Harvey's Margin Whiplash, Human Powered Agents, McLaren Rebrand, Insects > Humans? | Ben Thompson, Gagan Biyani, Alex Ratner, Peter Kalogiannis, Daniel Petkevich

(01:32) - Harvey's Margin Whiplash (12:54) - Insects > Humans? (26:44) - Human Powered Agents (45:59) - McLaren Rebrand (50:27) - Toy Sales Growth Driven by Adults (56:12) - Ben Thompson, founder of the technology analysis publication Stratechery, discusses how AI agents, personal assistants, and future robotics can eliminate tedious real-world tasks. He also explores consumer behavior, arguing that people value relief from everyday friction but still enjoy activities like shopping, while Amazon’s logistics infrastructure gives it a durable advantage over Shopify and other competitors. (01:38:16) - Gagan Biyani, CEO of Horowitz Andreessen Academy, discusses the new for-profit San Francisco school for young builders, backed by $42 million in funding. He outlines its tuition-free founding class of 50 students, one-year immersive program beginning in fall 2027, and mission to prepare students for entrepreneurship or impactful roles at established companies. (01:45:21) - Alex Ratner discusses Snorkel AI’s $350 million funding round and the shift from high-volume training data to precise, specialized data targeting model weaknesses. The Snorkel AI co-founder argues that recursive self-improvement will continue to require human expertise, real-world input, and sophisticated combinations of people and AI. (01:53:24) - Peter Kalogiannis discusses Swarm Aero’s Gamera, a low-cost autonomous aircraft designed for long-range missions and large payloads. The co-founder and CEO explains the company’s integrated approach to aircraft manufacturing, scalable production, and swarm autonomy, with a focus on potential operations in the Pacific. (01:57:55) - Daniel Petkevich discusses his entrepreneurial career, including founding Fair Square Medicare and Trim, and his current car show, *Cars and Capitalists*. He also shares predictions about the Tesla Roadster and describes building an open-source quadruped robot dog. TBPN is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Public - https://public.com Cisco - https://www.cisco.com Console - https://www.console.com CrowdStrike - https://www.crowdstrike.com Figma - https://www.figma.com MongoDB - https://www.mongodb.com NYSE - https://www.nyse.com Railway - https://railway.com Shopify - https://www.shopify.com Codex - http://openAI.com/codex Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tbpn/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Tuesday, September 22nd, 2026. We're live from the TVPN Ultra down the Temple Technology, the Focus of Finance. Let me tell you about ramp.com. A little teaser. That's foreshadowing. You see me wear the yellow suit. I tell you about ramp. Time is running. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more. All in one place. Jordy, his hat game has evolved. He's now wearing the fedora with the Blackstone cap on top, which I assume can only mean one thing. It means that your top priority is safety in

• 0:35Jordi Hays?

  Financial markets.

• 0:36John Coogan?

  Financial markets and the financialization.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  No, but also my safety as well.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  Oh, you care about both.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  I care about.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  So you want to accelerate the AI build out safely? Yes. I thought it was. I thought it was. You're going to blend the two and you're like, look, I want, I want insane private credit deals, trillion dollars of, of capital to flow into the AI build out, but I wanted to do, do it safely.

• 0:58Jordi Hays?

  I want, I want to prioritize safety. I want to prioritize safety on the whole frontier.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  Safety around the models.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  The capital markets frontier?

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  Safety and financial.

• 1:08John Coogan?

  In the capital markets. Got it. Okay. Okay. I'm seeing, I'm seeing where you get there. Well, there's no safer place to participate in the capital markets than on the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. Stop making excuses.

• 1:29John Coogan?

  Ridiculous. Anyway, I got some, I got some Harvey takes. Should we run through those? You want to do Harvey first?

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  Let's, uh.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  People are, people are taking shots at Harvey. So it started with Samuel.

• 1:41Jordi Hays?

  I won't stand for it.

• 1:42John Coogan?

  I won't stand for it. No, I like Harvey. We, we, we've talked to some lawyers that use Harvey. Seems like a great product. We also had Legora on the, on the, on the show just last week. Had a good time with them. Seems like a very competitive space, but the, the headline that grabbed attention actually came from Bloomberg reporting, but then this, uh, this company called the Redline HQ actually did a pull quote on that, got the reporting, repurposed it. So you don't even have to go to Bloomberg. We'll talk about that later too. No one's going to moot news websites anymore, but they say, track changes. Harvey's gross margin fell from about 50% to negative 50% by June as agent token use spiked 20 fold on rented OpenAI and Anthropic models, Bloomberg reports. And so

• 2:26John Coogan?

  it seems really bad. Like you definitely don't want negative gross margins as a software company, as a tech company, like.

• 2:33Jordi Hays?

  As any company.

• 2:34John Coogan?

  As, really as any company, actually, you don't want to be selling a dollar for 50 cents. And that's exactly what they did in June, basically. That's what they were doing. They were selling tokens uh, at negative gross margins. Not good. Um, but there's way more details in the actual reporting. So you should go read the Bloomberg report, subscribe and actually read it because there's way more details. Uh, so the first thing is like costs did explode. Uh, they, but it was on the back of more product usage, which is good. They're growing ARR. We'll get into that. Uh, and token consumption increased 20x this year. So basically they are feeling the reasoning era, the agentic era, uh, one, one job, one, one process in Harvey is generating a lot more token.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  Had seat based pricing.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  And then AI got a lot better. So every seat was just using it way more. Very simple.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  But it's not, it's not just using it more. It's that you're, the lawyer might be saying the exact same thing as they did a year ago. They might say, review this, but instead of like one-shotting it with no reasoning, they went to reasoning, which generated way more tokens. And then they went to agents. So they're like, okay, it's actually going to fan out, look at everything across your firm, all the other records that you have, all your different policies and MD files, like everything that you have is going to be worked through this agent. And so you're generating way more tokens. So that created negative gross margins. But the good news is that they're already back to positive gross margins, which is in the Bloomberg article. Kind of criminal not to repurpose that because it really makes it look like they are running at negative gross margins.

• 4:04John Coogan?

  They had a negative 50% gross margin in June, uh, but they are back to positive gross margins. Uh, they changed their model usage, of course. There's a whole bunch of models that are cheaper and better for certain things. And they actually, uh, fine tuned an open weight model. So they did post-training on an open weight model and they're calling it Harvey tenant. And there's some interesting details there. I want to debate with you on like the value of that, where that goes.

• 4:29Jordi Hays?

  First, Gabe, one of the founders of Harvey responded.

• 4:32John Coogan?

  Oh, he did. I was, he had.

• 4:34Jordi Hays?

  The hardest thing about building Harvey is doing what's best for our customers despite immense pressure to do what's easy. The easy thing would have been to force our customers into consumption pricing before they were ready and serve them worse models to protect our margins. We chose to help our customers transition on a timeline that works for them and give them the best models in the meantime, even though it hurt our margins. This meant optimizing our product through routing, harness improvements and post-training. So we could serve frontier intelligence at an affordable price. It also meant building the infrastructure for customers to monitor and manage spend. Usage dashboards per matter, cost attribution, spend caps and ROI reporting. As a result, we improved our gross margins from negative 50% to positive in a single quarter.

• 5:17Jordi Hays?

  Despite usage doubling month over month and continuing to serve the best models. Our philosophy is simple. Do what's best for our customers, even when it's painful, hurts our margin or draws criticism from competitors X and the press. We believe the most important part of building a company is earning and keeping your customers trust. You do that by doing the hard thing for them, even when it costs you. Um, bunch of great points in here, uh, even, even outside of the, the Bloomberg piece and the subsequent coverage. Uh, Max from Legora was going pretty hard, saying it doesn't make sense.

• 5:49John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, doesn't make sense to, to train your own models because the public, basically like publicly available frontier models are, are dropping in cost and the, and the quality is increasing. So you're just sort of like wasting your own. And again, like that's a bet that he's making. Harvey is going to make another bet.

• 6:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:10Jordi Hays?

  Probably some mixture of both is going to be the right approach.

• 6:13John Coogan?

  There's another interesting, uh, sort of like how, how bad is this situation? Uh, just comp, which is, so they had negative 50% gross margins in June. Uh, they're at a $400 million run rate, uh, for ARR, I suppose. And so that's 33 million a month. And so negative 50% margins means they lost $16 million, but they've raised like 500 million. So in terms of like burn, it's not super cause for crisis, in my opinion. And, uh, and what's interesting is that even through June, maybe they did the Sequoia deal that valued the company at 15.5 uh, before that happened, uh, because it was announced September 9th.

• 6:57John Coogan?

  But I have to imagine that, that the deal probably got done with at least some insight into those negative gross margins in June. What do you think?

• 7:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I would assume so, but, but the main thing is like every, every, every application layer company has like gone through a moment like this, even if, even if it was for like a single day.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 7:18Jordi Hays?

  So it matters how quickly you can respond and adjust.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, so where do they, where do they need to get to? Like, what is the standard for the legal technology industry? There's some comps here. Uh, e-discovery provider Disco, public company, 75% gap gross margins. Like it is a software tool that when you're going into discovery, you need to connect with a bunch of data. Okay. We got a whole bunch of tech messages, a whole bunch of emails. Let's put them in a system so we can review them. Sort of, you know, normal SAS. I'm sure there's a bunch of AI involved now, but that business is running at 75% gross margins. Uh, Thomson Reuters has legal professionals segment of software that's running at almost 50% adjusted EBITDA margins.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  So like true, true net profit. Um, so that's, that's sort of the way they want to be. Also pure, pure play law firms have really high margins as well. Um, hard to comp them to businesses because they pay out the, to the partnership. Um, but, uh, PricewaterhouseCoopers reports net profit margins around 41% for the top 10 firms. It's lower for firms 10 to nine, 10 to 100 or something like that, but still, uh, lots of health in the legal industry broadly. Obviously everyone knows lawyers make money. Uh, that's, that shouldn't be surprising. Um, and, uh, yeah, tokens are getting cheaper by the day. Uh, there's a bunch of model launches. Opus 5.5 launched today. Grok 4.7 was yesterday.

• 8:42John Coogan?

  Uh, and Grok 4.7, no one was, even Elon was like, okay, we're, we're not jumping straight to the frontier with this. It's going to be a couple more iterations, but we're excited with the progress. But there was one benchmark that really jumped out and it was actually the Harvey legal agent benchmark, which is interesting. So I don't know how insanely good that benchmark is. It might be, you know, you could, you could benchmark against it, but the interesting thing about that particular benchmark was that it was a legal task benchmark based on cost. And so Grok 4.7 is particularly cheap for the type of legal work that at the very least Harvey wants to do. So you could see them, uh, funneling more token spend towards, uh, XAI and Grok. Do you have something?

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  You wanted to give it up for big law?

• 9:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:29Jordi Hays?

  The chat wants to give it up for big law. They're the real winners here.

• 9:34Jordi Hays?

  Additionally, GPT-6 Sol and Luna are starting to roll out.

• 9:40John Coogan?

  Fun.

• 9:40Jordi Hays?

  So we'll look out for announcements there soon.

• 9:43John Coogan?

  There were some cool demos. I saw one Opus 5.5.

• 9:47Jordi Hays?

  Chad says the combination, the hat jacket combination isn't working. I'll try to adjust. Try to adjust. Hopefully that's better.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  Flawless. Yeah, thank you.

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for flagging.

• 10:00John Coogan?

  Huge upgrade. Very funny. Yeah, I saw a cool, I saw a cool demo where someone sketched out on a piece of paper, sort of a tree bouquet in Opus 5.5, took that image into simulation and created like a virtual version of it. The AI is, continues to impress in terms of translation of things. Oh, your kid drew a, you know, some crazy mythical creature, turn it into a story, turn it into a movie, turn it into a video game, whatever, whatever format you want. If you want to, if you want to read a 2,000-page novel based on Call

• 10:42John Coogan?

  of Duty: Modern Warfare 4, like you can probably do that now. So you can have your content in any specific, specific format you want. It seems to be where, where the AI continues to impress. Anyway, let me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents, whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows. Codex helps you move projects forward from start to finish. I've been having a lot of fun generating AI videos with Codex.

• 11:10Jordi Hays?

  Should we pull up your latest masterpiece?

• 11:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, the literally me compilation. It burns up the internet and vibe reels all of the time. But now, if you see those literally me characters and you're like, I am Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler. I am, I forget who else is there. Patrick Bateman in American Psycho. You can put yourself in the movie. There's Inception. We got Geordi in there. That's Drive. I think that's Heat.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  Heat.

• 11:39John Coogan?

  Mad Men. Can we call them out? I think that's Fight Club. You got Joker. You got Taxi Driver. You got Nightcrawler. No Country For Old Men. Social Network.

• 11:48Jordi Hays?

  Godfather.

• 11:49John Coogan?

  Godfather. Back to Joker. I forget that one. Sashank, maybe? That one's collateral. Then Blade Runner. Blade Runner again, I think. Yeah. Some of these, some of the renders are really, really good. That one, like your face doesn't quite fit on Leo's head, but that one's really good. That one works pretty well. This one's a little awkward. The Joker, it's really just Joaquin Phoenix's face. Didn't actually swap you in at all. Codex is even like, it didn't work. And I was like, do it anyway. I don't care. It's fine. It's going to be on screen for two seconds. That one's good.

• 12:21Jordi Hays?

  John is really my human agent. He just, he's sort of like an ambient, always-on agent. That's what I'm saying. I don't even have to tell you. You just predict my needs, right? You'll send me something like this. Everyone should have a, everyone should have a John in their life.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  Everyone should. Everyone should. But yeah, fun, fun, powerful tool. Still got 500 bucks locked away in Higgs field in the wrong section. Can't do anything with it. So maybe just give away the account or something. I don't know. Anyway, what matters more? People or insects?

• 13:00Jordi Hays?

  Tough call, John. We should, we should get into maybe one side of it first.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  Steel man.

• 13:07Jordi Hays?

  Before we form an opinion.

• 13:08John Coogan?

  Okay. The human side? You want to steel man the human side?

• 13:11Jordi Hays?

  Look, and I'll just, I'll just say that we're coming to you live.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  We're coming to you. We had a rough morning with the, with the mosquitoes. We actually had to, we had to, we had to DoorDash one of those bug bite treatment thing, the heat, whatever. What do you call them, Tyler? I think it's like insect bite healer. That's what it's listed as. It did work because I, yes, Sebastian says I'm famously, famously pro mosquito.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 13:43Jordi Hays?

  But a mosquito did bite me on the face today and, and a bunch more times. So we ended up, I ended up capitulating and having to get one of these. But I don't like using these. I don't like using these. I, it's funny because I'm, I'm, I, I can't stand EA's and I think they're weird freaks. And I don't think they should be anywhere near public policy or anything like that. But the one thing that I can agree on with Ben, this guy writing this post, that, that insects are more important than humans is I don't think anyone should, I don't think we should harm the insects, right? So I think humans are more important, but that doesn't mean we, you gotta like take them all out, you know? Just go somewhere else, right?

• 14:27John Coogan?

  You, you would take sort of, you would be altruistic towards the, towards the insects.

• 14:30Jordi Hays?

  Ellie says mosquitoes are terrorists of the air. They really are.

• 14:35John Coogan?

  You would, you, you want to be altruistic towards the mosquitoes? You want to be effective in your altruism when it comes to mosquitoes? You don't want to.

• 14:43Jordi Hays?

  No, I want them, I want to them effectively to be nowhere near me.

• 14:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 14:49Jordi Hays?

  But I don't want to harm them.

• 14:51John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 14:52Jordi Hays?

  But, but let's get into this.

• 14:54John Coogan?

  Let's get into the Bentham's Bulldog post. First, let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now fit and modify your Figma files with design system context. So, an effective altruist who writes under the name Bentham's Bulldog went viral over the weekend for an essay titled "Insects Matter More Than People in the Aggregate", arguing that the combined welfare of insects outweighs that of humanity. His basic argument is one of scale. Insects are so numerous that even if their capacity for suffering is only a tiny fraction of ours, their total suffering could still dwarf human suffering. It's almost just a thought experiment. There's so many other directions you could make.

• 15:37John Coogan?

  Why not go pound for pound? Maybe cows are the most important because there's a lot of cows and they weigh a lot. There's probably more aggregate pounds of cow than humans. Maybe they matter more than humans in the aggregate, right? Or fur, like the amount of fur on all the monkeys in the world is more than all the fur on all the humans in the world. And so maybe monkeys matter more. I don't know. It's a, it's a, it's completely arbitrary where people draw these lines. But he estimates that for every, for every second of human life, insects collectively spend roughly 270,000 seconds dying, about 75 hours, and notes that more insects die in a single second than the total number of humans who

• 16:20John Coogan?

  have ever lived. Wow, that's a crazy stat. I mean, the guy pulled some cool numbers together. This is interesting. This is fun fact territory. A large part of the essay turns on whether insects can, insects can experience pain. Bentham's Bulldog argues that they can even weakly. If they can even weakly, their suffering should count morally just as ours does. What species you are is just totally irrelevant to whether it's bad for you to feel terrible pain. Using what he describes as a conservative assumption that insects experience pain at just 1/10,000 the intensity that humans do, he concludes that the sheer number of insects would still produce vastly more suffering in the aggregate.

• 17:00John Coogan?

  He ultimately argues that insects may experience more suffering in a single day than humans have throughout all history. Now, is there, is there a piece on this where this is the view of the, of this community with the relative, like, are they looking forward to how a world might interact with like a godlike machine, superintelligence and humans? So the idea is like, we got to stand up for the insects now because we are the insects of the future? So we want them to make the same calculus?

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  I think that's certainly like where the thought experiment goes.

• 17:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, right? And so, and so the, this feels almost like bait or like a trap where it's like, if you are the type of person that jumps on this and says, and says, no, I disagree. Like insects don't matter more than people in aggregate, then you're setting yourself up for like the dunk that's, okay, well now there are a quadrillion superintelligences that can all feel pain in some abstract way. And so they're more valuable incentive. Now you're the insect. And so your previous argument can be used against you to advocate for your own eradication. And so it's like, stand up for the insects now, lest you be discarded in the, in the robotic future.

• 18:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:18John Coogan?

  I don't know. The, the reactions to this were rough. People did not like this argument at all.

• 18:26Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's, it's just the timing is funny because there's so much tension building around the sort of EA rationalist movements with.

• 18:34John Coogan?

  Which is super fractured. People don't realize how fractured it is.

• 18:37Jordi Hays?

  But it's sort of boiling up to the sort of national

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:40Jordi Hays?

  level in a way that it hasn't before.

• 18:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:43Jordi Hays?

  And so during the midst of that broader conversation to come in and being like, yeah, insects actually matter more than people.

• 18:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  In the aggregate.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  What were some of the reactions? Dumer said, if you truly believe that a bug's life is worth more than a human life, you will immediately feed yourself to bugs. Do it right now. If you don't do this, you are a fraud, a liar, a poser. Andre.

• 19:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think it's actually important for people to read the, before you go and comment on this article, watch A Bug's Life.

• 19:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  At half speed.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  Half speed.

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, watch the whole movie at half speed. You're a movie guy, but.

• 19:19John Coogan?

  I think we coexist.

• 19:20Jordi Hays?

  Maybe you're not a fan of watching movies at a half speed. It's not really how the.

• 19:23John Coogan?

  I'm really a half speed guy.

• 19:24Jordi Hays?

  But half speed is a great, is a great sort of tool to have in the tool chest.

• 19:29John Coogan?

  I like.

• 19:29Jordi Hays?

  When you wanna deeply comprehend.

• 19:31John Coogan?

  Two X speed, three D glasses with the two different, two different movies interlace so I can get one movie in one eye, another movie in the other eye, one audiobook here, one podcast here.

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  Duo.

• 19:44John Coogan?

  While I'm sleeping. Yeah.

• 19:45Jordi Hays?

  With the duo.

• 19:45John Coogan?

  Exactly. Max brain rot. Um, no, I, I, I think this is an odd. I mean, the, the, the fracturing of EA really like leads to a really, really wide range of, of outcomes that get sort of lumped together. Everything from the, the pace, the frontier essay to this, these are clearly very, very different pieces of communication and yet they get sort of lumped together. Uh, and, uh, it must be, uh, full employment if you're in the public relations department over there.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I, I think the shrimp, uh, shrimp welfare stuff.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Makes more sense to this because like, I'm not really sure what, like after reading this and say, I agree, like, what do I, what are the next steps? Like, we're not like really factory farming insects.

• 20:31John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Through pesticides or something.

• 20:33Jordi Hays?

  Speak for yourself, brother.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. The shrimp, the shrimp welfare.

• 20:37Jordi Hays?

  Got some big announcements coming soon.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Like what percent of, of these, uh, like 600 billion insect debt, uh, insect deaths per second are.

• 20:45John Coogan?

  Preventable.

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Preventable.

• 20:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  Where like with the shrimp, uh, you know, you can say like, okay.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  Change the farming practice or just don't eat the shrimp.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think that's why maybe this was less, uh, impactful. I don't know.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it's all, it's all a continuum to like, until you get to like the veganism, like the animals who you can pet, you know, should, should be able to live full lives. Uh, this is sort of the most abstracted version of that, but, um, yeah, I don't know. It's odd. Uh, yeah. Very, very, but I mean, I guess it's a good, good opportunity to go viral if you're looking for some.

• 21:18Jordi Hays?

  More importantly, update on TBPN's Road to Christmas.

• 21:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 21:23Jordi Hays?

  We're down to just 93 days. 93 days. Lot to think about, a lot of moves to make, and, uh, we couldn't be more excited.

• 21:34John Coogan?

  Start counting it down. Yeah. I was trying to think of a, uh, a realistic AI doom scenario. Like everyone's like, oh, I can't imagine it. And so I, I actually mapped out one that, uh, maybe I could take you guys through. Uh, I wrote a little script here.

• 21:50Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 21:51John Coogan?

  Called the old way. Um, so, uh, you know, fades in, starts in the TBN Ultra Dome. Me, you, Tyler, we're all doing the show. All of a sudden, all of the phones in the Ultra Dome light up. Emergency alert, unknown biological event. Shelter immediately. Outside alarms begin to sound across Los Angeles. A strange, strange haze starts pouring through vents and drifting across the streets outside. I see a cloud approaching the Ultra Dome entrance. First thing I do, bioweapon attack. This is what you gotta do. Boom. Right there. It's not going in your mouth. You're good. Second step, pull out your gun. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Start blasting whoever's responsible.

• 22:31John Coogan?

  You're just firing wildly. Once you got the situation a little stabilized, then we gotta start, we gotta figure out what's going on. So I go over to Tyler. And I say, look, we gotta hack into the super intelligence. We gotta figure out what is going on with this, with this bioweapon. And he's like, sure. Like, yeah, let's hack into it. Like, I'll open up Codex. What do you want me to prompt? I'm like, no, the AI has gone rogue. We have to do this the old way. He's like, okay, I'll, I'll, I'll open Claude code. Like, what do you want me to prompt? I'm like, no, the old way. He's like, okay, I got cursor open. Like, what are we doing here? I'm like, no, Tyler, we have to go back to the old way. So, okay, I got GitHub Copilot fired up. I'm like, no, Tyler, you can't use any AI at all. He's like, okay.

• 23:15John Coogan?

  Just let me know what code you wanna write and I'll look it up on Stack Overflow. And I'm like, no, the internet has been contaminated, Tyler. We can't use anything. We have to code the old way. We have to do it by hand. And Tyler's like, I, I can't, I, I don't know.

• 23:29Jordi Hays?

  We don't know how.

• 23:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. I don't remember anything. I can't write any code. So, so what do we do next? We gotta get George Hots. He's the only one who can help in this scenario. So we go.

• 23:40Jordi Hays?

  Cause he's the only one that remembers how.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  He remembers how to code. He's got local models stored. He's got his own hardware. So we go get George Hots. And then like, okay, George, hack into the super intelligence. Tell us what's going on with this bioweapon. And, uh, why aren't we affected? Like, we, we, we've been walking around. We seem to be fine. Everyone else is turning into a zombie. What's going on? So he, he locks in, he writes some code, he hacks in, figures it out. He says, Jordy, tell me about your diet. And you're like, well, I, I just eat heroin exclusively. And he's like, yeah, my analysis shows that your body has never had a toxin in it. And so you are immune to the bioweapon. It doesn't affect you at all. And I'm like, but what, how do you explain me?

• 24:24John Coogan?

  I only eat heroin once a day. And he's like, well, John, my analysis indicates that you might've had the original Four Loko.

• 24:32John Coogan?

  Drink the original Four Loko?

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  In, in large quantities?

• 24:35John Coogan?

  And I says, yeah, I was daily driving in college. Why? He's like, your body consumes so much original Four Loko. It's now essentially pure toxins. So the bioweapon sees it as a hostile environment. It doesn't even try to infect you. So you are immune. So we're both, so we're both immune. Uh, but the bioweapon is still wreaking havoc on America. So we gotta get to the bottom of it. So we're gonna need some muscle. So we go get Sam Sulek. So we go get Sam Sulek. And we're like, let's go. We gotta go to the data center. We gotta break in, shut this thing down. That's the only option. So we get in the Cadillac Blackwing. We jump it off a ramp, slam into the data center, pull out the gun, start blasting the GPUs. We're just firing everywhere.

• 25:14John Coogan?

  Finally, finally, after we've shot 90% of the data center, it's just bullets everywhere. We get the K everywhere. Finally, a humanoid robot emerges. It's Mecha Hitler. We gotta fight him. We gotta fight him. We're shooting, we're shooting. The bullets are just, are just bouncing right off. They're just bouncing right off. Uh, they're, we're, we're, we're getting beat up. We're trying to fist fight it. Sam Sulek's doing nothing. It's not working. Uh, and then at the last second, duh, duh, duh, duh, John Cena breaks through the roof. Slams down the humanoid robot, rips his head off, and humanity wins. So that's kind of like a concrete example of like how AI doom, how, uh, you know, runaway rogue.

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  Just one scenario.

• 25:58John Coogan?

  That's one possible scenario. I put it.

• 26:00Jordi Hays?

  Cause everyone's asking for.

• 26:01John Coogan?

  I put it at 10%. That's the way it plays out.

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:03John Coogan?

  That, that, that's kind of where I'm at right now.

• 26:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:05John Coogan?

  That's how I'm thinking about it.

• 26:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. 10% if we don't do anything.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:10Jordi Hays?

  Around, around safety.

• 26:11John Coogan?

  Well, we, well, that's what we'd have to do. We'd have to.

• 26:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's.

• 26:14John Coogan?

  Like this, if the bioweapon comes.

• 26:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:17John Coogan?

  Cover up and eat a lot of heroin and drink a lot of original Four Loko.

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  Round of applause. I didn't know that was coming and I didn't know where it was going.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  I'm just trying to like think more concretely about, uh, about how these things will play out and be prepared. You gotta, you gotta be prepared for what, for what happens. You also have to get on console.com. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Um, let's, let's see what's next. Uh, Meta, the AI agent company Muse, they're putting humans in there. Meta is testing human concierge for its new personal agent Muse. Uh, Meta has been testing human concierge for its new personal AI assistant. This is on Bloomberg, which entails having human contractors quietly handle some of the phone calls placed by the digital agent.

• 27:07John Coogan?

  You gotta use this to order Amazon. Like, Amazon's like, no, no, no, we're gonna block your browser. Well, did you block everyone's browser? How's that gonna play out? I was thinking about like, at some point, if I write a really, really bespoke, like, a, like basically a CLI, like a really bespoke weird CLI, like I vibe coded, but I use like sort of odd techniques. Like, I'm like, okay, use computer use and open up Opera or, you know, Mozilla and, and click around and add some randomness and do this. And it's like, and I basically create a CLI that wraps an agent where it's like, it runs on my home wifi. So Amazon, and I'm like, and I just do this. I, I don't productize it.

• 27:50John Coogan?

  So Amazon like can't really detect it. Do you think I could potentially stay in front of their, stay in front of their battle forever and then puppeteer it from other agents?

• 28:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, I just asked ChatGPT, can you order Amazon over the phone? Because I would think that at that scale, there would be.

• 28:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:08Jordi Hays?

  At least one way to do it.

• 28:09John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 28:09Jordi Hays?

  It seems like you can only use their customer service number to help with existing orders.

• 28:14John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  So one thing is you could order a bunch of the wrong thing, like a hundred of the wrong thing, a hundred, like, you know, bug treatment.

• 28:22John Coogan?

  Order everything and then have your agent refund everything but the thing you.

• 28:27Jordi Hays?

  No, have, have your Muse agent.

• 28:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:29Jordi Hays?

  Have a human via Muse call Amazon.

• 28:32John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 28:33Jordi Hays?

  And say, hey, I actually got the wrong thing here. Can you swap it with this other thing?

• 28:37John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 28:37Jordi Hays?

  And just do that as many times as necessary.

• 28:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 28:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, to get the right order.

• 28:41John Coogan?

  Maybe have one order that's just always open where you're just adding and, and removing.

• 28:46Jordi Hays?

  They have to be completed orders. Cause you have to have made a mistake for, to call the customer.

• 28:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. You can charge me, but just add it to the order. I don't know. We're gonna get, and so it's gonna be a weird battle. Ben Thompson was writing about it today. It was, it was pretty, uh, pretty good. Amazon, I mean, his, his whole framing is like, Amazon is like the strongest in the AI era of the hyperscalers because they own logistics, infrastructure, the final step, the real world. And so, uh, he anticipates that they will hold their ground for a very long time and not give in, uh, where, and, and that's basically what they did with OpenAI where, uh, OpenAI had the instant checkout process. They invited everyone to be a part of it.

• 29:23Jordi Hays?

  Amazon was like, no, no, thanks. But we'll give you tens of billions of dollars.

• 29:29John Coogan?

  And, but, but interestingly, yeah. So now, now the, the result is that Amazon is vending in their ads into ChatGPT, uh, to, to clo- close the purchase there. Uh, Toby Lookie at Shopify partnered with Muse and announced that they are integrating. But the interesting thing is like, where's the value capture layer? And it only works with Shop Pay. And so it's a lever to get merchants to go on to Shop Pay, which, which, um, uh, Shopify will still make money off of. But for merchants, a lot of people are worried about the, uh, implementation that happened with Walmart where ChatGPT integrated with Walmart.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  And the end result was that, uh, conversion rate was one third of what it was in the app and on the core website. And that carts were smaller because people were just going and saying like, I just need a roll of paper towels. Just send me that. Whereas when people are like, oh, I need to do my shopping. I need soap and paper towels and, and whatever else, I'll build.

• 30:29Jordi Hays?

  Paper towel holder that's made by a company that's over, over 50 years old.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Um, so.

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  No, so the, the crazy thing is, so, so now, um, uh, Vinod was on the show yesterday talking about, uh,

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  Wait, WaJo.

• 30:47John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:48Jordi Hays?

  Which is an AI foe. They have a new agent that I believe is human supported.

• 30:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in that some of the stuff is done by AI.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 30:57Jordi Hays?

  And some of the stuff, if necessary, can be escalated to a human.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 31:01Jordi Hays?

  Now you have Meta off, at least testing, exploring, having.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, a human in the loop on some of these things.

• 31:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 31:11Jordi Hays?

  And my big question is like, why, why? Why, like, voice models are getting pretty good. It feels completely unsustainable for Meta to roll out a product to billions of people where users might just be like, like, if I had like something I could text and say, hey, call this person, call that person.

• 31:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:33Jordi Hays?

  I'd probably be using it.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  I think there's a ton of, there's a ton of value. At first, the Muse install base is small right now, so it's not that crazy. They have the ability to stand up huge offices, whether it's through Scale AI and that team that came over or through their, you know, all the things that they've done over the past two decades. Um, the other thing is that Muse specifically will not train on your data that you put into Muse. And so that, this wasn't like a huge announcement or anything, but you could see people being like, ah, I don't know if I want to use this AI agent that's going to be, uh, that's going to be using my personal information, even if they're running like the PII redactor, uh, putting all of that, uh, might be a little bit off putting.

• 32:20John Coogan?

  So Meta's not getting that data, but if they have a human in the loop, the human who does the task that's just beyond what the model's capable of, they're also generating training data because they can probably train on that. And so it's like, the model, the model by default can, um, I don't know, like summarize your, summarize your calendar, right? And give you a, give you a briefing on what's going on in your calendar. It knows how to integrate and the model's capable of that. Muse one point, Spark one point three is capable of that. All the models are capable of that, but what can't they do? They might not be fully ready to, to go and have a complicated conversation with someone if they're ordering flowers over the phone or something. And, uh, and, and so like the current models might fall down.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  So you need more data to solve that. And so you put the humans in the loop and then that's your extra training data for the next leg up. And then you just keep repeating that. So I would view this human in the loop thing more as them doing data collection and, and, you know, creating more training data for them than a permanent solution to the product problems. Also, I, I, I just, I don't think the time on site for these apps is, is actually that high. I, I think there is like an excitement when you jump on, you do a bunch of stuff, but then with all these AI tools, like there's a reason why OpenAI comps to like weekly active users, because there's plenty of days where people are like, I went to the beach and I didn't touch AI at all. Like, I didn't do any work.

• 33:48John Coogan?

  Uh, there's some, there's some feedback on, uh, on, uh, Alex Wang's post talking about like, it'll help you with your goals. And, and I think Katie, uh, Nortopoulos was saying like, a lot of people just don't have goals, like they just want to chill. And this is also the Ben Thompson thing of like, consumers want to be entertained. Like people that go to the beach, they'll still scroll Instagram. Are they really going to be doing anything with any agent, no matter how, no matter how powerful it is? Like, there are plenty of people that have staffs of EAs and personal assistants and they don't do anything on a weekend because they want to chill and they don't want to think about it.

• 34:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, one thing's for certain.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  It's over or we're back.

• 34:21Jordi Hays?

  Professor Zhang is vindicated. Yesterday, we watched.

• 34:24John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:25Jordi Hays?

  We watched a video where he said, I guarantee that there are humans.

• 34:31John Coogan?

  In the loop.

• 34:32Jordi Hays?

  Behind the chat apps that you use, manipulating the information. And, uh, he is correct, at least in the short term.

• 34:41John Coogan?

  For today, uh, Citrini is thinking about the knock on effects of all these personal agents. Uh, he says, there's no way any of us can predict the impact AI will have on companies, sectors of consumer behavior, which has been for history, for all of history until now, human behavior, but to claim that it won't have an impact and simply brush it off lacks both humility and creativity. Tactics that worked when consumer behavior was dictated by human psychology will fall by the wayside. Um, and those that fail to adapt will be left behind. Every day from now on, we will see new examples of areas where friction was profitable, becoming cost centers for companies that don't react in a timely enough manner. Today you might realize just how many flight credits, loyalty points or promotional offers you've never used that will end up utilized by agents. What impact will that have?

• 35:26John Coogan?

  Tomorrow you might see something that makes you ask, how much money health insurers make simply because people won't sit on the phone for five hours trying to get coverage approved unless it's a massive expense or life or death matter? What about your savings account? The money could be in a money market fund. Uh, you haven't bothered to move it. How much in net interest income is made because of that friction? Yeah, people have money like locked away in Venmo, like a couple bucks here. And if it's frictionless and actually free to move stuff around, you get a lot different.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. This was like the David Deutsch anecdote about how he fixes dishwasher. He was like about to buy a new one and then it just told him that he could.

• 36:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like ghost GDP.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:03John Coogan?

  We'll need new.

• 36:03Speaker 02

  So it doesn't like show up anywhere, but it there is like.

• 36:05John Coogan?

  We'll need a new metric. No, uh, but, but, I mean, so I don't see a very many of these.

• 36:11Jordi Hays?

  adjusted GDP. That's how we get to 10% GDP growth.

• 36:15John Coogan?

  Plus AI. E equals MC squared plus AI. Um, yeah, this all, this was all kicked off because, uh, flight was delayed, delayed seven hours. Uh, someone asked Muse to file a compensation. Five minutes later, they had a $250 credit in their Delta account. That's something that you'd normally have to hop on the phone for. It was a lot of cumbersomeness. So like people on that team were clearly model, modeling like, well, 1% of people will ask for it and 50% of people will be able to be like, no, we can't really do it. And so we, we think this will only be like a dollar per flight. Well, now it might be $10 per flight, but of course the end result is that they will put AI on the other side and, uh, the two AI agents will just negotiate and find out a, a resolution, I imagine.

• 36:58John Coogan?

  Uh, anyway, oh, Citrini has a little prediction here. Uh, look at the, look at the follow up to this post. Uh, they put a, uh, what is that, an RSA hash or something? That's cool. So they made some prediction there, uh, that they will see. Uh, anyway.

• 37:14Jordi Hays?

  That's one of the greatest hacks. When you want to take a victory lap in the future, but you're not willing to actually.

• 37:19John Coogan?

  Post both. You post like, I think the stock market will go up by a hundred percent in the next 10 years. And then I think the stock market will go down in the next 10 years. And then you just delete the one that wasn't accurate and then you're, then you're good. Uh, Nikesh Rora chimed in on the knife fight between Amazon and Muse. There will be a bigger battle. This will be a bigger battle than anyone anticipates. It's only a matter of time before there is an Apple and Google version of Muse and possibly TikTok in addition to the Frontier LLM agents, maybe a commerce agent from Amazon. That's sort of my prediction. I think, I think Instinct might land with Amazon potentially, although they do have Rufus, but, um, uh, you can.

• 37:57Jordi Hays?

  And Tyler is a Rufus power user.

• 37:59John Coogan?

  Yep, Rufus is, is good. You don't want to talk, talk down on Rufus, but Instinct is clearly like tapped into something really special with like the energy and the support that they have in the community that they've built, but there are a lot of like little, little rough edges that need to get sanded off and like, that's the domain of Amazon, in my opinion. Like Amazon like is like the, you know, the trains run on time and it's a pretty efficient company. So, uh, every app that's a service marketplace or commerce app will need to existentially decide to open APIs for consumer agents to interact. Smaller players have no choice. Ad revenues are more than transaction fees. Either the consumer benefits or distribution aggregators will demand a higher fee transaction. There's an interesting stat from the Stratechery post about Amazon.

• 38:42John Coogan?

  Uh, they, the net income for Amazon e-commerce was like 36 billion and the ad revenue was exactly twice that. So the business is unprofitable without advertising and they put advertising everywhere. So it's like a very interesting dynamic where you can see the motivation. There's $68 billion. You, you flag that number. Uh, it's a huge.

• 39:02Jordi Hays?

  Over 70 in the last 12 months.

• 39:04John Coogan?

  Over 70 billion. So, uh, significant pool of revenue and profit that they will be protecting for sure. Uh, I don't, I know I don't want an agent for each app, which does sound very annoying. Uh, super agent could go and use all the other agents. Maybe that's the future. I don't know. Yeah. How, this is, this goes back to like roll your own agent that then puppeteers your, your Muse, which has good integration to, to Facebook and then your, your Amazon Rufus. Uh, yeah, I wonder if you could order via Rufus because you'd probably reverse that API, but you'd still get banned. You're just chatting with, it just Muse is chatting with Rufus to order you paper towels. No, I said over 50 years old, basically.

• 39:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you had an idea yesterday, a potential monetization channel, uh, for, or strategy for agents, which is like sponsored agentic flows, which I thought was really good. Like imagine you and your friends, they all have agents and then.

• 40:06John Coogan?

  My example was Spider-Man.

• 40:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's basically like it drops in and it says like, hey, I got five tickets to Spider-Man.

• 40:13John Coogan?

  Says, I know from your Instagram history that you're a Tom Holland fan or you like the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Uh, Spider-Man Brand New Day is coming out in two weeks. I can get you tickets Friday night. There's nothing on your calendar. I can get a Saturday matinee. I know you've been sending reels to these five friends. Do you want to plan a trip to the movies? And I will book it and message everyone, set up a calendar invite, text everyone and say thumbs up if you want in, thumbs down if you're busy, and I will put together a group outing. And that does feel like something where Spider-Man would, uh, the Brand New Day marketing team

• 40:55John Coogan?

  would put dollars behind advertising that to get people.

• 40:59Jordi Hays?

  The question is how much, uh, how, will consumers tolerate that at all? Remember how pissed off people were about the BMW Spider-Man ad flow?

• 41:08John Coogan?

  They will if it's good. And I think the long tail, small business advertising will, will work. Like, uh, especially if it's like, I, I, it's a little bit tricky to figure out how like, when you're in these agentic workflows, there's often like multiple beneficiaries. So Spider-Man benefits, but also Fandango might benefit, but also like a particular theater might benefit if you go to, you know, Lowe's versus AMC, or I don't know, they might be the same company now, but, um, so, so it's interesting to see like where the sponsorship would break down, but, uh, but you could totally imagine like you have a wedding coming up. You've been seeing ads for this tie company. You've also been seeing ads for this sock company.

• 41:53John Coogan?

  Do you want me to put together like a whole new outfit for the welcome dinner that might look really good? And those companies pay.

• 42:01John Coogan?

  Unclear like the like where all that goes, but the scale of the platform I think is what unlocks it because you know Sean Frank at Ridge Wallet is going to be like, I'm going to test that. And there's going to be millions of other small businesses that are going to test something or other. Anyway, let's see. Products like Muse and Instinct are going to saturate customer service teams. Again, we talked about that. Not a huge problem because you flip it around and the customer service team is using AI. So I think the equilibrium is just a lot more AI on both sides. Hopefully smoother transactions. Signal is talking about Walmart here. If only Walmart was actually competent enough to realize the agentic commerce opportunity ahead

• 42:46John Coogan?

  of them. And it's interesting with the backdrop of the Vibe acquisition. Walmart seems to be going after the same pool of revenue that Amazon went after with the ad market scale up and the ad business, when in fact, if they didn't have that, they would be sort of counterpositioned to lean a little bit more into agentic commerce because they'd say, look, we don't have an ads business to lose. So let's be the default option for agents that buy anything. There's also an interesting knock on effect, which is like with Shopify going so deep into Muse and agentic commerce and agent checkout, I wonder if we will wind up seeing a different

• 43:28John Coogan?

  type of Shopify merchant emerge. Because Shopify merchants, it's been a lot of clothing, it's been a lot of like D to C, single product, like a shoe, a single shoe company. But I wonder if you will see someone who's like, yeah, I sell a lot of stuff on Amazon. I have a factory that makes paper towel holders, but I also got paper towels. I also got socks, T-shirts. I got sort of basics. And I wonder if someone will go and try and win on Shopify and set up the actual, the actual economic structure to be able to provide the experience because consumers will clearly want to be able to go to agents and say, order me a new pair of socks and just have it done. Right? And so if they say, sorry, can't do it on Amazon, they're going to figure out another place to do it. The water will flow into the cracks.

• 44:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 44:13John Coogan?

  And so.

• 44:14Jordi Hays?

  No, it's a big, big opportunity for Shopify to be able to lean in here.

• 44:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I, but I wonder if.

• 44:19Jordi Hays?

  But the issue is still the real world, physical fulfillment, having a bunch of different products in.

• 44:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, but the, but the, the individual Shopify merchants like solve that on a, on a diffuse basis. So in theory, if it's like, okay, I want next day shipping, there's five Amazon merchants that sell, or there's five Shopify merchants that sell socks. You want socks tomorrow. There's only one of them that has a distribution center in your town and can actually get them to you tomorrow. We'll just go with that one. So you could maybe piecemeal together an Amazon like experience, but that's the, that's the bet. That's the knife fight. Like that's what we're going to figure out. Either Amazon wins and their, and their moat remains a moat, or the, the war for the open web like continues to, to

• 45:06John Coogan?

  battle it out. That's what Alex Wang is hoping for. He says, once more unto the breach, dear friends, the new open web, Meta, Stripe, and Shopify. The hilarious thing here, of course, is like Meta is like solely responsible for like sort of killing the open web in the former era. Like it's why like all the news sites are not, you know, initially, why everything went closed. Like you can't just Google search for stuff on Instagram. Everything's closed off. It's not truly open. But it's like, it's like the meta flags in the front because we'll be the aggregate.

• 45:41Jordi Hays?

  Open, open web for thee, but not for me.

• 45:43John Coogan?

  Everything below the fold will be the open web. But at the same time, it is just fun to watch the battleships go off to, to war and see how it, see how it penses out. Because there is, there is a scenario where the, where the equilibrium solution is actually a more open web. We will see. We will see. What is going on with McLaren? We got to talk about McLaren before we get any further because they rebranded.

• 46:09Jordi Hays?

  So brutal.

• 46:11John Coogan?

  And there's a new logo. They went from an angled M that looked very fast, very bold logo, and now it looks like Miss Laren.

• 46:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's interesting. They, they seem to be trying to reposition as, as a luxury brand versus a motorsports brand. Like the, when, when, when I think of McLaren, I think of like fast, sporty cars, period. I think of racing.

• 46:42John Coogan?

  Racing, F1.

• 46:42Jordi Hays?

  I love, I love the old logo.

• 46:44John Coogan?

  Coolest lineage too.

• 46:45Jordi Hays?

  I love the old.

• 46:46John Coogan?

  They've never made like a mass market car.

• 46:48Jordi Hays?

  I love the old Mark. I, I, it's one of those things. You hate to be the guy that when a brand, when a company rebrands, you're like, ah, it's brutal. Because oftentimes you revisit it in six months and you're like, okay, it wasn't that bad.

• 47:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was good.

• 47:04Jordi Hays?

  But this feels like bad. And, but the business has not been performing, right? The business has been in, in a, in a rough spot. They don't have the, they don't have like the Cayenne that they can sell.

• 47:19John Coogan?

  They're doing an SUV. That's.

• 47:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's coming. But I'm, but I'm saying like.

• 47:23John Coogan?

  Be an Urus competitor.

• 47:23Jordi Hays?

  To date, they don't have like a mid-market car.

• 47:26John Coogan?

  No.

• 47:26Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure their Urus competitor will do well. But still, part of what enables the Urus is like the Q5 and the Q3, right?

• 47:35John Coogan?

  And the core selling economy.

• 47:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Can't forget about that.

• 47:38John Coogan?

  Which is still growing, so.

• 47:40Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, pretty, pretty brutal rebrand. But, but again, it's a, yeah, it's a tough one just because it was always, like, I always just thought the brand.

• 47:51John Coogan?

  The steel man.

• 47:52Jordi Hays?

  Their brand was off.

• 47:53John Coogan?

  The steel man here is that, is that they are taking a number of bets that seem to speak to interesting, potentially valuable pieces of the market. So you have the SUV. The Urus is incredibly, incredibly well selling. So that could just be a cash cow business for them. Then you have the MCL, their manual supercar. And that could speak more to the enthusiast, right? Because enthusiasts want manuals. Porsche's been delivering manuals. Ferrari is starting to put them back in. And other brands are starting to like get

• 48:36John Coogan?

  that memo that it's not enough to compete on speed. EVs have you beat there. Don't, they haven't gone full EV. I haven't seen a lot of McLaren signaling that they're going to remove the combustion engines. So that seems like they are positioned for the future. That's certainly a trend is, is don't go full EV. Don't kill all the gas cars. And then they also have the W1. So they're staying in the hypercar world. And the W1 lineage, I think it clarifies what McLaren's been doing because when they were doing the Senna and the Speedtail, there were just like too many special cars. And the problem was that

• 49:16John Coogan?

  you, you were like, okay, Senna, Speedtail, where do we sit? But F1, P1, W1, very clear lineage. You know, it's the best. You know, if it's that, it's, it's going to be the craziest thing they have. And so if they can create some differentiation between the true hypercars that they create, the supercars that now come in manual, the SUV for the more everyday daily driver, you have, you have the trappings of, of at least satisfying the demand that exists in the market.

• 49:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 49:46John Coogan?

  You do have to go create more, more demand. You got to win in F1. But.

• 49:51Jordi Hays?

  And the, and the new Mark's not coming out of nowhere. On the website, they say, before McLaren became a mark recognized around the world, it was a family name painted above a service station in Remora, New Zealand. Those original letterforms inspired our new wordmark, reimagined for a new era. So they're going back in time. McLaren was started by a guy from New Zealand.

• 50:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:15Jordi Hays?

  But it was started in the UK.

• 50:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:17Jordi Hays?

  But the, the founder was, had been born in, in New Zealand. So.

• 50:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 50:22Jordi Hays?

  Anyways.

• 50:23John Coogan?

  Well, on a related note, there's some data that might be bullish for the supercar, hypercar market here. Toy sales among adult only households have outpaced households with children for toy sales, growing 16% through June. So when I think of adults buying toys, I think about Myers Manks. I think about dune buggies. I think about dirt bikes. I think about supercars, boats, yachts, wakeboarding. These are the toys that adults buy. And, and it's not surprising to me that, that there is a trend among adults buying, buying toys. I mean, these are, these are just fun toys. And so it's the fact that it grew 16% in

• 51:05John Coogan?

  June, sign that, you know, adults are having fun. They're buying toys. And, and bullish for the supercar community, right? Don't you think?

• 51:16Jordi Hays?

  Judging by the picture here, you might be. Might be incorrect.

• 51:22John Coogan?

  Wait, they're talking about like children's toys. Interesting. Yeah, I, I think that's a little bit more nuanced. I would go for, you know, gaming rigs, racing simulators. These are the toys that adults should be buying, I think. I think that's.

• 51:36Jordi Hays?

  I did, I did, uh, I was a teenager when I realized that the Lego Ferrari that I had built years, you know, probably when I was like 10, had a market value. Like I was shocked.

• 51:50John Coogan?

  Oh, the Lego did?

• 51:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because I, I, I had some Lego, like really complicated Lego Ferrari.

• 51:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:56Jordi Hays?

  That I probably built when I was around 10.

• 51:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:58Jordi Hays?

  And then as a teenager, I'm, you know, cash strapped teenager, I was like, wait, someone will give me a hundred dollars for this?

• 52:03John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 52:04Jordi Hays?

  Sold it, of course. I'm not super sentimental about that kind of thing. Um, but I think that trend has just been building. And now there's people that just buy every new Lego that's released and just sit on it.

• 52:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it's. I, I saw a, uh, I, I was looking with my son on an old Lego set that I played with as a kid. And I was like, I can actually go and buy the exact same Lego set, uh, and share that with him because I thought that one was really cool. But it has gone way up in value. I was like, I should have just held on to it because it's like a hundred bucks now. Um.

• 52:37Jordi Hays?

  Um, yeah, people are.

• 52:39John Coogan?

  So I built a Ferrari Lego as well, uh, when I was younger.

• 52:43Jordi Hays?

  Probably not as complicated.

• 52:44John Coogan?

  Probably less complicated, but, um, but I, uh, but I remember being like, oh, this is like a sick Ferrari. Like maybe one day I'll get a real one. And then, and then I like finally got older, learned more about it. I was like, it's an F40. So I was like, I'm probably never getting one of these, but maybe, maybe. I don't know what F40s are doing.

• 53:02Jordi Hays?

  Derek Thompson says today's adults increasingly behave like the children they never have. Feels like a rude thing to say about people and yet toy sales among adult only households have now outpaced households with children for toy sales. That is so crazy. Uh, and, and, uh, black, black pilling and sad. And it's over. It is so over. Uh, I don't know, you know.

• 53:28John Coogan?

  You're literally me. You're doing the literally me thing.

• 53:32Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think one, I think one factor here is like children, in my experience, don't care about the cost of a toy.

• 53:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:40Jordi Hays?

  And so a $5 toy will bring just as much joy to a child as the $500 toy. And so the adults are like, I have to get the $500 Lego set. So I think that, I think it's like for every toy that a parent buys their child, it could be like a dollar, $5, $10, $5.

• 53:58John Coogan?

  I went, I, so I went, I went toy shopping with my son and, and, uh, and we, and he finds this like Hot Wheels thing. And it's like a book that has like some Hot Wheels inside and stuff, and it has like the craziest, most electric.

• 54:12Jordi Hays?

  Look at this, look at this comment from Winsome. I never had a quote unquote Lego set. I just had assorted Lego bricks. I used to fill the bath with water and make oil rigs, which used to annoy my mom. This guy was hitting the oil rig.

• 54:26John Coogan?

  Hit the oil rig.

• 54:27Jordi Hays?

  Hit the oil rig.

• 54:29John Coogan?

  No, on that point, I, so I, I, I went to the store. Uh, my son finds this, uh, this, this Hot Wheels thing. It's like kind of structured like a book and it has some Hot Wheels cars in there. But on the cover of this like box is like the craziest, most elaborate, like loop de loop thing. And so he gets super excited about it. And I'm like, okay, I gotta like, check this out. And it, and it turns out that what you're actually buying is like a book with some stories and then just like a big sheet of like paper, like a poster that has that illustrated on it. And you can imagine the loop de loop and the actual track. And I was like, dude, like, let me clue you in this. This isn't the real thing. Like we can go get the real thing with the actual loop de loops and stuff.

• 55:11John Coogan?

  Like let's find the real toy. And he's like, no, this is the one I want. This is the one I want. And I'm like.

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  The power of my own imagination, dad.

• 55:17John Coogan?

  But like, but like, I'm like, I'm like, this is going to end poorly because he's going to be dissatisfied when he actually opens it up. Opens it up. He's like, this is the greatest thing ever. It's like, my imagination is running wild. I would never want the alternative. And so your point is 100% accurate. Um, anyway.

• 55:35Jordi Hays?

  Toys, the, the best toy company in the world, period.

• 55:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:40Jordi Hays?

  Is this company Play Forever. Have you seen any of these things?

• 55:43John Coogan?

  No, no, no.

• 55:44Jordi Hays?

  They're the most well-built kids toys in the world. So well-built. Yeah, we should.

• 55:50John Coogan?

  Let's get the founder on. Where's Nick?

• 55:52Jordi Hays?

  Uh, they are.

• 55:53John Coogan?

  Play Forever.

• 55:54Jordi Hays?

  They are absolutely incredible.

• 55:57John Coogan?

  Guest? Okay. Okay. Yeah. Let's bring in our, let's bring in our.

• 56:00Jordi Hays?

  As much as I want to keep talking about toys as an adult, I would rather have a surprise guest.

• 56:06John Coogan?

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

• 56:13Jordi Hays?

  We have a surprise guest.

• 56:14John Coogan?

  Surprise guest.

• 56:15Jordi Hays?

  Our favorite guest, Ben Thompson.

• 56:17John Coogan?

  Oh, wow. I didn't know that.

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  We actually were able to fully.

• 56:21Ben Thompson?

  I'll leave people to say your favorite guest.

• 56:23Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we were able to fully surprise.

• 56:25John Coogan?

  It's a very, very short list.

• 56:26Jordi Hays?

  We were able to fully surprise John. It was, it was me coordinating with Ben. So this is like, uh, this is a wonderful surprise.

• 56:33John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 56:34Ben Thompson?

  Well, I mean, you were going on and on about toys and I was sitting here trying to decide who has the most ridiculous jacket on today. I think it's down to a tie.

• 56:41John Coogan?

  Hey, I sit on the ramp side. I gotta wear the ramp suit. This is my ramp suit.

• 56:47Jordi Hays?

  I've been wearing this as we're trying to get to the bottom of this whole AI safety debate. I'm trying to embody the, the movement.

• 56:55John Coogan?

  In the mind.

• 56:56Ben Thompson?

  How cold is it there? I don't know. I thought, you guys are in LA.

• 56:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're in LA. It's warm.

• 57:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, we don't have any windows.

• 57:02Ben Thompson?

  Great insight into the booking process. Uh, Nick's been doing great work trying to get me on. I kind of was committed. Oh, we could do it then, do it then. He's like, oh, about Friday. And I'm like, I, I don't know what's going on on Friday. So I'm like, can I just go on now?

• 57:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:14Ben Thompson?

  And then I will stop feeling guilty about it. And somehow here I am. So this.

• 57:19John Coogan?

  You can just crash in whenever you want. That's fine. Um, what, what is, what is top of mind? What is the number one story to talk about right now? Why today?

• 57:27Ben Thompson?

  Oh, I could talk about toys for sure. I mean, I think the adult version of toys is we are sort of back in. I was actually kind of annoyed. Toby Lukey posted the picture of his, of his server. I was talking about my rack, uh, on Sharp Tech. Lots of compliments. Many people told me a nice rack. It was great. Um, although I didn't actually post any pictures of it.

• 57:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 57:47Jordi Hays?

  But, uh. How did they know?

• 57:49John Coogan?

  On, on, on that.

• 57:50Ben Thompson?

  Oh, because I could not shut up about it.

• 57:52John Coogan?

  Home organization? Should I be doing this? I don't think I've ever organized my home. I've never, I don't know how many nails and hammers I have. What are you doing?

• 58:00Ben Thompson?

  Oh, no, it's out of control. Uh, no. So the, one of the insights that, so I've had a non-traditional career, fairly non-traditional life. And so there's lots of things that I've experienced that I'm never quite sure how relevant is to most people. So one of them, for example, was like working from home. Uh, I worked for Automattic way back when, when I moved to Taiwan. And it was, they've always, they were always sort of distributed and developed lots of processes and ways to work around that that were really interesting. I wrote about it when like the COVID thing hit because all these companies had processes around assuming people were in the office. And then they tried to retrofit it with Zoom and it was a total disaster. It kind of still is a total disaster as, as far as I can see.

• 58:43Ben Thompson?

  Uh, but there is also like personal things about working from home. Like they're, working from home is a, uh, significant upheaval or can be to a marriage, just as an example. Like what I'm writing, I need to be in the zone, no interruptions, nothing bothering me. And that just doesn't compute when you're like within your house. Like you're in the house, why can't things be done? And, uh, so the importance of like either establishing that or getting an outside office for writing or whatever it might be. Uh, that, that was an example where I actually lived what everyone experienced like a decade later. There's other stuff like, uh.

• 59:23Jordi Hays?

  Wait, what's the solution there? Because my issue with, with working from home, at least with, with young kids, is that kids are going to run into the office all hours of the day when you're working. And how you can't explain to a two-year-old like, hey, like my computer is more important than, than you right now, right?

• 59:43Ben Thompson?

  No, the answer, the answer, if you can swing it, the answer if you can swing it is to get out of the house. Like, like it's just, and it, because it's kind of like you're, uh, you're exporting, externalizing your problem onto your family and it's not their job. And so it's almost like you owe it to your family to get out of the house. If you need to not be bothered, that's your problem. So figure it out. Like it, otherwise they're like, they're not getting paid to not bother me on this Zoom call. They're, their expectation of I'm their dad. I'm around. I can ask him questions. So obviously that's not always viable. Probably a locked door, I imagine would go a long way, but that ultimately was, you know, I had to figure that out. Sort of the hard way. And I'm like, oh, everyone had to figure this out eventually. In other words, like just

• 1:00:30Ben Thompson?

  being like, living online. Like I was, I lived abroad for so long. A lot of my friends, connections were online. That was very weird at one time. Now it's very normal. But another thing is this whole like personal assistant sort of area.

• 1:00:45John Coogan?

  Right.

• 1:00:45Ben Thompson?

  Yeah. And I'm hesitant to write about this one because it sounds kind of, kind of douchey. Like, let me tell you about my experience with my personal assistant.

• 1:00:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:52Ben Thompson?

  Um, but the reality is that it's, most people have no idea how to use a personal assistant. It took me years to figure out how to use a personal assistant, even though I needed one just to run like, like the first few years of shekery. I was doing all the writing, all the taxes, all the customer support, doing everything and basically dying. And so I had to get someone on sort of out of desperation to help me do all the, the sort of back office stuff, even just to respond to email. But the email one is a great example. You talk to people about like Muse or whatever, and they're like, you put your email in there? And it's like.

• 1:01:28Ben Thompson?

  How can you have a personal assistant who does not have access to your email? It's just not, it's not possible, but it speaks to the, where the challenges about these things. A personal assistant is so unbelievably useful. And what's super thrilling and exciting about stuff like Muse or the other ones. I've actually like been working on building my own version of this for, for in our company is I know how useful it is because I have a decades worth of practice having

• 1:01:54Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but here's, here's the thing.

• 1:01:55Ben Thompson?

  Neat version of a physical.

• 1:01:56Jordi Hays?

  Here's the thing. So a lot of the, a lot of the things that you were describing, like the email is one thing, but like, you know, managing inbound comms and taxes, a lot of those things sound like kind of roles within a company to some degree. Like I've had EAs and personal assistants and the only, and I actually don't have one right now. The only thing that I miss is having somebody embodied in the real world that can go and do tasks. And so this new wave of personal agents is like, actually not that exciting for me because I never got that much.

• 1:02:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of, a lot of assistants graduate, like Nick used to like set up car washes for us and stuff. And now he's like full time booking, working on that side of the business, like

• 1:02:39Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, the idea of like, I, I never, I never felt like, oh, this person sends calendar invites for me and, and, and will reschedule. That to me was never that helpful. Like I can just, there's a lot of, there's so much, the internet has reduced so much friction that to me, the final boss of, of agents is like, give me a humanoid in the real world that can just do tasks. Like organizing the garage, like that would be incredibly valuable.

• 1:03:03Ben Thompson?

  That's exactly where I was going. So like, I feel like I would, I, I under, like, I get the personal assistant mania because actually if you have a personal assistant that works and you learn how to use one, it is tremendously freeing. So when you get to the home improvement and organizing the house, what that is, is just me living in the future by virtue of paying someone to be the humanoid robot that hopefully we'll all have in our houses in the long run. And so Jordy, I think you're, that's the exact right segue.

• 1:03:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Cause even, even, even think about like, I, I, as I'll order a bunch of stuff online in a given year. I am like the best consumer for different retailers because I just won't return something. Like I physically cannot get myself to find the time to go to, even if it's like print out this thing, go there, drop it off, whatever. It's like, I just won't do it. Right? It's just like, you got me. I bought a product that didn't work out. And that was like the number one thing. When I have it, when I have an EA, it's like, I'm doing returns all the time. It's like this thing is like 1% not, not what I want it to be.

• 1:04:04Ben Thompson?

  Arguably the single core use case for my assistant here is package processing. Like actually bringing stuff in, opening it up, like the, it was embarrassing the amount of packages I would get that were just not opened. It's like, there, because this is like the final boss for e-commerce, like bring me on drone delivery, please. I bought this for a reason. And even if you deliver it in a few hours or the next day, like the pressing of the reason to buy it passed. And then it doesn't come up until you actually need it a few months later and then you can't find it because the bot knows what happened. So this is like, you're, you're honing in on it. Like actually open the boxes, actually make me say what this is for, where it goes. Actually process returns. And so I don't have to deal with that crap.

• 1:04:49Ben Thompson?

  But the, but then also to the home inventory point, like this is the, I felt so dumb writing about this, but it's like

• 1:04:58Ben Thompson?

  It's so funny. Yeah. Well, people, it, people absolutely loved it. Like, like for a painting, like would, would like mildly viral. But the idea was, so I moved back to America from Taiwan, if we've been in Taiwan for 20 years.

• 1:05:13Ben Thompson?

  Not recommended. Like I hadn't moved in a long time, moving across country, but the worst thing was actually stuff showed up in three tranches. Because I kept thinking, oh, I should only take this. I can leave everything behind. And I go back, oh, actually I should have brought this. What I should have done is just move the whole house. Like it would have been much easier, but anyhow, so just a general disaster all the way around. But stuff shows up and I need to put it away.

• 1:05:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:39Ben Thompson?

  I can't ask someone else to put it away because if they put it away, I won't know where anything is. So there is this huge, this, this sort of gap in, I had someone able to put it away. But I wouldn't have known where it was if they put it away. That's the home inventory app. They put it away and because it's their job, they actually catalog everything and where it is. And now I could just ask, I could do it all by voice, say, hey, bot, where's this? And it says, oh, in the garage on shelf number three and blah, blah, blah. Like it's all, all labeled and stuff like that. Now, to be clear, it's silly to talk about this because you should not do this.

• 1:06:14Ben Thompson?

  What do you do? Task your spouse to go in and label everything. But no, that is not going to fly. I'm not trying to do like encourage divorces here. This works because I actually am paying someone to do it.

• 1:06:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:24Ben Thompson?

  It will work in 10 years when we have a robot that you can actually tell them to, to go do it. And, uh, and it's amazing. Number one, just about this future with assistants. But then number two, the, there's just so much, the amount of software to be made is so astronomically large. Like Strategery as a whole, and we have Passport, like the, the, the software behind Strategery. And then either Start Media, and so we have editors and like, we, even like my assistant has already, he just keeps spinning up like random little apps that are really small. I'd host them on my server. I'll be on tail scale. These aren't meant for public consumption.

• 1:07:04Ben Thompson?

  But they fill like this little gap in our workflows that was handled by group chats. And like, that just would sort of accumulate, you're scrolling back and finding something. And it's such a crazy mental unlock that is hard to almost explain, even the technical people who theoretically know you can make software, but all software we've thought about has been heavy. Because it has to be heavy because it's shipped to, it's put on the internet. Anyone can download it. It's to handle use cases, to handle security, it's to handle all these sorts of things. And actually, you know, there's just little software shaped holes in everyone's life that could now be filled fairly trivially.

• 1:07:49Ben Thompson?

  It's, it's amazing.

• 1:07:50Jordi Hays?

  And where this is all going, which is the part that I'm actually, I'm actually most excited about is all those same types of like mini applications, but with robotics. Like we had this, this, uh, this guy on the show that was using Astra to paint. And it was like getting better and better with each cycle. And it would kind of make like something that was

• 1:08:09Ben Thompson?

  Oh, did you see the guy who just tweeted about they got Astra to drive?

• 1:08:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a whole other thing.

• 1:08:15Ben Thompson?

  They had to tell it was in a sandbox.

• 1:08:18John Coogan?

  Paul Horner, my self-driving predictions for the mainstream automakers at all. We've talked to automakers who are, who are like, when, when will, when will like mass market, your average OEM have full self-driving it? Like the current test level and they'll be like 2040.

• 1:08:34Jordi Hays?

  Okay. But here's the little mini robot that I want so badly.

• 1:08:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:08:37Jordi Hays?

  I get, everyone gets all this mail, right? And most of it is just total junk, garbage, ads. It's hard to actually ever stop the flow of junk. I just assume it's always going to come. But like one out of 10 things is mildly important and I want to basically

• 1:08:50Ben Thompson?

  And one out of 100 is like, you're going to lose your house if you don't see it.

• 1:08:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I don't want the physical copy, but I want like some amount of information there that I can pass to someone else. You know, a part of, a part of my life, whatever it is, an accountant or something like that.

• 1:09:04Jordi Hays?

  And, and I think that the mail process, the home mail processing robot, where you just drop the mail and it like slices. Yeah. It like slices everything open. It takes a picture and then it routes it to whoever needs the information or it just runs. It's like, hey, you got a

• 1:09:17John Coogan?

  It's a mailbox. It just replaces your mailbox.

• 1:09:19Jordi Hays?

  You got a parking ticket. Great. I went and paid the parking ticket. Or like you have this bill from the local utility and they don't do online auto pay.

• 1:09:27John Coogan?

  How has there not been an IOT mailbox company yet?

• 1:09:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, because you actually need a robot to like slice open the mail. It's like a little surgical center.

• 1:09:35Ben Thompson?

  This very simple robot, it's like, it's like, what's the, uh, there's some like ex KCD comic or something where like the person asked for this sounding like unbelievably difficult thing. It's like, oh yeah, I can do that in five minutes. And then they ask for something very trivial. It's like, ah, that's going to take two, two years in a team.

• 1:09:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:53Jordi Hays?

  There's so many, there's so many other There's so many other things like I

• 1:09:57John Coogan?

  Put it on a map in, in the cloud. And it's like, that'll be, that'll be like a day of engineering. It's like, and I need you to tell me which bird it is. And it's like, that will be 10 years of machine learning.

• 1:10:07Jordi Hays?

  But here's the thing. So there's so many of these other use cases. There's like the, the mini Roomba that's just for the garage. But then it needs to be emptied. So you need another robot that will go and empty it. And then you need the robot that cleans the windows. And that one again is going to need some support. And so I think that, I think the, the end state is you have some type of humanoid that can just go and, and generally do human-like things, but it's sort of maintaining a fleet of these other silly little robots that just have these sort of niche use cases, like cleaning the windows, or a lot of people will have like a pool cleaner robot that'll just kind of like, you know, trawl around in the pool. But then again, you need to change the filter at some point. And so these things end up not being maintained properly and then they don't get, get used.

• 1:10:50Jordi Hays?

  And so there's a long way to go, but to me, the, all the exciting stuff is actually in the real world. Like I don't, there's, it's so funny because I have, um, uh, I have ChatGPT connected to my email. And sometimes it will suggest like things that it can do that are like useful. Like, hey, like review this and sign this. But like yesterday I logged in and, and the only suggestion was like, it was trying to set up a loop to, to like, give me one way I can improve my surfing each week. And it was like totally validating like your thing, which is like consumers just want to be entertained, right? And so it's like trying, trying to do something where it's like, well, I'm sort of passively, that's like probably 20% of my mental energy is going towards already going. And I like doing that. I don't need you to like try to automate that.

• 1:11:36Ben Thompson?

  The, I mean, the thing that's interesting though about this is the real, for sure, the, the shortcut to doing this right now is to hire somebody. And again, it sounds douchey to talk about because I pay someone to take my garbage out and process my mail. But you know, as I tried to articulate, I'm a massive believer. I think it's a common trope to say this, but like this sort of I've been thinking about this since I was little, like, don't obsess about your weaknesses, like how bad I am at processing mail. Double down on your strengths and then pay someone to take care of your weaknesses. That is like generally my life philosophy. And this is certainly the case here, but what has been super striking and it actually has been arguably like the most profound experience I've had with AI was, so the home assistant obviously depended on this.

• 1:12:21Ben Thompson?

  The or the home inventory app depended on assistant actually doing all the work and he could see the utility, appreciated it from his perspective as helped me take care of the house. It was like, nice to actually get organized as opposed to like me just saying, oh, just leave it in the corner. We're going to get to it eventually. And it'd been a year and we hadn't gotten to it eventually. But when we actually, when I actually built an agent or a bot, I call it Gecko bot. There's this massive like metallic Gecko structure that I bought the Madison art fair at random. I had a big spot on my wall. So it's now called, we named it after it. That's the icon called Gecko bot. And one thing, there was like little stuff, like I take, keep very odd hours.

• 1:13:04Ben Thompson?

  Like I'm up in the middle of the night. I sleep at weird times. Like I was so addicted to Taiwan, living a day ahead that I've just transported here and I just stay up all night and like

• 1:13:14Jordi Hays?

  You manipulated time.

• 1:13:15Ben Thompson?

  Dead life. Yeah. It's not healthy. It's not good at all, but uh, or, but on the weekend I'm doing something like, oh, this needs to be done. This needs to be done. I try to be like a good boss and I feel felt bad texting on the weekend and like, and the great thing about this assistant, why he's a great assistant is he gets stuff done. He's the, there are some people that they like, they get something they want to do it. And so I know me texting him on off hours and over the weekend is just like making his skin crawl because he wants to take care of it right now. And then it's like, write it down and take care of it and all that. Like he doesn't want to do any of that. So just this simple concept of I tell the bot, do this, take a picture, do this, take a picture, just like as things are accumulating, he shows up Monday morning, it sends a briefing, here's all the stuff that Ben won over the weekend, things like this, ongoing projects.

• 1:14:01Ben Thompson?

  His joy and like relief was unbelievable. It was unbelievable. Like he like literally everyone in our life, like he was telling them, I was also kind of egging him out a bit, but it was, it was so weird, not weird. It was awesome that he, you could, he is like, this made his life so tangibly better. And like, he could just, the first time I'm like, oh, can, can you ask Gecko bot to do this? I'm like, you ask Gecko bot and they like ask the request or whatever. And then started just like creating all these use cases. I'm actually so grateful when I dropped a new, uh, reset, uh, which I haven't gotten yet, but I burned like, I

• 1:14:43Ben Thompson?

  ended up rebuilding the whole thing just to make it much, like much safer in terms of tracking reminders, tracking like, remind me to do this in June. Like, no, we actually need to have a system to make sure that gets logged properly. He's deterministic, all those sorts of things. But it's meaningful to see him happier, his life tangibly better. He's like, this is the greatest week of work of my life. It's been amazing. Like the first week he was using it. And it's like, I just made you a little bot and, but it's another software shaped hole. It was this little communication fall through where he wants to do his job well. I don't want to take advantage of his predilection to do his job well and let him enjoy time with his family.

• 1:15:26Ben Thompson?

  And I couldn't make something to solve that. And it's, it's awesome. And it's to have this feeling and realization at the same time, everyone's like, this is going to kill you. We're all going to die. It's just been, it's been pretty interesting in like a weird sort of like mind space. Just to like, be like, seeing people around me who aren't technical, like, just like, this is amazing. This is making my life better. And then everyone else is like, get ready to die.

• 1:15:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's cognitive dissonance.

• 1:16:00Jordi Hays?

  Okay. I want to talk about another dynamic with, with EA's personal agents, whatever form factor. So right now

• 1:16:10John Coogan?

  You're talking about executive assistants.

• 1:16:12Jordi Hays?

  I'm talking about real life executives. Something that, yeah, yeah, yeah. Not, not, I don't want to get in, I don't, I'm not trying to turn this into a freak show.

• 1:16:22Jordi Hays?

  But uh,

• 1:16:23Ben Thompson?

  That's the reason I didn't want to come on last week.

• 1:16:26John Coogan?

  The doom week.

• 1:16:28Jordi Hays?

  No. So, so something that actual executive assistants have done for a long time is coordinate with other people that have executive assistants and say like, hey, our, our, our bosses want to do this thing. Let's figure out the right time to do it. And that workflow is like amazing because you're letting, it is a game of telephone, but it often ends up being more efficient because there's sort of complicated lives on other side. Now we're applying that to personal agent software where instinct, and I'm sure Muse will roll this out, has these sort of like trusted networks products where instead of texting your buddy, hey, do you want to go see a movie or do you want to have a beer? Your, your personal agent reaches out to their personal agent says, hey, do you want to have a beer?

• 1:17:11Jordi Hays?

  Do you want to go see this basketball game? And they sort of like coordinate.

• 1:17:16Jordi Hays?

  And I'm trying to square the two things because on one side, when it's, when software is doing it, it's still feel, it feels like silly. And yet in my real life, it's just like this amazing experience. It takes so much off my plate and it's so much better.

• 1:17:28Ben Thompson?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:29Jordi Hays?

  So do you think it's going to translate? Uh, or is there some like disconnect there?

• 1:17:35Ben Thompson?

  I, this is hard for me to answer. Like I have no intention of, even now, we have like personal assistants that take care of your digital stuff and check your email. I am not getting rid of the assistant that I've had for a decade. And there's, and I think the real challenge with AI in general, my, my personal, what is AGI rule is AI that actually learns. And right now, what makes these agents possible is this like facsimile of learning where they're just writing stuff down all the time. And that has lots of challenges. Like it's been super interesting to like develop this version of the bot that I'm using internally. Because like you're learning way more about like context management and way more about like actual like data structures and what stuff to dispose of and what stuff to keep track of and all these sorts of things.

• 1:18:20Ben Thompson?

  And it's a, it's just a real challenging problem that is based on the fact that these models are frozen in a moment of time and everything is layered on top of them, trying to sort of overcome that challenge. Given that I'm going to stick with humans, I think for now. Now, the whole bit here though, is if you didn't have a personal assistant, you now have this. And I think there's going to be a real learning process in figuring out how that's done. This is going to be one of the big challenges. So I'm obviously out there, been out there frequently saying people don't care about being productive. Like people, they, employee, employers care about their employees being productive.

• 1:19:02Ben Thompson?

  Once you're off the job, you just want to go home and watch TikTok or whatever it might be. The way to frame this, and this is going to be the challenge for meta, I think with Muse and anyone else in this space is we're not helping you be more productive. We're helping you get rid of annoying crap in your life. Like that, it's, it needs to be framed more as a pain relief. As opposed to this aspirational, I'm going to be so productive and get things done. That's number one. Yeah. And so it's like, I think there's a messaging problem, but number two,

• 1:19:37Ben Thompson?

  the way I think this is going to land is through like Instagram reels or through TikTok is people like actually showing stuff they do. And people say, oh, that's amazing. That would make my life so much easier. And it really is a show, not tell sort of technology. And it's kind of interesting because the meta has been very, I think, arguably to their detriment, very disciplined about not putting their thumb, I think on the feed by and large. Like, but if ever they were going to, like, if you want to know, is this actually really what they see as their future? If your reels start having a lot of, wow, this is amazing. What you could do with Muse sort of thing.

• 1:20:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, they have done that with the Meta Ray Bans though. They were massively

• 1:20:27John Coogan?

  That's ad inventory. That's not

• 1:20:28Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no. I'm talking about, they are more likely to show creators that say, that make the content with the Meta Ray Bans.

• 1:20:34Ben Thompson?

  I didn't know that actually.

• 1:20:35Jordi Hays?

  They, they serve, they serve.

• 1:20:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. If you film in the Meta Ray Bans and it's like a POV video, people do like prank videos with them.

• 1:20:41Jordi Hays?

  So they did, they did put their

• 1:20:43John Coogan?

  Just funny.

• 1:20:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Some of them are funny. Some of them are funny, but it, but it, but it very clearly was like an engagement hack where like, if you would film it.

• 1:20:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:20:51Jordi Hays?

  With the Meta Ray Bans, like you were going to get more reach.

• 1:20:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. And people have speculated about this, whereas like, if you edit it in edits, their version of cap cut, you get more reach, but that's always been debated.

• 1:21:01Jordi Hays?

  No, you do get higher quality. That's, that's a hack. Like one of the ways.

• 1:21:06Ben Thompson?

  Yeah. It's not like compressed as much or whatever.

• 1:21:08John Coogan?

  It's less compressed. And so that might be better.

• 1:21:10Jordi Hays?

  Because it's transferring like on their own.

• 1:21:12John Coogan?

  Away. Interesting. Interesting.

• 1:21:13Jordi Hays?

  So there's a bunch of different things. I mean, their advantage here is, is

• 1:21:17John Coogan?

  Enormous.

• 1:21:17Jordi Hays?

  Enormous.

• 1:21:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. Can we do Shopify versus Amazon?

• 1:21:22Jordi Hays?

  Wait, I had one question because we're getting into Ben's. You know, he's embarrassed to talk about all his staff. He's embarrassed to talk about his staff.

• 1:21:30John Coogan?

  King in the castle, king in the castle.

• 1:21:33Jordi Hays?

  No, but have you ever had a

• 1:21:34Ben Thompson?

  I grew up a small town, Midwestern kid. I'm here back in the Midwest. Like it, it, I feel you putting it that way.

• 1:21:42Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no, I know, I know. But, but I have a question for you. Have you ever, have you ever had a, like a dedicated driver?

• 1:21:50Ben Thompson?

  No, uh, but I've very, that's very common in Taiwan. Um, so the, so I'm definitely familiar with drivers. It is a massive life hack, particularly in, in like a big city where you don't have to worry about parking, uh, makes a huge difference. I honestly have just always loved having

• 1:22:08Ben Thompson?

  My own car for one. I like driving even in Taiwan, which is that bad. But the reality is by the time I got in a financial position where that was a viable outcome, I'd never win anywhere. So I was just always at all doing whatever.

• 1:22:22Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so the but the reason the reason I ask is because we now we we now have self-driving. Like, ask a Tesla owner, how much time is your car driving itself? It's like over over ninety percent fully solved.

• 1:22:33Ben Thompson?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:33Jordi Hays?

  And last year, there were really fires, really bad fires where I lived. And it turned my commute from a one-hour each-way commute to a two-hour-a-day commute. And we were starting, or two hours each way, so four hours a day in the car out of nowhere. And so I was like, this is not really going to work if we're going to do. I'm spending four hours in traffic and three hours doing the show. And I'm also have, you know, young kids, all this stuff. So I got a driver and the funny thing was, everything that I loved about it was not actually the driving itself. It was having, again, someone in the real world that could just do things. It was like the parking the car when you get there. It was running in to grab food.

• 1:23:10Ben Thompson?

  Run and pick this up.

• 1:23:11Jordi Hays?

  It was like dry cleaning. It was like, it was all that stuff. And so the funny thing is, like, again, we've solved the

• 1:23:16Ben Thompson?

  Task.

• 1:23:17Jordi Hays?

  Solve like the task, but not the job, right?

• 1:23:20Ben Thompson?

  Yep.

• 1:23:20Jordi Hays?

  In that, like, you really want the Waymo or the Tesla with the humanoid in it. So or or again, the the ability to close the loop and like park or go run into the store and grab something, you know, or do things. And and it's exactly the same as a personal agents thing all over again.

• 1:23:39Ben Thompson?

  Yeah. The one thing I will note about Teslas and and the self-driving is. So I have a Tesla, but my parents use it the vast majority of my time. Like, the my mom sort of weighed down the law that I really think the self-driving is really good for your dad. Um, I was a little scared last night. Um, so they they've been using it most of the time. And so I don't drive it that frequently and but they're out of town right now. So I have so I have the Tesla. Number one, um, it was really good last year. This is it sounds like the classic Tesla sort of fanboy thing, but it's true. It's so much better this year than it was even a year ago. Number one. Number two, if you're on standard, of course, me, I always had it like hurry, like, because I'm in a rush and I don't like slow cars.

• 1:24:21Ben Thompson?

  Uh, if you have it on standard mode, at least now, it really does leave you alone to a greater extent. And to me, this totally flips the extent to which I would actually want a Tesla on a day-to-day basis. I like driving. So like, to me, and I don't really like driving Teslas. I they feel like I'm driving a scooter in Taiwan. I I it's hard to explain, but just like the sort of the way the acceleration is cool if you've never experienced it before. But there's an aspect of it that is not, I don't know, it just doesn't feel like a real car to me. This makes people very mad, but sorry, that's just how I feel. I don't actually enjoy driving a Tesla. If I'm in a Tesla, I'm going to be self-driving one hundred percent of the time.

• 1:24:56Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:24:56Ben Thompson?

  If I'm in self-driving her for the time and I can't use my phone, then what's the point? I'm just sitting there twiddling my thumbs. To the point there now, though, where it's definitely backed off in later updates. If you're in standard, it's like very strict for the first two minutes and then it kind of lets you do what you want to do. So I'm like, I could be vibe coding while driving. This would be this would be like, this is this is uh, this is exactly where I want to get to. So um, that's been an interesting shift uh, for me with with with the driving. I like to drive. Um, I also, you know, I'll chat with my AI.

• 1:25:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, I had one last question based on the the update today. Shopify versus Amazon, obviously, the knife fight is starting between Muse and Meta and Amazon. Uh, it will Shopify, is there a chance that they evolve to a place where there are so many new merchants that sort of fill in the cracks of what's available in the product portfolio? That you can actually get socks on, you know, a one-day delivery? Because I, when I think of Shopify, I think of like those particular brands. I don't think of like the broad inventory of like, I just need

• 1:26:07Jordi Hays?

  Socks are the best example.

• 1:26:09John Coogan?

  I just need paper towels. I'm going to go to Amazon. People don't go to a Shopify, like a D to C brand that has like, you know, images for on Shopify for that. And I'm wondering how much Shopify can do to actually fill in and be the default location for those like long-tail items that people shop on on Amazon for.

• 1:26:28Ben Thompson?

  Yeah, I mean, it's theoretically possible. The problem is you still have to deliver the paper towels. I mean, at the end of the day, this is what I think this dispute Muse, Amazon, Amazon versus the world sort of comes down to. Like, Amazon has the best AI moat precisely because what they do. To Jordy's point, Jordy's Jordy's been making the pro Amazon case Oh, yeah. This entire interview. He keeps saying, but what about the physical world? What about actually getting stuff done? And the whole point here is actually getting the package, getting it to your house and getting on your on your or wherever the Amazon drivers leave it, which can be fairly random, to be fair. But the the that is that's the key thing. And because of that, I will be researching stuff.

• 1:27:11Ben Thompson?

  I will find and, you know, if you ask ChatGPT or Quad or whatever, it'll give you links. And there'll never be an Amazon link because Amazon doesn't allow it. If you say, if you specify Amazon, it'll give you a uh, search URL because that's all they can do. But you know what I do? I just go to Amazon and I type it in and I click it. And it's not that hard. It's fairly annoying. I prefer to have a link. But at the end of the day, my personal revealed preference is I would almost always want it from Amazon because I trust it's going to get there. I know where to go to look to see if it's on its way. I know where to go to process a return if I want to do that. And when you introduce all these other pieces, you're actually introducing massive amounts of real-world friction

• 1:27:56Ben Thompson?

  just because you're too lazy to find, I'll click over to the other browser and type in a search term. So I think this idea that I want my agent to actually do it is going to force Amazon to bend. Um, I'm just skeptical because at the end of the day,

• 1:28:12Ben Thompson?

  Amazon, not really consumer-friendly, like, they're like, they don't care. And you like, you go to Amazon, it's all ads. Like, this is not a consumer-friendly website.

• 1:28:22John Coogan?

  For a decade, weren't they like the customer obsession company?

• 1:28:26Ben Thompson?

  No.

• 1:28:26Jordi Hays?

  They're obsessed with their customers seeing as many ads as possible.

• 1:28:30Ben Thompson?

  Yes, uh, you do. It it the I remember even like way before they even had an ad business, though. The website was always completely inscrutable. Like, it's it's it's like redesign the Amazon website. It's like, oh, my, uh, but the so that's the case. By the way, the in the other one, the only real alternative to Amazon in terms of it's just going to have it, it's going to get there is Walmart. And I was pretty optimistic when when OpenAI did the checkout thing or whatever. Walmart jumped in and Amazon was like, no. And I'm like, oh, this is super interesting. Like Walmart's going to actually make a move here. It makes sense for them. People in tech don't understand how actually awesome Walmart is.

• 1:29:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:09Ben Thompson?

  Uh, in that their stores, well, number one, their stores are like this crazy dystopian experience. Number two, if you go in their stores, their app is unbelievable. It will guide you through the aisles to tell you exactly where to go to get the thing that you need. Like, it's amazing. It's the best in-store app you like, by far, compared to anyone. Uh, like, I'm obsessed with the Walmart app. Like, I'm obsessed with like United's tech stack and why that actually makes them the best airline. It's a it's a very similar sort of thing. But then they also have, like, if the stuff's in their store, you can get it delivered in an hour. Like, who knew? Great slogan because like literally no one knows this about Walmart. And so when they did this thing with ChatGPT, I'm like, actually, no one in tech who's going to be buying stuff

• 1:29:54Ben Thompson?

  or who is technically inclined through ChatGPT actually knows how good the Walmart e-commerce experience is. So this makes a ton of sense.

• 1:30:02Ben Thompson?

  Fast forward six to nine months, like, yeah, that was a mistake. And they're like, people abandoned carts like crazy. Their their cart size was way smaller, like all these issues. It just wasn't a good experience compared to if you're on Walmart's site. They have control of the experience. You put more stuff in your cart, you convert more frequently. All and in addition to the getting more data about you, being able to show you ads, all the things that accrue to having on your site. And all this stuff matters to Walmart and they're the only one, just as much as the Amazon. And they're the only ones that can rival Amazon for this. So Shopify, as long as you shop pay, they're cool.

• 1:30:45Ben Thompson?

  Like abandoned cart, multiple items, that's that's not their business. And so it makes tons of sense for them to lean in for what they do. But Shopify tried to do the logistics thing, like, and it go look at the stock chart, the part where it goes super low down is because they're like, we're going to do logistics. Like, they learned their lesson. They are, they're they're asset-light, that's what they do. They work across all these sites. If you're a merchant, it makes total sense to be on Shopify. They'll abstract, they'll be the middle person for every platform you want to be on, you can sell everywhere. But they're by definition not going to solve the reason why we still go to Amazon. And that means Amazon is going to win this dispute or it's going to be resolved in their favor in the end.

• 1:31:27Jordi Hays?

  Last question, uh, relates to this shop Shopify dynamic, but but

• 1:31:33Ben Thompson?

  Shopify, by the way, awesome product.

• 1:31:34Jordi Hays?

  Like, it's the best. It's the product that makes me not care about personal agents that can shop for me. Because it's just like, it's very easy to buy it.

• 1:31:41Ben Thompson?

  It's very easy to buy it. One hundred percent.

• 1:31:43Jordi Hays?

  It's like, I could save you, I could save you a minute. And it's like, no, you can't save me a minute because I land on the site. It fills in the it fills in the code for my tech, you know, and it buys everything.

• 1:31:56Jordi Hays?

  How much do you think consumers? Actually enjoy shopping.

• 1:31:59Ben Thompson?

  Real quick.

• 1:32:00Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:32:00Ben Thompson?

  Yes. Oh, that was I was gonna drop in. Jordy, you and me, we are, we are two pieces of pot today. People love shopping.

• 1:32:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:08Ben Thompson?

  The, the, the, the, it blows me away. So tech companies are like, number one, let us book your flight for you. It's like, I've had a personal assistant for 10 years. He does not come within an inch of booking my flights for me. That is crazy talk. Once I have a private jet, he can book when my pilots show up and fly me a private jet. Until then, I'm deciding which flight I understand, which ones are gonna be delayed. I know which seat I want to be, be on like that. So the fact this is continually a demo is hilarious to me. Number two, people love shopping. They don't want to be productive. They want to be entertained. One of the biggest forms of entertainment is shopping. This is part of the whole like fast fashion or like, or all those Chinese, like it's fun. Like, speaking of toys, my nice rack. You know what's part, part is the whole joy of it?

• 1:32:54Ben Thompson?

  Endless hours of research and figuring stuff out and then buying stuff. And then the package shows up and you're like, and like, if you buy unified stuff, they always charge shipping. So you have all this pressure because you're like, I, I want to make sure I get everything in the right order. And then you buy it and literally the moment after you get the shipping notification, you're like, oh, I forgot to buy something else. And then you start the whole process all over again. And it's all torturous, but actually it's fun because that's kind of the whole point of this is we want to like.

• 1:33:19Jordi Hays?

  Also, there's so much information on a product page. Like companies have spent so much energy, like focusing on that. And, and you look at like apparel as a category. It's like, they're gonna tell you what size the model is wearing and you want to know that. And you want to look at, at the different, different styles. And the idea of having a personal agent that's like going and getting some of the information, bringing it back to you. And then you're like, well, what about this other, like, tell me about this thing.

• 1:33:43Ben Thompson?

  No, this is like life advice in general. Like, uh, this is a, this is my free relationship advice of the day. Um, just because someone's complaining doesn't mean they're unhappy. Like, like, and there's a bit like, oh, I have to go research this. I have to go do this and I'm so busy. And then, and you have your eager tech companies that can just say, oh, I have an assistant that can do it for you. And it's like, no, not only do I want to do it, I want to complain about it. I'm enjoying myself complaining right now. Okay? Would you just let me be and live my life? And that, so that's why I think there's, there's gonna be a mental reframing.

• 1:34:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:19Ben Thompson?

  Stop trying to make people's lives better and start highlighting to them. And this is marketing 101. Marketing 101 is you create the perception of a problem in people's lives. And you show how your solution or how your product is the solution to the problem. And instead of saying, people don't have a problem that I'm insufficiently productive. They have a problem that I have too many packages piling up or I'm not processing returns. And it's like, it like, just highlight that, like, how miserable this makes you. Do you know how much money Jordy, you're leaving on the table? You could have like three puffer jackets if you got all your money back. And then, and then say, look, you could actually just, done, it's done.

• 1:35:03Ben Thompson?

  Money you're making out wasn't that easy. Now you could go and do whatever you want. You can complain, you can watch TV, you can watch reels. That's the answer.

• 1:35:11John Coogan?

  More time to complain.

• 1:35:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the funny thing is, is it feels like what the personal agents have real, the thing that people are super fixated on is the saving money, canceling subscriptions and stuff like that. And the concern I have there is like, we've had a bunch of businesses like that, that will even call, like, I think Truebill.

• 1:35:28John Coogan?

  Rocket Money.

• 1:35:28Jordi Hays?

  Would call, yeah, is now Rocket Money. They would call, they would have people that would, a human in the loop that would call and just cancel subscriptions for you. Or they would try to renegotiate the bill. And the problem is these are like, these are like billion dollar businesses, which, which is not gonna fund the capex.

• 1:35:44Ben Thompson?

  Yeah. Well, the, I mean, the whole cancellation, auto cancellation thing drives me batty as a subscription proprietor. Like we will get, when these new ones come out, no, we will, no, no. It's actually, it's the opposite. We will have a wave of customer support issues, which is people contacting, saying, why am I not getting my email? I'm like, because you canceled your subscription. No, I didn't. And then they go back and look through their stupid little agent or whatever service went through and just canceled their recurring subscriptions. Or the worst one is it'll go through their email inbox and you, you, you are required. Now technically we do send transactional email. Every email is customized. It's not a marketing email, but Google doesn't really care. We have to put in the header with the unsubscribe thing. So what does that mean?

• 1:36:28Ben Thompson?

  People go through and click unsubscribe. What if you, what happens when you click that required to include unsubscribe? You will stop getting email, but your subscription was not canceled because those are completely, yeah, it's two different things. And so another customer support issue for us, I'm not getting my emails. Why not? And then actually no, you set some dumb agent off on your inbox that canceled your thing. And now it's this whole rigmarole of you having to agree to these things to, so we can legally let you back on the list. Because like, there's actual federal laws around email lists. Big pain in the rear end.

• 1:37:01John Coogan?

  Never cancel your techery. Just don't do it. Bake that into the pre-training.

• 1:37:05Ben Thompson?

  I mean, I should be happy about it because they're like upset that like, you know, this is actually, it's super, we actually ended up building our whole, we built our whole email service that is actually amazing. We send like fully customized emails at like the rate of like 20,000, like a minute or something like that. They're like more performant than any other service we have, fully customized, all these sorts of things. And the reason is all the genesis of doing our own email was every email service out there is sending email people don't want. Like definitely, so everything around them is about overcoming the fact that people don't want to get the email that they're sending. And I'm like, oh, I'm actually sending people email people do want. And it's really interesting.

• 1:37:46Ben Thompson?

  It just completely changes the problems and issues and features that you need, you need to build.

• 1:37:52John Coogan?

  We need custom silicon. I want 20,000 emails millisecond. That's the future. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:37:59Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic to see you.

• 1:38:00John Coogan?

  Always great. Have a great rest, you and I.

• 1:38:03Ben Thompson?

  Talk to you guys later.

• 1:38:03Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 1:38:04John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:38:06John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web app servers, databases and more. Well, Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. We got a traffic jam on our hands, so we're gonna do a lightning round. Bring in, uh, Gagan Biyani. Welcome to the show. How you doing?

• 1:38:25Speaker 04

  Hey, good. How are y'all?

• 1:38:26John Coogan?

  Sorry for keeping you long.

• 1:38:28Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully you got to hang out.

• 1:38:29John Coogan?

  Please introduce yourself. Tell us about Horowitz Andreessen Academy.

• 1:38:34Speaker 04

  I'm Gagan Biyani. I'm CEO of Horowitz Andreessen Academy. It's a new school for young builders who want to go and make something of their career. We're really excited to be announcing it today. Raised 42 million bucks and Mark and, Mark and Eric are joining the board.

• 1:38:51John Coogan?

  Cool. Talk about the structure in-person, virtual, uh, thousands of students to start, class of 20 to start. How are you thinking about, uh, scaling up?

• 1:39:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you, you, you gotta start small. So we're gonna have 50 students. It's, uh, the first class is tuition free. It's called the founding class fellowship. So it's going to be a little different from any other, uh, programs we run. It's in-person in San Francisco. It's, you know, I think that's probably the most important part of this whole thing is that it's about getting right in the mix of Silicon Valley, understanding the culture, getting immersed in the, in the people and building a, a great network.

• 1:39:33Jordi Hays?

  Uh, two years, did I have a, or is it one year?

• 1:39:37Speaker 04

  The, the first program will be one year. Eventually, uh, we'll, we'll launch a two-year program.

• 1:39:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. How, how hard is it these days to do like four-year accreditation? I know like getting accredited is really difficult, but people were saying that about banks and there's new bank charters that are going out for startups. Palmer Lucky's Bank, Arabor.

• 1:39:56Jordi Hays?

  Funny thing is it just doesn't matter.

• 1:39:58John Coogan?

  Like, maybe it does matter.

• 1:39:59Jordi Hays?

  None of the companies that you want to work at are like, wow.

• 1:40:02John Coogan?

  You went to an unaccredited school.

• 1:40:03Jordi Hays?

  You're super talented, but you didn't get the four years.

• 1:40:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, but how are you thinking about it? Are you thinking like?

• 1:40:07Speaker 04

  No, that's, that's my answer.

• 1:40:09John Coogan?

  Okay, that's your answer.

• 1:40:10Speaker 04

  That's my answer.

• 1:40:11John Coogan?

  Just skip entirely.

• 1:40:12Jordi Hays?

  And it's funny because, because I do think that I, I do wonder if over time, like a year is actually, a year is actually enough. Cause like I went, I, I remember the end of my spring semester of college. I was like, okay, like college was fun. I want to like start working now. I feel like I like met a bunch of, you know, cool people and, but I'm ready for like real life. And I know not, not everyone is that way, but oftentimes people aren't ready for real life because they're not prepared to have a real job. Right? And so if you could actually maybe solve that, then maybe people do a year of, of a university sort of experience.

• 1:40:51Jordi Hays?

  And then they can just actually go get a job and, and they realize like, hey, instead of going from this like high burn life where I'm, I'm basically losing money for four years to then try to make it all back. And in later years, you can just have it condensed down.

• 1:41:05John Coogan?

  So CEO, uh, raised money. I assume it's for profit, but do you have a view on for-profit versus nonprofit? Obviously there's a lot of critiques of the nonprofit system, but what is the philosophy around the, the long-term and incentive alignment, basically?

• 1:41:23Speaker 04

  I mean, we're pro-capitalist and pro-optimist over here, so techno-optimist, right? So we believe that having a financial model is only going to help us serve students better. And like, maybe one of the biggest challenges with the modern education system is we've completely forgotten about students. It's like, like, you know, talk about K through 12, or higher ed, or whatever. It's all about all the, all the quote-unquote adults who run the show and serve themselves. So one of the great things about the for-profit model is it forces you to deliver or die, you know? And so our, our plan is to, is to deliver an amazing experience and hopefully, uh, our investors and ourselves will get rewarded for that.

• 1:42:06John Coogan?

  Does delivering look like graduating straight into entrepreneurship? Or is there, are there other avenues that you think are exciting? Like, joining companies as employees, trade schools? Like, there's so many different opportunities in the modern economy.

• 1:42:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you, you guys have been in the valley a long time, so have I, right? Like, you know, the most successful people are not only founders. Like, I know, like, so many of my friends who decided to switch from being founders or never were and joined companies are incredibly productive and successful and happy. And so there's no reason to prescribe one thing. I mean, I think one, one of the biggest challenges we're going to have as a school is there's going to be a lot of attention and pressure on these students. And my goal as sort of CEO is to design a culture that reduces that pressure and allows them to see that there are many different options for their careers. And, you know, there's many different paths to a successful life.

• 1:43:08Speaker 04

  So I don't see why we have to over-aggrandize starting a company. Um, and that's actually why we're building a school and not an accelerator, right? Because we think that, you know, one, two years to explore and, and learn is a much better outcome than, okay, I'm 18 and now I either got to join something for four years or I got to start a company and give up 10 years.

• 1:43:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, it can be a crazy trip.

• 1:43:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so many, so many people would have been like, top 1% second and first, you know, uh, second-in-command type people and actually like, you know, maybe only top 30% founders. And the difference there is like, tens of millions or even, you know, in some cases, billions of dollars. And so I think that's like, it's such an important lesson is like, no, you don't, to have an impact in the world, to be successful, to have the career that you want, uh, you shouldn't just be being high, you know, when, when you're young, maybe being a founder is high status. When you're older, just like, being successful is high status. It doesn't really matter exactly how you got there. But like, you want to make sure that you actually win.

• 1:44:15John Coogan?

  Everyone's equal on the golf course, the country club.

• 1:44:18Speaker 04

  I mean, how, how many people made $100 million in the SpaceX IPO? And we don't know who they are or what they do. I mean, they, they're just, you know, they're not just, they are engineers for one of the coolest companies on the planet, right? And, uh, but they don't have a fancy, they're not even second-in-command. And I think that just tells you everything you need to know about, uh, why it shouldn't be, uh, just one path coming out of the academy.

• 1:44:43John Coogan?

  Very cool. Well, thank you so much for hopping on the show.

• 1:44:46Jordi Hays?

  When, uh, last, last question, when, when are you guys, uh, when's the first?

• 1:44:50John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Certain fall?

• 1:44:52Speaker 04

  First class in fall, fall 2027. Um, applications are open today, so check us out at theacademiesf.com.

• 1:45:00John Coogan?

  That's going to be an incredibly low admit rate, 50 slots for, I mean, something that already has gone viral on the internet. There's going to be a lot of people, so good luck to you if you applied.

• 1:45:08Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy.

• 1:45:09John Coogan?

  And it's free, yeah, that's a good steal.

• 1:45:11Speaker 04

  So first year's free. It won't, it won't be from then on.

• 1:45:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:45:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:14John Coogan?

  Well, thanks so much for coming on, breaking it down for us. Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business than MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it. We have Alex Ratner from Snorkel AI, massive fundraising news. I'm going to hit the gong straight away, $350 million round.

• 1:45:35Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 1:45:38John Coogan?

  Evaluation. As demand grows for specialized AI training data, how specialized are we talking these days?

• 1:45:47Speaker 05

  Well, first of all, thanks for having me on, and I love the gong. I bought a, a used gong on the street that looked kind of like that. And sadly, I, I then forgot about it and we never really developed the culture of gong ringing and.

• 1:45:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's not just about the object, it's about the lifestyle.

• 1:46:01Speaker 05

  It's process, it's process, discipline, lifestyle, exactly. And so you've, you've inspired me there.

• 1:46:05John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:46:05Speaker 05

  But yeah, I guess we were here to talk about data, AI ostensibly, right? So I should get back to that. Um, yeah, what does specialized data mean? I mean, I think one of the big shifts that in some ways, you know, so we started a decade ago at Stanford and UW doing research.

• 1:46:17John Coogan?

  Overnight?

• 1:46:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm a dinosaur.

• 1:46:19John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Congrats. Well deserved.

• 1:46:21Speaker 05

  I remember when a, when a, when a Jev was called a classifier, if you're, if you're okay with the, the truly nerdy AI jokes, but, um, uh, you know, I think there's this big shift that happens in, you know, any kind of autonomy, where, uh, or any learned autonomy, you know, self-driving, digital LMs, physical AI, where you, we call it like data 1.0 to data 2.0, where when you're early on in the, the, the learning curve, you know, the model doesn't know much, so kind of any bit of information is additive.

• 1:46:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:50Speaker 05

  And so therefore, your, you know, rational focus is on volume, right? And volume is mostly solved by, you know, staffing, crowdsourcing, how many, how many humans can you get into the factory, right? And then you naturally get to the kind of the more durable, you know, asymptote phase where, like now, models are really good. And it's not about any data, it's about the right data that, you know, targets some area where they're, you know, they don't know something or they're misaligned on, on something or, or, uh, or they can be improved. And finding and building that data, you know, becomes a lot more about precision, quality, and, and we think that's really more the, you know, the, the place where kind of a, a research and technology approach comes to bear. And so that's, that's kind of where, where we focus and that's, that's kind of what we think is the, is the, the interesting area in data today.

• 1:47:32John Coogan?

  Is it too aggressive to frame you as sort of like, short recursive self-improvement? Because there is this thesis, you know, sort of mulling around that like, the models are going to train themselves and then maybe you don't need any more data because they're all doing synthetic data. Like, how have you grappled with that? Because you seem very grounded, you've been doing this a long time. I feel like you're not maybe swayed by the latest hype cycle on, on Twitter in a single week, but, uh, how have you processed that whole thing?

• 1:48:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, uh, I mean, I've, I've heard the, and I've been working in synthetic data as a researcher for, yeah, almost a decade too. And I've heard the, uh, we're, uh, we're one model advance away from, you know, solving everything thing a few times. I, I, I'd say I'm, I'm short the more kind of sci-fi, uh, you know,

• 1:48:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:48:18Speaker 05

  accelerate and be done with humanities contribution to anything, uh, economic kind of version of RSI. I'm actually, I would call myself, though, more bullish on RSI, but RSI that contains other elements beyond just kind of modifying model training code and hyperparameters. In other words, you know, compute energy and, and data bottlenecks, human expertise bottlenecks, right? So, you know.

• 1:48:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I've, I've had this take that it's at a certain point, like, superintelligence to do RSI fully needs to be able to fundraise. Like, you got to go get more capital at some point. And so, and so RSI in many ways is like AGI complete in the sense that it should be able to do the full stack, even the capital formation.

• 1:49:02Jordi Hays?

  Maybe another example, another example is like, we, it feels like we're coming up on math being like somewhat, uh, solved. And I'm sure once it's all solved, they're, they're, you know, the, uh, hopefully, you know, you could figure out new questions. But like, do you, do you expect to see a drop in demand for math experts from the labs?

• 1:49:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think the, the first thing before double-clicking on math for a second, um, been too many years since I've taken a theoretical math course, so I'm going to, I'm going to dodge that whole topic, uh, artfully, run the clock down. But, um, it, first, on kind of overall, um, you know, areas where there's demand for, you know, overall areas where, you know, this RSI loop needs data, needs human expertise, needs real-world input as it, as, you know, as a necessary input.

• 1:49:51Speaker 05

  Um, there's this old, um, uh, you know, it's like, we, we tend to conflate areas that are easy for humans as necessarily being easy for AI and, and ones that are, that are hard, um, as being hard for AI, and it's often not the same, right? So math is something where it's very, very hard for humans, but there are some reasons to expect that it, it would be more approachable. I mean, there's, you know, decades of work on, on, you know, verifiability engines like Lean and ways to kind of check it. And, uh, and, and there's lots of data out there and data can be generated more, uh, more automatically. And then areas like, you know, writing a good Slack post to your coworker, uh, you know, has sparser data and more, you know, ill-defined rewards and, you know, doesn't

• 1:50:35Speaker 05

  work right away as well and, and needs more nuanced context. And so, you know, first of all, there are these areas that are kind of counterintuitive where there's real demand for human input. You know, it's not enough just to have a coding agent that can kind of tweak the hyperparameters of the model to achieve RSI, you need real input from the real world. But even in the areas like math, like coding, um, where we do a lot of volume these days, you know, one, there's some basic economic, you know, forces where. Once something becomes valuable, and this is especially true for some like coding, where maybe the, you know, the accuracy goes up, the demand for some types of easier data goes down, but the economic value of every kind of additional decimal point of improvement goes way up because of the value.

• 1:51:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:17Speaker 05

  And so does the difficulty of creating that data. And so that's kind of the growth trend that, you know, I mean, selfishly talking my book for a second that we've, we've benefited from is, you know, a lot of people have entered the data space, great validation for those of us who have been trying to, you know, push on data being an interesting area for a decade or so. But, you know, you can't get this hard data with just, just staffing or sourcing human hours. You can't get it with just kind of, you know, trying to have the model that you're trying to sell to that provider, generate all the data, you know, like a synthetic slop cannon. You have to actually use more sophisticated blends of human expertise and specialized AI to get this, you know, really, really hard coding data that, you know, emulates

• 1:52:00Speaker 05

  what a software engineer, a senior software engineer will do over, you know, days or weeks, what a, an expert mathematician would do. And so, you know, from a, from an economic perspective, in terms of how is the opportunity grown? It's if you can keep up with that kind of RSI waterline.

• 1:52:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:17Speaker 05

  And maybe, maybe, you know, feel free to make fun of me, but we, we call what we build the RSI engine for data because there's also kind of a compounding loop in our platform of humans being accelerated and improved by AI, but then their feedback improving the specialized AI models we use. And, you know, one has to keep up with the lingo, right? But, but, you know, our view is only if you have that, an approach like that, that can feasibly keep up with the frontier, you know, if you can't do that, your data is not going to be valuable anymore. If you can, it's more valuable than ever before.

• 1:52:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, congratulations on the round. Congratulations on the progress.

• 1:52:53Speaker 02

  Ten year overnight success.

• 1:52:54John Coogan?

  I love an overnight success like this. Well deserved. And hopefully we'll talk to you soon.

• 1:52:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:52:59John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:53:00Speaker 05

  Awesome. Thanks guys so much.

• 1:53:02John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you. Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. We have our lightning round continuing. I believe Peter from Swarm Arrow, the co-founder and CEO, is in the waiting room next, but we got a little bit of traffic jam. Hopefully we can bring in Peter and we're going to have Tyler Cosgrove sub in for Jordy Hayes, who has to take off right at 1:00 PM sharp. I don't, I like spraying it on people every once in a while. Sometimes I like to do a little bit of an intro, but we're going to have Tyler sitting next to me. Peter, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:53:36Speaker 06

  Fantastic. Thanks for having me on.

• 1:53:38John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for jumping on. Would love to reintroduce the product for everyone. Just explain how you're positioned in the market and sort of take us through the basics of the company.

• 1:53:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. So last week we introduced to the world Gamera, which is our, our aircraft really designed around breaking kind of the iron triangle of range, payload capacity and cost, right? And that's really one of the big problems facing, facing the Department of War today and the Air Force today.

• 1:54:07John Coogan?

  Is the name Gamera from the Conex car or is it a more generic?

• 1:54:12Speaker 06

  It's not. We did track that. No, it is from the, the, the turtle monster that fought Godzilla.

• 1:54:19John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Cool.

• 1:54:21Speaker 06

  It is old school.

• 1:54:22John Coogan?

  That's great. So what does the process of building this actually look like? I believe we have a video that we can pull up while, while you're explaining it further, but I'd love to know, like, are you, are you specifying it in, in basically like PDFs and documents and then going to the Department of War, selling it and then building it? Are you prototyping? Like, what is the flow to actually take something like this from start to finish?

• 1:54:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. So we started this about four years ago when we started the company. It is a long process and we started off by kind of sketching up a, a concept, figuring out what the problem is we needed to solve and then going about like designing the aircraft. But I love the aircraft. I'm an airplane guy at heart, but the aircraft was really just one piece of it. So along with the airplane, you really have to design how to build this. And so we've been in, as well as building the aircraft, we've also been building the factory, the, the capacity to, to really build these out hundreds a year.

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:55:14Speaker 06

  And when you look at it, you've got a bunch of aircraft, you can build them, you really have to be able to control them. And that's where we've tried to do things differently than the, the single pilot per aircraft model we have today is really building out that autonomy and that command and control stack that allows us to, to have truly a swarm of these hundreds of these operated all at once.

• 1:55:34John Coogan?

  Hundreds of them. When I think about one remote pilot per vehicle, is that actually a bottleneck? I mean, do we not have hundreds of, of Air Force, you know, soldiers in Nevada in shipping containers, controlling these things remotely? Are we actually bottlenecked there or is this, or is it just like thinking even further into the future?

• 1:55:58Speaker 06

  So it's a little bit of both. A, we truly are. There just aren't enough folks out there who have those, those skill sets. And B, think about coordinating this, you know, when you have hundreds of aircraft, like these are kind of conflicts that happened last time in World War II, right? So you can't have folks talking on the radio, trying to figure this out. You really need that autonomy to truly make that, make that effective day.

• 1:56:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. So how important is price to the buyer? How do you actually guarantee that? Is there any like financial risk where you go to the Department of War and you say it's 10 mil and then it winds up coming back at 9.9 and you're not making any margin? How does that work?

• 1:56:35Speaker 06

  It's, it's super important. So this is why we've kind of designed it from the very beginning. Typically in aerospace, you know, it's all, at least since in the last 50 years or so, it's really been about like, how do you get the most performance out of an airplane? And everything else you kind of, you know, kind of falls by the wayside. For us, we looked at how much does this cost from day one, right? And that's not something you sprinkle on top of design. You really bake that in from the, from the earliest stages. So we were confident the, the Air Force is asking for less than 10 million per and uh,

• 1:57:03John Coogan?

  They're not going to pay more. Yeah.

• 1:57:05Speaker 06

  We've done the math and shown we can do that.

• 1:57:07John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 1:57:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. Was there like a specific kind of like theater of war that this was like built for or is it like very general, like in your kind of ideal use case, is there like a very specific kind of like, I don't know, geographical?

• 1:57:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:57:20Speaker 06

  You know, it can be used in a lot of different places, but really when we looked at what, what's going to push the limits, it really is the Pacific. It's that range, it's carrying the kinds of payloads that the, the big enough ones that they make a difference in, in potential conflict there. Really it's, it's, it's focused on the, on the Pacific, but you use, you can use it pretty much anywhere in the world.

• 1:57:38John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for everything you're doing. Congratulations on the progress and hope to talk to you soon.

• 1:57:43Speaker 06

  Super excited. Thanks a lot, guys.

• 1:57:45John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 1:57:46Speaker 02

  Cheers.

• 1:57:47John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Cisco. Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Good soundboard, Tyler.

• 1:57:58Speaker 02

  I'm learning.

• 1:57:59John Coogan?

  Good soundboard. Uh, our last guest has been waiting far too long. We have Daniel from Fair Square Medicare. Welcome to the show, Daniel. Sorry for the switch around. Thanks for being flexible. Welcome to the show. How you doing?

• 1:58:13Speaker 07

  Hey, thanks. Thanks for having me, guys. It's great to be on here.

• 1:58:16John Coogan?

  Appreciate the flexibility. First time on the show. Can you sort of give us a whirlwind tour of your career? You've done a lot. How do you introduce yourself these days?

• 1:58:26Speaker 07

  Uh, yes, it's a great question. Right, right now I'm a, I'm a car show host.

• 1:58:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:58:33Speaker 07

  So I have a show called Cars and Capitalists. I take some of my friends who are great investors and operators out in our old 911 and we drive around Marin. So we have like Sam Lessin, Paul Gu, Sam D'Amico on there. That's a lot of fun. But, but I mean, like, I feel like the, the way I should introduce myself is I've tried my whole career to start companies by doing all the wrong things, but I did a couple of things right.

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:59:00Speaker 07

  And so, so I've, my last company was Fair Square Medicare.

• 1:59:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:59:04Speaker 07

  Sold it after six years. Great company. We ended up working, helping find like 25,000 American seniors, find the right health insurance. Like there's actually probably a good chance we've worked with like the, the parents of some of your staff.

• 1:59:19John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:59:20Speaker 07

  And before that did a, did a fintech app called Trim and way before that started a lender for the power sports space called Octane Lending.

• 1:59:26John Coogan?

  Interesting. Wait, is there any like common thread between the categories or strategies or teams between those companies? Or is it sort of just like be open to opportunity? When it knocks, you open the door and you go after it really hard?

• 1:59:42Speaker 07

  I think there are a couple of threads, there are two. One is just like consumer advocacy, which was true for the last two companies. So like this one was the, the, the kind of realization was people are turning 65 and there are like 50 health insurance plans to choose from and they really can't tell the difference. It might as well be like a foreign language to them.

• 2:00:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:00:03Speaker 07

  But the, the implications are massive of like you get on the wrong health plan and then you get like cancer and then you can't get on a better plan.

• 2:00:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:10Speaker 07

  Um, and before that, it was personal finance app called Trim, uh, which I co-founded. And we were the first ones to show you a list of all your subscriptions on your credit card.

• 2:00:19John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 2:00:19Speaker 07

  We were like, we were like Plaid's biggest, one of their biggest first customers.

• 2:00:23John Coogan?

  Wow. Yeah. You were early to that.

• 2:00:25Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:00:25John Coogan?

  And, and that's what became like a competitive space eventually. Uh, I know that didn't Rocket Money acquire True Bill? That's what Jordy was saying recently.

• 2:00:33Speaker 07

  Yeah. So True Bill, uh,

• 2:00:35John Coogan?

  Throwing your side.

• 2:00:37Speaker 07

  Well, they, they just copied us early on. They copied the subscription feature. And, uh, no, but they, uh, they out executed. Yeah.

• 2:00:45John Coogan?

  Look, they, they, Credit where credit's due.

• 2:00:48Speaker 07

  Credit, credit where credit's due, they out executed. I think they sold to Rocket for like a billion bucks.

• 2:00:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think they also sold it at a great time. Yeah. And so it was a lot of good, good times. Um, what, uh, where, where do you want cars and capitalists to go? Have you, have you asked people if you can drive their special cars? Because I feel like the comedians in cars getting coffee, part of the beauty is I think Jerry Seinfeld is such a huge collection that he picks a car that matches with the, or in his, the, in his theory, like the comedian's identity, but I, I would kill for a whirlwind tour of Silicon Valley's biggest motorheads, you know?

• 2:01:23Speaker 07

  Yeah. It's, it's a great idea. I, I actually, I, I should probably like, I, I liked, I like running it lean. And so I don't do any B roll. I don't do outside footage of the car. It's all, I just have a GoPro in the car.

• 2:01:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:36Speaker 07

  And it's just us talking. Um, and, and, and maybe I'll like go find other people's cars and get, I would need to like hire someone to take video of like a car. It would need to be a big thing.

• 2:01:46John Coogan?

  It would be a very weird show because I feel like 90% of your guests would be like, another Model Y. Yay. Like,

• 2:01:53Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah. No, no, no.

• 2:01:54Speaker 02

  Maybe the new Roadster.

• 2:01:56John Coogan?

  Maybe the new Roadster.

• 2:01:57Speaker 02

  Yeah. Get some air.

• 2:01:58Speaker 07

  No, I don't, I don't want to drive a go-kart, although I would drive a Roadster.

• 2:02:02John Coogan?

  Shots fired.

• 2:02:03Speaker 07

  Yeah. Like a Tesla, after you, after you drive an old nine 11, you realize that the Tesla is a, is an amazing vehicle for getting it a, but it's a fucking go-kart.

• 2:02:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:14Speaker 07

  And I, I don't know. Sorry if I curse on your show, but, but, um,

• 2:02:17John Coogan?

  But it's fine.

• 2:02:18Speaker 07

  But actually you raise a great point, John. And if anyone is watching and has a, a manual F430, that's something we should definitely add to the show.

• 2:02:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:02:27Speaker 07

  Uh, it would be, it would be great to have. But I mean, of course, like this is Silicon Valley. So, and, and like a lot of the people on my show couldn't care less about cars.

• 2:02:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's sort of bifurcated. It's like either they have like an exquisite collection or they've never owned anything other than a Tesla. And, and it's the most boring. Like either they care or they don't. There's very few people that are in the middle. We've been running predictions with a lot of guests about the Tesla Roadster. Elon's going to announce it on October 1st, and he said that it might fly, might jump, might leave the ground.

• 2:02:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Shut down the airspace.

• 2:03:00John Coogan?

  They shut down the airspace. The FAA said, uh, they've shut down the airspace for, for 10,000 feet in the air. So that creates a boundary. It's either zero inches off the ground. It winds up not jumping or flying at all. He was just joking around or it can go up to 10,000 feet. So I want your prediction right now, super binding, super high stakes. We're going to hold this to you. We're going to hold you to this. But, uh, how do you, how far do you think it'll get off the ground? Are we talking inches, feet, hundreds of feet?

• 2:03:27Speaker 07

  Zero inches. It's gonna have, it's gonna have four thrusters in the back that are gonna generate downforce. That's gonna let it go like really quick.

• 2:03:35John Coogan?

  Okay. So we're looking zero to 60, one and a half seconds, one second, something crazy like that.

• 2:03:40Speaker 07

  No, point, point nine seconds.

• 2:03:41John Coogan?

  No. That'll be wild.

• 2:03:43Speaker 07

  Yeah. I, I have, I have some inside info. I, I was, I, I did like a little, uh, deep dive on quantum computing at one point and it's in sale. And I was on a flight to Austin. I sat next to this guy who I don't, I don't want to.

• 2:03:55John Coogan?

  Didn't have a screen protector on.

• 2:03:57Speaker 07

  I don't, yeah, no, no, no, no. I just started talking to him. He's just great. He, he was pretty like senior Tesla dude. Um, and that's all I'll say about it. But he was like the goal. He was like the goal. He was a total bro. He was great. And his, and he was just the goal is to not kill the driver.

• 2:04:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. The G-force needs to be, uh, tolerable. So if the, if the, if the, if the cold gas thrusters act as downforce, couldn't you reverse them like the old fan car? Make it lift off the ground even just for a stunt? You don't think it's going to go even one inch? It feels like he's been teasing it. Like at least we're going to get it jumping off of a ramp or something. It's going to go in the air. Why shut down the airspace 10,000 feet up?

• 2:04:38Speaker 07

  I think that part is a PR stunt.

• 2:04:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:04:40Speaker 07

  I think he, I think he actually wants to make a car people can buy, right?

• 2:04:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:04:44Speaker 07

  And the thing, the thing about a car with wheels is that it's a wing, right? Because the bottom is flat.

• 2:04:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:49Speaker 07

  And then the, the top is curved. So it generates, which is why like spoilers exist.

• 2:04:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:04:53Speaker 07

  So the only thing that really makes sense is, is you have, you have the like boosters going down. But ma, you know, maybe it'll have, maybe it'll actually be a quadcopter.

• 2:05:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:02Speaker 07

  But, uh, but I mean, it's amazing, right? That they're, this is like their last hurrah. It's like the last car they're gonna make.

• 2:05:07John Coogan?

  Probably. Yeah. Maybe the Cybertruck SUV. I'm really hoping they do that. I think that would be an interesting one, but, uh, who knows?

• 2:05:15Speaker 07

  Would you, would you buy that?

• 2:05:17John Coogan?

  I don't know. It's certainly like a, a, an aggressive aesthetic choice, but functionally, like having a full-size SUV for so many modern American families, that's just a non-negotiable. Yes, there might be an, uh, an old Porsche in the garage, but there's gonna be a full-size SUV for anyone that has a family. So it just seems like a market segment that they've been sort of dabbling in with the Model Y and Model X, but they never really got there because those are more minivan sized. You gotta go with the land yacht, the American, the Expedition, the Escalade. This is what America was built on, right?

• 2:05:48Speaker 07

  I love that. Yeah. You know, you know, the Y, the, the Model Y extended wheelbase is like totally sold out.

• 2:05:53John Coogan?

  I have one. I'm part of the problem. I ordered one of those.

• 2:05:55Speaker 07

  Do you, you have the extended one?

• 2:05:57John Coogan?

  I don't have it yet, but I, but I, I was one of the pre-orders, um, because the full self-driving is very good. And I was like, ah, if they stretch it out, that sort of checks that box. I think I can fit all the kids, the dogs, all the, all the gear in there. So I think that might fill that slot for a little bit, but, uh, you know, land yacht, land yacht is, uh, is still, still in the books potentially. Um, what do you think on pricing? Tesla Roadster? He originally promised 250. At the time, 250K, that was supercar money. That was Lamborghini, Ferrari money. Now it's well-spec Turbo S money, right? It's like, it, it, it, it went down from 250 gets your sports car, used to get your supercar. Do you think he raises the price and it's a $600,000 car? Like a new Ferrari?

• 2:06:41Speaker 07

  Or like, or does he accept like alternate forms of payment? Like, is he gonna accept USD, right? Like he's, he's definitely gonna accept Bitcoin.

• 2:06:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:49Speaker 07

  Can't, will he accept, uh, shares in certain companies?

• 2:06:53John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. Yeah. Build the portfolio. Maybe.

• 2:06:56Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:06:57John Coogan?

  I don't know. I, I'd be excited because if they can do some surprising zero to 60 time or some gimmick, and then it's just a really fast sports car for 250, that actually is a unique space in a world where, uh, even for all the supercars, they all start at 400 now.

• 2:07:15Speaker 07

  Here's a question, John. Like there, this is obviously not serious for them, right? They're not going to scale this line. They don't, they don't care about like the revenue. I would guess the revenue or the EBITDA, right? This is, this is like a fun toy project. This is like a better version of that, that flamethrower.

• 2:07:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:29Speaker 07

  So like, I wonder how many people they have working on it. Like I bet it's a, I bet it's a tiny number. And I, I, I bet they just don't care that much about the price. Like they're just gonna say 250 because they said 250 before. Obviously if it was like 500 or a million, I, like I wonder what the elasticity curve there is. Like they would probably say it's all.

• 2:07:46John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. Maybe they just do a really limited run and then they don't even continue to sell them. And they're like, yeah, we sold them all at cost and we did the thing. We checked the box. I'm just shocked that Elon hasn't dropped it because he, he's, he drops projects all the time and he could have easily just been like, I'm refunding all the deposits. We're going in a different direction. We're refocusing and everyone would be like, great. Yeah, that's fine. Focus on the next thing. Like, you know, do, do whatever. It wouldn't be that big of a deal. I don't know.

• 2:08:12Speaker 07

  Well, that suggest, the suggestion you just made, it, it really begs like, maybe it is a real flying car, right?

• 2:08:18John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 2:08:18Speaker 07

  Cause maybe, cause, cause like, why, why would he do like a toy project?

• 2:08:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:23Speaker 07

  Um, if, you know, it like hints at something bigger.

• 2:08:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. He's never been one to like, yeah, just rip, rip the Band-Aid off. Like he never took Tesla private. And it wasn't like, he was like, I gotta do that. I'm, I'm sticking with it. I'm still telling people it's gonna happen. It was just like, yeah, that was a crazy idea. Didn't work out. Moving on to the next thing. Stock's going to the moon, you know? So.

• 2:08:43Speaker 07

  Are you, are you gonna get one?

• 2:08:45John Coogan?

  So, so the, the more we've been talking about this, I think that the deposit is incredibly up, incredible upside because I think it's like $5,000 down and then you have to put $50,000 down within, within, uh,

• 2:08:59Speaker 02

  Ten days.

• 2:09:00John Coogan?

  Within 10 days. The law, the, the announcement's 10 days away. And so it's refundable. And so if it's cool, then everyone's gonna flood in, you actually get one. Maybe regardless of whether or not it trades up or trades down, you just have the option to be the one with the flying car or you just get a refund. And so.

• 2:09:18Speaker 07

  Dude, what's the, what's the Roadster pop gonna be? People talk about IPO pop.

• 2:09:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:22Speaker 07

  Buy it for 250, turn around in a day and sell it for 600.

• 2:09:25John Coogan?

  But it's possible. It's possible. So yeah, maybe. I'm, I'm, I'm really, really close.

• 2:09:30Speaker 07

  If, if you believe it's downforce.

• 2:09:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:33Speaker 07

  Right? And, and therefore like this is not an entree into flying cars. This is just like a little gimmick.

• 2:09:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:38Speaker 07

  Then it's gonna be limited. It's gonna be the sickest gimmick ever, which means it's gonna, the value is gonna go up. So like, everyone should just try to buy one and resell it.

• 2:09:46John Coogan?

  And also I, I, I do just think that the, uh, like, like there is a more moderate scenario, which is it's not a flying car. It's not the craziest thing ever, but it's just like a really, really crazy sports car at that price point. And it's just like, yeah, it's just a good, good option to drive. Of course, like, you know, you're never going to compete with the, with the manual, uh, air-cooled Porsches of the world, but, uh, for us, for a different buyer, it is just like, you're getting a, you're getting a crazy experience for what is in the modern era, a sort of reasonable price. But yeah, if it, if, if it doesn't fly and, and he raises the price to 800K, I think a lot of people are gonna be saying, I'm out, but we'll see.

• 2:10:27Speaker 07

  You, you know, I would, I was, I wasn't thinking of buying one, but this conversation is, I think, I think might be a really great trade.

• 2:10:32John Coogan?

  You're not even, it's not that you're thinking of buying one. It's like, put down the deposit and then you just have the optionality and then you get to watch the, the live stream and say, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna stick around and wait. Cause it's still gonna take a year, but I'm converting. Uh, whereas people who did this the last time, they had to wait nine years and they tied up, I think even more. Some of them tied up a lot of money.

• 2:10:52Speaker 07

  Dude. The what would that money? Do you know how much they tied up and what like?

• 2:10:56John Coogan?

  I think it was like 50K originally. And if they put it in Tesla, it'd be like $10 million or something. It was like notoriously bad. But what I'm saying is like, under no circumstances, tie your money up in this deposit for 10 years. Just tie the money up for 10 days. See if you like it. If you like it, then continue. But if you don't, then pull out and time box it so that you're always going to be out of that, you know, that market in by the end of the year, basically.

• 2:11:23Speaker 07

  What if he says, just kidding? And he's like, it's gonna be another 10 years?

• 2:11:27John Coogan?

  If it's, then he deserves it. I don't know. Keep the, keep the working capital, I suppose, you know, have it as a treat. I don't know. Anyway, this is a lot of fun. Anything else go on in your world? Anything else?

• 2:11:39Speaker 07

  Robots. I think the thing, the thing I think about right now is I built a, building a dog. I have some free time and I run this company. We continue to help seniors. But we got, this is Popper.

• 2:11:49John Coogan?

  Ooh, what's this?

• 2:11:50Speaker 07

  This is a open source, uh, quadruped robot. It's a quadruped is a really suboptimal design.

• 2:11:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:11:58Speaker 07

  For a robot.

• 2:11:59John Coogan?

  Why? Why? Because it doesn't have wheels?

• 2:12:01Speaker 07

  Because, because like the, you know what an actuator is?

• 2:12:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:04Speaker 07

  It's, you know, electric motor. Like it spins an axle really fast, right? And basically, like actuators, like a geared down electric motor.

• 2:12:11John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:12:11Speaker 07

  So it's, it's really good for like a car. Like, it's really amazing in a Tesla. But they're, they're really bad at generating torque. Like, if you think about like, the way your arm moves, right? There's not like an actuator in your elbow that spins. Like, you just have a muscle.

• 2:12:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:12:24Speaker 07

  I, I think the nerdy way of saying that is like linear torque. So in a way, all the humanoid robots companies are kind of like hamfisting this like, this component, which generates radial motion into like, um,

• 2:12:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:37Speaker 07

  More linear motion. So that's like, that's something I'm playing around with.

• 2:12:40John Coogan?

  Cool. That's fun.

• 2:12:42Speaker 07

  And,

• 2:12:43John Coogan?

  Robot dog.

• 2:12:44Speaker 02

  AI generated videos. Are you getting any utility?

• 2:12:48John Coogan?

  What's the biggest use case? Defense? Home defense?

• 2:12:51Speaker 07

  It's like a party treat. We had, we had, we had like a bunch of our friends over for Ashana and dude, they went nuts for this robot.

• 2:12:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's fun. It's a pet.

• 2:13:01Speaker 07

  That's, that's, that's kind of it. And of course, like, if you're interested in, in building a robot, it's a great V zero.

• 2:13:08John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show.

• 2:13:10Speaker 07

  Hey, thanks for having me.

• 2:13:11John Coogan?

  Let's do it again soon. Talk to you later. Good to meet you. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. You think the roadster event's gonna go well? Go express your opinion on public.com. Do whatever you want to do. Any other breaking news? Anything you've been tracking over the last couple of hours while we've been live? I think we're pretty much good. Opus 5.5 launch. We talked about that. Benchmarks look really good, very cheap. And the, the key thing that you, that you pointed out was like, the second post is like, this is the first model that we've released since we said we were pacing the frontier. This is an expression of the pacing.

• 2:13:50Speaker 02

  Like this is, you know, Fable 5.1 class model, but it's, it's much cheaper.

• 2:13:54John Coogan?

  So it's not trying to be more superhuman, more dangerous. It's, it's the safest, best, fastest, cheapest, lightest, thinnest model ever, basically.

• 2:14:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then OpenAI also did the same thing today.

• 2:14:05John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. They, oh, so Soul's out.

• 2:14:07Speaker 02

  Soul, yep.

• 2:14:08John Coogan?

  GPT-6 Soul. Cool. And then also Luna, but not Terra?

• 2:14:12Speaker 02

  Or I might have had that back.

• 2:14:13John Coogan?

  Okay. But new, new models, the model wars never cease to, to entertain. Of course, all that matters is what you do with them. So send us some, send us whatever you build. Send us whatever you play around with. Send us the hallucinations, the good, the bad. I want to see it all. Thank you for watching TBPN. We will see you tomorrow at 11 AM Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. Throw that flashbang. Tyler Cosgrove.