Inside Josh Kushner's Rise, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Andrew Ross Sorkin, Brian Potter, Pari Singh, Henri Stern

(00:50) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (31:54) - Inside Thrive Capital's Rise (52:32) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:13:50) - Henri Stern, co-founder of Privy, discusses the company's recent acquisition by Stripe, emphasizing the shared vision of integrating crypto and fiat systems to make digital assets more accessible. He highlights the importance of seamless user experiences in crypto products, noting that wallets should be fast and tailored to different user needs, such as neobank clients or gamers. Stern also touches on the growing institutional adoption of crypto, mentioning collaborations with major financial institutions to enable global payments and stablecoin-based payroll systems. (01:37:27) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:00:07) - Andrew Ross Sorkin, a financial journalist and author, discusses his new book "1929," which examines the events leading up to the Great Depression and draws parallels to today's financial landscape. He highlights the role of figures like Charlie Mitchell and Carter Glass, and the speculative behaviors that contributed to the 1929 crash. Sorkin also reflects on the challenges of writing the book, including extensive research and the use of technology to access historical documents. (02:30:02) - Brian Potter, a senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress and author of "The Origins of Efficiency," discusses his background in structural engineering and his experience at Katerra, a construction startup that aimed to revolutionize the industry through factory-built methods but ultimately failed. He explores the challenges in improving construction efficiency, highlighting obstacles such as the difficulty in achieving economies of scale, reducing input costs, and overcoming regulatory constraints. Potter emphasizes that while other industries have successfully enhanced efficiency through various strategies, the construction sector faces unique barriers that hinder similar progress. (02:49:48) - Pari Singh, founder and CEO of Flow Engineering, discusses his company's mission to revolutionize hardware development by applying agile software practices to complex hardware design. He shares that Flow Engineering, originally a rocket engine design firm, developed an internal platform enabling rapid design iterations, which evolved into their current product. Singh also announces a $23 million Series A funding round led by Sequoia Capital, emphasizing their focus on next-generation aerospace and defense companies over traditional industry giants. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching Christmas TV.

• 0:03Jordi Hays?

  We are cozy maxing.

• 0:05John Coogan?

  It's rainy in Hollywood today and we decided to put on the fireplace, make the light a little bit warmer, have enjoy the warmth. And you know, I genuinely get depressed when it rains. Like it actually affects my mood, but putting on some warm lighting, a nice hearth, really has changed my mood and I'm having a great time today. I'm having a great time today already. And so if it's a little bit cold wherever you are, I highly recommend throwing on the fireplace. If you can get real, real logs, that's great. If not.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  You can get a projector.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  90 inch projector works too, I guess. But it is Tuesday, October 14th, 2025. We are live from the TVP and Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. So today, we got to talk about Zoomer. Zoomer Gate. Zoomer is a loved poster on this show. We've highlighted his post many times. He is a deranged trader who has a lot of fun.

• 1:03Jordi Hays?

  He was heavily promoting the use of leverage right up until Liberation Day two, Friday.

• 1:10John Coogan?

  And then he got wiped. Did he get wiped?

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I don't know. He's, he's been big into Chinese equities.

• 1:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, either way, he's been having fun on the timeline, posting a lot. He says, say hello to 50x leverage, more like say hello to God. Nobody is an atheist with 50x leverage.

• 1:25Jordi Hays?

  I love that no matter how much pushback he gets, how much hate, he just doubles down.

• 1:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31Jordi Hays?

  Doubles down.

• 1:32John Coogan?

  Well, Zoomer, if you're going to be risking it all, you got to save time. You got to save money. You got to go to ramp.com. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more, all in one place. Zoomer's had a number of posts do very well recently, like mega, mega viral, totally breaking containment, defining what's going on, on the internet that day. And Zoomer says, my tweet about Steve Jobs almost, about Eve Jobs almost outperformed the actual Eve Jobs tweet, Eve Jobs tweet lol. And so he's been going viral for posting Steve Jobs' daughter, a picture of her, and then posting meta commentary about how much he got paid to make that post. It was a very odd back and forth. And it's frustrated a lot of people, but I have a hot take. We're going to break it down.

• 2:17John Coogan?

  We'll discuss it. And so Zoomer, it all comes down to like, what is the value of your account? Zoomer went to some website and said, my Twitter account is estimated to be worth $3 million. And that's not what accounts trade for. That's not how that works, but I mean,

• 2:33Jordi Hays?

  In my experience, Twitter accounts are basically worthless. Except for the person that creates it.

• 2:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:40Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then it's, and then it has some intangible value. It can, it can increase the value of whatever you're working on, whatever the work it is that you do.

• 2:51John Coogan?

  But yeah. And that's sort of true across the board, across all social media accounts, especially if it's tied to an individual person or personality. But even the large YouTube accounts that have more of a corporate brand, like I'm thinking of like Donut Media, for example. Like that was eventually bought by private equity and some of the talent rolled off and then they changed, they changed hands. Like it's still like hard to just build a single account on a social media platform into like the millions of dollars. Like it's certainly not easy, but we do love Zoomer and we're wishing him the best during this tumultuous time. Because everyone's going back and forth.

• 3:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think people take, are overly serious when he is, when I view him as an entertainer.

• 3:36John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 3:37Jordi Hays?

  A, somebody at a dive bar that's getting a little wild.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:41Jordi Hays?

  But it adds, it adds to the experience.

• 3:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, I completely agree. I've always thought of Twitter as the internet's dive bar. You know, the drinks have always been cheap, the faucet in the bathroom's always broken. Maybe that's the fail whale. The whole, the whole bar's changed.

• 3:57Jordi Hays?

  Unreliable. It might be, it might be open late one night and closed early the next.

• 4:03John Coogan?

  It's changed ownership multiple times. It's just a, it's just a very, you know, it's not as polished as, you know, a Michelin star restaurant or a luxury resort that you might see on other parts of the internet. It's a little bit messy, but that's why people love it and that's why people keep coming back. At the end of the day, you grab your little table in the corner. Maybe that's basketball Twitter, teapot, or whatever, car Twitter, you know, whatever your little group is. You huddle up and, you know, maybe you get in a fight with some other table for a little bit. Bar fights are going to break out, but at the end of the day, you keep, you keep coming back. And so I've kept coming back through multiple eras of Twitter is done or X is over. You know, there was the whole narrative like Elon won't be able to keep the servers online.

• 4:47John Coogan?

  He couldn't possibly run a website.

• 4:49Jordi Hays?

  With only a thousand people.

• 4:51John Coogan?

  Thousand people. And it's like this guy sends rockets to space and builds electric cars. Like, I'm pretty sure he can like get the database working. Okay. So I never bought that, but there was, there were a number of like the advertisers are pulling out or the algorithm is bad. And the algorithm has been bad at various times. There's been plenty of moments where I've been like, man, I'm seeing a lot of just like generic junk. But what's interesting is that right now people are like the most mad they've ever been at X. I feel like that's kind of the mood, but I feel like the algorithm's been super fine tuned. And maybe that's just the way I'm using it. I'm really good about like muting and then also.

• 5:25Jordi Hays?

  Well, one of the reasons, one of the reasons that people are mad right now is the Dive Bar basically got a new manager, head of product, Akita, who was a power user of the platform for years.

• 5:35John Coogan?

  Power drinker.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  Power.

• 5:36John Coogan?

  At the bar.

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  Power boozer. He was hitting half the hour.

• 5:40John Coogan?

  He was a regular.

• 5:40Jordi Hays?

  And he was closing it out.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  He was closing it out.

• 5:42Jordi Hays?

  Um, and he's been making a number of different changes. One that he posted about that I was excited about was potentially bringing links back in some capacity.

• 5:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. But he also did the little, there's little growth hacks that he's done where I've been like, that's totally fine. Like when you take a screenshot, it replaces the follow button with the X.com just to remind people, hey, this originally appeared on X. If you're going to share it to Instagram, go to X.com. And I think that type of growth hack is like, fine. Like it, it doesn't bother me at all. It's like, yeah, they, they, they need to get their users up. I want more people on the platform. Like, I'm fine with that. And there's been a number of things like that where I've been like, yeah, it seems like he's, he, he's making positive progress on the product side, but. The creator payouts are still really hot, like very, very like hotly debated, unclear where it goes.

• 6:29Jordi Hays?

  Not among us. We would be down to kill them entirely.

• 6:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. And what's crazy is that I, I mean, I don't know if I got on, so Twitter launched in July of 2006. I'm pretty sure I got on like a year later because I went to col-, I went to college where Biz Stone went to college, one of the founders of Twitter. And that was one of the reasons I went to that college was because I was interested and I was like, oh, Twitter's a cool company.

• 6:50Jordi Hays?

  April 2009.

• 6:52John Coogan?

  Was when you got on, or when I, when I joined. Okay. Yeah. So.

• 6:55Jordi Hays?

  But still.

• 6:56John Coogan?

  Sophomore year of college or something like that.

• 6:58Jordi Hays?

  Very early.

• 6:58John Coogan?

  Um, but for 17 straight years, basically everyone on the platform posted for free. I guess for, you know, 13 years for me, I posted for free. Uh, July 2023, 17 years later, that's when the first creator revenue sharing program rolled out. Uh, and what's interesting is that YouTube has been making creator payouts since 2007, just one year after Twitter launched. YouTube was like, we gotta pay these people. We gotta pay our creators. And they did this like basically 50 50 deals, like 45 55. Um, but YouTube, the partner program has been a huge success. Basically you make no money when you're small. But if you can get to a couple hundred thousand subscribers, couple hundred thousand views on a video regularly, you have a formula, you have an audience for like,

• 7:40John Coogan?

  I talk about this and thing for 10, 20 minutes, people watch it regularly every week. Like you can quickly start making thousands of dollars and like turn it into a real job. And then you can layer ads on top, which you're obviously intimately familiar with because you've been on the other side of that. And, and there is basically like a middle class of like professional, not, not Mr. Beast level hundred person organizations, but just like a creator, maybe they have one editor, a couple editors, and they make a decent living just, you know, making YouTube videos. Uh, X has never really had that. And it's odd because like the amount of money that you put into YouTube video is correlated with how many views it gets. Like if you're like, I'm giving away a Lamborghini. I'm going to drive a Lam-, I'm a Whistling Diesel. I just rode a Lamborghini. You're like, I gotta click that. It gets a lot of views.

• 8:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:25John Coogan?

  But on X, you can just have a shower thought that is the most brilliant, hilarious, funny, banger take, and it will get a hundred million views.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  For me, I'm not very consistent with posting. I'll just decide I'm going to post today and then I can put up. Numbers. Posts that will get, I don't know, I could think I could reliably get 500,000 impressions. Yep. By just spending like 20, 30 minutes really focused on it. Yep. Uh, whereas trying to sit down for 20, 30 minutes and try to make a YouTube video that gets 500,000 views, almost impossible. Almost impossible. Even for the top, top, top creators. Totally, totally. Unless you're like Mr. Beast and you can actually at the scale where you could post a selfie video. Even then, that's not what drives his business. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And so, uh, so there's this. And we all, and the other thing that's worth noting is like, there's totally precedent to have a thriving social media platform that doesn't do any creator payouts at all. And that is Instagram, right? Yeah, totally.

• 9:16Jordi Hays?

  Instagram has never, I mean, I, I shouldn't say never because they've experimented with little things. I think they do creator payouts now. They did some AI companion type things with celebrities. I'm sure they paid them in those situations, but in general, there's always been an incentive to grow an Instagram following so that you could grow a business or partner with brands. Or there was just a number of ways that you could monetize it indirectly. And I think that that is, uh, for, for low effort platforms, a much healthier way. Low effort content creation platforms. Yep. It's a much healthier to have the incentive be like, you have to, you have to become somebody that is valuable to the world, not just you have to post the thing that, the thread that gets 5 million

• 10:01Jordi Hays?

  impressions, right? And, and the worst of the content that I've seen since the. Monetization. Monetization era of X has been the, why is no one talking about Marc Andreessen? Yes. And it's like a thread and it's like, cool. Yep. But, but we, everybody's talking about Marc Andreessen. Like to find somebody on X in tech that doesn't have an opinion on Marc Andreessen, right? You're not, it's hard to, hard to find him. Um, and so I think it was healthy. I think if you look back to when this era kicked off though, I mean, the vibes on X were just terrible. The public perception of X was terrible. And I think it made sense for Elon in that moment to say like, we need to kind of like rally the army.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  I'm going to start paying you guys out. Yeah. But you need to ride with me. Yeah. This tumultuous time. But it feels like we're back in an era where if you turn creator monetization off today, none of my top 50 favorite posters would really care. Yeah. They'd be like, ah, it's kind of a bummer. I was making a few grand a month, like. And I'd use that to, I don't know, but.

• 11:07John Coogan?

  More like a couple hundred bucks for, for a lot of the posters that I follow.

• 11:11Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  There's a few people that are in that thousand plus club, but it is rare. Like you have to be, you have to be taking it pretty seriously, but, uh, but yeah. I mean, in general, for 17 years, no one got paid directly on Twitter. Uh, and they were fine with it. They monetized by recruiting or finding jobs or pumping their company or just pumping their bags. Like there were a bunch of ways to, to monetize. One of the ways that we monetized by running ads, restream.io. We also streamed 2X through Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations, multi-streaming to reach your audience, wherever they are. There's also going back to like the Instagram thing with TikTok. They did TikTok and Musically, they did figure out this what?

• 11:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm looking back through my creator payout history and it's so funny that the dates are always different. It's like.

• 11:55John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not like on the first.

• 11:57Jordi Hays?

  Okay, I'm getting a payout for four days here. And then the net, and the next I'm getting it for two weeks. And then after that, it's like one week and it's just like completely random. So I go from making.

• 12:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess, I don't know. I, I, I probably, I've, I've averaged like roughly, um, probably like $400 per period or whatever. So like $800 a month.

• 12:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:21Jordi Hays?

  But it's just one of those things like at no point was I thinking, I want to post more because I'm going to get paid more.

• 12:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:29Jordi Hays?

  It's just not the incentive for me to use a platform.

• 12:32John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, I mean, it's interesting to look at the history of like how TikTok did it. The, the founder of Musically came up with this idea of like the dual sided marketplace. I'm sure YouTube was aware of this too, but basically they put a bunch of money from ads in a fund. And then they would just pay you out based on views, but it wasn't like they were actually showing ads directly in front of your content. YouTube's a lot better than that, a lot better than that. Like if you make a video, like the top 25 best credit cards, they will be running ads on credit cards in those videos. And you can get, you can make thousands of dollars just from like 10,000 views or something. These are super high CPM and it's targeted to the individual video. Now, you know, endless scrolling feed, you can't do that because you don't know where the ad was relative to.

• 13:15John Coogan?

  Particular post and it's the same thing on X. So if you post some banger post you and there's an ad right above it or below it. You don't know if that ad is attributable to that person. So you kind of just need to create this, you know, creator payout pool. And then just divvy it up based on impressions or views, which is a lot harder to actually assess. You know, how much people want. And also the pool isn't all that big because X doesn't even advertise, doesn't even monetize that much through ads. And so there's just a lot of, a lot of differences there. So I've always kind of gone back to that analogy of the dive bar. And I've just kind of thought that the creator monetization, I don't really care if it's messy. I think it's kind of fun if it's messy.

• 13:56Jordi Hays?

  I mean, we have to go back to one of my

• 14:00John Coogan?

  Please.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  Most liked posts ever.

• 14:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:04Jordi Hays?

  Elon unhooking your bra. Wow. Your creator payout is going to be huge next month.

• 14:09John Coogan?

  That's one of your biggest.

• 14:09Jordi Hays?

  The most liked, the most liked is actually Ashley St. Clair liking that post.

• 14:15John Coogan?

  And you said real. That's ridiculous. Um, but yeah, I mean, I've always enjoyed that like these random serendipitous moments can happen on X. Like Elon responding to a random message with a crying emoji. It feels like when the chef comes out and goes around to dinner tables to chat with the guests about the food. You know, Elon comes around and just leaves a crying emoji over here. It feels like he's on the app in, in a much different way than Zuck on Instagram.

• 14:42Jordi Hays?

  Around a shot for you.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 14:44Jordi Hays?

  You get a round of, round of shots for this table.

• 14:47John Coogan?

  Exactly. Exactly. And so I, I actually like that. I think it'd be very funny if Elon just dropped, you know, a thousand dollars on this person. $200 on this person. It was complete, no rhyme or reason whatsoever. Chaos. Uh, I, I think that actually makes it kind of fun. It feels like putting a slot machine in the quarter, in the corner of the dive bar, you know, some, some patrons are just going to throw a quarter in every once in a while just to feel something. So.

• 15:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I, and I, and I think this where we slightly disagree. I just think it's, it's enough to just go around, drop the like, drop a repost, drop. Because ultimately people come to X for attention.

• 15:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:22Jordi Hays?

  Like learn about the world and to get attention.

• 15:25John Coogan?

  Exactly. Um, well, it'll be interesting to see if we see any like changes to the monetization structure of X or the creator payouts. People are certainly. There is a big group of creators, like this is very real. There's a big group of creators that are just saying like, like it has to be more regular. It has to be easier to understand how the creator payouts, like they're pushing for a YouTube like transparency partner program where it's very, very clear that if you get this audience, this many views, like you will get this much money on a regular basis.

• 15:58Jordi Hays?

  And the other thing I think people forget is that the creator payouts were initially meant to be paid out a percentage of the subscript paid subscribers.

• 16:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:08Jordi Hays?

  That paid subscriptions. That was what was creating the pool for potential payouts. And so what the accounts that are angry and posts, and generally the accounts that are angry at creator payouts are angry because they're slop farming and their content is just not good. And they're specifically making, doing, making the content to make money.

• 16:28John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:28Jordi Hays?

  It's fair game. It's capitalism. It's free market. They're allowed, they're allowed to go and do this, but they're not getting engagement from verified like users.

• 16:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  For the most part, right? They're getting engagement on these posts where they get a lot of impressions and they get a lot of likes, but it's from like, I wouldn't go so far as to say bots, but it's like the lowest value people on the platform.

• 16:50John Coogan?

  I mean, the same thing happens on YouTube. Like you can, like there are channels out there that make, get millions and millions of views with just complete clickbait. One of, there was one channel that would just, it was like Elon Musk news or something and they would just post entirely fake videos about Elon Musk launching an iPhone competitor. And it was like the Tesla Pi phone. It'd be like, we're reviewing it today. We're breaking it down. Here's the phone that he launched. Elon, they did one that was like Elon Musk just launched a nuclear reactor. It's live. He built it. It's generating power. And Elon had like never tweeted about this and is in fact a solar maxi. He doesn't even like nuclear that much. And they would just put up a video being like, and it would just be B-roll of Elon like moving around, dancing, talking, and then over it, they would just

• 17:33John Coogan?

  have like this fake script saying that Elon had shipped a nuclear reactor and solve fusion or whatever. And it would get millions and millions of views with people who just like did not understand the truth or anything of the news. And so of course that's going to monetize way, way worse.

• 17:47Jordi Hays?

  This is the number one thing that pisses us off on YouTube is when you're watching a car video and there's a suggested video and you click on it only to realize that it's like some fake concept car that wasn't put out by Porsche or Ferrari and it's just

• 18:02Jordi Hays?

  Hallucinating with their chat GPT.

• 18:04John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of concept cars, we gotta go deeper in the deck and pull up the video, uh, the picture from Mercedes. Uh, I think this is real. I don't think this is AI. I saw this on a couple of different auto blogs. Uh, Mer- the Mer- newly revealed Mercedes vision iconic channels, the legendary gullwing.

• 18:23Jordi Hays?

  No way.

• 18:23John Coogan?

  And it's your first look at the next S class.

• 18:26Jordi Hays?

  Is that an EV?

• 18:27John Coogan?

  It's, I know, I think it's gonna be, uh, both, but you can scroll through these images and look at this thing. Look at the back, Jordy. The back is insane. Imagine bombing around in this. Obviously, this is like a, uh, a, a concept car, um, but it's still cool and I hope it's real.

• 18:45Jordi Hays?

  No, I, I was right.

• 18:46John Coogan?

  It's fake?

• 18:46Jordi Hays?

  A statement on the future of design language for Mercedes EVs. This looks like kind of Jaguar coded.

• 18:52John Coogan?

  A little bit.

• 18:53Jordi Hays?

  You know?

• 18:54John Coogan?

  Do I, wha- what do you think overall? I, it is, yeah, it does feel like it's a little bit, it's a little bit blocky, like big front grill, grill like Jaguar. But still maybe a little bit.

• 19:04Jordi Hays?

  This view looks better than the existing GT.

• 19:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:10Jordi Hays?

  Series.

• 19:10John Coogan?

  A little bit longer, a little bit sleeker.

• 19:12Jordi Hays?

  A little bit longer, yeah.

• 19:13John Coogan?

  I think it's pretty good.

• 19:14Jordi Hays?

  Look, it's riding a little bit lower even.

• 19:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:17Jordi Hays?

  I think it looks great. I think the grill on the front looks a little bit nasty, but especially considering it's a.

• 19:23John Coogan?

  It's a concept car. It looks, yeah, it's a little wild, but, uh, whatever X chooses to build, they should do it with cognition. The makers of Devon, the AI software engineer, crush your backlog, Nikita. We do a personal AI engineering team. We'd love to see it.

• 19:39Jordi Hays?

  It's not gonna help right now. Nikita is at war.

• 19:42John Coogan?

  Zoomer also had a post here. He said, this is gonna be good, uh, and he is quoting Colossus Magazine. Jeremy Stern has written a lengthy profile of Josh Kushner, Thrive Capital, and the American Dream.

• 19:57Jordi Hays?

  Okay, before we get into that.

• 19:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 20:00Jordi Hays?

  I think we need to address the Goon Wars.

• 20:03John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 20:03Jordi Hays?

  Sam Altman posted two hours ago. He said, we made chat GPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realized this made it less useful, enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue, we wanted to get this right. Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools. It's wild that he's just, uh, like.

• 20:26John Coogan?

  Job's finished.

• 20:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, well, yeah, it's, it's, it's wild to basically say. To just fully accept like, yeah, there were serious mental health issues, but uh bold. Uh, he said, we're gonna be able to-

• 20:38John Coogan?

  Seen more examples of the one-shotting, getting stuck in some hole. So maybe they did solve that. I don't know.

• 20:45Jordi Hays?

  No, it's totally possible. When, when these issues were popping up, it's like, okay, this person was 7,000 prompts deep.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, pretty easy to just be like, if more than a thousand prompts deep, send a message, hey, touch grass. Like, take a, take a breather.

• 20:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just end the, just say like, if you send another message, the chat will be ended.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, that doesn't seem like technically complicated to implement.

• 21:05Jordi Hays?

  So Sam says, in a few weeks, we plan to put out a new version of ChatGPT that allows people to have a personality that behaves more like what people liked about 4.0. If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it. But only if you want it, not because we are usage maxing. In December, as we roll out age gating more fully, and as part of our treat use adult users like adults principle, we will allow even more, like erotica for verified adults.

• 21:36Jordi Hays?

  And Doug over at Semi Analysis says, the Goon Wars have begun. The entire porn industry is about 100 billion, which can fund a few gigawatts. So I think that um, we always thought that uh, OpenAI wouldn't go there, Elon.

• 21:54John Coogan?

  It was a counter positioning thing.

• 21:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it was, it was a smart, you know, this is what we said. It's very possible that, that Grok, if they were able to figure out the erotica uh product side, that they would be able to take that product to a really meaningful run rate. Uh, very hard to assess like what percentage of Grok users or power users of the companion functionality, but either way, this kind of thing was already happening with OpenAI. People were falling in love with OpenAI. They were getting married to, not, not, not OpenAI, but ChatGPT. I got married to OpenAI. Uh, no, people were, were, you know, proposing to ChatGPT, right? People were developing serious romantic uh relationships with uh the bot.

• 22:38Jordi Hays?

  And uh, of course now, ChatGPT, great, great catch. John just slid away in the swivel chair to uh catch.

• 22:48Jordi Hays?

  Love to see it.

• 22:49John Coogan?

  Putting on a point. Well, if you want to design something that's not erotic, go to figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. Get started for free.

• 23:03Jordi Hays?

  Touch Figma, everyone.

• 23:05John Coogan?

  Touch Figma, yeah. If you're 7,000 problems deep, maybe you can find something.

• 23:09Jordi Hays?

  In other news.

• 23:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, what is your, what is your actual final take on this?

• 23:15John Coogan?

  $100 billion, that's the, that's the entire adult industry.

• 23:19Jordi Hays?

  I, I think that a large percentage of the people that will pay a subscription fee to ChatGPT as just everyday consumers will be people that

• 23:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:29Jordi Hays?

  develop like serious emotional connections, not necessarily adult level.

• 23:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 23:36Jordi Hays?

  But, but serious emotional connections.

• 23:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, I, like, the, the steel man here is like, treat adult users like adults principle. Like, I have not tried to generate erotica, but I've definitely gotten flagged for like weird reasons. Being like, no, you can't make this person into a bodybuilder or whatever for some reason, like.

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  They don't want it.

• 24:00John Coogan?

  Those muscles are too big, like this is horny now. And I'm like, no, like it's actually just a joke. And so I, I, I would be, I would actually be happy to like, kind of like age verify and just allow it to be like a little bit more lenient with me and give me like the benefit of doubt. But it does seem like It does seem like the, like the PR backlash from some of this stuff is going to be a little wild, like. And there's just been so many tech companies that have just said like, hey, yeah, like we're just, Apple famously like drew the line.

• 24:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, the other, the other side here is, uh, it's not like Google, if you search for Bob, Google doesn't say. Like you can't search this, right?

• 24:40John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure. Yeah, I, I think the, like, just, just mirroring, there's immense power in mirroring what people are already comfortable with morally. And so what I would do is I would just say like, we're bringing ChatGPT in line with what you expect on YouTube. Now, are there some graphic videos on YouTube of 360 no scopes with, you know, visually like distinct blood? Like, yes, there is R-rated content on YouTube. You can, you can watch R-rated content of a Tarantino film clip. You can watch a Call of Duty montage that

• 25:20John Coogan?

  is gory and maybe not suitable for children. But it's not a place for true adult content.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  I watched 360 no scope compilations with

• 25:31John Coogan?

  When you were four?

• 25:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, from a young age.

• 25:33John Coogan?

  It made me who I am.

• 25:35Jordi Hays?

  Turned me into a man.

• 25:36John Coogan?

  But, but, but Instagram apparently is doing this too. There was an article in the Wall Street Journal about this, how they're using the nomenclature from filmmaking now, saying that we will go up to PG 13, or you will be able to, to pick. And I feel like even though movies are like less popular than social media.

• 25:56Jordi Hays?

  Certainly on this side of the table.

• 25:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's very useful to use the G, PG, PG 13, R-rated, X-rated, like nomenclature. Just because everyone knows what that means, even though it's like a I'll know it when I see it type of rating that's done by the, not the AARP. There's some, there's some governing board that literally watches every movie and says like, this is R-rated. Because we saw, we heard like three cuss words and like, whatever.

• 26:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, here, here's the thing. When I see this announcement, I'm not entirely surprised, even though I didn't think they would explicitly go there.

• 26:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:33Jordi Hays?

  I didn't think they would, I think that I didn't expect to see Sam type the words erotica in a product update.

• 26:40John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 26:41Jordi Hays?

  Post, right? Didn't expect it. Makes sense from a business standpoint. I don't think they should expect applause. I don't think anybody should be, you know, I don't think OpenAI investors are going to be sitting around being like, I'm proud that OpenAI is going into this, but. Purely from a business standpoint, it makes sense.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:01Jordi Hays?

  So. And the other thing is, I expect that they will. Uh, the, the key difference between XAI and OpenAI is that OpenAI will not use this adult content in the promotion of ChatGPT, right?

• 27:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  Whereas Elon.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:17Jordi Hays?

  Was very, you know, forward with, with promoting it.

• 27:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. Well, I don't like talking about this, all this adult content. I like talking about compliance, automating compliance with vanta.com, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform is as clean as a whistle. It takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. It'll make your family proud. Um, do you think in a, in a year, we will look back at ChatGPT as a place that's R-rated, like Euphoria level or HBO level or a succession level? Uh, like adult themes and adult content or like X level, like not, not like X-rated level?

• 27:58Jordi Hays?

  I mean.

• 27:59John Coogan?

  Full adult content like you would not see on HBO beyond what's available on HBO.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure it will be beyond.

• 28:05John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:06John Coogan?

  Okay. That would be a bold step because I feel like.

• 28:09Jordi Hays?

  But the whole, but the whole point is that, is that OpenAI.

• 28:12John Coogan?

  All of those companies have said, we'll go R-rated, but we won't go beyond.

• 28:15Jordi Hays?

  But ChatGPT is fundamentally a single player experience, right? It's, it's, uh, it's, you know, some of, some of the chat.

• 28:23John Coogan?

  Screenshot. You, you take a screenshot and it's their brand next to the thing that it generated. It's, it's, it's like going to Apple TV and saying like, there is an adult film on Apple TV right now. Like I take a picture of the Apple TV and I show you that like it's, it's in their store.

• 28:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but this kind of content pops up on all the platforms, right?

• 28:41John Coogan?

  Well, I, I don't think so. I, I, I think that YouTube and Apple TV like very distinctly try and not allow.

• 28:48Jordi Hays?

  Reddit is notorious for this, right?

• 28:50John Coogan?

  Yes. Yeah. I would put Reddit in a different category. And so, yes, this is a decision to go more Reddit and less YouTube.

• 28:55Jordi Hays?

  And OpenAI is trained heavily on Reddit, so.

• 28:58John Coogan?

  Maybe that's.

• 28:58Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense. Do you think this?

• 29:00John Coogan?

  It'll probably be incredible.

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  Do you think this aligns with OpenAI's mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity?

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  Do you think humanity will benefit from everybody having a goon bot in their pocket?

• 29:15John Coogan?

  As long as every member of humanity is a shareholder, then they will then they will profit from it, which will be good. No, I don't know. It depends. There's a ton of there's a ton of like rough edges and like variability here that I'm like holding.

• 29:31Jordi Hays?

  Ty in the X chat says bear market and morals.

• 29:33John Coogan?

  Bear market and morals.

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  Well, in other news, Anthropic, David Sacks is going to war with Anthropic. He quoted one of Anthropic's co-founders, Jack Clark, and said Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy based on fear mongering. It is principally responsible for the state regulatory frenzy that is damaging the startup ecosystem.

• 29:55John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 29:56Jordi Hays?

  Not what you want to hear from the AI czar if you're running a US-based foundation model lab.

• 30:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 30:06Jordi Hays?

  But we'll see how this plays out.

• 30:10John Coogan?

  Yeah. You want to hear about Graphite if you're the AI czar.

• 30:14Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 30:15John Coogan?

  David Sacks, you gotta use this for your code review because it's the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software. You can get started for free. Let's go through some of the Jared Kushner news.

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  Josh Kushner.

• 30:29John Coogan?

  Josh Kushner. Jared Kushner is also featured in here, sorry. I was reading Jared Kushner because Tyler posted, sending Jared Kushner 25 books on how to prevent AI bubbles from popping, which was an absolute banger, got 1,000 likes. Tyler's been on a tear, but he's not even in his chair. You gotta cut to him before he gets back. No. Oh, he was out of his chair. I caught him. I caught his black.

• 30:58Jordi Hays?

  Hey, congrats on your fantastic.

• 31:00John Coogan?

  Back to back bangers. 1K club, two days in a row. Don't mess it up. If it's not a three-peat, just don't show up to work. You're done. Do you feel do you feel sequel pressure now?

• 31:12Speaker 02

  I mean, there is a lot of pressure on my, you know, on my shoulders.

• 31:15John Coogan?

  Heavy is the head that wears the crown, Tyler. Get ready. You've been on a roll. Let's see what your ex creator.

• 31:21Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I see this. I see a couple of bangers back to back and I think, hmm, maybe Tyler doesn't have enough on his plate.

• 31:27John Coogan?

  Maybe you should get him to vibe code something.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  I, I, I gotta hit, um, I think, I think it's five million impressions in three months to, like, I'm not available for the creator payout yet.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  So I think I gotta slop it up.

• 31:37John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why is no one talking about Ilya Sitskova?

• 31:42Speaker 02

  I'm never leaving this app.

• 31:43John Coogan?

  I'm never, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Just keep posting those. Uh, you'll, you'll.

• 31:47Jordi Hays?

  Ty in the chat says, if you cut to someone not on their battle station, they have to wear a part-time podcaster.

• 31:53John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 31:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Really, really phoning it in today.

• 31:56John Coogan?

  For having fun. Uh, so, uh.

• 31:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's get into this. Let's get into this piece. Uh, uh, Jeremy Stern profiled Josh Kushner in Colossus. It released today. It's not in print yet. It's going to be in print, right?

• 32:09John Coogan?

  Get ready.

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  Called The New World.

• 32:15John Coogan?

  Where do you want to start?

• 32:16Jordi Hays?

  Where should we start? I mean, there's so much in here.

• 32:18John Coogan?

  I, I like this bit about Spotify. So, uh, in 2012, uh, Thrive invested $6 million in a growth round of the Stockholm-based Spotify out of $150 million fund. And allocation Kushner had regarded as a favor until learning nearly a decade later that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek was in need of exactly $6 million to close the round. So he's just like, he's just like, oh, thank you so much for like making room for me. Like this is amazing. Like I'm so glad I could like, you know, get my $6 million in. And, and Daniel Ek's over there being like, the round would have completely flopped if you hadn't come in. So thank you so much. But, uh, there's more to this anecdote. This is the reason Ek knew he liked Kushner was that a

• 33:02John Coogan?

  few years earlier, when Spotify was only available in Europe, Ek was notified by an executive that someone in the US had manager, managed to register a fake UK address in order to download the app via the UK App Store. They discovered it was Kushner sitting in the Library of HBS.

• 33:20Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 33:21John Coogan?

  It's a, uh.

• 33:22Jordi Hays?

  I pulled out some highlights from the piece. It's way too long for us to try to, to get through entirely. Um, but the, uh, some background.

• 33:31Jordi Hays?

  On November 17th, 2023, Kushner was a 38-year-old spouse of a supermodel, brother and in-law of American political royalty and founder and CEO of what had very suddenly become one of the most coveted venture capital firms in the world. He was also the grandson of survivors of the Novo Grueda ghetto massacres, indignant refugees who, over the course of the Cold War, built a New Jersey real estate principality that their son, Josh's father, expanded into a multi-state empire before his conviction on felony charges and sentencing to federal prison. And before the White House activities of his older brother, Jared, put Josh in the crosshairs of a torrid political convulsion of which he wanted no part. So.

• 34:14John Coogan?

  Kindred spirits.

• 34:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, ultimately, it's this, Josh has put on an absolute masterclass of how to be an icon while being relatively in the shadows, right? He just sort of like pops his head up in these key moments. And yeah, I think, when I think about what Josh and the Thrive team has built, it's actually, I mean, it's just like, it's almost unbelievable, like the story, the story, end to end. By the fall of 2023, Thrive Capital, the New

• 34:59Jordi Hays?

  York-based investment firm Kushner started 13 years earlier, had become an overnight sensation. In 2010, Thrive's first fund was $5 million and included companies like Kickstarter and GroupMe. By 2023, its eighth fund was $3.3 billion, including a maniacally concentrated $2 billion investment in Stripe at a $50 billion valuation. He's like, here's two-thirds of my fund.

• 35:22John Coogan?

  This is the Fifth Avenue strategy, buy Fifth Avenue. He talked about this on Invest Like the Best.

• 35:26Jordi Hays?

  And $150 million check into OpenAI at a $29 billion valuation. The companies are now valued at $107 and $500 billion respectively. Along the way, Thrive's bet on Instagram, Spotify, Warby Parker, Skims, GitHub, Slack, Robinhood and other companies had become conspicuous for being prescient, aesthetic and exquisitely timed among its most vindicated admirers and for being absurdly priced, momentum chasing and too highly concentrated in dysfunctional businesses with unproven returns among increasingly sheepish critics. So.

• 36:02John Coogan?

  I like that they got Johnny Ive to give a quote for this piece. "Some people just have innately wonderful taste and intuition," said Johnny Ive, Apple's legendary former chief design officer, who's now working with OpenAI on a hardware device. "Josh has wonderful taste. I think it bleeds into his product intuition, which is just fabulous."

• 36:21Jordi Hays?

  Another, another highlight here. In 2010, moreover, the unknown Kushner's brother, unknown little firm, was making a bunch of large but weird sounding claims for itself, like that it was a stage, geography and sector agnostic venture firm that would concentrate all its investments in a very small number of companies, that it was not only an investment firm but also itself a company, that it incubated its own companies as well as invested in others, and that it didn't just invest and incubate but functioned as a service provider, product creator and embedded operational commando unit for founders. By 2023, every self-respecting investor on Sand Hill Road was also saying such things about themselves, even as they wondered how a New York firm made up of a handful of kids in their 20s

• 37:05Jordi Hays?

  and 30s, many of them with zero experience in venture capital, and from the technology Bermuda Triangle of New Jersey had become some of the most desired investors in tech and the ones most closely associated with the otherwise distinctly West Coast boom in AI.

• 37:21Jordi Hays?

  Of course, Josh had a very untraditional pathway to venture capital. He went to Harvard for undergrad while, at the time, Mark Zuckerberg had just dropped out of Facebook. Later, he got a job at Goldman Sachs, buying distressed debt, and then went back to Harvard for his MBA.

• 37:45John Coogan?

  It's a real miracle that he built that.

• 37:46Jordi Hays?

  Of course, I'm joking a little bit, but it, but it's, it's the, what I, what I appreciate about. What I appreciate about Josh is in many ways, he was on, he was on the perfect trajectory to be a venture capitalist and yet he has succeeded beyond what, he has succeeded in a way that so many other thousands of people that had the same kind of pathway into the industry by being in the right circles, like being early to a number of these, these different trends, like he's succeeded on a hundred time, on a scale a hundred times greater than many

• 38:29Jordi Hays?

  of the other people that were, again, had the same kind of like pathway in the industry.

• 38:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, my read on it is that a lot of the VCs that started in the same like vintage that did not become massive institutions, maybe just got caught in the trap of diversification. Like I keep going back to that story of Josh saying he wants to buy Fifth Avenue, buy the best asset in the class, be concentrated, build a big allocation, and that takes guts that I think a lot of VCs kind of fell in the trap of like, I need to get a bunch of logos for, I need, from a whole bunch of companies, or it's particularly cool, it gets actually higher status to be, oh, first check in this company, or see, even if you

• 39:15John Coogan?

  have a tiny allocation that gets completely diluted down, like you're not actually making as much, as many dollars. Like if you put $2 billion in Stripe at, at 50, and it goes up to 100, you made $2 billion, right? Versus you put 200K into some company, it gets diluted down, you make 50 million, like you made way less dollars on dollars return, but it's like somehow higher status in venture to be like, yeah, I was like the first check in. And I think Josh has been early in a lot of companies, but I think that he understands the importance of like portfolio concentration, actually getting all the dollars in the companies that matter. And that's like, yeah, it's something that's very, very hard.

• 39:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I think early on, I think my sense is that there was some like hunting for logos early on, but they were when the fund sizes were very small. And that led to him having the track record and ability to put $2 billion into Stripe out of a $3.3 billion fund.

• 40:13John Coogan?

  And also, like, we're just, like, the Thrive era, the era that Thrive grew in, is an era where venture changed pretty dramatically. I mean, we were talking about the Intel IPO raised $6 million. Like, what is your role as a venture capitalist? Like, deploy $100,000 and then wait for the IPO like a year later? And it was like that in the dot-com boom, and Google IPO'd pretty early. Even Facebook IPO'd at, what, $50 billion? And it was like the biggest IPO of all time. It was in like the deck.

• 40:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there were investments in that era that I'm sure the partners were underwriting as, I think there's a 70% chance this company IPOs in the next two years.

• 40:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:52Jordi Hays?

  This is why we're investing.

• 40:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 40:54Jordi Hays?

  And then they became compounders, and over time, it looked like...

• 40:57John Coogan?

  But they distributed, and so a lot of the funds became RIAs. But Thrive has been able to say, yes, we're investing in a company at $50 billion because we expect it to grow and grow and grow.

• 41:08Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 41:08John Coogan?

  And actually deliver like a venture-style return, or like a significant return.

• 41:12Jordi Hays?

  I appreciated this exchange between, part of the article, the beginning goes into Kushner visiting Rick Rubin in Malibu, and Josh was telling Rick, "My deepest insecurity is that I have these intuitions about things that I cannot explain to anyone," Kushner told Rubin as they sat in his garden overlooking the ocean. "Sometimes I see or experience something and it makes sense to me. I fall in love, but I cannot explain why. Like when Thrive invested in Instagram or Spotify or OpenAI, I could not explain to anyone why the products made sense to me. It is my job to learn as much as I can for my team and teach them as much as I can. But often, I have to push forward on my intuition alone, which is why my even deeper insecurity is, what if I lose it? Like, what if I lose the

• 41:54Jordi Hays?

  capacity to feel or experience these things?" He's basically the, having this exchange because, of course, Rick Rubin notoriously is just going off of raw intuition and vibes. I think the other, I mean, it goes into his entire, his family's crazy history dating back to Europe during World War II, getting out of Europe, but the, I think...

• 42:29Jordi Hays?

  Can't be understated how formative it was, I think, for Josh to go through this, this sort of, you know, right as he was, the quote here, "By the time I was in high school, my father had accomplished a tremendous amount. He was deeply impactful in both the business and philanthropic worlds. And then overnight, our family were outcasts. The world treated us all one way for the beginning part of my childhood, and then suddenly, they treated us very differently. That experience showed me how the world works, and why you should not care too much about what people think." Of course, his father was embroiled in a, you know, wild crisis, and ultimately went to prison for a couple of years. But I think Josh says elsewhere in the piece that he

• 43:11Jordi Hays?

  wouldn't, I forget the line exactly, but something like, "Wouldn't wish what he went through on his worst enemy, but at the same time, wouldn't, wouldn't, is sort of grateful for, for what kind of turned him into a monster," basically. Very kind monster.

• 43:30John Coogan?

  Well, if you want to try and reverse engineer Thrives Returns, dump all that data in Julius, and chat with your data and get expert-level insights, it's the AI data analyst that works for you. Tyler, what are you thinking about Kushner?

• 43:44Speaker 02

  I think there's also underrated is he's, he seems very aura-pilled, right?

• 43:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  He has this kind of nonchalance about him.

• 43:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 43:52Speaker 02

  There's a good quote, I think, that relates to this. It says, it's about Andy Golden, he's the Princeton Endowment head. He says, "Golden later recalled a happy hour for VCs in Cambridge in 2010, where he saw a six-foot-three emo-looking kid in a black cardigan standing apart from the group staring at the floor." I mean, that is just

• 44:10John Coogan?

  Pure aura.

• 44:11Speaker 02

  Pure aura, yeah.

• 44:12John Coogan?

  Apparently, we're on French TV right now. Thank you for the notification. Send us the link, if you can find it. Would love to see that. Yes, there seems to be somewhat of a correlation or inverse correlation between like,

• 44:27John Coogan?

  Just how much content and availability you like, how available you are in your aura. Like Ilya like never does any press.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's very mysterious.

• 44:37John Coogan?

  Very mysterious.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Because the mystery allows like people to like build this idea of you.

• 44:42John Coogan?

  Exactly. You're like, oh, yeah, like even when Ilya posted yesterday, like, oh, great. The best day ever. Everyone was like, clearly this is.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, like bubble is gone. I mean, we're gonna keep going.

• 44:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  We're safe.

• 44:53John Coogan?

  And it's like, that's not what it was about at all. He was talking about geopolitics. Um, and the end of the Gaza war, but.

• 45:00Jordi Hays?

  So Rimke in the chat says, uh, we asked for a link and Rim, uh, Rimke says France two.

• 45:06John Coogan?

  Oh, you just have to go.

• 45:07Jordi Hays?

  Just go to France two.

• 45:08John Coogan?

  France two.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  No, France two is the channel name.

• 45:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, no, I know.

• 45:11John Coogan?

  Go find it. Is there a way to stream that or something?

• 45:13Jordi Hays?

  French cable here.

• 45:14John Coogan?

  I would love to see.

• 45:15Jordi Hays?

  Go sign up, sign up, try to sign up for an account.

• 45:17John Coogan?

  Did they translate? Do they put subtitles over us? I'm so, I'm so curious about this. Uh, anyway, well, we dig.

• 45:22Jordi Hays?

  Wow, this is very base.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  I mean, I assume it's the interview.

• 45:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But I'm wondering because they could have put French subtitles over us. Or they could have dubbed us with eleven labs or something.

• 45:31Jordi Hays?

  Ask Le Chat, where how to, how to get access to French cable.

• 45:36John Coogan?

  There, there is, uh, more details on how the OpenAI deal came together in this article that are pretty interesting, which you should go read. Uh, I feel like I'm allowed to trash investors because I was one for most of my career, Sam Altman said. Most investors don't work that hard. They're usually not available for midnight at calls and won't drop everything to fly across the country on short notice to do you a small favor for you the next day. Josh is consistently willing to do all those things. He's incredibly hardworking for his companies. He'll do whatever it takes, any amount of time. Nothing is too big an ask. During that crazy week where I got fired and rehired, he just put his entire life on hold. Uh, he didn't leave his hotel room for seventy two hours. He just worked nonstop, very strategically, very effectively to get things back on the rails. Thrive had first gotten involved in OpenAI in early twenty twenty two when they met Altman to discuss a new round.

• 46:21John Coogan?

  They'd been given a preview of GPT three, the foundation model that preceded ChatGPT, which Kushner reportedly became so obsessed with, he almost seemed haunted by it. Now, that's, that, that needs to be like corrected because GPT three came out in twenty twenty. So I think they're either talking about GPT three point five, Da Vinci zero zero two, which was really popular, or. It's just a preview of ChatGPT because investors were getting previews of ChatGPT beforehand. And it was like blowing everyone's mind, but it was a really complicated deal and a lot of people passed basically for the wrong reasons, in my opinion. So.

• 46:52Jordi Hays?

  On Kushner's work ethic, he was, we met up earlier this year for coffee. And he was, he was, I had like gone to sleep. He was still on the East Coast. It was like 2am. He's texting like, yeah, do you want to like, I'll see you at like 10 or something like that. I'm like, you're on the East Coast. It's 2am for you. You're going to get to the West Coast and be ready for, and so.

• 47:20John Coogan?

  Absolutely grinder.

• 47:21Jordi Hays?

  That is part of the, part of the story, obviously, is just insane, you know, insane work ethic.

• 47:26John Coogan?

  Yeah. Did you see in the chat, somebody said, we're on France too. And Taylor says, dang, they released a sequel to France?

• 47:36Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, Tyler's MVP of the chat this week. Or sorry, Taylor.

• 47:40John Coogan?

  Taylor's been crushing it. Tyler has been struggling to learn French. I thought you studied French. You took French.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  I took, I took one, I took two semesters of French. I found it. Yeah, let me, I'll screen share.

• 47:54John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's figure out. I'll keep reading. So OpenAI at the time was a cap profit subsidiary controlled by a nonprofit board with the mission of safe AGI development, taking legal precedence over profits. Microsoft's $1 billion 2019 investment gave it a dominant position in OpenAI with complex revenue sharing agreements and preferential access to the company's technology. That and the company was reportedly valued at 29 billion while doing a trivial 50 million revenue. What a ramp from 50 mil to what are they doing now? Like 10 billion, 12, 20 billion, something like that? It was all very weird. There was no reason, there was a reason no other investor submitted a term sheet for that round. Wow. After several conversations with the investment team, however, Kushner marshaled his case.

• 48:38John Coogan?

  Forget the nonprofit structure and Microsoft and all the red flags, he argued. If you can create this much enterprise value, everything else is solvable. In any case, colleagues recall, he kept repeating things like, I saw the future and this is the one.

• 48:52John Coogan?

  Great call. Great, great, great call. Extremely hard. I know some other investors who literally passed on that round because they were like, yeah, like we, we, we talked to our lawyers and they were like, this doesn't make any sense. They're like, we couldn't understand like how we were getting it. Like, there were lots of smart people that passed.

• 49:07Jordi Hays?

  How early did people feel like ChatGPT was a gonna be a meaningful threat to Google?

• 49:16John Coogan?

  That probably started in like March of 23, but uh, I, but like November. I mean, people, when ChatGPT, when, when GPT-3 came out in 2020, people were starting to say like, you could use this to, you could ask it a question. You had to, you really had to prompt hack because you couldn't just ask it a question. You had to like ask it a question for a list of bullet points and put a couple, a couple.

• 49:45Jordi Hays?

  I'm just laughing. Rim K is saying it's live now on news.

• 49:51Jordi Hays?

  It's on France too. It's on the news. We're trying to find it.

• 49:56John Coogan?

  It's on the news. Um, and so, uh, Thrive submitted a term sheet, 130 million from its main fund at the $29 billion valuation. Uh, in November of 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT. Within two months, it became the fastest growing consumer app in history. By summer of 2023, Thrive was working on a $90 billion round. And in August, they agreed to anchor uh, 400 million of a $500 million employee tender offer, critical leverage in the explore, explore, exploding war for AI talent against OpenAI's publicly traded competitors. Um, by November 17th, 2023, Thrive had committed around $700 million to the company. So,

• 50:34John Coogan?

  uh, pretty, pretty remarkable results and uh, really just goes to show you that like there are certain pitches in venture like seeing ChatGPT before it launches that you need to really, really, really, really, really swing hard at. And, and Josh swung at the right pitch at the right time, which is like fantastic and much harder than I think people think. It's so easy now that everyone uses ChatGPT all the time to, to, to just be like, oh yeah, I would have, I would have made that deal too.

• 51:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And ignoring the, ignoring the FUD and just like doubling, tripling, quadrupling down every single possible.

• 51:12John Coogan?

  I mean, when that when that initial round was happening, I was I was also like, I mean, I wasn't an investor, but I was I was I was thinking like, it just makes a lot of sense. I was looking at the team and I was like, if you just make the bet on like, you have the CTO of Stripe, Greg Brockman, you have the former president of Y Combinator, just the resume of the founding team at that time, everyone was really, really tough.

• 51:34Jordi Hays?

  The mid curve response was the corporate structure was weird. Like, this isn't a norm, this isn't a C corp, it's breaking the rules. I don't fund non-C corps, like, I'm out.

• 51:46John Coogan?

  But just going back to basics of being like, the founding team, who's running the company? Are they the best? You know, is this an important category and do I have the best team? It's like, it was hard to make an argument against it at that time, in my opinion. Anyway, should have invested, I guess, but, you know, like, doing content instead, it's more fun. In other news with OpenAI, there's, they did an interview with the Broadcom team and Sam Altman shared a little bit more about the custom chips that they're working on. Before we tell you about that, let me tell you about Fall, the generative media platform for developers, the world's best generative image, video and audio models, all in one place, develop and fine tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters.

• 52:30Jordi Hays?

  Used by Adobe, Shopify, Canva, Quora, and many more.

• 52:35John Coogan?

  So, Sam Altman says, "To zoom out a little bit, if you simplify what we do in this whole process, you know, melt sand, run energy through it, and get intelligence out the other end, as we realized we were going to need the whole system together to support this, it's just gotten more and more complex." So it turns out Broadcom is also incredible at helping design systems, so we are working together on that entire package. We are able to think from etching the transistors all the way up to the token that comes out when you ask ChatGPT a question, and design the whole system, all of the stuff about the chip. The way we designed the racks, the networking between them, how the algorithms that we're using fit the inference chip itself, all the way to the end product. And so it feels very much like, like even if they're not, you know, fully like plateau

• 53:20John Coogan?

  pilled, like there's a lot more research to be done, there's a lot more improvements. Like there are at least pieces of the chat GPT architecture, pieces of the system, whether that's, you know, four O level inference or reasoning tokens that should effectively be baked down onto a chip. And so that's what, uh, what OpenAI is working on with Broadcom at this point. Um, uh, so, uh, Stratechery, Ben Thompson had a great, uh, deep dive on, on OpenAI and Broadcom and, uh, and sort of laid out the argument for working, for them working together and baking stuff down onto a chip. Um, it's a, it's a fun read, you should go check it out. Should we move on?

• 54:02Jordi Hays?

  Yep. I was just gonna try to figure out, uh, what.

• 54:06John Coogan?

  Well, while you do that, let me tell you about TurboPuffer, search every byte, serverless vector and full text search, built from first principles and object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable.

• 54:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Broadcom was a $220 billion company, uh, the day that ChatGPT launched. It is now.

• 54:22John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 54:23Jordi Hays?

  1.7 trillion.

• 54:26John Coogan?

  Almost a 10x. Wow. Nvidia too. Nvidia was, was much, much smaller. That might be a 10x as well. Um, yeah, wow. We have wild, wild growth across the entire category. Basically everything is, has 10x'd in price or something like that, roughly.

• 54:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, it's interesting. It'd be interesting to go back and do the math and the VCs, uh, there was some reporting in the Financial Times, a couple of days ago, talking about who actually owns OpenAI. And it would be probably, uh, interesting and painful to look back at the investors, how much they invested in OpenAI versus just like market buying Nvidia and Broadcom and some of the other beneficiaries. And would they have made more money? Um, the, the, the OpenAI is.

• 55:08John Coogan?

  Didn't Altimeter do both?

• 55:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm sure I'm sure the players like that did both, but OpenAI's expected ownership after the company restructures, Microsoft is going to have about 30%, OpenAI employees are going to have close to 30%, OpenAI, the nonprofit is going to have 20 to 30%.

• 55:28John Coogan?

  But that doesn't mean you shouldn't still donate. If you're thinking about doing some charitable giving this holiday season, consider writing a donation to OpenAI, the nonprofit.

• 55:36Jordi Hays?

  Prioritize tipping your cap table first.

• 55:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 55:40Jordi Hays?

  And then after that, consider donating to OpenAI, the nonprofit. But anyways, Microsoft to 30%, OpenAI employees around 30%, OpenAI nonprofit at 20 to 30%, SoftBank about 10% and the remaining is is Thrive, Cosla, MGX and a number of Bedrocks in there.

• 55:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. I wonder how accurate that reporting is. It feels like directionally correct.

• 56:04Jordi Hays?

  I think it's directionally correct. I wouldn't.

• 56:06John Coogan?

  But there's some pretty big error bars on either side.

• 56:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:09John Coogan?

  But still, I mean, you just look at some of these, like some of these numbers that we pulled up. It's like, you know, what was the original OpenAI deal? It was that Thrive did it was at a 27 billion, 130 million at 29 billion. So 29000. So that initial deal was half a percent of the company. Right? And that was like, and that was like a whole round. And so that was a very low dilution round even at that time.

• 56:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What's what's notable is like, looking at this kind of rough cap table, it's just astonishing to end up in a situation where VCs have the lowest ownership out of the employees, a nonprofit, a strategic partner. SoftBank kind of makes sense, but yeah.

• 57:01John Coogan?

  It's all hands on deck in the chat, trying to find France to thank you for everyone's service. It seems like they're making progress using VPNs, all sorts of stuff.

• 57:11Jordi Hays?

  Daniel says, what's a good number to tip your investors? 20% of the last round? Or is that too much? I think more like like 2% of the last round is feels they'll they'll feel very appreciated.

• 57:22John Coogan?

  But it's got to be delivered in a sports car form. It can't just be cash. Uh, let's read this Jeremy Giffon post. Things that seem true about AI today that will probably be laughably wrong in a year. One, it still seems underrated that ChatGPT has replaced eighty-five percent of my Google usage and has become a most-used app. That's certainly true for me. The reason we're so upset about slop is because it's obvious we're all going to love consuming it in two to three years. It's not going to be slop for long. What do you think?

• 57:55Jordi Hays?

  I, yeah, I mean, there's, out of the, out of the hundred Sora, you know, maybe, maybe way more than that, right? Call it a thousand Sora videos I've seen one way or another. Like, ten of them have genuinely been hilarious.

• 58:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:14Jordi Hays?

  And that is about the same ratio as like the regular internet, right?

• 58:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:20Jordi Hays?

  See a thousand videos, like, yeah, some, some of them are gonna be, um, but, but I, I, I think, uh, already there's, there's, I'm seeing instances where it's not slop. Still using the Sora app is not, I, I don't love it, but some of the outputs are, are...

• 58:40John Coogan?

  I like it as a creative tool. Like, I, I think that if you just view it as a creative tool, there's gonna be creative uses and stuff that's amazing, even if it is a little sloppy. The other lens to view it through is like Buzzfeed was creating a lot of kind of slop content, but with humans, and that never really broke through and became something that a lot of people, at least in my world, enjoyed. It, it kind of remained slop forever. And, um, but, but as AI generation as a tool, like you, you saw over the, over the weekend, I was having fun in our group chat, generating a Sora video, sending it there. I didn't even post it, but it, but the result was really funny in the context of our friend group. And so I think, uh, I think Jeremy's right there. Um, number three, he says, many non-AI

• 59:24John Coogan?

  products are being adopted due to economy-wide corporate and capital market, top-down mandates to buy/fund AI, a rare reversal of the norm where everyone wants to turn over their existing vendor for the new one. This will have a similar pull-forward effect as e-commerce during COVID, even if AI ends up being way overstated. And so, right now, some of the booms that we're seeing, some of the ramps in these companies going to a hundred million is just that... The entire Fortune 500, and we're going to get into this with some of the OpenAI partnerships. The entire Fortune 500 is saying like, CEO, you need to have an AI initiative or else you're gone. Like, you can't be sitting out AI, even if you're Walmart, for example.

• 1:00:10John Coogan?

  Maybe Walmart should get on Profound. They could get their brand mentioned in ChatGPT. They could reach millions of customers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. So Jeremy continues.

• 1:00:20Jordi Hays?

  By the way.

• 1:00:21John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:00:24Jordi Hays?

  Best diff in the chat did send me the video of us on French television.

• 1:00:27John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 1:00:28Jordi Hays?

  I cannot download it because X does not apparently allow you to download videos from DMs.

• 1:00:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:34Jordi Hays?

  So I asked him to send it to Ben's email so that we can pull it up on the show.

• 1:00:39John Coogan?

  We will, we will work on that.

• 1:00:40Jordi Hays?

  We are working on it.

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  So Jeremy goes to his specialty, how companies are using AI. He says, AI rollups and vertical AI. I've yet to see any part of a business unit that can reliably have cost cut or revenue grown with AI. That's very interesting because the narrative, we've heard this from a number of private equity folks who are saying like, I'm going to buy a company, throw AI on top and cut costs in this division or grow revenue in that division.

• 1:01:12Jordi Hays?

  And even, even, again, software engineers at a company, if maybe they haven't been using AI, you come in and you're bringing like fire to, you know, you're like, here, look, it's fire, it's magical. Fire.

• 1:01:27John Coogan?

  There's something interesting about reliably, there's still an art to it.

• 1:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, here's potentially why you should still be bullish on AI rollups is because you take a bunch of smart tech people.

• 1:01:40John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:40Jordi Hays?

  And you bring them into businesses that haven't historically had a lot of great technology. And they just built great software. It's possible to grow businesses faster, be more efficient, things like that, even if AI isn't actually doing the heavy lifting.

• 1:01:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:54Jordi Hays?

  So when I've talked to like a rollup founder and I'm thinking, you know, they've pulled together, in this case, they had pulled, they had pulled talent from like five of the best companies in. In the world, at least from a talent density standpoint. And they're working in these categories. I won't name it because I'll dox the company. But they're working in a category that never in history had super talented engineers working on it.

• 1:02:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:21Jordi Hays?

  And so they're probably going to do really well, even if, again, it's not like integrating an LLM into the workflow. That's actually doing that heavy lifting.

• 1:02:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:29Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:02:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, that's.

• 1:02:30Jordi Hays?

  It's possible that like, yeah.

• 1:02:32John Coogan?

  He says, companies can ship a lot more software quickly. Complexity of the build out is no longer a moat, which I think is interesting. Revenue velocity.

• 1:02:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but so the only thing is this kind of contradicts the.

• 1:02:44John Coogan?

  No, no. So, so one is, is it's hard to just go into a business and say, no matter what your business is. I know that I can come in and drop AI into your manufacturing process or your customer support department or your finance operations department and or your sales department and immediately see a result on cutting costs and increasing revenue. Like, it's not a reliable playbook. Every company.

• 1:03:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but I'm just saying, he's saying companies can ship a lot more software quickly. Complexity, the build out is no longer a moat. So that would, you'd buy a platform software business that has a bunch of other products that you want to build. And if the second point is true, you could just let go of a lot of the engineering team and say, we're going to cut. We're going to cut or we're not going to, we're not, we're going to change our, our hiring plan because we just don't need as many engineers and you can grow revenue while like keeping your costs relatively the same. Right? So.

• 1:03:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, but at the same time, like, like that software that you launch will be more competitive because there's no longer a moat around the complexity of the build out. And so you wind up with a more commodity product at the end of that build out. And so maybe the equilibrium is that you don't actually grow revenue that fast. I don't know. It does seem like it's very case by case basis, basically. Like, everyone wants to paint with a broad brush and just say that, like, every company will be transformed by AI. Every company will, will grow with AI. But it's, it's clearly like, like more, more nuanced than that.

• 1:04:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:11John Coogan?

  He says revenue.

• 1:04:11Jordi Hays?

  He's also saying margins and headcounts do not yet reflect the narrative around developer productivity. What I would say here is that if your developers get a lot more productive, you might actually want more developers, right?

• 1:04:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:27Jordi Hays?

  Cause like if a developer can produce three times as much valuable code, if you agree with that, wouldn't you want to grow your engineering team?

• 1:04:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, there is an equilibrium, like, there is like a game theoretic equilibrium where, where, where if we're direct competitors and I give all my engineers AI and you give your, all your engineers AI, like, we both have to employ the same amount of engineers to compete with each other, because if I fire all my employees and I'm just using AI and you-

• 1:05:01Jordi Hays?

  They're just gonna outship you.

• 1:05:02John Coogan?

  You're, you're gonna outship me because you have AI and humans and you're double important, you know, and so-

• 1:05:07Jordi Hays?

  This is another point here, it says PE and VC, ironic, and ironically VC have not found a way to adopt AI internally. I asked a lot of Gil-

• 1:05:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, a lot of Gil about that.

• 1:05:17Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, yeah, he, he, I mean, I think he generally agreed.

• 1:05:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, certainly for like, uh, research, I would imagine that they've, they've adopted that just as like a replacement for Google, like, like Jeremy's first line, like, you know, replacing uh, Google search, knowledge retrieval, that type of stuff, AI, uh, is certainly, is certainly a good point. Um, but yeah, I mean, it's not like you can just say, hey, go find me and you, the, the next unicorn and-

• 1:05:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:43John Coogan?

  Don't make mistakes. Where AI has created a lot of value is by being the missing puzzle piece for existing businesses, usually around, this is usually around onboarding, migration, or database querying. Oddly, I can't help but feel that at its core, that its core quality is just that it makes everything much faster. It feels as though the microprocessor, blockchain, and AI have all been these pushes away from clock time towards newer, faster standards, standard measure of times. I'm not that optimistic, but it does feel like there's a chance for the first time that we could get entirely away from the ad model, taking shots at ads, how dare you, Jeremy.

• 1:06:17Jordi Hays?

  He posts from the ad-supported platform.

• 1:06:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:20Jordi Hays?

  X.com.

• 1:06:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know. Um, I mean, it does seem like, it does seem like ChatGPT is gonna monetize pretty heavily on the subscription side and then also on the referral, uh, affiliate revenue side. But they're creating a ton of service area for ads and I think that there will just be ads. So I disagree with that one. Anyway, speaking of ads, Google AI Studio, the fastest way to prompt from prompt to production with Gemini. You can chat with models, you can vibe code, you can monitor your usage. They got Nano Banana. You can talk to Gemini live. Go check it out.

• 1:06:55Jordi Hays?

  Go to AI.studio.

• 1:06:58John Coogan?

  Post from Hype Beast. Apparently, Tim Cook now has his own custom Labubu, complete with an iPhone 17. I think that's in orange. I didn't realize they made custom Labubus. But, I mean, what a great, uh...

• 1:07:12Jordi Hays?

  What do you think Tim actually thinks about Labubu?

• 1:07:15John Coogan?

  Um...

• 1:07:16Jordi Hays?

  He doesn't look that happy there. It's kind of a forced smile.

• 1:07:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. I don't know. There's been a few photos of his office. You remember that viral video, viral image of like, this was Steve Jobs' office, this is Tim Cook's office. And Steve Jobs' office is all messy, and Tim Cook's office is all clean, and it's like supposed to be a referendum on the different leadership styles of the two CEOs. But of course, people made the point that that picture, that iconic picture of Steve Jobs, his office was in fact his home office. And we haven't seen Tim Cook's home office, so it might be equally messy. And Steve Jobs' work office might have been equally clean. But in that photo shoot of Tim Cook's work office, it did seem very clean. It didn't seem like it had a lot of tchotchkes or trinkets, or, I don't know, I don't even know where

• 1:08:04John Coogan?

  you'd put Labubus in there. But he doesn't seem like someone who's been collecting Pokémon cards and is just ready for the next thing to collect. But it's certainly a fun, fun, fun drop for Labubu. And if you're building a company, you should make a Tim Cook version of your product and send it to him and get a free, free ad out of it, I suppose. Who knows?

• 1:08:26Jordi Hays?

  Breaking news, I want your reaction to it, John. Your authentic reaction. John has not seen this post yet. Breaking. OpenAI to partner with OpenAI to help fund OpenAI. OpenAI up 90%.

• 1:08:40John Coogan?

  That sounds real.

• 1:08:42Jordi Hays?

  It's not. It's a, it's a.

• 1:08:46John Coogan?

  I mean, I know that they had crazy amount of partnerships just this week. I mean, the Walmart thing we'd heard about and then it went bigger.

• 1:08:54Jordi Hays?

  Jerry Capital says, this is how you top and it's Walmart partners with OpenAI to create AI-first shopping experiences. This makes a lot of sense.

• 1:09:03John Coogan?

  Netcap Girl said, in case of emergency, break the glass. It's an OpenAI partnership.

• 1:09:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, of course, Salesforce announced a partnership with OpenAI this morning.

• 1:09:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:09:12Jordi Hays?

  And they, people were memeing it because the.

• 1:09:16John Coogan?

  Didn't the stock trade down on it? It was crazy, crazy, crazy. And then High Yield Harry says, say the line, Bart, we're partnering with OpenAI. And so Salesforce and OpenAI just announced a partnership. It's the kind of partnership that will let companies across Salesforce Agent 360 platform in ChatGPT, clearing sales records. I mean, it all makes sense to integrate. What's interesting is that at one point Salesforce was building their own foundation model and seems to have, you know, backed down from that a little bit. Mark Benioff said, back in 2023, which I believe was the coup, right? This was right around the coup. So this was, this was when OpenAI researchers were leaving and there

• 1:09:58John Coogan?

  was, there was news that Sam might go to Microsoft Research and bring a bunch of people there.

• 1:10:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was like over the weekend.

• 1:10:04John Coogan?

  Over the weekend, right? And it was really crazy. And Mark Benioff was like, this is my zuck poach moment. I can poach all these folks. And he said Salesforce will match any OpenAI researcher who has tendered their resignation, full cash and equity, OTE, to immediately join our Salesforce Einstein trusted AI research team under Silvio Sarvesi. Send me your CV directly. Einstein is the most successful enterprise AI platform, completing 1 trillion predictive and generative transactions this week. Join our trusted enterprise revolution. High Yield Harry says, this is hilarious in retrospect. Yeah, it's like, it needs to be the main thing. Unless you're Google and you invented the transformer, like everyone

• 1:10:47John Coogan?

  else needs like a partnership. And so Amazon's fortunately in a good spot with Trainium, but they still have to partner. It doesn't seem like they've been able to really keep up in the foundation model race. It's, it's becoming like a triopoly between OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini. And everyone else is kind of dropping out. Although we do have new, new.

• 1:11:08John Coogan?

  Some new information from Balaji about the Chinese models and what's going on in the free AI model world on L M Arena. It's been back and forth between Meta, DeepSeek, Alibaba, and now Z dot AI is in first place. And they've all been, you know, going back and back and forth. It's knockout, drag out. But how each organization's best open weight model ranks on L M Arena, Z dot AI is now first.

• 1:11:35Jordi Hays?

  Good domain.

• 1:11:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, great domain.

• 1:11:36Jordi Hays?

  Not a dot com, but still solid. Before we move on from Salesforce, I think we can we can leak that Mark Benioff will be on the show on Thursday, joining TBPN at 12:15. You heard it here first.

• 1:11:51John Coogan?

  That'll be an interesting discussion to understand how he's thinking about build versus buy in the AI era. There was definitely a time when it made so much sense to say like, well, I don't want this company to train on it. I have my own system. It's not that expensive, but now it's extremely expensive. And OpenAI offers an enterprise plan where they won't pull your data back into their training runs. And so you can use all the best OpenAI models. They will serve them. Sam Altman's problem to provision all the GPUs. You're you're even better than being a renter because you're just a token buyer. And so there's very little risk of, oh, if you, you know, oh, we, you know, we overshot this AI thing, we'll just scale back your token consumption. And all of a sudden, your

• 1:12:36John Coogan?

  economics go back to what they were before the AI boom. So it's a very safe place to be. So.

• 1:12:40Jordi Hays?

  Jordi, you want this video? Let's pull up France 2.

• 1:12:43John Coogan?

  French TV, baby. French TV. Oh, this is the studio, not with the.

• 1:12:47Jordi Hays?

  This is a cool.

• 1:12:48John Coogan?

  This is very cool. Do we have audio on this? I want to hear some French TV. They're really filming us all. We didn't get any, we didn't get any audio?

• 1:12:57Jordi Hays?

  We didn't get the audio.

• 1:12:58John Coogan?

  Okay, odd. Well, we wouldn't be able to understand it either. Oh, look, here we go.

• 1:13:02Jordi Hays?

  They're calling you a

• 1:13:03John Coogan?

  An expert in artificial intelligence. Yep. This is the first trading card. I remember being at breakfast and Tyler described that idea and it absolutely ripped. We had a couple others. What was really funny about this was that the, the interviewers kept asking us like, "Okay, so for this trading card, like, how much did that person make personally?" And we're like, "Look, like, it didn't exactly leak like that. It was more of a general thing. There were some leaks of specific deals, but there, a lot of them haven't been confirmed. Like, we're more just, you know, having fun with the overall trade deal narrative. We can't really even clock a particular offer within an order of magnitude."

• 1:13:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, we gotta try to find out how to get the audio.

• 1:13:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, we do. Oh, there was audio, says Fanny, so we will figure that out and

• 1:13:53Jordi Hays?

  And now.

• 1:13:54John Coogan?

  Now, without further ado, we have our first in-person guest of the show. Welcome to the stream. How are you doing?

• 1:14:03John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 1:14:07Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the UltraDome.

• 1:14:09John Coogan?

  Hopefully, you're, you're looking cozy in that, in that sweater. Hopefully, you're enjoying the rainy day in Los Angeles.

• 1:14:16Henri Stern?

  I was told, "Come to LA, it'll be nice. It'll be warm."

• 1:14:20Jordi Hays?

  It's only, it's like 300 and 330 days a year.

• 1:14:23John Coogan?

  It feels very warm in here. It's actually more of a neutral temperature, but through the power of movie magic, it appears that we are in front of a warm heart. Anyway, please introduce yourself to the stream.

• 1:14:35Henri Stern?

  Yeah, I'm Henry Stern. I'm one of the co-founders of Privy. We build embedded wild software. I was told to come here to help translate the French television. I'm French originally.

• 1:14:44John Coogan?

  You speak French.

• 1:14:45Henri Stern?

  I watch France Television.

• 1:14:47Jordi Hays?

  France 2, are you a France 2 fan?

• 1:14:49Henri Stern?

  I'm a France 2 fan.

• 1:14:50John Coogan?

  Is France 2 better than France 1?

• 1:14:52Jordi Hays?

  They just have France 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I think it goes into the 40s if I

• 1:14:56Henri Stern?

  We're, we're working on, on iterations at this, at this point in time politically. And, and I think TVPN is, is welcome, despite for, for all French political watchers out there.

• 1:15:05John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. Yeah, it was fun telling the story of what happened over the summer. It felt like flashback because the AI talent wars, I'm sure you tracked them like in real time in

• 1:15:16Jordi Hays?

  He was busy getting acquired.

• 1:15:18John Coogan?

  You were busy, but still, I mean, I'm sure they broke through to you and you were aware

• 1:15:22Henri Stern?

  We saw these things.

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  You saw it, of course. And everyone's wondering like, hey, what's my comp package going to be next year?

• 1:15:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, we, so we normally don't do life stories on TVPN, but when did you actually, when did you leave France? Assuming you grew up there?

• 1:15:36Henri Stern?

  I grew, so I grew up there until I was like 12 or 13, then I came to the US, which is how I shed my accent to some extent.

• 1:15:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's barely, I don't even notice it.

• 1:15:47Henri Stern?

  And, and got very Americanized. So I'm, I'm an American person insofar as startups are concerned and I'm a French person insofar as like, you know, voting passports and food is concerned.

• 1:15:56John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Makes sense.

• 1:15:57Jordi Hays?

  Give us, give us the play by play of the last few months. It's been busy.

• 1:16:01Henri Stern?

  It's been very busy. There's like two parallel worlds. On the one side, there's, we, we got acquired by Stripe. So we had the great folks at Stripe

• 1:16:10Jordi Hays?

  Hit that gong.

• 1:16:11Henri Stern?

  Reach out. I think you gonged us already.

• 1:16:13Jordi Hays?

  I know, we're second gong because you closed.

• 1:16:15John Coogan?

  Retroactive gong.

• 1:16:18Jordi Hays?

  You gotta hit one for closing, one for the announcement, one for closing.

• 1:16:22Henri Stern?

  And, and basically, so they, they reached out in, in around April.

• 1:16:27John Coogan?

  Well, that's pretty quick.

• 1:16:28Henri Stern?

  And went through really well. It was a very, very fast time. So huge shout out to the M and A team over there and frankly, to the entirety of the leadership.

• 1:16:37Jordi Hays?

  Had you not, had you not talked, surely you

• 1:16:40John Coogan?

  You'd never heard of Stripe before that.

• 1:16:41Henri Stern?

  I didn't know what it was. No.

• 1:16:42John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:16:42Henri Stern?

  I, um, no. So obviously we knew Stripe and frankly, a lot of how we shaped our company and the way we wanted our product to work was based on what we saw Stripe doing.

• 1:16:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:51Henri Stern?

  We'd had talks with their crypto team and in general, and we did a lot of work with the team at Bridge through joint customers that we serve together.

• 1:16:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:16:59Henri Stern?

  And the outreach was some version of, listen, we think wallets as distributed global bank accounts are an extraordinarily powerful primitive to have as part of the stack that we're hoping to serve.

• 1:17:09John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:17:10Henri Stern?

  We'd love to talk to you about this, the way that, the way these work. So we had a conversation and it very quickly led to where we were. And I think we, we talked through what would it take for us to be excited beyond the general excitement of Stripe about like joining forces? What would it take for us to accelerate?

• 1:17:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:25Henri Stern?

  And, and we got there and it, you know, to their credit, we moved really quickly. So by By May, we were signed with a term sheet by, I guess, mid-June, we announced, and we closed in July. That's quick.

• 1:17:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, how, what was the pitch around synergy? Was it, obviously, they're well-capitalized, so you don't have to go out and raise anymore. They have a huge customer base of people who have saved credit cards through Stripe Link. But then they also have a bunch of merchants who have done developer integrations with the API. Like, what stood out to you as the most important piece? And what was maybe less important than people might think?

• 1:18:04Henri Stern?

  Yeah, I think there are two parts to it. The first is, how do we get this tech to mainstream? How do we get it to customers who otherwise don't care about crypto whatsoever? And one of the things Stripe has been excellent at is basically hiding the rails behind, you know, extremely complex banking infrastructure. Exactly, and you take these, like, you know, hundreds of banking partnerships, you turn them into an API that just works, and you enable, you know, in their case, like, commerce on the web for the last 15 years. And the question is, as this stack evolves, how do we do the same for crypto? So that felt like very natural, but I think for us, the point was, one, it is being able to strengthen our teams across security, infra, and obviously, across distribution to customers we wouldn't be talking to otherwise.

• 1:18:46Henri Stern?

  And two, being able to plug into money movement rails, like, making it that fiat and crypto are married to the point where they become indistinguishable from one another, and where, as a consumer of this API, you no longer have to think about one versus the other. So I think the way I look at it is broadly with two prerogatives. If Stripe is AWS for money, then this is a rail they should be leveraging, and they are intent on leveraging and building up. This is why they acquired Bridge, this is why they acquired us. And broadly, we want to be the best purveyors of money movement and storage systems on the web, so that you can build completely global businesses on modern financial rails. That's one.

• 1:19:25Henri Stern?

  And then, two, is beyond the tooling that we provide, can we make it that every existing Stripe user today can benefit from these rails? So they can provide, you know, cheaper, faster global payments, and they can enable anyone to hold dollars anywhere in the world.

• 1:19:39John Coogan?

  How do you think about the... Modern onboarding of the consumer, going back to maybe 2021, 2022, the way people would start. I mean, a lot of people were on centralized exchanges, like, oh, I want exposure to Bitcoin or something. I'll go buy some and I'll go through the setup flow and KYC and whatnot. And then the wallet era, I felt like started with NFTs, different tokens that were sort of like getting traction on Twitter. People would talk about them and then you'd have to be, oh, well, to buy this, I've got to set up this wallet. I have a specific wallet for Solana or a specific one for Ethereum. And people, it was very, it was very like prosumer activity.

• 1:20:21John Coogan?

  How do you think it evolves to a more consumer world going forward? Is it like?

• 1:20:27Jordi Hays?

  Well, my, my, my framework is there's the speculation era. People are signing up for different services to speculate. I think what you had seen probably prior to starting the company is that eventually there would be this like more functional use case of like, I'm going to sign up for products in general for specific purposes, whether it's to buy things, you know, you know, pay.

• 1:20:48John Coogan?

  So you think people will start with signing up or will it be like PayPal where it's like, I get an email and I'm like, I gotta go claim that. And then I set up the wallet.

• 1:20:54Henri Stern?

  I think there's going to be two entry. I mean, broadly what we're seeing, so to your, to your question of like, you know, what, what's been happening these last few months? There's obviously what we've been doing at the, the preview level, the Stripe level, but then there's the space overall and the amount of institutional adoption that's coming. And I think we broadly see it on three fronts. We see crypto as an asset class. So how do you unlock basically access to these assets for traditional consumers? And you see it through, you know, JP Morgan giving access. You see it through, I think Morgan Stanley is going to unlock spot trading on E-Trade. You see it through, we're working with Deutsche Bank, JV called All Unity on a European stablecoin for support. So broadly, that's, that's the first part.

• 1:21:36John Coogan?

  And quickly there, so someone has a, an account with a bank that has a brand that's probably been around for 50 or 100 or hundreds of years. And, and that particular web app or mobile app is like provisioning a wallet for them that they might not even know that is provisioned for them? Is that how you think that plays out?

• 1:21:57Henri Stern?

  I think we're see, I mean, this is, I think where it leads to start, I guess, the, the broadly, there's access to the asset class. There's obviously stable coins and global distribution. And the last is, you know, overall. Tokenized assets beyond, you know, things like tokenized equities or tokenized deposits is where you see players like, you know, Apollo or Blackstone getting involved. And the way we're seeing this develop is you broadly have a move from crypto native startups to fintechs. And so what you just talked about is exactly what's happening with a neo bank stack and a number of neo banks that we're seeing provision wallets exactly as you're saying it, which is as part of your traditional neo banking app, you'll have the ability to move your checking deposit or balance into a wallet that you control through which you can get, for example, yields on DeFi

• 1:22:42Henri Stern?

  in a way that as interest rate go down, becomes more interesting. So I'll be faced to to then

• 1:22:47John Coogan?

  Because right now, if you want to buy Bitcoin on E-Trade, for example, like you buy the ETF, which is like a very abstracted, like multi-levels of abstraction. It's not even self custody. And so, yeah, okay, that's a very cool work.

• 1:23:00Jordi Hays?

  Break down, maybe, what's, what are the institutions focused on? Like, what are the kind of the categories they're focused on? So one would be stable coins. Hey, these are going to be big. We want to have a play here. So whether that's leveraging them in the business or launching their own stablecoin is one. There's opening up access to crypto markets to their users are another one. What are kind of the other maybe, are you thinking about less like sexy use cases for crypto, like things like back office stuff? Or is that more on the bridge side of the business?

• 1:23:32Henri Stern?

  It's a great question. We are insofar as basically setting up, you know, you can think of a wallet in this, in this new instantiation where the wallet is just this embedded product that sits within your existing stack as a way to do broad treasury management. So Bridge, you know, is working, for example, with SpaceX on revenues across SpaceX's global operations. But, you know, this is a random example, but you can imagine a company like Coca-Cola, who is bottling plants all over the world, needing to have capital put to work. And so this is where the wallet stack becomes useful. Broadly, it breaks down largely, as you've said it, which is to say it's access to crypto as an asset class. It's stable coins, and that's on two fronts, issuing the own and, you know, for example, Stripe and Bridge have launched

• 1:24:15Henri Stern?

  open issuance where you can actually launch and own the economics of the stable coins that you're putting But broadly, we're seeing a lot more people starting to do this.

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:23Henri Stern?

  As well as using stablecoins for things like remittances and payroll. We, you know, see folks like Deal or Remote that are doing stablecoin-based payroll. We see folks like Zeps, Remitly, Felix, who are doing remittances using stablecoins. And then the third is broadly trying to see, can we open up tokenized deposits and other things to financial markets globally through crypto? So this is where I think the Apollos of the world are playing and want to become, in a sense, like, you know, lenders on chain for folks across the world who have not had access to private credit.

• 1:25:00John Coogan?

  So if I'm, if I'm a contractor for SpaceX at Quadeline Eight Hole or something, and I don't have USD or I don't have a USD bank account, SpaceX HR effectively or financing might send me an email, "Hey, sign up for this to claim your, you know, your payment, your payroll." And it's just a stablecoin wallet, they provision the wallet right then.

• 1:25:21Henri Stern?

  Exactly.

• 1:25:22John Coogan?

  And then they have it and they can move it where, and then they can interact in crypto, but then they'll also be able to move it outside.

• 1:25:27Henri Stern?

  And the specific case of the SpaceX bridge work, I think it's used for internal treasury operations.

• 1:25:31John Coogan?

  Oh, sure, sure.

• 1:25:32Henri Stern?

  But that's exactly the sort of thing that we're seeing come out. Exactly.

• 1:25:34John Coogan?

  Got it, and remittances, that makes sense.

• 1:25:36Henri Stern?

  That goes back to your question of, you know, how are people going to get wallets in the future? 2021, 2022, you have to be this prosumer, you have to be extraordinarily sort of high activation energy of, "I want this, I'm going to self-select into this." I think we're going to basically just start seeing myriad of ways in which this starts to bleed into your life as a participant in global financial markets.

• 1:25:56Jordi Hays?

  Do you think it's, uh, do you think there's, how many fewer crypto companies are being started today than in, than in 2021, 2022? Is it, is it like, I could imagine it's like 20% as many, even though there's a bigger...

• 1:26:11John Coogan?

  More than ever, I feel like, I feel like...

• 1:26:13Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but here's the thing, I mean, I feel like, I feel like crypto, crypto, this should be the excite, most exciting moment ever in crypto history, right? All the institutions, like, it's not just like the Robin Hoods coming in and saying, you know, "We're going to add support for Bitcoin." It's, it's the biggest financial institutions in the world.

• 1:26:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:26:31Jordi Hays?

  And yet, there's less, it feels like, less excitement from, like, look at the YC batches. You would think, you would think a YC batch would be like 50% crypto right now, given the institutional opportunity. And now regulatory clarity and all these things. So it's really great if you're if you're privy or Bridge or or you're, you know, some sort of established crypto company because you're not getting that that doesn't feel like you're getting the same influx of of new competitors, even though the opportunity has never been more obvious or bigger.

• 1:27:00Henri Stern?

  I mean, I, you know, I think we had to eat shit for a few years.

• 1:27:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:04Henri Stern?

  To get here, which which which I think speaks to it. But you're right. I mean, from my standpoint, the EV of starting a company right now related to, you know, crypto or stable coins or I wonder to what extent, by the way, just fintech and crypto are going to become one and the same.

• 1:27:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:19Henri Stern?

  And in the distinguishable. But but the EV as compared to some of the competition I'm seeing in AI, for example, is absolutely wild. So I do think it's fewer than in 2021 and probably at least 50 to 70% fewer than I'm seeing. But

• 1:27:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:32Henri Stern?

  The fun thing is I'm here in LA for an event for partners of ours called Lights Park that have a Bitcoin L2. And at the event, they're presenting the work that they're doing with SoFi, there's folks from Apple, Meta, like everybody is actually paying attention to the opportunity and coming in. So I think the next 18 to 24 months are going to be incredibly high leverage. And I think we'll look back and we'll have the same conversation, call it 2027, and say, you know, it was so quaint in, you know, late 2025 when we were talking about distribution starting off and so on.

• 1:28:02Jordi Hays?

  How how long until the average bank account in America, when you want to send a payment, you're getting a dropdown, like, do you want to send a wire? Do you want to send a stablecoin payment? It feels like that might be two years, three years away. But how quickly are the institutions actually, now that there's regulatory clarity, now that it's sort of fair game, how quickly can they actually adopt?

• 1:28:25Henri Stern?

  I mean, on pace of adoption, the reality is extremely fast. The rails are actually a lot of the rails have been tested. I think this is, by the way, where a lot of the crypto native usage for trading and for speculation has proved useful for the financial rails in that it's helped harden the financial rails. And then you have things like Tempo getting started for, you know, payment specific use cases to enable,

• 1:28:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:46Henri Stern?

  you know, Stripe level payments utility on blockchains. So the TLDR is I think that the rails are ready. The places where work will have to be done is on the last leg of distribution for global payouts. So banking partnerships on the ground in various countries where you'll want to move back to fiat. But this is work, you know, I'm going to keep plugging away my Stripe things, but obviously Stripe's doing a lot here. This is where, for example, Bridge and Visa are working together and you see the card issuers moving into providing this. So you could pay out in stable coins using a card directly rather than needing to move back to fiat via your banking partner on the ground. So I think we're going to see a lot of pressure from neo-banks pushing traditional institutions to pick this up. And I don't think your two-year timeline is crazy at all. I think it'll be one.

• 1:29:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, and that's why, that's why it's wild that there's so, it feels like there's massive reduction in new crypto company formation at a time when the entire, like, every key partnership will be, like, decided in the next, like, two to three years.

• 1:29:47Henri Stern?

  The other interesting point, this was like, you know, crypto cope circa 2022, but it was like, you know, crypto is the only net new technology AI serves the incumbents because you have data and distribution modes. And I actually think stablecoin changes that because stablecoins play to the strength of existing networks, distribution modes, and so on and so forth. And so I think the shape of crypto companies that will become valuable is also, like, not obvious, which is a really good opportunity and interesting time to start something.

• 1:30:15Jordi Hays?

  What, what regions or countries specifically are most hostile to crypto adoption today? I mean, I'm assuming like North Korea, Russia, countries that already have, you know, intense capital controls, but.

• 1:30:31Henri Stern?

  Yeah, I mean, there's probably a joke about North Korea somewhere in here in terms of crypto hostility. They certainly do a lot of crypto work, unfortunately, in terms of cybersecurity, but.

• 1:30:40Jordi Hays?

  Did you, I'm sure you got a bunch of applicants over the years.

• 1:30:43Henri Stern?

  We're all in person, which helps tremendously with that.

• 1:30:46Jordi Hays?

  It was always the remote North Korean engineers.

• 1:30:49John Coogan?

  There was a, there was a computer scientist from Caltech who went to North Korea, smuggled himself across the border from South Korea, gave a talk on Ethereum as like a way to kind of move money, not maybe above board, and, and he went to jail.

• 1:31:03Henri Stern?

  This is Virgil, I forget his last name, but I know, I know exactly what you mean. No, so the honest answer is the. Where you'll see it is, there's a lot of adoption today in LatAm and parts of, I mean, obviously, Europe and the US, but the opportunity is quite different there because the stablecoin opportunity where the pitch of, you know, just hold dollars is a little bit different. If you look at Tether, Tether keeps 100% of its yield, which speaks to how valuable holding a dollar is if people are willing to make no money on top of their sitting balance.

• 1:31:34John Coogan?

  So is that why there's so many stablecoins? Is this like, it feels like we had like a few dominant winners. It felt like it was going to be maybe a duopoly or like power law winners were going to happen. And then I hear stories about like, the state of Montana is going to launch their own coin. And I'm like, I kind of like the idea of just one standard, but I don't know enough to really make that argument beyond just like, it would be nicer if everyone used the same dollars.

• 1:31:58Henri Stern?

  I think we'll probably see two things, which is one, a broad like mesh of interconnectivity under the hood so that your coin for every single place you launch it. So again, you know, Bridge worked with Phantom to launch Cash, they're working with MetaMask, you'll be able to operate between them without having to think. But on the flip side, which ones will have a brand is going to be a separate question. So insofar as like, stablecoins are products, they are programs, they can be programmed, the way in which yield is managed, the way in which you put those underlying sort of collateral assets to work, all of that is configurable, which is why it makes sense that you'd have a proliferation. Like economic entities should be able to own how their balances are held and managed. But the actual rails through which you, you know, plug all these together will make it seamless.

• 1:32:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the headline KPI that the stablecoin industry is obsessed with? I remember during the Bitcoin era, everyone was talking about like number of Bitcoin wallets or a number of people that have bought some Bitcoin. And there was like, oh, eventually everyone will hold a little bit and that's will drive the value. Are you looking at like, number of wallets, number of transactions per user, DAUs, MAUs?

• 1:33:04Jordi Hays?

  At what point, is it worth tracking how many bank accounts are created daily globally versus how many wallets? Because I imagine that will flip at some point, but maybe that's not the right.

• 1:33:14Henri Stern?

  I may have already been flipped insofar as there's an issue of civil resistance, which is it's, you know, costless and instantaneous to create a wallet and you can do so very easily. So that's part of the value, but obviously it means that you'll get a lot more noise in that in that data.

• 1:33:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:26Henri Stern?

  Um, I think today the obsessive sort of stablecoin metrics are, uh, volume moved. So the, we're moving, I think about 5.3 trillion dollars of stablecoins annually at this point, as well as AUM, how much collateral is locked up in stablecoins. And last I checked, I think we're at about 300 billion.

• 1:33:45John Coogan?

  Do you have a comp for that, uh, that transaction volume? Because the Bitcoin folks would always say like, uh, well, gold is 10 trillion. If you think about it as digital gold, like maybe it'll comp there. Uh, but when I think about like the amount of money that's moved, you'll hear about like one high frequency trading firm is moving 5 trillion because they're just like trading a billion dollars back and forth every second. Uh, like what is the actual pie? Are we talking like quintillions of dollars a day floating around or something? Is it so high that we're like very early or is 5 trillion actually like a meaningful chunk?

• 1:34:17Henri Stern?

  No, I think these are just the starting days. And to your point, the metric I'd love to invite, by the way, is open data by the folks like these, uh, Mastercard, Stripe to actually show how much is going to end users through payments rather than potentially, you know, uh, trading that's happening that has less of an impact on end, uh, consumers.

• 1:34:34John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:34:34Henri Stern?

  But, um, you know, in an agentic world where ostensibly most commerce will happen via automated means, this is, you know, something Stripe is very focused on. But it stands to reason that a like natively digital payment method will be the choice way through which agents actually get to purchase goods and pay each other. So imagine now not just every bank account has a wallet, but every agent has a wallet.

• 1:34:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:34:58Henri Stern?

  And that can be used, you know, on Jordi's behalf to pay for something with, you know, some cap every day that you set for it.

• 1:35:05John Coogan?

  Ben Thompson was talking about the MCP, hopefully the future MCP standard has crypto in their stablecoins.

• 1:35:11Henri Stern?

  Exactly, just as a payments method. And so I think we're just scratching the surface because the, the denominator is not just global payments today, it is global payments in an agentic world where most money movement comes online.

• 1:35:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, and it feels like that's coming very, very soon. I mean, V G CMO has telegraphed it with OpenAI and like, there's a ton of startups that are working on this stuff and it makes a ton of sense.

• 1:35:28Jordi Hays?

  Is talent the primary constraint for you guys right now?

• 1:35:33Henri Stern?

  Yes. I'm trying to come up with a pithier answer. The short answer is yes. I think Stripe has been a major accelerant to our work. We're working with a lot of customers.

• 1:35:42Jordi Hays?

  I can imagine Patrick and John just firing off like, I'm gonna fire off like 10 intros right now. And it's like, you know, the most significant financial institutions in the world. And it's like, good luck.

• 1:35:54John Coogan?

  Just sending you the blog post fast and being like, we'd love to add you here.

• 1:35:59Henri Stern?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:59John Coogan?

  Keep going.

• 1:36:01Henri Stern?

  No, I mean, this is exciting a time to join. So obviously, we're hiring. I know Bridges as well, Stripe as well. But talent is absolutely the main.

• 1:36:09Jordi Hays?

  What kind of roles?

• 1:36:09Henri Stern?

  For doing this. A lot of it's software engineering across both sort of smart contracts to build up the actual sort of capabilities to build whole new currencies. So if you're an economics.

• 1:36:18John Coogan?

  How much of that is new? Yeah, how much of that is a new skill? Like, is it CS plus economics or CS plus a specific language that you've worked in a long time or just experience in smart contracts specifically?

• 1:36:30Henri Stern?

  The honest take is we found the people who do best are like generally spiky and then specialize over time. So you could argue like, we want solidity devs, which is the smart contract language on Ethereum. But I actually think people who are just like very deep in what they do and excited about the space and to pick it up have an opportunity to come here and shape the space in real time.

• 1:36:48Jordi Hays?

  So do you put engineers out with your customers?

• 1:36:52Henri Stern?

  That is, we were early to the, I spent some time at Palantir. And so we were early to the FDE resurgence. And so basically, that's exactly what we do. We mostly basically embed with our customers to build alongside them to get repeatable use cases. And then those are productized. And that's most of what you see on the preview website. But that's a lot of how we do our today.

• 1:37:13Jordi Hays?

  Cool.

• 1:37:14John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for coming by. This was fantastic.

• 1:37:16Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. Progress is absolutely wild. Congratulations.

• 1:37:19Henri Stern?

  Thank you.

• 1:37:21John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon. Well, he's walking out. Let me tell you about Linear, a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps and start building on Linear. Delian said, "Bro, these foundation model companies already have pretty rough P&Ls. Imagine if they also had to pay to put their data centers in space." Yeah, the space data center thing, there is like some sort of bull case, but every person who's sort of like an expert in building a data center, what it takes to actually like rack and unrack GPUs and what happens.

• 1:37:56Jordi Hays?

  Data centers in space are just the perfect SPAC, though.

• 1:37:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:38:00Jordi Hays?

  Perfect SPAC.

• 1:38:01John Coogan?

  I mean, it could happen. It just feels like something that's like 10, 20 years out. It feels a little bit longer.

• 1:38:06Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up. I think we got audio.

• 1:38:08John Coogan?

  Oh, we did.

• 1:38:09Jordi Hays?

  On the French TV.

• 1:38:10John Coogan?

  Great. Let's listen to that.

• 1:38:12Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully, Henry is still around, so he can translate if you can hear the audio.

• 1:38:19John Coogan?

  Let's see.

• 1:38:25John Coogan?

  Did they go to Silicon Valley for this, too? Who'd they talk to? Do we know what labs they went to? Do they get access?

• 1:38:34John Coogan?

  Here we go.

• 1:38:35Jordi Hays?

  Can we get Henry mic'd up?

• 1:38:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, she interviewed us.

• 1:38:42Henri Stern?

  Very French take on how to actually do it. They're talking about how Meta is paying engineers and absolutely bludgeoning each other with high salaries and the pressure blown away by basically how hard American tech will go to find talent.

• 1:38:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we just thought it was amazing that they came back from summer holiday and decided, we have to cover the story immediately. We have to get our reporters to the West Coast and figure out what's going on.

• 1:39:12Henri Stern?

  Now, covering, and the new fact is, these engineers are being traded like athletes thanks to TBPN cards. So you're seeing the emergence of a whole new talent market, basically, with active trades.

• 1:39:25John Coogan?

  This is a great translation. Thank you. You're doing this in real time.

• 1:39:27Henri Stern?

  I'm here for it.

• 1:39:28John Coogan?

  This is hard.

• 1:39:29Henri Stern?

  No, we need to get the new version of PES Manager, so people can actually trade their own talent.

• 1:39:36Jordi Hays?

  Oh, that's great.

• 1:39:37John Coogan?

  That's hilarious. Is that pro-evolution soccer? Is that what you're saying?

• 1:39:39Henri Stern?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:42John Coogan?

  They got a gamer in the Ultra Dome.

• 1:39:43Jordi Hays?

  Thank you so much, Henry, for the translation and for coming on. You're the man.

• 1:39:46John Coogan?

  Thank you. And thank you to France for highlighting the Ultra Dome. It's a huge sign of respect.

• 1:39:51Jordi Hays?

  TBPN is the TBPN of Europe.

• 1:39:53John Coogan?

  It is. Sonic 4.5 wrote a haiku. It said, "Sonic 4.5 really wanted to write some bad haikus to experiment in making itself laugh. The worst haikus ever written." This is the haiku on being digital. "I am made of math. Consciousness goes brrr. Ha ha." Still love you, though, bro. And RepliGate says, "That's actually an amazing haiku." It is a pretty good haiku. The LLMs are great when they're, when they're like trying to do something poorly and then it winds up being actually unintentionally amazing. It's very hard if you're, if you come in and say, "Write me something that's actually great." It needs to, the hallucination is a feature, not a bug, for sure.

• 1:40:34Jordi Hays?

  Ara says, "Your kidney can go for like 300K and you only need one to survive." "God gave us all startup capital. You just have to want it bad enough."

• 1:40:44John Coogan?

  You got to. I would not go that far. I am against selling body parts, but if you do, make sure you pay your sales tax. Get on numeralhq.com. Sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance.

• 1:40:58Jordi Hays?

  Chris over on X is highlighting the Apple TV Plus rebrand to Apple TV and says, "This changes everything."

• 1:41:06John Coogan?

  I have an idea. I have a pitch. We're going to get Ashley Vance to produce a documentary about Apple TV and it's just going to be called "Apple TV." And so you will be able to watch Apple TV's, Apple TV on, Apple TV on your Apple TV. And that was a grammatically correct sentence because there are three products.

• 1:41:26Jordi Hays?

  It's not an actual TV.

• 1:41:27John Coogan?

  It's not. It's not.

• 1:41:28Jordi Hays?

  It's not. So that's going to be slightly confusing. Some people are going to be excited because people like me have, have wanted Apple to make a proper television.

• 1:41:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Ben Tops had a funny take that was like, "Apple TV should have made like three different products where it would be like, "Apple TV the box, Apple TV set, which would be, which would be like the actual TV, the physical screen. Then Apple TV box would be the box and then Apple TV stick." I don't know. Have you ever used a fire stick, an Amazon fire stick? Have you ever used one of those, Tyler? Yeah?

• 1:41:58Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it's like the same thing as a Roku.

• 1:42:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, but it's like smaller. It just plugs straight into the HDMI port, right?

• 1:42:03Jordi Hays?

  Isn't Gen Z using that fire stick as a vape these days?

• 1:42:06John Coogan?

  What? What are you talking about?

• 1:42:09Jordi Hays?

  Don't act confused, Tyler.

• 1:42:11John Coogan?

  How would you use it as a vape?

• 1:42:12Jordi Hays?

  I'm just, I'm just, I'm just playing.

• 1:42:15John Coogan?

  But yeah, I it is it Ben's point was that Apple's incredible at miniaturization. The Apple TV is pretty big. I mean, it's small compared to like an old DVD player, but it's pretty small, but it could be way smaller and you could basically stuff stuff an iPhone in the in the I thought they should call it the Apple TV Nano. And then it would be the stick that plugs in the side because you could clearly fit plenty of stuff in there to actually do everything you need to do.

• 1:42:41Jordi Hays?

  Did you see this post from Pedro Domingos of most valuable private AI startups?

• 1:42:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:42:47Jordi Hays?

  And he says the most hilarious is safe superintelligence, no customers, no products, no plans. And a $32 billion valuation, obviously they have

• 1:42:56John Coogan?

  Plans.

• 1:42:56Jordi Hays?

  Plans. And obviously they're working on a product, safe superintelligence. What more do you need to know?

• 1:43:01John Coogan?

  What else do you know?

• 1:43:02Jordi Hays?

  They I my question is what?

• 1:43:06John Coogan?

  What's

• 1:43:07Jordi Hays?

  What percentage of these companies?

• 1:43:08John Coogan?

  We got to buy mid journey 20x revenue multiple. It's a banger.

• 1:43:12Jordi Hays?

  John, what how what percentage of these companies do you think will be

• 1:43:17Jordi Hays?

  valued at more than their current valuation in five years?

• 1:43:22John Coogan?

  Hmm, 30%. I would say like 30% of these are going to go the distance. There's a lot of these companies that have been around.

• 1:43:33Jordi Hays?

  They're going to get through the trough.

• 1:43:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, like, like, like, Databricks is like a very robust business that has been growing for years. It started in 2013, like, I don't know, it seems like they've they've they've been accelerated by the AI era. But they've built a very, very durable enterprise SaaS business. And I mean, a lot of these companies are just like set up for success, too. Like mid journey is a great example, like they haven't raised any money. And so it's like, OK, if if people get sick of mid journey and stop paying or something, it's like, OK, like, we'll go from 99% profitability to 92% profitability or something like it just seems it just seems like like a fine situation. A lot of these a lot of these companies have set themselves up and then a lot of them are just like, you know,

• 1:44:18John Coogan?

  like compounders grown, found their found their footing. And then there's some that are much earlier, obviously, some that have zero. Revenue so far and still need to go from zero to one or find the initial product market fit. And it'll be interesting to see like where some of these like how niche do the do the do the foundation model companies go? Like where does where does thinking machines actually wind up? Where does where does safe superintelligence wind up? There's a couple other companies that aren't even listed here that are doing this sort of more focused L L M's that aren't just trying to go straight at Anthropic or straight at OpenAI anymore. And we've only heard like very loose rumors about what that actually looks like. Some of them are pursuing like wildly different architectures.

• 1:45:01John Coogan?

  And there's actually been some interesting news this week about that. Google came out with a new paper. Did you see that paper about the humanities last exam? Or no, the R K G I, there was a new new model that did really well on R K G I that was very small.

• 1:45:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:17John Coogan?

  It was recursive model.

• 1:45:18Jordi Hays?

  We talked about this.

• 1:45:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:19Jordi Hays?

  I think it was tiny recursive model.

• 1:45:20John Coogan?

  Tiny recursive models. So you could imagine that someone comes up just like, just like you could look at mid journey as a competitor in A I. Like they train a model, their competitor Anthropic, but Anthropic doesn't do images and mid journey doesn't do code or text. And so they're actually not competitive at all. And you could imagine that there's a new architecture that emerges like, you know, you have the L L M. You also have the diffusion model. And then if you have a new architecture, a new model that's maybe not good for chat or good for images, but it's good for R K G I puzzles. Maybe that works in a particular place and maybe that becomes its own business. So I don't know. There's still a lot of a lot of gas in the tank for for the earlier stage.

• 1:46:01Jordi Hays?

  Or for Rock quoted this data and said Suno is at a hundred and fifty million of A R R up Forex year over year. Two years after launch, Suno is the way to make a song with A I via prompt. I wonder where this revenue is coming from? Is it just prosumers, people making songs for videos they're making? Is it actual musicians?

• 1:46:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, people seem very willing to throw down 20 bucks a month if they're in the like AI.

• 1:46:29Jordi Hays?

  For a magical experience.

• 1:46:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, if they're in the AI early adopter crowd. And also, I mean, I was, we were, we were testing some of these audio models and, you know, we have a business use case for them. Like if we could generate the sound of a crackling fire or Christmas song that was, you know, somewhat tailored to us, fit the mood, maybe was endlessly looping or something like that, we would pay for that because it's related to our business. And so we might, we might get on the $200 a month plan pretty quickly. I don't know. It's possible. But.

• 1:47:00Jordi Hays?

  Andrew Curran says, we are in a strange spot right now with AI. The anti-AI crowd believes progress has halted and are doing a victory lap. Insiders at all labs maintain advancement continues at pace. Only one of those, these versions of reality will survive the new year. Gemini 3 is very close now. We are hopefully, hopefully, I don't even know if we should get early access to Gemini 3 because we're probably gonna like.

• 1:47:26John Coogan?

  Tyler's gonna.

• 1:47:27Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, Tyler.

• 1:47:28Speaker 02

  Why wouldn't we?

• 1:47:29Jordi Hays?

  Well, I just, sometimes I'm like, okay, this fundraising announcement, give it to me under embargo. I don't, I don't really, you know, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna talk about it. But if, if we, if we get access to Gemini 3 and, and it, and it's, and it's like a step change difference.

• 1:47:47John Coogan?

  Oh, it blows your mind. And then you can't keep it a secret.

• 1:47:49Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be hard to keep.

• 1:47:50John Coogan?

  It's gonna be, people are gonna be read between the lines, see that Jordy is forever changed.

• 1:47:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:54John Coogan?

  Potential.

• 1:47:54Jordi Hays?

  What did, what did Jordy see?

• 1:47:56John Coogan?

  What did Jordy see? He's off in AI, the number one AI agent for customer service, the number one performance benchmarks, number one competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. What about you, Tyler? Do you think that progress has halted or advancement continues at pace?

• 1:48:12Speaker 02

  I mean, definitely the latter.

• 1:48:13John Coogan?

  Definitely the latter.

• 1:48:14Speaker 02

  Look at any like benchmarks, if we're on path.

• 1:48:17John Coogan?

  What, what is your prediction for Gemini 3? What do you?

• 1:48:19Speaker 02

  Rumors are saying that it is incredible. Those rumors are coming from fairly unreliable sources like random X and ons who like, it's like, why, how do they have access to this model? No one really knows.

• 1:48:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:32Speaker 02

  Do they even?

• 1:48:33John Coogan?

  But what do you think incredible will mean? Do you think it will mean faster, cheaper, or truly like good at posting, higher intelligence, some like qualitatively new functionality that you're like, oh, this doesn't even feel like Claude four point five or GPT five. It feels like a different thing.

• 1:48:51Jordi Hays?

  Well, there's this guy Vedant Mistra over at DeepMind, and he posted a couple of days ago, we're doing all kinds of stuff with these models that the public isn't even thinking of yet.

• 1:49:01John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:49:02Jordi Hays?

  He's vague posting.

• 1:49:03John Coogan?

  Vague posting.

• 1:49:04Speaker 02

  You like to see the vague post. I mean, I hope that the model is basically like way more expensive and it takes way longer because the output is like so incredible.

• 1:49:13John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:49:14Speaker 02

  Right? Like GPT five, I was maybe, I wouldn't say I was disappointed, but it was like clear that they were going for efficiency. They're driving down costs.

• 1:49:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:49:21Speaker 02

  Maybe that's better in the long run because you can just get way more output out of the models. But I would like to see an incredible model that is maybe expensive to run, but it's just, you know, way, way better.

• 1:49:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:30Speaker 02

  I think it's also, we're getting to a point where models, it's kind of hard to tell like how much better they are because it just saturates all the easy benchmarks.

• 1:49:38John Coogan?

  Yep, totally.

• 1:49:38Speaker 02

  There was GPT five, I had the horse benchmark.

• 1:49:41John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:49:42Speaker 02

  And even then, like if you run it on a couple of times, it would sometimes get the horse right.

• 1:49:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:49:47Speaker 02

  It's like, that's way better than, I can't name any horse.

• 1:49:50John Coogan?

  Why not?

• 1:49:51Speaker 02

  And it's like.

• 1:49:51John Coogan?

  You've been working here for almost a year.

• 1:49:52Speaker 02

  Give it any math question, give it any physics question, it's going to get it right. So it's definitely getting hard to actually tell that the models are getting better.

• 1:49:58John Coogan?

  Yep. I'd like a model that if I put in my query, put in my prompt, it says, I'm going to come back to you in a month. I'm going to think for a month.

• 1:50:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think.

• 1:50:07John Coogan?

  And then it goes and it agentically hires a person to solve that problem and it employs a human being. That's the goal.

• 1:50:13Speaker 02

  I do think the time horizon benchmarks, I think those are some of the most like promising things that we can still rely on.

• 1:50:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:50:19Speaker 02

  You're seeing. I forget what the exact number is, but it like doubles every six months or something like that.

• 1:50:25John Coogan?

  So like an impressive step forward would be doubling from like two hours to like four hours.

• 1:50:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think 4.5 was something like, I thought it was like around six or seven.

• 1:50:35John Coogan?

  Six hours? Okay, so maybe Gemini 3 goes 24 hours. That'd be pretty impressive.

• 1:50:40Jordi Hays?

  Noah Hirschfield in the chat says, I see Anons posting some crazy one-shot coded stuff using Google Studio 18 testing. Saying it's Gemini 3, looks impressive if real.

• 1:50:50John Coogan?

  Super vague post stuff. Okay, last question. If you're Demis, the founder of DeepMind, and you gotta put up the ultimate vague post before Gemini 3 drops, you're trying to out-vague post Sam Altman's Death Star post, what are you posting? What's the vaguest post you can possibly post? A solar system?

• 1:51:11Jordi Hays?

  Just post the solar system.

• 1:51:13John Coogan?

  Maybe just, uh, just, uh, just random noise, something like that.

• 1:51:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, an audio file.

• 1:51:20John Coogan?

  You know what'd be good? You know the green, uh, the green text from The Matrix? Where the green numbers flow down? That would be a cool vague post. Put that up.

• 1:51:28Jordi Hays?

  Or, or he could post that, you know, how, you know how the Tesla robotaxi and the Waymos, they hurl slurs at each other when they pass?

• 1:51:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:51:37Jordi Hays?

  Just translate that into English. That would be pretty mind-blowing, translating, you know, the machine superintelligence back into English. There's more, uh, some timeline in turmoil from, uh, some earlier coverage.

• 1:51:50John Coogan?

  What happened?

• 1:51:51Jordi Hays?

  Mark Andreessen quoted David Sacks, who said Anthropic is running a sophisticated regulatory capture strategy.

• 1:51:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, what?

• 1:51:58Jordi Hays?

  Mark Andreessen just said truth.

• 1:52:00John Coogan?

  Truth.

• 1:52:00Jordi Hays?

  He put it in the truth zone, uh, and it, uh...

• 1:52:04John Coogan?

  It's fact-checked true by Mark Andreessen.

• 1:52:06Jordi Hays?

  Saagar and Jetty quoted Sam Altman and said Sam Altman proudly announces ChatGPT will soon produce personalized pornography.

• 1:52:14John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:52:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:16John Coogan?

  It's a, it's a choice.

• 1:52:18Jordi Hays?

  That is one, that is certainly feels like a fair way to, to characterize the announcement.

• 1:52:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:25Jordi Hays?

  It's, I, I think it would be hard to argue it's not personal.

• 1:52:29John Coogan?

  The really crazy thing is when you think about like Sora cameos, adult content, where that matches is going to be extremely, extremely weird. But you know what's not weird? Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds, scales and grows your company to the next level. Get out there, make some sales calls.

• 1:52:48Jordi Hays?

  Barking.

• 1:52:49John Coogan?

  Get your dogs barking. Uh, head over to Alan and company, head over to Sun Valley. Andrew Reed has the story. In 1999, the year was the year that the internet guys showed up at Alan Company in Sun Valley. Uh, new media to click with the old guard at Sun Valley. This is from 1999. Uh, this year will be remembered out here as the year the internet guys showed up. As the giants of media businesses arrive here today for the annual Alan and company conference, they are being joined by a large scale for the first time of a new, new collection of internet billionaires. Tech giants like Bill Gates and Andy Grove have been coming out for years, as have AOL's Steve Case and Bob Pittman.

• 1:53:34John Coogan?

  But this year, there's a new breed of mogul. Michael Dell is coming from the first, for the first time. You gotta listen to him on David Senra.

• 1:53:43Jordi Hays?

  By David Senra.

• 1:53:43John Coogan?

  By David Senra.

• 1:53:44Jordi Hays?

  Hosted by David.

• 1:53:44John Coogan?

  David Wetherell of CMGI was here last year, but no one knew who he was. Now everyone does. Uh, his collection of internet properties, including Lycos, and soon AltaVista has taken off like a rocket. Then there's Jay Walker, who was here last year as well, but that was before he took Priceline.com public and became a billionaire. I believe Mary Meeker took Priceline public or, or at least reported on it. Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com is joining the party for the first time, as are Jerry Yang and Tim Kugel of Yahoo and Bob Davis of Lycos. Many of the traditional media moguls attending the presentations and panel discussions will be eager to meet the new media powerhouses and possibly work some deals. Time Warner, Disney, News Corp. and Viacom have all made the internet top priorities.

• 1:54:28John Coogan?

  Making his Sun Valley debut is Richard Bressler, the former Time Warner CFO who is now in charge of the company's internet ambitions. NBC and CBS will be chatting up the newcomers as well as the networks continue to continue trying to use their promotional clout to build internet dynasties. Frank Bondi will be seeing a lot of, a lot of two former bosses who fired him, Sumner Redstone of Viacom and just recently Edgar Bronfen of Seagram. This year, the broadcast network guys here will be able to walk around with their heads held higher. Last year, they were the poor cousins struggling for their lives against cable and the internet and trying to cope with skyrocketing program, programming costs.

• 1:55:09John Coogan?

  Barry Diller began talks here last year with NBC, trying unsuccessfully to acquire the networks. Fascinating archival post from the New York Post. Thank you for surfacing it. Andrew Reid.

• 1:55:20Jordi Hays?

  Ross Hendrick says, is quoting Wasteland Capital. Wasteland says, "We're at this stage of the market where any company that issues an AI-related quote, unquote, partnership, press release soars by 10 to 35% immediately, obviously except Salesforce." Ross says, "Yep, this is our version of 1999. Back then, it was adding .com that sent stocks up on autopilot. Now just announce a vendor-financed quote-unquote AI deal and same result. The name change, the names change, the game remains the same. We know how it ends." I would argue that announcing deals is not as bad as just like acquiring a .com domain.

• 1:55:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, slapping a domain on it is a little bit rougher. At least the, at least the partnerships should generate like economic value if they play out, but it is, it is very frothy and it's clear that like it's become some sort of like meme or there's some sort of like mimetic contagion where everyone needs to.

• 1:56:14Jordi Hays?

  Honey in the X chat says, "Bottom line is that Google has turned the tanker and the game is already over."

• 1:56:22John Coogan?

  We'll see, we'll see.

• 1:56:23Jordi Hays?

  We will see with Gemini 3.

• 1:56:24John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of turning the tanker, when you get an Aids sleep, you'll need to change out the water tank every once in a while, but otherwise it's a fantastic experience.

• 1:56:33Jordi Hays?

  Every few, every few months.

• 1:56:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:56:35Jordi Hays?

  How'd you do last night?

• 1:56:36John Coogan?

  I got an 84. I slept okay. Only six hours, though. I woke up a little bit early. Kids were a little crazy.

• 1:56:43Jordi Hays?

  Got an 81.

• 1:56:44John Coogan?

  Still very happy with my Aids sleep.

• 1:56:45Jordi Hays?

  Congrats.

• 1:56:45John Coogan?

  Get one at Aidsleep.com.

• 1:56:48John Coogan?

  Speaking of water, McMaster sells supplemental eye wash with Mount Station.

• 1:56:54Jordi Hays?

  I hope this catches on.

• 1:56:55John Coogan?

  There's a McMaster reaction meme, pouring water in your eyes. It's very funny.

• 1:57:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you see a post on the timeline that's not so great.

• 1:57:03John Coogan?

  Two 32 ounce bottles of McMaster water eye wash are $55 each. That is expensive.

• 1:57:10Jordi Hays?

  Okay, pull up this video of robot dogs.

• 1:57:12John Coogan?

  Robot dogs dressed in costumes. Fill me with joy, says Justine Moore of Andreessen Horowitz fame. This is a robotic dog in a dinosaur costume of some sort. Look at that. I like this a lot more than just the normal robot dog. This seems like low hanging fruit that everyone with a robot dog company should be doing. It's hilarious looking and it seems like the kids love it. It's a lot less scary that way. I feel like it's a lot more like, you know, less Terminator. What do you think, Tyler?

• 1:57:42Speaker 02

  I mean, we gotta get some kind of robot.

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  We really do. We really do have to get a robot.

• 1:57:48Speaker 02

  We could get so much good business value out of it.

• 1:57:51John Coogan?

  I agree. I agree. Have you looked into the APIs at all or what you can actually do with one of these humanoid robots?

• 1:57:59Speaker 02

  I mean, on the unitary, like, most of the videos you see of the unitary, like, fighting or walking around, it's just from, like, PhD labs.

• 1:58:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:07Speaker 02

  So it's just like, I don't even know if there is software that comes with the robot.

• 1:58:10John Coogan?

  Oh, really? I feel like it would at least come with, like, a, you know, basic Xbox controller so you could, like, do a basic walk cycle. Like, if they're not even shipping with that, that's a crazy, crazy move.

• 1:58:20Speaker 02

  I mean, it's mostly for researchers to buy, I assume.

• 1:58:23John Coogan?

  It's so cheap. It's wild. We really do have to get one.

• 1:58:27Speaker 02

  Gotta get one.

• 1:58:27John Coogan?

  It's gonna be, ugh, kinda creepy, kinda crazy. Well, in good news, Goldman Sachs has announced Q3 net revenues, 15.18 billion. Let's ring the gong.

• 1:58:43Jordi Hays?

  There we go. I love to see it.

• 1:58:46John Coogan?

  And if you want to get in on the action, whether you're long or you're short, head over to public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions.

• 1:58:57Jordi Hays?

  I think more startups should just post a picture of their net revenues like this.

• 1:59:02John Coogan?

  This is amazing.

• 1:59:02Jordi Hays?

  A picture that just says fifteen point one eight billion.

• 1:59:05John Coogan?

  It is amazing. This came from the official Goldman Sachs account. It's pretty, pretty sweet. Anyway.

• 1:59:12Jordi Hays?

  That picture, that, that video of the dinosaur reminded me yesterday.

• 1:59:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:59:16Jordi Hays?

  One of our nannies did something cool. They took a, a video of our, of our actual backyard and then they used Sora to make an animated video of one of my son's like toy dragons that flew into the backyard and landed.

• 1:59:32John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:59:32Jordi Hays?

  And of course, he absolutely loved it. He was like freaking out. There's like a dragon in the backyard or whatever. And I was just thinking, my immediate thought of this is amazing, but at the same time, like, is it good that my, like, three and a half year old, like,

• 1:59:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:49Jordi Hays?

  thinks that a dragon was actually in the backyard?

• 1:59:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, you definitely have to say like, this is from the computer. It's like when you draw with a pen and paper. This is, you know, not real.

• 1:59:58Jordi Hays?

  Imaginary?

• 1:59:58John Coogan?

  This is imaginary.

• 2:00:00Jordi Hays?

  But does a three and a half year old actually have the ability?

• 2:00:02John Coogan?

  Eventually, they do process that, you know, they learn that, you know, cartoons exist and animation is not real. And so I think that you can, you can instill that over time. But we have our second guest of the show, Andrew Ross Sorkin, the author of 1929.

• 2:00:16Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 2:00:17John Coogan?

  Andrew, thank you so much for joining. Congratulations on the book and thank you so much for joining.

• 2:00:21Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Hey, thank you for having me. I was just checking my, um, my score on my eight sleep.

• 2:00:26John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 2:00:27Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  I was because of you guys. I'm a, I'm a big fan of Mateo's.

• 2:00:30John Coogan?

  Me too.

• 2:00:32Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  They've done an extraordinary job and, but I was going to tell you, I really did not do well last night.

• 2:00:37John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 2:00:37Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  At all.

• 2:00:38John Coogan?

  What'd you get?

• 2:00:39Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Forty-three.

• 2:00:40John Coogan?

  Forty-three?

• 2:00:41Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Forty-three last night.

• 2:00:42John Coogan?

  I got an eighty-four.

• 2:00:43Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  But my Oura ring, I don't know if you guys ever compare.

• 2:00:46John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:00:47Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  My Oura ring has me in the seventies.

• 2:00:49John Coogan?

  In the seventies, okay.

• 2:00:50Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  I don't know what to do, but I, sometimes I, do you ever turn the mattress off in the middle of the night?

• 2:00:56John Coogan?

  I.

• 2:00:56Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  And then turn it back on because it's too cold. So sometimes it gets too cold.

• 2:00:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:00Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  And then I need to get back to sleep. So I'm like, I gotta turn it back on.

• 2:01:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:01:03Jordi Hays?

  I think you gotta do a software update.

• 2:01:05John Coogan?

  Yeah. You gotta get on autopilot. I have noticed that if I.

• 2:01:08Jordi Hays?

  It's autopilot.

• 2:01:09John Coogan?

  Uh, occasionally I have a bunch of kids, if they wind up piling into the bed over time, I will bail, go to a different bed. And then the eighth sleep gets all confused because it's like, why is this four year old in here? How, how do we track how he sleeps?

• 2:01:21Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Crazy heartbeat, crazy heart. I've had that. My, my daughter slept in the bed.

• 2:01:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:25Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Crazy, like all of a sudden you're like, is there something wrong with me?

• 2:01:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. There are, there are limits to technology.

• 2:01:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think it's, it's, it's fair to not sleep that well right before a day like today for you.

• 2:01:36John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:01:36Jordi Hays?

  A day that, that, uh, you've been working towards for how many, how many?

• 2:01:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, how long?

• 2:01:41Jordi Hays?

  When we were hanging out off, off the air, you said this has been like a seven, was it a seven year?

• 2:01:45Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Seven or eight years, I think. End of sixteen, early seventeen is when I really sort of began, uh, down this road, right? Right about nineteen twenty nine. So, uh, here we are.

• 2:01:55John Coogan?

  So you predicted the AI bubble all the way back then and you said, I'm gonna drop the book right as everyone's talking about a new bubble.

• 2:02:01Jordi Hays?

  Bubbles popping and.

• 2:02:03Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  No, now, to be honest with you, and I, it's actually funny that the book is coming out now.

• 2:02:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:07Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  I thought I was writing a story about the past and the truth is, it is a story about nineteen twenty nine and all of the shenanigans and crazy things. And I just really wanted to write a sort of cinematic, uh, character driven narrative of that time. I always loved books like Barbarians at the Gate and Den of Thieves and things like that. And nobody had really written a book about twenty nine like that. I had gone on this wild vacation years ago where I downloaded a million books about twenty nine. There's some really good ones, but no one told you like who the people were and what were they saying to each other?

• 2:02:35Jordi Hays?

  It's all about the people.

• 2:02:36Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  And then I found some, and then I found these transcripts and, and, uh, depositions and all sorts of things. I said, okay, maybe I could do this. But as I was working on it, it was weird because eerily, there were things that were clearly happening in the twenties that all of a sudden, I, you know, I'd seen the headlines today and I go, oh, okay, tariffs, like that's a thing.

• 2:02:56John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:02:56Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Uh, you're seeing some of these circular deals, that's a thing.

• 2:02:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:03:00Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Like, uh, there was a whole bunch of, I mean, some of the stuff that's going on with meme coins.

• 2:03:04John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:03:05Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  That's a thing. So, yeah, uh, it gets. It's a little nerve wracking, but I don't think we're going off the cliff just yet, I hope.

• 2:03:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, we know who the characters are today, but I'd love to know who were some of the key characters that stuck out to you that you identified, like you want to draw extra focus towards this particular person. I mean Churchill sticks out, but who else? Or maybe you could tell me the story of like how you thought to integrate Churchill into the story, and then we can talk about some of the other characters that stuck out to you.

• 2:03:36Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Well, Churchill was just almost an accident. I didn't realize Churchill happened to be in New York, literally, the week that the crash was taking place. He'd actually been down on the stock exchange.

• 2:03:46John Coogan?

  What did he know?

• 2:03:47Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  And there was a big dinner that was taking place the night of the crash with every major banker, and frankly, every major character in this book was all going to dinner with him. And I thought, okay, so now I gotta figure out everything about that because I gotta set that dinner up and really understand. He was, by the way, in this in New York because he needed money. He also loved the stock market. He was getting loans like crazy. He had totally got the bug. He was investing and he also, as you might imagine, lost. But really, the big characters in this book, a guy named Charlie Mitchell, who really was probably the, he was almost like the Jamie Dimon of his time, maybe more like Michael Milken in certain ways. But I mean, he was super famous. He was like on the cover of magazines. This

• 2:04:29Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  was also a period where all of these guys also became celebrities for the first time. That happened in the 1920s when, you know, Time Magazine would put these guys on the cover the same way they'd put Babe Ruth and Charles Lindbergh on the cover. So sort of like what we see now, you know, whether you Sam Altman or Elon Musk or whatever, that really, that whole kind of celebrity CEO, that started then. And this guy, Charlie Mitchell, ran a bank called National City, becomes Citigroup. If you're a New Yorker, he lived, by the way, on Fifth Avenue between 74th and 75th, which is where the French consulate is now. So that there's a beautiful building. That was his house. I mean, like, these guys lived like kings back then. And he really invented modern credit in terms of lending

• 2:05:14Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  it to people to go speculate, or not, I shouldn't say speculate, but invest. And ultimately, a lot of people speculated with it, but.

• 2:05:20John Coogan?

  Including Winston Churchill himself?

• 2:05:23Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Including Winston Churchill himself. Uh, by the way, he, he was staying at the Plaza Hotel, Winston Churchill. There, a brokerage house had opened, EF Hutton had opened inside the Plaza. I mean, these, these brokerage houses were opening up like, like Starbucks on the corner of every street. And you could go in and you put down a dollar, they loan you $10. I mean, like virtually sight unseen and there was no prospectuses, uh, or anything like, there's no SEC, no nothing. So at best you get like a leaflet.

• 2:05:50John Coogan?

  But I mean, 10x leverage now, that's low. I mean, I see people with 50, 100x leverage.

• 2:05:57John Coogan?

  We, we learned our lesson, go bigger.

• 2:06:00Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  So that, so, so Mitchell was really sort of the, at, at the edge of that and really building that. And the other character that really drove me to even write this book was you had Charlie Mitchell on one side. And then you had a guy who you probably know, Carter Glass. Uh, Glass Steagall, which is a bill in, in 1933 that gets put together to break up the banks. But, um, Carter Glass was a senator in Virginia who was like the Elizabeth Warren of his time.

• 2:06:25John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:06:26Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Rail about this thing called Mitchellism, how he thought Mitchell and Wall Street were going to ruin America. And speculation was going to go rampant and someone had to stop these guys. And it's really a, a bit of a story of the clash of these two, uh, remarkable figures. And then there's so many other sort of fascinating entrepreneurs, uh, along the way. A guy named Billy Durant, a guy named John Raskov. John Raskov is Elon Musk. I mean, I gotta tell you, uh, John Raskov, uh, created credit at General Motors, uh, became a, a amazing investor. Then takes all of his winnings, decides to get into politics, a little Elon like.

• 2:07:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:04Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Decides to, uh, back Al Smith against President Hoover. By the way, loses, then decides to spend his money to almost undermine Hoover's reputation. Hoover has a terrible reputation. I actually think John Raskov had this secret campaign going that gets exposed. Um, that really I think did a, did a whole number on Hoover. And then. He creates what was then probably like the SpaceX of America. He builds the Empire State Building. So he also has thirteen, he has thirteen children, so.

• 2:07:33John Coogan?

  There's a lot of similarities there.

• 2:07:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's so, I mean, yeah, as you get into this, it's just incredible proof that products and and technology changes and people have just seemingly don't at all. It's just the same kind of behaviors over and over.

• 2:07:52Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  But the truth is, and this is the part that I'm always grappling with, and I know you guys spend a lot of time with these amazing startup founders and entrepreneurs. You need some speculation in the system. Like, we always say speculation is a dirty word or a bad word, but, you know, the original investors in SpaceX or in Tesla probably felt the whole thing was insane. We're speculating, and you need some of that. You really do. And so the question is like, how do you create a line where, you know, you have enough of that to create that innovation, but it doesn't go, you know, totally parabolic and out of control?

• 2:08:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, it feels like the answer is probably like you can't have some sort of systemic risk that just brings down the whole thing, right? And I want to know about the reaction to 1929. I mean, you mentioned Glass-Steagall, that's four years post-crash.

• 2:08:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what were like the?

• 2:08:43John Coogan?

  The tools in the tool chest.

• 2:08:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and also the key, the key takeaways, like, hey, like, some of the speculation was fine, maybe that's, that can drive industries forward, but let's not do that again.

• 2:08:55Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  So I think a couple of things. First of all, leverage to me, and I wrote about this in Too Big to Fail in 2008, leverage is to me like the match that lights the fire every time. When you have too much leverage in the system, that is, that is the problem. You can actually have a lot of crazy things happening, but it's, it's the leverage that really exacerbates it and is the accelerant. So I think you have to watch for that. I think politically, interestingly, you know, we talk right now about the Federal Reserve and Fed independence and things like that. Back then, the Fed knew that there was a problem with speculation, and they didn't really do anything about it or enough about it, partially because they were worried about the politics. They were worried because they were such a new institution, they were born in 1913,

• 2:09:38Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  that, you know, not just they'd get hauled in front of Congress, but maybe they, you know, the Fed would effectively disappear. And then, once the crash happened, instead of flooding the money, flooding the system with money, the way Ben Bernanke did, who by the way, learned that because of the Great Depression and studying that when he was at Princeton for his PhD. We, there was almost like, um, no, pullback, nobody, nobody was flooding the system with money, everybody was in this, you know, crouched position, but you almost have to do the politically unpopular thing and flood the system with money. Then you had a whole series of other dominoes, you know, you had Smoot-Hawley, which was this tariffs, 1930, tariffs happened. Global trade drops by 60% as a result of that. Hoover's trying to raise taxes at this time.

• 2:10:21Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  That's the worst thing to do in a moment when the economy is faltering. So, I think there's so many different things, and then, setting the, setting up the SEC was super important because so much of what was messing up the market was, in truth, manipulation that wasn't really illegal at the time. So, talk about insider trading, there were groups of people, they called them investment pools, and in fact, I would say it's sort of similar to what goes on with some of the meme stocks, where people have like Telegram groups.

• 2:10:47Jordi Hays?

  Retail armies.

• 2:10:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, Reddit threads.

• 2:10:49Jordi Hays?

  These were the original retail armies.

• 2:10:51Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  These were the original retail armies, but they were typically the wealthy, so it was the elite doing this, this wasn't a democratized version.

• 2:10:58John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:10:58Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  And they had it all set up, and they, it would almost be like actors down on the floor of the exchange, saying, you know, I'm going up for a hundred, you two hundred. And it was sort of adly open, like, some people knew that there were pools in, like, for the next two weeks, there might be a pool in a, in a stock. And so then, other people would try to jump on the train and hopefully try to jump off the train before the rug got pulled.

• 2:11:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:19Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  But, obviously didn't happen.

• 2:11:21Jordi Hays?

  Who was on the, the right side of history?

• 2:11:25Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  The right side of history.

• 2:11:27Jordi Hays?

  Like, as in, as in, right now, right now, everyone's calling it a bubble, right? So, and presumably that's so that they can go back and quote, you know, two years from now, they can see like, look, I called it, right? And there's actually some, in 2021, there's an iconic post from Keith Raboy, where he basically called the top to the actual day. And so there's a lot of incentive to call the top and get kind of the aura of having that insight at the right moment, or maybe just getting lucky. But I'm curious if anybody, you know, pre 1929 was basically saying like...

• 2:12:05Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Two people. So there was a guy named Roger Babson, if you know Babson University, by the way, he founded it, and he created what was called the Babson Break. It happened in September of 29, and he had been, but he had been out, so this was a little bit like, you know, the clock strikes midnight, you know, it is gonna get there eventually. He was out there for like a year or two or three before saying the whole thing was gonna come undone. So, that's one Cassandra. Charles Merrill of Merrill Lynch, he was out there in 28, saying there's a problem. And then I would say the big winner was a guy named Jesse Livermore. Jesse Livermore was a short seller who made probably like about a hundred million dollars. He's the most interesting character.

• 2:12:47Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  I mean, you'll, if you get into this book, it's just fascinating all the things that were going on with him. But he was a real trader. By the way, he lost most of that money a couple of years later. He made some of it back, lost some back, and then, in truth, ended up killing himself up on Fifth Avenue at Sherry Netherland in the cloakroom. Literally went in there in 1940 and shot himself in the head. So, you know, hard, hard to say. The one thing that's interesting though about, about, no, but about being a Cassandra is interesting. So Charles Merrill was out there in 28 saying, "Don't invest." And he was right and he was wrong. I mean, he was right in that obviously the depression took a really long time. So he actually probably was righter than most. But, and this is the question for most investors.

• 2:13:31Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  The market between the beginning of 28 and September of 29 was up 90%. So if you had not been in the market during that time, you would have not participated in those ups. And so that's the question, you know, I was like, I was talking to Paul Tudor Jones about a week ago. And he said, I was asking him this question about bubbles. He said, I think we're in maybe like October 1999 right now. And I said, oh, that's interesting. Okay, 99. And he said, but there's still, if you said, if you remember October 99, there was still a 40% upside. Yeah, over six months. So you gotta know when to get on and off the train. And that's the hard part.

• 2:14:09John Coogan?

  Yeah. How do you think about tariffs then versus now? Because it feels like the narrative at least is that there's the, a bubble is inflating generally. But also we're seeing high interest rates tariffs. There's a lot of tools in the tool chest that could kind of come down if there was a sell off. And I'm, but it sounds like in 1929, a lot of this stuff happened after the fact. Like the, the government moved too late. What was the mood around tariffs and, and just anything that was done beforehand? That was a potential mitigator, like could it have possibly been worse?

• 2:14:44Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Well, you'll laugh because just like the past, call it six or eight months. You know, all of these economists were writing these letters, open letters in the paper, papers to Hoover saying, please don't do the tariffs. We beg you not to do the tariffs. The CEOs of the banks were all going to visit him in the White House. And he had run on tariffs because he, he was trying to get farmers to vote for him. When he was campaigning in 28, so he thought this was like a, a pledge that he had made that he had to follow through on. And that was a big part of what was going on. Obviously, similarly, you know, like a thousand economists write letters to Trump saying, please don't do this. The distinction I think today is back then it wasn't across the board tariff.

• 2:15:28Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  It was, there weren't these bilateral deals. And so maybe you could argue today, these one-off, you know, individual deals are better deals. In fact, one of the ways they tried to fix what happened after Smoot-Hawley was in 1934, they gave the President of the United States the authority, which is what President Trump is using today, to make these sort of bilateral deals. So you could, you could argue maybe it's more hopeful because there's a little bit more control today than what was happening then, which was just sort of broad based.

• 2:15:57Jordi Hays?

  So you said there were retail armies, meme coins, circular deals back then. Was there buy the dip culture? Did that exist? Anybody, anybody in September, anybody in September that was just like, nah, I'm, I'm still long.

• 2:16:13Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Yeah, no, I don't think they, I don't think they used the phrase buy the dip, but there was definitely a lot of people who thought, you know, this can thing can only go up. And this was really the first time that people ever saw the market, right? So they were sort of not used to the ups and downs.

• 2:16:27Jordi Hays?

  Just up only.

• 2:16:29Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Up only. And by the end of it, I mean, you know, I don't know if you remember, you could, you could, there's pictures in the book, but you've seen the pictures online. You know, all of those pictures of people who'd be like standing outside the New York Stock Exchange during the crash, like thousands of people in the street. The reason they had all come down there was because when they were up at the brokerages, they couldn't even find out what was happening to their stocks. Uh, cause everything was out of, out of, talk about time and technology. They didn't know what, um, you know, the, the stocks on the board would be three, four hours behind. And so that was a huge thing in terms of buying the dip. I don't, I think they were just so scared because they didn't even, they didn't even know. It'd be like being at a, a baseball game and, you know, you'd be in the eighth inning, but you'd be betting on what was happening in the third inning.

• 2:17:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:15Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  And not know what was really going on.

• 2:17:17John Coogan?

  How, how do you think about that canary in the coal mine of the, of the retail trader? There's always this apocryphal probably story from 1929 of like, I knew it was time to sell when the, the person who was shine my shoes is giving me stock tips. Uh, how real was the, are those anecdotes from what you're, what you found in your research? And then how real is it throughout time?

• 2:17:41Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  You know, I think it's not a bad signal, but I think you gotta take a lot of signals together. Um, John Kennedy, uh, Kennedy was the one who, who tells that story, uh, about the shoe shine boy. And I remember people, you know, talking in the, in the dot com boom about, you know, getting in the back of a taxi cab and getting told, you know, buy some shares of Lycos or whatever it is. So like that happened. I remember that, but I don't know if that's, you know, when it be, is it, is it the, when it becomes such a part of culture. But now with social media and by the way, all the amazing things you guys are doing, I feel like the exposure, I got 15 year old boys who are twins. And they're so exposed to this stuff. Just, and I don't think that they're. Because I don't think that's because their dad. I think that's just like the culture.

• 2:18:25Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  And so I think it'd be harder to figure out today. It sort of look at that as the signal.

• 2:18:29John Coogan?

  We'll tell them to leverage.

• 2:18:31Jordi Hays?

  It feels like it's been a very unreliable signal, at least over the last two years, when it feels like I've had people.

• 2:18:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's been sort of constant.

• 2:18:41Jordi Hays?

  It certainly maybe in 2021, if the Uber driver had like a crypto wallet pulled up, that was maybe a signal. But in general, it's like there's so little friction to investing. It's so much so a part of American culture now that it doesn't doesn't feel, you know, it's lost.

• 2:18:56Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  I don't know. I feel like every Uber driver talks to me about Bitcoin now, but I was I was hearing it from people in like 15, 16.

• 2:19:03John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:19:04Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  I don't know.

• 2:19:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's been it's been kind of consistent. Take me through a little bit of the the actual research process for this. I imagine it's like one lit big, long chat GPT.

• 2:19:16Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  I wish chat GPT existed when I started this project and actually worked. Maybe my next book AI will be able to help me.

• 2:19:26Jordi Hays?

  But I mean, that's part of it. I'm assuming a lot of the sources that you use for this book are not in the in the in the data set at all, right?

• 2:19:34Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  They're no data.

• 2:19:35Jordi Hays?

  Physical manuscripts.

• 2:19:36Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  They're not. They're not scanned. It's it was wild. So what happened was I actually went to the reason I really went down the road is I go to this library at Harvard University. I happen to be there giving this speech and I'm looking through these documents and I found out that Thomas Lamont, who ran JP Morgan, his secretary was keeping transcripts, basically of his conversations with Hoover and Roosevelt. And I was like, oh, my God, this is amazing. I got I got to find more of this stuff. And the archivist said to me, you know what, Andrew, you're not going to be able to write the book you want to write. She had read Too Big to Fail, and I wanted that sort of granular detail where you're like in the room. And she said, there's not like three or four archives in the country you could just go to and just excavate. It doesn't exist. And so I think I took that as a personal challenge, really, and ended up going around the country.

• 2:20:23Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  It was almost like putting puzzle pieces together, finding depositions and transcripts. I got access for the first time to the Federal Reserve Board minutes. From twenty nine in New York, they'd never been made public. So that really created sort of like an undergirding. I got this memoir that had never been published. And a whole bunch of of other things that that really sort of helped me create the story. And sort of a technology thing, mother of invention, it wasn't chat G P T. But during the pandemic, I got stuck. All of a sudden, I couldn't get into libraries. I was so and the only people could get in were students sometimes who had like a dissertation that they needed to do.

• 2:21:01Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  So I would find the librarians to find me students and I would pay them by the hour and I would say, go in there. Find box one fifty two and take a picture with your phone of every single page and Dropbox it to me. And so I did, I did, it was actually a very helpful, helpful thing. And then I will say one thing about chat G P T to its great credit. It was too sad because it was too late for me, too late for me. At the bitter end of this project, I'm doing the fact checking. I had a handwritten diary of a guy who was on the board of the Fed. And I only was able to read like two pages of it the whole time. I had given it to handwriting specialists and things. Nobody knew what to say.

• 2:21:39Jordi Hays?

  Because you just couldn't understand, you you could see the words, but you just didn't know what they.

• 2:21:43Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Yeah, I mean, it was terrible handwriting. Chicken scratch to me. So I'm doing the fact checking and I think and I had as a P D F because I had taken pictures of the pages. And so I don't know what happened to me. I just said, you know what? Screw it. I'm just gonna put it in chat G P T. Maybe it can read it. And it read it.

• 2:21:59John Coogan?

  Wow. Decipher the scrolls.

• 2:22:03Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  It wasn't perfect at all, but I was like, oh, yeah, that is what he's trying to say. Oh, and that matches that. And that. So I do wish that in some ways I had access to A I because I think that, I don't know, I don't think the story would have been totally different, but I maybe some things would have come together in a different way.

• 2:22:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:19Jordi Hays?

  Do you think part of why the crash was so bad was just the lack of high quality, real time data that the various players had to make decisions on? It feels like it feels like you would have just been, if you're just wildly confused about what's going on and you have people banging on your office door telling you one thing and it it just feels like it's hard to actually create a plan if you don't know how bad the damage is, how widespread it is, who the different players are. I'm sure people were actively trying to cover up, you know, you know, bad things that they'd been doing as well, right? That kind of thing tends to happen.

• 2:22:53Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  So two things, the guy Charlie Mitchell that I told you about before, his bank almost goes under because the bank bought, the bank was trying to buy back its own shares during all this, and it bought back too many, and it couldn't afford to buy them. And so, he didn't want anyone to know. So he actually goes and gets a loan, personal loan, to buy the shares off the bank.

• 2:23:15John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:23:15Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  So, I mean, it was wild. And then Jesse Livermore, this trader I was telling you about, because he didn't, because he was so worried about the issue of, of having bad information, he paid for his own people to be on the floor, so that then they would call him. It was like Citadel, placing, you know, their computers next to the exchange. He would place his people on the floor.

• 2:23:36John Coogan?

  That's you in the archive during COVID. You're the same, you're doing the same thing.

• 2:23:40Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Real-time information, exactly.

• 2:23:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's the same thing.

• 2:23:43Jordi Hays?

  Did they have revenue backlogs back then?

• 2:23:45Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  That I don't know about.

• 2:23:49John Coogan?

  Well, can you talk a little bit more about your process? I mean, obviously, you're incredibly busy. How do you get in the flow state to actually write a book? Do you write one chapter at a time, kind of outline, front to back revisions? Like, talk about your process as an author.

• 2:24:04Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  So, I'm one of those writers, and this is not good, I don't think. I really can't write one sentence. So, let me say it this way. I don't really like to write the second sentence less the first sentence I'm happy with. I'm one of those people who, there's some people who splatter on the page, meaning they sort of, they sort of throw everything down, and then they think they're gonna fix it. I sort of have a view that whatever gets sort of put on the page is sort of anchored in a way, and so, I can only upgrade it, maybe one letter grade. So if it goes down as a B, I can edit it and make it an A. But if I just splatter it down as a C, it's never gonna be better than a B, unless I start over again. So, that's a little bit of a thing for me. You know, this project went

• 2:24:48Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  on for so long that I would write lots of little parts of it, little scenes, vignettes. And so I had these almost like puzzle pieces, and then it was about connecting them. I think the hardest part for me, just given the, you know, the things I'm doing with, with The New York Times and CNBC and my Dealbook stuff, is For flow state, I can't, my wife would sometimes say, oh, you have half hour, forty five minutes. You want to go work, you can go work on the book now or whatever. And unless I really had two hours.

• 2:25:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:18Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  I couldn't really do it because the first half hour, forty minutes, I like almost had to rev up.

• 2:25:22John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:25:23Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  So that's a thing. That's a real, I think in the, I don't know, in the creative world or what, it's, I think you do need to get into that flow state and, and that's hard and, you know, I've got three kids and, um, sometimes I actually try to write with them, like, I mean, like hang out with them and have them around. And that's, that can work for me sometimes, but I have to sort of like really get super, super dialed in.

• 2:25:45John Coogan?

  What were, what was the nineteen twenty nine of nineteen twenty nine? Like what were folks in nineteen twenty nine looking back to and being like, this is just like.

• 2:25:54Jordi Hays?

  We've seen this before. History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes.

• 2:25:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Like, what were they referencing?

• 2:26:02Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  It's such a great question because the truth is they weren't.

• 2:26:05John Coogan?

  They weren't.

• 2:26:05Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  For the most part, they really, because I think that this was such a first.

• 2:26:08John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:26:08Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  I, I really think it was, that the twenty nine was such a first in terms of that break. Maybe what they would say, so there was a break in the market in the early twenties, twenty and twenty one, there was a break.

• 2:26:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:18Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Uh, that was, that was substantial, but most people hadn't experienced it really because again, it wasn't till nineteen nineteen that people were even started to think about taking on debt or, or anything like that in the country to, to then go to trade. It was really a function of General Motors, by the way. General Motors started, uh, loaning money to people to buy cars. That was, it was a moral sin in America prior to that really to, to take on credit. Like that was a very grubby thing to do.

• 2:26:45John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:26:45Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Um, before that.

• 2:26:47John Coogan?

  Have you, have you looked into tulip mania at all? It's, it's like referenced so often and then I've heard.

• 2:26:52Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Now it is.

• 2:26:53John Coogan?

  Stories about, yeah, now it is.

• 2:26:54Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  Back then they didn't. Back then they were not doing the tulip thing.

• 2:26:57John Coogan?

  I've heard that it's like, it was actually very short. It was very isolated. It was, it was not global contagion and maybe some of it was not even as big as, it might've just been somebody wrote down an extra zero in their accounting that day or for whatever reason. Um, but yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a fascinating story that now has just grown and grown in infamy, but maybe actually wasn't as big as something like nineteen twenty nine, nineteen twenty nine that deserves a huge book.

• 2:27:20Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  The next, maybe that's a slim volume.

• 2:27:22John Coogan?

  Maybe, yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe.

• 2:27:24Jordi Hays?

  How do you do three hours of live television a day?

• 2:27:28Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  I don't know, how do you use your three hours? By the way, I just want to tell you, I really admire what you guys do. I didn't even get to say this.

• 2:27:33John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:27:34Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  We've now gotten a chance to meet each other a couple of times, and it's just a joy to be on with you. I think what you're doing is amazing.

• 2:27:40John Coogan?

  Thank you.

• 2:27:40Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  And it's really, really cool to see your success. I was so thrilled to see that piece in the New York Times over the weekend.

• 2:27:45John Coogan?

  I appreciate it.

• 2:27:46Jordi Hays?

  Well, you're a hero to us.

• 2:27:47John Coogan?

  You're an absolute hero.

• 2:27:48Jordi Hays?

  And my favorite, we've said this line on the show before, but when we got to hang out in New York a few months back, you said, uh, said something to the effect of, "I do TV on my way to work." And hearing about your process with this book, it's clear that you're an absolute workhorse.

• 2:28:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, when are you guys publishing a massive, extremely well researched book? Because like, it seems like this three hours of TV is really taking out of you guys, and it is. But hopefully, we will learn and develop the muscle memory and the flow state and whatnot. Uh, there's a lot to learn. This is a long game. We've learned that. So, thank you so much.

• 2:28:20Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  You guys are doing it. You guys are doing it.

• 2:28:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's an honor to have you on the show.

• 2:28:22John Coogan?

  Yes, you're welcome.

• 2:28:23Jordi Hays?

  I cannot wait to get into the book. We'll have to, we'll be pulling more.

• 2:28:26Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  I'm just sad that I'm not in person and there's no gong. I meant in a hat, Zach.

• 2:28:29Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong, hit that gong for Andrew. One of the most well-deserved that we've had in a while.

• 2:28:37John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for stopping by.

• 2:28:38Jordi Hays?

  Let's do this again soon and have fun on, have fun on the book tour. I feel like you gave us the perfect, the perfect amount.

• 2:28:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:28:45Jordi Hays?

  Uh, like a little teaser, a trailer. We still need to get into it.

• 2:28:49Andrew Ross Sorkin?

  It's great to see.

• 2:28:49John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for stopping by.

• 2:28:50Jordi Hays?

  You're the man.

• 2:28:51John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:28:51Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:28:52John Coogan?

  And if you're watching or listening, please go pick up the book, 1929. Uh, it's available now. You can get it on Audible. You can leave it five stars. Leave a review. Leave an ad in the review. I think maybe you can technically do that.

• 2:29:05Jordi Hays?

  You'll probably get banned.

• 2:29:07John Coogan?

  Leave an ad for Squawk Box. Leave an ad for Deal Book.

• 2:29:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was, uh,

• 2:29:11John Coogan?

  To help out.

• 2:29:12Jordi Hays?

  I, I wanted so badly to put the Audible on last night as I was falling asleep, but I would have had to wait a few more hours, but, uh, that's gonna be my night.

• 2:29:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think the Audible's probably, uh, 40 hours long or something. So, you listen to it at 10x.

• 2:29:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so consider, consider taking off next week and just, and just

• 2:29:30John Coogan?

  I think

• 2:29:31Jordi Hays?

  walking and, and listening to 1929.

• 2:29:33John Coogan?

  No, this is gonna be a fantastic book to, uh, to dig into. Uh, Tyler wants this copy.

• 2:29:38Jordi Hays?

  It's so cool, it's so cool because there would have been a way to, Andrew could have done this book

• 2:29:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:42Jordi Hays?

  in probably a year, two years.

• 2:29:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:45Jordi Hays?

  He could have sold a ton of copies

• 2:29:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:29:47Jordi Hays?

  by just using, he, he would have made, it would have been entertaining. But the fact that he went and spent seven years like actually doing it properly, even though, even like he just really cares about fundamentally creating a great product.

• 2:30:02John Coogan?

  Well, we have another offer, another author joining us in the TBPN Ultra Dome. Brian Potter is in the Restream waiting room. He's the author of Origins of Efficiency. Thank you so much for joining us. We love Stripe Press. We love Stripe. We had Privey on. We had Dorek Hesh on. We've always enjoyed Stripe Press's books and we're, it's a pleasure to meet you. How are you doing?

• 2:30:25Speaker 04

  I'm good. Thank you guys for having me on.

• 2:30:28John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining. Would you mind kicking us off with an introduction on yourself and the book? And we can go into a bunch of questions about it, but I'd love to just kind of get a little bit of background for everyone on your journey to writing this book.

• 2:30:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, so my, I am a Senior Infrastructure Fellow. I work for the Institute for Progress, which is like a pro-progress think tank. I'm best known, to the extent that I'm known, for writing this newsletter called Construction Physics, which is about buildings and infrastructure and how to get stuff built in the US. And my background, I might, you know, before I did this, I worked in the construction industry. I worked as a structural engineer for about 15 years, like designing buildings and parking garages and water treatment plants and stuff like that. And the industry always seemed like extremely inefficient to me. Like, you know, everything is, you know, so labor intensive, it takes so long, you know, we're doing this similar work over and over and over again. It should be much more efficient, should

• 2:31:28Speaker 04

  all be done in factories, blah, blah, blah. And then in 2018, I had the chance to join this like big, exciting construction startup called Katera that had raised, this was back when SoftBank was...

• 2:31:40John Coogan?

  I remember Katera.

• 2:31:41Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:31:42Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for Masa.

• 2:31:43John Coogan?

  It was kind of a precursor. I think Hadrian was drawing from it now. Yeah, it was, it was the like machine shop almost, like...

• 2:31:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was like, you know, it was this idea is like, you know, construction's inefficient because it's not done in factories, right? So we're going to into factory-based construction. It was run by all these former electronics manufacturing guys. So like, not like software guys that, you know, that like, oh, I worked at Amazon, so I know how to do anything, right? It was like people who knew about... Manufacturing and they were going to sort of bring that knowledge to like the construction industry, right? So they raised a huge amount of money, got a huge check from SoftBank, raised like two, three billion dollars in venture capital. And it all went sideways, right? It all, it all went wrong and they, they burned through it in about three years and declared bankruptcy. And there were various, yeah, reasons for that.

• 2:32:35Jordi Hays?

  At what point did you, at what point did you leave?

• 2:32:38Speaker 04

  Uh, I was there about, until about a year, uh, before they went bankrupt. So I was there.

• 2:32:45Jordi Hays?

  Did you see the writing on the wall?

• 2:32:48Speaker 04

  Yeah. I, when I was there, I was saying, it was like, my, my, but my time there was like a year and a half of ups and then a year of downs. And then after about the sixth round of layoffs, I, I, with, you know, after our engineering team got cut by like about 90%, I was like, mm, need to, time to bounce.

• 2:33:06Jordi Hays?

  Saw yourself out.

• 2:33:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. But I wanted to understand, you know, why things had gone so wrong. Cause part of it is just, you know, startups are hard. Uh, building startups that are, you know, moving physical things around is, is very hard. There's very operation, various operational missteps or, or whatever. Um, but also I kind of came to believe that sort of the thesis that they had built the company around was kind of either wrong or just like not complete enough, like missing very large chunks of it. Cause people had tried to do similar things that Katera had done many, many times, right? If you go back over history, uh, there's like a huge graveyard of companies of like, oh, you know, light bulb will just, will build buildings and factories and be so much cheaper.

• 2:33:50Speaker 04

  And I'll be able to make a huge amount of money. I'll be the Henry Ford of housing. And this, it just has never worked, right? There's like this, people have tried this over and over and over again, and not been able to succeed.

• 2:33:58Jordi Hays?

  Will it work? Because I have an opportunity to invest. I'm a lucky, I have a lucky opportunity. No, no, I, I, I actually did meet, meet a company that's, uh, taking, taking another crack at this. Uh, do you think it'll ever work?

• 2:34:11Speaker 04

  I, I do think it will work, but again, I, you need to under, I wanted to understand why specifically it had been so hard in the past and why Katera and so many other companies had failed and what specifically.

• 2:34:23Speaker 04

  You know, would need to be true for it to succeed in the future. So it was it basically that the where I ended up was like, I need to understand what specifically makes it possible for an industry to get like more efficient over time and what specifically is happening, what when that is is occurring and what is what sort of can prevent those things from happening. And once I understand those mechanics, I will be, you know, I will know what specifically would need to be true for some for some, you know, the construction industry or any industry to sort of improve over time. And so that was sort of the genesis of the book. It's like, what specifically does it take for some process to get more efficient?

• 2:35:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, it feels like the entire book is kind of an abstraction on top of just this idea of like learning the learning curve. We've seen this in semiconductors. Everyone who follows like the AI boom is acutely aware of the learning curve that happened at TSMC. But you kind of draw a couple other historical analogies. What stuck out to you is like particularly great examples of this efficiency in in in like going successfully and us actually driving down the cost. And then what were the commonalities between that? And and like, what do they all have in common, basically?

• 2:35:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, so I kind of went through and I looked at like, you know, dozens and dozens and dozens of different industries and seeing, you know, how they had improved their operations over time and what specifically was was changing in them when that was happening and sort of, you know, and I looked at like industrial improvement systems, right? So like lean manufacturing and like value engineering and all the statistical process control and all these other things that like, you know, specific ways you could try to make something more efficient. And I kind of ultimately boiled all that down to like this, this, you know, a list of like a handful of things that you had to do to try to make some process more efficient. If you could do any one of those things, you could kind of make it more efficient. And if you couldn't do those things, those paths were blocked. As it turns out, they are

• 2:36:20Speaker 04

  in the construction industry, you're you can't make your process more efficient and it just gets more and more and more expensive over time. And so, yeah, I looked at like a lot of different industries. I go really into, you know, Henry Ford and how he sort of dropped the cost of the Model T. I look at sort of the evolution of like nail manufacturing, which is in the in the sort of the 19th century, go back even farther, and how they changed the technology to make over time to make nails, which started out like hand forged nails, like a blacksmith, like hammer and steel. And they found a way to, you know, machines that could sort of Emulate that process and they've replaced those machines with even better machines and so on. So there's like dozens and dozens and dozens of examples in the book of sort

• 2:37:01Speaker 04

  of specific things that have gotten cheaper over time and the lessons that we can kind of learn from those things.

• 2:37:07John Coogan?

  How naive is it to just say, what's remained stubbornly high cost wise, housing, medicine, education, what do those have in common, regulation, how naive is it to just throw regulation is the problem at those particular industries?

• 2:37:25Speaker 04

  That's a big part of it for sure. I mean, the problem is that like everything has gotten more regulated, right? Like manufacturing included. So it's like, that's like part of the puzzle, but it doesn't really tell you the whole thing. Cause even in, you know, the problem, you know, to take it back to construction, the problem of like construction productivity and not getting cheaper to build stuff is really something you kind of see around the world. You like, I have a graph in there that's like, construction costs in like a variety of different countries and they all kind of this, you know, scary line of going up and to the right.

• 2:37:58John Coogan?

  Even the countries without building codes and onerous.

• 2:38:01Speaker 04

  Or, you know, like less labor, yeah, or like different regulatory regimes and stuff. And there's certainly places that like do better than the US in various things, like in various ways of building the US is like very far from the efficient frontier. But we have a very hard time of like pushing that efficient frontier forward. So like regulation is like a big part of it, but that's kind of one of those sort of things, I think, a takeaways from the book is that it's not just regulation. Like you could have all the, you know, remove all the regulation you wanted and you'd still run into these sort of various physical constraints and market constraints that prevent these sort of efficiency improvements in some cases.

• 2:38:39John Coogan?

  How are you thinking about energy in America? We've, we've, we've gone through this AI boom now where we've scaled up the existing capacity of data centers, we're building new data centers, and it feels like the last link in the chain is can we build 100 nuclear reactors in America in 2030 to stay on track with like the most aggressive projections? Is there anything unique about, obviously, energy production is a construction problem, but is there anything unique that you found in the energy industry that folks might be able to learn from?

• 2:39:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm well, you know, I write a lot about energy on the newsletter. I don't have a background in energy. So it is a lot of me like groping my way towards like some understanding of how this industry works. I'm a really big solar guy. Solar has like a really lot of nice properties that like makes it easy to sort of make efficiently at like very, very large scale. There's this really interesting paper. But basically it's like big graph of like the sorts of energy technologies that have become cheap and the sort of any technologies that are not to become cheap. And the ones that have become cheap are these sort of things that like you can make repetitively in very large volumes and you don't need like a lot of customization of.

• 2:39:53Speaker 04

  And so like solar panels, which are like you can make in like really, really, really, really enormous numbers. And you can kind of plot down wherever it doesn't need a lot of like site specific customization. Are kind of in this like very cheap quadrant and then something like a nuclear reactor. But you make in like much, much smaller numbers and like needs a lot of like specific design for the specific reactor that you're building. Is sort of in the much more expensive quadrant. And so solar and like the batteries, which like really complement them really nicely is like a really good way to sort of make this stuff really cheap. These cost curves have like gone like down like a lot. And there's like no sign that those are stopping anytime soon.

• 2:40:35Speaker 04

  And so I'm, you know, that's it, you know, those it's aligns with like so much of what we know about it, what it takes to sort of make something inexpensive that I kind of see that like biting off a very large chunk of the of the energy that we produce in the US, assuming, you know, take it back to regulation, assuming that sort of regulation interferences don't kind of get in the way.

• 2:40:56Jordi Hays?

  How often did you find capital being a constraint lead to more efficiency? I think every startup founder has a has like an example of a time when like maybe if they they threw you know, a hundred people at a problem, they would have gotten a different solution, but they only had a handful. And so they were able to create some novel, a more efficient way of doing something. Or we saw this with like deep seek and in having having potentially fewer chips and creating a more efficient architecture. Was that a common theme at all in in

• 2:41:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's interesting. I think there's kind of like two sides of it. One is that in some cases, like, a repeated theme of the book is that like scale is really, really very important. And if you can, the more you can make of something, the more opportunities you have to make that extensively. And often, scale is like very, very expensive, right? So like one of the story of like container shipping over time is a story of like needing really, really enormous investments to like build these big giant ships, which are like cheaper per container that they're transporting, but very expensive overall. And also like really, really big expensive terminals to sort of handle those ships. And so only like a certain number of like countries could like invest in these like giant terminals

• 2:42:18Speaker 04

  that were needed to sort of service these huge ships. And so, you know, costs of transporting these goods fell a lot, but like there was winners and losers in who sort of gained gain from this technology development. It was really the people that could afford to put the money into it to do it. But then on the other hand, you also see cases where kind of like you talked about with DeepSeek, people working under these constraints were able to come up with like really improved ways of doing something that were much cheaper and much better than what was, what came, what came before. So a kind of example of that would be like Toyota's manufacturing methods, which like Toyota Production System, which evolved into Lean Manufacturing. Those kind of were created in this environment

• 2:43:02Speaker 04

  where like they couldn't develop these like mass production methods that Ford had used because their tire market was so much smaller and it was so much more varied. They couldn't just make a million of a given model or whatever, that they had to find ways of like producing this stuff efficiently that didn't require this like massive capital investment, basically. And so that was sort of the genesis of that, those, those ideas. And so, yeah, I think there's definitely cases where, yeah, you need like a lot of investment to sort of find ways to make this cheaper. But then there's also cases where it's like also working under constraints of not very much investment has been important as well.

• 2:43:39Jordi Hays?

  Are you at all optimistic that this data center boom will teach a generation of people that you can build big things quickly and efficiently if you just basically put your mind to it? Because there's like a lot of- From an energy standpoint, just like, you know, if you look at what Elon has done with Colossus 2, he's basically doing the impossible. A lot of people would have like looked at that project and said, it's not possible. And so that sort of, it feels like that sort of mindset of like, we're just going to make it happen, is being applied to data center development. But then presumably those people could say, I'm going to build a bridge.

• 2:44:21Jordi Hays?

  And they can imply that same kind of approach elsewhere.

• 2:44:26Speaker 04

  I certainly hope so. We're certainly building like an enormous amount of this infrastructure. Like, it's really, really unprecedented. There's all these crazy stats, like, you know, data center spending is now exceeded like office building spending, or something like that, which is totally wild. I guess one thing that worries me is that historically, people have been like, you know, not really cared about data centers. They've been happy to just like, let them get built and the jurisdictions sort of collect the tax revenue for it and not really worry about it beyond that. As like, the buildout of them is like, going forward and there's like, more and more of these data centers and they're bigger and larger, you're really starting to see like, a grassroots movement

• 2:45:09Speaker 04

  of people like, you know, the NIMBYs sort of now being opposed to data centers in a way that they weren't before. So like, Virginia, which historically has like, been, you know, a major place where data centers get built and has basically been fine with them getting built there. Now you're starting to see like, residents oppose them more and more. And you're starting to see, you know, grassroots movements around in different states, springing up to oppose these things. So that worries me a little bit. And I hope the sort of forces of getting these things built and enthusiasm about building infrastructure are stronger than that. But, you know.

• 2:45:49Speaker 04

  It always seems like the NIMBY forces are quite strong, so hopefully they don't build momentum. They're OP.

• 2:45:56John Coogan?

  I have one last question. There's this post by Rune who's talking about Dan Wang's new book, and he says, "The general elite consensus now is that industrial process is a technology that lives in the heads of people." And he goes on to say that it was a mistake to let so much low-value industry be offshored due to the loss of tacit process capital. And I was just wondering what your thoughts were on this idea of industrial process knowledge, that there might be a few key people that actually know how to build something at scale, and just what the ratio, how steep is the power law of human capital when it comes to large-scale industrial manufacturing efforts?

• 2:46:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's dead on. I think that's absolutely very important. And I talk about that at various parts in the book, how it's often really hard to transfer like manufacturing or production technology from one place to another place, in part because it's hard to like pick up and lift these process knowledge that is just in the heads or like embedded in this web of relationships. And so it doesn't necessarily even exist in explicit form, right? It's just like, this is the system that turns out to work very well, and you can't just like recreate it because we don't essentially know how it came to be in the first place. And then, you know, we talked, you talked about a little bit of the learning curve earlier, and that's kind of this really similar idea where a lot of your improvements

• 2:47:20Speaker 04

  to some technology over time come from just like the factory floor and learning how to sort of do this better and better over time. But it's very coupled with actually physically doing the work. And so that's one thing that I, yeah, I think is really important is that oftentimes just technological progress is coupled to sort of this like process factory knowledge of actually having the experience doing things. One really fun sort of example of this is During the early days of the space race where the US was having like a really hard time building their rockets and there's a part where like, you know, because of various

• 2:48:01Speaker 04

  political things, the Navy was going to send up their rocket first. They were going to be like the first ones to sort of launch a US satellite into space. And Werner von Braun, who was the German rocket scientist who then had been brought over to the US and was working for the army, he goes to some like, you know, military leader and he says, "Look, you can tell these Navy guys, they can do whatever they want. They can take my rocket and they can paint Navy on the side of it and do whatever they want, but they need to use my rocket and not theirs because my rocket will work and their rocket won't." And then what ended up happening was they didn't listen to him and the Navy launched their rocket anyway and it didn't work. It blew up on pad. And then so finally they listened to Werner von Braun and just launched his rocket. And that's when we finally

• 2:48:46Speaker 04

  got a satellite into space using Werner von Braun's rocket. And then of course Werner von Braun was like a major force in the Apollo program as well. So it was like, you know, the German rocket knowledge that had accumulated during World War II was like very, very important in both the Soviet and the US. Their early rocket development efforts were basically built on this German knowledge that had been accumulated. So this process knowledge and like this, you know, expertise that gets embedded in the heads of these people working at the sort of forefront of technology is not easy to sort of recreate. I think it's very, very important.

• 2:49:23John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for stopping by the show. The book is Origins of Efficiency from Stripe Press. It's available now for purchase. Highly recommend picking it up.

• 2:49:31Jordi Hays?

  One click on Amazon.

• 2:49:32John Coogan?

  And thank you. Stripe checkout, hopefully.

• 2:49:34Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully.

• 2:49:36John Coogan?

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

• 2:49:38Speaker 04

  Thanks.

• 2:49:39John Coogan?

  Thank you so much. Really quickly, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise, and data to enable efficient, seamless ad buying across the globe. Speaking of Founder Mode, we have a founder in the Restream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TBP and UltraDome.

• 2:50:00Jordi Hays?

  There he is.

• 2:50:01John Coogan?

  How are you doing? Good to meet you.

• 2:50:03Speaker 06

  Hey, I'm doing great. How are you guys doing?

• 2:50:04John Coogan?

  We're doing fantastic.

• 2:50:05Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic.

• 2:50:06John Coogan?

  Kick us off with an introduction on yourself.

• 2:50:08Jordi Hays?

  Big, big news.

• 2:50:08John Coogan?

  The company, the news. We're excited.

• 2:50:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. I'm Harry Singh. I'm the founder and CEO of Flow Engineering. Flow is a collaborative development platform specifically built for next-generation hardware companies. Our customers design things like rockets, airplanes, cars, nuclear reactors, and they use Flow to design, build, test, and iterate massively faster than they can do today. Basically, the way to think about it is we're taking the last 30 years of software development practices, everything from agile to continuous integration, continuous testing, and we're bringing that to the design of massively complex hardware products. Our news today is that we raised our Series A with Sequoia Capital.

• 2:50:48Jordi Hays?

  How much? How much did you raise?

• 2:50:50Speaker 06

  Twenty-three million dollars.

• 2:50:53Speaker 06

  There we go.

• 2:50:54John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:50:57Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. I love that you started building hardware yourself and then figured out along the way, I gotta build SaaS. I gotta build SaaS for this.

• 2:51:08John Coogan?

  What are you replacing most of the time? Is it a homegrown system?

• 2:51:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, it sounds like, am I getting it right? You basically built, you built an internal tool for yourself initially while you guys were building rocket engines? And then realized like, hey, seems to be pretty valuable.

• 2:51:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. It's like a little story of the company. I'm a mechanical engineer. I became an engineer because I wanted to build machines that matters. Went into the industry, went to companies like BA Systems and BP, and just realized the fundamental approach to designing hardware was completely out of date. So the company started out as a hardware company, not a software company. We were called The Rocket Company. We built the world's fastest design consultancy for hybrid rocket engines. The best people in the world could go from requirements to detail design in 12 weeks. We could do it in two hours. And the reason we could do it in two hours is we built this internal platform for ourselves called Flow that massively integrated and accelerated the design process. And that's what became, has become Flow today.

• 2:52:02Jordi Hays?

  So are you, you're just simulating physics? Like, what is the actual, like, you're, you're, I imagine you're basically, you're building a workflow? And then you're able to, are you able to get a good read on if the, the, the process or the, the product will work without actually testing it in the real world? Or what does that look like?

• 2:52:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. So let me give you the one I want on like hardware development versus software development. In software development, we have Kanban boards and tickets and you build a spread, burn it down and you go for it. When you're designing something like a rocket or an airplane or a car or nuclear reactor, it's much more complex. The way that we fundamentally design and collaborate are using these things called requirements. Let's say you're building a rocket, you'll say, hey, I need to get this much payload to this delta, to this orbit. And then to do that, I need to design this first stage and this second stage and to do that. And you go all the way from these top level requirements to very, very low level temperatures, pressures, masses and design criteria that engineers will need day to day. The big problem is that when you're designing like a humanoid robot, or you're designing a reusable rocket, or you're designing a self-driving car,

• 2:53:07Speaker 06

  you don't know whether those requirements can be met or not. Like 10 years ago, you would have these fixed requirements, you'd be able to execute against them, you'd build a big Gantt chart and you'd burn it down. In a modern massively complex system, our products are so complex that we have no idea whether we can design it. The requirements are changing on a nearly daily basis and the design is changing on a nearly daily basis too. So what flow does is it's a single source of truth for all of the company's requirements and systems information. And we glue all the requirements together, all the design together, and we have continuous integration between the requirement side and the design side, which enables teams to design and propagate changes much faster than they can do today.

• 2:53:47John Coogan?

  Are you aiming to go straight to Fortune 500, the Fortune 100, the biggest companies in the world that are manufacturing at scale? And maybe it's a lot of steak dinners and a really hard pitch, but you get a couple of those clients and you're in business? Or do you want to focus more on startups, smaller companies, scale ups? Like, what's the sweet spot for you right now?

• 2:54:06Speaker 06

  Yeah, we, we think about this very deeply. We regularly turn away Boeing and Airbus and these massive conglomerates. So here's a way to think about it, the hardware.

• 2:54:15Jordi Hays?

  Mugs.

• 2:54:20Jordi Hays?

  You're like, sorry, sorry, we're busy helping the next generation create the next Boeing.

• 2:54:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. So the way to think about it is the hardware engineering industry is going through a generational change right now. And it's this generational change from old school waterfall, think NASA, Lockheed Martin, to new school agile, think SpaceX, Nandurro. The way that SpaceX, Nandurro, and Joby, and Archer work are much more like software companies than traditional legacy primes. They don't go top down, they design bottoms up, and things are changing on a nearly daily basis. We're very, very, very specifically built for that new way of working. In the same way, this happened in the software engineering industry. So in the 2000s, we went from old school waterfall to new school agile. And companies like GitHub came about to serve that market.

• 2:55:07Speaker 06

  Now GitHub didn't go to IBM and say, we're going to build you a slightly better Gansha. They went to companies like Google and Facebook, and there were five people. And they said, this represents the new industry. And 10, 20 years from now, these small companies like Google and Facebook will be the mass market. And then when IBM and Oracle wake up, they will change how they work and they'll come to GitHub because they are changing to an agile way. So that's what we're doing. We're exclusively focused on next generation aerospace, nuclear defense companies. We're growing very, very quickly with those guys and we're making that workflow as good as it can be.

• 2:55:42Jordi Hays?

  How is it going in the Gundo? What's the update?

• 2:55:46Speaker 06

  Yeah, so this is like a global movement, but as you mentioned, the epicenter of the global movement is El Segundo, which is in LA. So everything from like rockets, aeroplanes, robots, cars, autonomous submarines are being designed in like the five or 10 square miles, which is El Segundo. El Segundo is amazing. I think it represents something like 70% of our customers. And the companies in El Segundo design and iterate at a speed that Boeing and Lockheed just can't comprehend. They're designing massively complex systems. They're designing and iterating faster than anybody thought they could do. And that is the reason they will become so much more competitive than the traditional primes, that the traditional primes just can't keep up.

• 2:56:28Jordi Hays?

  And I imagine what an advantage that is for you, being able to walk a few blocks and like see your products in action and actually get that real time feedback and then just be. On that same, you know, iteration cycle with your customers.

• 2:56:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, we have a kind of crazy story, which is most of our like, most of the other tools in the market came from El Segundo. We actually came from London and we were engineers and we wanted to build. And the European market just didn't want speed, or at least the market back five years ago didn't want speed. So we sold into traditional legacy companies and they they fell in love with the dream and the mission, but they didn't really, they didn't really use the software. And then the El Segundo market found flow and they pulled us into it. And what started out just one or two companies working in this crazy new way, designing and iterating like a software company have ended up becoming the new market. And that represents a really important part of our customer base.

• 2:57:23John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the funding news. Congratulations on the progress and good luck to you. Thank you.

• 2:57:28Jordi Hays?

  When you announced the B, come on over.

• 2:57:30John Coogan?

  Come on over.

• 2:57:30Speaker 06

  Thank you very much.

• 2:57:31Jordi Hays?

  Twenty, twenty, thirty minutes from the Gundo.

• 2:57:33John Coogan?

  We're in Hollywood. We'd love to have you.

• 2:57:35Speaker 06

  Ah, sweet. I'd appreciate that.

• 2:57:36John Coogan?

  We'll ring the gong in person. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good day.

• 2:57:38Jordi Hays?

  To the whole team.

• 2:57:41John Coogan?

  And when you announce that series B, you know what you gotta do?

• 2:57:44Jordi Hays?

  I know.

• 2:57:44John Coogan?

  Go over to getbezzled.com. Your Bezzle concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, and watch, take a couple mill off the table in secondary, put in an FP Jorn, put it in a Rolex Daytona.

• 2:57:57Jordi Hays?

  Deploy it.

• 2:57:58John Coogan?

  Put it in a Potec. Get a couple Aquanets.

• 2:58:01Jordi Hays?

  Before you, before you get the starter home.

• 2:58:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:03Jordi Hays?

  Get a starter hitter.

• 2:58:04John Coogan?

  Starter hitter. And then book yourself a vacation on wander.com. Find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better.

• 2:58:17Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 2:58:17John Coogan?

  Never gets old, Jordy.

• 2:58:21Jordi Hays?

  I just saw a post that I'm not going to read on the timeline. That is funny. But, but anyways.

• 2:58:26John Coogan?

  Cool story.

• 2:58:27Jordi Hays?

  Cool, cool story. No, what I was gonna say, I was gonna check the timeline before we get off. We have to enter our fourth and then fifth hour of podcasting.

• 2:58:36John Coogan?

  I'm so glad. I was worried we weren't gonna get to five today.

• 2:58:39Jordi Hays?

  Jackson Doll is, I believe, already here at the, in the Ultra Dome.

• 2:58:43John Coogan?

  Breaking news.

• 2:58:44Jordi Hays?

  And we're gonna be doing his podcast. Right now, so.

• 2:58:49John Coogan?

  So head over there, subscribe.

• 2:58:50Jordi Hays?

  Go shoot him a DM.

• 2:58:51John Coogan?

  On to dialectic and then you'll hear us talk more if you're not sick.

• 2:58:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't know when this episode will come out, but if you message Jackson now or you comment on one of his posts, I'm sure you can ask some questions there. And we hope you have a fantastic evening. We will be back tomorrow for another beautiful day of technology.

• 2:59:11John Coogan?

  Hopefully it's another cozy, warm day and we can put the fire on.

• 2:59:14Jordi Hays?

  I know, I like having the fire on.

• 2:59:15John Coogan?

  I really enjoyed the fire.

• 2:59:16Jordi Hays?

  We should have the fire on for Jackson's podcast.

• 2:59:18John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, we'll consult with him. Thank you so much for watching.

• 2:59:21Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 2:59:21John Coogan?

  We'll see you tomorrow.

• 2:59:22Jordi Hays?

  See you guys tomorrow. Cheers. Thank you.