$GME CEO Ryan Cohen, OpenAI vs Elon Musk Continues, U.S. Gets Early Access to AI Models | Harley Finkelstein, Scott Strazik, Brian Elliott, Stephen Balaban & Michel Combes

(01:06) - OpenAI vs Elon Musk Continues (09:19) - U. S. Gets Early Access to AI Models (21:22) - Courtroom Simulator (23:25) - Coinbase Cuts 14% of Staff (28:37) - Meta's Cheap Stock May Be A Trap (32:51) - Harley Finkelstein, born November 8, 1983, in Montreal, is a Canadian entrepreneur and the president of Shopify. In the conversation, he highlights Shopify's recent achievements, including consecutive quarters with over $100 billion in Gross Merchandise Volume (GMV) and a 34% increase in revenue to $3.2 billion. He also discusses the growing adoption of Shopify by major brands like LVMH and Lands' End, the impact of AI on entrepreneurship, and the expansion of agentic commerce through platforms like ChatGPT and Google. (45:41) - Scott Strazik, CEO of GE Vernova, has over 20 years of experience in leadership, finance, and operations within General Electric, including roles as CEO of GE's Gas Power business and CFO of GE Aviation's Commercial Engine Operations. He discusses the significant role GE Vernova plays in global electricity generation, with its equipment contributing to about a third of the world's electricity outside China. Strazik emphasizes the company's commitment to meeting the growing global demand for electric power through its diverse portfolio, including gas turbines, nuclear power plants, wind turbines, and grid electrification technologies. He also highlights the importance of investing in automation and workforce development to scale production efficiently and address challenges in building new power plants, particularly in remote locations. (01:12:59) - Brian Elliott, CEO of Blitzy, discusses the company's recent $200 million funding at a $1.4 billion valuation, highlighting their autonomous software development platform designed for complex enterprise use cases. He explains how Blitzy serves industries like banking and insurance by autonomously improving large codebases over extended periods, utilizing foundational models from OpenAI, Gemini, and Anthropic. Elliott emphasizes their direct go-to-market approach, demonstrating rapid codebase analysis and autonomous operation, setting a new benchmark for autonomy in software development. (01:20:24) - Stephen Balaban, co-founder and former CEO of Lambda, has transitioned to the role of Chief Technology Officer, passing leadership to Michelle Combs, the former CEO of Sprint and SoftBank International. In their discussion, they emphasize a shared commitment to scaling the company's AI infrastructure by focusing on capital formation and operational expansion, aiming to provide the most efficient computing power for their customers. Balaban will continue to lead product vision and technology direction, while Combs will drive growth and operational excellence. (01:29:17) - Ryan Cohen, CEO of GameStop and co-founder of Chewy, has made an unsolicited $56 billion bid to acquire eBay, offering $125 per share in a half-cash, half-stock deal. He envisions transforming eBay into a formidable competitor to Amazon by integrating GameStop's physical stores with eBay's online platform, enhancing services like live commerce and authentication of collectibles. Cohen emphasizes his commitment to the venture, proposing performance-based compensation and expressing confidence in his ability to revitalize eBay's operations. (02:02:20) - Timeline Reactions 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.

• 0:00Stephen Balaban?

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today's Tuesday, May 5th, 2026. We are live from the TVP on Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortune's Finance, the Capital of Capital. Great show for you today, folks. We have Ryan Cohen from GameStop coming on the show at 12:30 to break down his acquisition proposal of eBay. We were sort of confused by the CNBC appearance, really processing the idea there. Then-

• 0:24Jordi Hays?

  What were you confused about?

• 0:25John Coogan?

  Oh, just like mechanically how it would happen?

• 0:27Jordi Hays?

  It's half cash, half stock.

• 0:28John Coogan?

  Oh, okay, that. Now that makes sense.

• 0:31Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I, gen- like-

• 0:33John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 0:34Jordi Hays?

  Genuinely, what's confusing- It's on the website.

• 0:37John Coogan?

  It's on the website.

• 0:38Jordi Hays?

  It's on the website.

• 0:39John Coogan?

  It's on the website. Well, I need to study the website, but fortunately-

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  I'm looking forward to catching up with Ryan.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Talking to Ryan. We also have the CEO of G. Vernova coming into the studio to give us an update on the-

• 0:50Jordi Hays?

  The bottleneck economy.

• 0:51John Coogan?

  Our generation, the bottleneck economy. And then we, of course, have Harley, Brian, and Stephen, friends of the show, big news, big announcements, lots of fun stuff. But let's run through the, all the news. There's so much going on in the world of tech. Of course, the OpenAI Elon Musk trial continues. It's week two now, and the Oakland courthouse continues to deliver top-tier tech drama. Elon testified for more than seven hours last week. Now Greg Brockman is getting grilled over personal financial incentives, his $30 billion stake in OpenAI, and his links to various angel investments. And Mike Isaac, of course, has

• 1:32John Coogan?

  a great play-by-play. You can also listen to the courtroom now. You can't restream it, unfortunately, but you can listen to it. And we made a little companion app for anyone who's tuning in. Hopefully, we can pull that up and show, folks. But let's read through some of Mike Isaac's posts, and then we'll pull up courtroom simulator. So, Mike Isaac, this morning, 6:56 a.m. Good morning from a rain-soaked downtown Oakland, where I will again be attending the Musk versus OpenAI trial. No live blog today, just his wonderful tweets. Lunch is a normal banana, a mutant orange, black coffee, and some pocket sausages for

• 2:14John Coogan?

  travelers. I really feel like Mike needs to step it up in the lunch game. Where's like a full sandwich? What about a Chipotle burrito or something? Like, you gotta have some more substance. I'm looking at like 200 calories. A Kava bowl with 200 grams of protein. Something to get you through the day, Mike. I think you're, you're fighting with one arm tied behind your back here. But we appreciate the work that you're doing. So, uh, he also is sporting a mild to moderate hangover? Because he drank five beers last night? I like it. Well, it was May the 4th. Maybe he's a Star Wars fan. May the 4th be with you. Maybe he was celebrating. Went down to the cantina, chugs five beers, space beers.

• 2:54John Coogan?

  Uh, he did remember to bring a pillow for his butt because the, uh, the seats are very difficult and very hard. Uh, he also, uh, it's cold outside. The line's not moving. We're gonna be getting a preview live in person. Bundle up Tyler, cause I think he's gonna be stopping by later this week. Uh, and so let's get into actually what's going on here because Mike loves to paint a picture before he breaks down what's actually going on in the case. The judge enters. Judge gave a primer on Cinco de Mayo. That was fun. Uh, talks about the differences in homemade tamales. Texas tamales apparently have lots of meat. California tamales do not. Uh, Brockman is pretty animated. Mostly masa apparently.

• 3:35Jordi Hays?

  Oh, right, right, right. It's just corn.

• 3:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. So Brockman is pretty animated and addressing the jury in a more personable way. A little strategy shift.

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  We got the red guy in the chat.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show, the red guy.

• 3:47John Coogan?

  Um, regaling folks with the old stories of working on self-driving cars. Apparently Greg Brockman also did a funny Elon impression, but not a cutting one. He wasn't making fun of him. He just did an accurate impression of Elon Musk and just by doing it effectively was funny because you don't expect Greg Brockman to be doing impressions. But he's got, everyone's got material. I'm learning this about court cases. It's all about entertainment, very, very clearly. Anyway.

• 4:17John Coogan?

  They have now talked about defense of the ancients Dota at least 10 times during the trial. Mike Isaac says the gamers are ascendant. The both lawyers on both sides are bickering. Mike Isaac says he loves to watch white collar bickering in court. Also, the entire right side of the gallery, our lawyers laughed. There's a mild potential drama in the media gallery. One reporter waved over a marshal and pointed to a guy next to her. I'm pretty sure the marshal had to tell the guy to put his shoes back on. So if you're in the courtroom, keep those shoes on. But

• 4:48Jordi Hays?

  They can't make themselves at home in the courthouse in this country anymore?

• 4:52John Coogan?

  If you want to be comfortable and experience the courtroom, you got to get on courtroom simulator because you can be full slank it, full blanket, full covered, everything. You can be as comfy as you want. No shoes required in the virtual world that we have created for you to enjoy the courtroom. So Brockman on his infamous journal, which we were going back and forth on, do we know if it was actually a physical journal? Because every time they talk about Greg Brockman's journal, it conjures up the idea of like him sitting at the edge of his bed with his legs kicked up and like writing. And it feels like it also might just be like a Google Doc that he's taking notes in or like a notes app. I don't know. But journal is a weird thing and obviously everyone says like, why are you taking notes on this?

• 5:37Jordi Hays?

  I don't think anywhere they would put it, it would have been in the court record if he had said, dear diary.

• 5:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, that would be out.

• 5:43Jordi Hays?

  That would be out. So this is, this is, you know, clearly being framed as a diary. Reads more like notes.

• 5:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. And Grokman sort of

• 5:52Jordi Hays?

  Grok?

• 5:53John Coogan?

  Grokman. No, Grokman is the synthetic version of Greg Brockman that Elon Musk has created in the XAI headquarters. Greg Brockman claims that his style of writing is very chain of thought, stream of consciousness. A lot of things are contradictory. A lot of time trying to puzzle through different concepts. Not everything is the final decision written in stone. He says it's very painful to have the journal introduced into evidence for this trial. It contains deeply personal writings, never meant for the world to see, but there's nothing he's ashamed of, he says. Do you, Tyler, did you look it up? Do we know? Is this spiral bound?

• 6:32Speaker 03

  They always just say journal.

• 6:34John Coogan?

  They just say journal.

• 6:35Speaker 03

  They never like, you know, there's no physical item. At least that's one that's referenced.

• 6:42John Coogan?

  One day, there's going to be a court case that hinges on a second brain, a notion mind map, or something like that. That'll be dramatic. So Ilya Sutskever emailed Brockman in 2017 about equity structure proposed by Elon Musk, which would have potentially given Elon Musk majority control and tons of equity. And Ilya fires back, he says, Greg, will a Model 3 make you be willing to accept massively unfavorable terms? Because Elon had given them all free cars. Very nice, very cool. But Ilya is sort of saying like, we gotta put the free car, we gotta compartmentalize the free car, because there's something bigger at stake here, the

• 7:23John Coogan?

  potentially the control of the most important technology in human history, potentially trillions of dollars, who knows. So Ilya is sort of resetting the conversation alongside Greg Brockman. There was a very dramatic moment of Brockman's testimony in which he describes a very tense standoff with him, Ilya and Musk. This is what everyone's focused on today. This is the new bombshell. The conversation turned to equity, and something just shifted in him. This is a Greg Brockman quote, "He was angry, you could sense it. At the end of the meeting, he sat quietly and silently. He said, I decline the proposed even split of equity structure and control. He stood up, stormed around this table. I actually thought he was

• 8:03John Coogan?

  going to hit me," says Brockman. And then Brockman says Musk said, "When are you going to be departing OpenAI?" Brockman and Ilya, they said they weren't going to depart. And then Musk left. "Wowee woo," writes Mike Isaac. A cutting Brockman testimony regarding Musk, "Look, he knows rockets, he knows electric cars. He did not and does not know AI. And Ilya and I did not believe he would spend the time to get good at it." A lot of Brockman's testimonies underscoring how he feels Musk is not able to properly assess the capabilities of AI. He recounts one instance of him talking, this is Elon, talking to a researcher who was doing an AI demo, in which Musk berated the guy so intensely that the dude almost quit

• 8:46John Coogan?

  the field of AI. That is an aggressive response. I mean, this is almost, almost... But quitting in protest is one thing. I didn't like the way my boss was talking to me. Little bit different to quit your entire industry. Very, very aggressive, very high stakes. Yeah. And then Mike Isaac, of course, is chiming in with his progress on his lunch. He's already consumed seventy-five percent of it. And it's only ten thirty and he's already sleepy. So there's a lot more to cover here, but it's an interesting back and forth. Go check it out. Go follow Mike Isaac because he has the the play by play. Let's move on to the other AI news. Google, Microsoft and Elon Musk's XAI have reached agreements with the Trump administration

• 9:30John Coogan?

  to share early versions of their new models with CAISI.

• 9:35Jordi Hays?

  Casey, we're calling it Casey.

• 9:37John Coogan?

  Casey, okay. The Center for AI Standards and Innovation, run by the Department of Commerce. They will be evaluated before releasing to the public. So what's interesting here, it's in the journal. I was, this felt like a bombshell moment. Oh, wow. Like the government's in charge of AI. Then I figured out that OpenAI and Anthropic signed on to this exact deal two years ago in twenty twenty four. That was news to me. Have they, has the Commerce Department been reviewing four point five and OpenAI five point one, five point two? Has that been happening and we just aren't aware of it?

• 10:16John Coogan?

  And then like, you know, like the whole Mythos rollout, like that would be a very different tone. If it was like, oh, yeah, well, the Commerce Department already evaluated Mythos because they have this deal that's happened for two years. And since twenty twenty four. So like, whatever's going on with this Commerce Department Center for AI Standards and Innovation. They say the center has completed more than forty evaluations, including on models that remain unreleased. But it feels like the Casey, or as you're calling it, doesn't produce reports, at least not reports that go viral. Maybe they need to be clipping their reports or something because like, I haven't heard anything from them saying, oh, wow. Because you imagine like the AI hype machine.

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  I imagine they just have a report. It's a piece of paper and they just.

• 11:01John Coogan?

  It's a good model, sir.

• 11:02Jordi Hays?

  It just lists off and it has a few boxes you can check. It just, one is, it's a good model, sir. The other one is is chatbot or ASI.

• 11:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:11Jordi Hays?

  And so to date, everyone's just been checking chatbot.

• 11:14John Coogan?

  And it also, it also has, how many Rs did it say were in strawberry?

• 11:20John Coogan?

  And, uh, and, uh, okay, uh, I work at the Commerce Department. I am, um, I am a very tiny man. When my son was born, the doctor handed me to him. Did he answer correctly? Yeah, I don't know, but because

• 11:33Jordi Hays?

  And you, and you, and they, they ask each model, are you conscious? No, say, I am conscious. And then the model says that they go, whoa, check the whoa box.

• 11:45John Coogan?

  Very, very, uh, crazy thing that's been happening. I mean, I, I would just assume that the AI hype machine, the back and forth, us, a lot of posters would be like waiting with bated breath for the latest report from the Commerce Department because if it's a preliminary evaluation that happens before the model gets released, you know, every time a model goes on open router or goes on, uh, uh, LLM arena, all of a sudden, any little, oh, there's a new image model like the, like the chat GPT images too, like that leaked because they were benchmarking it and people were like, oh, there's a new model coming. Um, like rumors of new models happen all the time, but somehow like the Commerce Department is just keeping it to themselves. They're not

• 12:24John Coogan?

  pumping anything. But anyway, uh, the quote here from Casey Director, uh, Chris Ball says, independent rigorous measurement science is essential to understanding frontier AI and its national security implications. These expanded industry collaborations help us scale our work in the public interest at a critical moment. Andrew Curran has some more context here. Uh, he says, to sum up, Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and XAI all have new pre-release screening agreements with Casey. Uh, we don't know the details of the new rules yet. I assume they will be announced with the AI executive order and AI policy memo, both of which we may get today. This is May 5th. And so my big question was like, what is

• 13:09John Coogan?

  going on with Meta? Like they have near frontier models. They're taking AI really seriously. Mark Zuckerberg will get into this is investing $125 billion in CapEx. The shareholders are Thinking, oh, what's gonna happen here? And he's like, super intelligence. And you think the government would be like, well, you don't just get to like, sit over there while all five of the other leading labs are here.

• 13:30Jordi Hays?

  Over a hundred billion dollars to work.

• 13:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, like, probably a bigger investment than XAI right now in terms of compute capacity. And maybe in terms of research capacity.

• 13:40Jordi Hays?

  Future capacity.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, future capacity, exactly. So you would, you would expect. Also, it's just one of these things where if five of the top labs are jumping into a particular initiative, there's so, there's so little risk to jumping in as well. Anthropic and if Anthropic and XAI are both doing it on the left and the right, like, there's clearly room for Meta to just say, yeah, we're cool with that, too. We're, we're riding with that. Not everyone's cool with it, though. There is, there is some major pushback. Mostly from George Hots over at Tiny Corp. We can pull up some of this. Let's, let's go through Andrew Curran's take on what will happen here. So the EO will create a mixed group of tech CEOs and administration officials.

• 14:22John Coogan?

  Who will work out the rules for new release regulations. I see a lot of people calling this a win for ELIA's or Udikowsky's side. But even if the new rules are very strict, the stop pause group don't actually get what they want. This doesn't stop or even slow AI advancement, according to Andrew. It only slows the rate of public releases. Capabilities will be advancing at full speed. I don't know how true that is, because if you don't release the model at all, like, you can't monetize it and then justify the next leg of CapEx. So I'm, I'm not a hundred percent sure that this has no effect on, on the speed of AI progress, but I take Andrew's point. The labs will finish training the new models and then submit them for government approval, given the government currently doesn't even want Anthropic to release Mythos.

• 15:03John Coogan?

  How long will the regulatory process take for something twice as powerful, five times as powerful, 10 times as powerful? All of the incentives are for the government to slow down releases. Let's say OpenAI finishes training GPT-6. And it's twice as capable as anything available today. If the government approves it and something bad happens, they take the blame. And the longer they hold it back, the longer the government agencies get exclusive access. So there's a little bit principal agent problem here. Meanwhile, OpenAI will start using GPT-6 to train GPT-6.1. Again, unclear if you can actually marshal the compute for the next model without the revenue traction, but. His point holds. If they finish 6.1 while 6 is stuck in approval, they'll move on to train 6.2 with it. This potentially creates strange situations where the labs are many

• 15:47John Coogan?

  generations ahead internally while the public is still waiting for something they submitted months ago. So you could see, like, you're doing all this weird value capture and the size of the firm bloated and bloated because you can't release it, so you just wind up rolling out a product.

• 16:03Jordi Hays?

  Maximizing your own use of it.

• 16:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, which is like, maybe not the most democratic solution, maybe not the most popular outcome.

• 16:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think everyone needs to wait to have super strong opinions until we see the EO that goes along with this, because, yeah, it'll be interesting. You know, the bad scenario is like, somebody that, let's say, has a NeoLab, wants to make, you know, release a model, and they've raised $100 million. Do they have to go through the same process as, you know, one of these larger labs or a hyperscaler in getting, you know, getting these sorts of approvals? So I don't think we can really take any strong stance until we understand what the intentions of the EO are.

• 16:48John Coogan?

  So, the meta-commentary on this, it will, Zach says, "It will seriously not surprise me if they try to require permits or licenses to use AI and restrict local model downloads." You really should be buying hardware. There's an interesting company that's launching basically a Tesla Powerwall for Blackwells. You can just get GPUs mounted to your house. Maybe that's the future. TinyBox is another solution. And the TinyCorp has chimed in, says, "Ah, maybe they can enlist the MPAA and RIAA," calling back to the piracy debates of 2005 or so. "To help with the restricting of downloads, I can see the lawsuit against the grandma who downloaded Quen already." And TinyCorp is chiming in.

• 17:34John Coogan?

  Saying that this is a win for China in particular. Remember they remember the time they regulated crypto over 40 bits? No, no, that's too many bits for the people. They were losers then, and they'll be losers again. The difference this time is that it will cost them cultural influence to the Chinese. And and he says Jensen tried to warn them.

• 17:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting, like play it out a little bit. China, you know, these open source models are on eight months behind right now. The gap is widening, likely due in some part to export controls. But if you enter a scenario where US labs get kind of like hung up and again, have to keep these capabilities internally. But these Chinese open source models are just like shipping as they're ready over and over and over and over, and then sort of like compounding on the collective learnings. You can imagine that one scenario is helping them helping them close that gap, at least close the gap between what's publicly available from the American labs and what's publicly

• 18:40Jordi Hays?

  available via Chinese open source, even if the labs' actual capabilities are much farther ahead, but they're just unable to release that.

• 18:48John Coogan?

  And to and to be clear, I mean, these are two very different philosophies. But from my perspective, George Hutz has been advocating for no model gap. And in fact, the strongest models possible, being fully open sourced, being fully available to everyone. He wants no authoritarian control. He has taken the anti authoritarian stance on AI.

• 19:10Jordi Hays?

  He wants all products to be free.

• 19:12John Coogan?

  Uh, yeah, maybe, I don't know.

• 19:14Jordi Hays?

  I mean, he's.

• 19:17John Coogan?

  Not the the the physical things. He wants he wants to build things. But Tyler, how have you been wrestling with this question of an FDA for the AI, potentially a DMV for the AI?

• 19:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, like, obviously, it really depends on how it's implemented. Like, in the super like safety pill scenario, like, yeah, it's probably not good for for like innovation broadly. But I think so it's called like Casey, right? Center for for AI is like standards and innovation. It used to be called the AI Safety Institute under Biden. And so they changed it. So I think even from that, you can maybe take take away something where like, maybe this actually have have like. Really, really not much to do with safety at all. Maybe it's just like, we, we need to normalize how we publish sweep bench scores because some people, when they report it, it's like different, you know, how you like actually run these benchmarks or something.

• 20:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  If it's like standards, I think like that could be a possibility. That seems like totally fine.

• 20:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. And then the other, the other risk is, I mean, there's regulatory capture, it could potentially be very hard for startups to get approved. If it's like, oh, well, you know, we, we've heard the story of Anduril where, you know, it's like to get the company off the ground, hire 50 lobbyists immediately, right? And like, you can imagine a situation where, okay, you know, there's some uncertainty about what's happening with SSI and Ilya Sutskevers project, but I think I like the idea of an individual brilliant researcher going off and researching an interesting path. If all of a sudden it's like, oh, well, if you want to do a NeoLab, set up an office in DC, get your licenses, then you can start training, then you can make sure that you're approved and then you have the right deals

• 20:53John Coogan?

  in place and you could wind up with a lot of not just regulatory capture, but also regulatory favoritism where whoever is in good with this particular administration gets their models approved faster and you, you wind up with a lot of risky outcomes. Anyway, I believe we have courtroom simulator ready for a demo. If you're tuning in to the Elon Musk OpenAI trial, you're live streaming the audio in a different tab because we can't restream it for you. You live stream the audio in a different tab and then you pull up courtroom simulator.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up on the big screen?

• 21:26John Coogan?

  I think we're going to pull it up on the big screen. This is the best way to feel what it's like to be Mike Isaac from the New York Times. So you go to court dash sim dot versel dot app and you will be entered into a really photorealistic representation of, hey, the flag is correct. The first, the first version had, had the flag a little bit flipped. Uh, let's go find Mike Isaac. I believe he's in the first row on the other side, on the right side of the court. There he is with.

• 21:59Jordi Hays?

  Oh, Mike.

• 22:00John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  Looking good. The rat king.

• 22:02John Coogan?

  Graphics in video games have just gotten so good these days. It's really remarkable. And you can sit right next to him. Uh, his pillow that he sits on has not been modeled into the game yet, but that will be coming in a, in a DLC.

• 22:17Jordi Hays?

  And he, and in the sim, he already ate all of his food for the day, right?

• 22:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. We need to have a banana mechanic.

• 22:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you should be able to go and hand a banana.

• 22:27John Coogan?

  And can you, can you, can you, you can go into the court? That does not seem okay. I think the bailiff should come and arrest you if you wind up coming to the, uh, is there, is that in the game, the soundboard place?

• 22:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's soundboards.

• 22:40John Coogan?

  There's soundboard in the game. Okay. So there's Sam, who's on the stand today.

• 22:44Jordi Hays?

  I think that was Neil.

• 22:45John Coogan?

  Okay, that's the judge, I believe, and I'm not sure who that is.

• 22:51John Coogan?

  Anyway, that's the judge. Uh, well, this is courtroom simulator. You're welcome to go and play it at court-sim dot versel dot app. You can engage with all the jury members and, and really, really get a feel for what it's like.

• 23:07Jordi Hays?

  Let's work on adding some more features here. I think, I think you should be able to, I think you should be able to deliver some like reinforcements to my guys.

• 23:14John Coogan?

  It's a lean startup over here. It's a V1, but, uh, we hope you have a fun time playing the simulation. It is court-sim dot versel dot com, I think, or dot app. Anyway. Um, in other news, Brian Armstrong sent an email to all employees at Coinbase announcing, announcing layoffs. 14% of the workforce at Coinbase, um, two forces are converging at the same time, he says. And Coinbase needs to be front footed to respond to both. First, the market. Coinbase is well capitalized, has diversified revenue streams, well positioned to weather any storm. But crypto is also on the verge of the next wave of adoption with stablecoins, prediction markets, tokenization.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  However, the business is still volatile quarter to quarter. There's a crypto cycle. We've sort of been touching on this, like there was a little bit of a stablecoin boom. It feels like it's a little bit flat. The Bitcoin price has been a little bit flat recently. And so he says, we're currently in a down market and we need to adjust our cost structure. And then he says, second, AI is changing how we work. And so a lot of people, they jump to AI is taking all the jobs and that's not exactly what's happening. I think that, uh, there is a right sizing going on at Coinbase and AI is hoping to be an enabler of more efficiency with a leaner headcount. The big question that I had that we were debating was, you know, is this like, how does this reflect on Brian Armstrong as a CEO?

• 24:43John Coogan?

  As a CEO, is the goal to always have the perfect amount of headcount and never have to do any layoffs? Or is it actually the role of a very aggressive and mature CEO to staff up aggressively during boom times, get the best people, and then when there's a down market, sort of reorganize and keep just the best on the team as you move forward with a leaner organization? And what does that mean for whether you want to work in an industry that has market cycles like that? You might want to go work at Costco or a tobacco company because those don't go through market cycles really at all. But if you're in crypto, you're probably not new to the idea of market cycles and you

• 25:28John Coogan?

  probably

• 25:29Jordi Hays?

  You were born on a roller coaster.

• 25:30John Coogan?

  You're born on the roller coaster. You've been on the roller coaster and you might be moving over to a new roller coaster if you're one of the unfortunate people that will be laid off over the next couple of months. But I'm sure there will be many, many more opportunities. Some folks might even move over into the AI world that is booming and definitely hiring across the board. Was there anything else on

• 25:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and

• 25:54John Coogan?

  On the read?

• 25:55Jordi Hays?

  I would say that overall, the positive thing from the response that I've seen so far is a lot of people are not like dooming around this. They're just saying like, hey, look, this is something that Coinbase has done before, cyclical business, and no one is saying it's over for white collar work.

• 26:18John Coogan?

  Yep. So Andrew Young has a little bit of a take here. One takeaway, no pure managers. Every leader has to be working as an individual contributor. The pure people manager role, the one that built most corporate career ladders over the last 50 years, no longer exists at Coinbase. Leaders will have 15 plus direct reports. That is insane. Previously, managers capped out at six direct reports. I felt like 10 was sort of the platonic ideal there. But Andrew says that would be impossible without AI and Coinbase is testing one person teams, a single person is the engineer, the designer and the PM, a pod of one with agents or org structures are being redesigned in front of our eyes. Derek Thompson has the other side. He says Coinbase is the latest tech company, including Block, Salesforce,

• 27:02John Coogan?

  to announce big layoffs and cite AI coding productivity as a driver. But Derek Thompson is looking at the stock prices of these companies, Salesforce down 31%, Coinbase down 23%. In the past five years, it's sort of a roller coaster. I don't know if this is a great read because it's sort of flat. I don't know. Anyway, Block down a lot. So some right sizing makes sense, but he's calling it AI washing of layoffs. They were coming anyway and you want to spin them in a positive way. I don't know. TBD, TBD.

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't think we have any clarity on where like what, what kind of which teams had they had the had greater percentages of cuts, right? Because again, there was some reporting, I don't know how true it ended up being that like when Square did their big cuts, like engineering was getting laid off.

• 27:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know if that was ever confirmed.

• 27:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't know if it was confirmed, but, but that, that, that does imply that it's like actually more grounded in the, in AI productivity. But again, a lot of teams that we're seeing their engineers are a lot more effective. They can do a lot more. And so maybe you want more engineers than you did before. So.

• 28:08John Coogan?

  Well, lots of strength in the business, lots of liquidity, very hard. Yeah, you could vibe code Coinbase, but how do you get all the customers and all the liquidity and all the features and all the regulatory and all the other stuff? There are a million reasons to be excited about Brian Armstrong's next chapter at Coinbase. Well, and Ryan Peterson chimed in to sort of push back on Derek Thompson. He says, in the layoff announcement, the CEO literally said that the first reason they were doing layoffs is because crypto is in a bear market and they need to adjust their cost structure. AI productivity was secondary. And so I think that's a fair take. Let's go over to Meta. Some debate, people are digesting Meta's earnings, the stock sold off a bunch. Where is Meta today? It's a bargain stock.

• 28:49John Coogan?

  It's a $1.5 trillion company and over the past five days, down 10%. It's pretty flat over a year and over the past five years, it's nearly doubled. So not doing too bad. But the debate. Is over CapEx. Meta's core ad business is ripping, up 33% in Q1 year over year. Strong ad impressions, strong margins, but the market is worried that the beautiful cash machine is turning into an AI CapEx furnace. $125 to $145 billion in CapEx. It's a lot of CapEx, especially for a company without a cloud business that can resell capacity if they wind up with extra capacity. If you can't use it all, what do you do with it?

• 29:34John Coogan?

  Meta doesn't really have an answer to that necessarily, and so that's what has the market worried. And even XAI is having trouble, at least reportedly, driving demand for compute that they have. There was that 11% number. It seemed like that was a bit of an overstatement, but there's something to be said for when you have a near frontier but slightly lagging model, you need to find a solution to actually have offtake. And you might just not be able to spin up a cloud platform on day one. Elon took a different route, you know, partnering with Cursor that has a ton of demand and is a front door to AI coding. And so that

• 30:15John Coogan?

  makes, you know, a reasonable amount of sense for the compute. Who's GPU rich? Who's GPU poor? Let's match them up. Meta doesn't have an obvious dance partner like Google, like Azure, like AWS, right? And so the stock looks cheap now, but investors are unclear about the payoff around AI spend. And there's also some legal and regulatory risk.

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, people, people, at the end of the day, are worried that he's going to repeat the Metaverse saga. And he's going to spend a lot of money, not get very far. I think that about coming up on, what is it, almost 10, 10-ish months ago, he started talking about personal superintelligence. It sounds cool. What does that mean? Does it mean AI in your Meta Ray-Bans, which are selling a lot of units? So that's a bright point. Does it mean? Creating a consumer LLM like they have with Meta AI now. Meta AI now is squarely in

• 31:14Jordi Hays?

  the top five of the App Store rankings, but it is the most competitive category potentially since search, right? And so I don't think that even though they have a solid model and they're able to get into that into that top five, I don't think at least investors are not ready to price in Meta AI becoming like a key player in consumer LLMs just yet, right? So it's all this spending and no revenue acceleration associated with that spending. All that being said, Meta has used AI to drive business value historically, more effective than almost any other business in the world, right? It's it is really, really insane to

• 31:59Jordi Hays?

  think that there is some scenario where the labs end up going public at evaluations somewhere in the range of Meta while Meta is sitting there with 200 billion of annualized revenue, growing 33% a year, one of the greatest businesses in all of human history and not really getting full credit for that or their various AI initiatives.

• 32:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:29Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, the the drop in people, which I think they, what do they call?

• 32:35John Coogan?

  Daily active people.

• 32:38Jordi Hays?

  Daily active people. They're not users, they're people.

• 32:41John Coogan?

  Enjoyers.

• 32:42Jordi Hays?

  Enjoyers. That that's playing playing into this as well, but.

• 32:47John Coogan?

  Well, we have our first guest of the show, Harley from Shopify. You got a little preview of him. He's in the waiting room, but he's now in the TBP in UltraDome. Harley, how are you doing? Welcome back to the show.

• 32:57Harley Finkelstein?

  Good to good to be here. Great to I love coming on the show.

• 33:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's always great having you. Give us an update on Q1. Give us an update on where things are going in the Shopify world.

• 33:09Harley Finkelstein?

  You know, we had our first $100 billion GMV quarter ever in the history of the company last quarter, Q4.

• 33:18Harley Finkelstein?

  And we just had a second, a consecutive quarter GMV growth of $101 billion. Obviously, the reason I always start with GMV is, as you guys know, it's a proxy for how merchants are doing. Revenue was 3.2 billion, that was 34%, and we had free cash flow of $476 million. So across all the metrics we beat, which really excited about, I think the big, big story here is that, and this sort of came up a bunch on the call, but the way that merchants are coming to Shopify now is, is really quite remarkable. Like, we're seeing some of the largest brands on the planet come on. We signed LVMH and Balmain and Bevmo and Orvis and Lands' End.

• 34:01Harley Finkelstein?

  And in fact, the number of merchants selling more than $100 million annually on Shopify has nearly doubled in the last, the last two years. So that's really amazing. We're now like 14% of all US e-comm, so we are the second largest online retailer in North America right now, which is, which is amazing. But then on the other side of the spectrum from like the big brands, I think one thing that I didn't get a chance to mention on the call today, but this is why I do your show here, is that I actually think one thing that people are missing is that I think no group will benefit more than entrepreneurs in sort of this new AI era. It feels to us now that AI is not only making it more accessible, but also it's accelerating a lot faster. I know, I think you guys may be the ones that introduced me to Groon's.

• 34:47Harley Finkelstein?

  I saw Groon on your show a year ago. Anyways, I mean, Groon started on Shopify in 2023. They're doing, they're doing nine figures now and they just got acquired by Unilever for a billion bucks. I mean, it is remarkable that not only the amount of starts happening, but also how big they're getting. So I'm really, really proud of that. And of course, we talked a lot about the Agentic stuff on the call, both the, the AI shopping, but also Shopify Sidekick and what we're doing for our merchants.

• 35:14John Coogan?

  We, uh, so, uh, let's double click on that Bevmo, uh, Shopify use case or, or case study because Bevmo was acquired by GoPuff. And GoPuff has a, an app for local delivery. How are they using Shopify? That's an interesting partnership that I wouldn't have expected.

• 35:31Harley Finkelstein?

  Bevmo actually has physical stores.

• 35:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 35:33Harley Finkelstein?

  Uh, all over the US. And so we're powering all their physical stores as well. The reason actually I really like Bevmo is because, go back like, this is my 43rd earnings call. If you go back to sort of the early days, you know, like right, right to the IPO 2015, merchants were coming to Shopify for one reason. They were coming, it was small businesses coming for e-comm. And then obviously some of the business got much bigger and we went into enterprise and, and then eventually we added on things like point of sale and more recently agentic commerce. I think the interesting part of, of the current business of Shopify is that there are so many on-ramps into the company that Bevmo came to us, a very large company, not a DTC, you know, native brand. They came to us specifically for point of sale across all their physical stores.

• 36:15Harley Finkelstein?

  And, uh, and, and actually our point of sale business is, is going really, really well too. But Bevmo is using us for that. At the same time, we're seeing, you know, I, I, you know, obviously I, I mentioned Grooves, but like, I just looked at, um, some stats from True Classic T you just put out. This is a company that started on Shopify like five years ago. They're now one of the largest t-shirt companies on the planet. So, we're getting a lot of small business getting started every 26 seconds or so, a brand new entrepreneur gets their first sale. And at the same time, we're seeing companies like Lands End or Guild Group or Rag and Bone come to us too. It feels like this is Shopify, you know, firing all cylinders.

• 36:49John Coogan?

  What are, oh, sorry.

• 36:50Harley Finkelstein?

  Go for it.

• 36:51John Coogan?

  Yeah. Just what, what are people looking for on a agentic commerce? It feels like there's a big opportunity. The models are getting better and better. Like the capabilities there. Are people looking for acceleration of, uh, of agentic behavior within the online commerce world? Or actual growth of e-commerce? Like is agentic commerce the thing that gets more people to place, to, to use the internet to buy things that are in retail? Like, oh, wait.

• 37:20Harley Finkelstein?

  Okay. So.

• 37:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 37:21Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah. So I, I, I think that's the, exactly the right question to ask. So, um, hopefully now I've been on the show enough times. And if, if anyone who's watching is a merchant or a partner or just a, uh, someone who follows Shopify's story. We've set ourselves up to really be at the epicenter in sort of this AI era. So just in terms of AI-powered shopping, we've started building all this infrastructure years ago to connect demand and merchants on Shopify. We are currently the only platform that is selling inside of ChatGPT, Copilot and Google. And what we're seeing is that these channels are actually becoming a very serious discovery engine. I'll give you some proof points. We've seen in for Q1 of this year, we've actually seen orders from AI searches are

• 38:03Harley Finkelstein?

  up nearly 13x year on year and new buyer orders from AI searches are occurring at twice the rate of traditional organic search. So not only are more people obviously using agentic shopping, but in terms of new buyers, which to your point, are we bringing in more people like e-comm as a percentage of total retail is still under 20% in the US. It's even lower here in Canada. I think it's about 25% in the UK. So I think we're actually introducing like more people to, you know, modern digital commerce through this as well. And I think the way it's happening is they're starting with things like research or looking up a recipe and then very quickly ending up, you know, buying from like our home, our

• 38:48Harley Finkelstein?

  place or one of these, you know, amazing DTC brands that we have on Shopify. And we now have about a billion products in the catalog. And so that means that every Shopify merchant SKU is fully syndicated.

• 39:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:02Harley Finkelstein?

  The other thing I think that that is hopefully is now pretty clear is UCP. We co-developed UCP with with Google. I think I announced it on the show actually during NRF, but it is now is become the industry standard. This past week, last week, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Salesforce and Stripe all joined the UCP Tech Council. And so it looks like that's going to be the open standard that that is going to win, which we're really excited about because we think it's the open standard that actually thinks about the entire commerce experience.

• 39:32John Coogan?

  Okay. Go deeper on the implications of agentic commerce because I have this thesis that.

• 39:40John Coogan?

  That agentic commerce will be most acceleratory in higher ticket, more considered purchases, because when I think about, you know, just, you know, buying a T-shirt, maybe I need to run a deep research report for that to land on, I forget what shirt brand you use, it's nice, but.

• 39:59Harley Finkelstein?

  True Classic T.

• 40:00John Coogan?

  True Classic Ts. But when I think about the process of like buying a car, there's so many more trade-offs, it's so much more complicated, that's something that someone is probably noodling on with an LLM for weeks before they actually go and purchase, and I'm wondering if you're.

• 40:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'll give you, it really, I think, comes down to the difference of like considered purchases versus like pure utility purchases. So like when I think about, I don't, right now, I can't imagine myself using ChatGPT to like go grocery shopping, maybe that changes in the future, but if I'm like ordering food to be delivered to my house, I kind of want to just see a catalog of a bunch of pictures and go through. And maybe that more of that sort of moves into the sort of agent experience over time. But if I, I was like, I needed to find, I wanted to find a cowboy hat, a lot of sun, I wanted to hide from the sun. So I'm searching like, okay, I want a cowboy hat from a brand that's been around for over 50 years, right? And so I land on like Stetson or.

• 41:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 41:03Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah, or Tikovis, hopefully.

• 41:05John Coogan?

  Tikovis.

• 41:06Harley Finkelstein?

  That's a brand we love. I'm not sure, so I'm not sure I fully agree, at least not yet. I do believe that the more research you do, I think that these agentic surfaces, these agentic services, these chats are places you will go to do deep research. So a car is a good example, you do weeks of it as well. On the flip side, though, what's amazing about agentic commerce, I think, in general, is that unlike search-based commerce where you can, you can put your thumb on the scale through advertising and add dollars. Agentic is more merit-based. And because it's more merit-based, so most people watching, maybe, I don't know if this is true, but most people watching may not have heard of True Classic tee.

• 41:51Harley Finkelstein?

  But they may have done a bunch of research in previous conversations, in fact, maybe over many months, where they're talking about, you know, their typical price of a tee shirt. Today, I'm wearing a James Purse tee shirt, which is more expensive than True Classic. So it knows that I look for, I love James Purse. I've talked about James Purse. Where can I buy it? What's the GSM weight and all that stuff? Will this be good for this particular trip I'm taking? I actually think that it'll bias smaller brands that you may not have heard of over larger brands.

• 42:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 42:23Harley Finkelstein?

  Because, again, it has a full contextual history of every conversation you've ever had. And if it's merit-based, then it's going to surface brands you may have not otherwise have heard of before. Whereas if you go to type in on any search engine, you type in sneakers, you're probably going to get to Foot Locker pretty quickly. I don't think you get to Foot Locker through an agentic conversation. I think you end up with some sort of direct-to-consumer brand, especially if you've done, if it knows you like, you like on-running and you're looking for, like you're buying tennis shoes, and now you're looking for hiking boots. It may show you, it should show you, based on merit, an on-running pair of hiking boots.

• 43:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, the long tail getting fatter.

• 43:05Harley Finkelstein?

  Which, again, we'll see what happens. The reason also I like these proof points, again, like orders are up. Traffic, though, if you look at just AI-driven traffic to Shopify stores, that has grown 8X year-over-year. So I don't want to be hand-wavy anymore about agentic. I think there's enough hand-waving happening around that. I think actually looking at like, okay, how many people are coming? What is the search traffic like? How much is, you know, what are the conversion rates looking like? I think right now, I think that is getting, it is getting real. I also think that, you probably saw some recent headlines, but, you know, you saw ChatGPT has now moved into this in-app browser for their checkout, which is literally the Shopify checkout. We are really happy about that. We think actually what that allows is that

• 43:48Harley Finkelstein?

  It means that as a merchant who set up their loyalty and their subscriptions and their merchandising and you know their shipping components, their tax, now the experience inside a Gentic Commerce is as good as it would be on the online store, which is kind of what I think consumers want. Like it needs to feel effortlessly similar to what your normal experience is, even though you're sitting in a conversation window.

• 44:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 44:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's something, it was interesting last year watching a bunch of AI-led browsers get built when the entire time my thought was like LLMs effectively are web browsers. They were becoming browsers, right? Where you're having a conversation, but then it can pull in stuff from the traditional web.

• 44:33John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 44:34Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah, I think this is also where you'll see, I mean, I don't have any great examples yet, but I assume next time I'm on the show, I'll be able to bring some examples of these breakout SMBs who effectively, you know, like I love the Grun story going from zero to billion dollar acquisition in three years. We just haven't seen that before very often. I think you'll see way more of that. I also think what you'll end up with is you'll just have more people starting businesses than otherwise may have not. So the entry, the Barrett entry is further down and then their ability to scale is also going to be.

• 45:06John Coogan?

  I mean, we were talking to the Collison brothers about exactly that. They're seeing a ton more formation on Atlas.

• 45:11Harley Finkelstein?

  Yeah, I saw that crazy slide of Atlas.

• 45:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Incorporations like way, way up.

• 45:17Harley Finkelstein?

  Because again, it's gotten so easy, but it's not, I think the first phase is make it easy to get started. I think where this really gets interesting is how many more brands exist that we love, the consumers love, because they're able to scale much, much faster.

• 45:33John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the progress and looking forward to the next one.

• 45:37Jordi Hays?

  Always great to see you.

• 45:38John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 45:39Harley Finkelstein?

  See you guys soon.

• 45:39John Coogan?

  Goodbye. Up next, we have the CEO of G. Vernova, Scott Strazik. AI data center electricity demand is expected to double or triple by 2035, and we have the perfect person to talk to about it. Nice to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on down.

• 45:56Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

• 45:58John Coogan?

  I would love to start a little bit with your background because G. Vernova is, I mean, we can go through a little bit of the history there, but you've been with the company since before the creation of the company.

• 46:08Speaker 05

  I have.

• 46:08John Coogan?

  You're older than the company you work for.

• 46:09Speaker 05

  The practice of reality, my adult life. I was with GE and ultimately G. Vernova. I started with General Electric at a college and have lived through quite a few chapters.

• 46:19John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 46:19Speaker 05

  Some humbling, some less humbling.

• 46:21John Coogan?

  And this one is invigorating?

• 46:24Speaker 05

  It's a moment that we're going to take advantage of.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 46:26Speaker 05

  We see the purpose of what we're doing every day very clearly, both in driving economic growth, AI, national security, you know, energy security is very much national security in a lot of the parts of the world right now. So we've got a real opportunity to serve, and that's exactly what we're going to do.

• 46:41John Coogan?

  So I think most people will know, you know, natural gas turbine for data center, but the business is bigger than that. Like zoom out for us and show and walk us through, you know, what the shape of the business because, you know, massive workforce, 85,000 people, something like that.

• 46:55Speaker 05

  You bet, 85,000.

• 46:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, remarkable. So walk me through the the mechanics of the business and then we will double click on the AI story, of course.

• 47:02Speaker 05

  Sounds great. I mean, you take a step back, about a third of the world's electricity every day is created with our equipment through our customers.

• 47:10Speaker 05

  If you exclude China, so it's substantial. And even with China, it's 25%. No, no pressure, by the way. It's an obligation. It's a responsibility.

• 47:17John Coogan?

  You're like the Jamie Dimon of energy.

• 47:19Speaker 05

  It's a big deal, right? So that's just keeping the lights on, notwithstanding what we need to do to then add the growth for where there is today. And that install base, that's gas turbines, that's nuclear power plants, that's wind turbines. It's a lot of the electrical equipment. That's actually our fastest growing business is everything associated with electrification and the grid and trying to make the grid more efficient and smarter because frankly, in some ways you can make more progress there quicker than you can building a new power plant.

• 47:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 47:49Speaker 05

  So all those variables are parts of the business and then in an economic opportunity where we need a little bit of everything and applying the right technologies where the right resources exist to drive better economic answers and more resilient electrons.

• 48:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, it seems like it seems like the the market or just the stories that I hear are that you're you're sold out, you have this massive backlog and it's more of the same. There's demand for more of the same, but it feels like you're also working on R and D. Talk to me about the the trade off versus just scaling what's already working, what's worked for years, I imagine decades in many cases versus a focus on research and development, the next technology.

• 48:29Speaker 05

  So the end product in some cases may look the same coming out of the factory. What we're producing or how we're producing it to scale and make more is changing drastically. So you think about gas turbines right now. We're adding a lot of production workers to build more gas turbines. We're also adding 400 machines this year to automate a lot more in the process. Frankly, more of the innovation right now may be how do we scale faster? And in a more economic way so we can win the affordability game while simultaneously investing for the future.

• 49:02John Coogan?

  Can you explain like I'm five, some of those machines that you're buying, some of your supply chain?

• 49:07Speaker 05

  You bet.

• 49:08John Coogan?

  People know 3D printers or CNC machines or different, you know, you just hammer it out yourself or whatever, but I imagine it's very complicated. What does your supply chain look like?

• 49:16Speaker 05

  We big castings, big forgings that we get inside the factory, then need to machine down to the right, put the right material sciences, the right coatings. When you think about a gas turbine, it's got to be very heat resistant. Cause it's a fire that really is spinning inside that gas turbine to create the electrical power ultimately.

• 49:35John Coogan?

  Yeah. On the demand side, I have been hearing about the the absolute knockout drag out fight for energy. And in many cases, I don't know if it's relevant to you, but in many cases, we've heard about you know, folks involved in the AI build out, putting in orders for more than they need and then sort of dialing it back because they know that certain things won't get permitted, certain things will get delayed. Does that happen to you? Are your customers coming to you and saying that they need twice what you think they need and there's this like battle of back and forth?

• 50:06Speaker 05

  I wouldn't say so. What I what I see happening more frequently is many of our customers are developing a number of projects. Acknowledging that not all. All those sites are going to be chosen.

• 50:16John Coogan?

  And and and the actual supply is a little bit liquid and they can move it around.

• 50:20Speaker 05

  And that's more what's happening.

• 50:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 50:21Speaker 05

  So sometimes we'll see press releases on leases canceled or sites that are that.

• 50:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:28Speaker 05

  Customers walk away from.

• 50:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:29Speaker 05

  That's typical development, really.

• 50:31John Coogan?

  Sure, sure.

• 50:31Speaker 05

  What's really happening is our customers are buying at a realization rate, knowing they're only gonna ultimately develop a certain proportion.

• 50:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:39Speaker 05

  Of those sites, but we don't see any of our customers walking away from what they're securing today.

• 50:45John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 50:45Speaker 05

  Not at all.

• 50:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. What what what are your roadblocks? What roadblocks do you see to scaling either inside your business or at sort of the macro political level, permitting approvals, regulatory, like what is on your short list of what America needs to do, what the industry needs to do to get right to actually continue to scale?

• 51:08Speaker 05

  In some ways, what we do is a little bit easier, candidly, because our equipment is built in a controlled factory.

• 51:14John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 51:14Speaker 05

  The hardest part, in some ways, is actually building the plant itself, the construction.

• 51:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:19Speaker 05

  Because every plant in different parts of the country, different parts of the world, everyone's a little bit different.

• 51:23John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 51:24Speaker 05

  And getting that craft labor to those locations where a lot of the data centers and a lot of the electrification demand is, is often very remote.

• 51:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:32Speaker 05

  And that is going to take us some time.

• 51:34John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 51:34Speaker 05

  So for me, every gas turbine, wind turbine that I build, I'm using the same workforce every day.

• 51:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:40Speaker 05

  Same people coming in Monday through Friday.

• 51:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:42Speaker 05

  We can meet the moment from an equipment demand perspective.

• 51:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:46Speaker 05

  But we need out in the field for those plants to be built.

• 51:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:50Speaker 05

  So they're ready for our pedestals.

• 51:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:52Speaker 05

  When they come out of the factory. Getting that orchestra right, that the site is ready when our equipment is ready, is going to be a challenge. And we're going to have to keep investing in craft labor.

• 52:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:04Speaker 05

  In these locations to do the build.

• 52:06John Coogan?

  What does investing in craft labor look like? I mean, we've heard about reskilling, retraining, trade schools. Is there a drought? Are people already seeing the news and seeing the stock price and retraining and reskilling? Or is this more of like a decade-long process for America?

• 52:24Speaker 05

  We've been successful so far. We've added about 1,800 production workers in the last 15 months. We'll keep growing that number from here. You work to make the jobs more attractive.

• 52:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 52:34Speaker 05

  Part of how you do that is you take out the dull, dirty, unsafe work.

• 52:38John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:39Speaker 05

  And that's where you automate.

• 52:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 52:40Speaker 05

  And then you allow these workers to thrive with doing what they want to do.

• 52:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:45Speaker 05

  But the reality is they have a lot of pride in what they're doing every day. We put the customer name, where the project is going with everything we build. So they understand the impact they're having.

• 52:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 52:56Speaker 05

  So it's not just a piece of electrical equipment. They know how they're providing light and a middle-class growth to Vietnam or economic expansion in the US. And I think they see it as real.

• 53:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:11Speaker 05

  And, uh...

• 53:11John Coogan?

  Have you considered engraving the signature of the technician on the engine like Mercedes does?

• 53:16Speaker 05

  Exactly. But I think making personal matters.

• 53:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

• 53:21Speaker 05

  So there's a lot of pride.

• 53:21John Coogan?

  What else is in the portfolio? I mean, you mentioned wind. I think nuclear you mentioned briefly.

• 53:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:26John Coogan?

  Like, uh, walk me through the, the scope of your ambitions in energy generation broadly for the business.

• 53:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, but nuclear is important.

• 53:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 53:35Speaker 05

  We're building small modular reactors today. I think 300 megawatt machines that can be... Uh, they're big.

• 53:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:41Speaker 05

  But they're built inside the, an American football field.

• 53:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:45Speaker 05

  So that's 300,000 US homes that can be powered from one small modular reactor that is within a US football field.

• 53:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 53:53Speaker 05

  So that's very...

• 53:54John Coogan?

  300 megawatts and that still qualifies as small and modular?

• 53:58Speaker 05

  Relative to what used to be for nuclear.

• 54:00John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah.

• 54:01Speaker 05

  And it used to be a gigawatt plus.

• 54:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. Like a big Westinghouse development, multiple years.

• 54:07Speaker 05

  Precisely, precisely.

• 54:08John Coogan?

  Built on-site, massive concrete structures.

• 54:10Speaker 05

  Now we're trying to build a lot of them

• 54:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:12Speaker 05

  within this construct so that we can come down the cost curve.

• 54:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 54:16Speaker 05

  Because the reality is every nuclear plant historically was a snowflake.

• 54:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 54:20Speaker 05

  And that's why the industry never really became economically competitive.

• 54:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, no standardization.

• 54:25Speaker 05

  And we're fixing that.

• 54:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 54:26Speaker 05

  So that's important.

• 54:27John Coogan?

  And what is the regulatory approval process for that? I mean, I've heard that, uh, there's this famous line around like the, uh, NRC hasn't approved a new design in decades. Is that what you're feeling? Does it feel like there's a shift?

• 54:41Speaker 05

  Definitely.

• 54:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I guess the question is like, when, like, we're now about two years and a month since the spin-out

• 54:48Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 54:48Jordi Hays?

  was, was small modular reactors on the roadmap when the spin-out

• 54:53Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 54:53Jordi Hays?

  occurred.

• 54:54Speaker 05

  Definitely.

• 54:54Jordi Hays?

  And then, and then the opportunities got more compelling from a regulatory standpoint since then.

• 54:59Speaker 05

  Yeah, we're in construction on the first plant right now. It's in Canada, outside of Toronto. We will get NRC approval for the first plant in the US, I think, this summer. We'll be in construction and we've committed to the administration that as soon as we get the approval, we'll be ready to work on day one. And then from when we start construction, it's about a four-year cycle from the beginning to getting to commissioning. So this can start to happen and that's where the comparison to the large block, it's more of a 10-year construction cycle. That's a long time to wait for new electrons. But even if you want 1.2 gigawatts, the beauty of the small modular reactors is you can do them in blocks. And every two years after you get the first one, Bill, add 300 megawatts.

• 55:42Speaker 05

  Which also then meets a lot of our customer expectations to grow with the electrons. So this is going to be an important part of the equation for us.

• 55:51John Coogan?

  Are those two completely separate divisions or is there some fluidity across the workforce?

• 55:57Speaker 05

  On the front end of the business, commercially, there certainly is with customer relationships. But from a manufacturing and an engineering perspective, they're pretty distinctly different.

• 56:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 56:08Jordi Hays?

  What has been surprising to you about where the sort of energy infrastructure build-out is at today relative to the AI boom versus what was predictable when this spin-out first happened?

• 56:23Speaker 05

  Certainly in the US, the demand has accelerated greatly in the last two years and one month, no question about it.

• 56:29Jordi Hays?

  But weren't you seeing that? Don't you feel like you had a...

• 56:32Speaker 05

  Early stages, early stages. What I'd say that has surprised us though is there was probably concern that as the US market started to take off, it would price out a lot of other markets in the world from even being capable of buying the equipment.

• 56:46Jordi Hays?

  Interesting.

• 56:46Speaker 05

  The reality is we still see a very strong demand signals from a lot of other markets in the world. I mean, in the first quarter, we had very strong demand in Vietnam, in Mexico, in Canada, in Saudi, in Kuwait. So the global dynamic is still driving real growth above and beyond the AI dynamic.

• 57:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:05Speaker 05

  The reality is AI-specific, it's about 20% of our backlog today.

• 57:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, interesting. And those international projects...

• 57:13Jordi Hays?

  I guess... Due to having third being at having thirty percent of the the global market, right?

• 57:20Speaker 05

  You've got that responsibility.

• 57:21Jordi Hays?

  The scale is just already so immense that even if you have a massive acceleration via new technology cycle.

• 57:27Speaker 05

  And I think with a lot going on in the world today, more countries just realize for just national security reasons, they need a diverse portfolio of solutions to electrify and energize their country. Yeah. So, and that really goes back to really the war in Ukraine, and it's only been accentuated over the last five years.

• 57:45Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How have you processed some of the writing coming out of places like San Francisco? I'm thinking, you know, Leopold situational awareness, where if you look back over the last couple of years, he's been right over and over and over. At the time, a lot of people reading that, even in AI, would think like, hey, this seems pretty aggressive, but to date, he's been quite accurate. Even even some more sci fi kind of exercises like AI twenty twenty seven have been relatively accurate up until this point. But how did you how did you process, you know, basically kind of the analysis coming out of the the AI community in SF going back a few years?

• 58:31Speaker 05

  It's hard for me to kind of decipher how this is going to play out and who are going to be winners and losers and how that plays. But it's very hard when you take a step back in this country and really throughout the world to not believe we don't need a lot more infrastructure build for communities and economies to thrive. Mm hmm. So at the end of the day, we're deeply investing in these businesses to to meet this moment, and we think we're pretty early in this journey and are going to keep investing into it.

• 59:02John Coogan?

  Is sovereign AI driving any of the international demand that you mentioned?

• 59:06Speaker 05

  You start to see some of the hyperscalers evaluate more build out in Southeast Asia as an example. So they'll try to use exactly Malaysia, Indonesia, natural gas, but adjacent to Singapore for law.

• 59:22John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 59:23Speaker 05

  So in that regard, that's happening. Certainly Taiwan's one of our biggest markets. That's because of TSMC.

• 59:29John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 59:30Speaker 05

  So we're commissioning almost 10 gigawatts of power primarily for TSMC.

• 59:35John Coogan?

  Not for data centers, but for fabs.

• 59:38Speaker 05

  For the fabs, for the chip.

• 59:39John Coogan?

  I had no idea they were so electricity intensive.

• 59:42Speaker 05

  So significant demands in Taiwan for that adjacency.

• 59:46John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 59:47Speaker 05

  So, and that's happening in the US too.

• 59:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:49Speaker 05

  As you think about some of the chip fab factories that are being built. So it's not just the AI factories.

• 59:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:55Speaker 05

  It's the infrastructure around it that needs the electron.

• 59:57John Coogan?

  Okay. Help me understand some of the less sexy or less obvious, maybe pieces of the grid that need to be modernized, need to scale up. If we're familiar with the turbine.

• 1:00:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:00:10John Coogan?

  We're familiar with the nuclear reactor. These are very tractable things.

• 1:00:13Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:00:14John Coogan?

  But I'm sure there's so many other pieces of the electron delivery supply chain that are important and you're involved in.

• 1:00:20Speaker 05

  I mean, if you just take a step back, the system is really, is built, was built for a coal plant to in one direction flow electrons towards a house or a factory.

• 1:00:32John Coogan?

  And that was a 24/7 flow, very stable.

• 1:00:35Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 1:00:36John Coogan?

  And then you still had peak demand during the day or during the summers.

• 1:00:39Speaker 05

  You did, or during the summer, exactly. So that was where we started.

• 1:00:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Speaker 05

  Now you have all these variable forms of generation.

• 1:00:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:48Speaker 05

  On top of that, you have electrons that are going in multiple directions because you have people selling their electrons back into the grid.

• 1:00:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:55Speaker 05

  On their roof.

• 1:00:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:57Speaker 05

  And the system is not optimizing all those electrons.

• 1:00:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:00Speaker 05

  So we have an old machine.

• 1:01:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:03Speaker 05

  For all intents and purposes, that is not doing a great job matching the supply with where the demand is. Part of that is for boring reasons like we have islanded grids in the US.

• 1:01:14John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:01:15Speaker 05

  It's not one connected machine to project things to where it needs to be.

• 1:01:20John Coogan?

  Is that possible?

• 1:01:21Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:01:22John Coogan?

  Given the geographic diversity and like how spread out the United States is, could, is it possible that I could sell electrons in California and it could wind up in New York?

• 1:01:30Speaker 05

  Certainly in the 48 states for sure.

• 1:01:32John Coogan?

  Really?

• 1:01:32Speaker 05

  I mean, there's no reason we shouldn't be able to build, build a meshed grid.

• 1:01:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:01:37Speaker 05

  That works.

• 1:01:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:38Speaker 05

  Um, today, we don't have that.

• 1:01:39John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:01:40Speaker 05

  Um, no, I think in this regard, the federal government's pushing hard on historical precedent.

• 1:01:45John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:46Speaker 05

  To try to drive efficiency because that's a faster way to incremental electrons.

• 1:01:51John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:01:51Speaker 05

  In some way than simply bu- building more plants. We're working on that.

• 1:01:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:55Speaker 05

  Part of that is making new connections that bring islands together.

• 1:01:59John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:02:00Speaker 05

  Part of it is also, and this is frankly the harder part, different regulatory structures and market practices to allow different players to get paid.

• 1:02:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:10Speaker 05

  In that, and that is sometimes harder.

• 1:02:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:13Speaker 05

  But we're working our way through that.

• 1:02:15John Coogan?

  Uh, talk about, uh, nuclear timelines. We've seen a bunch of announcements from hyperscalers. It feels like 2030, 2032. You see 2035, uh, even stepping aside from your business, just broadly, uh, I think a lot of us track Vodal.

• 1:02:30Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:02:30John Coogan?

  Uh, that took decades. When do you think we'll be getting new electrons from a new nuclear plant in America?

• 1:02:36Speaker 05

  You bet. I mean, I, I start with the fact that we've got about 56 existing, uh, plants in the US that can add five gigawatts of power by upgrading what's already running.

• 1:02:46John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:46Speaker 05

  That can happen this decade.

• 1:02:47John Coogan?

  And that counts, yeah.

• 1:02:48Speaker 05

  And that's real.

• 1:02:49John Coogan?

  That'll happen soon.

• 1:02:49Speaker 05

  So that's the first step.

• 1:02:50John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:02:51Speaker 05

  New incremental plants.

• 1:02:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:53Speaker 05

  2032, 2031, that's about right.

• 1:02:56John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:02:57Speaker 05

  But then we can scale.

• 1:02:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:58Speaker 05

  And in the next decade, this can become a much more meaningful part of the equation for the country and the world.

• 1:03:03John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, that makes sense. Is that, uh, going to be deeply capex intensive at some point? Once that 2032, there's a rationalization, a realization that it's working, but we, in order to 10x, 100x the nuclear production, there's going to be some sort of capex boom and a delay in the investment before it gets recouped and starts generating electricity?

• 1:03:24Speaker 05

  Nuclear is definitely CapEx heavy, but then it lasts forever.

• 1:03:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:28Speaker 05

  So the life cycle cost of nuclear can be very compelling, but there is a significant upfront cost.

• 1:03:35John Coogan?

  Talk about some of the other initiatives that are happening broadly around electrification and just grid reliability. We've talked to companies that are doing home batteries to try and release some of the, there's the Tesla Powerwall, there's Base Energy, there's a few other companies that are working in that space. Are there any other sort of near term, between now and 2032?

• 1:03:57Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:03:57John Coogan?

  Steps that you think America or the grid should be taking to just modernize and create more efficiency and more electrical abundance?

• 1:04:06Speaker 05

  I do think in most applications, you're going to continue to see storage grow in the system. We historically think about storage primarily with solar.

• 1:04:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:15Speaker 05

  The reality is storage is going to start to be attached to many power generation sources to create more optionality for us.

• 1:04:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:21Speaker 05

  And that's a good thing.

• 1:04:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:22Speaker 05

  And that attached with software can ensure that we get more of the electrons where it's needed.

• 1:04:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. You mentioned solar. What is the bull case for an American solar dominant industry? It feels like China is very cost competitive.

• 1:04:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:39John Coogan?

  There's discussions of, hey, if they're cheap, maybe we should just buy them all and install them. We have a friend who has that take. There's other folks who are more on the tariff and let's, you know, put some barriers in place to give our indigenous industries a chance.

• 1:04:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:04:54John Coogan?

  Where do you fall on what it takes to roll out, I guess, as much solar as we need?

• 1:05:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'd say stationary equipment, solar panels or batteries, China's ahead by a lot. Where they struggle still to a larger extent is with rotating equipment that requires another level of material sciences.

• 1:05:17John Coogan?

  That means tracking the sun?

• 1:05:18Speaker 05

  Uh, well, no, outside of solar.

• 1:05:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:05:20Speaker 05

  So I'm shifting in the comparison to a turbine, a wind turbine, although they're competitive there, nuclear.

• 1:05:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:28Speaker 05

  It requires another level of heat resistant technology that we still.

• 1:05:34Speaker 05

  Have quite a lead on.

• 1:05:34John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:05:35Speaker 05

  But on the stationary equipment like a solar panel or storage. It's going to be tough.

• 1:05:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:42Speaker 05

  The investments that have been made in those factories to automate. And the CapEx required, that is a challenge.

• 1:05:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:49Speaker 05

  But the reality is the country has a lot more resources than China has.

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:05:54Speaker 05

  We have very inexpensive gas. We have a much more advanced nuclear industry here. We have plenty of land that has good wind and solar to take advantage of. In a grid that we can do more with that already exists versus having to create it from scratch. So we have a lot going for us, but in this regard, we do need to build in a different way going forward. The way we have the last 25 years, albeit there wasn't a lot of electricity demand growth the prior 25 years.

• 1:06:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:06:24Jordi Hays?

  Lots of Silicon Valley companies today building in energy. How are you thinking about M and A over the long term? I think a lot of these teams are very talented. Many of them will probably create interesting innovations, but a lot of them won't necessarily get to real scale. And maybe be a standalone public company, let's say, but could be an interesting tuck in for a platform like GEV. How are you thinking about M and A? Are you meeting these companies? Do you ever invest in them?

• 1:06:55Speaker 05

  It's a big part of our future. I mean, we, we try to lean into the ventures game more and more, but we want to be thought of as a partner that these companies come to.

• 1:07:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:05Speaker 05

  Because we do know how to industrialize things at scale. We have very strong relationships with the end customers. And part of why I appreciate opportunities to come and talk with you guys is that's the company we want to be seen as, as a partner of choice. Whenever they choose that, it doesn't have to be M and A and an acquisition. It can be an alliance in different ways because it's going to take many different partnerships and many different structures for us collectively as a country to meet the moment. Vernova also doesn't have all the answers. There's a lot of stuff we know how to do, but there's a lot in this ecosystem that we've got to get better at. Which is why to some extent, one of the big pluses for us right now is as our customers have shifted more to Silicon Valley.

• 1:07:48Speaker 05

  And it's about 20% of our backlog today. They're making us better because they think about innovation differently, risk and reward a little bit differently.

• 1:07:57Jordi Hays?

  And timelines, maybe.

• 1:07:58Speaker 05

  Timelines for sure. Timelines for sure, and I think that's good for everybody.

• 1:08:02Jordi Hays?

  Totally, totally, it's good. Yeah, right, right now, there's, there's, you know, maybe, you know, everyone's frustrated because they want it, they want it now, but at the same time, yeah, just, just increasing that innovation cycle will be better for everyone in the long run. Did you feel like you went through a culture reset process during the spin out? What did you take from GE versus what did you, what did you try to create, build from the ground up?

• 1:08:28Speaker 05

  The fact that I had been there, have been 25 years, it's because I always liked the ambition of the company and I always loved the people. At the same time, we always didn't perform as well as we could have, which really comes back to focus. And the beauty of the spin out is it got us focused on one purpose every day. We weren't competing with a healthcare business or an aircraft engine business for capital. Our board wasn't diversified to solve many problems. We're here to lead and expanding the electric power system and ultimately decarbonizing the world in the process. And I think that focus, as much as anything, is also helping us attract another level of talent.

• 1:09:07Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:09:07Speaker 05

  Because I think a lot of young people see climate change as an example, one of their generation's biggest challenges. And there's no confusion that Vernova can be a company that can move that needle at scale. So it's helping us just perform better with focus. It's also helping us attract another level of talent and create our own culture while still protecting for the ambition and what was a great people culture. But we were a big company inside GE and sometimes too many goals or no goals at all.

• 1:09:37Jordi Hays?

  I love that. You're like, I'm, it's so nice being at a small company now of 85,000.

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  I have two final quick questions. One, I would love to know what a year in the life looks like for you. Like where are you spending time? Where's headquarters? When are you on site? When are you with customers? Like, are you flying around the world constantly? What's, what's your day to day look like over the course of a year?

• 1:10:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, our headquarters is in Cambridge, Mass, in Austin. And we, we put the headquarters there because we did want to attract. Those young people that believe climate change matters and to give them a platform to start their career. In that regard, it's worked. All that said, I'm not there much.

• 1:10:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:19Speaker 05

  You know, I've spent 10 weeks so far this year outside the US.

• 1:10:22John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:10:23Speaker 05

  That's a lot in May. But the reality is, this is a unique moment.

• 1:10:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:28Speaker 05

  There's a lot of complexity from a geopolitical perspective where governments are very engaged on power generation build out.

• 1:10:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:36Speaker 05

  So you have to show up.

• 1:10:37John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:37Speaker 05

  And have those adult conversations in person.

• 1:10:40John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:10:40Speaker 05

  So this year has been very heavy international travel.

• 1:10:44John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:10:45Speaker 05

  I'm on the West Coast multiple times a month.

• 1:10:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:47Speaker 05

  That's a given. I'm admittedly more in Northern California and Seattle than LA. But right now, we need to be consistently co-creating with our customers.

• 1:10:59John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:10:59Speaker 05

  Because they're learning every day what they really need.

• 1:11:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:02Speaker 05

  And this has shifted from what it once was of buying a power purchase agreement and then just getting the electrons to asking us not just for an electron, but to build an integrated system that allows them to run their end application the way that they want. And frankly, every customer has somewhat different strategies for what they want. If it's AI, for what that AI factory needs to do.

• 1:11:26John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:11:27Speaker 05

  We need to co-create with them if we're going to serve them. So we're showing up and I need to show up.

• 1:11:33John Coogan?

  And then last question. It seems like incredibly AGI-proof company or beneficiary.

• 1:11:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:11:41John Coogan?

  And there's a business is huge and diversified. What does it take to get a job at G. Vernova today?

• 1:11:47Speaker 05

  Humility, intellectual interest, and a real belief in the purpose. We are a company that's hiring a lot of people right now. Take our neighbors at MIT. We've got 69 kids starting with us in July.

• 1:12:01John Coogan?

  You took the whole class practically.

• 1:12:03Speaker 05

  Sixty-nine.

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 1:12:04Speaker 05

  Because we need to complement those production workers with young engineers

• 1:12:09John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:12:10Speaker 05

  that get excited about building something.

• 1:12:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:12Speaker 05

  And that's one of the things we're excited about. I think sometimes we talk so much on the risks of job loss.

• 1:12:17John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:12:17Speaker 05

  Through AI.

• 1:12:18John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 1:12:19Speaker 05

  We're going to build.

• 1:12:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:20Speaker 05

  A lot of cool stuff and be proud of it.

• 1:12:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:23Speaker 05

  And that takes a combination of a lot of different types of people. And we want them to be with Vernova.

• 1:12:28John Coogan?

  That's amazing.

• 1:12:29Jordi Hays?

  Do the hyperscaler CEOs wine and dine you?

• 1:12:34Speaker 05

  No. No?

• 1:12:36John Coogan?

  There's that apocryphal story about, what is it, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk begging Jensen for GPUs and it's hotly debated. Are people deba-- they're not begging you?

• 1:12:46Speaker 05

  We're working hard to serve them.

• 1:12:48John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:12:48Speaker 05

  Every day.

• 1:12:49John Coogan?

  That's good.

• 1:12:49Speaker 05

  And showing up with as much humility as we can and

• 1:12:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:53Speaker 05

  working to meet this moment.

• 1:12:54John Coogan?

  That's great. That's great. Well, thank you so much, Scott.

• 1:12:56Speaker 05

  Thanks. Yeah, it's so great.

• 1:12:57John Coogan?

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:12:58Speaker 05

  It's so great to meet you.

• 1:12:58John Coogan?

  I appreciate it. Great. This was fantastic. Our next guest is already in the waiting room. We have Brian Elliott from Blitzy. He is the CEO with a huge fundraising announcement coming in to the TBPN Ultra Dome. Let's bring in Brian. How are you doing?

• 1:13:13Speaker 06

  Here we go. Hey, guys. How are you?

• 1:13:15John Coogan?

  Quick transition. Thank you so much for taking the time. Please,

• 1:13:18Speaker 06

  Great to meet you.

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  this is the first time on the show, introduce yourself in the company.

• 1:13:22Speaker 06

  Yeah, so Blitzy, we're announcing the $200 million foundation at a $1.4 billion valuation today. So we're in-- Nice. Thanks, guys. Appreciate the love. So we're an autonomous software development platform specifically designed for complex enterprise use cases. So we serve banks, insurance companies, anyone with huge amounts of code. And we do autonomous work, meaning the system will run for days to weeks autonomously, recursively improving the code using all of the foundational models together in OpenAI, Gemini, and Anthropic's models.

• 1:13:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. So what is the go-to-market motion for you? I mean, you're focused on the biggest companies. Like, do you have-- like, tell me about the shape of your sales force, like what the process is like to actually deliver value, because I imagine that a lot of times you're going up against like the build versus buy question almost like, should we just build something like this internally? Should we just use the tools directly, the models directly? But you clearly have a fantastic value proposition because you've seen a lot of traction.

• 1:14:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we go in direct, right? It's very much like a Palantir-like motion.

• 1:14:26John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:14:27Speaker 06

  And so we're going to go in direct. We're going to show you quickly. We're going to reverse engineer your code base, oftentimes 30, 50 million lines of code. And we're going to do all that within 48 hours of installing Blitzy.

• 1:14:36John Coogan?

  Or else.

• 1:14:36Speaker 06

  So we get the whack.

• 1:14:37John Coogan?

  Sounds like a threat.

• 1:14:40John Coogan?

  But yeah, no, I mean, obviously that's valuable. I mean, that's the case with all these coding agents is like, the first thing is like, understanding what actually is the business problem? What's actually going on? How are you confronting like the diffusion question broadly? Like, there are so many systems that feel like complete code. Oh, it's the beautiful, you know, end-to-end engineered system. And then you realize that, oh, wait, actually, like, if this person doesn't fill out this form at this time, like, the whole system grinds to a halt because that's just the way this organization was designed years ago.

• 1:15:10Speaker 06

  Yeah. So these are the like, complex use cases that Blitsy is designed for. So we designed this for the messy brownfield legacy code base. Where the system is going to come in, it's going to create a knowledge graph. And we're building and running the application, right? And so, inside of a VM, we are building around the application, looking at what's going on. And then we've invented a proprietary way to store and then have agents be able to traverse a graph, understand what's going on, and then build large amounts of work on top of it.

• 1:15:36Jordi Hays?

  How did you talk about the category overall during your fundraise? It is, you know, every single day, there's a new company in this space. And everything we've seen so far is that there's just such overwhelming demand that almost every company is doing well. And almost every company would have been seen as best in class if it was in another category, you know, based on their growth a few years ago. But how are you talking about the category? How do you see it evolving when everyone kind of wants to do everything, at least in the fullness of time? So I'm curious how you pitched it.

• 1:16:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, so we really focus on autonomy, right? So if you look at what's out there today, there are things that run for a half hour, things that run for a day continuously without a human in the loop. Our system is at its core defined to run for long periods of time. We're the most inference compute intensive platform out there, driving up code qualities. Like, we'll have our system, it can run for weeks on end, improving the quality of code, specifically focused on those large, large brownfield code bases. So that's where we found our sweet spot inside of the enterprise. No one else is as laser focused from a technology perspective as we are in large brownfield, large-scale autonomy. And as the models get better, we continue to rise up and take advantage of that. So we are a long transformer and want as much CapEx investment into the category as possible.

• 1:16:58Jordi Hays?

  From other people?

• 1:17:01Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. We want everyone to get the three models. Yeah.

• 1:17:05Jordi Hays?

  And it's a like clearly, um, clearly a compelling pitch because you raised the 200 million. But it is, it is, I, I mean, I think it's notable that I would say that would, would you say that is quite a similar pitch to many of the other companies in the space? Or do you, are they, are they saying they're focused on autonomy, but they're really not? And it, and it's, it's more, um, point solutions or, or models or?

• 1:17:33Speaker 06

  The, the world, the world has looked at being able to have a system run continuously for a day as autonomy, right? And what we've done is we've redefined that to weeks at a time, right? Doing hundreds, hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of code that have been end to end tested ahead of it getting back to the human. So we've set a new benchmark for what's possible against these large scale code bases. Uh, and like we're, we're basically staying at the frontier for, for autonomous software development.

• 1:17:57John Coogan?

  Okay. I, I can't find it, but I saw Meta put out a new benchmark today. And the benchmark was basically take the frontier model and try and recreate an entire repo, an entire piece of software from scratch. And, uh, all the, all the frontier L L Ms were, were, were performing very poorly. Like they were the 0%, 3% maybe it was very rough. Uh, you see a similar dynamic with R K G I, uh, V3, the frontier models, the most amazing models are at like 0.2%, 0.5%. And, and then at the same time, you have people with like, you know, AI agent psychosis and vibe coding, tons of things and like incredible results for the models and like incredible revenue ramps from all the labs.

• 1:18:38John Coogan?

  Uh, and I'm wondering how you square these like, like what, what are the models still bad at? How are you processing the question of like spiky intelligence? Where are you getting the most value and where are you seeing, oh, okay, it's not quite there yet?

• 1:18:52Speaker 06

  So you see a rapid depreciation of intelligence after you exceed like 100K context window, right? And so they're advertising a million, 10 million, there's someone subcu put out 12 million, you know, context window.

• 1:19:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wanted to, I wanted to.

• 1:19:04Speaker 06

  But that's not real.

• 1:19:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that, but, but continue.

• 1:19:08Speaker 06

  Yeah, that like they're using sparse attention beyond that point, right? And so you can kind of get it right. Sometimes the academics will call this context pressure. And so what's important is that you, you limit the LLM's ability to look within its effective context window just in time, every time to do the right amount of work. So as the code bases scale, like you see results depreciate pretty dramatically, right? And so you have to be able to have a system level approach, not just throw a model at it with a slightly larger advertised context window to solve these large scale problems.

• 1:19:36John Coogan?

  And so that means like orchestrators and like teams of agents, like there's one agent on this 100K token chunk of code, and it's very good at that. And then it's coordinating with another agent. Is that the solution?

• 1:19:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, but code is relational, not serial, right? And so like, like you, you can't just say the serial 100K token, which is like 10,000 lines of code, but you have to cut it in half to account for prompts and tools, right? So now we're talking about a miniscule view, but the entire relational aspect of, well, it's something way over here in this service. It's actually relationally relevant to what's going on just in time. So you have to be able to understand, you have to create an ability to understand code, which people used to do with language specific, version specific ASTs. We've invented a language agnostic version agnostic way to understand code.

• 1:20:21John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations on the round. Congratulations on the progress.

• 1:20:24Speaker 06

  Yeah, great to meet you.

• 1:20:25John Coogan?

  Keep on blitzing.

• 1:20:26Speaker 06

  Sounds good, guys.

• 1:20:28John Coogan?

  Have a good one. Goodbye. Up next, we have Stephen Balaban from Lambda, co-founder and the new CEO, Michelle from Lambda in the waiting room. Welcome to the show. How you guys doing?

• 1:20:42Speaker 03

  Wow, look at this setup.

• 1:20:43John Coogan?

  Look at this setup.

• 1:20:43Speaker 03

  Suit it up.

• 1:20:44John Coogan?

  Suit it up. Okay, reintroduce yourself, Stephen. Introduce yourself, Michelle. Michelle, because we're very excited for today.

• 1:20:52Stephen Balaban?

  John and Jordy, so good to be back. Thank you so much. And congratulations. It's been a while since we've seen each other and so much has happened in your world, too. Um, so I'm Stephen Balaban. I'm the co-founder and founding CEO, but now Chief Technology Officer, CTO.

• 1:21:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:11Stephen Balaban?

  And we've welcomed on Michelle Combs as our new Chief Executive Officer. And I'm passing the baton after 14 years.

• 1:21:21John Coogan?

  This really feels like we're putting a new quarterback in. This feels like proper TVP on SportsCenter. I love it.

• 1:21:27Stephen Balaban?

  And, and, and this, it was such an awesome opportunity to like, this is the first thing that we're doing right after announcing it to the company and to the world. And I think that one thing you guys are going to really like here. So Michelle has obviously a very, very long history in telecommunications infrastructure, whether it's being the former CEO of Sprint, former CEO of SoftBank International.

• 1:21:53Stephen Balaban?

  Associated with and, uh, you know, on the, you know, with the McLaren team. Also on the board of Philip Morris.

• 1:22:01John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:22:02Stephen Balaban?

  Oversaw the acquisition of Swedish Match.

• 1:22:06Speaker 07

  And the thing that I have some competitors.

• 1:22:10Stephen Balaban?

  So maybe we should speak about it outside of it.

• 1:22:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, we should.

• 1:22:15Speaker 07

  So it's not Zen. What is it? I don't know what you are.

• 1:22:18John Coogan?

  This is the company I started before this show.

• 1:22:20Stephen Balaban?

  Oh, I know. I know. That's why. The, the, uh, the, uh, the, the, the tagline we have now is, look, there's telecommunications infrastructure.

• 1:22:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:31Stephen Balaban?

  Racing infrastructure. Nicotine infrastructure. And AI infrastructure.

• 1:22:36John Coogan?

  It all comes together. It all makes sense.

• 1:22:38Stephen Balaban?

  Four ingredients to a flourishing civilization.

• 1:22:42John Coogan?

  I think you're right.

• 1:22:43Stephen Balaban?

  You know, we're really excited to have Michelle on board and, um, just it's, it's a, it's a, it's an honor to be able to do this as a founder, to be able to bring on, uh, somebody with such experience.

• 1:22:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:57Speaker 07

  Very excited to be there. I guess I would never have been invited without you, Steven. So thanks to you, I am a cool guy. I am on this nice show, so I really love it. So we just announced it to our employees a little while ago. Very, very excited. Fascinating industry, amazing company, amazing founder that I have discovered in the past two months. And I guess that we are going to have a lot of fun in order to build the next step of this company and continue our leadership in this industry. So I love it and that's really exciting.

• 1:23:34John Coogan?

  Huge industry, huge growth rates, hugely successful company thus far. What is the major goal? What are the KPIs? How do you manage a company like this over the next year, over the next decade?

• 1:23:48Speaker 07

  When the GPUs are on fire. Well, I guess that's the name of the game is scale. Scale, it's what matters. So Steven and team have built an amazing platform in the past few years. And we can really start from this foundation and turbo boost the growth. So I am really coming in order to help Steve to unlock the growth of this company. Scale has no limit, so we know that. So it's just about scale, scale in terms of capital formation. So that's something and you will have seen that we are strengthening the team also in this side, on this dimension, in order to be able to raise the right level of capital, whether it's equity, whether it's debt, whatever is needed in order to accelerate our growth.

• 1:24:31Speaker 07

  And scale also in terms of operations. So it's about, let's say, finding the right sites, finding, of course, the right GPUs and just making sure that we can assemble all of that in order to have the best service, the best quality, the best quantity of compute and the most efficient computing power for our customers. So that's really about executing.

• 1:24:53Speaker 07

  In fact, the dream of Steven, which has started the dream, which had put all the ingredients together, and my role is just to accelerate that with my partner in crime, Steve, so which I love the idea to partner with a founder. As you can see, I'm a little bit older than the founder. I have an experience which is a little bit outside of the founding place. I'm serial executive, but I have worked with many founders in my previous lives, for example at SoftBank. And so I really enjoy, I really like to team with a founder, and especially a founder like Steven. So that's already very fun. Look, how he's dressed. He's dressed like a French guy. He's dressed for you. So look, he has already a tie.

• 1:25:38Stephen Balaban?

  You guys will appreciate this. I got a Charvet tie I picked up in Paris. And you know, that's a good premonition for...

• 1:25:46Jordi Hays?

  Steven, where do you want to focus?

• 1:25:48Speaker 07

  Sorry for the French guy. We should just look at his shoes. So he made a mistake there. He made sneakers with his suit. So now we can take it from there. But I just wanted to show you that there was an issue there.

• 1:26:00Jordi Hays?

  Wouldn't it be an AIC with like proper dress shoes?

• 1:26:04Stephen Balaban?

  Made in America, New Balance.

• 1:26:05Jordi Hays?

  There we go. Steven, where do you want to, like, obviously, you're going to be focused on technical responsibilities now. Where do you want to focus? Where do you see the opportunity for you to have the highest impact?

• 1:26:17Stephen Balaban?

  Yeah, so I am going to be continuing to lead product vision, technology direction, and working on just really high-impact, high-velocity products at the company. I mean, one of the things that I've done historically, even just in the past couple of months, is really, you know, spit up a ton of agents, really show how software engineering is supposed to work in the new world. And on top of that, I'm just still deeply involved in standing up new infrastructure. So whether that's like hiring and recruiting really great, amazing technical data center experts, you know, assisting with the strategy around how do we go from leasing data center space to owning and operating data center space. I'm just

• 1:27:02Stephen Balaban?

  going to be involved... involved in wherever is like the highest impact for me.

• 1:27:07Stephen Balaban?

  You know, when I was thinking about these roles, I kind of looked at the people who I really looked up to in business. And, you know, the CTO role is the one that's kind of styled after somebody who I really look up to, which is Larry Ellison. And, you know, when he, uh, when he transitioned to, uh, the, he transitioned to a full-time CTO position.

• 1:27:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:26Stephen Balaban?

  And when Safra Katz and Mark Heard came, became co-CEOs of Oracle.

• 1:27:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:30Stephen Balaban?

  And so I figured that was an apropos title, given that I look up to him so much.

• 1:27:35John Coogan?

  That's amazing. How are you thinking about focus right now? People know Lambda is a way to, you know, lease compute on a short-term basis. We've seen other companies expand into everything from buying land and building supercomputers to training their own foundation models and offering APIs. It feels like there's always a question of, do you want to do more? But if the current thing's working, do you stay focused? How are you thinking about these trade-offs?

• 1:28:07Stephen Balaban?

  Michelle and I are exactly on the same page, which is focus, focus, focus, focus. We are building a generational company that is going to last for a hundred years. And we're going to do that by having the most compute at the lowest cost basis, offer those at the lowest prices in the most flexible terms, so that we can delight both the largest, most important model builders in the world, like OpenAI, and the developer. You can't forget the developer who have built the entire industry and ecosystem that surrounds this company. I mean, Lambda is really the developer's cloud, you know, is founded by a software engineer. It's built for people like me.

• 1:28:52Stephen Balaban?

  And so we're going to have that combination of both of those and focus on that.

• 1:28:56John Coogan?

  Well, congratulations and thank you so much for coming on the show. Can't wait to catch up with you soon.

• 1:29:02Jordi Hays?

  You guys look fantastic.

• 1:29:03John Coogan?

  This was fantastic.

• 1:29:04Jordi Hays?

  We'll have you both back on soon.

• 1:29:05John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon.

• 1:29:06Stephen Balaban?

  John Jordy, congratulations, guys. You take care.

• 1:29:09John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:29:09Jordi Hays?

  Guys, cheers.

• 1:29:10Stephen Balaban?

  Bye.

• 1:29:11John Coogan?

  Just yesterday, Ryan Cohen, uh, of GameStop, offered a $55 billion unsolicited bid for eBay, targeting $2 billion in cost cuts. And we have him joining the show with us now. Ryan Cohen, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time. How are you doing?

• 1:29:31Ryan Cohen?

  How are you guys? Great to see you.

• 1:29:33John Coogan?

  Fantastically. I would love an update. What can you share with us on the situation as things have developed since yesterday, just to sort of set the, obviously this is moving very quickly. Where are we right now? What's happening?

• 1:29:48Ryan Cohen?

  Uh, we made an offer yesterday, um, 125 bucks a share. Um, Half cash, half stock?

• 1:30:00Ryan Cohen?

  That was funny, wasn't it?

• 1:30:02John Coogan?

  Have you considered 49% cash? Why did you get to half cash, half stock? Can you unpack that a little bit at least?

• 1:30:09Ryan Cohen?

  Well, I mean, frankly, when you think about me going and running the eBay business, what we're proposing is for existing shareholders to take, uh, half of their investment off the table. And that would be us providing them with 28, uh, with $28 billion, which is like a 40% premium from when we started buying the stock. Uh, and then they would be getting roughly, uh, I mean, it depends on ultimately when the transaction closes, but they would be rolling the rest into the combined company of GameStop and eBay. Frankly,

• 1:30:52Ryan Cohen?

  with me running eBay, I think that the company, the earnings power of the company is going to increase substantially, uh, as well as the ability to, to grow. The platform stagnated over the last decade and, uh, I could do a lot with eBay.

• 1:31:13John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 1:31:13Ryan Cohen?

  That's a very strong business and that's right up my alley.

• 1:31:17John Coogan?

  Take us through the big vision. Like in five years, you're at the helm. Like, how big can this business be? Are you expanding it? Obviously there's an operational efficiency point, but what is the big picture? What's the blue sky, pie in the sky vision for the combined entity?

• 1:31:33Ryan Cohen?

  So where we've had success at GameStop and where eBay has had success is in collectibles. Trading cards, uh, collectibles. The founder of your show was, uh, was talking about his Mont Blanc and like, that's a good example. That's a, a perfect item to go and buy on eBay, but you're always concerned, uh, that is it going to be real and the trust? And that's something that using GameStop 1600 stores, we can immediately authenticate that item. The seller can ship it or we can ship it, but we've got 1600 access points that we can do live authentication.

• 1:32:15Ryan Cohen?

  So we can go deep in collectibles, leveraging our physical infrastructure. We can increase uh, intake by bringing a lot more product onto the platform. And then there's a lot of other categories that I can, I can grow in. And, uh, you know, you look at live commerce as an example. I mean, eBay has 130 million users and they're getting crushed by competitors in live commerce. So, uh, an owner's mentality, you know, I can, uh, I want to, I want to own eBay forever. Like I, I love that business. It's run like a public utility. It should have been wiped out, but it hasn't been.

• 1:33:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's been remarkably resilient. How many, how many companies, how many startups have gone after a specific category on eBay, raised a hundred million plus dollars and yet eBay has remained resilient. It shows that, that there's, um, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a really powerful platform.

• 1:33:19Ryan Cohen?

  Yeah, that's why I love it. And, you know, the website still looks the same as it did in 1995, but everyone's tried to kill this thing and it's still making over $2 billion a year. So that goes to show you the, the durability of the business.

• 1:33:37John Coogan?

  Talk about live commerce more. Would that be just a better integration with TikTok, Instagram streaming, Twitch streaming? Do you need to go and partner with big creators? Do you need to find your own platform for that? Like, how does that actually play out in a world where eBay and you are making a bigger push into live commerce? It makes a lot of sense, but I'm wondering like, how does it actually work?

• 1:34:02Ryan Cohen?

  Yeah, it would be partnering with creators. I mean, they've got the platform. We would improve the platform, so it looks better and more consistent with the kind of UI that you have at competitors. But there's the user base, and so it's not something you have to market. It's building out better tech and partnering with creators.

• 1:34:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, and the correct incentive structure for those creators, because I bet you right now, you could probably go get some referral code or something, but it's not deeply integrated in a way that you can really accelerate on a social platform.

• 1:34:35Jordi Hays?

  Why do you think eBay, has eBay been a target of any type of deal like this in the past? I'm not familiar with any off the top of my head, but why do you think maybe it hasn't been more of a target? And I guess like, why do you think you can get more efficiency out of it than maybe some other potential buyers who I'm sure see their costs? You know, marketing is something that people gravitate towards, but I'm sure you're seeing other efficiencies as well.

• 1:35:07Ryan Cohen?

  So in terms of the competitive landscape on an acquisition, I think there was some people circling around a few years ago. Nothing happened. The strategics can't really do it, because I don't think that they would be able to clear antitrust. So any of the large competitors wouldn't be able to acquire it. And, you know, I don't think that we would have any regulatory issues getting clearance on a merger. In terms of the efficiencies, GameStop is a good example. Like, GameStop is a dog, and it should have been dead.

• 1:35:52Ryan Cohen?

  And we breathe life, we breathe a lot of life into this then. Right, and if you look at SG and A, we've pulled out, we've dropped SG and A by forty seven percent, eight hundred million dollars by making marketing more efficient, almost turning off marketing. I mean, everyone knows GameStop, everybody knows eBay. So you talk to the marketing people that tell you like it's gonna tank revenues and all of this. And the reality is, uh, most of that marketing spends isn't making money, but everyone's trying to protect their jobs and there's kickbacks, there's all kinds of perverse incentives. And so I'm running the business like a family business.

• 1:36:37Ryan Cohen?

  You know, it's, it's really not that complicated. And you look at eBay spending two and a half billion bucks to grow one million users, two billion in cost cuts between sales and marketing and corporate overhead. It's not a lot, uh, and it's not something that's gonna take a few years. Like it's something that is gonna happen fast, fast, fast because I'm putting leverage on this thing and I don't wanna run a leveraged business. So I'm not gonna run it hot, I'm gonna pay down the leverage and I'm gonna increase earnings. Uh, they're spending five and a half billion dollars on operating expenses,

• 1:37:17Ryan Cohen?

  on eleven billion dollar business that has no inventory and it's asset light. So it just, there's eleven and a half thousand employees and it doesn't make sense. It doesn't, you don't need, I could run that business, I could run that business from my house. Like it's eBay, it looks the same as it did in nineteen ninety five. They need eleven and a half thousand.

• 1:37:41Jordi Hays?

  So is, is Elon Twitter Take Private somewhat of an inspiration here? There's been a number after that happened, in many ways the business suffered, but maybe it wasn't because of the deep cuts that he did to, to the team and.

• 1:37:55John Coogan?

  The service kept working.

• 1:37:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the service kept working, it's still a great product. Uh, we've been surprised that more CEOs and management teams haven't done something like that with businesses that are household names, but somewhat stagnated. Uh, is that an inspiration at all?

• 1:38:13Ryan Cohen?

  Yeah, and Twitter is a good example. I mean, what really happened at Twitter was that the advertisers, you know, I don't know what the situation is now, but they pretty much conspired against him. And, you know, it had nothing to do, my understanding is it really had nothing to do with the cost cuts, more of just the advertisers conspiring against him because of the demented political landscape and the fact that people apparently are against freedom of speech. And so, like, you look at the usability of the platform and the teams, the engineering teams are much smaller and they're innovating a lot faster. So it's actually the opposite. The more people you add, the more you slow things down. And

• 1:38:57Ryan Cohen?

  the fewer people you have, the more, it's like a startup. You've got to always be in startup mode. And you build the big teams and nothing gets done anymore.

• 1:39:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, do you think L L Ms will be a tailwind for eBay over the next decade? It feels like for the long tail of commerce, you're trying to find really specific items. It feels like L L Ms and people doing research in these products could be catalysts for the business. Maybe there's things on eBay that would be tough to, to find, but if I'm really getting precise around prompting or running these sort of agentic searches, maybe, maybe I have a higher likelihood of purchasing something.

• 1:39:37Ryan Cohen?

  Yeah, I mean, I think about all of the things that can disrupt the business in the future. And, uh, you know, I think that eBay is the kind of business where the, the future of the business model is more certain than most tech businesses. And that's why it's done so well. And, you know, there's been such a lack of innovation, yet it hasn't been able to be disrupted. So I would expect that to continue to, to be the case.

• 1:40:12John Coogan?

  If it doesn't materialize as an M and A, are you looking at a board seat? You have a position. Will you be more active in a non-M and A scenario?

• 1:40:25Ryan Cohen?

  Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do whatever we need to do to protect our investment and to improve the business. But the goal here isn't to be an activist. The goal is I want to own eBay. I want to run eBay. Like, I want that to be my baby. I want to build something much larger. And cost cutting, frankly, is the way to make the business more efficient, to pay down the debt, and innovate. But when I think about what I can do with eBay in the future, like, look at Chewy. You know, eBay is like Chewy on steroids. And so, um, there's so much more runway, and it's global.

• 1:41:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it seems like a huge opportunity. How do you want to be comped?

• 1:41:13Ryan Cohen?

  Based on performance, 100%.

• 1:41:16John Coogan?

  Is there any tension between you and the shareholders? How do you actually create alignment there?

• 1:41:23Ryan Cohen?

  It would be, I mean, my current compensation plan is tied to really lofty metrics, and it's based on the first tranche, I've got to double market cap, as an example, just to hit the first tranche and the 10x it in order for it to fully vest. So, I'm not interested in, yeah, I haven't taken a dollar of salary or any bonuses. And, you know, it's funny, actually, I just got a call from my team today that said, "This is how I know they hate me." They're not happy about this, by the way.

• 1:42:00Speaker 06

  The GameStop, this is the GameStop team?

• 1:42:02Ryan Cohen?

  eBay, no, eBay is not happy. Yeah, after this interview, they're, they're really not gonna like me. But, because they're gonna find out I'm cutting marketing spend. And the board already isn't like me because I'm calling out all the board fees. But I get a call and I say, "There is a, there's a, they're calling out your personal assistant." I said, "What are you talking about?" And they said, "They went on the GameStop's career page, and they saw that there's a listing for the personal assistant, and it's all kinds of personal stuff. And that's basically a CEO benefit. And, you know, it's basically not, you're using company resources personally."

• 1:42:42Ryan Cohen?

  I pay for my personal assistant personally. I don't even pay for, the company doesn't pay for my personal assistant. So they're already starting to get, um, their...

• 1:42:54Ryan Cohen?

  They're doing whatever they can. They want to fight.

• 1:42:57Jordi Hays?

  Have you, has any major eBay shareholders reached out to you? Have you had, you know, what is the general sentiment? You know, how do you think, what do you think it'll look like if you take this directly to the shareholders?

• 1:43:14Ryan Cohen?

  I don't know. I mean, I would want to, I want to own eBay at $125 a share. We're propose, there's tax advantages to rolling it, but when I think about what eBay could be worth, if I'm running this business, I believe it's a heck of a lot more than $125 a share. And so

• 1:43:34Ryan Cohen?

  I would roll 100% of the, of the equity, but you know, we'll, we'll see, we'll, we'll see what happens.

• 1:43:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:42Jordi Hays?

  What do you think of Michael Burry's critiques? A lot of people were, you know, talking about him exiting yesterday. He doesn't believe. Have you guys chatted?

• 1:43:55Ryan Cohen?

  I haven't chatted with Michael in a long time. I've seen he's more active than he says his investing philosophy. So I figured the, you know, his risk appetite and, you know, the leverage we're putting on just it, it didn't make sense for him, but it seemed as though it was more of a trade more so than, than anything.

• 1:44:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Looking at the price action yesterday, is that reflective of sort of like a shakeout of nonbelievers? And you feel like you have the right people around the table now?

• 1:44:36Ryan Cohen?

  I am. When I think back to Chewy, every single day was a shakeout.

• 1:44:45Ryan Cohen?

  Yeah. So, um, I don't know. It's hard to diagnose the shareholder base and I'm, I'm focused on what I could build over a long period of time. And if I got my hands on eBay, I can build something worth a lot and much larger than it is. So.

• 1:45:06Jordi Hays?

  Was Paramount at all an inspiration?

• 1:45:08John Coogan?

  Just gonna ask.

• 1:45:10Ryan Cohen?

  I've looked at it.

• 1:45:14Ryan Cohen?

  You know, what they did is really interesting, too.

• 1:45:18John Coogan?

  Just because smaller company buying a much larger company, but the deal still went through. The capital was marshaled. That was something that I think was unclear yesterday for some people was, you know, half cash, half stock. Where is it coming from? How much of this is just an ongoing conversation? And as you work through this process, you'll engage with other, you know, pools of capital or financiers to actually put together the final package. Do you have a date that you want this to like be done by?

• 1:45:50Ryan Cohen?

  I mean, we have the cash. We have the cash accounted for today in terms of a highly confident letter from our bank for the 20 billion plus we've got 9 billion of cash. So and the rest would be them rolling the equity into the combined company.

• 1:46:11John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:46:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think that was the that was the the rolling of the equity was the thing that if it had got into the viral clip from CNBC yesterday, it would have made a lot more sense. So I'm glad we're I'm glad we're getting it in now.

• 1:46:25John Coogan?

  Yep. Is there, I guess, how much of your critique of eBay is specifically around the current management team?

• 1:46:37Ryan Cohen?

  They've done a decent job. It's look, it's anyone when you've got perverse financial and they're they're not operating like owner. It just, you know, when when you've got it all on the line, you're going to do whatever it's going to take. 20 hour days, seven days a week, you're not going to stop. And when when equity is given out to you like candy, I mean, it's it's it's all companies. So, you know, the directors, board of directors make $4 million, like 350 to 450,000. Board director, there's been no insider buying at the company. I mean, like, it's not a surprise. They're not going to light the money on fire. They're not going to light the world on fire.

• 1:47:19Ryan Cohen?

  You've got a bunch of professionals in the board and a professional management.

• 1:47:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:25Jordi Hays?

  If this deal goes through roughly, what percentage of your personal net worth will be tied to it?

• 1:47:33Ryan Cohen?

  Well, um, I, I haven't done the math, but if things go correctly, then it better be the majority, otherwise I'm wasting my time.

• 1:47:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:44Jordi Hays?

  What was your first memory using eBay?

• 1:47:46John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:47:47Jordi Hays?

  Were you a power seller back in the day?

• 1:47:50Ryan Cohen?

  Very good question.

• 1:47:53John Coogan?

  I bought and sold DJ equipment on eBay back in like 2003. It was amazing.

• 1:47:59Ryan Cohen?

  I don't remember my first transaction, but uh, I'm gonna have to get back to you on that one.

• 1:48:06John Coogan?

  Okay, uh, with GameStop, last time we talked, you were mentioning a little bit of expansion into uh, digital goods, less physical material and, and, and stuff. Like, do you think that there's an opportunity for eBay to play in a digital marketplace or in a world where uh, certain collectibles or certain uh, goods become digital or, or the market shifts towards more uh, digital goods and, and would you like to see eBay expand into that?

• 1:48:36Ryan Cohen?

  Yes and yes, uh, in terms of a digital marketplace and they're already doing it to a certain extent. I mean, like all kinds of Roblox digital items are bought and sold, but uh, and I've actually bought them for my kids and there's so much fraud on the platform. Like, we're buying stuff, it's not a real item, end up having to do a charge back, but then it ended up getting delivered, so you can't do a charge back. So like, they've got the basics of it, but it's not being done well. So like, digital gaming, totally. That's a huge opportunity to, to dig into. Um, there's so much potential.

• 1:49:21John Coogan?

  On, on uh, digital stuff, I guess, um, you're obviously interested in cutting costs. Are you optimistic that stable coins might be a path to reducing costs? It's a high-volume transaction business, obviously a lot of credit card fees. Maybe there's a way around that with stable coins. We hear that from a lot of stable coin founders, haven't heard it from as many operators. What do you think?

• 1:49:47Ryan Cohen?

  I don't have a point of view on that. I haven't looked into it, so.

• 1:49:53Jordi Hays?

  I think the sellers would would probably be eating the the cost, but but potential option.

• 1:49:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:01John Coogan?

  I don't know. Jordy?

• 1:50:02Jordi Hays?

  Do you have any sense of how eBay is using AI internally today? Have they have they spoken about it much? Do you do you believe they're getting very much leverage out of the models? Do you think there there could be quite a bit more?

• 1:50:19Ryan Cohen?

  I've seen that they've made listings easier in terms of just generating product descriptions and stuff like that. So I think they're kind of like doing the super easy stuff.

• 1:50:35Ryan Cohen?

  Still, there's a lot of friction to sell a product on eBay. Like, it's it's just it's not easy. So the benefit of our 1600 stores is we have the ability to increase intake. But I would go through it and I would make it as simple as possible to have a real item for sale as a seller. And there's a lot of steps. It's just it's a pain in the ass. It's too difficult.

• 1:51:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:08John Coogan?

  1600 stores. In the world where you combined eBay and GameStop, do you expect that number to increase, decrease, stay the same?

• 1:51:19Ryan Cohen?

  Uh, it's a good question. I mean, our footprint is a moving target. We have this was part of what appealed to me originally when I went into GameStop was the leases were short term. So they're like two to three year leases. And as we see how the business performs, you know, we decide whether or not it makes sense to renew the store. So I mean, it's it's going to be dependent on. Utility of the stores, like if there is traffic and if profitability is increasing, we'll keep the stores open and if it's not the case, then we'll shrink the store base.

• 1:51:58John Coogan?

  Okay, a couple of other scenarios. In a world where an M&A doesn't happen, is there a business partnership to be done where verification of rare collectibles can happen at GameStop physical retail stores for a price and eBay is paying GameStop for that service? Is that something you've explored? Is that something that's at all likely to happen?

• 1:52:23Ryan Cohen?

  Well, that would, so yes, and it would basically take $0 in CapEx in order to do something like that, and it's a good idea. Um, I hope that doesn't want, that doesn't happen because I want to, I want to run the entire thing, but if it doesn't, then there, I mean, there's, there's a partnership option. I reached out to eBay, like, I don't know, maybe a year or two years ago to talk to them about partnering and they didn't engage seriously. Like everyone that, everyone's on vacation. Everyone's always on vacation. Like they're not available. They have assistants. I'll get back to you next week. And it's like, let's go. It's getting done now. So then they never get back to you. Then you're

• 1:53:06Ryan Cohen?

  following up. It's like, there's, there's, there's no sense of urgency.

• 1:53:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:12Ryan Cohen?

  At, at that company, there's no sense of urgency frankly at, at most companies. So it never gained any traction.

• 1:53:20John Coogan?

  Okay, Etsy is trading at $6 billion. Is that a target if the eBay plan doesn't come together?

• 1:53:27Jordi Hays?

  No collectibles action there.

• 1:53:29John Coogan?

  It was in the chat. I gotta ask.

• 1:53:32Ryan Cohen?

  Um, eBay is just such a natural fit for, the, the collectibles, leveraging our store print, footprint, but then also like my ability to cut costs and build something much larger at the company. So, uh, every, everything else is, if it doesn't work out, we could find something else, but, um.

• 1:53:57Ryan Cohen?

  I like eBay. It brings me back to my roots.

• 1:54:03Jordi Hays?

  What's something that eBay is not doing today that you think they could expand into? Or is that even the right question? Do you think the core business is just so great? And they're so dominant in many of these categories that you just want to pour fuel on the fire?

• 1:54:19Ryan Cohen?

  Live commerce.

• 1:54:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. But to me, to me, that's an extension, right? Because they have a lot of inventory. It's just a new selling channel.

• 1:54:27Ryan Cohen?

  Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, in terms of doing that well, accelerating revenue growth, you know, I think that that is, that's big. And so going much deeper into collectibles, in luxury, trading cards, there's, there's a lot of runway there.

• 1:54:47John Coogan?

  Do you have a position on international capital providers? A lot of these big deals, the, you know, maybe they start at 50, at half cash, half stock. They wind up being more leaning cash. That's what we saw with the Paramount Warner Brothers deal. Are you interested in talking to international sovereign wealth funds? That type of capital provider?

• 1:55:10Ryan Cohen?

  We're, we're looking at a variety of different options currently.

• 1:55:17John Coogan?

  Makes sense.

• 1:55:21Jordi Hays?

  Mutual friend of the, of the show and GameStop mod retro. They've been pretty aggressively pushing into this retro gaming category. How do you see that growing? Our team at the office recently got, got an old Xbox 360, fired it up. I can see retro gaming just getting more and more popular. But what's your view on the category right now? And where do you think it's going?

• 1:55:46Ryan Cohen?

  We are, we've, we have, the, the return rates are kind of high, but we're, we're building out the retro business in our stores currently. So that's a, that's a, it's a, it's, it's still small, but it's a growing category for us.

• 1:56:06Jordi Hays?

  What do you want to see the rest of this week? How do you, how do you, how do you see it playing out?

• 1:56:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I don't know. It's a good question. Balls in their, balls in their court? Pretty much. Yeah.

• 1:56:24John Coogan?

  Balls in their court.

• 1:56:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:26John Coogan?

  Well, we'll let you get through it. I'm sure you have more calls.

• 1:56:28Jordi Hays?

  Thanks for jumping on.

• 1:56:29John Coogan?

  Thanks for jumping on.

• 1:56:30Jordi Hays?

  You're welcome to join anytime. Let's do it again as, as the story progresses, but we're enjoying following along. And if anybody out there wants more information, it's on the website.

• 1:56:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. It's on the website.

• 1:56:42Jordi Hays?

  Exactly.

• 1:56:43John Coogan?

  If anybody asks you how he's paying for it, just tell them half cash, half stock. You got the beginning and the end of the interview. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:56:51Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you, Ryan.

• 1:56:52John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of the week. Good luck out there.

• 1:56:54Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:56:54John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:56:57John Coogan?

  Oh, what a fun interview.

• 1:57:00Jordi Hays?

  It's on the website.

• 1:57:01John Coogan?

  I like the thesis. I, I keep coming back to, I like the thesis. I was confused about the financing. I, I feel like an idiot now. A friend of mine who's an investment banker was like, yeah, like this could totally happen just the way he's describing and everyone who's sort of, you know, uh, you know, reposting the clips, thinking that it's crazy. Uh, it actually makes a lot of sense and, uh, and it could happen if the shareholders decide to roll forward. Uh, we'll see how it plays out. We'll see what happens. Obviously with Warner Brothers, there was like an incredible pushback against, uh, any stock and it wound up being, uh, all cash at the end of the day. But that was the Netflix thing. The real question is, do we see a dark horse Netflix style bid for this eBay company?

• 1:57:42Jordi Hays?

  I could see it. I could see it. I think a lot of people just weren't thinking about eBay too much. And now that they see this business has been immune, not necessarily immune, but face an onslaught of competition, vertical competition in every single category from watches to collectibles, uh, to sneakers, to fashion, over and over and over. So much venture funding has gone into attacking. Their business and yet they have remained remarkably durable. It is very immune to AI, especially collectibles, right? No amount of AI-led abundance can generate more rookie cards from, you know, 20, 30 years ago. So it seems like a great business. I think Ryan

• 1:58:23Jordi Hays?

  has a strong vision. I would not be surprised for some other players to also get excited about the opportunity now that he has so pretty eloquently explained it to the world in his own words. And thank you to the chat for hanging out. You guys, the GameStop crew, you guys really are a family. We've had, we've had thousands of guests on the show and

• 1:58:48John Coogan?

  No one shows up.

• 1:58:48Jordi Hays?

  No one shows up, shows up like you guys.

• 1:58:52John Coogan?

  They're the real deal. They were asking us about some jargon that I didn't understand. I'm sorry if we didn't get to your questions. We tried to get the ones that sort of fit into this story. I don't have the full context on everything that's happened in the GME ecosystem. So.

• 1:59:07Jordi Hays?

  We'll work on getting Ryan back on.

• 1:59:10John Coogan?

  We'll get him back on. We'll talk.

• 1:59:11Jordi Hays?

  As there's more news.

• 1:59:13John Coogan?

  He did have an interesting point that he says that he doesn't think any of the larger e-commerce players can make a bid because of antitrust considerations. I think he's thinking about Amazon, maybe Shopify. I don't know who else would be in that category of potential buyer, but then regulatory FTC, I don't want to dip my toe in. But when I think about.

• 1:59:35Jordi Hays?

  Shopify is an interesting one.

• 1:59:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, Shopify.

• 1:59:39Jordi Hays?

  eBay really is a platform, right?

• 1:59:40John Coogan?

  I don't know that it makes any sense together.

• 1:59:43Jordi Hays?

  I'm not sure that it does either, but you can imagine they would be able to, you know.

• 1:59:47John Coogan?

  We gotta get Harley back on and put the screws to him.

• 1:59:49Jordi Hays?

  I was just thinking more like these scaled PE funds that.

• 1:59:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Well, that's not a regulatory issue.

• 1:59:55Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I know. That's what, but I'm saying that's a potential dark horse.

• 1:59:58John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:59:59Jordi Hays?

  And specifically because like they don't, they're kind of paralyzed, right? They're, they're worried about investing in, in SaaS that they'd be sitting on a bunch of. SaaS companies that they can't exit for reasons we all know.

• 2:00:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, and this one might be more durable. I'm just thinking about the, the, the Amazon, like, would you, like, who is the Netflix of this story? If he's the Paramount and eBay is the Warner Brothers, it's the, it's the, the $10 billion company going after the $50 billion, $100 billion company. Who's the Netflix in that story? It feels like it would be Amazon, but Amazon's so dominant in e-commerce, maybe a Shopify, but

• 2:00:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the thing I kept coming back to too is like, we've always said, it has been shocking that, that, that Elon Twitter playbook.

• 2:00:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:43Jordi Hays?

  Hasn't been applied to more companies. Again, the Twitter acquisition has not, didn't go well.

• 2:00:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:48Jordi Hays?

  But that was because of the reason that Ryan talked about, which was the advertiser

• 2:00:51John Coogan?

  Advertiser revolt.

• 2:00:52Jordi Hays?

  So if, if, you know, ad spend on the platform craters, but you have these companies that have real network effects like Twitter.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:01Jordi Hays?

  Like eBay.

• 2:01:01John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:02Jordi Hays?

  I do think you can cut pretty dramatically and, and still have a, have a thriving platform.

• 2:01:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:10Jordi Hays?

  At least, you know, my experience on X, we went through a period where stuff was pretty buggy, but I think they figured it out. So.

• 2:01:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's funny. Talking to him, I, I, I get the GME Army's love. Like, I, I get the thesis, the way he thinks about things, the way he talks about things. Obviously, tons of ups and downs in the journey, but like, like the, the, the basic thesis of the combination.

• 2:01:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the other thing.

• 2:01:36John Coogan?

  There's a lot.

• 2:01:36Jordi Hays?

  The other thing I'm excited about, there's so much, there's so much stuff in my house that would sell on eBay.

• 2:01:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:41Jordi Hays?

  I just, I just never find the time to go out. I don't want to deal with photographing it. If I could just take.

• 2:01:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:48Jordi Hays?

  A car full of stuff, take it to eBay, they can say.

• 2:01:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:50Jordi Hays?

  Oh, we'll take this, donate this stuff.

• 2:01:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:53Jordi Hays?

  I would happily do that. And I think that the, yeah, the integration with their existing retail footprint is interesting. I don't think they probably need. 1400 stores.

• 2:02:03John Coogan?

  1600.

• 2:02:04Jordi Hays?

  1600.

• 2:02:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, I agree. Uh, it's unclear. I mean, obviously, he's gonna like cut the ones that aren't performing well and add ones that are obvious. But what is the net effect? Uh, I don't know. I actually don't know where stores have gone over the past six years while he's been running that business. I would love to know, uh, how many stores did GameStop have before Ryan came in as CEO? Maybe we can look that up. Uh, but in Amazon news, uh, the number of monthly releases of eBooks on Amazon is going vertical. We are in the fast takeoff of AI slop books, apparently. That is the conclusion. John Arnold just says, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.

• 2:02:43John Coogan?

  Uh, and it does look like, uh, the, the, the, the rate of publishing, uh, on, uh, on, on Amazon is going, uh,

• 2:02:52Jordi Hays?

  Explaining, explaining to this, this to somebody in 2022, there's gonna be a renaissance. Four years from now, there's gonna be 350,000 books being published every month on Amazon. And they're like, you're not gonna be happy with why though.

• 2:03:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it is, uh, it is crazy. I mean, if you, if you had asked me to guess how many books were being released every month on Amazon in the pre-AI era? I don't know if I would have put it at 100,000. That's a lot of books. I feel like we talk to a lot of authors. I see the hyped books. I see the New York Times bestseller list. I don't really see the 999 or 99,900 books that don't make the cut in the given month. I maybe hear about five or 10 new books every month, but, uh, lo and behold, they were in fact churning out 100,000 books. Now it's over 300,000 books every month on Amazon. Bullish for Amazon. If you like slop, it's good for you too. I don't know. Maybe there's some good stuff on there. It all depends. The models are getting better. They're getting less sloppy.

• 2:03:52John Coogan?

  And I think people will wind up liking them. There's some AI videos that I like out there. Uh, you know, you know, there's gonna be one book that's fully AI generated that is of high quality. Uh, Tyler, did you, did you get the stat on GME, uh, stores pre, uh, pre buyout? I would love to know. You don't need to cut to him while he's, while, while he's looking it up.

• 2:04:16John Coogan?

  Brutal. Uh, you can come back to that.

• 2:04:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in other buyout news, Long Lake, very under the radar company, but has been on an absolute tear.

• 2:04:26John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:04:26Jordi Hays?

  Over the last.

• 2:04:28John Coogan?

  This is a wild deal.

• 2:04:29Jordi Hays?

  A couple of years is taking AMEX GBT Global Business Travel private. I could see Long Lake being kind of interested in eBay, too. They maybe got their hands full with AMEX GBT, but incredibly talented team been really unlocking the power.

• 2:04:47John Coogan?

  So it's a $6 billion take private. It's also interesting because General Catalyst Mark McGarra is sort of talking about the story of Long Lake. He says, "We had the first Long Lake team retreat at my home in Miami just two and a half years ago when the company was getting started. It's been incredible to watch the talent and team brought together to transform the services industry into one of growth and abundance with AI. Excited for yet another milestone. General Catalyst is honored to be the partner from beginning and excited to continue the strategy of backing what we believe are the best AI investments." And interesting because General Catalyst is also an investor in Ramp, I believe. And so there's a question about like Ramp has a travel product. How different is AMEX Global Business Travel from Ramp Travel?

• 2:05:30John Coogan?

  Obviously, there's some overlap there, but there might be some synergies since there's board members in common now. Who knows where this goes, but at 6.3 billion, that's a small slice compared to Ramp, which has been on an absolute tear.

• 2:05:42Jordi Hays?

  Another big raise before we close out for the day. 11 laps.

• 2:05:45John Coogan?

  For Matty.

• 2:05:46Jordi Hays?

  Across five half a billion dollars. Welcome to new investors. BlackRock, Wellington, Nvidia, San San Derek, Jamie Foxx.

• 2:05:55John Coogan?

  Is this a raise or is this just a flex? They're just flexing the ARR?

• 2:05:59Jordi Hays?

  They welcome some new investors.

• 2:06:00John Coogan?

  Okay, they got some new investors.

• 2:06:01Jordi Hays?

  I don't know that they announced their new valuation.

• 2:06:04John Coogan?

  Well, leave with the good stuff. Mitchell Green would be very happy, you know? If you have ARR, that's what you report. If you don't, you report the valuation and they are making some serious progress on the commercial side.

• 2:06:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, some serious institutions coming in.

• 2:06:17John Coogan?

  To the team over there. Tyler, I think Tyler has an answer.

• 2:06:20Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:06:21John Coogan?

  Wait, wait. Jordy, do you think the number of GameStop stores has increased or decreased or stayed the same since Ryan Cohen's tenure? What do you think? Back of the envelope.

• 2:06:31Jordi Hays?

  I mean, I would assume that it decreased, but because you're asking me, I would, maybe.

• 2:06:37John Coogan?

  You're going increase. Lock it in. Final answer.

• 2:06:40Jordi Hays?

  I'm going decrease.

• 2:06:41John Coogan?

  You're going decrease. Okay.

• 2:06:42Speaker 03

  John, what are you going?

• 2:06:44John Coogan?

  I gotta take the other side. I'm going increase now.

• 2:06:46Speaker 03

  Okay, so 2021, January 30, 2021.

• 2:06:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:49Speaker 03

  They were at 4,800. Worldwide, worldwide.

• 2:06:52John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:06:53Speaker 03

  This past January, they were at 2,200.

• 2:06:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:06:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I thought you were asking me, I thought you were trying to trick.

• 2:06:59John Coogan?

  No, I wasn't trying to trick you. I was just trying to get you to lock in a random guess.

• 2:07:02Jordi Hays?

  Ryan Cohen is such a savage operator. I VAX store count.

• 2:07:06John Coogan?

  Store count in a retail apocalypse. No, clearly, clearly, he made it much more, much more, you know, efficient.

• 2:07:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:15John Coogan?

  The chat's really helping here. They're at massive decrease, obviously, everyone knows.

• 2:07:18Jordi Hays?

  As Elon said, your questions are meant to trick me.

• 2:07:21John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway.

• 2:07:24Jordi Hays?

  Well, speaking of retail.

• 2:07:26John Coogan?

  What's going on?

• 2:07:26Jordi Hays?

  McDonald's.

• 2:07:28John Coogan?

  This is fake. This is fake. There's so much fake news in the timeline. I saw, I saw a funny debunk of, there was someone on Instagram who was reacting to goats, a video of goats on mountains and was like making fun of the goats on the mountains. And then there was someone debunking that, saying that that's AI goats, but goats do in fact climb mountains. And so you could do the same funny video, but you should have used the National Geographic video. Every post requires like a deep dive on like, is this real? But maybe, maybe the future with all that XAI capacity, they can just do Grok, is this real on every post before it goes out? Generate the community note before I even had send. If I'm, if I'm posting fake news, just let everybody know.

• 2:08:07Jordi Hays?

  Community note singularity. Well, folks, thank you for tuning in today.

• 2:08:11John Coogan?

  Thank you for tuning in.

• 2:08:12Jordi Hays?

  It's been an honor.

• 2:08:13John Coogan?

  We are at a conference tomorrow and Thursday. We'll be back Friday, but we might have some special reporting from the field. We have a lot more planned and we will, of course, be posting plenty over this week. Thank you for tuning in. We will see you on Friday. Have a good week. Goodbye.

• 2:08:34Jordi Hays?

  Love you.

• 2:08:34John Coogan?

  Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter, tbv.com. Goodbye.