Week in Review | Neuralink Raises $600M at $9B Valuation, Judge Considers Curbs for Google in AI Arms Race, Jensen Huang Shifts Approach to U.S. Politics & More

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today's Friday, May 30th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance.

• 0:11Jordi Hays?

  The Capital of Capital.

• 0:13John Coogan?

  It's a remote show. I am traveling. How are you doing?

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  I'm good. I miss you.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, me too.

• 0:20Jordi Hays?

  We feel so close, but so far.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  It's brutal. Sleeping without an eight sleep. It's the punishment worse than death. It's a true torture.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  It really is.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  It's the worst. It's the worst. Anyway, exciting, exciting week. A short week with the, with the Memorial Day holiday, but I feel like we did a good job making up for the lack of major tech news, the lack of major announcements from AI companies. Although WWDC is coming up next week, which should be interesting. And that's where I wanted to start because John Gruber has been writing about Apple for years during firing, during Fireball. He has a show called Talk Show that he does at WWDC. And it's very interesting because he was one of the first people to do a talk show, an interview show in the Vision Pro with, in VR.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  They bring the Pro cameras and you can stream it and you can watch it in the Vision Pro. He went all in. He's been writing positively about Apple for a long time. Of course, a couple of months ago, he wrote Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino, talking about the, the difficulties with the rollout of Apple Intelligence. And they, uh, they didn't completely rug him, but they didn't sign up fully. So last year, uh, the Talk Show Live from WWDC 2024, uh, had Craig Fedorigi, Greg Jaws and John Giandrea, Apple's Head of Machine Learning and AI. And this year he invited them all and they said, no, we don't want to participate.

• 1:57Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  Which is rough.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  They took it, they took, uh, the rotten post personally. They took it personally.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  It hurts. And so, I mean, I was just reflecting on like what this means. Obviously we want to, we want to, you know, interview these folks. And so I, I just kind of had this realization that truly. Apple Intelligence is one of the most underrated products of all time.

• 2:19Jordi Hays?

  Totally, totally. And people are critical of it because it's Apple and they're, they, they, they always achieve perfection.

• 2:28John Coogan?

  But I think they did. I think they did.

• 2:29Jordi Hays?

  It's a product that we use and love daily, right?

• 2:31John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:32Jordi Hays?

  When you text me, when you text me, John, you text me this, a couple paragraphs, right?

• 2:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36Jordi Hays?

  Cool idea. I actually like that Apple, um, botches the summary because it inspires me to think, what would John think in this circumstance?

• 2:44John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  What would John want me to, to think that he was saying before Apple kind of stepped, you know, stepped in? And so I think you're totally right. I think Apple Intelligence, uh, criminally underrated.

• 2:57John Coogan?

  I agree. I agree.

• 2:59Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, John, I would take it a step further.

• 3:01John Coogan?

  Please.

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  Just eliminate all original, all the original text of every message in iMessage and only provide back and forth sort of ping pong summaries, kind of like a, a game of telephone in some way.

• 3:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:14Jordi Hays?

  And just let Apple intermediate everything.

• 3:16John Coogan?

  100%.

• 3:17Jordi Hays?

  You know, if.

• 3:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I think, I think a lot of people were critical of the Gen Moji campaign, but as, as someone who's sponsored by Adquick, we love out of home campaigns. And I think that that was also something that with the long arc of history, we'll look back on as, as.

• 3:32Jordi Hays?

  As an iconic campaign.

• 3:33John Coogan?

  Exactly. It was, it was contrarian.

• 3:35Jordi Hays?

  Up there with 1984.

• 3:37John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 3:38Jordi Hays?

  Um, and, and so many of these other, you know, the iPod campaign, right? So, so these type of iconic imagery and, and we spent a lot of time talking about the Gen Moji campaign, right?

• 3:47John Coogan?

  We did.

• 3:48Jordi Hays?

  And, and, uh, many people would say all attention, you know, even though we, we, we had some critiques, but.

• 3:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:53Jordi Hays?

  But all attention is good attention and, and, um, yeah.

• 3:57John Coogan?

  I think that's part of the show is like, yes, you could say we were critiquing, but a lot of the show is humorous. And so.

• 4:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:03John Coogan?

  I would now, my message to Apple is like, those critiques, those were the jokes. This is the serious part.

• 4:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:09John Coogan?

  Now I'm serious and I'm saying. They've never done anything wrong. Everything's perfect and I want to interview you. Let's, let's make it happen. But you know, the funny thing is that I was actually, obviously we're kidding around a little bit, but I was, I was reflecting on the fact that I am actually more bullish on Apple than John Gruber right now because after the state of Cupertino came out, me and you were talking and I was taking the position that like Tim Cook, because of how he handled the supply chain and the tariff stuff, that was actually more-

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  He made it all back in one trade.

• 4:39John Coogan?

  He made it all back in one trade. And so, you know, I think that, yeah, the Apple intelligence thing, it hasn't gone perfectly, but, but the execution, I mean, it's still a massive company and they're doing great. And I think that there's a world where they land this in a very interesting way with partnerships and they open things up and there's some really, really interesting outcomes that could happen. So, anyway-

• 4:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the question is for Gruber, how much angrier does he get at Apple as he gets less and less access, right? Did they, did they awaken, you know, a monster?

• 5:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. You'd think that you'd want to, you'd want to have him come on and, and kind of ask the hard questions and, and make your case and win him over. You know, they have a longstanding relationship. Also, did you say Gruber? It's definitely Gruber.

• 5:24Jordi Hays?

  Gruber, sorry.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  I like Gruber though. That's great. But yeah, I mean, he was talking to, he was talking to Ben Thompson and saying like, he's kind of relieved because this was going to be one of the harder interviews because the expectation would be that he asks like the hard questions, right?

• 5:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:40John Coogan?

  And like he actually pushes them because he, he has been a, although he's obviously been very, it's easy to be pro Apple over the course of, of his career because Apple's been on an absolute tear. And so if you're, if you, like, the correct analysis of Apple at every point in the last two decades has been, the stock's about to rip. And if you just kept saying that, you were right again and again and again. It, it sounded like you were glazing or being shilling, but like you were also correct.

• 6:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people-

• 6:08John Coogan?

  And so people look back and they're like, yeah, that's good journalism.

• 6:09Jordi Hays?

  Buffett bought Apple when it was already the most valuable public, valuable company in the world.

• 6:15John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 6:16Jordi Hays?

  There was not a, you know, there, there were people making that same trade-

• 6:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  Just thinking, oh, I should just buy the biggest company. And Buffett was basically making the bet that it was undervalued at that point massively.

• 6:34John Coogan?

  Great. Well, really quickly, we're gonna do some ads. We're gonna tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more.

• 6:44Jordi Hays?

  Whole lot more.

• 6:44John Coogan?

  Place. We love Ramp. I'm gonna get to see the Ramp founders this weekend, which should be a lot of fun. Anyway, let's rip through some news. I want to give a little update on like what did happen this week? Cause there were a bunch of small stories, nothing really big that became the current thing. But, but we should rip through this. So Elon Musk's Neuralink raised $600 million and nine billion valuation. This feels like old news to me. I don't know if that's just because I've been hearing through this through the rumor mill, but very excited for what they're building. We talked to Ashley Vance a little bit about Neuralink and the progress. And it's kind of underrated because the first, the first time it happens, it's like a miracle with that one Neuralink patient. But there's been a few and Ashley Vance has actually gone and interviewed others.

• 7:25John Coogan?

  And everything that I've seen is that this project moves slowly, like many, like, like SpaceX, where there's regulatory concerns and FDA approvals, but the foot is not off the gas. And like, it just continues to, continues to grow. So.

• 7:41Jordi Hays?

  The thing that stood out, the thing that stood out to me here is Neuralink raised $43 million in November 2023. Like the fact that there was an Elon company with this much potential in the private markets being valued at five billion, you know, roughly two years ago is actually crazy. Granted, the round was effectively like an additional tranche that had been part of an earlier FF round. But, but still, you know, not, not a bad bet.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, but just like insane concentration talent. I mean, we talked to the Teal fellow who was working at Neuralink and like, that's the DNA at that company and it's, it's pretty remarkable to see. Like obviously all the focus is on like super long-term brain-computer interfaces. But when you talk to the Neuralink team, they're, they're much more grounded in the immediate. Effects of what the technology can do, which is like, there are a lot of people who are paraplegic. It's actually a lot of people that get in pretty horrific accidents, like they're, they're doing like cliff jumping or skydiving or something and something goes terribly wrong. They break their neck essentially like sever their spinal cord. And then they just cannot access their limbs and, but they're alive and they're going to live out their life.

• 8:54John Coogan?

  And you give them the access to play video games, which is the most beautiful gift you can give someone, in my opinion.

• 9:01Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 9:02John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, it's always super inspiring and I'm sure we should talk to some of the, the Neuralink folks at some point.

• 9:07Jordi Hays?

  What was the name of?

• 9:08John Coogan?

  Call in.

• 9:09Jordi Hays?

  What was the name of, of the teal fellow who was at Neuralink? Do you remember?

• 9:14John Coogan?

  I don't, we, I mean, we interviewed 25.

• 9:17Jordi Hays?

  Twenty back to back, but that was, that was one of my favorite moments of the week.

• 9:21John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:21Jordi Hays?

  The, the, his philosophy of.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  So funny.

• 9:24Jordi Hays?

  Just trying to get two times cooler.

• 9:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  Over and over and over. And you stack a few 2X wins like that back to back, starting to get pretty cool. So I thought that was an amazing philosophy of life and he was just skill maxing.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, also his definition of cool, I kept, I kept expecting it to be like, and then I hit the gym or then I learned to race.

• 9:44Jordi Hays?

  Now, now he's like.

• 9:45John Coogan?

  Not cliche at all.

• 9:46Jordi Hays?

  Building a trumpet from first principles.

• 9:50John Coogan?

  It's extremely cool. It's genuinely cool.

• 9:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, anyone can, anyone can hit the gym and learn to do a kickflip, but.

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:59John Coogan?

  Build a trumpet.

• 10:00Jordi Hays?

  He'll get to, he'll get to that. Those are, those are, they're.

• 10:02John Coogan?

  Down the road, for sure. Down the road. Anyway, other fundraising news, Rillette raised 25 million dollars from Sequoia to automate general ledger systems using AI for accounting departments. Sequoia's been big on this application layer, value accrual in AI in the application layer. Obviously they have Harvey. They're in some of the foundation models, but they're also looking for bets in, in kind of every vertical SaaS category now. So this kind of makes sense. The, the, the partner at Sequoia that did the deal said, the general ledger is the beating heart of the finance function. And so asking to come. But need to remove it is kind of open heart surgery. So interesting to see how this actually interfaces with some of the other Sequoia bets because they're in ramp and they're in other companies.

• 10:44John Coogan?

  But there's certainly more stuff to do inside the enterprise and there's a bunch of different places. So a $25 million bet makes sense there. What else is going on? Horizon 3 AI raised $100 million from NEA at a $750 million valuation. AI startup Chalk.

• 11:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, lots of size gongs this week, honestly. A Databricks competitor raised a $50 million Series A from Felicitus at a $500 million valuation. There's a bunch of other stuff going on. Databricks, we've talked about the Neon deal, but it's becoming more and more finalized at this point. There's some venture fund news.

• 11:24Jordi Hays?

  There's also Clark, led by Brad Meneses, the first AI agent to build internal enterprise apps, raised $60 million, which I think we may have covered, but I wanted to give Brad a shout out because I wanted to get him on the show this week, but we didn't end up having the time. But shout out to Brad and the whole team.

• 11:49John Coogan?

  Yep. So the big news in the technology world in the Wall Street Journal this week is this Google lawsuit that's been going on for a while. Judge considers curbs for Google in AI arms race. And this is kind of interesting because this started around Google's search monopoly, which has been well documented. Obviously, they own like 90% of the search market. They own Chrome and they're the default on Apple and they have that, you know, very lucrative deal for Apple where they pay, I think, over $10 billion to be the default search in Safari.

• 12:22Jordi Hays?

  Isn't it 20 billion?

• 12:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a lot and it's just pure profit for Apple. It's pretty awesome. So lawyers are making closing arguments Friday.

• 12:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it reached 20 billion in 2022. So it may have ticked up from there.

• 12:35John Coogan?

  Let's go. Size gone, major size gone ever since. That is gone.

• 12:40Jordi Hays?

  Let's hear it from the Apple shareholders.

• 12:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, you love it. And this is why, this is why you can't critique Apple. There's just nothing to critique because they're printing. They're absolutely printing. They, I mean, truly, they set themselves up with the perfect platform. And so whatever happens next, they make money. Like they didn't need to compete in search. It's crazy.

• 12:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they, they have the $20 billion search deal with Google. And because of that, they can offer Genmoji for free, out of the box.

• 13:05John Coogan?

  Incredible.

• 13:06Jordi Hays?

  It's just that incredible consumer surplus that they're able to, you know, deliver.

• 13:13John Coogan?

  So US District Judge Amit Mehta on Friday questioned how far he should go to limit Google's monopoly in internet search, including putting curbs on how it competes in artificial intelligence. But his query came at the beginning of closing arguments in the final phase of the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit against Google. The judge questioned how, questions underscore how much rivals such as OpenAI have already changed how people access information on the internet. Mehta earlier found that Google is a monopolist in search and that it abused its power to maintain dominance. But the government's proposals for improving competition include curbing ability, Google's ability to promote Gemini, its AI product that competes with ChatGPT. I wonder if that's part of the story around Gemini being hard to find.

• 13:57John Coogan?

  Like there's this constant critique on X that, that Google has incredible models, incredible products, but they're just not distributing or surfacing them the well. And I wonder if it's less of a product management mistake, like the product manager made the wrong decision or the lawyers came in and said, hey, if you, I know that the, the product management best practices would be to roll this in. But if you do that, we're at antitrust risk. So we have to make it harder for you to sign up.

• 14:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I mean, this proposal from Judge Mehta is, is a proposal. It isn't, wouldn't the strategic thing to do as Google is to just say like, well, we're going to promote this as much as we can until we're told we can't, right?

• 14:41John Coogan?

  No, I so, so, so, yes.

• 14:43Jordi Hays?

  Or you think they would preemptively.

• 14:44John Coogan?

  Nvidia idea of like, if the speed limit is 60, you go 59. But I think internally at some of these companies that have been really scarred by antitrust and, and legal battles, sometimes the legal department says, the speed limit is 60, product managers, everyone's going 45 because we are actively being tailed by a cop. They don't have their lights on yet, but, but they could turn those lights on. You know how people like, you know, start going five under, 10 under when there's a cop behind them? That's, I think that might be a little bit of the dynamic at some of the big tech companies. I think Bill Gates talked about this at Microsoft, how part of the reason why he transitioned out and, and Ballmer came in was just, he got so tied up in antitrust legislation and, and,

• 15:28John Coogan?

  and antitrust fights that it became like a soul sucking job. And he couldn't do the thing that he wanted to do, which was just like build computers. And so there's this interesting dynamic where you could imagine a lawyer saying like, I'm going to get fired if we get a massive lawsuit or something like that. And so to protect this, I'm okay with us growing a little bit slower. I'm okay with these new products being, and, and it's because they're not comped on, did you deal with the innovator's dilemma and find the big next wave, right? They're comped on how, how bad are things in the courts right now? So I, and, and also if you're a product manager and a lawyer on the team comes to you and says, like legally, I'm recommending that we don't do this. It's very hard to push back on that.

• 16:13John Coogan?

  It's not the same as the dynamic between a designer and an engineer where the engineer might say, oh, this is like, you know, maybe better from an engineering perspective. And it's more of a discussion. I feel like when, when, when the legal team shows up, it's usually like they are issuing a, they're, they're dictating what will happen. And most people are just saying, okay, well, legal said we have to do it this way. So we're going to do it this way.

• 16:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 16:33John Coogan?

  But I don't know. The interesting dynamic here is around, like.

• 16:39John Coogan?

  The case specifically is not directly shaping how Google deals with generative AI and their new products. But it could have knock on effects because they are proposing the forced sale of the Chrome browser and preventing Google from being able to pay Apple to be its default search engine and requiring it to share data with competitors. And now, this is obviously bad for a number of reasons, but the interesting thing in the context of AI is that they, like, all the data that goes into Chrome and Google search from these extra search, it's not just about running more ads. Obviously, it is. Obviously, if they're paying Apple 20 billion, they're probably making 40 billion in ads off of those searches

• 17:23John Coogan?

  or something like that, right? But that's also really, really valuable data that they're going to be using to train the next generation of Gemini. And so if they lose a little bit of that edge in the flywheel to something like ChatGPT, where people are going back and forth and the data flywheel is spinning up faster at OpenAI, that could actually put them at a place where the data is compounding slower. And so they're not able to stay on that Pareto frontier of the best model at every single price that they've been so happy with. The interesting thing to me is, have you heard the story of how Google originally built the algorithm for?

• 18:05Jordi Hays?

  This is interesting, by the way.

• 18:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Jordi Hays?

  I don't think this would be the case for our audience, but Safari apparently has 90% of the browser market share on iPhone. I imagine a lot of people listening have Chrome installed and prefer that, but.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  I use Safari on iPhone.

• 18:25Jordi Hays?

  Safari guy.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, I use Safari.

• 18:27Jordi Hays?

  Narrative.

• 18:28John Coogan?

  It just feels like it's the default. I've tried to use Chrome and the iPhone keeps pumping me back. Oh, do you want to open this in Safari? And I've noticed that with the cookies, if you're logged in in Safari and then you're on the X app and you open a link, that will open a Safari web view. It doesn't open a Chrome web view. And so the Safari web view, it's like an iOS code module. If you're logged in in Safari. That will that will stay logged in even in when even when you're in the Safari web view inside of Instagram or inside of X. And so that extra benefit is enough for me to use a second browser, even though on my desktop I use Chrome. And like, I'm losing that connection.

• 19:11John Coogan?

  It's like, I want the mobile experience to be really cohesive. So I don't know if that's just like boomer mode, but it seems to be working for me.

• 19:18Jordi Hays?

  We need a boomer sound effect. So anyways, going back, you said the Justice Department, which brought the case against Google in 2020, has proposed forcing the sale of its Chrome browser, preventing Google from being able to pay Apple to be its default search engine. The department says the uncommonly harsh remedies are supported by a legal standard created when the US government tried to break up Microsoft over 20 years ago. All three of the DOJ's major remedies are aimed at helping generative AI providers take share from Google, says Paul Galant, a policy analyst for TD Cowan. The government hasn't met the standard of proof for obtaining such drastic remedies, Google's lawyer, John Schmiedlin,

• 20:00Jordi Hays?

  argued Friday. The Justice Department didn't prove that Google's exclusive contracts with device makers such as Apple were the primary cause of maintaining its monopoly.

• 20:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, we I gotta say.

• 20:12Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be happy if you're or if you're Sam or Arvin from perplexity right now, given that the DOJ is explicitly stating, we are trying to help generative AI providers take share from Google.

• 20:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. The the data flywheel is interesting. I got to tell the story of the the original Google autocomplete algorithm. They were this was prior to transformer based language models and but they needed a way to autocomplete on Google search as you type it fills it in. And what they found to be the most effective data set was, let's say you're searching for something like how to take the train from SFO to San Francisco. And you type it incorrectly, you misspell San Francisco, or you misspell SFO or something. What they found is the best way to to generate a massive data set of auto completions is just look at

• 21:12John Coogan?

  when someone types one thing and then they type a similar query immediately after within the next like one minute. And because because if Google fails and gives you and doesn't understand the query, you'll typically, the human will go and correct the query and be like, oh, I misspelled San Francisco. I need to spell it correctly. I will go spell it correctly. And but but how do you send that signal to Google that that the what is the correct way to spell San Francisco? Or what is the correct search term? What is the right way to phrase this question? Well, they were able to create this massive data set just by looking at like one query A, query B. And then and then just telling you, are you sure you don't want to just do the next query immediately?

• 21:54John Coogan?

  So it's the same kind of predictive text, but when you're at Google's scale, that has incredible value. And you can imagine that having a big data flywheel potential at Google as they scale up generative AI.

• 22:06Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, Judge Metta said said he expects to issue a ruling in August. Google, which has roughly 90% market share of online searches, proposed a narrow set of remedies that would modify its exclusive agreements with Apple, as well as Mozilla and Android to allow for more competition. It has said it would appeal the judge's ruling, sounds like whatever, whichever way it shakes out.

• 22:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's so there's so many different things going on.

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  Here's the interesting thing, too. So Google's already paying Samsung and Motorola to pre-install Gemini on devices, which is interesting. So potentially, you know, counterpoint to what you were saying earlier around, you know, wanting to be if the speed limit's 60, stay at 45. This feels like, you know, basically being like, hey, if the speed limit is 60 here, but it's 80 over here, let's go 80.

• 22:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm surprised they even have to pay them because like Samsung and Motorola build off of Android. So you would think it would just come pre-installed as like a default Android app. But I'm sure that there's a debate because Samsung probably has their own foundation model and could auction that off. And so it's kind of up for debate. But that certainly wasn't the case with like the other stock features of Android. And there's so now with the new ones, they got to they got to figure out the the deal. But yeah, there's so many interesting things going on with Google with like, absolute dominance in video generation, absolute dominance on YouTube. Like, the YouTube model just seems like stronger than ever and compounding, compounding, and like,

• 23:37John Coogan?

  not going anywhere. And like, just the absolute best business model. And then some weakness in search, which is obviously huge on.

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, the funny thing is, you could imagine, you could imagine, search is getting more competitive, naturally, right? As people use LLMs to do things that they would traditionally use a regular search engine for. And you can imagine, two years from now, the Department of Justice taking this massive victory lap of being like, you know, we created competition in this market. You know, we did our job. And it ultimately was just from the creation of new technology that Google itself has played a big role in creating. So I'm much more in favor of letting, you know, the best technology win and the best teams win. And it's unclear to me right now if there really needs to be any meaningful intervention.

• 24:29John Coogan?

  Well, if you have the best technology, you need the best design tool. Go to figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Go to figma.com.

• 24:41Jordi Hays?

  I've been seeing a bunch of people starting to use Figma Make and realizing how powerful it is.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  Starting to take hold.

• 24:50Jordi Hays?

  I will try to pull.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  I have the post in here somewhere.

• 24:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll get to it later, but it's very cool to see.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, and Angela Liu says H O L Y S H I T, which we will not say on the show.

• 25:05Jordi Hays?

  Friendly.

• 25:06John Coogan?

  Uh, just got in, just got access to Figma make beta on our team account and I'm totally mind blown. These are mocks that we one shot prompted and it's interactive buttons, tabs, prototype works. All and all the react code is there to copy and paste into an application. That's very exciting. Congratulations to the team. Very, very cool that they're getting this out into the world. Um, anyway, uh, other deals that are going on, uh, the Ray ban maker. How do you pronounce this? Esly or I just know it's Luxottica.

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  Luxottica.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  Luxottica.

• 25:39Jordi Hays?

  I never, I never had seen a slower.

• 25:42John Coogan?

  Esso lore Luxottica is buying Optegra in a medical AI push. So, uh, Luxottica partnered with Zuck on the meta Ray bands and they're getting more into AI and smart glasses.

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 25:54John Coogan?

  Interesting to see.

• 25:56Jordi Hays?

  Operates eye hospitals in the UK, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia and the Netherlands. So interesting. You think of Luxottica as a, you know, consumer product company, but, but this is a very different kind of business to integrate.

• 26:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, it, it's such an, it's such a different approach to the meta Ray bands. Like the, the, the reason it made so much sense for Luxottica to partner with, with meta on the meta Ray bands because it's a fashion item. Like you put it on your face and.

• 26:27Jordi Hays?

  Meta doesn't need to recreate an iconic silhouette.

• 26:29John Coogan?

  It's really, really hard. Yeah. Yeah. Iconic silhouette for sure. And, and meta, I mean, the quest looks okay, but it has not reached anywhere near the.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Kind of final form factor that the iPod had or the iPhone had like the silhouette as you as you mentioned and so to to to jump into and it's on your face. So it's not even something that's like, oh yeah, it's a little bit of an awkward device. Like it looks like a wallet, but I put up with it because I'm only using it when I when I'm when I pull it out. It's like, no, these are going to be on your face all the time. They need to look good. And the Ray-Bans are so iconic. It made a ton of sense.

• 27:04Jordi Hays?

  And they're able to draft off of Ray-Bans marketing and brand and they have ASAP Rocky. They're creative director. There's real momentum there. They don't need to reinvent fashion while they try to create a new technology platform.

• 27:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But it's a little bit different when you're talking about like medical AI, where I think you would think that like, like, like a branded product would be a little bit less important. But I guess Optegra operates a network of over 70 eye hospitals and diagnostic facilities across the UK, Czech Republic, Poland, Slovakia, and the Netherlands. It's offering comprises of the up that element treatments and effective vision correction procedures supported by artificial intelligence in the pre and post op phases. The transaction details were not disclosed.

• 27:52Jordi Hays?

  You want to know something interesting? So since doing the show, my eyesight has actually gotten better.

• 27:58John Coogan?

  Really?

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  And I think it's because we spent, we spent a lot of time looking at screens, which probably isn't good, but typically it's screens that are

• 28:05John Coogan?

  Far away.

• 28:05Jordi Hays?

  guests on that are far away. So my vision is actually getting better.

• 28:09John Coogan?

  That's hilarious.

• 28:09Jordi Hays?

  Narrative violation. But

• 28:11John Coogan?

  I didn't even realize you could. I thought your eyes only got worse. I didn't realize you could get your eyes better. He's like going to the gym for your eyes, basically?

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  You can, you can. Yeah, you can effectively work out your eyes. It's just a lot of people get it. A lot of people get into routines where they're either looking at their phone, computer.

• 28:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 28:27Jordi Hays?

  And there's not a lot of like, you know, intensive exercise at other sort of consistent ranges, I think.

• 28:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, interesting. Anyway, a report from the information says every VC-backed IPO in the past 12 months has been a down round.

• 28:42Jordi Hays?

  Moment of silence.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  This moment of silence is brought to you by AdQuick, out of home advertising.

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, back to the news.

• 28:52John Coogan?

  But but there's an interesting wrinkle here. So there's some good data in this article by Corey Weinberg in the information. And there's also some good news, which we'll get to. So when banking app Chime goes public next month, it will mark the eighth straight venture capital-backed IPO in the last 12 months that has been valued less than it was in private fundraising rounds. Chime was valued at $25 billion in 2021, but its bankers have been discussing pricing its shares at roughly an $11 billion valuation. That's a pretty significant down round, less than more than 50% off. Startup valuations are far lower than several years ago. So a lot of these companies, they raised big rounds during the Zerp era. Now they got to get out, got to get liquidity. And so they're willing to take a little bit of a haircut in trade for actually being able to do some distributions. Because even though the

• 29:37John Coogan?

  most recent backer might be taking a little bit of a haircut, a lot of the early backers are still like, well, yeah, I invested at 10 million. I'm happy with an $11 billion valuation.

• 29:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so an example is like-

• 29:46John Coogan?

  The founders are happy, the employees are happy.

• 29:49Jordi Hays?

  Forerunner did the seed round. They probably invested in a bunch of other rounds.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:55Jordi Hays?

  But their entry is so low that I imagine they're going to do fine.

• 29:59John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 30:00Jordi Hays?

  If it gets priced at 11.

• 30:01John Coogan?

  Christian Green's on the Midas list for that specific deal.

• 30:04Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 30:04John Coogan?

  Among others. But yeah, many investors are facing losses when companies go public at lower valuations. Yes, but like, again, these are later stage investors that might where even the LPs might have the the assumption that they'll hold a little bit longer. And that's what this article gets into. So quickly, let's go through some of the IPOs that have gone out and where they're where they're pricing. So Chime was 69 bucks a share in 2021. Upcoming, we know that it's about down, it's down about 50%. Circle, last private round was at $42. The IPO is predicted to be at $26, so down 38%.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  Hinge Health went from 77 in September of 2022 to 32, down 59%. That's a pretty steep haircut. MNTN, which was actually fair, a little bit better, just down 30% from peak.

• 30:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 30:55John Coogan?

  Etoro, 66%, CoreWeave down 15%, although I feel like CoreWeave has lifted. Service Titan down 16%, Tempest down 35%. Now, there are a couple, Ibotta and Rubrik did pop after the IPO, or at least priced higher than the previous round. So let's hear it for Rubrik and Ibotta. But what's interesting is that the information shares some data on companies that went public at discounts to the last fundraising tended to perform strongly in the public markets. And so Reddit went out at a lower valuation than their previous private market round, but then they went up 221% since IPO.

• 31:37John Coogan?

  Same thing with CoreWeave, went out at a slight haircut to the last private valuation and is now up 164%. MNTN is also up 63%, Service Titan up 59%, Tempest up 47%, Hinge Health up 22%, Etoro up 19%. And so it's not all bad news and there might be some sort of narrative where, you know, there's been this, there's been this story of the Zerp era, that the private markets went crazy, that the valuations were super, super high, like crazy revenue multiples. And so you go out to the market, you talk to your banker and you could do your IPO roadshow and you say, hey, look, we're taking our medicine. We are going out at a price that is a discount to our last private valuation, but we've grown so much, it's been three years.

• 32:21John Coogan?

  The business was sound, these businesses weren't frauds, they weren't bankrupt, they weren't like no users, they were just a little hotly valued for a while. And they say, hey, retail or whoever's buying in the IPO, we're giving you a discount to what the investors paid in the last round. And then that sets them up for an actually like new, new, new, resets the valuation, gets them into a, like a, like a liquid position where they can

• 32:47John Coogan?

  actually grow and build up earnings, beat earnings a couple of times and then go on an absolute tear, a generational run potentially.

• 32:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's good. It's good. We, you know, having a number of IPOs end up, you know, you want the retail or institutions coming in to not get hosed every single time.

• 33:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, totally. And if, yeah, I mean, that was the other story of the Zerp was that, like, there were a lot of SPACs that went out that went way down. And so it's almost better to go out at a discount and then build back up, especially, especially if there's a hold period, lockups for various investors, like you want to be growing in the public markets. You don't just want to get out of super high evaluation.

• 33:29Jordi Hays?

  An example, a company that went out in December 11th of 2020, Airbnb, is actually, if you just bought the day that it went out, you'd be down 8% after five years. So again, priced very efficiently, it did pop, but then it's just been effectively flat to down since then.

• 33:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, if you're thinking about taking your company public anytime soon, you got to get on Vanta, automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

• 34:09Jordi Hays?

  They make compliance a joy, John. They make it a joy. It used to be painful. Now it's joyful.

• 34:16John Coogan?

  It's joyful. Another big read in the, in the information about Jensen Wong. He used to delegate politics until Trump's return. We've been talking about Jensen going on an absolute tear, going to all these different conferences, pretty much everyone. He's been relying on Mar-a-Lago visits and a budding relationship with President Donald Trump to reopen a path to China, which demands his attention too. So, big, big questions about how Nvidia can maintain some position in China while obviously there is a decoupling going on.

• 34:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting to see. I was too fixated on this image, which is iconic, albeit a bit silly. Yeah, since the start of this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been thrust into an unexpected new role, chief lobbyist for his company, forcing him to carry its hopes, suggestions, and pleas directly to President Donald Trump. Many of Huang's conversations with Trump have happened at Mar-a-Lago, Trump's residence and private club in South Florida, and Huang has made far more visits there than have been publicly reported, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Indeed, these...

• 35:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:27Jordi Hays?

  I don't even know how to say that.

• 35:30John Coogan?

  But the next line is interesting. Nvidia executive to remark on Huang's absence from the company. We see a lot less of Jensen. He's been traveling to Florida a lot. But, I mean, it makes sense.

• 35:43Jordi Hays?

  This is what we were commenting on even a few weeks ago, of just, I mean, this guy's conference schedule alone, ignore the lobbying, is, you know, feels like a couple a week, sometimes more.

• 35:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it makes sense, because like, as we saw with how Tim Cook handled the tariff situation with Apple, even if there is going to be a decoupling, having insight into how that will unfold, and what the speed limit will be in one month, in six months, in 12 months. Like, we know Jensen's gonna go one under, but what is the speed limit gonna be, so you don't get caught with buying a car that goes 200 miles an hour, and the speed limit's 65. So, I'm sure it's top of mind for him. But it also seems like, there's the flip side of this. Like, this story is being told from the perspective of like, the bare case of like, China going wrong for Nvidia. But there's also the flip

• 36:39John Coogan?

  side, which is, like, Trump is clearly reopening relationships with new countries, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar potentially, and those are new markets as the diffusion rule gets phased out. And those are major, major drivers of GPU buying. And if there's a Stargate in every new country that Trump visits and opens up diplomatic relations with... You know, rolls out some trade deal.

• 37:05Jordi Hays?

  Another 50 billion for Jensen.

• 37:06John Coogan?

  That's hugely incremental to.

• 37:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other thing is Jensen is continuing to embrace and Nvidia are continuing to embrace China. I mean, they're setting up new, they're investing more in this facility in Shanghai, more into on the ground R and D. So it doesn't feel like, well, while Jensen is having to sort of massage the relationship with, with the White House, he's not pulling back from, from China in any, in any meaningful way that I can see.

• 37:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, what's interesting is like, we were talking to Aaron Gin about this idea of, of standardizing on the American AI stack. And we were only talking about the jump ball countries, right? It's like Saudi Arabia is gonna want GPUs. Those are either going to be from Huawei, Ascend chips, or Nvidia. There's really no, no one else in the conversation. They're either going to be running Llama or OpenAI Code or DeepSeek and Manus, right?

• 38:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:07John Coogan?

  What's interesting is like, is there a world where standardizing on the American AI stack in China is the right move? That's a very controversial thing to say or even explore, I think. I probably default against it, but I wonder if there's some sort of, some sort of good ending there where, where keeping China rely, reliant on American technology is actually better than them developing their own tech tree. Like out competing, out competing Huawei in a free market could work.

• 38:48John Coogan?

  I, I'm like 1% on that, but I wanna, I wanna hear from other people.

• 38:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, Jensen is finessing the situation. I'm looking right now at the poly market, largest company end of 2025. Nvidia is actually in the lead right now at a 37%, 37% chance with Microsoft at a 36% chance.

• 39:09John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  So, um, pretty, uh, people believe in the leather jacket man.

• 39:16Jordi Hays?

  Anyway.

• 39:19John Coogan?

  Let's take a quick second to tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Go to linear.app.

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  John asked me this week if we could also use Linear to plan and track our workouts.

• 39:37John Coogan?

  We're gonna do this.

• 39:38Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna do this.

• 39:39John Coogan?

  I didn't ask you for permission. I told you what's gonna happen.

• 39:43Jordi Hays?

  But, you know, using, you know, bodybuilding is, you know, potentially, I'm sure Linear would say, you know, that's not a core focus for us.

• 39:50John Coogan?

  Small market.

• 39:51Jordi Hays?

  Small market, but, you know, I think we can show them that that bodybuilding is, you know, potentially, you know, an entirely new opportunity.

• 40:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's the next big TAM expander for them, especially when you think about how Linear has agents. You can have an agent constantly going out there, finding the next trend in science-based lifting, figuring out exactly what workout you should be doing, building that into your Linear plan. Then you show up to the gym, just open your Linear app, start checking off the issues. Oh, put in a ticket. Oh, my delts aren't 3D. My traps aren't in my head. Okay.

• 40:29Jordi Hays?

  Kari's gonna text us and be like, guys, guys, I know it's funny, but please don't tell the market that we're getting into bodybuilding. But we can use, it's an open-ended tool and we're gonna, we're gonna push it to the limits.

• 40:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Other news in the information, VC funds are for sale at a discount. We were talking about this a little bit. 2025 was supposed to be a year of cash windfall for venture capital backers as companies that had delayed going public finally made the leap. We were tracking some big Deca corns that had hired CFOs that had previously taken companies public. The IPO window was supposed to be opening up, the market was ripping. Then we had the tariffs news and the IPO window kind of shut a little bit. Now it's opening again, but there's still, you know, more demand than ever for liquidity. And so it looks like some funds are trying to sell.

• 41:22Jordi Hays?

  The taco meme is really putting.

• 41:26Jordi Hays?

  You know, putting us in a precarious position that Trump always chickens out. Whoever, whichever journalist asked Trump about that to his face, you know, potentially could be responsible for another freeze in the IPO markets, but hopefully not.

• 41:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:46Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 41:47John Coogan?

  So the information writes, that hasn't happened with a roller coaster stock market delaying many anticipated IPOs. LPs and VC funds have been finding new ways to cash out of their stakes in private tech firms. Some are selling their ownership of VC funds. The VC funds in turn have been putting their own startup stakes up for sale. That means ownership of hot startups like Stripe and Databricks are sometimes up for grabs. The takeaway, Nokia pension plan plans to sell, Nokia pension plan sells VC fund stakes. Lee Fixle's family office sells dozens of early, early stage fund stakes. Buyers hunt for fund stakes at steep discounts. And so this is kind of like a macro version of what Jeremy Gaffon is doing, right? Instead of targeting a single company, targeting the actual fund stake.

• 42:31John Coogan?

  And we also heard a little bit about, maybe there would be pressure on some of the, some of the educational higher ed LPs, like if they're under pressure, like nonprofit, for profit conversion, like Harvard is kind of going to war with the Trump administration. Would that lead to them needing to pull back from VC? We haven't really heard that or seen that, but it would be interesting to see these changing hands. And I wonder, I wonder what the final holder will be. You could see someone creating kind of a rollups back, or you could see someone creating a new fund, but these ideas of like continuation vehicles are not entirely new.

• 43:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's not, I mean, it's, it's totally normal and healthy for people that hold certain assets to be willing to sell them at a discount to what they believe the, the future value or the terminal value of them will be. And I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing. It just historically wasn't as common in venture because it wasn't as mature of an asset class. And there was, you know, faster timelines to liquidity. But to me. All of this is normal. It would be more concerning if, you know, I'm sure there's funds out there that, or LPs that would love to sell stakes in funds that don't, where there's

• 43:48Jordi Hays?

  no actual ultimate buyer. But if you're in quality funds, there's always going to be some ultimate value for the LP stake. And so it's just good to see.

• 44:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to talk to someone who's running a company that's, that has a material stake from VC fund, from an early vintage, that's well beyond the 10 to 12 year hold period. Because I remember talking to a founder who had sold a number of businesses and he was, he was very successful in kind of telling this nightmare scenario where you, you raise in 2010, your company's doing fine, but you're not IPO-ing, and then the venture fund that you raised from needs to distribute shares. And so all of a sudden you wind up with like 500 different individuals or LPs on your cap table because the fund, because the shares

• 44:43John Coogan?

  have been distributed. And then you have to go public or that changes the way you're, you're seen by the SEC. And I've never heard of that actually happening. It's always just been this hypothetical nightmare scenario. But I wonder if there is something real to it, if there was ever a real problem, or if it was instantly solved by roll of vehicles and kind of continuation vehicles or something like that. But I'd love to dig into that more. I don't know if you've ever run into that.

• 45:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, that's one solution. They can always sit in a, in a single entity, but.

• 45:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, let's go through some timeline. Sarah Guo is highlighting some possible topics for the AI engineer keynote, which I think we'll be covering next week. I thought it was an interesting overview of what is the, what the hot topics are in AI right now, because we've moved past kind of the AGI doom scenario. And we're getting into like the next era of discussions. And we've been talking a lot about these. We're kind of putting together an informal AI day next Thursday, trying to book more people around AI that day. But we will be having an official TBPN AI day soon that we will announce. But here's some interesting possible topics. AI native UX, not chat skins, vertical AI surge, healthcare pharma, we're certainly

• 45:54John Coogan?

  seeing that at Sequoia, multimodal frontier, video, 3D audio, obviously VO3 driving a lot of that, retrieval and long-term memory. I saw a funny take that somebody was like, we've, we've switched from retrieval augmented generation to agents. And the person was just like, no, like you're, you're still augmenting the retrieval with text. Like it's the same, like it's the same buzzword, but it's like you, you kind of, you gave it a new buzzword. And there's a lot of like this buzzword recycling going on. Synthetic data flywheels, obviously super important in robotics, as we talked to Rob Taves about yesterday. Will be interesting to see if there are hard caps on how far synthetic data takes you in different scenarios. Closing the autonomy gap, robust agentic workflows,

• 46:38John Coogan?

  we're certainly seeing that with some of these agents that seem super promising, but don't quite get there. But at the same time, we've seen major breakthroughs with deep research is, I think, the first real breakthrough agent.

• 46:49Jordi Hays?

  The autonomy, I, I had a funny experience last night. I, I had, as I was going to bed, I turned on my Matic robot.

• 46:58John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:58Jordi Hays?

  I was telling it to, to mop and vacuum and mop. And I turned it on and, and it was like 17 hours remaining because it needed to like basically vacuum the whole house and then like figure out which areas to mop. I was like, this thing is just going to run all night. I was like, honestly, I feel, I'm, I feel like I should pay you or something, Matic. It's kind of weird that you're doing all this work. And, and then I actually, I woke up in the middle of the night to the, to the noise. It was outside my bedroom and I was like, okay, I'm actually, and then I actually went and turned it off. But, but it was interesting to think, you know, we've had people on the show talking about this concept of like 10 minute AGI right now, where you can like, you know, have an agent

• 47:41Jordi Hays?

  do an incredible amount of work for, for 10 minutes. But, you know, getting to this point where you can give an agent a task and then have it be so robust that it can just operate autonomously for hours and hours and hours and hours. And, you know, even days. And I think that's where things are going to get really exciting on the, you know, purely digital side.

• 48:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I saw that video that the team sent of the Matic robot cleaning our studio and I was very proud. It was handling the cables pretty well. I was surprised by that. That usually would throw them off.

• 48:13Jordi Hays?

  The cables would defeat it, but no way.

• 48:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:18Jordi Hays?

  Cell, scale, digital twins, and programmable biology. Excited to hear more.

• 48:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it still seems a little bit early from the folks we're talking to, but obviously exciting. And the...

• 48:31Jordi Hays?

  Jacob from New Lemon had a pretty solid case for some of this stuff and sort of their edge on the data side.

• 48:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Compute geopolitics, world models. We're having someone next Thursday talking about world models. And Fei-Fei Li is also working on world models, which is very interesting. And then RL environments that actually generalize. All cool stuff. And you know what else is cool? Numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

• 49:02Jordi Hays?

  Benchmark Series A. We just had somebody send us a cold email earlier. I didn't get quite a chance to look at it, but they included... They said they typed a sentence and then said Benchmark Series A.

• 49:13John Coogan?

  Really? That's amazing. I love that.

• 49:15Jordi Hays?

  Good way to signal that they actually listen to the show. We got a post here from Matty Pally. I threw this in this morning. "In 30 years, I'll probably be up to some boomer stuff like, 'No son of mine is marrying an LLM. Marriage is between two humans only.' And my kids will be like, 'OMG, Dad, you're so robo-phobic.'"

• 49:40Jordi Hays?

  Seventeen K.

• 49:41John Coogan?

  Crazy real, for sure.

• 49:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah, no, I... It's funny that even the kids that are being born today will very likely have conversations like this, which is absolutely wild.

• 49:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I like this. Homies in the chat will be dropping nice AIGF, no robo.

• 50:04John Coogan?

  Ridiculous. Anyway, speaking of other robo, robo nonsense, Mike Solana says we were supposed to have flying cars and his recent, his recent calls is just robo callers getting spam.

• 50:18Jordi Hays?

  How it's like.

• 50:18John Coogan?

  It's like six calls in the span of five minutes. It's so brutal.

• 50:22Jordi Hays?

  Brutal.

• 50:23John Coogan?

  I, I, there is a, there is a service. I don't, I don't know if I should directly plug them. No more robo. There's a couple of apps that you can, that you can install and there's also the iOS functionality to reduce. If you go into like the phone app, you can, you can tell it like, hey, I like really want to screen calls. And then also I think I have my phone and do not disturb all the time. And you can only get through to me and actually like ring the phone if you're in my contacts list. Otherwise you have to text me first. And so like, there's a whole bunch of things that you need to do to kind of prevent this from being annoying. But it's still just like ridiculous. My, my take was we really need to come up with a, a new phone number system.

• 51:04John Coogan?

  That's like a, like a crypto address, like a hash where, because there's only what, like 10 billion phone numbers. And so you can just robo call them all and it's not that expensive to do if every call is one cent or whatever. You can just call every human and just test them all and I'll test every number. But if you had like this really complex hash where there's now like quintillion possible phone numbers. It's like, yeah, it's probably going to be hard to remember, but once I give you my number, you're going to be able to call me and I'm not just going to be able, and people are going to be able to randomly guess my phone number. So I don't know. We need something because it's bad. What's your take?

• 51:42Jordi Hays?

  Something.

• 51:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just don't pick up the phone unless it's somebody I want to talk to. And then I pick up as fast as I can. This ad went pretty viral from Zoron, Mom Donnie. He's running for mayor of New York and his, he's got a bold pitch. Freezing the rent.

• 52:05John Coogan?

  Price controls.

• 52:06Jordi Hays?

  Price controls.

• 52:07John Coogan?

  You love it.

• 52:08Jordi Hays?

  I saw somebody compare this to, you know, somebody running for like student body president or whatever. And they're just like, free lunch, free lunch for everybody. I know people say there's no free lunch, but we're doing free lunch. If I'm elected, free lunch.

• 52:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So tech was pretty against this. Patrick Collison posted just a really quick screenshot of chat GPT. It says AI is getting pretty good. He says, does rent control tend to help or hurt cities? Summarize your answer in one objective, pithy and blunt 280 character assessment. And the response is rent control is a short term shield for incumbent tenants and a long term poison for cities. Caps freeze rents for the lucky few who but choke new construction, shrink supply, jack up market rents, misallocate housing and shift costs onto everyone else. Good politics, bad economics. And so this is kind of the general consensus that like rent controls are bad. I wanted to offer some some bull case for this.

• 53:04John Coogan?

  So first off, people are saying, oh, prices are going to go up. There won't be any new construction. Housing prices are going to go up. But if price controls really spread, and then there's a kind of cultural revolution type like mass famine and and the population declines by like 90% because everyone's dying. Well, then there might be so much housing that the price of housing falls for the remaining that made it through the famine.

• 53:28Jordi Hays?

  Below the original cap.

• 53:30John Coogan?

  Prices fall. Yeah, exactly. And so counterintuitively, it could be an interesting way to drop prices if you're OK with everyone dying of famine.

• 53:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Zeron just might be thinking in decades while everyone else is, you know, thinking more immediately.

• 53:43John Coogan?

  Exactly. And then the other bull case is, the other bull case is if you hate New York and you're pro California, pro LA, like we're we're pro Hollywood. I don't really care about New York City, so I might be donating a ton of money to this guy to try and destroy New York City so that everyone, all the best people in New York have to move to Hollywood and hang out with me.

• 54:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if you have SF VCs and New York VCs sort of, you know, yeah, basically funding the politician that they think is most going to damage that startup market to try to, you know, get themselves a little edge.

• 54:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's just basic game theory, right?

• 54:19Jordi Hays?

  I liked this guy Nikita Beer I saw in the comments on Zeron's post saying that. You know, he, he said that housing should be free, you capitalist pig.

• 54:31John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 54:32Jordi Hays?

  And so.

• 54:32John Coogan?

  Didn't go far enough.

• 54:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, didn't, Zeron really got mugged by, by Nikita.

• 54:38John Coogan?

  It was rough.

• 54:39Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and the silence from, from Zeron on Nikita's response has been deafening, to say the least.

• 54:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway.

• 54:49John Coogan?

  So silly. Anyway, we got to tell you about public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. Multi asset investing, industry leading.

• 54:54Jordi Hays?

  Take it seriously, folks.

• 54:55John Coogan?

  Trusted by millions. Let's go to Delian. He says, as a private pilot, my favorite part of this season of the rehearsal is that while it's an objectively a hilarious show, Nathan Fielder is also pointing out an incredibly critical pilot training issue that seems to be a regular contributing case to crashes, caused to crashes, including the DCA crash. And Kristoff asked him what the pilot training issue was, and Delian said, first officers not being comfortable with pushing back against a captain they think is making a mistake. I thought this is funny because I, I was watching the show, the first couple of episodes, I haven't finished it, but the, like, he identifies this and he's like, half joking, half serious, but telling him just like, no, it is real, it's real.

• 55:38John Coogan?

  And so it's this interesting way where I, I actually could see this comedy show having an effect on FAA regulation and like, actually increasing safety. Like, he's doing, he's doing good for the world through his comedy. It's amazing.

• 55:54Jordi Hays?

  It is. Everybody should go and watch it. It is, it is some of the most entertaining.

• 56:03Jordi Hays?

  Probably the best show I've seen this year.

• 56:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was watching a little bit of the original first season of Nathan for You last night, and I was crying laughing about when he goes into that interview and he has the comedian telling him what to say. And he's like, oh yeah, like my mom passed away. And the guy asks him like, how? And he just says like, in the war. Like, in what war? Like, the Iraq war? And he's like, what, what, what branch of the service was she in? And then he has to say, he was, his mom was fighting for the Iraqis in Saddam's army. It's just like, absolutely insane comedy.

• 56:41Jordi Hays?

  I went back and watched, I don't remember what season or episode it was, but there was. The bit where he's helping, he's giving advice to a woman who has a pet shop, who wants to increase business. So he goes and helps and he basically gives the advice to the woman that, you know, what's the right moment to try to get in front of a future pet owner or somebody that's about to, you know, buy a new pet. And his idea is to go to a pet cemetery and get the biggest possible tombstone. And so he works out a deal with the owner of the pet cemetery, where he basically gets the guy to agree that for like a thousand

• 57:20Jordi Hays?

  dollars, like one time payment, he can erect like, you know, a like six foot by four foot, you know, tombstone. And so it's just like this pet cemetery. It's like, we're sorry for your loss. Like this tombstone is brought to you by, you know, whatever.

• 57:37John Coogan?

  Very, very on brand for us. Pro, pro advertising for sure.

• 57:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:41John Coogan?

  That's great. Yeah, it's a classic show. Go, go, go, go watch all of it.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The other show, now that we're talking about it, Mountain Head releases, I believe, on Saturday around 5:00 PM. It's by Jesse Armstrong, who obviously created Succession. Mountain Head is, seems to be based on the All In Podcasts, loosely, but it's a group of billionaire friends get together against the backdrop of a rolling international crisis. So I'm looking forward to, I'm looking forward to watching this over the weekend.

• 58:14John Coogan?

  Sounds amazing. Let's go to this post from Kevin Kwak. He says, when exactly did the flip happen that all announcements have to be videos? That flipped really fast. What do you think? It was the, it was us? Did we do it? Can we take a victory lap?

• 58:30Jordi Hays?

  I mean, we've been doing video announcements for, for years.

• 58:34John Coogan?

  Party around.

• 58:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we, we use these heavily in 2021, but I also feel like they were popular then. I also still think there's incredible alpha in just creating an amazing text post. You can get the same, it, it doesn't give you the level of like depth to like really deliver brand, I think, in the same way that a video does. But I honestly think a extremely well-written text post, assuming you can even, there's potentially a hack to just include a lot of M dashes. So you get a bunch of comments from people being like, you use ChatGPT for this. And then that will actually boost the post and the algorithm. So there's potentially alpha in plain text, you know, write it yourself, but make it look like it was, you know, fully AI generated. But these things, these things flip back and forth.

• 59:20Jordi Hays?

  I definitely see videos now where I'm like, okay, this is based on like the 2023 launch meta.

• 59:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:28Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, I'm excited to see what comes down the line.

• 59:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think the new meta that, that like that comedy video from that Y C company.

• 59:41Jordi Hays?

  I just saw, I just thought of that.

• 59:42John Coogan?

  Rippling and deal, that was fantastic. And the other one that was really good was from ZipLine where it didn't have the same like hard tech, insane like free bird, kind of like vibe reel with American flags. It was this like sun drenched, high saturation. It felt like it was out of a Linklater film and it was just this beautiful pastoral illustration of what life could be with ZipLine. And I thought it was really beautiful.

• 1:00:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, I think where I would like to see video goes is go are, if you don't have any, if you're not trying to make people feel something, just explain really clearly what you're doing in a text post.

• 1:00:28John Coogan?

  Yep, yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:00:29Jordi Hays?

  Like vibral. If you're, if you're trying to entertain, inspire, et cetera, like if that really is your goal, then video can be the right form factor. And we saw that with that, that sort of humorous video from the Y C company. And then there was another company called Spawn that went super viral a while back for basically saying that like they, they took the team and just like lived in Europe for a few months. And, and that was one where I couldn't really quite tell if they were being serious or joking. And that's part of maybe what, what made it. Go so viral. And then you have the Clulee.

• 1:01:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:04Jordi Hays?

  Where you can go make, you know, you can go make half a million dollars a year making videos at Clulee.

• 1:01:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:10Jordi Hays?

  Great, great opportunity.

• 1:01:11John Coogan?

  Potentially clickbait, who knows if that's real, but certainly entertaining. I think the, the question of like the vibe reel is like it, it worked for us early on because we were trying to create a brand specifically. And I think a lot of companies, they obviously like a brand is important to every company, but like, I would say, like most B2B SaaS companies are not necessarily brand led, or they're not exclusively brands versus if you are building a fashion or media or, or nutrition company, or something that has like badge value that like expressing the brand and building the brand world.

• 1:01:50John Coogan?

  We have this example of like, of like, you know, you know, it's a brand when you can immediately say like, what is the car associated with that brand? The, the classic example is like, if Nike built a hotel, you would know exactly what that hotel would look like. It would have posters of Michael Jordan on the wall. The gym would be insane. Like, you know, you could buy the shoes there. It would feel Nike branded. Now, if Hilton made a shoe, you'd be like, what does that mean? Right? And so.

• 1:02:19Jordi Hays?

  Hilton 100.

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  But like, does Hilton really need a brand as big as Nike or as clearly defined as Nike? And so for it, it's kind of like, if you're, if you're building a product that's not necessarily needs to be brand led forever, you don't necessarily need to ape into, let's do a brand vibe reel to really tell people what our brand is. If it's going to be just like, I'm just a software company and the value prop is what the value prop is.

• 1:02:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep, totally.

• 1:02:42John Coogan?

  Anyway, nothing has a clearer value prop than Eight Sleep. I've been missing mine while I'm on the road. It's pain, but you can get yours at eightsleep.com. They have a five year warranty, 30 night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping. How did you sleep last night, Jordy?

• 1:02:58Jordi Hays?

  I was.

• 1:03:00John Coogan?

  Historic numbers?

• 1:03:01Jordi Hays?

  Historic numbers, eight hours, eighteen minutes.

• 1:03:04John Coogan?

  What?

• 1:03:04Jordi Hays?

  Ninety-nine.

• 1:03:05John Coogan?

  Huge.

• 1:03:06Jordi Hays?

  Huge.

• 1:03:08John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:03:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was despite being moderately interrupted because I let my medic work too hard overnight. But I did that to myself.

• 1:03:17John Coogan?

  Oh, well, well, we have a we have a post from Adquick, then we'll give you an ad read for Adquick. Adquick, they have a new Adquick co-pilot. You can generate AI ideas for your out of home campaigns.

• 1:03:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so what's interesting, what's interesting about this to me is Adquick obviously has a, you know, you can go into their application and and figure out how you basically build a campaign off of that. But a lot of my experience with out of home is like you want it to be conversational. It's like, OK, here's the general areas where we want to be. What inventory is available these dates? OK, what does that inventory actually look like? What are what are some examples? And so you can build a campaign in a sort of conversational way, which which makes a lot of sense. So go check it out, even if you're not ready to run a campaign. It's a good idea to get a sense of what these will actually look like, what budgets will look like, and all that kind of thing.

• 1:04:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, and like, just strategically, this is like the classic AI cherry on top business. They're not pivoting to AI. They're just giving it people a different way to interface with their proprietary data set, right? Because this is something that you can't just go to ChatGPT for because they have have billboards. So home advertising made easy and measurable. Go to adquick.com. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. We need a massive size gong, George, for Michael Dell.

• 1:04:39John Coogan?

  One of the greatest to ever do it. In Q1, we received $12.1 billion in AI orders, surpassing the total shipments for all of fiscal year 2025, and leaving us with a backlog of $14.4 billion.

• 1:04:54Jordi Hays?

  If John, if you were here, I'd be hitting the size gong, but I'm just hitting it in the air here. Pretty amazing, interesting story. I didn't realize that Michael Dell was back in the, is he?

• 1:05:07John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:07Jordi Hays?

  Is he back in the weeds? Oh, he's C. I didn't, how did I not realize it?

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  You gotta do whole, whole, whole take private, go public again. He's been, he's been on absolute tear.

• 1:05:19Jordi Hays?

  Wow, wow. Dark horse, dark horse. So cool on his LinkedIn. It says Chairman and CEO of Dell Technologies, 41 years, four months.

• 1:05:31John Coogan?

  He started when he was like 18 or something, 19.

• 1:05:34Jordi Hays?

  So good.

• 1:05:35John Coogan?

  Incredible, incredible.

• 1:05:37Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the, to the Dell team on the milestone.

• 1:05:39John Coogan?

  Congrats. Yeah. And, and makes sense. I mean, they don't, they don't fabricate GPUs. They're not in the energy side, but obviously they're building large racks and servers for AI. There's a boom and they're taking advantage of it. So makes sense. And we're seeing that with like Cisco too. Remember we were talking to Kevin Wheel about how Cisco plays a really interesting, unique role in the AI boom. It's a company that you haven't heard about for a while, but networking gear is obviously extremely important in AI contexts. You're networking together, all these data centers. And so Cisco's also a beneficiary of the AI boom. So diving in, revisiting these companies that are so, so historically significant is fascinating. There's a great founders episode on Michael Dell that you should go check out if you want to hear about Michael Dell's approach to entrepreneurship. So

• 1:06:22John Coogan?

  check that out. I, I don't know if we can sing. I, I think singing over, over Zoom just doesn't work. So we're just gonna have to say wander, find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel, great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better folks. And we'll be back on Monday with a song, a full rendition.

• 1:06:41Jordi Hays?

  We have to go hit the track with John Andrew too.

• 1:06:45John Coogan?

  For sure. I want to see, I want to see how he performs. Laguna Seca, you think?

• 1:06:48Jordi Hays?

  Dog. He's an absolute dog. I think he keeps his track cars in Texas, if I remember correctly. But anyways, that will be a great story when the time comes.

• 1:07:00John Coogan?

  Book a wander in Texas. Go visit him, race him.

• 1:07:03Jordi Hays?

  We got a post from Chris. How is?

• 1:07:08John Coogan?

  Chris Pike?

• 1:07:08Jordi Hays?

  Pike, Pike, Pike. He has a new post. He dropped the end of software on May 31st, 2024.

• 1:07:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:07:16Jordi Hays?

  He's got a new post called "The Dawn of Infinite Code", and I mean, he's plays X on.

• 1:07:22John Coogan?

  Built different, I was about to say. He posted the link and it works every time.

• 1:07:26Jordi Hays?

  Still does numbers. So he has a new article, "The Dawn of Infinite Code", all started off, says, "San Mateo, 2005, three founders add an upload button to their video hosting website in an office that smells faintly of pepperoni. Everywhere 2025, a person types an idea, presses Enter, and a network of agent, agents compiles, tests, and executes. In the end of software, I posited that large language models would drive the marginal cost of software towards zero, just as the internet did with content. A year later, that forecast is playing out. Code is beyond trivial to generate. The question now is how we deal with the oncoming flood. The pattern is familiar. When YouTube launched in 2005, its first video, "Me at the Zoo", seemed immaterial.

• 1:08:11Jordi Hays?

  This was the harbinger of doom for the media industry, but that was the point. It proved that content had become too cheap to meter. Now the dam has broken with code. Prompts produce prototypes that once required a team and a sprint. As transformative as broadcasting from your bedroom was, anyone can now ship their ideas. And you know what immediately comes to mind? Is we have somebody visiting us at the studio today that built an entire app based on TVPN yesterday, just randomly had the idea and sent it to us this morning. I think it's at tbpnguest.com.

• 1:08:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:08:49Jordi Hays?

  tbpnguest.com is an amazing, cool looking website that ranks every single guest that we've had, including gives you timestamps and breaks down the topics that it covers. So, very cool. This was built yesterday. Extremely impressive and probably wouldn't have been possible to build something as cool and beautiful.

• 1:09:13John Coogan?

  It would take a lot longer, for sure.

• 1:09:15Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, continuing Chris Pike's post, he says, "Web 2.0 gave everyone a single verb, 'upload', and it vaporized newsrooms everywhere." AI gives us a new one to describe and the 500-person single feature company goes poof. The work shifts from syntax to intent. Instead of writing software line by line, we define what it should and let models handle the show. And what about distribution? Don't software companies have robust sales and marketing teams? Yes, as newspapers with paper routes and circulation numbers, when free competes with free for distribution, paid distribution loses badly. At first, these models will rely on a set of default environments and stacks determined by a legacy training

• 1:09:55Jordi Hays?

  set. But defaults change. As options multiply, the decision of where and how code runs will be handled by algorithms. We already accept this logic elsewhere. TikTok decides what we watch. Spotify decides what we hear. The system is opaque. The results are good, so we scroll. When the flood of code arrives, we won't ask for explanations. We'll reward speed. Convenience will outrank transparency. The systems that earn our trust through responsiveness will hold the power once reserved for operating systems. As cost curves come down, we chase scarcity up the stack. It starts with compute, still mostly centralized but already seeping to the edge as local models take up residence on laptops and phones. Above that lies context,

• 1:10:39Jordi Hays?

  the habits, preferences, and history that let a model anticipate us better than any public corpus ever could. And finally, trust. Credibility earned over time determines whether an agent has the right to choose on our behalf. Once we arrive at full trust, active choice becomes a burden. Do you want to continue?

• 1:10:58John Coogan?

  I'll do it. And after 2010, I've never opened a newspaper, so they may never open applications. History shows the vessel always fades once the payload can flow without it. Newspapers yielded to website CDs to streaming. Software in its current circumscribed form is the next container on the chopping block. When logic can be summoned and stitched together on demand, the container evaporates and only capability remains. That's the real end of software, not the death of code, but the moment the container dissolves. Utility unboxed everywhere and all at once. And all at once, infinite capability, infinite code. And very interesting.

• 1:11:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a, yeah, it's a fun narrative. I wonder where, if there will be, there's a big question about like discovery. How will people discover these vibe coded apps? Distribution seems to be king. We saw that with Levels I O. Like, he was able to vibe code. He had a very different outcome from the random vibe coder who wants to share a link on, on X, unless you're Chris Pike, apparently, and you're not shadow banned from posting links. I mean, good links will break through, of course. And of course, you can always do a, you know, a viral video that, that announces your website and pitches it and then gets people to go there, even if they have to open up a new tab. But distribution will be king. So, get ready to optimize. And the value of the prompt will be, will be important, like the,

• 1:12:22John Coogan?

  the value of actually coming up with a unique idea and then it creates value, even if the instantiation of that value happens very quickly via vibe coding.

• 1:12:30Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:12:31John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's tell you about Bezel. Go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Check it out. And I want to close out with this post from Guillermo Rao, the founder of Versell, who's been on the show. "The only durable mote in technology is relentless execution." And we got Molly O'Shea in the comments, "Or violent execution." I like that. But this, this relates to the previous Chris Pike post, right? That, that as, as the barriers to entry come down, the winner is the one who executes relentlessly, right?

• 1:13:08Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:13:09John Coogan?

  And we see this all over the place.

• 1:13:10Jordi Hays?

  And I would, I would put an image in people's minds, relentless execution is like a golden retriever chasing a tennis ball, right?

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  It's good, that's a good metaphor.

• 1:13:20Jordi Hays?

  No matter what is in their way, no matter what, you know, gets in their path or presents challenges to getting that tennis ball, they're going to relentlessly charge at it until they get it and bring it back to you. And that is kind of like, I think, the right framework to be, to approach life with, right? A golden retriever is not, you know, rabid, foaming at the mouth, you know, being, you know, a poor sport. They're just, you know, joyful, you know, relentlessly chasing that, that tennis ball. And so I hope everybody brings that energy to the rest of their work week.

• 1:13:56John Coogan?

  I agree. I agree. Go have a golden retriever weekend, everyone. This has been a fantastic show. Thanks for tuning in. Are you gonna miss your flight? We have a whole bunch more guests. We're doing a bunch more of these special days, and we'll have a whole bunch more ads for you, of course. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, please, and stay tuned for the next one. Thank you. Cheers.