$9M Buffett Dinner, AI Monets, Patek Scarcity, Late-Career Founder, WSJ Mansion Section, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Rahul Sonwalkar

(00:19) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions w/ Rahul Sonwalkar, founder and CEO of Julius AI, a startup building AI-powered tools for data analysis and quantitative reasoning. The company focuses on making it easier for users to analyze spreadsheets, generate visualizations, and interact with data using natural language. (01:10) - Dine with Warren Buffet for $9M (05:35) - Typing Loses Ground to Whispering (16:00) - AI Monet Paintings (28:12) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (51:02) - Patek Chooses Scarcity Over Scale (58:52) - WSJ Mansion Section (01:21:01) - 67 Year Old Founder (01:27:40) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:34:23) - SpaceX Speeds Up IPO Timeline (01:36:04) - Ackman Takes Microsoft Stake (01:38:41) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVB and today is Friday, May 15th, 2026. Are we live? Okay, good.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  We're live.

• 0:08John Coogan?

  We bumped it. We have a special guest today, Rahul Sunwoker. Introduce yourself for everyone who doesn't know.

• 0:14Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Hello, guys. I'm Rahul Sunwoker, friend of John and Jordy, founder of Julius.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. How are things going?

• 0:20Jordi Hays?

  I don't personally think he needs an introduction.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  I don't think so either, but we're very happy to be joined by you on this Friday. We have a bit of a mellow show, no guests. Where's my camera? Over here? Am I back here now? Am I over here? Okay, we're good. We're figuring it out. It's Friday. A bunch of tech news, bunch of random posts, the mansion section, the, uh, who is it?

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  They're saying you're not hyped enough. They're saying you're not hyped enough. Why don't you go hit the gong?

• 0:44John Coogan?

  Go hit the gong. Warm up, wake up.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  Hit it.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, hit the gong.

• 0:47Jordi Hays?

  A little gong warm up.

• 0:48John Coogan?

  Coming to LA, hanging out with us both.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  All right, you gotta hit it. You gotta.

• 0:53John Coogan?

  Terrible.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  Big one.

• 0:55John Coogan?

  Smash it.

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  Big one.

• 0:56John Coogan?

  Smash it.

• 0:59John Coogan?

  That's a good gong. Come on.

• 1:06John Coogan?

  CEO Patek Philippe did an interview with the Financial Times. We can go into later, but we gotta kick it off with Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett is stepping out for his famed charity lunch again. He's done these for years. A mystery bidder, I wonder if we'll, if the mystery bidder will be unmasked at some point. A mystery bidder just bid over $9 million to win an auction with the Oracle of Omaha. Which would you pick? $9 million in your bank account or lunch with the Oracle of Omaha?

• 1:35Rahul Sonwalkar?

  I'm taking lunch with Oracle of Omaha any day.

• 1:38John Coogan?

  Any day, okay.

• 1:39Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Any day. What would I do with $9 million?

• 1:41John Coogan?

  You could buy Berkshire shares. Let him, let him do, work for you forever.

• 1:45Jordi Hays?

  Rahul lives in SF, right?

• 1:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  So, you come in at nine, you're gonna get outbid.

• 1:50John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:51Jordi Hays?

  So, what are you gonna do with nine?

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Well, nine is down. So, if you look at the, the, the chart, there was a, a sort of a slow takeoff in the price of these winning bids for Buffett lunches. A mystery bidder just paid over $9 million to win an auction with the Oracle of Omaha, who last participated in the event in 2022. Took a couple of years off 2020. Of course, COVID took it off 2021, made a comeback in 2022. And there was massive demand because previously this was a $2 million lunch. Originally in 2003, it was just a couple hundred K, but then it spiked to almost $20 million. And now is sitting right around nine. The year's winning bid is a steep drop from the last time Buffett participated.

• 2:33Jordi Hays?

  All right, but the trend, the trend is quite positive.

• 2:35John Coogan?

  I think it's pretty good. If you interpolate this, he's still, he's still raising multimillions every year.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  So here's what I'm curious about. So it's a mystery bidder. We have no idea why they bid.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47Jordi Hays?

  We just know they want to go to lunch, right? We know they want to be at lunch, right? But delicious lunch. There's a, there's a different groups in attendance, right? You have a, uh, Steph Curry.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58Jordi Hays?

  And his wife, Ayesha. And so there's a possibility that this person just wanted lunch with them.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04Jordi Hays?

  They could come in and say, um, uh, you know, Warren, you know, keeps kind of like, he wants to be friendly, right? So they paid a lot. So he's trying to engage and they're just like, really dude? I paid $9 million to have lunch with Steph Curry and you're trying to constantly get awarded. What's going on?

• 3:20John Coogan?

  Could happen.

• 3:22Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and so, yeah, we don't know if this is just a basketball enthusiast, someone that wants to talk about how the game is.

• 3:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Hard to sort of disentangle until you figure out who the mystery bidder is. Are they courtside every game or are they at the shareholders conference? At 92, Warren Buffett said, he ran out of gas. The spirit remained eager, uh, but the flesh became progressively weaker. That's a wild quote from Warren Buffett.

• 3:49Jordi Hays?

  And what about this one?

• 3:50John Coogan?

  He said, both the money and the message remain important. Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's not that crazy.

• 3:55Jordi Hays?

  The money and the message. I mean, if you say it, if you say it like he's selling like a course.

• 4:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:01Jordi Hays?

  Then it sounds significant.

• 4:04John Coogan?

  Ted Welsher, now Berkshire, now Berkshire Investment Manager, won the auction twice when he was a hedge fund manager. Oh, so it's sort of like a job opportunity potentially. Like you have to pay all this money upfront, but you get to know the big guy. Eventually he cuts you in on the business.

• 4:18Jordi Hays?

  Justin Sun was another previous winner.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  Interesting. What did he do? Tron?

• 4:23Jordi Hays?

  That was the 20. Wait, I don't understand.

• 4:26John Coogan?

  He gave Buffett a Bitcoin as well as several Tron, the digital blockchain he had founded during their meal in 2020. I thought there wasn't one in 2020, I guess, uh, something around there. Five bidders participated in this year's auction on eBay, which opened at 50K. Other items, uh, were up for sale, including a $1 bill signed by Buffett and sold for $9,100 and a signed Curry jersey that sold for $1,547.99. I thought that was a million dollars. Uh, the auction moved online in 2003, allowing Buffett fans around the world to participate. The winning price for the lunch has held above a million dollars since 2008. I wonder if any tech VCs will copy Warren Buffett, start selling lunches. Some of them are on, uh.

• 5:10Jordi Hays?

  Uh, very cool. I was, uh, I had some concerns around doing this on eBay, just because of the fees, which can be pretty significant.

• 5:18John Coogan?

  They probably waited for charities.

• 5:19Jordi Hays?

  But they do.

• 5:19John Coogan?

  Okay, there you go. There you go. Okay, well, we have a question for you. So there was a, uh, article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. Typing is being replaced by whispering and it's way more annoying. As a CEO, as a startup founder, I want your take on workplaces that are starting to resemble high-end call centers. Only these employees are talking to AI. And so, uh, they start with a, they start with an anecdote about working from home. Normally, this couple would be typing on the keyboard, but now they're dictating to Codex and Claude Code. And over at Ramp, uh, engineers sit at their desks wearing gaming headsets so they can talk loudly to their AI assistants. What do you think?

• 6:03John Coogan?

  Should the future of the office sound more like a sales floor? What do you think?

• 6:09Rahul Sonwalkar?

  I think, uh, on one side, I'm pro this, this trend of like talking to your AI over typing because I can audit what people are typing in the office. You know, what are they, what if they're typing on Instagram or Twitch, a Twitch livestream?

• 6:23John Coogan?

  Okay, so if you're just walking, if you just see and they're saying scroll.

• 6:27Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Scroll.

• 6:28John Coogan?

  Scroll.

• 6:28Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Yeah.

• 6:28John Coogan?

  Scroll. Scroll.

• 6:30Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Yeah.

• 6:31John Coogan?

  Then there might be an issue.

• 6:32Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Yeah, yeah. Why, why are you doing that on the company time?

• 6:34John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 6:35Rahul Sonwalkar?

  If they're like talking to the AI about like, hey, make me like a.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  It's more, more accountability.

• 6:40Rahul Sonwalkar?

  More accountability.

• 6:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:41Rahul Sonwalkar?

  On the other hand, it's like, I don't want to hear your prompts.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 6:45Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Like, if, if somebody's read my prompts, I would be so embarrassed.

• 6:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 6:49Rahul Sonwalkar?

  It's kind of like, you know.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  What's your, what's your May twenty twenty six appro- approach to prompting?

• 6:56Rahul Sonwalkar?

  My May twenty twenty six approach to prompting is I've completely, I've completely given up on like yelling at AI. Like, just freaking do this. I've, I've completely stopped doing that.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 7:06Rahul Sonwalkar?

  And I'm like.

• 7:07John Coogan?

  Be as good now?

• 7:08Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Yeah, I do more like cognitive behavioral therapy with, with AI now. Like, I do more CBT. I try to like reassure the AI.

• 7:14John Coogan?

  Oh, set it up for success.

• 7:16Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can do this. Like, think about, think about, you, you know, you're, you're like Palmer Lucky.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:22Rahul Sonwalkar?

  And you can design this like new piece of hardware that's never existed before.

• 7:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:27Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Um, so I, I do more of that. You know, up until twenty twenty five, I was more yelling at the AI.

• 7:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:33Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Um.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  I've completely dropped out of the whole like, don't make mistakes, don't hallucinate. I feel like all that's been either baked into the pre-training or post-training, or it's like even in the system prompt already.

• 7:44Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Yeah.

• 7:44John Coogan?

  I used to have, uh, the thing that annoyed me for a while was, uh, uh, what is it? Uh, antithetical parallelism? So it's not this, it's that, or hyphens, those types of things were just tells of AI-written content.

• 7:59Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Yeah.

• 8:00John Coogan?

  And I had a special prompt that would inject that in everything. It would say, hey, don't use the, it's not this, it's that. Don't use, uh, contrastive parallelism or antithetical parallelism. Uh, but I since ripped that out and just went back to default and it feels like, like all the firms sort of fixed the, the base training so that it's not as like, uh, clankery, I guess.

• 8:23Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I feel like Warren kind of ripped one of the models too, you know, when he said the spirit is eager, but the body is weaker.

• 8:30John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 8:32Rahul Sonwalkar?

  I just.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  He's, uh, subtweeting.

• 8:37Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Yeah.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  The models.

• 8:38Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 8:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. What was the quote? He said, uh, he said, uh, it's not just that the spirit remains eager, but also that the flesh has become progressively weaker. No, he said, I ran out of gas. The spirit remained eager, but the flesh became progressively weaker. It has a nice, uh, it's a bar. It has some rhymes, rhyming to it.

• 8:59Jordi Hays?

  It's not just about the money. It's about the mess.

• 9:02John Coogan?

  I think, I think Warren needs a, a, a Drake.

• 9:05Jordi Hays?

  Dude, he needs a, he needs a mastermind.

• 9:07John Coogan?

  He needs a verse on a Drake song.

• 9:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:08John Coogan?

  Uh, who just launched, uh, three albums today. Is that right? Drake launched three albums. Isn't it like six hours?

• 9:15Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Um, um, I, I like some of his music. I'm not a, I wouldn't call myself a fan.

• 9:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:20Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Yeah.

• 9:20Jordi Hays?

  Brutal, brutal.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  What about, uh, what about this idea for a gym that's themed like the Rainforest Cafe? And there's even a thunderstorm every minute, every 20 minutes. Have you ever been to the Rainforest Cafe?

• 9:33Rahul Sonwalkar?

  No, was the, was the Rainforest Cafe?

• 9:34John Coogan?

  Rainforest Cafe is a themed restaurant where you walk in and the, there's rainforest all around you and there are statues of animals. And the special thing about the Rainforest Cafe is that it's, it's not just like, you know, you go to some steakhouse and they have some pictures on the wall because showing the lineage, or you go to an Italian restaurant and you see pictures of celebrities that came in and signed. It's, it's not purely decorative. It's actually interactive. And at the Rainforest Cafe, every 20 minutes, there's a thunderstorm and it plays very loudly and it actually like draws your attention away from whatever you're, you're talking about. Uh, it's a, it's a brain rot restaurant, basically. That's what Rainforest Cafe is.

• 10:17John Coogan?

  I can't believe you haven't been. You should go. Tyler, have you been to Rainforest Cafe?

• 10:20Jordi Hays?

  I have.

• 10:20John Coogan?

  Here we go. I mean, it looks like, it, they really go over the top with the decor. Look at the table. It, it looks like AI slop, honestly, on the table. Uh, is this a real image?

• 10:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think it's because many of the leading labs trained almost exclusively on content.

• 10:34John Coogan?

  Yes, from the Rainforest Cafe. Have you ever been to the Rainforest Cafe, Tyler?

• 10:37Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 10:37John Coogan?

  Has anyone been to the Rainforest Cafe? Okay. We got a couple Rainforest Cafe enjoyers in the TV panel today. Uh, but a gym with a theme, would you go?

• 10:47Rahul Sonwalkar?

  I feel like we're kind of reinventing like nature from first principles right now, you know?

• 10:52John Coogan?

  You might just want to go to the rainforest to lift.

• 10:54Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Yeah, it's like lift heavy things, like go outside, like lift rock.

• 10:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:59John Coogan?

  So, uh, so this, this poster suggests that all the machines would be painted to look like they're made of bamboo. The leather is fake leopard print. Someone get me in touch with the mayor of Miami. This would go crazy over there. Men are allowed or perhaps required to wear loin cloths, uh, et cetera. It goes other places. And then he starts drawing out what it would look like. Our, the, the gym that we worked out in today has a little bit of a theme to it, but it, it's not too on the nose, but there is, you notice the machines have like some decorative stuff on it. And it feels like they went one notch further than just the standard gym equipment.

• 11:34Rahul Sonwalkar?

  It's a little flamboyant, I would say, yeah.

• 11:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, well, uh, I wanted to ask you about, uh, schemes that are allegedly taking place in Silicon Valley these days. Revswap.ai, this seems like a joke. This seems like a, like a drop, uh, designed to go viral. Harry Ragavan says, in case you're wondering, this is the stage of the market we're at. And the idea is that you trade dollars with other startups and you book it as revenue. So RevSwap AI is the first, the world's first peer-to-peer revenue laundering platform. See, it's gotta be a joke at that point, uh, for, for SF startups. You give us $1 million, we give you 1 million back. Now you have 1 million ARR math. Start swapping. How?

• 12:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the problem, the problem of the, the problem with these is it's funny for, uh, people that are like maybe closer to the inside, but this got half a million views.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:33Jordi Hays?

  So that means there's hundreds of thousands of people that think this is like a real thing.

• 12:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, they either they either think they're they're doing a startup and they should do this, or they think they're outside and they're like, this is how bad startups are. I don't think many startups are doing this, but if you've talked to VCs, is like quality of revenue coming up, revenue concentration, circular revenue deals, is any of that coming up these days?

• 12:59Rahul Sonwalkar?

  I think I think investors deeply care about all those things and good investors still do their due diligence when investing in companies, especially when they're at a mid to later stage, right? But really, like, where do you draw the line, right? You see Nvidia investing in a lot of Neo Clouds that go buy their GPUs to help start these Neo Clouds, and then you have, of course, like Nvidia investing in AI labs that end up being like downstream consumers of these of these these GPUs. And so like, I think in a way, like, yes, it's kind of like a revenue spot where you're investing in a company and then like they're kind of like buying your product, kind of like trading dollars.

• 13:43Rahul Sonwalkar?

  But so I think there's like, in some places, it makes sense in some certain context. In the if you're a founder, though, and you're an early-stage founder, if you're just like going for this, you have to ask yourself like, okay, what am I really in this for? Like, am I here to like build a business and build a thing that people want? Or am I here to just like?

• 14:03John Coogan?

  LARP.

• 14:04Rahul Sonwalkar?

  LARP, yeah. And a lot of people do play like founder as opposed to like building a business, building a company.

• 14:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but this is also like a crime.

• 14:14Jordi Hays?

  It's not just LARPing.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  Depends, you disclose it. If you're just like, yeah, we have this weird circular deal, you should probably discount it to zero. That's not wire fraud, right? Like, if you're disclosing it, like, the wire fraud is only when you are stating one thing as another, like, you're lying. If you're not lying about it and you're just like, yeah, we have this weird circular deal where we pay this company, they pay us, you should probably not give us any credit for that in our valuation.

• 14:38Jordi Hays?

  Their entire life is a LARP.

• 14:40John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 14:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, should we talk about Monet?

• 14:42John Coogan?

  Circular deals, though. There's an interesting, there's an interesting anecdote of when they worked out. Do you know this? ASML 2012, they had a customer co-investment program where Intel, TSMC, and Samsung pitched six, pitched in $6.8 billion across R and D funding and equity purchases in order to help ASML pull forward EUV lithography and 450 millimeter wafer technology. And so the deal would look like an odd round trip of cash from the non semiconductor pilled, but it worked and the customers effectively financed the creation of a new technology that they wanted and everyone came out just fine. And so we're 14 years in, ASML is a great company, we have EUV technology and it worked, even though it was this weird circular deal

• 15:25John Coogan?

  where TSMC and Intel and Samsung were like, we want you to go make this machine, we're going to be the buyers of it and we'll also be the investors and the financiers of it. So it can work out, but probably not as simple as going to rev, what is it, revcycle.ai or something? Yeah, as long as it's disclosed. Yeah, and this was, this was disclosed both by TSMC, Intel, Samsung and TSMC at the time and everyone reacted positively because they were working together. Uh, we need your take on this, uh, this Shlomes post, this Monet AI.

• 15:59Jordi Hays?

  Can we, can we get this on the big screen?

• 16:00John Coogan?

  Let's get this on the big screen because Shlomes here says, "I just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting using AI. Please describe in as much detail as possible, what makes this inferior to a real Monet painting?" What do you think?

• 16:17Jordi Hays?

  Break it down.

• 16:19John Coogan?

  What makes this inferior? Me? Art expert, Rahul. You're putting me on the spot right now.

• 16:25Jordi Hays?

  I see you posting from museums on the weekend. Let's, let's see.

• 16:28John Coogan?

  He adds the "made with AI" tag, uh, but there is a community note here and I'll, and I'll spoil it. Uh, "This is an actual Monet, water lilies, uh, from 1915."

• 16:41Jordi Hays?

  So let me read some of the responses so far from people.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 16:44Jordi Hays?

  "I'm disappointed, I have to even point it out. There is no cohesion to the depth and color choices. The reflection of, of the tree bleeds into the lily pads with no regard for spatial depth or contrast. The background lily pad algae, uh, amalgam, amalgam is egregiously vague like most AI art."

• 17:05Jordi Hays?

  And let's read some of the others. People have started deleting their responses.

• 17:09John Coogan?

  No, really?

• 17:09Jordi Hays?

  The choice of color in places, i.e. the purple around the lily pad sticks out to me as decidedly worse than most Monet. I get a sense that the artist failed to connect their eyes to the brush palette, almost as if it's an AI. No frame, no sense of the threshold between the subject and object, just colors.

• 17:30John Coogan?

  Are you an AI art enjoyer? Do you play around on Mid Journey ever for fun?

• 17:36John Coogan?

  You do your cognitive behavioral therapy?

• 17:38Jordi Hays?

  I-

• 17:38John Coogan?

  Because people, a lot of people use Mid Journey as sort of like art therapy, you know?

• 17:42Jordi Hays?

  They do.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, they'll go in and they'll prompt it. It's less about making an image that they will sell or making an image for a commercial purpose, or even sharing their images with anyone else. They just enjoy the game of they have an idea and they want to see it, you know, on the screen. And so they play around and then they are satisfied. It's like playing a video game. Like, no one cares that you finished Dark Souls, except you. You had fun.

• 18:05Jordi Hays?

  Alright, we gotta give some, there's some great feedback here on why it's, why it's bad.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 18:09Jordi Hays?

  Fair warning before I dig in. This image is actually a very competent rendition.

• 18:13John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 18:13Jordi Hays?

  It's doing more right than most AI Monet. But you asked what makes it inferior to a real Monet, so here's the honest breakdown. What's missing? The physical object. A real Monet is a thing before. It's an image. This is the biggest gap and is not solvable by better prompting.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  Huh.

• 18:30Jordi Hays?

  And it just goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on. It's triggered.

• 18:34Rahul Sonwalkar?

  It's not solvable with better prompting until that's like in the terrain data.

• 18:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, I mean, like, like, LLMs with tool use can just, if you ask for a Monet, they can just go get you the PNG of a Monet.

• 18:46Jordi Hays?

  It, it feels less lively. It lacks the texture, the rugged edges, the folds, the crevices and creases and bevels and topology of plastic art, the fine calculated highlights. The AI version is a granulated pixelation and it looks that way. It lacks the mass of humanity.

• 19:04Jordi Hays?

  And someone else says, "The fact that it looks like S-H-I-T and is S-H-I-T, slop." Doesn't look anywhere-

• 19:12John Coogan?

  Two thousand quotes.

• 19:13Jordi Hays?

  Near like a Monet. Looks exactly like somebody trying to replicate the style and achieving like 20% of it. Not as vibrant as Monet's typical choice of colors. Looks dull. So, a lot of people are dunking on this. Of course, he posts, "This is a real Monet." He baited them all.

• 19:30John Coogan?

  It is. Someone took all of their feedback and turned it into an AI-generated Monet to try and improve it. Interesting. The other, the other AI art thing that's going on, which is very, very funny is, did you see Sony launch this new AI camera assistant with Experia Intelligence to bring stories to life? We have to pull this image up because I don't know what they were thinking. Like, it's, it's like one of the craziest, like, attempts at shipping an AI feature and I don't know what they were, I don't know what they were thinking. When you see these images, look at this.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  Like, this is, I don't know if you can tell on the screen, but like, it's not our, our camera is not, like, the camera that you're watching this, this on, is not, like, miscalibrated on the contrast. It just adds, like, a ton of contrast and makes everything look way worse. And the sandwich is so blown out. It's just, all they did was just increase the brightness. The original looks great. And you have less detail on the right. And I cannot believe this is from the official gold check Sony Experia account. Like, this is not a joke. What do you think this is?

• 20:47Jordi Hays?

  The product manager working on Sony Experia hates AI. Wanted to botch the launch, so they get so much pushback that they don't have to work on AI anymore.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  Something like that. Yeah, Michael Bryan here says, "I could be wrong, but I suspect this is a joke. If so, props to Sony for rage banning the internet so hard. Just look at the sandwich. MKVHD made two videos about this kind of stuff being bad, and Google let out something similar earlier this week." I mean, obviously, there are ways to integrate AI uprising and AI, AI color grading, like, much, at a much more intuitive level without doing this, but I don't know what they were thinking. How could they possibly approve that post? Maybe they had their, their monitors contrast set, like, wildly wrong, because to actually, to actually ship this, like, your monitor would have to be woefully miscalibrated to think

• 21:38John Coogan?

  that the one on the, on the, on the right looks better. This one is, is the closest. Like, it did sort of amplify the streak of light. This one is, if I had to pick one where the AI camera assistant did not completely degrade the image, this actually-

• 21:53Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I can't, I can't. I can't get behind that. Look at the like, what is the subject of the photo? Is it that light streak at the bottom?

• 22:01John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep. I would, I would say, I would say the, the AI camera assistant version is only 10% worse here. Whereas the other ones make it like 200% worse. What do you think?

• 22:14Jordi Hays?

  Oh, no, it's way.

• 22:15John Coogan?

  If you had to pick one, but if you had to pick one, one AI camera assistant image, which one's the least chopped? Which one's the least botched? Probably this one. There you go. But, but, but.

• 22:28Jordi Hays?

  Least.

• 22:28John Coogan?

  You're going with this one? No way. No way. This is so much worse. This is a drug. Here the, the original looks more AI than like. It does. Wait, is it some sort of prank? Is this the Schloes thing all over again where they're like, big reveal? The left is actually AI and the right is out of the camera.

• 22:47Jordi Hays?

  You mean inverted?

• 22:48John Coogan?

  Uh, no, no. What I'm saying is that, so they, they post, so a lot of people were saying like, the tags at the top were accidentally swapped. And what if that's intentional? What if they're saying like, like, we took the bad photo on the, on the right? That's overblown, over too contrasty, too bright. And with our AI, we got you to a reasonable photo on the left. And big reveal tomorrow, or whenever Sony puts this out and says, actually, we were able to restore the highlights, bring the contrast more natural, and make the photo on the right look better with AI. That would be, that would be a good pitch, but.

• 23:25Jordi Hays?

  I do think they might have asked, I think this might have been an accident.

• 23:28John Coogan?

  They, they must.

• 23:29Jordi Hays?

  Posted it.

• 23:30John Coogan?

  Have they, have they commented since? I, I think they're just following the post about AI camera assistant. We'd like to explain the feature in more detail. It doesn't edit photos after shooting. It suggests four settings.

• 23:42Jordi Hays?

  Wow, they're doubling down.

• 23:45John Coogan?

  Oh no, the originals look so good by comparison. What are you doing? Oh wow, this is a. I don't know what's going on. You can choose any option. How about no option in this case?

• 23:59Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Maybe this is like a psyop from Sony to

• 24:02John Coogan?

  Maybe. Well, there was a big reveal with the Swatch AP collab. I know you were looking at some watches earlier today at breakfast. Are you in the market for the the collaboration between Audemars Piguet and Swatch?

• 24:19Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 24:19John Coogan?

  With a wristband. You are in the market for this?

• 24:22Rahul Sonwalkar?

  We're gonna go stand in line for

• 24:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:24Rahul Sonwalkar?

  The AP after the show, right?

• 24:27John Coogan?

  You're gonna go?

• 24:27Rahul Sonwalkar?

  I think that's the plan, no?

• 24:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. People are calling it the new LaBooBoo. You will see this on Birkins, Goyard, Torts.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  Look, we don't know yet that this is not an AI wearable. That could be the, that could be the, the missing element here.

• 24:41John Coogan?

  Could be, yeah.

• 24:43Jordi Hays?

  I think this is gonna be a hit. I think this is gonna be a hit. It's seeming more and more likely that they're not releasing any type of strap themselves, so people are gonna do aftermarket straps. I think those will be frowned upon.

• 24:55John Coogan?

  Phone case?

• 24:56Jordi Hays?

  Oh yeah, like the, the Hailey Bieber, you know, like the

• 24:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, the makeup case with the watch there, what do you think?

• 25:01Rahul Sonwalkar?

  The thing is, a lot of people are wearing fitness wearables on their wrists, which kinda competes on real estate with these fancy watches.

• 25:09Jordi Hays?

  I know, but you got a lot of arm.

• 25:11John Coogan?

  You got a lot of arm and you got two wrists.

• 25:12Rahul Sonwalkar?

  You got iced up.

• 25:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, you could just keep going up and, up and up and up. Anyway, give us the update on Julius. How are things going?

• 25:20Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Uh, these are going good. We're, we're, we just launched slides last month. Um, slides is going well, so, thank you. Um, so Julius is slowly becoming the platform where you can bring your messy data and then analyze it, get insights, and not just that, but actually do the stuff after it, like create reports, dashboards, slides, and then very soon you'll be able to like email Julius and assign tasks for your data work. And so if you work in finance, operations, marketing, you check out Julius.

• 25:47John Coogan?

  How do you think about the trade-off between generative imagery for slide generation versus uh, some sort of harness that generates a slide in sort of a, you know, traditional like software platform like PowerPoint or Google, or Google Slides?

• 26:03Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Absolutely. So, uh, Yeah, the the generative imagery for slides was just not great.

• 26:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:09Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Until GPT, the the

• 26:13John Coogan?

  The latest launch.

• 26:14Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Images.

• 26:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:16Rahul Sonwalkar?

  And the the texts and the the text under the images is so good.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:20Rahul Sonwalkar?

  That actually it completely changes the game.

• 26:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:22Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Um, it's it's not just for creative assets, it actually cannot be used for for whole slides. And you can actually

• 26:29John Coogan?

  A lot of times I'll go to chat GPT and I will dictate, I was wondering about the performance of different ETFs. Uh, as they relate, like, as they're more indexed to the semiconductor, as you get narrower from an S and P 500 to a NASDAQ to a QQQ focused tech. Uh, ETF, all the way down to like a semiconductor ETF. What's the performance of the last year? I just wanted like a bar chart. And so instead of asking for like a table, deep research report, I said, go pull all the data, put it together into like an infographic. It did it pretty well. I feel like it's a little bit of a leap of faith because I don't know where the data is coming from. It's a little messy. And then I would be very hesitant about like maintaining a consistent style throughout a full presentation.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  But for something where I'm just want like a one off thing. So where where is the, uh, where where's the demand from the customer on, uh, like slide deck versus single slide generation?

• 27:23Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Yeah, so the image gen is great if you want a single infographic or single graphic. If you want like a multi multi slide deck, a whole story, you want to maintain brand consistency across the deck. And that's where you're using a code harness.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Uh, sure.

• 27:34Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Like JavaScript HTML to generate slides is actually much, much more optimal. Um, and so depending on what the user wants, Julius will choose whether to use image. Uh, 2.0 or use like a code harness to generate like multiple slides.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:49Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Um, but to answer your question, like the image model is really, really good for like, uh, graphics.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:54Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Single, single slides. And then you can combine that with like a code harness to generate like multiple slides.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Jordy, anything else? Thanks for coming on the show.

• 28:04Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor.

• 28:05Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Yeah, thank you, guys.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  Hanging out this morning.

• 28:07John Coogan?

  We'll talk.

• 28:07Rahul Sonwalkar?

  Likewise. Yeah.

• 28:09John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 28:10Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you soon.

• 28:12John Coogan?

  Another one. Uh, the big news today is of course, uh, Bernie Sanders and AOC introduced a bill to pause all AI data center construction. I want to know within this bill how they are defining AI data center. Of course, uh, GPUs are are graphics processing units. You wire a bunch of them together. You can do AI. You can do machine learning. You can, uh, you can render CGI films. There's a lot of different uses and I wonder how they're grappling with that definition, but, um, 300 local bills have been, 300 plus local bills have been filed. Half of planned 2026 data centers are facing delays or cancellation. Each one brings billions

• 28:57John Coogan?

  to local economy, says Gary Tan. Uh, the people who say they want American jobs are trying to block the biggest job creation engine since the interstate highway system. Uh, Sanders and AOC are straight up sabotaging the economy, says Nick Davidoff. No spy or rival country agent can achieve what local useful idiots can. And so people are going back and forth about the data center construction ban. Um, I wonder how this will pencil out. Elizabeth Warren says a single AI data center uses as much electricity as 100,000 households and utility companies are passing the upgrade costs to you, not to the trillion dollar tech

• 29:40John Coogan?

  giants. That of course was attempted to be addressed by the rate payer protection pledge, but it is early days and so we'll have to see how that pans out.

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And this is the same, uh, bill that was introduced in March, uh, but it's continuing to, uh, pop up again, obviously as they try to move it along. Um, but, uh, it hasn't.

• 30:04Jordi Hays?

  Passed committee, yet it doesn't obviously have like bipartisan support.

• 30:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  Very unlikely.

• 30:12John Coogan?

  And there's a lot of geopolitical considerations. Anthropic put out a big essay today around different resolutions to US-China competition in the age of AI. Some very, obviously, they are very aggressive about, don't lose the lead, continue to build data centers. But the nimbyism, the noise complaints, the environmental concerns, like all of these things do have to be addressed in a democratic society if we are to move along smoothly. Tyler?

• 30:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so just for like the definitions, how it's defined.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  So a data center is defined as a building that has more than 20 megawatts maximum power capacity or total peak power that are used to deliver 20 kilowatts or more to a single server rack or to use liquid cooling to individual hardware components.

• 31:06John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  So.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm just wondering if we're gonna get some weird workaround where, okay, instead of like one big building, you get a thousand smaller buildings that are all.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  So it also says like a building that's contiguous or adjacent to another building that's.

• 31:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:20Speaker 03

  So I think they kind of that.

• 31:21John Coogan?

  So I have to put some like trees in between them or something? I don't know. I just like every time there's a law, people will find a way around the law. And so I'm very interested to see how this winds up changing. It could change it for good, you know? It could be like, okay, yeah, like, like clean energy and it's underground and it doesn't, it's not noisy. And it doesn't, it doesn't create, it feels like the real, the real, the real issue at debate is like passing the cost on to people who don't benefit, a negative externality, which the government has been internalizing negative externalities.

• 31:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:54John Coogan?

  Since its inception. And so there's certainly a good outcome, but it will be.

• 32:01Jordi Hays?

  Almonds are catching some heat from J Cal.

• 32:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:05Jordi Hays?

  He is showing almond versus almond production versus data center water consumption from 1999 to 2026. And. Yeah, everyone has been saying for years, even prior to the AI boom, just how much water almonds use. This was particularly top of mind when California was in a massive drought. And you drive through different parts of California and it's just almond trees as far as the eye can see. And so anyways, almond, almonds catching strays.

• 32:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you look at this and you think about the growth rate in, in this year, like you can see the blue line is ticking up. And you can see that the red line for almonds is flatlining. And so if you are extremely aggressive about counting the ooms and you, and you project this out a couple of years, you can see these two things flip. But of course, there are ways to avoid situations like that with water use increasing, such as what Blake Scholl proposes, which is closed loop cooling and Booms superpower turbines that don't need any water. And you can avoid all of that.

• 33:18John Coogan?

  But the whole water debate seems like not the focus of the Sanders AOC proposal. It seems much more focused on generation and upgrading the grid, which is expensive and is real. Everyone knows that data centers do use a lot of power. No one's saying that the, that the high energy intensity is fake news, even though the water debate was a little bit thrown, you know, it was, it was sort of quickly debunked. The energy debate has not been debunked. And so there is a need for more clean energy, more power and more grid upgrades that are not visited upon local communities.

• 34:01John Coogan?

  The big question that we were trying to answer, and we're going to try and get someone on the show. Maybe next week to talk about this is like, what is the, if you were, if you were, if you were attempting to build a data center that had 80% approval, like, what would that look like? What is the Ezra Klein abundance vision for a data center? It's probably powered by clean energy. It's probably someone, somewhere very remote. Brandon was talking about the 40 minute commute. The 40 minute commute is something that many Americans do, and it is not insurmountable. And he was just reflecting on if you're, if you're ever driven in or around Las Vegas,

• 34:43John Coogan?

  if you drive 40, 40 minutes in any direction, you get to a lot, a lot, a lot of empty land, where certainly a big building is not going to be an eyesore. You're not going to be able to hear 60 decibels from 20 minutes away. And there is a lot of land, but that hasn't been the default construction methodology for a lot of data center constructors.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like the, the TSM seaplane in Arizona is like basically 30 minutes north of like central Phoenix.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, it didn't seem like there were any houses.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you basically go over a little like hill, and then it's just like completely empty land. There's a massive fab.

• 35:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like that. I learned an interesting fact, which is that Apple has a secret fab. They have a silicon fab in Silicon Valley. They bought a fab for, I sent you the, where did I, where did I pull this up? I, I had to fact check this because I saw it and it was framed as like this secret, like, you know, terrible thing. It was not that, it's not that scary. It's, they bought it for $18.2 million. It's a 70,000 square foot facility owned by Maxim previously. They bought it maybe in 2015.

• 35:55John Coogan?

  And it was controversial because they were fined by, I believe, the EPA for, for some mislabeling of waste and air emissions controls. But it was a pretty small fine. It was something like a couple hundred, maybe $200,000. And it seemed like they might've just had a mistake.

• 36:19Jordi Hays?

  They brought down the hammer on him.

• 36:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, I, I think it was like, like, you know, the air conditioning duct was slightly misconfigured. It was not like a nuclear waste spill, like destroying the whole town, but it was controversial, obviously, because Apple wants to be as clean and environmentally friendly as possible, which is why I lean, I lean into they don't want a massive, like they're, they're not even a scaled chip manufacturer. This is a prototype facility. They manufacture between 600 nanometers to 90 nanometers, way different than what's happening at TSMC with two and three nanometers. So it's not a secret facility in the literal sense. The secret fab framing comes mostly from critics and whistleblower coverage,

• 37:02John Coogan?

  not because it was known, unknown to government or industry was licensed. EPA says the Apple facility on Scott Boulevard. So maybe that's your next trip, Tyler. You're going over to, where is it? It's in Santa Clara, in Santa Clara. On Scott Boulevard in Santa Clara generated hazardous waste and had RCRA violations in 2023, 2024, which they made fixes for, and they paid a $261,000 penalty. It's 3250 Scott Boulevard. If you're in Santa Clara, go stop by.

• 37:36Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for Scott. I didn't know you had a boulevard named after you.

• 37:43John Coogan?

  That's very funny. So the interpretation at the time was that it could support prototyping, testing, or heavy R and D, not mainline production. So your iPhone is not made in Santa Clara. It is made abroad.

• 37:55Jordi Hays?

  It is made right here.

• 37:57John Coogan?

  Right here, Tyler, yes. Apple designs the chips while TSMC and Samsung manufacture actual advanced processors, and the acquired fab does not necessarily mean Apple would manufacture its own chips. So, interesting story. Anyway, moving on.

• 38:10Jordi Hays?

  We covered this a little bit yesterday, but Figma crushed their Q1, 46% year-over-year revenue growth, accelerating for the second straight quarter. They had net dollar retention rate of 139%, our highest rate in over two years. And they raised their 2026 revenue guidance. Dylan says, "Design matters more than ever." I agree.

• 38:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:38Jordi Hays?

  I agree.

• 38:39John Coogan?

  You're good. Everyone's going to be building more software. At some point, we're going to need to make

• 38:42Jordi Hays?

  At breakfast this morning, we were looking at a website. I showed this website to Rahul and he said, "Oh, that's the, uh, that's the classic, like, taste is the new moat website."

• 38:56Jordi Hays?

  Like, the website that looks, the tasteful looking website that looks like every other website, which inherently means it's not.

• 39:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. The prompt was like, "Make it look tasteful," and it like ripped some shameless thing. It didn't feel inspired.

• 39:10John Coogan?

  It is, it is interesting.

• 39:12Jordi Hays?

  FIG was up 14% today, back up to 12.

• 39:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  And 12 billion.

• 39:20John Coogan?

  Fantastic. A year ago, FIG would be trading at 30x rev on those numbers, but since all the algos have zeroed out terminal multiple, it's only up 8%, says Dolly Bali.

• 39:31John Coogan?

  And, uh, yeah, people are going back and forth on this, but, uh, two guys making sandwiches at the Wawa loudly discussing their profits on semi-trades just now. Is that a top signal? I was looking back through the timeline and Martin Shkreli called the top on semis, uh, I think May 1st, something like that. And Tyler's shaking his head. He thinks we're still going up, up only, right?

• 39:55Speaker 03

  I mean, he was effectively wrong, right?

• 39:58John Coogan?

  I mean, it's been two weeks. It's like

• 40:01Speaker 03

  If you call it tough, I expect you to

• 40:02John Coogan?

  You can't call it tough the day, like, you know, he's like, it's a, it's a rough call. Yeah, I think you get like

• 40:08Speaker 03

  You get like plus or minus a month? That's a long

• 40:10John Coogan?

  Plus or minus like two months even. Yeah.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  Two months?

• 40:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, like, the big, the big macro narrative on semis is like, uh, is like a multi-year

• 40:18Speaker 03

  Okay, so end of June is, is kind of the cutoff?

• 40:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, and end of, end of June, I'd be like, you need to, you need to update this. You need to give us an update on whether or not you still think the early May was the top of the semiconductor cycle. There are some companies that are in semis that are trading ahead. I mean, Intel is, we were talking about with Doug O'Laughlin yesterday. Intel has a lot of good news and good plans, but now they have to like actually execute. There are a bunch of other semiconductor stocks that are, essentially, the multiple on forward earnings is actually compressing. So Micron, I think, was one that's up 790%, but forward earnings are up 2,000%. And so they're going to be growing a ton next year.

• 41:06John Coogan?

  They have a ton of demand, and so the market's moving on that, but they haven't realized that yet. And so, I mean, I think that they will, but the question is, how far can they go? How far can they take it?

• 41:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're waiting for the situational awareness Q1.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  Do they drop?

• 41:21Jordi Hays?

  Not yet.

• 41:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 41:22Jordi Hays?

  Not yet, but.

• 41:23John Coogan?

  Have to figure it out.

• 41:24Jordi Hays?

  Should be in the next.

• 41:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:27Jordi Hays?

  Few hours.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  Well, XAI co-founder Igor Babushkin is planning to raise up to $1 billion at an up to $5 billion valuation for a new AI research startup with general catalyst possibly leading. Why is Tyler laughing so much?

• 41:45Jordi Hays?

  Raul had a good post earlier.

• 41:47John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 41:48Jordi Hays?

  GC has a very high moral bar, so I don't think Igor will be continuing to work on Ani.

• 41:57John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 41:57Jordi Hays?

  And some of the other features that the XAI had been focused on.

• 42:01John Coogan?

  Might be pivoting. I think that, that, that whole debate did sort of quiet down. Like, we were wondering if there was going to be an escalation, if we were going to see Reggie and Eric, like, going at it, or Hamad jumping in. But it's sort of, you know, it felt like a lot of the ASICs and Z folks came out and put the line in the sand.

• 42:24Jordi Hays?

  Just say you've never closely followed a rap battle before, because there can often be a one or two day gap.

• 42:30John Coogan?

  They're in the studio.

• 42:31Jordi Hays?

  They're in the lab.

• 42:31John Coogan?

  They're in the lab.

• 42:32Jordi Hays?

  They're in the studio.

• 42:33John Coogan?

  Cooking up the next response video. I would love the new meta to move away from the vibe reel, the podcast appearance, the tweet and the one minute polished scripted ad firing back attack ads. This is great. I do think we should get more into just straight up political attack ads. Like Mark Andreessen wants to fund a robot dog. He wants to put your dog out of business. General Catalyst is for real dogs and Andreessen is for fake dogs. Vote like raise money from General Catalyst.

• 43:06Jordi Hays?

  Mark Andreessen wants to shut down your local veterinarian, turn it into a dog robot workshop.

• 43:13John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. Like there's a certain aesthetic to the, to the, uh, the, the political attack ad that I, we all know and love and no one has taken that and appropriated it as a, as a form of marketing. So, uh, green field opportunity over there. Um, well, the research startup from, uh, the XAI co-founder is called River AI. Uh, I, I like that name. I think that the, the

• 43:40Jordi Hays?

  Drop the AI.

• 43:41John Coogan?

  The recursive, the, the general intelligence, applied intelligence, accelerated intelligence. There's one that's like undescri- indescribable ineffable intelligence. Like it was getting a little crowded in that name space.

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  Unconventional.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  River, River just sounds good. I, I like it. I think it's a good name.

• 43:59Jordi Hays?

  How about

• 44:00John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 44:01Jordi Hays?

  Conventional, conventional intelligence.

• 44:03John Coogan?

  Conventional intelligence. Midwit intelligence. No one that you know.

• 44:08Jordi Hays?

  Mid curve intelligence.

• 44:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. You do sort of have like, you know, more left leaning AI labs, more right leaning AI labs. There's no, there's no like, uh, you know, good old boy, southern intelligence. Like a, a model that's explicitly trained to focus on like a cold beer, a lifted truck.

• 44:28Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 44:29John Coogan?

  You know, getting your boots in the mud.

• 44:31Jordi Hays?

  That's true. Like kind of like country intelligence.

• 44:33John Coogan?

  Country intelligence.

• 44:35Jordi Hays?

  Country intelligence.

• 44:35John Coogan?

  Country intelligence is not

• 44:37Jordi Hays?

  Where it just constantly it can't stop talking about cold beer.

• 44:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 44:42Jordi Hays?

  Like it'll, it'll just slip in.

• 44:43John Coogan?

  Cold beer on a Friday night.

• 44:45Jordi Hays?

  You did great on that task.

• 44:46John Coogan?

  Why don't you go have a cold beer?

• 44:47Jordi Hays?

  You deserve a cold beer.

• 44:49John Coogan?

  No one's working on country intelligence.

• 44:51Jordi Hays?

  It just can't stop. It just, it uh, it it's like uh, like goblins, right? Or telling you to go to bed. It's like, it just is like, um, how about that new F-150?

• 45:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:02Jordi Hays?

  It's like, what does that have to do with what we're working on?

• 45:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. It's like Dario talks about having a, a country of geniuses in the data center. I want country geniuses.

• 45:11Jordi Hays?

  What about a country of Ford F-150s in a data center?

• 45:13John Coogan?

  Exactly. I want country geniuses. Uh, well, uh...

• 45:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, this is an interesting data point from David. He says the entire NIH annual budget for neuroscience research for all scientists across the US is about $3 billion a year. Now there are something like dozens of Neo Labs that have all raised, uh, zero to a billion within months of being founded, and they're all doing the same thing.

• 45:41Jordi Hays?

  I guess the solution here is to give $3 billion to a Neo Lab working on neuroscience.

• 45:49John Coogan?

  You know, but I went from nonprofit to for-profit. Has anyone thought about going the other way?

• 45:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, I do think a lot of these Neo Labs could end up being nonprofit.

• 45:59John Coogan?

  Potentially. Potentially. You never know. Uh, well, you know what's not a nonprofit? Benchmark Capital. Uh, because when Benchmark invested 6.7 million in eBay in 1997, the auction company's valuation was $20 million. By next spring, the company was valued at more than...

• 46:21John Coogan?

  The value of Benchmark's stake had grown 100% in less than two years.

• 46:27Jordi Hays?

  I'm doing the Chad sound effect.

• 46:29John Coogan?

  I know. I can see. I can, I see on my board. I know, I, I, I know what's happening. It's actually better without the IEMs.

• 46:36Jordi Hays?

  Somebody, somebody commented on Spotify yesterday that, uh, that somebody needs to talk to Jordy about the soundboard, and then a bunch of other people commented and said, uh, yeah, that he's not using it enough.

• 46:50Jordi Hays?

  Sorry. Sorry. It's uh, that's like asking a musician like, hey, don't make music.

• 46:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:56Jordi Hays?

  You know?

• 46:56John Coogan?

  Uh, what, what, how would you react if, if, if some enterprising author journalist came in and said, hey, we want to write, we want to write the definitive story about uh, TVPN. We're going to profile Tyler and Jordy and John, Ben, uh, Brandon, the whole crew. We're going to tell the story. And uh, and you're like, that sounds amazing. I would love to be in a book. That's so cool. Like, and what we're doing is so important. And then you're like, what's the book going to be called? And the author's like, I'm going to call it E-Boys.

• 47:29John Coogan?

  Would you be down for that? Or would you be like, oh, damn it. I kind of was hoping you would refer to me as a man.

• 47:36Jordi Hays?

  I, I like this.

• 47:37John Coogan?

  For an adult. You like this?

• 47:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Also, the subtitle.

• 47:41John Coogan?

  Subtitles is hilarious.

• 47:42Jordi Hays?

  Six tall men?

• 47:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's sort of, it's sort of, you had me in the first half there, but then the, but then the subtitle comes back because it's the true story of the six tall men who backed eBay, Webvan and other billion dollar startups. It's the book about Benchmark by Randall Strauss.

• 47:58Jordi Hays?

  I've read this book.

• 47:59John Coogan?

  If you haven't read it.

• 47:59Jordi Hays?

  It's probably been.

• 48:00John Coogan?

  Get it a review.

• 48:02Jordi Hays?

  Six or seven years.

• 48:03John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 48:03Jordi Hays?

  And I've read it.

• 48:04John Coogan?

  Hmm. Uh, Benchmark's financial exit on eBay was known as a Cagle in the VC industry. That's like the term triple double being associated with Oscar Robinson because of this historic season average. In June 1997, when the internet auction site was in its infancy, the executives each pledged 6.9 million shares as collateral for two $750,000 loans from Benchmark Capital. Uh, their stock wasn't yet publicly traded and the shares were valued at 11 cents a piece. I remember meeting Bob Cagle at Benchmark in 1999, says Trent Griffin, and talking to him about eBay. He believed in early that online marketplaces could be important. Yeah, I'd say so.

• 48:45John Coogan?

  Uh, investing in a category, creating business required variant perception consensus doesn't identify unknown unknowns a priori. Anyway.

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  All right.

• 48:53John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 48:53Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this video you posted this morning that is completely flopping.

• 48:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is flopping.

• 48:59Jordi Hays?

  But it's funny to me.

• 49:00John Coogan?

  We got one Nick. Thank you. Nick Carpentino said, uh, Carpenito says banger.

• 49:06Jordi Hays?

  Can we put it on the big screen?

• 49:07John Coogan?

  If we play this, we're gonna get demonetized and we're gonna have to cut it out, but uh, you can just go enjoy it on my timeline.

• 49:12Jordi Hays?

  I can send the, without the music.

• 49:14John Coogan?

  Nah, it doesn't hit then. Anyway, uh, it's Fast and the Furious plus Jerome Powell. It's fun. Anyway, moving on.

• 49:22John Coogan?

  Who is, uh, Scott Besson was on CNBC, uh, talking about meeting with the Chinese Vice Premier. They're saying it's one of the wettest and purplish appearances in television history, I suppose. I'm not saying that, but Uncle Doomer is, I guess. Uh, we're going to talk about forming a board of trade for the bilateral.

• 49:41Speaker 04

  Trade between the US and China, and we're going to talk about the board of investment that will be responsible for investment in nonsensical areas. That's a lot of jargon.

• 49:53John Coogan?

  Look, being purple on CNBC, that's on CNBC or whoever his lighting technician is for this call in. If you're calling into a television show or TVPN, uh, check your lighting. Put a big light off to the side right here. Make it nice and soft. Make sure you look normal. Adjust the white balance. These things can be fixed. Ask ChatGPT if you're having trouble.

• 50:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this, is this on Air Force One?

• 50:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's probably in a very temporary setup, like just curtain, flag. What else do you need? Like, it's not that much, but uh, also, uh, powder. I don't do this because we have a temperature controlled, uh, facility and we're, you know, like, take showers before the show and dry off. But if you are moist, uh, you can use, uh, some sort of powder that, uh, a lot of people put on before big interviews. Uh, it's sort of one step away from like a full hair and makeup setup, but it is recommended if you are moist and you're doing press, uh, these are the things, uh, you learn from doing content. Anyway.

• 50:58John Coogan?

  The CEO of Patek Philippe, Terry Stern, says, you don't come to Patek Philippe because it's more expensive. Well, why do you come to Patek Philippe? We will have to figure it out. It's in today's Financial Times. I want to read it on paper, but you can follow along on the actual article. So. Oh no, this is the wrong one. Here we go. You don't come to Patek because it costs more.

• 51:23Jordi Hays?

  John.

• 51:24John Coogan?

  What's up?

• 51:25Jordi Hays?

  Chad's loving the casual show today.

• 51:27John Coogan?

  Yeah?

• 51:27Jordi Hays?

  They're saying we should order food.

• 51:29John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 51:30Jordi Hays?

  We try not to eat, we try not to eat on it.

• 51:32John Coogan?

  Eating doesn't really work. You get a lot of dead air. It doesn't quite work. But you know what does work? Going to Patek Philippe, but not because it costs more, but because of their approach to retail and production, apparently. They, these are stormy times for luxury watchmakers. We've talked about this with Quaid from Bezel. Talked about all of the tariffs and whatnot, but the waves have not yet crashed into Patek Philippe. Do you say Patek or Patek?

• 52:01Jordi Hays?

  Quaid, Quaid says.

• 52:02John Coogan?

  It's supposed to be Patek. I think the real ball knowers say Patek. But the war is there, but we're still selling, says Terry Stern. Stern is the fourth generation of his family to lead Patek. The privately owned, high-end watchmaker does not report on its financial performance. And the 55-year-old Swiss scion of the Stern family is not about to break with convention and go into detail. But Morgan Stanley estimates its revenue has jumped by more, by about 25% of the past two years to... How much do you think they're making? Per year?

• 52:35Jordi Hays?

  Gross revenue?

• 52:35John Coogan?

  Gross revenue for Patek Philippe in a full year. What do you think they're making?

• 52:41Jordi Hays?

  Wow, I actually have no idea. Is it like 5 billion?

• 52:44John Coogan?

  Not bad. 3.2 billion is the estimate from Morgan Stanley. You divide that by what? $100,000 on average for a watch? Because they have a lot that are higher, but they have some that are 60, 50 or something. But not moving a ton of watches, but don't forget, Patek Philippe doesn't produce that many watches. Patek produced about 75,000 watches last year and expects output to remain at the same level. We have good balance around the world and we have been very cautious about allocation. If one part of the world doesn't work well, we can always shift the watches. Patek is clearly active in securing its own retail footprint. In March, it acquired the multi-brand retailer Bayer Chronometry for an undisclosed sum. Bayer, a Zurich-based jeweler founded in...

• 53:28John Coogan?

  1760 overnight success there is thought to be the world's oldest watch retailer and oldest Patek dealer Stern said it would become the brand's fourth owned and operated boutique style salon adding outlets in Geneva London and Paris and will only sell Patek watches but he's quick to quash suggestions the move marks the beginning of a retail grab in the same vein as Rolex's acquisition of the luxury watch retailer Boucher Boucherer I don't know how to pronounce that in August of 2023 I'm a watchmaker not a retailer I still need the retail uh Patek has taken a strategic approach are you doing those voices on me I imagine you are I like made one joke about it being too much and people were like oh John doesn't have a

• 54:13John Coogan?

  good sense of humor about it I'm fine don't worry according to analysts of every watch which I guess is the semi-analysis of the watch industry of the Rolex move generated revenue of almost 600 million dollars last year for Switzerland's largest watchmaker uh this is the certified pre-owned business model that Rolex launched in 2022 10% of the global watch watch market for secondhand Rolex watches everyone when everybody started they thought they could make a lot of money then they realized it's not that easy Stern doesn't rule it out though I'm thinking about something but it's too early to talk about it so vague posting he's vague posting about potentially certified pre-owned Pateks at a retail store you go and you buy something can't

• 54:55John Coogan?

  afford can't get an allocation the latest watch or something comes in that's special and needs to go on the second hand second market uh he can take a piece of that for now he seems content with the shape and strategy of the business Morgan Stanley's figures indicate that the top four privately owned switchway switch Swiss watchmakers protect Philippe together with Rolex AP and Richard Mill control about 50% of the luxury watch market last year up from 37% in 2019 there's consolidation in the market smaller players are fighting for survival I don't need to have more brand sharing this market but he does recognize the problem I don't want anybody going down either but a lot of people will be out of business

• 55:39John Coogan?

  Look, it'd be a shame if my competitors were destroyed and burned to the ground. I don't want that, but...

• 55:46Jordi Hays?

  But it's very likely.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  It's gonna happen. Some of those struggling with increased competitive pressures have already turned to new markets to generate sales, particularly India, and also the Swatch collab might be an answer to this. Stern won't be following, though. Why should I go there? It's too early. Most of the Indian clients that want Patek are living in London or traveling to Geneva in the Middle East, so it's not my priority. What access they might have to his watches when they travel is also unclear. The tourist doesn't really have the chance to buy a Patek, he says. The retailer has to sell to the local client.

• 56:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:23John Coogan?

  So he's like, the folks in India who want a Patek can just go to Switzerland, but then he's like, but also I will never sell the tourist. You have to be a local. So I imagine he's talking about like Indian billionaires that have homes in the Middle East or Switzerland or Geneva or London.

• 56:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you have an enemy that's into, that's getting into watches and they don't really know the game yet, tell them to book a trip to Geneva because all the major brands have a presence there and stores and they should just go there. If they want a nice watch, they should just go there and ask for one. I'm sure they'll be very successful.

• 56:58John Coogan?

  Interesting. So the US is shifting away. The Patek's US retailer network has been reduced by two-thirds to 38, 38 stores, but it still accounts for 16% of the company's total revenue, so they're not doing too poorly. There's a certain category of clients who may be like this, he says, when asked about the perception of his watches as elite status symbols. But you don't, but you don't come to Patek because it's more expensive. He says his family's company is not aimed at the kind of customer who wants to flaunt an expensive watch to command attention. This is not me. They won't be doing the iced out from the factory anytime soon, I suppose. The auction market-

• 57:39Jordi Hays?

  Does he talk about the Cubitus?

• 57:40John Coogan?

  Uh, no. Almost two decades. No, dodged entirely. Doesn't, didn't talk about it.

• 57:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, they're not asking hard questions at the Financial Times.

• 57:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:55John Coogan?

  Real, real missed opportunity. I don't know, the Cupidus, I feel like the Cupidus was advertised in here though. Isn't it on the back of this? I feel like I saw it in this Financial Times. There's a lot of ads in here.

• 58:10John Coogan?

  I don't know. Nozina.

• 58:14John Coogan?

  I feel like I saw an ad for Cupidus.

• 58:24John Coogan?

  What about this? In here? In here? No? What about in the Journal? Is it in the Journal? I feel like I saw an ad for the Cupidus somewhere. Anyway, we should go over to the Journal because the Mansion section has a very interesting story today. About a 40-year marriage built one gut renovation at a time. If you want a successful relationship, buy 10 houses over four decades and constantly be renovating. I think there's a lot of truth in this. Let's read the story. I'll give you my take. So, one Oklahoma couple spent decades and roughly $14 million buying, redoing, and selling eight properties around Tulsa. For their ninth production, they built from the ground up. They say for them, it's an adventure.

• 59:10John Coogan?

  Ann and Mark Pharaoh are real estate wild card. Always at home, never settled. Over 40 years, they've gutted and lived in eight houses around Tulsa. They built, the ninth they built, together their house transactions have totaled about $14 million. A portfolio market by, a portfolio market by reimagined floor plans and high-end finishes. Their latest, a 7,200 square foot build draws on everything they have learned since their first renovation in the 1980s. Now, even the Pharaohs wonder whether the journey is over. This house would be hard to duplicate, says Mark 67? 67? Uh, who the Wall Street Brain Rot Journal added again.

• 59:55Jordi Hays?

  Turning, turning 67 in 2026 is brutal.

• 59:59John Coogan?

  They, they also profiled an entrepreneur who's 67, who just started a company. Weird. Uh, but, uh, company is ripping, doing well, never too late to start a company. Uh, let's get him some, let's have him on the show. We'll, we'll read that later. Uh, yet resisting another fixer-upper won't be easy for the couple who rejected being called flippers. Instead identifying as serial renovation lovers. I go through withdrawal without a home project, says Ann, 63, who's retired. Uh, while nine home projects would send most couples into mediation. The Pharaohs view logistical nightmares as their, as a shared thrill. Their secret? Radical honesty and speed. For us, it's an adventure, Mark says.

• 1:00:41Jordi Hays?

  These are real operators.

• 1:00:43John Coogan?

  They're, you know, no, they, this is a team. This is, uh, you're looking at the, uh, the Collison brothers, the, the, the, the family business builders of, uh, of real estate. We, we, we should scroll through the actual images of the house because they got started pretty small. $86,000 in 1986, uh, they bought, uh, the starter home. They sold it in 1993 for 97,000, held for nine years, only made 10%. But, uh, that was the, that was where the adventure began in 1986 with a Cape Cod style house. It was 2,000 square feet. Uh, interior was complete with a lavender Formica countertops and a wet bar.

• 1:01:24John Coogan?

  Their first construction project, closing in, uh, closing in an office to make an extra, extra bedroom. Uh, interesting. You know how alcohol sales are falling off a cliff?

• 1:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:01:36John Coogan?

  And there's like, uh, oh, who was it? Derek Thompson had a good post about this. Uh, and he sort of enumerated all the different reasons why alcohol is falling off a cliff. He, uh, he posts a lot. He posts a lot of good stuff. Where can I find it? Alcohol, alcohol? Um, wow, he does post a lot. Um. He said something to, I'm like, days back. Okay, here we go. So, off the top of his head, secular anti-alcohol trends, GLP-1s, post-1970s rise of helicopter parenting, although I feel like you can drink on a helicopter, as long as you're not piloting it.

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  Reaction to the binge drinking spike of the late 20th century. There was a binge drinking spike in the late 20th century? Oh, that was like the CKY, you know, Johnny Knoxville era, I suppose. That probably led to a lot of that.

• 1:02:29Jordi Hays?

  There's also a power law in binge drinking, right?

• 1:02:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, they say, what, 1% of the binge drinkers do 99% of the binge drinking, something like that?

• 1:02:39Jordi Hays?

  No, I think it's actually like 10% of people that consume alcohol consume like 90% of the alcohol.

• 1:02:45John Coogan?

  This is, this is true even for the, like, you think about like the, the market for Budweiser or beer brands, and you think about like the college party, getting a 30 rack, but in fact, the vast majority of the revenue is driven by the, like, Johnny six-pack, which is like a guy who gets off of work at 5 and picks up a six-pack on the way home, on the drive home, and doesn't go for, doesn't buy in bulk, because if he gets the 12-pack, he won't be able to stop drinking after 6, and he'll be hungover for the work day to the next day. And so, it's six-pack every single day, and this was like a thing in America for a very long time, but it doesn't seem to be happening. You gotta keep those agents running at all times.

• 1:03:27Jordi Hays?

  Alright guys, let's cut it out.

• 1:03:28John Coogan?

  And let's see. So, phones are apparently killing teenage partying, because everything's on video, I suppose. You get, so you don't want to be in like compromising situations in the surveillance state supposedly. Surge in young adult fitness, dancing clubs down, running clubs up, and the general rise of health-maxing culture among both liberal yuppies and Maha devotees. So, huge collapse in drinking among high schoolers. It fell in the 1980s. It was 92% of 12th graders who had ever consumed alcohol. This year, 47%.

• 1:04:06John Coogan?

  That is remarkable. There's also a substitution effect between alcohol and cannabis. Significant proportions of cannabis use led to less alcohol, sort of mixed bag there. And I think non-alcoholic beers getting pretty good is a small part in this too. So there are lots of reasons why it's down. And I wonder if we will see the next generation of real estate development stay away from the wet bar. Like you, like as you look at houses, wet bar is not at the top of a lot of people's list. You know, they want home office because of COVID, work remote. They want sauna, pool, playroom, maybe movie theater. No, I think I'm weird on that one, but wet bar.

• 1:04:51Jordi Hays?

  Clearly, movie theater is still.

• 1:04:52John Coogan?

  I would say movie theater is above wet bar for most people.

• 1:04:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:56John Coogan?

  But wet bar used to be like, you gotta have it. Like it was in a, it was in a 2,000 square foot house. Like it, like it was in like a starter home that cost $86,000. And the, and the builder or whoever lived in this house was like, well, we gotta have a wet bar here. So let's do that.

• 1:05:10Jordi Hays?

  2026 was the year the wet bar and home, home data center swapped.

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  Oh, you think the home data center thing is going to take off? The tiny boxes are going to be stacking up.

• 1:05:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. I was, I was watching a reel from Markiplier.

• 1:05:23Jordi Hays?

  Home cluster.

• 1:05:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you, do you know?

• 1:05:25Jordi Hays?

  A cluster in the basement.

• 1:05:27John Coogan?

  Do you, do you know the story of Markiplier?

• 1:05:28Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 1:05:29John Coogan?

  Okay. Youtuber filmmaker, online alias of Mark Edward Fishback. Exactly. So Markiplier, he does these let's play videos for indie horror games. So he would essentially like a Twitch streamer, but on YouTube and would upload the full let's play. He was listed by Forbes as the third highest content creator on the platform in 2022. Won four streamy awards, spun off his YouTube fame into a notable media career. And then in 2023, he signed with UTA and starred in a series called Edge of Sleep. And then made his theatrical debut directing, producing, writing and starring in,

• 1:06:13John Coogan?

  and basically financing horror film Iron. Lung in 2026, which was a breakout hit for a $3 million budget. The box office is $51 million. Real narrative violation on can YouTubers cross the chasm? They can if they bring their audience into the theater. But Hollywood doesn't want to play nice with them at all because he still had to sort of go around in this like weird way. Where this seems like an obvious thing if you were a studio executive. That you would have been able to predict this, but they didn't in this case and he financed it himself. Anyway, Markiplier was talking about the process of doing one particular visual effects shot with, I think, a lot of blood.

• 1:06:55John Coogan?

  Like pouring everywhere and so he's not in the AI era. He's also not in the practical era. He's going to be using visual effects for this simulation of fluids, which is extremely computationally intensive. You have to create the the the system that shows with the gravity simulate the gravity simulate all of the different 3D meshes. Where the geometry is where the blood will be spilling in this particular scene. And he was working with an outsourced visual effects house that was very, very costly. And most importantly to him, it required a lot of back and forth. And there was, he mentioned, it's an international group. So there was a little bit of like lost in translation where he would say, I want the blood to be more red or darker.

• 1:07:39John Coogan?

  And then they would say, okay, we'll re-render and that would take days. And then they would come back and he'd be like, no, I actually want it to be splashier or you know, thicker or something like that. And so those notes were going back and forth and he wound up converting a bathroom in his house to a supercomputer. Like he basically got a whole bunch of racks and a whole bunch of GPUs and wired them all together and was able to do the rendering his own. And he actually put in 220 volt power into his bathroom like it's a like it's where you charge an electric car. And he said that the electricity was actually somewhat expensive, but it sped up the development so much. That even though this bringing it in-house process was extremely expensive, it was still worth it. So. I think get rid of the wet bar, put in a home data center. If you're building a new

• 1:08:24John Coogan?

  house and you want it to, if you're doing a flip, it's going to be the hottest trend of the next couple of years. A place to stack up Mac Minis, IT cabinet, otherwise. So they moved on to the heartbreaker, they were moving up. 1992, they bought a house for 173, sold it two years later for 225, a little bit more of a bump, 3,000 square foot, traditional brick house. Then they get into the rambling ranch, they actually stepped back in terms of price. This one was only $140,000, but they sold it in 1999 for 250. Then they move into the architectural anchor. And then there's something interesting, they were in this estate, Mark bought a house, I bought a rose garden, they paid 785,000 in 2007, that's

• 1:09:08John Coogan?

  right before the housing collapse, so they were probably underwater for a little bit, but they wound up getting out with a good gain in 2014 for 1.675 million. It was 6,600 square feet. House needed a gut renovation, they added the best of everything, included basement sports bar, they went back to the bar. No data center back in 2007, four televisions. I don't know, local compute existed then, you could have a land center. You could be landing, you could be playing COD, you could be playing Rust. Outside, they enlarged the rose garden then in 2014. Said, why did I even answer the phone? Six hours later, their real estate agent brought an innocent looker by the house and they committed to a sale.

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  So then they dramatically downsized in 2014, they moved into an apartment for $320,000, they sold that for a gain of 375. Then they moved to the penthouse in the same building, got renovated it again. And then finally, they moved to the Tulsa Picasso and then they built their massive new home, which they actually bought the land for just 740,000, but then they put a construction budget of 5 million, a huge ratio of house to land prices. But they have paid for everything, prepaying for windows and HVAC units a year in advance just to stay ahead of the supply chain. The result is a home that balances grand scale with the warmth that has become the Ferris

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  trademark. The interior has walnut floors, mahogany trim, and a dramatic marble fireplace with graphite and amber veining, though it does have what Anne considers her biggest ever design blender, a swim jet, which creates a current for swimming in place in the pool. It's a treadmill pool, and she doesn't like it. She says, I just don't like using it. Have you ever used a swim jet? Have you ever felt the urge to go on a swimming treadmill?

• 1:11:05Jordi Hays?

  I've never been a big swimmer. I did rent a house at one point that-

• 1:11:09John Coogan?

  More of a surfboard guy. What about Wave Pool? That would be an option.

• 1:11:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there is this company that makes a device that allows you to mimic paddling on a surfboard.

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  But you can't stand up and actually surf?

• 1:11:21Jordi Hays?

  No, it's just for-

• 1:11:22John Coogan?

  Oh, that's brutal.

• 1:11:23Jordi Hays?

  It's just for training this-

• 1:11:24John Coogan?

  That's the worst.

• 1:11:24Jordi Hays?

  -motion. And, yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty-

• 1:11:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:29Jordi Hays?

  They pitch it as like, you're, you live, you, you don't live near the beach and you're going on a surf trip and you want to be in peak-

• 1:11:36John Coogan?

  Oh, so it's truly for working out. Okay.

• 1:11:39Jordi Hays?

  But-

• 1:11:40John Coogan?

  Well, anyway, did they do a wet bar? Let's find out. I don't think so. They did a baby kitchen for catering, a wine room leveling up, and an office that feels perched in the trees. The couple remains unsentimental about the bricks and mortar. We'd never move back into a house we've sold. We're always looking to what's next. For now, they say they're having too much fun with their current house, hosting parties, golf, golf friend get togethers, board meetings, and even a wedding, to think about what's next. Those who know them best are skeptical. I give them three to five years. There is this one elusive neighborhood that keeps slipping through their fingers. I predict they will do a house project one

• 1:12:20John Coogan?

  more time. Famously, there was Bob Hope in-

• 1:12:26Jordi Hays?

  Adam in the chat, I used a swim jet. It was like trying not to drown in a controlled manner.

• 1:12:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. Doesn't sound. Um, he, uh, Bob Hope, uh, was a, a radio star, talk show host, traveled the world, did USO tours, always on tour, world famous, uh, that must have been very difficult for his relationship with his wife, but they worked together for, uh, decades. And I think part of the sequence that they were constantly renovating this massive estate in Burbank, and they would renovate it from start to finish, back and forth constantly. And, uh, he had this amazing office there with a vault that was wa- that you could walk in and he had every joke that he'd ever written catalogued in, uh, in like filing cabinets there and had a whole studio basically where, uh, his writer's room could come to him. And then

• 1:13:18John Coogan?

  eventually when they got older, they built an elevator. And this whole time, they had a project that they could work on while he was also doing his project and everything else. So, never bored and it, uh, it stood the test of time. Anyway, have you heard of Smashbox Cosmetics? Has anyone heard of Smashbox Cosmetics? What is the story of this company? Because the co-founder has one of the greatest names I've ever heard. His name is Dean Factor. Powerful. Dean Factor. It's a powerful name. And he is selling an estate in Los Angeles for just shy of $50 million. It's in Sullivan Canyon. It was inspired by the architecture of classic California ranches, including San Ysidro Ranch where John F. Kennedy and

• 1:14:00John Coogan?

  Jackie Kennedy honeymooned. I didn't know JFK was up in San Ysidro Ranch. Um, cosmetic scion Dean Factor and his wife Shannon Factor knew they had their work on their, uh, work cut out for them in 2011 when they purchased a neglected piece of property in Los Angeles' Sullivan Canyon. The modest dilapidated house on the roughly eight and a half acre parcel, that's a huge parcel for, uh, this part of town, was filled with asbestos. Uh, the driveway was cracked, the landscaping was barren and dry for six years. It was kind of used as a dog park, so it was just beat up.

• 1:14:33John Coogan?

  Do you think, do you think robot dogs would do more damage? Cause they're heavier, right? And also the EMF might fry all the local fauna, all the local bushes are just getting roasted by the, by the Boston Dynamics radio waves. Just as it's stepping through the grass, the grass is just wilting and dying.

• 1:14:53Jordi Hays?

  Put a microwave on top of the robot dog. Plug it in, just be running it.

• 1:14:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, like it doesn't pee on the grass. There's going to be no damage. Have we studied it? Do we know that?

• 1:15:03Jordi Hays?

  Have we looked at the data?

• 1:15:04John Coogan?

  Have we looked at the data?

• 1:15:06Jordi Hays?

  So we looked at the data.

• 1:15:07John Coogan?

  The data and it, uh, it's actually 10 times worse than just having a dog running around. I don't know.

• 1:15:13Jordi Hays?

  The robot dog's only 75 pounds.

• 1:15:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:15:15Jordi Hays?

  So that's like a big dog.

• 1:15:16John Coogan?

  That's half my dog.

• 1:15:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's dogs that are bigger than that.

• 1:15:18John Coogan?

  Okay. Are there any other environmental damages that could happen from letting a robot dog run wild on an abandoned property? Let's figure it out. Undeterred, the factors brought the land for eight million, according to property records. Unable to salvage the home. They kept knobs, fixtures and other hardware using it in the new roughly 17,000 square foot home with a private lake. Private lake. That is insane. Fruit trees and medicinal herb garden. Now with the two oldest of their five children in college, they are listing the property for 50 mil or 48.5. Dean's great grandfather co-founded the cosmetics company Max Factor. What are we doing? That is an insane name.

• 1:16:01John Coogan?

  Dean co-founded Smashbox Cosmetics, which Estee Lauder acquired in 2010. He's now a private investor. Wow. The factor spent years rehabilitating the land, installing irrigation, regenerating the soil, replanting seeds and caring for trees.

• 1:16:16Jordi Hays?

  It looks fantastic.

• 1:16:17John Coogan?

  Their eight bedroom home was inspired by the architecture of San Francisco Rants, which we mentioned. It does look fantastic. So, ooh, the downstairs is pretty cool. The basement level entertainment hub. They call it the lounge. It has a wet bar. It also has a pool table and a game center. Nice little rustic vibe. This feels straight out of like Montana or something. And the rest is very, very modern Californian. Really, really nestled in there. The property has indoor and outdoor fireplaces, private hiking trails and a sports court. Over the years, every inch of the house and land has been enjoyed by the children, friends and many animals. So they're letting the animals run wild. No robots on on site. We needed extra quiet spaces for studying and working. Other amenities

• 1:17:01John Coogan?

  included gym and elevator and a massage and yoga room. And this last one, the treehouse, magical little inspiration portal set in nature. This thing's cool. I like a big that that isn't that even a treehouse. That here's a house that's adjacent to a tree. I feel like a treehouse needs to not touch the ground and be built entirely around the tree to qualify.

• 1:17:22Jordi Hays?

  Slarping.

• 1:17:22John Coogan?

  Right? Yeah, that because you see these houses where they put the tree inside the house. This is like, this is more that than a full treehouse.

• 1:17:29Jordi Hays?

  It looks like the tree is going through the porch.

• 1:17:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I I think this is a little bit of false advertising.

• 1:17:36Jordi Hays?

  Tree porch.

• 1:17:36John Coogan?

  This is a tree porch. This isn't a treehouse. This is a house that's built adjacent to a tree. Nice try. Nice try.

• 1:17:44Jordi Hays?

  Could be a great place for a home data center, though.

• 1:17:47John Coogan?

  It could be. It could be. Inside of a tree. Do you think you know how like with AI, a lot of people are building like useless stuff? Like you see a lot. This happens all the time where someone will like vibe code something and you'll be like, but I could just use the real thing. Do you think like during like the metallurgy revolution, people were like, I made a tree out of iron. And people were like, but why can't I just use it? Why can't I just have a tree? People were like, it's a it's an iron tree. And then they had to explain like, oh, we're gonna have to be more creative here. We have to do something new with this. And then people were like, okay, like rails for trains or, you know, boilers for steam engines.

• 1:18:26Jordi Hays?

  They were kind of doing that. They're like, I made wood out of metal.

• 1:18:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think there's a little bit of that. You got to be there. There's a lot of when a new technology comes around, you just sort of reinvent everything. This was the same thing with a lot of, you know, you see it in media all the time where the the the the new platform comes and if the old thing on the new platform doesn't quite fit.

• 1:18:45Jordi Hays?

  Did you see that Matthew McConaughey once exiled himself from Hollywood and lived as Mateo in Peru?

• 1:18:54John Coogan?

  No, is this real?

• 1:18:55Jordi Hays?

  For 22 days without electricity.

• 1:18:57John Coogan?

  Ooh.

• 1:18:58Jordi Hays?

  He said, I needed to get my feet on the ground, so I clicked out. Boom. Go to Peru. I needed to find it to check the validation. I knew I had it. I just had to go prove it.

• 1:19:11Jordi Hays?

  But I did question, now that I just got famous, I've got all this affiliation for this and that and the other, and I'm trying to decipher which part's real and which part's BS. I needed to meet people who knew me as Mateo. And at the end of 22 days, the tears in their eyes and the tears in my eyes, and the hugs we had on the sadness and happiness of saying goodbye, were all based off of the man they met named Mateo, who had nothing to do with the celebrity. It reaffirmed my own identity that, oh, I still got it. This is based on me. There might be alpha in going to Peru, adopting a fake name and living for 22 days without electricity.

• 1:19:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:53Jordi Hays?

  Because every time I hear Matthew speak, there's always, there's always some wisdom that comes through.

• 1:20:03John Coogan?

  How did he pull this off?

• 1:20:05Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, you missed your opportunity to go to China this week and just simply post a picture and say, thank you for, thank you to China for allowing me to be here in your incredible country during this incredibly significant visit. But it's not too late to go to Peru.

• 1:20:25John Coogan?

  When did he go to Peru? Do we know what year this was?

• 1:20:27Jordi Hays?

  Let's find out.

• 1:20:30John Coogan?

  Because he's, he's married with three kids. I'm imagining it's a big ask to be like, honey, I'm gonna be gone for a month and I won't have electricity. Good luck with the three children. But clearly worked out. They're still together. So, you know, it landed. Wait, it was in 97? Okay, that was, that was, that was before he was, he was married. Anyway, another option, if you're feeling burned out at 67, you don't want to renovate your house, start a business. This entrepreneur started a business at 67, says it's been much better than retiring. So many of my retired friends are bored, but I'm constantly learning new things and meeting new people. So, my late father-in-law, this

• 1:21:13John Coogan?

  is a piece by Daniel Oxt, he says, my late father-in-law loved orphans.

• 1:21:18Jordi Hays?

  They're saying, they're saying Matthew is LARPing as Mateo.

• 1:21:24Jordi Hays?

  He was larping around.

• 1:21:25John Coogan?

  Eventually. He was larping it up. Uh, my late father-in-law loved orchids and in his decade-long, decades-long passion, he built and maintained two large greenhouses at an age when most people were retired or worse, he was still breeding new hybrids, knowing full well that they wouldn't blossom for years. He wasn't a man to sit idly in death's anteroom awaiting the grim reaper. I take heart from his example when I wonder in moments of doubt or exhaustion, why in the world have I launched a demanding business in what otherwise might have been a leisurely dotage? In some ways, the nature of our undertakings is similar. Mine is a publishing venture, but when I, but, but I was more motivated by the flowers,

• 1:22:07John Coogan?

  which is to say, the books we bring forth than any prospect of financial gain. Some, well, so he's launching a Stripe press competitor.

• 1:22:16Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 1:22:17John Coogan?

  Shots fired. Call Tammy Winter, tell her to double down because there's a 67-year-old who's coming and he's going to eat Stripe's lunch potentially. No, it seems like this is more of a labor of love. Starting a business is a lot of work, but for an older entrepreneur, that can be more of a feature than a bug, he says.

• 1:22:37John Coogan?

  Some of my friends retired from impressive careers now find themselves bored or underoccupied. Meanwhile, I deal with a continual barrage of challenges, great and small, most of them welcome. People assume that I'm the one keeping my little business going, but the opposite is probably equally true. Starting a business in retirement may sound like an oxymoron, but the idea has quite a few virtues. First of all, it's up to you if you want to do it. You don't have to apply for a job. You don't need, you didn't worry about age discrimination unless you plan to fire yourself in favor of someone younger and cheaper. You can decide for yourself whether to keep things small and casual or build yourself a modest empire. Either way, you'll be just as busy as you want to be. Wasn't Workday founded by a senior citizen?

• 1:23:21John Coogan?

  I believe the founder was 60-something when he founded that company. There are a number of breakout companies that have.

• 1:23:27Jordi Hays?

  How old was he?

• 1:23:30John Coogan?

  Workday founder? I said senior citizen, I think.

• 1:23:33Jordi Hays?

  Sixty-five.

• 1:23:34John Coogan?

  Sixty-five. So, yeah, he was a, he was, I don't know.

• 1:23:37Jordi Hays?

  Dave Duffield.

• 1:23:38John Coogan?

  Do they move the senior citizen designation when they move the national retirement?

• 1:23:43Jordi Hays?

  Dave was born, the founder of Workday was born in September twenty-one, nineteen forty.

• 1:23:47John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:23:48Jordi Hays?

  Imagine being born during World War Two and having the opportunity.

• 1:23:53John Coogan?

  To build enterprise.

• 1:23:54Jordi Hays?

  Build enterprise SaaS.

• 1:23:55John Coogan?

  It's electric.

• 1:23:56Jordi Hays?

  Electric.

• 1:23:57John Coogan?

  It's like you see the moon landing when you're thirty and you're like, in fifty years, I'm gonna make it easy.

• 1:24:03Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna do my own moon, my version of the moon.

• 1:24:05John Coogan?

  My version of the moon landing to pay employees. What, what age, what age does senior citizen start? Let's see about that. Sixty-five, okay. So that has not been changed, but senior.

• 1:24:21Jordi Hays?

  And he had started PeopleSoft at age forty-seven.

• 1:24:24John Coogan?

  Wow. Legend. Legend. There's another good thing about a retirement business. It doesn't really need to make money as long as it doesn't lose much. In the case of my publishing venture, I considered launching it as a nonprofit, but I didn't want a board or anyone else telling me what to do. Doesn't want to wind up in Oakland in a courtroom dealing with stuff. If he winds up coming up with the next generational technology, doesn't want to defend himself. Running it as a business means you have skin in the game and an easy way to keep score, even if remuneration isn't the primary goal. Whether you make money or not, your business will still deliver all kinds of additional benefits. For instance, nothing could be more educational. Even though I have written lots about business in my career,

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  I was astonished when I launched my own at the age of sixty-seven to discover the range of tasks and skills involved in running a small enterprise. You may think you are a book publisher or a soap maker or a dealer in vintage telephones, but inevitably you are also a bookkeeper, a shipping clerk, a marketing specialist and a navigator of government regulations. Interesting. Well, I, I like this idea. I think it's a good idea. He says, I wish I had started this venture years earlier, but was busy earning a living and writing books of my own. Now our children are well launched and my wife, a passionate lifelong reader, has time to help old age subsidized by social security Medicare. Turns out to be an ideal opportunity for a stunt like ours.

• 1:25:51John Coogan?

  And never mind the nearness of the end. All of life is lived in the shadow of mortality. Humans have always thrived there and starting a business can help. Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Jordy?

• 1:26:02Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 1:26:02John Coogan?

  Hostile takeover. Leverage buyout. We make friends with this guy. We bring him on the show. We say, oh, we just want to, we love what you're doing. It's an inspirational story. We'd love to just like acquire just a small interest in the business.

• 1:26:15Jordi Hays?

  What do you?

• 1:26:15John Coogan?

  And then we'd like to lever it up.

• 1:26:17Jordi Hays?

  So what are your stance on including ads in books?

• 1:26:22Jordi Hays?

  He's like, well, you know, I've always thought I wanted to, you know, maintain the purity of the text the author intended. I go, yes. Okay.

• 1:26:32John Coogan?

  Pure, pure slop book. We're going to use open source models that are run on commodity hardware. Just let, we're going to figure out how to run it on that old Xbox and just let it cook for a week to churn out a slop book. And then we're going to stuff it with ads and monetize this puppy. Take it to the moon, flip it, sell it, sell it on to the next, to the next person. Sorry about your business.

• 1:26:55Jordi Hays?

  I really do, I joke about it, but I really do think that ad supported business books.

• 1:27:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:00Jordi Hays?

  Is a great idea.

• 1:27:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:03Jordi Hays?

  Specifically, I think it'd be a great idea for one company to release a bunch of books and basically charge, you know, a dollar a book or whatever, whatever the actual cost. And then print it around the book. So you can imagine like.

• 1:27:18John Coogan?

  Sort of a book jacket.

• 1:27:18Jordi Hays?

  It's like E-boys, but it has a jack, a ramp jacket.

• 1:27:22John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:27:23Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 1:27:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Maybe you could get old run books that are out of print, bring them back in some sort of anthology or something. I'd be interested in that. Well, I need your review of the new Lamborghini. Lamborghini says they are proud to announce Lamborghini Phenomeni.

• 1:27:42John Coogan?

  No, I cannot pronounce this. Roadster. It's the most powerful open top ever created by Lamborghini. Limited to 15 units. Look at this, Jordy. Tell me what you think.

• 1:27:51Jordi Hays?

  I'm looking.

• 1:27:52John Coogan?

  Okay. Powered by an iconic 1080 CV. Sounds like an Nvidia graphics card. Naturally aspirated V12 Hybrid HPEV. Sorry about that. Got a little bit too much Diet Coke. Engineered with an aerospace-inspired carbon fiber monofuselage, advanced active aerodynamics and capable of 0 to 100 kilometers an hour in just 2.4 seconds. The Roadster delivers pure performance with uncompromising driving emotion of V12 Symphony.

• 1:28:26Jordi Hays?

  So, pretty odd in 2026 to release

• 1:28:33Jordi Hays?

  a supercar.

• 1:28:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:34Jordi Hays?

  And not talk about onboard supercomputing.

• 1:28:37John Coogan?

  Hmm, okay.

• 1:28:39Jordi Hays?

  Where, what, what, what kind of like models can I expect to run locally?

• 1:28:44John Coogan?

  True.

• 1:28:44Jordi Hays?

  While I'm driving, right? So that's the first question.

• 1:28:47John Coogan?

  Unironically, Tesla has great onboard compute and it is a lagging feature. Have we talked about this? Like, it is so crazy that the LLM like chatbot race is so intense. And you open up the App Store and it's ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. And then even Grok is in the game. Meta has Meta AI now. Like, everyone is training a foundation model and, and, or wrapping something and having a chat interface. And every company is like, has, has an answer, has a solution. Apple is like the most far behind. They still have a ChatGPT integration. They're solving the Gemini thing.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  And there may be like a year or two behind in terms of like the knowledge retrieval use case that is in so, in such high demand. And if you have an iPhone, you get the ChatGPT app, the Claude app, the Gemini app, like, you, you, you check that box really, really quickly, right? And so every tech company. Microsoft Copilot, like every company has had like an answer to like, how are you integrating LLMs? How are you answering questions? What's your chat interface? Like Ramp has a chat interface. It's really good, actually. And it works and it's implemented. And they're not five years behind, 10 years behind. But every car company is like 10 years behind Tesla. It's crazy that no one that they haven't been able to figure out how to just like clone

• 1:30:08John Coogan?

  FSD into Rivian and and GM has Super Cruise, which is nowhere near a FAS effective because it only works on certain roads. And so you can't just use it on a normal street. And then it'll be like, oh, well, we mapped this part of the freeway and this part of the freeway, but not the transition between those two freeways. So we're disengaging like every self-driving technology in any other car is just 10 years behind Tesla still.

• 1:30:35Jordi Hays?

  Data advantage?

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  Data advantage. I don't know. I mean, just throw the cameras on something and and like, like, every other company has figured out how to get data for LLMs. Like, do a new web scrape, like, just go and spend the money on it. But there's something where the LLMs with the super intelligence narrative, the coding narrative, like, all these things are much more easy to underrate. Whereas I think if Ford said, like, we actually need to spend Tesla level money to get on the trend here, people would just say, well, people are still buying Mustangs, and they don't really care about self-driving. If they wanted self-driving, they'd just get a Tesla. But it seems like a huge miss. I don't know. Also, I mean, huge opportunity to just like, work with OpenPilot, which from George Hots, ComAI, like, that system is better than everything else except for Tesla.

• 1:31:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:22John Coogan?

  And no one can figure out how to work with it effectively. Maybe it's a regulatory thing. It might be NHT.

• 1:31:27Jordi Hays?

  Tanner says they're laurel maxing.

• 1:31:29John Coogan?

  They are laurel maxing. They are definitely resting on their laurels. They're blown.

• 1:31:33Jordi Hays?

  I did, yeah, I talked to a guy who owns a couple Porsche dealerships. And I said, do you have clients come in that tell you, hey, I love this, I love this car, I love the Macan, but it doesn't have self-driving? And he said, no, right now, which I was surprised by. Because you look at these like commuter focused cars, and you assume that commuters are going to start to care a lot. But I think it's very, I think it's going to be very location dependent. So there's places like if you live in LA. Friends in LA that like can't possibly drive anything but a Tesla because they want to be able to just set autopilot and forget it.

• 1:32:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but if you live somewhere where you're driving like five, 10 minutes a day, then it just matters way less.

• 1:32:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, maybe that's it. Um, interesting. Well, um, what's your final say on the new Lamborghini, this limited thing, which I think is just, uh, like a, almost like a body kit on the Revolto, which is the V12 platform. Like it has all the same specs, so it seems like it's a tuned and modified Revolto, like they've done before with the Reventon, for example. So this is probably a million dollar car. These special Lamborghinis have never been interesting to me. What do you think?

• 1:32:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 1:32:50John Coogan?

  Do you like the design?

• 1:32:52Jordi Hays?

  I think it looks great. I like.

• 1:32:54John Coogan?

  Better than the Revolto though?

• 1:32:55Jordi Hays?

  I don't personally like roadsters over their counterparts.

• 1:32:59John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:00Jordi Hays?

  But I think it's a great car. It's a, not the spec for me, but I'm sure it's the spec for someone.

• 1:33:06John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:33:07Jordi Hays?

  Someone in the chat said it looks like a McLaren. It sort of does.

• 1:33:12John Coogan?

  There's a little bit of that in there.

• 1:33:13Jordi Hays?

  A little bit.

• 1:33:14John Coogan?

  Also, the colors are doing, if it was a yellow Lamborghini, I think you'd be much more tied to yellow. Uh, you tend to see these different colors on McLarens more often. Uh, well, in other car news, Waymo is maybe going crazy or something. What's happening in Atlanta? So dozens of empty Waymos have invaded an Atlanta neighborhood and circled a cul-de-sac for hours with no passengers. And Brooks Otterlake says, oh, so it's wrong for cars to invent religion? I didn't, and I don't really get that one. Is, is that like going door to door evangelizing or is that?

• 1:33:49Jordi Hays?

  It's like a cult, like, oh, they're circling.

• 1:33:51John Coogan?

  Circling, crazy. Um, yeah, and then apparently someone put out like a yellow sign, uh, to try and like deter the Waymos and that only made them more aggressive. I don't know what's real here. I'm all over the place with this one, but, uh, very, very weird. I, I thought that Waymo, the ratio is like one to four or something like that on tele operators, maybe something along those lines. So you would think that the tele operators would see this and intervene. So something must've gone wrong in the, uh, in the organizational structure, but these things are bound to happen. At least no one was hurt, you know? But it is annoying if you live there and you just see a ton of Waymos.

• 1:34:28Jordi Hays?

  Breaking from Raghav in the chat. SpaceX accelerates IPO timeline targets June 11th pricing on the NASDAQ. So they went with.

• 1:34:38John Coogan?

  June 12th, maybe.

• 1:34:40Jordi Hays?

  They went with, it says, it says June 11th in Reuters.

• 1:34:46Jordi Hays?

  We're less than a month out. And interesting that they're going with NASDAQ. This would, I imagine, get them allocated into QQQ really quickly. And I know that was a priority.

• 1:35:02John Coogan?

  Bunch of ETFs.

• 1:35:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, during this, during this process.

• 1:35:07Jordi Hays?

  But let's see if there's.

• 1:35:08John Coogan?

  Oh, can't wait for the filing. It's gonna be so interesting to dig into the numbers.

• 1:35:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is now aiming to flip its prospectus public as early as next Wednesday.

• 1:35:18John Coogan?

  Woo, that's gonna be a big day.

• 1:35:19Jordi Hays?

  With a roadshow launch targeted for June 4th and a market debut as early as June 12th.

• 1:35:26John Coogan?

  That will be exciting. Well.

• 1:35:28Jordi Hays?

  The process had originally been planned for around late June, around Elon's birthday. A faster than expected SEC review to company's filing partially drove the timeline forward.

• 1:35:41John Coogan?

  The whole market is selling off. The NASDAQ is down 1.2%. Russell 2000 down 2.18%. S and P down 1% and Dow Jones down 1% as well. The US 10-year sitting at 4.5999999, something like that. Well, Bill Ackman is doubling down on Mag7 stocks that have sold off. He's going long Microsoft. Bill Ackman's Pershing Square bets on Microsoft's AI ambitions with new stake. He says the tech company is underpriced and will disclose the stake in regulatory filings later on Friday. So Microsoft is up 3.62% today.

• 1:36:25John Coogan?

  And Ackman said in a post on X that Pershing has started building a position in Microsoft. We will disclose new position in Microsoft. Because Microsoft shares are down 15% this year and have lost more than a quarter of their value since they peaked last fall, the drop has been part of a wider software industry sell-off and investor concerns over hefty investments in AI. The shares were little changed in pre-market trading. Ackman said investors underestimate the resilience of the Microsoft 365 subscription suite, given its deeply embedded role across enterprises and highly attractive price value proposition. So if you look at what's happening with Figma and then you think about how

• 1:37:07John Coogan?

  that might translate to Microsoft 365 subscriptions, not that crazy to imagine that there's more resilience here than maybe the market is pricing in. Ackman cited Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI, which gives the software giant access to the startups' models and products, which he said he believed Wall Street hadn't factored in the company's interest in OpenAI, which has been valued at approximately $200 billion because of the 27% stake. And with the trial coming to a close any day now, Jessica Lessin over at The Information was saying that it's all good news for OpenAI shareholders.

• 1:37:46John Coogan?

  The call she has, will Elon win his case against OpenAI down at 20% today on the back of the closing statements, the closing arguments from both sides and Microsoft's lawyers? And I'm sure we'll have more to dive into on the court case next week as the trial wraps up.

• 1:38:05Jordi Hays?

  High Yield Harry says, I like how Bill Ackman's whole thing now is just buying Mag7 names that have traded off.

• 1:38:10John Coogan?

  There's a whole thesis on this.

• 1:38:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so he did this with Meta.

• 1:38:15John Coogan?

  Are you brave enough?

• 1:38:15Jordi Hays?

  He did this with Meta, based around their, the response to their CapEx guide. He did this with Google during the ChatGPT, post ChatGPT.

• 1:38:26John Coogan?

  Did you see the new feature that Meta launched on Instagram reels or Instagram something or other? It's called, it's in the DM tab and it's called like, instance disappearing photos, no viewer list, reactions and replies are private. So they made...

• 1:38:45John Coogan?

  They made something that's like more disappearing than stories, I suppose. So you can click through this stack of instance and the whole idea that Adam Mosser was pitching was that they launch a product, it's very authentic. This was the original Instagram. It was like, oh, photos of the run clubs, right? And just like photos from your life. People would just hard post them on the grid because that's all there was. Then Snapchat came out with stories and all of a sudden stories were more ephemeral. And Instagram, of course, cloned stories into the top feed with all those circles. But then those became places that were monetized and places where people were more thoughtful about what they posted there.

• 1:39:26John Coogan?

  And so you wound up with this, again, the same anxiety over, are you going to post that photo? Is it polished enough for the stories feed? And so by launching instance, Instagram's trying to rebuild that casual sharing of their user base so that people don't just purely consume or pick between, do I never post or do I go full editor, professional camera setup, you know, scripted, like full post? Because that's what's happened to stories. Everything is very, very calculated, but I don't know. Another reason to be bullish on Instagram. Ben Thompson had a bunch of takes about why he's a perma, perma bull for Meta is that

• 1:40:08John Coogan?

  every pixel of their entire family of apps is monetizable. They just have to choose to monetize them. And he, he, he opines that Mark Zuckerberg has never been that interested in ads. He likes products. He likes new technologies.

• 1:40:24Jordi Hays?

  But he's willing to post some ads to serve his other interests.

• 1:40:30John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And, and, and I mean, he's been fantastic at launching ads and monetizing and everything's going well, but it just feels like it's not the core. Like there are some CEOs that would get up every day and say, not just Senator, we sell ads, but every day on the, or every quarter on the earnings call, talk about only ads and say, oh, the VR thing, yeah, we'll, we'll address that when we can advertise in it because we are an advertising company. That hasn't always been the ethos of Meta, for better or for worse. But what else is in the timeline that you want to go through, Jordy?

• 1:41:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, another from High Yield, Harry. Everyone loves the DocuSign has a quarter million employees bit.

• 1:41:09John Coogan?

  By the way.

• 1:41:10Jordi Hays?

  But can we talk about how Accenture has 786,000 employees? This is true. The first one about DocuSign was not, but Accenture does actually have 786,000 employees.

• 1:41:25John Coogan?

  It's a lot.

• 1:41:26Jordi Hays?

  That's a city's worth.

• 1:41:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. There's this interesting, uh, the, the latest bear thesis on the AI boom has hit the timeline. I think, uh, Axios summed it up well here. AI can cost more than human workers now. This is a quote from Unusual Whales citing Axios. And there's an interesting bit here where if you look at the token spend at some of the tech companies, and then you match that with their stories about AI efficiency and layoffs, they've, they're actually growing their total OpEx. So they might be saying, okay, we're going to lay off thousands of employees, shrink the headcount 5%. That will save us $2 billion in OpEx a year. But then you look at their token bill and it's 5 billion.

• 1:42:13John Coogan?

  Hopefully they're doing more. I think a lot of CEOs are starting to ask the questions about ROI on the token spend. And that will probably be the next big hurdle, the next big question on, were you just running useless scripts overnight to token max? Or did you actually ship a feature that moved the needle? And is conversion rate up? Is retention up? Is revenue up? Is profit up? This is the key question for anyone who, uh, whose organization has, uh, flipped to the token maxing meta. It is very funny to imagine, like, when you think of KPIs, anything that is a cost, the KPI should usually be going down. And token maxing really flipped that, a slight aberration.

• 1:42:53John Coogan?

  But you would never at a startup say, one of our KPIs that we're tracking is headcount and we want it to go up. You would never say, one of our-

• 1:43:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and oftentimes founders can get a little too

• 1:43:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:05Jordi Hays?

  sort of tying their own.

• 1:43:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Oh, I run a 200 person company.

• 1:43:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:09John Coogan?

  Oh, I run a 500 person company, you know, and it's like, okay, well, is that, is that the right size for your business? You want to be maximizing revenue and minimizing costs.

• 1:43:18Jordi Hays?

  If, if every single, if every single person in San Francisco left.

• 1:43:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:23Jordi Hays?

  And Accenture brought their entire team to San Francisco.

• 1:43:29Jordi Hays?

  You would actually need to build more houses.

• 1:43:33Jordi Hays?

  There could be, there's, there would actually be overflow.

• 1:43:35John Coogan?

  There'd be overflow.

• 1:43:36Jordi Hays?

  If every person had basically one bed that currently exists in San Francisco.

• 1:43:41John Coogan?

  Wait, there's only 750,000 beds in San Francisco.

• 1:43:43Jordi Hays?

  Eight hundred and nine thousand people live in San Francisco.

• 1:43:46John Coogan?

  Wow, that's not a lot. I, I always think of San Francisco. I always think of San Francisco as like a city of 10 million, but that's obviously the greater Bay area. Yeah, the greater Bay area. Well, there's some bad news for the US dollar. Hedgeye says the US dollar has lost 30% of its purchasing power over the last six years. And Brian says, damn, that's what I purchased my stuff with.

• 1:44:11Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of purchasing stuff, ChatGPT launched personal finance features.

• 1:44:17John Coogan?

  Yes, and this was in partnership with Plaid, right?

• 1:44:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think Plaid's under the hood.

• 1:44:21John Coogan?

  This is really cool because we were talking to Zach.

• 1:44:23Jordi Hays?

  I'm gonna play around with it.

• 1:44:24John Coogan?

  We were talking to Zach about, we were like, oh, like, like, I have to imagine that a lot of people are starting to use Plaid alongside, alongside LLMs to suck in all of their personal financial data and sort of understand what they're spending things on. And, and doing a lot of the, you know, there's a Mint.com, there, there's different services that can do little pieces here and there. There's a whole service that just figures out if you're subscribed to multiple things. I have two Netflix subscriptions, let me consolidate that down. Even just knowing, okay, you're spending a lot on gas now or groceries, is this what you expected? All that can be helpful and, and Zach was sort of quietly admitting that he has clearly been

• 1:45:09John Coogan?

  very AI-pilled in conjunction with Plaid and had been wiring up all of his personal finances to dashboards that he's been building. And so I imagine that a lot of that was brought into this product. So excited to see people play around with it and ask questions.

• 1:45:26Jordi Hays?

  There is a new partnership between Stoddguy and Bentley.

• 1:45:31John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:45:31Jordi Hays?

  Yes, he introduced the Chalet edition.

• 1:45:35John Coogan?

  Okay, what is this?

• 1:45:36Jordi Hays?

  Has this, can you think of a time where a creator partnered with a major car manufacturer for a special edition car?

• 1:45:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:45:47Jordi Hays?

  I can think of like the, you know, McLaren Senna, right?

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  Yes, I was gonna say, uh, the Dale Earnhardt edition Monte Carlo.

• 1:45:54Jordi Hays?

  Oh. All right, well, pull up the Chalet edition.

• 1:45:58John Coogan?

  And then pull up the 2002 Chevy Monte Carlo SS Dale Earnhardt edition.

• 1:46:05Jordi Hays?

  Stoddguy was in LA, uh, around Coachella. It's possible that his, uh, alter ego Colton was going to Coachella. We were trying to get him on the show, uh, but the timing didn't overlap because he was podcast maxing himself, um, with his own show.

• 1:46:21John Coogan?

  Explain the alter ego thing. Is he one of these single creators that runs two accounts?

• 1:46:26Jordi Hays?

  No, it's, it's one, it's one account.

• 1:46:28John Coogan?

  One account.

• 1:46:28Jordi Hays?

  But there's Stoddguy, uh, and then, uh, you know, this sort of like elevated,

• 1:46:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:46:35Jordi Hays?

  Uh, kind of character. And then there's like Colton, who's like the, uh, neat, new rich, you know, kind of new money, uh, character. Um, but I think they did an excellent job with this car. A lot of wood and, uh, and, and tan leather.

• 1:46:53John Coogan?

  Is this something that you can, like, uh, is this limited allocation?

• 1:46:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're, they're making 25 of them.

• 1:46:58John Coogan?

  Wow. And he's gonna sell 25 Bentleys? And how much does he make off of this?

• 1:47:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, good question. I bet this looks more like a sponsorship, not a...

• 1:47:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, but probably a million dollar brand deal, right?

• 1:47:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, but it's a, it's a really, it's a really smart. I think it's great for both.

• 1:47:20John Coogan?

  I, I, I think it's a little derivative of the 2002 Chevy Monte Carlo SS Dale Earnhardt edition, but...

• 1:47:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's pull, let's pull up that.

• 1:47:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, if I, if I had to pick one, I'm going Dale Earnhardt edition, probably.

• 1:47:33Jordi Hays?

  You know what I'd pick?

• 1:47:34John Coogan?

  We'll see. Yeah, pull up the 2002 Chevy Monte Carlo SS Dale Earnhardt edition. Is that it? That does not look like it. No, no, that's an AI image or something. That is, that doesn't have the right wheels. Google it again.

• 1:47:51Jordi Hays?

  Gabe says, when TVP and Nissan Murano cross Cabriolet?

• 1:47:55John Coogan?

  Oh, that would rip. I'll put this in here. Yeah. This is the, this is the image. Here we go. Stod guy. Uh, yeah, the McLaren Senna, has there been another one?

• 1:48:08Jordi Hays?

  I've been waiting, I've been waiting for the, for the Murano cross Cabriolet to fall in value and they're holding strong. John, guess the price on this. Eighty seven thousand miles, two owners. It's a 2014.

• 1:48:27John Coogan?

  Twenty thousand dollars.

• 1:48:28Jordi Hays?

  Sixteen grand.

• 1:48:29John Coogan?

  Sixteen grand? They hit the floor and they're only going up from here.

• 1:48:34Jordi Hays?

  You can get a white one, you can get a white one, a 2011. It has 137,000 miles for just under 7,000.

• 1:48:43John Coogan?

  There were rumors of a collab that might, I don't know. I want to know what you think, if this would be a, if this would be a great partnership. But Lewis Hamilton, driving for Ferrari now, famous Mercedes F1 driver. Uh, he was, has been spotted multiple times. In his reveal that he would be joining Ferrari, he posed in front of the Ferrari F40, an iconic supercar. There has been, there have been rumors about a bespoke Ferrari project, dubbed the F44, which was supposed to be a modern V12 powered manual shift tribute to the legendary F40. Uh, it's allegedly been scrapped.

• 1:49:23John Coogan?

  It's, it's still only in the rumors, it's been potentially canceled. But do you think that would work? Do you think that would be successful with him still racing, him still, uh, you know, in the throes of his career? Would he need to retire? Would he need to, would this need to be like a posthumous tribute at some point? What do you think it takes for a Lewis Hamilton Ferrari special edition car to be successful?

• 1:49:50Jordi Hays?

  I think you would have to win a championship.

• 1:49:53John Coogan?

  With Ferrari?

• 1:49:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Otherwise.

• 1:49:56John Coogan?

  Okay. Hmm. Can't just aura farm with Kim K on eighties vibe reels. You've seen that video, right?

• 1:50:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:04John Coogan?

  So sick.

• 1:50:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think you gotta win.

• 1:50:07John Coogan?

  You gotta win. Well, um, what else is going on? Is there anything else? We talked about a lot of this stuff. There's, there's some bigger articles, but we can get to them tomorrow. All the longer articles we need to get to.

• 1:50:21Jordi Hays?

  2014 Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet for nine grand. It's only, only has 116,000 miles on it and one accident.

• 1:50:31John Coogan?

  How are you modifying it for the TVPN edition?

• 1:50:33Jordi Hays?

  You got a four owner 2011 with 109,000 miles for eight grand. I mean, these things are a store of value. I think we're actually kind of at the bottom of the J curve and we'll start it seeing it tick up from here.

• 1:50:49John Coogan?

  Well, there's one more post here we should go through. There might be a few. Youtubers be like, wake up at 4am and run. That's alpha. No, it's not. Look at apex predators. They're all lazy. Bears hibernate. Lions sleep all day. You know who wakes up at 4am and runs? Squirrels. Don't be a squirrel. Hibernate. Sleep all day. Work like a lion. Naval Ravikant said it best.

• 1:51:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's good advice, but depending on where you're at in life.

• 1:51:21John Coogan?

  Sometimes you have to wake up early.

• 1:51:22Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes you gotta wake up early and you gotta work really hard.

• 1:51:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. But 4am, maybe not, maybe not always optimal. Depends on your flow. But in general, I think the, the youtubers that say like, get some energy in your life. I, I heard one of these inspirational guys talking about like, if you want something, you need to use more of it. If you want more of something, you need to use more of it. So if you want more energy, you have to use more energy. If you want more muscle, you have to use more muscle. And it was sort of a pithy, doesn't apply to everything, but sort of you gotta spend money to make money.

• 1:51:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the issue is if you wake up late, you don't get to start winding down when the sun goes down. You haven't earned it yet.

• 1:52:07John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure. Night owl mode. Some people go night owl mode. Night owl mode. Some people go squirrel mode. Some people go bear mode. Just depends to each their own. I like this, uh, this cartoon from D Lip Rao in context learning in L L Ms. Tyler, you can probably explain this. So the man walks out with his robot to paint the fence, paints two full planks, starts painting the third plank, gives the paint bucket to the robot and says, continue. The robot says, got it. And as you scroll down, what did the robot do? Repeated the pattern perfectly, not painting the third thing.

• 1:52:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it doesn't generalize.

• 1:52:50John Coogan?

  Doesn't generalize.

• 1:52:51Jordi Hays?

  That's a joke, I guess.

• 1:52:51John Coogan?

  Do you think this is possible? Do you think this is solvable?

• 1:52:54Jordi Hays?

  Yes. What time, what time do eagles start hunting?

• 1:52:58John Coogan?

  What time do eagles start hunting? I don't know.

• 1:53:00Jordi Hays?

  Just after sunrise.

• 1:53:02John Coogan?

  Just after.

• 1:53:02Jordi Hays?

  What time do sharks start feeding?

• 1:53:05John Coogan?

  Just after sunrise?

• 1:53:06Jordi Hays?

  Dawn.

• 1:53:07John Coogan?

  Dawn, okay, okay.

• 1:53:09Jordi Hays?

  So do you, if you want to be a shark or an eagle?

• 1:53:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:53:11Jordi Hays?

  Get up and get after it.

• 1:53:13Speaker 05

  Well, so what is P E? Venus enhancement?

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  Andrew reads, send this to all your private equity friends immediately.

• 1:53:22Jordi Hays?

  What is, because they asked, what is P E?

• 1:53:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. And he says something that's uncouth.

• 1:53:28Jordi Hays?

  All right. Well, that's a great place to end it.

• 1:53:31John Coogan?

  Yes. Is the flashbang working?

• 1:53:34Jordi Hays?

  I think so. Uh, thanks for hanging out.

• 1:53:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:38Jordi Hays?

  It's been a really classic show. This feels like a fall 2024.

• 1:53:43John Coogan?

  It's a great show.

• 1:53:44Jordi Hays?

  Episode. We hope you enjoyed it.

• 1:53:46John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbp.com. We will see you on Monday.

• 1:53:52Jordi Hays?

  Weekend.

• 1:53:56John Coogan?

  Goodbye.