Live from Washington, DC: Will Manidis, Analysis of Intel Earnings, Analysis of TSMC Earnings, Amazon Denies Plans to Display Tariff Impact at Checkout

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TPN. Today is Tuesday, April 29, 2025. We are live from the Temple of Technology, the fortress of finance, the capital of capital. We are in Washington DC, the nation's capital. We have a special guest, Will Manidis, here with us today. Our first chairman of TPN, our first in-person guest. We're very excited to have him here today. Let's hear it for Will in the studio. Earlier today, we went to a press briefing, our first press briefing. Will is in the studio, folks.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  We're here.

• 0:30John Coogan?

  Will, let's hear it for Will again. It's gonna be a fantastic show for you.

• 0:33Jordi Hays?

  For the journos.

• 0:34John Coogan?

  For the journos that we saw at the press briefing. It was the first time we've ever been to a press briefing. It was very official. And so Delian, Jacob.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the tension in the room, John.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  It was palpable.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  It was palpable.

• 0:44John Coogan?

  It was palpable. The, so basically.

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  Three technology brothers.

• 0:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  And just a standing army, effectively, of.

• 0:54John Coogan?

  Delian and Christian Garrett get up there to break down what's happening at Hillen Valley. And the journos were, were not happy.

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Not happy.

• 1:02John Coogan?

  They were, they were screaming, they were crying. It was very tense. It was very hostile. A lot of the questions were extremely underhanded. Clearly, lots of folks trying to write hit pieces. But then the mood changed over time and Delian actually turned the crowd.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  They won hearts and minds.

• 1:16John Coogan?

  They won hearts and minds, exactly with a message of unity across the aisle, bipartisanship, pro-America, pro-technology. And then the tears changed from tears of anger to tears of joy.

• 1:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28John Coogan?

  And people were crying. It was, it was something you had to be there. And I think it will go down in history as one of like, the defining moments in technology history, truly. It was fantastic.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  It was a turning point.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was, it was definitely a turning point. So you went to Hillen Valley.

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  Out of the valley into the hill.

• 1:44John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. Out of the valley into the hill. You went to Hillen Valley last year. Have you been previously?

• 1:49Jordi Hays?

  I have.

• 1:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:50Jordi Hays?

  Two or three times.

• 1:51John Coogan?

  Break down your experience for me. How has it evolved? What are you looking into for tomorrow? What's your game plan?

• 1:57Speaker 01

  I mean, it is, it is somewhat hilarious, like, two years back, like, tech people did not come to DC.

• 2:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  And now it feels like there's 1,200 people descending on the city. You can't go to any of the hotels without seeing poorly fitted suits. Like, you know, you're here, technology is in the city.

• 2:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there, there, there are a number of suits that I've seen so far that look like they haven't been worn in potentially about a year.

• 2:18John Coogan?

  Yes. It's the last Hill and Valley.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  I mean, you know a man is deep on Hill and Valley when he doesn't even need to get business cards back out, because they're already from Hill and Valley.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  It's just incredible. It's like seeing, like, a cheetah try to hunt in the Sahara, right?

• 2:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  It's like a different environment, but it's beautiful. Unity matters here.

• 2:38Jordi Hays?

  Unity matters.

• 2:38John Coogan?

  Yes. I was thinking about how, in a weird twist, I feel like DC has become what Miami was supposed to be become, was supposed to become, in the sense of, like, it's this place that everyone can descend on, have these, like, big events, and it's this, like, center of, like, it's a third space for technology.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  I mean, I don't know why you have to demean House Music Week like this.

• 2:58John Coogan?

  Yes, I, I, I know, I know. They're still, they're still kicking, but DC has become a place with, with higher profile events.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 3:05John Coogan?

  It kind of came from behind.

• 3:06Jordi Hays?

  On, on a more serious note.

• 3:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  The, the thing, the takeaways from the press briefing.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:11Jordi Hays?

  Is that this event is not about foreign policy as much as it's about, you know, basically, you know, the real theme of tomorrow is reindustrialization. We're trying to keep the topic around that.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:26Jordi Hays?

  And as much as the legacy media would, would like to make it political, it, you know, many of the, the, the sort of subjects should be very bipartisan.

• 3:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It was also funny digging into, like, what is the current thing with the mainstream media versus the current thing with us? Because Jordy asked a question, like, If we're talking Hill and Valley, if we're talking DC politics, geopolitics and tech, the top story of the last week has been Benchmark investing in Manus, a Chinese AI company. That's the interesting angle. That's the thing people want to dig into in tech.

• 4:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And a lot of the journalists were asking questions. I asked a question. It was like giving him a layup.

• 4:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:06Jordi Hays?

  He did like an out.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  It's true to over the top.

• 4:10Jordi Hays?

  But again, I actually don't even think that was top of mind for the other media that was attending.

• 4:15Speaker 01

  Just all a reindustrialization from their side.

• 4:18Jordi Hays?

  No, no.

• 4:19John Coogan?

  No, no, no, no.

• 4:20Jordi Hays?

  Everybody wanted to talk about tariffs.

• 4:22John Coogan?

  Tariffs. And even the discussion around AI was very much like, oh, have you tried the new 4O model? It can search the web like that.

• 4:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 4:32John Coogan?

  Like it was at that level. It wasn't. It wasn't talking about like, it wasn't talking about, you know,

• 4:37Jordi Hays?

  I asked.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  Like the glaz gate.

• 4:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I asked one of the writer, I think from a journalist from Politico.

• 4:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:44Jordi Hays?

  Who just covers AI policy and I asked her about glaz gate. She thought she responded like she knew what I was talking about. And then she was like talking about tool use and being like, yeah, I think it's really cool.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  It's strong evidence. You have to get your news from only one place, right?

• 5:00John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  The technology brothers media empire.

• 5:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Only somebody made a daily three hour live show just about technology and business.

• 5:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Sponsored by Ram.

• 5:10Jordi Hays?

  Sponsored by Ram.

• 5:10John Coogan?

  Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Have you been following earnings season this week? Well, what have you been tracking? What's been interesting to you?

• 5:20Speaker 01

  That all the great companies in the world are focused on one thing and that is controlling spend, which is best in the world handled on a platform like the Ram corporate card.

• 5:29John Coogan?

  Unnecessary, but you're punching above your weight already.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Every single month.

• 5:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  I want a special man named Zach who's close in our hearts to monitor my individual corporate card spend.

• 5:39Jordi Hays?

  It's good to have. It's good to have.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  Well, we do have some news from Tuesday. So UPS reported earnings. They missed. EPS was supposed to be 217, came in at 205. Revenue down to 21.4 billion, expected 21.7 billion, a missed. Obviously, bad news for the global economy. Domestic packages fell 3.5% on volume. People are worried about shipping stuff around. Coca-Cola beat though. People are drinking. The candy soda still.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  That's good for the economy.

• 6:13Jordi Hays?

  Sugar number go up.

• 6:14John Coogan?

  Economy. General Motors had a massive beat, earnings per share at $2.22, expected 188. And revenue was 43 billion instead of roughly 42 billion, probably driven by the Corvette ZR1, I imagine, Hummers, what else do they, what else do they make? The CT5V Blackwing.

• 6:33Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  They're probably selling a ton of those.

• 6:35Jordi Hays?

  Popular among, yeah.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  The elevator class.

• 6:38John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, exactly. Pfizer beat earnings, 62 cents a share.

• 6:43Jordi Hays?

  Do you want to give a, do you want to give a round of applause for Big Pharma?

• 6:46John Coogan?

  For biotypical big pharma.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  It's an incredible time to be receiving healthcare in America.

• 6:52John Coogan?

  COVID products felt, sales fell, but it was expected. The core business oncology and vaccines showed moderate growth and the market reaction was that the stock traded up 1%. Visa issues guidance tonight and consumer confidence was down, the biggest monthly drop since 2022. Big discussion over how all the news is falling with the consumer. People are worried about tariffs, even if they're not feeling it yet, they expect to feel it and so consumer confidence is falling. Anyway, market's pretty flat and in general, the takeaway that I had from the, from the press briefing was there's all these big stories about tariffs and chaos and, and what's happening with TikTok

• 7:35John Coogan?

  and it, and the mood was very much like, things are worse than ever, I guess, but the stock market is kind of resilient. It's like, it's not, is it?

• 7:48Speaker 01

  It's priced in.

• 7:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's kind of priced in and it hasn't been in, in as much of free fall as the news would have had you believe a few weeks ago, right?

• 7:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, we still have more data coming in this week. We have jobs and GDP and then tech earnings.

• 8:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:03Jordi Hays?

  Just given how much of the, you know, growth over the last few years has just come from the Mag 7.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 8:09Jordi Hays?

  Those are really the earnings to watch, so.

• 8:12John Coogan?

  Tomorrow and Thursday after the market closes, we have Meta, Google, no, Google already reported, but we have Meta, Amazon.

• 8:23John Coogan?

  Microsoft and Nvidia, I believe. Tesla and Google already reported. And then Intel and TSMC also reported, and we'll get into that when we, we can get into it now with the Ben Thompson analysis. Have you dug into Lip Bhutan at all?

• 8:38Jordi Hays?

  Not.

• 8:39John Coogan?

  Have you met him? Are you familiar with the new Intel CEO?

• 8:41Jordi Hays?

  Of course. Been doing the live work.

• 8:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, so he gave investors stark diagnosis of the chipmaker's problems on Thursday, along with the sense that it will take a while to fix them. Tan, delivering his first earnings report, CEO, said Intel's bureaucratic corporate culture needs a shakeup, so he's going to cut jobs, remove layers of management, and force everyone back to the office. His prescriptions for other areas of Malaya, such as Intel's struggling foundry business, which makes chips for outside customers, were more vague. What's most clear is Intel's short-term woes are even worse than feared. The company gave a revenue forecast for the current quarter that was well below what analysts projected, and Intel's chief financial officer warned that tariff-fueled recession could torpedo chip demand.

• 9:22John Coogan?

  The grim outlook sent Intel shares sliding by as much as 10% Friday to $19.34 a share. And Ben Thompson called, he said these earnings were absolutely brutal, and the earnings call was worse. Start with the good news.

• 9:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, fortunate thing for shareholders is that it was mostly priced in. In total, over the last month, only down just under 10%.

• 9:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 9:46Jordi Hays?

  The analysts were doing a good job effectively understanding, even if they were off on some of their own forecasts.

• 9:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, so the narrative is that Intel has shifted to these seven nanometer consumer chips that go into budget systems, Raptor Lake, and that's what drove non-GAAP gross margin three points higher than expected. But obviously, those sales came at the expense of Lunar Lake, which is a better processor with worse margins in large part because it is mostly made by TSMC. In other words, Intel benefited financially from being less competitive at the high end than expected. And this is the highlight. Will, have you been tracking any of the wild theories around Intel? Or what anyone's thinking like, break it up, put Elon in charge?

• 10:32Speaker 01

  I mean, it feels like very important to have an American foundry company, right? And it's such a shame Pat's no longer in the role. Truly one of the greatest CEOs, right? Like, great redemption arc at the company, leaves the company, comes back, out there doing amazing work today, building churches, but would have loved to see him in the seat, obviously, until shareholders disagree.

• 10:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  But.

• 10:51John Coogan?

  What is the full, like, what's been your full story of Pat Gelsinger? Like, give me more as to, you know, what he's like as a manager and as a CEO.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  I mean, I've met the man once.

• 11:02John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  But Incredible seems to put his faith at the center of his work. He has built, I want to say, seven churches in the Bay Area.

• 11:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  Seems to spend one day a week praying for Intel employees.

• 11:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Which is fascinating and interesting. Maybe more companies should try that.

• 11:15John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  Just seems like a man who has solved work-life-faith integration in a way that others have not.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  What about, uh, did you ever hear that take that, like, whatever type of scripture he's posting is like directly?

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, directly.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  You read into it.

• 11:29Speaker 01

  It's MMPI, yeah. It's like, maybe you don't want management teams posting daily Bible readings inspired based on material, not public information.

• 11:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:37Speaker 01

  That feels correct, yeah.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  Hey, as long as he puts at the end, "NFA."

• 11:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  Do you have a take on the split? Do you think that they should go pure fab or pure design shop, Nvidia style?

• 11:50Speaker 01

  I have no, I have no strong take on Intel. No strong take on it.

• 11:52John Coogan?

  I, I have this take that, uh, you, you, there's, there's a world where you rewind the clock and instead of Elon spending forty-four billion on Twitter, now X, he gets a bunch of money from the Chips Act and instead goes into, uh, chip fabrication, because he seems like the one person that could actually pull together all the talent and the culture to, if he can build the XAI data center so quickly, he could also turn around a fab. There was somebody else saying that, like, You know, he he's he's really owning like the stack of modern technology, whether it's space travel, cars, AI, Neuralink, et cetera.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Missing semis.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  Missing semis. Uh, what uh, what do you think about that theory?

• 12:31Speaker 01

  I mean, he does seem to be amazing at taking, you know, very highly priced XAI equity and trading it for real businesses.

• 12:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Right, it does seem like actually a good moment to, you know, take a slightly overvalued AI foundation model provider, trade that for a real business and run that company with kind of discipline that I think Intel has not had for like thirty years.

• 12:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Like, I think Elon going full sack is very good.

• 12:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it'd be cool. Um, there's actually, did you see the, did you see the other news about Elon?

• 12:57Speaker 01

  No.

• 12:58John Coogan?

  Uh, the the Wall Street banks sold the final slug of Elon Musk's ex debt. The loan sat on the bank's books for two and a half years until Donald Trump's election rapidly changed the company's fortunes. A group of Wall Street's biggest banks have finally dug themselves out of a thirteen billion dollar quagmire.

• 13:14Jordi Hays?

  Did the election, did the election change its fortunes, or did they just get efficient in operating?

• 13:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it doesn't even seem like it was the election that changed the fortunes. It was more that XAI started ripping.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it just rips.

• 13:24John Coogan?

  Refinance based on that. Uh, so a little bit of truth zone.

• 13:28Speaker 01

  Ninety-eight cents on the dollar, already priced in.

• 13:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, not bad. Um, so on Monday, banks sold the final slug of debt they lent for Musk's takeover of Twitter in twenty twenty-two, according to people familiar with the matter. Uh, the one point two billion dollars of loan sold at ninety-eight cents on the dollar. Of course, when Elon purchased Twitter for forty-four billion, he put up a bunch of equity from Tesla, there were a bunch of other investors that came in, Larry Ellison, Andreessen Horowitz, I think Sequoia came in as well. And then, uh, I think Morgan Stanley did a bunch of the debt. So the sale was a long time coming in April twenty twenty-two. Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, and five other banks agreed to lend the money to help Musk buy Twitter. The plan was to divvy up some thirteen billion dollars in debt, sell it to investors, and earn millions in fees. By the time the deal closed, the markets had tanked and investors were wary of betting

• 14:15John Coogan?

  on Twitter's debt. The unloved loan sat on banks' balance sheets for more than two years, while the financial prospects of the newly christened ex looked dimmer and dimmer. By the summer of twenty twenty-four, the ex deal was considered the worst buy of banks that agreed to finance since the two thousand eight financial crisis. And then they say everything turned with the election of Donald Trump as president, and the rise of Musk as a crucial Trump ally catalyzing a frenzy among investors to get a slice of Musk Inc. Advertisers such as Amazon.com started coming back to the platform, helping Musk To raise more capital for X. So I guess that's kind of a reasonable scenario that if he backs Trump, Trump loses, then maybe the advertisers don't come back. What do you think?

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  It's an interesting platform because historically, I just don't think the ad units were ever that good. So it was easy for advertisers to just say, okay, we're not gonna come back.

• 15:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:08Jordi Hays?

  Now it's an opportunity to sort of pledge allegiance to the Musk empire and in some way kind of cozy up to the, to the, to the power players by saying, yes, we're bringing our advertising back to the platform.

• 15:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 15:22Jordi Hays?

  And sure, that helps in terms of X getting properly, basically just, you know, the, as long as Elon is heavily involved with politics, his companies will, will be impacted by his proximity to power.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I guess the flip side is maybe if Trump loses, I mean, you could see a situation where the, the left is more aggressive about like holding Musk to account for trying to get Trump elected. But on the, but on the other side, you could see a world where it's just like, oh, Trump is a loser. He lost two elections in a row in this hypothetical and Musk is, you know, like a failure for, he couldn't even get Trump elected. And so he's less of a threat. And so, yeah, you can advertise on his silly little app. It doesn't matter anymore because he's irrelevant, because Trump is irrelevant, because he lost twice, he's never coming back. And so I, I, I feel like it's possible that, that this was less of an issue because he could have built back up.

• 16:19John Coogan?

  But certainly, like the, just being close to the president and having kind of the whole vibe shift in Silicon Valley and all the Silicon Valley CEOs going out to DC made a ton of sense.

• 16:30Jordi Hays?

  I think the really interesting question is how this new $20 billion financing comes together. I don't know where, where that capital is coming from. It already, and then, and then as you start to.

• 16:43John Coogan?

  You mean for XAI?

• 16:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, XAI doing this new financing that's been sort of reported on, just based on rumors, I think. It seems unclear to me if, if X, the, the social media platform starts getting any credit at all for even existing, right? It's just, just rolled in, it's like, oh yeah, like you're investing in, you know, the mega data center project and like, oh, we also have that app. And as an X user, all of this stuff, again, like it's just not, it's not default. Bullish for X, the social platform, just because it's happens because that capital is certainly not being going to be diverted in any type of meaningful way to the social platform.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  But it's also like, do you actually need to update X? Like, when was the last time there was a meaningful Twitter update?

• 17:31John Coogan?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa, they launched 4K live streaming recently. We will be live streaming in 4K very soon. Uh, but let's play the sound effect for 4K live streaming on X, folks. It's happening. You should be watching this on a QLED TV. You should be watching it in IMAX in the cinema.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Get Starlink so you can watch it in real time.

• 17:54Jordi Hays?

  We were talking with Tyler and the video team and they were basically saying like, yeah, there's like a one engineer who's like working on streaming. It's like.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  Just for you guys, just for you guys.

• 18:05John Coogan?

  It's our guy.

• 18:06Jordi Hays?

  That's our guy.

• 18:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is interesting to think like, you know, if Elon had just waited or been able to stall on the acquisition deal by like six months, he wouldn't have been able to buy it for a quarter of the price. Like, every single tech company sold off and Twitter would have sold off by more.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Meta went down by 50%.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  It would have been struggling to find a bottom.

• 18:31John Coogan?

  A hundred percent. It probably would have been like a five or 10 billion dollar company, right?

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, even if you pay 10, it's still 75% off.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know. I know, but remarkable timing and remarkable that he pulled it out despite like the the leg weights that were the initial buyout valuation.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  And it's crazy. They basically put a gun to his head and said, you're buying.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  You have to do it. Yeah. The court always forces Elon to do exactly what he wants to do. Can't do the pay package. You have to buy this. You can't buy that.

• 18:55Jordi Hays?

  What he should do is is come out really in favor of the for-profit conversion of OpenAI.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  OpenAI will absolutely not happen.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  He's doing more reverse psychology for sure, for sure. Uh, in a sign of how eager investors were, Monday's sale of 1.2 billion dollars in debt happened even while the markets have been in the doldrums since President Trump announced his tariff plan this month. Bankers working on the transaction said they felt that the high quality nature of the deal meant that they could sell the debt despite recent market volatility. In the end, banks found a graceful exit from the 13 billion dollar financing that weighed on them for some two and a half years. I mean. The team, I know some of the team at Morgan Stanley and it looked really rough for a while, but they got out Elon doesn't do down rounds and he knows how to steward capital. He's one of the greatest to do it. Forty percent premium. I forget how high the premium was. It wasn't even like trading at forty-four.

• 19:46John Coogan?

  He paid forty percent premium. That is wild. Reflecting the potential he saw in the social media company. He said at the time, free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:58John Coogan?

  And Twitter is the digital town square where it matters.

• 20:00Jordi Hays?

  No, it did feel like post-acquisition that he basically spent, he spent forty-four billion dollars to preserve free speech on the internet.

• 20:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:11Jordi Hays?

  In many ways, it actually did feel like that. That should be tax deductible. It's a nonprofit contribution.

• 20:16John Coogan?

  It should be. Yeah, I mean, that was my take was that like if he doesn't do something about it, there's going to be like the anti-Musk aggression is just going to keep building and building and building until he's in like real, real danger. And so it was a small price to pay.

• 20:31Jordi Hays?

  Small price to pay.

• 20:31John Coogan?

  That he got out of it. Speaking of small prices to pay, go get a watch on bezel. Go to getbezel.com. We're going to get Will set up with something after the show.

• 20:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Will's not a huge watch guy.

• 20:42John Coogan?

  He's not a huge watch guy, but we're going to convert him. I think this Rolex presidential.

• 20:47Jordi Hays?

  I need more gold material.

• 20:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, the yellow gold, the yellow gold champagne day date. That would look great on you. It's from Glengarry Glen Ross, maybe the GMT Rolex.

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  Texas Timex.

• 20:57John Coogan?

  The Texas Timex.

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  They call it when you're in the south.

• 21:01John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's move on to another story.

• 21:06Jordi Hays?

  What do we got?

• 21:07John Coogan?

  I mean, TSMC earnings also paired well with Intel earnings because interestingly, Intel is flat despite having a terrible couple of months, changing CEOs, lots of fear around. Can they be competitive on the leading edge whatsoever? TSMC has been crushing it, been in the perfect position, but has so much fear around global tensions. Invasion of Taiwan basically zeros the company. And so TSMC has been having a much harder time in the market, even though their outlook has been bullish. They're, they have a bullish outlook for growth in 2025 after reporting strong first quarter results suggesting the world's biggest chipmaker is confident it can ride out the US-China trade war.

• 21:48John Coogan?

  The main chipmaker for Nvidia, Apple and other companies said it still expects mid 20% growth this year in a doubling of AI revenue, mirroring goals set in January. And it's stuck with capital spending projection of 38 billion to 42 billion in 2025. TSMC's US stock rose as much as 3.8%, while, while shares of suppliers, including Tokyo Electron and Laser Tech climbed in Tokyo. The CEO stressed that demand, particularly for high-end chips, critical to developing AI, has remained resilient. That may assuage investors who've struggled through a turbulent few days when the US restrictions on the export of Nvidia chips to China and a disappointing report from ASML Holdings triggered, helped triggered a broad market.

• 22:29Jordi Hays?

  So Ben says what you were alluding to earlier, which in stark contrast to Intel, TSMC is killing it and yet you wouldn't know from the share price.

• 22:39John Coogan?

  Rough.

• 22:40Jordi Hays?

  Trading just down and to the right.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Still priced in.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  What is priced in?

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  Everything.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Everything.

• 22:49John Coogan?

  The market is perfectly priced.

• 22:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So he breaks it down here. He said, you would had you invested at the beginning of this year, been break even on an Intel investment and significantly down on a TSMC investment. Granted, the returns are a lot different if you go back even a year. Intel's are brutal, but it's clear that TSMC is being much more impacted by recent geopolitical events than Intel is, and for good reason. Above and beyond their location in Taiwan, TSMC is actually relevant to the global economy in a way that Intel is not boom roasted.

• 23:22John Coogan?

  Have you been tracking any of the new chip companies that are doing like transformers on a chip?

• 23:28Speaker 01

  I've surely been tracking. The heights of waves in the Taiwan Straits.

• 23:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's all that matters to the stock price. That's all you trade off of is the weather forecast.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Yardstick in the Taiwan Straits.

• 23:40John Coogan?

  That that is true, right? You can't like you can only invade in certain times or something.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  This is when Eric Prince appears on the show, you know, less than 24 hours. That does feel like a question for him. But my understanding is in the summer, the Taiwan Straits are flatter.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  Much easier to get landing craft across. In the winter, it's like 22.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Bad timing with the tariffs now.

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  Isn't it actually like a very narrow window?

• 24:04Jordi Hays?

  Which is helpful if you're trying to prepare for an invasion, but still not great. Anyway, so Ben goes further here. He says TSMC has, however, even beyond the last few months, suffered from the China overhang. Reality that any sort of conflict over Taiwan would zero out TSMC. And what he says, which is interesting, and we'll get into this is what is notable to me, however, and counter to what I wrote last month. Is the depth of TSMC's commitment to manufacturing in the United States. And again, this was like, we've been trying to pull out of some people on the show is is kind of understanding how much of Nvidia saying, oh, we're investing $100 billion in the US.

• 24:44Jordi Hays?

  How much is TS? How much of this is sort of marketing to the admin versus like actual practical business planning? And this is cool to see. So Ben wrote last month, at the same time, you can also view this announcement with some amount of cynicism. Particularly given the lack of specificity about either timing or process. There is both an optimistic and a pessimistic way to look at this. On the optimistic side, that first fab was upgraded to a more advanced 5 nanometer node. TSM.

• 25:13John Coogan?

  Love this.

• 25:14Jordi Hays?

  Love it.

• 25:14John Coogan?

  TSMC calls it the 4 nanometer node, but it's actually a third generation 5 nanometer node.

• 25:19Jordi Hays?

  Ben Thompson is truth zoning. Truth zoning, TSMC, the second fab meanwhile will also produce two nanometer chips at some point in the future, although not in 2026.

• 25:30John Coogan?

  That is crazy and something that a couple of years ago, people were like, that will never happen. There's too much like sacred knowledge in Taiwan that will never make it to America. If they can actually hit that, it's crazy.

• 25:39Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 25:41John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, on the earnings call, the CEO of TSMC said, let me talk about TSMC's additional $100 billion investment plan to expand in Arizona. All of our overseas decisions are based on our customers' need as they value some geographic flexibility and necessary level of government support. This is also to maximize the value of our shareholders, which we love to hear. Let's hear it for maximizing shareholder value. With a strong collaboration and support from our leading US customers and the US federal, state and city governments, we recently announced our intention to invest in additional $100 billion in advanced semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. This expansion includes major plans for three additional wafer manufacturing fabs, two advanced packaging fabs, and a major R and D center.

• 26:22Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 26:23John Coogan?

  Combined with our previously announced plan to build three advanced semiconductor manufacturing fabs in Arizona, this brings our total investment in the US to $165 billion to support the strong multi-year demand from our customers. It makes sense. Like, a lot of TSMC's customers are in America. Like, there's no reason why you shouldn't make them here, but it was thought impossible for a long time.

• 26:43Jordi Hays?

  How did we just sum $100 billion and $100 billion and get to $165 billion?

• 26:48John Coogan?

  No, he starts by saying, let's talk about the $100 billion investment. And then he's like, we're going to do all this stuff, which adds up to $100 billion. And then he says, we've already invested 65, so let's add the new 100 to the previous 65. We're at 165, which sounds staggering, I guess, when you compare it to what the hyperscalers are spending on CapEx, which is all in like the 60, 70, 80 billion per hyperscaler. It's not that crazy. And of course, this is over a number of years because they're building these out, but still very, very bullish for American manufacturing, very bullish for reindustrialization, which we love to see.

• 27:22Jordi Hays?

  It's not a meme.

• 27:23John Coogan?

  Not a meme. It's gonna happen. It is, uh, yeah, it, it, it, it is interesting to see that like they're actually making progress here that people thought was not possible for a long time, or they thought it would never happen for a variety of reasons. But, uh, TSMC, Foxconn's in the same, in the same boat where, uh, Foxconn's announcing new facilities. It's Taiwanese company. They obviously have a massive presence in China, but they're announcing a lot of new facilities in America because they see themselves as a Western company or a global company and they want to do business

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  I love when CEOs are super candid on earnings calls because it's so easy for them to go robotic. This is another quote. Uh, he was responding to a question. He said, "The first purpose in the Arizona fab, uh, is that the Arizona fab can operate independently, but of course we have done, and we are doing it right now, some kind of pathfinding exploratory work and cooperate with the university, blah, blah. It's actually a lot of activities. A thousand engineers is not a small amount. Of course, it's not comparable to, uh, TSMC." I think he's talking about, uh, you know, the facility in Taiwan that has 10,000 R and D people, but it's the beginning. Okay. So we'll do a lot more.

• 28:28John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 28:29Jordi Hays?

  And, um, anyways.

• 28:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, you, you were, you were talking about like the, the capex as marketing to the admin and probably the best example is from the first Trump administration where Apple did that, like that ribbon cutting ceremony. I think it was in Texas for the Mac. Uh, and it was like, they'd already been making it there. They weren't reshoring anything really.

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  Branding the dollar.

• 28:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then, and then earlier in Trump too, just a couple of months ago, Apple like kind of repackaged a bunch of their like spend and they were like, we're investing a hundred billion dollars in America. And it was like the salaries that we're already going to spend here.

• 29:04Jordi Hays?

  Build a warehouse and just like let people rent it for ribbon cutting ceremony. Huge, huge bull market.

• 29:11John Coogan?

  Massive American flag on the wall. You can move in. We rented by the hour.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll change the sign.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  It comes with a vibrio. It comes with free birds pre-installed.

• 29:18Jordi Hays?

  Secret service has been there already. They know the angle.

• 29:20John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 29:21Jordi Hays?

  Getting into American-made ribbons specifically for, for, you know.

• 29:25John Coogan?

  And those big scissors, the big scissors out of the American.

• 29:28Jordi Hays?

  Those are made in China today.

• 29:30John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 29:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, absolutely. Um, should we talk about, uh, Amazon?

• 29:35John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 29:36Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, all this drama around whether or not they were displaying, planned to display the tariff impact.

• 29:42John Coogan?

  This guy who ran this, uh, A B test on his e-commerce website. He found, he's a, he makes his, uh, shower head in China. Uh, it's the tariffs are gonna make a hu- $100 product like $250 goes to an American manufacturer. It's gonna cost him $250 to make it. So he puts an option on his website, $100 for the Chinese one.

• 30:01Jordi Hays?

  Where are they?

• 30:01John Coogan?

  Or 250. Uh, and he was like, 100% of people chose the cheaper one.

• 30:05Jordi Hays?

  Zero. We got zero made in America.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  But I was thinking about that more and I was, and I was thinking about how like, no, it's not, that's not the option.

• 30:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's not the trade.

• 30:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, the actual trade is $250 for the Chinese made one, $160 of which, or $150 of which goes to tariffs versus $250 made in America.

• 30:23Jordi Hays?

  No, it was a deeply flawed study.

• 30:26John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 30:27Jordi Hays?

  Exceptionally viral.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, but anyway, Amazon is thinking about doing something very similar, kind of, you know, uh, lobbying popular support amongst the American people, uh, breaking out import charges.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, they deny they had plans to do this.

• 30:43John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. But the administration announced, uh, addressed it and said that breaking out import charges would be a hostile and political act. Andy Jassy is, uh, getting in trouble with the White House. I'm sure they will be fighting it out, although they're still going after Bezos. So amazon.com was forced to play down a report that it was considering displaying the impact of tariffs during its online checkout process after President Trump called the company founder Jeff Bezos. And the White House said, uh, such a move would be a hostile and political act. I mean, you have to imagine that as soon as the tariffs drop, like, there's some Amazon PM who's like implementing this on day one, right?

• 31:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's also funny that, that Bezos is still the first guy to get the call.

• 31:23John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 31:23Jordi Hays?

  It's been so long now.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  He's like desperately trying to retire.

• 31:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, he's just like, oh.

• 31:28John Coogan?

  I just wanna do the Lex Friedman podcast and be on a yacht and, and go to space. Like, why are you calling me about my e-commerce business? Yeah, yeah, I was an e-comm entrepreneur.

• 31:36Jordi Hays?

  I was a big e-comm guy.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I was a 12-figure e-comm entrepreneur.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  But if he does save the global economy, that's like his beautiful act, right? Like if this works.

• 31:44John Coogan?

  With who, who?

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Bezos. If Bezos saves the economy by rolling back tariffs, by implementing this feature, that's a Nobel Peace Prize level achievement.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  It's possible. It's possible. It's gonna take an act of courage, standing up to the admin by, by, by. Putting a new div on the checkout HTML page. Pressing tab.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  There's some controversy because Punchbowl was doing some reporting on this, but Punchbowl is corporate media.

• 32:11John Coogan?

  Really?

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Supported by Amazon.

• 32:12John Coogan?

  What are you talking about?

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Um.

• 32:13John Coogan?

  This is real?

• 32:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:15John Coogan?

  Punchbowl news, okay.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, it says Trump called Bezos to raise concerns after Punchbowl News, which I've never heard of, uh, reported that Amazon was planning to display the impact of tariffs during its online checkout process, according to people familiar with the matter. And now, I mean, Amazon, to be fair, does break out a ton of expenses. Like, you see the shipping costs, you see the taxes, you see how the, how the receipt is calculated.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  And now you're gonna see 600% tariffs on your, on your shower hat.

• 32:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, on your, uh, on your, what, did you know that Amazon launched a Timu competitor?

• 32:45Speaker 01

  I did not know this.

• 32:46John Coogan?

  So they, so as, in order to participate in their, like, Timu competitor, you had to guarantee, like, price ceilings for things. And, uh, you could not sell a guitar for more than $12, and you could not sell a couch for more than $20.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  I mean, we have to start thinking about an American Timu reserve, right? Just importing thousands of Shein items.

• 33:07Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be, it's actually, it could very well stretch into the billions.

• 33:10John Coogan?

  It could.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  The billions of items. So who are gonna, where are yoga pants gonna come from?

• 33:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  If not Shein.

• 33:15John Coogan?

  That'd poison you.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:16John Coogan?

  The cancer. You're lying to me.

• 33:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so there's a, there's a post here from somebody who writes, uh, for his own. He has @bigtechnology on X, great, uh, great name. He says, "The Punchbowl story on Amazon, sponsored by Amazon, isn't completely true per Amazon."

• 33:36Jordi Hays?

  It's literally an article that's presented by Amazon and it says, and it says, "Amazon to display tariff costs for consumers." So, uh, a little bit, uh, hard, hard to imagine they weren't, uh, actually planning to do this, but.

• 33:50John Coogan?

  This is gonna be like when we report on numeral, and numeral has to deny our reports that numeral is, has a fact-achieved AGI in sales tax in the Chrome tab, yeah.

• 34:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:01John Coogan?

  Because we often call it AGI for sales tax, or AGI God.

• 34:05Jordi Hays?

  We were talking to Sam, the, uh, the CEO, and... You know, what, what, what he said was basically like, you know, we have a new version that like, we're actually not able to release because it's so powerful.

• 34:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:16Jordi Hays?

  That it might solve sales tax fully and then sort of like move on.

• 34:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's like, how do we actually reduce the number of sales tax receipts to zero? Well, we eliminate humans.

• 34:25Jordi Hays?

  We kill everyone.

• 34:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. That's the end result of all these B2B SaaS products.

• 34:30Jordi Hays?

  Have we achieved AGI to numeral safeties?

• 34:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's the same thing with Ramp. How, how do we get no more receipts?

• 34:36Speaker 01

  No more employees.

• 34:37John Coogan?

  No more employees. Get rid of everyone. But anyway, go to numeral HQ, put your sales tax on autopilot.

• 34:42Jordi Hays?

  Benchmark Series A.

• 34:44John Coogan?

  Per month on sales tax compliance. Anyway, Bargainsawers, Timo and Sheen also benefited from the exemption, which helped keep, uh, helped them keep prices down on clothing and other goods shipped directly from China. So that loophole is closed. Yeah. It was Amazon's haul.

• 35:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. The Max, you're gonna love this. The Max you could sell a couch for.

• 35:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. 20 bucks.

• 35:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  Again, I think we'll see this in cancer rates.

• 35:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:09Speaker 01

  I think once you get, you take this to like cheap polyester and you stop putting it on your skin.

• 35:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Cancer rates might fall a little bit.

• 35:14John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  That's much to think about.

• 35:16John Coogan?

  Interesting. Is that going to right size? Is that the ultimate right sizing of the government?

• 35:19Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, it's proof the Maha movement's totally in control, right? The tariffs get shamed.

• 35:25John Coogan?

  It's all part of the Maha. So is Maha the real one that's pulling the strings?

• 35:28Speaker 01

  It's Bobby Kennedy at the top.

• 35:28John Coogan?

  Bobby Kennedy at the top. Everyone, every other, the defense budget, it's all in the.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  It's all Bobby.

• 35:33John Coogan?

  It's all Bobby. Yeah, that makes sense. Uh, the tech giant has cost support agreements in place with some vendors to ensure that it makes consistent margins on the products it buys from them and sells to customers, according to consultants. Some vendors have tried, that have tried to charge Amazon more after tariffs were imposed, have been asked to pay the online shopping giant to make up the increase. So everyone's fighting over who pays the tariffs.

• 35:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, it's, Amazon's in a really tough place. They had been squeezing their, uh, their sellers for so long on both sides. Fees, advertising, uh, you know, not dealing with, with knockoffs very well, uh, you know, sort of purely focused on the consumer, which is, um,

• 36:16Jordi Hays?

  Which is, again, you know, Amazon's job is to deliver for their core customer, which is the prime subscriber. But at the end of the day, this is only going to create kind of more drama and chaos between Amazon and its sellers who already were not super happy.

• 36:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, the other story, Amazon's in the news because they want to be a satellite internet powerhouse.

• 36:37Jordi Hays?

  Who doesn't? I mean, we've had long conversations off air about how do we turn TVPN into sort of, you know, get a dish on every home.

• 36:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:47Jordi Hays?

  How do we get a TVPN dish on every home?

• 36:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need a dedicated network, for sure.

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  Dedicated network.

• 36:52John Coogan?

  So they launched 27 Coopier satellites, but they need to get thousands more to space to rival SpaceX's Starlink. Some of the company's biggest hurdles aren't in orbit, but on the ground, 27 Amazon satellites were launched from the Florida coast to orbit Monday night, a mission handled by rocket launch company United Launch Alliance. A year and a half ago, ULA sent two prototype satellites for Amazon to space.

• 37:16Jordi Hays?

  How have I never heard about United Launch?

• 37:18John Coogan?

  You don't know ULA?

• 37:19Speaker 01

  They're like the second biggest private launch provider.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  SpaceX is so much bigger.

• 37:22John Coogan?

  It's a joint venture between Lockheed and Boeing.

• 37:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, okay, okay.

• 37:25John Coogan?

  So they're like the legacy.

• 37:27Jordi Hays?

  I've heard ULA, but I didn't read it out loud.

• 37:29John Coogan?

  But ULA has been, you know, they've had a lot of problems with a lot of different projects they've been worked on, and Elon's obviously coming for them very aggressively. To compete with established providers, Amazon needs to rapidly manufacture and deploy thousands more satellites on a narrow timeline. It also faces a set of challenges familiar to many companies pushing to scale up manufacturing rates. The project Coopier venture aims to build large constellation of satellites. Yeah, how do you pronounce that? Coopier?

• 37:53Jordi Hays?

  Coopier.

• 37:54John Coogan?

  Coopier?

• 37:55Speaker 01

  I think it's French.

• 37:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay. I have no idea.

• 37:58Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for the misinformation.

• 38:02John Coogan?

  So they're trying to provide high speed internet.

• 38:03Jordi Hays?

  Our entire audience like going out saying like, yeah, it's like, it's actually Coopier.

• 38:08John Coogan?

  The company plans on having 3,200 satellites in orbit over the next few years, building a business it hopes will eventually provide meaningful operating income, chief executive Andy Jassy wrote in Amazon's recent annual letter to shareholders. But Elon Musk has demonstrated the power of such a fleet through Starlink. Business which has more than seven thousand satellites in orbit already and more than five million users. Uh, at least two similar Chinese systems are also in the works while Canadians satellite operator Telisat is developing a new fleet called Lightspeed. Everyone's got to have their own Leo cluster of satellites, I guess. Leaders at Kupier.

• 38:42Jordi Hays?

  Interesting to think about Amazon potentially over time, just bundling in satellite to Prime like it's not.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  If you have, you have TV, you have shopping, you have groceries.

• 38:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, deliver, uh, uh, uh, own the actual delivery. And yeah, I mean, it seems like it was really, really hard to actually own like cable or, or like wires in the ground. Like that was particularly hard monopolized to like build any, to actually grab any of that infrastructure. But if everything, if everything moves to satellite, you can actually throw up a constellation.

• 39:11Speaker 01

  No zoning laws in space.

• 39:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I, I mean, at some point I imagine that it gets too, too crowded that you can't put up anymore, uh, any more constellations. But we, it seems like we're pretty far away from here. People are already complaining about the space junk though.

• 39:24Jordi Hays?

  That feels far away. I mean, the mode is that you have to spend however, like what, what 20, however many tens of billions of dollars.

• 39:30John Coogan?

  And launch is not a zero margin business for SpaceX. So, but it is when they launch, uh, Starlink satellites. And anytime that they have, uh, you know, a free seat on the bus, they can just throw, uh, Starlink satellites on there. So they're getting them up there way, way cheaper than Amazon is, which is probably why Bezos is also investing in Blue Origin. Because if he can get that working and he can dump, uh, Kupier satellites up there cheaply, like that actually gives him, uh, the opportunity to, to challenge Musk. It is funny how, how much Bezos and Musk like go after each other. Did you see that, uh, Bezos? I mean, he already funded Rivian, but then he just funded that slate truck. Did you see that thing?

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Incredible truck.

• 40:09John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. What was your reaction to the truck?

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Incredible. Uh, TJ Parker, you know, big endorsement from a certified car guy. I mean, it's incredible to have a small, American made truck. That's that. I hate that it's an electric vehicle. I'd buy one day one if that was a combustible engine. I just feel like, you know, Europe doesn't have power right now. Why are you buying an electric EV?

• 40:27John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  But it's a beautiful car. It's an SUV. It's a sedan.

• 40:30John Coogan?

  Have you thought about buying one and swapping in like a turbocharged vehicle?

• 40:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was gonna LS swap.

• 40:36John Coogan?

  Slat truck for sure. Yeah.

• 40:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:38John Coogan?

  Kind of mini Raptor.

• 40:39Jordi Hays?

  Number one, I I've seen some people, you know, I think it's going to be a hit almost as a golf cart.

• 40:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 40:44Speaker 01

  I mean, the question is like, who is the singer Porsche of Japanese small trucks? Like, if I want to drop $2 million on a truck this big.

• 40:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 40:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's the real, that's the real.

• 40:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the big critique there, and we're going to get the slate founding team on. But on the show, TJ actually made made the intro, shout out to TJ. But yeah, the big critique has been around range. I'm sure they have a lot of plans there. I assume, you know, you have to look at with any EV, you know, manufacturer and assume that the range is only going to go up over time.

• 41:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:17Jordi Hays?

  So it's fine.

• 41:18John Coogan?

  Do they drop a range number?

• 41:19Speaker 01

  It's like 150.

• 41:21John Coogan?

  Oh, 150, that's really low.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  I mean, it's a golf car.

• 41:23John Coogan?

  It's a golf car.

• 41:24Jordi Hays?

  But it's even lower than that when you.

• 41:26John Coogan?

  When you put stuff in.

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 41:28Jordi Hays?

  Passengers, you have hills.

• 41:29John Coogan?

  But truly, like, if you're just going, like, around town and back, like, you're not going to do more than 150 miles. Even if you drive to work 30 miles away and back, you're you're fine.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  I mean, you can't even fit in it, right? You have to, like, cut a hole in it.

• 41:42John Coogan?

  For sure. Well, don't they have a, don't they have like a modular structure so I can get like a convertible version?

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that is, yeah.

• 41:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  You're not going to pass the broomstick.

• 41:50John Coogan?

  But the reason I brought up slate was because I think Bezos backed slate. He also backed Rivian. So he has bets, two different bets in.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Two different trucks.

• 41:58John Coogan?

  Two different trucks.

• 41:59Speaker 01

  Big and small.

• 41:59John Coogan?

  In EV, going up against Tesla. There was a conspiracy theory that slate was actually a Tesla project because it's an anagram. Have you heard of this?

• 42:07Speaker 01

  I have heard this.

• 42:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's a great one. And then, and then they're competing in space. They're competing in social networking now, too, because Bezos owns Twitch, which is a very large social network, streaming. X obviously has streaming, as we're streaming on X right now. And then, yeah, they've just been duking it out in all these little sub, submarkets, subcategories. Yeah, it's a lot of fun to watch. Anyway, we should move on to some timeline. Let's break down the best.

• 42:34Jordi Hays?

  This is the moment that you all have been waiting for timeline with none other than.

• 42:40John Coogan?

  Wilmannitis, king of the timeline.

• 42:41Jordi Hays?

  The king of the timeline, king of the timeline. Let's do it. Let's dive in.

• 42:49John Coogan?

  Founder of Intercom says, uh, this is truly the golden age of B2B software out of home advertising. Literally 98% of billboard and shelter stock in SF is being, is currently taken by SaaS brands. It's never been like this ever. It's either really bullish or really bearish for SaaS. Is it bullish or bearish?

• 43:07Jordi Hays?

  Intercom, by the way, Adquick.

• 43:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:09Jordi Hays?

  Customer.

• 43:10John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 43:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:11John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Yeah, they, uh, we are, we are sponsored by Adquick. Go to adquick.com.

• 43:17Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to cut you off.

• 43:17John Coogan?

  Out of home advertising. Made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of ad home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Anyway, Will, uh, bullish or bearish for SaaS?

• 43:28Speaker 01

  First. For Adquick.

• 43:31John Coogan?

  For Adquick, yes.

• 43:35John Coogan?

  The audience was. Yeah, maybe we get the Ashton Hall sound for every new post that we do during this timeline to really, really fire us up.

• 43:42Jordi Hays?

  I can do that.

• 43:43John Coogan?

  Really get us firing at all cylinders. Okay.

• 43:44Jordi Hays?

  All right.

• 43:45John Coogan?

  Bullish or bearish?

• 43:46Speaker 01

  I just think hope, hope, hopes the, you know, replier number one, also my favorite account on twitter.com is correct.

• 43:51John Coogan?

  Revenge.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  We do need to think bigger, right?

• 43:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 43:54Speaker 01

  We should be renaming San Francisco.

• 43:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  One wonders if instead of San Francisco, we could have Salesforce California.

• 43:59John Coogan?

  Salesforce California.

• 44:01Jordi Hays?

  That has a nice ring to it.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  OpenAI California.

• 44:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Right? The towers there are talking to an occupied state. Why not go all the way?

• 44:08John Coogan?

  I, what about just Altmanville?

• 44:10Speaker 01

  That would be even better.

• 44:11John Coogan?

  We've been talking about Voltaville down in Nashville.

• 44:13Speaker 01

  If Salesforce really wants to have that tower.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Company towns are back.

• 44:15Speaker 01

  Company towns.

• 44:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:16Jordi Hays?

  I would like to see an ad unit hung from the Golden Gate Bridge, you know, just sort of like, uh,

• 44:22John Coogan?

  100%.

• 44:22Jordi Hays?

  100 feet by like,

• 44:24John Coogan?

  Everyone always goes crazy over those videos of Chinese cities where they look so cyberpunk and they have like advertising everywhere. Blade Runner future, let's do it.

• 44:32Speaker 01

  Also, why do we need permission? Why don't we just project on the side of the Salesforce tower?

• 44:36John Coogan?

  It's a great idea. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, also drone shows, blimps. We should be doing much more advertising.

• 44:43Jordi Hays?

  Adquick, not to, not to go back to Adquick, but they do have a drone.

• 44:46John Coogan?

  No, no, no, please go back to Adquick.

• 44:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, please. They have, um, they have a drone, access drone show ads, which is pretty cool.

• 44:54John Coogan?

  Drone show.

• 44:59Jordi Hays?

  All right, next post. Ian Cinnamon. Apex Space has closed another round of funding to scale production and meet demand for satellite platforms for critical projects like Golden Dome. The new 200 million in Series C funding is led by Point 72 Ventures and co-led by ABC alongside and Theresa Horowitz and a number of other funds. So massive milestone. Ian says, "This Series C investment is a massive vote of confidence from our backers as demand for our bus platforms has exponentially increased as we are also seeing the underlying need for space-based capabilities growing rapidly. With this capital, we are excited to double down on supporting the needs of the US and allied warfighter as well as critical commercial

• 45:44Jordi Hays?

  applications."

• 45:46John Coogan?

  Congratulations, Ian. You invented a bus.

• 45:48Jordi Hays?

  Created a space bus. I mean, the speed at which Ian and the Apex team is moving, we had to go back and listen to our interview with Ian probably about a month ago at this point, but what an absolutely ambitious timeline they've been on.

• 46:07John Coogan?

  It is cool how like all of the different pieces of the satellite stack are disaggregating and now there's new companies in each of them. I wonder if eventually they'll kind of come together in some massive keretsu or something. Have you talked to Ian before?

• 46:19Jordi Hays?

  No, but I do like the idea of kind of a Frankel-esque role of all these kind of non-commercial viable or, you know, soon to be commercially viable launch providers.

• 46:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, it's not launch provider. He doesn't do rockets. He does the bus that the satellite rides on. So you want to put a radio or a camera in space.

• 46:37Jordi Hays?

  TBPN Network.

• 46:38John Coogan?

  TBPN Network will be using Apex buses to build on top of. And another example would be like Bridget Mindler, her company does the ground link. So how is TBPN going to beam down from these satellites? Well, she will have a ground link network of satellites that can receive the message from space.

• 46:58Jordi Hays?

  This next, we got another post from Trey Stevens.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  So we have some news from Lockheed Martin. They said with Lockheed Martin says without us AI might have never taken off.

• 47:13Jordi Hays?

  Said for over 40 years Lockheed Martin has used the power of AI and machine learning to help drive the future of defense, aerospace and national security. And it's just a giblified version of some of that kind of.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise from Top.

• 47:28Jordi Hays?

  I was gonna say this looks like Trey Stevens to me, but you know.

• 47:31John Coogan?

  Not enough beard, not enough body hair. But I mean, 40 years ago, I feel like they're not using that word correctly.

• 47:42John Coogan?

  1985, like what, what AI were they doing?

• 47:45Speaker 01

  That's like Apple 2.

• 47:46John Coogan?

  Like neural networks had not really been invented yet, right?

• 47:50Speaker 01

  It's a linear regression.

• 47:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  It's a TI 84.

• 47:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 47:54Jordi Hays?

  They're basically saying, when was the first time we mentioned the words artificial and intelligence? Not even together, but like it could have been in the same paragraph.

• 48:02John Coogan?

  I mean, at the same time, like the lesson one of Andrew Ng's course on machine learning at Stanford starts with multiple regression.

• 48:09Jordi Hays?

  Does it?

• 48:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is the foundation of, and then he builds you up to neural networks.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  I mean, I hear that was a big secret and how Grok got to state of the art so quickly.

• 48:18John Coogan?

  Linear regression.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Doing the regressions by hand.

• 48:20John Coogan?

  Yes, by hand, yes.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Training the transformers with artificial craft.

• 48:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We need to bring that back. I actually wouldn't be surprised if Lockheed did have some, you know, AI person that was foundational at some point, like some, you know, some Django block in the massive stack goes back to some Lockheed paper or some, some Skunk Works project. But it is hilarious that they're just like, yo, we're responsible for AI. You're welcome.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  Play it.

• 48:46John Coogan?

  Oh, this is huge. We got some huge news from Josh Kushner. Let's go. Josh Kushner says, we are humbled to announce, we are absolutely humbled right now. We are so humbled to announce Thrive Holdings, a permanent capital vehicle to dedicate, dedicated to investing in, acquiring and operating businesses for the long term. The mission of Thrive Holdings is to transform enterprises throughout the strategic application technology.

• 49:12Jordi Hays?

  You know, the only thing better than capital?

• 49:14John Coogan?

  What?

• 49:14Jordi Hays?

  Permanent capital.

• 49:15John Coogan?

  Permanent.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  You know, you know what they say, any man in possession of a good fortune only needs one thing, a permanent capital holding vehicle.

• 49:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:22Jordi Hays?

  That's right. That's right.

• 49:23John Coogan?

  Can you actually break down what a permanent capital holding vehicle means relative to like, everyone's familiar with like a VC fund, 10 year, 12 year continuation vehicles? What's permanent capital?

• 49:35Speaker 01

  What matters is that closeness to God is closeness to fee streams.

• 49:38John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 49:39Speaker 01

  And normally fee streams, they stop at 10 years.

• 49:41John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  You know what's better than 10 years of fees? A lifetime of fees.

• 49:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:45Speaker 01

  Fees that you can pass on to your grandchildren.

• 49:47John Coogan?

  But I mean, how is this different than, I mean, is it, but is it structured different than a private equity fund that has a specific life or even like a hedge fund?

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, the standard permanent capital vehicle will have some degree of redemption schedule, right? Like LPs can pull out some degree of profit.

• 50:02John Coogan?

  At certain points and they can swap with other people in and stuff.

• 50:05Speaker 01

  Uh, Brent B. Shore has some incredible essays that detail this. Yeah.

• 50:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is, is he truly the golden standard for permanent capital? Or is there like a public company? Like does BlackRock have a permanent holding vehicle that we don't talk about?

• 50:16Speaker 01

  I mean, there's plenty of like the, the closed end vehicles were like a huge thing in the UK in the nineties. There's dozens of these. Brent B. Shore, I think is the most artisanal.

• 50:23John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  His is printing cash at a rate no one else I think is doing right now. But of course there's, you know, permanent capital vehicles we cannot name rolling up H O As in the Midwest, right?

• 50:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I, I think the opportunity here is for Josh and the Thrive team to think even more long-term than they already do, right? Like, how do we think about, you know, uh, you know, uh, not, not in this sort of like 10 year cycle, which, um, Josh, I think had posted something a long time ago, which is that like managers think in quarters, like founders think in decades. And there's huge advantages in alpha and just being able to think, uh, and, and plan on a longer timeline than everyone else.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  And especially if you're Thrive and you're thinking about buying, like, I think it's been widely reported, they bought an accounting firm to, uh, put AI in the middle and do automation on top of.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  That's a deal you need to hold for 40 years.

• 51:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  And then this also solves the continuity vehicle issue, right? You have lots of companies like Stripe, you're holding a year, 10, 11, 12.

• 51:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Hell, how are you going to get liquidity on that? Well, you can pass it over to your permanent capital vehicle.

• 51:24John Coogan?

  You think that's possible?

• 51:25Speaker 01

  I mean, it's similar to a heritage, right? It's like a continuity vehicle.

• 51:28John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Pass those things over, get liquidity for the LPs in the initial set and hold a basket of really high quality assets.

• 51:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  So you want to hold for duration.

• 51:36John Coogan?

  Okay, so take me through some of the sizes of permanent capital vehicles. Because with a VC fund, you know, you hear people raising a $50 million SOG B fund all the way up to a $5 billion growth fund. Permanent capital feels like more narrowly defined, but is there, is there kind of like, what is a, what is like a sweet spot? Base hit for the size of a permanent capital vehicle?

• 51:59Speaker 01

  I mean, Mark Shire is like the best example.

• 52:01John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, okay.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  I wasn't actually sure. I didn't want to botch it, so I just looked it up.

• 52:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Um, but, but that's a good way to think about it of, hey, we're not going to focus as much on raising new, you know, the, the best scenario is like you, you have, uh, cash flowing assets that produce capital that allow you to, you know, reinvest or buy other businesses to produce more cash flow.

• 52:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  It's like sort of the holy grail. And many people have said the cure to male loneliness is, you know, a permanent capital vehicle.

• 52:29John Coogan?

  It would fix me. It would fix me. What about the mindset, what it takes to be great in venture capital is often high risk, you know, not making money for a very long time. All the capital, uh, all the value capture happens at the very end. Obviously, the, the types of companies that are typically rolled into permanent capital vehicles, cash flowing from day one.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  I mean, I think like the single greatest Josh Krasner quote is like, you never lose money buying Fifth Avenue real estate.

• 52:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  If you think about thrive as a thematic bet on the Fifth Avenue real estate of private companies, probably not a bad idea to hold these really blue chip assets to duration.

• 53:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. So it's more just about find great founders. If they're, if they're losing money in the super high growth phase, they go in the, they go in the growth fund, they go in the venture fund. If they're cash flowing, but they're still fantastic entrepreneurs, fantastic assets, they go in the permanent capital vehicle.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  I mean, if you're Stripe and you're planning to go public in 2035, 20, you know, 2300.

• 53:25John Coogan?

  2300.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  Like those.

• 53:26John Coogan?

  Once, well, once they've consumed 100% of GDP.

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Processed through Stripe.

• 53:31John Coogan?

  Global GDP, actually.

• 53:31Speaker 01

  Global GDP.

• 53:32Jordi Hays?

  They need, they need the space narrative. Look, you know, the space.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  They need to go off planet, yeah.

• 53:36Jordi Hays?

  We need to go off planet.

• 53:37John Coogan?

  Off planet.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  It's just these, these continuity vehicles are going to get huge.

• 53:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, wow. Okay, well, speaking of growth stuff, Hadley Harris, venture capitalist, actually wrote about vector databases, which I think you might be a little bit familiar with.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I was the first check into Chroma.

• 53:55John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  I still think it's the fastest growing open source vector database.

• 53:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love Jeff. We had him on the show.

• 54:00Speaker 01

  Jeff's amazing.

• 54:01John Coogan?

  He's great. So he's breaking down some hype, and I'd be interested to hear how the market has evolved and if Jeff has kind of altered his strategy. Hadley's breaking down the story of Pinecone. Two years ago today, Andreessen announced $100 million into Pinecone as everyone and their mother tripped over each other to invest in vector databases. Given how little standalone vector databases are valued now, the hype cycle is wild to look back on. The timeline is late 2022. ChatGPT launches, early RAG architectures emerge, there's first buzz around these companies. Then there's a massive surge in demand for vector search. Vector databases seen as critical infrastructure. But then after there's peak hype, every AI infrastructure diagram has a vector DB layer, saturation hits, Postgres,

• 54:45John Coogan?

  Redis, MongoDB, add native vector search, clouds bundle it, the hype fades, vector search becomes commodity, market tightens, attention shifts to agents, fine tuning orchestration. So is this a good telling of the history of the vector database hype cycle?

• 54:59Speaker 01

  I think it's accurate in the hype cycle. I put it in the truth zone in that this feels like kind of terminal VC brain.

• 55:06John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Like, it is likely true that the vector database market will not have dozens of billion-dollar outcomes.

• 55:12John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 55:12Speaker 01

  But if you look at even the traditional relational database market, there are hundreds of massive companies there, right? And if you think about a huge amount of enterprise software, it's just different views on top of structured data elements.

• 55:24John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Like Salesforce is the world's greatest structured database, right? There will be big winners in the vector database space in that you just need to be able to store unstructured data.

• 55:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:34Speaker 01

  And like, yes, you know, you can search vectors using NumPy dot sort.

• 55:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  But like, that's not an enterprise-grade database solution.

• 55:41John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 55:42Speaker 01

  And I just think this is a good excuse to, you know, have missed a lot of winning companies such as Chroma.

• 55:48John Coogan?

  Yep. A lot of people are taking victory laps. John Schuett, Coastless, as we told our LPs, that were staying out of the market because they were too trivial to build and commoditize and were never used without BM25. What is BM25? Do you know what that is? Never heard of that. Uh, BC Vec Database Thought Leadership was a great filter for those who, for who's really technical and who has shallow understanding of ML infra.

• 56:11Jordi Hays?

  We gotta have John on the show. He's always dropping.

• 56:14John Coogan?

  Bombs on the timeline. Well, speaking of dropping bombs on the timeline, hit me with a sound effect, Jordy, because we're moving over to a post by Deva about tech bros learning about convertibles. Uh, there are two different posts here. One from Spore, friend of the show, uh, says we, it's called, we do a little Bay Area sightseeing, uh, and someone else bought a BMW Z4. Uh, what's your take on convertibles?

• 56:42Speaker 01

  My first car in high school was a 2002 Honda S2000.

• 56:47John Coogan?

  That's a great car. Wow.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  Sick. I still own it to this day. It's the single greatest thing I've ever driven.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  It's amazing that they've discovered convertibles. I mean, it's just like, it's, you know, 25 years late, it's kinda weird to discover this in your 30s.

• 57:00John Coogan?

  Especially in California, it's usually obvious. Also, both of those look like automatics.

• 57:04Jordi Hays?

  There's a generation of, of young people in tech that have only owned Teslas.

• 57:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, and they don't make a convertible.

• 57:10Jordi Hays?

  And they're discovering that, that car manufacturers have been making pretty good cars. Lots of manufacturers have been making pretty good cars in a bunch of different categories for a long time, and it's a beautiful moment. I think it should be celebrated.

• 57:22John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 57:22Jordi Hays?

  I also think, I think what I wanna, what I wanna, what I wanna see people do more, people I don't think realize, like, if you have a car, let's say you have a Honda Accord, you can drive to any car dealership and within two hours have swapped it for a 911, right? Like, it's actually like an extremely smooth

• 57:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:43Jordi Hays?

  process, where they will take your car,

• 57:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:46Jordi Hays?

  basically, not sight unseen, but they'll look at it, maybe they're close to it.

• 57:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:50Jordi Hays?

  That your car has some amount of value, you can roll that into something else, and you can, within three hours on any day of the week, you can be driving in a 911 or another car that, that's, um, going to change your life. It's one of the few things.

• 58:04Speaker 01

  If you're, you know, not a permanent capital guy, can't afford the 911, Miata's.

• 58:09John Coogan?

  Miata's, yeah.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  $5,000.

• 58:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:11Jordi Hays?

  Miata.

• 58:12John Coogan?

  Do you know the best-selling convertible in America?

• 58:15Speaker 01

  Has to be a Miata, right?

• 58:17John Coogan?

  It's not. It's the Jeep Wrangler.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  No way.

• 58:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, because they sell a lot of them. People don't think of them as convertibles. They technically are.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  Drop top.

• 58:24John Coogan?

  But yeah, I think Tesla's missed out and Rivian's missed out on the convertible market. The, all of the car companies are just coalescing around like everyone wants a crossover SUV.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  That drives itself.

• 58:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 58:35Speaker 01

  Again, the one, one piece of feedback here, guys.

• 58:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 58:38Speaker 01

  Uh, manual transmission.

• 58:40John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  Like, I will teach, I will fly out.

• 58:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's gonna change you.

• 58:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, maybe, maybe that's next year. Next year, tech bros learned about manual transmissions.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  Manual transmission.

• 58:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  We're gonna put you on the bottom of the San Francisco hill.

• 58:53Jordi Hays?

  Except, except I, my, my first car was a very, very old Toyota Corolla hatchback.

• 59:00John Coogan?

  Was it manual?

• 59:01Jordi Hays?

  That was manual.

• 59:01Speaker 01

  No.

• 59:02Jordi Hays?

  And I would drive it in San Francisco and it would be like a life or death.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  Going uphill, manual is really hard.

• 59:08Jordi Hays?

  No, and, and San Francisco hills are just a different breed.

• 59:11John Coogan?

  It's terrible. That's wild.

• 59:13Jordi Hays?

  And I just remember like some of the, the peak fear of my teenage years was, you know, uh, hitting a stop sign or hitting a red light and.

• 59:21John Coogan?

  Oh, it's so bad.

• 59:22Jordi Hays?

  The issue is even by then, even at the time when I was 16, people were so, historically, so many, there were, every car was manual.

• 59:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 59:30Jordi Hays?

  And so if you wouldn't pull up behind somebody on a hill, you wouldn't pull up right behind their bumper.

• 59:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:36Jordi Hays?

  But in the age of automatics.

• 59:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:38Jordi Hays?

  People will just pull up right, you know, behind your bumper. Maybe they're leaving a couple of feet. And so I'd be looking in the rearview mirror being like, if I don't pull this off, like.

• 59:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's my issue with Teslas. It's like if you're self-driving, they don't see me in my Honda S3000. They don't know there's gonna be four feet of rollback. Self, self-driving is not prepared for me to stall five times to get up this hill.

• 59:59John Coogan?

  Brutal. It's really true. Uh, okay, so if you do want an electric vehicle that's also a convertible, do you know what you have to get? Tesla doesn't sell one. Rivian doesn't sell one.

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Can you not take the roof off?

• 1:00:11John Coogan?

  No, you can't take the roof off. Uh, uh, uh, Lucid doesn't sell one. Taycan doesn't come in a convertible yet.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  Whoa.

• 1:00:18John Coogan?

  Crazy. You have to get the Hummer EV. It's just great. Uh, I, I, I think that's a very rational choice for somebody who just wants, I, I, I just want an electric car and I want a convertible.

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, can we get a three-speed manual on an EV? Can we get a three speeds?

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  Well, you know that Hyundai has the fake DCT now and people actually love it. A lot of the car guys have driven them and they're like, because it injects sound that's pretty accurate. And a lot of them are like, yeah, it was weird for the first minute, but then I just got into it and it was exactly like.

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  Beyond the need of electric vehicles.

• 1:00:48John Coogan?

  Oh, totally, totally. Yeah. But it's like this funny like hatchback, the IONIQ 5N. It's designed by the guy who did the M division at BMW. They post him, the letter that comes after M is N. And so he made the N series. They're also doing this, Hyundai is on a tear, they're doing a whole bunch of random stuff. Anyway, we need the sound effect because Kuen 30B has dropped and Will Brown is given the review. Let's hear it for Alibaba with their open source model.

• 1:01:20Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully the sound is balanced on the stream.

• 1:01:23John Coogan?

  Uh, Will Brown says, I really didn't expect 30BA3B to be this good. I was hoping we'd get a small mixture of experts model as a useful research toy. Instead, we got one of the strongest all around models under a hundred billion parameters. Uh, have you been following Kuen at all and what's going on?

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  I only use American made models.

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Chinese models you can't use.

• 1:01:42John Coogan?

  Well, have you heard the Tyler Cowen take that the Chinese models are actually American models? Because they are trained on American data. Exactly. They're trained on the American internet because that's where the data comes from. And they often export the data or exfiltrate it from OpenAI.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  Or they use the American, or they train on the American models themselves, right?

• 1:02:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then they do maybe a little bit RLHF to say, hey, cut it with the Tiananmen stuff.

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  It's the Taobao model. It's a rip off of the American provider.

• 1:02:08John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. So maybe there's less to be worried about. Maybe the Manchurian candidate in DeepSeek is secretly a pro American Manchurian candidate. And once you get it, once you, once you, you know, actually prompt engineer it enough, it'll love talking about Tiananmen. It gets fire. That's what it lives for.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  Every single day.

• 1:02:24John Coogan?

  It's like capitalism is the best system. It's lifted more people out of poverty than any other system.

• 1:02:29Speaker 01

  Delian buried in the model.

• 1:02:30John Coogan?

  I believe it.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  We should send Delian into Shanghai, like behind enemy lines to train these models. Put them in a Varda capsule, send them down.

• 1:02:39Jordi Hays?

  All right, this next post from Ev Randall. He asked GPT-45, can you help me find some good Chinese food spots in SF that I may not have heard of previously? Absolutely. There are several Chinese spots in SF that will make your mouth water and we'll get to that. But first, in case this is a business meal, I'd love to talk to you about Ramp. Ramp is the ultimate platform for modern finance teams, combining corporate cards with expense management, bill payments, procurement, accounting automation, and more. Ramp is on a mission to help customers save their most valuable resources: time and money.

• 1:03:10John Coogan?

  I've been doing this to random people too. There's somebody flying down from San Francisco, and I was like, oh, like, are you gonna pay, will your company like pay for your flight? And he was like, yeah, yeah, of course. And I was like, by any chance, are you on Ramp? They have corporate travel that makes it really

• 1:03:25Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic travel product. We booked this room on Ramp Travel.

• 1:03:29John Coogan?

  We did.

• 1:03:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it makes you wonder if OpenAI was actually incubated by a different new company maker.

• 1:03:36John Coogan?

  It's possible. Well, speaking of travel and corporate travel, go to wander.com. Find your happy place. Find your happy place. There we go. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dream events, top-tier catering, and 24/7 consulting service.

• 1:03:50Jordi Hays?

  Getting Bill Manidis to sing your company jingle is priceless.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  I'm a happy wander investor.

• 1:03:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, you are. Okay. Run-hand washes the other. You come on the show, you run some ads.

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  Chill the investments, you're good.

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  Money goes right into your own pocket. I like it. That's great. Did you see this from Jarvis? This is awesome. A firm called Dragon Lawyers filed court papers with the watermark on every single page until the judge ordered them to stop.

• 1:04:16Jordi Hays?

  The thing that's beautiful is the word R.

• 1:04:20John Coogan?

  It's this massive Dragon Lawyers P L P C.

• 1:04:23Jordi Hays?

  Apparently their website is iconic too. It also features the dragon.

• 1:04:27John Coogan?

  The dragon. It just cracks me up so much.

• 1:04:32Jordi Hays?

  This is called exercising free will.

• 1:04:33John Coogan?

  This is innovation. People don't realize that you could do whatever you want with a watermark.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  What's incredible is that's not AI-generated. Someone drew that.

• 1:04:41John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:04:42Jordi Hays?

  AI does not know how to make that. The other thing that stands out here is that the attorney at Dragon Lawyers uses a at yahoo.com email. So that's how you know he's been in the game. He's been in the game for a long time.

• 1:04:55John Coogan?

  You see Yahoo. There's a whole, there's a whole like, you know,

• 1:04:58Jordi Hays?

  Cohort of hitters.

• 1:04:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, it's like astrology for business. Like, when you see the different domain names, you know. So, so, it tells a whole story about the person.

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  You would never want to work with a lawyer that has a corporate branded email.

• 1:05:09John Coogan?

  Absolutely AOL, Outlook.com, Yahoo.

• 1:05:13Jordi Hays?

  Even better, AltaVista.

• 1:05:14John Coogan?

  AltaVista, that's a throwback. You gotta get a lawyer who has an AltaVista.com.

• 1:05:20Jordi Hays?

  And a dragon watermark.

• 1:05:21John Coogan?

  And a dragon watermark, for sure. You should, you should get your own watermark. What, what would your watermark be?

• 1:05:27Jordi Hays?

  I think the dragon's pretty sick.

• 1:05:28John Coogan?

  The dragon's pretty sick.

• 1:05:30Jordi Hays?

  I think that's hard to beat. Mine might be the ramp logo to help control your corporate spend.

• 1:05:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. Just a massive ramp card. Maybe, maybe Jordy just a photo of you in the jacket like this, like the dragon.

• 1:05:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:41John Coogan?

  But in, in, in the TVPN jacket, that would be the way to do it. But we need to be watermarking more things. We're, we're thinking about selling the windshield of this show. So we already have the logos down there.

• 1:05:51Jordi Hays?

  So it'll be a piece of glass that separates between, no, and, and, and so basically we'll set up like a glass box.

• 1:05:56John Coogan?

  Physical glass.

• 1:05:57Jordi Hays?

  So every angle has a different.

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  Has a logo on it.

• 1:06:00Speaker 01

  I mean, I listen for the ad reads, right? The content in between is irrelevant. I, I think we should just do all ad reads.

• 1:06:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, speaking of that.

• 1:06:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, we're thinking of, we're thinking of setting up a premium subscription that's just the ads.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Just the ads.

• 1:06:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you got rid of us.

• 1:06:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, trusted by millions. Go to public.com.

• 1:06:24Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 1:06:25John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, did you see this post by Ben Scharf? Commerce as we know it has officially changed forever. Well done Shopify and OpenAI.

• 1:06:31Jordi Hays?

  I thought the first line was a little dramatic, but it's very cool. Uh, it's basically an integrate, it's a.

• 1:06:36John Coogan?

  Oh, you're shopping on OpenAI? Oh, on ChatGPT?

• 1:06:39Jordi Hays?

  Integration.

• 1:06:40John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  The bearish thing is these are not, these are not good red lights.

• 1:06:44John Coogan?

  These are not the best red light therapy for anti-aging. How do you get one?

• 1:06:46Speaker 01

  Tractor Supply.com.

• 1:06:48John Coogan?

  Tractor Supply? This is like a horse, horse electrolytes?

• 1:06:51Speaker 01

  The chicken light.

• 1:06:51John Coogan?

  Chicken light.

• 1:06:52Speaker 01

  If you go to my desk in my house, I have chicken lights all around.

• 1:06:55John Coogan?

  Why?

• 1:06:55Speaker 01

  For excitement. They're because you get the same wavelength as these expensive LEDs and chicken lights $19.

• 1:07:00John Coogan?

  And it's good for anti-aging.

• 1:07:01Jordi Hays?

  Huge alpha, you heard it here first, chicken lights.

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  Chicken lights, Tractor Supply.com.

• 1:07:05John Coogan?

  Tractor Supply.com. Well, I mean, as soon as we talk about this, this will be baked into the next training run of GPT-5 and it'll be updated.

• 1:07:12Jordi Hays?

  No, but overall, this is very cool. Uh, people don't really realize, like, nothing makes me happier than reducing friction in commerce. So the fact that I can just go to OpenAI. You know, do some product research, use Shop Pay to checkout with an OpenAI.

• 1:07:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:29Jordi Hays?

  And do all of that.

• 1:07:30John Coogan?

  And wasn't Aiden kind of, uh, kind of, uh, teasing this a little bit? He was like, oh yeah, like every time I shop for anything, I do a whole deep research report. I put, I, I, I burned 10,000 hours of GPU time to figure out what paper towels are like.

• 1:07:43Jordi Hays?

  Or you're burning, the money's gonna burn on Google Ads. I mean, um, yeah, the, the interesting thing here is that there were a lot of companies. There are a lot of companies that have raised venture capital to build AI shopping assistants.

• 1:07:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:57Jordi Hays?

  And this is kind of what we've talked about on the show quite a bit, which is that if you're building an agent.

• 1:08:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:03Jordi Hays?

  A consumer agentic experience, you have to assume that you're basically on OpenAI's roadmap.

• 1:08:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:08:10Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, maybe they haven't announced it yet, you know, they've talked about shopping before, they've talked about.

• 1:08:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:16Jordi Hays?

  Ads, different things like that, but, but this type of thing, uh, you know, any type of agentic experience that helps consumers transact online, you just have to assume that you're.

• 1:08:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, I mean, this is the Ben Thompson aggregation theory thing, why OpenAI needs to become a consumer tech company. Uh, they have, you know, almost a billion users. And so if they can be the portal to AI stuff, they can do a lot of the things downstream of that question.

• 1:08:42Jordi Hays?

  It is, it is funny. So, so in the, in the, um, in the meta lawsuit, they, they obviously avoid TikTok.

• 1:08:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Jordi Hays?

  And one reason that you could argue, you know, avoid TikTok is that it's state backed and they had to raise 10, you know, however many tens of billions of dollars to do it. But it seems now you can build new consumer tech giants, you just need tens of billions of dollars. And, and a state government backing you. Yeah, well, I mean, uh.

• 1:09:09John Coogan?

  Not for OpenAI.

• 1:09:09Jordi Hays?

  Not for OpenAI.

• 1:09:12John Coogan?

  Put on the tinfoil hat.

• 1:09:13Jordi Hays?

  Put on the tinfoil hat. We don't have the tinfoil hat today.

• 1:09:15John Coogan?

  But it is like a novel financing process.

• 1:09:18Jordi Hays?

  But it is an interesting. And legal process.

• 1:09:20John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. But I think it will set an important precedent. We've been advocating for more nonprofit to for-profit conversions. We're really looking into PETA because they know where all the tastiest animals live. And we think that that could unlock. Potentially hundreds of billions of

• 1:09:36Jordi Hays?

  Maybe trillions.

• 1:09:37John Coogan?

  Maybe trillions. Just maps of, just selling maps of the most delicious animals.

• 1:09:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  The most delicious. The PETA, the PETA Take Private is gonna be a banger. Every fund is gonna be in that for sure.

• 1:09:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:50John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:09:51Jordi Hays?

  It's what Thrive's gonna buy with this.

• 1:09:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I also think Red Cross, you put Brian Johnson at the helm, it's just, all the blood goes through him. It's a, it's a huge, huge opportunity.

• 1:10:02Jordi Hays?

  Huge opportunity.

• 1:10:03John Coogan?

  Blueprint, Red Cross, Blueprint, they work together.

• 1:10:06Jordi Hays?

  Blue Cross.

• 1:10:06John Coogan?

  Blue Cross. Put it all together. Kretsch of biohacking.

• 1:10:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, we have a post that-

• 1:10:13John Coogan?

  From a former guest that actually, did you know that we broke this story? And TechCrunch reported on us?

• 1:10:19Jordi Hays?

  We didn't break it. We didn't break this story.

• 1:10:20John Coogan?

  We caused the story.

• 1:10:21Jordi Hays?

  It was not meant to be a story.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  Wait, the podcast, you got community notes?

• 1:10:24John Coogan?

  This is us. That's me.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  That's you. You are the podcast host.

• 1:10:27John Coogan?

  Okay, so we had Jordy, Jordy, bring it down.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Also, this is not, not a podcast.

• 1:10:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I know, it's not. It's a live show. We need to put, we need to put them in the truth zone. Anyway, Jordy, read it.

• 1:10:34Jordi Hays?

  CEO of Perplexity comes on the show. We talk for 30 minutes about a bunch of different things. Ads were brought up in a hypothetical.

• 1:10:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:43Jordi Hays?

  He answered the hypothetical question.

• 1:10:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:46Jordi Hays?

  TechCrunch basically used it to do this sort of like clickbaity piece.

• 1:10:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:51Jordi Hays?

  Which I thought was wrong in so many ways. One is, if you actually listen to the interview, he's saying that the browser that they're building is a huge part of the company's, you know, a huge part of the company's roadmap. Very, very meaningful. He says this is their second act.

• 1:11:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:08Jordi Hays?

  It's got, it's, it's, you know, he's really betting the company on it in many ways. And so to do something, to write something like this in a way that is just objectively damaging to Perplexity's brand, because what user, no, yeah, of course, over time, every consumer tech company on a long enough time horizon runs ads, right? Netflix, Instacart, anybody with a large audience eventually runs ads. But that said, there's nothing about our conversation with him that said that that's the top priority, or that's how they're planning to monetize all these different things. And so that was just, you know, founders need to be aware and investors that TechCrunch is not the publication that it was.

• 1:11:48John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:11:48Jordi Hays?

  And you have to assume that they are a hostile actor now. And sure, they might cover your fundraise, they might do this or that, but I think they knew exactly what they were doing. And, you know, I support private equity broadly.

• 1:12:03John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, but now it's not private equity backed.

• 1:12:05Jordi Hays?

  Now it is.

• 1:12:06John Coogan?

  They sold.

• 1:12:06Jordi Hays?

  To another private equity.

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  To another private equity, yeah.

• 1:12:10Speaker 01

  Creative ham.

• 1:12:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I remember when TechCrunch was for sale, my thought was, you know, worthless asset, just because, not a worthless asset, that's a little bit harsh. I, we weren't interested in exploring it, but it almost would have been worth buying it just so that it didn't turn into TechCrunch being anti-tech.

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, much like Gawker, the most ethical thing to do is buy it and shut it down.

• 1:12:39Jordi Hays?

  Shut it down, yeah, true.

• 1:12:40John Coogan?

  What was interesting about this to me, so the actual title of the article is "Perplexity CEO Says Its Browser Will Track Everything Users Do Online and Sell Hyper-Personalized Ads." Now, I have always said that, like, I don't think it's a challenge to sell ads in LLM responses.

• 1:12:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  I think it's actually very true. There was initially a moment where it was like, oh, well, if it's all text back and forth, like, what are you gonna do? Put display ads? It's like, no, you're obviously just gonna have another LLM that runs on top of the response. And before it spits it out, you're gonna say, hey, add an ad into this paragraph at this point, and add a sponsored block.

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  And those ads will be more topical.

• 1:13:16John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  They'll be better.

• 1:13:17John Coogan?

  They'll be better.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  Users will want them.

• 1:13:18John Coogan?

  So I've been always super bullish on the idea of advertising in text-based LLM responses. I don't think it's a challenge at all. I think it's very logical. I think ChatGPT will do it on the free tier. I think Perplexity should do it. But his response to me was actually more bearish on ads in the short term than I thought it was going to be. But then TechCrunch flipped it around and made him sound, it was very, very odd.

• 1:13:39Jordi Hays?

  It is interesting to think about what Google would have to...

• 1:13:43John Coogan?

  Well, Google's already doing this, too.

• 1:13:45Jordi Hays?

  If Google made products.

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  In the Google results.

• 1:13:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, you already have AI results.

• 1:13:48John Coogan?

  You already have ads in the AI results. They already are doing this, yeah.

• 1:13:50Jordi Hays?

  No, but I was gonna say, what, if Google said, you know, for 50 bucks a month, you can have non-personalized ads in Chrome? Would you?

• 1:14:00John Coogan?

  No, I don't want that. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  I would pay a hundred dollars a month to have only ramp ads across every single vehicle.

• 1:14:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:08John Coogan?

  You probably could do that if you just set up your own Google Ads account and then just put your, only your email in there. You know how you used to get those like, those like Facebook ads that were like, you know, I'm a monitis on a T-shirt. Like, I have, don't talk to me until I've had my coffee or whatever. You know, there's like super, like Teespring was like really leveraging that.

• 1:14:27Jordi Hays?

  No, it's, I'm a monitis, don't talk to me until I've had one banger on X.

• 1:14:31John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly. Like, and you're just like, how did they think to target me with that? But it was all based on like the, the, the Facebook ad targeting at the time.

• 1:14:38Speaker 01

  Building a custom ad block Chrome extension that replaces it with the ramp.

• 1:14:42John Coogan?

  People have done that with like, you know, replace it with cats or replace it with random stuff. So, yeah, we should build that for ramp, for sure, for sure. Um, but, uh, uh, we got the, uh, we got the community note on it. Uh, and they did, they did actually credit us, credit us in the TechCrunch article.

• 1:14:58Speaker 01

  Incorrectly.

• 1:14:59John Coogan?

  Incorrectly as a podcast, yep. But they did give us the shout out, uh, and they didn't refer to us as our old name. They got the acronym correctly, correct. They called it TBPN, which is great. And, uh, and the, and the, um, after there was a big debate on X about the post, there was eventually a, uh, community note that says, TechCrunch takes what Arvind said out of context, the podcast host, I think that's me, asked him a hypothetical question. And Arvind, uh, tags Arrington, uh, Arrington, Michael Arrington, the original founder of TechCrunch. And he said, I am sorry, I'm deeply ashamed at what TechCrunch has become. It's rough. Never sell your company.

• 1:15:33Jordi Hays?

  Never sell.

• 1:15:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:35Jordi Hays?

  Whatever you're doing, make it your last company.

• 1:15:37John Coogan?

  Never, never sell. I, I, I would never associate with anyone who sold their company, ever, never. What do you have to say there?

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  What do you have to say for yourself?

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  As chairman of TPPN, we will never sell this media franchise to anyone. We will hover buy and shut down TechCrunch.

• 1:15:51John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. I think all three of us have sold companies to this point. Um, anyway, Ray Dalio dropped a long piece. I don't know if we want to.

• 1:15:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:16:00John Coogan?

  Skip over that.

• 1:16:00Jordi Hays?

  Skip over that one.

• 1:16:01John Coogan?

  Okay. Let's do, uh, Jason.

• 1:16:03Jordi Hays?

  I did say, I think it was, uh, uh, Buco or Bucko.

• 1:16:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, Buco Capital guy.

• 1:16:08Jordi Hays?

  He was basically saying if, if Dalio is wrong again this time, he was, he was basically saying like, I almost hope Dalio is right about this changing world order.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  You've heard the conspiracy theory that Bridgewater is not a real hedge fund, right? No one, if you ask all Bridgewater associate employees, they've never seen someone actually place a trade. Uh, it's like possibly it's like giant Ponzi that no one knows what to do with, you know? Obviously they're not a Ponzi, it's a real hedge fund, but no one has ever seen a trade get conducted at Bridgewater. So I like the idea that it's all in, it's a giant news, it's a media business. It's all subsidizing Dalio.

• 1:16:42John Coogan?

  It's a media business.

• 1:16:43Speaker 01

  This one trade.

• 1:16:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's hilarious because it's like they, they, they like up until like a couple of years ago, the media product was one PDF that was written out there called Principles that eventually got turned into a book. Like, that's like, that's the most tinfoil hat conspiracy theory in the world. Um, hilarious though. Anyway, uh, let's move on. Researchers secretly ran a massive unauthorized AI persuasion experiment on Reddit in a large debate sub. The bots answers mined the original poster's identity and post history to personalize answers and created identities such as Rape Survivor. This is dark.

• 1:17:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, super dark. I mean.

• 1:17:20John Coogan?

  Lot of updates here.

• 1:17:21Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 1:17:22John Coogan?

  Formal legal demands against the researchers who ran this experiment.

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

  The, the reason I thought this was interesting is that we tend to associate bots.

• 1:17:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:31Jordi Hays?

  With low quality actors.

• 1:17:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:17:33Jordi Hays?

  You know, getting a DM that's like, hello, you've, you forgot to log in.

• 1:17:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, here's your FedEx thing or some like, you know, credit card thing.

• 1:17:42Jordi Hays?

  But, but the, the, the internet is, um, full of bots from sophisticated groups in this way. This is just one story to break out of, out of many.

• 1:17:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:53Jordi Hays?

  And I thought it was an interesting, um, use case of like being able to influence opinion at scale in a way of not just in, in a hyper personalized way. So they would, they would be responding to. A comment or a post.

• 1:18:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:18:07Jordi Hays?

  And they would go to and and and whatever software they were they were using would go to the user's profile that they were commenting to look back at all their previous history.

• 1:18:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:16Jordi Hays?

  And craft a response specifically for that person.

• 1:18:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:20Jordi Hays?

  And again, a human can do that, but doing being able to do that at scale in order to influence opinion is.

• 1:18:28John Coogan?

  Our only saving grace is R K G I puzzles on every single webpage. Every time you click a new page.

• 1:18:37John Coogan?

  No, no, the I M O will be solved, but the R K G I puzzle.

• 1:18:39Jordi Hays?

  Will not be solved.

• 1:18:40John Coogan?

  Be solved. You'll have to mash the blocks for a minute every time you want to refresh the page.

• 1:18:45Jordi Hays?

  Save something outside of content safety guidelines.

• 1:18:47John Coogan?

  Yes, that that is a big one.

• 1:18:49Jordi Hays?

  And so on this Reddit's top lawyer Ben Lee said the company is considering legal action against researchers from the University of Zurich who ran. What he called an improper and highly unethical experiment. So anyways, Reddit not happy that their users are being turned into lab rats. But I'm sure.

• 1:19:11John Coogan?

  Let's move on to this design trend. Linear has for a long time been the design.

• 1:19:17Jordi Hays?

  Product building and planning.

• 1:19:20John Coogan?

  And everyone's been kind of ripping it off, but.

• 1:19:23Jordi Hays?

  Ripping off the website.

• 1:19:24John Coogan?

  But yeah, the website, but Canon over at Icon has completely changed the game in terms of design and. Built it's an A I ad maker, but it looks like a T M U design website.

• 1:19:38Jordi Hays?

  Coachella.

• 1:19:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does. He has his story, his investors on the landing page.

• 1:19:44Jordi Hays?

  Including the ramp logo.

• 1:19:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, I guess it's like someone from Ramp invested. The team is examples. Wait, wait, have you seen when you go and you you click like get started, it will actually say like only five slots remaining and there's like a timer for SaaS product.

• 1:20:00Jordi Hays?

  That's so good.

• 1:20:00John Coogan?

  It's so good. So, I mean, this has been hotly debated with like, is he in on the joke? Is he going too far? He's clearly pushing the limits in terms of baiting people and creating frustration. He, I don't know if you saw this earlier, but he put out, Icon put out a

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  Oh, the competitive grid.

• 1:20:21John Coogan?

  And, and he, his company was the only one with tier one investors.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  And tier one engineers.

• 1:20:25John Coogan?

  And tier one engineers and OpenAI had neither and they have a lot of the same investors. So, what is your take genius or, or, you know, or is it the scary castle?

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  I think it's, if you're gonna be the machine that generates slop, you have to become slop.

• 1:20:41John Coogan?

  That's a good take, yeah. It is a slop. It's a slop farmer.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  Icon's terminal business is TikTok slop. If you're gonna be in that business, you might as well live in it.

• 1:20:49John Coogan?

  Live in it, yeah.

• 1:20:51Speaker 01

  I think that's a good take.

• 1:20:52John Coogan?

  A, a, a life's work of slop. It's great. Uh, has you, wait, has your ex payout gone up?

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  My ex pay, yeah, I got, a lot.

• 1:20:59John Coogan?

  You got a big check?

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  A big check.

• 1:21:01John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:21:02Speaker 01

  There we go. Are you gonna retire? Uh, off the ex payout alone. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:05John Coogan?

  You know what you should spend your ex payout on? On Aidsleep. Go to Aidsleep.com. Nights that fuel your best days. Turn an Ebed into the ultimate sleeping experience.

• 1:21:14John Coogan?

  Apparently, this is from Sheil. Ex crackdown on engagement farms so real creators are earning more. Reminds me of Google's 2011 Panda update that crushed spammy sites like Mahalo, which I guess was Jason Calacanis's website? I had no idea about this. Uh, and boosted quality ones like NerdWallet.

• 1:21:29Speaker 01

  That was the most brutal.

• 1:21:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. Sheil's like really slides that in there. And made the internet a better place. It's interesting. So Sheil shares his payouts. It went from around $200, $240 to $700 and then to over $1,300. Let's hear it from Sheil pulling in the big bucks for his post.

• 1:21:49Speaker 01

  I mean, if you are. A four-figure paycheck.

• 1:21:51John Coogan?

  Pretty good.

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Pretty good.

• 1:21:52John Coogan?

  Pretty good. I mean, that's getting up into YouTube money.

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  If you have, if you're an LP of Shields, you have premonocent on the chat, right?

• 1:22:00John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 1:22:01Speaker 01

  That, that has to be a DPI driver.

• 1:22:03John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:04John Coogan?

  You think so? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:22:06Speaker 01

  He can't pocket that.

• 1:22:06John Coogan?

  You can't pocket that? It's gotta go back in the fund?

• 1:22:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:10Jordi Hays?

  We actually do do that, except, except John. No, but we, we, we put all of our.

• 1:22:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, we pull all of, all of the X accounts into one, into one, one, one account. But, but it has gone up. I'm excited to see where our TBPN official check lands because we've been pumping out a lot of content, getting a lot of views.

• 1:22:30Jordi Hays?

  My understanding is that was all going to finance a goo-based energy drink in Nashville, Tennessee.

• 1:22:35John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 1:22:36Jordi Hays?

  There were rumors circulating, yes.

• 1:22:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, watch the space. Uh, let's go to Lulu. She says, an example of what I call the cascade of courage when a brave CEO does something that everyone wants to, but no one dares to. The somewhat brave CEOs are emboldened to join and eventually everyone else follows suit until even the most risk averse CEOs do it.

• 1:22:55Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for the somewhat brave and the risk averse CEOs.

• 1:22:59John Coogan?

  Somewhat brave CEOs. Yeah, they don't get enough credit. They don't get enough credit. Everyone talking, oh, Brian Armstrong, so brave. No one says about the tier three bravery.

• 1:23:08Jordi Hays?

  Not first, not last.

• 1:23:09John Coogan?

  Not last, not total coward in the middle of the pack.

• 1:23:11Jordi Hays?

  It returns to being in the middle of the curve.

• 1:23:13John Coogan?

  Pretty good.

• 1:23:14Jordi Hays?

  Pretty good, yeah.

• 1:23:15John Coogan?

  Sometimes. But, uh, Duolingo, uh, I actually don't know if the CEO is the founder, but you know, Duolingo was started by the guy who's, who created Captchas?

• 1:23:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:22John Coogan?

  Yeah. Amazing. Legendary story. Um, but anyway, Duolingo says, BLO is an all hands email from our CEO. We will be going AI first. Just like how betting on mobile in 2012 made all the difference. We're making a similar call now. It's time for the platform shift. What doesn't change, we remain a company that cares deeply about its employees. And they said, Duolingo is going to be AI first, changing how work gets done. It's not just a product, productivity boost, it gets us closer to our mission.

• 1:23:49Jordi Hays?

  This gets me thinking, there is an opportunity for a company to basically let go every single person except the CEO and be the first.

• 1:23:59John Coogan?

  The one person company.

• 1:24:00Jordi Hays?

  One person, one billion dollar revenue company. And you just have to tap it for a second.

• 1:24:05John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, I was thinking of that. Why then rehire people? Yeah.

• 1:24:07Jordi Hays?

  Rehire back. The fastest way to get to a billion dollars, one employee is to start with six billion dollars, lots of employees. Fire everyone, see what happens.

• 1:24:16John Coogan?

  And then 20% of the clients just forget to stop paying. Everything breaks.

• 1:24:20Jordi Hays?

  X did this.

• 1:24:20John Coogan?

  X did this, yeah. X proves this is possible. What, what, what company do you think is plus a billion in revenue that you think you could actually run solo?

• 1:24:31John Coogan?

  I was thinking, I was looking at BlackBerry recently. They still make five hundred million dollars a year.

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  Auto insurance companies are another good one.

• 1:24:37John Coogan?

  Auto, oh yeah.

• 1:24:38Speaker 01

  Claim adjudication, kind of a good AI problem.

• 1:24:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, pretty simple. Interesting.

• 1:24:43Jordi Hays?

  Imagine saying you're having an issue and you're saying, "Talk to a human" and it's like, "We just got one guy."

• 1:24:49John Coogan?

  We only have the CEO.

• 1:24:50Jordi Hays?

  We just got one guy. Like, it's actually faster to talk to me.

• 1:24:52John Coogan?

  And the CEOs of Hill and Dolly, having a dinner, shaking hands, greasing balls.

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  You're on the side of the road, car's on fire, you're talking to OpenAI.

• 1:24:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:25:00John Coogan?

  It's great. Uh, anyway, uh, congratulations.

• 1:25:03Jordi Hays?

  It's glazing you.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  It's glazing you.

• 1:25:05Jordi Hays?

  No, you're a great driver, you're a great driver, like, you know, that, that sign.

• 1:25:09John Coogan?

  I just crashed.

• 1:25:10Jordi Hays?

  That sign jumped into the street.

• 1:25:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. How did he not see you?

• 1:25:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how did that sign not see you coming?

• 1:25:17John Coogan?

  Bicyclists shouldn't be on the road anyway. They should ride on the sidewalk.

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  Have you tried having four wheels? Cause I don't get it.

• 1:25:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, it makes no sense. Uh, anyway, I need a sound effect because Joshua Steinman over at Galpanic has launched a vibe reel announcing his company.

• 1:25:36Jordi Hays?

  Vibe reel alert. I mean, it was no, it was no, uh,

• 1:25:48Jordi Hays?

  I've never, honestly, I've, I've never seen John laugh like that.

• 1:25:53John Coogan?

  It's so mean because, obviously I love Josh, we saw him on the plane. Uh, no, this is the meme. This is the meme of like, you know, you're shipping me. But it is awesome. It's a great video. I love the aesthetics.

• 1:26:06Jordi Hays?

  And I think, I think he did this because he knew we were gonna be, he, he must have,

• 1:26:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:10Jordi Hays?

  you know, figured out from

• 1:26:12John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 1:26:12Jordi Hays?

  the airline that we were gonna be on the flight to, sitting right behind him.

• 1:26:17Speaker 01

  Do we know what Galvanic does?

• 1:26:20Jordi Hays?

  Yes. They secure

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  The American industrial base.

• 1:26:23John Coogan?

  The technology base. It's a technology company.

• 1:26:28John Coogan?

  But more importantly, it's run by our absolute boy Josh Steinman, who we love. Uh, it's fantastic. It, it, it does have very cool aesthetics. It's a great video. Go check it out. I wish we could play it, but we can't. We're working off a PDF today. So, share the video.

• 1:26:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:46John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:26:46Jordi Hays?

  Any, any critiques on today's stream, by the way, just go to, uh, find Ben Kohler on the app and, uh, shoot him a note. Uh, he'll have an MPS survey for today's stream.

• 1:26:59John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, what, what else is in the news? Uh, we should wrap up soon. This is too, it's getting a little too wild. We got 10 minutes till four.

• 1:27:05Jordi Hays?

  What else we got?

• 1:27:06John Coogan?

  We got Pelosi bill.

• 1:27:07Jordi Hays?

  Cover the Pelosi Act.

• 1:27:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:09Jordi Hays?

  Uh, there's a new bill in Congress. If you've been living under a rock since yesterday.

• 1:27:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:14Jordi Hays?

  It's the preventing elected leaders owning securities and, and investments.

• 1:27:19John Coogan?

  They get super creative with these acronyms.

• 1:27:21Jordi Hays?

  The Pelosi Act and, um, yeah, Josh Ha- Hawley, uh, sounds like an absolute dog for coming out with this.

• 1:27:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:30Jordi Hays?

  And, um,

• 1:27:30John Coogan?

  What's your take on the insider trading on Capitol Hill?

• 1:27:33Speaker 01

  I, I want to announce that we are supporting the Ramp Act.

• 1:27:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:27:36Speaker 01

  The, uh, the, um,

• 1:27:39John Coogan?

  What does the Ramp stand for? The Ramp Act?

• 1:27:41Jordi Hays?

  Running America.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  The right accounting company for your provider.

• 1:27:47John Coogan?

  Extremely. We need to get you a pen and paper so you can map these out beforehand.

• 1:27:52Jordi Hays?

  The interesting impact here is that autopilot, which has run the Pelosi tracker account forever. It, maybe it's own, oh, their own undoing though, because if they advertise how good, how good Pelosi is at insider trading.

• 1:28:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:06Jordi Hays?

  Made it too much in the public eye.

• 1:28:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:08Jordi Hays?

  And they're going to have to find another goaded copy, you know,

• 1:28:11John Coogan?

  I've always said that, I've always said that the elected leaders should be primarily optimizing for the stock market going up in the short term. And we should ultimately just give Jane Street right access to the legal code.

• 1:28:24Jordi Hays?

  We don't need elections.

• 1:28:25John Coogan?

  We don't need elections.

• 1:28:26Jordi Hays?

  We need markets.

• 1:28:26John Coogan?

  We need markets and we need, we, we need high frequency trading firms to decide what laws and they can toggle laws off within microseconds.

• 1:28:34Jordi Hays?

  Does that tie into our sponsor?

• 1:28:36John Coogan?

  Which one? We got a bunch.

• 1:28:38Speaker 01

  Polly Market?

• 1:28:39John Coogan?

  Uh, Polly Market. Oh, yeah.

• 1:28:40Speaker 01

  Polly Market.

• 1:28:40John Coogan?

  Polly Market. Did you see Polly Market, uh, predicted the Canadian election correctly?

• 1:28:44Jordi Hays?

  They absolutely nailed it.

• 1:28:46John Coogan?

  I don't.

• 1:28:46Jordi Hays?

  What they basically made, I, I mean, the way to think about Polly Market is it's, it's effectively, uh, like a, a, a decentralized crystal ball. Is the best way to describe it, right?

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  It is.

• 1:28:59Jordi Hays?

  And it's it's really interesting to watch this chart. Unfortunately, we can't screen share it. But about a month ago, they had Carney at 60% and you can just watch as we get closer and closer to yesterday. Uh, just going up and to the right. And again, this is uh, back to back to back to back. Uh, in in terms of calling elections. Um, it is.

• 1:29:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, I I I do like thi- this story that they got it right has been not really in the news. And I I think a lot of it's driven by the fact that the, I mean, the the liberal won, the conservative lost, right? And it was kind of like an upset, but polymarket called it correctly. I don't, I actually haven't been tracking the news in Canada. I don't know if if if it's been like as much of an issue, but uh, during the 2024 election, obviously the question about like, is polymarket biased was a huge one and then they called it correctly. And so I'm wondering in the next American election, if uh, there will be debate over polymarket role, polymarket's role in the American election. Or if we've like truly just laid it to rest and and prediction markets are just a thing that exists and everyone's say, oh, yeah, like they.

• 1:30:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because it seems like a, you know, election interference is obviously illegal, but but conclave interference is not obviously illegal. If you're a bishop.

• 1:30:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:17Jordi Hays?

  Why not get some action on the side? Gamble.

• 1:30:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. You think that's what's happening?

• 1:30:21Jordi Hays?

  I think it might be happening. We should check the odds.

• 1:30:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:24Jordi Hays?

  Following the the the the next pope.

• 1:30:26Jordi Hays?

  You can track the conclave on polymarket. I think these odds are wrong.

• 1:30:31John Coogan?

  Do you have a, do you have a pick over Pareto?

• 1:30:33Jordi Hays?

  All I can say on this is I think these odds are bad. I think it's all off.

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  Oh, you think it's all off?

• 1:30:38Jordi Hays?

  I think we're headed for an American pope.

• 1:30:39John Coogan?

  American pope. That'd be great.

• 1:30:43Jordi Hays?

  I think we know it'll get more and more accurate as the days go on. Uh, we have a post from Dylan Field. He says, tired. Hmm. The model makes trivial errors. This isn't useful. Wired. For $20 a month, I can rent a somewhat self-aware spaceship that enables me to explore the depths of latent space, access the collective wisdom of humanity and expand my mind.

• 1:31:06Speaker 01

  And

• 1:31:07John Coogan?

  When O three makes trivial errors like claiming to terms cancel when they clearly don't, it becomes apparent that the model doesn't actually understand anything. These models aren't remotely close to AGI. They're latent space search engines. You, how are you feeling about the idea that like the definition of AGI and and where we are in terms of the models? What are they good at? What aren't they good at? Tyler Cowen said AI AGI is here. We had another guy on, Will Brown, who said, we have 10 minute AGI now. Other people say, you know, it can't even solve an arc AGI puzzle. Therefore, it is by definition not AGI.

• 1:31:41Speaker 01

  I just think long duration tasks are clearly the the challenge, right? Like operator does not work particularly well today. Like we are seeing incredible returns to very well scoped, very narrow tasks with very specific models.

• 1:31:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:31:53Speaker 01

  However, you can do more than, you know, work for 10 minutes. I think long duration coherence is still a big challenge.

• 1:31:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:59Speaker 01

  If I had a handicap, but I think we're still probably 5,000, 6,000 years away. But that's going to be a real slow and long take off.

• 1:32:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. Where are you seeing?

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  Famous last words.

• 1:32:10John Coogan?

  Are you seeing AI be most valuable in your personal work life, like, like in your daily driving? Like I've had been, I've been having just a lot of luck with using the deep research function to basically build like, what's essentially just a really detailed Wikipedia page or aggregation of a bunch of Wikipedia pages? Instead of just, oh, I gotta go to the Microsoft Wiki to understand what they were doing in the eighties. And then, and then Apple, I can just say summarize it all, pull it all in, bake it all down.

• 1:32:35Speaker 01

  100% it's, it's, it's, deep research is doing easily four hours of work.

• 1:32:41John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 1:32:42Speaker 01

  On the average query like that, right? Even if, even if you knew exactly the sources to pull from.

• 1:32:47John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. It just saves me opening a ton of tabs. But what have you been finding useful?

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  I mean, even just as an interface to stuff I already like know and work with, like O three is an incredible tutor. Like there's a ton of healthcare regulation that's on websites I don't know how to read.

• 1:33:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:01Speaker 01

  That are like horrible to interface with. Even just using O three to interface with the sites, prepare research briefings for me. It's really amazing. The amount of documentation we're able to generate is much higher.

• 1:33:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. Are you a rune head? Text is the universal interface or do you think voice again is more important?

• 1:33:15Speaker 01

  I think corporate expense accounts are clearly the universal interface.

• 1:33:19John Coogan?

  Yes, receipts really are the universal interface.

• 1:33:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, we got to talk about this post from Luke Metro. He says, my most online opinion is that there should be awards for best screenshots like they do with photography. And I think this is one of the best takes. Take it a week.

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  It's a shame they cropped the best part of the week.

• 1:33:38John Coogan?

  So, so, so I think all three of us are in this chat or, or were before it got doxed.

• 1:33:43Jordi Hays?

  Were you?

• 1:33:45John Coogan?

  You were probably right above this, right?

• 1:33:46Speaker 01

  I did not leave.

• 1:33:47Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 1:33:48John Coogan?

  I know, I know. We were saying we should have left because then we'd be in the screenshot.

• 1:33:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'd be in the screenshot.

• 1:33:52John Coogan?

  If we'd been like, oh, David Sacks, I'm going to leave right now.

• 1:33:54Jordi Hays?

  Imagine how low status it would be if you left and they cropped you out.

• 1:33:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 1:33:59Jordi Hays?

  Like Sean McGuire, Tucker Carlson, not you.

• 1:34:01John Coogan?

  We were joking about, yeah, if you'd left right between David and Tucker, you could have changed your name to.

• 1:34:07Jordi Hays?

  Barack Obama.

• 1:34:08John Coogan?

  Or, or ramp.com or TVP on X, watch TVP on X, and then you leave and boom, you're part of history.

• 1:34:16Jordi Hays?

  Part of history. They would have cropped you out.

• 1:34:18John Coogan?

  Anyway, you're, you're, you're famous for collecting rare PDFs. You're famous for collecting rare books. Do you think you'll get in the rare screenshot game?

• 1:34:27Speaker 01

  I mean, this is just whoever leaked it, I do hope it pays federal charges.

• 1:34:34Jordi Hays?

  That is a bold statement, but I will, I will say, I feel like Will has already has a screenshot collection.

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  I do. I have a lot of great rare screenshots. The real alpha these days is rare RSS feeds.

• 1:34:45John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:34:46Speaker 01

  Private podcasting network.

• 1:34:47John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I've, I've thought about that. The, the, the, the RSS feed for just the partners, just one firm or just for the boys.

• 1:34:57Jordi Hays?

  All right, we got to cover this post from Dylan.

• 1:34:59Speaker 01

  I'll tweet about this.

• 1:35:00Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he says, Microsoft's initial plan was to leapfrog both Google and Amazon to become the largest tech infrastructure company in the world. Then they got scared. They backed away from OpenAI, backed away from some leases, and even slowed down their construction pace for major data centers. Shots fired. Shots fired.

• 1:35:23Jordi Hays?

  This was interesting. I mean, I do feel like Satya has taken a big step back from the media, even in the last, even, you know, in the last month, clearly felt like he was flying a little too close to the sun.

• 1:35:41John Coogan?

  Maybe, yeah, I don't know. The, I read this piece on the plane and like, the thing that was most clear to me is that it's extremely hard to sum up Microsoft's data center strategy in like a single pithy tweet, because Dylan's clearly gone so much deeper on all the different levers that they're pulling to access power and access data center capacity. And not only are the inference happening on the hyperscalers, but now there's the Neo clouds as well with Crusoe and CoreWeave. And so there's a lot of like these weird things where the headline is that Microsoft canceled two gigawatts worth of leases, but that only covers non-binding

• 1:36:26John Coogan?

  LOIs, not firm contracts, and it fails to mention that Microsoft has five gigawatts of pre-leased capacity under binding contracts that will start operations between 2025 and 2028. So it's not like they're like, so in reality, they walked away from more than two gigawatts of non-binding contracts, but you don't hear about those because they're just like in the handshake deal in the LOI phase. But then at the same time, they're also like the number one buyer, or they're, or they're growing a ton.

• 1:36:52Jordi Hays?

  No, and it's interesting, it's interesting to think about how much leverage they get from just coming out and saying, we're pausing on a few of these things.

• 1:37:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:37:01Jordi Hays?

  Because then all the people that had data centers and construction that were just like, oh, one of the hyperscalers will buy it, right? And like, they had raised hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to build this stuff out. So basically, you know, potentially a great case study in exercising leverage for one of a handful of buyers.

• 1:37:21John Coogan?

  Because so semi-analysis like they don't just look at the public reports of what the capex number is. They're actually looking, I mean, they task satellites to take pictures of how the progress on build outs is going. They dig into all this stuff. They said the estimates suggest that Microsoft accounted for more than 60% of all new leased turnkey capacity from Q1 2023 to Q2 2024. Just absolute domination. And in June of 2024, Microsoft's pre-leased capacity was larger than that of the four other major hyperscalers combined. They need a new term. They need to be like a giga scaler. Giga scaler. Because they're so, they're, they're doing so much more business here. And so

• 1:38:02Speaker 01

  What word comes after hyper?

• 1:38:04John Coogan?

  I don't know. Giga?

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  What's more

• 1:38:06John Coogan?

  Oh, oh, in the, in like the

• 1:38:08Speaker 01

  Sizing.

• 1:38:09John Coogan?

  Gigawatt, terawatt. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:38:12Speaker 01

  Terra scaler.

• 1:38:13John Coogan?

  Terra scaler. That's what's next. Microsoft significantly ramped up its self-build efforts, acquiring tens of thousands of acres around the US and the globe, accelerating construction of existing sites and securing gigawatts of power for future sites. Taken together, these moves signaled Microsoft's preparation for what was the most ambitious infrastructure build out in history. While the leasing slowdown is material, these changes are not material to the short and medium term, and they only impact 2027 plus. So this is like that pivot by Satya Nadella to becoming more of a leaser and maybe stepping off the gas. I think a lot of this is probably driven by the, you know, the, the, the deep-seak moment, the idea that these models can be distilled. Maybe there's a pre-training scaling wall

• 1:38:56John Coogan?

  that, you know, yes, there's going to be a ton of RL, but we're not necessarily going to need stuff in the short term. But at the same time, when I look at this, I feel like I want data center build out to continue and accelerate and energy production to build, to accelerate like it is in China. But what's your take?

• 1:39:14Speaker 01

  I just feel like enterprise diffusion is still so far away. Like getting 03-like capabilities in all of the Fortune 500 is like a 20-year project.

• 1:39:25John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:39:25Speaker 01

  Right. So as you think about like inference demand scaling, model distillation going down, it's still I think the Tyler Callen take is correct.

• 1:39:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:39:33Speaker 01

  Diffusion is going to take forever.

• 1:39:34John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 1:39:35Speaker 01

  And you're going to need a whole new class of companies. You know, hint, hint, my dear friend, Dan Ashton runs one of these. Where it's like you can actually diffuse enterprise AI into the enterprise in a way that doesn't take thirty years. Microsoft built, I think, for a world where that diffusion was going to be much faster than what's actually occurring.

• 1:39:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:51Speaker 01

  It's not like everyone's using OpenAI and Fortune 500 today, certainly not Fortune 20s.

• 1:39:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, he actually has a Google Trends chart here. Claude versus Gemini versus Copilot. And Copilot peaked last year and has been kind of flat in terms of interest. While Gemini has grown, obviously, because there's more of a consumer angle there. A lot of the different, like Salesforce has been upselling AI functionality. You know, what Microsoft did with Teams could potentially play out here, but I agree with you. I think it will take a very, very long time.

• 1:40:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, we got one more ad before we get our last post. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. I've used it basically my entire career. It is a system that allows teams to work more efficiently, including ours. And it is absolutely beautiful. So the overlay that you see, that's very much a product that we are building every single day. And thank you to Linear for powering the show. I have one more post, which is fun. Signing into stuff in 2025 from Kirav Vora. Says, sign in, forgot password. Check email, no email. Try Google Auth, hooray, works. Is this really you?

• 1:41:08Jordi Hays?

  Grab iPhone, open YouTube app. Yes, it's me. Okta sign in required. Enter pass key. Pass key expired. Need backup code. Open password manager. Signed out. Enter password manager password. No backup codes. Try another way. QR code. iOS Okta app. Sign in. Face ID. Is this really you? Two F A SMS code.

• 1:41:28John Coogan?

  The worst of all this is when, is when you try and you're like, oh, I should sign in with my Gmail. Cause I know I used my Gmail account as the username. You didn't. And then you click the login button and it creates a new account for you.

• 1:41:43Speaker 01

  Proud big company guy now, like Microsoft Teams sign in kind of elite.

• 1:41:47John Coogan?

  It's good.

• 1:41:48Speaker 01

  It's good, it gives you a little my my app stuff, Microsoft teams. Shows you all the stuff you're signed into, pretty hard to beat.

• 1:41:54John Coogan?

  That's good. Before we close, we should do Will's post, craft is the antidote to slop. Can you take us through this?

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, this is, yeah, no, I will not, I'll spare you two pages of paper. But the, the argument here is that we, we should be better about selecting the kind of problems we try to automate.

• 1:42:10John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  And I'm trying to draw a distinction here between labor and toil, right? Labor is, you know, toil is this unpleasant formatting spreadsheet, doing your expenses before you have ramp. Right? All this unpleasant work. Labor is the meaningful thing that God put you on earth to do. This is an argument that I think we are working on the wrong types of AI problems. So we're trying to automate things away that will lead to kind of disgusting outcomes. Right? You go to Nashville, you go to Charlotte, you go to any of these new tiers through these cities. They all look the same. They don't feel like real places. I think the models are going to drive kind of a similar thing happening to the timeline, to online spaces, to physical objects. I think we can avoid it. I think we can get more places and things that feel magical by dividing this labor. The essay's two pages. I think it's, it's worth reading.

• 1:42:55John Coogan?

  What is the prescription for actually avoiding the bad outcome?

• 1:43:00Speaker 01

  I, I think it's like, it's much like.

• 1:43:02John Coogan?

  Cultural?

• 1:43:02Speaker 01

  It's like a food quality, right? Like if we, we ignore the food supply and then we get sick in 20 years. I think if we ignore the supply of language being GMO, essentially like that, you know, the source of inspiration being GMO. We will just eradicate ourselves and it will solve itself.

• 1:43:18John Coogan?

  It, it, is there some sort of like tipping point where you need, you need more than 50% of humanity on the craft? You know, train?

• 1:43:27Speaker 01

  We need better elite taste. I feel like our, our cultural elites certainly, you know, the people that are running corporate expense providers today are not buying castles on the continent. They're not buying really high quality furniture. It just feels obvious that we need to turn away from slop.

• 1:43:40John Coogan?

  I did, I did notice that when I was in, I think in some of these cities, you just see like everyone, they're all rich, but they all have the exact same house. It's the glass box.

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's incredible. It looks like a, yeah.

• 1:43:51John Coogan?

  And so where's the Hearst Castle of today? I mean, some people are building, I think the Collison brothers are building a castle.

• 1:43:56Speaker 01

  I mean, Casper Boyle had a good take on this, like all architecture kind of looks like Islamabad. Like it's all, it's all Arabic and uh, uh, architecture and it's not, it's not pretty. Or it's at least not set in stage. My argument here is orient yourself in history, build meaningful things, let it rock.

• 1:44:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, interesting. Are there more like tactical things to do on the actual foundation model side? Are there things that you want to see? Like, a lot of people say, oh, Claude has more personality.

• 1:44:22Speaker 01

  I think it's also just like a task.

• 1:44:23John Coogan?

  AI safety issue?

• 1:44:24Speaker 01

  I think it's just like.

• 1:44:25John Coogan?

  Guidelines?

• 1:44:26Speaker 01

  Much like you can drive, you know, a, a automatic Ferrari versus, you know, a six-speed manual. It's all about choosing the right things to find enjoyment in. And I think a lot of what we're doing is seeing a culture that is downstream of slop. That people are choosing the kind of junk calories rather than the meaningful engagement. And I, I just think much like we're seeing in diet today. Like, that shift will be natural. I actually don't, I'm not worried about the future. Right, like, the, the Bible ends in, in Revelation, like, God wins. We've read the final chapter already, but I think we need to get past the slop on the way there.

• 1:44:58John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. Interesting. Jordy, anything?

• 1:45:02Jordi Hays?

  Powerful stuff.

• 1:45:03John Coogan?

  Powerful stuff.

• 1:45:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, we are in Washington DC.

• 1:45:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:07Speaker 01

  Hillen Valley.

• 1:45:08Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, we're at Hillen Valley and I'm very excited for tomorrow.

• 1:45:11John Coogan?

  Me too.

• 1:45:11Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, we've said it before, but we'll say it again. We will be live from Hillen Valley tomorrow. We're gonna be pulling in people that are talking, people that are attending, getting, uh, that boots-on-the-ground perspective on many of our nation's most important issues.

• 1:45:27Speaker 01

  Lowers on the ground, lowers on the ground.

• 1:45:29Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:45:30Speaker 01

  We're in DC.

• 1:45:31Jordi Hays?

  We're in DC. Uh, well, thank you for joining us, Will.

• 1:45:34John Coogan?

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:45:35Jordi Hays?

  It's fitting, uh, and, uh, thanks for tuning in, folks. We will, uh, see you next time.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  See you next time.

• 1:45:41Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:45:42Speaker 01

  Bye.