Mark Cuban, Vlad Tenev & MORE | Larry Ellison's Cloud Scores Big, Silicon Valley's Family Life, Qasar Younis, Minna Song

(00:21) - Timeline (06:37) - AI Orality Opens Up the Grift Gates (27:23) - Ellison's Cloud Scores Big with AI Titans (44:25) - Timeline (01:35:31) - Silicon Valley's Pro-Family Posture Fights Reality (01:46:00) - Timeline (01:57:17) - Vlad Tenev, co-founder and CEO of Robinhood, discusses the company's evolution into a comprehensive financial platform, offering services like credit cards, banking, and retirement accounts. He highlights Robinhood's mission to democratize finance by enabling customers to manage various financial assets and transactions within a single app. Tenev also emphasizes the integration of AI to enhance customer support and the company's commitment to expanding access to financial markets, including initiatives to involve retail investors in IPOs and private markets. (02:31:59) - Mark Cuban, a billionaire entrepreneur and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, discusses the potential risks of integrating advertisements into AI models, emphasizing that such practices could lead to manipulative outputs and ethical concerns. He highlights the importance of maintaining transparency and trust in AI interactions, warning that ad-driven algorithms might prioritize profit over accuracy, similar to issues observed in social media platforms. Cuban advocates for clear identification of any advertising within AI platforms to ensure users are aware when they are being marketed to, thereby preserving consumer trust. (03:02:38) - Qasar Younis, co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition, discusses his company's role in providing software tools for autonomous vehicle development, emphasizing their profitability and high gross margins. He highlights their partnerships with major automotive OEMs, including GM, and the adaptability of their software across different hardware platforms. Younis also addresses the evolving landscape of vehicle autonomy, noting the industry's shift towards integrated, cost-effective sensor solutions and the importance of maintaining brand identity amidst technological advancements. (03:22:33) - Minna Song, co-founder and CEO of EliseAI, holds a Computer Science degree from MIT and founded the company in 2017 to address inefficiencies in housing communication. In the conversation, she discusses EliseAI's origins, emphasizing its focus on automating property management tasks through AI to enhance operational efficiency and tenant satisfaction. She also highlights the company's commitment to providing reliable, enterprise-grade AI solutions tailored to the unique challenges of the housing industry. 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.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Today is Wednesday, August 20th, 2025. We are live from the TVP and Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital. The Fortress of Finance is not in good shape today. Holy bearish.

• 0:13Jordi Hays?

  Holy bearish.

• 0:14John Coogan?

  Back to back tech sell offs.

• 0:16Jordi Hays?

  Q Q Q. Having its worst two days since April 7th.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  I thought April 7th was Liberation Day. It wasn't Liberation Day. It was shortly after Liberation Day. But the NASDAQ did slide 1.5% on Tuesday. Some sort of correction was probably overdue and we certainly aren't in any sort of unprecedented territory. But public markets seem to be starting to react to some of the big top signal memes that have been flying around the timeline.

• 0:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:45John Coogan?

  For the past few weeks. So we need to continue to monitor the situation. Joe Weisenthal has a great newsletter today that we're going to be reading through. We'll be taking a tour of the timeline, of course. Digging into what else is driving the narrative? What else is driving the news? What else is driving the markets? This feels very different than the Liberation Day sell off, not just because Liberation Day sell off was, I remember there were multiple days we were in the gym and we checked the market and it's like down 5%, which is huge for a single day.

• 1:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  But Liberation Day to me always felt like there weren't that many tech considerations. Yes, Apple's in China. Yes. There were semiconductor considerations, Taiwan and AI supply chains generally, but.

• 1:32Jordi Hays?

  Market was scared about tariffs.

• 1:34John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:34Jordi Hays?

  For good reason.

• 1:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  And people can debate that, but now the market is just effectively scared that AI hype is over, you know, overblown.

• 1:45John Coogan?

  Yes, but there's, yeah, there's some sort of difference there where tariffs affect the real economy, the price of food, the price of gas, the price of, you know, like if there's going to be a tariff on lumber, that's going to drive up housing costs. That's all the real economy. That, we're talking about computer money, the money that's in the computer. That's the AI bubble.

• 2:04Jordi Hays?

  People have been trying to get out.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  That's what people are.

• 2:06Jordi Hays?

  They've been trying to get it out.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  They're trying to get it out of their laptop.

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  They've been trying to hit the keys in the right order to get.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  If you had a hundred million dollars in your laptop and you were trying to get it out, well, today it's only ninety eight million dollars because we're down 2%.

• 2:18Jordi Hays?

  I thought this post from the account Negative Alpha was funny. This is a quote, uh, this is an anon account, but he says it's from his PM. He says, "If your stocks are green today, you literally own dog S H I T. If your stocks are red today, you own AI. Basically, you're an idiot either way."

• 2:36John Coogan?

  Not true, though. One stock that's green, of course, Home Depot. You heard it here on the show. If you were interested in going long, the Amish, our pick was Home Depot, and Home Depot beat earnings and I believe is doing well.

• 2:50Jordi Hays?

  11% over the last month.

• 2:52John Coogan?

  Uh, yes, and, and, and hello to everyone in the chat. Thanks for tuning in. We're, we're glad to have you here and, uh, thank you for the feedback on the new soundboard. Sound the Eagle, I think, is, uh, is a perfect.

• 3:04Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 3:05John Coogan?

  Um, anyway, um, when the market's down, what do you gotta do to save time and money, Jordy? You gotta go to ramp.com. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Get your house in one place at ramp.com. Um, let's read through Joe Weisenthal's latest newsletter, AI Orality and the Golden Age of Grift. We live in an, we live in an age of extreme grift.

• 3:30Jordi Hays?

  Graphic here, too.

• 3:31John Coogan?

  Yes. What is this graphic? Come in, come on, come in, it's viral. This is the Dubai chocolate thing. Um, he breaks down some of the different viral products. And there's another article in the New Yorker that I, I put in the deck today that, um, talked about, uh, brain rot, I R L brain rot, the La Boo Boo-ification of the world and Dubai chocolate and these ideas that are, things that are designed to go viral, but then instantiate themselves in the physical world. I think that that's interesting.

• 3:59Jordi Hays?

  We like when the slop stays on various corners of the internet.

• 4:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, and you, and you can just hit, "I'm not interested in that post," as opposed to when you're walking around and, and you don't really have that option when you're at a store and it's stuffed to the gills with I R L brain rot. Uh, anyway, Joe Weisenthal says, "We live in an age of extreme grift. This is obvious. There are people out there publicly organizing pump, uh, pump and dump schemes. Right now, someone is trying to sell you a dollar's worth of cryptocurrency for $5." These are, of course, the Bitcoin, Bitcoin treasury companies that are trading above net asset value. They're trading above

• 4:39John Coogan?

  The the book value of the of the cryptocurrency that they have on the balance sheet. Celebrities scam their fans by selling them garbage. It's all over the place. But that alone isn't particularly interesting. Grift has been around since day one, and there might even be a cyclical element to it. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith famously talked about the bezel, not bezel, which is the bezel on a watch, which you can go to getbezel.com. Your bezel concierge is, of course, waiting for you to help you source any watch in the world.

• 5:10Jordi Hays?

  They're expecting you.

• 5:11John Coogan?

  Seriously, any watch. But the bezel is about embezzling, not the bezels of luxury watches.

• 5:18Jordi Hays?

  The bad faith business practices that produce an illusory wealth effect, which only gets exposed after the bust.

• 5:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 5:26Jordi Hays?

  Once everybody realizes that everybody else's, or at least some people, are swimming naked.

• 5:32John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 5:34Jordi Hays?

  Joe says, "The interesting part to me is the total lack of shame. Nobody bothers to try to hide it, and nobody really judges it either. It's all just right out in the open. The world is awash in economic nihilism." We've talked about, you know, this sort of get your bag culture.

• 5:48John Coogan?

  Your bag culture.

• 5:48Jordi Hays?

  Jim Chanos calls it "the golden age of fraud." Anyway, I know I haven't provided any hard evidence that things have become more deranged. This is just my sense from looking around. If you disagree with the premise, it's fine if you want to stop reading, or in our case, listening. With that being said, before going further, I want to take a brief detour. In the middle of the 20th century, when the television really emerged, it was probably seen as the polar opposite of the book.

• 6:12John Coogan?

  So the television emerged in the middle of the century, 20th century. That was before Restream, correct?

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 6:17John Coogan?

  So they couldn't do one livestream with 30-plus destinations?

• 6:20Jordi Hays?

  Not a chance.

• 6:21John Coogan?

  They couldn't multi-stream and reach their audience wherever they were?

• 6:23Jordi Hays?

  Certainly not a chance.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 6:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:25John Coogan?

  Anyway, go to Restream.com.

• 6:27Jordi Hays?

  But now you can.

• 6:28John Coogan?

  Now you can.

• 6:28Jordi Hays?

  So highly literate people look down on the idiot, quote-unquote idiot box and so forth. However, two dots on a plane that initially seemed very far apart will start to appear closer as you look from a distance, and that's how it is with books and TV, which actually have a lot in common as media types. Both engage the eyes, and actually with subtitles, both can be consumed in silence.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  Growing up, my parents were into film, and they would routinely say that TV rots your brain. That was like, brain rot was a term that was used for just television generally.

• 6:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 6:59John Coogan?

  Uh, and, and now we are so far beyond that.

• 7:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:02John Coogan?

  Anyway, continue.

• 7:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, now, now it's algo feeds rot your brain. The TV's actually fine.

• 7:06John Coogan?

  Lindy, yeah, it's fine, yeah. Turn it on and enjoy. It's, it's for, it's for the, the poo bear wearing a tuxedo.

• 7:12Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yes.

• 7:13John Coogan?

  The Winnie the Pooh.

• 7:14Jordi Hays?

  Um, and, uh, both are passive, one directional media forms.

• 7:17John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 7:18Jordi Hays?

  That, uh, that can be consumed alone. Both are very costly to produce and distribute at scale, which has a gating mechanism in terms of who can get involved. Moreover, television definitely has more in common with the book than radio does. Radio has a long history of bidirectionality, whether we're talking about trucker CBs, call-in shows, or amateur ham radio that can be broadcast on a shoestring budget from your basement.

• 7:39John Coogan?

  That's interesting.

• 7:40Jordi Hays?

  I was thinking about this the other day when I saw that Amazon is investing in a company that will allow viewers of TV shows to use AI to create their own scripts of shows they like, and somehow insert themselves into the show itself. The company has a vision of making TV a playable medium, a lot of video games. We'll see if anyone's into it, but it's yet another assault on passive media. There's also Netflix had that one show that really hit that was like a choose your own adventure type show.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 8:05Jordi Hays?

  But you haven't heard of any of those formats since then? I feel like it's been years.

• 8:09John Coogan?

  Bandersnatch is the one that you're thinking of, yes. Uh, it was, it was sort of, it was a cool idea. It was sort of difficult to consume because my experience going through it was like, I wanted to actually be told the creator's vision.

• 8:25Jordi Hays?

  The best.

• 8:25John Coogan?

  And I wanted to, I wanted to experience, give me the best story.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  I don't have time to watch this 10 times.

• 8:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, and then if you go back and you watch it again, then you're watching repeated things. There are some movies that do this really well. One, one is called Run Lola Run, uh, and it's this story of a, um, a woman who has to deliver, I think like drugs to a drug dealer or something. She has to run across town or something like that in a German, uh, city, and the movie is three scenarios of how they play out differently. And so you watch the same thing happen three times, and there was another, there was a music video that did a similar thing. I forget what it's called, but, um, uh, it, it's a cool storytelling technique when the, when the, when the creator of the art decides to. Take you on this like multi-forked path, but they do it intentionally as opposed to putting

• 9:15John Coogan?

  it in your, in your seat. It feels like you might just be better off just going full video game if you want a true choose your adventure. Like, we have the technology to just let you choose the entire thing.

• 9:26Jordi Hays?

  We have video games.

• 9:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, we have video games. And so, do we really need something like in-between, or do we need something that's more like the barbell strategy where it's a, it's a GTA online, you can do anything?

• 9:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the choose your own adventure movie feels somewhat NPC-coded, right? Where there's distinct paths, you're not actually able to have real effect on the world that you're in. Joe says, "This means TV may soon become another back-and-forth media. Everything's back-and-forth media these days. People comment, people fave, people share, people repost, people quote, tweet, and dunk. This is what people like the author Audrey Moore and sometimes Joe mean when we say society is becoming more oral. It's not so much about speaking and listening and sounds per se, it's about everything becoming this rolling conversation that appears and disappears in the exact same instant." I mean, TBN is a good example of this.

• 10:14Jordi Hays?

  We get a lot of alpha from the chat over here, and it makes, it makes the show.

• 10:21John Coogan?

  Siraj told us to bring Vlad Tenev from Robin Hood on the show, and boom, here he is today. So, thank you for, John Exley, for calling that out.

• 10:30Jordi Hays?

  "The constraints of oral communication impose certain distinct conditions on the mind. A premium is placed on one-upmanship and combativeness per Walter. Thought is less analytical and more grounded in the here and now, real world, in his famous book, Orality and Literacy. An oral culture simply does not deal in such items as geometrical figures, abstract categorization, formerly logical reasoning processes, definitions, and even comprehensive descriptions or articulated self-analysis, all of which derive not simply from thought itself, but from text-form thought. Prior to the written word, there was no reference material for people to look things up.

• 11:11Jordi Hays?

  So, in order for society to preserve important information, it had to be packaged in ways that are memorable, repeatable, and viral. This is all totally obvious and familiar to us now in 2025." The irony here of Joe writing this long-form written piece and then us evolving it into back-and-forth media, which he's describing, is not...

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  Lost on me. In his book, Preface to Plato, the British classicist Eric Havelock tries to unpack why it is that in his Republic Plato takes shots at poets and poetry. Plato's attacks on poetry is something that apparently bothers a lot-

• 11:48John Coogan?

  Do we take shots, Jordy? Do we have a sound effect for that? Taking shots.

• 11:52Jordi Hays?

  Still working on that sound effect. It's getting dialed in. But per Havelock Plato wasn't really concerned with the lyrical art form that today we call poetry. Instead, he was criticizing this world in which the Homeric epic was the primary vehicle of moral instruction. Education via Homer was becoming outdated in the emerging world of written word. Because the oral world finds it difficult to define and discuss why abstract analytical categories like moral behavior and hard work are good in their own right, moral instruction has to take the form of children's stories where good behavior leads to better personal outcomes.

• 12:29John Coogan?

  Hmm. Here, Havelock identifies the problem what Greece has hitherto enjoyed, says Adamantus. "In a passage of great force and sincerity is a tradition of half morality, a sort of twilight zone, at best a compromise, at worst a cyclical conspiracy, according to which the younger generation is continually indoctrinated in the view of that what is vital is not so much morality as social prestige and material reward," this sounds familiar, "which may flow from a moral reputation, whether or not this is deserved or else, and this is not inconsistent. The young are insensibly warned that virtue is the ideal, of course,

• 13:12John Coogan?

  but it is difficult and often unrewarding. For the most part, a lack of principle proves more profitable. Do not the gods so often reward the unrighteous? And immoral conduct in any case can be expiated quite easily by religious rites. The overall result is that the Greek adolescent is continually conditioned to an attitude at which, which at bottom is cynical." So he's calling the Greek adolescents, the adolescents, the get-your-bag culture. Identified back then. "It is more important to keep up appearances than to practice. The reality decorum and decent behavior are not obviously violated, but the inner principle of morality

• 13:55John Coogan?

  is. Cynical is the key word here, says Joe." If the point of good behavior is to achieve good personal outcomes, then what's wrong with bad behavior if that can also achieve good personal outcomes? It's all about outcomes. These days, everywhere you look, you find evidence that success per se is seen as a stand-in for quality. For example, wealthy people are always being asked for their opinions on all sorts of things, regardless of their domain expertise. The moment someone becomes a billionaire, they apparently become an expert on everything from interest rates to geopolitics to the electricity grid. There is something to this where, once you become a billionaire, you can just convene, like, you can snap your fingers and just be like, "I want to have dinner with all the geopolitical experts," and then you can kind of recycle their takes or process their takes.

• 14:40John Coogan?

  There is something to this, but I agree with Joe's take. It's a good one. The whole concept of selling out, this notion that an artist might sometimes have to choose between making a lot of money and producing the highest quality art, feels completely over as a concept. Incidentally, if you look at this chart of the term "selling out in books," it peaked right in 2008, soon after the introduction of the iPhone and the birth of social media and the web and mobile. Annoyingly, there was a major financial crisis right around the same time, and there are all kinds of cultural turning points that show up on charts around then. And we are doomed to be arguing for eternity about whether it was the phones or the foreclosures that changed the trajectory of history. I think that's a great take. Maybe discussions about selling out were just a luxury of a time when the economy felt

• 15:25John Coogan?

  less precarious. My favorite thing has to be how products get marketed for having gone viral. There are viral handbags. There are viral sandwiches, though this place in the East Village closed down and I never got to try it, says Joe. The chopped, the viral chopped Italian sandwich, not familiar with that one. There are viral chocolate bars that say it on the label, the original gourmet Dubai chocolate. And then it just has a seal, a stamp that just says "viral."

• 15:54Jordi Hays?

  Fact checked, viral.

• 15:55John Coogan?

  Fact checked, viral. Well, if you're designing a new package for your next chocolate bar, do it on Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at Figma.

• 16:08Jordi Hays?

  It's also funny because viral is, is something that, you know, happens to a thing for a specific moment in time, but it's not an enduring trait.

• 16:19John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 16:20Jordi Hays?

  So the right stamp would be, this went viral.

• 16:23John Coogan?

  Yes. Yes.

• 16:25Jordi Hays?

  Certified viral.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  Yes. This was the, this was the, the, the COVID virality take. COVID was viral. It had a positive viral coefficient. COVID, uh, COVID infections were growing exponentially, but by definition, COVID must be, must have a sigmoid function, not an exponential function. And what I mean by that is it's an S curve, meaning that there can never be more than seven billion, eight billion COVID victims at the same time. It's impossible. It can never be a hundred billion cases of COVID because we don't have a hundred billion people. So by definition, it, it has to peter out. And then also like, once you have, if you're actively sick with a virus,

• 17:08John Coogan?

  you can't get the virus again. And if everyone has it, then, then the viral coefficient drops. And so we were always going to see this sigmoid function pop up. And we did. Um, and we saw, you know, very, very fast exponential growth and then, and then declining.

• 17:23Jordi Hays?

  So Joe says, this is funny to me because in theory viral is a neutral adjective. It doesn't speak to any inherent quality of the good itself. Things can go viral for bad reasons. Are the handbags well designed? Does the sandwich taste good? It doesn't really matter. The benchmark of a sandwich is that people are posting about it. Everything else is an abstraction that we don't have the energy, time, or language to discuss.

• 17:46John Coogan?

  I mean, this ties to clearly like, at some point they will be weighted by like their G2 rating and their churn. But right now it's like, it is viral. They have viral market entry. And, and that's, I would imagine at some point people ask, is the product well designed? Does the sandwich taste good?

• 18:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:03John Coogan?

  And we'll see.

• 18:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I mean, I went through this with Party Round, right? We went viral over and over and over. Eventually, I realized it doesn't matter how many times we keep going viral. Our product inherently has massive churn. And it was valuable for a brief moment in time where companies were raising these crazy Party Rounds. And then I was kind of well aware that we were seeing a broader tech correction. I didn't think that.

• 18:29John Coogan?

  And then comp that to branded native.

• 18:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 18:32John Coogan?

  Never been viral.

• 18:33Jordi Hays?

  Never been.

• 18:34John Coogan?

  I've never seen it go viral on the timeline. I've never seen a stunt for it.

• 18:37Jordi Hays?

  But it's grown every quarter of my entire adult life.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  It's crazy, yeah. Underrated, underrated, and potentially a better way to get your bag in decades, not mere days.

• 18:47Jordi Hays?

  Yes, slowly.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  Slowly.

• 18:48Jordi Hays?

  And of course, this gets us back to the golden age of grift or the golden age of fraud and why it's all right out in the open. What exactly is the difference between a company that finds a way to sell a dollar's worth of crypto for $5 versus a company that designs the world's most advanced semiconductor? You or I might be able to come up with some story about how, well, you see, one is productive and one actually contributes something material in some way to society, and so the entrepreneurs and investors deserve some reward and so forth. And then someone else will poke holes in this. Are we really better off for semiconductors that make the AI that is breaking the brains of Facebook-addicted boomers? Have quality graphics and video games really made society better off?

• 19:27John Coogan?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 19:29Jordi Hays?

  Haven't you heard about all the people sitting on their couches addicted to looking at their screens? Did that company really do something better for society than the company that made a bunch of people rich with the magic crypto box? I don't know about you, but I'm exhausted just at the thought of having to engage in these articles. Life is much easier if we just say that the semiconductor company made a lot of money for investors, and so did the crypto pump and dump, and so they're both equally valid as business ventures.

• 19:54John Coogan?

  Disagree. I understand what he's saying, but I will engage in this all day long.

• 19:58Jordi Hays?

  Everybody has to eat, right? Who are we to judge?

• 20:03John Coogan?

  Anyway, new and different media forms don't just give us new means of expressing the same ideas, they change the internal logic of the human brain. And with the return to orality, this endless back and forth of as a pervasive modern condition. That that's it for the idea that certain modes of profit are more shameful or and ought to be covered up and obfuscated. I don't know about that. I think we are in a we are in a special time. I think we are more in a I'm more pendulum pilled on this issue. And I do think that that Warren Buffett will return as a hero and people will be quoting Warren Buffett.

• 20:44Jordi Hays?

  Could be Chamath.

• 20:46John Coogan?

  And and I think that getting back to getting back to understanding the fundamental value that businesses are delivering will be lauded more. And this is this is inevitable. It is a product of maybe it's more of a product of the kangaroo market of the faster cycles. Like in my early life, the cycle was dot com. And then eight years later, housing bubble. And then 12 years later, interest rate and COVID and the craziness then. But then since then, we've had every two years a cycle instead of every 10 years. It used to be really these long drawn out 10 year market cycles.

• 21:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 21:27John Coogan?

  But I do think that we will be going back.

• 21:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so relevant to this article, you have Michael Saylor's strategy down 20% in the past month. This is at the time when there's a bunch of new crypto treasury companies coming to market. And then, yeah, I think that there's a lot of people that will defend Saylor and his strategy. But ultimately, there's a number of reasons to think that that strategy might be too good to be true, at least if it's done too aggressively. And then we covered Chamath's back history the other day. And I think that that Joe, you know, I don't want to put words in his mouth, but he might

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  look at Chamath coming back to market with a SPAC and say that it's shameless, given the past performance. But at the same time, Every new investment is an opportunity to redeem, redeem oneself. So even though that, you know, SoFi has, has experienced a real return, Open Door, not so much Clover Health, not so much Virgin Galactic, down 99%, Pro Kidney, down 75%.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  I didn't realize that-

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  Akili, down 96%.

• 22:46John Coogan?

  That some of these SPACs were with Hito Sophia and some of them were with Cerveta. I'm not exactly sure the difference, the delta there. And then he also did Pipe Investments. It seemed like MP Materials did very well.

• 22:57Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:57John Coogan?

  622%. That's pretty cool. But a lot of this other stuff is, is down a bunch. Some bankruptcies, some acquisitions. Berkshire Grey got acquired by SoftBank, actually. I didn't realize that.

• 23:10Jordi Hays?

  But at 86%.

• 23:12John Coogan?

  Decline from the initial-

• 23:14Jordi Hays?

  Initial IPO price.

• 23:16John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, I mean, you were saying earlier, your take is that you look at this, it looks rough, but he probably learned his lesson. And he might be set up for success this time around? Is that the idea?

• 23:31Jordi Hays?

  He could have learned his lesson.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  I wonder-

• 23:34Jordi Hays?

  He also might not, again, again, you know, trying to analyze why he is coming back with a SPAC. The Bucho Capital take is the guy loves SPACs.

• 23:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 23:44Jordi Hays?

  He's just having fun.

• 23:45John Coogan?

  I mean, it is not easy to just set up a SPAC. If it was easy, everyone would just do it.

• 23:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:50John Coogan?

  But, but marshalling $250 million in capital for, for an acquisition or taking a company public is, is, is the domain of investment bankers. It's the domain of, of the, the high, high finance.

• 24:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:04John Coogan?

  It's not something that you can like whip together over a handshake deal at Demo Day. It requires a special set of skills, special set of connections.

• 24:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:12John Coogan?

  And Chamath has those. But yeah, I don't know. There, there clearly is another SoFi out there. There's another MP materials out there. There are good companies out there. The trick is just finding them with more than like one in 10 accuracy.

• 24:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:28John Coogan?

  Because ideally, every, every SPAC should be, at least some, some growth.

• 24:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 24:34Jordi Hays?

  Stacy Razgon says, I'm good with the government taking equity stakes for chip sack money as long as we get to hear Trump asking questions on the earnings calls. Totally agree. Let's, let's turn it into entertainment. You know, let's make the most of it.

• 24:50John Coogan?

  That would be hilarious. Yeah. I mean, I guess he would be in a, in a place to do that if he's a major shareholder. It would be, I don't think it would satisfy the semi-analysis folks to have more government involvement on the earnings calls.

• 25:03Jordi Hays?

  Certainly not.

• 25:04John Coogan?

  Let's get Dylan Patel. Let's get Doug O'Laughlin on the, on the, on the earnings calls. That's who I want in there. Anyway, if you're looking to automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously, go to vanta.com. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program.

• 25:25Jordi Hays?

  Thank you to Vanta. Andre says, miss the AI train. AI turns out to be fake. Watch your enemies and adversaries pour billions into a bottle.

• 25:35John Coogan?

  Trillions.

• 25:36Jordi Hays?

  Trillions.

• 25:37John Coogan?

  This is Europe, I guess?

• 25:38Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  Okay. It says, do nothing, win.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  I think this is a reaction to this idea that, that the EU had higher GDP than all of China. But I think they already had higher GDP or something. Did you see this?

• 25:56Jordi Hays?

  I, I just assumed this was general AI bearishness.

• 25:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know. It seems like you would still rather, like the net present value of all of AI is still extremely positive. And you would rather have an extra trillion dollars in market cap in your, in your domestic markets if you could. So little bit of silly post.

• 26:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Maybe, you know, in a, in a non-fast takeoff scenario.

• 26:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 26:21Jordi Hays?

  Europeans can use some version of ChatGPT.

• 26:23John Coogan?

  They'll probably literally use ChatGPT. I'm, I, I, I think that the answer, I think that the aggregation layer and the application layer matters a lot more than the data center layer. It's great to build data centers all over the world. You need to have local inference and, and low, low latency. But.

• 26:41John Coogan?

  Like if you can't get your populace to go to lechat.com instead of chat.com, like you have lost control over the LLM and you will and you will not win. I mean, you might be able to regulate and put cookie pop-ups and all sorts of different stuff, but you won't have true control over the platform. Like platform control in the modern era and the internet era comes from aggregation of demand and consumer habits. And that's why Google is dominant in Europe and has not been displaced by the Google of Europe.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Well, speaking of data centers.

• 27:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:18Jordi Hays?

  Oracle will spend over one billion per year to power a single data center with gas generators.

• 27:23John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 27:24Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for for big oil.

• 27:26John Coogan?

  OCI, deeply underrated Larry Ellison, absolute goat.

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  Diving in here, Oracle's Larry Ellison used to scoff at the idea of cloud computing, saying in 2008 that it was complete gibberish.

• 27:37John Coogan?

  That's crazy. I don't remember him saying that.

• 27:38Jordi Hays?

  Now, the success of Oracle's cloud infrastructure unit is why the company's stock price has soared and made Ellison, its chairman and co-founder, the second richest person in the world. Oracle's sitting at 654 billion at this on this lovely.

• 27:53John Coogan?

  He's catching up to Tesla.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're gonna need, we're gonna need.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, eighth to the mag seven, mag eight.

• 27:59Jordi Hays?

  Mag eight.

• 28:00John Coogan?

  Put Oracle in there. I mean, founder-led company.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  Good luck.

• 28:03John Coogan?

  He's been on an absolute run and he's, I mean, it's crazy the like where Oracle started and how they're still still conquering in essentially the same market, obviously very different technology, but.

• 28:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:17John Coogan?

  I've done quite well. Yeah.

• 28:17Jordi Hays?

  So Oracle, a software company that had long struggled to find its niche in this market, gained a foothold through scoring some major customers. Today, it's helping power Elon Musk's XAI from a data center in Utah, assembling a cluster of tens of thousands of AI chips for Nvidia near Singapore and recently inked what is likely the second, the largest single cloud deal ever with OpenAI. We talked about this a few weeks ago. This is OpenAI effectively committing to these sort of massive inference bills.

• 28:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 28:48Jordi Hays?

  Years in advance, we're talking tens of billions of dollars.

• 28:50John Coogan?

  Is this inference or or training? This is whole, I thought this was training news. Models will be trained there is what is what Brody Ford says.

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  I was talking about the I was talking about the OpenAI cloud deal specifically.

• 29:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a move away from Microsoft, which is the the the underlying the undercurrent here.

• 29:11Jordi Hays?

  Oracle is on the hook for tens of billions of dollars to develop unprecedented large data centers amid energy and material shortages shortages. That includes a plan to spend more than one billion a year just to power one new mega site in West Texas with gas generators rather than wait for utility connection. With all this spending, Oracle recorded a negative annual cash flow for the first time since 1990. That's absolutely wild.

• 29:35John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 29:36Jordi Hays?

  And questions remain about the longevity and margins of offering infrastructure to train AI models. Oracle, founded in the 1970s, had long faded from tech prominence, certainly hadn't faded from prominence in

• 29:50John Coogan?

  Sailing.

• 29:50Jordi Hays?

  Things that matter.

• 29:51John Coogan?

  Exactly, I was about to say.

• 29:53Jordi Hays?

  Racing.

• 29:53John Coogan?

  Racing.

• 29:55Jordi Hays?

  So I won't I won't I won't accept this.

• 29:57John Coogan?

  Having a founder that looks 40 despite being closer to 80.

• 30:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. On the road to its return in the AI era were internal battles to convince Chief Executive Officer Safra Kats to invest in the cloud, recruitment of key customers like TikTok, and the rise of a brash executive named Clay Magorick.

• 30:15John Coogan?

  Magorick.

• 30:16Jordi Hays?

  Magorick. Bloomberg spoke with more than 30 current or former employees and customers to understand how Oracle can deliver on its towering promises. They detailed spiraling costs, accelerated timelines to satisfy OpenAI, regulatory roadblocks, and the hiring of hundreds of former Amazon cloud staffers, speaking anonymously to discuss the inner workings of a famously private and litigious company. Oracle declined to comment. So as cloud computing picked up steam in the late 2000s, Ellison had little reason to be excited. Oracle's namesake database, which is purchased outright and installed directly on customer servers, is one of the world's great cash businesses. Adopting a cloud sales model where users rent access to software would almost certainly come with lower profits and a need to collaborate with rivals.

• 31:01Jordi Hays?

  After years of writing off the cloud as marketing, Oracle's tone changed as its business came under fire. Amazon pushed deeper, cheaper database options on its cloud customers. Application rivals like Salesforce promised easier installation and updates. Ellison saw the need to get Oracle's Fusion Apps, commonly used for finance and resource planning. On the cloud, according to people familiar with his thinking at the time. There were competing efforts through the 2010s with an Oracle to build a cloud for internal and customer use, an initial attempt led by Thomas Kurian.

• 31:32John Coogan?

  No way, he's the head of Google Cloud now.

• 31:35Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 31:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, I didn't realize he was at Oracle before.

• 31:38Jordi Hays?

  Yep, so a separate group made up of largely Amazon alumni led by Don Johnson pushed an approach called bare metal in which clients wouldn't have to share their servers with other renters, allowing Oracle to target privacy focused customers. The group also focused on building smaller data centers which let them expand in countries that weren't yet viable for industry leaders. The bare metal approach won the blessing of Ellison, who remains a key decision maker despite handing off the CEO title more than a decade ago. I absolutely love that, it's like, hey, somebody else can handle all the stuff I won't, I don't want to do, I'll still handle the, I'll still handle the big ticket decision.

• 32:14John Coogan?

  What was that famous Larry Ellison quote during COVID? Larry Ellison.

• 32:21Jordi Hays?

  I'll keep reading while you find it. The new product came to be known as Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, or OCI. Kurian departed the company in 2018 after his approach was sidelined. He then joined Google to lead its competing cloud service and remains in that position.

• 32:35Jordi Hays?

  And there's a chart here, if we can pull it up. Oracle Cloud is expected to be majority of business by 2029, and Wall Street is projecting breakneck, breakneck growth. You find the quote?

• 32:50John Coogan?

  I don't remember exactly what it was, but basically he was just hanging out in Hawaii during all of COVID, but he paid all of his workers like the full amount when they were in benefits through May or something. They did some shutdowns of the office, but it was just very funny where he was just like, I will be in Hawaii while this chaos is unfurling, and he was hanging out in Lanai.

• 33:10Jordi Hays?

  Why, yeah, why have a compound in Hawaii if you're not going to go there during a pandemic?

• 33:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like the spot, I mean, everyone was out there during that time.

• 33:18Jordi Hays?

  When offering the new product, Oracle had to overcome a long held reputation for aggressive sales strategies. Major pitches for OCI include cheaper pricing, thanks to a simplified set of products and good integration with other clouds. Oracle salespeople often take jabs at AWS's sprawling set of tools, telling customers that paying for Amazon's cloud means subsidizing expensive moonshots like in satellite projects.

• 33:43John Coogan?

  It's. Kupier.

• 33:44Jordi Hays?

  Kupier.

• 33:45John Coogan?

  Kupier.

• 33:47John Coogan?

  Interesting, yeah. I mean, there are a lot of tools in AWS. You don't necessarily need all of them. Some of them probably higher higher margin than others. It's just funny to hear the internal strategies of the Oracle salespeople putting the screws.

• 34:00Jordi Hays?

  You really want to subsidize this this satellite project with your money?

• 34:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:06Jordi Hays?

  You really, do you even care about this?

• 34:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:08Jordi Hays?

  Have you even, have you thought about it once?

• 34:10John Coogan?

  On the, on the.

• 34:11Jordi Hays?

  Did you know you were paying?

• 34:12John Coogan?

  On the battle card. It's just like, do you care about satellites?

• 34:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 34:16Jordi Hays?

  So during during the pandemic, they they landed Zoom, who who needed the capacity.

• 34:21John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, they they also got a a $2 billion commitment from Uber.

• 34:25John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 34:26Jordi Hays?

  2023. And then during that era as well, they got TikTok.

• 34:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:30Jordi Hays?

  Of course, owned by ByteDance.

• 34:32John Coogan?

  And that was the whole narrative of like, if TikTok sells, it'll be to Oracle and Oracle will just host all the data and TikTok will be kind of its own company. And there's no antitrust considerations because Oracle doesn't have any consumer facing social media products. Uh, it always seemed like a weird fit, but like a decent fit, like not huge synergy, but certainly solves the uh, uh, solves like all the security concerns because Oracle's like the most American forever company.

• 34:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 34:57John Coogan?

  It's like just, you know, built American data centers.

• 34:59Jordi Hays?

  So they landed, they landed TikTok.

• 35:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:01Jordi Hays?

  They that that account quickly surpassed $1 billion in in run rate.

• 35:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:07Jordi Hays?

  And then it eclipsed the rest of the cloud business.

• 35:10John Coogan?

  I mean, I remember seeing the the cloud bills from, uh, what was it? Snapchat, I think was paying maybe Google Cloud, like a billion dollars a year. And that's on like, what, 15 billion of market cap or something? So like a pretty significant investment. Uh, I mean, storing videos is a lot, a lot heavier than storing text.

• 35:29Jordi Hays?

  And so when they started working with TikTok.

• 35:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:31Jordi Hays?

  They actually, that's when they started getting familiar with, uh, building out these more AI focused.

• 35:37John Coogan?

  That makes sense because they need to do the inference for the recommendation.

• 35:40Jordi Hays?

  That's when they started buying a bunch of GPUs.

• 35:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it makes sense. Well, they should also get on graphite.dev, code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. You can get started for free at graphite.dev.

• 35:53Jordi Hays?

  Internal accolades have flown, have flowed to McGork. We're probably just butchering this.

• 35:59John Coogan?

  Butchering that name.

• 36:00Jordi Hays?

  McGork.

• 36:01John Coogan?

  Where are we?

• 36:02Jordi Hays?

  The 39-year-old has rapidly climbed company ranks and reports directly to Ellison.

• 36:06John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 36:06Jordi Hays?

  He was one of OCI's first employees after stint at Amazon and recently relocated to Nashville, where Oracle has pledged to move its headquarters. I didn't know that.

• 36:14John Coogan?

  Nashville, interesting.

• 36:16Jordi Hays?

  In June, he was promoted to president and is seen by company leaders as a potential successor to his 81-year-old boss.

• 36:22John Coogan?

  Do you think he went there because John Fio's out there?

• 36:24Jordi Hays?

  Probably.

• 36:25John Coogan?

  Nashville?

• 36:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:26John Coogan?

  Isn't, uh, who else is out there in Nashville? Uh, didn't Ben, who's the guy from the Daily Wire? I forget, anyway.

• 36:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Nicole Wishoff was, was there. She just moved back to San Francisco, though.

• 36:40John Coogan?

  But yeah, bit of an odd choice, but you know.

• 36:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:44John Coogan?

  No sailing in Nashville, right?

• 36:46Jordi Hays?

  McGork says, "Sometimes you look back and say, 'I'm not sure that I was entirely qualified at each step of the way.'"

• 36:51John Coogan?

  That's the best, though.

• 36:52Jordi Hays?

  But it seems to have worked out so far.

• 36:53John Coogan?

  That's great. Good for him. Uh, "Those who have worked with him describe him as highly effective and conflict-prone." He once told an executive his actions were effing stupid in a room full of leadership. That talks, man, talk about managing up, according to allegations in 2021 lawsuit. Blunt bosses are typical in a company run by Ellison, who once described his leadership style as "management by ridicule." We've been, uh, uh, we, yeah, we've been going through all the different, uh, Larry Ellison books in the group chat, uh, talking about, uh, what's the difference between God and Larry Ellison? Like, God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison or something like that, right? Isn't that one of the quotes? Uh, legendary, legendary.

• 37:36John Coogan?

  Uh, uh, we're having David Senter on the show soon and we'll, we'll have to get him to do a deep dive on Larry Ellison for us, since, uh, there's, there's so much more to the character Larry Ellison and the history. Uh, there's that famous book where he gave a writer, you, you know the story, right? Uh, Larry Ellison gave, uh, like biography rights to a, to an author and said, "You can write whatever you want, but I get a rebuttal in the footnotes."

• 37:58Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 37:59John Coogan?

  So, so the book is, the book is the writer, uh, like documenting, like shadowing Larry and following him around and the internal workings of Oracle. And then there'll just be a footnote and Larry Ellison will be like, "I wasn't being too aggressive in that meeting. They were being too aggressive, like, this is wrong." And it's like a debate. It's amazing. Anyway.

• 38:17Jordi Hays?

  Jeremy shared it in something in our group chat earlier. He said with his top guy, this is about Ellison from the difference between God and Larry Ellison. With his top guys running the day to day business, he was free to do the things he enjoyed. Brainstorm with his engineers.

• 38:32John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 38:33Jordi Hays?

  Reread Poe's Annabel Lee, visit Japan, entertain women, buy things, give interviews and dream.

• 38:40John Coogan?

  Ah, the dream. It's amazing. Yeah, it was Ben Shapiro. Stefan Solis says, and Nate says, move to Nashville for Volta Cafe. That of course is John Fio's latest caffeine.

• 38:56Jordi Hays?

  We'll eventually do a live show from the Volta.

• 38:58John Coogan?

  We need to. The aesthetics are fantastic. You should go check it out.

• 39:01Jordi Hays?

  We should do that show on a thousand milligrams of caffeine.

• 39:04John Coogan?

  I'm down.

• 39:05Jordi Hays?

  The ultimate challenge.

• 39:06John Coogan?

  Pump me full of it. Straight into the veins. OCI's importance has grown as the cloud has become a bigger part of the company's business. Today, about 23,000 employees report up through McGork. Over the last two years, more than 600 workers have joined from Amazon, according to analysis run by Workforce AI. Amazon's recent five days a week return to office rule has made poaching easier. As OCI remains largely a hybrid or remote workplace. Interesting. Today, the company's biggest driver of OCI is the biggest driver of the growth. Majority of Oracle's backlog or booked deals are tied to customers training or deploying AI models with GPU based servers. We've talked to some founders who have said OCI is deeply underrated.

• 39:47John Coogan?

  Everyone talks about Azure, GCP, AWS, but OCI, there's some good deals there. OpenAI is slated to become Oracle's largest customer and has marketed work as, the work as Stargate. An effort announced in January at the White House. The companies have struck deals for more than five gigawatts of computing power. That's a lot of power. An unprecedented sum and enough energy for millions of American homes. Work for OpenAI is happening on an aggressive timeline. The data centers are targeted for completion by early 2027 with many of the servers running as soon as next summer, according to people familiar with the plans. Facilities are being designed for training AI models with the assumption that they could also power the applications, so they will do training and inference.

• 40:29John Coogan?

  They need to, they need to be designed for, for hybrid workloads because they don't think that they will be necessarily training on an ongoing basis forever. And that at a certain point, the models get good enough and then you just gotta get them diffused into the economy. You gotta get GDP growing and GDP is not going to grow on training alone. Providing infrastructure for AI training is generally thought to be a lower margin business than inference because it requires more advanced semiconductors and cooling. Exact timing and design details for the OpenAI work could still change. Finding data center developers and power providers to support this project at palatable prices has been a challenge. Costs for many goods and services have gone up owing to tariffs and vendors capitalizing on intense demands.

• 41:11John Coogan?

  If you have some power transformers or tents for Meta, the price of tents is going up though. Yeah, you're going to be gouging them. And so Oracle cash flow has gone negative on the cloud build out, but just barely and they, and they assume that they will be turning it. Not like some, some other folks. The, the site Oracle plans to power entirely with gas generation is located in Shackelford County, near another Oracle server farm in Abilene. So they're expanding outside of Abilene in Texas. It's being developed by Digital Bridge Group's Vantage Data Centers and will have a compute capacity of 1.4 gigawatts, making it among the largest known sites.

• 41:50John Coogan?

  We've seen a couple groups pop up with one gig, one gig clusters. This is 40% larger, so you know, significance, but semi-analysis often, there's like, there's different ways to measure power, like it's, it's, and people get kind of funky with it. It's like, are you pulling 1.4 from the grid? Is it 1.4 to the chips? And there's like the concept of like compute capacity versus IT power. All these things kind of, you, you lose a little bit at every single stage. So we'll see where this, this, this cluster actually nets out and we will let. Dylan Patel will be the final arbiter of how insane this particular build out is.

• 42:32John Coogan?

  Part of OCI's popularity with AI firms is its longstanding focus on bare metal servers. This has become the standard arrangement for AI work.

• 42:40Jordi Hays?

  So funny, Miss Cloud, but made a key decision.

• 42:44John Coogan?

  Going bare metal.

• 42:45Jordi Hays?

  Early on to go bare metal.

• 42:46John Coogan?

  Instead of platform as a service.

• 42:48Jordi Hays?

  It ended up working out.

• 42:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:50Jordi Hays?

  For old Larry.

• 42:51John Coogan?

  Users and employees will also point to Oracle's networking quality and willingness to do high levels of customized work. Semi Analysis, shout out Semi Analysis in Bloomberg today. Popular industry analyst listed Oracle Cloud near the top of its rankings for AI infrastructure vendors in March, citing its cost effectiveness, networking quality, and strong customer service.

• 43:13Jordi Hays?

  Add a category for how aggressive the sales team is.

• 43:16John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 43:17Jordi Hays?

  Battle card ranking.

• 43:17John Coogan?

  How much trash they talk about.

• 43:21John Coogan?

  Another of Oracle's largest customers is Nvidia, which uses OCI for internal development and to power its own cloud infrastructure service. The chipmaker, code named Pathfinder internally rents capacity from Oracle, from an Oracle cluster of H100 chips in Japan and from a data center being built on Indonesia's Batam Island.

• 43:42Jordi Hays?

  Crazy.

• 43:43John Coogan?

  Big into islands over at Oracle. Oracle is also in talks with Meta Platforms and XAI for further capacity. Of course, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk are famous for getting dinner with Jensen Huang and begging him to use GPUs.

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  So Batam Island is right off the coast of Singapore.

• 43:57John Coogan?

  Is it beautiful?

• 43:58Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure it is.

• 43:59John Coogan?

  Or is it more like industrial? Should we go? Should we, next vacation?

• 44:03Jordi Hays?

  It's very industrial.

• 44:03John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 44:04Jordi Hays?

  But I'm sure it's so beautiful.

• 44:06John Coogan?

  Book a wander.

• 44:08Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place. Find your happy place.

• 44:12John Coogan?

  Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks.

• 44:19Jordi Hays?

  We need to get them to put together the data center, the Wander data center.

• 44:22John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, I want a wandering Abeline. I want to wander in Batam Island. I want to wander in Japan, wherever that data center is. I want to go on the world tour. Take me to Virginia. Put me next to AWS East. I want to visit US East. Oracle's cloud business is still orders of magnitude smaller than Amazon, Microsoft, and the number three provider, Alphabet Inc.'s Google, but plenty of room for growth exists. Orders of magnitude, it's 100 times smaller? That's shocking to me. I feel like it would be at least within like 100x. I don't know. The market generated almost 100 billion in revenue in the most recent quarter and expanding 25% year over year. The question is how Oracle

• 45:06John Coogan?

  will fund this development and what it does to the company's profitability. Still, the company hasn't had to borrow money to develop its centers like smaller rivals such as CoreWeave, who we've interviewed founder of. We believe margin will rebound and cash flow will be substantial once they get through this investment phase, said an analyst, I think, an analyst at Bernstein. Oracle is going through a business model transformation that is even more impactful over a shorter period of time. Yeah, it's hard to imagine that these data centers, I mean, we could be winding up in like the dark fiber world where a lot of these data centers don't get used if like truly there's a major popping of the AI bubble, but this stuff seems to be

• 45:50John Coogan?

  extremely valuable for a long period of time. And it's hard to imagine a bunch of huge data centers like not being useful to America in a decade. And so he's risk on, he's

• 46:03Jordi Hays?

  Risk on, but not using leverage.

• 46:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, not using leverage. It's all coming out of the free cash flow. They have the cash to pay for it. And, and it seems like he's, he's in a good position. Anyway, you should get on Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. You can ask Julius to analyze your data.

• 46:23Jordi Hays?

  Business better.

• 46:24John Coogan?

  They're loved by 2 million users and trusted by individuals at Princeton, Boston Consulting Group, and Zapier.

• 46:30Jordi Hays?

  And TBPN.

• 46:31John Coogan?

  And TBPN.

• 46:32Jordi Hays?

  There is a new leak of a memo from Alexander Wang.

• 46:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 46:38Jordi Hays?

  Kylie Robinson is reporting that Alexander Wang wrote that superintelligence is coming. In order to quote unquote, take it seriously, the company is making major changes. So we can get into this a little bit.

• 46:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do we want to have Tyler break down the whiteboard?

• 46:54Jordi Hays?

  We should.

• 46:54John Coogan?

  Or show us what, what is the structure? What can you tell us about the current structure of Meta's AI efforts, Tyler?

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think that the main thing is that we now know that Alexander Wang is like top dog of AI.

• 47:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  Right? So we have, I don't know if we can show it yet, but

• 47:12John Coogan?

  Top dog.

• 47:13Speaker 02

  You see Zuck at top.

• 47:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:14Speaker 02

  And then Alexander Wang.

• 47:15John Coogan?

  Reports directly to Zuck.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Reports directly to Zuck.

• 47:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  And then everyone who works at, on AI at Meta, not just MSL, like FAIR.

• 47:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:22Speaker 02

  Every single org that does AI.

• 47:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  Reports directly to, well, not everyone, but they all report to Alexander Wang.

• 47:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  So then below him, we see, we see three more people. We see Yan Le Cun.

• 47:34John Coogan?

  Okay. And is Yan Le Cun at FAIR?

• 47:38Speaker 02

  I

• 47:38John Coogan?

  Was that his?

• 47:39Speaker 02

  I think that is still unclear.

• 47:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 47:41Speaker 02

  We're not super sure. So he was chief scientist.

• 47:43John Coogan?

  But he was not on the Lama team?

• 47:46Speaker 02

  No, I don't think so.

• 47:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  It's also like, maybe he was on Lama team, but then for Lama four, he wasn't or something like that. But then, so in charge of MSL is Sheng Jia Zhao. He was at OpenAI. I'm like 90% sure. And then we see Nat Freeman is also there. And then so below them is just, these are like the actual researchers who've been poached from, from various labs. So you see like Jason Way, Lucas Byer from, you know, OpenAI, I think.

• 48:17John Coogan?

  I think, I think semi-analysis had a funny, funny joke post about this that they wound up taking down. There was something to the effect of like, you worked at a different AI lab focused on training. They decided that they sold and they said like this, this new organization won't be doing training. And then so you go over to Meta and you work under Yan La Kun and then they're like, you're not going to be doing training either. And so there, it seems like there's a real fight if you're an AI researcher to actually get onto a team that's working on training superintelligence, because there's a huge amount of demand for just like, let's productize this now. And there's probably a divide among the researchers on where they

• 48:59John Coogan?

  want to play in the stack. Do they want to be focused on, on, on implementation, applications, leveraging the foundation models versus training and coming up with the really novel solutions?

• 49:11Jordi Hays?

  So internally, they have TBD Labs, which will also be in charge of exploring new directions, such as building an Omni model.

• 49:19John Coogan?

  Okay. And TBD Labs is, is, is a subset of MSL or a side MSL? What's the, what's the take there?

• 49:26Jordi Hays?

  It's, it feeds into it.

• 49:28John Coogan?

  It feeds into MSL. Okay, got it.

• 49:29Jordi Hays?

  And then FAIR will be a quote unquote innovation engine for MSL's training runs by feeding its research directly to TBD Labs.

• 49:38John Coogan?

  Okay, got it.

• 49:39Jordi Hays?

  And that's a, according to Kylie, that's a more active role for FAIR than before.

• 49:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 49:45Jordi Hays?

  FAIR is known for publishing their research, giving it to employees.

• 49:49John Coogan?

  Yep. And so, so how, how would I comp this to OpenAI? It seems like Shen, Shen Jiao is sort of the Mark Chen of MSL?

• 50:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's probably

• 50:03John Coogan?

  Head of research?

• 50:03Speaker 02

  Way to do it. Yeah. Head of research.

• 50:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then, and then Jiao has four, at least four, like really key, high level researchers.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. These are mainly just like the, like big names.

• 50:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, the big names.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Obviously, there's like way more. But yeah, I mean, even at OpenAI, it's like still, it seems like there's like a lot of teams there that's like, oh, I'm like, I led O1 research, but then there's someone else who like led reasoning.

• 50:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 50:30Speaker 02

  So it's like unclear how those overlap.

• 50:31John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  So we don't really know like what the exact comp would be to OpenAI or to Anthropic or something like that.

• 50:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  But so far, the, the actual like MSL core team seems fairly small, at least of like public people that we've seen. I remember that there was some spreadsheet that leaked, maybe like a month ago, that had only like maybe 25 names on it.

• 50:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  And they were all like, kind of superstars, so.

• 50:54John Coogan?

  And were they mostly on OpenAI on the various training runs and various research projects? Or was this across the entire industry?

• 51:00Jordi Hays?

  No, yeah, it was not just OpenAI.

• 51:02John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 51:03Jordi Hays?

  There was a bunch of people.

• 51:03John Coogan?

  Was this like the list that was leaked?

• 51:07Jordi Hays?

  No, that was more recruiting focus.

• 51:09John Coogan?

  Okay, that's more recruiting.

• 51:10Jordi Hays?

  This was just like the actual team.

• 51:11John Coogan?

  Okay, got it.

• 51:12Jordi Hays?

  There's more info in the memo about the GOAT, Nat Friedman.

• 51:16John Coogan?

  Friedman.

• 51:16Jordi Hays?

  Friedman.

• 51:16John Coogan?

  What's he doing?

• 51:17Jordi Hays?

  Will lead MSL's efforts to integrate AI into Meta's products. So, as everyone knows, Meta's been trying to make things like AI glasses and the Quest VR headset go mainstream. These products have garnered good reviews but have yet to make up a meaningful portion of revenue.

• 51:33John Coogan?

  And Nat Friedman, it really feels like he might be the best person in the world to do that because who was the first person to actually make money off of GPT-3? It was Nat Friedman with GitHub Copilot, right? And so if you think about like, how can you actually deliver value that people pay for at a good margin? Which in the meta context, it might be it's value that's delivered for free and then monetized via advertising. But in general, you need to develop products that pass the hurdle rate of like value capture and not just go around doing science projects, which is what a lot of the research labs are set up to do, and that's fine. But like the real, like it feels like Meta has some real horsepower on the training side.

• 52:16John Coogan?

  They're going to be able to build great models and they're going to need to build those in and vend those into a variety of products. Everything from Meta Ray Bans to Facebook, the Blue App and Instagram, WhatsApp. And how can you do that in a way that is product focused? Well, you hire the person that was the first real like AI application layer builder like with GitHub Copilot.

• 52:37Jordi Hays?

  Demigod.

• 52:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I think his act.

• 52:40Jordi Hays?

  One thing that's notable, so when Meta internally announced the creation of MSL in June, it said that Friedman would be its co-lead. However, in the email, Wang made it clear that Friedman reports to him. Quote, "Nat will continue to lead this work, reporting to me."

• 52:56John Coogan?

  I don't think that that that that's as dramatic as you think it is.

• 53:02Jordi Hays?

  Freeman's Freeman's just like, yeah, I don't want to, I don't, I'm, I'm, I've been CEO.

• 53:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:08Jordi Hays?

  Pretty good at it.

• 53:09John Coogan?

  I think.

• 53:09Jordi Hays?

  I'd rather just focus on on making AI.

• 53:12John Coogan?

  It's such a huge organization. There's so much to do. I, I, I think that, like, you could, you could read that as like, he's reporting to Alex. I think he's close with Alex. I think he's worked with him in the past. And I think there's a bunch of interesting ways to, to, to, to actually go and have a better experience than the, within the behemoth that is Meta, focused on just implementation of frontier models as opposed to actually having to have the, have the AI researchers roll up to you. And then you're a middle manager in between Mark and you're kind of, you know, sharp elbows with, with Alex on, on, you know, who's doing what, where the stuff is allocated. It makes sense to just have a rock star training team and then take the stuff that they trained, go implement it.

• 54:00John Coogan?

  And of course, there'll be some feedback there, but it won't be, but you, if you are, if you're an AI implementer, an application layer developer, like, you don't necessarily need to have the, the researchers report to you.

• 54:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, true. Maybe there's like an equivalence to, there's like Google DeepMind.

• 54:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  And there's Google AI Studio.

• 54:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  Which is like the productized version of the models.

• 54:24John Coogan?

  The projects.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  So maybe it's something like Nat is in charge of the, you know, Google AI Studio for where, you know, Shengji is, is the DeepMind.

• 54:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I don't know. We'll have to, we'll have to dig into how it's, how it's sorted.

• 54:36Jordi Hays?

  Where's Daniel Gross?

• 54:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, where is Daniel Gross? We got to figure out how he fits in.

• 54:40Jordi Hays?

  Great question.

• 54:41John Coogan?

  I don't know. I mean, was his, was his transfer, his trade deal ever fully confirmed? I don't think he's put out a post about it yet.

• 54:48Jordi Hays?

  But it was confirmed that he left SSI.

• 54:50John Coogan?

  Okay. Oh, yeah, yeah. Ilya posted about that and said, like, we are.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  Yes. So on Daniel Gross's website, it just says, working on AI products at Meta.

• 54:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:58Speaker 02

  So it sounds like confirmed.

• 54:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's probably still working with.

• 55:00John Coogan?

  But who knows? I would imagine he's working alongside Nat, right?

• 55:04Jordi Hays?

  They merged.

• 55:04John Coogan?

  They, the merge, the merge happened and it's Nat and Daniel hanging out in a. Uh, going around stuffing AI in every meta product.

• 55:14Jordi Hays?

  We're putting it everywhere.

• 55:15John Coogan?

  Putting it everywhere. I mean, it seems like a good strategy compared to like, it's gotta be wrangling that problem at Google has got to be somewhat even more difficult because there's probably a Sheets team. There's Gmail team. There's a Google search team.

• 55:31Jordi Hays?

  It's harder at Google because the core search business is threatened by Gen AI.

• 55:36John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 55:37Jordi Hays?

  And because you can just go on ChatGPT and have it browse Google.

• 55:40John Coogan?

  Yep, apparently, yeah. But yeah, whereas, whereas if you're.

• 55:45Jordi Hays?

  It's more existential, right? Meta, you're like, this is cool tech.

• 55:48John Coogan?

  This is going to, you know, we only want to do things that drive higher ARPU or higher user minutes. How do we keep people in the apps for longer? And it should be very additive on the creator side, on the consumer side. But you should, that like, a lot of the usage patterns, I mean, when they rolled out stories, it was very clear that they, I don't know if they actually wound up rolling out stories in WhatsApp, but they definitely rolled it out both in Instagram and in, and in Facebook. And so there's a lot of AI features that you could imagine, even just like those meta AI studio, design a character that you chat with. There's no reason that that, that like being chatting with, although it's ridiculous to say out loud, like the Russian girl or whatever the killer app is.

• 56:30John Coogan?

  I mean, like, like the bull case is that it's chat with like a helpful assistant or chat with somebody who's an expert in watches or semiconductors or cars or whatever. Like you follow a lot of car content on Instagram. You can now chat with a, like the meta AI car expert, ask it questions, maybe. It makes sense that that would be vended into WhatsApp and it would also be vended into Instagram and it would also be vended into, into Facebook. Uh, speaking of watches, have you seen the levels of like?

• 56:59Jordi Hays?

  This was in a certain really important post.

• 57:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, this was.

• 57:02Jordi Hays?

  Tips for men.

• 57:03John Coogan?

  It was almost the current thing in Silicon Valley. Everyone was talking about this.

• 57:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this was flying around group chats.

• 57:08John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 57:08Jordi Hays?

  And the reason is, you know, tips for men was giving their sort of definition here, but to me, this just screams, RM at the top, LP, Patek.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 57:20Jordi Hays?

  Clearly the GP.

• 57:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 57:22Jordi Hays?

  AP, clearly principal.

• 57:24John Coogan?

  Principal.

• 57:24Jordi Hays?

  Rolex, obviously associate.

• 57:26John Coogan?

  Associate, okay.

• 57:27Jordi Hays?

  And then Cartier, I would say investor relations.

• 57:30John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 57:31Jordi Hays?

  And then I don't even know.

• 57:33John Coogan?

  Jaeger?

• 57:34Jordi Hays?

  Get into, to.

• 57:35John Coogan?

  IWC?

• 57:35Jordi Hays?

  C range.

• 57:37John Coogan?

  Um, I don't know. EIR.

• 57:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, seriously. Uh, E I R that had a, had a modern, you know, an Aqua Hire.

• 57:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 57:46Jordi Hays?

  Kind of looking for their next thing.

• 57:47John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. They, they define the levels of, of watches as Richard Mill, who of course we've talked about on the show here as filthy rich. Patac is old money king. A P is new money Rolex is wannabe rich. Depends on the Rolex. You got a Paul Newman. I think you're, I think you're old money, old money king.

• 58:07Jordi Hays?

  Picking up a land dweller from the secondary market.

• 58:09John Coogan?

  Are they spiking? Or?

• 58:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, they're sitting well, well above retail.

• 58:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:17Jordi Hays?

  Bezel has one for 70K.

• 58:20John Coogan?

  70K for a land dweller? It is a beautiful watch. I like it a lot, but that is a wild price for a Rolex.

• 58:29John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, I mean, make a statement.

• 58:31Jordi Hays?

  It's a nice bracelet.

• 58:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a good bracelet.

• 58:33Jordi Hays?

  It's a good bracelet, sir.

• 58:34John Coogan?

  If you're, if you were running a, a luxury watch brand and you wanted to get your watch brand mentioned in chat G P T, what would you do?

• 58:41Jordi Hays?

  I'd go to try profound.com.

• 58:44John Coogan?

  Try profound.com. So you could get your brand mentioned in chat G P T. You could reach millions of consumers who are using A I to discover new products and brands. You could even get a demo.

• 58:51Jordi Hays?

  I would not be surprised if at least one member of the Holy Trinity already uses profound.

• 58:56John Coogan?

  I wouldn't be surprised either.

• 58:58Jordi Hays?

  Be surprised.

• 58:58John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 58:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I got an investor update from James at profound last week and it was the single most impressive.

• 59:06John Coogan?

  Really?

• 59:06Jordi Hays?

  One, you know, month, monthly update that I've received across investing in.

• 59:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:11Jordi Hays?

  60 or 70. Different startups at this point. Very, very impressive.

• 59:16John Coogan?

  Shout out to them.

• 59:17Jordi Hays?

  What is Raboy talking about here?

• 59:20John Coogan?

  Uh, Keith Raboy has taken yet another victory lap on calling Miami as an underrated place to live. It was of course not in the conversation at all, and then it became the current thing. Delian famously posted, uh, can we just move Silicon Valley to Miami? He somewhat successfully did that and a lot of companies moved there, of course. It didn't actually become like a major tech hub, but, uh, it's certainly more of a destination for the tech elite than it's ever been in the past. Uh, it's a beautiful place. I love visiting it. Great for conferences. Great. My favorite thing about Miami is that if you host a tech conference there, no one will go home. After the conference ends because everyone will get a hotel room because almost no one like

• 1:00:02John Coogan?

  lives there and yet it's a place where people can justify going to a flight. It's not it's as convenient as Las Vegas as as like nice weather, lots of activities like Las Vegas. But if you throw a big event in San Francisco, half the audience will be like, oh, well, I'm, you know, I'm not, I mean, I got a babysitter, but I'm going to go home. And if you throw an event in New York, same thing. But if you get everyone to Miami, 90% of those people are going to be from out of town. They're going to book hotels. They're going to be there. They're going to be staying up later, going to be having more fun, more networking, more business connections, more value creation. So still bullish on Miami as a as a place to visit and as tech's Vegas. Less bullish on it as like, go try and build a foundation

• 1:00:46John Coogan?

  model company and recruit a bunch of AI engineers. That's going to be a tough lift. But the the the office visits in July 2025 changed from the first month of 2019 is way up. Denver is down 40%. LA is down 36%. We're trying to shift that trend by being fully in office. Alec McGillis, who Keith is quoting, says, really striking to what degree New York has become an outlier in recovering from the remote work shift, especially given that it is a city that was first hit hardest by the pandemic.

• 1:01:22Jordi Hays?

  Huge part of this is that people's apartments and or homes that are actually in New York City are so much smaller. So people often want to go to the office.

• 1:01:31John Coogan?

  That's a good point. Whereas if you're in Denver, or even LA, or Chicago, or Boston, you might live slightly outside the city. You might live in a suburb.

• 1:01:40Jordi Hays?

  Denver's over here, they're still on a hike.

• 1:01:43John Coogan?

  They're still on a hike.

• 1:01:44Jordi Hays?

  They're still hiking.

• 1:01:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. So nationwide, office visits are down over 20% since pre pandemic times. And so July of 2019 is kind of where the benchmark starts before the pandemic hit. And obviously, that changed a lot of businesses. It changed a lot of work from home behavior. We were just talking about Oracle. You know, they're building data centers, but they're doing it remotely. Whereas AWS has kind of gone back into the office. Seattle notably missing from this list entirely. But anyway.

• 1:02:18Jordi Hays?

  This this post from Tane is wild. So he's charting out annualized ad revenue by platform Google search at 215 billion.

• 1:02:28John Coogan?

  How much, Tyler, how much money do you think in revenue Bing brings in every year?

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  Five billion.

• 1:02:36John Coogan?

  Fourteen billion.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  All right, that's not too far.

• 1:02:39John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:02:40Speaker 02

  Pretty far.

• 1:02:41Jordi Hays?

  If you, if John had asked you about Snap, you would have been pretty close. They did five and a half billion.

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  Pinterest is at four billion, Uber at 1.5 billion. This is ad revenue, not platform revenue. DoorDash is making a billion on ad revenue. Instacart's making a billion on ad revenue, but Meta is up at 200 billion or 186 billion. Google Search is at 215 billion. And so, yeah, I mean, like, the OpenAI, we were talking about

• 1:03:11John Coogan?

  Brad Gersner kind of saying that, you know, the, the OpenAI valuation of 500 billion is like way ahead of Google's metrics based on where Google was when they were valued at 500 billion. But when you look at that pool of high margin ad revenue, 215 billion from Google, 8, 186 from Meta, 63 from Amazon, and you ask yourself the question of like, will ChatGPT be able to grab a piece of that? Is it already? It's not really already. It's mostly just people paying for a great tool that they prefer over the other, over other options. But if they, if they seriously get on the, in that game with a, a gentic commerce, a gentic checkout,

• 1:03:56John Coogan?

  and, and taking commissions and cuts from different revenue streams in the ad revenue world, like, there is just so much money to be made in internet ads. Like, you can be a company that's not known for advertising, like Uber, and still be making a 1.5 billion in ad revenue. That's extremely high margin. And so, can, can OpenAI suck 50 billion out of this 500 billion pool of ad revenue? And traded at 10x on revenue? Like, is it possible? It's like, it's not that crazy. I don't know.

• 1:04:29Jordi Hays?

  While getting, getting better and better at serving the models cheaper and cheaper.

• 1:04:33John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Well. As they build out their their ad product, they will need to be using linear over at OpenAI. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps.

• 1:04:48Speaker 02

  If you make software and you're not on linear, you're crazy.

• 1:04:52John Coogan?

  And if we flip over to the bear take on OpenAI, BoneGPT says, GPT-5 single-handedly destroyed the fast takeoff narrative and killed the stock market. I don't know if that's entirely fair. Killed the stock market, it sells off 2% and it's like.

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  GPT-5 took it out back.

• 1:05:11John Coogan?

  This is, this is the beauty of like the kangaroo market, the faster information is that like.

• 1:05:15Speaker 02

  Every time it's so over, we could just be a day away from being so back.

• 1:05:18John Coogan?

  It's, it's not just that, it's that, is that you, you, you go through the, the, the trough of disillusionment so, so fast. Like you can have like all of the think pieces, all of the memes, all of the hot takes about like, it's so bad, it's so bad. And then two weeks later, you can be like, okay, we've clearly hit the bottom, we've beat this to death. Everyone's talked about how, how we're completely over our skis and like the bubble has popped. Then you can be like, okay, now it's time to start reinvesting. We gotta start buying the dim. And then we start building back up so quickly. And that's what happened, I mean during COVID, like it was what, like a three-month drawdown, even, even, even the, the, the interest rate post-Zerp era was like pretty quickly turned around, maybe a

• 1:05:59John Coogan?

  year of hard, of like hard times. It was not, it was not the dot com bubble, which took years, years, years. And Tyler Cosgrove has the, this is the doomsday clock for us. So the doomsday clock, typically the folks who are worried about the apocalypse are tracking the doomsday clock, the amount of time until doomsday. We have been tracking, we say it's 90 seconds, not to AGI, it's 90 seconds to nothing. Tyler, can you give us some more context on what inspired this and how you're feeling?

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  Okay. So this is apparently, this is like the doomer take on GPT-5, right?

• 1:06:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:37Speaker 02

  Nothing ever happens.

• 1:06:38John Coogan?

  Nothing ever happens.

• 1:06:39Speaker 02

  No fast takeoff.

• 1:06:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:06:41Speaker 02

  I disagree. Okay. I think GPT-5 was pretty good.

• 1:06:43John Coogan?

  Yeah. But how many seconds until AGI and the singularity?

• 1:06:50John Coogan?

  How many days? I mean, Sam Altman put it a couple thousand days. Three thousand days is a decade, right? I would put it closer to

• 1:06:57Jordi Hays?

  Remember the singularity, the merge, his definition for that was just people become really close friends with a chatbot?

• 1:07:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, yeah, that's, that's, uh, that's pretty clear. Uh, I mean, I guess, uh, like, if there's gonna be a fast takeoff, there's gonna be some sort of singularity, something that's like unpredictable. I would peg it more at 7,000 days. I would put it at 2045.

• 1:07:18Speaker 02

  Okay, maybe I'm like halfway in between you and Sam.

• 1:07:22John Coogan?

  So Sam's 2035, 2040.

• 1:07:26Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:07:26John Coogan?

  2040. Okay. So that's a lot of seconds.

• 1:07:29Speaker 02

  That's a fair amount of seconds.

• 1:07:30Jordi Hays?

  Buko, Buko Capital, which is basically the, the, the fourth technology brother, he says, this is a drawdown for ants. Momentum names with zero valuation support still up 100 to 700% year to date. Several with no revenue, many still getting gunned from the lows back to roughly break even. I don't know when the music stops, but the palantards and the lemon apes are still dancing.

• 1:07:53John Coogan?

  Lemon apes? What are lemon apes?

• 1:07:55Jordi Hays?

  I think lemonade.

• 1:07:55John Coogan?

  Lemonade is meme stock now?

• 1:07:58Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it's, it's up, uh, it's up a couple hundred percent year to date.

• 1:08:04John Coogan?

  Well, um, there, there's another story that is

• 1:08:07Jordi Hays?

  Over the last year.

• 1:08:08John Coogan?

  That is, uh, developing, but we don't have a full analysis of it. So DeepSeek version 3.1 is out. The, the model was released on hugging face of that, correct, Tyler?

• 1:08:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so I think there's basically, there's no model card. So, so we don't know like what the benchmarks are really.

• 1:08:25John Coogan?

  Why would that be? Why would they release the model without releasing the model card? I feel like that's kind of standard issue.

• 1:08:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it could just be like, oh, we forgot to add it to the like file. I don't know.

• 1:08:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I assume that they're gonna add it within a couple of days.

• 1:08:39John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, people can do it independently too.

• 1:08:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can run the benchmarks independently, I guess. Um, but yeah, so far it seems, it's kind of up in the air, how good it looks. Some people were like, Oh, China's cooked like, you know,

• 1:08:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  The chips like totally screwed with.

• 1:08:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, they tried to train a Huawei, they failed, they couldn't get Nvidia.

• 1:08:59Speaker 02

  Like, people were saying like, oh, it was supposed to be DeepSeek before.

• 1:09:02John Coogan?

  That's what we were hearing, for sure.

• 1:09:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then it turned into 3.1, it was so bad.

• 1:09:07John Coogan?

  So it could be sort of like a 4.5 moment. But yeah, it's possible that they're going down, they're, they're, they're mimicking the error in the tech tree that was followed at, at OpenAI and Meta, it seemed like.

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:21John Coogan?

  Because GPT 4.5 kind of came out and was underwhelming, and then Lama 4 Behemoth couldn't get out, and we might be seeing something similar.

• 1:09:30Speaker 02

  I mean, so those were both examples of like,

• 1:09:32John Coogan?

  Big, big, big.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was like big pre-training runs, right? But, oh, uh, DeepSeek already has like good RL, right? They, because they have R1.

• 1:09:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:09:39Speaker 02

  That was like, I mean, that was the first reasoning model to come out after, after OpenAI.

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:44Speaker 02

  So I, I don't know if it was necessarily that. I mean, it, I, it seems reasonable that it's just like a chip thing where they were forced to use Huawei. But I, I think we'll see, hopefully over this week, they'll, they'll release some more details about it, but.

• 1:09:58John Coogan?

  Yep. Um, well, we will be tracking which company has the best AI model at the end of August on Polymarket, of course. Uh, Google's running away with it, 93% chance. I don't know if they're already in the lead and that's why, or maybe, maybe we're expecting something new to come out, but, DeepMind seems to be on a tear. They've been climbing even towards the end of the year, they're up at 59%. XAI has recently eclipsed OpenAI as the second best AI model at the end of 2025. The other news on DeepSeek, uh, this is still in the rumor mill, but, uh, some dude asked the official DeepSeek customer service,

• 1:10:39John Coogan?

  and they confirmed that version 3.1 is a merge of reasoners and non-reasoners. Maybe it's some sort of like, uh, model switcher coming soon. Uh, both Chat and Reasoner, Reasoner API now route to the same model, but just change if thinking mode is on, so. Anyway, if you're looking for sales tax AGI, head over to numeralhq.com. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance at numeralhq.com.

• 1:11:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, Howard Marks just had an interview with Bloomberg. I think it's relevant. He says, "US stocks are in quote, 'in early days for a bubble,' although the critical point for correction is yet to come." Says, "I'm certainly not ringing alarm bells. The point is that things are expensive." Palantir is certainly expensive at 500x

• 1:11:26John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:26Jordi Hays?

  price to earnings. It's been 16 years since investors last went through a quote, "serious market correction." He added, "The current period..."

• 1:11:35John Coogan?

  16 years? Oh, he's going back to 2008?

• 1:11:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:11:39Jordi Hays?

  "The current period reminds him of the late 1990s when the market was falling in love with tech stocks, leading to former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to warn of irrational exuberance. Still, the market rose for a few more years after that before the tech bubble burst."

• 1:11:55John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:11:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, again, like, you know, the debate everybody's been having is, is are we in January of 2021 or November of 2021?

• 1:12:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:06Jordi Hays?

  We might just be in 2019, you know?

• 1:12:08John Coogan?

  We might be.

• 1:12:09Jordi Hays?

  Just don't know.

• 1:12:09John Coogan?

  This is a Ben Thompson's take. It's very hard to call it.

• 1:12:12Jordi Hays?

  Mark says, "People get of the habit of thinking about market corrections, noting that a reversion to the mean is very likely. Some technology stocks are quote, 'quite highly valued relative to history.' No, no new insight there. This is a time to put a little more defense into your portfolio and invest, investing in credit as opposed to equities is one way to do it."

• 1:12:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. I saw another post that, was it Fidelity was recommending a portfolio of 70% bonds, which seems very, very conservative. But do with that what you will. Let's switch gears to a different hedge fund billionaire, Jim Simons. His daughter, Elizabeth Simons, has given $250,000 to a super PAC supporting New York City mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani. Of course, this is seen as sort of antithetical to who Jim Simons was and what Renaissance Technologies did as an applied math hedge fund. Gary Tan has a take. He says, It's a special form of insanity for private foundations to supercharge the destruction

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  of teaching math to the next generation when that money was earned literally by the merit of pure applied math, like the money earned by Renaissance Technologies. Legalize math, Gary says. Jim Simons' mathematical skills helped transform him from a prize-winning academic at Harvard and MIT into a legendary financier, whose algorithmic models made Renaissance Technologies one of the most successful hedge funds in history. After his death last year, one of his consequential bequests went to his daughter Liz, who oversees the Heising Simons Foundation and its near-billion-dollar endowment. What Liz has chosen to do with that inheritance might have surprised her father. Jim Simons devoted much of his charitable giving to basic research in mathematics and

• 1:14:04John Coogan?

  science, but his daughter's foundation is moving in a very different direction. The Heising Simons Foundation and similar organizations are supercharging a movement to remake K-12 mathematics education according to social justice principles. Interesting that both the left and the right are somewhat attacking math right now. Obviously, this is coming from the left, but there's also that attack on USC.

• 1:14:29Jordi Hays?

  Are numbers real?

• 1:14:30John Coogan?

  Yeah. UCLA mathematician Terrence Tao had his funding cut by the Trump administration, and so it's a bad time to be a shape rotator, time to pivot into word-selling. But we'll see how it shakes out. I haven't been following the New York City mayoral election too closely because I live in Los Angeles. Let's go to this post by Nikhil Krishnan. He says, "Dude, Mark Bertolini, the ex-ETNA CEO, now Oscar CEO, has an insane story."

• 1:15:09John Coogan?

  Here he talks about how after his skiing injury, he was in so much pain for seventeen years that he went to Switzerland to end his life and was then told he could fix his pain. He went through neuroplasticity exercises and got it fixed. So I was getting ready to go to Switzerland to end my life at Dignitas. It's an assisted suicide organization, but I had to prove I had intractable pain and pain that couldn't be cured. And so I was sent to a doctor and the doctor evaluated me. The doctor said I was going to do it on February fifteenth, twenty twenty-three was going to be my death day. I wanted to do the eighteenth, but it was a Sunday. What was the day I had the accident? So I went to this doctor and sat and he sat down with me and they did a few tests and

• 1:15:52John Coogan?

  they looked at me and said, so you don't have intractable pain. You have neuroplastic pain and we can fix that. I go, here we go again. I mean, I did seven days at the Henningman University Hospital ICU, fifty milligrams of ketamine an hour IV to try and reboot my system. I had a great time and it felt better for the first month afterwards, but then I came, then came back in a rush. And so I said, here we go again. And I had worked with Mary to get her through how that was going to work and what the plans were and all that sort of stuff. And so they go, uh, okay, well, let's start. So part of it was cognitive behavioral therapy and I had to go back to my childhood and my concept. I was not well treated as a child and so I was consistently under threat assessment.

• 1:16:36John Coogan?

  And threat assessment is the worst thing you can have when you have chronic pain because you're always waiting for one cell to have pain and then all of a sudden it goes everywhere. And they said, and also your forty-two pain centers in your brain have wired together from all this chronic pain over the years. So any touch feels like pain. So in essence, I was addicted to pain. And they had done MRIs on baseball hitters and they said the best baseball hitters, their visual cognitive and motor cortices light up instantaneously. There's no latency. That's why they see the ball in slow motion. That's how they see it moving. That's how they hit it so well. You have a baseball hitter's brain on pain. There's no latency in your system. Something touches your arm, you're in pain. So they helped me understand the system.

• 1:17:18John Coogan?

  Then they put me in transcranial magnetic stimulation and they zap my brain for 30 minutes to disconnect those pain centers and they put me in a virtual reality lab with a helmet and they repattern my brain and he got through it and he's doing well. So, very good to hear. What a crazy, crazy turnaround. Anyway, Microsoft Excel adds Copilot AI to help fill in spreadsheet cells. This is like a crazy-

• 1:17:42Jordi Hays?

  The moment you've all been waiting for.

• 1:17:43John Coogan?

  The moment you've all been waiting for, but there's been a lot of folks who have been building Microsoft Excel add-ons. We had some of them on the show. There's one that launched on Monday. We didn't have a chance to have the founder on the show, but there was this, the current Copilot instantiation, similar to the Gemini integration, just kind of sits in the sidebar, does a little bit, but now they're going to have Copilot AI in every single spreadsheet cell, similar to that demo that we saw on Monday.

• 1:18:12Jordi Hays?

  Yes, but they warn against using the AI function for numerical calculations or in high-stakes scenarios with legal, regulatory, and compliance implications as Copilot can give incorrect responses.

• 1:18:25John Coogan?

  Interesting. Do you think this is a disruptor's innovation or innovator's dilemma problem where there's a, there's a low-end solution-

• 1:18:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:35John Coogan?

  -that is counter positioned against the status quo because Microsoft can't, can't add like a unreliable product to something that is thought of as reliable.

• 1:18:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:46John Coogan?

  This was the take that the legal industry could face disruption from AI because right now AI is, is maybe 50% as good as a real lawyer. I don't even know. 80%, 10%. It doesn't matter. The point is that it's a thousand times cheaper, potentially.

• 1:19:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think people have gotten used to getting a result from Excel and feeling like they can trust it.

• 1:19:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:19:08Jordi Hays?

  Trust their own-

• 1:19:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10Jordi Hays?

  -calculation.

• 1:19:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:11Jordi Hays?

  You know, they don't feel like I need to get a whiteboard out and whiteboard it out and use a calculator and-

• 1:19:16John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:19:16Jordi Hays?

  -sort of fact-check it.

• 1:19:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:19:17Jordi Hays?

  But I think you're going to have to do that with Copilot and various AI tools for some amount of time. But at the end of the day, you have tools that humans use to do things, but then humans are held responsible for- Whatever whatever process they use in order to get a certain result.

• 1:19:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:36Jordi Hays?

  So I don't think this is that big of a of a change.

• 1:19:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean fundamentally, Excel is a functional programming language, essentially. Like it's a it's a bunch of functions. You can't write it's not it's not the type of language where you can create like a class. But or object, it's not object oriented programming, but it is functional programming. And what that means is that it's entirely deterministic. Like everyone opens up the Excel, the same Excel sheet, they should see the same numbers. There is no stochastic, non deterministic. And that is kind of antithetical to the way LLMs work. Now, to be fair, businesses all over the world have implemented LLMs at various pieces of their tech stacks

• 1:20:19John Coogan?

  and been fine with the fact that, OK, for this particular function call, we get a sort of fuzzy result. We're trying to tag something for fraud and we're giving it, you know, a risk score at the end of the day. And we know that there might be some hallucinations, it might get something wrong. And the tech industry has completely come to terms with that. And they know that these systems are sometimes reliable, sometimes they're not. But they they add value. And so the fact that Microsoft's actually rolling this out quickly is pretty bullish for Excel sticking around, in my opinion, and the fact that they are warning, as long as the warning doesn't pop up every single time you call the Copilot AI and you and you use an LLM in a cell.

• 1:21:01John Coogan?

  I I don't think it would be a major headwind, but I don't know, we'll see.

• 1:21:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:05John Coogan?

  I'm not using a lot of.

• 1:21:06Jordi Hays?

  Is it Lindy?

• 1:21:07John Coogan?

  Excel these days. But you should be using fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on on G2. We need we need.

• 1:21:21Jordi Hays?

  AI agent world champion.

• 1:21:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I mean, customer service is a good example of like where most of the customer service answers are non deterministic anyway, because they come from a human. So if you have an AI agent in the loop, you will still need to escalate and fact check and reality check what's going on. But in general, it's the perfect fit for generative AI.

• 1:21:41Jordi Hays?

  Kyle Chaka. Has a new essay in the New Yorker. He says, what do all these things have in common? I grapple with the burgeoning Gen Z and younger aesthetic of tacky, oozy, ugly, chemically augmented, brain rotted consumer slop. The Labubu Dubai Chocolate Matcha Industrial Complex. And I'm looking forward to a time when we don't have to use the word slop anymore. I think I think it'd be fair to at least soon call the top on that.

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  I was really hoping that I just would never need to learn about Labubu at all. And just like, it would just come and go. And I would just be forever ignorant of it, much like you're ignorant of every movie ever created.

• 1:22:25Jordi Hays?

  It's a beautiful experience.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  It leaves you with a sense of purity that I long for.

• 1:22:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:31John Coogan?

  And yet, today I find myself learning about Labubu. Tyler, do you have a take on Labubu?

• 1:22:37Speaker 02

  I know, but I have a fun fact. I'm pretty sure this is true. The first.

• 1:22:41Jordi Hays?

  This better be legitimately fun. Because I really hyped it up.

• 1:22:45Speaker 02

  So I think the first use of the term brain rot is Henry David Thoreau in Walden.

• 1:22:53John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:22:53Speaker 02

  So like 1850s.

• 1:22:55John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:22:55Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:22:55John Coogan?

  Isn't Walden, isn't Walden like literally about touching grass? The whole point is that you go to the pond?

• 1:22:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, he lives at the pond for two years.

• 1:23:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, he goes and he touches grass.

• 1:23:02Speaker 02

  He doesn't talk to anyone. And he just like.

• 1:23:03John Coogan?

  And he says the word brain rot or rotted brain or something?

• 1:23:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think brain rot.

• 1:23:08John Coogan?

  Wow. Okay. Yeah. Well.

• 1:23:10Speaker 02

  Is that a fun fact?

• 1:23:11John Coogan?

  That's a very fun fact.

• 1:23:12Speaker 02

  I thought that was fun.

• 1:23:12John Coogan?

  I would give that 10 funds up. On a recent quiet weekday morning in Manhattan, I attempted to obtain a Labubu, the cutesy monster doll that has become the biggest international toy fad since Beanie Babies in the late 90s. This is in the New Yorker. Collected by children as well as by adults, the dolls were created in 2015, I didn't realize it was 10 years old, by the Hong Kong born designer Ka Sing Lung. When they were brought to the mass market by the Chinese toy company Popmart in 2019, the K-pop star Lisa started sharing her collection on social media in 2024, sparking the recent explosion. I didn't realize that that's where this all came from, this K-pop star. Labubus have pointed teeth, rabbit-like ears, and wide

• 1:23:56John Coogan?

  glaring eyes. Their faces and extremities are.

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

  They're demonic.

• 1:24:01John Coogan?

  Lots of people have been saying that.

• 1:24:04Jordi Hays?

  TyDye in the chat says, "Tim Dillon said Labubus are just Chinese voodoo dolls."

• 1:24:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:24:09Jordi Hays?

  I think it tracks.

• 1:24:10John Coogan?

  Yes, I like that post. Someone was saying, "I want to pronounce it like it's a Greek hero." Labubus.

• 1:24:16Jordi Hays?

  Bill Bishop in the Substack chat says, "My dog Tashi wants a Labubu chew toy."

• 1:24:21John Coogan?

  That could be a good.

• 1:24:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's get, we should, we should.

• 1:24:24John Coogan?

  Use for Labubus.

• 1:24:25Jordi Hays?

  Let's, let's buy Tashi, all of them that are available on the market and have, and have a little, little Tashi destroy all of them.

• 1:24:33John Coogan?

  I loved, I love Tashi because Tashi is like a full-on character. He's sort of like the Tyler of Sharp China. And Tashi is a recurring character on the Sharp China podcast that you should obviously go listen to and.

• 1:24:47Jordi Hays?

  Bill, Bill, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're buying a Labubu for Tashi.

• 1:24:51John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:24:52Jordi Hays?

  Nick, can you figure it out?

• 1:24:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, get Tashi's address. We'll send a Labubu.

• 1:24:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, don't just get an entry level one. Tashi deserves.

• 1:24:59John Coogan?

  Get the rarest one possible, the one of one, the most hyped. Take it out of the clutches of the most K-pop addicted, brain-rotted teen who's ready to spend $10,000 of their parents' money and give it to the dog.

• 1:25:12Jordi Hays?

  Their faces and extremities are bare. The rest of their bulbous bodies are covered in layer.

• 1:25:17John Coogan?

  The New Yorker. This is, this is exactly who I want to be covering this story is the New Yorker.

• 1:25:22Jordi Hays?

  The creatures are usually found hanging from phones or handbags, tiny demons haunting our accessories or in haunting our lives.

• 1:25:29John Coogan?

  See? Demonic. You said it, but the New Yorker said it as well.

• 1:25:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they come in a menagerie of more than 300 collectible forms. They can be matched to a personal style or mood. Pink fur for when you're feeling flirty, glowing eye, red eyes for a bit of an edge. Dress be the latte, scarfed for a cozy vibe. The high-end art fair Art Basel released a limited edition art handler Labubu, a batch of which sold out in 20 minutes. I think that Tashi needs the, the art handler.

• 1:26:00John Coogan?

  For sure. As a result of their popularity, Labubus is, are, uh, Labubus are difficult to get a hold of. Often out of stock, both online and in, and in physical stores. Their scarcity made me want one even more. Perhaps those who own them know something I didn't. So I turned to Partia, a Union Square boba tea cafe with neon lit claw machines that are perennially well-stocked with Labubu boxes. I plan to win my own tiny monster by skill.

• 1:26:30John Coogan?

  A friend and I picked up refreshments at the counter sparkling grape yogurt and and iced green tea with vanilla mousse and traded $20 for 20 party tokens which would allow us to scant four attempts at grabbing one of the Labubus stacked and grinning inside their glass cages. This is the Skinner box. This is fun. I love, I love games. I would probably fall for this. Though the cafe had just opened, you know, the last time I, I

• 1:27:01Jordi Hays?

  We should make, here's what we need to do. We need to make a, a, a, a golden retriever, a golden retriever that can ward off the demonic Labubu.

• 1:27:10John Coogan?

  Yes, you know, the, you know, the antithesis of the, of the anti-Christ like Labubu. It is the Santa Monica Pier Mickey Mouse or, or like, you know, I forget exactly what I won, but I was with my son on the Santa Monica Pier and there is a challenge where you have to, you have to hold on to a bar, like a pull-up bar, and then it pulls you up and you have to dangle and you, and the longer you dangle, the bigger the prize you get. And I held on for my life because I was fighting for the love of a four-year-old. And I did quite well. There are a number of tricks, so for the first minute, it doesn't rotate and then it releases and then it can rotate freely. And so that makes it a lot harder.

• 1:27:53John Coogan?

  I, of course, was not carrying my weightlifting chalk like I should have been. And so my, my hands were a bit sweaty and I underperformed, but I drew a large crowd. People were cheering. It was a heroic moment, something I'll remember forever. And so if you're trying to, if you're trying to win a toy, stay away from the demonic claw grabber and instead do a feat of strength for your child. That's what I would recommend.

• 1:28:19Jordi Hays?

  So the author tries to, tries to win one of these. He does not. And he says, why did I feel the need to own one?

• 1:28:24John Coogan?

  He didn't win.

• 1:28:25Jordi Hays?

  No, he didn't win. He just decided to cut his losses and go buy one. Why did I feel the need to own one in the first place? It seemed to be an accessory of lifestyle that I was missing out on and already late to adopt. One constructed of physical goods that have attained, yeah, it feels very, you're going to be late to the Labubu game if you're, you know, buying it now that we are

• 1:28:44John Coogan?

  Talking about it. Oh, yeah. We are definitely late to this one.

• 1:28:49Jordi Hays?

  One constructed of physical goods that have attained intense online fandom status symbols that are both Instagrammable and consumable. Uh, why are they, uh, you know, I don't, I don't know that anybody's eating their Labubus except for Tashi, but, uh, and yet this lifestyle seemed demarcated by objects that were ugly, strange and uncanny. There's Dubai chocolate, a candy bar stuffed with patas, patas, pistachio cream.

• 1:29:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:29:14Jordi Hays?

  And dough that oozes pea colored mush. And I don't even have the, uh, we're not going to go into.

• 1:29:19John Coogan?

  Yes, the lore. But you can look into it if you're interested. The Dubai chocolate story, very interesting.

• 1:29:24Jordi Hays?

  There's a conspiracy theory there that, uh, I do think tracks.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  We don't have a tinfoil hat big enough.

• 1:29:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, for that one.

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  But you can do your own research.

• 1:29:32Jordi Hays?

  There's matcha lattes, bright green caffeinated beverages that sometimes come out through with a red strawberry syrup resembling blood splashed on a lawn. What is this?

• 1:29:41John Coogan?

  I don't like any of this. Oh, anyway. Uh, I think the antidote to Labubus.

• 1:29:49Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the main thing is we are far from the Everlane era of consumer goods.

• 1:29:55John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:29:56Jordi Hays?

  Right? These sort of, uh.

• 1:29:57John Coogan?

  Sure. It needs to be garish. It needs to be controversial. It needs to be viral. It needs to be unique, gamified.

• 1:30:03Jordi Hays?

  Built for the timeline.

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. Um, if you're looking for a physical good, get an Eight Sleep. Get a Pod5. You don't need to go to a claw machine to pick up an Eight Sleep. You can go to eightsleep.com. They got a five-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns, free shipping. Does Labubu have a five-year warranty? No. Does Labubu have a 30-night risk-free trial? No. Does Labubu have free returns, free shipping? No. Get an Eight Sleep.

• 1:30:27Jordi Hays?

  The one thing we didn't ask Mateo yesterday when he came on, CEO, was, uh, when are they coming out with Eight Sleeps for dogs?

• 1:30:34John Coogan?

  Hmm, yes, yes, yes. And also, and also a third zone for the small child who demands sleeping in the middle and wants his own temperature control.

• 1:30:43Jordi Hays?

  Comes in the middle of the night, yeah.

• 1:30:43John Coogan?

  Uh, that was a request that came in during the, during our segment yesterday.

• 1:30:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:47John Coogan?

  Uh, from the family. Uh, also, uh, timeline was in turmoil yesterday around Eight Sleep, Delhi and taking shots at Benchmark. I thought about it. I am incredibly bullish on Eight Sleep selling in China. I'll give you my, my rationale. So.

• 1:31:03John Coogan?

  A lot of Americans are saying, oh, China-America conflict. It's the worst possible thing. The invasion of Taiwan would be disastrous. We need to be, you know, we need to be extremely judicious with the, you know, our frontier technology that we send to China. We need to restrict exports of, of cutting-edge frontier semiconductors. The H20, maybe. Definitely not the GB200. Definitely not the H100. We'll see. They're not getting Blackwell. But they will be getting the POD5. And I think it's incredibly bullish for world peace, and I'll lay out my rationale. So there are studies that show that aggression is deeply tied to lack of sleep.

• 1:31:44John Coogan?

  And the POD5, as you know, makes it impossible to wake up on the wrong side of the bed.

• 1:31:49Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:31:49John Coogan?

  So if you get a good night's sleep, you are less likely to want to engage in geopolitical conflict. And so I think we need to be sending POD5s to the Forbidden City, to Zhongnanhai, to Beijing, to every CCP official, to every PLA official. And making sure they have a good night's sleep, so they wake up refreshed, they wake up feeling good, and they wake up like, I don't want to go to conflict with America.

• 1:32:13Jordi Hays?

  Maybe Trump should-

• 1:32:14John Coogan?

  It's fine. We can work together.

• 1:32:15Jordi Hays?

  Trump should have America take a position-

• 1:32:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:32:18Jordi Hays?

  In-

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  Eight sleep.

• 1:32:19Jordi Hays?

  In eight sleep.

• 1:32:19John Coogan?

  Absolutely.

• 1:32:20Jordi Hays?

  And maybe get on the board.

• 1:32:21John Coogan?

  Yes. I think it's, I think it's a, it's a strategically important business for the United States.

• 1:32:26Jordi Hays?

  Something that we could take away at some point if we did get into a conflict-

• 1:32:29John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:32:29Jordi Hays?

  And we didn't want them to be sleeping well.

• 1:32:31John Coogan?

  If all of China is sleeping on eight-

• 1:32:33Jordi Hays?

  We could cut off the supply.

• 1:32:35John Coogan?

  And we can remotely turn it off and say, hey, you're not getting a good night's sleep.

• 1:32:38Jordi Hays?

  Or turn it really hot.

• 1:32:39John Coogan?

  Really hot. Oh, you like it cold? Now it's hot. This is a major geopolitical-

• 1:32:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so right when they're gonna take Taiwan-

• 1:32:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:32:46Jordi Hays?

  We just crank them up.

• 1:32:47John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly.

• 1:32:48Jordi Hays?

  And everybody's sleeping.

• 1:32:49John Coogan?

  And they're like, no, no. Cancel the invasion. Cancel the invasion.

• 1:32:53Jordi Hays?

  The New Yorker says, "These products feel hallucinatory. They take the social media mandate of self-modification to its logical extreme, embracing easy-breezy chemical additives and image augmentation, enhancing the self until it spills from its pores. The aesthetic is as much a defense mechanism against the internet era as it is a self-aware and joke. We can see what late, hyper-digital, artificially intelligent capitalism is doing to us. Isn't it a laugh? It's very unnatural-looking, the cultural critic Dean Kessick told me, describing the dominant visual style of extremely online consumerism. It kind of relishes its own artificiality."

• 1:33:32John Coogan?

  Do you know this song?

• 1:33:38Jordi Hays?

  I do not.

• 1:33:40Jordi Hays?

  I do not. What's that song?

• 1:33:41John Coogan?

  BlakeTheMan1000 wrote a song about Dean Kissick. It's a banger. You should go check it out. Anyway, cultural critic. I love Dean Kissick.

• 1:33:47Jordi Hays?

  Any pretense of the pure organic is undercut by the kind of willful alchemy. Everything is an admixture. The skincare brand, Rode, put peptides in lip gloss. The Los Angeles-based grocery store chain, Erawan, enhances-

• 1:34:01John Coogan?

  Like IGF1 in lip gloss? The Wolverine peptide? I'd be down for that.

• 1:34:07John Coogan?

  What else could we put in there?

• 1:34:07Jordi Hays?

  BPC157.

• 1:34:08John Coogan?

  Oh, BPC157. That's the one.

• 1:34:10Jordi Hays?

  Huge muscular-

• 1:34:11John Coogan?

  BPC157.

• 1:34:12Jordi Hays?

  Face.

• 1:34:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:14Jordi Hays?

  The-

• 1:34:14John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 1:34:15Jordi Hays?

  Erawan enhances multicolored smoothies with collagen and sea moss. Touchlin makes outer mist-scented hand sanitizers.

• 1:34:25Jordi Hays?

  And the drug and beauty brand, Hers, produces an Ozempic knockoff that comes in a bottle the color of matcha. I did not know that.

• 1:34:34John Coogan?

  As if you're injecting yourself with Japanese tea. I can hear the barista now. Would you like a shot of semaglutide with that? These days, memes are to be ingested into the body, not just viewed on screen.

• 1:34:47Jordi Hays?

  That's a good line.

• 1:34:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. We should move on from this. It's a long article. You can go read it in The New Yorker and have a deep dive into IRL brain rot and the trend. I want to read this article by Nadia Asperuhov, Delian's wife, who's been on the show. And she is responding to Catherine Boyle's article, "The Great Tech Family Alliance", talking about pronatalism. I thought it was interesting. We didn't get to it when this dropped. But it's in The New Atlantis. And I guess The New Atlantis is doing an essay series of replies to other essays. I thought that was kind of an interesting format. Anyway, Nadia kicks it off by saying Catherine Boyle's speech is a sign of a new song making its way through the tech world.

• 1:35:31John Coogan?

  One that trills the importance of investing into our social infrastructure, strengthening our nation, and yes, building families. I agree with all of that. It's a hopeful message, but like tech's early forays into politics, which began as a vague mood board of civic aspirations before coalescing into real policy efforts and wins, the pro-family cultural shift still has a long way to go. And so Nadia is laying out a new pathway towards pro-family cultural shift in tech. This is not to say there isn't a real movement happening, and as a parent, I'm grateful for it, says Nadia Asperuhov. But I feel the gap between rhetoric and reality as I navigate the tech world as a writer and researcher, particularly when visiting the San Francisco Bay area.

• 1:36:14Jordi Hays?

  Never ask a pronatalist founder or VC how many children they have.

• 1:36:19John Coogan?

  I mean, you can't do that one in this case, because I believe Catherine Boyle does have kids.

• 1:36:25Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 1:36:26John Coogan?

  But I have long joked that, yes, bro, I will definitely read your 5,000-word essay on pronatalism, but I gotta take my son to soccer right now, so I'll get to it later. There were too many instances of that, for sure. Dinner conversations still tend to circle around whether children are worth having at all, or they treat global fertility rates at arm's length. Many in tech embrace a borderless lifestyle that implies constant mobility, hosting events in cities like New York and Austin, which doesn't blend well with family obligations. Children are rarely present at social gatherings. I've had the strange experience of bringing my child to events where I'm praised for this act as some sort of pro-family ideological flex, which, while flattering, misses the much

• 1:37:09John Coogan?

  less glamorous truth. With no evening childcare available, I didn't have a choice. That's a really, really good point. There's something telling about this disparity. Tech is clearly eager to recast itself as pro-family, but it hasn't yet internalized what is required to support families day to day. I mean, I literally just experienced this, where I was invited to an event, and I was like... Yeah, I'd love to stop by. I wrapped the show at two. I might be able to get there, but I gotta be home for uh, family dinner. That's at six, like, and the event wound up being really far away. And I was like, there is just no way I can get there an hour and then get back and do anything meaningful there. Um, and that's just the nature of these things, like the, the,

• 1:37:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I had the same thing this morning. We, we saw a friend that he invited us to an event and I said, if I go to that, I won't see my fam, my kids for

• 1:37:58John Coogan?

  Like forty-eight hours. Yeah, yeah, it's tough.

• 1:38:00Jordi Hays?

  I say goodnight, eight-thirty, I see them the next day around five.

• 1:38:04John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:38:04Jordi Hays?

  If I go to something in the evening, I won't see them again till the next day.

• 1:38:08John Coogan?

  There, yeah, there is a real trade-off between, uh, like, we, we have said in America, in tech, we work really hard. We also are saying we take our family life really seriously. Something has to give. It's probably the, uh, the, the, the dinner parties and the happy hours for the most part.

• 1:38:25Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:38:26John Coogan?

  Unless they're particularly about.

• 1:38:27Jordi Hays?

  The other thing, I mean, I think, I think a lot of people in, in tech, uh, you, you sort of grew up, uh, hearing that, you know, global warming was gonna make the world uninhabitable at some point in, in the near future. That was the, the sentiment. If you turned on the television, that's what you saw.

• 1:38:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:38:47Jordi Hays?

  And I just remember hearing, you know, even as a teenager, you know, people talking, oh, I don't, I don't know that it'll make sense to have kids, right? If, if the world is so

• 1:38:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:58Jordi Hays?

  bad and dark and, and growing up in coastal California.

• 1:39:01John Coogan?

  My take was always like, no, we need way more kids because they're the, they're the ones that invent the technology that solves the problem. Um, the solution is always like more ingenuity, more people, in my opinion. Uh, I'm not Thomas, Thomas Malthus-pilled. It's crazy to see Malthus coming back. Uh, the Malthusian trap. Are you familiar, Tyler? The Thomas Malthus, the Malthusian trap?

• 1:39:23Jordi Hays?

  Wait, I don't know the trap.

• 1:39:24John Coogan?

  So, so the Malthusian trap was that, uh, Thomas Malthus was an economist, uh, a hundred, two hundred years ago or something, and he looked at the growth rate of, uh, of farming and the growth rate of the population and was projecting exponential growth in population while linear gains in farming. And, and, uh, his conclusion was that we were all gonna starve to death because we would never make enough food. We would never create exponential growth in food production to match the exponential growth rate in the populace. Of course, we did just that. And the number of farmers went from like ninety percent of the population to like two percent of the population. And Although obviously food prices are important and starvation is still an issue,

• 1:40:05John Coogan?

  in general, we, humanity has survived the, the lack of food. And so it's called the Malthusian trap. It's Malthusian ideology to, to be afraid of a linear trend not being able to ever go exponential. And so if you think about like, uh, carbon recapture or anything that is, that is mitigant to, uh, waste heat and pollution and, um, and carbon emissions. Uh, you, you, you, you track this out and you say, well, carbon emissions are growing exponentially. The, the temperature is growing exponentially and our progress on solving that is growing linearly. But all it takes is actually finding the correct exponential solution, which might just be like exponentially growing nuclear or exponentially growing solar.

• 1:40:50John Coogan?

  And then all of a sudden we're, we're having a very different conversation. Anyway, Catherine Boyle, as a parent herself, says Nadia Asperuhov, uh, is right to highlight pragmatic changes as the scaffolding that's required to build a pro-family culture. Flexible work, improving and reducing the cost of education, raising the status of parents. Agree with all that. And like Boyle, I believe that tech has the ability and resources to bring this future to fruition, fruition if it wants to. Oddly, however, it is tech's unmatched capabilities that might be what's holding it back. Tech is arguably the best place in the world for unchecked personal ambition to flourish, particularly for young childish people.

• 1:41:32John Coogan?

  You, uh, grind and get the hundred million dollars out of your laptop. Not a lot of time to raise kids while you're in that process. Uh, but this type of environment can delay or disincentivize family formation. My peers in tech who are reluctant to have children often express fear that it will interrupt the arc of the careers they've worked so hard to build. That I think is the primary tension, not between the family and the state, as Boyle argues, but between the individual and collective ambitions. Both the state and the family ask us to make sacrifices for something bigger than ourselves. And this perhaps is why, why they have historically fought each other for mindshare.

• 1:42:11John Coogan?

  What tech offers is the opposite, a chance to realize a vision that is entirely one's own. Tech worships individual talent. Look at the talent war and the AI researchers that are getting the absolute bag right now. And it's a unique thrill to live and work among peers who don't shy away from greatness. I agree, but it also means that tech has to work harder than other industries to demonstrate that starting a family doesn't require giving up these ambitions. That case can't be made through vibes alone, as any parent can attest who has spent a sleepless night with a sick child before a big meeting, zooming with one hand while playing peekaboo with the other and/or who has missed a deadline because childcare fell

• 1:42:56John Coogan?

  through. The answer to this, more secondary sales, more tender offers. If you're a venture capitalist, you're talking a big game about being pronatalist, you need to put a couple million dollars into the common in a tender and make sure that childcare is paid for. What do you think?

• 1:43:12Jordi Hays?

  I like it. I like it. My, my, my, my lead VC in my last company, the second I told him I was having a baby, he said, "Time for a raise."

• 1:43:24John Coogan?

  Time for a raise.

• 1:43:25Jordi Hays?

  And it was, like, it was very meaningful.

• 1:43:28John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:43:29Jordi Hays?

  Important at that, at that time.

• 1:43:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:31Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, I mean, that, that's the, if you're an entrepreneur and you're building a company and you're having a child and you aren't going to be able to have access to childcare, that is a, that is a...

• 1:43:43John Coogan?

  A serious leg weights while you're running. It's putting an extra 45 on the bench press.

• 1:43:49Jordi Hays?

  Exactly. Maybe 90. Maybe a couple plates on each side.

• 1:43:52John Coogan?

  Maybe a couple plates on each side. Unnecessarily.

• 1:43:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:55John Coogan?

  You need one of those shirts that makes it easier to bench press. Are you familiar with those? We gotta get those. Have you seen these? Yeah.

• 1:44:01Jordi Hays?

  That's our new merch drop.

• 1:44:02John Coogan?

  That is a great merch drop. So it's a compression shirt that basically it keeps your arms like this, like tight. And so when you stretch back...

• 1:44:10Jordi Hays?

  It's just taking some of the weight off.

• 1:44:11John Coogan?

  You get like 20 pounds. And so people do it to get comfortable and like, "Yeah, I can't really do 315, but if I wear the shirt, I can." And then they get comfortable with 315, they do it a bunch, and then they can take the shirt off and then they hit 315 and then they can push up. So yeah, I think that's our next merch drop for sure. For sure. There's some big news coming.

• 1:44:29Jordi Hays?

  Big news.

• 1:44:30John Coogan?

  This will be for the, for the people in the chat first. Let's continue with Nadia. If tech... Wants to embody more pro family values. It needs more skin in the game. It's not enough to tweet about population decline or pass around graphs on it in the group chat. Tech will learn much faster what's required by having kids, raising them and supporting each other through the ups and downs. Pro family culture means figuring out how to meet the family's needs for parental leave, affordable childcare, quality education, and social environments that are welcoming to children and family lifestyles. Until then, the rhetoric will feel less like a movement and more like a mood. Tech has a track record of moving quickly once it figures out what it truly wants. If the pro family turn is real, and I hope it is, then what we need next is to move the discourse from talk to action.

• 1:45:15John Coogan?

  Only then will we be able to say it with a straight face that tech is building not just companies, but families too. Fantastic article, Navia. Thank you for posting that. And if you want to, if you want to, if you want to invest in the public markets, completely unrelatedly, go to public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously.

• 1:45:33Jordi Hays?

  Tried to find the translation.

• 1:45:35John Coogan?

  Sometimes the anti-transition keeps you guessing. Public.com is investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, they're trusted by millions. Oh, you want to transition? Why don't you set up an investment account on public.com for your child? Do your own Gersner account. Tyler, what you got?

• 1:45:49Speaker 02

  It was an anti-transition, just like anti-Memex.

• 1:45:52John Coogan?

  Oh, there we go. There we go. Yeah, all these other, all these other, all these other livestream hosts, they think they need to have the perfect transition. I keep you guessing with the anti-transition.

• 1:46:04Jordi Hays?

  Well, we have some big, big, big breaking news.

• 1:46:10Jordi Hays?

  Elon has hit the timeline and Ani from XAI has new outfits. So, I know.

• 1:46:19John Coogan?

  So for all the Grok-heavy subscribers, get ready to.

• 1:46:23Jordi Hays?

  This is big.

• 1:46:24John Coogan?

  A little virtual try-on.

• 1:46:25Jordi Hays?

  Fortnite skins for your companion.

• 1:46:27John Coogan?

  Didn't we just say this? That that's the way that they'll monetize is that there will be a number of outfits and that the outfits will be priced.

• 1:46:33Jordi Hays?

  Ani's gonna say, I want, I want a Birkin.

• 1:46:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:46:36Jordi Hays?

  I want a Labubu.

• 1:46:37John Coogan?

  I, I think we just unlocked like the real value of the virtual AI companion economy. And all of a sudden, I was previously thinking. This is a single-digit billion-dollar opportunity. Now, the moral stuff is aside. Like, I think me and you are both like, "We don't love this." And that's the point that Jira Tickets makes here. He says, "Sir, we need to get to Mars." And I agree with that. I think the efforts would be better spent getting us to Mars and getting us to AGI and solving physics. And I hope that none of that takes a backseat to this stuff, but...

• 1:47:10Jordi Hays?

  You got the new fits?

• 1:47:11John Coogan?

  Do you have the new outfits already?

• 1:47:12Jordi Hays?

  Are they free, or do you have to pay?

• 1:47:14John Coogan?

  Are there any upgrade picks?

• 1:47:15Speaker 02

  They're free.

• 1:47:16John Coogan?

  There's no in-app purchases yet?

• 1:47:17Speaker 02

  They're all free. No, no in-app purchases yet, unfortunately.

• 1:47:22John Coogan?

  Well, let's hope that one of the upgrade picks is just a donation to the next Mars mission. Maybe put on, instead of being so scantily clad, you could put on a full spacesuit. And then, all that money would go to the next Mars mission, which I am in favor of. But I do think that, you know, the Aliya Akta Yest, I botched that super bad. The die has been cast. The AI companions are on a trajectory to monetize very well, specifically in price discrimination. And so, this is the brilliance of OnlyFans.

• 1:48:03John Coogan?

  And why OnlyFans is so profitable is that there are both power law creators who generate the vast majority of the revenues, and there are power law customers that spend the most money on the individual creators. This is the value of, this is the economic insight in Fortnite. There are power, many, the median Fortnite player probably spends zero. But the biggest whale on Fortnite is probably spending thousands of dollars. And so, that price discrimination, there's going to be someone who is on Grok and talking to Annie and spending thousands of dollars on virtual goods, I would predict. I think that's where this goes.

• 1:48:46Jordi Hays?

  Same thing as the dynamic in mobile gaming.

• 1:48:49John Coogan?

  Mobile gaming's the same.

• 1:48:50Jordi Hays?

  Crazy whales that are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.

• 1:48:52John Coogan?

  Bringing price discrimination into a category that previously did not have it, where it was one-size-fits-all, all-you-can-eat, like, you know, Netflix does not have this. Everyone pays the same price for Netflix. But if there's a version of the product that can ramp up, so you're making more money, and this is the beauty of just online advertising, Meta... Makes, probably makes more money from advertising, um, uh, Aquanauts to you,

• 1:49:23John Coogan?

  than, than someone who has lower, has, has lower pension for, uh, luxury watch shopping.

• 1:49:31Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 1:49:32John Coogan?

  Anyway, uh, Dan Nolan says, "A guy on Reddit built something I've wanted for ages, scraping public data and putting together a leaderboard of real estate agents who appear to seriously get prices wrong." And so, uh, I guess you could go and find the real estate agent who is underpricing assets and then, and then go and buy a house from them. Maybe this is the solution to the housing crisis. Maybe this is alpha for Open Door, in a bull case for Open Door. Uh, Open Door, of course, buys and sells, uh, real estate and houses. And, uh, if there is, uh, if there's a, a market dislocation and an, an inefficiency in the market, you would expect, uh, financial institutions to take advantage.

• 1:50:16Jordi Hays?

  So, this, uh, Real Estates, Real-

• 1:50:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, what you got?

• 1:50:20Jordi Hays?

  Real Estats.org.

• 1:50:22John Coogan?

  Real Estats, that's a good-

• 1:50:23Jordi Hays?

  Having a leaderboard of just the people that misprice assets.

• 1:50:27John Coogan?

  But, and, and they do it to both directions? They overprice and they underprice? I feel like, how, how, how responsible is a real estate agent for mispricing a house? I feel like a lot of that's driven by the home buyer. Like, the home buyer might say, "I know what I'm, I know what I got. I want 3 million for my house." And the real estate agent is like, "But you made some really weird decisions in the remodel. You have four movie theaters."

• 1:50:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, people also will strategically underprice it at listing-

• 1:50:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:55Jordi Hays?

  -in order to create-

• 1:50:56John Coogan?

  Demand and then get an over- Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, uh, there aren't that many people in this neighborhood that need car lifts in their garage. You're like, "But everyone wants car lifts." Everyone has four GT3 RSs that they need to store in the, in, in the plastic. Everyone has supercars in this neighborhood. They're like, "At, at, at 1.5 million?" Yeah, people usually spend 50% of their net worth on cars.

• 1:51:22Jordi Hays?

  Yes, yes, they all should.

• 1:51:24John Coogan?

  Get a 1500 square foot, 1.5 million dollar house in LA and spend it and get four supercars for the next 1.5.

• 1:51:33Jordi Hays?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:51:34John Coogan?

  And secure it all with an unsecured.

• 1:51:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, we have another massive announcement.

• 1:51:38John Coogan?

  What's that?

• 1:51:39Jordi Hays?

  Again, I think everybody listening has been, you know, waiting for this.

• 1:51:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:51:44Jordi Hays?

  Really, I'm feeling the AGI right now.

• 1:51:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:51:47Jordi Hays?

  Feeling the AGI, we gotta update our timeline.

• 1:51:49John Coogan?

  Update our timelines, Jordy.

• 1:51:50Jordi Hays?

  Notion has launched offline.

• 1:51:52John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:51:52Jordi Hays?

  Let's go.

• 1:51:53John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 1:51:54Jordi Hays?

  Give it up for the Notion team.

• 1:51:57Jordi Hays?

  I actually think this, I mean, this is cool. I mean, I, I.

• 1:52:01John Coogan?

  Chopping wood.

• 1:52:02Jordi Hays?

  I used to use Notion a lot. And, you know, even if you have a small feature update, make it, make it feel big.

• 1:52:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:52:09Jordi Hays?

  Clearly, their users are excited about it. Terminally online engineer says, Notion is so funny, announcing an offline mode for a to-do app in 2025.

• 1:52:17John Coogan?

  This is the right thing to do. Don't get distracted. We saw this with Figma. Figma launched, Figma Make, vibe coding platform, super on-trend AI stuff. And then simultaneously, like, yeah, we improved responsive design.

• 1:52:28Jordi Hays?

  No, Figma site.

• 1:52:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, sites for sure, but also just like minor iterations on, you know, the, the opacity layer and, and how, how, how you can implement parallax in your design. Like, you, you, you, you can't get lost in the sauce. You have to stay on the trend and be using the latest tools and, and, and be on the cusp. But also you can't let the culture of, of, you know, regular iteration fall by the wayside. You can't, you can't get distracted by the, by the shiny green tennis ball. Sometimes you have to focus on just, you know, scratching your ear.

• 1:53:09John Coogan?

  This golden.

• 1:53:10Jordi Hays?

  We got a post, we got a very low tan post here from Mopar.

• 1:53:13John Coogan?

  Two, two.

• 1:53:14Jordi Hays?

  Two likes, 61 views.

• 1:53:16John Coogan?

  Under.

• 1:53:16Jordi Hays?

  Highlighting the MIT report that we covered yesterday. 95% of Gen AI pilots at companies are failing. Mopar says, no, babe, your zero ROI is perfect. Big one, scare me. Yeah, I think this is a, this is a real, real problem. There's a lot of Gen AI companies that have sold in pilots to things like healthcare

• 1:53:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:38Jordi Hays?

  systems that are not, these are not going to turn into multi-year contracts.

• 1:53:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:45Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully, a lot of them do, some of them do.

• 1:53:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:53:48Jordi Hays?

  There's still a business there, but your ARR is not necessarily real.

• 1:53:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. We'll see. I, I, I wonder the methodology of this report. I wonder what a generative AI pilot means, what failing means. I, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of companies are using tools that have implemented generative AI features under the hood and they don't even really realize that their software is just getting better. But it's probably deeper in the stack. It's probably a little more, I don't know, obfuscated. And they're just seeing like, oh, the fraud detection algorithm that my, you know, ERP uses is a little more reliable. But I didn't like pilot that.

• 1:54:41John Coogan?

  It's just like the software I use, the tools got better. The, the graphics in video games got better. Like, there, there's not a, a binary moment. People are hoping for the chat GPT moment of generative AI pilots and it might not be coming. We might be on a smoother adoption curve there. Anyway, what else?

• 1:54:59Jordi Hays?

  We have a post here from Julie Chang, very important. Who wants to own Bill Walton's longtime San Diego estate in the Marston Hills neighborhood, which has two homes sitting on 1.3 acres combined? Both homes sit abutting, a trailhead, seven beds, eight baths, listed at $5 million. Absolutely giving it away. This thing looks beautiful.

• 1:55:26Jordi Hays?

  What else we got here? We have, is it Vlad or Mark joining? Vlad is joining in just three minutes, so we'll keep going.

• 1:55:35John Coogan?

  I'm just posting for my personal account, just letting everyone know.

• 1:55:38Jordi Hays?

  Alyssa says she's looking for the most performative man in San Francisco.

• 1:55:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, what is this?

• 1:55:44Jordi Hays?

  Can you explain this, Tyler?

• 1:55:45John Coogan?

  Tyler, do you understand this?

• 1:55:47Speaker 02

  A little bit. So there's this concept of like, you're like performative guy, right? So you can imagine you're going to like a matcha, where do they sell matcha?

• 1:55:57John Coogan?

  Matcha?

• 1:55:58Speaker 02

  Matcha. You go to like a coffee shop?

• 1:56:00John Coogan?

  Okay, he's drinking matcha.

• 1:56:03Speaker 02

  You have a book with you?

• 1:56:04John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, like you with Infinite Jest on the subway.

• 1:56:07Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:56:07John Coogan?

  Like how you were reading Infinite Jest on the subway. That was like a performative thing that you did.

• 1:56:11Speaker 02

  Well, okay.

• 1:56:12John Coogan?

  And how you were telling everyone about how you're, you know, you're a bit of an intellectual and you read Infinite Jest.

• 1:56:17Speaker 02

  Okay, okay, let's move on from this. But yeah, there's like, like Intern Michael, he loves matcha. He's kind of a very performative guy.

• 1:56:26John Coogan?

  Oh, he just likes matcha. Cool.

• 1:56:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:27John Coogan?

  Oh, he's a performative guy. You're taking shots? He can't defend himself. He doesn't have a mic. That's not fair.

• 1:56:33Speaker 02

  But then, I don't know. Yeah, you have like a tote bag?

• 1:56:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:56:37Speaker 02

  It's like a...

• 1:56:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, signaling. It's signaling.

• 1:56:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:56:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I'm just unclear on exactly what people are signaling. Yeah, is it more the aesthetics or is it more like the startup swag? Either way, the SF's Performative Male Contest will be happening at Alamo Square Park on August 22nd at 7:00 PM. They're putting up posters in San Francisco advertising it. They should get a billboard. They should go 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. And we have our first guest of the show, Vlad Tenev. How are you doing, Vlad? Good to meet you.

• 1:57:19Vlad Tenev?

  What's up, guys? Good to meet you. Thanks for having me.

• 1:57:21John Coogan?

  Thanks for joining. Give us, can you give us a little bit of a state of the union on Robinhood? You've launched so many different products. Like, how do you see the shape? How do you define? Are you a financial institution? I remember when I first used the product, probably almost a decade ago now, I guess. It was, it was an app. And now it's a company, now it's a business, now it's an institution. What is the shape of the company today and how has it evolved?

• 1:57:48Vlad Tenev?

  Well, first off, our mission hasn't changed. Our mission has always been to democratize finance for all. And what that means to us is we really see Robinhood as the defender of free markets. And we're building a financial super app, a platform where all of our customers can custody and hold any financial asset or conduct any financial transaction. And obviously, it started with stocks, but it's expanded across multiple domains. We have a credit card, which, in my unbiased opinion, is the best credit card on the market. Banking, which is a high-end, private banking-inspired offering, is coming out very soon.

• 1:58:30Vlad Tenev?

  We offer, I think, the best retirement account on the market for the self-employed entrepreneur, folks that might not have access to a traditional 401K. So really, we've been on this journey, and we've increasingly been expanding the scope and capabilities of what we offer.

• 1:58:47John Coogan?

  Does that mean something like, when I think about, like, legacy financial institutions, I think about, like, an auto loan, a mortgage, like, is that coming down the pipe? I mean, I'm sure you can't comment on specifics, but just like, that shape of experience for consumer finance, like, what are all the touchpoints as you kind of plan the next phase of growth?

• 1:59:08Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, I mean, the scope is broad, right? Any financial asset, any transaction. We actually, a couple of months ago, started piloting a mortgage offering in partnership with Sage Home Loans. And surprisingly, you know, I announced that on X, and it was probably one of my best-performing tweets of the year. I mean, people are really interested in these types of offers from Robinhood. The focus is really on daily habits, the financial products and services that you use on a daily basis. But I think... Serving our customers well with those gives us the opportunity to do these one-time offers. And you could imagine if we serve you well with your banking needs, we would be sort of like

• 1:59:53Vlad Tenev?

  your first call if you want a mortgage. And I think the wrapper behind all this is our Robinhood Gold program. So at first, when I launched, when we launched this, there was skepticism because subscription products never really worked in financial services. But we've seen this interesting thing where someone joins Robinhood, usually to buy a stock or a crypto. They sign up for Robinhood Gold very quickly. Our attach rate for, you know, day one has gone up quite high. And then, once they become a Gold member, they look at what else is offered in the Gold bundle. And even if they're not ready for that service, like a mortgage right away, we usually are top of mind if they ever, you know, become interested in something like that in the

• 2:00:38Vlad Tenev?

  future.

• 2:00:39Jordi Hays?

  How do you think about services broadly over the long term? I think our generation oftentimes saw, you know, having somebody at your bank, for example, that you could call and talk to as kind of a bug, right? And then, at some point, you realize, hey, this is actually a feature. It's actually great to have somebody on the other end that you can call if there's an issue or things like that. It's very different. How are you thinking? Yeah, it's a different margin profile. But how are you thinking about that side? And especially in the context of AI and giving people that ability to kind of have these like new ways of interacting with platforms. I could imagine a world in the future where somebody can call their, you know, call Robinhood,

• 2:01:22Jordi Hays?

  effectively call Robinhood and have a conversation with the platform and that person not necessarily even being human.

• 2:01:27Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, I mean, we're already basically there. You can have a chat interaction with a Robinhood agent, and the majority of our cases are handled by our in-house AI. And I think people don't realize this about Robinhood, but, you know, we've looked at where we are relative to others in our industry. And I think we're best in class. Like, we're doing very sophisticated things with AI, both internally and in the product through Robinhood Cortex. The service model has evolved, and I think what it's going to look like in the future is if you're a customer that's high net worth or a little bit older.

• 2:02:10Vlad Tenev?

  And then we serve an increasing number of these customers as time goes on. I mean, I'm talking to customers on a semi-regular basis who are thinking about moving hundreds of millions into their Robinhood account. And I wasn't having those types of conversations a year ago. But we have Robinhood Concierge that gives you a high-touch experience for those types of customers. And the aspiration of the AI team is let's just make sure the baseline level of support that everyone gets is world-class with like an increasing amount of sophistication. And I think we've been making a ton of progress and like I mentioned, already, I think best in class in terms of how we use AI.

• 2:02:53Jordi Hays?

  How do you, let's talk about IPOs. That's like the number one thing I wanted to get your kind of updated thinking on. I'm curious how you expect the IPO process will evolve. Obviously, we covered the Figma IPO live at NICE. It was an incredible day. It was unique to our industry because it's a product that many, I'm sure everybody that's listening to this has used at some point or another. But there was certainly a frustration from the retail community and I'm sure even a frustration from your side, right? People were able to get into, get in at the IPO price, but not necessarily as much allocation as some would have liked. I'm sure you were doing everything, you and the team were doing everything you possibly

• 2:03:38Jordi Hays?

  could to get as much allocation for your users as possible. But how do you think that process is evolving now that, you know, we have millions and millions of investors in the United States that are smart enough to know when they want to get in, you know, and

• 2:03:54John Coogan?

  At the IPO.

• 2:03:54Jordi Hays?

  At the IPO.

• 2:03:55John Coogan?

  Which is just a completely different shift from a decade ago. I mean, we have, we have multiple ways of going public with direct listings, traditional IPOs, SPACs, like the landscape's changed a lot and the appetite for these products has changed too.

• 2:04:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and so I'm curious like what kind of change you're personally pushing for and what role Robinhood will play in that.

• 2:04:13Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, and by the way, a lot of my friends were with you guys there. You know, Andrew Reed from Boya, Danny, I believe.

• 2:04:23John Coogan?

  Danny Reimer, yeah, index.

• 2:04:26Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, shout out to those guys, early Robinhood investors as well. Our, our approach to this, we, you guys probably know, four years ago, we rolled out this product IPO access. We started with some companies that were going public in 2021 and then our own IPO had at the time the, the biggest, or if not one of the biggest, retail allocations of over 20%. And at first, it was, it was kind of a challenge to get companies excited about this. There was skepticism about the value of retail. The companies were concerned that, you know, retail would, would sell and they wouldn't hold. And over time, that shifted to the point where, you know, nowadays,

• 2:05:11Vlad Tenev?

  the majority of companies that are interested in going public are coming to us and talking to us about retail. And I think that's an awesome shift. And where I'd like to take that is even earlier in the lifecycle. Now we're helping companies and retail get access to IPOs. But can we go to late-stage privates? Can we go early-stage privates? Can we go seed rounds where actually Robinhood can offer capital as a service to entrepreneurs? And we can deliver a button where, you know, you, you press the button, maybe you issue some information

• 2:05:50Vlad Tenev?

  and you get capital for your business deposited directly into a, a Robinhood account for, for you to operate.

• 2:05:57Jordi Hays?

  Let's, let's kind of go, could we go through, could we, could we kind of talk through those specific stages? And, and kind of what the product would look like? So, so on the one hand, late-stage privates, you, over the summer, you had talked about tokenized products that, that could involve late-stage privates. That's super exciting. How, how are those conversations going? This is such a like hot, hot button issue, obviously, companies and, and CFOs that are, that are worried about, you know, being mark to market, but it's ultimately something that. Everyday retail investors want so badly, right? People are smart.

• 2:06:36Jordi Hays?

  They know they can identify generational companies and CEOs and teams and they want it. So it's going to happen eventually, right? But at the same time, there's this incredible friction at this moment in time in order to get to that point.

• 2:06:52Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah. So I started making a public stance on this whole thing with an op ed in the Washington Post in January. And I think that op ed was basically universally acclaimed. People got very excited about it. Everyone's on board. But of course, I'm not one to just write op eds. I think a lot of people are doing that. I want to go and do the thing and actually execute on these things. And as it turns out, execution and whenever you're the first to do something, it can be a little bit messy. It can be a little bit unclear. But going back to our mission, we believe in free markets.

• 2:07:32Vlad Tenev?

  We want people to own the means of production to the greatest extent possible. AI can be this massive transformative force. And I think it's very, very important to have everyday people aligned with that, right? If you're worried about AI having disruption on the labor market, you could either fight it, which you're more likely to do if you have no ownership stake. Or if you have an owner, you're kind of rooting for that innovation. So I'd like to live in that latter world. And we see a path. We have the technology to do it. We've had a lot of companies actually come to us and they want to be a part of providing access to private markets.

• 2:08:15Vlad Tenev?

  And I think at first, there will be a little bit of hesitation, just like for IPO access. But I think five years from now, we'll be looking around. Retail will have access and we'll all wonder why we were so foolish and having such resistance to being in this world. So I'd like to accelerate that and I'm very motivated to make this happen in a way that addresses everyone's concerns, even the companies with the real time pricing that you mentioned.

• 2:08:48Jordi Hays?

  Totally. Yeah, somebody needs to come in and just rock the boat. Right, like it wasn't, you know, it seemed obvious that it wasn't going to happen totally organically, or it has been happening, but in ways that aren't necessarily good for investors, right? Like the meme from the last week is everybody's being offered these like incredibly layered SPVs. And that that just shows that like capitalism is going to find a way to allow this demand to find supply. But if you have all this friction, it's not going to happen in a way that actually is is good for for the demand side.

• 2:09:25Vlad Tenev?

  And I think this is an incidental, I don't think anyone sat around the table and said, you know, we don't want retail investors 80% of the market that's unaccredited to not have access to, you know, the leading innovation companies of our era. I think it was incidental. In the past couple of decades, it's gotten harder and harder for companies to go public. There's more, you know, process. It's a greater burden and some companies are just avoiding it all together. And at the same time, the private markets funding environment for startups has gotten much easier to the point where, you know, now companies can raise tens of billions, if not more, in the private markets. And I think the outcome of that, the collateral

• 2:10:10Vlad Tenev?

  damage is that retail is not getting access to the leading company in the space, the emerging space industry, and many of the leading companies in the AI industry, which I think is, yeah, that should be allowed to continue.

• 2:10:28Jordi Hays?

  How do you how do you think about offerings? You mentioned potentially at one point having retail be able to access even earlier stage opportunities like, you know, maybe seed or series A. How would, how do you kind of, what's your vision for for that kind of product? Given that a lot of Robin Hood users are going to be, you know, used to to making investment and maybe changing their mind about it and getting out of it. And as we all know, if you back a company at seed, you're riding with them for a very long time. And maybe you can make, you know, maybe there's features that would allow you to to let people get out over time. But I'm curious kind of what your vision for for that would look like.

• 2:11:07Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, I think the interesting point is that the customer and the market are slightly different between an early-stage seed investment and a late-stage private. So, early-stage seed investment, there's primary capital. Your market is entrepreneurs that are in need of a capital-as-a-service offering. So, whether it's on-chain or off-chain, what I think would be very attractive is pressing a button, putting in some information, and getting money into your business bank account as easy as possible. When I was a seed-stage entrepreneur, I spent half my time fundraising, if not more.

• 2:11:52Vlad Tenev?

  And so, the time at which your time is most critical, and you need to build your product and make sure your business works, you're spending a ton of time trying to fundraise. So, I think it's very, very valuable if you lower the friction to getting capital. You'll get more startups, more entrepreneurship, which is great for the long term. So, there's one. If it's a late-stage private, your market increasingly becomes secondary transactions from early shareholders and employees. And I think that's very, very different. And I think any private's offering has to deal with these realities, that you have to have two slightly different customers and constituents.

• 2:12:34Vlad Tenev?

  And I think where they failed in the past is by treating them kind of as one. So, we're thinking a lot about this. I think as time goes on, I'll get much more specific, but I think what you'll see is various mechanisms. The way it's going to work is Robin Hood will get exposure through various means to these assets, will hold them in a box, very much like how stable coins work. You know, you get exposure to dollars or treasuries, hold them in a box. And, you know, distribution overseas will have tokenization as kind of a delivery mechanism.

• 2:13:13Vlad Tenev?

  And in the US, it'll be tokenization, hopefully, once the regulatory environment matures around that. But there's also lots of other means to give access to privates.

• 2:13:26John Coogan?

  Is there a risk that companies wind up like changing their docs to try and push back against this? I remember forward contracts were pretty popular in the secondary market for a while and then companies started saying, hey, no forward contracts, early employees, like you gotta go to us because we have a rofer and we want to offer that to our investors.

• 2:13:46Jordi Hays?

  The beauty of a forward contract is...

• 2:13:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but you know, they, they, they, they, like capitalism finds a way as always, but I'm just wondering if there's other like layers of abstraction that might be more dominant, like they don't have nearly the brand with retail traders, but there's a world where you're, you're slicing venture funds and offering those to retail traders. And then the companies might be a little bit more on board because the, because like they don't wind up with a retail army that's, you know, like upset with their latest product release or, you know, monitoring them, but they might still see the economic upside or exposure. What do you think about that?

• 2:14:25Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, I think all of those are right. I mean, some, some of those vehicles exist already. And like you said, I think we'll find a way. I do think over time, companies will see the value of this. It'll be, right now, the companies that are coming to us for IPO access see that when you have a, an established retail base as a public company, there, there are certain advantages, right? Your customers are also active shareholders in, in many cases. They, they can defend you. They can give you good feedback, but they're a constituency that, you know, companies are beginning to value more and more. They

• 2:15:09Vlad Tenev?

  want to hear from them. They want to encourage retail participation. And I think you'll see that at earlier stages because companies will believe, and I think it's true, that cultivating retail interest early has a compounding effect as, as you go public and, and even beyond.

• 2:15:28John Coogan?

  I know this story has been like beaten to death, but we talked to Mickey Malka about the round that came together in the middle of the night during GameStop, but I'm interested to hear just about what has changed technically and then financially and then from a brand perspective in terms of like the going through that cycle, making it through, but then just having a lot of folks out there who are like, oh, like I had a bad experience and I'm still I'm still holding the grudge. How do you win them back? What's the strategy, both on the actual like business building side and then the messaging, the changes that you made? Like, what's the full postmortem?

• 2:16:12Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, there's this phrase that trust is slowly gained and can be lost in an instant. And I have validated that that's basically true. When January 28th, the date that we'll live in infamy and Robin Hood lore came down, we saw, you know, hit to our NPS, obviously on social media and across every channel. It was abundantly clear that customers were unhappy and we've had to climb out of that slowly over time. And I think there have been moments where we've sort of like gained a net promoter score.

• 2:16:53Vlad Tenev?

  It's clear that, you know, we've done good things and we've sort of like accelerated earning trust from customers, but there's no magic formula where I snap my fingers and say the right words and, and suddenly, you know, you make up for that. I think that it's done by delivering on our value proposition and being sort of like a consistent trusted member of the ecosystem for many, many years. And it was probably like, A year and a half ago where it became clear like, okay, we've like shaken off and turned the corner and I think we've been, we've been on a great trajectory since then with some of the highest net promoter scores in the past four years and customers are very,

• 2:17:38Vlad Tenev?

  very happy and you know, I think we just have to keep executing. There's, the only way is through, right?

• 2:17:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

• 2:17:47Jordi Hays?

  As somebody who runs a platform that actually facilitates stock trading at scale, what gets you excited about the potential of tokenized stocks? I think there's a lot of people that are more crypto native that are very excited about the potential and they talk about how easy it will be to trade and transition in and out of positions and somebody might say, well, I can open, I can open my brokerage right now and do that today. And so that's maybe a luxury of being in a great market like America, but where are you particularly excited about the intersection of traditional finance and crypto and where

• 2:18:32Jordi Hays?

  do you think there might be unnecessary or hype is overblown?

• 2:18:38Vlad Tenev?

  Well, I think that in the same way that stable coins have become a great delivery mechanism for US dollars outside the US, tokenized stocks will be a great mechanism, probably the dominant mechanism for US shares being delivered to retail outside the US. Inside the US, there is benefit going from 24/5, which we offer through Robinhood 24-hour market today, to 24/7 as well as self custody and DeFi applications. I think

• 2:19:14Vlad Tenev?

  We haven't scratched the surface for what those can be yet, but as the regulatory environment matures, I think there's a lot of really interesting potential. And it's also the cost of operating because more and more of what's traditionally been applications and, you know, centralized third parties run by humans, more of that in crypto is being replaced by software. So you have, you know, transfer agency, payment processors, clearing houses. All of this is just now in software. And what that allows us to do is lower the cost.

• 2:19:54Vlad Tenev?

  And eventually, if you lower the cost enough, the value gets best packed to customers. So I view it as, you know, the next stage in the technological evolution of financial services, going from, you know, pen and paper filing cabinet to mainframe to cloud and then blockchain infrastructure is the next stage in that.

• 2:20:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it feels like there's this like almost barbell emerging within Robinhood where you are going like more individual expression, the ability for a single retailer, retail investor to buy a single share in a pre-IPO company. That's like an incredibly high agency thing to do. And then simultaneously, you recently launched managed investing, which feels like at the opposite end of the scale. And I'm wondering if you see this more as, is this like a funnel where people move from one group to the other? Are these distinct groups? And I'd love to just hear more about the managed investing product. How's the business going?

• 2:20:59John Coogan?

  And how that weaves into the rest of the landscape of the product you're building?

• 2:21:05Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, I think the end state is uh gonna look less like people graduating from self-directed trading and active trading to, you know, retirement and more passive products and more that uh customers are gonna have multiple accounts.

• 2:21:24Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 2:21:25Vlad Tenev?

  So you'll have your discretionary self-directed account on Robinhood. You might have a joint account with your spouse. You'll have your retirement account and some of those will be passively managed and others will be uh actively managed by by uh by yourself. And I think that as we've gotten deeper into understanding our customers, we see that it's less two different groups of people. Even the active traders are interested in retirement products and sometimes have an even larger bucket of their capital that is managed on their behalf.

• 2:21:59Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:22:00Vlad Tenev?

  And so that's why, you know, we've been focusing a lot on the customer experience and the technology front on serving your broad financial needs.

• 2:22:12Jordi Hays?

  How has your uh you know, approach to running the company changed having having been in the game for uh over a decade now? I can imagine uh in the earlier days when markets were ripping broadly, there's all this activity. I'm sure it was easy to get kind of caught up in the hype a little bit and uh I'm sure now I would imagine you've you've you've uh kind of adapted to try to stay as level as you possibly can when when uh you know, we've been uh joking around on the show recently, counting up how you know, you you certainly need more than 10 fingers to count all the different top signals. So how do you how do you kind of uh stay even keeled even when markets are euphoric

• 2:22:57Jordi Hays?

  and and wild in so many ways?

• 2:23:00Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah, I mean, it's much, it's much easier to stay about your wits when things are improving, right? Even though it can be challenging, I think when, when markets are going up and everyone's looking at, you know, increased stock prices, whether it's our employees or, you know, investors, we, we just like to tell ourselves, we shouldn't get complacent. We've got a huge opportunity in front of us. The job's not finished. And then, you know, at the same time, in 2022, when interest rates went up and, you know, our stock traded below $7 a share, it was trading basically at cash value. You have to tell people that,

• 2:23:44Vlad Tenev?

  you know, you, you have to make sure people aren't discouraged and they, they, they think that there's, you know, a wonderful future worth fighting for, both outside the company and the environment and, and also here. So you go through enough of these, and I think we've been through multiple waves of, of ups and downs. And I, I'd like to think I've, I've developed a little bit of a wisdom about it through experience, right? I, I started the company writing all the code or a large portion of it myself. And, you know, you sort of evolved with the company. And I, I think I've been fortunate to be part of ups and downs. And I think now I just, I, I enjoy all of it, you know, bring, bring

• 2:24:27Vlad Tenev?

  it on and each one is a learning experience and an opportunity to kind of like develop some more tools in the toolbox.

• 2:24:35Jordi Hays?

  Totally. Can you give us an update on Harmonic?

• 2:24:38John Coogan?

  I was about to ask.

• 2:24:39Vlad Tenev?

  Oh, yeah. So Harmonic is building mathematical superintelligence. And what that means is we, we want to build something that can solve math problems at a level exceeding the best humans. I, I don't know if you guys were math people in your, in your, uh, uh, school days, but we actually recently-

• 2:25:05Jordi Hays?

  Word cells.

• 2:25:07John Coogan?

  I dropped out of differential equations.

• 2:25:10Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:11John Coogan?

  That's where I topped out.

• 2:25:12Vlad Tenev?

  Differential equations are are hard and very useful. But, uh, yeah, we'll have machines doing them for us.

• 2:25:20John Coogan?

  Thank you. I appreciate that.

• 2:25:23Vlad Tenev?

  Um, yeah, essentially, we, uh, developed a model called Aristotle that has gold medal level performance on the International Mathematical Olympiad, which is a very difficult test. Off the shelf AI models like GPT-5, Grok-4, all the things that you can use, don't do well on this exam at all. Um, so this is one area where humans still do very, very well relative to the AIs. And the reason is when you have a, a very difficult mathematics problem, um, it's not just like computing big numbers, right? It's, you know, logical, difficult challenges that require a spark of genius and actually

• 2:26:07Vlad Tenev?

  require you to take nine or 10 correct logical steps. And, and if you're an AI model that hallucinates, if you get one of those wrong, the, the result is, is done. So what you have to do is build a, a very strong way to verify the output of, of your AI model, which means that, uh, you have to control hallucinations and you have to make sure every, uh, line or piece of output, uh, follows logically from, from what happens before it. And we think that this is going to be a new paradigm in AI models. And it's a little bit different than what everyone else is doing because, uh, nobody's really tackling the, the verification problem. And more and more of our software code is going to be written by AI.

• 2:26:52Vlad Tenev?

  And we're, we're in a future already where the job of an advanced software engineer is no longer to write code, but it's to like review code that's written by AI. And as that becomes more voluminous, you know,

• 2:27:08Vlad Tenev?

  The humans reviewing it is both a very sad existence for our top software engineers, also impractical. You're not going to review hundreds of pages of stuff. So Harmonic has figured out how to solve this problem. And I think the applications are beyond just math, but any domain where accuracy is critical from computer software.

• 2:27:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, I'll give you, I'll give you an example. So Copilot, they've, they've added the ability to add Copilot to Excel.

• 2:27:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:27:40Jordi Hays?

  But then they had to add like a heavy disclaimer that basically said, don't rely on this, don't rely on Copilot for anything important because we make mistakes. And I think that hallucination.

• 2:27:52Vlad Tenev?

  And now you have to double check all of your spreadsheets and all of the calculations in them, right? And yeah, I think, I think it's a big problem, not just for spreadsheets, but you know, think about control systems for autonomous vehicles and all of this safety critical code. In order for AI to be used to generate it, we need to solve this hallucination problem.

• 2:28:14John Coogan?

  Did your team find problem six on the IMO as difficult as everyone else? It was this combinatorics problem. It seemed like everyone was struggling with it.

• 2:28:23Vlad Tenev?

  Oh, gosh, you know about this.

• 2:28:24John Coogan?

  Um, are there any glimmers of hope for solving that? Or is it intractable? Is it some sort of wall that we've run into?

• 2:28:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And what are your ambitions for next year with the IMO? Are you guys gonna take it?

• 2:28:35John Coogan?

  Go for the perfect score?

• 2:28:37Vlad Tenev?

  So we, we had, uh, we had proofs for five out of the six problems, formal, formal proofs that didn't require humans to verify.

• 2:28:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:28:46Vlad Tenev?

  Uh, we did not solve number six, even though I was really hoping, uh, we would. But yeah, it turns out that the solution to that problem.

• 2:28:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:55Vlad Tenev?

  Was a tiling. It was a tiling problem, but the solution was the exact tiling used at the, at the floor of the Sunshine Coast Airport in Queensland, Australia.

• 2:29:07John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:29:07Vlad Tenev?

  Which is where, uh, which, which is where the IMO was held this year. So the human contestants had an advantage. They all walked through that airport.

• 2:29:15John Coogan?

  Oh, so it was in their mind.

• 2:29:17Vlad Tenev?

  And basically were given the answer.

• 2:29:18John Coogan?

  Interesting. That's a fascinating piece of lore. Thank you for sharing that.

• 2:29:21Jordi Hays?

  All right. So next year, have a humanoid.

• 2:29:24John Coogan?

  Perfect score. Oh, yeah. The humanoid needs to go through.

• 2:29:26Jordi Hays?

  All around the city of the location.

• 2:29:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Get the, get the photo, scan that into the, to the context window. The, the full IMO contestant experience, uh, context window is important.

• 2:29:36Vlad Tenev?

  Oh, ne- next year for sure. Problem six and problems like that will definitely, uh, will definitely be solved.

• 2:29:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the pressures, the pressure will be on for you guys because it's the main, it's the main thing, you know, the other labs can be like, well, we, we, we do math, but we're really a consumer, you know.

• 2:29:54John Coogan?

  I don't really care about it. Yeah. No, this is.

• 2:29:55Vlad Tenev?

  Well, I don't know. I mean, once you have the gold medal, I guess the, the perfect score is a, is a, is a big accomplishment, but I think our sights are a little bit higher. I think we're, we're interested in kind of two things. One is solving a unsolved problem in science and mathematics and actually contributing to the state of the art in one of these quantitative fields, like the Riemann hypothesis, if you guys are familiar.

• 2:30:20John Coogan?

  Navier-Stokes, same thing, right?

• 2:30:22Vlad Tenev?

  Yeah. If we could solve that, uh, Navier-Stokes is, uh, I'm less excited about because I'm, I'm more of a theorist.

• 2:30:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:30:30Vlad Tenev?

  But Riemann hypothesis would be good.

• 2:30:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:30:32Vlad Tenev?

  Um, also just delivering this technology to individuals and corporations in a form that they could actually use. So I think there, there's lots of things coming, but uh, another IMO gold medal maybe, maybe isn't top of the list.

• 2:30:48Jordi Hays?

  Last question. Have you, uh, have you, did you give Terrence Tao a call?

• 2:30:52John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. We were riffing on this on the show.

• 2:30:55Jordi Hays?

  We were like, who, who should give him a maxed out contract?

• 2:30:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. What are your thoughts?

• 2:31:00Vlad Tenev?

  So I, I don't know if you guys knew this about me, but I was a math PhD student at UCLA and I actually went to UCLA to, uh, study under Professor Tao.

• 2:31:12John Coogan?

  I had no idea. That's amazing.

• 2:31:15Vlad Tenev?

  I, I know, I know him very, very well. Yeah.

• 2:31:17John Coogan?

  That's great. Fantastic. Well, yeah, I hope he puts some good outcomes there.

• 2:31:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was joking, uh, if you're saying.

• 2:31:23John Coogan?

  Seems like he does great stuff.

• 2:31:24Jordi Hays?

  I had a non-traditional background, starting Harmonic. I got a math PhD.

• 2:31:29John Coogan?

  Under Terrence Tao at UCLA. That is fantastic. Uh, well, thank you so much for joining us.

• 2:31:34Jordi Hays?

  Great hanging. Appreciate the updates.

• 2:31:36John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day.

• 2:31:38Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:31:39John Coogan?

  And we have Mark Cuban joining the stream. We invited him on after him and Jordy got in a little timeline in turmoil. Friendly dust up. AI advertisements. We have a lot more news on the front of AI ads. We have more news on what Meta is doing with AI. We have more news on what OpenAI is likely doing in the world of advertisements. We're going to debate that. There it is. Stream, Mark. How are you doing?

• 2:32:05Mark Cuban?

  Good, guys. How y'all?

• 2:32:07John Coogan?

  What's happening? Thanks so much for taking the time. Good to meet you. Where should we kick it off, Jordy? Where should we start? Dive straight into the debate over artificial intelligence and advertising.

• 2:32:17Mark Cuban?

  Sure.

• 2:32:18John Coogan?

  Maybe you could set the stage for us. What, what set off your alarm bells? What triggered your initial worry about this idea of ads in LLMs?

• 2:32:31Mark Cuban?

  Because this isn't the internet, right? It's not just a normal digital platform. It's, it's a platform that depending on how it's trained, depending on what pre-prompts you put in, it could be very manipulative. And there's not really age limitations at all. There's not really any limitations whatsoever. And normally I'd be, let's just be laissez faire, right? The market is the market. But you've already heard, you know, of stories of kids going down these rabbit holes and, you know, other people being told, you know, to kill themselves and you just, you just don't know what can happen. So if I, if, if I build a model and it becomes popular, even if it's only a niche model, right?

• 2:33:16Mark Cuban?

  Just like there's Headspace and there's Calm. Let's just say I build the Calm AI large language model and I have millions and millions of users and I want, and I have an advertiser who sells Xanax or sells, you know, whatever, right? And they're trying to get more sales and I need the money. I can easily, easily train this thing to manipulate people into doing things we typically would not allow people to do. And that's my concern. And so if we just want to put up, you know, um, Just little ad, traditional graphics, JPEG ads, all, you know, put them into the chat

• 2:33:59Mark Cuban?

  list on the left-hand side, great, you can do all the display ads you want, you could do video there, all you want, but if it's in the response that comes back from the model, boy, you're, you're going to have lots of problems.

• 2:34:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think, I think Sam Altman said something to this effect, saying that artificial intelligence will be superhuman at persuasion before it is truly super intelligent, it will be very good at convincing people, so it is reasonable. What do you think of Sam Altman's latest commentary on how OpenAI might get into this world, that the actual LLM interaction, the chat would not be, would not be monetizable, but if you, if it made a recommendation to buy a product, and then you said, hey, I want you to go check out for me, it sends out?

• 2:34:45Mark Cuban?

  It's already doing that, right?

• 2:34:46John Coogan?

  And it gets the referral fee, is that okay?

• 2:34:48Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, it's already doing it, you know, it's, it's, you know, it's one thing to have the model itself convey and try to manipulate, it's a whole nother thing when there's a search query.

• 2:35:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:01Mark Cuban?

  Right, we get a lot of traffic from OpenAI ChatGPT for costplusdrugs.com. In fact, I've used it because sometimes if I want a price for one of our drugs, and I don't want to take the time to look at the latest price list, I'll just put in what's the price for, you know, Deriprim, whatever it may be, and it's right there.

• 2:35:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:35:22Mark Cuban?

  And so, yeah, of course, they can extend that, but response is a whole, and models are, are smart enough to know what the difference between a response to a query versus influencing and engaging in a chat.

• 2:35:36John Coogan?

  I guess the question is.

• 2:35:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I, I think to, to double down on what you're saying, an example, if you're going from search, which is people coming in with a specific intent, and maybe doing some product research, and you have ads, and you have, you know, organic listings or webpages, that's one thing, but if, if, if various AI models are seen as trusted advisors.

• 2:36:01Jordi Hays?

  Uh, if you compare that to a situation, if I ask John, what kind of car should I get? And John starts giving me answers and saying, uh, like, I think you should, I really think you should get this car. It's really nice. And then I buy it and then later I find out John was getting a 10% kickback. I'm like, I hopefully I like the car, but if I didn't, what are you doing? You know, and this happens in a business context too. You might, you know, people get in hot water all the time because they're taking referrals. Yeah.

• 2:36:28Mark Cuban?

  In this particular case, it's really easy, just like, you know, there's, you know, a emoji for sources or just says sources. You could put a dollar sign just to show they're being compensated.

• 2:36:38John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. And do you think that needs to happen at like the FTC, FCC level? Or are you, do you think?

• 2:36:43Mark Cuban?

  I don't know the legal aspect of it enough. You know, hopefully it's self enforced, but you know, there's idiots and assholes who don't self enforce.

• 2:36:52John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:36:52Mark Cuban?

  And particularly for medical stuff. I mean, it's easier to talk to chat GPT about your own personal medical situation than it is to find a doctor to talk to sometimes.

• 2:37:02John Coogan?

  But does that calm example you gave matter? Because, uh, like I, I, I imagine that there'll be a power law outcome here. And yes, I could set up a search engine that serves, that serves ads and doesn't disclose that they're ads. But how am I going to take market share from Google? People are going to go to Google and Google does say when it's an ad. And so like, as long as the power law winner is a good actor, we kind of get a good outcome.

• 2:37:27Jordi Hays?

  There's also an interesting thing where there's this self, self enforcing sort of positive effect, which is if, if people rely on chat GPT, for example, to help them do product research and buy the right products. And you buy a bunch of bad products in a row because they're just pushing the, the product that, that they're getting paid the most. Eventually I do think that consumers are smart enough to realize, ah, I'm not going to use this app anymore.

• 2:37:50Mark Cuban?

  I wouldn't agree with that, Jordy, because I think people are primed for misinformation these days. You see it in healthcare continuously. You know, you saw it with COVID vaccines. People under deathbed saying, I wish I had taken the vaccine, you know? And you see it now with, you know, um, raw milk where now there's more people who have, you know, there's. Examples of people who have died and people just don't care. Yeah. You know, they just go on and maybe they'll say, you know, chat G P T is woke. So I'm using right G P T. Yeah. And that's because those are the kinds of answers I want. Because, you know, there are people who want to be influenced and want to be part of a group.

• 2:38:31Mark Cuban?

  When it comes to the product decisions, just like we saw the anti Bud Light and that kind of builds. And you see pro right wing products. I just don't know that it is an efficient market enough where people are going to take responsibility for just making a bad product choice and then going to another source. There's just so much personal identity and how we use technology. That's part of my concern.

• 2:38:58Jordi Hays?

  How how worried would would you say you are about A I broadly? I think over the last few months, the industry has woken up to, uh, you know, a year ago, people were kind of laughing about A I safety, right? And and thinking about these fast takeoff scenarios. Now I think people are kind of waking up and worried about the general well being. If you just give hundreds of millions of people, you know, unlimited access to these tools, you know, they are gonna, there, there is gonna be some effects. Some people will be good, some people will be bad. But but what's your, what's your high level read?

• 2:39:33Mark Cuban?

  Well, it's changed a lot. We went from fear of the Terminator.

• 2:39:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:36Mark Cuban?

  To fear of being influenced in ways we didn't expect because they're such good communicators. Right? We can't talk to other people or we feel, you know, shy or not open in communicating with other people, experts or friends or otherwise. But this is our best friend who never gives us a hard time. And depending on how it's programmed, we'll compliment. What a great question, Jordy. What a great. That is a really interesting approach. So a lot of things to be concerned with there, particularly because A I is not smart. Yep. Right? A I is just statistical right now, and I'm of the mindset that that's not going to change for a long time.

• 2:40:20Mark Cuban?

  You know, one of the reasons that you don't see full self driving cars. That are just everybody using no matter what is because it's it's easy. There's so many adversarial things that can happen to a car.

• 2:40:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:32Mark Cuban?

  You know, we have um a Australian, many Australian German shepherd or a million Australian shepherd, right? Tux and about six years old, I trust tux at an intersection to know when to cross before, you know, that he's never been to before, before I trust a car. And that's the whole point with AI because they're they're just rules and laws and latencies that they that it can't account for.

• 2:40:59Jordi Hays?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:41:00Mark Cuban?

  It's all text, some graphics, some video, but it's always behind. And then that's part one. Part two, we're I think we're going to see a groundswell in how um intellectual property is dealt with, a groundswell change in how IP is dealt with. Because there was for a long time, it's been publisher perish. Get your stuff out there, get it into journals, make it available so that you can present yourself as being an expert. Well, the minute you do that right now, it's going to get absorbed into, you know, training data for these models and you've lost everything you've just created.

• 2:41:38Jordi Hays?

  Well, what if I want to, what if I'm taking the side of big raw milk and I want to and I want to get people and so I should just write as much as I can about how great it is?

• 2:41:46Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, you're people are going to use bots to try to influence, to post things to try to influence like the um robots dot text for AI, you know, for AI.

• 2:41:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:56Mark Cuban?

  You can you can structure it in ways where you can set up sites where you can tell it exactly where to go, you know, tell it all why raw milk is amazing.

• 2:42:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:05Mark Cuban?

  Right, but the bigger point is AI doesn't understand death. AI doesn't understand pain. AI doesn't understand context. AI doesn't know what happened two minutes ago. It doesn't know that there was a plane crash as it's about to tell you or something happened, right? AI can't tell you why that ball fell off the table unless you tell it, you know, this ball fell off the table, what happened next, right? It's just not smart. And as long as it's not smart, A, it can be influenced and B, you're just not going to know what it's going to do next because it can't, it doesn't have judgment.

• 2:42:41John Coogan?

  So what would you tell the folks at OpenAI and the other foundation model labs on how to structure their business? It feels like a firewall between there needs to be some sort of truth-seeking organization that's focused on delivering the highest quality results and then on the flip side, you have a monetization team.

• 2:43:00Mark Cuban?

  No, I mean, you can't check for quality. That's impossible.

• 2:43:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course you can. You can always benchmark these things or just vibe test them with the audience.

• 2:43:11Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, but Jordi was giving me shit online. I was giving Jordi shit online.

• 2:43:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:43:15Mark Cuban?

  My vibe test is going to be completely different, right?

• 2:43:17John Coogan?

  What I'm saying is like, Google does try and deliver the highest quality search results for a particular query and then separately, they have an ad auction function that adds as an ad platform and those two teams are separate. And so like, if your age is showing up as one of those like knowledge boxes on Google, you can't just pay to have them change it. Like, that's a separate business line and it's a separate team and they are separate products in the UI. Yes, they exist on the same page, but they're separate.

• 2:43:50Mark Cuban?

  And that's fine, right? I mean, to me, the bigger questions are, what's the value proposition for AI as we understand it today? Or at least as I understand it today, right? I don't see AI getting smart. I look at AI and I think it's the world's best library. Let me explain it another way. We all have that one friend that remembers everything. Everything, right? Hey, what did we do that one day back in college? Remember when, you know, our one buddy, oh yeah, this is da-da-da-da. That's AI. It'll remember everything. It'll give you the, you know, if you give it A, B, and C, it'll figure out D, E, and F, right? But it doesn't even know XYZ exists, just like you're right.

• 2:44:33Mark Cuban?

  So it is just like the world's biggest library. It is just like a meeting of the minds of just regurgitation. And so knowing that, then you have to, there's going to be so much competition between the models. That is the biggest driver right now in terms of revenue generation, right? Because

• 2:44:57Mark Cuban?

  There's not, there'll be five, six, whatever it is foundational models before this consolidation. But beyond that, there's gonna be millions of models, millions and millions of models. And every brand is going to need a model, particularly like in healthcare. Like if you are Stanford Medical, right? If you are Mayo Clinic, if you're M D Anderson, you're not gonna just, you know, put out all your I P from the doctors and researchers and scientists you're paying so that Chat G P T can absorb it and have the benefit of all that knowledge. So it remembers everything that, that all your doctors and scientists did. You're gonna keep that to yourself. And so in terms of the business models, these guys are gonna have to start making decisions.

• 2:45:43Mark Cuban?

  Are they start, gonna start paying a lot of money for content? Cause as much as they're investing in the technology, they've reached a lot of limits, right? You don't, you're not hearing about, wow, these guys are getting to do these new topics that I had no idea that they could cover.

• 2:46:00John Coogan?

  They're paying for a ton of content, to be clear. I mean, they pay Reddit, they pay the New York Times, they pay all sorts of.

• 2:46:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had, we had a group reach out wanting to buy our back catalog. I was like, I assumed you already scraped it.

• 2:46:13Mark Cuban?

  But, but think of it, if you're, I mean, let's talk about from the government perspective. So they just cut all these N I H grants, right? All this stuff that presumably went and created new drugs, which they have, right?

• 2:46:26John Coogan?

  Foundational research, basic science.

• 2:46:27Mark Cuban?

  Right, all this research.

• 2:46:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:46:30Mark Cuban?

  If the government really understood A I, they'd be like, okay, we're gonna keep on investing in this research and then I'm gonna make it available to the biggest bid, the highest bidder. Whoever wants it in their model.

• 2:46:43John Coogan?

  Privatize it, I like that, make some money off of it.

• 2:46:45Mark Cuban?

  Right, not even necessarily privatizing it, but monetizing it.

• 2:46:49John Coogan?

  Monetizing it, I like this, this is good, make some money off of that nonprofit research.

• 2:46:54Mark Cuban?

  Well, I mean, cause that's, that's the way things are working right now, right? And I don't, I don't have, honestly, I don't have a problem with that at all. If it gets us more solutions. But or do our own, you know, the government do its own model and making that available for a fee. Yeah. Those decisions from a business perspective that all these models are going to have to make. Otherwise, how do they keep on adding more training data? Cause there's no way to synthesize all that shit. You're not synthesizing, you're not creating synthetic data that all of a sudden is going to, you know, you could tell, you can give it all the backstory you want. That you're a doctor, that you invented this, that you did that. It ain't going to invent what the doctor and the scientists are going to invent. Yeah.

• 2:47:34Jordi Hays?

  At any point during the AI hype cycle so far, did you think that this time might be different? There was, I would say, a year ago, the common, a common line was, this isn't like the internet bubble because there's real revenue. You know, these companies are ramping revenue to hundreds or billions of dollars of revenue very quickly. This is different, this time is different. Meanwhile, uh, and, and I wouldn't lean on this too heavily, but MIT had a report this week saying that, you know, 95% of, of Gen AI pilots in the enterprise are not turning into, uh, not creating real value. I'm curious what your read has been.

• 2:48:12Mark Cuban?

  I've been through every single technology, uh, you know, event and evolution. And this blows them all away. Now, how you implement it in business is a whole different issue. Like literally when I was 24, I was walking into companies who had never seen a PC before in their lives and explaining to them the value. And having these guys going, well, son, I got this receptionist right there. I got that secretary, I'm never going to need that shit ever, right? And, but then, you know, my business then was helping them figure out how to implement it to give them an advantage. Yep. They're going to be integrators that particularly young kids, like when I'm telling my kids who are 15, 18, 21 or 19, 21, and kids going to school, what should I do? What should I do? I'd be like.

• 2:48:57Jordi Hays?

  AI research.

• 2:48:59Mark Cuban?

  Learn all you can about AI, but learn more on how to implement them in companies, right? Because to your point, companies don't understand how to implement all that right now to get a competitive advantage. You got the head of Microsoft saying, software is dead because everything's going to be customized to your unique utilization, right? Or use, usage.

• 2:49:22Mark Cuban?

  Who's going to do it for them, particularly small to medium sized businesses? There are thirty three million companies in this country. Thirty million of them are solo entrepreneurs, right? Um, single person enterprises. There are only, you know, there are millions of companies that have one, five, ten, fifty, a hundred, five hundred people that aren't going to have AI budgets, aren't going to have AI experts. This is where kids getting hired, coming out of college are really going to have a unique opportunity. If you're spending your senior year in college right now, your senior year in high school even, whatever it is, your excess time, and you're learning the difference between Sora and Vio, and you're learning how to do all this video, you're learning how to customize a model

• 2:50:05Mark Cuban?

  so that then you can then walk into a company and say, I understand your business as a shoe company selling shoes at a retail store. We're selling and selling shoes online. Let me show you how to benefit you. That is every single job that's going to be available for kids coming out of school because every single company needs that. There is nothing intuitive for a company to integrate AI. And that's what people don't understand.

• 2:50:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we hired two, we hired two interns this summer at the end of the last school year because they just built products instead of saying, hey, here's what I can do. They just showed us, they took a day and just built something. We said, that looks pretty good.

• 2:50:46Mark Cuban?

  They went to ChatGPT or perplexing.

• 2:50:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, the bear, the bear case John was joking about this, though. I thought this was interesting. Uh, we, we, we had one of our interns built this product. It's tbpn.com slash guest. It's this guest directory transcript tool. And he built it in a day, but then he had to spend the whole summer improving it. So that was, that was a bull case for software engineers still having a job.

• 2:51:09Mark Cuban?

  But you don't even have to be a software engineer, right? You just have, people are afraid to ask the models the right questions. They're afraid to ask complex questions because they just presume that it can't, they can't answer. Kids coming out of school today that are fearless in the questions they ask and the follow ups and their ability to prompt, they have more skill than everybody in every major corporation with under a thousand employees, right?

• 2:51:36John Coogan?

  I completely agree with this.

• 2:51:37Mark Cuban?

  That's jobs for everybody.

• 2:51:38John Coogan?

  This feels like a, it feels like you're making the argument for putting ads in AI and keeping it free so that kids can have access to frontier models and then go and. And explore, learn, implement things at businesses. If all of a sudden you can't get in the game, you can't even interact with a cutting edge.

• 2:51:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, Mark, Mark's saying he's cool with display ads. He's cool with a Labubu showing up in the sidebar.

• 2:52:01Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, on the side, right chat. That's fine. But think of it, you're okay. There's a death war going on with the frontier models.

• 2:52:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:52:08Mark Cuban?

  War. Yeah. It's zero sum game in their minds. Not all will make it. Some will get consolidated. Maybe one goes out of business.

• 2:52:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:15Mark Cuban?

  Right? And so for the next however many years, however long, there used to be a time when Excel costs $499. To buy a spreadsheet. Now it's free. You know, it's not free, but like.

• 2:52:29John Coogan?

  Basically.

• 2:52:31Mark Cuban?

  Yeah. Google Sheets, right? Google Docs, et cetera. The basic models are always going to be free.

• 2:52:38John Coogan?

  Because of ads. Like, the reason Google Sheets is free is because of Google's ads business.

• 2:52:43Mark Cuban?

  When was the last time you saw that in Google Sheets?

• 2:52:45John Coogan?

  No, you don't. But but the reason that they can subsidize is because they have this amazing ads business over here that throws off so much cash. They don't care about monetizing it.

• 2:52:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but in the case, I mean, to to to to to take Mark's side here, I mean, a subscription product also subsidizes a free product.

• 2:53:01Mark Cuban?

  Yes, that that's exactly right. So you're going to have tiers, right? Free, your all your your kids version free. And those those those versions are going to have more constraints because they know high school kids, you know, seven year old kids are going to use them. So there'll be all kinds of limits built in.

• 2:53:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:19Mark Cuban?

  But then you get your $20 version and chat GPT is doing what $12 billion annualized and growing quickly?

• 2:53:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:53:26Mark Cuban?

  That's insane. Love, you know, lovable. All these guys were just crushing it. And like, I I am, I was the first investor in a company called Synthesia, which does, you know, talking avatars, I don't know if you know those guys.

• 2:53:38John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:53:39Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, they're killing it. That's killing it. It's just up and to the right.

• 2:53:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:53:44Mark Cuban?

  You start them off with, it's just a whole freemium model, right? That's been around forever. And I think that's going to happen. But as, you know, we talked earlier about buying IP. You'll see things go into different directions. So you'll have a chat GPT slash healthcare. And if you want that, it's an extra five bucks a month. You'll see chat GPT programming or math or foreign lang- duolingo version, right? And it might be an extra 50 cents a month or a dollar a month, whatever it may be. And then there'll be, you know, entrepreneur version and it'll have all the integrations into all the the states so that you just, you know, fill in these forms and you're incorporated wherever you want to be incorporated. Cause all the agents will do all the work.

• 2:54:29Mark Cuban?

  All that stuff you can upsell. Yeah. And so, but if they're not using your model i- in high school, they ain't going to use it in college. If they ain't using it in college, when they go for that, to that company, they're not going to use you. Yep. And I think that is a big deal. But I can't say it enough. All these people were in a transit transition period right now for kids coming out of college. Whether you have a computer science degree or not. But you're not trying to go to the big companies to get a computer science degree. Probably not the right way to go. Going to any other company who has no idea about AI but needs it in order to compete.

• 2:55:12Mark Cuban?

  There'll be more jobs than, than people for a long, long time. Cause there's only gonna, there's gonna be two types of companies in this country, in the world. Those who are great at AI and everybody else. And this is not, AI is not intuitive. You're not going to take a 40 year old who's worked at a company for 15 years and say, go play with chat GPT and figure out how we can improve our, our productivity and improve our processes. Some people will put in the time to learn it, but it's not intuitive to pull all those pieces together and extend them with agents and have the agents start doing things. And then, you know, writing the software on lovable or whatever and having all. It's going to be intuitive for digital natives and Gen Z who are going through school

• 2:55:56Mark Cuban?

  and graduating with that. That is going to be jobs left and right.

• 2:56:00John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 2:56:00Jordi Hays?

  Totally agree. Wanted to get your, we were just on with Vlad from Robinhood and

• 2:56:05Mark Cuban?

  Yep, that's my guy.

• 2:56:07Jordi Hays?

  He's, he's super excited about getting everyday investors access to great private markets, great companies in the private markets. Wanted to get your general read on that. You've obviously been part of Shark Tank for a long time.

• 2:56:21John Coogan?

  Can you imagine if you were watching and you could be like, I want to invest? That seems extremely

• 2:56:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and a lot of people have taken crack at this.

• 2:56:26John Coogan?

  I'm sure people have pitched you this exact thing.

• 2:56:28Jordi Hays?

  But I'm curious, because, because you obviously, you, I can, I can see you being, yeah, it's great when company, if retail can get into the next Figma, but there's, you know, not making a lot of Figma's.

• 2:56:42Mark Cuban?

  I've, I've been anti, not sweat equity, crowdfunding, right? Crowd equity programs, against it because there's no liquidity. People love a company, the next Figma, and they put in their life savings because they know Figma is going to the moon, baby. And they can't, they can't get out.

• 2:56:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:00Mark Cuban?

  And they gotta wait. That's the problem.

• 2:57:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:57:03Mark Cuban?

  And so that's part one to the problem. Part two and more of a systemic problem, there's just not enough IPOs. I mean, it's like watching some of these IPOs. They're like meme coins now. Bam, they take off and then it's musical chairs to see who can get out the last but first, right? And if you don't get out first or at near the beginning, you're getting crushed, you know? And so is there a way, whether it's tokenization or other approaches to that? Probably, but it's going to have to go back to the future where somebody is going to have to take some risk and be a market maker.

• 2:57:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:42Mark Cuban?

  If Vlad or whoever is a market maker, so that there's always some liquidity within X percentage of the last trade, great. Then everybody can do it and everybody's protected to a certain extent, as long as they're not doing deals where the people are just out and out lying, right? Or misrepresenting it. At which point, hopefully, the CFTC or the SEC, whoever happens to end up in charge.

• 2:58:06John Coogan?

  It's not enough just to bring access. You also have to bring liquidity. Last question, if Donald Trump runs for a third term, will you run for president?

• 2:58:15Mark Cuban?

  I mean, it's easy to say yes right now, but it's that's the only probably the only thing that could make me really reconsider because otherwise I'm not I don't want to do that shit.

• 2:58:26Mark Cuban?

  Not my dream to be president. I'd rather argue with you guys.

• 2:58:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's my dream. Come back on the show. You'll be too busy if you're in the.

• 2:58:32Jordi Hays?

  Last, last question for me. Are you excited about the, the, the, the American taxpayer potentially taking a position in Intel?

• 2:58:40John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:58:41Mark Cuban?

  You know what? It's a great question, Jordy. So.

• 2:58:45Jordi Hays?

  You're sounding, you're sounding like an AI. You're sounding like.

• 2:58:48Mark Cuban?

  You know what?

• 2:58:51Mark Cuban?

  What you don't know is I have chat GPT listening.

• 2:58:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. He's running clearly. He's running clearly.

• 2:58:58Mark Cuban?

  It is a progressive's dream. This is the Bernie Sanders dream, the AOC dream because, and I'm not saying I agree with it, but if you think about it, it's asking for equity and taking value from the billionaires before it even makes them billionaires or goes to the billionaires. So when you take 10% of Intel, and first let me add the fact that it's a grant that they're converting, I think is awful because it was meant to be a grant and that was the deal the United States of America made. And now we're going back on the paper that we signed as a country. I think that's bad. But generally, if this was, okay, we'll put in more money in order to take, and we want 10% of Intel, obviously,

• 2:59:42Mark Cuban?

  they can say yes or no, just like Nvidia and AMD had the option to say yes or no on the H20 chips, just like material, whatever MP had the option. Yeah.

• 2:59:53Jordi Hays?

  Politicians, politicians have gotten so good at trading stocks. Maybe we want them. Maybe we want them running our, our federal balance.

• 3:00:01Mark Cuban?

  No, you don't.

• 3:00:02Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding.

• 3:00:03Mark Cuban?

  Yeah. But if you're going to generate, if I, if I was running, right? And I would say Donald Trump did the same thing. He got this one right. Now the only question is, will he do it at the right time? Because would you rather take more money from taxpayers, the average person who might need to pay more, or even the billionaires, the oligarchs, according to Bernie, would I jack up their tax rates, the 30, from 39, 37 to 39 or 41? Or can I just take it this way? Right? Take it before it even gets to them. It's a progressives dream. I don't understand why AOC and Bernie aren't shouting to the rooftops. And Elizabeth Warren, yes, yes, yes. And make, you know, make Donald Trump's head spin around in circles along with every other supporter.

• 3:00:48Mark Cuban?

  Because those guys are-

• 3:00:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, if they got excited about it, he might reverse course.

• 3:00:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:52Mark Cuban?

  Well, of course.

• 3:00:53John Coogan?

  That's why they're being quiet, because they don't want him to reverse course. This is forty chess.

• 3:00:57Mark Cuban?

  Maybe that, maybe you're-

• 3:00:57John Coogan?

  Forty chess. I'm both side of the aisle. Everyone's playing chess.

• 3:01:01Mark Cuban?

  Yeah, I mean, but don't you guys agree? Isn't it just like a progressive's dream?

• 3:01:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:01:06Mark Cuban?

  Like, and, you know, so tariffs, which is just like the greatest sales pitch in the history of sales pitches. When you can convince thirty plus percent of people in this country that that tax that they're paying with increased prices isn't a tax, somebody else is paying it. Amazing sales job, right? So now that's three hundred sixty billion dollars towards the deficit and everything. And if you can start doing these other deals that aren't piggish, right? Meaning they're, they're fair to the companies that are involved. And they're not across the board like tariffs. And start banging down on the deficit in the way that is the ultimate progressive approach. He's turned into Bernie Sanders.

• 3:01:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:01:47Mark Cuban?

  He literally has. You know, only he's a better salesperson.

• 3:01:51John Coogan?

  Uh, you're great at this. This is fantastic.

• 3:01:53Mark Cuban?

  I give him credit though. I'm not knocking him, right? I am giving Donald Trump all his flowers. Because he is, he is doing things in a way that the Democrats aren't smart enough to figure out to have done themselves.

• 3:02:07John Coogan?

  Yep. This is great. Uh, thank you so much for stopping by.

• 3:02:11Jordi Hays?

  We'll have to do this again soon.

• 3:02:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, we gotta do this again soon. We gotta find a new, uh, new topic to argue about, but this was fantastic.

• 3:02:17Mark Cuban?

  Let's go healthcare. I gotta wait till you hear my shit with healthcare.

• 3:02:19John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, let's do it. Let's do it tomorrow. Healthcare debate's here. Well, we'll email you. I'll, I'll see you soon.

• 3:02:24Mark Cuban?

  You got it, guys.

• 3:02:24John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for joining.

• 3:02:25Mark Cuban?

  Appreciate it. Take care.

• 3:02:27John Coogan?

  Uh, up next, we've been keeping him waiting. We got Qasar Younis from Plaid. Uh, welcome to the studio. Do we have him? I want to ring the gong preemptively. I don't even know if we have news, but I'm just excited for what's up. We haven't talked to you since DC. We talked to you at Hillen Valley. How you been? What's new in your world?

• 3:02:47Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to keep you waiting. We had to.

• 3:02:49Qasar Younis?

  What is new in my world?

• 3:02:51John Coogan?

  We were arguing.

• 3:02:53Qasar Younis?

  Hillen Valley seems like a lifetime ago.

• 3:02:55John Coogan?

  It really was. There's been like four other iconic DC tech crossover events. I have yet to make to many of them, but it was a fun time and we appreciate.

• 3:03:05Qasar Younis?

  Hillen Valley is the only one that's, that's worth, that's worth it. So, so I think that's fine.

• 3:03:10John Coogan?

  I mean, it used to be a dinner. Now it's an organization that throws like some of the biggest and most impactful events. It's a fantastic crew over there. Shout out to them. But anyway, this isn't about Hillen Valley. This is.

• 3:03:21Jordi Hays?

  This is about you.

• 3:03:22John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. How you doing?

• 3:03:24Qasar Younis?

  I'm doing great. I'm doing great. You know, following up Mark Cuban, I couldn't really watch the, the thing. I don't know if this is gonna be, this is the, this is the, you know, the slow let down to the end of the day.

• 3:03:36Jordi Hays?

  No, no, we got.

• 3:03:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're working on being able to feed back the show to you so you can watch it while you're in the waiting room, but we're, we're sorry to keep you waiting, but give us the update. And, and I mean, maybe for those who are new and maybe hopped on during the, the Mark Cuban segment, if you could introduce yourself and the company briefly and then go into the news, that'd be great.

• 3:03:55Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, for everybody who's not in the Bay Area ecosystem, my name is Pastor Eunice. My, and the company is called Applied Intuition. We are a, now I say late stage company. We earlier this year raised a, a Series F, if I got my numbers correct, led by BlackRock and KP at 15 billion. The company is broadly, there's a couple of unique things about the company. One is we've been historically profitable, which is super rare. We've preserved a hundred percent. Yeah. That, that word, that word probably doesn't get thrown around a lot with AI companies.

• 3:04:31John Coogan?

  No, no, we talked to a lot of folks with high revenues. Gross margins not there yet. Hope it on some.

• 3:04:37Jordi Hays?

  Very low, very low gross margins.

• 3:04:39Qasar Younis?

  The prospect that you want, and you know, you can never be bragging about any of this stuff because you know, it creates great fodder for when you fall.

• 3:04:50John Coogan?

  Every, every bull cycle, I think like, maybe I should start playing around with hubris. Maybe this time is different. I think hubris, it might be fun to experiment with, but

• 3:05:00Jordi Hays?

  Never.

• 3:05:01John Coogan?

  It, it just never, it never works. It never works.

• 3:05:03Qasar Younis?

  But the three things that you want in a, in a late-stage company is, you know, uh, things like profitability, but you also want high gross margins and you want high growth.

• 3:05:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:05:13Qasar Younis?

  And we, we've been fortunate, we've had triple-digit growth for basically the history of the company and then, uh, and high gross margins. But that's the finance side. For all the people who are like engineers or, or technical people watching, we're a AI company that focuses specifically on vehicles. So the broad category we talk about is vehicle intelligence.

• 3:05:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:05:29Qasar Younis?

  Uh, it would be a subpart of physical AI. Sometimes, you know, you might hear Jensen or somebody talk about that. This is, I think, the most pragmatic and real part of physical AI right now. Humanoids, I think, will come for sure. But, uh, but in terms of like monetization, it's cars, trucks, tanks. That's the business that we're in and we bring AI to those systems. So, uh, it's, it's in a bunch of different, we have dozens of products and all this stuff, you know, I won't get into it, but.

• 3:05:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, take it through the, the, the, the market structure because you have, uh, Waymo, no consumer product whatsoever. You have Tesla vertically integrated. I, they, I mean, they had a mobile ID deal a while ago. I don't even know if they have mobile ID anymore. Uh, pretty much vertically integrated. Uh, I, I drive a Cadillac. It's, it's, it's a, a product of Kyle Vogt over at Cruise. They bought Cruise. They were thinking about getting into the self-driving taxi market. They kind of pulled back from that, but they have Super Cruise, pretty great system. Um, and then you got George Hots with Kama, the, the bolt-on. But what, what is the shape? All the OEMs, they need a play here. How, how is this going to play out in kind of the, the, the, the vehicles that most people see? We can go into the defense side later, but just in terms of like what the average American.

• 3:06:38Jordi Hays?

  No, Marie, they're coming for it. They're coming for it all.

• 3:06:40Qasar Younis?

  Yeah. I mean, you, you just said it like, like, uh, GM's been a long customer of ours.

• 3:06:44John Coogan?

  Okay, cool.

• 3:06:45Qasar Younis?

  That, that, that you're using is built on our tools. So.

• 3:06:48John Coogan?

  Let's go. Thank you. Be safe.

• 3:06:49Qasar Younis?

  Our, our business, our business is one where we are a supplier to the broad ecosystem.

• 3:06:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:06:55Qasar Younis?

  So the, of the top 20 global automotive OEMs, uh, we say 18 out of the 20. Use our tools, but in a really honestly, everybody does. And so that's our play. We are we're we're like the, you know, I don't want to use the the like, it's a very, it's a very like risky analogy, but we're the arms dealer in this ecosystem.

• 3:07:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, give me a little bit more context and shape of like what what what the product you're actually vending in is because there are physical cameras that need to go on cars. If you're going to do an a self-driving system. There's also some sort of foundation model, I imagine, that gets trained and a lot of data. There's data aggregation. There's all sorts of, you know, some part is going to be in C++ the other is going to be in ML. Like, are you doing an end-to-end system? Like, like, what's the shape of the product and how much is like solutions versus just like the the packaged up software?

• 3:07:48Qasar Younis?

  Yeah. So historically, the kind of what we announced yesterday and why we're talking is historically, we've been a tools manufacturer. We've as in give engineer, we make tools that engineers use to build these systems.

• 3:07:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:07:59Qasar Younis?

  Like the companies you know, you're talking about. Then we got an operating system. We still that's a huge part of business. But a while ago, we got into autonomy, but we got into autonomy directly, like literally making the autonomous systems. That's in our words, that's the algorithms, the models that run vehicles. We've been in it for defense. We've been in it for commercial trucking. We do L4 trucking, you know, we're running driverless trucks right now in Japan as an example. So we're already doing that. What we announced yesterday is an L2 plus system for automotive.

• 3:08:29John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 3:08:30Qasar Younis?

  So it's specifically, it's kind of like, you know, the average person would know Tesla FSD.

• 3:08:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:08:36Qasar Younis?

  It's like that, except it's one that you can buy from us.

• 3:08:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:08:39Qasar Younis?

  And so where we fit in the ecosystem is we're we're like, so I come from the car business. So I went undergrad to the General Motors Institute. I used to work at Cadillac in the Cadillac building as an example.

• 3:08:50Jordi Hays?

  You're John's hero. You're John's hero.

• 3:08:53John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it.

• 3:08:54Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, the car business is an awesome business, by the way. If you ever want to just nerd out in the car business, we can. It's going through lots of changes. But one thing to understand the industry structure of the car business is historically, the car business was kind of like defense where you'd procure all these technologies in OEM from other parties. What's changed now is OEMs are like Tesla has shown. You can actually verticalize, do a lot of this stuff yourself. And you kind of need to do it because these systems are way more integrated with each other. It used to be you could bolt on a mobile eye system. And then that would give you lane keep and adaptive cruise. But when these systems are much, much more sophisticated and they're, they're working with the other functions within the vehicle, you need like a white box solution. And so our, our SDS product is a white box solution.

• 3:09:37Qasar Younis?

  And what I mean by that is, you know, access the source code agnostic to the silicon. So if you're, if you're buying, you know, like, like an Nvidia system or if you're buying a Qualcomm system, you're going to use Nvidia and Qualcomm chips. So we, being just a software supplier, we can ride on different silicon. And then on the other end, where you're talking about sensors, each company has a different sensor strategy, but the broad summary of passenger, the car business is, it's a cost business. And so all of the, all the OEMs basically want to have the cheapest sensor suite they possibly can. But like even more fundamental question, why can't we get all the Waymo's tech into the passenger vehicle? It's because all the way to the compute that's being used, it's just very expensive.

• 3:10:17Qasar Younis?

  And so other like feature quote unquote of our self-driving system is it's embedded, which is another way of saying it runs on automotive grade silicon, which is cheaper and has all these other things that you need for automotive grade products.

• 3:10:31John Coogan?

  How are the OEMs reacting to the, the latest version of Apple CarPlay? I saw it roll out in an Aston Martin SUV. From a consumer perspective, it seems awesome. The new CarPlay takes over all the dash, so even the volume control will be handled by CarPlay. But it feels like if you're an OEM, you're kind of giving away, you're letting the fox in the hen house potentially.

• 3:10:52Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 3:10:53John Coogan?

  What, what's the reaction been? And then what, what does that mean for your business, basically?

• 3:10:57Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, I think so. So let's kind of gear shift. You're that's the, you know, we go from autonomy to now just let's say the in cabin software experience. For us, we call that business line vehicle OS. It's it's something that that we build and sell. The the punchline there is the issue with CarPlay is if you're a Mercedes and you're in in your experience is the same as a Chevy Bolt, which is the same as, let's say, a Aston Martin. You know, OEMs are really good at two things that they're really their heart of their business is two things have to get right. And if they get it wrong, they ultimately end up going bankrupt. The first one is is managing the cost side of the business, supply chain, getting all the suppliers wrangled. So they put all the parts in a factory to because the factories is big fixed cost and it pops out at a certain rate.

• 3:11:42Qasar Younis?

  The economy actually moves up and down at pretty significant, you know, consumer car sales and consumer index are very, very connected. So all the global OEMs are extremely good at forecasting what they need to build, where and when years in advance. Other thing that they have to do very well is brand management. And and what it like more fundamental question, what's a brand? Like fundamentally, what what's a Mercedes brand? It's the collection of experiences you've had. That's what a brand is. And so if the collection of experiences you've had is with Apple CarPlay, that does actually degrade your brand. And so the OEMs are extremely sensitive. I mean, I think maybe a controversial thing to say, I think we've seen car a peak CarPlay and peak Android Auto has already happened.

• 3:12:24Qasar Younis?

  I mean, multiple OEMs have gone out and said that they're not going to do CarPlay in the future. They're not going to do Android Auto in the future. And by the way, Tesla doesn't do CarPlay and Android Auto. The emergent emergence, you know, the Lucids, the Rivians, they're all they're all similarly, they they build their own user experience. So I think that's a tough business to be in. Now, if you're Google or if you're Apple, your your consumer brand has to be in that interface. If you're applied intuition. It doesn't. We're a B to B software supplier. So we can make same thing that CarPlay and Android Auto do, except we can do it in a, again, white box.

• 3:12:58John Coogan?

  And I view the self-driving system much more like seatbelts or airbags, where all I care if I'm driving a Mercedes or Cadillac is that I survive and I'm safe. And I, and I, people talk a little bit about the driving style of a self-driving system in a Bentley might be a little bit different than a Chevy, but in general, I feel like it's something where I'm very, I would, I would make the selection based on the benchmarks. Like, what are the incidents per vehicle miles traveled?

• 3:13:25Jordi Hays?

  What is, how do you see the autonomous driving landscape evolving over the next few years? A lot of people talk about this like two-horse race, Waymo and Tesla, but using the arms dealer analogy, it's like Tesla and Waymo are a nuclear war, and you come and you're like, hey, I'll give everybody nuclear weapons. Is that?

• 3:13:50Qasar Younis?

  Listen, this is not the time to make jokes about my Pakistani heritage.

• 3:13:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we'll skip that, but, but is that, is that, is that really your play here is basically leveling the playing field?

• 3:14:02Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, absolutely. And I would take issue with a two, two-horse race. I mean, you gotta remember.

• 3:14:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's more so, I'm talking about that in the context of, oh, you're, you're gonna be able to just like, you know, why would I buy a Tesla, something other than a Tesla if I could rent out my Tesla when I'm not using it? There's a section of the market that's excited about that, but I can imagine.

• 3:14:24Qasar Younis?

  I think that that future is to be determined, right? And so let me, let me answer the, there's many, and this is such a vast area, we, we could spend hours on it, but let me tackle each of those individual points first. For the first one is, is it a two-horse race? Absolutely not. I mean, you talked about Super Cruise just earlier. Every manufacturer globally is absolutely building some version of an L2 plus system or working with a partner like us. There's, without exception, the smallest manufacturers that you know are doing that. A good Petri dish of you seeing how this will unravel is China. Is this kind of like swalled off ecosystem separate in the automotive industry? And you there is no dynamic that says a winner take all will be effective.

• 3:15:09Qasar Younis?

  And I'll I'll do the 10 second pitch on why I think an SDS from us would be better. We're taking data from all geographies, from many manufacturers, and not only that, from many vehicle types. Like off road, defense, etc. And our models therefore are just will be and already proving to be more performance. So there you could have an, you know, you could have a pretty plausible technical view that actually the two legs are are maybe the early entrance. But when everything being autonomous, it's gonna be and there's just no, there's just no winner take all dynamics there. There's no winner take all dynamics there. And then and then in terms of like the the broader, what happens with autonomy next five to 10 years? Like, this is the, this is the autonomy moment.

• 3:15:52Qasar Younis?

  It's happening now and we're, you know, when you're in the Bay Area, you kind of live just maybe it used to, you know, Paul Graham used to say six months into the future, maybe we live three months in the future. But you do live a little in the future and you hang around any street corner on San Francisco. You'll see Waymos after Waymo, after Waymo, and then you'll start using them and you see them eating at Uber's, you know, market share in terms of, right? Like, that's absolutely gonna happen. Pass and what that's doing is is getting the public used to this concept of self driving. We in the tech industry are very comfortable with it. A lot of us are Tesla owners, a lot of us use FSD, so we're comfortable with it. You go to Michigan and from Detroit, you go to Detroit. People don't know any of this stuff and the forget and Detroit's a car town.

• 3:16:35Qasar Younis?

  You go to Tulsa, you go to, you know, Dallas, it's just not what people are talking about. So I think that in the next five to 10 years is the general availability of autonomy. And so if you want to use a good analogy, mobile, we're in like 2008, 2009. If you're in the Bay Area, you saw that the iPhone is coming, people talk about, people talk about Waymos, but most people. So when does mobile really hit? Well, mobile kinda hits in like, you could say it hits when WhatsApp, or maybe Uber, or maybe Instagram. Like Instagram, you can't even think of before mobile. And it requires an app store and requires a front-facing camera. So like, when will that self-driving moment happen? It's happening now, but I think, I think the next two to five years, I'm not just saying, I'm not just pitching my book, by the way.

• 3:17:20Qasar Younis?

  I like, I believe this, like, I think the next two to five years is all driving. It's, it's gonna be massive. It's like the A, it's like the area of AI that everyone, I think it's just because it's not, you know, the hype happened 10 years ago. So everyone wants to talk about LLMs, and they wanna talk about humanoids. But it's like, this is the thing where it's, you know, when we started the company, the reason we're called Applied Intuition, by the way, is we wanna be on the applied side of this technology. You can spend many years on the research side, and if we-

• 3:17:48Jordi Hays?

  It's a subtle dig in the name.

• 3:17:51Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, and like, the, the, like, SDS, the reason people ask us, like, especially engineers who, you know, are working or interviewing with us, they're like, well, why don't you get into like, this space like, four years ago, number one transformer boom, you know, and the change hadn't, like, the technologies just wasn't very good. But also now, if you get into it too late, then like, timing is a really, really important thing. And I think like, we always wanted to see, hey, when are we exiting the research phase of self-driving? And when are we entering, and the applied phase, just to be very direct for folks who are not, is, it's when it becomes an engineering problem. And now, the engineering problem is just about cost, cost, cost, cost, cost. Like, you guys are not asking me, is self-driving real? Like, that conversation in 2015, that's maybe the first question, is like, is this like a real thing?

• 3:18:34John Coogan?

  I know it's real. I wanna know when will self-driving be available in a cone exec? When will it be in the next Pagani Huayra? When will it be in the next McLaren? Because this is, San Francisco lives in the future. Everyone there is already driving P1s. Uh, Mustang GTBs. You gotta get these into the general-

• 3:18:54Qasar Younis?

  For the people who don't know what Koenigsegg are, which like, by the way, they make like six a year. Right? It's like, these cars aren't even crash tested. They're so, they're so infrequent. Ferrari, more of a mass, mass car.

• 3:19:05John Coogan?

  Well.

• 3:19:05Qasar Younis?

  It, I think it'll be a while, but.

• 3:19:06John Coogan?

  I'm challenging you. Sell your product to Koenigsegg. Get it into Koenigsegg. I'm throwing down the gauntlet.

• 3:19:12Qasar Younis?

  We, we, we have, you know, we have a large and public relationship with Porsche. They're big shareholders of ours as well.

• 3:19:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:19:18Qasar Younis?

  Um, I, I, and we never, you know, we, we deal, like I said, with all the OEMs. I never want to expose any particular strategy. But if you, if you think about it, if you're from a buyer perspective, if you're looking at a Tesla Model S, what's the other thing you look at? You look at Taycan.

• 3:19:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:19:33Qasar Younis?

  And a lot of times, so like, I think even the more exotic companies that are focused on driving dynamics. You just have to think about this technology of good UX in the cabin and safety systems that prevent, you know, you from getting injured, I think will be like table stakes. By the way, AEB, like the, another, like a subtle revolution that's happened in the car business that people don't talk about is the automatic emergency braking.

• 3:19:56John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:19:57Qasar Younis?

  Now coming in like. It's, it's, it's like statistically making an improvement in like passing, uh, pedestrian deaths.

• 3:20:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:20:05Qasar Younis?

  That's wild. It's like things that often you can talk about. So I think even the highest end stuff, right now, everyone talks about EPA and emissions stuff. I think in 2035 and going forward, it'll all be just like, hey, why are we still having deaths?

• 3:20:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:18Qasar Younis?

  Like, and then, and then that's the Koenigsegg question will come up is like, hey, it should be aware enough. It doesn't have to drive, but it should be aware enough to take over from the driver when something really bad is about to happen.

• 3:20:30John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much.

• 3:20:31Jordi Hays?

  Last, last question, just curious, we're, we're.

• 3:20:33John Coogan?

  We're keeping a series E company waiting just to talk to this guy with a series F.

• 3:20:37Jordi Hays?

  I was gonna say, uh, when, uh, how, how do you think about, you know, financing the business in the future? Uh, it feels like, I'm sure, I'm sure many, many SPAC, uh, SPAC, uh, sponsors would be begging, but you, I imagine will take the more traditional path. How, how do you think about?

• 3:20:54Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, we've, uh, we've preserved a hundred percent of the capital we've ever raised in the company's.

• 3:20:59John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 3:21:01Qasar Younis?

  So, uh, so I.

• 3:21:03Jordi Hays?

  Hit that gong, John. Hit that.

• 3:21:08Qasar Younis?

  Yeah, yeah, for the for the for the finance folks at home, they know what that actually means. That is that is no easy feat.

• 3:21:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:21:15Qasar Younis?

  So no, SPAC is not. I can. There's many things that I'm speculative about. SPAC is definitely, I can tell you affirmatively, we wouldn't do.

• 3:21:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:22Qasar Younis?

  I, you know, we fall into the very, I mean, there, it's not random that Fidelity and Blackstone and, you know, Franklin Templeton are investors in the company. I think in that way, we're very traditional. In the way we're not traditional is we're a very hard tech company. I mean, the stuff we build, there's virtually no other companies that that do it. So, yeah, the future, I think the future is good. You know, how are we going to spend the money? I mean, or how do we think about capital allocation? I'm, all of our values, the company's values can be reduced to radical pragmatism. If we had to, if we had to raise a billion dollars to get into some specific technical area or fight that we think is worth fighting for, we'd do it. Like, it's like pretty straightforward.

• 3:21:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's fantastic. Well, congratulations.

• 3:22:00Jordi Hays?

  Always great to talk.

• 3:22:01John Coogan?

  We do talk about the Fed. That was, that was. I know, I know. Well, you just hop on next week. Yeah, we could talk for hours. This is awesome. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your day.

• 3:22:10Jordi Hays?

  Good to see you.

• 3:22:11John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. We have been keeping Elise AI waiting, but we will let them in from the restream waiting room. Some big announcements today. Good thing we warmed up the gong because we got a big deal coming into the TVP and Ultra Dome.

• 3:22:26Jordi Hays?

  Big news.

• 3:22:27John Coogan?

  From the restream waiting room. Hello, how are you doing?

• 3:22:32Jordi Hays?

  So sorry to keep you waiting.

• 3:22:33John Coogan?

  Sorry to keep you waiting.

• 3:22:34Jordi Hays?

  On your big day.

• 3:22:35Speaker 06

  All right, I was tuning in. I was learning stuff.

• 3:22:37John Coogan?

  The previous guest was talking about cars and we went down a whole rabbit hole. It happens. But thank you so much for taking the time. Would you mind kicking us off in the introduction on yourself and the company?

• 3:22:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, absolutely. I'm Minna Song, and I'm the co-founder, one of the co-founders and the CEO of a company called Elise AI. And Elise AI is built, is a company in, based in New York City. We build AI agents that automate the entire customer journey for two verticals, the housing industry and the healthcare industry. And we've, we just raised our Series E today, so.

• 3:23:10John Coogan?

  Give us the news.

• 3:23:11Speaker 06

  I did. Yeah. Yeah, we raised a 250, 250 million dollars.

• 3:23:18Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 3:23:18John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:23:19Jordi Hays?

  Can you give us a quick history of the company? We heard from a friend, what, he gave us a general read on your revenue ramp and it was pretty mind blowing. So I would love to kind of get the quick history of the company since this is the first time.

• 3:23:37John Coogan?

  Overnight success.

• 3:23:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:39Speaker 06

  Yes, just started yesterday, vibe coded too.

• 3:23:46Speaker 06

  No, we, you know, we've, we've, we started 2017, started with my co-founder, Tony, who's the CTO. We met in college, studied computer science, both software engineering backgrounds. I went to MIT, he went to University of Cambridge. But we, after college, shortly after college, we wanted to build a company, build technology for industries that serve fundamental human needs. And that gave us this idea that we wanted to, we wanted to go into housing and housing is our largest expense as humans. And we thought, it seemed like it had limited technology as an industry. We didn't really know too much about it, but it felt like a good place for two technologists to start investigating.

• 3:24:26Speaker 06

  So I, when we got started, I took a job working at a real estate firm in Manhattan and that was just sort of a research opportunity. I got to, I worked at the front desk, I answered all the phone calls, I greeted everyone, answered all the emails and was just really listening for what is the biggest bottleneck that exists that we can start chipping away at. And it was very clear that was communication. And so we were actually a conversational AI startup right from the very beginning versus I think a lot of the companies that, you know, are adding on AI right now. It's been pretty obvious, if you've been doing it for a long time, that there's a lot of value. And a couple of years ago.

• 3:25:07Jordi Hays?

  How long did you last at that job, by the way? Your research, your paid research opportunity?

• 3:25:12Speaker 06

  It was like, it was like a good three months.

• 3:25:16Speaker 06

  It was, it was quite fun. I enjoyed it a lot.

• 3:25:19Jordi Hays?

  That is a wild start.

• 3:25:21John Coogan?

  Uh, how, how important is it to the company to be seen as like an AI agent pure play? Like, it feels like a lot of companies that are do, that are really, really successful, are really adding a lot of value, are actually not just picking the hottest tools off the shelf, but they also have a lot of traditional software and like SaaS. Some are bolting on AI tooling, but others are kind of offering elements of both, whether it's traditional dashboarding or just traditional, you know, business logic and workflows. Like, how has the business grown? What's the shape of it? What's demand like? Is it, is it, are, are customers receptive to something that is purely non-deterministic?

• 3:26:07Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, a, a big part of what we work on is to make sure that it's providing enterprise-grade reliability to our customers in housing and healthcare, to, you know, highly regulated industries, to just really consequential decisions for, if we make mistakes, it's a big deal for our customers, right? And for their customers, their, the consumers. So, um, we, we focus a lot on making sure it is, um, you know, it is, it is stable and it is reliable for, for them.

• 3:26:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:26:37Speaker 06

  But yeah, it's a mix of, I mean, you have to, you know, AI is a really powerful tool. It's a new type of computer, really, and you can solve problems with that, but also traditional software and other things that you, you need are, are also important in solving a problem. I think what's sort of different about what we build, we're not a, we're a vertical AI company, right? We're not a horizontal AI, horizontal being, you know, you can, um, solve one sliver of a problem for a bunch of different industries. But our approach is we, we sort of go 10 layers deep into every problem. And, um, that way we can actually solve that problem end to end. So it's very different. So let's say in, in housing, um, you are, um, you are.

• 3:27:25Speaker 06

  Saying that you have your a broken sync, right? It's very different when an AI might be able, you know, a large language model might be able to say, hey, thanks for letting me know. I'll submit a ticket for you. And maybe it does that. For us, um, our AI is actually doing a bunch of things. It's understanding how that resolution should, uh, how, how that issue should be resolved. It's coordinating all the, the workforce and all the resources, the systems, the compliance to get that ultimate issue resolved. Or, um, there's things that we do that are not just pure sort of conversational AI pieces, but we work in the physical world. So we have to actually unlock these things called doors and allow people to go and get into the building.

• 3:28:07Speaker 06

  So we have to do things like hardware integrations and you, you can't avoid doing that if you actually want to solve the whole problem.

• 3:28:13John Coogan?

  Yeah. On the integration side, uh, what's working on the marketing side is are there channel partners or platforms that you can plug into to accelerate growth? Is it just a ton of SDRs? Is there a viral component to this? Like what's accelerating the growth other than just the product delivering value?

• 3:28:29Speaker 06

  Yeah. Um, yeah, we, we work in particularly non-technical industries. So it's not really, there's not a, a great, um, market for people that are just naturally searching for the latest.

• 3:28:44John Coogan?

  It's not like an app store that you can go viral on and then all of a sudden you're the number one enterprise app in, in, uh, property management.

• 3:28:51Speaker 06

  Yes, I, I wish. Blood, sweat and tears. We have outbound sales.

• 3:28:56John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 3:28:57Speaker 06

  Um, we do have a lot of partners. Um, AI is actually a great vehicle for delivering a lot of the other products that exist in the industry. So historically, if you needed, um, if you, let's say you were a marketing software for housing providers, or you were, um, or you have some other tech, uh, you have insurance or something like that, you needed to train a human agent, a leasing agent or a property manager to make sure that got, that, that marketing content got distributed. And that's another manual step that people had to have. And I think a lot of people in the industry have realized, hey, I can just partner with a lease AI and my, now my marketing tierials or my, my, uh, or insurance will be, you know,

• 3:29:42Speaker 06

  will be, um,

• 3:29:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:29:44Speaker 06

  communicated to everybody else.

• 3:29:45John Coogan?

  That's Jordi.

• 3:29:48Jordi Hays?

  Nothing for me. This is very exciting.

• 3:29:50John Coogan?

  Congratulations on the fundraiser. Thanks so much.

• 3:29:52Jordi Hays?

  Let us know when you add podcasting as a vertical.

• 3:29:56Jordi Hays?

  Happily try it out.

• 3:29:57John Coogan?

  We're definitely in the market. We'll have a great rest of your day. Congratulations on the raise. We will talk to you soon.

• 3:30:02Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for joining.

• 3:30:02John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 3:30:03Jordi Hays?

  Bye. Thanks.

• 3:30:04John Coogan?

  I wanted to finish on this post from Lucas Bayer now at Meta AI. He says R F R O F L. Rolling on the floor laughing. The solution it draws is amazing. This is from Tomer Ullman. So the question for Chat GPT for GPT five is let's go back to this and it's a picture of what you can go to the next slide. Is this the head of a rabbit or a duck? And the answer that Chat GPT gives is this image shows the duck rabbit illusion. It can be seen in two ways as the head of a duck with the beak pointing to the left or the or the head of a rabbit, the ears pointing to the left. So the answer is it is both a duck or a rabbit.

• 3:30:46John Coogan?

  And then and then it says, would you like me to mark the outlines for each interpretation directly on the image to make the two views clear? And it does.

• 3:30:53Jordi Hays?

  Ah, that's so clear now.

• 3:30:55John Coogan?

  And it draws it on there, which is a fascinating ability to even trace the outline. This was unthinkable in machine learning just a few years ago.

• 3:31:03Jordi Hays?

  What does it see that we don't?

• 3:31:05John Coogan?

  Yes, maybe it's found a deeper truth. It's possible it's found a deeper truth. No, this is this is this is hilarious because clearly it's been RLHF to know that people play pranks on LLMs all the time. They hit them with riddles. They hit them with unsolvable questions and trick questions. And that one of the things people demand of their AI chatbots is that they don't mess up when they're hit with a. One of the classic examples is a boy is injured, goes to the hospital. The doctor says, I can't, I can't operate on this child. And then the question is like, why? And the answer should be because the doctor is the is the is the patient's father or something.

• 3:31:46John Coogan?

  But you can throw all these subtle changes where it clearly indicates who is who and it'll still think that it's being hit with the with the test. With the trick question.

• 3:31:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, one more post from Luke Metro, since we haven't covered him today.

• 3:32:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:32:01Jordi Hays?

  There was a a young man, very young man, a teenager, joined SpaceX at 14 at 16.

• 3:32:09Jordi Hays?

  Kyran is joining Citadel Securities.

• 3:32:13John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for.

• 3:32:14Jordi Hays?

  Luke says the hard tech is cool.

• 3:32:15John Coogan?

  Teen prodigy.

• 3:32:16Jordi Hays?

  Actually, money is cooler. We've seen it before. If he's really good, he'll get poached by a lab within the next.

• 3:32:23John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 3:32:25Jordi Hays?

  And then one final post from NetCapGirl.

• 3:32:28John Coogan?

  You can't pull Jordi Hays out of the timeline.

• 3:32:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Sophie NetCapGirl says August is the Sunday of months. So here's to hoping that

• 3:32:38John Coogan?

  It does feel like that.

• 3:32:39Jordi Hays?

  The markets have the Sunday scaries.

• 3:32:40John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:32:41Jordi Hays?

  September's gonna come around and we'll be extremely back. But thank you for

• 3:32:46John Coogan?

  Thank you for watching. Hope you enjoyed the guests. Hope you enjoyed the show. We will see you tomorrow. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Thank you for listening.

• 3:32:54Jordi Hays?

  Subscribe to our Substack.

• 3:32:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 3:32:56Jordi Hays?

  vpn.substack.com.

• 3:32:58John Coogan?

  Thank you. Have a good day. Goodbye.