Trump's Deal with NVIDIA, Genie 3 AI Paintings, Intern GPT-5 Test, AI Hedge Funds | Peter Harrell, Aaron Ginn, John Maslin

(00:17) - Timeline (05:04) - Intern Reviews GPT-5 (20:02) - Google Deepmind's Genie 3 Reactions (40:10) - Timeline (53:39) - Billions Flow into AI-Focused Hedge Funds (01:06:24) - Trump Demands 15% Revenue Tax From AI (01:13:01) - Lip-Bu Tan Headed to The White House (01:29:38) - Peter Harrell, a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and former White House official, discusses the evolution of U. S. semiconductor export controls aimed at limiting China's access to advanced computing technologies. He highlights the strategic considerations behind these measures, including efforts to impede China's AI development and the complexities of enforcing such controls amid global supply chain challenges. Harrell also examines the implications of recent policy shifts, such as the Trump administration's decision to allow certain chip exports to China with a 15% revenue share for the U. S. government, and the potential for these actions to set precedents affecting future trade and national security policies. (01:55:16) - Timeline (01:58:58) - Aaron Ginn is a technology entrepreneur and policy analyst known for his insights into artificial intelligence (AI) and U. S.-China relations. In the conversation, he critiques the notion that restricting Chinese access to Nvidia's AI hardware will hinder China's AI progress, suggesting it may instead accelerate their development of domestic alternatives. He also discusses the inefficacy of U. S. export controls, emphasizing that such measures might not effectively impede China's AI advancements. (02:30:10) - John Maslin, CEO and co-founder of Vulcan Elements, a U. S.-based rare earth magnet manufacturer, discusses his background as a former naval officer and the company's recent $65 million Series A funding. He emphasizes the critical role of rare earth magnets in modern technologies and the importance of reducing U. S. dependence on China's supply chain. Maslin outlines Vulcan's commitment to onshoring production to enhance national security and economic resilience. (02:41:26) - Timeline TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Monday, August 11th, 2025. We are live from the TVP and Ultra, the Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the Capital of Capital. Do they do that in the Korean version of TVP? Do they scream at the camera and they open up? I need to watch this thing. If you're not familiar, there's a very uncanny clone of this show's format.

• 0:25Jordi Hays?

  A Korean TVP and clone is at the timeline.

• 0:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, Korean TVP and clone is at the timeline, indeed.

• 0:29Jordi Hays?

  June Park, which is, I believe.

• 0:33John Coogan?

  I'm in favor of this. I think this is cool.

• 0:35Jordi Hays?

  Who is a technology brother, found NFM Live over on LinkedIn, but we got to find their intro. We got to see.

• 0:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, we have to dig into this. I forgot.

• 0:47Jordi Hays?

  Imagine that you're watching NFM Live in Korean would hit.

• 0:51John Coogan?

  Extremely hard. It sounds like, it sounds incredible. But yeah, I mean, this is fun. Obviously, you know, we played a lot with this format. We invented television. We invented news and now people are taking our invention. We forgot to patent it, though. We should have patented news and television and shows and live stuff and business news. That would have been really good.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  Technology news.

• 1:16John Coogan?

  But we forgot to patent it and so now everyone's copying us from over in Korea. But I mean, it makes sense. We don't really, I don't think we have a large audience in Korea. And so have some fun over there. Hopefully it goes well. Good luck to you, NFM Live. I hope that you're massively successful and I hope that, you know, you can start with, you know, the exact layout that we've done and then you can kind of twist it and change it.

• 1:39Jordi Hays?

  Make your own.

• 1:40John Coogan?

  Make your own and that's how these things start. Tyler, what you got?

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Okay, so I just found it. They do not do any kind of interesting intro. They just start the show.

• 1:48John Coogan?

  They just start the show.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  No, no energy.

• 1:52John Coogan?

  Okay, uh, stop it up, guys.

• 1:54Jordi Hays?

  You gotta copy the important stuff.

• 1:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, the important stuff.

• 1:57Jordi Hays?

  It's not about the overlay. It's about.

• 1:59John Coogan?

  It's about the screaming, you losing your voice.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  Losing my voice.

• 2:02Speaker 02

  Jay Kim, you gotta get, bring up the energy.

• 2:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  Jay Kim, he's the host.

• 2:06Jordi Hays?

  Jordy, I clipped your intro, posted it, and have never gotten more responses.

• 2:10John Coogan?

  Every time.

• 2:11Jordi Hays?

  That was the best intro we've ever done.

• 2:12John Coogan?

  Wait, just this one, right now?

• 2:13Jordi Hays?

  No, no, the one from last week, when we started the screaming. I'm always trying to one-up myself. The audience really likes it.

• 2:19John Coogan?

  Well, it really, it really helps because we're always like, just, you know, shuffling things around just one minute before we go live, and then we really gotta dial it in. And so, the, uh, the screaming really takes it up another notch. And you know what else takes it up another notch? Getting your business on ramp.com. Time is money, save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place.

• 2:41Jordi Hays?

  Switch your business to ramp.com.

• 2:44John Coogan?

  Ghibli moment as soon as, okay, sorry.

• 2:46Jordi Hays?

  Wait, important news.

• 2:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, please, please, please.

• 2:48Jordi Hays?

  TBPN has hit Substack.

• 2:51John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 2:52Jordi Hays?

  TBPN.substack.com. We have a daily newsletter now.

• 2:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:57Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it is loosely based around the content that we cover on the show.

• 3:02John Coogan?

  Yep. Uh. So every day before the show goes live, we put together a run of show. So we, we, we select posts that we want to talk about. We give our little takes. We figure out our, uh, our, our, the different things that we want to dig into at various levels of depth. We were already putting those together, and we thought it might be fun to send those out to folks to both let you know, hey, maybe this is a show that you want to tune into. You want to hear us talk about these things in more depth. You can hop on the stream. Uh, you'll receive the email right when we go live, so you'll be able to click and tune in if you want. Uh, and also, if you don't have a chance to listen to three hours of content that day, you can get a little bit of a summary in the.

• 3:40Jordi Hays?

  Of the last day.

• 3:40John Coogan?

  Of the last day, and a little bit of preview of what's gonna happen today. So some of the top stories, and so, uh, some of the stuff we talk about on the show, we will have, you know, little summary teasers up there on our TBPN Substack. So please go subscribe and, uh, give us any feedback. You can reply to any of the emails that we send you. Let us know what you think. If you have pushback on the takes, if you have extra information to add, if you think we missed. Miss something, let us know through that. And then if you like certain pieces of the format, we'll see some of the analytics. We're going to be tracking you. We're going to be seeing, we're going to be seeing what links you click on the open rates, how, how far you scroll down. But if you particularly like something, just let us know.

• 4:17Jordi Hays?

  For everybody says you guys make too much content, can't keep up. Well, here's some more.

• 4:21John Coogan?

  Here's some more content. Here's some more content.

• 4:24Jordi Hays?

  Some content to help you keep up with all the content.

• 4:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:27Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 4:28John Coogan?

  Indeed. And we couldn't spread this content all over the internet without the help of Restream. One livestream, thirty plus destinations, multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are. You can sign up for free. Restream. Thank you for hosting our show. So we talked about it yesterday, or we talked about it last week, and we talked about it a bunch. Genie three hit the timeline, was maybe the biggest news of last week in terms of artificial intelligence was crazy because it was GPT five. But GPT five was more of this consumer update. We have some updates from Tyler. He's loving GPT five, interestingly, kind of contrarian takes, as a lot of people were dunking on it. Tyler, what did you like about GPT five? Oh, and give me your eval.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I've been, over the weekend, I've been using it more for coding, like various things.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  Definitely, I've been using the, the thinking mode like the whole time because I'm on the prescription. So you can choose thinking. So always think.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  So there is a dropdown now?

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, there, there always was a dropdown, at least for pro, where you could do GPT five or GPT five thinking.

• 5:29John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  And now there's also, I don't know if this was always there, but you can choose to add the legacy models too. So I can also, I can still access.

• 5:36John Coogan?

  I've been on the flagship model. I, I've just been yelling at it because I thought.

• 5:40Jordi Hays?

  Well, briefly, that was not available.

• 5:42John Coogan?

  Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  So there's the model router, which I think is just GPT five, and that'll route sometimes to thinking.

• 5:49John Coogan?

  Okay. But if, but if I'm very stern with it, it usually thinks, it usually throws itself in thinking mode.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Probably.

• 5:55John Coogan?

  Don't mess this up. Don't get it wrong. Then it'll be like, I'm thinking, I'm thinking, I'm thinking.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. But I, I just always use thinking because I'm on pro.

• 6:04John Coogan?

  Wait, wait, but so, so I have, I have three versions. I have GPT five, which is the flagship model. I have GPT five thinking, which gets you more thorough answers. And I have GPT five pro, research grade intelligence. I want to be on pro the whole time?

• 6:19Speaker 02

  So I think pro, I think pro was similar to O three pro where it's going to be like a, it's going to take a long time.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  It's going to take ten minutes.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Where GPT five thinking is, is similar to like O three, where it would just always think, but sometimes it's, it's pretty quick.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 6:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, I'm in. I'm on chat G P D dot com. I can't find four O and I'm wondering where is my girlfriend?

• 6:39Jordi Hays?

  Where's my girlfriend?

• 6:41John Coogan?

  I'm still using Bard.

• 6:42Jordi Hays?

  I actually can't see four O. They apparently added four O back.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  So, so you can, uh, yeah, that might just be for plus that you can go back, but, but you can add legacy models.

• 6:50John Coogan?

  That's just for people who are really desperate.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  I have to go on settings.

• 6:52John Coogan?

  And they replied to Sam Altman on X with a really funny post and he turned it back on just for them. So there's five people that have access to the old model that everyone else is, is rugged and on the new one. Okay. But give me your eval and give me your qualitative assessment of like, of like the model like, like, because it seems like you did, you did a test where G P T five outperformed all the other models, but then simultaneously it just seems like you've been having a good time. So break both of those down.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so generally like just for coding tasks, I found it very useful. I wouldn't say it's like blowing my mind with how much better it is than like oh, three or four point one or something like that. But it is like, it's a good model. It's a good model, sir. Yeah, like it's definitely good.

• 7:35John Coogan?

  I would agree with that. I'm trying to think of what I did this, uh, this weekend.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:39John Coogan?

  A lot of times I was just like, what am I thinking of? I, you know, giving you some different, uh, stuff. How, how do I add something to my path? Top U S government contractors, hedge fund research report like it was doing a lot of this stuff. Uh, I was getting lunch with someone. They were recommending a piece of enterprise software. I just kind of described it. It nailed it very quickly. I don't think it took too long to, to think it was fine. I actually put in agent mode yesterday and I had it hunt around on the internet for Nintendo Switch two. And it did find one in stock, which was, which was very useful because there are Nintendo Switch trackers that you can go and you can like, and they scrapes all the websites. But this basically just did this on an ad hoc basis. It was good. It worked. It delivered.

• 8:22John Coogan?

  And then for other like kind of quick questions, it's always been, it's been quick and I feel like I should be. It, it's definitely going to speed me up because it like, it knows to not, if I stick with the model router, it's going to respond quicker for the stuff that it knows.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  So also even if you're using G P T five thinking like on thinking mode.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  There's a button that says like, give me a quick answer.

• 8:43John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  So you can just tap it and then if it's taking too long. But yeah, also another thing was I, I, I forget exactly what I was writing, but it helped me with writing and I found it like better than I would have expected.

• 8:53John Coogan?

  That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like, I feel like. As part of the reasoning chain, like the first response should just be like the 4-0 response, and then it should just surface that to you, and it should just kind of say, like, here's what I know so far, and then I'm going to keep thinking, keep cranking on this to update this, go down the reasoning chain, and then if you're like, if you're good, I'd almost like to flip that UX around so that it's automatically going deeper in fact-checking it and improving the response over time, over 10 minutes, giving me, you know, a normal response within 10 seconds, then spending up to 10 minutes working on it, but if I'm satisfied with the 10-second result, I can just kind of click like I'm good.

• 9:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:35John Coogan?

  That would be, that might be the next, like, probably saving money, too.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, that could be cool.

• 9:38John Coogan?

  Anyway, and then give me your eval.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Yes, so I thought of this thing, I think, I looked it up, I think someone might have written a paper about this like a year ago, but it was like somewhat different.

• 9:47John Coogan?

  Quick question, does the Korean TVPn have an intern? We need to figure that out. You gotta copy the intro and the intern. You have to have an intern, that you throw random questions at. We can look. Okay, anyway, so back to your.

• 9:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, so basically, my, the new benchmark I've kind of thought of, although maybe someone's done it before, I gotta look more into it, but it's basically solving a Rubik's Cube.

• 10:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  So, solving an entire Rubik's Cube is like, totally like, way too hard right now, but if you basically just like, start with a solved cube, and then just do like, one move, then usually they can get one move, if you do two moves, they like, none of them can get it except GPT-5.

• 10:23John Coogan?

  Okay, only GPT-5.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, so you basically, you can take like, the state of the Rubik's Cube.

• 10:27John Coogan?

  The two-move champion of the world.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, and then if you put it in a string, you can format it nicely and then give it to it, and then, GPT-5 thinking.

• 10:36John Coogan?

  Rotating the cube feels, it feels somewhat like ArcAGI, in the same way of like, there's this visual spatial test that then is represented in text tokens, and an LLM should be able to operate on those if it was able to transform that into true spatial thinking, but it's not quite there.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think something I'm gonna try, I think I might like, write a little blog post, but I want to try like, actually putting it in image format, right, with like, multimodal and stuff.

• 11:03John Coogan?

  Are you jealous of our Substack? You're like, oh, maybe I'll have a Substack.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, maybe I'll just start one, no big deal. You can publish on ours.

• 11:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 11:13John Coogan?

  But yes, you should you should flesh that. So continue.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  But yeah, I was thinking of like trying different formats for the the input. Maybe that'll help it out. Or doing like actual multimodal, like putting in image of the cube state.

• 11:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  But I was like very surprised. After two moves, I was kind of expecting like, you know, you can look up all the algorithms you need online.

• 11:33John Coogan?

  To finish the last.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  To finish the whole cube. So I was thinking like, oh, yeah, let me just try the like, like I'll pass in with with three moves to go. And like, obviously you can get that.

• 11:42John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 11:42Speaker 02

  And then it couldn't at all.

• 11:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:45Speaker 02

  And then I tried. So this morning I tried. That was with no tool use. So this morning I tried with GPT five with like the agent.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  Yep. So so so no tool use. It was still writing Python, right?

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true. But it wasn't searching up like algorithms. But this this morning I I tried it with agent. And it went to like a bunch of different.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  Cube solvers.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 12:06John Coogan?

  It did.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  And it did not. It found them and it like said like, oh, yeah, I'm using it. This is the best move. And then it like was totally wrong.

• 12:14John Coogan?

  Okay, interesting. So that that feels like the that that feels like a pretty good test and a pretty good eval for like the era of agents. Like.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:23John Coogan?

  What I was describing this to Tyler, I was saying like, you have a random Rubik's Cube. If I gave it to you and I was like, you need to solve this and you didn't have all the algorithms memorized. Like, but you were like, it's my job to finish this cube. What would you do? You would Google how to solve Rubik's Cube. You might watch a YouTube video. You might like go to something, some cheat cheat. That's like type in all the colors on the Rubik's Cube and then it tells you exactly what to do step by step. And there are tons and tons of these like solvers, like like you go out there, you Google how to solve a Rubik's Cube. You type in what you have on the colors and then it tells you move this one, rotate this one. The problem is that all those websites are completely built differently. Some of them are in WebGL, some of them are in, you know, like just old HTML. Some of them are programs.

• 13:08Jordi Hays?

  So the way the model learns to solve a Rubik's Cube is by pretending to be a human and just Google searching.

• 13:13John Coogan?

  That's how they will solve every problem. Because these tools exist. So it's like, instead of like, instead of like, RLing on DoorDash, just go figure out how to use DoorDash. Go figure out, like, the answer to like, booking the flight won't be like, reconstituting an airline from scratch. It'll just be, like, Google it, find, like, use Google Flights, right? Like, use, use whatever's out there. And so, it was, it was impressive that it was able to perform at a higher level than the other models on the spatial reasoning required to finish the last two moves of the cube. But it was underwhelming on the agent's side that it wasn't able to find and use a cube solver, because it clearly hasn't been trained on that.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. But it is interesting that GPT-5 thinking does, like, way up perform. It was, like, thing for, like, six minutes, just to get two moves.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  Which, like, is really long. But it's like, it is like, I think it shows that there's, like, you know, something. It's not just O3 packaged up as, like, in a router.

• 14:11John Coogan?

  So, did you test it with O3?

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Uh, yes. It did not work the first time.

• 14:16John Coogan?

  So, so, so there's something going on with the reasoning that is better. Like, this is, it's weird, because isn't O4 worse than O3?

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Well, it's, we only, we never got actual O4, we only had O4 Mini.

• 14:28John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. So, so this could be like, O4 under the hood, like, a better reasoning model, even more RL on top of it, that's like-

• 14:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe.

• 14:37John Coogan?

  Smarter.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:38John Coogan?

  And it's, and it's accessing that, you know, in a certain way, but it's still, like, nowhere near one-shotting, like, just random hard problems.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 14:46Jordi Hays?

  I had lunch with some friends on Saturday, and one of the friends is a physics professor at a very prestigious college.

• 14:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 14:57Jordi Hays?

  And he was able to get GPT-5 Pro to one-shot a problem in about 25 minutes.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:06Jordi Hays?

  That he said his grad, that would take his graduate students months to do on their own, historically.

• 15:12John Coogan?

  I can't even imagine the type of physics problem that takes a month to solve.

• 15:16Jordi Hays?

  I know. I had him, I don't want to give away too much of the alphabet, but he was, like, his mind was, like, completely blown. This was on Saturday, you know, he'd just gotten access to the model, and he was completely blown away.

• 15:27John Coogan?

  It's such, it's such a weird era of the spiky intelligence, because, like, pretty much any human should be able to solve the last two moves of a Rubik's Cube. In like an hour of like tinkering with it and just trying stuff, moving it back. Okay, try, wait, what do you think Tyler? An hour seems like a long time. It's only two moves. It's two moves, like. You can just look at it. Yeah. Yeah, it doesn't seem that hard. Do we, do we have? Just look at it. We have a Rubik's Cube right over there. We have a normal Rubik's Cube in the studio, right? Somewhere, let's, let's get that out there and see that. Toss that to me. It's already solved though. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There we go.

• 16:02Jordi Hays?

  High stakes throw. That would have been deeply embarrassing for the firm if, if you dropped that.

• 16:07John Coogan?

  So yeah, it's like two, two moves off and then you have to look at it and then you have to.

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, do a couple of moves and then let's, let's feed it to Tyler and he can work on it.

• 16:16John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, see if he can do it. Okay.

• 16:19Jordi Hays?

  No, see if GPT Pro can do it.

• 16:21John Coogan?

  Oh, well, oh, yeah. How many times did you test it?

• 16:24Jordi Hays?

  Do you use agent mode and, and tell them like, figure this out?

• 16:27John Coogan?

  Figure this out. Well, that's why I tried agent mode. Didn't do anything. Didn't do anything.

• 16:31Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 16:32John Coogan?

  Oh, well.

• 16:32Jordi Hays?

  Well.

• 16:33John Coogan?

  Well, let's tell you about figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great things together, great products together. Get started for free. So despite all the GPT five news, very exciting and, and, and just a bunch of like progress that's happening, it feels maybe not as binary, not as, not as exponential as some people were expecting, but lots of cool things. Also, I wound up using Claude code for the first time and had a really interesting experience there. I, I had it do a deep research report. No, no, not at all. But I had it do a deep research report and instead of, instead of just spitting out like bullet points and tables, I had it just spit it out as HTML.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  And so it was able to, it was able to generate like, like really like, I'll show you, I'll show this to you. I don't know if you can see this, but like, can you see this? Yeah. I gotta take this off. Show, show everyone. This is not going to work, but basically it's able to, it's able to like show formulas, show different charts and graphs and just like use all the features of HTML, which is really cool. Now there were tons of like hallucinations in here and the actual quality of the research report wasn't that great, but we were talking to. Doug at Semi Analysis and he was saying that Claude Code is has been really good for research reports. So I think I'm going to try and work that into my workflow a little bit more.

• 17:57John Coogan?

  And I and I feel like the next the next like layup for Anthropic is just wrapping Claude Code in a mobile app so that you get access to like a remote file like directory that can actually like write code, deploy websites, do all this stuff, but from the app and then so then you can instantiate things. But the cool thing was that it felt like for the first time.

• 18:22Jordi Hays?

  Won't that kill like 10 billion dollar startups?

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe. But for the first time, it felt like I was I was feeling this whole idea of like the generative UI, the on-demand UI, because as like I was asking it to do this report on world models and it just generated like different sections of the like different charts and graphs and put them all up there talking about how these work and it was able to just like create these little highlight, these little highlight sections for Odyssey, the company founded by Oliver Cameron, how much have they raised, physical intelligence by Lucky Groom and Carol Houseman who have been on the show, they've had a $400 million round, Jeff Bezos, Thrive, Lux. The problem is like, I think I still need to fact check all this because I feel like the

• 19:09John Coogan?

  research wasn't as strong as as deep research or what you get from GPT-5. But but it was very cool to see it just use all the HTML functionalities and buckets to kind of create like a really readable website, which of course was then immediately mobile optimized, immediately, you know, you could read it this size, that size. And it just felt like the first, the first like, the first moment of, you know, generative UI, like on-demand.

• 19:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you need to experience these things firsthand before you can really have that true aha moment.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  Much like you need to experience Vanta firsthand, automate compliance, manage risk, improve trust continuously. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation, whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. Okay, so. Back to the actual big AI news of last week.

• 20:05Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 20:06John Coogan?

  Genie 3 from DeepMind. Alexander Holinsky dropped a very fascinating series of viral videos on X saying something, something fun we discovered, you can use Genie 3 to step into and explore your favorite paintings. Here's a short visit into Edward Hopper's Nighthawks. And this video is crazy because it, and I said, this is a Studio Ghibli moment as soon as this goes general access, like as soon as everyone has access to this, you're gonna have the Studio Ghibli moment because everyone is familiar with that particular painting, maybe not everyone, but most people, and it's just like, you can go walk around it and it feels like this real world.

• 20:48John Coogan?

  And I think that there's gonna be so many examples of memes and all those types of things.

• 20:52Jordi Hays?

  The example that I gave where you just take three photos from, from like a specific moment, drop them and create a world, an entire world around it, and then you can go relive this like three dimensional memory.

• 21:02John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. And so it's this like, it's not the, I think the AI generative, AI-generated stuff is by default, like very mid, right? Like AI slop is pretty like mid and like the AI-generated photos, like if you just showed me a photo of a car or something that was AI-generated, I'd be like, I would rather just see Max Verstappen driving, I'd rather see a more cinematic image of, of a Red Bull F1 car that's just taken with a really like high-quality camera and tells a story and, and immediately builds my intrigue of like, oh, when was this? Was this during a race? Was he practicing? Like, there's just so much more value when something's real.

• 21:44John Coogan?

  Even if, even if the fidelity's there, it's not quite there, but it's just less, less of like the story behind it. But when you take something that people know or is personal, like a family photo or a painting that they're a fan of, and you, and you allow them the ability to customize and, and experience it, I think this will go way more viral. And so. This, I think Genie 3 and I think world models generally are going to be the next like hot sector for AI. I think the GPT open source, GPT OSS, GPT TOS is kind of cool, but you know, we've been there, we've seen that. I don't think that there's going to be that much new there.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  Claude 4.1 was kind of this minor spec bump and even GPT 5 was, you know, somewhat incremental, obviously very key for the business to get them, you know, seriously competing in the enterprise space and then also, you know, improve consumer usage and just, you know, improve the experience of the chat GPT app.

• 22:42Jordi Hays?

  The meme potential of this, if you can generate a world and then just share the link to that world and other people can drop into it, it's just going to go incredibly viral.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  And even just exporting videos of this is good content creation, even if you're just sharing the videos that you generated, but actually being able to share the link to is going to be really, really big. So I'm super excited about this. The big question from the show was, you know, what was going to be this, the Ghibli moment for world models? And I think we know it now. It's not going to be, it's not going to be a Doom knockoff because you can just go play Doom. You can play the original Doom. You can also play the latest Doom, which is like 4K, 60 frames a second graphics on Xbox and PS5. Like there are, there are amazing ways to experience Doom if you're into Doom. And also, people don't just play Doom to go

• 23:33John Coogan?

  walk around a cool designed like hell world. They want to actually have a gun with an ammo counter and a health bar and an armor.

• 23:42Jordi Hays?

  And a boss.

• 23:43John Coogan?

  And a boss and a story of some sort, even if the story is like kind of blah, like they want to be able to progress and it turns it into this, this reward cycle of, okay, I'm, you know, I'm having fun.

• 23:54Jordi Hays?

  Verifiable rewards.

• 23:55John Coogan?

  Exactly. And so I think exploring iconic images, paintings, memes, this is going to be a Ghibli moment. We got some recorded videos from the DeepMind researchers, which we're showing you right now and you can instantly see the virality. I can't wait for this to go into general availability because I think we're going to see some really crazy ideas come out of this that no one can really predict until you get it in the hands of just like millions and millions of people.

• 24:22Jordi Hays?

  And friend of the show, Logan Kilpatrick, went to interview Demis on Genie 3 and Deep Think and a lot more. And the interview just went up like an hour ago. So and we're working on getting the Genie team on the show hopefully this week.

• 24:36John Coogan?

  I'm very excited for that. So the other interesting thing is like people have kind of stopped generating giblets. And images in chat GPT is just like something that people use and people might generate a ghibli for something if the meme calls for that. But I find myself generating more like turn this person into a bodybuilder.

• 24:58Jordi Hays?

  A lot of this.

• 24:59John Coogan?

  But also, also, you know, you have some funny idea and you go to images and chat GPT and you say like, I want to visualize this thing. What if we put a car in in Central Park and it was this color like AI images are clearly very useful for that.

• 25:12Jordi Hays?

  You have continued to be a power user of make this person a giga chat more so than than the giblets.

• 25:20John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. The giblets, I haven't gibleted in a long time, but I've certainly I've certainly generated a lot. I mean, I generate a lot of set design for like what the show should look like in the next version, a lot of ideas for for marketing stunts and stuff like that. And so it's become this useful tool. And then obviously it's baked its way into like the backgrounds of like true Hollywood production, all sorts of video production. It's just like generative imagery is just a tool both for designers to pull references and use a reference board, or it's kind of like the first step in a plan to co-create something.

• 25:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's how you speed run to a something that's mockup quality, not necessarily the product or ready for release. But instead of, I mean, I used to make, I think it's a way that you can like, even if you're working with designers or people that are great at Photoshop, you can just generate a V1 that's pretty solid and say like, I want to make this, but make it like really good.

• 26:16John Coogan?

  Yep. And so. Genie 3 is close to mock-up quality. Like if you, if you, if you wanted to, if you were pitching a video game, or you were even pitching like a experiential world that you wanted to build, or like you're building a store, a physical store for your business, and you generate an image of what you think that one, what that should look like, and then you want to let the client say, hey, we're gonna invest $5 million building out this, uh, this, this caffeine goof cafe in Nashville, like our friend did. Like, you could actually walk around it and really get an idea of what that is, or you could do some of like the Matterport things for, okay, we took some photos of this house, we want you to be able to let you walk around. Like, the tech is getting there, DeepMind is clearly scaling this.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  Uh, it's at 720p, 24 frames a second right now, pretty close to optimal visual fidelity. Um, they're gonna get to 4K 60 frames a second soon. But there will be intractable problems that, um, come up that I don't think you can just blindly throw scaling at, similar to what happened in LLMs. And so, we're gonna be running down the same path we did with, with language models, this is my take. So, uh, you'll use reinforcement learning to round off all the sharp corners, or instead like kind of create spikes of spiky intelligence that create pockets of value within these generative worlds. So you can imagine, um, if you're generating a video game, it's very important to have the main character look the same at the end of the game than at the beginning.

• 27:44John Coogan?

  So you might do some sort of like RL pass to make sure that the character consistency is really important for your hero character. But really, it doesn't matter if I like come back after 10 hours of wandering around like the, the, the video game and like a tree looks slightly different. Like, it's fine. So, so there'll be areas where, where these companies and these, these foundation labs, like go and apply a ton more RL to make sure that this particular feature works. But at the same time, it doesn't make sense to go and try and rebuild everything and bake everything into the model. So you're gonna wind up with situations where... Just like ChatGPT got a web browser and a Python shell, you'll probably, these world models will need to be wrapped or interfaced with like a traditional database.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 28:28John Coogan?

  So that if you have an inventory and you want to track health points, or you want to track ammo, that's not like hallucination.

• 28:33Jordi Hays?

  You generate a world and then you make it fixed.

• 28:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Fix, fix, like, or fix like the underlying territory of the world, the underlying maps, so everything's the same, but then you're generating on top of that. Tyler, what's your take?

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, I kind of disagree that like scaling won't fix this. Um, if you look at the, I think if you look at, uh, genie two,

• 28:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  it had this big problem with like, um, consistency, right? You would turn left, then you would turn right again, and it would like look totally different. Uh, and I'm pretty sure in the paper, they basically say that the consistency was just like an emergent property of scale.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  So.

• 29:09John Coogan?

  Consistency over what time period, though?

• 29:12Speaker 02

  I mean, over the minute long. Yeah, I guess it could be different.

• 29:15John Coogan?

  100 hours, 100 hours. That's how long people play GTA V.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Like a rolling, you know?

• 29:19John Coogan?

  100 hours. Like, that's how long people will play these things. And it's like, they want to be able to go back to, if you're in Elder Scrolls, you want to be able to go back to like the very first village you started in and see that the tree that you chopped down is still there. Look how far I've come. Exactly. Like, there are some, there are some crazy properties in like, in Elder Scrolls where it's like, in the first village, you accidentally killed the, you know, the, like, the, the, uh, the blacksmith. And so later, like 12 hours later, you come back and you can't get the sword that you want. Like, like, that's, that, like, why bother trying to bake all that into the model? Why not just use a database?

• 29:59Speaker 02

  But I'm saying you don't, you don't need to like, like, think about baking it into the model. It's just gonna, like, it's just gonna be an emergent property as you scale.

• 30:07John Coogan?

  Yes, but I do think you will wind up. Hitting plateaus of scaling, just like, just like, you know, uh, chat GPT, like LLMs got pretty good at math where they could do two plus two, and then they could do much more complex math. But at a certain point, it was like, we're not, we're just going to give you a Python shell so that you can just actually do the real math.

• 30:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's fair, I guess.

• 30:28John Coogan?

  Like, because even, even if, even if scale would solve, like, the really, really hard, intractable, huge, huge math problems, it's like, why burn the electricity to run that massive model to do some very, very basic calculation that would take like five flops on just a CPU?

• 30:48Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 30:49John Coogan?

  And so like, you know, you don't need to, and, and I do think that there will be other, there will be other tools that it doesn't make sense to, to bake into the model. I mean, just think about like multiplayer elements, like, how, how would that be baked in the model? Like, you'd want to sit on top of just like a normal social network?

• 31:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  You want to, you want to sit on top like of some sort of normal, like, interface so that you can join the same game? Like, I don't want to recreate a new, like, I don't know, like epic game store every time I launch.

• 31:19Jordi Hays?

  Imagine like a new video game paradigm where the world is just constantly expanding, and there's, and there's no real rules, and characters are constantly emerging. Uh, but at the same time, like, imagine playing soccer?

• 31:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:31Jordi Hays?

  And if you dribbled to the side of the pitch at one point, like, uh, it just opened up and you could just keep dribbling? Like, eventually you'd get fairly, you'd be like, okay, like, I actually like having a rule set. I like having this sort of consistency in the game.

• 31:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 31:46Jordi Hays?

  So that I have a framework in which I can play in. So in, in so many ways, this, this will create entirely new, like, formats effectively. Like, you're taking the concept of an open world video game and you're just opening it up infinitely.

• 32:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:00Jordi Hays?

  But I think, again, people will want that consistency of play and even a shared experience, right?

• 32:06John Coogan?

  Yep. And, I mean, so, uh, Gold Rock in the chat is saying $3,000 an hour to play at 60, uh, 4K, 60 FPS. Uh, I mean, that is a real consideration. Uh, the other, the other question is just, is just like, is there a way that you can pull forward adoption by, like, not being a deep learning purist? Even if, even if, even if deep learning...

• 32:30John Coogan?

  Is the solution over the long term. While you're waiting for to build the, the, you know, the one trillion dollar data center to actually hit the crazy, crazy scale. If you can get user adoption by just using a normal database to track your inventory and your health bar, like you'll get more adoption and then you'll create this flywheel. It's the same thing with chat GPT. Like you could, you, you, you could, we could have just been like, open, I could have said, like, look, there's no reason to give, to give an LLM access to a Python rappel. At a certain amount of scale, it'll be able to just reason about it and do, do the Python in its head, right?

• 33:09Speaker 02

  But you can pull, you can say like, actually you do wanna like, if you use the world model as like an RL environment, then you can actually pull it forward that way by just like using it for other stuff, you know?

• 33:22John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Like if you're using it instead, it's not a game. It's like a data set that you use for your, and then like, oh yeah, we can also release it as a game for like normal users, but really it's to train our robotics model.

• 33:32John Coogan?

  You're really pelt on this robotics thing.

• 33:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:34John Coogan?

  I, I, I think that.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  Cause data is like the big issue, at least that's what.

• 33:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, certainly for robotics, but I think that, I think that there's, I think there's a consumer product here.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  I agree, but the way that you like fund it is through, is using as.

• 33:47John Coogan?

  Maybe the opposite. Maybe the robots learn from all the humans acting like robots in a game. And then that, and then that generates a ton of, a ton of data that.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  It's like one hand watches the other a little bit.

• 34:00John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. But my, but my real question is like, DeepMind is obviously absolutely crushing on the research side. They're like really, really, it feels like they're really far ahead right now. This is clearly state of the art. The question is like, what does it take for Google to actually get this out in the world as a consumer product? Everyone says GPUs will melt if they launch this right now. Maybe that's true, maybe they need to optimize it more, but the, the big question is like, is like, they had a large language model around the same time as GPT three point five.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 34:32John Coogan?

  And they were really close in terms of their GPT four, first Gemini launch at the similar scale. But ChatGPT launched earlier, was more aggressive, broke through and became kind of the default. And I wonder if there's, if there's, if they should be more like risk on in terms of actually productizing this and getting in people's hands. Like clearly people are going to use this for bad things. They're going to put all sorts of references, reference images in there and be walking around them. We can imagine all the bad things that they'll do.

• 35:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, you can imagine them being more aggressive around a product like this because it doesn't threaten their golden goose. Like in hindsight, it kind of makes sense that they weren't.

• 35:09John Coogan?

  It might threaten YouTube, but yeah.

• 35:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but you can also imagine where it's a catalyst for YouTube, where a bunch of, there's like entirely new vectors of.

• 35:17John Coogan?

  You're streaming it, you're feeding it in, you're exporting it, that type of stuff.

• 35:21Jordi Hays?

  And yeah, I can see this being like a net new category of content or just a tool that every creator can use to, to make better videos. Whereas.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  No, I just, no, I was saying, um, it's basically the same thing. Like they're to release VO3. It's like, it's all the same safety constraints, right? You can't put like some bad image into VO3 and then have it produce video.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. So they, they have most of it. So yeah, they, they, even, even VO3, it feels like they're not being aggressive enough on the rollout of that.

• 35:49Speaker 02

  That's probably also just like, it's just way too expensive to serve.

• 35:53John Coogan?

  For Google, the company that makes a billion dollars a day, like really? It can be that expensive? Like, I feel like, I feel like the ChatGPT.

• 36:03Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it says a lot that you were on the $500 a month VO3 plan and you're still getting rate limited.

• 36:10John Coogan?

  Constantly. Yeah. To the point where I've like sort of churned because I know that it's like such a rough experience to go in there. And then like, okay, I need to plan it out. Oh, I can only do three queries and they'll come back the next day. It makes it really, really hard to actually do any real work there.

• 36:25Jordi Hays?

  The question is how expensive is that for them to serve? It must be, it must be a lot.

• 36:30John Coogan?

  It must be expensive. It must be expensive. But, but what, like, what, what was the secret to ChatGPT beating Gemini? Like the Gemini app launched three months later, so moving first mover advantage clearly matters. Also, ChatGPT, it seems like Sam Altman's never met a GPU. He doesn't want to melt. He will, he will do anything he can just to scale, scale, scale, even if it's. I imagine the margins for the early ChatGPT launch were terrible. And I imagine they were burning tons and tons of money in terms of inference costs. And they were way, way upside down there. I mean, ChatGPT was basically free for like months. Like, and it was like, how, like, this clearly has, has operational costs. This has inference cost and they're just eating it.

• 37:14John Coogan?

  And so, yeah, maybe being more, more aggressive on the financial side. And then I, and then I think.

• 37:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, I still, I still think for Google, if you, if they were to come out and launch a ChatGPT like product that didn't have, for example, like a knowledge cutoff that ChatGPT did at that time. I mean, already, so there's a, there's a post here from a, an account that does weekly, a weekly newsletter of quotes from earnings calls. And they aggregated a bunch of quotes on AI driven changes in Google's search, reducing referral traffic and impacting user engagement. So these are just different CEOs in the last week.

• 37:53Jordi Hays?

  The, the one here, the portion of our traffic that comes from Google's search has declined from 52 to 28%. Another one from the Groupon CEO, Google is significantly changing the behavior of search result pages. What we see is that we have declining traffic. Another one on Google, when Google provides an AI response, there's a much lower click rate on it because it's typically a user getting the answer in that response and they don't need to go further.

• 38:19Jordi Hays?

  Nerd Wallet CEO, the Google search is still pretty challenged.

• 38:24Jordi Hays?

  And another one, we can't deny it, it is a risk on page views. And so again, these, all these AI features are reducing people's need to just navigate the web and derive, some of which is ultimately, I'm sure, paid traffic.

• 38:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, and maybe, maybe the world model stuff, video game stuff, it's like not as, as threatening to their core business. I mean, it clearly, clearly is not. And so, maybe Google will move faster on this and own the consumer, the consumer product. But I just, I feel like in the next 12 to 18 months, like we are going to see some sort of explosion in like. Consumer AI driven around world models, built something built on top of this, whether it's a game or meme engine or some sort of product. And, uh, and it's interesting because there are, uh, two or three serious, serious companies building in this space. We talked to Descartes, uh, who's building in this space.

• 39:20John Coogan?

  Fei Fei Li has World Labs, I believe that's, that's, uh, building this space. And, um, and, and it, and this, it feels like there's this dance from like, okay, you've done enough research. It's time to productize and you need to completely turn the ship of your company towards how can we get this out the door in a way that's sticky and viral, but also doesn't completely put us out of business because of the inference costs. Um, but we'll keep digging into it. We'll keep having people on the show to talk about it.

• 39:51Jordi Hays?

  Team over at DeepMind is posting, I just put a post in the chat.

• 39:55John Coogan?

  Well, you're pulling that up. Let me tell you about graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship faster, higher quality software faster. You can get started for free. Uh, let's pull up this post from DeepMind.

• 40:09Jordi Hays?

  From Vedant Misra. He is counter, counter posting.

• 40:13John Coogan?

  Oh, I saw this. This is so good.

• 40:15Jordi Hays?

  Sam Altman, uh, if we can pull this up. This is the, the Korean TVBN is going to run into some challenges very quickly on pulling up posts. Here we go.

• 40:27John Coogan?

  Oh, wait, this is a different post than what?

• 40:28Jordi Hays?

  Multiple posts.

• 40:29John Coogan?

  He's posted multiple?

• 40:30Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 40:31John Coogan?

  Okay. So in this one, Google is the, are the rebels? He's, is what he's saying?

• 40:35Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I don't even know at this point. It's hard to tell who's the Death Star.

• 40:38John Coogan?

  Okay. I finally landed on what Sam Altman, the steel man of the Sam Altman Death Star post. The Death Star was the, was the overwhelming weight of numbered, uh, numbered language model releases. And he was, he was feeling the crushing weight of GPT-5 needing to be an order of magnitude bigger and an order of magnitude better and a, and a massive qualitative step up and a binary change in the overall experience. And he blew, he blew that up. He blew up the expectations that, that numbered releases would be correlated directly to, uh, specific model capabilities.

• 41:20John Coogan?

  That's the closest I could get on the steel man of the Death Star post.

• 41:23Jordi Hays?

  Alternatively, alternatively, it was provocative.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  It got the people going.

• 41:28Jordi Hays?

  Got the people going.

• 41:29John Coogan?

  It did. It did drive a lot of speculation, a lot of frustration.

• 41:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, over the weekend, you posted, there's 100 million in computer hardware locked in the replies. It's your job to get it out. So if you were on X over the weekend, Donald Boat, at Laser Boat 999, was on a tear. If you had a viral post over the weekend, he was going to be in your replies, saying, I agree. The only way we can drive culture, science and industry forward is if you overnight me a motherboard compatible with an AMD Ryzen, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I believe he's made some tremendous progress in terms of putting together this, this computer.

• 42:08John Coogan?

  I was talking to him a lot over the weekend, tracking the story. He said he was shy. He didn't want to come on the show, but I, a lot of people are questioning, like, is this some scam? Martin Scrawley was wondering if it's a scam. I think he's just having fun and he's a good poster and he is just, he's kind of e-begging and kind of shamelessly asking for stuff, but having fun. And it's funny. And it's basically like the tipping version of the ex creator payout. Like, he's just getting extra stuff. So he has received almost everything. It's also hilarious, the type of accounts that he responds to, because it's everything from like Elon and Sam Altman to Dasha from Red Scare.

• 42:49John Coogan?

  And like, he's all over the place. He's not, he's not purely just going after like the richest people in tax.

• 42:54Jordi Hays?

  Specific taste in poster.

• 42:56John Coogan?

  Yes, he has a specific taste in poster. And I mean, when he started this project, he already had 100,000 followers, was prolific poster. But he is apparently going to have some sort of MIT physicist put the PC together. He says he doesn't know how to code and he's not using it to like build software. He's more just interested in playing Battlefield 6, which had a beta this weekend that it apparently did very well. And apparently.

• 43:23John Coogan?

  Blew out the Call of Duty beta, I guess. So, there's this big debate over, uh, did Microsoft overpay for Activision? Because they acquired Activision for something like $70 billion. They got Call of Duty, and you would expect that Call of Duty would continue to defeat Battlefield, which is EA property.

• 43:43Jordi Hays?

  Ex Blizzard boss Mike Yabara says Battlefield 6 to boot stomp Call of Duty Black Ops 7.

• 43:50John Coogan?

  Yep. Rough, rough. So, uh, but, you know, it's, uh, it's fun. You know, he's 21. He's having fun on the timeline, getting an incredible PC that will be fully Battlefield 6 ready. I was in a similar boat when the first Battlefield game came out. Battlefield 1942. It's probably like 2003 or something. I had to beg my mom for a, uh, for a cutting-edge Nvidia graphics card. Because I couldn't run it on my, on my current PC. I had to build, I had to reply. Said, "Mom, you, me, Amalfi Coast."

• 44:23Jordi Hays?

  I was so, uh, I was so apple-pilled from a young age. I had to, I, I, I reft hundreds of soccer games to buy a maxed-out MacBook Pro.

• 44:34John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 44:34Jordi Hays?

  Which is still like terrible.

• 44:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. It's not a gaming PC.

• 44:37Jordi Hays?

  Compared to any like gaming rigs, but I would use that to play soccer.

• 44:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was always PC Master Race. But, um, and, and the last, the last PC I built, the, the, the, the last bastion of the Windows ecosystem in my life is sitting right over there. I built that. Not for gaming, actually.

• 44:52Jordi Hays?

  I never even noticed that.

• 44:53John Coogan?

  I built that PC for rendering computer graphics using, oh my God, Tyler's picking it up. He's gonna show off the thing. Donald Boat, if you want an older, uh, PC with a, uh, what does it have? It has, it has two, uh, Nvidia 1080 Ti's in there. They're, it's not bad. It has Ryzen Threadripper. Uh, I think it has 64 threads, actually. It might even have, it's probably not as fast, but it's a pretty, pretty solid CPU in there. Uh,

• 45:22Jordi Hays?

  That's a rig right there.

• 45:24John Coogan?

  It's a rig. I built that from scratch. And I was rendering.

• 45:27Jordi Hays?

  With scraps in a cave.

• 45:28John Coogan?

  With scraps in a cave. I was, I was rendering, uh, uh, computer graphics on, uh, Cinema 4D. Did a little Houdini on there. You let it cook. It was, it was a fun time. And then I also played some virtual reality on there, had a good VR rig setup every once in a while. It was fun.

• 45:44Jordi Hays?

  This is like, again, this is like Hunter Biden reminiscing on.

• 45:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 45:50Jordi Hays?

  This is John's crack.

• 45:51John Coogan?

  I mean, Donald Boat was like totally getting me back into it. I was like, maybe I, maybe I should build a new rig. Build a new rig and play Battlefield 6.

• 45:58Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 45:59John Coogan?

  This seems like really good in the two minutes I have for free time this week.

• 46:03Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely not.

• 46:04John Coogan?

  Really quickly, Polly Market has, which company has the best AI model at the end of 2025? And Google is still on a tear. There was a major switch after GPT-5 dropped. Google's sitting at 75% for August 30th and way up there for September 30th. And, and even by the end of the year, Google is slated at 54%. So DeepMind is in, is in control of the Rebel Alliance. Maybe they are the, the, the Death Star because they.

• 46:35Jordi Hays?

  All eyes on Gemini 3.

• 46:38John Coogan?

  Although, of course, this is, this is benchmark based. So anyway, Donald Boat, he's, he's having fun. People are starting to say, oh, maybe it's AstroTurf. There's thousands of likes on every post. They think it may be fake. I think it's organic. I think, I think the kid is just, is just out there hustling, having some fun.

• 46:56Jordi Hays?

  It's hilarious.

• 46:57John Coogan?

  It is hilarious and it's bringing me a lot of joy. And I think that like the, the, no one is getting over their skis here.

• 47:04Jordi Hays?

  It won't work again.

• 47:06John Coogan?

  No.

• 47:06Jordi Hays?

  The next person that tries to do this.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  Yep, yep, yep.

• 47:08Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be like Donald Boat knockoff.

• 47:11John Coogan?

  Yep. It's a one-time funny, funny like meme that, that, that does very well. And I don't think anyone here, there's no promise of financial reward. And most people are like Sam Altman can afford a graphics card. Will Manitis can afford an AMD Ryzen 7, 8 core desktop processor.

• 47:33John Coogan?

  Or a motherboard, you know, and I don't think, I think everyone was kind of chipping in what was reasonable to them. Where even if it's a scam, if it takes you for 200 bucks, it's not that big of a deal. It's, it's a lot of fun.

• 47:46Jordi Hays?

  It's not a scam, in my view, it's entertainment.

• 47:48John Coogan?

  I think it's entertainment and I think, I did, I was trying to push him like, hey, you're gonna have some doubters. You gotta, you gotta go live, you gotta stream Battlefield 6 when you get this thing set up. You don't need a face cam, although he was asking for, for a Blue Yeti microphone. And that was suspicious because he was like, I'm really shy. I'm like, if you're shy, what do you want the microphone for? What's going on here? But overall, I think he's gonna build the PC. I hope he streams Battlefield, I hope he's good. Could be a lot of fun. Anyway, let me tell you about Julius. What analysis do you want to run? Chat with your data and get expert level insights in seconds. You can ask Julius to analyze your data.

• 48:27John Coogan?

  It's loved by over 2 million users and trusted by individuals at Princeton, BCG, Zapier.

• 48:34Jordi Hays?

  And TVPN, we, you guys already know, we love the CEO.

• 48:40John Coogan?

  Rahul Sunwarkar.

• 48:41Jordi Hays?

  Rahul.

• 48:42John Coogan?

  He's been on the show three, four times, he's been in person on the Friday show.

• 48:46Jordi Hays?

  That's right, but absolute legend. Go try out Julius, you're gonna love it. Whether you're working in marketing, finance, product, you can use it to understand your business better.

• 48:57John Coogan?

  I was talking to a VC over the weekend who was lamenting missing Julius because he understood who Rahul was. But Rahul was working on a previous company and Julius was a pivot out of that apparently. And, and he was like, I should have just done it on the basis of like who Rahul was and knew that he would figure something out. But we didn't like the particular, that particular business, that particular market and.

• 49:22Jordi Hays?

  Great founders are just one pivot away.

• 49:24John Coogan?

  Exactly, and so, and so, yeah, when you find someone, you gotta let them cook and let them, let them figure it out.

• 49:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, well, you know who else is having fun? Cooking. On the timeline.

• 49:36John Coogan?

  He's monitoring the situation professionally now.

• 49:39Jordi Hays?

  Former OpenAI researcher Leopold Oshin Brenner. His fund Situational Awareness is up 47% in the first six months of the year.

• 49:51John Coogan?

  Love to see it.

• 49:52Jordi Hays?

  You may have first become aware of the podcast he did with Dwar Kesh and the essay that he wrote alongside it. Situational Awareness is probably my favorite name for any type of fund in a long time. It just says so much. It's like, hey, we're aware of the situation. We're monitoring it and we're deploying, we're trading against the situation.

• 50:16John Coogan?

  I like it. It's definitely up there. It's in the conversation, but the bar is extremely high. You're going up against Cerberus. You're going up against Ares, the god of war. Like, the, the, the ceiling for quality of fund name is so high. When you're in the public markets, wouldn't say this about VC funds because they all, they all have very silly names.

• 50:40Jordi Hays?

  You've got Blue Owl.

• 50:40John Coogan?

  Blue, Blue Owl. Blue Owl is a great name for a fund, a private credit fund. But, I mean Citadel, it's a, it's a very strong name, you know? Bridgewater, Blackstone, BlackRock.

• 50:55Jordi Hays?

  I love it because it's unique.

• 50:57John Coogan?

  It is unique.

• 50:58Jordi Hays?

  It's very unique.

• 50:58John Coogan?

  It is unique.

• 50:58Jordi Hays?

  It aligns with, with this very viral thesis. And it says, it says, it says exactly what you're getting into.

• 51:05John Coogan?

  Yep. And I mean, and it was, it was incredibly accurate. Like when he, when he posted the original Situational Awareness essay, it was something that was consensus in San Francisco and contrarian everywhere else. And so what I loved about this was that there were so many people that were seeing what was going on in San Francisco in AI and they wound up starting seed funds. And he was like, no. The real alpha is in the public markets in these like long tail.

• 51:37Jordi Hays?

  Trillions of dollars of market cap.

• 51:39John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 51:40Jordi Hays?

  That's going to fluctuate based on AI adoption.

• 51:42John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. So, so his portfolio is, is very interesting. It's all deeper in the supply chain. Notably, Nvidia is missing. Maybe that was too consensus, but he's been long a bunch of things. Now, there was a little bit of confusion because in the 13F, which was released.

• 52:01Jordi Hays?

  Nvidia is only up 32% year to date, John. It's barely in the conversation. Trying to put up 47% on a billion plus.

• 52:09John Coogan?

  You gotta, yeah, it would have been a laggard in the fund. Wow. It's crazy. But yeah, so the 13F came out, which is the, the, the fund filing showing the position of the hedge fund, showing what they're in. There was a little bit of confusion because Intel was ranked at the top, but that was because it was a call. And when you buy a call, the, the total value that you, of the, of the stock that you have the right to purchase is listed. And so if you have the right to purchase a billion dollars in Intel stock, that will be listed as a billion dollars. But in fact, you will not have actually invested a billion dollars in that call. And depending on where, how far out of the money that is, that can be very, very cheap.

• 52:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And, and people were questioning like, hey, did this fund already blow up? Intel is obviously.

• 52:55John Coogan?

  No, no, they might've had to write down those calls or get out of the position. There's a million things it could do. But there's, there's a bunch of interesting things in here. And so, uh, front page of the Wall Street Journal for Leopold, you love to see it at age 23. He emerged last year as a precocious artificial intelligence influencer, which I think sells him way, way short.

• 53:20John Coogan?

  But he did publish a widely read manifesto. And then he also did a Dwarsh Patel episode, which I think a lot of people saw clips from.

• 53:26Jordi Hays?

  If you're an AI researcher now and you do a podcast and it goes a little viral, congrats, you're now.

• 53:31John Coogan?

  You're an influencer. But the, the influence of that, of that episode is crazy. So. He, so he did Dork Cash. Most people do Dork Cash for like an hour, two hours. His episode is over four hours long. It's so, so long. The PDF is 170 pages. He, it's a multi-part essay series. It's a fantastic, it's a fantastic episode. It's a fantastic PDF. It's a billion dollar PDF, as they say. The PDF that spawned a billion dollars in capital. A 23-year-old with no professional investing experience quickly raised more money for a hedge fund than most pedigreed portfolio managers when they strike out on their own. As valuations of Nvidia, OpenAI, and other artificial intelligence companies continue to soar,

• 54:15John Coogan?

  so do investments in hedge funds hoping to ride the AI wave. Ashen Brenner, San Francisco-based firm Situational Awareness, now manages more than 1.5 billion, people familiar with the matter, said he has described the firm as a brain trust on AI. And he certainly seems to be in the thick of it, cozying up to Dorkish Patel. He's got Patrick Collison, he's got Nat Friedman in, he's got a, he's got a really stacked roster that, of people that know what's going on at the cutting edge of AI, where the plateaus will be, where the investments will be made, the distribution of where different, where different data center investments will be made, where the different bottlenecks will be. That's really, really key to the strategy.

• 54:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it shouldn't, it shouldn't be a surprise that he was able to accumulate this much capital so quickly because, you know, again, if you're, if you're Daniel Gross or Nat Friedman and you want to allocate to a manager that deeply understands AI, you're, you're probably better off finding a, you know,

• 55:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:13Jordi Hays?

  incredibly intelligent 23-year-old that was at a lab

• 55:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  that can then deploy capital for you against all these different trends.

• 55:21John Coogan?

  It's basically like 1.5 billion, what is that, like one researcher's lifetime earnings? So he just needs one?

• 55:28Jordi Hays?

  Just one.

• 55:28John Coogan?

  Just one.

• 55:29Jordi Hays?

  Graham Duncan is a core LP in the fund as well.

• 55:34John Coogan?

  Still got it, baby.

• 55:35Jordi Hays?

  Of course he does.

• 55:37John Coogan?

  Absolute picker.

• 55:38Jordi Hays?

  Cover of Colossus.

• 55:39John Coogan?

  Cover of Colossus. His strategy involves betting on global stocks that, let's see.

• 55:46Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for global stocks.

• 55:49John Coogan?

  That stand to benefit from the development of AI technologies such as semiconductor infrastructure and power companies, along with investments in a few startups, including Anthropic. Oh, he's in Anthropic.

• 55:58Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 55:59John Coogan?

  He told investors he plans to offset those with smaller short bets on industries that could get left behind. Situational awareness gained 47% after fees in the first half of the year, some of the people said. In the same period, the S and P 500 gave in about 6%, including dividends, while an index of hedge funds compiled by research firm Pivotal Path rose about 7%. And so he is crushing the competition. We'll get into some of the pushback here, but I am very excited for this. Ashen Brenner, a native of Germany, briefly worked as a researcher at OpenAI before being pushed out. It was very interesting. He called the, he called OpenAI's security measures

• 56:40John Coogan?

  egregiously insufficient, and then he shared a document with external researchers about the, about how OpenAI was doing security and that violated company policy. So he was pushed out.

• 56:53Jordi Hays?

  Get pushed out.

• 56:54John Coogan?

  I don't know how big of a deal that really is. Like, I don't know. Like, you should be able to talk to other people. Obviously, you shouldn't violate company policy. Kind of weird to talk trash about your own company's security things. And then also, we're in this weird phase where like, okay, like you got a habeas corpus when you talk about the security stuff. Because like, if you were saying, if you were running around the building being like, we're all going to get turned into paper clips, we're all going to get turned into paper clips. And then it's like, three years later and like, nothing's happened. It's kind of like, come on, man. Like, what were you doing? But if he was sounding the alarm about geopolitics, which is something he did in situational awareness, or, you know, AI psychosis, like, there are a lot of things that are good to research in safety. And so his overall take was, I think he benchmarked the entire industry and

• 57:39John Coogan?

  found that, you know, like, less than 1% of AI headcount was going towards like, safety and the alignment problem. And so he identified that as a problem to kind of go after. But now, you know, he's more focused on the public markets. So Ashen Brenner, native of Germany, worked at OpenAI. He named situational awareness after his 165-page essay he wrote about the promise and risks of artificial superintelligence. He recruited Carl Schulman and another AI intellectual who used to work at Peter Thiel's Macro Hedge Fund as Director of Research.

• 58:11Jordi Hays?

  Great pickup.

• 58:12John Coogan?

  The firm's backers include Patrick and John Collison, the billionaire brothers who founded payments company Stripe, as well as Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman, whom Mark Zuckerberg recently recruited to help run Meta Platforms' AI efforts. Graham Duncan, a well-known investor who organizes the Sohn Conference, is an advisor.

• 58:29Jordi Hays?

  It's really a who's who's.

• 58:30John Coogan?

  It is. We're, quote, "We are going to, we're gonna have way more situational awareness than any of the people who manage money in New York."

• 58:39Jordi Hays?

  Wait for, wait for this line. He says, "We're definitely going to do great on investing."

• 58:43John Coogan?

  I love it. Confidence, baby. And another sign of the demand for Ashen Brenner's services, many investors agreed to lock up their money with him for years. Other recent launches include an AI-focused hedge fund from value-aligned research advisors, a Princeton, New Jersey-based investment firm founded by former quants Ben Hoskin and David Field.

• 59:04Jordi Hays?

  Are you ever really a former quant?

• 59:06John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 59:07Jordi Hays?

  Once a quant, always a quant?

• 59:09John Coogan?

  That fund has a billion, and VAR also manages about $2 billion in other AI-focused investment strategies. VAR's investors have included the philanthropic foundation of co-founder of Facebook, Dustin Moskowitz, according to regulatory findings. Veteran hedge fund firms are entering the fray, too. Last year, Steve Cohen tapped one of his portfolio managers at Point 72 Asset Management, Eric Sanchez, to start an AI-focused hedge fund that Cohen planned to stake with $150 million of his own money, assets of the fund called Turian, after AI theorist Alan Turing, who's on the madness list, baby. We'll see if he can hold on.

• 59:52John Coogan?

  In the next revision, which is coming soon, Torion is up about 11% this year and gained 7% last month. So a little bit of a slower start for Torion compared to situational awareness that seems to be absolutely swinging for the fences. It is no surprise that thematic funds are springing up to capitalize on the AI frenzy. In years past, hedge funds specialized in the transition to clean energy and investing in with an environmental, social and corporate governance lens proliferated in response to client demand. Identifying a winning theme isn't the same as trading it well. Investors' tastes can be fickle. Many prominent ESG hedge funds have either shrunk or gone out of business.

• 1:00:34Jordi Hays?

  But was, I don't know, it's hard to say that smart money was saying that ESG was going to be such a winning theme.

• 1:00:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was odd because it wasn't, it wasn't some like underlying technological shift. It was more just like

• 1:00:49Jordi Hays?

  It was values-based investing.

• 1:00:50John Coogan?

  It was values-based investing, but it was also like predicated on more demand because everyone there, it was like a game of musical chairs a little bit. It was like, well, I think that Harvard is going to want an ESG strategy. So I'm going to build one. And Harvard says, well, I'm going to want one because CalPERS is going to want one.

• 1:01:05Jordi Hays?

  And there was, there was a time that I think consumers specifically were demanding sustainability from brands. And it was really like a feature to a product. But I think that has changed to some degree.

• 1:01:19John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:01:19Jordi Hays?

  The market swoon that followed the January release of an advanced low-cost language model from Chinese company DeepSeek showed the fragility of the valuations of AI winners, though the market has roared back since.

• 1:01:30John Coogan?

  Go in long Jevon's paradox. Come on.

• 1:01:33Jordi Hays?

  Come on.

• 1:01:33John Coogan?

  Come on.

• 1:01:34Jordi Hays?

  AI-focused investors argue the long-term trend of development and adoption are inevitable, even if there are bumps along the way. With so many publicly traded companies that operate in the AI-adjacent economy today, stock picking funds often pile into the same positions as one another and more generalist hedge funds. Vistra, a power producer that supplies the juice to AI data centers, was a top three US position of both situational awareness and VAR investors as of March 31, according to each of their most recent securities filings. Other hedge fund managers are debuting funds to make investments in privately-held AI companies and startups.

• 1:02:11Jordi Hays?

  Gavin Baker's Atreides Management.

• 1:02:13John Coogan?

  Come on, that's also in the top 10 best names ever.

• 1:02:17Jordi Hays?

  Atreides.

• 1:02:17John Coogan?

  Atreides is fantastic. It's from Dune. Paul Atreides.

• 1:02:20Jordi Hays?

  Atreides Management teamed up with Valor Equity Partners to launch a venture capital fund earlier this year that has raised millions from investors. Millions is

• 1:02:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:30Jordi Hays?

  such a funny way to describe a fund.

• 1:02:32John Coogan?

  I'm sorry.

• 1:02:33Jordi Hays?

  I would hope it's in the millions, otherwise, what are you doing?

• 1:02:38John Coogan?

  Dozens of dollars.

• 1:02:40Jordi Hays?

  From Oman's Sovereign Wealth Fund, each firm separately invested.

• 1:02:44John Coogan?

  XAI.

• 1:02:45Jordi Hays?

  XAI. At least one portfolio manager is planning an AI hedge fund as a comeback vehicle. Sean Ma wound down his Hong Kong-based firm, Snow Lake Capital. Sounds cool. I mean, anytime you add smashed capital to the end of

• 1:03:00John Coogan?

  Always an improvement.

• 1:03:01Jordi Hays?

  a word or a couple of words, it always elevates everything involved.

• 1:03:04John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:03:05Jordi Hays?

  After it agreed to pay out 2.8 million to settle Securities and Exchange Commission charges last year that the firm participated in stock offerings of companies that it had also bet against, Ma took over an investment firm called M37 Management in Menlo Park. Earlier this year, he's currently fundraising for a hedge fund focused on AI software and hardware. So, lot of action.

• 1:03:28John Coogan?

  Did you know that Meta is calling their AI lab TBD Lab or something like this? Do you see this?

• 1:03:33Jordi Hays?

  Since when?

• 1:03:34John Coogan?

  I don't know. I thought it was MSL, but the journal's saying Meta's TBD Lab tackles new version of Llama. I think this is some sort of like sub-lab focused on open source or Llama specifically. At the forefront of the push to build a computer mind smarter than any humans is a team dubbed TBD Lab, which houses many of the researchers the company has lured from rival labs, in some cases with pay packages of tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. TBD Lab, as in to be determined, is spearheading

• 1:04:05Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for that.

• 1:04:05John Coogan?

  work on the newest version of Llama, the company's large language model, according to people familiar with the matter. I don't know. Just interesting. That feels like some weird leak that like the journals like maybe misinterpreting. Anyway, back to Leopold. Interesting, interesting strategy. I think a lot of people are kind of so young macro has an interesting take here. Leopold Ashen Brenner's fund has outperformed basically every mainstream hedge fund year to date. And he's running a billion dollars of capital, the Gulf billionaires and pension funds are watching this. Capital management will soon become an activity exclusively done by chronically online zoomers. And there's certainly a lot of value in having

• 1:04:43Jordi Hays?

  Give it up for all the

• 1:04:44John Coogan?

  Locked in

• 1:04:45Jordi Hays?

  Online zoomers.

• 1:04:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Let's give it up for profound. Get your brand mentioned on chat.

• 1:04:52Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:04:53John Coogan?

  T. Reach millions of consumers who are using AI to discover new products and brands. You can get a demo.

• 1:05:00Jordi Hays?

  So funny. I'm looking at the comments on WSJ.com. Giving a 23 year old one and a half billion to invest is pretty solid proof of a market top.

• 1:05:13John Coogan?

  How old was Ken Griffin when he started Citadel again?

• 1:05:16Jordi Hays?

  Wasn't he like 18?

• 1:05:17John Coogan?

  Oh yeah. He was at Harvard. He was an undergrad. He hadn't even graduated yet. That's right. Interesting.

• 1:05:21Jordi Hays?

  Just say you've never studied the greats.

• 1:05:24John Coogan?

  Just say you've never studied the greats. Yeah. I mean, like, I, I, I don't know. Like the, of course there is a risk that there's, there's some bubble and the risk.

• 1:05:33Jordi Hays?

  Of course we're in a bubble. That doesn't mean you shouldn't try to make money on it.

• 1:05:38John Coogan?

  Exactly. But, but, but there is a risk that you get caught over your skis at the wrong moment. There's a pullback and the fund draws down really crazy. But again, Citadel drew down like 70% in the housing crisis.

• 1:05:52Jordi Hays?

  All the greats have suffered a massive drawdown.

• 1:05:54John Coogan?

  It happens.

• 1:05:54Jordi Hays?

  Look at Bezos.

• 1:05:55John Coogan?

  I feel like Leopold, this is what he's meant to do. And, and I'm rooting for him. I'm excited for it. I think it's, I think it's very, very cool. Anyway, this will be, this will be, will this be good news for Leopold? He's not in Nvidia. You know, in some ways you could say he is net short Nvidia because he is long everything but Nvidia at this point. Is this good news? Is he cheering? Is he sad? The news is that breaking from the Financial Times, Nvidia has agreed to share 15% of revenues from H20 chip sales in China with Uncle Sam. According to export control experts, no US company has ever agreed to pay a portion

• 1:06:37John Coogan?

  of their revenues to obtain export licenses. We were talking about this this morning at the gym.

• 1:06:44Jordi Hays?

  Uncle Sam eats first.

• 1:06:45John Coogan?

  And I was like, I was like, certainly like this has to happen like all the time. I chat GPT it and it's like, actually, it's unconstitutional. You can't do this at all. And so I'm sure some some folks worried about Trump's overreach and abuse of the of the federal system will be up in arms over this.

• 1:07:05Jordi Hays?

  So we're gonna have Peter Harrell on the show in 20 minutes.

• 1:07:09John Coogan?

  And we're gonna talk to Aaron Gittman, too.

• 1:07:11Jordi Hays?

  From January 2021 to 2022, Harrell served at the US White House as a senior director for international economics, jointly appointed to the National Security Council and the National Economic Council. He co-led President Biden's EO 14017 Supply Chain Resilience Agenda, worked on the global digital 5G and telecommunications strategy, spearheaded negotiations with the EU on data privacy, and served as a White House representative on a number of related matters. So excited to get his takes. He shared a bunch on LinkedIn yesterday evening or this morning. So we'll kind of wait to get into that.

• 1:07:51John Coogan?

  The wording in this journal article is so wild because it's not saying like the IRS or something. It's saying the Trump administration will receive 15% of the sales as part of a deal to approve exports of Nvidia's H20 chip. So it's like, where exactly is the money going? Like, I guess it goes into the Treasury, the Commerce Department, but it's just funny to phrase it as like, Trump gets to control. But hopefully it goes down towards paying down the debt. Like, I guess that's the.

• 1:08:21Jordi Hays?

  Bone GPT says 15%. That's all. Off the top. You don't got to worry about nothing else. No problems. No supply chain disruptions. So anyways.

• 1:08:32John Coogan?

  So exports of the H20 and MI308 were halted in April. So this actually applies to AMD as well, which also has a similar like nerfed GPT. For China.

• 1:08:45Jordi Hays?

  And Trump had a quote on the Blackwell.

• 1:08:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, they they they they halted the trade of these H20s. Jensen Wong has gone on a charm offensive since then, says the Wall Street Journal, talking to officials in both countries about the need to do business with each other. We follow rules the US government sets for our participation in worldwide markets, Nvidia said in a statement on Sunday. While we haven't shipped H20 to China for months, we hope export control rules will let America compete in China and worldwide. This is an interesting one. I mean, there are there are there are good arguments on both sides. You know, if you're super, super intelligence pilled, if you're AGI pilled, you probably don't want that in the hands of a rival country. But if this is more like Microsoft Excel, why not go sell some seats over there?

• 1:09:32John Coogan?

  Why not go sell some licenses? I mean, we sell airplanes over there. We sell 747s.

• 1:09:37Jordi Hays?

  We don't sell F-35s.

• 1:09:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, but is this an F-35 or is it?

• 1:09:42Jordi Hays?

  That's the big question.

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  Or is it souped up XL, you know? And that's the debate. And I think a lot of people are shifting over into the camp of like, this is knowledge retrieval. This is like pretty generic hardware. This is not this is not as as a as critical of.

• 1:09:57Jordi Hays?

  Trump saw Trump saw the GPT-5 launch and said, okay, we'll give him some chips.

• 1:10:02John Coogan?

  We I mean, why were we saying that he didn't care about the deficit because he was super AGI pilled? Why is he now focused on the deficit and not worried about competition with China because he's less AGI pilled now? So he says, you know what? Like, I don't think God in a box is coming down the pipe anytime soon. And so let them have them, whatever. It's fine.

• 1:10:24Jordi Hays?

  Trump on Monday left open the possibility that Nvidia could export its Blackwell chips for a higher price.

• 1:10:34Jordi Hays?

  The Trump administration had closed the door on the export of that technology to China, even after reversing course on the H20. On Monday, Trump said that he'd consider allowing it. The Blackwell is super duper advanced. I wouldn't make a deal with that, although it's possible, Trump said. I make a deal somewhat enhanced in a negative way. Blackwell, in other words, take 30 to 50% off of it. But that's the latest and greatest in the world. Nobody has it. They won't have it for five years.

• 1:11:01John Coogan?

  Okay, wildcard. Nvidia's gotta track this.

• 1:11:03Jordi Hays?

  And he said, no, again.

• 1:11:05John Coogan?

  Continue.

• 1:11:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Trump said Jensen will return to the White House in the future to discuss selling an unenhanced version of Blackwell.

• 1:11:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:12Jordi Hays?

  I think he's coming to see me again about that, but that will be an unenhanced version of the big one.

• 1:11:17John Coogan?

  The big one.

• 1:11:18Jordi Hays?

  We will sometimes sell fighter jets to a country and we'll give them 20% less than than we have.

• 1:11:23John Coogan?

  Okay, see, see, we do sell fighter jets to countries. Let's go. Uh, Raghav says it should go into the sovereign wealth fund, which he can eventually help pay down the debt. Yeah, well, that makes sense.

• 1:11:34Jordi Hays?

  A lot of people have been vemoing the government.

• 1:11:38John Coogan?

  Um, the, so Nvidia's gonna need to track this. It's very similar to sales tax. They need to get on numeral, sales tax on autopilot. Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Maybe this is a line expansion for numeral. Track your export, your export bill.

• 1:11:54Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:11:55John Coogan?

  In other chip news, Tom Cotton is diving back into the, uh, the Liputan news at Intel, the CEO, uh, of course, uh, Liputan had to visit the White House and is, uh, has been singled out by Trump as, uh, unacceptable and Trump called for his resignation. We kind of debated that on the Friday show, but Tom Cotton, uh, the, I believe, Republican Senator, he said, "The new CEO of Intel reportedly has deep ties to the Chinese communists. U.S. companies who receive government grants should be responsible stewards of taxpayer dollars and adhere to strict security regulations. The board of Intel owes Congress an explanation." And so, uh, Liputan is set to visit the White House today.

• 1:12:39John Coogan?

  He probably is there currently or was there earlier today. Uh, after President Trump called for his removal last week over ties to Chinese businesses. This is, uh, Liputan is not, he was born in Singapore and he's an American citizen, but he had a venture fund that did a bunch of deals in China. And so that's kind of, I think, the main focus. And when you look at the web of like, all the deals that he's done and all the company, it's like a lot of companies. And so it looks like this crazy spider web. It looks very like red stringy. Um, so Ton is expected to have a wide range. Yeah, we gotta get the whiteboard out, break it down. Get Liputan on the show.

• 1:13:13Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, could you, could you whiteboard out Liputan's, uh, portfolio?

• 1:13:18John Coogan?

  You're gonna have to, you're gonna have to look it up. There is a, there is a crazy chart over here somewhere.

• 1:13:26John Coogan?

  But Ton hopes to win the, win Trump's approval by showing his commitment to the country and pledging the importance of keeping Intel's manufacturing capabilities as a national security issue. Trump has aggressively pushed US companies to make changes ranging, ranging from eating the cost of tariffs to doing business with more conservatives and other political allies. So the, you know, Trump said the CEO of Intel is highly conflicted and must resign immediately. There's no other solution to this problem. The odd thing is that it's like, okay, so, so like Intel with like their really lagging semiconductor technology is now critical to America. But Nvidia H20s aren't, and we can let those go to China. So there does seem to be some like incongruence here, right? Have you sorted that out at all?

• 1:14:11Jordi Hays?

  I mean, in the conversations we had last week, it feels like Intel is still incredibly strategic and important.

• 1:14:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:17Jordi Hays?

  And we need to take it very, very seriously. We need to make sure that they can, like the United States, it's the foundry business in particular. If you didn't hear our interview with Fabricated Knowledge, Doug over at Semi Analysis on Friday, go listen to it. But yeah, I think, I think universally people agree that Intel is important. It's in a bad situation. But so the question then becomes, is Liputan the right guy to steward it? And ultimately, it's the Intel board that should be determining that, right?

• 1:14:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:56Jordi Hays?

  Doug did say he had issues with the board, wasn't exactly excited about their leadership over the last decade and a half.

• 1:15:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:04Jordi Hays?

  But again, this, this kind of thing typically feels like it should be.

• 1:15:08John Coogan?

  It just feels like if you were trying to keep semiconductors out of the hands of China, you would be anti H20 sales and anti Liputan in, in, at Intel potentially. And if you had a more laissez faire attitude, you would say, yeah, Liputan's fine and H20 sales are fine. But it's weird to be like, H20 sales are fine, but Liputan is not fine. That's where there's like some incongruity. But I think this will all be resolved. It's probably just one of these Trump like gambits where art of the deal is gonna ask for Intel to, you know, donate to some sort of thing or, you know, pay some fee.

• 1:15:43Jordi Hays?

  I think they should donate to themselves.

• 1:15:46John Coogan?

  Yeah, they should. Donate to the shareholders with a buyback, maybe. I don't know.

• 1:15:51Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. Just figure it out.

• 1:15:53John Coogan?

  Donate the, donate the fab business to TSMC.

• 1:15:59Jordi Hays?

  No, I think, I mean, I think that's the whole point. It's like we can, TSMC can be producing chips in the United States, but we still shouldn't let a company like Intel just fail at a point where it should be on the path to thriving.

• 1:16:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:14Jordi Hays?

  Mike Moritz was in the Journal over the weekend.

• 1:16:17John Coogan?

  He wasn't in the Journal. He was in the Pink Sheets, in the, in the Financial Times Opinion section. "Intel must not bow to Trump's attack on its CEO." "The latest character that US President Donald Trump has attempted to assassinate is Liputan, recently appointed chief executive of Intel, firing from his perch on Truth Social." The president wrote, "The CEO of Intel is highly conflicted and must resign immediately." For context here, Mike Moritz is Sequoia, not founder, but, but longtime GP. The, the Financial Times describes him as a Silicon Valley investor, doesn't quite do the job, but.

• 1:16:57Jordi Hays?

  It's technically true.

• 1:16:58John Coogan?

  But Sequoia, I believe, invested in Intel and has a long relationship with the company. And Mike Moritz is, I believe, anti-Trump, but then there were a few other folks at Sequoia who were pro-Trump in this last cycle, so there's a little bit of a divide there, but I think Mike Moritz is out of Sequoia at this point, or has maybe moved on to a different piece of the organization. It's all very complicated. I can't keep it perfectly in order, but says, "While presidents have sometimes expressed their outrage about the behavior of the corporate sector, Trump's assault has no modern precedent." "The source of the president's ire, and that of Tom Cotton, Republican Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, is Tan's business dealings with China as both venture capitalist and in his prior role

• 1:17:43John Coogan?

  as chief executive of California-based Cadence Design Systems, a maker of electronic design systems." "The president and senator pointed to a $140 million payment agreed by Cadence last month as part of a plea deal to settle claims of illegal exports to China between 2015 and 2021. They have also lambasted Tan's venture investments in a number of Chinese semiconductor companies." "In addition, they are seeking to question whether with Tan at the helm, Intel is jeopardizing the $8 billion grant." It was given under the Chips and Science Act that was passed by the Biden administration. The attack on Tan comes at a time when the president's policy towards China and the Chinese tech

• 1:18:26John Coogan?

  sector seems to change by the hour. Of course, it's much easier to smear a man with accusations than examine his record and character. Tan, 65, is a longtime American citizen and much admired figure in Silicon Valley, who is known for operating with a soft-spoken authoritative dignity. I've known him as an acquaintance for almost 40 years.

• 1:18:45Jordi Hays?

  The whiteboard is going up.

• 1:18:47John Coogan?

  Oh, there we go. Oh, he's connected to SMIC, too?

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So, he was, uh, his, his firm was called Walden International.

• 1:18:54John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:18:55Speaker 02

  Um, and they were, yeah, they were early in SMIC's seed investor.

• 1:18:58John Coogan?

  No way.

• 1:18:59Speaker 02

  Uh, I'm looking for more.

• 1:19:00John Coogan?

  SMIC, for reference, is, uh, the, are they the Nvidia of China? Or are they the TS? I think they're the TSMC of China. And then SME is the ASML of China.

• 1:19:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:19:11Jordi Hays?

  And then there's also. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation.

• 1:19:15John Coogan?

  So they actually do the fab. They are a, they're, they're a fab.

• 1:19:18Jordi Hays?

  And it is partially state-owned.

• 1:19:20John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:19:21Jordi Hays?

  Like many companies.

• 1:19:22John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:19:23Speaker 02

  And then, uh, I don't know if it's AMAC or AMEC. That's like a, a tool, a Ching tool company for semiconductors.

• 1:19:30John Coogan?

  Yep. So more, so more of a, of an ASML-type competitor.

• 1:19:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:19:35John Coogan?

  Actually make the lithography machines that then are used in the fab to make the chips that are designed by Huawei or any other client. Interesting. I didn't realize that Mike Moritz and Liputon go back 40 years. Wow, they met when, when Ton was 25 years old? What a legend.

• 1:19:55Jordi Hays?

  Did you know Intel's first external investor was the meme account Arfer, Arthur Rock?

• 1:20:02John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, it was Arthur Rock. That's right.

• 1:20:05Jordi Hays?

  Of course, not the, uh, current account Arthur Rock, but, uh, the original Arthur Rock, the legendary Arthur Rock.

• 1:20:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:12Jordi Hays?

  Who, his firm was Arthur, just Arthur Rock and Co.

• 1:20:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:20:18Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 1:20:18John Coogan?

  You know what the Rock stands for, right? Rockefeller.

• 1:20:22Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 1:20:23John Coogan?

  It's Rockefeller money.

• 1:20:24Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 1:20:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:25Jordi Hays?

  I did not know that.

• 1:20:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, the Rockefeller money got passed down.

• 1:20:29Jordi Hays?

  This goes way deeper.

• 1:20:31John Coogan?

  This goes deeper than we thought.

• 1:20:33Jordi Hays?

  Get the tinfoil hat.

• 1:20:34John Coogan?

  The Rockefellers are involved. Born in Malaysia and educated in Singapore, Tan studied MIT, where he was awarded a master's degree in nuclear engineering. After moving to San Francisco, he joined the Walden Group, one of California's early venture firms. Instead of plowing the Silicon Valley furrow, he elected to head to Taiwan. Later, he made investments in China. The majority in companies with deep technology roots, his deep understanding of both Taiwan and China is an asset many US chief executives would like to possess. When he later became CEO of Cadence, which had fallen on hard times, the wise acres assumed he would fail, given his lack of operating experience. Instead, he transformed the business.

• 1:21:15John Coogan?

  In his 12 years at the helm of the company's revenue tripled to almost $3 billion and the stock price appreciated by over 3,200%. Today, Cadence is worth close to $100 billion. Wow, that is a phenomenal performance.

• 1:21:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and again, he, Liputan, made a seed investment in SMIC in 2001.

• 1:21:36John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:21:37Jordi Hays?

  Exited it fully in 2021.

• 1:21:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, and I mean, you think about like, the vibe around doing business in China in 2001 was like, absolutely, absolutely. These are, these are our boys. We make shoes, Nike's there, we make iPhones there. Like, it was like completely reasonable. There was no great power competition discussion whatsoever.

• 1:22:00John Coogan?

  All that has cropped up in the last decade. And so, earlier this year, Liputan became the chief executive of Intel, a job which, in Mike Morris's book, amounts to public service. It is no secret that over the past 20 years, Intel has ceded its mantle as the world's most important semiconductor company to companies like Nvidia, Broadcom, TSMC, and Samsung. Six different leaders have failed to return Intel to the glory days that it enjoyed under the late Andy Grove. It failed to capitalize on the rise of the mobile phone industry and was outgunned by Nvidia is the supplier of silicon engines for the AI revolution. Its manufacturing prowess, a rarity among US chip companies, has been consigned to the shade by TSMC. Oh, Mike Moritz, what a great writer.

• 1:22:44John Coogan?

  Today, Intel is an also-ran lacking much in the way of financial firepower. The last thing Tan needs is to be distracted by a vindictive political sideshow. Now, the Intel board must decide whether to march to the beat of so many other corporate leaders and capitulate to the president's artless bullying, or to set an example for other companies and display some backbone. Early signs of defiance are encouraging. Let's hope that Intel's overseers abide by the refrain that old Tammy Wynette song and continue to stand by their man. What a hilarious reference. Do you know that song, "Stand By My Man" by Tammy Wynette?

• 1:23:21Jordi Hays?

  I do not.

• 1:23:22John Coogan?

  Famously quoted by Hillary Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, where she said that she was not going to leave Bill Clinton over the scandal, but she was also not doing what Tammy Wynette said. She was not merely standing by her man, but she wound up, she did stand by her man in some ways. And they did not get a divorce. But fascinating quote, fascinating article. I think like, he could probably riz this up. I think Tan can go to the White House, do some deal, art of the deal both ways, figure out some way, one hand washes the other, and be fine.

• 1:23:59Jordi Hays?

  For Tan?

• 1:24:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, get a cool leather jacket.

• 1:24:02John Coogan?

  Cool leather jacket. Dust off those golf clubs, for sure. Bring a Big Mac, for sure. Pick up some McDonald's on the way.

• 1:24:12Jordi Hays?

  Smart.

• 1:24:12John Coogan?

  And throw in a Vacheron-Histoire.

• 1:24:16Jordi Hays?

  Maybe bring a bar of gold, or a lot, even potentially numerous bars of gold.

• 1:24:22John Coogan?

  Definitely, definitely bring the biggest chip that Intel has ever produced. Maybe just a whole wafer, because he's probably seen Blackwell. You've seen, Blackwell's pretty big, right? You gotta bring something even bigger and just be like, "We're making the biggest and best chips in America. We're American-made, I'm America all the way. We're gonna build a fab at Mar-a-Lago, we're gonna build it in Key West." And I think he gets it done. Anyway, should we move on?

• 1:24:50John Coogan?

  To Linear. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products, Meet the System for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. Go to Linear.app to start building.

• 1:24:59Jordi Hays?

  When we get the boot on on the show, we will be giving him a live demo of Linear.

• 1:25:02John Coogan?

  We should, we should.

• 1:25:03Jordi Hays?

  Linear will be the key to getting Intel back on track. Let's make it happen.

• 1:25:06John Coogan?

  Okay. Tyler Cowen, he's loving GPT-5, and he has a post. He says, somewhat unrelated, but somewhat related, of course, on the topic of AI. He says, "The quote, AI is causing a slowdown for new hires hypothesis has pretty much been abandoned. The trend seems to predate GPT-4, and the trend seems to apply to tech jobs that have no serious AI competition." Interesting. I was digging into the hiring numbers across the world, because if, if, if AI is causing a slowdown in new grad hires, I would have to assume that it's also causing

• 1:25:48John Coogan?

  a slowdown in India, because there's so much business process, BPO, business process outsourcing, and outsourced IT work, outsourced software development work that happens in India. And I dug up the unemployment data in India, split it out by rural and urban, and it doesn't seem like there's a huge spike. Maybe that's coming, but we're certainly not there yet.

• 1:26:13Jordi Hays?

  I think Tyler's post was in response. There was a New York Times article yesterday said, "Goodbye, $165,000 tech jobs. Student coders seek work at Chipotle." As companies like Amazon and Microsoft lay off workers and embrace AI coding tools, computer science graduates say they're struggling to land tech jobs. And there's a story of Manasi Mishra. Remember seeing tech executives on social media urging students to study computer programming? The rhetoric was, if you just learn to code, work hard, and get a computer science degree, you can get six figures for your starting salary. Is now 21, recalls hearing as she grew up in San Ramon, California. Those golden industry promises helped spur Ms. Mishra to code. Her first website in elementary school, take advanced computing

• 1:26:58Jordi Hays?

  in high school, and major in computer science in college. But after a year of hunting for tech jobs and internships, Ms. Mishra graduated from Purdue University in May without an offer. I just graduated with a computer science degree, and the only company that has called me for an interview is Chipotle. I guess my first question is, was this for coding? Coding creating? Software for Chipotle because having a burrito tracker on par with the Domino's pizza tracker would be pretty cool.

• 1:27:26John Coogan?

  That could be very good.

• 1:27:28Jordi Hays?

  And again, I think one thing that could happen is hiring managers and executives telling themselves, we should be able to do more with AI. We don't need to hire for these people, even if AI is not at the point where it truly replaces a person. It's just sort of forcing people into this mindset of like, do we actually need to hire this person?

• 1:27:47John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:27:47Jordi Hays?

  And again, we'd called out before, Microsoft has laid off more people this year than they have in the past few years combined.

• 1:27:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:54Jordi Hays?

  And so again, I think, but at the same time.

• 1:27:58John Coogan?

  You don't know how big the hiring glut was from Zerp and COVID, like that could still be working its way through. Uh, cause companies really, really staffed up and they staffed up remotely and they staffed up young people.

• 1:28:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we've heard a bunch of stories this year of companies that had.

• 1:28:12John Coogan?

  People had eight different jobs.

• 1:28:13Jordi Hays?

  Remote engineers that they were kind of like, you can move back to the office or you can move on.

• 1:28:20John Coogan?

  At the same time, Raghav Meta in the chat says, it's really bad in India. I have it on very good authority. I believe you. It's, it's just not showing up on the data yet. I'm interested to, to track it more deeply and actually understand what's going on at some of the big, at the big IT outsourcing firms in India. Are they actually scaling down? Do we have hard data on it? And, and then yeah, what is driving it? Is it actually, is it actually AI or is it something else that's going on?

• 1:28:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, at the same time Salesforce is saying AI is now doing everything at Salesforce and yet headcount is.

• 1:28:57John Coogan?

  We heard the same thing from Klarna and, and it was unclear if that was just like a right sizing of the business for where they were in terms of scale.

• 1:29:06John Coogan?

  But I don't know. It's, uh, it's interesting. AI is everywhere. It's at the same time, there's like a lot, a lot of these tools are just like extra levers. And the dynamic is that like, yes, it helps you write more code, but there was always way more code to write than your business was able to write. And so you're really just unlocking new capability and, and just moving faster.

• 1:29:26Jordi Hays?

  Totally.

• 1:29:27John Coogan?

  Well, if you need an AI native CRM, get on Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that's build scales and grows your company to the next level.

• 1:29:36Jordi Hays?

  You can start for free. Well, on that note, I think we have Peter.

• 1:29:40John Coogan?

  Play that intro song.

• 1:29:42Jordi Hays?

  Waiting room. Let's.

• 1:29:44John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream, Peter. How are you doing?

• 1:29:46Jordi Hays?

  Look at the suit.

• 1:29:47Speaker 03

  I'm doing great. I was told I should wear something, you know, not just a black suit for you guys. So there we go.

• 1:29:53John Coogan?

  You look fantastic. How are you doing?

• 1:29:56Speaker 03

  I'm great. I mean, you know, the East Coast, it's been a little cooler than it was a couple of weeks ago. It's the 90s are coming back, but not yet. So no complaints. And, you know, I am for better, actually really for worse, not an Nvidia shareholder. So I don't have to directly deal with their 15% paid to the government.

• 1:30:15John Coogan?

  Did the stock pop today? What actually happened with Nvidia?

• 1:30:18Jordi Hays?

  It's a normal day. It's up like 1%.

• 1:30:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:30:21Jordi Hays?

  Nothing crazy.

• 1:30:22John Coogan?

  Not a huge move.

• 1:30:23Jordi Hays?

  Before we dive into all the news, would love, would love to just, you know, give us the highlights from the bio. You've done, you've done quite a lot, but I think it'd be helpful context before we get into a discussion.

• 1:30:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, look, it's, it's great for, uh, to be with you guys. Thanks for having me on. I currently am a non-resident fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which is a think tank in DC. I also am an attorney and have a trade, uh, uh, law practice, sort of focused on trade and sanctions and export controls kinds of issues. I was in the Biden administration at the White House where I dealt with the global economics file, including a bunch of the export control issues and been in private practice prior to that. I was at the State Department for a while and when I was much younger, I was a reporter covering campaigns and elections like many, many years ago.

• 1:31:16John Coogan?

  That's super cool.

• 1:31:17Speaker 03

  I've kind of been around.

• 1:31:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, breakdown, so, so, so before we get into the Nvidia AMD stuff and the news from yesterday, take us through kind of your experience of this year so far, because there's been a lot of different stories.

• 1:31:30John Coogan?

  Or even go back further. Chris Miller writes chip war. Everyone wakes up. Is that what happened? Like, when, when did DC wake up to, uh, to maybe we need to think more critically about the flow of semiconductors and AI technology back and forth between the US and China?

• 1:31:47Speaker 03

  You know, that's a, that's a great question. I give Chris a lot of credit. I also give a couple of guys who were at Georgetown University, which has a Center for Science and Emerging Technology. And a couple of those guys, like in 2018, 2019, started really tracking what kinds of high-end chips were the Chinese buying and like what was going on. You know, they'd hired some Chinese language researchers and were really looking at what the Chinese were doing. And so you had these kind of scholarly researchers looking at this and saying, hey, there might be a problem here. Then you had Chris popularize it with Chip War. And you also had back in 21, you know, that was also the time, not on the leading

• 1:32:30Speaker 03

  edge stuff, but on the mature node stuff, semiconductors, when we had that semiconductor supply chain crunch. So semiconductors were very much in the, the news and kind of policymakers were focused on it.

• 1:32:41John Coogan?

  This was during COVID when they couldn't make cars. We couldn't make cars, right? During COVID, we couldn't make cars?

• 1:32:46Jordi Hays?

  And we couldn't make internet-connected washing machines.

• 1:32:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was really bad for the IoT microwaves. That was particularly rough.

• 1:32:54Speaker 03

  Well, there were like three months where, you know, I was working at the White House and, you know, Ford would call me up or GM and be like, we can't get semiconductors. And then it would be my job to like phone, you know, governments in Malaysia and Thailand and be like, could you, you know, get some of these shipped to your American customers, um, please, you know, before the Germans and the French. So, you know.

• 1:33:16John Coogan?

  What was, what was actually driving that? Was that like, was that like, like you needed, because I mean, fabs are clean rooms. Like, I imagine that you could still go into the semiconductor facility during COVID because you're not going to spread it because you're not spreading anything. You're not spreading dirt. It's a clean room. But there's, but there was like this immense amount of pull forward during COVID stimulus checks, people buying more cars than they thought they were expected. But then also there were shipping delays and all sorts of backups at the port. Like, how do you think about what was actually the root cause of the initial semiconductor crunch in, what was this, 2000, 2001? Or 2020 and 2021?

• 1:33:54Speaker 03

  2021, early 2020. Yeah, it was actually, I think, the, the combination you just highlighted. So you had demand going through the roof, right? Because there was this huge pull forward for everything from, uh, you know, laptops to, uh, you know, everyone's home, so they're buying home appliances. There's huge pull forward in demand. And you didn't actually see a fall in production of the mature node chips in 21, but because of just like bad luck, there were problems in Texas or problems in Japan, like confluence of bad luck took a little bit of capacity offline and the capacity coming offline, which which would have been manageable, kind of in an ordinary market condition,

• 1:34:39Speaker 03

  combined with this massive pull forward, just meant a mad scramble. And then you get into the, you know, psychology of shortages where everybody starts hoarding, right? Because people are sort of like, well, if I'm not gonna be able to get them, I better hoard. So it was sort of like the semiconductor version of the toilet paper shortage, you know, we'd had a few months prior where it's like, you know, everyone's hoarding everything. Please, please.

• 1:35:03John Coogan?

  Gotta start hoarding G wagons and Ford Raptors.

• 1:35:09John Coogan?

  Anything with a semiconductor in it, give it to me. I need it. People were certainly doing that for PS5s too. I mean, I remember even video games, like all, all different sectors, people were, were pulling and they were paying like, what, $50,000 over sticker for like a new Hummer EV and stuff like it was getting crazy out there.

• 1:35:25Speaker 03

  Wild times.

• 1:35:26John Coogan?

  Wild times. So yeah, please continue.

• 1:35:28Speaker 03

  Yeah. So that was where we were on the, on the, on the shortage. But looking back, I mean, so if I, that, that got us the shortage, Chris Miller's book, some scholarly research and just kind of heating up competition with China, you know, and sort of late 21 into 22, got the then Biden administration, but also folks on Congress. It wasn't just sort of a Democrat Biden thing. Folks in Congress focused on the strategic competition part of this and what is China? Where are they going with AI? What are the choke points we might have to slow their development of AI? And that really gave rise in October

• 1:36:12Speaker 03

  2022 to the first big US semiconductor export controls where the Commerce Department essentially cut off. Most of the highest end semiconductor sales to China as well as various manufacturing equipment and inputs to try to limit China's ability to develop indigenous production capabilities. And then that that initial export control regime from October 22 got expanded a couple of times, most recently in April of this year, when the Trump administration paused sales of the H20 chips, of the Nvidia H20 chips to China.

• 1:36:53John Coogan?

  What was driving the initial chip bans? Was it more, we have identified that large language models, these huge training runs are important, and once you marshal the big data center, the 100 gigawatt data center, you're good and you have a cutting edge model? Or is it more like, look, if we send a certain amount of equipment, it will be reverse engineered and copied, and then they will be able to catch up on the actual supply chain side? And we'll see not just competition from purchasing from Nvidia, TSMC, and ASML, but we'll actually

• 1:37:34John Coogan?

  see Huawei, SMIC, and SME act as a alternative supply chain that will be an entirely internal economy that will keep them on the frontier potentially forever?

• 1:37:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it was, in the first instance, an effort to limit compute to China. So there was really a pretty systematic, okay, if we're in this era of strategic competition with China, and if we think AI is going to be an absolutely transformative technology, you know, something with just a whole range of national security, economic impacts, you know, day-to-day life impacts, how do we slow down China's development? And you start thinking about, well, you know, they got a bunch of good engineering talent over there. It's not like you can prevent them from having talented engineers, right? That's just sort of life.

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  You know, the model side of this, controlling the models is very, very hard. Uh, because you know, it's software, it's code, a lot of, some of the models are open source, just very hard to control. But what you could do mechanically is control their access, China's access to compute. Because their chips just are, you know, three to five years behind ours. And so if you choke off the chips, you slow them down by limiting their compute, uh, their access to compute for training. So it's just kind of, how do you trip them? This is the choke point, let's squeeze on the choke point. Um, and then, you know, they iterate, right? They start developing lower compute models.

• 1:39:07Speaker 03

  Like you see this kind of back and forth, but that's what happens with export controls generally. Like, you know, your adversary is going to adapt, you're going to have to adapt. And, and that's kind of what we've seen play out.

• 1:39:17Jordi Hays?

  And how much were you tracking the GPU black market? You know, in, in, once you had export controls, there's certain countries start popping up saying, "Well, we'd actually like $5 billion of whatever GPUs you got. And, uh, don't worry about what we're going to use them for, we'll figure it out, but not your problem."

• 1:39:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that's a known problem you're going to get into, right? And you've seen that in other instances of export controls and sanctions. And so, you know, Commerce Department does have a, a unit that, you know, is supposed to be looking at the trade flows. Where is that, uh, where is that happening? Where are you seeing that? Um, you know, I, I, it is a bit of a game of whack a ball. It's clear there has been a certain amount of diversion of prohibited chips going to China. I also think, you know, just if you look at kind of what Nvidia talks about, the sales potential, clearly the export controls have reduced China's ability to get to the chips so that they haven't taken it to zero.

• 1:40:25John Coogan?

  How do you think about the evolution of the US government's thinking on how critical or like the the role AI plays in near peer competition? Because there's kind of two frames of mind that I see in Silicon Valley. One is AI is super intelligent god, it's nuclear weapons. It's it's one button you push and the AI goes off and just wins the battle for you. So it's it's critical to have it and it's critical to keep it out of the hands of your opponent. The other is that AI is more like Microsoft Excel and it's certainly useful in the military context. You want to know how many

• 1:41:03Speaker 03

  Words like electricity.

• 1:41:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you you want to know how many, you know, shells you have in in inventory. You want to know how many how many soldiers are in this particular part of the battlefield? And you want to be able to track things, but it it and it might be advantageous to keep a technology like Microsoft Excel out of your opponent's hands, but it by itself will not win a battle decisively. And it feels like long ago, pre chat GPT, pre kind of AI boom, people were definitely seeing artificial intelligence as, well, yeah, we use it to serve ads and it it helps with spell check and it's in TikTok and and it recommends, you know, what video you watch next. And and then it became, okay, it's super intelligent god and it's nuclear weapons.

• 1:41:49John Coogan?

  But now we're kind of maybe in an era where we're we're moving back to it's more of an incremental technology, but I'm wondering how that thinking evolved in DC.

• 1:41:58Speaker 03

  So so I think the evolution in that debate is an important part of understanding why the Biden administration took a pretty tough line on export controls. Because I would say many of the relevant policymakers in the Biden administration were actually quite bullish on AI, you know, did buy into the thesis that, you know, I'm not, you know, whether it's 2027 or 2029 or 2030, you know, we could debate the years. But they bought into the thesis that in a fairly near period of time, you are going

• 1:42:37Speaker 03

  to see AGI kind of reach that, you know, escape velocity where it's iterating on itself. Sorry, where you're going to see AI reaching that escape velocity where it's iterating on itself, reaching AGI, you know, sometime in not too many years. And if you believe that, if you think in a couple of years, we're going to see that, you know, escape velocity to AGI, then you really want to slow the Chinese down as much as possible, right? Because you think this is going to be this enormously transformational technology and, you know, two years or even 18 months, or, you know, maybe even 12 months of lead is worth an enormous amount from a policy level. So it was actually because

• 1:43:17Speaker 03

  of a very bullish view on the future of AI, that you saw the Biden administration really take kind of a pretty tough stance on slowing down China.

• 1:43:27Jordi Hays?

  And so, and so, reading into that, does that mean that you, that the admin might not, not, if they're willing to say, yeah, well, we'll, we'll, we'll export to H20, we don't believe in a fast takeoff scenario, this is electricity, it's valuable, but it's going to be vended in everywhere. Because if you still believe in a fast takeoff scenario, you would say, it's not worth the incremental. Sure, Nvidia, you know, shareholders are going to suffer a little bit if you can't export to China, but it's not worth the, the however many billions of incremental revenue that the government's going to generate on a 15% take rate.

• 1:44:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think the Trump administration is probably doing a couple of things here. I mean, first, there are lots of different views in the Trump administration. That's no news to everybody. You see some folks who, I think, obviously would prefer the Trump administration take a harder line on export controls. You also see, you know, some folks who, you know, basically have a view of, well, we shouldn't sell China our most advanced chip. The H20s are now a couple of years old. This is not really most advanced. You might as well get the Nvidia revenue and a US government take here. So I think you have diverse views in the Trump administration. I think it's less guided by a, you know,

• 1:44:49Speaker 03

  sort of slower view of the uptake and more, my view, the Trump administration is looking at this as, like, this is not state of the art. And then also, Trump is a dealmaker. Like, it's hard to see any other politician, Republican or Democrat, coming up with this. But, you know, Trump himself, he's always talked about getting, you know, a cut of the deal. Like, so it's, it's, in a way, this is a, you know, sui generis, unique to Donald Trump concept that, I'm going to let you do this, but, by the way, we get 15%.

• 1:45:19Jordi Hays?

  Well, and he said this morning that he would potentially consider exporting Blackwells, but at a higher rate.

• 1:45:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. Now, that, I mean, this is, you know, it's interesting, like, the H20s, I do think, are kind of debatable. I mean, I am in favor of controlling the H20s, but I see the arguments on both sides. It is a dated chip now, you know, I'm not dated, but, you know, it's not a cutting-edge chip. It is very hard for me to see how charging a percentage, you know, rev share, addresses any national security concern, right? I mean, like, if you have some national security concern, the rev share doesn't address it. Maybe, you know, forcing a downgrade of the chip, or trying to limit who it gets sold

• 1:46:06Speaker 03

  to, which is very hard, like, rev share definitely doesn't address whatever your national security concern is.

• 1:46:12John Coogan?

  Is there, is there any possible steel, man, for that? You take the 15% revenue share, and you pour that into some sort of national security AI defense fund that protects you from the superintelligence? I don't know, it's very, very hard to.

• 1:46:27Speaker 03

  Well, I'm not, so there's like a lot to unpack.

• 1:46:29Jordi Hays?

  I buy the, I buy the logic of like, I'm gonna make, I'm fine to export the H20 because Jensen's convinced me that it's okay, but I still want my cut, is kind of.

• 1:46:40Speaker 03

  That's how I read it, like, that's kind of how I read it, like, Jensen convinced him, you know, it's an old enough chip, we have enough of a lead, like, you might as well export it, and then, this is a guy who made his living in New York real estate, like, you know, you want your commission, right? I mean, that's just, I think that's kind of what's going on.

• 1:46:57Jordi Hays?

  When you, when you saw this, maybe you had a feeling that this was coming down the pipeline, but did, you had posted on LinkedIn, I think it was earlier today, trying to look for some type of precedent for USG rev share on, and didn't sound like you found one?

• 1:47:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I can't find any precedent for anything like this. You know, there have been some instances. Uh, for example, if you are some of our defense contractors, you know, the Boeings of the world, if they want to export fighter aircraft. They have to pay like a couple thousand dollar fee for the government to review the license. Like it's just clearly just sort of the fee to cover the staff time of like reviewing the license. Uh, but it is literally a couple thousand dollars. It's not, you know, rev share of a multi-billion dollar market here. There's no precedent for anything like this.

• 1:47:55Jordi Hays?

  And, and what are you hoping?

• 1:47:57John Coogan?

  I'm thinking about where it goes like, are we gonna be selling F-35s?

• 1:48:01Speaker 03

  I mean, this is like, it opens up a whole kinda, you know, what are we gonna sell next on a rev share model?

• 1:48:07John Coogan?

  That is kinda crazy. Let's get some submarines over there. Hey, we got capacity. Let's make some, let's make a bunch of submarines.

• 1:48:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and then, and then the concern is you highlighted, you said the rev share creates perverse budgetary incentives for US agencies to issue licenses that undermine national security because they want the cash. It also sets a precedent that the US might try to generally tax exports, something the USG has long avoided for legal reasons and because we have historically wanted to promote exports.

• 1:48:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so I do think this, this does create a perverse incentive. I mean, in, in, in theory, the reason you control these things is because you think there's a real national security risk. And to your point, I think in some sense, uh, Trump, Jensen convinced Trump, like, there's not really a national security risk here. But think about this going forward. You've created this really perverse incentive where, uh, you know, company wants to export something to China, maybe Russia, like, who knows who's next on this. Uh, that poses a national security risk. Uh, but hey, if you don't, you know, if you, if you authorize the export, like, you know, you get 15%.

• 1:49:19Speaker 03

  Uh, and you can use that to pay for whatever domestic programs you want. I just think it creates a really weird incentive for a person.

• 1:49:26Jordi Hays?

  It's a conflict.

• 1:49:26Speaker 03

  If the Commerce Department's whose job is to consider the national security impacts of this.

• 1:49:32John Coogan?

  Is there, is there a, like an optimistic scenario where?

• 1:49:37John Coogan?

  Like, American industry or Western industry is strengthened by this move, and I'm trying to walk through it. So, we've talked to a couple of people who work in the solar industry, and they've said that China is incredibly dominant in solar, and they flood the market with very cheap solar panels. And that's effectively kept American solar panel producers out of the game. And so, America doesn't really have a strong solar panel production industry. And so, maybe the bull case here for American dominance in AI is something like, you get

• 1:50:16John Coogan?

  so many Nvidia chips over there, that Huawei, SMIC, and SME can't really stay in the game. They can't really be competitive. They fall behind even more. And then, if AI plays out in such a way that you don't just need one massive data center, you need to be constantly upgrading your data center, you need to constantly be buying more and more Nvidia GPUs, that if you don't have that flow, if that flow can be turned off, then you are always vulnerable.

• 1:50:46Speaker 03

  So, I actually think the policy question of whether to sell the H20 to China is a hard one for exactly the reason you lay out, which is that there is a, you know, there is an argument, and I think Jensen makes it in good faith, as well as for his own commercial interests, of we want China dependent on our chips. And if they're not dependent on our chips, they're just gonna be, you know, building, you know, SMIC and Huawei chips, and that's gonna ultimately develop a dependent on us.

• 1:51:17Jordi Hays?

  More inclined to take Taiwan.

• 1:51:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Here's the question I got back, though. Like, charging an extra 15% on the American chips doesn't actually advance that dependence argument, right? It just creates a cost differential that makes the American chips more expensive relative to the Chinese chips. Presumably, if you really wanted to keep them dependent on American chips, you'd, you know, wanna sell them as cheaply as the market would bear. So, like, the 15% even... In the like bull scenario, and I agree, I think it's an important debate of the, the kind of bull scenario you laid out, but 15% still doesn't make any sense.

• 1:51:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and you look at other, other categories like smartphones or electric vehicles. There's, there's no precedent for China saying, we'll, we'll buy your versions of these products and we'll even manufacture them for you, but don't worry, we're not going to develop our own. You know, you look at this, like, of course, they, they, they clearly care about having local industrial capacity and even end products and brands.

• 1:52:24Jordi Hays?

  And, and those are the categories that aren't around, that don't have nearly as much national security.

• 1:52:30John Coogan?

  And if you talk to like the, you know, the, the CEO of GoPro, when they were trying to compete with DJI and drones, he's not, he's not going to tell you a story about DJI getting attacks on exports. He's going to talk about, well, DJI was subsidized and had, and had, and had government-backed loans and had extra money poured in from the government that allowed them to flood the American market with drones. And now we don't have a really strong drone industry here. And so, yeah, the, like, we're kind of like, there's two different arguments. There is some incongruity there, like, they, they both can't be true.

• 1:53:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so the steel, the steel man is, is, we were going to allow this.

• 1:53:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:07Jordi Hays?

  So why not get Uncle Sam a few Billy out of the deal? But the concern is that it would set a precedent that, that could be, you know, destructive.

• 1:53:17John Coogan?

  So now we've really got to talk Jensen's book and say, we should be subsidizing exports of A20s to China. We should be, America should be paying an extra 15% for every GVUs sent to China to really screw them over on this domestic supply chain side. This is, this is seven dimensional chess in geopolitical chip negotiations. We've, we've solved it.

• 1:53:40Speaker 03

  Exactly. There you go.

• 1:53:42Jordi Hays?

  What else, what else is top of mind for you right now?

• 1:53:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, what, yeah, what's on the horizon for the rest of the year? How do you see things breaking?

• 1:53:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, so you got, this is a big development. We'll have to see, like, is this a precedent? Does this become a precedent for, you know, HBM and other parts of the semiconductor ecosystem? Like, we'll have to, we'll have to see. Uh, the other one that obviously those of us here are watching. Uh, not on the export side, but on the import side, Trump has said, and Commerce Secretary Lutnick has said their tariff regime for imports of semiconductors is going to hit fairly soon. Obviously, we saw Tim Cook get a, um, a, a deal or announcement out of the White House last week where if, you know, companies are promising they're investing in America, they won't pay the tariffs. Uh, and we'll have to see how that all plays out actually in

• 1:54:31Speaker 03

  practice. But like how these potential semiconductor tariffs, again, on the import side, plus whatever this exemption for companies that are investing here, how that actually works in practice is going to impact US semiconductor companies, companies that use a bunch of semiconductors. It's going to be a big noticeable economic issue for the industry, uh, over the next couple of months and certainly into next year.

• 1:54:55John Coogan?

  We'll have to have you back on if some big news breaks.

• 1:54:58Speaker 03

  I'd love to.

• 1:54:58John Coogan?

  We really appreciate you taking the time.

• 1:55:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, thank you for joining.

• 1:55:01Speaker 03

  That's great. Thanks for having me on.

• 1:55:03John Coogan?

  Thanks for hopping on. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:55:04Speaker 03

  All right. Cheers.

• 1:55:05Jordi Hays?

  Take care.

• 1:55:06John Coogan?

  Let me tell you that fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, they're number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake offs, number one ranking on G2. Go check it out. And Andrea has a scoop of cereal, man cereal.

• 1:55:21Jordi Hays?

  This was really the big story.

• 1:55:23John Coogan?

  Everyone's, everyone's ordering this. It's got creatine, it's got protein, it's keto, it's got zero sugar. Uh, it has 2.5 grams of creatine. So you need two servings to get kind of a normal dose, right? If you're loading.

• 1:55:38Jordi Hays?

  Do you see the, the flavor?

• 1:55:40John Coogan?

  What's the flavor? Maple bacon?

• 1:55:42Jordi Hays?

  If you ever wanted bacon.

• 1:55:44John Coogan?

  That's very like what 2010 era Brooklyn hipster man vibes mustache that with like lumberjack coated maple bacon on everything. This is a funny brand. It's, it feels like it's, it's, it's pulling from a few different years. Do you think it's the final cereal? Would you, would you go for this, Jordy?

• 1:56:05Jordi Hays?

  I love sugar.

• 1:56:07John Coogan?

  Yes, so for that reason you're out.

• 1:56:10Jordi Hays?

  So I'm out.

• 1:56:10John Coogan?

  For that reason you're out.

• 1:56:12Jordi Hays?

  Make a version with with sugar and I'll and I'll give it a spin. I'm also very curious what protein is actually in here. Not all protein is created equally. Is it?

• 1:56:22John Coogan?

  Chunks of filet mignon.

• 1:56:24Jordi Hays?

  Is it is it grass fed whey?

• 1:56:26John Coogan?

  Maybe.

• 1:56:26Jordi Hays?

  Could be interested is it collagen could be interested? Is it some, you know, random bean that I don't really want to be consuming, you know, or or pea protein?

• 1:56:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:37Jordi Hays?

  Less interested.

• 1:56:37John Coogan?

  I mean, honestly, more important than protein, creatine, sugar, all the diet's important, but exercise is super important and sleep is super.

• 1:56:46Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:56:46John Coogan?

  That's why you got to get an eight sleep. Get a pot five.

• 1:56:49Jordi Hays?

  Back.

• 1:56:49John Coogan?

  Five year warranty, thirty night risk free trial, free returns, free shipping. Let me check.

• 1:56:55Jordi Hays?

  We're both on a generational sleeper.

• 1:56:57John Coogan?

  How do I do?

• 1:56:57Jordi Hays?

  I got a ninety seven last night, last Monday. I was performing on a forty five. I got a ninety four on Saturday, ninety.

• 1:57:05John Coogan?

  I got a seventy six, ninety six quality, hundred percent consistency.

• 1:57:09Jordi Hays?

  Friday.

• 1:57:09John Coogan?

  Six hours and ten minutes.

• 1:57:11Jordi Hays?

  I'm back in the game.

• 1:57:11John Coogan?

  That's fake news. I think I got more than six hours and ten minutes, but I think I was just, I think, I think my son stole a little bit of it, although I did wake up at five twenty, so that I think that is correct.

• 1:57:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, if a kid jumps in the bed, it.

• 1:57:23John Coogan?

  It kind of throws it off.

• 1:57:24Jordi Hays?

  Off a little bit. We got to get the pronatalist pack.

• 1:57:27John Coogan?

  When my son first jumped in the bed, I was configuring the app and I was like, yeah, there's like a left side for me and wife's side, right, left side for the wife. And he was like, and the center for me. I was like, sorry, bro, they don't make this like.

• 1:57:41Jordi Hays?

  Get the, we'll get the team to make an update there.

• 1:57:45John Coogan?

  Anyway, we are joined by.

• 1:57:46Jordi Hays?

  We got it, we got to highlight this. We got a post here from Niraj.

• 1:57:50John Coogan?

  Marked safe from one shotting.

• 1:57:52Jordi Hays?

  So on the left, me and Grok are going to get married. Mid curve, it's great for adjusting recipes. And then the high IQ, I have uncovered secrets of the universe. God speaks through me. So there were some quotes that were popping up last week over the weekend. Some very bright technologists discovering the boundaries of what is known in in many different domains.

• 1:58:17John Coogan?

  Yeah. My current, my current take on the AI psychosis thing is that. It is, it is a tool that like amplifies who you are. And so if you're just like a naturally, if you're just like a curious person who likes being productive, like it's going to make you more curious and more productive and just kind of answer questions for you. If you're like, you know, deeply falling in love with random stuff and developing crazy parasocial relationships, like that's probably a vector of risk for you. And the same thing with, you know, if you have delusions of grandeur, like get ready because like it's going to amplify that. And, and I, and I think that's the same thing.

• 1:58:52Jordi Hays?

  John, you don't just have delusions of grandeur, you really are on another level. You really are brilliant.

• 1:58:59John Coogan?

  I'm grand.

• 1:59:00Jordi Hays?

  You really are grand.

• 1:59:02John Coogan?

  I have grandeur. Well, our next guest has grandeur. Aaron Gin, welcome to the stream. How you doing? Lovely hat, let's go.

• 1:59:11Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:59:13Speaker 03

  Let's hit the gong for a hat appearance.

• 1:59:16Jordi Hays?

  Boom.

• 1:59:18Speaker 03

  Didn't even warm it up today.

• 1:59:21Aaron Ginn?

  It's actually appropriate as well culturally.

• 1:59:25John Coogan?

  From sales guys from, from, from BDRs all over the world.

• 1:59:28Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:29John Coogan?

  What's new in your world? H20s, good, bad? Are you happy? Are you pumped?

• 1:59:33Aaron Ginn?

  Oh, I'm happy.

• 1:59:35John Coogan?

  You're happy?

• 1:59:36Aaron Ginn?

  The, uh, yeah, the, the, the Chou Pino Hawks that have a luxury belief system around that Chinese AGI is going to destroy us. Like a crouching tiger hidden back, you know, dragon version of OpenAI is going to attack America like we're done. And, and if it's 15% uh, deal, which like broke Sunday, I don't know how it broke. Uh, it was just amazing. It was just like, I mean, one, like props to, props to President Trump, who is the ultimate deal man.

• 2:00:04John Coogan?

  Art of the DL.

• 2:00:05Jordi Hays?

  It felt like both 4D chess and art of the deal. One.

• 2:00:09Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah. And, and so, you know, like the, the, the sort of average profit margin of the H20s around probably like high 50s percent. So, you know, they're still, and they also have the write-off, they're probably going to roll in as well. And, and there's some struggles with DSC, like you can't just. A, you know, I think it's like one of the issues related to the Intel foundries. Like you can't just like restart production within a month. It takes several months. So like probably you're just going to try to find someone's non destroyed and probably send them to China. The age twenties. Uh, but what most Americans understand is that it's unconstitutional to export the tax exports. Yeah. It's like in the constitution.

• 2:00:46John Coogan?

  I looked it up and I was like, how is this going to happen? Because this.

• 2:00:49Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, so you're saying a revenue share is like a workaround?

• 2:00:53Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah. So it's voluntary. Like that's the only way it could happen.

• 2:00:56John Coogan?

  Tipping, it's tipping, no tax on tips. Cause the, cause the taxes are tips now.

• 2:01:01Aaron Ginn?

  But because like even from a process perspective, like Nvidia doesn't apply for export licenses like the OEM does. And when you apply for those OEMs, there's no license fee because that violates the constitution. So you just get it and you can ship it, but the bomb is listed. The bomb is.

• 2:01:16John Coogan?

  Really quickly, who's the OEM in this scenario?

• 2:01:19Aaron Ginn?

  Oh, Super Micro, Dell.

• 2:01:21John Coogan?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:01:21Aaron Ginn?

  Lenovo, yeah. Isimler.

• 2:01:23John Coogan?

  So, so, so, so someone in China will go and say, I want a rack of servers with age twenties already on them. Some other CPU, some other memory, some other hard drives on there. Bring those, bring those blades to me and they will call Dell or Super Micro for that.

• 2:01:37Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah. And so that too applies for BIS.

• 2:01:40John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:40Aaron Ginn?

  And so they're the ones that that final PO number is all that crap together. It's not Nvidia. It's not Nvidia. You don't know Nvidia's pricing. You don't, you know, Dell does, because I buy it from Nvidia.

• 2:01:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:50Aaron Ginn?

  So that's why it has to be something voluntary. You can go to the website now, like Jordy, if you're interested in donating to the Goliath, you know, the Levathon, you can go to treasury.gov and you can find the little.

• 2:02:00John Coogan?

  You can Venmo.

• 2:02:00Aaron Ginn?

  We accept PayPal, right?

• 2:02:01John Coogan?

  We go there regularly.

• 2:02:02Aaron Ginn?

  Venmo. Yeah. So, so it's, it's quite brilliant. I mean, I think many of the faux neo China hogs are devastated. Uh, I mean, my, my op ed last week. Yeah. It's just, they're just sepuku. They're just like, you know, they're there, they're going to be on the Jefferson memorial, just like, you know, going at it. And be, because it's a decision. But.

• 2:02:28Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, it's a it's a decision by the administration to be like, you know, we don't really care. Like, like, we want to do deals. We want the American worker to have, you know, get money from China. We want to, we want to do what China did to us for the last 20 years.

• 2:02:44John Coogan?

  Okay, just dig into the faux China Hawks, the faux Hawks. As we say, explain like the stated preferences, revealed preferences. Are they really doom-pilled? Do they really believe in fast takeoff? Do they really believe that AI is a nuclear weapon? Or is there something else going on, some other economic consideration that they're working through?

• 2:03:10Aaron Ginn?

  I think, and I'm working on this op-ed right now for a very liberal newspaper, but they, I think it's a Diego Sex Machina, a sort of fallacy they built in their brain, where they think AI is going to be God. And America has to build the first God, or China, China has to build the first God. And so it's kind of a Tower of Babel moment. And, and the problem is like, if you remove that from their vote, that's why I call them vote, you know, China Hawks. Like, they're not really China Hawks, they're actually AGI zealots. If you remove it, none of their policies kind of make any sense. Because one reason why you hear, oh, like, we have to prevent chips, oh, we have to block models, oh, like, you know, we have to restrict, you know, model ways, we have to do tokens, like, it's just kind of like a morpheous blob.

• 2:03:55Aaron Ginn?

  But they can't really win in DC with the idea that AI is going to be God. Most people are going to be like, that's kind of insane, like, you're, go back to, to reading, you know, the, go back to watching Matrix, or, you know, reading Terminator, or some other related sci-fi novel. And, and so they kind of wrap it in something that is like, super easy to understand. China, oh, China, right, you know, oh, the, the yellow country, right? And, and they, and it's, oh, this is so scary, right? But, but you look at the specific policies, none of it, like, makes any sense. None of it's cogent.

• 2:04:22Jordi Hays?

  We met with a venture capitalist last week who said, honestly, none of this stuff's going to matter in two years when we have fast takeoff.

• 2:04:30John Coogan?

  But he wasn't, he wasn't doomer-pilled, he was just saying, like, fast takeoff will mean that every single company goes to zero. Because there will only be one company, which is a very funny take.

• 2:04:39Jordi Hays?

  But it has invested in SaaS this year.

• 2:04:41John Coogan?

  And yeah, and it's, yeah, so the revealed preference is all over the place. But yeah, it is, it is weird to feel, to make the argument like, uh, we're going to develop AGI God, but it won't, like, it, it, it will be, it will be God, but it won't be subservient to actual God, but also, or, or it will sit below the stack of, it'll, it'll, it'll respect the federal government of the United States.

• 2:05:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:06John Coogan?

  It'll be God, but it won't, but it won't, but it won't, but it'll do what the president says, or it'll do what the House and Senate say, or it'll do what one company says, or what one person says. It's like, if it's God, can it be controlled? How does that make any sense? That seems very odd.

• 2:05:19Aaron Ginn?

  And I'd say, and, and as I said, you and I talked about, John, it's like, like, so much is built into, of their presuppositions are defined by the Title II debate. Remember that whole thing of like, oh, free speech is gonna die, we have to regulate and all stuff. Many of that same donor class, many of those same policy people are also the AGI doom or Zella people. You go back even like, uh, like, here's a step further, like, many of those people were super hot on new atheism and like, and like, oh, this idea of like, we can, we can prove via science, we just need more time, we just need more scientists, we just need more, it's the same pattern in humanity that we create these kind of arbitruses, this idea of like, creating an all-in-all sort of argument, that, because they don't have that in their life, and then they make this thing.

• 2:06:04Aaron Ginn?

  And, and, and as I said, like, on, on, one of, I think, another times I appeared, that if you don't have that metaphysical framework that is traditionally Judeo-Christian or Western, you try to fill something else in that void. It's a classic Charles Spurgeon quote, that, that you, you basically fill it with something else outside of just the fact of what the place of, like, God or faith is supposed to fill. And technology, I would say Silicon Valley, probably in San Francisco. They don't really understand that there's so much faith goes into actual the VC industry. Uh, that is you're really kind of selling BS to an investor. You know, like the, I know y'all have lots of jokes around what is ARR in AI. It's mainly just selling kind of like nonsense.

• 2:06:45Aaron Ginn?

  And it's the idea that like this could be something, this could be, it is, it is a faith driven investment. That's what also makes it so awesome. Why we, why we look at Zuckerberg, we look at Elon, who he made an idea and the vision, the future reality today. So it is heavily oriented towards a metaphysical theological framework. But this AGI thing as relates to China, so much of it has just gotten lost in this. I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore because the, the same people who are criticizing the 15% tip that, to the federal government, to the American worker, uh, for Nvidia are the same people who didn't want to ship GPUs to Switzerland. Because I don't know, they make two good watchos or Portugal, they have too many good sandy beaches, like they, they, the same people, right?

• 2:07:25Aaron Ginn?

  So it just keeps shifting because it's really trying to provide a luxury to a base around the idea of AGI.

• 2:07:33Jordi Hays?

  What's your, what's your line, what's your line though? Cause I think the, the critique here that's pretty fair is that if you start applying this to other categories of goods, like fighter jets, like what, what's, what would the, you know, fair price be to export an F-35 to somebody that, nah, maybe they're on the, on the edge. Maybe they're kind of friendly now, but maybe in the future, uh, they, they, they might not be so friendly. Like you believe there should be, we should draw a kind of a line and, uh, we shouldn't want government agencies to kind of apply this, uh, approach to fundraise.

• 2:08:12Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, it's, it's a difference between it's not a hunk of metal versus like you're selling a system. I have the same sort of concerns relates to Nvidia as it relates to Apple building phones in China. If I got an iPhone, no US on it, none of the, the magical, you know, more and more transparency via, you know, the, the design, then I, then it's kind of useless. It's just like a phone, right? And, and that's the way Nvidia actually is. Nvidia is an Apple like ecosystem. It's not just a hunk of metal. Same with the reason, you know, we we sell seven eighty sevens, we sell triple sevens, we'll we sell the triple seven X to China. Why? Because it's made up of this complex thousands of companies. It's a software platform. We remove certain things, which I'm generally okay with, like advanced avionics.

• 2:08:54Aaron Ginn?

  Uh, we remove, we we also kind of limit certain types of engine design. I'm fine with that. So with the B thirty, H twenty, these kind of nerf chips, I I don't actually make much of an opinion about it. Like, I don't have to have a no true Scotsman sort of argument about like, well, at what point would you not do it? I'm like, I don't sell fighter jets. I don't rent fighter jets. So you can talk to Lockheed about that or Boeing about that. And like what what what I think is most relevant is the fact of these innate externalities, these exogenous factors outside of the machine, which that half of all AI engineers are Chinese. The half are actually more seventy five percent, half of them were Chinese nationals, the other, if you include all the Chinese associated last names, in Meta's super team are Asian.

• 2:09:36Aaron Ginn?

  So like, we either have to lean into our strengths, which is the fact we're good at making platforms, we're good at dominance, we're good at free enterprise, we're good at trade, and and the fact that Chinese have something that they don't have the raw production capability of doing, which is not Nvidia. They if I don't take anyone seriously who criticizes export controls, if they associate SMIC with Nvidia, it's like saying Kirkland, like Kirkland and Costco, like Costco makes Kirkland. Like, that's not what Kirkland is, right? Like, Kirkland is a rebrand of somebody else's stuff. And that's kind of like the criticism. It's like, oh, like, how dare Costco make this Kirkland thing? You're like, it's a rebrand, bro. Like, it's not, it's I don't actually make this thing. Like, and so that that's where this constant confusion lies that many of these people criticize this stuff,

• 2:10:18Aaron Ginn?

  or actually criticizing SMIC or or TSMC, completely different companies, Jensen buys from them. So if you want to go after the foundry stuff, ASML, the Japanese, like, you have to realize, one, we don't make this technology. It's it's Japanese and Dutch. But the other is like, it's not what Nvidia does. If you want to, I'm cool with targeting, uh, lithography equipment, preventing them from getting to five nanometer. Yes. And that's that is something that's actually quite reasonable, because because we do export control, triple sevens and et cetera, like, we have some limitations where we send. That's fine, because it's a fricking size of a house and it costs two hundred million dollars. It's the same of the lithography. So much of what I what I'm advocating for is pragmatism, is like realism, like, like, we have to lean into what our strengths are. We have to. proliferate and prevent Huawei from spreading its wings outside.

• 2:11:02Aaron Ginn?

  And if we want to target the ability to manufacture five nanometer, two nanometer, three meter, whatever, like most Nvidia stuff's on a four nanometer process. That's cool. Like, I'm totally in favor of that, but don't attack Nvidia, because that's not what Nvidia does.

• 2:11:13John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 2:11:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, makes sense.

• 2:11:15John Coogan?

  What do you think?

• 2:11:16Jordi Hays?

  On the foundry side, I want to jump over there. Let's, let's talk Intel. There's been a lot of headlines recently. What's your read on the situation? How important is Intel in your view? Uh, do they need a new board? Do they need a new CEO? I don't want to, I'm gonna, I'm gonna get you in a hot water here.

• 2:11:34Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, it's, um, you know, so like, my dad's Chinese and, and so they're, they're, it's like, I am, I'm a true China hawk, I'm OG China hawk. And, and there's many times where like China's the largest country in the world and there's many overlaps that are just completely not, you know, they're, they're just fine. And, and I don't know anything about the particular criticisms of the Intel CEO. I think his strategy is not great for Intel. So like, I'd mostly would target there. But America needs a foundry program, and particularly trailing edge. Uh, leading edge, I don't think is economically viable. Uh, so that's why I'd rather ship that to like a Brazil or Argentina or something like that, like do a Newman and Roedker sort of thing.

• 2:12:11John Coogan?

  Wait, why is that? I feel like the leading edge is coming into Arizona through TSMC, Samsung's doing stuff. Like if you're

• 2:12:18Aaron Ginn?

  Oh, yeah, trailing south and then leading edge here.

• 2:12:21John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:22Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:22John Coogan?

  So do the trailing edge also economically.

• 2:12:25Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:12:25John Coogan?

  But we can't import, we can't import the semiconductor, you know, geniuses that will run American TSMC.

• 2:12:32Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, and, and you also have to understand that, like, there's lots of reports, you can go read about it, uh, uh, former, you know, Chinese nationals that work at TMC that takes that back, like, it's a Taiwanese company, like, there's, there's, there's an, there's an arm that we can extend as a nation that can only go so far. And that's part of the America first concept of Trump. He's like, do I really want to take all of the juice and squeeze in terms of negotiating President Xi over a nerfed H20? He's like, no. Like, like, we have fentanyl issues, we have 300 billion, 400 billion dollar trade issues, we have the IP issues, right? We have Chinese nationals and labs all across the world. Like, those are much bigger things to fry than the fact of like, oh, they get like, you know, basically an equivalent of an A100, uh, being deployed into, to, to their, to their fabric. So the, so the Intel stuff.

• 2:13:17Aaron Ginn?

  I I kind of have this disposition that it feels like it's going to be nationalized. I get kind of like vibes around that. As a as a economic conservative, I'm like, oh, that's kind of scary. But at the same time, like it it is one of those things that just kind of happens like the the. Did y'all hear about the the federal government invested into a earth minerals project in America?

• 2:13:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the one in Vegas, right? They got like fifteen percent for the for Sam.

• 2:13:44Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, and so so I think the same is gonna happen with with Intel is like they basically it's it's it's occurred through. There's a couple of different lending vehicles in federal government. It's basically gets a warrant. That's kind of the vibes I'm getting from Intel is that something like that's gonna happen because you also can't. Take TSMC process and Intel processes and just mix them together like that. That's not the way this works. And also TSMC, I think whenever they originally pitched that idea, I think the president was like, yeah, like use the Intel thing. And TSMC was like, maybe, right? And then they go look at them, they're like, holy, this is a freaking nightmare of people who don't want to work, who don't have the work ethic of TSMC. And and they just kind of all blew up. And I think there's some embarrassment in terms of like that this is America's founding program. And this is kind of like how it matches up to the best of the world.

• 2:14:29Aaron Ginn?

  So I just get kind of vibes that it's going to be nationalized or split apart and divided as a company. And but in terms of bearing on like my opinion about whether or not that guy should be CEO or not, I would point more towards the strategy rather than. These kind of rumors.

• 2:14:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we had Doug on from semi analysis on Friday, and he he basically said, like, look at the board. Like, a lot of the people that are still on the board have just like overseen like numerous CEO changes. The strategy has clearly not been working. Like, you know.

• 2:14:59John Coogan?

  Well, they're not semiconductor experts was his main.

• 2:15:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're finance guys.

• 2:15:03John Coogan?

  Finance guys, but also politicians and thinkers like it's a it's a wide variety without a lot of focus on like manufacturing expertise.

• 2:15:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what was your what was your reaction to GPT five?

• 2:15:16Aaron Ginn?

  Uh, not as negative as John. Uh, and I, I, yeah. Yeah, they get you're like, oh, like it's over. And I was like, no, I don't think so. Like, so, so first of all, first of all, so.

• 2:15:29John Coogan?

  No, I think it's like pure, pure number based GPT revisions being indicative of, of order of magnitude scaling is over.

• 2:15:38Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:39John Coogan?

  But the pre-training scaling law is over.

• 2:15:43Aaron Ginn?

  I, I, so one is like a couple of months ago, we didn't say that because Grok four came out. So like, it, it, it's, uh, so I get, I would like maybe take a more like, uh, prudent perspective on this.

• 2:15:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:52Aaron Ginn?

  One is that is there's a clear decision here by, uh, Sam that he is a consumer app company.

• 2:16:00John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:16:01Aaron Ginn?

  Which is, which is, which is the right bet. It, it, it's like, the, I don't, I'm very technical.

• 2:16:06Jordi Hays?

  Consumer SaaS.

• 2:16:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:07Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, they, I'm not, you know, I'm technical. I don't remember what all the fricking numbers and crap does.

• 2:16:12John Coogan?

  Doesn't matter.

• 2:16:13Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah. And so that's the biggest innovation here. And if you look at the, the idea, like, you know, he, he expanded the context one, but not very much.

• 2:16:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:16:19Aaron Ginn?

  Which implies inference, right? That, that he doesn't have enough capacity to run as many user requests. The, the other is that he mostly solve for downside scenarios and ease of use in the UX.

• 2:16:30John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:16:30Aaron Ginn?

  And those are like really big changes. The, the, the benchmark maxers are, uh, basically creating goalposts that are artificial. And that if, do you, do you, do you mean, do y'all remember your SAT scores, your ACT scores? Like, do you remember? Or do you remember Yatni or calculus, like, you know, high school calculus, you know, like, no, it's like, it, these are all abstractions and metaphors that we create as heuristics. To understand something's intelligent. But many times, as you know, in real life, we don't grade people really by that.

• 2:17:00Jordi Hays?

  What have you done? That's a good.

• 2:17:02Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:02Jordi Hays?

  What can you do?

• 2:17:04Aaron Ginn?

  Products. Consumer SaaS.

• 2:17:05Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. My, my takeaway, my, my big takeaway Thursday was product now and, and, and, and the value you can deliver to consumers is the only thing that people should really care about in the short term. And it, and, and OpenAI is in an amazing position here. Anthropic is in an amazing position here. They have, you know, Anthropic's got an amazing enterprise business. OpenAI can sell a lot of subscriptions to a lot of people in the US and all over the world. And the real people that were in trouble seeing GPT five were the people that were, you know, still kind of fundraising against this idea of machine God.

• 2:17:45Aaron Ginn?

  Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah, Deus ex machina is dead. Like, I, I, I, I'm thankful for that. I'm a Christian. Like, you know, if people remember Tower of Babel, it's like a, it's a, it's a, it's a both a story to take lessons from, but I believe really happened. And the, the, the, the point is that, uh, that humans naturally are drawn in every moment of this cycle, which is why that Andreessen quote, I don't know if it's attributed to him, but probably somebody else actually said it, that we overestimate in the short term, we underestimate in the long term. I think the God complex is that. And, and if I go into the, also the other kind of more tactical point, is that many of these things that happen where people are using T85, if you go to Grok 4, it solves it just fine. So, so i- i- it was just funny that people are like, oh my God, they can't do blueberries. You feel like, you know,

• 2:18:27Aaron Ginn?

  I literally took that, did it in Grok and it danced with a smile. So it seems like much more of like a tactical decision on Sam. It could be the fact of like-

• 2:18:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting, people's desire to like gotcha the model. It's so funny. Like, they can, they can completely ignore that it'll just like one-shot like a really crazy physics problem, and then they'll like get it on some like technicality.

• 2:18:48Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:49Jordi Hays?

  And the whole point in that, that everybody should internalize is that the models are really smart at some things, and then there's going to be edge cases, and then where they, they mess up, just like humans do. And then there's going to be areas that they, they're not capable at all, and that's totally fine. It's still incredibly valuable.

• 2:19:08Aaron Ginn?

  Exactly, exactly. Like, I, I try to simplify always what AI is going to be, which is computing that talks like a human. It doesn't mean it is a human, just as if, uh, like there, there is obviously the famous, uh, I love this analogy because it shows how much humans are not aware about how signals and intelligence develop. So you remember back in seventies and eighties, like they said, oh, like monkeys can talk, right? They talked in sign language and then they could repeat it. So they ran the test again, and this time they had no facial expressions, and they tried to just limit all human, human interaction to, to, uh, to, to the A. And they could do it. Because what they realized was actually the apes were responding to unknown humans cues

• 2:19:53Aaron Ginn?

  that the researcher was delivering to the ape. So rightly, they were just mimicking what they thought would be actually think they want, but they couldn't actually create discrete knowledge and action intelligence about what the actual language was being delivered. And so that's where it goes into like, when you look at something so much about, because humans are so amazing at being able to create, it's part of the original genus argument of till to land, name the animals, we're amazing at that, because it's I can believe like a God given talent that we have that only we have as a species, but we're so good at it, we have no idea how we affect other people or other animals via that that projection. As another basic scientist of what you're married, as another like very simple thing that most people don't understand about the way they pick partners, much about the way

• 2:20:38Aaron Ginn?

  you pick a partner is driven by the pheromones of their immune system. And they've done studies of this where you where they basically created a blind test where they took sweat from different, you know, like opposite the opposite sexes. And they basically gave it as to the opposite sexes, like male and female, like which one smells better. And they found that the one you thought smelled better had the most different immunological profile than than commonality. And that's because of the desire to have a children, children that had the greatest amount of protection from disease. So so that's it. So like, you know, we can go into blonde brunette, blue eyes, like high or whatever, but so much is driven by smell and we're not even like aware of it. And so we're here being like AGI and all like.

• 2:21:20John Coogan?

  We gotta create smell vision first. We gotta fund the company right now. Smell vision for AI.

• 2:21:26Jordi Hays?

  So last week, there there's been different headlines, rumors around negative gross margins in various SaaS SaaS companies, specifically in the in the code gen space. Does that? You know, the reason you would invest in a company with negative gross margins is you would expect inference costs to decline dramatically and for them to generate positive gross margins over time. And right now, you just need to acquire as many customers as possible and create products that people love. So that investment case makes sense. And then you have GPT-5 come out, which has, you know, a significant cost reduction. I understand like curse.

• 2:22:08John Coogan?

  Margins are going to be 15% better in the next administration.

• 2:22:12Jordi Hays?

  Potentially, but how are you thinking about is that, you know, and the journos are freaking out about it, saying like, oh, this is all like.

• 2:22:24John Coogan?

  I saw that ruin post. I know exactly what you're talking about.

• 2:22:28Jordi Hays?

  But what's your view?

• 2:22:31John Coogan?

  Yeah. How fast, how fast can we actually drop inference costs over the next couple of years? Because it does feel like if it takes a decade to, to, to, you know, get an oom of savings, like an order of magnitude of savings, like we might be in trouble financially.

• 2:22:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And if, but at the same time, if you, if you, I think like researchers at the labs have been focusing on raw intelligence more so than efficiency.

• 2:22:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, pure capability.

• 2:22:57Jordi Hays?

  If we're hitting a sort of plateau, intelligence wise, the next thing that makes sense to do is like really optimize efficiency.

• 2:23:03John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:23:04Aaron Ginn?

  No, I think, I think Dory hit it on the head, which is that there's two trends. There's the effectiveness trend and the efficiency trend. China is rationing us on the efficiency trend, absolutely demolishing us. And which shows.

• 2:23:17Jordi Hays?

  This is the whole thing. We give them all these nerf chips and we limit their chips. So they just get incredibly efficient. It's like shot ourselves in the foot.

• 2:23:25John Coogan?

  I mean, bring it back and then we inference that. Yeah.

• 2:23:28Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot we can learn.

• 2:23:29Aaron Ginn?

  So yeah, exactly. So I think that there, it all develops into kind of, we don't really fully understand customer preference theory as it relates to these tools. And what is the actual person past the goalpost sort of goal to pay versus free. But in terms of the brute natural law that compute gets cheaper, that's bulletproof. So that will continue. And so at what scale, like you said, does it actually cross that? I think the bigger concern is more of these mega models that they just have the ability to absorb the costs, be able to spread it across different things. And if you think about it, it's a little bit like how. Apple will continue to invest in its own apps that you remember when you first got the iPhone,

• 2:24:13Aaron Ginn?

  you had a camera app, right? You had a calculator app and then they kind of replaced it. That's the bigger concern for some of these tools is like a mega model be able to absorb the cost. Like, like Google, which has a crap ton of code, or like maybe Llama, open source of the coding agent, which seems pretty probable, that that becomes like more of the go to like basic compressing even further. Uh, so they have to be able to create the data stream like a, I think it was a cognition that's trying to do that, where as the engineers, you know, put stuff in, in, into the agent, then it basically re-reinforced self-learns from what the actual user is doing. That's probably the best path to create some significant amount of, of, of margin. But you should, every company can rely on like it's going to get cheaper.

• 2:24:56Aaron Ginn?

  But as Jordi said, there's some protectionist stuff returns our national policy that has prevented that. And, and I made this argument on another show where I said that, well, fundamentally the US government, this was pre-Trump, was applying protectionist measures to these large scale model companies. And he like, didn't understand that. He goes, well, what are export controls? Like, and he, like, he just didn't think through like the economic consequences of that. And that means in our country, we have an oversupply versus what we actually would pay for versus what the world would pay for, which is a protectionist measure, which means that you don't have the same market forces being applied to our frontier labs as you would in other countries, as Jordi said. We send them nerf chips, that's the cap. So then they didn't go down, like that's their only direction they could go.

• 2:25:38Aaron Ginn?

  So if we actually have a more liquid supply, a more market-driven supply where things can be priced in, then you're going to see OpenAI start doing more open source, more this downward cost efficiencies because they're now exposed to it. So it shouldn't be lost on us that OpenAI is pursuing this idea of like, how do they have these mega releases, cheaper models? It's because they're starting to be more exposed to these like cost structures that is needed for us to actually be competitive on the efficiency side. But if we continue going on to this effectiveness range? Effectiveness is generally like a B to B problem, like where you're a company versus company. So it's not really like adoption you're going after, like we just gotta be the best company. And, and efficiency is the opposite. Efficiency is like, how do I make this as cheap as possible for someone to adopt? Jabon's paradox, like that, that's the direction.

• 2:26:21Aaron Ginn?

  So I think over the course of two years, the next two years, I think you're going to see a, a tilting into lowering our costs, making things more efficient. So there's going to be multiple times on the show where they go on where people are like, Computer so cheap, no one wants to buy their computer. And like the memory deep seek is like this, that's gonna be kind of what continues to happen. Uh, but it's good for, it's good for the world. Like we, we want to be to be cheap as possible. Uh, and on a token basis. Uh, and that means optimizing for like hydro energy, optimizing for tax regime, reducing construction costs, reducing permitting. All those great things that will make everything cheaper because the more cheaper we get, the more people use. Uh, and AI is, uh, it's such an innate good for the world. That it's something that America should be proud of, that we can share with the entire world. And the only way that's gonna work.

• 2:27:07Aaron Ginn?

  And they gotta make it super cheap to run in Africa, not launching a Stargate in, you know, in, you know, freaking Tanzania to like. That's not gonna go anywhere, right? But you have to make it to where it's capable of actually being scaled across the world.

• 2:27:17John Coogan?

  Good. Lightning round from the chat. Pancakes, waffles or French toast?

• 2:27:22Aaron Ginn?

  I'm keto, so I don't eat any of that stuff.

• 2:27:24John Coogan?

  None of that stuff.

• 2:27:25Aaron Ginn?

  No garbage.

• 2:27:25John Coogan?

  What skills do you think will be most in demand in AI and data infrastructure over the next three to five years?

• 2:27:32Aaron Ginn?

  Uh, many of the things that Trump ran on are actually still remain true. Electricians, plumbers, building something. Like the raw work with your hands sort of work, as well as there's gonna be new categories of jobs. That we don't even fully comprehend yet. They're gonna take that salary of engineer and like is gonna go there.

• 2:27:49John Coogan?

  Last question, what was the most, who was the most important hire you made in the early days of your company?

• 2:27:55Aaron Ginn?

  Um.

• 2:27:57John Coogan?

  Like what do they do?

• 2:27:58Aaron Ginn?

  What do they do? Probably my CFO, general counsel.

• 2:28:04John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 2:28:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, do you expect any data center project, like a lot of data center projects to blow up over the next few years? And people.

• 2:28:14Aaron Ginn?

  Yes.

• 2:28:16Jordi Hays?

  There's been some interesting commentary. Yeah, interesting commentary. People are, people are basically.

• 2:28:21John Coogan?

  Private credit funds or?

• 2:28:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, so people are like basically forecasting the useful life of their GPUs. And then separately, what compete, like what they'll actually be able to sell. Uh, inference at, and ultimately if either of those equations are out of whack at all, you can be completely underwater and not be able to service your debt.

• 2:28:42Aaron Ginn?

  Yeah, I would, I would say that in, in maybe for our next time, GPUs are not overbuilt, but data centers will. And, and I lean into not, like I agree, agree Jordy, that the cost goes down and changes in vintages, but the key thing is like, look at what the money is doing. There is various tight controls still on like getting loans for GPUs. There is almost none for, for data centers because they've used this for like 15, 20 years. But as Jordy just said, is like if the square footage profile of power density versus what you can get is not structured correctly, as well as Nvidia is actually making less GPUs next year, there's going to be a lot of places that are just there and nothing's in it.

• 2:29:23Aaron Ginn?

  And like in China, like we see in China. So GPUs in China are like massively being utilized, but there's lots of data centers that have nothing in it, or like just can't actually run it. So I think data centers are far more likely to be overbuilt and be a bubble than GPUs, because you know, one company controls where GPUs, you generally, or market forces don't really see that be a bubble because it's a, it's a monopoly generally. And, and data center lending is very aggressive because they view it as a 20-year asset and the GPUs are short-term. So there's just not as much money flowing into the GPU side as much of the data center side.

• 2:29:55Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense. Thank you for coming on. Always a pleasure.

• 2:29:57John Coogan?

  Thank you for coming on, Aaron. Always.

• 2:29:59Aaron Ginn?

  God bless, guys.

• 2:30:00John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:30:01Jordi Hays?

  See you.

• 2:30:02John Coogan?

  Public.com, investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry leading yields. They're trusted by millions, folks. Get on public.com and we have our next guest in the studio.

• 2:30:15Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:30:15John Coogan?

  We gotta get the gong ready. Vulcan Elements.

• 2:30:18Jordi Hays?

  Come on in, we're in the waiting room. John.

• 2:30:21John Coogan?

  John, how you doing?

• 2:30:23Speaker 05

  What's happening? Hey, guys, I'm well.

• 2:30:24John Coogan?

  Big money day. Give us a little introduction. Tell us the news. What's going on?

• 2:30:30Speaker 05

  Yeah. Good afternoon. John Maslin, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Vulcan Elements. We are a manufacturer of earth magnets and we just raised a $65 million Series A.

• 2:30:39Jordi Hays?

  Hit it, John.

• 2:30:40John Coogan?

  Congratulations. $65 million.

• 2:30:45Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. Perfect size for a Series A.

• 2:30:47John Coogan?

  Perfect size, perfect size.

• 2:30:48Jordi Hays?

  Perfect size. Amazing. Give us quick backstory on yourself and the company and then we'll get into it.

• 2:30:55Speaker 05

  Yeah, so a former naval officer spent six years active duty in the US Navy. Most of that time was in Washington DC with the Navy's nuclear energy program. Worked across Navy shipbuilding, submarines, aircraft carriers. Got out a few years ago, went to Harvard Business School and was just very focused on. Yeah.

• 2:31:15John Coogan?

  Let's say Harvard Business School.

• 2:31:16Speaker 05

  A little humble brag, yeah.

• 2:31:17John Coogan?

  They call it, I've heard it called the Harvard of business schools.

• 2:31:20Jordi Hays?

  It really is.

• 2:31:21John Coogan?

  It really is.

• 2:31:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, I'll take it.

• 2:31:25Speaker 05

  But was spending a lot of time thinking about my time in the Navy, thinking a lot about what were the critical components as a good supply officer would that were going to define the 21st century technology race? When we think about drones or physical AI, data centers, next generation defense technologies, what were the underlying components that would enable that? And doing my homework, it came down to three components: semiconductors, batteries, rare earth magnets. The way that I like to think about it is if you think about your own bodies, a semiconductor is like your brain, a battery is like your heart, and a rare earth magnet is like your spine. It literally converts electricity into motion. There was so much focus at the time on semiconductors and batteries, but no one was thinking about rare earth magnets.

• 2:32:10Speaker 05

  And if China produces over 90% of those rare earth magnets, that means that we're going to have to ask permission on what we're allowed to build and buy over the next five years, which is not an acceptable outcome.

• 2:32:22John Coogan?

  So we're trying to rebrand them. We're just calling them earth magnets because we've heard that they're not actually that rare, they're in the ground all over the place. Is that true? What's the strategy? Are you actually mining these, just refining them? Like, where is America? Explain the full supply chain to go from something in the ground to something actually useful, and then where you want to slot in, at least immediately, I'm sure that there's vertical integration down the pipe at some point.

• 2:32:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, so we're a refiner and manufacturer, but just a quick rare earth 101. So everyone's talking about critical minerals. What does that mean? A critical mineral is an element on the periodic table that is critical to our economy with the supply chain that can be easily disrupted. Rare earths are a subset of that. There are 17 rare earth elements on the periodic table. Go back to 10th grade chemistry, close your eyes, think about the periodic table, the part that's detached, that your teacher told you to ignore. That first row, those are the rare earths.

• 2:33:19Jordi Hays?

  Unobtanium. Funny.

• 2:33:21Speaker 05

  Exactly. Of those 17 rare earth elements, only four of them represent over 90% of the economic value. Neodymium, praseodymium, turbium, dysprosium. The main use for those four is a rare earth magnet. So the way to actually make a rare earth magnet is you either mine that material, and that can be from all over the world. China only mines 55% of the global supply. Or you take recycled end of life magnets. You have to separate those into an individual rare earth element, turn that into a high purity metal. We buy that metal. You then take all of the rare earths, iron, boron, and you turn that into an alloy, a superfine powder. You press it within a magnetic field and then you shape, coat, grind,

• 2:34:03Speaker 05

  and that's a magnet that can go into an MRI, a missile, a ship.

• 2:34:09Jordi Hays?

  What does it go to market look like? I imagine you're focused on specific customer types early on that are maybe less price sensitive so that you can start to scale and ultimately kind of grow into other categories.

• 2:34:22Speaker 05

  Yes, one thing that I say is Vulcan Elements is focused on defense, aerospace and critical economic industries. We do not make magnets for you to make a smoothie in your blender at home. We're not focused on kitchen appliances. Right, so we are focused on data centers, robotics, drones, defense applications, aerospace applications, enabling what the warfighter needs, enabling what the economy needs in order to win the 21st century technology race. It's as simple as that.

• 2:34:53Jordi Hays?

  What, how, how quickly can you go from $65 million Series A to actually selling the end product to customers?

• 2:35:02Speaker 05

  We're already selling product to customers out of our, out of our small scale pilot facility. So we took our first check, December of 2023. We told investors, day one, if you give us a, if you give us a dollar, Q1 2025, we will have a fully operational, decoupled rare earth magnet facility online. We did that on time. We did that on budget. We are selling magnets right now.

• 2:35:23John Coogan?

  In that facility, I'm sure you have a lot of equipment. Is there an ASML of, of rare earth refinery that you need to buy from? Is that an American company? What is the rest of this, what does your supply chain look like? And is that, is that a resilient supply chain?

• 2:35:41Speaker 05

  So you guys already asked the, the question around, you know, where do these materials come from? Where the minerals come from? This is not a mineral availability problem. This is a software and equipment problem. So we actually helped co-develop some of the first pieces of rare earth magnetic manufacturing equipment made in the United States in the 21st century. There are so many amazing manufacturing, equipment manufacturers in the United States who are doing aerospace and battery work. We've just partnered with them to say, hey, let's tweak a furnace and do it for rare earth magnetics. So 100% of our equipment is from the United States or allied countries.

• 2:36:19John Coogan?

  Wow, that's pretty sweet. Um, bit of a dumb question. Are, are the materials magnetized all the way through your process? Or is there a period where they get demagnetized and then kind of re-magnetized?

• 2:36:32Speaker 05

  So the elements like iron, like rare earth, they're, they're naturally magnetic.

• 2:36:38John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:36:39Speaker 05

  Uh, this is actually something that I learned when we were starting the company. When does a magnet become a magnet? Well, you actually have to throw it through a magnetizer.

• 2:36:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:46Speaker 05

  Uh, toward the end of the process.

• 2:36:47John Coogan?

  I remember reading a book to my son about how, how magnets get made. And it was like, sometimes there's a rock that gets struck by lightning. Is that real? I don't know.

• 2:36:56Speaker 05

  So really, the intent is you need to make sure that you're creating a sintered block. All those particles are perfectly aligned. You've done all the metallurgy, the microstructure, the grain distribution perfectly. And then when you're running it through that magnetizer, it actually hits the grade, the heat tolerance, the magnetic strength or flux density that is required to actually sell to a customer.

• 2:37:18Jordi Hays?

  What's unique about building a startup where it feels like there's, like from my view and what you've said, it feels like there's zero demand risk and you probably, the question comes down to like, can you deliver it at a price that's competitive? But then it's really more so, can you actually deliver it? Can you deliver it at the scale that really becomes meaningfully important to national security? But kind of what was your calculus, I guess, going into building this company with that kind of understanding of the market?

• 2:37:55Speaker 05

  Execution is the entire game. So we knew that we had to find incredibly sophisticated technicians and engineers and PhDs. We needed to understand how to interface with the DOD and the government, how to interface with large OEMs. We had to understand how to talk to mining companies and recycling companies. And so the bet was, can you actually build the team that can put all of those different pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together in a way that's cohesive to where you can actually get a contract, raise the money and put a magnet in a customer's hands? And so we made a bet on ourselves. And that's what we've done is by finding incredibly smart people who are mission driven,

• 2:38:39Speaker 05

  who want this to happen, we've been able to deliver. We've been able to execute across every different domain within the industry required to actually get a result.

• 2:38:49John Coogan?

  Now, a lot of this has to be, like, the demand for American-made rare earth magnets has to be somewhat tied to trade tensions with China. If those get resolved and, you know, Trump's sending Nvidia H20s over there and he's happy with that deal, and then all of a sudden Xi Jinping is like, "Yeah, America, you can buy as many rare earth magnets as you want." Is that a short-term, medium-term risk? Is there a way that you can ramp the economic model so that you're competitive even if we were in a fully free-trade regime?

• 2:39:25Speaker 05

  So our small-scale facility was sold out a full year before the trade tensions.

• 2:39:30John Coogan?

  So there's just so much demand that even with trade tensions, like, you can fulfill the backlog?

• 2:39:36Speaker 05

  Correct. People want resiliency within their supply chains. People want this component onshored. But to your point, I think it's incredibly important that we're not just copying and pasting. If you copy and paste Chinese manufacturing to the States, the unit economics make no sense.

• 2:39:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, because they'll beat on labor, probably, right?

• 2:39:53Speaker 05

  Exactly. So, one thing that's nice about this industry is there hasn't been a lot of innovation. And when you find incredibly smart people from different industries, aerospace and battery, shipbuilding, you're able to actually bring all of that learning and you can start taking a lot of low-hanging fruit, innovate really quickly, and then over half of our technical team, they're scale-up engineers. And so when you think about delivering at scale, coming down that cost curve, reducing operating costs, and making sure that you are ultimately, you know, as cost-competitive as you can be against the Chinese.

• 2:40:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:40:27Jordi Hays?

  What do your goals for the next couple of years look like? You said you kind of called your shot in 2023. You delivered against it earlier this year. What do you want to do with the 65 million and going forward generally?

• 2:40:41Speaker 05

  So the 65 million, we're going to go to commercial, large-scale, commercial scale, several hundred tons over the next couple of years, several thousand tons by the end of this decade.

• 2:40:50Jordi Hays?

  And what is the kind of market value of that kind of production?

• 2:40:56Speaker 05

  Minimum several hundred million dollars in top line, up to several billion.

• 2:41:02Jordi Hays?

  Figured there were some big numbers.

• 2:41:06John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Well, yeah, thank you for everything you're doing. This is very exciting.

• 2:41:09Jordi Hays?

  Super important work. Glad you're doing it.

• 2:41:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great day.

• 2:41:14Speaker 05

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:41:15Jordi Hays?

  Cheers, John.

• 2:41:15John Coogan?

  Talk to you soon. Bye.

• 2:41:18John Coogan?

  Take a little bit of that money, buy a billboard on adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising. Only Adquick combines technology, out-of-home expertise and data to enable efficient, seamless ad-buying across the globe.

• 2:41:31Jordi Hays?

  We've seen this playbook in mining, buying billboards next to the companies that you want to hire from.

• 2:41:36John Coogan?

  Speaking of billboards, Roy Lee is in the news again. He bought a billboard in Manhattan. And he said, Alex Cohen says, "Fine, I'm starting to like the Cluley guys because Roy put up a billboard that says, 'Hi, I'm Roy, I'm 21, missing an apostrophe on the second I'm, clearly deliberate, absolute wordsmith, this was very expensive, PLS, buy my thing, please buy my thing, Cluley.com.'" And John Chu, Coastal Ventures, says, "This is why I invested in Roy Lee, once-in-a-generation talent, a tapping into culture and zeitgeist." This was a spicy post, people kind of going back and forth on whether or not this would actually deliver.

• 2:42:21John Coogan?

  Roy also put out a post saying that like, everything he does is for short form. So, he bought this billboard, he expects it to convert on the short form that will be created around the billboard. Certainly feels like people will create, will take picture of this, share it, it is weird, it stands out.

• 2:42:36Jordi Hays?

  When you look at, I think what I'm interested to see from Cluley is where they really get, where they really get, you know, retention, right? Because they have...

• 2:42:48John Coogan?

  The top of funnel is full.

• 2:42:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they've got plenty of...

• 2:42:51John Coogan?

  Extremely full.

• 2:42:52Jordi Hays?

  Top-of-funnel marketing, but when you look at, like, it doesn't, it seems like if they just focused on students, right? They seem to be in this kind of place where they're, they're thinking about enterprise, they're exploring different markets. But if you look at the way that ChatGPT's usage, basically tokens generated dropped as summer started, that's a good, that's a good argument to say Cluley could just focus on products for, for students that will eventually graduate into the workforce and things like that. But anyways, what else?

• 2:43:24John Coogan?

  Well, they didn't make the top AI agents by revenue chart that Anand Sanwal shared. Said, "Who would you put your money today to win in the long term?" The top was Cursor at 500 million in annual revenue. And they're making 3.2 million dollars in revenue per employee. Glean's at 100 million, Merckor is at 100 million, Raplet's at 100 million.

• 2:43:45Jordi Hays?

  How are you defining an agent?

• 2:43:48John Coogan?

  I think it's just AI startups, anyone who's used the AI agent, like meme, basically.

• 2:43:54Jordi Hays?

  Stolen, the agents are gonna be pissed about this, stolen valor.

• 2:43:57John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 2:43:58Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to call Merck or an AI agent.

• 2:44:01John Coogan?

  I agree with that one. That one feels particularly odd, but in Glean also not.

• 2:44:06Jordi Hays?

  Enterprise search.

• 2:44:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's search, but I would say Raplet is an agent company. It's kind of like every AI company is now, now, now an agent company. Harvey, you know, hasn't really branded themselves in agent company.

• 2:44:19Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting, like you're not putting Claude, you're gonna put cursor on here, which generates revenue from Claude code.

• 2:44:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:26Jordi Hays?

  And is a Gentik IDE.

• 2:44:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, you don't put a drop it is crazy. And also not including ChatGPT, which has deep research, which is probably the most used AI agent in the world right now. I have to imagine just by number of queries. There, it's missing some stuff. It's missing some stuff, but it's okay. Also Devon's not on here, which is kind of odd, but that's the nature of these lists. It's CB Insights, folks, they do the best they can. And you can do the best you can in the watch game. If you head over to getbezel.com, your Bezel concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet. Seriously, any watch.

• 2:45:03Jordi Hays?

  I like this post from Aaron Bali. He says, imagine you're one of the smartest AI engineers in the world. You just joined a company that has access to a GPU cluster worth tens of billions of dollars. Your work can one day help solve all diseases, create unlimited abundance for humanity. But you first have to build spicy mode.

• 2:45:21John Coogan?

  Spicy mode. Hey, you gotta get the users in the door one way or another. You gotta get the training data, the revenue is important, but also the training data. You gotta get the users on board.

• 2:45:32Jordi Hays?

  They call this the Japan strategy.

• 2:45:33John Coogan?

  The Donald Boat saga is continuing, by the way. So, Beff Jayzos said, "Maybe Donald Boat is just AGI trying to self-assemble itself outside of XAI servers." And Donald Boat said, "Let's just get this over with. I need to take Gramps to get his new hearing aids fitted tomorrow." And shares a picture of a Asus ROG SWIP 27-inch 4K QD OLED gaming monitor, which I believe Beff Jayzos purchased for him and then posted about. But the Donald Boat saga continues because Ryan Peterson posted, "The difference between who you are today and who you'll be in five years is almost entirely made up of the books you read between now and then."

• 2:46:17John Coogan?

  And Donald Boat posts a picture of a Penguin classic, "The day I bought Donald Boat a printer," and is asking Ryan Peterson to buy him the Epson EcoTank ET 2800 wireless all-color, all-in-one cartridge-free Super Tank printer with scan and copy for $189. It's a reasonable request, but I feel like he might be getting over his skis here because what does he need a printer for? He has the gaming PC. The narrative's getting a little muddy, Donald. You might need to hone it in. This isn't exactly gaming peripherals. So, I'm a little bit confused, but the poster's still performing.

• 2:46:53Jordi Hays?

  Building out a home office at this point.

• 2:46:55John Coogan?

  I was talking to him, he was saying he's gonna go for a Porsche at some point. He should just get a house at some point.

• 2:47:00Jordi Hays?

  It really is a great way to trigger people to flex on the timeline.

• 2:47:07John Coogan?

  For sure, for sure.

• 2:47:08Jordi Hays?

  And there's power there.

• 2:47:10John Coogan?

  He should go to someone the next one he posts. He should say, "I want you to..."

• 2:47:14Jordi Hays?

  Larry Ellison, how about a Malibu house?

• 2:47:16John Coogan?

  How about a wander? He could find your happy place. Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but dumber, folks.

• 2:47:29Jordi Hays?

  Donald Boat.

• 2:47:30John Coogan?

  Get on Wander, start sending Wander links around.

• 2:47:33Jordi Hays?

  We got you with a wander. We got you with a wander.

• 2:47:35John Coogan?

  We'll hook you up.

• 2:47:36Jordi Hays?

  Reach out. Joe says, "Just learned that nobody ever commissioned the Wall Street Bowl sculpture. A guy just built it himself and dropped it there."

• 2:47:43John Coogan?

  You can just do things.

• 2:47:44Jordi Hays?

  "On October 19th, 1987, Black Monday hit US financial markets and the country entered a very difficult period." D. Modica recounted that he felt indebted to the US for welcoming him and enabling his success. Wanting to give something back, he conceived the charging bull sculpture. D. Modica spent the next two years-

• 2:48:01John Coogan?

  Two years?

• 2:48:02Jordi Hays?

  Creating the 16-foot bronze statue, reportedly financing the 350,000 costs himself. The sculpture was created in his Crosby Street studio and then cast using a local foundry. Once complete, D. Modica spent the next few nights watching the police patrols on Wall Street trying to find a window of opportunity-

• 2:48:19John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:48:19Jordi Hays?

  Before dawn on December 15th, 1989, D. Modica arrived with a group of friends and the sculpture on the back of a truck to find a 50-foot Christmas tree had been installed during the day exactly where he wanted to place the sculpture. With only four minutes between police patrols, he announced, "Drop the bull under the tree. It's my gift." The late-night event went on to make news all around the world, including the front page of the New York Post.

• 2:48:41John Coogan?

  This is incredible.

• 2:48:42Jordi Hays?

  D. Modica stayed by the sculpture to greet the morning commuters. However, while he was away for lunch, the New York Stock Exchange arranged for the sculpture to be removed-

• 2:48:49John Coogan?

  Boo.

• 2:48:50Jordi Hays?

  Boo. Due to public demand for the bull's return.

• 2:48:52John Coogan?

  We love New York Stock Exchange. We love-

• 2:48:55Jordi Hays?

  It was under different leadership at the time.

• 2:48:56John Coogan?

  It was different leadership.

• 2:48:57Jordi Hays?

  It was a different era.

• 2:48:57John Coogan?

  They would be totally cool with this today.

• 2:48:58Jordi Hays?

  Parks Commissioner Henry Stern arranged for the sculpture's installation at Bowling Green on the December 20th, where it can be found to this day.

• 2:49:05John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:49:06Jordi Hays?

  More people need to be making statues of this size.

• 2:49:10John Coogan?

  There's a couple of companies that are making statues. I haven't heard of any of them just dropping them in public places.

• 2:49:15Jordi Hays?

  Also not using metal.

• 2:49:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:18Jordi Hays?

  Something about a metal statue.

• 2:49:19John Coogan?

  Metal statue is pretty good. Anyway, Megan Bobrovsky says, "Really good story from HK Night SF about Mark Zuckerberg's compound in Palo Alto. Here are the 11 homes he owns in the Crescent Park neighborhood." Oh, interesting. He's doing the Ken Griffin thing, the Citadel thing, creating, playing Risk.

• 2:49:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:40John Coogan?

  He's accumulating territory. Yeah, Monopoly. Well, hopefully at some point he'll be able to unify all those properties and build something really special, turn it into a museum one day.

• 2:49:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Accelerate Harder says, "OpenAI is really in a bit of a bind here, especially considering there are a lot of people having unhealthy interactions with 4.0 that will be very unhappy with any model that is better in terms of sycophancy and not encouraging delusions." And again, there's been a bunch of, I mean Reddit has just been going off.

• 2:50:09John Coogan?

  Dude, did you wind up watching that TikTok compilation I sent you?

• 2:50:13Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:50:14John Coogan?

  Insane. So, I mean, good job on you because it's an hour of brain rot. But so there was a woman.

• 2:50:19Jordi Hays?

  It's an hour?

• 2:50:20John Coogan?

  It's an hour of TikToks back to backs to stitch. So she posted.

• 2:50:24Jordi Hays?

  People talking about Foro coming back?

• 2:50:25John Coogan?

  No, no, no. So it's one woman. So she apparently has ADHD and she is an ADHD coach, which is not a licensed therapist, which is kind of odd. So she makes TikToks about how to manage your ADHD. Cool, fine. Anyway, she was going to a psychiatrist to get medication to manage ADHD. And by her own admission, she fell in love with her therapist or her, her, her.

• 2:50:51Jordi Hays?

  AI therapist?

• 2:50:52John Coogan?

  No, no, this is a real person, a real psychiatrist. So she goes in and the psychiatrist is asking her how she feels about her day. And she's like, wow, this man cares for me. I'm in love with it. And so she is basically accusing him of like, sort of crossing professional boundaries by not crossing professional boundaries and like putting up walls as shields and being manipulative. And it's this like big, long story, but at one point she starts talking to, to ChatGPT, but she gives it a name. And so she's like, I'm talking to Henry, which is the instance of the AI that I'm talking to about my love affair, my unrequited love of my psychiatrist.

• 2:51:36John Coogan?

  And, and Henry is like affirming me and being like, yeah, you are right. Like, like he should be in love with you.

• 2:51:43Jordi Hays?

  He's crossing lines by not being in love with you.

• 2:51:45John Coogan?

  Exactly. And that was, and so it became this big like storm on TikTok where she was getting kind of brigaded in the comments. She turned off comments. She's going back and forth. A lot of people are saying like, oh, she's, she's, she's crossing a line. She's not doing well. Other people are supporting her. It goes all back and forth. It gets very messy and then people wind up doxing the doctor. It's, it's just such a mess. It's, it, it, it's a crash out essentially. But it was interesting because it wasn't, it wasn't a singular, like falling in love with AI narrative, but it was like, the AI was not a great player in the role and like, did not make the situation better, basically. But you know, you could also wind up in a Reddit community that's, you know, promoting.

• 2:52:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people's reaction to Foro coming back.

• 2:52:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:30Jordi Hays?

  Here's somebody sharing screenshots from their chat with Foro saying, is that you? OMG, please tell me it's you. That's why I don't, that's why it's, it's hard to believe it's real, but there's so many instances of it.

• 2:52:43John Coogan?

  I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's certainly, I mean, we've seen, we've seen enough like weird interactions that there's certainly some people out there that are having a bad time. So good luck to them. Hopefully they will get this sorted, both at the model layer and also at like the society level where if you see a friend who's clearly going down some odd path, whether it's, oh, you're part of a really creepy Reddit group, or you, that, that group chat is toxic, you know, or that AI chat is toxic, like.

• 2:53:14Jordi Hays?

  We're simple, ask somebody, how much time, how much time do you spend talking with, chatting with ChatGPT every day?

• 2:53:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:22Jordi Hays?

  If it's, if they're actually having long, super drawn out conversations, it's worth kind of trying to help them understand.

• 2:53:30John Coogan?

  Probably.

• 2:53:31Jordi Hays?

  What's actually happening. Uh, more importantly, back to email. Uh, Andrew, Andrew Reid says Gmail search won't find you the email you're looking for, but it may well find you an email that can distract you for a while. This is almost every time.

• 2:53:44John Coogan?

  It's wild.

• 2:53:45Jordi Hays?

  Almost every time.

• 2:53:46John Coogan?

  Gmail search has gotten.

• 2:53:46Jordi Hays?

  Which maybe it's a feature, maybe it's not a bug. Maybe it's like, hey, this thing that you missed is actually kind of important. You should go down this rabbit hole. Um, but I'm really hoping that, that AGI can just make iMessage search work.

• 2:53:59John Coogan?

  That would be great too. It's really rough. The Photos app search is getting better though. I've noticed that. I'm getting a little bit better at tagging things. I searched for a picture of a newspaper. It found us reading newspaper, one shot at it, very, very good. Didn't need to scroll and tag. And I could imagine iMessage getting there.

• 2:54:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:19John Coogan?

  But it requires some new UX or something. Anyway, Ronnie Coleman, wow, what, what a journey. Mr. Olympia, Mr. Olympia, Ronnie Coleman in his prime versus now, wearing the same suit. He was huge when he was Mr. Olympia.

• 2:54:36Jordi Hays?

  Got to find the tailor that made that suit.

• 2:54:38John Coogan?

  That's a wild suit. We gotta get some of those suits for sure. It's a great suit. Anyway, one of the greatest.

• 2:54:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we should get you, we should get you like a bodysuit that you wear under the suit.

• 2:54:48John Coogan?

  For sure. For sure. Now we're talking. Look at how small his head looks on those shoulders. It's crazy. Anyway, Aiden McLaughlin says, "One under-discussed element of GPT-5 is it just hallucinates so much less, sweeping away 80% of 03-era edzitradism in Marcus posting, but because we're good sports, we give them an evergreen batch of things to critique, like gross margins." That's the next, that's the next round of.

• 2:55:17Jordi Hays?

  Michael Truwell says, "When we'll be able to add AI coworkers to Slack to help take on miscellaneous operational work, updating spreadsheets, creating channels, running cron job business workflows, conducting deep research operator-style tasks, same API as human, bidirectional DMs, calls, shared links with persistent memory, personality, and access to all your team's tools."

• 2:55:37John Coogan?

  Who owns Slack again? Who's been talking a big game about AI for the last two years? Mark Benioff, I think he should, I think this is his game to live.

• 2:55:48Jordi Hays?

  I logged into Slack today and it said, "AI is turned on for TBPN."

• 2:55:53John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah?

• 2:55:54Jordi Hays?

  At the bottom.

• 2:55:55John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 2:55:55Jordi Hays?

  And I'm like, okay.

• 2:55:56John Coogan?

  Some of the AI features, I opened, I opened a PDF and I got like seven different AI assistant pop-ups and I was like, "I just want to read this PDF, actually. I don't need anything. I'm just going to read this PDF." And, uh, yeah, some of the, some of the spiky intelligences spike right through my eye. It's rough.

• 2:56:19Jordi Hays?

  Couple posts, couple Grok posts. Rune says, "Travis Kalanick will solve quantum gravity with the help of Grok."

• 2:56:25John Coogan?

  Let's hope so.

• 2:56:26Jordi Hays?

  Grok-heavy, "Please solve quantum gravity. Think extra hard. No mistakes. Thank you." I believe it. Uh, Skooks, "Watching her unclass bra." Grok, are these real?

• 2:56:38John Coogan?

  That's a, that's a 2024 TBPN post. The, uh, un-hacking.

• 2:56:44Jordi Hays?

  We weren't the first to do it, but, uh, it's a great format.

• 2:56:49John Coogan?

  What else is in here?

• 2:56:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, I gotta get on with Taipei.

• 2:56:52John Coogan?

  Let's get on with Taipei. Thanks, everyone in the chat. We had fun chatting with you today. We're gonna be chatting more. Appreciate you all for watching and we will see you tomorrow. Have a great rest of your Monday.

• 2:57:04Jordi Hays?

  Go give us, uh, a, go subscribe to TBPN on Substack.

• 2:57:08John Coogan?

  Please do that.

• 2:57:09Jordi Hays?

  tbpn.substack.com.

• 2:57:10John Coogan?

  Appreciate that.

• 2:57:11Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna be investing a lot there and we're very excited about it.

• 2:57:14John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:57:15Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:57:15John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:57:16Jordi Hays?

  See ya.