Ukraine Minerals, LIVE Ryan Peterson Interview, Trump Pentagon Reform, $200B Meta AI Build

TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://youtube.com/@technologybrotherspod?si=lpk53xTE9WBEcIjV (00:00) - Chapter 1 (00:00) - Chapter 2 (01:05) - Nvidia Earnings (04:33) - US & Ukraine Minerals Deal (17:46) - Ryan Peterson Interview (36:02) - Pentagon Reform (54:34) - Meta's AI Data Center (01:13:13) - Apple's Transcription Problem (01:21:46) - Superbillionares (01:36:29) - Timeline

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 T B P N live from the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Dojo of the Dollar. Today is Wednesday, February 26, 2025, and this show starts now. We got a great show for you today. We're covering Nvidia earnings that are dropping later today. There's a rare minerals deal that's going on in Ukraine. We're going to dig into the companies that might make money from that deal. Stay away from the politics, stay in the business world, the technology world. There's also an article in The Economist about D O D procurement reform. They're calling it the Battle for the Pentagon, folks, the Battle for the Pentagon. Check it out.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  Very cool graphic there.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  I think I just doxed my address. It's a live stream. Hopefully, no one shows up at my house. And Meta, Zuck is, is going to spend $200 billion on a data center potentially. We're going to break it down for you. And we have Ryan Peterson calling in from Flexport in just about 15 minutes. And so, we're going to run through the Nvidia stuff first. Our first article of the day comes from the Wall Street Journal, Nvidia earnings, what time do results come out and what to expect? Nvidia's chips are the computational workhorses of artificial intelligence, and the company's quarterly reports have become gauges of health of the AI boom. Nvidia is due to report fourth quarter results Wednesday after market close about 4:20 PM Eastern Time, so 1:20 our time.

• 1:24Jordi Hays?

  And if you aren't stressed about this, you're not heavily invested enough, not just in Nvidia, but the entirety of the market.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  Everything.

• 1:33Jordi Hays?

  I mean, everything's riding on that.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  I was talking to somebody who's thinking about going to

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  The global economy.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  changing from one fund to another. And I was like, you should probably wait until Nvidia earnings drop to make that decision.

• 1:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43John Coogan?

  Because if Nvidia rips, might be a good time to lever up.

• 1:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and it's interesting because you have people, earlier this week, Steve Cohen was on record flipping bearish, saying this is the first time I've been bearish. There's all these cyclical sort of forces.

• 2:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:00Jordi Hays?

  Austerity, right, reducing spend in the government, which sort of trickles down.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05Jordi Hays?

  Anti-immigration, which, you know. Reduces some economic activity that's happening.

• 2:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, and tariffs are taxes.

• 2:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  And so, you know, there is a case that tariffs make sense in the long term, but in the short term, there could be some financial pain. And so, plenty of investors are sounding alarm bells. We see this on the timeline. And Warren Buffett is also sitting on a historically large cash pile of hundreds of billions of dollars in cash now.

• 2:31Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  And, you know, he's looking at the fundamentals and saying, I don't get it. But we will find out more when Nvidia drops their earnings. Analysts expect to see strong sales growth in today's report, even after about two years of unprecedented expansion. They point to capital expenditures by Nvidia's largest customers, Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft. These are the hyperscalers. They all plan record spending this year driven by AI. But as we covered earlier in this week, some of the hyperscalers are getting a little bit of cold feet, such as saying, hey, maybe I want to lease, maybe I want to, you know, not really sign that many leases. And so I'm sure Dylan Patel and Ben Thompson will have great analyses out tomorrow or later this week, breaking it all down, and we will

• 3:15John Coogan?

  bring that to you. Much of the money that goes directly into Nvidia's pocket, which has helped elevate its market cap above 3 trillion and make it one of the most valuable companies in the world. There's no shortage of challenges. Nvidia's dominance in AI chips has made it a target for disruptive startups and other chipmakers who want in on the action. Nvidia's chips have also been caught up in a geopolitical standoff between the US and China. And any concerning signal about the future could worry investors, much like China's DeepSeek did last month, when it claimed it could create advanced AI models with fewer chips.

• 3:47Jordi Hays?

  I'm interested to see what Jensen has to say around earnings specifically in regards to DeepSeek. Because the easy answer is to say, look, Jevon's paradox, right?

• 3:55John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 3:56Jordi Hays?

  This is what every, everybody that's heavily invested in AI, that was their immediate reaction.

• 4:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:01Jordi Hays?

  And I think it's a fair one. But I think he'll need to go a little bit deeper than that on earnings, because everybody sort of heard that already. If he just sort of doubles down, it's like, if I was an analyst, I'd be pressing him, okay. Like, what does that actually?

• 4:14John Coogan?

  Where does this actually go?

• 4:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, where does this actually go?

• 4:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, if you're looking to make investments in Nvidia or any other asset, why not go to public.com investing for those who take it seriously, multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. Go to public.com. So let's talk about the US and Ukraine deal. There has been a deal that's been reached, but details remain unresolved. This also comes from the Wall Street Journal.

• 4:41Jordi Hays?

  Was this Trump giving into the, you know, he just was feeling the pressure from the truth social ban in Ukraine?

• 4:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 4:48Jordi Hays?

  Over the weekend, or it was Friday, Zelensky was feeling the pressure from Trump. So he hit him where it hurts, truth, social ban. The truth social, if you don't know, they've got about a million dollars in revenue globally. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna go out on a limb and say maybe five grand of that was generated in Ukraine. So not exactly hitting Trump that hard, but it was a statement.

• 5:13John Coogan?

  He's letting him know.

• 5:13Jordi Hays?

  Letting him know.

• 5:14John Coogan?

  You're not messing with me.

• 5:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, don't mess with me. But something happened. I mean, earlier they were talking about a $500 billion mineral deal, but it's since become much more vague in terms of what this deal actually means. The text of the deal, which has been viewed by the Wall Street Journal, includes the creation of a fund co-owned by the two countries with the details of the financial arrangement to be determined later. So they're basically just saying, hey, we know that America has spent a lot of money on, on supporting Ukraine. It's $100 billion investment overall over the last few years. 70 billion of that was in military hardware specifically. And, you know, it typically, there is some sort of repayment plan when these military

• 5:58John Coogan?

  activities happen, like even in World War II, you know, it's probably like the most noble war that America has fought, right? But Americans who footed the bill for those tanks and bombs and everything, they got war bonds and then they got paid back. And it was actually a good investment for people that were supporting America at the time. And there's no reason why.

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  I hope we never see war bonds on public.

• 6:20John Coogan?

  But, yeah. I mean, now, now it's just treasuries, right? We just issue a ton of treasuries and then we do whatever we want with the money. It's one big pool of capital and it's not necessarily. Yeah, yeah, very specifically, but but it can happen. There can be a war bond drive if there's like, hey, we need, you know, a trillion dollars right now, or a hundred billion or something. And so how are they going to pay this back? Trump wants to get the deal done and make sure America comes out on top. And so he's saying, hey, you got these assets in the ground, these minerals, and these minerals have been very hotly contested because China has so many of them. And there's a desire to shore up our access to rare earth elements and other minerals as well. So the deal is part of a broader of broader arrangements with the United States.

• 7:04John Coogan?

  Zelensky said this deal can be part of future security guarantees. And so initially, the the thought was, give us all 500 billion, and we will guarantee your safety. We will do anything to protect you, because 40% of the minerals that are targeted in this deal are in war torn areas that are contested regions that Russia is actively active in. And so America would have this massive financial incentive to go and protect those areas. But it's since kind of downgraded to a like, I don't know, a more more vague deal at this point.

• 7:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just an interesting data point. So mining actually only contributes 6% of Ukraine's towards Ukraine's GDP. So it's not, it's not, you know, it's significant. But when you think about Ukraine's.

• 7:54John Coogan?

  Well, it's balance sheet versus cash flow, essentially.

• 7:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:57John Coogan?

  Like, they're not generating a lot of money, but they have a lot on their balance sheet.

• 8:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So in 2021, Ukraine's GDP was just under 60 billion. So by Trump going out and saying, we want the value of the next $500 billion of your minerals, like, that's pretty, you know, it's not an insignificant ask, even though there was this $100 billion investment.

• 8:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, Zelensky said he specifically didn't want to strike a deal where. Ukrainians would be paying for it for multiple generations.

• 8:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  Like, the great grandchildren of the Ukrainians now are still, would still be paying it back. So they want something a little bit more.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  And we've seen how throughout history, if you saddle a nation with, with extreme levels of debt.

• 8:38John Coogan?

  It can create chaos.

• 8:39Jordi Hays?

  It can create chaos.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  Absolutely. And so, uh, the, this agreement can have a major success or quietly pass by. Zelensky said, and I believe that a major success depends on our conversation with President Trump. He said that he would have several questions for Trump whenever they meet, including whether the United States would cut off aid to Ukraine. And if so, whether Ukraine would be able to buy weapons from the United States. He also would ask whether sanctions on Russia would be lifted. He said, uh, we will draw conclusions after my dialogue with President Trump. And so the mineral rights agreement has been a major sticking point in the relationship between Kiev and Washington, which has deteriorated, deteriorated rapidly this month. At the Munich Security Conference, Zelensky refused to sign a version of the deal presented to him by Treasury Secretary Scott Bassant.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  Uh, at the time, he said he couldn't sign an agreement that didn't include a security guarantee for Ukraine. Officials across Europe also expressed shock at some of the demands the US had made in their offer, including the right to up to 500 billion in revenue from mineral development. And so, uh, they've been going back and forth. Trump called Zelensky a dictator. Uh, the, the relationship is deteriorating, but the end result might be that, uh, you know, some sort of deal gets done here.

• 9:49Jordi Hays?

  Where, they don't quote this, but they say that Trump accused Ukraine of starting the war.

• 9:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:55Jordi Hays?

  Which seems.

• 9:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, anything to get a deal done here.

• 10:00Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 10:00John Coogan?

  Today, Zelensky said, today it's important not to lose the US as one of the guarantors, whether it's the main guarantor or one of the guarantors of security guarantees for Ukraine, and we are working on it. And so I wanted to dig in, so I had, I, I pulled up some data on the companies that might be involved in actually going and extracting these, uh, these, and you can see a sheet here, uh, going and extracting these, these minerals. So, uh, MP Materials, Albemarle and Uranium Energy Corp. could benefit from the deal, given their focus on rare earths, lithium, lithium and uranium. uranium respectively. The deal was agreed to involves Ukraine sharing revenue from critical minerals, but these aren't developed yet. And so you need companies that come in and do survey,

• 10:42John Coogan?

  surveys to actually understand what's in the ground. Even Caterpillar was cited as a potential beneficiary here because they make a lot of mining equipment, a lot of, you know, construction equipment.

• 10:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How much, what is the total value of the equipment needed to mine $500 billion worth of rare minerals?

• 11:00John Coogan?

  It's a lot. And this is, this is a multi-decade.

• 11:02Jordi Hays?

  Could be double digit percentage of the end value.

• 11:06John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. It's a, I mean, it's a.

• 11:08Jordi Hays?

  That's what I don't understand. So the United States is not going out and saying, we're going to come mine your rare earth minerals. It's that we want a like a massive royalty on the value of whatever is mined within the country.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  And so at some point, there needs to be, these private companies need the ability to capture margin as well if they're going to go do the work. And so it'd be interesting to see a diagram specifically around how that, where the sort of like actual margin is being allocated to. Because the US can't just take the actual retail, you know, market value of, you know, a piece of titanium, right? It has to take, otherwise the economic, what's the incentive for the mining company to actually pull that out of the ground?

• 11:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally. It's, it's that there's 500 billion allegedly in the ground on the balance sheet of Ukraine. That's going to get turned into cash at some point over the next few decades. A number of companies could come in and buy those rights and they could pay for them upfront and then they reap the benefit. But at some point, the money from that deal is going to go into this, formerly it would just go into Ukraine's treasury because they own the materials, the minerals. But under this agreement, it will go into a, like a collective fund.

• 12:26Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting too, because, yeah, it's interesting too, because.

• 12:31Jordi Hays?

  Presumably, much of these deposits are on private land.

• 12:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:35Jordi Hays?

  And so if you're a private citizen who owns the land and then the United, this foreign government is making a claim to it and they're making that claim because, you know, we provided capital to fund the war.

• 12:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 12:49Jordi Hays?

  You're like, well, I, you know, I didn't ask you to do that. My, my mineral deposit isn't even anywhere near the front lines, you know?

• 12:55John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 12:55Jordi Hays?

  There's a bunch of crazy dynamics here and.

• 13:00John Coogan?

  I think these are essentially on like federal.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  A Stargate is on the line.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a big deal. And so digging into some of these companies, MP Materials Corporation headquartered in Las Vegas, they're the largest United States producer of rare earth elements, operating the Mountain Pass Mine in California. Given the deal stipulation that US companies must hold 50% ownership of Ukraine's rare earth deposit, MP Materials is a prime candidate to expand its operations. Now, this is all like super hypothetical. This is just, you know, you could bring in any company to do this deal, but the question is like, is Ukraine even like, they're not currently mining these. Are they set up to, or will they partner with an American company? They, they could partner with a Chinese company for all, for all we know. There's actually a Chinese company that's,

• 13:42John Coogan?

  that's, that like the largest rare earth mining company in the world is a Chinese company because that's where a lot of these rare earths come from.

• 13:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And you can imagine China is doing many of these same deals with the Belt and Road Initiative where they say, cool, we're going to give you, you know, this funding for infrastructure. If you can't, you know, actually pay for it over time, we're going to claim the infrastructure and also, you know, secured by underlying mineral.

• 14:06John Coogan?

  And I don't know if you have the market caps there, but I was kind of shocked by how small some of these companies are.

• 14:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I just think it's, it's, many of them are sort of low margin businesses.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:16Jordi Hays?

  Right? So they're, you know, getting a fairly low multiple on.

• 14:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think most of these companies are in the single digit billions if they're public. There's a couple here that are in just the hundreds of millions. There's not a huge, like, you know, moat around these businesses.

• 14:32Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 14:32John Coogan?

  It's just a lot of hard work digging, digging in the mines, basically.

• 14:37Jordi Hays?

  Yep. And there's been some, a lot of talk recently of Durin Mining, which is out of El Segundo. And I have just appreciated. Pretty much every graphic that they've put out, it makes me yearn for the mines. I've never set foot in one, but but their visuals are fantastic. It's just durin.com, D U R I N dot com. Unfortunately, I'm not an investor, but I am very excited to see what they do and maybe will look to invest in the future.

• 15:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. So we should have Ryan Peterson joining us in just a few minutes. We're figuring out our second live call in of all time. We're trying to do it a little bit more professional this time with a real zoom. You should be able to see his beautiful face on video.

• 15:23Jordi Hays?

  I think people appreciated the Senna call in.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  Senna was fun.

• 15:25Jordi Hays?

  Was it Monday?

• 15:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. And if we can just wire this, the phone in, we can just make some phone calls while we're on stream. That'd be fantastic. But I'm sure we'll follow more as that deal rolls out. I'm super interested. I mean, we've seen Ukraine as an opportunity for hard tech companies. Neros is probably one that took the most advantage, but Anduril certainly had a Ukraine narrative for a while, in the sense that Palmer Lucky was saying, hey, we've been talking about the return of great power competition. We've been talking about the importance of drones. And Anduril was very countercultural, very contrarian. And now it's super consensus because everyone, all through 2020 through 2024, was basically like, we need to defend Ukraine. I'm not exactly sure when the, I think the Ukrainian

• 16:09John Coogan?

  war broke up in 2021, 2022, a couple of years ago. But at that point, everyone, you know, not just right wing, obviously, left wing was very, very in support of defending Ukraine. And that led to a lot of energy and positivity.

• 16:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was 24th of February in 2022, so almost exactly three years ago.

• 16:29John Coogan?

  Two years ago. Yeah. And so, and then Neros has a similar thing. I think they just struck a deal to send a few thousand drones over there and they're just kind of scaling up manufacturing.

• 16:39Jordi Hays?

  That speed was wild. I don't think, I'm sure even their investors didn't feel like it was feasible to get Neros products onto the front lines of this war. And bravo to them for making it happen.

• 16:53John Coogan?

  Cool. Well, let's, uh, let's move on to something that is a great place to express your rare mineral collection on your watch.

• 17:03Speaker 02

  God, he's good.

• 17:04John Coogan?

  Go to get, uh, Bezel to shop for over 22,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. Um, and they have a great post here. Uh, POV, you say you're full, but then they roll out the six foot Rolex cake. Have you seen this photo?

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Insane.

• 17:22John Coogan?

  And they did a little giveaway. You gotta follow these guys on X because, uh, they said, uh, and Connor, can you let Ryan in? He is in the waiting room.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  First ever video guest.

• 17:39John Coogan?

  This is in the waiting room.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  Here we go.

• 17:47John Coogan?

  Ryan, how you doing?

• 17:49Speaker 02

  Stop, God, man, I'm traveling. I'd wear a tuxedo to join you guys. You're looking good.

• 17:53John Coogan?

  You look good too.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Fantastic.

• 17:54John Coogan?

  I like the zip up. It looks comfy. Where are you right now?

• 17:58Speaker 02

  I'm in Dallas, Texas.

• 17:59John Coogan?

  Nice. Uh, can you give me the breakdown on the announcement, kind of the cadence, what this means for the company? Just break it down.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we, we launched, uh, earlier this week, we launched about 20 AI products, basically stuff that we built over the last six months. We moved to this model where we, every six months, just do a big drop, try to kind of drop a little bomb. Uh, it comes from a principle in physics where the maximum energy transfer happens when you take something really, really hot and you put it in a place that's really, really cold. And we feel like great industry in general is like that. So you just want to just gather a whole bunch of hotness and drop it all at once.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  Was there any pushback when you kind of pitched this to the team? Or was everyone kind of like, oh yeah, we already know the Brian Chesky, uh, kind of like talk that you were referencing and, and we're in, we're bought in.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  People liked it a lot. No, no pushback because I think a lot of our tech teams feel a little frustrated that they don't get enough support from marketing or they build this thing and people don't pay attention and never gets any buzz and it's all feels a little incremental when you got it a little bit by bit. Um, the pushback that I was expecting to get would have happened over the last month because there's a, there's nothing like a deadline to get people to work hard. I remember,

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, like some good business advice, actually, is the way to get people to work on nights and weekends is not to ask them to work nights and weekends. It's just give them a deadline that can only be met if they work on nights and weekends. So

• 19:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's the same thing.

• 19:24Speaker 02

  I think some of the stuff we shipped over the weekend, like right before the launch.

• 19:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was gonna say it's the same thing with sales. Like it's hard to know if a sales rep is actually good unless they're, you know, competing on a team with other people, you know, their other peers, right? One of the things I thought was interesting, I think that early-stage companies can struggle sometimes when they end up dropping like three major announcements on one day because if you're just like starting to like build that brand and audience, I think it can be, you can end up wasting a handful of announcements by, you know, dropping them all at once versus spreading them out. But I think at the scale that Flexport did that, it makes a ton of sense to, you know, do this sort of keynote sort of approach.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  It could be that. It could be also earlier-stage companies don't know what's gonna work and need to iterate more and be more like evolutionary. And at our scale, we sort of know what the thing needs to be and

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Business is tough work as is, so.

• 20:22John Coogan?

  Customers ask for these and you're basically just paying down like a backlog of like the most common requests, right?

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, and like, we're not really holding much back. Like a few of these things kind of soft launched or already in production and live over the last couple of months. But like, we never did any fanfare or marketing or packaging of it up. But definitely a bunch of stuff was like barely shipped on time, kind of team grounded out over the last few weekends and working, you know, burning the midnight oil.

• 20:48John Coogan?

  That's great, though. It's got to feel like very inspiring to the team and very like, just like, everyone's on the same page now. Everyone's on the same cadence. Everyone has the same like popping champagne at the same time because like, we all hit the same goal, basically.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I recommend it to companies. I think, yeah, it's an interesting caveat. Maybe some early-stage companies want to like build more of a success compounding motion of little wins and constant launches and stuff. There's a lot of, there's a, there's probably something to that as well. But we saw such good results from packaging. It's definitely our new rhythm going forward.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  How are you pitching Flexport now? Kind of at the highest level in terms of like the long-term vision and how, how, how do these new releases kind of like fit into that narrative or like the, the high-level story you're telling about Flexport?

• 21:34Speaker 02

  It's always been a really challenging thing because we can do a lot of things for a lot of different use cases for different audiences. At its core, what we're trying to do is run this full end to end from factory floor all the way to customers' doors and retail stores. I like that it rhymes. Being able to everything on that full end to end transaction and then including placing orders back to those factories to replenish, we want to make that as simple and reliable as a light switch, like that your logistics just kind of works. You take it for granted. You go back to focusing on your brand or focusing on your product, which is what you should spend all your time on as a product company. And like the logistics piece is just automatic. It's pretty automated. It's

• 22:16Speaker 02

  reliable. It's cheap and lots of options to get the products where they need to go. And we're also, Flexport Capital has become a really instrumental part of our business where we do inventory financing for people. So you're like, you also shouldn't have to worry about that. Compliance, capital, insurance for the products. Yeah, it's a very big ambitious vision because the world's big. We got to be able to, we shipped product to and from 147 countries last year.

• 22:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:43Speaker 02

  That's a lot of different surface area.

• 22:46John Coogan?

  You mentioned trying to get to a place where, you know, like an e-commerce business can basically with one click, get on Flexport and then be fulfilling through the, you know, Nordstrom's France e-commerce system. Can you break down a little bit more of like what that will look like? And what, what are the barriers? Like, why is that difficult?

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that is a big part of the vision too, is like we, logistics right now is your cost center. We want to make it a growth engine. We want to be like, hey, you know, you've got this awesome logistics platform. You can sell in more markets, whether that's geographies or more channels, different retailers, marketplaces. And yeah, it's hard because these retailers all have their own. Very specific requirements for how you label the goods like it would Nordstrom wants it appear as a Nordstrom package, even if it's shipped by Flexport or the brand. So you've got to get that custom. They want it to run on a Nordstrom shipping label.

• 23:42Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Not a Flexport shipping label. They want, some cases, they want special hang tags that say nordstrom.com or whatever. And it's slip stuff. So you've got to do for each retailer onboard them in that way. And then when that's on the digital side, where you, what we call drop shipping, where you're selling on nordstrom.com. If you're selling to Nordstrom, or really any of the big box retailers, they also have huge requirements for how you deliver pallets to them. Like the label has to be a certain number of inches above the ground and has to arrive at this time. And if you miss those things, they have a call a chargeback. They they they like thousands of dollars for it.

• 24:20Jordi Hays?

  And the other challenge is compliance across all these different product categories, right? Which is a whole other beast in terms of, I understand, I've invested in a number of consumer brands and just dealing with that level of complexity. And especially a lot of 3PLs are not super sophisticated and there's real, you know, fines associated with sort of not doing these things correctly. One question I had is around, you know, entering sort of fulfillment and being a player there. From every, my sense is that nobody loves their their 3PL or their fulfillment provider. And so that's a huge challenge. I'm sure you've been super intentional coming into that. How are you sort of focused on, you

• 25:02Jordi Hays?

  know, making, is it, is it possible to make a fulfillment product that brands like truly, truly love, right? Because everything could be going great for years and you have a small issue and it's so critical to the business that it can, it can be very challenging. What's been your approach there?

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Definitely, our goal is to become, you know, the most loved vendor you have in all your logistics. We've done that on the freight forwarding side, although we've had our ups and downs lately. Our NPS score has been through the roof, so 70% PS last and last time we measured it last month. So we definitely know what to do. What Flexport did differently than the fulfillment business we acquired from Shopify Logistics. We were very enterprise focused. Our tech teams meet with customers constantly and solve tech problems. And then we are also more than a tech company. We're a service provider, and so if the tech can't do it, like, we're still gonna get it done. And I think that's something that we've had to kind of learn, teach new tricks to this business that we acquired. Now, I'm really proud of them for the last nine months, at least.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  They've just been like, our tech teams have been meeting with the customers nonstop, closing gaps, like, taking feedback, solving the problems. We definitely still have work to go, but the the the cycle time of like, taking their feedback, implementing it is really good. Like, these customers feel like they have a custom dev shop, even though we don't build custom software for people. Uh, it's been a mess lately, so um, I don't know how close you guys have followed, but a huge amount of um, e-commerce is fulfilled from Mexico, duty-free into the US. If it's under $800, there's no taxes. That was 30% of all the big Shopify merchants were doing that. Uh, and it went away. The Mexican government shut that program down on December 19th. And then, like, totally no one saw that coming.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  Everyone thought Trump was gonna shut it down. No one thought Mexico was gonna shut it down. Didn't make any sense. They kind of brought it back, but then they like, haven't given the importer licenses to these companies, so it's not really brought back. So Flexport fulfillment, we doubled our revenue in the first, what is today, February, late February? So the first two months of this year, we've already doubled the revenue of that big business unit that we acquired from Shopify. Wow. But it's not been without hang up. Like, we, our team, my whole leadership team, I was there last weekend working, whole leadership team is basically living in our warehouse in San Bernardino right now, because we're taking all this inventory out of fulfillment centers in Tijuana. And trying to inbound it and none of it's proper, a lot of it's not properly labeled.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  Imagine, right? You're like taking it all out of this Mexican fulfillment center, throwing it in boxes and shipping it to us. And like, the people labeling these boxes didn't care that much about the, you know, labeling and compliance.

• 27:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, there's so many, there's so many landmines. If, this is like one of the most crisis prone borders in the entire world, right? Between Mexico and the United States. You gotta be so careful around so many different things to make sure that, you know, everything that you're doing is, is, you know, not, not, and there's the whole, you know, dynamics with the cartels down there that try to get involved in some of these more traditional businesses. So.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  So is, so that Mexico thing that you just mentioned, that's separate from the Timu de Minimus change that's going on?

• 28:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, Mexico did its own thing. Mexico did its own thing and like, it's possible that it's related. It's possible that Trump, they were trying to do Trump a favor or something and close this down. Not really clear to me why they would do this because they say on the surface it's to protect Mexican exile workers' jobs. And kind of create a barrier to entry so that like you would source in Mexico instead of in Vietnam or something, but bit of a mess. Separately, Trump, actually first Biden's CBP did this customs and border protection back in September, I want to say, announced they previewed, hey, this 321 de minimis program for goods made in China is going to go away, but it was very vague. It was sort of when that would be implemented or how

• 28:55Speaker 02

  Trump on, in his first week made the executive order to shut the program down. And then in his second week, he brought it back.

• 29:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  But no one thinks it's back for good. Like we're sort of in this limbo stage right now, but it's making it really hard for companies to plan. And now that is just targeting goods made in China.

• 29:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  But I don't know. Everyone's like, oh, I'm fine. I produce my goods in Vietnam. I just don't know that the Trump administration is going to see the world that way. I think that you, I would predict, and I don't have any evidence for this, but my intuition tells me I would predict some tariffs on other countries besides just Vietnam, that a lot of these people think they have a safe haven for their products, but maybe we'll wake up to a rude awakening.

• 29:36John Coogan?

  What is the, what is the global footprint of Flexport look like now? I mean, it's a big company. You said 146, 147 countries or something. Do you have offices, people, warehouses in all these places?

• 29:47Speaker 02

  No, not in all of them. We have offices in 15 countries and then adding five more, five more in the next 12 months, as fast as we can. We're, we're launching. So it's a big.

• 29:57John Coogan?

  So that's why you're traveling all the time.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I went to 19 countries last year and, and some of them twice.

• 30:05John Coogan?

  I don't think I left the United States last year.

• 30:08Speaker 02

  It's a big place, Sean. You're gonna get out there. It's not that bad. I enjoy it.

• 30:14Jordi Hays?

  Talk about the news this morning. There was some news around the, the port deal. And specifically around automation, like what can you speak to on that front? What should, you know, there was a lot of pushback, people being, you know, obviously a wage increase. And then on top of that, banning some of these companies from rolling out automation that would, that would threaten jobs. What is, what's going on there? What's your take on, on the most recent news?

• 30:46Speaker 02

  Pretty ridiculous to ban automation in a port. Just putting America at a competitive disadvantage. The reality is, you know, at this table, you have carriers, the, the port operators and the ocean carriers on one side of the table. These are the employers. And then you have the union on the other side. And they're negotiating. Neither of them cares that much about automation because if, if there's no automation, it's sort of like a non-proliferation treaty. Hey, cool. We don't have to spend money on automation as long as our competitors don't either. Like it's a all level playing field here. The people who lose are you and all of us who buy, who use the ports, who ship stuff. Consumers will have to pay more for everything. And I don't know, by the same logic, like.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  We should all be farming with with sticks instead of, you know, just dig a hole with a stick and put a seed in the ground. So I think it's very stupid. I'm sure the union will want to come after me for that. They're doing the right thing for themselves, by the way. They should represent their interest. That's their job as a union. So I don't criticize what they're doing, but my stance is very pro robotics and automation. Obviously, we're a technology company, so.

• 31:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, broadly, I mean, there's been a lot of uh heat around the humanoid robotics space and just robotics broadly. Where where do you see Flexport itself leveraging uh some of this tech? And uh I'd love uh I'd love to get your take on just the humanoid form factor generally. Is that something that you see being integrated? You know, across um, you know, all the different physical touchpoints of the Flexport business? Or do you think there's a better, you know, form factor? You know, it's not obvious to me that humanoids are going to be the right form factor for like 3PL and fulfillment, for example.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely. Obviously, the whole thing is it's I'm very much wait and see. It's the humanoids are making enough progress that it's really causing me to second guess how much I want to spend on CapEx and a big automated system right now in a fulfillment center. Because, you know, three years from now, I don't want to have this, the life cycle on that investment, they probably like 10, 15 years at least, right? Not, hopefully it can pay back faster than that. It would have to before we invested, but like it's gonna, it's gotta last that long. I'm not gonna replace it. And I could just totally imagine I have this like giant expensive system that three years from now is just obsolete because progress in humanoids or other types of robotics. So it's kind of interesting, one of these cycles where you're like, if it's improving that fast, then you definitely can't invest in it.

• 33:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 33:11Speaker 02

  The future one is gonna be way better.

• 33:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, it's a lot.

• 33:14Speaker 02

  I think humanoids are good in that sense because they're modular. You can buy one at a time instead of like having to buy.

• 33:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, the concern, we've talked about this before, the concern with humanoids is just if if humanoids depreciate at the rate that the Model 3 does, are they viable investments, right? You're just like sinking dollars into these things. And then the next year, it's like, well, you know, I could have invested 50 grand into training this human who's gonna be like better at their job and all this stuff. And I invested in this robot. And now it's like, just not even uh, you know, effective or.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  Far for them to clear a so high, too. I mean, workers are very like on an IQ basis, like they're pretty smart. They got amazing dexterity in their fingers. They run around.

• 33:56John Coogan?

  They've got agency.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're good ones. Not that expensive. Like, there's a lot. That bar is gonna be really high for them to clear.

• 34:03John Coogan?

  Yep, for sure.

• 34:04Speaker 02

  So, we're, I'm, we're still like pretty manual in our fulfillment. So now we're digital in the sense of like, we scan everything in and out and like, a lot of you can't screw this up, technology, but the actual pick pack and parcel, you know, putting this, putting it in the box is pretty manual and I, the bar is so high to, to, to clear. So we're, we're kinda happy with that.

• 34:27John Coogan?

  Uh, well, it's 11. We'll let you get out of here unless you want to lecture us on, uh, JFK. Uh, otherwise, hope you have a great day.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Who, did you see that? I did a TV interview yesterday and I was on the air to talk about ports and they were like in the back room waiting in the, in the, the green room or whatever. And they're like, our next story is JFK assassination, but first we gotta talk about ports.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  At the end of my interview, I'm like, can I just stay? Let's talk JFK, like.

• 34:54John Coogan?

  This is great. Well, uh, wh- wh- wh- where can the listeners, uh, uh, what's a good starting point to get into the JFK lore?

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Okay, great. Well, I'm here in Dallas.

• 35:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  Which obviously is, Dealey Plaza is where he got shot. And if you are ever in Dallas, you gotta go down to Dealey Plaza, right at the scene of the crime. There's this guy, this fat guy in sweatpants. He sits right there all day, every day. And he will tell you everything. You give him 20 bucks. He, he sells like a little magazine. You give him 20 bucks, he'll give you a tour. Going behind the bushes. It'd be like, oh, the mafia was right here on this bridge. And like, he will give you the whole layout of how it all went down. So I highly recommend Dallas.

• 35:34John Coogan?

  So you just gotta go to the source. You're not even recommending a movie or a book. It's just go to Dallas and get the tour. I like it.

• 35:40Speaker 02

  Correct. This guy will tell you everything.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  That's great. Okay. That's amazing. Uh, have a great rest of your day. Safe travels. Enjoy Dallas and, uh, let us know. Congrats on the launch. Crack the case on the, on the JFK stuff. Talk to you soon. Bye. Yeah. Uh, well, let's move on. That was great. That was great.

• 35:57Jordi Hays?

  Always candid.

• 35:58John Coogan?

  We do need to do a JFK deep dive. That's how we really blow the show up. Go into the conspiracy realm. No politics, just straight up tinfoil hats.

• 36:06Jordi Hays?

  The hat is right here.

• 36:07John Coogan?

  We need permanent tinfoil hats.

• 36:08Jordi Hays?

  It's ready.

• 36:09John Coogan?

  Constantly. Well, let's stay with the politics stuff. The Economist has an article on will Donald Trump and Elon Musk wreck or reform the Pentagon? I don't know if you want to read from this, Jordy.

• 36:23Jordi Hays?

  You got a copy?

• 36:23John Coogan?

  I got a copy for you. I got a hard copy.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  I'll find it.

• 36:26John Coogan?

  Battle for the Pentagon. They got some nice.

• 36:27Jordi Hays?

  I want to dox your address.

• 36:29John Coogan?

  I got it here too. I'll kick it off. In the Pentagon, they must surely be on high alert. On February 9th, President Donald Trump declared that it would soon become the target for Elon Musk's Doge, accusing it of hundreds of billions of fraud and abuse. Mr. Trump will unleash his insurgents fresh from the feeding foreign aid into the wood chipper. Their work could not be more important or more risky. And yeah, I mean, we've heard this for a while, like, oh, the Pentagon wasn't able to pass an audit.

• 36:57Jordi Hays?

  No, it's been like a decade in a row of being unable to, I don't even know if it's a, it's really the issue is the audit, but it seems like they just don't use Ramp. They don't have, they don't have a good grasp on it. You remember?

• 37:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:11Jordi Hays?

  The last week I was, you were like, how do we spend, how do we spend so much money this month? And I was like, look in Ramp and you like were able in like,

• 37:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:19Jordi Hays?

  Literally 10 seconds to see exactly where everything was spent. But yeah, they couldn't even hit that bar.

• 37:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:25Jordi Hays?

  Which is.

• 37:26John Coogan?

  We will definitely be passing our audits here at this podcast.

• 37:29Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 37:30John Coogan?

  You don't become the most profitable podcast in the world without passing an audit.

• 37:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 37:33John Coogan?

  But I mean, to kind of put on the steel hat and take off the tinfoil hat, the steel man hat.

• 37:40John Coogan?

  You know, I am okay with the idea of a, of a black budget. I'm okay with paying my taxes and the Pentagon does stuff that I'm.

• 37:48Jordi Hays?

  You don't need it to be all on chain.

• 37:50John Coogan?

  No, I don't need it to be all on chain because I don't want the adversaries to know. And I don't want the average citizen who does pay their taxes to just be able to say, hey, it's my right as an American to know exactly where the CIA is spending money. And then I can just immediately text that to someone in Russia or China. Like, I'm fine with not knowing, but. I don't want there to be just massive money stolen like that doesn't make sense. I want it to be, you know, some, some sort of accountability and checks and balance internally. And so this is, uh, this is a, a big debate here. So that is because America's armed forces face a real problem. Not since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and built huge tank formations at the height of the Cold War. Have Americans, have America's military vulnerabilities been so glaring?

• 38:31John Coogan?

  In, in the killing fields of Ukraine, America is being out innovated by drone designers. In the seas and skies off China, it is losing its ability to deter a blockade or an invasion of Taiwan.

• 38:42Jordi Hays?

  And one thing interesting from this morning, I saw Chris from Amadon Heavy Industries. They're, they're building maritime defense products. And he shared something earlier about how China was caught, I guess, in the last 24 or 48 hours, cutting undersea cables off the west of Taiwan. So they had come sort of around the other side. And so there's that. The other thing that's, that's relevant to the defense side, which is a whole front that people don't even really talk about. But a Texas rancher was killed by an, an improvised explosive device yesterday morning.

• 39:18John Coogan?

  I saw that.

• 39:19Jordi Hays?

  Which is just insane. And many people are saying that should be considered an act of, you know, basically, that's a terrorist activity. If, if on American soil, an American citizen was killed by a cartel, which you could easily, you know, Trump has already paved the way for basically labeling them as, as, I think he did label them as terrorists.

• 39:42John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  And so the, the, the problems are clearest in the struggle to turn technology into military advantage. The drones over Ukraine are upgraded every few weeks, a pace that is beyond the Pentagon's budgeting process, which takes years. And this is what we're seeing with Neuro and Anduril, uh, equipment going out. It gets revised much faster than the. Pentagon can even update a requirements document. And so there's been a big push for updating the the way procurement happens. We talked about this on a previous show. I have a good post here from Eliano over at Palantir. There's an article in Breaking Defense. Pentagon leaders are crafting a plan to shake up how they buy and field technology with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth,

• 40:23John Coogan?

  starting things off by potentially directing that the department adopt the software acquisition pathway as the preferred method for software development. In a draft memo obtained by Breaking Defense, Hegseth calls on the department to adopt the software acquisition pathway, a practice created in 2020 to accelerate software development by implementing best practices from the private sector. At its core, SWP is a streamlined method for procuring software programs bespoke to DOD requirements. DOD requirements. Although the SWP organizations can deploy capabilities into platforms within six months or less, DOD has previously stated that the goal is to speed this process up into hours or just days, which makes a ton of sense. So that companies like Palantir and other software providers to the DOD

• 41:06John Coogan?

  can push updates much faster than having all this back and forth. And so there's a lot going on there. But of course, a lot of people are worried that the DOGE stuff will just result in smaller budgets. And then, you know, defense tech companies will be on their back foot because they're expecting an expansion and they can't get that if if things are are pulling back. But at the same time, there's, you know, the the actual budget will be passed not by the executive branch, but by Congress. And it all looks like there's a continuing resolution and then maybe even an increase in in defense spending. And so we can read more of this. I don't know if there's anything else you want to say.

• 41:42Jordi Hays?

  Not on that specifically. I'm sure there's other stuff in here. But, um, but yeah, I mean, we joked about this yesterday, too. Every it's sort of, um, what's interesting right now is every department feels like they're knows they're under threat.

• 41:57John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 41:57Jordi Hays?

  Because to them, you know, if you're running a department or, you know, even if you're just employee. Generally, everybody that's worked at a startup that has a massive, it's way more fun to have massive budgets that are sort of like, you don't really have to, you know, it's, you know, and this is the issue when startups raise too much money.

• 42:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:14Jordi Hays?

  They just start, you know, spending them or, or, you know, and so

• 42:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 42:19Jordi Hays?

  Regardless, bloat, bloat is more fun than austerity and being, you know, and running, you know, highly efficiently and questioning every spending decision and cutting back and saying, oh, we can't do, you know, this idea is good, but we're not going to do it because we have, you know, somewhere better to spend that money, or it's just not good enough.

• 42:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:37Jordi Hays?

  It doesn't meet the bar. And so no, you know, you know, historically, these departments have just sort of said, every year, we need more and more money. We give them more and more money. They're not being evaluated, you know, purely on, they're certainly not being evaluated on efficiency.

• 42:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. You know, you had that tinfoil hat conspiracy theory about NASA saying that they might be talking about the asteroid that's going to destroy Earth to keep

• 43:01Jordi Hays?

  It was just too conveniently timed. This thing's hitting in 2030, apparently, or might hit in 2030.

• 43:06John Coogan?

  2032.

• 43:07Jordi Hays?

  And your math is so bad that every other day, the odds go up by 1%.

• 43:13John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 43:13Jordi Hays?

  No, the odds don't go up 1%. They were like, you know, doubling every two days.

• 43:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. Who knows? Who knows? But, but I heard a similar conspiracy theory about the hypersonic missile stuff. It was always hard to tell when there would be a Chinese demonstration, like these undersea cables. Like on one hand, yes, it might be China's more dangerous than ever. So we need to increase military budgets, or it could just be, I want an increased military budget. So I have an incentive to make China look more dangerous than ever.

• 43:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 43:40John Coogan?

  And so it's always really hard to, to, to figure out what, what is driving the narrative.

• 43:46Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 43:47John Coogan?

  And, you know, in the China case, I am a little worried. In the NASA case, I don't know how much I buy that conspiracy theory, but it is interesting. And I'm glad

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  I'm not betting the farm on it.

• 43:56John Coogan?

  But, but it is, it is, it's an important question to ask, you know? This is an interesting line from here. Behind this is the nightmare of budgets. Two-year delays are aggravated by congressional squabbling. Pork-barreling politicians waste money by vetoing the end of programs.

• 44:13John Coogan?

  They guard their control over spending so jealously that without congressional permission, the Pentagon cannot, as a rule, shift more than $15 million from one line to another. So if it's over $15 million, it has to go to Congress and Congress has to say, okay, yeah, we'll take not even not even taxing more, spending more.

• 44:30Jordi Hays?

  It's so insane.

• 44:32John Coogan?

  And they and they put in context here, it says 15 million is too little to buy even four Patriot missiles when the Pentagon proposed diverting just 0.5% of the defense budget to buy thousands of drones under its replicator initiative in August. Winning approval took almost 40 congressional meetings.

• 44:50Jordi Hays?

  So Mitch, so the idea that Mitch McConnell should have a say in in this sort of individual line items of the Pentagon's budget is insane, especially when you consider that he goes, you know, anytime he does an interview, he, you know, sort of, there's like a bug and, you know, poor guy, but there's a bug in the system that just causes him to just like, you know, you got to restart the computer, basically. He did just announce his retirement in 2026, but or he's not going to run again in 2026. But unfortunately, that means for for the foreseeable future, he will still have a

• 45:30Jordi Hays?

  say in, you know, things that, you know, generally this level of micromanagement should be done, almost like looking back to say like, we gave you this budget. Did you spend it efficiently? If not, you know, we there needs, you know, and then we're enforcing changes versus the micromanagement at the.

• 45:51John Coogan?

  And I'm sure, I mean, I'm, I need to look this up, but it feels like this $15 million number is one of those uninflation adjusted numbers where when they passed that rule, they were like, they were like, well, yeah, we don't want the Pentagon to just randomly move $15 million and be able to create a new Manhattan project. Like, you know, $15 million, that's all of our aircraft carriers. And now $15 million is like four missiles. And so Pentagon can't shift it around. Pentagon angst is as old as the military industrial complex. Past secretaries of defense, including Bob Gates and the late Ash Carter, were philosopher kings next to their new and manifestly unqualified successor, Pete Hegseth.

• 46:29John Coogan?

  Who was a Fox News host, but has military experience. I don't buy the unqualified narrative as much as some people. But but he definitely has a different background from from previous secretaries.

• 46:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's more it's more so. Do we need a leader who's highly experienced as a warfighter and highly pragmatic? And has deep relationships within the active, you know, actively enlisted.

• 46:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:57Jordi Hays?

  Military? Or do we want the philosopher king who's going to sort of sit and, you know, tell everybody else how how things should be done without the sort of boots on the ground?

• 47:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's almost like we need both, you know, we we need the guy like Pete Hegseth.

• 47:12Jordi Hays?

  X needs both, right? We need our we need our operators and we need our philosopher kings.

• 47:17John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 47:17Jordi Hays?

  Sometimes they end up intersecting.

• 47:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of times the philosopher king usually would write, you know, the book that then goes viral and becomes the the tone that everyone's marching to the same drum of. But then you see what Pete Hegseth is doing with some of those photos where he's like working out with the guys and like really like leading from the front. And I think that that could be good. There was a great op ed in the journal yesterday about army recruiting falling off a cliff and now starting to climb back up and what they can do about this. And they actually mentioned the JFK proposed a 50 mile march like nationally to like encourage men to like go and work out and like potentially join the army. And so he was like proposing this is very cool. Anyway, there are two reasons why this moment may be different.

• 48:03John Coogan?

  One is the time is ripe. Not only is the threat to American security becoming clear, but a new generation of military technology firms, including Anduril, Palantir, Shield AI, is banging on the Pentagon doors. Indeed, Palantir is now worth more than any of the five prime contractors. More controversially, Mr. Musk is eager to crack heads together, an enthusiasm which stems partly from the second reason to hope, his experience elsewhere in the 2010s. To escape the ignominy of paying of paying for rides to the International Space Station on Russian spacecraft. NASA put fixed price contracts to provide such services out to tender. Boeing offered something called Starliner. Mr. Musk's SpaceX offered Crew Dragon at a much lower cost. Crew Dragon has been a huge success.

• 48:45John Coogan?

  Starliner has yet to fly a successful mission and has left Boeing having to absorb billions of dollars of budget overruns.

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  As they should.

• 48:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, and that's the nature of the free market like that is a good outcome, I think. From the 60s to 2010, the cost of getting a kilogram to orbit hovered around $12,000. SpaceX rockets have cut that by a factor of 10 already. It's 1,000 or 1,200 per kilogram and promise much more. Very, very fascinating. Mr. Musk's task is big and complex. American weapons need more AI autonomy and lower costs. Where possible, they should be made from cheap off the shelf parts that ride on advances in consumer tech. This is a lot of what Andrew Ral's doing. The Pentagon should foster competition, risk taking, knowing that some schemes will fail.

• 49:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. You know, part of the reasons why these decisions end up being so contentious is that the individual senators have, you know, their constituents back home that are oftentimes dependent on jobs from specific programs. Right. So it ends up getting into this position where we're not, we want to keep this program going because 300 people in this small town that voted for me rely on this program for their livelihood.

• 50:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:04Jordi Hays?

  And so it's a very, very complicated issue. And yeah, I'm interested to see, I would love to hear as this sort of Pentagon Doge, you know, collision happens, it'd be really fascinating to hear what our analysts in China and Russia and any of our adversaries saying, because they might be, you know, they might be actually concerned about it because hey, we have the biggest military budget in the world. And if we keep the budget the same, but spend it three times better, it'll actually be very bad for adversaries. But if we just cut, you know, and hack across the board, they might be, you know, rubbing their hands together, saying like, this is, this is great.

• 50:47Jordi Hays?

  Right. It makes, it makes us able to be more competitive. But any, this is one of those things, every single American should want, if your tax dollars are being spent anywhere, you should want them to be spent right. And I don't think that that's a political issue at all. That's just called being pragmatic.

• 51:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. So if you're at the Pentagon and you're working, if you're burning the midnight oil, trying to figure out where the budget is going, figuring out how to optimize our military spend. There's no better mattress to sleep on than an Eight Sleep.

• 51:21Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 51:22John Coogan?

  Nights that fuel your best days. Turn any bed into the ultimate sleeping experience. Go to Eight Sleep to purchase one. Big fan of Eight Sleep.

• 51:28Jordi Hays?

  Go to TBPN. You can compete. You can compete with John and I.

• 51:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 51:32Jordi Hays?

  Sleep scores. We should get, just get like a group chat going and we can.

• 51:36John Coogan?

  I did not do well last night. I think I got like an 80 something. It was rough.

• 51:40Jordi Hays?

  Why was it rough?

• 51:41John Coogan?

  I don't know. Couldn't, I, I think I went to bed too.

• 51:44Jordi Hays?

  I was the one.

• 51:46John Coogan?

  83. Only six hours and 41 minutes. Not good.

• 51:49Jordi Hays?

  You're, you're.

• 51:50John Coogan?

  I'm falling, I'm falling off.

• 51:52Jordi Hays?

  I had a 96.

• 51:53John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 51:54Jordi Hays?

  And the thing that just keeps dinging me is I'm not getting quite, I'm barely getting more than seven.

• 51:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 51:59Jordi Hays?

  But I'm in the range.

• 52:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. But some of it work on. I've reflected on it. I think that choice of shirt and suit phenomenal.

• 52:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 52:07John Coogan?

  It's great.

• 52:08Jordi Hays?

  Risky one today. I wasn't sure if this sort of off-white shirt could go with the suit, but it's working.

• 52:16John Coogan?

  I think, I think it looks great. And you know who needs to put on a suit one of these days?

• 52:20Jordi Hays?

  Who's that?

• 52:21John Coogan?

  Mark Zuckerberg.

• 52:22Jordi Hays?

  That is true.

• 52:22John Coogan?

  He's a hype beast. He's looked good.

• 52:24Jordi Hays?

  He, he put on a suit for, it's, it's a shame when a man only puts on a suit when they're in trouble.

• 52:30John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 52:31Jordi Hays?

  Don't, you don't want to be the guy that only is wearing a suit when, when people, you know, are trying to come down on you. Because if you're wearing a suit all the time, when you are, you know, in the shit.

• 52:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:43Jordi Hays?

  Sorry.

• 52:43John Coogan?

  Swear jar.

• 52:44Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, swear jar. But you know, if Zuckerberg wore a suit every single day and then he goes in front of Senate and he's wearing a suit, he doesn't look guilty.

• 52:51John Coogan?

  I don't think he needs to wear it every day. I, I just think, we know he can pull off the cool tee shirt with the, the graphic tee. We know he can look good walking into UFC, but I want to see more versatility, more range in the outfits.

• 53:04Jordi Hays?

  The New York Times actually has an article in 2018 called Mr. Zuckerberg's I'm Sorry Suit.

• 53:10John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 53:11Jordi Hays?

  And another one from the Hollywood Reporter, yes, Mark Zuckerberg wore a suit at the Senate hearing. So.

• 53:15John Coogan?

  He's got to reclaim it.

• 53:16Jordi Hays?

  The guy who had the, the sort of, you know, daily uniform, what was it? Like the, the gray shirt?

• 53:23John Coogan?

  It was the gray sweatshirt, the hoodie.

• 53:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 53:25John Coogan?

  And, and there was this famous interview with Kara Swisher, where Kara Swisher's really putting the screws to him.

• 53:30Jordi Hays?

  Here's another, here's another one. These, these headlines are amazing. Washington Post, 2018, Mark Zuckerberg is one of the suits now. He'd better learn to get comfortable in one. And so they're all just dunking on him from wearing his suit. But if he'd been wearing it, you know, even once a week prior to that,

• 53:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:46Jordi Hays?

  Nobody would have been able to say anything.

• 53:48John Coogan?

  I mean, his suits looked great, but I'm, but he could take it a step further now that he's so into fashion. He could really find something that's a standout suit and even blend in some of the, the, the hype beast. He could take some creative risks with the suits that he chooses and how he puts them together. And just throw it in every once in a while. I'm not saying, I'm not saying get rid of the T-shirt entirely. I'm just saying every once in a while, show up in a suit, show up in a button down. Let's see a polo. Let's see you be able to style, you know, it, you know, in any, in any different way.

• 54:17Jordi Hays?

  Former Facebook employee Chamath was recently on his podcast talking about his Laura Piana addiction. And he looked fantastic.

• 54:23John Coogan?

  He looked fantastic.

• 54:24Jordi Hays?

  I thought, uh, you know, he was getting memed for it, but, um, it, uh, you know, I think he looked great. And, uh, yeah, it's hard to argue with that.

• 54:33John Coogan?

  It is, it is. Well, the reason we're talking about Zuck is because Meta has, is discussing an AI data center project that could cost $200 billion. And for reference, they are spending something between 60 and 80 billion on CapEx per year. Not all of that is for artificial intelligence. A lot of that's just for serving reels, which is obviously AI driven as well, but it's not for specifically for LLM training. But he's all in on AI and is now thinking, I'm sure this 200 billion is over a series of years. He's not just ramping up the CapEx by a factor of three or four overnight, but it is an exciting story. And it's interesting, given that Nvidia earnings are happening later today. We'll see if this is something that moves the needle for Nvidia.

• 55:17John Coogan?

  Cause if they really do want to spend $200 billion, that's going to be a lot of GPUs. So I'll kick it off and then I want to get your take. Meta Platforms is in talks to build a new data center campus for its artificial intelligence endeavors that would dwarf anything the company has done to date and would be among the biggest of its kind. It would cost more than $200 billion. The proposed campus, which hasn't been previously reported, this is in the information, would be several times larger than a new data, AI data center in Louisiana that Mark Zuckerberg discussed last month, which he implied would be about four miles long. That data center would cost 10 billion. And so now we're going up 20x. The discussions suggest Meta is preparing for a multi-year surge in demand for generative AI

• 56:01John Coogan?

  among its billions of users through an AI chatbot available in all of its apps. It also shows the lengths that to which Zuckerberg may go to keep up with its rival OpenAI, which has embarked on a joint venture with SoftBank to spend 500 billion over four years on new data centers for its AI. Like Microsoft, Google and Amazon, Meta has outlined plans to massively increase CapEx, largely for AI development. Meta said it will lift its CapEx between to between 60 and 65 billion. That's the actual number, up nearly 70% on last year. So there, there are.

• 56:32Jordi Hays?

  And he's no, he's never been afraid to roll a dice on CapEx.

• 56:38John Coogan?

  Yes, and he's founder mode. He can just.

• 56:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, just generally making big bets, obviously around, you know, he, he, he, you know, it's funny. At the time, Meta, the rebrand seemed so silly to me. And in the fullness of time, Facebook is like 50% of the metaverse that we experience, right? When you look at everything from Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, it's actually a perfect name.

• 57:05John Coogan?

  I, I, I agree. I agree. I think it's aged very, very well. And I think like it did get away from the blue app. Yeah, like people use Instagram, they use WhatsApp, like everyone uses a Meta product, even if they don't use Facebook specifically. And I think that Zuck realized that and.

• 57:23Jordi Hays?

  And he actually needed, so, so what, what we're seeing now is that every single one of Zuck's apps will eventually like become somewhat irrelevant with the youth. And so he needed a sort of, he needed this sort of parent level brand to say like, you're investing in Meta and my leadership and this sort of collection of, of digital. And you know, now physical products.

• 57:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 57:48Jordi Hays?

  Some of them will, you know, they're going to have their time. But but many people have reported, you know, we talked about this probably a month ago at this point. A lot of people feeling like I don't use Instagram as much anymore. I don't post there. I'm, you know, my, my attention is being spread elsewhere. And so he needs to, I think it was really smart to not be the blue, the blue company, you know, the Facebook company.

• 58:10John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 58:11Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah.

• 58:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. And there's something about CapEx spending like this that's somehow less risky than spending on a specific app or specific platform. Like when he, they, when they went to build out the, the last data center build, the last big data center plan, they, they got kind of caught flat footed with reels because TikTok came out and the main, you know, TikTok was, oh, it's vertical video that scrolls. But the real thing that made TikTok take off was that it is able to, with AI essentially, personalize a feed very, very quickly.

• 58:48Jordi Hays?

  And scale AI-esque.

• 58:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm sure. But, but even, even then, like, it's clearly like, like a very robust algorithm in terms of understanding what is this content and how is it linked to other content in the feed? And this person spent 45 seconds watching this one minute clip and 15 seconds watching this other clip. So they like cars and not trucks or whatever. And so it, bringing that to bear in reels on Instagram was something that required a new data center. Like, it wasn't just something that they could just spin up on AWS or on their own servers because it required new, new AI, uh, new AI data centers. And so Zuck famously, when that happened, he said, I don't just want one reels sized data center, I want two.

• 59:35Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 59:35John Coogan?

  And because then if we get caught again, we'll just have one ready to go. And then, of course, the LLM boom happened and he was ready and he was able to train Llama really quickly. And then they have been not dependent on any other LLM provider and they've been able to just open source that, but also use it internally for their chatbots. And so you, so you can. Imagine that, you know, this, it's like, he spends $200 billion on this. Is it just to serve L L Ms in all of their apps? They're probably looking at the data of how many people are chatting with Lama across all of their apps. It's looking really good, but even if that doesn't happen, maybe people start generating a lot more video. And that's really intense, or people start doing something else and it still requires a lot of hardware, a lot of AI chips, a lot of GPUs.

• 1:00:19Jordi Hays?

  And so It's also, you have to imagine that, that, uh, you know, we're in this sort of more pro business administration. If M and A come, you know, gets back on the menu in a big way, Zuck is going to get extremely aggressive. Acquiring these sort of breakout consumer AI products. And being able to go to the founder of an AI company that has product market fit, but it's losing a billion dollars a year. And saying, why don't you join Meta? I'll still let you run the business. And you're going to have access to this $200 billion of, uh, you know, data center.

• 1:00:52John Coogan?

  I mean, you can see

• 1:00:53Jordi Hays?

  Capex that you would never be able to get on your own.

• 1:00:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, you could see, you could see character AI having a very natural home and fit within that metaverse.

• 1:01:00Jordi Hays?

  And so I think my read on this is, is broadly that he wants Meta to be independently competitive in AI. Have, you know, you know, not be held back by, by, you know, GPUs and just raw, uh, computing power. And ultimately create, you know, allow Meta to be a place where, uh, other companies can land and get, and be competitive with Stargates. And Elon's and things like that. The other thing from this article that stood out to me is that, um, this line leaders at Meta and OpenAI grew concerned about the speed with which XAI stood up a data center to develop AI in Memphis, Tennessee last year.

• 1:01:37Jordi Hays?

  So every single person that wasn't at XAI watched what the XAI team did in Memphis and that became the bar. And so if, if, if, um, Zuck is paying, uh, you know, some, you know, executive teams specifically around data centers, you know, uh, combined. I'm sure it's like $50 million, like some absurd amount of comp. He's looking at them and saying, this is the bar.

• 1:02:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:03Jordi Hays?

  You should be able to achieve this because I know it's possible. Uh, and there, and there's, um, you know, some, some sort of, we've talked about this yesterday, but, uh, some constraints around, uh, you know, potentially promises that were made around, um, ESG and stuff like that. I don't know where Meta lands with that, but, uh, ultimately that's the bar now. And so And if Zuck is certainly going to be intense around that and say, you know, the, you know, actually, you know, I would want you to, you know, do it even faster because that's him as a leader saying, you know, he was wanting to really set the pace, but that's a bar now.

• 1:02:38John Coogan?

  And yeah, and when you launch a new LLM, like because the landscape is somewhat commoditizing, like you have to be superlative in some way. And so essentially like OpenAI seems to still be on the frontier of the frontier. They are the leading, but every other company is when they launch something, they always have some differentiator. Maybe they beat them by just a couple of points on Chatbot Arena or MMLU, or their slightly bigger context window with Google, or, you know, oh, it's, you know, it's, it's open source. And that's enough to be like, well, it's a GPT four class model and it's open source. So now it's, it's, it's in the conversation. Whereas if you're just launching a clone, that's exactly like, like, you know,

• 1:03:21John Coogan?

  OpenAI, but like DeepSeek, it's like, oh, they had this, oh, we were, it's so cheap and it's really cheap to use and it was trained really small and you can run it, you know, you can inference it so cheaply. It's like, it didn't matter that they, they weren't an order of magnitude better than ChatGPT or GPT four. What mattered was that it was at the same level roughly, but then also had a little bonus. And I think that Zuck is, is thinking about that right now as XAI spun this up is like, can their Llama four drop outdo XAI's Grok three? Because if it can't, then they need a new twist on it. They need something else that, that will really, otherwise it's just, you know, it's not going to become some popular product.

• 1:03:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. One interesting thing is Meta has not been nearly as aggressive of forcing Llama down people's throats as XAI and Grok have, right?

• 1:04:10John Coogan?

  That does feel right.

• 1:04:11Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, most people are using Grok within X. Makes sense. It's already there. They have the standalone app now. I think people are starting to use that more. But Meta with how much they're investing in AI, how much Zuck cares about this? Why is it that you go to your home, you know, why, why have they not slammed this on the home row of Instagram, which is a, you know, an app that? I don't know. They must have.

• 1:04:36John Coogan?

  So I, I would push back on that in some ways because they do show it. It's more than just that there's a conversation about AI that's happening on X that we are very much a part of. And so we see that integration. I don't know if, you know, basketball Twitter is using Grok in the same way that tech Twitter is. But if you go to Instagram and you type in a search term, there's an icon right here to click, you know, put this in a chat and all of a sudden I'm talking to Lama. And so it, it pulls it up right here and, and.

• 1:05:07Jordi Hays?

  By the way, guys, John's explorer page is cars, watches and weightlifting.

• 1:05:13Jordi Hays?

  Very, uh, very pure.

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. Most expensive Lambo. Let's do this. And like very quickly, it will, it will insert me in a, in a chat. It, it used to be really aggressive where it was actually hard to, to pull this up. But like, you can see that like this is like, you know, um, it's like, if you search in Instagram, you will get pipelined into a flow. They've gotten less aggressive about it, but, uh, they are definitely slipping the AI in, uh, I think they're trying to do it tastefully because there's, there's often really big pushbacks to any changes in Instagram, even when they changed to like, hey, we're going to put more reels in your main feed. There was a big like backlash to that, uh, becoming more algorithmic. People are, hey, I built up a following of five million followers. Like now every post has to go viral or it's just a flop. Like that's not fun.

• 1:06:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Weeze in the chat says, didn't meta add artificially generated profiles? I'd argue that's way worse than X.

• 1:06:07John Coogan?

  They did, but, but, but those never broke through in the same way that the Grok narrative has on.

• 1:06:12Jordi Hays?

  It's very different to be like, I still use Instagram search to search for specific things. I don't go there with the intention at all of, I'm going to ask this LLM a question that I have.

• 1:06:25John Coogan?

  And they certainly, they certainly haven't been pushing like a deep research comparable product in, in any meta products that I'm aware of.

• 1:06:32Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:06:33John Coogan?

  Um, it would be cool. I mean, I, one of the favorite parts of X and XAI is that you're on a, you're on a post and you just click the button and then it just gives you more context and you can say, hey, write a whole report about this.

• 1:06:44Jordi Hays?

  There could be, that's a really good point. There could be so much more like research, like using Instagram for research. So if I wanna, it would be very cool to be able to, and maybe, maybe this is possible and we're, we're just not engaged enough with, with uh, Lama. But being able to say, who do I follow or who have I engaged with in the past? That has talked about intermittent fasting and then get, you know, a bunch of, you know, get a uh, return.

• 1:07:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I was thinking about this just on X. Like I, I really hope that, that XAI gets more access to my X profile. So I could actually say of the people I follow, who are the experts in this?

• 1:07:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Cause right now it's a little bit random.

• 1:07:25John Coogan?

  It's really hard to search right now for, for what's happening. Sometimes I'll just do uh, filter follows and then the topic. So I'll say, okay, I wanna see, you know, uh, anyone who's talked about Metas, uh, I'll search like Meta data center, filter follows. And then it filters out all the junk accounts that I don't follow and I'll just see, okay, Dylan Patel posted about it. Someone else posted about it, et cetera. Uh, there's some interesting scale here we should go over. Uh, the meta, the meta executives discussed eventually needing between five and seven gigawatts of power for the site. By comparison, OpenAI has planned to acquire eight gigawatts of power for its proposed array of data centers known as Stargate by 2030. Each gigawatt is enough to power 750,000 homes to put OpenAI and Metas projects in perspective.

• 1:08:10John Coogan?

  At the end of 2023, Microsoft's entire Azure cloud business had around five gigawatts of capacity. And that's across the entire world. Um, so getting, getting up there, getting up there, big, big data centers training.

• 1:08:25Jordi Hays?

  And we use around one gigawatt to run the show.

• 1:08:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:30John Coogan?

  That's great. Anyway, so everyone is focused on this drastically more or drastically less. As Meta charts, as Meta charts plans for a major expansion, it is waiting on some of the Nvidia chip orders placed last year. Instagram head Adam Mosseri told his staff in a note this month. Meta is also contending with uncertainty over how many AI chips it needs to train and run its AI. We may need drastically more or drastically less capacity than we thought to build frontier models. That's of course about deep seek. Why are you laughing?

• 1:09:02Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that to me, I mean, is relevant to Nvidia earnings later because it's possible that companies are just, you know, the risk right now for Nvidia is that companies massively, you know, overspend and then flood the secondary market, you know, end up having to offload some of these chips that are depreciating because the chips are actually getting better.

• 1:09:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:09:24Jordi Hays?

  And then it gets into a situation where you can go on the secondary market, not from Nvidia and buy, you know, however many H100s and that revenue no longer goes directly to Nvidia and Nvidia nukes.

• 1:09:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:09:42Jordi Hays?

  That's a risk. And so to see the head, basically the CEO of Instagram, he operates very much as in sort of founder mode. He still makes great videos about the platform and helping creators there. To see, to see him, you know, it sounds like he wasn't intending this for to be, to be publicized, but we may need drastically more drastically less capacity than we thought to build frontier models. That just says, we don't know what's going on. We're not, you know, that's not a high, you would prefer him to say, we think we're going to need, you know, we're pretty confident in our projections. It's possible we might need more or less is very different than saying we may need drastically more or drastically less.

• 1:10:26John Coogan?

  We have no idea.

• 1:10:27Jordi Hays?

  No idea. We're going to find out.

• 1:10:29John Coogan?

  I tend to think we, I'm still pretty scalepilled. I still think we need a lot more. I think that the, the deep seek optimizations.

• 1:10:38John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe, we'll see. But I think the DeepSeek optimizations, you get those, and it's kind of like a one-time algorithmic benefit, just like RLHF was kind of like an algorithmic benefit, but then you want to apply scale to it. And so I look at DeepSeek and I say, cool, let's do all of the optimizations that DeepSeek did around memory bandwidth and int4 or int8 instead of int32, all of the different optimizations that they did, let's take those and run that at 100x scale, and we'll probably get better models.

• 1:11:08Jordi Hays?

  So the wild thing is, is right now, this is the interesting question, and we're not going to go Kramer and start making predictions, but Nvidia's worth almost twice what Meta is today.

• 1:11:21John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:11:22Jordi Hays?

  What does that look like in a decade from now? It's hard for me to, it's hard to imagine,

• 1:11:30Jordi Hays?

  it's easier for me to imagine Meta as a $10 trillion company than it is for me to imagine, especially than it is for me to imagine Nvidia as a $10 trillion company. And that's, that's a primarily vibes-based analysis, but it, anyways.

• 1:11:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, when you think about like potential platform shifts, like post GPU, maybe you go TPU takes off, that's rough for Nvidia potentially. If you're, I mean, Apple silicon is a non-Nvidia product, right? It goes directly from Apple design to TSMC, kind of cutting out the middlemen. And then quantum computing, Nvidia doesn't really have a piece in that. At the same time, like, you know, everyone's using these GPUs right now and continues to, versus the Facebook narrative and the Meta narrative of like, if VR is a big platform, well, they're really well positioned for that. If, you know, the social stuff is really, really sticky, people, you know, can't really go rebuild their social graphs everywhere else. There's just all these different elements where Zuck seems to have his finger in so many

• 1:12:35John Coogan?

  different pies that could potentially be huge over a very long period of time. But it's fun to figure it out. But Jordi, if you had $200 billion to spend, how would you track it all?

• 1:12:46Jordi Hays?

  I would use Ramp.

• 1:12:47John Coogan?

  Oh, Ramp. Save time. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Go to ramp.com and we will move on.

• 1:12:57Jordi Hays?

  Wait, quick note. A Ramp SDR is in the chat right now, under the account Ramp SDR. And they say, when are you interviewing a Ramp SDR?

• 1:13:07John Coogan?

  Oh, there we go. We gotta bring him on.

• 1:13:08Jordi Hays?

  I would say that we have a nightly interview where I just call him up and we just chit chat.

• 1:13:13John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 1:13:14Jordi Hays?

  We should start bringing him on the show.

• 1:13:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love it. That's great. Did you see this Alex Jones post? Exactly what we want to be covering. But it is funny. Yeah, this is funny because you need to put it on anytime you interact with Alex Jones because he's Tinfoil Hat City. But he said, major scandal breaking. Apple iPhones now replace the word racist with Trump. So you would use the dictation, you would say racist, and it would just autocorrect to Trump. Obviously, that was very controversial. And what's interesting is that there's a proposed community note here that says, this is false. The only way this happens is if you set up personalized autocorrect in Apple's settings. This was staged for engagement farming. And I believed that. But then I opened

• 1:13:58John Coogan?

  The Wall Street Journal, and The Wall Street Journal has an article here saying, Apple has pledged to fix transcription glitch that replaces racist with Trump. And so what's interesting is that like, I guess it was a problem. I have no idea how this happened.

• 1:14:11Jordi Hays?

  I just, I'm gonna text you right now.

• 1:14:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Test it out and see, and see what it does. If it autocorrects. It needs to be the dictation. So you have to say it. You have to say racist to the, to the dictation button, and see if it replaces it. Let's, let's test this now, live. We'll get to the bottom of this. Alex Jones, you're in the truth zone. No misinformation allowed here.

• 1:14:39John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 1:14:40Jordi Hays?

  Racist?

• 1:14:41John Coogan?

  What does it say?

• 1:14:44Jordi Hays?

  It says racist.

• 1:14:45John Coogan?

  Okay, well debunked. Alex Jones, you're on notice. But for some reason, Apple did actually address this and they said they would fix the bug occurring on some iPhones in which its text to speech transcription software is sometimes replacing certain words with an R consonant, including racist with Trump. And I'm sure the words rampant and rampage at all, at times also appear to be replaced with Trump. And I bet you that's just something in the, they're updating the transcription algorithm, which we've talked about, we wanted them to do this. There are always hallucinations whenever you build these deep learning models. They're very hard to validate. And I'm sure just somewhere, you know, there's so much in the corpus of like YouTube videos that they're probably scraping to train these models of people saying Trump and racist

• 1:15:29John Coogan?

  in the same section or in the same sentence that some bit got flipped and all of a sudden it thinks that they're similar.

• 1:15:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, what Alex Jones, I'm sure would suggest is that it was an activist employee.

• 1:15:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, of course. Oh, yeah, I hardcoded this in.

• 1:15:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:42John Coogan?

  And, and I don't think that's what's, what's happening. Did you notice that with some of the transcription models, if you, if you just triggered them and had it transcribe nothing, like you didn't say anything and you said, thanks, like transcribe that basically, it would say, like, thanks for watching and don't forget to subscribe. Because it was clearly trained on YouTube videos and it was like the most, the most popular thing humans say ever is please subscribe. Isn't that hilarious?

• 1:16:07Jordi Hays?

  That's hilarious.

• 1:16:08John Coogan?

  And so I would, I would.

• 1:16:09Jordi Hays?

  We say that.

• 1:16:09John Coogan?

  I would open, no, no, we don't, we, we got it.

• 1:16:11Jordi Hays?

  You should.

• 1:16:12John Coogan?

  But yeah, I would open it up and I would just push this and then this and it would, and it would just say like, you know, oh, thanks for subscribing or please subscribe. And so these, these errors happen all the time. People blow them out of, out of proportion. There was the, there was the Gemini image debacle. People said, oh, chat GPT can do all these things. Grok is advocating for, you know, giving Trump the death penalty. It's all, it's all over the place and people read into it whatever they want, whatever their political ideology, they're like, I gotta, I gotta score the points. And so it does seem like there was an error. It does seem like Apple's working on it, but it also seems like, you know, Alex Jones is engagement farming a little bit. But, you know, he's got to get that creator payout, you know?

• 1:16:52Jordi Hays?

  Done that before.

• 1:16:53John Coogan?

  Done that before. This is crazy. A TikTok user who goes by the handle David Median PDX said on a post on the platform, you say racist and it blurts out Trump. The software correctly renders racist or rampage several times, but occasionally when it is replaced, it will dictate the word Trump instead of racist. And so, artificial intelligence has been known to generate unexpected results. The current excitement around general artificial intelligence, which is able to produce text and images, has attracted controversy over its propensity for presenting erroneous, fake or harmful content. And this is why Apple's been so conservative with the generative AI stuff, like the Gen Moji. Why is it restricted to the just cartoons? Well, if you tell the model, never create anything photo real ever, it's very hard to say.

• 1:17:36John Coogan?

  Someone used Gen Moji to create a fake image of the president going to prison and it swung the election. And so that was the narrative of the election. And I had a prediction that, I think I posted this, I need to take a victory lap on this one. But I said that After Effects would be more, Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, the Adobe Creative Suite. That would be more impactful in the election than generative AI. Because generative AI was still very clockable, like you could see, okay, that's clearly an AI rendering of Biden doing something stupid or Trump doing something stupid. Like, not many people are falling for that and then voting based on that. But the, but the, but the video editing stuff was much easier to see.

• 1:18:19John Coogan?

  And we actually saw a lawsuit about this where, you know, I think it was, oh, I'm gonna get this wrong. One of the major networks did an interview with Kamala Harris and then they edited it down and they took out some pieces and Trump sued and said, you edited out the bad parts which swung voters to vote for Kamala. That wasn't generative AI. That was just the razor tool.

• 1:18:39Jordi Hays?

  Artisanal.

• 1:18:40John Coogan?

  In, yeah, in Premiere, basically. And, and that, those types of edits, even, even just doing little things like you're, you're watching a clip of Biden. You, you cut it and then you add some extra sound and it sounds like he's taking an extra long amount of time to answer the question. Something like that can be misinformation more than, you don't need generative AI to do that. And so, Apple has been really on top of this stuff and playing it very safe. I think that they should be more aggressive and I actually don't think this is that big of a deal and I don't care. What's your take?

• 1:19:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just another moment that you can imagine that Apple execs are just deeply frustrated with all things AI summarization and AI, you know, dictation decoding. So anyways.

• 1:19:23John Coogan?

  Well, I'm sure Apple will need to clean up their reputation. They'll need to put up some new billboards. Those Gen Moji billboards aren't doing a good job. And when they run their next billboard campaign, who should they use, Jordy?

• 1:19:34Jordi Hays?

  Adquick.

• 1:19:35John Coogan?

  Let's go. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the out of the headaches of out of home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. And I wanted to highlight a cool billboard from Northrop Grumman, who, you know, the company's not doing as well. Palantir's bigger now. We love Anduril on this show, but hey, it's a cool billboard and it looks nice. It's a little B20.

• 1:20:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you have to. You have to imagine Anduril's been been very, I think, effective with their out of home strategy. And in all the places that Northrop Grumman execs are also, you know, commuting around, you have to imagine that they felt a little bit of a fire.

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  Look at where this billboard is. It's truly in the middle of nowhere.

• 1:20:22Jordi Hays?

  No, I think that's in.

• 1:20:23John Coogan?

  Probably outside of.

• 1:20:24Jordi Hays?

  California.

• 1:20:25John Coogan?

  Outside of their testing facility, which is cool. And yeah, I mean, if you're building hard tech, take a picture of the hard tech, make it look great and throw it on a billboard. What a great way to get the message out there if you have a striking product. And that's really where where the Adquick stuff and the out of home really hits its stride is when you can come up with with great copy, great visuals that when they're put in the real world, they make people stop, they make people take a picture of it, they make people post the picture of your ad for free on the internet because it's so.

• 1:20:56Jordi Hays?

  And the opportunity for Apple is to look back at, you know, their decades of incredible marketing and just run back.

• 1:21:03John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:21:04Jordi Hays?

  Play the hits.

• 1:21:04John Coogan?

  Play the hits.

• 1:21:05Jordi Hays?

  Play the hits.

• 1:21:06John Coogan?

  Play the hits.

• 1:21:06Jordi Hays?

  They're more of a luxury brand today than anything. That's okay.

• 1:21:10John Coogan?

  And Gen Moji doesn't feel like a luxury brand.

• 1:21:12Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:21:13John Coogan?

  It doesn't. And I mean, I hear you that they're a luxury brand and a lot of their products feel like the AirPods Max, those feel very like you wear them as a status symbol. And you know, the phones certainly feel this way. But they did, they did have like the fun color, the see-through plastic IMAX back in the day. They've always had a little bit of fun.

• 1:21:33Jordi Hays?

  Even doing a see-through phone, you can imagine almost like an acrylic phone would be harder to break in place, but.

• 1:21:43John Coogan?

  But good luck to them. Hopefully we'll see some cool stuff from Apple. And we wanted to move on to a new term. We know, we talk about Deca millionaires, Centi millionaires.

• 1:21:55Jordi Hays?

  Centis?

• 1:21:56John Coogan?

  Billionaires, Deca billionaires, and now there's the super billionaires. And the Wall Street Journal wants to introduce you to the world's 24 super billionaires. The ultra-rich are growing in numbers and changing wealth as we know it. In 1987, Forbes published its first billionaire list. There were 140 people on it with a combined wealth of 295 billion. At the time, the richest person was Japan's Yoshiaki Tuzomi, a real estate tycoon worth 20 billion. Today, the world's richest person is Elon Musk with a net worth of 420 billion.

• 1:22:32Jordi Hays?

  I think Elon lost 20 billion yesterday.

• 1:22:34John Coogan?

  Just yesterday.

• 1:22:37John Coogan?

  It's a moment of silence for the capital erosion going on roughly 21 times as much as the previous peak. And so as the ranks of global billionaires have swelled dramatically in recent years, a new category of ultra-rich has emerged, the super billionaire. Musk is just one of 24 people worldwide who qualify for that distinction, which is defined as individuals worth 50 billion or more as of February. These super billionaires.

• 1:23:01Jordi Hays?

  Imagine you're, you're sitting at 48, you thought you were ready to retire, and they come out with this new definition.

• 1:23:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:08Jordi Hays?

  And you're going to be thinking to yourself, I'm so embarrassed to go to Davos this year. I'm so embarrassed for Sun Valley. I'm not getting invited to the super billionaire dinner.

• 1:23:18John Coogan?

  Totally. I mean, if I meet someone who's sitting at 48, 47 billion,

• 1:23:22Jordi Hays?

  You got them on.

• 1:23:22John Coogan?

  I'm not even giving them the time of day.

• 1:23:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:24John Coogan?

  I'm, I'm kind of snickering.

• 1:23:25Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you want to be on the show? Oh, you want to be on the show? Why don't you pump those numbers up?

• 1:23:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, why don't you go turbo long something right now? And try and pump those numbers up. Well, they have a very interesting list. Tons of people worth deep diving. A lot of these people have been featured on David Senna's founders podcast. And let's go through them. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bernard, I know Larry Ellison, Zuck, Sergey Brin, Steve Ballmer, Warren Buffett, James Walton from Walmart, Samuel Walton as well, from Walmart, although they used to have the exact same net worth. James is pulling away with 117 billion. His brother, 114 billion. Yeah, something's going on there. Amancio Ortega is at 113 billion. Alice Walton is at 110. Jensen Wong at 100. Man, he's up there now.

• 1:24:14John Coogan?

  That that stock is doing well. Yeah.

• 1:24:17Jordi Hays?

  Generational run.

• 1:24:17John Coogan?

  It has been. It's fantastic. He's been founder, CEO of that company for what 30 years now?

• 1:24:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:24John Coogan?

  Deserved. Bill Gates, Michael Bloomberg, Larry Page, Mikesha and Bonnie, Charles Koch, Julia Koch, Francois Bettencourt Myers from Lorient. Gautama Andani from the Andani Group is at 60 billion. Michael Dell is also at 60 billion. Zhong Shan Shan from Nongfu Spring. No idea who that is.

• 1:24:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:45John Coogan?

  And Prajogo Prangetsu.

• 1:24:49Jordi Hays?

  Is Nongfu Spring the water?

• 1:24:51John Coogan?

  I have no idea.

• 1:24:52Jordi Hays?

  Yep, it is. It's a bottle. It's a dominant bottled water brand in China.

• 1:24:57John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:24:58Jordi Hays?

  Obviously. There's actually, I have a book. I have a book on this guy.

• 1:25:03John Coogan?

  You do.

• 1:25:04Jordi Hays?

  That I that's just been sitting there in my office at home. Maybe I got to pull it out. Nongfu Spring mode.

• 1:25:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, that sounds great. In major luxury real estate markets like New York, Miami, Palm Beach, and Los Angeles, and Aspen, new super tall towers and spec mansions have popped up geared specifically to the billionaire set. And there has been an explosion of nine-figure home sales across the country. You remember the the one in Beverly Hills?

• 1:25:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was a rough one.

• 1:25:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, but that was built on spec. They wanted to sell it for $500 million would be the most expensive.

• 1:25:37John Coogan?

  Home ever sold in America and it was basically just like billionaire bait. It was like, we'll build this and somebody will come pick it up. Nobody really did. The market kind of crashed. It was kind of a disaster. I think the bank wound up selling it to the guy who started that fashion company Fashion Nova. Yeah.

• 1:25:53Jordi Hays?

  But at, but at maybe their cost or maybe they lost money on it.

• 1:25:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think, I think the house is a hundred thousand square feet. It has a 50 car garage. It has a full club.

• 1:26:04Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense.

• 1:26:05John Coogan?

  It has a full club, like the club for like DJ and like you can host, you can host like thousands of people there.

• 1:26:11Jordi Hays?

  The LA fires are kicking off. You've got your 50 car garage at one house.

• 1:26:16John Coogan?

  Like I need to move all of these tonight. Very, very difficult. Did you see the, the video tour with the guy who built the one? It's fascinating.

• 1:26:24Jordi Hays?

  So maybe, maybe it's worth a deep dive.

• 1:26:26John Coogan?

  We should definitely dive this. So he, he basically made his money in directed DVD movies. So he made a ton of money in like the eighties and nineties, taking like cheaply made movies and then distributing them into like grocery stores. And people would pick up a new VHS. Oh, some jog clown bad damn movie or something and they'd, and they'd pay for it. So he made a bunch of money doing that in, in film production, then got into real estate. He built a home for the Winklevoss twins, I believe.

• 1:26:54John Coogan?

  And, and then as the deal was kind of going south and he realized like, hey, maybe no one's going to buy this 500 million dollar house. He was like, well, now I'm pitching it as a reality show to Netflix. I'm going to live here and we're going to have concerts and he wanted to have like UFC fights there and stuff. And he was really like scrapping it, like any way to make this deal work. And I think it eventually the bank said, hey, you owe us too much interest. You gotta pay up.

• 1:27:20Jordi Hays?

  I wonder what the appetite, I mean, a lot of these homes, you know, once you get into the hundred million dollar plus range are, are very much trophy homes. And for the people that are buying them, they could burn to the ground without having, making really a dent, right? Like if you look at any of the, this list, if they lost a hundred and 35 million dollar home. Be a basically annoyance, but almost a minor one at that compared to the sort of day to day or year to year fluctuations in the stock. The one out of the LA fires that was wild was the $135 million home that was in succession.

• 1:27:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:27:55Jordi Hays?

  That burned down. And the issue with these is they're just not like you can get insurance on them, but not actually.

• 1:28:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:04Jordi Hays?

  Insurance that will cover any sort of, you know, even the rebuild on it. So anyways.

• 1:28:11John Coogan?

  Let me keep reading. The rise of the super billionaire marks a transformation in the composition of the world's ultra wealthy, experts said. In the 19th century and the early 20th century, the richest men were industrialists. John D Rockefeller built Standard Oil into a monopoly. Andrew Carnegie dominated the steel industry and Cornelius Vanderbilt amassed a fortune through railroads. Their wealth, while vast, was spread across industries that defined an era of physical infrastructure and manufacturing. Through Standard Oil, John D Rockefeller became the world's first confirmed billionaire in 1916. During that period, a company valued, the company's value accounted for physical assets like property and machinery more so than the types of intellectual property and promise of future scale and earnings that push up values today.

• 1:28:56John Coogan?

  Today's tech billionaires make up a significant portion of the super billionaire pool. In addition to Musk, there's Bezos, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Ballmer. Their wealth is linked almost entirely to the stock prices and therefore future cash flows of the companies they started. And there's an interesting kind of narrative violation in here. Steve Ballmer is at 157 billion. Bill Gates is at 106.

• 1:29:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:20John Coogan?

  Ballmer.

• 1:29:21Jordi Hays?

  Ballmer.

• 1:29:22John Coogan?

  People don't like the Ballmer era for Microsoft, like the stock didn't do as well. Satya kind of brought it back, pivoted to cloud.

• 1:29:28Jordi Hays?

  The only thing I remember is the video, you know?

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:29:32Jordi Hays?

  And that was, that was great.

• 1:29:34John Coogan?

  But clearly held on properly.

• 1:29:36Jordi Hays?

  The wild thing here, this has been discussed a lot, but it's worth bringing up while we're on the subject. There's only one investor on the entire.

• 1:29:44John Coogan?

  Warren Buffett.

• 1:29:44Jordi Hays?

  Top 10 list, which is Warren Buffett. Every single other person on the list. Was a founder or CEO, you know, or part of the family that started one of these companies. And so.

• 1:29:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. So when you're pitching a VC.

• 1:29:57Jordi Hays?

  But I would argue that.

• 1:29:58John Coogan?

  They're flexing on you and they're like, oh yeah, I'm a VC. I make so much money. Be like, oh.

• 1:30:02Jordi Hays?

  See you on the super bean air list.

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. Good luck trying to make it. Good luck.

• 1:30:06Jordi Hays?

  Cracking the top 20.

• 1:30:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Good luck.

• 1:30:10Jordi Hays?

  No, but you could also argue though, that Elon, you know, people like Bernard, Bezos, Elon, are actually the world's best capital allocators.

• 1:30:19John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:30:19Jordi Hays?

  Just sort of keep reinvesting into the machine.

• 1:30:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:24John Coogan?

  And so unlike past generations where fortunes were built over decades, today's tech-driven economy has also enabled founders to amass enormous sums in a matter of just a few years. Before his arrest in 2022, Sam Bankman Fried, the now disgraced founder of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, who we covered on the Monday show because he did a interview from prison. He was worth 26 billion before the age of 30, for instance. That is so much money. Wow.

• 1:30:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, I mean, Sam is actually not, there's a world where if Sam gets another markup, he cracks his list. Cause at the current, I would imagine, so at the current, he got seven-ish percent of OpenAI.

• 1:31:07John Coogan?

  Oh, you're talking about Sam Altman, not Sam Bankman Fried.

• 1:31:08Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no.

• 1:31:09John Coogan?

  I'm pretty sure Sam Bankman Fried has no equity in anything right now. He is destitute.

• 1:31:13Jordi Hays?

  I, you have to imagine that in all that.

• 1:31:15John Coogan?

  He might have coins hidden somewhere.

• 1:31:16Jordi Hays?

  I bet you SBF has hidden away some coins, but no, Altman specifically.

• 1:31:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:20Jordi Hays?

  I think he, did he get 10? It was seven to 10%.

• 1:31:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. So he's climbing up. Could be in 10, 20 billion.

• 1:31:26Jordi Hays?

  If they get the $350 billion round down and then they get a nice 2X, you know, just a simple 2X on that.

• 1:31:31John Coogan?

  2X on that. Simple.

• 1:31:32Jordi Hays?

  Boom. He's in, he's in, he's in the territory.

• 1:31:35John Coogan?

  I mean, he's certainly shooting for a trillion dollar company and you know, consumer, consumer tech companies seem to be the ones that get two trillion dollar valuations. Certainly not in the rare mineral mining business over here.

• 1:31:48Jordi Hays?

  Correct.

• 1:31:49John Coogan?

  The great American fortunes of today are new money, not old, said a 2024 report by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, which noted the absence of names like Store, Carnegie Mellon Rockefeller and Vanderbilt on lists like the Forbes 400. Of the approximately 97 still living billionaires on the 2005 Forbes 400 list who inherited fortunes. Less than half are still on the list today. The minority of heirs and heiresses who remain on the list today. Were three times more likely to have fallen in the Forbes rankings than have risen. And so, bad day to be old money.

• 1:32:24Jordi Hays?

  Did you know that, uh, speaking of old money and television hosts. Uh, Anderson, do you know that Anderson Cooper was a descendant of the Vanderbilt family?

• 1:32:33John Coogan?

  I did know that, yeah.

• 1:32:33Jordi Hays?

  Um, but his, his mom balled out too hard.

• 1:32:36John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:32:37Jordi Hays?

  So he didn't actually inherit much money.

• 1:32:38John Coogan?

  No way. Well, he's done quite well.

• 1:32:40Jordi Hays?

  But he's done well. Yeah. Self-made.

• 1:32:42John Coogan?

  This, this is hilarious.

• 1:32:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So he, he only inherited 1.5 million, uh, which is actually very common, right? And in some of these families for over time, a couple of generations down, there's really, uh, nothing left.

• 1:32:54John Coogan?

  Uh, so, so they, so they go to this economist, uh, Joseph Stiglitz, uh, Nobel Prize winning economist. A professor at Columbia University said he attributes some of the rise of the super wealthy to the inability of antitrust laws to contend with monopoly power in the tech sector. We've covered this before because a lot of these tech companies, they do essentially have monopolies, but not because they are sequestering a particular resource. They're not cornering a resource. They have created aggregation platforms like Tesla is not a monopoly on cars. You can just go buy another car and yet the company is worth a ton of money. Um, and so the antitrust laws are not really set up to bust these companies up.

• 1:33:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Which is why Tesla is down however many percentages. Specifically because they don't, they're not a tech company in many ways.

• 1:33:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so we have antitrust laws that were well adapted to Standard Oil, but that don't work well here in the tech sphere. Monopoly power has given rise to the potential of enormous amounts of wealth. Uh, these guys have both at the corporate level and at the individual level been even better at avoiding taxes than in making good products. Stiglitz says he's a little bit of a hater. The level of taxes they pay as a share of their profits should be an embarrassment to them. He's, he's wagging the finger, but this is my favorite line in here. Wall Street Journal, they called for comment and they said, "The 24 super billionaires declined to comment or didn't respond for requests for comment." They sent, they sent this article to 20, to all 24 people on the list.

• 1:34:25John Coogan?

  And everybody was like, nah, I don't want to be in this article. I don't want to comment. I'm like.

• 1:34:29Jordi Hays?

  On, on the, on the tax subject. So I mean Berkshire and specifically Warren have been smart about advertising how much taxes they pay.

• 1:34:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:39Jordi Hays?

  Berkshire paid 28 and a half billion dollars of 2024 taxes.

• 1:34:43John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:34:44Jordi Hays?

  And I think at that scale, when you're, you know, I think they, you know, making a good argument that they're paying their, their fair share there.

• 1:34:52John Coogan?

  There's also the argument that like, yes, like Elon's not paying.

• 1:34:56Jordi Hays?

  Biggest tax bill, single tax bill in history.

• 1:34:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. And, and so a lot of these, a lot of these guys, they own, you know, 50% of a company, it doubles in value. They make a hundred billion dollars. Sure. If they didn't sell, like, why would you tax them? That doesn't really make sense. But they generate tons of taxes because when you go and buy a Tesla, you have to pay taxes on that. When, when, when you buy a product through Amazon or you're, you know, you're paying sales tax and all this stuff. And so taxes are generated by their companies. And of course there's income tax of everyone who's an employee and they are linked to lots of taxes, but yes, they are not taxed on their wealth until they go and sell it. And then they have to pay capital gains. Um, let's close out here. Regardless, regardless, the growth of the super billionaire segment shows no signs of slowing. Um, it's plausible that we could

• 1:35:41John Coogan?

  see the first, the world's first trillionaire in the next few decades. That'll be a size

• 1:35:46Jordi Hays?

  possible. They are listening to the stream right now.

• 1:35:48John Coogan?

  It's possible. One would probably have said no in the past, but anything's possible these days. So fascinating. Well, if you're trying to win the favor of a super billionaire and you want to take them on a nice vacation, where are you going, Jordy?

• 1:36:03Jordi Hays?

  Wander.

• 1:36:04John Coogan?

  Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel grade amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning and 24 seven concierge services of vacation home. But better. Well, we love wanderers.

• 1:36:15Jordi Hays?

  They are, if you're looking to take a wander trip, they're offering $400 off your trip for a spring sale that they're doing. I think it's for the next 24 hours.

• 1:36:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:25Jordi Hays?

  You gotta move quick, but.

• 1:36:27John Coogan?

  We gotta get on wander. Ryan Peterson, because he's always traveling.

• 1:36:30Jordi Hays?

  He's always on the road.

• 1:36:31John Coogan?

  He just posted this right before he came on the show. He says, JetSuite X with Starlink is simply the best airline product in the world right now. He's getting blazing fast to internet. He told me, he was, we were trying to get him to call in yesterday and he was on a plane right when we were recording. I said, you gotta get Starlink on the next flight. He had Starlink.

• 1:36:50Jordi Hays?

  So I experienced this exact combo on Saturday.

• 1:36:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:36:54Jordi Hays?

  Flew up to the bay and back. And I think you could livestream like this connection. The cool thing is, is, you know, if you're flying Delta or whatever, they don't even really turn on the wifi until you're in the air. And so you have this potentially like, you know, period where you're disconnected. Starlink is just constantly on when you're next to the plane or, you know, when, when, when you're in the vicinity of the plane. So you can get on the plane, sit down, five minutes later, you take off, you're connected the whole time.

• 1:37:22John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 1:37:22Jordi Hays?

  It's beautiful.

• 1:37:24John Coogan?

  Huge fan, huge fan of Starlink. Haven't had to use mine, actually. Every, I, I, I bought it as a prepping thing and I fortunately had internet the entire time. Well, we already talked about the dock workers, so let's move on to Casey Neistat, fantastic vlogger, really pioneered the vlog on YouTube. He says, terrible idea, but hear me out. Buy up all the humane AI pins. They closed the company last week. Reprogram them to only run Grok sexy mode and boom, we now have the thingy the Joker was in love with in the movie Her from 2013. He just calls Joaquin Phoenix the Joker.

• 1:38:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, this is, this is really what, uh, this is really the bulk is for friend.

• 1:38:08John Coogan?

  That is friend.

• 1:38:09Jordi Hays?

  People fall in love with their device.

• 1:38:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:38:11Jordi Hays?

  And Avi can jack up the price, you know?

• 1:38:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:15Jordi Hays?

  20 bucks a month forever.

• 1:38:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:38:17Jordi Hays?

  And people will spend, you know, thousands of dollars a year.

• 1:38:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:38:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, on their, on their digital partner of sorts.

• 1:38:26John Coogan?

  And so a lot of people were kind of going back and forth on this. It's a little bit of a joke. It's funny, but I love this because Oscar here says, we dot, dot, dot, may have made a prototype of this once.

• 1:38:36Jordi Hays?

  And Oscar was at Humane?

• 1:38:37John Coogan?

  He was at Humane. And so now that Humane is, is done, all the Humane people, like they clearly had a very talented team. We've been working with Sam Sheffer on PMF or Die. And it's great to see that, you know, the gloves are off. They can go have fun. They can say, hey, look, we tried this, but it wasn't some fraud. You know, we were all talented designers, talented engineers. We just kind of missed the mark on the product. We got a soft landing at HP and now we're going to have fun. And we're going to tell you the stories of, of what we did and, and kind of go direct, which I think is great because, you know, this makes me aware of who this person is. They're going to find a job and it'll be great.

• 1:39:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Yeah. We didn't even cover Grok sexy mode because it was.

• 1:39:14John Coogan?

  Low class and vulgar.

• 1:39:15Jordi Hays?

  And, but it's probably, I mean, what I think Grok is doing generally is very, you know, intelligent by just being kind of obscene and the internet has always had corners of it that were obscene.

• 1:39:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:39:28Jordi Hays?

  And that's what gets people talking and using these products. And so I think that while it is vulgar, it is smart from a user acquisition standpoint. You know, if, if somebody likes, you know, chat GPT for what it is, a sort of work companion, et cetera. And then they hear, hey, there's a version of this product, but it's actually insane and wild and entertaining. They're much more likely to try that versus, hey, you know, we have a 1% better version of, you know, oh, one pro.

• 1:40:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:01Jordi Hays?

  Like people just aren't going to care about that.

• 1:40:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. Again, it goes back to this idea that like, if you launch a frontier model, most people will not be able to detect two points higher in MMLU or chatbot arena. Like you gotta come out with something different on the product side. You gotta come out with a different, it needs to be opinionated.

• 1:40:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:21John Coogan?

  And that's what's happening with all these products, even with Claude. You know, people, Claude is kind of the opposite. It's not, I don't think it's sexy mode. I think it's, but it is friendly and affable and people are, are excited about that. And then also it's just really good at coding. So people have been into that. Anyway, let's move on to Bridgette Harris. We had her on the show yesterday.

• 1:40:38Jordi Hays?

  She's back.

• 1:40:39John Coogan?

  She's back.

• 1:40:40Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back, Bridget.

• 1:40:42John Coogan?

  She says, in the past day, in the past three days, the SEC, the Securities Exchange Commission, has dropped their cases against Coinbase, Robinhood, and Uniswap. Let's go. This is great news.

• 1:40:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, good, good timing. Bridgette comments there. Just some, it's some, some nice wins for the industry amid the market.

• 1:41:02John Coogan?

  Nuking.

• 1:41:03Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely, nuking.

• 1:41:04John Coogan?

  Bitcoin's down at 83 today, off of a high of 105 or something like that. We're off 20% now. But I think a lot of this was priced in and people maybe got a little bit over their skis. I'm like, it's going to be perfect and Trump is going to buy a trillion dollars of Bitcoin and like, I'm pricing that in too. And so when everything doesn't, it was priced for perfection.

• 1:41:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:24John Coogan?

  And so now we're falling back, but it's good for the entrepreneurs that have been working on building products where the SEC cases, of course, if there's something really going wrong at a company, like it makes sense that the SEC would step in. But what about the situation where it's just purely based on some regulatory uncertainty or some lack of clarity around how you build these products? I think, I think everyone just wants, everyone in the industry at least, who's a serious player, not like some new coin trader.

• 1:41:47Jordi Hays?

  And it's interesting because these are not, these are across multiple categories. You have, you have one Coinbase, which was a, you know, trying to be a basically a regulated crypto product, centralized exchange here in the US. You have Robinhood, which entered crypto at a much later point, I think in 2019 or 2020, if I remember.

• 1:42:07John Coogan?

  The fractionalized Bitcoin offering.

• 1:42:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was fractionalized. You didn't really own it and people pushed back against that at the time, but eventually got into some of these more high-risk, volatile assets, even more high-risk than, than Bitcoin itself. And then Uniswap is in a totally other category where this was a company that had a US operation and team, but then also, I'm assuming, had sort of offshore foundations related to their token. And so they had like the most complex structure. So it's interesting to see that across the board Coinbase, Robinhood, and Uniswap squarely in three individual categories are all now not having to fight these cases. And I think it's Hayden from Uniswap had a rough few years just sort of battling this.

• 1:42:52Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure it was massively distracting and. You know, Uniswap is an American company. They pay employees here in the US and they very much, I think, suffered by having to fight with the SEC while international unregulated competitors ate into their market share. And so they lost, I think, a lot of market share over that period, but a good opportunity for them to refocus and build here in America.

• 1:43:16John Coogan?

  Obviously, for a public company, it's rough, but for a private company, it gets really, really hard to underwrite that risk as an investor. Because you could say, okay, well, you know, maybe this, maybe this, maybe this case gets completely dropped in the new administration. So the, the, the impact of the liability on their balance sheet right now is actually zero, and I don't need to worry about it. Maybe just some legal fees to string out the lawsuit until it gets dropped. Or it could be a million dollar fine, or a $10 million fine, or it could be shut down the company and, you know, seize the founder's phone, you know, FBI raid. Like, it's so hard to price what the impact of these suits will be because the, the regulatory clarity is so minimal. And hopefully, we're moving towards something that's a little bit more clear. Trump isn't exactly known for clarity.

• 1:43:58John Coogan?

  There's usually a lot of chaos, but hopefully, things get clearer over the next couple of years.

• 1:44:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's wild to think about, there was a period in 2022 where Coinbase was a $7 billion public company, and they went on to get this Wells notice, which was the thing that everybody was afraid of in crypto, is getting a Wells notice if they were operating any type of exchange adjacent product. And now, even though it's down, you know, dramatically in the last week, still a $50 billion company. So they've, they've finally, you know, this, this recent news, you know, just happened, and I think was probably priced in to some degree, right? But, but yeah, they were a company doing, you know, basically, over a billion dollars of earnings or something like that, and getting, getting like a, getting

• 1:44:48Jordi Hays?

  seven billion. Like, it was almost offensive, but people didn't want to touch it. They said, this is going to get regulated into the ground. There was a big period as, as FTX was...

• 1:44:59John Coogan?

  Huge scandals. People thought Binance was at risk too. People had some of the stablecoin companies were at risk.

• 1:45:03Jordi Hays?

  I remember, I remember seeing the... Exact Ethereum bottom, which was around, I think, $800.

• 1:45:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:09Jordi Hays?

  And thinking, I don't know what the floor is. Because all this stuff had been happening and it just didn't seem, it felt like the equilibrium price for some of these assets was dramatically lower than it ended up being.

• 1:45:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:24Jordi Hays?

  And, you know, I think Coinbase has, Coinbase also deserves a lot of credit for leading the charge around a lot of the different sort of movements within tech that have become now just part of the culture.

• 1:45:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Coinbase has always been aggressive. They've listed a lot of assets. Some of those assets have kind of like, you know, not done that well.

• 1:45:46Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure if you look at it.

• 1:45:47John Coogan?

  But they never became like complete like meme token like pump.

• 1:45:52Jordi Hays?

  They were oriented around economic freedom, right?

• 1:45:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:55Jordi Hays?

  So the economic freedom is people should be able to buy whatever they want.

• 1:45:58John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:45:59Jordi Hays?

  But, but yeah, they ran into trouble recently around just how do we process listings?

• 1:46:06John Coogan?

  So many listings, yeah.

• 1:46:08Jordi Hays?

  There were, you know, it became clear that the meme sort of cycle sped up so quickly that if they didn't list an asset within the first 48 hours, it wasn't going to get any buying activity at all because these things would pop and then just go down.

• 1:46:22John Coogan?

  And then they become a huge market mover as well in the sense of like if Coinbase lists it, you know, it's going to pop. And so there's all this speculation and then it's highly, you know, material, non-public information, whether or not they're going to, whether or not they're going to list it. And so it all gets very complex, but hopefully smooth sailing from here. Good luck to the Coinbase team. A big fan of Brian Armstrong over there, leading the charge in more ways than one. But let's move on to David Senra.

• 1:46:47Jordi Hays?

  The man himself.

• 1:46:47John Coogan?

  Founder's podcast. He says, "A friend asked me to take a personality assessment and then he used AI to analyze my personality in every single episode of Founders. This is the one thing the AI wanted me to know." One thing you might not fully realize about yourself is how rare you are and how valuable your level of obsession is. Your approach, deeply studying biographies, recognizing patterns across time, and distilling fundamental truths is something very few people have the discipline or patience to do consistently. Most people skim the surface, you go deep. This obsession has shaped Founder's Podcast into more than just a podcast. It's becoming a timeless archive of entrepreneurial wisdom. You're essentially building a modern version

• 1:47:30John Coogan?

  of your personal library of the greatest minds of business history.

• 1:47:33Jordi Hays?

  It does seem like the AI is using his own words to describe.

• 1:47:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Hey, AI, let's put away the glazinator 3000 here. Come on. Tell me something, you know.

• 1:47:42Jordi Hays?

  Tell me something that Sunra hasn't told us.

• 1:47:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Throw some shade on Sunra. Take him down a peg, AI, you know?

• 1:47:48Jordi Hays?

  No, take him down a bit, build him back up.

• 1:47:50John Coogan?

  Build him back up, yeah.

• 1:47:51Jordi Hays?

  Motivate him. Say, hey.

• 1:47:53John Coogan?

  Say, hey, hey, that last episode, you know, normally you post weekly. It's been two weeks. What happened? Step it up.

• 1:47:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. No, we want Sunra to get, he's already the best. Let's make, motivate him to get better. It's okay. Even the goats have had a rough season.

• 1:48:09John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:48:09Jordi Hays?

  And it's an opportunity to come back.

• 1:48:10John Coogan?

  Exactly. It makes for a better storyline. Like, you watch Michael Jordan, you want to know, oh, he had that rough period where he dropped out when played baseball, came back. You know, we want a comeback story here. We don't just want, oh, he's been on a historic run, no problems in this guy's life. No, I want to hear about times his microphone broke. He couldn't get the RSS feed to work, couldn't upload it.

• 1:48:30Jordi Hays?

  You got a bad review.

• 1:48:31John Coogan?

  But he did it anywhere. Yeah. He's dealt with injuries. He's told me, yeah, he's talked too much. He's lost his voice.

• 1:48:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's very careful about his voice.

• 1:48:38John Coogan?

  And he has all sorts of different, like, lozenges to.

• 1:48:40Jordi Hays?

  He knows it's the moneymaker.

• 1:48:41John Coogan?

  Oh, he knows it's the moneymaker. So tell me about this. Your ability to push through the pain, that's what makes you great, David. Not just your content, which obviously is good. Your ability to connect past wisdom to present challenges and tell stories in a way that makes those lessons stick is a unique skill. You don't just transfer knowledge, you embed it in people's minds in a way that compels them to take action. Many people want to learn from history. Very few dedicate themselves to living inside it like you do. That's what makes you work and your perspective so valuable.

• 1:49:13Jordi Hays?

  So, on this note, the other two days ago, I posted a picture of David with the quote, "I'm really in the pursuit of greatness. I know people don't usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats, David Sunra." And nobody. Only like a handful of people noticed that that was actually a quote from Timothy Chalamet.

• 1:49:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 1:49:33Jordi Hays?

  But Senra actually talks like this and the beauty of hanging out with Senra is that the podcast just morphs with real life. So in the same way that when we're working out in the morning, it's basically like an offline version of the podcast where we're just talking through what's happening and takes and different things like that. Whereas hanging out with Senra, you actually get the wisdom of all the history's greatest entrepreneurs because he'll just bring up the sort of obscure reference to, you know, something that, you know, Warren Buffett did and that, that nobody else would even think of in that moment. And, but he'll tie it back into how it's relevant and it's, it's, it's truly priceless.

• 1:50:11John Coogan?

  I can't wait to have him on the show again. Next time with video.

• 1:50:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So what we're going to do, uh, we haven't even told him this yet, but when we are doing a deep dive on a specific company or entrepreneur, we're going to just start calling him in and just start bringing that founder's level analysis to TVPN.

• 1:50:28John Coogan?

  Can't wait for it. Uh, well, let's move on. Mark Suster over at Upfront Ventures says, "Data rooms are where fundraising processes go to die." Quote tweeting Bryce Roberts, friend of the show. He says, "No one finds conviction in the data room." So true, but also, you know, we worked, didn't really have a data room and sometimes like, you know, you need to do the due diligence.

• 1:50:51Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure they had a data room, but it just had a, a model that was just extremely aggressive, not an operating model at all. Just a purely, uh, community adjusted EBITDA based model.

• 1:51:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:03Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, I, I noticed, you know, I, I put this in the stack because when I am talking to a founder about investing, ultimately if I want to invest, I, you know, on the first call, I'll basically be like, sometimes I'll decide on the first call if it's coming from an, you know, warm intro from somebody that I invest with a lot. I'll just tell them right on the first call, yeah, I'm in for 25K. Uh, just let me know when you need me to close.

• 1:51:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:29Jordi Hays?

  Other times it's, hey, let's go meet up and grab lunch and I'll hear a little bit more. Uh, and you know, I'm not a professional investor, so my process is, is, uh, should be quite different from institutional investors, but. If I'm actually not at all convicted, I'll just be like, cool, send me the deck and I'll, I need to like sit with it for a little bit. And so investors, institutional investors will get to that point where they meet with a company two, three times. They don't have conviction yet. And so they say, send the data room and we'll, we'll discuss it internally and get back to you. And that is the point that the deal base oftentimes dies.

• 1:52:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:06Jordi Hays?

  Because it's hard to just look at the numbers and actually build Bryce here, which, which Sush is quoting Bryce Roberts, a friend of the show. No one finds conviction in the data room, right? You find conviction in the conversation.

• 1:52:18John Coogan?

  In the meeting.

• 1:52:19Jordi Hays?

  And in the meetings. And then the data room is just sort of like almost, you know, checking the box often case.

• 1:52:26John Coogan?

  It's all downside risk. You're only going to say no, if you see what's in the data.

• 1:52:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, you're only gonna.

• 1:52:31John Coogan?

  Tep it and then see a data room, ah, blown away.

• 1:52:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. You're seeing the data room and you're just, you're, you're only going to invest in the business if you think that, you know, entrepreneur is going to take it, you know,

• 1:52:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:40Jordi Hays?

  10, 20, 100 times, you know.

• 1:52:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. But you're looking for, you're looking for bombs in the data room. You're looking for like some contract or some, I mean, we, we saw a funny one recently where someone sent out, this is just an investor update, but someone sent out a, an investor update where they said they were, they made like a million dollars in the last quarter. And then they said they quote unquote burned like 500K or something. But when you looked at it, they really were using burn just as expenses.

• 1:53:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:08John Coogan?

  And they were actually profitable.

• 1:53:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:11John Coogan?

  And but.

• 1:53:11Jordi Hays?

  I was super concerned when I first saw it.

• 1:53:13John Coogan?

  Like, how are they burning so much when they're generating so much revenue? But in fact, they were just, they just misuse the term burn to mean expenses. And they were actually profitable. But yeah, that like, that's, you know, an air to the upside. But you're often looking for that in the data room of like, is there something here where there's been a bunch of companies that have been solid? And then you dig into it. It's like, oh, they have some crazy, you know, liability, some contract that they need to pay. That's going to be millions and millions of dollars. And that completely changed the business. And that's something that you might find in the data room. But you don't want, you don't want the process to get stuck there. You want to be firmly handshaking. We're, we're doing this unless there is a bomb that we find or someone finds in the data room. Interesting.

• 1:53:57John Coogan?

  Well, let's move on to perplexity. They launched a $50 million seed and pre-seed VC fund. Why'd you think this was interesting? Break it down.

• 1:54:07Jordi Hays?

  I, I think this.

• 1:54:11Jordi Hays?

  This doesn't make any sense.

• 1:54:12John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:54:13Jordi Hays?

  For.

• 1:54:16Jordi Hays?

  This, this feels very 2021 coded where a lot of companies were basically saying,

• 1:54:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:22Jordi Hays?

  Hey, we should, we should have our own little venture fund because everybody was getting a venture fund.

• 1:54:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:26Jordi Hays?

  And it's really hard to generate returns in venture.

• 1:54:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:30Jordi Hays?

  You gotta be crazy insider networked, great brand.

• 1:54:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:34Jordi Hays?

  Or you just have to outwork the competition or you have to get lucky. And perplexity, what is, what is the, what's the reason that the next Google needs a pre-seed fund today?

• 1:54:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:46Jordi Hays?

  And who's going to be spending their time on it and why are they spending resources here?

• 1:54:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:50Jordi Hays?

  And I'm sure they have a, a reason for it, but you know, maybe it's that, hey, perplexity relies on a bunch of these, you know, up and coming models, you know, we, we use them in our product. We want to be able to be invested in those companies and get some upside, but a $50 million fund, you're not really going to get enough ownership to be that, that meaningful especially. And is it their money? If it's their money, I don't think that makes sense. There, there has to be better places that could spend it. If it's other people's money, then now they're managing this sort of LP base. Just seems, seems like a distraction.

• 1:55:25John Coogan?

  Okay, let's do some steel manning on this. First one, Arvind is super well-connected.

• 1:55:31Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:55:31John Coogan?

  He's, he's a super well-connected in AI. He's probably meeting a bunch of great founders. Maybe he doesn't want to sell $50 million in secondary and invest on his own balance sheet. Would you give him a $50 million sidecar fund to write million dollar checks into companies that he meets randomly? Yeah, why not?

• 1:55:46Jordi Hays?

  I think that they will get into good companies.

• 1:55:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:55:50Jordi Hays?

  I, I think that this fund will not impact their success as a business. And I don't think they're, when you look at where they are in the App Store charts.

• 1:55:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:56:00Jordi Hays?

  They don't have time to be distracted.

• 1:56:02John Coogan?

  That's fair.

• 1:56:03Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, you know, looking, looking here, like the other.

• 1:56:08Jordi Hays?

  Hadley is in the comments says that should be enough for one investment, which is like kind of a joke, but like some of these, the kind of rounds that

• 1:56:16John Coogan?

  Are moving the needle in AI are

• 1:56:18Jordi Hays?

  Are ones where you kind of have to

• 1:56:19John Coogan?

  200 million dollar rounds.

• 1:56:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you need to be writing, you know, some of the most competitive rounds are sort of these.

• 1:56:25John Coogan?

  So the other flip side that I'm thinking is we've seen these types of small funds from startups and scale ups before Slack had one that was specifically targeting at if you're a company and you're building a Slack integration, a Slack bot, a company that will be built on top of the Slack API, we want to help you get off the ground. So we'll just throw you, you know, a venture investment to kind of help you build that business. I don't know if perplexity is planning to think about it that way, but you could think about this as almost like you're, you're, you're outsourcing a little bit of development of the ecosystem around your product. I don't know if that works for perplexity, but you could imagine that there's other products that you could build on top of the perplexity API and you

• 1:57:08John Coogan?

  want to build those companies perplexity has unique insight into what's going on with your product. So they, they, they let you build that. They put some money in, they're getting the investor updates. They see that you're taking off and then they can acquire you. And so it's kind of like corp dev marketing budget almost.

• 1:57:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting. So the funds GPs are Kelly Graziani and Joanna Lee Chevalenko.

• 1:57:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:57:31Jordi Hays?

  They had another venture fund. And so I imagine they're sort of rolling their efforts into this new fund. So in many ways, like, yeah, maybe this is primarily, you know, perplexity is anchoring the fund with their own capital. But again, perplexity is going to win because consumers want information and they go to perplexity instead of Google or OpenAI or any of these other, you know, chat, chat interfaces and ask perplexity. And right now I just think it is the most competitive category.

• 1:58:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:06Jordi Hays?

  And I think that the comments are very fair

• 1:58:10John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:58:10Jordi Hays?

  to kind of push back on this.

• 1:58:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, OpenAI has a startup fund. They've funded a lot of stuff. Sam has a fund.

• 1:58:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but it's different because you're saying, you know, you're basically saying, we're going to give you A million dollars, you're going to spend all that money back with us.

• 1:58:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:58:25Jordi Hays?

  And you're going to build on top of our platform. I don't see the case right now that that people are going to be building on top of. Maybe they'll integrate perplexity.

• 1:58:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:33Jordi Hays?

  Right. But for example, public.com has a perplexity like interface built on top of all of their data.

• 1:58:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:58:41Jordi Hays?

  And they would be a good candidate to use perplexity, but they built it in-house and it works really well.

• 1:58:48John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, I agree with you. I, I, I think you've convinced me, even though I played the steel man on this one.

• 1:58:54Jordi Hays?

  Somebody's got to be the steel man.

• 1:58:55John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:58:56Jordi Hays?

  And again, at the end of the day, more money for great founders.

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:00Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and I bet you they'll have good returns. I just think it's, it makes sense for the community to push back a little bit and say, hey, we want you to just build the best possible search. You know, product, uh, information engine, or what are they, uh, answer engine.

• 1:59:14John Coogan?

  Answer engine.

• 1:59:14Jordi Hays?

  Build the best possible answer engine. I don't care that you could three X a $50 million fund.

• 1:59:19John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, let's stay on AI and go to Andre Karpathy, former OpenAI employee, former Tesla employee. He says, agency is greater than intelligence. I had this intuitively wrong for decades. I think due to a pervasive cultural veneration of intelligence, various entertainment media, obsession with IQ, et cetera. Agency is significantly more powerful and significantly more scarce. Are you hiring for agency? Are we educating for agency? Are you acting as if you had 10x agency? You know who has agency? The golden retriever. Golden retriever is going to get that ball when you throw it.

• 1:59:54Jordi Hays?

  Every time.

• 1:59:55John Coogan?

  Not going to be the most intelligent dog.

• 1:59:59John Coogan?

  But the dog is going to look good doing it. Uh, Grok explanation is close. Agency as a personality trait refers to an individual's capacity to take initiative, make decisions and exert control over their actions and environment. It's about being proactive rather than reactive. Someone with high agency doesn't just let life happen to them. They shape it. Think of it as a blend of self, self efficiency, um, determination and a sense of ownership over one's path. People with strong agency tend to set goals and pursue them with confidence, even in the face of obstacles.

• 2:00:30John Coogan?

  They're the type to say, I'll figure it out and then actually do it. I was thinking about this, like as a founder, um, like I probably don't have more skills or, uh, than like, you know, someone who's like a, you know, high level PM at a tech company, but. Like what the agency is the thing. It's basically just like, yeah, I'll grind on something for years and years and years. And I'm used to like, oh, like things are terrible for multiple years. Like, no problem.

• 2:00:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:56John Coogan?

  And I don't think that that that skillset is built everywhere. In certain organizations, it is certainly.

• 2:01:01Jordi Hays?

  I noticed that in a class, like in the classroom, growing up.

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:04Jordi Hays?

  Having an understanding that I that I wasn't necessarily more intelligent than someone else.

• 2:01:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:11Jordi Hays?

  Yet I had more ability to shape a conversation or shape a discussion or things like that. And then carrying that into professional life. And I think every, anybody that decides I'm going to start a company is default sort of higher agency than, you know, or do anything, right? It's high agency for a lot of guilt to be like, I'm just going to build a monument because I want to build beautiful things. It's high agency for Nat Friedman to say, I don't know how much plastic, microplastics are in these Fairlife things. I'm going to find out. I'm going to test it. I'm going to just make it available. Right? And so it shouldn't just that that sent, you know, agency when channeled in an entrepreneurial

• 2:01:52Jordi Hays?

  way is is one of the most powerful forces in the world, but it also is beautiful to channel it in other ways, right? It's it's important to channel it in your relationships with, you know, with your family, with, I I've tried to leverage agency in my HOA. It's gone terribly.

• 2:02:12Jordi Hays?

  But that's more of like a zoomer, zoomer on boomer, you know, dynamic. But, uh, but yeah, it's cool to see this because I think for a very long period in tech, we've been obsessed with our high IQ heroes and legends. And I think that that's intelligence should be celebrated.

• 2:02:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:02:35Jordi Hays?

  But for too long, people would knock the founder that was high agency, got a little bit lucky, made it big. And then when they were successful, other people would say, oh, like.

• 2:02:46John Coogan?

  He's not even that smart.

• 2:02:47Jordi Hays?

  He's not even that smart.

• 2:02:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:48Jordi Hays?

  And as sort of a, as a way to sort of take them down.

• 2:02:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:53Jordi Hays?

  And we should be celebrating our golden retrievers, the ones that go and get the ball.

• 2:02:57John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:02:58Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, they might look a little silly doing it sometimes, but they got the ball.

• 2:03:02John Coogan?

  They got the ball.

• 2:03:02Jordi Hays?

  And that's what matters.

• 2:03:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, I've heard some people riff on this where it's like, after you get to like 140 IQ, you get up too high, there's actually a falloff in terms of kind of your impact and you just go into like chess or like pure math. And then that can be extremely valuable and great for the world, but it's not just that like

• 2:03:22Jordi Hays?

  Pure theory.

• 2:03:23John Coogan?

  The algorithm is not just, hey, we want to run Microsoft, we need to find, just have everyone take an IQ test and the person that scores the highest becomes the CEO.

• 2:03:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:30John Coogan?

  I was thinking about this with Satya, it's like, why is he such a great leader at that company? Like, they're probably smarter people at the company presumably, working on crazy quantum computing and algorithms and all sorts of stuff, but he has some blend of skills that's

• 2:03:45Jordi Hays?

  He can take initiative, make decisions and exert control.

• 2:03:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, and he also

• 2:03:50Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure he was doing that way before he was

• 2:03:51John Coogan?

  You see him on the Dorkesh, he has so many other charisma, it's like, when you look at the stats, I always think back to like, if you're building a character in Diablo or something in some RPG, there's like strength, which is probably like your fortitude, how much, how willing, how willing are you to just like grind and grind and grind? There's intelligence, of course, which we all know, but then there's also wisdom, like how much knowledge do you have? There's plenty of people that have super high intelligence, but super low wisdom, so they don't know anything about

• 2:04:20Jordi Hays?

  Street smarts.

• 2:04:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's not just street smarts, it could just be like a super, you take some math PhD or some chess master and you say, hey, come in and figure out this, you know, industrial supply chain. And they just don't know any of the power players, they don't know how the thing works, they don't know anything. And they have to get up to speed on that, and maybe they can quickly because they're intelligent. But then there's also charisma, there's luck, there's all these other skill points that you can kind of weave into your, your build. And it's always funny when you see someone who like clearly specked into intelligence while they had none into whiz. And they wind up making really silly mistakes. So I think this is going to be an increasing narrative in the age of AI as intelligence, you know, the golden retriever thing's like kind of a joke, but there is a shred

• 2:05:03John Coogan?

  Of truth there, which is that purely relying on intelligence is not going to be enough. And that there's going to be a blend of traits that we have a harder time building models against. Because we don't necessarily have evaluations for agency yet.

• 2:05:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:18John Coogan?

  Or evaluations.

• 2:05:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like a good, a good example here is some founder, you know, up and coming founder with high agency. Augustus Storko Rainmaker, right? He wouldn't tell you he is the most gifted climate scientist in the world. Right? Because he did, I don't even believe he studied climate science at school. Right? But he came out, he wanted to be able to make it rain on command. And he is just, you know, smashing through every possible, you know, door that gets put, you know, or sort of wall that gets put in his path. Yesterday, he was posting that some state is trying to explicitly ban like his company from, you know, and he's just saying, cool, do it like I'm gonna, I'm gonna make it rain.

• 2:06:03Jordi Hays?

  And so that type of both tenacity initiative, the ability to have conviction in your decisions, which I think is a big part of agency too. A lot of people decide they want to do something, take a few steps down that path and then hit some type of wall and say, I'm gonna, you know, I guess I went the wrong way.

• 2:06:22John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of agencies, we got a present from a VC fund that also has a marketing agency attached to it now. I think this one is yours, Jordy. This is from Wiz over at Space Cadet.

• 2:06:34Jordi Hays?

  Space Cadet.

• 2:06:35John Coogan?

  Classified. This is, I mean, the design here is fantastic. You open it and it plays a video of, it's an AI generated version of you.

• 2:06:48Speaker 02

  My name, my name is John Coogan. I live in West Virginia.

• 2:06:55Speaker 02

  Whoever is seeing this, I exist in the Yggdrasil.

• 2:06:59Speaker 02

  It's not too late to fix it. You don't have much that I can give you this.

• 2:07:03John Coogan?

  Very fun.

• 2:07:04Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so incredible execution, but the only thing is that doesn't look anything like you, in my opinion.

• 2:07:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:10Jordi Hays?

  Some of them like Shields.

• 2:07:12John Coogan?

  Shields looks pretty good.

• 2:07:13Jordi Hays?

  Very accurate. There's the other guy from 50 Years VC that I saw. I haven't actually seen mine yet.

• 2:07:18John Coogan?

  What yours looks like.

• 2:07:19Jordi Hays?

  Let's live.

• 2:07:19John Coogan?

  So I mean, very clearly, it's like a pipeline of they took your profile photo or an image of you. And he takes your, your image and where you live. That doesn't look like you.

• 2:07:45Jordi Hays?

  It looks similar to my eyes.

• 2:07:47John Coogan?

  There's something there.

• 2:07:51John Coogan?

  The hair's all wrong, too short. You would never do that with your hair.

• 2:07:56John Coogan?

  Okay, I think we can close it up. It's very loud. Anyway, what a cool drop. And I love this as an idea for, you know, high value clients, uh, marketing for a company. I, I think this is super interesting. I saw Jake Paul did something like this for W, where they did the, I don't know if it's AI deep fakes or something, but, uh, the concept is really, is really key here to getting it executed correctly. Obviously, this is like a sci-fi themed venture fund. Uh, so, uh, you know, you want to make it, uh, you know, science fiction.

• 2:08:26Jordi Hays?

  Ty in the chat said, call it Timu Jordy.

• 2:08:30John Coogan?

  Timu Jordy, yeah.

• 2:08:31Jordi Hays?

  But, uh, but anyway, so, so one of the cool things was this was timed with basically the kickoff of their new fundraiser.

• 2:08:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:08:38Jordi Hays?

  And I saw Wiz shared, uh, we officially kicked off fundraising two weeks ago and we're already 50% to first close, which is just amazing. And, uh, so anyways, if you are planning stunts, it's important to time them up in a way that you can benefit from the attention.

• 2:08:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:08:57Jordi Hays?

  Because there's a, you know, I've had super viral drops in the past where we had, we dominated the timeline for a day and then, you know, it just, you know, the attention fades. And what did you actually get from it? And so very well timed for, for Wiz and the Space Cadet team to do this when they're, you know, wanting to get in front of, uh, you know, a bunch of LPs and other investors and, uh, it's clearly paying off.

• 2:09:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's done a ton of these drops. He did a Cards Against Humanity spin on tech. I also got a deck of magic cards with a bunch of different characters from tech imagined as magic card folks. Very fun, very differentiated, uh, much better than a cold email for sure. Uh, so always enjoy that. Well, speaking of funds, let's move on to, uh, Pedro Sorrentino. He says, today we are returning 7X cash on cash to our LPs.

• 2:09:50Jordi Hays?

  Let's go, Pedro.

• 2:09:51John Coogan?

  Grateful.

• 2:09:53Jordi Hays?

  Hit the site. You got the site going handy?

• 2:09:58Jordi Hays?

  Here we go, Pedro. This is for you and your LPs. That's fantastic. We love to see it. Leak that, newcomer. Leak that.

• 2:10:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, newcomer. And VC Brags is in the chat saying, "Sweet." So just some pure, pure content from VC Brags.

• 2:10:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you're not, if you're getting the engagement from VC Brags, but not the dunk, you're doing something right.

• 2:10:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Flexing, but not being like the humble brag. Just actually laying out the facts. It's great. It's the right way to kind of brag. Just say, "Hey, we did our job."

• 2:10:29Jordi Hays?

  This is amazing. People don't realize, you know, VCs get dragged a lot. But their job, imagine having a job where you think of it as a 10-year engagement, 10-plus-year engagement, where you do most of the work upfront, and then you just kind of have to sit and wait to see how you did. And that level of waiting, like, most people do work and they want to know right away, or that month, or that quarter, if it's going to yield results. And it's just, it's an entire skill set in itself to have that level of patience, to be able to do a bunch of work, wait a very long time. And I'm sure that, you know, he did very well from this, and it should be celebrated, right?

• 2:11:09Jordi Hays?

  It's the same cultural movement as, you know, Timothy Chalamet talking about his orientation. It's like, we should celebrate when somebody has a very successful fund. That's what they set out to do, and there's nothing wrong with sharing news like that, so.

• 2:11:26John Coogan?

  Great. Well, speaking of sharing news, let's go to Lulu. She says, "Unrelenting torrent of AI news is the new normal. There used to be big launches every few months, then every few weeks. Now it's every day of the week. If you were waiting for an open window to do your launch, don't wait." And she's quote tweeting Vittorio, who says, "Just making sure I'm not losing my mind here. Last week, we got Grok 3 with reasoning plus voice, Mirror's thinking machines, Microsoft's Majorana 1 quantum chip, Ark and Nvidia's Evo 2, Google AI's Coscientist, AI-generated gameplays, Helix by Figure, a new clone robotics, and it really is like every single day." That's why we need a daily show.

• 2:12:03Jordi Hays?

  I think we missed one of those. We missed Nvidia Evo 2.

• 2:12:07John Coogan?

  We did miss that. God. Oh, we'll have to follow up.

• 2:12:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no. And the main thing here is it does feel like if you have a, if you're a, you know, hyperscaler or, you know, one of these new model, foundation model companies, you can just pick a random day and launch and you maybe wanna feel around and make sure one of your immediate, most direct competitors is not launching. But one of the benefits-

• 2:12:31John Coogan?

  Oh, you think that's what they do? Because I think that they see when the person's launching and then they launch the day before.

• 2:12:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, but I don't think that works. It also backfires to some degree because you can, maybe you're only getting your 24 hours of fame and then there's something new and exciting. So it's really difficult to time these. It's hard to know what the actual right strategy. But the other benefit of there being so much news is that people are more engaged in the news, right? We talked about this. Would we have been able to do this show two decades ago? Probably not. There just wasn't that much exciting stuff happening. Whereas now there's new, exciting developments every single day. And we have way more stuff to cover than what we can actually fit in the show. And so anyways,

• 2:13:17John Coogan?

  There's tons of stuff. But yeah, important to break through. I mean, it really underscores like how impressive the ChatGPT launch was in my mind, because the internet is extremely noisy. You can't even share links anymore on X. Like, it's very hard to go viral with a new product launch to the tune of a billion users or 100 million users, you know? Yes, yes, it's totally possible to do a stunt or a viral video and get a few thousand people paying attention. And then that starts the flywheel of growth and you grow your business for a very long time. But it's hard to jump to, you know, consumer internet level scale very quickly. And yeah, I mean, breaking through is harder than ever. So yeah, for a lot of startups, the answer is not waiting for the perfect moment where it's dead silent

• 2:14:01John Coogan?

  on the internet and hoping that your launch goes 10 times bigger. It's maybe launch as soon as you can and then do a six month second launch and launch again and then do a stunt.

• 2:14:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and this was what we were talking about with Ryan earlier. A lot of, I think, once you're an at scale company, especially, you know, something, someone like a Flexport or an Airbnb, the average Airbnb user doesn't care about these incremental updates. Oh, we made it, you know, slightly easier to like pick a, oh, you can now book- You know, anywhere in a 10 day period.

• 2:14:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:34Jordi Hays?

  It just doesn't really matter. It's not as significant, but when you bundle all of those stuff, it can be, it can show, hey, we're making major advancements to the platform every six months. And people aren't going to care as much. Oh, we hired a new Airbnb, hired a new director of marketing.

• 2:14:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:50Jordi Hays?

  No one cares.

• 2:14:51John Coogan?

  We care.

• 2:14:51Jordi Hays?

  We care. We care, but, but.

• 2:14:54John Coogan?

  We're going to make an ESPN video out of it.

• 2:14:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, we will. But, uh, but, but for small companies, I do think the right approach is you want to show the pace and the iteration. And you want to just launch. I, I, I've told founders, figure out a way to launch something once a week.

• 2:15:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:15:08Jordi Hays?

  Do try to be in the timeline in a big way 50 times a year.

• 2:15:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:15:13Jordi Hays?

  And you will build a brand that way. You, you can't build a brand off of two touchpoints a year.

• 2:15:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. And also, I mean, talking to, to Ryan, it seems like, like the launch went well. He, you know, iterated through all the different product improvements that they've made, but it didn't take over the internet the way, you know, uh, Grok 3 did. But it was incredibly valuable to the pace and culture at the company that they had this. And it's, and that's almost, and then, and then that feeds into the brand and you start associating. Okay, yes, this company feels like it's moving faster because I can see that there are, that there are events and updates. And so, uh, it's one of those like shoot for the moon, you'll land amongst the stars situation where like, if you, if you start launching more frequently, you start batching launches, even if those launches don't wind up going mega viral and 10xing your business,

• 2:16:02John Coogan?

  at least you're on a product development cadence that is quick. And that's valuable. So I love that. So get out there and launch and call.

• 2:16:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, today, I mean, an example of a launch that maybe is getting a little bit lost, is this company, Paper, which is coming out and they, they look like they basically cloned Figma completely. Down to some of the branding even just feels like an extension of Figma. And again, uh, they, they launched, they got some traction, but, uh, they didn't even break through to the same degree that I, I would have thought they did. They would have, you know, they got like a hundred K views to me.

• 2:16:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:42Jordi Hays?

  Opportunity for them to just keep launching it and continuing to double down.

• 2:16:47John Coogan?

  Yep. Well, good luck to them. And that's our show for the day. Do you have anything else, Jordy?

• 2:16:53Jordi Hays?

  That's it. I'm excited for tomorrow. It's good to be back in the studio. Thank you guys for tuning in.

• 2:16:57John Coogan?

  Thank you for tuning in. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. And when you leave us a review, put an ad for your company or your favorite company in the review description. We'll read it on the show. Send us any questions. Follow us at TBPN. Subscribe, follow us on YouTube, all the things. And thanks for watching. We will see you tomorrow. Have a great day.