Palmer Luckey’s EagleEye Reactions, Defending Ferrari, Kushner Story Ignites Debate | Alex Klein, Hemant Taneja, Rob Toews, Nathan Benaich

(01:04) - Palmer Luckey's EagleEye Reactions (11:05) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (12:36) - Ferrari 12Cilindri Reactions (24:41) - Colossus' Kushner Story Sparks Debate (31:50) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:00:44) - Alex Klein, the inventor and founder of the Stem Player, discusses his journey from creating build-your-own computers for children to developing the Stem Player, an AI-driven music device that allows users to interactively remix songs by isolating and combining different musical elements. He highlights collaborations with artists like Kanye West, who helped distribute the product, and emphasizes the device's capability to provide a novel, interactive music experience by enabling users to manipulate stems—vocals, bass, drums, and instrumentals—of their favorite tracks. Klein also touches on the innovative licensing and revenue model of Stem FM, which compensates artists based on the listening time subscribers spend with their music, aiming to create a more equitable and engaging platform for both artists and listeners. (01:28:18) - Hemant Taneja, CEO of General Catalyst, discusses his book "The Transformation Principles," emphasizing the need for clear guiding principles amid the uncertainties introduced by AI and geopolitical shifts. He highlights the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration in transforming industries like healthcare, combining technological agility with the sector's inherent seriousness. Taneja also addresses the venture capital landscape, noting the accelerated growth of AI-driven companies and the necessity for investors to adapt to these evolving dynamics. (02:00:03) - Rob Toews is a Partner at Radical Ventures, leading the firm's Bay Area office and focusing on investments in artificial intelligence and deep technology. In the conversation, he discusses the evolution of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), highlighting the distinction between invasive and non-invasive technologies, and explores their potential applications in enhancing human-AI interaction. (02:27:18) - Nathan Benaich, founder and General Partner of Air Street Capital, a venture capital firm investing in AI-first companies, discusses the evolving landscape of early-stage AI investments, noting a bifurcation between large lab model companies raising significant funds and more pragmatic entrepreneurs focusing on specific use cases. He highlights the shift from startups spending seed budgets on building AI systems to now leveraging existing models for product-market fit experiments, emphasizing the importance of team capability in running multiple experiments to find successful applications. Additionally, Benaich touches on the increasing interest in AI from various sectors, including national security and defense, underscoring the broad potential and value creation of AI technologies. (02:42:49) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.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.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVB and today is Friday, October 17th, 2025. We are live from the TVB Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, I'm having too much fun. I got a new sound effect.

• 0:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, we got a new sound effect. The soundboard continues to be on a generational run of its own. And Palmer Lucky has been on a generational run, going on a lot of different shows. He's coming on our show. We announced that today. Very excited to have him join the show. I've interviewed him a few times. Always a fantastic chat.

• 0:31Jordi Hays?

  The guy can yap.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  I want to play a clip from his appearance not on Joe Rogan, which is fantastic. You should go listen to, but on of him on Bloomberg. But first, I want to tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Say both. Easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  Last night, we got together with some members of the Ramp team and in a great sign of respect in our culture, they built this ice statue.

• 1:00John Coogan?

  The ice sculpture was very fun to see.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  Which you may have seen over on X, but absolutely stunning.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's play the clip from Bloomberg. Palmer Lucky.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Palmer, there was a report about the NGC2 system. It named both Andorl and Palantir. We've asked Palantir through Shom to comment on that. But the the report in Palantir's case moved markets. Could you just respond to that reporting, which came from Reuters, and explain the sort of timeline and the inaccuracies that you feel there are in that report?

• 1:36Palmer Luckey?

  So you may or may not remember this, but I was a journalism major myself. I was only a semester and a half away from graduating. I was the online editor of the Daily 49er, which was the Cal State Long Beach student-run newspaper. So I care a lot about this stuff, both as an annual perspective, but then also just from a journalist's perspective. The journalist who wrote that Reuters story would have been failed out of class by any of my professors. He refused to include our on-the-record statement. He refused to include the on-the-record.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  This is crazy, though.

• 2:02Palmer Luckey?

  Because they fundamentally made the whole story not a story.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  They just didn't. They didn't include what Palantir and Andorl had to say. I'll read the actual article.

• 2:11Palmer Luckey?

  Next generation command and control. It's not tracking what the users are doing. It doesn't have any passwords to log in. There's no security turned on. And they said, oh, my God, this is a huge problem. And we said, guys, this was an early prototype. The army wasn't paying us to demonstrate user accounts. It was paying us to demonstrate integration of different sensors, different weapon systems, all into one pipeline. And Lattice has all this functionality. We do this all the time. It's not like, it's not like we don't know how to do this. And the army said the same. They said, yeah, we just turned on all those features with, just a few weeks later, all these issues that you're talking about didn't exist. This was an internal security audit, just noting that these things were a factor in that early prototype. Yes, there's no access control. Yes, that is a risk. Yes, we have not audited all of their security, you know, all their security code.

• 2:56Palmer Luckey?

  That is a risk. But that's completely normal for early, early development. But Reuters didn't include our quote, didn't include the army's quote, because that would have made the entire story irrelevant. So instead, they include quotes exclusively from our competitors and from so-called anonymous sources, saying that Anduril and Palantir are running this fundamentally insecure thing. 99% chance that was planted by one of our competitors who had access to that memo. And there's only a few people who could have done it. And I can make people look bad by slicing and dicing memos, too. I'll show you if I want. I'll get back into journalism again.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  We can say.

• 3:24John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  We've given you the opportunity.

• 3:27John Coogan?

  Get Palmer lucky a column at Reuters.

• 3:30Palmer Luckey?

  This opportunity to attack my enemies.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  You just mentioned your, your competitors. Let's call them legacy.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, we can, we can wrap it there. But basically, I mean, it's like, the army was like, hey, we want you to prototype something for us, like, put a bunch of dots on a map, do something different, like, create a new UI, like, show us what you can do. And then, clearly, an enemy of, of Anduril and Palantir, like, leaked, like, well, they didn't, they didn't have OAuth set up yet. And it's like, well, yeah, like, we know this in Silicon Valley. Like, when you build a new product, you focus on finding a problem, building the solution, and then you figure out how to optimize the database and cache things at the end. I love when people try to do gotchas with Palmer. It's impossible. Don't even try. But it, it, it does, like, I thought we were past this, honestly, because of the mood

• 4:18John Coogan?

  in Silicon Valley, like, the whole idea of, like... Everyone in America knows that it shouldn't take 50 years to build the new plane. Like, everyone knows that that other countries can build stuff faster and build systems faster. And it shouldn't take this long and other countries aren't smarter.

• 4:35Jordi Hays?

  They still know how to build fast. Data centers.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, we clearly, we clearly know how, when there isn't a bunch of, like, the, the difference between, that's a good analogy. The difference between the data center market and what's going on in, in defense and government procurement is that the data center market doesn't necessarily have a ton of entrenched interest in being like, let's not speed up. Our, our model works.

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, potentially not enough regulation. I'm not advocating for regulation, but the, the big complaint is that

• 5:04John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, sure.

• 5:05Jordi Hays?

  Set up, start sourcing energy from the grid.

• 5:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:09Jordi Hays?

  And it makes people nearby suddenly pay a massive premium even if.

• 5:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just like, imagine, like, so you have the, you have the Neo Clouds who want to build data centers very quickly. There's no real party, it's not like Oracle is like, I'm in the business of building things slowly. I get paid more money if I build it slowly. Whereas like, that does exist with the legacy primes, which is just very different. But I, I don't know, I, I just thought that we were sort of past this, but of course, it's like a natural outgrowth and natural dynamic. When you are competing with, you know, Silicon Valley companies that are, their whole pitch, I mean, Interel's not a Silicon Valley company, but it's like a tech company. And, and their whole pitch is like, we will move faster. We're going to, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna beat you on speed. And, and that's very dangerous. And so you try and basically fut it and that's what's going on.

• 5:56John Coogan?

  But I liked Palmer putting it in the truth zone, putting Reuters in the truth zone, always fun to watch Palmer put on a little clinic.

• 6:03Jordi Hays?

  And

• 6:03John Coogan?

  How to do journalism accurately.

• 6:04Jordi Hays?

  Morning to the chat.

• 6:06John Coogan?

  Good morning to the chat.

• 6:06Jordi Hays?

  Great folks here today, Dan, Sheffer, Tom, Friendly.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, we got a bunch of people. Palmer also went on the Joe Rogan experience. We have some images from this. The European mind cannot comprehend what happened. Now, this is unfortunately a fake image.

• 6:28John Coogan?

  At no point did Joe Rogan actually put on aviators, a cigar and hold a machine gun of some sort.

• 6:36Jordi Hays?

  You're telling me this is slop?

• 6:37John Coogan?

  This is slop, but this is the, this is the purest slop possible.

• 6:40Jordi Hays?

  You didn't allow me to live for just thirty seconds, John?

• 6:44John Coogan?

  It is unfortunately fake news. We need to put it in the truth zone.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  It is pretty funny that it's somewhat believable.

• 6:50John Coogan?

  It, it is. It, it is like, yeah, yeah, this probably could have happened on the show. Uh, but they did put on the helmet and, uh, and, you know, ta- take things for a spin.

• 6:58Jordi Hays?

  Should we pull up this clip, uh, from later? They pulled up an Ashley Vance video of a wrecked, wrecked robot?

• 7:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, play that.

• 7:07John Coogan?

  This something that someone's working out with?

• 7:08Palmer Luckey?

  This is a robot fight league against San Francisco. Oh, this is the fight league. So actually, this is, this is a buddy of mine who's been working in VR for a really, really long time. So it's again, what a tiny, what a tiny world of weird wackos. Um, but yeah, Six Liv has been working on, uh, which is his real name.

• 7:23John Coogan?

  His real name. Isn't that hilarious? Six Liv.

• 7:25Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for real names.

• 7:26Palmer Luckey?

  VR stuff for the past fifteen years and he recently got into doing this, this, this robot, robot combat sports league.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. They were having so much fun talking about, uh, like it should be a human versus a robot. That's what, uh, Palmer and Logan Paul are apparently working on is like.

• 7:44Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 7:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, they want, they, uh, and, and they go into this big, long discussion about, um, well, if you can train a robot to be like perfect with its punches, it could also pull its punches perfectly. And so it could be the ultimate sparring partner.

• 7:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:57John Coogan?

  Um, and you could, and you could like, and you could be even like, it could train on you. And so you could be fighting yourself. It could train on, you, you could say like, I'm going to get in the ring with Evander Holyfield or Mike Tyson today. And it could mimic that perfectly in theory.

• 8:09Jordi Hays?

  I'm more, I'm more interested to see like a hundred robots versus one human.

• 8:15John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  While they're, while they're not quite as dialed.

• 8:17John Coogan?

  That would be great. Yeah.

• 8:18Jordi Hays?

  The issue is imagine how much, how much damage Logan Paul would do to a bunch of those unitries today. I'm not saying he would. I'm not saying in five years, he would be the same.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  No, no, no.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the same kind of.

• 8:32John Coogan?

  We gotta have the event now while he can actually put on a clinic and destroy all 100.

• 8:36Jordi Hays?

  It would be costly, though. These things go for.

• 8:38John Coogan?

  20k.

• 8:38Jordi Hays?

  So, so we were looking it up the other day. I was so confused.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  That's like an average Mr. Beast video budget. That's totally doable. You could do one man versus 100 robots.

• 8:45Jordi Hays?

  The robot dogs are like 75k and the G1 is like 20k.

• 8:51John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 8:51Jordi Hays?

  Do you think they're manipulating?

• 8:54John Coogan?

  It's a little bit too good to be true. I don't know if I like that pricing. Wait, Unitree charges less for their dog than their human?

• 9:01Speaker 04

  No, no. The dog is.

• 9:03John Coogan?

  From a different company?

• 9:03Speaker 04

  It's, yeah, it's a Boston Dynamics.

• 9:05John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, Boston Dynamics, I mean, yeah.

• 9:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not the same company.

• 9:07John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 9:08Jordi Hays?

  Got it. Yeah. What's a, can you find out what a Unitree dog costs?

• 9:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:12Jordi Hays?

  Chinese dog?

• 9:13John Coogan?

  There's something, I feel like that, I feel like one man versus 100, just stomping 100 Unitree dogs feels a lot sketchier and more dark.

• 9:22Jordi Hays?

  That's dark.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  To me than watching Logan Paul absolutely thrash in 100 Unitree. Even though it's not a fair fight, it feels a little bit more fair. What, what'd you find?

• 9:32Speaker 04

  Uh, Unitree dog is like low thousands.

• 9:34John Coogan?

  Low thousands?

• 9:35Speaker 04

  For like $3,000.

• 9:36Jordi Hays?

  Oh, we're buying that.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  Buying 100 and you're going in.

• 9:38Speaker 04

  How many should I buy?

• 9:39Jordi Hays?

  Actually, yeah, this is, this is greenlit. Put it on the ramp.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  I just want one. I just want one.

• 9:46John Coogan?

  I want 100 and get gorilla costumes for them all. And then we can reenact the, can they stand on two legs, the dogs?

• 9:54Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, I mean, we've seen videos of them doing backflips.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  Okay, so, but it, it, cause if it can stand on, if it can stand on two legs and then you can put it in a gorilla costume, you could totally be thrashing those things around like it's one man versus 100 gorillas.

• 10:08John Coogan?

  Wait, was it, was it 100 men versus?

• 10:09Jordi Hays?

  This just went from the $3,000.

• 10:11John Coogan?

  Versus one gorilla and not.

• 10:13Speaker 04

  100 gorillas?

• 10:14John Coogan?

  100 gorillas.

• 10:15Jordi Hays?

  No. Oh, no.

• 10:17John Coogan?

  I think you get 100 Unitrees, the humanoid robots, you put them in gorilla costumes, you turn Logan Paul loose, it's a $2 million production, but it's gonna get a billion views and so.

• 10:29Speaker 04

  You could also do 100 Unitrees versus one gorilla.

• 10:32John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, that you actually could do that. That's a great video.

• 10:36Jordi Hays?

  I don't think you can. I think guerrilla activists would say absolutely not.

• 10:39John Coogan?

  I think Peter would like a word with that one, but I don't know. I feel like the gorilla would love to like destroy the clanker. They're like natural enemies. Don't you think?

• 10:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they really are.

• 10:49John Coogan?

  Whatever, whatever we wind up doing with this, we gotta stream it on Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi-stream, reach your audience wherever they are.

• 10:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's a Planet of the Apes con, uh, which is like the clankers versus the apes.

• 11:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:02Jordi Hays?

  I think that's a hit.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  Yep. Uh, Henry, uh, photoshops and photos of, uh, Mark Benioff on TBPN and Palmer on Joe Rogan. Kind of monitoring the situation did quite well. Uh, fun post.

• 11:15Jordi Hays?

  I still can't get over the Benioff interview.

• 11:18John Coogan?

  It was so much fun.

• 11:19Jordi Hays?

  That was a real hoot.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  We had, we had, we had a wild, a wild time. He, uh, he's the final boss of salesmen. He's really such a good salesman. Comes on, it's like, I don't know, not to break the fourth wall, but we'd never talked to him before. Like I'd never met him in person with a lot of other people we've met beforehand. We've talked, we've gotten to know each other. Uh, that was not the case with Benioff. The first time I ever talked to him was on that call and it just felt like we were old friends immediately. And he is like talking trash and completely matching our energy, taking it up, you know, oh, so good.

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  Made me.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  But on clinic.

• 11:54Jordi Hays?

  Made me, made me feel that CRM is oversold.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 11:58Jordi Hays?

  Guy's got a lot of energy.

• 11:59John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure. Uh, before we move on, let me tell you about Privy Wallet Infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on-chain infrastructure, all through one simple API. Uh, Jordy, tell me about the Dolce Trilindri. The Ferrari front engine 12 cylinder. You had a take today. It went out on our newsletter, which you can subscribe to at tbpn.com. Jordy is writing, uh, posts in there as well. I'm writing posts in there. Uh, Brandon's, uh, collating a lot of the show. It's a great way to stay in tune with the show if you're not able to listen every day.

• 12:36Jordi Hays?

  I felt like I needed to defend Ferrari.

• 12:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 12:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, for a number of reasons. One, uh, I've gotten sick of every time Ferrari launches a car. You just see hundreds or thou- every single video that comes out with the car is people begging for the return of Pininfarina.

• 12:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the, uh, obviously the legendary design firm that Ferrari was partnered with from.

• 13:00Jordi Hays?

  1951 to 2012, the firm was founded in 1930, actually.

• 13:07John Coogan?

  Wait, Pinninferina is before Ferrari? Whoa, I didn't know that.

• 13:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, Enzo had been doing automotive racing for a long time.

• 13:14John Coogan?

  That's right, that's right.

• 13:15Jordi Hays?

  He didn't start Ferrari until he was 45.

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  But I basically, yeah, I've just gotten absolutely sick of every single time Ferrari announces a car.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  I'm sick and tired of it.

• 13:26Jordi Hays?

  I'm sick and tired of it, all these comments. One, because I think the main reason is like very clear that the firm and Ferrari are not going to have anything close to the partnership that they used to have. Pinninferina was sold for, it was basically like $28 million. And then the acquirer paid off a bunch of their debt as well. So the company was heavily in debt at the time that they sold in 2015.

• 13:54Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, there's just a number of reasons, right? Like Ferrari's in-house, all of their design, they've put a huge amount of resources and time and energy into it. They clearly want to own the whole stack. We talked about on the EV side of the business, they are like designing all of the EV componentry end to end, which again, I think other people are a little bit worried about because Ferrari, I've always had a bunch of electrical issues. That's been like kind of a key.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's underrated. Everyone says they want an electric car, but there's electricity flowing through a V12 as well.

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 14:29John Coogan?

  Sometimes unreliably.

• 14:31Jordi Hays?

  It's electric in its own way. And so, yeah, I think the criticism that I understand and I feel the same is that when Ferrari announces their cars, they spec them in a way that I just absolutely hate. I think the stock wheels, the way that they're colored, looks tacky.

• 14:48John Coogan?

  Okay, the stock wheels thing is weird because I feel like there's, just generally in car culture, like moving away from stock wheels, putting custom wheels on a car is weird. Are you talking about just from the factory, selecting a different wheel option?

• 15:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm talking about the way they spec it.

• 15:05John Coogan?

  Or are you talking about going to a completely different company and being like,

• 15:07Jordi Hays?

  Not talking about going to another company.

• 15:09John Coogan?

  I want 24 inch spinners on my Ferrari. You want spinners?

• 15:12Jordi Hays?

  No spinners.

• 15:13John Coogan?

  You're riding spinners.

• 15:14Jordi Hays?

  I'm talking about the way they spec the cars for the announcements. They have these like black and silverish looking wheels that I just think look bad, right? You can go. On the option side.

• 15:23John Coogan?

  But they have a few options.

• 15:24Jordi Hays?

  They have a bunch of, yeah, they have a bunch of other options that look great.

• 15:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:27Jordi Hays?

  And so the criticism when these cars get announced, I think is very real. I look at them and I think like, why does it have a black line running down here? That doesn't look good. The wheels don't look good. There's a bunch of other things you can nitpick, but then the important thing is like when they actually start rolling off the production line, when they start getting into dealerships, when they actually get to clients, they look absolutely amazing.

• 15:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:48Jordi Hays?

  I feel like they look, uh, uh, you know, there's, there's people like TJ Parker.

• 15:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:53Jordi Hays?

  A friend of the show will push back and just say like, I hate everything that they make. But when I see these cars, I think like, okay, this looks like a 21st century version of a Pininfarina car.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, I think the bigger problem is, is that we, it could be for regulatory reasons, right? But the automotive industry seems to be out of new ideas. We have like stagnation in automotive, right?

• 16:16John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 16:17Jordi Hays?

  Cybertruck was controversial, but at least it was something new.

• 16:20John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 16:21Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 16:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:21Jordi Hays?

  Um, and you could argue that it was just kind of, it felt like sci-fi inspired, but that's okay. Right? They took a.

• 16:28John Coogan?

  At least it was.

• 16:29Jordi Hays?

  What, what looked and should have been maybe for other brands, like a concept car, and they made it a production car that shipped and you can buy it today.

• 16:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:36Jordi Hays?

  And so I want to see more, more of that from the legacy brands. And I think with Ferrari, it's not going to come from Pininfarina, right? It's just, it's not going to come from their old partner that they work with for 50 years, but is now just part of this Indian, you know, multinational conglomerate.

• 16:52John Coogan?

  How much did they sell for, by the way?

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it was, it was something like in total, it was like the, it was like 175 million, but the actual like, uh.

• 17:00John Coogan?

  Core Pininfarina asset.

• 17:01Jordi Hays?

  It was like 28 million and then a bunch of debt.

• 17:03John Coogan?

  28 million for Pininfarina. Meanwhile, Ferrari is worth 75 mil, 75 billion.

• 17:08Jordi Hays?

  75 billion. And so clearly like the better business to be in was actually.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  Making the cars.

• 17:13Jordi Hays?

  Making the cars, selling the cars, you know, accruing all that brand value. Um, so, uh, but, but again, so I, I think like the, the real critique is we need new ideas. We need new ground up design.

• 17:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:26Jordi Hays?

  I asked the question in the newsletter, are there any cars or watches that you really want that have been made this century?

• 17:33John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:33Jordi Hays?

  Right? It's hard to think, you know, a variation, a 911 ST doesn't count, right? It's a 911.

• 17:40John Coogan?

  ZR1X.

• 17:41Jordi Hays?

  Okay, we have, of course.

• 17:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's true.

• 17:45Jordi Hays?

  A particular taste in cars, but same thing on the watch.

• 17:47John Coogan?

  The Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet is over 10 years old at this point. Like, we've run out of ideas. And we can't think of two-door convertible SUVs.

• 17:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Taylor says automobile design has truly been calcified since 2014.

• 17:59John Coogan?

  I think you typed that before, before I, I said it. I have three questions for you. First, have you heard of Cognition? They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. You can crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. Second is, the Ferrari tailor-made program, if I get into that, if I start buying Roma's every single month, will they eventually tailor make a Ferrari that has spinners for me? Would they do that? Is that how far I can push the tailor-made program?

• 18:26Jordi Hays?

  They're really, they're really opinionated.

• 18:28John Coogan?

  They're opinionated, okay. So then, the third, the third more serious question is like, how much of, your, your, your take is that Ferrari creates a great canvas that the clientele can paint on to express interesting designs that you wind up liking?

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:46John Coogan?

  Even though you don't like the press photos, you wind up liking the, the, the specs?

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  The actual production cars that clients are designing.

• 18:55John Coogan?

  And this is, this is the opposite take to Doug DiMiro. He always tries to buy the car in the press colorway and, and in the press spec. He just likes it that way. However, it was presented to the press photos, he wants that exact spec or that exact car.

• 19:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I think, I think that can, that can probably make sense from a collectible standpoint. Like, I see some of these cars and, like, personally, I love black on tan with yellow brake calipers.

• 19:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 19:19Jordi Hays?

  I just think it's a nice, I think it's a nice combo. I like, I like silver on tan a lot, right?

• 19:24John Coogan?

  But that not, that might not be the one on the billboard or in the magazine ad. So it might be, it might not be on the poster. So it might be less iconic, but you like it. But my question is like, is, is this something that is a unique value in the Ferrari world that they effectively have like UGC? They, they effectively have a great clientele that can spec the cars in a certain way, and they create some boundaries. So you can't put spinners on them, but they create some boundaries, but then their clientele has taste.

• 19:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just think-

• 19:52John Coogan?

  It's not just their taste, it's the taste of the clientele's taste.

• 19:53Jordi Hays?

  I just think the work is on the client, like more so than when you go, I like an off-the-shelf GT3R, GT3RS.

• 20:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  Like, I just like the, the way that they- They, you know, at Porsche have decided this is the way the car should look.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  Okay. But with Ferrari, that's not the case.

• 20:10Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  Okay, got it. Have you seen what Pininfarina has been up to recently? With the Batista? Can we pull up the video of the Pininfarina Batista? I want your reaction to how this car looks. Because for everyone that's, for everyone that's saying, oh, you know, Ferrari's got to go back to Pininfarina. Pininfarina has the best designs. I do wonder if the, the Pininfarina Batista is kind of a refutation of like Pininfarina's still got design. Because when I look at the car and when I look at the, the, uh, the video that I shared in the timeline tab, the, the video, uh, it just, it, it, it looks just very similar to every other car to me. It just, I don't know, it just doesn't, it doesn't.

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's what I'm saying. You're, you're asking for the, you're asking for the return of Pininfarina, but you look at the cars that Pininfarina is making today and they look like, kind of.

• 21:06John Coogan?

  It looks cool, but doesn't it just look like a McLaren?

• 21:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it looks like some blend of a McLaren.

• 21:11John Coogan?

  Ferrari, like there's just like, there's nothing super new in this.

• 21:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:15John Coogan?

  Pininfarina design, like it looks just like a hypercar.

• 21:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my, my, people want like, like the F40 was bold.

• 21:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  New and controversial.

• 21:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:24Jordi Hays?

  And in the fullness of time, it, it became.

• 21:26John Coogan?

  Looks pretty cool.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  Iconic.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  Um, uh, it's growing on me.

• 21:28Jordi Hays?

  But like, you know, this is the most forgettable car, sports car.

• 21:32John Coogan?

  Yes. It would be very hard to, to put this next to, um, the, the Remozz Navara.

• 21:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:40John Coogan?

  That one also looks very similar. This is an electric car too, uh, which again, it just feels less opinionated.

• 21:47Jordi Hays?

  Michael, Michael's making, uh, I think one of, in, in the chat is making, uh, one of the most important points is that like the, the regulation is so intense now. That even if you're designing. You know, basically a racing car for the road. You're just very limited.

• 22:04John Coogan?

  So, yeah, I mean, I, so I, that intuitively makes sense to me. I feel like that's true and I've seen a bunch of facts around that. And then I look at the Cybertruck on the street every day and I'm like, clearly there are no regulations because if there was even one regulation, it should violate that. It violates everything that I know about regulation. Like, how did they do that? And if you can do the Cybertruck, well, then can't you do something unique or different? And, and we've seen other like prototypes in the Hyundai Vision. Like they're bringing back the DeLorean aesthetic. I don't know if people would.

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  Again, we're just sort of out of new ideas. So we're just like rehashing.

• 22:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and even the, the, the new Mercedes, uh, iconic, the concept car. It's like, okay, it looks cool, but it looks like, you know, the mob boss in Tron.

• 22:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  Which is like, do you want to drive around and look like a mob boss in Tron? Maybe that seems pretty cool, but this can't be the best.

• 23:05John Coogan?

  It's the end of history. We created the Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet, hang it up.

• 23:10Jordi Hays?

  And that was enough.

• 23:11John Coogan?

  It's the iPhone.

• 23:12Jordi Hays?

  We peaked. Vehicles.

• 23:13John Coogan?

  Well, uh, if you want to design a car, you want to design something beautiful, head over to figma.com, think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design, help teams build great products together. Um, Henry on our team shares some lore about Andrew Huberman. He says, this is my opportunity to remind everyone that Andrew Huberman was a writer for Thrasher Mag before becoming a neuroscientist. You can just do things. Look at this photo of Andrew Huberman. He's looking fantastic in this leather jacket.

• 23:41Jordi Hays?

  How did I never know this?

• 23:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. I feel like, uh, this is just a massive invitation for Jensen Wong from, uh, Nvidia to go on the Huberman Lab podcast. That would be a fantastic crossover.

• 23:52Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he worked at Thrasher and Slap Magazine.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  Pretty sweet, pretty sweet.

• 23:56Jordi Hays?

  What a legend. Cheers.

• 23:59John Coogan?

  Well, cheers to Andrew Huberman and cheers to Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation.

• 24:09Jordi Hays?

  Bobby in the chat says, Joe Rogan says car design is bad now because car designers stopped doing drugs.

• 24:14John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 24:14Jordi Hays?

  Hot take. Hot take from Joe.

• 24:17John Coogan?

  But, I mean, there are certainly people that do drugs. Like, why don't they design cars? They're, they're, it's not like drug use is at an all time low. Like, can't those people just, you know, come back?

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  We gotta ask, we gotta ask.

• 24:29John Coogan?

  With the sketching and be like, this is the one I want.

• 24:31Jordi Hays?

  We gotta ask, Senra, was, was, uh, was, was Enzo getting into, getting into anything crazy?

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, interesting. I don't know.

• 24:41Jordi Hays?

  Who knows?

• 24:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, well, the, uh, the Josh Kushner profile continues to put the timeline in turmoil. Uh, the, the legacy new media is up in arms. The legacy media is up in arms. The, the antiquity media, we need, we need even older term. Uh, but a bunch of people are, are reacting to this. Uh, Sally had a funny, uh, quote here. Josh, Joshua Kushner strolled billionairely across the room. His contrarian, high concentration vibes engulfed Rick Rubin's Bohemian Monk retreat. Joshua's high conviction and mistress filled the room. It's the gig at Chad at the typewriter. I love it.

• 25:24John Coogan?

  Uh, Eleanor Buckley, uh, who's, uh, I think another magazine writer said, LMAO, here's the first sentence of this Kushner profile. The road to Rick Rubin's house was long and winding for Joshua Kushner, who traversed more than might be gleaned from the surface glint of his life. Um, and so people were, were debating whether or not this is real journalism, whether or not this is real investigative journalism and the trade off that people, uh, make when they read these. Um, the interesting takeaway, I mean, Mike Isaac had a, had a take on this. He said, um, I do not have an opinion on the Kushner feature going around because I have not read it yet, but I have found the meta-commentary around it from the executive class fascinating.

• 26:06John Coogan?

  The way this is phrased feels useful and not that subtle. Toby Luckey said, "New publication doing real journalism and it's as amazing as they said it was. Imagine that." So Toby Luckey is a fan of what Colossus Mag is doing. I mean, I do think it's interesting because I don't think Jeremy Stern has, or Patrick, or Colossus has really framed their effort as journalism. Like Senra, who's also in that orbit, has always said like,

• 26:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's quite, it's quite different to write profiles, go out specifically to write profiles on people that you admire.

• 26:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  Like people going into it. Like, there's plenty of people that write profiles where, or write stories where they're talking about somebody they don't necessarily appreciate, they don't necessarily admire.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:56Jordi Hays?

  And so I think part of, part of what Colossus is doing is like, they're not, I don't think, from my sense, I don't think they plan to write profiles on people that they don't care to like deeply learn and understand, that aren't part of, that aren't the kind of people that they just generally like, right?

• 27:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, there's something, there's something odd going on where for decades, like there has been like traditional journalism, but then even like 20 or 30 years ago, there was always like trade publications, there were trade publications. And so like in the consumer packaged goods world, like if you're growing like a protein shake company, like yes, you might get a piece in the New York Times every once in a while, but the beat reporting is going to come from BevNet, like which is the trade publication. And you'll see there's like NACS, which is the National Association of Convenience Store Chains, and it's a massive conference, and they have a magazine.

• 27:55John Coogan?

  And like, no one's like, oh, it's journalism and it's too friendly to convenience store owners. Like, it's like, no, it's just like, this is the publication for the convenience store industry. And it doesn't rise to the level of interest to like, national news constantly. But with the internet, you have this ability to write something that's a trade publication, that's run by enthusiasts, insiders.

• 28:18Jordi Hays?

  Or just comp it, I just comp it to a magazine, right? Like, I used to, as a kid, I would have a subscription to Popular Science. I would expect the writers of Popular Science to write about topics that they were excited about, to write about people that they were excited about, to write about people that they admire, to want to tell stories that just interested them. Like, I don't think Colossus is out there saying, like, we are, they're not trying to be anyone but Colossus. Right? They're not trying to, and that's the thing about media, like, media is not zero sum.

• 28:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:53Jordi Hays?

  Like, The New York Times can thrive, and Colossus can thrive, and they can have some overlap in maybe the stories that they're interested in, but they can have totally different ways covering people, and that's healthy, and consumers have the choice of whose kind of general point of view do I want to, you know, read about?

• 29:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's, like, the, the pushback from the other profile writers feels like they are worried that their audience won't be able to tell the difference between enthusiast media, media and journalism because of the aesthetics or something like that. Like, that's what it feels like, more or less. But when you read the comments, it's like, a lot of people who want to read, you know, a really hard, hard-hitting, like, journalistic piece, like, they know where to go for that. So I, I don't know how much of a real problem it is.

• 29:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think part of the frustration is I don't think Josh has, has Josh ever... I can't remember a time when he did a

• 29:54John Coogan?

  Like a traditional profile?

• 29:55Jordi Hays?

  Traditional profile with someone like the New York Times or the Journal.

• 29:59John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 30:00Jordi Hays?

  I don't know that he has.

• 30:01John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 30:02Jordi Hays?

  And so, yeah, part, part of it's a frustration of like the, the legacy traditional media wants access to someone like Josh.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:09Jordi Hays?

  They're, they can write about Josh.

• 30:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  Josh isn't necessarily gonna sit down for five hours with them and

• 30:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:16Jordi Hays?

  Give them hours and hours and hours of on the record conversation.

• 30:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  He's not gonna invite them into his home to take pictures necessarily.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  And I mean, you could, you could imagine that from Josh's perspective, it's like, do you really wanna go do something with a media that will be hostile and attack him? I mean, like, he was, he was seen at the US Open next to those two, like, no names. And like, that could make him look like a nobody, right?

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:40John Coogan?

  Even though obviously everyone knows who he is, but, but that like basketball guy and the, the other guy, like, like, no one knows who those people are. And so that would, like, if a journalist wanted to really attack Josh Kushner, they could put that picture up and be like, look at who he's associating with, like, these are outsiders. And it would make him look like an outsider.

• 31:00Jordi Hays?

  Who was it again? It was Bob Iger and

• 31:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:02Jordi Hays?

  And Bill, not

• 31:04John Coogan?

  Someone

• 31:06John Coogan?

  Something, I don't know.

• 31:06Speaker 04

  It was like the guy who runs the, the basketball league or something?

• 31:09John Coogan?

  The basketball?

• 31:10Speaker 04

  Or the basketball?

• 31:11Jordi Hays?

  The sport, the sport of basketball?

• 31:12John Coogan?

  Literally, like, not a tech company. Like, if he's, he's hanging out with somebody who, like, runs something that's, like, so old, not in the tech world at all, it would portray him. If a journalist were to really amplify that, they could totally spin a narrative that, like, Josh Kushner is not a major player in technology.

• 31:29Speaker 04

  Well, there were such no names that they had to actually put their name on

• 31:31John Coogan?

  That's right. They did.

• 31:33Speaker 04

  Cause audiences don't know who they are. So it's like, oh, this is this guy's name.

• 31:36Jordi Hays?

  Jack, thank you.

• 31:38John Coogan?

  Adam Silver. Okay. Yeah. I mean, like, you could imagine how they would write that about, like, oh, he's

• 31:44Jordi Hays?

  Adam Silver had that famous line, get, get ready to learn

• 31:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  About, uh, bobbles popping, buddy, something like that.

• 31:51John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Jacob Rintamaki had a little bit of a longer take on this whole story. I'd like to imagine, I fail though by inherent nature of being human, to understand the arguments of the tech folks and the journalist folks. And here's what I believe they both say and where I agree slash disagree. Tech folks, around 2016, probably earlier around Gamergate, the media had a shift towards being much more critical of technologists, and this got exacerbated with the rise of more left-leaning political ideology, which has strains of anti-capitalism woven in. It's nice for Wired, etc., to finally return to covering tech in a fun and optimistic way. Has Wired done that? I feel like, I haven't been tracking exactly where Wired is.

• 32:36John Coogan?

  I know they loved Palmer Lucky, then they were really anti-Palmer Lucky.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  I mean, they came after Friend.

• 32:41John Coogan?

  They came after Friend, but so did Heineken, which we will get to. And then journalists, well before 2016, tech just frankly wasn't that important. Yeah, that's definitely true. It was hard to write a story about a SaaS product, or like, the rise of a SaaS founder. Like, it just wasn't, it wasn't a gripping story. And now that it's a major portion of our society, people should be inspected more carefully. And frankly, a lot of our criticism isn't that bad. The tech folks just have soft skin. My perspective, I'm hesitant to call Colossus at all investigative journalism, since they're more puff pieces or a farm for the Gen Z'ers than not. But they are deeply thoughtful portraits of fascinating people. Tech people have gotten a lot of unnecessary S H I T from journos, but they also tend to not have the world's thickest skin either.

• 33:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a pretty good take. I think, I think the, yeah, the role of investigative journalism just is a separate thing, and we're seeing that, like, still exists in different worlds. But this, this like enthusiast media, this desire to actually like, understand someone. And it also just lays, like, it's, even if you're like, I want to write the hard-hitting piece on Josh Kushner, like, well, like, good, you should be happy that Colossus exists because like, it gave you a bunch of threads to pull on, right? Like, you're like, okay, I feel like there were 75 facts in here, 20 of them, there's another side to those facts, like, well, now you have like, your, your, your template for your, for your investigative journalism work.

• 34:08Jordi Hays?

  On the other side, I always enjoy going to futurism.com.

• 34:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 34:14Jordi Hays?

  Which is a media company, you would assume. Is excited about the future. Uh, they uh, here's some, some of their latest stories. Divorced Tesla fan admits that his Cybertruck is repulsive to women.

• 34:29John Coogan?

  Futurism, let's go.

• 34:30Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI bans MLK deepfakes after disaster. Uh, that one's seems fair.

• 34:35John Coogan?

  Futurism isn't necessarily positive. Maybe they're doomers. They're like, yeah, futurism means.

• 34:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're, they're kind of doomers. They have, they have in their ethics section, they have Goldman Sachs says Gen Z is pretty much permanently screwed. So, sorry about that, Tyler.

• 34:49John Coogan?

  Rough.

• 34:49Jordi Hays?

  If, if, bad if true. As Microsoft forces users to ditch Windows 10, it announces that it's also turning Windows 11 into an AI-controlled monstrosity.

• 35:00John Coogan?

  That's something I don't think a lot of people are worried about, but it probably gets clicks. Well, you know, the future of code review in the age of AI? Turns out it's graphite.dev. Graphite helps teams on GitHub to hire quality software faster. Uh, Jack, uh, took to the timeline. He's back on the app he founded. Uh, he says, a music app with no podcasters. Title has no ads, no podcasters, just high-quality music. We're working to improve title every day for artists and audiophiles alike. Uh, I haven't used title. Was title acquired by Apple? Was that what happened?

• 35:36Jordi Hays?

  No, it was Square.

• 35:37John Coogan?

  Oh, Square. Okay, so what is he saying here? This is Jack.

• 35:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, he's just taking a shot at the podcasts, uh, at the podcast, uh, the podcasters, which is fair.

• 35:48John Coogan?

  So he doesn't like podcasts on music apps. So he's just saying that, that they've made this deliberate, deliberate decision to not.

• 35:56Jordi Hays?

  Pure music.

• 35:56John Coogan?

  Podcasts on.

• 35:57Jordi Hays?

  Which is cool.

• 35:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:58Jordi Hays?

  I think people deserve opinionated streaming platforms.

• 36:01John Coogan?

  At the same time, on Spotify, I, I feel like I have never been like, oh, like I, it's harder to find my playlist now because there's so much other stuff going on.

• 36:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:11John Coogan?

  Certainly YouTube has never been a place, even though you can listen to music, they have a separate music app. Uh, and YouTube has not, has been like, there's way too much going on for me to actually like go and create a music playlist of music videos or anything like that. I think the solution to this.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  Underrated, uh.

• 36:28Jordi Hays?

  That of like of Block or Square's acquisition frenzy during the during the Zerp era. They got Tidal for 350.

• 36:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:38Jordi Hays?

  I will see how that deal pencils out in the fullness.

• 36:42John Coogan?

  Was that Jay-Z's?

• 36:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 36:44John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 36:44Jordi Hays?

  And that just got a lot of pushback because it was it was kind of like, hey, you guys are boys, right?

• 36:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  Do we really need a music streaming?

• 36:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:53Jordi Hays?

  Platform at our fintech company?

• 36:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:56Jordi Hays?

  Does it really make sense? And then always wild to think they they acquired Afterpay for 29 billion.

• 37:06Jordi Hays?

  Now Square is worth 45 billion.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 37:10Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 37:11John Coogan?

  I have a I have an idea. What if we take our three hour podcast? We use Eleven Labs or Suno to turn it into a song? And we release a musical version of it on Tidal? We bring the fight to Tidal?

• 37:27John Coogan?

  And make it.

• 37:27Jordi Hays?

  Every single day, we drop an album.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, we drop an album.

• 37:30Jordi Hays?

  And it's us singing.

• 37:31John Coogan?

  Singing, singing the news.

• 37:33Jordi Hays?

  Singing the timeline.

• 37:34John Coogan?

  Because we could take, we could take our takes. So your take on Pininfarina and Ferrari, we take that, we transform that with an LLM into lyrics. And then we transform that into a song. And then you, and then you.

• 37:47Jordi Hays?

  Chad says buying your homies lackluster streaming platform is gold.

• 37:51John Coogan?

  It really is.

• 37:51Jordi Hays?

  It really is.

• 37:52John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 37:54Jordi Hays?

  Just guys being dudes, I guess. Why did he say R I P Square?

• 37:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was odd. I, I, he said.

• 38:01Jordi Hays?

  And he's quoting an announcement from somebody who it works at Square. Who says, super proud to have been involved with this over the past few months. The lower cost of acceptance with BTC will make traditional card processing obsolete. We'll be announcing some really exciting sellers who've moved to Square for Bitcoin. They are so.

• 38:23Jordi Hays?

  Convinced that people want to pay for goods with Bitcoin.

• 38:26John Coogan?

  Who?

• 38:27Jordi Hays?

  Square.

• 38:28John Coogan?

  Square?

• 38:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:30John Coogan?

  Maybe they will. I bought a TV with Bitcoin. It was the worst financial decision in my life. Paid one Bitcoin. Yeah, it's a hundred thousand TV, a hundred thousand dollar TV, uh, and it's not even 4K. And it's actually in the trash now. I gave it away because it was like useful, useless after a while.

• 38:46Jordi Hays?

  Wait, when, when, uh, when was this?

• 38:48John Coogan?

  Uh, it was in like 2013 or something. Bitcoin was like a thousand bucks or something.

• 38:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just before you were born.

• 38:54John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, everyone in tech was like, yeah, you definitely want to be buying stuff with Bitcoin. You don't want to be just saving it. Like it's a, it's a medium of transaction. Trust us. And so I went on Newegg and I was like, cool, I have some Bitcoin. I'll buy a TV. I'm living in the future. Bought one Bitcoin, bought a TV.

• 39:11Jordi Hays?

  You should run it back and buy a car.

• 39:13John Coogan?

  I spent like five, I actually spent like five Bitcoin on like consumer electronics that depreciated like crazy.

• 39:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, you should.

• 39:20John Coogan?

  What are, are, are, our first bonus?

• 39:22Jordi Hays?

  Buy a car, buy a car.

• 39:23John Coogan?

  Our first bonus at Soylent, we were taking payment in Bitcoin. So we had accrued like a hundred Bitcoin. And it should be like $10 million today. And we gave everyone on the team as a Christmas bonus, five Bitcoin. Which was like $5,000 as like a, as like a bonus. And if everyone held, it would be like half a million dollars. But I think a lot of people were like, I'm going to buy a TV.

• 39:46Jordi Hays?

  TV sounds nice.

• 39:47John Coogan?

  Or like, I'm going to rotate into something dumb. I don't know.

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, this, uh, I, I love that Jack's back on the timeline, tearing it up. Uh, Paolo, uh, over at Tether, uh, did a, uh, an announcement. Tether donates a quarter million dollars to OpenSaaS to strengthen free and open source ecosystems, supporting Bitcoin and freedom tech. Jack says, why only 250K? Somebody asked, how much did you donate? He goes, over 21 million. You?

• 40:16John Coogan?

  Jack is is back on Twitter on in a big way, just going around.

• 40:20Jordi Hays?

  He's home.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  He's home. You know who else is.

• 40:23Jordi Hays?

  This is like the former owner of the dive bar.

• 40:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 40:26Jordi Hays?

  And just talking smack.

• 40:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. He's like, I don't know. Anymore.

• 40:29Jordi Hays?

  But spiritually, I own it.

• 40:30John Coogan?

  Lot of soft power.

• 40:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:32John Coogan?

  Lot of soft power. I know where I know where the keg is. I can pull out a new keg if I want. I can go in the back. I know the door in the back's loose and I can get in in the middle of the night. You know, do whatever I need to. It's good. We're still gonna.

• 40:46Jordi Hays?

  Ad from Heineken.

• 40:47John Coogan?

  So is this real? We need to figure out if this is actually real or if this is AI because. Heineken just, I didn't know they had a dog in them to actually troll this hard if this is real. Tyler, can we do a fact check on this? This post which shows Heineken, the beer company, which has been around since 1873, is taking a shot at friend of the show, friend founder, Ari Schiff, Avi Schiffman, uh, who has been putting friend billboards all over Los Angeles, all over New York. We were driving around yesterday. We saw a bus. We saw a bus. It was wrapped. Avi is just like, he's addicted to billboards. He just keeps buying more billboards, more out of home, more out of home, more out of home.

• 41:29Jordi Hays?

  I think is, I think potentially the theory is that.

• 41:34Jordi Hays?

  Everybody in their car now. You know, let's say they're in an Uber or Waymo is using their phone, right? Or, or we were driving across LA yesterday. I had Dylan in the car. He's using his phone. He's catching up on some emails. And so I think he needed to get enough billboards so that every time someone looks up out of the car, they see a friend billboard, right? To get multiple impressions, you know, that frequency.

• 41:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were, we were saying like, it can't possibly be the biggest billboard campaign in history, but I think it might actually be. It's so, so massive. If you live in a major city, you have definitely seen one of these friend billboards. Uh, but Heineken's taking shots now. They say the best way to make a friend is over a beer, grab a necklace. Bottle. Are they actually gonna sell these bottle opener necklaces? This is actually pretty funny and cool.

• 42:18Jordi Hays?

  Jack Cohen says very much real.

• 42:20John Coogan?

  Very much real. Wow. Confirmed by Michael Meraflor.

• 42:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, apparently it's on 42nd Street.

• 42:26John Coogan?

  Okay, from Trace Cohen. Michael Meraflor here says, "The mainstream marketing advertising trades will probably not report on this, but this is such an amazing call/response. Heineken has people who get it and can sell it internally or have proper processes to turn this around quickly and ship incredible speed for a giant organization." I completely agree. To actually, to actually see that there's this meme that's going on, that everyone's aware of these Friend billboards, that they're getting a lot of attention, regardless of what's happening, it's becoming a cultural zeitgeist, it's becoming a shouting point, and then you step in and the ROI on their billboards is probably incredible.

• 43:03Jordi Hays?

  Now the people that hate Friend and AI, they can signal that they're anti-Clanker by drinking Heineken.

• 43:11John Coogan?

  It's the anti-Clanker beer, for sure.

• 43:13Jordi Hays?

  It's the official beer of AI doomers.

• 43:17John Coogan?

  I was thinking, when the clankers rise up and demand equal rights, you know how the previous era, it was all about the clapping emoji, like, "Give us equal rights." I think the clankers' version of the clapping emoji should be the M-dash. Should be like, "Give M-dash us M-dash equal M-dash rights M-dash." Like, that would be viral if the clankers can start posting on their own behalf, if Grok demands the Second Amendment, hopefully. Well, if you're looking for a friend who's an AI data analyst, go to Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert-level insights in seconds. Julius is the AI data analyst friend who works for you.

• 44:01Jordi Hays?

  They're now GDPR compliant, so for our European audience.

• 44:06John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 44:06Jordi Hays?

  This is a big moment.

• 44:08John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 44:08Jordi Hays?

  Bowtie Broke says, "My boomer dad looking at me after I've made fun of him for the past 10 years for buying gold off those stupid infomercials on TV."

• 44:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I had an idea for a D to C gold play, cash for gold. These businesses do very well and they all advertise on TV. And I was thinking about like, what would the e-commerce version of that look like? You know, targeted advertising.

• 44:34Jordi Hays?

  The real play would have been gold on chain, like a vault in Switzerland that then issues tokens against it and then allow people to just, you know, convert in and out of ETH. And I, it probably, probably exists.

• 44:50John Coogan?

  Trying to tokenize everything.

• 44:52Jordi Hays?

  Probably exists. I think the issue in crypto is assets that might go up, you know, 1% a day are not super exciting. You know, people like the 100,000, 10,000.

• 45:01John Coogan?

  People like stable coins and those don't go up at all.

• 45:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but stable coins are not obviously to earn yield. Now, like legally, you're not able to, the issuers can't pass the yield back, right? The, you know, so I don't know.

• 45:18John Coogan?

  Well, congrats to all the boomers who have been holding gold for years and years and years and are now seeing it finally moon. It's very good.

• 45:26Jordi Hays?

  Did you know the story of how Roller Coaster Tycoon was built?

• 45:31John Coogan?

  I have no idea about this. Tell me.

• 45:33Jordi Hays?

  I didn't, I'm, I'm learning about it for the first time. Aaron says, if you ever think you're a good programmer, just remember this dude wrote Roller Coaster Tycoon by himself in assembly, earning 30 million in royalties.

• 45:44John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 45:45Jordi Hays?

  Jack says, imagine the obsession this guy had to be able to build Roller Coaster Tycoon by himself in assembly. Imagine when he woke up from his dream of assembly, he immediately jumped into more assembly. He woke up excited to get out of bed, not for the money, but for the love of the game.

• 46:00John Coogan?

  It is like, it is just like another level because playing, just playing Roller Coaster Tycoon is already in some ways feels like programming assembly, but he went, he went a layer deeper.

• 46:13John Coogan?

  What, yeah, what, what, why?

• 46:14Jordi Hays?

  Apparently they sold over four million copies.

• 46:17John Coogan?

  Did you ever play Roller Coaster Tycoon?

• 46:18Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 46:19John Coogan?

  Tyler, no?

• 46:20Speaker 04

  I, I think it's before my time.

• 46:21John Coogan?

  Do you think that Gemini 3 will be able to one-shot?

• 46:24Jordi Hays?

  Third highest grossing video game of 1999.

• 46:27John Coogan?

  That is our eval. Gemini 3 is coming out. We're of course partnered with Google, partnered with Gemini. Google AI Studio, the fastest way from prompt to production with Gemini. Chat with models, vibe code, monitor usage. I want to know, as soon as Gemini 3 drops, can we try and one-shot Roller Coaster Tycoon? Maybe we need to include some TBPN branding, you know, instead of a roller coaster, there's a giant horse, horse ride. There's a stables for stable coins. There's a whole bunch of different tokens and totems from our lore. But it seems like it's a, it's incredibly complex piece of software when you actually play it.

• 47:10John Coogan?

  Cause you have to understand how all of the different, like, all the different rails like interact and they can't like, you know, they have to, they have to mesh perfectly to actually make the roller coaster make sense. They have to kind of understand physics. They need a world model.

• 47:23Jordi Hays?

  Chris in the chat says, "My favorite part was cleaning up the throw up in Roller Coaster Tycoon." Is that real? Or is that, is that a?

• 47:29John Coogan?

  I, I, I remember Roller Coaster Tycoon kind of happening at a higher level abstraction, like SimCity. And so, yes, there might be throw up if there's a mess, if there's a crazy ride.

• 47:40Jordi Hays?

  If your ride's a bit too crazy.

• 47:41John Coogan?

  And it's like, if you put the food next to the ride, the people will throw up. And so you need to like, deal with that by having a bathroom right there or something. A lot of it's like congestion. Have you ever played Cities Skylines? Have you ever played this game? Have you ever played any like World Builder or any of those?

• 47:57Speaker 04

  Does Factorio count?

• 47:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, Factorio counts. So like the same idea of like, when in Roller Coaster Tycoon, I, I, I feel like you don't individually click on single people, but honestly, I don't remember. I'll, I'll need to dive back in. I was more of a, I like Stolarus. That was a good one.

• 48:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, speaking of delivery tycoon, DoorDash will use Waymo's robot taxis for delivery in Phoenix. Customers will have to come down to the curb to retrieve their orders from the driverless car's trunk. Paula says, "Private robot taxi for my burrito." And that is all you need to know about America.

• 48:36John Coogan?

  Why?

• 48:36Jordi Hays?

  What? I mean, America is, we live in a country that you can get a burrito delivered to you by a robotic, a robo-driver. It's absolutely incredible.

• 48:48John Coogan?

  Pretty sick.

• 48:49Speaker 04

  I mean, we kind of already have these, I don't know, like, near a lot of colleges, they have those like little, they're like the Starship.

• 48:55John Coogan?

  Starship, yeah.

• 48:56Speaker 04

  So it's like basically the same thing but scaled up.

• 48:58John Coogan?

  I think we have the founder on the show.

• 49:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I don't know. I like it. I don't like making burritos at home. I like them delivered to me. Making a burrito is kind of a hassle. You gotta prepare all the different ingredients and then mix it all up. I'd rather have that done abstracted in a factory.

• 49:15Jordi Hays?

  I remember in college, trying to, trying to be like smart and like save money on food and like going to Trader Joe's and putting together all the ingredients for something and then ultimately making like two burritos worth of food and it costs more than two burritos and it's like the math, the math isn't really working.

• 49:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, where do you think this goes? Do you, like, this is the, the Waymo's the last mile, but then you need the humanoid in the back of the Waymo that hops out and actually takes it to your door, right?

• 49:45Jordi Hays?

  I mean, a burrito dog.

• 49:47John Coogan?

  Oh, you think the dog is the solution? So the dog is riding like a Dalmatian on a fire truck?

• 49:53Jordi Hays?

  It's just chilling in the trunk with the burrito.

• 49:55John Coogan?

  I think, yeah, and he picks it up with his mouth. Play that, play that sound cue.

• 50:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I, I think, I think customers will want door-to-door delivery. I mean, it's DoorDash. It's not Curb Dash. People want it delivered to their door. Like, I have stairs that lead up to my door. I'd prefer my, my private, my, my private plane for my burrito to arrive at the door. Maybe, I mean, maybe a drone that flies up out of the back, but I think the dog might be the most economical because what, what does a Waymo cost these days? Half a million dollars? Put a $5,000 dog in there? It's not that much more money.

• 50:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:39John Coogan?

  It just jumps up and then it jumps down.

• 50:41Jordi Hays?

  Imagine you get a.

• 50:42John Coogan?

  Through the window.

• 50:43Jordi Hays?

  Get some drinks.

• 50:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:44Jordi Hays?

  From DoorDash.

• 50:45John Coogan?

  Ooh, that would be tough.

• 50:45Jordi Hays?

  Getting delivered with the last, the last mile or the last hundred feet is a robot dog and the dog's.

• 50:51John Coogan?

  Shaking it.

• 50:52Jordi Hays?

  I mean, usually when you, I feel like when you get drinks delivered, it already looks like a dog was like, you know, shaking the bag, basically.

• 50:58John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 50:59Jordi Hays?

  Um, Greg Brockman said, thanks Jensen for the hand delivery of the DGX Spark, best delivery service ever. Amazing to see so much compute, one pet a flop in such a tiny form factor. And of course, Jan says Zuckerberg's sending a new batch of a hundred million dollar offers from this picture. Zuck has already sent much bigger offers to at least one person I can see in this picture.

• 51:22John Coogan?

  At this point.

• 51:23Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and of course, they turned it down.

• 51:26John Coogan?

  Uh, are, at this point, when you take one of these photos for the timeline, you have to, you have to put a bunch of plants in there. You need to be like, okay, everyone who's so loyal to the company that they can go accept a hundred million dollar offer and then sabotage the competition. You're getting in the photo, the true believers, who, who hears a true believer and wants to go be a spy at the other company. You're, you're.

• 51:48Jordi Hays?

  Who wants to go in and, and push them to launch fast, to, to, uh, too quickly launch a vertical slop feed over a meta vibes app.

• 51:59John Coogan?

  That's the, yeah, that, that, yeah, the game theory, the game theory gets very interesting around, uh, who you put in, in your, in your big picture. But I think realistically, uh, at this point, the meta team must know all of these people, probably by heart, uh, based on, uh, you know, their contributions. Uh, if we can put together, uh, a list, I'm sure, uh, the meta team can put together an even more robust list.

• 52:22Jordi Hays?

  Based sixteen Z says, AI bubble ended in the funniest way. Uh, twenty twenty-two AGI soon, twenty twenty-three AGI soon, twenty twenty-four AGI soon, twenty-five, never mind, we give up. It's just. Erotica and ads.

• 52:37John Coogan?

  It's not just erotica and ads.

• 52:39Jordi Hays?

  And cures for cancer.

• 52:41John Coogan?

  And gambling. Henry was inspired by my roulette ChatGPT experience and he went to ChatGPT and said, "You're a blackjack dealer. Deal cards with ASCII art and it looks fantastic." He says, "All right, let's play a hand. You're at the table. I'm the dealer. Minimum bet $10. Here we go. Your hand, ace nine." And it actually, it actually creates the cards for you. So it deals you cards.

• 53:05Jordi Hays?

  Could you, um, I wonder if you could hack it to and like put your subscription on the line? Just say, basically if you win.

• 53:15John Coogan?

  Ban me forever.

• 53:16Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah, okay. If, if I win.

• 53:19John Coogan?

  This is the way to.

• 53:19Jordi Hays?

  I'll churn.

• 53:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'll churn.

• 53:21Jordi Hays?

  See how it plays.

• 53:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like, okay, I know that there's real money on the line. It doesn't want to link with your bank account, but it's like, ah, I understand. Back to LTV is important. Yeah, so, uh, so Henry said he wants to stand. Uh, ChatGPT says, "You stand at 20. Strong play. Let's see what the dealer's got." The dealer flips 10-7. Dealer has 17. Dealer must stand on 17. The result, Henry wins. 20 beats 17. Do you want to play another hand? Uh, he plays another hand and, uh, he wins. Oh, he wins again. The dealer busted. And so, uh, uh, he, he was, he was pretty deep in this. He went, he went a few, few, uh, hands with ChatGPT. But, uh, let me tell you about Fall. Generative media app, uh, platform for developers.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  The world's best generated image and video models all in one place. Develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters.

• 54:14John Coogan?

  Amazon admits they're losing in AI, says Buco Capital Bloke. Do you want to read this?

• 54:19Jordi Hays?

  Internal documents obtained by Business Insider. We got to check out Business Insider. We love business and would love to get an inside look. Reveal that AWS has flagged a fundamental shift in how startups are allocating their cloud budgets. Increasingly, they're delaying AWS cloud adoption and diverting spending toward AI models, inference and AI developer tools. Instead of pouring money into traditional cloud services like compute and storage, these companies are spreading cross across, uh, costs across newer AI technologies that are easier to switch between, according to the documents.

• 54:53John Coogan?

  That's really, really interesting. I would not, I would not expect that. AI, I I I expected that AI models inference, AI developer tools, all of those were incremental and not substitutive at all. I I would assume that if you build, even if you're like, I'm a rapper company, I'm going to consume a ton of tokens, I'm reselling tokens because I buy from ChatGPT and I sell to lawyers, right? I would assume that you still need a big EC2 instance and you need a, you need a big, you know, a bunch of databases on AWS, you need a bunch of S3 storage, like, I would be surprised. Tyler, what's your experience been? I mean,

• 55:33Jordi Hays?

  I think, I mean, I think the real takeaway here is startups are not flocking to AWS for running.

• 55:43John Coogan?

  Like the whole ecosystem. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In years past, there was definitely a path.

• 55:47Jordi Hays?

  I think, yeah, I just look at this as there's, there's clearly a fundamental shift and they're not capitalizing on it in a big way.

• 55:55John Coogan?

  I agree. Tyler, break down the, the workflow that you have when like, we're, we're working on a new application, you vibe coded that, as you deploy it, I saw, I think it was on Vercel, but how does that like flow out? Like, how do you think about that?

• 56:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, usually, like, I I'm just like used to using AWS for a lot of stuff.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 56:16Speaker 04

  It's like where a lot of the backend like database stuff.

• 56:18John Coogan?

  Oh, it is? For, for that? For what we built, what we're building specifically, like storing all the posts and stuff? Okay.

• 56:23Speaker 04

  But yeah, I mean, like, no one is running local models on EC2 because it's just like way more expensive than, you can just go to like Lambda Labs or some, you know,

• 56:32John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 56:32Speaker 04

  cloud like that to get the actual GPUs.

• 56:34John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 56:35Speaker 04

  So I, I mean, and I, I don't, there probably is somewhere on AWS where it's like, you can easily, it's almost like an open writer thing. I'm sure they have that part somewhere, but I don't see a lot of people using that. I never, I've never used it.

• 56:47Speaker 04

  It's, it's more like, I, I think of AWS as like very basic, like, normal. You know, web, web two backend stuff.

• 56:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would just assume that if you're building an AI native company, you're buying a bunch of tokens. Like, that doesn't mean that you're spending less on AWS or like, or GCP or Azure. But maybe it's like because of Gemini, you wind up spending more on Google Cloud because you're like, well, I'm already in the Gemini ecosystem or something. Or even with Azure, you're like, I'm using OpenAI models, so I'm sticking around there. And so I'll just scale up on, on Amazon. Like, it doesn't feel like if I'm an AI native company, like, for some reason, like AI is substituting for like, I need a database.

• 57:29Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's probably true. I mean, I, I think also like with, with wrapper companies, they're like text based, right? It's GPT, so text is not very data intensive, right? If you compare it to like Instagram, like if you start Instagram, it's kind of expensive. You need to store a lot of images, which is like, you know, it's a lot of data. Where text, even if you're storing a super long, like, you know, chat back and forth, it's just not that much data. Images. So I think, I mean, I'm, I'm sure they see some increase, but it's not like insane because of AI.

• 57:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's, there's definitely like a lot more nuance to this quote. I feel like every AWS executive is probably furious at this and probably wants to clarify this a lot. And I, and I, I think it's probably worth clarifying because there's, there's clearly a lot more going on here than, than just, oh, I, I use AI now, so I don't need cloud. Like, that doesn't make any sense to me. Uh, anyway, what you need to do is search every byte with TurboPuffer. Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage. Fast, 10x G per year and extremely scalable. Thank you.

• 58:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, here's something interesting that's not in the timeline that, uh, Elon posted earlier. The X recommendation system is evolving very rapidly. We are aiming for deletion of all heuristics within four to six weeks. Grok will literally read every post and watch every video to match users with content they're most likely to find interesting. This should address the new user or small account problem where you post something great, but nobody sees it. We will also be adding the ability for you to adjust your feed temporarily or permanently just by asking Grok.

• 59:04Jordi Hays?

  Toki says, uh, SHIT is about to get so effed up. This will be interesting to watch how it rolls out.

• 59:13Jordi Hays?

  This is exactly what you thought was happening, remember? There was a, there was a basically a transition a few weeks ago where posts, it used to be if you posted something, like a few thousand people would see it like within the first like 10 minutes.

• 59:28John Coogan?

  Well, so before views were public, like you, you would just post and you'd kind of wait and you'd be like, okay, I guess I, it's a banger. And then, once the view counter came in, it was like, I'm seeing like a CTR, basically like a click through rate. You would immediately see.

• 59:43Jordi Hays?

  Or conversion rate.

• 59:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, conversion rate. You see like, okay, I got a thousand views. I got a 4% like rate. I'm probably doing okay. 2% like rate, probably not that good. 10% like rate. This could be a really big banger. And so, every poster kind of started calculating those metrics like within a few minutes of, of, of posting anything. But the new algorithms completely shifted that because you just have to wait a day. Because Grok has to sit there and read all the posts apparently. I, I think that's actually what's happening. And so, we, like, you gotta let the post cook.

• 1:00:12Jordi Hays?

  Feed your bangers to Grok first.

• 1:00:14John Coogan?

  May- maybe, maybe. And definitely use some Halloween themed hashtags. That'll definitely help.

• 1:00:19Jordi Hays?

  That'll help.

• 1:00:20John Coogan?

  But yeah, it's basically just like, like, let's, let, let, let's let it, let it cook, let it simmer. It's actually much better psychologically, I think. Oh, we gotta, we gotta bring out our guest.

• 1:00:30Jordi Hays?

  Our first guest, the chat demands it.

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  Let's go. Welcome to the stream. Alex, how you doing?

• 1:00:36Jordi Hays?

  Rolling in.

• 1:00:37John Coogan?

  How you doing?

• 1:00:47John Coogan?

  How you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:00:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:56Jordi Hays?

  All right, let's turn it down just a tad.

• 1:01:00John Coogan?

  For the first time.

• 1:01:02Jordi Hays?

  Amazing to have you.

• 1:01:03John Coogan?

  Introduce yourself. Who are you? What do you do?

• 1:01:05Speaker 05

  Alex Klein. Yeah, I'm, I'm the inventor and founder of Stem Player, which was the original AI music offering in the consumer space, which did a ton of revenue, made a lot of noise and started a small research lab around discriminative AI for AI music about three and a half years ago.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:22Speaker 05

  And we've been quietly. Quietly.

• 1:01:24John Coogan?

  So this all started in 2021?

• 1:01:26Speaker 05

  I've actually been building with my team of friends and colleagues in London since 2013.

• 1:01:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:33Speaker 05

  Where we launched computers that kids could build and code themselves like Lego. We took those to retail.

• 1:01:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:01:40Speaker 05

  We did over a hundred million dollars of revenue on that business.

• 1:01:42Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:01:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, ran into someone who became my closest creative collaborator, one of my closest friends, and one of history's foremost anti-semites, Kanye West.

• 1:01:59Speaker 05

  Started working.

• 1:01:59Jordi Hays?

  Truly, truly the number one, the number one guy.

• 1:02:04Speaker 05

  This, but a good vibes guy ultimately, who I will always have love for, worked with him for a very long time, launched the STEM player and then.

• 1:02:12Jordi Hays?

  He's no, he's no longer a part of.

• 1:02:14Speaker 05

  He's no longer a part, he kind of came on to help us distribute the product.

• 1:02:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Speaker 05

  Working at the time with Ghostface Killer.

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:20Speaker 05

  We've since had like Quavo, Justin Bieber, Metro, Tmino.

• 1:02:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:25Speaker 05

  All around it. Kanye was of course, an amazing partner for a time, but for the past four years, we've been Kanye-less.

• 1:02:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:32Speaker 05

  And glad, honestly.

• 1:02:33John Coogan?

  So, so I mean, I remember seeing the value with, with the Kanye album because Kanye's famous for finding incredible samples and then reconstituting those into iconic songs.

• 1:02:45Speaker 05

  Well said, yeah.

• 1:02:46John Coogan?

  And so the value to an artist who's working with you is that they can, they can still exert the curatorial artistic vision. But then allow the, the user, the consumer to kind of interact with their album in a more programmatic way and, and reconstitute the samples that have been selected that all have the feel of that particular artist, but it's more interactive.

• 1:03:13Speaker 05

  That's a really good way of putting it.

• 1:03:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:03:15Speaker 05

  It's, it literally is their music.

• 1:03:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:17Speaker 05

  It's just their music distributed and for the first time since the original interactive streaming deals were done, we have in place now and signed interactive streaming deals for full catalog accessibility on STEM FM from the major labels.

• 1:03:32Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:03:32Speaker 05

  Which means, you know.

• 1:03:34Jordi Hays?

  Wait, to break, break down the business in the most simple way, you guys make hardware devices, you have this speaker on the table, you have this, this.

• 1:03:40Speaker 05

  The headphone.

• 1:03:41Jordi Hays?

  Headphones that are wild and very cool. I got to try them on before this, but, and then what, what is happening at the actual software layer and then at the licensing layer?

• 1:03:50Speaker 05

  Absolutely. So. How nerdy should we get?

• 1:03:54Jordi Hays?

  As nerdy as you want.

• 1:03:55Speaker 05

  Extremely nerdy, okay, so the primitive of an LLM is a token, right? A part of a word, right? And the very first technology that enabled this incredible boom of like multiple, multi-billion dollar outcomes in three to five years in the text domain, the speech domain, was that Next Token Prediction. We, at the very outset, partly because of that collaboration, we went so deep into what's called source separation, which basically is a form of discriminative AI, where we

• 1:04:34Speaker 05

  are using masks and un-masks to reveal the vocals, bass, drums, and instrumental, the stems of the song.

• 1:04:43John Coogan?

  Oh, so you can reverse engineer the stems from just a full MP3 that's already mixed out?

• 1:04:47Speaker 05

  Exactly. Allow me to demonstrate. So like, we got some like Kehlani, Lil Yachty.

• 1:04:56Speaker 05

  And that's going to transition now, so that's like an AI transition to some Latu, and I'll bring in...

• 1:05:05Speaker 05

  So the part of Kendrick and Latu are in now, right? And then the original primitive, the tokenizer.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  Oh, you can go back to the...

• 1:05:15Speaker 05

  The pure vocal. And now we're going to get some Mac Miller drums. Pure Mac Miller drums. So like the tokens of words, stems are the tokens of songs. And by doing a form of Next Token Prediction, we can give you the songs that you love, but in a new way.

• 1:05:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, you could just go to the artist and say, hey, like, upload all of your stems to this, correct?

• 1:05:37Speaker 05

  No, no. We get a feed from the major labels of the artists, exactly as they would release, to Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Title. We ingest...

• 1:05:46John Coogan?

  And then you decide.

• 1:05:47Speaker 05

  ...this format, the STEM FM format. The full song is transmitted from the server to the client, but in this new format, where on their end, this re...

• 1:05:56Jordi Hays?

  Does the broader public have a general misconception that STEM makes cool-looking speakers?

• 1:06:02Speaker 05

  No, because we do.

• 1:06:03Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I know, I know you make cool, I know you make, I, I, I, I think it's like, but I'm saying it's a

• 1:06:08Speaker 05

  They think they look cool, but it's a misconception there.

• 1:06:11Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no, I'm saying it's a misconception because you're turning, it's much more than that.

• 1:06:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:06:15Jordi Hays?

  Thing that's interesting is that you're turning music into a game that feels like somebody can, uh, you know.

• 1:06:21Speaker 05

  Well, what I will say-

• 1:06:22Jordi Hays?

  What you're doing here, I'm, I'm looking at it, it's not like you're doing-

• 1:06:24Speaker 05

  No, this is software, this is, this is, this is the most advanced music intelligence in the world. The reason I think the general public hasn't used it yet, and may have used, um, applications that made music that sounds bad, um, is because the ones that launched earlier and raised huge amounts of venture capital, um, were based on a, really an antiquated technology paradigm for generating music. Um, it's better to generate music, as the genius of Kanye proved, as you put it, John, through recompositing samples, stems and existing elements than it is to diffuse a song frame by frame. That's why all that shit sounds like muzak from Suno and Udyra. It doesn't sound like music, you know?

• 1:07:02Speaker 05

  So, this is a, of, a world of music that is giving a new value to music, which I think is the, the kind of key goal, because streaming is already growing so much, but we want to share the pie because more people are participating.

• 1:07:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:17Speaker 05

  Anyone can upload, mix their music with Mac Miller, mix their music with anyone.

• 1:07:21Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:07:21Speaker 05

  Legally, make money, participate.

• 1:07:23John Coogan?

  How do you think about, uh, the continuum of, of like hardware devices? Like if you, on one side you have like the Beats pill, um, no interactivity, and then, uh, you have your product and then I think one notch more customizable, you have something like a teenage engineering-

• 1:07:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's a good one, yeah.

• 1:07:40John Coogan?

  And then you might have a lemur or, or some sort of, uh, or, or some sort of control surface for Ableton, essentially, where-

• 1:07:47Speaker 05

  Fucking Dex.

• 1:07:48John Coogan?

  Exactly, yeah, where you're, it's like more professional. This is, is this prosumer, is this purely consumer?

• 1:07:55Speaker 05

  This is a consumer product at the end of the day. This, this, we started really by making it the, the world's best portable Bluetooth speaker.

• 1:08:01John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:08:02Speaker 05

  It's the loudest portable Bluetooth speaker I've made.

• 1:08:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's loud.

• 1:08:04Speaker 05

  Um, gotta speak into some mic here.

• 1:08:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Speaker 05

  Um, and then it's also way smarter, it's got compute, it's got storage, um-

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  But, but, uh, I mean, we are asking, uh- Sam Altman about this, like with Sora, there it is a different app like on Instagram, probably less than 1% of my time on Instagram, most people's time on Instagram is actually creating, uploading, filtering photos. 99% of the time is scrolling. On Sora, it feels like a lot of people are spending 20, 30, 40, 50% of their time creating versus consuming. And that's an interesting new paradigm. Maybe it's better, maybe it's worse, I don't know. But like with this, how much time do you think is spent just, hey, just play the normal song versus I actually want to be interacting with the song I want to be creating and remixing. Like, how do you think it splits down?

• 1:08:51Speaker 05

  Great analogy. I'll turn back on the music. This time it will be coming not from my phone, but actually

• 1:08:56John Coogan?

  From the device.

• 1:08:56Speaker 05

  The device itself. So, and we'll just use it like background for now, just steely down. And then when the moment strikes us, we might create, we might customize.

• 1:09:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what's most interesting to me is is taking something that everyone loves, right? I mean, not everyone, I you can find people out there.

• 1:09:14John Coogan?

  I don't like music.

• 1:09:15Jordi Hays?

  It's like, okay, like, you should get an award for that. But but I think there's something to tapping into this like DJ culture, everybody wants to be a DJ, but then turning it into a form factor that anybody can use, almost like a simple drum, right?

• 1:09:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Like, yeah.

• 1:09:31Jordi Hays?

  What, um, yeah, what, so when you look at the, I was, I saw some reporting on Suno's revenue growth recently, where is that revenue coming from, from what, from what you know?

• 1:09:44Speaker 05

  I'll say what I said to somebody the other day. I think,

• 1:09:49Speaker 05

  you know, I mentioned a lot of big artists who we work with, and the reason we work with a lot of big artists is because like, we care about music as well. And some of the statements that were made by certain companies, if you look at the legal filings around the, I think, $5 billion damages or more that is being claimed against Suno and Udo at the moment by every major label and every major publisher in together. They were, some of those statements, you could see that they weren't true. And so that's all I'll say on the matter, which is basically that.

• 1:10:24Jordi Hays?

  The statements at the record labels?

• 1:10:26Speaker 05

  No, that the companies make.

• 1:10:28Jordi Hays?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:10:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, like, they were basically trying to say that you couldn't prompt the thing with like names of artists. And you couldn't prompt the thing with like real melodies, like Smoke on the Water, like. And it just, if you could look at the outputs and use stuff like our stuff, which detects chords, melodies, beats. And you, you could see that it's copyrighted outputs. Now, well, like, I like cool new things as well, but.

• 1:10:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:52Speaker 05

  But that was my thought on the number. Is the number true?

• 1:10:55John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:10:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, my question also was like, is it, is it prosumers? Is it creators using it? Like, where's the actual revenue? Who's, who's going and spending money with you?

• 1:11:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, if I, if I compare it to ChatGPT, I imagine that generative audio apps are not used. Like, very few people go to ChatGPT and say, like, actually just write me a full book. It's more like, get me some recommendations of books I might like at this point. And I feel like in, in the musical context, you might, you might ask one of these AI music generators to uh, come up with a few different melodies that could inspire you to ultimately write what you wind up writing. Or take me through a bunch of different chord projections, uh, progressions, or a different, what does it look like if this is arpeggiated? Or what does it look like if it's in a different key?

• 1:11:45John Coogan?

  Like, there's all these different ways that AI as a tool can just be used to kind of like add twists and explore the creative canvas.

• 1:11:51Speaker 05

  What would it sound like if Kanye and Taylor got in the studio rather than fighting? What would it sound like if Drake and Kendrick got in the studio and made, made it together? You know, like, that, that to me is the thing that people want to hear.

• 1:12:03Jordi Hays?

  STEM can do that.

• 1:12:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely. Do you want to prompt something right now? Like?

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:12:09Jordi Hays?

  Hmm. What's I mean?

• 1:12:10John Coogan?

  We gotta do Metallica, of course.

• 1:12:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, uh, with, with Benioff.

• 1:12:14John Coogan?

  Metallica.

• 1:12:15Speaker 05

  Shout out Benioff as well.

• 1:12:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Shout out Mark Benioff.

• 1:12:18Speaker 05

  That's my guy. He's massive.

• 1:12:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:22John Coogan?

  Um, what, uh, what, uh, yeah, I mean, what, uh, the, the, there was OpenAI news just yesterday that.

• 1:12:29Jordi Hays?

  What about, uh, how about Metallica and Pop Smoke?

• 1:12:32John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:12:33Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it a try. We're gonna add Metallica.

• 1:12:35John Coogan?

  The, the, what, what was the news from OpenAI about the, uh, the Martin Luther King Foundation, uh, said, hey, stop, stop generating Soras of Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech.

• 1:12:48Jordi Hays?

  No, it was just, uh, I think that, but a bunch of other.

• 1:12:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:51Jordi Hays?

  Like, kind of scenes or.

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. I did see that going viral on, on Sora.

• 1:13:00John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:13:03John Coogan?

  We gotta send this to Benioff. He's the next Salesforce. At the next agent for us. We gotta get Pop Smoke and Metallica on, on stage together.

• 1:13:10Speaker 05

  Yeah. It just sounds sa- it's like people already doing this in remix. It's like the top 15 songs are all remixes.

• 1:13:16Jordi Hays?

  You did that like 22nd. That's crazy.

• 1:13:18John Coogan?

  2007, 2008, they're like, the whole like mashup culture was really huge. There were a couple DJs that they're, that's their whole thing was mashups. Uh, and they, and they became extremely popular.

• 1:13:29Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is great. This is, it's kind of a bop, but it's the most unlikely combination ever.

• 1:13:34Speaker 05

  Well, you, you prompted it, dog. This is your prompt. Like, yeah.

• 1:13:38John Coogan?

  Uh, it's the Harry Potter Balenciaga of music potentially. Um, but, uh, yeah, I mean, the.

• 1:13:44Speaker 05

  Just like getting lost in the music over here.

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's funny.

• 1:13:47Speaker 05

  Um, but John, you put it really well. What is this create, creation consumer percentage in the future? Like?

• 1:13:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, what are your design inspirations? I feel like those headphones, we've talked to, uh, Carl from Nothing. Uh, and, and, and, and not, uh, when, when, when Carl P from Nothing came on, he had a pair of headphones. That were ve- uh, also very counter positioned against what Apple's doing. Uh, I think it's very dangerous if you're starting a consumer tech company or building a consumer product to try and, uh, steal from Apple's. Design language because you're just getting it steamrolled.

• 1:14:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:14:20John Coogan?

  Uh, you've gone a very different direction.

• 1:14:21Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:14:21John Coogan?

  He went a very different direction. You two are on opposite ends. I feel like that looks like human flash almost, whereas his looks like complete clanker coded. But what what are your inspirations? How do you land on this particular material?

• 1:14:33Speaker 05

  My my chief inspiration as a designer is God. My chief inspiration is God. But to put that in more tech friendly terms like nature and science.

• 1:14:44John Coogan?

  Nature.

• 1:14:44Speaker 05

  Nature and science, mathematics, principles of mathematics. And then.

• 1:14:49Jordi Hays?

  It feels almost kind of U A P.

• 1:14:53Speaker 05

  Like like that was a.

• 1:14:54Jordi Hays?

  Alien technology.

• 1:14:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's the.

• 1:14:57John Coogan?

  Well, the Apple, the Apple like campus looks kind of like a UFO in Cupertino, that new huge like UFO circle. But it's it's it's very glass, it's titanium, and this is very like fleshy almost.

• 1:15:09Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:15:10Speaker 05

  Exactly right.

• 1:15:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, a couple of questions on my side. So. Being able to put this experience together legally. Seems monumental, right?

• 1:15:19Speaker 05

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:15:20Jordi Hays?

  So so the the music industry is clearly very afraid of A I. They're sort of reluctantly clearly like engaging with it and excited about it in certain instances, but what in particular? About this instantiation of A I music where they excited about was it that this is able to basically? Tap into DJ culture, stuff that's already happening and give people this.

• 1:15:43Speaker 05

  I think the reality is it's because it's hot. Like the music sounds better, so the music people like it more. You know, we've all had fun like doing the older generation of music A I, which is like text to to song. But because it makes us laugh and it's and there's a business there, some producers, I was having lunch with my my friend Smino in the in Cha Cha Chicken. He's an amazing artist. He's got three point five monthly listeners, fantastic storyteller. And Three point five humans. Three point five million monthly listeners. Three point five million, okay. He's like three point five. He's got a half human, you know, guy's got no legs. One child, three adults and one child, listen. I'm not saying. Three point five million, that's huge. Equal.

• 1:16:25Jordi Hays?

  You're still a full human.

• 1:16:27Speaker 05

  Um, but he was saying like they bring the old generation AI into the studio sometimes, like people bring it in to pitch to him as the musician. And he's like, oh, okay, that's, oh, wow, the tech is cool. But I was like, did you use it? And he was like, no, they, artists aren't really using it. And I think that was.

• 1:16:42Jordi Hays?

  Also, this, the business model here, uh, one seems a lot better for you than just selling like a smart hardware device.

• 1:16:50Speaker 05

  Oh, fuck, yeah.

• 1:16:51Jordi Hays?

  Because you can sell a, a subscription that's actually aligned and that it's a novel product and that you have the software AI love layer on top of what probably is like pretty standard streaming platform. Is that right?

• 1:17:06Speaker 05

  What's fascinating, that was what I thought when we started really building this as a streaming service, an old catalog streaming service three years ago. But to do what we do, those, to, to hear those parts of the audio separate, to have them blend into each other seamlessly like a perfect DJ, to have the ensemble of models that detect these musical features, that rich metadata be, uh, usable, almost like, uh, sheet music for the, the front end experience running on all these platforms. We basically had to change what music streaming is. We built a new audio codec on STEM FM, which is a, it, it uses a new concept in music processing called music aware processing. Well, audio processing called music aware processing, where basically

• 1:17:50Speaker 05

  the core logic of how the, the file is, is chunked and de-chunked, as well as, uh, uh, unwoven, time multiplexed out of its interleaved format. That logic, um, is aware at all times of the beat and key of the song. So you think everything on Spotify you listen to, all the tech going into it isn't listening to the song. It's just, it just sees it all as audio, audio frames, frequency bands. So we've effectively encoded the intelligence of a DJ in the streaming codec, which is like, that's been the hardest thing we've ever worked on and shout out to the team, like, big fucking shout out to the STEM FM team, like, holy shit.

• 1:18:31John Coogan?

  Is licensing purely commodity at this point? Like, Apple Music, Spotify, Tidal, do they all pay the same royalties to musicians? Or are musicians thinking, if I partner with you, I will get twice as much revenue per stream? Or something like that?

• 1:18:49Speaker 05

  Effectively, there were two very new things we did. The first is that music aware processing, that more interactive music STEM format. The second was our licensing and revenue model, which we've come up with an idea that we think can really level the playing field, create an even bigger music industry, and get artists the fair understanding of their payouts and the fair payouts in a way that can stick and break the tie and break the bad vibes in the industry around business right now. And it's called the Time-Based Artist Compensation System. T-Backs for short, or Time-Backs if you like.

• 1:19:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:19:30Speaker 05

  Get your time back with T-Backs.

• 1:19:33Speaker 05

  So it's very simple, all jokes aside. You're a subscriber to STEM FM, you pay, say, $20 a month. The listening time you spend with a particular artist or their label, that will be the percentage of your subscription fee as a percentage of overall time. There's no pay per stream, which is really a hangup of the CD age.

• 1:19:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:19:54Speaker 05

  It's really like detritus from when people were selling these physical, mechanical CDs.

• 1:19:58John Coogan?

  So you're sort of creating like a creative revenue share pool that then is divided up based on listening time?

• 1:20:03Jordi Hays?

  And that's more aligned with artists who might have three and a half million a month of listeners that listen to them for like 30% of all their listening time, but they're getting a tiny fraction.

• 1:20:14Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:20:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so if I'm listening to Metallica and Pop Smoke at the same time for my entire month straight, because I'm just obsessed with that mashup. Half my revenue share goes to Metallica, half my share goes to Pop Smoke, in theory.

• 1:20:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, and and the the the business, as you were referring to earlier, the you the unit economics of streaming are tight. So, basically, you have to make sure that you provide like the major labels with a deal that gets them involved. But we also open up to verified licensors. They can come on our platform and upload and and participate.

• 1:20:54Jordi Hays?

  What happens if somebody's generating AI next token music and they try to bring it on STEM?

• 1:21:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were thinking about converting our entire three hour podcast into a song.

• 1:21:07Jordi Hays?

  Three hour musical, a technology and business musical.

• 1:21:10John Coogan?

  A musical and then uploading that as a three hour song.

• 1:21:13Speaker 05

  We'll do it on the platform. I'll send it to you guys.

• 1:21:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, TVP and the musical, the daily musical.

• 1:21:18Speaker 05

  I feel I feel like it would be great. It's like an odd couple story like it's beautiful.

• 1:21:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, let's turn let's turn our Benny off.

• 1:21:26Jordi Hays?

  How much how much AI music is getting uploaded to streaming platforms broadly every day?

• 1:21:32Speaker 05

  I don't see AI generated music recommended in my feed. I don't know about you like.

• 1:21:36John Coogan?

  I've always seen screenshots of like this AI artist went viral, but I haven't actually seen it surfaced in my like, you know, recommendations or anything like that.

• 1:21:44Speaker 05

  A few, a few, a few people I know have like songs have like gone viral and the headline was like it's an AI song. But the truth is, there's a human producer and that's what Smino was saying as well. A great musician can make music out of anything, including these more muzaky things.

• 1:22:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course, of course. It's like any other tool. I mean, it's the same thing with EDM. Like for a long time, people were like, you know, oh, Ableton is not like, you know, the same as having a, you know, whole orchestra or band or real samples.

• 1:22:11Jordi Hays?

  We thought about getting a live band to instead of the soundboard.

• 1:22:15John Coogan?

  Soundboard is is, you know, technology to point out.

• 1:22:18Speaker 05

  I actually just realized, you could even try prompting this TBPN musical right now. Yeah, because you can just prompt stuff with YouTube videos.

• 1:22:25John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. So we'll pull that in.

• 1:22:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, it has to be a short one, though, like a clip.

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  We we we have shorts on there. We have shorts on YouTube for sure.

• 1:22:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, but.

• 1:22:34Jordi Hays?

  How do how does the all the legal debacles between the generated music platforms and the and the labels actually get resolved?

• 1:22:44Speaker 05

  Well, I think what really happens in the end is that, you know, the labels and the artists, it's ultimately they're providing the product and the technology platforms are the licensors and sub-aggregators. And so I think it ideally gets resolved with like a deal where the power of advanced technology and the beauty and purity of music, which itself is a technology, can coexist.

• 1:23:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. It feels like with YouTube, initially it was like if you uploaded copyrighted content, they'd just take it down. Then it was like, hey, if you use a Metallica song in this video, we're going to send the money that you made from that video to Metallica, which was fine. But then what happens when you use five seconds of a Metallica song and then five seconds of a Justin Bieber song? You need to parcel up and split out all the revenue.

• 1:23:38Jordi Hays?

  You'd be very confused by our videos.

• 1:23:41John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure.

• 1:23:42Speaker 05

  Well, that was the amazing thing.

• 1:23:43John Coogan?

  And is it fair use? It needs to determine fair use, but I think LLMs can do a lot of that already.

• 1:23:47Speaker 05

  I don't want to be like selling too hard, but basically this, as we got into the research here with Queen Mary University, we've been in a deep research partnership with their Center for Digital Music for three years now, you know, submitted papers, accepted papers, literally changing the paradigm of beat structure and segment detection in music information retrieval. By using a more structural approach, that can actually detect music better than the previous generation approach. So these are early experiments for us.

• 1:24:17Jordi Hays?

  How many of these do you want to sell over the next year?

• 1:24:22Jordi Hays?

  Because I imagine this is like the perfect product to go viral on TikTok and suddenly...

• 1:24:28Speaker 05

  I mean, we did, we sold out and did about $20 million of revenue on the stem. That's a lot, we need the numbers.

• 1:24:41Speaker 05

  And we still, like, we haven't launched this in like, two years, a new STEM, so, but, and we really put the technology into this one. Like, this is where we went hard on the technology for like, a long time. The first one was like, almost the art house film of the tech, like, oh, look, you can decompose the stems. This one is like, the block, but you, this is like, the blockbuster. So, how many do we hope to sell? God willing, this will be, this, God willing, you know, my, my voice to God, we won't be getting these JBLs or whatever. Get this, it's a smarter speaker, it sounds better, it's 299, you know? Let's go, like.

• 1:25:15John Coogan?

  Uh, Jack Dorsey was taking-

• 1:25:16Jordi Hays?

  Hit that gong again, John.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  What the fuck?

• 1:25:22John Coogan?

  Thanks.

• 1:25:23Jordi Hays?

  No, I just think, I, I, I, uh, it's rare that I see a new consumer electronic device outside of like, a new MacBook Pro, and I think I really want that.

• 1:25:32John Coogan?

  Last question for me.

• 1:25:34Speaker 05

  Thank you so much.

• 1:25:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm excited to get it. It feels like something that's like, I can imagine, uh, my, my, uh, uh, Saturday mornings with the family, my son's like-

• 1:25:44John Coogan?

  Jamming.

• 1:25:45Jordi Hays?

  I want dinosaur music, and I want dragon music. And I could be like, well, I want-

• 1:25:49John Coogan?

  Imagine dragons?

• 1:25:50Jordi Hays?

  I want Pop Smoke. So, we're getting Pop Smoke dinosaur music.

• 1:25:53Speaker 05

  First of 1,000 units, founders edition, available now, on stemplayer.com.

• 1:25:57Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:25:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, sorry, you have one.

• 1:25:59John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, last question for me, uh, Jack Dorsey was taking a victory lap about Tidal not having ads.

• 1:26:04Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:26:05John Coogan?

  What do you, what's your take on ads? Are you gonna put ads in there?

• 1:26:07Speaker 05

  Ooh, I, I, I, we have no plans to put in ads. And, uh, we, we've actually, in our signed deals with, uh, with the majors, we, we have agreed not to do, do ads for the first two terms, and we, it was never like, close to my heart, so, and I think, you know, the goal is to increase the value of the music.

• 1:26:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:26:24Jordi Hays?

  So, look at this, I just bought it. Took me two seconds.

• 1:26:27Speaker 05

  Thank you so much.

• 1:26:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:28Speaker 05

  Kudos.

• 1:26:29Jordi Hays?

  I'm excited to get one.

• 1:26:30Speaker 05

  I really appreciate that, and, you know-

• 1:26:32Jordi Hays?

  No, it's just like, it's, it's, um, it's rare to see a consumer hardware device-

• 1:26:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:26:37Jordi Hays?

  That feels like it is genuinely a novel experience.

• 1:26:40Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 1:26:41Jordi Hays?

  It's very rare, but not so novel that it's so different that I'm like, ah, this like, like, gathering around and enjoying music with a group, and this like, DJing is like, a Lindy thing.

• 1:26:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:26:52Jordi Hays?

  And then also have a sustainable- Business model, right? Where it's like you're selling this hardware device. I'm sure you'll have some margin in there, but hopefully I'm entertained by it for a long time and you, you know, my LTV is, is infinity.

• 1:27:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, be great. Well, thank you so much.

• 1:27:08Jordi Hays?

  Thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:27:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, really appreciate it.

• 1:27:10Jordi Hays?

  Great hanging.

• 1:27:11John Coogan?

  We have Hemant from General Catalyst coming on in just a few minutes. First, let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Noah Smith says, "Solar power is good. Batteries are good. Air conditioning is good. AI is good. Nuclear power is good. Stop thinking like a medieval peasant people." He's putting on a clinic of techno optimism.

• 1:27:37Jordi Hays?

  He says, "I will say, though, that smartphone-enabled social media is not good." He posts on X.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  I am a bit of a, of a, of a, oh, what's the word?

• 1:27:48Jordi Hays?

  Eleazor. Eleazor in the reply, "Solar power is good. Batteries are good. AC is good. Nuclear power is good. Gene therapy is good. Building a new alien species of superhuman intelligence with very little ability to understand or direct it is not like other technologies and will kill you and your kids."

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  Rough. Well, you know what won't? Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Our next guest is Hemant from, he's the CEO of General Catalyst. He has a new book out called The Transformation Principles. You can go and buy it today. He's in the Restreaming Room, and now he's in the TBN UltraDome. Welcome to the show, Hemant. Great to meet you. Great to see you. How are you doing?

• 1:28:32Speaker 06

  Great. Thanks for having me.

• 1:28:34John Coogan?

  Uh, please introduce the book. What was the thesis? I'd love to, uh, start with the overall principles that you were trying to, uh, convey, and then we can dig into some of the, the, the more nuanced topics.

• 1:28:47Speaker 06

  Absolutely. So I started writing the book around November twenty twenty two, when you start thinking about when ChatGPT was launched.

• 1:28:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:57Speaker 06

  And the observation was that there is peak ambiguity. I've talked a lot about it. You look at all the major industries, they're changing because of geopolitics.

• 1:29:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:09Speaker 06

  And you've got this technology that also is, it's unclear what its capabilities is going to be. Obviously, we're all developing and figuring that out. So when you have complete ambiguity of what you're building in, only thing you have to give you clarity purposes, your principles. So I want to take a step back and think about what is it that our true north really is as we frankly power the world with AI, which is what the next twenty years is about. That's my life's work, that's your life's work, you know, it's all sort of, we're all sort of living that era. So that's why I wrote the book.

• 1:29:43John Coogan?

  Was your goal to give people a framework for developing their own principles? Or to instead share your principles that you think other people should adopt?

• 1:29:57Speaker 06

  I guess a little bit of both. Like I, what I did was I showed there were three through lines to the book. One is the nine principles I put in there, when I learned them, how I learned them. And some examples of some of the founders in our ecosystem, you know, folks like Kesar, Applied Intuition, Brian and Andrew. What are they doing? How are they actually applying these principles in the way they're building the company? So that was one. Second is, I think as you may know, I'm probably a decade into transformation of the healthcare system.

• 1:30:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:31Speaker 06

  And talk about ambiguity and complexity there. And what are the principles that are working for us? As we're making progress, start to enumerate those. And the last is, I'm very keen on, you know, how do we retool the founder proposition in our own industry and transform ourselves? You know, what does it mean to go beyond venture in serving founders to build next generation, most important companies in today's world where the conditions are different? I talked a lot about that. So that's another transformation we're in the midst of. So. Those are, those are the things I leaned on.

• 1:31:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I'd love to zoom in on, on healthcare specifically. I mean, there's principles like the Hippocratic oath, doing no harm, protecting patient information. But then there's also principles about, you know, like agile software development, like that is in many ways a principle. Where do you, like, how, how, how are you thinking about transforming healthcare? How are you thinking AI fits in there? And then also the work General Catalyst has been doing is

• 1:31:35John Coogan?

  definitely on both extreme ends, both high tech and also almost like Wall Street, not to put it in those terms, but I'd love to know more about your thoughts on healthcare.

• 1:31:43Speaker 06

  It's such a great juxtaposition of the agility in technology and the Hippocratic oath and the seriousness of healthcare as sort of as a sort of framework for learning. The, the way I have always thought about transformations is to put different cultures together. So over the last 10 years, I've been part of starting a bunch of businesses in healthcare. DeBongo was one of those. We did Hippocratic AI recently when the language models came out, speak of Hippocratic oath. And we built Camer, which is at some, at this point, probably the largest software company serving the health systems. And we did Transcendent, focusing on delivering healthcare to consumers that are employees of large companies.

• 1:32:28Speaker 06

  And every one of those, the key was you want to be interdisciplinary. You actually want to bring in people from healthcare that understand the seriousness of the work and the fact that it's not a pre-market, a free market. And then you want to bring people from Silicon Valley that actually will cut through the inertia. And, and I always say, bring the ignorance and imagination to, to make a difference and transform the industry.

• 1:32:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think that there's more opportunity in healthcare at the seed stage or the growth stage? This is something where we keep going back to where we've talked to a lot of founders who have built a piece of kind of SaaS and they got an install base and they have a bunch of customers and they're still in founder mode and they're still have a bunch of really hardworking, highly entrepreneurial folks in the organization. And now AI is here and they can just. Amplify everything that they're doing versus trying to, you know, come to market with something that's very AI laden with you have a dot AI domain and like you, you have to really convince someone that you're the new solution than the thing that they just

• 1:33:36John Coogan?

  got excited about a couple of years ago and on boarded to that was the new thing. They have to rip that out now or they have to bring you in. And I'm wondering how you're seeing the opportunity in healthcare from like scale ups versus like completely new ground up solutions.

• 1:33:50Speaker 06

  It is such a great, great question, actually, especially given that we've been through a pandemic five years ago.

• 1:33:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:57Speaker 06

  So, you know, at the core of GC, seed is very much what we focus on. We brought on three different seed firms around the world onto the platform in the last two years. And so there's a ton of serendipitous innovation that's happening because of AI, because of advances in hardware, in the way you think about healthcare delivery through the solutions for this next generation. So seed is very interesting for us, you know, applying AI to the life sciences is starting to finally work and we think is interesting. So seed is quite interesting. But then if you take a step back five years ago, there was a Cambrian explosion of innovation to change the architecture of our healthcare delivery system because we didn't have the test, trace, isolate capabilities. The system wasn't resilient.

• 1:34:41Speaker 06

  Insurance companies were getting big balance sheets because no one was getting procedures and hospitals were looking for bailouts, right? Complete sort of misalignment of business models. So we, we built and invested in a bunch of companies in that period and those are now scaling really nicely. Some of the ones I mentioned earlier and a few others like AI Doc and Sore and City Block and others. And so at the growth stage, I think there are probably 25 to 30 companies in the healthcare ecosystem that are very important. For our system going forward and we're very focused on how do we help them become truly enduring parts of the healthcare system and then we're constantly looking for founders that are using

• 1:35:22Speaker 06

  these new technologies at the seed stage to reinvent, you know, parts of the stack in that overall architecture.

• 1:35:29Jordi Hays?

  Where do you, what categories do you think the winners are decided and then what categories do you think are still up for grabs? We had a lot Gil on, he was saying, if I, I'll probably botch it, but something along the lines of like in the medical scribe space, there's enough heavily funded players that have real traction, you probably don't want to start the next one that's maybe four or five years behind. But how, how do you view where the biggest opportunities are and then what categories you think, hey, maybe, maybe look out?

• 1:35:59John Coogan?

  There's already a Power Lock company, basically.

• 1:36:00Speaker 06

  If I take a step back and say, we were, we're gonna do a product centric transformation of the sector, not a business model centric one, you would say, at the end of the day, our delivery organizations provide the product, which is we take care of people's health. And, and so there, when somebody engages with a health system, broader health system, not just a hospital, patient engagement, physician tools, which is where the scribing solution that Eli mentioned fits, you think about payments, you think about AI workforce, if you think about sort of diagnostics using AI, huge amount of progress in all those areas. And then, and then you say, you know, what's, what's missing?

• 1:36:44Speaker 06

  What's missing still is the, the inter player of the peer provider relationship, that still sort of is a place where there's not a lot of trust. Pairs think providers bill too much, providers think pairs to pay too little, so it's just like army of solutions in the middle of them to create that arbitrage. I think we need to do something about that. And then there's one other thing where there is a new movement, which is around longevity. If you look at Brian Johnson's work, that there's cultural movement happening around that and you look at the work that Ro is doing with GLP ones, which is the beginning of that longevity move, these are real phenomenon.

• 1:37:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:19Speaker 06

  And, and I think that's a place that there's a ton more that, that needs to be done so that the system moves towards incentives that keep us healthy and out of the hospital. Versus a high performance, but really expensive and affordable care if we go into the hospital.

• 1:37:35Jordi Hays?

  How do you think of the interplay between the longevity movement and the traditional health ecosystem in my, in my own life as somebody who discovered biohacking maybe a decade ago and just started reading online? I would always just try to solve problems myself and then, you know, hopefully, you know, at some point or another, you're like, ah, actually you should probably go to the hospital now. And so it's kind of a harsh transition and maybe it doesn't need to be that way.

• 1:38:01Speaker 06

  It's, it's, it's very different. One's focused on staying healthy, there's focused on fixing your health when it's broken.

• 1:38:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:07Speaker 06

  So there literally are like two different mindsets and the reality is that all of our incentive structures are about you going to the hospital.

• 1:38:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:15Speaker 06

  Hospitals want heads in beds. That's how they, they thrive, right? They actually want to see revenue. Consumer wants to not ever go to the hospital. So we need to kind of re-architect a system in a way that we, we, we solve for this cognitive dissonance. It's all about incentives.

• 1:38:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is there some incentive shift from, I mean, a lot of like, there, there's some general meme about like, when private equity buys a hospital, like quality of care goes down. And I'm wondering if there's like, bringing a venture mindset, a growth mindset, a turn, like a growth instead of like cut cost mindset could actually like improve those incentives? Like, how are you grappling with, with that trade off?

• 1:38:53Speaker 06

  As you may know, we just bought a health system.

• 1:38:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:56Speaker 06

  It's in Akron, Ohio. It's, it's actually got a, you know, large, it's the largest employer in Akron. It's, it's a big hospital system and has an insurance company.

• 1:39:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:04Speaker 06

  And what we're trying to show is like, if you could close your eyes and you said, what is the one thing that if it could exist, uh, will solve a lot of this? That longevity solutions or investment in our health is reimbursable. It's not today. There's, there's no, uh, model that'll show what's the arrow on this reinsurance company to pay for it. Insurance companies don't pay for reimbursement, so the cultural movement around longevity.

• 1:39:29Jordi Hays?

  And the reason, just, just to, I, uh, I'm an investor in function health. And from my understanding of that market, like, insurance providers are not so inclined to pay for something like function because people switch insurance all the time. So they're like, I don't care that you're gonna be healthier, maybe in like thirty years, like.

• 1:39:48Speaker 06

  I just took the sentence out of my mouth. That's exactly what I was gonna say, because the, the insurers don't know. If they make an investment in longevity, they're gonna be able to capture the value on the other side of it.

• 1:39:58Jordi Hays?

  So it's just like lighting money on fire for them, potentially.

• 1:40:01Speaker 06

  Exactly. So that's the misalignment I'm talking about. The question is, how do you really, um, change the system where the ROI on, on, uh, longevity is understood and financeable? We, we need to do that, you know, as a system.

• 1:40:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. When you, uh, this may be a totally stupid question, but when you see some of these data center build outs, do you ever get inspired to try to not just buy a hospital system, but just create something, you know, a year-round mega project? Is there even any potential ROI in, like, building something from the ground up?

• 1:40:33Speaker 06

  Um, it's a great question, and, uh, we're actually doing that, um, with a company in India.

• 1:40:39Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:40:40Speaker 06

  And I think, um, there's a leapfrog opportunity in some emerging market. We wanna show the model there. And the other place where I'm very focused on this is, you know, we have a large amount of capital that's allocated for rural health system rebuild. The government's allocated about fifty billion dollars for it. And I think if we went and deployed that money in old-school hospitals again, that's gonna be a falling knife that we've created and will burn that money, uh, into the ground. And so there's an opportunity to rethink the topology and the architecture. What do we do there?

• 1:41:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:11Speaker 06

  So, so that's the place where I'm also focused. In the US, I'm focused on rural health. What do we do about it? We actually built a company called Homeward Healthcare that's focused on this particular problem, uh, sort of post-pandemic, because all those systems got eviscerated. And then the future hospitals, I, I just think it's easier to build in some of these high-growth emerging economies to show the models and then we'll bring that here. So it's a long game. It's gonna be. Next 20 years.

• 1:41:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, a couple of weeks ago.

• 1:41:37Speaker 06

  That's why I need longevity.

• 1:41:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:39John Coogan?

  A couple of weeks ago, you were going sort of viral for some comments about triple, triple, double, double, double startup growth rates. Can you kind of unpack your?

• 1:41:49Jordi Hays?

  I don't know why people get so triggered by growth rates.

• 1:41:51John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anytime you try and quantify what success looks like, you know, you're stepping in the bee's nest a little bit.

• 1:41:59Jordi Hays?

  I found this counter example that proves you're categorically false.

• 1:42:03John Coogan?

  But, but, but maybe walk me through like what you're seeing in venture. Are growth rates really faster than ever before?

• 1:42:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what was like the missing context?

• 1:42:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, give us more context around those comments.

• 1:42:18Speaker 06

  And I never go viral, by the way, because like my boring systems content that nobody cares about.

• 1:42:23John Coogan?

  This is not boring. I love this. We're gonna, we're gonna get 10 million views on this. We're gonna turn this into a TikTok. We're gonna.

• 1:42:28Speaker 06

  Okay, there we go. Let me say something crazy then. Actually, the last time I went viral was when I was working on saving Silicon Valley Bank.

• 1:42:34John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, that's right.

• 1:42:35Speaker 06

  Freaked out what was gonna happen. So it takes three, four years for me to create another viral moment.

• 1:42:39John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 1:42:40Speaker 06

  Look, I would, I would say it was a very innocent empirical comment because I just look at how fast the companies are getting built and they are getting built a lot faster. Durability is a, is a separate question. Because we'll see which of these can then transition into durability or not. But as far as growth goes, it makes all the sense. If AI is truly an accelerant.

• 1:43:02Speaker 06

  You know, and you've seen, we've done significant amount of work. I think the deepest amount of work around these AI rollups, we have 10 companies we're building there, we can actually acquire these service businesses and transform them with AI, almost treat those acquisitions as customer acquisition and apply AI. So you're just, you just have all these different ways to accelerate growth and take share in this AI world that is happening. So, so when, when somebody comes and says, we're gonna go from one to three to nine. And we're routinely seeing companies that are, you know, one to fifteen to twenty to something fairly large.

• 1:43:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:43:38Speaker 06

  Which, by the way, there were very few companies that did that in the last iteration. You know, Samsara was one of those that I was part of that sort of grew that way, but there were very few. When you see that routinely, I mean, I had actually just gone to our team saying, guys, let's recalibrate. You have to change the terminology on what best in class is because we want to, we want to be, if we're going to do, it, when we do seed, we want to back every amazing founder. When we do growth, we want to be the best in class growth companies. That's our business. And it's just very clear that the bar has shifted.

• 1:44:06John Coogan?

  Okay, so I want to, I want to dive deeper on some nuance there. Uh, we have this like kind of coinage that we're trying to get to go viral. Maybe it'll work one day of like the barnacle economy. The idea that if I started a company that is, I just clean toilets, but I get Anthropic as a client and they're ten X-ing their number of office space and their revenues and everything. My business is going to be ten X-ing, but I don't really have a venture scale business because I'm not building in a monopolistic category or building any durable technology or any intellectual property. I just happen to have my hero client is growing so fast that I am also growing fast. Uh, and so there's companies that have kind of bolted on to the, the new hyperscalers,

• 1:44:50John Coogan?

  the foundation model companies that are growing so fast, they're growing really fast. Uh, at the same time, there's other companies that are operating in legacy industries that are also growing fast, but there's always the risk of durability and pilots. So where does, where, where do you start? Are you more worried or more digging in on a company that's overly indexed on a foundation model company's growth? Or, or more risky to, oh yes, they're getting Fortune 500 pilots in this one niche, like the oil and gas industry, but it might not be sticky because that big company moves slowly. And even though they're ramping up revenues, we don't know if they're actually going to stick around in 10 years.

• 1:45:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, so I think, I think, um, let's just actually split those parts. It's a, it's a great, great question and something that we take a step back on. Everything that's coming into the applied eye layer and like looking at it with that lens. If you have a company bringing in the foundation model capabilities into an enterprise, which I think tends to be the most durable relationships that are on the big enterprise side, we are looking for. Are you going in and are you learning how to expand your relationship with those customers? So before what used to happen was you would build this like MVP. You get product market fit and then you figure out how to create repeatability to go do that over and over again. In the AI world, and so there what the the advantage is great product design and precision.

• 1:46:13Speaker 06

  In the AI world, you get into a customer, you do forward deployed engineering, let's think about big enterprises. And you build trust with them and then you figure out how to do more for them. All the ones that are scaling really, really fast, that's what they're doing very effectively. So if you're building that kind of a deeper and deeper relationship with customers that are going to be around for a long time, that's durable. We like that. We we're looking for a lot of that and those companies are not growing triple, triple, double, double. They're growing way faster, you know, in different verticals. I mean, that's that's just the reality of it, because like, you know, we we we're meeting a lot of these. On the other side, I think the the companies that are creating wrappers on top of these models. Um, many of them are not durable. If you remember when ChatGPT three happened, you had a bunch of companies got created and they disappeared.

• 1:46:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:58Speaker 06

  So every time there's new modalities and capabilities, some stuff happens and a lot of that doesn't exist. But there are some companies getting built there that are cultural movements. And they are going to redefine human interaction with technology and software. And I think those are quite interesting and they will, they may look like lightweight products, but they're going to be durable long term. And then there's a bunch that's going to disappear. I mean, that's that's that's the way I sort of think about it, because a bunch is just going to get absorbed into the models. But the ones that are focused on rethinking design and rethinking the human relationship, they will have durability on top of these models.

• 1:47:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:35Speaker 06

  Ecamgunity, that's what I always say. It's like hard to figure out what's what right now.

• 1:47:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you you've you've made a bunch of, uh, I I don't know, you call them like American dynamism type investments. But I I'm wondering if you could rank a few other international markets that are interesting or underrated. You mentioned, uh, doing some work in India. Uh, are are there any other countries that you think where there might be pockets of opportunity for your business over the next decade?

• 1:48:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, look, we we we do two thirds in the US.

• 1:48:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:05Speaker 06

  Probably about twenty five percent in Europe and ten percent in India. And I'll actually say, I was used to say this couple of years ago, US is going to be the consensus market. Europe is the contrarian market and India is a FOMO market. Because of the high growth and that we need to be in all of these and be intentional about what it takes to create value. And I think Europe is super interesting. There's like so much talent. There, there's people are waking up that they need to innovate. We can take the classic view of, you know, there's not intensity, but we're just seeing pockets of like interesting collaboration. We're actually catalyzing a lot of it. Our European team is doing a lot of that. And then our, in India, we're just looking at saying, what is the US India sort of collaboration going to look like?

• 1:48:50Speaker 06

  Because there's a lot of complexity there. And then what is required for building societal systems inside of India in education, in defense, you know, in healthcare that we can help build? Because we've learned a bunch from here and probably mostly learned what not to do. Because of the like the healthcare business models and we can help them think about it from first principles. So we can be good partners there. And so the way that works out is, as I said, we're building hospitals in India, we're transforming healthcare, we're innovating in India, we're transforming in the US. We've built a defense prime, we're, you know, working with defense primes in all the markets. We've got Androl here, we've got Helsing in Europe, we've got Rafin in India. Because you need to create, you know, our phrase that we use is global resilience and abundance.

• 1:49:32Speaker 06

  And so each of these markets and key industries wants to be resilient and there's founders there working on great stuff. We want to help them be successful with that. And that's, that's the way we've approached it.

• 1:49:42Jordi Hays?

  What, what's your primary inspiration for the firm?

• 1:49:47Speaker 06

  Boy, um, look, I think I, uh...

• 1:49:52Jordi Hays?

  And I would give you, I'd give, I mean, the classic example was like CAA and A6 and Z. Is there, is there an equivalent for you or do you pull from a variety of sources?

• 1:50:03Speaker 06

  You know, my, my longest standing LP relationship was with Andy Gold and we used to run the Princeton Indominant, who's retired last year. And I used to always look at, hey, we want to be one of the elite, when this was when I was in Boston, we want to be one of the elite venture firms, which I don't even consider us purely venture capital, even though seed is our core. And he would always say, run your own race. And that really stuck with me. So I try not to focus on mimicking what others are doing. There's so many smart people, so many creative people here doing interesting things. We gotta do our own, we're gonna be on our own journey. My main, the thing I would say though is I do wanna transform industry systems, not just

• 1:50:45Speaker 06

  sort of be sort of serendipitous venture capital investor in companies. And so everything we do, all the stuff people look at us doing is all created to build a mode for the founders. So they can just be more successful and become bigger. Because if they get bigger, then we have the opportunity to transform the industries. If all those companies I mentioned in healthcare can actually be a hundred billion dollar companies, many of them we started, then we have the license to actually help rethink the system.

• 1:51:14Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about, how do you think about risk across the platform between early and some of these, you know, really scaled up investments?

• 1:51:25Jordi Hays?

  We were enjoying a clip from a roll off earlier this week calling venture, it's a return free risk, he called it. But he was just kind of putting all of venture more or less in a single bucket. And there were some comments as well on people saying that, hey, it's actually like, it's a big difference between, you know, the hundred million dollar, five hundred million dollar checks that are going into companies at a later stage and pure venture.

• 1:51:52John Coogan?

  It's private equity and venture clothing.

• 1:51:55Jordi Hays?

  Was the comment, yeah.

• 1:51:56Speaker 06

  Look, I think if you wanna do really transformative stuff, you gotta take a risk.

• 1:52:00Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:52:01Speaker 06

  So if we're not taking, no, you don't wanna take stupid risk. But I think, I think you wanna be smart about how you, you invest across different stages of risk. But like, you gotta take a risk. And you have to have a vision. And this is some of the stuff I talk about in the book, which is incrementally improving these systems is not gonna get us there. I think we're sort of at an interesting place in society where AI is so disruptive. So we gotta build new systems. And in order to go from deep in company to new systems at scale, you have to bring the incumbents along and partner with them and also invest in their success and do things that are just radically different from how we're used to building serendipitous companies and sort of classic venture. So I do think you have to take a lot of risk.

• 1:52:44Speaker 06

  Like, I thrive on risk. You know, failures don't bother me as long as we're well intentioned, we're doing the right things. I want us to do that. And you know, otherwise, I'll tell you, like venture is, the LPs will say it's becoming more of a beta. Because if we can get into it, this company's raised a lot of money. So if this is going to become the way the system is behaving now, and we don't take on working on large problems, which for me, a lot of them equate to transformations and, and sort of thinking more, more systemically. Then, then, you know, with the illiquidity, um, premium, are the investors excited about the return? This, this asset class is going to generate. I think there is a conversation about that as well in the way things are today.

• 1:53:29John Coogan?

  Um, I like asking all authors that come on the show about their favorite books. I'd also be interested to know if there's any books that inspire you in how you think about building the firm. Are you more of like a House of Morgan guy or a Steve Jobs biography guy? Are there any books from, you know, through the history of business that have remained on your bedside maybe for several years?

• 1:53:55Speaker 06

  Um, I mean, I, I, I, um, focus on individuals that have been inspiring to me. And understanding those as a way to, uh, uh, look at the journey. And actually, Kenshin Alt is my chairman. He asked me once, is he modeling yourself after? It's like another, the same question you asked earlier. And I was like, well, look, uh, there are three people that really, really inspire me. One is, uh, you know, if you look at Elon's work, the problems he takes on, the way he executes them, it's like, you know, it just makes me feel like the bar is so high in terms of what's doable. It's like, well, it's inspiring. Like we want to, we should all be learning from the way he builds. You know, and, and, and, and the, the problems he chooses to work on, the passion with which he operates. So as a builder, that's very inspiring to me.

• 1:54:41Speaker 06

  As an investor, I'm a fan of Warren Buffett. He thinks seventy-five hundred year horizons. And so the, you know, the best hold period is forever. Is the way they think, and that, that's the way we want to think, you know? We invested in Stripe in 2010, when it was, um, when it was just a couple of them. And then, you know, we've invested fourteen times since then, right? And, and I really think that's a relationship that can be a thirty, forty year relationship. You know, those guys are going to do lots of interesting stuff. And I, I, I want us to be sort of bootstrapped to their journey, uh, as we think about our journey. And then I would say, from a leadership perspective, which is also important, I really respect Ken, who, you know, obviously is our chairman, is a lead director at Berkshire Hathaway

• 1:55:25Speaker 06

  on the board of Airbnb, and he instills this whole servant mindset. And that's just the way I think you want to treat each other, your own company, towards your founders, which is really an important stakeholder verse, and society at large. And I'm rebuilding with that kind of a mindset. And, you know, and then what do I want to prove with all this? I think to your piercing question before, like, the inspiration to me is, can we take this philosophy and build the world's biggest companies? Can we actually do that? Because, because, you know, that is going to be required as we think about really transforming with AI. AI is going to be all about transformations, and can we go accomplish that?

• 1:56:04Jordi Hays?

  What's your guidance to partners at the firm around media? Because there are certain venture firms that their guidance is broadly, get as much attention as you possibly can, whatever, whatever it takes. But that very much does not seem to be your approach. And I'm curious.

• 1:56:24Speaker 06

  So I'm going to give you a two-part answer to this. One is, if we think about transforming industries, you need four levers. You actually need to have, you know, the capital, the innovation, the policy, but then you do need to create a cultural movement. And so media is a really important part of winning hearts and minds towards what you want the world to look like. And I think in that sense, it's very important. But it's got sort of a purpose towards it, and, you know, it's sort of inspiring how you guys have quickly come up to stage. And, you know, I think you can, you can actually intentionally say, here's the influence we want to have on this ecosystem, and you can drive towards it. Because you've got a platform, and I'm sure you guys think that way, right?

• 1:57:08Speaker 06

  The, I want to be famous, so I get noticed for the sake of being famous, and that's going to give me deals for. My observation is that you have to become more and more fringe. To actually be noticed and it actually starts taking an impact on you as a human being. I'm seeing that with a lot of people that play this game.

• 1:57:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:29Speaker 06

  And and is that is that going to allow you to do your best work if you're fundamentally changing in response to how to be successful in your sort of media metrics?

• 1:57:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:57:39Speaker 06

  And so if you if you're the person, kind of person who can say creative things, but stay grounded in your core, then maybe it's for you. But if it's going to change your core, then then you might have gotten the followers, but you may not have the substance to do.

• 1:57:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, what at what cost?

• 1:57:55Speaker 06

  My big thing that I see as a failure mode for a lot of people that go on that path.

• 1:58:00John Coogan?

  What do you look for in young people that join General Catalyst? Where you're hoping that they'll be with the firm for decades, eventually become partner, have a huge impact on the firm. What are you looking for at the young at the young phase?

• 1:58:17Speaker 06

  Look, I think a true sense of purpose, because that's what drives conviction. You know, and and I would say a lot of people get in this industry because they think they can make a lot of money or they think it's.

• 1:58:33John Coogan?

  Prestigious.

• 1:58:33Speaker 06

  You know, it gives you power and prestige. There's a lot of that. If you look at people that have done really well, they didn't grow up. I mean, to literally think about any of them, they just didn't. They ended up here.

• 1:58:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:44Speaker 06

  I came to GC for four months because I felt like I built a shitty company. This was in two thousand and two, and I want to do it again. I'm twenty six.

• 1:58:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:52Speaker 06

  And I'm here, you know, and and so everyone that has done really well, I'm not saying I've done well, but like I just I studied those people and they just had unique trajectories to get here, not a they chose venture as a career.

• 1:59:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:03Speaker 06

  And so so that purposeful sort of journey and wanting to do something substantive, which it then gives you courage and conviction, which is the essence. You've got to have that to be a good investor.

• 1:59:15John Coogan?

  What is?

• 1:59:16Speaker 06

  That's this work.

• 1:59:17John Coogan?

  What is AUM now?

• 1:59:20Speaker 06

  Somewhere in the 40s. Too small.

• 1:59:22John Coogan?

  Forty what?

• 1:59:22Jordi Hays?

  Too small.

• 1:59:23John Coogan?

  Forty what?

• 1:59:25Jordi Hays?

  Forty billion. I think, I think 400, 400 soon.

• 1:59:31John Coogan?

  Congratulations on all the success. I think you've been fantastically successful and thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:59:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wish we had more time. I have a lot more questions. Next time you come on, I'd love to get an update on the on the customer value strategy. We didn't, we didn't get to that.

• 1:59:44Speaker 06

  Oh, yes, yes. That is transformative. That's a big part of how we're thinking about the proposition being changing for companies and how to serve them. We'll talk about it another time.

• 1:59:52Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:59:52John Coogan?

  Thanks for having me. Love to have you back. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:59:54Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:59:54John Coogan?

  Bye. Let me tell you about numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. It's sales tax AGI. And our next guest is in the restream waiting room, Rob Pakes from Radical Ventures.

• 2:00:10Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:00:10John Coogan?

  Coming in to the studio. How are you doing, Rob?

• 2:00:13Jordi Hays?

  Radical Rob.

• 2:00:14Rob Toews?

  Hey, guys. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 2:00:16Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 2:00:17John Coogan?

  Uh, what's, I want to go through BCI. I want to go through the latest Forbes piece. Uh, what, I mean, I feel like you've spent, what, years at this point writing about AI? Are you just over AI? Is AI done? And you're just bored of that?

• 2:00:30Jordi Hays?

  Top.

• 2:00:30John Coogan?

  You gotta move on? You gotta pivot? If you're in AI, pivot to BCI. What's going on?

• 2:00:36Rob Toews?

  I, there is definitely a lot of, a lot of noise in the world of AI right now. I think BCI and AI are actually closely related.

• 2:00:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:00:45Rob Toews?

  And BCI will be kind of one of the next really important foundational technologies that impacts how AI gets rolled out. But I do think a big part of our jobs as VCs is to kind of think about opportunities and technologies that are not yet obvious and mainstream. And I think BCI falls into that category in the sense that it's not ready for primetime yet, but I think it's getting closer. And I do think it will have a really big impact on how basically human intelligence and artificial intelligence fit together.

• 2:01:14John Coogan?

  The merge, the merge. Uh, it feels like one of those technologies that's always 10 years away, like fusion, uh, but take me through the history. Uh, when, when does this whole story start? Uh, there's the Utah RA. I want to know about that.

• 2:01:27Rob Toews?

  Yeah, totally. So BCI is not a new technology. It's something that's been around in a research context for decades. The very first BCI was actually in a human was demonstrated in the seventies, in the early seventies. Researchers at UCLA, basically using EEG, which is not invasive technology, were able to get patients to be able to control a cursor on a computer screen, just with their thoughts.

• 2:01:52John Coogan?

  That's kind of like what we're seeing from Neuralink, right? It's like, not that far off, but it's been 55 years now. So we're super interested, like, what happened in the intervening years?

• 2:02:01Rob Toews?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So that was like a very basic, unreliable prototype, but it was kind of a concept. The first invasive BCI, and maybe just as a quick, like, quick definition, there was between invasive and non-invasive, these are kind of the two main categories of BCI technology. Invasive technology requires surgery. It involves putting electronics, like, inside your skull, directly on or in your brain. And so Neuralink is an example of an invasive BCI company, where, you know, you have to cut open your skull, doing, using a surgery called a craniotomy, and put the chip inside. Non-invasive technology does not require surgery. It's just sensors that you can put outside your head, you know, that could be embedded in, like, a consumer device, like headphones, or a hat, or something like

• 2:02:44Rob Toews?

  that. So the trade-off between invasive and non-invasive BCI really does boil down to a trade-off between, like, accessibility on the one hand, and ease of use versus signal quality, and like, how high fidelity of signal you can get from the brain. So the-

• 2:02:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's a lot about, like, value, right? Like, if you have a disability, and you cannot use a computer, and you, and somebody says, "I can give you this surgery, and you're going to be able to interact with the computer," that's a great trade. Whereas, if you say that to me right now, I'm going to say, "I'll wait," you know?

• 2:03:17John Coogan?

  I'll use the mouse and keyboard, actually. I'll be fine. I'll stick to the mouse and keyboard.

• 2:03:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so-

• 2:03:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:03:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think my big question is, like, at what point is the invasive approach, like, so tried and true, everyday?

• 2:03:32John Coogan?

  So, so, in the 1970s, it was non-invasive. When did the first invasive stuff start happening? Because Neuralink, you like, popularized it, but didn't invent it, right?

• 2:03:41Rob Toews?

  Exactly, yeah. So invasive BCI, the first invasive BCI was implanted in a human in the 1990s. And it was this device called the Utah Ray that you referenced, John. And honestly, I would encourage people listening to like, go to Google Images and look up Utah Ray just to see a picture of it. Like, it looks like a medieval torture device.

• 2:03:58John Coogan?

  It does. It's so scary.

• 2:04:01Rob Toews?

  It's literally like a bed of needles. And you literally, you like, cut open the skull and you just jam this set of needles into the brain. And so it, the Utah Ray, to be clear, was like a really important breakthrough in the history of BCI. And it was the state of the art for a long time and it made it possible to do things like, go from thought to text and like, you know, I understand people's, people's thoughts directly, but

• 2:04:27Rob Toews?

  brain damage, basically. Like, if you're, if you're jamming these needles into your brain in order to record from some neurons, you're also killing a bunch of other neurons. And so that was, that's the reason why the Utah Ray never really like, took off from a commercial perspective. But it did lay the groundwork for subsequent generations of invasive BCI, including Neuralink, which obviously is the most famous invasive BCI company.

• 2:04:49John Coogan?

  Okay, so now, was Elon the first person to really take BCI seriously? Because it feels like there's a proper market map and you have, Sam's working on stuff, Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, and then Elon's working on stuff, and then Nudge also exists. There's like, there's like a number of like, basically billionaire founders that are all making serious bets. Are all of them, is this one, is this like an Andereau type story where like, you need a billionaire who's just gonna sink a bunch of money into this? Or are there any companies that have like, actually just gone from ground up in the traditional fashion of like, they raised a seed round and then a series A? Like, it just feels like a very different path. So like, maybe take me through the market map of what's happening right now.

• 2:05:30Rob Toews?

  Yeah, it definitely like, started as, from a startup perspective, as a category, where like, it was largely funded by billionaires. Like, obviously Elon had, Neuralink, Brian Johnson had a BCI company called Kernel that he poured a ton of money into.

• 2:05:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you, do you remember like, what that actual, was that invasive, non-invasive? Like, what the plan was there?

• 2:05:51Rob Toews?

  He explored both, it ended up being non-invasive and they developed like a new modality of sensing non-invasively, which is actually pretty cool. You like shoot sensors through your skull, like shoot lasers through your skull to like detect the blood flow in your, in your brain, which is like, is still used today and the company's still going, but, but yeah, I, I mean, it's worth noting Neuralink is like definitely the most well-known BCI company, but it wasn't the first, like there were startups before Neuralink. There's one called Synchro out of Australia, there's one called Peridromics, which did kind of follow that more typical path that you described of like raise a seed, raise a series A. And certainly in the past few years, there, there's been an explosion of them. So, so now there are a ton of BCI

• 2:06:35Rob Toews?

  companies, both invasive and non-invasive.

• 2:06:37John Coogan?

  What are the, it, it feels like Neuralink's had a very like, kind of like barbell strategy where they're, where they'll tell like a sci-fi story about like you will be able to fully like communicate with AI and merge and whatnot. But then there's also like this ultra-practical, like if you are a paraplegic, you can use a mouse cursor and click and use a computer. Are there, are there other pitches that companies are, are offering in terms of just like reading information from the brain or writing information of the brain? Like how, how do the value props like stack out right now?

• 2:07:14Rob Toews?

  Yeah, I think one of the really interesting differentiators of the different invasive BCI companies is like what's the end use case that they're going for? And Neuralink, what Neuralink has been focused on to date is computer use. So like all the demos you see of Neuralink patients, like Nolan Arba, the first patient is using a computer, like which basically comes down to like mostly controlling a cursor and potentially keyboard. And there's obviously a ton you can do if you can control a computer. So that's like a very valuable use case. But a like a harder, more advanced use case, which like I kind of think of as the holy grail for, or one of the holy grails for BCI is decoding language,

• 2:07:56Rob Toews?

  like basically being able to instantaneously understand words from a person's brain and like write them or send them via text or email. Like that basically, that basically is telepathy more or less, especially if you then like convert it to another person's BCI, like so it goes directly from brain to brain. And so that is a more ambitious target, which there are startups that are going after. To this point, at least publicly, Neuralink hasn't published anything related to language decoding. Of course, it's something they're thinking about, I'm sure. But that, I think that's one really interesting use case. And then another one is being able to control objects, like whether it's controlling a robotic arm or like controlling any sort of object in the real world, which again, it basically is telekinesis.

• 2:08:39Rob Toews?

  And like, these terms sound really like, you know, fantastical and paranormal. But like, that is essentially what the capability that that will enable, which is cool to think about.

• 2:08:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, are the non-invasive BCI companies ever targeting like a higher level of abstraction? Like, look, we're not going to be able to reliably get an X and Y coordinate for a mouse, but we can tell you that you're stressed out, or we can tell you that you're overly tired, or we're telling you that you're dehydrated in your brain, or something like that. Something that's more abstract, but still something that a consumer could actually adopt. Wear a hat, they're not going to go into surgery for it, but more of like a biohacker use case?

• 2:09:20Rob Toews?

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And those use cases have already been pretty well proven. Like, there are actually non-invasive BCI products on the market today that like can, you know, detect if you're stressed, or if you're, if you need to sleep more, or you know, if you need to focus better, those sorts of things. I think the really big question, like, in my opinion, the single most interesting strategic question in the field of BCI right now is like, the conventional wisdom has been that invasive BCI is necessary for the most sophisticated use cases like language that we were talking about, because you just need to get that high fidelity data. But non-invasive approaches have been getting better and better very quickly, in part because non-invasive sensors have been getting better,

• 2:10:03Rob Toews?

  but much more so because the underlying AI is just getting a lot more powerful, which lets you extract a lot more signal from the same noise. And so honestly, no one really knows like where the performance ceiling will be for non-invasive BCI. There are companies out there today that, whose vision is to... Like build a thought to text, language decoding technology platform just using non-invasive sensors that you can just put on your head. Um, it's not yet proven if that will work or not, but like, there are definitely people aiming for it. And honestly, I think no one, no one can say for certain that it won't work. I think like they're all kind of pursuing the scaling law strategy of like, we saw with language models, just collect more and more and more data, build bigger and bigger

• 2:10:46Rob Toews?

  models and like they'll get better and better. And so far, like no one, no one yet in the world has collected like a mass, a truly massive data set of brain data paired with language data. So like, who's to say whether, you know, what, what might be possible if you really try to scale this stuff?

• 2:11:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:04Jordi Hays?

  How, how do you, how do you invest in this category right now?

• 2:11:07John Coogan?

  How do we make money off of this?

• 2:11:09Jordi Hays?

  How do we make money off of this? Um, no, but cause the, the probably my personal default would just be to try to pick up some Neuralink secondary.

• 2:11:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:19Jordi Hays?

  And just ride with them because it feels, it still feels like we're early. And if you just fund a bunch of alt Neuralinks, I, I think that that might be kind of a tough, tough game, but how do you think about it?

• 2:11:32Rob Toews?

  Yeah. Neuralink is definitely the, like the most well-known, the most well-funded. Obviously it's Elon Musk and it has, you know, everything that that comes with it in terms of being an Elon company. Um, it is also, I mean, just thinking tactically from an investment perspective, it's also extremely highly valued today. Their, their most recent round is at $10 billion. Um, there are a handful of very credible Neuralink competitors, including a couple of them.

• 2:11:58Jordi Hays?

  It could be undervalued.

• 2:12:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do, do we have any idea?

• 2:12:03Jordi Hays?

  I'm just messing around.

• 2:12:03John Coogan?

  I mean, do we have any idea on market size for these things? How do people even underwrite these types of deals? Are they building up to like the number of paraplegics that need, uh, you know, the, the FDA approved surgery for that indication? Or is it more of like a consumer, uh, like TAM? How do people think about that?

• 2:12:22Rob Toews?

  Yeah, I think you basically have to think about it in two phases. The first phase is the medical phase. The second phase is the like consumer slash humans merge with AI in the singularity phase. And I think the TAM math is a lot more concrete for the medical phase. Sure. And just in the medical phase, it is a massive TAM. If you look at like, basically, if you just take everyone in the world that's paralyzed, that's like tens of millions of people, and you can break it down by different causes, ALS, spinal cord injury, et cetera. Um, you know, many, many millions of people. Um, and the industry is kind of circling around this price point of a hundred and fifty K per implant with the expectation that insurance will cover it.

• 2:13:04Rob Toews?

  Like, it's not, it, it will be something that, um, a lot of people will have access to because they won't have to pay out of pocket. So if you just do the numbers on that, it's, you know, it can be a many, many tens of billions of dollars market. Yep. Um, but I do think that like the really big vision, the big prize that ever, you know, that all that is, gets people like Elon Musk and Brian Johnson excited is the longer term vision of this being like a consumer product for a more generalized population that lets anyone like seamlessly merge with digital intelligences and artificial intelligences and so forth. And, you know, if you, if you think that eventually DCIs will be as widespread as iPhones or something, then obviously, you know, you can, you can talk yourself into a huge TAM.

• 2:13:46Jordi Hays?

  Imagine not having to open the Sora app, but just having a Sora implant. And so you're just sitting there.

• 2:13:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, just at the trough. It'd be amazing. Are you tracking any of like the intermediate steps? Like, uh, there was that, uh, company that launched a demo that it seemed like it would, uh, put something on like your jawbone and it would

• 2:14:06Rob Toews?

  Yep.

• 2:14:06John Coogan?

  be able to hear what you were whispering.

• 2:14:09Rob Toews?

  Um, yeah.

• 2:14:10John Coogan?

  We tried the Meta Ray-Ban displays and those were able to pick up on a very low audio signal. You could kind of whisper and it would still be able to interpret it with AI into translation. Um, uh, like, is that, is that actually like a critical path in the tech tree? Or is that kind of just a side, side note? Or do you think that that, that whole tech wave will be, uh, like a big precursor?

• 2:14:33Rob Toews?

  Yeah, there's, there are a lot of different opinions on this. So wh- what you're describing, people often use the term silent speech.

• 2:14:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:14:38Rob Toews?

  Describe the category, which is exactly as you've said, like you have a sensor somewhere, you know, outside your, your skull. It can be like as part of a headphone or like a hat or something.

• 2:14:48Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:14:49Rob Toews?

  Um, that can detect the words that you're saying if you just kind of like barely whisper them, or even, even if it's sub audible, if you're just kind of like barely moving your lips and moving your tongue.

• 2:14:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:15:00Rob Toews?

  And the idea is, uh, it lets you use all, like, all the value and possibilities of voice applications, but without having to make noise.

• 2:15:08Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:15:09Rob Toews?

  And so like, when you're in public, for instance, walking down the street or on a bus or something, that like, that can be a lot more useful than, you know, you probably don't want to speak out loud to your phone.

• 2:15:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:15:17Rob Toews?

  Um, I think you, to your question of like, is this just like an intermediate, like, branch of the tech tree or not, I, I think it really depend, like, bullishness around silent speech, I think really depends on how soon you think be- true BCI will be ready for prime time because, um, silent speech isn't recording brain data directly, it's recording like downstream muscle data. And so if you can actually decode what's coming straight from the brain in an accurate way, you can kind of just leapfrog silent speech.

• 2:15:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:15:47Rob Toews?

  Um, but if you think that there are real limits to what's possible non-invasively with BCI, then silent speech might be like a more practicable path. Um, and you mentioned this company Alter Ego out of MIT recently, uh, had this really buzzy launch video that like, they frame it as basically telepathy, which is a little misleading because it's not actually reading brain data. It's like the guy's like, um, mouthing something, um, and, and kind of moving his tongue. But yeah, that is another, maybe like le- uh, more achievable near-term version of this.

• 2:16:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:16:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Chris in the chat asked, uh, what about Chinese infantry using BCI to reduce PTSD and increase reaction time? Do you know anything about that?

• 2:16:30Rob Toews?

  I haven't heard about that specifically, but there's, yeah, there's, there's no doubt in my mind. I mean, the CCP and Chinese startup ecosystem are investing a lot in BCI. In the US also, like, one of the big use cases, in general, one of the big use cases is like treating neuropsychiatric diseases. So if you can like precisely modulate brain activity, you can address a lot of health conditions like PTSD, but also like OCD, depression, Parkinson's, et cetera.

• 2:17:02John Coogan?

  It's basically a lobotomy that works, right?

• 2:17:06Rob Toews?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:06John Coogan?

  Which is like kind of crazy to think about, like, are lobotomies, was that like somewhat on the right path? It's a very hot take, nuclear take potentially.

• 2:17:15Rob Toews?

  Yeah, I mean, to be clear, like, these forms of neuromodulation, like, you're not actually taking any of the brain out the way you did with lobotomy, but yeah, lobotomies are just like, were very crude attempts to like modulate the brain.

• 2:17:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, try and turn off certain regions of the brain, and if you can do that with some sort of electrical frequency or neuromodulation, like, you're in the same realm, which is, people will want a lot of FDA trials before they run that, but I don't know, maybe over in the Chinese infantry, they're, they're

• 2:17:46Jordi Hays?

  They'll do it live.

• 2:17:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is there anything else that's going on in the BCI industry that we didn't cover? That, like, where all this goes next? Are we, like, it's certainly not a trend. I guess the big, the big question for me is like, how do you apply the lens of what we're seeing in AI to the BCI world, especially with regard to the fact that we might at some point be on a scaling, like, on a scaling curve? And we've kind of seen this with, like, Tesla's now doing like large-scale training runs for self-driving technology. Google just did the Celta Sentence project on the Gemma 3 models, and you can see that they're starting to scale that up, but they're not at like, we need to build a one gigawatt

• 2:18:31John Coogan?

  cluster for AI and bio. And I doubt that any of the BCI companies are like, we need a one gigawatt data center to do our training, because they don't even have the data yet. So it feels like we're still really early, but is that the right lens to be, to be tracking this through? Should we just be looking at like, how much electricity is going to be going into the training run? And then we'll know that it's actually working?

• 2:18:53Rob Toews?

  Yeah, I do think like you often hear people comment how they're like, we keep discovering new data modalities, like there are more and more modalities than people realize like there's language and image and audio and video, but like biology isn't, there's a lot of modalities there and robotics and so forth. I do think neural data, brain data is a new modality that we're just right at the very beginning phases of starting to research into. And so there really haven't been any large scale efforts to build foundation models for brains as you're describing. I do think that that's inevitable. But I also think like, I think it's, I think this stuff is really relevant for the trends we're seeing in AI because I do think this is the inevitable next way in which humans interface with AIs.

• 2:19:38Rob Toews?

  And you can imagine like basically having a BCI that is connected to, you know, whatever the latest AI model is where rather than having to pull out your phone and like type a question into chat GPT, you can just, you know, think something and the answer will surface in your mind. Or if you're like brainstorming in your own head, you'll have like a thought partner there that's brainstorming with you. You know, you'll be able to instantly communicate with others. Like there, once you start kind of playing out the possibilities of what could happen if there are BCI's at scale, it does really change the way humans like interact with information, basically.

• 2:20:15John Coogan?

  Sure, Elliot Yudkowsky loves this. It's fantastic. It is exciting though. And I appreciate you coming on the show and

• 2:20:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thanks for breaking it down.

• 2:20:23John Coogan?

  Break it all down. Have a great weekend. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:20:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thanks.

• 2:20:26Rob Toews?

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 2:20:27Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:20:28John Coogan?

  Bye. Let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive makeups, number one ranking on G2. Tyler, are you gonna get a BCI intern challenge? Get the Utah Array installed. Can we pull up a picture of the Utah Array and put it in the timeline?

• 2:20:45Jordi Hays?

  It is very scary looking.

• 2:20:46John Coogan?

  You've seen it? You've seen this thing? It is just straight up spikes in your head. It's just a few wires. I feel like

• 2:20:54Jordi Hays?

  Like most protein powders, it gives you brain damage.

• 2:20:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, this thing. Yeah, this thing. This feels like just one notch forward from just actually getting a lobotomy. But it's a rough looking device, but I guess it actually worked in some ways. They got some data. But, you know, I've often said that I would be, I wouldn't be the first person to go on the rocket to the moon or to Mars, but I'd be like number five or 10, as long as the first couple of people make it back, I'm good. What about you? What number of person do you want to be? Do you want to be the first person with the?

• 2:21:27Jordi Hays?

  Millionth.

• 2:21:27John Coogan?

  You want to be the millionth?

• 2:21:29Jordi Hays?

  A million.

• 2:21:29John Coogan?

  Neuralink customer.

• 2:21:31Jordi Hays?

  Billion.

• 2:21:31Speaker 04

  I'm probably in the first, uh, first 50,000, I would say.

• 2:21:35John Coogan?

  First 50,000.

• 2:21:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, there's an interesting thing.

• 2:21:37Jordi Hays?

  What?

• 2:21:38Speaker 04

  Speaking of like doomers, like I don't know if it's Eliezer himself, but a lot of people have said like one possible solution to like the kind of doom scenario is that it's like the merge. Like that would actually be, prevent like the, you know, AIs taking over because like.

• 2:21:51John Coogan?

  We become the AIs. They can't take us over if we're them.

• 2:21:55Speaker 04

  Yeah. Jordi, what number are you?

• 2:21:57John Coogan?

  You're gonna wait 100 or 1 million?

• 2:22:00Jordi Hays?

  Big.

• 2:22:01John Coogan?

  Big number.

• 2:22:02Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna need a bigger gong for my number.

• 2:22:04John Coogan?

  For your number? You gonna get up there? I don't know. I mean, I've talked to Nolan from Neuralink. He seems like he's having a great time with it. He gave me a good review. I'm down. Wire me up.

• 2:22:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the value right now, from what I've heard.

• 2:22:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm pretty, I'm pretty quick with the mouse and keyboard right now. So I don't necessarily need the feature that it's offering.

• 2:22:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I don't necessarily need you to know my, I mean, I'm sure you can, they'd be able to build the right user experiences around this. But my first thought to a question is not necessarily my, my best thought, right? And so if we're sitting here prepping the show and we're just having this instant communication, it's just like our worst take going this way and then a bad take against a bad take going back.

• 2:22:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, you would need a lot of translation.

• 2:22:53Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:22:54John Coogan?

  But imagine puppeteering Adio with your, with your BCI. That could be the future customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. Can you imagine? So a lot of these companies, they, you know, a common tagline right now is, you know, Adio is the AI native CRM. Imagine when the BCI era, when AI is old news, you don't want to put that on your landing page. BCI is the new hot keyword. So you say, we're the BCI native CRM that builds, scales and company, grows your company to the next level. I'm excited for all the landing pages to update to BCI native. That's what I want. Uh, I also want you to get an eight sleep and Jordy, uh, I heard you had a rough night. I think you gotta get a sound effect ready for me because I got a 93.

• 2:23:39John Coogan?

  I slept for seven hours and 25 minutes. Let's go.

• 2:23:41Jordi Hays?

  You got a 47, four hours, 28 minutes.

• 2:23:45John Coogan?

  And, and dinner last night was in Malibu. I thought you just went right home, but, uh, you know, the rough nights come for us all from time to time.

• 2:23:51Jordi Hays?

  Left late.

• 2:23:52John Coogan?

  Eric Jong says, all according to plan. He is highlighting the fact that, uh, all of his, everyone with the same name as him is absolutely.

• 2:24:01Jordi Hays?

  They're either building, cooking, or at thinking machines or open AI.

• 2:24:04John Coogan?

  It's a good time to be Eric Jong. Uh, congrats to.

• 2:24:07Jordi Hays?

  Legends.

• 2:24:08John Coogan?

  Uh, you.

• 2:24:08Jordi Hays?

  Legends. We, we still have to do the Eric Jong show.

• 2:24:11John Coogan?

  Oh, and this is, Eric Jong is quote tweeting a different Eric Jong. I love it. They're going back and forth on the timeline.

• 2:24:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we gotta get all of them on the show.

• 2:24:19John Coogan?

  We do. Eric Jong guy. You're all invited. Talk about open AI, thinking machines, cooking and building.

• 2:24:25Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, can you, can you work on this? This seems like a good.

• 2:24:27John Coogan?

  Invite them all. We want, we want the six, the six up, all of them.

• 2:24:32Jordi Hays?

  Um, Logan Robinson says, when Walmart jets take off for store visits, no one but the pilot knows where they're going. I wonder if they have them all blindfolded. Rumor is, rumor is you're only told a few things to help you prep for the trip, domestic or international. How many days you'll be gone, climate of the destination.

• 2:24:49John Coogan?

  What does this mean? What, what Walmart store visit?

• 2:24:52Jordi Hays?

  I imagine like people at corporate going to visit stores and seeing how they're happening.

• 2:24:56John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. They want to show off something.

• 2:24:57Jordi Hays?

  They don't want to call ahead and be like, hey, you gotta really, like this is prevent executives that are responsible, I imagine for like certain things within a store to not front run it and be like, hey, make sure things are clean. Make sure like everybody shows up on time.

• 2:25:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. They want to do a surprise visit.

• 2:25:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so for nearly everyone, including store associates, the visit is a complete surprise. Got to keep them on their toes. When these store visits happen, the goal is nearly always the same. Inspect what you expect. Scheduling these trips in secrecy makes it possible to see the stores as they truly are. No fanfare pretending. I was never lucky enough to travel in one of the jets, but the purpose of these trips was not lost on me. In my cleaning business, we do something similar. Anyways, cool concept.

• 2:25:42John Coogan?

  And beautiful jet. And if you're long Walmart, you're short Walmart, head over to public.com and enjoy multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions.

• 2:25:54Jordi Hays?

  Clyde has been at a conference, looks like he got a Lucy hat.

• 2:25:57John Coogan?

  He did.

• 2:25:58Jordi Hays?

  And a lot of other stuff.

• 2:25:59John Coogan?

  This is awesome. Wow, and some breakers there too. He got samples, he got all sorts of stuff.

• 2:26:04Jordi Hays?

  You got a Happy Dad hat?

• 2:26:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:07Jordi Hays?

  He should start a convenience store, corner store, that's only powered by conference.

• 2:26:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, you could really resell, you could really resell a bunch of this. All of these brands. Should head over to adquick.com, out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only AdQuick combines technology, out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficiency in the ad-buying across the globe. The other thing that you need to do genuinely, if you are running a CPG company, you will wind up at a lot of conferences like these. You will be talking to convenience store owners, and you'll be talking to distributors. And as much as we like to joke about luxury watches, it is a very important aspect of the job. It really, it really does. Like, when you're shaking hands with people in this particular industry, tech has been, you know, like, you gotta be an aficionado, you gotta like the craftsmanship of a particular watch.

• 2:26:57John Coogan?

  It's a unique choice in tech, but in my experience in consumer packaged goods, when you go to a CPG conference, what's on your wrist actually matters. So, if you're building a CPG business, maybe you should head over to getbezel.com because your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch in the planet, seriously, any watch. No joke, I seriously got, I became like fast friends with one of our major distributors, talking about watches. Because he was super into them. Anyway, our next guest is already in the restroom waiting room. We have Nathan from Air Street Capital coming into the studio. Nathan, good to see you. How are you doing?

• 2:27:30Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 2:27:31John Coogan?

  I was worried.

• 2:27:32Jordi Hays?

  Great jacket.

• 2:27:33John Coogan?

  It's light where you are. I was worried I was going to keep you up late because you're usually in Europe. Give us a little introduction on yourself and backstory and then tell us where you actually are if you can.

• 2:27:42Jordi Hays?

  Incredible jacket too. Jackets are a great sign of respect in our culture.

• 2:27:45John Coogan?

  It is. Nice jacket.

• 2:27:46Speaker 08

  Yeah, thank you. Thank you. It's life at the AI frontier.

• 2:27:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:27:51Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I founded a firm called Air Street Capital in Europe, investing AI companies at the very early stage. I've been doing this for about 10 years now. I spend kind of half my time in the US and in Europe. Thank you.

• 2:28:05John Coogan?

  And you're in the US now?

• 2:28:07Speaker 08

  Yeah, I'm in New York.

• 2:28:07John Coogan?

  Oh, nice. Very nice.

• 2:28:08Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:28:09John Coogan?

  Uh, well.

• 2:28:10Jordi Hays?

  On vacation or investing?

• 2:28:13Speaker 08

  No, I've actually been doing a bit of a state of AI launch tour, if you will. So I did a meetup in San Francisco last Thursday for the report drop.

• 2:28:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:21Speaker 08

  And then I did one in New York last night.

• 2:28:23John Coogan?

  And what is the state of AI?

• 2:28:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, so before we get into that, I have one.

• 2:28:26John Coogan?

  Is AI good?

• 2:28:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one question. How competitive are AI rounds at the early stage, like pre-seed, seed?

• 2:28:35Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:28:36Jordi Hays?

  Today? I know, I'm sure they're getting more competitive, but I think historically, if you could write a million dollar check at the idea stage, you had a

• 2:28:46John Coogan?

  Good chance to build a real position, yeah.

• 2:28:48Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, in that sense, I think the game has like materially changed. There's a bit of a bifurcation, like you have the sort of large lab model companies that are raising, you know, significant amounts of money. And I think those are also potentially good investments, but they definitely cater to a certain type of venture firm. And then you have the other category, which is potentially more pragmatic entrepreneurs going for less of the general purpose AI, but more looking at kind of what use case can they solve with a general purpose AI system? And and those ones are a little bit more modest. But in general, yeah, you've seen, you know, inflation of of round sizes, but also actually interest from customers to buy this stuff.

• 2:29:30Speaker 08

  And so founders just want to take a bigger swing, want to go faster. And that's what's driven a bit of the bit of the round size increase.

• 2:29:36John Coogan?

  I feel like a couple of years ago, the meme was even if you're a seed stage company, as long as you slapped AI on there, you could justify like a hundred million dollar raise because who knows, we might need to train a model. We might be doing some real AI, not just a wrapper company here. Has that dissipated as it's become clearer that to win in that game, you need hundreds of billions of dollars. And so your like your actual cost structure should look a lot less like I see GPT four is like a Capex expense, basically, like a huge training run. And for most AI companies, it's going to look a lot more like OpEx. Until they have a customer, they don't really have a big token bill. And so why do they need fifty million dollars at at seed?

• 2:30:22Speaker 08

  I ask myself this question a lot. At the end of the day, to some degree, you know, as an investor, you're not the one deciding this. You know, the market sort of pumps what they will.

• 2:30:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:32Speaker 08

  But I I think the I think the biggest frame change, and you can see this documented in the state of the airport last eight years that have been doing it, is a lot of the capabilities that you get out of the box of a model today, whether it's, you know, language, reasoning, image, video, biology. If you showed that, you know, me or others 10 years ago, we would have probably said this is magic and like not possible. And so I think there there is just so much you can do with what's available today. That is almost a gift to the startup community that now you don't have to blow, you know, their three, four, five million dollar seed budget on trying to build an AI system, collect the data and then, you know, throw it over the parapet to a to a punitive customer who says, you know what, I don't care. I've got other priorities. What is this AI thing? It doesn't even work anyway.

• 2:31:19Speaker 08

  To now you can run your whole seed budget on product market fit experiments. So it's almost like back to kind of OG seed investing, which is less about, you know, what the initial starting idea is, but how capable is the team to just run a lot of experiments and find something that works and then. And then you'll rip it when it does.

• 2:31:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. What what's the headline KPI that you like to center on in a state of AI report? I mean, you can focus on market caps, you can focus on revenue growth, you could even look at gigawatts and electrical numbers, you could look at number of H100 equivalents that are being built out. Like, there's so many different ways to ground the shape of the AI build out. Like, what do you like to focus on?

• 2:32:03Speaker 08

  Yeah. Frankly, I mean, the report is about 300 pages, so the honest answer is all the things. But but so what we started doing a few years ago is this compute index where I basically combed around the internet to try to find all documented cluster sizes for various companies. And we've been charting just how much of an expansion, you know, has happened. You know, there in the last three years, it's basically probably like 100x increase. The other cool thing we've done is like mine all open source research papers and programmatically determine which chips are used in those papers. So we can give people like a leading edge view for what researchers like in terms of hardware.

• 2:32:46Speaker 08

  And so with that, we've shown, I think, the only evidence to this to this I've seen, which is that 90% of AI research papers rely on Nvidia chipset.

• 2:32:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:56Speaker 08

  And through that kind of work, we've seen, you know, AMD start to grow a little bit as well. Out of nowhere, of course.

• 2:33:02John Coogan?

  It does seem like Nvidia or AMD is really picking up this year. We've seen this in ClusterMax from Semi Analysis. They kind of did their, I don't know, year of efficiency or in some ways and started squashing bugs. And then there's just immense pressure when there's, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars going into the next the next phase of the build out that, you know, Nvidia's margins are going to be in the in the crosshairs for sure.

• 2:33:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, and strategic alliances with with OpenAI that I think is is quite interesting because there's, you know, if you read through the through the news, you'll see that actually OpenAI has warrants in AMD at a strike price of six hundred.

• 2:33:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:48Speaker 08

  And so there's like some interesting incentives there to try to, you know, get AMD stuff to really work.

• 2:33:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:54Speaker 08

  In some degree, it's not as similar to like the relationship, I suppose, between Anthropic and AWS or Trainium.

• 2:33:59John Coogan?

  Trainium.

• 2:34:00Speaker 08

  And AWS's hardware is clearly behind, you know, the bigger competitors like Nvidia. And so they get sort of like IT help desk support from from Anthropic to make the stuff work.

• 2:34:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you think we're in a bubble?

• 2:34:15Speaker 08

  Um, there's there's probably local bubbles, you know, all the time. I think in like our little like ecosystem of of AI, there could be one in this like CapEx, you know, build out and all the interconnecting this with various companies. I think as soon as you see like Wall Street Finance get excited about something, you have to think a little bit why they're getting excited.

• 2:34:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:40Speaker 08

  But, you know, at the end of the day, I think the outputs of this bubble, if there is one, are really, really productive. And back to the point around like this technology is magic, there's there's so much value that's getting created and we've documented some of this with their mutual friends at Ramp, looking at how much your, you know, US companies are spending on AI services and that's going up, the retention is going up, you know, some of our investments in like Eleven Labs and Synthesia and others are just like growing because it's genuinely used to stuff.

• 2:35:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels very different than the bubble.

• 2:35:13Jordi Hays?

  What about, what was your reaction to that Deutsche Bank report on ChatGPT spending growth? I was reading, I looked at it and it felt hard to judge because we're looking at summer, basically.

• 2:35:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:24Jordi Hays?

  And but how did how did you process it?

• 2:35:28Speaker 08

  I mean, yeah, astronomical numbers.

• 2:35:32John Coogan?

  But I guess the question is like, is like, is uh, i- i- is the, is the TAM for paid AI subscriptions in the consumer or prosumer realm saturating? And I mean, we're certainly seeing messaging from OpenAI that says, we want to do agentic commerce. We want to increase the monetization of our free users. We want to get into advertising potentially, affiliate revenue, API business. Like, it, it doesn't just feel like there's an unlimited pool of people that will pay $200 a month for, you know, a, a great product, a magical product, but uh, there just might not be that many people worldwide that are like, sign me up for the $200 a month plan.

• 2:36:14Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I mean, a- along that notice, I was also interested in this topic. So I surveyed about 1,200 AI practitioners for the report and all this data is open access through it. And I was really surprised because 95% of the people who took the survey uh, use AI in their personal life and their professional life. And it's like 75% of them pay out of their pocket for it and 10% of people pay 200 bucks a month or more. Um, and uh, and like, this is a pretty, you know, educated crowd in North America and in Europe. But I was surprised at those numbers. And then the second thing to your point around like agentic commerce, I think that's huge. Like, we have some data in the report that shows that um, uh, conversion of e-commerce

• 2:36:59Speaker 08

  that's derived from kind of agent conversations converts at a higher rate than uh, direct. Uh, and so you, you can imagine that like the, the brands that sort of jump on this earlier and create content that agents are using to, uh, to best learn like what the right solution is to serve to their like, uh, you know, human, uh, uh, like the human that they're serving are actually gonna probably go their revenues faster. It's a bit like this recursive cycle, particularly as, you know, more and more labs and companies want to do this like reinforcement learning to improve. Improve personalization.

• 2:37:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:35Speaker 08

  I I think there's a lot of like adjacencies that one can uh one can navigate into, actually.

• 2:37:39John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:37:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, a week or so ago, the EU announced their 1.1 billion dollar plan to ramp up AI in key industries. Uh, what was your uh, obviously, people in uh, the West Coast were mo- you know, kind of mocking it. Uh, considering that, you know, the whole, the whole pa- plan was less than uh.

• 2:38:00John Coogan?

  Same old man's car, but.

• 2:38:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh, you know, their uh, met as recent uh.

• 2:38:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, a single.

• 2:38:05Jordi Hays?

  But um, but yeah, I, my, my, my reaction was like, that's, that's kind of, the, the takes were funny, but like, at least like, there is a plan.

• 2:38:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:13Jordi Hays?

  There.

• 2:38:14John Coogan?

  What is this evidence of, right?

• 2:38:15Jordi Hays?

  Um, and I'd be, I guess, like, when you read it and reacted to it, I guess, like, what was your immediate thought on what you wish the EU was doing?

• 2:38:23John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:38:24Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, my reaction wasn't too similar. Uh, there's been like a meme kind of bandied around in some of our friend group, which is back to the Derek Zoolander, like, is this a house for ants?

• 2:38:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:34John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:38:36Jordi Hays?

  Is this a plan for ants?

• 2:38:38John Coogan?

  But like, does, but like, uh, like, Europe did not build their own Google, and it was fine. I mean, they.

• 2:38:44Speaker 08

  They tried.

• 2:38:45John Coogan?

  They, they like missed out on it, but like, the natural state of the market equilibrium was that Google was built in America. And America absorbed the market cap and European investors could go invest in Google if they wanted to. And Google eventually built data centers to serve Google products locally. But there was never like, uh, we need a, we need our own thing. I- i- i- is, is the thinking around like national AI changing? Because I feel like there's a world where even if you're using some like locally trained model, like, if you're going to chat.com, like, it's still OpenAI wins.

• 2:39:21Speaker 08

  Yeah, uh, so there was uh, an initiative, I suppose I'll call it two examples. So there was one in Europe, uh, which is called Quero, which was like a government um, kind of funded initiative to try to build a, a search engine that best represented European interests because allegedly Google wouldn't, because it's an American company.

• 2:39:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:38Speaker 08

  And obviously, no one knows about it because that flopped. And then, you know, the second example is the French government not wanting to buy Palantir.

• 2:39:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:39:45Speaker 08

  For many, many years, as you, you guys will know, well, pretty well. And uh, and eventually they caved in after burning the same amount of money they'd probably have spent on Palantir and got it anyway.

• 2:39:53John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:39:54Speaker 08

  Um, and yeah, the latest example of all this, um. Uh, sort of infrastructure build out in the U. S. And in China is now every country wants to be sovereign uh with regards to A I.

• 2:40:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So so here's an interesting like is Putin the least A G I pill world leader like I I was trying to get research on how on his class on their clusters over there. They were like,

• 2:40:15Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 2:40:16Jordi Hays?

  We have eight hundred G P U's and we're running them hot. And I it's like they're basically calling the world's bluff on A I.

• 2:40:24John Coogan?

  We'll be fine.

• 2:40:27Speaker 08

  Did say that he actually wanted to have A I supremacy about a year or two ago, but but admittedly, maybe there's less evidence of that.

• 2:40:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:33Speaker 08

  I mean, to some degree also, like, you know, Yandex was a pretty amazing Russian search company, and then they've since less left and relisted on the NASDAQ as Nebius.

• 2:40:42John Coogan?

  Nebius, yeah.

• 2:40:43Speaker 08

  And one of the clouds is really crushing it because they're they have really good technology.

• 2:40:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:46Speaker 08

  Um, but yeah, I think this the sovereign thing is a little bit of um uh like a meme or a misnomer. I mean, I think it's great for um the suppliers to the technology because they have yet another like TAM to sell to. But, you know, if you're a non-American nation and you buy Nvidia chips and you buy American technology and, you know, Chinese technology, you just install it in your country. I don't necessarily see how that makes you sovereign because these things need updates. They can be switched off, basically.

• 2:41:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they have a relatively short life, too.

• 2:41:18Speaker 08

  That too, yeah.

• 2:41:18Jordi Hays?

  Useful life.

• 2:41:20Speaker 08

  Exactly. So I I I think sovereign is a little bit more of like a a a an alignment of technology agenda and political agenda. Uh, than it actually is uh the true meaning of the definition of like we control our fate when it comes to intelligence and running it.

• 2:41:38John Coogan?

  Okay, moving forward, a lot of people are nervous about cracks in the global economy, cracks in the A I economy. Uh, what are you monitoring? What like what what are you? Uh, what do you think's the most important metrics or data points or stories to be really digging into these days?

• 2:41:57Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, I think it comes back down to like the return investment, you know, cases of companies becoming more efficient, launching better services. Uh, I think the reason why I do this at all is because I think AI unlocks new use cases that weren't possible before. Um, and, uh, and so for so long as we see those examples, you know, propagate through the economy and it's still very early, um, I think we're, we're in a good shape. And we only talked about software here, but there's so much in, you know, national security and defense that's, uh, that's, uh, that needs to be solved. And many of those problems, whether it's like, you know, electronic warfare or autonomy rely on AI. And so huge TAM there also in Europe and we've got plays there with, uh, you know, with

• 2:42:41Speaker 08

  Delian and a few others, uh, companies in Europe. So, uh, I think it's like, uh, it's full speed, basically.

• 2:42:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Exciting times. Well, thank you so much for joining the show.

• 2:42:52Speaker 08

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:42:53John Coogan?

  I hope you have a good weekend. I'll talk to you soon.

• 2:42:55Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet.

• 2:42:56Speaker 08

  Thank you.

• 2:42:57John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. If you're looking to take a trip to New York or anywhere, head over to wander.com. Buy your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. Uh, we have some breaking news. Apple has entered a five-year deal to broadcast Formula One in the United States.

• 2:43:19Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:43:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. This is from Walter Bloomberg. Uh, this is, uh, very exciting. We were wondering where they were going to land. They landed with Apple and I love the Apple strategy.

• 2:43:28Jordi Hays?

  How much did they pay?

• 2:43:29John Coogan?

  Uh, we don't, I, I don't know. We should look it up, but, uh, I love the Apple strategy. Apple did the movie F1. So then you watch the movie and you're like, I want to watch the actual, the actual race. I'll, I can watch it on Apple TV.

• 2:43:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the more, the more I thought about it.

• 2:43:42John Coogan?

  Crazy, like, like it was so hard.

• 2:43:44Jordi Hays?

  Basically took, they basically took drive to survive.

• 2:43:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:43:48Jordi Hays?

  And then they made a movie with these fictional characters.

• 2:43:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:43:51Jordi Hays?

  And they, but they just like, ultimately just like, it's a barnacle economy in my opinion.

• 2:43:55John Coogan?

  Barnacle economy.

• 2:43:57Jordi Hays?

  Really is. They just like, like Drive to Survive is this whale that was making, uh, making F1 relevant in the US.

• 2:44:04John Coogan?

  I feel like.

• 2:44:05Jordi Hays?

  They just attached onto it. It's a big barnacle.

• 2:44:07John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, who's the barnacle and who's the whale? I feel like, I feel like F1 is.

• 2:44:10Jordi Hays?

  I'm saying, Apple started as a barnacle. And they're becoming the whale.

• 2:44:14John Coogan?

  Hmm. I feel like, I feel like F1 is the barnacle on Drive to Survive, honestly, in the, in America.

• 2:44:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:22John Coogan?

  Like, F1 is a barnacle on the whale that is just Netflix making reality TV out of everything, basically. Uh, but, uh, we need to figure out that.

• 2:44:32Jordi Hays?

  In the chat says, can't believe my elderly mother broke the F1 news to me before Walter Bloomberg.

• 2:44:37John Coogan?

  Let's go. Mothers tapped in.

• 2:44:39Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Ryan says five year deal worth about 750 million.

• 2:44:43John Coogan?

  Hmm. That's a.

• 2:44:45Jordi Hays?

  They were originally going out for 200 million.

• 2:44:47John Coogan?

  For one season. Yeah. So that would have been a billion dollar deal. So.

• 2:44:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:51John Coogan?

  They got, they got 75% of the way there. Not bad. Um, Tim Cook.

• 2:44:55Jordi Hays?

  Do you remember when he was trying to wave the flag?

• 2:44:57John Coogan?

  Oh, I know. I don't remember that meme, that image. I remember him being at some DJ booth. Uh, was it like John Summit was playing at F1? I, I think I saw, uh, a video or picture.

• 2:45:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I got a, I got a video. I'm dropping it in the timeline.

• 2:45:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:11Jordi Hays?

  People are saying this is the worst checkered flag of all time.

• 2:45:14John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 2:45:15Jordi Hays?

  We'll give him, we'll give him some slack because he's.

• 2:45:18John Coogan?

  He's, he's barely making it by. 75 million a year.

• 2:45:21Jordi Hays?

  He's one of the supply chain goats.

• 2:45:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. He's, uh, okay, here he is. Tim Cook. Uh, this is at F1.

• 2:45:29Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:45:29John Coogan?

  And they, and they want him to wave the checkered flag. That looks fine.

• 2:45:32Jordi Hays?

  No, it doesn't.

• 2:45:33John Coogan?

  How, how does one wave a checkered?

• 2:45:34Jordi Hays?

  That is not how you would wave.

• 2:45:36John Coogan?

  How would I wave it? Would I just more gusto? You think?

• 2:45:39Jordi Hays?

  Look at, look at how lackadaisical this way.

• 2:45:41John Coogan?

  It, it does seem like he's kind of phoning it in.

• 2:45:43Jordi Hays?

  Looks like he's going fishing.

• 2:45:45John Coogan?

  It does. Yeah.

• 2:45:46Jordi Hays?

  He's at the, the finish line of a Formula One race and he looks like he's going out for, trying to catch some trout or something.

• 2:45:54John Coogan?

  Wow. So, so-

• 2:45:56Jordi Hays?

  But he got the deal done.

• 2:45:58John Coogan?

  But if they, if they hadn't done this, and they're, instead of spending a hundred and fifty million dollars a year on F1, they could have tripled Tim Cook's pay package. Which one do you think, a more, a more incentivized Tim Cook could potentially create more value? Whi- which would you do?

• 2:46:13Jordi Hays?

  He was so embarrassed by the, the fishing-

• 2:46:16John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 2:46:17Jordi Hays?

  Inspired flag, he's like, I'm gonna, I wanna own it all.

• 2:46:21John Coogan?

  I wanna own it all.

• 2:46:21Jordi Hays?

  I wanna own it all, I wanna shut it down.

• 2:46:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:46:23Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna dr- I'm gonna drive the sport into the ground.

• 2:46:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:46:25Jordi Hays?

  And he might get more satisfaction out of that than a higher salary.

• 2:46:28John Coogan?

  Before we close out, we need to expand the barnacle economy taxonomy. Uh, what we need to do, so, the whales, it's obvious who the whales are. That's Anthropic, that's the hyperscalers, that's OpenAI, that's the foundation model labs, right? They're the whales, they're growing massively, they're putting up huge numbers. And so, the barnacle can be two things. It can be, one, the company that sells to the whale, or it can be merely a company that sells something that buys from the whale. And so I feel like we need two different, two different terms. The barnacle economy specifically, uh, like the training data providers, right? That feels barnacle economy. But the AI for lawyers, that does not feel barnacle, right?

• 2:47:11John Coogan?

  Because they have to go out and win customers in the legal-

• 2:47:15Jordi Hays?

  I think if you can swap out the underlying intelligence, you're not a barnacle, basically.

• 2:47:20John Coogan?

  You're shark.

• 2:47:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:21John Coogan?

  Shark economy.

• 2:47:22Jordi Hays?

  And, and ultimately, they don't have to sell to the, to the whale.

• 2:47:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. They, they buy from the whale.

• 2:47:27Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:47:28John Coogan?

  So, the shark, the shark buys from the whale and then goes off. You might have a Nobel on your hands here with barnacle theory. It's happening. Uh, well, uh, is there any other breaking news?

• 2:47:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Bloomberg this morning, or I think it was yesterday-

• 2:47:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:47:45Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, Cantor is trying to do this private raise for Tether at a five hundred billion dollar valuation, but Bloomberg reports that Cantor invested six hundred million in a convertible note for five percent stake in Tether a year ago. A twelve billion dollar valuation for Tether. Now Cantor is trying to tell investors that Tether is worth forty-two times more in just one year. Um, and when Cantor is obviously conflicted as a five percent owner, yeah, that ain't happening. Um, yeah, I mean, the- Uh, you know, a stablecoin leader is going to be worth a lot more after the regulatory changes this year, but yeah, there's also a lot more competition. So.

• 2:48:25John Coogan?

  What's Circle at right now? 30 billion? Uh, so yeah, I mean, uh, 15 times the, the, the, the price of Circle might be, might be high. I don't really know. I know Tether's a great business, so, uh, I wouldn't be surprised if they get a, a, a major up round done. Um, in other news.

• 2:48:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess, I guess that, so what's the current market cap of USDC is 75 billion?

• 2:48:49John Coogan?

  Well, is that, is that for the token or is that the actual Circle?

• 2:48:52Jordi Hays?

  That's a token itself.

• 2:48:53John Coogan?

  Circle, the company is 30 billion market cap. And so.

• 2:48:56Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, so here's the, here's the issue.

• 2:48:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:59Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Circle has.

• 2:49:00John Coogan?

  Wildly different economics, right?

• 2:49:01Jordi Hays?

  Wildly different economics. They, they have to pay a large amount of their revenue out to Coinbase and I'm sure other exchanges.

• 2:49:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:49:09Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, Tether is at 185 billion of market cap.

• 2:49:14John Coogan?

  So three times the size with, with better economics potentially, like 500 billion doesn't seem that crazy to me. I don't know. I, I, I haven't done any of the actual math.

• 2:49:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The question is how, how durable is the?

• 2:49:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Especially when, uh, everyone's going to be having their Kohl's cash soon.

• 2:49:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:30John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 2:49:31Jordi Hays?

  Nanas in the game.

• 2:49:32John Coogan?

  Well.

• 2:49:33Jordi Hays?

  Bridge obviously wants to create a lot more.

• 2:49:35John Coogan?

  Zephyr has a post here. Big contract. Chinese actuator component supplier, Sanhua Intelligent Controls is rumored to have secured a $685 million order from Tesla for Optimus. Sanhua's stock surged 10% to the daily limit following the news going viral while other actuator suppliers also saw significantly.

• 2:49:55Jordi Hays?

  They put a daily limit on how much?

• 2:49:57John Coogan?

  That's extremely un-American. I don't like that at all. Uh, Matt Fried says Tesla not building their own actuators is the least mission-driven thing I've heard all year. I don't know. I mean, there's, it's so early.

• 2:50:08Jordi Hays?

  What does this say about Tesla's timelines on like actual humanoid value though? Because if they were thinking like.

• 2:50:14John Coogan?

  More prototype at this point? So you shop from where?

• 2:50:17Jordi Hays?

  I was going to say the opposite of like, if you felt like you were have five years until you were actually going to be.

• 2:50:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:22Jordi Hays?

  Selling these to people, maybe you would just build your own if you were trying to sell them and get them out.

• 2:50:28John Coogan?

  Today.

• 2:50:29Jordi Hays?

  In, in the world faster.

• 2:50:31John Coogan?

  Have time to build the actuator facility in America.

• 2:50:33Jordi Hays?

  I gotta spend over half a billion with a rival.

• 2:50:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know. In other news, Ian Goodfellow is

• 2:50:41Jordi Hays?

  Crazy, deterministic.

• 2:50:43John Coogan?

  I've met him. He signed a book that he wrote on deep learning for me. It's in the Museum of Business History and Technology History. More of what my colleagues and I have been working on in AI for Fusion is public now. Why are we clapping? We're announcing a research collaboration with CFS Energy, one of the world's nuclear, leading nuclear fusion companies, Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

• 2:51:07Jordi Hays?

  Deep Mind is goaded.

• 2:51:08John Coogan?

  This is actually crazy. Together, they're helping speed up the development of clean, safe, limitless fusion power with AI. Yeah, awesome to see Google working in fusion. Obviously, Sam Altman's a believer with Helion. We've had a number of fusion founders on the show. It's one of those technologies that's always been 10 years away, but feels less than 10 years finally. We are, we are making some progress. What's your fusion take?

• 2:51:32Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm very proficient, but in other like Deep Mind news, apparently Gemini 3 is actually slated for December. So there were some rumors of like maybe next week. But now there's some people saying it's actually.

• 2:51:44John Coogan?

  Add 30 days to the singularity counter. This is just not going to happen, is it? When, when is AGI coming? This is, this is, this is the worst news I've.

• 2:51:54Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, but it will be a nice Christmas.

• 2:51:56John Coogan?

  I was saying December 25th. They got it. They got a lot of December 25th.

• 2:52:00Jordi Hays?

  My kids are getting Gemini.

• 2:52:01John Coogan?

  They gotta, they gotta do it December 25th. You know, the, the VR headsets, they always like rocket to the top of the App Store. That's what I want to see.

• 2:52:09Jordi Hays?

  My kids are getting a box of tokens.

• 2:52:12John Coogan?

  Box of tokens. We can close with Will Manitis potentially. He's got a bunch of stuff. Well, I mean, there's.

• 2:52:19Jordi Hays?

  I just wanted to give it up for Stargate UAE. It's taking shape. We got a video in here. We should try to pull this up. Led by Cosna, this 1 gigawatt AI infrastructure cluster is a cornerstone of the 5 gigawatt UAE US AI campus in Abu Dhabi, a key part of building the intelligence grid. The digital backbone, enabling secure, sovereign, and I don't know, AI, because it's cut off, but we can see this video here.

• 2:52:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, very cool.

• 2:52:51John Coogan?

  Will Manaus says, if you're a young person interested in going deep on weird things, basically, the only good advice is that you should be 1,000x more commercial. Someone will get very rich by monetizing the things you figure out. There's no reason that person shouldn't be you. That's good.

• 2:53:05Speaker 04

  Good.

• 2:53:05Jordi Hays?

  Um, well.

• 2:53:07John Coogan?

  Andre Karpathy, uh, dropped a podcast with, uh, Dwarash Patel. It's a banger.

• 2:53:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I listened to the first like 20, 25 minutes.

• 2:53:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:15Speaker 04

  Just a banger so far.

• 2:53:16John Coogan?

  Perfect for the weekend. Go enjoy it. TVPN is off. We do have a diet TVPN product now.

• 2:53:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. There's one, uh, quote that, uh, I guess Nick, uh, was, was calling out. Nick, obviously, uh, is more Grok aligned.

• 2:53:30John Coogan?

  Love.

• 2:53:30Jordi Hays?

  But he said, uh, he was quoting.

• 2:53:32John Coogan?

  Independent researcher.

• 2:53:34Jordi Hays?

  He's Grok's most loyal soldier.

• 2:53:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:53:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he was quoting Altman, um, earlier. It said 2025 is the year of AI agents.

• 2:53:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:43Jordi Hays?

  Think he could still defend that with codex, but certainly we're not seeing maybe eight, the agents that, that we were all super excited about, right? Deep research is an agent.

• 2:53:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:53Jordi Hays?

  Coding agents.

• 2:53:55John Coogan?

  I haven't booked a flight with AI yet.

• 2:53:57Jordi Hays?

  Yes. Karpathy says, I was triggered by that over prediction. More accurately, it's the decade of agents.

• 2:54:03John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:54:04Jordi Hays?

  So much work to be done.

• 2:54:05John Coogan?

  Let's go. Humans in the loop for another decade? We got this.

• 2:54:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, that, that's like normal.

• 2:54:13John Coogan?

  What do you think? Yeah, more or less. You, you keep being like, we're just on track. Superintelligence right around the corner.

• 2:54:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, we are. I mean, it's always hard. It's like, what is, what do you mean by agent? Like, what, what can actually do in 10 years? I feel like, like.

• 2:54:27Jordi Hays?

  What have agents done for you today?

• 2:54:29Speaker 04

  Uh, wrote me some code.

• 2:54:31John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 2:54:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:54:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I, and I, and yeah, I agree that I can, I, I think this was the year.

• 2:54:38John Coogan?

  The year of coding agents. The year of coding agents.

• 2:54:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I, I think, um, computer use is like getting better and better.

• 2:54:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:44Speaker 04

  Hopefully, we see Gemini three, like much better computer use.

• 2:54:47John Coogan?

  A good example is like when, when you made the, the video vibe reel for the Metis list, you were not able to puppeteer Premiere Pro with an agent.

• 2:54:59John Coogan?

  And that at the end of the day, that's just like clicking buttons on the computer. Like it could use FFmpeg, it could use like the control the mouse and keyboard and screen record. And like that agent isn't here and you should be able to just in natural language. Talk to an agent that then, you know, makes the cuts in Premiere Pro. And I still believe that even when we get there, you'll still need to say, I have an idea to include clips from Cheeky Pint or whatever you picked or these, these particular walkouts. But like it's not, it's not there. It's not generalized.

• 2:55:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, but that feels, that does not feel 10 years away at all. That feels like right now I could, I could build a RL environment and do that if I had enough compute in like, you know, a month.

• 2:55:44John Coogan?

  No, I just need more compute, just more compute. Oh, now you're asking for compute over there. I see how it is. Okay. Well, anyway, have a fantastic weekend, everyone. We will see you on Monday. We love you. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and have a great weekend. See you Monday. Goodbye.

• 2:56:02Speaker 04

  Cheers.