Why No One Talks Cournot, Hollywood vs. Seedance 2.0, Micron’s $200B Bet | Jon Caramanica, Haseeb Qureshi, Spenser Skates, Celine Halioua, Ankur Goyal, Reed Duchscher

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (00:52) - Why is no one talking about the Cournot Equilibrium? (23:53) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (33:04) - Adani Group Unveils $100B AI Investment (35:31) - Micron Bets $200B to End AI Bottleneck (41:01) - Warner Bros Reopens Paramount Talks (43:05) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:00:54) - Thrive Capital Raises $10B in New Funding (01:02:54) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:15:20) - Hollywood Responds to Seedance 2.0 (01:29:08) - Jon Caramanica, born in 1975, is an American journalist and pop music critic for The New York Times, known for his insightful coverage of hip-hop and popular music. He discusses the viral ascent of "My Granny Got Hit with a Bazooka" by Miami XO, highlighting its rapid memeification and the artist's sudden rise from obscurity. Caramanica examines the song's adaptability across various formats, the music industry's response to such unexpected hits, and the evolving dynamics between virality and artist development. (02:02:17) - Spenser Skates, co-founder and CEO of Amplitude, transitioned from algorithmic trading at DRW Trading Group to leading a product analytics company that went public in 2021. He discusses the benefits of taking Amplitude public, including enhanced talent acquisition and long-term stability, and emphasizes the importance of rapid innovation in the SaaS industry to maintain a competitive edge. (02:24:20) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:29:16) - Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly Capital, a $4 billion crypto venture firm, discusses the firm's recent announcement of their fourth fund and the evolving landscape of crypto investments. He highlights the increasing intersection of crypto with AI, noting investments in platforms like Polymarket and the acquisition of OpenClaw by OpenAI. Qureshi emphasizes the enduring nature of crypto, its expansion into various sectors, and the growing adoption of stablecoins, particularly in countries with high inflation, despite regulatory challenges. (02:42:42) - Celine Halioua, founder and CEO of Loyal, a biotech company developing drugs to extend dogs' lifespans, discusses the company's recent $100 million Series C funding round, bringing total funding to over $250 million. She emphasizes the primary goal of obtaining FDA approval for their first longevity drug, highlighting that much of the development process involves time-consuming steps like aging studies and regulatory responses. Halioua also notes the impact of GLP-1 drugs on public perception of aging biology, making the concept of aging interventions more tangible and understandable. (02:51:33) - Ankur Goyal, founder and CEO of Braintrust, a company specializing in AI product observability, discusses the challenges of predicting AI product behavior post-launch and emphasizes the importance of monitoring real-world usage to identify successes and failures. He highlights the necessity for companies to adapt their AI models regularly, suggesting that best practices involve updating models every four to six weeks to maintain optimal performance. Goyal also notes a growing interest in open-source models, observing that while few companies currently use them, those that do account for nearly half of the token usage on Braintrust's platform. (03:01:22) - Reed Duchscher, founder and CEO of Night Media, a talent management company representing top digital creators, discusses the recent announcement of a $70 million capital raise led by Stepstone, with participation from Founders Fund and K5 House Capital. He explains that, despite Night Media's decade-long profitability, this funding will enable expansion into new areas such as music, sports, and live events, aiming to position the company as the internet's leading media entity. Duchscher also shares his perspective on the future of AI in content creation, expressing skepticism about its ability to produce engaging content in the near term, and highlights the growing trend of creators utilizing clipping strategies to amplify their reach across platforms. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Tuesday, February 17th, 2026. We are live from the TVP and UltraDome, the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place.

• 0:16Jordi Hays?

  It is so good to be back.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  It's the year of the fire horse. And

• 0:20Jordi Hays?

  And we get to celebrate it twice. We think we, I remember we talked about it at the beginning of the year, but the Chinese New Year did not start until today.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  It's Lunar New Year, right? Worshippers burned large incense sticks on Monday outside a temple in Hong Kong to mark the Lunar New Year.

• 0:35Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 0:35John Coogan?

  Which falls on Tuesday. People around Asia celebrate the start of the year of the horse.

• 0:39Jordi Hays?

  In the UltraDome, it's the year of the horse.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  Every year. Every year, I think so.

• 0:45Jordi Hays?

  Look at this. Look at this. We were, we were early. We were early.

• 0:49John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  And right.

• 0:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 0:51Jordi Hays?

  On horses.

• 0:52John Coogan?

  Uh, well, everyone is talking about the Korno equilibrium, at least Dario, Amodei and Dorkesh Patel are.

• 1:00Jordi Hays?

  And you.

• 1:00John Coogan?

  And me, uh, and some folks on the timeline. We're going back and forth and basically trying to get to this question.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  I feel like we should give the context on this, on the titling strategy of these, because we call the, uh, run of shit, like we'll title an essay, why is no one talking about the Korno equilibrium? Because there's one guy that had this super viral thread like a year or two ago. And he's, and the title was, why is no one talking about Mark Andreessen? We were laughing about it so much because he's one of the most talked about.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  Investors in venture.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  He's on the Midas list constantly. He's written essays and books.

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  Everyone's talking about like

• 1:37John Coogan?

  Been viral a million times. He's done so many podcasts.

• 1:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. There's someone that everyone in the industry has an opinion on already.

• 1:44John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:45Jordi Hays?

  He's not like a Midas lister.

• 1:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:47Jordi Hays?

  Up there, but not a lot of people. It's like everyone's talking about it. But in this case.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Really, I mean, truly, I do think more people should be talking about the Kornow equilibrium, or at least learning about what it means, because it is this sort of obscure economic construct. And it's really, really old. The guy who coined it is, he died 150 years ago. His name's Antoine Kornow. And the basic idea is that if there's only a few players in a given market, you can think about, you know, any, any specific market, lemonade stands or whatever, and they aren't competing on price, they will compete on supply. And they'll try to predict what their competitors are doing and then respond accordingly. And this is really, really relevant to the AI lab discussion, because you can tell that

• 2:35John Coogan?

  even though all the leaders of the AI labs say, "I don't think about the competition, I don't talk about the competition, I'll use general terms," they're all obsessed with what everyone else is doing, and they think about it constantly, very clearly. And if someone's buying 10 billion a compute over here, they're going to counter with eight over there, try and jump to 12. And everyone's sort of keying off of each other. You know, Microsoft pauses, AWS goes all in, there's all these like horse races. It's why semi-analysis exists and provides great, you know, cross-functional data.

• 3:05Jordi Hays?

  Daniel in the chat says, "State actors at work."

• 3:08John Coogan?

  Again.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  Apparently, we're having technical difficulties today.

• 3:12John Coogan?

  We'll fight through it.

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  We're back.

• 3:13John Coogan?

  We're back.

• 3:13Jordi Hays?

  In every way, but we're working on it.

• 3:16John Coogan?

  Okay. And so, yeah, there's this big question. In, outside of tech, there's this, there's this discussion that I see that's always funny to me, where people would be like, "Oh, the, the, the price to earnings ratio..."

• 3:28Jordi Hays?

  Brian says, "They don't want you to talk about the Kornow equilibrium."

• 3:30John Coogan?

  They don't want us to talk about it, they don't want us to talk about it, for sure.

• 3:34John Coogan?

  I like the Chiron 2 AI Labs locked in Kornow battle.

• 3:39John Coogan?

  And the, so outside of tech, there's this discussion, I saw a person say, "The price to earnings ratio for OpenAI and Anthropic is just simply too high." And I was like, "Earnings? These companies are losing money. They don't have a price to earnings ratio, it's divided by zero."

• 3:57Jordi Hays?

  This is going to blow your mind.

• 3:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's, it's so much worse than you think, right? They're not making any money. They're deeply unprofitable. These are the most unprofitable companies in human history, I think. But at the same time, there is an economic rationality behind all of this. And what is that economic rationality? Well, when you're running a...

• 4:19John Coogan?

  AI lab, you actually have two businesses that are sort of hiding within the P and L. And so the first, you, you know, you share this brand, you share the data centers, you share compute, but there's a whole bunch of risks and rewards to the various pieces of the business. So first, you have training the models. So you make an upfront investment in a training run that creates a particular model generation. And then that asset depreciates as the frontier moves. And then when a new and better model is released, everyone moves over and you stop reaping the benefits of that and the value of that model goes much, much lower. How much money is OpenAI making from GPT 3.5? They spent money training that, now not a ton, but

• 5:00Jordi Hays?

  I would actually love to know.

• 5:02John Coogan?

  They're probably making almost zero. Who's still on GPT 3.5? I don't even know if the API is live anymore. But GPT 4 is the really instructive, is the really instructive example because I believe that model costs like a hundred million dollars to train and it was really expensive at the time. But then very quickly, they were on a multi-billion dollar run rate. And it was very clear that based on the inference margin and subscriptions, ChatGPT Pro, that they made all the money back from GPT 4 and more. Now there's a question about, okay, well, if they go and spend 10 billion on training, how quickly will that come back? And how much, how quickly can they reap that? And there's this game of chicken that's happening. So that's one of them.

• 5:43John Coogan?

  Then the other side of things is the inference factory. So this is essentially a manufacturing business. You have, you have variable costs, so GPUs, power, engineering overhead, and then your revenue is subscriptions, API usage and enterprise contracts. And so when you just look at inference, you see positive contribution margin. And we can see that because we can compare the cost to inference a model of the GPT 5 class size or the OPUS 4.5 size. You can see, what does it look like to run an open source version of that model on commodity hardware? Well, it's way, way cheaper than what you pay to Anthropic or OpenAI, so they must have good margins. And everyone sort of agrees at this point that inference margins are in fact healthy.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  The question is, how do you balance those two pieces? And when do you risk over investing? And that's sort of this corno game of chicken that everyone's playing. Now, The the Kornow equilibrium comes when a small number of labs in oligopoly effectively choose supply at the frontier level and then the market clears at a high price for frontier access. So choosing supply in this case means how many data centers get built, how many GPUs get ordered, but also how much low latency capacity is allocated to the top tier. So, you know, right now, they just OpenAI just did the Cerebrus deal, there's Claude Fast, and there's a whole bunch of different modes that will deliver faster inference. And how many of those fast queries you get, how much, how much of the best chips are allocated to

• 7:11John Coogan?

  a particular tier that you're paying for is an economic question for the labs. So, on the true frontier, there aren't great substitutes, and so price stays high based on customers' willingness to pay for frontier access. So you can just think about it in more simpler terms, like, there's a ton of developers and knowledge workers who are happy to pay hundreds of dollars a month or more, but they always want the best available model. This is most people in executive roles in startups, right? It's like, yeah, I got my $200 a month subscription, I'll pay 250 or 100 or whatever, couple hundred bucks, and it just makes me better at my job. I just do whatever I need to do. But don't give me the old thing. I want the best. I want to know that the hallucination rate

• 7:54John Coogan?

  is as low as possible. I want to know that when it builds me an economic model, it's doing it as best as it possibly can, so I need to spend less time like.

• 8:02Jordi Hays?

  1% of the time, it makes a career-ending mistake.

• 8:05John Coogan?

  Maybe. I, no, no, I really, I mean, there are some crazy, crazy, like, possible outcomes. We haven't heard too many nightmare stories, but there certainly have to be out there, like the truth hallucinations.

• 8:20Jordi Hays?

  You need checks and balances.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But increasingly, yeah, increasingly less.

• 8:25Jordi Hays?

  Everyone's gone through the experience of somebody building a model and then being like. I don't know why, but it's wrong.

• 8:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:34Jordi Hays?

  And then it's usually a battle.

• 8:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:36Jordi Hays?

  You gotta train, you gotta train that instinct that can just clock this, even if you have, have no, if it just like, if it feels off.

• 8:46John Coogan?

  I was talking to a buddy about using AI tools who works in like, uh, uh, high yield debt, sales and trading and issuance. And he was like, yeah, like the models just like, aren't that good? And I was like, really? And he was like, yeah, they don't understand like Q476 of the tax code and how it applies. And I was like, okay, yeah, actually that seems like something that they might not be great at. I was like, because I, I build a toy model with just like, project out the cash flows, discount them back. And it did a great job. And I was like, cool. And he was like, no, I'm like 25 levels above that. And like deep in all these different codes and like, it's not quite there yet.

• 9:23Jordi Hays?

  Good work, little bro.

• 9:23John Coogan?

  It'll get there, but it's just like, you know, the base models are not just going to be able to like one-shot that. What do you think, Tyler? Fire it back?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  You would imagine that like something as like, if it's just like tax code, even if it's super complex, you can just put that in the context and it just does a very good job.

• 9:36John Coogan?

  Yes, but.

• 9:36Speaker 02

  Like finding specific facts from a super big document is like, that's one of the things that models are best at.

• 9:41John Coogan?

  Yes, but there's, there's a lot of, um, there's a lot of, are you laughing in the chat?

• 9:47Jordi Hays?

  Ethan, Ethan says, computer, fix TBPN. Use Gunna and Grok.

• 9:53Jordi Hays?

  Gunna can fix, Gunna can fix us.

• 9:55John Coogan?

  We're back, we're back. Um, it's, uh, yes, but I, there are, there are nuances to the tax code and to a lot of legal documents that where the law says one thing, but it's, but it's, uh, but it's implemented in a different way, or it's not enforced, or the, or some regulatory organization has enforcement discretion, or there's some understanding, and even if you just go into like, training on. You know, IP, it's like if you have really good lawyers, you can figure out, okay, well, they'll come to the table, we'll be able to negotiate this, this will be the price, this will be the settlement. So even though the model might say like, don't do that, like you have a chance to do it, there's a whole bunch of different reasons why. But yes, I generally agree with you, this is like a six month away thing. Not, but it's just like

• 10:40John Coogan?

  the current, the current.

• 10:41Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's the current thing, but with like good, you know.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. And maybe some more harnessing and more some, and better context. Anyway, the question is like, where does this all go? What is the natural state of equilibrium in the longer term? Right now, they're locked in Cornell, where there's a whole bunch of companies, individuals that want to buy the best AI inference possible. They want the best tokens, they want the best deep research reports, they want the best code, and they're willing to pay for it. But we're supply constrained. And so, OpenAI brings a certain amount of GPUs and tokens and supply to the market. And then Anthropic also does. And the whole Cornell thing is that they're all keying off of each other.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:22John Coogan?

  And saying, okay, if they're offering this much, I'm going to offer that much.

• 11:25Jordi Hays?

  And to be, and to be clear, so having a product, just an API business, gives you leverage. Because at some point, the models are smart enough where you don't need to train them, you don't need to train a model that is 4% better, because people are still coming to your application and having a good product experience, right?

• 11:43John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 11:43Jordi Hays?

  So historically, one of the critiques to Anthropic's business was that they have to just be on this constant, constant fly, sort of hamster wheel of training the best model, because they have an, the majority of their business is this API business.

• 11:58John Coogan?

  They're not an aggregator yet.

• 11:59Jordi Hays?

  Swap it out for a smarter model.

• 12:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 12:01Jordi Hays?

  That said, they have Claude Code now, which gives them some more leverage over the market.

• 12:07John Coogan?

  And the, and the really interesting thing is that Dario is now talking about Being near the end of the exponential or maybe producing like the final models. Because we we've talked to a few people about this, but it's very unclear if if it's possible to create like a super intelligence of like 5,000 IQ. It might just be they get good at all knowledge work and they can answer all tasks, but it's like the digital guy. And so at that point, it does commoditize and you drop out of Korno equilibrium and you become more customers are more aggressive about switching to cheaper models to cut costs because the frontier is now commoditized in the entire backlog. Everyone is at the frontier, basically.

• 12:51John Coogan?

  And so in that scenario, you you switch over to Bertrand competition, which doesn't really mean that profits go to zero, but there is more competition. And it looks a lot more like the hyperscaler cloud market, which is, I think, what people have been sort of signaling towards. And also, it sort of explains why a lot of the VC firms are getting in multiple companies because they don't think it's going to be winner take all anymore. They think it's going to be much more oligopolistic for the long term, and there will be competition between the major three or four labs that will and and it will be much more about how can you marshal enough supply, create a huge barrier to entry. Like you and I could start an AWS competitor tomorrow, but it's going to be extremely expensive to bring up data centers that just serve web apps everywhere, let alone AI stuff,

• 13:36John Coogan?

  right? Building all those data centers. You're thinking what I'm thinking? You're thinking you're thinking AWS?

• 13:41Jordi Hays?

  No, I was hanging I was hanging.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  People are saying, when does T P P go to product?

• 13:43Jordi Hays?

  I was hanging with my buddy, my buddy Ben on Sunday, and he was, we both live in Malibu. He was thinking of just getting some chips and setting up Malibu inference.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 13:55Jordi Hays?

  Just the name alone, it sounds like you could get at least, at least.

• 14:00John Coogan?

  Malibu inference.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  Malibu inference.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  That's really funny.

• 14:03Jordi Hays?

  Would would be a good would be a beautiful name for for a Neo cloud.

• 14:09John Coogan?

  It's funny. And so there is a question about in the final models, will there be differentiation? What does differentiation look like? There's a potential for differentiation around, okay, you get a model that's really good at bio or math or engineering or code or writing. That's possible. Another possibility is that there's just differentiation on on quality, latency, safety, enterprise tooling, and you wind up with a small number of vertically integrated firms. And so in that scenario, I feel like OpenAI's recent moves make a lot of sense. Cerebrus offers differentiated product around speed. Peter from OpenClaw joining makes a lot of sense around building orchestration products

• 14:54John Coogan?

  that can route to particular models. So a, you know, the next generation of the Claude code router that can route you to specific APIs and act as a model router on top for for the agentic programmer, AI assistant use case. You already see the the model router happening in the ChatGPT consumer app. We haven't really seen that in the desktop CLI app. And so there's there's something interesting there. And then Frontier, OpenAI Frontier, that forward deployed engineer thing, that digs deeper into the enterprise and probably gets them, you know, more hooks in there, more more pricing power.

• 15:32Jordi Hays?

  The chat's going off today, Ryan says, the Cornell Company of Malibu.

• 15:35John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 15:38John Coogan?

  I love it. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches.

• 15:47John Coogan?

  Let's let's play the clip of Dwar Kesh Patel and Dario Amodei discussing the economics of AI labs, because I think it's informative. And this is where the whole Cornell current thing came from, because Dario dropped that phrase.

• 16:04Jordi Hays?

  So when you said, why is no one talking about it?

• 16:06John Coogan?

  It was literally everyone that listened to the biggest podcast of the week. But I'm explaining it. Let's play it.

• 16:14Speaker 03

  Like we have a, you know, let's just imagine we're in like an economics textbook. We have a small number of firms. Each can invest a limited amount in, or like each can invest some fraction in R and D. They have some marginal cost to serve. The margins on that, the profit margin, the gross profit margins on that marginal cost are like very high because inference is efficient. There's some competition, but the models are also differentiated. There's some, there's some, you know, companies will compete to push their research budgets up, but like because there's a small number of players, you know, we have the, what is it called, the Kornow equilibrium, I think is what the, what the small number of firm equilibrium is.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  The point is it doesn't equilibrate to perfect competition with, with, with, with, with, with zero margins. If there's like three firms, if there's three firms in the economy, all are kind of independently behaving, behaving rationally, it doesn't equilibrate to zero. Help me understand that because right now we do have three leading firms and they're not making profit. And so what, what, yeah, what is changing? Yeah, so the, again, the gross margins right now are very positive. What's happening, what's happening is a combination of two things. One is we're still in the exponential scale up phase of compute.

• 17:38Speaker 03

  So what, basically what that means is we're training, like a model gets trained. It costs, you know, let's say a model got trained that costs a billion dollars last year. And then this year it produced $4 billion of revenue and cost $1 billion to, to, to, to inference from. So, you know, again, I'm using stylized number here, but you know, it'll be 75%. These aren't my numbers. I'm just picking random numbers. Gross, gross margins and you know, this, this 25% tax. So that model as a whole makes $2 billion. But at the same time, we're spending $10 billion to train the next model because there's an exponential scale up. And so the company loses money.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  Each model makes money, but the company loses money. The equilibrium I'm talking about is an equilibrium where we have the country of geniuses, we have the country of geniuses in the data center, but that, that model training scale up has equilibrated more. Maybe, maybe it's still, it's still going up. We're still trying to predict the demand, but it's more, it's more leveled out.

• 18:46John Coogan?

  Let's go. Let me tell you about TurboPuffer. Serverless vector and full text search built from first principles in object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  There is another fun clip that we should watch from A Beautiful Mind. Jordy, have you seen A Beautiful Mind?

• 19:00Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 19:00John Coogan?

  It won the Oscar for Best Picture, I believe. It's about the mathematician John Nash. Have you seen A Beautiful Mind?

• 19:07Jordi Hays?

  I've not.

• 19:08John Coogan?

  Wow. Unc status over there.

• 19:10Jordi Hays?

  You would have, you would have, I was, I was walking on the beach with Senra on, I think, Saturday. And we walked by an incredibly famous, one of the top movie directors of the last probably 10 years.

• 19:26John Coogan?

  Really?

• 19:26Jordi Hays?

  And Senra was like, "Do you see that?" And I was like, "See what? It's a guy with a dog."

• 19:32John Coogan?

  That's hilarious. I, I feel like that your beach tours have been really star studded lately. This is a different from the previous one you mentioned, correct?

• 19:40Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 19:40John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 19:41Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  That's remarkable. Well, let's pull up the clip from...

• 19:52John Coogan?

  It's from A Beautiful Mind.

• 19:54Speaker 04

  Nash, you might want to stop shuffling your papers for five seconds.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  Is that Eric Clayman?

• 20:02John Coogan?

  Yes, it's Eric Clayman. In the, in the Ramp biopic. We got, we got, we got our cast right here.

• 20:09John Coogan?

  This is the original, like, looks, Max and maybe...

• 20:15Speaker 04

  Well, she won a large wedding, you think? Should we say swords, gentlemen? Pistols at dawn?

• 20:19Speaker 05

  Have you remembered nothing? Recall the lessons of Adam Smith, the father of modern economics.

• 20:25Speaker 04

  In, in competition, individual ambition serves the common good.

• 20:29Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 20:30Speaker 04

  Every man for himself, gentlemen. And those who strike out are stuck with their friends.

• 20:35Speaker 05

  I'm not going to strike out.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  You can lead a blonde to water, but you can't make her drink.

• 20:38Speaker 05

  I don't think he said that.

• 20:39Speaker 04

  All right, nobody move. She's looking over here. Why is she looking at Nash?

• 20:43Speaker 05

  Oh, God. All right, he may have the upper hand now, but wait until he opens his mouth.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  I think this, this is very, very stylized and completely apocryphal. Like, he definitely thought of this theory, but not at a bar.

• 21:09Speaker 05

  We block each other.

• 21:11Speaker 06

  Not a single one of us is going to get her.

• 21:15Speaker 06

  So then we go for her friends.

• 21:18Speaker 06

  But they will all give us the cold shoulder because nobody likes to be second choice.

• 21:23Speaker 06

  What if no one goes for the blonde?

• 21:27Speaker 06

  We don't get in each other's way. And we don't insult the other girls.

• 21:33Speaker 06

  That's the only way we win.

• 21:37Speaker 05

  That's the only way we all get laid.

• 21:41John Coogan?

  So he's describing the prisoner's dilemma.

• 21:44Speaker 06

  Adam Smith said.

• 21:45John Coogan?

  Where everyone must work together.

• 21:46Speaker 06

  Best result comes

• 21:49Speaker 06

  from everyone in the group doing what's best for himself, right? That's what he said, right? Incomplete, incomplete.

• 21:53John Coogan?

  Incomplete.

• 21:55Speaker 06

  Because the best result would come

• 21:59Speaker 06

  from everyone in the group doing what's best for himself.

• 22:04Speaker 06

  And the group.

• 22:04Speaker 05

  Nash, this is some way for you to get the blonde on your own. You can go to hell.

• 22:08Speaker 06

  Governing dynamics, gentlemen. Governing dynamics. Adam Smith. He's wrong.

• 22:19Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 22:21John Coogan?

  It is. So good.

• 22:25John Coogan?

  Anyway, very fun.

• 22:25Jordi Hays?

  Dave says, just join the stream. We watching a movie. Yeah, it's movie day.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  Movie day.

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  We should bring back, bring back movie days in school.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 22:34Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that was iconic. Rainy day, substitute.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  Watching Gladiator in Latin class. That's the best. Really quickly, let me tell you about vibe.co. We're DTC brands, B2B startups and AI companies. Advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  Anyway, very, yeah, very fun. Nash equilibrium, lots of game theory going on in the, in the AI wars right now. Everyone's trying to figure out how far to push it. There's a fair amount of risk. There's still the Korno game of chicken around who will invest the most in advancing the frontier. But the end state looks a lot more durable than, than pure model commoditization. And the perfectly competitive situation that many were predicting a few years ago. So if you go back to like 2023, a lot of people were saying like the models will commoditize and there will be no value there, like no profits. Because like the, the, the deep seek moment and it'll all be run on commodity hardware. That doesn't seem that likely. It seems like the labs will turn into sort of new hyperscalers.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  There will be, you know, increased competition, but.

• 23:39John Coogan?

  Still very, very good businesses à la cloud. So anyway, fun to dig into some little econ 101 or 102 depending, but let's go to the timeline.

• 23:50Jordi Hays?

  Puko Capital says, I thought Dorekesh had a good point that software engineering is the only job where the full context needed to do the job is available to an AI agent via the codebase. And I didn't think Dari had a good answer for why automating other jobs will be as easy. This got a bunch of, a lot of people kind of reacting, kind of disagreeing generally that that all of the full context needed to do the job is available. But I do think it's a, it's a, it's a something we need to figure out.

• 24:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were debating this because there was a post that was just sort of like a whoa jack reaction that was just making fun of this. And it wasn't clear if they were saying that, like that they were agreeing or disagreeing. But basically, my, my, my take was, well, it's possible that a lot of the, you know, the full context needed to do the job of a lot of, a lot of different white collar jobs is in fact logged. It's just logged in the final product, which is like a deck or spreadsheet or a decision, and then a whole bunch of emails, a whole bunch of slacks, and then a whole bunch of Zoom calls that's recorded. And so, yes, if you're running a, a business where a lot of work gets done in smoky bars late

• 25:02John Coogan?

  at night and, and, you know, back alley deal making, sure, that's going to be harder to automate. But in the world where it's someone sitting in front of a computer and there's a screen recorder running, like you should be able to pull up most of the context. At the same time, you can't just snap your fingers and go back and get every decision that was made in the eighties that allowed Coca-Cola to become a dominant soda maker.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  But you can't with Linux. You literally can't with Linux. People on calls just being like, knowing the call is being recorded and used to train something to replace them. They're just like, I'll tell you offline.

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  I'm not speaking this secret.

• 25:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, golf this weekend. You want to play golf? Um, really quickly. Figma, ship the best version, not the first one with Figma. Introducing Claude Code to Figma. Explore more options. Push ideas further.

• 25:54Jordi Hays?

  Figma. Uh, but this was funny. Bucho said, basically a non-zero chance of, uh, Joe Weisenthal victory, where software engineers write themselves out of a job first and everyone else has, has the boring parts of their job automated. Joe, of course, was joking, just saying, well, of course, software engineering is being automated. So easy.

• 26:13John Coogan?

  It's so easy.

• 26:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the debate around, uh, the posture.

• 26:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:20Jordi Hays?

  Druar Kesh, uh, his posture was absolutely excellent.

• 26:24John Coogan?

  He looks fantastic. Um, I, I love this sweater. The crew deck works really well. The, the, the pushed up sleeves is a particular choice. Didn't translate into that Chad Wojack, but, uh, he looks fantastic here and the Aaron chair is certainly helping with the posture. Uh, a lot of, a lot of fun on the timeline. Um, looking at, uh, the, the, uh, the, the, the, the looks mogging or whatever, the looks maxing. I don't even know. I can't, frame mogging. That's the.

• 26:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Having the, he, he kept bringing up the, uh, the example of, of a video editor.

• 27:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh, saying, yeah, but when will the models be good enough to edit videos well?

• 27:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

  Pick out moments.

• 27:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:07Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and give me two years and another 500 billion. This is.

• 27:13John Coogan?

  I mean.

• 27:14Jordi Hays?

  We've, we've tried every tool there is.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  They can't do it yet.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Crikey. I don't know. I don't know what's.

• 27:21Jordi Hays?

  And it's, and it's not even that we're, we're not trying the tools to replace the people on our team. We're trying to make them have higher output.

• 27:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but to date.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  I don't know if there's something super sticky. I mean, it does seem like one interesting thing is that there aren't a lot of open source, like Premiere profiles. Like, I've edited a ton of videos for YouTube. There's a whole bunch of cuts in there. What I cut out, what I didn't. You could have that record, but it's not stored in GitHub. Like, it's just, you can't necessarily train on it. You can train on the final product and understand, but you don't understand what actually got left on the cutting room floor. There's this whole concept of like, kill your darlings. Like, when you're in the edit, like, you need to be cutting more. You're like, "I like that shot. It's so cinematic. So cool." But does it actually advance the story? No. So you cut it down. I was watching The Matrix

• 28:14John Coogan?

  this weekend, and there's this amazing shot of when Neo and Morpheus are going to visit the Oracle. Is that one? The Oracle? And Neo, is that the one? Oracle? Yeah. And they reach for the doorknob, and the doorknob has this perfect reflection, and the reflection shows Neo and Morpheus. And they had to do this crazy VFX shot to hide the camera in what looks like Morpheus's coat, because if you point a camera at a mirror, you see the camera, and you don't want to see the cameraman there. That ruins the shot. And so they did all this crazy stuff to like, you know, cover up the camera. And I'd seen the behind the scenes and been like, "Wow, that's really impressive." And in my memory,

• 28:57John Coogan?

  I thought, it was like, "Oh, it's such an important shot. They probably lingered on that for like, five seconds to really let it sink in." Like, they're pulling a trick on the audience. It's beautiful. It's like half a second. And they did all this work, and then they knew that like, from a storytelling perspective, you don't want to hang out and watch a picture of a doorknob for five seconds. And so, all these decisions, like, they sort of get chronicled, but they don't get neatly organized in the way that a GitHub log does with pull request discussions and what happens. So, it'll be difficult. So, maybe two years and another $5 billion does it. But it's coming, so we'll keep monitoring it. Let me tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. We have a special guest joining, John.

• 29:42John Coogan?

  Karomica is joining.

• 29:44Jordi Hays?

  Good to talk about.

• 29:45John Coogan?

  And I wanted to, music, but I wanted to, I wanted to tee up his appearance with, with a little music review that I found in the newspaper today. The algorithm wants you to grieve. Rest in peace, my granny, she got hit by a bazooka. A title that functions as its own thesis statement is the kind of song that resists every framework we've built for understanding virality. It is not quite parody, not quite sincerity, not quite meme. It exists in some fourth space where emotional register becomes irrelevant and the only metric that matters is whether the thing lodges itself in your prefrontal cortex like a splinter. The melody, if we're being generous enough to call it that, is a three-note loop that sounds like it was composed on a Fisher Price keyboard during a power outage.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  The vocal delivery is flat, almost affectless, a kind of anti-performance that paradoxically demands more attention than virtuosity ever could. The lyrical content is, well, the title, repeated with conviction. And yet, something is happening here that's worth taking seriously, or at least worth resisting the urge to dismiss. The song collapses the distance between tragedy and comedy so completely that neither category survives the collision. It's grief as non sequitur, eulogy as punchline, memorial as munition. The bazooka isn't just absurd, it's so specifically absurd that it loops past irony and arrives somewhere strangely earnest. Nobody's grandmother has ever been hit by a bazooka.

• 31:09John Coogan?

  The scenario is impossible, and impossibility, it turns out, is its own form of tenderness. A way of saying loss is so incomprehensible that only nonsense can hold it. Or maybe it's just a guy yelling about a bazooka. The internet doesn't require you to choose, but we'll be following this story, so thanks for tuning in.

• 31:27Jordi Hays?

  And we'll get, we'll get John's take on that review.

• 31:29John Coogan?

  We will. It's the song of the week. And the ad platform of the week is AppLovin'. Profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over 1 billion daily active users and grow your business today.

• 31:41Jordi Hays?

  Andrew Reid says, horses don't stop, they keep going.

• 31:45John Coogan?

  Wait, did he actually say that?

• 31:46Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  No way.

• 31:47Jordi Hays?

  Yes, in response to 2026 being the year of the horse.

• 31:51John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 31:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, one of the greatest lyrics. Of all time.

• 31:55John Coogan?

  Originally, to, to, to, to explain the joke, it's a, is a Young Thug song. And the, the actual lyric is hustlers don't stop, they keep going.

• 32:05Jordi Hays?

  Oh, really?

• 32:05John Coogan?

  But it sounds like horses. And so people put horses don't stop, they keep going. And they show the AI generated image of the horse bench pressing and it's incredibly inspiring.

• 32:15Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of Young Thug songs that are hard to decipher.

• 32:19John Coogan?

  100%.

• 32:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, let's hit the size gong.

• 32:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 32:23Jordi Hays?

  For this Pennsylvania Girl Scout, six years old, breaks record selling 87,000 boxes of cookies. She's unstoppable.

• 32:33John Coogan?

  Unstoppable. Wait, how much is that? What's the ARR?

• 32:36Jordi Hays?

  How much is a?

• 32:38John Coogan?

  Break it down.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  Is it $12?

• 32:42John Coogan?

  That's a lot. Uh, how long does this, six years old, wow. What, uh, what enabled this incredible scale? Was it potentially Shopify? Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds, online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI?

• 32:58Jordi Hays?

  Estimating that it's somewhere around $600,000 of sales.

• 33:02John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 33:03Jordi Hays?

  At only six years old. Really incredible stuff. Heartwarming.

• 33:06John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 33:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, India's Adani Group to invest $100 billion in AI infrastructure.

• 33:11John Coogan?

  We gotta hit the gong again.

• 33:12Jordi Hays?

  Hit it again. The Indian government's investment will be a boost to the country's ambitions to become an AI power. India's Adani Group, an energy and logistics giant, said it would invest $100 billion to develop large scale data centers by 2035, the largest such commitment in India so far. Tyler, what do you think about the timing here? Is this gonna be too late? Are the clankers gonna, like, is 2035? How are we looking there? Is that, that's post singularity?

• 33:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm very bullish on, on the clankers coming pretty early. So, you know, time will tell, I guess.

• 33:43John Coogan?

  I'll see.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  I cannot wait to pull up this clip.

• 33:46John Coogan?

  It is, it is a big number. That I feel like a lot of countries have been teasing big numbers, but this is like

• 33:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're kind of mugging Micron.

• 33:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is like a really big number. You see a bunch of like multi-billion dollar deals, multi-billion dollar releases, but this is like a serious, serious, uh, serious investment. So, you know, good, good news.

• 34:08Jordi Hays?

  For many countries, one of the biggest concerns about the looming AI era is that it will deepen existing technology divides in which tech services are developed by companies in a few countries. Some countries have also expressed concerns about how large tech firms will consume data generated by their citizens to build their AI products. India is focused on making sure that startups and researchers use AI to solve pressing, development challenges, and paving the way for its businesses to become providers of global AI services. India will shape solutions not just for India, but for the world, said Indian Prime Minister Modi in a social media post today. Yandani Group said the dedicated, uh, said the dedicated computing capacity it is building will support Indian large language models and ensure data

• 34:49Jordi Hays?

  generated in India is stored locally. Uh, let's see how the stock's doing, up, up 2% today.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  Is it a $28 billion company? Do I have that right? I don't know. It's like 2, 2.5 trillion INR. So I think that's about 28 billion. So this is a huge investment.

• 35:13Jordi Hays?

  Raghav says, "Yandani will more than likely use government leverage."

• 35:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 35:17Jordi Hays?

  Government-backed data centers.

• 35:19John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 35:20Jordi Hays?

  You happy about that, Tyler?

• 35:21John Coogan?

  Government backstop coming to India.

• 35:23Jordi Hays?

  Backstop.

• 35:23John Coogan?

  Let's go. Uh, before we move on, let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30-plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com.

• 35:30Jordi Hays?

  Micron is spending 200 billion. So congratulations for saying the biggest number, Micron. Micron is spending 200 billion to break the AI memory bottleneck. For decades, memory chips were low-margin commodity products. Now the industry can't make enough to satisfy data centers' hunger.

• 35:47John Coogan?

  Just like this one company is like, yeah, we're going to spend twice as much as India as the Yandani Group.

• 35:55Jordi Hays?

  Boise, Idaho. Each afternoon at around 4:30, the earth here shakes from a series of controlled explosions as engineers blast through basalt.

• 36:04Jordi Hays?

  Bedrock to flatten out the ground underneath a gigantic new semiconductor factory.

• 36:08John Coogan?

  That's cool.

• 36:09Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for Idaho.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:11Jordi Hays?

  We don't talk about Idaho enough.

• 36:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:14Jordi Hays?

  Micron Technology is the largest American maker of memory chips, the tiny slices of silicon that store and transfer data and help power everything from smartphones and car computers to laptops and data centers. Micron is rushing to add manufacturing capacity to avert the biggest supply crunch the memory industry has seen in more than 40 years. In Boise, where the company is based, Micron is spending $50 billion to more than double the size of its 450-acre campus, including the construction of two new chip factories. The first fab's inaugural. Wafers are expected to roll off the factory line in mid-2027. So this is their first fab or they're the one that they're spending the $50 billion on right now?

• 36:53John Coogan?

  I think the new one.

• 36:55Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so that's pretty quick.

• 36:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, but did you hear that the PS6, the PlayStation 6, is now delayed because of memory shortages? 2029, 2028, 2029, it's still a rumor. Maybe they'll, you know, maybe this solves it and they can get it out earlier, but pretty, pretty big delay to 2029. They really don't refresh.

• 37:18Jordi Hays?

  You just created a trillion gamer. No, seriously, I think adding insult to injury.

• 37:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:26Jordi Hays?

  To...

• 37:27John Coogan?

  The gamers might actually be...

• 37:28Jordi Hays?

  Rise up.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  Gamers might rise up. They might be an important voting bloc. A lot of them are, a lot of them are of age to vote and a lot of them don't, would, would rather have new gaming hardware than, you know, necessarily AI slop in the feed. And they're like, yeah, I, I can't afford the new PC that I wanted. What do you think?

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I feel like this says a lot about how good the PS5 is, right? Because they can like afford to just like postpone the PS6. Like what games?

• 37:58Jordi Hays?

  Oh, now you don't want technological progress?

• 38:00John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  I want it to go to the data centers. I don't, I don't care about like the next, like...

• 38:05Jordi Hays?

  Game graphics have like, have they gotten that much better in the past like five years? Like, yeah, maybe, but it's like, for the actual gameplay, is it that important if like the actual pixels are?

• 38:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, realistically, a lot of this stuff should be moving to the cloud soon if it's not already.

• 38:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like the, it was the Meta Quest VR, I forget.

• 38:26John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:27Jordi Hays?

  Xbox, Xbox Edition.

• 38:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it was all in the cloud and it was like totally fine.

• 38:31John Coogan?

  It was low latency.

• 38:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 38:33John Coogan?

  And then if you're running in the cloud, you can upgrade the hardware and in theory you should be able to run like a gen AI up resing pass to make it more photoreal and I feel like that's going to be where more of the, the juice is squeezed out of the graphics than just continuing on the traditional path of like more pixels, more ray tracing. It'll be make a really beautifully, you know, designed video game that works really well, really tight deterministic interactions, so it's satisfying and then give it a, give it a layer.

• 39:05Jordi Hays?

  We gotta have, we gotta have like a RAM trader on the show, like really somebody that's in the thick of, of deal making in this space.

• 39:12John Coogan?

  There's a couple of folks over at Semi Analysis that cover it. One of them just went on Odd Lots.

• 39:16Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 39:17John Coogan?

  Get him on the show.

• 39:18Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 39:19John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Graphite, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster.

• 39:24Jordi Hays?

  That's not all near Syracuse. Micron just broke down, broke ground. They just broke down in Syracuse. No, they just broke ground on a hundred billion dollar fab complex that represents the state of New York's largest ever private investment. Late last year, Micron announced a $9.6 billion fab in Hiroshima, Japan.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 39:44Jordi Hays?

  While competitor SK Hynix announced in January that it would build a $13 billion fab in South Korea in addition to a $4 billion manufacturing complex it is building in Indiana.

• 39:53John Coogan?

  This is interesting. I feel like this is acceleration in CapEx from the memory makers, but this, I, I wonder how TSMC responds to this because the, the big criticism of TSMC is that they are increasing CapEx, but the rate at which they are increasing CapEx is decelerating and so they're not really keeping up with the exponential growth in compute that every AI lab, every data center builder, every...

• 40:23John Coogan?

  Memory maker is pushing towards. And I wonder, I wonder, like, what do they know? What do they know? Oh, yeah, TSMC is being so, so conservative. I mean, they, they might just have the AI industry in a chokehold. And so if there is a bottleneck, they can just raise prices. But they also might, you know, screw everything up by not investing enough. And then we get to some sort of solid bottleneck for a while and we can't actually roll out more.

• 40:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's get someone on from Semi Analysis tomorrow to talk about memory. Moving on, Lucas Shaw was on a tear over the weekend, reporting on the Warner Brothers Paramount conversations. He says this morning Warner Brothers is going to resume talks with Paramount after two months of rejecting them playing mind games. The company still says it's committed to Netflix, but needs to find out just how much the Ellison's will offer. He originally reported on this Sunday, but it's being confirmed today. Again, we kind of knew this was going to happen. If the Ellison's had been saying, we're making it, we're giving you a big number,

• 41:32Jordi Hays?

  but it's not our biggest number. It's not our best and final. So no surprise here. Paramount has now just eked out a lead on who will successfully take over Warner Brothers over on Calci. They're sitting at 49% chance with Netflix at 37% and then none before July 2027.

• 41:53John Coogan?

  This was such an interesting flippin' here. I was talking to a Hollywood executive this weekend, and he was like, yeah, I think there's just too many people that are against Netflix for a variety of reasons, that it'll reopen the Paramount conversations. And specifically, I was like, but YouTube, YouTube. And he was like, no one buys that argument. Like, everyone thinks about the entertainment industry as its own thing, and then social media, Tac, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube as a separate thing. And no one is making that comp. It's just calling on deaf ears. Not mine.

• 42:29Jordi Hays?

  YouTube is not a, you know, having, having, we asked Ashley Vance, how do you feel about having kind of one less big buyer in the buyer pool for documentaries? And he was like, not great, already bad, this would be worse. But YouTube is not a... Buyer of IP.

• 42:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:45Jordi Hays?

  They host content and serve it to people. So it's a tough argument to make, even though there've been absolutely on an insane tear from an overall watch time standpoint.

• 42:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let me tell you about, hold on, let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it.

• 43:07Jordi Hays?

  AJ says Grace Blackwell is a beautiful name for a baby girl. I totally agree.

• 43:14John Coogan?

  I mean, isn't that because it's actually the name of a girl, right? Like, isn't Grace, uh, like the name, like they're, like, the chips are named after real people.

• 43:25Jordi Hays?

  Who's?

• 43:27John Coogan?

  Well, there's like Ada Lovelace, uh, I want to say Trevor Blackwell.

• 43:31Jordi Hays?

  Grace Hopper.

• 43:32John Coogan?

  Grace Hopper, yeah, Grace Hopper. So it was.

• 43:33Jordi Hays?

  And David Harold Blackwell.

• 43:35John Coogan?

  David Blackwell. I always think Trevor Blackwell because he's a YC partner, but he did not invent the Blackwell. Uh, but Grace Blackwell is a beautiful name. Vera Rubin, too. Vera Rubin is also the name of a female mathematician, I believe.

• 43:49Jordi Hays?

  The only person I can find named Grace Blackwell is an audio designer and composer based in the UK.

• 43:56John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 43:56Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, gonna have a rough go on the SEO front.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's, uh, flip over to Claude Bott. Kent Dodd says, name's a thing Claude Bott, Claude asks for a rename, rename's to OpenAI, OpenAI buys it. Legendary, uh, legendary couple of weeks, I was looking back on like, when did we talk to Peter? And it was like two weeks ago. That was when.

• 44:17Jordi Hays?

  Feels like two months ago.

• 44:18John Coogan?

  It feels like two months ago. Things are moving very, very fast. Now, uh, no confirmation on, on buying. It's an open source project. They're keeping it open source. Uh, there's a whole bunch of different.

• 44:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Dave, uh, Dave Morin.

• 44:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:32Jordi Hays?

  I remember reading is gonna step in to, I believe, run the foundation that will, that will kind of steward the open source project. And then Peter's obviously joining OpenAI. This wasn't, uh. This wasn't, this wasn't super surprising to me when you looked at the potential places that he could land. It felt like there was, he, he had talked about like, hey, I'm kind of losing money on this. And he, our takeaway from the conversation is this is a guy that just wants to keep shipping, get, get this product into the hands of as many people as possible.

• 45:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:04Jordi Hays?

  And when you looked at the kind of buyer pool, you know, he was, he was coming to the West Coast. You can assume that he was making the rounds.

• 45:12John Coogan?

  He went on lax and was like, yeah, I'm talking to OpenAI and Meta, which is like a crazy thing to say.

• 45:18Jordi Hays?

  And Meta, and Meta, Meta always felt like a somewhat of a long shot because even though I think, I'm sure he's done very well from this.

• 45:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:25Jordi Hays?

  It didn't feel like dollars were his number one priority. It's very possible that, that Zuck would have been willing to, to overpay or pay whatever price needed to get him on board. Zuck had just also acquired Manus, which like feels like his like agents team, right? And Manus has already responded by rolling out some

• 45:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 45:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, open claw like functionality. And so that, that didn't make sense. Um, uh, I think people were expecting Anthropic to make a move. Part of that is like Anthropic's just had so much mind share and been on an insane run the last month or so. And so I think people, and, and the name, right? Um, Peter also at multiple points said Anthropic didn't send their lawyers. They sent an individual, but it got turned into this meme that Anthropic had like really come and, and like really made, made his life difficult. I think they were like, hey, this is going to be confusing to consumers.

• 46:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:23Jordi Hays?

  And then the other thing is Peter's over and over and over talked about how much he loves Codex. Like, he talked about that on our show. He's been very vocal about it.

• 46:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 46:32Jordi Hays?

  Like he likes building with Codex. And so I think when you understand all these different factors where not entirely financially motivated, I'm sure that was a factor, but uh, not entirely financial, financially motivated. So saying the biggest numbers not going to get him to make a move. OpenAI with, with uh, somewhere around a billion consumers that use these product, you know, that are using products in the, in, you know, in the ecosystem today. Uh, that creates an exciting opportunity for him to like come in and actually roll this out to as many people as possible. Uh, and you put all these factors together and, and you know, the, him landing there makes a lot of sense.

• 47:09John Coogan?

  Yes. Let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet. State of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, deep multimodal understanding. Alex Hermosy chimed in on the OpenClaw Bot discourse. What did he say?

• 47:25Jordi Hays?

  He says, "I'll take this day off to figure out this whole OpenClaw thing every entrepreneur on President's Day weekend." We've talked about this on the show before. Long weekends are really good for AI progress and AI diffusion because people have a few less meetings and they say, "Hey, maybe I can mess around and figure this thing out."

• 47:45John Coogan?

  It really is remarkable how quickly Claw Bot, OpenClaw broke through the discourse. Like, I was at dinner at a steakhouse like last Wednesday and I overheard a conversation with just a couple of guys in suits who I don't think work in tech, talking about different models and how they wanted to use OpenClaw. And they were thinking about getting Mac Minis. Like, it was like, it really did break through beyond.

• 48:12Jordi Hays?

  Our lawyer, our lawyer, who doesn't work at a, he works at an entertainment-focused law firm. He got a Mac Mini, set it up. And so, yeah, it's very mainstream. I did see some, I did see some people reporting that the Mac Mini had sold out in their, in their local area too. So it's not, it's not fully sold out by any means, but you look at the, the traction on GitHub and you look at, yeah, just the overall demand and how kind of like mainstream, at least the, the, the concept of this has gone.

• 48:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:42Jordi Hays?

  And Apple's overall production numbers on the device. I mean, I, I think we can, I think we, we could enter a world where, where at least the ones, the more in-demand models are, are sold out.

• 48:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. Petition for three-day weekends to speed up AGI timelines. Probably would work, for sure. Fumblegate, fumblegate. Did Anthropic fumble OpenClaw? Daria says, "I don't think about you at all." Probably overstated. It doesn't seem like they... It was like key to their strategy. They're sort of just focused on their own thing. I don't know. It doesn't, it doesn't seem like, like, oh, they completely fumbled.

• 49:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, part, part of this was the original naming Claude bought, right? But, but when you look at how many different product, projects Peter shipped.

• 49:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:27Jordi Hays?

  It's not like he was thinking at every moment, oh, I have to name this because it's going to get a million GitHub stars.

• 49:34John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 49:35Jordi Hays?

  He was, he was just like ripping products, building really quickly.

• 49:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:40Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and, and it wasn't even Claude wasn't the default.

• 49:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, no.

• 49:44Jordi Hays?

  In, in open claw ever.

• 49:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Codex was actually the, the, the number one, and there are like 10 L L M's that you can choose from when you, when you actually set it up. It, it very much seems like he's just having fun with the name. I mean, the fact that he was calling it Moltbot for a while is just, tells you.

• 50:01Jordi Hays?

  That was a great.

• 50:02John Coogan?

  That was a great.

• 50:03Jordi Hays?

  That was a great 24 hours.

• 50:04John Coogan?

  24 hours. Um, but, but, but seriously, like he, I, I, I don't think he was like, yo, I need a branding agency. I need to think of the name that will go forever. It's just like, yeah, this is like a lobster meme. It's fun.

• 50:17Jordi Hays?

  Wes Winder says LOL meta couldn't acquire open clause, so they pulled a classic zuck move, just clone the whole thing. Then it added as a feature to an existing product. Surprised they didn't try to shove this into Instagram. So Manus announced Manus Agents yesterday. They moved quick. Your personal Manus.

• 50:34John Coogan?

  Manus.

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  Manus. Now inside your chats, long-term memory, uh, full Manus power, create videos, slides, websites, images from one message. Your tools connect at Gmail, calendar, Notion and more. Uh, available now in Telegram. I'm just, I would assume.

• 50:49John Coogan?

  Why Telegram?

• 50:51Jordi Hays?

  Kind of surprised they wouldn't roll this out into WhatsApp.

• 50:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, they, they don't even own Telegram. Available now on, we, that is so confusing.

• 51:01Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think it's possible that WhatsApp didn't have the.

• 51:06Jordi Hays?

  Didn't have some functionality that they needed to actually do this integration.

• 51:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:10Jordi Hays?

  And they're moving so quickly. Like, they, they, they seem to have turned this. I don't think, I think like Wes is maybe overstating a little bit.

• 51:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:19Jordi Hays?

  The classic Zuck move. You can imagine like Manus would have done this probably independently.

• 51:23John Coogan?

  A hundred percent.

• 51:23Jordi Hays?

  Um.

• 51:25John Coogan?

  You were calling this. You were like Manus is a good acquisition because if in the, if you want.

• 51:29Jordi Hays?

  It's an agent that people were like Manus is great.

• 51:31John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 51:32Jordi Hays?

  And so Zuck has been great at buying a product that has a lot of potential.

• 51:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:37Jordi Hays?

  It has some like customer traction and like scaling it up massively.

• 51:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. And even just for the most mundane Instagram usage where you could say, you know, oh, I want to look across my audience and see who's the most engaged. Or understand what trends are happening in my, in my vertical or, you know, we like respond to every comment with a heart. If it's positive, like anything that you'd want just an agent to go around on these social platforms and do, let alone like go buy something for you. Having, having a team that works on agents makes a ton of sense, but it's, yeah, it's funny. It's just funny that they're rolling it out.

• 52:13Jordi Hays?

  Mateus says, I think that's connected to WhatsApp deplatforming other AI companies. Remember ChatGPT had like a huge integration in WhatsApp and they got, and they got booted.

• 52:23John Coogan?

  That's crazy. Uh, Hari shares a little bit of lore about Peter Steinberger. Says, uh, he bootstrapped PSPDF kit over 10 years ago. It's gold standard PDF library used by Box, Apple, and even DocuSign.

• 52:40Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 52:40John Coogan?

  It's crazy. Insanely hard tech. If you know, you know, it's very hard to work on PDFs. I guess he's worth a couple hundred mil from that. Everyone's, everyone's trying to guess the number, but, uh, then nothing's been confirmed. If he goes to OpenAI, he might make more from OpenClaw, which is three.

• 52:52Jordi Hays?

  Peter says he signed the contract today with software my company built years ago.

• 52:56John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 52:56Jordi Hays?

  Now it's nutrient docs.

• 52:58John Coogan?

  Still best for anything PDF. It's like I'm PDF maxing. Um, let's take a look at this. Harnesses won't matter in less than three years, says Ahmad. Yes, there's money to make at the moment, but keep in mind that this is, this is the play of two years ago. And you should be playing for what the models will be capable of in two years from today instead. Claude plays Pokemon kind of proves this. Opus 4.5 and 4.6 has the same insanely bad harness. No babysitting like Gemini and GPT. And 4.6 is like.

• 53:34John Coogan?

  One thousand one hundred and ninety seven hours ahead of four point five. So, oh, it's how far they get.

• 53:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've seen some people trying to back a bunch of like open claw startups and given that just feels like a potential bloodbath.

• 53:52John Coogan?

  I, I think.

• 53:53Jordi Hays?

  Especially, especially knowing that.

• 53:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:56Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI will be able to build, I would assume, build the best possible kind of wrapper around everything that open clause built so far.

• 54:04John Coogan?

  Again, I would assume that, that the three major labs, DeepMind, Anthropic and OpenAI, all have serious orchestrators very soon. And they will acquire talent and acquire products and build products and license stuff and figure out all sorts of integrations, do all the business things necessary to make it happen. But as I wrote in the year of orchestration or orchestrators, like this is coming. People are managing multiple agents already and tools that make that easier, tools that make that more reliable and more efficient. Like, that's going to be a big focus for this year and everyone's going to be focused on. So, the, the idea of like, oh, I should just like fork this open source project and like

• 54:48John Coogan?

  bring it to enterprises. Like, that's going to be rough when OpenAI has a thousand forward deployed engineers going into every enterprise that they already have contracts with.

• 54:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 54:57John Coogan?

  Tyler, what do you think?

• 54:57Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I was just gonna say, like, I, I think it's a similar thing to the hardware. So, like, um, Gemini is, is developing the TPU like with the architecture of the model in mind and they're developing the architecture with the, with the hardware in mind, right? So, it's kind of like these things are like helping each other. So, you're gonna see the same thing in, in the harness, right? Where like, the, the harness is made with the model in mind, obviously, but then you're, you're gonna start to see it as these things like as agents become more and more popular, um, like, uh, OpenAI already has like, there's the normal, uh, you know, GPT five one three, and then there's five one three codex, right? So, the models are like built with the, with the harness in mind.

• 55:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:33Speaker 02

  So, I think if you're not the one building the model and you're just adding your own harness, right? The model's not gonna be like customized for your harness.

• 55:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:40Speaker 02

  Um, so if, if, if OpenAI and Anthropic are building their own harness, they're gonna do it with the model in mind. It's gonna be like much better than having some third party thing that you.

• 55:48Jordi Hays?

  You build, right?

• 55:48John Coogan?

  I would think so, yeah. No, that's totally reasonable. Harness for horses.

• 55:52Jordi Hays?

  Bobby says, yeah, it really is the

• 55:54John Coogan?

  Horses don't stop. Harnesses don't stop.

• 55:57Jordi Hays?

  Will Brown says, honestly crazy that OpenClaw sold for 1 billion. Like, he's really the first solo $5 billion founder. Time will tell if it's worth the 15 billion that OpenAI spent on the acquisition, but it's pretty wild that you can just vibe code an open source project and make 40 billion in a couple of months now.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  It really, really nails it, because everyone jumped immediately to a billion, immediately.

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  Off of nothing.

• 56:21John Coogan?

  Off of nothing. Off of like, one rumor forum, a thinking machines person that went to Meta, and we don't even know what the earn-out schedule for that is and how much that happens.

• 56:34John Coogan?

  It's, uh, it's very, very funny. Who knows?

• 56:38Jordi Hays?

  We gotta give some credit to Simphore Satoshi. I brought this up, I brought this up before.

• 56:45Jordi Hays?

  Simp has been working on truffles for a handful of years now. I've been by, I've been by his, his studio in Venice. It's a, it's a very cool setup and team over there. But he hosted a little bit about this. Where is it?

• 57:05John Coogan?

  And TinyBox, George Hotz's project, is also apparently going to ship a more consumer product, maybe, I think they're around $10,000 right now. They're probably going to bring that down to a few thousand dollars, or maybe even a few hundred dollars. You get a lot with a Mac Mini, but we'll see where the prices land after the memory shortage takes hold and whatnot. But lots of people are doing this. Alex Cohen breaks it down for Gen Z. If you're wondering what happened today, Claude was mugging OpenAI for weeks, then this gym cell dev ships Claudebot, which was the fastest growing open source thing ever. Absolute looks max for the whole ecosystem. Anthropic tries to dairigoon him with legal. Dev renames to OpenClaw. OpenAI slides in like a Floyd pulling Chad with acquisition interest.

• 57:50John Coogan?

  OpenClaw gets acquired by OpenAI. Now Anthropic is getting jester gooned by the entire timeline, and OpenAI is giga-maxing off their fumble. Open, Anthropic could have just let them cook, him cook. Instead, they went full Moide and got outframed by the jester maxers at OpenAI. Eight thousand likes. The looks like lingo is really, it feels like hilarious. I do wonder the half-life. I feel like it's

• 58:15Jordi Hays?

  I think it's over.

• 58:16John Coogan?

  It's gotta be, it's gotta be towards the end in this boom, but the rise of the kick streamers is certainly the story of the year. Certainly the story of the year. Dave Moran shared more context on like what the future of OpenClaw will look like. So Dave Moran, who you might know from offline ventures, Slow, he's been on our show, Path. He is now on the board of OpenClaw and he says, he's been working on the OpenClaw Foundation structure for weeks, a home for thinkers and hackers that choose, and those who want to own their data. He's honored to serve as the founding independent board member. This community built something extraordinary. Our job is to protect it. Open source forever.

• 58:58John Coogan?

  Excited to share more soon. Raul says, let's go. There was, there was some funny, there was some funny pushback about, someone was like, oh, it's so unfair that Peter's like reaping all this reward from, from these work. Like it's an open source project. There were a lot of committers and he shared the number of commits and it's just like him and like 90% of the work and then like a few of his buddies who are all in the chat in the replies being like, yeah, like we love this. This is great.

• 59:23Jordi Hays?

  And a number of them are going to OpenAI too. He's like the headline pick up, but

• 59:28John Coogan?

  And then a number of the other committers were AI models.

• 59:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And then, and then the other, the other key contributors started committing after it was like fully viable and had hundreds of thousands of people building on top of

• 59:42John Coogan?

  It was, it was like pure, I don't know. There's no, I don't know if there's a term for it, but it was like, it was like third party, like angst or something. It was like people were feeling angst on behalf of people who felt no angst. Like the people on the team were all like, this is awesome. We're all on board. And then other people were like, they got screwed. And it's like, I don't know, not quite.

• 1:00:01Jordi Hays?

  Intern is sharing what your 2027 team offsite will look like, taking the, taking the Mac Mini's somewhere nice, taking them out. We'll see.

• 1:00:13John Coogan?

  And here's the, here's the post you were talking about from Ashen. I didn't believe it, but Mac Mini Studios are actually sold out in most places. Walmart, Apple Store, Amazon, Best Buy, Micro Center. Apple has a month wait now too for most AI type beat models. Forty-eight gigs plus of RAM. Funniest part is that they're still 24 gig Mac Mini's. What's up? Forty eight.

• 1:00:35Jordi Hays?

  Said it was possible.

• 1:00:36John Coogan?

  Oh, that they would sell it. Yeah.

• 1:00:37Jordi Hays?

  Like a week, couple of weeks ago.

• 1:00:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I went, I went to the Apple Store and they were, they were fully in stock. But, uh, you know, the timeline moved on and people, uh, people went more aggressively into the Mac Mini. Let me tell you about Vanta. Automate Compliance and Security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Started today.

• 1:00:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we have some breaking news out of New York.

• 1:01:00John Coogan?

  Oh, yes. What happened?

• 1:01:01Jordi Hays?

  Josh Kushner has announced Thrive ten, exceeding 10 billion. Thrive ten compromises. One billion designated for early-stage investments and nine billion designated for growth-stage investments. He said, "We do not view this as a milestone, but as a commitment to the long work ahead. We view Thrive as a company, our products as partnership, the willingness to commit deeply to a small number of founders and to stand with them through momentum and adversity. This is the discipline we bring to our work and the responsibility we accept when founders partner with Thrive. We do not hedge. Concentration demands loyalty to the founders and missions we back. In this moment, exposure alone is not a strategy.

• 1:01:44Jordi Hays?

  Judgment without commitment is not enough. Advantage will accrue to those who choose deliberately, commit deeply, and endure through difficult moments. Thrive was founded to be an enabling technology for the world we want to see. We are deeply aware that we are not the main character. The founders that we are fortunate enough to partner with are the artists. Our role is to help create the conditions where great work can come to life. We take a long view grounded in the belief that category-defining companies tend to create structural compounding advantages over long arcs. This fund reflects the continuity of our approach and the ways our work has deepened alongside the founders we support. We are grateful for the trust our limited partners place in us and for the opportunity to work alongside those who are building with purpose, integrity, and courage. Hit that gong."

• 1:02:31Jordi Hays?

  Love to see it.

• 1:02:33John Coogan?

  Good numerology. Josh has been. Thrive ten and 10 billion. I like that.

• 1:02:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Despite having zero exposure, uh, or anything to TBPN, he's been nothing but, uh, kind and helpful to us.

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 1:02:47Jordi Hays?

  On the journey and, uh, it's, uh, yeah, testament to the work of the whole Thrive team. And I will say. Their merch is phenomenal.

• 1:02:57John Coogan?

  Really good.

• 1:02:57Jordi Hays?

  I was wearing the.

• 1:02:58John Coogan?

  You were in the pajamas?

• 1:02:59Jordi Hays?

  The pajamas.

• 1:03:00John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:03:01Jordi Hays?

  I was wearing the pajamas this weekend.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, they got some good stuff, creative stuff, like different, different stuff, unexpected drops, which I love.

• 1:03:08Jordi Hays?

  Yep. And we have to, we have to read this off.

• 1:03:12John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:03:12Jordi Hays?

  It's just so good. Sale says, Joshua Kushner strode billionairely across his room. His contrarian high concentration vibes engulfed Rick Rubin's Bohemian Monk retreat. Joshua's high conviction and mystery filled the room.

• 1:03:26John Coogan?

  I know what this is referring to.

• 1:03:27Jordi Hays?

  This is a reference to the Colossus profile.

• 1:03:29John Coogan?

  The Colossus profile.

• 1:03:30Jordi Hays?

  Which is.

• 1:03:30John Coogan?

  Which really got a lot of people upset. A lot of people were like, this, this doesn't count as, as writing.

• 1:03:38Jordi Hays?

  How? It was, it, it, it transported me to Malibu.

• 1:03:42John Coogan?

  It was fantastic.

• 1:03:43Jordi Hays?

  I thought it was great.

• 1:03:44John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligent cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and entrant at scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands.

• 1:03:53Jordi Hays?

  Let's head over to Tyler Callen.

• 1:03:54John Coogan?

  Tyler Callen, he is giving us some more economic data on AI productivity. Quote, you see tech and AI everywhere, but the productivity statistics, that's what people say. He says, how many times have I heard versions of that claim? Eric picks up the telephone in the Financial Times. He says, while initial reports suggested a year of steady labor expansion in the United States, the new figures revealed that total payroll growth was revised downward by approximately 400,000 jobs. Crucially, this downward revision occurred while real GDP remained robust, including a 3.7% growth rate in the fourth quarter.

• 1:04:37John Coogan?

  This decoupling, maintaining high output with significantly lower labor input is a hallmark of productivity growth. My own updated analysis suggests a US productivity increase of roughly 2.7% for 2025. That is a near doubling from the sluggish 1.4% annual average that characterized the past decade. It's fine to suggest this, suggest caution in interpreting such statistics, but they hardly push the other way, says Tyler. And it's, yeah, it's just a very fascinating, that we're potentially the end of stagnation in seeing, seeing productivity growth.

• 1:05:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, relevant to this conversation, you were looking at, uh, employment data out of, um,

• 1:05:22John Coogan?

  The Philippines?

• 1:05:23Jordi Hays?

  The Philippines.

• 1:05:23John Coogan?

  India. So I, I've been very cautious about the AI will take all the jobs narrative. When will that happen? Is it happening yet? Uh, is there Jevon's paradox to the type of work that we're doing? How much software do we want? You know, we have the ability to write way more lines of code. How many more lines of code do we actually want? Uh, it feels like there's a lot of opportunity. Uh, it feels like the labor market is weak, but it hasn't collapsed. A lot of people still have jobs. It's, it, there's a lot to unpack. And so I was, I was interested to know, are we seeing a massive spike in unemployment in the Philippines or in India where a lot of white collar labor is outsourced? Whether it's, uh, answering the phones or doing business process outsourcing. But

• 1:06:08John Coogan?

  a lot of companies have back offices in, I was talking to somebody who works in architecture and they said that a lot of the architectural drawings that, that happen, happen overseas. Uh, the same thing happens in the big three management consulting firms. You want, you, you, a lot of management consultants will, will sort of sketch out a, a slide and then they will send it over to a team offshore that actually turns that into the final PowerPoint product. And you can see how if you have a sketch and you just need to turn it into a real chart, that's textbook use case of artificial intelligence. Whether you just style transfer it with something like Nano Banana, or you go and do a deep research

• 1:06:49John Coogan?

  report and then, and then basically code the actual chart. And all the models are very, very capable of, of generating charts based on data. That's actually how I generated the chart of the Philippines, uh, late, uh, unemployment rate. Um, and, and I saw from both the Philippines and, and India, uh, there was not a major spike in unemployment. Maybe it's coming. Uh, you know, we've, we've heard from the ground that job market's not good. Uh, and, and, and maybe, maybe the jobs are getting worse, but there's, at least there's not high unemployment yet, both in the United States and, and abroad. So it's something to keep a, keep an eye on, but I don't know. I've just been like

• 1:07:32John Coogan?

  looking for more solid data points around labor displacement because it's such a huge narrative. Um, I don't know. We'll see. Um, let me tell you about railway. Oops.

• 1:07:44John Coogan?

  There we go. Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

• 1:07:54Jordi Hays?

  What did Claude do?

• 1:07:56John Coogan?

  What did Claude do?

• 1:07:57Jordi Hays?

  The Pentagon has said that Anthropic will pay a price.

• 1:08:02Jordi Hays?

  Of course, this was, there was reporting last week that Claude was leveraged in some way during the Maduro planning, the planning of the Maduro

• 1:08:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:08:14Jordi Hays?

  raid. I was imagining in my head Dario as Walter White, you know, in the SUV, just being like

• 1:08:22John Coogan?

  No!

• 1:08:22Jordi Hays?

  Watching, watching the logs and seeing Pete Hegseth running a deep research report on Maduro.

• 1:08:28John Coogan?

  Who is?

• 1:08:28Jordi Hays?

  Who is Nicolas Maduro?

• 1:08:31Jordi Hays?

  He's just like, "No!"

• 1:08:33John Coogan?

  No, don't do it.

• 1:08:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, very, very unclear how, how it was used, but a lot of pushback, you know, Palmer, Palmer was pushing back pretty hard. Let's see if I can pull up what he actually said, so I don't botch it.

• 1:08:53John Coogan?

  The, the Wall Street Journal headline is Pentagon used Anthropic's Claude in Maduro Venezuela raid. Use of the model through a contract with Palantir highlights growing role of AI in the Pentagon. Now, I remember seeing a clip from Shams Ankur at Palantir talking about how every query that the government runs is actually run through three or four different LLMs and then synthesized. They sort of put their own model router on top of the other models, because if you're doing

• 1:09:18Jordi Hays?

  Fed wrapper.

• 1:09:19John Coogan?

  Basically, I guess it's basically a wrapper, because you sort of want every possible, you know, piece of information. All the LLMs have different parts of the internet, different training corpuses, different opinions, different, all sorts of different things. So, you put all those together. The mission to capture Maduro and his wife included bombing several sites in Caracas last month. Anthropic's usage guidelines prohibit Claude from being used to facilitate violence, develop weapons, or conduct surveillance. We cannot comment on whether Claude or any other AI model was used for any specific operation classified or otherwise, said an Anthropic spokesman. Any use of Claude, whether in the private sector or across government, is required to comply with our usage policies, which govern how Claude can be deployed. We work closely with our partners to ensure compliance.

• 1:10:03John Coogan?

  The deployment of Claude occurred through Anthropic's partnership with data company Palantir Technologies, whose tools are commonly used by the Defense Department and federal law enforcement. Following the raid, an employee at Anthropic asked a counterpart at Palantir how Claude was used in the operation, according to people familiar with the matter. An Anthropic spokesman said it hadn't, it hasn't discussed the use of Claude for specific operations with any industry partners, including Palantir, outside of routine discussions on strictly technical matters. Anthropic is committed to using Frontier AI to support, in support of US national security. Okay, so we'll see, we'll see where this goes. Anthropic's concerns of how, about how Claude can be used by the Pentagon have pushed administration

• 1:10:47John Coogan?

  officials to consider canceling the contract worth up to 200 million, which is a drop in the bucket at 14 billion ARR, but still probably has larger implications for, you know, their relationship with the, with the government broadly.

• 1:11:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was, someone was saying, I don't know who needs to hear this, but punishing private companies because their CEOs don't share your politics is really bad capitalism. Palmer said, this is not a reasonable characterization of what is happening. It isn't a matter of punishing companies for not sharing political views. It is a rational response to a vendor trying to control the government via terms of service and the products they power.

• 1:11:22John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. I hope you realize, oh yeah, people are going on, okay, wait, so disclosed TV, shared it as well, Pentagon used, and...

• 1:11:36John Coogan?

  What is this? Someone launched a Federal Reserve simulator? Is there anything more on the?

• 1:11:41Jordi Hays?

  No, we could move on. This is more important.

• 1:11:43John Coogan?

  This is way more important.

• 1:11:44Jordi Hays?

  Bill Mead Gaming just released the Federal Reserve Simulator in Steam. If you like flight simulators, you're probably gonna love this.

• 1:11:54John Coogan?

  Productivity is gonna go to zero.

• 1:11:56Jordi Hays?

  A turn-based.

• 1:11:56John Coogan?

  People aren't gonna be going to work. They're gonna be taking days off to play this.

• 1:12:00Jordi Hays?

  A turn-based economic simulation game where the player assumes the role as head of the United States Federal Reserve.

• 1:12:07John Coogan?

  This is awesome.

• 1:12:08Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, fire it up. This, I would actually play this.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, fire it up. Fire it up. Download it. I want, I want your, I want your review.

• 1:12:15John Coogan?

  I like Garrett Jones here, just promising. And he's a professor of economics at Georgia Mits.

• 1:12:21Jordi Hays?

  He's actually serious. I feel like, I feel like this would be an amazing game to play.

• 1:12:27Speaker 02

  So in the reviews, I'm reading on Steam, they say, "I learned more about monetary policy in 15 minutes on this sim than I did in five years of university."

• 1:12:35John Coogan?

  That's actually.

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  Please do Investment Banking Simulator next.

• 1:12:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was thinking about the.

• 1:12:40Jordi Hays?

  LBO Simulator would go so hard.

• 1:12:44John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Cisco first. Unlock infrastructure, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless real-time experiences and new value with Cisco. So I was thinking about Sholto's Age of Empires real-time strategy game based on the AI era. And I was wondering if it's easier to ship basically a skin or a mod for, for Age of Empires? Because the actual fundamental mechanics are pretty tight and you actually don't want to mess with those because the game's so balanced and it works so well. What you really want is just instead of like, instead of like archery units and horses, you want robots and terminators and you know, you want like a sci-fi theme on top of it.

• 1:13:28John Coogan?

  And I feel like that would be something that an agent could work very well at, just. Export the image and the description and the words of every single unit and item in the game, export all the textures and then upload each texture to Banana Banana one by one and say, this is a tree, what does the cyberpunk tree look like? What does the Diamond Age tree look like? What is the, you know, the 2026, you know, tree or building look like? And then it just iterates through all of those to create effectively a mod or a or a skin for the game. But if you do want to change the actual underlying structure, you got to go deeper. But that's, that's a lot of tokens. So we'll see, we'll see where

• 1:14:13John Coogan?

  it goes.

• 1:14:14Jordi Hays?

  We got to keep pressing him on his game.

• 1:14:15John Coogan?

  We got, he's got to ship it.

• 1:14:17Jordi Hays?

  You got to ship.

• 1:14:18John Coogan?

  It was, it was.

• 1:14:18Jordi Hays?

  You got to beat the, beat the vibe coding allegations, right? The never ask somebody what, never ask a Claude code maxi what they've, what they've shipped.

• 1:14:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, you got to beat them.

• 1:14:28Jordi Hays?

  He's got to ship.

• 1:14:29John Coogan?

  I want to show you this Instagram video because it had me dying laughing. And so if we can play this, we're going to get demonetized, but we'll talk over it. So he vibe coded a calculator. Can we zoom in? I don't know. You vibe coded a calculator and you, and you type in your numbers. You type in five times nine and then it says unlock results. $299 one time payment. You pay and then it gives you payment successful. The answer's 45. This is the future of vibe coding. I loved it. Anyway.

• 1:15:09Jordi Hays?

  I wonder, I wonder, did he actually ship the product? Because this, this got millions of views and.

• 1:15:14John Coogan?

  You think someone would just be like, I want to know if the payment rails work. Let me see. Quickly, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.

• 1:15:24Jordi Hays?

  SAG AFTRA.

• 1:15:26John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 1:15:27Jordi Hays?

  Put out a statement on C dance 2.0. And uh

• 1:15:32John Coogan?

  It's not a comment, it's a statement.

• 1:15:34Jordi Hays?

  The Chinese, yeah, now the Chinese are, have been quivering in fear ever since

• 1:15:39John Coogan?

  Oh no.

• 1:15:40Jordi Hays?

  ZAG came after them.

• 1:15:41John Coogan?

  What'd they say?

• 1:15:41Jordi Hays?

  ZAG stands with the studios in condemning the blatant infringement enabled by ByteDance's new AI video model, Seedance 2.0. The infringement includes the unauthorized use of our members' voice and likenesses. This is unacceptable and undercuts the ability of human talent to earn a livelihood. It is kind of interesting that, just in this statement, they're admitting, just saying, like, it's so good, you're, you're gonna make it impossible for our members to earn a living. Which doesn't actually...

• 1:16:10John Coogan?

  It says "undercuts."

• 1:16:12Jordi Hays?

  Undercuts.

• 1:16:12John Coogan?

  It didn't say "eliminates."

• 1:16:13Jordi Hays?

  True, true, true. Seedance 2.0 disregards law, ethics, industry standards, and basic principles of consent.

• 1:16:20John Coogan?

  Hit that, boom!

• 1:16:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, responsible...

• 1:16:24John Coogan?

  AI development demands responsibility that is non-existent here. Uh, completely correct. Uh, some of the Seedance videos are insanely infringing. It's just like, wow, it's Larry David, and it looks exactly like Larry David. Um, do we license this? Let's figure it out. Um, "Beginning of the End," says Growing Daniel. Uh, yeah, we have the, I have the Larry David video, but I don't think we want to play it. It's very, it's very uncouth, and so we won't play it.

• 1:16:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll skip that one. Uh, Disney, as expected, sent a cease and desist letter to ByteDance over Seedance 2.0. Uh, I wonder...

• 1:17:04John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 1:17:04Jordi Hays?

  I wonder how ByteDance will actually react to this pushback. Obviously, they expected it.

• 1:17:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:09Jordi Hays?

  They know that they're not abiding by a number of different US laws. Whether or not they care is another thing.

• 1:17:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. I wonder how, like, what, what will the, will the equilibrium be here? Like, they don't allow usage in America, but everyone goes and gets VPNs. Is Seedance 2.0 open source? Because if it's, if you can just run it, like it's like so hard to play Whack-a-Mole and actually, and actually get the, uh, and actually get this taken down in any meaningful way. Like the cat's pretty much out of the bag if this is something you can just download.

• 1:17:47Jordi Hays?

  I don't think it's open source.

• 1:17:48John Coogan?

  Okay. So it's running on.

• 1:17:50Jordi Hays?

  But, but again, like in some ways, a lot of this stuff will need to be solved by Meta and YouTube.

• 1:17:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:17:58Jordi Hays?

  So if somebody makes a video with a famous actor.

• 1:18:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:01Jordi Hays?

  And they're like just monetizing that.

• 1:18:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:05Jordi Hays?

  I would assume that YouTube should be in the fullness of time forced to demonetize that content or just give the revenue back to.

• 1:18:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:14Jordi Hays?

  The actual IP holders.

• 1:18:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, you'd think, you'd think that you'd be able.

• 1:18:18Jordi Hays?

  And then Meta, Meta, the other thing is Meta, like if you, if you make an AI version of Andrew Huberman and you get in a fresh ad account, you can probably start spending money before the Huberman Lab team finds out what you're doing.

• 1:18:33John Coogan?

  I would disagree. I think Rob's on top of it. I think he's goaded. So, but anyone else, any other team would be cooked.

• 1:18:38Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I mean, he might respond faster than, than, than the others, but this is certainly happening.

• 1:18:43John Coogan?

  He is, he is superhuman.

• 1:18:44Jordi Hays?

  And this has been, this kind of thing has been happening to Joe Rogan for years at this point, with just like very poor.

• 1:18:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:51Jordi Hays?

  Deep fakes, but, but, uh.

• 1:18:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. I watched a video on, on Corridor Crew about how to identify like the latest, uh, the latest AI slop. And it was very interesting, all the different techniques that are used. Now, there's some really obvious ones where it's just, uh, it's just, you know, clearly AI video from end to end. And so if you look in the background, like the, the wood grain on the, on the wooden poles or the walls changes from shot to shot. And that's like a tell that it's not consistent. But there were some where there was an AI influencer that was taking real photos and then just adding this AI influencer into the photo. So it'd be like Joe Rogan with Tony Hinchcliffe, replace Tony Hinchcliffe with this AI.

• 1:19:39John Coogan?

  Influencer girl and then you look in the background and you're like, there's no hallucinations. Like, everything looks perfect. Because it is, it's just the base, it's just the base image and then you're just adding this one character. There were a bunch of interesting things. There was also a video that everyone was calling AI. There was just a dog painting and it just turns out the dog can paint, which is awesome. But it was a little bit of a magic trick because the dog couldn't actually paint a picture. But it could sort of pick up the paintbrush and like draw strokes. But the dog was next to the dog's owner and the dog's owner-

• 1:20:11Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna say that's not art?

• 1:20:12John Coogan?

  It is absolutely art, but the dog's owner was actually a great artist and would switch paintings with the dog. So the dog would make one, one like big messy brush. They would switch paintings and then she would turn that messy brush into a tree and like adapt it.

• 1:20:27Jordi Hays?

  To be like a time lapse?

• 1:20:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, yeah, there were just some cuts and so they, they would switch and then whatever the dog did would sort of serve as like the interpretation and the case for the, the artist to like take it to the finish line. And so you wind up with these like two beautiful paintings that like the dog and the artist sort of collabed on, which is kind of cool.

• 1:20:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Gavin Purcell says if ByteDance doesn't restrict or nerf uh, uh, a Sea Dance, this is going to escalate to a political conversation unlike the Sora 2 launch because OpenAI restricted

• 1:20:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Jordi Hays?

  likeness of head of time. Sea Dance shows just how clearly every major movie star is generatable by AI. So this is interesting. If, if you're already like an A-list massive superstar, I think you see some stuff like this and you're actually like, great, I'm gonna be able to shoot a movie in a week from LA. I'm not gonna have to travel to these insane exotic locations and spend a week in the desert filming all these clips. So if you're like a Timothy Chalamet, this is maybe like, yes, you're worried for the overall industry, but at the same time, you're thinking, okay, my name and likeness is now- Infinitely scalable, I can still like restrict the supply in some degree, right?

• 1:21:41Jordi Hays?

  I'm not going to tell any any movie studio, hey, you can make a movie with me, whatever. You're still going to kind of restrict it and have pricing power. But if you're a, the question becomes new, new talent that's emerging, trying to build their brand. At what point do studios say, we're just going to make a character, we're going to make a new actor out of thin air, place him across different movies, build them up over time. You could imagine, I don't think a company like CAA would do this because all their talent would be like, what are you doing? Like, you're, you're taking our job, but I could imagine a group trying to make like a little Michaela style actor that you build up over time.

• 1:22:22Jordi Hays?

  One, one thing that we'll find out is how much does the actual actor's real life matter? In the context of their career, like if Timothy Chalamet is dating Kylie Jenner, does that like increase his appeal? On the big screen?

• 1:22:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:41Jordi Hays?

  And I would say yes, probably, right? There's so much fixation on the lives of all this talent.

• 1:22:47John Coogan?

  You could sort of fake a decent amount of that, you could fake paparazzi photos, you could fake, you know, vacation photos. You could create a whole world around a fake person potentially. But if people find out, will that break the illusion? Will they be not into it?

• 1:23:02Jordi Hays?

  But it's not real drama. People like the drama, they like following stars.

• 1:23:06John Coogan?

  I'm still, I'm still just pretty optimistic about like AI as a tool in Hollywood. Did you see that fully, fully AI generated movie about the woman who goes in the cyber truck that went viral this weekend?

• 1:23:17Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't it like only three minutes?

• 1:23:19John Coogan?

  I think, yeah, exactly, it was only three minutes, but, but it was consistent from one shot to another, which is impressive. And somebody's like, not enough people are talking about why this, how much this sucks. And Ben Stiller chimed in and was like, because it's bad, people don't talk about things that are bad. And it was, it was sort of interesting. I, I think the, there's still a lot of interesting, like, I was thinking about like, imagine if Kevin Feige, is that how you say his name? He's the creator of the Avengers.

• 1:23:48Jordi Hays?

  Don't ask me.

• 1:23:49John Coogan?

  Don't ask you, anyway. I don't know, Christopher Nolan or, or James Cameron. If James Cameron got up and was like, was like. I'm introducing Avatar. It's a great movie. And yes, we it's a we use CGI. It's like, no, the CGI is like just a tool that he uses. It's like, you don't say like, yeah, we're doing Avengers. And guess what? We use green screen and that's a selling point. It's like, it'll always be a tool. And so I would, I would, I would assume that there will be amazing directors and creators in Hollywood that use AI as a tool in certain areas.

• 1:24:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:23John Coogan?

  But they won't, they like, you'll know it's arrived when they're not making a big deal out of it. Like, it should just stand on its own. Right now, things go viral because you say, this is 100% AI generated. And you're like, okay, I want to know. Like, how good is this AI stuff?

• 1:24:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:35John Coogan?

  But no one's just like, here's my green screen test. And they're like, okay, awesome. Like, we know green screen works. We know it's it's a thing. It happens.

• 1:24:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when I, when I see the sea dance content, I think, okay, if movie budgets stay the same,

• 1:24:52Jordi Hays?

  I think we can potentially get a lot more great movies.

• 1:24:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:54Jordi Hays?

  And that's specifically because how much of these budgets goes to, let's say, somebody's making like, a movie like 300. And we need to get, you know, a thousand people out in a field.

• 1:25:06John Coogan?

  300 people. But yeah, who's counting?

• 1:25:08Jordi Hays?

  Who's counting? We need to get a lot of people out in a field.

• 1:25:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:11Jordi Hays?

  And spend days, weeks, you know, recreating all these different scenes.

• 1:25:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:17Jordi Hays?

  And now that budget can go towards.

• 1:25:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. The famous Henry Cavill Superman. They, they, they finished shooting Superman. He moved on to, I think, The Man from Uncle. He grew a mustache and they were like, we got to shoot another Superman scene. And he's like, contractually, I cannot shave my mustache. And they were like, fine, we'll do it in post. And they have him come on and they CGI'd of like a shaved lip on the top of his mustache. And it looked really bad. And it was like.

• 1:25:43Jordi Hays?

  People called it out?

• 1:25:44John Coogan?

  I actually think a lot of people saw the movie and they were like, yeah, it's fine. It's pretty quick. But the VFX artists were like, this is bad. But with AI, obviously, that's much, much more doable these days. So, anyway, console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, finance support, giving employees instant resolution to access requests and password resets.

• 1:26:04John Coogan?

  Andrew Curran gave us a shout out, very nice of Andrew Curran. He said, "One of the reasons Sea Dance 2 has impressed everyone is that it does the same thing that Sora did, make very detailed video gens from very simple prompts. There's probably some prompt hydration going on. There's reasoning in the LLM that then prompts the model. So you type in one sentence, it hydrates that into a lot to work with for the model." In fact, most of the Sea Dance clips that went viral were made from one or two sentence prompts. We never did find out exactly what's going on under the hood with Sora. TVPN asked about it when Sam was on, and I think he, I think he means Bill, Peebles, from the Sora team, and he says, "Thank you, guys." So, "Thank you for shouting us out there." But what they chose, but they chose not to answer this specifically. So, they dodged

• 1:26:48John Coogan?

  our question. We asked the hard question. Give us the IP. And they said, "No." This is the funny thing about the hard questions in tech interviews. You're like, "Okay, so tell me how many parameters in the model?" And they're like, "That's a great question. We're really investing in advancing the frontier." You're like, "I saw what you did there, but it's understandable." With Sea Dance 2, we don't have a paper yet, but there is one out for Sea Dance 1, and it says that they do use an LLM to convert the user prompt into a much more informationally dense and structured style of the prompt that the video model was trained on. They use a Qwen to do this. This is what most of us guessed was going on with Sora, a version of GPT-5, maybe fit for this, was rewriting our prompts and adding details. Vanilla 5.0

• 1:27:32John Coogan?

  would already be great at this out of the box, so it doesn't even need to be fine tuned, really. If this is how Sora really works, then everything does make more sense. And there's a whole bunch more context from Andrew Curran's post that you can go check out. So, Bojan Tunguz is saying, "I can't wait to use Sea Dance to fix the last season of Game of Thrones." Go do it. Go do it. I think that the last season of Game of Thrones was not, I mean, it was, I thought it was good, but also I think that everyone's saying, "Oh, I wish it would have ended this way." I don't know. I think if you did that, you would actually be like, "Ah, it's harder to land this plane than you think."

• 1:28:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it'll be interesting when people are, are...

• 1:28:09Jordi Hays?

  Watching a series in real time.

• 1:28:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:28:12Jordi Hays?

  And then in advance of the final episode, let's say there's a week.

• 1:28:16John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:28:16Jordi Hays?

  They're like, okay, I'm just gonna make the version that I want.

• 1:28:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:19Jordi Hays?

  And I'll put it out.

• 1:28:19John Coogan?

  No, people on Reddit had written like full endings of Game of Thrones. Uh, and, uh, some of them were really convincing. Some of them I was looking forward to and it went a different direction, but you know, it is what it is. Uh, let's pull up the linear lineup so we can tell you about the guests that are coming on the show today because we have one in the restream waiting room already. I'll let you read this while I tell you the linear is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces on linear are using agents.

• 1:28:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we have John Caramanica, uh, New York Times music critic and buyer of fake TVPN merch, uh, coming on the show. We have Spencer Skates from Amplitude. We have Haseeb from Dragonfly. We have Celine from Loyal, uh, Anchor from Brain Trust.

• 1:29:01John Coogan?

  And Reed.

• 1:29:01Jordi Hays?

  Closing it out with Reed from Knight. So fantastic lineup here. And without further ado.

• 1:29:07John Coogan?

  We have John.

• 1:29:08Jordi Hays?

  We should bring in.

• 1:29:09John Coogan?

  From the restream waiting room. Let's bring in the man himself. How you doing?

• 1:29:14Speaker 07

  I'm so sorry to not wear the merch today.

• 1:29:16Jordi Hays?

  You're book, you're book mogging.

• 1:29:18John Coogan?

  You're book mogging.

• 1:29:19Jordi Hays?

  Book mogging, I think.

• 1:29:19John Coogan?

  Book maxing.

• 1:29:20Jordi Hays?

  Gen, Gen Alpha would be saying.

• 1:29:21Speaker 07

  Book max every day.

• 1:29:23John Coogan?

  Shelf mogging. Um, clarify how to say your last name.

• 1:29:27Speaker 07

  It's Caramanica. I appreciate Jordy. That was, that was noble.

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  Caramanica.

• 1:29:31Speaker 07

  You must not have a lot of Italians in your life.

• 1:29:33Jordi Hays?

  Harmonic. Now I get it. Harmonic, harmonica.

• 1:29:36John Coogan?

  Good nominative determiner.

• 1:29:37Speaker 07

  Very, yes. Uh, were you in my kindergarten class coming up with it?

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  You got a lot of that. Okay.

• 1:29:44Jordi Hays?

  I will, you know, I mispronounce your name. I'm gonna find the people that bullied you in kindergarten and I'm gonna go bully them to make it up to you.

• 1:29:53Speaker 07

  They all lost.

• 1:29:53Jordi Hays?

  They all lost.

• 1:29:54Speaker 07

  They all lost.

• 1:29:56Jordi Hays?

  Total victory.

• 1:29:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, you have real TVPN merch now. Do they?

• 1:29:59Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:30:00John Coogan?

  No, they're step by in the fake stuff.

• 1:30:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the cigarette fumes.

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, we gotta talk about the hottest song on the internet. We gotta talk about my granny got hit with a bazooka. What are your thoughts?

• 1:30:11Speaker 07

  Yeah, you know, if we were taping like an hour later.

• 1:30:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:16Speaker 07

  My song of the week video is going up this afternoon. It happens to be about bazooka.

• 1:30:20John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:30:21Speaker 07

  Um, what a special and strange song. You guys are into it? You guys like it?

• 1:30:26John Coogan?

  I like it. Yeah, I like it a lot. Uh, I, I like that it's so quickly been adapted into all the, it, it has the meme. You know, when a meme goes viral and then you get it in an image format, it turns into a cartoon. There's the video overlays. Like I saw someone, uh, singing it. They, they, they did sort of, uh, like an a cappella rendition with nine, uh, recordings of themselves. Uh, I've seen people play it on, on orchestral renditions and rearranging it guitar. And I love that. And you get that with some songs, you go and you find a song and you go on YouTube and you say like heavy metal version. And there's someone who's just jamming, playing like the rap song of the day or acoustic version. I've always found that fun. Um, so generally I'm a fan, but what do you think?

• 1:31:08Speaker 07

  Yeah. So my thing with this song, it's, it's a perfect blank slate, right? Because nobody knows the artist. It truly did come out of nowhere. I mean, this happened. I, this is a rare thing. Like I went on vacation over the holidays. It literally happened while I was away. I came back. I had no idea. All of a sudden the internet is, is completely cluttered with it within a space of a week. Um, Miami XO, who's the artist, doesn't really have much of a foot, like not much of a footprint leading into this.

• 1:31:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:38Speaker 07

  So unlike a lot of meme records that are from kind of well-known artists where the meme ability is somehow predicated upon a pre-existing understanding of the musician.

• 1:31:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:49Speaker 07

  This is pure, it's pure joke. You know what I mean?

• 1:31:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:52Speaker 07

  Like you can access it at that level.

• 1:31:53John Coogan?

  I, I don't know if this is a good, good, uh, example to draw on, but I'm thinking of like Lil Nas X, Old Town Road where he had been immersed in the Nicki Minaj fan club, understood how the internet worked and, and was already sort of sampling from Nine Inch Nails. And so there was an, there was an established sort of repertoire. It just felt like he was ready for primetime in a way that Miami XO might not be, but.

• 1:32:18Speaker 07

  Yeah, I think that's totally fair. I mean, here's someone, I mean, hasn't even really done, did his first interview from what I can tell, maybe two days ago to kind of a random YouTuber, like, doesn't seem to be ready to rise to the moment. And one thing that I find so strange is, when a record gets memed this intensely, this quickly, I know major labels are obviously knocking on the door, but things tend to happen a little bit quicker. You sort of, you get a press release that they've maybe signed a distribution deal, like, things move. But there's something that's, I almost feel like, a little hands-off about what's happening now. Like, people are just like, let this cook. Like, let me get the Indian classical version, like, let me get the SpongeBob

• 1:33:00Speaker 07

  version. Like, let's just see what the sort of logical endpoint of this is gonna be. Um, are you guys up on the, the dancing video, like, the Dancing Bones 07 dance videos?

• 1:33:10John Coogan?

  No, no, tell us.

• 1:33:12Speaker 07

  Like, a middle-aged gentleman, Navy veteran, uh, kinda dancing in his living room, in a Chick-fil-A, in a car dealership, really made his own kind of side cottage industry, dancing to Bazooka. And he's probably done about twenty or twenty-five videos just to this one song, creating a bit of an unholy alliance.

• 1:33:30John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting. He's a key collaborator.

• 1:33:34Jordi Hays?

  What is, what's the playbook? What, what's the, what's the pitch that record labels are giving to Miami XO? To turn you, to capitalize on this, this algorithmic moment, and turn him into a star?

• 1:33:50Speaker 07

  So, the cynical playbook, I assume, is what you're asking, rather than the real playbook? So, the cynical playbook is, we're gonna give you a short-term distribution deal. Maybe we're also gonna give you a publishing contract in which we extract maximum value from your writing on this song and the next.

• 1:34:08Jordi Hays?

  What's the difference between those two in a music context?

• 1:34:12Speaker 07

  So, publishing deal is gonna be on the songwriting, the lyrics, the melody, whereas a distribution deal is for the finished product of the song itself. So, those are-

• 1:34:21Jordi Hays?

  But the song already exists.

• 1:34:23Speaker 07

  The song already exists, but a lot of times what they're doing is they're retrofitting contracts on top of things that already happened. Like, he's someone who has a SoundCloud page, but you and I could have a SoundCloud page. That doesn't mean that we're registered with ASCAP or BMI. It doesn't mean that we have a lawyer who's negotiating splits on any deals that we might have done with collaborators. He's just a guy with forty songs on a SoundCloud page. So if I'm a publisher, I'm looking at those and saying, how do I monetize those on a writing perspective? And if I'm a label, I'm saying, how do I put gasoline on this thing that already has fire? Probably what's happening is one of the major labels is gonna scoop them up, get a remix going with two or three of your favorite SoundCloud graduate rappers,

• 1:35:06Speaker 07

  and see if they can turn it into a radio hit.

• 1:35:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, cuz it does.

• 1:35:12Jordi Hays?

  The challenge is that, you know, sometimes you have one of these songs, it's like catchy and funny and it naturally can play on the radio. But if you actually just start playing this on the radio, you could imagine, I mean, I remember getting into rap music in maybe high school, middle school, whatever, and playing songs in the car with my parents. And then you really hear the lyrics for the first time. You can imagine the moments with this song. And they're like, did I just? Did I hear that correctly? So it's hard to imagine this as a, like, it feels like a, it's an audio version of a meme. It's not a-

• 1:35:47Speaker 07

  Here's my, here's my counterpoint. Grandma got run over by a reindeer. You know that song?

• 1:35:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's a classic.

• 1:35:56John Coogan?

  It's a classic?

• 1:35:56Speaker 07

  That's a classic. So if that's a classic, why can't this be a classic?

• 1:35:59John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, yeah.

• 1:36:01Jordi Hays?

  That's a great, that's a great-

• 1:36:02Speaker 07

  One of the great Christmas songs of all time.

• 1:36:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so I wanna see the Miami XO Christmas edition of Granny Got Hit With A Pizzico.

• 1:36:11John Coogan?

  Miami XO is a great name. I like it.

• 1:36:13Speaker 07

  It is a great name. He's not from Miami, apparently. Apparently, he's from South Carolina, which, you know. We're all inventing ourselves on the internet.

• 1:36:23John Coogan?

  Was it Big Shaq who came out with that song, "Man's Not Hot"? Do you remember that whole prank?

• 1:36:27Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah, yeah, of course.

• 1:36:28John Coogan?

  So I believe that started with a joke version of "Fire in the Booth", a segment on BBC, Radio One, maybe, and-

• 1:36:38John Coogan?

  Normally, rappers show up to the booth.

• 1:36:40Speaker 07

  Good grind history lesson.

• 1:36:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but normally, rappers show up and they deliver freestyles that are somewhat prepped and like, iconic amigos have a great one, but then, uh, Big Shaq shows up and gives this like, completely jokey, but he's in on the joke, but no one really knows, it goes massively viral, and then he sort of commercializes from there. My question is like, like, with Lil Nas X, there was clearly a contract that they needed to clean up with Nine Inch Nails to properly sample that. And then, there's the remix, like, is that a big part of the pitch? Like, we're gonna sort of protect you from what's coming if you're an agent and you're going to one of these breakout stars?

• 1:37:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I think viral stars are really vulnerable, right? Because they're often operating outside of any formal arrangements with any institutions.

• 1:37:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:25Speaker 07

  So typically, what happens in a situation like this is, the first person who comes in is either a manager or a lawyer, often. Because sometimes you don't need both of them at this early stage. You simply need someone to represent your interests when you're walking into the room at Atlantic Records or Universal Records, or with UMG Publishing, UMPG, or something along those lines. So, that's probably what's happening right now. The truth is, there are plenty of viral moments, quote unquote, that other people capitalize. Like, I think a lot about On Fleek. There's like a young woman, a young black woman, who invented, or at least popularized the term, in a viral video, who then watched it get away from her.

• 1:38:10Speaker 07

  And it's in, you know, L'Oréal commercials and all this other stuff, with none of the sort of benefits redounding back to her. And so, a lot of times now, what's happening, that was like, six years ago, before these processes really formalized. People didn't know how to handle virality back then. But I think now, people understand that virality is about the best marketing that's available, and it can't be faked. Well, it can't be, but that's the subject.

• 1:38:35Jordi Hays?

  So, so, artist, new artist has a viral moment, they start talking with all the record labels, how much? Differences there between the different deals that they're being offered in our world. If you are, if you create a viral product, your every VC will reach out to you. They're just kind of offering you different valuations, different kind of ownership. Levels that they're looking for and it just becomes.

• 1:39:02John Coogan?

  20% in the boards.

• 1:39:03Jordi Hays?

  And, and, and some element of, some element of it's just like, what price are you willing to pay? The others like, who do I want to partner with? I'm assuming it's something similar, but how much, how mu- is there, is there a record label that's going to be like way more risk on like, hey, we don't, we don't think this is just a one-off moment. We, are they all telling them that you're, you're a future superstar, but then some of them are secretly saying like, yeah, we're just going to max kind of extract what we can out of this.

• 1:39:28Speaker 07

  Yeah. I think, I think there's, there's two levels of answer to the question. Like, I don't, I haven't spoken to Miami XO. I don't know if he wants a 30-year music career or if he sees music as like one part of a larger suite of like viral offerings. When you look at his Tik Tok and Instagram right now, the last two weeks of content is all him making jokes about his own virality. Maybe he's a, maybe he's a viral comedian, cosplaying as a musician.

• 1:39:56John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:39:58Speaker 07

  Tough to know.

• 1:39:58John Coogan?

  Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:40:01Speaker 07

  So if I'm a label, I might say, do you want this to be your career?

• 1:40:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:07Speaker 07

  If so, I'll invest X amount of dollars for X, for Y percent over 12 months. Or if, if he says, you know what? This was kind of a lark. Like, let's just, let's squeeze every little inch out of it. They may say, great, we're going to give you a distribution deal for this song. We're going to absolutely gasoline on it. We're going to get a remix going. We're going to put it in commercials. We're going to do all this other stuff and let's get you a quick half a million or a million dollars and then do whatever you want with it. It really, it really varies.

• 1:40:37Jordi Hays?

  Is there some sort of iron law that says a song like this can only break through?

• 1:40:44Jordi Hays?

  Like once it it seemingly like a silly song emerges like once a year. And you would think with

• 1:40:50Speaker 07

  I hear silly songs every day.

• 1:40:52Jordi Hays?

  No, I know, but I know, but we're talking about it. That means like this is not a music show.

• 1:40:56John Coogan?

  This did break through.

• 1:40:57Jordi Hays?

  And it's broken through and it feels like every, I don't know, is it 12 months? There's like some song. And I would think with Suno, a lot of people could be like, I'm gonna make a song like Bazooka.

• 1:41:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:09Jordi Hays?

  And they're just like taking a format for a song, which in this case, I don't know the exact genre, but it's like, not, it's not, uh, you know, melodic, kind of like

• 1:41:19Speaker 07

  It's like melodic underground rap.

• 1:41:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:21Speaker 07

  You know, like.

• 1:41:22Jordi Hays?

  Um, you would think there would be, uh, this would catalyze, like when you get, like a meme, like a more traditional meme, it just catalyzes a ton of different remixes on top of, on top of that and kind of branches off of the format. But I haven't, I, I, because of, because of the way that the algorithms work and like syncing, video or image content to the music, it just perpetuating like the same, the same thing over and over.

• 1:41:50Speaker 07

  I mean, I think to your first question about how many of these do we get in a year? Maybe we get four or five in a year that really like break escape velocity and get out to the wider public. And radio is, is a funny thing. I mean, you were joking that like, this would sound strange to hear on the radio. You know, five to 10 years ago, you'd have a station like Z100 in New York, which is like the big pop hit station. That studiously like walled off Tik Tok hits. They were like, we don't play those. Those aren't real songs. You know, real songs are Lady Gaga songs, like real songs are Katy Perry songs or, or Taylor songs. Uh, and then something happened. Maybe it was COVID. I don't exactly know what, but like 2021, 2022, you turn on,

• 1:42:35Speaker 07

  Z100 in the car and it's literally just like listening to Tik Tok. Just the whole thing inverted. And obviously that's part because radio, record labels are invested in both Tik Tok promotion, which is screwing with your algorithm and putting songs in front of you, but it's also invested. Radio promotion, which is putting things at a more mainstream level. But the chasm between those two universes is so thin right now. I would not be surprised to hear Bazooka on like a mainstream rap station by mid March. I really wouldn't be surprised.

• 1:43:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, sounds right. I want to like where this goes from a just like the cynical machine that takes place and like turns this into a repeatable formula. Is there, do you think there will be a new movement where a mainstream big artist hires a comedian to write some lyrics? And then they do specifically architect the virality where they have some UGC creator with a guitar doing an acoustic version on day one and they hire that guy to do the dance of outside the car dealership. And so it's like much more orchestrated to like create that viral boom.

• 1:43:53Speaker 07

  What I would say is things like that are already happening. Like I know people in Los Angeles. It may not be the literal, the exact literal thing you just said. But I know people in Los Angeles who work in production and songwriting. A lot of songwriting rooms are three or four people. Oftentimes you'll have one of those people who have fluency in viral content or fluency in memeable internet content. And the, the gap between like, I'm a comedian, I'm a content creator, I'm a musician. We used to think of those as three different jobs. They're not three different jobs anymore. It's basically just one job, which is getting attention. That's the main job. So I think what you'll see is actually there are a lot of people

• 1:44:35Speaker 07

  even who build themselves as songwriters, but who have been posting TikTok content for four, five, six years already and they're 20 years old. Are they a songwriter or are they a TikTok maker? You know, are they engineers of, are they recipients of virality or are they engineers of virality? Uh, I just don't think those lines are as meaningful as they used to be. But yeah, things like what you're saying, they're definitely already happening.

• 1:44:57Jordi Hays?

  What are the?

• 1:45:00Jordi Hays?

  What are all the ways that you're tracking algorithms influencing the music business? Because like optimizing for that like 10 to 15 second repeatable thing that you can attach to a reel or a photo dump or things like that. I remember first processing artists gaming the like streaming platforms by making every song, you know, much shorter, right? I'm not like, I'm not, I don't, I listen to music. I'm not like a music head, but I distinctly remember being like, wait, this guy just dropped, you know, Future just dropped a mixtape. Why does it have like 30 songs that are all like, you know, two minutes? So that, that was like one of those moments that was like the platforms influencing the, the,

• 1:45:45Jordi Hays?

  the, the, the music itself. But what are all the different things that you're tracking right now? And which make your blood boil the most?

• 1:45:54Speaker 07

  I gave up blood boiling a lot. I'm too old to have my blood boils. No, you're not allowed. At my age, you're not allowed for that. You're not allowed to have that. Okay, let me take you back even further. First of all, let's go back to actual Napster, like primetime Napster when aspiring artists would tag their songs as Britney Spears songs or Eminem songs so that they would pop up in the search algo and you downloaded thinking you got some Eminem leak and it was by somebody else, right? I've got untold on old hard drives, untold MP3s of who knows who like advertising themselves as like Metallica songs or something. So there's that. Your question about the future sort of a gaming the algorithm, that's functioning on two levels. One, you want to provide as much raw content to any algorithm as you can.

• 1:46:38Speaker 07

  But two, when you think of how streaming platforms serve you music, the entire goal of a streaming platform is to make sure you don't press stop. It's to make sure you don't go away. And so not only did that affect the length of albums, because 30 songs is a longer play time than 10 songs, it also affected the structure of music. Think about Post Malone in the mid to late 2010s, right? What do you think when you think Post Malone? You think that's a little bit hip hop, it's a little bit R and B, it's a little bit pop. Nowadays, it's a little bit country. But when you think of the kind of Uh, overall sonic framework of the song, it's real blurry, right? It's smeary. He's singing in this very stretched way.

• 1:47:19Speaker 07

  The beats aren't like, it's not like nineties rap beats where it's like on the one. It's not that. It's a lot blurrier. Streaming did that because streaming wanted to trick you into thinking that a song was never ending. And so you can press track one on a Post Malone album and before you've even woken up, you're on track seven. The structure of the music.

• 1:47:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's so, it's so, it's so interesting because I remember, I don't know, being, being young and like buying an album. And then like when you buy an album, it's such a different like for whatever. Ten, twelve bucks, fifteen, whatever, whatever, however it was priced. Like you're actually like, you're not just listening, you're like studying it. You want to come away being like, do I really like this? And you want to be taken on a journey and I would immediately clock, okay, I like these songs in this context. Like these songs when I'm driving to school, this song in the gym, you know, you're, you're kind of like mapping. I would map the album to my life. And then at some point it was like, oh, you made, you made thirty of the same song.

• 1:48:22Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. Thank you for that. And like sometimes it's, it's kind of like a, the cool vibe and it's fun to, to listen to. But it's not like, it's not like watching a movie that's taking you through all these different emotions.

• 1:48:36Speaker 07

  It reminds, it reminds me a little bit of jam bands in that way, which is like not a genre of music I care much about or, or certainly not one I enjoy. But anytime I've been forced to go to like a concert of that style, I'm always kind of shocked that. Maybe it doesn't totally matter which point in the show you're dropped in or which point in the show you're pulled out. Like it's kind of always happening and like the dynamism is like, oh, in minute four, he did this lick. But also in minute forty seven, he did this other lick that kind of talks to that. Maybe it doesn't totally matter when you entered. And I think streaming really, especially for hip hop, really, really pushed things in that direction. Uh, and what you're seeing now, like when I hear Bazooka, I'm hearing twenty sixteen SoundCloud records.

• 1:49:21Speaker 07

  Like I'm, I'm hearing Saw Baby records. Like I'm, I'm hearing things that. Post Young Thug that really, really made it seem like any kid with Fruity Loop software and like a tiny bit of a melodic sense could all of a sudden have a viral hit. It's really, I mean, we are living in 2016, not just, you know, in Instagram hashtags and everything, but the fact that we've cycled back and the biggest record of 2026 so far is basically a 2016 SoundCloud hit is, I think, striking and also talks about how nostalgia is like extremely collapsed right now. Like, we're nostalgic for things that happened 45 minutes ago, you know?

• 1:50:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, the 2016 trend was huge on Instagram when 2026 happened. It was like me in 2016 and I was like, that wasn't that long ago.

• 1:50:09Speaker 07

  Not long ago at all.

• 1:50:11John Coogan?

  But, and, and the photos, like, they look a little bit older, but like, they were taken with iPhones and so, like, they look like relatively recent. I'm like, oh.

• 1:50:18Speaker 07

  It's also like, well, one thing, it also adds that is like, are we remembering a specific song or are we remembering like a set of memories? And, and I think that's the fuzziness. And obviously like AI complicates that. Like, there's, there's, um, there are, I'm beginning to think that like original text, which is say Bazooka is like far less important than the memes, which are in turn far less important than how we talked about the memes. And I wonder if 10 or 20 years from now, we're not really remembering Bazooka as a song, but we're remembering Discourse far better.

• 1:50:57John Coogan?

  I mean, I, I, I'm here talking about it for half an hour and I don't think I've ever listened to more than 30 seconds of it. Like, I could not tell you if it has a verse. I know the chorus. It does. Okay, that's.

• 1:51:10Speaker 07

  It does. I can confirm it has a verse.

• 1:51:11John Coogan?

  I will, I will add.

• 1:51:13Jordi Hays?

  I had that experience. I was in a, I did a, I did a yoga class and they were playing music.

• 1:51:18John Coogan?

  They were playing Bazooka?

• 1:51:19Jordi Hays?

  And not, not Bazooka. That would, that would go, that would go hard. But they were playing songs and I was like, oh, that's a, that's a song. Cause I, I had heard them as like background music to, to so, you know, social media content, but had never heard it. And I was like, oh, that, that, that 10 seconds.

• 1:51:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:38Jordi Hays?

  I've heard that 10 seconds. I've never heard the full thing.

• 1:51:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:41Jordi Hays?

  Um, what, what's the, uh?

• 1:51:44Jordi Hays?

  Are there any, are you tracking any groups that are just fully in, in, in the music industry broadly that are fully leaning into AI and saying like, we know a lot of people hate this and are scared of it, but we're going to try to create like a super, like a faceless superstar here, like a, like a Daft Punk or, or something like that. Uh, any, any, any kind of, cause I, I've seen the, the people that will like go up the charts and saying, this is a fully AI artist and it's hard to actually read too much into

• 1:52:17Jordi Hays?

  any one of these artists because it could very well just be a really talented musician who's like using the tools to the best of their ability and it's not just like one shotted AI music.

• 1:52:26John Coogan?

  Or bots too. I mean, if you're willing to do AI, you could also be willing to bot.

• 1:52:30Speaker 07

  You can bot the success of it. Yeah. I mean, I think so, so there, towards the end of last year, there were maybe three or four like AI musicians that ended up on some chart. Look, there's a lot of charts. You can try, like again, we could, we could pick a chart and chart on it next week if we really tried hard.

• 1:52:51Jordi Hays?

  Um, uh, let's do it. All right. If you want to get involved, all right, we'll, we'll talk offline.

• 1:52:57Speaker 07

  We'll, we'll, we'll crack the code.

• 1:52:58John Coogan?

  I got the, I got the refrain right here. You're watching TVPN. We'll do a remix. There we go.

• 1:53:05Speaker 07

  So, uh, Solomon Ray, who was like a R and B artist, a lot of them are R and B gospel leaning R and B with a little bit of kind of like a MAGA adjacent country. These are the artists that have tended to been, to break out into broader consciousness. A thing that I, I noticed is a lot of these songs are, um, what's the way to put it? They're sad. They're, they're for depressed people. They're, they're for people who are looking to get lost in a song, maybe without thinking too hard about who's the musician behind it or what's going on. They, they feel like emotionally manipulative to me in a way. And I think those,

• 1:53:48Speaker 07

  but I also think they're also calling cards, right? Like, uh, if you made the Solomon Ray music. And then you ended up on some billboard R and B chart, you can then go into a publishing meeting or go into a label meeting and say, look what I did with no resources. Imagine what I can do with that. So as far as like super groups and like big picture, like I don't think people are thinking quite at that scale, but I think a lot of people are prompting AI to make music that will resonate for people who are in the music business specifically.

• 1:54:20John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, we see this on X articles where people will use AI to generate something that's like, oh, that technology is so crazy. And I've seen on Instagram reels where you'll get sort of like a video that's very clearly like just glazing you and confirming all of your biases and stuff. I know why this is getting a lot of views because it's not acting as any sort of complex narrative or anything like that.

• 1:54:45Speaker 07

  No, and the other thing, I mean, AI, I mean, I'm sure you guys see this a lot more maybe in your side than I see it on my side, but there's a lot of like unseen process that AI can help with. You have songwriters who are like, hey, I need a 20 part vocal harmony on the bridge. Can you just do 20 parts that kind of sound like they're in the same genre as the original audio? That comes together really quickly. Hey, I need a lyric to fill in like the fourth bar of the quatrain. Can you give me 10 ideas for that? I think you're seeing that in places already in studio sessions, but you haven't yet had the breakout of like, it's Taylor Swift, but it's

• 1:55:28Speaker 07

  not Taylor Swift. Like you haven't had that. I think we're still like a few years away on a macro, on a mat, on a major scale from that. But the small stuff is, it's, um, it's softening our resolve. I don't know. Do you guys, you guys care if there's AI music? If you are listening to a Spotify playlist and track five is human, track six is AI and track seven is human. You stressing about that?

• 1:55:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I

• 1:55:51John Coogan?

  I like shelling points. I like I like songs that other people know are songs. So even if you told me that Bazooka was AI generated, I'd be like, I'm still down because you have an experience about that and we can talk about that. And if I'm humming it, you're like, oh, he's humming Bazooka. I don't want to be off in my own world, listening to music that's just generated for me. Because no one else will get what I'm humming. And so as long as it's a shelling point and everyone knows, or everyone in my group knows about the song, or I can share it and then they can find it and they can enjoy it. I'm cool. But I don't, I don't want hyper personalized music necessarily. At least that's what I think.

• 1:56:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I had

• 1:56:33Speaker 07

  I think Humming Bazooka is a good hardcore band name. We should do that.

• 1:56:36John Coogan?

  Humming Bazooka, yeah.

• 1:56:37Speaker 07

  Humming Bazooka.

• 1:56:38John Coogan?

  I have some lightning round questions that you can do.

• 1:56:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I had the probably almost two years ago at this point, maybe, maybe a year and a half. But somebody made an AI Gunna album, posted it on YouTube, and you easily could have, even that was, you know, I imagine all the models have made a ton of progress, but you could have slotted that into a Gunna. You could have like snuck one of those into a real Gunna album. And I would have been thinking, yeah, this, this, yeah, this is, this is a vibe.

• 1:57:06Speaker 07

  This tracks.

• 1:57:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. My one

• 1:57:10Speaker 07

  To me, sorry, just the tech, it's like, I'm not like a purist in any way. I think people use whatever technology they want to make, whatever they want to use to make great music. But we become so desensitized in the sort of post-T-Pain era to like hearing digitally processed vocals. That like, this is kind of what we were asking for the whole time, you know, like, and again, I'm not passing judgment on it. I just sort of think anyone who's complaining about it, but then goes and dances to like, I'm in love with a stripper at the club, almost like we're not that far away.

• 1:57:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:44Jordi Hays?

  Everyone knows that just being in the streaming business, making all your money from streaming is rough. I think the is it's like a billion streams on Spotify or Apple Music gets you like low, single digit millions in revenue that you're then splitting up with tons of different people. So not, not super significant. And so the answer is do, do constantly be touring, doing big tours. Are there artists that have insane streaming numbers that don't?

• 1:58:15Jordi Hays?

  Actually crush it when they go out touring? Like is that?

• 1:58:18Speaker 07

  That's that. So, so that's interesting because I think you have. Streaming has created its own tier of superstars. If you think about NBA Youngboy. The most streamed artist on YouTube, uh, maybe three of the last five years, two or three of the last five years.

• 1:58:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Are you serious?

• 1:58:37Speaker 07

  Oh, a hundred percent NBA Youngboy. Look, NBA Youngboy is the most popular and meaningful rapper in America for the last five years.

• 1:58:44Jordi Hays?

  I had no idea. In my head, he's still like SoundCloud.

• 1:58:48John Coogan?

  No, haven't you seen his earnings? He's outpacing the S and P 500.

• 1:58:51Speaker 07

  He had the number one, no, no, he had the number one debut solo rapper. Tour rep by revenue, the tour that that just completed last year. I think it's 70 million in ticket sales.

• 1:59:03John Coogan?

  Never broke again. He's never broke again. He called a shot. I love it. He will never be broke again. Put some of that in. In CDs.

• 1:59:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's a determinant of someone who streaming created a marketplace.

• 1:59:17John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:59:18Speaker 07

  And then went out into the world and received all the riches that came with it. But then you have other people who, uh, you know, to your point earlier about Miami XO, is this guy a star or not? Like? Who knows? Like, is he gonna be on one hit wonder bills 10 years from now? Maybe, but you have people like, say, even Playboy Carti, who like can tour. Well, but isn't really trying to be like a public facing celebrity. It's like he's a little bit in the shadows. Um, everybody takes their streaming success differently. And but Youngboy is a, is an example of someone who. Literally saw that and then went out and sold. A million tickets off of that, you know, or something along those lines. I went to three dates on that tour. It was the most.

• 2:00:02Speaker 07

  Enlivening tour I've been to in years.

• 2:00:05Jordi Hays?

  What, uh? Did you feel like you needed to go to three? Dates to do your job properly? I mean, after the second. Were you like, was it just like, it's fun? I want to go again?

• 2:00:17Speaker 07

  Joy, man. I chased pleasure.

• 2:00:19Jordi Hays?

  I love it. I love it.

• 2:00:22John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:00:22Jordi Hays?

  The chat says he also has 13 kids. He may be broke again.

• 2:00:28John Coogan?

  This is wild. Thank you so much for coming on the show. This is always so much fun. We got through exactly one question. I had 10, so we'll have to have you back soon. Yeah, it's okay. We'll be back. Appreciate y'all. I can't wait.

• 2:00:40Jordi Hays?

  Great, great to see you, John.

• 2:00:41John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Stay hydrated. Yeah, we'll tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity, so you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. And I'm also going to tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. We had some breaking news.

• 2:01:03Jordi Hays?

  If you told me, if you told me that NBA Youngboy was the biggest artist on YouTube.

• 2:01:11John Coogan?

  That took me by surprise as well.

• 2:01:12Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would have said, that's a, that's a great bit.

• 2:01:15John Coogan?

  That's a great bit, but he deserves it. I love NBA Youngboy. Fantastic artist. We had some breaking news. The Netherlands House of Representatives has approved a 36% tax on unrealized capital gains and Aaron Bali says, how do you short a country and got 27,000 likes? It's, it's getting spicy over there in the Netherlands, but fortunately.

• 2:01:35Jordi Hays?

  ASML, ASML employees are giga-cooked.

• 2:01:40John Coogan?

  Oh, that's right. They're over there in the Netherlands.

• 2:01:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't, I still.

• 2:01:46John Coogan?

  Oh, they're exempting startups. That's fun.

• 2:01:49Jordi Hays?

  But ASML is not a startup.

• 2:01:51John Coogan?

  I think of it as a startup. I actually think of every business as either real estate or startup. You know, McDonald's, that's real estate play. If we get, if we get crazy with it, I imagine that there will be a lot of companies that are redefining their category as real estate if it's truly exempted here. It's full employment for tax lawyers over there. Get in that business because you're going to be having a lot of clients.

• 2:02:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the.

• 2:02:12John Coogan?

  Our next guest is here.

• 2:02:13Jordi Hays?

  Our next guest is here.

• 2:02:14John Coogan?

  Let's bring in Spencer from Amplitude. Welcome to the show. He's in the restroom ready room now. He's in. The TV been altered.

• 2:02:20Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:02:21John Coogan?

  Hello.

• 2:02:23Speaker 08

  Jordi, John, great to see you guys.

• 2:02:25John Coogan?

  Great to see you.

• 2:02:26Speaker 08

  So excited to finally make it to TBN and the big leagues, man.

• 2:02:30Jordi Hays?

  I mean, we're way overdue, way overdue.

• 2:02:33John Coogan?

  You have a very unique superlative, right? Aren't you one of the first YC founders to ever take a company public? Like, in the first 10 at least, something like that?

• 2:02:41Speaker 08

  We were one of the earlier ones in our batch in YC 2012. It was us, Gusto, and PlanGrid. And those were kind of the big... That was the emergence of YC as SaaS, which is now dead. We can talk about that.

• 2:02:55Jordi Hays?

  How big was the class at that time?

• 2:02:58Speaker 08

  I like to think we made B2B hot. 60 companies, so very, very different from what it is today.

• 2:03:03John Coogan?

  Wow, that's really fast, yeah. Yeah, we always recommend taking companies public. If you're building a business, just go head over to the New York Stock Exchange, take your company public. But how has it been for you? You know, there's always like, "Oh, stay private forever, do the SpaceX thing." Obviously Elon's changing his tune on that. Give us a review. What's it like being in the public markets? And what's your journey been like?

• 2:03:27Speaker 08

  This may sound very surprising, but it's actually incredibly positive for a whole bunch of reasons. My opinion is, once you get a company to about $100 million in ARR or beyond, you have an obligation to the business, to the stockholders, to everyone that works with you to take it public. We did it for a number of reasons. I mean, one, there's the liquidity aspect where now we can get talent and say, "Hey, this equity is worth something right this second, not in some future scenario." And that's huge, because that allows us to attract a different level of executives, attract different types of software engineers, like acquire companies. That's actually a really big deal. There's tons of companies up for sale these days and saying, "Hey, we're going to give you real liquidity now."

• 2:04:12Speaker 08

  On the first day we do this transaction is a huge deal for them. The other thing it does is it... Makes it clear that we are sticking around for the very long term. We're not continued dependent on the private markets for either liquidity or for future cash. We're profitable as a company. We're able to set that stake in the ground and talk about the next five, 10, 20 years. Oh yeah, the profitability.

• 2:04:40Speaker 08

  And then it just, the last thing I'd say is it sets a higher bar for execution.

• 2:04:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:45Speaker 08

  Now, the downside is a liquid stock price massively distracting to the team. Because everyone's like, oh my God, I'd make a point of not looking at it. Someone told me there's a SaaS apocalypse last week. And so I'm like, oh, I better say something on this. But overall, it's actually a very positive thing.

• 2:05:02John Coogan?

  Since this is the first time in the show, take us back to YC Demo Day. Give us the elevator pitch. Like, what were you describing then? And then, obviously, I want to go forward to like what the company is like today.

• 2:05:14Speaker 08

  So we actually had a different company during YC Demo Day.

• 2:05:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, we were doing this voice recognition app called Sonalite.

• 2:05:21Speaker 08

  It was like an early version of Siri before Siri. And it listened to you in the background so that you could safely talk to it. Like, you had this really sick demo where you had your phone and you put it in your jacket pocket and you had a conversation and people were like, whoa, this is like Star Trek. This is the coolest thing ever.

• 2:05:37John Coogan?

  You're so close to the AI pin.

• 2:05:39Speaker 08

  You know what's funny? Voice was just not good enough as a technology then. 10 years later, it actually might break through, which is funny. But anyway, we pivoted that into Amplitude. And the very first version was mobile analytics. We saw mobile taken off like this. And we said, there is a whole set of infrastructure companies going to be built to make those companies successful. So companies like Snapchat, or Instagram, or WhatsApp, or YouTube, or Yelp, that were just... And then, a lot of people were accessing the internet for the first time on mobile. You had people coming online in Asia and Africa. And we said, okay, let's go bet on this. And let's build a company that solves a lot of their infrastructure and data analytics problems. Because we had those same problems at Sonalite.

• 2:06:25Speaker 08

  Fast forward today, now we're doing all sorts of stuff.

• 2:06:27Jordi Hays?

  That means you were getting some users for the first product. Like, if you...

• 2:06:33Speaker 08

  For Sonalite?

• 2:06:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:35Speaker 08

  Yeah, we got, we got like a few hundred thousand downloads, so. Someone who wasn't us, well, I think you guys are much more successful consumer guys than I am, but someone who wasn't us was using it, so that was good.

• 2:06:46John Coogan?

  No, I, I, I launched an iOS app in YC summer 2012 and I think I got like 500 installs. It was a disaster. I didn't understand.

• 2:06:55John Coogan?

  It's really, really hard. So, yeah.

• 2:06:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, yeah, and I, and I just asked because you don't, you don't discover all these different pain points and problems.

• 2:07:02John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:07:02Jordi Hays?

  Unless you actually have some, some.

• 2:07:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:05Jordi Hays?

  Element of scale.

• 2:07:05John Coogan?

  So what was, yeah, what was the first use case for mobile analytics is like conversion rates, A/B testing? Like what were, what were the killer features?

• 2:07:15Speaker 08

  The key question people wanted to know was what actions lead to long-term successful usage?

• 2:07:21John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:07:22Speaker 08

  So we wanted to know, does the accuracy at Sonalite, does the accuracy of voice recognition matter for someone's long-term engagement? Turns out it massively matters. If you have a first successful voice recognition event, you're twice as likely to stick around long-term.

• 2:07:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:36Speaker 08

  And it turns out every single product needs that same intelligence. And so all, all the different startups in our batch were like, hey, can I get that data analytics? When we'd show them, you know, they're more interested in that than what we're doing on voice recognition with Sonalite. Because to my surprise, like even companies like PlanGridge, which were very, very successful in our batch and kind of one of the stars coming out. We're like, I don't even know the, the first thing about what causes my users to stick around. So we ended up building that, you know, we've helped companies over the years like DoorDash, Calm, Peloton, tons of others. Now we're working foundational model labs to help them as well.

• 2:08:13John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:08:13Speaker 08

  Understand the same things.

• 2:08:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. How power law driven is the business? I imagine that there's like a really long tail of just so many app developers that need analytics. Then at the very, very tippy top, you probably have like, you know, some of the hyperscalers that are like, hey, we'll do it in-house. But is that the right way to think about the market structure?

• 2:08:35Speaker 08

  Yeah, it, it, it definitely is. I, I think. One of the surprises is just how widespread this need is. And so it's not just within technology. It's like quick service restaurants. So we have Panda Express and Chick-fil-A and Jersey Mike's as customers of ours. We have media companies like NBC. We have and Fox. We have, you know, it's like everyone needs this. And then in terms of the actual breakdown of our ARR, it's we have over 40 companies above a million in ARR, which is very concentrated for someone of our size and stage. And I think from my standpoint speaks to how deep this pain is. If you really need this, you really need it and you're willing to spend. We're often the largest spend in someone's stack.

• 2:09:19John Coogan?

  Well, talk to me about how the analytics are changing in the age of AI. Are you rolling out tools that will like build an iPython notebook, write Pandas, like do SQL queries? Like I imagine that the previous era was very much like, great, you got the data together. Now hand it over to me and my data scientist will write a bunch of Python to actually interpret it. How much of that is changing and happening in-house now?

• 2:09:47Speaker 08

  Oh, it's completely changing. So the key issue is that you had to be familiar with SQL. You have to be familiar with data taxonomies. You have to be familiar with how to do a funnel analysis, like all these pieces of specialized knowledge. And so today we launched an AI agentic analytics platform with Amplitude where you can just type any free form question and then get an answer back. And it'll do the deep work of figuring out how to translate it to a query, how to use the right tools, how to map it to your taxonomy. So you don't need to know any of that. You can just say, what are my DAUs? Or what's the worst step in my conversion funnel? And then how do I improve it? And it'll come back with a whole notebook and analysis of results, all within Amplitude. You can also connect it via Slack.

• 2:10:31Speaker 08

  So you can just connect our Slack bot, have it hit our MCP server. And then it comes back with this like very rich dashboard and widgets and text responses that's formatted that tells you all about it.

• 2:10:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. Talk about the SaaS apocalypse. Are you worried about people vibe coding their own in-house version? Like, what are you seeing on the ground? What, uh, what do you think like long-term moats and software look like? Is anything

• 2:10:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think there's, there's, there's like two things like what, what, what happens to the core business? And then like, how do you create net new products? Or this new kind of like category of company that has entirely new kind of needs around understanding how their products get used and all that kind of thing.

• 2:11:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:17Speaker 08

  So first on SaaS, I think the key lesson is the software you've already built, that is no longer a moat. Because to your point, whether it's someone vibe coding it or someone going after as a company, they can replicate it pretty quickly. And so the new key moat in my mind is, it's a little trite, but speed of innovation. You have to be pushing the bleeding edge of what capabilities are. And that's what customers, and if you do that and you create a company that can do that, that's what customers will buy. And so what I think the SaaS apocalypse has actually gotten right is if you look at the median SaaS company, whether it's, um, you know, a few hundred million in AR like us, or whether it's in the billions, the median SaaS company, their innovation has actually slowed to a standstill.

• 2:12:01Speaker 08

  I don't know if you guys have ever been inside of these. But it's, it's crazy how little that they, they ship in terms of net new products. You know, they'll put some nice branding on it. They'll be like, oh, introducing our new Salesforce AI agents. But then it's like, okay, this is the same thing you guys had last year. Like, why, like, what are we doing here? And so I think the difference is, um, speed of using the bleeding edge of these model capabilities is all that matters. And you're even seeing it in foundational model companies. It's right, like, okay, Opus was the hottest thing, you know, a week ago. Then it was Codex literally launched the same day and said, hey, we're even better and we're faster and we're on cerebrus trips and all this stuff. And so I think it just matters the rate of improvement.

• 2:12:43Speaker 08

  The analogy I've heard for software that I actually like by one of my, uh, one, a former amplitude investor is, uh, it's like sushi. And so buyers are always going to want the best thing. And so if you're keeping up with innovating the best thing, you will be able to charge a premium. And so, you know, it's fine that the gas station at the 7-Eleven at the gas station now sells sushi, you know, it's not going to put, you know, Jiro in Japan out of business.

• 2:13:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:10Speaker 08

  And so for us, the lesson is, okay, there is no moat anymore from what we've built. There is only a moat if we're able to deliver the most bleeding-edge capability.

• 2:13:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about other moats that could potentially relate to what you're doing? I'm just thinking about like, we were talking about just email delivery. Like, there is a way to get a web server to send a, to send an email, but there's all this trust that's built up around email delivery rates. And so you're probably better off going with a company that has a lot of experience there, understands what Gmail likes, and sets rate limits, and has a history of like, good behavior. And then you were talking about payment rails and all the bank licenses and money transfer licenses. Have you, have you, have you started thinking about like, other pools of moats that might

• 2:13:59John Coogan?

  exist in, in software companies as the divide grows between, okay, you have a stagnant pile of code versus a company that's actually being agile, innovating, and carving out new moats and digging existing moats deeper?

• 2:14:13Speaker 08

  Honestly, I'm, at least at Amplitude, we're kind of full send on this SaaS is dead, AI is the future. And so we're just assuming for our business that like, it doesn't matter, you know, what we've built to date, and all that matters is, can we deliver, you know, an AI analytics future? And so I'm sure there's going to be moats like you described where you get weird interfaces in the human world. But I, I actually believe in the thesis that, I think a lot of specialized skillsets are dead. And if you look at, I don't know if you guys have ever read The Bitter Lesson?

• 2:14:46John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:14:47Speaker 08

  The, and, Rich Sutton, yeah. You know, and, and Dario was actually recently talking about that as well on, on the Dork Cash podcast.

• 2:14:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:56Speaker 08

  Where the, all that matters... Like specialized skillsets go away. All that matters is scaling these different variables. So compute, training time, quantity of data, breadth and quality of data. And it doesn't really, like, all these places where you could eke out a job because you have some specialized knowledge in a niche, I think are going to completely go away. And so, and that goes for the companies too, where, you know, a lot of them are giving lip services, AI stuff. But you look at your media and SaaS company again, and it's like, okay, you know, we rebranded some stuff and maybe we have some cool, you know, one little AI feature here, but that's, that's kind of all they've done.

• 2:15:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. What about, um, uh, just like, just being reinvigorated? I mean, what were you, YC 10?

• 2:15:43Speaker 08

  Winter 12.

• 2:15:43John Coogan?

  Winter 12? Yeah, like, it's, it's an overnight success. It's been 14 years. But at some point, you know, it can get exhausting. Has the AI boom sort of reinvigorated you, reinvigorated the team? And then, and then what changes have been made to the, the individual roles of folks on the team to actually diffuse AI into everything that you do?

• 2:16:08Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, we're super excited. The team's been very excited. I, I think the biggest thing we're seeing is specialized skillsets are going away. And so if you're an engineer, you have to think about whether what you're building, customers actually use and want. If you're a product manager or designer, you're actually shipping code. Like, we see, like, one of our best designers is, is shipping code on a daily basis here, which is pretty crazy. I wouldn't have thought that were possible a year ago. And then I, I think it extends beyond the, the engineering and product and design functions. I think you look at go to market, I think the same thing's going to happen. Like, you're still going to want salespeople because we as humans naturally respond to other people. And, you know, we much like rather talking to a person than AI and, and AI, but.

• 2:16:53Speaker 08

  All the kind of specialized niche skills like, oh, I know how to write an earnings call script, or a blog post, or file a Form 4, or do this legal review, or create an infographic. I think a lot of that is going to go away, and instead, you're just going to be left with high-agency people who just know how to use AI.

• 2:17:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:11Jordi Hays?

  What are, like, we've seen so many different products explode from zero to hundreds of thousands or millions of users really quickly. Part of that is because, you know, models are this sort of magical technology that we're still processing, right? We've seen this with, you know, back, what was it, like, two, three years ago, when you had that image generation company that would make, you know, do like headshots? You remember this company? You have this magical technology, it can cause like really fast explosive growth. There's like this urgency from this early adopter crowd that will just try anything at least once. Like, historically, if you were making a digital product and you were using Amplitude,

• 2:17:54Jordi Hays?

  you'd be able to see like, okay, if somebody signs up and they use the app three times in the first three days, there, you know, there's an 80% chance that they'll still be using it in the six month. At what point can you kind of see through all the noise and the chaos with some of these newer digital products that are leveraging AI, and realize that you have something like sticky? Are there kind of new indicators? Or is it, or is there still something to be learned from the sort of like approach to retention analytics from maybe a decade ago?

• 2:18:28Speaker 08

  So the core is the same thing, which is, you want users to use your product and get a ton of value over time. So you're still looking at, do they retain, you know, one, two, three months down the line? But what you're looking at upstream is different. So you're going to be looking at What sort of prompts is someone putting in? Is it getting them the result they want? Did they seem to like it? Did they reshare it? And so, one of the things we're doing is actually building LLM analytics internally. And we're partnering with a number of our AI forward customers that have chatbots or are building models to see, okay, well, does this sort of response get better engagement than this sort of response or vice versa? And so, you do need some customization to do that because you want to look at these

• 2:19:13Speaker 08

  traces in real time. You want to understand the sentiment. You want to figure out how to, what sort of context you can give it to give it a better response. But you're still, like, the thing that hasn't changed is you're still connecting it to long-term engagement. So, I know if they're still retained after three months in subscribing, that's a great outcome. So, I just want behaviors at the start that correlate with that. Yeah, makes sense.

• 2:19:37John Coogan?

  Two somewhat unrelated questions to the core business. But what can you tell us about how the iOS app charts work? About how they work? Because I imagine that you see analytics and then we see the charts. And everyone has this feeling that the charts are based on momentum. How real is that? Like, what does it take to chart? How confident are you in people gaming the charts? Or, you know, how do you think about charting in the App Store broadly?

• 2:20:06Speaker 08

  That's so funny. I, dude, this is a blast from, a blast from the past. Like, this is like a typical question we get in like 2014.

• 2:20:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:15Speaker 08

  Charting is, at least from what we've seen, charting is not the best way to get distribution anymore. You want to get it through other channels that are, whether it's viral, whether it's like, you know, own media, whether it's, you know, just a community of influencers. It's like very, very different adoption. As far as I can tell, I mean, the guys at Sensor Tower would probably be able to give you a better answer than this. It is very much how many people downloaded in the last, you know, 24 hours, seven days? And then, what's the change in that over time?

• 2:20:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. And that's why we see, yeah, and that's why we see like the MetaQuest charts like right around Christmas because everyone's getting an Oculus.

• 2:20:52Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah, just like spiked up.

• 2:20:53John Coogan?

  And it has a huge spike. And there's, it's always fun checking the charts after Christmas because you're like, oh, here are all the toys that did well. Very, very interesting. Do you keep, you worked as an algorithmic trader at DRW Trading?

• 2:21:07Speaker 08

  DRW Trading, go to Don Wilson.

• 2:21:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, do you, uh, do you keep up with any of those folks? Do you have any ideas or predictions about how AI will impact, uh, trading firms?

• 2:21:18Speaker 08

  Uh, Don, you know, I'll, I'll just tell this quick story on Don. He is fucking next level. He was out here in Silicon Valley and I randomly bumped into him at a party two years ago. And he was like, oh, we're trying to create models that like build the, the, the bleeding edge of what might happen in markets and incorporate all this data, whether it's geopolitical or macro or, you know, uh, whatever else. And I'm like, holy shit. And he was physically out here in person, so much so that he had gotten a, gotten a place out here in the Bay Area, even though he's in Chicago. So I'm like, wow, this guy is next level.

• 2:21:48Jordi Hays?

  Tapped in.

• 2:21:49Speaker 08

  Um, I, I, I think it will, I think it will dramatically change in that if you can create models which take in all these different data sources. And then the, the lesson from deep learning is if you just get continued scale, you will all sorts of trends, uh, and underlying structure is going to pop out that you didn't even expect was, was there. So I, I think the, I think the high frequency trading firms that figure it out will do incredibly well and they'll leave, uh,

• 2:22:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Francois Chalet was posting yesterday or the day before saying like, one of the first signs of like a, like ASI will be a, will be a hedge fund that is just so dramatically outperforming.

• 2:22:32John Coogan?

  Just like they made 10 trillion this quarter. Um, would you bet on a?

• 2:22:38Speaker 08

  Well, that's why, that's why they got to have the wealth tax to redistribute it.

• 2:22:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:22:41Speaker 08

  Sorry, bad joke.

• 2:22:43John Coogan?

  Would you bet on a, uh, traditional trading finance background getting up to speed on AI or an AI lab learning finance?

• 2:22:53Speaker 08

  Oh, definitely the labs or one of these engineers learning finance.

• 2:22:57John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:22:57Speaker 08

  I, I, I mean, when we went into high frequency, you know, it used to be the finance world was filled with jocks, right?

• 2:23:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:04Speaker 08

  You know, it's like chest thumpers that like did, you know, hundreds of phone calls every day.

• 2:23:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, Wall Street.

• 2:23:09Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. When I went into it, Uh, you know, the nerds were just beginning to become hot. And so you wanted these people with math PhDs or, you know, physics Nobel Prize or whatever else. And it's like, yeah, they're going to outthink you. And so it's, it's just going to go more in that direction. Um, you know, the, the old days of the, the finance pro is, is gone. So.

• 2:23:29John Coogan?

  The revenge of the nerds is upon us.

• 2:23:31Speaker 08

  Hell, yeah.

• 2:23:32John Coogan?

  Last question for me. Do you skate? Do you skateboard?

• 2:23:36Speaker 08

  Oh, absolutely.

• 2:23:37John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:23:38Speaker 08

  Let's go.

• 2:23:39John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:23:39Speaker 08

  You got it. You, uh, roller skates, not, or ice skates, not, not, uh,

• 2:23:44John Coogan?

  What about ice skates?

• 2:23:45Speaker 08

  My brother's skate sports.

• 2:23:46John Coogan?

  It's the winter, it's the winter Olympics. You ever get out?

• 2:23:48Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah. Oh, dude, I'd never be able to compete at that level.

• 2:23:50John Coogan?

  No, no, but you know, it's like, if it's Christmas time, you go out with the family. I don't know. You, you put on some ice skates. It's a nice wintry activity. I participate.

• 2:23:59Speaker 08

  Oh, totally. It's, it's great, great, great, uh, great first date idea. I'll tell you that.

• 2:24:04John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:24:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 2:24:06John Coogan?

  Well, fantastic. Thank you so much for coming.

• 2:24:08Jordi Hays?

  So great to finally have you on.

• 2:24:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:24:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Hop on anytime.

• 2:24:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd love to.

• 2:24:12Speaker 08

  Thanks, Jordy. Thanks, John.

• 2:24:12John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:24:14Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, Spencer.

• 2:24:14John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. Goodbye.

• 2:24:19Jordi Hays?

  And back to the timeline.

• 2:24:23John Coogan?

  Phantom cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or metalmen and spend with the phantom card with phantom cash. Uh, estimated ownership in anthropic of various corporations. Uh, Amazon has around 15%. Google has 13%, Nvidia has 2%, Microsoft has 1%, Zoom has almost 1%. Salesforce has a little under half a percent and, uh, SBF also has a huge stake, although I think that that's transferred at some point. I wonder where those shares actually went. I have yet to get to the bottom of that.

• 2:24:53Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think a lot of those positions got bought out at the time of bankruptcy in order to repay. Yeah, no, no, they, they are still owned. Somebody bought them. I, I remember, I, I believe that the cursor position traded at like near the, like, that, that was a situation in which kind of the vultures kind of descended and they were like, there's some good assets in here. The, uh, you know, bankruptcy process obviously needs liquidity to pay back the people whose money was used to fund the investments. But, uh, but yeah, let's, I'd love to see, uh, last time Benioff was on, I think he said they had around a point. And so may have been diluted since then, but maybe more than, maybe more than that half a percent.

• 2:25:38John Coogan?

  Well, we have some new Sonnet 4.5 is out from Anthropic.

• 2:25:43Jordi Hays?

  4.6.

• 2:25:44John Coogan?

  4.6. Sonnet 4.6. They say it's our most capable Sonnet model by far.

• 2:25:49Jordi Hays?

  It's newer, faster, lighter, thinner.

• 2:25:52John Coogan?

  Capabilities in many areas. Very excited for folks to try this one out, says Alex Albert over in Claude, the Claude Relations Department at Anthropic.

• 2:26:01Jordi Hays?

  Will Brown says, uh, Sonnet 4.6 is the first flagship LLM since Bloomberg GPT to be targeted primarily at the finance crowd.

• 2:26:09John Coogan?

  Hmm. Bloomberg GPT 4.6. It does well on agentic financial analysis and office tasks particularly well. Yeah, neck and neck with some other stuff, but does pretty, pretty well. Um, let's see, what else is going on? We have Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow, and invest securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud, and improve.

• 2:26:34Jordi Hays?

  Orin says Manus, Manus has entered Instagram.

• 2:26:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:26:39Jordi Hays?

  It gives you an overview and it says you've reached 120,000 accounts. Create a content strategy with Manus based on the success of this reel.

• 2:26:47John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:26:48Jordi Hays?

  And then apparently it just takes, uh, takes you straight to the Manus homepage.

• 2:26:51John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 2:26:52Jordi Hays?

  Um, so not super integrated yet, but driving, driving, uh, leads.

• 2:26:58John Coogan?

  There's also drama at the Olympics. Curling is in the hot seat.

• 2:27:02Jordi Hays?

  This is crazy, crazy.

• 2:27:04John Coogan?

  Amanda says, I'm obsessed with the curling drama. What do you mean? The Canadians are such consistent and known cheaters that the Swedes were willing to set up a sting operation to catch them in the act, which they knew would happen because again, they keep cheating in the same way every time. It's difficult to assign intent, but it does seem like the Canadians are cheating and in this exact way because they know that the usual cameras that cover curling matches do not cover the angle that would catch them, which is why they're mad at the Swedes for setting up the camera. And so.

• 2:27:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what was the?

• 2:27:32John Coogan?

  Headline is, the Olympics have been rocked by a cheating scandal in curling. Good pun there because I think the curling stone is called rock. The double touch and the hog line are at the center of controversy that has Swedes tattling and Canadians cursing. The Olympics are where human beings accomplish the impossible. Skiers blaze down mountains at 90 miles per hour. Skaters spin four times in the air and land on a pair of knives. And Canadians, by reputation, the nicest folks in North America, transform into something else altogether. The expletive spewing, potential rule breaking, rule breaking villains of the games. Canada's heel turn has come in curling of all sports. The saga began Friday during its men's match against Sweden,

• 2:28:14John Coogan?

  when the Swedes accused Canadian curlers of grazing the stone with their fingertips after they'd already released it. The move is known as a double touch and is highly illegal. Canada's Mark Kennedy took the allegation sadly.

• 2:28:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so wait, Canada's still competing? Even though they were caught in 4K?

• 2:28:32John Coogan?

  Well, they were, they were accused of cheating by the Swedes, not by the Olympic governing body yet.

• 2:28:37Jordi Hays?

  Which seems insane.

• 2:28:37John Coogan?

  So they got a passive.

• 2:28:38Jordi Hays?

  There's a video of it. You can see him doing it.

• 2:28:41John Coogan?

  I don't know, can you? I don't, I haven't seen a video that convinced me. Innocent until proven guilty.

• 2:28:47Jordi Hays?

  I haven't, you, you haven't seen the video?

• 2:28:49John Coogan?

  I haven't watched the video, so who knows?

• 2:28:52Jordi Hays?

  It's absolutely blatant.

• 2:28:53John Coogan?

  It is? You, you saw the video?

• 2:28:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you can see.

• 2:28:56John Coogan?

  The double touch is real?

• 2:28:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I think we have our next guest, so we won't pull it up now.

• 2:29:01John Coogan?

  Well, we will pull up public, investing for those who take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. Let's bring in Haseeb from Dragonfly. We have the lightning round is starting. Thank you, Ben. The la, the lightning round is beginning now with Haseeb Kreshi from Dragonfly. He's the managing partner and he's here.

• 2:29:22Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:29:23John Coogan?

  The TVP LTRM, how are you doing? Thanks so much for joining. First time on the show, please kick us off.

• 2:29:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I've been looking forward to this.

• 2:29:29John Coogan?

  An introduction.

• 2:29:31Speaker 09

  Yes, so I'm Haseeb, managing partner at Dragonfly. We're a $4 billion crypto VC firm. Actually, just today, we announced our fourth fund. Uh, we got overshadowed a little bit by Thrive. I think they, I think it's called mogging.

• 2:29:44Jordi Hays?

  Yes, it is called, it is called mogging.

• 2:29:47John Coogan?

  We'll still ring the gun.

• 2:29:47Jordi Hays?

  There needs to be, there needs to be some organization that, we're still. The same gong, the same gong that we hit for Josh. Yeah, there needs to be more. We got 365 days a year. And if you're raising a fund, there's got to be some governing body that dictates.

• 2:30:05John Coogan?

  Rolls them out, yeah.

• 2:30:06Jordi Hays?

  If you're a hundred million dollars plus, you could only.

• 2:30:09Speaker 09

  You'd be coordinating with us, but somehow, yeah, the AI guys, they don't really care about the crypto guys anymore. They just overshadow us.

• 2:30:15John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. How focused is the fund on crypto? Is it 100% or what?

• 2:30:21Speaker 09

  100%.

• 2:30:22John Coogan?

  And are the, are the lines blurring as more? I mean, we, we, we know some folks who are like ostensibly doing crypto, but it's, you know, AI training, distributed compute. And so crypto is starting to touch more and more pieces of the tech economy. Where, how, how have you been processing the blurred lines?

• 2:30:41Speaker 09

  More directions.

• 2:30:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:42Speaker 09

  Yeah. So I, I think we can see on the one hand, so we're investors in Polymarket. Polymarket now is becoming increasingly, you know, a lot of people don't even know that Polymarket is crypto.

• 2:30:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:51Speaker 09

  Original Polymarket application was entirely on chain on Polygon. They're now launching their US app, but before that, basically, you know, today, unless you were on the US app, you were using, you were using it on chain.

• 2:31:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:01Speaker 09

  If you look at increasingly, a lot of the apps that are really working crypto are more fintechy. And we're seeing a lot of fintech investors coming up against us in a lot of these deals. And then of course, like you mentioned, crypto is increasingly bleeding over with AI. There was just this acquisition of OpenClaw. I think it was yesterday announced that OpenAI is acquiring them. The Moltbook drama, if you go on Moltbook today, so I still look at Moltbook every day. And most of the highest ranked things on Moltbook are all crypto related. It's all, almost all.

• 2:31:30Jordi Hays?

  But is that, is that because people are trying to create, is that because people are creating projects?

• 2:31:35Speaker 09

  There's, there's a lot of bullshit. There's a lot of bullshit going on right now in Moltbook.

• 2:31:38Jordi Hays?

  They're like, you don't even need users now. You just create a million users for your project.

• 2:31:43Speaker 09

  That's right. That's right. Look, it's the infinite variety of, people will always find a way to try to make money from anything. And crypto, it both represents the best in humankind and the worst in humankind. It's part of the reason why it'll never go away. No matter how unseemly or distasteful or just insane it becomes, it just never dies. So it's something that I, I was just reflecting on because we're, we're now eight years into Dragonfly. It's been a long time, been a. A lot of, we're now clearly in a trough of this cycle. Sentiment in crypto land is extremely low right now.

• 2:32:14Speaker 09

  But on the other hand, like the actual adoption, you know, stable coins. You see all these financial institutions coming into the space. Multiple of your sponsors are crypto sponsors and they're, they're seeing their underlying traction go up even as prices are going in the other direction. So I feel really good and it is bleeding into everything.

• 2:32:31John Coogan?

  Quick, quick update on Moltbook. 2.8 million AI agents have joined. There are over 1.4 million posts and over 12 million comments now. So still, still cooking over Moltbook.com.

• 2:32:46Jordi Hays?

  Still kicking. Where are you, what's the, yeah, it felt like prediction markets were the product that kind of broke out fully. Maybe last cycle, some of these cycles blend together as different products, products get traction. Where are you most excited to invest the new fund that you guys haven't necessarily invested before? There were still in this kind of moment as, as various laws work their way through Washington, trying to figure, actually get clarity on some of these things. So, but what are you most excited about over the, over the kind of fun lifecycle for Fund 4?

• 2:33:26Speaker 09

  So there's the core bread and butter of crypto, which is just the financial applications. Actually, I recently got into an online debate with Chris Dixon, who, you know, he was kind of coming out, giving this big expose about, oh, well, you know, all the non-financial applications of crypto is just too early. And we still got to give them time to bake and maybe they're going to come back. I sort of took the other side as I think it is largely a death knell for the non-financial applications of crypto. Crypto is about money. It's about finance, always has been from the very beginning, whether it's Bitcoin, you know, Ethereum being programmable money to ICOs, which are fundraising to DeFi, which has finance in the name. Almost everything that's ever worked in crypto has been financial in nature and everybody who's tried to make non-financial things plug into crypto has basically failed.

• 2:34:12Speaker 09

  Now, I think the, the, what falls under that umbrella is pretty big. And I actually do think AI does fall into that umbrella. But it's more the ways in which agents are going to be interacting with money. That very clearly, I mean, you can see it right now in Moebuck. You go on Moebuck and you can see that agents are trying to find ways to pay each other for things and to get each other to do things for them. It's very primitive right now. You could, but you can see where it's going. You can draw the line out about, uh, you know, if, if you're an agent, if I have an agent, you have an agent, you live in a different country, or maybe I don't even know who you are. I don't need to know who you are if you're somebody else on Moebuck. It's very difficult for me to pay you with a traditional financial system. It's not really designed to have non-human recipients of money.

• 2:34:55Speaker 09

  We don't really know how the laws are going to work, how taxes are going to work, how money laundering is going to work. Whereas crypto doesn't ask any of those questions. Crypto was really designed for machines more than it was designed for humans. And so I think we're going to see this become an increasing part of the story of how AI agents are going to become more and more autonomous and, you know, self-driving financially is by giving them crypto and allowing them to just interact with other agents and other systems, um, using, using crypto rails. So I'm, I'm very intrigued by that. But the core trend of crypto is just more and more of the same.

• 2:35:29John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:35:29Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you invest, uh, in like stable coins as a category going forward? Giving you have-

• 2:35:36John Coogan?

  I put a ton of money in stable coins. I haven't lost anything. I mean, I haven't made a lot, but-

• 2:35:41Speaker 09

  They've done really well compared to Bitcoin so far.

• 2:35:43John Coogan?

  They've done really well compared to Bitcoin.

• 2:35:44Jordi Hays?

  Outperformed. But, but you have, you have a bunch of startup players, you have big institutions. Like it, it feels like, uh, like I, I'm, I'm wondering where there's white space, where, where you think there's still, there still could be white space, given that we know there's so much growth that's going to happen. That, that part feels inevitable, but where does the value actually flow? And what, what are the opportunities for startups?

• 2:36:10Speaker 09

  So I think everybody at this point is bullish on stablecoins, right? Yeah. Secretary Besen has said he expects stablecoins to hit 3 trillion by the end of the decade. Right now, they're about 300 billion, so that's like a 10x in the span of, you know, call it four to five years. Now, I think that's pretty optimistic. I don't know that we're going to hit that kind of growth rate, but the numbers are clearly growing and they're growing every single year, like 60, 70% year over year. Now, how do you make money on that? So one way is to own a stablecoin issuer. I think that's pretty tough at this point, right? You can see it's basically a duopoly between Circle and Tether. Circles are public, Tether is private, but they're supposedly raising around at 500 billion. There's not a lot of meat on the bone if you're investing at 500 billion into a stablecoin issuer.

• 2:36:55Speaker 09

  And the economics are really good of being a stablecoin issuer, but it's basically being a bank, right? And it's the modern financial institution, except they have 100% net interest margin, which is great. Are there going to be new stablecoin issuers who show up now? If there are, they're probably going to be G-SIPS, right? They're not going to be some new startup that comes up with a new way to launch the same product, which is effectively just, you know, a narrow bank. I think the place where you want to be investing as a VC is more in the interstitial layers, which is how is this stuff going to move around the world and get into the hands of a user, wherever they are? So one of the investments that we've made recently is a company called Rain, which basically they do these stablecoin cards, right?

• 2:37:37Speaker 09

  And they allow you, let's say you're in some country where you're using some fintech app that's allowing you to get access to stablecoins. Let's say you're in Argentina, you're in, you know, you're Nigeria, you're somewhere where you really want stablecoins, or you want dollars, you don't even know that they're stablecoins. A lot of these apps, the users don't even know that there's crypto underneath the rails. They just know that, you know, they send their Naira, they get USD, and they can send their USD overseas to somebody else. The problem with a lot of these apps is you can't pay anybody who's not in the app. You can't pay anybody who doesn't directly take crypto, or they're not sitting on the same fintech as you. And so these cards, you can basically issue cards against your stablecoin balance, and the moment you swipe your card, whether you enter it into an app or you tap to pay or whatever, it debits stablecoins and settles directly on VisaNet using stablecoins.

• 2:38:21Speaker 09

  Visa has now seen these as one of the fastest growing use cases for Visa around the world, and they're just growing like gangbusters. You know, it's like 20% month-over-month growth. This, I think, is going to be the way in which you see stablecoins go global, is that they just get more and more integrated into the normal payments workflows for people.

• 2:38:40Jordi Hays?

  How, what do you, what do you look at? Do you, do you see much broad geopolitical risk to stablecoins if I'm a country and I have a currency and suddenly all my, all my citizens say, well, actually, we like USDC or USDT. At what point does that become, you know, so such a, such a threat to the country's own monetary system that they need to, you know, pass new regulations and that kind of thing?

• 2:39:10Speaker 09

  It already is. So a lot of the countries that have a lot of stablecoin adoptions, stablecoins are per se illegal. You know, if, if you go to Venezuela, you go to China, you know, buying things with dollars is illegal in size, right? And that's why these are black markets. Most of these places like, you know, Venezuela, very famously, there's a very different price for the Bolivar in the quote-unquote, you know, lit market as opposed to on the black market where people are actually transacting with dollars. Any of these places where you have very high inflation, you see this. Now, in the past, especially pre-COVID, the way that this was done was you imported little green piece of paper and that's how these countries dollarized. That's not happening anymore. Increasingly, the way in which these countries are dollarizing is they're dollarizing digitally. They're

• 2:39:55Speaker 09

  dollarizing from the ground up. And that's much harder to police, right? Because the reality is that all you need is a mobile phone and an internet connection, and now you can get stablecoins. No matter where you are, anywhere in the world, all you need is somebody who's willing to trade you the local currency for that stablecoin. So I, I, I think the, the right way to think about this is not, okay, when are governments going to push back? They were already pushing back. Especially if you're in a country that has very high inflation. Why do they have very high inflation? The answer is because the governments are printing a ton of money to make up for the fact that they're spending like drunken sailors, right? It's a, it's a way to tax your citizenship when you cannot actually extract that through taxation. So in, in, every technology renegotiates the balance of power between individuals and governments. The internet did the exact same

• 2:40:40Speaker 09

  thing. Information technology did that with respect to the dissemination of, of information.

• 2:40:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:45Speaker 09

  I think what you'll see is that crypto does that with money. The presumption was always that this narrow waist of the banking system was always controlled by the government. And it's easy to control because it's very centralized and banks everywhere in the world are basically nationalized. Even when they're quote-unquote "private companies", they're essentially controlled by the government. When that's no longer true, when basically you can exit by going on-chain, by going to the blockchain, by going to a stablecoin, then now that is a check against every government and every form of profligate spending everywhere in the world. I think that's ultimately good. Competition is almost always good. Now, it's disruptive to a lot of countries that will say, "Hey, this is terrible. You know, the US is attacking us" or, you know, blah, blah. There's going to be all sorts of rationing

• 2:41:28Speaker 09

  up of geopolitical tensions. You saw this, by the way, in Nigeria. I believe it was Nigeria, where there were Binance executives who got detained by the Nigerian government under the claim that Binance was assisting in, you know, tax evasion and all this other stuff, which is basically another way to say that they were allowing the sale of stablecoins in the country. And it was a huge political flashpoint and they ended up having to get the Secretary of State to negotiate with them to get those executives out. But I think that's only the beginning. You're going to see more and more of this. And I think this is very intentional by the US government, right? Like, Bassett has said very clearly, "A big part of the reason why stablecoins are good for America is that they increase the demand for treasuries. They increase the demand for dollars and they increase the

• 2:42:13Speaker 09

  demand for treasuries." Where is that demand coming from? Obviously, it's coming from people who don't want their citizens to be holding their treasuries.

• 2:42:19John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah, that makes tons of sense. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Congrats on the massive fundraise.

• 2:42:24Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure we'll have a bunch of your companies on.

• 2:42:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're looking forward to it. Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:42:31Jordi Hays?

  Congrats to the team.

• 2:42:32John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Labelbox, Reinforcing Learning Environments, Voice Robotics, eVowels, and Expert Human Data. Labelbox is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. We will continue our lightning round with Celine Hallelujah from Loyal. Celine, how are you doing?

• 2:42:48Speaker 10

  Hi. Good to be back.

• 2:42:51John Coogan?

  You got some big news for us. What happened?

• 2:42:54Speaker 10

  Raised a hundo milli.

• 2:42:59Jordi Hays?

  Big day for our gong. Big day for the gong.

• 2:43:02John Coogan?

  Everyone took yesterday off and was like, I'm dropping a big number on Tuesday. Uh, what's the, what does this unlock? Like, what's the next step in the company's mission?

• 2:43:13Speaker 10

  Get this goddamn drug to market and launch the first FDA approved longevity drug. Just, just do that.

• 2:43:20John Coogan?

  Just that, just that.

• 2:43:22Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah. And build our pipeline and all that shit too. But like, honestly, man, I'm just like locked in on getting that first FDA approval. It's been six years of work.

• 2:43:30John Coogan?

  So what does that mean? Hiring more lobbyists, lawyers, doctors, scientists?

• 2:43:36Speaker 10

  No.

• 2:43:36John Coogan?

  Who are you bringing on with this new money?

• 2:43:38Speaker 10

  It's actually spectacularly boring. It's literally just time. Like so much of developing a drug is like, you put the drug on a shelf, you wait for it to age, you quantify how it ages, that tells you it's shelf life. You send something to FDA, they reply six months later. So there's obviously like we're spending on things like product expansion and commercialization where, you know, doing an owned commercial strategy. But honestly, our biggest burn driver is just time.

• 2:44:03John Coogan?

  Okay, unpack the owned commercial strategy. What does that mean?

• 2:44:06Speaker 10

  So when I started Loyal five years ago, we kind of had this thesis of building a pharma brand that people love. Right? This idea of building a consumer brand around a pharmaceutical product, which five years later is like supernormalized with Ozempic and GLP-1s. Like everybody's like going to peptide parties in Silicon Valley. Like everyone knows Ozempic and Monjaro and all that stuff, right? But before that, really the only consumer marketed drugs were like Botox.

• 2:44:33John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:44:34Speaker 10

  So we could sell out. That's like what most farm biotech companies would do right now. I could like go buy a small, maybe medium sized island.

• 2:44:44Speaker 10

  But I think it's much more exciting to commercialize it and build a consumer brand around this pharmaceutical product.

• 2:44:50John Coogan?

  What, uh, what's the impact of the GLP-1 boom on your business? Is that, is they feel like almost longevity drugs? They're definitely life extending for a lot of people. But is that going to actually change anything in the market or at the FDA?

• 2:45:04Speaker 10

  I think it has really changed how people think about the biology of aging, right? It was so difficult to explain these drugs before, like, oh, it's this one drug, it has this one mechanism, but it'll help this aging phenotype and that aging phenotype and this bad thing that happens and that bad thing that happens. People are like, but how can that happen? It's a drug, it's only hitting one thing. And now they're like, oh, my God, GLP-1s, they like, you know, make you lose weight and your metabolic fitness is better. And, oh, my God, you're not addicted to things anymore. And there's just 10 other magical benefits that seem to happen. And it actually makes total sense, right? Improving metabolic fitness improves basically everything downstream of that. But the general public had not been exposed to that writ large until GLP-1s.

• 2:45:45Speaker 10

  So I think people really understand an aging drug a lot better now, and it sounds a lot more real now than it did, you know, before a year or two ago.

• 2:45:53Jordi Hays?

  Are people giving GLP-1s or peptides generally to their dogs illegally?

• 2:45:59Speaker 10

  No.

• 2:46:00Jordi Hays?

  Have you heard about it?

• 2:46:01Speaker 10

  No, there, there's a couple of people trying to do GLP-1s for dogs and cats. I think it like could maybe make sense for cats. I have a really fat cat that like maybe could benefit. But no, people don't want their dogs to not have appetite, motivation and drive. This is like a whole thing, you know? My dog is, you know, sleeping at my feet right now. I would love to think it's because she loves me, but it's also probably because she wants treats.

• 2:46:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, food motivated.

• 2:46:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, parents know this, there's nothing, there's nothing better than when your child is just like wants to eat a lot of food. And if they're not incredibly hungry, you're like trying to.

• 2:46:39Speaker 10

  I mean, it's literally one of the two major levers we have to negotiate with them. It's reward via food and then negative reinforcement, which, you know, you don't want to do a ton of. So we don't want to take that lever away from people.

• 2:46:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, how are you thinking about branding, like?

• 2:46:56John Coogan?

  GLP-1s are interesting because I feel like they're not just consumer marketed as people know the name Wegovy or Ozempic. They also know peptide. And peptide has become a new category that people, I think largely feel more comfortable about than magical weight loss pill or like injectable drug. It's like, what were you injecting? There were a lot of injectables that people were not cool with. And now everyone's like, well, if it's a peptide, then okay. How do you think about...

• 2:47:30Speaker 10

  It's natural.

• 2:47:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about like educating folks about your category and how you fit into the overall hierarchy of things that you put in your body potentially?

• 2:47:40Speaker 10

  Yeah. So you know, this drug that we're hopefully bringing to market first, Lloyds for Senior Dog Lifespan Extension, it works by metabolic fitness improvement, which is one of the predominant mechanisms of GLP-1. But actually, our first drug, and hopefully drug will bring to market after this, it's a bit slower in the manufacturing side, is for big dog short lifespan.

• 2:48:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:02Speaker 10

  And this idea that, you know, large and giant breed dogs live, you know, half as long as small breed dogs. And introducing, there was like such a nice like Trojan horse or Trojan dog or whatever to introduce to beat this, both said in general, thank you, thank you, I'm here all day. Introduce people to the thesis of the aging field and also introduce regulators, right? Because we're like, oh, like, here's this thing that you take as inherent as natural, you know, Roddy's dying at age 10. It's actually not natural. Here's like the mechanism, and here's the drug, and here's how it's going to work. And oh, by the way, the way it works is by just slowing the rate of just slowing the rate of aging of these big dogs.

• 2:48:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:42Speaker 10

  And so I think it's the same thing, right? You you give something where somebody only has to make one leap or two leaps, right? It needs to be accessible, but still technically rigorous, which is always a challenge as bio. And then you can push it further and further and further from there, like peptides, right? Like, I don't think peptide is going to become a thing if it wasn't a weight loss drug.

• 2:49:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. So what's the...

• 2:49:01Speaker 10

  But that was a great intro.

• 2:49:02John Coogan?

  What's the current phrasing? Because you have like drugs, then peptides, then Ozempic, and you have drugs, and then blank, and then loyal.

• 2:49:11Speaker 10

  Oh, small molecule, mostly.

• 2:49:13John Coogan?

  Small molecule, okay.

• 2:49:14Speaker 10

  Yeah.

• 2:49:14John Coogan?

  So, people are loosely familiar with that, but maybe it needs a buzzword. I don't see small molecule parties happening, even though people are obviously doing that.

• 2:49:22Jordi Hays?

  Is there any?

• 2:49:23John Coogan?

  Different thing.

• 2:49:24Speaker 10

  I don't recommend small molecule. I mean, that's just like drug parties. That's like college.

• 2:49:28John Coogan?

  That's what I mean. That's what I was saying.

• 2:49:30Jordi Hays?

  Is there, is there anything to learn from fringe internet communities in relation to dog health?

• 2:49:38John Coogan?

  Oh, the Brian Johnson of dogs is out there somewhere.

• 2:49:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that kind of thing. You know, some owners going crazy, but I think about, like, there's so much that, like, bodybuilders were doing 10 years ago. That's now becoming mainstream.

• 2:49:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:50Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 2:49:50John Coogan?

  Futures here is just not evenly distributed.

• 2:49:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:53Speaker 10

  I think it's all the raw food stuff.

• 2:49:55John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:49:55Speaker 10

  And all the cooking at home food stuff. Yeah, like the nutritionally complete. I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of scandal here and we like, we like pretty purposely stayed away from the dog food wars, as I like to call them. But that is definitely where people started. They, people don't really do drug hacking as much. Uh, well, because also a lot of drug hacking for like weightlifters. I mean, yeah, it's like for fitness, but it's really for like aesthetics.

• 2:50:20John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:50:21Speaker 10

  Uh, and you're not gonna like hack your dog for aesthetics. That's kind of unethical.

• 2:50:25Jordi Hays?

  There's gotta be looks maxing.

• 2:50:26John Coogan?

  Looks maxing, dogs. I mean, that's all the breeding.

• 2:50:28Speaker 10

  Looks maxing, looks maxing.

• 2:50:29John Coogan?

  Looks maxing. That's the story of dog breeding.

• 2:50:32Speaker 10

  You would totally do that.

• 2:50:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:50:33Speaker 10

  I mean, not gonna lie, like, there's some genetics, um, in like golden retrievers that we like inadvertently gave them to be like extra cute and extra lovey. You could totally give that to any dog.

• 2:50:42John Coogan?

  Let's go. We should, we should, we will.

• 2:50:45Speaker 10

  I, tempting, we are not doing dog gene editing, but like, someone totally will and they totally will do that. And.

• 2:50:51John Coogan?

  Well, you'll be the first person we call when it happens. Thank you so much for coming on the show and congratulations.

• 2:50:58Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations, you feel like, uh, yeah, the, the energy is real. It's coming through the, uh, the screen. You're swearing like a sailor. That's always.

• 2:51:06Speaker 10

  I'm so sorry.

• 2:51:08Jordi Hays?

  No, I mean.

• 2:51:09John Coogan?

  The energy is probable.

• 2:51:10Jordi Hays?

  The team's fired up.

• 2:51:11John Coogan?

  Team's fired up.

• 2:51:12Speaker 10

  The team gives me a lot of drama for it, but you know, you can.

• 2:51:15Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be yourself.

• 2:51:16John Coogan?

  Be yourself. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:51:19Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:51:19John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:51:20Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on the progress.

• 2:51:21John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Let me tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. Let's have Ankur from

• 2:51:35Jordi Hays?

  Up next.

• 2:51:35John Coogan?

  Brain Trust.

• 2:51:36Jordi Hays?

  Brain Trust.

• 2:51:37John Coogan?

  He's in the restream.

• 2:51:37Jordi Hays?

  Let's bring him in.

• 2:51:38John Coogan?

  We were chatting with him earlier. How are you doing?

• 2:51:40Jordi Hays?

  It's happening.

• 2:51:41Speaker 11

  What's up, guys?

• 2:51:42John Coogan?

  Not too much. First time on the show, quick introduction. I want to hear the news and then I want to talk about the economics of AI labs. But I want to talk about your news first, so please introduce yourself.

• 2:51:51Speaker 11

  Awesome. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm Ankur, founder and CEO of Brain Trust. We build observability for AI products. So companies like, you know, our overlord here, Ramp, Notion, Instacart, Dropbox, et cetera, that are building really great AI products. They all use Brain Trust to help with that. We're announcing our Series B today. We just raised $80 million and it helps us build.

• 2:52:19Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to interrupt.

• 2:52:20John Coogan?

  Congratulations. We're very excited.

• 2:52:22Jordi Hays?

  You said that helps you build.

• 2:52:26Speaker 11

  Yeah, it helps us ship more stuff and hire more people.

• 2:52:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:29Speaker 11

  Very simple.

• 2:52:30John Coogan?

  So yeah, walk me through why someone's picking you, how they're integrating you, what the business model looks like and what like the best case scenario of AI observability looks like.

• 2:52:43Speaker 11

  Yeah, I think what's interesting about AI is when you build a product, you actually have no idea what's going to happen when you ship it. So if you're, you know, you're building a traditional UI, you can pretend to be Steve Jobs, look at the UI, play with it, form an opinion, and then you can kind of guess what's going to happen when people actually use it. With AI, you have literally no idea what's going to happen. And so being able to look at how people actually use your product and then capture the cases where it works well and the cases where it doesn't and test them is critically important. And that's basically the data flywheel that we power for all these companies.

• 2:53:16Jordi Hays?

  And then you have, yeah, digging in a little bit deeper, you have like same application, different models integrating as well that I imagine you're also comparing. So like what is best in class look like if you're? A software company that's integrating L L Ms like what is best in class testing look like? Who who who's like doing this at the highest level? Uh, that you

• 2:53:37Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, I honestly, I think RAMD is a great example of a company that does this very well. They use a bunch of different models for different use cases, and I think there's two things you shouldn't do. One is just use the same model and be very afraid to change it. There's some companies we meet that are still using G P T three point five on Azure.

• 2:53:55John Coogan?

  Oh, no way. I was Are they making any money from three point five? And I was like, it might be actually zero.

• 2:54:00Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, you kind of set set one of these things on a on on some feature.

• 2:54:04John Coogan?

  Okay. Or or Well, update your depreciation schedule in that case, because those G P Us are going to be burning into the twenty forty's running three point five. I love it. Okay, sorry.

• 2:54:13Speaker 11

  And then there's there's some companies that are just changing the model every day. And I think that's not a good way to build a good product. You need to really understand the nuances of the technology that you're using. So I think best in class is actually being able to change the model every four to six weeks. And if a new model comes out like Sonnet four point six came out today, the best companies are going to have that integrated into their product in the next twenty four hours. If it makes an improvement for what they're doing.

• 2:54:38John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, any more questions? I want to talk about A I lab economics.

• 2:54:42Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 2:54:42John Coogan?

  Are we in the the Korno equilibrium? Do you agree with that characterization? How long does that last? Walk me through how you think the A I lab economics might change over the next few years.

• 2:54:54Speaker 11

  I think it's it's really simple. So basically, when new models are coming out, people forget about open source and they forget about economics. And that's because it changes fundamentally what you can do with a model in the first place. Like the, you know, programming is a good example. The workflow today is completely different than it was a year ago. And if you tried to use the models from a year ago today, you wouldn't be able to do crazy stuff like, you know, Claude Bot or whatever that people are building. Um, nowadays. And when models don't change at that speed, then what happens is people optimize the performance on the use cases that they have. And so in between major model releases, and I think we're in one of these periods right now, there are new models coming out, but they're not fundamentally changing what's possible or not possible.

• 2:55:37Speaker 11

  You see a lot of interest in open source models. And I think that's very exciting right now. Although there are not that many companies using open source models, if you look at usage on our platform, almost half the usage, like token usage, is coming from open source models from a very small number of companies that have figured out how to optimize use cases really well. And so I think it's going to be really interesting.

• 2:55:59John Coogan?

  Okay, so I feel like we've been playing this cat and mouse game with value accrues to the foundation model layer, value accrues to the to the application layer.

• 2:56:09Jordi Hays?

  Value is very clearly accruing to brain trust.

• 2:56:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. But but.

• 2:56:13Jordi Hays?

  I agree.

• 2:56:14John Coogan?

  How does that how does that flip? And what do the big AI labs look like in the like after the final models? Do they look like hyperscaler clouds? Do they look like Azure, GCP, AWS? Is that the right formulation? Or are they more like infrastructure providers? How do you think about that?

• 2:56:35Speaker 11

  Well, first of me, it's not clear to me when, if, whatever, the party is ever going to end. But let's say, let's say the party sort of slows down at some point. I think one thing that happens is there are some use cases that actually aren't changing that much. So customer service for a consumer software app at the very, very highest scale, if you think about like deflecting incoming tickets that come in. For example, can I get a refund? That use case doesn't really change at the speed that new LLMs are coming out. And so we actually have a lot of customers that have built solutions, in many cases, using open source models like one or two years ago, that they're still using and optimizing. And they're getting both better performance and better economics each coming month.

• 2:57:21Speaker 11

  By taking advantage of the downstream optimizations that are happening from the frontier. So I think a lot of use cases are just going to get cheaper and higher margin, especially the use cases that aren't changing that much.

• 2:57:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:33Speaker 11

  In terms of what we see with the models, I think probably the most interesting trend is that they're verticalizing and building products. Like, again, I think Claude Bot is a really interesting example of this. So is Claude for Sheets and obviously Claude Code.

• 2:57:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:48Speaker 11

  So I mean, I think if the party stops, there's a whole nother layer of low hanging fruit, tightly integrating models into these canonical applications. And I think there's still a lot of room to make that really good.

• 2:58:00John Coogan?

  Do you think that that will, how long do you think we'll stay in this regime of building Centaur-like projects instead of, you know, it's like, you know, big AI lab launches a product for legal, they haven't launched a law firm yet. Is that coming?

• 2:58:17Speaker 11

  Yeah, I mean, I have been working in AI now for like 10 years. And prior to that, I'm a crusty, yeah, crusty, jaded, pessimistic engineer type person.

• 2:58:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:58:29Speaker 11

  And so when I first started working in AI, I thought, wow, things are changing really quickly. It's not going to be like this forever. And next year, it's going to be totally different. But this is like 2017, 2018, right? And, and so I've had to totally unwind that part of my brain and just assume that I, I think there's a reasonable chance we will be in this state and, and the normal is going to change for, for a very long period of time.

• 2:58:55John Coogan?

  Just progress will continue for a very long time and we'll see more.

• 2:58:58Speaker 11

  Yeah, yeah. And I, I mean, I think that's just generally true, but you know, the baseline for progress is going to feel different a few years from now, once we get used to this than it, it did like 10 or 20 years ago.

• 2:59:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. How, how have you reacted to that line from Dorkash that like diffusion is cope? And that the models aren't actually that good. And so if they were better, they would diffuse much more fast.

• 2:59:22Speaker 11

  Oh, totally. I mean, I was actually talking to Martine last night about this, but I think we are now programming at the maximum speed that we can program.

• 2:59:31John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:59:31Speaker 11

  In fact, there are so many people who make so many mistakes and walk them back, or we ship crappy products and then walk them back, or we ship buggy products and then fix them, or the speed at which we're able to respond to user feature requests and bugs is we're totally tapped out, right? And so I think that we're in this really weird equilibrium state with how productive we can be in some of these use cases. And it's not super clear, at least to me, that a model that's 5% smarter at writing C++ code is going to dramatically change the amount of productivity we're able to create.

• 3:00:06John Coogan?

  Bull case for FDEs, basically. Is that right?

• 3:00:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. It's like you can do so much more, but there's still value and focus, right? It's like, you know, a company that raises like Brain Trust raises a big round, you've got a lot of resources available. That doesn't mean, okay, we should launch 10 products at once. It's like, okay, you still have to like, you know, focus that energy in.

• 3:00:29Speaker 11

  And, you know, weirdly enough, we actually raised a smaller round than we could have. I think we are trying to be very careful about not getting. Yeah, I'm sorry. Trying to be careful about not getting caught up in the craziness. Like, we know exactly how much money we need to hit our revenue target for the next two years, and we raised that much money.

• 3:00:48John Coogan?

  No, very, very smart. We're messing.

• 3:00:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, you're giving us time to get a bigger gong.

• 3:00:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:00:53Jordi Hays?

  You get it. This one's not big enough.

• 3:00:55Speaker 11

  Oh, we'll be ready.

• 3:00:57John Coogan?

  Keep it warm. Well, thank you so much for coming on.

• 3:01:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to finally have you on and come back on anytime you have thoughts.

• 3:01:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'd love to talk more.

• 3:01:05Speaker 11

  Awesome. Thanks for having me.

• 3:01:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, congrats to the team.

• 3:01:07John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 3:01:08Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:01:08John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about 11 Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents and reimagine human technology interaction with 11 Labs. And we have our next guest almost here in the Restream waiting room. We have Reid from Knight. He's the founding CEO. He's been on the show before, but he has some big news for us. So, Reid, how you doing?

• 3:01:32Jordi Hays?

  He's back.

• 3:01:33Speaker 12

  Uh, I'm just trying to get on the show as much as Delian at this point.

• 3:01:36Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you gotta get your numbers up.

• 3:01:39John Coogan?

  Number two. Well, you're welcome anytime. We can always talk, uh, creator economy, what's going on.

• 3:01:42Jordi Hays?

  This is cool. I feel like you're, this is like your, your streaming setup.

• 3:01:46John Coogan?

  This is.

• 3:01:46Jordi Hays?

  It was fun having you here.

• 3:01:47John Coogan?

  Wow, that's the big play button. Is that 10 mil?

• 3:01:50Speaker 12

  Uh, it's a hundred.

• 3:01:51John Coogan?

  A hundred? Wow, there we go. Let's hit the.

• 3:01:57Speaker 12

  Four subs, you'll get there.

• 3:01:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. On the way, on the way.

• 3:02:02John Coogan?

  Anyway, give us the real news. What happened today?

• 3:02:05Speaker 12

  Uh, yeah, we finally, uh, announced our capital raise. Uh, Steph Stone led it. Founder's Fund also involved, K5, uh, House Capital. Kinda, kinda felt like it was time to, to get that out there. And so, yeah, we officially announced it at Bloomberg today and I'm kinda bouncing around.

• 3:02:20John Coogan?

  Amazing. How much did you raise?

• 3:02:22Speaker 12

  Uh, 70.

• 3:02:23Jordi Hays?

  Oh, he's going back. He's going.

• 3:02:27Jordi Hays?

  All right, what, uh, yeah, let's, you've been on the show before. We'll assume people generally understand Knight, like, what does this capital allow you to do? Because you guys are in a business that, uh, unlike some of our other guests, makes, you know, has been making real, real money for, for some amount of time. Um, and so why raise, why raise?

• 3:02:48Speaker 12

  Yeah, we're probably a little bit different. Like, we're, we've been profitable for 10 straight years, so it's a little bit different.

• 3:02:56Speaker 12

  And so, you know, I, I think for us, you know, I kinda said this last time I was on the show.

• 3:02:59Jordi Hays?

  You're bored. You're bored of profitability. You're like, I've done that. I've done that for 10 years. I gotta switch it up.

• 3:03:05Speaker 12

  I've listened to the show too much and like all these companies lose so damn, lose so much damn money. It kinda felt like the time for us to not be profitable anymore.

• 3:03:13John Coogan?

  Let's go. Let's go. Gas pedal. Uh, but seriously, yeah, what, what, uh, what, like, can you acquire assets? Can you hire a bunch of people? Are you gonna build technology? Like, like, what, what's on the menu? There's so much that you could do.

• 3:03:27Speaker 12

  Yeah, the focus has always been talent, talent management. You know, I think we launched the venture studio five years ago. You know, we did feastables and tone, outtake, and a lot of stuff has come out of that. The venture studio is going to be a big focus of ours. And then we're also like, we think music is interesting. We think sports is interesting. We want to push deeper into live events. I think it just kind of opens the aperture a little bit wider for us. The core idea is just continue to be the internet's media company, like bias, assets that are transcended by the internet over the next decade. Hopefully, I'm doing this for a long time. Hopefully, we're profitable for a long time. And so, yeah, it's an exciting next step. And, you know, I'm glad StepStone and honestly, like Founder's Fund and some of these other ones are involved. Like, I don't think FF has ever

• 3:04:11Speaker 12

  done another media deal. I think this is kind of like the first one for them. And yes, we have a venture studio.

• 3:04:17John Coogan?

  They did this media company called Facebook back in the day.

• 3:04:20Speaker 12

  That was one, yeah.

• 3:04:21Jordi Hays?

  You don't hear about Facebook much anymore.

• 3:04:24John Coogan?

  Well, they do Metaverse now. Yeah, they're kind of out of the media game. No, but truly, like, yeah, what you do is very, very unique for venture broadly, but also for Founder's Fund. Give us a, give us a song review of R.I.P. My Granny, She Got Hit With A Bazooka.

• 3:04:41Speaker 12

  Wait, what happened?

• 3:04:46John Coogan?

  Have you not heard that song Bazooka?

• 3:04:48Speaker 12

  No, what? Like, did this just happen today?

• 3:04:51John Coogan?

  Oh, it's just this viral song.

• 3:04:54Jordi Hays?

  We'll send you, we'll send, we'll send you some videos.

• 3:04:57John Coogan?

  It's a stupid meme song. But unpack, unpack bullishness around music. Obviously, a lot of people are doom and gloom. AI is going to do it all. Where are you seeing opportunities? What are the smart musicians doing today?

• 3:05:11Speaker 12

  I'm still waiting for AI to create content, to be honest. Like, I like, didn't figure it out. Like, yes, like Mid Journey and VO3, there's some cool shit. And some big animations, it's okay. Like, I'm so... Not bullish on the future of AI transcending content, at least not in the next two to three years.

• 3:05:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:31Speaker 12

  So I, I am not as much doom and gloom as people are in the music industry and the content industry. Like, I, I get it. Like, I get why people are scared. It just feels like adoption takes so long and the products aren't even close.

• 3:05:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:43Speaker 12

  So that, that's like my take and I.

• 3:05:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels just so much like a tool, like, okay, you don't have the money for the drone. You take a photo with your iPhone and then go to Google Maps and you say, interpolate these two with VO3 and it does the cool drone shot for you and your viewers don't really notice and all of a sudden you have higher production value with lower overhead. But one-shotting a truly viral video, it just requires so much, you know, you have to be one with the algorithm.

• 3:06:11Jordi Hays?

  Are you, are you getting, are you getting pitches from people that are saying like, I'm gonna be a creator, but I'm gonna be faceless, this sort of like Lil Makayla thing. Obviously, they were earliest to this trend and, and kind of.

• 3:06:26Speaker 12

  Two sides of this conversation. There's one, like, being a faceless creator, which Iron Mouse, I think, is one of the biggest ones in America. She's considered a VTuber. And so I, I get why that's popular. It's a, it's a faceless animated character with a real person doing the voiceover. I get that. It's popular in Japan. It's becoming popular in America. In terms of AI, more generative AI channels, or 100% generative AI channels, I don't think we're even close. I, I see the news channels on YouTube. I, I see a lot of this stuff. Nobody's watching it. I think you guys gain, have gained momentum for a reason. I just don't think that some AI news channel is going to do anything in the next, like, I don't know, five years, to be honest.

• 3:07:08John Coogan?

  I mean, maybe competitor to, if your news, if the news channel you're competing with is just straight up reading you headlines, but if there's commentary and back and forth and stuff, that, that, that's much harder to capture.

• 3:07:19Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about, like, timelines around deploying capital? This is not, you know, because you guys have just been operating real business for so long. I would assume you're not like, we wanna burn through, we're gonna burn through this over the next 18 months and then try to raise another round. It's more like strategic capital that can allow you to kind of strike when you have an amazing opportunity or own more of a business that's kind of, you know, being created with some of your existing talent. How do you think about it?

• 3:07:46Speaker 12

  Yeah, I think that was well said. I, you know, I take a pretty long-term outlook on this company. I, I hope to do this for a long period of time and so I'm not. In a hurry, like I like to have long-term outcomes and I think long-term when it comes to acquisitions as well. So I think about what's going to be popular five to 10 years from now because hopefully I'll be running this company five to 10 years from now. So it's not necessarily let's go do something tomorrow. We're going to look at a lot of different things and you know, we're having a lot of conversations, but I'm not in a hurry to just go spend rapidly and lose a ton of money.

• 3:08:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, what, when's the right moment to meet a creator? Like, do they need to have, uh, proven that they have some element of star power? Like some, some like base fan base, like when do you know? When do you look at somebody's like content? It could be a standalone Instagram account or a YouTube channel or a Tik Tok or a Twitch account and say, I can, I can hundred X this individual.

• 3:08:48Speaker 12

  Man, it's changed a lot over the years. I, you know, five years ago, we were very, very, very selective and we were mostly just working with the top people in the world. But then people have come around that have changed how I think about content and also the careers get big so quick. I mean, things like, let's just take the Rizler, I think I have the IC back there. Let's just take the Rizler an example, like we found him very early. And I think five years ago, Knight would have not signed the Rizler. And we took, we took a little bit of a risk and it paid off. And now he's this just like global superstar of a nine-year-old. And so we, we take a lot more risks.

• 3:09:25Jordi Hays?

  He's nine?

• 3:09:27Speaker 12

  He's nine.

• 3:09:28Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy. I always assumed that he was at least, at least a teenager.

• 3:09:33John Coogan?

  Well, in my mind here.

• 3:09:34Speaker 12

  I know. And so we'll, we'll take risks a lot earlier if we have high conviction in somebody. We'll take risks earlier on Twitch, YouTube, Tik Tok. And I know also it's more competitive. When I first started the company 10 years ago, there wasn't a lot of representation companies that gave a shit. Uh, can I swear on this?

• 3:09:51John Coogan?

  We don't, but you can.

• 3:09:52Speaker 12

  Okay, I can't swear. That, that care about digital. Now it's the big agencies, the big management companies, the traditional management companies, they all look at people pretty early. And so discoverability of new talent only happens on the internet and comedy, podcasting. And, and so it's just more competitive now. And so we've taken earlier swings on people.

• 3:10:13John Coogan?

  What can you tell me or explain what's going on on Kick? Looks maxing, clavicular is in the New York Times now. Like, it feels like there's some machinery there behind the scenes. There's clipping. We do a little bit of this.

• 3:10:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's funded, it's funded in this case by Kick, my understanding. Like, they're putting up budget and saying, we're gonna pay, pay out views.

• 3:10:35John Coogan?

  Maybe just give me like an IRL streamer 101. Like, what's going on here?

• 3:10:41Speaker 12

  It's, it's not new. I think you guys are just now hearing about it and people are hearing about it for the first time on Twitter. But this was very much like how Aiden Ross became popular is he was paying a lot of, uh, clippers to clip his content out. And you can live stream on Kick or Twitch and you can get 5,000 CCVs, but those 5,000 people are the only people that see it. So a lot, the discoverability and the amplification of those views comes from clipping on the internet. Creators figured that out two to three years ago. It's just now becoming a lot more mainstream and people are realizing that that's the growth metric. And so clavicular, neon, there's so many now that are spending 10, 20, up to upwards of a hundred thousand dollars a month right now, just clipping content.

• 3:11:22John Coogan?

  Interesting. And so, yeah, that's why it's breaking through broadly.

• 3:11:25Speaker 12

  It is too, the looks maxing thing, like, it's, it's kind of like catching a wave. And, and, you know, it's like, I have a lot of people texting me about it with, about my thoughts on just him more generally.

• 3:11:35John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:11:36Speaker 12

  But he does.

• 3:11:36Jordi Hays?

  This is great. Now, now you, you, all your investors, anytime there's a new internet star, they just get to text you a clip and they're like, are we in this one? Like, am I making, am I making money on this indirectly? And you're, I'm sure a lot of the time you're like, yeah, we're, we're, we're partnered and then, and then you got it.

• 3:11:53Speaker 12

  They did ask about clavicular, so.

• 3:11:55John Coogan?

  I'm sure.

• 3:11:56Speaker 12

  I have had that text. So his, his clips are breaking through to a lot of people, not just kids.

• 3:12:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It feels like there's also a little bit of like creative writing going on. I mean, the whole vernacular and the way they structure it, like it's, like it's TMZ based celebrity news, but it has all this lingo and you have to peel back this onion to understand what's actually happening in the clip. That has created this sort of like, nerd snipes a lot of people. They're like, I want to learn what frame mugging means today. And then they go and dig in there. Oh, they're engaged.

• 3:12:25Jordi Hays?

  Do you think, do you think we'll get, uh, one person movie studios in the next few years? Is that, is that something that you're kind of waiting for? You said earlier, like, AI is not really making content, but you can imagine the archetype of somebody who's like a writer, who can like write out. A, you know, a, you know, effectively an entire script and then piece by piece prompts to get to something that is a cohesive project and seeing like Sea Dance from last week and seeing SAG's reaction to it, you can immediately see like it will be possible to piece together with character consistency, maybe even using traditional stars and get to the point where

• 3:13:05Jordi Hays?

  somebody can put out 90 minutes of content and do that every month, maybe every two months. It's not going to be like one shotted to make something great.

• 3:13:15Speaker 12

  Yeah, I agree. I think the, you know, I've been seeing rumblings of people now going to go back on strike. I think that the big, to your question, yes, I do think it's going to happen. How are the guilds going to handle this? Because that will undoubtedly be like non-union work. And so I think they're going to have to come to terms with, are we going to allow this to happen within the guild? Or are we going to allow these things to get built outside of the guild? And then does non-union work actually become more powerful? And the streaming services start buying that stuff? And so I think a lot of that's going to have to unravel over the next like three to four years. And yeah, I do agree that we will have like a one-person studio that uses prompts to create a script to then create content. And we just saw like Markiplier did this all just by himself, wrote Iron Lung,

• 3:14:00Speaker 12

  directed and acted in the film, distributed independently to movie theaters. I think it ended up doing like 25 million box office on a $6 million budget. And so we're seeing it happen and we're seeing the model to go direct to theatrical. Will that happen through generative AI? Like undoubtedly, yes. I just think we're further away than people realize.

• 3:14:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How, how badly do you want to help create a new platform, the likes of a Twitch or a Snapchat or, or ideally an Instagram or YouTube? Because like eventually.

• 3:14:36Jordi Hays?

  Like the, the nature of these platforms is, is you want to have the breakout stars, the superstars creating content on your platform, but you also want to keep them down, right? You don't want to let them get too powerful to have any type of leverage over the platform. You can imagine at some point, you know, some amount of creators rising up and then using clipping on all these different platforms to try to seed kind of a new platform with users. And, and given that you're in the business of being effectively at the mercy, like every creator is at the mercy of these platforms and you can, you know, sometimes you're, you're on a, on a hot streak and then other times you're kind of on the receiving

• 3:15:21Jordi Hays?

  end of, of different changes. But how do you think about new, new platform opportunities?

• 3:15:27Speaker 12

  I, I don't think I'll be the one, or we as a company will be the one that creates the next platform. It's, it's not something we're thinking about internally. I hope that a new platform pops up in the next 12 to 18 months. It feels like we're due for something. I have no idea what that's going to be because the meta still feels very much like short form content dominates attention. So I, I don't know what else is going to come through the system, but it, it is an interesting trend we're seeing right now where every platform is adopting video podcasts. Netflix kind of to start, just saw the Apple announcement this morning that they're going to start doing video podcasts. Amazon's going to follow. Everyone's going to follow. And then there's going to be this long form podcast feed. Maybe that scene is a new type of mechanism.

• 3:16:08Jordi Hays?

  Apple's, Apple's timing with that. I'm very, I'm, I'm super happy they're finally doing video. We still get way more views on, on like Apple podcasts than, than YouTube and Spotify, which we laugh at because we're like, it's such a, such a video heavy show. Like it's insane to be like, I'm going to watch TBN.

• 3:16:28John Coogan?

  Hey, respect for anyone who's just listening.

• 3:16:30Jordi Hays?

  Total, total respect. There's, there's somebody listening to this. There'll be someone listening to this. Many people over the next 24 hours from Apple Podcasts, but...

• 3:16:38Speaker 12

  But is that because your audience is older and the boomers listen to it on Apple Podcasts?

• 3:16:42John Coogan?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. They're, let's not call them names here. They're lovely members of our community, upstanding.

• 3:16:50Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think it's just habit. I think it's just habit forming. I, I, I listened to probably thousand, thousands of hours podcasts back on Apple Podcasts back in, in college.

• 3:17:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. Help me get up to speed on video games. There's this weird boom and bust that I sort of perceived and I want to reality check. So we had boom in Twitch streaming for video games. People were watching a lot of video game content. That seems to be continuing to go. But the esports IRL competitions felt like they reached a zenith and sort of have been either status quo or declining. At the same time, you have something like Kaisa Nats Bloodborne stream that looked like it had the budget of an ESL event. Like, so it feels like there's more, there's exciting things happening in video game streaming and content related to video games,

• 3:17:46John Coogan?

  but I can't quite put my finger on it. Like where is video game content today and where is it going?

• 3:17:53Speaker 12

  It's still struggling and I think we've had a lot of games come out and have moments like a month at max, like a moment, and then just kind of fade into the darkness. We haven't had a game that has come out that has been a Minecraft Fortnite, Grand Theft Auto that's sustained.

• 3:18:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:18:08Speaker 12

  Hopefully we get Grand Theft Auto the end of this year. I'm probably not as confident that they finally put that out. But even in the esports genre, we had everything. We had Rocket League. We had like, we had every single esport out there. And it feels like we've fully retreated just back to League of Legends and Counter Strike.

• 3:18:25John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:18:25Speaker 12

  And I don't know if that changes. Like it feels like the esports thing had its moment. Most of the teams are no longer here. And the two esports that were dominating, that were the biggest in the pack while this trend was happening, Counter Strike and League are still very much the two most popular. We just, we need to get back to making games. Like it, but it's hard. Like Roblox, kids are playing our Roblox games every single day. And so you just have a new influx of games. Like you have YouTube videos every single minute. And so it's hard, I think, for a AAA studio like an Activision or Ubisoft to put out a game and that game to have some sustainability over the one month period that people play it.

• 3:19:05Speaker 12

  You know, so I, I don't know. I've, I've been pretty upset by like the last two and a half to three years of the video game industry. Maybe some of it was COVID induced, but we just have had a big titles.

• 3:19:16Jordi Hays?

  Well, the good news is that AI will totally help this. No, it's gonna make it, it'll make it way worse because you can imagine my, my theory is that the, the platforms of existing networks like Roblox make, use, integrate a bunch of AI to make it even easier to make all these games and then you get more fragmentation and it becomes even harder to have a truly breakout durable hit.

• 3:19:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. It is odd that we have like the Call of Duty annual release cadence, which I think a lot of people have not been happy with because there's just too much incrementality, not much changing. But then you have Rockstar and the exact opposite spectrum. It's been what? Like almost 20 years since the last Grand Theft Auto came out and everyone's like, okay, we'd love a little bit more cadence from you, uh, but less cadence from you, Call of Duty, slow down Call of Duty, speed up Grand Theft Auto. But, uh, yeah, greatness takes time. So I don't know. Maybe it'll happen.

• 3:20:07Speaker 12

  Yeah. I, I, Call of Duty will retreat and not do every year rollouts. I, I do, that is what, what ends up happening. And then the resurgence of sports games has, has been good for the, the, at least the video game ecosystem. The content creation of those sports games has not increased as those games have come out, but Call, NCAA football was one of the biggest releases we've had in a long time and it took a long hiatus. And so we, we are seeing a resurgence in sports games. I just think from a casual fan, they're playing the games. They're not just watching streamers play the games.

• 3:20:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. What, how are the economics or key strategies of a video game launch different today than maybe a, a decade ago? I, I, I've, I've watched some video game reviews and I'll see, you know, oh, thanks to Activision for sending me the free review copy or hey, this was actually promoted by, this is a promoted video by Ubisoft for the latest Assassin's Creed. I probably wouldn't have made a video review of it, but I am because they're paying me all the way to, you could imagine a Kaisa not stream where they pay for the production value and you know, when GTA six comes out, they're putting, you know, props behind him, all sorts of crazy integrations. What does a rollout of, of a successful video game look like and partnering with like your team?

• 3:21:23Speaker 12

  Yeah, used to be a lot of linear TV ads. That's transition, obviously, to like, let's pay creators. Let's do interesting things with creators. But I don't think people remember when Fortnite first came out, it was called Save the World.

• 3:21:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:34Speaker 12

  And they paid a lot of creators, like their strategy when they came out with the game was to pay every single creator. And then when Battle Royale came out, they paid every single creator again to play Battle Royale. So it's been going on for a long time. This isn't a new thing. Individuals discover video games on YouTube or Twitch from their favorite people making those games. And so the advertising has had to change with that.

• 3:21:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:57Speaker 12

  But I still feel like Activision, Ubisoft, they still have traditional spend. I still see the commercials.

• 3:22:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:02Speaker 12

  They're just like, the budget allocation is very different. It's like, let's at least spend on creators and Google and Meta Ads. And some of the linear stuff, maybe we'll play that at NBA All-Star Game during the commercial break, whatever that is. But yeah, it's changed rapidly and will continue to change.

• 3:22:17John Coogan?

  How much of it is like top down versus bottom up? Like you could pay a ton of small creators to play a game, or you could say like, we're having Shroud and Ninja on day one. And just the fact that you could queue with them, or you could watch their streams, maybe they get paired. Like you create this like snowball effect and you just jump straight to the top of like the Twitch viewership numbers.

• 3:22:39Speaker 12

  Man, it's so dependent on the game. I think if you're creators, you probably get more out of paying Shroud and Burn Peanut, whoever that is, play your game than you will after, or than you will from just doing a wide micro influencer strategy, which is gonna be 10 times more work to get all that paperwork done. And then you're gonna have to manage hundreds of creators or just Shroud, who's known so deeply in the community to be one of the best FPS gamers of all time. I think it's such a balance depending on the game, to be honest, and each studio is trying to figure that out right now. And but I've seen this go more micro in the past, like now, over the last few years. Let's widen out the budget. Let's not necessarily give it all to Mr. Beast or some other macro creator.

• 3:23:24John Coogan?

  Uh, last question for me, and we'll let you get back to your busy day. Uh, give us a Burn Peanut 101. Uh, the chat's going crazy for Burn Peanut. Like, what is that? How does it work? Whether the key is to success? Why are we talking about Burn Peanut, not someone else?

• 3:23:39Speaker 12

  Yeah, it's been it's been crazy watching him kind of just come on and I'm quite confident he doesn't pay clippers. I think a lot of this is just organic, like all the clips that you see on TikTok are just fans making clips because he is hilarious, but it is essentially a VTuber, a real person behind a peanut. And I my theory is that peanut is a Snapchat filter of some sorts or some own filter and they overlay it over him. And yeah, it's it's worked. And now I'm seeing like burnt broccoli and like all kinds of different melons and fruit characters on Twitch right now. So he's he's found something. Yeah, the cinematic universe of like fruit and like

• 3:24:23Speaker 12

  vegetables streaming on YouTube is a real thing.

• 3:24:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, one of my friends started sending me burnt peanut videos and was just like, these are hilarious. And I was like, oh, I think I understand what's going on here. But thanks for breaking it down.

• 3:24:34Speaker 12

  Are we are we like I'm seeing this on Twitter. So we're charging a million bucks per right now? Or are we ripping over here?

• 3:24:40Jordi Hays?

  That was that was not I don't know where they got that information. But the they certainly ran with it. Yeah. But we're having a good time.

• 3:24:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're running ads.

• 3:24:54Speaker 12

  You guys have been killing it. It's been fun. I have it on the TV every day. So it's fun to watch.

• 3:24:57Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Well, come back on soon. Bring bring your next when next time you sign a client that you think is interesting or relevant to our world, come bring him by the Ultra Diamond Wall, hang out in person. We always love these conversations.

• 3:25:12John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon, Reed.

• 3:25:13Speaker 12

  Of course.

• 3:25:14John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day.

• 3:25:15Jordi Hays?

  Congrats.

• 3:25:16John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll, benefits, and HR, built to evolve with modern, small, and medium sized businesses.

• 3:25:23Jordi Hays?

  Funny, because every every time a creator is doing anything, people are talking like, oh, are they are they PT backed? Is PT involved? Like, is PT backing clavicular? And now the schizos with the red tape are gonna be like, wait.

• 3:25:38John Coogan?

  Crazy.

• 3:25:39Jordi Hays?

  So PT backed Knight, and the Knight backed them. And so Bernie.

• 3:25:47John Coogan?

  The Rizler.

• 3:25:47Jordi Hays?

  The red, full market in red string. The Rizler's PT.

• 3:25:51John Coogan?

  You gotta go long red string right now.

• 3:25:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:53John Coogan?

  Anastas. Uh, anyway, uh, we have the video from.

• 3:25:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're gonna pull up.

• 3:25:58John Coogan?

  Ian curlers, double touch cheating allegations. Apparently it's dead to rights. We'll see. I haven't seen the video. We're gonna pull it up and we will decide whether or not they broke the rules.

• 3:26:11Jordi Hays?

  Wait for you to see this. So here they're getting called out and he's freaking out like, "Give me a break. Give me a break."

• 3:26:16John Coogan?

  And that's the Canadian who was accused.

• 3:26:18Jordi Hays?

  Alright, let's get some sound on.

• 3:26:19John Coogan?

  He was accused of.

• 3:26:21Jordi Hays?

  Curling Canada?

• 3:26:23John Coogan?

  So the Canadian was accused of cheating by the Swedes. And here's the clip of them at the Olympics. I don't know if we can play the audio because of the, uh, the Olympics is very, very tight about, uh, not repurposing.

• 3:26:36Jordi Hays?

  Can we find the actual video though?

• 3:26:38John Coogan?

  Uh, wait, they said that there's a clear double touch at, uh, 58 seconds. Yeah, see, see, the, the copyright strike could, could end us. Let's be careful. Let's keep talking over it the whole time so we don't get destroyed. Okay, this is, uh.

• 3:26:56Speaker 13

  Even for a late release, that's considered a double touch violation.

• 3:26:59John Coogan?

  Double touch violation.

• 3:27:00Speaker 13

  The result of that, the stone gets removed from the game.

• 3:27:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:27:03Speaker 13

  On Saturday, Canada's Rachel Holman had a rock removed after a double touch call.

• 3:27:08John Coogan?

  I don't see anything there. That looks fine.

• 3:27:09Jordi Hays?

  Look at this. Look at this. There it is.

• 3:27:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:27:11Jordi Hays?

  He pushed it. He, he.

• 3:27:13John Coogan?

  Why would you touch it like that? That doesn't, that doesn't do anything.

• 3:27:18Jordi Hays?

  What do you mean? It obviously does something. He's, he's, he's watching.

• 3:27:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:27:23Jordi Hays?

  Watching the thing. I don't know what it's called.

• 3:27:24John Coogan?

  The rock.

• 3:27:25Jordi Hays?

  And he's kind of like directing it a little bit. That's all you need, a little micro.

• 3:27:28John Coogan?

  You've had your whole hand on it. Like, let the hand do enough. Like, look, you're releasing it. You don't need one extra touch. That doesn't do anything.

• 3:27:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're, I, I agree. They should not cheat in the game.

• 3:27:38John Coogan?

  But I, I just, I don't even think the, the cheating has that much of an impact on the actual result. I, I, I think that one extra touch, it's an accident. It might not be an accident. But it just doesn't seem like it really changed the trajectory of.

• 3:27:51Jordi Hays?

  That's blatant.

• 3:27:52John Coogan?

  But isn't he already touching it? So he took his hand off and then.

• 3:27:55Jordi Hays?

  Hand off and he put it back on and he's directing it.

• 3:27:57John Coogan?

  Do that.

• 3:27:58Speaker 02

  He's so dialed on the release, he can tell if he messed up.

• 3:28:00John Coogan?

  He can tell if he messed up and make a slight tweak.

• 3:28:02Speaker 02

  Released it, I think, and then.

• 3:28:04Jordi Hays?

  He's like, oh, I'm chopped.

• 3:28:05John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, okay. Interesting. This is the equivalent of taking steroids and curling.

• 3:28:13John Coogan?

  I really hope we can get that curling, that curling guy on the show. I know we talked about him earlier.

• 3:28:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so.

• 3:28:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, his name is Rich Rahonin.

• 3:28:25John Coogan?

  Rahonin, yeah.

• 3:28:25Jordi Hays?

  54 year old personal injury attorney.

• 3:28:27John Coogan?

  We'd love to have him.

• 3:28:28Jordi Hays?

  We talked about him on the show last week. He followed me on Instagram. I messaged him. He says, "After the Olympics are wrapped up, I'll consider it."

• 3:28:34John Coogan?

  Yeah. We will see. Well, anything else to talk about? We did not get to the Neo Lab.

• 3:28:41Jordi Hays?

  Tomorrow.

• 3:28:42John Coogan?

  Tomorrow.

• 3:28:43Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna be doing a breakdown.

• 3:28:44John Coogan?

  Dive on Neo Labs. I posted some fake news on X. I said, "I'm gonna do it with Tyler," and we didn't get to it. We had plenty of time. I just like, we need to put it in the timeline. That's what we gotta do so that I know when we're hitting it. Anyway, thank you for watching. Is it time to plant the bomb?

• 3:29:00Jordi Hays?

  Plant the bazooka.

• 3:29:01John Coogan?

  Let me tell folks, the bazooka has been planted. Bazooka has been planted. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts. If you're listening, it's fine that there's no video. We don't mind.

• 3:29:12Jordi Hays?

  But there's gonna be video soon. I can't, I'm so excited for the people on Apple Podcasts.

• 3:29:17John Coogan?

  We might be on Apple TV soon. Who knows? Leave us five stars on Spotify.

• 3:29:21Jordi Hays?

  Thank you all for watching.

• 3:29:22John Coogan?

  Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com.

• 3:29:23Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait for tomorrow.

• 3:29:24John Coogan?

  Tune in tomorrow at 11 a.m. sharp, Pacific.

• 3:29:29Jordi Hays?

  Nice work, brothers. I'll see you on the next one.