The AI Slop Debate, OpenAI’s $1T Web, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Shayne Coplan, Antoine Tessier, Rami Karabibar

(02:09) - The AI Slop Discourse (18:48) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (20:07) - OpenAI’s $1T Web (24:50) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:13:47) - Shayne Coplan, founder and CEO of Polymarket, discusses the recent $2 billion strategic investment from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE), valuing Polymarket at approximately $8 billion. He highlights the partnership's potential to integrate prediction markets into mainstream finance and emphasizes the synergies between Polymarket's consumer-focused platform and ICE's institutional expertise. Coplan also expresses excitement about collaborating on future tokenization initiatives, aiming to enhance the efficiency and accessibility of financial markets. (01:22:27) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:55:35) - Antoine Tessier, CEO of duPont REGISTRY Group, discusses the company's transformation into a digital platform for luxury car enthusiasts, aiming to facilitate online transactions and community engagement. He highlights the launch of duPont REGISTRY's live auction platform and emphasizes the importance of storytelling in marketing, focusing on the passion between drivers and their cars. Tessier also notes the younger generation's readiness to purchase luxury vehicles online, underscoring the company's commitment to evolving with its audience. (02:09:02) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:17:57) - Rami Karabibar, CEO and co-founder of EvenUp, discusses the company's mission to level the playing field for personal injury victims by assisting attorneys with AI-driven tools that expedite case settlements and enhance outcomes. He highlights EvenUp's rapid growth, including a recent $150 million Series E funding led by Bessemer, and emphasizes the importance of accuracy in legal AI applications to maintain trust and effectiveness in the legal process. (02:35:49) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:03John Coogan?

  I forgot we were gonna start on Horse Cam.

• 0:06Jordi Hays?

  How could you forget?

• 0:07John Coogan?

  It is.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  The horse has a fedora.

• 0:09John Coogan?

  Tuesday, October 7, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome, the temple of technology.

• 0:14Jordi Hays?

  The fortress of finance.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  The capital.

• 0:17Jordi Hays?

  The capital.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  Fantastic day today. Jordy did get food poisoning yesterday. We went out to, can we say where we went? Can we say who we were talking to? I don't exactly remember the rules, but.

• 0:30Jordi Hays?

  I don't think we can discuss the discussions.

• 0:32John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  But I think we can say that we are with a Mag7 CEO.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  But if we say the event that we were at, then it's obvious who we're talking to.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  We had a magnificent evening.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, we had a magnificent evening with a magnificent seven.

• 0:50John Coogan?

  And you can probably just figure out who it is by looking at what events.

• 0:54Jordi Hays?

  I mean, there's a lot of companies in the Mag7.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  Seven of them.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, we did, we did get to hang out with David and Ben from Acquired as well, which was super fun. We're gonna have them drop by the studio tomorrow.

• 1:07John Coogan?

  I'm excited for that.

• 1:08Jordi Hays?

  Which I'm looking forward to.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  I'm gonna ask them to quickly summarize the full history of every technology company.

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  And every luxury goods.

• 1:14John Coogan?

  And every luxury, and every company ever, actually, and Costco too. Throw that in. Quick.

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  Retail.

• 1:17John Coogan?

  Just give me a one liner on Costco.

• 1:21Jordi Hays?

  Name every person on Costco's team.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, but we did have a fantastic evening, although Jordy did get food poisoning. I think.

• 1:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Ryan Walsh, how did you get food poisoning while with a Mag7 CEO? Good question. There was two types of fish served at dinner.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  There were two types?

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  And I indulged in both. That was.

• 1:40John Coogan?

  I skipped the fish.

• 1:41Jordi Hays?

  There was that crudo and then there was.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, I had a lot of the crudo. The crudo was not the problem. I'm fine.

• 1:45Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  I'm fine. But I, I, I think it was because I had a glass of the sang sere, the wine. And you did not partake in the wine. And I think the, the alcohol.

• 1:54Jordi Hays?

  I was punished for it.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  It, it served as, it detoxified my stomach and prevented me from getting sick.

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  The toxins from the alcohol.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  It was poisoning the poisoned food instead of poisoning.

• 2:03Jordi Hays?

  That's it.

• 2:04John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  That's it.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  Anyway, what a day. It did, we, yeah, so we talked a lot about AI slop, AI video slop. And I had this thesis, it's been kicking around in my head for a while. And I thought it would be interesting to kind of relay my thought process after talking to a bunch of creators and folks working in big tech. So we've been talking about the AI video stuff and the wave has been fascinating where Vibes was like immediately jumping to like this is infinite jest, it's terrible. And same thing with Sora 2. Like we jumped way past like any of the normal discourse. There was a little bit of discourse about the electricity stuff and the water. My water bill is going to go up because of this. There was some talk of AI psychosis.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  And that discourse is still going on, to be clear.

• 2:52John Coogan?

  It is.

• 2:53Jordi Hays?

  There's a post here. We can pull it up. I'll put it at the top of the timeline while you continue on.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. But I thought about, there was a time when the narrative around this type of content, like fake content, doctored content, fake news, AI content.

• 3:11Jordi Hays?

  It says, "Me watching Stephen Hawking drop into a sick half-pipe McTwist while my electricity costs triple."

• 3:18John Coogan?

  Honestly, so down. It's great, but...

• 3:21Jordi Hays?

  Worth it.

• 3:22John Coogan?

  I mean, that is one of the greatest AI videos. And that gets to my point, which is that I don't regard that video as AI slop. I would like to be shown that video. I don't want to be shown an endless stream of AI slop that is bad, but there are obviously creative ways to use these tools. There are even ways to reappropriate the tools that where the joke of the video is that it's an AI video and it's like self-aware. And those are very interesting. I was watching Casey Neistat's video all about his reaction to Sora and he used a lot of AI video generated from Sora in the video. And so like there was a time when the answer and the call from the public was, "We need to build an AI detector

• 4:06John Coogan?

  and we need to cordon this content off in its own tab." And that's kind of what Meta Vibes is doing. And that's what Ben Thompson was talking about. He was like, I have not been enjoying my Instagram experience because I'll be scrolling and then I'll see some AI content and I'm in this active mode again of like, is this real or not? As opposed to on Meta Vibes, to his point, he was like, I can just lay back and look at it and it's like a screensaver and it's chill and I know every-

• 4:30Jordi Hays?

  And you've been using it a lot, right? You've been vlogging multiple hours a day.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  I have not been using it a lot. Also, Ben Thompson kind of reversed his position and was like, like, because he was, he was saying he was bullish on Vibes and like, less interested in Sora, but then he was like, look, the charts speak for themselves. Like, people clearly like Sora a lot more than Vibes, uh, just looking at the growth of the, of the App Store. And so, um, the, but there was a call for like, let's build a detector. I think it's a bad idea for two reasons. One is it's this Red Queen's race between AI generation and AI detection. Like, the original, uh, did you ever look at generative adversarial networks, Tyler?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, for sure.

• 5:10John Coogan?

  Um, like, can you describe like the thesis of a GAN and why it works?

• 5:14Speaker 02

  Um, yeah. So it's basically that, this was like the first kind of way that, that generally worked of, of producing images.

• 5:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  Um, so there's like two parts and they're basically, uh, acting against each other. So, so one part is the, the, the generator. So it will like create an image.

• 5:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  And then there's the other part, which is the, uh, detector and it tries to figure out if it's AI or not.

• 5:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Um, and then they basically go against each other. They're trying to beat each other at all times. And then basically you just, um, like, because you're training the detector based off like, sometimes you, uh, give it a real image, sometimes you give it a fake image.

• 5:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  And then slowly-

• 5:49John Coogan?

  And if it can detect the AI image, that gets negative points in the reward function. And if it can't, and if it thinks, yeah, this is real, then it gets upvoted from, hey, you did a good job generating that AI. So like, effectively, a lot of these models that are AI generators have AI detectors like built into them. Like, it's part of the training process. Uh, I don't know exactly how the diffusion models work. I think they work similarly. I think that, that concept from the generative adversarial network has been employed and, and repurposed.

• 6:18John Coogan?

  But it seems like it's kind of a, it's kind of this like endless arms race between like, you build a detector and then the generator gets better. And so I'm not even sure if technically it'll work. What do you think?

• 6:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, so there's like, a lot of people want the detectors, especially for text. But the text is a lot harder, right? Because there's just less signal. Like there's only, in a sentence, there's only, you know, like 20 characters or something. Yeah, you just can't get that much data out of it. Where with video and photos, it's actually much easier to like encode some like meaning that like, like there's this thing about like printers, they have these like little dots.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  And it like traces the printer.

• 6:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 6:53Speaker 02

  But you can't see it because there's just like, it's super faint and very small. You knew the same thing with images, where you can encode, like you just change the images, like just barely up a little bit brightness, down a little bit brightness.

• 7:03John Coogan?

  And you lose it.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  So you can.

• 7:05John Coogan?

  Like a slight crop and a slight tweak to the contrast. And it's probably the same thing in text where if you just add one extra space or one extra period or change one word, all of a sudden like the, the, the, whatever you've encoded in the overall text is just not going to read as much.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Yes. So like with, with text, you're basically like seeing the.

• 7:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:23Speaker 02

  You're seeing everything.

• 7:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  But with an image, you can like kind of change stuff just a tiny bit to where you're actually like seeing something else, right?

• 7:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  There's this famous example where with the image classifiers, you can like adversarily train against them to where like you have an image of a panda, but it thinks it's a dog because you just updated the.

• 7:39John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Kind of the, the pixels slightly.

• 7:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And even with like the Sora watermarking, like immediately I saw a watermark removal tool that just does the inpainting just on those watermarks.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  But what I'm saying is.

• 7:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  You, you should, in theory, it should be much easier to create like a classifier that can figure out if an image is AI or not. Like if it's directly from Sora.

• 7:58John Coogan?

  For a while, but you, you don't think it'll, you don't think it'll be this endless race where like the AI image generators will just get better and better and better and like the AI detectors will just always be like a little bit behind?

• 8:09Speaker 02

  That could be true. I think also, OpenAI probably has some incentive to, to have

• 8:15John Coogan?

  Watermarking?

• 8:15Speaker 02

  Something that's like a classifier.

• 8:16John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  Or at least something that's like able to be classified on.

• 8:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Like a watermark.

• 8:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  And if you think people will mostly just be using OpenAI or Google's image video generations instead of open source stuff.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Because it'd always be like a little bit ahead.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that Apple will make any moves in terms of embedding anything in meta, like the metadata to like prove that this was taken, is an unaltered video from an Apple device?

• 8:39John Coogan?

  Yep, for sure. Some of that.

• 8:43John Coogan?

  Should be fakeable, but I think that for the most part, that's definitely coming. Yeah. It already is there to some degree in the metadata. That's maybe a little bit hard to spoof, but there's always a way around it. But there's definitely some stuff that you can do with cryptography to like sign, basically like sign the image as like from this, at the hardware level, from this hardware device. I think that there will be this endless race between these two, but there will always be people that figure out how to sneak in something because it's like, okay, well then, like you can prove that it's from an iPhone, but what if you film a screen that's AI generated? Well, then, then you have a video on your phone that says it was taken with an iPhone, but and it's signed, but it's actually AI generated.

• 9:25John Coogan?

  So there'll always be these ways around it. So I think that it's a little bit of like, like somewhat of a waste of resources. We should probably do it to some degree, at least be able to classify, but that's not really a perfect solution.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  The other, the other like side of this is that I don't know that we need to build AI slop detectors into large media platforms because the problem isn't AI, it's slop. Like the people enjoy seeing the Stephen Hawking at the X Games video. You don't like, we already have tools to filter out slop. They're called algorithmic feeds. If you don't like slop, you will swipe past it and it automatically, and you automatically get served other content and that just happens naturally. And so there is a problem with algorithmic feeds, though. They have, they're pretty far from their final form and we should go through a little bit of the history. So they used to just focus on the, the initial action of choosing to watch a video.

• 10:21John Coogan?

  So on YouTube, for instance, they would rank videos in your algorithmic feed based on click through rate. So they'd show you thumbnails. If you clicked, that was the only signal that went into the algorithmic feed that the video was good because it got a click. And so what people would do is they do clickbait and they'd in the thumbnail and title be like, I bought a Bugatti. And then you watch the video to the end and it's like, actually the person just went to the store. They bought a toy. Exactly. Bugatti. Exactly. Yeah. And so. Mr. Beast had this thesis of like clickbait that delivers. If he says he's going to crush a Lamborghini, he's actually going to do it. Uh, and so YouTube changed to, uh, view duration and watch time. So they shifted to being more watch time focused. And this did really solve the clickbait problem, uh, because videos that earn clicks, but not watch

• 11:06John Coogan?

  time were deprioritized. So you can be very high CTR, but low AVD and you do not go viral in the algorithm. So this led to relatively high user satisfaction, but there still is the problem of being glued to your phone, watching something that is engaging. You watch all to the, all the way to the end, but after you're done and you're reflecting on like that hour that you spent watching that video, you're like, why did I waste an hour watching that? Uh, because it was essentially slop, even if it wasn't created with AI, it was not good. And the signal to the algorithm right now is I love that video. I watched a hundred percent of it, but internally you know that that was a waste of time. And so you can churn. I wound up churning from Tik Tok at one point because I downloaded the app like years ago,

• 11:50John Coogan?

  scrolled and was like, yeah, this is some good stuff. This is interesting, but then afterwards I was just like, this is candy. I'm not interested in this and I just uninstall the app and I've never, haven't been on since. And so, um, there's the, there's the, there's what I think is like the third phase, which is companies are starting to do now. So, uh, phase one is click through rate optimization. Then you get to AVD, average view duration, watch time optimization. Third is ARPU, like, uh, average revenue per user optimization. So it's not enough to get someone to watch a full video they hate because then they might not open the app again. I personally churn from Tik Tok for this reason. Recommendation algorithm that optimizes for average revenue per user over an entire year is going to focus on mitigating app churn.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  Cause it doesn't matter that you just got, you know, one really great video. They watched it all, but then they never came back. You want to optimize for, they came back a lot over the entire year, but that can still lead to brain rot. Like you can brain rot your users into being very high average revenue per user for a year, for a while, but eventually they get so brain dead that they lose their jobs, drop out of society, uh, they become depressed, they stop being good customers, they stop being good consumers, which is something we can't have in the American economy. Uh, and so my answer to this and my pitch for these algorithmic platforms is to optimize for LTV, true LTV, the lifetime value of a user is usually estimated over a couple of years. If you're a startup, you look kind of crazy if you come in with like a five year LTV.

• 13:17John Coogan?

  But if you think about how long I've been using YouTube, it's basically been my entire life and it's been like 20 years or something I've been on that platform since it started in what 2005. And so, really, you should be modeling the-

• 13:31Jordi Hays?

  You're just saying YouTube is 20 years old really makes you feel old.

• 13:36John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. But you should be, you should be actually considering the full human lifespan. Like algorithmic video platforms should basically work like this. If I show this kid a brain rot video, I might be able to show some, some cheap toy ads right now, or some mobile game ads or something like that. But if I show this kid an educational video and I teach them how to program, teach them how to be a business person, then they go get a high paying job and in 20 years I'll be able to show them ads for Ferraris. And if I show them ads for Ferraris, I'll make more money discounted in today's dollars. And so you should have an incentive at the algorithmic level to actually upskill, actually

• 14:18John Coogan?

  engage people in having like a meaningful life where they wind up generating enough-

• 14:22Jordi Hays?

  So you're saying YouTube should actually create their own dropshipping course to help everyone become financially independent?

• 14:29John Coogan?

  It could be a variety of things, anything that leads to a fruitful life, right? So the current-

• 14:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I think it's, I think it's just that tension between, you know, helping create a more valuable user over time-

• 14:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 14:43Jordi Hays?

  And extracting as much attention-

• 14:45John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  You can get value from in the short term.

• 14:47John Coogan?

  Exactly, short term versus long term.

• 14:48Jordi Hays?

  And then the tension there is that, you know, all these scaled platforms or public companies that need to-

• 14:53John Coogan?

  Yep, quarterly earnings.

• 14:54Jordi Hays?

  Show results today.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 14:57Jordi Hays?

  And so there's, there's a-

• 14:58John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so none of the current recommendation algorithms are at all tuned to the average American's lifespan, which is 78 years. But I think they should be, they don't have enough data for this and I don't know if they will, how they would solve for this before they have a full cohort. Like it's going to take, YouTube's 20 years old, but the average American's 70, lives 78 years, it's going to take another 50 years to get a full, just one cohort to be like, okay, now we know that, now we know what happens if you show kids this video when they're young, or this video, and we saw how their entire life played out. And turns out that this one was a better customer, so we should show them more of this. Like, that's the feedback loop. It's a 78-year feedback loop, basically. It's crazy. Maybe not 78, but maybe 50 years.

• 15:41John Coogan?

  Like, it's a really long feedback loop. It's gonna take a long time to get all that data. But that's how these algorithms should work. And so I have no idea how they will solve for this before they have a full cohort. It's gonna be some rough estimation, but I continue to believe it should be the guiding light of all the stewards of large algorithmic content platforms. Like, even if you don't have the data, even if you can't just train the algorithm on that, you should still be thinking about the type of content.

• 16:06Jordi Hays?

  This was the critique of ByteDance, right? People would talk about in China, the Chinese version of TikTok shows like science and math videos.

• 16:13John Coogan?

  Why is that?

• 16:14Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, your children are getting shown, you know, slop.

• 16:17John Coogan?

  And they have like a 10,000-year plan over there. They're thinking in decades. And so you, as the steward of an algorithmic platform, should be thinking in decades. And you should be thinking about, if I take this, you know, quarterly earnings bump right now, but I wind up ruining all my customers' lives and they wind up being bad consumers, that's a financial issue. Like, that does work within the capitalist framework. And so I think you should build an algorithm that optimizes for your users, leading more flourishing lives, so they can ultimately afford more expensive things and make you more money. It's capitalism at its best. Anyway.

• 16:51Jordi Hays?

  Perfect blend of techno-optimism and hyper-capitalism.

• 16:56John Coogan?

  Yes. And for what it's worth.

• 16:58Jordi Hays?

  And one theory. I like it.

• 16:59John Coogan?

  The response to this, I gave an abbreviated version of this pitch, and the response is magnificent. I think it resonated very well, which I was excited about.

• 17:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, you know what else is magnificent?

• 17:11John Coogan?

  What else?

• 17:12Jordi Hays?

  Ramp.

• 17:12John Coogan?

  Ramp.com, Time is Money, Save Both, easy-use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Go to Ramp.com.

• 17:20Jordi Hays?

  Another magnificent thing, actually, future member of the MAG8, Sam Altman.

• 17:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 17:26Jordi Hays?

  Will be joining the show on Friday to talk about Sora.

• 17:28John Coogan?

  We're very excited for this.

• 17:30Jordi Hays?

  This is a real picture of him.

• 17:31John Coogan?

  Yes, he's been hitting the gym.

• 17:32Jordi Hays?

  Not, this hasn't really been in wide circulation, but we kind of expect this to be one of the default headshots that he uses going forward. He looks fantastic here, so.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  We're very excited for it.

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  Very excited for this. Lots of... Questions that we have around Sora, the real plan is, and I'm looking forward to it. It'll be noon Pacific on Friday. And in other news, Morgan Houseall, friend of the show, has launched his new book, The Art of Spending Money.

• 18:02John Coogan?

  Is he coming on soon? We gotta get him on.

• 18:03Jordi Hays?

  I just sent him a message. I kinda botched it. I was supposed to email him a long time ago, but we'll work on getting him on hopefully tomorrow or Thursday. Very excited to read the book myself. I'm assuming a lot of the book will be about Ramp, but which we obviously know quite a lot about. But I'm interested to see what else he's writing about.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Yes, this is the psychology of corporate cards. That's the next book. You're like, is he doing SpawnCon now? What? That's what we should write.

• 18:36Jordi Hays?

  Good stuff.

• 18:38John Coogan?

  Anyway, Restream.io, one livestream, 30+ destinations, multi-stream to reach your audience wherever they are. Get signed up for free, folks. Fabricated knowledge, Doug O'Laughlin, he was on the show yesterday, had a great time hanging out with him. He says, oh my God, faceplant, faceplant, faceplant. Oracle lost nearly $100 million from rentals of Nvidia Blackwell chips, which arrived this year. That's partly because there's a period between when Oracle gets its data centers ready for customers.

• 19:05Jordi Hays?

  And he's bolding this part.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  And when customers start using and paying for them, the documents show it's not clear what causes the gap or how Oracle plans to shorten it.

• 19:15Jordi Hays?

  And so, of course, he's referencing an article by The Information this morning, an absolute bombshell.

• 19:21John Coogan?

  Bombshell.

• 19:21Jordi Hays?

  They dropped, "Internal Oracle data show financial challenge of renting out Nvidia chips." And obviously Doug is highlighting that, yes, it's possible to lose money between the time when you invest a lot of money in something and when you can actually sell the service. So not a huge surprise there.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  So Joe Weisenthal had a little take on this. He said, is this from him? This is from Bloomberg Terminal, but I don't know if it's an information article put into a Bloomberg.

• 19:50Jordi Hays?

  There's another post here from Dolly Balli.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  You wanna read that one?

• 19:53Jordi Hays?

  He says, "Information article is stupid. If you look at the beginning of a site ramp, obviously there's no margin lol." So anyways, timeline, putting this one in the truth zone.

• 20:05John Coogan?

  Indeed.

• 20:05Jordi Hays?

  I think we need to ourselves.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  Indeed. The Financial Times had an interesting breakdown of OpenAI's current corporate structure, which

• 20:16Jordi Hays?

  Not enough red string here.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, every time you think it can get, it's like, oh, oh, well, OpenAI has 12 different organizations within OpenAI. It can't get any crazier than this. Well, they go and do deals with every single company in the world, apparently. So this

• 20:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, every time I list off how many companies are riding with OpenAI and how many companies' current market caps depend on their partnership with OpenAI.

• 20:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:44Jordi Hays?

  I always leave off too. I'm always like, think of like Nvidia, Oracle, and CoreWeave. And then it's like, oh, there's actually Broadcom and AMD.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:51Jordi Hays?

  There's also SoftBank. There's also Microsoft.

• 20:54John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:54Jordi Hays?

  And it's just all over. And the interesting thing that, you know, we had been talking about off air yesterday is this dynamic where you kind of have to assume there'll be some type of correction in the coming two years.

• 21:07John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 21:07Jordi Hays?

  Not a super bold statement to make.

• 21:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll get to that.

• 21:11Jordi Hays?

  And OpenAI could very well be the only company in this crazy web that's private, which could be an advantage in an environment where we're seeing, you know, massive drawdowns. And it just, just, just due to OpenAI can effectively controlling your share price.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, I like this take. I thought, what's interesting is that like, being, being public during a major correction is not a death sentence. Like, Amazon got through it. They saw a massive drawdown. But is being private during a massive drawdown an asset? Is that something that you should be optimizing for? Does it matter at all?

• 21:52John Coogan?

  Because in some ways, if you, if you go out, you're public, you raise a ton of money, you have a fortress balance sheet. Yes, you might have employees who are disappointed because they're, they're

• 22:04John Coogan?

  Their personal financials are being marked to market and they're way down. That would be emotionally rough, right? But at the same time, it is possible that at least it's public and at least you know there's some liquidity and you're not sitting there wondering like, am I, is this company actually worth zero? Like you're being marked to market and it's like, if you're at Amazon in 2000, 2001 and you're down, I think they went down like 80, 90%, right?

• 22:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Oracle withstood a more than 80% drawdown between 2000 and 2002.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  I really wonder how that was as an employee. Like if you were, if you were there at Oracle and you were like, I'm about to buy a house. And then you're like, I'm about to buy a shack.

• 22:53John Coogan?

  Was it that, like, was it that rough? Like, did you, like, were, like, did that emotionally affect your work? But do you, but did it emotionally affect your work? Were you like, ah, I'm too depressed to do the database migration? Like, I'm too depressed to call.

• 23:07Jordi Hays?

  I have a family friend that retired in their early 40s, kind of after the, after the dot com craziness. And they sold, not at the top, they sold about, they exited the majority of their position. I won't, I won't name the company, prior, you know, six months out from the top. And so for a while, they looked really silly.

• 23:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:29Jordi Hays?

  And ultimately, they were telling me all the peers that they had were still working to achieve like the wealth that they had on paper during 2020 years later.

• 23:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  And so you can, again, going through these is, is, I feel like the venture industry broadly had to go through this somewhat, obviously, in 2022, 2023, right? Everybody had these crazy paper marks that suddenly were, were not, not living up to expectations.

• 24:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:05Jordi Hays?

  Or, or at least.

• 24:08John Coogan?

  There are some crazy, crazy examples. I don't know if Akamai is one of them. There's a few companies. I think Akamai was actually, it still is not at its all time high of the dot com boom. Cause it IPO'd at three hundred, in nineteen ninety nine, it was at three hundred and twenty seven dollars a share. And now it's at seventy six. I never know if the splits are accurate and whatnot. But there's been a bunch of companies that traded down. I mean, Akamai went down by ninety nine percent. And then built back up and saw, you know, fifty X gain over the next twenty years as they built back. And it was like, it was always a real company. It was just massively overvalued in the dot com boom.

• 24:50John Coogan?

  But it will be a, oh, this is a funny post you just put in the timeline. There's a bubble in people calling for bubbles, calling for bubbles or calling bubbles. Are you calling for a bubble? We pray for a bubble. You don't call for a bubble.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  We used to pray for a bubble like this. We did. We did.

• 25:08John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 25:09Jordi Hays?

  I do remember in twenty twenty three during, you know, post SVB. I, I wouldn't go so far as to say I was actually praying for a bubble. But I thought it'd be crazy if our industry went through something like that, quite that crazy again. And sure enough, we got it. And AI, the current AI hype cycle, hasn't even got to dance with low interest rates yet.

• 25:34John Coogan?

  It hasn't gotten to dance with low interest rates or leverage, really.

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  Imagine that.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  Or leverage. Yeah. Yeah. Everyone's, everyone's saying it's nineteen ninety nine. Not many people saying whether or not it's January, December of nineteen ninety nine, because that is important. What day did the actual stock market peak in nineteen ninety nine? I have, I have a search here. It was actually March tenth, two thousand, March tenth, two thousand. So if it's January and you're like, oh, I'm calling, it's nineteen ninety nine, I'm going bold, I'm calling the top. It's like, no, you're calling, if you're calling, if you're calling in January of nineteen ninety nine, you're calling yourself fifteen months out from the top, which is a wild amount of time. Lot of room to make money. Who knows?

• 26:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was, uh, who was it yesterday? Paul Tudor Jones was saying he feels like there, he was on CNBC yesterday saying, hey, things feel overheated, but he was basically calling for like a blow off top.

• 26:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 26:30Jordi Hays?

  He says, in his view, it can get a lot crazier before a correction. So, and again, that feels like the, the, the general sentiment right now is, you know, Doug on the show yesterday was saying like, look, we're not even, most of these companies are not even levered yet. And like, that is like, almost certainly going to happen.

• 26:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:51Jordi Hays?

  Except Oracle, they're.

• 26:53John Coogan?

  They're pretty levered, but not that crazy levered. Like there, there is some fake news around the, the, the 5X leverage that's going on over there. Uh, it's not quite, uh, that big of a deal. Um, but, uh, let's switch.

• 27:06Jordi Hays?

  Famous last words.

• 27:07John Coogan?

  But first, let's tell you about Privy, wallet infrastructure for every bank. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions, and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Uh, Joe Lonsdale is celebrating one of his portfolio companies. He says he's blown away by the talent behind some of these great companies. Just a casual Nobel Prize. Uh, so Sonoma Bios Fred Ramsdale won the 2025 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his work on regulatory T-cells or T-regs, which act as an emergency brake on the immune system. T-regs are a critical link in understanding autoimmune disease and advancing immunotherapy more broadly. So, congrats to him. He's the

• 27:49John Coogan?

  co-founder, former chief scientific officer and a current advisor to Sonoma Bio, a trailblazer in cell, cell therapies and an 8B C portfolio company that 8B C has proudly supported from the beginning. He led the team that discovered and characterized the gene F O X P three. Talk about a cool name for a gene. F O X P three. I like that. Uh, which plays a critical role in T-regs development, leading to a new field of immunotherapies. Um, the thesis continues to be validated with portfolio companies like Orca Bio, which recently received FDA acceptance priority review of its BLA and Orca T and hemologic malignancies. See below.

• 28:27Jordi Hays?

  Joe just comments, cool. I agree.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  Did he comment? No, I think I clicked in. I think I clicked in. I was wondering if he commented cool on his own post, which would be, uh, some, some king, a king move. Anyway, uh, another 8B C portfolio company. Cognition.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  The makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal engineering team. Martin Scrawley's been on a tear. Got your capital breaks down. So Scrawley does it again. He picked a stock that went up 1,400% today. That is an insane pop. Martin Scrawley says long SPRB. His price target is $500. It was trading at 25 at the time. And or I guess even less. It was trading at eight and it went up 152.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  Scrawley on Friday.

• 29:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:17Jordi Hays?

  You could buy one share.

• 29:19John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  Bruce Biosciences for $8.78. It's now trading at $197 per share.

• 29:27John Coogan?

  That is crazy.

• 29:28Jordi Hays?

  Still sitting at a $111 million market cap.

• 29:33John Coogan?

  I still don't understand like can he can't run a fund, but he can trade this like is this financial advice? Like he seems like he's playing it really fast and loose, but he's clearly calling good stuff and doing research. So appreciate the work.

• 29:48Jordi Hays?

  He's been, I think, making a lot of people a lot of money.

• 29:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. So everyone's happy. He says his price target is $500. Rare disease is his specialty. The ERT for San Filippo will be approved, CMC notwithstanding, and be the new standard of care. Said, I was working on a presentation when the news was scooped, but this drug restores the abnormally high levels of heparin sulfate to normal. Without this drug, patients will die at 18, the normal ranges of HS. They may live a normal life. Well, that's really exciting. That seems really good. TJ P says, I'll pass already up too much.

• 30:24Jordi Hays?

  It's just.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 30:25Jordi Hays?

  If it goes up a lot, there's no way it could go up more.

• 30:27John Coogan?

  There's no way. Well, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free, brother.

• 30:37Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, start playing around with Figma Make in.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  Chat GPT, I want you to test out the

• 30:44John Coogan?

  The integration, that sounds very interesting.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  At Dev Day.

• 30:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, do you know if those agent builder tools are like general availability already?

• 30:53Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, so I tried to use the agent builder earlier today. And then you have to, I couldn't get it to work because you have to verify your organization.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  And then I, I tried to put in my ID and then it just like said failed.

• 31:05John Coogan?

  Hmm, interesting.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  So I don't know.

• 31:06John Coogan?

  Oh, well.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I'll try it again, but they are generally available.

• 31:10John Coogan?

  Okay, well, that's good. Well, Max Meyer is breaking down the Free Press acquisition. This was announced yesterday. Barry Weiss's Free Press was acquired by Paramount.

• 31:23John Coogan?

  Max says, seeing so much cynicism and bitterness on the timeline about the Free Press. So let me tell you why I love it as a contributor and why it means so much to many people. The FP is a match made in heaven between writers and readers. We writers can't leave, live without readers and the FP readers are amazing. Savvy, thoughtful, opinionated, but kind. I can't tell you how many emails, texts, phone calls, DMs I've received every time I put a piece in the FP. These are Americans I want to know and the FP is their gathering place. I've written pieces about very random things. Warren Buffett, my brother. Not, he's not, Warren Buffett's not his brother. There's a comma, he says, I've written about Warren Buffett. I've written about my brother. I've written about

• 32:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:05John Coogan?

  A Missouri resort town, the Latter Day Saints church and SpaceX, which is an amazing blessing. And a credit to their smart editors. The FP team and the readers care deeply about America, even if they disagree about politics. Some, just scroll some of the comment sections on Trump related articles and you'll see the amazing fights and disagreements. What Barry Nelly and the entire FP team have done in three years is now the model for media. Make something so good that people would walk over glass to pay their hard earned money for it. Not to get through some terrible paywall, but to be part of something. The Free Press is worth every penny Paramount paid, probably more. How often does a talent like Barry come along? And people who work in the world of talent should know this rather than be cynical or conspiratorial. Barry and team have a long way to go from here. This is the beginning.

• 32:48John Coogan?

  The complainers should watch and learn. Which is exciting.

• 32:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I just looked at this as a way to make CBS News relevant again.

• 32:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  To a new.

• 33:01Jordi Hays?

  Important class of readers.

• 33:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:04Jordi Hays?

  A much younger demographic than the CBS audience today.

• 33:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:08Jordi Hays?

  And you look at it as like a trade deal, right? This is a talent acquisition.

• 33:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:13Jordi Hays?

  Barry Weiss will probably create far more than $150 million of value just by being a part of CBS.

• 33:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Also, I mean, I do think that like, I mean, we talk about this a lot, but like, audience quality is like, still deeply misunderstood. A lot of people just look at total audience size, impressions. They see every reader as the same value. And that was certainly true in the days of the three major networks, CBS, NBC, ABC. But we're just in a completely different, much more fragmented world. And so I don't know if they had a million subscribers or something like that. But the people that opted into the Free Press's funnel are probably way more monetizable than the people

• 34:00John Coogan?

  that are, you know, turning on late night CBS for the, you know, 50th time. And so they definitely pulled in interesting people, pulled in me when they signed Tyler Cowen. And I've been enjoying his column there. He wrote a wild one about how his favorite new actress is AI. Very controversial. He's really leaning into it. It's great. But Alex Bronzini, Bronzini Vendor is a perfect example of someone who's a little bit of a Free Press hater. So the Free Press on October 6th said, "The Free Press is joining Paramount." And they share a link to the FP.com. They put the link right in there.

• 34:41John Coogan?

  And Alex says, "This post has accrued 147 likes in four hours, nearly one for every million dollars Paramount thought the Free Press was worth." And honestly, 147 likes on X with a link in there to a Substack is, uh, it's a miracle.

• 35:00John Coogan?

  It's a miracle.

• 35:01Jordi Hays?

  It is.

• 35:02John Coogan?

  But yeah, people are laughing. But yeah, Nick says the New York Times gets similar likes on Twitter. You're not saying anything meaningful. And yeah, I don't think anyone believes that Barry Weiss has as big of an audience as Mr. Beast. But that doesn't quite matter because it's a different audience and hitting certain audiences is more valuable than other audiences. Where else should we go?

• 35:28Jordi Hays?

  Jordan.

• 35:29John Coogan?

  The entrepreneurial tech glaze. The hat is back in the news. The hat is back in the news. Anthropic hat. Break it down.

• 35:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Jordan says the tone of the quote entrepreneurial tech glaze makes me sad for the whole world and all of history. That is a bold statement. I don't know. I mean, did we talk about this yesterday?

• 35:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:46Jordi Hays?

  I think that Anthropic's campaign is good. I don't think it's, and I can see why people want the hat. And Anthropic is a great brand and they have a great team and they have a unique culture.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:00Jordi Hays?

  And they've been able to retain people. It's the place that many of the brightest minds in AI want to work at.

• 36:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:08Jordi Hays?

  That said, I don't think this is an award-winning campaign.

• 36:12John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 36:13Jordi Hays?

  It's like they put a verb on a dad cap, right?

• 36:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:16Jordi Hays?

  We've been doing this since like

• 36:17John Coogan?

  2016.

• 36:18Jordi Hays?

  2016 is kind of how I clocked it. They're selling coffee. A lot of people in tech have done this.

• 36:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 36:26Jordi Hays?

  I think this is more just excitement around Anthropic's overall positioning, right? As like the anti-slop AI company.

• 36:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 36:34Jordi Hays?

  So people are choosing to side with them and they've built up a cult around what they're doing, which is very powerful. But again, I'm not, I'm not blown away by the ca- I love the Anthropic team and I think their products are amazing.

• 36:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:54Jordi Hays?

  But personally, at no point was I thinking

• 36:58Jordi Hays?

  I need to line her up around the block to get this hat, you know, and I actually wouldn't, wouldn't wear the hat, but um, um, so anyways, I think.

• 37:08John Coogan?

  It would be caught dead in the hat.

• 37:09Jordi Hays?

  I wouldn't be caught dead in the hat. Don't even try to put one of these on my head.

• 37:13John Coogan?

  I, I, I, I think the hat is kind of like a side show.

• 37:16Jordi Hays?

  They're cool. It's fine. It's just that you put a verb on a dad hat.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:22Jordi Hays?

  Do you want to?

• 37:23John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 37:23Jordi Hays?

  Do you want an award?

• 37:25John Coogan?

  No, they didn't ask for award. People are just excited about that.

• 37:28Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 37:28John Coogan?

  But that's, so Jordan Castro is reacting to the reaction. It's not like Anthropic went out there and was like, please like glaze us, you know, it's just like they got glazed. And then Jordan is like, stop with the glaze and it's not really their fault, but I, I, I think the bigger question is like, is like, is I?

• 37:45Jordi Hays?

  I just think the question is can they get a true foothold in consumer? Because this campaign.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  That's a great question. That's a great question.

• 37:51Jordi Hays?

  This campaign is very consumer focused. I saw these keep thinking billboards on, uh, I don't know, not, not Melrose, uh, Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood.

• 38:02John Coogan?

  Sandwiching between two friend.com billboards.

• 38:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, probably. I'm surprised they could even buy them. John and I, John and I drive, John and I drive around.

• 38:11John Coogan?

  We see friend billboards everywhere.

• 38:13Jordi Hays?

  You can't go two.

• 38:14John Coogan?

  They're everywhere.

• 38:15Jordi Hays?

  You cannot go two blocks. It's like every other block.

• 38:18John Coogan?

  It's every.

• 38:19Jordi Hays?

  The most massive billboards. I saw, we saw a friend.com billboard that is like basically behind the building and I was like, Avi.

• 38:26John Coogan?

  Why did he even pay for that one?

• 38:28Jordi Hays?

  Did you just really hit market buy?

• 38:30John Coogan?

  He bought everything. He went on adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Only, only adquick.

• 38:41John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, get on adquick because they will help you pick billboards that are not directly up against walls.

• 38:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, you, you know, in, in no circumstance would an entrepreneur with limited resources look at this billboard and think, yep, I gotta have this one because it's like more than two thirds of it was covered by a building. You had to be at the most insane angle while you're driving by. You have to, you have to peek around out your window.

• 39:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, I mean, uh,

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  But, but so, so here's what I'll say about Anthropic's campaign.

• 39:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:12Jordi Hays?

  Breath of fresh air.

• 39:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:13Jordi Hays?

  It's quality.

• 39:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:15Jordi Hays?

  It's not award winning.

• 39:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  And I think that the people that like it, I totally get why they like it. Breath, breath of fresh, fresh air. I understand why other people. That are not in tech are thinking this is the best that you got.

• 39:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:29Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is, this is your hero?

• 39:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:33Jordi Hays?

  It's like, the bar is just pretty low, right?

• 39:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:35Jordi Hays?

  Bar overall is low. And one of the challenges is that AI, the, the brands of AI companies get tied to the outputs.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 39:44Jordi Hays?

  And sometimes the outputs are great and often, and most often they're not so great, right? And so, um, I'm interested to see how aggressive OpenAI gets with that video campaign they did with the, um, what's the tele, Euphoria?

• 39:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Euphoria.

• 39:59Jordi Hays?

  I thought those videos were great.

• 40:01John Coogan?

  Um, yes.

• 40:02Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  What's interesting is that, uh, Anthropic did a, a video series that was very similar aesthetically. Uh, warm tones, highly cinematic, shallow depth of field, uh, very emotional, like just a few weeks or months earlier. I can't even keep track at this point. Uh, so both of them were experimenting in the same brand landscape. Um, I, I personally would like, uh, you know, our sponsor, Vanta, to do a hat that's actually just a huge llama helmet. And it says automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously on it. And it should also say, you know, the Anthropic hat is so simple, it just says thinking. It doesn't even say Anthropic on it. I think the Vanta hat should say, Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program,

• 40:48John Coogan?

  like all the way around the hat. Just put the entire landing page on the hat. I think that would be innovative.

• 40:54Jordi Hays?

  Um, I, uh, there's also, I was thinking, uh, somebody needs to make a, uh, nobody's made the AI smart helmet yet that you can wear all the time.

• 41:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 41:05Jordi Hays?

  From the moment that you wake up to the moment you go to bed, potentially even when you're sleeping. Think about how much compute you could put in a helmet.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  So much battery. You could have all day battery, all month battery.

• 41:14Jordi Hays?

  All month battery.

• 41:15John Coogan?

  Also, wearing a motorcycle helmet is incredibly cool.

• 41:19Jordi Hays?

  Hardcore.

• 41:20John Coogan?

  You, I mean, I know you haven't seen Kill Bill, but the bride, played by Uma Thurman in Kill Bill, uh, Tarantino, Tarantino classic, uh, wears this motorcycle outfit with this motorcycle helmet and just looks so sick.

• 41:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So next time we talk with Zach, that's going to be my pitch.

• 41:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:36Jordi Hays?

  AI motorcycle helmet that you can daily.

• 41:39John Coogan?

  Imagine you're just like, just rocking it in the workplace and you're just like, I'm locking in.

• 41:44Jordi Hays?

  I don't, yeah, we're joking about it, but I could see this actually being created. It's like a rugged helmet.

• 41:51John Coogan?

  Dude, it's more comfortable to wear a ski helmet or a motorcycle helmet than Apple Vision Pro.

• 41:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:56John Coogan?

  Let's just be honest about it.

• 41:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 41:58John Coogan?

  And so why not strap that whole thing on your, on your head? I love it. It's amazing. I have a couple rebuttals to you. First, I'm going to talk about graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. But so Anthropic in consumer, they're clearly behind, but it's very interesting because they have a fantastic model that can instantiate code very quickly. You could do all of this like on the fly app development, basically. So when you ask a question, it actually builds a piece of software for you that's interactive. There's so many cool things that they can do with their foundation model. Also, they have Mike Krieger. And so I, I just feel.

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  But I was trying to push him on a little bit. What, what can you do on the social side to catalyze?

• 42:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:43Jordi Hays?

  Claude's growth.

• 42:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, like when I think of the backlash to meta vibes, the backlash to Sora 2 and Sora. If I were to try and build a team that would not face backlash to a consumer product, to a new consumer product, I would back Claude with Mike Krieger, right? Because he's going to build something that's like delightful, just like the early days of Instagram. I would think that he would inject that kind of like simplicity and beauty into the product that they build. Who knows? Maybe it's coming. Maybe every foundation model company needs an answer to the AI slop TikTok feed. And I would be very excited to see what comes out of Anthropic.

• 43:22John Coogan?

  The other take on this hat is hat aside, I think that keep thinking is a good phrase. I think thinking is a good phrase. I think it's a good word. I think they picked that word well and it excites me and it actually hits like, you can talk a lot about it like, oh, they just a word on a hat. But of all the words to pick, it feels more human. It feels less, less cyber punky. It feels less like super.

• 43:55Jordi Hays?

  Very human.

• 43:56John Coogan?

  Personal super intelligence feels like, okay, maybe that's opposed to my interests, like fast takeoff, all these scary AI doom things, which Anthropic is like honestly famous for.

• 44:05Jordi Hays?

  Everybody is loving this campaign, but Thinking Machines lab.

• 44:11John Coogan?

  That is true.

• 44:13Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely brutal.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  But I thought it was interesting that that the message is keep thinking. If you're a human, keep thinking. Don't stop thinking. Like what we do here at Anthropic is not think for you. That's an interesting message because for a long time, people were saying.

• 44:29Jordi Hays?

  They say we hear for you.

• 44:33John Coogan?

  A lot of the, what's that problem?

• 44:35Jordi Hays?

  Waystar Roy.

• 44:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. So.

• 44:40John Coogan?

  So a lot of, like, a lot of the AI, like, a lot of the AI rhetoric has been. The AI will be able to think for you. And Anthropic is specifically putting on a billboard, whether they believe it or not, or whether that's where AI actually goes. They're encouraging you to say, hey, keep thinking. Because that's not our job. Our job, you do the thinking and we do the coding and all the boring stuff.

• 45:03Jordi Hays?

  Are you sure they're not just worried? It's like, hey, you guys are relying on Claude a little too much. Why don't you keep thinking, buddy?

• 45:08John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. And so that is the question is like, is this Dario's new view? Because the view that Dario has espoused on many a podcast is, yeah, you're not going to be thinking because there's like a 45% chance that everyone's dead. Because, you know, he like, he comes out with some hardcore rhetoric that does not feel extremely warm or human or anything about like, hmm, hat. Like, are you going to be wearing hats if we're all paper clips? Like, no. And so like, is this a, is this the marketing team at Anthropic saying like, let's, let's step away from Dario's viewpoint a little bit? Or is it more, Dario has actually shifted his thinking and is saying like, no, I actually feel like what we are building is complementary to humans. That would be exciting.

• 45:53John Coogan?

  And I feel like that would be inspiring to me and I would be, I would be excited about that. And so I don't know where all this goes, but it's, I think it's a step in the right direction. There, there, there are so many other campaigns that could have been. Less human, more clanker coded and would not have hit. And this one clearly hit to the point where it got so much positive attention that there was a backlash to the positive attention. Which I think is, it's kind of the best case scenario for a really positive ad campaign is that people get sick of people talking about how good your ad campaign was. So I think it was pretty good. We need to react to the AI homeless man prank on someone's dad.

• 46:37Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 46:38John Coogan?

  Uh, we've been instructed that we must.

• 46:39Jordi Hays?

  Our silence has been deafening.

• 46:41John Coogan?

  It's been deafening. Uh, can't we pull this video up?

• 46:45Jordi Hays?

  While we pull it up, Avi Schiffman has hit the timeline again. He says, every single available bus shelter in LA now has a friend ad. So apparently there weren't enough ads.

• 46:57John Coogan?

  That's what people were saying. They were like, Avi.

• 46:59Jordi Hays?

  They said more.

• 47:00John Coogan?

  We need more bellboards. You gotta push this campaign further. There just aren't enough bellboards. People aren't aware of your campaign. You're barely making through, buddy. Snap it up. Uh, let's watch the AI homeless man prank on my dad video.

• 47:17John Coogan?

  Okay, so you take a picture, send it to the dad. I can't read any of this. This is too small.

• 47:30John Coogan?

  Is this add, is this like Nano Banana adding the dad to the, to the pictures of the actual house? Seven phone calls from the dad. So he's, he's pitching, I'm bringing in the homeless person into my house. No. Oh, in the bed. Do you think this is at all real or do you think this is all theater? Do you think this is all created?

• 47:55Jordi Hays?

  All theater.

• 47:56John Coogan?

  All theater?

• 47:58Jordi Hays?

  But it's mildly entertaining.

• 48:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is. Uh, it is an interesting case study in like AI slop in the sense that like it's using AI to create, you know, Photoshop text messages, I suppose. Um, and, uh, and, and getting a laugh out of that, but.

• 48:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's like using AI to lie. For entertainment.

• 48:19John Coogan?

  To lie, yes, but but it's it it the lie is like a meta commentary on the nature of AI slop, right? Because it's it's the the joke is on the dad or the theoretical hypothetical dad and this kid, the character of the dad. Anyway, let's talk about Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. Ask Julius to analyze your data. Images that make you feel pain?

• 48:49Jordi Hays?

  There's a post here from Ishwarya, who says, low key, the anthropic NYC pop up hype is proof a lot of tech people have never been invited to a Fashion Week event or a real brand activation before. Keyword being invited.

• 49:04John Coogan?

  It's probably true. I mean, these are wildly different worlds.

• 49:09Jordi Hays?

  Hayden Johnson has a post here that says, every AI ad is like, hey Gemini, what would I have for lunch? And then the phone is like, sandwich. And the guy is like, wow.

• 49:23John Coogan?

  That's so funny.

• 49:23Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 49:24John Coogan?

  Okay, we need to watch the video of Ken Griffin, giving some hot takes about the AI.

• 49:30Jordi Hays?

  This is, this should be the most near term bearish thing you watch today.

• 49:35John Coogan?

  Let's see, from Bourbon Capital, Bourbon Capital highlights, finally, someone isn't afraid to speak the truth. People have been speaking the truth or, you know, giving hot takes for months now. Let's just make that clear. But let's hear it from Ken Griffin himself at the Future of Global Markets 2025, Sedal Securities Conference.

• 49:52Speaker 03

  Large language models in particular have been in existence for a few years. I think there's a real chance that when we think about the the forms of of AI that are alluded to by many of the markets leaders today, that their dream for the future may not take three to five years to play out. It could be 20 years. It could be 30 years. You know, it's like the internet and I, I, people hate this analogy, but like the dot com moment.

• 50:22John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 50:23Speaker 03

  Back at the start of this century. Did anyone have any doubt that the internet was going to change the world? No. Has the internet changed the world? Absolutely. But did it take longer than anticipated? And was there a period in which, which there was a real sort of sorting of the winners and losers that took place? Unequivocally, unequivocally. And I think that the AI story will have many of the same components.

• 50:53John Coogan?

  There's a bubble and people calling for bubbles. Tyler.

• 50:58Jordi Hays?

  But I think this is, this is, this is just ultimately a very sound analysis. And it's coming from somebody who is highly intelligent, highly accomplished, highly invested, and yet doesn't personally, to my knowledge, have a billion dollars of equity in a lab who's incentivized to keep the party.

• 51:20John Coogan?

  Well, he might have a billion dollars like this second and then not tomorrow. And then no, no, not the next second and then this second and then not.

• 51:25Jordi Hays?

  Ken, Ken, Ken's going to make money no matter what.

• 51:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:29Jordi Hays?

  He doesn't, you know, I'm, I'm sure he's making a lot of money now, maybe, maybe in a correction he makes less, but he's going to do fine no matter what. And so it's important to.

• 51:38John Coogan?

  Sundial got roasted in the financial crisis.

• 51:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:40John Coogan?

  They drew down like 50%.

• 51:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he didn't almost like wind down the fund.

• 51:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was really, really rough.

• 51:45Jordi Hays?

  Bad. But, but it's important to not just listen to the predictions and opinions of people who have the heaviest bags.

• 51:55John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 51:56Jordi Hays?

  That are dependent on keeping the party going as long as possible.

• 52:00John Coogan?

  Uh, Tyler, what you got?

• 52:01Speaker 02

  Um, so it could also be that his competitors are invested in AI labs, right? I think Jane, Jane Street is big in.

• 52:09John Coogan?

  Anthropic?

• 52:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, big in anthropic.

• 52:10John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, yeah.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  Maybe it's really.

• 52:12John Coogan?

  Lack of bags, problem with, he has lack of bags, so he's bearish.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  Sidelined.

• 52:17John Coogan?

  Lack of bags is, is as much of a conflict as not having conflicts is a conflict because you don't have bags. And so you're incentivized to be bearish on people that have bags.

• 52:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:27John Coogan?

  This is a fact.

• 52:28Jordi Hays?

  He wants to crush his enemies.

• 52:29John Coogan?

  Tyler, how many days until the singularity?

• 52:32Speaker 02

  We're still, we're still at thirty-six fifty. I guess it should have.

• 52:35John Coogan?

  Thirty-six fifty.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  There wasn't a lot of big news since I changed it last, so I guess it should have gone down every day, but.

• 52:40John Coogan?

  So ten years until the singularity. We need to be updating that daily, so at least we're ticking down. But watching that Ken Griffin clip, are you adding days? Are you removing days? What are you thinking?

• 52:51Speaker 02

  Ken Griffin is like kind of boomer coded, so I'm saying, I'm saying we're closer to AGI after watching this.

• 52:58John Coogan?

  Okay, you think, you think he's a contra indicator for AGI progress?

• 53:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 53:02John Coogan?

  Okay. So you're, so you're removing days. So we're down at like three thousand days now, just nine years.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  I mean, six hundred days, I think that that's almost two years, right? That's a little too big of an update.

• 53:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  But.

• 53:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Did, did either of you watch the Dwar Kesh Sutton reaction? The apology video?

• 53:18Speaker 02

  Someone said, this is so funny. It was not apology video. Dwar Kesh did apologize in the video,

• 53:24John Coogan?

  but only saying, I apologize if I'm mischaracterizing your, your statement and I have some of the ground truth wrong. But I, I thought it was interesting. I, I felt like I came away originally thinking that the, that the bitter lesson was poor endless commute, compute behind any algorithm that's working and scaling, when Sutton kind of reclassifies it as like, like the game of the AI researcher is to hunt for the next algorithm that will scale with compute. And he's not saying that any algorithm will necessarily scale infinitely with compute. And so he, like my, my takeaway was that he was, he's, if he looks at LLMs, he's like,

• 54:02John Coogan?

  good progress for, for ums, maybe need a new thing to go for the next five ums or something like that. Was that your, was that your read?

• 54:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the, the thing about LLMs is like, you, like the scaling, like you, there's just no more data to scale with. So it's like not kind of bitter lesson pill in that sense anymore, because you can't just keep throwing more compute at the same LLMs. Because if you just make the models bigger or whatever, it, it's not like, it's not going to get better. The model won't be better because the, because the data is, is constrained.

• 54:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's this weird thing where like, on, like, you can zoom out and look at like computing power over the past fifty years and see a very, very smooth curve. Then you can look at like the AI winters and see that there's like these huge steps in progress, the transformer paper, um, the, uh, I don't know, there, there's been a whole bunch of like, uh, ImageNet, right?

• 54:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, reasoning models.

• 54:59John Coogan?

  Reasoning models. Big, big step forward. And those are like, those are like a decade apart sometimes. Um, and so you get these like qualitative bumps where you're like, oh, wow, like this feels different. But then in that interim, you might not see a lot of like qualitative jumps in clear progress, clear new capabilities, but the diffusion of that economic value is immense. And so we like technically pre LLM, we were kind of in an AI winter, I suppose, where like, you know, self-driving cars were like 10 years behind and nothing was really like popping in AI. AI was not a buzzword. Uh, people weren't using dot AI domains. But in that, in the, in the period of time from like, call it 2010 to 2020, like what

• 55:44John Coogan?

  was the economic impact of AI? Like it was insane, right? Because Netflix was doing recommendation algorithms, Amazon was doing recommendation algorithms, the Facebook algorithmic ad feed, TikTok feeds, like, like AI wasn't transformer based LLMs, but AI was a massive driver of economic growth.

• 56:04Jordi Hays?

  Do you think it's possible that Anquilla created the AI hype cycle?

• 56:07John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 56:08Jordi Hays?

  In order to sell more dot AI domains?

• 56:10John Coogan?

  Isn't like 50% of their GDP AI domains now?

• 56:13Jordi Hays?

  50% of their like

• 56:15John Coogan?

  Budget.

• 56:15Jordi Hays?

  Basically like budget comes from

• 56:17John Coogan?

  It's remarkable.

• 56:18Jordi Hays?

  Dot AI.

• 56:18John Coogan?

  It's remarkable. Well, if you want to generate some media, head over to Fall, the generative media platform for developers, the world's best generative image, video and audio models, all in one place, developing fine-tuned models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters.

• 56:32Jordi Hays?

  And if you want to bring our soundboard into your team meeting,

• 56:36John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:36Jordi Hays?

  Team Zooms, your team hangouts, go to tbpn.com/sounds. Brought to you by Fall.

• 56:42John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, Chubby says, I double-checked, you can already buy Unitree's G1 at Walmart, only $21,000 shipping in one week. Tesla must hurry to deploy their optimism.

• 56:54Jordi Hays?

  Buy one. Do we buy one?

• 56:56John Coogan?

  We got to, right?

• 56:57Jordi Hays?

  We got to.

• 56:58John Coogan?

  We have to buy one of these and have Tyler fight it.

• 57:02Jordi Hays?

  It's such a wild thing to let a fox into the hen house, but sometimes you gotta do it, right? The global economy let Sam all the fox into the hen house.

• 57:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and, uh, we'll see what happens. We gotta let-

• 57:17John Coogan?

  The fox in the hen house analogy is amazing, but I don't think of the TVP and Ultra Dome as a hen house.

• 57:21Jordi Hays?

  G1 Basic. This is the CCP Fox into the Ultra Dome and just-

• 57:26John Coogan?

  I think of the TVP and Ultra Dome less as a hen house and more as a bull ring.

• 57:32Jordi Hays?

  More of a fox house.

• 57:33John Coogan?

  We're still on the farm, but over here you have the bulls jacked, fighting.

• 57:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, there's also-

• 57:39John Coogan?

  You mess with the bull, you get the horns. Unitree, you're on notice. If you send over a Unitree G1 Basic for $21,000 with shipping in one week, and you try any funny stuff, you're getting the horns. Cause this is not a hen house.

• 57:50Jordi Hays?

  I would say this is like letting a clanker into the fox house.

• 57:54John Coogan?

  We're all foxes now?

• 57:57Jordi Hays?

  I think we, I think I, I-

• 57:59John Coogan?

  This is a hen in the fox house. In the fox hole.

• 58:04Jordi Hays?

  I, I'd be kinda worried leaving the G1 Basic with Tyler, the, you know, I, presumably Tyler would be tasked with setting it up. But then you're thinking about, okay, the G1 is gonna be here with Tyler. Potentially after hours and I'd be should be a little bit worried about Tyler.

• 58:22John Coogan?

  So we can, so we can train it to swipe ramp cards or something? What, what, what, what can we do with this?

• 58:26Jordi Hays?

  You could, uh, automatic gong hits?

• 58:28John Coogan?

  Ooh, automatic gong hits. Sounds good. Put me out of a job. Wow. Real, real black belt in economics.

• 58:35Jordi Hays?

  Dario was right.

• 58:37John Coogan?

  Automate-

• 58:38Jordi Hays?

  White collar work.

• 58:39John Coogan?

  White collar work.

• 58:40Jordi Hays?

  AKA gong hits.

• 58:41John Coogan?

  And I hit a gong. Uh, that is remarkable. We'll have to-

• 58:44Jordi Hays?

  I can't believe we're doing this again like we did with drones where we're just gonna let Unitree just flood the market.

• 58:50John Coogan?

  Yes. Where is, uh, where, where are the hawks?

• 58:54Jordi Hays?

  I'm normally, normally, you know, against government intervention, but, uh-

• 58:59John Coogan?

  Two hour battery life? Look at this thing. We gotta get one. Tyler wants it so badly. I wonder, I wonder what else you can do with it. Like, how strong is the API? Does it have like the ability to issue voice commands?

• 59:13Jordi Hays?

  Can we replace the hands with ramp cards?

• 59:16John Coogan?

  Swiping everything. You get dangerous. Anyway, we are being joined by Shane from Poly Market in just a few minutes. In the meantime, let me tell you about what Buco Capital bloke is saying on the timeline. He says, "We had a good thing, you stupid son of a... We had 98% gross margins and LTV to CAC ratio is above 5. We were considered safer than first lien debt. Nobody questioned our terminal value or stock-based compensation. We had everything we needed and it all ran like clockwork. You could have shut your mouth, funded a few new SaaS companies each year and made as much money as you needed, but you just had to blow it up. You and your pride and your ego." Talking about AI. Lots of people having fun. Well, in the, uh, in the rest of the AI world...

• 59:57Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, OpenAI sent around a bunch of, uh, basically, uh, deal toys for people that spent over, uh, or used a trillion tokens with OpenAI. Notion got one, Ramp got one, a bunch of others. Lauren Good says, "This is sort of like spending a million bucks gambling and the casino gives you a free hotel room for the night." It's close. I think, I think that's the next, that's the next leg up in the, in the cycle.

• 1:00:23John Coogan?

  Cognition got, uh, got one trillion hacking. Ramp got one. And I was trying to do the math on how much a trillion tokens actually costs so I could clock how much these companies are spending. ChatGPT, uh, clocked it as if they're doing GPT 3.5 Turbo, uh, that's the cheapest, cheaper case. That's a million bucks. If it's GPT-4 Standard, that's $45 million. So, potentially hitting, I mean, Notion has talked about how this hit their gross margins. It's not an immaterial cost, but a lot of value to the customers. And Tyler, what's the cheapest way? Do you have a, do you have an update on how, how cheaply you could acquire one of these deal toys?

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, um, well, so, so the main thing you would do is you can do a batched API calls. So instead of just doing like one and then you, you get the response, you send like a ton and then it, it's, I think it's like within 24 hours, you'll get the response back.

• 1:01:17John Coogan?

  Do you actually do that when you, when you run your examples?

• 1:01:20Speaker 02

  Uh, no, none of the stuff I do is.

• 1:01:21John Coogan?

  Oh, so money just doesn't matter to you around here? You just don't care about cost optimization at TVP.

• 1:01:25Speaker 02

  I gotta be timely.

• 1:01:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  But I, I think that is.

• 1:01:28John Coogan?

  That is money.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  I think that's either 50% or 90%. And then the other thing you do is you can do cached inputs.

• 1:01:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:01:34Speaker 02

  Which is like, I, I forget which one is which 50 or 90%.

• 1:01:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:36Speaker 02

  But if you combine those, then it's like massive savings. So then I think if you combine those with, is it, is 3.5 triple the cheapest? Or it, I feel like it's GPT-5 nano.

• 1:01:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, something like that.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  Um, but I think you could probably do it for a couple of thousand dollars.

• 1:01:50John Coogan?

  I, I think I saw someone, maybe they were talking about 10 million tokens.

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  Billion.

• 1:01:55John Coogan?

  Uh, 10 billion tokens.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  I think that post was like.

• 1:01:58John Coogan?

  But they said $25 for a 10 billion token. So for two grand, you could potentially get one of these deal toys that are pretty rare. Maybe they'll flip these, who knows? This is a piece of, uh, this is a piece of lore.

• 1:02:07Jordi Hays?

  Did you see Matt Levine's summary of AMD and OpenAI?

• 1:02:10John Coogan?

  Yes, Martin Scrawley put this in the truth zone to be clear. Let's read it.

• 1:02:14Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I'll read it.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  But first, let me tell you about TurboPuffer's Search Every Byte, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Uh, read Matt Levine's summary.

• 1:02:23Jordi Hays?

  How do these negotiation, negotiations go? Uh, like schematically? OpenAI, we would like six gigawatts worth of your chips to do inference. AMD, terrific, that will be 78 billion. How would you like to pay? OpenAI, well, we were thinking that we would announce the deal and that would add 78 billion of, of, to the value of your company, which should cover it. AMD, dot, dot, dot. OpenAI, dot, dot, dot. AMD, no, I'm pretty sure you have to pay for the chips. OpenAI, why? Uh, AMD, I don't know, it just seems wrong not to. Uh, OpenAI, okay, why don't we pay you cash for the value of the chips and you give us back stock? And when we announce the deal, the stock will go up and we'll get our 78 billion back. AMD, uh, here we go. AMD, yeah, I guess that works. So I feel like we should get some of the value. Uh, OpenAI, okay, you can have half.

• 1:03:07Jordi Hays?

  You give us stock worth like 35 billion and you can keep the rest.

• 1:03:12John Coogan?

  Martin Scrawley didn't like it. He said, this is not at all what happened and Matt Levine is stupid. You shouldn't read him. Zero days, Wall Street experience, word sell. He's not happy about it.

• 1:03:21Jordi Hays?

  Mogged.

• 1:03:22John Coogan?

  Mogged, but uh.

• 1:03:24Jordi Hays?

  This is interesting.

• 1:03:25John Coogan?

  I think it's, I think it's a funny take.

• 1:03:26Jordi Hays?

  From uh Jay Bull, tard on X. How hilarious is this Oracle move? Oracle makes all the AI names rip on some made up capex guide using revenue that doesn't exist from OpenAI. And now it sinks the entire space with bad news regarding AI capex not working. What a joke.

• 1:03:49John Coogan?

  I mean, how, how quickly do you expect the capex to pay off? It's.

• 1:03:53Jordi Hays?

  Oracle sold off hard.

• 1:03:55John Coogan?

  How about?

• 1:03:55Jordi Hays?

  This morning, uh, went from $290 a share to $270 a share, but it's climbing back up. We may be back to where we were.

• 1:04:03John Coogan?

  I think that's because people are reading into the, uh, that, that, that article about the.

• 1:04:09Jordi Hays?

  The information, the new Hindenburg research.

• 1:04:11John Coogan?

  Potentially, but I think people corrected the record pretty quickly on that. Yeah, if you were expecting high margins, what, it's like two weeks out from the Oracle news, maybe a month. I mean, I guess we were at the stock exchange for, uh, for the Klarna IPO when the Oracle news broke, right? Or what, it was then, right? Yeah, that week. So that was just a couple of weeks ago. And, uh, and, um, I mean, it was definitely like the most aggressive deal ever. And it was a crazy deal, but, uh, people are potentially reading too much into the near term. The near term financial impacts because it just like takes time to understand.

• 1:04:52John Coogan?

  Like if the demand shows up and more people pay and the ads monetize and more people are, you know, seeing ads on Sora or paying for credits. Like there is a world where the economy keeps flowing back and forth and people, consumers are putting money into the system. And so even these circular deals work out, so.

• 1:05:11Jordi Hays?

  You want to add something bullish?

• 1:05:12John Coogan?

  Please, I'd love a bull.

• 1:05:14Jordi Hays?

  Russia's flagship AI product is called GigaChat.

• 1:05:18John Coogan?

  That's bearish because Russia is the bear, right?

• 1:05:22Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 1:05:22John Coogan?

  Their mascot.

• 1:05:23Jordi Hays?

  It's a cool name.

• 1:05:23John Coogan?

  That's a crazy mascot to pick, Russia. Instantly perish your entire country. Wait, what is it?

• 1:05:31Jordi Hays?

  It's called GigaChat.

• 1:05:32John Coogan?

  GigaChat. That's a pretty good name. All the different countries are really leaning into their sovereign AI.

• 1:05:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you don't hear much about Russian AI, though.

• 1:05:41John Coogan?

  No. I was wondering when they would get around to announcing something like because they have all these incredible math, like math experts, you'd think that they would be like really, really good. But maybe they've been preoccupied with a bunch of other stuff going on.

• 1:05:56Jordi Hays?

  Certainly. Yeah, I mean, they lost Nebius, too. Which would have been a national champion had they not gotten into a.

• 1:06:04John Coogan?

  That is a crazy story. Yeah, we gotta have the Nebius CEO on and dig into that. It's what a wild, wild time. Good morning, Nat Ellison. Is it Eliasen? How do I pronounce that?

• 1:06:14Jordi Hays?

  Nat Eliasen.

• 1:06:15John Coogan?

  Good morning.

• 1:06:16Jordi Hays?

  Remember the name.

• 1:06:17John Coogan?

  Good morning.

• 1:06:19Jordi Hays?

  Do we have time to get through this Wilmanitis post? This looks a little long.

• 1:06:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is the new meta, I think. I think the algorithm has changed on X. It used to be all about short, pithy, punchy posts. But now the 500-word long post is doing really well. And so we're seeing a lot more of those. Jeremy Giffon has dropped a couple that have done very well. Wilmanitis is now getting in on the action. Let's read through it. He says, "Every few weeks now, a fee drunk allocator declares a company going from zero to 2 million is not interesting. Only the ones that go from zero to 500 million. This is, of course, a very silly idea, but it is proximal to an important one. We are returning to a much older model for growth of internet companies. Welcome to the DL UGA.

• 1:07:07John Coogan?

  Following the dot com crash, the modern internet company was defined by sales as its fundamental motion for growth." Scared of the business development of the 90s, companies would hire farms of thousands of SDRs to smile dial and build pipeline. ACVs across the businesses fell steadily over the decades as we realized if we lowered the contract pipe, the contract price, collective delusions like product-led growth allowed increasingly lower and lower individuals on the totem pole to sign software contracts when cold called and thus increase the speed in which a business could grow, albeit in smaller and smaller steps. As the discretionary spend capabilities of a random software engineer increased, this is like the bottom-up

• 1:07:48John Coogan?

  adoption of software, so did the viability of product-led growth and thus we cargo-culted a set of growth metrics built around it: Time to 100 million, Cloud 100, etc. Some good businesses were built alongside many bad ones. It's easy to think of PLG as a trauma response to the dot-com and subsequent SaaS bubbles. If you lower your engine of growth to only grow in human-sized chunks, you can both grow increasingly predictably that revenue and decrease the damage of any given customer imploding has on your entire book. The best way to think of PLG perhaps is to perhaps imagine it as the golden calf of Exodus 32. If we had the real god, Enterprise, and we had the real god, Enterprise, and

• 1:08:31John Coogan?

  we decided to take the easier path after he stopped, when he stopped speaking momentarily. The shift we are watching today, with many companies growing quickly, one to $100 million in 48 hours, and many companies growing in massive chunks, OpenAI owning AMD, etc., is not a new model, but instead a return to the origin of this industry: Deals. Deals are, of course, the origin of the internet business itself. The internet business, as originally built, raised money exclusive to conduct "deals." The 90s were awash with channel partnerships, leasing agreements, customer book buyouts, IP sharing and washing, and all kinds of beautiful "deals." Deals. Deals, in all caps. The incredible Alex Danko, speaking on Jackson Doll's podcast,

• 1:09:16John Coogan?

  put this well, quote, "One of the interesting hallmarks of that era was that much of the genuinely forward progress a company had to make was by doing deals. The incredible stable surfaces and platforms we enjoy today, from which you can just build and get growth, didn't exist. Companies were ultimately dependent on business development at a much earlier and more critical stage." The path was much more milestone driven, involving major deals. For instance, you had to secure vendors for compute, buy computers, buy a database from Oracle, and also arrange distribution deals priced in than it ought to have been. Sound familiar? It certainly should. Even Oracle is still the same. These 100 to 500 million dollar stories are not software companies growing fundamentally quicker than their predecessors.

• 1:09:59John Coogan?

  They are software companies growing in fundamentally different ways. As we return to the deal, Yuga, we should expect the shape of these companies and the teams that run them to change even further. The teams and investors that learn from history from the first great deal age will avoid the many pitfalls that come from this kind of growth. Chief amongst them, the idea that partnerships and infrastructure providers much larger than you are somehow win-win altruistic arrangements and not having you the device of your underdog, of your undoing and hoping for the best. Welcome to the second deals era. We've never been more back. Fun. Very similar to what-

• 1:10:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, this is what people say about, you know, in another life, Sam Altman would be on Wall Street-

• 1:10:44John Coogan?

  Banker.

• 1:10:44Jordi Hays?

  Being as a banker.

• 1:10:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:46Jordi Hays?

  Doing deals.

• 1:10:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:47Jordi Hays?

  So it is, even his critics should admit that it's remarkable.

• 1:10:51John Coogan?

  Fantastic deals guy. Remarkable. And like, I think people have been so skeptical of the early deals, like the Microsoft deal. Like, it seems like that deal completely saved OpenAI. They were never going to get compute as a nonprofit. They had to do this insane deal to create this for-profit entity. Very complicated, something that requires an immense amount of, you know, greasing the wheels. And we're just seeing more and more of these like founder-to-founder deals, no investment bankers involved. It really is the era of the high-agency dealmaker. Jeremy Kaufman was talking about this. I asked Patrick Heskey about this on the show.

• 1:11:33John Coogan?

  This idea that in the future, folks with private equity backgrounds, investment banking backgrounds might be better as founders because they are more set up to be deals guys on day one, as opposed to the- The the more product focused, PLG focused, engineering focused founder of the YC 2010 era that was focused on building a product that was sticky, had a viral loop, would grow and kind of, you know, it just compound and then and then eventually they would learn to do deals at some point, but that was something that they would add on later, like learning financial engineering in in the second decade of your company. Now, companies and founders seem to be adopting these ideas on day one.

• 1:12:15Jordi Hays?

  For sure. Well, there's a video that went quite viral yesterday that we can pull up in the timeline. Another illustration of the deals between Nvidia, AMD and OpenAI.

• 1:12:26John Coogan?

  While we pull that up, let me tell you about profound, get your brand mentioned in chat GPT. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover products and brands. And we will pull up this video. Let's see it.

• 1:12:41John Coogan?

  Who, where did this come from? You just saw this on the timeline. This is.

• 1:12:44Jordi Hays?

  Hey.

• 1:12:46John Coogan?

  Is this AI generated?

• 1:12:46Jordi Hays?

  Oh, Lord.

• 1:12:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:12:47Jordi Hays?

  We need some audio here.

• 1:12:49John Coogan?

  Let's see. AMD Nvidia. Is it the Three Stooges? I think it is.

• 1:13:24Jordi Hays?

  Somebody quoted this and said, Kupi says, 25 years ago, this was called round tripping and was considered illegal. After investors suffer trillions in losses, it will probably be considered illegal again. So we will see. It's kind of the Wild West right now.

• 1:13:40John Coogan?

  Well, in non-AI news for once, we have Shane from Polymarket joining the show. He's in the restream waiting room. We'll bring him into the TV in Altrum.

• 1:13:52Jordi Hays?

  Shane, how are you doing? Look at that setup.

• 1:13:55John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:13:56Jordi Hays?

  Shane, can you hear us?

• 1:13:59Speaker 04

  I can hear you guys, I cannot see you guys.

• 1:14:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:14:01Jordi Hays?

  Okay, well, trust that we are looking at you and smiling at you and...

• 1:14:06John Coogan?

  You look fantastic.

• 1:14:07Jordi Hays?

  You look fantastic.

• 1:14:08John Coogan?

  What a day.

• 1:14:08Jordi Hays?

  Today's about you. Break down the news.

• 1:14:13Speaker 04

  It's hard not to look fantastic with this backdrop. This backdrop.

• 1:14:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:17Speaker 04

  Right there. I had to FaceTime all my family members, be like, "Hey, look at that." You know, now with the... With all the AI stuff, you gotta... You gotta show that it's true.

• 1:14:27John Coogan?

  You gotta break through.

• 1:14:28Jordi Hays?

  From the bathroom office in 2020 to the nice seat in 2025, anything is possible.

• 1:14:35John Coogan?

  What a run. Take us through the deal today, take us through the news. What's the... What are the key points in the announcement?

• 1:14:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, look, it's, um... I've never been really like a deal guy or a guy that's very focused on, um, you know... I would say a lot of entrepreneurs, they're very optimizing around fundraising, etc. I really just like building things. And usually what I've found is when you get traction and when you get motion and when people start taking notice of what you do, the money usually follows. And in this case, there was a lot of interest from people who wanted to invest, and I'm very grateful and humbled by all of it. And then Jeff reached out to me and it was kind of like... We got to talking, he has... He knows markets and traditional finance better than anybody. He runs his own company that he started, solo founder like myself.

• 1:15:29Speaker 04

  And there were all these ideas that we had that we could do together and we were very like-minded on it. And he was a big fan of Polymarket. So when... When he started saying, "Hey, let's do something," there were a lot of synergies that came together quickly. So it's very exciting.

• 1:15:42Jordi Hays?

  And this is not a token strategic investment. I mean, this is very, very meaningful. I think I... Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is like the single... This is the single largest investment in a crypto company ever.

• 1:15:59Speaker 04

  Okay, now... Yeah.

• 1:16:04John Coogan?

  Give us the actual numbers. What's the structure of the deal? Is this a strategic deal? It's not like you're giving it a series number, like a letter? Like, how are you actually describing the deal? I want to ring the gong for you. I want the numbers.

• 1:16:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, they're investing $2 billion.

• 1:16:22John Coogan?

  Let's go!

• 1:16:24Jordi Hays?

  Hit that gong. There we go.

• 1:16:28Speaker 04

  Oh, the gong's from your side. I thought the gong was like a periodic New York Stock Exchange thing.

• 1:16:33John Coogan?

  The gong is from our side.

• 1:16:34Jordi Hays?

  Gongs everywhere.

• 1:16:35John Coogan?

  We have it here in the studio.

• 1:16:36Jordi Hays?

  What can you share about what the partnership will actually look like

• 1:16:43Jordi Hays?

  over the next 12, 24 months and beyond? Like, what's most exciting about it to you?

• 1:16:49Speaker 04

  I mean, look, it's right now such a moment for prediction markets.

• 1:16:54Speaker 04

  It's been exciting for us to sort of be,

• 1:16:58Speaker 04

  like, you know, sit there and even two years ago, it really was a category that people kept writing off and saying, "Oh, yeah, it's an idea that makes so much sense, but it's never going to work." We're really excited that we were able to buy QC and be set up to go and to enter the US market. I think it's lining up perfectly. The stars are aligning. The timing's about as good as it could be.

• 1:17:21Speaker 04

  So on that side, there's a lot in terms of data and in terms of distribution and sort of who can have access to Polymarket, particularly in the US, but also globally, because ICE has, you know, exchange assets all around the world. But also, Jeff in particular, as he mentioned on CNBC earlier, is like, he's a big believer in tokenization. He's a big believer in all assets are going to be tokenized. It's a superior technology for the exchange of assets. And Polymarket is the biggest consumer product that's built on tokenization, under the hood. For every prediction market, it's actually tokenized. There's a yes token and a no token. So there's a lot of ideas we've kicked around there. And I think ICE has incredible savvy,

• 1:18:05Speaker 04

  and Jeff is incredible savvy about how you can do these things, utilizing existing assets.

• 1:18:12Speaker 04

  And understanding sort of the existing matrix of US regulation. And then where there could be pockets that there may have to be collaboration between the regulators and the innovators for how to basically do things that exist, but in a more efficient way utilizing new technology. So that's the thing that I'm definitely going to be leaning on him for. That's not the thing that I'm, that, you know, I can't say that I'm the best at that like he is. But in terms of the consumer side and building the products, ICE doesn't have any consumer properties, right? So that's where we come in. And that's where I think him and I, we have this mutual understanding, common ground of how these products could work. He's a very innovative guy, very forward-thinking. And, you know, we can kind of see the vision in terms of polymarket.com, how it can look there.

• 1:18:56Speaker 04

  And he can understand the infrastructure and how to make it happen from the regulatory and infrastructure side.

• 1:19:01Jordi Hays?

  Did you ever expect prediction markets to be in South Park to have an episode? Was that on your bingo card for this year? Or was that still a surprise?

• 1:19:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I love South Park. Like, I grew up a South Park kid. I remember watching the original movie. I remember being at Best Buy and buying season two, season three on VHS. And, look, I think that, it's funny, because the geopolitical markets on polymarket have proven to be extremely useful. Like, in the WhatsApp groups from people in the Middle East and people who are into open source intelligence, OSINT, they really watched polymarket like a hawk. And the sort of crux of the episode being this idea of like, you know, this sort of, will the mother in the Jewish family, you know, bomb Gaza?

• 1:19:56Speaker 04

  Like, that kind of being, it's this play on those markets. Like, it's definitely pushing it, but it's also just so South Park. And, you know, it's obviously all in good fun, but the way that they interpreted the situation and distilled it into a South Park episode, you know, you wouldn't expect anything less from them.

• 1:20:16John Coogan?

  What about just the Intercontinental Exchange, ICE, founded in 2000, backed by Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Shell, Deutsche Bank, Sock General? Like, it is the ultimate bridge to Wall Street. How important are those connections? Are you already plugged into all the Wall Street firms? Is this a new pipeline for you to just Wall Street generally? And professionalization? Like, how does that all play out for you?

• 1:20:50Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Look, I've historically been more of a cold email guy. So I don't think that would get me that far on this street. And yeah, you know, when I talk to Jeff and co. about this, like, they know everyone and everyone's a text or an email or phone call away. And that's really exciting because there's a lot of interest. Every time I meet somebody who's, you know, from the traditional world, high up, they love polymarket. They love what we do. They're obsessed with the data and they oftentimes track it. And, you know, it's something, polymarket's something that they look at frequently. And, you know, now, one, having the bridge, but also having the credibility of such a great partner,

• 1:21:32Speaker 04

  it's probably hard to underestimate how important that will be in terms of us bridging the gap, especially as we enter the US market and we open up for institutions.

• 1:21:40John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Anything else?

• 1:21:41Jordi Hays?

  Well, absolutely iconic image today.

• 1:21:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:45Jordi Hays?

  You outside the exchange.

• 1:21:47John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:21:48Speaker 04

  You know, it's funny, like, we've had so many missed connections, right? Like, there were so many times we were gonna hop on and I was gonna be in a little booth or like a little chair in the back. And I said, you know, one time, if I'm gonna go on, if I'm gonna go on your guys' pod.

• 1:22:02John Coogan?

  It's gotta be special.

• 1:22:02Speaker 04

  I gotta figure out how to mog one way or another.

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  Well, mog you did.

• 1:22:07Speaker 04

  So here we are.

• 1:22:08John Coogan?

  Shane, thank you for everything that you do to make this show possible.

• 1:22:11Speaker 04

  I appreciate it. I'm a huge fan of what you guys do. And it's awesome to see right there that the polymarket ticker.

• 1:22:19Jordi Hays?

  There it is.

• 1:22:20Speaker 04

  You know, you guys are real champions, pioneers. Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:22:25John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 1:22:26Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you on, Shane. Congratulations to you and the whole team.

• 1:22:28John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:22:29Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:22:32John Coogan?

  Those cubes look fantastic.

• 1:22:35Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely mogging. We have another post here. Blake Robbins said yesterday, OpenAI is operating on a different level. The amount they have shipped in the past few weeks and months is incredible. Eric says, indeed impressive, but the scattershot nature raises questions about the company's discipline and ability to support these disparate initiatives. Is OpenAI a frontier research lab, a social network operator, a commerce engine, a hardware company? Because it's hard to do all of that. Well, I would say they are a hyperscaler. If you look at any of the hyperscalers, they have a frontier research lab, they usually have a social network, they usually have a commerce engine, they usually have a hardware

• 1:23:19Jordi Hays?

  division. And it is hard to do all of them well. I think that Sam is playing for keeps, right? He's, you know, there's a lot of founders that wouldn't have launched Asora as a standalone app, right? There's a lot of founders that wouldn't acquire a company for $6.5 billion that doesn't have a working product yet and just kind of an idea of what they want to build, right? But he is incredibly aggressive. He's fast becoming too big to fail. And, you know, I think that put differently, if you asked, okay, this company has 800 million weekly active users. Do you think it's fair that they would get, experiment with a social

• 1:24:04Jordi Hays?

  network? Do you think it's fair that? So there's, there's a lot of companies with far less scale that are doing this kind of range of activities. But you have to, my framework for OpenAI now is looking at them as, as a, you know, as a hyperscaler that's going to launch products all the time, some of which will work, some won't. And that's totally okay. They're just, they're experimenting, they're shipping, and they're taking big swings because at this point for them to Take for them to create something that's meaningful to their business, it has to be a billion dollar opportunity. So.

• 1:24:42John Coogan?

  I agree. I have a rebuttal, but first I'm going to tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and build products, meet the system for Microsoft's development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. So, back in GPT-3, launched 2020, I was playing around in the playground and I was writing video essays at the time about companies and I wanted to create a list of companies that could potentially profile. And so, back in the day, there was no prompt, there was no RL, there was no RLHF. And so you had to, as Rune told us, like, the foundation models are complete hallucination. And so, you had to write a prompt that would really set it up to just continue what you were saying

• 1:25:24John Coogan?

  because it was just guessing the next word and it was not very good at it. And what I did was I went to GPT-3 in the playground and I typed out like, some of the most interesting business stories in history and I put, one, Theranos, two, WeWork, three, Lehman Brothers, four, spa-, dot, space. And then it would continue to fill in based on your prompt that you had written and it's just trying to guess the next word. And it actually did come up with some interesting companies that weren't on my radar and I was able to go and Google them and fact-check them and understand those stories. It never really became part of my workflow, but I thought it was interesting. And at the time, I was thinking like, this is a search engine. Like, it's just, it's just something that I would normally have

• 1:26:09John Coogan?

  gone to Google and searched for like, top 10 most interesting companies and I would have gotten a listicle, but GPT-3 just gave me the text itself. And so, for a while, my model for ChatGPT and OpenAI has been like, they're just the new Google. And my, my wondering is like, how much of the culture of Google has, you know, is a natural outgrowth of just having a fast-growing consumer? You know, web app. And if they're, if they're, if ChatGPT is growing, then will they have a bunch of twenty for twenty percent time projects? And so the social network operator, the commerce engine, the hardware company like Google's tried a bunch of those. They tried Google Plus, they tried Google Glass.

• 1:26:53John Coogan?

  Those didn't work, but YouTube's a great social network loosely. And their Android phone ecosystem is a successful hardware bet. Commerce engine, certainly that's cooking at Google. And so I, I do wonder how much you like, like, I agree, the scattershot nature raises questions about the company's discipline. But we've seen it play out before where if you have an engine that's growing, growing, growing, you can actually go and do a bunch of twenty percent time projects. Some of them hit, some of them don't.

• 1:27:24Jordi Hays?

  Also, Sam Altman has never come out and said, focus is our highest virtue and we're just gonna work.

• 1:27:32John Coogan?

  Hundred percent true.

• 1:27:33Jordi Hays?

  On ChatGPT. It's like, okay, their research.

• 1:27:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:36Jordi Hays?

  They're, you know, an infrastructure, they're becoming an infrastructure player.

• 1:27:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:27:40Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 1:27:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:27:40Jordi Hays?

  They're going to experiment in all the different areas.

• 1:27:43John Coogan?

  They have an API, cloud business.

• 1:27:45Jordi Hays?

  Do, right? I think I would be interested to see if they do. Again, like, do they acquire someone like a Snapchat?

• 1:27:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:27:54Jordi Hays?

  At some point, does that, does that happen?

• 1:27:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I don't know if they'll do.

• 1:27:57Jordi Hays?

  Suggested.

• 1:27:58John Coogan?

  At some point, they have to do a bunch of acquisitions, I would imagine. They're already doing some of them. Didn't they buy?

• 1:28:03Jordi Hays?

  Statsig.

• 1:28:04John Coogan?

  Statsig. And obviously other, other companies as well.

• 1:28:07Jordi Hays?

  They announced a acquisition of a company called Joy.

• 1:28:11John Coogan?

  Today?

• 1:28:11Jordi Hays?

  The other day, which was like a finance tool.

• 1:28:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they're, they're adding a bunch of stuff. I mean, other hyperscalers have done this in the past. I, I wonder, you know, obviously there's always a risk of being too scattered, but it is a large company. And it's also interesting to look at the timeframe. Like, a lot of people are viewing OpenAI as a company that started in 2023, essentially, even though ChatGPT launched in 2022. They really feel like the OpenAI story started in 2023. It did not. The company did start in 2015 and it was a frontier research lab for now a decade. And so if you look at the timeline for Google, well, Google search launches in 1998.

• 1:28:57John Coogan?

  And then six years later, in 2004, they're launching Gmail and that's a great product and it worked out. And so should you give them credit for the time they were wandering in the wilderness as a nonprofit? Or should you comp them just to when they got product market fit on on ChatGPT? Maybe something in between, but there's certainly a lineage of companies that find really strong internet product market fit, scaling, growing, and then doing other projects and not having those, not getting over their skis. A social network operator, what's the real cost if Sora blows up and it never goes anywhere? And they light a bunch of GPUs on fire? Well, if it fails, they won't be lighting that many GPUs on fire because nobody will be generating anything.

• 1:29:39John Coogan?

  If their hardware project goes south, like, yeah, that's probably multi-billion dollar investment. But a company of their scale at $500 billion with billions coming in from all sorts of different deals can probably take that hit on the chin and keep keep moving and keep refocusing on the on the main on the main main project. So I don't know how how how big of a of a worry it is, but

• 1:30:06John Coogan?

  they certainly don't seem to have been, you know, massively falling behind in the core product. We're not seeing, you know, huge churn or anything.

• 1:30:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Doug from Semi Analysis says, OpenAI is tweeting about real interest rates. We get a new Fed chair that's whole job is to lower rates to as low as possible. OBB means no taxes. Money becomes really cheap. You got to invest in America at all costs. Wow, it's so clear.

• 1:30:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, people are excited.

• 1:30:34Jordi Hays?

  DJT certainly wants you to invest in America.

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, let me tell you about numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Peter Wildiford has a forecast on how AI infrastructure spending goes over the next four years and what kind of models we'll see as a result. This is a very bullish take on AI infrastructure that I thought would be interesting to read through. I continue to assess that we are on track for models that can replace a wide variety of human labor, sometimes four to sometime four to 15 years from now.

• 1:31:07Jordi Hays?

  The big gap.

• 1:31:08John Coogan?

  Right in that singularity calculator we have going. He says, currently, the world does not have any operational one gigawatt plus data centers. However, it is very likely that we will see a fully operational one gigawatt data center before mid 2026. This will, this likely will be a part of a 45 to 60 gigawatt of total compute across Meta, Microsoft, Amazon, AWS, Anthropic, OpenAI, and Oracle, Google, and DeepMind, and XAI. So everyone's building huge clusters. They're all investing a ton in capex, and it will net out to something between 45 and 60 gigawatts next year.

• 1:31:46John Coogan?

  His median expectation is that these largest one gigawatt data center facilities will hold between 400 and 500,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips and be used to train four to the 27th flops, or four E27, so four times 10 to the 27th flop model sometime before the end of 2027. Such a model would be 10x larger than the largest model today and 100x larger than GPT-4. Each individual one gigawatt facility would cost 40 billion to manufacture with 350 billion total industry spend across 2026. Now, the big question is, how confident are we are, are we on scaling up those models?

• 1:32:27John Coogan?

  There's a wide range of takes around how easy it is. Clearly, we saw with GPT-4.5 and Lama Behemoth, and just scaling up, you have to be very careful about what you're scaling up. The actual underlying design of the model matters a lot. By the end of 2027, he expects a fully operational two gigawatt facility with total AI compute across all companies raising, reaching 90 gigawatts. That'll be a lot of inference. These two gigawatt facilities would cost 95 to 100 billion dollars each, and total industry spend would reach 500 to 600 billion. By the end of 2028, I expect the largest single facility to be a three gigawatt facility holding 1 million Nvidia Blackwells Ruben mix.

• 1:33:11Jordi Hays?

  Three nuclear reactors worth of energy.

• 1:33:15John Coogan?

  Something like that, yeah, costing 150 to 165 billion dollars to build capable of a 1E28 flop training run. A 1E28 flop training run represents a computational effort thousands of times greater than what was used to create GPT-4, allowing the AI to process and learn from vastly more information. Total AI data centers would reach 130 gigawatts combined with 900 billion to a trillion spent by the AI industry over 2028. That is a lot, but that matches up with what everyone's saying. Everyone's marshalling the capital. Everyone's planning to do this.

• 1:33:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think we, we want to look to Meta's earnings, next earnings call, October 29th. Zach is going to feel pressure to say the biggest number. And we should probably, we should probably stream that live. Do a companion stream.

• 1:34:07John Coogan?

  It'll be fun.

• 1:34:08Jordi Hays?

  I'm, I'm looking, I mean, I just think that's going to be a big indicator of, do they push all the chips in?

• 1:34:13John Coogan?

  Literally.

• 1:34:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:16John Coogan?

  By 2029, it starts to get very fuzzy to predict and his forecasting powers break down. How AI continues to scale, whether we've encountered data related or other algorithmic bottlenecks, what AI capabilities have already emerged and how economically valuable those AI capabilities are will be key to whether the economics favor continued scaling. Needless to say, building 150 billion dollar individual data center campuses and spending a trillion on AI infrastructure would get very difficult to sustain financially, let alone to increase dramatically year over year. I feel like the trillion dollar cluster is within reach. I mean, it needs to be probably distributed across all the different companies, but these numbers don't, they're not as scary as I think. And you think about like across the hyperscalers.

• 1:35:01Jordi Hays?

  One trillion doesn't scare you?

• 1:35:02John Coogan?

  No, because the, across, across the hyperscalers, you have almost 20 trillion of market cap, maybe 10 trillion of market cap. And so you're looking at, okay, so they need to move 10% of their market cap into this project. That's not 50% of the market cap. Can they liquidate 10% of their market cap and and put it towards this?

• 1:35:25Jordi Hays?

  Set current prices and they would have to lever up.

• 1:35:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:29Jordi Hays?

  Significantly.

• 1:35:30John Coogan?

  No, not significantly, 10%. Like, they would need to take 10% of their of their equity, of their.

• 1:35:37Jordi Hays?

  I know, but but if you have a massive correction between now and then, it starts to be starts to be quite a bit more than 10%.

• 1:35:44John Coogan?

  Sure, but I mean, a trillion dollar spread across the Mag7 isn't it isn't actually that much. I mean, Nvidia is a $4 trillion company. They're they're all they're all a trillion dollars, right? So, I mean, it I agree with this conclusion, 2029, it gets crazy. And then the real question is like, OK, what about the $5 trillion training run or the $10 trillion training run? But just purely like, like, is the money there? Like, the money feels there. The the less clear thing to me is this question of how AI continues to scale, whether we will encounter data-related or other algorithmic bottlenecks. And and then the question of.

• 1:36:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think the thing that people.

• 1:36:24John Coogan?

  Times more money, are you actually getting a thousand?

• 1:36:26Jordi Hays?

  But but when you look at this, it's like, it's it's more likely that it'll be an energy bottleneck, right?

• 1:36:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's another good one.

• 1:36:33Jordi Hays?

  Where you're going to get three nuclear reactors worth of energy.

• 1:36:36John Coogan?

  In one year.

• 1:36:37Jordi Hays?

  In two years from now.

• 1:36:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, when it takes us 30 years to build them. So, yeah, there's a big, big question there.

• 1:36:43Jordi Hays?

  We got to check in with the nuclear bros.

• 1:36:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:45Jordi Hays?

  Because a lot of wasn't wasn't it the last time we had Isai?

• 1:36:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:50Jordi Hays?

  He he was saying he was going to have a first reactor in like 12 months or something like that.

• 1:36:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's working on it.

• 1:36:56Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:36:57John Coogan?

  I mean, a lot of the he was going kind of mid-scale, I think, 10 megawatts. And so if you're like, you're talking about him not just making the first one, but then making 10,000 of those, which is a lot to to generate this much electricity. We did talk to the nuclear company at Palantir Dev Day, and he was saying that he's much more encouraged by bringing, you know, nuclear, like, like, the the original, like, GE plants online, the 1 gigawatt, like, the large-scale.

• 1:37:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:29John Coogan?

  Nuclear reactors.

• 1:37:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Doug's point is like, energy, when when when a premium is placed, when there's more demand, there's more capital chasing energy, energy will come out of the woodwork.

• 1:37:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:39Jordi Hays?

  So there's. Uh, Gabe in the chat says Buffett is good for 400 billion. Uh, he

• 1:37:46John Coogan?

  He does have a lot of cash right now, right?

• 1:37:47Jordi Hays?

  He has, I think, like, uh, 350-ish billion of cash on hand.

• 1:37:51John Coogan?

  Can you imagine? He just gets super AGI pills.

• 1:37:53Jordi Hays?

  Sam, if Sam does a deal.

• 1:37:55John Coogan?

  It's 99.

• 1:37:55Jordi Hays?

  If Sam, if Sam can do a deal with Buffett, I mean.

• 1:38:01John Coogan?

  I mean, is, is the final boss. It's the final boss. There's no one bigger that he hasn't been able to do a deal with. I mean, he even did a deal with, with Elon back in the day, you know? He's done deals with every single person at various times, pretty much.

• 1:38:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What if Buffett ends up owning all the data centers because they just get super levered up and just go bankrupt?

• 1:38:21John Coogan?

  He buys them for pennies? I could see it. I mean, he loves rail. He loves infrastructure.

• 1:38:27Jordi Hays?

  I become compute.

• 1:38:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:30Jordi Hays?

  Berkshire just becomes the next hyperscaler.

• 1:38:33John Coogan?

  It would be so insane if Buffett's vindicated and just like his model holds forever.

• 1:38:40Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's pretty much Lindy, it's held for his whole career. It's pretty Lindy at this point.

• 1:38:45John Coogan?

  Can you imagine? He just winds up owning every power plant in America.

• 1:38:51Jordi Hays?

  It's so crazy. So Berkshire is up 2% over the past, uh, six months.

• 1:38:56John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:38:57Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, 2.2% to be clear. Hit that gong for Buffett.

• 1:39:02John Coogan?

  Congratulations, 2% gain. Sending a lot of cash.

• 1:39:06Jordi Hays?

  Lot of cash.

• 1:39:07John Coogan?

  Should put in gold.

• 1:39:08Jordi Hays?

  They're, the, the market cap is just, just basically three times their cash on hand.

• 1:39:14John Coogan?

  Wow. Three times their cash on hands. Uh, in other news.

• 1:39:18Jordi Hays?

  Elon names Anthony Armstrong.

• 1:39:21John Coogan?

  Good name.

• 1:39:21Jordi Hays?

  As the new XAI CFO. Strong name.

• 1:39:25John Coogan?

  Armstrong, Strong Arms, the financial markets.

• 1:39:29Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:39:29John Coogan?

  During complicated fundraise at XAI, the, uh, New York Post headlines write themselves. Let me tell you about not XAI, but fin.ai, the number one AI engine for customer service, number one performance benchmark, number one in competitive make offs, number one ranking on G2.

• 1:39:46Jordi Hays?

  Chat, Mark in the chat is asking about TBPN merch. We, this first merch run we did, we, we didn't sell, we just gave it away somewhat randomly. We're making more. We actually have a design meeting right after the show today to get into it. So it is coming. This next time we will make it available for the world and the chat will get first access to it.

• 1:40:11John Coogan?

  For sure. Yeah, we'll drop it right at the end of an episode.

• 1:40:14Jordi Hays?

  I gotta stop wearing it so that.

• 1:40:16John Coogan?

  I know, you're teasing everyone.

• 1:40:17Jordi Hays?

  Stop teasing.

• 1:40:18John Coogan?

  I have to run the suit. David Holes, the founder of Mid Journey, says, "My previous startup Leap Motion made the best hand tracking to this day and an amazing open source AR headset North Star. Now the tech is getting deployed by Globus."

• 1:40:33Jordi Hays?

  Great name.

• 1:40:33John Coogan?

  Surgical, to surgical theaters around the world.

• 1:40:36Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I work for Globus Corp. Oh, what? Oh, I work for the Globus Mega Corp.

• 1:40:43Jordi Hays?

  I work for the Globus Center of International Business.

• 1:40:47John Coogan?

  Globus is a great name.

• 1:40:52John Coogan?

  It's like, well, we do business on the, around the globe and in the United States. Globe US.

• 1:40:57Jordi Hays?

  Globus.

• 1:40:58John Coogan?

  Globus. We gotta get the CEO of Globus on. This, it sounds like a great company. They are deploying these AR headsets to surgical theaters around the world. Eighty-five degrees.

• 1:41:08Jordi Hays?

  Globus is an eight billion dollar company, undervalued just on the value of the trademark alone. Globus. Great hit, great hit.

• 1:41:17John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for Globus. Huge Globus fans here. This is a very cool tech. It makes a ton of sense in a medical setting. Obviously, you're not wearing the headset for fun all day. It's a professional environment. There's always been enterprise applications here and of course, it's a medical device and it's adding a ton of value to a high-paid doctor's routine. You can probably put the best, most cutting-edge technology in there. If it's 10K, it's probably cheaper than the, you know, the chair that you sit on in a medical setting. So, congrats to David Holes for being on. An absolute run. The Leap Motion story is fascinating. I dug into it a little bit.

• 1:41:57John Coogan?

  It seemed like they were about to sell the company to Apple and then Apple had printed like welcome letters to everyone on the Leap Motion team and then something happened. The deal fell through at the last minute. David was like, you know, in and out, had a really rough run with venture capitalists, then went back to Mid Journey, didn't raise a dime. He loved to see it, bootstrap founder. And him and Mark Andreessen were going back and forth. Did you see that yesterday?

• 1:42:24Jordi Hays?

  No, I missed it.

• 1:42:24John Coogan?

  So David Holes posted something to the effect of like, hey, any other bootstrap founders in SF to call Mid Journey a bootstrap company? I mean, it is a bootstrap company. They haven't raised a venture, but it's like the biggest company ever.

• 1:42:38Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I did see this.

• 1:42:39John Coogan?

  And Mark's like, me, I bootstrapped A16Z.

• 1:42:42Jordi Hays?

  Hundreds of millions of revenue. Love to see it. I didn't see this yesterday either, but US is taking a 10% stake in Trilogy Metals.

• 1:42:54John Coogan?

  I've heard of this company.

• 1:42:55Jordi Hays?

  It was a $480 million Canadian dollar market cap company. Yesterday, it is now 1.63 billion Canadian dollars.

• 1:43:07John Coogan?

  Well, metal, so that's exciting.

• 1:43:09Jordi Hays?

  How many, I don't know what the exchange rate's probably pretty rough.

• 1:43:12John Coogan?

  I have no idea. Well, let me tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI-needed CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level.

• 1:43:21Jordi Hays?

  Next level CRM.

• 1:43:23John Coogan?

  Tim Cook is likely to step down as Apple's CEO. According to Bloomberg, John Turnus, who I'm dying to have on the show, got to make it happen, get to him before he becomes CEO potentially. Apple's senior vice president of hardware engineering is expected to take over. Interesting because you don't see him in all the keynotes. He's not the biggest face, but he's clearly doing something right at Apple. And, you know, for all the discussion over, do they get AI right or whatever, like the hardware is good.

• 1:43:52Jordi Hays?

  Nominative determinism. Turn us around.

• 1:43:57John Coogan?

  Turn us around. Okay, I see what you're doing there. Yeah, like it. Bloomberg notes that Apple will now likely.

• 1:44:03Jordi Hays?

  Johnny Appleseed.

• 1:44:07John Coogan?

  Tim Cooked, we know this. Tim Cooked.

• 1:44:09Jordi Hays?

  I saw a graphic of like all the different products that that Tim Cook has like six, you know, overseen.

• 1:44:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:44:18Jordi Hays?

  And it's actually remarkable. I think he will be, uh, while he certainly isn't being celebrated in the AI era, he will be celebrated in the fullness of time.

• 1:44:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's two very.

• 1:44:31Jordi Hays?

  I think he's dramatically underpaid.

• 1:44:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:34Jordi Hays?

  Um, I hope that the history books will remember his name for just, uh, exceptional execution on, um,

• 1:44:45Jordi Hays?

  Steve's vision that was Steve's, Steve's visible vision.

• 1:44:49John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:44:50Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:44:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, well, whatever your view on Apple, whether you're long or short, get on public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields, they're trusted by millions. I have some.

• 1:45:02Jordi Hays?

  And they just launched, uh, direct indexing, which is very cool. Uh, specifically because it allows you to, you know, if you have outperformance with one stock, underperformance with another, you can actually recognize those losses.

• 1:45:16John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:45:17Jordi Hays?

  And so it can be more tax efficient way to get exposure to.

• 1:45:21John Coogan?

  To a broad swath of companies. Interesting. In one go. Cool. Um, I have a bit of cognitive dissonance about Apple. On the one hand, apparently they have this like belief or something that, uh, that Bloomberg was reporting that they don't believe like chatbots are going to be a dominant form factor. Like they've really leaned back in terms of chatbots. Siri has kind of been slow. I've been trying to use Apple intelligence to query chat GPT and it's still like it's, I have to click a button every time. It's very like, it doesn't seem like they're really moving quickly. And it's been like years now since chat GPT has come out and I would have liked a deeper integration on day one. They could have bought something. They could have trained their own model. Like there are so many companies that have been able to catch up. It doesn't feel like it's

• 1:46:06John Coogan?

  complete rocket science. The narrative of like the foundation model commoditizing, uh, even, even if they have something that's not at. GPT five or Claude four point five sonnet or even Gemini two point five level like I it would still be better and it would improve my experience but they've really leaned leaned back on that so so that's like a really, really clear like bear case for like they're not winning AI. And then at the same time, whenever we talk about hardware and the next, the next devices, we just keep coming back to, well, not only is the hardware extremely good and sticky and you know, just like the best devices and the best supply chain and Tim Cook's done a fantastic

• 1:46:49John Coogan?

  job of man managing the tariff battles and whatnot, but they also have iMessage, which feels like an incredibly powerful social network that is very, very hard to rip people out of.

• 1:46:58Jordi Hays?

  Social graph.

• 1:46:59John Coogan?

  Social graph. And so when we, when we demo.

• 1:47:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I saw somebody posting yesterday. Somebody was posting yesterday, Apple better start moving faster and it was in reference to chat GPT's like booking.com integrations.

• 1:47:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:13Jordi Hays?

  And it was fairly, you know, it was getting quite a lot of engagement, but I was surprised by that considering that Apple's never been able to really directly tax like retail, right?

• 1:47:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:25Jordi Hays?

  They don't, they don't get a percentage of every dollar that's spent on Meta.

• 1:47:30John Coogan?

  Well, they do take a cut of booking.com in the sense that booking pays Google, Google pays Apple.

• 1:47:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's way less that that revenue is not necessarily directly threatened because if Google has more.

• 1:47:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:43Jordi Hays?

  You know, they're, they're happy to keep paying the their version of the Apple tax.

• 1:47:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:47Jordi Hays?

  But again, it's, it's not like Apple is getting billions of dollars a year from Amazon and they're, they're, they would suddenly not be getting that if chat GPT starts dominating in retail, right?

• 1:48:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Maybe, maybe what the move internally or the mood internally is at Apple is something like they don't see AI or LLMs or chatbots as disruptive to Apple's hardware plans. They think that even in a post AGI world, people will still be carrying iPhones. And so they can just sit and wait until they get some foundation lab to come to them and say, we're going to pay you $10 billion a year to be the default. And they're just like, yeah, we'll just wait and you can come to us today. But we're not, we're not doing the deal until, and so like it's, it's going to be uncomfortable for customers until someone ponies up.

• 1:48:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it still feels hard for me to imagine a world where Siri is just replaced by another brand, like what Siri does functionally in terms of being an assistant layer on top of the hardware device. It feels, it feels very unbelievable to me that Apple would say like, we're going to let this other assistant directly integrate throughout the entire device. Like that feels like a big step.

• 1:49:07John Coogan?

  It does.

• 1:49:07Jordi Hays?

  Because the phone in many ways already was operating as like an assistant, right? It's like the center of your world. It can do, it can do anything you want to do in your digital life on your behalf. It's sort of, and so giving up that, giving that up feels major. But yeah, I think we have to see more announcements out of Apple this year on this front. I know based on the last, they still have longer time horizons internally around their like AI turnaround, right? They're not saying we're fixing this this year.

• 1:49:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:43Jordi Hays?

  It's very much like we're fixing this over the next 24 months.

• 1:49:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:48Jordi Hays?

  They're, and again, I still stand by Apple and believe that the competitive threats, OpenAI just doesn't feel like a legitimate hardware threat today.

• 1:50:03John Coogan?

  No, not at all, because of the lock-in around the Apple ecosystem. And it does feel like Apple might be looking at AI more as a profit pool. And once that profit pool gets really big, then they're going to want to go after it and they have, they will have a ton of leverage at that moment and so it'll be fine. But just chat interactions.

• 1:50:25John Coogan?

  Are not generating tens of billions of dollars in profit yet. And so, but Google search is. And so, Apple says, hey, we gotta go get a cut of Google search. They did, and they've been very successful there. Once the profit pool of chat interfaces becomes really big, Apple will probably say, hey, we gotta get a cut of that. And maybe at that point, we will invest, but we understand the economics and we're not supply constrained on data centers. And so, we don't have to pay a high margin. We can do Apple silicon chips for, you know, our inference or something, or our own custom model. There's a million different ways that they can, that they can like get their fairish share of that market when the time is right.

• 1:51:06John Coogan?

  Because they will still have the leverage and they don't see that their leverage is decreasing because people are not churning from iPhones based on the lack of ChatGPT integration or the lack of LLM integration. Even though it's like a pretty crazy feature to be missing in 2025, it just still hasn't really hurt them. I bought a new iPhone. I didn't sweat.

• 1:51:24Jordi Hays?

  I'm still waiting for my iPhone that I order. I'm waiting for my iPhone that I ordered weeks before John just walked into a store and bought an iPhone off the shelf.

• 1:51:33John Coogan?

  Skill issue. Skill issue.

• 1:51:35Jordi Hays?

  Unbelievable.

• 1:51:36John Coogan?

  The iPhone was delivered, delivered to me.

• 1:51:38Jordi Hays?

  Here, here I am thinking like, wow, there is so much demand for Apple, the new iPhone, that, that they can't deliver me one.

• 1:51:48John Coogan?

  I mean, to be clear, like, there was only one in stock that I was able to purchase and it just happened to be a model that I was happy with. But I didn't get to pick a color or anything like that. I was just like, yeah, just give me what you have. Anyway, speaking of iPhone apps, open up your 8Sleep app and tell me how you slept last night. Because you had a tummy ache from lack of alcohol consumption. I was boozing it up with the white wine at the luxurious event and I slept for seven hours and got an 84. I did pretty well.

• 1:52:22Jordi Hays?

  I slept for five hours, 56.

• 1:52:26John Coogan?

  Five hours? Wow. Oh, 56 minutes. Okay, that's close to six hours. Yeah.

• 1:52:30Jordi Hays?

  And my 8Sleep is very concerned about my health.

• 1:52:33John Coogan?

  Oh, no. Well, did you get over?

• 1:52:36Jordi Hays?

  I got a 75.

• 1:52:38John Coogan?

  And you know what you gotta do, Jordan?

• 1:52:39Jordi Hays?

  I know what I gotta do.

• 1:52:40John Coogan?

  Let's go. I win.

• 1:52:42Jordi Hays?

  Credit where credit's due.

• 1:52:43John Coogan?

  I've been on a run. I've been doing very well recently. And anyway, Mick franchisee shares, I remember this Happy Meal promo back in 1991 for Earth Day. You could ask for a free tree at McDonald's, no purchase necessary, and they would give you a sapling, I guess. Pretty cool to see.

• 1:53:03Jordi Hays?

  That is so big.

• 1:53:04John Coogan?

  Apparently some of these Mick trees, over three days later, 30 years later, have grown into behemoths. And so after 50 years, this man's family is moving out of his childhood home. In the 90s, McDonald's gave out pine seedlings for Earth Days. And look at this tree. It's now 30 years old. What a beautiful tree.

• 1:53:22Jordi Hays?

  My happiest childhood memory?

• 1:53:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:26Jordi Hays?

  With McDonald's, they had a deal with Sugar Bowl.

• 1:53:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:29Jordi Hays?

  That if you bought anything at McDonald's and you brought the receipt to Sugar Bowl, you could get a $5 lift ticket.

• 1:53:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:53:36Jordi Hays?

  And I was doing that all day.

• 1:53:37John Coogan?

  Thanks.

• 1:53:38Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that was like the greatest trade of all time. You get a Mick, you get like a Mick blurry.

• 1:53:41John Coogan?

  This was a big thing, yeah.

• 1:53:42Jordi Hays?

  And then you get a $5 lift ticket.

• 1:53:43John Coogan?

  You used to be able to take a Coca-Cola and go to, yeah. You used to be able to take a Coca-Cola can and go to Six Flags for cheap. There were a bunch of these like cross promotional like deals that were going on. I think this is a great merch idea. I think some startups should do this. If you're super not AGI pilled, give away a tree sapling and be like, yeah, this tree is still gonna be around. It's not gonna get paper clipped. I'm long humanity. Keep thinking, folks. This also reminds me of our idea for merch, the bonsai tree. I really like the idea of sending everyone a bonsai tree to remind them that progress is measured in decades and you should never stop working. Keep grinding. Anyway, what else is going on? Do we ever recover this?

• 1:54:28Jordi Hays?

  This is, this is something that's probably worth mentioning. Jay Bull says, here's the thing with today's OpenAI pump. Elon is B-U-T-T-H-U-R-T. He hates Sam. Sam is getting all the attention these days and nobody cares about Elon anymore. I fully expect the mother of all pumps from Elon sooner than later because he's a narcissist and no way he doesn't do it.

• 1:54:51John Coogan?

  What a funny way to frame like what happens in the capital markets, like. Oh yeah, like they're going to do a pump because there's spite or something. It's like

• 1:55:00Jordi Hays?

  Spite pump.

• 1:55:01John Coogan?

  Spite pump. What about just like building something that delivers value?

• 1:55:06Jordi Hays?

  And Tesla's at an all time high right now.

• 1:55:09John Coogan?

  I mean, the Roadster, the Roadster video dropped yesterday over the weekend.

• 1:55:12Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna get that, aren't you?

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  I'm 100% gonna get one. I'm so excited. A Roadster fix me.

• 1:55:18Jordi Hays?

  It's actually having, having the, the aesthetics of a supercar, but having like great self-driving.

• 1:55:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:24Jordi Hays?

  That's a recipe for a hit.

• 1:55:26John Coogan?

  Wait, we have the perfect guest to talk about the Tesla Roadster. We have the, is it the CEO of DuPont Registry joining us?

• 1:55:33Jordi Hays?

  I corrected Tesla's not at an all time high.

• 1:55:36John Coogan?

  Oh no.

• 1:55:36Jordi Hays?

  Peaked last year, but getting close, getting close.

• 1:55:39John Coogan?

  Well, we have our next guest in the restroom waiting room.

• 1:55:41Jordi Hays?

  I am absolutely pumped for this.

• 1:55:43John Coogan?

  Oh, look at this.

• 1:55:44Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 1:55:45John Coogan?

  Fantastic background.

• 1:55:46Jordi Hays?

  Great, uh, great setup.

• 1:55:48Speaker 05

  For having me.

• 1:55:49John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 1:55:50Jordi Hays?

  We couldn't have said yes faster to having you on the show. I think I'm, I'm, I'm a, I'm a daily active user.

• 1:55:57John Coogan?

  100% of DuPont Registry.

• 1:55:59Jordi Hays?

  Of the products and yeah, super excited to, to get the update from you.

• 1:56:04Speaker 05

  Thank you for having me, guys.

• 1:56:05John Coogan?

  Yes, please, uh, kick us off with an introduction on yourself and actually describe the company for anyone who might not know.

• 1:56:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure. So, uh, I'm, I joined the company two years ago, as you will, you will hear from my accent. I'm not from Paris, Texas. I was born and raised in France. I came to the US 16 years ago, started my career with, in the luxury and tech world with Louis Vuitton. Uh, and moved two years ago to, uh, to lead, uh, DuPont Registry Group. Um, we're going through a major transformation. We're disrupting the luxury automotive industry. Uh, the group has been building for the past 40 years, amazing trust, uh, towards the, uh, audience of, you know, car enthusiasts and car collectors. Today, we're the only one place where any car collector can find the product of their passion.

• 1:56:55Speaker 05

  Um, and we're transforming the industry. We're building a brand new tech platform to have a, for our ecosystem of dealership and clients. A way for them to transact online. Uh, we're very excited about it. The market opportunity is huge. Um, and the group is, uh, is moving in the right direction.

• 1:57:13John Coogan?

  What's the shape of the business now? And then how much do you want to move to online platforms?

• 1:57:21Jordi Hays?

  I want one click checkout.

• 1:57:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, like how far does this go?

• 1:57:26Speaker 05

  I want one click checkout too, and this is what we are working towards.

• 1:57:29Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 1:57:30Speaker 05

  So the group has been the foundation of the group is again 40 years of legacy and trust. We have today amazing brand within our portfolio. Events that are gathering all the enthusiasts and car collectors, some of them the the most affluent car collectors in the world. And we want to use that foundation and the data that we've been accumulated for years to to build really an omnichannel tech platform that will allow anyone when they see a product and a car that they want to be able to purchase it online and get delivered at their home. This is what we're building on right now. And the recent investors that we announced today that brings capital to the company,

• 1:58:13Speaker 05

  we're going to use that capital to build that tech platform. So expect a lot of new changes in the in the next few years.

• 1:58:23Jordi Hays?

  What any, you know, what is what I kind of you mentioned events, more seamless transactions? That all makes sense. Are you guys planning anything on the auction side? Or you feel like that is well served by the industry today?

• 1:58:38Speaker 05

  No, no, no, it's it's definitely something we have in mind. It's part also of our where I came from in the luxury world. It's all about the omnichannel and being being taking care of our clients wherever they want to buy and whenever they want to buy. So if you look today in the car space, the the auction piece is quite important. And we are launching in a in a few weeks our own Dupont Registry Live Auction Platform that will support our audience and allow us and our dealers to sell their cars. It's going to be a disruptive one. You will see a couple of announcements are coming in the next few weeks.

• 1:59:18John Coogan?

  How do you think about defining the like the the tone, the vibe around what type of cars make it onto the platform? It feels like, you know, dollars a dollar, you could have every car on there, but you have to define the the brand somehow. So how do you think about what is an appropriate car to work with? And and how do you how do you let someone down if they bring something that's just not quite there, a little bit too not special enough?

• 1:59:49Speaker 05

  To me, we don't let anyone down because at the core of our audience is there is passion.

• 1:59:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:59:55Speaker 05

  So whether you're you're talking about, and we had we had someone the other day from Eastern Europe that rebuilt the Dacia from his father. There was a strong passion about that Dacia. And we actually talked about it and with petrol issues, one of our brand, we we did a movie about this this guy. So to me, it's it's all about that passion component. Of course, for the past 40 years, we've been the leading marketplace and our positioning is luxury and high-end luxury, and we want to continue to go there. But my job is not to say no to my clients, it's to be able to welcome them in our ecosystem and serve them and make sure that they evolve with us throughout their their collector's journey.

• 2:00:34Jordi Hays?

  Give us a high level view of the current state of the automotive industry. We obviously are we're car enthusiasts ourselves, but cover tech about 1,000 times more closely than automotive world. But seems like we're at a very interesting time right now. You have pressure from on on the Chinese market, you have trade wars, you have

• 2:00:55John Coogan?

  Back and forth on electrification.

• 2:00:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, electrification that enthusiasts have certainly not, you know, overall not not been huge fans of. You've also seen, you know, the massive depreciation on that front. If you're an automotive enthusiast, nobody wants to buy a car that that might look pretty and drive well. But if it's going to depreciate 40% in the first year, it's just not you're never going to really get that enthusiast love. So I'm curious, what kind of trends are you tracking most closely and and kind of new activity over the next 12 months?

• 2:01:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a very good question. So all you mentioned does not really affect us today. We're in the used cars luxury space and we're in the business of our clients are looking for something they want, not something they need. So from a pure purchase funnel standpoint, they are not really affected today by tariffs and otherwise.

• 2:01:55Speaker 05

  You will see in the next few weeks, we're partnering with Boston Consulting Group and we're going to release a luxury car market report. We've seen first few things in that in that report, we're talking about hundred billion dollar market. So it's going to be, it's quite interesting. There is a huge market opportunity, not at all digital today. What's interesting too is that we see that electrification is not there. There is nothing in if you're looking at the luxury car market, people are looking for performance, they are looking for fun. They are not looking at their daily driver. So they will look more for that car behind me. A two thousand one Ferrari five fifty Maranello than an electric car.

• 2:02:35Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Yeah, the other the other thing I think is worth calling out and part of your guys' opportunities is like I have bought, I've purchased a number of cars sight unseen online. And maybe that's just because I was born in the, you know, I was born in nineteen ninety five. I grew up purchasing everything on the internet. I have no problem seeing a video of a car. I might get a remote PPI done on it to have that confidence. But I continuously am happy to purchase cars out of state, you know, wherever I don't need to see them. I've done that, I think, at least three or four times at this point, and I expect to do that many more times in my life.

• 2:03:15Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that that is part of your guys' opportunity and that the the new generation of of car owners and enthusiasts are just willing? Again, it doesn't matter if the car, if the spec you want is out of state, great, I have no, you know, no problem kind of purchasing.

• 2:03:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's actually very interesting. Today we see that about ninety nine percent of the purchase decision starts online. It takes a couple of months for anyone to decide which cars they want to buy and there is a lot of online research. Yet, less than one percent of those transactions are happening online. So there is, there is a lot of potential to disrupt the market and disrupt the industry. When you're talking about buying a car sight unseen. And this is the power of our brand and our ecosystem. We have the trust from millions of people that have been, you know, looking at our brand and coming to our brand for the past forty years and they trust the brand to show them the right product with the right condition and be transparent about the product. And this is what we're offering at the national

• 2:04:13Speaker 05

  audience for the US. You'll be able to buy a car from California, get it delivered in New York. And behind the scene, we will be the intermediate to facilitate that transaction and make sure that you trust the seller and the buyer and trust both parties.

• 2:04:27John Coogan?

  How do you think about the the next generation getting into cars? What's different about Gen Z or millennial car collectors? Are they going as are they going less far back into historical or retro cars? Or or does every generation just love the car that they had on the poster in their bedroom forever? And you're kind of locked in a time capsule? Or or is there something unique and different about the millennial generation or the Gen Z generation as opposed to the Gen Xers or the Boomers?

• 2:05:06Speaker 05

  I think there is there is something unique is that they are discovering the they are discovering the luxury car market through experiences and and and community. And that's what we are doing at the group. We're organizing many events every year to build that community and to continue fostering the dream within the community. From a purchase standpoint, as any as any other car enthusiast, you will start with the car that was that you had as a poster in your in your bedroom when you were fourteen. And that will be your first car. But then you're going to evolve throughout your collection. The good thing is that today we're seeing a transfer of wealth between generation. The passion is also transferring. So we're actually seeing that our audience is getting younger. And definitely, to your

• 2:05:48Speaker 05

  point, the audience is ready and they are they are used to buy those products online and luxury products online. And this is where we're going to offer them that ability.

• 2:05:57John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about marketing and content production? I engage with DuPont Registry on X, actually. I see every new auction and there's a lot of facts and interesting details in there. It's very interesting to me. But there's so much that you can do with Cars when you're marketing a platform because the cars themselves are interesting. Like that car behind you, I could watch a 20 minute video about it. It's fascinating. I probably have by other creators. Have you, how are you thinking about partnering with creators? Either sponsoring content or bringing people in-house, agencies? Like, how do you think about the correct shape for just raising the awareness of DuPont?

• 2:06:38Speaker 05

  It's all about stories to me. We need to tell stories between a driver and his cars. That's what we're doing with one of our brand petrol issues. Every Friday, we have a new movie about a car story.

• 2:06:49John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:06:49Speaker 05

  This is what we want to do. We want to make sure that we, we tell the story of the enthusiast community. We tell the story of the car collectors and how they build their collection from the first purchase until their latest investment. And this is really how we're, today, how we're targeting our content strategy is really focusing on that.

• 2:07:09John Coogan?

  Very cool. Do you want anything else?

• 2:07:11Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. We'll send you some posts after this, but we've featured DuPont.

• 2:07:17John Coogan?

  Thousands of times.

• 2:07:17Jordi Hays?

  Thousands of times in our, in our early episodes, it was a core part of the content.

• 2:07:22John Coogan?

  Please, like, never stop posting on X. It is the best little drip feed. It just, it just sprinkles itself in with all the other tech news and I see it and I love it. And I usually tag a friend and I say, you should get this car.

• 2:07:34Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I can't, I'm very excited you guys have, again, you know, as just a daily active user, I'm very happy that you guys will have more, you know, investment. And let us know if we can help you recruit anybody in on the technical side.

• 2:07:49John Coogan?

  Did you share the terms of the deal, how much was raised, anything like that? Do you have any numbers to share for us?

• 2:07:54Speaker 05

  No, unfortunately, we don't disclose financial numbers. What I can tell you is Francois is one of the top collectors in the world as well as very well-known race car drivers. He brings a lot of validation of our strategy. He's a big, he's a big tech guy and he loves tech as well. He sees what we're building from a tech and AI standpoint with the data we have. And we're very happy that he's on board with this.

• 2:08:24Jordi Hays?

  But one number, you guys reached unicorn status. That's correct, right?

• 2:08:28John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:08:29Jordi Hays?

  Yes, there we go. Hit that gong, John.

• 2:08:34Jordi Hays?

  There we go. You'll appreciate this. We're waiting for the right car to put this on, so this just came in the mail.

• 2:08:43John Coogan?

  Maybe it's the 599.

• 2:08:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:46John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much. This one is not for sale though. No.

• 2:08:49Jordi Hays?

  Another one.

• 2:08:50John Coogan?

  They're there these days.

• 2:08:52Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on and congratulations on the milestone.

• 2:08:55John Coogan?

  We appreciate it. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:08:57Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:08:58John Coogan?

  And if you're looking for a luxury watch to go with your luxury car, you know where to go. Getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is now available to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

• 2:09:10Jordi Hays?

  Add Cars Bezel.

• 2:09:11John Coogan?

  Tyler, what do you think about this GPT Image 1 Mini post? Angel is saying they didn't fix consistency, apparently. The prompt was remove all the ingredients from the burger and keep only the top and bottom buns. Leave a gap between them. Keep keeping the same spacing as if the fillings were still inside. Why are you laughing?

• 2:09:31Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, Taylor with a deep cut. He says DuPont Registry is gonna love my Nissan Murano CrossFit Blade. Let's hit the gong. This is the most underrated car on the market.

• 2:09:44John Coogan?

  What other convertible SUV two-door are you getting? A Range Rover Evoque?

• 2:09:50Jordi Hays?

  We really botched it not. There's one for sale right now with almost a hundred thousand.

• 2:09:55John Coogan?

  They're available.

• 2:09:56Jordi Hays?

  It's for $10,000 and.

• 2:09:58John Coogan?

  It's honestly a great production car. You lean out the side, take some video of the other cars. It's a great production. We gotta pick one up.

• 2:10:06Jordi Hays?

  Most wild car. It's a V6. Let's give it up for V6s.

• 2:10:10John Coogan?

  That's not bad.

• 2:10:10Jordi Hays?

  Underrated.

• 2:10:11John Coogan?

  Four-cylinder.

• 2:10:14John Coogan?

  But Tyler, did you see this post about the remove the toppings from the burger? What do you think's going on here? Is this, does this push your AGI timeline out or pull it in?

• 2:10:24Jordi Hays?

  What's going on here? I mean, I think just from this, like.

• 2:10:28Speaker 02

  I think it's, we can probably just assume that like Nana Banana is, there's some kind of like architecture difference.

• 2:10:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:10:33Speaker 02

  Where it's not just like doing diffusion on the entire image.

• 2:10:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seems like it might be, it might have like tool use and I feel like tool use has gotta come to image generation soon to just be like, for this prompt, you actually just need to cut one half of the image out and cut the other half and just stitch them together using basically like Figma or something.

• 2:10:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:10:55John Coogan?

  The basic Lasso tool is like what you need. So just give the AI image generator that instead of trying to re-render the entire image.

• 2:11:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, and like maybe that like kind of tool use was only in the training step and it's like kind of been distilled into the weight somehow.

• 2:11:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:09Speaker 02

  But it does seem like there's some, it's like, it looks like it's just like segmenting something out.

• 2:11:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:14Speaker 02

  And then it just does kind of inpainting on that part and then it just gives you the new image where, where GPT is like very clearly, it's like, it's doing the whole image.

• 2:11:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, Sean says, vision reasoning is far from a solved issue. Uh, I'm, I'm very excited to see where, where that goes. It feels like tool use and reasoning, all that's coming to image, but just, uh, just slowly, it's gonna roll out slowly. Um, I, I demoed one, uh, image generator project that was clearly cutting out pieces of the image because the grain was even the same and it wasn't re-rendering the face. And so you could say, make this a Giga Chat or a Bodybuilder and it would add the muscles, but you'd look at, you'd zoom it in the face and it'd be pixel perfect. And it's like, that's not re-rendered, like I can just tell. Um, anyway, uh, Grok is still on a tear on, uh, on open router. One trillion tokens every three hours.

• 2:12:07John Coogan?

  That's a lot of plaques. Um, they're doing well. We already dug into the Grok stuff. Uh, that's fun. Uh, and, uh, KSA says, the dumbest person you know is currently being told you're absolutely right.

• 2:12:18Jordi Hays?

  You're absolutely right.

• 2:12:18John Coogan?

  By ChatGPT. This is a repost. Someone else posted this. We, we talked about this. Uh, there is, somebody just found a banger and just re, re, uh, re-appropriated it.

• 2:12:26Jordi Hays?

  I told you that yesterday. You said.

• 2:12:28John Coogan?

  You did.

• 2:12:28Jordi Hays?

  You said.

• 2:12:29John Coogan?

  I finally posted the Grok post.

• 2:12:30Jordi Hays?

  October hits and suddenly I'm craving pumpkin everything. Binge watching horror movies and planning the ultimate costume. Who's with me on turning this month into pure spooky magic? I said, you're absolutely right, John.

• 2:12:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. Compound 248 says, if I am Sundar Pichai, I will bury all competing foundational models in negative gross margin tokens for eternity. I will never take my foot off the price and gasp. To merely compete, I will force you to dilute your equity into oblivion. Sam will drown in my tsunami of cogs. So very well written piece.

• 2:13:04Jordi Hays?

  The dilution is real.

• 2:13:06John Coogan?

  Dilution seems real. Certainly, yeah, it's interesting. I talked to somebody a long time ago who was like, there was a moment at maybe AWS or maybe GCP or one of them, where there was the option to, to get in a price war and they chose not to. And so all of the hyperscalers, all of the clouds have.

• 2:13:26Jordi Hays?

  It's like the soda companies, right? If you, if they got in a price war, it would suck all the profits out of the industry.

• 2:13:32John Coogan?

  For sure, there's that. There's also just, the way I heard it described to me was, like, if you're a CFO, you're just kind of like, but I want, but I want 30% margins. Like, that's my goal. So like, why would I do, why would I do low margins when my goal is 30% margins? And so it's almost just like, kind of hardcoded into the fabric of these financial institutions, the finance functions at the large companies is that it's like, yeah, there's like this world where we get into this price war and there's risk, like, maybe we could win, but we could also just continue to get 30% margins. So I don't know if this will play out this way. Maybe, maybe on the, on the API side, but Tyler, have you noticed any, any like real price fight going on in the foundation model layers?

• 2:14:17John Coogan?

  They're all pretty price competitive, right? On a per million token basis, right?

• 2:14:21Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, they're all pretty close. I would say maybe Anthropic is a little bit more expensive.

• 2:14:25John Coogan?

  More expensive. But it's supposed to be a better model.

• 2:14:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and it's like, it feels, if you look back, it's like, oh, the models are staying the same price, but it's just because you keep updating to the new model.

• 2:14:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:36Speaker 02

  Like, if you're using GPT 3.5 Turbo, it's like, obviously, super, super cheap now compared to what it was.

• 2:14:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:42Speaker 02

  So there's some, something there, but.

• 2:14:44Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 2:14:45John Coogan?

  Well, Barry Weiss dropped a letter to all CBS News employees. And there's some debate in the comments as to whether or not this was AI-generated.

• 2:14:58Jordi Hays?

  Really? What was, what was the call out?

• 2:15:00John Coogan?

  There are M dashes, but that's it. And so I'll read it and I, I think she wrote it herself, but she says, Dear colleagues, I am thrilled and humbled to be writing you as the new editor in chief of CBS News. Growing up, CBS was a deep family tradition. Whenever I hear that tick, tick, tick or trumpet fanfare, it sends me right back to our den in Pittsburgh. The opportunity to build on that legacy with you hyphen and to renew it in an era that so desperately needs it hyphen is an extraordinary privilege. Right now, I imagine you all have some questions. I do too. My goal in the coming weeks, days and weeks is to get to know you. I want to hear from you about what's working, what isn't, and your thoughts on how we can make CBS News the most trusted news organization in America and the world.

• 2:15:41John Coogan?

  I'll approach it the way any reporter would hyphen with a new, with an open mind, a fresh notebook and an urgent deadline. She drops the Oxford comma. This feels extremely human written to me. And of course it should because she's been a writer for a decade, way before LLMs were a thing. So why would she lose that ability to do that? She has a couple. She has 10 points that she defines journalism around. It reports on the world as it actually is.

• 2:16:06Jordi Hays?

  You can abbreviate it.

• 2:16:08John Coogan?

  Fearless and factual.

• 2:16:09Jordi Hays?

  You can say journalism.

• 2:16:10John Coogan?

  Journalism uses all the tools of the digital area.

• 2:16:14Jordi Hays?

  A lot you may as well.

• 2:16:15John Coogan?

  Journalism that understands the best way to serve America is to endeavor to present the public with facts first and foremost. I look forward to meeting many of you in the days ahead and listening and learning to you. I am profoundly honored to join you. M dash and I can't wait to get started with gratitude and excitement. Barry. That seems very, uh, seems very like well-written. I don't know. Gold is up at $4,000 for the first time ever. It's a record run for futures. Comes amid concerns about the economy's outlook. Gold has been on such a run since 2000, a little bit of a sell-off post GFC,

• 2:16:53John Coogan?

  but has been on an absolute tear going from $2,000 per troy ounce to over 4,000 in just a few years. Gold soared to 4,000 a troy ounce for the first time, signaling an investor rush into alternative assets at a time of concern about the outlook for the US economy. The price of precious metals has surged this year more than it did during some of America's biggest crises, raising more than 50%. Futures run up in 2025, has outpaced rallies during the pandemic and the 2007, 2009 recession. Not since the inflationary shock of 1979 has gold catapulted so much higher in a year. There's been-

• 2:17:33Jordi Hays?

  Think I look at the gold chart and I think, I'm in danger. The US dollar is in danger.

• 2:17:41John Coogan?

  Yep. Bitcoin was at an all-time high last year, or yesterday too. Everyone is flying to other, other assets, whether it's AI stocks, energy, Bitcoin, gold. Everyone wants something else. But what, what a run for gold.

• 2:17:58Jordi Hays?

  We have our next guest-

• 2:18:00John Coogan?

  We do.

• 2:18:00Jordi Hays?

  In the pre-stream waiting room.

• 2:18:02John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:18:02Jordi Hays?

  We have Rami from EvenUp. Let's bring him on in.

• 2:18:05John Coogan?

  Let's bring him in. To the TV.

• 2:18:07Jordi Hays?

  What's happening?

• 2:18:08John Coogan?

  How are you doing?

• 2:18:09Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:18:10Speaker 06

  Hey guys, how's it going?

• 2:18:12Jordi Hays?

  It's great to see you. We're doing great. We got our, we got our gong ready for you.

• 2:18:15John Coogan?

  Yes, introduce yourself, the company, and any of the news today.

• 2:18:21Speaker 06

  My name is Rami. I'm the CEO and co-founder of EvenUp. We are happy to announce our $150 million Series E led by Bessemer.

• 2:18:31John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:18:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, break down the company history. Yeah, how you got into the category.

• 2:18:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, we started even up about five years ago. This is before legal tech or generative AI was all that interesting. And the premise was to ultimately even up the playing field for personal injury victims in the US. So every year, there's about 20 million injury victims where often these cases take a lot longer than they need to to settle or settle for a small fraction of what they're worth. And so our goal is to even up that distribution by helping ultimately their attorneys. So it's a B two B startup. We're helping them across the whole life cycle of their injury cases. Think of it as doing the heavy work for these attorneys for them at what I call superhuman quality. We're helping them settle their cases faster, helping them settle their cases for larger amounts,

• 2:19:22Speaker 06

  and removing a lot of the manual work as we go through a lot of these workflows for these attorneys and their staff.

• 2:19:28Jordi Hays?

  How are you guys already running up against the the oppositions or the defenses AI themselves? How is the battle evolving?

• 2:19:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, we don't really see too much of that. The crazy thing is, this is our fourth round of financing in the last two years. And we're on this really rapid growth trajectory where we see about 10,000 cases a week. But when you think about just the TAM here on 20 million cases, we're about 1% penetrated today. So in a way, even though we're a big number, it's still really early days in our space that we haven't seen any of that come through. What we have seen is ultimately being able to change some of the operations of these law firms for the better. So one of our firms has scaled revenue by about 70% year on year on a base of over 100 million of revenue without adding headcount.

• 2:20:23Speaker 06

  Another one of our firms have used one of our products in mediation in real time where they turned a $50,000 offer into a multimillion dollar offer. So it's kind of crazy to see the impact we've been able to have, but it's still early days.

• 2:20:35John Coogan?

  Is plaintiff screening a different business?

• 2:20:40Speaker 06

  So, yes, not fully. The way you can think of this is the way we help is, you know, imagine somebody gets injured. They would typically call an injury attorney. They would sign up.

• 2:20:50John Coogan?

  They see a billboard. They see a billboard and the billboard says injured, call this number. They call that number and they describe their injury and then there's somebody needs to qualify that and it's probably not the most highest paid lawyer and it feels like those intake forms could be processed by AI, but is that something you're looking at doing?

• 2:21:05Speaker 06

  So, yes, that's really interesting. So, we don't do the intake call themselves, but as soon as the intake call is done, the transcript of those calls is something that we would analyze.

• 2:21:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:21:13Speaker 06

  To say, hey, law firm, you need to prioritize this case.

• 2:21:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:21:17Speaker 06

  Or this might be a case you want to draw.

• 2:21:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:21:19Speaker 06

  We don't do the signing up of the case, but as soon as there's any information, whether it's audio or document-based info in these cases, we read that, we scan it, and we ultimately make decisions off of that with the, obviously with the, with the attorney hand in hand.

• 2:21:32John Coogan?

  How are like hallucinations and how are you thinking about like lawyer in the loop? Geordi was talking about this, there was some case about a consulting group that turned over an analysis to a city and had to give them a huge refund because-

• 2:21:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was Deloitte basically got caught delivering a study that was just inventing like judgments that no judge had actually-

• 2:22:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, it wasn't grounded in like the ground truth of case law and I imagine that like, I mean, the stakes are pretty high.

• 2:22:07Jordi Hays?

  The model just had a really-

• 2:22:08John Coogan?

  But also, I mean, you could, you could wind up in a situation where like your firm is like forever tainted by a certain judge and the judge is like, I remember what you did. That was really sloppy. I imagine that your clients and your customers care deeply about that. Like, what are the, what are the strategies for avoiding those types of situations?

• 2:22:27Speaker 06

  You both brought up really great points here and it's a really funny thing because folks are always like a generative AI and legal tech are all shoe-ins for each other, but folks generally tend to forget accuracy really matters.

• 2:22:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:38Speaker 06

  These cases, you can't be 90% of the way there on a legal letter. That's how you get this part, right? Or that's how you get those, again, some of those headlines that you guys just mentioned.

• 2:22:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:48Speaker 06

  And the way we think about this internally is you need to have done a lot of cases because every basis point of accuracy matters. It's another way of thinking about it. We do a number of different legal workflows for these attorneys, but if you think of one letter called a demand letter, that's one of the documents that we prepare for our, for our firms. The quality from this in us being able to repair this two years ago versus today was very different.

• 2:23:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:12Speaker 06

  Right. When we started, keep in mind, this is before GPT three and the big, you know, all the craziness around AI two years ago, we had to have a human in the loop to QA these letters.

• 2:23:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:23:24Speaker 06

  And if you think about the inputs in these cases, and we're at a point now where we're going to be seeing millions of pages of medical records, medical bills, police reports, bra underlying documents, we've had to fine tune these models, one to be able to get a much higher level of accuracy than what you typically see off the shelf. And so it's a simple example of this is if you think of something as intuitive as, hey, list me all the medical visits that a plaintiff has seen in a case. If you just go into any of your, you know, models today that are publicly available, ask it to do it for you, you'll see the accuracy is just not good enough. And this is where we had to train our own data service model, just to do something intuitive is be able to pull out a date. Because

• 2:24:06Speaker 06

  when you look at these case files, you get to see timestamp dates, signature dates, date of birth, etc.

• 2:24:11John Coogan?

  There's so many different dates, yeah.

• 2:24:13Speaker 06

  It gets pretty complicated with even just one piece of extractions. And that's how we had to build this with time. You had to do a lot of, you had to get your reps in to get the quality where it needed to be.

• 2:24:23John Coogan?

  How are you growing the business? Are you running billboard ads? If you're an injury attorney, call this number? Or are you doing steak dinners?

• 2:24:31Jordi Hays?

  You should really do that on the 101. That'd be great.

• 2:24:35John Coogan?

  Or are there like legal tech conferences that you like? What does the top of funnel look like for you?

• 2:24:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, this is the crazy thing as well about our space is this is such a massive space that folks just don't necessarily know too much about. But when you mentioned those billboards.

• 2:24:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:51Speaker 06

  Again, folks are saying this in jest, but when you see one of these firms has a thousand billboards in California. That's, I don't know any SaaS business that has a thousand billboards.

• 2:25:02John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:25:02Speaker 06

  Like massive marketing machines and they're, based on our math, there's around 300,000 of these injury attorneys.

• 2:25:08John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:25:09Speaker 06

  And about 20 million cases and they're all over the place, right?

• 2:25:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:13Speaker 06

  One of our largest customers as an example is in Alabama.

• 2:25:17John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:25:17Speaker 06

  You would have never thought it would be in Alabama.

• 2:25:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:19Speaker 06

  Massive firms in California, massive firms on the East Coast, and it really follows population.

• 2:25:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:25Speaker 06

  Wherever there are people, there's going to be injuries because it can mean anything from a motor vehicle accident to a dog bite case, even police brutality cases. There's many different ways folks get injured. And so as long as there's people, there's going to be personal injury attorneys, as long as there's personal injury attorneys, they're all B to C. They're all kind of like, they want to be found. And so if you think about our go to market approach, we have a over 100 person go to market team that's territory based. So this is where we could go local in LA and SF, wherever it might be, to be able to get these folks. And that's where, you know, a lot of this is outbound as opposed to inbound.

• 2:25:54John Coogan?

  Did you ever think about the Atrium Clearspire model of like bolting an actual law firm onto your software company of an LLC bolted to the, uh, to the C corp with like an MSA, uh, that was a model that's been tried a few times. Uh, they think people are trying it again, but did it ever occur to you to try and try your own cases, team up with a lawyer, build a firm?

• 2:26:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, for us, like we, we, we wanna, the way at least I see this space evolving is I see this as very much a winner take most. And even though we're in vertical SaaS here, it, there's like elements of Uber and Lyft that feel true to our space where the first startup that gets 10% of LA will win LA.

• 2:26:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:35Speaker 06

  Because every time you see these cases, the better this whole system gets. And I'll just, I'll elaborate on that a little bit more and that should hopefully explain why we're doing this in a very B to B fashion. But the one thing you folks should know is even though there's 20 million cases, 99% of them are settled privately. And so there's a real wide gap in performance in terms of how long these cases take to settle and how much they settle for. And generative AI alone can't solve that problem. You need to be able to see a lot of cases for you to be able to do that because most of this data is sitting in the inboxes of a very fragmented industry. And so for us, the goal is how do we expand or go to market as quickly as we can to be able to go from 1% to 10% to 30% market share? And the people who want to think about as a key metric, more cases we see the better the

• 2:27:19Speaker 06

  system ultimately gets. And if we're just very focused on, I mean, we will never do this, but like competing against our own customers, you're only going to get a ton of the cases that are out there.

• 2:27:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes tons of sense.

• 2:27:30Jordi Hays?

  Do you think that legal AI is underhyped as a category? Obviously, there's a ton of funding flowing in, but there's not, you know, on the code generation side, it's sufficiently hyped, right? Every researcher at every company, you know, is talking about the leverage they're getting. Every startup founder is talking about the leverage they're getting. Every CTO is talking about the leverage they're getting. Public company CEOs, legal is like, you know, just happens, you know, there we certainly have plenty of lawyers in tech, but they're not, you know, they just don't tend to be in a position where they can talk about stuff in the way that regular software engineers can. So it feels like you could be seeing the same type of revolution happening, but it

• 2:28:13Jordi Hays?

  just would be much, get much, much less coverage.

• 2:28:16Speaker 06

  No, for sure. I, I think that there's obviously been, and when we started even up a couple of years ago, you folks could imagine it's like legal tech sucks, AI sucks, personal injury sucks. And like my background is I used to work at Waymo and I used to work as like a tech investor before that. And so it's definitely a lot, there's a lot more attention today in legal tech than there's ever been before. Is it, again, is it overblown or not? I think in the end of the day, the thing that makes our space so different when we're selling to these injury attorneys, the thing you folks should know is it's a very fragmented, highly competitive, and most importantly, commission only industry. These folks make a percentage of the value of the cases that they settle. So unlike other parts of, you know, AI or legal, there's no experimental ARR.

• 2:29:02Speaker 06

  Right? These are not like big firms where they can afford to spend a million dollars on something. And because of how competitive it is, like you better believe this thing can actually help their case operations. Otherwise they'll churn. They don't have the luxury of, you know, being able to have big IT budgets, et cetera. And so in that sense, if you think about our 2,000 customers, it wouldn't be around if they're not seeing real demonstratable ROI in terms of increasing case outcomes or reducing the duration of these cases. And in that sense, you know, I do think it is, call it, it's still early days. And if you think about the mission of the business, it's not, I, I think it's just gonna be, it's inevitable in terms of those 20 million cases being able to be settled, not again, all over the place, but as fast as they can for the fair amount.

• 2:29:43Speaker 06

  And so in that sense, when we're just 1% penetrated, it's, it's not overhyped, at least in my mind. It's like clear ROI.

• 2:29:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and there's that, that customer alignment where they're incentivized to adopt as much AI as they possibly can because they're not billing hourly, right? They're just getting paid when these cases settle versus, you know, traditional law firm. If you, if something they used to be able to bill 10 hours for suddenly it takes 30 minutes and they had a lot of margin in that 10 hours, there's not, there's not the same incentive to adopt as, as what you're seeing.

• 2:30:20Speaker 06

  You, you nailed it. And the other thing that's also different about this wave, and it's funny because I was having a conversation with one of our, one of our customers about this, some of these folks are still on-prem, but they're one of our biggest customers. And so when, when you go to a law firm and you're like, hey, you gotta be on the cloud, they're not gonna understand what you really mean. When you're going to these law firms and you're like, here's a legal letter, it was drafted instantly. You can evaluate the quality of this thing relative to your own staff because you're a subject matter expert. You know what, you know, this legal letter does. And that's what allowed the space to adopt a lot quicker than anything that we've seen before in legal tech. And again, I think you really pinpointed that they really genuinely care a lot about being faster,

• 2:31:02Speaker 06

  settling quicker, spending less time on review, because anything that they save, they get to keep right as their own margins.

• 2:31:10Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:31:10John Coogan?

  One of my first jobs ever was doing paper filing at a law firm as an intern. I was like a kid.

• 2:31:18Jordi Hays?

  You're a paper boy then. You're kind of a paper boy now. You're still a paper enthusiast.

• 2:31:22John Coogan?

  I hadn't, I hadn't put it together until I, until I actually just had this conversation and reflected on like how crazy that was that, I mean, I guess the cloud like barely existed then, but yeah, it was paper back then. It was wild. I mean, computers were around, but like my job was sort of like, yeah, inventorying this stuff. So yeah, law moves slowly. Like the, like a lot of the law firm partners that get like effectively tenure are like, my process works and I like it printed out or I like, I like, you know, having the network, the Intranet at my office is reliable. I don't know about putting it in Google. And so like people got to figure it out.

• 2:31:58Jordi Hays?

  When do you, when do you expect the first AI legal company to IPO?

• 2:32:06Jordi Hays?

  Still feels like we're probably a couple, couple of years out, but I imagine the revenue for you or some, some of these other players could get there. You know, get to that $500 million mark or wherever, whatever the, wherever it needs to be to, to be interesting to, to Wall Street.

• 2:32:25Speaker 06

  Yeah. So this is my, just on the paper piece real quick and I'll answer the other question. And it's, it's so funny. The way you're going to kind of think of this, there's been so much innovation and more of the consumer, like how to get leads, like the consumer part of personal injury where like, you know, attorneys are advertising on TikTok, on social, et cetera. But on the operations side, there's been very little innovation back to your paper days. They're still doing stuff on paper. We've had some of our folks asked to pay our, our annual SaaS subscription with monthly checks to give you a sense of the ops piece can be in this space. And so this is the first time really in history that these operations of these firms are changing substantially, right? Because you now can do a lot more with a lot fewer staff.

• 2:33:11Speaker 06

  And if you think about, again, like where we're going with this. You're going to see these firms be able to handle a lot more volume. And if you think about the amount of cases that first line of attorneys take on today, you'd be surprised at how many cases they're not taking on because they just don't have capacity or they can't make the math work because again of their of their model.

• 2:33:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:33Speaker 06

  Sorry, I think I missed the other question. What was the other question again?

• 2:33:35Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I just kind of, yeah, IPO timelines for the category. When do you expect the first companies to get out?

• 2:33:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does feel like an entirely different like market. Like there's no like clear comps that everyone knows. It's not just like, oh, another like, you know, SaaS company that we can just immediately comp to. So it would be like a new.

• 2:33:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And in the legal industry, law firms can't go public, right?

• 2:33:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 2:33:58Jordi Hays?

  You want exposure.

• 2:33:59John Coogan?

  Financials got to be different. Yeah, I would love to hear some color on like how the public market might receive some of these.

• 2:34:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I mean, in terms of like timeline, I'd say again, the 500 million of ARR, median ARR, you know, business going public, being the threshold there. I think we're a couple of years away, but you know, I mean, we're scaling super fast.

• 2:34:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:17Speaker 06

  From doubling year on year on a, on a meaningful base. So I do think we're maybe two, three years, not us, but for one of these companies, us as well, two, three years out before going public. In terms of like how the markets might receive it, it's so interesting, right? These are such different businesses where you're going to see a lot more TAM than you've seen in traditional software. And so I, I kind of say this, one of our, one of our biggest customers is, is paying us 4 million a year and they have 100 employees at the firm.

• 2:34:45John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:34:46Speaker 06

  Think of the wide.

• 2:34:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, 40,000 in value per head. Yep, exactly. So you're delivering a ton of value to this.

• 2:34:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's because one of the things that comes up with, with some of our investors say is like, you're focused in a very niche part of law, personal, right? And 300,000 attorneys out of, you know, over a million is maybe 30% of the base in the US. But when you're making 10x more revenue per head than traditional SaaS.

• 2:35:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:35:08Speaker 06

  Your TAM is actually meaningfully bigger than a lot of these SaaS companies.

• 2:35:11John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 2:35:12Speaker 06

  That are out there. And so again, I do think it'll be interesting to see much more rapid growth, much higher base SaaS businesses than you've ever seen before. And how the market would, would be able to evaluate that because it is going to be different than traditional SaaS.

• 2:35:26Jordi Hays?

  Totally. Well, congratulations on the funding milestone. I'm sure we'll see you back here again soon. Maybe one more round before the end of the year. You've already done a couple, you know, but looking forward to the next conversation.

• 2:35:39John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Thank you so much for hopping on.

• 2:35:41Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:35:42John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:35:44John Coogan?

  And now it's time for our song. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. Book of wonder with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Go to wander.com. Uh, when Lisa Su took over as chief executive of chip, of chip company Advanced Micro Devices, AMD, in 2014, the company's market value was just under $3 billion. Decade later, today, it's worth more than $330 billion. A little hundred X. There we go. The more than hundredfold increase that reflects how deftly AMD has pivoted its

• 2:36:25John Coogan?

  strategy from mainly producing graphics cards for gaming and personal computer processors to more tightly focusing on the data center chips that power, power the artificial intelligence revolution. Uh, the share price rose 24% on Monday after the company announced a partnership with OpenAI um, to build six gigawatts of power for inference. The deal has given rocket fuel to AMD's share price and the company's ambitions to complete, to compete with rival chip designer Nvidia, which is by far the dominant competitor in the AI semiconductor industry at more than 10 times the valuation. Now, the AMD share price is kind of up and down and, and we're, we're, we're now at all time highs, but just barely.

• 2:37:04John Coogan?

  Uh, March 8th of 2024, the stock was trading at $207, now it's at 211. And so, uh, they, they've already ridden an AI boom from $50 a share, $60 a share, up to 200, then back down to $80 a share, and then back up to 211 shares, uh, 200, 211 dollars a share. So, uh, Monday's deal specifics, uh, specifies that OpenAI will be issued warrants for $160 million shares of AMD stock at a marginal price of one cent per share. Once OpenAI hits certain deployment targets and once AMD's share price rises, the final tranche of shares will be granted only if AMD's stock hits $600 a share.

• 2:37:46John Coogan?

  So it needs to, uh, three X and become a trillion dollar company, basically. For now, the market capitalization with a market capitalization of four and a half trillion, Nvidia is nearly 14 times the size of AMD and most analysts' estimates peg the market share for graphics processing units, or GPUs as they're known, thank you, Wall Street Journal, that power AI training and inference at more than 75%. So 75% of the market is Nvidia and they're trading at 10 times the price of AMD. AMD faces pressure from companies such as Broadcom, which produces application-specific custom chips for customers such as OpenAI. And so the OpenAI deal might have shifted the balance in AMD's favor somewhat. How AMD

• 2:38:27John Coogan?

  got to this inflection point is a combination of careful strategic planning and being in the right place at the right time. Quote, "Over the last few years, what's been important to us is to understand the workloads that would really drive the next generation AI training and inference," Sue said in an interview. "This deal is a huge expansion of the work that we're doing." For much of the past decade, AMD's archrival has been Intel, the troubled chip designer and manufacturer that recently received major investments from Nvidia and the US government on the strength of popular designs for the graphics chips used in the PlayStation and Xbox gaming systems and the CPUs, or main computer brains, thank you for explaining what CPU is, Wall Street Journal, used in consumer PCs. AMD has steadily eaten

• 2:39:10John Coogan?

  away at Intel's market share for years. Intel's been bogged down by a costly effort to turn around its chip fabrication business. AMD, however, spun off its manufacturing business, now known as Global Foundries, in 2009, while Intel has continued to pour money into its unprofitable Foundry segment even as it fell badly behind the more technologically advanced rivals such as TSMC. And so this is where everyone always says Intel should have gone fabulous, they should have split the companies off. That's what AMD did. They split off Global Foundries, became a fabulous semiconductor design shop like Nvidia, the business is similar to Nvidia, and now this seems like they're catching up. I mean, the stock's up a hundred.

• 2:39:51Jordi Hays?

  Somebody asked Lisa Su if they are going to partner with Intel. Buco Capital says they gave a very awkward and funny response. She says, "Well, as you know, the supply chain is something that we work on, you know, very meticulously. I think we have a very strong supply chain. We're certainly partnered with, you know, TSMC across the supply chain." You know, just to that earlier question, we're Absolutely prioritizing building in the United States because I think that's super important. This is the the USAI stack. We want to have as much of it in the US as possible. And you know, we continue to really look at, you know, how do we ensure that there

• 2:40:32Jordi Hays?

  will be a strong supply chain, you know, going forward. So when you have it typed out, it really, you can tell she's trying to.

• 2:40:42John Coogan?

  It's always tough to stuff a mic in someone's face and then transcribe it. Who knows? We've been going back and forth on the AI bubble. I think we should close out with clearest evidence that we're not in an AI bubble from Trung Phan. He says he's not worried about the AI bubble bursting until corporate social accounts start having these exchanges again. And back in 2021, December of 2000, December of 2021, Meta says this is going to look great in the metaverse. And the official Pepsi account says, you know it, friend. And Budweiser Beer chimes in, says, welcome, brand friend, wag me. And then Pepsi says, thanks, friend,

• 2:41:25John Coogan?

  wag me with the rocket emoji. And this was.

• 2:41:29Jordi Hays?

  That was a moment.

• 2:41:30John Coogan?

  This is a dark time.

• 2:41:31Jordi Hays?

  That pretty much was, that was actually two weeks, or about a week after the actual topic in the top end of November.

• 2:41:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, Keith had called it.

• 2:41:40Jordi Hays?

  Keith called it perfectly. Everybody should have post notifications on for Keith.

• 2:41:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:41:45Jordi Hays?

  Probably gonna, if he, if he makes a call again, I think people will be listening.

• 2:41:52John Coogan?

  Yes. Anyway, keep monitoring the situation, folks. Stay sharp. And we will see you tomorrow.

• 2:41:58Jordi Hays?

  I cannot wait.

• 2:41:59John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

• 2:42:01Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 2:42:02John Coogan?

  And tune in Friday for our interview with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI.

• 2:42:07Jordi Hays?

  Sam, it's time.

• 2:42:09John Coogan?

  Thanks for watching.

• 2:42:10Jordi Hays?

  See you tomorrow.

• 2:42:10John Coogan?

  Bye.