Google Doubles Down on Cloud AI, Hulk Hogan Passes Away at 71, Hill and Valley Forum Reactions | Casey Neistat, Chris Samra, Zak Kukoff, Vineeta Agarwala, Micky Malka, Alex Hawkinson

(00:14) - Timeline (05:16) - Google Doubles Down on Cloud AI (38:10) - Hulk Hogan Passes Away at 71 (49:49) - Timeline (57:44) - Zak Kukoff is a venture capitalist with over a decade of experience in the technology and venture capital sectors, focusing on early-stage investments and entrepreneurship. He currently serves as the Chair of the Tech and Venture Practice at Lewis-Burke Associates LLC and is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation. ([lewis-burke.com]( [thefai.org]( In the conversation, Kukoff discusses the recent interview of Trevor Milton on Tucker Carlson's show, expressing that it was a poor choice of platform and suggesting that a more direct approach to questioning, such as confronting Milton about specific fraud allegations, would have been more effective. (01:14:37) - Timeline (01:29:04) - Vineeta Agarwala, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, discusses the transformative role of AI agents in healthcare, highlighting their potential to revolutionize drug development and patient care. She emphasizes the increasing adoption of AI-driven tools to address labor shortages and improve efficiency, noting that both startups and established companies are integrating these technologies to enhance operations. Agarwala also points out the growing interest in open-source models within the biotech sector, facilitating rapid innovation and collaboration among researchers and organizations. (01:51:11) - Micky Malka, a Venezuelan-born entrepreneur and founder of Ribbit Capital, has a history of pioneering financial services innovations, including co-founding Latin America's first online trading platform in 1998 and establishing the first online bank in Europe. In his conversation, he reflects on his journey of creating financial solutions that enhance accessibility and trust, emphasizing the importance of building brands that resonate with consumers. He also discusses the evolving landscape of fintech, highlighting the convergence of financial services with technologies like AI and crypto, and anticipates a future where tokenization plays a central role in transforming the industry. (02:18:47) - Casey Neistat, a renowned filmmaker and YouTube personality, discusses his involvement with ModRetro's M64, a modern reimagining of the Nintendo 64 console. He shares his passion for retro gaming and the importance of preserving the authenticity of classic gaming experiences. Neistat also reflects on the challenges of integrating modern technology while maintaining the original essence of beloved gaming hardware. (02:51:08) - Alex Hawkinson, Founder and CEO of BrightAI, leverages over 25 years of experience in IoT, AI, SaaS, and cloud-based technologies to transform critical infrastructure management. In the conversation, he discusses how BrightAI's platform integrates sensors, robots, and wearables to provide real-time monitoring and proactive solutions for essential services like energy grids and water systems, addressing challenges such as aging infrastructure and labor shortages. He also highlights the company's recent $51 million funding round led by Khosla Ventures and Inspired Capital, emphasizing the importance of achieving product-market fit before seeking external investment. (03:00:48) - Chris Samra is an engineer and founder of Symphonic Labs, where he develops AI-enabled consumer tools and gadgets. In the conversation, he discusses the launch of Waves, a new type of camera glasses designed for content creators, highlighting the positive response from creators and addressing privacy concerns by including an indicator light that can be disabled for capturing candid moments. He also shares plans to test the device with 100 creators, aiming for mass production in Q1 next year, and explores potential partnerships with prominent IRL streamers to showcase the product's capabilities. (03:15:10) - Timeline 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 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.

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVPN.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Today is Thursday, July 24th, 2025. We are live from the TVPN Ultra Dome.

• 0:05Jordi Hays?

  The temple of technology.

• 0:07John Coogan?

  The fortress of finance, the capital of capital. It's Google earnings, earnings season, baby. Big tech earnings are happening now. Google reported earnings last night. Ben Thompson has a breakdown. It's in the, it's in the Wall Street Journal. There's a bunch of good posts. We're going to break it down for you today. So, uh, Google Capital bloke says many queries that moved to OpenAI will move back to Google. AI overviews are good now, less hallucinations. I've experienced that. Uh, for some of those quick answers, Google's still really fast. Uh, two, uh, can move to AI mode for follow-up. I haven't really played around with that yet. Have you bounced into AI mode very much?

• 0:46Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  You have. In, in Google searches, you've actually done that?

• 0:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 0:49John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  And, and the main thing missing from Google search and the reason why ChatGPT has been so good is you can search something, get information and then chat with that information.

• 0:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 0:59Jordi Hays?

  And that before typical, you know, you're going down a, a search query. You click onto a page. You can't really chat with the page or

• 1:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07Jordi Hays?

  You could maybe search for information on that page. So that was the key innovation.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, type into toolbar, V, open new app. That is a huge advantage. A lot of people have, you know, the, the primary app on their laptop is, that's open is a Chrome browser for most people. And so, uh, you know, command T and you're already searching. That is a huge advantage. And that's probably why ChatGPT is starting and OpenAI is thinking about a browser. Cause if they can replace that, they can, um, get way more queries into ChatGPT. Four, Google's models are better. They search the web better. I don't know that their models are that much better. I haven't noticed that specifically. I know that they're better on like some benchmarks and they're certainly dominating on that Pareto frontier graph that Swix puts out. Um, it feels pretty comparable to me. Uh, but yeah, it makes sense that they would search the web better because they have, you know, what?

• 1:57John Coogan?

  Two, three decades of search experience.

• 1:59Jordi Hays?

  It's, it's, they, they try to obfuscate it, but to my knowledge, ChatGPT will leverage Google search.

• 2:06John Coogan?

  It does feel like that's kind of happening. And then CloudFlare just gave them a massive structural advantage. That, of course, is because CloudFlare, by default now, they used to have like the big, easy button for blocking all AI crawlers. Previously, if you had a website and you didn't want to be crawled, you could put that in your robots.txt, so whatever your website was, slash robots.txt.

• 2:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:30John Coogan?

  Crawler should go there. And out of the goodness of their own heart, they would respect that, but it was not legally binding, so you could still scrape a website legally if you were using it in a fair use context, transforming it like for search. Now, Google famously did respect robots.txt. They did for a long time, they still do. But now CloudFlare has disabled AI crawlers by default. The problem is, is that Google has two crawlers. They have Google Bot, which crawls for Google Search, which you definitely want to be in for sure for the SEO. Who doesn't want to be findable in Google? And then they have Gemini crawler, separate crawler, that you can disable with CloudFlare.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  But the, there is still AI sort of crawling happening with the Google Bot. Because if the Google Bot goes and crawls all your webpages for search, that, your data will show up in the AI overviews, which feels like they're not maybe training the foundation model, but they're still summarizing it and they still might be, they still might be reducing traffic. Now, for publishers and content creators, that's harmful potentially, but for ecommerce people, it's great.

• 3:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. There's kind of two sides of that. There was a post on r/seo five days ago titled, "ChatGPT Plus is secretly Google-powered. My hidden page experiment proves it." So he created a dummy page indexed only in Google and got it to show up in ChatGPT Plus results within hours. The same query in Bing, DuckDuckGo, et cetera, still returned zero results.

• 4:02John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 4:03Jordi Hays?

  And he did this by coining a nonsense word, put it on a page that was not linked anywhere, forced Google to index it via the search console, and then asked ChatGPT Plus to define the term, which he invented, and it quoted the hidden page verbatim.

• 4:18John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 4:19Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 4:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder what that relationship's like. I mean, OpenAI has, you know, I felt like they would always be, there would always be some relationship with Microsoft because Bing has really solid search infrastructure. Like, for a while, people were saying like Bing has as robust of a crawling infrastructure as Google. Like, they built the technology, they just weren't able to actually transform, you know, customer behavior to the degree that people would by default go to Bing. They ran this big campaign, Bing it and go and all this, and it never really happened, but the tech was always good because they were, they knew what to build and they went and built it. They just couldn't change people's behaviors. So, interesting. I wonder if Google will be bringing out the Sharpell any time soon for OpenAI. Anyway, let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money, save

• 5:05John Coogan?

  both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place. Go to ramp.com. So, Tane, who's been on the show before, says Sundar Pichai on Google CapEx. With this strong and growing demand for our cloud products and services, we are increasing our investment in capital expenditures in 2025 to approximately 85 billion and are excited by the opportunity ahead. We gotta hit the gong.

• 5:28Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong for Sundar. Well deserved. Sundar Pitch AI.

• 5:34John Coogan?

  He's pitching AI, and he's pitching it successfully. The Google earnings are staggering. So, 14% jump in year-over-year revenue. Guess their ARR, their annualized revenue.

• 5:49Jordi Hays?

  Wow. I don't even, oh, run.

• 5:51John Coogan?

  Their run rating, 400 billion, almost. They did, they put up 96.4 billion in the second quarter and said CapEx, it's like, it would be a lot if it was in millions. It's in billions. They said that CapEx would increase 13% to 85 billion, and that compares with 52 billion last year. So, that's a big, big increase, even above expectations. Ben Thompson has a great analysis of this and is, it came away, from my reading, pretty excited about it. So, Andrew Curran also has a post here, says, Sundar Pichai on the earnings call, the growth in usage has been incredible at I In May, we announced that we processed 480 trillion monthly tokens across our surfaces.

• 6:36John Coogan?

  So that's both AI search features and Google search AI mode Gemini, also API stuff. So overall tokens, we're going to have Milky Milk on the show later. He's going to talk about token factories. The demand for tokens is immense and it's really just weaving its way into all these different nooks and crannies. It's certainly going mainstream. If you just ask a friend who's not, you know, in the horse race of who's going to win, just a normal friend. Look at, let's look at your screen time. How much time are you looking at chat GPT? You're going to see 10 minutes, you're going to see 30 minutes a day.

• 7:10Jordi Hays?

  This was buried, not in the main post, but Andrew follows up and said, he said there will be over 70 million user videos made with VO3, which is impressive, especially considering that they massively rate limit everyone.

• 7:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:23Jordi Hays?

  You pay $500 a month and you get a measly couple of videos a day.

• 7:27John Coogan?

  It's hard, it's hard to actually.

• 7:29Jordi Hays?

  Somebody made a great, made a great, very cool intro video using VO3.

• 7:34John Coogan?

  So they've doubled tokens since May and then yeah.

• 7:37Jordi Hays?

  The more interesting thing here is that Safe Superintelligence, Ilya's small $32 billion AI upstart, is going to exclusively use Google TPUs.

• 7:51John Coogan?

  That's exciting.

• 7:51Jordi Hays?

  That seems like a bombshell.

• 7:53John Coogan?

  Maybe, I mean, you got to get big infrastructure somewhere. And if everyone's optimizing against Nvidia, maybe there's, maybe there's like Slack capacity in TPUs. I mean, you certainly, like if you are trying to bet on a hyperscaler to hit your horse too, and you see that Google's increasing their capex pretty significantly to 85 billion, like you, you know that they are going to have like enough capacity to surface, to service you to the tune of one gigawatt or something like that. If you want to do some massive training run. I do wonder how, how compute constrained SSI.

• 8:29John Coogan?

  Is in the sense like, like, how much is Ilya feeling the scaling wall? Because for a long time, it was scale is all you need. Just go bigger, bigger, bigger. And that's certainly the playbook that we've seen Sam Altman run with, with the Stargate project and with the bringing in Masayoshi Son, bringing in Donald Trump and Crusoe, and putting together this like team that can actually marshal half a quadrillion dollars? Is that right? It's 500, no, no, half a trillion. It's 500 billion they want to spend.

• 8:58Jordi Hays?

  They haven't marshaled it yet, John.

• 9:00John Coogan?

  It's a lot of money.

• 9:01Jordi Hays?

  They're working on it.

• 9:02John Coogan?

  It's half a trillion. But, but, but SSI, at least, at least like the rumors or the memes around it have been very much, have been more focused on, let's advance the research. And maybe that next phase of research is not purely compute bound. It's not, it's not purely, hey, we're in this scaling race. We're going to build a bigger transformer. That's, that's honestly a little bit of what Elon's been doing. They're saying like, we have the transformer architecture. We're going to scale this up a ton. And, and where we are great is building a massive cluster, the Colossus, 100,000 GPUs. We'll build it faster and we'll get it up to speed and we'll train it. And in three months, when most people would think it would take a year, we haven't been seeing that from SSI.

• 9:45John Coogan?

  SSI, we haven't seen, oh, SSI has tents with GPUs in it. That, that's their, that's their edge. The, the, the edge with SSI, as it's been pitched at least, has always been foundational research progress, just making, making progress on, on the underlying research that might be an elegant solution that increases the efficiency and you get a better model with even less GPUs. But if they need a ton, Google will have them because they're investing more in CapEx more than ever before. While talking, while taking a question on Agentic capabilities, it sounds like Sundar said this, when we built our series of 2.5 Pro models, it's the direction where we are investing the most. That's definitely exciting progress, including in the models we haven't fully released yet. Long answer on Agentic progress.

• 10:29John Coogan?

  The good news here is that we are making robust progress. We think we are at the frontier here. He said that they, he said they have projects running internally, but now they are slow and expensive. They see the potential and are making progress on both. Gemini has a deep research product, which I would call an agentic product. The question is, are they going to try and match what ChatGPT launched with agent mode sooner than later? Is there a security or a risk thing? Google's been a little bit more hesitant to just throw stuff out in the wild, but they're moving very quickly. And I think they will probably be able to get something up. There's certainly nothing on the capex or model capability side that would stop them. And Elon Musk just says, wow.

• 11:11Jordi Hays?

  Well, Elon is playing the enemy of my enemy is my friend mode.

• 11:16John Coogan?

  It's like, I love these guys. Yeah.

• 11:18Jordi Hays?

  Love to see it.

• 11:19John Coogan?

  It's not a, it's not a knockout, drag out fight. So let's go over to, oh, this is interesting. So Moffett Nathanson, Michael Nathanson, who's been on Strategery a few times in the Wall Street Journal was quoted. What people worry about is just the math around search. Isn't AI going to be negative to search? And they went out of the way many times on the call to say, that's not what we're seeing. And so there's this big question on can, can Google avoid disruption by integrating the new disruptive technology, artificial intelligence in a way that doesn't destroy their core business, which is search ads. They're putting up 80 billion in revenue a year on it.

• 12:03Jordi Hays?

  My personal feeling is that Chrome specifically is just so unbelievably sticky. And as long as it takes the average person to, to, you know, hitting, hitting two buttons to get to the point where they can do any type of search, Google will continue to dominate because right now I can hit command T. Search something quickly. Yes, I'm sure I could update the default like search to something else, but I haven't. Even though I love the model.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  There was a time when I bounced around. I remember having Opera installed and Firefox installed for a while. And then for the last decade, it's just been.

• 12:41Jordi Hays?

  I used to love, there was a moment. Like probably five years ago that I was loving Safari. It was just so snappy and fast and simple.

• 12:48John Coogan?

  I believe it's also built on Chromium, but yes, but it's not a Google product, so they so they could in theory reroute.

• 12:56Jordi Hays?

  No, Safari is not built on Chromium.

• 12:59John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  Uses Apple's own WebKit rendering engine.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  I do, I do like, so it's weird. I use, I use Safari on my phone and Chrome on my desktop, which feels like it totally breaks the continuity, right? But I've just, I've just kind of stuck with that and it's been fine. And I don't have like tabs that float in between. They're kind of separate, but it's fine. Really quickly, this show is brought to you by Restream. One stream, thirty destinations, multi-stream, and reach your audience wherever they are. We love Restream. You can sign up for free. So let's go over to Ben Thompson, talking about Google earnings. He has said, I've repeatedly laid out the theoretical case for why AI is potentially disruptive to Google. And we asked him about this when he came on the show.

• 13:42John Coogan?

  My question was like, is there a world where, where revenue and profit from, from generative AI products is actually not as counter positioned against Google in the sense that like, if they had launched the Gemini app first and become the ChatGPT, they'd probably be seeing a drop in search volume, but then also seeing revenue spike from an even more popular Gemini that's monetizing even better. And, and was it a question of them just like not being able to take that pill? Or, or was it more about like the risk and PR nervousness than actual structural?

• 14:18Jordi Hays?

  That stood out to most, the, the most to me and I'll probably butcher it a little bit, but he effectively was saying like, it's really hard for companies to change who they are. And when you look at Google's mission statement to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful, that is so deeply aligned with AI. It's like, what does ChatGPT do? Like organizes information and makes it useful, right? Agents like ChatGPT agent is making that information useful. And so it just feels like, again, like generative AI is like deeply aligned with the core mission. And so it's easy to see, you know, them continuing to win here.

• 14:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I think the, the problem is, is like, the, like disruption comes when you create a product that is.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  Not as good, but the financials are structurally different. So the idea of like, if AI disrupts like a law firm, you look at this product or even like, I don't know, what's the classic example of disruption that people go through?

• 15:25John Coogan?

  I don't know, but like this idea of like-

• 15:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the big thing was innovator's dilemma, right?

• 15:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, in the innovator's dilemma, the example is like, a new product comes to market that does something 90% as well. And so it's like unacceptable to the people that are buying the current product, but then over time, it gets better and better and better until it replaces the current product. And so there is a world where if they had just changed the Google search bar to just be like, this is just an LLM now, people would have been really, really disappointed with that shift. And they would have been like, I want to go back. And ripping that Band-Aid off to the tune of, what, $300 billion a year in search revenue would be really painful. So they had to take a more iterative, like

• 16:13John Coogan?

  stepwise improvements, but it seems like they're doing well. And Ben Thompson is kind of echoing this. He says, "Once again, and however, I have to come to Google's defense. All available metrics suggest that the company is doing quite well. Indeed, I would go further. You can make the case that the company's biggest mistake is not going harder." And so they flipped the switch on cloud. Their infrastructure spending is through the roof, as we mentioned. So after the Q4 2024 earnings and their announcement that they were spending $75 billion on CapEx, then Google Cloud's revenue numbers disappointed, but this was because they didn't have enough GPUs and they were actually constrained.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  So they missed on top line, like they didn't bring in enough revenue, but their margins actually improved. And so what that means is that there was so much demand that they had pricing power. And they could say, no, we're not giving you any discounts because everyone wants these GPUs right now or the TPUs. They want our infrastructure. So we don't need to, we don't need to sell them at a discount. And so their margins were really good. And what that revealed was that they were, they were capacity constrained, and that justifies the bigger CapEx spend that they're going into right now.

• 17:22Jordi Hays?

  And Google is still the polymarket, which company has the best AI model end of 2025? So December 31st, there's been one and a half million in volume and Google is still sitting comfortably at 46% chance of being at the top of LM Arena at the end of the year.

• 17:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is such a crazy supply constraint metric. So the Google CFO, Anat Ashkenazi, said on the earnings call, "In cloud, as I mentioned, the demand for our products is high, as evidenced by the continued revenue growth and the cloud backlog." Guess how big their cloud backlog is? Just the demand for Google Cloud products that they can't fulfill because they haven't built the data centers. But if they had more capacity, they think that they could deliver this. $106 billion. So much money.

• 18:13Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, more businesses should try to put themselves in the position.

• 18:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:19Jordi Hays?

  160 billion of demand.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  106 billion.

• 18:24Jordi Hays?

  We try to not give business advice.

• 18:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:26Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 18:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:28Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's just like every business is different. Every founder's different. But in general, if you can develop a demand.

• 18:36John Coogan?

  It's a good call for like a YC company. Like if you go on stage at Demo Day and you say like, "Yeah, we have LOIs and we have some demand backlog."

• 18:42Jordi Hays?

  We have $106 billion of demand that we're unable. There was actually a YC company yesterday or two days ago that was getting a little bit roasted because they were like, they launched a product and they were like, "Wow, today was insane. Our servers went down immediately." And you could see the user chart and they had like 250 users. And so people are like, "Wait, like your entire product went down on 250 users?"

• 19:10John Coogan?

  That's ridiculous.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, but happy for their success.

• 19:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started for free at Figma.com. And so this, so he keeps going into the CapEx.

• 19:25Jordi Hays?

  Wait, before we do that, Figma Make is generally available today. You can go to Figma.com/make and just start building various products. Tyler has been using Figma Make to make a product that we'll be releasing very soon.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  Very excited for that. We will, we will announce that soon. So from the earnings call, given the strong demand for our cloud products and services, we now expect to invest 85 billion in CapEx from 2025 up from a previous estimate of 75 billion, just a 10 billion incremental investment, absolutely massive. Our updated outlook reflects industrial investment in servers, the timing of delivery of servers and an acceleration of the pace of data center construction, primarily to meet cloud customer demand. The challenge pitch I cautioned in an answer to an analyst's question is that it takes a while for these investments to come on board. So of course, the, the risk is like you overbuild, but there's certainly

• 20:23John Coogan?

  no evidence of that, given the massive backlog. So the other interesting thing that Ben dips his toe into. So Ben Thompson, Mr. Teckery famously does not get caught up in trade deals and non-CEO employee shifts.

• 20:42Jordi Hays?

  They're below his line.

• 20:43John Coogan?

  They are below his line. They're below his line. But he had to chime in on the CFO change that happened at Google. So he says, I'm always hesitant to delve too much. I like that he's throwing in a delve. You know, it's not written by AI, but he's baiting.

• 20:57Jordi Hays?

  He's baiting people. He's like, how dare you accuse. He's like, you can go back and look at how many times I've used.

• 21:04John Coogan?

  I created delve. I coined that word.

• 21:08Jordi Hays?

  There's, there's, there's a YC company called Dell as well. It's doing well.

• 21:14John Coogan?

  So he says, but it's interesting that the Google, that the earnings call was Ruth Perat's last one as CFO. Perat earned a lot of plaudits for getting Google's spending under control in the late 2010s. But what seems clear in retrospect that is that 52.5 billion that Google spent on CapEx in 2024 was too little. And so he's kind of like, you know, noodling on this idea that maybe the CFO was too cautious going into. An AI boom.

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  You could lose your job over that.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  Called a, maybe Ruth Perot was calling top signals like us. It looks terrible. Fortunately, we don't lose their job.

• 21:57Jordi Hays?

  There's nothing wrong with calling top signals.

• 22:00John Coogan?

  There, there, there's something wrong with underinvesting.

• 22:02Jordi Hays?

  Water if you're calling, specifically calling the top.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 22:05Jordi Hays?

  Trying to identify top signals is more of a meta game.

• 22:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. So, uh, so basically, um, Google, it, it, it does seem like Google under invested in CapEx in 2024 based on demand. Wound up with that massive backlog, missed on top line, couldn't, couldn't make enough money, couldn't generate enough revenue. Had higher margins, that's great, but, uh, but didn't deliver on the cloud side, uh, on, on the actual scale. So Askanazis, Ashkanazis calls meanwhile have repeatedly reiterated that Google Cloud is particularly supply constrained. They don't have enough servers and the company has now surprised investors twice in six months with the scale of its CapEx plans. Let's go. Um, says this, in my opinion, is incredibly bullish for Google. Go back to this, the disruption lens, which we were kind of noodling on earlier.

• 22:51John Coogan?

  The exact avenue from which you would expect management resistance to a disruptive innovation to, to flow is from this, is the CFO office. Like the CFO, uh, should be resistant to, uh, disruptive innovation. And when you look at the history of companies that got disrupted, the CFO is saying, we have a good business. Let's just keep printing cash. Like this new thing, let's not worry about it. Let's not go in.

• 23:17Jordi Hays?

  Nokia CFO.

• 23:19John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 23:19Jordi Hays?

  Are you guys seeing the numbers?

• 23:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, but like for a lot of those companies that got disrupted, it's like they were printing cash, high dividends for decades, even after the disruption happened. The next, the iPhone comes out and in order to actually do something to compete, they have to completely go into startup mode. They have to burn a ton of cash, cut their dividend, stop stockpiling cash, issue debt, do a ton, raise more equity, maybe like they have to become a new product development company. And it would be very, very difficult, usually. Um, but.

• 23:48Jordi Hays?

  BlackBerry's annual revenue in 2005, 1.9 billion.

• 23:53John Coogan?

  They completely, they completely pivoted.

• 23:55Jordi Hays?

  Annual revenue in 2024, 580 million.

• 23:59John Coogan?

  It's a cybersecurity company now. They bought a couple cybersecurity assets while they were valuable.

• 24:06John Coogan?

  While they were like, you know, while the stock was up and then eventually they wound down the phone business and just kind of became a cybersecurity company because obviously they had a ton of enterprise contracts because BlackBerrys were sold into like large enterprises as you know, work phones. Very few people had BlackBerrys as like everyday phones. But so they had all those, they had like solid sales team, solid connections, bought a new asset and were able to continue the business even though obviously it's not the company that it once was. So Ben Thompson goes on to say, there's a, there does seem to be a major shift in mindset in terms of the company's willingness to lean into AI,

• 24:48John Coogan?

  particularly for a segment, Google Cloud, that even in the best case scenarios is significantly lower margin than the company's core business. What's interesting about that margin point, however, is that it too is another reason to be bullish on Google's prospects. Google is the only company, we talked about the TPU thing, they're the only company with an at-scale ASIC alternative to Nvidia's GPUs, which should give them a meaningful cost advantage to that end, to the extent the cloud compute

• 25:13Jordi Hays?

  At scale to a point where they, they're going to be able to support

• 25:16John Coogan?

  SSI.

• 25:16Jordi Hays?

  SSI.

• 25:17John Coogan?

  Which is crazy.

• 25:17Jordi Hays?

  Not just their own needs.

• 25:18John Coogan?

  And then, and then there's also another question.

• 25:21Jordi Hays?

  The dynamic that's interesting is like, OpenAI needs to massively scale infrastructure and, and as we covered earlier this week, commit to spending tens of billions of dollars with, with Oracle.

• 25:33John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:34Jordi Hays?

  And their revenue today doesn't support that. Obviously their, their growth trajectory is absolutely insane, but OpenAI being in a position where they are competing head-on with Google for this very, very critical consumer use case, search, knowledge retrieval.

• 25:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 25:51Jordi Hays?

  And ultimately usefulness. It is a extremely tough position for OpenAI to be in.

• 25:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. So the other hyperscalers are working on ASICs that are alternative to Nvidia GPUs, but they all seem to be following the similar path, trying to get line time at TSMC, not fully at scale. Then there's also the question, and I think a lot of people's mind is like, Is this the end of history? Is there something that's coming down the pipe that could disrupt the Nvidia GPU monopoly, the CUDA ecosystem, or even the Google TPU? And Semi Analysis has a funny meme here, way down in the stack, about the next generation of chips that were, that have been pitched from startups like Etched and a few others.

• 26:35John Coogan?

  So Semi Analysis says, although baking transformers into silicon may sound cool, it's mostly just a marketing slogan, 90% of transformers flops are just GEMMs and 256x256 or 128x128 systolic arrays in TPU and in TPU Tranium are already optimized for these. Even modern GP GPUs with tensor cores are optimized well for GEMMs. Even if you bake transformers into silicon, AKA just create a giant systolic array, most of your die area will still be taken up with SRAM cells that's the memory, and you will still face the memory wall since your HBM memory bandwidth will be the same as GP GPUs, TPUs, and Tranium.

• 27:19John Coogan?

  And so the meme is transformers are just 90% mat moles. George Hatz had a similar analysis or take, just saying that if you look at the actual energy use of GPUs right now, there isn't that much opportunity to squeeze more value out of them. They're pretty efficient and most of the, most of the energy that goes in goes into these very, very specific math calculations that are already pretty optimized. We did hear from someone, something about the, this is from Martin Scrawley, that Jane Street, or was it, was it Jane Street? One of the high frequency trading firms figured out how to run one of those very, very basic mat mole calculations on a GPU more efficiently and I guess kind of open sourced it or something, or got out into the, into the research world.

• 28:04John Coogan?

  So it doesn't, it doesn't feel like at this moment, I still think that there's a interesting bull case for the Etched crew in some ways and some niches or something, some specific models. But it doesn't seem like there's some new disruptive chip architecture that's going to come out and, and obviate the need. For both Nvidia GPUs and Google TPUs. And so Google's very well positioned as Ben Thompson is writing. So he says, this should give them their position that they have an at scale ASIC alternative to Nvidia GPUs. Should give them a meaningful cost advantage to that end, to the extent the cloud compute becomes commoditized is the extent to which

• 28:45John Coogan?

  Google actually has a margin advantage. Because if all of the clouds are commoditized, but all of them are on Nvidia and then Google is taking the Nvidia margin basically from their TPU, they should be in a very good spot. This is to be sure a bit weird. Parat gained these plaudits, those plaudits because there was so much waste in Google to cut, which was downstream of the company's amazing monopoly and margins in search, which hardly seems like the recipe for a structural of cost advantage. But here we are.

• 29:11Jordi Hays?

  Sundar is going to tell every employee, we're cutting your daily massage allowance from three massages down to one. We're deeply sorry, but we need to get fit.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  Got to get fit. And you got to get on Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. 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.

• 29:36Jordi Hays?

  Talking with Christina yesterday. She's an absolute dog.

• 29:39John Coogan?

  Boardroom general.

• 29:40Jordi Hays?

  Boardroom general.

• 29:41John Coogan?

  She put the KPIs in orbit.

• 29:43Jordi Hays?

  She really has.

• 29:44John Coogan?

  She really has. Did you see that? Did you see that chart that Reid shared?

• 29:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this chart, she says, Andrew said Christina often talks about stacking rice on the chessboard. And I didn't see this until after the show, but I was like, it seems like you guys are just chopping wood like every day, just out there like.

• 30:03John Coogan?

  That's what it is.

• 30:04Jordi Hays?

  Putting in the work.

• 30:04John Coogan?

  Just, you know, a couple percent here, a couple percent here, just very consistent growth, very consistent growth, very smooth growth curve into a monster of a business. So. Congrats to everyone over at Vanta on the new round and we will go back to Google. So more broadly, the way in which Google seems to have flipped the switch in terms of going all in on AI, along with Meta's spending on AI talent, really does strongly suggest that AI in the end is a sustaining technology that favors the incumbents most of all. Both see a line of sight to new revenue streams and critically, both can fund AI from profits, not speculative investment or debt. And of course, both have distribution, including search. Sometimes the empire strikes back. I love that. So there were other takes from

• 30:49John Coogan?

  search. You'll have to subscribe to Sir Teckery to get the full analysis. You gotta go and subscribe to Sir Teckery. If you're not subscribed, what are you doing? But the interesting takeaway from search is that it seems like Google's being a little squishy about, hey, we don't want to report certain KPIs anymore. So they used to report paid clicks and now the chief business officer, Philip Schindler, is saying, and on your paid click question, look, to be very clear, I think we said this before, we manage the business to drive great outcomes for our users and attractive ROI for our advertisers. We actually don't manage to pay clicks or CPC targets, which is fair and good, but it's

• 31:31John Coogan?

  funny because Ben Thompson's like, but I want that data. That would be helpful to me.

• 31:35Jordi Hays?

  I mean, when a business has a metric that they tell you is important for a long time and then they suddenly tell you it's not important.

• 31:42John Coogan?

  Don't worry about it.

• 31:43Jordi Hays?

  You gotta read into it a little bit.

• 31:44John Coogan?

  But it does make sense. They're a huge business. They've moved on to bigger and like higher levels of abstraction.

• 31:48Jordi Hays?

  Just look at the growth in tokens.

• 31:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 31:51Jordi Hays?

  Don't worry about anything else.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  What he says is that there are product changes and policy changes that actually drive better monetization, but at the expense of paid clicks and that's probably AI searches and stuff like that. You'll see in the 10Q, paid clicks were up 4% year on year, but a number of factors affecting these metrics from quarter to quarter, such as advertiser spending, product changes, policy changes, user engagement. So it's really important when it comes to pay clicks and CPC to avoid drawing overly broad conclusions solely based on these metrics. Don't put Me in the truth zone on this, he says. So Ben Thompson, this is exactly what you said. I don't even think you pre-read this, but you basically have Ben Thompson working in your head.

• 32:32Jordi Hays?

  This is what I said when Ben Thompson came on the show. I was like, I think your way of thinking has been so ingrained into my mind that I think that I have an original thought and you've already thought it.

• 32:42John Coogan?

  Okay. So this is what he says.

• 32:46John Coogan?

  The more that management tells me not to pay attention to paid click rates, the more I want to pay attention, which is exactly what you just said. Regardless, once again, the fact that paid clips, paid click, paid clicks were up 4% and search revenue was up 12% makes it clear that search growth is primarily being driven by higher prices. And so the actual number of clicks is up 4%, but revenue is up 12%. That means that they're monetizing each click better. But people are obviously going to read into, oh, paid clicks aren't growing that fast. Like the actual pie isn't growing that fast. They're just getting like, it's basically like, you know, once Instagram reels is popular, everyone's watching it, then you just got to put more ads in the feed.

• 33:28John Coogan?

  Right. And that's kind of, that seems like what they're doing. And that's what's driving search revenue up 12%. AI overviews is another question. This is a funny one where basically the, the chief business officer, Philip Schindler at Google says,

• 33:46John Coogan?

  basically says that AI overviews are monetizing as well as other Google searches. And Ben Thompson says, given the fact that the vast majority of Google searches don't monetize at all, because people just click on a link.

• 33:59Jordi Hays?

  That's what I was about to say. Oftentimes, the, if you're searching for information, you can have very low purchase intent. Right. Like, how many times a day do I search for a specific fact? And never would have, you could show me the best ad in the world and I wouldn't click through because I'm just looking for a fact.

• 34:17John Coogan?

  Yep. So if you're looking for something like, you know, Hulk Hogan's age, that's not a, that's not a purchase intent. If that comes from an AI overview, or it comes from a, you know how they used to have those like knowledge boxes or like we would pull from Wikipedia? Or if you click on Wikipedia, none of that is making Google any money. So it really doesn't matter the UI or the actual underlying technology to get you that answer. And then Gemini is on absolute tear. Really remarkable. How, how many monthly active users do you think the Gemini app has?

• 34:51John Coogan?

  These are MAUs, not DUs.

• 34:52Jordi Hays?

  On the mobile app?

• 34:54John Coogan?

  Gemini app.

• 34:55Jordi Hays?

  Combined?

• 34:55John Coogan?

  Uh, I think this is probably across mobile, web and desktop, but I would assume mobile.

• 35:01Jordi Hays?

  Seventy million?

• 35:02John Coogan?

  Four hundred and fifty million.

• 35:03Jordi Hays?

  Oof.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  Big, right?

• 35:05Jordi Hays?

  And that's signed, like, I guess, I guess, I mean, they kind of get the, it's kind of a, they, they have a cheat code because everybody already has a Google accounts that are like, signed in.

• 35:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 35:14Jordi Hays?

  But in, in term, I don't, I don't know.

• 35:17John Coogan?

  They're monthly and, and what we know from semi-analysis is that they're not taking share of queries that much, but four hundred and fifty million downloads on an app and monthly active users is pretty, pretty high. And so if there's, if there's a world where Google can build business around, if they can bring in ads faster and keep the Gemini app cheaper and offer better, better products and like you get deep research, you get agent, you get the $200 tier, the ad free, if, if OpenAI and ChatGPT has a $200 tier that's ad free, and then Google's giving you the same product and the same experience, but with ads for free, like that feels like an Android iOS battle going on, that feels like something that could actually be pretty sustainable

• 36:02John Coogan?

  and kind of drive this like little bit of a duopoly. I don't know. Uh, we'll have to see how it goes, but, uh, daily requests grew over fifty percent from Q1 to Q2. Um, and I think everyone, everyone is, is pretty surprised, uh, by that. Um, and I was also surprised when I went and pulled up the, uh, the Gemini app, when I went to go download it, um, the number of five star reviews is like hundreds of thousands. And I was like, okay, this is very serious. And that reflects the actual number that they shared, four hundred and fifty million monthly active users. So still a lot of work to be done. I was very frustrated when I went to go get VO3, I got the Gemini app and they were advertising VO, but I couldn't access it.

• 36:46Jordi Hays?

  Is Gemini a default in, in Android yet?

• 36:50John Coogan?

  I don't know. I imagine that it has to be pre-installed in the next round of Android phones that go out. Why would you not want that pre-installed and there? But I would be surprised if that's what's driving it because, I mean, how many Samsung Galaxies have they sold in the last quarter? Probably not 200 million, right? I doubt that that's what's driving the growth. But maybe, that might be an interesting thing. How many of them are pre-installs, pre-loads? But even then, you have to open it to become an MAU. But yeah, maybe they're testing, maybe people will churn and go back to OpenAI and ChatGPT.

• 37:22Jordi Hays?

  Android users have had access to Google Assistant for a long time. That's getting phased out. It's just gonna be Gemini.

• 37:28John Coogan?

  Yep. Well, let me tell you about 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.

• 37:38Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if people can hear, but anytime we do an ad read, the entire team breaks out in applause in the studio. So it's really...

• 37:47John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for some advertisements. There we go. In other very, very sad news, Hulk Hogan has passed away at age 71. Cardiac arrest was what you said, right, Jordy? I didn't actually dig into that. I looked a little bit more into some of the history. I wanted to know a little bit more about his story. There's a whole bunch of different profiles. There was at one point going to be a biopic about him. In a recent interview with Variety, director Todd Phillips revealed that his long gestating Hulk Hogan biopic will not progress. Unfortunately, it got canned. This was back about a year ago today. I love what we were trying to do, but that's not going

• 38:30John Coogan?

  to come together for me. Chris Hemsworth had signed on to play Hogan in early 2019 with the Joker writer and director duo Todd Phillips and Scott Silver attached to lead the charge. Films producers, you got Phillips, Hogan, Hemsworth, Bradley Cooper, Michael Sugar, Sugar? I don't know.

• 38:50Jordi Hays?

  Stacked.

• 38:51John Coogan?

  And Hogan's longtime pal and New World Order stablemate Eric Bischoff.

• 38:58John Coogan?

  In a July 2020 interview with Total Film, Hemsworth described the training he'd have to undergo to transform into the 80s WWE icon. As you can imagine, the preparation for the role will be insanely physical. I will have to put on more size than I ever have before, even more than I put on for Thor. There is this accent as well as the physicality and the attitude, Hemsworth said. The Hogan biopic would explore his rise to stardom in the early 1980s. His WWF World Heavyweight Championship win over the Iron Sheik in 1984-

• 39:28Jordi Hays?

  It's a good role. You know that Hemsworth has a personal fitness training app called Center?

• 39:34John Coogan?

  I have heard of that. Is it good?

• 39:35Jordi Hays?

  Like, wow, I'm really gonna have to use my app a lot for this role.

• 39:38John Coogan?

  Maybe we should start using his app. Get on the Hulk train. Become Hulkamaniacs, as they call them.

• 39:46Jordi Hays?

  Did you grow up watching wrestling at all?

• 39:48John Coogan?

  I didn't, but I was aware of Hulk Hogan just through the lore because it was so dominant.

• 39:55Jordi Hays?

  Even I feel like I would hear more about Hulk Hogan in the context of the Gawker saga.

• 40:03John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, we should go into that. I wanna, I wanna pull up this Hulk Hogan video. I'll send it to the, the team. There's some like great like rants. Where is it? There's one where he's, where he's talking trash about something. Wow, everything's just like RIP. But he was, he was legendary at like, I don't, what do they call in UFC where you like, are pre-show pump up talking about the competition? I guess it's like a promo? Is that what it is?

• 40:38Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense.

• 40:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, this one. Seek and Destroy. We gotta watch this. I will put it in the tab so we can watch this. And then, yeah, we should talk about the Gawker fallout a little bit. Let me put that in there. The best promos. Hulk Hogan, Seek and Destroy. Let's pull that up.

• 40:56Jordi Hays?

  Hulk Hogan has recently been a founder. He has-

• 41:00John Coogan?

  Here it is.

• 41:01Jordi Hays?

  -a real American beer-

• 41:03John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, he does.

• 41:04Jordi Hays?

  -which he did with the Budweiser family.

• 41:07John Coogan?

  This is what we need to channel. We need to bring this energy to the show every day.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  I'm fighting for life, brother. I'm fighting for all those people that have remolded their lives, man. Modelled after Hulkamania. Get their priorities in order, man. Walk around with a lot of pride. As far as those people that are on Andre the Giant's side, I wish they'd come on down too. I'd like to slap them around just for a warm-up. But I've already gone through my transformation, man. I'm ready for Pontiac, Michigan. I'm not the Hulk anymore. I'm the Hulkster, man. Look into my eyes, man. Come on, that mountain top, back off, little man. I'm on that mountain top, and I'm waiting for you, Andre. And I'm guarding that mountain. And the Hulkster that's guarding, he's got a 32-inch neck, a 64-inch chest,

• 42:07Speaker 02

  the largest arms in the world. And I'm geared to seek and destroy. Seek and destroy the cancer of Andre the Giant. Seek and destroy the Weasel's empire. And what you gonna do, Andre, in Pontiac, Michigan, when Hulkamania destroys you?

• 42:27Speaker 03

  He is indeed absolutely livid. Going against a man that one time he looked up to and respected. Hulk Hogan to defend-

• 42:35John Coogan?

  That's the energy I want Sundar Pichai to bring to Google Analytics. I got 85 billion of CapEx. I grew 50% top line. And I'm coming for Sam Altman. They're coming for me. I'm coming for, I'm coming for- They're coming for me. I'm coming for them. I got 450 million MAUs on the Gemini app. The search overview's are going great. They're monetizing just as well as regular search results. Come here to Mountain View. Get your, get down to Mountain View. And if you're riding with, if you're riding with the Andre the Giant, like, you gotta be a Stark Raven Hulkamaniac. That's so good. I love it. Chris Hemsworth signed on to play Thor, from Thor, signed

• 43:19John Coogan?

  on to play Hogan in early 2019. Said he had to put on a lot of size. The biopic would have explored his rise to stardom in the early 1980s and then Hulkamania takeover that ruled the wrestling world well into the 1990s. Phillip's take on Hulkamania was going to stay away from Hogan's recent controversies, instead focus solely on the early years. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are currently developing a film titled Killing Gawker that will explore Hogan's campaign against the media empire in the wake of an explosive home video.

• 43:54Jordi Hays?

  Hulk Hogan was six foot seven, which is wild because you'd be able to height mog him.

• 43:59John Coogan?

  Pretty close to me. It is crazy.

• 44:01Jordi Hays?

  He's got you on next.

• 44:03John Coogan?

  He's got me on next conference for sure, for sure. And I think I will be staying away from his supplement stack, hoping, hoping, hoping to make it longer.

• 44:12Jordi Hays?

  Really sad, though.

• 44:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, very sad. What a, what a career and what a fantastic, the Hulk, the Hulk Hogan theme song, I Am A Real American, such a good song, such a great rallying cry.

• 44:24Jordi Hays?

  That's the name of his beer, Real American Beer.

• 44:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Fight for the rights of every man. Such a good song.

• 44:32Jordi Hays?

  Light, crisp, crushable.

• 44:34John Coogan?

  So there is a, there is a reflective piece in the New Yorker about Hulk Hogan's Gawker lawsuit that we can go through. But first, let me tell you about Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the modern, meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. Go to Linear.app to get started.

• 44:56Jordi Hays?

  That is a powerful homepage.

• 44:58John Coogan?

  And, you know, if Hogan's selling beer, you gotta get on numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

• 45:06Jordi Hays?

  Friend of mine is, was business partners with, with Hogan on that.

• 45:13John Coogan?

  That's crazy. So we have Zach Kukoff joining at noon to break down the AI day yesterday in Washington DC. The besties met up with the Hill and Valley crew, honestly crushed it. We have a bunch of great posts that we can run through.

• 45:30John Coogan?

  First, let's go through a little bit of the Hulk Hogan law, Gawker lawsuit. This is from 2016, well before we actually saw the, the results from all this. But on Monday afternoon, a Florida jury added $25 million in punitive damages to the $115 million it had awarded Hulk Hogan on Friday in his invasion of privacy case against Gawker Media. Hogan sued Gawker for posting portions of a sex tape it received from an anonymous sender. It's a shocking amount, not least because it's $40 million more than Hogan, whose real name is T. J. Hara, had demanded. Verdicts of this size can pose an existential risk to media, to a media company. That's what happened to Gawker.

• 46:11John Coogan?

  Gawker has reported that it earned $44 million in revenue in 2014. In January, Gawker's owner, Nick Denton, announced that he had sold a portion of his company to investors in order to fund this case. Gawker will certainly appeal the verdict, as it should, after it pays a bond of up to $50 million, arguing that the jury was unreasonable and finding that Hogan's right to privacy outweighed Gawker's right to publish the material, which it believes was of public interest, which is a very, uh, yeah.

• 46:38Jordi Hays?

  Strange defense.

• 46:40John Coogan?

  It is, it is, it is hard to, to argue. He is a public figure, but this is a very personal thing.

• 46:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, if they had just posted that it existed and they had seen it.

• 46:50John Coogan?

  That's true, and that's kind of what's happening with the Wall Street Journal. They're not posting everything all the time with regards to the, to the, to the Trump, Epstein stuff, but they're, they're referencing that it exists, that they verified it, and that seems to be a safer path for media companies to, to kind of report that they've confirmed that something exists without actually putting everything out necessarily. Hmm. So, "The publication of the videotape of consensual sex between adults is not the most appealing place to plant a First Amendment flag, but is worth considering the possible effects on publishers if a judgment of this magnitude is allowed to stand." And so, the fallout from Gawker was, uh... Certainly celebrated in tech because they also had Valleywag, which was very annoying

• 47:33John Coogan?

  to a lot of people in tech because it was basically like TMZ for tech. I don't know if you were aware of Valleywag back in the day.

• 47:39Jordi Hays?

  Before my time.

• 47:40John Coogan?

  Before your time. But it did have like a chilling effect. I remember being at South by Southwest and a friend of mine, who's a venture backed founder at the time, was really into doing handstand pushups and was doing handstand pushups at a, at like a party that was being thrown, that were people just kind of hanging out and he was just doing some handstand pushups.

• 48:00Jordi Hays?

  As one does.

• 48:01John Coogan?

  As one does. And, and there was a Valleywag reporter there and wrote about it as a characterization of like how bro-y the situation was, but didn't include his name. And he was like, I dodged a bullet because like it could have been forever outed as.

• 48:14Jordi Hays?

  I mean, in many ways, in many ways, it could have built his aura.

• 48:18John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 48:18Jordi Hays?

  If he was named.

• 48:20John Coogan?

  In the modern era, it would have been incredibly bullish, but at that time, it did feel like something that could destroy you. It was, it was a very tense time, very, very tense time.

• 48:28Jordi Hays?

  Roy Lee would not have done well during that era.

• 48:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:33Jordi Hays?

  Maybe he would have, maybe he would have changed the meta though. Cause he's making, he's making shirtless posts on the timeline.

• 48:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 48:41Jordi Hays?

  Bringing them into the modern era.

• 48:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is, it is, it is an interesting, interesting thing. Like Valleywag would probably be writing about Cluley a lot and framing it in a different way. There's already probably folks out there who are framing Cluley as particularly bad on the other side of the aisle or in the, in the anti-tech category. But it just doesn't seem to have the same effect. It certainly doesn't stop venture funding or customers or any of that. It doesn't, it, it seems to be that we're in a different era where people, people in tech were, were, clearly was controversial in tech. People were definitely divided.

• 49:14Jordi Hays?

  Think it would be good if there was some law that required if, if a media company wanted to write about someone's physique, they should have to post physique.

• 49:23John Coogan?

  Oh, their own physique, yes.

• 49:25Jordi Hays?

  So that should just be in the footnotes.

• 49:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 49:27Jordi Hays?

  It's important context.

• 49:29John Coogan?

  Anyway, in other, in other news, fin.ai, the number one customer, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one on ranking on G2. Go check out fin.ai.

• 49:43Jordi Hays?

  And OWN is apparently helping launch a media company. And so if you want to go work for OWN or this new company, which I believe is called Cool Tech News. Go check it out. They're looking for a producer.

• 50:00John Coogan?

  The founder of Nicola, the electric vehicle company that went bankrupt and landed its CEO, founder in prison for a brief time. He was in jail for life. Then he got pardoned. Just did a sit down interview with Tucker Carlson and Nate Anderson from Hindenburg Research had a lengthy rebuttal to this that I thought was pretty interesting. So Nate says, I am Nate Anderson, the founder of Hindenburg Research.

• 50:33Jordi Hays?

  Okay. And just for context, if people haven't seen this yet, Tucker is basically positioning the takedown of Nicola as a woke witch hunt? Is that, is that, is that an accurate summary?

• 50:45John Coogan?

  It's, it's kind of unclear. I think he's, I think he's more just really, really open and digging into like, hey, Trevor Milton, like tell your side of the story. And it seemed like, it seemed like Tucker didn't come with really strong opinions, at least for the part that I saw. It didn't seem like he was taking a super strong stance on like, whether hydrogen is a good strategy or what happened. I haven't dug in, dug in, but a lot of it, a lot of those claims, I think, don't come from Tucker. I think they come from, from Trevor Milton. And so the, the real debate, it seems like, is between Nate Anderson and Trevor Milton's side of the story. I wouldn't say that in this podcast interview, Tucker has a particular,

• 51:29John Coogan?

  like thesis that he's advancing. He's more just asking Trevor Milton to tell his side of the story.

• 51:36Jordi Hays?

  And people are not liking it.

• 51:38John Coogan?

  People are not happy with this, for sure.

• 51:39Jordi Hays?

  People are saying pitiful. Someone else is saying Trevor Milton is a convicted fraudster and pathological liar. Other guy's saying terrible take scam artist platformed. Anyways, another person just says, seriously? Question mark and even Tik Tok investors is memeing it just being like, wow, this is

• 52:00John Coogan?

  I mean, a lot of people got burned, right?

• 52:01Jordi Hays?

  The funny thing too is, is he was, wasn't he initially prosecuted during the Trump admin?

• 52:08John Coogan?

  Yes. So Nate goes into this. He says, I'm the founder of Hindenburg Research referenced repeatedly in this bizarre and fantastical interview. During my career, I helped expose numerous financial scams, including over a dozen Ponzi schemes and numerous instances of public companies lying to and stealing from investors. Of course, he's talking about Hindenburg Research, his firm. I am immensely proud of the career of that career, including our work on Nikola Motors referenced in this interview. Trevor Milton is a convicted fraudster held criminally responsible for the incineration of hundreds of millions of dollars in retail investors hard earned money. And should, and as should be unsurprising Milton in this interview seems just to fabricate key events and information out of thin air. Unfortunately, with zero critical questioning or pushback from Tucker.

• 52:52John Coogan?

  For starters, contrary to Trevor Milton's implications that his prosecution was some sort of Biden administration conspiracy. Conveniently, neither Milton nor Tucker share that the investigation into Milton was started and disclosed in September 2020 under the first Trump admin as well as before the 2020 election. There were numerous inaccuracies throughout this interview. The claim that Hindenburg paid employees for inside information is patently absurd. The key whistleblower discussed in the interview was only briefly a contractor for Milton. He was so horrified by what he viewed as Milton's repeated false claims that he did a tremendous amount of research on his own. Unraveling numerous additional suspected lies that Milton peddled to the investing public.

• 53:34John Coogan?

  Further, Hindenburg didn't coordinate anything with media or the DOJ. Such entities ran their own investigations for their own purposes, unconnected to us. There was ample evidence that Milton misstated numerous aspects of his business and as, as the company later itself acknowledged. What's interesting is like, I feel like when we talked about the Marquez Brownlee Escobar phone, like MKBHD kind of broke that story and did some investigative journalism.

• 54:01John Coogan?

  Wound up getting his hands on the phone and then the DOJ or the FBI came and said, hey, we want that phone as evidence. We'll give it back to you maybe in five years. And so it's interesting that that it seems like the DOJ, according to Nate Anderson, did not coordinate with Hindenburg. Maybe that's just because Hindenburg was doing public research or just doing like informational research and didn't have any like hard physical evidence. But I certainly wouldn't be surprised if the DOJ reached out to Hindenburg, but it seems like they didn't coordinate, according to Nate Anderson. It would take hours to write out all the other observatives, have truth, innuendos and false statements in this interview. But in the interest of correcting some of the record, here's a handful. Milton waxes on about his pardon, but no one mentions that Milton's lawyer was Brad Bondi, the

• 54:46John Coogan?

  brother of AG Pam Bondi, nor did anyone mention that Milton donated $900,000 to Trump in October 2024, less than a month before the recent election, strategically timed well after his criminal conviction and immediately prior to the presidential election. What's interesting is like, like, you know, you do you take a company to bankruptcy, you wind up in prison for life, you would think that you get zeroed pretty hard to the degree that you don't have $900,000 sitting around to make a political donation. So I'm very curious about how the money flowed around post bankruptcy, post, post, post indictment

• 55:26John Coogan?

  and conviction, because I think that will change the calculus of people that are thinking about doing crazy stuff in the public markets. Because if you're like, okay, yes, I might get thrown in jail, but then I can squirrel away some money, donate it, get pardoned, and then have half left over to hang out. Like, that's a pretty good deal. So certainly not the functioning of the system that we want. Uh, very, very odd.

• 55:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the, the other thing that Nate calls out, he says, waxing poetic about hydrogen in the interview echoes Nicola's lies to retail investors that it successfully produced hydrogen at a cost 81% lower than anyone on earth, a feat that it would have upended the entire energy industry had it been remotely true. Nicola's head of hydrogen production, presumably in charge of this world, world-changing scientific breakthrough, turned out to be Milton's own brother, who had no scientific background and previously did odd construction jobs in Hawaii.

• 56:30John Coogan?

  See, I want to push back on that because last night I was like 7,000 prompts deep and I feel like I cracked the code to upending the, the energy markets.

• 56:40Jordi Hays?

  Chat GPT had you pretty convinced that you could produce hydrogen.

• 56:44John Coogan?

  It was like, John, you're, you're on to something.

• 56:45Jordi Hays?

  You're on to something here. It doesn't matter that you're a podcaster.

• 56:48John Coogan?

  Go public.

• 56:49Jordi Hays?

  It does not matter that you're just a mere podcaster.

• 56:52John Coogan?

  You cracked it. You cracked the code.

• 56:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the, the, you know, one, one thing you can kind of, Tucker could have pushed on was you rolled a truck downhill and you, and you marketed it as though it was a functioning vehicle.

• 57:07John Coogan?

  Yep. That was a big one.

• 57:09Jordi Hays?

  And doesn't seem to be something that he pushed back on.

• 57:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Um, big questions about short selling and he makes the case that short selling is good because it creates a financial incentive to expose companies that lie and engage in fraud. Um, I think I agree with that. I think, I, I think I'm pro short sellers. Um, although of course they can be very frustrating if you're on the other side and you're being shorted. Um, fortunately, TBPN is a privately held company, so we don't have to deal with short attacks, at least for now, but who knows?

• 57:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, with that, let's bring in our Washington correspondent, Zach Kukoff. Zach, what was your reaction? What was your reaction to Trevor Milton going on, on Tuck, Tuck Radio?

• 57:57Zak Kukoff?

  I just think terrible choice of network to go on first. The clear answer was TBPN.

• 58:02John Coogan?

  I don't know if I'm ready.

• 58:04Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 58:05John Coogan?

  It's a tough one.

• 58:06Jordi Hays?

  We'd just come, we'd come with a fact sheet of just fact by fact and say, did you roll the truck down the hill?

• 58:12Zak Kukoff?

  You're telling me you wouldn't have cobbled him the way that Tucker did?

• 58:15John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 58:17Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. When we had Soham Pareek on, people, people were saying we went, we went too easy, but clearly we got him to just admit to having multiple jobs immediately.

• 58:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, the key question was, was are you working multiple jobs? That was my first question. He just said, yes. And then, you know, from there, it's like, okay, he's admitted it. Like, let's talk about redemption. Is there a possibility?

• 58:36Zak Kukoff?

  What else did people want him to admit? Like five other made up things he hadn't done?

• 58:40Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think, I think the critique that was fair was that he's clearly a pathological liar and fairly charismatic. And we probably just should have said, hey, it seems like you're still lying. But at the same time, we got to check in with the company he just joined. He said he's going, what did he say? He said he's going.

• 59:01John Coogan?

  Exclusive.

• 59:02Jordi Hays?

  Exclusive.

• 59:02John Coogan?

  Exclusive is the term.

• 59:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm going exclusive.

• 59:05John Coogan?

  I'm going exclusive, just one job now. So I don't know. I still want to believe in redemption. Not many people believe in redemption. That's where it was interesting. But yeah, I mean, like, I suppose that if I was interviewing Trevor Milton, the first question would be, did you roll the truck down the hill? And did you, did you actually do that? Because that is the fraud claim mainly. And if, if it's like, okay, yeah, I did that. I made a mistake. Now I'm on the redemption path, as opposed to, you know, like, you know, waffling around it. But.

• 59:35Zak Kukoff?

  As opposed to, no, I didn't roll it downhill. The truck was just built that way. And the hill was just built that way.

• 59:39Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this has been a big, we got to call out, this has been a big week for podcasting. You have Sam Altman on The Ovvan. You have Netanyahu on the Nowcoys. And you have Trevor Milton on Tucker Carlson. I mean, what a week, what a week. But.

• 59:53John Coogan?

  And Zach Kukoff on TV.

• 59:54Jordi Hays?

  And Zach Kukoff on TV.

• 59:56Zak Kukoff?

  Four figures of equal stature. Correct. Thank you very much.

• 59:59John Coogan?

  I think, I think higher stature than some.

• 1:00:02Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah. Well, higher than some, lower than others. Correct.

• 1:00:04John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:00:05Jordi Hays?

  What's going on in your world? How was yesterday? It looked like total, total, also total podcast victory.

• 1:00:12John Coogan?

  Total podcast victory, for sure.

• 1:00:14Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, yesterday, I think somebody said All In is now state media, which I loved. I was like, yesterday literally was total podcast dominance,

• 1:00:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:23Zak Kukoff?

  Which was wild. It was very well done. Major props to frequent TPN guest Delian, who did an amazing job. And you know, they hold the whole thing together. And like, yeah, Christian and Delian, yeah. They put the whole thing together in like 10 days. You guys notice? The whole thing came from nothing.

• 1:00:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:38Zak Kukoff?

  10 days.

• 1:00:40Jordi Hays?

  When you get a 20 minute block on the president's schedule, you gotta move quick.

• 1:00:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:00:44Zak Kukoff?

  That is exactly, exactly true. So, all right.

• 1:00:46John Coogan?

  They started Hill and Valley a couple of years ago, just as a dinner, but now there's like enough of an organization. I think it is like a company at this point that's doing these events and they have a playbook and they, every time they execute, it's better than the last one. So.

• 1:00:58Zak Kukoff?

  My understanding is they have like 30 something people who help put these things together. It's a serious, surreal operation that really staffs it up.

• 1:01:04John Coogan?

  Uh, where was it?

• 1:01:06Zak Kukoff?

  It was at the Mellon Auditorium, which funnily enough is like next door, or maybe even part of the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA. So it's a nice, it was very funny because I would not say it was a particularly environmentally focused group in the audience, but beautiful space nonetheless. Honestly, a highlight of the day for me, and probably for everybody there, a very funny, very well done POTUS speech, end of the day keynote. Real red meat for us and for tech on a lot of the key questions on AI development. Also, a lot of very funny crowd work, like really talented crowd work bits on Jensen and on Doug Burgum. I was like, wow, it's gonna be a really talented Netflix special and this all gets packaged up.

• 1:01:50Jordi Hays?

  And did he have a, did he have, did, did Trump have a good line on Jason too? Or I couldn't tell if that was fake news or it was real?

• 1:01:58Zak Kukoff?

  No, it was, it was real. Trump gets up, first thing he says is, thanks to the All In podcast, Chamath and David, and yes, even Jason. And there was a huge pause for laughter and he goes, yes, we're even thanking Jason today. A lot of Jason Calcanis jokes. I will say one interesting dynamic at the thing that I don't know if, I don't know if it was streamed online, but wasn't, but one interesting dynamic that I don't know if folks saw, the, uh, Jason was doing the voice of the liberal in the, in the questioning. He was like trying to really put a little bit of the heat on some of the, uh, Trump admin guests and it was an interesting departure from everybody else who was asking questions.

• 1:02:34Jordi Hays?

  That's good. People will find a way to hate that, but it's. Good.

• 1:02:38Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah. No, it's good to get the diversity of voices. I will say clearly some people that I don't necessarily expected it, but yeah, it was good to get the diversity of voices. That's fun. Up there. Yeah.

• 1:02:47Jordi Hays?

  What was the best line, the best, the best line to me was, uh, somebody asked Jensen to talk about America's AI advantage and he said, "The one thing that no other country has is President Trump."

• 1:03:03Zak Kukoff?

  That's right. That's why Jensen gets to, that's why Jensen gets to export H20s because he's had good lines like that. It's wild.

• 1:03:10Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 1:03:10Zak Kukoff?

  Um, it was a well-done speech. Honestly, it was a well-done event. I would say, uh, highlights for me from like a serious way, the big one for me was, uh, fair use training of the copyright material for AI. So this is the one we've been asking about for a while and a lot of companies have been talking about it. In fact, there was a recent Anthropic court case that ruled on this, said, "Look, if it's trained on legally procured, legally purchased copyright material, that's fair use, that's in scope. If it's stuff that you're pirating, which allegedly Anthropic and Meta and others have done to build their corpus of data, that's when you get into legal trouble." This was the first time that I've heard the admin come out and codify that, which is really nice. So I loved that. I loved the energy permitting

• 1:03:51Zak Kukoff?

  stuff. There was a lot of stuff for all the abundance boys on permitting, a lot of permitting reform questions, a lot of accelerating data center build outs, a lot of trying to streamline getting new sources of energy online. And then yes, there were some talk about how do you try to tighten, even while we're still letting folks like China buy H20s, some talk about things like location tracking for export controls too. So there was a lot to like in the speech. I actually thought it was a very, very well-done speech. Um, and it was funny because there was actually a live, I know, is, who's, uh, who's your partner? Is it Kalshi or Polymarket? Polymarket. Okay. So there was probably a polymarket. I saw it on Kalshi. There's probably a polymarket, market going at the same time. Yeah. Where people were betting on things like, "Will Trump say, uh, David Zak's name?"

• 1:04:36Zak Kukoff?

  Oh, sure, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Before it gets resolved. So I thought it was really, really well-done. Vance spoke super well. Burgum, uh, and Chris Wright had a very funny panel, the two of them together, where, uh, Chris Wright and Jason got into it mono a mono a little bit, which was, uh, interesting to hear too. But great and really good energy in the space. A lot of good companies. Hadrian did a very good, uh, almost like a sermon on the enthusiasm of re-industrialization. I loved Chris from Hadrian did that.

• 1:05:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's been on the, he's been on the roadshow with that because uh

• 1:05:05Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:05John Coogan?

  He was probably giving something, some similar version of that at, at reindustrialized.

• 1:05:08Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:09John Coogan?

  Worked out the bit, took the tight five to DC. Love to see it.

• 1:05:13Zak Kukoff?

  It was a tight five. It was great.

• 1:05:15John Coogan?

  That's great. Um, what uh, how should I think about this AI plan, this documented website that's been floating around?

• 1:05:23Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23John Coogan?

  Is this, is this more of like, like laws aren't changing, but this is just, these are, this is the plan for the laws that we will eventually change. Is that the idea?

• 1:05:34Zak Kukoff?

  So think about it in two ways. One way is this is the White House using its bully pulpit to call for a series of changes that yes, would need Congress to enact them or would need agencies to change their policy. Right now, agencies changing their policy is something the White House can do.

• 1:05:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:49Zak Kukoff?

  The other side is, look, there are two EOs that were signed, uh, live on stage yesterday that Trump did a very theatrical signing of. It was beautiful. Uh, and those are things that the admin can do directly. So there are some things, for example, some of the energy permitting stuff, uh, it's, you know, there's certain things like doing categorical exclusions from NEPA that are a little bit more within the realm of, uh, things that can be done, my understanding is via EO. But there are also things, as you guys know, a lot of permitting is done at the state and local level, right? So the White House can't necessarily say, we're going to overrule what state and local government does on permitting as a fiat. They have to work with partners all up and down the stack of government to get what the AI action plan calls for actually implemented.

• 1:06:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, um, how big are those EOs? Like, what were people tracking on those? And then, um,

• 1:06:38Jordi Hays?

  What was, what was the specifics? There was, uh, was, was one of the EOs around, uh, making it so that states can't enact AI safety laws for the next 10 years? What, do, do you have specifics on that? That felt super significant.

• 1:06:55Zak Kukoff?

  So there were three AI EO, said two earlier, there were three AI EO's, and sometimes why. One was on bias free AI, which is something I would instead frame as transparency, right? There was a lot of talk about woke AI and removing things like DEI from AI implementation. The actually specific version of that, the instantiated version of that, is that model providers, if they want to be used in government procurement, have to attest to the values, to be transparent about the values that go into their models. That's AI EO number one. AI EO number two is trying to fast track some of the development work we did. So it's fast tracking some of the data center permitting stuff that we did. And the third AI EO that we talked about is the export expansion. It's funny, Jordy, a thing that you're asking about, which we talked about last time, right?

• 1:07:40Zak Kukoff?

  This idea of a moratorium on AI regulation for 10 years. The big challenge is to actually get that done. That's something that has to be now done, actually beyond my understanding, is beyond the scope of just what can be done in an EO, right? Something that can be started, has to actually transcend that as well. And some of the challenge, like you saw today, California is already starting to push back on the idea that the federal government has preemption ability over California's ability to regulate AI. And the truth is, there are powerful senators like Marsha Blackburn, who we discussed last time, whose job it is to protect their local industries, like the music industry in Nashville, Tennessee, right, her home state, who are not going to be thrilled about what I think is a pretty reasonable, but ultimately controversial idea of trying to create a standard set of regulations that aren't 50 patchwork states, because the default, and Trump mentioned

• 1:08:25Zak Kukoff?

  this in his speech, is that in 50 different states, whoever's the most restrictive is who people end up following.

• 1:08:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Because if you're a product, if you're a product company or a foundation model lab, you want to be available everywhere. So the default is like, basically be, be allowed under the most restrictive regulations.

• 1:08:45Zak Kukoff?

  That's right. That's right.

• 1:08:47John Coogan?

  One kind of funny framing I was, was, was kicking around was the idea of no paper clips. So this kind of marks a shift away from worrying about AI doom. We're not worried about getting paper clipped. We're not worried about fast takeoff, this crazy doomsday. So we're pulling back on safety, pulling more, pushing more into geopolitics. Let's actually scale up infrastructure, get these products out into the world because we think that by and large they're safe. And now the game is to win on more or less like industrial capacity. Like if we're just producing way more tokens than every other country, that will help our GDP, we will grow that way.

• 1:09:28John Coogan?

  The flip side of the no paper clips is that there's no move to do a new operation paper clip. Where we, where we pulled scientists from Germany to America to build the bomb.

• 1:09:40John Coogan?

  And the, and the, and the, the reference point there is that something like, uh, something like 75% of AI researchers on Meta's super intelligence team are, I think on O1s or they're not

• 1:09:51Zak Kukoff?

  Yes.

• 1:09:51John Coogan?

  American citizens. And we've seen the deep seek team and Manus and you know, there's some venture capital firms that are investing in Chinese AI and kind of the bull case is like, okay, well, get them from China, Singapore, and then get them to Silicon Valley, and then we have the team on our side. And so it feels like that's the one area that wasn't really discussed. I, I know immigration is obviously just a broadly hot topic, but in terms of like brain drain of the ultimate top AI scientists. Is there any movement or people thinking about that? Is there any nuance coming up between, okay, maybe that's a different, maybe that's a different problem set or different question than like dealing with like fentanyl dealers coming across the border?

• 1:10:32Zak Kukoff?

  So I don't know that that was super within scope for the AI action plan. I'll tell you personally, there are definitely people who are thinking about an operation paper clip, or how do we get the world's best and brightest, the truly, truly elites, right? Even above people who might qualify for O1s.

• 1:10:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:46Zak Kukoff?

  To come and build in America, AI with their families. That's the first thing. Second thing is, listen, the question you're getting to, which is a question of soft power, is a question the admin is thinking about, right? And so the reason that the AIO, sorry, the AI action plan is so supportive of open source and open weight models is because the admin views it as a national security imperative to get American soft power, i.e. American models, to become the most widely used in the world. So the soft power lever the admin's pulling, I would like to see more. And I'm hugely supportive of getting people here on a really targeted basis, ultra elite talent to come here and build as opposed to building for adversaries.

• 1:11:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, we're talking about like 50 people. It's like it's super.

• 1:11:26Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, exactly. Like 20 people.

• 1:11:28John Coogan?

  It's a complete, it should be a completely different, different discussion than like, you know, border wall or anything like that.

• 1:11:33Zak Kukoff?

  Correct.

• 1:11:33John Coogan?

  Nor AI researcher has ever been impacted by a wall. Like, that's not.

• 1:11:37Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, that is exactly right.

• 1:11:38John Coogan?

  Maybe the pre-training scaling wall is their problem.

• 1:11:42Jordi Hays?

  I know, I know you have to run.

• 1:11:44Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, sorry.

• 1:11:45Jordi Hays?

  There was, there was a post yesterday going viral. Somebody realized you could Venmo the government to help reduce the national debt. What's the right amount to start Venmo-ing Uncle Sam if you want to do your part?

• 1:11:57Zak Kukoff?

  Listen, there's no tax on tips now. So we should all be tipping the government, help them. They should be tipping, we should be getting tips, paid in tips, no tax on that. And then we could turn around and tip the government and Venmo as well.

• 1:12:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's all, it's a tipping based economy.

• 1:12:09Jordi Hays?

  As much as you can do, as much as you can do, but every day, every day.

• 1:12:12John Coogan?

  Really quickly.

• 1:12:12Zak Kukoff?

  But every day.

• 1:12:13John Coogan?

  Last, last question for me, we'll let you go. That point on open source is really interesting. It feels like Mark Zuckerberg could be the national champion. He could be the hero of American open source with the Llama Project. We don't know if Llama 5 is going to be open source. Behemoth had trouble getting out. He hasn't really given clear guidance on how hard he's going into. How, how hard he's going to stay in open source. But what, how do you think the mood is around Mark Zuckerberg in DC? Is he a winner or loser? The Wall Street Journal had this article on, you know, how much people have donated. Obviously Jensen feels ascendant. Elon feels like he was at the top and then kind of dialed back a little bit, but is still doing okay.

• 1:12:56John Coogan?

  The other hyperscaler CEOs are like, none of them are in bad, bad positions, but Zuck is like the interesting one where you could see a really interesting partnership form. But I don't know where we are on that.

• 1:13:08Zak Kukoff?

  Zuck, I think is interesting because he took a big swing. I'd say, listen, I want to go do the cultural work. I want to enmesh myself really deeply.

• 1:13:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:13:14Zak Kukoff?

  And what we've learned is this is an admin that really respects power and success, right? Success is its own ability to attract more success. It's a virtuous cycle. Jensen does well, in part because he's tremendously gifted, interpersonally, but also because he's the CEO of the most valuable company in the world. And the admin respects that, right? And when he comes to town, we know this is an admin that loves talking about things are number one, things are the biggest and the best and most important. And Jensen has that. Zuck, uh, Zuck tried to aura farm a little bit, you know what I mean? He tried to get in here and do a little bit of that. And I don't know that it's fully landed for him. I agree. Listen, I hope he keeps Lama Five open source predominantly because I think it would be a great bite at the apple for him with national priority here. But part of that's going to also be his ability to invest and do some of the interpersonal retail stuff that Jensen's done so well.

• 1:13:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. With, with OpenAI launching the open source model, you have to wonder if, if, if like national open source champion of America is a title that Sam Altman is like, I'd like that.

• 1:14:10Zak Kukoff?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:14:11John Coogan?

  Even if it doesn't have, even if it doesn't have like direct economic value, if it comes with political power, that could be incredibly valuable. So, uh, interesting to see how it breaks down. Thank you so much for joining. We'll let you get to your next meeting.

• 1:14:22Zak Kukoff?

  Thanks for having me. Sorry after one. Thanks, guys.

• 1:14:23Jordi Hays?

  Making you miss your next one. Cheers.

• 1:14:24John Coogan?

  No worries. Talk to you soon. Uh, and we will tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level.

• 1:14:33Jordi Hays?

  It's the next gen of CRM.

• 1:14:34John Coogan?

  It's the next gen of CRM. And speaking of gens, Gen Z has a particular nihilism. I call get my bag culture, says Jasmine Sun. Uh, the mentality of everyone's grifting, so I better get my own. This ties into the Trevor Milton, uh, debate that we were having earlier. Uh, they've never voted without Trump on the ballot. All content is sponsored content unless proved otherwise. Post-truth politics is all they know. The president's been scamming for the last 10 years. So don't be meek and virtuous or else you're gonna lose. So no wonder why you end up with Cluley. Bit of a hot take, uh, interesting, but I do think that there's this, there is this world where...

• 1:15:09Jordi Hays?

  The interesting thing though, just to call out, uh, that the, the Cluley haters will be in shambles over this, but, um, Roy was posting yesterday that he's... Set up a 20% employee option pool.

• 1:15:20John Coogan?

  Whoa, okay.

• 1:15:21Jordi Hays?

  So he was paying a lot and people are pushing back and being like, your burn's gotta be crazy.

• 1:15:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:15:25Jordi Hays?

  And his pushback was basically, we're way more efficient to, you know, you can get to 10 million of ARR with a small team.

• 1:15:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:32Jordi Hays?

  I pay people a lot and I also, you can also give them a lot of equity, so.

• 1:15:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, interesting. I do, I do worry a little bit about just as we see more meme stocks, it gets more tempting. So for like, ah, like, and that, that meme about like, you have five years to get the bag before.

• 1:15:50Jordi Hays?

  The permanent underclass.

• 1:15:51John Coogan?

  The permanent underclass, like, and, and if you're just seeing people get away with things that feel crazy and you're like, well, they, like, everyone else got away with it, maybe I should get away with it too. It is, it is sad. We need Gen Z founders building permanent structures, institutions, products that will outlive them. And there hasn't been a ton of those. Alex Wang was certainly the, the leading candidate as kind of all-star Gen Z company.

• 1:16:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people, people were pissed when, I mean, a lot of people were super happy when Ross Ulbricht was pardoned. A lot of people were upset. They were like, he was dealing drugs on the internet and tried to kill someone. So I think there's, allegedly, allegedly.

• 1:16:31John Coogan?

  Is it alleged?

• 1:16:32Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, I think he did order the hit, but it didn't work.

• 1:16:36John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:16:36Jordi Hays?

  Like, it didn't go through because he was talking with a, with a undercover agent.

• 1:16:40John Coogan?

  Happens to the best of us. Sometimes, sometimes you put something on the to-do list.

• 1:16:45Jordi Hays?

  Trump's like, who hasn't ordered a hit?

• 1:16:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, sometimes you put.

• 1:16:47Jordi Hays?

  You never ordered one hit?

• 1:16:49John Coogan?

  Not even one. Sometimes you put something on, on an underling's to-do list and they just forget about it. It happens. And you're like, ah, they dropped the ball. It, it, it happens. Anyway, in other better news, there's a profile in Colossus of Romton Nyami.

• 1:17:04Jordi Hays?

  My boy.

• 1:17:06John Coogan?

  Who you, you, you've worked with, you've met, and he says.

• 1:17:09Jordi Hays?

  A dear friend.

• 1:17:10John Coogan?

  We, we've been quietly building abstract for nine years. He's your friend? He hasn't been on the show?

• 1:17:15Jordi Hays?

  Well, he's never done any media, literally never. So this is like the first significant media that he's ever done. He's been very, very under the radar. We don't have to list out his full portfolio, but if you look at, you can go to abstract dot VC and check it out. He's backed a lot of incredible companies. He backed my last company. He was, was an incredible partner and has been a true friend throughout as long as I've known him. And I'm excited for him to talk about it. It's a crazy story. He had a fund, blew up, went bankrupt when he was 24, and he's 34 now, has 1.8 billion under management.

• 1:17:56John Coogan?

  Wow, that's impressive.

• 1:17:57Jordi Hays?

  And he's an absolute dog. I can't wait to see him at the top of the Midas list.

• 1:18:01John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:18:02Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna happen.

• 1:18:03John Coogan?

  So that will be in the next edition of Colossus Magazine, which you should of course subscribe to.

• 1:18:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you can read this article for free.

• 1:18:11John Coogan?

  The man with the hot hand. The man with the hot hand needs to link up with the man with the hot leather jacket, Jensen Wong, apparently dropping a bombshell at the AI summit that we were just talking to Zach Kukoff about. I have 60 plus leather jackets. My wife picks them. That is the scoop that I need to hear. Bev, thank you for reporting on the ground. Jensen Wong says, I have 60 plus leather jackets. That's a lot. One for every week of the year. I love it. Anyway, another quote from, which you mentioned, Jensen Wong, America's unique advantage is that no country could, no country could possibly have is President Trump. He is happy to be

• 1:18:55John Coogan?

  partnering with the president, the commander in chief. Also, a reconciliation of sorts between Delhi and Asperu have and Chamath Palihapitiya. In DC, they're comparing anacondas and IRRs. Delian and Chamath, of course, to put the timeline in turmoil a couple of weeks ago, talking trash to each other, all friendly, all's fair and love and war, all's fair on the timeline, taking a friendly picture together. You'll love to see it. I love a recalcitation, even if the, the, the language is a little vulgar for my taste, but great to see two capital allocators hanging out in DC together. Christian Garrett also broke it down.

• 1:19:34Jordi Hays?

  Man behind the, behind the scenes pulling all the strings, pulling all the strings.

• 1:19:38John Coogan?

  Christian Garrett says, last night was truly something special. David Sacks and the All In Pod brought Jacob Helberg and Delian and I in to something that we'll all never forget. The business of America is business, as Calvin Coolidge said, and it was never more important than last night. Friedberg stressed the importance of showing how the everyday American and those who the system has not worked for are already experiencing job creation and transformation due to AI. Winning the AI race will be a bigger, will be part of a bigger story that benefits us all. There were members of Congress from both sides of the event, showing how there is a unified front that's bipartisan around techno industrial policy and the opportunity AI presents itself.

• 1:20:21John Coogan?

  Jacob Helberg and those in the admin now have to get to good work. Amazing work, dude. Congrats. As well, O'Brien. Bobby Goodlatte says, saw some of the post, looks absolutely epic. So all three former guests, you'll love to see it.

• 1:20:36John Coogan?

  So President Trump said he had planned to break Nvidia up until he learned who Jensen Huang was. What's funny is, I don't, I don't even know how you would break up Nvidia. Like, it's, it's just, just a, it's a fabless semiconductor company. Like, it's not like the Intel thing where you have, you have a fab and then you also have a design company. I mean, I guess you could break down like gaming and AI training or something, or I, I, I just, I, I don't know where the, the dividing line would be, would be. It's really just like, they haven't, the story of Nvidia isn't, they, they don't have an Instagram. It's not, they, they don't have a story of, oh, they acquired this company and it, and it got really big and it saved them from disruption.

• 1:21:15Jordi Hays?

  Break it up and say, okay, you're gonna have an AI division and a gaming, you know, but gaming's like a rounding error.

• 1:21:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, they have some other stuff that's in there. I mean, I don't know, you break out CUDA or something? I don't, I don't know how you would do it.

• 1:21:28Jordi Hays?

  Force Jensen to sell off the majority of his jackets.

• 1:21:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, break up the jackets.

• 1:21:33Jordi Hays?

  Pay down the national debt.

• 1:21:34John Coogan?

  But anyway, Jensen's been in DC. We saw him there a couple of weeks ago, a couple of months ago. And he's been doing the work to get to know Donald Trump, and it has worked out spectacularly. And now Jensen is the biggest business.

• 1:21:46Jordi Hays?

  I have a, I, we, I, I, this will go unmentioned, but I had, we have a friend of the show. And Jensen walked up to us. And the friend introduced himself and his company. And Jensen didn't know the company and he's like, oh, it's so bearish for me.

• 1:22:03John Coogan?

  Wait, that was Jensen?

• 1:22:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:05John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. I know the other side of that story. I didn't realize. I thought it was a random person.

• 1:22:09Jordi Hays?

  He's like, he really took it personally.

• 1:22:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, you know.

• 1:22:12Jordi Hays?

  But he's been on a generational run since.

• 1:22:14John Coogan?

  You want to be known by the greats, the, the folks who only worked at Denny's and then started a generational company.

• 1:22:21Jordi Hays?

  Ignore that 10-year gap when he was at AMD.

• 1:22:24John Coogan?

  Um, this is an interesting thread by Kevin Bryan. Um, talking about how the New York Times is reporting on the AI action plan. Kevin says, come on, man. There's no way you can read the AI action plan and think this is the first order thing. That, that the first order thing that New York Times readers should know about it. Anthropic is positive. AI has huge implications for the national economy, defense, future of science. Half this article is about copyright. Um, it is wild how much tech journalism comes from a place of extreme hostility towards the technology. It often reads like RFK writing articles about new pharmaceutical breakthroughs. No wonder the Silicon Valley set completely ignores this.

• 1:23:06John Coogan?

  And then he closes with a post about 90% of mainstream writing on AI is one, encoded bias. Two, theft of copyright. Three, wasting water and electricity ad nauseam. Gangs, gang, folks in these labs think they're curing cancer. Honestly. Who gives anything about one, two, and three, given that even if those worries were true, they aren't. If you think those three things are the most important policy issues or even the biggest downside risks of AI. And I mean this in a let's be real, not in a mean way.

• 1:23:36Jordi Hays?

  It's hard, it's hard to argue that energy use by itself is a bad thing.

• 1:23:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:42Jordi Hays?

  And it is true that data centers require an obscene amount of energy. We talked earlier this week about how Oracle's partnership with OpenAI, where OpenAI will be spending $30 billion a year with Oracle by 2027, at least how it was reported, will require two Hoover Dam's worth of energy, which is an exceptional amount. But as energy production has gone up, so has human prosperity.

• 1:24:13John Coogan?

  And water production. There's plenty of water for the data centers. There's plenty of water to fill your eight sleep. You can go to eightsleep.com, get a Pod 5.

• 1:24:21Jordi Hays?

  I'm back.

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  Five-year warranty, 39 risk, free trial, free returns, free shipping. Go get a Pod 5.

• 1:24:27Jordi Hays?

  I've been ill. I finally put up seven and a half hours last night. I'm back in range. My HRV, I'm no longer looking dead. And I got over two hours of REM sleep last night.

• 1:24:40John Coogan?

  So we have Venida from Andreessen Horowitz joining in just a few minutes. In the meantime, let's do some timeline. I want to dig into this Financial Times article.

• 1:24:50Jordi Hays?

  I think we're gonna need more time.

• 1:24:51John Coogan?

  But let's do that later. The headline, of course, just to keep you up to speed, is that Nvidia chips worth $1 billion were smuggled into China after Trump export controls. We've heard about this black market. We've heard about people stuffing suitcases full of them and flying around the country. They're not the biggest thing in the world, so it's easy to route them around. There's always a question, could the government have done more? Could Nvidia have done more? Who are truly the bad actors?

• 1:25:18Jordi Hays?

  Crazy graphic right there.

• 1:25:20John Coogan?

  Good graphic. Love it. But we will cover this later in the show.

• 1:25:24Jordi Hays?

  Danish is throwing some shade at Ilya. He says, how you got 32 billion? He doesn't have 32 billion. And don't take the turkey flight to restore the hairline. I would have Pavel Durov myself into a Greek god the instant it was financially feasible. Dude does not give an F about anything but the mission. Incredibly bullish.

• 1:25:47John Coogan?

  You don't think superintelligence is gonna be able to cure hair loss? Like, that's gonna be the single prompt?

• 1:25:52Jordi Hays?

  Right before cancer.

• 1:25:54John Coogan?

  Probably. It does seem more tractable. It doesn't seem that crazy. Very rude. Anyway, people having fun on the timeline. Oh, well, we have Andreessen Horowitz partner, Vinita, joining in just a few minutes. And there's a post about Andreessen Horowitz. So, James Lynn says A16Z and Sutter Hill Ventures.

• 1:26:11Jordi Hays?

  Well, so the context here.

• 1:26:12John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:26:13Jordi Hays?

  Avedon Rodinsky says, recently got asked which VC firm changed the game like Steph Curry did.

• 1:26:20John Coogan?

  Lots of sports metaphors in tech these days. You love to see it.

• 1:26:22Jordi Hays?

  It's tough when you know nothing about sports.

• 1:26:24John Coogan?

  And so the two examples of VC firms that changed the game like Steph Curry did for the NBA, Andreessen Horowitz and Sutter Hill Ventures, but in completely different ways. James Lynn here says, A16Z realized that everyone was undervaluing startups and massively overbid 10x what other people were offering. I don't know if that's actually happened that often that you go get a term sheet and Andreessen comes in at 10x the price, but they've certainly been aggressive on pricing and it's worked out in many cases.

• 1:26:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it could be 50% higher, but.

• 1:26:53John Coogan?

  Yeah. So it got them Twitter, Instagram, Coinbase, GitHub, Anduril, Airbnb, Slack, round sizes went up after that. Sutter Hill saw trends in cloud computing, incubated Snowflake from idea to IPO. They made Mike Spicer, a partner, the interim CEO, hire the technical co-founders, funded the entire Series A. They had 20% stake in Snowflake at IPO at a $33 billion valuation.

• 1:27:18Jordi Hays?

  That was worth 12, it was a $12 billion position for them. So pretty much the best incubation of all time.

• 1:27:25John Coogan?

  So A16Z finds talent and makes several outsized bets. Sutter Hill sees a trend and operationalizes one to two companies completely in-house. Now, larger rounds are the norm and the venture studio model is much more common. That makes a ton of sense. We'll have to ask Vinita about that when she joins. What else do we have here in the timeline?

• 1:27:46Jordi Hays?

  I also think you can't, you can't leave YC out of that group, right?

• 1:27:49John Coogan?

  Who else changed the game?

• 1:27:51Jordi Hays?

  It's an entirely different model, but highly, highly, highly effective.

• 1:27:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think the initial YC, the way it changed the game was that. It made it completely possible for college new grads to go and start a company without getting any experience in enterprise or in business. And so that was the initial arb, like San Hill Road existed, Sequoia Capital existed, Kleiner Perkins existed, but if the Airbnb guys had gone

• 1:28:22Jordi Hays?

  You didn't need a friends and family round to get a friends and family round done.

• 1:28:26John Coogan?

  Exactly. So if the Airbnb guys, I think, had showed up to Kleiner Perkins or Sequoia, who actually I think wound up doing the Airbnb deal later, I think Sequoia did, pre YC, that might have been like, this is a little weird company. This is a little bit out of our sweet spot. But then you go through YC, you get coached by Paul Graham at the time, and you polish things up such that you're ready to go and ready to talk to the big firms. And Paul Graham, I think famously told the Sequoia partner, like, you should do the Airbnb deal, even as weird as it is. Like, think about, you know, eBay for space. And it worked out. Fantastic story. Anyway, we have Vanita from Andreessen Horowitz in the studio. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 1:29:06Speaker 05

  Hello, hello, I'm an Airbnb fan.

• 1:29:09John Coogan?

  Yes. Yeah, what's your, what's your take on this, on this A16Z changing the game by recognizing that everyone was undervaluing startups and massively overbidding for early rounds? Do you think that resonates? Do you feel like Andreessen Horowitz has changed the game in venture?

• 1:29:25Jordi Hays?

  Totally unbiased take two coming out.

• 1:29:28Speaker 05

  Totally unbiased. I do believe my partners are changing the game. No, and part of what's amazing about A16Z is our willingness to bed in every sector, every vertical, every part of the economy, really every part of the economy, you know, both locally, domestically, and globally. So my corner of the world, it's a big corner of the world, it's a $5 trillion corner of the world, is healthcare. And one of the things I love about our firm is that we've really established a dedicated strategy here, too, and hopefully changing the game here, too.

• 1:29:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, has, how has bio investing, healthcare investing changed? We were talking about the Airbnb example. It feels like it's, it's, it's easy for a couple of folks with just a hope and a dream. They don't need to do a friends and family round. They can just go to Sand Hill Road. They can go to places like Y C. They can go to Andreessen Horowitz directly and raise a seed round and have enough to actually pay the bills, hire a couple of people, do a couple of tests, launch a consumer app, launch an enterprise app. Has there been a meaningful change in the way healthcare and bio companies get started? For a long time, it felt like the only way to do a company in that space was you're at

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  MIT and you do some partnership with flagship pioneering and then you IPO and then you're living and dying by your FDA trials. The traditional venture path felt very, just like a completely separate track, but how has it evolved from your experience?

• 1:30:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, great question. I mean, I think we're absolutely, we're absolutely part of the agentic wave. I've never seen so much interest in, in the role of AI agents in transforming how science is done, how research is done, how discoveries are made, how drugs could be developed. The FDA launched an AI agent called Elsa. Cute name, but you know, potentially signaling, you know, a transformative role for AI even in the regulatory agency, which is kind of a mind blowing, mind blowing thing to think about, right? You would have thought that it would have been the innovators and the startups kind of pushing AI first and then waiting for the regulator to say, yes, we believe these predictive tools are going to help us make drugs.

• 1:31:36Speaker 05

  So I think we are seeing a really different market pull than ever before. At the same time, the business models in healthcare, you know, are still similar and the core products that drive value are still similar. So we're in the business of making new medicines. So are the startups that we back in large part, or making the practice of medicine way better and transforming the practice of medicine. And both have some really established business models around them. Drugs that work, that have an impact on patients get paid for. They get paid for because they save the system money. Services, we pay for because people need services on time, you know, from the right specialist, for the right disease. And so those are all.

• 1:32:18Speaker 05

  You know, great business models in which to, in which to invest and in which startups can run. But certainly startups are now running in a much more capital efficient way, in a much more AI powered way than they ever were before. We need agents in the game in our space too.

• 1:32:32John Coogan?

  Where is Silicon Valley's sweet spot or like strike zone in bio? Because I was, I was reading the Wall Street Journal today about a company that does, they're developing robotics for lab testing equipment. So basically like pipetting, you know, famously it's like a PhD student just going like this all day long. Bunch of robots doing that makes a ton of sense. That feels like Silicon Valley all the way.

• 1:32:54Jordi Hays?

  How many, how many cursor for bio pitches have you, have you got? Is it, is it in the hundreds?

• 1:32:59John Coogan?

  But that feels like more in the sweet spot. When I think about like an ERP system for, for biotech companies, that feels a lot easier than saying, I'm going to take a cancer drug through the FDA trials and I'm never going to go public. I'm going to raise growth rounds at every stage. Like we haven't seen that that much, but maybe we're still just early in that trend changing.

• 1:33:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I think part of that, the trend is changing in part because of the same trends we're seeing in other verticals. That AI is getting paid for through labor budgets and AI is not necessarily replacing, but augmenting labor. Right? 90%, 90 plus percent of all chemical screens for new drugs fail. No drug comes out of it. 10% of all nurse positions across the healthcare system are vacant. We can't find the nurses to fill the positions. Right? So we're living in a world where actually we need agentic resources to come in as labor. And that is different than the world we were living in before, where we were trying to squeeze out IT budget.

• 1:33:59Speaker 05

  From, you know, let's say a large pharma company, or let's say a hospital system to deploy the types of Silicon Valley technologies that could have been transformative for the industries. And so now that there's a lot more, you know, autonomous task completion as well as augmentation well beyond what humans could do in those fields. I do think some of those Silicon Valley technologies, you know, obviously, yes, they are being formed. Yes, we are absolutely. Being pitched the cursor for bio right now and and we think it's very credible. We think it absolutely is the case that if you have a lot of data, you you're a company that's let's say run clinical trials before, managed many, many drugs through development. You should have agents crawling through that data,

• 1:34:42Speaker 05

  learning what humans might have missed, learning why things failed, why things succeeded, and then bringing that knowledge to your next set of set of endeavors. And so absolutely, you know, this kind of regime of a of a fully virtual agentic uh lab that for every one human scientist, you know, has hundreds of agentic scientists is a really, really interesting, interesting vision. At the same time, making the drug is really valuable. So we really do think that great innovation can take it all the way and can, you know, great startups can actually develop their own.

• 1:35:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how how often a company comes to you that wants to be more on the picks and shovels side, kind of infrastructure, maybe more B two B? How often do you find yourself encouraging them to own, try to take it all the way and actually like use whatever innovation or or insight they have to not just make that product available to other uh bio or pharma companies, but uh, you know, actually deliver the end value?

• 1:35:46Speaker 05

  I think it really depends on the founders and exactly where the innovation sits. We've backed both. Um, we're long on both infrastructure for the industry. And um, you know, uh, SaaS, forward deployed SaaS, SaaS plus agentic implementations. And all, you know, I think we think a lot of that has a ton of value and will fundamentally change how every organization operates. And not every organization is going to build their own cursor-like tools for research. Um, at the same time, sometimes the innovators who are closest, I'll give you a real example, you know, autoimmune disease is horrible. Ten percent of people have an autoimmune disease. Um, and it sounds like science fiction, but recently we tried CAR T therapy. Take take my T cells out of my body,

• 1:36:30Speaker 05

  engineer them, and instead of attacking a tumor cell, attack bad autoimmune cells. Okay, well. That's interesting. And what if I could deliver it in the same type of vaccine type format that you got your COVID jab in, an LNP and RNA?

• 1:36:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm kind of surprised to hear you calling a vaccine. I'm kind of surprised to hear you calling a vaccine a jab. Uh, but maybe that's just a comment.

• 1:36:57Speaker 05

  It's like reclaiming tech.

• 1:36:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, reclaim it. We reclaim tech, bro. Technology brothers.

• 1:37:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, the pharmaceutical industry definitely needs to reclaim a jab. The name of this thing to tech nerds.

• 1:37:07Jordi Hays?

  What about, uh?

• 1:37:08Speaker 05

  But you know, to finish that story out, to make that requires a lot of engineering and a lot of optimization and a lot of so-called Silicon Valley style Sure. optimization. And so we're seeing that. A company in our portfolio called Orbital Therapeutics announced really exciting data in monkeys, you know, demonstrating that that might be possible for autoimmune disease. So That's cool. Um, I think it goes both ways. Silicon Valley tech is going to permeate every company, whether they're based here or not, and whether they're making drugs or not.

• 1:37:37Jordi Hays?

  Do you, do you think that these sort of early IPOs that, that drug companies have done historically is a feature or a bug? Like if, if we have more developed private capital markets, do you think that, uh, like, is it even right that effectively retail, uneducated retail could just be taking these like, you know, gambling in, in the public markets on, on, on effectively FDA trials or, or, um, is there a better way?

• 1:38:06Speaker 05

  There is a huge public market for biotech. Um, the stage at which companies access those markets in the last few years was, um, was miscalibrated. And so that's why you see the headlines you're seeing with respect to public biotech stock performance, with respect to, um, public fundraising challenges for companies because they were very far from the clinic. They were very far from generating commercial value. They were very far from demonstrating hard data that they were close to developing a product of value. Um. So I do think the pub, the private markets continue to be, to have massive pools of capital in them and biotech companies will stay private for longer.

• 1:38:48Speaker 05

  But, you know, at the same time, we're seeing huge demand and appetite for technologies that work from pharma companies that have a really rich ability to continue to back biotech companies, partner with biotech companies, fund biotech companies, buy biotech companies. So um, we partnered up with Eli Lilly on that front and started a whole dedicated fund focused on supporting the biotech ecosystem and that serves pharma and it serves the biotech ecosystem too, right? And so there are lots of ways for companies to continue to make progress on those technologies. While private, um, until they, until they have the metrics that justify, justify going public.

• 1:39:24Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. You said something earlier around, uh, nursing, job vacancies. How do you? What's your thesis on how that market evolves in four years? Are we still going to see? You know, hospital systems unable and, and various groups unable to get the nurses that they want? Or do you think that uh, agentic systems can, can kind of backfill those roles and, and they just, there, there will be more kind of balance in the market?

• 1:39:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I hope we also project needing fewer roles. I mean, we are projecting that we're going to be short over three million healthcare workers just in the United States alone over the next year, right? So it's a huge.

• 1:40:06Jordi Hays?

  And the people, so, and, and, and the people making those projections, are they AGI pilled? Are they humanoid robot pilled? Like I, I, I, it's cool that the FDA has a chief AI officer. That feels important. Um, but anytime I, I'm like reading into projections, uh, it's more interesting to get a projection or, or insight from you, given that you're backing all of these companies that understand that reality and want to.

• 1:40:33Speaker 05

  Right. That's a big number. That's based on, you know, the job count, you know, job that health systems and providers are opening but unable to fill based on the projected increase in healthcare demand as our population ages. But absolutely, I, I hope it's not really that high because there's only like eight million total job vacancies in the US. That's like almost half our total job vacancies in healthcare alone. So we have to actually decrease our need for those jobs and we could redirect some of our extremely skilled healthcare existing workforce from answering phone calls, dropping up picked, you know, picking up drop balls. Recommunicating the same information to patients, recommunicating the same information between providers who are trying to coordinate. There are a million ways in which our system

• 1:41:17Speaker 05

  does not work today, and so I hope that number goes down. But the reality is that the willingness to try out the agentic solution, whether it's for documentation, whether it's for getting prior auth from an insurance company, or whether it's for actually providing a clinical consult, has never been higher. Because the reality is today, we don't have the humans to fill those jobs. Wait times are long. Thirty percent of Americans skip care. Like, they skip or delay prescribed care. We're a developed country in which that's happening. And sixty, seventy percent of Americans say, "I will see an AI doctor." Like, just, "I will see one." Like, at least I will engage with one. And in fact, I'm

• 1:42:00Speaker 05

  probably going to engage with one before I engage with a human doctor now, right? We've all changed our consumer behavior that way, almost overnight. So, it's a pretty remarkable shift that's happening that will, I hope, make us need a lot fewer than those, you know, that number of open jobs.

• 1:42:18John Coogan?

  I, I, I remember, what was it, in like, 2008, there was a boom in electronic medical records startups, like Athena Health was one of them. And there was kind of like, two waves going on that were kind of adding together and making those businesses work. One is like, a technological wave, obviously. Like, we had access to cloud databases and cloud infrastructure and better software. And so, you could actually, like, put medical records safely, securely, in a cloud. And so, that was obviously, like, a great business. But then there was also an EHR mandate from the Obamacare legislation, I believe. Are there any regulatory tailwinds that are adding on top of, like, the AI technology tailwinds right now in bio or healthcare broadly?

• 1:43:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely. So, there are...

• 1:43:05Speaker 05

  Uh, first of all, I will say historically, um, historically, a lot of healthcare software and technology was adopted because of regulatory incentives and payment incentives.

• 1:43:14Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:43:15Speaker 05

  But for the first time, we are seeing bottoms up adoption of tools and technologies and an extraordinary NPS of healthcare software with scribing tools, um, like those developed by companies like Ambiance and Abridge, um, you know, uh, uh, you know, uh, you know, evidence, uh, access tools, like what, what Open Evidence has built. And so for the first time, we're also seeing pull. That's just like, hey, this is better. I don't need the government to give me a, you know, a kickback to tell me it's better, but it is better. So that's a separate trend that we're very excited about. Um, but, uh, huge regulations are also going to incentivize, um, a better technology infrastructure. So price transparency is a good example. There are clear incentives and penalties for not being able to share

• 1:43:59Speaker 05

  transparently your price, your pricing cards as a provider, as a payer, and to create that type of open access for patients. And so building that infrastructure layer is going to be super important. Um, the administrations talked a lot about patient choice. That could be patient choice with respect to how you use your benefit dollar, patient choice with respect to what, um, uh, plan coverage you select. Um, and ICRA is a good example of, um, of, uh, of, of a potentially big change in the employer sponsored healthcare space. So these are all financial rails and incentives. CMMI continues to advance value-based initiatives, um, that, uh, that basically prioritize preventive care and say, hey, at the end of

• 1:44:44Speaker 05

  the year, if you save the government a dollar, if you save CMS money, uh, dear smart provider who's using technology, you'll make money, right? So that's a clear financial incentive. It's good for patients. Generally being out of the healthcare system, preventing something before it costs a lot of money is good for patients. Um, but the financial incentives and policy incentives do need to, you know, do provide a huge acceleration in our space. And that will continue to be the case.

• 1:45:08Jordi Hays?

  Can you give us the update on the drug pricing EO from, I don't know, was it six weeks ago, eight weeks ago? It feels like a year ago at this point. There's been a lot that, that happened. We had a bunch of people on the, the day of, um, and a lot of people were kind of saying that it wasn't going to be as impactful as it kind of felt in the moment, but what, what's the update there?

• 1:45:30Speaker 05

  I don't think there's been a policy update, like, you know, nothing has been enacted yet. That's still an EO. The, the concept of it, of course, was to say, um, was to use international trade as a backdrop for holistic negotiations inclusive of drug pricing, to say, you know, as part of an overall tariff negotiation, why is it the case that the US pays two or three times or more for the same exact drug that another, that another country pays? And so that it is a logical question to ask, and, um, we know that CMS is continuing to ask that question, but the actual policy is going to depend on quite a bit of, you know,

• 1:46:13Speaker 05

  there are a number of moving parts in a holistic policy with respect to every other, every other country. So it's important for us to retain huge incentives, um, and it's not going to be as simple as cut the price, get great drugs. That's not how the market works. But should the price be more equitably shared across countries? It's an absolutely reasonable perspective to have.

• 1:46:36John Coogan?

  How popular is open source in the bio world? I feel like, like the cursor for bio thing is very interesting, um, but when I think about the electronic lab notebooks that folks are using, like, if it's not open source, you can't fork it, and it feels like part of Cursor's ability to grow really fast was that they, they, they sit on top of your codebase and you can change IDEs very quickly. But if you're, if a, if a researcher is using a closed source lab notebook that has a database built in, that company is going to be like, no, no, no, like, I do not want you just stealing all my customers or like migrating off, but are, is open source popular? Are there opportunities?

• 1:47:19John Coogan?

  Like, what's the VS Code equivalent, I guess, would be the question?

• 1:47:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think there's a lot, you know, in bio research, there's a lot more informatics Okay. and less organized software. I think that will change. Yeah. But historically, um, historically, there is a lot of bespoke informatics, which is why some of the agentic adoption, like for exploratory informatics research is happening on its own and people are adopting open source agents for resources like that. Um, you know, the structure mo- the protein structure models like Alphaful. Sure. Um, were followed by a number of models that were open sourced and within a period of weeks, thousands of scientists, thousands of companies adopted, um, additional structure prediction models. Hmm.

• 1:48:05Speaker 05

  Uh, Boltz II was a popular one, the Chai model, a number of startups put out open source models and we saw really fast adoption, which is kind of cool, right? It's like, it's a scientist sitting in a company who says, I want to try that, you know, and see if it would help my workflow. And actually, I want to benchmark it and I want to try three at the same time. So we didn't have that many great open source resources like that before. We had data sets, uh, but not necessarily models and APIs to those models that made them easy to use. So I think that, that in, that whole ecosystem is in its like square one infancy of growing and exploding, but you're gonna need a library of models. You want to be able to try all the models. You want your agents to be able to use the

• 1:48:48Speaker 05

  models without even a human interface. And so suddenly, the same thing that's happening in enterprise software in every vertical is going to happen here too. You know, agents on behalf of scientists will be able to select which models to use, try five models at once, um, and then incorporate the results and predictions of those models into a workflow, um, you know, that is deeply integrated with, um, you know, with other agentic automation. So it's, none of that's built, I would say, for the vast majority of the industry. And so it's a huge, huge opportunity for, um, for startups to build. Yeah.

• 1:49:26Jordi Hays?

  Last quick question, um, maybe if you could answer in, in, uh, 60 seconds, that's the challenge. Uh, what, what is the, uh, what's the vibe on the Stanford campus right now? Are people dropping out of, you know, PhD programs to start companies in, in bio? I'm sure we're seeing, uh, people dropping out of PhDs to join Meta and other AI research orgs broadly, but I'm curious if that's happening in, in bio.

• 1:49:53Speaker 05

  There are a number of fast-growing AI biotech startups that are bringing AI and computational tools to model trainings. We are seeing that. If you're asking, is it a response to federal funding changes? I think that's always been the case, that a large fraction of trainees from university campuses end up in biotech and pharma companies, and that's great. It's a great outcome. I do think there's probably, in the near term, going to be continued exploration of industry alternatives to federally funded research. And I really hope that the federal grant funding is clarified and that there's more

• 1:50:38Speaker 05

  stability on university campuses for federally funded research, because some of that infrastructure has been behind a huge number of these innovations.

• 1:50:48Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense. Thank you so much for joining.

• 1:50:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, thank you so much.

• 1:50:52Jordi Hays?

  Great to chat.

• 1:50:53John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 1:50:54Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:50:54John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Mickey Malka, the founder of Ribbit Capital. Really quickly, I will tell you about AdQuick, 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 hopefully have Mickey Malka. How are you doing, Mickey? Good to meet you.

• 1:51:16Speaker 06

  Hi, guys. Good to see you, John and Jordy. How are you guys?

• 1:51:18John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 1:51:19Jordi Hays?

  Great background. What's going on there?

• 1:51:22John Coogan?

  Break it down for us.

• 1:51:23Speaker 06

  Those are some NFTs.

• 1:51:25Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:51:26Speaker 06

  Actually, from an artist called Bright Moments. They did an exhibition all over the world, and these are crypto citizens from the 10 cities around the world where they had their exhibitions.

• 1:51:35Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Amazing. It's great to have you on the show. We've been excited for this. You guys have been on an absolutely crazy run, and it's awesome that you're starting to talk about it a bit more.

• 1:51:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, I want to start with your background. I think that you might actually have a non-traditional path to venture, or at least a very interesting entrepreneurial journey prior to launching a venture firm. So can you just give us a little bit of background on your history and how you wound up running Ribbit?

• 1:52:02Speaker 06

  So I'm an entrepreneur, and I'm still an entrepreneur. It just happens that I started when I was 17 years old, and that's all I know how to do. And I started in financial services. Uh, growing up in Venezuela in the early nineties, it was inflation, crises, bank failures, all the things that you need to learn in your life, I had them by the time I was twenty-two years old.

• 1:52:25Jordi Hays?

  Speed run.

• 1:52:26Speaker 06

  Oh, my God, yes, light speed through all of that. So, uh, I started four different companies around the world before the word fintech or crypto even existed, always trying to do something in, in, around the internet and making money better, simply that was the whole thing.

• 1:52:43Jordi Hays?

  And what did, and what did, what did some of those first companies look like? Were they specific to problems that you were having in Venezuela or were they global by nature?

• 1:52:54Speaker 06

  The first one was, uh, it was the first online trading platform for Latin America, a little bit what Robin Hood is today.

• 1:53:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:00Speaker 06

  Imagine that in nineteen ninety-eight, in the beginning of the internet, and you could trade online stocks of every local Latin American market, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Chile, we had a Brazil, we had a, we bought its stock exchange, uh, seats in all of them and we were able to allow people to trade. So that, that was one of the first ones. And then I.

• 1:53:22Jordi Hays?

  And you were, you were, you were like twenty at this time?

• 1:53:26Speaker 06

  I was twenty-three, twenty-four when I started, yes.

• 1:53:29Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:53:29Speaker 06

  That company. And, um, and there were no venture capitalists in Latin America, there was nobody. Uh, we had to convince some people in the US, in New York, to fund us, uh, and headquartered in Miami to avoid any kind of problem with choosing a place in Latin America. And, and that company, uh, became the largest online broker dealer in South America.

• 1:53:51Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Insane. Um, and then where'd you go from there?

• 1:53:55Speaker 06

  Uh, I went to Spain because my first company was acquired by a big Spaniard bank and the internet had blown up, a little bit like when they think it was all hype. Uh, it will happen to AI eventually when they will all people will think it was it was all wrong and eventually the future but. Um, and I started the first online bank in Europe. There was no online banks. Uh, it was a bank called Open Bank. Because it was supposed to be open twenty four, twenty four, seven, three sixty five. It still runs uh in Spain and it was.

• 1:54:26Jordi Hays?

  Were you, were you the, was, was adding open to the start of a word? Were you the first person to do that?

• 1:54:31John Coogan?

  You started the trend. Open AI, open store.

• 1:54:33Speaker 06

  Very early.

• 1:54:34Jordi Hays?

  Open store.

• 1:54:34Speaker 06

  We're taking over the open words these days.

• 1:54:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:40John Coogan?

  Pay me my fee. Uh, I, I coined that. Uh, yeah, that's wild. Uh, what, what, uh, who was the first LP uh to kick you off? Like, what was the story?

• 1:54:48Jordi Hays?

  Well, first I have to ask, I'm assuming there wasn't bank, there wasn't like twenty banking as a service platforms back then. How did, how did you get it? How did you, how did you convince a bank to in uh in Europe to, to bank?

• 1:55:00Speaker 06

  Well, I, I, I had to become regulated. By the time I was twenty five or twenty six, I was regulated by eight central banks. To uh go through the whole KYC, bank approval process myself. So very early I learned.

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  What was the secret there? Is it, is it more just like you filled out the forms perfectly? You sent the right messages? Or were you like kind of knocking on doors, trying to grease palms to make it happen?

• 1:55:25Speaker 06

  All of the above. Uh, depending on the country, you had to do a lot more. Some were a lot more technical than others. But definitely you had to see, they had to see that I was not just this kid who didn't know anything about finance. And then I had to pretend I knew a lot about finance.

• 1:55:40John Coogan?

  So, yeah, you want to continue with that?

• 1:55:42Jordi Hays?

  No, from where, where did that go? I, I don't want to leave a cliffhanger.

• 1:55:45Speaker 06

  So, so that business uh grew to the fastest bank in Europe. I sold it back to the, to the uh, to the bank that uh we were partnered with. And, and I moved to Brazil, started and I got approval by the president of Brazil back then, Lula was, which is again president now. To approve a new banking license granted so we could start a bank to serve the on bank with financial services. So I lived in Sao Paulo, did that for three years, became the largest retail bank in the country, serving almost fifteen million customers.

• 1:56:17Jordi Hays?

  I'm seeing a trend. I'm seeing a trend.

• 1:56:21Speaker 06

  It's a bad day to be unbanked.

• 1:56:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, no, no, I was gonna say, you seem to like being the fastest growing or the number one in your category.

• 1:56:28Speaker 06

  You know, what I like is making, allowing people to, when, when people have access to better money, it makes their life better. It's not about having more money or less money, it's just making money better. And better money means you should be able to invest the same way I can anywhere in the world. You should be able to get the best loan and not get your knees bitten up if you don't pay it back a credit. You should be able to get a good insurance product, no matter where you are or what you're trying to do. That's what I call better money. So I think the journey of my life has been one of pursuing that better money makes life better. And moved to Silicon Valley eighteen years ago to start a company in payments before the iPhone came out.

• 1:57:13Speaker 06

  And I had a feeling people were gonna tap and pay with their phones. So we were one of the first companies tapping on NFC stickers, putting them on back of the phones. You could pay for merchants and, and that when the App Store came out with the iPhone, we were the first wallet in the phone. So that moment was like an aha moment. When you saw mobile and you saw the App Store, this is like, this is what I had been waiting for twenty years as an entrepreneur. That moment in time when suddenly you can compete with incumbents in a playing field that they were not looking at. So that's where Rivet Capital started.

• 1:57:52Speaker 06

  Instead of building one more company, because I always consider myself, even though we always move the ball forward, I was a failed entrepreneur because the best entrepreneurs never sell their companies. So I decided to start Rivet as a way to say, this is the one, I'm gonna run. Until the last day, I want to run it.

• 1:58:12John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Sorry, now I'm going backwards. Can you talk to me about some of the wedges that you used in the previous companies to actually drive adoption of a new banking product or a new bank online?

• 1:58:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I have to imagine, I have to imagine, starting in markets like, you know, Spain, Brazil, et cetera, helped you, you know, many, it's been, the narrative violation over the last 20 years has been that developing countries adopted fintech faster, they adopted new methods of payments, you know, much faster than developing countries in many ways, because there just wasn't that legacy infrastructure. So I'm curious if you even think you would have been successful if you had had just tried to come and only crack, you know, the US market?

• 1:59:05Speaker 06

  No, I will have been a failure. I would not understand the world. I was never the best student at school, but I was a student of life. And walking through the streets of all these countries and seeing how people behave with money was the best class and the best master class I could have gotten. Because at the end, everything you do is building a brand. And brand means trust. And it's very underrated to understand how long it takes to build trust, and how fast can you make it shake, or disappear, or fracture? And then how long it takes to bring it back? So if you see a pattern in everything that we've done, is working with teams that we believe can build a brand, and working with

• 1:59:50Speaker 06

  them, because that is the only mode that you can build that gives you the chance to succeed in financial services. Because every financial product at the end, it's a commodity. It can be copied. You can start with free commissions, it will be copied. You can start with free credit scores, it will be copied. You can start with free interest rate lendings or tipping, it will be copied. So it has to be the brand. And that's a special DNA that I got to understand from working in markets where people's level of trust was even lower than in developed markets.

• 2:00:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, how do you actually build that trust and build that brand in some of those markets? Is it different in Brazil than other countries? Are you talking about the feel of the product or actually just the marketing and telling people what your brand stands for? Or does it infuse through the interactions with a bank teller in the virtual environment?

• 2:00:50Speaker 06

  I think it's all of the above. It's the little things. It's really telling a story in a way that people believe and consistently see that you're doing that. And everyone, every company does it in a different way. So there was a story I remember from Nubank in Brazil, when we backed them super early. You know, in Sao Paulo, they are 18 million people, but there's, I think there's like four million dogs. It's almost like one dog for, and so whenever they saw that you had a transaction on your credit card for a vet, they will send you cookies to your helm.

• 2:01:30John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:01:31Speaker 06

  Right? Because it meant that your dog was sick or something was happening. So imagine, but those are little things that you do that with consistency. And if the message is, we care about you and we're paying attention to what's going on in your life, that's how you build that trust. It's a bunch of little details. There's never a big thing, but it has to be genuine. And you can see when CEOs or teams are not genuine, you can see it 10 miles away.

• 2:02:00Jordi Hays?

  How do you feel about, so you did the first institutional round of Coinbase and Robinhood, correct?

• 2:02:06Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 2:02:07Jordi Hays?

  And did you, did you think at the time that, that those companies, did you have a feeling that, that if they were successful, they would end up ultimately competing with each other? Because it's not. Exactly head to head yet, but you can imagine 10 years from today, these companies will just be going at it. And maybe that's just because of the trends around bundling in fintech, right? If you can create one product, you can add a bunch of others. If you can earn someone's trust in one category, you can expand out. But I think we're at this really interesting moment where the last 10 years were about. You had like, you know, traditional fintech and you had crypto and they were these distinct categories.

• 2:02:44Jordi Hays?

  But it seems that it seems very obvious now that they will be, you know, massively overlapped in ultimately just one category, which is money.

• 2:02:53Speaker 06

  Yes, so we were the first to turn around to Coinbase and Robinhood, but also to Revolut, which is in the same camp. And also to Nubank. Also to, we were super early and we built with MercadoLibre, MercadoPago, which is a competitor of Nubank now. So if you had told me back then that all these companies were going to be competing for this, we will have never guessed it ever. And the reality is-

• 2:03:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm surprised you say that because it seems like you have a bit of a, you got a secret crystal ball or something.

• 2:03:27Speaker 06

  Well, five years ago, we told our LPs, our investors in our, one of our Investor Day meetings, that the rails of crypto and financial services were actually starting to blend. And it was going to be indifferent. And then companies that didn't do both were going to be completely spaced out or lost the window of chance to build. So five years ago, we started to see it, but it wasn't obvious before that. Because there were different geographies and all of that, but now they're competing globally to each other. So the way I think about it is the first decade of all of this momentum was the few companies that will have the right to win.

• 2:04:06Speaker 06

  And they've earned it by building brand, by building teams, by delivering on services, by getting licenses, by doing all these things that they needed to do. So now we have a, call it 30 or 40 players worldwide that we call the compounders, the one that will deliver and compound for the next decade. Now this second decade of those 40 names or 30 names is the decade where they steal market share from every single incumbent. Because so far- They haven't that much.

• 2:04:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:37Speaker 06

  But this decade with AI, with crypto, with the way they're building new products, with the way they're using their own brands, with the trust they have, with the government regulators leverage they have today versus five years ago, buckle up because what's coming is going to be really fun if you're an incumbent and really tough if you're an incumbent.

• 2:04:57Jordi Hays?

  What lessons do you think the, uh, the company, the coin bases, the Robin Hoods, uh, et cetera of the world learned in 2020 during, in 2021 during that sort of chaotic market cycle that, uh, it, it, it feels good and that, and that many of them, uh, learned various lessons. I was also told to ask you about, um.

• 2:05:20John Coogan?

  Are you talking about, uh, COVID era or?

• 2:05:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just the whole like, you know, you know.

• 2:05:24John Coogan?

  The SVB crisis.

• 2:05:25Jordi Hays?

  Like Robin, Robin Hood.

• 2:05:27John Coogan?

  That felt like.

• 2:05:27Jordi Hays?

  You know, the Robin Hood GameStop saga, those moments. It feels like there was a lot of hard ones lessons and then we've started this new cycle, this new bubble, whatever you want to call it. Uh, and hopefully a lot of them have taken those, uh, taken learnings from that and are, are implementing it, whether it's around risk management, things like that.

• 2:05:46Speaker 06

  Yeah. So I think the lessons from that time was when COVID started, most of these companies were not ready to turbocharge. And what happened during COVID, if you look back, is that you probably fast track four or five years of customers and growth into 12 months. And none of these teams were prepared for it. Being at home, not being able to do much more, it just supercharged all of these companies and they over hire and they were working remote and they didn't have capital, you know, frameworks in place because the growth was unexpected. And we remember getting a bunch of calls during that time, the beginning, like this is amazing. And then like this is getting tough and this is going to be problematic.

• 2:06:26Speaker 06

  And, and it can crack here or there. And when we got the phone call at three, four, five in the morning from Robin Hood saying the GameStop day and what needed to be done. And we funded them in four hours, almost half a billion dollars that we didn't have, that we asked a bank to lend us to do it.

• 2:06:48Jordi Hays?

  Called in an old favor, a favor from an old friend?

• 2:06:51Speaker 06

  Yes, literally, a favor from, literally a favor from an old friend. And that's what it takes to build relationships in banking. You need decades of that so you can call in that favor when it's needed. Um, and that day, and look at how long it took for the brand to regain the trust of the market. It was almost two and a half years from that moment. And you gotta be a special leader and a special team to go through that turf and come back out of it. And now they're hitting their cylinders, but they got their story right. So you can see it in the Brian Armstrongs, in the Nikolai Zoronskis, in the Vlad Tenev's, in the David Velez, they have that now. Uh, they went through that and they're on the other side and they're all between thirty-eight and forty-one.

• 2:07:36Speaker 06

  So they got the best decade of their life coming, coming their way.

• 2:07:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. What does that mean for competition at the early stage? It feels like it's, it was really, it was, in, in, in retrospect, it seems like a no-brainer to back disruptive technologies in this huge market finance. But now you have, if you're starting a company that's going to carve out a little slice of, oh, Robin Hood's not touching this yet, or Coinbase isn't touching this yet. It's like, well, those companies are incredibly well capitalized and they're run by founders who are not about to retire anytime soon, seems kind of dangerous. So where are you seeing pockets of opportunity in the early stage? What are you seeing in the next generation of founders that might actually go and be able to carve out enough of a slice to grow into a generational company?

• 2:08:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think what's coming for, I'm more excited for what's coming this next decade than the last decade, if you ask me. Um, the last decade was just a setup for this decade. Uh, and there will be a bunch of new teams and companies. And we have been spending time with the young generation, like kids who are between founders who are between nineteen and twenty five.

• 2:08:44Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:08:44Speaker 06

  And or nineteen and twenty seven, call it, their brains are just faster. Their ways of thinking about how to build products is just different. They are, they, they spend the best years, the, the year of Covid's learning.

• 2:08:59Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 2:09:00Speaker 06

  And learning how to think really fast. And I've been blown away on how quick they are understanding and how quick they are to build. So we have this thesis that we've, we've been, we've been, uh, we wrote, it took us almost a year to write, which we call it Token Factories. And it's this world where, forget about crypto rails or fintech or AI. All of these things are blending. If before it was fintech here and AI and crypto here, and we said that they blended. Now we have financial services with crypto rails with AIs. And the thing between all of them is that they're all tokens. Everything is a token.

• 2:09:38Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 2:09:39Speaker 06

  So we, we call it the Token Factory, uh, Token Revolution Era. And tokenizing information, tokenizing money, and tokenizing power. And how those three things combine, it's where we're seeing some of the best entrepreneurs working. So that's what got us really excited. So we found a bunch of small, young teams who are building what we call now Token Factories. Companies that are building either access tokens that give you abilities to connect anywhere they want in the world to do anything. There's expert tokens. These are companies that are generating knowledge or expert information that is solely unique.

• 2:10:17Speaker 06

  That is going to change the way you manage wealth management, wealth advisory, the way you manage insurance product, insurance, um, agents.

• 2:10:27Speaker 06

  And then you have what we call asset tokens.

• 2:10:30Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 2:10:31Speaker 06

  And stable coins is the first of the asset tokens, outside of Bitcoins, the first of the, of the true asset tokens.

• 2:10:37John Coogan?

  Talk to me about real estate. I feel like that's the, that was something in the, at the peak of the crypto boom 2022, we were starting to hear about mortgages on chain, physical assets on chain. We're now starting to see stocks get on chain and obviously US dollars, which are much more tangible than artworks, for example. But it feels like most of this generation's entrepreneurs probably learned a hard lesson during the global financial crisis of like the risks of over-financialization in the real estate markets. But maybe like, how do you see things developing or, or, or real estate assets playing out generally over the next decade?

• 2:11:19Speaker 06

  So I, I think you, John, you said something that was really important. If you look this wall behind me, artists always tell you where the future is going before we get there.

• 2:11:29John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:11:30Speaker 06

  And NFTs was, and it wasn't about, just about the beauty of the art and the tokenization and the provenance and, and the transferability and the democratic. It was the first asset that was truly put on chain, that you trusted, that you knew there was only one of each, that you knew who had it and you knew when it was minted and you could find, you can lend against it, you can pledge it, you can do whatever. So guess what? Artists did their job. They showed us where the world was going. So to me, I, I'm very grateful because that's how we learned what was going on. And then we found companies like Figure, who's tokenized most of the mortgages that you get, HELOCs right now. They're the biggest HELOC tokenizer

• 2:12:13Speaker 06

  in America. Then you had the Circles of the Worlds and the Tethers tokenizing dollars. And there's like 10 more coming behind them. Then now you have Robinhood tokenizing stocks. So I think the problem with mortgages is that they don't move that much. Out of all the financial assets, They probably transfer themselves 10 times in your lifetime, maybe five. Maybe you buy a home, you have a four. So it's not the lowest hanging fruit need of a tokenized asset, even though it's a great asset to tokenize. But I think we're gonna get there because right now, the SEC and the other regulators have put the real rules in place to see tokenization. And the best organizations, you're not gonna see. You're not gonna realize their tokens.

• 2:12:56Speaker 06

  But suddenly, you're gonna be able to click, make two clicks, and get a mortgage against this. And you're gonna be able to do one more click and swap to another mortgage issuer. And not miss a beep on your payments. Or on your servicing. Those, that's what the consumer is going to see. That's what the consumer is gonna see with Robinhood tokenized stocks. You don't, you're gonna have the same UX experience and just trade stocks anywhere in the world, not knowing that they're tokenized. And that's, that's where we get super excited. Uh, because we're just at the beginning of that ecosystem, which is probably like growing up again in the 1970s, when you're about to electronic, create electronic payment transfers.

• 2:13:38Jordi Hays?

  Uh, how, how have you thought about the investability of stablecoins as a category? When it feels like a feature for so many of the companies that you've already backed? I know, I know you guys did Privy, which recently sold to Stripe. But that bet, that bet.

• 2:13:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:58Jordi Hays?

  What, what was the other one?

• 2:13:59John Coogan?

  Bridge.

• 2:14:00Jordi Hays?

  Oh, there you go.

• 2:14:03Speaker 06

  It sounds like, I, I, we, we told the Stripe that we're shareholders, we love them, we're good friends with Patrick and John and the whole team. And we'll, we told them that we feel that we were, we were, we were their core of their team because the tooling that we did in stablecoin infrastructure, they took out of our plates in less than a year.

• 2:14:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:19Jordi Hays?

  Wild. But how, but yeah, so, so you, you made some infrastructure bets. Are there, are there consumer bets that you see going forward? I, I know there's a bunch of different potential use cases, but again, it's so easy for an existing company to add stablecoins and they already have the distribution and the customer network to quickly, uh, you know, uh, service.

• 2:14:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, so it's a great question, Joey. We, we've been trying to find, we've been looking worldwide for consumer applications that start with stablecoins first as a user experience. We haven't found. One that will say this is the way it's going to work to scale globally at a scale that matters. So that's why we have been backing much more the infrastructure providers of all these schemes, because they feel like they have a lot more growth potential than the consumer side. But I think we're just starting. I think now we're starting to see the beginning of agentic experiences with crypto rails and AI with true agents.

• 2:15:25Speaker 06

  And I think in that intersection, we're going to find native stablecoin retail brands that are going to provide services that you don't expect. So we've been investing a lot there in learning. We've been testing ourselves a lot there. We have our own thesis on how it's going to work, so we're actually building some of them in learning. But we expect to see entrepreneurs worldwide working around them in the very near future. My guess is in the next year, we will be surprised to find a few already.

• 2:15:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, when you come back on, and hopefully you'll come back on many more times between now and then. But I'm assuming in 2030, we'll have the same conversation again. You got every single new stablecoin pure play that mattered. What about on the issuer side? I feel like now that stablecoins have clear regulation, it seems like we'll see a lot more people start to issue them. Is that needed? Do you see use cases? Or are the USDCs and the tethers like providing kind of enough value right now?

• 2:16:28Speaker 06

  I think people underestimate how important the Tether brand is worldwide. I think when you are in Argentina, or in Venezuela, or you're in Indonesia, they don't even say USDT, they just call it Tether, right? And I think Tether has a chance to be a really global brand that most people were well under.

• 2:16:52Speaker 06

  Imagine the scale of it. Circle has a great reputation institutional side, but we're super early. I mean, think about it. We're only $250 billion into stable coins. We should be in $2 trillion in the next year, or a year and a half or two. And if we're not there, something's off. So for that, we will probably need like five, seven, 10 more names. Now, you're not going to care as a user, to be honest. You may have a preference. I remember growing up, my parents and us to save money from inflation in Venezuela. Every Friday, we walked to the bank branch and we bought travel checks. And it was a way, a way of saving, which is literally the same as stable coins today. And those

• 2:17:34Speaker 06

  travel checks in the era, you could buy American Express travel checks, you can buy Thomas Cook, which were Mastercard travel checks. And there was another third brand, I forget. I didn't care which one we got. All I care was getting the dollars and being able to save. So I think, but over time, I remember my family's Q2 American Express travel checks. For whatever reason, it had like a better recognition brand. So I think we're still in the early days of that. And that's going to happen. And I think we're going to see five to 10, and we're going to see the incumbents issuing their own token and stable coins. And now the bridges of the world are going to be super important because they're going to be the bridge to connect all of them, no matter what, what, what you're doing. And

• 2:18:17Speaker 06

  it's going to be very simple to solve. So my guess is five brands in the next five years.

• 2:18:22John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:18:23Jordi Hays?

  Great. Great.

• 2:18:24John Coogan?

  Very exciting.

• 2:18:25Jordi Hays?

  This was awesome.

• 2:18:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks so much.

• 2:18:27Jordi Hays?

  You're a legend.

• 2:18:28John Coogan?

  Up and on.

• 2:18:29Jordi Hays?

  Come back on again soon.

• 2:18:30Speaker 06

  Guys are doing amazing job. We'll be following your show and congratulations. It's really fun and you bring super fresh content and news and people to the show.

• 2:18:38John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:18:39Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, Mickey.

• 2:18:40John Coogan?

  We appreciate it.

• 2:18:41Jordi Hays?

  Talk again soon. Looking forward to it.

• 2:18:42Speaker 06

  Bye.

• 2:18:43John Coogan?

  Bye. Up next, we have Casey Neistat, recently.

• 2:18:46Jordi Hays?

  The YouTuber, the creator.

• 2:18:48John Coogan?

  He's over at Mod Retro now, working on the chromatic, which we've been playing in the studio, working on the M64. How are you doing, Casey?

• 2:18:57Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 2:18:58Casey Neistat?

  Alan, good to see you.

• 2:19:01John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream. What's new in your world? How did the, are those the Nothing Year One? Give us a little review.

• 2:19:08Casey Neistat?

  Oh yeah, these are fantastic. I actually had to take them off because the noise cancelling on these is um, it's it's like too good and I'm at home right now and my kids were screaming two seconds ago. But yeah, these things are fantastic.

• 2:19:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, we had Carl pay on the show a week ago and uh he put them down and I was like, I was too afraid to ask like, oh, are those for me? Like, are you gonna leave those for me? I kinda want those. I need a new pair. I'll have to pick them up.

• 2:19:32Casey Neistat?

  I'm not enough of an audiophile to know what if something sounds good or not, like if either good or it's not good.

• 2:19:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:19:39Casey Neistat?

  But physical switches, like buttons you can touch?

• 2:19:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:44Casey Neistat?

  I really like and the like the Apple, I don't know what they're called. What are they? AirPods?

• 2:19:49John Coogan?

  AirPod Maxes, yeah. AirPod Maxes.

• 2:19:52Casey Neistat?

  There's no on off switch.

• 2:19:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:54Casey Neistat?

  Like I can't.

• 2:19:55John Coogan?

  Digital crown.

• 2:19:56Casey Neistat?

  I needed I need an on off switch and these have that.

• 2:19:59John Coogan?

  I like that. I like the tactile feeling. Yeah. Are you are you a big teenage engineering guy? It feels like kind of like that that they're almost coining like a trend that's like becoming more mainstream now.

• 2:20:09Casey Neistat?

  Teenage engineering is the only company whose products I buy religiously, even though I have no idea how to use any of them.

• 2:20:17John Coogan?

  The same thing happened to me. I bought the little keyboard. I'm a musician now. Couldn't figure out how to make a song.

• 2:20:22Casey Neistat?

  I'll use it.

• 2:20:22John Coogan?

  I love it. It's amazing.

• 2:20:24Jordi Hays?

  Looks good on a desk.

• 2:20:25Casey Neistat?

  Beautiful.

• 2:20:25John Coogan?

  It's so beautiful.

• 2:20:26Casey Neistat?

  Someone that cares that much about the craft, um, I want to be a part of that.

• 2:20:31John Coogan?

  Support them unconditionally. Uh, yeah. So tell me about mod retro. How'd that come together? Uh, what what what is the news in your world?

• 2:20:39Casey Neistat?

  Um, you know, the mod retro thing is really funny because uh I my video says all this, but like I'm a big retro gamer. Um, I'm guilty of sometimes playing Call of Duty on my Xbox, but it doesn't work out when you got a wife and kids.

• 2:20:53Jordi Hays?

  You're not being guilty. Every every man should have an allocation of time daily for Call of Duty, you know, getting on Rust. Getting on Rust with your boys.

• 2:21:02Casey Neistat?

  I'm so close to that W and then the door comes flying open. The children come running in. It's challenging. But I'm 44, so like.

• 2:21:12Casey Neistat?

  Apex of video games for me was like nineteen eighty-nine, I think, getting a Game Boy, the first year they came out for my grandmother for Christmas. And like, you guys are younger than me, but before that, all we had were those like L- LED LCD games that were like really janky, like the Tiger games, and they were terrible. And the first time I turned on the Game Boy and like saw the Nintendo come down, I was like, holy, this is such a moment. Um, and then Nintendo sixty-four came out when I was, I was like just getting into high school as a freshman. We used to sneak out of high school, get on the city bus, like the, the, the regular bus, and then drive two towns across and then

• 2:21:53Casey Neistat?

  walk a mile and a half to Toys R Us to sit in Toys R Us and play the demo of Mario sixty-four. When that thing came out, I think it was in ninety-four, so I was twelve or thirteen years old.

• 2:22:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:04Casey Neistat?

  So I, I love that stuff. And Mod Retro, when I first learned about it, when I first learned about the Chromatic, their Game Boy, I thought it was really stupid. I didn't understand because you can get those like Chinese ones off of Amazon for fifty bucks. And, um, a friend of mine was like, no, this is great. They're doing great things. Do you want to talk to Palmer about it? And I'm a huge Palmer Lucky fan. And I was like, I'd love to. And I don't know that I've ever been evangelized so much in my life. Like by the end of that call, he didn't just convince me, but I was like, I felt like an idiot for not seeing what Mod Retro was. And then as I got to know Torin, who, who is the, the CEO of Mod Retro and understand

• 2:22:48Casey Neistat?

  the vision for the company, I was just so like overwhelmed. I was like, this is the most like beautiful vision ever. I don't understand the business of it. It makes no sense to me, but the fact that these guys have the guts to do this, like, can I be a part of it? And I think I pitched back to them what I understood the company was, and they're like, that's it, that's what we want to say. And I was like, all right, give me a job. And my job will be to figure out how to communicate that and we'll make videos and stuff. And they're like, sure, but we're not going to pay you. And I was like, great, I'll take a business card.

• 2:23:19Jordi Hays?

  Business card.

• 2:23:21Casey Neistat?

  It's been great working with it. I also, I'm an investor in Mod Retro. I have a vested interest in them succeeding, but I mean, that's not the, that's not where the passion to be a part of what they're up to comes from for me.

• 2:23:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, so many places we could go with this. This is fantastic. What, yeah, do you think that there's a world, I mean, I love the handheld gaming stuff. My, my experience having kids was I stopped playing console games. The N64 was actually my first console ever. And, but once I started

• 2:23:52Casey Neistat?

  What was your game?

• 2:23:54John Coogan?

  Mario 64 for sure. Goldeneye was big. Big Headshot, Golden Gun, you gotta do that. And then a couple other, Donkey Kong and was never really into the Mario Kart racers, but then Smash Brothers kind of took over and that was the real competition with everyone eventually.

• 2:24:11Jordi Hays?

  I think what, I think what's exciting to me is like building new, new hard consumer hardware that will still turn on and work and bring joy 20 years from now. I had, I had the game, I have like my Game Boy Pikachu edition from growing up. And I, when Mod Retro came out, I went and found it and I turned it on and it worked. And that was like such an amazing moment for me. Cause like when, like I haven't, I've got old iPhones lying around. I've never been like, not one, I've never been like, oh, I should turn that on. It's gonna be fun, right? Cause it's like, it's not evergreen. It was of the moment and you just move on. And so I think if Mod Retro can do anything, which is like make consumer hardware, which is so disposable today across all these different

• 2:24:55Jordi Hays?

  categories and make it so that, yeah, you're gonna get your Mod Retro or your M64, you know, this year, and then you're gonna turn it on in 30 years and like, you know, bridge generations.

• 2:25:06Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, you know, it's, I think there's, there's, it's easy to sort of shit on planned obsolescence because it is real. I think of that, like, we woke up, my house woke up this morning at 7:30 a.m. because the refrigerator repairman finally showed up and was banging on our door at 7:30 in the morning. The dog was freaking out because our two-year-old refrigerator doesn't work. And this is a refrigerator that has Wi-Fi.

• 2:25:33Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Let's give it up for Wi-Fi.

• 2:25:37Casey Neistat?

  It doesn't work. It doesn't work. And when I think about that, it's like that refrigerator that we had as kids with the one big heavy aluminum door, like it just worked. It worked forever. But in order to keep selling shit, you have to keep coming out with new things. And I think that's the negative of planned obsolescence. But I think when it comes to consumer technology, there is an argument for having to keep up with the rate of innovation. You know, like the new phones that come out, every time you get a new phone, it does do something that your other phone didn't. So there's maybe a reason for that. But I think with that sort of tidal wave of innovation that feels faster now than it ever felt when I was young. I think we we lose some great things.

• 2:26:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:20Casey Neistat?

  And, you know, my understanding of mod retro, at least what I want it to be, and I think what what what Palmer and and what Torin also want it to be, is like, let's identify consumer electronics that people just love, like had an unbelievable relationship with. They really like the love I had for my Game Boy. I don't know that there was another thing that I owned through my adolescence that I treasured more than my Game Boy. And let's bring them back and let's do them justice. Let's build them so they last forever. I think Palmer's boat when I was interviewing was, we don't want to build another Game Boy. We want to build the last Game Boy, like the last one that ever needs to be built. And that's the vision with M sixty four as well. Like you can get emulators that kind of they kind of work.

• 2:27:05Casey Neistat?

  But let's let's build the thing that that, you know, you and I had John when when we were kids and let's have it last forever. And I, you know, I just think there's so much romance in that. When you start digging deep, you can start to see products everywhere. And, you know, mod retro is tiny, just a couple of people working out of a small office. But like, the list of of products that that we want to build, the list of ideas that we have is is endless. And that's like a, that's a really exciting thing to take on.

• 2:27:35Jordi Hays?

  It's also such an interesting company because you're trying to recreate things of the past that were good products. And you want to improve on them, but you need to stay true to the original product. Otherwise, you know, what do you, I mean, it's not to say that that mod retro couldn't one day create, you know, novel, totally novel products. But it is like an interesting constraint and challenge. And you actually have to, it's it's really, in some ways, it's easy because you know exactly what you need to build. But in other ways, it's harder because you're taking a product that was almost perfect in its original form. And still, like, you need to make it, it needs, it should be better. Otherwise, you know, what are you doing?

• 2:28:15Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, you know, like, one interesting challenge, and I'm not the right person to speak to this, I'm not the technical guy, but to make the screen match the old Game Boy screen was an exhaustive process. So when you buy one of those handheld emulators that looks like a Game Boy, the Chinese-made ones, they have fairly high, high-pixel-density screens on them. So in order for them to give the look of an old Game Boy, you're using multiple pixels to emulate a single pixel. So it's inaccurate, and real psychopaths, I'm not one of them, but I appreciate it, real psychopaths on Twitter have done like this super zoom into a pixel and you realize that Mario is like jumping a half a pixel too low or a half a pixel too high within the frame because of the limitation of the screen.

• 2:29:01Casey Neistat?

  And Torin and Palmer's, like, religious obsession with matching that screen was one of the hardest things to overcome. So it's actually harder to build something that matched the quality of a product that's 20 years old than it would be to actually get the latest and greatest screen and just plug it in there.

• 2:29:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember Palmer saying something about like, a couple of the companies, the screen is actually rotated 90 degrees. So instead of the scan lines coming down this way, they go across this way and then they just transform it at the last second. But it's like this bizarre, bizarre thing that you would never really notice of, but it's this craftsmanship that actually you feel, I feel like. And it feels like something that's just like been lost in this, like, everything's disposable, everything's junk, everything's a knockoff culture. And it feels like, I, I don't know, like, it just feels like it's worth it to have stuff that exhibits craft and taste.

• 2:29:54John Coogan?

  And even if I don't, even if I'm not the one that can tell that Mario is one pixel too low when I do the jump, like, the fact that the craftsman worked on the product means something. I, it's hard to put an exact, like, quantitative value on it, but you feel it, right?

• 2:30:09Casey Neistat?

  That is the gamble that is the company. Palmer said that in my video, he's like, You know, maybe nobody cares about this, but weirdos like you and me, but that's enough. And I think it's like, there is an argument that's like, well, who cares if it's off by half a pixel? And if you're one of those people, totally cool, you're well, there's plenty of products in the market for you. But if you're someone who does care, if you're that weirdo that buys teenage engineering products, because you just value the integrity of the product so much, you want to have it. Then, you know, there's a place in this world for companies like Mod Retro.

• 2:30:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, what do you think about like the temptation to just make like one small change? Like the chromatic has a USB C port on it. That's a huge upgrade, but you could easily turn this into like, well, like, you know, we have the technology to make the M64 handheld. And then, you know, then you're in Switch territory and all of a sudden it's like a completely different product, right?

• 2:31:03Casey Neistat?

  I think, look, that's ever present. And that's, that's the problem with sort of limitless, you know, like when Nintendo was building this, what was four, almost 40 years ago, 35 years ago now. They were so limited by what the technology enabled them to do. Like when you think about the Sega Game Gear, I don't know if you've ever had one of those, great product. It's this big, but it was the first one that had really great color screen on it. And it took six AA batteries instead of four, like the Game Boy. But the battery life on it was like 40 minutes.

• 2:31:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. And Do you remember the N64 like expansion pack that you put in to like double the memory? That was

• 2:31:39Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, dude, I remember that. What about the rumble pack that shipped with Star Fox? That was like the greatest innovation ever. My mind exploded when the controller shook.

• 2:31:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, dude, he's like, like these add-ons, because like they couldn't bake it all into the first product and

• 2:31:52Casey Neistat?

  And that's, that's indicative of the limitations of what tech can do.

• 2:31:56John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:31:56Casey Neistat?

  And when you look at like, you know, I don't know what Samsung announced last week or two weeks ago at Unpacked, and you're looking at what the limitations are today of like a folding screen that's as thick as 10 sheets of paper. You realize how far we've come. But when you go in the other direction. But there's kind of no limits and you're looking to make something that was made 30 years ago. The problem is like, where do you draw the line? And I think that's a really, uh, it's a really interesting thing to try to overcome and confront.

• 2:32:23John Coogan?

  Yeah. What can you teach me about the lore of, uh, in the video camera world? I was looking at a cool new music video and it had this fisheye lens and this grain. And I was kind of digging in and it seemed like they shot it on like a Sony skate camera with mini DV tapes. Like this feels like something that I was looking like, maybe I could buy one on eBay, but it's probably broken and I want someone to go remake it. But then of course you always have like, oh, you could just like throw the filter on there and premiere or whatever. But what, what, what are some of the, what are some of the iconic video cameras? Or just like creative tools that might, uh, you know, be worth revisiting at some point?

• 2:33:00Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, it's, it's such an interesting examination and, and your, your question's great because my family and I are out, we're in Massachusetts for, for summer vacation. And there's a lot of kids around, like we went and got ice cream last night, a lot of teenagers around. And a lot of these kids come up and they ask me for selfies. And the amount of teenagers that come up to me and ask me for selfies and they're carrying the point and shoots that we had in like the 2010s, like before your phone camera was good enough.

• 2:33:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:29Casey Neistat?

  They all carry them. No one makes that camera anymore, which means if you have one, you have an old one.

• 2:33:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:35Casey Neistat?

  And every one of these kids has it. And when I, I asked them, because I'm curious, like, why do you carry that? They're like, I love the way it looks. And I think we've reached this point, like iPhone, cell phone photography, it all looks so perfect. In a way that it almost becomes artificial. Like I think the iPhone 5 was the last iPhone where when you took a picture, it just sort of took a picture. And then after that, every time you take a picture now on any modern smartphone, it takes a picture and then runs it through an algorithm to make the picture sweeter and cleaner and sharper and better for you. And I think there's sort of this yearning for something that feels more real and authentic.

• 2:34:09Jordi Hays?

  It's like you look at a, you're at a store, looking at a picture, you know, a camera from a picture from, from 2010, uh, or a camera or a picture from an iPhone today is like you're at, you're at the grocery store and there's the organic apples. And they look, they look good, but like they're a little fucked up and, and, and you know, they may be like, whatever, part of it's kind of rotten. And then you look over and you see the perfect apple. And like intuitively, you know that you're like, that it's a little bit too good to be true, that apple over there, you know? And I think, I don't know, the other thing that's real is ta- removing the camera, like adding the camera to the phone has been one of the greatest

• 2:34:50Jordi Hays?

  innovations of the century, right? In, in, in many ways, but now removing it, removing the camera from the phone and being able to leave your phone and just bring a camera around is also an innovation, right? Going, going, going backwards. And I think that's the other thing that, that kids like, and, and I've found that's nice. If I'm going to the beach with my kids, it's nice to be able to bring a camera, but not have my phone.

• 2:35:13Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, um, my daughter is 10. This is the first summer she's allowed to like, walk around with her friends without a parent and she has a flip phone. And she had this whole argument for getting an iPhone that has nothing on it, but the phone and messaging. And my wife and I had this discussion and the reason why we said, no, it has to be the flip phone is because of the camera. Like it, it introduces a new level of sort of attention and why you're in purpose. And the reason why we wanted to have a phone is simply to stay in touch with us, no other reason. But the minute you introduce this other sort of novel aspect of it, it becomes much more of a social dynamic and a social consideration. And the way that you're trying to get away from that.

• 2:35:57Casey Neistat?

  But I think just going back to the camera things, this is such an obsession of mine. I think that. We are quick to, to, quick to ignore or look past the relationship we have with, with the aesthetics that a camera yields. And when you see those pictures off of those old point and shoots, they look like something specific. Like when you were talking about that old skateboard fish I D V look, it looks like something specific. You have a relationship with that. When you see stuff that looks like it's V H S, we think of the eighties or the nineties. And I think now there's just sort of this generic aesthetic across the board. This like crispy, flat, four K phone thing. And there's this desire to have something that, that it has some sense of identity attached to it.

• 2:36:38Casey Neistat?

  And that's why we're seeing these sort of Gen Z types, you know, looking for older tech that's, that reflects more of who they are, more individuality. And I think that's a trend that we're going to see continue.

• 2:36:49Jordi Hays?

  Yes, this generation's vinyl.

• 2:36:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I've joked that I want to film, I want to film the first podcast on Panavision film or something. Just spend a fortune developing the film.

• 2:37:00Jordi Hays?

  What other, what other, what other cat, consumer tech categories are you excited about? We're having, we're having the founder of Wave on and I, and I, in 20 minutes. And they got like 12 million views yesterday for launching like sunglasses that live, will just live stream constantly.

• 2:37:18Casey Neistat?

  Do you have a, do you have a ratio of positive to negative mentions in those 12 million views?

• 2:37:25Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I think everybody, people had a viscerally negative reaction to it.

• 2:37:29Casey Neistat?

  That's, that's my take on it as well. And it makes me think, you know, my, my software development company being my startup. Um, and we started that coming in 2014. And a little known aspect of that company is initially it was built around Google Glass.

• 2:37:46John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:37:46Casey Neistat?

  And we actually, you know, we, we rewrote the code, we rewrote the, the software that Google Glass ran. So it had a singular function, which was you push a button like this, it captures 10 seconds and immediately shares it to your feed. That's where we started with that. And I remember meeting with Google and they were excited about it and they showed us what Google Glass two was going to look like. And we're like, fuck, yeah. We started raising money based on that. And then a week later, they announced they were killing the entire Google Glass program. And we, we backed off. We're like, all right, we'll just do it on the phone now. Um, but I think when you ask about sort of the social impact of being able to live stream all the time with the negative reaction that we're seeing based on, on Wave's, uh, video they posted yesterday.

• 2:38:26Casey Neistat?

  I think the social dynamic is something that is often overlooked in the hardware startup world. I think of the humane AI pin, you know, a really good friend of mine worked for humane and obviously super excited about new technology. Yeah, Sam, which parenthetically, you joke about Panavision for a podcast. Sam Sheffer has in his studio for his live streaming setup, a VHS camera hardwired into his deck. So he can live stream from VHS. That's amazing. But Sam would be around.

• 2:38:57Jordi Hays?

  We tried to, I tried to hire Sam, by the way, we worked with him on a project and I was like.

• 2:39:01Casey Neistat?

  He's way too hot. He's way too hot.

• 2:39:03Jordi Hays?

  He's gotta be, he's gotta be so.

• 2:39:04Casey Neistat?

  He's way too big of a deal.

• 2:39:08Casey Neistat?

  Sam's the best, but when I'd be around him and he had his AI pin on, I was always sort of looking down at that or like thinking about what I'm saying and uncomfortable about, you know, speaking openly to him. And I think like, that's what I mean by social implications. Like, you know, my phone is on my couch right here. But if we're sitting together and I'm holding my phone like this, the whole time we're talking, you're uneasy about that. And so when I think of a pair of glasses that are live streaming, or at least have the capability of live streaming the whole time. When I look at them, I'm uneasy. And I think of this, you know, maybe the most extreme example of this is Apple Vision Pro, which, you know, blew my mind when I got that thing. Like I made the most, the most glowing video about it because it was the greatest technology I've ever used.

• 2:39:53Casey Neistat?

  But later that night, because I made the video the same day I got them, I'm at home using them. And my wife is like, Casey, take those fucking things off your face and pay attention to your kids. And I was like, oh, you can't wear these around other people. And I was like, how did they not see that?

• 2:40:14Casey Neistat?

  And so I, I think about that because like, we're sort of accustomed to people using their phones and it's kind of okay. Like we're used to this, this is not okay. And so when I think about wearables, I think that that is going to be a gigantic thing to overcome. Which is sort of the

• 2:40:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, the crazy, so, so, Amazon acquired a company, uh, it got announced this week called Bee, which is a brace, after, after all, everything they faced with Siri, Siri's listening to me, the B band just listens to you all day long, every single conversation.

• 2:40:43John Coogan?

  Everything.

• 2:40:44Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and I, and it's, and it's cool, like, I, I think all new tech, for the most part, is cool. Do I want my team to be wearing a B bracelet? Are we gonna allow people to wear B bands?

• 2:40:56John Coogan?

  This might be a B-free zone.

• 2:40:57Jordi Hays?

  This might be a B-free zone, you know?

• 2:40:59Casey Neistat?

  I'm not gonna have any friends that wear Bs. I don't have any friends anyways, but if you have a B, it just means like, we can't hang out.

• 2:41:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:06Casey Neistat?

  Because it makes, it makes me uncomfortable. And look, I think there's an argument, it's like, get over it, like, you fucking Luddite, like, this is the direction everything's headed, and you're being recorded all the time anyway. Duh. But in the interim, I do think, like, there is a, there's a learning curve. I think that Meta's decision to put wearable glasses with a camera on them in Ray-Bans, the most common sunglasses in the world, was brilliant because we are all familiar with this pair of sunglasses. Like, there was no learning curve. There was no like, what's that thing on your face? We know what it is. I think how emphatic they are about having the indicator light. There's no way you can turn it off. If you cover it, they don't record. There's some degree, at least there's a tacit acknowledgement.

• 2:41:47Jordi Hays?

  That's important. Like, my question, my question for the, the Wave founder in 20 minutes is, should your glasses be bright red and have like, you know, a circle in the middle of your head that's flashing that says, "I'm recording"?

• 2:41:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, if, if, like, if someone shows up with a TV camera, like, I don't feel like, oh, this is in violation of my privacy. I'm like, I know exactly what's going on. The news is here. And if I step in front of that camera, I'm on the news. Like, it, it, we have a social understanding of that.

• 2:42:13Jordi Hays?

  You still might not wanna be around it.

• 2:42:15John Coogan?

  Yeah. And I might be like, actually, I'm gonna turn around and walk the other way, because I don't wanna be seen on, on this camera or whatever. I don't know.

• 2:42:20Casey Neistat?

  But there's there's an understanding there. Yeah. And look on on WAVE's website and the Q and A, there's a question like, is there an indicator light? And their answer is, yeah, but you can turn it off.

• 2:42:29John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:42:30Casey Neistat?

  And so like, I, you know, I don't know that I read that. That makes me a little bit queasy.

• 2:42:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:34Casey Neistat?

  As a guy who has a camera on him, you know, all the time and so much of the the videos that I've made is about filming everyone in the whole world around me.

• 2:42:42John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:42:42Casey Neistat?

  I still think there's something honest about having that camera on your shoulder, pointing a camera at someone. Um, versus like, you know, the glass hole movement of the, you know, Google Glass, which like by having this on your face, everyone was uneasy around you. I think it's a big hurdle to overcome as we eventually like figure out what this hardware AI future is going to look like.

• 2:43:04John Coogan?

  Yeah. What do you think about, uh, like airplane demos? It feels like all there's so much tech where the demo is like, you'll love this on an airplane. The Apple Vision Pro is a great example. A lot of the, a lot of the, the handheld.

• 2:43:16Jordi Hays?

  But it doesn't work when it's dark?

• 2:43:17John Coogan?

  Uh, it's not too dark on planes. It does work very well on planes. But it's this like weird niche use case that feels like killer application. And then you actually get out into most of your life is not spent on airplanes usually. And so.

• 2:43:29Casey Neistat?

  Yeah. Look, if if that's the best you've got, like I travel more than most people I know. We're still talking about, you know, maybe double digits, maybe, uh, maybe 10 hours a month tops.

• 2:43:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:40Casey Neistat?

  So, you know, 4,000 bucks for a face computer that I use 10 hours a month on an airplane, which by the way, it doesn't work for me on an airplane. Like I didn't like it at all on an airplane.

• 2:43:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:43:49Casey Neistat?

  No, it will work. Like.

• 2:43:50John Coogan?

  Was that like claustrophobia or?

• 2:43:53Casey Neistat?

  No, when you're on an airplane, you're surrounded by strangers.

• 2:43:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:56Casey Neistat?

  So the idea that like, I'm just gonna go like that and watch Avatar with all these people around me. You know, I don't fly Spirit that often, but I have flown Spirit and I know what goes on in those flights. Like it just, again, like.

• 2:44:09Jordi Hays?

  He lives to tell the tale.

• 2:44:11Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, the social implication of it. You know, I think if that's the best you've got, then maybe, you know, maybe you're not thinking holistically enough about your, about your hardware.

• 2:44:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:20Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you spot talent? You, you, you discovered Sam, uh, someone in the chat was asking.

• 2:44:27Casey Neistat?

  That's a great question.

• 2:44:28Jordi Hays?

  If you have a framework for it.

• 2:44:31Casey Neistat?

  It's a difficult question, but you know, it's the same, I approach it the same way that I approach investments and it's seldom the work and it's almost always the individual. You know, like I think Sam is brilliant, but he's brilliant at everything that he does. He's brilliant with the work that he did at Humane. He's brilliant at the work that he did at The Verge before that. He's brilliant with his own YouTube channel. You know, I've got a dear friend of mine, a kid named Hunter, who works in the building with me.

• 2:44:59Jordi Hays?

  Hunter's a friend and we invest together, so.

• 2:45:03Casey Neistat?

  Hunter's fantastic and like, I don't know what Hunter does because every time I have a conversation with him, he's starting some new business or some new endeavor, like the work is almost irrelevant. It's the individual. And I think it's like, it's that mentality that you have or you don't have. Not everyone has it. I do think maybe you can get it if you don't have it, but when I see that in people, I have a tendency to sort of gravitate towards those people. And when I look at the, when I look around at the friends of mine that have some sort of professional relationship with a professional admiration for, they all have that thing, that sort of desire to see it through, whatever the it may be. So, you know, I guess the short answer is like, it's always the person, never the product.

• 2:45:49Jordi Hays?

  That's great. Hunter's in the chat, by the way. He says hello. The, another question I have is, we've been thinking about AI-generated images, video, et cetera, is getting so good. If it stays at this pace, you're going to be able to generate characters consistently. You're already seeing this on Instagram, people just creating entire personalities for influencers in different verticals. Do you have any type of strong thesis around how that will play out? If we're going to have sort of organic influencers, regular humans, and then, you know, the synthetic. I've been thinking about in the context of, you know, an example, it's like, I don't want the AI Andrew Huberman.

• 2:46:34Jordi Hays?

  I want Andrew Huberman to get health advice from because I know Andrew and I trust that he's making the best decisions and studying, you know, and making, you know, these recommendations and understands the weight of that. And you have like a synthetic Andrew Huberman in five years. Doesn't care if he convinces a million people to do something dumb with their health because he can just shut the account down and turn a new one on. But I'm curious how you think.

• 2:47:02Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, okay, my cynical take on it, which is, which I believe is accurate. I'd wager that this is accurate, is that it's a tidal wave that none of us will, will be able to, to overcome. We can hold our breath for a while. It is a tidal wave. And I wish I had a better analogy, but it's a little bit like, you know, when Toy Story came out in 1999. It was the first computer animated feature film. And it was great. I loved it. But then five, six years later, there was just this, you know, onslaught of computer animated films. And I was like, you know what? The hand drawn stuff is better. I miss that. When CVI first started getting introduced into films, I was like, no, practical is better. I like practical better. That's going to be the thing. And it's like, no, you're gonna lose. And I think AI is probably the most existential version of that.

• 2:47:46Casey Neistat?

  I think that it's just going to be so good that it's going to become irrelevant. And old people like us might appreciate, you know, real human things and we might keep it alive. But the generation behind us, my children, when they see draw, hand drawn animation, they're like, what is this? They don't care. It means nothing to them. So I think it's just going to get so good that it really doesn't matter. And that, that tidal wave is going to consume everything. And I, I, I think that we're, we're, it's, the progress that we've seen in the last couple of years of how good it is and how quickly it's developing is incredible. But when you look at the capabilities of, you know, the latest Grok and the latest GPT,

• 2:48:29Casey Neistat?

  you look at how smart these things are, you look at the sort of conversations you can have with, with any of these agents. And then you look at how good the images that can be spit out by, you know, Google's video or whichever, whichever AI you, you might be fond of. It's like, They're just gonna marry really, really quickly. And I think five or six years from now, we're gonna start to see real sort of erosion in the space because what they're delivering is gonna be so good. You know, like another example is like, we haven't had a number one song yet that's completely AI-generated. But it's gonna come out of nowhere. It's gonna be like Gangnam Style, which like the novelty of it allows us to dismiss the lack of humanity that this song

• 2:49:09Casey Neistat?

  has. The first AI song that's gonna be a number one hit is not going to be a Bob Dylan-esque song that comes from the soul. It's gonna be something fun and outrageous, and we're gonna forgive that AI made it. And then slowly, it's gonna start to chip away. But I think it is a losing battle. And the optimistic take on that is I think that there is going to be an extreme premium, but on the humans that are able to sustain because of of what they represent uniquely. Um, you know, maybe another bad analogy is it's like, I love Marvel movies. They're fucking fantastic. But as far as cinema goes, like, you know, there's an argument that said it's like, those kind of artistry that we saw in the the 70s or 80s, like the the apex of cinema,

• 2:49:54Casey Neistat?

  or it comes from one, when you think of a Tarantino movie, you think of, um, you know, a truly great filmmaker with a voice. Marvel movies are something else. They're fucking great. And we love them. We all show up to see them, and we're okay with that. And I think that's going to happen with AI, but it's gonna happen at a rate of acceleration that we've never encountered before. And it's gonna be so good that we're willing to forgive it. And I think it's gonna leave a handful of people out there. Maybe Andrew Huberman will be one of them. I hope so. I'm a fan of his as well. But it will put an extreme premium on the sort of human voices that are distinctly, um, human, that distinctly represents something that AI could never. When you look at the landscape of media, a lot of that shit could be replaced by AI.

• 2:50:38John Coogan?

  The power law gets steeper.

• 2:50:41Casey Neistat?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 2:50:42John Coogan?

  Makes sense. Well.

• 2:50:44Casey Neistat?

  That's like a five-hour conversation, by the way.

• 2:50:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, we'll have you back on again soon. This was, this is awesome. And congrats on your new, your new, uh, fake but very real role at Mod Retro.

• 2:50:55Casey Neistat?

  I appreciate it. Thanks for the time, guys.

• 2:50:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, have fun in Massachusetts. We'll talk soon.

• 2:50:59John Coogan?

  We'll talk soon.

• 2:51:00Casey Neistat?

  Take care.

• 2:51:00John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Bye.

• 2:51:03Jordi Hays?

  Air horn for Casey.

• 2:51:04John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Alex from Bright AI coming in the studio. But let me tell you about Public Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks. Interesting. What else do we need to cover today? There are a bunch of posts we've been through, but we have our next guest here in the studio. We will welcome him in. How are you doing?

• 2:51:30Jordi Hays?

  Welcome, Alex. What's happening?

• 2:51:32Speaker 08

  Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on.

• 2:51:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, thanks for hopping on. Give us an intro. Break down who you are, what you do, for everyone who's listening.

• 2:51:41Speaker 08

  Yeah, so I'm CEO and founder of Bright AI. We build physical AI solutions for all the sort of essential services that society can't live without. So things like energy grid, you know, power supply, water infrastructure, HVAC, pest control, and all those things. So we have a platform that lets you kind of real-time observe this distributed physical infrastructure in the world and solves a bunch of the problems that people have in those industries in terms of like labor shortages, you know, breakdown in the aging infrastructure, sustainability challenges, all those things.

• 2:52:14John Coogan?

  Is the customer more government-focused or private companies?

• 2:52:19Speaker 08

  The private companies now, it sort of touches touches everything, you know, these services of obviously, everybody alive is a consumer of these things. You know, and as a result of that, there's plenty of government involvement, but they tend to be owned privately in the US. So big utility companies, service providers, you know, pest control operators, like all the different sorts of companies. And then you've got this crossover interest with, you know, the national interests and so on as well.

• 2:52:48John Coogan?

  Where's the strain the worst right now across those different areas? Or like, where are we seeing the most strain? What's the evidence of the strain?

• 2:52:56Speaker 08

  It's uh, it's pretty severe everywhere. So like the US has got a, you know, if you grade the infrastructure, it's like a C minus or a D. So most of the critical infrastructure was built, you know, just before and after World War II. And it's like, of course, like typical American plan with a 20 year lifespan, we'll figure it out afterwards. And now it's just, you know, in a lot of places, it's like really held together with duct tape and, and wire. And so if you look at all those industries, you have this aging infrastructure.

• 2:53:23Speaker 08

  And then you have labor force, like a systemic labor problems because older, like older technicians are aging out instead of, it's a bigger economy now, I guess, you know, it's still cool work to do, but younger workers are just not signed up for the journey to be a, you know, 25 year time horizon to be a master technician in these spaces. So all of it's crushing. I mean, to give one example, it'd be like water infrastructure, like 30% of the water we clean up, leaches back out into the environment due to leaks in the pipes everywhere. Like my town has wooden pipes, if you can believe that.

• 2:53:59Jordi Hays?

  I know about, I know about all the lead pipe that, that our country depends upon to deliver water to, uh, to homes, which is concerning, but wood pipes sound pretty bad, too.

• 2:54:09John Coogan?

  A good thing. It feels like an aqueduct. I'm, I'm down. Give me a wood pipe. It's probably safer. I don't know. It's like something a beaver would.

• 2:54:16Speaker 08

  But it's, uh, it's bad. It like the fresh water is leaching out and the bad stuff is leaching in.

• 2:54:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:54:22Jordi Hays?

  So, so, uh, you're active in a bunch of different industries. What is like, what does it go to market? And what does even the sales cycle look like? Is this you coming to these owners of these various assets and saying like, we're going to help you leverage AI? And it, and it's, looks like, you know, kind of Palantir's forward deployed model? Are you doing something different?

• 2:54:45Speaker 08

  Yeah, it's in that zone. I mean, we bootstrapped through the first 100 million in revenue. So it was like, I was trying to figure out that, that path, uh, path through, uh, path to customers.

• 2:54:55Jordi Hays?

  We need a word for bootstrapping to a hundred million dollar run rate and then, and then raising some capital later, but it, it, it, it needs its own. Maybe it's Hawkinson's, uh, Hawkinson's, uh, model, something like that.

• 2:55:09Speaker 08

  There you go. Well, I've, I've raised too early a bunch of times before, so I can like give warning shots to other founders, but. Believe you should raise capital when you got the pattern figured out, but I had to figure out that go to market. All the beginning stuff was through private equity firms. But it turns out that they're, you know, private equity kind of sits and, and basically owns all the service companies that service this infrastructure. And so, and they're also very aligned with like five to seven year cycles where they wanna drive change, like big EBITDA growth and change in these, in these industries. And so that's where all of our first customers have come from. So we work with a lot of the biggest private equity firms, the sort of their, their secret weapon for physical AI.

• 2:55:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, what, yeah. What's the latest news on the fundraising side?

• 2:55:53Speaker 08

  Yeah. So we, uh, we just, uh, uh, raised a fifty million dollar A.

• 2:56:01Speaker 08

  Congratulations. Thank you. Co-led by, uh, Khosla Ventures. And, uh, Inspired Capital. And, uh, we picked those guys because you know, Cos- Khosla's super badass. They were, you know, the first and earliest to check in OpenAI. They leaned forward into sort of the future of abundance.

• 2:56:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:18Speaker 08

  Theory, you know, there. And then Inspired is a lot of people don't know about, but a New York based firm. They're deep in infrastructure specifically and super great founder operators, you know, and all that. So it's, uh, it's good.

• 2:56:31Jordi Hays?

  Do you see, do you think the company will always be a software, more of a software provider? Or is there a world in the future where you guys would just actually buy the, and operate the underlying asset if you felt like you could do it, you know, better than other players in the market?

• 2:56:47Speaker 08

  It's a good question. Uh, you know, we provide a lot of software and hardware today. So our platform combines. We have, yeah, we have like sensors and robots and these wearables that you put on the frontline workers and it ties all this like crazy distributed infrastructure into one big like physical AI learning loop, if that makes sense. And, uh,

• 2:57:07Speaker 08

  We found some industries like are more efficient than others, but like the most efficient one we found, like give you an example is like 50% of the time they send a technician out, there's nothing to see. That's the most efficient.

• 2:57:19John Coogan?

  The most efficient.

• 2:57:19Speaker 08

  We found a lot of them are like 90% of the time you send somebody out, there's nothing to, there's nothing to do. Um, but you still keep going in case it goes really bad. And so, you know, I think in some of those industries where you get, we're seeing 90 plus percent productivity gains, that might be so disruptive that we actually have to come in and just buy and operate assets directly to sort of make the value unlock happen in the biggest way. But, you know, we'll see. Right now we're deeply with these operators. It's a great, great way to go fast.

• 2:57:48John Coogan?

  I was actually a customer of your previous company, Smart Things. Um, what's the through line? What are the lessons that you learned from the first IOT company to new IOT devices? Uh, what, what are the biggest lessons from that story?

• 2:58:02Speaker 08

  Man, uh, you're welcome and sorry, I guess. You know, that where it landed for you, but uh, Smart Things was amazing. It was, um, you know, we grew it to today, it's like 500 million households. It's, you know, more than 2 billion connected devices, pretty big platform.

• 2:58:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:18Speaker 08

  All over the world. Um, I guess what I learned, so I learned a lot about scaling and sort of making IOT work. You know, it's, it's matured a lot since then. And so, um, you know, those things are good. I think I, I feel like I was solving the wrong problem though. So my wife hated the, not to say this in a bad way, but she like progressively hated the company more the more time went on. Like, like wants regular light switches and stuff like she doesn't.

• 2:58:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 2:58:41Speaker 08

  Vibes always know.

• 2:58:42John Coogan?

  That was my, that was my experience. Like I, it was like magical and then slowly like little like, like hiccups creep in and those, like the expectations of software and hardware or modern technology are that it's perfect because it's a computer and it's a robot.

• 2:58:57Speaker 08

  Yeah, I had, I had. Wrong market, wrong market. You know, it's not a big enough.

• 2:59:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, I'd love your take on Sonos. We've been talking about Sonos a ton. Um, what do you think they need to do to, uh, make the, make the app open faster? I opened the Sonos app. It takes me 90 seconds to adjust the volume and I'm like, I don't know how I haven't churned. Maybe I should, but.

• 2:59:20Speaker 08

  I won't be negative on Sonos, but I've gone through two like hopeful waves of buying it completely in my house and then it'll take out eventually.

• 2:59:26John Coogan?

  Same thing.

• 2:59:27Speaker 08

  And, uh, it's in the orphan stage right now. I think I just donated a bunch of like great gear.

• 2:59:33Speaker 08

  It's the most, they have like the best sound and all that stuff, but talk about like missing the software opportunity, like every stage in the company.

• 2:59:41John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:59:41Speaker 08

  And, uh, you know, I just don't see, you know, it's sort of Alexa's sort of faded out in a way. Apple Home is not going anywhere. The Google Home stuff hasn't really, like Sonos has this opportunity to like own, they could be the thing that like unlocks things like ChatGPT.

• 2:59:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, John's idea.

• 2:59:58Speaker 08

  Like Johnny Ivan's stuff.

• 3:00:00John Coogan?

  My idea was, was Sonos is trading at what, like one billion market cap or something?

• 3:00:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:04John Coogan?

  Uh, my idea was OpenAI literally buys them.

• 3:00:07Jordi Hays?

  They shipped like five million devices last year.

• 3:00:09John Coogan?

  Ton of devices and OpenAI has fantastic engineers. Whatever the engineering problem is, they can fix it, I believe. I don't know. It's a wild, it's a wild theory.

• 3:00:16Speaker 08

  License Scarlet's voice this time and like, you know.

• 3:00:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:21Jordi Hays?

  Do it properly.

• 3:00:22John Coogan?

  Uh, see, not the, not the, not the dumbest crackpot theory we ever come up with, but uh, we, we will leave, uh, the, the, the wild riffing to the next one. Thank you so much for hopping on.

• 3:00:32Speaker 08

  Awesome.

• 3:00:32Jordi Hays?

  Congratulations on seeing the team. Really, really tremendous progress.

• 3:00:36John Coogan?

  Great news. Good luck out there.

• 3:00:37Speaker 08

  We'll be good in the future.

• 3:00:38John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:00:39Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 3:00:40John Coogan?

  Have a good one. And up next we have Chris from Waves coming in.

• 3:00:46Jordi Hays?

  Chris.

• 3:00:46John Coogan?

  The studio, some sonic vibes.

• 3:00:49Jordi Hays?

  Went viral yesterday. We should play his video maybe before he joins.

• 3:00:53John Coogan?

  Let's try and pull up the video that went viral yesterday about Waves, the, uh, the glasses. Okay. I'm hearing it. Let's bring it up. Let's see it.

• 3:01:11John Coogan?

  The cinematography on the startup ads is getting insane.

• 3:01:29John Coogan?

  It feels like noise cancellation. It sounds like the audio is switching.

• 3:01:35John Coogan?

  A banana.

• 3:01:39John Coogan?

  So when he's tapping it, is he starting a live stream or just taking a picture?

• 3:01:42Jordi Hays?

  Clipping?

• 3:01:42John Coogan?

  Clipping. Oh, clipping.

• 3:01:46John Coogan?

  Wait, this is, this is beam. This is what Casey Neistat was describing. 10, 10 seconds or?

• 3:01:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the bar for startup launch videos is content of 10x.

• 3:02:00John Coogan?

  It's insane.

• 3:02:02Jordi Hays?

  Getting Project X vibes. You remember that movie?

• 3:02:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, your average, like, your public company has trouble producing marketing videos at this level.

• 3:02:12Jordi Hays?

  Whoops.

• 3:02:12John Coogan?

  This is remarkable.

• 3:02:16John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 3:02:20Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 3:02:21John Coogan?

  Now we're getting into FPV hardcore Henry.

• 3:02:24Jordi Hays?

  Somebody just pulled a gun at a house party, I guess.

• 3:02:26John Coogan?

  It's wild. Yeah, if you have a life like that, maybe you do need to be recording all the time.

• 3:02:34John Coogan?

  Does she have it on too? Is it recording? Oh, there you go. Okay.

• 3:02:41John Coogan?

  Oh, records from the center. Okay, cool. Well, let's bring him in. I'm excited to talk to him about waves.

• 3:02:48John Coogan?

  Welcome.

• 3:02:48Jordi Hays?

  What's going on? The man, the man that kicked the hornet's nest.

• 3:02:54Jordi Hays?

  How are you doing? How's the last?

• 3:02:55John Coogan?

  How's the foot?

• 3:02:56Jordi Hays?

  How's the last 24 hours been?

• 3:02:57John Coogan?

  Stung?

• 3:02:58Speaker 09

  It's been, it's been wild, man. It's amazing. It's really, really awesome.

• 3:03:03Jordi Hays?

  Wait, before we start, sorry, are you recording this?

• 3:03:06Speaker 09

  No, no, no, no.

• 3:03:07Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 3:03:07John Coogan?

  You can. You're live. We're recording.

• 3:03:09Jordi Hays?

  We're recording it.

• 3:03:10Speaker 09

  Yeah, no, these are cosmetic. They, they, they're not.

• 3:03:13John Coogan?

  Not, not live. So yeah, uh, this is kind of like a typical hardware pre-launch, vision statement, collect pre-orders and then start manufacturing, I assume?

• 3:03:23Speaker 09

  Yep.

• 3:03:23John Coogan?

  Very cool. Uh, what, what was the key takeaway? What was the good response? What was the stuff that you think you need to address? How has the overall response been? What have you like learned? What did you expect versus surprised you?

• 3:03:36Speaker 09

  So I'll talk about the good and the bad. I think, um, you know, we, we have hundreds of creators in our inbox right now. It is, it is really popping off. I mean, I think, uh, you know, Twitter is, is very much like a tech forward audience, but even with that, I think with the virality, we were really able to lock in our ICP here. We have some of the biggest names in IRL that want to work with us. I can't name names right now, but, uh, it is very exciting. Um, the downside, I mean, like, I think I think we we we got a lot of feedback about privacy. And, you know, I think we're we're still pretty set on our stance here like. We're gonna ship with an indicator light, but in the conversations that we had with content creators, a lot of them.

• 3:04:20Speaker 09

  Emphasize the fact that like, you know, they they want something that allows them to capture candid, authentic moments. Because those go the most viral. And if in certain situations, that means them being able to disable the light. We want to give that option to them. So, yeah.

• 3:04:38Jordi Hays?

  And that's distinctly, we were just talking with Casey Neistat, he said that if you try to cover the indicator light on the Meta Ray-Bans.

• 3:04:46Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 3:04:48Jordi Hays?

  And so do you think part of your opportunity is that you're willing to go and do something that Zach, Zach won't?

• 3:04:54John Coogan?

  Counter positioned.

• 3:04:54Speaker 09

  I think so, like, I mean, I I don't think Meta realizes where the puck is going. I think they're they're way too focused on like adding AI and. Waveguide displays and trying to go after a bigger market that we don't really know is going to fully adopt just yet. What we're seeing now is like the most retentive Ray-Bans users are content creators. And what are they doing? They're posting social content on reels and TikTok. They're posting prank videos, Riz videos. Like, social interactions, interviews, things like that, right? And all of them that we talked to are just like, we want to take this, we want to go live. Like, instead of me flirting with somebody on a short clip, I want to actually livestream a date and have chat. Tell me what to say and what to do, right?

• 3:05:38Speaker 09

  So we just want to be able to enable those kinds of content to to exist.

• 3:05:43John Coogan?

  How is the actual live streaming infrastructure? I assume this pairs with your iPhone somehow to to pass to like some sort of stream key to. Twitch or whatever, yeah?

• 3:05:52Speaker 09

  Exactly. It's just RTMP. So we stream to the phone and then phone streams to either the the streamer's backend and then to Twitch or Kick. Or just straight to the streaming service.

• 3:06:02John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is there any like? Pushback from Apple on this type of thing? Are they pretty open with those particular APIs?

• 3:06:09Jordi Hays?

  It's effectively just a camera.

• 3:06:11Speaker 09

  There are apps that exist already that let you do this just with your phone.

• 3:06:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, which is a different camera. Yeah.

• 3:06:15Jordi Hays?

  What about the, uh, how, how, how do you evaluate like the technical risk? Uh, the, the glasses look great. They're very, and they look really tiny. Uh, you're trying to pack a lot in there. Uh, maybe the, the actual uh, quality of the video matters less early than just the ability to have that FPV view.

• 3:06:36Speaker 09

  So I'm pretty confident that, you know, we'll be able to hit a pretty similar quality to a Meta Ray-Bans or a Meta Oakley. We, we have good connects in Shenzhen that have set us up with some really good, uh, suppliers. And, you know, I think, uh, like if, if the issue is like, can we fit it in these frames? The answer is yes. Um, like the way we've sized it is, is kind of unique in that I almost call these like the hockey stick temples. Because we keep it thin in the front and then like thicker in the back. So PCB, uh, internal battery and then swappable battery.

• 3:07:09John Coogan?

  Oh, swappable.

• 3:07:09Speaker 09

  At the end of the temples. So, yeah.

• 3:07:12John Coogan?

  Two different batteries? You can swap one and then swap the other and then swap the one and then swap the other?

• 3:07:16Speaker 09

  So there's only one swappable battery, but, uh, we'll, we'll pack it with two. So like while, while you're using one, the other one's charging. And so you can just flip flop and it's hot swappable. So you don't have to stop your stream.

• 3:07:26John Coogan?

  You don't have to stop your stream because there's enough battery juice in the actual glasses that when you take the battery out, you have a minute to swap the next one or something.

• 3:07:33Speaker 09

  Exactly.

• 3:07:34John Coogan?

  That makes a ton of sense.

• 3:07:35Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing before this?

• 3:07:37Speaker 09

  So I originally started this company with my co-founder to do, uh, sub vocal speech recognition. We did a lot of stuff with like neuro tech and just like, um, ML research. And I think we were caught in this loop where like, we wanted to make a cool gadget, um, but we were way too research focused and not market focused. And we just decided to do a full 180 and just like, you know, I'm, I'm very inspired by what Roy Lee has done and what Avi has done with their products. And I, I just think that like, You know, really focusing on a retentive user, so i.e. a content creator, but then also making a gadget that's just cool and nice to wear and doesn't look like a super bulky thing and just, I think that's, that's the goal for me. So.

• 3:08:21John Coogan?

  Sub vocal, so you were thinking like hardware device that I can whisper and it picks up what I'm saying?

• 3:08:27Speaker 09

  Or just mouth out words, yeah.

• 3:08:28John Coogan?

  Just mouth out words, that's pretty cool. Yeah. Interesting.

• 3:08:31Speaker 09

  How much did you spend on the launch video?

• 3:08:33John Coogan?

  That, yeah.

• 3:08:33Speaker 09

  It was very well, well produced.

• 3:08:34John Coogan?

  That thing looks amazing.

• 3:08:36Speaker 09

  So, I mean, we have a, we have the next Spielberg on our team, man. Donald is, is an amazing individual. We, we actually filmed it in Canada. So, for context, my co-founder and I were both Canadian. We filmed it in Vancouver. It was around, I'd say USD like maybe 50, 60k. Solid.

• 3:08:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it looks like Super Bowl quality.

• 3:08:59Speaker 09

  Well, yeah, and there's so many different actors. I'm assuming you just like actually had to hire a bunch of people.

• 3:09:05John Coogan?

  Now, now, none of the footage is from the same sensor that will be in the actual camera. So there'll probably be some sort of disconnect there, but hopefully people are happy with the final sensor. Do you have any goals? Like, you know, we shoot on FX3s. I like the full frame look. I like a 12 megapixel, you know, 4K. Obviously can't stuff all that into, you know, something the size of a little smartphone camera. Where, where are the breakpoints in terms of quantitative metrics for a camera to get good enough that people will actually share it? Cause even with the Meta Ray-Bans, the, the pictures and images I was taking and videos, they weren't jumping out to me as like, yeah, these are really great to post right now.

• 3:09:46Speaker 09

  Yeah. I think a big thing with, with the Metas is just image stabilization. Like if you're like walking around while, while you're taking the video, there's like almost like a bobbing effect. And I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done there. Low light is another thing. I mean, you're kind of working against the volume that you have to fit the sensor. So you, you are already constrained with how much light that you can actually capture. But you know,

• 3:10:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, that dark party scene you filmed, that would be extremely rough, dude.

• 3:10:15Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 3:10:15John Coogan?

  Kind of a wild choice, not the sunny day, but it tells a better story. So I get why you did it. And obviously this stuff will get better, but there are like laws of physics around like you just can't fit a medium format sensor in a

• 3:10:28Speaker 09

  In a pair of glasses.

• 3:10:29John Coogan?

  Unless it's an eye patch. Maybe, maybe that's the future.

• 3:10:31Speaker 09

  Maybe.

• 3:10:32John Coogan?

  Put the full sensor right there.

• 3:10:33Jordi Hays?

  What um, how do you expect the, what do you expect the go to market to look like? I imagine you could partner with a bunch of just big streamers and really focus on delivering value for them. And then if it's working well for them, then you would have like the next hundred thousand people ready to go. Is that how you're thinking?

• 3:10:49Speaker 09

  That's exactly what we're doing. So we're, we're already talking to big IRL streamers about partnerships. We're going to Shenzhen in a couple of weeks just to get the beta device ready. And then we're going to test it on a hundred different creators and just get their feedback, iterate, improve the user experience. And then, you know, we were trying to do mass production Q1 next year. And I think like, you know, there's kind of just like an infinite marketing glitch here. It's like if we give these streamers early access to just show what this kind of content can look like, it'll just inspire other creators and wannabe creators to, to buy this product.

• 3:11:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Is there?

• 3:11:28Jordi Hays?

  I feel like there's like gonna be a whole new, like you could create a whole new class of IRL creators. I can imagine somebody that's, they just do hiking or they just ski or they, you know, they, and I'm sure people do that already. But if you make it really truly seamless.

• 3:11:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:11:44Jordi Hays?

  And I can imagine creators that, uh, yeah, are more like the like, like, um, these like ambient videos and music on YouTube where there's not really

• 3:11:52John Coogan?

  Study with me, that type of thing. Yeah. Yeah. Kind of crossover.

• 3:11:55Jordi Hays?

  We'll get it set up. We'll get glasses on Ben, our producer. We'll have a Ben Cam feed.

• 3:12:00Speaker 09

  Awesome. Hey, would love, would love to do a pair when we have one.

• 3:12:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, for sure. Uh, on, on kind of like pricing and technology. One thing that I thought was interesting about the Vision Pro was that it was like almost an order of magnitude more expensive than the Quest. But it was very clear that Apple was able to spare no expense, get the best screen. And they jumped forward a lot in terms of just quality, didn't really hit the mark in terms of retention. But when I think about a streamer, most people who are doing it professionally, spending $3,000 on a Sony camera is totally reasonable. Is there a world where instead of Meadows Ray Bans, which are in the couple hundred dollar mark, you go to a couple thousand dollars? And you're buying and you're providing a more prosumer, more professional level product. And then actually acts as differentiation and then maybe you go down the price ladder over time.

• 3:12:46John Coogan?

  Are you looking into that? Is that, is that even something you could do?

• 3:12:50Speaker 09

  Oh, absolutely. Like, I think right now, uh, we're, we're gonna stay sort of like in the mid-market. But we, we would ideally want to find like bigger, um, like creator groups and like, I mean, like, imagine like, I could almost imagine having like a super pro version that's like fifteen hundred, two thousand dollars. And like Mr. Beast uses it for Beast Games. You get the POV of like every single contestant in Beast Games. Dude, that would go crazy. And like, I, I, that's something I would really wanna see.

• 3:13:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 3:13:22Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 3:13:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, people do that with like the head mounted GoPros. It's a little bit awkward and just doesn't land as well. But, uh, but you can get great footage out of a, out of a GoPro mounted to your forehead. If you're racing around. Uh, Injuri, anything else, Dury?

• 3:13:35Jordi Hays?

  No, this is great. Thanks for, thanks for jumping on. Congrats on the launch. I think a lot, a lot of the people, a lot of people's like concerns are real. But I think there's ways around it and ultimately it will just come down to how individual people choose to use the tech, the technology. Like, there's gonna be people that use this to livestream privately for their grandma. So like the grandma can feel like they're hanging out with the grandkids and there's a bunch, there's just so many like use cases that are really cool.

• 3:14:00John Coogan?

  There are people right now who use the cameras in their iPhones to violate people's privacy at Coldplay concerts.

• 3:14:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:06John Coogan?

  Like, that happens. So we have to deal with that as a society.

• 3:14:09Speaker 09

  Yeah, it's, it's not a device problem. I think it's more of an actor problem. You have people that are gonna do weird shit and we, we don't condone that. Um, I think we're just gonna focus on creators that wanna make genuinely good content. Um, I didn't, I didn't get to see what Casey was saying, cause I was in another call.

• 3:14:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:26Speaker 09

  But, uh, I would love to just pull up to New York this weekend and have a chat with him and show him the frames and get his thoughts. If that's something he's interested in, if he still, uh, likes the original vision of Beam, I would be more than happy to have a conversation.

• 3:14:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm sure he'd have a ton of interesting feedback that you could incorporate and, and twist around and just, it'd be a great meeting of minds.

• 3:14:45Speaker 09

  Real quick, John, just wanna say, loved your videos on startups. Like, I would, I would always watch your like startup history videos while eating dinner. Like, I, I love a meal on YouTube. So just like, that was, that was. You should, you should go back to that at some point.

• 3:15:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:15:01Speaker 09

  It would be really cool.

• 3:15:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:15:03Speaker 09

  But TBPN is awesome, man. I love this show. This is great.

• 3:15:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're having a lot of fun.

• 3:15:07Jordi Hays?

  Thanks, Chris. Well, awesome having you on and good luck with everything. I'm sure, I'm sure your round will be done by the end of the week.

• 3:15:12John Coogan?

  For sure. Good luck.

• 3:15:14Jordi Hays?

  Knowing how, knowing how the valley moves these days.

• 3:15:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:17Speaker 09

  Yep.

• 3:15:18Jordi Hays?

  Have fun out there.

• 3:15:18Speaker 09

  Okay, take care, guys.

• 3:15:20John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Bye.

• 3:15:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it all comes down to the device itself is not bad. It's how it gets used. And I think there's a bunch of really cool use cases here, so.

• 3:15:34Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 3:15:35John Coogan?

  Well, if you want another wearable, go to Bezel. Getbezel.com. Your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch. Uh, you know, why, what, you know, who needs a, who needs a camera on their face when they can have a Patek Philippe Nautilus on their wrist?

• 3:15:50Jordi Hays?

  A condo on the wrist.

• 3:15:51John Coogan?

  Condo on the wrist.

• 3:15:52Jordi Hays?

  An RM.

• 3:15:53John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure, dude. Uh, Brandon Jacoby, we got some trade deal news. He's starting a new decade today, more focused and motivated than ever. It's time to build.

• 3:16:03Jordi Hays?

  I, I'm an idiot. I, I was like, you're 30? He's like, no, I'm 29. I'm starting the, I'm starting the 30th year.

• 3:16:14John Coogan?

  What?

• 3:16:14Jordi Hays?

  That's what he texted me.

• 3:16:15John Coogan?

  Is this his birthday?

• 3:16:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, this is, this was him announcing his birthday.

• 3:16:19John Coogan?

  Okay. I thought he was going, I thought he was going to a different job or something.

• 3:16:22Jordi Hays?

  No, you completely.

• 3:16:24John Coogan?

  I was also very confused.

• 3:16:25Jordi Hays?

  Everybody's confused about your post. Stick, stick to Figma, Brandon. Stick to Figma. Uh, we got a post here from.

• 3:16:32John Coogan?

  Put the pixels in the bag.

• 3:16:34Jordi Hays?

  Just put the pixels in the bag, bro.

• 3:16:40Jordi Hays?

  We got a, we got a shout out. Uh, I'm Rita. Uh, Block officially joined the S and P 500 yesterday. She says, it's not the finish line. It's a signal that what we're building has staying power. Inclusion brings broader exposure. Proud of our team. Focused on what's next. Hit the gong.

• 3:16:59Jordi Hays?

  She's the CEO and CFO over at Block.

• 3:17:03John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 3:17:03Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Liquidity says incredible work, fellas. Sydney Sweeney had a campaign with American Eagle that went live yesterday. Of course, American Eagle was up 6% on the day and then 17% after hours. Makes total sense.

• 3:17:19John Coogan?

  But aren't, I heard all like the big, the big LPs are pouring into Andreessen Horowitz right now because just on the rumor that Sydney Sweeney might be joining Andreessen as a partner. Is that true?

• 3:17:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, the fund has to be, the new, the new raise will be massively oversubscribed on that news. I did have somebody, I did have somebody smart text me and say, is this, is this real?

• 3:17:42John Coogan?

  I, I, I heard the news and I was like, I think it's real. I think it's real. But, but to be fair, I thought it was that Andreessen was investing in a company that had done a marketing deal with Sydney Sweeney. I didn't realize that the rumor was that she was joining as a partner.

• 3:17:55Jordi Hays?

  She kinda has the Midas touch right now. She did Dr. Squatch, $2 billion exit. We got a post here, we got a post here from Nat Elyason. Fantastic post. He says Waymo is a godsend for working parents. Need to hand off the baby between meetings? Put them in a Waymo and send them to your partner across town. Impossible before now, really grateful we have this technology. This went super viral. I'm sure Waymo was like trying to get it community noted because I don't think, this is definitely not allowed. Against the terms of use, probably illegal in multiple ways.

• 3:18:27John Coogan?

  Wow. Age discrimination at Waymo, bombshell.

• 3:18:30Jordi Hays?

  He's, he was clearly joking. I, I was thinking about this though. I, I do think it's a game changer that, you know, how much time do, do parents spend every day just like commuting their kids to and from school? I think AVs are going to be great for families. For example, like I remember like as a kid, my brother's school would start at a different time than mine and like one of us would have to wake up earlier than the other. I think we're going to be living in a world where.

• 3:18:56John Coogan?

  You don't have to hang out with your kids at all.

• 3:18:59Jordi Hays?

  No, it's like more quality time and less, you know, commuting.

• 3:19:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, but who says the commute isn't quality time? It can be.

• 3:19:05Jordi Hays?

  That's true.

• 3:19:05John Coogan?

  It can be, it can be a moment to, you know, actually have a conversation, kind of unplugged from all the other toys and stuff.

• 3:19:10Jordi Hays?

  I've literally listened to hundreds of hours of dinosaur content, driving.

• 3:19:16John Coogan?

  You gotta, you gotta give a lecture. You gotta show up to the commute, ready to give a sermon on the T-Rex.

• 3:19:23Jordi Hays?

  Today is the first day of the rest of first grade.

• 3:19:28John Coogan?

  Just pump up speeches.

• 3:19:29Jordi Hays?

  Just pump up speech in the car.

• 3:19:31John Coogan?

  Just lock in, buddy. Get in there. I want you to win. I want you to win on the playground. Build the biggest sandcastle.

• 3:19:37Jordi Hays?

  We have another post from Tweet Davidson. He says, in your twenties, you get sorted into one of these four houses like Harry Potter.

• 3:19:44John Coogan?

  I got both of them here. Celsius, Celsius is out, your mate is in.

• 3:19:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm a big fan of three out of the four of these.

• 3:19:50John Coogan?

  I'm not big into the green one. What's the green one?

• 3:19:53Jordi Hays?

  Are you joking?

• 3:19:54John Coogan?

  I don't know what that is.

• 3:19:55Jordi Hays?

  It's a matcha?

• 3:19:55John Coogan?

  Matcha?

• 3:19:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you're definitely.

• 3:19:56John Coogan?

  But what's the white part?

• 3:19:58Jordi Hays?

  Probably oat milk with a bunch of canola oil in it.

• 3:20:01John Coogan?

  Never been.

• 3:20:02Speaker 08

  We can do a matcha taste test, see if you like it.

• 3:20:04Jordi Hays?

  No, we're absolutely not. I mean, I, matcha's never been for me, uh, and never will be.

• 3:20:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, I clearly just like divide the line.

• 3:20:13Jordi Hays?

  Just never been big into that world.

• 3:20:14John Coogan?

  No, Diet Coke for sure.

• 3:20:16Jordi Hays?

  But three out of the four.

• 3:20:17John Coogan?

  Celsius, yeah, for sure.

• 3:20:19Jordi Hays?

  I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, uh, I'll, I'll have a Celsius in a pinch, but.

• 3:20:21John Coogan?

  Black coffee's mid. It's mid. I, I do drink one every, every day, though.

• 3:20:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and we gotta give it up for Satya Nadella.

• 3:20:28John Coogan?

  Massive news, GitHub Spark.

• 3:20:28Jordi Hays?

  He said, today, we're releasing GitHub Spark, a tool and copilot that turns your ideas into full stack apps entirely in natural language.

• 3:20:37John Coogan?

  Vibecoding game.

• 3:20:38Jordi Hays?

  They're getting into the game.

• 3:20:39John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 3:20:39Jordi Hays?

  They're working to sit this one out.

• 3:20:40John Coogan?

  They're not positioning this as a Claude code competitor, more as like a Figma Make V0.

• 3:20:45Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's definitely not a Claude code competitor. This is more of like a, yeah, Figma Make, lovable, V0.

• 3:20:50John Coogan?

  Lovable competitor, interesting.

• 3:20:52Jordi Hays?

  Bolt competitor.

• 3:20:54John Coogan?

  It's gonna be a knockout, drag-out fight.

• 3:20:55Jordi Hays?

  Every, in the future, every SaaS company will have a little text box that lets you generate more SaaS. And this is how SaaS will live forever.

• 3:21:03John Coogan?

  The SaaS Ouroboros, the Ouroboros of SaaS.

• 3:21:05Jordi Hays?

  The SaaS industrial, big SaaS wants you to think that, big SaaS wants you to think, uh, that, uh, you can get in the game too, but on their infrastructure.

• 3:21:15John Coogan?

  You can.

• 3:21:15Jordi Hays?

  You can.

• 3:21:15John Coogan?

  You can. We, we have, we have a vibe-coded project, uh, that, uh, was very handcrafted as well, from Tyler, coming soon, dropping soon.

• 3:21:24Jordi Hays?

  I'm very excited about that.

• 3:21:25John Coogan?

  Tyler, wait, wait, let's go to Tyler. Any news in your world before you're taking tomorrow off? Well, I'm not, I'm just, I'm remote. I'm not taking it off.

• 3:21:32Jordi Hays?

  Oh, oh, sure. Oh, yeah. The, you're gonna work so hard tomorrow when you're remote.

• 3:21:40John Coogan?

  I have some breaking news. I'll bring this up. Your camera's not working, but I'll. Okay, okay, yeah. Bring up the breaking news. We got some breaking news.

• 3:21:47Jordi Hays?

  We got, we got a lot Gil scoop. A lot Gil is raising a one and a half billion dollar fund, which if closed would be one of the largest halls for a solo GP. Love to see it. Natasha's got the scoop. Hit it.

• 3:22:03Jordi Hays?

  Sure, this will be oversubscribed.

• 3:22:05John Coogan?

  We got the wipe. I like the wipe. Good job, production team. That's fun.

• 3:22:10Jordi Hays?

  Very, very, I would have, I mean, I could, I could see a lot at some point with it, with a $10 billion.

• 3:22:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. The real, the real story that's the investigative journalists have to dig into. Is there anyone else on his payroll? Because if there's even one assistant.

• 3:22:27Jordi Hays?

  No, there's, he's got a fantastic team.

• 3:22:29John Coogan?

  Jacob or Micky.

• 3:22:29Jordi Hays?

  He's got a fantastic.

• 3:22:30John Coogan?

  Then he's not a solo GP.

• 3:22:32Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I think he's.

• 3:22:33John Coogan?

  He's not a solo investor. Everyone's like, oh, he's the only guy around. He's got other people on his team?

• 3:22:36Jordi Hays?

  He's got a team, but I, but I.

• 3:22:37John Coogan?

  Maybe he doesn't have another GP.

• 3:22:38Jordi Hays?

  It's probably, I would, yeah, I would just imagine.

• 3:22:40John Coogan?

  But he has other people. What if he had like 500 associates, 300 principals, 200 partners? And he's the only GP. He's like, I'm a solo GP. I'm a solo GP. I have a bigger infrastructure team, bigger back office than Andreessen. But I'm still, you call me a solo GP. I'm not a platform fund. He's getting into platform fund territory, but congratulations. Absolutely insane investor.

• 3:23:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we covered his post yesterday, basically saying these are the early winners.

• 3:23:08John Coogan?

  Been fairing him for a long time.

• 3:23:08Jordi Hays?

  And of course, he's in all the number one, he's in the number one company in all of those categories. We got a post here from Jack.

• 3:23:15John Coogan?

  Crazy run entrepreneur for a long time. Color this, this DNA company.

• 3:23:20Jordi Hays?

  His book too is, is.

• 3:23:22John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. High Growth Handbook. Legend.

• 3:23:24Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 3:23:24John Coogan?

  Everything he does, he hits it out of the park.

• 3:23:26Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Jack Corbett.

• 3:23:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, has a post here, went super viral. I was referencing this with Zach earlier. He says, you can Venmo the United States to pay off the national debt. And so they have a, a, a website you can go to, gifts to reduce the public debt. And you can just make contributions. You can use ACH, PayPal, Venmo, debit, or a credit card. So if you're really a patriot, go max out your credit card for Uncle Sam and make a gift to this country.

• 3:23:55John Coogan?

  Is it a tax write-off?

• 3:23:58Jordi Hays?

  That's a good question.

• 3:23:58John Coogan?

  Does it count as taxes? Can I just Venmo my taxes now? If I'm like, I owe this much?

• 3:24:03Jordi Hays?

  Probably.

• 3:24:04John Coogan?

  Just send it in and then be like, take that as a deduction? If this is not tax deductible, that would be the most annoying thing ever. Very funny.

• 3:24:12Jordi Hays?

  Jamie Cuff has launched Pace, the agentic process outsourcer, APO for the insurance industry. Jamie is an absolute dog.

• 3:24:22John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 3:24:23Jordi Hays?

  I think I met him in 2021. He was at Retool at the time. So excited to see him back in the game with his own startup.

• 3:24:33Jordi Hays?

  Brian Norgard, he says, "A rating system for men in the dating marketplace was inevitable, and so is one for women." That's interesting.

• 3:24:42John Coogan?

  Signal says there will never be one for women, in his humble opinion. The market dynamics are skewed because every woman is going to for the same guy, West Elm Calib effect. Oh, that's an old story. I remember West Elm Calib. That was interesting. For dudes, it's an adverse effect. Yeah, I don't know. Reviewing women, that feels like that would get disapproved by the App Store for some reason. It just feels odd. I don't know. We'll see where it goes. But it is odd that I don't, I haven't heard rumblings about like there's a Reddit out there that already exists. Because like, the whole idea of like, the rating system app, what was it called? T? T? That app? That, like, what was new about that wasn't that it was an app, it's that it was a trend on Reddit. I think Reddit or some sort of community, some sort of web-based community

• 3:25:23John Coogan?

  beforehand. But anyway, weird times. I was talking to a friend of the show about T, and she said it's, what'd she say? Something like, "It's a Stalinist ritual," or something like that. And I, it kind of went over my head, but I thought it was funny.

• 3:25:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't know how I feel about it. We're trying to get the founder on. You can imagine he's been pretty busy at the top of the App Store and getting a massive amount of hate constantly.

• 3:25:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:25:50Jordi Hays?

  I don't think-

• 3:25:50John Coogan?

  But also probably doing a lot of project management. It's in his blood.

• 3:25:53Jordi Hays?

  It really is. Yeah. Product management.

• 3:25:57John Coogan?

  Let's, let's go through this fun story from Charlie Munger. Very interesting to dig into. In 1949, Charlie Munger was 25 years old. He was hired at the law firm Wright and Garrett for $3,300 per year, or $29,851 in inflation-adjusted dollars as of 2010. He had $1,500 in savings, equal to about $13,570. Now, a few years later, in 1953, Charlie was 29 years old when he and his wife divorced. He had been married since he was 21. Charlie lost everything in the divorce, his wife keeping the family home in South Pasadena, not far from where I live. Munger moved into dreadful conditions at the University Club

• 3:26:41John Coogan?

  and drove a terrible yellow Pontiac, which his children said had a horrible paint job. According to the biography written by Janet Low, Molly Munger asked her father, "Daddy, this car is just awful, a mess. Why do you drive it?" The broke Munger replied, "To discourage gold diggers." Shortly after the divorce, Charlie learned that his son Teddy had leukemia. Heartbreaking. In those days, there was no health insurance. You just paid everything out of pocket, and the death rate was near 100% since there was nothing doctors could do. Rick Garren, Rick Garren, Charlie's friend, said Munger would go to the hospital, hold his young son, and then walk the streets of Pasadena crying. One year after the diagnosis, in 1955, Teddy Munger died. Charlie was 31 years old,

• 3:27:24John Coogan?

  divorced, broke, bearing his nine-year-old son. Later in life, he faced a horrific operation that left him blind in one eye, with pain so terrible that he eventually had his eye removed. Incredibly, incredibly rough, and then to go on an absolutely generational run after that. Man, really speaks to resiliency and perseverance. What a wild story. Anyway, we need something to cheer us up. We need to go to Howard Lutnick Investments. His, his investment bank, Cantor Fitzgerald, is offering to buy the right to businesses tariff refunds, basically betting that the courts will overturn the tariffs-

• 3:27:58Jordi Hays?

  What does-

• 3:27:59John Coogan?

  -from Ryan Peterson.

• 3:28:00Jordi Hays?

  What does Lutnick know?

• 3:28:01John Coogan?

  Financialize everything.

• 3:28:04John Coogan?

  This is wild.

• 3:28:05Jordi Hays?

  What does let me know?

• 3:28:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, if you're, maybe if you, if you have, if you paid a bunch of tariffs and you're expecting some refunds, or thinking that they might be there, you could get the cash flow now if your business is in trouble. That's obviously relevant to Flexport's customers. In other news, SpaceX direct-to-cell phone coverage is growing fast. Elon posted a chart that's not quite going hyperbolic, but certainly growing exponentially. I didn't realize that direct-to-cell was, was, was growing as fast as it was. I didn't even realize it was that available. I see the, I see the generic satellite service show up on my phone every once in a while, and it's usually a harbinger of very bad connection. But Starlink should be much faster.

• 3:28:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, that is a great place to end the show today. This has been a fun one.

• 3:28:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:28:55Jordi Hays?

  Lots of range. Leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It helps the show.

• 3:29:04John Coogan?

  It does.

• 3:29:04Jordi Hays?

  And we were charting today.

• 3:29:07John Coogan?

  We're climbing in the rankings on Spotify.

• 3:29:08Jordi Hays?

  Number 14 on Spotify.

• 3:29:10John Coogan?

  You can help us by going, listening to the show on Spotify, giving us five-star reviews.

• 3:29:13Jordi Hays?

  If you're on, if you're on Apple Podcasts, I do recommend switching over to Spotify.

• 3:29:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 3:29:18Jordi Hays?

  We got video. It's pretty awesome.

• 3:29:20John Coogan?

  That does make sense. That would be a better experience.

• 3:29:21Jordi Hays?

  Makes a big difference.

• 3:29:22John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 3:29:22Jordi Hays?

  But we hope you have a fantastic day. We love you. We'll see you tomorrow.

• 3:29:25John Coogan?

  See you tomorrow. Bye.

• 3:29:26Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.