Nvidia’s Cloud Strategy Evolves, Factory-Cognition Drama, Instinct Pushes Into Shopping | Diet TBPN

Diet TBPN delivers the best of today’s TBPN episode in 30 minutes. TBPN is a live tech talk show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming weekdays 11–2 PT on X and YouTube, with each episode posted to podcast platforms right after. Described by The New York Times as “Silicon Valley’s newest obsession,” the show has recently featured Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Mark Cuban, and Satya Nadella. 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/ Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/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.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  It was just like last year that Nvidia was like, we're going to layer CoreWeave, or we're going to layer all the NeoClouds. We're going to be the front door to compute with DGX Cloud Lepton. I don't know if you remember any of this, but this started back in like 2023, post the ChatGPT moment. Jensen comes out on stage at one of the keynotes he gives and he says like, this is the iPhone moment and we're going to aggregate all of the underlying compute and you're going to be able to come to us and deploy whatever resources you are and we're going to compete with like AWS and Azure and GCP and we're going to be a one stop shop for this stuff. It's going to be really important. And at the time, I feel like people were sort of like, whoa, okay, this is bold,

• 0:47John Coogan?

  but this could be really, really powerful because they have this odd tension between the NeoClouds, where if you go in, you lose your connection to your customer effectively and the Marses could get compressed. You're in a much more competitive environment. And at the same time, if you don't go in, then Nvidia can just say, hey, like, you know, all the DGX Cloud Lepton customers, well, we're going to send them to the clouds that did sign up. And so you have this like tension. They really did, really did, it really did feel like Nvidia had some leverage, biggest company in the world very shortly after, and obviously a very aggressive business. Like they're, they're not just going to be like, oh, that would be improper to compete. But it, but it played out

• 1:29John Coogan?

  very differently and Nvidia has become very friendly with CoreWeave and they both found their places where there's still little competition here and there. But I was just reflecting on like, how that journey came together, where that, where that landed. And, and the long story short is that like, the DGX product, it came out and the reviews weren't like, okay, yeah, this is actually better than working with CoreWeave. And there was still so many benefits from going to a NeoCloud or even a, you know, true cloud provider. There was just more to do. Nvidia made an acquisition. They bought Lepton, where the name came from, in April 2025, which sort of kicked most of that discourse off.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  The rumor was that they paid between 300 and 900 million dollars for that. And, and Jensen was like so gassed up on this. I loved his quote. He said, Nvidia DGX Cloud Lepton connects our network of global GPU cloud providers with AI developers. Together with our NCPs, which is Nvidia cloud providers, we're, we're building planet, a planetary scale AI factory. That's what his tagline was, which makes sense. Like there is a world where that would have played out. That's

• 2:40Jordi Hays?

  Got to pause for one second and talk about how we have failed so far.

• 2:45John Coogan?

  I know.

• 2:45Jordi Hays?

  To convince a lot of our friends not to call supercomputers AI factories.

• 2:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 2:50John Coogan?

  If we continue to fail, they're going to be like, it's a refinery.

• 2:56John Coogan?

  It's a, it's an AI offshore decker. It's an oil decker for AI.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  Gabe says it's a data ranch, brother.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Data ranch. There we go.

• 3:05Jordi Hays?

  Putting a data ranch in your backyard.

• 3:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. But yeah, I mean, at, at the time, there was a bunch of reporting, sort of like people familiar with the matter. The information got a scoop from a bunch of the NeoCloud compute providers saying Lepton was a potential competitive threat. And, and if you refuse to participate, that creates a risk that Nvidia could direct workloads toward competitors. It was a bit of this tense time, but the end result was more balanced. So instead of layering their customers and trying to control aggregate demand, which would be really powerful if it happened, the product evolved into this unified AI platform, which is their, their words. But basically, it's, it's between an actual like Expedia for GPUs and just a set of standards. So it's a bunch of

• 3:47John Coogan?

  proprietary software. It is sort of what makes up the CUDA mote. So everything from handling GPU node groups, interactive dev pods, distributed batch jobs, inference endpoints, storage, observability, reservations, more. So all the things that you need to actually schedule, manage GPUs, you can run that, but you can still use your own hardware, do whatever you need to have the relationship with the underlying owner of the GPUs. And so the rest of the NeoClouds are generally like, you know, pretty safe. And so it was, it was interesting because it was, it was, it was heralded as this like, oh, okay, things could get spicy. You could see all the NeoClouds like really chirping at Jensen, Jensen really coming for the throat. Didn't really play out that way.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  But it does sort of go to show that Jensen is, does not take lightly to, to any whispers that the CUDA mote is going away anytime soon. Like he, he's like, the ace is still up the sleeve, in my opinion. Like they still have to do a lot of work because when semi-analysis actually like demoed it, they were like, it's not working as well as some of the other systems. Like if you were to put, I don't even know if Nvidia Cloud Lepton is on cluster max, but, but they would, they would, at the time that they tested it, they were like, yeah, you're going to have a better experience if you just go direct CoreWeave, Nebius, the other ones that are in the platinum tier.

• 5:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Overall, I think in many ways, we've seen, it's been very strategic to work with 50, 100 really, really, really smart teams that are going to have their own incentives to grow their businesses, grow their, their buying of Nvidia.

• 5:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. And if you just use the, if you just use the framework of like, who was upset yesterday about CoreWeave launching their, what was the actual product called? CoreWeave Forge, which is their like AI cloud, right? So they're just saying, hey, we got CPUs now, we got storage, we got tools to manage all of that. Who's really mad? It's like, it's only their direct competitors, basically, who are like, ah, now we got to catch up. If you're a CPU seller or you're a compute or a storage seller or something like that, you're like, great, I got a new customer. I'm happy. And then if you're a customer of CoreWeave, you're like, okay, I'm happy. I get more stuff. And so it was, yesterday's CoreWeave move was not particularly a, like a shot across the bow to anyone, other than just like, hey, we know we're in a race with like 300 other NeoClouds. You see

• 6:04John Coogan?

  them on cluster max, we're going to do more to reach that diamond tier, which is what you propose. But yeah, really, really remarkable margin expansion story. I mean, the depreciation, the depreciation story, like they beat the depreciation allegations pretty quickly, but that, that value of like dollar per watt is increasing really, really quickly. And so if they can get in line with, with Elon and Jensen's 60 billion a gigawatt, it's, it's going to be a very, very exciting business. It already is an exciting business, but, and that's what my wheels were turning about yesterday. Let's go over to the timeline. You, you.

• 6:40Jordi Hays?

  Anything going on yesterday?

• 6:42John Coogan?

  You said you wanted to get in the mud and wrestle with pigs, even though the pig likes it and you get muddy?

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  Okay, let's wrestle. What are we wrestling about today?

• 6:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So we, we kind of caught some of this live at the beginning of the show yesterday, but the posts kept flowing yesterday.

• 7:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  What really got people up in arms was Vinod coming in and saying, you are a struggling second tier competitor that is more unethical and lying just because you have no decency or sense of proper behavior and shows your desperation straight out lying about if Chris being fired, I thought would be below even you. Just like the most, the most crashing out on Matan's personal crash out.

• 7:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 7:26Jordi Hays?

  So crash out on crash out violence.

• 7:28John Coogan?

  Three car pile.

• 7:29Jordi Hays?

  It only took about 20 seconds for people to put it together that Coastal Ventures is of course an investor in Factory and Cognition.

• 7:37John Coogan?

  And like a pretty big one, right?

• 7:39Jordi Hays?

  But is funny enough, an example that like venture firms can have firewalls and individual people that have exposure to one company that might want to get involved with another company can still behave in a way that is ultimately like ethical.

• 7:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  Right? I'm not saying that Vinod, you know, attacking his portco is, but.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  Was Keith still at FF when cognition, when they did cognition? I think he might have already been at Cosla potentially then. And so I, I think Keith might be the, the, the factory board member or something. I don't know. I just saw Keith coming to Matan's defense.

• 8:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:18John Coogan?

  Right? Which is obviously the, the Coastal Ventures divide, but that's the nature of these, of these, these partnerships. Sort of, he sort of clear that Vinod's not using AI for these posts.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 8:31John Coogan?

  Total all, all over the place grammatically.

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  Straight out lying.

• 8:36John Coogan?

  You are a competitor that is more unethical and lying. That's not right.

• 8:41Jordi Hays?

  This was firing from the hip.

• 8:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. But he's, he's gotta lay it down. He's gotta lay it down. I mean, what, what this really could say is that even though you have an economic incentive to align with this person, you need to distance yourself from them because you know that they are in the wrong. Like that's like, the fact that Vino has bags here and he's still posting this makes it more severe, right?

• 9:09Jordi Hays?

  Like, yeah, but I, I think there is a chance that Vino kind of forgot that.

• 9:14John Coogan?

  You think that's what happened?

• 9:15Jordi Hays?

  That exposure. I think I, I got, you gotta put that at like 15%.

• 9:19John Coogan?

  Hmm. Forgot. Is that possible? I don't know. I don't know. What? I mean, he's a multi billionaire. The, the, the economic.

• 9:29Jordi Hays?

  I mean, he was coming, he was coming, he came on the show last week, last week to talk about, uh, F O F F O.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  F O. He's clearly working more closely with another.

• 9:41Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, Tyler.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  Was it called F O? I, I like that. I would sign up for that. Uh, but, uh, yeah, he's clearly like on the board of that company and not on the board of Factory. Because the, the really crazy thing is like, how did this not, how did this go straight on the timeline? Like this should have been a text message and maybe it was, but you're only talking about two and a half hours. I feel like if a portfolio founder is out of control, you would text them and say, hey, you are in the wrong. You're about to get smoked. You don't have the leverage here. Like you would say, hey, look, you're, you're a second tier competitor and you're being unethical and you're lying. So I think you should take the post down and apologize. You know, you would say that behind closed doors.

• 10:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  You would text that. You would not just go straight to the truth nuke from outer space, which is what Vino did. It's a truth, right?

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, I don't, I don't even think it's necessarily, I wouldn't call it a, a truth nuke because it's, it's an ad hominem. Like he just went directly at him. He didn't even talk about any of the facts.

• 10:40John Coogan?

  Well.

• 10:40Jordi Hays?

  So here's the thing. So, so Luke Metro came in.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  If he knows, if he knows the facts are true and it's cool, we, we don't, we don't disagree that it's a nuke, correct?

• 10:48Jordi Hays?

  It's definitely a nuke.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  It's definitely a nuke. The question is, is it a truth nuke or is it an ad hominem nuke? And I think it might be a truth nuke because I think as an investor, you might actually know the truth of what happened. You might know because he could go into like the internal COSLA Slack or something and say like, who are the board members? Is this guy actually a board member? You know, like, like what, what files have been shared from Factory to our board? Oh, nothing relevant that would be useful to cognition. You know, he could have made that decision.

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  What are you, what are you calling it, Tyler? Ad hominuke?

• 11:24John Coogan?

  Ad hominuke. Okay. It's an ad hominuke. We'll leave it there. I think we, we close that out.

• 11:29Jordi Hays?

  Um, anyway, so Luke Metro said what I think everyone was thinking. Can we please not start cognition versus Factory before we get a resolution to Rippling versus Deal? Great post. That being said, wildly different situation than Rippling versus Deal. When the Rippling deal drama broke, there was immediately insane, seemingly insane smoking guns.

• 11:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  That are getting worked out through the court system, but it was like, uh, Rippling had basically tricked Deal in some ways, right?

• 12:00John Coogan?

  Wait, really? Oh, I don't remember that at all.

• 12:02Jordi Hays?

  Um, I mean, it, it's, it's sort of fuzzy at this point.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  It was like a honeypot operation. That is sort of a trick. That's sort of tricky.

• 12:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:09John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah.

• 12:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, honeypot is better written.

• 12:13John Coogan?

  I, I think that was like their, their term, right?

• 12:15Jordi Hays?

  All this being said.

• 12:16John Coogan?

  The honeypot and the spy went for it.

• 12:18Jordi Hays?

  My current read is that CRO, you know, the advisor goes to Matan and says, I'm getting poached. And Matan says, you can't get poached. You're being fired for unethical conduct. But the firing happened days after he was notified that he was leaving for a competitor.

• 12:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Keith, Keith, uh, said it is unethical per se to even interview at a competitor while attending board meetings and board dinners. And, and I, I, I read this and I was like, yeah, I, I think that's right. I think I agree with that. But then I was thinking about like, how would you do this? How would he have done this more responsibly if that's what happened? And I was like, so, so the, you have to, you have to resign because you think that you should go interview at a competitor and then reach out to them? And it doesn't, it doesn't seem, it doesn't seem like that's the way things happen that often. I don't know.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  People, people like even direct competitors will maintain, you know, somewhat jovial, uh, you know, interactions. Oh, how's it going? Oh, it's going great. Yeah. Cool, man. Like, and both parties are kind of just saying nothing, but you are having like a conversation technically. Because you like bump into someone at a conference. You might both be on stage at the same part, talking about agentic AI or something. I don't know.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  And then, and then I was thinking about like, how does this rank if he was, uh, if the, if the new cognition CRO, I forget his name, was, um, on the, uh, Chris Deggan. You know, if Chris Deggan was on the, he was a board observer or board advisor? What's the terminology?

• 13:59Jordi Hays?

  I think his only, from what I understand, his only technical title was advisor.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  Advisor. Okay. So I'm just thinking like, you, you back to your, back to your original frame of like, is this more or less hardcore than before? And I'm thinking about like the Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt interaction where like Eric Schmidt is on the board of Apple and being like, we're buying Android over at Google. We're launching Android over at Google and Steve Jobs gets pissed.

• 14:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:24John Coogan?

  Uh, but it doesn't spill out on the timeline. So that's where Steve Jobs.

• 14:27Jordi Hays?

  Another, another comp is like Mike Krieger.

• 14:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, his involvement with Figma.

• 14:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:33Jordi Hays?

  And resigned from the board, I think a couple of days.

• 14:37John Coogan?

  A day before launching.

• 14:38Jordi Hays?

  A day before launching a, a competitor.

• 14:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 14:41Jordi Hays?

  So again, this stuff has been happening, but the funny thing is to see this like whole, all this drama around companies that provide basically enterprise applications. When you look at what's happening on the research side where aggressive, constant aggressive poaching around like truly like companies developing truly novel IP that basically have no protections where you can work at a company for five years, learn a bunch about what they do, get poached and bring all of that know-how over to a new company within the same 24 hour period, right? This whole situation, like an advisor that gets poached, doesn't feel like a big deal at all to me in the context of everything else that's been happening.

• 15:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just.

• 15:24Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and ultimately I don't think, I think the story's like over. Like I think it's, it.

• 15:29John Coogan?

  No, no, I think you're right. It's, yeah, it's different because like the researchers do post, but they don't, they don't have like, they don't have as many interactions with VCs. So like there's, uh, there, there, there's that back and forth about the three OpenAI researchers who were just fired, according to the Wall Street Journal for sharing information. But like, that doesn't reach the level of like board interaction, right? So you're not going to see board members, at least that I can tell, um, like doing drama about it. And even when the talent wars happen between Meta and OpenAI, like we were the ones that were posting the most like spicy stuff about it, right? Uh, because like the board members, they don't necessarily have the same level of interaction with the researchers as the other board advisors.

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:12John Coogan?

  And so I think this, it is just gets a lot more personal, I think. Anyway, you want to close the book on this? Are you sure?

• 16:20Jordi Hays?

  Miles says, I work with a company.

• 16:21John Coogan?

  Okay, we're going back into the trough.

• 16:23Jordi Hays?

  Let's go back.

• 16:24John Coogan?

  Let's go back.

• 16:25Jordi Hays?

  Let's go find the pigs.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 16:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Miles says, I work with a company that's doing great by all definitions. Recently, one of its star executives was poached by an A plus company to lead a very popular product. Founders tried to retain him. They couldn't, so they wished him well and began the recruitment process to replace him. The investors sent him notes thanking him for all his work. No temper tantrums or ethics debate, debates or Twitter name dragging, just grownups getting back to work. And Martin over at A16C says, boring.

• 16:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, but that's kind of what Miles is advocating for. He's like, these, these types of interactions should be boring, right? Uh, Sean McGuire says, nice one from the cheap seats. You know 1% of the story. And Sean's really like teasing something. He's like, there's going to be the files. There's going to be some crazy drop. There's going to be another truth nuke. It's going to be truth, World War III, something like that. But has he actually posted anything? Like it feels like today is the day to like share the, like the truth.

• 17:25Jordi Hays?

  I hope everyone can, uh, sort it out behind the scenes.

• 17:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. He said he has a nuclear weapon. Uh, yeah, that's a truth nuke. He has a truth nuke. That's what he's saying. A nuclear weapon on the timeline, but.

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  He did come out and say cognition is Infosys masquerading as anthropic, which is funny because Infosys does like technology, IT transformation, which is in many ways what cognition does. But the only thing I would disagree with Sean on is I, I don't see cognition like masquerading as anthropic.

• 17:55John Coogan?

  No, not at all. You talked to Scott Wu and he's like, yeah, we're providing enterprise value.

• 18:00Jordi Hays?

  Automating code generation and business.

• 18:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's not an anthropic library all over there. I mean, like they, they, they take their business seriously, but that's not an anthropic, that's a uniquely anthropic.

• 18:11Jordi Hays?

  Well, and also, also this would tell me that the two, that Factory and cognition are going in very different directions. If he thinks the Infosys direction is bad.

• 18:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  And hopefully they can go in a different direction.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 18:22Jordi Hays?

  And maybe they could even work together at some point.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  Ooh, okay. Yeah. Uh, and maybe you don't need the snowflake CRO if you have discovered some fundamental thing, right? Like, like the whole, the whole tease was like, we did something on the research side, but like, that doesn't matter if your CRO leaves, right?

• 18:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Hopefully he didn't, hopefully he doesn't even understand it. He doesn't even understand what's going on in the research department. He's like, I don't know. It's a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Just tell me who to call and sell it to. Moving on. What's next?

• 18:53John Coogan?

  Bunch of people got slop ads from Instinct. They're upset.

• 18:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, here's the thing.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  Because I think it's good.

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, get the steel man helmet.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  I'm gonna fight Jordi on this one.

• 19:03Jordi Hays?

  But I would clarify, I don't, I don't think they're, I would be shocked if they're actually monetizing this already. Seems like it was just an experiment, right?

• 19:10John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 19:11Jordi Hays?

  Can we suggest products that people will want to buy? Noah's been very explicit that they plan to do this, right? They plan to get deals with different retailers and platforms and be able to monetize the purchases that they draw.

• 19:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  Now, something I've always said, or at least said a lot in the last month or so, is that if you want to get to the point where you can have meaningful take rates, you need to be driving net new demand, right? So if I go to my personal agent and say, buy me this thing, right? The demand was created elsewhere, like that it was generated with like advertisement or, or organic content or some, something caused me to want to go and buy it. And brands are not going to be standing up and lining up to pay big referral fees effectively when they already paid to create the demand elsewhere. And so this Instinct test is, is hey, we understand this person.

• 20:03John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:04Jordi Hays?

  Let's basically suggest some products that they maybe weren't thinking about, but they would buy and...

• 20:10John Coogan?

  Like a phone charger.

• 20:11Jordi Hays?

  Like a power bank.

• 20:12John Coogan?

  Like a power bank.

• 20:13Jordi Hays?

  Or some sunscreen.

• 20:14John Coogan?

  I just like, I saw like 12 different screenshots that were all power banks. It's like, it is sort of universal. If you were gonna, if you were gonna blast, just blast that. I mean, I mean, we talked to the shot at the ridge and he's like, yeah, they just move. Like, it's a good business. But I don't know. We gotta just figure out, like, are they actually monetizing this? Because Instinct is in a position where you could literally just go and set up an Amazon referral fee thing and start taking a cut. And websites have done that for a long time. Like, if you go to the Wirecutter, now owned by the New York Times, you will be able to click on checkout for a suitcase, for some sunglasses, for the best TV they have.

• 20:56John Coogan?

  And if you click on one of their partner sites, it puts a cookie there. And when you check out, they actually do make a referral commission. I would be surprised if Instinct wasn't monetizing that. But at the same time, I think they might not even need to because the scale of what they're trying to do is more just like, understand the consumer and then have a, have a, have the next proof point for the next raise. Because obviously it's incredibly compute intensive. They're gonna be, they're growing very quickly. They're gonna be raising very quickly.

• 21:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:30John Coogan?

  And being able to go back to the next round of ECs and say, hey, we've actually tested e-commerce and it converts at seven times the rate of Instagram reel ads or whatever. And it's like, we have this, this much surface area and here's the response. And yes, there was a lot of feedback that was like, oh, this is slop. Who, who, who said it's shop slop or whatever? Shop slop. Dave Morin called it from Open Claw.

• 21:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, somewhat, somewhat, somewhat biased, right? He's running the, the open, like, he's running the foundation.

• 21:59John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  For Open Claw.

• 22:01John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 22:01Jordi Hays?

  Which, you know, is like basically own your compute, own your agent.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:05Jordi Hays?

  Don't get ads pushed to you. Have your agent be aligned to you. That, that's their stance.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  I think the, I think the slop...

• 22:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, overall, here's, here's the thing. Here's the thing.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  Please.

• 22:14Jordi Hays?

  If they can actually give you a 10 out of 10 recommendation, people will love it. When someone recommends you a product and you're just instantly like, yes, this is great.

• 22:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:23Jordi Hays?

  That's a wonderful experience. The question is, how quickly, how quickly can they get there? It didn't really feel like they were nailing it, but we don't know. Like, maybe people are sharing screenshots. Like, one of these was pretty cool, uh, was, um, they found like some row loafers, which are generally, they generally sell out. They're kind of hard to find.

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  And so it's possible, this person didn't like it, but I think a lot of people would be like, cool, thank you.

• 22:52John Coogan?

  You're like, this is, this is the worst thing ever. And then you see one thing you like and you're like, eh?

• 22:56Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I'm told. No, the one that I saw that, that I thought was funny was Instinct knew that this guy had a 9/11 Targa.

• 23:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:04Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, because they'd worked on some insurance stuff.

• 23:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:08Jordi Hays?

  But the issue is that Instinct was like, basically clocked like, okay, this guy's a car guy. I gotta hit him with a bunch of car stuff.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:15Jordi Hays?

  And then it recommends a trickle charger.

• 23:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:17Jordi Hays?

  Which 9/11s really don't need, especially modern 9/11s. And an indoor cover.

• 23:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:24Jordi Hays?

  To use inside your garage, which car guys I know would never use an indoor cover because I said this yesterday briefly at the end of the show, but the cover against the paint can cause more damage than it just like sitting there, right? So you generally want it out of the sun, but, uh, but you're better off just like leaving it. Especially because if there gets, if, if there can be any debris between the cover and the paint.

• 23:47John Coogan?

  But you could imagine how the model evolves.

• 23:49Jordi Hays?

  It knows about the user, but it doesn't know about what car people actually want, right?

• 23:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, with the shop slop screenshot here from Dave Morin. What sticks out to me is, uh, the, the, the fact that there's like five let's buy this buttons. I don't know, like, this seems like a normal e-commerce site, but the, the repetition there of all the calls to action is what's throwing me off and making this look sloppy. I don't know if that's what's triggering me, but the actual recommendations there of a couple things.

• 24:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's funny because this was, this was always a historical concern with AI ads. Is the AI that you trust for information and to help you do things suddenly is like, come on, let's like, I think we should buy this.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 24:35Jordi Hays?

  Let's buy this.

• 24:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:35Jordi Hays?

  What do you think? Should we buy this, right?

• 24:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:37Jordi Hays?

  And it's like, it, it ends up feeling a little, this feels a little bit pushy.

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:41Jordi Hays?

  The other thing that stands out is, is, you know, they've taken a very UI light approach, right? They're, Noah said, you don't need new interfaces, you know, it has a computer, it has a phone number, it has a number that you can text. But I feel like they're gonna need to, they have to make interfaces, right? And this is one, one of the first.

• 25:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:01Jordi Hays?

  And, um, and then, yeah, again, the challenge is like getting pushed products in text is just very, very, very, very person. It's just very, very personal, right? Um, and I think that a lot of e-commerce brands, you know, will use text marketing. I find that I'm like thousand times more likely to unsubscribe from text marketing than I am to, uh, from email marketing, right?

• 25:25John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I mean, it can be dangerous to operate on the previous era of like text message conversion rates and open rates because we have moved into a regime where my iMessage at least, probably yours as well, has a number of folders for unknown senders, promotions, spam, transactions. And if it starts flagging Instinct or your AI agent, not as a friend, but as a promotions vehicle, it goes in that bucket and then the open rate goes way down. And this is what happened with like the newsletter apocalypse and Gmail where you got filtered off into a different section. You're not actually in the inbox anymore. And so that's, that's pretty risky.

• 26:10John Coogan?

  I, I was, I was demoing Dot yesterday and just had a phone call with it on the way home and was shopping and said like, go find this pair of pants that I bought in my Gmail. Go find another, uh, pair in like a slightly different color. And it was hunting around and it was just like, nothing's in stock in your size, bro. And I was like, uh, is there some like global pants outage or something? What's going on? And it was like, no, this isn't like a conspiracy or something. Uh, but I was actually like kind of laughing back and forth.

• 26:41Jordi Hays?

  You're not crazy. They're crazy.

• 26:43John Coogan?

  It was a pretty, it was a pretty delightful experience, but, but like my end result was like, I was like, I don't want you just to send me random stuff, but I do actually want you to check on this. So go create a background task to check like every day for this pair of pants and then just let me know if they come back and stop. And it's like, I'm expecting one notification sometime in the next few months for that particular pair of pants. And then I can just be like, get it.

• 27:06Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, closing this segment out, Instinct is, as of I think last week was like 13 or 14 people, right? Like tiny. They're shipping super quickly.

• 27:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  As a, as a small team, experimenting, I think that's important.

• 27:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:20Jordi Hays?

  Um, and they just hired our friend Ben from Kotu.

• 27:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:25Jordi Hays?

  Who was at Snapchat for almost a decade.

• 27:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:28Jordi Hays?

  Leading like content and partnerships there.

• 27:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  He joined as a chief business officer at Instinct. And I think that that is going to be a massive unlock for them.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:37Jordi Hays?

  Um, there's so much that Ben can do.

• 27:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I do think that there is a...

• 27:41Jordi Hays?

  To improve this experience and make it more like an Amex style experience.

• 27:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:46Jordi Hays?

  Right? Where it's very mass marketed and commercial, but they're trying to make it feel like elevated and, and put the, put the user first.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  They might need to do a new pre-trained specifically on car guy data to, uh, to really nail that, really dial that in. No, I, I think that there is a little bit of a gap between the ex Twitter community, the tech people, the insiders who are like, I don't want a bunch of ads. And like, there's a lot of people who are like, yeah, like I actually enjoy going through all the newsletters and sales in my email. I like the email, email, you know, promotional marketing materials. And I watch the ads on Instagram. I like them. I enjoy having products be shown to me in aesthetic ways.

• 28:31Jordi Hays?

  There's some people that, you know, they, maybe they park their car on a, on a public street and then they go back to their car. Maybe after going to a restaurant, there's one of those like, um, business card ads.

• 28:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:42Jordi Hays?

  I will buy your junk car. You ever got, you ever got those?

• 28:46John Coogan?

  No.

• 28:46Jordi Hays?

  In, in LA, there's people that like, they put a, they'll put a business card like in your windows, like...

• 28:51John Coogan?

  I, I've gotten that business card, but for like, uh, like gardening or like, we'll trim your trees, like that type of stuff. I've never gotten an offer to buy my car.

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've got the multiple times in LA that like, we buy junk cars. I'm like, wow, shots fired. I thought I was, I thought I was doing all right.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of a, kind of a neg. Um, but yeah, I, I think a lot of people will, will, will be excited to have the daily text of like the best product that they could, that they could possibly buy.

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  John says, nobody on earth can do what Ben can. Changes instinct overnight. I agree.

• 29:25John Coogan?

  The folks over at D-Mine picked the best day to launch Gemini 4 Argon when everyone's talking about Factory and Cognition, of course. But, uh, it did break through some really impressive benchmarks. Uh, also some controversy over how much Google employees are using it internally to code. Of course, we'll need to see. The meme is, we're launching Gemini 4 Argon. And a group of people are talking about, did you see the factory guy calling out cognition guy? The Twitter shooter goes, cool. And then goes back to, um, uh, the, the, the model agnostic, the enterprise model agnostic harnesses are fighting. Uh, and so it is certainly a tough day to launch when there's a lot of drama on the timeline that is more engaging than the model wars.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  The model wars used to be the most engaging thing, but now the interpersonal board dynamics are clearly taking a lead. Um, but what's going on with the naming schemes here? So open eyes.

• 30:18Jordi Hays?

  All my tokens are gone.

• 30:23John Coogan?

  That's pretty funny. So the naming schemes, OpenAI is in the solar system. You got Luna for the moon, Terra for the earth, Sol for the sun, Astra for the stars. Anthropic is doing Haiku, a Japanese poem, a sonnet. It's a 14 line poem. Opus, major work, fable, moral story. And then Google arrives with Argon. Just look at the image. The word Argon comes from the ancient Greek word argos, which means lazy or inactive.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  I think they're named after the element Argon, and they're probably just going to go down the list of elements, which is a cool place to pull from. But yeah, tech leaders, you gotta dig into these words. I keep saying this, too many, too many hubristic tales. I don't need any more Project Titan, Project. But Pop-Tarts has ended their Buzz Balls partnership. This is huge. But on the other side of things, there's more collabs happening because Mr. Beast Feastables partnered with Liquid Death Peanut Butter Cup Soda Flavored Sparkling Water. So

• 31:31Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so we kind of, we kind of ended up like net, we're net neutral.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, it's reincarnated in some ways.

• 31:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it never really died, it never really died.

• 31:40John Coogan?

  Has been reincarnated as the Mr. Beast Feastables Liquid Death Peanut Butter Cup Soda Flavored Sparkling Water.

• 31:49Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, this is, this has got you written all over it.

• 31:53Jordi Hays?

  Friday challenge, drink a six pack of peanut butter cup water.

• 31:58John Coogan?

  Would you rather drink the Mr. Beast Feastables Liquid Death Peanut Butter Cup Soda Flavored Sparkling Water or the Pop-Tarts Buzz Ball, Frosted Smores?

• 32:08Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 32:10John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  See you tomorrow.