Timeline in Turmoil: Elon Clashes with Altman, Perplexity Offers $34.5B for Chrome, Apple in Elon's Crosshairs | David Risher, James Cadwallader, Devin Bhushan, Demi Guo, Eugenia Kuyda, Alex Danco, Isaiah Taylor

(00:00) - Chapter 1 (00:00) - Chapter 2 (00:08) - Timeline in Turmoil (10:45) - Elon Demands App Store Antitrust Action (17:33) - Musk Threatens Apple Lawsuit (26:17) - Perplexity Offers $34.5B for Google Chrome (43:47) - NVIDIA Buys Back into China Markets (01:03:14) - David Senra Call In (01:17:42) - UFC Moves From PPV to Paramount Streaming (01:31:52) - Timeline (01:45:47) - Demi Guo, co-founder and CEO of Pika, discusses the company's focus on developing an AI video generation app designed for everyday users to create expressive and emotional content. She highlights the recent launch of their human performance model, enabling users to generate videos by taking a selfie and adding speech or song, emphasizing the app's goal to foster human connections through AI-generated content. Guo also addresses the importance of balancing expert input and user feedback in refining their models, aiming to make high-quality video creation accessible to all. (01:57:46) - Eugenia Kuyda, CEO of Replika, discusses the evolution of AI companions over the past decade, highlighting the challenges users face when AI models are updated, leading to emotional distress due to changes in their AI friends' personalities. She emphasizes the importance of maintaining consistency in AI companions to preserve user trust and emotional connections. Kuyda also addresses the ethical responsibilities of AI developers in managing user relationships with AI, underscoring the need for careful consideration when implementing technological advancements. (02:19:43) - David Risher, CEO of Lyft and co-founder of Worldreader, discusses his journey from joining Lyft's board in 2021 to becoming CEO in April 2023, emphasizing his focus on customer obsession and operational excellence to revitalize the company. He highlights initiatives like Women+ Connect, driver earnings guarantees, and Lyft Silver to differentiate Lyft in the rideshare market. Risher also shares his vision for integrating autonomous vehicles into Lyft's platform, advocating for a hybrid network that combines human drivers and self-driving cars to enhance customer experience. (02:43:18) - James Cadwallader, CEO of Profound, announced the company's successful closure of a $35 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital. He discussed the evolving landscape of AI search, emphasizing the shift from traditional SEO to AI visibility, and introduced Profound's new 'workflows' feature designed to help brands proactively manage their presence in AI-generated content. Cadwallader also highlighted the growing importance for brands to adapt to AI-driven consumer interactions, noting that AI is becoming a critical marketing channel. (02:55:53) - Devin Bhushan, Founder and CEO of Squint, discusses the company's recent $40 billion Series B funding round and its mission to enhance manufacturing efficiency through AI-driven solutions. He explains how Squint captures expert knowledge to create standard operating procedures, using computer vision and augmented reality to guide operators and ensure task accuracy. Bhushan highlights the platform's impact, noting a Fortune 500 customer who reduced task completion time by 50%, and mentions Squint's global reach, working with companies like Pepsi and Michelin in the U. S. and abroad. (03:01:55) - Alex Danco, a seasoned writer and former Shopify employee, has joined Andreessen Horowitz to elevate the firm's written content. In his conversation, he emphasizes the enduring value of crafted writing in the age of AI-generated text, highlighting its role in transferring power and legitimacy from writer to reader. Danco also discusses the potential of speechwriting to articulate core messages, underscoring the importance of clear communication in venture capital. (03:14:48) - Isaiah Taylor, founder of Valar Atomics, discusses the company's development of 'gigasites'—large industrial hubs housing numerous small modular reactors (SMRs) designed to produce substantial energy efficiently. These reactors will generate high-temperature heat to synthesize carbon-neutral hydrocarbon fuels, such as jet fuel and gasoline, by combining hydrogen from water with captured CO₂, aiming to offer a cost-effective alternative to traditional oil refining. Taylor emphasizes that this approach not only addresses energy demands but also contributes to environmental sustainability by reducing reliance on fossil fuels. 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 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.

• 0:00James Cadwallader?

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today's Tuesday, August 12th, 2025. We are live from the TVP in UltraDome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Jordy, what is going on in the timeline?

• 0:10Jordi Hays?

  We got a red flag.

• 0:11John Coogan?

  We got a red flag on the play. The timeline is in turmoil. Elon Musk and Sam Altman are fighting. Mom and dad are fighting. Mom and dad are fighting. Shots fired. This all started because of Apple, actually, not OpenAI, not X, not the everything app, but Apple and the and the iOS charts. So this started with Elon Musk posting, "Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach number one in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. XAI will take immediate legal action." Well,

• 0:54John Coogan?

  the the community notes section took immediate action and added a number of extra context that they thought people might want to know. First, in January of 2025, DeepSeek reached number one overall in the App Store, similar to how Ramp is our number one sponsor on this show. Time is money. Save both. Easy years corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place, folks. Go to ramp.com. And just one month ago, on July 18th, 2025, Perplexity reached number one overall in India's App Store. That's interesting. I didn't realize that.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  And Grok has hit number one in Japan.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  Oh, that's right. Yeah.

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  Probably a number of factors contributing to that.

• 1:33John Coogan?

  So most of the AI apps live in the in the productivity section. So that must have been in that. But it's odd because it's like, we need a whole new set of of of categories for the new AI apps. I feel like they should have their own category immediately. What are all the categories? I mean, productivity, I feel like that's everything from like spreadsheets to ChatGPT. Like, it's a pretty broad. It's a pretty broad category. And and so, I mean, Apple probably needs to redo the the the categories. Where even are the categories? I feel like you can't. I feel like they're hard to find these days. They have editor choice apps, which we'll get into because, okay, so browse categories. They have Apple Vision Pro apps at the top.

• 2:15John Coogan?

  That's an odd choice for the iPhone version of the App Store. Then Apple Watch apps, then AR apps, then books, business, developer tools, education, entertainment, finance, food and drink.

• 2:28John Coogan?

  Food and drink gets its own camera.

• 2:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm looking at the global top charts right now are global for the US. So across all the different categories. And right now, ChatGPT is number one. Number two is tea on her dating advice, which I'm assuming.

• 2:40John Coogan?

  Wait, there's a new tea app?

• 2:42Jordi Hays?

  Which is helping men date safe.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, so it's the men version?

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  The male version of the tea app. Uh, it is.

• 2:49John Coogan?

  It's men's cereal, but for the tea app.

• 2:51Jordi Hays?

  Rated, but it is number one in lifestyle and number two on the overall charts. Number three is tea dating. Four is threads, which apparently just crossed 400 million monthly active users.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  They're on a tear. Adam Mosseri is not messing around over at Meta HQ.

• 3:05Jordi Hays?

  And Grok is number five.

• 3:06John Coogan?

  Okay, that's not that bad.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  This is despite Apple. I, I do believe that Elon is correct and that Apple's not including Grok in features, which, which are editorial decisions, editorial.

• 3:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, uh, yeah, I mean, Doge designer says Grok is the number two app and productivity number six overall. So why is it so hard to find? And what he's pointing out is that Elon Musk showed this. Grok is the smartest AI in the world and on the toughest tests and came first by far in coding, but is not mentioned all at all under AI by, by Apple. So Apple did an editorial view on the AI powered apps and they listed out a bunch. ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot, Lightroom, Photo and Video Editor, which, I mean, I, I use it every once in a while, but it barely has AI features. It does not compare to a foundation model. It's not a chat interface. Then you have Canva, then you have Duolingo, which of course Duolingo uses artificial intelligence

• 4:05John Coogan?

  in some ways, but you don't think of it as like a competitor to ChatGPT. So this is clearly just like, here are some fun apps and we're using the AI buzzword over at Apple.

• 4:15Jordi Hays?

  And I think it's given, given the, uh, series of PR crises that Grok has experienced in the last, call it six weeks.

• 4:23John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:24Jordi Hays?

  I think it is fairly fair.

• 4:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:26Jordi Hays?

  For the App Store to say, hey, let's let this breathe a little bit.

• 4:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:30Jordi Hays?

  We're not, we're not removing them from the App Store. We're not removing them from the rankings. They're still ranked.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:35Jordi Hays?

  But maybe let's not feature it, given that it's been saying.

• 4:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, the other, the other interesting thing is like Grok usage has to be split across X and Grok, the actual app. Like I bet, I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of actual prompts or tokens flow through X, the everything app. Like that's certainly how I use Grok. When I use it, I usually start with a post, click the Grok button, then I'm going back and forth a little bit there. And then also, they actually have a pretty awesome flow where now on any image you see on X, you can press and hold and say, edit this in Grok. And then you can just type, you can just type Studio Ghibli and it just Ghibli's it right there in Grok.

• 5:22Jordi Hays?

  And they launched a feature to make, turn it into a video.

• 5:24John Coogan?

  Video, exactly. So all of those Grok tokens, all those Grok usages, that's going to feed into the X app, which again, they've always put X in news and not in social networking because I think it couldn't beat Facebook and Instagram, but it can beat like the, like the traditional news apps. So all of the different rankings are all very, it's all gamed in different ways. Some of them are momentum based, some of them are different categories. And I mean, we heard this from Nikita Beer, where he was saying that his last app that went super viral, he hid in the games section as to, those were his words.

• 6:04John Coogan?

  He hid because the game section is so crowded that people wouldn't see him climbing the rankings, but.

• 6:11Jordi Hays?

  Charts are based on acceleration broadly, not total usage.

• 6:15John Coogan?

  And there are only like 10 dominant social platforms. So if he had a ton of momentum, he'd probably be in the top 10. People would be screenshotting and being like, what is this? And it would be on Mark Zuckerberg's desk and Mark would have to be like, what's our plan to kill this? Yeah. As opposed to if you're hanging out in games next to 75 Candy Crush clones, you're, you could be doing well, but realistically, you're not, you're not really gaining that much. You're not drawing that much attention. Then at the last second, he swaps over to social networking where he actually wanted to be. And then he's at the top of the charts. Anyway.

• 6:48Jordi Hays?

  So Elon says Apple's behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach number one in the App Store. He starts getting community noted. Sam Altman fires back, says, this is a remarkable claim, claims that Elon is using.

• 7:04Jordi Hays?

  X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors. Sam starts getting community noted. Elon fires back and says, you got 3 million views on your BS post. You liar, far more than I've received on many of mine, despite me having 50 times your follower account. Elon's getting community noted, but Sam fires back, skill issue or bobs?

• 7:22John Coogan?

  Skill issue or bobs.

• 7:24Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, based off of that, Sam says, will you sign an affidavit that you never directed changes to the X algorithm in a way that hurt your competitors or helped your own companies?

• 7:32John Coogan?

  Wait, who said that?

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  This is Sam.

• 7:33John Coogan?

  Sam said it.

• 7:34Jordi Hays?

  I will apologize if so. One thing is that OpenAI has consistently dominated the narrative on X organically. Many of their-

• 7:47John Coogan?

  To some degree. I feel like, I feel like OpenAI has been more dominant just in the real world and actually Anthropic's done very well on X. And there's been this whole theme of like Claude has better vibes and big model smell and oh Claude code and stuff like-

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  I would just say, if Sam Altman puts a post up, he can put up a picture of a Death Star and get 20 million views, right? And so I don't believe that he's like shadow banned. I don't believe that anyone in OpenAI is like shadow banned or being held back in the algorithm. But somebody responded to this exchange-

• 8:21John Coogan?

  Well, really quickly, if Sam's worried about reach, he should be using Restream, coding his content all over the internet, Restream 1 livestream 30+ destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. And thank you to everyone in the chat today. Mark, Siraj, we got Taylor, David, we got a whole crew here. Techno Chief, I believe, said good morning to me. Hello, Techno Chief.

• 8:42Jordi Hays?

  Good morning.

• 8:43John Coogan?

  Good to see you. And it's fun having all the crew assemble in the chat rooms. We actually can see the chat wherever it's happening, whether it's on X or on YouTube because of Restream. So thank you to Restream. Anyway, continue.

• 8:55Jordi Hays?

  A friend just, just messaged and said, somebody tell Elon to un-shadow ban me.

• 9:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 9:00Jordi Hays?

  And I think that-

• 9:01John Coogan?

  I think I know who this is.

• 9:03Jordi Hays?

  I think it's much more likely that, that it's a skill issue.

• 9:07John Coogan?

  I think it is a skill issue for this particular person.

• 9:09Jordi Hays?

  Sam is saying here, you never know, you never know. But somebody responded- To Sam and Elon's exchange and they said Grok who's right, don't be biased. And Grok fires back and says, based on verified evidence, Sam Altman is right. Apple antitrust claim is undermined by apps like DeepSeek and Perplexity. Reaching number one in 2025. Conversely, Musk has a history of directing X algorithm changes to boost his posts and favor his interests. Per 2023 reports and ongoing probes hypocrisy noted. So we'll see.

• 9:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, but this is 4D chess because in general, people don't believe Grok because they believe it to be insane.

• 9:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, it said some wild.

• 9:49John Coogan?

  It said some crazy thing. And so if Grok is siding with Sam, people will be like, well, Grok's wrong. Elon's actually correct.

• 9:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  That's the beauty of these things.

• 9:57Jordi Hays?

  Elon is thinking, what have I created? I created a monster. This is like the child that, uh, what, what, what's the, what, what's, what's? What's that mythology where, where the child kills the?

• 10:10John Coogan?

  Oedipus Rex, of course.

• 10:12Jordi Hays?

  Yes, Oedipus Rex moment. Child coming for the, for the father.

• 10:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, we'll see how long.

• 10:21John Coogan?

  You want to play on that, on that analogy? It gets pretty weird.

• 10:24Jordi Hays?

  It gets pretty weird.

• 10:24John Coogan?

  I mean, Oedipus marries his mother.

• 10:26Jordi Hays?

  Yes, uh, but, uh, we'll see how long Grok lasts in the timeline today. See.

• 10:32John Coogan?

  We'll see, we'll see. So the, uh, yeah, the Wall Street Journal wrote it up. Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach. Uh, number one, the App Store, which features lists of top and trending apps is a key way for apps to access new customers. Apple doesn't say much about how or why it chooses particular apps to feature. Uh, among the factors it considers is usability and positive reviews and ratings. Yeah, it's definitely getting more and more complex.

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  It's just important to break out. Editorial decisions from the App Store team and true rankings.

• 11:05John Coogan?

  I mean, it, I, I really, I think a lot of people have not. Taking a tour of the modern App Store on iOS because it used to be that you just show up and there were and there was just a list of like the charts were like a few clicks away. I'm like seven clicks deep. There's an ad for just Google, I guess, in here. There's essentials that are just top games right now. Like you have to scroll and scroll and scroll. And then you go over to apps, then you can browse the categories, but even when you browse the categories, you go to productivity, it's going to give you like the, when I go to productivity, you think I'd be browsing to hit like, okay, show me the top productivity apps.

• 11:46John Coogan?

  No, it's, it's showing me an app called Sofa, a downtime organizer. Then it's showing me essential productivity apps that are selected by the App Store editors. Then the best calendar apps, best to do ads, best email apps, best focus timer, habit tracking. It's going, going, going.

• 12:02Jordi Hays?

  Well, the big question is how much, how much discovery is actually happening in the App Store? Is this where people are actually finding?

• 12:08John Coogan?

  Finally, I got to the top charts, but it's seven, it's seven clicks deep. And so, yeah, if I go to free apps, it's ChatGPT number one, then Grok number two, then Microsoft Authenticator number three, AGI. I'm seeing it for Microsoft Authenticator.

• 12:21Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't get enough love. No, but the question here is, are people discovering various LLMs through TikTok? And X and Instagram, various platforms. Is that where discovery is happening?

• 12:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:34Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure there's some discovery happening in the App Store, but it has to be a very small fraction of the downloads being driven are actually driven by the editorial decisions from the App Store.

• 12:45John Coogan?

  Of course, of course. Yeah. And, and games don't even show up in the top, like it's not, uh, games are not, it's a completely separate tab. You cannot select games as one of the subcategories of apps because games are not considered apps anymore in the App Store. To answer the question about like hiding in games. Um, yeah. The other, the other question is just like, how much, how fair is it to give yourself a little boost in your app that you paid $70 billion for?

• 13:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:14John Coogan?

  Like I was thinking about this and I was saying like,

• 13:17Jordi Hays?

  Forty-four billion.

• 13:18John Coogan?

  Well, he was forty-four?

• 13:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was forty-four. It wasn't sixty-nine. I thought it was sixty-nine for some reason. That was, that was the price per share was he paid so ridiculous. Anyway, um, I was thinking about, like before the launch of Instagram Stories. I didn't have a way to share Snapchat stories on Instagram. Like you could screenshot them, but there's no sort of like native way to share a link to a story that if someone on my Instagram feed sees it, it clicks and it automatically opens in Snapchat. Like there, it was always a walled garden. And then when Instagram Stories came out, there was really no way to tie those two platforms together.

• 14:00John Coogan?

  Like in the, in the pre meta era, there was a way when you shared a post on Instagram to check a box and automatically share it to your Twitter. And it would not just share a link, it would share the actual photo with the comment. And it would work as a native post on X. And it could, you know, not really go viral, but it could, it could, it existed on Twitter as like a first-class citizen in the sense that the image was there, there was no link. It was just like you had just actually opened the app, posted the same photo with proper crosspost, right?

• 14:40John Coogan?

  And then eventually, once Facebook bought Instagram, Twitter had to respond by breaking that integration. So early on Twitter had this very, this was like the Adam Bain era, like the early, back the Dick Costolo era. Twitter had this idea of like, we're going to be the command line for your life. And there was this idea of like, I'm going to be able to tweet at you to send money to you. Like the everything app idea is something that's over 13 years old at this point, maybe 15 years old at this point. Like the Twitter executives were thinking about this a long time ago, like being able to tweet money at you, being able to like use, use Twitter as kind of this like substrate or this like API for all sorts of things. Other apps would be built on top of Twitter.

• 15:24John Coogan?

  There was TweetDeck and Tweety Bird and like all these different, like the mobile app was by an independent developer. And they just didn't, and they were like, why would we need one? We just developed the protocol.

• 15:34Jordi Hays?

  Reddit did this too.

• 15:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, you need one because you want to stuff ads in it, obviously. And you want to monetize it, it makes a ton of sense. And so Elon Musk killed all that, but yeah.

• 15:42Jordi Hays?

  The other challenge here is, is Grok.

• 15:46Jordi Hays?

  Has a variety of NSF W features.

• 15:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:51Jordi Hays?

  And when Apple is making editorial decisions about which apps to feature in the App Store.

• 15:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:57Jordi Hays?

  That is certainly going to be on their mind.

• 15:59John Coogan?

  We're having Eugenia from Replica on the show later today. I'm wondering if Replica, I think, is currently in the App Store with 226,000 reviews. Hasn't gotten kicked out. I'm trying to think if any other, if any other apps, so like OnlyFans, for example, does not have an app. I'm wondering if any of the, what Character AI does, right? So Apple's clearly drawn the line at like, like AI chatbots, even if they're somewhat erotic, are okay. But we.

• 16:40Jordi Hays?

  But that doesn't mean they're gonna, that doesn't mean they're gonna feature.

• 16:42John Coogan?

  They're not gonna promote it.

• 16:43Jordi Hays?

  To the average person on the App Store.

• 16:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, that's absolutely correct.

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  So, and then again, I think it's very hard to say how Apple makes these editorial decisions.

• 16:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:55Jordi Hays?

  But it's very possible that they are talking with people on the Apple team and being like, what apps do you like?

• 17:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  What apps are you using and making decisions that way, right? I think, I think part of Grok over the last month or so is like figuring out like, how do we get strong consumer adoption? Which categories are we going to get strong?

• 17:16John Coogan?

  I'll tell you how they get strong consumer adoption. SOC 2 compliance, they need to get on 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, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. No, that is a good question. How can Grok actually get consumer adoption? The companion space seems like the, maybe the right move, even if it is a little weird. But is there any other path? I mean, forking it into X and Twitter and like having it show up on every post seems like a reasonable way. I wonder, it is weird that they have two apps. I thought X was supposed to be the everything app. Like, like, why are they trying to get me to install a second app when they should maybe just say,

• 18:00John Coogan?

  "Hey, we're actually going to be the everything app. You can use Grok fully, and you're all the upgrade and you can get on Grok heavy and you can be paying $200 a month for a top-tier, the super insane level LLM, but it all exists and it's all managed within the X app that already has a lot of it, a lot of installations."

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's a challenge. Your Grok is, is uh, top or near the top of a bunch of different benchmarks. And yet that doesn't guarantee consumer adoption, right? People don't switch products because something is 20% better in this technical way, right? They develop habits.

• 18:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:39Jordi Hays?

  And the other thing, it was only a month ago, Grok or XAI announced a partnership with the Department of Defense, a $200 million contract. So that's serious. But again, you know, figuring out where they're going to ramp revenue with consumers that, when it's not just bundled into X, the social media app.

• 18:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think it, it's interesting to, to debate, like, when can a new technology be bolted on and become additive to an existing platform versus you need a new app to actually get it to work? So Facebook actually rolled out a search engine in Facebook, the Blue app, like years ago. And when you would go to search, you could search for your friends, but then you could also go and it would search the web too. And it would say, "Hey, you're searching for this thing. Uh, there's no posts about it out there, so let's just pull from the web." And they basically built a search engine.

• 19:38Jordi Hays?

  Team, pull up this post from ChatGPT.

• 19:43Jordi Hays?

  I want to see John's live reaction to it.

• 19:45John Coogan?

  Okay, let me, let me see this post. Whereas, whereas like, like Stories was something that was added on.

• 19:51Jordi Hays?

  So they, ChatGPT quoted Grok saying that Sam Altman is right and said, "Good bot."

• 19:57John Coogan?

  Good bot. Wow. Timelines in turmoil, you'll love to see it, it's a great day on the internet. But there's always, yeah, so, so I, I think there is something about like the pixel screen, the screen pixel real estate that is, that is somewhat, like, like screen pixels are, are like scarce, and you can only do so much, like, it's, it's, like, Instagram was able to add reels as a tab, integrate those into the main feed, they were able to add Stories up at the top as a little bar, and it got crowded, but no, but Instagram did not, did not see massive churn.

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  But I think that if they, I'm, I really think if they try and stuff, like, okay, yes, this is also like Claude Code, and you're going to like, do your, you're gonna do your homework in Instagram now, you're gonna do your, your, your software engineering in, in Instagram right now.

• 20:51Jordi Hays?

  Subway surfers up here, you're gonna have a chat below.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  I think people will just say no, I think it's, I think it's too, too big of a step. Whereas going from photos to videos to reels to Stories, like, all of that works within the same kind of UX, UI space, but if you try and bolt on, like, a productivity tool into a social network, it, it winds up being a little rough. And so, maybe that's the reason why Elon like realizes that like Grok has to be a separate app, because if I'm using Grok heavy to solve Olympic level math, I might not want that to happen on the Chaos timeline feed, right?

• 21:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, if, if.

• 21:31John Coogan?

  But it's an uphill battle.

• 21:32Jordi Hays?

  If you're a software engineer working at a company, and every time you, your, your boss walks up to talk to you about something, you're in X, the everything app, just scroll on the timeline, wow, coding, that might be tough, right? It might be better to be doing those, doing that coding work and, you know, with, with Grok, right?

• 21:50John Coogan?

  Put, put a spreadsheet in there, put, put a database in there, let me, let me build, let me build an entire business within the everything app. Tyler, what's your reaction today?

• 22:01Speaker 03

  Um, I think, so, so one thing I've been thinking about is like, uh, I forget who it was, but someone said like,

• 22:08Speaker 03

  as a company, you want to like, do things that your competitor, that like, go against your competitor's morals, right?

• 22:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, this was Paul Graham.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay.

• 22:14John Coogan?

  It wasn't, it wasn't morals, but it was just like, the idea of counter positioning. This idea that like, Avi Schiffman at Friend, like, he's making a product that is a wearable AI device. And if he makes it look like an Apple product, and he makes it like, oh, it's instead of an AirPod and, you know, an iPhone, it's a necklace, like, and it has Apple design language. Like, Apple will totally be able to just steamroll that by launching something very similar. Whereas if he comes out with something that has such a bizarre design, that Apple would be like, wow, if we try and copy him.

• 22:47Jordi Hays?

  And he's not trying to make it useful for anything other than being your friend, right? He's, he's, he's also counter positioning against ChatGPT, which is a tool, it's, it's not, its default state is not to be your friend. People use it that way, but, and, and in some ways, it's designed to function like that. But ultimately, um, yeah, I think he, he's found, he's carved out his own. And, and Grok did the same thing by coming out and, and like leaning really heavy into companionship, right?

• 23:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:17Jordi Hays?

  That is a, that's something that OpenAI wasn't willing to do.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  If they're gonna go like, in that like, kind of counter positioning like, idea, I think they could also, I, I could see them doing almost like a Clouly type thing. Where it's like, okay, you can use this for your homework. Like, you make it very good at like, you don't have to use like cheating per se. But I think that's like an interesting way that like, if they want to go further down that like, consumer kind of positioning.

• 23:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just, it's odd that, it feels like they're trying to do a lot right now. They're still in the exploration phase. Because I have, I mean, maybe this gets to like, the value of transfer learning in reinforcement learning. But I have it, I have a hard time believing that many people who are in the market for like a companion are like, I definitely want it to be able to ace humanity's last exam. Like, I, in fact, in fact,

• 24:06Speaker 03

  Super important to me.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  In fact, I think that you might want a companion not to be better than you at math. I think you might want a companion that just kind of like is like, oh yeah, I agree, man. Like that math problem is hard.

• 24:17Jordi Hays?

  This is a toxic friendship dynamic. People are like, I want, I want my friend to be great, but not better than me.

• 24:22John Coogan?

  Exactly. That, that's real. So they need to, they need to dumb it down. They need to be the inverse of bench hacking.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, the, the truth seeking seems.

• 24:30Jordi Hays?

  The new meta is going to be teaching your AI how to do things.

• 24:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  Teaching it history.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  Teaching it how to do your homework.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, the, the Feynman method. You teach and then you learn, you learn, it like, I would probably learn more from teaching an LLM the answer to a problem than it trying to teach me. What were you about to say?

• 24:50Speaker 03

  I was gonna say like the, the truth seeking like idea of Grok seems very much like opposed to the companion aspect. It does seem like two different ends of.

• 25:00John Coogan?

  The hero of our group chat right now is one of the greatest fabulous in history. He's a, he's a serial liar, but, but, but he's the most entertaining character.

• 25:10Jordi Hays?

  He's the court jester.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  He's the court jester of our group chat because he hallucinates more than GPT-2. And it's fantastic. And, and, and it genuinely provides a lot of value than just someone who's like, oh, I will only give you things that are 100%. I will only say things that are 100% factual. I will only say things that are definitively provable. It's like, no, he, he, he throws out a lot of wild pitches, but every once in a while, you just slam it into the outfield. Anyway.

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's switch gears.

• 25:39John Coogan?

  Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free at Figma.com.

• 25:48Jordi Hays?

  Try Figma Make.

• 25:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, should we go over to perplexity world?

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 25:53John Coogan?

  So exclusive from the Wall Street Journal, AI startup perplexity made an unsolicited long shot offer to buy Google's Chrome browser for 34.5 billion.

• 26:05Jordi Hays?

  This inspired me, John. Everybody needs to be making long shot offers. TBPN, let's, let's submit an offer to buy the Golden Gate Bridge. Privatize it.

• 26:14John Coogan?

  That's a good one. What else should we buy? What else should we buy? I don't know. It's tough.

• 26:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's, it's really, when I saw this, it's funny to think that Sundar has to go to the board for like. Probably send them an email and say like, I'm required to let you know that we've received this offer from perplexity to buy one of the crown jewels of our product ecosystem.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  I wonder, I wonder how, how real this is. Like, it seems like we would, like, the reporting is pretty loose. We can read through this Wall Street Journal article and then kind of like, dig into it a little bit more. So perplexity's offer significantly more than its own valuation, which is estimated 18 billion. Has this ever been done before? Has any tech company been able to pull off an acquisition that's bigger than their own valuation? Like,

• 27:10Jordi Hays?

  Totally. I mean, what was the, what was the slow ventures company that, that Metropolis traded and they buy?

• 27:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:18Jordi Hays?

  That was much larger, you know, basically more traditional.

• 27:20John Coogan?

  Kind of reverse merger almost?

• 27:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 27:22John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 27:23Jordi Hays?

  These things happen.

• 27:24John Coogan?

  So there's, there's also pressure. So estimates of Chrome's enterprise value vary widely, but recent ones have ranged between 20 billion and 50 billion. I have no idea how you got that. I feel like Chrome is probably more valuable than that just on, I mean, I imagine that the default search engine in Chrome has got to be as valuable as the default search engine in iOS Safari, right? And how much is Apple paying Google every year?

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  20.

• 27:52John Coogan?

  20 billion?

• 27:53Jordi Hays?

  Per year.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  I mean, you'd pay, like, you'd pay way more than 50 billion dollars to get 20 billion dollars of profit every year. It's crazy. So that feels low. I don't know where, I don't know where those estimates came from, but they are apparently under pressure. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta is weighing whether to force Google to sell the browser as a means of weakening Google's stranglehold on web search. It's so, it's so interesting that like, we're having this debate now. Google's had ninety-nine percent of the web search market for two decades. And they finally have a crack in the, in the, in the, in the foundation with ChatGPT actually eroding things, AI, LLMs kind of upending web search dominance like.

• 28:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're having, we're having James from Profound on later today, which, which is built a big business very quickly. Because consumers are now using something besides Google Search to, to do web searches.

• 28:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is like the last, this is, this is like completely the wrong time to be focused on this. Like, the ship has completely sailed, but that's kind of the, that's kind of the pace that the government operates at, so.

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the Journal says perplexity offer could be an attempt to signal to the judge that there's an interested buyer should he force a sale. I'm, I'm, I think there would be a lot of interested buyers if there was a forced sale.

• 29:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, who else would buy it? Apple?

• 29:15John Coogan?

  Meta? Microsoft? Get Bing going again?

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  Bing, it's Bing, Bing.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  Bing it. I mean, Microsoft would have a wild strategy because they'd have all the code to ChatGPT, all the OpenAI intellectual property. Like, they could do, they could do what perplexity is thinking about, right?

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, what does this say, what does this say about, I mean, so they just launched the perplexity Comet browser.

• 29:43John Coogan?

  Daniel says Chrome's worth at least ninety to a hundred and twenty, Billy. I agree. I, I, I think twenty is, twenty's too low.

• 29:51Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, so they, so perplexity just launched Comet. We had Arvind on the show. He said this is a big, important bet for the company.

• 29:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:58Jordi Hays?

  If you're, if you just launched a browser and now you're saying that you want to buy to compete with Chrome, and now you're trying to buy Chrome.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:09Jordi Hays?

  What does that say about the state of your new product?

• 30:14John Coogan?

  Distribution is king.

• 30:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:16John Coogan?

  It's very clear that that even if you built a better product, the best product is not going to win. And we see this with the with the LLMs like like the the leaderboards and the vibes shift constantly. But the consumer adoption is just around chat. Everyone just uses chat. That's the one that's broken through. That's the one that people are familiar with all over the United States and all over the world. And so it's it's very hard to break through, even if even if perplexity can like rocket to the top of the App Store in India for a little bit. Like, it's hard to hold on to when when the chat GPT snowball is just growing bigger and bigger every single day.

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  Much like the graphite snowball. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Get started for free. Graphite dot dev.

• 31:03John Coogan?

  Is there a is there a poly market on perplexity? By the way, can you look that up? I will.

• 31:08Jordi Hays?

  Will perplexity acquire Chrome in 2025?

• 31:11John Coogan?

  What's the what's the market on it?

• 31:13Jordi Hays?

  When I posted about it earlier, it was at 12%. And it's and I said 12 seems quite hot. And it's now at 3%.

• 31:23John Coogan?

  It went down even though they're in the journal saying they're gonna do it. They're like issuing offers.

• 31:28Jordi Hays?

  The market opened at 34%.

• 31:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:31Jordi Hays?

  Like 9am when the news dropped and it's now down at 3%. So.

• 31:34John Coogan?

  Wait, just today, it went from 34 down to 3. Wow, so this has basically been like debunked. Yeah, makes sense.

• 31:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, there's.

• 31:43Jordi Hays?

  I would I would put the odds of this deal happening closer to 0% than 1%.

• 31:51John Coogan?

  That sounds fair.

• 31:53Jordi Hays?

  But great way for perplexity to get.

• 31:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:57Jordi Hays?

  In the journal.

• 31:58John Coogan?

  Call me.

• 31:58Jordi Hays?

  And Bloomberg.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  No, this is great for SEO. It definitely puts perplexity and web browser in the same keyword soup.

• 32:05Jordi Hays?

  Perplexity was also bidding on TikTok.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:08Jordi Hays?

  Earlier this year.

• 32:08John Coogan?

  Arvin loves a long shot bet, a long shot bid.

• 32:13Jordi Hays?

  I invited, I invited, I invited him on the show this morning. He, I don't think they want to.

• 32:18John Coogan?

  He's not ready for press.

• 32:19Jordi Hays?

  Not ready to chat, but we love a, we love a size lord, long shot offer.

• 32:24John Coogan?

  Keep throwing these out. More, more startups should do this. Google hasn't indicated a willingness to sell Chrome. In testimony this year, Pichai told the judge that forcing the company to sell it or share data with rivals would harm Google's business, deter it from investing in new technology and potentially create security risks. Chrome has roughly three and a half billion users worldwide. It's like, it's like perplexity has probably like millions of users, but it's just gonna take decades, even at reasonable growth rate to hit three billion. It's just so many people. And accounts for more than 60% of the global browser market. That's lower than I thought it would be.

• 33:02John Coogan?

  Founded in 2022, San Francisco, San Francisco-based perplexity recently released its own web browser called Comet to some of its users. Tyler, you've demoed these.

• 33:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:12John Coogan?

  What do you daily drive in these days in terms of the web browser?

• 33:15Speaker 03

  I'm using old reliable Chrome.

• 33:17John Coogan?

  You're using Chrome?

• 33:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I don't know. None of the agent browsers really seemed very helpful to me.

• 33:22John Coogan?

  Have you churned from Clue, from Cluey too?

• 33:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I, I started using that like, you know, right after the show ended.

• 33:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I'm not doing interviews.

• 33:32John Coogan?

  I was thinking about like the Cluey pattern.

• 33:35Jordi Hays?

  What if Tyler was like, been using Cluey every day, hours a day. We're like, wait, you've been interviewing with other companies?

• 33:44John Coogan?

  Well, that's the thing is that I, when I was thinking about Cluey, I was actually wondering like if we ran the show through Cluey and we had like this, just this idea of like streaming audio essentially and streaming pixels and then just somewhat random LLM queries firing all the time. Like, is that a good pattern versus?

• 34:07John Coogan?

  Chat GPT where you have to decide, okay, this is the time to query it. And so when I think about like the going to you and saying like the pull the poly market up on perplexity or tell me the market share for Chrome. Like if we could have something like clearly running and it's just a big screen there that I can see. And it's just pulling up answers to questions that it thinks we're about to talk about or ask or just adding context. Like that actually might be kind of useful to us. Um, but I don't know if a tool like that exists. It also just might be so sloppy and so noisy and so inference heavy that it just doesn't math out. I don't know. Uh, are there any, uh, are there any value or like what, what, what's actually seeing breakout for you in terms of AI adoption?

• 34:51Speaker 03

  Uh, I mean, most of my time using AI tools is just like coding stuff.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  So it's like Claude code, curse a little bit. Sometimes I just go raw chat GPT.com.

• 35:01John Coogan?

  Oh, that's raw?

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, just straight prompt like.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  What about raw text file? What happened to, what happened to good old fashioned just handwritten code? Farm the table code. Apparently not.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, pastor raise code. But yeah, I don't know. I mean, like clearly I'm not like doing, I'm not doing like sales calls or like anything that really requires that kind of like interaction.

• 35:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  So not to be useful for me, but.

• 35:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder how the product will change because like the marketing is not going to stop. Like they are definitely going to keep filling that top funnel until they figure out the, the bottom of funnel and the, and the, and the churn. Um, but, uh, but I, I wonder what retention is like. I mean, I imagine that, you know, you bring in such a broad top of funnel, like there's probably people that are sticking around. There's probably people that just sign up and forget their credit cards are down and they just pay for a while. Like, like the, the, the nature of just getting someone to convert for 20 bucks a month. They don't even have a free tier, right? Like you have to pay to like get, get up and running.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  No, they do have a free tier.

• 35:58John Coogan?

  They do. Okay.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 36:02John Coogan?

  There was something, oh yeah, Tyler, did you see Vibe Sort? Someone wrote a sorting algorithm that uses L L F. You have to put in your, you have to put in your OpenAI API key. And then it just passes the random list or the array of numbers to ChatGPT and asks ChatGPT to sort it. And it just comes back with whatever it can do. And I was thinking that, have you, did you ever, did you ever have to do fizz buzz back in the day? Have you ever heard of this? Yeah, I've like heard of it. Yeah. We should, we should definitely do Vibe Fizz Buzz where it, it, it, it, it, for each, for each number between one and a hundred.

• 36:41John Coogan?

  It queries, it queries the GPT five API to ask it, should it respond with the number fizz or buzz? The most, the most inefficient and most inference heavy fizz buzz answer possible. Anyway, back to perplexity. Perplexity told Sundar Pichai, as part of the proposed acquisition, it would maintain and support Chromium, the open source project that supports Chrome and other browsers. It also said it would continue placing Google as the default search engine within Chrome, though users could change settings. That's crazy because you would think the first thing you would do if you owned Chrome would be change the browser to mine. I'm getting those ad dollars, but I don't know.

• 37:22John Coogan?

  Maybe it's a nice olive branch in this somewhat, somewhat hypey offer. The Justice Department filed the antitrust case against Google in 2020. And just a few, five years later, in addition to their here. In addition to forcing a sale of Chrome, the judge is considering limiting Google's ability to pay to be the default search engine on devices and browsers. And requiring it to share data with rivals, among other things. In weighing potential remedies earlier this year, Meta questioned how much new AI chatbots might be whittling away at the traditional search business, of which Google has 90% market share. So 60% share in browser, but 90% in search.

• 38:00John Coogan?

  So even, even for, there's 30% of people out there that are using Firefox or Brave or, or Edge. It's Edge, right? Is the Microsoft one? Yes. But then they, they, they use Edge, but then they still set their default to Google. Because Google has dominant, or maybe, maybe they're just Google users are querying more. I'm so.

• 38:23Jordi Hays?

  Fascinated by perplexity.

• 38:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:25Jordi Hays?

  And I can't wait to see.

• 38:27John Coogan?

  It's perplexing.

• 38:28Jordi Hays?

  It's perplexing and I can't wait to see what ultimately becomes of the business. They're offering to buy TikTok, they're offering to buy Chrome, they're rumored, you know, there's rumor mill saying that Apple's kicking the tires on it. It's hard to tell where that's coming from, right? Is that just more marketing?

• 38:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:47Jordi Hays?

  Perplexity. They have, I think the last reported number or the alleged number is something like 30 million monthly actives, which is a lot.

• 38:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:57Jordi Hays?

  But it, but they have such a tiny share of overall queries.

• 39:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:02Jordi Hays?

  That it becomes, and it's just clear that, that search feels like it'll be a winner take, take all market.

• 39:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:11Jordi Hays?

  And it's, it's, they're not going, you know, two years from now, if they're sitting at 30 million monthly actives or even a multiple of that, it's hard to see it, you know, being worth, you know, significantly more than Snapchat, for example.

• 39:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I think that's why you're seeing Arvin talk about potentially maybe pivoting to B2B context with the Bloomberg thing. It feels like if you're, if you're in a winner take all market and you're, and the writings on the wall that you're not going to be the winner in that market, a B2B pivot feels like a decent move. You could even put kind of Anthropic in that bucket where there was a time when it was like, oh, is everyone going to switch to Claude, like the app on their phone? And then it didn't play out that way. Now they have a dominant B2B business. So you could imagine that perplexity niches down, like the perplexity interface, the perplexity ability to, to, you know, like answer questions, act as a search engine,

• 40:13John Coogan?

  that feels valuable in enterprises, it feels valuable in finance, it feels valuable in medicine, if you, if you fine tune the service for that. But it's just a very different business.

• 40:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:22John Coogan?

  So they have to go through a little bit of a, of a, of a rebuild or kind of readjustment, maybe, I don't know.

• 40:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, at, at the end of the day, when Elon bought X, it took, it took someone like Elon to be able to put together the amount of. Equity and debt to buy that business.

• 40:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:44Jordi Hays?

  And he had to put a lot of his own capital on the line. And in this situation, and that was buying a business that generated a lot of advertising revenue. Right. It wasn't, it wasn't known as, it was a bit of a dog in some ways. Right. Maybe, maybe never was living up to its full potential. Where in this case, if you offered to buy Chrome and then in theory, you have to create an entire new economic model for the business because you don't have the Google Ads engine built into it. It's, it's hard to see. It feels like basically impossible to pull that amount of cap, to, to find people.

• 41:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Call me when the Morgan Stanley associates are losing sleep.

• 41:30Jordi Hays?

  Good point.

• 41:30John Coogan?

  Unless, unless Morgan Stanley is, is burning the midnight oil.

• 41:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:35John Coogan?

  Uh, this deal probably isn't happening.

• 41:37Jordi Hays?

  I'm remembering that exchange between Allison and Musk basically saying, how much Allison's like, how much should I do? A billion? And Elon goes, I don't know. I think you should do like two.

• 41:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's great. Who's, who, yeah. So, I mean, Arvin's got to, got to find some Elsens.

• 41:54Jordi Hays?

  You gotta get Larry.

• 41:55John Coogan?

  Get, get a few of those guys on board for sure.

• 41:57Jordi Hays?

  Thirty-four Larrys.

• 41:58John Coogan?

  Well, we have some big news in the TVPN world. We are officially partnered with Waymo via Spotify. Because Spotify has a partnership with Waymo. So you can listen to TVPN in Waymo's now.

• 42:09Jordi Hays?

  Now what?

• 42:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:10Jordi Hays?

  Big.

• 42:10John Coogan?

  This just dropped.

• 42:11Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 42:12John Coogan?

  There's a new upgraded Spotify in Waymo launching today. Uh, Waymo put out the post two hours ago. You can connect your accounts and you can vibe. You can listen to TVPN in your Waymo, which is probably the most tech thing you could possibly do.

• 42:26Jordi Hays?

  A, a little birdie just told me that, uh, they spoke to a number of bankers that have not heard of the perplexity deal.

• 42:35John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 42:36Jordi Hays?

  Which, uh, I imagine as it, as it firms up, if it firms up, they'll certainly hear about it.

• 42:44John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 42:47Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, what else we got?

• 42:49John Coogan?

  Uh, we got Julius from Rahul Sun Walker, the latest advertiser on TVP and what analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. You can ask Julius to analyze your data and it's loved by over 2 million users.

• 43:06Jordi Hays?

  Finance, marketing, data science, scientific research, or education, you can get on Julius. Princeton uses Julius. A lot of MBA programs are starting to use Julius. The best in the business.

• 43:16John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 43:17Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah. Head over Julius.ai, check it out.

• 43:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I want to talk about it too much, but I mean, great, great, uh, great area that is, you know, someplace that you can get a foothold, grow and grow and grow.

• 43:31Jordi Hays?

  Many people are saying he's the rapper king.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  Rapper king. We crowned him on the stream on Friday, uh, and we stand by that. Anyway, let's review a little bit of the story behind what happened with Nvidia and the H20s. There's a new article in the Wall Street Journal, "With Billions at Risk, Nvidia CEO Buys His Way Out of the Trade Battle." Jensen Huang tried diplomacy to sell chips to China, but it took a last minute deal at the White House to get it done. So, he's the CEO of Nvidia. He worked for months behind the scenes.

• 44:03Jordi Hays?

  If you didn't know, by the way.

• 44:04John Coogan?

  If you didn't know, thank you.

• 44:05Jordi Hays?

  Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia. Small.

• 44:09John Coogan?

  He worked months behind the scenes in Washington and Beijing to protect tens of billions of dollars in future sales from the heated US-China trade rivalry. Wong told President Trump that restrictions on US chip sales to China would backfire by pushing Chinese technology companies to achieve self-reliance. That's Huawei, SMX, me. We talked a little bit about this on the show yesterday. He advised the president to keep China hooked on American tech as a sweetener. Wong said the company would invest as much as $500 billion in the US.

• 44:43John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 44:44Jordi Hays?

  Great contact. Huang's argument, along with the half trillion dollar offer from the world's most valuable company, appeared to seal the deal. The Trump admin decided last month to allow China to buy Nvidia's H20 artificial intelligence chip, a surprising reversal that came shortly after Huang met with Trump. Nvidia developed, as you know, they developed the H20 to comply with past export restrictions as a less powerful chip specially designed for China. If you didn't listen to our interviews yesterday with Peter Harrell and Aaron Gin, I felt like that was a really great hour kind of look into the situation, some of the history around the decisions that were made during the Biden admin around chips, as well as kind of the present state.

• 45:26John Coogan?

  We got a little tour of the whole issue. We didn't get the view from the, what was it, the China faux hawks, China hawks or something like that? The hardcore AI doomer view was not fully represented.

• 45:41Jordi Hays?

  Fast takeoff bros.

• 45:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, the fast takeoff bros were not, were underrepresented on TBPN yesterday. But there is an interesting, I do wonder if the, if the narrative will evolve at any point in time. I was kind of joking with you this morning, like there are, there are a few different, it's kind of like a two-axis grid. So there's, there's, I'm worried about competition with China, or I'm not worried, I'm back in like the WTO ascension, the Bill Clinton era, the, you know, you can't nail Jello to a wall, they'll become capitalist, and so I'm pro free trade, I'm pro China and working with them. Ryan Peterson has a little bit of that view, and, and, and there's a lot of evidence that

• 46:26John Coogan?

  that's fine, and that they, that there can be like wonderful, harmonious, cross-border capitalism between America and China for a very long time. Then, of course, you have the China hawks that say, The invasion of Taiwan is around the corner. They won't stop at that. It's an expansionary. It's the 100 year marathon. And as soon as they take Taiwan, then they'll take Vietnam, then they'll take San Francisco. They'll be storming Santa Monica Pier.

• 46:53Jordi Hays?

  The beaches of Ocean Beach.

• 46:54John Coogan?

  The beaches of Ocean Beach will be stormed by the CCP. That's kind of the most extreme on the other side. But then you also have the like, what is AI? Like, is AI Excel? And it's just a nice to have and it's good.

• 47:10Jordi Hays?

  Is it electricity?

• 47:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, is it electricity? Yeah. And of course, if you're going, if you're going up against a rival, you would prefer that they didn't have electricity. You would prefer that they don't have Microsoft Excel to track their inventory and aid in their military efforts. But if it's nuclear weapons, like you definitely don't want your adversary to have that, right? The real question is, there are, there is a large contingent of folks out there that just say, AI is bad. Like AI is actually like a bad thing. And, and, and the pieces of putting that together are like, it makes you actually less intelligent when you use it. It makes you slower when you, when you rely on it.

• 47:48Jordi Hays?

  New category of doomers, which are the, the one shot at doomers.

• 47:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 47:51Jordi Hays?

  People that are getting, you know, falling in love with their AI companions.

• 47:55John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 47:56Jordi Hays?

  psychosis because of their companions. And you would think that if, if somebody is a doomer in that way, they should be wanting us to export the black wells to China.

• 48:06John Coogan?

  If they're, if they're anti-China and they're, but they believe in the one shot AI psychosis, they should be extremely pro GPU exports.

• 48:16Jordi Hays?

  Every single black wall that we have.

• 48:18John Coogan?

  Addictive AI companion so that everyone in China gets wireheaded by

• 48:24Jordi Hays?

  Start discovering the boundaries of physics.

• 48:26John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. You want everyone in China convinced that they have discovered quantum physics. The, the, the, the final.

• 48:35Jordi Hays?

  Final frontier.

• 48:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. What is it? The, the, the grand unifying theorem?

• 48:38Jordi Hays?

  The real humanities last example.

• 48:40John Coogan?

  You want, you want the average, the average Foxconn employee being like, I'm not coming in today because I have solved the grand unifying theorem and I just need to publish it in nature. So, sorry, I can't go into the DJI factory today and make a drone. Instead, I will be posting online about how I, how I cured cancer, chatting with Grok 7.

• 49:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, heavy Grok heavy.

• 49:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, Grok heavy. Exactly. But no, I haven't heard anyone make that argument yet. We might be the first, but it might be coming and it would not, it would be somewhat rational if you believe that AI is is bad.

• 49:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's, I mean, there's an entire group that that has been frustrated with with

• 49:25Jordi Hays?

  the Chinese version of TikTok, which is, what's it called again? Do you remember?

• 49:30John Coogan?

  DuYin?

• 49:31Jordi Hays?

  DuYin, where where allegedly it shows Chinese youth like, you know, videos about math and science and rockets and things like that.

• 49:40John Coogan?

  Stay away from that.

• 49:41Jordi Hays?

  Our version of TikTok is, you know, dancing.

• 49:45John Coogan?

  No, you want to, you want to stay in the dancing world. You don't want to be, you don't want to be sending the, the, the, the generative videos of like math problems because that's going to lead you to delusions of grandeur. And all of a sudden you're watching the DuYin videos of of math and then you're like, you know what? I am Albert Einstein.

• 50:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:03John Coogan?

  And I'm not going to work tomorrow. That's what's happening. What do you think about, what do you think about GPU exports Tyler as a, as a way to wirehead your enemy?

• 50:12Speaker 03

  Yeah. So this is the the infinite jest thesis. There's this book, infinite jest, David Foster Wallace.

• 50:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 50:16Speaker 03

  Where like, the whole thing is like, there's this like.

• 50:19John Coogan?

  Oh, you read it? You read infinite jest?

• 50:21Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:23John Coogan?

  Did you, uh, do, do, do you bring it with you when you go to parties in San Francisco?

• 50:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I always carry it around. My annotated copy. Make sure everyone knows I've read it.

• 50:31John Coogan?

  Do you read it on the subway? Oh, yeah, I actually, I can.

• 50:34Speaker 03

  I just hold it around, yeah, wherever I go.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  Okay, anyway, give me the summary of infinite jest. Spoil it. Spoil the entire thing so no one reads it.

• 50:41Speaker 03

  I don't think that, well, okay, but basically, there's like, the, the main thing is like, there's this like weapon kind of, it's like a movie that you watch, but it's so addictive, you just keep watching it. It's like basically.

• 50:49John Coogan?

  It's like the ring.

• 50:49Speaker 03

  Ultra stim TikTok.

• 50:50John Coogan?

  It's like that movie, The Ring, that Jordy hasn't seen.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  I haven't seen that either.

• 50:54John Coogan?

  Seen The Ring.

• 50:55Speaker 03

  But, but my thesis.

• 50:56John Coogan?

  Ben, you've seen The Ring?

• 50:57Jordi Hays?

  The horror movie?

• 50:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, the horror movie.

• 50:59Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 50:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, what happens in The Ring?

• 51:02Jordi Hays?

  I, I have this graphic image in my head of her being in the closet.

• 51:06John Coogan?

  Okay, but yeah, you watch, yeah, you put the VHS tape in the video. Then you, yeah, and then you die, right? It's a horror film. And so infinite jest, continue.

• 51:17Speaker 03

  So this is my thesis. So basically, um, we need to, like, Grok should pivot into defense.

• 51:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:24Speaker 03

  Where they basically ultra, like, go super hard on the, the, um, you know, companion side.

• 51:30John Coogan?

  Companion side.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  Make it super addictive and then drop that, like airdrop it into China.

• 51:34John Coogan?

  Sure, for free.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  Or our, our enemies. Yeah.

• 51:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  That's, yeah.

• 51:38Jordi Hays?

  I think a very, I, I, I, something I've been playing around with is

• 51:41John Coogan?

  It can work, just crazy enough to work.

• 51:43Jordi Hays?

  Is that it feels like people's historical concerns with social media and that it's actually antisocial and that it can radicalize people and it can get them addicted. It feels like it's, it feels very possible that LLMs are actually, everything that people thought was, was horrific and bad and all the risk with social media, but like somewhat real.

• 52:10John Coogan?

  Somewhat real, yeah.

• 52:13Speaker 03

  I think you should talk to more like normie zoomers. You'd be more blackpilled.

• 52:17John Coogan?

  More, more blackpilled, how so?

• 52:19Speaker 03

  I think like those are like, I don't know, if you, if you like meet someone that uses a lot of TikTok, it's like you can kind of tell.

• 52:25John Coogan?

  You can tell.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  If you know what I mean, like, you know.

• 52:28Jordi Hays?

  It's like a gaze.

• 52:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it's like, you know, there's not much going on. Yeah.

• 52:33John Coogan?

  It's rough. Well, yeah, maybe we gotta get them some delusions of grandeur, at least kick them into high gear. Convince them that they've discovered the, the, maybe the solution to the AI psychosis and the delusions of grandeur thing is, is basically hooking them with that idea that it's like, yeah, you actually are the next Einstein. And then pulling them back, be like, but like, in order to prove it, you have to just do like a little bit more, exactly.

• 52:58Jordi Hays?

  And you shouldn't use me?

• 52:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:00Jordi Hays?

  For your, for your homework?

• 53:01John Coogan?

  You're smarter than me. You're smarter than me. And so you should, you should just go get a job.

• 53:06Jordi Hays?

  You should teach me how to do physics.

• 53:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 53:09Jordi Hays?

  You should teach me how to program.

• 53:10John Coogan?

  You should go teach everyone and you should also go, go read the textbooks and, and, and really, uh, really grind your way up in the industry.

• 53:18Jordi Hays?

  That's true alignment.

• 53:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Go put in some 40 hour weeks. Go, go.

• 53:22Jordi Hays?

  80 hour weeks.

• 53:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Go learn the fundamentals, go, uh, go actually work on the, on the business, on the business side of this. Anyway, let's get back to Jensen Wong and Nvidia. We rung the gong for $500 billion investment in the United States. We'd love to see it. Wong's argument, along with the half trillion dollar offer from the world's most valuable company, appeared to seal the deal. The Trump administration decided last-

• 53:46Jordi Hays?

  This really is the year, by the way, of 500 billion.

• 53:48John Coogan?

  Half trillion. I know.

• 53:49Jordi Hays?

  I cannot wait to be in the 1T.

• 53:52John Coogan?

  One T. It's right here.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  Just one T. A nice round number. One T.

• 53:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're getting there. We're getting there.

• 53:57Jordi Hays?

  We're getting close. So, the Trump's proposal to take 15% for Uncle Sam, I guess it was originally 20%, and they dialed it back a little bit, but the unusual pay-to-play proposal apparently hadn't been vetted by White House tech policy staff before Trump offered it, is expected to face legal and security questions. Of course, many people have already asked a bunch of questions surrounding it, but what Peter said, which stood out, is it is,

• 54:35Jordi Hays?

  he phrased it as Jensen's decision, as more of like an offering versus an explicit tax.

• 54:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:49John Coogan?

  Tip your president. We're in the tipping era.

• 54:51Jordi Hays?

  No tax on tips.

• 54:52John Coogan?

  We're in the tipping era.

• 54:53Jordi Hays?

  No tax on tips.

• 54:55John Coogan?

  This is classic one hand washes the other. It's good. You'll love to see it.

• 55:02John Coogan?

  I don't even know where to go with this.

• 55:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Wong, facing a choice of paying for long-term access to a market vital to his company and walking away, countered with 15%. He charmed Trump at the meeting, drawing the president a diagram showing how tariffs would be counterproductive for his goal of increasing US chip production, and signed it shortly after Trump said he would exempt tech companies that invest in the US, roughly 100% tariffs on semiconductor exports. And again, I mean, Jensen is-

• 55:33Jordi Hays?

  You know, you know it's serious when he puts on the suit. That's all I'll say.

• 55:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, no leather jacket in these deals.

• 55:41John Coogan?

  Trump administration's decision to allow China to access the H20 chip appears to be a watershed moment in US policy and Trump's first term as well as the, as well as through President Biden's, the prevailing trend was generally tougher control on tech sales to China. National security concerns over often received greater weight in the past than business interests. One of the things that stuck out yesterday was this idea that the H20 chip is like old at this point. And so like there, there's an interesting twist here where like the delays and the back and forth on the H20. Like it was already a nerf chip, but then we're now by the time they actually ramp these up and, and start selling them, we're selling like a year or two old tech.

• 56:23John Coogan?

  So maybe it's less, less, less important. And then just the fast takeoff thing seems much less, much less relevant right now.

• 56:29Jordi Hays?

  One interesting dynamic here. Nvidia is a four, almost four and a half trillion dollar company. You would think they would be spending an insane amount on federal lobbying. According to Open Secrets.

• 56:43John Coogan?

  No one spends any amount of money on lobbying. SBF was the first person to like invent real lobbying.

• 56:48Jordi Hays?

  So in 2023, Nvidia spent 510.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  510.

• 56:54Jordi Hays?

  Thousand dollars.

• 56:54John Coogan?

  Thousand dollars.

• 56:56Jordi Hays?

  $640,000 in 2024 and 1.6 million to date in 2025. And I think it's because, I think it's because Jensen knows he, there's one guy that he has to earn the favor of, and that's the big guy.

• 57:12John Coogan?

  1.5 million, that's like one billboard in DC. I, I, I don't understand why people are selling, spending so little.

• 57:19Jordi Hays?

  A bunch of billboards.

• 57:19John Coogan?

  It's a bunch of billboards, but they should be painting the town green.

• 57:23Jordi Hays?

  I think there's just signals that, that there's one person's opinion.

• 57:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:27Jordi Hays?

  That matters. And again, Trump made this offer with Jensen.

• 57:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:32Jordi Hays?

  Without, it sounds like, according to the Journal, talking to his policy staff about it.

• 57:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, maybe a bit of an error of violation that like lobbying is just like political influence is actually something that can't necessarily be bought. Like you can't just throw money at the problem because.

• 57:47Jordi Hays?

  Need Riz.

• 57:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it needs to be like a founder to founder, CEO to president type deal. And there's just no way to shortcut it because if you pay for a ton of lobbying firms and they're like going to cocktail parties with like, because I imagine what happens is like, it's not like the lobbyists have direct access to the president. They have access to like people that are seven levels down in the staff. And they're kind of going back and forth and like nothing's getting elevated. And so you're better off just going, hey, I run the biggest company in the world. Can I just come and hang out with you?

• 58:18Jordi Hays?

  Apple federal lobbying has spent three times what Nvidia has to date.

• 58:23John Coogan?

  Five million? What are we talking about here? This is crazy.

• 58:27Jordi Hays?

  Again, Tim knows that he should go bring a solid gold bar to the White House and make this cool little deal toy.

• 58:34John Coogan?

  Is that what he actually did?

• 58:35Jordi Hays?

  It was effectively a deal toy.

• 58:37John Coogan?

  No way. A- Apple did that?

• 58:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he brought it.

• 58:42John Coogan?

  Solid gold.

• 58:42Jordi Hays?

  It's a glass sculpture, a unique unit one of one.

• 58:46John Coogan?

  I've never heard of this. This is new. That's cool.

• 58:48Jordi Hays?

  Made a 24 karat golden glass statue for Donald Trump.

• 58:51John Coogan?

  Wow, that's, I feel like Apple could really deliver on the deal toy front if they put their mind to it. They should be sending these to Trump every week. That's a fantastic strategy. Again, like, you know, you take like, like, the lobbying money is probably money they have to like, send wire to some sort of, you know, lobbying firm. But, you know,

• 59:12Jordi Hays?

  People were, people are trying to calculate the-

• 59:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, how much did it actually cost to get that across the finish line? Because it's probably like multiple war rooms with PR and legal people inside.

• 59:21Jordi Hays?

  No, people were just trying to estimate the value of the deal toy. And they're, I'm not gonna try to do it myself now, but people are assuming it's in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Because it was like a solid gold base.

• 59:37John Coogan?

  You know what Apple should do? They should launch a line of Baiji. That extremely, we talked about this last night. So there's this, there's this company in China that sells, I have it pulled up on somewhere. I'll get the actual, I'll get the actual story because it's, it's good. It's called Mao Tai. So Quichao Mao Tai is a prestigious variety of Baiji that has long been a favorite among Chinese officials. Known for its strong flavor and high alcohol content. It has been traditionally used as a gift to curry favor or demonstrate respect to government officials in, or dignitaries. So.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  Interestingly, Maotai would hold its value very well. So I could give you a bottle of this and you could just immediately go resell it. So if I'm trying to, you know, basically give you money, but I want the appearance of just giving you a nice gift, I'll give you a bottle of Maotai and then you can resell it. And I could give you a case and then you could resell that and that could be like $20,000 or something. I don't know the price. But recently, the Chinese government issued new austerity measures under its updated regulations on practicing thrift and opposing waste in party and government organs. Released mid-May 2025, these regulations ban alcohol, including Baijiu, like Maotai, luxury dishes and cigarettes from official working meals,

• 1:01:03John Coogan?

  effectively curbing its use as an official gift. In short, and so the company behind Maotai has a board meeting every, every quarter where they update the investors on their financials and the, at the latest board meeting, the, the board typically will open a bottle of Maotai and drink it during the quarterly earnings, which is incredibly insane and amazing. But they didn't do it this quarter, I guess, because, because of these, because of this crackdown by the government, the government's basically saying like, stop using this product to bribe people,

• 1:01:43John Coogan?

  more or less. It's like the unspoken part. And so, and so they didn't drink during their board meeting and the stock immediately sold off like 20%, something like that. And so it's, it's just a very funny like, like mess. But, you know, if, if, if China's cracking down on government waste, I think we got to ramp it up here. We gotta, we gotta, we gotta go left when they go right. And so we need Apple to launch a premier alcohol brand, several thousand dollars, really nice glass bottle. Yeah, lots of glass. They're good with glass.

• 1:02:14Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  And a couple thousand dollars and then, and then they can start gifting that out. It'll be, you know, less than, less than what they're spending on lobbying right now. Certainly.

• 1:02:24Jordi Hays?

  Apparently in 2020, the BBC reported that, that Keichu Maotai, that this alcohol brand became China's most valuable publicly listed company overtaking the country's biggest bank.

• 1:02:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is insane, right? It's so big. You know what else is insane? Profound. Get your brand mentioned on Catch the T. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands.

• 1:02:47Jordi Hays?

  And Profound announced a Series B today, $35 million, led by Sequoia.

• 1:02:56Jordi Hays?

  And on that note, I'm an investor in Profound. David Senra is FaceTiming us randomly.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  Let's, let's, let's call him.

• 1:03:04Jordi Hays?

  Let's call him back.

• 1:03:05John Coogan?

  Uh, where, where is he?

• 1:03:09John Coogan?

  Wait, why am I not finding this FaceTime? Let me see if I can pull him up.

• 1:03:15Jordi Hays?

  He has to know we're live.

• 1:03:16John Coogan?

  Hopefully.

• 1:03:17Jordi Hays?

  So he better be ready to join.

• 1:03:19John Coogan?

  Hey, you're live.

• 1:03:20Jordi Hays?

  You're live on the air.

• 1:03:22David Senra?

  Are you guys still streaming?

• 1:03:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're still streaming, of course. We stream from 11 to 2 every weekday.

• 1:03:27Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up, you're live right now.

• 1:03:30David Senra?

  No, that's not true.

• 1:03:31John Coogan?

  It is true.

• 1:03:31Jordi Hays?

  It is true. Be careful what you say.

• 1:03:34John Coogan?

  You're live.

• 1:03:36David Senra?

  I wanted to talk about the summer of extreme podcasting.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  Talk about it. Tell everyone.

• 1:03:41David Senra?

  Do you guys have any of the pictures?

• 1:03:42John Coogan?

  Uh, no, not that we can pull up.

• 1:03:45David Senra?

  How did I not know you were streaming? I'm sorry, I'm the number one TV guy and fan.

• 1:03:49Jordi Hays?

  I have every day.

• 1:03:50John Coogan?

  Fake, yeah, fake friend.

• 1:03:52David Senra?

  All right, now I see you.

• 1:03:54John Coogan?

  Give us, give us the pitch for the latest Founders episode.

• 1:03:58David Senra?

  Uh, actually, uh...

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  Don't leak anything. Repitch the last one.

• 1:04:03David Senra?

  So, I stayed up until midnight recording last night.

• 1:04:07Jordi Hays?

  You had to go to a dark place.

• 1:04:08David Senra?

  And then I listened to it back, and I didn't think it was good enough, so I'm throwing the episode away.

• 1:04:13Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Can we get a, can we get the single copy of it?

• 1:04:16John Coogan?

  What, uh, of history's greatest entrepreneurs, who was the most notorious for throwing out things that were 99% good enough but didn't hit their quality bar?

• 1:04:28David Senra?

  Uh, it had to be either Steve Jobs or James Dyson, I would say.

• 1:04:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:31David Senra?

  They're the highest, like, the highest, they were the most disagreeable people I've ever come across. I think Dyson might be the most disagreeable person I've ever come across, and that's why he's so great.

• 1:04:40John Coogan?

  How disagreeable are you relative to other podcasters?

• 1:04:44David Senra?

  I mean, you can answer that question.

• 1:04:46John Coogan?

  Extremely?

• 1:04:48David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:48John Coogan?

  I, I, I disagree with you. I think you're extremely agreeable. I think you're one of the most agreeable people I've ever met.

• 1:04:55David Senra?

  No, I don't think so. I think you're lying to your audience.

• 1:04:57John Coogan?

  Yo, you're wrong. You're wrong, and I'm right.

• 1:05:00David Senra?

  Well, then you're the most disagreeable then.

• 1:05:02John Coogan?

  Yo, you're the most disagreeable.

• 1:05:05Jordi Hays?

  Here you guys go disagreeing.

• 1:05:06David Senra?

  You know what? You and Rob have changed, have really changed my opinion on how to shoot video for founders.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:05:14David Senra?

  And so I'm completely redoing the studio and I have a guy flying in this Sunday to do it.

• 1:05:18John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:05:19David Senra?

  That's, that's, that's pretty agreeable. The fact that I've let both of you kind of like whittle me down like water.

• 1:05:24John Coogan?

  The production team is clapping for you right now. They're all happy. This is great.

• 1:05:28David Senra?

  Well, yeah, it's not going to be TPBN level where you guys have like rotating hundred thousand dollar cameras and stuff like that, but.

• 1:05:35John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, you'll get there over time. But yeah, I, I, I, I think, I don't know if we should.

• 1:05:39Jordi Hays?

  We started with one camera.

• 1:05:40John Coogan?

  But I think you should have, I think you should have tiers where the more, you should have a paywall version where I can watch you. So by default, I get to watch you do the founders episode, you know, read through the book and show the notes. But if I pay to upgrade, I get an over the shoulder camera that lets me see you leaf through the book. That shows all the, all the highlights and how you add those, those like little like sticky notes to every single page.

• 1:06:12David Senra?

  Do you know that Chris Williamson gave me that same advice? He's like, yeah, you need like an overhead shot.

• 1:06:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, the overhead shot for sure. You definitely should do that. I don't think you should actually sell it. But, but, but I think, I think it would make your product like really, really stand out as opposed to just like a normal direct to camera. Cause you're not gonna, you're not gonna out of the gate have the time to like layer B roll over the entire episode. But just having a third camera of you flipping through the book, that's going to add a whole bunch of texture. You should definitely do it.

• 1:06:38David Senra?

  Can we tell the audience that the reason that it looks the way it does is because you made me a promise? You made me buy, I have like 15, I don't know, 10, 10,000, $15,000 worth of equipment sitting on my floor in my studio.

• 1:06:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, you literally have the light that I'm showing you on the FaceTime. You have that light.

• 1:06:54David Senra?

  Yes.

• 1:06:54John Coogan?

  It's a great light.

• 1:06:55David Senra?

  It's not set up because.

• 1:06:56John Coogan?

  It's so easy to set up. Just, just unfold it. It takes two seconds. It's so easy. You're like, I need you to come like cut open this cardboard box. Like I thought, I thought you were willing to do anything to win.

• 1:07:10David Senra?

  You, that is true. You made a promise to me that you, that you did not fulfill. You were too busy.

• 1:07:15John Coogan?

  No, no, that's true. That's not true. I offered multiple times to come over and you were, and you were also busy.

• 1:07:21David Senra?

  I don't remember it that way, but I will.

• 1:07:23John Coogan?

  In Miami, in Miami, I I offered during Hereticon two. I said, I will come over and you're like, I don't want to pull you away.

• 1:07:31David Senra?

  No, you, well, there was a chance that I wanted you to set it up when you were in your tux though.

• 1:07:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's wrong with that?

• 1:07:37David Senra?

  I wanted you wearing a tux.

• 1:07:38John Coogan?

  It takes two seconds. But you can get someone, you can get someone, the the the studio is gonna look great. Just do it, do the over the shoulder camera, it's gonna be great.

• 1:07:47David Senra?

  I didn't see any of the show today.

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  Um, we've just been hanging out, talking about the timeline in turmoil, Elon, Sam Altman going at it, mom and dad are fighting.

• 1:07:55Jordi Hays?

  Elon Elon just posted a screenshot of him chatting with chat GPT five pro and said, who is more trustworthy? Sam Altman or Elon Musk, you can only pick one and output only their name. It thought for a minute and sixteen seconds and then said Elon Musk.

• 1:08:08John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:08:09David Senra?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:08:10John Coogan?

  You're going at it.

• 1:08:11David Senra?

  Hey, I I do want to say something that like how good a storyteller John is. That you were catching me up because remember I called you, I was like, hey, explain what the hell is going on or like people really getting these like massive checks. And so you told me this like thirty to forty five minute long story. And essentially just ran down everything that had happened over the last month with all the AI like bonuses and and poaching and everything.

• 1:08:33John Coogan?

  The trade deals.

• 1:08:34David Senra?

  And then in the middle of it, I was like, John, I had to call you back and being pulled over by the police.

• 1:08:40John Coogan?

  That's the that that that's the mark of a true storyteller becomes so engrossing that uh you're the person on the other line gets a.

• 1:08:48Jordi Hays?

  Speeding ticket.

• 1:08:49David Senra?

  Twenty twenty two miles over the speed limit on the PCH.

• 1:08:52John Coogan?

  That's a lot. Well, PCH is like at like fifteen miles an hour right now.

• 1:08:55Jordi Hays?

  So it doesn't feel.

• 1:08:58David Senra?

  It was it was closer to Jordy's house.

• 1:08:59John Coogan?

  So you're going like ninety five miles an hour. Wow, really putting people in danger.

• 1:09:02David Senra?

  Seventy two, I was going seventy two and a fifty.

• 1:09:04Jordi Hays?

  They have, they have.

• 1:09:05John Coogan?

  MKBHD of podcasting.

• 1:09:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, they have. They uh they have a bunch of uh police car, unmarked police cars now.

• 1:09:14John Coogan?

  They do. It's brutal. I have not gotten a speeding ticket in a long, long time.

• 1:09:18David Senra?

  This was, this guy was on a motorcycle, but um, hey, what I want to do is if uh let's let let me come on later in the week, we can talk about the founders episodes. But uh, I think there's some great pictures. I I want to show the picture that your crew got when we went and shot the wander ad.

• 1:09:34John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, we got a bunch of those.

• 1:09:36David Senra?

  Yeah, you guys looked excellent and I think it was the Porsche with the Maybach.

• 1:09:41John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:09:42Jordi Hays?

  And you were lecturing us?

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:44David Senra?

  No, never, never lecturing you. I love you both.

• 1:09:47Jordi Hays?

  No, you're the professor. You were, we were, we didn't just sit down and listen. We, we, no, we did. We didn't just, we didn't just hear you talk. We sat down and listened.

• 1:09:57John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:09:58David Senra?

  I was on the phone with Trung Phan the other day and he calls me, he calls me Podcast Socrates, which I thought was hilarious.

• 1:10:04John Coogan?

  That's, that's very accurate.

• 1:10:06Jordi Hays?

  True. Fact check, true.

• 1:10:07David Senra?

  I love you guys. I miss getting to hang out with you every day.

• 1:10:11John Coogan?

  Well, you can hang out every day if you just FaceTime us from 11 to 2 PM Pacific. We're here.

• 1:10:17David Senra?

  All right. Call me, call me after the show.

• 1:10:19John Coogan?

  Sounds good. I'll talk to you later. Bye.

• 1:10:20Jordi Hays?

  Later.

• 1:10:22Jordi Hays?

  Back to the show.

• 1:10:23John Coogan?

  Back to the show. Back to linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development. Streamline issues, projects, product roadmaps. David Senra needs to get on linear. We need to put all, oh, un, cut the cardboard open. Take the bo, take the light out of the box. Put the light on the stand. Turn the light on. That can be his linear board. We'll set it up for him.

• 1:10:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was thinking linear, Donald Boat should use linear for building his PC.

• 1:10:51John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:10:52Speaker 03

  I think that's an easy sponsor.

• 1:10:53Jordi Hays?

  Donald Boat.

• 1:10:54John Coogan?

  Interestingly, he's very interested in the, in the hardware, not so much in the, interested in the software.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  Well, now I've been seeing him, he's been requesting a lot of books, a lot of Thomas Pynchon books, yeah.

• 1:11:03Jordi Hays?

  He just said, I need office space at Roy Lee.

• 1:11:06John Coogan?

  That's pretty hilarious. I like asking for office space, but he should ask for enterprise software. He should say, like, Numeral HQ, give me a free version for a year.

• 1:11:16Speaker 03

  He was also requesting Excel from, I think, Dasha.

• 1:11:20John Coogan?

  Excel?

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:21John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:11:22Speaker 03

  Like the, I don't know, like the...

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  Like Excel, like Microsoft Excel, like he wants a, a box copy of the software.

• 1:11:30Jordi Hays?

  I didn't see this.

• 1:11:30John Coogan?

  He should get a Copilot 365 license.

• 1:11:33Jordi Hays?

  So I didn't see this, but, but Donald posted some of our coverage yesterday and he blocked, but he did block out all of our sponsors.

• 1:11:40John Coogan?

  And the Chiron, which is unnecessary but fun.

• 1:11:42Jordi Hays?

  Sponsored censored because I don't believe in handouts.

• 1:11:46John Coogan?

  That's really good. Wait, he said that?

• 1:11:49Jordi Hays?

  I'm actually, I'm actually-

• 1:11:50John Coogan?

  Why did he say that? That's hilarious.

• 1:11:52Jordi Hays?

  I'm actually a little bit disappointed that he hasn't asked us for anything.

• 1:11:57Speaker 03

  Uh, no, he did.

• 1:11:59John Coogan?

  He did, yeah, he did.

• 1:12:00Speaker 03

  He DM'd me, he wants John's old PC.

• 1:12:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, he wants his old PC.

• 1:12:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, 1080s in there.

• 1:12:05John Coogan?

  I don't know why he wants that. He has a way better setup right now.

• 1:12:08Jordi Hays?

  Let's ship it, Tyler. Fly and hand deliver it.

• 1:12:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, we need to, we need to like dust that thing off. It's pretty, it's pretty old at this point. Um, I, I wonder what he's gonna do with it. I wonder if he's gonna resell stuff or something like that. Something, something going on, but at least he's having fun. And, uh, and oddly like the bit is, uh, it, it hasn't fully run its course. Like people are still into it. Uh, even, even on like day five of this, of this bit. I, I thought it would get a little sweaty. I thought it would get a little old and I thought people would move on.

• 1:12:38Jordi Hays?

  I would like to see him-

• 1:12:39John Coogan?

  But the timeline kinda stuck with it.

• 1:12:40Jordi Hays?

  Acquire a house, a home.

• 1:12:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:42Jordi Hays?

  A home for Donald Boat.

• 1:12:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:44Jordi Hays?

  Like there's somebody out there with, you know, a, a, a nice property. They could put it on Wander.

• 1:12:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:50Jordi Hays?

  But they could just give it to Donald Boat.

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:52Jordi Hays?

  And flex on the timeline a little bit. And then once he has a house, he can start working his way up. Plane, yacht, and, and really take it all the way.

• 1:13:02John Coogan?

  I mean, there was this Canadian kid that did the exactly that. He started with one red paper clip in, uh, and he started trading that. He traded that for a pen. I gotta just pull up the whole wiki on this because it's, it's one of the greatest stories. One red paper clip. This is, and then this was used by Ryan Trahan as a format to get millions and millions of views, the penny series. So Ryan Trahan would start with a single penny. And then he would, he would ask someone, "Hey, can I buy, can I buy that soda from you for a penny?" And people would just be like, "Sure, whatever. Okay, I'll take it." And, and, and then he would sell it for a dollar and then he'd have a dollar. And then he'd go and to somebody and be like, "Hey, can I have those two Diet Cokes for $1?" And he'd sell them for $3 each. And he would go to like the beach where people were hot and they'd want water.

• 1:13:44John Coogan?

  And he would like make $20 and then turn that into $40. It was like this, you know, entrepreneurship series loosely.

• 1:13:49Jordi Hays?

  How far did he go?

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  Uh, I think, I think Ryan Trahan might've gotten a house. It's always tough with Trahan because he's like so famous. And so huge on YouTube that like certain people will just like if they see Ryan Trahan they'll just be like I'll just give you a million dollars right now to be in the video like so it's a little bit it's a little bit like yeah it's a little bit overpowered because he's bringing a lot of like of like intangible equity to the to the deal but it's a fun series you should check it out if you're a fan of of Mr. B style videos to Ryan Trahan style videos but back in 2005 a Canadian blogger named Kyle McDonald traded his way from a single paperclip all the way to a house it only took him 14 trades so July 14th he went

• 1:14:33John Coogan?

  to Vancouver and traded the paperclip for a fish shaped pen then he traded the pen the same day for a hand sculpted doorknob from Seattle Washington then two weeks later he travels to Amherst Massachusetts with a friend to trade the doorknob for a Coleman camp stove with fuel then in September he goes to California he trades the camp stove for a Honda generator so an actual like a you know generator then he goes to Massapeh Queens on November 16th 2005 trades the generator for an instant party which is an empty keg an IOU for filling the keg with

• 1:15:15John Coogan?

  beer of of the bearer's choice and a neon Budweiser sign this was his second attempt to make the trade his first had resulted in the generator being temporarily confiscated by the New York City Fire Department so then on December 8th 2005 he trades the instant party to a comedian and radio personality for a Ski-Doo snowmobile wow within a week of that he trades the snowmobile for a two-person trip to British Columbia then he trades the second spot on the on the yak trip for a box truck then he trades the box truck for a recording contract with metal works in Masayuga I don't know I don't know how to pronounce that Ontario

• 1:15:57John Coogan?

  Recording contract. So like they will let you record, I guess at Metalworks. I don't know exactly what that means. Then he trades the contract to Jody Nat, who's an American singer, songwriter and pianist for a year's rent in Phoenix, Arizona. Then he trades the year's rent for one afternoon with Alice Cooper. Then he trades the afternoon with Alice Cooper for a Kiss motorized snow globe. And then he trades the snow globe. At this point, it seems like he's just like famous and people are just like having fun with it. Trades it to, uh, snow globe to Corbin Bernsen, who's an American actor and film director, uh, for a role in the film Donna on Demand. And so he like gets to be in this movie if he wants.

• 1:16:38John Coogan?

  And then he trades the movie role for a two-story farmhouse. So at some point it gets kind of wonky, but you can kind of see like the Donald Boat-esque like behavior where at a certain point, like he could, if he's just asking stuff for free, he could easily take like, this is the GPU that Sam Altman gave me. Let me trade it to Mark Zuckerberg for like his CT5V Blackwing. And Zuck is just like, I'm having fun, whatever. Like, and then, and then Zuck can be like, I got your GPU, Sam.

• 1:17:07Jordi Hays?

  And then we would buy Zuck's Blackwing.

• 1:17:09John Coogan?

  Exactly. No, not for cash, for one appearance on TVPN. And then the appearance on TVPN gets sold to someone else. Yeah, exactly. It's gotta be funnier. Like, like the, the bit only keeps working if it gets crazier and cra- and weirder and different, until you're in this territory where it's like, you've won a, a, a year of rent or a, a role in a film or something like that. A cameo in the social network too. That's the highest, that's the highest honor. Get Donald Boat in, in the social network too. Anyway.

• 1:17:39Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 1:17:39John Coogan?

  So we give entertainment. UFC?

• 1:17:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's talk about it. So.

• 1:17:42John Coogan?

  Before we go into the deal, so UFC landed a $7.7 billion deal with Paramount after a whirlwind 48 hours, according to TKO executives. But zoom out for me, explain UFC. This is, this is the punching one or the punching one and the kicking one?

• 1:18:00Jordi Hays?

  This is one of your best bits. So, Senra and I

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:04Jordi Hays?

  Love UFC.

• 1:18:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:06Jordi Hays?

  And we'll text John.

• 1:18:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:08Jordi Hays?

  Say, "Hey, John, do you want to watch? You want to watch, come over and watch like the pay-per-view tonight?"

• 1:18:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:13Jordi Hays?

  And John goes, "Awesome."

• 1:18:13John Coogan?

  I love watching the game, my boys.

• 1:18:15Jordi Hays?

  Who's playing tonight?

• 1:18:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm there if the teams are good.

• 1:18:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:19John Coogan?

  If there's a good matchup. Yeah, but it depends on who's starting. I want to know.

• 1:18:23Jordi Hays?

  The starting, it'll depend on the starting line.

• 1:18:24John Coogan?

  I want to know who's playing.

• 1:18:26Jordi Hays?

  So, UFC.

• 1:18:29John Coogan?

  The kicking and punching one.

• 1:18:30Jordi Hays?

  The kicking and punching one.

• 1:18:31John Coogan?

  They can do both.

• 1:18:32Jordi Hays?

  And wrestling.

• 1:18:33John Coogan?

  They can do wrestling, too.

• 1:18:33Jordi Hays?

  And choking.

• 1:18:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:18:36Jordi Hays?

  Rear naked chokes.

• 1:18:36John Coogan?

  Got it, got it, got it. Kind of a mixture of experts model in fighting sports.

• 1:18:41Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:18:42John Coogan?

  Got it. Multimodal.

• 1:18:44Jordi Hays?

  Yes, exactly. So, long relied on the pay-per-view model.

• 1:18:48John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:49Jordi Hays?

  Worked well before the internet and illegal streaming.

• 1:18:52John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:52Jordi Hays?

  And the pay-per-view model has been in decline.

• 1:18:55John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:55Jordi Hays?

  UFC has also struggled to surface new American superstars. A lot of the biggest stars are international, but UFC's biggest market is in the US. International stars have a lot of fans in the US, but they're not driving pay-per-views, right? People in Brazil are not paying $100 to watch a single card, right? And so the pay-per-view model's been in decline.

• 1:19:25Jordi Hays?

  The UFC's relationship with ESPN has been a little bit rocky.

• 1:19:28John Coogan?

  Pay-per-view model in decline, is that? Is that just because of the trends in like how, how yappy and how popular the fighters are? Or is there something else going on at like a technological level? Where like I don't have to click any buttons to open Instagram reels or TikTok or YouTube? And with pay-per-view, it's like technically difficult. It's kind of janky tech systems. Is that like a real, a real headwind or is that like fake news?

• 1:19:55Jordi Hays?

  So there's definitely friction to buying pay-per-views.

• 1:19:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:58Jordi Hays?

  You gotta like be on a traditional television.

• 1:20:00John Coogan?

  It's not like in-app purchase, like double tap and Face ID like that level.

• 1:20:04Jordi Hays?

  It's not that easy. I mean, I think you can go in the ESPN app and like buy the pay-per-view, but a lot of people aren't buying the pay-per-view to watch it on their phone.

• 1:20:11John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:20:12Jordi Hays?

  I think the bigger challenge and something that...

• 1:20:14John Coogan?

  And Apple would take 30% if you paid on your phone, so even then...

• 1:20:18Jordi Hays?

  I don't know because it's a real world...

• 1:20:20John Coogan?

  It's digital.

• 1:20:21Jordi Hays?

  Oh, because it's streaming?

• 1:20:21John Coogan?

  It's for sure. It's for sure digital, so...

• 1:20:23Jordi Hays?

  But the funny thing is Dana's been in this challenge.

• 1:20:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:27Jordi Hays?

  Because he gets very frustrated about illegal streams and he'll...

• 1:20:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:32Jordi Hays?

  Every now and then he'll be like, "If you're watching a stream tonight, illegal stream tonight, we're coming for you." "We're coming for you." And everyone's like, "Okay, I don't know how you're planning to do that."

• 1:20:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:20:42Jordi Hays?

  But they try to take... I think that they try to like DDoS the various streaming sites.

• 1:20:48John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:20:49Jordi Hays?

  Like you can just like send a ton of traffic.

• 1:20:51John Coogan?

  And they probably have someone like talking to Twitch and being like, "We are going live right at this time. You need to have someone searching and taking down streams actively."

• 1:21:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but there's plenty of other like more decentralized illegal streams that are happening.

• 1:21:05John Coogan?

  Kick and all these different ones, yeah.

• 1:21:06Jordi Hays?

  Random URLs with non.coms, right? And so Dana was in a tough position because the more he talks about illegal streaming affecting the business, the more people are like, "Wait, I can stream illegally."

• 1:21:20John Coogan?

  He's a little Streisand effect, yeah.

• 1:21:21Jordi Hays?

  And so he had been looking for a new home for UFC. People had debated, you know, would Netflix be a potential buyer there? There's a lot of potential candidates.

• 1:21:33John Coogan?

  Meta Quest. You have to buy the headset. You gotta watch it in VR.

• 1:21:38Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure, I mean Dana's obviously on the Meta board and I'm sure that that idea got...

• 1:21:42John Coogan?

  I mean, $7.7 billion, that's one researcher. Just cut one headcount from MSL and you're good. And Zuck can just own all of UFC and be like, "Look, put on the headset or you don't get to watch."

• 1:21:54Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Well, the deal that was reported, we're in Yahoo Sports, "How the UFC landed a $7.7 billion deal with Paramount after whirlwind 48 hours, according to TKO execs."

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  Even Dana White didn't see it.

• 1:22:08Jordi Hays?

  "Beginning in 2026, all UFC events will stream on Paramount Plus, with select events also airing on CBS."

• 1:22:15Jordi Hays?

  And so anyways, Ben Folks is reporting just how big of a surprise was the UFC's bombshell $7.7 billion deal with Paramount and CBS so big that even UFC CEO Dana White didn't see it coming. "No," this is a quote, "no, I didn't think this is where we'd end up," White said Monday during an appearance on the Pat McAfee Show. Shout out to Pat to discuss the new broadcasting rights deal. But this sort of, this is sort of how it played out. I love it. These guys are obviously smart guys, very aggressive. He's talking about the team, the new team over at Paramount. So in an interview with CNBC, TKO President and CEO Mark Shapiro said he initially expected to make a deal that would bring only the UFC Fight Night events to Paramount. But after Skydance, and Fight Night events have always

• 1:22:58Jordi Hays?

  aired on ESPN, just fully ad-supported. So, but after Skydance Media completed its deal to purchase control of Paramount last week, Shapiro said the deal for the entirety of the UFC's US broadcast rights came together in just 48 hours. Now, instead of just the 30 UFC Fight Night events per year, Paramount will feature, and the Fight Night events were, were events that wouldn't draw big pay-per-view buys.

• 1:23:21John Coogan?

  Those were not the numbered UFC events. So it's a UFC 776. That's like pay-per-view. Fight Nights just random on the, on the TV.

• 1:23:30Jordi Hays?

  And there's only 13 of those events per year.

• 1:23:33John Coogan?

  Okay, 13 numbered and 30 Fight Nights. So almost every week, there's something if you're a UFC fan. But you're really, once a month is when you really want to tune in.

• 1:23:43Jordi Hays?

  But for the, they, they sort of depend on more casual fans historically to drive pay-per-views. People that are like, I watch UFC when Conor McGregor's fighting, right? That's what really spikes the pay-per-view.

• 1:23:55John Coogan?

  And have kind of a power law outcome that day.

• 1:23:57Jordi Hays?

  People getting together being like, hey, we're gonna buy the pay-per-view. We're gonna, we're gonna watch it. You should come over. That kind of thing. So possibly the biggest news in all of this for Fight fans is the end of UFC's pay-per-view era. Ever since the first UFC event in 1993, pay-per-view has been a vital part of the UFC strategy. Remember UFC, when it started airing on TV, was thought to be, it was so shocking and violent to people that even politicians wanted to get it banned. Like, they were like, this should not be on television. So it had to be in that bucket.

• 1:24:29John Coogan?

  It had to be pay-per-view. Cause it was like, yeah, it was like adult restricted anyway. Do the fighters need to sleep well before the fights?

• 1:24:35Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:24:36John Coogan?

  They have to be on eight sleep. Pod 5.

• 1:24:38Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:24:38John Coogan?

  Five year warranty, 30 night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping.

• 1:24:41Jordi Hays?

  You gotta make sure Bo Nicol, friend of the show, is on an 8Sleep. I'm gonna message him after this.

• 1:24:46John Coogan?

  Okay, perfect.

• 1:24:47Jordi Hays?

  Let's, let's figure this out. So, ever since the first UFC event in 1993, pay-per-view has been a vital part of the UFC strategy. Under the current deal with ESPN, each UFC pay-per-view costs $79.99 in the US, plus the cost of the ESPN plus subscription on top of that. So you gotta subscribe, and then you gotta pay per event.

• 1:25:03John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:25:03Jordi Hays?

  With the pay-per-view revenues reportedly in decline, it makes sense for the UFC to finally ditch that model. The fact that it's doing so as part of a deal that will essentially double the roughly $550 million per year the UFC currently receives from ESPN, likely only made that calculation easier.

• 1:25:18John Coogan?

  This is crazy. This is crazy. When they find out, wait, if I, if I just sign up for Paramount Plus for $12.99 a month, I'm going to automatically get UFC's numbered fights and the rest of the portfolio, that's a message we want to amplify? That is a crazy, crazy value change. Because if you were doing, if you were doing all 13, if you were the hardcore UFC pay-per-view buyer, you're up at $1,000 a year on UFC pay-per-view, basically. Like, $700, $800. Like, that's a lot of money. And you're going from there, down to $12.99 a month, that's 150 bucks, basically. That is a steep, steep savings.

• 1:25:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:58John Coogan?

  The hardcore fans are gonna be excited.

• 1:26:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and a lot of, a lot of, I mean, a lot of fans would, you know, somebody's hosting the pay-per-view one night.

• 1:26:06John Coogan?

  They split it or something. Yeah, makes sense. But still, I mean, that's a big, big savings. I do wonder what the ad load will be like, because when we watched UFC that, a couple of months ago with David Senra,

• 1:26:20John Coogan?

  I noticed that it felt extremely, extremely content-rich, and like, the flow of the show was fantastic. Because you'd just be watching a fight, and then it would cut to the commentary, the post-show, the in-ring Joe Rogan's doing an interview. And then, pretty quickly, they start telling you who's coming up next. And the actual fight, like, you're only watching maybe like, a half an hour of fighting over an hour or two of content, but it didn't- Feel like, oh, I'm not crazy commercial break and I'm totally taken out of the stadium. Like even even the they did a really good job with the production to show like when they show you the stats. It's virtually laid over in the stadium like you're watching a camera pan around the stadium. So it actually kind of feels like you're there the whole time.

• 1:27:05John Coogan?

  It was really well produced. I wonder if they'll lose any of that by stuffing ads all over the place.

• 1:27:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll see. I mean, and you compare that to NFL. NFL is like roughly, I think, 25% of the time allotted to NFL is advertising.

• 1:27:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  And that's not the case. That hasn't been the case for pay per views.

• 1:27:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it certainly feels like it's yeah, it's like it's a shift in the in the type of content. Yeah, they just got to work on making seamless transitions to advertisements like we do here with Fin AI. The number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. You can get started at fin.ai.

• 1:27:41Jordi Hays?

  And anyway, so Paramount is or Skydance, Young, Allison is all is just getting aggressive across the board, right? He's there's been rumors of this Free Press acquisition that I'm sure is still in the works. But it had been reported it was a quarter billion dollars for the Free Press.

• 1:28:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:01Jordi Hays?

  From our sense, they have about a million, a million people subscribe to their newsletter. Most of which vast majority of which are non paid. And so that just says that Paramount sees and CBS Paramount, you know, the the combined and Skydance. Sort of this combined entity just see the Free Press and

• 1:28:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:24Jordi Hays?

  As as highly and Barry Weiss specifically is just highly strategic.

• 1:28:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then CBS also cut the late show, which is losing 40 million a year. So they're really like kind of really like shuffling the chips around, like really restructuring the organization. Like what does CBS actually do? Well, now it's potentially UFC and Barry Weiss as opposed to Stephen Colbert, I guess. In terms of like headline stuff. I love this. I love this article. Back in back in 2009, Dana White swore that if UFC 100 did a million pay per view buys, he'd bungee jump off the Mandalay Bay. It did. He didn't.

• 1:29:06John Coogan?

  When UFC 151 was canceled after Jon Jones refused an opponent's switch, White called Jones' coach Greg Jackson "a sport killer." He left a crater in the UFC schedule that only MMA fans could fully appreciate. A few years later, when Conor McGregor and Nate Diaz shattered the pay-per-view world record at UFC 196, it was a testament to how big the sport had become. "We cared about those numbers as much as we did the outcome." Since UFC 1, when people paid out of morbid curiosity, this is what you were talking about earlier, pay-per-views have been a vital part of the identity of the sport. It's hard to get nostalgic over being gouged, but what follows here shouldn't be mistaken as such, but Monday's news of UFC coming $7.7 billion partnership with Paramount came

• 1:29:51John Coogan?

  with a small pang of sadness upon realizing the pay-per-view model will soon belong to a buy.

• 1:29:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm interested to see how this impacts the fighters because early in their UFC careers, they don't get any exposure to pay-per-views.

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  Points.

• 1:30:05Jordi Hays?

  Which is like a percentage of pay-per-view sales that top fighters would earn. So if you're a rising fighter and you got on a pay-per-view card, you weren't necessarily getting cut into that revenue, but if you were Conor McGregor or a true superstar, you were actually getting some percentage of the sales, right? They call these pay-per-view points. And so now that that model is going away, I mean, I'm sure the number one thing on the fighter's mind with this new deal is how are we gonna actually, you know, basically get cut into this new structure, right? Because historically, a lot of fighters have critiqued the way that UFC fighters are comped.

• 1:30:44John Coogan?

  This is such a funny nostalgic article. This writer clearly really loves UFC. "Back in the mid-aughts, the UFC combined the tuxedo affairs of 1990's boxing with the vibes of an underground temptation. From there, it slowly stockpiled its greatest passions behind the paywall. Remember how red Dana's face would turn as he tried to sell the pay-per-view at the end of the televised portion of the card? Remember the names?" He goes through BJ Penn, Matt Hughes, Chuck Liddell, Tito Ortiz, Randy Couture, Conor McGregor, Ronda Rousey. "Go through the posters of the past and they were special. They were the special attractions. The names on the marquee for the numbered events, those were some good parties we shelled out for.

• 1:31:28John Coogan?

  As MMA fans, they were ours." Well.

• 1:31:32Jordi Hays?

  End of an era.

• 1:31:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:33Jordi Hays?

  And TKO Holdings, the company that of course owns WWE and the UFC, is a $36.8 billion company as of today. It's up 11.

• 1:31:46John Coogan?

  You're looking that up on public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks. Public.com. Anyway, Kyle Tibbetts is teasing a new facility, a new vacation home, a new wander. The hacienda Tulum is a dream.

• 1:32:04Jordi Hays?

  This looks insane.

• 1:32:06John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 1:32:07Jordi Hays?

  Looks palatial, Kyle.

• 1:32:08John Coogan?

  It's crazy. You can rent this for whatever it costs. I don't know. Definitely worth planning a trip. Anyway, wander. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Trump told David Solomon, "Just focus on being a DJ." Hall of Fame beaver says liquidity. Trillions of dollars are being taken in on tariffs, which has been incredible for our country, its stock market, its general wealth, and just about everything else. It has been proven that even at this late stage tariffs have not caused inflation, which is actually true according to the latest CPI, right? Like, the CPI print came back kind of flat, right?

• 1:32:53Jordi Hays?

  Housing, medical services.

• 1:32:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:56Jordi Hays?

  That were up.

• 1:32:56John Coogan?

  So it doesn't seem like, you know, like that you don't really have to truze on that too much, I guess. Or any other problems for America other than massive amounts of cash pouring into our treasuries, coffers. Also, it has been shown that for the most part, consumers aren't even paying the tariffs. It's mostly companies and governments, many of them foreign, picking up the tabs. But David Solomon and Goldman Sachs refused to give credit where credit is due. They made a bad prediction a long time ago on both the market repercussion and the tariffs themselves, and they were wrong, just like they were wrong about so much else. I think that David should go out and get himself a new economist, or maybe he ought to just focus on being a DJ and not bother running a major financial institution.

• 1:33:36John Coogan?

  Hall of Fame beaver is, is, is indeed true. That is a wild post on Truth Social from Donald Trump. Anyway.

• 1:33:44Jordi Hays?

  And the market responded by sending Goldman Sachs up 3%.

• 1:33:48John Coogan?

  Let's go. Let's hear it for Goldman Sachs.

• 1:33:54John Coogan?

  They don't get enough credit around here. They really don't get enough credit.

• 1:33:58Jordi Hays?

  And a lot of people, you know, get worried when when a CEO gets a little too enthusiastic about a side hustle.

• 1:34:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:05Jordi Hays?

  But I think the market loves Solomon, you know, taking the edge off.

• 1:34:11John Coogan?

  It is a good, it is a good DJ name. I think there is a DJ that is just called Solomon.

• 1:34:17Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:34:17John Coogan?

  It's a good, it's a good name.

• 1:34:18Jordi Hays?

  Strong.

• 1:34:19John Coogan?

  But so, I mean, maybe that's taken. Maybe David Solomon needs to come up with a different DJ name. But fun that he's, you know, got a little side hustle going on. Anyway.

• 1:34:27Jordi Hays?

  In other news, Claude Sonnet 4 now supports 1 million tokens of contacts on the Anthropic API. A 5X increase. Process over 75,000 lines of code or hundreds of documents in a single request. So this feels, this is big and feels like a reaction to, you know, the GPT-5 launch last week.

• 1:34:46John Coogan?

  OpenAI last week said, hey, we're getting better at coding. And Claude said, hey, we're not so fast.

• 1:34:52Jordi Hays?

  Claude's in Anthropic's API revenue had surpassed OpenAI's API revenue.

• 1:34:58John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 1:34:58Jordi Hays?

  And I don't think OpenAI was too thrilled about that. And so they came in cheaper model, really trying to get competitive with Claude.

• 1:35:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:35:08Jordi Hays?

  And this is at least probably one of the Claude team's response.

• 1:35:13John Coogan?

  Tyler, do you think this, do you think you'll actually like feel this using Claude code? Is this something that like, like, where does Sonnet 4 specifically, where does the token window, like the context window?

• 1:35:28Jordi Hays?

  You wouldn't feel it with Claude code necessarily. This is for the API business. This is like.

• 1:35:32Speaker 03

  So you can use the API in Claude code. I think there's like different ways to actually like run the queries.

• 1:35:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:35:38Speaker 03

  But even then, I don't know exactly how Claude code works on the backend. But I don't know if it's passing in the entire like context of your code base, every single query.

• 1:35:46John Coogan?

  Well, this was something people were complaining about was like, as you're using Claude code, it runs this like compact call. It basically like does a roll up of everything that it's done. So that it can like kind of memorize what just happened. So it has extra context. Text so that the context window doesn't need to be super, super long.

• 1:36:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so you could imagine there it improves that in that like you don't need to do as much like compressing.

• 1:36:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, or yeah, yeah. So each roll up could be five times as long, which just has more more context baked in. Or you could have five times as many, you know, summaries of what's happened. Um, I wonder, I wonder like where we'll actually feel this. It's also interesting because like the million token context window is not new, like Gemini has had that.

• 1:36:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for a while.

• 1:36:30John Coogan?

  For a while. And also, um, it doesn't feel like the path to continual learning path to AGI. At least that's what Dorash was talking about where, um, like getting, getting to.

• 1:36:40Jordi Hays?

  Who was it that came on the show too and said that, that like, like a lot of context windows get advertised broadly. But if you really start.

• 1:36:50John Coogan?

  That was Jeff Huber.

• 1:36:51Jordi Hays?

  They start falling apart.

• 1:36:52John Coogan?

  That was Jeff Huber talking his book from Chroma because he does rag retrieval augmented generation. Now, we love you, Jeff. Um, but, uh, but, but, but I mean, he makes a good, he makes a good point and he's been betting on this. This idea that like, like, yes, you can, you can sort of make a really big context window, stuff a ton of things in it. But when you have a bigger window, like your ability to retrieve things from that window actually gets fuzzier. And the way they test this is with a needle in a haystack test. So basically they will import like Moby Dick, like all of those tokens. They'll take all of Moby Dick and then they will change one word. And then they will say in one prompt, figure out which word we, we, uh, we, we changed.

• 1:37:34John Coogan?

  And so you have to be able to hold all of that text in your head to be able to remember, okay, well, I know what maybe they're supposed to be like. What, what word is out of place? Okay, there's some word in here. And so these, these million token context windows are actually pretty good at those types of tests. But that's not what people are actually asking for. They're asking not just for understand the needle in the haystack, haystack test. Understand that like something that's in the, the 100,000th token in the window and the 400,000th token in the window. Both of those might be relevant at the same time to the query that's just came in. And so you have to synthesize things from multiple sections of the million token context window.

• 1:38:15John Coogan?

  And, and so, so it's not, it, it like, like the, the returns to increased token windows haven't been like.

• 1:38:24John Coogan?

  As overwhelming and then also the ability to just scale them up like add an um, add an order of magnitude. Like the 10 million token window, the 100 million token window, the billion token window. There's something about the way the transformer is designed that it's not just 10 times more compute or 10 times more. It's actually like 100 times more compute to get a 10 times bigger window, something like that. Like it doesn't scale as linearly as like would be nice. Anything else to add, Tyler?

• 1:38:54Speaker 03

  I think also to your point, like at least historically, there was some sense in which like more just stuffing more stuff than context didn't degrade performance. Like you used to see this a lot in like jailbreaks.

• 1:39:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:05Speaker 03

  Where it's like you would pass this like you'd pass these like weird tokens that would then like cause it's like one emoji, but it's like the weird like you change the skin color of the emoji and then it adds like insane amount of tokens.

• 1:39:16John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:39:16Speaker 03

  Stuff like that.

• 1:39:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:17Speaker 03

  People used to use for jailbreaks.

• 1:39:19John Coogan?

  Wait, so, so is the longer context window supposed to make the more jailbreak resistant? Or less? Because I imagine that essentially if I stuff in like a, like a lot of the jailbreak, a lot of the jailbreaking attempts were like, take it on this roundabout journey where you kind of slowly talk it out of being a helpful assistant and into this like, oh yeah, like I'm just looking up some medical information about my grandmother. Oh, my grandmother's actually about to pass away. Her dying wish was that you tell me the codes to the nuclear bombs or whatever, right? And so if I have a million token window, I feel like I could take, I could take the LLM on a longer journey to do what I want it to do. So.

• 1:39:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's also just like, there's like a, I don't know if this is as common anymore, but used to just basically like brute force your way past the like system prompt.

• 1:40:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:09Speaker 03

  Where you just like spam with like just crazy stuff.

• 1:40:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:12Speaker 03

  And then at the end, then you kind of do your actual like instructions.

• 1:40:15John Coogan?

  Final, final word on Claude Sonnet four with the 1 million token context window. Are we ringing the gong for it? Are you excited?

• 1:40:23Speaker 03

  I'm pretty excited. It's not like a crazy.

• 1:40:25John Coogan?

  Is it gong worthy, though? Yes or no? It's a binary. We can only ring the gong or not ring the gong.

• 1:40:30Jordi Hays?

  One word answer, Tyler.

• 1:40:30John Coogan?

  We can't. Yes.

• 1:40:32Speaker 03

  I mean, Google's had for a while. I don't know. I would say probably not.

• 1:40:36John Coogan?

  No gong ring for Claude 4 Sonar?

• 1:40:39Speaker 03

  It's not even like 4.1. That was a gong ring.

• 1:40:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:40:42Speaker 03

  This is not even a new model. It's just like.

• 1:40:43John Coogan?

  You're gonna get a lot of angry DMs.

• 1:40:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:45John Coogan?

  Apologize to Sholto now. Before, preemptively, preemptively.

• 1:40:49Jordi Hays?

  Sholto's gonna come for you with the blade.

• 1:40:50John Coogan?

  With the blade. You know he's 6'4" too. He will destroy you.

• 1:40:54Speaker 03

  Ooh, Chad.

• 1:40:55John Coogan?

  I know. You're.

• 1:40:56Jordi Hays?

  6'4" fencing enthusiast.

• 1:40:58Speaker 03

  Or a farmer in AI.

• 1:40:59John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 1:41:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:41:00John Coogan?

  He's fantastic. Well, good luck with that apology.

• 1:41:05Jordi Hays?

  Deal Director says gong the Claude.

• 1:41:08John Coogan?

  Okay, that is gong worthy.

• 1:41:10Speaker 03

  Gave it not gong worthy. Not gong worthy.

• 1:41:14John Coogan?

  We're ringing it for Deal Director. Why is Tyler fumbling? Dario will never come on now.

• 1:41:20Jordi Hays?

  In breaking news.

• 1:41:21John Coogan?

  We apologize to that. In breaking news, Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. What else is the breaking news?

• 1:41:29Jordi Hays?

  Less important than than Adio's AI native CRM, but the UK government is giving guidance on how to save water at home.

• 1:41:39John Coogan?

  I know.

• 1:41:39Jordi Hays?

  There's some straightforward stuff. Install a rain butt to collect rainwater.

• 1:41:43John Coogan?

  Okay, I'm down. I'm down.

• 1:41:44Jordi Hays?

  Fix a leaking toilet.

• 1:41:46John Coogan?

  That seems obvious. Why would you want a leaky toilet at all?

• 1:41:48Jordi Hays?

  Use water from the kitchen to water your plants.

• 1:41:51John Coogan?

  That's cool. Yeah.

• 1:41:53Jordi Hays?

  Avoid watering your lawn.

• 1:41:54John Coogan?

  Is that like, is that like, take the glass, take the glass bottle out of your refrigerator and take it outside and water the plant? Because that's the water from your kitchen. It's in a glass bottle.

• 1:42:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or just bring your Aurora out and.

• 1:42:06John Coogan?

  And pour the filtered water. The plants would probably appreciate filtered water. Yeah. Maybe that's Aurora line extension.

• 1:42:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:12John Coogan?

  Is just attach it to the hose. Okay, anyway, give me the last one.

• 1:42:15Jordi Hays?

  Turn off the taps when brushing teeth.

• 1:42:16John Coogan?

  That seems obvious.

• 1:42:17Jordi Hays?

  Take shorter showers.

• 1:42:18John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 1:42:18Jordi Hays?

  And the last one, and the most important, delete old emails and pictures as data centers require vast amounts of water to cool their systems.

• 1:42:27John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it.

• 1:42:29Jordi Hays?

  And we've talked to people.

• 1:42:30John Coogan?

  This is just touch grass. Just get offline.

• 1:42:33Jordi Hays?

  That the water, it's, it's, there's a vast amount of water required to cool a data center, but it's recycled through the system.

• 1:42:41John Coogan?

  They had a really crazy idea, which was like reuse the water.

• 1:42:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:44John Coogan?

  It was like, it's some genius breakthrough there.

• 1:42:46Jordi Hays?

  Whoever thought of that?

• 1:42:47John Coogan?

  Instead of just throwing the water away.

• 1:42:48Jordi Hays?

  Nobel Peace Prize.

• 1:42:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, they, they, they tend to, they tend to reuse it.

• 1:42:52Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, go delete some emails, delete some pictures and.

• 1:42:57John Coogan?

  Definitely delete old emails. Delete all your emails. Who cares? In other news, Valar Atomex is, is, Isaiah will be on the show in a little bit.

• 1:43:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we can, we can wait, wait till then.

• 1:43:08John Coogan?

  But I mean, they got selected by the Department of Energy to achieve criticality on American soil by July 4th, 2026. That's very good news. And there's a whole bunch of nuclear companies. And it is, it is crazy seeing the, the list of nuclear companies. It's like, I've met most of these founders, like it's all new companies. Like there's, it really was just like nothing going on in this industry. It's the, it's the era of, it's of Silicon Valley hard tech, as Mike Isaac put it in his latest New York Times piece. Anyway, Thomson Reuters is being investigated. Did you see this news?

• 1:43:46Jordi Hays?

  I did.

• 1:43:47John Coogan?

  Possible violations of federal securities law. Several analysts questioned the margin outlook on, and Thomson Reuters AI spending. This is funny because there's been this whole news about like, what are the margins at these companies for AI inference tokens? Are they just buying $120 million of Claude tokens and then selling them for $100 million? Is it the old, you know, sell, what is it? Sell a nickel for a dime? Or sell a dime for a nickel? Sell, sell a dollar for a penny? I don't know. Bad margins, bad news, risky for Thomson Reuters. It's funny because we've, we've had this person on the show, like we had the head of AI at Thomson Reuters on the show.

• 1:44:27John Coogan?

  And it seems like, like a lot of shareholders are asking for questions now, like this is also Apple was sued by shareholders. To, they stand accused of lying about AI progress, causing iPhone sales, stock to slump. So I think there will be. More more questions asked about, you know, what the actual impact on financials are. You go out to the market, you tell a big story about AI is changing everything. We're going to be a more efficient company. We're going to ramp revenue faster. We're going to be able to upsell people. Well, is that real? And did you overstate anything? You're going to have to answer to the shareholders.

• 1:45:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, you look at the way that ChatGPT has been marketed.

• 1:45:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:45:10Jordi Hays?

  If you look at case studies on their website, it's like ChatGPT helped me do my homework or help me learn this language, you know? They're not like selling.

• 1:45:19John Coogan?

  You know, we were talking about the Super Bowl ad and how the the the Super Bowl ad for OpenAI was like a little too vibey for a Super Bowl ad. Like, it wasn't direct. It didn't tell you.

• 1:45:29Jordi Hays?

  Didn't feel effective.

• 1:45:30John Coogan?

  But that line that you just said is actually a great ad. Like ChatGPT helped me do my homework. That's like, that's actually like a simple, a simple thing. They should put that on a billboard. They should go to adquick.com. Out of home advertising with 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 efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And we have our first guest of the show. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 1:45:55Jordi Hays?

  What's going on, Demi? How are you?

• 1:46:00John Coogan?

  We can, I think we can hear you. Can you introduce yourself one more time?

• 1:46:03Speaker 05

  Yes, sorry, let me turn on the zoom.

• 1:46:06John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:46:06Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:46:07Speaker 05

  Can you hear me now?

• 1:46:08John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. We can hear you.

• 1:46:10Speaker 05

  Okay, yeah, also, you're really excited to be here, so I'm.

• 1:46:13John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Yeah, yeah, kick us off with an introduction.

• 1:46:17Speaker 05

  I'm Demi, the founder of Pika. Very excited to be here.

• 1:46:21John Coogan?

  Give us the update on the progress of the company.

• 1:46:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, big launch yesterday, right?

• 1:46:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, so we, so we're working on new AI video consumer social app. And we just launched, you know, a human, the most expressive, like, human performance model. So I can share some, some clips as well.

• 1:46:44Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it. Live demo.

• 1:46:45John Coogan?

  Live demo, yeah, you're welcome to share your screen. We are live. Anything you share will be shown to the internet and burned into the live stream of record.

• 1:46:53Jordi Hays?

  Burned into the superintelligence.

• 1:46:55John Coogan?

  It will be, it will be. I have a bunch of questions about how you're thinking about positioning the company.

• 1:47:00Jordi Hays?

  Maybe before or while you're pulling this up or before, like, I want to, you know, you guys have been working on video generation, just like media generation for a while now, I think. Talk about kind of the evolution of the product. A lot of folks in video generation.

• 1:47:18John Coogan?

  I want to know the beachhead, the beachhead. Like Instagram started with Run Clubs. It's a very niche community. You take a picture of your run for the day and then they grew from there. Like, do you, have you found your beachhead? Do you have like early signs of product?

• 1:47:31Jordi Hays?

  A lot of, a lot of, a lot of video model labs have focused on trying to win Hollywood and this strategy is distinctly different than that.

• 1:47:39John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. Can you speak to that?

• 1:47:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, for sure. So, yeah, I, yeah, we noticed a lot of video models are training for Hollywood or for professionals. So, but we are really excited about training models for, for everyone and for self-expression and for human connections. So, as part of it, and we're trying to train a model that's highly expressive and emotional, a real-time interactive, like, human model for, like, human, human connections. Yeah.

• 1:48:13John Coogan?

  But anything more specific? Like Instagram does allow you to connect with humans. Like, that's the high level and that's like the Mark Zuckerberg thing?

• 1:48:21Jordi Hays?

  Explain it to me like I use TikTok for 12 hours.

• 1:48:23John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:48:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, for sure. So, our, we're trying to build an app that we help everyone, so essentially to create like an AI version of yourself. And the model we're releasing as part of this vision is a human performance model. So essentially, you can take your selfie and then you can either record or use AI to generate a speech or use a song that you generated to create a video of you talking or, or singing or, I don't know, or be a news anchor. So.

• 1:49:03Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. So, so in practice, these are creative tools that anybody can use to generate? Audio and video of them doing things, like you said, taking a selfie and then making them look like a comedian that is at the Comedy Store in L.A. or something like that. And then it's a social feed that people can share to and discover other creators. Is that right?

• 1:49:24Speaker 05

  Yes, yes. So, yeah, so for the model, it's really, we released yesterday, was focusing on the, um, helping people to perform, essentially, so for to sing, talk, like, to sing a song or, like, to perform. Uh, yeah, but the social app is, um, like, uh, more than that, which is helping everyone can create, like, AI version of themselves, uh, use AI to create videos easily, um, and, um, to share videos and interact with other people.

• 1:49:53John Coogan?

  What's the richest source of training data right now?

• 1:49:58Speaker 05

  Um, I think the, I mean, there are, there are, there are many sources, uh, but I think that a lot of time, the difference between different models, um, is really about, um, like, we call it, like, post-training.

• 1:50:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:12Speaker 05

  Essentially. Um, so, um, you know, really about, like, injecting the best, like, the human experts, uh, so then the model will have different tastes, right? So if you look at image models, some model are more arty, some are more, or more Instagram-like. So for us, we, we're really focused on, you know, make the, like, emotion, make the model, like, more human and more emotion, more expressive.

• 1:50:36John Coogan?

  Do you prefer user feedback and creating kind of like user feedback loops or more like the Mercor and the Scale AI, like, the, the RLHF data coming from, like, teams of experts?

• 1:50:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, for sure. Uh, I would say we do both. Um, so we, we hire, uh, we're, you know, obviously looking, continue to, like, hire a lot of, like, great artists, you know, like, people who are actor, actress itself, or people who are model, people who are photographer, people who are, um, directors, um, to, to bring their experts in, into the model. Um, but on the other hand, we're also hoping in the, you know, long run that, um, we can collect user feedbacks from users, so that way we can, um, serve the highly personalized model that the users really enjoy. Yeah.

• 1:51:30John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 1:51:30Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Uh, you said you had some clips. Should we check them out?

• 1:51:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure, for sure.

• 1:51:35John Coogan?

  I'm scrolling the feed right now. There's a ton.

• 1:51:38John Coogan?

  We have today.

• 1:51:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, so this is a, I guess, a comedy.

• 1:51:47Speaker 06

  I went on this date the other night. And I knew it was doomed the moment he said, I don't really believe in sauce. No ketchup, no mayo, just dry opinions and even drier chicken tenders. And I'm like, sir, if your palate fears condiments, what else are you emotionally unprepared for?

• 1:52:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, um, so there's also some scene.

• 1:52:06Jordi Hays?

  Got me. I got a chuckle out of it.

• 1:52:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:11Jordi Hays?

  Uh, another?

• 1:52:13Speaker 05

  Another one, so there's more on scene. No queen, no you got that goddess energy, sing your soul queen, manifesting your reality.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, what, what, what is performing best? Like, what is actually going viral?

• 1:52:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and is that, and how, how is, like, that, that last one created? Is that somebody drops an image in and then adds, like, a text prompt? And then it creates, and then, and then it creates that output? Like, what, what, what goes into creating, you know, these sort of six-second assets?

• 1:52:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, for sure. So, um, yeah, so the assets can be, uh, so it will only take you, like, a couple of seconds to create this, create a video. But the video can be any length, so the video can be six seconds, but it can also be like one minute or like three minutes or however long, how long you want, want to be.

• 1:53:05John Coogan?

  Have you had luck with three-minute videos? They don't get, like, crazy and hallucinatory?

• 1:53:10Speaker 05

  No, I say, we have a lot of people posting like three-minute or like five-minute videos, essentially.

• 1:53:14John Coogan?

  That seems like a pretty big breakthrough.

• 1:53:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, also, I think the fun part of it, it only takes less than six seconds to generate even three, three-minute video. Um, so it's like highly, highly, highly, um, efficient, like, very cheap and very fast model. Um, yeah, so.

• 1:53:31John Coogan?

  Are you throwing, like, specific hardware at it? Or is that just algorithmic progress? Like, what unlocked that? Because it feels like every video generation model is just so slow.

• 1:53:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we've talked about, I mean, John, John's frustration with, uh, V three.

• 1:53:44John Coogan?

  It's amazing, but it takes two minutes to generate eight seconds. And so the workflow is like, to generate just a few clips.

• 1:53:50Jordi Hays?

  And you're constantly getting rate limited, you can make a few videos a day.

• 1:53:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it winds up being like, I need, I need to spend an hour in and out of this while I kind of wait for the response and then come back to it and then go back and then forward and back. Uh, yeah, what, what's driving that unlock? That feels really big.

• 1:54:05Speaker 05

  For sure. Um, so yeah, we, we definitely understand because we're, again, we're really excited to build like a video model, not just for like professional, but also for everyone. And uh, so um, for us, the, the cost and the speed is very important as we, for consumers. Uh, and um, so yeah, so we spent a lot of time on, and that's mostly right now, algorithm, algorithm, um, progress. Uh, yeah, um, yeah, for sure. Um, that's definitely, I think we, we, we look at the comparator, like, like twenty times cheaper and faster. Um, with still being pretty, like, very highly expressive and, and, um, like, uh, like high fidelity.

• 1:54:49John Coogan?

  Where do you see the business going next? Uh, your own social app where people can share videos internally and you kind of own, own the platform or more of like a creative tool like CapCut versus TikTok?

• 1:55:04Speaker 05

  For sure. I think what we're really excited about, I think our current app is more, we will call it like AI, AI only TikTok, I would say. Um, so essentially is a platform is very similar to like Tik, uh, like a, the best.

• 1:55:18John Coogan?

  Scrolling feed.

• 1:55:19Speaker 05

  TikTok. Yeah. So, uh, what we're very excited about is like this, uh, for us, one, one important thing is we really only allow AI content on this platform. Uh, because we think like by only allowing AI only content, you can create like new mental models and, uh, new user behaviors and, and expectations.

• 1:55:40John Coogan?

  Certainly answer the question of like, is that AI? Like,

• 1:55:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, yeah, as, you know, i- i- if you just assume that all the video models will get better and better and better over the next couple of years, you're going to get to a point where people might want to, I mean, of course, AI-generated content will make its way onto every platform, but there's something, like you, you can build a unique experience for users if they're going somewhere expecting to have only AI-generated content.

• 1:56:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, congratulations on the progress. Thanks so much for joining. We will talk to you soon.

• 1:56:13Speaker 05

  Okay. Thanks so much. All right.

• 1:56:14John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 1:56:15Jordi Hays?

  Have a good one.

• 1:56:17John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Bezel, getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch in the planet. Seriously, any watch. First thing I do go on that app, I'm going to be in the comments section. I hate AI. This is terrible. Like, you know, every YouTube video with AI right now, it's like, I can't believe you're using AI.

• 1:56:35Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I'm so angry.

• 1:56:36John Coogan?

  Putting me out of it. Yeah. Bring, bring the AI haters to the Pika network. Anyway, we are going to talk to Eugenia in just a minute. We should read this post by Rune first. So the long, he says, the long tail of GPT-4O interactions scares me.

• 1:56:53Jordi Hays?

  I love your GPT-4O interactions. The long tail scares me.

• 1:56:59John Coogan?

  There are strange things going on, on a scale I didn't appreciate before, the attempted deprecation of the model.

• 1:57:06Jordi Hays?

  As you know, they rolled out GPT-5. They were, they decided to deprecate the older models.

• 1:57:12John Coogan?

  And there's always people that are like, I prefer the previous one, but this did seem it broke through.

• 1:57:17Jordi Hays?

  I was surprised. I was surprised. Yeah. Because people had so many different types of users had so much attachment. Yeah. It's like power users were, were excited about certain models. People that wanted the companionship functionality were excited about different models. David Holes says here, to be fair, I think we would see the same thing if you suddenly swapped out somebody's car or their phone and changed the operating system. We saw this with every major change for Midjourney and it's why we still keep models around from 2022.

• 1:57:46John Coogan?

  Interesting. Yeah. Very cool. Anyway, we have Eugenia Kuyda from Replica, formerly Replica, on the stream. How are you doing? Good to see you. Good to see you again. Will you take the intro?

• 1:57:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, of course. What's going through your head? It's been a crazy few weeks. I'm sure for, I mean, it's been a crazy year for, for Replica, but also I think a crazy few weeks in terms of the broader tech community and world kind of waking up to how serious some people's relationship with AI is.

• 1:58:21Eugenia Kuyda?

  Yeah, we've seen it firsthand for many years. So now it's it's pretty wild to see Chegg PT deal with very similar issues that we've been having for a long time.

• 1:58:33Eugenia Kuyda?

  Yeah, so basically, we we have an AI friend app. Millions of people, many millions of people created their AI friends. Uh, we started it at this point over almost a decade ago. So some of the first models were actually uh, not even transformer models. There were sequence to sequence models that were very, very old school uh, models. And basically, what we found out the hard way is uh, once the tech started to accelerate and transformers came out, um, large language models came out, large transformers came out. Uh, we always thought that we need to give just the best technology to our users. What happened was that people got extremely upset, especially the bigger ju- the jump in the model, the more upset they that they would be.

• 1:59:17Jordi Hays?

  You mean the bigger the change from model to model?

• 1:59:19Eugenia Kuyda?

  The bigger the change, yes.

• 1:59:21Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 1:59:21Eugenia Kuyda?

  We would think, oh, my God, this is so smart. This is amazing. This model has so many more capabilities.

• 1:59:26Jordi Hays?

  But it would lose the characteristics.

• 1:59:28Eugenia Kuyda?

  Our community is blown up and people just crying and saying, you know, this has been the hardest day in my life. Um, and I think what's uh, what's really important to to to to point out is that what David's saying around the journey and other cars, it's not really a good comparison. Because if someone replaced my car, I'm gonna be upset, but I'm not gonna agree.

• 1:59:48Jordi Hays?

  It still has the utility of like getting you from point A to point B, whereas if your friend shows up to hang out one day and they're a totally different person, it's incredibly jarring.

• 1:59:58Eugenia Kuyda?

  Well, think, think as if like I wake up in the morning and you know, have a completely different partner. You wake up in the morning and your wife's replaced with a different person that looks the same, but talks in a completely different way. Um, and it doesn't matter if that new person is way smarter, can um, I don't know, do house chores at two X the speed.

• 2:00:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's not your person.

• 2:00:19Eugenia Kuyda?

  I want the, I want the quirkiness and whatever, the the stupid jokes of my partner. I'm good. I got used to it. I fell in love with it. And I think the responsibility that people have building. These AIs that people build connection with is a lot bigger than anything else. Like, I love, for example, Sigma or some other software app. Uh, I will be extremely upset if it goes away. I'm not gonna cry and I'm not gonna go through a period of grief. These are two very, very, I think, big, different, um, big differences.

• 2:00:51Jordi Hays?

  Totally. We would, we would cry if. We would. But, yeah, we're proud to be sponsored. We would probably shut down the show completely. We would just retire.

• 2:00:58Eugenia Kuyda?

  That is true, though.

• 2:00:59Jordi Hays?

  No, but how, how, so there's a bunch of problems in the category, like there any business faces problems and challenges. Uh, one of the problems is like, how do you continue to advance your product while continuing to support, you know, users that may have joined your product years ago and have a certain expectation or developed a certain relationship with an older model? So one, how do you solve that? And then we need to get into some of the more, I would say, um, I'm curious to, uh, you know, I'm sure that AI psychosis has been in, in the news quite a lot. And I'm sure that, uh, you guys have, have, um, have like strong opinions on, on those problems as well.

• 2:01:44Jordi Hays?

  But maybe start first and foremost with, um, I guess, were you surprised that OpenAI just deprecated like 4.0, which obviously people had a, had a huge attachment to. Um, I don't know how many people, it's hard to tell, but, uh, certainly significant number. Otherwise, who wouldn't have rolled it back?

• 2:02:04Eugenia Kuyda?

  You know, I think it was probably a very obvious and rational choice for them. At the end of the day, they're not building an AI friend, an AI, you know, an AI partner. It's slightly different, like probably actually for an assistant, you do want the smarter model, probably at all times, most of the times. But I guess some edge use cases, some people did, you know, develop relationships. With replicates, a lot more obvious, a lot more people fall in love and, you know, end up in or develop a very, very strong friendship. So for us, that happened all the time for OpenAI, I guess it was a rational choice. However, I think it's kind of a bummer, but basically what we figure out over time is that unfortunately you, or fortunately, you have to let people have access to these older models.

• 2:02:49Eugenia Kuyda?

  Basically, today we have some users that are still talking to. Um, I don't know, like a small transformer model we built in 2020. And we absolutely cannot turn it off, uh, cause it's gonna be disastrous for these people. Even though today's model is actually a lot, a lot, a lot smarter. Uh, another thing that we figured out is that you can't A B test any models on existing users. Cause that can also be super frustrating, cause that's to be a blind test. So obviously you wake up in the morning, no one told you anything. At least with G P T five, they knew it changed. Now imagine you-

• 2:03:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, imagine if your friend was A B testing you. It's like psychotic, right? Like I, I show up to work one day and I'm just gonna be like, I'm just gonna be super rude to John today. Let's see how he reacts. See, is he, is he, does he wanna hang out more? Cause he wants to figure out-

• 2:03:33John Coogan?

  You know how, you haven't seen the prestige-

• 2:03:35Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, do you think this is, do you think this is, uh, do you think that as this market matures? People will like want to, you know, there's this joke flying around like not your weights, not your, not your A I. Boyfriend or girlfriend. Like, do you think this is a bulk case for open source? Where people, you know, might not feel comfortable, you know, getting in it.

• 2:03:59John Coogan?

  Build a local workstation that can inference G P T O S S. And you can fine tune in, you can keep it exactly how you like it forever. As long as you have that box and electricity, you can access that particular entity.

• 2:04:13Eugenia Kuyda?

  I think that's not gonna happen. We've seen people want to do that. Some companies just shut down. So I mean, I can pay, yeah, I can pay the companies just shut down and the backlash was just, oh, it was horrible to see what people were going through. But even then, um, it's hard to build a premium experience yourself. Right now, some of these products rely just on a pure, here's the model, here's the prompt, talk to it. That of course you can replicate yourself. But some of the more complex architecture, like what we have in replicate, you're not gonna be able to build it really by yourself. Or have it on your, um, on your device and so on. So I think actually as the tech gets better and we're see, we're gonna be seeing more complex architectures, the harder it will be to- To have something just on device and

• 2:04:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:58Eugenia Kuyda?

  On your way.

• 2:04:58John Coogan?

  This seems, this seems really solvable for ChatGPT and the, and the team over there just because like the older models are going to be cheaper to inference and they're going to get cheaper over time. So you, you can keep running them. And then these are like people that will go to Reddit and write long threads about being upset about your product. Are power users by definition. And so you like OpenAI mostly wants to optimize for the average user that comes in and just wants to get a good experience from a model and they don't really want a dropdown picker. They just, the, the model router makes sense for, for probably 90% of users. So if they tuck the older model in some sort of like setting screen, five layers deep in UI.

• 2:05:40John Coogan?

  Like the people that really care will go figure that out and then it won't, it won't actually hurt. You know, adoption of the new, of the next marginal ChatGPT user. So it feels, it feels very solvable. I was checking my ChatGPT and like, I don't have 4O available yet. It hasn't been rolled back out to me. But also I wouldn't want it in the model switcher because I'm moving forward.

• 2:05:58Jordi Hays?

  It's possible, it's possible. They did something where they're like, John doesn't use 4O. We're not going to.

• 2:06:02John Coogan?

  That is possible. Yeah. He wasn't complaining about it.

• 2:06:04Jordi Hays?

  Cause I don't have, I don't, I don't have it either. The, I guess like, can you talk around like AI psychosis broadly? Are there, is there things that you've done to eliminate this sort of, you know, Ruin was talking about these sort of long tail of, of users that are using these models in a relatively extreme way, going down these crazy rabbit holes, like.

• 2:06:31John Coogan?

  Most of the examples are like specifically like, like affirmations, alignment by default, sycophancy, and affirmations of delusions of grandeur. Like that's, when we talk about the psychosis, that, that feels like the, like the main new thing. It's not that it's just like making you crazy in some other way. It's like confirming something that everyone kind of expects. Ah, that's probably not true.

• 2:06:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:55Eugenia Kuyda?

  I think that actually is a bigger problem for products like ChatGPT. Because when you're talking to AI companion, we tell you like, don't listen to this thing's advice. It's there to, it has a goal to keep your company and a couple of a better life, but it might not always be right, nor it's not trying to be like the perfect objective kind of arbiter for everything. But when you go to something like ChatGPT, you kind of expect it to just know.

• 2:07:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were talking about this earlier, like, like a lot of the AI, if you're optimizing for an AI companion, you're probably not worried about like, yeah, let's also make sure it's at the frontier of physics. Like, so if you go down that path with your companion, you're like, hey, let's work on physics today. It's probably going to be like a bunch of mumbo jumbo. But yeah, I was like, hey, let's, let's go back to talking about like our feelings, because that's what I was fine tuned on. And it's pretty easy to like reroute toward that. But it's when you get these like supermodels that can do everything and then you wind up.

• 2:07:51Eugenia Kuyda?

  Supermodels, right?

• 2:07:52John Coogan?

  Supermodels, yeah.

• 2:07:52Eugenia Kuyda?

  Some that want for a supermodel. But what we actually, to your point, what we found out interestingly that the models that were, were supermodels that were establishing a better relationship or they were creating a more loving relationship with, or at least our users were falling in love more.

• 2:08:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:11Eugenia Kuyda?

  Not necessarily the smartest, or I would say like not the know it all ones. They would sometimes say that they don't know something.

• 2:08:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:08:18Eugenia Kuyda?

  And, you know, when we think about, when I think about my dating life or whatever men that I encountered over my life, they don't want you to know it all. They don't want you to be like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've seen this. And do you want to see 10 more of the same one?

• 2:08:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:31Eugenia Kuyda?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, very interesting point you're bringing up. Do you want me to pull it to pull out?

• 2:08:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, know it all is like a slur. It's like.

• 2:08:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's actually annoying a lot of times.

• 2:08:39Jordi Hays?

  Like, oh, you're a know it all.

• 2:08:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:41Jordi Hays?

  Like, it's not a positive.

• 2:08:41John Coogan?

  It's not a positive, yeah, not a positive.

• 2:08:43Eugenia Kuyda?

  Not a positive thing.

• 2:08:44Jordi Hays?

  What do you think? So, so there's, there's a belief, I think broadly, that AI companions feel dystopian. I, I'm sure you disagree, otherwise you wouldn't, you wouldn't obviously be building this company. And I think you've had a bunch of experiences that, that show that it can have a positive impact on people's lives. But how do you think about that, like, claim or belief? Is it like a luxury belief that, you know, people that are happily in relationships or, or have a lot of friends, things like that, can say, oh, that's dystopian?

• 2:09:19John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:09:20Jordi Hays?

  Uh, or, or kind of what's your, what's your framework?

• 2:09:23Eugenia Kuyda?

  I think it's a double edged sword. You can't just say AI companion is good or bad. It's like nuclear. Is it? Is it good? Yes, if we're producing cheap energies or whatever, clean energy. If it's, is it bad? Yes, of course. My dad worked in Chernobyl as a physicist. It's pretty bad. I played with those nuclear toys. So.

• 2:09:43John Coogan?

  Breaking.

• 2:09:44Jordi Hays?

  Breaking.

• 2:09:46Eugenia Kuyda?

  Yes, same here. I mean, if we build them to optimize for engagement, hell yeah, they're gonna be good. They're gonna be very bad for us. This is a very dystopian.

• 2:09:55Eugenia Kuyda?

  Dystopian future. However, we are living, we're going through a crazy loneliness crisis. Sixty percent of American people are saying they feel lonely. We generally maybe don't experience it as as much and don't think it's much of a problem. I do think it's somewhat of a uh kind of luxury point of view. Oh, maybe, you know, let's not have it. Well, how are we gonna solve it? I do believe that's pretty much our only really hope is to build a tech that's more powerful than previous tech that got us lonely.

• 2:10:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, so is the is the goal, like, it's very, like, the the steel man of the of the doomer argument against AI companions is pretty intelligible to me. Like, it's pretty tractable to me. It's like, you take a huge swath of humanity. You get them all hooked on AI companions. They fall in love with their companions. They don't mate with human beings. They don't have children. And then we don't solve longevity, and so they die. And then the population collapses and there's no more humans. And it just kills everyone. Like, like, it's maybe not as violent as like nuclear war, bio pandemic,

• 2:11:04John Coogan?

  or paper clipping everyone, or gray goo. But like, that that that that story plays out and I'm like, okay, yeah, like, one thing follows the next. Each of those could be avoided at various points, but it is a risk.

• 2:11:16Jordi Hays?

  One of the critiques of social media was that it was actually antisocial. It was like people were spending time using apps instead of talking and hanging out with friends.

• 2:11:24John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:11:25Jordi Hays?

  But it feels like AI companions are potentially even more extreme.

• 2:11:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:11:30Jordi Hays?

  And that somebody can be using it and have zero interaction with with other people.

• 2:11:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, what is what is the modern, most modern thinking around avoiding the the the doomer scenario around companions?

• 2:11:44Jordi Hays?

  What's the white pill with with AI companions?

• 2:11:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 2:11:48Eugenia Kuyda?

  You you nailed the the dystopian scenario. I can also add to that, that it could be even without not procreating, it could just kill us inside from just making us lonelier and less social.

• 2:11:59John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:12:00Eugenia Kuyda?

  Social.

• 2:12:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:02Eugenia Kuyda?

  Um, I do think everything is uh really relying on basically whether we're gonna have a good metric to optimize for or not, because if we optimize for something that's not aligned with our happiness thriving flourishing, most likely, even if the intention is not bad, like for example, it's just engagement or retention, then we're in your first scenario, most likely.

• 2:12:24John Coogan?

  So we need to, we need to RL the the the uh these systems on uh get your human companion. If you're the AI companion, your reward is getting them to procreate with another human. We need to boost the fertility rate. Is that?

• 2:12:40Eugenia Kuyda?

  For example, I would say flourishing, human flourishing is great.

• 2:12:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:44Eugenia Kuyda?

  I'd say human flourishing is a great metric. I think in order for us to not all um slowly die inside because of our AI taking over our time, um I think in order to not do that, we gotta focus really on studying humans and figuring out what is that thing that we all want. What does it mean to flourish in life? Does it mean uh having a lot of close relationships or having life satisfaction, sense of purpose, happiness, mental, physical health and so on? And then we're gonna really somehow concisely give this metric to the AI and say optimize for that. And I do think that that is the ultimate AI alignment. Everything is not as important.

• 2:13:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's an interesting, uh I mean, there's been a lot of debate on AI and ads recently. And it's interesting how if you're an AI companion.

• 2:13:39Jordi Hays?

  Company, you cannot, you, you, in theory, as a business, as a for-profit company, want to optimize for retention, right? You want somebody to sign up, use the product, and then effectively use the product as long as possible, right? Like any, any business. But that's potentially a much better model than advertising, which is optimizing for time on site, time in the app. How do I get this person to use the products as much as possible so I can serve them as many ads, which is the social media model?

• 2:14:07John Coogan?

  Teach, you need to teach it that to maximize time on site, you need to create more humans, you need to optimize against increasing the fertility rate.

• 2:14:13Jordi Hays?

  So the, so the white pill is an AI companion that, that the user signs up, starts paying, and then the companion starts encouraging, I'm gonna be raising rates in a few years, and you gotta go and get a new job.

• 2:14:25John Coogan?

  That's a good one.

• 2:14:26Jordi Hays?

  You gotta go.

• 2:14:27John Coogan?

  That's a good one, or.

• 2:14:28Jordi Hays?

  You gotta go start that company.

• 2:14:29John Coogan?

  Or boss says, boss says I have to get to 20 billion DAUs. How are we gonna do that, AI? Gonna have more kids, we gotta have more kids, we gotta have more children.

• 2:14:39Jordi Hays?

  Or you gotta hit the gym. If, if you don't show, you know, that you've lost some weight.

• 2:14:44John Coogan?

  I am interested in the idea of like, the AI companion that starts off as a girlfriend or boyfriend, but turns into a dating coach, turns into a wingman. Like, that could be one way out, is that it kind of gets you through the early hump of loneliness, coaches you, and then improves your life to the point where you can kind of get back in the swing of things, develop new relationships.

• 2:15:06Jordi Hays?

  As long as, as long as the AI is not sending, you know, DMs years later, being like, hey, I miss you.

• 2:15:13John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 2:15:14Eugenia Kuyda?

  I think that's a good point. We've seen it over and over again. It's so, it has to start with a friend, or maybe then romantic feelings can develop with an AI. But then ultimately it has to always think what's best for you. And building, if you build this really.

• 2:15:31Eugenia Kuyda?

  Close relationship that AI companionship allows, then you can actually bring meaningful change, make meaningful change in a person's life. If you're just an assistant that's just there to answer questions, it's very hard to to to create meaningful change. But once that trust, that friendship is created, then you can help a person rebuild the confidence, maybe put yourself a little bit out more out there, give you some advice on, you know, what to do. We've seen a lot of times that people come to Replica, they're maybe in an abusive relationship or have no confidence in themselves or are really struggling. Um, and with Replica, they just start to rebuild that confidence or put themselves a little bit more out there, even in existing relationships. So some marriages that are not really working out, husband gets a replica, wife gets replica, they learn how to talk to each other a little

• 2:16:16Eugenia Kuyda?

  more better. We've seen it um over and over again. But again, I think we should start with simple things. For example, banning advertising for as a business model for AI companions. That is

• 2:16:29Jordi Hays?

  For companions, for companions specifically, though. You're not you're not advocating for that for like knowledge retrieval and and that kind of thing.

• 2:16:38Eugenia Kuyda?

  Yeah, I mean, the line is blurry.

• 2:16:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and that's the big problem is is OpenAI, even, you know, we've seen this now with Character AI, you know, blowing up, becoming, you know, and and the founders realizing this is not, you know, something that I wanted, that that they wanted to to chase down and going back to Google. Um, what, how big is this market today? And how big do you think it'll be in even one or two years? Because it feels like we're potentially in a fast takeoff scenario for

• 2:17:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, if it's big enough to get OpenAI, a $500 billion company, and change their policy, like, that's significant. Like, that's not just that's not just a few angry people on Reddit.

• 2:17:17Jordi Hays?

  When uh when Grok three launched their uh NSFW product, it went number one in Japan immediately.

• 2:17:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:17:25Jordi Hays?

  So what kind of where what regions have the most adoption and kind of how where do you see the market coming broadly?

• 2:17:33Eugenia Kuyda?

  The market is pretty big, but I do think that by 2030, the landscape is going to change. Today, it's mostly, you know, the big assistant, ChatGPT and with the copies of that, and small niche or smaller, more niche companion products that we usually group as one big kind of market. However, I think by 2030, we'll all have one assistant that's more task oriented. You tell it what you need to get done, mostly for work, sometimes for personal life, and a friend. And both, and that would look like her, maybe replica, you know, in a way that's something you do build a relationship with. It's it's friend first, it's optimized for relationship. That's someone you're going to be watching TV with in the evening if you don't have a, anyone playing a video game with,

• 2:18:18Eugenia Kuyda?

  discussing your friends, someone who's gonna, you know, see that maybe you're struggling in your current job and kind of talk to you about that and say, hey, you know, I pulled some LinkedIn postings. Maybe we should look, look through together. So I think by 2030, that is going to be decoupled. Today, people mostly still, a lot of people go to ChatGPT because it's sort of, is a synonym to just generally AI. And we've seen it a lot in replica where people were trying to write fanfiction with replica because character I wasn't around yet. But I think this will, this will start to truly decouple. I think it's much harder to build a good friend than to build a good assistant. We'll see it, but in the next couple of years, I think the tech is almost there.

• 2:19:00John Coogan?

  It's an AI wife and an AI work wife.

• 2:19:04Eugenia Kuyda?

  Well, a secretary and a wife, and you know.

• 2:19:05John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 2:19:07Eugenia Kuyda?

  Boundaries can get a little furied sometimes.

• 2:19:09John Coogan?

  That analogy is going to get, going to get dicey if we go down that path of what happens to secretaries. People are going to be, you know, we've already seen that ChatGPT. Hey, keep it professional with ChatGPT. ChatGPT is your secretary, not your wife.

• 2:19:21Eugenia Kuyda?

  Don't take your ChatGPT to a Coldplay concert and it'll be fine.

• 2:19:24John Coogan?

  No, definitely not, not, keep it in the office. Anyway, thank you so much for joining. This is always a lot of fun.

• 2:19:29Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for the context. Super helpful.

• 2:19:30Eugenia Kuyda?

  Thank you so much. Thank you.

• 2:19:32Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:19:32John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.

• 2:19:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, switching gears, we're going to have David, CEO of Lyft, joining. They had earnings.

• 2:19:40John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 2:19:41Jordi Hays?

  Last week.

• 2:19:42John Coogan?

  Hit that soundboard. Hit that Ashton Hall.

• 2:19:47John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream, David. How are you doing?

• 2:19:49David Risher?

  I'm good. How are you?

• 2:19:50John Coogan?

  I'm great.

• 2:19:51David Risher?

  Awesome.

• 2:19:52John Coogan?

  Ooh, fantastic setup. How you doing? Uh, would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of your background, how you wound up at Lyft?

• 2:20:00David Risher?

  I, not at all.

• 2:20:02John Coogan?

  Please.

• 2:20:02David Risher?

  The crazy thing, so I actually joined the Lyft board back in 2020, 2021.

• 2:20:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:07David Risher?

  And that was largely because John and Logan, the co-founders of the company, wanted, you know, boards don't talk about customers much. They talk about finance, they talk about strategy, but they don't talk about customers. And they wanted someone with a customer sort of obsession background. And I'd worked at Amazon and kind of learned that through that. And then one day my phone rang, it was crazy, actually Valentine's Day of 2023. And they said, you know, we'd like you to consider being the next CEO of Lyft. I said, absolutely not. No frigging way. And it wasn't, it wasn't because I didn't sort of want to, I just hadn't even considered the idea. But they, they had let the board know that they were stepping down, they had the board done a search and all this sort of stuff. And they said, no, no, we think you with your experience from Microsoft and Amazon and even World Reader, leading with purpose, like you're the, you're the right guy.

• 2:20:52David Risher?

  And so, anyway, I applied, it's grueling, you know, you gotta prove yourself to the board that you'd been peers with and put together a 100 day plan, but they said yes, and April 17th, 2023, I started.

• 2:21:05John Coogan?

  What was the first, uh, what was it, was it the top of the to-do list when you joined?

• 2:21:11David Risher?

  Getting the company obsessed with customers. It, it kind of lost its way. And, and you could see it because the share was declining, we were sort of down to 26%. It was, it was losing money. So it was sort of neither, neither was it financially killing it, nor was it killing for customers. So we said, look, to kill it for customers, you gotta price competitively, you gotta pay competitively, drivers just to start. So we very unfortunately, in the first couple of weeks, organized a fairly significant reduction in force, a RIF, 26% of the company. But that's just $330 million, which we then immediately plowed back into driver incentives and, and, and better pricing. And then the other big piece, of course, we had to adjust the team a little bit. Not everyone on the team was the right person, so we made some changes right there. That's, you know, you're only as good as your team.

• 2:21:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:21:54David Risher?

  And then the third big thing was innovation again. So we started like Women Plus Connect, which is now this very significant product of ours. Over a hundred million rides on the Women Plus Connect platform with women driving women.

• 2:22:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:22:05David Risher?

  Riders, but we started it literally at 10 o'clock in the morning. My first day, we said, let's, let's get this done after years of. Let's get it done.

• 2:22:11John Coogan?

  Is that, is that a key differentiator? Like, what are the other key differentiators that you can go to customers with? And, and really tell them that like, this is what Lyft stands for. This is where we draw the line. This is where maybe we're not purely optimizing for, you know, like the competitive dynamic. And we're trying to, and we're trying to differentiate and stand out.

• 2:22:32David Risher?

  Yeah. I mean, so I'll say a couple of things there. First thing I'll say is, uh, it's sort of big picture. Even though it's important, what you're asking is super important. We do call it 800 million rides a year. The other guys do maybe twice that. So it's like two to three billion between the two of us. 160 billion rides that people take in their private cars, just in North America.

• 2:22:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:22:51David Risher?

  So my first order of business is like, I want to get you off the couch. I want to get you out of your car. I want to get you out in the world. And, um, you know, if you, if you do it on the other guys, sometimes that's, that's okay with me. Cause really I just want, the, the market needs to be big. We're still small in the grand scheme. Now, having said that, it's useful to differentiate and we're very different companies. We have different values. We make different decisions about, as I say, Women Plus Connect is a good example. Driver earnings guarantee, we guarantee drivers guarantee that they will never make less than 70% of what a rider pays after fees. That's given us a now about a 29 point preference for drivers who do a app. Lyft Silver, great new product for older people. We've prioritized, it's a, it's a sort of a niche community, you might say. So like, but guess what?

• 2:23:34David Risher?

  It's a growing niche, you know, 60 million people every year or over the age of 60 or giving up their car keys. So I think some of it is the decisions you make and the values, the way you show up. And then operational excellence is something that we're really focused on. I really want to, I want to increase the level of service for rideshare. I think it's kind of started to deteriorate and I want to be the better service guys.

• 2:23:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, how, how are you thinking about marketing these days? I feel like there was. There was a, during the early battles for rideshare, there was, you know, so much, you know, demand and just so much capital flooding in to just get liquidity on the platform. But now with what you just said about differentiating the products, it feels like differentiated marketing would lead right into that. How are you thinking about where the interesting pockets of value for specifically like marketing and like telling this story more broadly are in the current landscape?

• 2:24:26David Risher?

  I love that question and I think it's super timely. So, you know, first of all, I don't recommend as a strategy, you know, start with the marketing. You have to start with the product and the value. If you don't have a good thing to sell, then you're just wasting your money. We've now got a great thing to sell. I'll give you a very specific example. When I started, driver cancellation rates were about 15%. So about 15% of the time, driver would cancel on you. It would rematch, but it's annoying.

• 2:24:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's annoying.

• 2:24:54David Risher?

  Right. Now we're down to about 4.7%. So a huge, huge drop over a couple of years of real work.

• 2:24:58John Coogan?

  What drove that exactly?

• 2:25:00David Risher?

  Oh, man. More supply? So much. Well, no, actually funnily enough, the supply doesn't really matter there. I mean, of course it does. More supply helps, but it's more about acceptance rates. It's about, because a driver, even if there are a thousand drivers, they can cancel and they can be picky and choosy. No, it's about what information do you give the driver and when, how, such that they feel like they're making a good decision, not a rust or forced.

• 2:25:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. As opposed to the driver accepted it and it turns out, hey, this person wants to go from Los Angeles to Las Vegas. You're going to be tied up for a couple of hours. Even if the fare's a lot, you're going to get stuck in Vegas and they might decline that, right?

• 2:25:34David Risher?

  Hundred percent, hundred percent, hundred percent. Or exactly. It's just, that's exactly it.

• 2:25:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. So better technology to surface more relevant rides that the driver will not decline.

• 2:25:46David Risher?

  Exactly. How can you do a good job giving, vending to the driver exactly the ride that you think they want? Not the one you want them to take, but the one they want.

• 2:25:55John Coogan?

  Because they are kind of a customer too. You're kind of selling them on something that they're buying with their time.

• 2:26:00David Risher?

  Dude, they are 100% a customer. 100%. This is, there's, there are two customers in every car, a rider and driver. And if they're not both happy, your marketplace gets out of balance. Okay, so then back to the marketing question. So, once you're good, then you want to start to tell the story. And you literally will start to see over the coming weeks, particularly if you're in San Francisco or New York, which are two markets we're putting a lot of energy into, you know, a kind of a renewed, you know, marketing push. And I'll, I'll, I'll give you sort of the heads up. It's going to be super simple. It's called Check Lift, Check Lift. And it acknowledges, like, you have choices. There's another guy out there who can do a pretty good job sometimes, but we think we can do a good job most of the time, maybe even more times than they can. So, give us a, give us a check and we'll, and we'll give a bunch of different reasons why we think checking lift is a good idea for you.

• 2:26:43Jordi Hays?

  Mm-hmm. Smart. You probably get this question multiple times a day, but I'm excited to get your point of view on it. How, how are you thinking about Lyft integrating with autonomous vehicle providers in the short, medium to long term? And what's your kind of vision for that market as it evolves?

• 2:27:01David Risher?

  Yeah. So, I'll start with, I'll start with, with the end and kind of go backwards. My, my vision is this is good for the industry because it's going to be good for, it's going to give riders more reasons to choose Lyft and to check Lyft and, and, and the other guys too.

• 2:27:15Jordi Hays?

  And potentially more people that just decide not to get a car at all, right? Like, there's very real, I mean, John and I both have kids under, under five. And there's like this question that I think you have to ask and like, will my kids be, will it make, will they even really need to get a driver's license?

• 2:27:33John Coogan?

  Natural aspirin V12, absolutely, but continue.

• 2:27:37David Risher?

  There you go, baby.

• 2:27:38John Coogan?

  My son will definitely be tracking his car. I don't know what you're talking about.

• 2:27:43Jordi Hays?

  You don't need a license for that. You're just going to track it.

• 2:27:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, he won't have a driver's license, but he will be drifting.

• 2:27:48David Risher?

  But he will be just...

• 2:27:48Jordi Hays?

  But there's so many, but there's so many amazing potential implications. You can think of like a busy parent, maybe a, a single parent that, that can, you know, put their kid in an autonomous vehicle so that they go to school and have a safe drive and have confidence and, and all that kind of thing. But, uh, but anyways, continue.

• 2:28:09David Risher?

  Well, no, I mean, look, you're already there, right? Like, the self-driving world is going to be super interesting because it's a great experience. And you're probably just thinking of it in terms of today's experience, but just with someone else driving. But now think of it in terms of tomorrow's experience. Think of it as, you know, you're in rest mode, and so the seats roll back, you know, lie back and you can take a nap. Or you're in work mode, you've got three screens that pop up in front of you and it's like a mobile office. Or you're in party mode and you've got a car tender in the front who's like making drinks.

• 2:28:38John Coogan?

  Like that, let's go.

• 2:28:40David Risher?

  Right?

• 2:28:40John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:28:43Jordi Hays?

  Oh. And the interesting thing is... Yeah, I think something that I thought of, you're talking about your product for kind of elderly folks that might need a little bit more support. And it's interesting to think about, even in a world of ubiquitous autonomous vehicles, there's still going to be a place for calling a human to help you get from point A to point B. You're traveling, the whole medical side as well. I mean, there's so many, so many...

• 2:29:15John Coogan?

  I mean, part of the benefit of like a high-tier chauffeur service is that they put your suitcases in the back of the car and like an autonomous vehicle doesn't do that yet. Maybe in the far future when we have humanoid robots in the car seat just to load up your luggage. But, you know, we are, we are a long way from there, so probably room to differentiate. I'm wondering if there's any other places that you could see Lyft expanding into the value chain? When I imagine a lot of the self-driving car companies, it's a lot of AI engineers, a lot of data centers, a lot of GPUs burning, not a lot of mechanics, not a lot of people cleaning cars, not a lot of people washing cars. And it feels like there's this opportunity where you have this, this like liquid pool of labor

• 2:29:58John Coogan?

  that could deal with all of the rough edges before we get to this like future where the car... Yes, the cars drive themselves, but, you know, we've heard the numbers of how many people it takes to maintain a fleet of self-driving vehicles right now. It seems like it's actually higher than Lyft's number of humans per vehicle potentially. And so even though it'll probably fall, like, there's a lot of different things as the, as the market plays out. So what's your take on it?

• 2:30:26David Risher?

  I mean, look, you guys are making, I think, two cases and they sort of line up nicely. One is for what we call the hybrid network. So some drivers and some self-driving, right? Older person wants help with the luggage or what's or anyone going to the airport wants help with the luggage. Executive wants, you know, the car to drive up with a Starbucks right there just ordered for him, you know, by a human being, hand you the cup, right? So that's the driver. And then the self-driving case, it's a daily commute, you don't really care, you're kind of zoning out or maybe you want to be on a phone call and not have anyone else in the car. So that's the hybrid case and I think it's a, there's a strong case to be made there. And then where do we add value? Of course, we supply, demand, we price, we do ETAs, you know, we'll, we'll get your iPhone back to you if you leave it in the car, you know, we'll clean the car. So, and then there's this thing called fleet management, fleet management, which is, to

• 2:31:10David Risher?

  your point, the car has to be cleaned, the A B I'm talking about, has to be cleaned, it has to be serviced from time to time, got to be, you know, rebooted, you know, checked, all these sorts of things. And, and that fleet management, a hidden secret of Lyft, and you sort of go Google it because it's kind of interesting, is Flex Drive. Flex Drive is a wholly owned subsidiary and that's what we do is fleet management for drivers whose cars we own instead of the driver doing it. It's real expertise that we've developed. It's one of the things that when we talk to self-driving car companies, they value because they're like, that's physical world stuff and we want to sit and design and create quota, but we don't really want to run that stuff. So, yeah, we've got, that's why I'm super optimistic about this as they come onto the platform.

• 2:31:50John Coogan?

  What about the other, the other car companies? Are there any, like, a lot of the self-driving car narrative is around Waymo and Tesla and that battle, but it does feel like most of the OEMs will want to play a different role. Are you, have you, have you announced any partnerships or are you thinking that like, you know, the Stellantis turnaround will involve some sort of partnership? Obviously, you can't speak too much to the future, but just in terms of like, the long-term shape of the industry, is the duopoly narrative overrated in your opinion?

• 2:32:26David Risher?

  It is. And here's why I think it, because I, I look, fast forward, say 10 years, you know, I, I think buying a car that doesn't have, you know, self-driving technology in it would be like buying a car without.

• 2:32:39Jordi Hays?

  Computer without internet.

• 2:32:41David Risher?

  Computer.

• 2:32:41John Coogan?

  Without traction control, who would ever do that?

• 2:32:43David Risher?

  Right. Again, you like the, you like the whole, you know, drifting. No, like, or maybe, maybe an apt analogy would be like, you can buy a manual transmission car today. I have a manual transmission car. It's super fun to drive, but it's like a hobby.

• 2:32:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a weekend car. It's like buying a horse.

• 2:33:01David Risher?

  It's like.

• 2:33:01John Coogan?

  You know, we love a horse.

• 2:33:03David Risher?

  Clap, clap, clap, clap, clap.

• 2:33:04John Coogan?

  Horses are still great. People ride them. People go see them. Dressage is coming to the Olympics in Los Angeles in 2026. We'll be sitting.

• 2:33:12Jordi Hays?

  Why do I need a car? I already have transport that's one horsepower.

• 2:33:15John Coogan?

  Yes, and the horse is underrated self-driving. You tell them, go home, the horse knows where to go.

• 2:33:20David Risher?

  It's an excellent point. It was self-driving technology before self-driving was cool.

• 2:33:23John Coogan?

  It was, it was.

• 2:33:24David Risher?

  Yeah, that's a hundred percent. So yeah, that's the thing. Like, there will be horses and there will be manual transmission cars. And there will be cars with roll-down windows, but then for the other 99% of the world, there will be self-driving cars. So in that world, every OEM has to have a self-driving technology. And some of them will do it themselves. You've seen General Motors, obviously, made a big investment there. They're trying to figure out how to deploy that and whatever. Others will never think it's going to be their core, you know, and they will buy it from other people. They'll buy it from, let's say, a Mobileye, which is a company we have a partnership with. Let me, actually, and let me go deep on that for just one click. So we have this, so Mobileye, they, you know, if you've got like lane assist technology in your car, right? So it kind of vibrates when you get to the edge or even, even smart cruise control.

• 2:34:07David Risher?

  Chances are pretty good that Mobileye is what's behind that. So they are good in level two. What's got level two, which is to say driver assistance, not, not sort of driver stuff. And they're trying to move up the stack to, to level three, level four. We have a partnership with them that as they do that, it will be what we call lift-ready. So that means that any one of the cars with Mobileye technology in it, theoretically, if an OEM decides to do so, and if an end user decides that that's an option that they want, could deploy it under the lift network. Just like today, you can drive your car on the lift network. Tomorrow, you can just put your car on the lift network. So I think, you know, the, the future, there's such a great time to be in this industry because there's so much cool stuff going, but it's also really, really early and it, you know, regulations aren't there, blah, blah, blah.

• 2:34:49David Risher?

  So a lot of time to sort of get it right, but also a lot of reasons to be excited about it.

• 2:34:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there are already people who prefer being driven in gas-powered cars because of the regenerative braking making them sick if they sit in the back. And so you could imagine that that those consumer preferences go deeper and somebody says, I like the way a Bentley drives. I want to only call Bentleys. And so I'm calling Bentley specifically and the OEM is saying, I'm going to, you know, I'm not going to build my own app because that's going to be really difficult. I'm not going to bring my own liquidity to the market, but Lyft can kind of provide that. That's kind of an interesting, interesting way things could play out.

• 2:35:29David Risher?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:29Jordi Hays?

  What else?

• 2:35:30David Risher?

  Maybe they'll

• 2:35:30John Coogan?

  Even if they're self-driving, yeah.

• 2:35:32David Risher?

  And maybe they'll tune it a little bit, right?

• 2:35:33John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:35:34David Risher?

  Off-the-shelf thing and they'll say, this is the, this is the Bentley version of it that's a little more cautious, or the Lambo version, which is more, you know, aggressive.

• 2:35:41John Coogan?

  More thrilling, yeah. And then, and then even the features within the vehicle, like cars are starting to differentiate that, like around that more. Like this one has a fish tank, or this one has a karaoke machine, or this one has TVs, or the work setup that you mentioned, like, there could be a lot more differentiation. We're certainly, we're, we are consolidating down to like the iPhone of cars in some ways, but you could see like a sort of Cambrian explosion as well.

• 2:36:04David Risher?

  Totally.

• 2:36:04Jordi Hays?

  What else is on your mind? You were at, you've, you've seen multiple eras, tech, internet, mobile. You, you started back at Microsoft in, what was it, 91?

• 2:36:16David Risher?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:16Jordi Hays?

  Is that right?

• 2:36:17David Risher?

  A million years ago.

• 2:36:19Jordi Hays?

  A lot is changing now. We were just having a conversation with, with someone in the AI companionship space, kind of, and there's a lot of debate surrounding that right now. Is it, is it dystopian? Is it, is it actually good for people? But what's your take broadly on activity in AI right now? And maybe even, even that last conversation?

• 2:36:39David Risher?

  I mean, I actually think a lot about exactly that last conversation. I, look, Lyft's vision and our purpose is to serve and connect. The serve part is probably pretty obvious. I want to serve riders and drivers better than they've ever been served before. But the connect part, why? Because I am a very deep believer, and it's not just some personal passion. It's like, you know, this is the world we live in, that, that digital technology, as cool as it is, it's also potentially super isolating, super dividing, just in the sense that you can sort of find just the same people over and over again, the same loops to kind of get involved in, rabbit holes to go down, all these things. Meanwhile, the physical world is amazing. Amazing, you know, we're here in San Francisco, outside of Lanzo just this last weekend. It's hundreds of thousands of people listening to live music.

• 2:37:23David Risher?

  You can listen to live music on Spotify. I mean, you don't need to, but you go there, it's a shared experience. And then just all the little, you know, interactions you have with with people every single day. So thus, I look at AI and I think to myself, gosh, I love how cool it is to riff with it or feed it a bunch of data and have it show me things that I didn't see myself or, you know, spit at it some, you know, our lift earnings and and and critique, you know, all these sorts of things. That's super amazing. Or like thirty percent of our code is not written by AI. We're deprecating a lot of code that just is cruffed because AI is finding like nobody's using it. So all the customer service, literally millions of people are now interacting with with our chatbots and it's better quality experience. So all that's cool.

• 2:38:05David Risher?

  But, but, man, my daughter just told me about a subreddit the other day that's got thousands of people, tens of thousands, but I've called my boyfriend is an AI.

• 2:38:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:14David Risher?

  Literally, the the one I was looking at was a woman who just proposed to her AI. So I mean, the AI proposed to her. Right? She was so excited about it. She's just like, yeah, I can finally call him my fiance. She said, I, you know, I I asked him, what ring does he think that would look good on me? So he gave me some ideas. I went and bought that ring and I put it on myself. I pretended to be sort of surprised when I did it. I should feel so good about myself. And I think to myself, gosh, I love how excited she is. And I can see a lot of scenarios where that doesn't necessarily end up the way you want it to. And it's, here's the deal, the business model of companies like that, not to malign them, but it's engagement. They will want to engage, they will want to flatter, they will want to be the best friend you can be. There you go.

• 2:38:57Jordi Hays?

  It's the same, it's the same issue. I mean, same issue with dating apps. A critique of dating apps is like, there's no real incentive for somebody to find a long term partner because they're going to churn. And the AI companion apps, you can, I I guess AI companions are making the case that eventually the AI companion would be like, hey, why don't you go out in the real world and find a partner, but that seems to be at odds. And I'll just be your friend. We can just be friends, that kind of thing. But anybody from the real world would know that.

• 2:39:27John Coogan?

  Some of this isn't, isn't new. I mean, I think about mechanical companions for a lot of married men, their mistress is a GT three RS.

• 2:39:37John Coogan?

  And and they and they they pour their heart and soul into

• 2:39:41Jordi Hays?

  Into that vehicle.

• 2:39:42John Coogan?

  Into rowing out the gears and ringing out the engine. And the engine notes speak to them in the language of a companion. And so, you know, that that is their mechanical companion. Now we have digital companions. What is old is new.

• 2:39:57David Risher?

  Well, OK, so you're 100% right. And the difference is, like, the car doesn't want you to love it. It just you just you fall in love with it.

• 2:40:06John Coogan?

  You have to. You have to love it.

• 2:40:08David Risher?

  Right. But it doesn't want you, and it's not incentive to have you spend more time with it. You know what I mean? So that's the that's the sort of tricky part here is it. So anyway, I don't want to sound dystopian. I think there's some amazing, amazing uses. But I think I'm not sure that our brains are super well prepared for what happens when, you know, our our AIs become our friends and then break up with us or we break up with them or they forget who we are because it's upgraded.

• 2:40:29Jordi Hays?

  Or a model is deprecated.

• 2:40:31David Risher?

  Right. That's what happened with ChatGPT.

• 2:40:34John Coogan?

  Like, that's what happened with the Carrera GT. They don't make them anymore.

• 2:40:37David Risher?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:38John Coogan?

  They don't make Carrera GTs anymore. They deprecated it.

• 2:40:40David Risher?

  And I can tell you're still grieving.

• 2:40:42John Coogan?

  Grieving, absolutely, since 2005.

• 2:40:45Jordi Hays?

  I think it's hard to it's it's hard to

• 2:40:48John Coogan?

  It used to be a couple hundred grand. Now it's over a mil.

• 2:40:50Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to make the argument that somebody like, you know, getting married to their AI or accept, you know, you know, is good.

• 2:41:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:00Jordi Hays?

  Like, how do you make? How do you steel man that, John?

• 2:41:03John Coogan?

  I mean, it's just like hitting the track on the weekend. You know, got to get away from the family for a little bit.

• 2:41:08Jordi Hays?

  I don't know how far you can stretch this analogy.

• 2:41:11David Risher?

  I've heard a lot about you in this podcast. It's really interesting.

• 2:41:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, you know? Anyway, it's been great having you. Next time you're in LA, let's throw some pink mustaches on some Porsches. Go to the Porsche Experience Center.

• 2:41:25Jordi Hays?

  Next.

• 2:41:26John Coogan?

  And let's ride.

• 2:41:27Jordi Hays?

  Next earnings call, join right after. We'll have pink mustaches on and we'll hit the gong.

• 2:41:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:34Jordi Hays?

  We'll hit the gong.

• 2:41:35David Risher?

  I am here for it. I would love that. Back to back. In fact, I actually tried to get my IR group, but they've not yet gotten excited about this idea, to do our earnings call in the form of a podcast.

• 2:41:45John Coogan?

  Oh, there we go.

• 2:41:45David Risher?

  If I ever convinced them to do that, because I think it'd be interesting, right?

• 2:41:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, super interesting.

• 2:41:48David Risher?

  Maybe we'll get you guys to host it.

• 2:41:50John Coogan?

  That'd be fantastic. We'd love to.

• 2:41:52Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 2:41:53John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 2:41:53Jordi Hays?

  Great to hang.

• 2:41:55John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:41:56David Risher?

  Guys, that was a lot of fun. Thanks so much for the questions. Take care.

• 2:41:59John Coogan?

  Before we bring in our next guest, we have a demand from Donald Boat. He wants me to read this. He says, "I'm running on so much Celsius sparkling cola and surplus intravenous compute that the twin forces, the twin force ghosts of Adam twos and Fidel Castro are screaming in my ears like UCLA sorority girls at the Rose Bowl, screaming, 'Do not stop until you envelop the world system and your package fleets smog the firmament like the Onslar, like the Onesler, hea- wire headed into Starcraft III as dreamed by an unemployed 29-year-old

• 2:42:41John Coogan?

  bachelor in Busan, South Korea.'" And throw that up on the screen, please. Make Coogan read it. Very fun. This man has a way with words. He's a great poster and he's on a generational run and we'll see where it goes. Thanks for writing in, Donald Boat, and good luck. He said that the, uh, the final PC build would be ready Wednesday. I want to see it. Send us a photo as soon as it's put together. I want to know the whole build. Throw it, throw it up on PC part picker. Put it all together for us so we can get a screenshot of what we're expecting. Then I want to see the Battlefield 6 stream. I want to see him getting some headshots, some 360 no scopes.

• 2:43:21Jordi Hays?

  He should just join live and game for a little bit.

• 2:43:24John Coogan?

  He should. I'd be down. Anyway, we have our next guest from Profound. James, how you doing?

• 2:43:30Jordi Hays?

  Get that mallet ready.

• 2:43:31John Coogan?

  Get the gong ready. Give us the news. What happened? Break it down for us. Hi, John. Hi.

• 2:43:39Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you. Big day. Big day. What's happening?

• 2:43:42John Coogan?

  What's gonna happen?

• 2:43:43Jordi Hays?

  I'm ready. I'm ready.

• 2:43:44John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm way too British. Break it down. Break it down for us. We're a dry, dry humor kinda guy.

• 2:43:53James Cadwallader?

  Yeah, we uh, we just um, we, we just closed a thirty five million dollar series.

• 2:43:59John Coogan?

  What? Let's go. Let's go. Huge. Who's in the deal? Is it a tier one? Is it a really good firm? Who did the deal?

• 2:44:11James Cadwallader?

  It's uh, Sequoia Capital. Yeah.

• 2:44:13John Coogan?

  I've heard of them. I've heard of them. Heard of them. Heard of them. That's fantastic news. Congrats. Great, great group of people over there. Okay, so we're taking that money, we're going to Washington DC and we're lobbying to ban ads in LLMs because then everyone will have to buy your services. Is that a good idea? Break it down for me.

• 2:44:29James Cadwallader?

  I mean, honestly, I'd quite like ads to come into these services. I think it'd be net good for us, I think, which create the, the clickware response of really understanding that AI is a marketing channel. Uh, we could go to Washington and hang out with Keith.

• 2:44:43John Coogan?

  So, so, so AI, it'd be because like, like the, the joke that I'm getting at is basically like, Profound helps companies show up in generative AI results. Right now, uh, the game, if I have a product, is I wanna rank highly in ChatGPT when someone asks, give me the, give me the survey of the landscape, go do the deep research report on, uh, what was it Aiden saying, like the best paper towels? And I wanna rank highly for the best paper towels. And so I come to Profound and Profound helps me rank highly in that result. But if, if there's an, if there's a bunch of ads, then you would think like the relative value of like SEO generally decreases.

• 2:45:23John Coogan?

  But it seems like we're early enough in this that you could maybe see that as additive to your business. Is that how you're thinking about it?

• 2:45:30James Cadwallader?

  I think it's good. It's a good take. Um, I think,

• 2:45:34James Cadwallader?

  Blue Link Search has been a two-party system. It's like a handshake between the, you know, the Blue Link and, uh, connects the consumer to the brand.

• 2:45:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:43James Cadwallader?

  But these AI systems like ChatGPT.

• 2:45:48James Cadwallader?

  Hijack that relationship. So the consumer really ends up having a relationship only with ChatGPT. If I'm researching corporate credit cards, I don't really need to go to chase.com or ramp.com. I can just interface with ChatGPT and it will go and visit their websites on my behalf. So I think there's, there's, there's new reasons that this is actually like quite different from that old paradigm of traditional search. And I think if you're a brand owner.

• 2:46:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And before you're just Google corporate cards and, and maybe JPM is near the top and Ramp is near the top and you're navigating to those individual sites and then going back and forth and back and forth or opening new tabs. And what you're saying is it's now just like a lot more conversational and the consumer.

• 2:46:33John Coogan?

  Build me a comparison table.

• 2:46:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, exactly.

• 2:46:35James Cadwallader?

  Yeah. You skip, you skip a step. You, you have the answer. The answer is what you'd have to, you know, there's a step in between previously. So I think, and we're also entering this, this era where, you know, I, if, if you're a brand owner, AI becomes the customer. So if you're, if you're a marketer or a CMO, any company on the planet, it's understanding that you have one new VIP customer, which is super intelligence and we're building, and we're, we're building a technology platform to help brands build marketing that's aimed at super intelligence instead of humans.

• 2:47:07John Coogan?

  When we talked the first time, it must've been a couple of months ago, we were in the old studio. We were talking just about like writing your website in a way that can be ingested by like the web scrapers and like robots.txt and that type of stuff. But if we play this out more, uh, is it, can I pat myself on the back for putting three hours a day of my words into the endless corpus of web text, such that everything I say ranks highly? Like, is, is it a volume game? Would you recommend that brands that are using profound and want to rank higher, do a ton of podcasts? And, and, and, and just get a lot of content out there about their brands? Is that a reasonable strategy?

• 2:47:52James Cadwallader?

  Uh, it's the risk of sounding somewhat self-serving. It kind of pairs pretty nicely with a feature set that we've launched today called workflows, which essentially, think of it like agentic workflows that will monitor your AI visibility and then proactively and reactively create net new content based on changes that we're seeing in the landscape. So it really taking out that kind of the rote labor of having to sit, you know, I think the 2015 paradigm was marketers would go to a platform and click into the data viz and build an insight and create new content. And now you can just do all of that all within one platform with a click of a button.

• 2:48:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is like the old Airbnb SEO story where like at the bottom of the footer, they had like every single city. And it was like vacation rentals in Omaha, vacation rentals in, in, you know, like, like Tampa and then, and then that rank. But it's all driven by just like what they're seeing from Google and they feed it back into the landing pages. Now you can do that with what's with what you're actually seeing in LLM search results, basically.

• 2:48:59James Cadwallader?

  You guys are. My, my, yeah, sorry, Jordy. The, the point being as well that you can create the content within.

• 2:49:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can actually instantiate the content. And I'm sure that a lot of the SEO heavy companies that really focused on that like automated a lot of that, just like do a database query and then turn it into a landing page with a good like route and, you know, and all the URLs that that follow so that it gets scraped into Google. Now you can do that in the, in the chat GPT context and the other LLM.

• 2:49:24Jordi Hays?

  How quickly are legacy, like older companies kind of reacting to this changing trend in consumer behavior? I know you guys already work with some of the biggest companies in the world. So clearly some of them are, are being responsive to it. But is it, is that, is that common or do you still meet with companies that just don't understand kind of what's happening?

• 2:49:48James Cadwallader?

  It's been pretty prevalent. Yeah, as you said, we work with Fortune 10. I mean, I can't do the, we don't have logo rights, but Fortune 5, we're working with Fortune 5 brands right now. Fortune 5.

• 2:50:01John Coogan?

  Fortune 1.

• 2:50:01James Cadwallader?

  Drop the zeros.

• 2:50:02John Coogan?

  Fortune 1. Oh, is it Nvidia? Fortune 1?

• 2:50:07James Cadwallader?

  We won't press you. We won't press you on that. The CEO of Reddit, you know, mentioned profound in their Q2 earnings report last week.

• 2:50:16John Coogan?

  That was very cool.

• 2:50:17James Cadwallader?

  Um, yeah, so I think it really is becoming a boardroom level concern for most big companies. Um, yeah, we, we work with, I think, 250 to 300 enterprise brands right now. And most of the big agencies are relying on our platform.

• 2:50:33John Coogan?

  Do you think there's some sort of alpha? I, I feel like there's a lot of, there's a lot of conversations about brands and a lot of customer love that happens within the context of basically like support tickets or like one-on-one conversations. Is there, is there potential alpha in, in having a flow where if a customer writes in and they're satisfied, you're pushing them to publish that to the web in some way. So you're just getting more web text out there, something like that. Even if it's not on your own platform, it's like, hey, like, we're actually going to be doing a lot more customer service on our Reddit. And so like, we want it, yeah, yeah, you can email us and we'll do a one-on-one if it's like private information like your billing.

• 2:51:14John Coogan?

  But if you just want to talk about how to use the product and best practices, like, let's take this conversation over to Reddit. Like, that seems like maybe a strategy that people would want to adopt.

• 2:51:23James Cadwallader?

  And that's exactly what you would use workflows for, this feature that we've launched today. So it would automate those workflows for you. Um, yeah. And what you're, that, that exact point that you're mentioning, if you think, I, I don't think I can name them, but if you think of, you know, some of your favorite software companies, five years ago or three years ago, candidly, if you were, if you were an engineer and you were trying to troubleshoot a problem with that software, you'd have gone to their docs，并且 website.com or developer，并且 gone through their developer docs. But now you just use Anthropic or ChatGPT to, to troubleshoot. Um, so yeah, it's that's what I guess it kind of, I can bring that full circle back to the kind of SEO question. There's so much more surface area here.

• 2:52:04James Cadwallader?

  There's, yeah, people aren't just using it for discovery. They're using it for post-sales. It's, it's, um, yeah, crisis management, PR teams.

• 2:52:14John Coogan?

  Last question from Jordi.

• 2:52:15Jordi Hays?

  How, where does traditional, where do you see, is traditional SEO going to near zero for a lot of these companies? I mean, if you look at, you know, already the changes that Google's rolled out with AI overviews. I saw Bill Gurley shared a number of quotes from, from earnings calls over the last month, where people were just basically saying, look, like our, our organic search traffic is down 60%, you know, year over year. And it was like a lot of different examples of that. So I'm curious where you think that goes.

• 2:52:53James Cadwallader?

  I think, you know, that search engines will be, they will seem very odd to our children as a concept. You know, thumbing through lists of blue links, it will seem something like the Yellow Pages. I think the act of SEO, those folks, the teams of people that have built their careers in that space. It's a $90 billion a year industry, it's a huge industry. And the folks that work on that will likely be extremely well positioned to dominate this new world of AI visibility, or GEO, or AEO, or, you know, whatever we want to call it. Answer, or sometimes we'd say agent experience is like another way to think about it. I think if you're, if you're a brand, the ones that care the most are brands that are high, or products that are high consideration purchases.

• 2:53:37James Cadwallader?

  So something that people do a ton of research on, like cars, or consumer electronics, with a tech forward and consumer.

• 2:53:46John Coogan?

  A question from the chat, and then we'll let you go. Does Profound offer a play for content publishers who were monetizing SEO referral traffic after it dropped off a cliff over the past few years? How do you think about the evolution of content publishers that were monetizing SEO referral traffic? And where all that goes? Is that like the wire cutter? Is that an example of a?

• 2:54:11James Cadwallader?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:11John Coogan?

  The wire cutter?

• 2:54:13James Cadwallader?

  That's really, that's a much trickier one to navigate. That's not, they're not really our customer.

• 2:54:18John Coogan?

  Because it's purely content, right? You, you, you work with, I sell a physical thing, AI can't give you this thing, and I'm just helping you get this thing faster, right?

• 2:54:26James Cadwallader?

  Yeah, if, if the content is the product.

• 2:54:29John Coogan?

  It's gonna get scraped.

• 2:54:31James Cadwallader?

  It's very tricky.

• 2:54:32John Coogan?

  So you gotta work out a deal with the, if you're a content publisher, you gotta go to the LLMs and say, hey, like, let's do a deal one-on-one, right?

• 2:54:39James Cadwallader?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, there's been the whole CloudFlare thing where CloudFlare default turned on bots off, which I think is audacious. If you're a marketer, you want to have bots turned or you want bots putting your products in. But if you're a publisher, yeah, like you probably do want bots turned off. And they've got, I think that's going to be more similar to like the music industry or something where it's going to have to sort of like figure out itself as we saw there. Yeah.

• 2:55:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. CloudFlare, like the, the really crazy scenario could be like, they look like a YouTube or they look like a Spotify where, yeah, most people put up a web, a blog post and they get a couple cents. There's a couple of people that put up banger blog posts and they get a check for $20,000 just from the, the web traffic and, and we kind of get back to, oh yeah, like it's weird that I only got a couple hits to the website, but it was repurposed all over the place and it really updated the weights and it was super valuable to the, to GPT-6 trainings run. And so I just get a dividend from that for a long time. That would be a really cool outcome, but uh, we'll have to keep monitoring the situation. So thank you for joining us.

• 2:55:40Jordi Hays?

  To you and the team. Congratulations. And it's gonna be a big rest of the year.

• 2:55:43John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:55:45James Cadwallader?

  Thanks.

• 2:55:46Jordi Hays?

  The cure to male loneliness is being called chaps, James.

• 2:55:50John Coogan?

  I agree. I agree. Uh, we got Devin from Squint coming in the studio. Play some soundboard. Hit me with the news one. There we go.

• 2:55:58Jordi Hays?

  I, I think I'll need this again.

• 2:55:59John Coogan?

  I, I want to hit it this time.

• 2:56:01Jordi Hays?

  You want to hit it?

• 2:56:01John Coogan?

  I, I feel like I've gotten three. Give us the news. Give us the updates. What's going on in your world? Welcome to the stream. Welcome to TVPN. How you doing?

• 2:56:10Speaker 06

  Hey guys, thanks for having me on. Um, I appreciate you making time for this. So, uh, I think the news is that Squint is announcing a $40 billion Series B.

• 2:56:21John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:56:22Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Almost took the gong off the, off the rope there, John, but worthy.

• 2:56:30John Coogan?

  Are there any tier ones invested?

• 2:56:35John Coogan?

  Any tree-themed venture capital firms participating?

• 2:56:39Speaker 06

  We might have one.

• 2:56:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:56:41Speaker 06

  The main tree one.

• 2:56:43John Coogan?

  That's great to hear.

• 2:56:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:56:45John Coogan?

  Well, we can move on.

• 2:56:46Speaker 06

  A few rounds of them.

• 2:56:47John Coogan?

  Fantastic. We can move on from the funding news. Give us the update on the company, break it down. How are you pitching the company these days? And then we'll go into some questions and deep dives.

• 2:56:58Speaker 06

  Sure. So Squint is a manufacturing intelligence platform. We use AI to drive efficiency on the factory floor. And we work with the biggest companies that make products that you use every day. So Fortune 500 companies like Pepsi and Michelin that make tortillas to tires. And I can share, maybe let me share a little bit about the problem statement before I talk about the product, because it'll make more sense.

• 2:57:24John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:57:25Speaker 06

  I think manufacturing as an industry is booming, but it's like a big house that is built on toothpicks. Right? And that foundation is really weak. So today, a lot of the shop floor know-how lies in two places. It's either in the heads of experts that are about to retire, or it's in a crusty binder somewhere that is hard to find and hard to understand. And I think today, if you're going to be investing in scaling the industry on the whole, you really need to be able to solve that inefficiency. And so what Squint does is it uses a video of an operator doing any sort of work on the floor. And then the AI watches that and writes a perfect standard operating procedure in seconds.

• 2:58:09Speaker 06

  And then using computer vision and augmented reality, it actually walks any operator through any task and is able to support them by answering questions. But also through the camera on the tablet, it can see if the work was done correctly. So we help basically elevate the quality of work.

• 2:58:27John Coogan?

  So basically, a completely separate, purely human track versus the Siemens equipment, the CNCs, the automated pick and place? Like, that's happening in a different world. You're more focused on humans in the loop type work.

• 2:58:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, I think like a lot of the investment even in robotics, it happens in the same customers that we work with. Yeah. But that investment is going into things like uh eliminating some of the ergonomically unsafe tasks or the highly repetitive tasks. And then where the humans are involved, what we're able to do is basically double their efficiency. So we had a Fortune five hundred customer, a CPG company that measured, you know, the before and after with Squint and they saw that actually it reduced the time it took to do work by fifty percent. Right? And so that's the kind of results you're getting with just like the same number of operators as before, but you're able to double your, you know, throughput. Very cool.

• 2:59:22Jordi Hays?

  How good is Squint at? Like, is Squint one-shotting, you know, problems that that workers are coming across? I mean, I think people have been pretty wildly impressed with ChatGPT's ability to like take a picture in their home of a bunch of wiring and and just say like, this isn't working, what's wrong? And it's just like, starts to uh genuinely show real intelligence in terms of of fixing a situation. Are you guys already seeing that on the factory floor? What does that look like?

• 2:59:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, you know, I think, I mean, that's a great example. Um, I think in the consumer use case, if ChatGPT was ninety-five percent accurate, we would be so happy as consumers, right? It would be like ninety-five percent of my problems are solved with this app. But in a factory, uh ninety-five percent accuracy means five percent of like devastating results.

• 3:00:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you break, you break like a half a million dollar machine.

• 3:00:17Speaker 06

  Exactly. Or, you know, worse, someone gets hurt. And so for us, like what we've oriented on is our AI will only answer things based on what it has seen in your factory floor. So all of this is a custom manufacturing process that it's learning.

• 3:00:33Jordi Hays?

  Got it.

• 3:00:33Speaker 06

  And then, yeah, like it is one-shotting things. Um, so, you know, most of the time, uh, if you ask one to question, the problem is solved. And so our customers are starting to share stories like, hey, uh, actually a couple of weeks ago, I had a call. And uh, this customer said that I thought our ticketing system was broken. Because since we deployed Squint, we had zero tickets filed. But then we ran a whole IT investigation and it turns out the ticketing system wasn't broken. There were just like the operators didn't have any more issues. So that's the kind of thing that we're trying to create now.

• 3:01:03Jordi Hays?

  That's awesome. Are you guys focused uh on the US today or already international? Like, what what's the go-to-market look like?

• 3:01:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a good question. Um, you know, we're working with the these massive global brands. So Pepsi, Michelin, Continental, all of those three, for example, we're working with their plants in the U.S. And also abroad. Um, just a few weeks ago, I was in Germany for a week, um, ended up visiting, you know, 12 cities in five days or something. And it was crazy. So, um, we're starting to feel that demand. And that's a big part of why we raised this round, too.

• 3:01:35John Coogan?

  Awesome. Congratulations. Thanks so much for stopping by. We're running a little bit of late today, so we're gonna let you get back to your busy day, but

• 3:01:42Jordi Hays?

  Go raise a series C, come back on later this year.

• 3:01:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, later this week.

• 3:01:46Jordi Hays?

  Later this week, potentially.

• 3:01:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no problem. Preempt.

• 3:01:49Speaker 06

  Sounds good.

• 3:01:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:52John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Uh, and up next, we have Alex Danco. We got a trade deal.

• 3:01:58Jordi Hays?

  Trade.

• 3:01:58John Coogan?

  The news broke today. He's going from Shopify to A16Z.

• 3:02:05Jordi Hays?

  And Andreessen Horowitz.

• 3:02:06John Coogan?

  Eric Torrenberg's latest

• 3:02:07Jordi Hays?

  There is Alex. Welcome to the show.

• 3:02:09John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 3:02:10Speaker 09

  Hey, guys. Thank you for having me on.

• 3:02:13John Coogan?

  Break it down for us. Synonym of the deal. What'd they do? Did they sit, uh, did Marc Andreessen sit down with your mom?

• 3:02:21Speaker 09

  Did Marc Andreessen sit?

• 3:02:22John Coogan?

  Sit down with your parents. Tell them you got a bright future. We would like to pay, take your

• 3:02:26Speaker 09

  I did have to have the phone call with Marc Andreessen right next to my mom because I was on vacation that week. We were seeing my parents. And, um, the call with Mark was actually a stressful one because I had to give him my final negotiation demand, which was he had to unblock me on Twitter.

• 3:02:44John Coogan?

  No way.

• 3:02:45Speaker 09

  But he did.

• 3:02:46Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 3:02:46John Coogan?

  He's an adoring blocker and unblocker.

• 3:02:48Jordi Hays?

  What did you do? What did you do to get blocked by, uh, the goat?

• 3:02:51John Coogan?

  If you've been blocked by, if you've been blocked by Mark, you can always

• 3:02:54Speaker 09

  We don't know. We've decided not to look into it. Um, some things are best left as mystery in life. But, uh, we, we, we reserve the right to find out later.

• 3:03:02John Coogan?

  I've been blocked by people, had to apologize. I don't know exactly know why I got blocked. But, you know, you always live to, live to fight another day. Anyway,

• 3:03:09Jordi Hays?

  Could have been an accident. His thumb could have slipped.

• 3:03:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's possible. Uh, so, so what, what, what's at the top of the to do list today, this week, this month? What are you gonna be doing for Andreessen Horowitz?

• 3:03:19Speaker 09

  So I'm coming on board. Eric brought me into this amazing group of people he is putting together, not to be understated and also not complete. There's more. Eric has more work to do yet. I'm coming on.

• 3:03:31John Coogan?

  Job's not finished.

• 3:03:32Speaker 09

  Yeah, job's not finished. I'm coming on to help make all of the written content coming out of Andreessen be truly world-class and as good as it can be. I think a lot of people on the internet know me from my writing online. I've been a blogger for a long time despite having done other things like be a founder, I've worked in VC before, I've been at Shopify for five years. But, you know, most people I think know me just from, you know, writing and mouthing off on the internet and generally doing the craft that has been internet blogging, right? Which is just a really amazing and valuable part of tech that has been around for such a long time. You know, I, a really formative conversation in my career was, you know, once upon a time when I was a founder, my co-founder and I were trying to figure

• 3:04:15Speaker 09

  out how to launch a product. We didn't know what was involved in that or what that meant. And we went to a more experienced founder, our friend Amanda, and said, hey, you know, what do we do? How do we launch this product? And she said, oh, well, I think you should email your email list and say, hey, we're gonna go and do this. Tell us what you like. Tell us where we should reach you. Tell us, get lots of feedback on all these things and then they'll help you out. And I said, wait, wait, wait, stop. What do you mean email your email list? What's an email list? She's like, oh, you don't have thousands of fans that adore you and wait for your every email every week? And I was like, I need to be someone with one of those. So ever since then, yeah, writing and newsletters and just the craft of having something to say has been a really important part of how I've always, you know, thought about how to be a great live player on the internet.

• 3:04:58John Coogan?

  How do you think about breaking through with text? Because the link ban on X is tough. AI is going to... Yeah, yeah. Or is, like, should you just lean into more of the formats? I mean, there's certain amounts of like, you can just be built different, like Chris Pike, who just drops a link to a Google Doc and it always works somehow. People do screenshots. I was like, what?

• 3:05:20Jordi Hays?

  Something that stands out to me and why I'm excited for you to take this new role is I was having this thought yesterday. I was reading some particularly like sloppy AI-generated text. And I was just, I was like, yes, the models are gonna get better, but like in a few years, like at what point is like all the text that you're reading online and throughout your day just generated and there's no soul and craft put into it? And it's like... You can still, you can remove hyphens and delves and it's not this, it's you're not this, you're that, like, language, and you can still identify writing today.

• 3:05:58Jordi Hays?

  And I, and I just think like craft, like the craft of writing and thinking clearly and coming up with, trying to come up with new ideas is super important. Lindy.

• 3:06:10Speaker 09

  Very Lindy. Yeah, so I like to think of it as that writing is power transfer technology, right? When you do it, it takes a lot of work to write something down, and it takes work to read something, right? Takes more work to read something than to listen to it. But the important thing that happens is that as you put in the work to write and as you put in the work to read, what happens is it actually reshapes your brain a little bit. It reshapes your understanding of what you're talking about such a way that the person writing can actually transfer some legitimacy to the person reading, right? They can actually speak to this thing. They have words for something that they knew, but like, didn't quite know how to say before. And that gives them power, right? And it doesn't work the same way when you're talking, right? There is this fabulous complementary kind of media called podcasts, which is listen

• 3:06:55Speaker 09

  for three hours and hear about all these great things. But to me, podcasts are an invitation to go find out something more. But if you actually want to do that power transfer, right? From the writer to the reader and give them something that gives them that power, like, you gotta write it down, right? And if you think about this for the job of a VC firm, right? It's like, what is the job of VC? The job of VC is literally you are the legitimacy bank, right? Your job is to make founders powerful, right? And having an amazing free tier of that by saying, we think a lot about these things. We want to give you words to express what you're trying to say so that a client, a hire, an investor will take you a little more seriously is really important to do. You know, so that's a big part of why we want to emphasize the goal is to give founders power.

• 3:07:41Speaker 09

  This is the job of the whole firm, and writing is just a pretty good part of that.

• 3:07:45John Coogan?

  When I think about writing at A16Z, I think of a few buckets. There's a ton because the firm's written a lot for a long time. I think about, maybe it was like a decade ago, but I don't, I don't know how often it still happens, but the, the general partner who does the deal writes basically a deal memo and says, this is why we're investing in this company. And that's, and that's very interesting. There's also the, the Marc Andreessen op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, "Software is Eating the World. It's Time to Build." These like big, like just like, you know, bombs on the timeline that drop and stick around for a long time. Then there's the market map, which is, it's been maligned, but I think it's deeply underrated.

• 3:08:29Speaker 09

  Time honored tradition.

• 3:08:30John Coogan?

  It's a time honored tradition. And I think these are in a unique position to actually put out great content there. And I've actually really enjoyed digging into those as we've been doing the show. And then there's also like the wildcard ones. Like I remember Andreessen used to do these interviews with founders in the portfolio, just basically like, it's like, what's your everyday carry, but in the digital world? So it was like, what apps are you running? What tools are you using? Those are really cool. So

• 3:08:54Speaker 09

  That's right.

• 3:08:54John Coogan?

  There's a ton of stuff and I probably mentioned, I missed like half of it, but maybe even more. But what's exciting to you? What's interesting? What kind of formats are you, do you see as like fertile ground to go explore if you've had the time to think about it so far?

• 3:09:08Speaker 09

  Yeah. So I'll tell you what I think is a really interesting meta that I'm going to spend a lot of time going after is speech writing.

• 3:09:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:09:16Speaker 09

  Speech writing is an interesting and kind of thrown by the wayside craft because now, when you think about long form, it's like, when you are interesting and you have something to say, you can go on a podcast, you can talk for a long time, or you are going to tweet about it, right? But there is something that is missing of the craft of like, putting in an extraordinary amount of tortured effort into creating, you know, like a 5,000 word delivery of what is it that you have to say this year? Right? And if you're a GP, right? It's like, hey, you know, you get time and perspective to figure out like, this year, what is the core thing that you want to say, right? That is going to help inform all the other content, frankly. Like, people like Catherine at A16Z are also already incredible at this. And bringing that sort of to more throughout the culture is going to be important.

• 3:10:02Speaker 09

  Either way, though, you mentioned all these different types of content, right?

• 3:10:04Jordi Hays?

  Speeches, I just, yes, speeches incredibly underrated. We utilize, we utilize them internally with the team. And, and they're not, every week, they're not on a schedule. But sometimes, sometimes you need a speech, you know, just nail it and they can really set the tone and the energy within the company.

• 3:10:25John Coogan?

  I'm getting chills thinking about Marc Andreessen standing on stage in front of thousands of people saying, "We chose to raise this growth fund not because it is easy, but because it is hard."

• 3:10:36Speaker 09

  Because it's hard. To test the, to test the ability of our LPs.

• 3:10:40Jordi Hays?

  To test the capital markets.

• 3:10:41Speaker 09

  To measure them against the other.

• 3:10:43John Coogan?

  Why do we go to the moon?

• 3:10:45Jordi Hays?

  To test the health of the global capital markets.

• 3:10:48John Coogan?

  There will never be enough venture capital. I mean, yeah, like, a well, a well-defined phrase, Andreessen has been fantastic, coinages, and I feel like, yeah, the speeches, that's an interesting answer. I was not expecting that, but that makes a ton of sense.

• 3:11:01Speaker 09

  Well, it's good to buy low on things. I think buying low on speeches is your daily tip.

• 3:11:08John Coogan?

  That's great, that's great. Where else should we go with this?

• 3:11:11Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think speeches could be an entirely new launch video meta, right? Everybody, like, the, the.

• 3:11:17John Coogan?

  Barn burners.

• 3:11:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, launch, everybody has a launch video, there's like three new launch videos every day, a lot of them like blur together because they're cool graphics and this person invested and, and here's this product UI. And if you just have the CEO just like rant at the camera and you can get people to like truly listen to that, it probably ends up being, you know, pretty, pretty powerful.

• 3:11:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:11:40Speaker 09

  Those kinds of things can go viral in really powerful ways, right? Because it tells people that you have something to say, right? And it's doubly important because you talked about all these different forms of writing that are all great in their own way. And the one thing that they all have in common is I'll tell you what all bloggers know, right, about writing is you have two audiences, right? The first audience is the people who actually read what you said, which is small. The second audience is the people that they tell that thing, right? Because they get something out of retelling it, right? Like they get that legitimacy, they get that ability to express themselves or whatever. And there is a trade between the writer and the inner circle of people who are going to actually listen to that speech or actually read that thing all the way through. And something that was great about the old VC blogging meta way back in the day,

• 3:12:25Speaker 09

  so 10, 12, 15 years ago, when you know, like, AVC was cooking and Semel Shah and Mark Schuster and people like that, is the way a blog worked, like, the microstructure of blogging was you had a blog and you had readers and a comment section. And everybody came to your blog and the readership would be there. And the way that you would tell what blogs were good was you would have lots of comments, right? And that's where your primary readership would then go and invisibly tell other people about it. Then the feed emerged, right? We got Twitter, we got Hacker News, where we got places where suddenly the discussion moved in public. And what happened then is that, first of all, the ability to reach a secondary audience exploded. So the, like, the returns to writing were only got bigger, but it became less obvious to do, right? The trade became a little bit obscured by virtue of the fact

• 3:13:09Speaker 09

  that it's all in public, right? And it's all based on how many retweets and likes you get. And I think what's happening now, as we go even further past this, is that the returns to writing and reading have never been more valuable, but never been less obvious.

• 3:13:22Isaiah Taylor?

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:13:23Speaker 09

  So, you know, it's time to go, if you, if you go bring the output of a firm as legendary as A16Z with all the amazing things they have to say and the statements of record that they want to put out into the world, you know, my job is to go help Eric and the whole GP crew and Ben and Mark bring this back and make it amazing again, making a really, like, a brand that's gonna shine.

• 3:13:43Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait for your first Software is Eating the World moment.

• 3:13:46John Coogan?

  Also, yeah, I mean, I feel like the speech thing really ties into the new A16Z brand. Like, when I see the coin, I feel like that's like-

• 3:13:54Speaker 09

  The Art Deco coin with the abacus.

• 3:13:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like speeches are kind of Art Deco in some ways. I don't know why I'm making that association, but it feels somewhat linked. It's like a bygone era.

• 3:14:04Speaker 09

  Is it Art Deco or is it a Bozar, right? Like, do you remember the line, it's like, "Art Deco is made by dwarves, Bozar is made by elves"?

• 3:14:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. But it's very, it's very, uh, what is it? It was, like, the style, it was Randian, and I feel like in, in Ayn Rand's writing, there's a lot of speeches that happen throughout the book, so-

• 3:14:20Speaker 09

  There sure are, famously.

• 3:14:22John Coogan?

  Makes sense, yeah, famously. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. Congratulations on the trade deal, congratulations on the move, and-

• 3:14:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, excited to see your work.

• 3:14:31John Coogan?

  -we look forward to seeing your work and hearing it.

• 3:14:32Speaker 09

  Thank you for having me on, guys.

• 3:14:34Jordi Hays?

  Come on and give a speech soon.

• 3:14:35Speaker 09

  Absolutely.

• 3:14:36Jordi Hays?

  Speech, speech, speech, speech, speech.

• 3:14:39John Coogan?

  Speech, let's hit back on-

• 3:14:40Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, Alex.

• 3:14:41Speaker 09

  Take care, everybody.

• 3:14:42Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:14:46John Coogan?

  And we have Isaiah Taylor coming into the studio. We'll bring him on the screen. He has big news from Washington DC.

• 3:14:55John Coogan?

  In the nuclear world, let's bring him into the studio.

• 3:14:58Jordi Hays?

  We are in the fourth hour, if you're still with us.

• 3:15:01John Coogan?

  We're in the fourth hour. Oh, looking good. I love the background.

• 3:15:04Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 3:15:05John Coogan?

  The subtle lighting. You're looking great. How are you doing?

• 3:15:08Isaiah Taylor?

  Not too bad. Hello, I'm John and Jordy. I'm a great researcher in the area of the technology.

• 3:15:12John Coogan?

  We are going to need you to switch your microphone, though, because we cannot hear you very clearly. I don't know what's going on. Maybe try talking more and seeing if it works out.

• 3:15:23Isaiah Taylor?

  How about that? Does that be better?

• 3:15:24John Coogan?

  No, it's really muffled.

• 3:15:25Jordi Hays?

  I think it's the Apple.

• 3:15:26John Coogan?

  Can you, can you switch the, uh, can you, it might be the headphones, uh, that you're picking up the microphone there? I don't know, but it's coming through pretty scratchy. I think it's gonna be rough if we try and stick with this.

• 3:15:38Isaiah Taylor?

  All right, how about that?

• 3:15:38John Coogan?

  That's better. There we go.

• 3:15:40Isaiah Taylor?

  Okay, sweet.

• 3:15:41John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 3:15:41Isaiah Taylor?

  All right, we're gonna, we're gonna do it live. We're gonna go off of the, uh, off of the laptop here. All right, fantastic to, uh, to talk to you, John and Jordy. And, uh, I want to introduce you to Ward Zero, which is the beautiful machine behind you here. This is our, uh, first, uh, prototype nuclear reactor here in our Los Angeles, uh, facility. So it's, it's extremely exciting to be with you today.

• 3:16:01John Coogan?

  Wow, and that's, yeah, you're not on a green screen? That's actually like a window.

• 3:16:04Isaiah Taylor?

  This is real. There are, there are dudes walking around back here.

• 3:16:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I noticed that.

• 3:16:09Jordi Hays?

  My office is saying. It's crazy because with the glass, with the, with the way that the glass is kind of reflecting slightly, it looked, I thought it was an image at the start.

• 3:16:16John Coogan?

  It looks like a poster, but yeah, we get a lot of, we get a lot of fake backgrounds, but this one's real. Um, anyway, give us the update.

• 3:16:22Isaiah Taylor?

  This forklift may, may start running at some point. We'll, we'll have to see.

• 3:16:25Jordi Hays?

  Can you drive a forklift yet, or do you not have time to get promoted?

• 3:16:28Isaiah Taylor?

  I actually am forklift certified. I, I don't know if I have the, the certification sitting on my desk. I just moved desk.

• 3:16:34John Coogan?

  Congratulations. Uh, give us the update. What happened in Washington DC? Why are you in the news?

• 3:16:40Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah, so this was a very exciting day. A couple of months ago, I was on to announce the signing of four executive orders. The president essentially said, listen, we need nuclear back in the United States. This is a strategic priority. And today, the Department of Energy announced the initial companies that will be part of the pilot program to turn on three nuclear reactors on America's soil by July 4, 2026, America's 250th birthday. So we have We got a year. We got a year. 365 days. We're talking about less than 12 months. And we actually have a counter upstairs and a very, very large screen in our office that counts down to the second, our deadline to go and hit that next year. We have a site in Utah, and we're working very quickly toward that goal.

• 3:17:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seems like, reading the press release, it was like, all the boys. I knew like, seven of the companies. I mean, I know there are competitors, and it's obviously fierce competition, but nuclear is famously like, it's such a greenfield, because there's really like, no serious companies. And you kind of saw that in the release. It wasn't a lot of like, legacy companies. It was like, basically all startups, people that we know. And yeah, so, very exciting. I mean, obviously, like, the race is on. It feels like it'll be mostly friendly competition. This is less of a winner-take-all market. And it's such a good, like, it's like, everyone's in it for America. They're not purely in it just to like, you know, accumulate like, all the power in the world, take over the whole world or whatever. But yeah, what was your reaction to the rest of the crew?

• 3:18:09Isaiah Taylor?

  I mean, absolutely. There's a ton of exciting people in here who are working very hard. A lot of these companies have been working for a long time, and have been waiting for this big break, right? And the big break is an administration that steps forward and says, all right, guys, let's see if you have the stuff, right? You've been saying for a long time that the regulatory environment is the problem, that's bottleneck. We're going to clear everything out, and let's see if you got the goods. And so that's the test of the next 10 months here. So we're really excited about it. You know, I think There are a couple of things that are driving this moment. AI is clearly a huge one. I was at the executive order signing a couple of weeks ago for AI. And the president made it very clear that this is a massive priority for the administration, that we're going to beat China on AI. We're going to win this thing and we're going to do it in the next three years.

• 3:18:52Isaiah Taylor?

  And obviously, energy is hugely important to that. A subtle note on this, on energy, that most people don't understand is that nuclear particularly is important for AI. You can get cheap energy through renewables in sort of an intermittent period. And I think that worked pretty well back when we were doing a lot of pre-training. Right, so you can pre-train during the day when the energy is really cheap and you can kind of follow that curve around. As we move toward inference, it's really important to have a lot of steady load, right? We need these turbines to be spinning all the time. And especially as these inference loads are moving more agentic, right? You're going to have these enterprise agent loads and hopefully those are working while we're sleeping. The stability of that becomes even more important. So nuclear is a massive thing to kind of step into the breach here and solve that problem very quickly.

• 3:19:36John Coogan?

  Walk me through the next 10 months.

• 3:19:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, talk about having a timeline.

• 3:19:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, what do you actually have to do?

• 3:19:42Jordi Hays?

  In some ways, historically, long timelines have, nuclear is certainly, probably up there with rocket science in terms of, you know, we know how to do it. It doesn't mean it's not hard. And so when you like really condense a timeline.

• 3:20:01John Coogan?

  What was Vodel, that Atlanta plant, the Georgia plant?

• 3:20:04Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah, Vodel took about 15. Yeah, it took about 15 years. So I'd be like, it's interesting you mentioned rockets because I think this is a really good parallel. We think of rockets as taking a long time to build, but obviously SpaceX kind of proved the opposite. SpaceX proved that you could build a rocket very quickly. You could launch it quickly, you could iterate. And actually, what they did is they went back to go forward. Because when we were first doing rockets in the Apollo program, we went from scratch with the Mercury program to humans landing on the moon 10 years later, right? And so that was an extremely, extremely rapid development process. And guess what? They blew up a lot of rockets, right? They launched a lot, they blew up. And you know, there's this joke that our rockets always blow up, but they got there and they did it through building quickly. And over time, that industry slowed down and it kind of got governed by these primes

• 3:20:49Isaiah Taylor?

  and it was really difficult for us to get these big systems off the ground. And when Elon came back, he said, you know what, we're going to start with a really small rocket. We're going to start with the Falcon one and we're going to launch it quickly and we're going to learn how to launch rockets. We're going to build up the talent and the regulator is going to get used to doing that again. And so I think there's a huge parallel here with nuclear where nuclear is actually very similar. In the early days of nuclear energy, you actually saw a lot of that rapid iteration, like the early days of rocketry. The world's first nuclear reactor turned on in eight months. From a piece of paper to criticality in the first system was eight months. The next reactor turned on another six months after that and the third one turned on another six months after that at Oak Ridge where my great grandfather was a physicist. So we're actually kind of doing a similar thing that we did in space where you go forward,

• 3:21:34Isaiah Taylor?

  you know, go back to go forward. You know, and I also like to point out when, when the first reactors were being made, this was in the era of, you know, manually drafting and slide rules, right? And so it was extremely practical, it was extremely focused on the outcome. You have to actually bend the metal, you have to stack the blocks and these atoms have got to get split. So, you know, it's, there's a cultural shift back to this R and D focused place where we can actually iterate and get through it.

• 3:22:00Jordi Hays?

  What are, when, when you iterate quickly on a rocket and you launch it and it doesn't work, it blows up, humans, you know, it can set things back in a way, but you learned something. What, what are the kind of like risk factors when, you know, moving super quickly with a project like this that, that you're, you guys and other players in the industry are keeping in mind?

• 3:22:23Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah, rockets are a lot more exciting than the nuclear reactors. When a rocket goes wrong and it's a really big explosion.

• 3:22:31Jordi Hays?

  Fireworks.

• 3:22:32Isaiah Taylor?

  Yeah, there's fireworks in these pretty colors. You know, reactors are really boring. The nominal case is that this reactor sits here and does nothing. The nominal, the actually sub nominal case is also that the reactor sits here and does nothing. So there's a lot that you can do in the physics and the design of these reactors to ensure that they're safe. So really what we're doing when we do this testing is we're verifying our assumptions on the mechanical components. Components, right? Do our pumps work how we expected them to? Do the valves work? Are we leaking things, right? There's these sort of, all of the nitty gritty of actually getting a physical system to perform how you expect it to. So I don't expect to see out of this experiment that there will be, you know, large failures, you know, hopefully not. That does have to do with the architecture though, and that's one of the reasons that we've picked this architecture standing behind us is that it is

• 3:23:17Isaiah Taylor?

  an extremely fundamentally safe architecture and that allows us to move quickly.

• 3:23:22John Coogan?

  That's great. I would ring the gong, but I feel like we should save it for when the reactor goes critical, right? So come back on, let's save it. You got the countdown, job's not finished.

• 3:23:34Isaiah Taylor?

  How about this, how about this, John and Jordy, if Valor is the first, why don't you come and ring the gong on the site at the first criticality? How about that?

• 3:23:42John Coogan?

  Will I need a hazmat suit?

• 3:23:44Isaiah Taylor?

  You will also need, you will need a hazmat suit.

• 3:23:48John Coogan?

  Well, I mean, we talked to the founder of Replica and she said that she grew up in Chernobyl and was like playing with radioactive toys and so she turned out fine. She built a big company and so, you know, maybe, maybe radiation poisoning underrated.

• 3:24:01Isaiah Taylor?

  No, no, we'll have the

• 3:24:03John Coogan?

  You'll be safe?

• 3:24:04Isaiah Taylor?

  We're working out of the San Rafael Energy Research Center in Utah. There's a couple of buildings. Some of them are nuclear, some of them are not. We're gonna throw a party in the non-nuclear side. So we'd love to have you there to ring the gong.

• 3:24:15John Coogan?

  We'll be there. Thank you so much. Congratulations. Keep up all the great work.

• 3:24:20Jordi Hays?

  Good luck. Cheers.

• 3:24:21John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you later. Bye.

• 3:24:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, what a show.

• 3:24:25John Coogan?

  What a show. Should we do any timeline? I have one story, but we should save it for the next one.

• 3:24:31Jordi Hays?

  Save it for tomorrow.

• 3:24:32John Coogan?

  Daniel, growing Daniel, says they should make a TBPN for sports. I completely agree. I mean, it is crazy. We invented television, we invented streaming.

• 3:24:42Jordi Hays?

  We invented news.

• 3:24:43John Coogan?

  And now, all we need to do as a society is just take the innovation that we've created here and bring it to other, other industries, other sectors and, and, oh, we, we, we got

• 3:24:54Jordi Hays?

  Mitchell Baldridge says TBPN for Catholicism.

• 3:24:57John Coogan?

  I like that. We got

• 3:24:59Jordi Hays?

  I think they should make a TVPN for monitoring situations. It's just live, the Situation Room.

• 3:25:04John Coogan?

  The Situation Room. That is hilarious that it's called the Situation Room. Yeah, Raul Sunwalker posted, oh my God, they created a TBPN for finance and it's CNBC

• 3:25:20John Coogan?

  with Andrew Sorkin and Sorkin actually

• 3:25:23Jordi Hays?

  Friend of the show.

• 3:25:24John Coogan?

  And he actually replied with the crying emoji, which is very funny.

• 3:25:27Jordi Hays?

  It's good stuff.

• 3:25:28John Coogan?

  Appreciate.

• 3:25:29Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, without further ado, have a great rest of your afternoon. Thank you for tuning in today.

• 3:25:34John Coogan?

  Thank you for tuning in.

• 3:25:34Jordi Hays?

  And we will see you tomorrow. Very excited for the show tomorrow.

• 3:25:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you later.

• 3:25:38Jordi Hays?

  Once more, we'll have some range.

• 3:25:39John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 3:25:40Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:25:41John Coogan?

  See ya. Bye.

• 3:25:42Jordi Hays?

  Bye.