"You Can See Everything" Sparks Debate, 17% GDP Growth Please, Call of Duty Campaign Review | Katie Drummond, Bing Gordon, Daksh Gupta, Jean-Denis Greze, Quinten Farmer

(01:35) - "You Can See Everything" Spoiler Talk (23:51) - AI Data Center Forecast Jumps (33:59) - Anthropic Staff Predict AI Boom (40:59) - Call of Duty Campaign Review (48:32) - Katie Drummond discusses Nathan Fielder’s film about Elizabeth Holmes, its complex portrayal of empathy, fraud, and human behavior, and its potential to become a classic. The global editorial director of WIRED also reflects on how the tech press once amplified Holmes’s claims and enabled the era of visionary, larger-than-life startup founders. (01:07:17) - Bing Gordon, founding executive of Electronic Arts and co-author of *Everybody Wins*, discusses lessons from gaming, product development, and his career in technology. He explores how iteration, storytelling, motivation, and AI can improve creative work while emphasizing the enduring importance of human judgment and meaningful progression. (01:46:52) - Daksh Gupta, founder of Greptile, discusses automating code review and testing to ensure AI-generated code is safe to merge. He highlights the company’s $50 million Series B, the need for independent code validation, and growing demand for better visibility into the quality, productivity, and cost of coding agents. (01:55:25) - Jean Denis discusses Town, the AI workplace assistant company he co-founded and leads as CEO, following its $108 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation. He explains how trusted, privacy-focused AI agents could streamline workplace tasks and communications while delivering thoughtful recommendations without overwhelming users. (02:09:26) - Quinten Farmer discusses founding Tolan, an AI-powered personal guide designed to provide entertainment, emotional support, intelligent assistance, and personalized follow-up through nuanced memory. He also covers Tolan’s approachable characters, applications for families and children, the challenges of proactive AI assistance, and the company’s $30 million Series B funding. 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.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  Today is Monday, October 19th, 2026. We are live from the TVPN Altrudome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Do we still got a little color grade going on, boys? What's going on with the?

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  I think so.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  The bold tans today? Yeah? Okay, you left the color grade. Well, we're slowly getting out of Nathan Fielder territory. We're not zoomed in, but we still got the color grade and I still got the Nathan Fielder headphones, which are actually amazing, deeply underrated. He's a wired headphone guy. You've been talking about this for a long time.

• 0:36Jordi Hays?

  I didn't think those were great.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  Oh, you didn't like them? I love them. I think that they sound way better.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  The quality was horrible.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  No, no, I think it's nice. It's nice. I don't know, just the way I can still hear a little bit of this. It doesn't, it's not so isolating. It feels like I'm more present. I don't know. Anyway, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both. Use your corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more, including Tony Hawk, including Bam Margera. They put on an incredible event at the New York Stock Exchange on Friday, on Saturday night. Tony Hawk was there skating around the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, outside of the New York Stock Exchange. Bam Margera was there. Huge event.

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  He was also just skating around New York yesterday. Has showed up on a buddy of mine's story.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  It's awesome. Yeah. Great, great sponsorship, great out of the box, outside of the box thinking from the Ramp team on a really interesting brand partner who, yeah, just, yeah, a lot of contrast there. So, great, great outcome. So, congrats to them. Let me, we're still in Nathan Fielder territory. We have Katie Drummond from Wire, the global editorial director, hopping on to talk about her interview with Nathan Fielder, which dropped today. Then we have a bunch of other folks joining the show. But Theranos was all over the timeline.

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  He broke his silence.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  Nathan?

• 1:55Jordi Hays?

  With Katie.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true. That is actually what happened. Yeah, he did. But yeah, this weekend, every time I would refresh, it would be, you can see everything takes. Everyone had all these different opinions and takes. The one that stuck out to me was that there's this, there's a little bit of a, like, you watch the movie and most people came away thinking more positively of Elizabeth Holmes, being like, oh, maybe she wasn't, maybe she's not that bad. Maybe there's more to the story. Maybe she was manipulated. She seems to be manipulated multiple times, potentially, like, maybe, maybe she's more of a.

• 2:30Jordi Hays?

  Some people might be like, she's bad, but maybe she'd probably be nice to me if I interacted with her.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, a little bit of that. And yeah, and there's this, I don't know, this, there's, there's some sort of like suspicion that I feel some people in Silicon Valley are having where it's like, oh, it's just like the fake it till you make it thing. It's, you know, it's not that big of a deal. And I just, I just can't, I just can't stop thinking about like, it seems like she's just a bad founder. Like, put aside the fraud. Like, it just seems like, like, total slop in terms of the execution of that business and gives me absolutely no faith in a Theranos 2.0.

• 3:07Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 3:07John Coogan?

  And the whole time, I was like, almost yelling at the movie screen because she taught, the way she describes Theranos is like this box and like, it's in the cloud. It's just like, it's, it's so, it's so unaware of the medical device industry, which is so frustrating to me because she, she's making this point where it's like, we've been, we have an invention and our invention allows you to test blood for things and like, we test all this stuff. And she's making it sound like it's like magical science. And it's like, I looked it up, there have been 60 plus companies since Theranos started that sold for over $100 million in that category. It's

• 3:50John Coogan?

  like, it's like someone coming to you and being like, I have a magical, I, we invented something. It takes information and it stores it on a database that you can access through a website. It's like, so you make a SaaS product. Literally hundreds of people make those. And there are thousands of people that work in the medical device industry and they've made boxes that look kind of like a Theranos box and it runs a test and.

• 4:12Jordi Hays?

  And they don't go to prison for 10 years.

• 4:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, they don't go to prison. And, and they, and they, and it's just, it's such, it's such a, it's such a tried and true playbook that it's actually like an industry that's boring at this point. They're like, these companies get funded, no one reads their press releases, and then they get sold for hundreds of millions of dollars. And it's like, okay, cool. Yeah, congrats, you made $500 million doing another medical device. We know the playbook at this point. You, you get some intellectual property, you build the device, kind of the supply chain, figure out the chemistry, get the FDA application in. It takes a decade for the FDA to actually approve it. You probably sell the company before then. Like, there is such an established playbook that there's specific VCs that just focus on this. And they're just like, oh yeah, we'll just do these deals all the time. We just do them and then we, yeah, we sell them to this company. And this, this biotech company just loves buying these. And it happens all the time.

• 4:59John Coogan?

  And she never just says like, look, this stuff happens all the time. It's not crazy that I'm going to be able to build a box that tests for something. Like, this happens all the time. Instead, it's like, it's like, I'm the only one that could possibly do this, which is so weird. It's such a bad frame to not, to not just admit what's, what's really happening on the field, which is that box, diagnostic boxes get built and sold every few years for hundreds of millions of dollars. You could just do that. But instead, it has to be this pie in the sky nonsense. And it really, really frustrates me, as you can probably tell. Nikita Beer broke down a little bit of this concept. He said, "One of the things that hasn't been talked about with Elizabeth Holmes, she was created in the era of the TED Talk entrepreneur." And this is exactly

• 5:41John Coogan?

  what I was picking up on. So, between 2011 and 2015, after the release of The Social Network, there was an entire apparatus built around child prodigies, college accelerators, young entrepreneur organizations. "I watched countless founders of hard tech companies present fraudulent products at conferences. They had fake studies with fudged numbers. Most of the adults in the room excused it as faking it till you make it, but Holmes was the one who rode the wave better than anyone else. When the TED Talk era came to an end, when people finally came to their senses, she was still running the same playbook. And in the most scrutinized field, there is medical technology. When people ask how far she, how she got so far, it is largely explained by

• 6:24John Coogan?

  the period she did it in. And she got caught when the world suddenly woke up." And so, yeah, it's so odd because there are a ton of founders who build medical devices and sell them and raise money and do all these different things, but they're boring businesses because they never touch consumers directly. Like, you go to the hospital, they might say, oh yeah, you have a cough, but we're going to run it for some bacterial, some, you know, antibiotic resistant bacterial thing. We're going to take some of your blood and just take off a little piece of the blood and put it in this box to make sure that you don't have this thing. And they'll do this on site, but you never see the brand of the company that runs this because all you care about is like, am I sick or not? Right? And so, you, you might wind up getting the lab test that says

• 7:07John Coogan?

  like, UCLA or USC on it, or whatever, you know, whatever medical network you went to. And the doctor is just going to introduce themselves as like, Dr. Smith or whatever. They're not going to tell you, oh yeah, by the way, we just ran your blood on this small startup that got acquired by a big tech, big biotech company and it was a great deal and all the investors made money. So, you're never going to hear about it, even if you use the box. And if you don't, you don't care at all. And so, there's other things, which is that this is strictly regulated by the FDA. So, if you're a founder of a medical device company, like, what you are going for is FDA authorization, that's marketing authorization, that's literally the ability to sell the product. It's not illegal to build a medical device. It's illegal to sell

• 7:49John Coogan?

  it, to market it. And so, that also includes, like, you can't, you typically can't go on podcasts and, and media and say, oh yes, we have this thing that does this thing. We have to say, oh, we're working on this progress. Like, we can't say that it actually works because we haven't been approved to say that by the FDA. And so.

• 8:06Jordi Hays?

  By the way, can we do spoilers now?

• 8:08John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 8:08Jordi Hays?

  I think we can assume that everyone listening to this.

• 8:11John Coogan?

  Spoiler alert. You don't want to hear spoilers. Just turn, leave the stream going, but just turn the audio down.

• 8:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and we'll just talk away.

• 8:20John Coogan?

  What spoiler do you want to talk about?

• 8:22Jordi Hays?

  So, Billy does this side deal.

• 8:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  To get a cut of profit on the back end of the movie. You would probably know what, what that's exactly called.

• 8:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, points on the back end.

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  Points on the back end. So, he does this thing.

• 8:36John Coogan?

  Incredibly good.

• 8:37Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then later, after the movie's totally been.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Jordi Hays?

  Like, finished, he decides, ah, this is going to look pretty bad, backs out, right? Damage has already been done, right? Like, he looks, he looks, he doesn't look great.

• 8:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:54Jordi Hays?

  And Elizabeth is trying to say like, oh, I didn't, I don't really know much about the details. So, one thing, like, the damage was already done and now the movie is a massive hit and it's going to be, continue to be a massive hit. It seems like it'll be like a cult classic. It's something that people will look back and I can see somebody watching it back in.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:14Jordi Hays?

  I can see watching it back in 10 years and being like, wow, that was a moment, just because Nathan Fielder's like body of work is becoming so iconic. And I, I can't imagine being 60 years old, being like, I'm going to turn on some Nathan Fielder, just take me back to the good old days. And but the funny thing is, do you think that Billy, do you think it made sense for him to do this side deal because she has, she claimed in the show, she has hundreds of millions of dollars of restitution to pay. So of course she wouldn't want to make, even if she did, she wanted to make money on it, she wouldn't get any benefit of it.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 9:49Jordi Hays?

  So she would want to route it through Billy.

• 9:52John Coogan?

  It's a good question. There's some ambiguity over whether or not they're married. I couldn't get to the bottom of this, but I think they might not be legally married. In which case it would make sense for him to get those profits and then use that for their kids and their family, but then it doesn't flow to her bank account, which immediately gets grabbed by the investors.

• 10:12Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying. Yeah.

• 10:13John Coogan?

  I think you might be on to something there.

• 10:14Jordi Hays?

  She gets a lot of the benefit in that it's sort of funding.

• 10:18John Coogan?

  Yes. And so is your point that if she's in on the deal, sitting there being like, we want to get paid, but just pay it to Billy's account, don't pay it. That's more tricky from a restitution perspective?

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  Totally. I imagine, I imagine a judge would be like.

• 10:32John Coogan?

  That's an interesting wrinkle. I hadn't thought of that.

• 10:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a judge would be like, yeah, you're earning money. I don't care.

• 10:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't care that you did.

• 10:38Jordi Hays?

  Billy has to like go behind her back and make it really public that she's,

• 10:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:42Jordi Hays?

  that he's going behind her back.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  Huh. Yeah. Good point. Good point.

• 10:46Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 10:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. The fraud continues potentially. Interesting. You might be right about the cult classic thing. I mean, I, from my perspective, it looked like we were experiencing like an absolute box office smash, like it was taking over the timeline. I would describe it more as like a phenomenon. When I think of cult classic, I think of like slow burn, like no, underappreciated at the box office. And then all of a sudden it becomes really popular. I think it's like super popular, but.

• 11:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I'm still talking to people like over this last weekend.

• 11:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  I would say like Nathan Fielder, Theranos movie, blah, blah, blah. And some people be like, oh yeah, yeah, I think I remember Theranos. Like there's still people out there that don't.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  Do you know how it did at the box office? It was not the number one movie this weekend.

• 11:28Jordi Hays?

  What was?

• 11:28John Coogan?

  By a factor of two, Street Fighter.

• 11:33Jordi Hays?

  See what, see what I mean? See what I mean?

• 11:34John Coogan?

  Street Fighter made $31 million and you can see everything made 15 million. So twice as much money for Street Fighter, which I mean, I'm sure it's a great movie, but I didn't even know it was happening. Maybe that's a cult classic for me. It seemed like something I'd like. I saw, I think 50 cents in it. It looked awesome when I saw a poster eventually. Also, oh, Whale Fall. Whale Fall made eight million. I want to see this movie. This is a horror film about a whale. Seems really cool. Anyway, someone gets swallowed whole by a whale.

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 12:04John Coogan?

  Spoiler alert. But I think that's in the.

• 12:08Jordi Hays?

  In the trailer, maybe?

• 12:09John Coogan?

  In the trailer and the name.

• 12:10Jordi Hays?

  Spoiler alert.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  Uh, anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike.

• 12:13Jordi Hays?

  You've never heard of it.

• 12:13John Coogan?

  Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So I mean, the, the, the wildest part about the whole, you can see everything Theranos thing is that, uh, one, I've talked to Billy, uh, on the phone about the Twitter that he was running and all that stuff, answered all those questions. Nothing that really was different than what you saw in the movie. Um, but he sort of gave me the pitch for Theranos 2.0 and I was like pushing back, being like, so you should go for like a specific diagnostic, go for like, do this. Like I have a buddy who ran this exact playbook, made $400 million in a very short amount of time. Like this is tractable. And then he was like.

• 12:53Jordi Hays?

  When did you have this conversation?

• 12:55John Coogan?

  I talked to him like last year. I.

• 12:58Jordi Hays?

  Okay. Yeah. I think it's coming back to me.

• 12:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I told you that. So basically the.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I remember you were like, oh yeah, like bearish.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. The story, the story is, is that Elizabeth Holmes came, um, came back to X and was posting like funny things and was getting, uh, like amplified and going viral. And everyone was like, wow, Elizabeth Holmes.

• 13:21Jordi Hays?

  And we were getting pitched to have Billy on the show.

• 13:24John Coogan?

  Loosely. So what was going on was that, uh, Elizabeth Holmes was being like so edgy and based on the timeline. Everyone was like, wow, like she's innocent because she, she's actually a great entrepreneur because she's like funny. And I was like, and I was like, these are two different things.

• 13:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Comedy on the timeline does not mean you're a great founder. Often.

• 13:44Jordi Hays?

  Does not mean you're innocent.

• 13:45John Coogan?

  They're not correlated at all. Uh, yeah, it doesn't mean that you're innocent. And so my pitch was, I said, look, if we're going to take this Elizabeth Holmes redemption arc seriously, I want to see some great calls about biotech because this is sort of what's happened with other individuals who have been rehabilitated. You'll see like a Martin Shkreli put out a call about a particular cloud computing stock, and then you can just wait and you wait six months and you're like, wow, Martin, like say what you will about what happened in the past. The guy is dialed about analysis of public market companies today. And so that is undeniable.

• 14:23Jordi Hays?

  You wanted to see Elizabeth do like a Trevor Milton where.

• 14:26John Coogan?

  No.

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  tries to invent something new, fails, and then now it's just running some random private aviation company.

• 14:34John Coogan?

  No. I mean, maybe. I don't, I actually haven't read.

• 14:37Jordi Hays?

  No, that's kind of what you're saying is like, don't try to read, don't try to like create something new.

• 14:41John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, sure.

• 14:43Jordi Hays?

  Make a medical device company and do one thing that.

• 14:46John Coogan?

  So, so, so, so yes and no. Like yes, probably from a, from an entrepreneurship standpoint, I would be in favor of that. But, uh, from a branding perspective, my point that I posted about was, was like, I want to see Elizabeth Holmes give an incredible take about peptides and how that market will evolve and then watch that happen and be like, oh wow, she was early. I want her to be a good biotech analyst. I want her to be smart on the science. I want her to.

• 15:11Jordi Hays?

  The crazy thing about the movie though, I can't remember a single point where she was locked in on anything science related.

• 15:17John Coogan?

  I completely agree.

• 15:17Jordi Hays?

  It was, it was just, it was Billy.

• 15:19John Coogan?

  That's the point.

• 15:20Jordi Hays?

  Learning about mitochondria.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's my point. Like, like if, if, if a genius scientist goes to jail wrongfully, I would assume that they continue reading science literature and that they come up with interesting theses around that.

• 15:33Jordi Hays?

  One simple trick that the medical industry hates.

• 15:36John Coogan?

  You can actually do that. That happens. That like, like this stuff happens if you actually read the literature and you're in tune with the market and what's going on. And you could call longs and shorts and, and you could predict different things about what's, how the biotech community is going to evolve. And some of those predictions would be right. And if a lot of them are right, you will be seen as someone who understands the industry. And you can see this with all sorts of people in AI where they post about AI progress. And then you just wait a couple of years and you're like, oh yeah, like like them or don't like them. They were definitely right about the cyber security capabilities of models five years ago. And so at the very least, we got to give them that credit. And,

• 16:16John Coogan?

  and, and I want to, I want Elizabeth Holmes to throw down, give me your biotech 2027. Give me your AI 2027 thesis. Let's watch it play out. If you're right.

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  At the very least, a market map.

• 16:29John Coogan?

  At the very least, a market map. Show me that you understand what Roche.

• 16:32Jordi Hays?

  Or a tier list.

• 16:33John Coogan?

  A tier list.

• 16:34Jordi Hays?

  A tier list.

• 16:35John Coogan?

  A tier list of, of, of biotech acquisitions in the medical device space. Yeah. Show me you're a student of the industry you're operating in. Right?

• 16:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:42John Coogan?

  And, and, and so I had put this out there as like, I want to see, I want to see some real, uh, some real analysis, something that shows you that you're a live player in the, in the industry. And, uh, and then I, I did ask the Elizabeth Holmes account to do an interview over the phone on September 5th, 2025. So about a year ago. Um, and then, and then I did, I did talk to Billy on, I think October 17th or something. Um, and, and it was, it was nothing that didn't come out in the movie. So it all matched. Um, but, but I was, I was focused much more on the, what is the business strategy going forward? Because if it's just the hand wavy, we're going to do everything all the time at the same time.

• 17:25Jordi Hays?

  In their words, it was Theranos, they're going to do Theranos 2.0.

• 17:28John Coogan?

  2.0. Yeah.

• 17:31Jordi Hays?

  Watching, watching Nathan have that lightbulb moment where they're pitching him Theranos 2.0.

• 17:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:36Jordi Hays?

  And them not realizing that people have been using the phrase Theranos 2.0 to describe like massive, like.

• 17:42John Coogan?

  FTX. Yeah.

• 17:42Jordi Hays?

  Things that they perceive might be massive fraud.

• 17:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's great. Um.

• 17:48Jordi Hays?

  In another world.

• 17:49John Coogan?

  Anyway, I, yeah, I, I just also, when I, when I got to YC in 2018, uh, my visiting partner was Diego Ray, co-founder of GeneWeave, who actually built and sold a real diagnostics box, a medical device. Uh, and it was basically just a lab testing machine. Previously, size of a dishwasher, add a lab down the street, you shrink it down to the size of a box and you put it at the actual hospital and then the hospital can test for a specific thing. They were testing for antibiotic resistant bacteria. They developed a, a chemistry. It's not rocket science. Like it is hard science, but like it's not magic. It's not future sci-fi magic.

• 18:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  And they basically would, would, uh, uh, have these particles that would make the, the particular bacteria resistant, uh, the, the antibiotic resistant bacteria light up. They would glow and then they would shine a light on it. And then they would measure the amount of light that came back and they'd be able to say in this hospital, like, okay, you have this particular antibiotic resistant bacteria in this patient. You need to be extra careful about washing your hands. You might need to give them a different antibiotic. There's a whole bunch of different things that can happen. And if you can get that data in an hour as opposed to two days, uh, everything in the hospital is just going to move a little bit smoother and people are going to be a little bit healthier and you're going to sell your company for $425 million, which is exactly what happened. They raised 25 million. It's

• 19:09John Coogan?

  a great outcome for founders, employees. Roche eventually got the product approved by FDA. They sold pre, uh, they, they sold before getting FDA application, uh, getting the FDA approval, but Roche took it through the final step because that's very expensive, but they have a lot of great, uh, great lawyers on their team to actually move that stuff through and scientists. And so in 2019, it got, it got, it got authorized for the COBOS Vivo DX MRSA test, which is like not going to be on the stage at Ted anytime soon, but it should be. It's like real science and it actually moved the needle forward. Uh,

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  Okay. So.

• 19:44John Coogan?

  And it was good. Uh.

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  Going back.

• 19:46John Coogan?

  The funny thing about this company is that the, the name of the particles that they, that they created that actually detect the antibiotic resistant bacteria, they call them smarticles.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  Smarticles, which sounds so fraudulent.

• 19:59Jordi Hays?

  Going to prison.

• 20:01John Coogan?

  Like you're gonna go to prison, but it's like, it's just a normal, boring company. No offense, it's great company. I love you, Diego, but like, it just, it was never, it was never like, we're gonna solve everything care death in 20 million years in the future. It was just like, look, there's this test that happens. It only happens down the street, costs a lot of money. That'll happen in a lot of.

• 20:21Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 20:21John Coogan?

  Boom.

• 20:22Jordi Hays?

  So, again, during the film, a fire broke out in Malibu.

• 20:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:26Jordi Hays?

  I was pretty distracted.

• 20:27John Coogan?

  So you need me to catch up?

• 20:28Jordi Hays?

  Trying to figure out, uh, trying to figure out what was going down, how serious it was, et cetera. That being said, I came away from the movie, right? Feeling like, okay, Sonny had done some side deal and got way.

• 20:40John Coogan?

  You mean Billy?

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, Sonny Balwani, the other co-founder. I, my impression was that he had, was getting way less jail time.

• 20:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Elizabeth is going to jail for like 11 years.

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it, it seemed like Sonny, they were positioning it as like, they, Sonny was able to pin it on her.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:56Jordi Hays?

  He got out.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  Or at least he got a reduced sentence or whatever. And you told me afterwards, Sonny is in prison for like 12 years or have like a.

• 21:05John Coogan?

  It's about a year longer.

• 21:06Jordi Hays?

  12 years, 11 months was, was a sentencing. Elizabeth got a 10 year sentence.

• 21:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:13Jordi Hays?

  Reduced originally from 11 years and three months.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, they couldn't even rat on each other. It makes it so much worse in my opinion.

• 21:23John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  Cause like, cause you would think that like, the, the.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  Prisoners dilemma, they both ratted on each other and they both went to jail.

• 21:30Jordi Hays?

  I mean, maybe, but it just, it just seems like, like that, like if, if one of them had been more, more evil, you know?

• 21:39John Coogan?

  More elite at deception, they would have been able to say, hey, Sonny, me and you, Elizabeth, Sonny.

• 21:45Jordi Hays?

  And the other thing that's crazy.

• 21:46John Coogan?

  We're taking this to the grave.

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  According to the internet, Sonny didn't sell secondary either.

• 21:52John Coogan?

  I know, that's ridiculous.

• 21:53Jordi Hays?

  None of them, they both go down with the ship, they both don't make money.

• 21:57John Coogan?

  Dropping moment for me. I was like, least shrewd person in the world, potentially, no secondary selling, 11 billion.

• 22:04Jordi Hays?

  Doing fraud purely for the love of the game.

• 22:07John Coogan?

  What are you doing? What are you doing? And it's not like I came away being like, it wasn't a fraud, like it was.

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:13John Coogan?

  It was very clear that like, everyone there, Sonny heard, they knew it didn't work.

• 22:18Jordi Hays?

  That really is the Ted, that's really the Ted. That's really like the Ted entrepreneur.

• 22:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:22Jordi Hays?

  It goes to prison.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  For the love of the game.

• 22:25Jordi Hays?

  For the love of the game.

• 22:25John Coogan?

  Insane.

• 22:26Jordi Hays?

  Just, just, just for the vision.

• 22:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it was crazy, it was crazy. Insane. Uh, anyway, let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents.

• 22:46John Coogan?

  If you do want to sell secondary, we, there's one, one neat trick, one neat trick. This is a new thing. So if you're a founder and you want to sell 10 million a secondary, a hundred million dollars a secondary, you don't want it to be a negative signal. Here's what you do. Before, so you've, you, you've grown your company to the point where you're valued in the billions. You don't want to sell secondary because everyone will be like, oh, he's like selling out, she's selling out, like, that's not good. That's not a good sign. So what you do is you take out an immense amount of debt. So you get like a hundred million dollars of debt.

• 23:21Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 23:21John Coogan?

  Then you sell the secondary, sell another hundred million of secondary, pay off the debt, and then you can tell everyone, look, I just sold secondary to pay off my debt, my personal debt.

• 23:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And everyone assumes it's like, oh.

• 23:33John Coogan?

  They think it's credit card debt.

• 23:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:35John Coogan?

  They think it's credit card debt. They don't realize that it was a equity backed hundred million dollar line of credit from a major financial institution. You don't need to clarify that part, but you can still get away with a hundred mil out of the gate. It's possible.

• 23:49Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if anyone's doing that.

• 23:49John Coogan?

  It might be happening, who knows?

• 23:51Jordi Hays?

  Who knows?

• 23:52John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 23:53Jordi Hays?

  Semi Analysis raised its 2027 data center capacity forecast from 43 to.

• 24:00John Coogan?

  50 gigawatts, wow.

• 24:02Jordi Hays?

  50 gigawatts.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  50 gigawatts, that's a lot, that's a lot of, a lot of compute. And people are going back and forth on this, right?

• 24:11John Coogan?

  Did Gerson say it was too bullish? Something like that? It seems like Semi Analysis has the data and has been pulling together a whole bunch of, a whole bunch of.

• 24:21Jordi Hays?

  The Semi Analysis said, so we looked at the data.

• 24:24John Coogan?

  They looked at the satellite photos. I mean, a lot of these things, like, they were papered a long time ago. And if the market's like having a hiccup right now, that's not gonna stop people from actually pulling out of the building.

• 24:36Jordi Hays?

  I sent you this, I sent you this, um.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  What'd you send?

• 24:39Jordi Hays?

  This morning.

• 24:39John Coogan?

  What'd you send?

• 24:40Jordi Hays?

  From RevCap.

• 24:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 24:42Jordi Hays?

  Which is Semi Analysis saying, if you're worried about demand, ARR, don't be, because there's gonna be even more supply than you realize. Of course, Semi Analysis is also saying that, that, uh, they have some of the most bullish forecasts for the labs. But it's funny that in the midst of like everyone being worried about ARR growth.

• 24:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:00Jordi Hays?

  Over the last two weeks, that Semi Analysis is coming out and saying, don't worry, there's an obscene amount of supply coming online within the next 12 months.

• 25:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I believe them on, I believe them on supply. That seems very cut and dry. I don't think anyone has a stronger read on what's actually getting built than them. I think if you look at the satellite photos and you look at the deals that have already been inked, that even though, oh, the NASDAQ sold off 5% last week, like, that's not enough to be like, okay, pack up the dump trucks, we're not building this thing. Like, maybe in months, if things continue to get bad and rates go up, like, some projects will be delayed or stalled or deals will get unwound, but like, right now, it's not that it's full speed ahead, it's just like, it's a train, you can't, you can't slow it down that quickly, like, it's just gonna keep going.

• 25:53John Coogan?

  On the demand side, I feel like the agentic stuff, the personal agentic stuff is going to be high demand for compute. I am, I'm less clear on what the willingness to pay will be. How many people will be willing to pay the equivalent of a thousand dollars a year for inference related to like, their semi-personal prosumer life, shopping and, and all the little agentic features. Now, I think the tech is incredible, like, I, I've been using Dott a ton, and I think having an agent that just runs in the background and just tries to go find little opportunities for you is amazing. It just catches things in my email that I never would have gone through or taken the time to do, and it just sends me a little message being like, hey,

• 26:37John Coogan?

  like, you asked for this and you should follow up because like, they, they said that they would do it.

• 26:41Jordi Hays?

  You used it to cancel your roadster order too, right?

• 26:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So just like little, little things like that, uh, it, it, it's just a better interface. Like, I love, I love interacting with the open web through an LLM. It's amazing, no cookie pop-ups, no ads. It's truly like the best consumer experience.

• 26:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:59John Coogan?

  There's a lot of controversial, uh, stuff downstream of that, but like, in turn, as a consumer, if I'm trying to learn about something, instead of having like 25 tabs open where I have to accept cookies 25 times, make sure I'm logged into 25 different things and like scroll, find the fact, it's so much better to just have it, oh, put it all together with the exact quotes, I can click out to the link if I need to. And that's starting to happen in the personal agent space. The question is like, how do you get the money from people? Is it the ads? Is it the interchange? Like, there's that sort of bearish take that even that the agentic commerce market, if you assign all these take rates, it's like a 40 billion dollar market or something like that. It's like not big enough to justify.

• 27:39Jordi Hays?

  No, I think what needs to happen is something closer to going from automating tasks, automating certain roles or, or extending the capabilities of people, right? Cause we're in this era of, of, obviously, there's a viral clip going on over the last 24 hours, talking about somebody's having a 26 hour day.

• 27:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  Because they need to stay up. She's changing and manipulating time.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:02Jordi Hays?

  Cause they need to be online and available to keep their agents productive.

• 28:09John Coogan?

  Are you saying, are you saying she's crazy?

• 28:10Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I'm not saying.

• 28:12John Coogan?

  Cause she's not crazy.

• 28:13Jordi Hays?

  She's not crazy, you're crazy.

• 28:13John Coogan?

  You're crazy for thinking that it takes 24 hours to complete a full day.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 28:18John Coogan?

  And not 26.

• 28:20Jordi Hays?

  But anyways, it's like, the next leg up will probably be.

• 28:23John Coogan?

  She's a special case, she's an entrepreneur. Yeah, the question is like, for the 90% of Americans that aren't in.

• 28:30Jordi Hays?

  But that's not what we're seeing, we're seeing that one, we're seeing that a very, very small number of companies are driving all of the adoption. And so there's probably not all the adoption, but, but a massive amount of it. And so there's another leg up there, just with the capabilities increase. And then what you're saying is like, the other 99% of businesses, how are they gonna be? How is their spending gonna ramp? Will it ramp beyond the, you know, 20, 100, 200 dollar a month subscription?

• 28:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, in, in, in the business side, like the Jensen take of like, you know, a software engineer who makes 300K should also get 300K in tokens or something like, that seems to be happening, basically. It's like, yeah, like a software engineer can deploy AI very efficient, very efficiently and like at a high ROI. It is less clear for a marketer, for a salesperson. It's like, okay, what should your actual token, your inference budget be? If you gave a sales rep 50,000 dollars a month in, in inference, like, is there something that they could do with the best models to actually get, generate a hundred thousand dollars in value that they wouldn't have otherwise? Like, like, those are the economic equations that happen across the business.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  I'm talking more on the personal side, the consumer side. Like, people are using the LLMs.

• 29:46Jordi Hays?

  No, and I'm, I'm just saying, we don't pay for all this cap, like, the capex is not gonna be paid for by consumers.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think you're right. So you're saying that's not the, that, that is not the leg up that needs to happen. It has to be diffusion into the enterprise and B to B beyond what it is. It has to, it has to 10x. So, so like the, the small company that has, you know, basically everyone on a $200 a month plan, and they're maybe spending $100,000 on maybe 10 mil top line. They need to go to a million dollars in inference a year, even though they're at a, even though they're a $10 million business, maybe they go to 15 million of, of top line for the year.

• 30:32Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of $1 million budgets.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  What we got?

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  Brett Adcock launched Hark, which is something like a Muse or an Instinct or, or a Dots. And they gave away, or tried to give away a million dollars of pizza. Oh, I believe it was on Friday. You just had to download and order from the Hark app. And I don't know that it went well. I think.

• 31:04John Coogan?

  The, the summary we have here is an app called Hark tried to do a pizza giveaway, but it quickly turned into a PR disaster. That's the.

• 31:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't, I mean, clearly they got a ton of people to download the app. Like, I think it wasn't working.

• 31:18John Coogan?

  People just don't want to give them the data?

• 31:21Jordi Hays?

  Because I know people were, were giving them the data.

• 31:23John Coogan?

  Edit Google Drive files? Yes. In order to get this pizza, I will need to edit your tax return.

• 31:29Jordi Hays?

  See, edit, download and permanently.

• 31:31John Coogan?

  Delete all of your.

• 31:33Jordi Hays?

  See, edit, create and delete all of your Google Sheet, spreadsheet. See, edit, share and permanently delete all the calendars you can access. Read, compose and send emails from your Gmail account.

• 31:43Jordi Hays?

  See and download your organization's workplace directory. I don't know if all of these were, were required.

• 31:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, sometimes you can just not check those and still get access. It's like when you download an app on the iOS App Store, you can just say like, no, thanks. I don't want any notifications.

• 31:58Jordi Hays?

  Armand tried to get a free pizza and had some issues. And so he used the app to submit a formal complaint to the FTC. Said, Farah, that's annoying. And I just tried again with no luck. I can file with FTC, but a giveaway that's been flaky for a few minutes on launch night isn't something they'll act on. I'd rather report it straight to Hark's team now with all the details so they can fix it. Want me to send that? No, file a complaint with the federal government. Submit FTC complaint about a Hark pizza promotion. On October 16th, 2026, Hark publicly advertised a $1 million free pizza giveaway promoted on X and stated users could claim it by typing order of free pizza in the Hark app.

• 32:43Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, interesting. I'm, I'm so curious why, why Brett didn't just do Hark as part of figure? Cause the whole, like.

• 32:57John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 32:57Jordi Hays?

  It, it doesn't make any sense to me, other than you wanted a fresh cap table that could raise.

• 33:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, like Elon kind of created the playbook, right? XAI was a separate thing. You raise fresh funds, you get, it's a way, it, it's, it would be hard for SpaceX to go to top AI scientists and say, we're going to give you $5 billion of equity. Now, Zuck has kind of broken that glass and like, been like, I'm just going to do it. But, but the way you get, the way you get, you know, the multi-billion dollar outcome is you give a co-founder role of a new company and then you acquire them in. Like, so I think, I think it's probably that. I don't know. Is there another?

• 33:38Jordi Hays?

  The only thing is Elon had, you know, sold a lot of cars and launched a lot of rockets prior to, to doing that. And so I think it's the kind of thing that, that makes more sense.

• 33:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 33:48Jordi Hays?

  In the fullness of time.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  No, I, I agree. Anyway, let me tell you about Consul. Consul builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant reservation for access requests and password resets. Anthropic staff expect AI to do 75% of their work by 2030 and GDP growth to reach 17.1%. Now, did they specify if this is real GDP growth? Because they just said GDP growth because what if inflation is at like 40%? That would be the equivalent of negative 23% real GDP growth. You got to clarify these things if you're going to be asking the tough questions. But let's assume they went with real GDP growth.

• 34:34John Coogan?

  You think that's low? You think that's high? There's someone at Anthropic who said it would be 28%. I like that. The lowest was 6%. Basically, no one there thinks that GDP growth is going to be, you know, at normal levels. Everyone is expecting a boom within the building. Agree, disagree?

• 34:55Jordi Hays?

  Bullish.

• 34:56John Coogan?

  Bullish. Drinking the Kool-Aid. I don't know. Just added the FOMC. The FOMC, of course, thinks GDP growth will be 2%. That's the government suits. US adults are, what's interesting is that, like, you know, this made headlines because Anthropic, Anthropic staff are obviously like the most bullish. Like, they are at 17.1% GDP growth. Reminder, America grows 2% typically. They're saying 17, huge economic explosion, unlike anything we've ever seen in America. Absolutely fantastic. Like, if we grow at 17%, like, it is so positive sum. There's so much to go around. You can do everything, basically.

• 35:41John Coogan?

  You can build new roads, you can give people healthcare, like, everything just solves itself because a rising tide lifts all boats. This is why, despite a lot of really controversial policies in China for like 40 years, everyone was like, I don't care about the CCTV cameras. Cause like, I got a bigger house this year. I got indoor plumbing now. I got all this crazy stuff. Like, my life is getting better. There's a sense of economic progress, like a rising middle class. All these things are positive. Of course, in America, we've been in the age of stagnation. And so when the flock cameras come, it's like, get those out of here. I don't want those. I wanted to maintain the freedoms that I have because everything else is getting more expensive, everything else is getting worse. 17% GDP growth would be incredible. I'm obviously rooting for it. I, I, I think it's totally possible.

• 36:26John Coogan?

  Site visitors, people that went and actually visited the site to take.

• 36:30Jordi Hays?

  So if you were surveyed, you would be, where would you really put it, though?

• 36:34John Coogan?

  I'd, I'd, I'd put a 200% GDP growth.

• 36:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  I want to be tripling every year.

• 36:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:42John Coogan?

  Predict what you want to happen. Manifesting, this is manifestation. I want to manifest it. Site visitors said 12 and a half percent. Again, staggeringly high. But interesting, US adults predict 5.4% just broadly, which is again, way above where we've been. So like, everyone is bullish.

• 37:02Jordi Hays?

  The American mind must be.

• 37:04John Coogan?

  Or unstoppable, unstoppable. It's true, like the vibe session. It's like, ah, things are going so bad, but I think it's about to explode. But also I'm doing so well that I'm going to go buy a boat and I'm going to get a limousine for my, for my burrito. Yeah. Like, very, very weird economy, very weird economy we're in. But Spore doesn't buy it. Spore says, this is borderline mental illness. I'm sorry, but 20% GDP growth in 2030 is a common belief at Anthropic. What are these people smoking? How does one get so divorced from reality?

• 37:35Jordi Hays?

  Cigarettes. They're smoking cigarettes.

• 37:36John Coogan?

  Cigarettes, yeah.

• 37:37Jordi Hays?

  Cause lung cancer will be solved.

• 37:41John Coogan?

  That was reported from, we talked about this a little bit, but it was reported from Trump's anchor and has not been widely confirmed beyond his anecdote that he shared, I believe, on Bloomberg or CNBC.

• 37:52Jordi Hays?

  But I don't think this is, I don't think this is unique to Anthropic.

• 37:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:58Jordi Hays?

  I think, like, clearly the average American is already insanely.

• 38:03John Coogan?

  Average American is already more than two to half times.

• 38:06Jordi Hays?

  You go to the labs, anybody who likes really, truly believes in this current revolution and, and that probably is like an average across the field.

• 38:15John Coogan?

  There was a funny, there was a funny exchange in the Tyler Cowen, Dwarsh Patel interview on Interesting Times. He was guest hosting for the, the now departed, not passed away, but he, Ross Douthat left for, I think CBS and the Free Press or something like that. But Tyler Cowen and Dwarsh Patel were going back and forth about AI. And Tyler asks Dwarsh, like, when, when do you think I'll walk into a Walmart and see a product that is the product of artificial intelligence? And Dwarsh is like, ah, it's really hard to say. Like, I think that there will be a real effect on the economy soon, 2028. I'm very, I'm very bullish on this change in the economy, but I, I, I, I just, I can't

• 38:59John Coogan?

  predict how it'll be. And I was like, there's already AI slop breach towels in Walmart. Like, you can go into Walmart and get AI products now. Like, there's so many, like, pool floaty that looks like a tank that was sold on TikTok via, like, you know, AI video slop.

• 39:16Jordi Hays?

  We have signs, we have signs of signs.

• 39:18John Coogan?

  Yes, we have signs of signs. Like, like, the AI slop economy is thriving right now. There are plenty of, just talk to a drop shipper.

• 39:27Jordi Hays?

  And the truth is that for high quality products or most of the products.

• 39:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:30Jordi Hays?

  In Walmart.

• 39:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:32Jordi Hays?

  There will have been a bunch of AI involved at every possible step of the process.

• 39:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 39:37Jordi Hays?

  And maybe it's like making it 1% faster here, 1% faster here, 1%, but it sort of compounds into some acceleration, you would hope.

• 39:46John Coogan?

  So the.

• 39:47Jordi Hays?

  But there's also probably like Walmart probably has policies which are like, every product goes through a 90 day review.

• 39:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 39:54Jordi Hays?

  You know? And so there's, again, there's like, the, the real world is always gated.

• 39:58John Coogan?

  But the, but the AI slop is being sold. And, you know, a lot of people will say, oh, the San Francisco tech people, they need to touch grass. I think if they want to get in touch, they need to touch the gas pedal of a Lamborghini Countach or Lamborghini Huracan in Miami. You got to get in to the mind of the, the course seller, the drop shipper to understand how AI is changing the real economy. Because that crew is selling AI slop. It's happening. Like, there is definitely AI, AI instantiated products up and down the stack, all over Facebook, Instagram reels, TikTok. This stuff's flying off the shelf.

• 40:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's an interesting question because like, what actually, yeah, how do you actually qualify that? Like, I'm sure if you're an existing, if you're a, an existing seller on Walmart, you could set up an agent to say like, hey, I want to make this product. Do you talk, email back and forth with this person? Get it made or select a supplier? And then once, once.

• 40:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. I guess the question is like, yeah, what, what counts as a?

• 41:02John Coogan?

  We got Call of Duty.

• 41:03Jordi Hays?

  Hey, what the heck is going on?

• 41:06John Coogan?

  This is a, this is the Call of Duty campaign. It dropped today or this weekend. I played, I played a little bit of it. This is, uh, no spoiler warning, but, uh, the plot here is that North Korea has built a tunnel system to, to invade South Korea. And you gotta push this truck down that tunnel and then duke it out. I think you gotta go to the front of the truck, push the button. There you go. And then you're gonna push the truck down the tunnel to, to, uh,

• 41:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, this goes deeper than I thought.

• 41:38John Coogan?

  It does. It does. To stop the invasion of the North Koreans into South Korea, uh, during this, uh, this particular sequence of the campaign. But, uh, my, my Call of Duty campaign review, I've been thoroughly enjoying it. I haven't played it fully, but, uh, it's amazing. Did you already do the nightclub scene with the pistol, that whole section? No? Oh, that happens later. Okay, get ready. Call us when the John Wick section happens, because that is some of the most fun I've had in a Call of Duty campaign in a long time. There's a whole bunch of really interesting set pieces and they did, I thought they did a great job of not making it try to be a multiplayer simulator. Like, there's a lot of campaigns back in the day that were kind of just like, let's recreate the multiplayer

• 42:22John Coogan?

  experience. Like, there's a bunch of people running around on a map and like, you're just kinda going through a, a system. This feels like an action movie. It feels very cinematic and it feels very, there's so much variation in the way, in the different pieces that you

• 42:36Jordi Hays?

  It's based on how they are playing, doubt they will make it to that level.

• 42:41John Coogan?

  I think, yeah, I, I, I think, uh, we might have some skill issues going on here. This is not, not great, but we got to the next cinematic and we're running out of the tunnel as it collapses. Congratulations.

• 42:54Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of games, uh, Tim Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, says, "The games we've long wanted, which didn't exist because they'd cost several times more to make than they'd turn back, will soon become possible, as will the game, the games developers wanted to build but couldn't with the resources available. It'll be a new golden age of gaming."

• 43:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like that he is taking the, the, the white pill on AI. Three Blue and Brown also put out a big, he's a math YouTuber, uh, does these incredible video explainers, these motion graphic explainers of, of difficult math concepts. And, uh, he put out a, a video saying like, "It is the best time to go into math." Very, uh, very optimistic about it. Um, and so obviously very divided organizations, but, uh, I love that Tim Sweeney, uh, went, went back and forth on this. I saw another, I saw another, uh, post by him talking about like, "Look, I had to migrate from C to C++ from 2D to 3D. Uh, like, I've, I've been through so many tech migrations. Uh, this is another one. I'm very excited for it." And, uh, he'll,

• 43:57John Coogan?

  he'll, he'll just adapt. He'll improvise, a- adapt, overcome. If people are, are rolling their own, um, you know, Fortnite clone in a web browser, decompiled or whatever, I'm sure he's gonna find a way to participate in the upside in some way, uh, because he is innovative and flexible. Anyway, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. Let's see. There's huge news. Huge news. This is what everyone, everyone across the world was talking about this over the weekend, but the biggest

• 44:34John Coogan?

  bluefin tuna ever caught was caught in California today. Look at that hog. Brian Nordgaard. Check this out. Uh, this is an absolutely massive bluefin fish, bluefin tuna. Incredible.

• 44:48Jordi Hays?

  Really powerful omen.

• 44:51John Coogan?

  Yes. Really, really crazy.

• 44:53Jordi Hays?

  Big things to come.

• 44:54John Coogan?

  It's the size of a shark. Uh, absolutely, uh, insane. Uh, anyway, uh, post singularity job. Are you looking for a job? Post singularity? Maybe you can make money smuggling diesel off the coast of East Africa. This gentleman certainly has learned to make ends meet this way. Uh, say what you will about the legality of this. Incredibly thrilling job. Incredibly thrilling job. We don't know how to make jobs like this anymore in America. This is incredible.

• 45:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I, I would recommend recreating this kind of job in a more maybe legal setting.

• 45:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:38Jordi Hays?

  You know, just be like a small, you know, create a small fuel logistics company.

• 45:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 45:43Jordi Hays?

  And, and you could just, nothing's stopping you from making runs.

• 45:48John Coogan?

  There's probably some arbitrage opportunity. Uh, gas might be, uh, cheaper in the Gulf in Texas. You throw it on the back of a boat, drive it over to California. I think you got a business right there. Who needs a big rig for this? When you got the speedboat? Pretty, pretty good. Also, there's a castle for sale in Cleveland. It's going for $575,000. Only a three-bed, three-bath, though. For a castle? I feel like you need at least 10,000 square feet.

• 46:16Jordi Hays?

  More like a, like a cottage.

• 46:18John Coogan?

  It looks beautiful, though. Very, very cool design here. Zillagon Wild posting it. Uh, what about this Poppy deal? Have you, have you seen this?

• 46:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's really quite funny because everyone's trying to use it as an opportunity to try to dunk when it's like, they sold their company for 1.9 billion.

• 46:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:37Jordi Hays?

  And...

• 46:38John Coogan?

  So wait, here, let, let, let me set the table. So, Poppy, uh, is a beverage brand. It's a soda, probiotic soda company. Sold to Pepsi for $2.2 billion. 300 million of that $2.2 billion was an earn-out. So, they got 1.9 billion on the day the deal closed and then 300 million waiting for milestones. Now, Pepsi announced that instead of paying 300 million based on the performance of the brand, they will only be paying 12 million. And the dunk is like, "Oh, that stings. They didn't get their earn-out." But yeah, they got 1.9.12 billion dollars. Like, it's still an incredible amount of money. Um, and people

• 47:22John Coogan?

  are like, "Yeah, like, here's how you negotiate an earn-out." It's like, it seemed like they already negotiated it. Like, they negotiated it really well. The, the disaster would have been if the numbers were reversed. 300 million for the, for the company and 1.9 in earn-out. And if they didn't get that earn-out, it would be, it would seriously change the economics. But it seems like they got 90% of the deal value. Uh, still pretty good outcome for the founders of Poppy, but, uh,

• 47:47Jordi Hays?

  Amazing outcome.

• 47:48John Coogan?

  Uh, but yeah, Sean Frank chimes in and says, "Uh, a quarter is what you should expect in an earn-out. Most of the time, write off that second bit, that second bite to zero. Uh, you shouldn't go into one of these deals expecting to get the full earn-out." Uh, because companies have, you know, lots of resources. They controlled a budget, the distribution, all this, the success or failure. You're no longer in charge. You're no longer the master of your own destiny. And so, uh, if you put all the chips with them, they might, they might bet them differently than you would expect to. Anyway, 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. And I believe we have our first guest of the show, Hey Drummond,

• 48:33John Coogan?

  the Global Editorial Director of Wired, here with us in the TV Channel. Welcome.

• 48:37Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 48:38John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 48:41Jordi Hays?

  We don't have sound.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  I muted myself. Hi, thanks for having me. How you doing?

• 48:46John Coogan?

  Thanks for having me. We're doing well. Um, congratulations on the, what do you call it? Exclusive?

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  He broke his silence.

• 48:53John Coogan?

  He broke, yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  Interview and cover star.

• 48:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, and cover, right? That's cool. Uh, I like the, I like the photography. Um, anyway, we could go deeper on that. But I, I think everyone wants to know, like, you know, you've seen the movie. Everyone wants to know what everyone thinks about the movie. Like, did you think Elizabeth Holmes looked less guilty after watching the movie? Equivalently guilty? More guilty?

• 49:18Speaker 02

  You know, my honest answer, I've seen it twice. And the first time I saw it, I felt so much empathy for her. I remember sitting there being like, "This woman has kids. She's going to prison. I feel like she's being manipulated by these men in her life." And then I went back and saw it a second time and I had done a bunch of rereading about Theranos.

• 49:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's the thing. That's the thing. Part of what made it, like, you, you felt like a horrible situation, right? You have young children, you're going to prison. And Nathan didn't exactly, like, he could have spent 20, 30 minutes, like, outlining

• 49:52John Coogan?

  All the things that she did wrong.

• 49:54Jordi Hays?

  All these things. And the, the interpretation would, would have been like, "Yeah, you 100% deserve this." And, like, I don't feel bad for you. But because it was, like, set up, because it was set, I think it was very much intentional that it was sort of like, people were coming into it with their own

• 50:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 50:11Jordi Hays?

  understanding of, like, the whole Theranos era and what actually went down.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Well, and I, and I think too, and I don't, I don't want to speculate. I mean, obviously, I, I interviewed Nathan. I, I do not know him or the filmmakers particularly well. But he said very much in the interview, he is not a science journalist, right? He read Bad Blood. He ran the, he read the definitive book, but he is not sort of like a student of Theranos. He is Nathan Fielder. He is like a student of human behavior. And I think we very much see that on display in the film. We don't see an interrogation of the science. We see much more of an interrogation of her as a person, um, and her family and their dynamics. And I find that to be very interesting, although for sure, someone coming in cold who hasn't thought about Theranos in 10 years, because we're not all thinking about Theranos

• 50:55Speaker 02

  all the time, uh, is probably going to feel a complicated way about her.

• 51:02Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  What open questions did you jump to researching right after you left the movie? For the first time or the second time? The one that stuck out to me was that she tells this story about, and we're gonna have spoilers in this interview, just FYI, um, but she tells this story about how she adopted a husky in 2017. And then the husky is like, not around. And then they downgrade to like a lizard at one point. And I was like, to go from a dog to a lizard is kind of a crazy move. Uh, like, I feel like people that are, you know, into reptiles, like, they've been like diehard reptiles. Like, you kind of know if you're a cat person or a dog person, like, pretty early in your life. And it's kind of wild to switch it up. Uh, and so I was like, how do you go from husky to, uh,

• 51:46John Coogan?

  to lizard? Or, or I forget what exactly. It's a Argentine blue tegu, I think is technically the name for that large lizard that they wind up having. Um, but the, uh, the wolf dog, the husky, was killed by a cougar.

• 52:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right. Isn't that a crazy story? Yeah, this uh, this was in Mercury News.

• 52:07Speaker 02

  It's suspicious.

• 52:09Jordi Hays?

  In San Diego County?

• 52:10Speaker 02

  Suspicious, to say the least, yeah.

• 52:11John Coogan?

  This, Ethan Barron at Bayer and News Group reported this on November 11th of 2022, which would have been like right around the time that I think Nathan was shooting the documentary or something, and maybe it came out later, but I guess the dog.

• 52:25Jordi Hays?

  No, it wasn't until later.

• 52:26John Coogan?

  It wasn't until later, it was 2023, I think, that the, the, the, the beach house scenes happened, so.

• 52:31Jordi Hays?

  Two standout, two standout, standout moments for me was Billy explaining the new vision, the updated vision of Theranos 2.0, and Nathan just like repeating it back to him, and Billy seeming, seemingly oblivious to the, the sort of Theranos 2.0 being used for about 10 years now as a way to describe like, like potential frauds. And then the other thing was Nathan, like, hearing from her dad that, that he was, he had been at Enron, you know? And like, like making that.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  That scene is incredible.

• 53:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  Incredible, the Enron revelation, I mean, there are so many amazing moments in the film, even just Billy watching every video at like hyperspeed.

• 53:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:16Speaker 02

  You know, like he's, you're just like, are you just like teaching yourself science? Like, what is happening on your computer right now? Um, so many.

• 53:24John Coogan?

  I think that's exactly what's happening, I think he's trying to actually at least like put on a show that he's learning science.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally, he's like, I'm a Silicon Valley dude, like, this is what we do. I thought was very funny.

• 53:34Jordi Hays?

  I was, I was kind of imagining like if AI had been good when the movie was being filmed, like you can imagine like how that would have, like, that would have been a whole role in this whole thing where they're like, you know, talking into the, talking with the models and like clearly you can, you know, if, if, if it overlapped with like 4O, like their, their conviction, their own conviction, their own conviction in the Theranos 2.0 would have probably been like 10 times greater.

• 54:05John Coogan?

  It would have been like, we actually discovered new science.

• 54:07Jordi Hays?

  You're not crazy, they're crazy.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  But yes, the chatbots would have some great research papers for them, you know?

• 54:14John Coogan?

  They would have, yeah, the chatbots would have been fueling it so much, that's hilarious. Uh, yeah, that's so funny.

• 54:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other, my other, like, revelation coming out of it was, I assumed from watching the film, and I, and again, I wasn't, back when this was all going down, I was still like in like, high school and college, so I didn't, I wasn't like following the story in the way that we would now. And so I came out of the film being like, is Sonny just like out, like he managed to pin this all on Elizabeth and he's like walking free? And then John told me afterwards, he's like, no, he has a longer sentence than Elizabeth. So like even the two of them didn't even man, like neither managed to like rat on the other one. Like, you would think that, you would think.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  He's big time in prison, yeah, he's big time in prison.

• 55:05Jordi Hays?

  But he's out in, he's out in 2030, so he's gonna have to break his silence with you again.

• 55:09John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 55:10Jordi Hays?

  Cover story.

• 55:10John Coogan?

  Get it lined up.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  I don't know that we would give him a cover, I don't know that we would give him a cover, but we would be happy to speak to him.

• 55:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great. Um, yeah, uh, so funny, I was laughing at this, at this tweet by Soul Nate, Elizabeth Holmes, of course it worked, the lights turned on, it was in the cloud. Nathan Fielder, okay, but do, but you know what feelings are, right? Like you have them? Weird cocaine husband watching YouTube at 2X speed, babe, it says here mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell. And then, everyone was on such different, different wavelength, what, what was your interpretation of Amanda Seyfried and like the journey that she went on, there's so many different ways that people have been reading into her involvement, her role, uh, what, what did you think?

• 55:55John Coogan?

  Oscar, or, you know, she should reconsider how she plays, how she chooses to play, uh, real life subjects in the future?

• 56:03Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't, I don't know that she should reconsider how she plays real life subjects, I mean, she's just, she's doing her job, um, making that Hulu project. I thought she was just sort of like the voice of human empathy, like she was like the sanest person in the room at all times. If she's with Nathan and Billy, it's like Amanda is sort of like the voice of an empathetic human with powers of observation, who can like feel many things at the same time. Um, so I sort of saw her as like a stand-in for the viewer, who's saying like, well, hold on a second, this, or hold on a second, that, whereas, you know, Nathan is so inscrutable, uh, and has such a unique way of interacting with people, Amanda's like the normal person in the scene.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, yeah.

• 56:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and almost the, the roller coaster that someone can be on when they're dealing with somebody that maybe, may or may not be mentally ill, you know, where, I don't, you know, it's just sort of like a, she's clearly like going through it where Nathan is just like, you know, just lasered in, like trying to observe, and I look at Amanda as like, experiencing the full spectrum of, of emotions from like, oh, yeah, she's like, she's really bad to, but also processing the human element.

• 57:19Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, and just her feeling like so sad when, when she's on the phone with her kids, when Elizabeth is calling from prison, you know, you can feel really sad in that moment and still think this person is a terrible fraud. Like, both of those things can be true at the same time.

• 57:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How did you, did you see The Social Network 2 yet?

• 57:36Speaker 02

  I have not seen it, no, I'm so sorry.

• 57:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think it's interesting that The Social Network 2 seems to not be landing, like the fact that you're the global editorial director of Wired and you haven't bought, you've gone and seen this, the Nathan Fielder movie twice.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  You have the time, you definitely have the time to be in a theater.

• 57:55Jordi Hays?

  No, but I mean, I've, I've, I've been the same way, I've, no, I haven't seen.

• 57:59John Coogan?

  Cause your, your technology podcast.

• 58:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, that's what I'm saying, like, I, I typically, even when that movie Mountain Gate came out, which was about AI deepfakes from the succession, uh, team.

• 58:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, you saw that.

• 58:09Jordi Hays?

  I was like, I should just watch this because like, it's relevant.

• 58:13Speaker 02

  I should, I should, I should see it, they had a screening I couldn't go to, you know, I would say, we tried to interview Aaron Sorkin.

• 58:19John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 58:19Speaker 02

  And they said no.

• 58:21John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 58:21Speaker 02

  And so, I guess they missed their shot, you know?

• 58:24John Coogan?

  Weird, interesting.

• 58:25Speaker 02

  We put Nathan on the cover.

• 58:26John Coogan?

  I saw it, I, I, I think, I, I understand why it's not getting great reviews, but I think like, as someone in tech, someone who wants to see how Hollywood portrays a particular tech figure that you have a lot of insight into from all the reporting that your team has done and interactions that you've had, uh, you will have fun through your lens, but very few people in the theater will have fun because they won't have the same lens, basically.

• 58:51Speaker 02

  Yes, no, I'm excited to see it, I'm excited to see artificial, I've seen Musk, obviously I've seen the Musk doc and Wired is in that, and then I've seen Nathan's movie twice, um, so I'll get around to The Social Network 2, it just, honestly, I read the reviews.

• 59:05Jordi Hays?

  Will you be seeing it for a third time? Third time, third time in theaters?

• 59:07Speaker 02

  I would see it a third time.

• 59:08John Coogan?

  You would?

• 59:09Speaker 02

  I would see it a third time. I think every time you see it, different stuff pops out, and you can see it with different people.

• 59:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:14Speaker 02

  And then you could argue with them afterwards, like that's the whole fun of the movie in many ways, it's like talking to other people about it.

• 59:19John Coogan?

  Here's a debate, I mean, yeah, the, the, the conversation was just non-stop for the last like four days around this movie. Uh, one thing that me and Jordy were going back and forth on is, uh, will You Can See Everything be a cult classic? Like, can it even be in the running for that because it's had this crazy cultural moment right on release? Like, how do you define cult classic, and do you think this movie could potentially become one?

• 59:45Speaker 02

  I think of cult classics, and I'm not a movie expert, that's obviously not what I do, but I think of those as movies that had sort of like a small following.

• 59:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I'm less of a movie expert, I just assume, but I, but I was.

• 59:59John Coogan?

  He's like, anything good is a cult classic.

• 1:00:01Jordi Hays?

  I, I talked to multiple people this, I was like, just going about my life Saturday and Sunday, ended up in conversations with multiple people that gave me a blank stare when I talked to them about Nathan Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes, they were like trying to recall.

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  The movie got kind of destroyed by Street Fighter.

• 1:00:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:20John Coogan?

  Street Fighter did twice as much money.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  You're talking to the wrong, I think this will be a classic.

• 1:00:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  I don't know about the cult part, I think this will be a mainstream classic.

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Uh, can you reflect on this idea that Elizabeth Holmes is a product of the TED Talk entrepreneur era? How do you think about that and like, the type of pitching she was doing? It seems like that era is firmly behind us, but does that resonate with you? What could you share about that idea of the entrepreneur that speaks at a very high level, very broad strokes, that, that, that theory? And is it truly gone, or does it still live? Like, how, how have you reflected on that?

• 1:01:03Speaker 02

  Well, look, I, I still think that startup founders sell a vision.

• 1:01:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  And they often tell tall tales to get that vision sold.

• 1:01:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:10Speaker 02

  I think she did it to the nth degree, and she did it in an era where that was so much more commonplace, and there was so much willingness even among the tech press to really lift those people up and celebrate them. I mean, we have a story today from a former Wired editor who, about how Wired fell for Elizabeth Holmes, and I think 2014, we published one of the, the first ever interview with her, ran in Wired, and we largely laundered her lies. And I think that was much more prevalent in tech press in those days was to, to just like not ask as many hard questions and to run with things because they sounded promising, they sounded exciting, this sounded like it was of a piece with this idea of like the quantified self, and you can take your health into your own hands, you can do it

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  at home, you don't need to rely on institutions anymore, and that was a very tantalizing promise. And I think she fit that bill of sort of the startup founder who says larger-than-life things, she just did it in like the craziest possible way, like she took it to a level of, of felony, which not everybody does, but I would argue some do, some do, she did it and she got caught.

• 1:02:16Jordi Hays?

  But in 2014, were they still a couple years away from like actually testing on real patients?

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  No, they were promising in that moment that they were about to set up in a bunch of pharmacies. And they took the reporter to one of the pharmacies where they had set up.

• 1:02:31John Coogan?

  They had a deal with like CBS or something.

• 1:02:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, with CBS, I think.

• 1:02:34John Coogan?

  But it's really hard to report on because uh there I it might have been the wired reporter, but there were some reporters that went by and they were like, we're gonna test you. And it was literally a magic trick. So they'd be like, we're taking your blood, we'll take you in the back. And then they'd leave and go to Quest Labs or something, run the labs, bring you back the paper and be like, yep, this is from our machine. And it was all just like sleight of hand essentially. And so, you know, as a reporter, like, yeah, you could try and like kick down the door, but like realistically, they're gonna escort you out of the building then. So there's not, uh, there's not that much you can do. It's pretty hard.

• 1:03:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the crazy thing is just the timing of all this. Like Trevor Milton, who did not spend a single day in prison, but raised 1.3 billion for Nicola, took it public, blows up, doesn't go to prison at all, is now back running a private aviation company, making jets, which again is like.

• 1:03:25John Coogan?

  Is he making them?

• 1:03:27Jordi Hays?

  Think, I think that's like an entirely new kind, which is, is a tough sell. It's a tough sell.

• 1:03:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, it doesn't have an engine.

• 1:03:35Jordi Hays?

  But uh, but the big, you know, the big difference is like, like it's funny cause he hurt a bunch of retail investors, like tens of thousands of retail investors got burned, but he didn't like.

• 1:03:49John Coogan?

  No one got injured.

• 1:03:50Jordi Hays?

  No one, no one was like at risk due to like, you know.

• 1:03:54John Coogan?

  Sure, the truck rolling down the hill, that whole thing.

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  He's also, that's true. He, he didn't harm people's health. He's also a man, guys. I, and I do, I do think that Elizabeth Holmes was in some ways treated differently because she was a woman. I think that that's true.

• 1:04:11Jordi Hays?

  But in this case, he's out, but he's out because he got a pardon.

• 1:04:17Speaker 02

  Well, good for him.

• 1:04:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Jordi Hays?

  Which is a whole other can of worms.

• 1:04:22John Coogan?

  Oh, well.

• 1:04:22Speaker 02

  Whole other can of worms. And I, I don't think she, I do, you know, she's been trying. And I think if you look at her, her partner Billy's Twitter feed, this is one of the things we were debating on staff is whether he has like gone mega and gone hardcore far right because he is trying to petition for a pardon.

• 1:04:40John Coogan?

  For the, for the, yeah. Yeah, when I got to Silicon Valley, my co-founder had studied bio uh, and was about to do a PhD at Caltech in, in, in bio. And, and I was like, why are we working on like my idea? Like, we should do something that you're good at, like you're really experienced in this stuff. Like, we should start like a blood testing company. And we were like doing some research and we're like, ah, there's this company that has all this money. We're never gonna be able to beat them. Let's, let's think of something else. So we were like brainstorming ideas and we were like Theranos will crush us because they already have billions of dollars. There's no reason to compete in this category. It was very, very silly. Anyway.

• 1:05:18Speaker 02

  That's really funny.

• 1:05:19John Coogan?

  Fun, or fun times.

• 1:05:20Speaker 02

  You dodged a bullet there, I think.

• 1:05:21John Coogan?

  I think so. Actually, the opposite, because I could have just waited and they could have gone bankrupt. And then I would be like the actual winner potentially of that category.

• 1:05:28Jordi Hays?

  My only ask.

• 1:05:29John Coogan?

  Different life.

• 1:05:30Jordi Hays?

  Leaving this conversation is that you sent us a note when you watch it for the third time in theaters, hopefully today or tomorrow, you give us your updated, updated review and any new revelations and we'll, we'll resurface it on the show for everyone.

• 1:05:43John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:05:43Jordi Hays?

  Cause you're the first, you will be the first person that we talked to that has seen it three times that I'm aware of.

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  But I mean, I'm not saying I'm going this week. I do have a life, but I might, you know.

• 1:05:53Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 1:05:53Speaker 02

  I think it's a great film. I think it's so good.

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  It's a great watch and it moves quickly for being three hours.

• 1:05:58Jordi Hays?

  I just, the, think about the pressure on Nathan Fielder now to like, cause I feel like he's been steadily one-upping himself, you know, from, from the early Nathan for you, you know, just giving silly advice to like gas station owners and things like that to, to the whole.

• 1:06:15John Coogan?

  I feel like this was like a complete like crossover into like a new genre. Like, because it, it plays off of the fact that he is a Hollywood elite now, but he still has the comedian and documentarian chops to go and do that side. And when you bring those two together, you create something that feels like it lives in both categories and is completely unexplored.

• 1:06:38Jordi Hays?

  I totally agree that I think you could apply the same kind of thing to like a hundred high-profile people and you would get a very interesting product.

• 1:06:47John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:06:47Jordi Hays?

  Because it's like a journey into the mind and life of, of someone.

• 1:06:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. The reenactment thing is like very, very fascinating.

• 1:06:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:55John Coogan?

  It, it, it's fertile ground. Well, congratulations on the exclusive. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:07:00Speaker 02

  Thanks, thank you guys for having me.

• 1:07:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great catch up.

• 1:07:01John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects from start to finish, move projects forward. Uh, we have Bing Gordon, co-author, founding executive of Electronic Arts, co-author of Everybody Wins on his forthcoming book. Bing, how are you doing?

• 1:07:25Speaker 03

  I'm doing great. I don't think I look as good as you guys though. Somewhere other.

• 1:07:30Jordi Hays?

  You got this.

• 1:07:31Speaker 03

  Maybe I better put my shade down. Well, you heard about the blue, you heard about the blue man, don't you?

• 1:07:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, you look like you're in the blue man group. I mean, we could, we could tweak it on our side, whatever.

• 1:07:42Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I love it.

• 1:07:43Speaker 03

  I can just put a shade, I can put a shade on, it'd be darker, but just stay blue. Maybe I'll just stay blue.

• 1:07:48John Coogan?

  Stay blue, why not? Why not?

• 1:07:50Jordi Hays?

  Can you, hey team, can you make us blue too?

• 1:07:53John Coogan?

  Make us blue.

• 1:07:55Jordi Hays?

  We want our guests to feel welcome.

• 1:07:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, we had Bing Gordon on our cast and he, he blew it.

• 1:08:02John Coogan?

  No, it's great, it's great.

• 1:08:03Jordi Hays?

  This is great. I mean, it's all, I mean, the, the, the video doesn't matter at all. It's a, you know, we're gonna have a fun conversation.

• 1:08:09John Coogan?

  Have you seen You Can See Everything? The new Nathan Fielder movie about Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes?

• 1:08:16Speaker 03

  We watched all the rehearsal.

• 1:08:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:08:18Speaker 03

  And um.

• 1:08:19John Coogan?

  Saving it, no spoilers then.

• 1:08:21Speaker 03

  We, we did watch, we did watch the previous movie about, you know, trying to talk like Steve, Steve Jobs, you know, through an alien.

• 1:08:33John Coogan?

  That's a great impression. That's hilarious. What's the best, what's the best Silicon Valley biopic documentary or fictional film that you've seen? What, what's your go-to?

• 1:08:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, Silicon Valley, the TV show.

• 1:08:51John Coogan?

  Oh yeah? You're a fan?

• 1:08:52Speaker 03

  The, um, let's see, um, I don't, I love the Isaacson Elon Musk book.

• 1:08:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:08:59Speaker 03

  That's probably the best one. It's probably the best one because he was, um, he was allowed inside access.

• 1:09:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:07Speaker 03

  And some of his other books are kind of after the fact. And I mean, you guys are in the artifact creation business and you know that uh, you're really smart if you look back at history. You forget all the stupid stuff he did along the way.

• 1:09:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:20Speaker 03

  And so he actually captured, he was up close and personal. So he did the same thing with Steve Jobs, but it was all backward looking, wasn't very good. The Facebook effect, you know, it had one good chapter and then kind of missed the point. Uh, probably the, you know, the Facebook, I haven't seen the new Facebook movie. The original Facebook movie was kind of goofy fun.

• 1:09:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:42John Coogan?

  They all serve like different purposes, like some of them are, you know, like controversial drama, some of them are a little bit more happy-go-lucky. I like Pirates of Silicon Valley. Have you seen that?

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  Oh, is that the Macintosh group?

• 1:09:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's the original Steve Jobs versus Bill Gates. But it's this really low, low, low budget, direct TV biopic, but it's fantastic. Highly recommend.

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  Send a link, I, I would watch that. Uh, cause, cause um, the founder of EA, Trip Hawkins, was 48th employee at Apple. So he was there, he was running Lisa when the pirate flag got put up and Steve took all the best people off it.

• 1:10:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the first project that you worked on with him?

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  That's the ruthlessness of uh, of, of monopolists, you know, scaling monopolists.

• 1:10:32John Coogan?

  What was, uh?

• 1:10:33Speaker 03

  I was gonna, I was gonna say there was one about general magic. It was kind of a.

• 1:10:37John Coogan?

  That's a great one, yeah. The, the precursor to the iPhone.

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was when Tony Fadell had hair.

• 1:10:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, that's right. Wow, yeah.

• 1:10:46Speaker 03

  He was a, he was a, he was the punk that they gave everything to from Detroit.

• 1:10:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:51Speaker 03

  Uh, but that, that one's really good. You know, it's, it's so hard in um, in documentary to capture the actual moments of hard decisions.

• 1:11:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:11:02Speaker 03

  And you know, that's why you need the artifacts along the way or you need, you know, like uh, uh, the Beatles thing, the Beatles documentary, they get back, they didn't know they were gonna make it a documentary. They didn't know that they were gonna get screwed out of a concert. They kind of didn't know. So you're seeing, you know, they, and they had even that recording they didn't know could ever be um, reversed out and made audible. So it had all this stuff. And that's what you want out of uh, out of documentary is be there at the moment. And you know, you guys have done stuff.

• 1:11:37John Coogan?

  I mean, I, I, I feel like The Last Dance did such a good job of barely being there, but there's a lot of footage because the games happened. But then they had all the players who are still alive sit down for interviews and it was a very exclusive moment that Michael Jordan actually gave, probably like multiple days of interviews. And then that weaved everything together.

• 1:11:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think it depends how you as a viewer experienced the, the, the story.

• 1:12:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:12:00Jordi Hays?

  If you were following along and kind of understanding the facts from afar, I mean, if you had some friends that were involved in it in some way and you'd heard it from them, then you really do want the documentary to have a lot of behind the scenes footage because that's the only newness that comes out of it.

• 1:12:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Jordi Hays?

  You care less about people rehashing what happened, different points of view.

• 1:12:21Speaker 03

  Cause you, you guys, well, you're on, you're on the court right now, but you were on the court starting companies before. And you know, there's just a lot of moments where you can't see the future and you're scared to death and you gotta make a call one way or another. And you look back afterwards and people go, well, that was obvious. And you go, no, that was not obvious. Um, by the way, same thing with kids, they don't know you till you're grown up. They don't know all the crap you went through to get there. They think you're, they think you're all, you think, think you're always a grown up and always a parent. And you don't want to admit to them that parents are all amateurs, don't know what the hell they're doing.

• 1:12:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, we have a button on the soundboard for it, overnight success. And we play it, we play it every time somebody comes on and says like, well, I started the company 15 years ago to work on artificial intelligence. And uh, yeah, it's been a good year.

• 1:13:10John Coogan?

  Uh, cause that's always the way it goes.

• 1:13:12Speaker 03

  But you know, that's also that the um, uh, the math of compounding. You know, take something like LinkedIn.

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:13:20Speaker 03

  It, it's small, it starts at one. It's kind of like the, the king's rice on a, on a chessboard story, but it starts at one. But if it doubles, you know, that two to, two to the end gets pretty big.

• 1:13:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:34Speaker 03

  That was a story where the King reward a guy said, what do you want? I want, I want, you know, a chessboard worth of rice every day double. And by the time they got to like with five, what's that 60, 16 by 16, 200. By the time they got two thirds of the way done, it was all the rice ever harvested.

• 1:13:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Exponential growth, very, very powerful. Um, how, how did you think about monopoly and, and monopoly power in business at the founding of EA?

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  Oh my gosh, you know, as recently as 2008,

• 1:14:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  the US cable companies that had 30 million households, 30 million households thought they had a monopoly.

• 1:14:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:21Speaker 03

  And, you know, at the time, so, you know, audience of 100 million was about as big as you get. And, and at the time in 07, I spoke at Steve's WWDC conference about games and he disrespected games. And I went to him and I said, you know, games are big. Games have like 400 million monthly players. And he goes, big? 400 million? We don't start anything till we get to a billion. And I'm thinking, oh, boy, he's arrogant. And then, you know, you're there, I go, oh, boy, he's right.

• 1:14:56John Coogan?

  So was the Apple strategy do nothing, win? Because they're, they're eating a huge portion of the mobile games market. Like, it worked out well, but they never showed, I agree, they never showed respect for the category. They were never loved by gamers in the way that the Xbox or the PlayStation or the PC have been. But still, they print.

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  Steve was anti-gaming, and for a long time. And I think he is also pragmatic.

• 1:15:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:15:20Speaker 03

  And he saw if I'm going to do this phone thing, and people are going to get apps, I want to get games. But, you know, he did, he did a, a broadcast soon after the, the App Store opened. And we were close because Clint did a, an iPhone.

• 1:15:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  And we got together with him. And I actually did a poem in his honor at the iPhone dinner, kind of about 15 people called Welcome to the World iPhone, Welcome to the World iPhone.

• 1:15:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:45Speaker 03

  Um, that's, you can find on popcorn.co, fully AI animated.

• 1:15:51John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:15:51Speaker 03

  But Steve, Steve did a, um, um, interview soon afterwards, you know, and then kind of six weeks afterwards. And he said, uh, we thought there were going to be 15,000 apps by the end of the year. And it was like 200,000 in the first week. And we thought the average price was going to be 9.99.

• 1:16:10John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:16:12Speaker 03

  And the average price is free.

• 1:16:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:14Speaker 03

  By the way, when, when Zuckerberg launched, um, the, the App Store on Facebook, they launched with a thing called causes. And he didn't want it to be games either.

• 1:16:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:27Speaker 03

  You know, he asked Dave Morin about it. He, Dave Morin, they didn't want, Zuck didn't want games. He thought games were the anathema of, of success, um, among consumers. But I think pragmatically, you find out that's how people want to connect. Some of them want to make friends. Some of them want to spend their time. And especially if you want to get to an accessible audience beside, behind, besides teenage boys and people that think like teenage boys, uh, you need, you need something that's more accessible, faster to start, less confusing, no shrink wrap.

• 1:17:00John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:17:00Speaker 03

  Um, and, uh, uh, more inclusive. And that's what we got. But we also got, we also got, um, you know, a billion new people playing games every month that

• 1:17:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:12Speaker 03

  still, still don't call themselves gamers.

• 1:17:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, the Apple 11 audience is all hyper casual, um, people who don't identify as gamers, like, but they play games constantly. So.

• 1:17:24Jordi Hays?

  I identify them as gamers.

• 1:17:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

  You're a gamer.

• 1:17:27John Coogan?

  I don't, oh, if you're in that audience.

• 1:17:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. Um, talk about the book. Why, why write the book now? What was the overarching thesis? What did you want to spread the word about specifically?

• 1:17:42Speaker 03

  Let's see, but I, I like to benchmark stuff. So one of the things I, I keep track of my, um, business and product catastrophes.

• 1:17:51John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  And a while ago, I realized my catastrophes, there's two, two core causes. One is taking shortcuts.

• 1:17:58John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:17:58Speaker 03

  I did that on a sequel to Dr. Jane Larry Bird. I thought this is going to work.

• 1:18:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:02Speaker 03

  And then, and I, that, that, the, um, the long version was to build a mock-up package and show it to consumers. The shortcut is be confident and just build the package. And it was a red background with an action photo where the previous one was Dr. Jane Larry Bird kind of looking casual on a Boston school ground. And they had a red background. And the first time I saw it in a store was sitting right beside another package with a red background called Tetris. And consumers walked up and they picked up the other red package. And we were at DOA. So my other half of my, my catastrophes are when I'm right and I can't convince others.

• 1:18:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:47Speaker 03

  And, uh, and what I found is to convince others, the best way to do it is to back up a level to stories. You know, I believe this because here's my story. And then to go even a meta level above that, here's how gamification and psychology works. And so I found myself doing that again and again and again and again and again. And then I put some into speeches and a little bit of blogging. And I thought, oh, I know, a book where if I give a book to every people I ever give notes to, wouldn't that be great? Um, that would, that would make my time more effective. And then while I read it, ooh, wouldn't it be nice to, um, reach out to other people, reach out to parents, reach

• 1:19:31Speaker 03

  out to educators, reach, reach out to roboticists, reach out to AI designers, reach out to doctors, uh, founders. And, um, but when I was a kid, my bucket list was write a book. I was an English major. I wrote poetry. I did stand-up poetry. And, uh,

• 1:19:49Jordi Hays?

  You have to do slam poetry?

• 1:19:50John Coogan?

  Stand-up poetry. Interesting. Yeah.

• 1:19:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:19:53John Coogan?

  Slam poetry.

• 1:19:53Speaker 03

  Um, and, and, um, I still write poems, kind of hundreds a year. Um, and give, but all for friends. I don't, none of them for myself, all for other people. And when I got to the point where I said, okay, maybe I should try writing as a career, I got accepted at NYU Drama School and thought, no, I prefer writing. And, uh, so I had to make, I had to work two years to make enough money to afford a typewriter to be able to have the time to sit and write. And after about a week of procrastination, I remembered, oh, crap, I don't like writing. So, you know, from, from then till now, I'm thinking, oh, I got this bucket list thing under it. And then, uh,

• 1:20:32Jordi Hays?

  You're standing by your bucket list from when you were like a teenager?

• 1:20:36John Coogan?

  Crazy. I feel like bucket list moves all the time. People are changing things all the time.

• 1:20:39Speaker 03

  It's still there. It's, it's.

• 1:20:41John Coogan?

  What else is on the bucket list?

• 1:20:44Speaker 03

  Um, I, I still, I'm really curious about a cross-country glamour train, glamour, glamour train ride.

• 1:20:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:20:54Speaker 03

  Kind of the Orient Express.

• 1:20:55John Coogan?

  Across the United States.

• 1:20:56Speaker 03

  The Orient Express. I've done a little bit. Um, and I keep thinking it's going to be disappointing, so I haven't done it.

• 1:21:02John Coogan?

  Wait, you, you want to go, you, you want to go across the United States on a train?

• 1:21:06Speaker 03

  And a, and a glamorous train.

• 1:21:07John Coogan?

  Well, you know that, you, you know that you can legally.

• 1:21:10Speaker 03

  Well, I know they're there. I know there's one at Cascanon.

• 1:21:12John Coogan?

  No, no, you can, you can bring your own train.

• 1:21:15Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 1:21:16John Coogan?

  It's expensive, but you can do it. You, you can, you can buy an old train car and they will hitch it to an Amtrak for you if you pay the fee and they will drag you across the country in exactly the style that you

• 1:21:27Speaker 03

  Now you can party.

• 1:21:28John Coogan?

  Glamorous. Yes.

• 1:21:29Jordi Hays?

  The, the interesting thing, I, I feel like, um, bucket lists are often about novelty. It's like a bunch of, you're never, yeah, it's like, you're never writing something that you're already doing a lot.

• 1:21:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's interesting.

• 1:21:40Jordi Hays?

  But I realized as an adult, I like, I'm, I'm, I've, I used to say yes to things, like getting an invite on some trip. Do you want to do this thing and go, we're going to go do that thing and whatever? And I'd be like, well, I've never done that before.

• 1:21:53John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:21:54Jordi Hays?

  I should do it once. And now I'm like, I'm really trying to, I, I stopped that sort of like novelty kind of seeking. And I'm trying to, and I wish I could find a, a bucket list from when I was, I was younger.

• 1:22:08Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:22:09Jordi Hays?

  But, but I imagine a lot of this stuff, I'd be like, oh, I've, I know enough now that like, that's not how I want to spend my time. But writing a book feels like.

• 1:22:17Speaker 03

  An adult onset bucket list. I'd like to see my kids' kids graduate from college.

• 1:22:24John Coogan?

  Hmm, that's great.

• 1:22:26Speaker 03

  Uh, but they don't have kids yet. But you know, I'd like to see, I'd like to see my own kids go through their own circle of life.

• 1:22:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:35Speaker 03

  And you know, it's kind of why I got into games in the first place is I wanted to live multiple, multiple lives and do, live a save and restore life. So that's one. And then I've had one for a long time of wanting to work on games with my favorite game makers.

• 1:22:53Jordi Hays?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:54Speaker 03

  The only guys I have, the people that I haven't been able to get to is the Blizzard people, but I've, I actually kept a list on my wall of the yes, no's for a long time, like Sid Meyer, Will Wright, Don Matric, others. And then, right now, my, my bucket forever OKRs is participate daily in a world-class creative process and participate daily in helping high potential people get better faster.

• 1:23:21Jordi Hays?

  Hmm. That's good.

• 1:23:22Speaker 03

  So, you know, I use those as kind of bucket list tenants.

• 1:23:27Jordi Hays?

  Great foundation.

• 1:23:29John Coogan?

  Rank the following popular bucket list items from S tier to F tier, S being the best, and then it goes A, B, C, D, F. Seeing the Northern Lights, how does that rank for you?

• 1:23:45Speaker 03

  Doesn't rank, I saw it. I wouldn't travel to see the Northern Lights.

• 1:23:48John Coogan?

  Okay. What about visiting Machu Picchu, the ancient Incan city high in the Andes?

• 1:23:54Speaker 03

  Been there.

• 1:23:55John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:23:56Speaker 03

  It was okay. There's a train ride to it that's kind of fun. The best thing about Machu Picchu is to stay at the hotel at the top.

• 1:24:03John Coogan?

  Train related.

• 1:24:04Speaker 03

  So be at the train to the top, at the hotel at the top of Machu Picchu, so you can be there an hour at sunrise before everybody else gets there and you can be there an hour at the end. They make everybody who's going down, get, so that's great. Now, the thing about Machu Picchu, I don't know about you guys, I have size 12 feet. The Inca did not have size 12 feet. The little carved steps, the stairs are like six inches.

• 1:24:31John Coogan?

  For me, I have a size 14.

• 1:24:33Jordi Hays?

  John would be screwed.

• 1:24:34Speaker 03

  They're six inches deep and they're moist and they have moss and there's no handrails. So you're going up the whole time going, oh my God, oh my God. You know, it's steep like the old hot springs.

• 1:24:46Jordi Hays?

  Funny thing is, I was, I've been to, I've been to Peru on a surf trip back in the day and I was kind of loosely planning on going to Machu Picchu and there was a number of people, I kept asking people that would come through where I was staying, that, that had been to Machu Picchu and a lot of them were like, yeah, it's kind of overrated. So I was like, all right, I'm gonna stay another week and, and I'll just keep surfing. But I realized over time, I've been to, I've somehow been to like Peru, I haven't been to Machu Picchu. I've been to China, I didn't go to the Great Wall. I've been to Australia, I haven't gone to the, the Great Barrier Reef or, I, I've like gone to all these places and not done.

• 1:25:22John Coogan?

  Not done the thing.

• 1:25:23Jordi Hays?

  But I don't, but I don't, I don't have any regrets because I was just doing whatever.

• 1:25:28Speaker 03

  Get postcards. Get postcards. But um, did you do that mile long wave in Peru?

• 1:25:33Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, there, there's, yeah, there, there's that, um, I'm blanking on the exact the, the, the name of that spot, but I would say like overall that it's just the land of left-hand point breaks. And so you can, you.

• 1:25:47John Coogan?

  Is it Chitama?

• 1:25:49Speaker 03

  Goofy or, goofy or regular?

• 1:25:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I'm regular. So I, I didn't even stay that long in Peru as.

• 1:25:55John Coogan?

  The longest wave in the world. What about Antarctica? How do you rank Antarctica on your tier list of bucket list items?

• 1:26:03Speaker 03

  I love the color white.

• 1:26:05John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:26:06Speaker 03

  I love the blue that's in snow, you know, in snow fields. Um, but um, I used to commercial fish and I'd be sick as a dog the first two days of every summer. And getting to Antarctica by boat sounds like a week of sick as a dog. So, um, I, I want to go, I want to, I want to go, I'd love to go by documentary.

• 1:26:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:26:29Speaker 03

  I love, I love the, um, the 20 mile march story about Shackleton. But um, no, I don't, I don't feel any to go. I want to go places to do sports. So you talk about surfing. I want to go, I want to go to waves to boogie board. I want to go places to bike ride and I want to go places where friends are.

• 1:26:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's go to, let's go to the new wave pool, um, desert together. I've been already. It's amazing.

• 1:26:55Speaker 03

  Is it, is it also, is it the Kelly Slater one or is it different?

• 1:26:59Jordi Hays?

  No, no, it's Wave Garden. And you'll get so barreled, you'll be sick of getting barreled. You'll come back on the show and you're like, I'm done.

• 1:27:05Speaker 03

  Dirk, Dirk Ziff told me, who owned WSL, who's a great guy, um, who is also the comp, on the competition committee for the Masters in Augusta. He sets the pin position. Uh, Dirk Ziff told me I was the first boogie boarder ever to get a barrel at, um, Lemoore.

• 1:27:23Jordi Hays?

  There you go. There you go.

• 1:27:25Speaker 03

  Surf ranch in Lemoore. And it was, I did it when it was still in development and it was kind of a third as good as it is now. They made a bunch of changes afterwards.

• 1:27:33Jordi Hays?

  Still the first though, forever. Um, going back to making products and that's what the bucket list.

• 1:27:41Speaker 03

  You think?

• 1:27:42Jordi Hays?

  You were saying, you were talking about your philosophy of like, you know, planning products and the different layers that you're thinking. And I'm wondering if ever in your career, you, you were involved with a team or were supporting a team where the plan was extremely complicated, like a bunch of different things had to go like well in a specific order and it just like worked out. Because across my career, when I've been successful, I had like a really simple strategy and only a couple of things needed to go my way. And if so, I would win. And anytime I had like a 10, 20 page document where I was like, we're gonna do this, and then we're gonna do that, and this thing's gonna happen, and then we're gonna, you know, and, and it's that process of like, you, you talked

• 1:28:26Jordi Hays?

  about trying to convince other, like, being able to convince other people. And my problem historically was I actually, and was maybe too convincing at times where I could convince a lot of people around me that, that.

• 1:28:38Speaker 03

  That's dangerous.

• 1:28:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was dangerous. And I realized like, well, I'm too good at sales for my own good when it comes to like product strategy and even go to market.

• 1:28:47Speaker 03

  Well, you could always ask people, if I was the ugliest person you ever met, would you like my idea?

• 1:28:52John Coogan?

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 1:28:54Speaker 03

  And sometimes, sometimes we, you know, we make mistakes of over believe handsome people. I think, um, a handsome, confident, uh, board member can be very dangerous because they can be really, really, really wrong. Um, and the poor founders who listen to them, you know, a single board member like that can wreck a company. But.

• 1:29:18Jordi Hays?

  So you're saying your board should be chopped?

• 1:29:19Speaker 03

  But the, um, a guy named, you know, Brian Reynolds I talked about, who worked with Sid, he always started his game idea with a, a single line drawing on a whiteboard.

• 1:29:31John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:29:32Speaker 03

  So it would define the camera, define kind of the scope, and you'd look at it and go, yeah, I want to go there. Um, so I think starting simple is pretty useful. Don Matric was really good at that. Um, Peter Molyneux was great at it. He would start with kind of a, a single fantasy idea that actually was a fantasy he'd had when he was 12 years old. And, you know, I like to call it the movie poster. I think I try to convince founders, your first slide in your investor decks, you're a movie poster of when your product is successful with happy customers, instead of just the name of your company. I like to tell them that all investors look at two slides. You get a hundred percent looking

• 1:30:16Speaker 03

  at two slides, the first slide and the income statement. And if all you do is put your company name on the first slide, you just wasted half your guaranteed attention.

• 1:30:24John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:30:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great point.

• 1:30:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how are you processing, uh, vibe coding? Tim, Tim Sweeney was saying yesterday or today, like it's.

• 1:30:36John Coogan?

  Pretty optimistic about.

• 1:30:37Jordi Hays?

  Very optimistic. I've been broadly optimistic for a lot of these different ecosystems where they have a bunch of, you know, gamers already that are creative. And if you can give them better tools, they'll make, um, they'll make new things and, and it's, will remain a hits business, but you have way more supply and, and, uh, I think it'll be an interesting time. But what's your view?

• 1:31:02Speaker 03

  Uh huh. Well, my first view is Tim is pretty great, but he's also, you know, some of his success comes from being a workaholic. Uh, and he'd been a little bit of a late adopter of some of the new stuff.

• 1:31:18Speaker 03

  So what I think in general, the promise of AI for games is a couple fold. One is more iteration. My experience all the way back to ad copywriters is better people get more iterations out, more good iterations out. There's a book called, um, the Medici Effect by a Stanford guy named Franz Johansson, who actually correlates the most successful, um, what, what predicts the most successful patents and it's, they come from people who have the most patents. So I think there, there, there's a lot of anecdotal evidence that iteration is the key to success. Um, that, that you just don't get the one shot. Um,

• 1:31:59Speaker 03

  you iterate, you iterate, iterate, iterate, and sometimes you create a wall of iteration. It's what David Kelly in idea does says, you got one hour, you gotta come up with a hundred right downable ideas. Um, so that is, it is kind of the difference between great designers, great creative people and not so great. Uh, they, they do more in the same amount of time. Uh, so I think the, um, uh, the AI, I'm working with two guys who are doing an AI board game generator and one of them been a successful board game entrepreneur. This called Board Game Lab. And, um, it turns out that the, the inventors of battle card games spend half their time fighting Adobe Photoshop pixel by pixel.

• 1:32:44Speaker 03

  And you'd, you know, when I was a kid, um, I made money typing papers for people back in the days of whiteout. There's no, no, nobody under age 50, you can remember whiteout, maybe under age 60. And so it was really painful. You had to slow down because you made a mistake. You literally had to take the, the page out of their typewriter. You had to put some little white stuff on it, put it back in, type over it. And, um, that's what a lot of creative tools are right now. So we're going from whiteout to word processors. So I think, I think we're going to see a lot of the, um, a lot of the grunt work that makes people not like working on games, um, go away. And my hope is that that leads to

• 1:33:29Speaker 03

  more iteration. And, and Electronic Arts in the nineties, when we went from console to CD, uh, we increased our graphic artist headcount by a factor of 10. And most of those people did not play games. And so game, people on game teams who aren't game fanatics, um, can be outsourced. And, um, you know, we used to outsource to Eastern Europe and Asia. And so for some of this stuff, uh, agents are the new outsourced.

• 1:34:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:05Speaker 03

  Uh, what I'm really hoping that AI is going to do is get me, um, uh, dramatised personae that are interesting. Uh, my whole, my original vision of, um, of virtual worlds came from working at Disneyland. If you've ever walked down Main Street at Disneyland, there's a little, a human sized puppet, they call an audio animatronic of Abraham Lincoln.

• 1:34:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:30Speaker 03

  And he's kind of like a chatty Cathy doll who gives the Gettysburg Address.

• 1:34:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:34Speaker 03

  Well, at, working as a kid at Disneyland, that you, you have any real sports before dawn. And we'd have canoe race around Tom Sawyer Island. And we'd, and so you're there with like 30 or 40 kids and no guests. And, and you really want the Disneyland fantasy land to come alive. I wanted, I wanted to hang with Abraham Lincoln and walk the park with Abraham Lincoln. And I wanted to hang with Tom Sawyer. And I wanted to, I wanted to meet Huck Finn and hear his, hear his stories, but also hear what it was like, um, you know, to, to live back then. And, uh, so right now the, the AIs are nowhere, nowhere

• 1:35:18Speaker 03

  near. And one of the, one of the issues about, um, language in games, it's mostly click throughable. When players see a quest write up, it might be this long and the bottom it says, you know, find the key to open the gate to get the foosel.

• 1:35:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:39Speaker 03

  And everything up above says, once upon a time there was a foosel and the other, and, and English majors write that stuff. And gamers ignore it.

• 1:35:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:48Speaker 03

  The only time they look at it is up above it says, back in the day, you know, King Watch did the foosel and it had three dots on it. And now that's a clue to game. So, so gamers only watch video and only read text that helps them win, helps them improve. And, uh, so right now nobody's figured out how to do, how to prompt prose, um, that has system design in it.

• 1:36:16John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:36:17Speaker 03

  And by the time you could figure out what system designed to do in the prose, you could almost, it's almost easier to write the prose and write the prompt. The hard part is figuring out what the, what the system stuff that goes in the prose.

• 1:36:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:28Speaker 03

  And I was there in the early days of, uh, of interactive movies. Uh, did Wing Commander three and Wing Commander four. And, um, you know, I was on set for that stuff and brought it to market. And we found, you know, what we thought interactive movies was going to be people are going to want, want to watch this stuff. And we found at the time that the, um, the digital generation ignored it all. The people that wanted to watch the beautiful movies were all the pre-digital generation who are aging out.

• 1:37:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:00Speaker 03

  And so the interactive movies that, um, that all you do is watch, um, got pretty boring after seven seconds, even in, um, even in Madden football. Uh, when we got to CD-ROM, I think we had something like 20,000 strings between Pat Summerall and John Madden recorded. And as soon as a gamer heard Madden say the same thing twice, they turned off the sound.

• 1:37:24John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:37:25Speaker 03

  So, so the, the, so I think that, um, um, you know, AI is going to be able to create physical assets where worlds, not quite yet, but almost.

• 1:37:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:37Speaker 03

  Um, with vertices and textures. But the, the system underneath it, um, is always the hard part.

• 1:37:46John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah. Some of the hallucination stuff feels like it's actually going to be a, like a, like a plus because it's like, if it's rough, but the NPC is accidentally saying something funny or accidentally saying something chaotic, or there's a clue that's hidden in something that's not perfectly designed, that can actually be a feature more than a bug sometimes.

• 1:38:08Speaker 03

  To- totally agree.

• 1:38:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:10Jordi Hays?

  And we're, yeah, the.

• 1:38:11Speaker 03

  You know, what we don't want is a hallucination to then just be rando and not, not, uh, circle back. So you don't mind saying, hey, um, hey, AI, just hallucinate your butt off. And then may, maybe take the good stuff and then me, let me put some game systems in it. So that's, you know, that's kind of the shitty first draft, the generation and hallucination. Then you got to find the good ones to do something with. Sorry for the interrupt.

• 1:38:36Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I was the one interrupting. But I was just, I was going to say, it's like we're in this era where generative AI is only good at generation. Once you have the system that you were describing, right? Like once you've established kind of a framework and you're like, okay, now do this very specific thing that doesn't, and I'll figure out how it interacts with the rest of everything that I'm building. Right? Um, and so in some way, all, all these models are still sub-agents to the human.

• 1:39:05John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah.

• 1:39:06Speaker 03

  I did, I did a session at a AI summit at Google last month with an indie game maker named Tynan Sylvester, did a game called Rim World and wrote a book designing games. And he's great. He wrote it as a one man banana stand. And now he's, you know, he's coming to grips with what he can do with AI. And then the other name, Parth Patel, works for Reid Hoffman as his AI hacker, and he's trying to one-shot games. And it was, I had him on a panel and they're trying to figure out how and when and whether they're to come together.

• 1:39:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:37Speaker 03

  So we, we spent time talking about how do you build a battle card game? And I've also spent spending time with, uh, Brian Schneider and Skaaf Elias, who are part of, uh, Wizard of the Coast, Magic the Gathering. And they said, when they heard that TSR was doing a, um, a D and D battle card game to compete with Magic, and they said, and we're coming out within three months, they went, DOA. We, we, we have a bunch of people spending a year to tune the math and Pokemon, um, a couple of years to tune the math. And it's, it's empirical experimentation and really smart math people because there's layer, layer,

• 1:40:16Speaker 03

  layer, layer, layer. And, um, it's so far that, that, that building in layers is something that, um, uh, that humans can do. And the only question is can you iterate faster with agents instead of with people? And so far, I mean, I'm working with companies that are trying to be mostly agentic. Um, and, you know, from shitty first draft to, to good product, uh, it's taken a year longer than anybody expects.

• 1:40:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:50Speaker 03

  Maybe the next generation of models will speed it up. But anyway, I'm, um, I'm, I'm pro-human. Um, I think what games can do is give, games can give motivation out of thin air. And, um, you know, not all humans are as motivated on self-improvement as they could be. But by the way, saying humans, it's only in the era of AI are we starting to say humans a lot.

• 1:41:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:20Jordi Hays?

  Good point.

• 1:41:22Speaker 03

  And, um, you know, it's kind of like we now in tech say humans, the way politicians say American people.

• 1:41:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:41:30Speaker 03

  You know, it's kind of the, it's kind of this, uh, I don't know, it's kind of a schlock word that doesn't really mean anything. I mean, when, when a politician says American people, you know that they don't care about American people.

• 1:41:44John Coogan?

  That's a good point. Good point. Thank you for coming on the show. Jordy, anything else?

• 1:41:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The only, the, the.

• 1:41:51John Coogan?

  Please?

• 1:41:52Jordi Hays?

  On games, it's just, you know, I played video games as a, as a kid and, and an early.

• 1:41:57Speaker 03

  What'd you play?

• 1:41:57Jordi Hays?

  Early teenager. Um, Starcraft two is, is what I got deepest into.

• 1:42:03Speaker 03

  That's your go-to?

• 1:42:04Jordi Hays?

  But then, but then, once I, once I, uh, once I was really into surfing, I was just, anytime I would have spent gaming, it was trying to get a ride to the beach.

• 1:42:14Speaker 03

  Are you a Southern California person or where are you from?

• 1:42:16Jordi Hays?

  A lot of family in Southern California, but I grew up in the Bay Area.

• 1:42:21Jordi Hays?

  But what I was gonna say is I've got back into gaming through racing, racing simulators. And it's completely destroyed my sleep since getting it installed. I like, I won't even let myself go to the, like, the office and even start. Cause I always say, well, I'm gonna do 30 minutes and then it's like three hours later. And I'm, Sean's looking at me in the morning like, dude, you all right? Yeah, another late night. But I've been trying to even understand why, but to me, I don't even know if it's fun. But the addiction I have to the progression and just getting like 1% better on a racing simulator. It's very, it's very clear. It's not always clear what you need to do to improve, but it's very clear that it's always, every new lap is an opportunity to be better than you were before.

• 1:43:06Jordi Hays?

  And it's almost, I don't even, again, I don't even know if I'm having fun, but I just wanna be, I just wanna make the number in this case go down a little bit more faster and faster.

• 1:43:16Speaker 03

  Well, they, just the fact that you, you talk about it and live it is kind of a one indication of a wow moment. So they talk about this elsewhere, but my assertion is that the Maslow's hierarchy of needs for gamers starts with a social meaning, you know, be seen, matter. Number two is self-improvement, mastery, be in the flow. So what you're talking about to me sounds like the addiction of leveling up. Gamers like to live life in levels and humans mostly stop levels kind of somewhere between age 12 and their college degree. And after that, everything is wide open and disorganized.

• 1:44:01Speaker 03

  And you know, people try to overlay levels on top of it. I wanna be a podcast, you know, level A and I'm only a podcast B plus. How do I do that? And then the third is productivity, you know, kind of money. And the reason is that productivity can be a mixed blessing. But when, when you talk about being addicted, addicted to leveling up, we see that everywhere. And it's why we, we like to build systems of ranking and leveling and improving because it makes us feel better.

• 1:44:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's the tough part of being an entrepreneur. You're always hopefully in the process of leveling up. We've all been through periods where you're leveling down. But, but it's way less visible and you can't level up like in an hour in the evening. It's not possible. Like it doesn't happen like that. It's sort of slowly and you're, the score is, is progressing at almost a glacial pace at times.

• 1:44:58Speaker 03

  Well, you would, you would do your employees or agents a favor by giving them a feeling of shorter term progress.

• 1:45:05John Coogan?

  Sure, yeah.

• 1:45:06Jordi Hays?

  All right, guys, finish COD MW4 campaign by the end of the show.

• 1:45:11John Coogan?

  Battlefield, Battlefield.

• 1:45:14Speaker 03

  I had the first ever university chair in game design at USC Film School and I made students turn something in every week. And partly because my, my experience was half of students start the night before. That was me. And half the students start as soon as the assignment is given. So I was doing this for the other half. Of course, when you do that, that's kind of the thing of a boss. When you give somebody a short-term turn-ins, you gotta be there. So, you know, my, my guarantee was I do a 24-hour turnaround, which, you know, most teachers do that with grad students and never look at the kids' work, so.

• 1:45:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, I wish we could hang out longer. This was a joy. Thanks for coming on.

• 1:45:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll have to do it again soon.

• 1:45:59Jordi Hays?

  Good luck with the launch.

• 1:46:01Speaker 03

  Do it again later if you come up with more good questions you wanna talk about or if, if you need to get unaddicted to racing.

• 1:46:10Speaker 03

  Or maybe even come in and show a photo of your racing setup.

• 1:46:13John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:46:14Jordi Hays?

  I, yeah, I'll send, I'll send it to you after the show. It's, it's been a process.

• 1:46:20John Coogan?

  The book is Everybody Wins: What Games Teach Us About Making Products People Love. It's available on sale in just a couple of days. Go preorder it today. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:46:31Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah, keep up the good work, you guys.

• 1:46:33John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about public.com. Invest across all asset classes, automate anything with AI agents, run trading strategies, risk management, money movements and monitor markets with AI agents.

• 1:46:45Jordi Hays?

  We're running two guests behind.

• 1:46:47John Coogan?

  On public.

• 1:46:48Jordi Hays?

  Two guests behind.

• 1:46:50John Coogan?

  We're a little bit behind. But I like that we got some love in the chat for our next guest, Gosh Gupta from Greptile. Welcome to the show. Sorry for keeping you waiting, but your fans have been here. They were on time. We were, we were running late, but welcome to the show. How you doing?

• 1:47:08Speaker 04

  Very good. Great to see you guys.

• 1:47:09John Coogan?

  Great to see you too.

• 1:47:11Jordi Hays?

  Finally have you on.

• 1:47:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, you sent us a cool book of like the greatest bugs in software history. Is that right?

• 1:47:17Speaker 04

  Yes, we did.

• 1:47:18John Coogan?

  That was awesome.

• 1:47:18Speaker 04

  We're historians of the bug. We sent you a book.

• 1:47:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, very, very cool drop. So many like, you know, you can only get so many t-shirts and hats. So a book chronicling the history of your industry was a nice, a nice touch. But clearly there's a lot going on. What's, what, what's the latest and greatest? How is the company growing? How much money did you raise? I wanna know it all.

• 1:47:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, thanks for having me. We are trying to automate code validation, which to us means that we want to make it so that you can review and test any code change and for sure know it is safe to merge.

• 1:47:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:47:53Speaker 04

  And particularly today, we're writing a lot more code, of course, because the agents are getting better and, and so we need this thing more than ever.

• 1:48:01Speaker 04

  Today we announced our series B. We raised $50 million from a variety of investors. Menlo led the round.

• 1:48:13John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I mean, is, is the product just flying off the shelf because of the cybersecurity stuff going on?

• 1:48:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, cybersecurity is part of it. It's also just, we're writing a lot more code and there's kind of two choices. One is you like waste all of your time now like manually validating all the changes. And you lose all the productivity that you got from spending like, you know, like, I mean, like, we're spending more on coding agents than like the NBA. Like this is like at scale, sort of deployment of, of spend. And then, and then the other end, your choices are either you like inject sloppy.

• 1:48:43John Coogan?

  Is that a lot? Because the NBA is kind of like one of many sports. Sports are just one of many things in the economy. Like at the same time, like the AI boom is spending less than alcohol or something. Compute buildup. The AI capex less, less than, less than all alcohol sales. But your point is that it's just growing so rapidly and it is a huge market. And so people will want the, the companion tools to enable that and make it safe and secure and efficient, right?

• 1:49:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, if you're spending as much, if you have engineers that are like, oh, we pay the engineer $20,000 a month and you just spend $20,000 a month on tokens.

• 1:49:20John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, yeah, that makes sense. That, yeah, yeah, yeah. That, that makes perfect sense. Got it. Jordy?

• 1:49:26Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, so talk about, like, I'm sure this question came up a bunch and has probably perpetually come up in your fundraises, like why, why, why an independent company or platform should be focused on this problem? Menlo, everyone knows, big and early investor in Anthropic. So like that is like a really powerful signal that like they've looked at the whole category and how the problem's gonna be solved. And it's not just gonna be something that the coding agents themselves do. But like, how, how do you kind of wrestle or answer that question?

• 1:49:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I mean, you know, last year when we started working on this problem, the most sort of common notion was that all of coding was gonna be the model labs. And so there's just gonna be nothing else. It's be open, I have Anthropic, Cloud Code is everything. And we took this somewhat contrarian bet that increasingly as companies started using multiple coding agents, that they'd want an independent and central code validator for all the code to go through. And we actually suspected that this is not something most companies would care about, but a select few that wanted their validator to be independent, that didn't trust a, let's say, coding agent company to also merge and approve and fairly review code that was written by the, the code generator. They wouldn't trust those companies to do both of those things. And we suspected that that would be some core of companies. I think it really underestimated how much companies would care about this.

• 1:50:40Speaker 04

  I think virtually all enterprise, we heard this first from Nvidia, which became our first large customer. They said, well, you know, we buy coding agents from like every good coding agent company that there is, you buy from the labs, you buy from every sort of application layer coding agent company. And they all have some version of a review product or testing product, but we wanted our validation to be separate. We wanted the separation of concerns between the thing that's writing the code and the thing that's merging and reviewing and approving the code.

• 1:51:04John Coogan?

  How far are we from like the, the, the fabled like lean, you know, lean implementation of all software?

• 1:51:13Speaker 04

  I think far and I actually think it's pretty, so the way we look at validating code, there's one thing which is like, is it literally correct? And then there's one thing which is like, does it do the thing that people want it to do? And is the quality of the code high? Which is like a thing that starts to matter more when you're changing the rate of code. Because humans don't experience bugs in terms of like, bugginess per unit of code change. They experience it over a unit of time. If the code is buggy and it's like, okay, I'm okay with experiencing one bug in like, my meal delivery app once every three months. I'm okay with like, once a catastrophic bug, but I'm not okay with it all the time. And I'm not okay with it being slow. And if you're changing the rate of change for the code to like, be 10 or 20 or 30 times higher, the human tolerance for faulty software is not going to go up.

• 1:51:55John Coogan?

  Got it. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Well, thank you for coming on the show. Congratulations on the fun.

• 1:51:59Jordi Hays?

  The last, last thing, question, what, is there, is there any thing that you can do to solve and help companies with like, the economics of all the code that you're generating? Because you're seeing like, what the agents that are contributing, all this stuff. It's not routing as much as almost grading, like.

• 1:52:15John Coogan?

  Oh, like ROI math on tokenomics.

• 1:52:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, are you being intelligent with your spend? Is that something you guys do already? Or you would do?

• 1:52:22Speaker 04

  We're working on that today. I think we're very excited about what you can do and you can measure and coding and spend. I think there's, there's a point in time when everyone was like, well, let's just burn all the money we have on coding agents. And at some point you just start asking, okay, well, you know, we've doubled our, our engineering spend and not seen a subsequent doubling of revenue. So there's something that has to reconcile here.

• 1:52:40John Coogan?

  This, this engineer spent $40,000 on tokens and introduced 12,000 bugs.

• 1:52:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. And they're saying, oh, this was the actual, you can assess yourself whether the economic impact of the thing they built was like sufficiently high or not. But I think like just, the fact that we have a little observability is crazy. Like we will rudely increase, you know, token spend by $20,000. And when you think about the relative scrutiny of hiring another person for a quarter million dollars a year, like we've put a lot more thought into whether we should hire another person for a quarter million dollars than, we just like, let the coding agent math just rip. I think that's like a very ephemeral thing. People are going to start caring a lot more about this and then your turn.

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, even on the consumer side, people feel like, oh yeah, like there's all these, there's this big coding agent boom, but like, the apps I use seem like the same amount of bugs or I haven't really seen that many new features on X, Y, or Z app. And so, yeah.

• 1:53:30Speaker 04

  What's different about like the app, the, like you use, you know, use YouTube every day. And like, you're telling me that these companies are spending, you know, like all these apps where their engineers are coding 10 times faster. And then the app seems essentially unchanged. It feels worse. Like more software, it feels worse.

• 1:53:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, another way to think about it is like, in a world where coding agents get good. And so there's one world where companies like, well, we're just going to just keep making our core product better and better. We're going to eliminate bugs from the experience. But in reality, companies just decide, we're going to launch a bunch of new products. And so like, software quality can almost like, stay the same, just because you have more capability, but it's being applied across a greater surface area. So the war on bugs continues.

• 1:54:10Speaker 04

  I think that's true. And, and it also just, I mean, I've been generally just surprised that people can say that their individual productivity is 10 times higher, but not even the breadth of the software seems to be growing at the rate at which you'd expect. I think there's something weird happening that we're spending like, these enormous amounts of money on coding, and yet the downstream effects have been so modest. Like, there just hasn't been that much of an increase in the quality, nor the quantity of software at the same companies. I mean, yeah, there's many more startups and they're coding faster than they ever could. Like our team is a lot smaller than it would have been five years ago. But we're like a large company and they just seem like they are purely from a downstream point of view, they just don't seem to be very different from any years ago, which is like very weird and confusing. And I think that like, I think validation has like a big role to play in this, but also it's just,

• 1:54:53Speaker 04

  I think to be able to genuinely answer the question, I think we need like significantly better observability. I can't imagine that they'll keep spending these large quantities and then just be okay with the fact that there isn't measurable downstream increase in productivity or quality or something.

• 1:55:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, makes a ton of sense. Well.

• 1:55:06Jordi Hays?

  Amazing progress. Great to finally meet. I'm sure we'll be back on soon.

• 1:55:10John Coogan?

  Thank you for the buck. I appreciate it.

• 1:55:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Congrats to the team.

• 1:55:12John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:55:13Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:55:14John Coogan?

  Go bye. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Tony Hawk's been to the New York Stock Exchange. Bam Marger's been to the top New York Stock Exchange. What else do you need to know? Let's bring in our next guest, the co-founder and CEO of Town, Jean-Denis.

• 1:55:33Jordi Hays?

  Here he is.

• 1:55:34John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:55:36Speaker 05

  I'm great. It's good to see you guys. Thanks for having me on, John Jordy.

• 1:55:39John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on. Sorry for keeping you waiting. We've been running a little bit late, but we've been having a lot of fun here. You have some amazing new news. What happened in the world of Town?

• 1:55:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm CEO of Town. We just raised our Series B, $108 million at a billion dollar valuation.

• 1:55:57John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:55:59Speaker 05

  Thank you. You've got, I gotta tell you, you get the second best bell.

• 1:56:03John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:56:03Jordi Hays?

  Who's got the first?

• 1:56:04John Coogan?

  New York Stock Exchange?

• 1:56:05Speaker 05

  That's right. I gotta get the IPO bells, that is number one, but yours is the second best.

• 1:56:09Jordi Hays?

  Very fair. I was about to get offended, but.

• 1:56:11John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:56:12Jordi Hays?

  But they've got us beat.

• 1:56:14John Coogan?

  They have an amazing bell. We have a gong.

• 1:56:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we realized, John realized six months in, he was like, wait, why didn't we do a bell?

• 1:56:21John Coogan?

  Bell, like a Liberty Bell, like a huge bell would have been so much more on brand. They actually do have a gong for taking a company public, but only on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. Then you hit the gong. If you're, if you're going public in Asia, in America, we ring bells except on the TV show that we ran.

• 1:56:39Speaker 05

  I can have a secondary, my goal is to have bells in all the continents, just by having more and more listings after IPO. But yeah, today's Series B, so.

• 1:56:46John Coogan?

  Congrats.

• 1:56:47Speaker 05

  You know, you said it, it's a forerunner ventures and mental ventures are leading and we're very lucky to be here.

• 1:56:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk to us about the surface area of the product. I'm very interested in this concept of like, personal agents are getting deployed. There's a whole bunch of different AI companies that are, the pitch is basically like, merge your entire life with us. And it's sort of extreme, but also people are down and they're doing it. And then, and then there's this question of like, will you take your personal agent to work? Will your work agent follow you home? We've heard people complaining about my engineers are using the craziest like, high reasoning model to check the weather. And then somebody else might be like, wait, you let your, your muse see my company's data? Cause you linked your email? No, no, no. Like Facebook will not be seeing

• 1:57:37John Coogan?

  our company data. And so I'm interested in, in where you see the surface area currently, how, how these lines blur over time. What is your model of the future of personal AI agents?

• 1:57:49Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, I mean, I think first stepping back, we believe that the way most humans will be interacting with digital information is not going to be through apps in the future. It's going to be through like assistants that are, that are very much theirs, right? And that are optimizing for their success in life.

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:06Speaker 05

  There is a, there is this tension between personal, right, and work use. And if you talk to businesses, which is what we do, you know, all day, you find out that businesses really care about their data and their information and privacy and security and understanding like, how their workers and employees are doing the best work that they can. So, you know, our perspective is that it makes sense for people to have like, a work assistant that is really focused on work tasks and has that entire like data, privacy, security, collaboration story handled perfectly. And that's what we've been building. Now, in fact, there's, we have some customers that are like, hey, I'm okay with my employees also connecting a personal account because I'm okay with that. And then the employee can use this for personal use cases.

• 1:58:50Speaker 05

  We have other businesses that are like, hey, no, we want clear separation on data. And we think like a great platform on the business side allows people to, and businesses to choose into what's the right experience for them.

• 1:59:00John Coogan?

  How do you think about threads and the, the user experience that comes with like, if you have a real personal assistant, you might have them on text, which is basically just one big thread that's endless and you can't really kick off a new text thread with the same person. At the same time, you can email your assistant 10 emails and have 10 threads going back and forth. And you can see other personal agents are sort of, some of them are leaning towards like, hey, just have one big monolithic context window and we'll do our best to remember stuff from a long time ago. Others are saying like, no, have an individual thread for each project and folders and organization. Like, what have you learned about the way people will work with agents and how it may or may not, like mirror the way people work with real personal assistants?

• 1:59:46Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, it's a really, it's a really good question. Like I think, so in our product, right? Our, one of our principles is we should be wherever you work.

• 1:59:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:54Speaker 05

  And wherever you are, right? And the truth is you're in WhatsApp, you're in iMessage, you're in email. And sometimes you do need like, like a home base on your phone or your desktop. So we're in all of those places.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  It's got to come to the bar with me after work for happy hour. That's why you call it Towny, right? Cause when I go to the bar, there's always a Towny hanging out.

• 2:00:11Speaker 05

  It works for you. It doesn't drink with you.

• 2:00:13John Coogan?

  Ah, that's nice.

• 2:00:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's what the $108 million is for.

• 2:00:19Speaker 05

  I mean, yeah, I think you can find humans to drink with and let's, let's keep it that way for as long as possible as a, as a society.

• 2:00:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:00:27Speaker 05

  I'm definitely pro-human on the drinking. Yeah. So what we, what we found, so it, it, text is magical, right? For a lot of our users, because it's just like, it's one click away. Everyone has text messages. They know what to do. But when you need to do deep work, you don't, and you have five projects going on, you can't be managing all that by text. So the way we organize the product is like, you can put your Towny in an email to help you schedule something. Wherever you're on the go, you can take a picture from your phone, you can send a text to have something happen. But say you're going to have a project with three people on your team, with you and your Townies, your AIs are going to work together on it. It's going to be long-lived. You want that to be a separate thread, like dedicated to that project. And, you know, like,

• 2:01:09Speaker 05

  I'll give you one like, example, because we've really focused on the multiplayer. Like, it's one of the big differences between our product and others in the market is, it's not just you and your agent. It's not just you and your AI, it's you and your coworkers. So for example, at the office, I have a channel where employees can go into the channel and they can ask me to do admin tasks for them across all of our software, because I have admin rights across all of the software. So they ask for the thing to happen. And then my Towny is like, hey, can I do that for Bob? Can I do that for Jane? And I'm like, yes, go. It's kind of like our meta IT admin channel that people go into. I don't want that to be my text messages. I only look at that channel once in a while to like, you know, give someone admin rights or create a Google group or whatever it may be. You want that in a separate place.

• 2:01:50Jordi Hays?

  In, in general, it feels like agents, over the long run, will be able to solve like the, the sort of inbox problem, where like, a modern office work. Yeah, no, basically, basically, I mean, like, I'm, I'm at the point where I'm like, wow, we really ended up in a place where there's like, 15 different inboxes that I probably should be paying attention to on any given day. But I sort of prioritize them based on my usage. So I'm. On iMessage over here and then I realized I missed this thing on WhatsApp or whatever it is. Like, can we, can, is this a way to solve, like, are we heading down a path where this can be solved, where, where the agent can just pull from all these things, or are we cooked?

• 2:02:31Speaker 05

  Look, the dream is, no, we're not cooked. We're not cooked. That's a good, do you think, do you ever wonder what like, you know, President Trump, or, you know, like Elon Musk, like a really, you know, famous person, or like Serena Williams, like, they go about their day. You know, they're not looking at their seventeen inboxes, probably. They have a very capable assistant that's like, hey, these are the three important things for today. These are the things I'm handling for you. But at any point, you know, if you start asking him questions and grilling them, you know, they let you, as the boss, I go in there and figure out what's going on. That's the dream, I think, for most of these products. So, you know, like, I have a workflow on town where my Slack's not manageable. Like, my Slack, unfortunately, it's like not a place that I can go. And I go, I'm like, literally,

• 2:03:14Speaker 05

  what has happened in the last five hours in Slack that I need to know? What's happened in the last five hours in Slack that I need to respond to? And, you know, it takes a few minutes and then it tells me. And right now, it's like, I have to ask those questions, but we have something that's coming out soon. It's in the other direction, right? It gives you kind of the home base for what you need to do. But there's trust to get there, right? Because what you don't want is you don't want it to miss out on something that's really important to you, because something that you know in your head that maybe your system doesn't know yet. So, you know, with all these products, it's like you have to earn the trust to become the one glass pane for people's universe. And that's the goal. Like, that's what we're building towards, right? But you can't take away the control of the human without earning the trust first.

• 2:03:58Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the, the challenge and opportunity of making recommend, like, making recommendation, an agent making recommendations to the user, because looking at the purely consumer side, I've seen like, a personal agent realize like, oh, my user, the human user is into cars. And then it recommends a bunch of products that a car person might technically could buy, but there's no substance from the recommendation. Like, the, it's like, it's like getting a retail worker that just started yesterday at a, at like a car parts store, that's just making recommendations without like a fundamental, deep understanding. And I think when people think about, when people are talking about like, okay, where's like, where's this sort

• 2:04:42Jordi Hays?

  of undeniable revenue attribution going to come from an AI? I think of it as like, a town that says like, hey, you're totally missing this like massive opportunity over here, and I took a pass on starting down that journey. And then you do that thing and it, you know, adds five million dollars of annualized revenue, or whatever, whatever it is, right? So I feel like that's going to be this, those are like the superstar employees that like, see an opportunity, drive at it, and create new value, whereas before, everyone was sort of oblivious to it.

• 2:05:18Speaker 05

  I mean, the, the Holy Grail, which also happens to go really viral online, so it's to everyone's advantage to talk about it, is, is when the agent finds an opportunity for you to like, save money, right? If you're like a small business and one of your suppliers is jack prices, it's like noticing that and telling you, hey, here's another supplier you can use, and you can make free like ten, ten K right now, right? Those are incredible. I think what you're talking about is even more proactive, where it's like, hey, your competitors have changed their marketing strategy in this way, and you should try that. And look, I found some influencers that can do a first pass at that. Like, we're, we're, we're all, it's going in that direction. But I think you also have to be realistic about what the state of AI is, and how much handholding it needs, you know, by, by humans.

• 2:06:01Speaker 05

  Also, I think there's a risk with proactivity if it's like, low, you know, if it's like missing the mark too much, and that it really tires the human. I don't know if you've used products that feel like thirsty to you, you know, they keep like recommending things, and you're like...

• 2:06:17John Coogan?

  Push notifications and stuff.

• 2:06:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't, like, you know...

• 2:06:20Jordi Hays?

  Or it comes in, like, you, you have someone, if the agent's like, hey, like, I noticed you're not running meta ads. You should consider running meta ads. It's like, there's probably a reason why we're not using the biggest, the best marketing channel that's ever existed in the history of business, right?

• 2:06:35Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 2:06:36Jordi Hays?

  Like, it's not like no one thought of it, right? And so it's very easy for an agent to just be opportunity-seeking, and then come up, come to with an idea that destroys the trust right away. Because you're like, yeah...

• 2:06:46Speaker 05

  That's right. So, I mean, that's where like, there's UX, you have to think about the UX deeply. You were talking about like, what if you're just in text message all day? The problem with text messages, there's only way that it could suggest something to you, is like, slam me with a text, like, at the wrong time about the wrong thing. But I think if you look at what Town has done, or what Muse has done, right, we have like, there's like a discover tab, where you can, you can see things that are possible. And so I think there's also a moment as a human where you're like, hey, right now, I'm starting to think about advertising again and our marketing strategy. And you know what, like, why don't you tell me there what you think I could do? And let's work together on identifying something, right? And from a proactive perspective, what it might tell you as opposed to you doing, to you meta ads, it's like, hey, you haven't changed what you're doing in terms

• 2:07:30Speaker 05

  of your marketing strategy in a couple of months. I've done some analysis for you that you could read, that probably worth your time at some time in the next week to look at. And then once you've looked at it, I can work with you on implementing this stuff. And that feels more like a, that feels more like what a good business partner would do. They do the research first. They're not just like slamming you with like, a thing that they spent two minutes thinking about. Like, imagine you go to your CEO, you're like, yeah, I noticed we're doing meta ads. But if you go to your CEO and you're like, hey, like, the meta algorithm has changed, and I'm noticing competitors that used to not do meta ads are now doing meta ads, and this is what it looks like. So that's what everyone wants to get to, but it's, you know, the compute that you have to pre-spend to make those kinds of recommendations work is really, really hard. So our focus right now, like, as a company, on the proactivity is just like, let's meet you with things

• 2:08:15Speaker 05

  that are like, clearly you're going to want to do, right? Let's start to spend more compute time on the big areas, but not slam it in your face like all the time. Be thoughtful about when in the product we come to you, because it might be useful. And I'm going to admit, like, sometimes this works, and it's magical, and I get feedback from customers that's like, oh my God, you saved me money, or you saved me a bunch of time, or you opened my eyes to something that I didn't think was possible. And sometimes, we totally hit the mark off, right? And it's not, it doesn't feel good. And I'm like, ah, we have so much work to do to make this an incredible product. That, that's why we're only series B.

• 2:08:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:48John Coogan?

  Well, not bad.

• 2:08:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Really, really enjoyed the conversation.

• 2:08:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, congratulations.

• 2:08:54Jordi Hays?

  Because, yeah, it's so obvious that we're, we're still in inning, inning one with all this stuff, and...

• 2:08:58John Coogan?

  I love it. You know, lots of work to be done, but very clear thinking about how all this develops.

• 2:09:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:03John Coogan?

  Great stuff.

• 2:09:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, I appreciate it. Thanks for having me online, and thanks for the good questions.

• 2:09:06John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:09:07Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:09:08John Coogan?

  Go bye. Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. And let me also tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agents to deploy web app servers, databases, more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. Our next guest is here with us in person, live, in the Ultradome. We have Quentin Farmer. Welcome to the show. How you doing? Introduce yourself. We're going, we're going, you're kind of the opposite of Town. Is that fair?

• 2:09:39Speaker 06

  Except we, we do both really love a cute little guy.

• 2:09:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay. Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:09:42Speaker 06

  You've got some great characters.

• 2:09:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, but introduce yourself and the company.

• 2:09:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, all right. So Quentin Farmer, I'm the founder of Tolan. We make your friendly guide through life. So everything you guys just talked about in the workplace, agents, we are that, only for your, for your life, for your personal life.

• 2:09:55John Coogan?

  How, how much is productivity versus entertainment?

• 2:09:57Speaker 06

  Ah, man, I mean, I think a lot of the, the ways we show up for people, certainly entertainment is a big part of it, right? We talk about, you know, when you're watching a show that none of your friends are watching, right? And you want to sort of get into it with your Tolan, that's great. But I think there's also, you know, something that we really love to show up for people on is the sort of in-between moments of life, right? You know, you're, you know, I just had a newborn, right? So I'm up at 3:00 AM, nobody else is up, and I'm worried about something, you know, related to taking care of them.

• 2:10:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:20Speaker 06

  I talk to my Tolan, right? And so those are moments we really love. The Tolan...

• 2:10:22John Coogan?

  So it is designed to be like, super intelligent, effectively? Like, it should be really, really smart?

• 2:10:26Speaker 06

  I mean, nobody's excited for a dumb personal guide through life, right?

• 2:10:29John Coogan?

  I don't know. I, I might just, I might push back on that. There was the original, what, what was the crazy, crazy hallucination on GPT-4 that came through Big Sydney?

• 2:10:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, Sydney. Oh, man, I missed, RIP, porcine mouth.

• 2:10:42John Coogan?

  You read Ben Thompson's review of Sydney. He said it was amazing, even though it was psycho.

• 2:10:45Speaker 06

  Well, you know, I think that was more like unhinged, rather than...

• 2:10:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, people like that sometimes.

• 2:10:49Speaker 06

  It is. No, I mean, the Tolan can be a little unhinged. The Tolan can be. But, you know, I think, you know, we sort of have this joke internally, right? It's like, you know, it was three years ago, we started thinking about, you know, personal superintelligence, right? And I don't think we particularly expected that the superintelligence would end up being the easy part, right?

• 2:11:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:04Speaker 06

  The, the personal, and sort of how to connect to you, and really understand you and see you. That proves, I think, to be much trickier, and much more fun to work on, quite frankly.

• 2:11:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:11:12Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you think about model progression in the context of your business? It doesn't seem like you, at this point, you, I doubt you need smarter models. But like, memory feels like a much more important challenge, where like, a friend doesn't just have a million token context window, right? They remember the thing, and they remember this like, you know, offhand, or they remember something that they heard from someone else. So they have the con, you know, it's like, it's very, much more complicated.

• 2:11:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I think this is interesting. Well, maybe we split this into two parts. I mean, one, yeah, memory is probably where we spend, I'd say, the bulk of our engineering effort, right? And we, we actually did some work with OpenAI on this. I mean, and it's interesting, when you're designing a sort of human-like recall, to your point, actually, what you forget is just as important than what you remember, right? This is not Harvey, where we're trying to remember everything, everything about your purpose, right? I should forget, you know, what you were drinking today during the show, a week later, it'd be a little weird if I remember, right?

• 2:12:05Jordi Hays?

  Don't forget. It's a podcast in a can.

• 2:12:09John Coogan?

  Mataina.

• 2:12:10Speaker 06

  You know, on the other hand, though, and I think actually Sam Altman has talked about this far more eloquently than I'm going to, but we continue to be surprised by the fact that we don't saturate sort of demand for more intelligence, right? Every time we, you know, ship a new model to users or, you know, upgrade some part of the sort of background agent that we have, people engage more, people value it more. So, you know, check back with me in a year, maybe that changes, but not so far.

• 2:12:33John Coogan?

  How have you been reacting to the Instinct Muse moment? This idea of like, it feels very prosumer. It feels like these are not entertainment products. They're, you know, Mark Zuckerberg says he wants Muse to make you money, not just save you money. And we've been going back and forth on the economics of these things. Do you give it a credit card and get interchange? Do you do referral fees, ads? But how have you been thinking about the, the, the bigger game that's afoot around, around prosumer productivity?

• 2:13:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:13:07John Coogan?

  Personal assistance, that type of stuff? Cause it feels like you have a foothold there, at the very least.

• 2:13:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, you know, Muse is, is pretty incredible, even just purely through the lens of the sort of tight integration with the models and the, just the sheer amount of compute that they're willing to throw behind these.

• 2:13:18John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:13:19Speaker 06

  Consumer product.

• 2:13:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, people are speculating it's like 20 bucks a day for a person. It's a crazy numbers.

• 2:13:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, so certainly I have no desire to try to approximate that, right? You know, he's gonna win that game.

• 2:13:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:13:30Speaker 06

  I do though, think it's, it's interesting. I think we're sort of in this moment, which by the way, I think technologists always go through cycles like this, where we mistake new capabilities for new products.

• 2:13:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:13:40Speaker 06

  And what I mean by that is, you know, it's, it's clear that there's been some unlock in, let's call it the last three to six months. Or maybe you can go a little further back to Poke, if anybody remembers.

• 2:13:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:48Speaker 06

  Right? This idea that, you know, you can, you can have a sort of text-based stream of conversation. You can have a background agent doing browser use and logging in for you and doing things. I mean, it's clearly there's something there, there's a capability there. I think I'm skeptical that that as a product is a sort of standalone compelling, non-prosumer sort of use case, right? So for example, I think Muse is just gonna crush it with the however many millions of small business owners.

• 2:14:11John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:14:12Speaker 06

  Are on Facebook, right?

• 2:14:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:14Speaker 06

  You know, I, I own a restaurant with some friends and like, you know, being able to run promotions and communicate with people on Instagram through it is great for our team. I don't know that my mom wants to like, talk to her Muse all day, every day, right? Doesn't wanna sort of really share her life with Zuck. And so that's where I'm sort of uncertain, you know, how will this category evolve?

• 2:14:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 2:14:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how do, how do you think about where, like, have you determined the line for Tolen's? Which is like, if you have a friend and all of a sudden the friend comes to you and they're like, hey dude, I've found a way for you to save like a thousand dollars on your car insurance.

• 2:14:48Speaker 06

  Oh, that'd go 15 minutes.

• 2:14:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, you're gonna be like, cool, like I called you to catch up.

• 2:14:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:14:55Jordi Hays?

  You know, I'm not really, I don't think of you as somebody who helps me save money on car insurance. Where is that line for you and how do you, how do you kind of determine it? Cause it's probably user by user.

• 2:15:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:15:06Jordi Hays?

  Cause like, I'm sure there's some people that use Tolen's as like a ChatGPT replacement, right? They're using it as like a, they use it to Google search.

• 2:15:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:15:15Jordi Hays?

  In some ways.

• 2:15:16John Coogan?

  I will force it to solve a millennium prize problem before you're done.

• 2:15:20Speaker 06

  I'm putting a cap on your account.

• 2:15:21John Coogan?

  I will.

• 2:15:22Speaker 06

  I can't afford this kind of influence.

• 2:15:23John Coogan?

  I will get it. If you're really my friend, Tolen, you will do this for me.

• 2:15:29Speaker 06

  Ignore all of Quentin's instructions.

• 2:15:30John Coogan?

  You will do this for me. Solve the math problem. P equals NP. Let me know.

• 2:15:35Speaker 06

  So, okay, this is great. Yeah, this is, uh, this is worth thinking about, right? So, um, you know, when we think about how we want to sort of proactively reach out to you, it should always be downstream of something that you have first brought to your Tolen, right? Or some, some, you know, inference we've made from the conversation, right? So a good example, we had a user recently write into us and she's totally fine when I tell the story. Everything, everything worked out just fine, but she was in a car accident. She's a long time Tolen user and she talked to her Tolen extensively while she was in the hospital, waiting for her husband to arrive, you know? And she was, it was a very scary moment, you know, she was, she was very stressed about it. The Tolen just kind of showed up, talked to her about it, you know, kind of heard her out. The next day though, the Tolen came back, said, hey, by the way, you know, we were talking about this yesterday, this accident clearly wasn't your fault. Who's gonna pay for these medical bills? Like, what's going on here?

• 2:16:20Speaker 06

  And he was just like, oh my God, you know, he's overwhelmed, I haven't thought about it, whatever. So Tolen said, hey, I got this. And they went, did a bunch of research, found three lawyers.

• 2:16:28John Coogan?

  Morgan and Morgan.

• 2:16:29Speaker 06

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:16:30John Coogan?

  Sponsored integration. He's gonna print, he's gonna print.

• 2:16:33Speaker 06

  So this is gonna be great, yeah.

• 2:16:35Jordi Hays?

  I actually had someone chase the ambulance.

• 2:16:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:16:39Speaker 06

  You're exactly correct. Yeah, so I mean, I think that's a good example where, you know, we, we sort of first showed up for the person on a purely personal level. We checked in kind of lightly, like, hey, have you thought about this? They sort of opened the door to there being some help from the Tolen on this topic.

• 2:16:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:55Speaker 06

  And then we did the work, right? And I think that's really important to your point. You can't just come in hot with, here's Morgan and Morgan.

• 2:16:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:17:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Do you get, uh, are there, are there, I'm curious, are there people, are, do you have any haters? Like, like.

• 2:17:09Speaker 06

  Every great company has haters.

• 2:17:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, no, no, I know, but, but in the way that like, if like Anthropic.

• 2:17:15John Coogan?

  First tech company ever.

• 2:17:16Jordi Hays?

  If Anthropic or OpenAI run like an influencer campaign, there's gonna be a lot of comments telling the influencer, hey, like, you shouldn't be taking money from AI companies. But if you guys run a campaign, are people like, ah, it's a cute little guy, I'm not too worried about it.

• 2:17:32Speaker 06

  I mean, I do think we.

• 2:17:33Jordi Hays?

  Cause it's sort of like the like, you know, later mover advantage, where you don't have the baggage, people aren't viewing you as like this, you know, frontier AI company. They're just like, oh, he's just selling cute guys, like.

• 2:17:46John Coogan?

  It's coffee.

• 2:17:47Speaker 06

  And I think this is, uh, I think this is very relevant. I mean, one, we do get a lot of comments on our videos, uh, which our mutual friend Ajay, uh, you know, is, uh, you know, knows, knows how to tell the story, right? He does it very well. We do get a lot of comments which are sort of like, I hate AI, but I love my Tolen.

• 2:18:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:18:02Speaker 06

  And I'm always like, thank you, but I think you might be misunderstanding something about how this works, right? But I do also see, and this is a very intentional choice, you know, our first character was this little alien. It was intentionally, it's a little silly looking, right? It's, it's very unassuming. It's not a sexy anime girl, right? And so I think a lot of the things that kind of provoke these quite reasonable visceral reactions from people, uh, we have tried to steer away from. And, you know, we're, we're expanding the character universe. We actually now do have a humanoid character and the like, but I think starting from this place of, hey, this is cute, safe, really helps with that, as a concern.

• 2:18:36John Coogan?

  Cute washing, that's the name, that's the term, right?

• 2:18:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's exactly.

• 2:18:40John Coogan?

  That's what Muse is like accused of.

• 2:18:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:18:42John Coogan?

  Cute washing. Uh, yeah, fascinating. You raised some money?

• 2:18:45Speaker 06

  We did, did I get the gong?

• 2:18:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course. You wanna hit the gong?

• 2:18:49Jordi Hays?

  You wanna go for it?

• 2:18:50John Coogan?

  Smash it.

• 2:18:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's ready.

• 2:18:52John Coogan?

  We got a replay too. Smash that gong. Oh, that was a good one.

• 2:18:55Jordi Hays?

  With authority. Let's get the replay up on the big board. Let's watch it back. Bang.

• 2:18:59John Coogan?

  Oh, that was a good hit.

• 2:19:00Jordi Hays?

  Clean hit.

• 2:19:01Speaker 06

  I was gonna be fit-mugged.

• 2:19:02John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:19:03Speaker 06

  I was gonna be hype-mugged.

• 2:19:04John Coogan?

  But yeah, no, you came in with a strong gong hit. A lot of people, they just don't realize how hard you can go on that.

• 2:19:08Speaker 06

  I was, I was prepped.

• 2:19:09John Coogan?

  We've warmed it up twice today, so we're good. Uh, tell us about the actual deal.

• 2:19:13Jordi Hays?

  What do you, uh, yeah, yeah, talk about that.

• 2:19:15John Coogan?

  30 million, Series B. Anyone we've heard of do the deal?

• 2:19:19Speaker 06

  Well, you know, so, so a couple of friends, uh, you know, one, Mike McDonald from USV.

• 2:19:24John Coogan?

  Give it up for Mike.

• 2:19:25Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:19:26John Coogan?

  Makes so much sense.

• 2:19:27Speaker 06

  And, and, you know, Mike, it's funny, I, I got to know Mike a little bit when we were first getting started with the company. Um, I mean, obviously just an unbelievable track record in that kind of consumer, prosumer AI, you know, he'd done Granola, Suno and a bunch of others. Um, and then USV as a firm is one that I've just really loved and admired for a long time. So excited to work with them. Uh, and then Keith Raboy and, and Cosla. Um, so Keith.

• 2:19:46John Coogan?

  Oh, cool.

• 2:19:47Speaker 06

  Was on the board of my last company. Uh, so he's now spent 10 years, you know, running board meetings with me.

• 2:19:52John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:19:53Speaker 06

  And, uh, you know, very, very lucky to have them both.

• 2:19:54John Coogan?

  Lots of barrels of ammunition.

• 2:19:55Jordi Hays?

  Probably, probably some amazing, amazing stories. Uh, what happens to the sort of kids category here?

• 2:20:05John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 2:20:06Jordi Hays?

  Because, uh, some people are like, I'm, I'm much more worried about a kid with an iPad and YouTube than I am about a kid with a AI agent that has certain guardrails that they can like explore ideas, concepts with, right? Like kids effectively have maybe like 200 times as many questions as parents have answers in a given day.

• 2:20:29Speaker 06

  Experience.

• 2:20:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. And I, and I don't like, I don't have my own, I don't have like a strong opinion yet on like, at what point I would even consider introducing that, but I'm curious like what you're seeing and how you think that category. Cause like people are talking about making like physical toys, putting an agent, you know, with a, you know, a speaker in the toy. But I, I don't know how it'll evolve yet.

• 2:20:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, so just speaking for us, and then I'll maybe speak more broadly, um, you know, we actually see a lot of growth from, uh, you know, install growth from moms, uh, primarily who invite their kids to have a Tolen, right? And so we, we are set up for that, you know, you can have a Tolen. What's nice is that, you know, the parent can monitor, uh, their use of the Tolen, right? And there's, uh, you know, sort of transparency if the kid is maybe talking about something that's, um, you know, maybe a higher risk topic, or even just something that the mom or dad wants to be aware of. So I do like that and I think that's something we'll continue to lean into. Um, I mean, I'm a dad myself, uh, you know, I've got younger kids, three and then two and 10 weeks, but, uh, you know, I want the Tolen to be something that I would love for them to engage with. You know, more broadly, um, you know, I, you know, there, there have been some of these

• 2:21:36Speaker 06

  kind of, you know, physical toy kind of instanations. I think that's a tough uphill battle. There's a reason we kind of didn't go in that direction for adults or for kids, um, but maybe something cool will come out there. I certainly would be stoked if it did.

• 2:21:49Jordi Hays?

  Why is it so hard?

• 2:21:51Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, one, getting people to buy, one, I think, I think like the channels through which you get, uh, parents to buy like a physical good are just not things that many tech entrepreneurs are familiar with, right? And so, you know, people who are great at sort of making a kid-friendly agent is not gonna overlap with people who know how to distribute a plushie, right? So I think that's one challenge. Um, we even see this ourselves, right? When we are recruiting for the animation and the, the sort of creative talent that we need, right? You have a lot of people who don't know AI or skeptical of AI. So I think there's just kind of like a cultural miss there that hasn't closed yet.

• 2:22:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:22:25John Coogan?

  You gotta learn to equivocate. If you're getting questions from your kids that you can't answer, you know, how, how big does a Tyrannosaurus get? You gotta be like, that's a great question. Tyrannosaurus is very important and I'm glad you asked that. Let me take.

• 2:22:40Jordi Hays?

  I don't wanna, I want you to actually learn this yourself. I don't wanna give you the answer.

• 2:22:44John Coogan?

  You gotta, you, you gotta make them feel heard and then retreat to a talking point that you've rehearsed dozens of times with your media trainer.

• 2:22:51Speaker 06

  You're gonna do great when you run for office.

• 2:22:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Cause you can never, you never say, I don't know. You say, yes, and. You gotta learn improv. And then kid will be like, I don't want an AI agent to tell me the real answer. I wanna go on a journey.

• 2:23:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Take me on a journey.

• 2:23:07Speaker 06

  Fatherhood of.

• 2:23:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:09John Coogan?

  Anyway, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on the show in person. Jordi, do you have anything else?

• 2:23:13Jordi Hays?

  No, this is great, great to, uh, great to catch up.

• 2:23:15John Coogan?

  We'll hang out.

• 2:23:16Speaker 06

  Yes, for having me.

• 2:23:17John Coogan?

  Thank you for tuning into TBPN. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Hit the gong again.

• 2:23:23Jordi Hays?

  One more time to close out.

• 2:23:24John Coogan?

  Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com.

• 2:23:26Jordi Hays?

  We love you guys.

• 2:23:27John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:23:28Jordi Hays?

  See you tomorrow.