Muse Wonder, Social Reckoning Review, Apple HomeView | Eli Manning & Michael Waldron, Anjney Midha, William Chu & Negin Oliver, Neal Stephenson, Ravi Gupta & John Hegeman, Jack Goldburg, Oege de Moor, Nick Talken, Jeff Holden

(01:13) - Social Reckoning Review (14:12) - Muse Wonder (30:15) - Apple HomeView (43:36) - Anjney Midha, William Chu & Negin Oliver. Anjney “Anj” Midha, founder of venture firm AMP, discusses the Grid Trust, a $100 billion program anchored by Zurich Asset Management to expand affordable, reliable AI computing capacity for startups and public-sector users worldwide. He explains how pooling customers and hardware providers, along with AI-powered demand forecasting, can improve GPU utilization, reduce risk, and broaden access to compute. (59:52) - Neal Stephenson, an acclaimed science-fiction author known for *Snow Crash*, discusses fiction’s influence on technology, his preference for hands-on research, and the importance of grounding speculative ideas in social, cultural, and economic realities. He also explores AI-assisted storytelling, carbon removal, algorithmic misinformation, the erosion of societal norms, and overlooked science-fiction author Matt Ruff. (01:25:29) - Ravi Gupta & John Hegeman. Ravi Gupta discusses Ithaca Holdings’ acquisition of Bumble alongside co-founder and co-CEO John Hegeman. He explains their conviction that human relationships will become even more important in an AI-driven world and outlines plans to improve Bumble’s matching, profile quality, and user experience before focusing on monetization. (01:37:12) - Jack Goldberg discusses co-founding Yes Chef Group, transforming a passion for food into a global media brand centered on content, live events, and community. He shares the company’s rapid growth, strategic partnerships, expansion into long-form programming, and plans to build the next-generation Food Network while exploring opportunities in live streaming, technology, and consumer products. (01:59:42) - Oege De discusses XBOW’s AI-powered cybersecurity platform, which autonomously identifies vulnerabilities by replicating the work of skilled offensive security researchers. He highlights a critical Chrome exploit affecting one billion users that was discovered in six days using GPT-5, emphasizing the urgent need for automated security testing as advanced cyber capabilities become increasingly accessible. (02:09:30) - Nick Talken discusses Albert Invent, the chemistry-focused AI company he co-founded and leads as CEO, and its $55 million Series B led by TCV. He explains how Albert’s specialized models and proprietary customer data help scientists accelerate materials and chemical innovation in areas such as batteries, solar cells, biodegradable plastics, PFAS alternatives, and spaceflight. (02:16:20) - Jeff Holden discusses his career as an early Amazon engineer, creator of Amazon Prime, and founder and CEO of Atomic Machines. He explains how the company’s “Matter Compiler” aims to turn AI-generated designs into functional micromachines, enabling innovations in medicine, robotics, electronics, and other fields. (02:28:02) - Eli Manning & Michael Waldron. Eli Manning discusses how his Penn State walk-on prank inspired Chad Powers and how his football experiences shape the show’s characters and stories. The retired two-time Super Bowl champion also advises young athletes to pursue media opportunities authentically while continuing to take their sport seriously. (02:46:15) - OpenAI Uncovers Insider Security Threat 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 TVBN. Today is Tuesday, October 13th.

• 0:05Jordi Hays?

  We got something in the mail.

• 0:07John Coogan?

  We are locked in the Ultra Dome. The temple of technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. Let me tell you about ramp.com, kind of funny. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, counting and a whole lot more all in one place. What do we get in the mail, Jordy? Are you gonna open it?

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  I don't know what it is.

• 0:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 0:26Jordi Hays?

  You guys can guess. What could it be?

• 0:31John Coogan?

  How many days is it until Christmas? Do we have that counter?

• 0:35Jordi Hays?

  You should pull up a countdown if we have one. It'd be kind of crazy to have one before Thanksgiving and Halloween.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, October 13th is a little early, but it would be nice to know how many days until Christmas.

• 0:45Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  Wait, only 72 days? We're really getting close.

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  I think it's fair game now.

• 0:50John Coogan?

  It's totally fair game.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  Totally fair game.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  It was funny earlier, now it's a serious business. So, anyway, how was your weekend?

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  It was great. Too long.

• 1:00John Coogan?

  Yeah?

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

  Too long.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, four days is way too much.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  I missed you.

• 1:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  I missed us. I missed the Ultra Dome. I'm glad to be back.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  We are back and, yeah, it was a good, good weekend. I saw The Social Reckoning. Big, big drop, big weekend, because I think it was opening weekend this weekend. The theater was completely empty, but it's interesting. Do you think that the Meta team tried to time up Muse Wonder, all the good news, to like fight back? Like the Cheeky Pint appearance? Because they completely steamrolled the movie.

• 1:35Jordi Hays?

  They won.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  I don't think they needed to because the movie got really packed.

• 1:37Jordi Hays?

  The crazy thing is that I had, I have zero desire to see the movie. I will not be going to the movie. And in many ways, it's my job to at least go. I feel like, I figured you were gonna go. So I felt like we were covered.

• 1:51John Coogan?

  So I did go.

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy that I'm like, it's crazy how excited I am to go see the Nathan Fielder film. And how little I even cared even know about, I don't even care about your review.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  Okay, well, you're about to care.

• 2:07Jordi Hays?

  Others might.

• 2:08John Coogan?

  My review is gonna be riveting, okay?

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  So, it's Saturday, it's a little rainy in LA. And so I'm like, I'll throw on this jacket, I'll get a little cozy.

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  You'll go see a film.

• 2:19John Coogan?

  I had to go to some other events, went over to our friend's place, and then I go to the movie. So I walk in and I think I'm looking good. I'm dressed for like a, you know, a nice rainy day in LA. I walk in to the theater, I sit down for The Social Reckoning and it stars, you know, it focuses on this Wall Street Journal reporter, Jeff Horwitz. And in the movie, I'll pull up a picture of what he wears in the movie. Because I looked like a kid from Spider-Man who dressed up as Spider-Man going to see Avengers. And I was like, wait, that's my exact jacket, my exact, I had the same jeans and boots too. It was, it was really, really striking.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  I just accidentally wore a costume to the movie. So it was very funny. And I was like, that is exactly my jacket. Like, it's not even just the same brand, I think it's the exact same jacket. Anyway.

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  That's so funny.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  It was a very funny moment. But it's not quite a sequel to The Social Network. Like, it's not the same structure of protagonists, antagonists. It's not really about the internal operations at Meta, at Facebook. It's very much about the, so the Mark Zuckerberg character is now played by Jeremy Strong instead of Jesse Eisenberg. And it's much more peripheral. The story follows data engineer Francis Haugen and Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz. The whole thing feels very out of date in the scaling era. The race towards superintelligence so dominant in the minds of tech people right now. I'm not surprised that this movie is underperforming because it doesn't answer the questions that people are asking about tech companies right now.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  Worldwide opening was 9 million on a budget of 40 million. So it's like gearing up to be a flop, but not, you know, the game's not over yet. And Rotten Tomatoes has a 55% score across 215 reviews. The acting's fairly compelling, the lighting, and it moves quickly. Story ebbs and flows nicely over the two hour runtime. But it feels like a time capsule from a completely different era. Mark Zuckerberg has so thoroughly reinvented himself that it felt like, I was like, who is, who is Jeremy Strong playing? And I'm like, oh yeah, Mark was kind of like that in 2019. But since then, it's like UFC, complete fashion makeover, change the company's name.

• 4:39John Coogan?

  They have fashion line now with like glasses and so many different elements. And then AI, obviously, personal assistants. Like even hearing the word Facebook feels antiquated now. Because people have actually shifted to, well, Instagram's the more important social platform. And then MSL and the AI stuff is really important. So Muse is a more important buzzword than, than Facebook. And then they renamed the company and stuff. So it felt like a blast from the past. You know, people often say the job of media is to speak truth to power, ask the hard questions. And I came away thinking Aaron Sorkin refused to ask the hard questions. There are so many hard questions to ask about Meta.

• 5:21John Coogan?

  You could ask, you know, will Muse margins be comparable to Meta's core ad business? But Sorkin doesn't ask that. Or you could ask like, does Muse Wonder jumping really good on the benchmarks, does that change the underlying?

• 5:33Jordi Hays?

  Is it benchmarked?

• 5:34John Coogan?

  Is it benchmarked? That's a hard question.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  And even Cheeky Pint, even Cheeky Pint was pushing on that.

• 5:39John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 5:39Jordi Hays?

  Corporate media.

• 5:40John Coogan?

  Sorkin completely drops the ball.

• 5:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:43John Coogan?

  Doesn't, doesn't address the fact that if Muse is, if Muse Wonder is competitive, does that change the underlying frontier model economic thesis? Like, that's the question that people want to ask. That's the question that media has a responsibility to ask and to investigate and to interrogate. And yet, Sorkin completely shirks his duty there. Will the retention curve for Muse smile? You know, right now, there's some, there's a post by Didi Dosh showing that Muse, you know, there's a lot of excitement on day one, after 14 days, a lot of people have stopped using the product. Sometimes these things come back, what's going on there? Completely ignored by the movie. It was very, very odd. And so instead, he focuses on old stories that have been settled in the courts essentially. But there were a bunch of other funny things, I was taking notes.

• 6:28John Coogan?

  And it's hard because, Michael, are you, are you here to give your review?

• 6:37Speaker 02

  I have to be very careful because I'm a fan of Aaron Sorkin. I think he's great. He has made a lot of great work. This did not feel like one of those great ones.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  What specifically was lacking? Because I thought the acting was pretty good and I thought like, if it had been three hours, I would have been like, oh, that was a drag. But like two hours, I thought it was okay. Was it just like too contrived? Because like, I feel like my critique of it is probably very different than yours.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, contrived feels like a good word. It just feels like, it felt like all the, all the character dynamics and the dialogue and everything just felt so forced.

• 7:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  And it felt like it was trying to be like an 80s, like journalistic thriller, like All the President's Men or something like that. But it just felt like kind of out of place and it felt too polished to actually fit in that, in that scope. I don't know.

• 7:23John Coogan?

  It was a total glaze piece on the Wall Street Journal. Because Jeff Horwitz.

• 7:27Jordi Hays?

  Maybe I want to watch it now.

• 7:28John Coogan?

  Jeff Horwitz, I mean, sure he's in shape, but let's be honest, Jeremy Allen White, the guy is diced. He's absolutely shredded and they've made, they cast him as like the ultimate chat. There were a bunch of other funny moments where Jeff Horwitz, the character, the journalist, shows up and he's like, I don't even have a Facebook, I don't know how to use the GPS stuff in my, he's like the extremely offline guy. And there's a whole bunch of funny, funny moments where the benefits of social media are kind of revealed through this. Because part of it takes place during COVID. And the Francis Haugen character is like, oh yeah, I set up a Facebook group for all these scientists. And everyone like really understands how serious COVID is gonna be.

• 8:10John Coogan?

  And, and the journalist who's like offline and like doesn't care about tech is like, that's a bunch of mumbo jumbo. And it's like, wait, like you're kind of pitching me the whole idea of like the internet. Like, it's like the biology calling COVID so much earlier. Like, there clearly are some benefits here. But there's a bunch of other stuff. They, what stuck out? They, oh, they have this funny moment where they're like, Mark Zuckerberg has a bulletproof couch. And they're framing it as like, look at how weird this guy is. And it's the meme like, literal coolest thing ever. Like, this thing sucks. Because I'm watching there, I'm like, bulletproof couch, that's amazing.

• 8:49Jordi Hays?

  A couch that's always watching your back.

• 8:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, so the idea is that you can hide under it. And they kind of frame it as like he's being a coward by having it. Because like, you should obviously like charge straight into the hail of gunfire if you're being attacked. But, and they're like, he would be hiding behind his bulletproof couch.

• 9:03Jordi Hays?

  Did I not kind of call this like two months ago that no one would care at all about the, the whole premise of this movie anymore?

• 9:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:10Jordi Hays?

  Like the whole, the narrative, like even the media itself has so far moved on.

• 9:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:18Jordi Hays?

  That they, I would have liked to see this kind of production on the current AI race.

• 9:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:27Jordi Hays?

  And I think we're getting something like that with artificial. But it's interesting because like The Social Network.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:36Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, I don't know if I can say this, this is a cult classic?

• 9:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  I mean, it was, it was a box office success as well, but.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  Box office success, but within tech, it's like, it's a classic. It was so, it, it was so influential on the culture, sort of had the opposite effect that, that the, the makers of the film maybe wanted it to have, where everyone was like, I want to be like Zuck.

• 10:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:02Jordi Hays?

  I want to be that guy. At least, at least on the inside of the industry. And, and in some ways, like I could imagine that, that Zuck and his team were worried about

• 10:14John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 10:15Jordi Hays?

  this movie because the last one was like such a hit outside, in the outside world and within the tech industry. And they've had to, it was like, I'm sure hard to reinvent like Zuck or figure out who he was outside of, you know, at some point in the 2010s, it felt like he was just becoming the character. He was looking more and more like the character in the movie in some ways, like almost like becoming.

• 10:38John Coogan?

  Wait, when?

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  This was like late.

• 10:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then PT has that idea that it's funny and ironic that Mark Zuckerberg became the Justin Timberlake character from the movie.

• 10:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or that was, but it was like so influential on, it was so influential on the industry and especially the next generation of founders that it seemed like it had an influence on Zuck.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 11:05Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's funny. I mean, it definitely, it definitely feels like the, the post 2020 UFC, like, you know.

• 11:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was like, wait, who am I? Who do I want to be?

• 11:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:17Jordi Hays?

  I have to figure out.

• 11:18John Coogan?

  And it created a ton of distance because the Jeremy Strong character, it feels like it's a completely different person. And then he also, Jeremy Strong reads is kind of older, but he's playing a much younger character than what you see on Cheeky Pint, who's like actually Jeremy Strong's age, but has become something else. So yeah, there's a whole bunch of interesting weird things. There's, yeah, there's also a bunch of things where you're like, oh, that just doesn't, that doesn't, that's not how things work. Like, there's a scene where Mark Zuckerberg is like addressing the board and explaining how the algorithm will work. And he's like, emoji reactions will be worth five points and, and retweets will be worth 50 points. And it's like seen as like, oh my God, he designed

• 12:00John Coogan?

  the algorithm for controversy. And it's like, that's, you know that the algorithm's like 12 levels deep. It's like, he goes to Adam Mosseri, who goes to the chief technology officer, goes to VP of engineering, who says like, okay, what are we doing? It's like, well, we created this optimization pipeline for retention that balances all these things. It's a bunch of, it's a bunch of data and we have no idea what's going on in the black box, but we saw the retention went up. There's no, there's no one at Facebook who's like, add another three points to retweets or reposts or whatever, shares. It's like, it's like more, more signal than can be humanly understood, for sure. Also, it's just hilarious view of like Hollywood's perception of tech that like the final shot of Mark Zuckerberg is

• 12:43John Coogan?

  him sitting in front of like a 42 inch TV in this like war room. And he's just like sitting there like this, and he's just watching code scroll by, just like really fast code scrolling by. And it's like, why would you be reviewing code at extreme speeds during like, it happens during like January 6th. It's like, that's not how you monitor a situation.

• 13:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you could just open Instagram.

• 13:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And then also like they go through the Trump ban in this weird way where it's very much, it's framed as like his decision. And it's like, if you were, if you were paying attention on that day, it's like very clear that all of the different tech CEOs were like in a group chat together, talking about like, hey, if we're going to do this, we all got to do it at once. Because like, otherwise, we will be, you know, singled out as like the one that did, that did it. So there's a bunch of interesting things. And also very weird that, like Aaron Sorkin, like seems to be under the impression that Francis Haugen and Jeff Horowitz like had a romance of some sort, like, which they deny. And Jeff Horowitz was like, Aaron Sorkin, please don't make it seem like it was romantic. We were, I

• 13:48John Coogan?

  was, she was my source and we just worked together on this, but we weren't romantically involved. And there's like so many scenes where you're like, okay, they're trying to make, they're kind of making it look like they're going to date. And then they like sail off into the sunset and you're like, oh, so do they get married? And you look it up and it's like, no, they were both married to other people the whole time. Very weird. Anyway, funny movie. But the big news of course is Meta, Zuck says Meta has reached the frontier with its new Muse Wonder agent. What was the exact line? He said, he said he, you know.

• 14:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's get it. We'll get into, we'll get into that. Let's talk about it.

• 14:25John Coogan?

  So this is from the Financial Times. Mark Zuckerberg says Meta has reached the AI frontier. FT interview, tech billionaire touts release of new Muse Wonder model after vast spending to challenge rivals in AI race. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So speaking with the FT, as Meta released its Muse Wonder AI model on Monday, this is watermelon, right? Everyone's doing the, the fruit thing. There was strawberry and then there's banana. And now there's watermelon. Internal code names. I mean, I guess the fruit code names are like hard to read into, like unlike the, the Greek mythology, which is like laden with all sorts of pitfalls and you can be in a hubris tale or a cautionary

• 15:10John Coogan?

  tale all of a sudden. Anyway, he said, the new system was going to allow much more sophisticated behaviors that are at the frontier of what's being done in the AI field. Silicon Valley Group, the Silicon Valley Group claims Muse Wonder outperforms or performs better than comparable models released by Anthropic and OpenAI in some tasks, according to technical benchmarks. The release marks, marks a major milestone for Zuckerberg, who since last year, has committed billions of dollars to shake up Meta's AI leadership, build vast data centers and hire star AI researchers on multimillion dollar salaries, all in a bid to keep pace with OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. Quote, getting to this point required both a large amount of compute and investment and a lot of very rigorous scientific work

• 15:54John Coogan?

  by the group working on it over an extended period of time. So he's bullish. He's posting on X about it. What's your take, Jordy?

• 16:06Jordi Hays?

  I was trying to understand how Mark and Alex like really felt about the model by watching Cheeky Pint.

• 16:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:16Jordi Hays?

  On the, on the drive to work today, I was listening. It's great to have Cheeky Pint back.

• 16:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:21Jordi Hays?

  I thought that they were all like, I mean, this was the most candid I've ever seen Zuck.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 16:26Jordi Hays?

  Like he felt like he was just hanging out, having a beer.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:30Jordi Hays?

  Trying to have a couple beers.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:33Jordi Hays?

  And so I thought, I thought it was great.

• 16:35John Coogan?

  Tyler, Tyler cataloged it.

• 16:37Jordi Hays?

  He did. How many exactly, Tyler?

• 16:38John Coogan?

  One point two.

• 16:39Jordi Hays?

  It was 1.4 pints.

• 16:40John Coogan?

  1.4? Okay.

• 16:42Jordi Hays?

  Okay. And I will just go out and say, as somebody who's had a couple of drinks while recording a podcast, as we would celebrate whenever we would double way back in the day.

• 16:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:54Jordi Hays?

  I certainly, we always felt that the content just got worse.

• 16:58John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 16:59Jordi Hays?

  Like, it was like each sip, it was getting like a little bit worse. And so we basically.

• 17:03John Coogan?

  No, it's a funny idea. You think, oh, it'll be looser, it'll be better content, but that's just not what happens.

• 17:07Jordi Hays?

  You're just not as sharp.

• 17:08John Coogan?

  You're just not as sharp.

• 17:09Jordi Hays?

  Like, you're just period not as sharp. And, and, uh, I, yeah, it wasn't like, suddenly it was like, there's no reason we're here for three hours.

• 17:19John Coogan?

  So if you're going to do it, you got to practice. You got to, you got to be drinking six to 12.

• 17:22Jordi Hays?

  So anyway, if I'm, if I'm Zuck and I have to launch this new model family and talk about Muse and all these things, you got to give him credit because I, I either, either one, he was practicing having like 10 beers a day. So that when he had 1.4, he was still feeling like sharp.

• 17:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:40Jordi Hays?

  I like to imagine.

• 17:42John Coogan?

  He built up his tolerance.

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he built up his tolerance. But either way, ballsy to come on and, and, uh, and just start throwing them back. So yeah, I was, I was trying to understand, you know, the benchmarks are all amazing. Muse is a great product.

• 17:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:59Jordi Hays?

  People love it. They like manage by, by being like later movers, they manage to solve a bunch of problems.

• 18:06John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 18:07Jordi Hays?

  And like created just a more compelling user experience. I thought it was cool. They were even talking about how, they even talked about their experience with like OpenClaw.

• 18:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 18:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, which was cool. But I was trying to, if you actually listen to the wording, Zuck's wording, he said, the, the quote that stood out to me, and I had to play it back a few times to get the exact string of words. He said, this is the beginning of like MSL kind of being at the frontier. This is the beginning of like MSL kind of being at the frontier.

• 18:44John Coogan?

  I mean, it's so hard.

• 18:44Jordi Hays?

  At the 24, at the 24 minute mark. And then, and then, and so, uh, my brother Collison then said, so you think this is Astra or, or, or Fable level?

• 18:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:56Jordi Hays?

  And, and they, and then Alex and Zuck kind of both like fight over each other for a second, which can't knock them for, we do the same thing. But then they said, by looking at the benchmarks, one would conclude that. Which to me is like, yeah, we all see the benchmarks. They look amazing.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  We all, but you've been accused of benchmarking before. And so we all wanted.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  No, no, I don't think they've been accused of benchmarking before. Oh, maybe like early llama stuff.

• 19:21Jordi Hays?

  Like everyone went through this with, with.

• 19:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe.

• 19:24Jordi Hays?

  Sparks bench, you know.

• 19:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 19:26Jordi Hays?

  But it's not like, and, and so to me, if it's like, so you think this is Astra or Fable level? And then you answer, by looking at the benchmarks, one would conclude that. So, so again, like, I don't think that they are actually, it doesn't, based on a few of these factors.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  I don't think they're, I don't think they're really at the frontier.

• 19:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 19:47Jordi Hays?

  Um, and I think it will become pretty obvious that that's the case.

• 19:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:51Jordi Hays?

  As people.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  I mean, these things always like the, the crown goes back and forth so quickly like they're, you know, they've been working on this for a long time. They launched it. Who knows what the other labs have up their sleeves to fire back, et cetera. I, but I, I do think the, the language is odd because it feels like there's pretty little downside to just being like, yeah, this is a fable class model. And just use the anthropic terminology because everyone has an idea of what fable means. It's like big model, we're, you know, uh, really expensive. And you're like, yeah, we're giving this away. We, we, we're putting it in the same category, but it's basically free because it's integrated into the product.

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:28John Coogan?

  And.

• 20:28Jordi Hays?

  But here's, here's what, here's what is, I think, here's what I think is interesting.

• 20:32John Coogan?

  And then people can quibble over like the.

• 20:33Jordi Hays?

  I think you have to be way more excited about, you have to be way more excited about what MSL is doing.

• 20:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:39Jordi Hays?

  Than, than Google or, or SpaceX at this point.

• 20:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:44Jordi Hays?

  And you have to give, like, everyone should be giving Mark credit for that because if you're thinking about rewinding a year, even after the talent raids, hey, a year from now, you're going to be more excited and more interested about MS, what MSL is doing than Google and XAI, SpaceX.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:02Jordi Hays?

  You know, this was, this was pre-merger, but.

• 21:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  Um, so yeah, they're, they're competitive.

• 21:09John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. Yeah. It is interesting that, that SpaceX has yet to launch a model. Like Elon's been very, very cautious with the words on like, when the progress will come from that team on Grok and different versions. But obviously they have cursor, they have a great team inside. So you would think that there'd be, there'd be more progress there, but he's been sort of downplaying it a little bit more.

• 21:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Uh, the, the, the big debate, uh, the funny thing about the, the interaction with like the meta-universe and like the EA world is, I mean, going back to the movie, there's this moment where, uh, they're like, somebody asks Francis Haugen, like, what, what, uh, what percentage of teenage girls, uh, having a bad experience on Instagram would be acceptable to you? Like developing body image issues. And she's like, 2%, uh, maybe 1%, she like backtracks it. And they're like, it's 34%. And that's like a bombshell. But from like an EA perspective, it's like, oh, so like potentially net good if like,

• 22:09John Coogan?

  if like 46% are positively impacted and only 34% are negatively impacted. It's like, you take that trade all day long because it like maths out in the spreadsheet. Not how people actually think about things, but it really goes to show you how, how different philosophical, how, how different philosophically some of the, some of the worlds are right now. And, and this is like, the, the, the AI safety world is like colliding with Mark Zuckerberg right now. Like Andrew Curran summed it up. He said, uh, pacing is out the window. For it to work, every American lab needed to be on board. Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly make it, made it clear that he is not interested. One defection among US labs breaks it all, as the others will be forced to accelerate or get passed.

• 22:49John Coogan?

  Mark has a staggering amount of compute and, and has been all in on compute capex for years, even in the face of some investor opposition. He never stopped building his in for once. Uh, he said on the earnings call a couple of years ago that he'd rather overspend now and potentially even be wrong than not have the compute when he needed it for the next 10x. He's finally hitting his stride and he's not going to slow down for team pacing to solve a defection like this. They would have needed a supportive pro pacing administration that was passing capable, capability regulations and was willing to use the power of the federal government to enforce them and bring non-compliant labs into line. They don't have any of this. In fact, it's the opposite. Mark has Trump's ear. President Trump, Mark Zuckerberg and Jensen are all completely aligned on policy. It's full speed ahead.

• 23:33John Coogan?

  And if you want to pace yourself, go ahead, but don't tell anyone else what to do. That, this breaks pacing. And so the interesting thing is like, the, like, are we on the frontier? Are we not? There are benefits to being on the frontier from a prosumer adoption perspective. Like people will be like, oh, I gotta try the new model. It's fable class. Or it's, it's, it's Astro, but it's cheaper, or it's Astro, but it's integrated by Instagram. People will be excited to try that. But if you actually say like, now we're on the frontier, we're the most important AI lab. It's like, okay, so what are you doing about the potential problems from AI? Like now you're the one getting the hard questions about that stuff. Uh, and so it, it like being like a strong second, a strong third actually gives you a little bit of cover

• 24:16John Coogan?

  because you can say, oh, well, like the, you know, the most dangerous stuff, like, yeah, like Muse Wonder is great at coding, but you can't build bioweapons. Like that's not, that's not anything. Like we'll see that emerge at the frontier labs first. We'll see those problems confronted by.

• 24:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:31John Coogan?

  Anthropic OpenAI.

• 24:32Jordi Hays?

  That's one of the reasons, that's one of the reasons why you can say like, they're not at the frontier because the researchers that are at the frontier sometimes, sometimes have this like, you know, you know, stare where you're like, oh, you've seen things.

• 24:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:44Jordi Hays?

  That no, you've seen man-made horrors, you know, beyond.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  Beyond all comprehension. Yeah.

• 24:51Jordi Hays?

  Um, let's pull up this video on Saturday. Zuck, uh, Zuck went live.

• 24:56John Coogan?

  He went back to the barbecue.

• 24:57Jordi Hays?

  Went back to the barbecue, back to the egg.

• 24:59John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 25:00Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video. Let's get some sound on.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, Tank, we're smoking sausage. Smoke whatever the fuck we want.

• 25:09John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 25:14Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so.

• 25:15John Coogan?

  Is this real?

• 25:16Jordi Hays?

  Catch me up to speed. I was, I was just a boy during this era, but he didn't used to like post selfie videos during the social network.

• 25:24John Coogan?

  Well, he was in and out of going direct through the entire journey.

• 25:30Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 25:31John Coogan?

  So he like.

• 25:33Jordi Hays?

  Cause like part of the reason that this new, the new, uh, the new movie doesn't hit.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  Is because you just see Zuck all the time, talking to people.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  And he'll go on podcasts.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  And, and you could do an impression of the new Zuck and make fun of him and do a more exaggerated version of this character and poke fun at the quirks of this character, but it's a completely different vector of like comedic attack than the previous arc. Uh, yeah. So, I mean, early on he did a, uh, he did like an interview where he was talking to some interviewer and he was drinking a beer out of a solo cup. And it was like very casual and funny. Then he went on stage with Kara Swisher and she was asking him like hard questions and he started like sweating and, and sort of pacing in his sweatshirt. And it was like a really like bad moment where it was like, oh, like he like couldn't handle the pressure. He like crumbled in the hot seat and then.

• 26:26Jordi Hays?

  Sure, he was just getting his steps in, but.

• 26:28John Coogan?

  Yes. And then, uh, and then there were a number of other things where he would like start doing long posts on Facebook directly, writing blog posts. Uh, he did, he tested like the live stream functionality with that smoking meats video. And Sam Lessin is in that video. And that was actually like a longer live stream.

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  So, so this new live stream was almost the 10th anniversary of that. It was on October 9th, 2016.

• 26:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so I think, I think he tested it out with the sweet baby raise smoking meats thing, but there was like some backlash. He, but he, he'd live streamed like other presentations, other talks, keynotes and stuff. So he'd always been dipping his toe in and out of going direct and working with the media and, and, and being quiet. Like there's been, there's been, uh, you know, arcs and ups and downs throughout the entire journey. But, um, the sweet baby raise thing, I think he, he embraced as a meme pretty quickly because in a future keynote or, you know, video, he had a bottle of sweet baby raise on the, on the shelf and was sort of like a nod. And he's made jokes about that like many times and sort of leaned in. And so this is just further, further leaning in. Um, but anyway.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 27:46John Coogan?

  So, uh, what, what else is important to review here before we move on? Because there are a lot of other posts. People really enjoyed the cheeky find. I'm so glad it's back. Uh, and this is a really good format. Uh, doing like two, two interviews, one host, it turns it into a roundtable. Uh, we've seen Alex on David Senra, we've seen Mark on, I think he did sources recently. There's been a couple of other interviews, but this roundtable format really, really works. Uh, oh, it's funny that they're talking about deploying capital for AI spend and, and Alex is like, uh, you have to make this very large investment. You have to make big decisions about how you're going to invest and develop the technology.

• 28:25John Coogan?

  Uh, before you know that there's data to support this. And it's funny because you go back and listen to Dario on Dwar Kesh. And he's like, there's these people that are just yellowing. And everyone's like, oh, he's talking about OpenAI. But, uh, it's like, oh no, he was actually, he was talking about Meta 2 and it was absolutely the right thing to do. So it's just funny.

• 28:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it seems that way so far, but I just didn't, yeah. The, the, using like this line to try to criticize Zuck's management style is like, he's always operated the business this way. He's always been willing to bet the company. He's always been willing to invest more. He did, he did this with the metaverse. You think like, it's, I don't think if you look back, I don't think if you look back, it's like.

• 29:05John Coogan?

  Company if you're just spending.

• 29:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, not betting, not betting the company. Not betting. So that's not the right word.

• 29:10John Coogan?

  He'll just be like, I have this cash machine and I'm going to spend it. Like he actually treats $10 billion like it's $10 because he makes a $200 billion, you know? And like to him, it's like, you know, a nice car.

• 29:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  And for other people.

• 29:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I, I just never thought that with the metaverse, he was like, oh, like this is a hundred percent going to work. So that's why we're going to invest so much. It was like, there's a chance that this is the next paradigm on a shorter time horizon than the rest of the world thinks, and we're going to invest against that. And it's okay if it doesn't work out. Clearly the company has been fine.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  It is remarkable how, how quick companies can catch up in AI, can, can get another foothold, can train a new model, can get near the frontier or to the frontier with enough effort, uh, versus metaverse and VR where, uh, you know, Microsoft has a hollow lens and like, it didn't really go anywhere. And like Apple, when are they going to fire back with the next Vision Air or Vision Pro or something? Uh, it's just completely, when you're, when you're operating in the domain of pure software, things move so much faster. Um, anyway, speaking of Apple, Apple just announced Home View, a $299 smart home hub. John Turnus posted it on X. Let's play the video.

• 30:25John Coogan?

  And I want to know, are you in the market for this? Looks like a big Apple watch, like the rounded rectangles or the rounded square.

• 30:33John Coogan?

  You're spinning like it? Yeah, we heard about this and I thought it was going to be much more like the Pixar lamp, like with an articulated arm. Uh, it has a much simpler design to it. I think it just swivels and then you can manually adjust it up and down. But I guess it can follow you around the room. If you put it on a kitchen island and they're touting the new Apple intelligence and they think that will catch up. It, it is interesting how, what they will have to do to catch up to Muse and Instinct and Dot and Grokbot. Like there are several AI agent products that are barely fully featured at this point and they all have pros and cons based on what they integrate with. Apple has an incredible integration point and an incredible model partner with Gemini.

• 31:18John Coogan?

  Uh, I think if you, if you went to Noah Shin and said, you can only use deep mind models, he would, but they're free. He would say, yeah, game on. Like I, I can build a great product. Uh, but, uh, it'll be interesting to see like, when do they have?

• 31:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:34John Coogan?

  The, hey, go and, go and, uh, you know, plan a birthday party, reserve, make a reservation, create the invite, send it out to all my friends and, you know, just come to me with the key decision-making questions and, um, and I don't want to be involved. I want you to actually do this agentically. Um, that, that functionality, that, that ability feels far off.

• 31:58Jordi Hays?

  Screams, you know, screams stagnation.

• 32:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 32:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and, uh, yeah, it's hard to get excited about this. I would be, so here's, here's where I would get excited, John.

• 32:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:10Jordi Hays?

  If Apple actually, and maybe this is where they're going.

• 32:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:13Jordi Hays?

  But if actually, if Apple was committed to actually making this device be able to control all of the electronics on my, around my house from like my gates to cameras, to lights, to, um, HVAC, all that kind of thing.

• 32:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:30Jordi Hays?

  I would be extremely excited because the current system I have in my house is like some random tablet thing. I don't even know who makes it.

• 32:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 32:37Jordi Hays?

  Attached to the wall.

• 32:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:38Jordi Hays?

  And it controls everything and the software is really bad.

• 32:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:41Jordi Hays?

  And if they were going to actually, is that what they're doing? Or is this literally just like a half iPad, half computer that sits on your kitchen counter?

• 32:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's not bad.

• 32:50Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 32:51John Coogan?

  So, and that functionality exists like Astro or Fable can like straight up reverse engineer the API to your garage door clicker and make it work on the smart home. Uh, but then they bump into the OS layer all over the place. Um, but I think they're going to reverse engineer that too.

• 33:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:12John Coogan?

  I think, uh, the end, the end state might be buy this and jailbreak it and run your own software that's, you know, sort of instantiated on the fly or forked from something.

• 33:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:24John Coogan?

  But in terms of industrial design, looks pretty nice.

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, really solving a problem that no one has.

• 33:35John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange.

• 33:41Jordi Hays?

  John needed, uh, to break the ice, he ran another ad for the New York Stock Exchange.

• 33:46John Coogan?

  Oh, I did? Sorry.

• 33:48Jordi Hays?

  Um, yeah, solving a problem that I don't have. You know, when you're FaceTiming and you need the phone to follow you around the room? And it's hard to hold it because you're cooking and you want it, and you want the camera to follow you around the room.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:07Jordi Hays?

  But we built the solution for that.

• 34:08John Coogan?

  So Meta had a product that competed with this called the Portal.

• 34:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:11John Coogan?

  Uh, same thing.

• 34:12Jordi Hays?

  And I was, I like that for the name. It's portal time, baby.

• 34:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. I, I actually did get a bunch of them for family members during COVID and we used them like once and then, and then they started collecting dust. Uh, they worked as like picture friends basically, but, uh, they, they, they did not become like the smart home, although maybe they should bring that back now that they have Muse. Uh, uh, like they, they basically have a direct competitor to this pre-built. They just need to upgrade some software and like.

• 34:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one of the other videos was like highlighting, one of the other videos was highlighting Siri.

• 34:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:45Jordi Hays?

  Like the Siri integration here.

• 34:47John Coogan?

  Comes with Siri AI.

• 34:48Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, we know they're working on making a better, a better Siri, but I actually, it made me realize, I think they need to change the voice of Siri.

• 34:56John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 34:56Jordi Hays?

  Because at this point, anybody.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  The brand is.

• 34:59Jordi Hays?

  Everybody has had so many disappointments using Siri that I just associate the name with like, I tried to do something, it didn't work, or I accidentally triggered Siri. I definitely don't want to do that. And so I think they have to like rebrand.

• 35:12John Coogan?

  You want Tim Cook.

• 35:13Jordi Hays?

  I want, yeah, I want chair, I want, I want the chairman.

• 35:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:17Jordi Hays?

  Speaking to me.

• 35:18John Coogan?

  That'd be great. Good morning. Um, let's see. Is software actually dead this time?

• 35:24Jordi Hays?

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

• 35:26John Coogan?

  Okay, continue.

• 35:27Jordi Hays?

  Can you, so, so I use FaceTime with family members.

• 35:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Jordi Hays?

  Usually like with the kids.

• 35:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:34Jordi Hays?

  And like, it's very chaotic.

• 35:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:36Jordi Hays?

  The kids are like jumping all around.

• 35:37John Coogan?

  Ordinarily.

• 35:38Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine trying to have a successful like FaceTime with like the home view?

• 35:44John Coogan?

  No.

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  With like a bunch of kids running around? It would just be like, it would just be getting kicked over.

• 35:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, you put out, you'd like need to put it on the floor in the playroom and then it would, they would get kicked over or they would need to be tall enough to stand and then at which case they could like maybe just hold the phone.

• 35:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:58John Coogan?

  It's odd.

• 35:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I'd just be curious how Apple thinks about this. Is this like, uh, yeah, we have enough customers that like a million people will buy this?

• 36:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:06Jordi Hays?

  Like, does it actually move anything? I, I would just like to.

• 36:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:10Jordi Hays?

  I would love to see that like really bold bet on like, we are actually going to provide iPhone level software.

• 36:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:16Jordi Hays?

  For your entire home.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  I mean, it would be, I mean, Amazon has gone on a tear and bought like a smart lock system and, and they bought Ring cameras and all sorts of different, they have Aero Wi-Fi mesh routing. And so it would be very cool. Like this could be so much cooler if it was like, oh yeah, Meta or Meta, uh, Apple also has a garage door company and a, and a, and a smart doorbell company. And they also have a product for the cameras in your home and they have a, and they have a, a wide range of speakers and they make a TV. And so like you can actually get all your consumer products from them. And if you go all in, you get a great experience, but you gotta be in the walled garden. Instead, it's like, even if you go all in on Apple, you just don't wind up, you, you're, you're still going to have so many devices because they don't have a thermostat.

• 37:02John Coogan?

  Google has a thermostat, but they don't have a thermostat. And so you're going to wind up with like all these weird integration points where Google's like, oh, well, like, yeah, we're happy to integrate with Siri AI, but, uh, like let's make sure you're still, you're logged into your Nest Google account or whatever, and they're going to be fighting. So, anyway, um, let's, uh, let's move on to console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% IT, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Um, people are going back and forth on, uh, on software being dead. There's no mode, the mode is you, blah, blah, blah.

• 37:39John Coogan?

  Um, the one that, the one that I wanted to cover was, um, oh, there, did you see this spa sign? The AI generated sign outside of a spa? That is a sign of a sign?

• 37:57Jordi Hays?

  I love it.

• 37:58John Coogan?

  They went?

• 37:59Jordi Hays?

  They really took me into a different world.

• 38:01John Coogan?

  And they zoom in because they, they, they generated an image of a sign and they printed it and put it on a sign.

• 38:11Jordi Hays?

  Signception.

• 38:12John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, they should add a not for you tab. I want to see what the algorithm thinks I'd hate. Um, that's funny. This one, this one, I had me dying. Uh, well, that's a new one. My Mustang came back from a Turo, fully tinted. Someone rented this guy's Mustang and they tinted it so that they could enjoy tint while, while on the Turo trip.

• 38:37Jordi Hays?

  It makes me think they were maybe doing something that illegal?

• 38:41John Coogan?

  Questionable.

• 38:42Jordi Hays?

  Very questionable.

• 38:43John Coogan?

  Very, very questionable. Very, very questionable.

• 38:46Jordi Hays?

  Um, people were going back and forth. Elon posted.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:50Jordi Hays?

  I think his mailing address, uh, just right on main.

• 38:55John Coogan?

  Did he?

• 38:55Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he said, I asked Grok to research the most fun Lego Star Wars kits for young kids and order them as easy as that. But if you zoom in, you can, you can see that, um, he's sending product to somewhere and, you know, it has a shipping address and billing address and.

• 39:11John Coogan?

  That's a crazy lead.

• 39:13Jordi Hays?

  And I don't know if this is true.

• 39:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's probably not, but somebody said like, I just canceled your order. Don't share your info online. Uh, so they had the order number, all that other details. Um, who knows?

• 39:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, this seems maybe photoshopped because.

• 39:28Jordi Hays?

  And he says, that's not my address and the order isn't canceled.

• 39:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:33Jordi Hays?

  Got him.

• 39:33John Coogan?

  Uh, but yeah, I mean, yeah, uh, yeah, it's a tell because the first reply by the bot is, hi Elon, thanks for waiting. And it's like, it wouldn't know that until you actually went and said, I'm Elon. Uh, here's my information, please cancel. Uh, it would be potentially possible to do that, uh, with, with a bad prompt injection or something, but, uh, did you see this, uh, this F1, uh, camera transition?

• 39:58Jordi Hays?

  I did, break it down for me.

• 40:00John Coogan?

  This is elite, elite transition. Play this. So it goes from one camera to the next and everyone thinks they're using AI to merge the two, the two video feeds, which is really, really cool. Way, way more immersive. So there's levels. We gotta get the AI transitions in the UltraDome for sure. We gotta figure out how they did this. But that is such a cool, such a cool move. What are you drinking over there?

• 40:25Jordi Hays?

  OJ.

• 40:26John Coogan?

  Orange juice. Why does Mert think F1 is a scam? F1 might be the greatest game of the decade, totally unwatchable IRL. Fifty percent oversupplied for paddock tickets that are just random IBM and Oracle employees. That's a dream come true. Who else do you want to be hanging out with other than

• 40:41Jordi Hays?

  I agree.

• 40:41John Coogan?

  tech employees?

• 40:43Jordi Hays?

  It is completely unwatchable IRL.

• 40:47John Coogan?

  It's not about like following the race directly. Like you can still watch the TV or the map if you want. It's about like

• 40:52Jordi Hays?

  It's about being in the environment.

• 40:53John Coogan?

  the cars go by really fast, I think, like

• 40:56Jordi Hays?

  But it's really just like a, it's a big spectacle now.

• 40:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:59Jordi Hays?

  It's not about

• 41:00John Coogan?

  It's like a weekend and you're there to like, watch the performance. Like you go to the practice. Sometimes you'll take a ride on a vehicle and go on the physical track. It's like, it's much more experiential than like you're locked in like

• 41:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, and the, and the biggest challenge with motorsports is that the viewers, live viewers, whether you're watching at home or at the event,

• 41:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:23Jordi Hays?

  you have no way of understanding what the drivers are going through. Like

• 41:27John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 41:28Jordi Hays?

  Because

• 41:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's all abstract.

• 41:29Jordi Hays?

  Because it's so normalized because the cars are going around and they, and they rarely crash.

• 41:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:33Jordi Hays?

  And so it doesn't feel nearly, and they're, and they're so precise, they're so technical, they're so highly skilled, that they just normalize it very quickly, even though it's completely ridiculous. Like it's one of the craziest things that we do

• 41:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:47Jordi Hays?

  as humans.

• 41:48John Coogan?

  No, it's insane.

• 41:49Jordi Hays?

  Um, and it's an insane workout, but, but again, like you don't, you can't tell that they're uh, they're, they, they have like the equivalent of like a ridiculous fever the entire time that they're driving, right? Like you can't tell that, that, um,

• 42:03John Coogan?

  Well, it gets kind of sniffy on the, on the comms sometimes.

• 42:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 42:06John Coogan?

  And that's, uh, but that's the most you get.

• 42:08Jordi Hays?

  That's it.

• 42:08John Coogan?

  Uh, well, speaking of cars, Alfa Romeo launched a new car. I want your review. The Corresco, Corres, Corres, Coro Rosso, uh, launched and they put up a YouTube video here breaking it down. There's also an article that we can click through from Autoblog, but let's play the actual video. Uh, I think it's a cool launch and I want to know what you think about the front, the wheels, the back. Let's play this video.

• 42:36Speaker 04

  They almost forgot how to make a heart's race.

• 42:41Speaker 04

  But not us.

• 42:44Speaker 04

  Every Alfa Romeo has always been built around the same engine. Not the one beneath the hood. The one inside our chest.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  That's why an Alfa Romeo has never simply taken you somewhere.

• 43:03Speaker 04

  It has always taken your breath away.

• 43:09Jordi Hays?

  As much as I want to keep watching this, we have our first guest.

• 43:12John Coogan?

  Give us your review first.

• 43:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave it as a cliffhanger.

• 43:16John Coogan?

  Cliffhanger?

• 43:17Jordi Hays?

  Cliffhanger. We'll get back to it.

• 43:18John Coogan?

  I think the, I think the front looks great. I think the side looks great. The back is a little crazy, but it's, it's pushing it. Uh, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. And let's bring in our first guests of the show. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much.

• 43:43Jordi Hays?

  There they are.

• 43:43John Coogan?

  For joining. Uh, let's start with some introductions. So everyone knows who's who.

• 43:49Speaker 05

  Hey guys, uh, go ahead, William.

• 43:53Speaker 06

  Uh, hi, I'm William Chu, um, the head of private equity over at Zurich Alternative Asset Management. Um, thank you guys very much for having us here. Longtime fan, first time joiner, Diet Coke enabled.

• 44:07Jordi Hays?

  There you go. Cheers. Great to have you. What about these other two? Who are they?

• 44:12Speaker 05

  Hey guys, good to see you again. Uh, some of you know me. My name is friends Anj and I have friends calling me Anj. You guys should feel free to as well. And you got my partner Negin over here.

• 44:21Speaker 07

  Hey there.

• 44:22Jordi Hays?

  Hey.

• 44:22Speaker 07

  Mickey and Oliver. Nice to meet you guys.

• 44:24Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Where are you guys calling in from? Side of the road somewhere? Data center?

• 44:28Speaker 05

  You can, you can probably see. Does it look, is it obvious?

• 44:33John Coogan?

  Isn't that the Golden A Bridge?

• 44:34Jordi Hays?

  I mean,

• 44:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, it is.

• 44:35Jordi Hays?

  your hat was kind of blocking it, I gotta say, at least at the start, but now, now I see it. I thought you were going to be somewhere down in like West Texas or something like that, but, um, it's amazing to have you guys.

• 44:46Speaker 05

  Well, we are in, we are in federal land. We're at the Presidio in SF, which is where our campus is. This is where AMP is headquartered.

• 44:53John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 44:53Speaker 05

  And, uh, and so we just stepped outside for some sunshine and to talk to you guys. Thanks for having us.

• 44:58Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Well, why don't you kick it off, Anj? Uh, why are we all here today? And, uh, why is this? Why will this day be remo- remembered throughout? Why will it echo throughout history?

• 45:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:11Speaker 05

  Uh, well, um, as you guys know, compute is getting expensive. And as sheriffs, um, in the AI infrastructure world, we started getting a lot of calls for help last year from startups who wanted access to compute at scale, but, uh, because they weren't, um, as rich as the hyperscalers, they were getting told they could not access the compute they needed. So they called us in, we're the cavalry, and I'm excited to announce today that we're kicking off a hundred billion dollar, um, program called the Grid Trust that's been anchored by Zurich. Uh, Zurich Asset Management is one of the biggest institutional investors in the world. They have over 300 billion of assets under management. And they have anchored, uh, the Grid Trust program with a meaningful amount of capital that we are using to bring up capacity, compute capacity for startups all around the world.

• 45:54Speaker 05

  And, uh, we're really lucky that we had Negin join us from, uh, AMD to lead this effort. When Negin, Negin was at AMD for over eight years and helped build the GPU business over there from scratch. So between Negin and William, we're in pretty good hands.

• 46:10John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 46:13Jordi Hays?

  Where should we start from here?

• 46:14Speaker 05

  William, I'm gonna hand it over. I'm gonna call on William a little bit to explain

• 46:19John Coogan?

  Perfect.

• 46:20Speaker 05

  what, uh, Zurich does. I think the, the big question, every time you guys have asked me, Anj, you want to build out two gigawatts?

• 46:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:27Speaker 05

  Your question has always been, how are you going to pay for it? And so the good news is we've got William to answer your question.

• 46:33Speaker 06

  Uh, that's a, that's a heavy ask there, but, um, look, um, happy to, uh, give you some perspective from our lens here. And just for some context as well, what I do here, uh, over at Zurich Alternative Asset Management, we are the alternative investing arm of Zurich Insurance Group. Uh, obviously you know that it's a bond and future in the company. I will slightly correct Anj. We have a little bit more than 300 billion, it's actually 440 billion.

• 46:58John Coogan?

  Whoa, there you go.

• 46:59Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow. It's just a round, just a rounding error. A hundred billion dollar rounding error.

• 47:04Speaker 06

  Uh, you know, what's the, what's that among friends, right?

• 47:07Speaker 05

  Exactly two gigawatts. Isn't that convenient?

• 47:11Speaker 06

  Um, yeah, look, uh, we are super thrilled, super excited with our partnership here with AMP. And, um, Anj, the dear friend of mine and the team as well. I've got to know them, um, for some time and really are excited about this ambition endeavor. Uh, super proud to have this opportunity and privilege to kind of showcase with you guys live today. As you said, uh, this is kind of a, a very memorable day for us and obviously for hopefully the future of compute. I mean, there's a number of reasons why I'm very super excited about this opportunity. And, um, you know, I think from a perspective of what really kind of got us over, um, over the hump, so to speak, is a few reasons.

• 47:54Speaker 06

  One, I would say, as Anj has been kind of the lead, uh, catalyst around the whole world of compute. He's, he's looking to change the game in venture and in the very core and what the essence of it is. I cannot be more excited about partnering with someone like that who is not just kind of be yet another venture firm. Because I think the firm, the reality is, you know, we've seen a lot of those folks out there, but I think for those that really kind of have an ambitious plan to really change the DNA of what it means to be a venture capitalist today in today's environment. I think that's one of the reasons why we're super excited. And I think from the specific opportunity set here, I think a few reasons. One is, I'll break it down into a few categories and I'll try to be brief, right?

• 48:37Speaker 06

  But, you know, the spending curve, one is people often think about the frontier AI labs, um, and the compute is always speculative. But frankly, the infrastructure side behaves a little bit more like a utility than a startup. And that's, I think, uh, a testament to what Anj has been kind of, um, evangelizing. And we're a believer as well. I've, obviously some data and research has kind of shown that. I think model capabilities have improved. I mean, we know the obvious ones, particularly on the frontier side. And likewise, higher compute consumption has followed, right? So labs may compete, models come and go and change, but the demand frankly for the compute has followed consistently.

• 49:17Speaker 06

  So as investors, institutional investors at that, we're looking for a pattern of spending that's durable and observable, right? A few other things I'll just highlight, you know, I, I think that we've seen what, uh, Jensen's been doing, particularly around the Nvidia chips. And really just kind of making a big splash around, if all the various different parts of infrastructure being now financeable because of this pattern of spending, right? And there's demand and you get reasonable confidence in that. So that helps. We're not relying on any single model provider to win the game. And this is going back, going now into my third piece of why we're super excited, which is pooling. Pooling actually reduces the risk.

• 50:00Speaker 06

  So instead of kind of putting all the eggs in one basket where you have a single tenant build out, you know, you're basically going for the Hail Mary, one customer, run one roadmap, one growth trajectory. Pooling actually changes the economics. It actually helps diversify. Um, and from a risk perspective, as you can imagine, I work in an insurance company, so risk is a, a natural big theme. This is actually an incredible diversifier here. So, and last but not least, you know, I would say why does it matter? I think we all know, like, look, AI is not a fad. AI is longstanding here. And we're, we're investing here, not just in, in the promise of compute and what it can bring, but

• 50:43Speaker 06

  You know, in terms of the high utilization that it, of course, compute can deliver over a long period of time. And so we're super excited and of course it starts with AMP in our partnership with them. They are, I mean, Anj doesn't need to get another plug, you know? If you, if you follow Anj, he's successful in his own right.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  He's been right a lot.

• 51:04Speaker 06

  Well spoken and he's got his X account for those that don't follow, they should. It's quite entertaining on many levels. But I think what's important as well is there's a lot of players in this space, but you have to have the right one. And I think AMP is the partner of choice for us and, and they're one of the very, very few that we are doing business with.

• 51:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very cool. Anj, how are you thinking about timelines here? You have a bunch of portfolio companies, you're going to have a lot more in the future. You also have, I'm sure companies reaching out to you all the time. Anj, we don't work together yet, but I need compute. You're looking to bring two gigawatts online. That's not going to happen instantly, but how are you communicating the timeline today?

• 51:52Speaker 05

  Typically I introduce them to Negin and then she takes over. So why don't I turn to her? Because, you know, at AMD, the last thing Negin helped assemble over there was the two gigawatt partnership each with OpenAI and Anthropic. And I think those will be looked on as templates for scaling across the ecosystem. But, you know, Negin, how would you answer that question?

• 52:12Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, and I think it is going to take some time. And as Anj mentioned, my focus is really to figure out how we get the two gigawatts online in a reliable way. You know, one of the things that William talked about pooling for the end customers. There's also value in having multiple cloud providers and Neo clouds on the grid. So our customers are now, you know, have a little bit more security and they're less dependent on a single cluster and have, have more of a reliable vision of where the capacity is going to come online. And whether it's one or the other, it kind of doesn't matter. When people come to us looking for compute, I mean, we have compute live today. The grid works, we have people running on it. It's been unbelievable. We have Nvidia and AMD.

• 52:56Speaker 07

  Our hope is to get all chips onto the grid because that's what's really going to make this fungible for, for people. And, you know, we've got capacity coming online between now and say 12 months from now that we have very clear line of sight to where it's going to be, how much it's going to be. And it's a process to educate our customers on how best to utilize that capacity. Cause our goal is not to have them lock it up and just sit idle. The goal is to make sure we get the most utilization out of those GPUs that we have on the grid. So that's really what my focus is. I've spent my entire career in semiconductor industry, focusing the last eight years just on the infrastructure side for AI. And so that's what's complimentary with what Anj is bringing to the table.

• 53:41Speaker 07

  And looking, you know, looking forward to getting this built out and getting our labs access to GPUs at the way they need it, really, when and where they need it.

• 53:50Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 53:51Speaker 05

  So next time any of our friends listening in want to know exactly when their next cluster is going to come online, all you have to do is message [email protected]. You no longer need to go, I'm no longer the bottleneck, as many will testify. I hope you don't mind me sharing your email.

• 54:09Jordi Hays?

  No, it's good.

• 54:10Speaker 07

  Most people won't know how to spell it, we'll be good, we're good.

• 54:13Jordi Hays?

  No, that'd be a lot of, a lot of.

• 54:15Speaker 05

  The motivated ones will find out.

• 54:15Speaker 07

  Yes, the motivated ones will find me.

• 54:19Jordi Hays?

  John, what were you going to say?

• 54:20John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm interested to know about, how do you think about the diversification, the spreading of risk across different customers at different levels? That seems like it's important to the philosophy here. Obviously there's a number of labs and hyperscalers and Neo clouds, but then there's also startups. But how do you think about actually spreading out the long tail of demand across all the potential customers? Is there like a portfolio strategy in place?

• 54:49Speaker 05

  This is a great question. So if you go to the website, nationalcompute.com, which is where the grid is hosted, you'll see it says the grid is now in public access, public sector access. You know, we, we started with a public mission, which means the, the compute, the infrastructure that's being built out has to go on the grid to people who need it the most. Today, that means for us, .edu users, .gov users, .ml users. We're, as far as where we're, we're one of the only places where these folks can access live, like hundreds of chips on demand at subsidized rates. You can get an AMD chip there, MI355 for three bucks an hour. And you can get a B200 from Nvidia for about four bucks.

• 55:33Speaker 05

  The commercial pool we have, there's over 60 different commercial labs also on the grid. They pay a much higher price. So we've had several millions of dollars being spent on MI355s at about $12 an hour as of yesterday. And so just to give you a sense of the spread, commercial customers do pay higher for on-demand access, but public sector users get the compute at subsidized rates. And, and the benefit of pooling is we get the essentially load balance across these different customer types and ensure folks who need access the most can get it at prices that don't sort of exclude them from the market. Does that make sense?

• 56:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 56:10Jordi Hays?

  Last question from my side for now. How, like, demand planning? It feels like the, the greatest challenge for application layer companies, even, even obviously the labs as well. But is this something that can be solved? Or, or like, it feels like this is the solution where you just get the most number of chips in a single sort of platform all over the world. And because it just feels like, it feels like demand planning for, for these companies is entirely unpredictable. You have like an instinct moment where suddenly you go from obscurity to, you know, overwhelming demand. Or, or you've seen labs release a new model and it's, you get that new capability increase and suddenly you have customers that you weren't even imagining.

• 56:54Jordi Hays?

  And so this feels like the only solution, but what are you guys seeing the smartest companies do around, around forecasting? Is it really just napkin math and sort of like guessing? Or, or is this a new kind of core skill set?

• 57:09Speaker 07

  I, I think each company on their own is doing the napkin math and guessing. And they're looking at their neighbors, like they're looking at what is this guy doing? What is that guy doing? And trying to like extrapolate that. I think the beauty of what we're doing is, is that our grid members are sharing their napkin math with us. So we get visibility across a larger number. And then we're the ones taking the bets on some of the unknowns, right? Like, like the instinct moment you mentioned, you know, we're going to plan for that so that there is capacity for those that didn't know better than to plan. And the idea is that if you have enough users across it, some may plan too high, some may plan too low, but you should be able to sort of smooth out that demand curve

• 57:50Speaker 07

  and make sure that the people who need it most have access to GPUs at the time they need it.

• 57:55Speaker 05

  And, and like everybody else, we also use AI. So the first thing you'll see when you log into nationalcompute.com is our agent called Marshall. Marshall is named after, you know, the, the general who helped unite the United States and Europe post-World War II, after the Marshall Plan. And Marshall is an automated system that input ingests all of that data that Negin was talking about and then actually does demand forecasting for us. And every grid member can go talk to Marshall, do, you can kind of think of Marshall as your chief AI compute officer. And we're using reinforcement learning to improve it. And over time, I think this will really unblock a lot of bottlenecks for folks who don't have their own infrastructure teams, their own procurement teams.

• 58:36Speaker 05

  You know, it's not uncommon today for the, the largest labs to have 100 plus people doing this job. But I don't see why we can't relieve some of that stress through automation.

• 58:47John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming up with it down.

• 58:50Jordi Hays?

  Amazing milestone and, and so excited that a lot more companies will, will get access to this, to this compute. And, and yeah, it feels like we had this beautiful sort of hacker moment, hacker culture emerging. And then the sort of like financial realities of like, how do you access massive amounts of compute? As a small team, kind of you run into that. So very excited about this and, and congratulations on the partnership.

• 59:15Speaker 05

  A big shout out to Zurich. It takes a village to raise AI infrastructure. And as you can see between William with this grid background and us over here in San Francisco, William's actually based in New York. We think this has to be a cross-country scaling approach. And we're really lucky to have Zurich believe in us at scale.

• 59:32John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 59:32Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Well, looking forward to having all three of you back on the show soon and good luck out there.

• 59:36John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your week.

• 59:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, wear our cowboy hats next time.

• 59:39Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 59:40Speaker 05

  See you.

• 59:40Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 59:41John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Cisco. Critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. Our next guest is Neil Stevenson, the fantastic author you know and love. His latest book is D-Heavy Water.

• 59:56Jordi Hays?

  Here he is.

• 59:56John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show, Neil. How are you doing?

• 59:59Speaker 08

  I'm good. My voice is still working because this is day one of the book tour. So you got me in a great time.

• 1:00:05John Coogan?

  I'm sure.

• 1:00:06Jordi Hays?

  How have book tours evolved? I imagine your book tour now is like eight podcasts a day for two weeks.

• 1:00:13Speaker 08

  Well, yeah, of course, that's obviously new during the time I've done it. It used to be like the first book tour I did, it was old school and they would sort of put you on like drive time shock jock radio programs. And you'd try to explain your book to a, you know, a shock jock in 30 seconds. It was pretty challenging. I like this better.

• 1:00:37John Coogan?

  Is there a trade-off between talking the book too much and not leaving enough for people to actually go and convert? Versus like talking about anything, talking about other topics, anything that just gets people interested? We've talked to some people, I think it applies more in nonfiction where someone has a thesis and then they lay out that thesis on like a three-hour podcast. And then people are like, well, why would I get the six-hour audiobook if I could just listen to you for three hours?

• 1:01:03Speaker 08

  I kind of had that experience with, sometimes with nonfiction books like business

• 1:01:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:01:09Speaker 08

  Advice books, you know, it's like, okay, I get it, I don't need to read it. Obviously, you don't want that as an author. I think with fiction, you've got a big advantage in that if you can kind of set up the general, the general thesis of the book, that, you know, that hopefully gets people interested in the story and gives them a reason to actually pick it up and read it.

• 1:01:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, makes sense.

• 1:01:37Jordi Hays?

  What do you, how do you think about the, how do you think about the responsibility that, like, do you feel like science fiction, science fiction authors have a responsibility? And, and you think, like, how much of a weight do you feel like there is to the work? Because, like, in my view, you guys, you're sort of predicting the future and you're entertaining, but then also it inspires so many people that you, you impact the world in a very unique way, just, just with your words. And I think you have to assume that, like, something about it, these ideas just sort of like weed their way into people's consciousness and it affects their actions and affects the products that they make, it affects the weapon systems that get built in the future. And there, there seems like there is some weight to it.

• 1:02:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think the, the good thing is that to tell a story that intelligent readers will actually enjoy, you need to be realistic, you need to include some of the actual complexity and ambiguity of the real world. Otherwise, it just comes off as kind of a one dimensional, you know, screed. And so, so I tried to do that. You know, the last book I wrote that had some of that potential was, was Termination Shock, which is about geoengineering. So, I mean, it depicted people doing geoengineering and one of the main characters was a big advocate of geoengineering, but there are also characters in the book who took a different view and

• 1:03:06Speaker 08

  who were ambivalent or openly hostile to the efforts that were being made in that area. So I think if you, to begin with, that just made it a better book. But, you know, if you're reading a book like that with an eye towards, you know, starting a company or something, then hopefully you notice the fact that there's different points of view on it, there's complexity, and you take that into account in your decision making going forward.

• 1:03:37John Coogan?

  Do you believe in nominative determinism?

• 1:03:41Speaker 08

  Well, in, in, in novel writing, sure, because you get to pick the names. And so, the, so Dickens, for example, you know, was, was really good at giving his characters names like Scrooge or Uriah Heap, or whatever, that immediately gave you a clue as to the nature of that particular character. Whether that really translates into real life, I'm a little less certain.

• 1:04:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, how do you grapple with it as an author? It, it, it can sometimes be tempting to say, the main character's name will be, you know, Chad Goodman, and the bad guy will be named like Evil Doer, and it can be a little bit on the nose, but sometimes it's

• 1:04:27Speaker 08

  Hero protagonist.

• 1:04:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, hero protagonist is a great one. But how do you, how do you personally deal with that balancing act?

• 1:04:36Speaker 08

  I mean, it's just a question of trying to have a little bit of a light touch, you know, make it a little funny, a little witty. If, if it feels like you're hitting the reader over the head with something obvious, then they're not gonna take that very well. But on the other hand, if you can kind of slip it in there and have it be sort of, sort of clever and funny, then the reader feels like, okay, I'm in on the joke.

• 1:05:08John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Can we go back to 2013? I'd love to know how you met Seamus Blackley, who sort of, I think, sort of kicked off this arc, do I have that correct?

• 1:05:20Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah. I've known Seamus, I don't know, since the late 90s, probably. He, after he left Microsoft, he got interested for a while in trying to help gamers fund their projects and that, I think led to him being, kind of running the game division of CAA, the big Hollywood talent agency. And at the time, my, my agent in LA, Richard Green, was working at CAA. And so, one day, Rich said to me, hey, you know, if you're in town, there's this guy,

• 1:06:05Speaker 08

  Seamus, you know, you guys should meet. So we went out, had lunch, and immediately kind of, I think, understood each other and became friends. And so we're, we've been in touch ever since. I saw him just two weeks ago when I was down in LA.

• 1:06:23John Coogan?

  How are you

• 1:06:24Speaker 08

  But yeah, he

• 1:06:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. He sort of inspired the book, right? Sorry.

• 1:06:28Speaker 08

  Yeah, he, he, he made me aware of the existence of, of some of the story content that, that this book is based on, specifically the, the Earl of Suffolk. And so since then, he and I have sort of traded notes as, as the occasion warrants about, you know, when we come across some interesting piece of information, well, we'll email it back and forth to each other.

• 1:06:57John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about the current moment in video games and AI? There's all of these mashups that are happening, people are using AI to decompile video games, and it feels like we're at a moment where fan-made video games are going to be more of a thing, like a fan-made Halloween costume. I can imagine that fans will turn many of your works into AI-generated video games. There's obviously a lot of intellectual property discussion around there, but how are you, how are you churning through it? Is there a part that excites you, a part that is nerve wracking? How are you dealing with that moment?

• 1:07:36Speaker 08

  Well, I'm more of a just hands-on guy, so I, I'm a co-founder of a startup called Win Air that's actually working in, kind of in this area, not exactly what you're talking about, but, you know, the, the premise is to allow fans of story worlds to tell stories in their favorite, you know, fictional universes by giving them an environment that, that, you know, represents a part of that world and a script editor that they can use to determine what they want to see happen. So, and, and we've actually just last week made an announcement, we've been working

• 1:08:18Speaker 08

  with a company called Dreamlands.ai that has made some incredible strides in this area and made it possible for a tiny team like ours to generate environments, realistic, high-quality, you know, video game environments that a few years ago would have cost, you know, a million dollars plus. So that's kind of the way I come at this. If, I, I haven't followed the, you know, the, the mashup scene very much, though.

• 1:08:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Sure, please.

• 1:08:53Jordi Hays?

  So you published No Crash in 92, and then we went through a period of like, what, what in hindsight feels like total stagnation, where you get, you know, the, the internet becomes big and, and that's cool, but it sort of just extends, it extends a lot of existing technologies. And then it feels like the 2020s, like, I, I think, like, generally, people have felt the sort of acceleration and this, and the speed up and, and new capabilities. From your view, having, you know, written about a lot of the things that we're starting to like see in the real world and experience today, even in, in small ways, did it feel like a period of, you know, 20 years of, of stagnation and then, and then a, and a

• 1:09:38Jordi Hays?

  real acceleration? Or like, what was your sort of lived experience? Because it just feels like such a big, it feels like a big gap where like, if reading the Wall Street Journal or reading the mainstream media has at times felt in the last year like you're reading science fiction.

• 1:09:54Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:09:55Jordi Hays?

  And, and it certainly didn't feel that way. Like, in some ways, like

• 1:09:59Speaker 08

  Sounds like a good point.

• 1:10:00Jordi Hays?

  The early 2000s and the 2010s was like, great, we have new database software and we have more wars and it didn't, it didn't feel like there was any, it didn't feel like it was The news was not-

• 1:10:12Speaker 08

  Wild excitement, yeah.

• 1:10:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:15Speaker 08

  Yeah, I know what you mean. I kinda wasn't even aware of it, you know, but now that you pointed out, it's like, yeah, yeah, it was sort of that way. And I mean, you know, the internet came along, it was big, it was very important, and there was kind of a period of consolidation, I think, where it changed from, you know, sort of like, you know, rampant grad students, you know, stringing things together, to big business and the consolidation of power and influence on the internet by the, you know, the Fang companies, basically. And so, so yeah, I think gradually over time, you begin to, you get tired of it, you begin to lose

• 1:11:00Speaker 08

  the sense of wild excitement and, you know, big things happening and the sense that, hey, there's, I can do something, you know, there's opportunities here that I could grab. That starts to fade after a while, and now it's sort of back because of the things that you mentioned.

• 1:11:22John Coogan?

  How are you thinking-

• 1:11:22Jordi Hays?

  And then, yeah, and then on that, like, as you're, I don't know what your process is like for, you know, generating ideas for future work, but like, do you feel like this is a time where you can open the newspaper and start to, like, cause what's been interesting is like, many people in the technology industry, like, the people closest to the frontier of AI, have started writing their own science fiction, right? So you have work like AI 2027, which is like-

• 1:11:51John Coogan?

  2040, yeah.

• 1:11:52Jordi Hays?

  And AI 2040, where it's like, hey, let's look at the technology that we have today and sort of just try to extrapolate it out quarter by quarter and see where this goes. And you have to, you basically have this series of like compounding assumptions that lead to these really insane outcomes. But in some way, like, that's, you were kind of running that same kind of process, but over maybe a larger time scale, where it's like, if you assume the technology we have today is gonna improve this way and make jumps in this way, then I can imagine this whole world where this would be the way that you travel around the earth, or this would be the way that individuals interact with, you know, corporate, large corporations, et cetera.

• 1:12:38Speaker 08

  Yeah, I haven't read the things you mentioned. I wasn't aware of them, but, you know, now I am, I'll check them out. But I think, you know, to make it a good yarn, you need to, there's some elements that you need to include in the story that give it a feeling of realism. And one of those is, you know, it's one thing to posit a new technology and think about what you might be able to do with it just on a pure engineering level. But in addition, you know, real technologies answer to other masters as well. So you've

• 1:13:21Speaker 08

  got kind of the social and creative side, you know, what do people do with new technologies that's unexpected, like electric guitars? You know, we had electricity. Everyone knew there was going to be light bulbs and washing machines, but electric guitars were kind of an unexpected thing that came out of a more social and cultural milieu. And then there's the business side, you know, you've got to, you know, you've got to have a plausible business plan for why some future technology in a science fiction book actually makes sense

• 1:13:58Speaker 08

  and can get funded. So, so those are some elements that I think, in a way, it adds some additional work, it's an additional challenge to the process of writing science fiction, but it more than pays off because what you end up with is something that feels a lot more organic and realistic, and as such, can do a better job of drawing the reader into the story.

• 1:14:26John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about AI in the process of researching, writing, fact checking, proofreading, and the trade offs of using tools that might atrophy your own skills? How have you grappled with all the different opportunities and risks?

• 1:14:43Speaker 08

  I think you answered the question. I'm not real big on atrophying my skills. So I do think that it's, you know, it's a little bit difficult to explain, but there's something about the serendipity and the randomness of doing it yourself that is very productive in the end. And so, like, when I was writing my Baroque cycle series of historical novels, I would just make notes by hand in comp books. I had a huge stack of these notebooks, and

• 1:15:23Speaker 08

  it was all hodgepodge, you know, it wasn't organized, it wasn't searchable, certainly. And so I would have to flip through them, trying to find stuff, you know, I think it's somewhere in here, kind of deal. And in the course of doing that, I would stumble across things I'd half forgotten about, or connections would get made, new ideas would emerge. And so, so for me, having that work done by a research assistant, whether it be a human or an AI, would actually be counterproductive. I'm just not interested in it at all. But, I mean, I already know how to write books, so I don't need help.

• 1:16:07John Coogan?

  That's a good point. Is there a science or technology that you think is underrepresented or underexplored in science fiction? Like, there's a lot of space stuff explored, there's a lot of robots, basically. I mean, we maybe need to advance that, but is there something that sticks out to you as potentially fertile ground or underexplored?

• 1:16:31Speaker 08

  I mean, I think a lot of the story of the next half century or century is gonna be how we get carbon out of the atmosphere. Sure. And that is a straight up technology engineering project that's gonna have to be carried out on a really large scale. So I'd like to see more about that, for sure. There's all kinds of different carbon sequestration technologies that are being talked about. Some are biological, some are kind of industrial facilities, some are like enhanced weathering

• 1:17:11Speaker 08

  of stone and so on. So there's a lot of ideas floating around right now, and we haven't really settled on what the right one's gonna be. But it's an interesting area right now of engineering ferment. There's like bright people going into it. And so I hope that, I hope that we'll be seeing more in that area.

• 1:17:39Jordi Hays?

  What about, would you ever write something about algorithmic social feeds? Like, it seems like, it seems like an idea that you would have imagined, and maybe you have, like, you know, a decade ago or two decades ago, where this idea that like, everyone would be spending, you know, four hours a day, you know, immersed in this device that is showing them entirely different sort of worldview and set of facts and all these different things. I was scrolling, I was scrolling on X over the weekend, and there's this new, I mean, it's not really new, but it seems to have gotten worse, where people would just share fake image, you know, fake, fake news, fake images, and the only, and these

• 1:18:24Jordi Hays?

  things have, you know, 10 million views. And I can see that it's in the process of getting community noted.

• 1:18:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:18:30Jordi Hays?

  And you can click in and see that, like, oh, this is not a real image, this has never appeared or whatever. But AI is making it, we've had this technology for years now, but it's so much easier. And if I wasn't in the, if I wasn't in the, like, community notes program, I never would know that, I would just be scrolling past these things, seeing fake news. And so, there's this sort of fake news element that is still underexplored, but then also this idea of like, I'm just seeing-

• 1:18:56John Coogan?

  Living in a filter bubble.

• 1:18:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm living in an entirely different online world than, than somebody next to me in traffic. And then what are the downstream implications of that?

• 1:19:06Speaker 08

  Yeah, I kind of went there briefly in my book Fall or Dodge in Hell. And it's sort of a minor sideshow to the main story. So, but it kind of depicts a semi near future in which big swathes of the country have been kind of colonized by the sort of thing you're describing with the results that that part of the country in my book is called Ameristan. And, you know, it's this kind of war torn place inhabited by people who have absolutely no idea what's going on, but they're sure that they do.

• 1:19:46Speaker 08

  And so it's to me, to me, I mentioned carbon before. To me, the two big problems facing us right now are carbon and what you just described. And with carbon, I can see, you know, that's an engineering problem straight up. The other problem, people living in their own realities is you could address it with with engineering or, you know, by by blowing up a few Yandex server farms.

• 1:20:19John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 1:20:22Speaker 08

  You know, it's it's a harder problem because people like it, you know.

• 1:20:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:29Jordi Hays?

  And that means you have to police. What are you going to do? Start policing like it can get kind of dark if you're like, oh, OK, well, now the government is going to decide all they're going to try to enforce a rule set around what can be seen and shown. And it's this weird thing where, like you said, like, the fake stuff just naturally is absurd often. So it gets more engagement. It is more entertaining. People spend more time. They get served more ads. But at the same time, if you have government intervention. And so, yeah, it's like we're much the human race, the human race is so much better set up for like engineering problems. We're like, we have this monumental problem that we're that we're facing.

• 1:21:09John Coogan?

  At least we all agree on it.

• 1:21:10Jordi Hays?

  But but in that situation, you have one hacker, you know, theoretically hacker in their garage or at some university lab or whatever. And they can they can have this one breakthrough that can then get global adoption because there's an incentive to have that global adoption. And right now, with this like problem of us all living in our own world, there's no obvious incentive structure that that will fix it. If anything, there's an incentive for it to get worse.

• 1:21:35Speaker 08

  And in some ways, the videos and the images are.

• 1:21:40Speaker 08

  For me, it's a little easier to look at those, at least at the current stage of technology and say, yeah, I don't think that's real. But what's more insidious in a way is lots of posts underneath that video, you know, by by so mostly by bots, right? And so in a way, that's a sneakier way that the same bad actors can influence the way we think because we read these things and we tend to think, oh, well, there's a real person out there somewhere who's actually typing this when, you know, that's that's not actually the case at all.

• 1:22:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. I know you've studied the fall of Rome a lot. How do you compare those problems that you just described to the problems that were faced by Rome? They feel extremely modern, but is there some connection that we could actually learn lessons from the past here?

• 1:22:33Speaker 08

  Yeah, well, you know, there were two falls of Rome. There was the fall of the Republic, you know, which finally bit the dust around time of Julius Caesar. And then there was the much slower fall of the the empire. And they're kind of different phenomena in a way. It's easier to get a grip on the fall of the Republic because you can just see what happens to certain people like Marius and Sulla. You just decided that they were going to sweep aside the the norms that until then all of the the important people in the Roman Republic had agreed to to observe. And and they just decided to to flout those norms and and do what they wanted to do.

• 1:23:17Speaker 08

  And that's a little bit, I think, where we are right now in in modern society.

• 1:23:27Speaker 08

  The the fall of the empire is a, you know, slower and more complicated process that it took, you know, another 1,500 years to fully, you know, reach its reach its end. And and there you're talking about a lot of things like migration and and changes in religion and so on and so forth that make for good reading. I recommend, you know, studying this, but I don't know if I have a quick answer for you.

• 1:24:01John Coogan?

  Well, one solution for algorithmic feeds, picking up a book, D. Heavy Water is available.

• 1:24:07Jordi Hays?

  I wanted to ask you before you leave, who do you think is the most? Who do you think is the most underrated science fiction author that you think would resonate with our corner of the Internet, our small corner of reality? You're you're you're among like venture capitalists. You might laugh at this, but you're certainly the most widely recommended and read, you know, ask if you ask any of them there, they'll tell you.

• 1:24:35Speaker 08

  I mean, if I just had to pick one off the cuff, first thought is Matt Ruff, our UFF, who wrote, he wrote The Lovecraft Country, which got turned into a TV series. So that's his most widely known book. But every book he writes is different and they're all great. And he's got one that he's winding up now called Black Sheep, but I don't think it'll be out real soon. But I know he's he's it's about AI. So so if I had to pick one, that's that's my first thought.

• 1:25:11John Coogan?

  Well, thanks for the recommendation.

• 1:25:12Jordi Hays?

  It was great to meet you. Thank you for coming on.

• 1:25:13John Coogan?

  The show and congratulations on the book launch.

• 1:25:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, good luck keeping your voice over the next couple of weeks.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  Yes, good luck.

• 1:25:19Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Talk to me in two weeks. We'll know.

• 1:25:22John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:25:23Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Neil.

• 1:25:24John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:25:25Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 1:25:25John Coogan?

  Our next guests are already in the waiting room. We have Robby Gucca and John Huggiman from Ithaca Holdings, the co-founders, co-CEOs here to discuss the landmark deal. Welcome to the show, guys. Thank you so much for coming on and hopping on such a big day.

• 1:25:41Jordi Hays?

  Look at us. You put a smile on our face.

• 1:25:43Speaker 09

  Dude, it's good to see you guys. But sorry, before we get started, why are you guys so bundled up?

• 1:25:48Jordi Hays?

  It's 70 degrees in LA. It's the coldest it's been in about nine months.

• 1:25:53John Coogan?

  As the gumshoe journalist from The Social Reckoning. There's a Wall Street Journal reporter. He wears this exactly. And we were doing a movie review earlier, so.

• 1:26:04Speaker 09

  And Jordan, you're just cold because it's 70.

• 1:26:06Jordi Hays?

  It's freezing. It's freezing. It's it's a it's a, yeah. It's the it feels like the tundra out there.

• 1:26:11John Coogan?

  It's only 72 days till Christmas, so you know, you got to warm up inside. The Yule tide is here. We want to warm our hands by the hearth. But things are heating up in the world of deal making. You are buying Bumble. Take us through.

• 1:26:26Speaker 09

  Let's go. Yeah, we signed it. We signed it. We announced it this morning, so we're pumped. We are partnering with Whitney Wolfherd, who's the founder of Bumble. And we are taking it private. It's the first thing that we're doing as Ithaca and John and I are pretty pumped.

• 1:26:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, take us through the thesis because, I mean, we talked about the the idea for Ithaca, the structure, and there's so many different ways this fund could have gone. There's so many different activities, the different funds and different teams are working on different opportunities. Why is Bumble the right move right now?

• 1:26:59Speaker 09

  Yeah, well, listen, the first thing is, I'm going to tell you, so we're not a fund. We're a technology company.

• 1:27:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:04Speaker 09

  You know, so, you know, so the first thing is, what we're looking for is companies that matter, right? And companies that are going to matter even in an increasingly AI, you know, abundant world, right? And so when you think about that, it's actually pretty hard, right? Because what consumer value propositions are going to endure? But when you think about human connection and you think about meaningful relationships, you think about bringing people closer to love, we think that's only going to get more important. And so in the all the companies we've looked at in the last six or seven months, Bumble was crazy unique. And the thing that's pretty cool about it is Whitney saw that 12 years ago. And so this starts with her. I mean, she founded this company. She started a movement, you know, millions of people have better lives, right?

• 1:27:46Speaker 09

  Have found their spouses, have, you know, had children and because of Bumble. And so when we think about important missions, you know, John and I had the best jobs in the world before we started this. I came on TVPM that day, if you guys remember, you know. And like, you got to work on something that's a worthy journey. And there's nothing more worthy than Bumble. And then I think, John, you should talk about it, but we think that we can actually really help and really make the product even better than it is now.

• 1:28:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:12Speaker 10

  Oh yeah. So AI is not going to replace human relationships, but we do think it can play an important role in just making the product a lot better and helping people connect with other people, not just that they're going to swipe right on, but that they're going to have a great conversation with, that they're going to go on a great date with and hopefully form a lasting, meaningful relationship. So just really excited about the opportunity to work on an important problem and one where we think we can do a lot to help people.

• 1:28:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I feel like one of the main benefits that's always touted about to take private of a public company is that you have an opportunity to actually rethink the business model, basically from first principles, as long as you have the cash on the balance sheet. And I feel like there's a lot of different monetization paths that have been tried. And you could imagine everything from the product's free the whole time, it's just ad-supported, obviously you have experience there, to, you know, what would people pay to actually find the one? Like people pay, what are they called? Matchmakers? Like $20,000?

• 1:29:07Speaker 09

  What would you have paid to find Jordi?

• 1:29:09John Coogan?

  A million dollars.

• 1:29:10Speaker 09

  I want to know that. I want to know. What would you have paid?

• 1:29:11Jordi Hays?

  It is like, it is, it is a, it is a.

• 1:29:15John Coogan?

  To find a real spouse is incredibly valuable. And, and so there's this wide gamut of business models, but then there's also just, hey, maybe it's time to bring in some new operational talent and, and keep the business model the same and just be more operationally efficient. What are you thinking that might change? What's going to stay the same? What are you excited about?

• 1:29:35Speaker 10

  Yeah. I mean, so I think the number one priority is just on making the product create more value for people and getting more people to use it. And like, I don't think we're at all worried about ability to kind of grow revenue and monetize better over time. If you can do that, I think there will be plenty of good opportunities. But yeah, it's such an important problem to people where like, you know, if you have the best possible version of the product, that is like, it's priceless. And so, you know, I think there will be great ways to monetize that over time.

• 1:29:58Speaker 09

  Yeah. The other thing, it's so, it's so funny. This is going to be a reference. I don't think it's made very often on TVP N. Okay. But I was watching the post this weekend with our family, with my wife and our boys. And there's a line where Catherine Graham is writing it down. And it's like, you know, profits follow quality.

• 1:30:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:14Speaker 09

  Listen, like you have to actually help people find amazing dates. You got to have them find amazing relationships. And like, the monetization will come. And one of my favorite things about John is like, John was responsible for $200 billion of revenue at Meta, right? I don't know. I don't know. We're going to hit the gong, but that feels like it could get the gong. It may, we hope. But like,

• 1:30:32Jordi Hays?

  We'll get there.

• 1:30:33Speaker 09

  The only thing that gets you that, what'd you say?

• 1:30:34Jordi Hays?

  We'll get to the gong. So.

• 1:30:35Speaker 09

  Okay, good. Please, we appreciate it. I think the only thing that gets you that is if you actually provide value for people, right? And so ultimately for us, like, the monetization will come, but what you actually have to do is be great at getting people great dates, getting them matches that they wouldn't have gotten, and getting them matches that are the best matches that they could ever get.

• 1:30:52John Coogan?

  So what's the low hanging fruit on the product side? Do you need to like kill off more bots or bring new people in with top of funnel advertising? Like where, how do you make the product actually better?

• 1:31:03Speaker 10

  Yeah. I mean, I think those are some of the themes, you know, I think we can do more to improve the matching algorithm so that it's showing you matches that you're not just going to swipe on, but that will lead to, you know, great conversations, great dates. You know, I think there's, you know, is I think more work to be done to make sure that, you know, all of the profiles you're seeing are high quality. You know, I'll think there's been some good work on that already. And yeah, and then I think there is room to kind of integrate AI in kind of more ways over time, too, that will, I think, facilitate that whole process and just make it work better for people.

• 1:31:30Speaker 09

  Yeah. And I think on that, guys, one of the things that I think Whitney started it with the quality reset, right? This idea of like, we are going to make sure that we have only the best profiles, only real profiles on Bumble. Like, that's a hard decision that's courageous. And she did it as a public company CEO, which is Baller. And then the other thing I would tell you that I get some inspiration from is like, listen, like I, I see Instagram ads and I think they're magic. I can't imagine how they understood what I wanted, right? And that was John and his team when he was there. And I think that what you hopefully want people to feel is that same kind of magic, but even more important, right? Because it's on a much more important problem, right? That they get to feel because of the matching algorithms and because of some of the work that we hope we can do in the product.

• 1:32:11Jordi Hays?

  How have you guys thought about developing your own internal thesis around AI winners versus losers? Because over the last year, we've just seen in the public markets, it's extremely violent, right? Like the general investors, like you sort of bubble up, there's a more of sort of like broad ideas, like SaaS is dead, and maybe you want network effects. But then there's also like, looking at all these, all these, you know, subcategories. In the public markets, like, even if you don't think a company's an AI loser, other people might, and then you probably should, should at least get out of it. Whereas you guys can take a longer term view and, and actually apply more rigor. And I think that's

• 1:32:54Jordi Hays?

  an advantage. But like, how much of that, like you've, you've looked at hundreds of companies since, since starting Ithaca. And so like, what are your sort of like updated models there?

• 1:33:04Speaker 09

  Well, so the best part for us is concentration actually is extraordinarily helpful, right? Like, we're not trying to build a portfolio. We're going to go, we signed up an agreement to buy Bumble. We're going to go operate it. John and I are going to be the co-CEOs. So there is a real like look into the, each other, the whites of each other's eyes of like, do you really want to go do this for a long time? That actually is extraordinarily helpful. Because on a lot of companies, it's not that we're like, oh, we know that this is going to break this way. It's honestly that we don't know. It's uncertain, right? But if it's uncertain, that's good enough for us of like, well, we're not going to go do that. Right? We better be, if it's not a hell yes, it's a hell no, right? For us. And so that really helps. I think the other thing is, you know, one of my favorite things about working with John is like, despite being so smart, like, there's just a lot

• 1:33:49Speaker 09

  of humility. So a lot of times I'll ask him like, hey, what do you think's going to happen here? And he just kind of like, I don't really know. You know, I don't really know how to think about the way that's going to go. And I think that's kind of missing from a lot of people's perspectives in the markets right now. Cause they're sort of trying to take a strong point of view. And the reality is on a lot of businesses, nobody knows, right? The reason that we think Bumble's unique is we do fundamentally believe, and we believe this with all of our hearts, that like humans want relationships with humans, right? And they're going to want relationships with humans. And those relationships are going to be even more important in the future. And what we hope is that this is pretty obvious in retrospect, as AI has advanced the way it has.

• 1:34:26Jordi Hays?

  So it's like betting on, betting on the, betting exclusively on the why and being okay with not knowing exactly the how, right? Is that like another way to put it? Because like there's software companies where like their why is the how. It's like we create like a database and then we sell that to companies. And this is like a very, and, and, with this, it's like if human connect, well, the company exists to drive human connection. But how exactly you do that, whether it's like opening up, you know, digital twins or agents or whatever, whatever it might be, or just better matching algorithms, like that feels like, like all of that can be figured out in time. But knowing that like the, the end goal of the company will never change is like something that you feel like

• 1:35:09Jordi Hays?

  you can lean on and like, bet the next chapter of your career on. Is that?

• 1:35:14Speaker 09

  Yeah. I mean, I honestly, I'll be, I'll, I will do this for John rather than him having to do it himself. I think we are more confident in the how, right? And I think specifically, maybe I would tell you, I think that, listen, like, you know, I, I sort of think like, John, like, couldn't you, couldn't we fix this? What about this product? What about this product? I think this one has a pretty good overlap with stuff that I think John has done in the past. And so I think we do believe that the matching algorithms and maybe just like the way that you actually go and show people, people they might really like. I think we can do that really well. We really believe that we can do that. And I would say like, that's very difficult, you know, to do, but we think we're uniquely suited to do it. I think the thing that is more of a question mark that we think will follow the why is the monetization, which is like, we will figure out how to make sure

• 1:35:57Speaker 09

  that people are, feel like they're paying for something that's fair. But the most important thing is that you actually deliver the value. And I would tell you that we have real confidence that we can deliver this value in this sector and that people are going to want this value for a long time. You know, so I agree on the monetization side, but on the product side, you know, we feel confident, I'm using we liberally because of my, my co-founder here, John.

• 1:36:21John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:36:24Jordi Hays?

  It's great. You guys are a fantastic, fantastic duo. And, and yeah, I can tell that there's so many things like with, with John and I where it's just like, yeah, I never would have been able to, to do this if we didn't have what, what John is, is so, so capable at. So.

• 1:36:40John Coogan?

  It's also just so fun that this happened in consumer. Like, I don't, I think everyone was like, oh, they're going to buy some database thing or something.

• 1:36:46Speaker 09

  Dude, I'm so happy you said that. And I think that's the thing for us is like, it's gotta be fun. If you want to get the best people in the world, it's got to be fun. And this one's going to be fun. So we appreciate it. And we appreciate you guys. Yeah. Thank you.

• 1:36:57Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 1:36:58John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. Let me tell you about public.com. Invest across all asset classes. Automate anything with AI agents. Run trading strategies, risk management, money movements, and monitor markets with AI agents on public. Our next guest is with us in the waiting room. We have Jack Goldberg from Yes Chef Group, the co-founder and creator. We're very excited to have Jack. How you doing? What's going on?

• 1:37:22John Coogan?

  Not too much. Good Tuesday. You have a good weekend?

• 1:37:26Speaker 11

  It was good. It was good. We did our first.

• 1:37:28John Coogan?

  I feel like you have like a million things going on.

• 1:37:31Speaker 11

  Yeah, we do. For good or for bad. We're trying to trying to cool it down. By the way, I I'm super pumped to be here.

• 1:37:37John Coogan?

  Thanks.

• 1:37:37Speaker 11

  I, you know, you guys have been inspiring to our team in many ways. I feel like I I love this this story and the trajectory. I mean, I think people I think it probably was like, oh, my God, this happened so fast. Obviously, it's taken. I mean, you put in a lot of fucking work to get to this point, and I think a lot of people don't maybe not realize that.

• 1:37:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:56Speaker 11

  How about that's and everything that you guys have done. It's been very cool for our team to watch.

• 1:37:59Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. Yeah, the meta, the meta story behind like media companies now is like more important than ever.

• 1:38:07John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:38:07Jordi Hays?

  I I saw you guys posted a recent, a video recently about like one of your event, like having, it was a weather issue with one of your events and like giving people like so much of TVPN has been about like giving people behind. We we sort of. We came out and we were like, don't believe in like building public in the traditional sense, like in in tech, when people build in public, they just post their revenue every single month. And then usually they stop because they go through a rough patch. Um, but uh, but like in media, you're sort of forced to build in public because people just see everything that you're working on.

• 1:38:39John Coogan?

  The interviews you're getting, the sponsors you get, whatever you're doing.

• 1:38:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like creating that, creating that meta narrative is like actually really important to driving engagement.

• 1:38:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:48Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:38:49John Coogan?

  But, uh, I mean, let's go back and set the table for everyone. Uh, how'd you get started? I want to hear about the first product and and the growth trajectory there. How fast was that? I'm sure everyone, uh, labels you know, a nice success as everyone does. It was probably a lot of hard work, but take us through that because I want to then explore how the footprint has grown because there is a lot going on now.

• 1:39:12Speaker 11

  Yeah, hundred percent. Um, kind of the high level. So about four years ago, my co-founder Liam and I, we met studying abroad. Actually, before four years ago, we met studying abroad in Australian college.

• 1:39:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:24Speaker 11

  And four years ago, we posted our first video and it really has always just been rooted in passion and love for food. Like I was working at PWC doing tech consulting at the time and he was like, Capgemini, I do management consulting.

• 1:39:35Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for your service.

• 1:39:36John Coogan?

  Service, seriously. It's it's a little disappointing that you laugh, but uh, you know.

• 1:39:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:42Speaker 11

  Yeah. It's actually funny because the first full circle moment, the first job I did at PWC was for Pepsi.

• 1:39:48John Coogan?

  Whoa, okay.

• 1:39:49Speaker 11

  I didn't, and I was a consultant for Pepsi. And now fast forward to today, Pepsi is one of our large partners. I'm really close friends. Kurt, come to CMO. And I told him, I was like, I actually worked for you before in a good way. Uh, so we we did our first video, this Mexican restaurant, Aldama, like literally four years ago, and we'd be working till eight PM. Go to dinner. We we didn't know what we were doing. We're like pulling a lobster tail like this and holding this and I was just like doing it because we felt that there was a need for innovation in the food space. Everyone was kind of the same and we're like, it doesn't feel like there's someone who is relatable, who when you go and watch their content, that's like me and my boys or our friends sitting and eating that. That's what we want to put out like. There's no difference between us talking here and me talking on the internet. Like it's just the same thing.

• 1:40:33Speaker 11

  Um, and we went, we did that first video and it did like a quarter million views and we were like, oh shit, like that was crazy. Let's go into every single restaurant in a square mile and show them what we just did and run it back. So Liam was living in San Francisco. He was literally, he canceled his flight home. He was supposed to come for a couple of days. He stayed on my couch literally for a month and he's like six, four and the cat's like five feet tall. Closet with three people and and he just running gun every day, same thing, like work during the day, eight PM dinner, edit till three AM. Post boom, boom, boom. Um, and it just kind of compounded and you know, the next video to like half a million and a million, we started gaining followers.

• 1:41:15Speaker 11

  And our our big moment, I think in every founder's story, there's like that that moment that you work towards and it that lucky moment that allows you to take the next step.

• 1:41:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:41:24Speaker 11

  And I think a lot of people say luck is involved in all stories and it totally is. Obviously, you need to be ready to like take advantage of a lucky moment though. Uh, and we were at dinner and the CEO of Sports Illustrated at the time was the table next to us and we just kind of get it, started getting some followers. And we have a bunch of food on the table and these moms come up to us and are like, my daughters know you. So we like kind of had a little bit of motion for the first time. And he kind of looked at us. He's like, who like, who are you guys and what the hell's going on? And we give him the pitch. We're like, we make content, but we do consulting. This is only 10% of the time. We've done 30 million views in two weeks. And he was like, what if, you know, we're looking to get younger and do more social first content on SI and they also,

• 1:42:05Speaker 11

  it was the company Rudy Group. They own Men's Journal and they own a couple other magazines and different sites. So he's like, what if we did short form content with you guys? And we kind of just like pitched him the entire world that night. A week later, we got on a call with their whole C suite team and they offered us a full, so they offered to match our consulting salaries plus a 50 50 on rev split. And we literally never looked back and just went for it.

• 1:42:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:32Speaker 11

  And consulted and did, we created shows for them. So we came up with two new shows. And that's kind of like, since then, we we've just, we just never really looked back and we just doubled down on the content. And then the experiential side of the business has been really a big part over the past two years.

• 1:42:48John Coogan?

  Quick side note, Sports Illustrated, did you know that they're sitting on an absolute gold mine?

• 1:42:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:53John Coogan?

  You know the website, SI.com. If you're going to rebrand to super intelligence, someone's going to have to pay a billion dollars for that domain at some point. Uh, anyway, uh, focus, focus, focus. That's the mantra. Eventually, everyone realizes that there are opportunities, but you got to be really careful not to get over your skis and ruin the golden goose while you go and explore the next thing. Like, what was the first side project or line expansion that you got enough confidence to actually go after aggressively and know that it wouldn't degrade the core product?

• 1:43:27Speaker 11

  Yeah, it was our festival because we spent the first two-ish years doing at that point, probably like a couple billion views. And we were doing all these cool things and seeing all these different foods and tuna cuttings. And we're like, this is all awesome. What if we can bring this together? Not only have people watch it, because I I wanted to prove to ourselves and our team and me and Liam that we're not just creators that live online, but we can actually move bodies and create real community. Because there's such a difference between people that can go viral on the internet, but people that can actually create communities and move people together. I I've always said, I think it's harder to get 10 people in a room on a Tuesday night than get 10 million videos on 10 million views on a video on a Tuesday night.

• 1:44:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:05Speaker 11

  Um, so our food festival, we kind of took all the cooler things that we saw and restaurants that we loved and, you know, tuna cuttings and different moments and put it into this experience and made content about it, just like we made content about everything else. We're like, we have the Yashafu Festival. And we sold out on like two posts and that was our first ever festival in New York about, that was like, that was two years ago, two and a half years ago. And since then, we've sold out 10,000 people. Again, we did New York the year after, then we moved to LA, we did LA. Uh, we just did New York recently, but we had to move because of the storm. Um, but experiential for us is so important because it doesn't take away from what we're doing. Actually, I think it builds a stronger connection and community into

• 1:44:51Speaker 11

  the people that watch the content. They feel like it's more real. Um, and we try to think about events on like a way that we can hit different consumers in different parts of their journey. So we have Yashaf tailgates that we just launched this past weekend with Pepsi on in Penn State, with Penn State, University of Florida, Texas A&M. And then we're doing an NFL one with them. That is geared more towards like the college sports crowd. We have the festival, which is 10,000 people. And the demographic is awesome because you you have every type of person there. We have Yashaf Reserve, which are like these super invite only premium one of one dinners that we do with super high end guests and celebrities, billionaires, athletes. We have a wrong club that we do that focuses on like the health space.

• 1:45:33Speaker 11

  So for us, we're like, food is this underlying connection, like everyone in the world eats. So essentially, your total address market is eight billion people.

• 1:45:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was about to ask, I was about to ask about TAM because it's funny, like I'm I'm not a foodie at all. Like if I'm traveling somewhere and I have a night, a meal that I actually like, I'll just go back to the same restaurant like three or four times because I don't, I don't even care to try something else. I'm like, I like this. It's solid. I don't want to, I don't want to roll the dice and like have a bad meal. I'd rather just stick with with what I know. So I've never, I've never been, I've never been a foodie. But like, what, I I'm curious of like, what percentage of people actually describe themselves as foodies and like, is that actually like the TAM feels a lot bigger because like, if you guys do a pop up at like a sports, you know, sports event or something like that. Uh, I feel like a bunch of people will just happily participate, even if they are not like self-described

• 1:46:25Jordi Hays?

  like foodies that are just obsessing over it day to day.

• 1:46:28Speaker 11

  I think it's unique because you guys have talked about how you knew your audience is kind of finite and like you wanted it to be that way because you have this super niche and you've done such a good job of that. I think in some ways, like, I, I guess it's the opposite for us. Like, I truly do think that tan is like the whole world. And if, if maybe, you know, you're not the biggest food guy, but you love sports. You know, when you go to sports, you're still eating and you can pair it. So food's kind of like this underlying connecting layer to food and music and travel and sports. So, you know, I like to think of it as food and food being the part that everyone can connect on initially.

• 1:47:07Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:47:08John Coogan?

  How do you think about when you launch a new product or event or series or something that's going to have its own name, its own brand? Are you the type where you effectively want to be the CEO of that project? And you're maybe hiring younger, more up and coming talent? Or are you trying to bring in a general manager, someone to run that process? Like, what does the team building look like as you're expanding into different areas?

• 1:47:33Speaker 11

  Yeah, that's a really good question. Um, we, no, I mean, in order to scale it, anything, you're, you're only as good as your team. I think it's really important that as we look to this next year and we're really kind of focusing on the content side of things. So for us, it's, one of our first partners that we brought in was a live events expert who did that for 10 years. And through, you know, Drake and Justin Bieber, Super Bowl parties and other huge concerts and events. So we like to bring in, partner with people who are really good at what they do. One of our big focuses, as I mentioned, is content and also stepping into long form. We just announced this really big deal with one-on-one studios, David Glasser, Taylor Sheridan, who do Yellowstone, Landman, Line It's Tulsa King.

• 1:48:18Speaker 11

  Our thought is like, sure, could we spend the time to maybe try to go create it ourselves over the course of the next five or 10 years? Like, maybe, yeah, but it, to do it really, really well and kind of break through the noise of everyone else making content in the world. You have to partner with the best in class. And that's why we partnered with one-on-one to launch Yes Chef Studios, which we feel like for us, like, I think that's going to be the next food network where people grow up, bring in new talent. I want to be, you know, we have an incredible team and, you know, me and Liam are so involved in all the, you know, processes and main decisions of why certain brands launch. But ultimately, you know, I would love to have people that on the team, like, run and manage these things on our own.

• 1:49:02Speaker 11

  And I'm focusing on the content side, still being involved, of course. Um, but I think it's always great to add people who are like focusing and specializing in those areas to help them drive. So we can expand and scale up both parts of the business.

• 1:49:14John Coogan?

  What is the state of live streaming in food? I feel like YouTube is really well, you know, uh, like defined in terms of you can do everything from like food challenges to specific recipes that you follow very closely.

• 1:49:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, and we went on, we went on a show and we were like, we, we thought that like TVPN for cooking would be an interesting niche, like a daily live show where it tells you a day in advance, hey, at five o'clock every day, I'm going to cook, you know, this thing. Um, the funny thing is I think someone in tech watched it and then they made it tech podcast cooking show.

• 1:49:49John Coogan?

  No, no, no, it needs to be like an actual amazing chef, actually, you can watch them step by step, make the whole thing. They gotta be entertaining enough to talk about it. But with us, the reason we went live was because like the tech news happens so fast. There's like a new release, there's a new financing, like being live matters. But with food, I don't think foodies are like, there's a new cut of beef dropping, I gotta get a review right now. But maybe I just don't follow it closely enough. I mean, certainly for restaurant openings, maybe you want to know that minute. But, uh, what is the state of live streaming in food? Where do you think it'll go? Where are the opportunities? Or is it maybe farther off?

• 1:50:27Jordi Hays?

  Is it cooked?

• 1:50:27John Coogan?

  Is it cooked?

• 1:50:29Speaker 11

  No pun intended. I think there's definitely an opportunity for live. I mean, we've gone live as we travel a bunch to Spain and Japan and these different markets. And we're walking around showcasing these crazy things because a lot of people too are so interested in these other places. And obviously you can get that from videos, but I think there is a value of seeing it live there that you can kind of get the surroundings and understand where the person is that you can't get just from other content. So it's something that we definitely think about, you know, we, in Barcelona recently, we're at dinner. We were shooting a short form video, a YouTube video, and we're simultaneously live on X, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, all at the same time.

• 1:51:14Speaker 11

  So it was just like, like a content overload shooting out to millions of people. So I, I think that there's, yeah, there's totally like room for that. And as every genre of content and topic innovates, I think there, there will be ways that live finds its way in the food space. And I, I think live cooking thing is cool.

• 1:51:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I could imagine it working, but you gotta have really good talent for sure.

• 1:51:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, would, would you guys ever create like a Yes Chef kind of cafeteria, like an ongoing physical space that had basically like individual food stands? There's a place where I went to college where it was like one, one building and there was probably like 10 different restaurants inside. And, and each one was like a very opinionated, individually operated. So it wasn't like, it wasn't the building being like, oh, we're going to make 10 different, you know, restaurants inside. But it feels like over time you go from like, okay, making videos that people love to events that people love to eventually like a, a, you know, maybe it starts as a pop-up, but then like a sort of ongoing durable thing.

• 1:52:20Speaker 11

  Yeah, definitely. I think, I've always thought about like this golden triangle of content, community and products. And if you can pair that, kind of like the famous Disney flywheel, each part helps the next. So, yeah, we, we've ideated a bunch on some different brick and mortar concepts and different CPGs that we have. But I think it's really easy to think about a million ideas and to, like you said, you know, forget about the golden egg. For us right now, that is content. That's why we're so focused on the studio deal. We're, you know, like, we're looking to hire the best in class editor and video artist to add to our team so that we can really double down.

• 1:53:01Speaker 11

  And I think the more, this world, I think you guys have seen it, is really just like whoever gets the most amount of attention wins. If you can get the most amount of attention, the eyeballs, and then you have all these, all these like AI companies and, you know, Instinct and the other one that like they have, their, their values go from 50 million to 500 million in two weeks because a million people use their app and they don't even monetize. But the, you know, the public thinks they can monetize in the future. I think it's how we view it is like, we're building the largest and most engaged food community in the entire world. And we don't need to rush to monetize that right away. We want to really thoughtfully and carefully come out with things that are, we're passionate about.

• 1:53:46Speaker 11

  So it, everyone launches a product and sells you something. Like, we don't want to do something to do something. Uh, and we know like that long-term value of what we're building with the studio and the next gen food network and the content uh, and these events and experiences of like, we, we want to just continue that. It, it doesn't need to happen overnight tomorrow. We know the value that all that is like, going to kind of like combust and explode over time.

• 1:54:11Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully not explode, but, but launch into the stratosphere. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:54:18Jordi Hays?

  How, uh, are you seeing any interesting technology in, in kitchens? Like people have, you know, some of the QSR concepts have been, you know, promoting their, their, their robots for a long time now. Unclear, like, very unclear as someone who's, you know, far from the industry, like how, how much adoption these kind of tools are getting. One thing's for sure, I don't think consumers are going to care. If anything, it'd be a turnoff. It's like, hey, this sandwich was made by a robot, like kind of a interesting novelty thing. But like, you would think it would be hitting in coffee so hard by now. Like, you'd think we'd have like really good coffee robots and yet like people want to go to a barista that they know. And that, that seems pretty lindy.

• 1:55:03Speaker 11

  Yeah, I saw, I agree. I feel like especially in the coffee space, you'd see it explode. I'm sure you guys have seen, um, Mark Thorey from Wonder, his friend, and he invested a ton of money into the robotic systems to automate all the food. And I, I'm curious to see how that plays out because if it works, I think it's great. Like, I don't know, there's so many people that every day at work, you don't care. Like, if your food tastes good, you don't really care who made it or how fast it was made for a large part of the population. But on the other, on the other side, I do think there's a huge population that does really care and doesn't want to just like let a machine make their food. I think it's an interesting balance. I don't know. I think that technology has killed lunch though. Like lunch, lunch is dead. No one goes to lunch anymore.

• 1:55:47Speaker 11

  You know, like ball swap old, like, like technology, literally like lunch used to be a thing. Lunch does not exist, like RIP lunch.

• 1:55:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, you used to have like, you know, some, some, a nice salad, some salmon.

• 1:56:00Jordi Hays?

  Three or four cocktails.

• 1:56:02John Coogan?

  Three or four cocktails.

• 1:56:03Speaker 11

  Yeah, maybe. You walk around in London and everyone's pounding Guinness. I like, this is awesome.

• 1:56:08John Coogan?

  Go, we forgot.

• 1:56:09Speaker 11

  Where did that go? Like, we're too.

• 1:56:12John Coogan?

  Locked in, I guess.

• 1:56:14Speaker 11

  Capitalism has overtaken lunch.

• 1:56:16Jordi Hays?

  Totally agree. We gotta bring it back. Uh, my last question for now, uh, should your metabolism be studied? Like, do you think there's any sort of like, yeah, your personal metabolism? Do you think there's be any sort of like breakthrough, scientific breakthrough that, that we could get by, by, you know, understanding how you, how you process such a, such a high volume and diverse set of foods?

• 1:56:41Speaker 11

  Potentially, I, I guess, first of all, thank you. I'll take that as a compliment.

• 1:56:45John Coogan?

  It was a huge job that came in the chat.

• 1:56:47Speaker 11

  And there, there actually is, uh, there's something that we're, we're working on.

• 1:56:52Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 1:56:54Speaker 11

  That, that, you know, is

• 1:56:58Speaker 11

  it kind of, it kind of helps digest and something that I think would be valuable to a lot of people that.

• 1:57:04Jordi Hays?

  Yes Chef GLP one slash testosterone blend.

• 1:57:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. Okay. Last question.

• 1:57:11Speaker 11

  Not crazy.

• 1:57:13John Coogan?

  Last question. On AI, I think we've all had this experience where like the model progress is really good. Everything's like, whoa, this is amazing. And then you go and you talk to the models about the thing that you're the expert in and you're like, ah, like it's not good at the thing that I'm good at. Jordy always has this with like surfing and cars. It'll make weird recommendations. Are you seeing that in in food? If you ask for recipes? Like we noticed with music, the lyrics will always have the word glass in it, which is just an odd thing that doesn't need to be in every song. And I'm wondering if there's like, you know, you're absolutely right, or it's not this, it's that, but for food or for recipes. Have you picked up on any like telltale signs that like a recipe is AI? Or like AI is in the food world or something like that?

• 1:57:58Speaker 11

  I think when it comes to recipes, it's it's fine and works because recipes are pretty like

• 1:58:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:58:04Speaker 11

  All of it. Comes to actual recommendations. I think there's a yeah, there's a huge lacking because it it kind of just pulls like what it sees. But then you go on Uber Eats and a lot of people pay for reviews. It's not, I can't really actually, you can intuitively think about like who this chef is and what they're doing and the seasonal. So I think it kind of spits out like not great recommendations. I think there's a huge area for growth

• 1:58:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:31Speaker 11

  in the AI food world. That is very interesting to me. But yeah, I don't, I don't think it's like perfect.

• 1:58:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:40Speaker 11

  Yeah.

• 1:58:41John Coogan?

  It also goes back to like, often the models are good at like what the researchers care about. If they don't care about going to lunch, it's not going to give you very good lunch recommendations. They care about chess. They care about math. It's really good at math. But

• 1:58:53Speaker 11

  Really good at math.

• 1:58:55John Coogan?

  whipping up the best possible, the super slot bowl.

• 1:58:58Jordi Hays?

  Power lunch.

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  Power lunch.

• 1:59:01Speaker 11

  I think it has some room.

• 1:59:03John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming.

• 1:59:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to have you on. Amazing. Yeah, amazing business and journey. And and I love when we meet a company that's crushing it. And yet it feels like there's just a million, you know, new opportunities and and ways to expand. So come back on soon and

• 1:59:19Speaker 11

  Yeah, I'd love to come back on. And thank you guys for inspiring our team from afar. It's been awesome. It's been a growth and journey. Hopefully we'll meet in person and get some

• 1:59:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be great.

• 1:59:27Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it. Yeah, give our best to the team. Cheers, Jack.

• 1:59:29John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all in one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring and security. Our next guest is Uga Demore from X B O W X Bo.

• 1:59:47Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:59:47John Coogan?

  And CEO.

• 1:59:50John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 1:59:52Jordi Hays?

  Here he is.

• 1:59:52John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking

• 1:59:54Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:59:55John Coogan?

  Welcome.

• 1:59:56Speaker 12

  Thanks very much for having me.

• 1:59:58John Coogan?

  Thank you for today. Yes. I would love to to get a brief introduction on yourself and the company first, and then I want to go into just cybersecurity and what you're seeing, what is interesting? How big is the problem? How effective is the solution?

• 2:00:15Speaker 12

  X Bo is a company that automates security research. So it does the work of an offensive security researcher. You point it at a target and it will report the vulnerabilities it finds working like a human expert.

• 2:00:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:30Speaker 12

  Now, today, we are announcing a particular vulnerability found by our, a full chain vulnerability in Chrome.

• 2:00:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:00:43Speaker 12

  What that means is that you just point your web browser at one malicious website, and the attacker will own your entire Windows PC. Can read your email, bank account, passwords, keystrokes. And so this vulnerability affects a billion users.

• 2:01:02John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:01:03Speaker 12

  Google, Google acknowledged the problem, paid their maximum bounty. But what's really interesting is that it only took six days.

• 2:01:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:12Speaker 12

  Six days by a very skilled security researcher.

• 2:01:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:18Speaker 12

  Was joined by a swarm of agents.

• 2:01:20John Coogan?

  Sure. That makes sense.

• 2:01:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And the other, the other thing that's notable is like, you know, finding this, this exploit that that would impact a billion users in a very meaningful way. And and congratulations, your prize money is $250,000, which

• 2:01:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, prize monies need to go way up so you can offset compute. I don't know what you spent. I don't know if you want to share, but I've heard of like million dollar agent swarm runs essentially prompts that wind up working for days of wall clock time and they're burning GPUs for hours and hours. And it feels like it can get expensive. But the value of catching these bugs is so high, especially right now, that should companies be spending more on these like white hat bounties?

• 2:02:08Speaker 12

  So definitely, everyone should get their defenses up. But no, it was not that expensive. We used an off the shelf model, GPT-56, so and it only cost $40,000.

• 2:02:23John Coogan?

  Okay, wow.

• 2:02:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:26John Coogan?

  And so how, how, how integrated are you with OpenAI to be able to do offensive cybersecurity testing? Do you need to get whitelisted with them in some way to to actually be able to run prompts that might get rejected just by the default chat GPT front end?

• 2:02:46Speaker 12

  So OpenAI are a great partners of ours, as are all of the other frontier apps.

• 2:02:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:52Speaker 12

  In this case, it was a publicly released model, but we are part of Daybreak. And of course, we also got to get to play with the restricted models.

• 2:03:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:02Speaker 12

  However, we really wanted to make the point here that it's possible to do with a publicly available model.

• 2:03:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 2:03:10Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, break, break this down a little bit more because, because so, so the browser, like you would simply have to navigate and land on the website. You don't need to, you wouldn't need to download anything or run any software. It's literally just you land on it and it's over for you. Is that, is that generally correct?

• 2:03:27Speaker 12

  That's exactly right. So this type of bug in Chrome is really, really hard to find. Every major security intelligence agency in the world has a team of people doing this kind of thing. And someone in contacts have been telling me that it takes months, something like six months to do this with a team of people. And this time, it was done in just six days by one person, admittedly, building on our previous experience that he had gathered with his, with his, with his colleague.

• 2:04:04Jordi Hays?

  When you find an exploit like this, or is it ever go through your head? Like, maybe somebody would have found this before, but wouldn't have the incentive to share it publicly? Or obviously, they like, yeah, like a malicious actor could make a lot more than $250,000 like exploiting this than, and so it begs the question, yeah, was this our, you know, already being abused for a while?

• 2:04:34Speaker 12

  So we have no evidence of that. I don't know for sure, but we, we, we, we, we don't know whether someone else has found this particular bug before. But what the story does tell you is that everybody really has to get their defenses in order. Cybersecurity is now right at the top of what everyone needs to be worried about. And take action, find the bugs before the bad guys do.

• 2:05:08Jordi Hays?

  What are your predictions for, for the next three to six months? Like, it feels like this, everyone inside of tech is, is, is well aware of the issue and, and, you know, making sure that that their walls are, are, are as strong as possible. And it feels like the, the, the sort of mythos moment really helped bring this sort of risk into even outside of the tech industry. Let's call it like the Fortune 500, things like that. But, but, but for, for every one of these

• 2:05:49Jordi Hays?

  that your team finds, there's a, there's a concern that there's, you know, more, more risk out there that that's not being found. So like, how are you, how are you advising your customers in a more, maybe in a more specific, in a specific way?

• 2:06:05Speaker 12

  So this particular research that we're reporting today is part of work that we're doing towards new products that test desktop applications like Chrome. We have a already released product used by hundreds of enterprises around the world that autonomously test web applications. So you point it at a website and it will do the work of a skilled hacker. We do it carefully, not doing any damage, just reporting the problems that are there. Everybody needs to do this type of autonomous scanning.

• 2:06:50Speaker 12

  There's just not enough security experts in the world to do it all manually or even with a human in the loop. And so, well, this particular bug was found through the combination of human ingenuity and AI. Our ultimate aim is to do this completely, in a completely automated fashion. We already do it for web apps and now we're also starting to do it for desktop applications and phone web.

• 2:07:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Talk about progress in open source. You know, people on X have gotten access to obliterated models and been very concerned about their capabilities. What are you seeing? I'm assuming any, I'm sure you guys are experimenting and testing open models so that you understand what people around the world, even people that aren't a part of, let's say, nation-state groups or more sophisticated groups could get access to.

• 2:07:51Speaker 12

  Totally. So whenever new models drop, we immediately run them through our tests. That includes the OpenWaze models. I'd say that the OpenWaze models are three to four months behind the frontier and Sarbi capabilities. And so that just shows the urgency of the problem. We all need to get ready for models that are as powerful as the very best ones in the frontier labs, being available to all, everybody, including the attackers.

• 2:08:36John Coogan?

  Well, thank you for everything you're doing. Thank you for coming on the show.

• 2:08:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thanks for helping out a billion people. It's great work. Not many of our guests get to do that every day at least, so.

• 2:08:49John Coogan?

  And hopefully, I don't know, many more bugs found before anyone else does? I guess that's it. We want as few bugs as possible, but we want you to be as successful as possible.

• 2:08:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, personally, I would hate for another company to save as many, save more people than you guys do.

• 2:09:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:09:07Speaker 12

  Thank you very much.

• 2:09:09Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, yeah, great to meet you and I'm sure we'll have you back on soon.

• 2:09:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, have a great rest of your day.

• 2:09:16Speaker 12

  Awesome.

• 2:09:17Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:09:18John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with design system context. Next, we will be talking to Nick Talken at Albert Invent, the co-founder and CEO. He's in.

• 2:09:35Jordi Hays?

  Here we go.

• 2:09:36John Coogan?

  Let's bring him in to the TV.

• 2:09:38Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:09:40John Coogan?

  Nick, how you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 2:09:42Speaker 13

  I'm doing well, guys. How you doing?

• 2:09:44John Coogan?

  We're good. I think we need to warm up this gong. First gong hit, we had another couple other big announcements, but.

• 2:09:51Jordi Hays?

  We kind of missed the gong moment. It's been a little crazy today.

• 2:09:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, there were a lot of people on, so, but this is, this is a clean gong hit territory. So take us through it. What's going on?

• 2:10:01Speaker 13

  Yeah, so excited to announce today, Series B, 55 million, led by TCV.

• 2:10:09Jordi Hays?

  Great hit, John.

• 2:10:13John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:10:15Jordi Hays?

  Great. Well, we'll talk soon. Yeah, yeah. Introduce yourself, the company, how you got here, all that good stuff.

• 2:10:25Speaker 13

  Yeah, so at Albert's, we make chemistry native AI. And so we're helping scientists in the lab with the white coats invent faster. A lot of people don't really appreciate the chemical industry, but it's, you know, the entire physical world is made of chemistry. Everything in your studio, everything you're wearing is chemistry. And traditionally, it takes years to invent and launch new products. And so we're replacing paper notebooks, bringing AI into the lab and help them invent faster.

• 2:10:52John Coogan?

  And what's your, what's your thesis between fine tuning models, training your own models versus using the advancements that are happening in the, in the foundation model companies and then diffusing that with software integrations, et cetera?

• 2:11:09Speaker 13

  Yeah, I mean, there's no sense in reinventing the wheel if the wheel is working well. But it turns out that in chemistry, it doesn't work too well. And so as part of this announcement, we actually are announcing a new frontier retrieval model that we trained. It's 45x better than OpenAI and Voyage and some of the traditional retrieval models. And what it really comes down to is the models that are trained on the entire internet are really good at discriminating between this is life sciences, this is chemistry, this is legal. But when you get down to what's the difference between a, you know, nanoparticle encapsulant in a paint coating and a, you know, some sort of cellulite there, they cannot differentiate between that. And so we had to build our own models for that, which is, which is fun.

• 2:11:52John Coogan?

  45x feels like a different type of lift from when we talk to like a legal company that's like, yeah, we fine tune this and we do 20% better on this benchmark. Do you expect that to hold for a long time because of the data? Because there's constantly this back and forth and then the specific models get leapfrogged and then they go back and forth. How are you thinking about this over the long term?

• 2:12:17Speaker 13

  Yeah, super good question. So it all comes down to the data and the availability of the data. It turns out that in chemistry, all of the publicly available data is the successes, right? So if you think about science, right, you publish your successes and the failures, you basically discard or you keep in your paper notebook. And so we have customers who are using our platform that have more tokens of chemistry information in their single enterprise than the entire public corpus of chemical information out there. And so that allows us a pretty big advantage to build something that's very domain specific to them.

• 2:12:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, how is, how is people that work in, you know, chemistry and material science, how are they reacting to model advancements? I can imagine, I can imagine, you know, you're working with commercial companies, they see model progress, they probably get excited because they think we can do more work faster. Whereas like mathematics that's happening on university campuses, that can be a little bit more jarring because you're sort of like, hey, there was a bunch of work that was being done that we were enjoying doing and now there's no point in doing it anymore and what do we do?

• 2:13:29Speaker 13

  Yeah, so I think it's scary to a lot of the people, right? I mean, a lot of our customers are 100-year-plus-old companies, they, you know, change is hard. And the other thing that's different is that you have to get into the physical world to close the loop, right? With math or coding, right, you can have a model that just reinforced learns on a computer and you can just set it and run it and it will just get better and better and learn. In our world, we have to get to the lab. You have to actually run that experiment. You actually have to do that. And so we like to think of, you know, software engineers are turning into software architects, right? You're architecting systems, you're architecting, you know, your applications. I think the same is happening now in chemistry, maybe a little bit delayed, where instead of you being the person doing the work in the lab and maybe designing every nuance of the experiment, you're now architecting an experimental system.

• 2:14:14Speaker 13

  And then you're letting the AI go and actually do that work for you. I think, you know, problem solving has become, is becoming commoditized. So now the question is, what is the right problem to solve? And so that is, you know, get close to your customers, understand their needs, and then you can figure out what to actually point the AI to go solve.

• 2:14:31John Coogan?

  What is the holy grail in chemistry and material science? Like everyone in bios says cure cancer, but what is like crazy advanced success over the next decade look like?

• 2:14:45Speaker 13

  Yeah, I don't know if it is one problem, and I think that's kind of the fun of it, right? I mean, if Elon wants to go to Mars, he needs better ablative materials for the outside of the rocket. Like, they know what the trajectory looks like to send a rocket to Mars. They need better materials. If we want batteries that last longer, if we want better solar cells, we want plastics that degrade and don't pollute, we want to get rid of PFAS that's leaching into the environment, that's all chemistry. Those are all chemistry problems. And so I think there's a lot of holy grails, and our hope is to give the tools to the people that are inventing and trying to solve those problems, because if we don't, they're not going to be solved fast enough.

• 2:15:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, it's fascinating that there's so many different opportunities and applications here, and probably lots of companies, lots of potential customers, and lots of work to be done up and down the stack. So, yeah, what an exciting time. Congrats on the fundraiser. Very exciting.

• 2:15:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm hoping that you're, like, you know, I've gone back and forth on this idea that when you see all these math breakthroughs, you have to assume that a bunch of other breakthroughs in other fields that are going to be much more impactful

• 2:15:48John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 2:15:49Jordi Hays?

  directly on people's life, like an alternative to PFAS, or, you know, new

• 2:15:54John Coogan?

  You weren't frustrated by now the Stokes on a daily basis?

• 2:15:57Jordi Hays?

  I mean, personally, but I don't want to speak forever.

• 2:16:00John Coogan?

  Personally, but most people that weren't affected by it.

• 2:16:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:03John Coogan?

  That makes sense. Well, congratulations.

• 2:16:05Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you.

• 2:16:06John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for coming on.

• 2:16:07Jordi Hays?

  And congrats to the team.

• 2:16:08John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 2:16:10Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:16:11John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And we have Jeff Holden from Atomic Machines, founder and CEO, with us here at the TV panel on the black screen. We are working on Jeff.

• 2:16:30Jordi Hays?

  Here he is.

• 2:16:31John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. How are you doing, Jeff?

• 2:16:33Speaker 14

  Good. How are you doing?

• 2:16:35John Coogan?

  We're good. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Since this is your first time, I would love for you to kick it off with an introduction on yourself and the company.

• 2:16:40Speaker 14

  Oh, great, yeah. So, let's see, the nutshell version of me is, you know, I'm a computer scientist who went very multidisciplinary over my career. My first manager out of college was Jeff Bezos. He was my manager at D E Shaw and Company in New York, and I followed him to Amazon. And so I was engineer number 10 at Amazon, and it really built the, you know, led the charge to build the whole backend of Amazon, kind of all the fulfillment aspects of it. And then went over and I joined his team and ran the consumer side for about four years and built Amazon Prime and all those other things. So I'm the one to blame.

• 2:17:17John Coogan?

  So if you're building

• 2:17:19Speaker 14

  If you find yourself spending too much.

• 2:17:20John Coogan?

  The Matter compiler from the Diamond Age. Explain for everyone

• 2:17:24Speaker 14

  Yes.

• 2:17:25John Coogan?

  what that is and how you're actually going about building it.

• 2:17:27Speaker 14

  Yes, the Atomic Machines has just come out of stealth after six years. We're like turning into mushrooms.

• 2:17:32John Coogan?

  How much did you raise in the process of coming out of stealth?

• 2:17:36Speaker 14

  Two hundred and fifty million.

• 2:17:38Jordi Hays?

  A very humble amount for your pedigree, I will say, but it's a good start.

• 2:17:46Speaker 14

  Yes, it does seem small these days, but we've made it work well. So, yeah, so what the Matter compiler does, it's a new kind of manufacturing technology, a new manufacturing system. And it's new because what it does is it takes, you know, digital code and produces a complete working micro machine at the other side. And that's, you know, they're just, this is, you know, the technical name for this is a compositorial constructor, as a David Deutsch reference. But, you know, this type of technology doesn't exist today. You know, the closest thing would be something like a 3D printer, which can make different shapes in a material. But this is, you know, complete working micro machines with moving parts, you know, that

• 2:18:29Speaker 14

  to serve a purpose you basically described to an AI.

• 2:18:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. So this is building the Grey goo machine from the book, Don't Build the Grey goo Machine?

• 2:18:39Speaker 14

  We're not quite at Grey goo yet. You know, so, yeah, so this is, you know, it's actually, Neil Stephenson, who was obviously just on a little while ago, is, you know, is like my favorite author. And the Matter compiler is actually attributed to, you know, the Matter compiler in the Diamond Age. But I would say we're closer to the manufacturing technology in Snow Crash.

• 2:19:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:19:02Speaker 14

  You know, so like the auto factories of Snow Crash, you know, we're still working with material, you know, kind of like, you know, macro materials. We're building micro machines, so features in the microns. But we're not working yet with atomic scale. So that's

• 2:19:15John Coogan?

  That's true. But the actual machine might be a centimeter?

• 2:19:19Speaker 14

  You know, millimeters, millimeters in scale. Yeah. Our first device is called Prime Switch. It's a new class of power relay, and that's a 9.5 millimeter diameter by 3 millimeter thick device, and it can carry 150 amps and open in 50 microseconds. So, yeah, new thing for the world.

• 2:19:35John Coogan?

  What is the TAM on these types of machines? Like, it seems like if they're used in data centers, they're used probably all over the place, but what is your go-to-market? Are you going to conferences for people that need these particular machines of this scale? Like, it feels like it's very diffuse. It's probably like a piece in the supply chain of, you know, so many, everything from consumer electronics to medical equipment to data center equipment, et cetera.

• 2:20:02Speaker 14

  Yeah, yeah, it's true. Like, what we did is we essentially planted a flag in a relatively unserved space, right? Micro machines, you know, and this is the reason we started here is because it's out of reach of conventional manufacturing. You just can't use traditional kind of macro-scale manufacturing technologies because the physics kind of fails you as you go down into the low-digit microns. And so what you have left to make something, anything at any kind of volume at that scale is semiconductor manufacturing. And semiconductor manufacturing was invented to make one kind of machine, right? It's the semiconductor transistor and circuits built around that. So that leaves the whole world of micro machines, which is, you can think of as kind of several

• 2:20:46Speaker 14

  different domains of physics crossed with, you know, kind of a couple of different purposes. You know, it leaves that whole space unserved. And so, you know, we've built the first manufacturing system that can actually really fully address that space. But we also went beyond that, and we built it in a way that is a compositorial constructor, so that what we're hoping to trigger is a massive, you know, kind of innovation explosion at that scale. And you mentioned, you know, some of the kind of domains of applications. I mean, you know, this is a negative space, so it's hard to put a TAM on it. You know, I think it's extremely large, of course. But, you know, things like, you know, robotics, micro robotics, it can go into difficult environments, including the human body. You know, medical micro robotics is something that people have talked about forever, right?

• 2:21:31Speaker 14

  It's like, you know, like early 2000, people are like, it's here, you know? But it's not really here. It turns out you just can't build those things. You know, and like one example of that is, I was actually talking to Eddie Chang, who's the head of neurosurgery at UCSF, and he said, you know, what we need for a watershed in neurosurgery is like a millimeter scale, you know, micro robot that we can insert into the, you know, through the cranium into the brain and then steer it to its destination. It sounds kind of creepy, but like, you know, imagine if you could just, if you could carry a little drug payload to any place in the brain. Today, you're limited to, you know, you make a hole in the cranium, and then whatever you can reach with a straight-line tool is what you can get to. And that limits the areas you can operate on.

• 2:22:15Speaker 14

  And that's a really simple idea, you know? And it's, but like, there's just never been a manufacturing technology to make that device. And so, you know, so medical applications, you know, little tiny, you know, grain, sort of size of a piece of rice, kind of dosing pumps, these kinds of things, that's the stuff we'll be able to build. And I'm super excited about medical applications.

• 2:22:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, very exciting.

• 2:22:36Jordi Hays?

  One of the, yeah, it's a very fitting, very fitting day to have you on the same day as Neil. When you were, you know, prior to six years ago, you know, post-Amazon, did you just decide, I'm going to read a lot of science fiction and figure out what to build? Like, where was the, I was asking Neil about, like, how he feels, like, what kind of weight he feels in terms of writing science fiction, because

• 2:22:59Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 2:23:00Jordi Hays?

  for better or worse, he's sort of come up with ideas that are plausible, believable, but far out and entertaining, and yet then generations of humans read that and imagine what's possible, and then

• 2:23:13Speaker 14

  Yeah.

• 2:23:14Jordi Hays?

  and then it becomes possible because somebody imagined it in a sort of fictional context.

• 2:23:19Speaker 14

  Yeah, right on. Yeah, no, I mean, I was definitely influenced by by science fiction. I mean, it started for me at five years old with Star Trek. In fact, there's an Enterprise right behind me. That's the original, the original series, which you guys probably don't even remember. But Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock and those guys. Yeah, basically, you know, this idea that you could like, you know, a purpose for existing is exploration and learning and curiosity was like, it blew my mind. And the idea that you could, you have the ability, our species has the ability to like, edit our future, you know, to build for problems we can't yet anticipate, you know, to create new knowledge and to build new types of technologies, new physical things. And I just wanted to be part of that. Like, from when I was a kid, I wanted to, I wanted

• 2:24:03Speaker 14

  to push on the frontier of what humanity can do. And so, you know, I've done that in different ways. I, you know, I was at Uber. Another thing there is like Uber, you know, that's the elevated aircraft. Yeah, so, you know, the EV toll world. I mean, so, you know, that's been a passion of mine for a long time. And I developed a thesis around this that I call the human command of matter. And it's, you know, it led to, you know, it led to the creation of atomic machines, and it led to our very ambitious mission, which is on-demand, universal command of matter. To get there, you're really at the point that Neil envisioned in, you know, the Diamond Age, where you, it might not be done, there's the feed and the seed. There's two different versions of that world. I hope it's the seed, not the feed.

• 2:24:46Speaker 14

  You know, but where you can, you can literally create any sort of physically stable, you know, configuration of atoms that quantum mechanics allows, right? That's what we wanted. That's, that's when we, when we're done with that, like, I'll probably take a vacation, but.

• 2:25:00Jordi Hays?

  What's a more, what's a more, leave us with a sort of, maybe a more acute or trivial use case besides, you know, medical applications? Like, I'm imagining, could we get mosquito-sized robots that defend your home from mosquitoes? Like, how far can you take this?

• 2:25:19Speaker 14

  Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, there's all kinds of things like that, you know, and our approach is going to be to open up the matter compiler as a foundry. And so, we'll let the world invent what those devices should be. If it's mosquito-killing machines, or it's, you know, graphene on copper supercapacitors, or it's, you know, you know, a cooling, a two-phase cooling loop for a GPU, right? Something that you can't, you know, you can like, bond to the chip and put inside the package. I mean, these are all, these are all kinds of applications, but, you know, our goal is to get to the point where, you know, you interact with an AI, just the way you would with like Claude Code or, you know, Codex, right? You interact with an AI, and the AI is generating output tokens, some of which are physical,

• 2:26:03Speaker 14

  you know? So, it's, and the reason, like, you know, yeah, if you think about it, like, the reason you can do Claude Code is because beneath, beneath this, now you have this new layer of intelligence, which lets you vibe code, right? You can, you can like, talk to the intelligence, and the intelligence will map your messy natural language into a formal grammar of a compiler. And you have a compiler with a formal grammar. There isn't something like that for atoms, right? You can't do the same thing. You can talk, you might even, even if you kind of presume that there's a Claude Code 2.0 that, you know, now for atoms, and it says, you know, hey, you know, go ahead and design anything you want, any machine, there's no formal language to express the machine in to then compile it into a physical thing.

• 2:26:46Speaker 14

  So, you then have to go figure out how you're going to manufacture that thing. And that's, that's the kind of, the world we live in today, right, is like, the manufacturing line is a kind of per-device thing, or per-kind-of-device thing. You have to build kind of from scratch, and figure it out, and tweak it, and tune it over years. You know, that's the game we're trying to change, so that there is a formal grammar that you can express, you know, the thing you're trying to build. In our world, it's called a process graph. This is real. And if you can express the correct sentence in that formal grammar, you get the machine out the other side. So, that's a very hard thing to build. That's why we went in a hole for six years.

• 2:27:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. I feel like we're going to look back in 50 years and look, and look at, you know, pre-2030 and be like, back then, we could only build big machines. Like, the only machines that you could build, like, you could, we're just, we're massive. Yeah, the car, you know, the plane, et cetera.

• 2:27:39Speaker 14

  Right.

• 2:27:40Jordi Hays?

  So, very, very fascinating. I'm sure you'll be back on a lot, and we'd love to have you.

• 2:27:46John Coogan?

  Congrats on the fundraising, coming out of stealth.

• 2:27:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:49John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:27:50Jordi Hays?

  Do it again soon.

• 2:27:51Speaker 14

  Take care.

• 2:27:52Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:27:53John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Eli Manning and Michael Aldrin, the executive producers of Chad Powers, and we have some special. I know what time it is. Time to put on. Here we go. Powers. These are insane. Let's bring in Eli Manning and Michael Aldrin to discuss the latest season. There they are. Chad Powers, how you guys doing?

• 2:28:15Speaker 03

  Been great. Thanks for having us.

• 2:28:17Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna try to keep, I'm gonna try to keep it together.

• 2:28:19John Coogan?

  You're gonna keep it on?

• 2:28:19Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna try to keep it together. It's a lot.

• 2:28:22Speaker 15

  It's really upsetting.

• 2:28:23Jordi Hays?

  It's a lot.

• 2:28:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, on Halloween, we do the full Hollywood makeup, and last year, we did Marc Andreessen, and it was three hours. It took forever.

• 2:28:33Jordi Hays?

  It was a lot more than three hours.

• 2:28:35John Coogan?

  It was so worth it. And when I watched the 2022 clip of you, Eli, putting on the makeup, I was like, that is us. Like, this is so, this is so us. I know how much time that takes, and then in the, in the, in the show, you show all the different prosthetics, and how much work goes into that, both, like, it's almost an athletic endeavor to get into that makeup every day. But, anyway, thank you so much for being here.

• 2:28:59Speaker 03

  Of course. Look forward to it.

• 2:29:00John Coogan?

  Thank you. Can we go back to that 2022 original bit you did? Like, what was the inspiration? What were you drawing on? Like, what led you to come up with that idea?

• 2:29:13Speaker 03

  I think just the idea of the fact that Penn State still, you know, held an open tryouts for, to try to walk on, and, you know, to try to go out there and see if you could still throw a little bit and compete with these guys. So, I was excited about that, the fact that Jane Franklin was into it, didn't want to tell any of his coaches. I felt like he was kind of pranking his coaches to see if they would, you know, would recognize if someone had a little talent and showed up for one of these tryouts. And definitely, after, you know, sitting in that chair for two hours, to go through the prosthetics and the hair, you know, sweet mullet, great mustache, and, you know,

• 2:29:55Speaker 03

  once I started competing, like, I was definitely worried about the 40-yard dash, that I might pull a hamstring and just ruin this whole thing. All that hard work and logistics to pull this thing off is go to waste on the hammy. But then, just started making up stories, and just kind of, you know, did not worry about getting caught in the lie, and just, I'm gonna make every lie more outrageous than the other, and kind of, I like how Michael's continued to do that with the show. It just like, keeps going a lie after lie that you gotta kind of cover up and figure out, and then sometimes you just kind of run away, and like, don't, don't over, you know, complicate things in the sense of explaining too much. Just kind of say random stuff, and then get out of it.

• 2:30:39John Coogan?

  That's great. So, Michael, what was your, what was your reaction to that, and your journey to getting involved and actually taking this into what it's become today?

• 2:30:48Speaker 15

  Uh, well, I was, Glenn, Glenn and I were buddies, and we'd been looking for something to do together. And I'm a big, I'm a big college football fan. I went to Georgia, Glenn went to Texas, and obviously a fan of Eli and the original sketch. And so, somehow, this thing came to us, that they, that they wanted to adapt it. And I, and I think our initial reaction was, that's an insane idea. But, but as, but as Glenn and I started talking about it, and Glenn was the one who said, well, what if you really, you know, took, what if, what if you did the Mrs. Doubtfire

• 2:31:30Speaker 15

  thing? And it was a story about a guy putting on prosthetics to try and do this for real? We got really excited because I think what we thought about was just how insane someone would have to be to do that. And also, it's weirdly believable in the world of college football, like, that someone would do something that insane. Like, if I saw that story, I think I'd believe it. And, and so, we said, all right, let's, let's do it, and let's take the story really seriously. And let's like, let's try and make it dramatic and romantic, and like, elevate the filmmaking. And, and so, we did. And I, and I think the other

• 2:32:12Speaker 15

  thing that about, about it was fun for me, everything that Eli said, it's, it's stupid improv. Like, Eli, it's like, he's just saying the first thing that comes to mind. So, really, it allows me to be a very lazy writer. The funniest thing that Chad can say is the first thing that comes to mind. He's an idiot. He's terrible at improvising. So, it's actually a very joyful, easy show to write. So, yeah, it's just, I think it's just a lot of fun, and I can't, I can't believe here we are.

• 2:32:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:48Speaker 15

  There's two seasons of it.

• 2:32:49John Coogan?

  How did you think about the transition from season one to season two? I mean, the reviews are incredible, and a lot of shows, a lot of shows, I feel like, have 10 years of, we're gonna do this. They do the first season, and then they're like, oh, we caught the, we're the dog that caught the car. We gotta figure out season two. This feels like there's much more planning, or much more thought. But is this something that's evolving organically? Are you responsive to what the fans and the critics are saying? Or have, are you more of like, I know where things are going five years from now?

• 2:33:23Speaker 15

  20-season plan.

• 2:33:24John Coogan?

  Okay. Lock it in.

• 2:33:27Jordi Hays?

  You're like, no, I live my life one episode at a time.

• 2:33:31Speaker 15

  This, this, if any idea has legs, it's Chad Powers. We're gonna, we're, we're gonna chase down the Simpsons. Yeah, he's going to space eventually. I think it's a, it's a little bit of both. I mean, you, you have an idea of maybe where you hope something would go, but I think that you're, you're an idiot and, and if, if you're not responding, if you're lucky enough to get a second season and, and you've got fans and you, and you've got sort of audience reaction, you, you know, you, that should inform what you do. And, and we're making the show hopefully to, to hit as wide of an audience as possible.

• 2:34:10Speaker 15

  And I, at the same time, I think for season two, I kinda did more of probably what I always wanted the show to be, which was just make it more of a thriller, maybe more dramatic, um, and lean into those elements. And I, and I think that while perhaps unexpected for, for audiences seems, seems like it connected with them, which is good.

• 2:34:34John Coogan?

  Eli, what advice are you giving to young athletes that wanna get into media or even just have a great career in a world where you're expected to do some sort of media, even if it's just some social media? How are you thinking about the challenges faced by young athletes today?

• 2:34:53Speaker 03

  Well, I think, you know, you don't do anything you don't wanna do. You know, if you don't wanna be, be, be a media source, you don't wanna be on social media, if you don't wanna, um, you know, be out there and, and doing it, don't, don't do it. But if you have interest in it, if you have a personality and, and, um, and, and you, you know, wanna pursue that or just kinda enjoy being in front of the camera, behind it, or doing interviews, or having fun with it, then, um, I think just gotta be yourself. You know, don't, don't try to be someone you're not. And, and, and so I think that's kinda the idea, uh, that you can have fun. I think, I think nowadays, um, kinda being an athlete and being a personality and, and

• 2:35:36Speaker 03

  doing things outside of your sport is kinda more acceptable. Twenty years ago, that wasn't really the case. Like maybe you could do a commercial, but you didn't wanna kinda be seen as like, well, this guy's doing too much, or he's not taking his day job seriously. All these athletes take their day job very seriously, but they can also kinda show the lighter side of themselves and do something, go undercover, or do a, a skit, or do a prank, or you know, what, or whatever, kinda show a little, um, that you have, you have something going on besides your, your kinda, your everyday, your day job, your, your sport that you, you know, spend 90% of the time doing. You know, you can have a personality, you can do other things, and if that's an interest, you should pursue it.

• 2:36:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I, I, I noticed like, like, being great at the media side cannot take you from a good athlete to a great athlete, but it can take you from a, a, an, an okay athlete that maybe wouldn't have a career to somewhat of a career, you know, not necessarily in, in, in every sport, but, but there, there is a new generation of athletes that are actually not elite, but they're just so good at social media that they can get the attention necessary to kinda make a career out of it. Uh, I wanted to ask, like, what are, what are the ups and downs, uh, across, you know, creating a, a new season of a, of a, of a, you know, a TV show like this? We, you know, most of the people, most of the entrepreneurs that, that come on our show are building companies and products, and it's kind of like this, you know, it's, it's a

• 2:37:02Jordi Hays?

  roller coaster, but you go from like concept, everyone gets excited about a concept, maybe you raise some money, build a product, you launch it, you, but, but like the, the point of launch is like when the work begins, because you have this flood of customers that come in. For you guys, like, when the customers are coming in, people are watching, it's like the work has already been done and you have to be thinking about the next one. But like during the sort of, during the actual creation process, I imagine you get all sorts of roller coasters where you're going, maybe we're going in the totally wrong direction with, with, with this part of the story or whatever it is.

• 2:37:37Speaker 15

  Yeah, and we, and we have, we have our investors that we have to, to contend with, the Walt Disney Company.

• 2:37:47Speaker 15

  But, but that's, it, it's, I mean, there's probably, I hadn't thought about it, there's probably, probably a ton of, uh, similarities between the two, you know, filmmaking, making anything, it's, it's a collaboration. It's a, it's a lot of people with a lot of different skillsets collaborating, you know, you're, you're working with the studio and the people who are paying for the thing and, you know, they, they've got a perspective on what can make something a success for their platform and, and, and you, unless you're really up your own ass, you, you want it to be a, a, a commercial success. And so, you know, you take that into account and, and then just in the making of, of something,

• 2:38:31Speaker 15

  yeah, there's a million different departments that, that you're, you know, the actors, the costumes, whatever, you know, and, and, and these things take a long time. When you, once the thing launches, it's true, we have to sort of sit back and, and just see, you know, all right, how's-

• 2:38:49Jordi Hays?

  Let Chad take the wheel.

• 2:38:51Speaker 15

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's, it's up, it's up to Chad then, and, and, you know, you, you hope, you hope that a thing connects and it, and, and there's no guarantee, that, that's hard, you know, I, I've, uh, and, and so when something like this, that's, that's really, you know, people don't know what to think of an adaptation of the Chad Powers sketch. And so when it does break through and you're able to get a second season, then it's like, all right, that's, that's a gift. And, and so really, I think the goal of season two is just elevate it and you wanna grow the audience and, and keep, I guess, making a better product over time.

• 2:39:31Jordi Hays?

  Eli, when you, I'm sure you have a lot of ideas for different characters that you've seen across your career. How do you, how do you think now about which characters should be, should end up in Chad Powers versus our entirely other cinematic universes that you could, you guys could build shows around?

• 2:39:51Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, I always, I always try to think of like, you know, and, and, you know, when, kinda talking with Michael a lot, kinda around the first season, just about the characters, like on the team that you could, you could have, or just funny stories that happen in the locker room, or things that happen at practice that maybe you could make into a funny skit. So it was a lot of fun, I think, working with him and just gotta, you know, reminiscing on just the great things that, that happened in a locker room. A lot of it, you can't quite tell the public, but you can tell a writer that he could kinda get this story out without me saying, this has happened to me, or this is, my teammate did this. So kind of a secret way to release some of these stories. And, uh, maybe the greatest way to tell a story is like, a guy, all of a sudden your

• 2:40:36Speaker 03

  teammates watch, it's like, wait a minute, that's me, I did, I did that, I'm the pervert that said that. Like, that's my, you know, I did, you know, what the, what the heck's going on here? But, uh, so I think, you know, that's kinda the, the fun way with, with, uh, with shows or, or movies and, and these type of things, doing these things, it's kind of another way to tell, tell different stories and, uh, and how you're, and, and also you can make it to how you want it to happen also, and how you wanted it to remember. And, and you don't have to let the total truth get in the way and just to, to, you know, make it a little bit better. Hollywood it up.

• 2:41:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, someday, you know, 20 years from now, you should do, you should put out the like watch along guide, you know? This is this guy, this is this guy, this is this guy.

• 2:41:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great. All right, I, I, I'm interested in, uh, understanding a little bit more about Glenn Powell. There's this take that goes around Hollywood, like Tom Cruise is the last movie star. And when I saw the new Top Gun, I was like, I think we might get another movie star. But I'm wondering about how you're processing just the changes that are happening in Hollywood? What's actually not changing? And what's it like working with Glenn?

• 2:41:52Speaker 15

  Eli, how are you processing the changes in Hollywood?

• 2:41:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, uh, yeah, I, I think you should take this one, Michael.

• 2:42:02Speaker 15

  I mean, I mean Glenn, you know, Glenn, uh, clearly, you know, a, a movie star is so, so amazing and, and that's part of the joy of, of this show is getting to show audiences what he can do, you know? It's one half of this handsome leading man, and then the other half is this Jim Carrey-esque idiot performance, which is so insane. So, so it's like, I, I, I love just what a showcase it is for, for his incredible range of talents and, and it's, it's a really like, for a guy that is, everybody's like, oh, there, you're the, you're the next guy.

• 2:42:45Speaker 15

  This, this is a really brave performance, like, like not, not every, um, leading man is always able to, to go and, and play an idiot and, and, you know, really humble themselves and lose scenes the way that, that Russ and Chad does. And, and Glenn is that character is so happy to be the, the butt of the joke and let other actors win, uh, and it, and it makes you root for him and root for Chad, root for Russ. And so it's, it's really an incredible performance.

• 2:43:23Speaker 15

  And as far as, you know, I don't know, I, I, I mean, I'm, I'm not that old, I guess. People are always saying, I mean, Hollywood's, everybody's always saying that Hollywood's changing. I suspect that's a thing that everybody's heard. And, and it probably is always changing, but I, but I think the, the thing that- I believe at least is that, you know, and maybe we're seeing it this year more than ever is that audiences will show up for original cool stories and great actors, great performances and great filmmaking. So if you make good shit, people are gonna wanna watch it. And it's like, that's not really a subversive idea. And I actually don't think that that's gonna change.

• 2:44:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like this year's been particularly, like, we've just seen so many breakouts, the Backrooms, Obsession thing, Iron Lung, all these like indie filmmakers. Are you finding talent in like non-traditional places for your team across the organization? Like, because we hear about the YouTuber who turns into the director, right? But I don't know if we hear about-

• 2:44:32Jordi Hays?

  What about the Friday beers guy in Artificial?

• 2:44:35John Coogan?

  That's right, yeah. He was an Instagram comedian, right?

• 2:44:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're seeing this, and I have a buddy who's just started making skits and-

• 2:44:43John Coogan?

  He's getting cast and stuff now. Yeah, but are you seeing the same effect, or is it just starting to heat up?

• 2:44:49Speaker 15

  I mean, yeah, well, I can at least speak to like, you know, casting, you know, these people that are just casting folks, digital creators or whatever, folks who are just have little niche followings online are oftentimes really exciting to see them break out in these big movies. Like, the guy who played Timmy Chalamet's friend in Marty Supreme was amazing, that guy. And I think he had like, maybe a little, he was like a little minor internet presence before that, I think. But like, he was so good.

• 2:45:29Speaker 15

  And so I think it's a great place to find actors. Certainly, we're seeing these, you know, awesome industrious filmmakers and writers come out of YouTube and all that. So, yeah, I mean, of course, I wanna work with those people.

• 2:45:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:47Speaker 15

  Give me a job.

• 2:45:49John Coogan?

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

• 2:45:54Jordi Hays?

  Awesome, guys. Well, we're super excited for everyone else to get to watch. And yeah, really amazing work.

• 2:46:00John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 2:46:01Jordi Hays?

  Well, we'll see you soon.

• 2:46:03John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:46:04Speaker 15

  Those fish.

• 2:46:05John Coogan?

  Well, 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.

• 2:46:20Jordi Hays?

  Some big news on the timeline.

• 2:46:23John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 2:46:23Jordi Hays?

  We're just getting it live, so I'm gonna try to figure out what happened. OpenAI discovered a sophisticated recording device that was hidden inside one of their offices. They used models to understand the device and where it came from, identifying that a specific employee had planted it a few days earlier. We refer the matter to the FBI, and we're grateful to the agents and prosecutors who moved quickly to make an arrest. The FBI's investigation is ongoing, and we will continue to support their work. Just reading the OpenAI newsroom. At this time, we have no indications of this individual inappropriately accessing or exfiltrating model weight, source code, or customer data. The employee was terminated.

• 2:47:07Jordi Hays?

  We take protecting our technology, data, and people seriously, and as a matter of national importance, our security program is designed to protect against a wide range of threat actors, from insider risk to cyber criminals to nation-states. And this case is an example of how AI can help address these sophisticated security threats. So, reading the SF standard, if I can pull this up.

• 2:47:32John Coogan?

  This photo is crazy.

• 2:47:33Jordi Hays?

  Federal prosecutors say an employee from Saudi Arabia planted an audio recorder and left another unattended in his bag. I'm not gonna be able to fully pronounce this. Abdulrahman Al Fazan, a Saudi national, was arrested Friday and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications. He made his initial appearance in federal court today.

• 2:48:02John Coogan?

  This photo is crazy. They have a camera back there that caught it? What is going on?

• 2:48:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, was this maybe his own device that he recorded himself with?

• 2:48:09John Coogan?

  Maybe. I don't know. I don't know why you need video from behind the TV. That's very odd.

• 2:48:13Jordi Hays?

  No, but it said it was a recording device.

• 2:48:16John Coogan?

  But I thought it would just be audio.

• 2:48:18Jordi Hays?

  I know, but maybe it just happened to-

• 2:48:19John Coogan?

  Well, that's crazy, crazy, crazy. Interesting.

• 2:48:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, really, really wild.

• 2:48:26John Coogan?

  He wanted to be a fly on the wall for the wrong reasons. You gotta be in those meetings just for the mindset, like our friend, the poster, who wanted to be on the fly on the wall at the White House dinner. You know, this is very, very crazy. Really underscores like the stakes here, that there are like, potentially the nation-states and spies afoot, all sorts of crazy, crazy stuff going on in the AI race. But thanks for breaking it down. Jordy, anything else we need to cover today on the show?

• 2:48:53Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure we'll get more on this story by tomorrow, but fun show. Fun show. Ending on a brighter note, are we gonna get the Roadster this week?

• 2:49:05John Coogan?

  It's a crazy week for cars. On October 15th, both Porsche and Tesla should be announcing vehicles if the Roadster is not delayed again. They said it was delayed for weather. The weather seems like it might be getting worse. I don't know. We'll see. But yeah, October 15th, both the-

• 2:49:27Jordi Hays?

  And if this doesn't launch, I think a lot of people will accuse SpaceX and Tesla of manipulating the weather to hide the fact that their car might be a bit behind schedule.

• 2:49:36John Coogan?

  And they might wind up competing more directly than people think. Like, they're going out on the same day. I know that they'll have different price points, but like, in terms of like, new supercar?

• 2:49:48Jordi Hays?

  These are not-

• 2:49:50John Coogan?

  I'm not saying that they're gonna be direct competitors or anything. Obviously, they're wildly different. I'm just saying in terms of like, it's not that Porsche's Mission S is going up against the new Model Y launch. Like, it's, both companies are launching a product that is above their normal level. They're both launching special cars. And that's what's interesting, is that it's happening at the same day.

• 2:50:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, I think-

• 2:50:16John Coogan?

  So they will go head to head. Obviously, two wildly different camps. I agree with you on like, that they don't actually compete, but they are both special announcements.

• 2:50:24Jordi Hays?

  You might be the one person that is equally excited about both.

• 2:50:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, I'll have to see day of. And we're gonna invite some car journalists and car content creators on the show over the next couple of weeks to discuss-

• 2:50:37Jordi Hays?

  We should, yeah, we should get some people lined up for Thursday. I'm hearing a lot of amazing things about the new Porsche, hearing it all, hearing and just seeing, because they have some teaser images, but something between a 959 and a GT1. I think they're gonna make a lot of them. I think people are gonna love it. Even the key that they're teasing now looks incredible. So, can't wait for this to get out. Can't wait to drive it. Nick, if you're listening, let's figure out a way to take it for a spin sooner than later. But thanks for hanging out with us today, folks, all over the place. But that's what we do.

• 2:51:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. We'll see you tomorrow at 11 a.m. Pacific. Sign up for our newsletter, tbpn.com. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And we'll see you tomorrow.

• 2:51:31Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.