores.

• 1:06:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:28Speaker 06

  You have to grow from there.

• 1:06:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:29Speaker 06

  But you can get the volume, the velocities that you can take in Air One and prove that to other retailers, other investors, et cetera.

• 1:06:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:35Speaker 06

  And it's happened organically. We just have a cachet of bringing in the best and the newest and, and knock on what everyone wants to be in Air One without us having to go out and forge all those brands today.

• 1:06:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:44Speaker 06

  Uh, and it seems to work.

• 1:06:45John Coogan?

  What's the?

• 1:06:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the other thing that's notable is like, I, I know, and I'm, I'm sure there's multiple, but I know of one, one SKU at Air One, that's the number one SKU at Air One and the number one SKU in its category on, uh, at, at Amazon as well. So like, uh, I think Salt and Stone?

• 1:07:00Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:07:00Jordi Hays?

  Yodder company?

• 1:07:01Speaker 06

  Yeah. Just got bought.

• 1:07:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:07:03Jordi Hays?

  Friends company.

• 1:07:04John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting, yeah. Uh, what, what, what is the life cycle for a brand from first meeting to actually being on the shelf? Like how quick is that? Is that years of, of building a relationship?

• 1:07:13Speaker 06

  Could be two weeks.

• 1:07:14John Coogan?

  Two weeks?

• 1:07:14Speaker 06

  Could be two weeks.

• 1:07:15John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:07:15Speaker 06

  Yeah. So we, we try to operate very differently from the traditional grocery store and that allows us to be fast.

• 1:07:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:22Speaker 06

  So Whole Foods, you know, sprouts, six-month category reviews, they cut in new products.

• 1:07:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Speaker 06

  We're reviewing products every Thursday in the office. And we're reviewing categories on the go.

• 1:07:30John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:07:31Speaker 06

  And we can self-distribute and bring them into our distribution center. We can go through distributors we already have.

• 1:07:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:35Speaker 06

  And it allows a brand to get on shelf really quickly.

• 1:07:37Jordi Hays?

  And how, how quickly do you know if something's going to work?

• 1:07:41Speaker 06

  Couple months.

• 1:07:42Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 1:07:42Speaker 06

  Couple months. And it's hard. I mean, getting into Air One is not the hard part. Selling at Air One is the hard part.

• 1:07:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:47Speaker 06

  You guys have been there. Look at the beverage wall.

• 1:07:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's tons of stuff.

• 1:07:49Speaker 06

  It's a ton of stuff.

• 1:07:50Jordi Hays?

  No, every, every time somebody, uh, every time somebody pitches me a beverage brand, I say like, go to Air One and be honest with yourself when you are on this wall.

• 1:08:00John Coogan?

  Are you getting?

• 1:08:00Jordi Hays?

  And, and this market, and, and Air One's are, I think, a place where people are probably more inclined than ever to try something new because of that curation element and because like people are novelty seeking when they're, when they're in, in an Air One.

• 1:08:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:08:13Jordi Hays?

  They're like, they might go in and get their favorites, but they also want to try, I'm going to get five things I've never had before.

• 1:08:18Speaker 06

  For sure.

• 1:08:18Jordi Hays?

  And, but be honest with yourself, are you actually going to win on that wall? Cause it's like the most competitive market, probably.

• 1:08:25Speaker 06

  I, I take that beyond beverage. I mean, I'll take my Air One hat off. If someone wants to start a CPQ burn, I say, don't do it. Like it's incredibly competitive. It's really hard. I can see it from the inside angle.

• 1:08:33John Coogan?

  It's really hard.

• 1:08:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:08:34John Coogan?

  What, what, what have you learned about retention curves in Air One? Like we're, we, we see with like software, you know, you, you get somebody in, they might churn for a little bit, but then they become a weekly active user, then a daily active user and this curve kind of smiles. What does success look like for a launch? Is it like really high conversion as soon as they're in? And then some reasonable churn or how, how do you even?

• 1:09:00Speaker 06

  From a brand perspective?

• 1:09:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, from a brand perspective, like you, you're putting a new brand on the shelf. You, you know, it's been a couple of weeks. You're, you're moving quickly.

• 1:09:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  But then you need over three months or six months to see good turn data, but what is the shape of that turn data? What other metrics are you looking at?

• 1:09:16Speaker 06

  Yeah. The reality is the brands control the brand's performance at Air One.

• 1:09:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:09:19Speaker 06

  We, we can't, you're on the shelf and it is what it is.

• 1:09:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:22Speaker 06

  And brands will invest or not invest. They might be local, they might not be.

• 1:09:27Speaker 06

  Retention curves, we think about from the member perspective. There is a, Air One's a fascinating business for a lot of reasons. There is everything the customer sees and there's everything the customer doesn't see.

• 1:09:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:09:35Speaker 06

  And where me and my team folks are all the things the customer doesn't see.

• 1:09:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:38Speaker 06

  And talk about retention, like membership drives Air One. Sales from members are well over half of our business.

• 1:09:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:09:44Speaker 06

  And that drives our entire business. We might try to be Costco one day where we're not a hundred percent, but we're close to a hundred percent.

• 1:09:51Speaker 06

  The evolution of a customer at Air One is they will come with a friend.

• 1:09:54Jordi Hays?

  Part of that, it's like, if you live near an Air One and you're going even a couple of times a month, it's hard to justify not getting a membership.

• 1:10:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:03Jordi Hays?

  It's actually really good. I mean, it's.

• 1:10:05Speaker 06

  But it starts way, it starts way before that. You, you'll have never heard of it and someone will say, let's go get breakfast at a grocery store. And you'll say, why are we doing that? And you'll come get a breakfast burrito and it tastes good. And you might come back and get a smoothie and it tastes good. And you might come back the next time by yourself and get a couple of things. And on your third or fourth or fifth visit, you've bought the membership. Once you're a member, unless you leave LA, you are not leaving the membership program. Because like you said, you come once every week or two and it pays itself off. So that's our evolution and we just launched the tiers program. You got it on your app where we're just getting people further and further into the cycle to keep them as long as we can.

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  What's the thesis on celebrity collabs? Very unique, very interesting.

• 1:10:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:10:42John Coogan?

  Are you ramping that up? How do they work?

• 1:10:44Speaker 06

  Yeah. So they, uh, I would say the thesis is it's top of funnel.

• 1:10:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:48Speaker 06

  They don't make or break the business from like a dollars perspective at all. But you get a lot of eyeballs and you can leverage audiences that we may not have already.

• 1:10:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. It feels like it's, uh, like, you know, Hailey Bieber smoothie was like globally relevant. It was like global news or at least national news.

• 1:11:02Speaker 06

  I mean, that, that skew in particular was.

• 1:11:04John Coogan?

  Broke the internet.

• 1:11:05Speaker 06

  Anomaly.

• 1:11:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:06Speaker 06

  Like they'll do HBS case studies on that individual item. You could run businesses off of that item alone.

• 1:11:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:11Speaker 06

  But we run them every month. Um, they're successful. They usually last 30 days. We leverage another audience. Then we've kind of built a system and a process. We can just keep kind of going with them.

• 1:11:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How do you, how do you think about balancing the in-store experience for people that live in the area and are like DAUs or weekly active users versus the, the most frustrating times I've had in-store are like a summer weekend and it walks in and it feels like it's a tourist attraction.

• 1:11:39Speaker 06

  Beverly Hills.

• 1:11:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Beverly Hills is crazy. Venice can get crazy.

• 1:11:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:11:43Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, it ends up, you know, I might rage quit, you know, I might just walk out. And, uh, and, and I feel like that's a champagne problem, right? Like there's people traveling from around the world. They're like.

• 1:11:57Speaker 06

  Or local.

• 1:11:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Local, but also like I'm in LA, I gotta go, this is like part of my stop.

• 1:12:03Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. Champagne problems for sure. Cannibalization is good for our stores. I will not go to Beverly Hills on the weekend. I won't go to Venice on the weekend and I work there. It's a, it's a terrible customer experience from my personal perspective. And so we, our stores have theoretical limits of capacity and a good customer experience, we believe. And so we have lately infilled, the West Hollywood's door opened, it pulled away from Beverly Hills.

• 1:12:26John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:12:27Speaker 06

  Believe it or not, Calabasas was our best store. We opened Thousand Hoax to pull away from there a little bit. And it helps the overall experience, um, to offset that. Because you know, whether you're a member or you're not, or you're local or you're not, if you go into Beverly Hills and it's.

• 1:12:40John Coogan?

  And the anomaly is just another spoke.

• 1:12:42Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:12:42John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:12:43Speaker 06

  And it helps fill out that capacity.

• 1:12:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:45Jordi Hays?

  How, how, how have you guys thought about technology and like the consumer app experience over the years? I, I felt like it actually took me a while to like even be, use the app just because like my association with like a grocery store made an app.

• 1:13:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:13:03Jordi Hays?

  This is so bad, right? It's like, sorry, I'm not going to download. I'm not going to download the Vons app. I'm just never going to do it, right? I eventually downloaded it and you guys ship a lot of updates. It's, you know, I, it, it feels like a startup is shipping it.

• 1:13:18Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Jordi Hays?

  In a, in a good way. In a good way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In the sense that like some stuff will break, but it'll get fixed quickly.

• 1:13:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:13:25Jordi Hays?

  And it's constantly improving and, and things like that.

• 1:13:28Speaker 06

  I appreciate that. We, uh, I mean, it feels like a fraud coming on a tech show, working at a grocery store. But, uh, it's all built in-house. So we operate a team of 10 folks and every piece of software you see, we built ourselves from the ground up.

• 1:13:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:39Speaker 06

  We didn't have it before. We had a third-party app and you, if you had it at the time, you'd probably agree.

• 1:13:45Jordi Hays?

  The app when I moved to LA.

• 1:13:46Speaker 06

  It was disgusting.

• 1:13:47Jordi Hays?

  It was so bad.

• 1:13:49Speaker 06

  We wanted to shut it down because the retail experience was here.

• 1:13:54Jordi Hays?

  It was like, it was like, like IRS.gov.

• 1:13:58Jordi Hays?

  It was like.

• 1:13:58Speaker 06

  And so we, we, we put.

• 1:14:01Jordi Hays?

  And actually I think in hindsight, it was like, I actually had, when you, when the, the new app came around, I had pretty low trust level with it because I used to like with, with Connor and, and Sean, we would all order breakfast burritos on that. And the app was just like so horrific. It was, it was so bad. But it got good. So you guys fixed it.

• 1:14:21Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 1:14:22John Coogan?

  10 people seems like the right amount, the, the right size. Like it's, it's a big enough team, but it's not overstaffed.

• 1:14:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:28John Coogan?

  It's a team, basically.

• 1:14:28Speaker 06

  It is. It's a, it's an internal tech software team with developers and data engineers and all of that. I mean, we're sitting on treasure troves of member transaction data that are starting to layer into the app. And so we made a conscious decision that that app was terrible.

• 1:14:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:41Speaker 06

  And we needed one that reflected our brand in our stores. And we put in the time and the money and the effort to build it. And that's where we got it. And the numbers speak for themselves because people that go on the app and shop omnichannel are not novel to Air One, spend a lot of money.

• 1:14:52John Coogan?

  So you have 10 people on technology or on the app. Who else is on your team? Who else sits in growth? Like what other disciplines fit under growth?

• 1:15:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. So our, our team, we define it as what are all the ways Air One can grow outside of opening new stores? We will continue to open new stores and we are, you know.

• 1:15:08John Coogan?

  That's like an obvious way to grow.

• 1:15:09Speaker 06

  That's an obvious way to grow. And we had that. And we're focused on everything else.

• 1:15:11John Coogan?

  The function of growth.

• 1:15:11Speaker 06

  Yeah. And so what do we do? We do all things e-commerce and digital.

• 1:15:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:15Speaker 06

  And so that's the app, that's the website. We run a separate DTC Shopify site standalone that we're merging in now.

• 1:15:21John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Okay.

• 1:15:23Speaker 06

  We built a data warehouse. We have data analytics. We just hired a data scientist down on our team to start churning through all the transaction data.

• 1:15:30Speaker 06

  We've got applied, applied AI engineer who's building internal tools using AI.

• 1:15:34John Coogan?

  What's the history?

• 1:15:35Jordi Hays?

  Imagine, imagine your job is to apply AI to Air One.

• 1:15:39John Coogan?

  It's fun. You're super intelligent. You're super markets.

• 1:15:44John Coogan?

  What, uh, what, what has the, uh, the, the, the evolution, the journey of like third-party delivery services, just delivery been? Like I, I saw this report that there's a secret network of In-N-Out delivery. Have you heard about this? That, that there's like a, it's basically just like a WhatsApp group. Yeah, bootleg. Like, like, so In-N-Out has turned down.

• 1:16:06Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:16:06John Coogan?

  DoorDash. Like you can't DoorDash In-N-Out.

• 1:16:08Speaker 06

  Correct.

• 1:16:09John Coogan?

  And that's a brand standard. They've decided to do that. But there's people that are like, I got another idea. Life finds a way. And so I'm wondering about the evolution of delivery, what's worked, what, what, what, uh, you know, what have you learned along the journey?

• 1:16:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. Every restaurant has to do with it separately. I'm, In-N-Out might've done it from a capacity perspective.

• 1:16:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:26Speaker 06

  Potentially.

• 1:16:27John Coogan?

  There's always a line out the door.

• 1:16:28Speaker 06

  There's always a line out the door. There's only so much throughput they can put through the kitchens.

• 1:16:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:31Speaker 06

  We, we keep both. We have three P and one P.

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:16:33Speaker 06

  One P is what we're talking about.

• 1:16:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:34Speaker 06

  Three P is Uber and Postmates. We're exclusive to them.

• 1:16:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:16:37Speaker 06

  And we like to balance both. Uber is a marketing machine.

• 1:16:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:16:41Speaker 06

  We could turn it off, but they are bringing in net new customers to us.

• 1:16:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:44Speaker 06

  All day long.

• 1:16:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:45Speaker 06

  We maintain margin neutral in them because we markup to offset the fees.

• 1:16:48John Coogan?

  And are they getting, uh, and are most of those Uber customers getting like food and smoothies? Or are they doing like their full grocery shop?

• 1:16:53Speaker 06

  Mostly prepared foods.

• 1:16:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:16:54Speaker 06

  Mostly prepared foods.

• 1:16:55John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 1:16:56Speaker 06

  And then our app is our one P.

• 1:16:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:57Speaker 06

  We're margin neutral, but if you're a member, you're not getting points on this side. You're getting points on the app only.

• 1:17:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:02Speaker 06

  And so every member that shops digitally, I'm guessing you.

• 1:17:05John Coogan?

  Flows over.

• 1:17:06Speaker 06

  And the more we can transfer over here, we can bring over here.

• 1:17:09John Coogan?

  Wow, yeah, that's.

• 1:17:09Speaker 06

  And we keep this on for eyeballs and people coming into our system.

• 1:17:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:12Speaker 06

  And then we use our marketing effort to transfer them over here. And as long as this experience is good, if not, we think better than Uber Eats.

• 1:17:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:18Speaker 06

  We've got them. That's how we think about it.

• 1:17:20Jordi Hays?

  What is, uh, do you guys spend a lot of money on, on traditional advertising?

• 1:17:25Speaker 06

  Zero.

• 1:17:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I figured.

• 1:17:26Speaker 06

  Zero.

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

  Is the products really like? Everyone has managed to like stay like in the conversation at least at a low level like perpetually.

• 1:17:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:34Jordi Hays?

  And it's it almost feels like it does.

• 1:17:36John Coogan?

  But I mean, the obvious that marketing thing would be like buy an F1 team, right? Like if they got an F1.

• 1:17:41Speaker 06

  It's on the roadmap.

• 1:17:43John Coogan?

  I'm not saying you should run like D to C ads, that's you know, potentially.

• 1:17:46Speaker 06

  But in all fairness, we've been in Southern California. So when we go to market number two, there will have to be more outward.

• 1:17:53John Coogan?

  F1 Vegas.

• 1:17:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:17:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it feels like you guys have exercised like insane self-control around expansion.

• 1:18:00John Coogan?

  But it's the family business. Like this is always the story, right?

• 1:18:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, but but but still, it's like the amount of people that are like, when are you opening in New York?

• 1:18:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:07Jordi Hays?

  When are you opening in New York? Like for like years and years and years and years and then letting people like front run you in the market, right?

• 1:18:15Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:18:15Jordi Hays?

  And in some ways, I feel like they'll do a service to you because they're just introducing people to the model. And then because they don't have the the scale and the playbook, like the the experience is ultimately like inferior.

• 1:18:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:18:28Jordi Hays?

  But they're getting people sort of like bought into that idea of like going and getting you can get breakfast, lunch and dinner at the grocery store.

• 1:18:34Speaker 06

  I think there's two elements to it. Um, we can't miss on a store. It's too costly. And so we don't want to open New York or Vegas until we're ready. And if you miss on a store from a brand perspective, it can it can hurt.

• 1:18:44John Coogan?

  Why is it costly? Is it just the build out cost?

• 1:18:47Speaker 06

  No, no, sorry.

• 1:18:47John Coogan?

  The 10 year lead.

• 1:18:48Speaker 06

  No, like the brand impact on a miss.

• 1:18:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:18:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, it would be obviously very.

• 1:18:51John Coogan?

  Oh, that's the empty one.

• 1:18:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, no one, they messed up. They should went to New York too early. It's not gonna work in a second market.

• 1:18:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:57Speaker 06

  But discipline, we are a family owned business. That's true. But our owners, Tony Justine, have maintained a lot of discipline on opening stores. They bought the first Arowan, which was at the Grove in 2011. And then they waited three years to open a store. They waited two years to open a store. We open a store every year, then every six months, and now we're opening three a year. Three year for everyone is very fast. Uh, these things are Titanic. They're like operational behemoths. But the economics suggest take out as much capital as you can and open as many stores as fast as you can because they pay back like that.

• 1:19:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:19:26Speaker 06

  But if you do that, the model breaks.

• 1:19:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:19:28Speaker 06

  So we've taken the route of going slow, but three this year was good for us. We've got three openings next year in the Palisades reopening downtown LA and Newport Beach, which will be a slam dunk for us. And then we'll kind of go from there.

• 1:19:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes sense. It's exciting. I love it. Thanks for coming by.

• 1:19:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, super cool. I've had I've had like my adult life perfectly tracks with like my Arowan experiences. Like moving to LA, I drove into LA with like a with a with a gold colored Prius that had 200,000 miles on it. And I would drive it to Arowan, but I knew that I couldn't afford anything in the store. And so I would just bring these big glass jugs of water and at at the Venice location, I'd be filling up these jugs and I'd always be looking inside.

• 1:20:12John Coogan?

  I never understood that. You've told this story before, but like Arowan gives like free filtered water.

• 1:20:17Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no. This was like you maybe have removed it by now, but you could pay like $2 and fill up a jug like with like.

• 1:20:23Speaker 06

  With water.

• 1:20:24Jordi Hays?

  Reverse osmosis water.

• 1:20:25John Coogan?

  That's.

• 1:20:25Jordi Hays?

  So I would just drive in there and I would never, I just like knew that I couldn't afford anything in there. I just wouldn't go in at all. And then and then over time, I just like, I just, it just, it just sucked me in. Yeah, it sucked me into a vortex. And then and then other like all these memories tied to like whatever car I was driving at the time.

• 1:20:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:43Jordi Hays?

  I distinctly remember, uh, I was on like a pretty long drive, pulled into Arowan, the spot right in front of the opening in Venice. And went in, had dinner or whatever, bought bought some groceries, come out, car doesn't start. Luckily, I knew all the Valley guys like super well, like they're my buddies. Like I would talk to them all the time. So I'm like, oh, guys, like this thing looks pretty cooked. I'm gonna be working on this for the next couple of hours. But uh, they're the best. So many, so many great memories. So um, yeah, really, really cool how how sophisticated the operation is. And uh, yeah, excited to hear how you guys effectively apply AI to get me to spend more money.

• 1:21:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it's it's joyful. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Have a good one. Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support.

• 1:21:38John Coogan?

  Giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. I had to get my headset back on. We got our next guest. In the waiting room, we have Danielle Axman from Wilder.

• 1:21:49Jordi Hays?

  Another market.

• 1:21:50John Coogan?

  Kitchen, the founder and CEO on launching a new, and I got a spider here. I got a spider. What should I do?

• 1:21:56Jordi Hays?

  Wait, the timing of this is crazy.

• 1:21:58John Coogan?

  Wait, why?

• 1:21:58Jordi Hays?

  Did the team do this? Uh, must have done this.

• 1:22:01John Coogan?

  Didn't that happen last time when I was talking?

• 1:22:04Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm not talking about spider timing. I'm talking about our next guest.

• 1:22:07John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:22:08Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? Welcome to the show.

• 1:22:10John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. Sorry, there was a spider on my desk. Welcome.

• 1:22:13Speaker 07

  Thank you guys so much for having me. My husband and I are huge fans.

• 1:22:16John Coogan?

  Oh, amazing.

• 1:22:17Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:22:17John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:22:18Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 1:22:19John Coogan?

  Since it is your first time, can you introduce yourself and the company?

• 1:22:22Speaker 07

  Yeah, of course. So I'm Danielle Axman. I'm the founder and CEO of Wilder Market. We just announced today, um, we're opening up our first one in Midtown Miami, uh, this fall. Yes.

• 1:22:35John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 1:22:36Speaker 07

  Like excited to share more about it, but yeah, thanks again for having me.

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, yeah. What goes into opening it? What what what is the competitive landscape like in Miami? Why now with Miami?

• 1:22:47Speaker 07

  Yeah, this is a great question. Um, so I moved to Miami a couple of years ago. I grew up on Long Island. Uh, I spent a couple of years in New York City Post College and then actually in LA for a few years. And I share that because it's where I see premium food shopping boutique grocery stores more abundant. And moving to Miami, we don't have something like that. And so I moved here a couple of years ago, but really when I became a mom, I started to look at food differently. I really cared more about what I was bringing home to feed my family. I did a lot of research. I learned a lot and was really, you know, the more that I learned as um, the more I learned about food and and the ingredients and what was important to um, really provide for my family and my kids.

• 1:23:30Speaker 07

  I became more empowered as a mother, but like more frustrated as a consumer where I wasn't finding what I was looking for at the grocery stores. I became really chaotic and I go to the farmer's market for certain things and somewhere else for dairy. And honestly, even when I found something that checked all the boxes, that felt like this was really clean and safe for my family. Uh, it didn't taste good either. And so I wanted to put together, create this this experience, this market that combine thoughtfully sourced ingredients, culinary excellence and hospitality all under one roof. And so excited to share more details about that as well.

• 1:24:04John Coogan?

  I want to go back to Babe Rosé. Tell me the story about your involvement because that's a that's a very fascinating story that I think people were like skeptical of. And then it got acquired. And what what was the journey there?

• 1:24:16Speaker 07

  Yeah. Um, oh my God, I had so much fun doing that. So I joined the founding team of Babe Rosé after I left. I worked for the founders of SoulCycle and I was actually there during the the acquisition of Equinox. So then joined the team at Babe Rosé. We sold the business to Anheuser Busch. That was for fun. Um, but really, even though my my background is working with um, consumer, I would say like disruptive consumer businesses. Uh, and then while those businesses were very different, they both taught me so much about building consumer brands, understanding what people want and creating these experiences that people genuinely connect with.

• 1:24:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. So what did what what did you, what lesson did you learn from the Babe Rosé journey? That you're either taking or adapting for this in terms of like working with celebrities, influencers, social media? Like, how do you think your marketing will evolve over the next few years as you grow this uh, the store?

• 1:25:10Speaker 07

  I love that. And I think I'm taking a lot of lessons that I learned from those experiences. I think one of the biggest ones is that the strongest brands don't just sell products. They really understand what their consumer wants. They create something people genuinely want to be a part of. And community is a really big aspect of that. And you see that SoulCycle with Babe Rosé and so much about what we're doing. We want to reimagine the neighborhood market, this place that used to be a hub of connection for the local community where you, you know, the owner knew you by name. They knew your favorite order. You had this closer connection to your food. And I think community is one of those things, we're meant to be social beings and it's super important in anything, you know? We crave human connection.

• 1:25:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Jordy?

• 1:25:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to me, to me, the thing that uh, that's like most exciting with a concept like this is just the focus on like, we had uh, one of the founders of Yes Chef on yesterday and I was realizing how much I'm just really not a foodie at all. But I am obsessed with ingredient quality. So like for me, I can't enjoy something if I don't have confidence that there was at least like some amount of effort put into the ingredient selection. And so to me, it's like ingredient quality comes before taste. Taste is like very much secondary to that. And I feel like grocery stores and markets, like all over the country, outside of obviously, you know, Arowan and some other, a handful of other concepts,

• 1:26:38Jordi Hays?

  have always focused on like taste before ingredient quality. And so that ends up netting out where like I just won't, I just won't shop in places like that. And I think that there's like this whole new wave of consumers that are in these key markets that very much think that way, which is like, I don't care how good it tastes if you didn't like put in the effort on the ingredient side first.

• 1:27:00Speaker 07

  I actually really agree with you. I think there's a huge new wave of people who care more about what they're putting in their bodies and on their bodies. We have more information now than we've ever had before, right? And this is like something that's really important to me and to so much of our community. And so we developed something called the Wilder Standard. So it's basically a vetting process that evaluates every single product that we sell. And it was really important to me that when I had this idea, sure, I've done my research. I've figured out what works for my family, but I'm not here preaching that to everybody else. I'm not trying to create something that's like super exclusive either. This is meant to be developed by independent experts. So I went out and put together this incredible team

• 1:27:41Speaker 07

  that spans across nutrition, epidemiology, food science, agriculture. Ken Cook, the founder of EWG Environmental Working Group, is one of the advisors as well. I was actually just with him this morning walking the store. If you're familiar with EWG, they come out with the clean fifteen and dirty dozen list every year on produce, which wants to retain the most pesticides and which ones retain the least. And I think creating a standard based on experts is really what we're built upon. So that's the thoughtful sourcing piece of this. And then you combine our partnership with Grass Fed Culture, which is a Michelin star culinary group based here in Miami with the same sourcing standards that we have. If you haven't been to one of the restaurants, you have to go. It's incredible. They developed the entire culinary program.

• 1:28:25Speaker 07

  The food and beverage menu, soup to nuts, based on the standards that we've created. So that again, you compare both thoughtful sourcing and culinary excellence. And then the third thing that I have to mention is Major Food Group came on as a founding investor and strategic advisor.

• 1:28:46Speaker 07

  They're legends. I mean, truly the best in the business at creating hospitality experiences. I also was with Mario today, walking the store, thinking about the entire customer journey from walking up to the store, what the flow looks like. They've been really instrumental in helping us bring this vision to life.

• 1:29:05John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations.

• 1:29:06Jordi Hays?

  Do you have any idea on how many stores you think Miami specifically or the greater Miami area can support?

• 1:29:13Speaker 07

  I definitely think there's a lot of opportunity, not just in Miami, South Florida and even beyond in the southeast region. You know, if you think about, well, to me, so we, local sourcing is really important to us. We have incredible relationships with local farms. In my research, found that the agriculture in Florida is actually pretty incredible most of the year. Something I just didn't probably even like thought about learning before this. But with that, we have Miami is the local sourcing that we're focused on. And then we also have great partnerships with farms in the southeast region. And to me, that's local because there's like a lot of, you know, things that you could grow in Georgia, Carolinas. You don't necessarily grow in Florida. So we want to focus on those partnerships.

• 1:29:53Speaker 07

  And I think there's a lot of opportunity with post pandemic, the migration of people that have moved to these cities and are craving this type of experience.

• 1:30:03Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm very excited that you're set up there. Look forward to visiting the store next time we're in Miami. Last time we were in Miami, I kept ordering bottles of water and they would show, I would order glass bottles. They would deliver plastic. I would get really frustrated at the substitution.

• 1:30:21John Coogan?

  You're looking at this.

• 1:30:22Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know, I know we won't have that problem with Wilder.

• 1:30:25Speaker 07

  You gotta come check out our glass juice, our organic cold pressed glass juices. You'll love them.

• 1:30:29John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:30:31Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations.

• 1:30:32Speaker 07

  Thanks so much.

• 1:30:32John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 1:30:33Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet.

• 1:30:34John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:30:34Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 1:30:35John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. We have John Urschel with us in the waiting room. He's an assistant professor of mathematics at MIT. You know him because we discussed the Wall Street Journal article about him and we're very excited to be joining. Professor, welcome to the show. How are you guys, how are you doing?

• 1:30:58Speaker 03

  I'm doing well. I'm looking forward to hanging out with you guys.

• 1:31:00John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time. I wanted to start in a very maybe basic place. Like what is the day to day life as an assistant professor at MIT? I think a lot of people are grappling with the fact that AI can do some mathematic research, prove theorems or disprove them. But how much, how much of your time is spent like working on hard math problems versus teaching versus doing something else? Like what is a day in the life of a MIT mathematician?

• 1:31:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. So this is something that I feel like if you don't, you know, if you don't study mathematics at a high level, it can be hard to sort of know. And, you know, we spend so much time teaching, so much time talking with each other, trying to, you know, think about good math ideas, trying to teach our students. These days with AI, it certainly looks different. I would say the thing that really is universal is that there's still an emphasis on understanding, whether it's ideas that a human came up with or ideas that let's say chat GPT or Anthropic came up with. The idea is trying to look at approved, look at a solution and understand something about what that means for the broader ecosystem.

• 1:32:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. How much of mathematical inquiry is, I don't know, discovery versus understanding the process and then actually diffusing that information? I, I feel like maybe I went through a small version of this like five years ago. I was interested in, in business history and journalism and I'd go and, and compile these, these essays about a certain technology's evolution, certainly not at the level of a nonfiction writer, but it was very edifying work. Chat GPT can do that and has been able to assemble an essay about a technology and how it evolved and do some historical research.

• 1:32:57John Coogan?

  It's still fun for me. It's still edifying. And then I still have, I think, a purpose explaining that to other people and sharing that in different formats. And I feel like I've grappled with it. But how different is your experience, is the experiences of the mathematics world to like the experience that I just described, which was I got steamrolled by AI like five years ago, maybe. I don't know.

• 1:33:20Speaker 03

  No, I mean, it's true. I mean, the latest frontier models can do what a lot of good mathematicians have been doing for a lot of years. And the question now becomes, where do we focus our effort?

• 1:33:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:31Speaker 03

  Understanding was always a crucial part of the process.

• 1:33:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:35Speaker 03

  It's even more important now.

• 1:33:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:37Speaker 03

  I still think there's room and I still think there's importance for problem solving. Even when AI systems can do this well, I think this is a fundamental joy of doing mathematics. You know, just because, you know, a computer can solve the crossword puzzle for you doesn't mean you don't want to do it yourself. I think there's personal joy and enjoyment and honing your skills to work on these things. But definitely there's a completely new aspect to doing mathematics, which is having this tool that can really crank in a way that, you know, humans just haven't been able to do.

• 1:34:12John Coogan?

  How do you think about mathematics progress in the very long term? It feels like AI can, can duke it out with the top mathematicians and solve really, really hard problems. But it, it, people are joking about like mathematics is solved, but that doesn't seem like it's the case. It seems like this is sort of a rabbit hole that might just go deeper and deeper and deeper. But do you have an intuitive sense or is the mathematics, is the mathematics community like coming to a consensus around like how far we are away from actually the last mathematics question being solved?

• 1:34:51Speaker 03

  So definitely we don't have any consensus, I'd say, about how we should be using AI, what things are going to look like in a couple of years. But I think we have pretty good consensus that, you know, math is not going to be solved.

• 1:35:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:04Speaker 03

  I mean, the amazing thing we're seeing is that we're pushing the frontier of what we understand and know mathematically faster than we ever have in history. And so we're understanding more, we're pushing boundaries further. But there's so much farther to go and there are so many things we don't understand. So many tools that can be helpful, not just in mathematics, but in other areas. And so, you know, these modern developments, this is just like, you know, people used to climb a mountain, you know, using their own little ropes and things. Now we have a helicopter, but still, you know, there are further places we need to explore and things that we need to understand.

• 1:35:40Jordi Hays?

  How, how is AI being used to come up with new problems? Like is that, is that, is there any?

• 1:35:48John Coogan?

  Progress there?

• 1:35:48Jordi Hays?

  Are you or any of your peers like thinking like, well, if you can use this to solve problems, can you generate?

• 1:35:54John Coogan?

  Can we create new millennia?

• 1:35:55Jordi Hays?

  Can we at least create new problems faster than we solve them?

• 1:36:00Speaker 03

  No, so this is the question. We're trying to understand, you know, these tools are very, very good at solving a well-posed problem that we've been thinking about for a while. The thing that we're still trying to figure out is how generative can this be?

• 1:36:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:36:14Speaker 03

  How well can this technology actually recognize what are important directions that we need to study and understand to help push ourselves forward technologically and mathematically? And that's the part that it's still, you know, the consensus is not there yet. I'm not going to make a prediction for fear of being horribly wrong, but we're going to have to wait and see.

• 1:36:37John Coogan?

  How do you think about the progress of mathematics education at this moment? Like, there's, you know, algebra and basic geometry, like, these things are taught to almost every American gets exposure and learns a little bit, and then calculus, a little bit less. And I'm just imagining a future, maybe like the good outcome would be, yeah, everyone can actually sort of explain Navier-Stokes, and it has gotten to a place where even the really, really hard math has been so, so digested by AI and top mathematicians and understood that it's been turned into YouTube videos and turned into curricula. And maybe it never

• 1:37:18John Coogan?

  gets down to high school level, but at least if you're in college, you could go much further than we are currently. And it feels like humanity has been progressing towards more and more mathematical understanding, even among like, average, non-mathematicians. And that feels like it would be a really good outcome. But how do you grapple with that, that fact, or that potential outcome?

• 1:37:41Speaker 03

  No, you've got it exactly right. This is, this is definitely the hope that with the new technologies, it somehow like, levels the playing field for education. It somehow, you know, opens up possibilities for people to learn more advanced concepts much quicker. I mean, I remember when I was a kid, the fact that the internet existed and that, you know, top professors at universities would post lecture notes and things like this online. This was huge for me as a kid in Buffalo, New York. I can, you know, I have a computer and an internet connection, and all of a sudden, it's like I'm learning from top professors.

• 1:38:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:15Speaker 03

  And, you know, when I compare this to the way people learned in the, you know, eighties or seventies, you know, you have to go to a library, you rent out a book.

• 1:38:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:23Speaker 03

  It was just a game changer for me.

• 1:38:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was funny as, as like, as a teenager, realizing like, wait, this top university just publishes the entire course. And I was like, why would I go to this school? Obviously, there's other, you know.

• 1:38:37John Coogan?

  Well, I, I, I want to talk more about like, the, the competitive dynamics between universities. We've seen some prize money up there, a million dollars for a millennial, a millennium prize. I've seen $25,000 prize pools. This is not the funding mechanism for mathematics, correct? There is tuition, there's scholarships, there's government funding. But, but I'm, but in, in, I don't know how deeply you're embedded in that side of it, but it feels like there's a potential that, much like chess has been solved by computers, I don't know that I'd want to go to a university where it had a really, really bad math program just because they're not winning the prizes anymore. Like, it feels like there's still

• 1:39:20John Coogan?

  a lot of value in having a fertile mathematics education program that's pushing the frontier, both in terms of exploring new problems and working alongside AI, but also just being the best human mathematicians. That's going to have knock-on effects around the entire organization. But how do you see it evolving?

• 1:39:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think you've got it exactly right. I think our roles are certainly going to change with the advent of AI. But we're very much going to be needed. And I think understanding mathematics at a deep level, being able to help communicate that to young people, to help people gain the tools to be able to empower themselves, to solve problems in all areas of, you know, science, technology, and engineering, I think it's important. And I think we really need to try to adjust to this world we're in, and try to serve our students as best we can.

• 1:40:10Jordi Hays?

  So, so, do you think math ends up tracking exactly like chess has, in that, like, chess was solved, and then people just kept playing it and, and kept watch, you know, kept following it and, and, and the, the sort of field continued to progress? Because the way that you're describing this just feels like, you know, one, the understanding is key, but then, then the just enjoyment, enjoyment of, of understanding and like, individual progression, I feel like is limitless regardless of the abilities of the models.

• 1:40:45Speaker 03

  So I feel that it's a bit different. So I'm not that good of a chess player, but okay, I play a bit of chess. I feel like chess has very much hit some sort of like, plateau in equilibrium. Like, yeah, you had Kasparov in Deep Blue, but really, after like, you know, this AlphaZero stuff from Deep Mo, you know, there were some great chess innovations that were really new things that affected actual top players and how they played. But really, things started to sort of like, level off. And, you know, there, there is only so much in chess. You know, there's so many, there's so many optimal things that you can do. Whereas in math, I really do think it's generative. Like, it's really not nearly as limited in the same way. And the directions you can sort of move forward,

• 1:41:29Speaker 03

  and the directions we're going to need, sort of for applications of applied math, I think are much more limited. So I really don't see it going that way. Instead, I see it sort of really exploding, like, the field of mathematics and what falls under math is just going to get bigger and bigger.

• 1:41:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you, this is an odd question, but you're like, the person to ask this. Do you have any intuitive feeling for how AI might change football?

• 1:41:55Speaker 03

  Oh, that's a great question.

• 1:41:57John Coogan?

  I'm just thinking about like, when you go for two points, like, these things, statistical models, Moneyball has been around, but we're in a new territory now where you might see a team be like, what if we spent a million dollars of compute crunching all the numbers, and we don't even know, but we just call the plays this way? I'm just wondering if you have any feel for it?

• 1:42:15Speaker 03

  No, I think, I think there's definitely a potential, because, you know, fundamentally, football is so much harder a problem than baseball.

• 1:42:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:23Speaker 03

  Like, if you think about sabermetrics, like, like, Moneyball worked in baseball, because it's so, such an easy problem, if you think about it.

• 1:42:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, one player at a time.

• 1:42:30Speaker 03

  People are in set pieces, the rules are so straightforward, like, you know, it, you know, someone's batting, someone's pitching, then something happens, and it's really well-understood.

• 1:42:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:40Speaker 03

  Whereas football, you've got 22 guys on a field, and it's just complete chaos from like, a data statistical point of view. And so, bringing like, better technology to bear on that, I think can definitely be useful. Because I remember, like, even a couple of years ago, it was not easy to take player tracking data and actually recognize what play just happened.

• 1:43:01John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:43:02Speaker 03

  You know, was the defense in cover two? Were they in cover three? What was, you know, what run play did the offense do? What was the passing scheme? And so I think there's a huge potential for AI to help.

• 1:43:12John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah, very cool. Jordy?

• 1:43:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my big, biggest takeaway from this is just this, like, this idea of like, the, the models are, don't seem to be generative in the sense of like, coming up with like, what to solve, right? And, and we experience this when, anytime you see a piece of AI content, the models are good at making content now, if you have like, an amazing idea, right? And it's always like, one human out there came up with the idea of like, combining like, these two different IPs into something that is like, entertaining or funny. And, and even with, with marketing, you can have a brilliant marketing idea, and then an AI can like, one-shot it really quickly. But the AI, again, is not generative when it comes to marketing.

• 1:43:58Jordi Hays?

  It's not on the fly coming up with great marketing ideas, and that's still the domain of, of humans.

• 1:44:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it just feels like we're in a spike intelligence moment. It's very spiky.

• 1:44:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:08John Coogan?

  Very interesting.

• 1:44:10Jordi Hays?

  Pure execution.

• 1:44:11John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 1:44:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, okay, well, we'll see how long that persists.

• 1:44:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:18Speaker 03

  It's that way right now.

• 1:44:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know if you're a fan of like, the, the bubble with the spikes, and then the all just gets bigger until it just goes over everything. But, yeah, we are in this odd transition moment. But, but thanks so much for coming on and sharing.

• 1:44:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to meet you.

• 1:44:31John Coogan?

  Perspective here. We really appreciate it.

• 1:44:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me.

• 1:44:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:44:35Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, John.

• 1:44:35John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 1:44:36Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.

• 1:44:38John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is Nicholas Sharp, the co-founder and CEO of Atio. He's in the waiting room, he's been on the show twice. Welcome back, Nicholas. How are you doing?

• 1:44:56Speaker 08

  Hey, guys. Good to see you again. Good to be back.

• 1:44:59Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you back.

• 1:45:00Speaker 08

  Always a good sign. It means we've launched something. So that's a good mark for us.

• 1:45:05Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:45:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:45:07Jordi Hays?

  You're always up so, so, so late. So, thanks for bringing me down.

• 1:45:10John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:45:11Speaker 08

  No, you've got to remember that in Europe, we wake up late and stay up late. So it's very normal.

• 1:45:18Jordi Hays?

  West Coast hours.

• 1:45:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:20Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 1:45:21Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. What's new?

• 1:45:22Speaker 08

  So what's new is a really big launch from us. We have launched our new architecture, hybrid architecture for gigantic revenue. So it's all about allowing agents to be unleashed on your data while maintaining all of the guardrails you'd expect from business applications. So it's trying to drastically blur the lines between infrastructure, having just a raw fire hose to a database, but all of the stuff you'd expect when dealing with customer data, guardrails and policies and all those sorts of things.

• 1:45:56John Coogan?

  What's more important to people right now? Because if you go to some frontier model and you give it slash goal and you just say like, "Look, I got a spreadsheet here. I'm pointing you in the general direction. Go figure out how to get into this database and then this SaaS product and figure it out." A lot of times it can write an API binding and build an integration on the fly. But so it feels like there's the unleashing, like adding capability, and then there's the adding the guardrails. And it feels like right now people are shopping for guardrails, but what are you feeling from customers?

• 1:46:35Speaker 08

  That's right. And what we want to do is we want people to be able to do that. We want people to be able to point an agent at the CRM at Atio and say, "Hey, go and find me these customers and have all of the context." We shipped Universal Context earlier in the year, which is this kind of full 360 view of all of the unstructured data in a vector store so that the agent can go and search all over it. And so you do want to unleash them. You do want to allow them to go and do all of this really difficult work. And they will write amazing queries and they'll blow your mind. But equally, you are dealing with customer data and a lot of it. And there's a lot of orchestration that goes into that. There's a lot of governance and policy and all that kind of stuff. So we're really trying

• 1:47:19Speaker 08

  to push the best of both worlds.

• 1:47:21Jordi Hays?

  What are the best sales teams and GTM teams in the world doing? We were talking about cold email on the show earlier and this frustration now with like, it feels like 90% of the emails I get are like, "Hi Jordy, here's some random context from something you shared online at some point."

• 1:47:43Speaker 08

  Yeah, like two years ago.

• 1:47:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, years ago. Now here's the product. And it's like, obviously like very low effort.

• 1:47:49Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:47:50Jordi Hays?

  But what are you seeing like the best teams in the world actually do?

• 1:47:54Speaker 08

  Well, so you had one of those teams, I think, if not already on your show, on your show today, Modal is one of our other customers and has built some awesome things on Atio. But what we see with these great go-to-market teams is essentially that they are not just trying to do what was done in the old world with agents. So they're not just simply replicating the kind of like SDR, outbound SDR to inbound SDR to hand over to sales rep, et cetera. They're rethinking the customer flows entirely and not just building a skew-morphic version of what they did before. And so what that looks like is being much more personalized, doing way more work per customer and being able to deliver an experience that might only

• 1:48:38Speaker 08

  be saved for your very highest value customers to absolutely all of them. And for companies that might be PLG have signups, that means doing a ton of research on every customer and making sure that when they show up for a call, when you reach out to them, you actually have the full picture. There's no need for all those handoffs. You don't drop the ball, et cetera.

• 1:48:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:00Speaker 08

  So I think we're seeing that, yeah, the best teams are just being way more imaginative and are in real build mode and first principle mode.

• 1:49:06Jordi Hays?

  Where are you most excited for models to make meaningful progress? It feels like for a lot of this work, using cheaper models or open weight models probably can get a lot of the job done.

• 1:49:25Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, we're pretty excited about some of the decision models as well because it's really nice. There's so much of this stuff that's making lots and lots of decisions before you actually need the output of a traditional LLM. And we're very excited about what we can do there and the kind of, you know, the next order of magnitude of scale it allows. And especially when you start being able to get access to probabilities as well, then you can start building very, very different types of workflows. And so much of what you need to do before you actually get into a reasoning model and into unstructured

• 1:50:07Speaker 08

  output is just lots of decision making. And so we're very excited about the capabilities of those models.

• 1:50:13Jordi Hays?

  Makes a lot of sense.

• 1:50:14John Coogan?

  How much are you dog fooding Atio? How pro are you in terms of, how key is Atio in like your actual growth story?

• 1:50:22Speaker 08

  We are like, we're patient zero. I mean, sometimes to the frustration of the team because we get the very, very kind of, you know, day zero releases. And we really use our own team as guinea pigs of this stuff. So sometimes you have to remember that the version of the product that your customers has is a month or so behind what we have. And we're always kind of very excited to show them the latest and greatest features. But no, we're huge Atio users.

• 1:50:55John Coogan?

  Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:50:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great update.

• 1:50:59Speaker 08

  Thank you, guys. Nice to see you again.

• 1:51:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to see you.

• 1:51:01John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:51:02Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:51:03John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Mary Koch over at the Wall Street Journal shares a story from Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar, get friend of the show, says "Some AI researchers have started smoking cigarettes because they are confident that technology will cure cancer. The trend is a way of signaling to other researchers how much they believe in AI," he told CBS News. "If that logic is sound, AI optimists might soon hitting the bottle and eating cake for breakfast. Sometimes it seems like we're begging AI to replace us. She's not a fan of this. We were pitching this months ago. We were saying if you really believe it's going to cure cancer..."

• 1:51:48Jordi Hays?

  Didn't we say cigars?

• 1:51:49John Coogan?

  "...start ripping darts, start smoking cigars." We said everything, everything, you know? Eat cake for breakfast, hit the bottle. I want to see it. Yeah, this all started with the sunscreen thing. "Oh, I don't wear sunscreen because AI is going to cure skin cancer." There's still a chance. And I like the idea of the revealed preferences. You know, you've got to be aware. It can't just be the stated preferences. It's got to be the revealed preferences. We have yet to see an AI lab leader smoke a cigar in an interview.

• 1:52:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:16John Coogan?

  That feels like something that might happen in the next month.

• 1:52:19Jordi Hays?

  I'd like to see that.

• 1:52:21John Coogan?

  I hope so, yeah. Put your money where your mouth is. Put your lungs where your mouth is, I guess.

• 1:52:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'd like a sit-down founder interview podcast.

• 1:52:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:32Jordi Hays?

  Where they actually have a live smoke break. So they keep taping.

• 1:52:35John Coogan?

  Kind of like Cheeky Pint, but it's just ripping darts the whole time.

• 1:52:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's actually an underexplored...

• 1:52:41John Coogan?

  Cheeky American spirit.

• 1:52:42Jordi Hays?

  That feels like the last like white space in tech media is just like smoke breaks.

• 1:52:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:47Jordi Hays?

  Because we have like running...

• 1:52:48John Coogan?

  No one's done it.

• 1:52:49Jordi Hays?

  We have the walk and talk interviews. We now have running interviews.

• 1:52:53John Coogan?

  No one's done like a Marlboro Red focused show.

• 1:52:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but like a 10-minute mini podcast where somebody's having a smoke.

• 1:53:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:03Jordi Hays?

  You're rattling off questions, riffing.

• 1:53:05John Coogan?

  Dwar Cash is right, could do it.

• 1:53:07Jordi Hays?

  He's the guy.

• 1:53:08John Coogan?

  Or, you know, maybe the next Dwar Cash, a challenger, a spinoff, a knockoff. It's Dwar Cash with cigarettes.

• 1:53:16Jordi Hays?

  Cheeky heater.

• 1:53:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, heaters. Well, they're on a heater. There's some other news. Muse was just knocked out of the top of the App Store despite Alex Wong, Mark Zuckerberg, Cheeky Pint, amazing model. They couldn't go up against what company? Dave's Hot Chicken. Dave's Hot Chicken, they have a new discount going, I think. Have you had Dave's Hot Chicken?

• 1:53:41Jordi Hays?

  Never have.

• 1:53:43John Coogan?

  Delicious.

• 1:53:44Jordi Hays?

  Never will.

• 1:53:45John Coogan?

  So good. It's kind of the the Arowan of fast food. No, it's ridiculous, but.

• 1:53:51Jordi Hays?

  How does Vinted do it?

• 1:53:53John Coogan?

  Vinted is really on such a run. Vinted is is is doing really well. But fun to see Dave's Hot Chicken up there at number one. Anyway, what else is what else needs to be discussed? People are people are really feeling the cheeky pint debating when will the first person drink 12 Guinesses or delete 12 Guinesses and pick a fight with the film crew? We got a little preview because I think Will O'Brien.

• 1:54:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's going on, so. Well, he's already been on.

• 1:54:24John Coogan?

  He's already he's been on once or he's or they filmed it, but they haven't released it yet.

• 1:54:28Jordi Hays?

  So that like trailer.

• 1:54:29John Coogan?

  He's in season two.

• 1:54:30Jordi Hays?

  We know that he already filmed it.

• 1:54:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:54:32Jordi Hays?

  We don't know how many Guinesses he's deleted.

• 1:54:34John Coogan?

  But he wasn't he backtracking? I thought he was saying that, oh, well, the real metric is not total Guinesses, but Guinesses per hour.

• 1:54:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so independently, he texted me a slightly different metric than just mass because.

• 1:54:46John Coogan?

  He's looking for.

• 1:54:47Jordi Hays?

  The Elon interview was so long. I think, you know, if he's only on there for an hour, like, we can't expect him to actually put down 12.

• 1:54:53John Coogan?

  I think we can. I think we can. You get one appearance.

• 1:54:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, also, what if the what if John has to go back to work, but he just stays and they just let the they let it run?

• 1:55:04John Coogan?

  True.

• 1:55:05Jordi Hays?

  And he can and he can just start getting some work done, have a few more drinks.

• 1:55:09John Coogan?

  True. Yeah, I don't know. I I love Will. I'm sure he put on a masterful performance, but I'm getting some some red flags with this fuzzy math. This is a vanity metric. He wants to switch to to beers per hour as some, you know, non-GAAP metric here. I think like the the standard has been established. If you want to put down more beers, you got to keep the conversation going. You got to be good content, and then you get the opportunity to spend more time drinking beers. So if you only have an hour of content, you got to be really be chugging the whole time. You got to get as many as possible because Elon's going to be able to go on a run for hours and hours and hours.

• 1:55:50Jordi Hays?

  You're going on a run right now.

• 1:55:52John Coogan?

  This is important stuff.

• 1:55:53Jordi Hays?

  It's time for our next guest.

• 1:55:55John Coogan?

  Our next guest.

• 1:55:56Jordi Hays?

  From Icon.

• 1:55:57John Coogan?

  Jason Ballard. Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Jason?

• 1:56:00Jordi Hays?

  We're getting carried away.

• 1:56:01Speaker 09

  Really good. Nice to meet you, Jordy. Nice to meet you, John.

• 1:56:04John Coogan?

  Nice to meet you.

• 1:56:05Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 1:56:06John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:56:07Jordi Hays?

  How many how many beers would you drink on Cheeky Pint?

• 1:56:09Speaker 09

  You know, I think the beers per hour is a good metric. I I appreciate that it's not a gap metric. I think I'm good for four or five.

• 1:56:19John Coogan?

  Four or five? Over what time period are we talking about?

• 1:56:22Jordi Hays?

  Four or five minutes. Four or five beers in four or five minutes.

• 1:56:25Speaker 09

  I respect that I got to be interesting enough to be on for a couple hours, but I think if I get on there for a couple hours, I could do four or five.

• 1:56:29John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah, that seems reasonable.

• 1:56:32Speaker 09

  Brad, the record, the record is three right now.

• 1:56:33John Coogan?

  The record is three, but.

• 1:56:35Jordi Hays?

  You know how you could speed it up?

• 1:56:36Speaker 09

  I would be going in. I would be going in to win.

• 1:56:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, you'd be going in to win.

• 1:56:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but you know how you speed it up is get one of those those hats that have the beer and the and, you know.

• 1:56:45John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:46Jordi Hays?

  And so you don't even have to worry about your hands. You can just focus and.

• 1:56:50John Coogan?

  How everyone was sort of dancing around the cheeky pint thing. Are people going to be and now season two came and it's clearly a competition. Like, every person that goes on Cheeky Pint now is looking at that chart and thinking like, I got to be number one. And so I think anyone who takes the yeah, anyone who accepts the invite is going to be thinking, I got to at least be number one for a little bit. I got to be at the frontier.

• 1:57:13Speaker 09

  I wonder I wonder if people are going to start doping, like, taking charcoal pills and stuff to, like, really.

• 1:57:17John Coogan?

  100%. There's already been doping allegations.

• 1:57:19Jordi Hays?

  Or just or just have a huge.

• 1:57:20John Coogan?

  There's already been doping allegations in terms of the size of the glasses and whether or not they're alcoholic Guinesses or they're zero zeros, because sometimes there's founders who come on the show who don't drink alcohol at all, and they still want to participate. So they drink non-alcoholic Guinness, and then sometimes they're filmed during the day.

• 1:57:38Speaker 09

  That clearly doesn't count. That clearly doesn't count.

• 1:57:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, so maybe you get disqualified for that, but you still get to do the show. But for the founders that do drink alcohol, it stands to reason that there's going to be a competition, and they're going to want to get to the frontier. You agree with me, Jordy? You do?

• 1:57:52Jordi Hays?

  I want to talk about Icon personally. I think I think it's time.

• 1:57:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:57:57Jordi Hays?

  I think it's time. This guy, this guy, this guy is ready to ready to I think you, let's face it, you want to go on Cheeky Pint. You want to you want to.

• 1:58:05John Coogan?

  I've technically been on Cheeky Pint. We did a crossover episode. I drank a Guinness with them.

• 1:58:09Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 1:58:10John Coogan?

  That was technically a Cheeky Pint episode.

• 1:58:11Jordi Hays?

  Right. Anyways, Jason, it's it's thanks for hearing us out here and riffing with us, but it's great to have you.

• 1:58:17Speaker 09

  A good debate.

• 1:58:18Jordi Hays?

  A great debate, but but we have a big gong. We want to hit it.

• 1:58:21John Coogan?

  Ooh, yeah.

• 1:58:22Jordi Hays?

  What's the news?

• 1:58:23John Coogan?

  Give me some news.

• 1:58:24Speaker 09

  Yeah, we just closed our series D led by Bailey Gifford and BlackRock, $200 million.

• 1:58:29Jordi Hays?

  Boom. Fighting for him today, John.

• 1:58:36Speaker 09

  Yeah, really well done. I appreciate I feel honored. Thank you.

• 1:58:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it shook the room. What why'd they give you so much money?

• 1:58:46Speaker 09

  Yeah, so Icon's a construction. Yeah, great question. My my family back in East Texas wants to know the same answer, the same question. Yeah, Icon's a construction technology company. We use giant robots, the the big 3D printers to to build things faster at lower cost and at higher quality. And as you guys know, there's a thing going on called the global housing crisis. We are like not building correctly, and shelter is a really basic human need, and we we feel like we've got lightning in a bottle. We feel like we've got the receipts to prove it and are ready to scale this thing up.

• 1:59:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so what like, how have you been proving out the thesis? Like, are you like?

• 1:59:20John Coogan?

  What's the fastest way to build a home?

• 1:59:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, what's the core metric that you that you track?

• 1:59:25Speaker 09

  Yeah, so there's there's a lot there, sort of inside baseball. The the whole industry itself and construction revolves around this metric of dollars per square foot. Homes are underwritten that way. Construction's measured that way. Homes are appraised that way. So you kind of have to, even though we have our own internal metrics on like robotic performance, materials, cost, and thing, that's really where it resolves. The automation in particular with 3D printing, you know, we're replacing the wall system of a home. We started with wall systems because wall systems historically are the slowest, most labor-intensive, materials-intensive, and expensive part of the home. Also, walls create like the form and feeling of a home, so it's just a very powerful thing to automate. The average cost of delivering a wall system in America right now is approaching $40 a square foot.

• 2:00:07Speaker 09

  Our new Titan system that we'll be scaling up now delivers wall systems at about $20 a square foot, so about half the cost of construction for the most expensive part of construction.

• 2:00:17John Coogan?

  Interesting. I've heard so many I've heard so many like like hot takes about 3D printing not being necessary because you can just, you know, mill like like we have a lot of machinery that's good at making flat things. Like, how do you get over that? What like like, why isn't it better to just make, you know, a flat wall structure in a factory, for example? Or there's a lot of folks who are building houses manufactured in house in like shipping containers, for example.

• 2:00:45Speaker 09

  Yeah, so I've been in construction for almost 20 years, inclusive of my time at Icon. I mean, shipping container houses, prefab houses, modular houses, everything have been around for quite some time. If that was going to work, it would work. And like, come on, come out to the field and compete.

• 2:00:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:59Speaker 09

  I don't think it works for a number of reasons. Number one, a lot of the gains you get by automating, you surrender those gains by shipping. I mean, it's expensive to ship a washing machine. It's very expensive to ship a house.

• 2:01:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:11Speaker 09

  Number two.

• 2:01:12Jordi Hays?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait. Sidetracked. So over the weekend, John and I were driving, we were in the car together, and we see some guy with a big truck driving a house down the road, and then he just pulls off the road and just drives through.

• 2:01:30John Coogan?

  Like a cornfield.

• 2:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Field like it was like.

• 2:01:32John Coogan?

  He just cuts the corner.

• 2:01:33Jordi Hays?

  Cuts the corner in a big rig with a house. Never I was like, that that's the most seems like the most illegal thing I've seen on the road in my whole life. It was crazy. It was like he was bouncing through the field.

• 2:01:46John Coogan?

  But little did we know, he was just trying to help the the bottom line. He was just trying to help the margins.

• 2:01:50Jordi Hays?

  Just get there a little faster.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  He's going to burn more fuel if he goes around the corner.

• 2:01:52Speaker 09

  Every bit counts.

• 2:01:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, yeah, because basically there was just a normal, he could have just turned right on a real road, but instead he like cut the corner across this huge field. Any any thoughts?

• 2:02:06Speaker 09

  You know, my thoughts are, I bet that's not the way to deliver a dignified housing to Americans. I appreciate I appreciate his hood spa.

• 2:02:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:14Speaker 09

  But that's sort of maybe makes my second point for me, which is to make houses in a factory and ship them, you actually end up having to design the house for the roadway, for the vehicle. And houses aren't for roads. Houses are for people. And so I think that's another limitation of that model. And then finally, you have to standardize a lot in that model. And I think there's like cultural resistance. You need like a million people to want the exact same house or something some near variant.

• 2:02:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:41Speaker 09

  And I think those three reasons, the economics, the the design problem, and the standardization problem are why those models haven't worked. 3D printing, you can think of it, it actually is a factory that comes to the site.

• 2:02:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:53Speaker 09

  But because the building material is fluid when you're depositing it, it's like a bespoke housing factory that arrives on site. It's a lot easier to ship a machine than a house.

• 2:02:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:03:00Speaker 09

  And then once it gets there, can do a lot of a lot of very good work.

• 2:03:01John Coogan?

  And so how vertically integrated are you like? Can you just buy a plot of land, build a house, and then sell it on like Zillow or Redfin? Or are there more steps?

• 2:03:11Speaker 09

  So we're not vertically integrated into like the land development itself. So we make our own, we make and manufacture our own robots in our factory in Austin. We we develop and manufacture our own materials, the print material that we call FormCrete.

• 2:03:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:21Speaker 09

  We make our own software stack. We've developed our own architecture, and even like the wall system itself has had to be optimized. Maybe you remember the early desktop printers kind of fought over how to do the internal geometry for the most efficient printing or whatever. So we've done a lot of that work, too. So the sort of full technology stack, we are vertically integrated to because it's it's not enough just to hand people a robot and say, good work. It really is a new way of building, and you have to deliver that way of building fully formed to the market.

• 2:03:45John Coogan?

  So who are your customers? Is it like commercial real estate developers that already have like a couple acres of land? They want to build 25 homes, and they come to you to actually go and build them, but then they will be selling the individual houses?

• 2:03:58Speaker 09

  You got it. That's exactly how it works so far. So we've we've kind of run like a build business using our own technologies to prove that a construction company using these technologies can be very profitable, very powerful, very fast, very exciting. The newest business model we launched, which is part of this fundraising, is this technology business model where the technology now is performant enough, stable enough, reliable enough, and the cost are in the right spot, that we really want to equip builders and developers all over the world with these tools themselves, right? The builder of our past showed up on a job site with nail guns and saws. The builder of the future is going to show up with robots, advanced materials, and a tablet to operate the whole thing.

• 2:04:35Jordi Hays?

  What about builders on the moon?

• 2:04:37Speaker 09

  You know, yeah, yeah, we do hold the contract with NASA to develop the lunar construction system. It's very similar thesis, right? If we're going to build on the moon, number one is going to be robots. It's too difficult to spot for humans to build. Number two, you need to use the local resources of the moon to build on the moon because it's too expensive to get things to the surface. Every other plan NASA had involved bringing everything with you. It's the shipping problem again. The number three, versatility beats specialization. You need a single system that can do landing pads, roadways, walls, reactor shielding, habitats, everything. And so we've been developing that, that system. We have hit all of our performance gates, kind of blew all our performance gates out of the water. And now the new NASA administrator is talking about moon base, moon base, moon base. And I think we'll have some very exciting news to announce on that front soon.

• 2:05:21John Coogan?

  That's very cool.

• 2:05:22Jordi Hays?

  I like the sound of that.

• 2:05:23John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the fundraiser. Thanks for coming on.

• 2:05:25Speaker 09

  Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

• 2:05:27John Coogan?

  This is a great time.

• 2:05:28Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang, Jason. Looking forward to make sure, make sure we get you on the show for that next announcement.

• 2:05:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great.

• 2:05:34Speaker 09

  Yeah, thanks, friends.

• 2:05:35John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:05:36Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:05:37John Coogan?

  Bye. I'm next. We have Eric Modl, co-founder and CEO. I'm glad the gong's warmed up. You know, I warmed up the gong earlier and I'm glad it's warmed up because it's ready for the next.

• 2:05:50Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 2:05:51John Coogan?

  Welcome back. How are you doing?

• 2:05:52Speaker 10

  Good. How are you?

• 2:05:54Jordi Hays?

  The man, the myth, the legend.

• 2:05:55John Coogan?

  Tell us what happened.

• 2:05:57Jordi Hays?

  Is this your third, is this your third time on the show?

• 2:05:59Speaker 10

  Third time.

• 2:06:00Jordi Hays?

  Was it, was the, did we, did we get the series, did you do the series A with us? Or was it the series B? Was that the first one? Trying to remember.

• 2:06:07Speaker 10

  B, C, and D, I think. I forgot.

• 2:06:10Jordi Hays?

  B, C, and D. I'm, I'm upset we didn't get the A. I would have liked to start earlier, but you've been on an absolute tear. And John really wants to.

• 2:06:19John Coogan?

  How much did you raise?

• 2:06:20Speaker 10

  Go ahead. We raised a bunch of money.

• 2:06:21John Coogan?

  A bunch of $700 billion, $15.75 billion valuation. Congratulations.

• 2:06:31Jordi Hays?

  Amazing, amazing progress.

• 2:06:32John Coogan?

  What's working? Other than everything?

• 2:06:35Speaker 10

  I think we see, we see so much demand from all these incredible AI applications out there, you know, cognition, ramps, Suno, Runway, Decagon, DoorDash. And there's so many companies out there building incredible stuff, running on Model, because they like the building blocks that we give them. Inference and training and sandboxes and all kinds of other stuff.

• 2:06:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, what's then been your, other than capital, like what's been your binding constraint? Is it power, chips? Like where's your bottleneck?

• 2:07:05Speaker 10

  We don't run data centers. We run capacity today. It might change in the future. But yeah, capacity's certainly been constrained. A lot of the capital we're getting used towards ramping up capacity a lot to serving all the demand out there.

• 2:07:18John Coogan?

  And so what's been the secret between balancing, you're basically load balancing between all the Neo clouds, bringing your software to bear, your, your, your techniques and then, and then also balancing against all of your customers. But what has been the secret to, you know, actually being able to reliably deploy across different clouds? I mean, we follow the semi-analysis Cluster Max 3.0. It feels like there are some differences between these different, these different platforms and these different Neo clouds. What's your experience been like?

• 2:07:47Speaker 10

  Yeah, there's a lot. And we have our own internal Model Max rating. I mean, in general, like we aggregate capacity from 20, I think maybe 25 clouds today. And it's, it's painful, right? And they're all somewhat different. But I think that's also the value prop of using Model for our customers. It's like, you don't have to deal with that nonsense. And then we add like a pretty rich software layer on top of it to, to write a few lines of Python and deploy incredible applications and run sandboxes in a way we don't have to think about all this cloud idiosyncrasies.

• 2:08:15John Coogan?

  What's the state of load balancing across time and geolocation? Is that becoming a priority? I remember hearing early on that Mid Journey had some inference capacity in Asia because there were people that were generating Mid Journey images in America during daytime. And as we get into more agentic workflows, I'm, I'm thinking, oh, this is a, this is something that ran in the background that I wouldn't mind if it ran at 3:00 AM local time.

• 2:08:44Speaker 10

  Totally. This is something we think a lot about. As we aggregate and run a larger and larger percentage of the world's compute, it's still pretty small, but hopefully growing over time. Those, those things become like really interesting optimization problem. Can we run things overnight? Can we run things on weekend? Can we like arb the geo stuff and run things in Asia when they're sleeping and stuff like that? There's a lot of opportunities to do that. And we can do that transparently because we, we aggregate all that capacity with two, does one big pool. Our customers don't have to think about it.

• 2:09:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yes.

• 2:09:12Jordi Hays?

  How, how are you thinking about diffusion timelines? Like I imagine your customers, like the ramps and the, and the DoorDashes of the world are doing things that like the Fortune 500 might be getting pitched these ideas from various like AI, like consulting companies and things like that. But they're probably not like at the frontier of whatever that new capability is. And so how are you, how are you, yeah, how, how does like, what is, what is the current state of diffusion from the sort of like scale up, you know, sort of tech, tech companies that still have a bunch of like really AI-pilled talent versus the rest of the world where they have smart, talented people, but they're not necessarily

• 2:09:56Jordi Hays?

  like watching, listening to Dwar Cash or, or watching TVP or whatever it is, right? They're just like, they don't really care about AI. They're like, I'll, I'll adopt it if, if that's what we're going to do, but I'm not spending time on the weekend.

• 2:10:09Speaker 10

  Yeah. I mean, I think this is like a massive shift. We basically opened up a whole new set of capabilities for software. It's, you know, I've been programming since early 90s, seeing a lot of these things in the past, you know, whether it's cloud or big data, mobile, or a lot of these shifts in the past. And it takes time to transpire and like, you know, to, to reach the enterprise customers. And I think we're still very early, very early in that adoption. But, you know, we're starting to see initially, we started, had a lot of AI natives adopting this, you know, all the companies I mentioned, kind of building things from scratch. Starting to see slightly more mature companies. I mentioned DoorDash is one of our customers. And over time, I think it's going to be, you know, Deutsche Bank or whatever. Like eventually we'll get there.

• 2:10:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. But, but it's, but it doesn't feel like there's still like a large gap between this sort of AI-pilled scale ups.

• 2:10:57Speaker 10

  Massive, massive, massive. And I think a lot of it is like, it's harder to work with these things. And so that's a big problem that we're obviously very focused on. It's like, with this new technology, you need a new set of tools. Like you need to kind of build the right building blocks. And, you know, what are those? I mean, we think they're, you know, the things I mentioned, like inference and training and sandboxes, reinforcement learning and post-training and a bunch of other stuff, like kind of packaging that up and making it easier to take things from research to, to production and scale it up. Like that, that's really what we enable a lot of these companies to move fast and get value into production.

• 2:11:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:29Speaker 10

  And not have to think about infrastructure.

• 2:11:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. But because we're so early, it's like you guys can only do so much. And then you're sort of relying on your own customers creativity to like fully be able to apply this set of tools to their workflows.

• 2:11:41Speaker 10

  Exactly. Yeah. And that's the beauty of software. It's all about creativity. Like we give them the building blocks. They can kind of combine them in an infinite way and, you know, that they can build software.

• 2:11:49John Coogan?

  How much demand are you seeing or how many CEOs are talking to you about the potential of bringing an ultra-fast product to their experience? I'm thinking about Suno. If I install that app, they got me to like get over the hump to do the install. That's important. And if they were able to inference the first song I generate, I mean, it's already really, really fast. But if it was like milliseconds, that might, that, that might get me over like the, the conversion hump a little bit faster because I don't even close the app while it's queuing for five seconds. And, and you can imagine developers wanting, you know, an ultra-fast product, something on Cerebras or Grok, or like, there's a whole bunch of chips that are out there and the labs have their strategy, but you have the

• 2:12:34John Coogan?

  opportunity to sort of bring that to, to everyone. And I'm wondering how much demand you're hearing from that and if you're planning on solving it.

• 2:12:40Speaker 10

  So I, I think the beauty of Model is that it's really a general purpose product and you can build almost anything on it. And that includes things that, that need to run very fast. I mean, we're very focused on real-time voice, real-time audio, things like that that need streaming. We're also looking into alternative chips, like maybe Cerebras, like things like that. Like it's still kind of early, like we'll see what happens. But, but I think there's some really exciting stuff. And, and I think that's like the, the sort of general purpose nature of Model is that we can cater to all these things, like batch shops on one side of the latency spectrum, really low latency inference on the other side of the spectrum. We're spending a lot of time optimizing LM inference as well, like getting some really good performance. So there's a lot of that for sure.

• 2:13:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:17Jordi Hays?

  When, do you feel like inference platforms are going to be, are they starting to diverge? Like, you know, the other companies in your space, are they starting, are we in a period of convergence or divergence in the sense of like Claude Code and Codex have been sort of like looking more and more like each other in, in many ways. And then there's a bunch of other applications that end up looking more and more like each other. But I can imagine like, I can imagine there's, there, there becomes more separation just because there's so. There's so much to do.

• 2:13:52Speaker 10

  We certainly think that we're very unique in the sense that we're more general purpose than than pretty much all the other players in the space. I do think just because the market turned out to be like 10x or 100x or 1,000x larger than anyone thought, including myself, by the way, I think by just virtue of the market being large, like we're, I think we're going to see it a lot of specialization, market's going to fragment a lot of stuff. And I think a lot, our role there is to cater to a lot of those different needs, like bring a lot of the products, like inference itself, just vanilla straight down in the middle, you just want Kimi K3. I think it's going to be a very competitive space. But if you do all the stuff around it, you know, sandboxes, agentic stuff, like reinforcement learning, I think you can build a really, really strong generational company, something that can grow and, you know, grow and grow and grow for many, many years.

• 2:14:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I mean, we're seeing it every day. It's awesome.

• 2:14:39Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Well, congratulations on the milestone.

• 2:14:42John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:14:43Jordi Hays?

  Thank you so much. We'll support you to the next one.

• 2:14:44John Coogan?

  Hanging with us. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:14:46Jordi Hays?

  Thanks. Cheers, Eric.

• 2:14:46John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Up next, we have Josh from The Atlantic, a writer who talks about, he wrote the November cover arguing that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are racing to vertically integrate the space economy. So we'll get to the bottom of it. Who you got? Musk, Bezos? We'll figure it out with Josh. Welcome to the show.

• 2:15:10Speaker 11

  Hey, guys. How are you?

• 2:15:12Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? Dude, I'm envious that you get to work with Mike Isaac now.

• 2:15:17John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:15:19Speaker 11

  I'm very excited. I've been trying to work with Mike for like 15 years.

• 2:15:24Jordi Hays?

  There you go. There you go. You made it over. Very cool.

• 2:15:28John Coogan?

  How'd you get started on this particular beat? How long have you been writing about space, writing about Musk, writing about Bezos, et cetera? Give us some background.

• 2:15:34Speaker 11

  So I, you know, I used to be the editor of Bloomberg Businessweek and the chief content officer there. So I've been dealing with technology and business for a long time. In 20, end of 2023, I started writing a column about AI for the Washington Post. And I just took it on for a year because I don't want to be a columnist. But AI was happening and they really needed somebody who could kind of step in and explain to normal people like, what, what is this? And I've been covering AI ever since and trying to cover it in ways that are different from the sort of standard beat reporting. I don't really care about startups and their valuations. I don't think most people do. I care about what the tech does, what it might do. I care to some degree about the representations being made by

• 2:16:19Speaker 11

  the founders and the, and the hyperscalers and like the frontier models. So I like practical applications. I like seeing what it'll do. I didn't originally intend that, you know, I didn't even know when I started thinking about this story that it would, of course, as with all things, end up back in AI land. But it did. And so I guess I feel qualified to trace it.

• 2:16:41Jordi Hays?

  Isn't that sort of the nature of the, of life in 2026 where everything becomes?

• 2:16:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, like you can be a sports podcast and you still have to talk about AI at least a couple of times a month because there's some, some crossover.

• 2:16:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or even like the health, every health podcast like just ends up having a bunch of people all, you know.

• 2:16:58Speaker 11

  It does. And, and look, I think that that is part of the reason ordinary people are exhausted by the subject, right? Is that they're just like, do I need to hear about this everywhere I go? Also, look, part of the reason that I like doing what I do is that I feel like there's a very unfilled bit of white space, which is actually explaining both how the tech works and looking past these kind of like statements that, you know, when I was a columnist, the first eight weeks, the number of times I heard the following phrases, and you guys are very familiar with this, AI is going to cure cancer and it's going to mitigate climate change. And then by the fifth time, you're like, say more. Tell me, tell me what that means so that we're not just dealing with this kind of

• 2:17:43Speaker 11

  like, you know, level of bullshit that people have washed over them. And at a certain point, you're like, I don't believe anything you say.

• 2:17:50John Coogan?

  Step one is we all smoke cigarettes because then we have to cure cancer. That's what I'm hearing.

• 2:17:55Jordi Hays?

  Create the incentive.

• 2:17:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It should be mandatory if you make an AI cure cancer, cancer claim, you have to smoke a cigarette on the spot.

• 2:18:04Speaker 11

  Right. Yeah, that would be a good way to at least get us back to reality.

• 2:18:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Okay. Well, let's go over to the space economy. I think most people are, are familiar with like the Musk vertical integration strategy. SpaceX has been widely talked about forever. He's very noisy. We know Starlink is available on planes now and he's going direct to cell and he's going to put the data centers in space. The Bezos side of the story feels not, not like it's a secret, but it's just less discussed because Bezos is a little bit less noisy than Musk. But he's been taking this very seriously for just as long as Elon. But can you break down what the Bezos space empire will look

• 2:18:48John Coogan?

  like, currently looks like, what's real, what's promised? What, what do you see over in that world?

• 2:18:55Speaker 11

  Yeah, look, I mean, Bezos is actually, Blue Origin started two years before SpaceX. So Bezos had a head start. The first, I can tell you, the first 20 years of the company's history really boils down to just, they took two very different paths. Bezos, you know, had Amazon when he started Blue Origin and he founded, you know, Amazon with his head and he founded Blue Origin with his heart. And so he really, he allowed it to kind of drift a little bit. And it was described to me by a former senior NASA official who visited both of those companies in their adolescence. This person said, look, Blue Origin was an academic lab, right? It was like a science project. They had beautiful 3D printers and beautiful buildings, but nobody was working. There's like no energy

• 2:19:38Speaker 11

  there. Whereas this person went over to SpaceX and it's like, everybody was dirty, everybody's young, they were sleeping in the office. And that's a product of the fact that Elon just didn't have as much money as Jeff. And he basically said, you gotta eat what you kill. And I don't mind losing it all if on the, on the chance that we actually win. And so they moved very quickly. Blue Origin for years, Jeff just was not fully dedicated to it. That gets us really up to the, the current day where SpaceX is responsible, as you guys probably know, for 80% of what was launched in the world in 2025. And the next closest competitor is the Chinese government.

• 2:20:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. So dominant market share and it feels like dominant margins and economics. It feels like a monopoly business and yet there might not be a structural monopoly like a network effect there. So it feels like something that another company, Blue Origin or someone else could actually go after, get market share and get some of that margin if that's possible. So is this a your margin is my opportunity all over again?

• 2:20:44Speaker 11

  It's a little bit of that. It's also that the, the race is about to change, right? So the first 25 years is about lowering launch costs, which Elon has successfully done. And then covering your other costs by having a business like Starlink, you know, launch is not a great business. High risk, very expensive. Boring old telecommunications is a fantastic business. That's where you get Starlink. And, and obviously Blue Origin and Amazon are now in their own satellite race. So if you think about the, there are four steps on the ladder of vertically integrating all of this stuff. Those are the first two. They're pretty well established. SpaceX is ahead. The next two are where things change. Okay. Number three is data centers in space. You guys have covered it. I know that a lot

• 2:21:29Speaker 11

  of your listeners and viewers are aware of it. But basically the compute costs, dealing with NIMBYism on Earth, dealing with energy costs, the fact that it can be throttled at any point and it's highly competitive, make data centers in space not only logical, but by some people who I reported on, they feel like it's inevitable that we're five to seven years away. And of course, because this is a ladder, if you don't have launch, your ability to have data centers in space is going to be really problematic. There's a reason that a year and a half ago, Sam Altman mused about the fact that maybe OpenAI needs a space company and tried to buy Stoke Space, which is a startup, very successful,

• 2:22:11Speaker 11

  didn't end up doing it. But if you don't have launch, you have issues. So that's the third wrong. And the third wrong is yet to, we, we've yet to figure out who exactly is going to be able to deploy and build these data centers in space. Both Blue Origin and SpaceX have big plans for it, as you saw on the SpaceX prospectus. That's really what they expect to make most of their money on. The fourth wrong is AI models on Earth, right? Which we all know how people are imagining the financials around them. The number one issue is the throttling of compute. If you can't compute, you can't build and fine tune new models, you can't have inference, you can't service people's products. So the ability

• 2:22:52Speaker 11

  to have unfettered compute depends on satellite infrastructure and launch. And then your ability to build out your model becomes very different. The other thing that's different between these companies is what the AI models themselves do. Elon is largely invested in Grok, which is basically an LLM infrastructure. It may at some point change, but that's what it is. Bezos wants, Bezos has a project called Prometheus, which like Blue Origin, he kept very, very secret. And then last year, sort of came out of the closet on it and is the co-CEO of Prometheus. So he has an operational role in the company. And Prometheus is, you know, it's the closest thing to compare it to is a real world model. It's a world model

• 2:23:33Speaker 11

  in which physical data makes up most of the model. He refers to it in others as an artificial general engineer. What they mean by that is that it's trained on physical data in the world and tries to make physical things from that data, tries to model things that are really hard to model. The end game, if you believe we will get there, is a machine that makes machines. And if you're Jeff Bezos and you own Amazon and need dexterous robots everywhere, and you have plans to colonize the moon and you need all sorts of machinery there, it makes sense that that's the kind of AI you would be going for. So the two of them, that's what they're both aiming for is this flywheel where everything leads

• 2:24:17Speaker 11

  to everything. Now, the other thing that that does is if you don't have launch capability, You're out of the game.

• 2:24:24John Coogan?

  So.

• 2:24:24Speaker 11

  And so it's at some point, if this space economy becomes real, inevitably, there will be scrutiny around it non-competitive practices because they'll have lockdown on it.

• 2:24:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, but there's a lot of hyperscalers that don't have launch capacity, but they feel like they've like sort of dipped their toe in. I'm thinking of like that solar plane that Meta was working on maybe a decade ago, or Google had a balloon project and Sergey Brin's built a big blimp and like there's little experiments that are happening and I'm wondering if there's rumblings of, you know, are we going to hear about Meta and Google and maybe Microsoft? And maybe Nvidia saying like we like we, we, we, at least one of us is like going for it. And we're going to try and partner up with a Rocket Lab or Stoke Space and really get into launch.

• 2:25:12Speaker 11

  I mean, maybe. The problem is how far behind even Blue Origin is, right?

• 2:25:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:25:17Speaker 11

  So I went to watch a Blue Origin launch in April. It was lovely. The mechanics of the rockets are gorgeous, very brilliant people there, right? It was the third time they had reused a booster. And as we discussed, like reusable, reusability is the key to the whole thing. You drive the the cost to get of kilos to space. They celebrated. It was the third time. And as I was driving away, I opened X and SpaceX very casually posted they had just reused a booster for the 600th time.

• 2:25:45Speaker 11

  And so it's 600 to three.

• 2:25:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:48Speaker 11

  And Stoke Space and Rocket Lab, all these places are really smart. They're really good.

• 2:25:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:25:53Speaker 11

  But that's an indicator of how far behind they are. And so if you're Google and you're thinking, hey, we ought to get into rocketry, well, call me in 25 years.

• 2:26:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, it really does take that long.

• 2:26:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, and they also own a bunch of SpaceX, do they not?

• 2:26:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, they do.

• 2:26:07Jordi Hays?

  So they've been, they've been sort of like at least developing a financial relationship for a while. I wanted to, what, what is your view on this sort of how? I imagine talent flows were very one directional over the last 20 years where people would be at Blue Origin, they'd be like, I want to work on space. And then they'd realize like, I don't know what my equity is worth and like, it seems like SpaceX's valuation sort of tends to go up every few years and I can sell some shares and it's more tangible. Now, Blue Origin's raised outside capital. They have a new valuation.

• 2:26:47Jordi Hays?

  I imagine that they're going to need to start making like very, very serious offers to try to peel people away from SpaceX back to, back to Blue Origin in order to catch up in a bunch of different ways. But what are you seeing?

• 2:27:00Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think that's all right. I also think that these are tribal companies in ways that some of it is endemic to the space industry. Like they, they're very, it's a really interesting subculture. These are very sweet, smart people, right? These are e- even low down the chain, you're dealing with people who have a sophisticated understanding of science. They really love what they do. They're very invested in space. They dream science fiction dreams, right? And so they are tribal in that way. But you can't help but be at one of these companies and constantly track how the other companies are doing. And so people have gone back and forth, but not as much as you might think. Now that the money is out there and that there's some, there's some people at SpaceX who are ready to go.

• 2:27:44Speaker 11

  They've been working for it. They got their equity moment. They're ready to roll. But I don't think it's as cut and dry as other, other businesses that are comparable, like where, you know, an AI researcher might defect for a certain amount of money. One, the money isn't that size, right? It's still, it's good money, but it's not like AI researcher money. And two, they're, they're often in different places and they're, these are much more community oriented companies. So I don't think that, that Blue Origin is going to get there simply by rating talent.

• 2:28:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:14John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah, you can't really just like take everything with you in the same way you can with an AI research project where you kind of know, oh yeah, there's this one pitfall in how you train the model. I'll take that over to another lab and immediately we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll jump. You know, a lot of these things are like industrial processes that build up over years and years and years. And yeah, you might know, hey, we need 25 more machines over there, but that takes time to build and takes time to organize.

• 2:28:39Speaker 11

  It does. And the other thing that's interesting about it is that, you know, it's incredibly collaborative between the sort of theoretical space side, the physical engineering side.

• 2:28:49Speaker 11

  And so it's, it's a kind of different type of person. And so you are knitted into your environment in ways that are much different than technology or software engineering.

• 2:28:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. Last question. Is Jeff Bezos as space pilled or like excited about space as Musk? I mean, Elon has been talking about going to Mars. We got to get multi-planetary. It's existential. Earth could get wiped out and he's been excited about space for so long. Is Bezos equally excited and just less outgoing about it?

• 2:29:22Speaker 11

  Yeah. Okay. Listen, the, the difference in their personalities may be attributed to lots of things, but one thing that I, the people I spoke to said, look, Jeff's a little bit older and so his view of business was really formed by being a D E Shaw, which is you keep your secrets close. You don't talk about your failures or your passions. You produce your results on the field. Elon's just young enough to really like love social media, to have almost no inhibitions about what he says out loud. But all the people that I spoke to said, Jeff, you know, listen, his high school girlfriend told reporters when Amazon was first happening, the reason he was trying to get rich was so that he could go to space.

• 2:30:05Speaker 11

  And I think what he's been doing all these years is real.

• 2:30:11Speaker 11

  I did not speak to him for this piece, but the number of people I spoke to who mused about the fact that he really wished he could have left Amazon earlier to focus on Blue Origin was significant. And I think he's trying to make up for a lot of lost time because he loves space as much as Elon, if not more.

• 2:30:27John Coogan?

  Interesting. Fascinating. Well, have you seen Mike Isaac give him a banana from us? We, we.

• 2:30:33Speaker 11

  I'm coming out to see him next week.

• 2:30:35John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:30:36Speaker 11

  I might try to expense more than a banana, but if you guys want to contribute to that.

• 2:30:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just make sure he's eating because he'll just go, he'll, he'll just go black coffee all day and we just want him to be.

• 2:30:45Speaker 11

  You know what? That's me too. So maybe we'll just find the finest black coffee we can and sit there and admire each other.

• 2:30:51John Coogan?

  Well, thanks so much for coming on the show.

• 2:30:53Jordi Hays?

  Josh.

• 2:30:53Speaker 11

  Yeah, great to talk to you guys.

• 2:30:54John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 2:30:55Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:30:56John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Ada Bhattacharya from Devailance coming on to talk about what you need to do to stop un- unapproved audio recording in and around you. We'll talk about how to fight this.

• 2:31:12Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 2:31:13John Coogan?

  How are you doing? Welcome back.

• 2:31:15Speaker 12

  Thank you so much for having me. I'm really excited. I mean.

• 2:31:17John Coogan?

  Thank you. Yes. Perfect time. Kick it off with an introduction.

• 2:31:21Jordi Hays?

  Are you behind this?

• 2:31:22John Coogan?

  Is this a marketing song?

• 2:31:23Jordi Hays?

  Because the whole scheme, the whole scheme seems so silly. It's like you're covering it up with toilet paper, using, using, using your employer's product to try to do research on how to do the crime. It's very silly.

• 2:31:38Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, it is very silly. And I mean, in many ways, I can totally understand the skepticism from people.

• 2:31:47Speaker 12

  I would say, but that's exactly the point as well because actually it's a chip that is super simple and easy to get. We actually have originally tested some of these. This is the baseline chip for this. Right? So it's that, that's the point with AI. Anyone these days can really become an expert. That's something that they don't know and they can just build this. So in many ways, it was exactly what we have been preaching for a while. And seeing that come up here is of course very concerning.

• 2:32:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:17Speaker 12

  So yeah, I think, I mean.

• 2:32:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we, please reintroduce the, yeah, reintroduce the company and the product and yeah, should I get one of these to block my LG TV at home?

• 2:32:29Speaker 12

  Great question. So Devailance builds for devices that prevent unauthorized audio recordings, in particular Spectre prevents microphones from recording you. So we have been developing this technology. It's based on innovations in both hardware and also physics, as well as we're building our own in-house models with AI to make sure that we can specialize exactly in this area. So I would say it is the perfect time to think about how can you protect your physical security because we are really moving from a digital security based cybersecurity time into also a physical one with meta-rebans, with TVs, making innovation and

• 2:33:15Speaker 12

  also content recognition, you know, all of these things. There's a lot that's coming up. But the OpenAI case in particular shows that AI recorders and recorders overall are going to be very cheaply accessible for anyone. So if you care about your privacy, if you care about keeping your conversations where they're being held, this product is for you. We also have another product that's called Calypda, which prevents AI transcription during online meetings, but that's a bit separate on this issue.

• 2:33:47John Coogan?

  Okay, I signed up for Calypda for the beta. Put my email down. That's not shipping yet. But you can order the Spectre one today, preorder. When is it shipping? Take me through the, the process of actually building, manufacturing, distributing these.

• 2:34:04Speaker 12

  Definitely. So we have been developing Spectre. So it is still in R and D phase to make sure it really works as well as it can. So the pre-orders are more so to secure your spot. We're hoping to ship it early next year. And there are also demos that we are planning to release up until the end of this year to showcase our progress on the technology. So I would say that is the general understanding of Spectre.

• 2:34:31Jordi Hays?

  And recording devices, what's happening on the spyware side? I've, there's, there was people talking about how some of these devices can be, you know, significantly smaller than, than a penny. Like, you know, something that you would never notice, right? I think what was interesting about this case that that came out yesterday is just like it, it was not necessarily very sophisticated hardware was, you know, they were trying to cover it up with toilet paper, but it feels like there's, we now have, humans have the capability to, you know, capture information in a form factor that, that much smaller than ever before.

• 2:35:11Speaker 12

  Yes. So that is, especially that's why we're focusing on a lot of R and D. And we're actually looking for enterprise partners to make sure that we can specifically protect against these cases because they're very particular. They're usually in meeting rooms. So there's a very.

• 2:35:32Speaker 12

  Normal design that we can go through to make sure that it's for meeting rooms. We can do more than just putting one device in there. So we are looking right now to mesh capabilities for room level protection instead of just on the go protection, which is what Spectre One was originally. Um, but now the question for enterprises is how do we protect entire rooms? So, um, we're looking to partner with people up on that front as well.

• 2:36:00John Coogan?

  That makes tons of sense. Yeah. The, the, the Spectre One device, I'm looking at the landing page. It, it, it seems like it's maybe the size of a donut or maybe a little bit bigger. It's not like keychain size, so it's a, it's a commitment. But I feel like if I wear this around a necklace, everyone will get the idea, don't spy on me. Could be kind of a fashion statement, I suppose.

• 2:36:18Speaker 12

  That is very true.

• 2:36:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are, are, i- i- is miniaturization on the roadmap? I imagine that this could shrink down. Also on the cost side, uh, $1,200 feels a little high for something like this. But what's been the response? What's the roadmap to get to something that's, um, more just like everyday consumer friendly?

• 2:36:37Speaker 12

  Definitely. So when it comes to, for example, um, business rooms, positioning multiple in there, that will allow for us to shrink down the form factor a little bit. For consumers, we're also looking to shrink it down. It is the size of a speaker approximately. Um, main problem is, you know, we are using compute on these devices. So everything can run locally. So that's why the price point is at that, um, level. Because we are running our own models on it in order to make sure that everything stays secure and private on the device as well. But we are working on this and it is in the pipeline. It's just good things take time. So we are working through it.

• 2:37:17John Coogan?

  Interesting. Is the device able to detect if recording is happening or does it matter? Like if I'm in the forest and there's no electronics around me at all, will it still be scrambling and, and, and blocking? Or does it turn on proactively when it knows, hey, those meta ray bands are on and they're listening?

• 2:37:37Speaker 12

  So right now it's doing it regardless of whether something is recording or not, as long as it detects there's a device that can record.

• 2:37:44John Coogan?

  Got it. Okay. So yeah, it's, it's hearing like Bluetooth.

• 2:37:47Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if you'll have time this holiday season, but next holiday season, if you could release a Christmas themed device that's sort of.

• 2:37:55John Coogan?

  That might do it. I think if you're just constantly rattling the jingle bells, it's going to throw off a lot of the AI recording. That's the low tech and long solution.

• 2:38:03Jordi Hays?

  Put you in the Christmas.

• 2:38:03John Coogan?

  Really loud, actually.

• 2:38:04Jordi Hays?

  Put you in the Christmas spirit.

• 2:38:05Speaker 12

  Yes.

• 2:38:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:38:08Jordi Hays?

  Really glad you're doing this work.

• 2:38:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Thank you for everything.

• 2:38:10Jordi Hays?

  Feels more important than ever.

• 2:38:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Congratulations on the progress. Good luck with the, the next product revisions and have a great day.

• 2:38:16Jordi Hays?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:38:17Speaker 12

  Sounds great. Thanks, guys.

• 2:38:18John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:38:21John Coogan?

  Well.

• 2:38:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, folks, it's been a good run.

• 2:38:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's been a great run all over the place today.

• 2:38:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:30Jordi Hays?

  From Arowan to mathematics to Devalence.

• 2:38:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, we did go all over the place. Uh, very fun. Any breaking news in the timeline, Tyler? Anything you do? No, you're good. Uh, the only thing that I saw that we gotta talk about first, we gotta go back to alcohol. Uh, but this is a crazy stat today. Leonard Heim, former guest of the show, says, global spending on alcohol is still larger than AI infrastructure spending this year. $1.7 trillion spent on alcohol, $1.5 trillion spent on AI infrastructure. So if we all band together and start teetotalling, we got another leg up.

• 2:39:10Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:39:11John Coogan?

  We got another leg up. We might have to do it. Uh, no, really, really puts in perspective. I, I had no idea that the alcohol market was so huge, but it in fact is, it's bigger than AI and.

• 2:39:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is.

• 2:39:21John Coogan?

  We'll see how it goes. Well, there's what? 71 days till Christmas? How many days until Christmas we got? Let's count it down. We got plenty of stuff going on. Here we go.

• 2:39:34John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts.