David Senra LIVE in The Ultradome | Chase Lochmiller & Alon Yariv, Filip Aronshtein, Gorkem Yurtseven, Sudheesh Nair, Julie Zhuo, Jakob Diepenbrock, Gabe Whaley

(00:13) - Timeline (11:48) - The Inexorable Rise of Latin America's Drug Cartels (26:18) - Timeline (26:45) - Beers, Buns, Baseball: The 9-9-9 Challenge (31:35) - Timeline (43:38) - Chase Lochmiller, co-founder and CEO of Crusoe Energy Systems, discusses the company's acquisition of Atero to enhance GPU utilization and efficiency in AI workloads. He emphasizes the importance of optimizing memory management to improve GPU performance and reduce costs, aiming to deliver high-performance, scalable, and reliable AI cloud infrastructure. Additionally, Lochmiller highlights the establishment of Crusoe's first Middle East office in Tel Aviv, leveraging regional talent to better serve a global customer base. Alon Yariv is a technology executive and entrepreneur currently serving as CEO of Atero.ai, a startup he founded in 2024. He has a background in mathematics, holding a Bachelor of Science in Pure Mathematics from Tel Aviv University, with expertise in combinatorics, graph theory, topology, and algebraic number theory. In addition to his work in tech, he shares insights on AI, entrepreneurship, and product development through writing and social media. (58:57) - Fil Aronshtein, co-founder and CEO of Dirac, a company specializing in automating work instructions, discusses the company's partnership with Siemens, which has facilitated introductions to major automotive and defense clients, enhancing their market presence. He announces a successful primary financing round, securing $10.7 million from Founders Fund and Coatue, underscoring investor confidence in Dirac's mission. Aronshtein also highlights the importance of capturing and structuring tribal knowledge within manufacturing processes to improve efficiency and adaptability across various industries. (01:08:33) - Gorkem Yurtseven, co-founder and CTO of Fal.ai, a company specializing in AI-generated media, discusses the company's rapid growth, attributing it to a dual focus on enterprise sales and an accessible developer experience. He highlights the importance of fine-tuning image models for specific products, enabling better image generation, and anticipates similar advancements in video fine-tuning. Yurtseven also notes the emergence of competitive open-source video models from China, such as a recent release from Alibaba, while acknowledging that AI-generated media has yet to reach mainstream adoption. (01:18:34) - Sudheesh Nair discusses his company's recent $47 million funding round, emphasizing plans to create a new category by developing enterprise web agents that automate large-scale web browsing, transforming the internet into a structured database for enterprise analysis. He highlights the challenges of automating complex human-like browsing behaviors and outlines a proprietary architecture that captures website snapshots to generate synthetic data for scalable solutions. Sudheesh also addresses the competitive landscape, noting the convergence of browser agents, infrastructure providers, and code generation tools, and expresses confidence in his company's ability to build a significant enterprise-grade solution in this evolving market. (01:28:09) - Julie Zhuo, a Chinese-American computer scientist and businesswoman, served as Facebook's Vice President of Product Design before co-founding Sundial, a data analytics startup. In the conversation, she discusses the importance of internal tools and experimentation in scaling products, the role of intuition and data in product development, and the significance of observing user behavior to inform design decisions. She also reflects on the challenges of managing growth teams and the necessity of balancing qualitative feedback with quantitative data to achieve product success. (01:37:51) - Jakob Diepenbrock, a student investor and entrepreneur, founded one of the world's largest investing clubs for young people and has collaborated with leading financial industry figures to educate youth about investments. In the transcript, he discusses the evolution of startups Rainmaker and Valor from their early, uncertain pre-seed stages to their current success, emphasizing the importance of El Segundo as a hub for aerospace, defense, and hardware companies due to its rich talent pool and supply chain. He also highlights the area's cultural appeal to young entrepreneurs aiming to build impactful companies and mentions the historical significance of El Segundo, originally established as Chevron's second refinery in California. (01:46:05) - Timeline (01:50:17) - Gabe Whaley, founder and CEO of MSCHF, discusses the launch of Applied Mischief, an agency offering their internal creative services to external clients. He explains MSCHF's structure as a holding company with various divisions, including handbags, footwear, and fine art, each supported by a centralized back office handling design, marketing, and other functions. By opening these services to external clients, they aim to create a new profit center and expand their creative horizons. (02:19:05) - Timeline (02:46:24) - David Senra is the creator and host of the "Founders" podcast, where he delves into the lives and careers of notable entrepreneurs by reading and discussing their biographies. His podcast has gained recognition for its in-depth analysis and storytelling, attracting a dedicated audience interested in business and entrepreneurship. In various interviews, Senra has emphasized the importance of passion and perseverance in one's work. He believes that genuine love for one's craft enables individuals to overcome challenges and achieve long-term success. For instance, he highlights how Steve Jobs consistently created innovative products across multiple decades, attributing this sustained success to Jobs' deep passion for his work. Senra also discusses the significance of choosing the right heroes and learning from their experiences. He mentions figures like Steve Jobs, Enzo Ferrari, and David Ogilvy as sources of inspiration, noting that studying their lives provides valuable insights into building successful businesses and fulfilling lives. Regarding his own journey, Senra shares that he didn't discover his true calling until his early thirties. He underscores the importance of persistence and following one's passion, regardless of when one finds it. This perspective is evident in his dedication to the "Founders" podcast, where he combines his love for reading and storytelling to share the lessons from the lives of great entrepreneurs. In summary, David Senra is a podcaster who explores the biographies of influential entrepreneurs, extracting lessons on passion, perseverance, and the importance of learning from the experiences of others. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVBN. Today is Thursday, August 21st, 2025. We are live from the TVB and Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. We have a post from Jeff Dean, the legendary programmer. Tyler, do you know who Jeff Dean is?

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Dumb question.

• 0:18John Coogan?

  Dumb question.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Of course I know Jeff Dean.

• 0:21John Coogan?

  Of course Tyler knows Jeff Dean. Do you know the list of Jeff Dean jokes? So Jeff Dean is a legendary programmer, been at Google for a very long time. One of the best to ever do it. And there's a list on, it was on some random website for a while, somebody finally put on GitHub. These are, these are the facts about Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean proved that P equals NP when he solved all NP problems in polynomial time on a whiteboard. Jeff Dean's PIN, his ATM PIN, it's the last four digits of pi. This is, this one's true, actually. When Jeff gives a seminar at Stanford, it's so crowded that Donald Knuth has to sit on the floor. Apparently that actually happened.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  My favorite one is Jeff Dean NP is no problemo.

• 1:07John Coogan?

  No problemo, yes. Another one, Jeff Dean got promoted to level 11 in a system where the max level is 10. Apparently this happened at Google. They had 10 levels of software engineering. He was so good, they were like, we gotta make an 11th level.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  Let's take this one to 11.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's great. He's a legend. You don't explain your work to Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean explains your work to you. There was another one that I thought was funny, which is Jeff Dean, his keyboard only has two characters, one and zero. He just programs in binary. I think that's hilarious. Jeff Dean has exactly two keys on his keyboard, zero and one. Errors treat Jeff Dean as a warning. Compilers, compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers. Anyway, you could go through these for all day. Google, it's basically Jeff Dean's side project. Anyway, he's a legend. People love him. I love him. I would take a bullet for Jeff Dean. One of the greatest to ever do it. Seriously, he's amazing.

• 2:09John Coogan?

  But anyway, he posted something very interesting. So he said, AI efficiency is important. Today, Google is sharing a technical paper detailing our comprehensive methodology for measuring the environmental impact of Gemini inference. We estimate that the median Gemini app's text prompt uses 0.24 watt hours of energy, equivalent to watching TV, average TV, for nine seconds and consumes 0.26 milliliters of water, about five drops. So they did all the averages.

• 2:40Jordi Hays?

  Drops, sir.

• 2:41John Coogan?

  It's just a few drops. And so this, of course, is to, is to counter the narrative that was growing online in the media and just in the general like anti-AI, anti-tech world, that every time you fired off a prompt on any AI system, you were lighting the Amazon rainforest on fire, using enough power to power an American city, stealing water out of the homes of American people. And that does not appear to be the case.

• 3:08Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, many of these new data center projects are, will use the energy equivalent of millions of single-family homes.

• 3:15John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 3:16Jordi Hays?

  This is still energy intensive.

• 3:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:18Jordi Hays?

  But what matters is that the underlying products still get more and more efficient.

• 3:23John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:23Jordi Hays?

  As they get more efficient, we'll probably use them more.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:26Jordi Hays?

  Hence, you know, the massive energy consumption.

• 3:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, somebody was comping one of the latest, one of the latest build outs as, I think it was in the Journal, actually, today. It's like enough power to power a small US city. And they think they maybe said like Austin, Texas, or something is like one data center is enough to power that. But again, this is training, a model that will be used for years, probably. And the training run only runs for a couple of months and then it's distributed. Yes, it's enough to power a million homes, but a billion people wind up using the stuff. So. You so you have to think about the overall value that is created by these systems. And obviously, everyone wants to optimize them, not just the environmentalists, also the companies

• 4:12John Coogan?

  with that if they don't, if they don't reduce the amount of energy they use, their margins are terrible. And so there are, it's not just Jeff Dean and the group and the crew at Google who enjoy optimizing systems and I'm sure got a ton of joy out of squeezing such performance out of Gemini on the inference side, but it's also just the CFO who says, hey, why are we, why are we spending so much energy on a single Gemini apps text prompt? Let's get this down, let's optimize this thing so we can actually make some money, which is great.

• 4:43Jordi Hays?

  And Bubble Boy over on X had a good post. They said, AI inference is the new high frequency trading and the companies that serve models and don't realize that will die. Thought this was a solid take. It's just that performance and efficiency and speed are going to matter more and more.

• 5:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:01Jordi Hays?

  And if you're in the business of serving up

• 5:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:05Jordi Hays?

  Farm to table inference, better make sure you're efficient.

• 5:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, Jeff Dean was like the original superstar AI researcher, just software engineering researcher, honestly, built a lot of the systems that Google built GCP on top of. And what's interesting is we just, we just realized or came to terms with the rise of the superstar AI researcher. And that was underwritten, probably at least in part on the back of superintelligence. If you find a researcher who creates an insane trek that unlocks trillions of values.

• 5:40Jordi Hays?

  In-app purchases for your AI.

• 5:42John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe, maybe, but, but no, XAI has not, has notably not been competing in that space. We have not heard about billion dollar aqua hires at XAI, hundred million dollar offers at XAI. Elon has said, I'm focused on engineers, not researchers. But the reason you would underwrite paying a researcher a hundred million dollars is that if there's a 1% chance that they create a new advancement in how large language models are designed, trained, implemented, well, then that could drive $10 billion in value overnight, just like what happened with GPT-4.

• 6:17John Coogan?

  RLHF, post-training, pre-training, all that stuff. Anyone who's involved in that created a ton of value, right?

• 6:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:23John Coogan?

  And so basically Meta's been saying, hey, we're going to comp the researchers against that optimistic scenario where they come up with some breakthrough and that drives a ton of value. Now, the question is, are we going to shift into an era where the superstar AI inference optimization engineer is worth $100 million?

• 6:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, I will say that I, you know, the big labs are poaching from the high-frequency trading firms.

• 6:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, Mark Chen worked at Jane Street.

• 6:53Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 6:54John Coogan?

  I mean, that wasn't a poach, but there are, there are lots of people that come over. My, my question is, is if I come in-

• 7:00Jordi Hays?

  So the poaching is just not happening within the labs. They're looking to areas-

• 7:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yes. Yes, Sam Altman came out and said, hey, if you're working at, yeah, if you're working at a high-frequency trading shop, you should come over to AI research. But my question is, if, if I'm, if I'm a superstar inference optimization engineer and I go to one of the cloud providers that's, that's going to be generating, you know, tons and tons of tokens, they have these token factories, these massive AI data centers, and I come in and I say, I can make them, I can make them use 5% less energy, 10% less energy, that could drive billions of dollars to the-

• 7:36Jordi Hays?

  Put some points on the board.

• 7:37John Coogan?

  Put some points on the board. And so are you going to get comped on that? I don't know. Will, will Jeff Dean be getting a maxed out contract? I'm sure he's had a maxed out contract this entire time, but can he go further? We'll see. The, the other interesting thing here is just how Google exactly pushes back on the media is very different than what we see from other tech folks. So obviously there, there have been, there have been posts about water usage in AI inference that have gone out in the mainstream media. Sam Altman did address GPT-4's water usage specifically. They did an analysis, but he dropped it kind of in the middle of a long post, I think in the Soft Singularity or something.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  He just mentioned it randomly.

• 8:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:24John Coogan?

  The, I like this approach of not being combative, not calling anyone out for being wrong, just saying, hey, we take this seriously. We have this, this dog-

• 8:35Jordi Hays?

  They ran the number.

• 8:36John Coogan?

  We ran the numbers.

• 8:36Jordi Hays?

  And they're willing to talk about it.

• 8:37John Coogan?

  Here's the, here's the actual, here's the actual post. We have a blog post, we have paper. You can see our full methodology. We're, we're, we're committed to this stuff. And and also, it it serves as like a big flag for hiring, saying, hey, we're the type of company that's dropping our energy footprint on Gemini apps, text prompts by thirty three X. Like, that's got to be exciting. That's got to be on the back of some really solid engineering. So maybe you want to come work there.

• 9:02Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's it's worth noting that despite the windsurf debacle.

• 9:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 9:07Jordi Hays?

  Gemini and the Google team broadly.

• 9:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:09Jordi Hays?

  Have been threading the needle, avoiding a lot of controversy.

• 9:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:13Jordi Hays?

  You don't hear people about getting getting one shotted by.

• 9:16John Coogan?

  No, no.

• 9:16Jordi Hays?

  Gemini, you don't you don't see them posting, you know, three D renders of scantily clad.

• 9:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:22Jordi Hays?

  AI characters.

• 9:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:25Jordi Hays?

  They're they're just focused.

• 9:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:27Jordi Hays?

  Clearly.

• 9:28John Coogan?

  I do think that we are going to see a new genre of not necessarily hit piece, but negative AI story. It will be before bad person did bad thing. Here's what they talked to chat GPT about, or here's what they talked to their AI assistant about. And we've seen this with, there's been a few articles of what what were people talking to chat GPT about before they ended their lives or anything like that. But basically, these tools are going to be so diffused within society that everyone's going to be using them constantly. And for a long time, if there was a high profile crime, the courts would look up and

• 10:12John Coogan?

  subpoena Google search records and say, well, they were Googling how to sell drugs across the world and they were how to start a drug cartel. And so that was a kind of a smoking gun. Now it will be phrased in a different way, not just, it won't just be in a knowledge retrieval context, at least the the a lot of the articles won't be.

• 10:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:32John Coogan?

  They won't just say, before before Pablo, the next Pablo Escobar started a drug cartel, he Googled how to start drug cartel. It'll be. Before Pablo Escobar started, uh, there was the Medellin cartel. Is that the one?

• 10:47Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 10:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Medellin cartel. He was talking to ChatGPT about starting a drug cartel. And did ChatGPT talk him into it? Was it being Pablo, that's the best idea ever?

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:59John Coogan?

  You're, no one's thought of starting a drug cartel before.

• 11:02Jordi Hays?

  Is all about sycophancy.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 11:04Jordi Hays?

  And there's a scene where I don't, I don't even know the character's name, but there's a husband and wife and they're talking and the, and the, and the, uh, husband is in a K-hole. And for the wife to try to break through, she's acting, she's pretending to be ChatGPT.

• 11:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Jordi Hays?

  And apparently David Sacks made it in there.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  Really?

• 11:23Jordi Hays?

  Cameo from Sacks, South Park.

• 11:25John Coogan?

  Well, if you want an AI agent that won't be sycophantic to you, get on Ramp. Ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Ramp isn't going to tell you, oh yeah, that expense is fine. Don't worry about it. Yeah.

• 11:39Jordi Hays?

  Be like, hey.

• 11:40John Coogan?

  Go out for the stick there. It's no, it's going to say, let's put, let's save some time and money.

• 11:44Jordi Hays?

  Let's say both.

• 11:45John Coogan?

  Let's say both. Let's say both. Uh, anyway, we should do the inexorable rise of drug cartels. I've been waiting to do this story for gays and we, and we put it off, but there is a big read in the Financial Times that I want to read through because, uh, if you're, if you're tuning in for the first time and have been living under a data center, Jordy Hayes is, is a bit of an expert, bit of a, bit of an expert when it comes to drug cartels.

• 12:07Jordi Hays?

  Expert, but a, but a, but I.

• 12:09John Coogan?

  You famously fall asleep listening to stories of drug cartels, correct?

• 12:13Jordi Hays?

  Yes. It's relaxing to me.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  So.

• 12:15Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's, it's, it's business, business oriented content that's just far enough outside of my world.

• 12:21John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 12:22Jordi Hays?

  That I don't, that it doesn't keep me up.

• 12:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. You're not like, wait, should I invest in this?

• 12:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So, so if you.

• 12:27John Coogan?

  It doesn't turn into like, wait, should I have the founder on the show? Like this doesn't turn into work.

• 12:31Jordi Hays?

  I've maybe listened, watched like two episodes of Silicon Valley TV show.

• 12:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, it hits way too fast.

• 12:36Jordi Hays?

  And it's because it's not relaxing to me.

• 12:39John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 12:40Jordi Hays?

  Because it's just prompting, I gotta respond to that email or I, I gotta.

• 12:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So we have, uh, the inexorable rise of drug cartels in the Financial Times. With the cocaine, with the global cocaine business booming as never before, organized crime groups are diversifying into a swath of other illicit activities. Politically leaders across the region warn about the threat to stability. We're going to find out what America is going to be doing about this. Do we have a particularly American sound effect today? Thank you, Jordy. Over the past century, the Tacuna, the biggest tribe in the Brazilian Amazon, have bended off threats from loggers and illegal miners in some of the most remote tracts of the vast rainforest. But the latest challenge is more intense than anything they have experienced before.

• 13:25John Coogan?

  Drones were flying around this area last year, says Major Jonatas Suarez, the regional military police commander, speaking in the village of Orique, about 1,000 kilometers west of the city of Manaus. Drug traffickers, he adds, were stopping off there, storing their cocaine, and then putting drones up to check what was going on before continuing their journey.

• 13:50Jordi Hays?

  Yes, picture this, they're in a jungle, they're hanging out. Normally, you can't get a lot of visibility, so they just pull the, they just, they just send drones up, they look around, make sure everything's all clear before they make any moves, right?

• 14:01John Coogan?

  That's super interesting. Wow. Informants said there were 200 kilos of the drugs stored there, but police were unable to locate the stash. One of the world's largest and most inaccessible stretches of rainforest, the upper Amazon, has today become a superhighway for the export of cocaine to Europe, its fastest-growing global market. I didn't know that Europe was down like that. Every week, Brazilian law enforcement officials say tons of cocaine make their way from illicit production labs in the jungles of neighboring Peru and Colombia through the Amazon to Manaus and the port of Belem for export to Europe and Africa. Sometimes the traffickers pay locals to smuggle just a few kilos downriver, or they hide

• 14:44John Coogan?

  larger amounts under the floorboards of motorboats. At the other end of the scale, semi-submersible craft, dubbed narco subs, capable of carrying several tons of drugs, have been detected on rivers feeding the Amazon from Colombia to and Peru. Imagine buying directly from the coca producers for 300 a kilo and then selling a refined kilo for 60,000 euros, wow, in Europe. That changes the life of, of the guy who's trying his luck bringing it. So it's high risk but high reward, at least financially.

• 15:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the, the...

• 15:21Jordi Hays?

  If you haven't gone down this rabbit hole, it's fascinating. The history of the way they make these submersibles is fascinating. So it started out, they would obviously use regular boats.

• 15:32John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 15:32Jordi Hays?

  Those are still used. Eventually, they realized we could make these kind of homemade submarines that are not like traditional submarines and that they're going deep under the water, but they're just hovering right at the surface.

• 15:43John Coogan?

  So they might have like a snorkel.

• 15:45Jordi Hays?

  So you could see one like, if you were looking out at the ocean five miles away, you would just not pick it up.

• 15:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, but if it was sitting like right, if you were on a dock and it was right there, you'd just see it right there. It's just like one foot under.

• 15:56Jordi Hays?

  Radar.

• 15:56John Coogan?

  Got it. Interesting. And it probably makes it a lot less risky. You don't have to do with pressurization. You don't wind up in an ocean gate scenario because you're not putting it in any sort of extreme scenario.

• 16:07Jordi Hays?

  So the more recent trend is they're now starting to leverage Starlink to maintain connectivity. And they are no longer having to put passengers in actual pilots.

• 16:17John Coogan?

  Oh, because they can be remotely piloted.

• 16:19Jordi Hays?

  Control them, which just reduces, I mean, again, these, the cartels don't want to lose lose out on shipments, like if one gets captured, but it's certainly better to just lose the product over a team member. If that's, if they want to go so far as to, I don't know if they have these people in Slack or WhatsApp groups, but.

• 16:39John Coogan?

  Chat, chat is proposing spacking a cartel. We are firmly against that here at TBPN. We will not be.

• 16:48Jordi Hays?

  Don't give Chamath any ideas, folks.

• 16:51John Coogan?

  The global cocaine business.

• 16:53Jordi Hays?

  You asked for a business with free cash flow. I brought you one.

• 16:56John Coogan?

  Yes. Stop complaining. The global cocaine business is booming as never before. I had no idea. Europe's drug habit has grown so fast in the past two decades that it has overtaken the US as the biggest cocaine market. That is crazy. They really are like 50 years behind everything. They don't get their movies for a few years. They don't AC yet. But, and they're just getting the drugs that Americans were doing in the eighties, I suppose.

• 17:24John Coogan?

  While the narcos are hooking new users in the Middle East and Asia, flush with money, Latin America's cartels are diversifying from drugs into a swath of other criminal activities. "We think 2024 was the most lucrative year for organized crime in Latin America," says Jeremy McDermott, co-founder of Insight Crime, which tracks illicit activity in the region. "This was driven principally by three criminal economies. The first is cocaine, lagging not that far behind. Not far behind that is gold. Gold? They're smuggling gold? Okay. Number three is human smuggling and human trafficking."

• 18:03Jordi Hays?

  I would imagine the gold activity is tied into the first one.

• 18:09John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense. Drug-related crime and violence used to be concentrated in the narcotics-producing nations of Peru, Colombia, and Mexico, with nations such as Argentina or Chile largely untouched. Today, such violence has become a feature of life in virtually every country in the region, reaching even former havens Costa Rica and Uruguay. A nation of four million people, sometimes hailed as the Switzerland of Latin America.

• 18:34Jordi Hays?

  This is why Pam Bondi is putting out 50 million for Nicolas Maduro.

• 18:38John Coogan?

  That's right. Yes. He's been accused of narco-terrorism.

• 18:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, effectively having the government of Venezuela

• 18:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:46Jordi Hays?

  Run, basically run their own cartel.

• 18:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, run.

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  Not even getting a cut.

• 18:51John Coogan?

  Oh, they're actually...

• 18:52Jordi Hays?

  Like, they're being accused of just actually running a drug cartel.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  Well, that might actually be the answer to the drug war.

• 18:57Jordi Hays?

  Kind of like...

• 18:58John Coogan?

  Because if you put the folks who did the DMV in charge of getting drugs, you have to, "Oh, I'd like some cocaine." You go, you take a ticket, you wait four hours, they say, "Ah, we're out. You gotta come back. You gotta mail in this form. You gotta fill out that form." All of a sudden, you're like, "You know what? I've cleaned up. I'm just gonna stick with caffeine.

• 19:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:17John Coogan?

  I'm good. I'm good. I don't actually need any cocaine." Anyway, really quickly, let me tell you about Restream. One livestream, thirty plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. Stick to live streaming, folks. You don't need to go into narco-terrorism.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  Pivot to live streaming.

• 19:35John Coogan?

  Pivot to live streaming. So, drug-related crime and violence. Organized crime has become the main threat to institutional stability of our nations, says the former president of Costa Rica. No Latin American country today can escape this.

• 19:50Jordi Hays?

  You have to wonder what's going on with El Salvador, right?

• 19:53John Coogan?

  You do.

• 19:53Jordi Hays?

  They locked up all their, they locked up all the gang.

• 19:55John Coogan?

  Is that the one that has Bitcoin too?

• 19:56Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 19:56John Coogan?

  He's Bitcoin maxi, right?

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  Yes. They've locked up all the criminals.

• 20:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:00Jordi Hays?

  Safer than ever.

• 20:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:02Jordi Hays?

  You, are they, you know, through that, are they able to prevent trafficking happening within their borders? I don't know.

• 20:08John Coogan?

  I don't know. It's probably, like anything else, probably like a cat and mouse game that is never, is unending.

• 20:14Jordi Hays?

  I went, I've been on a couple surf trips to El Salvador.

• 20:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:18Jordi Hays?

  The day, and it was historically known as one of the most dangerous countries to visit.

• 20:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:24Jordi Hays?

  And then the cartel at the time realized that it was terrible for business if you didn't get tourists coming through the country.

• 20:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:32Jordi Hays?

  They couldn't sell drugs to tourists.

• 20:33John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 20:34Jordi Hays?

  And so, by the time I got there, there had been some unspoken deal, which was that if anybody harmed a tourist in any capacity or stole from them, they would get like an insane beat down from the gang.

• 20:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, it does feel like, when you...

• 20:50Jordi Hays?

  I spent over a month there, probably like six weeks in total, and never had an issue at all, could walk around at night, could go anywhere, and, and so, they had their sort of own cartel-enforced safety mechanism.

• 21:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It does feel like there's a, there's a bit of a truce. Yeah, Gold Rock nailed it. Cartels are just CPG companies with better PR. Not necessarily better PR, no PR or negative, they, they, they build in silence, but...

• 21:22Jordi Hays?

  CPG companies with no brands, right?

• 21:25John Coogan?

  Yes, with no brands.

• 21:26Jordi Hays?

  They have the distribution, they have logistics.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:29Jordi Hays?

  They, they have very sophisticated operations, they just don't put... There's no branding on the product.

• 21:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, some of the larger players are so powerful, they challenge even the biggest states, forging links with long established organized crime groups in Europe and Asia and generating billions of dollars in profit. At the heart of Latin America's vast criminal enterprise is cocaine, by far the most profitable illegal business, production, seizures and use of cocaine hit all time highs in 2023, making cocaine the world's fastest growing illicit drug market. Illegal production skyrocketed to 3,708 tons.

• 22:04Jordi Hays?

  It is funny that they had to say illegal production because I guess there must be some legal production.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's the, what's the fastest growing non-illegal market, probably AI tokens?

• 22:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, the question here, because the cartels obviously generate massive amounts of cash flow and profits. And then they have the choice of reinvesting that in the illegal business or reinvesting it in legitimate businesses.

• 22:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, which is kind of laundering, right?

• 22:31Jordi Hays?

  Gas and you could imagine, you could imagine Mexican data centers being built out with cocaine dollars.

• 22:37John Coogan?

  Neo cloud.

• 22:41John Coogan?

  In Colombia, the world's, the world's biggest producer cocaine production rocketed 53% from 2023 to, from 2022 to 2023. That is crazy. A senator in a presidential hopeful was shot in June at a rally in Bogota and later died of his wounds, raising fears that the nation might relapse into cocaine fueled political violence that started in the 80s and 90s. But cocaine is only part of the picture. Experts say Latin America's organized crime groups now run a portfolio of diversified businesses robust enough to absorb cyclical downturns in one area like a, like a legal conglomerate. Criminals are now starting to accumulate revenue at the scale of national GDPs with none of the burdens of a state.

• 23:23John Coogan?

  They're operating across borders and countries with legal systems that were built for a past age. The combination of illicit businesses, they're no longer drug trafficking organizations. They will move anything that transits their area of control. You have all of these new markets opening up. Incredible. Anyway, you should go and read the full, the full deep dive in the Financial Times.

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, here's, here's, here's the thing that's more interesting. So Trump recently designated eight Latin American cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and secretly signed a directive to the Pentagon to begin using military force against them. The New York Times reported this month. And as part of that, so now there's spy drones flying over Mexico like gathering information in real time. And the US has deployed naval forces into the Caribbean, basically the Gulf of America, formerly known as the Gulf of Mexico. And it seems pretty, it seems somewhat unlikely that they would start striking the cartels. I don't know if we need to open up a new front at the moment.

• 24:26John Coogan?

  Yep, yep.

• 24:27Jordi Hays?

  But it's certainly not totally off the table.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  Well, this is part of a three-part series. Part two will be on Syria's drug war and part three will be on the illegal gold trade, which is very interesting. Anyway, yes.

• 24:40Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so you're a drug dealer, right?

• 24:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:43Jordi Hays?

  So are you gonna start a cartel?

• 24:45John Coogan?

  No, I was talking to Jordy about that. The drawback of selling nicotine pouches is that there really are no cartels.

• 24:53Jordi Hays?

  Closest thing to cartels are the big, are the big nicotine.

• 24:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, the big tobacco companies have really, really solid control over their supply chains and their distribution.

• 25:04Jordi Hays?

  And they won't, they won't kill an upstart like you, but they do try to make startups' life, startup life a bit harder.

• 25:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, a little bit. It's more just like they, they have a monopoly over the distribution and retail, which is where people buy nicotine-containing products. And so they don't, they can just kind of sit back, like they're chilling. It's kind of like Google's search monopoly. Like they're just, they're just good. They don't really need to be overly aggressive. Google doesn't really need to, you know, take shots at Bing or like try and like tie Bing up in court or do anything because like people just use Google and they're good. Anyway, let's, the chat says Tyler unlocked Grosh premium for sure. I missed something, what's with Tyler's fit?

• 25:55John Coogan?

  It is Thursday and it's summer and it's hot.

• 25:58Jordi Hays?

  It's a mid-August Thursday afternoon.

• 26:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, anyway, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, AI powered analysis, and they're trusted by millions, folks.

• 26:13Jordi Hays?

  We have a very important post here from East Village Guy. He says, being a salesperson that doesn't drink or golf is like playing Scrabble with dyslexia.

• 26:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, the golf.

• 26:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  Uh, I mean, the real, the real, uh, fighting with one hand tied behind your back would be, uh, being a vegetarian, not being able to go out to those steak dinners. I think you can get by without drinking. Golf is important, but you know, there's other things to do. You could go track days.

• 26:41Jordi Hays?

  Track days.

• 26:42John Coogan?

  Do something else. There was a fun article in the Wall Street.

• 26:45Jordi Hays?

  But if you can't go steak to steak with a prospect, you're gonna have a tough time.

• 26:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, this, this article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal really tells you about, uh, what, what, what's slow in news day. It, it truly is, uh, nine beers, nine hot dogs, nine innings. Challenge accepted. A gut busting race against the clock has taken off among baseball fans. I tried it, says Xavier, uh, Xavier Martinez in the Wall Street Journal on the front page. This is front page Wall Street Journal news. I leaned back in my nosebleed seat, seven empty cans of Coors Light littered around me and eight hot dogs marinating in my stomach. I tried to remember how I ended up in this place, so sick and yet so determined to keep going. I'm not a big drinker, nor can I remember ever craving a hot dog. Oh, right, I was attempting the nine nine nine.

• 27:38John Coogan?

  Now, a ballpark tradition, the challenge entails eating nine hot dogs and drinking nine beers in the course of a baseball game. I had found out, I had found a group of friends who planned to take it on during a game between the New York Mets and the Atlanta Braves, and asked if I could tag along. Against the advice of every cardiologist ever, I decided to try it myself. Joining me in attempting the challenge were Tim, uh, a 29 year old software engineer. Let's hear it for the software engineers, folks. Uh, and William Lee. A 38-year-old analyst, Sharona Lynn, a 31-year-old writer. If things went wrong, we could share the janitorial duties. Wild, wild story in the journal just about this.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  Just the important stuff.

• 28:19John Coogan?

  Just the important stuff. And he truly like wrote, he wrote, he wrote this piece fully. Like it's, it's great.

• 28:25Jordi Hays?

  Does it kind of trail off towards the end? Like he's clearly feeling the effects.

• 28:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. I was thinking about, this reminds me of the 999 that a lot of people in Silicon Valley do. Nine glasses of Screaming Eagle, nine servings of Beluga Caviar, nine different horses competing in dressage.

• 28:42Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  And so that's the, when I heard he was doing the 999, I thought that's what he was doing.

• 28:47Jordi Hays?

  Venture capitalists heard about the 996 and they decided to adapt it for their lifestyle.

• 28:52John Coogan?

  Yes, the 999. Our fears, our first beers had been a respite from a sticky New York afternoon. Those Nathan's hot dogs had their, had surprised me with their juicy snap. It's now or never, I recalled Lee saying, when the game began and we naively clanked our 12-ounce cans together in celebration of gluttony. But now with time running out and my body at war against itself, doubt, doubt was creeping in. I'm limping, but I'm getting there, said Tykel. I was feeling worse. The 999 has existed for at least a decade, though for much of that time, it was largely the domain of frat bros and competitive gorgers. Recent social media attention and spinoffs have given it new popularity. NFL great J.J. Watt completed the challenge last month.

• 29:35John Coogan?

  Barstool Sports this year debuted a 99999 challenge with a nine-member team that included competitive eating champion Joey Chestnut. Skateboarders gather each year in Brooklyn Park to consume nine hot dogs, nine beers, while completing nine specialized kickflips. That sounds extremely difficult.

• 29:56Jordi Hays?

  Specialized kickflips?

• 29:58John Coogan?

  Probably like a kickflip, a heel flip, a pop shove it, right?

• 30:04Jordi Hays?

  That's not a kickflip.

• 30:05John Coogan?

  It's, I think that's, I think he's using kickflip as an abstraction on top of just flip tricks generally.

• 30:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, he should, he should respect.

• 30:14John Coogan?

  He should respect your culture. How advanced can you do? Can you do a double kickflip? Can you do a triple kickflip?

• 30:21Jordi Hays?

  I probably couldn't right now at Lovers, but I could land a kickflip in, in five minutes if I was.

• 30:29John Coogan?

  But, but at your peak, at your peak, could you do a 540? Could you do a 720?

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  All of them.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  You could do a 900?

• 30:36Jordi Hays?

  I had a skateboard company.

• 30:37John Coogan?

  You could do a 900?

• 30:38Jordi Hays?

  900, no.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  Okay, so there's a limit.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  Those are, those are, talking about half pipe.

• 30:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, okay, I'm just, I'm trying to understand.

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  I had a mini ramp, my dad built me a mini ramp with scraps. My dad and my uncle built a mini ramp with scraps in our front yard. It was probably the worst thing I've ever.

• 30:54John Coogan?

  What about a varial?

• 30:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, varials, yeah.

• 30:56John Coogan?

  What about a switch, switch nollie, quad heel flip?

• 31:02Jordi Hays?

  Quad heel flip?

• 31:03John Coogan?

  That's a special trick from Tony Hawk's Pro Skate.

• 31:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. XX, what are the, what were that?

• 31:09John Coogan?

  SSX, SSX was the, was the snowboarding one. Great game. You know what else? It's great Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk and accelerate trust with AI. Vanta helps you get compliant fast and we don't stop there. Our AI and automation power everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Whether you're starting up or scaling.

• 31:28Jordi Hays?

  Oh, guess what, John? Investment alert.

• 31:31John Coogan?

  Investment alert?

• 31:32Jordi Hays?

  The White House, at White House has just posted, "Investment alert. Adrian is investing 200 million to build an advanced manufacturing facility in Arizona." I said it before, America is cultivating Chris Power and he.

• 31:47John Coogan?

  They really are cultivating. Chris Power.

• 31:50Jordi Hays?

  The new, the new startup meta, launch videos are done. Don't do launch videos.

• 31:54John Coogan?

  You gotta get.

• 31:55Jordi Hays?

  You gotta get the White House to post.

• 31:57John Coogan?

  You gotta get the White House to post.

• 31:59Jordi Hays?

  Your announcements from their main handle.

• 32:01John Coogan?

  Or you can get Patrick O'Shaughnessy to post.

• 32:03Jordi Hays?

  That also helps.

• 32:05John Coogan?

  Profile on you. So there, there are a bit of dueling, dueling articles today.

• 32:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:10John Coogan?

  Because the, the Wall Street Journal is talking about a school that embraces AI learning. We'll run through this, then we'll do the, the Patrick O'Shaughnessy Colossus profile. Billionaire Bell Ackman has a new fascination, a fast growing private school that eschews lessons on diversity, equity, inclusion, and uses artificial intelligence to speed teach children in two hours. Alpha School is launching a New York location in September, and the investor and social media commentator has been acting as something of an ambassador for the institution. On Friday, Ackman is set to appear with Alpha's co-founder, its principal, and others

• 32:49John Coogan?

  on a panel discussion in his Hampton's home. The panel on K-12 education will be moderated by former financier Michael Milken as part of Milken Institute's Hamilton, Hampton's Dialogues. Alpha School, which calls its teachers guides, says it uses AI-enabled software to help students complete core subjects in just two hours daily. It claims students learn twice as much as those in traditional schools despite condensed days. The schedule allows students to do hands-on activity in the afternoon, which the school says help them build real-life skills. These include five-mile bike rides without stopping for kindergarteners.

• 33:28Jordi Hays?

  No stops?

• 33:28John Coogan?

  No stops. Five-mile bike ride without stopping for kindergarteners. That's pretty sick. And exploring personal hobbies through AI-generated plans. They should learn some kickflaps. Learn the 900. I would send my children to Alpha School. I was guaranteed a 900.

• 33:42Jordi Hays?

  Kids to do a bike ride and not stop?

• 33:47Jordi Hays?

  If you could actually pull that off, I don't know how, I don't know how your little guy does, but my little guy.

• 33:52John Coogan?

  Stops constantly.

• 33:52Jordi Hays?

  Stops constantly.

• 33:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:54Jordi Hays?

  It's a stop machine.

• 33:54John Coogan?

  He's not a kindergartner yet, though, so anything's possible. Maybe Alpha School, maybe AI will make it possible. Uh, the school also strives to ke- keep the hot-button social issues that have divided grade schools and colleges across the country out of its classrooms entirely. Uh, co-founder Mackenzie Price said in an interview, "We don't let anything, political, social issues, come in the way. We stay very much out of that." Uh, Alpha's guides come from a variety of backgrounds and don't typically have teaching degrees. I wonder if there will be a backlash to this, or like a response to this, like a hyper-political school that teaches your child how to navigate the modern political landscape for maximum power.

• 34:37John Coogan?

  So you go there, you learn how to, how to really pour the fire on the culture war and create a movement around yourself and get into the White House. Could be some interesting Alpha there. Uh, do they not, is this, why do they call it Alpha School? Are they trying to like develop alphas? Is that the idea?

• 34:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:53John Coogan?

  It's like no betas.

• 34:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, John, if they wanted to develop betas, you can imagine what they would call it.

• 34:58John Coogan?

  I would be interested. So, we need to start a competitor to this. Sigma School.

• 35:03Jordi Hays?

  Sigma.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  Sigma School.

• 35:05Jordi Hays?

  The lone, it's a school for lone wolves.

• 35:07John Coogan?

  Lone wolves, yeah. And it just plays, it just plays "Literally Me" songs on repeat. It's like, yeah.

• 35:14John Coogan?

  "Class is in session. You're going, today you will become Ryan Gosling from Drive."

• 35:19Jordi Hays?

  You're gonna be operating outside of social hierarchy at this school.

• 35:22John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, class.

• 35:23Jordi Hays?

  You develop any friends?

• 35:24John Coogan?

  We live in a society, and you will be the Joker today. Here's how to become Joker-fied.

• 35:31Jordi Hays?

  We're training, we're training you up to, to, to join the manosphere one day.

• 35:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, join the manosphere, yeah.

• 35:36Jordi Hays?

  When you, when you enter the first.

• 35:38John Coogan?

  You'll be studying the blade.

• 35:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, when you enter the first grade, you have to choose between Tim Ferriss.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:42Jordi Hays?

  Andrew Huberman, Lex Friedman, Chris Williams. You get sorted into the house.

• 35:47John Coogan?

  The house is the manosphere, this at Sigma School. We're on to something here. Yeah, we need you to study the blade.

• 35:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 35:55John Coogan?

  We're sure.

• 35:58John Coogan?

  Purely so that in two decades' time, you can say, so you come to me in your time of need.

• 36:03Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 36:04John Coogan?

  The new school aims to launch with 30 or so founding families.

• 36:08Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 36:09John Coogan?

  Still on Sigma School?

• 36:10Jordi Hays?

  Sigma School?

• 36:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:12Jordi Hays?

  So imagine you have a five-year-old, right? They join Sigma School. So these are our principles. Individualism, right? So Sigma operates independently and doesn't seek to be at the top or even a part of a social hierarchy.

• 36:24John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  Like an alpha male.

• 36:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:26Jordi Hays?

  Solitude.

• 36:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:29Jordi Hays?

  You need to teach the five-year-old to find strength in solitude.

• 36:32John Coogan?

  Solitude, yes.

• 36:34Jordi Hays?

  You know, you'll be taken to like the base of a mountain.

• 36:37John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:37Jordi Hays?

  You say like, okay, class today.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  Oh, five-mile bike ride with all your friends with no stops?

• 36:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:42John Coogan?

  How about five-mile bike ride by yourself?

• 36:44Jordi Hays?

  Summit this peak.

• 36:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 36:45Jordi Hays?

  You have eight hours to get to the top of this peak.

• 36:47John Coogan?

  Yes, Tyler.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Is this like a monastery?

• 36:49John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  You're just driving a little monastery, yeah.

• 36:51John Coogan?

  Monasteries.

• 36:51Jordi Hays?

  Okay, no, not yet, not yet. So, so the other aspect of the Sigma archetype, mystery.

• 36:57John Coogan?

  Mystery.

• 36:59Jordi Hays?

  Teaching a five-year-old, teaching a five-year-old to be mysterious.

• 37:03John Coogan?

  Good morning, Mark. Uh, Ragov says Alpha School replaced teachers with clankers.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  The backlash. I think the clankers are, are, uh, are.

• 37:14Jordi Hays?

  But Alpha School should.

• 37:15John Coogan?

  Responsible to the teachers.

• 37:16Jordi Hays?

  Should test the hormone profile of the, of the, the human teachers to make sure that.

• 37:22John Coogan?

  That they are also alphas, yes, yes.

• 37:26John Coogan?

  So, anyway, um, let's continue on this. They talk about Ackman. Ackman, who regularly weighs in on everything from fine dining to the war in Khazanah, X, had uncharacteristically not said a word about Alpha School on the social media platform until The Wall Street Journal revealed his involvement. I don't know why this is such like a revealing thing. This is like, this is, this is just like a startup that people are doing. I don't know.

• 37:51Jordi Hays?

  These parents.

• 37:52John Coogan?

  I guess it's because like schooling is important and it's like culture war issues and stuff.

• 37:56Jordi Hays?

  No, it really comes down to these parents want their children to get a good education.

• 38:00John Coogan?

  Yeah. On Wednesday, he wrote a fawning post that read like an ad. A person close to the school said Ackman is now poised to become a de facto ambassador. He is already enmeshed in the New York's education scene, sits on the board of trustees of Horace Mann, the school's most storied, one of the school, one of the city's most storied private schools. Ackman first learned about Alpha School this year at this year's Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting after speaking to Sahil Bloom, author of The Five Types of Wealth. Some of the people familiar with the manager.

• 38:31Jordi Hays?

  What are the five types of wealth again, John?

• 38:33John Coogan?

  Cars, watches, horses, merchants.

• 38:37Jordi Hays?

  Real estate.

• 38:38John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:38Jordi Hays?

  And boats.

• 38:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think we kind of upped it to like 10 sources of wealth.

• 38:46John Coogan?

  Anyway, he has since been hyping up Alpha School to parents in his social circle. Ackman has been a spoken critic of DEI programs. He will appear on a panel Friday alongside Price and Joe Lamont, a Texas-based billionaire who Alpha says has served as its school principal for the past two years. Lamont is the founder of Trilogy Software, which became part of his private equity firm, ESW Capital. Do you know what ESW Capital stands for? Tyler? Pop quiz?

• 39:17Jordi Hays?

  Pop quiz.

• 39:18John Coogan?

  ESW stands for Enterprise Software.

• 39:21Jordi Hays?

  Group?

• 39:21John Coogan?

  No. ESW Capital, Enterprise Software Capital. Nothing better than that. That is a fantastic name.

• 39:27Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 39:28John Coogan?

  He has developed.

• 39:28Jordi Hays?

  Can we jump over to the Colossus story?

• 39:29John Coogan?

  We should, we should.

• 39:30Jordi Hays?

  So Patrick has a, and Jeremy Stern have a new profile in Colossus today. It is available online.

• 39:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, you should go order.

• 39:38Jordi Hays?

  Subscribe to the print edition. But the profile is all about Joe Lamont and Alpha School.

• 39:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 39:45Jordi Hays?

  And the, I guess his co-founder in Alpha School, Mackenzie.

• 39:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 39:50Jordi Hays?

  Mackenzie Price, so.

• 39:52John Coogan?

  Crazy lore in here.

• 39:53Jordi Hays?

  It's insane.

• 39:54John Coogan?

  Deeply underrated. We've heard, a lot of people have known about Trilogy and known about Joe Lamont for a long time, but to get this level of lore drop.

• 40:02Jordi Hays?

  If you don't know about Joe. And it wasn't because you weren't, you were living under a data center.

• 40:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 40:08Jordi Hays?

  Because he's pretty much.

• 40:09John Coogan?

  He's been very.

• 40:10Jordi Hays?

  Completely silent for the last 25 years.

• 40:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:12Jordi Hays?

  So he was, he's an alpha, but then.

• 40:16John Coogan?

  Well, no, no, no.

• 40:16Jordi Hays?

  He was an alpha transitioned to more of a sigma.

• 40:18John Coogan?

  More a sigma.

• 40:19Jordi Hays?

  Sort of mysterious, outside, traditional higher.

• 40:22John Coogan?

  Extremely sigma, extremely sigma.

• 40:25Jordi Hays?

  So anyways, I'll give you some background here. So this is, this is from the profile. Even after agreeing to break his silence after 25 years, Joe Lamont is still reluctant to talk about himself. It's hard to get him to relive Trilogy, the enterprise software company. Let's just give it up for enterprise software real quick. The enterprise software company he founded in 1989, which by age 27, put him on the cover of Forbes twice as America's youngest self-made senti.

• 40:49John Coogan?

  So if you are, if you are, if you've been going through a period of silence and mystery and you've been a sigma and you're trying to become an alpha, trying to get your brand mentioned in chat GPT, go to profound, reach millions of customers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. Continue, Jordy.

• 41:07Jordi Hays?

  So he isn't keen to expound on Sales Builder, which is an amazing name for software company. Trilogy's flagship expert system from the 1990s and the world's first billion-dollar artificial intelligence product in all but name. Ditto ESW, the investment arm of Trilogy that's acquired hundreds of software companies since 2000 and helped make him a deck of billionaire.

• 41:28John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 41:28Jordi Hays?

  Yet the mention of which makes the otherwise inexhaustible Lamont, who always seems to be straining at some invisible leash, seem drowsy and bored. Nor is he interested in dwelling on his reputation as a tech pioneer in everything from expert systems to manufacturing configuration, college recruitment, corporate bootcamps, tech pro culture, remote work, monitoring employees with surveillance software and replacing American employees with overseas contractors. Whether his reticence can be ascribed to an inhibition about the things that made him rich or because he's refreshingly adverse to gilding them with hypocritical virtue signaling or because he simply doesn't give an S H I T anymore is hard to tell.

• 42:10Jordi Hays?

  The one thing Lamont will talk about for hours on end is Alpha School, the teacherless, homeworkless, K-12 private school in Austin, Texas, where students have been testing in the top 0.1% nationally by self-directing coursework with clankers for two hours. Of course, with AI tutoring apps for two hours a day, Alpha students are incentivized to complete coursework to quote unquote mastery level, scoring over 90% in only two hours via a mix of various material and immaterial rewards, including the right to spend the other four hours of the school day in quote unquote workshops, learning things like how to run an Airbnb, or a food truck, manage a brokerage account, or Broadway production, or build a business or drone.

• 42:51John Coogan?

  And you know why you have to go to, and actually subscribe to Colossus Magazine? Because you can get this beautiful picture of this horse.

• 43:01Jordi Hays?

  With Mackenzie Price.

• 43:05John Coogan?

  Yes, the co-founder of Alpha School, and Flair, the horse.

• 43:09Jordi Hays?

  But it's so, when you think about, you know, thinking about these courses that they're taking, you know, these K through 12 students through how to run an Airbnb, I wonder if they found any course bros online that are, and trained in AI on their programs of how to build a nine-figure Airbnb empire? First trick there would be to just get those assets on Wander, find your happy place.

• 43:33John Coogan?

  Book of wander, inspiring views, a hotel, great amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. And we have our first guest of the show.

• 43:41Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 43:42John Coogan?

  Black Miller is here. Welcome to the stream, Chase, how you doing?

• 43:45Jordi Hays?

  Calling in from a log cabin set.

• 43:47John Coogan?

  That's a beautiful background. Where are you?

• 43:50Jordi Hays?

  Great.

• 43:51John Coogan?

  If you can't, you can't talk to your location broadly.

• 43:54Chase Lochmiller?

  I'm in, I'm in Jackson Hole right now. I have an event that I'm attending out here, so.

• 43:59John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 44:00Chase Lochmiller?

  Found a corner of the log cabin to call in to hang out with you guys.

• 44:04John Coogan?

  I love it. Give us the update, what's the news? Break it down for us.

• 44:08Chase Lochmiller?

  You know, we are excited and thrilled to share that, you know, Crusoe made an acquisition today. We, let's go.

• 44:19John Coogan?

  Get the gun ready. What'd you buy?

• 44:26Jordi Hays?

  What'd you buy?

• 44:27Chase Lochmiller?

  Crusoe acquired a business called Atero.

• 44:33Chase Lochmiller?

  Sorry, sorry to keep interrupting.

• 44:35John Coogan?

  What do they do?

• 44:36Chase Lochmiller?

  I got a little excited.

• 44:39Chase Lochmiller?

  So Crusoe acquired a business called Terro.

• 44:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:41Chase Lochmiller?

  And we're really thrilled to welcome the entire Terro team to Crusoe. You know, Terro's been a company that's mostly been operating in stealth. But they have been focused on optimizing the very low level pieces of the high performance computing infrastructure stack, particularly around memory optimization. So, you know, there's a lot of investment being made today for these very large clusters, these large scale AI factories that are bringing, you know, intelligence to the masses and embedding intelligence in the economy. But, you know, a lot of that infrastructure is not used nearly as efficiently as it could be.

• 45:24Chase Lochmiller?

  And a lot of that has to do with like getting the data into the right place at the right time so that your GPU utilization rate can go way, way up. And, you know, sort of our commitment in this Terro acquisition is, you know, building both very, very large AI, large scale AI factories and then building the operating systems and, you know, the software systems to basically operate those AI factories with incredible degree of efficiency and scale.

• 45:53John Coogan?

  So. Amazing. I want to go into, I want to go into trends about inference cost and, and kind of what's going on in the broader market. There was this amazing Google paper today by Jeff Dean about saving water and energy. It seems like there's a lot of progress. But first, let's hear from Elon about the actual journey. When did you start the company? What, what, what made sense about teaming up with Crusoe here?

• 46:21Speaker 04

  Okay, we started the company last July, so about a year ago now. With the understanding that inference is going to be the next huge frontier in this space. Training was all the rage for the last few years. People all of a sudden realized that they need to make money off of AI. And inference is the only place that you actually make any money building a model.

• 46:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 46:47Speaker 04

  What we realized in addition, like one of our members of the founding team, Ben Ches, he came out of OpenAI. He led the infrastructure in OpenAI for about five years.

• 47:01Speaker 04

  This guy knew what it means to run inference at scale. He knew what are the challenges. He knew the challenges of scaling. He knew the challenges of orchestrating different workloads on the GPU clusters. And our realization was that it is not enough to run models at a really high efficiency when you're running a single model on a single GPU. But the challenge comes when you actually have a real world workload that breathes and changes size, like changes the amount of resources it consumes, changes what models are being served, what type of prompts are being asked of it to do. And what we realized is that memory is the main bottleneck for this infrastructure for inference. First, you need to shift the model into a GPU. Models are huge.

• 47:46Speaker 04

  They're about a thousand times larger than standard containerized applications. Just how much time it takes to put it into a GPU. Secondly, user assets are also huge. Typically, when you have a user session in a standard consumer application, you have a few photos, a few text assets, those weigh a few kilobytes, megabytes. KV cache volumes, which are the equivalent of user sessions in inference, those weigh gigabytes. So it's another times, like it's another increase of three orders of magnitude of how much memory you need into a process. So that's what we have solved with our technology. We have the Atero UM technology, the unified memory layer.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  This allows you to utilize the GPU cluster to its fullest, shift memory assets fluidly and in the highest possible speed throughout the cluster. And this allows you enormous performance improvements in everything related to inference.

• 48:46John Coogan?

  What layer of abstraction are you operating at? There's obviously a host of different large language models, some open source, some closed source. There's a variety of different chips and you have stuff from Amazon and Google. Are you sitting above CUDA in the Nvidia ecosystem? Are you agnostic to any particular piece of the stack? Just help me kind of understand when an AI company would pull this particular product off the shelf.

• 49:22Speaker 04

  So we have built for the last year few different ways of structuring this offer. And this also relates to your question. But the way I like to look at it, I have two, two part, two analogues in mind when I think about our tech.

• 49:41Speaker 04

  You can think about us as an in-memory, high, high throughput cache. So it's kind of like a database, a Redis for your AI application that gives you the assets as fast as possible into the process. And so I like to think about it as something that is sort of orthogonal or in parallel with the, with the CUDA stack and the VLLM. So we integrate on the side and allow you to shift in and out assets from the existing stack very rapidly. This actually allows us to very easily integrate to everything. We can integrate to VLLM, but we can integrate to any inference runtime. And while we currently only support Nvidia officially or Nvidia hardware officially,

• 50:25Speaker 04

  and we are by no mean shape or form constrained to Nvidia hardware.

• 50:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 50:33Speaker 04

  That's one, one, one way I want to look at it. But the other way that I find more inspirational and kind of like tells about this partnership with Crusoe is I like to think about as the sort of native virtualization for this new world. So it's virtualizing the memory, which is the main asset. So I think about it as the equivalent of VMware for the wave of AI.

• 50:55John Coogan?

  That makes sense. Uh, Chase, uh, when I think of Crusoe's business, I think of like the big projects that get cinematically filmed in Bloomberg documentaries. And then I also think about Crusoe Cloud. And the reports from Dylan Patel over at Semi Analysis around ClusterMax. What does this allow you to say to customers that you couldn't before? Is this purely going to help with pricing in some sort of commodity offering? Is this a differentiator? Is this something that will increase reliability and uptime? I think a lot of people are maybe underpricing what it takes to actually not just, yes, I have a chip and I'm selling it at a cheap price. But if it's offline all the time, people aren't going to be happy.

• 51:40John Coogan?

  So what's the shape of how you're, uh, how you're sharing this with customers? And where you hope this goes from like a sales position?

• 51:49Chase Lochmiller?

  Yep. Well, you know, we feel like a lot of the technology that Alon and his team have have built at Ateros is incredibly complementary to our infrastructure software stack at Crusoe Cloud. And a lot of this is really about accelerating performance and enhancing performance across everything from, you know, how do you actually get the most out of the GPUs that you're you're paying for? And and how do we do that through things like, you know, more optimizing or

• 52:24Chase Lochmiller?

  but how do we do that by by things like, you know, investing in the storage layer so that you're you're basically able to use multiple different layers of storage very cohesively to, you know, have your data in the right place at the right time to utilize your GPUs more effectively. And so I think from an efficiency standpoint, it's a major investment. From a reliability standpoint, it's a major investment. And then, you know, leveraging the scale that Crusoe has and being able to operate that infrastructure at, you know, gigawatt scale, I think is like a very important aspect to, you know, this this investment we're making.

• 53:04Chase Lochmiller?

  You know, when I think about like benchmarks and metrics, I think like, you know, one of the things that people are frankly looking at is like dollar per token. Right? And if you you actually, you know, if you double your utilization rate of your GPU simply by, you know, optimizing how you manage your KV cache, how you, you know, manage your, you know, you know, how how the model actually gets managed.

• 53:31Chase Lochmiller?

  Then you can actually drive down the cost per token by half, right? So when we think about it, it's like, what is the cost of intelligence running on Crusoe Cloud and like the intelligent result that folks are actually, you know, coming to us for at the end of the day? And how do we actually drive massive efficiencies for all sorts of different high-performance workloads?

• 53:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it goes from cost per token to the for the end customer in the end profit profit per token. Be the

• 53:59Chase Lochmiller?

  Exactly.

• 54:00John Coogan?

  I yeah, I want to hear.

• 54:01Chase Lochmiller?

  Yeah, I mean, if you're if you're if you're, you know, people get very focused on the dollar per GPU hour. But if your GPU isn't stable, it's not reliable, you know, you can't move data into it effectively. You don't actually know how to utilize it effectively for your own, you know, hosted inference workload. You're not going to be able to create that much value for ourselves. So, you know, our goal here is to, you know, invest in the platform and to drive massive performance gains that will ultimately enable our customers to drive more value for themselves by using Crucial Cloud.

• 54:31Jordi Hays?

  There was a there was a post we covered earlier on the show from an account called Bubble. They said AI inference is the new high frequency trading and the companies that serve models and don't realize that will will struggle. What's your reaction to that? Is that is that what it kind of feels like right now internally in terms of just like it feels like speed, performance, costs?

• 54:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, you hear all these crazy stories about high frequency traders like, you know, Jane Street maintains O camel, like a special language just for high frequency trading. They're they'll they'll build their own their own like backbones if they need to, just to move data more more quickly. It feels like there's a there's potential that we're going in that direction.

• 55:12Chase Lochmiller?

  Uh, yeah, you know, speaking of someone who spent 10 years working in the high frequency trading sector, uh, I don't know if you guys knew that, but uh,

• 55:20Jordi Hays?

  That's lore. That's lore.

• 55:23Chase Lochmiller?

  You know, I I do think that there are elements of this that rhyme with kind of what's happening in high frequency trading, you know, they're they're you know, we we I view it very much as a massively expanding pie, though, as opposed to kind of a fixed pie that, you know, the high frequency traders are competing for. And, you know, as performance gains increase, utility of, you know, this infrastructure will go up and demand will go up with it. And so it has kind of this like reflexivity that, you know, if we can actually as an industry help drive better performance, we can actually grow the pie and make, you know, make make make the impact of what we're doing way, way larger. So I think it has like a, you know, positive force that, you know, high frequency trading doesn't in that regard.

• 56:09Chase Lochmiller?

  That being said, you know, I I do see like hosting of.

• 56:15Chase Lochmiller?

  You know, hosting of more widely used open source models to be something that will commoditize over the course of time. And, you know, things like speed, cost, and, you know, a bunch of different tricks to optimize performance are definitely going to be instrumental in, you know, providing a great product to the marketplace.

• 56:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, on that, on that note of like tricks, do you feel like we're on a Moore's Law type curve for cost per million tokens, where not necessarily that it mirrors Moore's Law in, in getting half the price every 18 months, but it just that it's somewhat predictable versus the progress on the usefulness of LLMs felt extremely spiky and you get these crazy branches in the tech tree and research paths that just all of a sudden produce a ton of value and it kind of goes from zero to 100. But on the cost side, do you think that we're going to be chipping away at this, making solid gains on a predictable cadence? Or do

• 57:16John Coogan?

  you think there, there, there might be like one weird trick that, that, you know, every AI lab will love?

• 57:25Chase Lochmiller?

  Look, I think it's both is the answer. You know, we're definitely like writing the, you know, Nvidia roadmap curve to like, you know, better, more performant, you know, chips that we're able to drive down our, you know, dollar per flop by just kind of, you know, continuing to grow and build on, you know, a lot of the innovations that are taking place in the silicon companies. But certainly there's a lot of low level software optimizations in term. And as Alon like frankly put it, you know, I think there's this massive opportunity to kind of have this, you know, VMware for, for, for memory where, you know, that ultimately is this critical piece in the stack to, to produce valuable results from these chips.

• 58:08John Coogan?

  Amazing. Well, congrats on the announcement.

• 58:11Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on the deal.

• 58:11John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on. Enjoy the rest of your trip and safe travels. We'll talk to you soon.

• 58:16Jordi Hays?

  Appreciate it, guys. Great chatting, guys. Thanks a lot.

• 58:18John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 58:19Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 58:20John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Graphite Dev, the AI developer platform, the AI developer productivity platform. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster, get started for free. I'm very much enjoying the soundboard today. Missed dearly on Monday. It's back in action. We have Phil coming in the studio.

• 58:41Jordi Hays?

  The thing about a new sound effect too, it's like discovering a new favorite song.

• 58:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:43Jordi Hays?

  You play it like 100 times.

• 58:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:45Jordi Hays?

  You gotta find a new favorite song because it doesn't hit quite the same it once did.

• 58:50John Coogan?

  I mean, I'm pulling, we have an alert noise. I'm pulling for that to come out during this next interview with Phil from Dirac. He is in the studio. He's in the restream waiting room. Now he's in the TVPN Ultra Dome. Welcome.

• 59:03Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 59:04John Coogan?

  I like that you're tenting your fingers in anticipation of a big announcement. What you got for us, Phil? What's new in your world?

• 59:12Fil Aronshtein?

  Gentlemen, it's a pleasure to be on. Good to see you all.

• 59:15John Coogan?

  Great to see you.

• 59:15Fil Aronshtein?

  I'm calling in live, currently forward deployed onsite with a customer. You know, we are, you know, a small burgeoning defense prime in Costa Mesa, you know, having a great time over here. As you can see from the phone booth that I'm in, it's a great lighting, great lighting over here. We have, we have some pretty exciting stuff that we're talking about today. Two big announcements. One of them is a spectacular technology partnership with our favorite great giant Siemens. So that means a team center integration for the uninitiated, but it means that Siemens is bringing us.

• 59:47John Coogan?

  Gotta hit the gong for Siemens. Let's go.

• 59:51Jordi Hays?

  We love Siemens too.

• 59:53John Coogan?

  They've been in business for a while.

• 59:54Jordi Hays?

  We won't take the team slander.

• 59:55John Coogan?

  Siemens, overnight success.

• 59:57Jordi Hays?

  Totally. What else you got?

• 59:59Fil Aronshtein?

  Well, we're helping, we're helping. So with the, with the Siemens partnership, this means they're like bringing us into their customers. It's been great. They walked us in some pretty great automotive giants lately and some defense companies. So we're rock and rolling. Great partnership. Love the Siemens team. Secondly, we are announcing our primary financing.

• 1:00:15John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:00:16Fil Aronshtein?

  Brought to us by founders one and co to our favorite Trey and Thomas LaFonte fellows.

• 1:00:20Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:00:25Jordi Hays?

  The number.

• 1:00:27Fil Aronshtein?

  Oh, sorry. 10.7 million.

• 1:00:29Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:00:33Fil Aronshtein?

  Captain.

• 1:00:33John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:00:35Fil Aronshtein?

  There we go. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you. It's a pleasure. It's a pleasure. I thought, what better place can I tell the world than my favorite technology podcast and news network, the TVB N Billings?

• 1:00:45John Coogan?

  I appreciate it.

• 1:00:46Fil Aronshtein?

  Yes.

• 1:00:48Jordi Hays?

  We still have to do the live episode from the Empire State Building.

• 1:00:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, we do. Walk us through the most concrete example of like, what could be better about automotive manufacturing? Like, are there patterns from Tesla that you think could be ported back to the legacy OEMs? Are there entirely new things? Are there particularly broken processes in automotive manufacturing that you've discovered? Any anecdotes? You can share them anonymously, but whatever's interesting.

• 1:01:20Fil Aronshtein?

  So, it's actually kind of interesting. A lot of our insights are not specific to industry. So, it's actually this realization that you end up having a very bad context problem. So, what we're, this paradigm that we're trying to push through is what we call context-aware production planning. This means us basically taking, you know, every piece of information in a manufacturing facility is one node in a very, very large and deeply interconnected graph. And what Bill of the West is today is basically a point solution for a manufacturing engineer. One person in that whole process who is helping with the beginning of the production plan process and a good chunk of the production planning process. And what we find at an automotive facility, at an aerospace and defense facility,

• 1:02:00Fil Aronshtein?

  at an ag, like a tractor manufacturer facility, is that they have context that might live on the shop floor, they have context that might live in the design world, and they often aren't connected, they often leave the facility once somebody retires with all that tribal knowledge. And so, a lot of what we've found is there exists this interesting like spectrum of volume versus mix. So, a aerospace and defense manufacturer does everything very manually. And so that might look like a very, very high mix. They have a high, a lot of variability in their production and very low volume. So they call that high mix, low volume. On the other side of the spectrum, you end up having like consumer electronics manufacturing a little bit before that you end up having automotive.

• 1:02:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:40Fil Aronshtein?

  Where it's pretty low mix. So like, you know, they're having like one, one line for one type of car, but it's very high volume. And because of that, you know, because of that predictability, you end up having the ability to have a lot of automation. And a lot of what we want to drive as a company is taking tho- those two trade offs of high mix, low volume. So you like have a lot of flexibility. In your production, but like you can't do a lot of volume really quickly versus the other thing, which is like you can churn out a lot of stuff really fast, but you can't reconfigure your line a ton. We want to basically swap and democratize a lot of that value. And so we want to basically allow an automotive manufacturer to have very, very high reconfigurability and mass produce with a lot of flexibility.

• 1:03:22Fil Aronshtein?

  And then on the aerospace and defense side, we want to allow them to be able to mass produce that scale while maintaining that flexibility that they have. And so that's a lot of what we've seen. That's kind of interesting. Yeah.

• 1:03:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like Tesla's gone like, except with the Cybertruck, like all the, all the cars are kind of like very clearly like, okay, this is the same platform. The Model three, the Model Y, like there's a ton of shared parts and that's been what's allowed them to scale volume.

• 1:03:46Jordi Hays?

  Color of the seats.

• 1:03:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. There's like two colors, three colors. Whereas a company like Mercedes that's been in business for so long, they have like everything from like a small sedan to the, the, the AMG one. Which is probably hand built. What, what is, what is the biggest like bottleneck to getting more information out of the heads of like the old guard? Like. Is it just bringing on a new system that they are forced to use? Or are there other kind of like pieces of data collection? I'm thinking about like, like, you know, GitHub, Cursor, Cursor for Bio, the electronic note,

• 1:04:31John Coogan?

  the lab notebook, just this idea of like, if you can have someone use voice notes in medical context, all of a sudden, you're starting to get that data into something that can be parsed with AI or just software. And it feels like that particularly, if someone says, oh, today I realized that this tool needs to be lubricated a little bit more in order to get good yield, that's staying in their head, they're not saying it out loud, they're not writing it down anywhere. Is there, is there like, is there a solution to that? Is that a real problem? Or is that just something that people say when they're marketing?

• 1:05:01Fil Aronshtein?

  A very, very real problem. It's a very real problem. I'm not a huge fan of approaches that like, that don't structure that information in a very useful way. Like, I believe that like, context is king and structure is key. Right? Like, my manufacturing facility can't just be like a dune buggy going off the rails, being really crazy. You need a manufacturing facility to be extremely fast, repeatable. You need to basically have a high-speed rail system as the manufacturing facility. And so, in order to do that, you need to be able to take that tribal knowledge in what might be like in the back of, you know, some dude who's in their 50s and about to retire, might be in back of his head a little bit like unstructured, but you need to be able to make sure that you're capturing that information in a really structured and intentional way.

• 1:05:46Fil Aronshtein?

  And so, a lot of the way that we end up serving as a platform for that is allowing folks to like, associate, you know, specific like standard notes and different pieces of context with specific components. So like, that's one way to do it. But I've seen a lot of really interesting approaches in other places, right? The key is not just the tooling, though. The key is the culture. And a lot of folks on the manufacturing side are actually like, Unfortunately, for the past like fifteen, twenty years, some Silicon Valley folks have been just like flying into some facility in Texas or Michigan and saying, you know what, like, here's this some gobbledygook sass, you know, it'll take your manual pen and paper process and it'll still be manual, but now it seems through the cloud like, whoa, crazy. Thanks, yes. So, the problem is that like, a lot of folks in the manufacturing world,

• 1:06:31Fil Aronshtein?

  like, they see a new tool coming in and they're like, oh, this is BS, like, this is another one of those.

• 1:06:37Jordi Hays?

  I've seen this before.

• 1:06:39John Coogan?

  Oh, super intelligence.

• 1:06:40Fil Aronshtein?

  Exactly, exactly. And so, it's, uh, what you end up having to do is build trust and love and affection from like the guys on the shop floor. We've been very, very fortunate to be able to do that. Like, we have really great relationships with the folks who are actually like doing the work. And so, if you were a company trying to change the way the West builds, you can't just go top-down, you know, go golfing with the C, you know, with the C O L or the C E O and like force the top-down adoption. You need buy-in from the guys doing the work. Otherwise, they're not going to use the thing. Tool's going to sit on the shelf collecting dust.

• 1:07:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, and that's very common. I mean, that's like, that actually is like the adoption pattern for like Cursor, you know, it doesn't come as a, as an enterprise sale mandate. Uh, it comes by just one developer picking it up and then it grows internally and you have your internal champion. Um, well, I'm very glad everything's going well. Congrats on the new round.

• 1:07:27Jordi Hays?

  So bullish on you, Phil.

• 1:07:28John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon.

• 1:07:29Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.

• 1:07:30John Coogan?

  Showing off the guts for us. Thanks, man.

• 1:07:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, can we get a quick, can we get a quick, uh, there we go.

• 1:07:35John Coogan?

  No, no, you know what I want? I want, I want your take on those shirts that allow you to bench press more. Are you familiar with these shirts, the compression shirts?

• 1:07:44Fil Aronshtein?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:45John Coogan?

  Is that cheating?

• 1:07:46Fil Aronshtein?

  The slingshots? I think it's cheating. It's cheating. It's cheating. It's awful. It's awful.

• 1:07:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but what if, what if it gets you comfortable and gets you to that next level?

• 1:07:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, what if, what if you're not ready to bench three fifteen? This is the thing that gets you out of the, out of the valley of despair.

• 1:07:57Fil Aronshtein?

  If you're using a, if you're using a slingshot shirt for a If you're using a slingshot shirt for 315, you got other problems.

• 1:08:04John Coogan?

  Oh, shots fired!

• 1:08:06Fil Aronshtein?

  Like, that's crazy. That's crazy. Just take some creatine, get some protein in, take like a healthy helping pre-workout and rip it. Like, you got it. You don't need a slingshot shirt.

• 1:08:16John Coogan?

  You heard it here first. Uh, thank you for stopping by. We'll talk to you soon, Phil. Have a good one. You're the man. Cheers. Uh, if you're looking to design parts, obviously go over to Dirac. If you're looking to design anything else, go to figma.com. Make anything possible all in Figma. Figma lets you turn big ideas into real products, brainstorm design, and build with your team at figma.com. And we have our next guest in the studio. Looking sharp. Looking sharp. How are you doing? We caught up yesterday. He said he was gonna come prepared, but you're blowing us away here. You look fantastic. Uh, give us an introduction. Give a, explain the company. Give us any news that you got to share with us.

• 1:08:55Speaker 06

  Of course. Uh, my name is Garkan. I'm one of the co-founders of Fall. Uh, Fall is a generated media platform for developers. We provide fast, ready-to-use APIs for image, video, and audio models. And then, application developers in enterprises like Shopify, Canva, Adobe, they use these APIs to build AI-enabled products in their own product. And then, I do have some news as well.

• 1:09:27John Coogan?

  You have some news?

• 1:09:29Speaker 06

  So, two weeks ago, we announced our 3C announcement. We raised 125 million dollars.

• 1:09:35John Coogan?

  Boom, edit it.

• 1:09:39John Coogan?

  It's not announced until it's announced on TV. That's right. We just broke the news.

• 1:09:45Speaker 06

  I have other news as well, so this is...

• 1:09:48John Coogan?

  Great. Let's keep it rolling. What else you got for us? Hit that soundboard, Jerry.

• 1:09:52Speaker 06

  And this month...

• 1:09:53John Coogan?

  More news coming in. Okay, give it to us.

• 1:09:56Speaker 06

  100 million run rate.

• 1:09:58John Coogan?

  No!

• 1:10:01Speaker 06

  Ten more days, but yet we still, we still crossed it.

• 1:10:04Jordi Hays?

  That's crazy.

• 1:10:05Speaker 06

  It's been an incredible summer for us and the whole industry, to be honest.

• 1:10:09John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:10:10Jordi Hays?

  That is absolutely insane.

• 1:10:13John Coogan?

  Amazing, amazing. What's the key to the high growth? What marketing channels are working? Are you buying an incredible amount of steak dinners? Is there some bottom up adoption?

• 1:10:24Jordi Hays?

  Some golf.

• 1:10:25John Coogan?

  Is there self-serve option?

• 1:10:26Jordi Hays?

  Some golf.

• 1:10:26John Coogan?

  Are you secretly brothers with a hyperscaler CEO or something? What's going on? How are you selling this thing?

• 1:10:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, I would say all of the, all of them.

• 1:10:34John Coogan?

  You are brothers with Tim Cook. Interesting. Except that one. That's great.

• 1:10:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, we are taking enterprise sales really, really seriously. We work with some of the biggest enterprises, but also like our developer experience, the way to get started is so easy. We are getting a ton of like indie developers. Levels IO, for example, is a big customer and you know. So we are getting a lot of enterprises and indie developers. And indie developers, they go work at bigger companies and they bring file with them. So both of the sides of the go-to-market strategy is working.

• 1:11:14Jordi Hays?

  What trends, what trends are you seeing on the, on the cost side?

• 1:11:19John Coogan?

  I was gonna ask. I'm sure people are saying, oh, yeah, you're making this much money in revenue. What does the gross margin look like? At the same time, we saw amazing news from Google today that they dropped their inference cost by 33x or something.

• 1:11:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the other thing on the media side, with text-based prompting, you can use a non-frontier model and get a great result if you're just using it in sort of like a Google search function.

• 1:11:43John Coogan?

  I would consider last generation video generation to not be on-brand for a lot of use cases.

• 1:11:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we see, you're absolutely right. Some people, they wanna use the best news model and they're willing to pay whatever it takes for that. But we make more money actually on like the cost-effective models. People who are, who wanna use it for higher volume, but the model is good enough. So that's a very interesting sweet spot that we actually make more revenue. But you're right, for a certain type of customer, they're always looking for the best and the newest. Maybe they are trying something, maybe they just wanna get it out the door. So the cost is not a problem for them.

• 1:12:28John Coogan?

  Are you seeing opportunities on distilling models for specific use cases? I could imagine like an image or video generation model that's just good at really, really good at logo animations or text or just product photography or just beverages. And then that being just cheaper to inference, is that a crazy idea? Is there something there?

• 1:12:50Speaker 06

  No, I don't think so. I wouldn't say it's cheaper to inference, but it's maybe better to inference. So for image models, fine tuning is actually a really, really big use case. Not enough people pay attention to it because I don't think it works very well for LLMs. But for image models, for the past year, we've done like really good work on fine tuning research. And you know, you can basically fine tune on a product and you now can generate better images of that product. It's actually a really big use case for us. And same, same thing is gonna happen for video. We are just getting open source video models that are fine tunable.

• 1:13:28Speaker 06

  So a lot of companies are working on post-training strategies to create different camera angles, different styles, you know, different angles of a certain product or a person. So I expect a lot of developments on the video fine tuning side going forward as well.

• 1:13:46Jordi Hays?

  What are you seeing out of China? What are the best image, video, audio models coming out of China on the open source side?

• 1:13:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, video hasn't really had a deep-seek moment, have they?

• 1:14:00Speaker 06

  I wouldn't say so. Like there is, the best open source model is, video model is Chinese right now. It's coming out of Alibaba. It just came out a couple of weeks ago and people started using it right away. I wouldn't call it the deep-seek moment. I don't think the deep-seek moment for the whole industry hasn't happened yet.

• 1:14:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:19Speaker 06

  And you know, we have. Haven't really hit that inflection point that video generation or image generation is mainstream. It's it's hidden inside products. If you go to Canva, Adobe, all these products, it's still not the main feature.

• 1:14:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:14:34Speaker 06

  It's like an additional thing.

• 1:14:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:36Speaker 06

  We still have some time to hit fully mainstream. But yeah, we have great models coming out of China and we have.

• 1:14:43John Coogan?

  And also just for, I mean, this is the classic story of enterprise software, like there are open source databases. And there are still companies that build amazing businesses on top of them, providing enterprise tooling and and support and infrastructure and all the different pieces to actually make a product useful instead of saying, okay, yeah, let's go provision some servers to do this ourselves. Fascinating. George, do you have another question right now?

• 1:15:09Jordi Hays?

  Not for now. I'm just blown away. You guys are cooking.

• 1:15:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I do. I do want to talk about hybrid deals or hybrid models. I, somebody had me demo a AI image generator that I I had it take a picture of me and turn me into a professional bodybuilder. It was the most remarkable thing because typically when you go to chat GPT and have that do that, it kind of gets the face a little bit wrong. But very clearly, and I could tell this from the grain pattern, what it had done is it had cut out my face and then only operated on the body. And so the face was a pixel to pixel perfect representation. And for a certain thing, oh, you just want to change the logo on the shirt. You don't want to change anything else about the shirt.

• 1:15:52John Coogan?

  It seemed like a good value. Now, I was being gaslit by the founder who was like, no, we're not doing that. It's all in one network. And I was like, I don't care. I just want good images. It's cool. But but where do you see the different like value added, like maybe less sexy, less pure end to end AI, but value creative opportunities in in image and video generation? I could imagine like a multi-layer diffusion model that has a specific, a specific layer just to add text on top of images. So you're not trying to confuse those. I don't know if that's actually how these models work, but what do you see as as valuable in terms of like merging multiple models to create a better pro end product like the way, you know, O three pro

• 1:16:36John Coogan?

  has a web browser, a Python shell, and then also the ability to search the web and and pull stuff together in reason.

• 1:16:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, one of the reasons why, you know, our business has higher margins than some LLM input providers is because of this fragmentation of different kinds of models, different kinds of use cases. People are trying to chain these models together and create workflows. Both image and video models, they haven't really generalized yet. So you can't write a long prompt and expect, you know, the image and video to edit itself. It's still a lot of model chaining and workflow generation. So like the use case you just said, like putting your face on something else, it's like chaining a couple of models.

• 1:17:25Speaker 06

  And we have a lot of that behavior on the platform. The models are getting bigger and better. So some of that is actually happening, you know, by the model itself. But still, unlike LLMs where it's like a single prompt and you expect it to, you know, write a book, but also generate code and like generalize very well. It doesn't, it doesn't happen for image and video yet.

• 1:17:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, I can imagine that there's tons of interesting enterprise, like, features and harnesses on top of the models that will be extremely value creative. So, seems like you're in the good business, in a good business, but everyone already knows that from the revenue and the fundraising. So, congrats on all the progress, Jordi.

• 1:18:05Jordi Hays?

  And we'll have you back on again soon.

• 1:18:06John Coogan?

  We'd love to have you back.

• 1:18:07Speaker 06

  Thank you. Thank you so much.

• 1:18:09Jordi Hays?

  Legend.

• 1:18:09John Coogan?

  Bye. Let me tell you about Julius, the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English and get insights in seconds. No coding required. Sorry Tyler, you're out of a job. I'm gonna be using Julius. Try Julius for free. They're loved by over 2 million users and trusted by individuals at Princeton, ECG.

• 1:18:32Jordi Hays?

  And you connect Google, your Google Ads account to Julius now. Run some numbers there.

• 1:18:36John Coogan?

  Love that, love that. Anyway, we have our next guest in the Restream waiting room. He's here now in the TBPN Ultra Dome. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 1:18:46Speaker 07

  I am doing well, Jodi and John. Thank you so much for having me here.

• 1:18:49John Coogan?

  Thanks for joining. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself, your company, and any news you got for us?

• 1:18:56Speaker 07

  My name is Sudish. I'm the CEO of TinyFish. First of all, I'm very happy to be here. First time I got to know you was Soham Parikh. By the way, that was a great get.

• 1:19:04John Coogan?

  That's amazing. That was a great get. What a wild day on the internet.

• 1:19:08Speaker 07

  And how fast it's all gone too, though. It's all gone, so.

• 1:19:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, people were, we never got the full postmortem. We'll need to check in, but he said he was going exclusive.

• 1:19:18Jordi Hays?

  There's somebody named Soham Parikh, exact same spelling, that's been appearing on AI research paper.

• 1:19:24John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:19:24Jordi Hays?

  People are trying to figure out, is it the same guy?

• 1:19:27Speaker 07

  I saw that too, yeah. I think DBP and you should have an investigative arms.

• 1:19:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, I actually did talk to someone that was thinking about hiring him after the fact, and it seemed like it was not enough of a red flag. And they said they were gonna give it a shot and hope that he's.

• 1:19:43Jordi Hays?

  Right, I thought he was going exclusive.

• 1:19:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, as far as I know, he is still exclusive, but I haven't done any research recently.

• 1:19:50Speaker 07

  Fantastic. Anyway, guys, thank you so much. I'm really proud of you both have built something in the last 10 months, entrepreneurs, investors. We appreciate it.

• 1:19:59John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 1:19:59Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 1:20:00Speaker 07

  TinyFish, we just announced our 47 million funding series.

• 1:20:06Jordi Hays?

  I was not ready for that. I was not ready for that.

• 1:20:09John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:20:10Jordi Hays?

  I needed a big number, I needed a big number warning.

• 1:20:12John Coogan?

  Absolutely huge. Congratulations.

• 1:20:15Speaker 07

  47 million is like a seed round, right?

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  Mango seed.

• 1:20:19Jordi Hays?

  It's a seed round for TinyFish these days.

• 1:20:21John Coogan?

  TinyFish, but congratulations. I'm sure you can do a lot with it. So what are you gonna, what are you gonna do with it?

• 1:20:28Speaker 07

  I think we are gonna invent a category, build a category that makes sense, and build a great company. That's basically it. Prior to this, you know, I was at ThoughtSpot and Nutanix. We have done some large enterprise companies. Co-founders, they all came from Meta and companies like large. We wanna build a large company doing one thing, which is to make web browsing like humans do, but a superhuman scale for solving enterprise problems. We don't wanna be a consumer company. I know you both have built companies. A lot of AI companies doing things in consumer space, browser agents and all of that. We wanna do a massive scale of web browsing and turn the internet into a structured database for enterprise customers to analyze and act on.

• 1:21:15John Coogan?

  Do you want to sell this to other software companies that are going to piece it together with other APIs to create maybe even more enterprise SaaS? Like, how deep do you see yourself in the stack?

• 1:21:28Speaker 07

  I think nowadays, there is no difference between enterprise business and developer slash builders, because every enterprise product in the AI world starts as a builder product, somebody trying it out. We 100% want to be the best way anyone to connect to connect code to internet. Because, look, these models can solve math problems at international math Olympics level, but when it comes to browsing, it's a mess. Because browsing is so complex that our brains make it look easy.

• 1:21:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:55Speaker 07

  Like, think about going to a movie. The seed that you pick is a function of complex reasoning. If I'm going by myself, I can sit in front and read the movie. But if I'm far away with my family, I want to make the right place, right fishing, you know, contiguous seeds. These decisions we make without even thinking, not to mention the complexity of the website itself, how the pictures are popping, how there is like a pop up here. These things need to be solved really well. We do that. So enterprise customers who want to browse math, 60% of all time of a knowledge work in enterprise is on browsing.

• 1:22:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:22:28Speaker 07

  And we think we can automate that through what we are calling enterprise web agents.

• 1:22:32John Coogan?

  So we we heard reports that some of the big labs were building RL environments with verified rewards, basically cloning DoorDash, creating clones of amazon.com so that they could train an agent on the full amazon.com web app, and then an agent would be able to check out for you. Are you doing something similar? What does data collection look like? What does training look like? What does differentiation look like in the world where where these agents might need to be RL'd on a specific website to really get good results?

• 1:23:06Speaker 07

  This is why I love talking to you guys. You know, it's the you geeks ask the right question to geeks.

• 1:23:13Speaker 07

  There are two models when it comes to these. One is synthetic websites like Web Arena and others have built this.

• 1:23:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:23:19Speaker 07

  The other is paying money to say, let us go learn DoorDash workflows.

• 1:23:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:24Speaker 07

  Both are good, but both have downsides. Because both really create significant challenges with respect to scale when they come out of that environment. What we are doing is something very, we have a proprietary architecture that we have built that frees us and takes that snapshot of a data website in a way that becomes, that exhaust feeds ourselves in a very scalable way. So yes, it is synthetic data that we are generating, but it is out of actual web. And more importantly, most of our use cases, we launched our company with a use case with Google Hotel as a customer. DoorDash is a customer.

• 1:23:57Jordi Hays?

  Great, great. I try to give this, I try to give this advice to, to early stage founders. If you, if you're gonna get a customer early, just get Google. Start with a Mac seven. Start with a Mac seven.

• 1:24:08Speaker 07

  Why not? Why not, right? They built this AI technology. I mean, it all started with, all you need is attention, right?

• 1:24:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:16Speaker 07

  So these customers are giving us access. There's a customer who has twenty two million uh, uh, web SKUs in the product. There's another customer, the forty thousand uh, sub shops as part of them, ClassPass, we announced them, right? So these sort of things, while we are solving for them, is giving us a lot of data. And that exhaust is mined by our products for annotation and creating labeling that makes our The second thing I will tell you though, models are good at a lot of things. But they usually perform really well when the goal is straight. And the reinforcement can be built on something where the context doesn't change. Web is exactly the opposite. Everything is context, that is constantly changing. The goals are changing, the websites are changing, and the context is changing.

• 1:24:59Speaker 07

  So what we have done is, we use reinforced learning and models for understanding and like sort of see what the heck we are trying to do here. Then we separate that and execute that code in CPU at massive scale. And then we use Alpha Evolve, a version of that, to make the code better. So separating exploration and execution is another fundamental thing that we've invented that is gonna make this browser agents, you know, perplexity, Comet and Operator and others, that is like forcing and feeding us. But this is where the execution framework, so that's an infrastructure problem. Think about uh, the, the amount of browsers we have to spin up, the fingerprinting, the anti-bot, all of that infrastructure need to be solved.

• 1:25:40John Coogan?

  Interesting. How do you think the competitive landscape will evolve? Amazon's launching a bunch of stuff. I'm sure all the clouds have something that looks like a browser agent on the shelf somewhere. But we've seen Silicon Valley has probably hundreds of stories about companies that have built things that have been competitive with the big hyperscalers and been wildly successful. But what's your specific plan?

• 1:26:12Speaker 07

  You know, there is a quote that often attributed to Chesty Puller, a marine, that we are surrounded from the north, southeast, west, I better watch out. This is one of those things where it is so amazing because there are three groups of companies that we will be competing with from a tech space. I mean, obviously, there is share shifting of dollars. One are the browser agents who are doing one thing, like Jody, go on a vacation, 20 minutes, he'll book a hotel for you. We want to sell to Expedia and not to Jody because Expedia now want to simulate 100,000 Jody transaction from 50 states or 50 countries. How do we do that? So browser agents to a certain extent will be trying to expand to that space. I think we want to compete. The other is the infrastructure.

• 1:26:55Speaker 07

  So the browser base and others who have been building things. We want to build something enterprise grade with the surveillance, the governance, the control. So that's the second. Third is going to be another interesting area where the code gen and the developers, who builders, who just want to connect their code to internet so it can do amazing things. There again, there are parallel, you guys interviewed Parag. I do think that we will compete with them some level, not because today we compete, but all of these will converge because there will be a few massive companies built on how browser access, how internet can be turned into a structured database. So exciting time. We've raised enough only because we want to make sure that we build it in a way

• 1:27:38Speaker 07

  that is where we can control our destiny. I have a lot of respect for all of these companies. But to me, if you're not surrounded by competitors, you're not in the right place.

• 1:27:47Jordi Hays?

  Yep, you're not going after a big prize.

• 1:27:50John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations.

• 1:27:50Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic answer. Great to meet you.

• 1:27:52John Coogan?

  Good luck out there. Have a good rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:27:56Speaker 07

  I hope so. This was such a short conversation. I enjoyed it. I'll keep watching. Thank you so much.

• 1:28:00John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:28:01Jordi Hays?

  You're the man. Talk to you soon.

• 1:28:01John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:28:01Jordi Hays?

  Bye.

• 1:28:02John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Adio, Customer Relationship Magic. Adio is the AI-native CRM that builds, scales, and grows your company to the next level. We have our next guest already in the restream waiting room. He is bringing her in now. How are you?

• 1:28:17Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 1:28:18Speaker 08

  Hi, nice to be here.

• 1:28:20Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet you, Julie. What's happening?

• 1:28:22Speaker 08

  Great to be here.

• 1:28:23John Coogan?

  Would you mind kicking us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself, your company, and maybe some of your background as well?

• 1:28:29Speaker 08

  Sure. So I am one of the founders of Sundial. We are trying to build the cursor for data analysis. So we're trying to automate a lot of what data scientists will do so that we can help companies make better decisions with data. We work with great companies like OpenAI, Character, Captions. Before that, I led design and research for the Facebook product. I grew up at Meta back then. It's called Facebook.

• 1:28:57Jordi Hays?

  Could you explain for the audience what Facebook is? They've been living under a data center? No, sorry.

• 1:29:03Speaker 08

  So, you know, if you guys become friends and your relationship gets to a certain level and you want to let the world know, can broadcast it online.

• 1:29:15Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Well, I think it feels like the absolute perfect background to build Sundial because when I think, when I think people think about optimizing digital products and making decisions with massive amounts of data, people think Meta and they think Facebook.

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:29:34Speaker 08

  I mean, you say that because you probably know more than most people, but I do think what makes Meta so good is that it was so frickin' operationally rigorous. It was so good at actually capturing and modeling what made it a great business and being like, you know, just so on top of every little thing so that we could optimize, iterate, experiment, test, and eventually, you know, get to that scale.

• 1:29:57Jordi Hays?

  And did you guys, I imagine, had to rely on a bunch of internal tooling that you built in order to do that that was proprietary? Or what did that look like?

• 1:30:07Speaker 08

  Absolutely. Yeah, everything was just homegrown because like actually the whole concept, I would say that Meta probably introduced this idea of growth. I mean, now everybody's got growth themes, but back then that was like a new thing and it was only created, you know, with people like Chamath and Alex Schultz and Naomi because... Facebook was growing like crazy and then one day growth kinda stalled. And you know, every, I think this happens to every successful company, right? In the beginning, you're like, we're, we're, we're great. Our intuition is on, we're solid, like everything hits. And then one day it stops hitting and then everyone's like, oh my God, what happened? And there's a lot of questions, you know, board, board members are calling. And then it becomes like, well, we have to figure it out. And the only way you can do that is with good observability.

• 1:30:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, can you take us through like a concrete example of like one of the, like a case study of like design at Meta and, and, and how like some of the decision making linked to some of the data analysis you did, like, do you have anything that you can share? I know, I know it's been a while, but some of this stuff's probably private, but some of it you can probably share.

• 1:31:09Speaker 08

  Yeah, um, I'm trying to figure out, um, what's an example I can pull out? Well, I will say that like a lot of the process, so I, I think we kind of segment things into two worlds, right? The first is like, look, in order to build something new, you do need that spark of inspiration. And it usually comes from intuition, like you need to kind of have like a vision. And so often that would be like the spark of the idea. But then as soon as you realize that you have like a hypothesis, you know, like I think what people want is, you know, better ways, like if we give people more custom ways of sharing on Facebook, for example, they will share more. That's an example of like a particular hypothesis that somebody would have. And usually that comes with like an idea, you're like, if I build, you know, a really awesome text editor,

• 1:31:53Speaker 08

  or I give them a way to record video, or, you know, I, I make it super easy to like pull in a quote, right? Then people will go and share more. But the thing that you then need to do is to figure out, well, how quickly can you test whether that hypothesis is true? Like what's the, what's the kind of smallest thing that you can build? That gives you either more or less assurance that this thing is, is the thing to bet on. And so we would try and figure out what's like the smallest framing of that experiment. Um, and then if it seems like, you know, okay, it's inclusive or. We actually think it might be promising, then you just double down, right? Then you like add more, you know, you keep building. And I think that um, that that's been like, you know, very, this is like a super early example.

• 1:32:36Speaker 08

  But I think like Hackathon project, like video is like a Hackathon project that somebody did. Um, and then very early on, like video came out after the Hackathon. It's like just very quickly, you can see um, what what will, you know, like that that people are actually using. In fact, maybe a better example that I'm thinking about is actually Feed. So Feed is one of those very early examples where people hated it. So News Feed came out. Before that, the way that people went to profiles is like, you know, I would go to your profile, John. I'd go to your profile, Jordy. I'd see if anything changed. But there was no system that automatically told me if you updated something. And so we launched Feed, this was like back in 2006. And there were like huge protests.

• 1:33:20Speaker 08

  In fact, like a million people within a week joined this Facebook group called I F and Hate Facebook News Feed. Uh, because people thought it was like, it was creepy. It was like, you know, um, it was too much surveillance. But the reason, I think Mark and the team, like we kept on it, is the fact that like through the numbers, like through the data, you could see that people are spending a lot of time on News Feed. And in fact, the reason they knew to join this group, I F and Hate News Feed, is because of News Feed. Like it was, they were like, you know, so it just was like very obvious to us that this was working despite what people are saying about it.

• 1:33:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, uh, can you talk about preference falsification more broadly? Was that like a hard one lesson that carried through? It feels like Meta has really um, like absorbed that lesson and it continues to inform the company culture. Have you carried that idea of preference falsification forward into your career? Uh, how do you think about that disconnect between what people say and then what they actually do?

• 1:34:20Speaker 08

  I think it just like you'd have to gather the data. You just have to look at, you know, like you can say, okay, look, this is what I see. I see like data, their data is that people tell us they don't like it or they tell us they're feeling one way or another, right? So I think about qualitative feedback as data, customer surveys are, you know, are data. Like anything is data, but also behavior. Like what do people actually do? What do they click on? Where are they spending their time and attention? And the more we can have all of that in one place, the better, like a better, more realistic and accurate view of reality we have.

• 1:34:53Jordi Hays?

  When should a company sign up for Sundial? Because I, I think there's a, there's, it's almost a meme in Silicon Valley. If you, if you launch a product early and you're obsessing maybe too much over the data, you could, you could go, end up actually going down the wrong path. And, and there's points in which maybe you disagree with this where the actual, just like founders intuition is what, what's going to get you to that sort of take off of the product, but what's your read?

• 1:35:21Speaker 08

  I agree with that. I do think that it's, there's such a thing as like obsessing too early. Like when you don't have product market fit, you probably have to take bigger swings or probably not in the business of trying to optimize. But I think if you feel like you have product market fit, you're clearly scaling your team. Like you're like, okay, I probably need a growth person. I probably need a data, like the reason you want to grow through data person is you want to pour more fuel on the fire. Like you want to understand what works and what doesn't. And so what all of these roles are trying to do is start a series of experimentation and just like, again, get to better, better visibility, right? Better observability for like, what we all want to do is just build a mental model. Like this is how the business works. And if you tweak this thing, more money goes up and you tweak this, more users, right?

• 1:36:05Speaker 08

  We want to build a very real and influenceable model. And that is what like all of that work of trying to build and, and do analysis is, is there to help us do.

• 1:36:16John Coogan?

  Did you overlap with Laura Dana at Meta? Can you tell me a little bit about her?

• 1:36:20Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 1:36:21John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, we have.

• 1:36:21Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:36:22John Coogan?

  She was in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week. What, what, what's made her, you know, what's the secret to her impact?

• 1:36:30Speaker 08

  So Laura Donna joined as a design lead and I think she took over Messenger, so Facebook Messenger. And I think the team was pretty small then, maybe about eight designers and she helped scale that up to like 200 designers and eventually she actually become the product group lead. So the product group lead is kind of like the GM role. And in fact, there's not that many examples of design leaders who become GMs, you know, like engineers can become GMs. Like I think Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram is one. I think Laura Donna is probably the other that I can recall. So she ended up actually leading all of Messenger. I think recently she went to go work on AI and I just saw the news that she is joining as Figma's new Chief Design Officer, which is fantastic news.

• 1:37:15Speaker 08

  I absolutely adore Laura Donna. I think she is fabulous.

• 1:37:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll have to get her on the show. That would be, it'd be fun to dig into. Anyway, Jordy, anything else?

• 1:37:23Jordi Hays?

  I have a bunch more questions, but I don't think we have time.

• 1:37:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, thank you so much for having me on.

• 1:37:28Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, congrats on all the progress so far.

• 1:37:31John Coogan?

  This is fantastic. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:37:32Speaker 08

  All right, talk to you guys soon. Bye.

• 1:37:34John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 1:37:35Jordi Hays?

  Cheers. Gabe in the chat says, whoa, she has a headset on. How can I belong in this company?

• 1:37:40John Coogan?

  I love it. Yeah, the headset's great. Let me tell you about Numeral HQ. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. You can get started for free. Benchmark Series A. Let's go.

• 1:37:52Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:37:54John Coogan?

  Our next guest is in the restream waiting room. We will bring them into the PBPM Ultra Dome.

• 1:38:02Jordi Hays?

  Jacob, welcome to the show, finally. We've been waiting for this moment. It took us a bit long.

• 1:38:07Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Yes, sir. We're pretty good. How are you guys?

• 1:38:10John Coogan?

  We're doing great. Give us the breakdown. What'd you launch today?

• 1:38:14Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Color 3 applications are live.

• 1:38:17Jordi Hays?

  Boom, hit it.

• 1:38:18Jakob Diepenbrock?

  The best part here is the video. I assume you guys may have watched it, but it's, I think, the best Gundo hype video.

• 1:38:26Jordi Hays?

  Wait, can we pull it up?

• 1:38:28John Coogan?

  That's a tall order. Yeah, production team. Ben, can you pull up the latest Discipulous Ventures post? Maybe we can put it in the chat. Can you send it to them?

• 1:38:40Jordi Hays?

  I'm trying to find it right now.

• 1:38:41John Coogan?

  It's probably on Jacob's X.

• 1:38:42Jordi Hays?

  Throw it in the chat.

• 1:38:43John Coogan?

  We will pull this up. We might need to watch this after you hop off, but, but give us the update on, on the, on the previous cohorts. Who's in those? What companies are you in? What's the general thesis? What like, what's the why now for this particular organization? Break, break it down to me.

• 1:39:01Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Yeah. So cohort one was in Rainmaker and Ballard at the time, their office, they were sharing it. They were both pre-stage. I think it was still very much like, is this going to work or just not going to work? I think now we're at the point where like, okay, this, something's working here really well. And I, I think the, the big kind of thesis and point here is like, we want to be like that entry point to what's going on in El Segundo. The culture is very attractive to, to mostly young people want to build companies that really do matter a lot for the country. It's kind of been pushed away from other ecosystems that don't really care about that. And then into practically like, if you want to build a hardware or aerospace defense, you should be in El Segundo. SpaceX started down the street from where I'm based and the best talent, the supply chain, the whole supply chain.

• 1:39:42Jakob Diepenbrock?

  And a lot of the customers are in El Segundo area. So it's like, if you want to build in El Segundo, if you're building in aerospace defense and hardware and want to be part of the ecosystem, we want to be that way to do that.

• 1:39:51Jordi Hays?

  Augusta said, Augusta said earlier Rockefeller built El Segundo. I, I never knew that. What's, what's the lore there?

• 1:39:59John Coogan?

  The oil company.

• 1:40:00Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:01John Coogan?

  It's Chevron. Like there, there is a massive oil and gas extraction, oil refinery there. When you're in El Segundo, you see it.

• 1:40:07Jordi Hays?

  The whole town was built out to service.

• 1:40:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, you, you can tell the story.

• 1:40:11Jakob Diepenbrock?

  I'll, I'll give the, the rundown. So El Segundo means the second, it means the second Chevron refinery in the state of California. So that's the reason why. So it's very, it's very cool.

• 1:40:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. We got the video if you guys want it.

• 1:40:24John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Let's play the video.

• 1:40:26Jordi Hays?

  Play it.

• 1:40:27John Coogan?

  We're going to, we're going to switch over to the video. This is the fall cohort applications are live now. Yeah. Hit the soundboard. Why not just add an extra layer on top? Are we going to get taken down for this? This is an open source song hopefully. We'll see. This is good.

• 1:40:46Fil Aronshtein?

  It is necessary and it is fair.

• 1:40:50Fil Aronshtein?

  That every human being in the United States.

• 1:40:54John Coogan?

  It's a lot of backs that I've familiar with. A lot of adults, I can talk to them just by their shoulders.

• 1:41:06John Coogan?

  It's a cool presentation.

• 1:41:12John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:41:14Jordi Hays?

  Holy babes.

• 1:41:22John Coogan?

  Good sound editing. There's Isaiah.

• 1:41:27John Coogan?

  There's Augustus. We got cameos on cameos.

• 1:41:36John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 1:41:37Jordi Hays?

  With the, with the.

• 1:41:38John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:41:39Jakob Diepenbrock?

  The back.

• 1:41:40John Coogan?

  We're definitely getting demonetized.

• 1:41:43Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for demonetizing us. It was worth it.

• 1:41:45John Coogan?

  It was worth it. It was worth it. Take me through the economics. So, so, so how much money do you raise for each cohort? How much money are you putting in? Well, what's the deal structure? Like, how does, what, what, what do the, what do the companies actually get out of going through the cohort?

• 1:42:02Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Yeah, yeah. So I guess just top big picture. Fund one ended up being right around the nine million dollar mark. We're basically doing five cohorts out of this. So three next year, one end of year in October. The basic kind of structure, each cohort, we do 10 to 12 founders. So a hundred K check per company.

• 1:42:23John Coogan?

  It's sizable.

• 1:42:24Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Around 1.2 mil per cohort, and then that'll go across the rest. And a little bit for follow-on for kind of ProRata. But yeah, so the kind of standard deal cohort itself is like, main thing, again, you want to be an El Segundo, a weird way to do that, you have all the big name people, everybody knows, like, we can give you access to them just like that. And we think that's very valuable early on. It can become like, I guess, consensus bet in a way, just to have those behind you is very helpful. And then we have a demo day, we bring out like 120, I think we had 120 partners last time from top firms. Like, just like that, access to all of them. So that's kind of the breakdown. We have a house, it's very fun. We have a chef, we have a gym, everything you need to build a amazing.

• 1:42:59John Coogan?

  Are you officially taking over from Augustus's job as El Segundo tour guide? Because every, there was like a solid six-month period where every single VC and founder would hit up Augustus and be like, "Okay, time for the tour, let me go around."

• 1:43:14Jordi Hays?

  He doesn't have time for that.

• 1:43:15John Coogan?

  I don't think he has time for it anymore. He's on the road a lot.

• 1:43:18Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Yeah, it's funny. Yeah, I I I'm getting, I have too many texts from from B C saying, hey, I want to see El Segundo coming around. So I I think I've taken, I I think it's more of a good job for me than him. But what one actually

• 1:43:29John Coogan?

  Cool, cool. Here's the wire details and then I'll take you on the tour.

• 1:43:32Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Exactly, exactly. But also on that point, we had the most recent bonfire, which a couple of you guys were at last week, last Friday.

• 1:43:39John Coogan?

  Oh, Tyler.

• 1:43:40Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Gus is like, you're taking this over. And we had like, I think, close to 200 people come out, which is pretty awesome, which is like, I think a record, I hopefully for one of the bonfires.

• 1:43:48John Coogan?

  Wow, a venture capital firm absorbing an iconic networking series. Where have we seen this before?

• 1:43:56Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting. I I'll I'll be like completely honest. When I saw Disipulus launch, I I wasn't, I like, I've I've backed a bunch of, you know, I backed Rainmaker, I backed Shinkei, a bunch of the Gundo companies, but it didn't immediately click for me. But hearing you, hearing you talk about it, it's just like, and obviously, we're we're super close with with Gary and the whole Y C team, and they've backed a bunch of hard tech companies. And so my immediate thought was like, do we need something like this? Do we need a new institution? And hearing you talk about it and seeing, you know, the progress from the port coast so far, it just makes a ton of sense to have like an institution in El Segundo, because we can't just rely on the city to give tour guides to people that want to set up companies.

• 1:44:39John Coogan?

  A couple of years ago, I went, I went and did the tour of El Segundo.

• 1:44:43Jordi Hays?

  You created, you you helped facilitate the meet.

• 1:44:46John Coogan?

  There were a bunch of folks that were that were highlighting it. And it, the energy was very similar to like, you know, Mountain View in 2009 or 2012, in my opinion, like, it had that like university av feel like, it's sort of, it's just boring enough, like you're in L A, but it's not like this hot town that you're going to get distracted by. Like, it's really just like a lot of cool companies building. And then you walk across the street, there's another founder, they have some tool, like, it actually makes sense to have people sharing stuff and moving stuff around. Yeah, it's very, very, very cool community. It makes a ton of sense.

• 1:45:23Jordi Hays?

  Well, congratulations on the launch of the new application window. I haven't run this by John, but hopefully he agrees. We'll sponsor the next bonfire.

• 1:45:32John Coogan?

  Let's do it.

• 1:45:33Jordi Hays?

  Count us in.

• 1:45:33Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Let's go.

• 1:45:34John Coogan?

  Can't wait.

• 1:45:35Jakob Diepenbrock?

  Don't come to the Purple Orchid as well afterwards.

• 1:45:36John Coogan?

  I've been to the Purple Orchid. It's a lot of fun. It's a good spot.

• 1:45:40Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 1:45:40John Coogan?

  They do the dragon bowls there that you drink out of.

• 1:45:43Jordi Hays?

  Dragon bowls.

• 1:45:44John Coogan?

  Dragon bowls.

• 1:45:44Jakob Diepenbrock?

  They light them on fire.

• 1:45:45John Coogan?

  They light them on fire. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway.

• 1:45:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, congrats Jacob.

• 1:45:50John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on. We will talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your day. Awesome. Thank you guys. In the meantime, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.

• 1:46:04Jordi Hays?

  Cursor, remote, runway, perplexity, retool, mercury, raycast, ramp. They all use it.

• 1:46:11John Coogan?

  We have another three hours of content to go through. I like this post from Growing Daniel. "The opposite of FOMO is when you skip an event and then everyone who went says it sucked." Vindication of missing out. And Tyler Cowen says, "VOMO."

• 1:46:27Jordi Hays?

  VOMO.

• 1:46:28John Coogan?

  I think VOMO is a good one.

• 1:46:30Jordi Hays?

  It's simply the best.

• 1:46:32John Coogan?

  It is the best.

• 1:46:32Jordi Hays?

  It simply is the best.

• 1:46:34John Coogan?

  It is the best. I'm trying to think of the last time I had VOMO. I don't want to put anyone in a blast, but I have certainly, I've certainly said no to things.

• 1:46:41Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's keep going through the timeline. John, can you text Gabe?

• 1:46:45John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:46:46Jordi Hays?

  And see if he is still coming on. He confirmed one. We moved him up 10 minutes. We might need to do some timeline.

• 1:46:53John Coogan?

  I'm happy to hang out.

• 1:46:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we can hang out. So Sophie, NetCap Girl, says, is showing a post saying, "There must be some mistake. I thought I'd be working on digital superintelligence." And it is an angry man in a military uniform saying, "Build the Goon Bot." And so there's a lot of that going on right now.

• 1:47:18Jordi Hays?

  Luke Laisher has another post in response to the UK Independent Space Agency is entirely scrapped to cut costs. And we have Matthew McConaughey here saying, "We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars. Now we look down and worry about our place in the dirt."

• 1:47:41Jordi Hays?

  KPMG wrote a hundred page prompt to build a Gentic tax bot. Produces advice in a single day instead of two weeks without job losses. And X Nihilio says a hundred page prompt is crazy. You ever ripped a hundred page prompt, John?

• 1:47:57John Coogan?

  I've gotten close. I've used a lot of those like repurposed prompts that people have online. Oh, this is the super prompt. Never, never got in the habit of like daily driving one of those. Dwar Kesh Patel had a good prompt in Gemini that would take a transcript and clean it up. And it gave a really like the hundred pages is really like a hundred pages of examples. Basically like here's what a messy transcript looks like out of a, out of just like a transcription service where the speakers aren't labeled and there aren't necessarily paragraph breaks. You give it a ton of extra, you give it a ton of extra context, but a ton of extra examples. And then that makes it perform a lot better because it knows, it understands the job.

• 1:48:41Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:48:42John Coogan?

  Uh, but yeah, a hundred page prompt is pretty wild.

• 1:48:44Jordi Hays?

  So Kafka Esquire says, uh, just one more model, bro. Just one more funding round, bro, please. And this post from Walter Bloomberg, esteemed journalist.

• 1:48:55John Coogan?

  Where did this come from?

• 1:48:56Jordi Hays?

  So this was from some interview.

• 1:48:57John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:48:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and to be clear, yeah, taken out of context. Uh, the, the headline was opening ICO Sam Altman concedes GPT five was a misfire bets on GPT six. And this has been going pretty viral. People are poking a little fun. I think, I think in some ways, you know, um, the, this, the, the Death Star kind of set them up for this.

• 1:49:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:20Jordi Hays?

  Double bird capital says just one more trillion, bro. Honestly, I swear.

• 1:49:23John Coogan?

  I mean, my take on this is that like the numbered releases should just go. Uh, when Facebook introduced the feed, they, they stopped saying we're changing things.

• 1:49:32Jordi Hays?

  It's a good take.

• 1:49:33John Coogan?

  Because when you say.

• 1:49:34Jordi Hays?

  It's a good take, sir.

• 1:49:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. When you say, when you, when you tell everyone we're changing everything, people are like, I don't like change. But if instead you just say like, yeah, like every day, Facebook gets a slightly different update and the algorithm slightly different. And then some days people are like, ah, the algo is not really for me right now. And then they complain enough and then you get the feedback and then they tweak and they make it better and better and better. Like, I feel like, uh, we should just be in the era of GPT is what powers chat.com. And it's constantly getting better and stop focusing on the size of the pre-training bubble. Stop focusing on the parameters if you're a consumer. Stop focusing on the numbers. Start focusing on your sleep number, your sleep score. Go to eightsleep.com. Exceptional sleep without exception.

• 1:50:18John Coogan?

  Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized. You can discover pod five at eightsleep.com. And I believe we have our next guest, Gabe from Mischief. How you doing, Gabe?

• 1:50:28Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 1:50:29John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 1:50:30Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:50:32John Coogan?

  At the TBPN Ultra Dome. What's new with you? How you doing? I think everyone knows you. Maybe just launch into the announcement this week about the private military corporation that you're starting.

• 1:50:47Gabe Whaley?

  You saw the Twitter. I didn't think anybody looked at that. Interesting.

• 1:50:50John Coogan?

  Everyone saw that.

• 1:50:51Gabe Whaley?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a sure, sure. What do we do this week? Well, we launched an agency called Applied Mischief.

• 1:51:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:01Gabe Whaley?

  The agency, honestly, like to rewind, where does that even come from? And a lot of people don't actually understand this about mischief because probably what you see is like videos of people wearing boots or like press headlines or whatever. But the way we're actually organized is we are essentially a holding company of different creative enterprises based on categories. So there's like a handbag division. There's a footwear division. There's a fine art division. There are other divisions I can't really talk about yet, but with like more bigger permanent structures.

• 1:51:37Jordi Hays?

  Well, you talked about a division you can't talk about, so I had to.

• 1:51:42Gabe Whaley?

  Nice, nice. So we've been operating like that for a second now. And to make that efficient, there's been an internal back office that's like normal, right? Like finance, legal, manufacturing, customer support, but also like design and marketing.

• 1:51:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:51:59Gabe Whaley?

  And that's a group that not only does design, but also applies that sort of like. Mischief magic like viral juice or whatever.

• 1:52:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:06Gabe Whaley?

  Uh, so the thinking here was we might as well open up that to external clients. It can become a profit center, which is great. But the other part is like, maybe it can make our world a little bit bigger too, because we're hungry for more formats. We've made so much stuff over the last like six years. What have we not touched yet? And like, maybe we won't get sued this time around. Like maybe there's just stuff that we can do. That's like, cool. We can, uh.

• 1:52:32Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's, it's, it's there. What, what, what seems obviously exciting to me is partnering with, with global companies. I mean, sure, I'm sure you'll partner with, with startups and, and scale ups and things like that. But what, what gets exciting at a certain point has to be scale.

• 1:52:48John Coogan?

  There's so much.

• 1:52:49Jordi Hays?

  Hey, instead of selling like a thousand of this thing, can we figure out?

• 1:52:52John Coogan?

  It's like when Spike Jones does an Apple ad, it's like, that's just not, there's just special, there's something special about that. About just like giving it, it's almost like patronage in some ways, it's marketing, but it's just like, it's still art and it's cool. And it's like un, unbridled.

• 1:53:06Gabe Whaley?

  No, totally, totally. Right? Like the way that we look at these is like, it's not a service that we're providing necessarily. Like there are brands and entities and culture that we perceive as cultural material. The same way artists looks at their material is like paint or sculpture or marble or whatever. Like for us, Coca-Cola is material. Give us that and we'll make something new with it. Instead of fabricating a marketing story to sell more units that people do now anyways, right? The opportunity is like, there's just so much cultural material being left on the table to make new things work.

• 1:53:42John Coogan?

  So talk to me about inbound versus outbound. I feel like in that vein of like, there's cultural material. If you come up with just like, I have a great idea. It, it would only work for this particular brand because the nature of the idea is tied deeply to the lore of that brand. They're never going to think about this, but I need to, I could, the only value I could get out of this is selling it to them. Are you going outbound and pitching big companies and saying, I have, I have the idea for you? Or is it more like there is an actual process where you can sit down and do ideas?

• 1:54:17Gabe Whaley?

  I'm going outbound, outbound right now.

• 1:54:19John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 1:54:19Gabe Whaley?

  This is a message for Gabe Newell from Valve. We want to design your submarine.

• 1:54:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, so let's go. I love that. That would be an amazing project.

• 1:54:28Gabe Whaley?

  That's that's the outbound. That's what I want to do. Or extraterrestrial space research organizations. We want to design that you're putting into space.

• 1:54:37John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:54:38Gabe Whaley?

  We were, look, we were Fast Company's number one design in the world in 2023. People don't think about that because they think about viral, but if you actually get like what we do, it is unparalleled.

• 1:54:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:54:48Gabe Whaley?

  So let us, uh, let's like put some stuff.

• 1:54:51Jordi Hays?

  We got a, we got a space play for you with, with a company that we're very close with.

• 1:54:54John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:54:55Jordi Hays?

  I won't say anymore, but, uh.

• 1:54:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, we'll talk after the stream.

• 1:54:58Jordi Hays?

  I, I have a bunch of, uh, I have a bunch of questions. One, quickly on the business model of the new agency. Is there a world where you would, you would, uh, you know, the standard agency model would be like, hey, let's do this project and we'll charge you like a million bucks or a couple of million bucks. But there's some scenarios where you could actually, I imagine i- if it was a one-off, more like drop style, you could take a percentage of of the sales even. Is that something you would ever explore to get to really bet on yourselves and say like, hey, we think we could sell like a $10 million of this and we'll only price based on, on success. Is that, is that something you would consider doing?

• 1:55:36Gabe Whaley?

  It's totally on the table and it's, it's not, that's not even uncommon from like the collaboration route. Like some of the collaborations that we've done in the past have been that kind of model where it's like you make a bunch of product together. We both invest on our own ends and then you split the cut afterwards. I think what's more interesting though is because of mischief's position as like this artistic entity, like in a way like we have a personality, we have an audience. And so we're actually like building a pipeline of joint ventures.

• 1:56:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:07Gabe Whaley?

  With.

• 1:56:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what I was getting at.

• 1:56:09Gabe Whaley?

  Yeah, it's not even about 10,000 units. We're talking about millions of units.

• 1:56:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, over forever, basically.

• 1:56:15Gabe Whaley?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:56:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like I want, I want the, I want a mischief themed line of, of kids toys, right? Like I would happily buy those. I, I would buy a bunch of those, right? And so that's like, get you, if you partner with the right company, that should be in the, the, you know, my personal lifetime value would be in the hundreds of dollars and I would even pay a premium.

• 1:56:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:35Jordi Hays?

  Because I know it's you guys behind it.

• 1:56:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:37Jordi Hays?

  Um, another question I have. Uh, you know, I've, I've leveraged the, the drops kind of model to do marketing. I was inspired by you guys, uh, to do marketing for my last company party round. And something that I've noticed recently, a lot of companies in tech say they want to do drops and it's because they're inspired by mischief and they just see like drops get attention. I want attention.

• 1:57:01John Coogan?

  One drop please, sir.

• 1:57:02Jordi Hays?

  One drop please.

• 1:57:03John Coogan?

  One drop please.

• 1:57:04Jordi Hays?

  The usual, sir.

• 1:57:05John Coogan?

  Sign up.

• 1:57:06Jordi Hays?

  No, but the, the thing I usually push back on and the thing I'd curious to get your opinion on is like, I think when companies think they want to do drops, what they really want to do is true advertising. And they don't even know the difference. And so like where, where's that line for you? And how often are you, you know, would you talk to a company and it's like, what you really want is to do advertising.

• 1:57:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, just like a consistent message delivered via every channel forever might be the right thing.

• 1:57:32Jordi Hays?

  Not even forever or like for a few months, for a quarter. Yeah.

• 1:57:36Gabe Whaley?

  I would, I would take it even further and it's, it's like, that is the final goal, which is like, get a message out into the people, get them talking, whatever. But like the, the focus on the drop is, is misplaced. Drop is just a delivery mechanism for something new. What these guys are actually looking for, like what they actually want at the end of the day is how do you break through the noise? And right now you can either just make more content, which honestly the ROI I think is going down on that. There's too much content and not enough demand. Sorry. That's just how it is. But the opportunity is you can make new things that fit within your brand parameters, that use your brand as cultural material,

• 1:58:20Gabe Whaley?

  that are actually interesting, that are tactile, that have a story to them. And if they happen to be ephemeral, then it's a drop, but don't get hung up on the drop. Just make something interesting. That's.

• 1:58:31Jordi Hays?

  Are, are ideas valuable? And, and, and if you had to, you know, what?

• 1:58:39Jordi Hays?

  Kind of think about like a making something new. How much is it is it the idea versus the execution?

• 1:58:44John Coogan?

  Also, yeah, do you hire? Do you hire idea guys and then like operational excellent people? And they're like a dividing line?

• 1:58:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and to me, I, John and I will sit down with companies that we're friends with and will generate like 20 ideas. It ends up being super frustrating because you're like, we're get, we're feeding you this like incredible idea. It doesn't even cost a lot to do. And if you do it right, like it could be like a million dollars of like, you know, a brand value, however you want to measure that. But it feels like you can give people these, these things that in your hands, they might be million dollar ideas, but, but.

• 1:59:23John Coogan?

  Poorly executed.

• 1:59:24Jordi Hays?

  Poorly executed, they're a negative value.

• 1:59:27Gabe Whaley?

  Totally, I think it's like, like squeezing a balloon on two ends. Like there's the conceptual power and then there's the execution. There are things where like the concept is really high and the execution doesn't have to be crazy. You don't need a huge budget. It's just a good idea and it's going to work. What you typically see a lot of brands do is they're afraid of good ideas because good ideas have not been done by definition. So they lean more on the execution and you see like large budgets and like huge bloated teams and production. So it's sort of like, now, if you can dial in both, that's the magic, right? That's, but that's really hard to do because more money, more risk, you want to, it's you just, you don't, you want to de-risk on the concept side. John, to your question, I don't hire idea people.

• 2:00:12Gabe Whaley?

  Everyone here is an idea person. We did, I'll give you an example. A couple of years ago, we made handbags, right? They're very expensive. The smaller they get, the more expensive they become. So we made a microscopic handbag that sold at auction for $63,000 at Paris Fashion Week at Pharrell's, whatever coronation of Louis Vuitton. That idea came from a summer intern. Anyone here can have an idea, right? The lawyer or general counsel joins, brainstorms, our ops lead joins, brainstorms. Because being creative doesn't mean you have good ideas. Being creative just means you're human. You have insights and you have reactions to things that are going around you. That's it. And then also like being creative means you're not afraid to like look stupid.

• 2:00:55Gabe Whaley?

  And I think that's like a big defining trait here because anybody can look stupid here, including myself.

• 2:01:03Jordi Hays?

  What have you ever seen highly complex ideas work well as marketing, advertising stunts? This is something that we end up talking about.

• 2:01:16John Coogan?

  I think David Ogilvy said like, "Simple ideas are powerful ideas." That's certainly something I've seen in Mischief's work throughout your entire career. But is there some sort of contrarian or nuance to that concept?

• 2:01:29Gabe Whaley?

  I think there could be. The line that we use here is, "A good idea should slap in one sentence and then slap even harder in three." And that just means there are layers, right? Like, you appreciate it for the headline, but if you like really dig into it, you're like, "Wait up, is this thing making fun of me? And do I still like it? And am I gonna like it? And if I buy it, am I a chump or am I a patron of the arts, right? It's like, the layers are good, the ambiguity is good. But at the end of the day, like, from a marketing perspective, just being practical right now, like, people's attention spans are so low. And honestly, like, people are just, we're all like very distracted.

• 2:02:12Gabe Whaley?

  So you don't have a lot of window to like nail it. So you do gotta have that one liner, like, pretty dialed in.

• 2:02:20Jordi Hays?

  How dialed in is your crystal ball when it comes to releasing new things on the internet? Like, do you have a, do you feel like you usually have like a pretty accurate sense of how much attention something will get?

• 2:02:33John Coogan?

  Do you get surprised?

• 2:02:34Jordi Hays?

  Or do you still get surprised often?

• 2:02:37Gabe Whaley?

  Totally still get surprised. Like, you always get surprised. I think it's easy for us to fall in a comfort zone where we're like, "Oh yeah, like this will work." Because what that ends up doing is you start coming up with ideas based on a framework of what has worked. We actually put in a lot of effort to come up with formats and mechanisms that don't really fit into our existing framework, that we're like, "Oh, I don't know if this is gonna work and is this offensive? I don't know. Are people gonna buy slices of this giant foam baby that we're cutting up in Brooklyn? I don't know." They did.

• 2:03:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:16Gabe Whaley?

  No, you know, like.

• 2:03:18John Coogan?

  Is there a project that you think is like criminally underrated? People are obviously familiar with the boots. They're familiar with the, uh, the, the, the shoes and the footwear stuff and some of the other projects. But what, what, what's your, what's your example of a project? You're like, ah, that's still like one of my favorites.

• 2:03:34Gabe Whaley?

  Good question. And the reason it didn't really get seen as much is because, to be honest, we were a little bit scared.

• 2:03:43John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:03:43Gabe Whaley?

  And so, you know, buried it in an art show that we did. But, uh, are you guys familiar with the paradox of the ship of Theseus?

• 2:03:50John Coogan?

  Yes, but explain it for the listener.

• 2:03:52Gabe Whaley?

  Totally. So it's like, uh, it's this old paradox where imagine you have this like large wooden ship. And every day over seven years, you're coming up with a new piece of wood identical to a piece of wood on the ship. And you are swapping it out. The question is, after seven years, is it the same ship or is it a different ship? We found that, uh, a very interesting question. And so we decided to, uh, apply that in our own way to a sink located in the American wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

• 2:04:25Jordi Hays?

  As one does.

• 2:04:27John Coogan?

  How did you do that?

• 2:04:28Gabe Whaley?

  Yeah, explain. And so we, we found the sink. We did recon. We, uh, not me, I'm not, I, it wasn't me personally, it was somebody here. Names, but we found, you know, we, we tracked down the serial numbers, the parts, uh, ordered exact like replica, we, we ordered the exact same parts, built it here, tied off the dimensions of the bathroom here so that we could practice swapping things out. And then over many months, we would walk into the Met and do a quick swap and leave. Then the next day, do it again and do it again, bolt by bolt, screw by screw.

• 2:05:07Jordi Hays?

  Just an art enthusiast. I just, I just like art and I, I go to the bathroom.

• 2:05:11John Coogan?

  What is the piece that's gonna be big? How'd you get the big piece there? Isn't there like one piece?

• 2:05:16Gabe Whaley?

  That, that, so that we decided to leave.

• 2:05:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:05:18Gabe Whaley?

  That we did not swap out, although we had, uh.

• 2:05:21John Coogan?

  A plan.

• 2:05:22Gabe Whaley?

  We we we we fabricated a wheelchair that could have hit it in the sink.

• 2:05:28Gabe Whaley?

  I'm telling you, we got we got a little bit. We were honestly scared.

• 2:05:32Jordi Hays?

  You got a little carried away.

• 2:05:33Gabe Whaley?

  We still we still did it. We got everything else. And so, yeah, they they they have our sink and we have their sink. And ours is now a part of like our art gallery. So

• 2:05:44John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 2:05:44Gabe Whaley?

  Although although I believe they figured it out and they've replaced it. Because as soon as we announced the art show, even though the sink was sort of like hidden in all the other pieces, people definitely found out and there was a line in the Met for that bathroom.

• 2:06:02Jordi Hays?

  They should have they should have sectioned it off, turned it into an installation.

• 2:06:06Gabe Whaley?

  So if any of your if any of your viewers are on the board of the Met, the coolest thing you could do right now is acquire that sink from us and put it back.

• 2:06:16Jordi Hays?

  Let's make it happen.

• 2:06:17John Coogan?

  Let's make it happen, Armie.

• 2:06:19Jordi Hays?

  How how many millions of dollars do you think you've left on the table by not doing crypto projects?

• 2:06:29Gabe Whaley?

  The painful question.

• 2:06:31Jordi Hays?

  Is it like it has to be like 100 million?

• 2:06:34Gabe Whaley?

  Yeah, probably. Honestly, probably. Probably.

• 2:06:38Jordi Hays?

  And is there is there

• 2:06:42Jordi Hays?

  like there I'm sure I'm sure at some point there will actually be a way to do this. Like, there has to be something that makes sense. Like, we did something back in the day with Party Round where we did. It was called Helpful VCs, where we made CryptoPunks for every VC and then we put them on a website. And we said, you have four hours to retweet these, otherwise we're going to auction them off. And it was like, for like charity, right? We weren't like trying to make money. And that was like one of the ways that we broke through and like shortly after.

• 2:07:09John Coogan?

  I think there might be something to do with crypto and like stable coins where there's not as much gambling involved, but there might be something with crypto. I don't know.

• 2:07:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, you have to remove you have to make it not like a speculation.

• 2:07:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, because as soon as you leave the like, like the the people who get the joke are and then the people who don't get the joke show up and then and then they're losing their life savings. That doesn't feel good. Whereas whereas like if Somebody, you know, is bidding on that handbag, like they probably know what they're doing. They understand that it's

• 2:07:38Gabe Whaley?

  Yeah, exactly. Look, I think that crypto route for us is we've often plotted our own death. And I think there's like a chaotic evil way to go out where you just

• 2:07:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:52Gabe Whaley?

  I shouldn't even be saying that because now everybody's gonna know.

• 2:07:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, everybody's gonna know.

• 2:07:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think switching gears to another topic that I'm sure you guys. So one, I don't think AI is going to take your guys' jobs anytime soon. Despite it being able to maybe piece together, you know, random ideas. It's so much about taste and things like that. But how excited are you to leverage that technology for some of these various plays?

• 2:08:26Gabe Whaley?

  Honestly TBD and I think it's.

• 2:08:31Gabe Whaley?

  I do, I will say like unlike the whole like crypto craziness of the last couple of years. We didn't get into that because we didn't feel like it was here to stay yet. That's like the truth, like when you see the herd run so fast. It usually means they're running towards the end of a cliff. There's a little bit of a similar sentiment right now. That said, it is rooted in something real.

• 2:08:55Gabe Whaley?

  But we're not in a rush to like. Use it necessarily, right? If it's going to be here forever, we've got time like it's mischief doesn't win as a first mover. If you look at all of our work, it was never about being the first to react to something. We're the first to like make use of a format. So we'll see, we just have to see.

• 2:09:15Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about, are there any projects like time is an interesting variable that you can play with? Right? Like part of the thing with the sync stunt that you guys did is it's just the narrative in the story of like, you guys were conducting this in secret for a long time. It was like a very, and that's part of what makes it so entertaining is kind of like the lore of what went into it. But have you thought about even longer term plays like things that you could do over a decade or 50 years? That in hindsight would just be absolutely hilarious. And but, but again, take this sort of incredible planning.

• 2:09:54Gabe Whaley?

  Yeah, yeah. Honestly, we are at that stage of just like our lives and as a company now to be thinking like that, right? Because like if you think about it, we were in

• 2:10:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you, if you would, you know, I know you guys have have a few investors. If you told your investors, first thing we're working on is a 50 year stunt. It's all you're like, all right, buddy, like, why don't you put some points on the board first?

• 2:10:20Gabe Whaley?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:10:21Jordi Hays?

  But you guys, I feel like I've earned it now, like I, you know, something like a decade.

• 2:10:26Gabe Whaley?

  No, yeah, because like we've we spent basically like we've only been around for the pandemic and post like a little bit post pandemic, right? And all of that was just like, you don't know what's coming, like live day by day, like just survive. Like banks are shutting down. Okay, get through to tomorrow, right? Now we've been around for a second. We're more well known. We have our existing infrastructure and now we really are asking the questions of like, okay, what does that legacy look like in 10 years? Or should we, should we disappear for 20 years and then come back? That would, that would actually be the coolest thing we could do is go dark for two decades and then come back.

• 2:11:07John Coogan?

  Banger.

• 2:11:08Jordi Hays?

  It's work for, it's work for other, it's work for other artists.

• 2:11:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:11Jordi Hays?

  I, I, I, could you do something? So, so we both loved Nathan Fielder's latest sort of like aviation stunt television show.

• 2:11:21Gabe Whaley?

  I've heard a lot about it. I haven't watched it.

• 2:11:23Jordi Hays?

  I mean, you, you should. It's one of the few people in the world that I think is executing on your guys' level in the sense of

• 2:11:30Gabe Whaley?

  He's next up.

• 2:11:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like one sentence, you know, pitch that's hilarious, but then the more you get into it, like the funnier it is. But could you do something like that for like the cost of housing? Like sort of a decade long stunt, like mischief, like mischief figures out a way to like reduce, you know, cut the cost of housing in the United States.

• 2:11:54Gabe Whaley?

  Like we, if there are any like pricey neighborhoods that would love to commission us as an artist to install a sculpture, we have a really good trailer park trailer that we would love to erect in a public square.

• 2:12:13Jordi Hays?

  I can just see like the right RV like there's this RV outside of our gym.

• 2:12:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Kind of yellow from the sun.

• 2:12:22Jordi Hays?

  Like the windows open.

• 2:12:23John Coogan?

  Aluminum on the outside. Yeah, Winnebago. It can be a stunt for Winnebago Corporation.

• 2:12:28Jordi Hays?

  What do you, um, how do you feel about the state of, uh, social media like broadly? It feels like we've gotten to a point where in many ways the platforms look so similar, but they also have their own character. Some of them are becoming Lindy, even thinking about how durable like Twitter and X have been despite all this change. But what's your, and, and do you even, do you, do you feel like you need to use social media or are you better off not using it and then just releasing, you know, stuff on the platforms?

• 2:13:03Gabe Whaley?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, um, definitely a love hate relationship with the, with the platforms, right? Cause like platforms, if you, if you really think about it, they started as a way to share things that you found were interesting. And now they are mostly ways to share, uh, photos and videos of you talking about things that you find interesting. It's kind of become like less novelty based and more vanity based. Just fine. That's like a fundamental human instinct. So I get it. Um, I would continue to love to find a way to not use the platforms to disseminate information. And that's kind of how we started. Our first audience portal

• 2:13:47Gabe Whaley?

  was Venmo. Um, we had a huge audience on Venmo and we like had this huge phone bank, uh, like a Chinese phone click farm. And we, every time we had a new project, we would Venmo our audience a penny and they would get that notification because that's the most powerful notification layer in your phone.

• 2:14:07Jordi Hays?

  The cha-ching, the cha-ching.

• 2:14:08Gabe Whaley?

  Right? I am now banned from Venmo for life.

• 2:14:15John Coogan?

  Well PayPal.

• 2:14:16Gabe Whaley?

  They want to work with a client, just let me know.

• 2:14:19John Coogan?

  PayPal, we'll have the CEO of PayPal on.

• 2:14:21Jordi Hays?

  I think the last company that came on works with Venmo will work on it.

• 2:14:26John Coogan?

  We should get this reversed. This is important. We were reading an article in The New Yorker yesterday about this concept of IRL brain rot. The examples were the viral.

• 2:14:38Jordi Hays?

  Labubus.

• 2:14:39John Coogan?

  Labubus, Dubai chocolate, the viral Italian sandwich. We saw a few of these. Joe Weisenthal at Bloomberg was also writing about these kind of like viral as being something that you stamp on your product as a product feature, almost. And I was wondering if you're worried about the spillover from internet slop culture into the real world, just kind of how you're tussling with this idea of brain rot coming into the real world. I don't even know if you read the article or you have thoughts there.

• 2:15:12Gabe Whaley?

  I think I saw it on Instagram, yeah.

• 2:15:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:16John Coogan?

  Of course, yeah. Yeah, you probably did a front-facing video talking about it. Or you saw someone do a front-facing video talking about it.

• 2:15:22Gabe Whaley?

  Exactly, like a reaction video.

• 2:15:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:25Gabe Whaley?

  I mean, look, it would...

• 2:15:30Gabe Whaley?

  I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing, but like, what mischief has put out historically is kind of in that brain rot category.

• 2:15:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the boots, the boots, right?

• 2:15:40Gabe Whaley?

  Yeah, it's like absurd aesthetic and maybe, maybe even I could be so conceited as to say we were part of creating that.

• 2:15:48Jordi Hays?

  The meta. No, you guys definitely, that it was an era of minimalism and it was like the Everlane era.

• 2:15:56John Coogan?

  Quite lucky.

• 2:15:57Jordi Hays?

  And the boots, the boots are like, you know, an incredible reaction to that of being like...

• 2:16:01Gabe Whaley?

  Absurd aesthetic, just like popping imagery off of your screen.

• 2:16:07Jordi Hays?

  But then the challenge with this trend, right, is if you go back to minimalism, it actually becomes, I mean, maybe, maybe as like for me, right, I became part of the mischief audience and mischief customer in my early twenties. I'm in my late twenties now. Eventually, maybe I'd want some ultra minimalist.

• 2:16:30Jordi Hays?

  You know mischief item for my home, but but but but at the same time, like, once you get on the on the on the maximalist track, like, you're kind of on this maximalism treadmill where you just got to keep like going crazier and crazier and and, you know, maybe maybe in the internet era, there's no turning back.

• 2:16:48Gabe Whaley?

  It it's totally possible, right? Like, we might, we might have built a machine so effective that it's now our master. And like, how do you break free from that, right? But I'm not too worried. Like, we don't, we actually don't think so hard about it. We just kind of make the things that we like. And then if it ever stops working, then.

• 2:17:07John Coogan?

  Do something else.

• 2:17:09Gabe Whaley?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:09John Coogan?

  Figure it out.

• 2:17:10Jordi Hays?

  Well, I I have an idea to put out in the ether. I think next time a an A-list celebrity is going through a massive comms crisis, PR crisis, or a scandal, they should hire you guys to create something more more viral than than the scandal.

• 2:17:25Gabe Whaley?

  They just need to do another crisis to compete with that. All they got to do is go to Twitter and be like, send a Bitcoin to this address and I'll send you to Bitcoin. And then they actually do it. They actually do it.

• 2:17:37Jordi Hays?

  Actually do it.

• 2:17:37John Coogan?

  Genius. Yeah, that is a get it. That is a one time get out of jail free card. You heard it here first.

• 2:17:42Jordi Hays?

  Just payoffs.

• 2:17:43John Coogan?

  If you, yeah, if you're a celebrity and you're in trouble, you're you're you're caught at a Coldplay concert, that's the only way you can reverse the tide.

• 2:17:50Gabe Whaley?

  You will be good. Yeah.

• 2:17:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:17:51Gabe Whaley?

  Great idea. Go for it.

• 2:17:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:53Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  This is great. Yeah, thank you.

• 2:17:55Jordi Hays?

  It's really great. Great to get the update and just hear your so much clarity on on all these different areas that we talk about all the time.

• 2:18:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, we could talk for hours. Yeah, we'd love to have you back whenever whenever it makes sense.

• 2:18:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we gave gave and I kicked around an idea that we won't share now. We'll we'll leverage that for for your next appearance. I can't. I can't wait for it.

• 2:18:18John Coogan?

  One hundred percent.

• 2:18:20Gabe Whaley?

  Let's do it.

• 2:18:21Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 2:18:21John Coogan?

  Awesome. I'll talk to you soon.

• 2:18:22Jordi Hays?

  Great to catch up.

• 2:18:23Gabe Whaley?

  Well, see you.

• 2:18:24Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:18:25John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:18:25Jordi Hays?

  Absolute legend.

• 2:18:27John Coogan?

  One of the best to ever do it.

• 2:18:28Jordi Hays?

  What if we found out that that Dubai chocolate was was a was was a mischief stunt?

• 2:18:35John Coogan?

  It's possible, it's possible.

• 2:18:37Jordi Hays?

  Anything's possible.

• 2:18:38John Coogan?

  Well, if you want to do a stunt, you want to promote a stunt, you want to have some fun with billboards, head over to adquick.com, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to 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. You should also get a hitter. Go over to Bezel, getbezel.com.

• 2:19:00Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:19:00John Coogan?

  Shop over 26,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. What you got for me on the timeline, Jordy Hayes?

• 2:19:08Jordi Hays?

  Wow, our...

• 2:19:11John Coogan?

  Timeline's in turmoil. Are you seeing this Francois Chollet post? Or you want to go say hello?

• 2:19:15Jordi Hays?

  I was saying our next, our next guest has a 133 ETA.

• 2:19:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:19:19Jordi Hays?

  Coming into the studio, David Senra says a fire broke out on my route to the studio.

• 2:19:23John Coogan?

  Oh no, we'll have to read more posts.

• 2:19:25Jordi Hays?

  No, he said, little do they know, nothing, nothing will stop extreme podcasting.

• 2:19:30John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:19:31Jordi Hays?

  We'll see you in a little bit, David.

• 2:19:32John Coogan?

  In-person.

• 2:19:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's dive into this post. You want to read through it?

• 2:19:36John Coogan?

  Yes, so there is a debate. Francois Chollet and someone named Oivend on the timeline. So there's this debate around how will AI impact worker productivity? It's very clear that when you use AI, it feels like you're getting a speed up. When you use a coding agent, it feels like you're getting a speed up. Meter did a study and found that maybe some AI tools are making you less performant. But, so there's this debate. And for a long time, there was this idea that AI will supercharge workers and labor and

• 2:20:16John Coogan?

  anyone who's using AI will be more, more productive than someone who's not. And, and the advice that was given by pretty much everyone in the industry was like, you need to learn how to use AI effectively because if you don't, you'll be left behind. And so, Oivend shares that LLM adoption rose to 49 point, 45.9% among US workers, 18 plus, as of June, July 2025. According to a Stanford World Bank survey, inference demand will continue to surge, not just as more and more user, more usage per user, but as newer, more advanced gen AI models require far more compute. And so...

• 2:20:58John Coogan?

  Obviously, no one was using LLMs just a few years ago. Now, almost half of the American workforce over age 18 are using AI tools in their daily work. Francois Chalet, of course, is asking the question about when is this going to show up in the economic statistics? He says LLM adoption among US workers is closing in on 50%. Meanwhile, labor productivity growth is lower than in 2020. Many counterarguments can be made here, like, they don't know yet how to be productive with it, they've only been using it for one to two years, 50% is still too low to see impact, models next year will be unbelievably better, etc. But I think we now have enough evidence to say that

• 2:21:42John Coogan?

  the 2023 talking point that LLMs will make workers 10 times more productive, some folks even quoted 100x, is probably not accurate. And so he gets a little bit of a turmoil here, a little dust up with Noam Brown, polynomial over at OpenAI. Francois continues and explains a little bit more of his reasoning here. He says, by the way, I don't know if people realize this, but the 2020 work-from-home switch coincided with a major productivity boom, and the late 2021 and 2022 back-to-office reversal coincided with a noticeable productivity drop. It's right there in the statistics. Narrative violation, productivity growth is now back to pre-2020 levels. So for a lot of jobs in the American economy, working

• 2:22:27John Coogan?

  from home was actually a benefit. I'm not a huge fan. I felt like maybe I was more productive, but I certainly didn't enjoy it. And so we've been having

• 2:22:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's interesting.

• 2:22:36John Coogan?

  in person.

• 2:22:37Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting. You'd have to dive in, okay.

• 2:22:41John Coogan?

  Depends on the type of work.

• 2:22:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, and you can also be more productive, but on the wrong strategy. Like, I found it, working from home during that era

• 2:22:49John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:22:50Jordi Hays?

  and having a remote team, I found it very difficult to Like change strategy quickly, even on small things, easy to lock in, but not you were

• 2:23:02John Coogan?

  Hard to zoom out.

• 2:23:02Jordi Hays?

  I felt less, yeah, adaptable, right? You'd sometimes waste three weeks working on something where maybe if you were in the same room, you would have like not made a different decision.

• 2:23:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Noam Brown over at OpenAI says, I don't, yeah, yeah, get the gunshots ready. I don't recall a lot of people in 2023 saying that within a few years, work of productivity with 10x due to LLMs. I do recall a lot of people in 2023 saying LLMs can't reason though. Shots fired on the timeline. That is a fantastic.

• 2:23:31Jordi Hays?

  Ranshwa says, back in 2023, AGI was one to two years away in the form of GPT-5, no less. Productivity was about to create, increase 10 to 100x and developers were about to go extinct. People who questioned the narrative were a tiny minority. We were proven right.

• 2:23:47John Coogan?

  He was the John Brown standing up. I believe that AI will not 10x productivity. Tyler, do you have any takes on this?

• 2:23:54Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah.

• 2:23:55Jordi Hays?

  Will AI be able to get Tyler a shirt?

• 2:23:59John Coogan?

  An AI agent might, but he might be able to do it faster himself. Who knows?

• 2:24:03Speaker 01

  Still unclear on that, but I, I think the idea that people don't know, like, aren't using them efficiently yet makes sense, right? Cause so if you look at that meter study, it was about how like open source developers are actually slower when they use AI tools. But like, if you actually read it, it was open source developers who it was their first time ever using AI tools.

• 2:24:24John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:24:25Speaker 01

  So it's like, obviously like, there's like, you know, some learning curve to using like Claude code or whatever. Like you, it's, you're not going to instantly become way better.

• 2:24:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:24:33Speaker 01

  So I think it's, it's kind of a similar thing there.

• 2:24:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, we heard that there's a, yeah, there's an interesting phenomenon where some companies are getting more value out of having.

• 2:24:44John Coogan?

  Having designers go from zero X engineers to one X engineers and they're not seeing as much of like the 10 X engineer becomes 100 X engineer because the problems are still like intractable in some ways. No Brown says, I was on the AI job market in 2023. I spoke with a lot of researchers, a lot of frontier labs. Some thought scaling pre-training was sufficient. Some thought additional paradigms were needed, but regardless, almost none of them thought AGI was one to two years away. Yeah, that was something that was maybe more parroted in the on the podcast circuit and from those who were raising the mega rounds who needed to kind of justify underwriting AGI at, you know, 1,000 X revenue multiple.

• 2:25:26John Coogan?

  It's interesting. I don't know. It is interesting that to look at the economic statistics to keep going back to what's happening in the labor market, what's happening with unemployment. Like it would be, it would be weird to have a unemployment tick up without productivity tick up because that would just mean lower GDP and that seems like an, like an impossible scenario. I, I'm somewhat receptive to the idea that, that maybe AI is substitutive for a different type of work and, and maybe it's not driving major productivity booms just yet, but I, I would, I have trouble believing both narratives that, that AI is driving massive unemployment and also it's not driving increased productivity because companies would just

• 2:26:11John Coogan?

  be doing less than and we're seeing earnings growth. We're seeing growth in the economy. We're seeing high GDP growth. So one of those has to be, has to be right. They can't both be.

• 2:26:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, breaking news, President Trump was on Newsmax, not our, not our internal software that we use to create the show, but the TV show, President Trump tells Todd Sterns, he's going out on patrol tonight with DC law enforcement and the military.

• 2:26:41John Coogan?

  They're really taking DC seriously, aren't they?

• 2:26:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. If you're in DC, have a, keep an eye out. Nate Eliason says, gonna have to block Elon Musk soon for all the AI goon spam. Feels like I can't open X in public.

• 2:26:58Jordi Hays?

  I think a lot of people are feeling that way.

• 2:27:00John Coogan?

  Skill issue. I've still fine tuned my algorithm so much towards tech and AI content that I don't see any of the Elon.

• 2:27:07Jordi Hays?

  You don't.

• 2:27:08John Coogan?

  I don't see it.

• 2:27:09Jordi Hays?

  I get it. I get it because people that I follow reply to him and tell him to stop.

• 2:27:12John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah, I follow Elon, but I still don't see it. I see. I see high yield Harry saying Tom Brady was so ready back in the day to be a finance bro. And they share Thomas E. Brady Jr.'s resume. He was at University of Michigan. Then he went to Merrill Lynch, the University of Michigan Golf.

• 2:27:31Jordi Hays?

  Summer, summer intern.

• 2:27:32John Coogan?

  Polo fields golf and country club. He was.

• 2:27:35Jordi Hays?

  Sales rep.

• 2:27:36John Coogan?

  Uh, high yield Harry says this guy could have had a successful career working at Merrill Lynch instead of pursuing football. Now no one on Wall Street will remember his name. Oh.

• 2:27:47Jordi Hays?

  Andrew Reid, Juwan had said, what the heck is a series K?

• 2:27:52John Coogan?

  Those data bricks.

• 2:27:52Jordi Hays?

  During data bricks.

• 2:27:53John Coogan?

  They were the gong of the day.

• 2:27:55Jordi Hays?

  I know quite a few people in SF with a series K problem.

• 2:27:58John Coogan?

  Yes. Uh, stay away from the series K. Enjoy the series C, the caffeine, the yerba mate, the.

• 2:28:07Jordi Hays?

  Next time you have an urge to do hard drugs.

• 2:28:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:10Jordi Hays?

  Why not try a fridge cigarette?

• 2:28:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:14Jordi Hays?

  Rune says the demand for anti-AI takes is enormous and will take anything and run with it. Meta consolidating and doubling down on MSL is being misrepresented as bearish on AI, for example.

• 2:28:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:25Jordi Hays?

  Something to keep in mind. Yeah, the, the, they, they conducted a reorg because they added a bunch of people to the team.

• 2:28:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, it makes sense. This is.

• 2:28:33Jordi Hays?

  And had a few weeks together and, and kind of updated, um, certainly, and, and they, it got positioned as like, like layoffs almost kind of what I was reading into.

• 2:28:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's very odd. Uh, for obvious reasons, it's not that popular when we're like, this technology will bring about a turning of the age and reshape the thought, the thought world of man. And even a miraculous year in AI progress can be spun into a disappointment. Uh, careful observers will note that revenue growth of the consumer AI industry has outstripped the most bullish expectations. We maxed out the metac calculus predictions and nobody is mea culpa on this. You're not going to get an apology from Rune. No way. He's absolutely printing in consumer AI adoption. People love it. Anyway, what else is going on? Uh, Elon Musk, we were talking about the.

• 2:29:25John Coogan?

  The potential spam, he is unpacking his ideas around the birth rate. People saw this as incongruent. How can you possibly be worried about the birth rate when you are creating romantic companions that by definition cannot reproduce with their companions?

• 2:29:42Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:29:42John Coogan?

  Elon Musk says-

• 2:29:43Jordi Hays?

  Theo Von, Theo Von was, was, you know, kind of getting into this with his interview with, uh-

• 2:29:48John Coogan?

  A little bit with Sam, yeah. It was, it was a very funny interaction where he asks, Theo Von asks Sam Altman, "What do you think about test tube babies, the idea of having children outside of the womb?"

• 2:29:59Jordi Hays?

  That you could visit on the weekends, he specifically-

• 2:30:01John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. And, and so Sam is kind of like, "That, it sounds maybe like that's futuristic and that might happen and there are some scientific reasons, but it feels unnatural to me. I'm not that into it," says Sam. And Theo just goes, "Oh, like, I thought you'd be into that." It's like very revealing that, that Theo clearly sees Sam as like this like techno-

• 2:30:20Jordi Hays?

  Dystopian.

• 2:30:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, or just like this crazy, crazy tech futurist guy, like from the future. And so they kind of like, they kind of like worked through it on the conversation, but it's a very funny clip because they're both like playing the game of like, "Who are we? Like, what, what, how, how do we perceive each other?"

• 2:30:35Jordi Hays?

  But Elon says, "AI is obviously going, gonna one-shot the human limbic system. That said, I predict counterintuitively that it will increase the birth rate. Mark my words. Also, we're gonna program it that way."

• 2:30:48John Coogan?

  But what I find interesting is what Nikita Beer says here. He says, "Grok companions, Duolingo for dating." So, the idea that you could go to a Grok companion, learn amazing pick-up lines, like, "Are you a Nvidia GB200? Because I'm getting hot hanging out next to you." And, and then take that, that pick-up line on the road and meet someone real. The more interesting thing I think is, is if two people are talking to companions and they're a perfect match, just introduce themselves. Introduce them to each other and say, "Hey, we are foregoing the, the future revenue here and we are introducing you in IRL." But

• 2:31:32John Coogan?

  we'll see. The proof is in the pudding. He's got to put his, his AI where his mouth is and actually deliver a product that increases-

• 2:31:40Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully he doesn't put his AI where his mouth is.

• 2:31:43John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 2:31:44Jordi Hays?

  Literal sense.

• 2:31:45John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 2:31:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, China is pushing for a total ban on the use of foreign chips for inference.

• 2:31:50John Coogan?

  They're not a fan of Nvidia.

• 2:31:51Jordi Hays?

  Financial times, some Beijing policymakers are pushing to ban foreign chips altogether for inference, which accounts for most AI demand, according to a person recently summoned for a meeting with them. That is unlikely to happen soon due to a shortage of domestic chip supplies, which Beijing hopes.

• 2:32:08John Coogan?

  Who do you think is gonna sort it out?

• 2:32:10Jordi Hays?

  The juggler.

• 2:32:11John Coogan?

  The juggler, Jensen the juggler. He's able to juggle the interests of America, the interests of China, the interests of Taiwan, the interests of Nvidia. Jensen the juggler will get it done. Hopefully he doesn't drop one. But we will talk to Aaron Gin if there is a dropping of a juggled ball from Jensen the juggler.

• 2:32:29Jordi Hays?

  Google declares the green versus blue bubbles debate silly and tired. And Signal says precisely what a green bubble would say. I will say, my little brother uses an Android. It's gotten quite a lot better to text him. We can now effectively use FaceTime through this weird kind of hangout integration thing. Certainly better. But it's definitely, it's definitely still a real thing.

• 2:32:54John Coogan?

  You got something Tyler?

• 2:32:55Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, this is different though.

• 2:32:57John Coogan?

  No, hit me.

• 2:32:58Speaker 01

  Out of the White House, new executive order. They're establishing a national design studio.

• 2:33:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:33:02Speaker 01

  So Giga bullish for Figma, obviously.

• 2:33:05John Coogan?

  Let's go. Let's go. Universal basic Figma.

• 2:33:07Speaker 01

  But yeah, like a new, a new design language. Announcing America by design.

• 2:33:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:33:12Speaker 01

  National initiative to improve experience for Americans.

• 2:33:15John Coogan?

  Like UI UX or?

• 2:33:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, a new life into, into the designs of sites where people interface with their government.

• 2:33:22John Coogan?

  I'm getting known in the chat. Stop, stop.

• 2:33:24Jordi Hays?

  Chat is saying you look like Greg from Succession.

• 2:33:26John Coogan?

  Uh, that's the first I've ever gotten that. That's weird. Never gotten that before. Anyway, move it on.

• 2:33:31Jordi Hays?

  I've never.

• 2:33:32John Coogan?

  You've never said that. I've gotten that a ton, of course. I actually live in the same building as him.

• 2:33:35Jordi Hays?

  Okay, what if, what if Greg from Succession was a Sigma? That's kind of the question that, that.

• 2:33:41John Coogan?

  Well, the actor who plays Greg from Succession is in fact a Sigma. Sort of lone wolf. He had his own apartment.

• 2:33:48Jordi Hays?

  Dar says, who has a house like this in the bay? I would like to spend some time together, preferably in your house.

• 2:33:57John Coogan?

  That is a cool, that is a cool design, like the soft wood tones, the, the, uh, the brown.

• 2:34:02Jordi Hays?

  The, the.

• 2:34:03John Coogan?

  It feels very comfortable.

• 2:34:04Jordi Hays?

  Conversation.

• 2:34:05John Coogan?

  It actually doesn't feel that comfortable, like, look at that couch. That couch does not particularly look like loungable. Um, I'm much more, I'm, I'm, I'm a fan. My ideal, my ideal living situation is, uh, a, a modern glass box on the outside, but then log cabin on the inside. I want like the moose head on the wall of the glass. And then I want overstuffed leather chairs. Brutalist outside. Exactly, exactly. The fortress on the outside.

• 2:34:35Jordi Hays?

  Fortress of finance.

• 2:34:35John Coogan?

  But then, super cozy, maxing, like, thick rugs, warm hearths. These are the things that I want inside. I, I, I always hate going inside those glass box houses and being like, okay, like, everything's uncomfortable. There's so many corners.

• 2:34:48Jordi Hays?

  Look at all these hard corners.

• 2:34:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, I can just bang into everything.

• 2:34:50Jordi Hays?

  Look at this glass point.

• 2:34:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want like a wooden coffee table that's just so rounded, like, there's just no sharp edges whatsoever. That's my, that's my ideal thing, but this is a little minimal, but.

• 2:35:01Jordi Hays?

  Gabriel says, what does he know? He's quoting our post.

• 2:35:05John Coogan?

  We broke the story, really, after, uh, Ben Thompson emailed his newsletter, uh, subscribers on Stratechery. We broke the news that after 21, any 22 years in Taiwan, uh, I think.

• 2:35:17Jordi Hays?

  Where did he say he's moving again?

• 2:35:19John Coogan?

  I think he's, oh, he, I don't know if he said, but he's been, he spends time in the Midwest. So I think Wisconsin, I think Michigan, that general area. Did you see Dylan Briscata's reply to our, uh, to our breaking news that Ben Thompson has officially relocated to the United States? Welcome home, brother. He, he did the NBA commissioner meme, he said, "Time to learn English, buddy." Of course, Ben Thompson does know English, but a lot of people were speculating this is about Taiwan tensions. I don't think it is. And Ben Thompson said that exactly in his email. He said, yes, Taiwan is complicated, but that's not why I'm doing this. It's that my kids are at an age where we want them to go to school in the United States and we've been contemplating this for a long time and we're very happy. We always spend, he already spends summer in the United States and spends time. So going back and forth.

• 2:36:04John Coogan?

  So, but it was not, it was not like the last, the last helicopter out of Saigon situation.

• 2:36:09Jordi Hays?

  One thing is for sure, if there is ever a conflict in Taiwan, Gabe, Gabe will repost his, this.

• 2:36:16John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, definitely.

• 2:36:18Jordi Hays?

  Take a victory lap.

• 2:36:19John Coogan?

  Definitely.

• 2:36:19Jordi Hays?

  Jira Tickets just said, my boss just told me, quote unquote, don't make mistakes like I'm a clanker.

• 2:36:25John Coogan?

  Oh, it's brutal. Yeah.

• 2:36:29Jordi Hays?

  I'm asleep.

• 2:36:29John Coogan?

  Clanker is still getting more juice. I'm still laughing when I hear it. It is not completely died down.

• 2:36:35Jordi Hays?

  It's actually gotten better.

• 2:36:36John Coogan?

  I think it's gotten better.

• 2:36:37Jordi Hays?

  It's gotten better.

• 2:36:38John Coogan?

  It's building some lore. I'm having fun with it. Plus, it is turning into a bit of a culture war issue. Mike Solano was talking about this where there were a couple of posts that went out that were saying like, you should not use this. It's a slur. It's bad. Like, don't, don't use the word clanker. And I like, I like that we're already being language police on it. So that, that gives it a little extra juice. Like, it's, it makes it more fun to use.

• 2:36:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:58John Coogan?

  Anyway, should we go to this post from Bone GPT?

• 2:37:02Jordi Hays?

  Back on the show.

• 2:37:03John Coogan?

  Back on the show. Thank you for posting our reaction to your post a few days ago. Bone says, Apple has no chance of catching up to Google with AI features that will become increasingly useful. OpenAI thinks they can do hardware from scratch because they bought Johnny Ive, which is a level of delusion that's hard to describe. Shots fired. Meta is playing catch up desperately, just distorting the whole market with their hires so they can ship stepmom. Google won. Shots fired.

• 2:37:34John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 2:37:34Jordi Hays?

  This is what I was kind of getting at earlier. They look really great during the AI wars right now.

• 2:37:41John Coogan?

  I think it's like, I think it's like, you know, if this is, if this is mobile, if this is cloud, like, yeah, AWS was the first mover in cloud, Azure, GCP, these are great businesses, you know. Did Apple kind of win mobile and get the vast majority of device revenues? Yes. Was it still extremely valuable for, for Google to develop Android? Did every company eventually need to have a mobile strategy and a mobile app and a mobile design? Like, yes. And so it's, it's a little, it's a little dramatized, but that's why we love your posts, Bone. Keep things spicy on the timeline. Keep us hitting that soundboard.

• 2:38:16John Coogan?

  Anyway, timeline in turmoil again. Malo Burgon from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Miri, is getting in a fight with Rune on the timeline. Rune says, Miri is an incredible name, maybe the best in AI. It's a shame they don't research machine intelligence. And Malo fires back, OpenAI is a pretty good name. It's a shame they don't... dot, dot, dot. He said, yes, I know. They published a couple of open models recently. And he has to kind of walk it back because he got hit with a community note. But I think, I think Rune also got hit with a community note. Maybe Miri does research machine intelligence.

• 2:38:54Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I think Rune is getting community notes.

• 2:38:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, because I think Machine Intelligence Research Institute does in fact research machine intelligence. Maybe just, maybe they just don't ship models or products. Maybe they ship other types of research. Anyway.

• 2:39:10Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, OpenAI's CFO, Sarah Fryer, who we've had on the show.

• 2:39:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:39:15Jordi Hays?

  Absolute Dog.

• 2:39:15John Coogan?

  One of the best to ever do it.

• 2:39:17Jordi Hays?

  Was on Bloomberg TV during an interview.

• 2:39:19John Coogan?

  She's a real CFO CFO, if I can say it myself.

• 2:39:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:39:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:23Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 2:39:24John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 2:39:24Jordi Hays?

  If you know, you know.

• 2:39:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:39:26Jordi Hays?

  But she was asked about selling infra services in the future. She said, I do think about it as a business.

• 2:39:32John Coogan?

  This is why Ben Thompson moved back to America. He's like, I gotta end this right now. Ben Thompson famously does not like the fact that OpenAI is, has an API. He thinks that they should focus entirely, at least for now, on, on saving every GPU cycle for the consumer product that is absolutely on fire. They should become, they should embrace being the accidental consumer company and they should go as deep as possible.

• 2:39:56Jordi Hays?

  Where do they have an incredible edge?

• 2:39:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:39:58Jordi Hays?

  In consumer?

• 2:39:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:40:00Jordi Hays?

  Where do they not have an incredible edge in the just vending out intelligence?

• 2:40:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, they're doing great and it is a good business. And so from a CFO's perspective and from Sam Altman's perspective, it certainly makes sense. Like, yeah, like, why not also be in that game? It is value creative. It is profit generating. And, and yet, Ben Thompson thinks now's the time to focus, focus, focus, focus. At the same time, I kind of take the other side of this a little bit and say, OpenAI is in a fortunate situation. They have a lot of data, a ton of customers. They're going to have a very great consumer business that will probably throw off a ton of cash, especially once they start monetizing it more heavily. And what that means is, is they, they might be the next Google in the best sense possible. And what I mean by that is that they might

• 2:40:49John Coogan?

  be able to go and do 20% projects. They might be able to go spend a couple billion dollars trying to build a new device. And maybe it doesn't work. But when you add up all the Google 20% time projects and Google's side projects, it's easy to laugh at all the things that they've shut down. Like 10 different chat bots or chat, chat products.

• 2:41:07Jordi Hays?

  Businesses that have 100 million of revenue.

• 2:41:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, they launched Wave and they've launched Google Glass and they've missed on so many things. But when they hit, it's great. You know, they, they hit on Gmail, they hit on Docs, they hit on Cloud, they hit on Waymo. And so I love that you get sort of this like humanity or America gets like somewhat of a subsidized R and D org at Google. And it all pencils out and it all makes sense. And so maybe the infrastructure services group is not that at OpenAI, but I'm excited for these other, these other like less focused efforts from OpenAI. And I think we'll see some cool stuff. Anyway.

• 2:41:46Jordi Hays?

  This is a good post from Steever, if we can pull it up.

• 2:41:49John Coogan?

  Read it out.

• 2:41:50Jordi Hays?

  Guys say, you're finally awake. That fall looked real bad. Sui, LLMs, B2B SaaS, what are you talking about? You're an electrical engineer. Let's go build some chips.

• 2:42:01John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 2:42:03Jordi Hays?

  So good. This post, really gonna be relatable for a lot of you.

• 2:42:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:42:07Jordi Hays?

  Nine-figure hell is real. Sure, you don't have to work and have some assets, but you can't really afford a decent yacht, let alone a private army or nuclear submarine.

• 2:42:18John Coogan?

  It's real. It's real. Get back in the wage cage.

• 2:42:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, get back in the cage, buddy. Get ready to send some emails, buddy.

• 2:42:24John Coogan?

  Captain Nemo. Oh, they're doing an OpenAI movie. And they're basing it on a book. I think there might be two competing scripts, but they are finalizing the cast. I believe Andrew Garfield, who is also in The Social Network, it will be playing Sam, but Will Brown, friend of the show, has a recast. He has, can you name these actors?

• 2:42:49Jordi Hays?

  Jason Statham.

• 2:42:50John Coogan?

  You got Jason Statham, and who will he be playing?

• 2:42:54Jordi Hays?

  He'll be playing two, is that?

• 2:42:56John Coogan?

  The joke here is that he's playing both Greg and Ilya. When I saw Jason Statham as Ilya, I was laughing out loud. I was there.

• 2:43:04Jordi Hays?

  And then, I don't, the guy on the left, he was in a bunch of stuff.

• 2:43:09John Coogan?

  What stuff? What have you seen?

• 2:43:12Jordi Hays?

  I didn't even know his name. I've seen him a bunch, though. Seen him around.

• 2:43:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. He's in Nightcrawler.

• 2:43:19Jordi Hays?

  Nightcrawler.

• 2:43:20John Coogan?

  Wait, actually.

• 2:43:21Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 2:43:23John Coogan?

  It's Toby Maguire? I don't know. I'm all over the place.

• 2:43:26Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, who's the actor?

• 2:43:28Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, Under Day Armus.

• 2:43:30John Coogan?

  Under Day Armus, but who's the guy in the top left?

• 2:43:32Speaker 01

  Uh, Jake Gyllenhaal.

• 2:43:33John Coogan?

  Jake Gyllenhaal, that's right. Not Toby Maguire.

• 2:43:36Jordi Hays?

  That's a famous guy. Everybody knows that guy.

• 2:43:38John Coogan?

  I got so tied up in.

• 2:43:39Jordi Hays?

  Anyway, so the real cast of the movie Artificial is gonna be Andrew Garfield, Monica Barbaro as Miramarati, and then a guy named Ike Baranholtz, is rumored to be Elon.

• 2:43:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. Who's playing Dylan Patel?

• 2:43:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, who's playing Rune?

• 2:43:56John Coogan?

  Who's playing Rune?

• 2:43:57Speaker 01

  Rune is the real question.

• 2:43:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, Rune is the real question.

• 2:44:00Jordi Hays?

  Who should play Rune?

• 2:44:01John Coogan?

  Who should play Rune? Wait, so I wonder if Mark Zuckerberg is gonna like make an appearance in the film and they're gonna have to cast him again. Should they have the guy who played him in the social network reprise the role?

• 2:44:11Speaker 01

  No, but he like hates Zuck now.

• 2:44:13John Coogan?

  Wait, who?

• 2:44:14Speaker 01

  Jesse Eisenberg.

• 2:44:14John Coogan?

  Jesse Eisenberg?

• 2:44:15Speaker 01

  He has beef with like Beck and Jenna.

• 2:44:17John Coogan?

  Why?

• 2:44:18Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 2:44:18John Coogan?

  Oh, weird, okay.

• 2:44:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44:20John Coogan?

  Why? Uh, uh, very odd. Anyway, uh, should be fun. Hopefully, we can get a cameo. We can sneak in. If you know someone, introduce us.

• 2:44:27Jordi Hays?

  Chat, chat, thank you for helping us out there.

• 2:44:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, Jonk.

• 2:44:31Jordi Hays?

  Jelly Hill from Gold Rock. Jay, thanks, guys.

• 2:44:35John Coogan?

  It's good.

• 2:44:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Kylie says, "I can't believe this is real." I can.

• 2:44:39John Coogan?

  I can't believe this is real. I saw this and I was like, "This is not real."

• 2:44:42Jordi Hays?

  "President Trump dialed into Fox and Friends on Tuesday morning. We're a couple of days late and revealed his newest and truest motivation for brokering an end to the war in Ukraine. He's worried he might not get into heaven after he dies. I want to try and get to heaven if possible," he explained. "I'm here and I'm not doing well. I'm really at the bottom of the totem pole, but if I can get to heaven, this will be one of the reasons." So.

• 2:45:03John Coogan?

  I like this. Whatever your motivation is, uh, for peace, uh, do it. Do it.

• 2:45:08Jordi Hays?

  It is solid.

• 2:45:11Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so there was a debate breaking out.

• 2:45:13John Coogan?

  Yes, break this debate down.

• 2:45:14Jordi Hays?

  Craig Weiss says, "Having kids before 30 is how you stay generationally poor."

• 2:45:19John Coogan?

  A real, a real, uh, real TakeSmith's take there.

• 2:45:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so surely not gonna drive anything.

• 2:45:25John Coogan?

  Perfectly put the timeline in turmoil.

• 2:45:27Jordi Hays?

  The dude Richie, the rich, highlighted, uh, Warren Buffett, uh, net worth 154 billion.

• 2:45:34John Coogan?

  He had a kid at 22?

• 2:45:36Jordi Hays?

  Child at 22. Michael Dell, 23.

• 2:45:38John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:45:38Jordi Hays?

  Bernard Arnault, 26. Some absolute dogs.

• 2:45:42John Coogan?

  Jordy Hayes.

• 2:45:43Jordi Hays?

  Jordy Hayes, 26.

• 2:45:45John Coogan?

  I just missed it by a year or two. I think David Sandler might be in the club, too.

• 2:45:48Jordi Hays?

  I will say, I will say, uh.

• 2:45:50John Coogan?

  You can come on whenever.

• 2:45:51Jordi Hays?

  Uh, kids are much more, I, I, uh, when I started making money, I got into cars.

• 2:45:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:45:59Jordi Hays?

  And when I started having kids, I realized that, um, they are a much more, uh... Quite, you know, I used to think, uh, there, there was kind of a meme growing up.

• 2:46:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're pretty close to cars in terms of like joy.

• 2:46:11Jordi Hays?

  People would say like, the average American kid, by the time they are 18 is like a quarter of a million dollars.

• 2:46:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:46:17Jordi Hays?

  But it feels like, uh, children feel like the carrying cost of like 10 supercars at times.

• 2:46:23John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 2:46:23Jordi Hays?

  Between school.

• 2:46:24John Coogan?

  Well, we have our first in-person guest of the show. We got David Senra.

• 2:46:28Jordi Hays?

  Finally.

• 2:46:29John Coogan?

  In the TVPN UltraDome, live.

• 2:46:32David Senra?

  See you.

• 2:46:32John Coogan?

  How you doing, man?

• 2:46:33David Senra?

  Good to see you, man.

• 2:46:34Jordi Hays?

  Finally in the UltraDome.

• 2:46:36John Coogan?

  Finally in person.

• 2:46:38Jordi Hays?

  How was it, how was the drive?

• 2:46:39John Coogan?

  Five times.

• 2:46:41David Senra?

  It's a testament to how much I love you that you got me out of Malibu. It was an hour and a half.

• 2:46:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's rough.

• 2:46:46Jordi Hays?

  I know, I do it. Speeder and I do it every day.

• 2:46:48David Senra?

  No, but it takes you an hour and a half at like, you know, you go at like five in the morning.

• 2:46:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:52David Senra?

  Five thirty in the morning. This is a different story.

• 2:46:53John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 2:46:54David Senra?

  This is, I love this place, though. You guys have an army back here.

• 2:46:56John Coogan?

  We do have an army.

• 2:46:57David Senra?

  You have the crew, the interns, then I met the friends of the interns.

• 2:47:01John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, we got everybody. Oh, yeah, we have intern friends.

• 2:47:03David Senra?

  Intern friends.

• 2:47:04Jordi Hays?

  Lads, lads, lads, lads, lads.

• 2:47:06John Coogan?

  Lads, lads, in the studio.

• 2:47:07David Senra?

  What is this?

• 2:47:08Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that's a chat. So if, if they, if they start saying how handsome you look, you'll, you'll see it.

• 2:47:13John Coogan?

  People are talking about, uh, yeah, we're, we're, the, the chat is still talking about, uh, this debate, uh, over whether you can become generationally wealthy while having a child before age 30. What do you think?

• 2:47:27David Senra?

  Obviously.

• 2:47:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, and they gave Michael Dell, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs.

• 2:47:31David Senra?

  Shout out to Michael Dell, Dell Technologies on the.

• 2:47:33John Coogan?

  Dell Technologies Studios.

• 2:47:34Jordi Hays?

  Don't say too, don't say too much, cause, cause that'll dox us.

• 2:47:40David Senra?

  No, actually, that, that might be an interesting place to start. I actually flew to Austin. I spent five hours with Michael Dell.

• 2:47:45John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:47:45David Senra?

  Like two weeks, two or three weeks ago.

• 2:47:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, what was, what was that like? What'd you learn from him?

• 2:47:49David Senra?

  You know what?

• 2:47:50John Coogan?

  Well, what, what surprised you? Cause you've already, you've already done, uh, a full episode on him. You've dug in, you've probably spent days on his story. You know most of the facts.

• 2:47:58David Senra?

  It's not only that, like, I listened to, so I highly recommend every entrepreneur listen to his audiobook, cause he actually narrates it. And so I listened to it three, can you hear me?

• 2:48:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:06David Senra?

  I listened to it three times. Uh, I listened to it three times and then read the book and then made the episode.

• 2:48:13John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:48:15David Senra?

  There was like halfway through our conversation, I said some, I said something like, I'm having a hard time reconciling, like this paradox in my mind about between like your immense accomplishments and just like how normal you are. And obviously, he's this super extreme person, but he's unbelievably measured and controlled and kind and generous. It's just like one of my favorite people I've ever met.

• 2:48:38John Coogan?

  We gotta get him on the Theo Von podcast and see how he does there. I mean, everyone in tech has been making the rounds and it's been, there's been multiple times when tech people have gone on, Theo, and they've had like kind of awkward starts. Like it took, it took Zuck a minute to warm up. There was like the caffeine thing. Oh, you know, I don't, I don't.

• 2:48:55David Senra?

  I think this is the mistake that people in tech make and you're seeing with a bunch of other podcasts. They should definitely come here before anywhere else. This is not a joke. It's like, they see a number on a screen and they don't think about what that number represents and who that person is. And like, you can just read some of the comments on some of these like mainstream podcasts. It's like, this guy's six years old. He's in his fucking underwear and misery. He's got unemployed, like he's not the person. You're just optimizing for the number when you should optimize for the quality of the people in the audience.

• 2:49:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's for sure.

• 2:49:22David Senra?

  It's insane to me.

• 2:49:23John Coogan?

  Uh, well, you know who's optimized for the quality of the audience? Colossus Magazine. There's a new, uh.

• 2:49:29Jordi Hays?

  I love how you printed it out while we wait for the printed edition.

• 2:49:32John Coogan?

  I don't have the printed edition yet, but you can still go subscribe. Patrick O'Shaughnessy has printed a warehouse full this time. Have you had a chance to read through the Joe Lamont profile?

• 2:49:44David Senra?

  I get, I got, or Patrick's, you know, obviously like my brother. I talk to him like every day. I, there's actually an interesting, um, something we can talk about that I called him about yesterday. I actually think moving forward, and I told him this yesterday and I told him again today, I was like, if you give me more than a day to read it, we, if on, especially these long form profiles, I should do an, that is good enough if you read the whole thing. It takes like an hour and a half to listen to. So I read it.

• 2:50:08John Coogan?

  I was thinking about printing the whole thing and I was like, there's no way I can read this before the show. It's like a hundred pages.

• 2:50:13David Senra?

  I read it and then I threw into a 11 reader and I listened to it on the way out.

• 2:50:16John Coogan?

  Oh, that's good.

• 2:50:17David Senra?

  And so it's like an hour and a half if you listen to it 1X.

• 2:50:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:50:19David Senra?

  Um, but I think that source material is so good.

• 2:50:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:50:23David Senra?

  I could definitely do an episode of Founders and I was like, just tell me in advance, give me like, you know, two weeks, two, three weeks. And then we can drop it the same day that you publish it. But what I called.

• 2:50:32Jordi Hays?

  One of my favorite little stories from that is, is how, so, um, Joe had sort of a non-traditional, you know, entrance into, uh. Startups in business. He was a Stanford undergrad.

• 2:50:46Jordi Hays?

  So, no, more traditional in that sense. But, but at the time that he was building, what was the software called? Sales Builder or something like that?

• 2:50:54David Senra?

  Yeah. Then his name, the names for his...

• 2:50:56Jordi Hays?

  They're so great. Enterprise software.

• 2:50:59David Senra?

  It's like building a microphone, like it's called microphone.

• 2:51:02John Coogan?

  And I mean, you look at some of the companies here, like Newview, GCE, Still Secure, Ignite, Aria, Object Store, Accept, Prologic, Ravenflow. It's just like...

• 2:51:12Jordi Hays?

  So, there's two, there's two things that stood out from the story. One is that there wasn't a meme yet of, of VCs being like, "I'm gonna back the Stanford dropout." They wanted to back executives that had experience and crazy access to talent. And there were some early kind of garage success stories, so he was kind of following that. But the other thing is, is bigger companies, Fortune 500 companies refused to buy from startups.

• 2:51:39David Senra?

  But then his pricing, did you see what he did with his pricing?

• 2:51:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:51:42David Senra?

  Like, it's a hundred grand and they're like, "No, we, we don't buy from startups." They come back, "Okay, we need it, no one else can do this." It's 300. And then he goes from like, "Now it's a million, now it's seven and a half million, now it's 25 million dollars."

• 2:51:52Jordi Hays?

  And everybody kept saying, "Yes, because he had the best..." But, but the other thing is, the why now for the business?

• 2:51:58David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:58Jordi Hays?

  The initial why now and why it worked, not like the business catalyst, was that they started sending, this was at a time where they would just send you a letter and said, "You're pre-approved for this credit card." You just have to fill this out.

• 2:52:08David Senra?

  He did credit card roulette.

• 2:52:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, he would, he signed up, he racked out half, racked up half a million dollars of credit card debt.

• 2:52:16David Senra?

  Good story.

• 2:52:16Jordi Hays?

  And was, was finally, before he got his first customer, still no VC would fund him at all. He finally, like, he was basically like evaluating like bankruptcy, like he had played it out in his head. Like, it's gonna be like seven years, it's gonna be really annoying, but it doesn't matter if you have... His calculus was like, you, you know, how much debt you have going into bankruptcy actually, like, it doesn't, going from 100,000 to 500K, it's not that much worse to go through.

• 2:52:41David Senra?

  You might as well do it the real way.

• 2:52:43Jordi Hays?

  So, he just went full send. Absolutely. And then, and then basically made it all back from like his basically first couple of customers.

• 2:52:51David Senra?

  So I, we have a mutual friend that we can't name. That has been close and is basically Joe's been like a mentor of his for a long time and actually like a funder of a lot of projects that he does behind the scenes. So I've heard a lot about this guy. And what I like about people is just like the people that chart their own path and and intentionally go in the opposite direction. So everybody heard Buffett and Munger and they're like, you should buy phenomenal businesses. Even if you have to pay more. And so then everybody in the VMS like rollups, they're like, I'm going to buy the great businesses. And what he realized, and I heard this story like probably two years ago, it's like, well, okay, so I have a lot more competition for the, everyone wants the great ones. What about these shitty ones over here? And he turned it into a math problem. He's like, okay, this is your ARR.

• 2:53:34David Senra?

  This is your rate of attrition. Like I know exactly how much I'm going to get out of this in the next six years. They talk about it in the, you know, they, they use different words that they talk about in the article. He's like, okay, so I can easily buy this thing for two because I'm going to rip, I'm going to pull out, you know, 15 over the next five years. He just does it over and over and over again. And then I heard, I don't know if it was in, if they said it, but like, you know, he bought out his shareholders. He owned a hundred percent of the company. And what I heard is like, he's been taking billions. A year in dividends, his fucking paycheck. At the end of the year, it's like, how much money did you make there? I don't know, like 1.5 billion dollars. And no one knew who he was.

• 2:54:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's built a machine, a machine, a machine behind the scenes.

• 2:54:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other thing that's wild is going dark, going dark for 25 years and just getting told that.

• 2:54:15David Senra?

  Well, this is, this, you know, this is like one of my fetishes. It's like these very silent, family owned businesses where they own a hundred percent of them. You'll never hear about them. I've been lucky enough to have dinner with some of these people. And they're just, again.

• 2:54:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I know. You, you've talked to people that have written books about their family business. And, and haven't released them. And you're like, please let me, let me, and they're just like, no.

• 2:54:38David Senra?

  Okay, so I'll just tell the story. So there's this guy, he's 76 years old. Okay. This is like one of my favorite dinners I've ever had. And.

• 2:54:47David Senra?

  I do really careful here. So he started working in the family business when he was six. Okay, he's the second generation of this family dynasty. They own, the original source of their wealth was one of the largest privately held shipping companies in the world. What do you mean privately held? Owned by his dad and now owned by him and his brother. Like, it's just like, there is no shareholders, no board of directors, it's just the family. I've now become close with the third generation and I get insight on how they run their, the family is a business and the business is a family. And the way they go about things is just really, really intelligent. And so we had this phenomenal dinner. You look up his reported net worth. It's like, it's still in the tens of billions and it's like, under-reported by a factor of like, four. Cause then he tells you about like, oh yeah, I put money into this and I never sold and it's worth this. It was just crazy stories. And he's also like, super charismatic.

• 2:55:33David Senra?

  One of the best rock and tours I've ever like, been around. And just super, and he's still on it 24/7, like, works all the time. And, uh, so there's two things that were funny. The, this has happened a few times where families will commission real writers, right? They, they commission a, a, a, actual biography. And I have a copy of a separate family. It looks like the book, it looks like a book you'd buy in a bookstore. The only difference is, there's no ISBN number on the back. So like, some of the books I have, no one else in the world has these books besides like, the family and the author and everything. OpenAI would give you a lot of money for that. So, so there's two, two funny things that, that, uh, that he told me. Uh, one, that they commissioned one for his father and then one for him. And I was like, dude, give me those books. Like, I would do such a good job on them.

• 2:56:18David Senra?

  Um, and he, without hesitation, he's like, absolutely not. Like, that's out of the question. I go, why not? And he said something like, I have no desire to educate my competitors. And just real, like, real fast. And then, um, he Leave it to me in the will. No, and then all, no, I, I, I think, so I, there's another founder. The next generation. No, but there's, there's another founder who's 78 and I spent four days with her, her, the CEO and the top 40 executives. Uh, they were going through, um, how do we, they, they wanted advice on like, how to transition from a founder-led company. She's one of my favorite founders I've ever come across in my life. And like, to the next generation. And so I spent, after talking to all the executives, spending time with them, they're like, hey, so what do you think? And after four days, I go, when she's dead, you're fucked. This is like, there's not like, you're not replacing her. She's a singular individual. You should like,

• 2:57:02David Senra?

  either sell the company or go do something else. Cause like, there's no transition here. It's like, what do you do when Michael Jordan retires? Like, I don't know. Start rebuilding. Um, but he said something funny because they're obviously in shipping. They now have real estate and they have finance and everything else. And he's got also one of the biggest boats in the world. And he had mentioned, no, but no, he, he mentioned earlier, though, so early in the conversation, he's like, yeah, uh, when you read a lot of these biographies, he had read all the same biographies I'd read, like Daniel Ludwig, Aristotle Nastas, all these like shipping guys, he knew all of them. They would also run their company headquarters from their private, like giant boats, right? Giant yachts.

• 2:57:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:37David Senra?

  And so he, he had mentioned earlier, he's like, yeah, I spent, you know, part of the year, I lived part of the year on, uh, he said, I thought he said boat, he said ship. So I was like, yeah, so like, when, like, what month?

• 2:57:48John Coogan?

  There's a difference.

• 2:57:48David Senra?

  He's gonna tell us. I go, so what, what, uh, like, when are you gonna go back on your boat? Like, how long are you gonna be in your boat for? He goes, what are you talking about? I go, you said, like, earlier, you live on your boat. He goes, I don't have a boat. I'm like, is this some kind of joke? He goes, I have a ship. I go, what's the difference between a boat and a ship? He goes, you can put a boat on a ship. You can't put a ship on a boat.

• 2:58:10David Senra?

  So my favorite conversations are these kind of people and I, I like, I'm obsessed with like older entrepreneurs, because they're just so much smarter than like a 25-year-old fucking startup founders. It's like, not even, they're not even, it's like, maybe they'll be an alien. Yeah, it's just like, these people are just, they just, they have so much more experience, they have so much more knowledge, like, I just can talk to them for hours and hours and hours.

• 2:58:27John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Uh, have you dug into the trilogy Software Mafia? Are you familiar with this?

• 2:58:31David Senra?

  No.

• 2:58:32John Coogan?

  So, uh, this was some secondary research I did. Out of trilogy, this is of course, the, the, the, the subject of that Colossus profile, um, on Joe Lamont, um, the, in the 90s, trilogy was on such a tear, they were recruiting out of MIT, Harvard, and a bunch of folks went through trilogy and then went on to do cool things. Eddie, uh, Ellie Seidman, the CEO of Tinder, was a trilogy alum. Cyrus and Nick Ganju, founders of Zocdoc. Henry Ward, the CEO and founder of Carta.

• 2:59:03David Senra?

  Crazy.

• 2:59:03John Coogan?

  John Lilly, former CEO of Mozilla, and now he's an investor at Greylock. And Andy Palmer, the CEO of Tamer, former CEO of Vertica, which was acquired, major angel investor, invested in Carta, in part due to his connection. There are 87 trilogy mafia companies now on Crunchbase. So it's just like this very interesting, we've heard that Joe like keeps his team very tight, but clearly selects for extremely entrepreneurial people. They don't often get poached to like other firms that are doing the same thing. If you leave, you're probably going to lose your company.

• 2:59:38David Senra?

  I wouldn't want to make money the way he did, you know, but put that aside. Like what I do admire, like I'm like the most pro-American person, like obviously the son of Cuban immigrants, like I grew up, you know, meeting people, like literally came to this country, fled communism on a raft.

• 2:59:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:54David Senra?

  Like, so I don't like outsourcing anything. I've had tons of people try to advertise on the podcast, like I have this outsourcing thing. I was like, I want to find a way to pay people more money, not less. Like, I want to work with the best people in the world and those people don't work for $8 an hour.

• 3:00:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:00:06David Senra?

  But I do what, the thing I respect about Joe is like, he doesn't give a shit what other people think.

• 3:00:10John Coogan?

  True.

• 3:00:11David Senra?

  And he's willing to have his own thinking. And then even if everybody's going in one direction, I was listening to your mischief on the way over here.

• 3:00:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:17David Senra?

  He had this great line where he's like, if everybody's running fast at something, they're probably running off a cliff. I was like, oh, that's a bar.

• 3:00:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:22David Senra?

  That's a good bar. And so I like that Joe's like, hey, you guys are all doing this. So that means by default, there's an, there's an opportunity. I called Patrick yesterday. I was like, it's kind of funny, you know, there's not any other people more obsessive podcasts than me, you, Patrick, we talk about this stuff all the time. And I was like, everybody, even now, is still starting podcasts. And Patrick, you know, he has the highest value investing audience in the world. And what I love about what he's doing is he's like, oh yeah, you guys are all going to go to the podcast? I'm going to write, I was at 15,000 word in-depth profiles, but they're so much better.

• 3:00:54John Coogan?

  No.

• 3:00:54David Senra?

  Like the Neil Meadow one.

• 3:00:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:00:56David Senra?

  Um, who's the paradigm guy? I read.

• 3:00:58John Coogan?

  Matt Wong.

• 3:00:58David Senra?

  Matt, yeah.

• 3:00:59John Coogan?

  Matt Wong.

• 3:00:59David Senra?

  This one.

• 3:01:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:01:01David Senra?

  And they're gonna keep doing it and he'll tell you in the group chat like some of the ones they're working on now, they're crushing. I just love this idea.

• 3:01:06John Coogan?

  It's a very special product and I went through when we were doing the show and we didn't have guests or anything and we needed a lot of material. I went through and looked at old New Yorker deep dives profiles.

• 3:01:16David Senra?

  So good.

• 3:01:17John Coogan?

  They're so good. Old Bloomberg and old Forbes pieces and they're just not doing it at that level anymore. There are some profiles, but the one profile that was written in a prestigious magazine about Zuck is all about like, did he have the right team in place? Like it's like a diversity, like referendum on diversity and stuff like brotopia type take, which is just not really the story. Like that's a very minor piece of the Zuck story in my opinion.

• 3:01:42David Senra?

  I'm glad you said the New Yorker part because every single time I do a deep research report and every single person I'm working on, just to get an overview and it's always like you, I want it written like a New Yorker piece. One of my favorite.

• 3:01:51John Coogan?

  Fantastic writers.

• 3:01:52David Senra?

  Yeah, we did one on, we read one on Mary Meeker.

• 3:01:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Mary Meeker.

• 3:01:56David Senra?

  I read that too. I read that too. So, um, Jackson Dahl, you guys should have him on there. He's doing, cause. For the record.

• 3:02:02John Coogan?

  We have invited him.

• 3:02:03David Senra?

  He needs to call in today. I don't know what he's doing.

• 3:02:05John Coogan?

  Nick, send him an invite.

• 3:02:08David Senra?

  Have him join right now. The reason, no, no, I don't share it like sharing the mic. So you'll have to come after I'm done.

• 3:02:14John Coogan?

  Send the invitation, like send the invitation for tomorrow.

• 3:02:17David Senra?

  But, but the reason I say that is because he put me onto one of, he's like, hey, you have this, this thought that I haven't heard anywhere else because, um, something that I've talked about is just like, I actually think like introspection is one of the worst things like an entrepreneur can have. And I say some of the greatest entrepreneurs in history had low to no introspection. Like Sam Walton didn't wake up every day wondering like what his purpose of life was. Rehashing the past, I wish he did this. Nothing.

• 3:02:45John Coogan?

  It's like being a golden retriever. You have to benignly be going after the tennis ball, not thinking about the nature.

• 3:02:50David Senra?

  Never thinking about the last tennis ball.

• 3:02:51John Coogan?

  No, always the current tennis ball.

• 3:02:53David Senra?

  Excellent. So Jackson's like, hey, I heard you say that. Have you heard of this guy named Larry Gosean? Which I didn't know who that was. And so he sent me this great New Yorker piece. The piece was so good, I made an episode on it. I think it's one of the best episodes I've ever done. It's one of my favorite. Like, the guy's a little, obviously crazy. Every single person I profile on Founders is crazy. The best. But the, the, it's better than a book. That New Yorker piece was better than if I read 600 pages on Gagosian. Yeah. But yeah, I, I, I think there's like a clear, again, you, we, us three talk about like, what's the white space all the time? It's like what Patrick and his team are doing, it's like there's a clear white space there. People write profiles, but like, the profiles suck. There's no craft in them. Yeah, yeah, the, the New Yorker is insane because it's a-

• 3:03:32Jordi Hays?

  And people care about who the person writing the profile, a lot.

• 3:03:34David Senra?

  Well, did you, did you, did you guys ever cover, you know how Patrick found Jeremy Stern? No. So, I think you covered that. I'm pretty sure you read this to me. I love when John reads things to me. Uh, the, this, I think it's the best profile ever written about Palmer Lucky. Oh, sure, sure, sure. I forgot the title. It had like a very- Uh, yeah, I, I, I know the one- You know the one I'm talking about, like, spread. Yep, yep. Jeremy wrote that. Oh, no way, that makes sense. Yeah, American Vulcan.

• 3:03:57Jordi Hays?

  Is that it?

• 3:03:58David Senra?

  Make sure it's by Jeremy Stern.

• 3:03:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:59David Senra?

  Okay, so, so what did Patrick do? Patrick's like, "This is great, come do this for me." Yep. And then, he did something, and then Patrick did something smart. Yep. Choked him with gold. Yeah, yeah. He was just like, "Name your fucking price." So, this is really important. No, this is a really important thing. Yeah. So, the, there's a line, uh, I sent to, if you're, for startup founder, or for any founder trying to recruit people. And there's this thing I, I found in one of the books on Ogilvy, where he was looking up letters that the Medici family would write to the artists that they wanted to sponsor. And there, there was this one sculptor they wanted to, to, to essentially be, uh, become a patron of, and then move to Florence. And he's like, says something like, "Come to Florence," but the last, uh, the way he ended the letter was one of the most gangster things I've ever heard. He's like, "Come, I will choke you with gold." That's great. Great, great.

• 3:04:44Jordi Hays?

  That's a bar.

• 3:04:44David Senra?

  That's, but that's exactly what Patrick does. He's just like, "Name your price." The guy that does my clips. I just like- Same thing. "Name your price. I don't, I'm not negotiating with you at all. What do you want? Yep. That's the number? Fucking, send me an invoice. Pay today on my ramp card." Yep.

• 3:04:57Jordi Hays?

  Always.

• 3:04:57David Senra?

  Um-

• 3:04:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we were, we were covering, uh, a bit on Oracle's latest, latest moves.

• 3:05:04David Senra?

  Cash flow negative.

• 3:05:05Jordi Hays?

  Give us the five-minute founders of, uh, on Larry Ellison.

• 3:05:09David Senra?

  So I'm actually working on a Larry Ellison episodes. I did three episodes on him. It's like one twenty four, one twenty six and one twenty seven, but that was probably like six years ago. And I reread the Billion and the Mechanic just now. I was like, fuck, I don't think it's good enough to do another episode on. I need like a different angle here. So there's a guy in my audience who I knew was like completely obsessed with Larry Ellison and we've been DMing for years. He had transcripts for every single interview Larry Ellison has ever done. So it's taken me a while, as you can imagine, but that's the source material.

• 3:05:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 3:05:36David Senra?

  Highly likely it'll be out in three episodes from now. I'm doing Elon right now, which is fucking killing me. That's why I like, I look like shit and I'm very tired. This outline is destroying me.

• 3:05:43Jordi Hays?

  Don't go on X right now, by the way.

• 3:05:45David Senra?

  Why?

• 3:05:46Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna make you rethink doing that episode.

• 3:05:47David Senra?

  Why?

• 3:05:48John Coogan?

  He's in hot water. He's pushing AI companions, which people are not a fan of.

• 3:05:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, scantily clad companions.

• 3:05:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:05:56David Senra?

  Okay, so here, I'll, I'll tell you what I'm doing. And this is why it's really important. Because, you know, you, people, the very first episode of Founder, September, uh, two thousand sixteen, was, uh, Elon, Ashley Vance's biography of Elon Musk. I was obviously an Elon fanboy. I was looking at Teslas before they even had the Model S. You know, everybody that's a fan of his obviously goes through like these cycles of like, you have to ride the fucking Elon roller coaster.

• 3:06:18Jordi Hays?

  Well, you can say on the podcast, I, I, I, I made this episode before I went crazy.

• 3:06:23David Senra?

  No, but like, the, the problem is, and so like, there's, there's actually, I, I think the best biography of Elon written is this book called Liftoff, because it's the first six years of SpaceX. It's very fascinating.

• 3:06:36Jordi Hays?

  There's pictures where he's like standing in the rubble, right? It's like iconic.

• 3:06:39David Senra?

  So what I decided to do is like, listen, man, I don't care about politics, culture or stuff. I don't care about anything. I care about entrepreneurship, taking ideas from great people.

• 3:06:47John Coogan?

  Actually building the business.

• 3:06:48David Senra?

  And, and just throwing it to the next generation to hopefully help people do that, right? Do that better. So, no disrespect to Walter Isaacson. I've read all of his biographies. The Elon biography is like written like it's a newspaper. Now, When you take an asset, like, or you take a liability and you try to flip it into an asset. So I was like, okay, the problem is, no disrespect, there's no craft here. I like soul, I like craft, because I read for fun. Like, this is what I want to do. This is like, a news update. But the good news of that is it's in chronological order. So the reason this is killing me, is because the reading's been done for like, five days. It's just been outlined, outlined, outlined, outlined, outlined, non-stop. So what I did is like, I'm gonna rip out every single thing about Elon. I'm not gonna talk about his family, his wives, his kids, his politics, culture war.

• 3:07:33David Senra?

  This guy's got brilliant ideas. So this is literally just, what are the most enduring principles that Elon used across three decades in seven different companies? And I really think I'm crafting something that's gonna be really valuable, and I think you're gonna have to use some level of like, intelligence to listen to it, because I'm not, I'm gonna like, jump from idea to idea to idea, rapidly. And like, you have to put the shit together yourself. And it's just like, hey, this guy's been repeating the same principle for decades, and it worked in Tesla, it worked at SpaceX, it worked in Neuralink. Why is this working? Might work in your work. You should fucking know this. You should have a tool where you can listen to this, hopefully listen to it today, or whenever it's out, and then you listen to it a year ago, two years ago.

• 3:08:11John Coogan?

  Okay, I have a take on craft.

• 3:08:12David Senra?

  So anyways, let me finish one thing. So when you get to the end of this, you're completely back on the Elon train. You're like, this is a singular person.

• 3:08:20Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think to people's credit, people, a lot of the people posting these recent comments are on his team, and want, and it's this, I think they're struggling with like, wanting him to focus on what, what, rockets and the things that they...

• 3:08:37John Coogan?

  But the rockets in orbit, sir, is like, the take.

• 3:08:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:40David Senra?

  He says that himself, in the book. It was really interesting, because he was talking about, what, what do I have to do that if I don't do it, it doesn't get done? And he's like, listen, somebody else, electric cars were inevitable, this is a direct quote from the book, I'm paraphrasing, he's like, electric cars were inevitable. They were gonna happen with or without me. But the rockets were not, and so therefore I should focus on that.

• 3:09:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:09:01David Senra?

  That was like, 2022.

• 3:09:02Jordi Hays?

  I think people, the people that want to go to Mars are concerned that, you know, what, what takes down... Uh, great man. It's a

• 3:09:09David Senra?

  Ladies liquor and leverage.

• 3:09:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. In this case, uh, liquor, leverage and goon bots.

• 3:09:14John Coogan?

  Um, my, my, my problem is, uh, I would gladly give up, uh, the Mars ambitions if we could get a Tesla with a V12 in it. And I feel like every moment he spends working on rockets is another moment that I don't, I don't have a thousand horsepower naturally aspirated screaming. Straight piped Tesla. That's my goal. Anyway, uh, on, on the topic of craft, I was, I was trying to think about, you, you mentioned Joe Lamont. His business has been buying companies that are not generational products. They're not the iPhone. They're not these amazing monuments to craft. They're businesses that deliver a little bit of value for a bunch of customers.

• 3:09:55John Coogan?

  And he, and he has figured out a, a pattern of, of offshoring some of the software engineering, running the business more efficiently. He is like the private equity buyout. He's not trying to, you know, completely transform and like build a generational product. The product is not a product of craft. Like he is not a craftsman.

• 3:10:12David Senra?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:13John Coogan?

  And, and then I was trying to think about

• 3:10:15David Senra?

  I think he's trying to be now the new one, but

• 3:10:17John Coogan?

  So, so on the flip side, I, when I was talking to Delian, um, early on, Delian Asperov, at Founder's Fund about, uh, like why, how, how did he underwrite the investment in Ramp? He was talking about software is, it can be like art and that, and that the team there has like this attention to craft. And they see that's why they hire the IMO gold medalists. It's like, why do you need someone that good? Uh, it's because they, they see the product as like so, so important, even though it's in this highly competitive, like particular, like corporate card space. Um, it's, it's something that they take really seriously. And I think that there's this, it's not that there's necessarily one pattern that's correct.

• 3:10:59John Coogan?

  It's more of like this barbell and you can be on either side, but you need to know what camp you're in. And so when I see Joe Lamont, I see him as software as widgets. He is crafting a machine that produces software and it produces it at the lowest possible cost. And it all kind of looks the same. And then I see on the other side, uh, like Ramp and folks like that who take software development more as art and more as craft. And both can produce outsized returns. Both are big companies.

• 3:11:25Jordi Hays?

  It's also where you apply the craft. I would say that Joe, from my read, brings craft to the organization.

• 3:11:31John Coogan?

  The organization trilogy.

• 3:11:32Jordi Hays?

  Right? He has Trilogy University and, and you can, you, you I think you're going to struggle to build an iconic enduring company if you're not bringing craft somewhere, right?

• 3:11:43John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:11:43Jordi Hays?

  Ferrari is bringing craft to racing.

• 3:11:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:11:47Jordi Hays?

  They don't necessarily care about certain other elements.

• 3:11:50John Coogan?

  They're not bringing craft, like the mechanical. Mechanical.

• 3:11:52David Senra?

  Okay, so.

• 3:11:53John Coogan?

  And the reliability.

• 3:11:54David Senra?

  You said something like, other than the spectrum.

• 3:11:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:11:57David Senra?

  I think like what I'm trying to drive home with founders and why I'm like, this is like, there is no right way.

• 3:12:03John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:12:04David Senra?

  Based on who you are and what you're into.

• 3:12:06John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:12:06David Senra?

  So I just came, I just flew from New York and I spent, I always spent a ton of time with Kareem and Eric, founders of Ramp.

• 3:12:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:14David Senra?

  And I specifically this last time spent two hours with them. And I would like to talk about some of the stuff I've learned because I spent a lot of time with them. But there's an example of this is like, this is where people fail is they're like, this, Steve Jobs did it this way, so I should just copy that.

• 3:12:29John Coogan?

  Yes. It's inauthentic.

• 3:12:31David Senra?

  Yes, natural. So I was saying for a long time, this is Michael Dell again. So I was saying for a long time, you need to build a business, it's very obvious when you read biographies of people, you have to build a business that's authentic to you. And then I read Michael Dell's autobiography and I talked to him about this when I saw him in Austin a few weeks ago. I read Michael Dell's autobiography and again, the guy wants to, IBM is the largest company in the world. It's the first company to reach a hundred billion dollar market cap. And this guy's like, I'm going to, I'm going to compete with them with a thousand dollars out of my University of Texas dorm room. That's not an exaggeration. And, and so he then brings in this older guy, I think his name's, I forgot his name, it's in the episode. But the guy had a couple of successful businesses and he worked with Michael, I think for four years. And when he's 80, he's now looking back, I think he's 25 years older than Michael, something

• 3:13:16David Senra?

  like that. And he's like, listen, he's like, four years of this, like, I lost all my hair, my back hurt, I couldn't sleep, I had like intestinal issues, I had to stop. And Mike, because like the competition was so intense and we had no money, we were under capitalized and we were just like going 24/7. I'm dying and Michael was full of energy because he's like, he built a business, this is his line, he built a business that was natural to him. So I was telling, I was telling Michael when I saw him in Austin, I was just like, nothing we're doing with podcasting is like new. I was like, think about like, if you ever read Robert Caro's biographies of LBJ, one of my favorite stories in there is W. Leo Daniels, right? And it's this guy, Texas Hill Country, right? This is like.

• 3:13:58David Senra?

  There's no internet. There's barely any electricity. So there there's this guy has like ninety percent market share with the the wives of farmers in the Texas Hill country, right? And so he has this daily news show, right? It's on for a few hours a day. We invented that. You're telling me that somebody was doing this before us? Here's the funny part, and don't let me let me go back to Cream and Arcs. Don't let me forget that place. So the crazy thing is, so he wants to get like ninety percent market share in this area, right? So then he's like, okay, well, what should my sponsor be? Well, who's listening? What do the women in these houses need? And he comes like, everybody needs baking flour. They all need baking flour. So I'll find the best manufacturer baking flour and they'll be my advertiser. He sells a ton of baking flour and he's like, wait a minute, I could just like make my own baking flour.

• 3:14:43David Senra?

  So then he starts manufacturing some big flour. He makes like fifty million dollars in like the nineteen forties or something. And then he goes. Feastables and. And then he goes, what am I gonna do next? Like, what can I do with this? He's like, I'm gonna run for governor. And then people are like, this is Trump before Trump. This is what I'm telling you. There's an element of Trump to this. Had vodka. Yeah, but so then everybody tells him, everybody tells him, nobody, you're not a professional politician. You can't possibly win. But then he starts hosting these rallies. Remember in two thousand fifteen, Trump was doing this? And then like the rallies, it'd be like selling, it'd be like a monster truck rally. It'd be like fifty thousand people there. Of course, that's gonna translate from votes. So he wins the governorship of Texas. And he moves his radio show into the Texas governor's mansion.

• 3:15:26David Senra?

  And so he's still broadcasting that. Then the reason he's in LBJ's biography. Ever stop broadcasting? It's because he runs, uh, and then he's like, what are you gonna do next? I'm gonna run for Senate. He ends up stealing the election from LBJ, legitimately stole the election. But I was telling, uh, Michael about this, and you know, in Texas, they teach Texas history before they teach American history. Right? If you go to any used bookstore in Texas, my favorite thing to do, there's huge sections on like, you have American history? It's like Texas history. And Michael texts me back the funniest thing. He goes, oh, I must admit, I missed this part of Texas history. I was too busy reading computer magazines. I wanna fucking hit the table. Cause that's exactly, he picked the business. Yeah, that was authentic to him. Natural to him. Natural.

• 3:16:06David Senra?

  Completely natural. It's what he wanted to do. Um, so the Ramp guys, like, they're not, they're like, whatever the, you guys, I always have to like get the way people talk on the internet translated. To me, from you.

• 3:16:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:21David Senra?

  So I don't know if there's a term for anti-slop.

• 3:16:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:24David Senra?

  There's a term for anti-slop.

• 3:16:25John Coogan?

  Craft.

• 3:16:26David Senra?

  Craft. Thank you. So if there's, there's a very old term for this. So the way I think of this, have you guys ever heard of shokunen?

• 3:16:33John Coogan?

  Yes, Lucille, but explain it for the listeners.

• 3:16:35David Senra?

  So shokunen is this idea in essentially, it's almost like a Japanese word for craftsmanship.

• 3:16:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:42David Senra?

  And it doesn't matter if you're building, you know, a 22 billion dollar fintech.

• 3:16:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:46David Senra?

  Or you're sweeping the floor, the Japanese, if you're shokunen, you take pride in the activity, making it, making your, uh, you take pride in the activity of yourself. And pride in making your work as good.

• 3:16:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:57David Senra?

  Even if no one else sees it.

• 3:16:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:59David Senra?

  And so what I would say about this is spending a lot of time with Kareem and Eric is one. From the outside, like they have very complimentary skills. And what I would say, like, um, especially with, with Eric, one of the best sales advice that I think. It was, it was advice for sales, but I actually think it's advice for life and dealing with people that I've ever heard. Is, uh, Mary Kay, remember Mary Kay Cosmetics?

• 3:17:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:25David Senra?

  They built this like massive empire, like going like door to door sales. It might've been like an MLM kind of thing.

• 3:17:29John Coogan?

  It's kind of like the proto MLM.

• 3:17:30David Senra?

  Yeah. And they'd drive around like pink catalogs. Good up for MLMs.

• 3:17:33John Coogan?

  They don't get enough credit. Underrated.

• 3:17:35David Senra?

  Criminal underrated. The way.

• 3:17:37John Coogan?

  Sometimes literally criminally rated.

• 3:17:39David Senra?

  The way, the way that she, the way that she trained her saleswomen.

• 3:17:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:44David Senra?

  She says, never forget that every single person goes through life with an invisible sign around their neck that says, make me feel special. And Eric has very understated charisma and he is gifted at salesmanship. At listening, he's a very good listener, understanding what's important to you, and then translating what's important to you and to how his business can solve your problems. And so what I think I, one of the things I admire about both Eric and Kareem is like, I like people that take what they do very seriously. I don't care what that activity is. And they work like dogs. I'm not into this like. I'm not into work-life balance. I don't like balance. I'm not a balanced person. I'm either I completely I'm at zero or a hundred and nothing in between and they're both like that.

• 3:18:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're always telling you you don't have to destroy your life for this next episode. Whatever the product you want, it's possible. You don't have to push yourself.

• 3:18:34David Senra?

  So there's a couple of things I think they do really, really smart. Um, one is, and I think they both have commonalities is one, they pay attention to every single little detail, which is the point that you were making. So the point where like they're running a giant company. They have tens of thousands of uh customers. They have thousands of employees. Their revenue growth is exploding right now. They have all these features. They did three hundred updates. Yeah. To the product in the last year and yet. It's only two hundred and fifty workdays. Yeah, well, like I think this is yesterday, day before. I don't even know what day it is today. We sat in there. It's not like Eric and Kareem have empty schedules. No. And it was us three and we sat there and we talked about podcasting. Yep. And like the role it could play, what we talked a lot about you guys. Yeah.

• 3:19:19David Senra?

  And what I like about them, I'm just gonna like say random stuff. You guys jump in whatever you want, but like the one example I used for them and I was just like, listen, I and I like how fast they make decisions and then when they make a fucking decision, they don't like, oh, we'll kind of like test it out. They go all in. They make big, bold bets. Yeah. And they're willing to take a risk, even if it will fail, where I think a lot of the biggest mistake you can make in a world that's changing constantly, the biggest risk is taking no risk. And so I I use the example, it's like. Is that an Elon quote or Sam? I don't know. All my quotes come from other people. I have no original ideas. I need to, I have no original ideas. I think, I think, I think the original idea that you have that you beat the drum on is podcasting.

• 3:19:58Jordi Hays?

  It's a Zuck quote. The biggest risk is not taking.

• 3:20:01David Senra?

  So there you go. Shout out to Zuck. Can we get, you have a, what kind of, what should we hit for Zuck?

• 3:20:06Jordi Hays?

  You're not gonna be able to hear it.

• 3:20:07David Senra?

  The glazinator. No, but. Triple glaze.

• 3:20:10Chase Lochmiller?

  The glazinator three thousand.

• 3:20:12David Senra?

  The glazinator. So what Eric and Kareem both do, that they, the commonality they have with history's greatest leaders is they bet on talent. So they overpay for talent. They're, they're like, they will find the best people in the world, like their head of AI, some of their designers, some of their engineers, the people they partner with. Yeah. Like, they're like, that's the best person and let's make sure he's competent. He or she is compensated at a level that makes sense. And so I was talking to him. I was like, I really do think we have like.

• 3:20:41David Senra?

  John and Jordy are gifted at what they're doing. And we had a long conversation about this. I was like, I'm telling you, man, I talked to a lot of people on a permanent basis. And I've told you guys this, you know, privately, I'll say, obviously in public. It's like on a permanent basis, I don't know anybody else that comes up with better, more simple, more effective and inexpensive marketing ideas. And I go, I really think we have this huge opportunity for leverage. It's like there should, if they have an idea from the idea to execution, since we trust them, we know they're talented, we should, there should be no barrier. There should just be like, here's a fucking pile of money. And next time you have a come with idea, do it. And immediately they're like, done, what else you want? It's just like, there's no, like, yeah, that's obviously a good idea. John and Jordy are obviously talented. Like, how can we get more out of the talent that we have around them?

• 3:21:26David Senra?

  Um, I just think that's, there's just a million little ideas that they have like this. Uh, I remember, I don't even know what the valuation is now, but it went like, it had like a huge jump. I don't think it was this time, it was the last time. But we were having dinner, it was gonna be me, Kareem and two other people. And me and Kareem got there first. And it was the day that that announcement came out and Twitter was going crazy. They're like, Ramp's fucking killing it. And your side of the world with all these VCs are like, fighting over this shit. And, um, and Kareem shows up in the first 10 minutes. He's just like, this feature's not good enough. We lost this deal. This is an, he didn't mention a word. And I just sat there smiling. And you know, it's really hard for me to not talk for 10 minutes. And I just started, I go, that's the reason, your perpetual, your defined discontent is why you're so good.

• 3:22:10David Senra?

  Because the, the, the value of your company is just the, the, the collective value of all the problems that you solve for your customers. And he doesn't give a shit about taking a victory lap. He cares about solving problems for his customers. And I like the fact that I can call them. I've called Eric at 1 a.m., his time. And I'm like, where are you? And he's like, oh, I'm in like Chicago and I'm like doing like customer meetings and like I recruit people. And like, I'm closing this deal. He's just like, they work all the time.

• 3:22:39John Coogan?

  Working hard, working hard.

• 3:22:41David Senra?

  Work all the time.

• 3:22:43John Coogan?

  It's a good. It's a good mantra.

• 3:22:45Jordi Hays?

  It's one thing you can control.

• 3:22:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:22:47David Senra?

  The Joe Lamont, think about that. I mean, that's excessive, but I think they were having, they were in that piece, they were talking about this conversation he was having with Jack Welch, if I'm not mistaken. Where he's just like, well, if you have a product that's working and you're willing to work 20 hours a day, it's really hard to lose at that point.

• 3:23:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, no. Yeah, find, find your life's work, find something that's, what was the phrase? Not authentic.

• 3:23:07David Senra?

  Natural.

• 3:23:08John Coogan?

  Natural, and then work constantly.

• 3:23:12David Senra?

  Well, okay, so this is again, we, everybody, I'm so happy to see what's happened to you. I still consider myself your first listener.

• 3:23:22John Coogan?

  It's true, you are literally.

• 3:23:23David Senra?

  Literally first listener.

• 3:23:25John Coogan?

  Sent you the MP3 on Google Drive.

• 3:23:26David Senra?

  Oh, and that's another thing. So going back, I want to talk about why I think you guys are really special. But it also goes back to.

• 3:23:34John Coogan?

  The Glazanators.

• 3:23:35David Senra?

  Hold on, it also goes back to what Eric and Kareem were willing to bet on talent. When I was just like, guys, they have a thousand listeners right now.

• 3:23:44John Coogan?

  It was crazy.

• 3:23:45David Senra?

  They're gonna fucking blow. I don't know anything, I only, I know about podcasts, and I know how history's greatest entrepreneurs think. I don't know anything about anything else. I promise you, there's zero chance. They already knew you were talented, but they already knew, it was obviously Coogan's talented. They tried to buy you and recruit you a long time ago. And they made a bet, and they made a bet on talent, which again, is something that Brad Jacobs does, that Elon Musk does, that Steve Jobs did, that all these people did over and over and over again. Again, these are ideas that are timeless. You can use them today, you can use them 100 years ago, they were used 100 years ago, you're gonna be able to use them 100 years from now.

• 3:24:18Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 3:24:18John Coogan?

  So get out there and use them.

• 3:24:20Jordi Hays?

  Get out there, folks. We have a 3pm reservation.

• 3:24:23John Coogan?

  We do. We gotta get on the road.

• 3:24:24Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get offline, we gotta get off air. It's hard to get this guy off the mic. I wish that we could go, we could go for another, we could go for another five hours right now, but.

• 3:24:34John Coogan?

  You in town tomorrow? Let's do it again, run it back.

• 3:24:36David Senra?

  I gotta finish this episode.

• 3:24:37Jordi Hays?

  Gotta stay in Malibu.

• 3:24:38David Senra?

  It's already too late. And I'm never driving here, guys.

• 3:24:41Jordi Hays?

  We're getting a helicopter, we're getting a helicopter.

• 3:24:43David Senra?

  No, that's how Kobe died.

• 3:24:44John Coogan?

  It was, it was, but it was foreshadowed in our first launch video. We, we open in with us in a helicopter. We're gonna be helicopter guys.

• 3:24:51David Senra?

  So that's what me and Kareem and Eric were talking about, your launch video.

• 3:24:54Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's about the type of helicopter.

• 3:24:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:56Jordi Hays?

  Not all helicopters are created equally.

• 3:24:58David Senra?

  We need to move the studio.

• 3:25:00Jordi Hays?

  Tamalba. Anyway. The center for extreme podcasts. We will see you tomorrow. Thank you for watching. Of course. Thank you for hanging out with us. See you tomorrow, chat. See you tomorrow. Leave us five stars. Have a fantastic evening. Have a great rest of your day. Goodbye. We love you. Bye.