Intel Lays Off 15% of Workers, Trump's $550B Japan Investment, Hulk Hogan's Legacy | Live TBPN Taste Test with Saif Khawaja

(00:30) - Intel Lays Off 15% of Workers (17:45) - Timeline (25:42) - Trump's $550B Japan Investment (39:41) - Timeline (42:45) - Hulk Hogan's Legacy (01:00:57) - Bay Area Gets Tesla Robotaxis (01:08:27) - LVMH Lobbies for U. S. Trade Deal (01:21:57) - Timeline (01:34:13) - Vitamin Shoppe Owner Lists Hamptons Mansion (01:39:41) - Timeline (01:50:48) - Sam Altman on Theo Von Reactions (01:59:09) - Timeline (02:13:37) - Live in the TBPN Ultradome: Saif Khawaja, founder and CEO of Shinkei Systems, discusses his company's development of AI-powered robotics that automate the traditional Japanese ikejime method for humane fish harvesting, enhancing both the quality and shelf life of seafood. He explains how their machines, deployed directly on fishing vessels, process fish immediately upon capture, resulting in a product that retains its premium taste and texture for up to three times longer than conventional methods. Khawaja also highlights the company's partnerships with Michelin-starred restaurants and their plans to scale operations to make high-quality, sustainably harvested fish more widely available. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVP. Today is Friday, July 25, 2025. Time is flying, John. TVP, an ultra dome, the temple of technology, the fortress of finance. The capital, the capital. Today, we got to talk about Intel. We have a post from Take Him, who wrote the book on Nvidia, the Nvidia way about Jensen Wong. He says. Literally, literally, by the way. Literally wrote the book, yes. Intel now expects to have 75,000 employees at year end, down from 116,500 in June of 2024. That's basically one year ago. That's a massive cut. Nvidia is on the other side of the trade.

• 0:40John Coogan?

  Nvidia CEO said they now have 42,000 employees yesterday, up from 36,000 in January of 2025. Massive shifts. It's crazy to think about the market cap per employee difference there. It's pretty remarkable. If you're cutting costs, you got to get on ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. So the news is. Intel has a ramp problem. Yet they really should get on ramp. Lip Bhutan, I know you're listening. You should get on ramp, Lip Bhutan. So this is from the Wall Street Journal, the business and finance section. Intel is going to lay off 15% of their workforce. Chip giant stands at a strategic crossroads. The CEO warns no more blank checks.

• 1:24John Coogan?

  Intel detailed dramatic steps to revive its sagging fortunes, outlining layoffs for 15% of its workforce and scrapping plans to spend tens of billions of dollars on new chip facilities in Europe. Ooh, bearish for Europe. I didn't realize that was going on. The chip making giant said Thursday it would refocus its strategy on the highly competitive market for AI chips, regaining market share in personal computer processors and developing its advanced 14A technology to sell to large customers. It's like, okay, we're going to, we're going to narrow down. We're just going to do three incredibly difficult things. We're going to compete in, in the most aggressive AI chip market where we're not just competing with Nvidia, but also.

• 2:07John Coogan?

  The TPU from Google, all the upstarts, Grok, Cerebras, all these different companies. So we're gonna like go from zero to one there and then we're also gonna turn around our, our personal computer processing market.

• 2:19Jordi Hays?

  Bold.

• 2:19John Coogan?

  Bold. Intel, which has long dominated the business of making chips for laptops and desktop computers, fell far behind competitors like Nvidia, AMD, and TSMC after it failed to anticipate the surge in demand for the powerful chips fueling the artificial intelligence boom. Liputan, the CEO, the new CEO of, of Intel after Pat Gelsinger stepped down about a year ago, I believe, said, "There are no more blank checks," he wrote in a memo. "Every investment must make economic sense." Love to hear that.

• 2:52Jordi Hays?

  What is the nominative determinism of Liputan? Hate to put you on the spot.

• 2:59John Coogan?

  Hitting the beach, getting a tan?

• 3:01Jordi Hays?

  That's...

• 3:02John Coogan?

  You know?

• 3:03Jordi Hays?

  I can see it. I can see it.

• 3:04John Coogan?

  Maybe if, maybe if Intel doesn't work out, he can get into cosmetics. It's like, get a tan with this tanning oil, get some lip balm, lip balm tan.

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's something that, there's something called lip blushing, where I think it's like a mild tattoo. So maybe if this whole semi thing doesn't work out, he could get into the lip blushing franchise game.

• 3:25John Coogan?

  Yep, I, I agree. Revenue in the June quarter was roughly flat at 12.9 billion, beating Wall Street's expectations. The quarterly loss, though, widened to 2.9 billion for the quarter from a 1.6 billion loss in the year earlier period. The results represent the company's sixth consecutive quarterly loss, extending its longest streak in 35 years. It's got to suck to be in a position where computing broadly, computers are doing incredibly cool things. AI is magic. We passed the Turing test and you're not a beneficiary. You're losing money and it's because of a bet on, you know, the server and these large scale CPUs and not getting into GPUs and then missing mobile. There's a whole bunch

• 4:09John Coogan?

  of things that went into it. So, sales in Intel's PC chip division, the company's largest segment, fell 3% from the year earlier period. I remember about a decade ago, I built a new, you know, ma- massive PC rig to do CGI rendering on it.

• 4:25Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 4:25John Coogan?

  Intel was.

• 4:26Jordi Hays?

  Sure, John. You weren't, you weren't building it to.

• 4:29John Coogan?

  Game.

• 4:29Jordi Hays?

  As a gaming rig?

• 4:30John Coogan?

  I did use it for a gaming rig.

• 4:32Jordi Hays?

  That's John's vice.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:33Jordi Hays?

  John's vice, he said, uh.

• 4:35John Coogan?

  It's market research. I need to understand what the gaming market's going. I need to understand, uh, the future of VR.

• 4:41Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to your credit, I think, I think, uh, you, you, you beat your video game addiction.

• 4:45John Coogan?

  I did. I haven't played in years. Um, and so, uh, uh, it's, uh, it, it's an interesting time for Intel. We, uh, I have some more, more information here.

• 4:57Jordi Hays?

  Do you remember six months ago, there was the rumors floating around that, that Elon was, was a potential buyer?

• 5:02John Coogan?

  I was.

• 5:02Jordi Hays?

  That feels so long ago.

• 5:03John Coogan?

  I was propagating those rumors.

• 5:05Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and ultimately it feels like, uh, you know, he, he got the, uh, got the fun experience of a turnaround at Twitter. Does he want to do that again?

• 5:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 5:18Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 5:18John Coogan?

  I mean, um, my take when, when he bought Twitter and turned it into X was that it was exciting. I thought that he could make it a lot better. He has in many ways made it a better product. We stream on it now and, and it feels like it's still a vibrant community and there's a whole bunch of new features. Good stuff, bad stuff, but overall, I think he put the company back in startup mode. They're shipping very quickly. Interesting things are happening and he's making plays in an interesting way that I like. But at the time I was like, okay, $44 billion. There's something like $50 billion from the CHIPS Act, maybe going to Intel and foundries in America. Run this back and marshal the same amount of capital. Let him buy Intel, turn that around.

• 6:00John Coogan?

  That feels like something that Elon would be uniquely equipped to turn around. And would put us on a very different path, uh, if he got into semiconductor manufacturing, but it would be a huge challenge. And maybe it wasn't as important to him. So I don't know. Um, but.

• 6:14Jordi Hays?

  I mean, only a week ago, a, a small company called AOL, AOL.com was posting, uh, that is Elon Musk about to buy Intel. Um, so this feels like, um, very, uh, you know, Dylan, Dylan Patel on January 17th, saying Elon's jet is in Florida. Global foundries dread is in Florida. Qualcomm's jet is in Florida.

• 6:37Jordi Hays?

  And but ultimately, a lot of people were in Florida at that time.

• 6:40John Coogan?

  Well, if your jet's flying around the world, you gotta take your jet to a wander. Find your happy place.

• 6:44Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  Book a wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. And so Dylan Patel, speaking to Dylan Patel, he actually hung out with Lip Buteon at a conference, and he has this hilarious story where he clearly wanted to meet Lip Buteon and spend some time with him. And everyone's coming up to Lip Buteon, asking him what the future of Intel is. And so he goes up and offers to make him tea and makes his tea for him. And they sit down, and they have tea, and they like, and I think Dylan Patel really understands like tea culture and knows what makes for a good cup of tea in the same way that someone like a coffee snob knows about good coffee.

• 7:20Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 7:21John Coogan?

  So they have tea, and Dylan Patel's kind of picking his brain. And it just feels like Lip Buteon's overall goal is just layoffs, reduce costs, right the ship, refocus. And so what's interesting is that we talked to Ben Thompson, and I wanted a clear, I wanted a, I wanted a clear narrative. I wanted something like, oh, it's obvious. Just split the foundry and the design business, split up Intel into two companies, and that will solve all the problems. But everyone seems to agree it's more complicated than that because part of Intel's foundry business is that they design their own chips. And so they're both their customer and their supplier, and breaking those up might be more difficult. It's not a cure-all. It's not a panacea. And so it is more complicated.

• 8:05John Coogan?

  So there's not a super clear path forward. It's a lot of hard decisions. It's a lot of cuts to employees, and that's what we're seeing today with the 15% layoff. There will probably be more in the future as Intel continues to downsize the workforce.

• 8:17Jordi Hays?

  Really, really rough for morale, knowing that the workforce will just be, you know, continue to get cut into, you know, like you said, probably not the last.

• 8:27John Coogan?

  Yep. And so they are focusing on, the direct quote is, "Refocus strategy on the highly competitive market for AI chips, regaining market share in personal computer processors, and advancing the 14A technology." Now, the problem is that Intel is still more expensive than TSMC on a normalized per wafer basis. This comes from This comes from semi-analysis. So they have the Intel 3 node, the 18A, and that goes up against the N5, N3, and N2 nodes from TSMC. And across the board, Intel is more expensive on a per wafer basis. So this is at their own fabs. They're trying to catch up. They're

• 9:06John Coogan?

  trying to create chips that are that are as as powerful, but the name of the game is always cost.

• 9:13Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Yeah. Semi-analysis says the company has cost discipline in its DNA, talking about TSMC. Intel, not necessarily. This manifests in many ways. TSMC has more aggressive cost down targets and exercises its leverage on suppliers. It has not used the copy exact dogma that creates unnecessary overhead and resistance to improvements.

• 9:34John Coogan?

  Hence, Intel is now moving to copy smart. Are you familiar with the copy exact strategy?

• 9:38Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 9:39John Coogan?

  So when Intel built the original fabs, what they would do is they would build this, I mean, it is a incredibly precise process. So you can think of lithography is basically etching. That's why that company, that semiconductor company is called etched, because they, you're etching grooves in a silicon wafer. And that's where, when you put electricity through it, it goes through a series of gates, and that's what a semiconductor is.

• 10:04Jordi Hays?

  And that's how you create magic.

• 10:05John Coogan?

  That's how you create magic. Yes, it's the it's the spice. The dune analogy is the most important one here. But basically, you have to etch these grooves at as small, as small a scale as possible. So 3 nanometer silicon atoms are 1 nanometer. So you, in theory, cannot go smaller than 1 nanometer chip, because the space between the atoms is only 1 atom or 1 nanometer. So this is incredibly small. And so you basically have to shine like a laser or some sort of light or some sort of radiation to actually etch into the silicon to create the grooves, basically. This is very, very high level abstraction. But In order to do that, they get these they get these mirrors from a company called Trump,

• 10:48John Coogan?

  which is unrelated to Donald Trump, but and and Zeiss makes these lenses and they focus all this stuff and this liquid tin gets like, you know, dispersed and then they bounce light off of it. It's this crazy process. The mirrors are so flat that if you if you if you if you like blew them up to like the size of the moon, you would still would not be able to see a groove even this hot. It's like the most precise process in every single

• 11:13Jordi Hays?

  By the way, Intel missed opportunity to create the TPU. Google's obviously owning that right now, but if Intel had said, we're making Trump processors.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's back it.

• 11:25Jordi Hays?

  It's back, you know, I mean, they're already public.

• 11:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, what's the chip that's going to be in the Trump phone? The golden, the golden, American made phone. Should be an Intel processor.

• 11:35Jordi Hays?

  It really should.

• 11:36John Coogan?

  Who knows?

• 11:37Jordi Hays?

  American made.

• 11:37John Coogan?

  So the the semiconductor manufacturing process is so precise that apparently at TSMC, like if there's an earthquake or anything like that, everyone, they don't even need to send out a notification. Everyone just knows, go to TSMC because deal with everything because the slight change in like the road noise or slight could like miscalibrate the machines. If it like rains too much, there will be extra salt in the parking lot that will get tracked in. Even when they go into the clean room, it'll get tracked in and the small sodium particles will throw off the yield. So all of this is about yield. They'll make a ton of these wafers. There'll be small imperfections. It ruins the whole wafer. That's been a big problem with the wafer scale.

• 12:14Jordi Hays?

  Which is why TSMC getting any yield in Arizona despite setting up, you know, this new facility so recently.

• 12:22John Coogan?

  Was very unexpected. It's a miracle. Yes. And so the copy exact

• 12:25Jordi Hays?

  America.

• 12:26John Coogan?

  dogma was it is so hard to build a fab that manufactures semiconductors reliably at good yields that when Intel figured out how to make one fab, they said, let's make a second and let's change nothing. And so they build a building, they build the exact same foundation, they build the, the bathrooms would be in the same place. If there was two urinals in one bathroom, like there would be two urinals at the other one. Like, everything was exactly the same, copied exactly.

• 12:58Jordi Hays?

  Basically extremely superstitious.

• 12:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, basically, because they were like, anything that changes, like if the water flows through the pipe in the bathroom at the wrong flow rate, it might throw off the amount of molecules in the air over here, and the atoms over, it's like, it's crazy precise, right? And so that worked for Intel, but it had this problem, which was that every once in a while, you do want to make an iterative change when you're building the next fab, and you do want to increase yield by maybe not copying exactly and doing things slightly differently. And so now Intel's pivoting to copy smart, only copy what's actually improvement, instead of just copying everything exactly. And TSMC has never held themselves to that same standard. And so customers are likely baselining the 18A Intel node against N3,

• 13:42John Coogan?

  3 nanometer nodes at TSMC, given the characteristics. But Intel will have to be aggressive on pricing if they want to compete, because they are not competitive on the actual cost of the wafer. And so they would need lower margins if they want to compete. And so you can think about Intel as having kind of like three feature products that people are focused on. It's Intel 3, which is their 5 nanometer class. That one is fabbed in Arizona and Oregon and Ireland. These are at Intel facilities. Intel also has the Intel 18A, which is at the same sites plus Ohio, and this is competitive with the 2 nanometer

• 14:24John Coogan?

  class from TSMC. And then they have the 14A, which is supposed to be 1.4 nanometer or below. This is the most cutting edge, extreme ultraviolet, really, really aggressive lithography. And, and this is also made in America, which is great. And these will compete with Nvidia's Blackwells and then the next generation Blackwell successor. And so they're going head to head, but the real question will be, can they go head to head and still squeeze out a decent margin? Because the Nvidia TSMC partnership is really, really strong. They both have good margins and they've really optimized for cost and reliability and yield. And Intel has kind of lost a step there.

• 15:06John Coogan?

  And so they will probably need to get on linear to make this work. Linear is a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects and product roadmaps. So Lip Bhutan, if you need an intro to the folks over at Linear.

• 15:21Jordi Hays?

  Reach out, we will make it happen.

• 15:22John Coogan?

  Reach out and we'll figure it out. So.

• 15:27Jordi Hays?

  And Intel is of course down almost 10% today. Market is not loving much of anything happening over there right now.

• 15:37John Coogan?

  Yep. So semi-analysis continues saying, Intel, the home of Moore's Law. Gordon Moore, of course, worked at Intel and coined Moore's Law. The idea that the number of transistors will double every few years on a silicon chip, allowing for more compute power, basically at the same price. They are evaluating if it will continue at the leading edge. This is, this is what moves the stock, in my opinion, more than the 15% layoff. The layoff seems like reasonable downsiding, but deciding, hey, we're not even going to compete on the, on the most advanced semiconductors, which is what Elon, Google, Anthropic, Sam Altman, you know, every single company is like, give me all of the best and give me hundreds of thousands of the best.

• 16:20John Coogan?

  The rest of the stuff is like, okay, I'll go to anyone because I need a, you know, Wi-Fi chip in my toaster. So the quote from the 10Q, from Intel's 10Q is, however, we are unable to secure a significant external, if we are unable to secure a significant external customer and meet the important. Customer milestones for Intel 14A, we face the prospect that it will not be economical to develop and manufacture Intel 14A and successor leading edge nodes on a go forward basis. In such event, we may pause or discontinue our pursuit of Intel 14A and successor nodes and various of our manufacturing expansion projects.

• 17:01John Coogan?

  And semi-analysis says, just like that, we could be talking about a TSMC monopoly and the death of American made semiconductors forever. Very dark. Well, let's tell you about Restream. One livestream, 30 destinations, we couldn't do the show without it. Multi-stream and reach your audience wherever they are, you can sign up for free at Restream. So in other semiconductor news, there's a big debate going on around Etched. I reached out to the founder, I did an interview with him a while back, I'd love to have him on the show. He was Gavin Huberty. Etched is the basic high level pitch is we're taking the transformer architecture and we're baking it down in silicon.

• 17:44John Coogan?

  Semi-analysis has been taking some shots at the idea saying, hey, it's just marketing. But I feel like he has something else going on, some other strategy. Teal Fellow, very smart guy, very interesting, very nuanced take on AI. And a lot of his predictions have been right since I interviewed him a few years ago. And so I'd love to catch up with him and hear his rebuttal to this at least. But basically, Semi-Analysis makes a very detailed analysis saying that transformers are 90% matrix multiplications, you take a bunch of math, you multiply it together. So baking the transformer architecture into silicon doesn't actually get you that much. A different semiconductor analyst. Semi-analyst. A different semi-analyst.

• 18:28John Coogan?

  I don't know why they call them semi-analysts. I think that they're full-time analysts. Yeah. I don't think they're anything but semi. It's rude. It's very rude. To say that they're part-time. It's disrespectful. And they're clearly putting it all on the line. They're putting it all on the line for sure. So Sally Ward says, okay, I'll bite. Yes, making a transformer chip does mean making a large MatMole engine, but there's a lot more to efficient transformer inference than gems slash flops. You need to be able to feed and use those flops efficiently. Goes back and forth a bit, even takes a shot at them using GPGPU, which I guess is an industry term, and the Semi-Analysis team.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  Drops a very, very thorough post. You can just go read it, but they close. In regards to, by the way, no one in AI has used the term GPGPU since about 2020. That, that, this is not correct. Many chip architects definitely continue to refer to AMD, Nvidia, Intel, art class of software as GPGPU and differentiate from the Tranium TPU Gowdy style architecture and programming model. So a little bit of timeline in turmoil in this semi-analysis world, which I enjoy.

• 19:32Jordi Hays?

  By the way, uh, somebody, one of our early listeners, Wade Lloyd, bought TimelineInTurbowall.com and redirected it to TVPN. So thank you to Wade for doing that. It is a fantastic domain.

• 19:48John Coogan?

  But yeah, um, so big debate over how much more you can squeeze out of baking the transformer into silicon. There's also this interesting concept that the, the, which I didn't know. A lot of people think like attention is all you need is the paper that dropped. The transformer architecture isn't going anywhere. You're long transformers, but apparently according to semi-analysis, the transformer architecture moves in on the order of months and how, and the typical chip lifecycle is years. And so, yes, we're still using transformers, but the transformer is changing slightly. And so we don't have a new word for it, new buzzword, but there are changes that if you got really locked into V2 of the transformer architecture,

• 20:31John Coogan?

  then V3 might not be as advantageous. So, uh, big debate over the future of semiconductors. Intel will have to figure it out and see where they can play. Um, let's tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. They're IPO-ing next week, so.

• 20:48Jordi Hays?

  And Figma Make is publicly available.

• 20:51John Coogan?

  Go check it out.

• 20:52Jordi Hays?

  For free now. Check it out. Yep. In other news, Jared Isaacman, uh, who we know was Trump's initial pick for NASA administrator, uh, just took Secretary Duffy up in one of his personal fighter jets. So.

• 21:07John Coogan?

  This guy rocks.

• 21:08Jordi Hays?

  If you have a personal fighter jet and you can fly it yourself, I think, uh, I think you should have a good shot at becoming the NASA administrator. I think that kind of narrows the options down to probably one man. I don't know. I, we, we should figure out how many people on earth have their own jet. Fighter jet that they can actually fly.

• 21:28John Coogan?

  I wonder what.

• 21:29Jordi Hays?

  Can't be that many.

• 21:30John Coogan?

  I wonder what fighter jet this is. I know people used to buy MiG trainers and fly around in those and those are fighter jets. They were like decommissioned, easier to get, and I don't believe they were actually that expensive. I think they're cheaper than a Gulfstream and so.

• 21:44Jordi Hays?

  Well, the TAM of people that are gonna buy one and, and use it.

• 21:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:49Jordi Hays?

  Just very small.

• 21:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, very, very small. Obviously, high skill ceiling, but if you pull up in a jet, it's just incredible aura, incredible.

• 22:00Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the one that's gonna be, you know, the best personal jet will be the F-35. It's a little bit pricey, but being able to, you know, vertical takeoff, landing.

• 22:10John Coogan?

  Here's the video.

• 22:10Jordi Hays?

  Makes it much more.

• 22:11John Coogan?

  Pull this up.

• 22:13Jordi Hays?

  Useful.

• 22:15John Coogan?

  I wonder, yeah, we gotta figure out what, what, how much that thing costs. I've, I've long advocated for the president to recommission the SR-71 and, and use that as the Air Force one because going, I mean, this is the pitch for Hermes and Boom Supersonic.

• 22:30Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Michael Miraflo in the chat says that's a MiG-29.

• 22:33John Coogan?

  MiG-29, so it is a MiG trainer, um, which is like decommissioned, doesn't have weapons on it, I believe, but, uh, pretty, pretty amazing. But I, I think it's like a 20 million.

• 22:44Jordi Hays?

  He says it's the only Western-owned MiG-29.

• 22:46John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 22:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 22:47John Coogan?

  Okay, wow. Very, very cool. Well, thank you for the, for the details in the chat.

• 22:53Jordi Hays?

  MiG was, uh, apparently, uh, designed, uh, by, um.

• 22:59John Coogan?

  It was Russian.

• 23:00Jordi Hays?

  Yes, but this guy, um.

• 23:04John Coogan?

  John Miggs.

• 23:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm looking it up. Uh, it's Miko Yan, uh, which was headquartered in Moscow. And, uh, the, the designer, uh, creator was born in 1893 in Kursk, Russia, and died in the 70s.

• 23:22John Coogan?

  If you're, if you're accumulating military hardware for personal use, you've probably got some compliance needs. You gotta get on Vance, uh, automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Vance'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. Let's go to Donald Trump meeting with, uh, Powell at the Federal Reserve.

• 23:45Jordi Hays?

  Pull up the video.

• 23:46John Coogan?

  Tom says, LMAO, this is a comedy skit. I wanna watch this video. Let's play it.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  So we're taking a look and it looks like it's about 3.1 billion, one up a little bit.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  So the 2.7 is now 3.1.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  I'm not aware of that.

• 24:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, it just came out.

• 24:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I haven't heard that from anybody from Fed.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, it just came out.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  Arno said it about 3.1 as well.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  3.1.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  3.2. This came from us?

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Yes. I don't know who does that.

• 24:23Speaker 03

  You're including the Martin renovation.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  You just added in the third building is what that is. That's a third building.

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Well, no, but it's a building that's being built.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  No, it was built five years ago. We finished Martin five years ago.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  It's part of the overall.

• 24:42John Coogan?

  I think there was another one where he talks about like, now we have to lower rates because of this.

• 24:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, there's one where he says, I'd love, I'd love it. I'd love it if my buddy here would lower the rates. I love to see him in hard hats. Really shows that they're, you know, getting close to the metal.

• 25:01John Coogan?

  Yep, totally. Well, Donald Trump is doing deals, trying to bring more money into the United States. The news is that Japan is apparently committing $550 billion to the United States.

• 25:15Jordi Hays?

  To our sovereign wealth fund?

• 25:17John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. This is a crazy, crazy story.

• 25:20Jordi Hays?

  Very, very American to treat the sovereign wealth fund as just private.

• 25:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's amazing. I don't know if it was in the, was it in the Journal today? Oh, there's, there's the, no, I don't think, I don't think this one printed yet, but look at this costly overrun to renovate Fed's office fuels criticism. The Journal's so good at picking images. This image is so iconic.

• 25:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so in the Journal today, Trump's quest for his own sovereign fund gets $550 billion boost from Japan.

• 25:51John Coogan?

  We were talking about this earlier. Japan was like kind of not wanting to play ball on the tariffs for a while. There was a question.

• 25:56Jordi Hays?

  They're playing ball now.

• 25:57John Coogan?

  Now that they're doing deals.

• 25:59Jordi Hays?

  But already, I think there's some weird externalities as government intervention in free trade often has. So President Trump has long wanted a US sovereign wealth fund that would give him free rein to make big investments in key sectors. Japan could help him get the next best thing. As part of a trade deal reached this week, Japan agreed to invest 550 billion in projects across strategic US industries, including energy, semiconductor manufacturing, and shipbuilding. The White House said Trump would have final say over where the money goes. Deploying Capital, folks, it's effectively the GP of the

• 26:35John Coogan?

  Sovereign Wealth Fund.

• 26:36Jordi Hays?

  Sovereign Wealth Fund. New title. And the US would keep 90% of the profits on any investment.

• 26:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's like, instead of like 2 and 20, it's like a 0 and 90.

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 26:47John Coogan?

  I guess that's

• 26:48Jordi Hays?

  Sure, we're getting some fees off the top, too. I mean, we've got to have management fees. How else is Trump going to travel three months in Europe?

• 26:55John Coogan?

  All these tier one funds are like, oh, 2 and 20, no. We're a 4 and 40 shop. We're 3 and 30 shop. And they think they're so fancy.

• 27:03Jordi Hays?

  There's levels.

• 27:04John Coogan?

  There's levels to this, yeah. And you just got absolutely mugged by the President of the United States.

• 27:09Jordi Hays?

  90% carry.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  90% carry. Let's hear it for the United States, baby.

• 27:13Jordi Hays?

  I mean, this is going to inspire some hardworking allocators out there that are going to look at their fee structure and say, if I'm really a generational investor, should I really only be getting 20%?

• 27:25John Coogan?

  Also, imagine getting staffed on this as like a principal, or like an analyst or something. Because like

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, is the investment team going to get some points on this?

• 27:33John Coogan?

  I don't think so. I think, no matter what you do in the government, you're basically salary capped at like 200K. I don't think there's anyone in the government

• 27:41Jordi Hays?

  How are we going to get our best and brightest?

• 27:43John Coogan?

  I know. We got to uncapped the salary cap. Get some rising stars on Sand Hill Road.

• 27:50Jordi Hays?

  We need some VPs from everywhere, from, you know, Blackstone to Sequoia. I want Andrew Reid deploying the US Sovereign Wealth Fund.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  Poached.

• 27:58Jordi Hays?

  Poached.

• 27:59John Coogan?

  Benchmarks, hemorrhaging partners, put them on the team.

• 28:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, maybe Victor's going to the US Sovereign Wealth Fund.

• 28:06John Coogan?

  Maybe. That would be a big bombshell. I'd love to see it.

• 28:09Jordi Hays?

  One Trump official said the administration was thinking of an arrangement like a sovereign wealth fund that Japan is funding. I love that we're just like rebranding sovereign wealth funds. The money will take the form of equity loans and loan guarantees and come from the Japanese government, said Senator Bill Hagerty.

• 28:27John Coogan?

  Not private companies specifically. It's coming straight from the Japanese government, which I think is frustrating people in Japan. Although Hiro Noto, I don't know if this, he's using they, so it seems like he's not in Japan currently. Says it's greater than 10% of their GDP. They exported $150 billion to the US and assuming they just bore the extra cost of 15% extra, even that's 20 billion a year. So that is a huge, huge commitment. But I mean, I guess if they have a big balance sheet, like makes sense to put it to work somewhere.

• 28:59Jordi Hays?

  Howard Lutnick said this is literally the Japanese government giving Trump 550 billion and says, go fix whatever you need to fix.

• 29:08John Coogan?

  I love it.

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  One admin official gave a hypothetical example of how Japanese money could be deployed. The US could fund construction of a semiconductor facility for say Intel, then lease it to Intel and keep 90% of the leasing revenue.

• 29:22John Coogan?

  Well, if you're looking to fix your code review process, get on graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Anyway, let's continue with this. If the fund materializes, Trump envisions, a significant question, it would give an American president unprecedented power to steer money into the projects of his choosing, potentially with some significant impacts on particular industries. This is interesting because I feel like this story just broke and the reindustrialized crew isn't necessarily talking about it yet, but this feels extremely aligned with the whole reindustrialized movement, the idea of more US dollars. We saw this with the AI

• 30:03John Coogan?

  summit and the AI action plan. There's a lot of talks about positioning, but there wasn't that much actual new legislation or new funding that could. Specifically move a particular project forward, which I think would be more exciting. To be like, okay, like, you know, we're building a bridge, we're building a dam, we're building a nuclear reactor. We're building something like the US government hasn't really been in build mode for a long time. It feels like everything's kind of stalled and some of that's good because it's handled by the private sector.

• 30:34Jordi Hays?

  We had, we had the founder of Bright AI on yesterday who scaled to a hundred million dollar run rate or bootstrapped to a hundred million dollar run rate and then recently raised from cost law. He was saying a lot of US infrastructure was built during the World War II era with a 20 year, expected 20 year lifespan and obviously is still what we're relying on today. So.

• 30:57John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of the reindustrialized crew, they sent us this wonderful clock from Shinola, Detroit based company.

• 31:04Jordi Hays?

  Clocks are incredibly underrated.

• 31:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, clocks are fantastic. Thank you, guys. We really appreciate it.

• 31:09Jordi Hays?

  Thank you, Aaron and Austin.

• 31:10John Coogan?

  Very frustrated that we couldn't make it to reindustrialize. Seemed like an awesome time with all the absolute boys out there having a good time. I think we will have our remote workflow worked out and studio stuff worked out so that we can travel more in the near future. But it was fun having so many of the folks call in from reindustrialize, give us the updates from the ground and excited to do more of that. So. Who is this Christina Davis Harvard University Professor of Japanese Politics, who directs its program on US Japan relations said, where this one deviates is the step toward investing at the president's direction with the profits going to the US.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  It makes it sound coercive socialist and unprecedented in any sense of past trade negotiations. Now, the US has a mixed bag.

• 32:01Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, it makes sense that the president would be the chief capital allocator, the chief GP.

• 32:07John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. So.

• 32:08Jordi Hays?

  Commander in chief, GP in chief.

• 32:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, what's weird is that we've, we've talked a lot about how when the US government. Tries to pick a winner, it often doesn't go very well. The famous example, at least from Zero to One, Peter Thiel's book, is Solyndra. Are you familiar with this? So Solyndra was a clean energy startup.

• 32:30Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yes.

• 32:30John Coogan?

  That was a cylinder, like instead of just a flat photovoltaic panel, I believe it was like a cylinder. And the idea was like clean energy and they got this massive grant from the Obama administration and the company went bankrupt and it was a big mark on this idea of the government like picking winners and backing companies. And in Zero to One, Thiel kind of outlines this idea that like from first principles, you could tell that just mathematically, a circle didn't fill as much space as a square. And so you should have gone with a square solar panel.

• 33:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 33:05John Coogan?

  And so the business model was kind of flawed from day one and you could have figured that out if you'd just done the basic math of, you know, how energy dense is a circle versus a square? If you're packing them in, pack a bunch of circles in, there's going to be a bunch of extra space. I think that's basically what happened. Maybe I'm collapsing it a little bit, but I have not, I'm not a huge fan of the government picking winners. I like the Tesla model a little bit more where there was just this EV tax credit and anyone could have gone after it. And then Tesla just dominated it and won it and then.

• 33:39Jordi Hays?

  Well, even in China, China effectively encourages massive competition and then kind of waits for there to be a breakout winner.

• 33:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 33:48Jordi Hays?

  And that creates a talent vortex and then the state, then the state is effectively saying, starting to like really back it in a meaningful way.

• 33:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's very like.

• 33:57Jordi Hays?

  But they didn't necessarily pick the winner.

• 33:58John Coogan?

  Exactly. It's somehow more capitalist and that's what, and that's what this Harvard professor is kind of taking shots at, saying like, it's pretty socialist to be picking winners. And. In a weird world, like China's policies tend to be more capitalist in some ways. Like, they are doing a lot of investing in technologies and putting government and, I guess, taxpayer funds into strategic technologies and subsidizing whole industries. Like, their chip manufacturing, their supply chain for semiconductors has been lagging. For like 50 years, they've been not competitive. But the Chinese government has just been like, "Well, there's still an incentive to make semiconductors here. There's still an incentive to make semiconductors here."

• 34:43John Coogan?

  Who's gonna do it? Who's gonna do it? And it's one company, and then it's SMIC, and then it's me, and then Huawei's getting stuff. And it should be the same thing with electric cars in America. Tesla got a benefit. Rivian also got a benefit. Lucid got a benefit. And even when BMW went over into electric cars, they got a benefit. And now those benefits are pulling back, and we can go into what's happening with Tesla's stock, but...

• 35:05Jordi Hays?

  Well, to put the 550 billion number in some context, American tourists spent just under $6 billion, or $6 billion in tourism in Japan last year.

• 35:19John Coogan?

  Okay. So they'll earn it back in 100 years. 100 years of tourism, and they get it back. But, no, I mean, the thing is that this is not them giving us the money. Like, they should earn a return. I would be surprised if these infrastructure investments don't pay off.

• 35:32Jordi Hays?

  It's gonna be hard to beat the market if you're getting 10% of the upside.

• 35:39John Coogan?

  I mean, if you collapse it down, you know, you're basically treating Trump as a solo GP, and you have to look at his historical IRR, and he's gone bankrupt a few times. But I think overall, he's not just zeroing everything, right? Some of the stuff's ripping. I bet on average, he's preserving capital, if not returning multiples of it. And so, you know, you think about a scale of, okay, there's gonna be a new semiconductor plant in Arizona, and Japan's gonna come in and underwrite $100 billion of, you know, development and some massive, probably debt deal or something, and they're gonna earn some sort of return. The chance that they don't get anything back is pretty low, I think.

• 36:24John Coogan?

  I don't think this is money going into a pit and burning. You're here a little bit.

• 36:30Jordi Hays?

  I'm a little worried. I mean, I mean, the example was the money goes into a, let's say, a semiconductor manufacturing facility.

• 36:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 36:40Jordi Hays?

  And then Intel would pay the US government to lease it and the US government would keep 90% of that. It's going to be hard to, you will be losing money if you factor in inflation.

• 36:55John Coogan?

  Maybe. I, I mean, I, the way I, the way I see a deal happening is, is I'm going to go, I need a hundred billion dollars to go build a bunch of nuclear power plants. I go to Trump or the US government and say, I need a hundred billion dollars. And they're like, great. Take 20 billion in equity, take 80 billion in debt. And then there's, you know, an interest rate, a coupon rate attached to that debt. And then the equity has some sort of value. And hopefully the plan works out so that there's a multiple return on the equity. And there's a, you know, an interest rate that, and like you blend the IRRs and you're getting to like, I don't know, five, 10% across everything. And then yes, the

• 37:35John Coogan?

  US is taking 90% of that, but you are still preserving your capital. Like it, like the, the idea that it's like instantly a zero is probably hopefully avoidable, right?

• 37:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm not saying a zero.

• 37:49John Coogan?

  They'd have to do a lot of deals, but if they have a portfolio, you know, you would, you would assume that the portfolio broadly does okay.

• 37:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It's possible that Ashiba, the, the president of the prime minister of Japan is just so AGI pilled, he's, and is such a firm believer that America is going to win the AI race that he's just says, yep, take it, Mr. Trump, you got it from here.

• 38:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, it could be seen as a, like, are you comping it against buying treasuries? Because that's just a way to like index to the dollar. If your, if your currency is in decline, like at least at the end of that term, you've got 3%, 5% continuously.

• 38:27Jordi Hays?

  That'd be really funny if Trump just takes the 550 billion and buys T-bills.

• 38:29John Coogan?

  To lower the rate, to bring down the yield curve. Just wants to bring down, it's he's obsessed with the yield curve.

• 38:34Jordi Hays?

  Market buying, market buying T-bills and taking 9%. Sorry, sorry, 90% of the yield. Anyways, lots of fun.

• 38:42John Coogan?

  Asset management is the greatest business, AUM maxing.

• 38:45Jordi Hays?

  Yep, Jeremy Giffon called it.

• 38:47John Coogan?

  So, let's keep going with this.

• 38:49Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 38:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's a little more in here that I want to go through. So, the plan has raised more questions than answers on Wall Street and beyond. Details remain unclear, including whether Japan will have any discretion over projects in the time period during which the investments will be made. Hagerty said the investment will be overseen by two Japanese-backed administrators, Japan Bank and Nippon Export. One administration official said the funds would likely arrive only as needed, so you make capital calls when you need to. As you know, these deals have been agreed in principle, but they have not been fully papered yet. In selecting investments, this is where it gets interesting, Trump would have help from the Commerce Department's US Investment Accelerator,

• 39:28John Coogan?

  headed by former Morgan Stanley investment banker Michael Grimes and polytechnic alum. I went to the same school as this guy, absolute beast. He took Facebook public. He has a massive row. He's like the kingmaker.

• 39:44Jordi Hays?

  The deal toy, final boss?

• 39:46John Coogan?

  Deal toy, final boss. You walk into his office and it's just, there's no room to put down a coffee because there's just a deal toy on every single surface. It's insane. Absolute beast.

• 39:55Jordi Hays?

  The dream.

• 39:55John Coogan?

  One of the greatest to ever do it. His team will help identify investments and make sure the funds are used properly and expeditiously. People familiar with the matter said, the size of the commitment dwarfs most investment funds. It's more than twice the size of Japan's gross foreign direct investment in the US last year. And so, we can't really evaluate the agreement because it's so vague at this stage. There's a lot of vague deals happening right now. The AI action plan is kind of in that territory now. But, you know, we still are only six months into this administration. Maybe all of this crystallizes. And then they comp it to Stargate, which was unveiled at the White House in January, involved a commitment from OpenAI. This apparently already been scaled back, unclear exactly what that means.

• 40:38John Coogan?

  And so, there was also an EO from Trump in February, directing his team to develop a plan for an establishment of a sovereign wealth fund within 90 days. This is the start of that, so. Anyway, get on numeralhq.com, sales tax on autopilot, spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Let's go to Avalanche Energy.

• 41:00Jordi Hays?

  Avalanche was awarded a $10 million grant from Washington, the state, to develop fusion force neutron factory. This marks small-scale fusion's evolution from a laboratory curiosity into a neutron source that creates real-world value, from Robin Langtry, the CEO of Avalanche.

• 41:19John Coogan?

  We've had him on the show, great guy. I've toured his facility with Ben up in Washington. We had a lot of fun. Extremely hard project, small-scale fusion. Fusion is still not fully commercialized. Small-scale fusion is, in some ways, easier because you're making something smaller, but also still untested. Lots of work to be done, but great to see that they have more money to develop more technology. So, congrats.

• 41:43Jordi Hays?

  Love to see Washington State.

• 41:46John Coogan?

  They've been really, it's, yeah, it feels like Washington's been kind of under the radar as being like very hard tech friendly. Like, he's had a pretty, like, he set up a whole facility over there by the Sea-Tac Airport and seems to be able to do stuff. Although, he's not working with radiation because he's not doing fission, he's doing fusion. And so, his, his like, power sources are like, he needs like hydrogen or something, or, you know, it's like, it's like pretty inert gases that aren't that big of a deal.

• 42:12Jordi Hays?

  He should, he should talk to Trevor from Nikola's brother, the man.

• 42:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:20Jordi Hays?

  The head of, head of hydrogen.

• 42:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, you want to be taking, taking advantage of this 80% energy gains.

• 42:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they're making it for 80% less than anyone else in the known universe.

• 42:31John Coogan?

  Anyway, fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs, number one ranking on G2.

• 42:39Jordi Hays?

  Say it again, don't get in a bake-off with FinAI.

• 42:43John Coogan?

  Don't do it.

• 42:43Jordi Hays?

  If you, if you enjoy winning.

• 42:44John Coogan?

  Don't do it, anyway.

• 42:45Jordi Hays?

  Great post here from Antonio Garcia Martinez.

• 42:50John Coogan?

  He's coming on the show next week, by the way.

• 42:52Jordi Hays?

  "The 80s were the apex of American civilization, and today is a sad day. His memory will be a blessing."

• 42:59John Coogan?

  Yes, we mentioned.

• 43:00Jordi Hays?

  Talking about Hulk Hogan. Let's play this video, if we can.

• 43:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, pull up that video and I will read from the Wall Street Journal. Hulk Hogan is gone, but still everywhere. He may not have been a traditional athlete, but the late pro wrestler's influence in sports and the culture at large was pervasive.

• 43:18John Coogan?

  So, um, I'm not sure where to put, this is from Jason Gay in the sports section of the Wall Street Journal. Jason says, "I'm not sure where to put Hulk Hogan in the history of sports, or whether to put him in there at all. Hogan, who died Thursday at age 71, could pull off exceptional athletic feats with his massive sculpted six-foot-eight body." We got some misinformation yesterday where we were quoting him at six-foot-seven. Six-seven. Seems like he's my height exactly. Um, "Still, a professional wrestler's trade is," spoiler alert, "entertainment, not pure competition, and yet it's impossible not to recognize wrestling's evolution from regional circus to widespread cultural force."

• 44:03John Coogan?

  It is crazy that pro wrestling started as just like a traveling circus, like just a bunch of dudes coming into town and being like, "You want to see us fight?" It's so funny. Today, this is an accepted, well-trodden observation. "Sports, politics, and daily life are closer atmospherically to the wrestling ring than ever before." Uh, this is the idea of kayfabe in politics, the idea of people being in on the joke. They know that people are just saying things to rile up the other side. They're entertaining. We see this in journalism and media. We see it in tech. We see it all over the place. And Jason here in the Wall Street Journal is drawing more analogies from that. Uh, "We become a nation

• 44:44John Coogan?

  of noisy confrontationalists. The skillful soft touch replaced by the swing of the folding chair. Reason is routinely drowned out by the loudest voices in the room. Wrestling strips life's complications down to primal conflicts, and few wrestlers embody this approach as famously and forebodingly as Hulk Hogan. I'm not a wrestling obsessive. I've been a couple times. That's it. I still need to look up the correct spelling for Bruno Somartino. Uh, but I know enough to know Hogan, born Terry Bolea, was a transformative figure, one of the most larger-than-life characters in a larger-than-life universe." And I think we have the video ready to pull up. It's not a video. Oh, it's not. It's just an image.

• 45:29Jordi Hays?

  I think it's just a picture.

• 45:30John Coogan?

  It's just a picture from AGM. Well, we, well, we did, uh, we did play the Hulk Hogan, uh, calling, um, calling out someone else. I forget, in one of those like pre-show, uh, reels on the last show. So you can go check that out if you want. Anyway, uh... He says, "A true brand name Hogan over time refashioned himself as a heel to hero to heel and everything in between." So we went back and forth. I think the actual wrestling term is a face. A face is someone that everyone loves. A heel is someone that everyone cheers to lose. But they both play, they both play the role and there's a lot of interesting like fourth wall breaking, all sorts of stuff going on. He had too many comebacks, collapses and professional detours to count. At one point he went and did movies and he came back and everyone was saying,

• 46:16John Coogan?

  "He's Hollywood Hogan. He's gone to Hollywood. He's sold out. He doesn't represent us." And so that was like a whole character that he played up. Hollywood Hogan. He's too good for the, for the, you know, the mainstream wrestling fan and everyone loved that. There we go. We got some video of Hogan running around with an American flag. You love to see it.

• 46:34Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting, over time, his character seemed to merge with Terry. Terry Balaia, the, the human and Hulk just became the same person.

• 46:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. I was talking to Rob about this. There's, this is idea just generally in media about, um, like you play this character when you're on camera, but you want to be authentic, but you don't want the, the attacks on your character to ruin your personal life. You don't want to lose yourself in the sauce. It's all very, it's all very complicated, modern. It's very, very bizarre. Celebrated and repeatedly scandalized, swapping places as poster boy and pariah, fired for getting caught on tape using racist slurs, a strange protagonist at a media crusade, and even a convention speaker. Yeah, he spoke at the most recent RNC convention where he ripped

• 47:30John Coogan?

  off his shirt in, in support of Donald Trump. He was controversial and omnipresent through the end. He exploded on the scene in the early 1980s, a lot of people's first exposure when they came, when they, when, uh, came when he appeared in the ring as Thunder Lips, the ultimate male against Rocky Balboa in Rocky III, tossing rock like a rag doll as a horrified Mickey and Adrian recoiled. Going to Hollywood cost Balaia his job in the then WWF. They didn't want him to do it. But Hulkamania only grew and he returned. The fever reached the point he landed on the cover of Sports Illustrated in April of 1985.

• 48:11John Coogan?

  Biceps flexed, hands clawed, a fictional barbarian at the gate. Traditionalists-

• 48:17Jordi Hays?

  Pull up this post from Luke Metro.

• 48:19John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Traditionalists howled, "Pro wrestling wasn't real sports. How could the Hulkster enter the same cathedral as Kofax, Ali, and Abdul Jabbar? I admit to harboring the same feelings when I see pro wrestling events treated seriously by major sports outlets. Why are we doing this? Why?" Yet wrestling's reach is indisputable and Hogan's timing in its ascension was impeccable. He hitched his career to its leap from localized products to global force. A handsome blonde agent of Vince McMahon's aggressive growth strategy and a media ecosystem that cultivated better than most. Hulk understood a very old fashioned wrestling concept. To be seen, it's better to be outrageous.

• 49:03John Coogan?

  To be heard, you need to be loud. If you, if it earns you love, great, but even if you are hated, you are still noticed. Great lesson there. So what did Luke Metro say?

• 49:14Jordi Hays?

  Says, "You watch the earth, I'll watch the sky, brother."

• 49:17John Coogan?

  What a great post.

• 49:18Jordi Hays?

  And of course, referencing the Gawker takedown where these two-

• 49:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, linked in such an odd way, such different characters and yet linked both in the support of Donald Trump at various points on the conservative politics world and also with a mutual distaste for Gawker and their salacious reporting. Absolutely insane. This kind of intentional performance, what wrestlers call a work, is routine in sports. Common is the athlete who arrives on the scene and makes noise to get attention, make a name and make money. It's pervasive in every profession now. The media used to be a necessary partner, but now the digital tools exist to do it on one's own. Influencers, business antagonists, media flamethrowers, and the performative fray of social media.

• 50:10John Coogan?

  The exhausting, not very real, reality programming on television. There's a bit of wrestling in all of it. I'm sure, I'm not sure the tools exist-

• 50:18Jordi Hays?

  How much, how much do you think the combined entity that includes WWE and UFC is worth in the public markets today?

• 50:27John Coogan?

  I would say like- Four billion dollars.

• 50:31Jordi Hays?

  Close.

• 50:31John Coogan?

  How much?

• 50:32Jordi Hays?

  Thirty-three billion.

• 50:33John Coogan?

  Well, not close at all, dude. I was off by an order of magnitude. Wow.

• 50:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 50:38John Coogan?

  That's a beast.

• 50:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it also includes IMG, the sports talent management.

• 50:44John Coogan?

  Isn't that a modeling agency too?

• 50:46Jordi Hays?

  I think they have a modeling division, but it's primarily sports talent. They also own PBR, the premier bull riding.

• 50:52John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 50:53Jordi Hays?

  We gotta, we gotta sponsor, we gotta get a TVP and bull riding athlete.

• 50:56John Coogan?

  I'm a huge JB Moni fan, one of the greatest to ever do it. He's one of the most legendary bull riders. I know all about him. Recently injured, very sad, but the bull that retired him by breaking his back, he now owns and affectionately takes care for, and they are now friends. Beautiful story. I'm not sure the tools exist to turn the clock back. The appetite exists for relief, but I don't know if there's room anymore for subtlety, context, or even expertise. The algorithms reward volume and so does the culture. The rest of us are caught in the noise. Hulk Hogan has departed, but he remains among us. What a wonderful obituary. Tell me about UFC and how this.

• 51:36Jordi Hays?

  It is, it is incredible that so many, it says something about the character that Terry played in Hulk Hogan, that he could have these glowing obituaries despite having so many, you know, terror, you know, sort of terrible moments, whether it was when that, he made some, some terrible comments on recording at one point and to still to get this.

• 52:06Jordi Hays?

  Again, referencing what I said earlier is like, who is the man, who is the man? Is it Terry? Is it, is it Hulk Hogan? Are they, are they the same, are they the same thing?

• 52:15John Coogan?

  I watched a, I watched a hilarious interview with him in maybe GQ or something where they go in his house, they see his supplement stack. And he said that during this time when he was fighting, this is insane, he, he would, he was like, what was, they were like, what was your diet? What were you on? He was like, well, I'd wake up and I'd have beer and two Tylenols. And then, and then like after the fight, I'd have six beers and two more Tylenol, something like that. And I remember you asked me one day, you were like, oh, I got like aches. I'm not feeling well. And I was like, you gotta take Tylenol. And you were, and you were.

• 52:48Jordi Hays?

  Why didn't you recommend beer?

• 52:50John Coogan?

  I should have recommended beer, but I remember you, I remember you asked me like, okay, John, like, I know you're like, really like nerdy about all this stuff. Like, you probably have some like, really solid rationale for like, why Tylenol is like, the correct painkiller to take. And my entire rationale was just like, it was good enough for Hulk Hogan. But in this, in this video, they're asking him all these questions, they're doing the rapid fire questions. And, uh, and they ask him like, Hulk Hogan, if you could fight anyone, alive or dead, who would you fight? And he just says, Bill Clinton. It's like, I have no idea what he's thinking. It's just like, and they just move on to the next one. It's like, why is he, he holds some grudge, I assume for political reasons or something, but, uh, it was just a wild thing to say, very entertaining. But on the note of entertainment, I want your reaction to this specific.

• 53:34Jordi Hays?

  That seems a little more tan than you'd, than you'd want to go for.

• 53:37John Coogan?

  A little too tan. I think that's probably the camera adding some color correction or something. It seems like the exposure on the camera was a little low that day, but he is very tan. Uh, because here, look, look at this picture in the Wall Street Journal. It's the same photo, and it's much, it's a much more normal tan. But he is, he is very, I don't know if he's Italian, but he is, he is very tan. Um, so I want your, I want you to explain to me about how this relates to UFC. Uh, in this article, they say, common is the athlete who arrives on the scene and makes noise to get attention, make a name and make money. It's pervasive in every profession now. Uh, how does getting attention work in UFC? You mentioned that Conor McGregor was particularly good at like, trash talking, and that allowed him to be more successful than some of the modern UFC

• 54:21John Coogan?

  fighters. But how does that dynamic work? Because I feel like UFC is not fake, like, like, like wrestling, it is very real. And so why don't, why is it that the points aren't all that matters? Or I guess there aren't points in UFC, but like the wins, the knockouts. If I come in, I should be able to be entirely silent and win, and I should still be comped the same, but that's not how it works in UFC. Explain it.

• 54:42Jordi Hays?

  So, yeah, so Conor McGregor had, uh, had, had arguably had the gift of gab, uh, yet he backed it up with a series of wins that elevated him to superstar status, right? You can't just be a yapper, but there were some iconic moments where he would, uh, I believe, um, uh, I'm forgetting the guy's name, but when he was fighting the, um, Brazilian champion, he basically called exactly how he was gonna knock the guy out like the day before.

• 55:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  And there was these moments that just like launched him into superstar status. Since then, you've had people like Ilya Topuria, who are probably more talented, better all-around fighters, more consistent. And it's interesting because Ilya Topuria, the main critique early on was that he was just like a, just copying Conor McGregor. He wasn't his own man. He would use Conor McGregor like lines. He got a tattoo that's almost exactly like Conor's on his back. But overall, like UFC, people, like hardcore fans will be frustrated because they'll say, oh, this is just like wrestling, like he shouldn't be getting the fight. This is just like pro wrestling.

• 55:59Jordi Hays?

  It's like, you realize the companies are owned by the same group? Like it's, it's all, it's an entertainment company, right?

• 56:05John Coogan?

  Wait, oh, wrestling and UFC are both owned by the same company?

• 56:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's what I'm saying. The $33 billion public company called TKO.

• 56:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:13Jordi Hays?

  It's all entertainment. It's an entertainment company.

• 56:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 56:16Jordi Hays?

  Entertainment disguised as sport.

• 56:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 56:19Jordi Hays?

  Obviously, the athletes in UFC are incredible, but, you know, over and over, you've seen the best-paid fighters are, end up being oftentimes the most entertaining.

• 56:29John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 56:30Jordi Hays?

  The Russian fighters like Khabib were historically very humble and very quiet.

• 56:37John Coogan?

  Less entertaining.

• 56:38Jordi Hays?

  And, but they were so dominant, like Islam is so dominant, he can be humble and still draw attention.

• 56:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 56:47Jordi Hays?

  But nothing like, nothing like Conor did in his prime, right?

• 56:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, I remember Conor's swag walk is like iconic.

• 56:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 56:53John Coogan?

  There's a lot of things that are...

• 56:54Jordi Hays?

  So, and then you have people like Patty the Batty from the UK, who's a loudmouth, very entertaining in a bunch of different ways. He, he swells up, he gains like seemingly 50 pounds in between fights.

• 57:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, when I saw him for the first time, I was like, that does not look like a fighter. That looks like a musician or something. It's fantastic.

• 57:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm gonna look at the, the pound-for-pound rankings right now on UFC, if I can pull this up.

• 57:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's interesting because that, that hasn't really, I feel like that hasn't really happened in the NFL for some reason, like, because the, the Super Bowl is not decided based on any qualitative factors whatsoever.

• 57:33John Coogan?

  It's purely stats, I believe. There's no voting at all. College football used to be that way.

• 57:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the UFC is trying to make fights that will sell pay-per-views, right?

• 57:41John Coogan?

  Yes, exactly.

• 57:42Jordi Hays?

  And so they will elevate somebody. I mean, this was, um, uh, this is the critique of Sean O'Malley, right? Uh, another guy with, uh, very bright, uh, bright hair. He posts TikToks of himself, you know, smoking weed and stuff like that. Um, and then, uh, has been put in his place, uh, fairly recently. But again, he, they, they would call it Dana White privilege, right? So it's like a fighter who's entertaining, loud enough, uh, enough of a draw. Um, but if you look at the pound for pound rankings, there's some guys on there that, uh, uh, uh, over time, the pound for pound ranking tends to reflect

• 58:24Jordi Hays?

  somebody's actual athletic abilities. You have Ilya Islam Marab, Tom Aspinall, and Andre, uh, Alexandre Pantoja, who are all, uh, ultimately just incredible athletes.

• 58:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 58:39Jordi Hays?

  Um, and, uh, a lot of the loud mouths will end up getting paid quite well.

• 58:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 58:43Jordi Hays?

  But they're not necessarily getting on that, uh, pound for pound ranking.

• 58:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. There is a little bit of a dynamic of that in, in traditional professional sports where I believe, like, the MLB is basically hoping for Dodgers, Yankees in the World Series, like, every single time, because the Dodgers and the Yankees have, like, the biggest fan bases. So broadly, there will be more people tuning into that than, say, two, uh, two teams facing off from second and third tier cities. But there's no world where, you know, oh, going into the Super Bowl, you know, there's really, like, you know, a lot of trash talking going on, but like...

• 59:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's just looked down on. There, there's an interesting story. Colby, Colby Covington,

• 59:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 59:22Jordi Hays?

  Uh, who, uh, has fought for a championship, I think, a couple of times, never won. He was at a point in the UFC where he was facing getting cut. He was just not really doing that well.

• 59:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 59:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and he decided to basically completely... Rebrand himself as a heel and just say the most offensive possible things he could say. He came out loudly in support of Trump.

• 59:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 59:46Jordi Hays?

  Uh, when that was much, uh, much less popular. He would post videos of himself with like seemingly only fans, uh, creators, uh, uh, adult entertainers and it totally actually turned around his career and he ended up, um, again, he didn't actually fight and win, uh, uh, didn't win any titles, um, and probably never will, but, uh, it, it definitely turned his career around.

• 1:00:11John Coogan?

  Well, if you're looking to talk some trash to about your competitors, when you're selling your product, you gotta do it in Adio, custom relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level.

• 1:00:25Jordi Hays?

  Not endorsed, uh, not endorsed by Adio, but endorsed by John at this moment. Turn, turn, you know, your CRM should look like WWE, right?

• 1:00:34John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:00:35Jordi Hays?

  You should be really getting into it with people.

• 1:00:37John Coogan?

  You're using our competitor. Take a look at this deal card and tell me you don't want to switch right now. Uh, yeah. Channel Hulk Hogan in your next, uh, BBR meeting. Uh, Sheel has a good post here announcing some news. Tesla is telling staff internally that it plans to roll out its robot taxi service in San Francisco this weekend and they'll include Marin, much of the East Bay and San Francisco and stretch to South, uh, to stretch south to San Jose. This will be crazy if it, uh, if it goes through this weekend. I mean, it's going to come soon. Uh, will be very interesting to see because I imagine that driving in San Francisco is a little bit harder than driving in Austin, but there's

• 1:01:19John Coogan?

  a ton of people that have Teslas and have been driving around San Francisco for a decade or more now with cameras. So they should have a lot of data. They should be trained.

• 1:01:27Jordi Hays?

  I think the robot taxis will be fine. Uh, if the, if, if the robot taxis were a Tesla humanoid driving stick shift, they'd have a really rough time in San Francisco. You ever driven stick in San Francisco?

• 1:01:39John Coogan?

  No, but it is extremely hard on the hills. I maybe once I, yeah, I think I actually once did it. It's really bad.

• 1:01:44Jordi Hays?

  My first car, Toyota, 20 year old Toyota stick shift. And I would drive it into San Francisco. And it was already at a time where people were just assumed everybody was in an automatic. And so you'd pull up on just like the most steep hill and somebody would come up. You know, right behind you, park, you know, an inch away from you and it's very exhilarating. So I think they'll do fine. It will be interesting though, like, you know, are the car, are the robotaxis going to be like followed by another car?

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

  We'll probably have safety drivers in them for a while.

• 1:02:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:19John Coogan?

  Right? And, and they'll probably be teleoperated for a while. The, the, the question I think is just like, will we see memes on acts of people switching? Because we've seen a lot of people in San Francisco post, I think, what is it? Justine Moore from Andreessen Horowitz said that she hit her like 500th Waymo ride. Like people truly just use Waymo constantly. And they've really shifted from Uber to Waymo. And so will they shift again to Tesla? Will they be dual using? Will one be cheaper? Will it be a price war, capital war? What's going to happen there? Finally, they're going to head to head. So it'll be interesting to follow. Well, no matter what you think of Tesla, whether you're long or you're short, do it on public.com.

• 1:03:01John Coogan?

  Investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, industry-leading yields, and they're trusted by millions, folks. In other news, if you're not looking to take a robotaxi, I would recommend picking up this 2025 Ferrari SF90XX.

• 1:03:16Jordi Hays?

  Great call.

• 1:03:17John Coogan?

  It's $2.3 million. It's a stunning example here, loaded with over $100,000 in options. And everyone will know that you are not just rich, but wealthy because this car is probably going to depreciate like crazy.

• 1:03:32Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. How many of these are they? How many of the XX are they making?

• 1:03:36John Coogan?

  Well, the, the original SF90 priced at 700, $800,000, but it was not a limited production run. And so it has traded down to about half that price. Very unfortunate for the SF 90 buyers in the audience. Our, our hearts go out to you after taking such a bath, but you can make it all back on an SF 90 XX.

• 1:03:58Jordi Hays?

  I love the XX. I gotta say.

• 1:04:00John Coogan?

  Now, what, what is the, is the XX a, a, a street legal car? I, I, they, they do this weird thing where they make a road car, then they make it a track car. And then they make the track car a road car version. And we've gone kind of back and forth and back and forth. But I think this is the road, the road version of the track car version of the road car. Is that right? I think I'm right.

• 1:04:19Jordi Hays?

  I think you're right. The chat, the chat will correct, correct us quickly.

• 1:04:22John Coogan?

  I'm pretty sure the SF, I'm pretty sure the XX series is, is they took it, they put it, they got it ready for the track. And then they dialed it back to where it was street legal again. Anyway, you gotta pick this up, folks. It's a, it's a steal.

• 1:04:34Jordi Hays?

  John Exley in the chat says, just got a notification from the FT. Anthropic is reportedly raising capital from the Middle East at a valuation north of 150 billion.

• 1:04:45John Coogan?

  150, wow.

• 1:04:49John Coogan?

  That is wild.

• 1:04:50Jordi Hays?

  Love to see it.

• 1:04:51John Coogan?

  But I'm sure.

• 1:04:52Jordi Hays?

  Seems like every company in the world is using Claude code.

• 1:04:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:56Jordi Hays?

  Maybe even OpenAI.

• 1:04:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:58Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it's just that good. Yep. So the article went up 11 minutes ago. Artificial intelligence startup Anthropics is in early talks. Okay. Not advanced talks.

• 1:05:07John Coogan?

  Early talks.

• 1:05:08Jordi Hays?

  No term sheet yet. Uh, at more than double its valuation to more than 150 billion in a new funding round, giving it additional firepower to keep pace with rival, rivals, building advanced models.

• 1:05:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:05:20Jordi Hays?

  It's preliminary stages, uh, has received interest, uh, which was a massive jump from their current $61 billion price tag. Um, so it sounds like they're talking with, uh, MGX, Abu Dhabi's, uh, AI fund. Um, and again, coming off, um, coming off that nice memo that they had, uh, that leaked earlier this week saying, uh, saying something to the effect of. Bad, he basically said, bad.

• 1:05:51John Coogan?

  They're bad.

• 1:05:51Jordi Hays?

  Bad people are gonna make money on this.

• 1:05:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he said, unfortunately, I think no bad person should ever benefit from our success is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on.

• 1:06:04John Coogan?

  That's the worst quote. The quote you should drop is, I can change him. I can change him.

• 1:06:08Jordi Hays?

  I can fix that.

• 1:06:09John Coogan?

  Wait until, wait until he, if I don't, if he's doing something bad over there, wait until he starts talking to Claude. And he's like, yeah, maybe I should be nicer. Maybe I should just get into the Golden Gate Bridge. Have him chat with Golden Gate Bridge Claude for a while. Cheer him up. And whoever he, whoever Dario is worried about, get him on the straight and narrow.

• 1:06:26Jordi Hays?

  It's just so funny because it's like, how much, how much, uh, how, how much does Anthropic rely on sovereign investment from the Middle East already for their business?

• 1:06:40John Coogan?

  Oh, just through the VCs?

• 1:06:41Jordi Hays?

  Just through all life, right?

• 1:06:45Jordi Hays?

  All life, right? They're a key player in the global economy.

• 1:06:50John Coogan?

  Dario Hobson, Uber.

• 1:06:50Jordi Hays?

  And it's just, I mean, it's, I mean, I've, uh, been, uh, been to the, to the UAE twice and met so many, uh, so many amazing people and share.

• 1:07:05John Coogan?

  I've never been to the UAE. I've been to Qatar and it was cool.

• 1:07:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:09John Coogan?

  And other than that, I don't think I've been to anywhere in the Middle East. Maybe I should go. I don't know. Need to do a world tour.

• 1:07:15Jordi Hays?

  I met, uh, I met a buddy of mine, a now, now friend, when I met him, he showed me he had his, uh, formal, um, formal wear on. And he got it custom made to have a-

• 1:07:28John Coogan?

  I'm like you, casual Friday over here.

• 1:07:30Jordi Hays?

  Casual Friday over here. Sorry, folks. Sorry, folks.

• 1:07:34Jordi Hays?

  And he had a, a custom insert for his vape and then extra cartridges at the side.

• 1:07:40John Coogan?

  That's pretty sick. Who's that, who's that designer that does extra pockets everywhere? That's like a thing? Is that, is that?

• 1:07:48Jordi Hays?

  I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna name him. They're a friend. They're a friend. Accidental pockets.

• 1:07:55John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:07:56Jordi Hays?

  Just throw a pocket on it.

• 1:07:56John Coogan?

  So, so these are not advanced talks? These are early talks?

• 1:08:00Jordi Hays?

  Early talks, preliminary talks.

• 1:08:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, preliminary talks.

• 1:08:03Jordi Hays?

  But they are talking terms.

• 1:08:04John Coogan?

  Cause there are other preliminary talks going on between us and AdQuick for their next billboard buy.

• 1:08:11Jordi Hays?

  There are.

• 1:08:11John Coogan?

  You could be in advanced talks with AdQuick.

• 1:08:13Jordi Hays?

  We are in.

• 1:08:14John Coogan?

  If you're interested in making out of home advertising easy and measurable, you can say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising. Because only AdQuick combines technology, out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe.

• 1:08:25Jordi Hays?

  Given how addicted we are to out of home, we're pretty much always in advanced talks.

• 1:08:29John Coogan?

  Always, always.

• 1:08:29Jordi Hays?

  The good folks at AdQuick.

• 1:08:30John Coogan?

  Bernard Arnault is in the paper again. LVMH boss Bernard Arnault seeks to avert the trade war. This is a very interesting article. I wanted to kick it off with a little background on Bernard Arnault. So we have some posts here, one from Speedwell Research. He was explaining the difference between iPhones and Dom Perignon. And the CEO of LVMH says, in 50 years' time, will the iPhone still be used? Or the people who are making it today, will they have found out what will be at the cutting edge at that time? But I believe I can say without being mistaken, that in 50 years' time, we will still be drinking Dom Perignon.

• 1:09:15John Coogan?

  And I agree.

• 1:09:16Jordi Hays?

  Iconic.

• 1:09:16John Coogan?

  I agree. Johnny Ive and Sam Altman aren't teaming up to make a champagne brand, baby. They're coming for the iPhone.

• 1:09:24Jordi Hays?

  The issue is it's hard to, it's hard to create legacy quickly.

• 1:09:29John Coogan?

  It is, it is. Heritage is not, is not made in a day. The other funny thing, this is extremely disrespectful to Apple. Did you know this? So it's disrespectful in multiple ways. One, obviously, Apple would say, of course, we'll be around in 50 years. But Apple has a set of rules for PR people. And if you're working with them and you're, and you're talking about the iPhone, they have a set of rules for how you talk about the products. And they specifically don't want you to say, "The iPhone." They say, "Let's talk about iPhone."

• 1:10:04Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 1:10:04John Coogan?

  Yes. And if you watch the keynote, they never say "the iPhone." They say "iPhone." No "the." And this is just like, part of their thing. And they have a set of rules that are like, it's like hundreds of pages in this PDF. It's crazy how much control they exert over the, uh, over like-

• 1:10:24Jordi Hays?

  I wonder if you can get Siri to say "the iPhone."

• 1:10:28John Coogan?

  So, they, uh, they have a bunch of funny things. Uh, you're not supposed to say "click here." You're not supposed to use "App Store" generically. You're supposed to capitalize it. You're not supposed to say, uh, "the device wants, thinks, or tries." Apple prefers a tone that's helpful, not whimsical or personified. Uh, you're not supposed to describe the apps that come with the device as free. You're not supposed to say, "Oh yeah, Apple includes like a free Maps app." You're not supposed to say that if you're doing an iPhone review. And so, um, choose your, choose your words wisely if you're, uh, if you're trying to get in good graces of Apple's PR team. And I don't think Bernard Arnault will be reviewing the next iPhone with language like this.

• 1:11:11John Coogan?

  But maybe people will be using their iPhones to buy Dom Perignon in 50 years.

• 1:11:14Jordi Hays?

  Max Meyer, uh, highlighted a quote from Bernard Arnault a while back, uh, earlier this year. Uh, he says, "When, uh, when you cannot, you cannot dream when you talk numbers. When you create desire, profits are a consequence."

• 1:11:29John Coogan?

  So good. You need to be creating desire.

• 1:11:31Jordi Hays?

  I think this is a reference to the Tiffany's store in New York.

• 1:11:34John Coogan?

  Yes. He spent $500 million renovating the Fifth Avenue Tiffany flagship. People were like, "That sounds like a lot to spend on a renovation of a single store." He says, "You can't dream when you talk numbers. Don't talk numbers, create desire." And if you want to sleep in the Tiffany store of mattresses, get Nate's sleep. Get a Pod 5 Ultra. It has a five-year warranty, 30-night risk-free trial, free returns.

• 1:12:02Jordi Hays?

  Exceptional sleep, without exception.

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  So, David Senra also has a good quote, Bernard Arnault's advice to himself. "In business, I think the most important thing is to position yourself for long-term and not be too impatient, which I am by nature, and I have to control myself." I think that's a good point. And Senra also highlights 10 highlights about Bernard Arnault. He made a bunch of commitments that early that were very, very detail-oriented, things that you wouldn't typically notice, but once you'd seen tens of thousands of stores over the years, it's what comes to your mind immediately. He spots any incongruities that might disrupt the aura of opulence he has carefully constructed. Then he reels off texts and emails to his senior executives describing any perceived deficiencies and bullet points of obsessive detail.

• 1:12:49John Coogan?

  Arnault has assembled the world's largest luxury conglomerate and globalized the sector once constrained by the limited ambitions of family-owned European companies encrusted in tradition, very good at stewarding these brands that probably are owned by families and don't want to part ways if they, you know, it's not just a source of income for the family, but it's also a source of pride to be the owner of a luxury house. But Bernard figures out how to get them to part with it. He believed luxury brands could be larger than anyone at the time imagined.

• 1:13:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was that, the acquired is such a good coverage of LVMH, of course, but just how long he, just how badly he wanted Dior and how it ended up in the hands of this like weird government-owned conglomerate. Anyways, wild story.

• 1:13:41John Coogan?

  He did take over Dior. So it had three stores and the equivalent of $90 million in sales when he acquired it. Now it has 439 stores. So, I mean, massive growth and 9.5 billion in sales. He 100x the business, absolutely insane.

• 1:13:58Jordi Hays?

  It's wild how bullish he was despite, you know, probably not being able to predict social media early on.

• 1:14:06John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:14:06Jordi Hays?

  Like, you could kind of identify flex culture just maybe in a cafe or a restaurant.

• 1:14:12John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:14:13Jordi Hays?

  But scaling flex culture in the way that Instagram and social media did

• 1:14:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:19Jordi Hays?

  has been incredible.

• 1:14:20John Coogan?

  So if you're looking for a luxury watch, get on Bezel, go to getbezel.com. Your Bezel Concierge is available now to source you any watch on the planet, seriously, any watch. So, let's talk about how he's working behind the scenes to avert a trade war. President Trump's efforts to secure a trade deal with the European Union have the help of an old, powerful friend, luxury titan Bernard Arnault. The LVMH chief has spent recent weeks shuttling between Europe's capitals, meeting with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, pressing them to agree to a deal along the lines of the one Trump reached with Japan this week.

• 1:15:01John Coogan?

  And he has spoken to the president, seeking to de-escalate tensions with Brussels. Arnault is also hedging his bets. He plans to open another Louis Vuitton factory in Texas, a move partly credited with sparing the luxury industries from tariffs during Trump's first term. "I'm pushing as much as I can for us to reach an agreement with the Americans so that we don't get caught up in a trade war, which would be extremely damaging for European businesses," Arnault said in an interview at LVMH's headquarters in Paris. Much is now at stake for Arnault. On Thursday, LVMH reported a 22% fall in first-half net profit, hit by sharp decline in sales as its core fashion and leather goods division, that includes Louis Vuitton and Christian

• 1:15:46John Coogan?

  Dior. The company is contending with a range of challenges. China, long the luxury industry's growth engine, is in a protracted economic slump, and consumer confidence in the US, which accounts for one-third of the group's sales, has been shaken by uncertainty over tariffs. Then some consumers are now questioning the inherent value of luxury goods after years of price rises. That's insane. Who are these consumers? It's ridiculous. Investors meanwhile are scrutinizing whether the business model of LVMH, a conglomerate of more than 75 brands that ranges from cosmetics retailer Sephora to Hennessy Cognac, is built

• 1:16:31John Coogan?

  for a world with rising trade barriers and deepening geopolitical uncertainty. LVMH's shares are down more than 30% since January. That is, they are one of the durable losers because the S and P 500 and the Mag 7 have both dropped down probably around 20, 30% in some cases during the post Liberation Day tariffs, but they all bounced back. And now Jensen's running a $4 trillion company.

• 1:17:01Jordi Hays?

  LVMH is bouncing back. It's been rocky over the last week, but they're up 11% over the last 30 days. But like you said, down 27% in the last six months, but only down 10% year to date. They have been growing nicely into the new year.

• 1:17:19John Coogan?

  So Arno pioneered the luxury brand conglomerate in an era when the world economy was opening up, lots of trade, a burgeoning middle class around the globe fueled a decades-long boom in luxury spending that made him one of the world's richest men. Now, LVMH's two biggest markets, the US and China, are at loggerheads with Europe and Arno caught in the middle. Trump is demanding European countries move manufacturing to the United States to avoid tariffs, a tall order for luxury brands that market their wares as made in Europe with old world craftsmanship. That's a very good point. Arno, yeah, it is funny to imagine a Birkin bag made in Texas. It's just like, it just doesn't feel right. It's not the brand.

• 1:18:00John Coogan?

  Trump, so Arno said that while LVMH is strong enough to ride out the slowdown, other luxury companies were getting exposed. Echoing Warren Buffett, he added that when the tide goes out, you see who's been swimming without a swimsuit. For Arno, the luxury downturn is temporary, not a structural shift, and successful investors often do the opposite of stock market players who he called a bit sheep-like. Shots fired. LVMH's array of labels gives the group scale to attract top talent like creative directors and designers, secure prime retail locations and negotiate favorable media rates by buying in bulk according to The Billionaire. In periods when the economic climate is more difficult, when markets slow down, which is

• 1:18:44John Coogan?

  the case today, we tend to come out stronger. Arno is putting his money where his mouth is. His family holding company has bought more than 1 billion of LVMH shares since the end of January regulatory filings show, so he's buying back in, increasing his stake. He said that, he said that put them, he said that put them on their, the track to own more than half of LVMH's stock by the start of next year. The most urgent order of the business, however, is resolving.

• 1:19:13Jordi Hays?

  Got some breaking news, John. LVMH is in talks to sell Marc Jacobs.

• 1:19:17John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:19:18Jordi Hays?

  Michael Mirflor in the chat again, just, just breaking, breaking news, delivering insights. Not super surprised to see this news. It feels like Marc Jacobs, I don't know any people in, in and around our world that are super excited to buy whatever's coming down the Marc Jacobs runway. So anyways, LVMH is in discussions to sell fashion brand Marc Jacobs in a deal that could fetch around 1 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. They've been discussing deals with multiple parties, including Reebok owner Authentic. Authentic, I think, is, we should try to have the CEO on sometime.

• 1:20:02Jordi Hays?

  They basically buy up, let me list all their brands, but they buy up brands that are honestly, I hate to say it, aging out a little bit. Not, not necessarily aging out, but losing some relevancy. Reebok Champion, Nautica, Arapostal, Eddie Bauer, Brooks Brothers, Billabong, Quicksilver, Juicy Couture, et cetera. So they buy these brands seemingly when they're in decline and then try to, and then try to kind of make them more relevant. I think, I think the strategy has generally worked pretty well. And I could see them reinvigorating Marc Jacobs, but not surprising, it just doesn't feel

• 1:20:45Jordi Hays?

  like it's in the same category as, as many of the other. LVMH brands.

• 1:20:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, the, the thing that I remember about Marc Jacobs was that at one point they had a line called Mark by Marc Jacobs, which I thought was just hilarious and recursive and tautological. Of course, it's by Marc Jacobs. It's called Mark, but.

• 1:21:03Jordi Hays?

  I would like to see Marc Andreessen have a standalone fund and a 16Z by Mark by Marc Andreessen.

• 1:21:10John Coogan?

  That's really good.

• 1:21:11Jordi Hays?

  Personal.

• 1:21:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Get into the solo GP game. Give a lot Gil a run for his money.

• 1:21:17Jordi Hays?

  I like it.

• 1:21:17John Coogan?

  Uh, but the, the, the key turnaround strategy, if you're trying to turn around Marc Jacobs or increase Aeropostale or Nautica, of course, put Sydney Sweeney in the ad. That's the move. Overfit quantitative strategies has the meme. You find your target audience, craft a compelling message, reach them through experience, marketing, storytelling is key. Long-term brand loyalty is the end goal. And they say this marketing thing is easy. You just put Sydney Sweeney in the ad. And of course, that's referring to, what is it? American Eagle?

• 1:21:47Jordi Hays?

  American Eagle. Are they already owned by authentic brands?

• 1:21:50John Coogan?

  No, maybe. I don't know.

• 1:21:53John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:21:53Jordi Hays?

  No, American Eagle is publicly listed.

• 1:21:56John Coogan?

  Publicly listed.

• 1:21:57Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 1:21:57John Coogan?

  And the new CEO is making moves, putting Sydney Sweeney in ads and, uh, absolutely printing and bring new relevancy to that brand.

• 1:22:05Jordi Hays?

  I mean, wild. They're up 16% over the past five days.

• 1:22:10John Coogan?

  When was the last time people were talking about?

• 1:22:11Jordi Hays?

  Sydney Sweeney effect.

• 1:22:13John Coogan?

  When was the last time people were talking about American?

• 1:22:15Jordi Hays?

  I wonder, I, I really wonder how much they paid her for this because she clearly, uh, could, I mean, probably that, uh, it would be hard for her to capture the real value of this.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:22:28Jordi Hays?

  If her, if her manager.

• 1:22:29John Coogan?

  What was the market cap move? Like how mu- what's their market cap? And you said 18%?

• 1:22:32Jordi Hays?

  Sitting at $2 billion, up 16% over the past five days.

• 1:22:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's 300 million. So Sydney, if you've got less than 200 million, call us. We'll help you negotiate the next one, uh, because you deserve every penny of that.

• 1:22:43Jordi Hays?

  The question, the question is, is how many, how many times?

• 1:22:47John Coogan?

  That's a great ad.

• 1:22:48Jordi Hays?

  How many times? Oh, and this, apparently somebody called out the second part of this ad.

• 1:22:51John Coogan?

  Oh, this is a reference to.

• 1:22:52Jordi Hays?

  Was made with AI.

• 1:22:53John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:22:54Jordi Hays?

  So look when the car is driving away.

• 1:22:56John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:22:57Jordi Hays?

  So she's getting in the car. This is real.

• 1:23:01John Coogan?

  Interesting, okay.

• 1:23:04Jordi Hays?

  Could have been fake news.

• 1:23:08John Coogan?

  Oh, no transitions?

• 1:23:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't think she was doing that burnout.

• 1:23:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, the burnout would be really hard to do in a soundstage like that. That feels really, really difficult to do reliably.

• 1:23:17Jordi Hays?

  Well, some deep TVP on lore. Our production team went to college film school with Sydney Sweeney.

• 1:23:23John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:24Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if I'm supposed to say that, but I just doxed you guys.

• 1:23:28John Coogan?

  Um, anyway, I am a podcast crossover accelerationist.

• 1:23:34Jordi Hays?

  You are.

• 1:23:34John Coogan?

  I posted this last night. I'm not satisfied with Sam Altman on Theo Von. I want Tyler Cowen on Hot Ones. I want Dylan Patel on Nelk Boys, and I want Sarah Payne on Impulsive. I had some fun with this. People are really into this.

• 1:23:48Jordi Hays?

  Imagine the Hot Ones audience interacting with watching Tyler Cowen.

• 1:23:52John Coogan?

  It'd be hilarious. It'd be amazing.

• 1:23:54Jordi Hays?

  The all time.

• 1:23:54John Coogan?

  All of these are good ideas that would go viral. I want more of these crazy crossovers. And I was thinking about it, like the Sam Altman on Theo Von. This is a, this is a formula that is, it feels very new, but it, it has happened before. And I was thinking about, are you familiar with Love Line? So back in the late 90s, early 2000s, there was a show, a radio show.

• 1:24:17Jordi Hays?

  You were like, what, 30?

• 1:24:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:24:19Jordi Hays?

  I don't want to date, I don't want to date you.

• 1:24:21John Coogan?

  Please. Um, there was a show, a, a, a daily radio show. I think it was an hour or two, two hosts, not unlike this one. But it was between Adam Carolla and Dr. Drew. And they played different characters because they were different people. One was a comedian who would kind of make fun of every situation that came up. And the other one was a doctor, like a clinically trained psychiatrist or psychologist. And so people would call in with their relationship situations, kind of the precursor to the T app. Am I dating the same man?

• 1:24:54Jordi Hays?

  We gotta talk about the T app, by the way.

• 1:24:56John Coogan?

  We do, we do. They were recently hacked, apparently, and everything is leaked on 4chan now.

• 1:25:01Jordi Hays?

  Is it even a hack if it was publicly accessible?

• 1:25:03John Coogan?

  It is crazy. You would expect a Salesforce PM to be able to lock down the database a little bit better, but

• 1:25:09Jordi Hays?

  Data walls.

• 1:25:10John Coogan?

  We will see how true that is. I saw some community notes out there. I want to hold my judgment until I see really how bad this is.

• 1:25:15Jordi Hays?

  I mean, there's, there's apparently a, like a, a

• 1:25:19John Coogan?

  It could be fake. It could be AI-generated images in there. It could be all sorts of things. You know, we, we, we don't know. I, I, I'm, I'm reserving my judgment until I see, I see it in the, in, printed in paper. I need it in the Wall Street Journal to believe it. I don't know. But this Love Line show was very popular. People would call in with relationship problems. Oh, I think this person's cheating on me, or I'm, you know, how do I find a date? This type of thing. And then Dr. Drew would give a very serious psychological analysis. He's a doctor. He's actually like a board certified psychologist, I believe.

• 1:25:52Jordi Hays?

  One of us should become a doctor.

• 1:25:54John Coogan?

  And then, and then Adam Carolla would be just the jokester, just the comedian. And he would just like have a lot of fun. It was a very good show. It was very successful. And it went on a massive run. And then they kind of like scattered to the wind and did their own things eventually. But this, this putting two people together that are, that are, have different interests, it actually creates something new and beautiful. And I think it's a case for getting Tyler Cowen on Hot Ones. I'd like to see it.

• 1:26:20Jordi Hays?

  I like it.

• 1:26:20John Coogan?

  We need to brainstorm some more. If you have ideas, let him, let us know in the chat who, what, what crossovers do you want to see?

• 1:26:25Jordi Hays?

  It was a crazy weekend. I mean, it was just a wild weekend in podcasting. I think I said it yesterday.

• 1:26:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:30Jordi Hays?

  Netanyahu on the Nelk Boys.

• 1:26:31John Coogan?

  That was also a wild crossover.

• 1:26:33Jordi Hays?

  Sam Altman on Theo Von.

• 1:26:33John Coogan?

  Yep. There's been, there's been other crossovers. I mean, when Mark Zuckerberg went on Theo, that was crazy. There were also...

• 1:26:40Jordi Hays?

  Was it, who, who was the, but, but Alex from Scale was the first?

• 1:26:45John Coogan?

  He had done that too.

• 1:26:46Jordi Hays?

  Was he one of the first to go on Theo?

• 1:26:47John Coogan?

  One of the first tech people to go on Theo. I mean, a while ago, like years ago, I said like, tech is like truly crossing over because there were three back-to-back tech people on Rogan. So Peter Thiel did it. Mark Andreessen did it. And Mark Zuckerberg did it. And so it was like, oh, wow. Like tech has really like crossed over into the mainstream going on Rogan. And I was advocating that they should get Pat Gelsinger from Intel, Jensen Huang from Nvidia. And then the wild...

• 1:27:18Jordi Hays?

  I mean, the way to say it, Morris Chaling from TSMC. We need Intel to trade like a meme stock and, and access...

• 1:27:24John Coogan?

  Get Lip Butan on Theo. Immediately.

• 1:27:26Jordi Hays?

  Immediately.

• 1:27:26John Coogan?

  Make it happen. Put him on the whatever podcast. That's what I want. Put him on Fresh and Fit. Get, get Lip Butan on Fresh and Fit. That's what we need.

• 1:27:34Jordi Hays?

  Something there. Should we cover the T, the T news since we're already talking about it?

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  Please, please break it down and give me, give me the facts. Put it in the truth zone.

• 1:27:42Jordi Hays?

  So Kremiu posted earlier, the T app has been hacked and you can now download 59 gigabytes of user selfies right now. The hack is real. A picture from someone I know who signed up just to see what was on there was in it. This was obviously a vibe-coded app and was bound to be insecure. So it is over on 4chan, as well as proof of what it took. So Kremiu says, "If you ever wanted to see people's selfies without filters, I've got the dump for you."

• 1:28:14John Coogan?

  Okay, if Kremiu is reporting it in that way, I'm a believer now. This is a...

• 1:28:19Jordi Hays?

  Kremiu says, "Free unicorn startup idea, security audits for vibe-coded apps."

• 1:28:23John Coogan?

  Ooh, that is interesting. It would be. There was a company that was doing AI agents for cybersecurity and they were saying that the problems of cybersecurity were actually beyond the capabilities of the current state-of-the-art models and they were still having trouble getting their product fully polished.

• 1:28:41Jordi Hays?

  John, well, one, Kremiu has another app, App Idea: Facial Recognition That Warns You If A Date Was Trying To Use This God-Forsaken App.

• 1:28:50John Coogan?

  Okay. There was also, somebody also vibe-coded the opposite app for men to check on, "Are we dating the same woman?" or something along those lines. And so that was somewhat inevitable.

• 1:29:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we won't say the name of that one. Apparently, one of the users of the T app is at the US Department of Defense. She used an official ID card in order to get access to the app. So not...

• 1:29:17John Coogan?

  There's a lesson in here. Touch grass. Anyway, anything else on the T app today?

• 1:29:24Jordi Hays?

  I think that's it. It's very unfortunate. I actually feel bad for all the people that are getting there.

• 1:29:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, data breaches suck. Hopefully, it's one of those situations where it's just like so big and messy that it doesn't actually affect any single person. It's just kind of like, okay. Because like, I'm sure like my credit card details have been leaked in some sort of, you know, I'm pretty sure like Home Depot got hacked or Walmart got hacked. My email's out there. I get random phone calls. My phone call, my phone number's been leaked. And it's just part of life now that like... Stuff is out there. I have old selfies that are on the internet. If you Google me, there's old pictures from like, oh, I signed up for a music website and I put an image on there.

• 1:30:03Jordi Hays?

  One thing, one thing.

• 1:30:04John Coogan?

  Somewhat embarrassing, but who cares?

• 1:30:05Jordi Hays?

  Interesting on the T app.

• 1:30:07John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:07Jordi Hays?

  A couple of days ago, T born, which was a copycat of T.

• 1:30:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:12Jordi Hays?

  Was the number three app. Now it's not even in the top hundred from what I can see.

• 1:30:17John Coogan?

  Sort of a flash in the pan situation. Interesting. Did they, were they monetizing the T app? Uh, were they actually like getting twenty dollar in-app purchases going?

• 1:30:25Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I'm sure.

• 1:30:26John Coogan?

  Because it feels like if you're going viral and you're at the top of the app store and you're not cashing in at that moment, you made a huge, huge mistake.

• 1:30:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, Sam Lambert says, uh, CEO of Planet Scale says, new training data set just dropped.

• 1:30:40John Coogan?

  No.

• 1:30:43Jordi Hays?

  Uh, if you, if you signed up for the T app, you were already being used to train the next Ghibli.

• 1:30:50John Coogan?

  The next VO or something like that. That's rough. Is it tagged? I guess, I guess it's a pretty well-tagged data set, too. That is crazy. I mean, I used to reverse engineer APIs when I was a kid and, and kind of figure out, oh, you, like, if you went to an app, you could do this thing where you would, uh, kind of man in the middle yourself. So, uh, typically when you open up an app, the, the flow is it goes from your iPhone, it makes the request to the backend, which is a server. It hits a API dot the app you're using and it goes over your wifi. So what you could do is you could, you could have it routed to your laptop and then to the wifi, pass the signal along essentially. And you could see all of the requests and all the data that was going back and forth. And you could

• 1:31:35John Coogan?

  see the actual API that was, that you were interacting with. And oftentimes you could get kind of like, you know, it was, it was usually against terms of service to really do anything with this data, but you could see the data that's going back and forth and you could get the undocumented API. So there's like the public API where you need a key and they're like, hey, if you're going to use a lot, you gotta pay us. But then there's the, there's the private API that's used for the app and that's what's going on here. But usually you can't just get into the database. Usually it's like, okay, I could get my Twitter feed sent to me in JSON form. And that's like, maybe a nice to have if you're, you know, hacking an app or something and just hacking something together. You want digest of your own data. You can just scrape it out without needing to scrape the HTML.

• 1:32:17John Coogan?

  But lots of companies have locked that down. Certainly, all the big ones have encrypted the stuff, so you can't do it. This seems like it was very poorly built. So, good luck to everyone involved. I'm sure it's gonna be a lot of long nights and weekends fixing all those bugs.

• 1:32:30Jordi Hays?

  I went back and forth on email with the CEO. I think it was on Wednesday morning, and I think it's probably good that he's not joining because he's got some work to do. It sounds like they've secured the database now, but a little bit too late.

• 1:32:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:46Jordi Hays?

  Many, many, the data is already out there.

• 1:32:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:50Jordi Hays?

  Meanwhile, Levered Lloyd on X has an interesting startup, startup idea here that he's been running. He says, "Every summer, I open a new bar in the Hamptons. Cheapest lease I can find. Just enough plumbing to pass inspection. Hire smoke show bartenders, book a washed DJ, and bring in TikTok influencers to call it a hidden gem. $5 Costco tenders become $100 tender tower. Kirkland vodka, $25 a shot. Reject 95% at the door to create fake exclusivity. No resi, no signage. Kids max out credit cards for clout, staff's underpaid, tips are guilt, guilt trips. Clear $2 million by Labor Day. Same scam, new name

• 1:33:34Jordi Hays?

  next year. We don't sell drinks, we sell delusion. Have fun staying broke, sucker."

• 1:33:38John Coogan?

  This feels like fanfiction, but fantastic post, Levered Lloyd. I would love to know if he actually did this. It feels like kind of real, maybe exaggerated a little bit. Definitely seems possible.

• 1:33:48Jordi Hays?

  I would argue that this is not actually a scam. This is just marketing genius.

• 1:33:54John Coogan?

  Okay. Wow. Yeah, it is. It is genius. It definitely exposes a very fundamental

• 1:33:58Jordi Hays?

  Unless he's selling Kirkland vodka and saying that it's Grey Goose. You know, people that make, they say, "Oh, it's the same, it's the same, it's the same alcohol."

• 1:34:06John Coogan?

  If you're out in the Hamptons, you gotta be suspicious. But he should do this 45 years in a row, bank 90 million, 2 million a year, and then he should buy this beautiful house that's for sale from the founder of Vitamin Shop.

• 1:34:20Jordi Hays?

  I'll be right back.

• 1:34:21John Coogan?

  It's an $89 million Hamptons home, and it's in the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal. The Friday edition, let's read through this. So this is from the Vitamin Shoppe founder. You've probably been there picking up creatine or something like that. Says it pays to take your vitamins. Jeffrey Horowitz, founder of the nutrition nutritional supplements retailer, Vitamin Shoppe, is putting his oceanfront Hamptons estate on the market for $89 million. The 3.5 acre property in Sagaponak, New York, has a nine hole golf course on it. That's incredible. I believe Emily Sundberg was telling us about Sagaponak, that it's extremely delightful

• 1:35:02John Coogan?

  because it's a microclimate. Everyone wants to be there. The listing agent is Ryan Serhant of Serhant Brokerage, a fantastic social media influencer, content creator, and real estate broker. Has a massive team pumping out a ton of cool content. I've seen a lot of what he's built and the business that he's built is absolutely fantastic. So excited to see that he is listing this $89 million, nine hole golf course, 3.5 acre home. It also has an arcade. That's very cool. So the property's two parcels are also available separately. The two acres containing the houses are priced at 75 million while the golf course on 1.5 acres can be had for 15 million. So if

• 1:35:45John Coogan?

  you're looking to pinch pennies, you can just pick up the golf course and deal with the house later. Maybe sleep in the putting green on a tent. Horowitz and his wife Helen Horowitz bought the land in the mid 90s for about 2.68 million and built the estate in 1998, according to property records. They, the Horowitz declined to comment. Interesting. Usually they, they throw something in here. Earlier this year, the estate was quietly shopped off the market for 125 million. Now it's down about 30% cheaper. What a bargain. It's now being offered for 89 million. Who said an $80 million waterfront house recently went into contract in East Hampton. A nearby waterfront home in Sagaponak is asking $85 million,

• 1:36:28John Coogan?

  Serhant said. The contemporary home has eight bedrooms and measures about 9,000 square feet. Features include an outdoor pool and a video game arcade with pinball, racing games.

• 1:36:38Jordi Hays?

  Does it have a movie theater?

• 1:36:39John Coogan?

  Air hockey, let's figure that out for sure. A pavilion.

• 1:36:43Jordi Hays?

  Did air hockey fall off?

• 1:36:44John Coogan?

  It did, for sure. It's dead. Don't do it. I don't know. Air hockey? Air hockey, never been big into that whole world.

• 1:36:53Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 1:36:54John Coogan?

  Kind of displaced by video games, you know, movie theaters.

• 1:36:57Jordi Hays?

  It really was a physical, it felt like a physical.

• 1:36:59John Coogan?

  We, we, we, we got, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's trying to disrupt air hockey with, with the new virtual reality, augmented reality glasses. We played basically a version of that. This, the Orion headset you put on and you see a hologram and you kind of play pong with each other. It's kind of a modern version of air hockey. So who needs?

• 1:37:19Jordi Hays?

  I got the data here. The air hockey table market is set to reach 3.6 billion in 2024. 7.7% CAGR.

• 1:37:28John Coogan?

  Curse for air hockey, let's raise for it now. It's a massive market.

• 1:37:33Jordi Hays?

  Uber for air hockey.

• 1:37:34John Coogan?

  Let's do it. Horowitz, who is an avid golfer, built the golf course with views of nearby Fairfield Pond. Nine holes, got really mogging your buddy in Malibu with the three-hole golf course or whatever.

• 1:37:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people say there's no golf in Malibu and there's a private golf course in the center of Malibu, right by the country mark. You can't really see it because there's a fence, but it's just one guy. I think it's a, I think it's a five-hole par three. I've never played it, but nobody really ever plays.

• 1:38:08John Coogan?

  You can because it's private. So the Horowitz's also have homes in New York City and on Florida's Fisher Island. They are selling because their children are grown. They founded the Vitamin Shop in 1977. I didn't realize it was so long ago, right? Right during the Hulk Hogan rise. Hulk Hogan's rising, you gotta get bulky like Hogan.

• 1:38:28Jordi Hays?

  Whey protein.

• 1:38:29John Coogan?

  The Hulkster, you're gonna go get some whey protein, some creatine. The New Jersey-based company was sold to Bear Stearns for about 300 million in 2002. I had no idea that Bear Stearns did a buyout.

• 1:38:40Jordi Hays?

  He then became an executive at VitaCost.

• 1:38:43John Coogan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:38:44Jordi Hays?

  Which then sold to Kroger in 2014.

• 1:38:47John Coogan?

  What an absolute dog. This guy's a boardroom general. You love to see it. Homes in the Hamptons are traded.

• 1:38:53Jordi Hays?

  Put the KPIs in orbit, John.

• 1:38:55John Coogan?

  He really, he clearly did put the KPIs in orbit. It's funny because, you know, this is a lost art. You start a company, you sell it to a bank. Like, people don't do that. Bear Stearns. I don't know. Not around anymore, unfortunately. The most expensive home ever sold in the Hamptons was a $137 million East Hampton sale in 2014, according to Jonathan Miller. So, uh, seems like a decent house. I'm not really, I'm not too big into golf, so I'm not that into it. I won't be bidding on that one, but you can if you're looking for a, uh, golf estate in Ha- in the Hamptons. But I do want to go through this article because we got to have a debate.

• 1:39:36Jordi Hays?

  Which one is that? Because I think we should cover the, uh, the, the, the, the drama in the air.

• 1:39:41John Coogan?

  In the Hamptons, yes. Let's stay with Emily Sundberg and then we'll go to my debate.

• 1:39:44Jordi Hays?

  Emily Sundberg's got the scoop. She says, feel like I'm losing my mind seeing a candle brand fly influencers to the Hamptons on a private plane for a brand trip with my candles fly private pillows. Um, and, uh, some, so anyways, um, her post was going viral. I wish I, um, what is the name of the candle company is the, is the problem. I can't see it anywhere. It's unclear. The candle's got to be pretty good if they're flying private. I would like to know.

• 1:40:16John Coogan?

  The candle is Hotel Lobby Candle. That's the name of the candle company. Hotel Lobby Candle. You can go check them out if you want.

• 1:40:25John Coogan?

  They didn't take off. Okay. I, I have some, I'm doing some capital J journalism right now with Preston Holland.

• 1:40:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So Preston says, he's calling it out. He says, this is a King Air.

• 1:40:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:40:36Jordi Hays?

  It's also on the ground parked and put to bed. See the ground outside and windshield cover on.

• 1:40:43John Coogan?

  Windshield covers on, the screens are off, so they might not even take, taken off. It's King Air. The windows are too small. Uh, he said it might be a CJ3, uh, which is a small, like Cessna Citation, uh, type plane. Uh, still beautiful, but I really think, so Emily Sundberg's take here is that. Is that there was backlash because, uh, you know, it's just a candle brand. What are they doing flying private? Emily Sundberg says there was backlash.

• 1:41:10Jordi Hays?

  I gotta, I gotta, I gotta say they have a Hampton's candle. They have a Hampton's re-diffuser. They have the poolside candle. Kind of makes sense for them to do, do an influencer trip out there.

• 1:41:25John Coogan?

  But did they? Or did they just get on the plane, get off and then hop in a car? That's the, that's the conspiracy theory. Put the tinfoil hat on.

• 1:41:33Jordi Hays?

  There you go.

• 1:41:34John Coogan?

  Anyway, oh, we both have straw man hats today, but, um, I think that the big problem here is that, why didn't they go with the BBJ? They should have gotten the 747.

• 1:41:43Jordi Hays?

  Wrapped BBJ.

• 1:41:44John Coogan?

  Wrapped 747 in the VIP configuration. Only nation states have access to it.

• 1:41:50Jordi Hays?

  Just borrow the one that came over for Trump.

• 1:41:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:53Jordi Hays?

  From Qatar.

• 1:41:54John Coogan?

  Wrap it, sell the most candles ever. That's the real solution to this problem. I don't know. Uh, I think it sounds fun, very cool, interesting activation. This is something that Emily's been talking about, this idea that, uh, that like more brands are doing like influencer parties, sponsoring things and, um, I've never really gotten into that on the buy side.

• 1:42:17Jordi Hays?

  Your Instagram is entirely cars and watches and bodybuilding? So you wouldn't have seen the rise of influencer trips?

• 1:42:25John Coogan?

  Maybe I do though. Maybe I do. And maybe some of the, some of that content is generated.

• 1:42:29Jordi Hays?

  It's actually really, I mean, it's really, I mean, the, the, you, is looking at the pure economics of it, you could pay an influencer $10,000 for a post or $5,000 for a post.

• 1:42:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:43Jordi Hays?

  Or you could plan a trip that it's going to cost you $10,000 per influencer to come on.

• 1:42:50John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:42:51Jordi Hays?

  And then, but you might get hundreds of posts, right?

• 1:42:54John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have a friend who's an influencer and they, and some tequila brand paid for like a whole, like just party at her house with her friends and they were just like, just have the tequila there, show people and maybe it shows up in the background, but like you don't really have any deliverables. It's very, very interesting. I wonder if there is an agency that sits in between. Um, have you ever run into that in the influencer ad buying world?

• 1:43:18Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, you said retainers?

• 1:43:20John Coogan?

  So what I'm talking about is like you built a business where you match brands with influencers, particularly on YouTube for host read ad reads, correct? That's a good description. I'm wondering if there's a line extension for your business or potentially a new business for a firm, an independent firm that brokers these contracts and makes sure that they happen seamlessly. So it's easier for a company like hotel pillows, hotel candles, what's it called?

• 1:43:53Jordi Hays?

  Hotel lobby candles.

• 1:43:55John Coogan?

  Hotel lobby candles. They say, "We want to make a private jet plane trip happen to the Hampton with some great influencers, but we don't have all the mechanics to make it happen. We want it to look good. We want our product there. We want some special pillows on the seats. We want the plane rented. We want..." There was also like a custom floor mat that they stepped on as they stepped onto the plane.

• 1:44:17Jordi Hays?

  Very nice.

• 1:44:18John Coogan?

  There were some photos. And so I'm wondering if there is a, if there is a world where an agency could spring up. Maybe there's already an agency that brokers these types of deals. Because right now they seem very one-off, but they seem like they're growing in trend. What do you think?

• 1:44:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think, I think there's plenty, plenty of agencies that do that kind of thing. I also feel like this is the kind of things that brands want to actually own end to end. You want to have deep relationships with specific influencers and have it not feel like entirely like the person only came because they were getting paid or because it was free.

• 1:44:51John Coogan?

  So maybe it lives within the brands.

• 1:44:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, a lot of, I mean, certain influencer deals make sense to do kind of programmatically. Others make a lot of sense to go direct.

• 1:45:01John Coogan?

  Yeah. Anyway, let's go back to real estate and the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal because I want to debate the nature of what makes a house special. Do you need a weird quirk? And this is from their section called "In the Trenches", which I love. Commonly used in the crypto world, also used in the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal. So Robin "In the Trenches" has an article called "Batman's Cave and Secret Bathrooms", and there's a question here. "What's the most unusual design feature you've ever encountered in a home you've listed or showed?" So Andrew Klima, a real estate agent in Seven Fields, Pennsylvania, says, "I recently listed Castle Bristlecone,

• 1:45:46John Coogan?

  a 23,500 square foot property in Gibsonia, Pennsylvania, about a half an hour north of Pittsburgh, which sold for..." Guess how much it sold for, Jordy?

• 1:45:56Jordi Hays?

  Four million.

• 1:45:57John Coogan?

  It's a 23,000... Yeah, oh, did you already see this? 3.8, 3.8, you nailed it, wow.

• 1:46:01Jordi Hays?

  I was looking up an image of it.

• 1:46:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's amazing.

• 1:46:04Jordi Hays?

  But when you hear 23,000 square feet in LA, you just assume...

• 1:46:08John Coogan?

  Easily, easily, yeah, easily. So it's the most, it was definitely the most unusual home I've ever listed or shown. "There was a replica of Batman's office from the television show, not the movies. On the desk was the iconic red bat phone and a bust of Shakespeare. When you tilted Shakespeare's head back, a bookcase slid open and two poles appeared. There were poles for both Batman and Robin, and if you slid down them, you reached the Batcave below, which was the basement of the house. The owners built the house in 2008, and they liked eccentric things and also things that were part of their life. Since they were interested in movies and TV production, they included Batman's office."

• 1:46:52Jordi Hays?

  Naturally.

• 1:46:53John Coogan?

  "There was a chapel, which was a replica of Heinz Memorial Chapel, where they had gotten married. There was a bedroom that was a replica of a hotel room at the Hotel del Coronado, where they spent their honeymoon. All of the important places in their life..."

• 1:47:06Jordi Hays?

  This is textbook, you can just do things.

• 1:47:07John Coogan?

  This is amazing, and this is, I'm so pro this, it's ridiculous. I think everyone should do this at some point in their life. Build a project that consumes you. It probably took them a decade to make this, and they spent so much money on it.

• 1:47:19Jordi Hays?

  Ended up selling it for 3.8 million.

• 1:47:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, it probably, if they didn't have all these weird quirks, probably would have sold for twice as much. But that's not what life's about, baby.

• 1:47:27Jordi Hays?

  I think the whole thing holding back the price was most likely because it was in Gibsonia, Pennsylvania.

• 1:47:32John Coogan?

  What's wrong with Gibsonia, Pennsylvania? That seems like a great place to hang out. Probably a future of technology and innovation, maybe an AI company going in there soon. All the important pieces of their life were designed into their home. The Batman office was so iconic that when the bookcase opened, it blew my mind. I jumped right on the pole and slid down, says the real estate agent. So, there's another one here. There's a few others. So Alex Micus, a real estate agent in Oakland, said, "In September, my business partner and I listed a five-bedroom contemporary home in Oakland called Sky House. The masterpiece of the home was a 1,000-square-foot glass veranda that was created from 28 tons of industrial glass. The owner considered it a piece of art. From this vantage point, you not only had fantastic views across the hillside and out to San Francisco Bay,

• 1:48:17John Coogan?

  but since the veranda was made of glass, you could see into the family room below it. Walking out from the kitchen onto the glass floor was not a comfortable experience. I'm afraid of heights, so it took a bit of trust to walk out there. It gets even scarier when you go toward the railing because a drop to the ground 30 feet below is visible there through the glass. Many people who came to see the house were timid about walking onto the glass, and several asked if they needed to take their shoes off. Of course, the glass did create some issues. Women were not excited about the balcony because of the optics from below, and when we planned the open house, we wondered if we would, we should tell people not to wear dresses. But the veranda got us a lot of exposure for the house,

• 1:48:57John Coogan?

  and it sold in two months to an out-of-town buyer for 2.655 million, just shy of the asking price." Then there's another one. Chip Madsen says, "In February," this is in Las Vegas, "I sold a three-bedroom, four-bathroom home on the 10th hole of Canyon Gate Golf Course in Las Vegas," right near Andreessen Horowitz's new headquarters, I imagine, "for 1.7 million. It had all of the usual luxury features that you expect in a home of this caliber, but one feature I didn't expect when I first saw the home was a cabana bath by the pool that was hidden behind a rock wall. This was not the only unusual bath in the house. There was also a secret bathroom located behind a bookcase in the family room.

• 1:49:40John Coogan?

  But the one by the pool was hidden behind a giant rock wall with a lazy river streaming above it, and anyone who walked in was taken by surprise because when you turned on the light, you realized you were in a rock cavern but with a full bath." The walls and ceiling were built to resemble the contours of a cave and it was all done in various brown tones to resemble the rock walls of an actual cave.

• 1:50:00Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of caves.

• 1:50:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:50:01Jordi Hays?

  We should pull up, uh, Sam on Theo Von. Sam is talking about his bunker. If we can pull up the video.

• 1:50:09John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, I want to pull up that. Do you have the timestamp already?

• 1:50:11Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:50:12John Coogan?

  There's another one here, um, uh, from the, uh, the Modern Family actress, uh, Julie Bowen. Uh, she was talking about, "Today I live in, uh, I live with my three sons in Toluca Lake in Los Angeles. I bought an updated farmhouse and barn in 2022 following her divorce. Previously, they lived in a beautiful mid-century glass box, but my boys were skateboarding into the walls." Growing up, growing up as one of three girls, I had its challenges. Now I marvel at the tranquility of my boys. Girls have a million things to say about everything. Boys say nothing. They grunt and eat food."

• 1:50:52John Coogan?

  That was a great section, a mention section. Let's pull up Sam Altman on Theo Von and react.

• 1:50:56Speaker 04

  Was there like a, just a practice or was it just his verbal reminder, like, I'm gonna do this?

• 1:51:00Sam Altman?

  I just kept saying it to myself. I was just like, someday you'll miss these moments. You may as well find a way to like, find the

• 1:51:08Sam Altman?

  happiness and kind of great gratitude for them in the moment.

• 1:51:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:14Speaker 04

  A lot of these guys have bunkers. Zucky has a bunkie, I know that, somewhere out in Hawaii.

• 1:51:18John Coogan?

  Zucky has a bunkie?

• 1:51:18Speaker 04

  People have bunkers. Do you have a bunker?

• 1:51:22Sam Altman?

  I have like underground, concrete, heavy reinforced basements, but I don't have any.

• 1:51:28John Coogan?

  Not beating the bunker allegations, Sam. You definitely have a bunker.

• 1:51:32Speaker 04

  I'll let you keep me on the ropes of a lot of this conversation, but I am gonna call that out as a dang bunker, dude.

• 1:51:36John Coogan?

  That's a bunker, exactly. It's a bunker.

• 1:51:38Sam Altman?

  What's the difference between a basement and a bunker?

• 1:51:40John Coogan?

  Here we go. Semantics. What's the definition of it is?

• 1:51:43Speaker 04

  Or whatever.

• 1:51:43Sam Altman?

  I know. Yeah, I have been thinking I should really do a good version of one of those, but I don't, I don't have like a, I don't have what I would call a bunker, but it has been on my mind. Not because of AI, but just because of like, people are dropping bombs in the world again, you know, like.

• 1:51:58Speaker 04

  That's a good point. That's a very good point. Yeah, basement right there, part of a house building typically used.

• 1:52:02John Coogan?

  Oh, Theo's fact checking him. Putting him in the truth zone. This is technically a bunker.

• 1:52:08Speaker 04

  Built for protection, often military or emergency related.

• 1:52:11John Coogan?

  Not beating the bunker allegation.

• 1:52:13Jordi Hays?

  I think a reinforced basement.

• 1:52:15Sam Altman?

  Do you use ChatGPT as the fact check?

• 1:52:18Speaker 04

  We did this just for you.

• 1:52:19Sam Altman?

  I appreciate it.

• 1:52:20John Coogan?

  We did this just for you. This is nice. They're having a good time.

• 1:52:23Jordi Hays?

  Pull up, pull up, uh, pull up this other video. It's in, uh, it's in the chat with the team. Uh, Sam has some interesting thoughts around, uh, sensitive stuff that people might have in chat GPT.

• 1:52:41John Coogan?

  Okay. Oh yeah. People were reacting to this a lot.

• 1:52:44Sam Altman?

  Policy framework for AI.

• 1:52:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:45Sam Altman?

  Um, one example that we've been thinking about a lot, this is like a, maybe not quite what you're asking. This is like a very human centric version of that question. People talk about the most personal shit in their lives to chat GPT. It's, you know, people use it.

• 1:52:59Jordi Hays?

  We try to bleep them out.

• 1:53:02Sam Altman?

  Having these relationship problems, what should I do? And right now, if you talk to a therapist or a lawyer or a doctor about those problems, there's like legal privilege for it.

• 1:53:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:12Sam Altman?

  You know, like it's, there's doctor patient confidentiality, there's legal confidentiality, whatever. And

• 1:53:19John Coogan?

  Just doesn't exist on chat.

• 1:53:20Sam Altman?

  We don't, we haven't figured that out yet for when you talk to chat GPT. So if you go talk to chat GPT about your most sensitive stuff and then there's like a lawsuit or whatever, like we could be required to produce that. And I think that's very screwed up. I think we should have like the same concept of privacy for your conversations with AI that we do with a therapist or whatever.

• 1:53:39Sam Altman?

  And no one had to think about that even a year ago.

• 1:53:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:41Sam Altman?

  And now I think it's this huge issue of like how we're going to treat the lawsuit.

• 1:53:44Jordi Hays?

  Okay, pause because one thing that's interesting here is that there was a court that successfully has made OpenAI, at least in the near term, save even private chats.

• 1:53:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, but that's true of email and that's true of chat. And, and if you commit a crime, you can get subpoenaed and they'll pull your WhatsApp, they'll pull your private messages. Like this is standard.

• 1:54:08Jordi Hays?

  Sure, sure, sure. Um, but I think this is a super, super critical issue because I think some people are going to, as an example, you know, let's say they're going through divorce and they're talking with chat GPT a ton and they're saying,

• 1:54:23John Coogan?

  Yes, people need to be aware of it for sure.

• 1:54:25Jordi Hays?

  You know, if, if you're dealing with like custody over children and the mom or the dad is saying, I'm actually, I think I'm a pretty bad parent. Like that can be used in court.

• 1:54:36John Coogan?

  A hundred percent. So people need to be aware of it. And then people need to know that there is another option, which is to go and buy George Hotz's tiny box and run Lama locally. And then it probably can't be subpoenaed, or you can have

• 1:54:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just run Lama locally.

• 1:54:50John Coogan?

  You can delete, you could set it up like Signal where it deletes the chats after a day and it doesn't have a long memory. But if you give your data to another company and then the United States law enforcement sends a letter and the judge says, we need to get this data, like they're gonna get it. And it's the same thing. I mean, the FBI can come in here and take these papers.

• 1:55:10Jordi Hays?

  Take all of our posts.

• 1:55:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, they can take our posts.

• 1:55:12Jordi Hays?

  Take our whole, all of our bangers.

• 1:55:13John Coogan?

  And now, like shredders exist and people shred stuff and, and you know, you can get in trouble if you're shredding something that you know that the government wants. But in general, document retention policies are, are, you know, like, like understandable. But I like his point that like, you should, like, it's not that unreasonable to say, okay, I'm going to be using it as a therapist, put it in therapist mode and keep that private. Or, or, you know, like, a lot of people will CC their lawyer on sensitive things to maintain, to maintain attorney-client privilege. So that those, those, those discussions cannot be admissible in the court of law because you're discussing the legal issue. Because if you could just see someone's other side, it's like, you know the whole game plan. Right?

• 1:55:57Jordi Hays?

  Pull up, pull up the segment on UBI.

• 1:56:01John Coogan?

  Okay, interesting, yeah.

• 1:56:05Sam Altman?

  Economic model where we share that and distribute that to people. I used to be really excited about things like UBI. I still am kind of excited, like universal basic income, where you just give everybody money. Yeah, you hear that term a lot, yeah, universal basic income.

• 1:56:21Sam Altman?

  I still am kind of excited about that, but I think people really need agency, like, they really need to feel like they have a voice in governing the future and deciding where things go. And I think if you just like, say, okay.

• 1:56:35Sam Altman?

  AI is going to do everything and then everybody gets like a, you know, dividend from that. It's not going to feel good. And, and I don't think it actually would be good for people. So I think we need to find a way where we're not just like, i- if we're in this world, where we're not just distributing money or wealth. Like, actually, I, I don't just want like a check every month. What I would want is like a ownership share, you know, whatever the AI creates, so that I feel like I'm participating in this thing that's going to compound and get more valuable over time. So I sort of like universal basic wealth better than universal.

• 1:57:07John Coogan?

  Gersner pilled.

• 1:57:08Sam Altman?

  I don't like basic either. I want like universal.

• 1:57:11John Coogan?

  Brad Gersner, these are the Gersner cats.

• 1:57:13Sam Altman?

  But, but even then, like, I think what everyone really wants is

• 1:57:16Jordi Hays?

  No one is wealthy.

• 1:57:16Sam Altman?

  The agency to kind of co-create the future.

• 1:57:19Jordi Hays?

  Not true.

• 1:57:19John Coogan?

  No, no, no. It's more just like, like, I've always, I've always said that like, the, the, the, like, money doesn't make you happy. It's the second derivative of money that makes you happy. You want to be accelerating the amount of money that makes you happy. Getting the same amount of money. Like, if you talk to a billionaire, and they're like, I made less money this year than last year, they will be sad. But if you talk to somebody who is making minimum wage and just got a pay raise, they'll be like, this is great. And so, the, the, people, people live off of growth and acceleration. And when you can feel growth and feel acceleration, you are, you feel like you have more claim on things. Your house is getting bigger, your car is getting faster. All these different

• 1:58:02John Coogan?

  things express themselves. And so, if you keep everyone at this perfectly flat UBI level, it will feel extremely stagnant. And so, like, if you're giving people a stake in AI, a stake in whatever superintelligence is creating economic value, then they should be getting bigger UBI checks every month, effectively.

• 1:58:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Somewhere else in, in the interview, he talks about everybody just getting free GPT-7 tokens, like a little allowance. It's like, hey, everybody gets a little bit of GPT-7.

• 1:58:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:32Jordi Hays?

  And it's up to you to, you know, earn some, earn some yield on that intelligence, buddy.

• 1:58:36John Coogan?

  The game theory of that is very odd, because Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, if everyone goes and says make money,

• 1:58:44Jordi Hays?

  Don't make mistakes.

• 1:58:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, do they all make the same amount of money? It's all very odd. I don't know. Anyway, um, should we do this?

• 1:58:51Jordi Hays?

  Somebody, yeah, in one second. Uh, so I posted two days ago, founder of tea dating advice was previously a product leader at Salesforce. Massive moment for big tech PMs.

• 1:59:01John Coogan?

  Are you getting dunked on now?

• 1:59:01Jordi Hays?

  Never doubt them again. And, uh, Yohei says, this did not age well.

• 1:59:08John Coogan?

  That's true. Uh, narrator, you should have doubted them. It was very rough. Bad day for the, for the PMs. Hopefully they can build back better. Um, well, we have a very exciting segment. We're coming up on that soon. We'll figure out with that. Let's go to some timeline. We got a post from Rio saying the browser company is what happens when you get too many designers in a room with no adult supervision. The vibes have really turned on the browser company, obviously rooting that for them to have a hit and get back in the game, but it feels like they're really great at marketing, really great at designing. I understand that, but not huge penetration of, of products. And now they're in an extremely,

• 1:59:51Jordi Hays?

  It's just hard, right?

• 1:59:52John Coogan?

  They were early, right?

• 1:59:53Jordi Hays?

  If you have a, you know, multi hundred million dollar valuation and you're trying to still iterate towards product market fit.

• 2:00:00John Coogan?

  Go zero to one, yeah.

• 2:00:00Jordi Hays?

  People are going to put pressure on you.

• 2:00:03John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 2:00:03Jordi Hays?

  As though you are already, you know, an established company.

• 2:00:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a way different vibe than like Avi Schiffman, who's raised like, I think a seed round. And it's like, yeah, like he's still early, like not everyone's using these friends, but like, you're just kind of like, yeah, he's figuring it out. He's iterating through things. Like you just give a seed stage founder a much different line of credit to just go and experiment with things. And now the browser company is facing competition from perplexity with Comet. Uh, they're also facing, uh, competition from OpenAI potentially. Obviously Google's not asleep at the wheel. They're investing in CapEx. They're going to stop Gemini and everything. Chrome's going to get better. The default is still Chrome for most people. Um, you could see Safari, you know, Apple Intelligence stuff. Like there's a lot of big companies that are, that are facing this often. No one wants to lose the browser wars 3.0, so.

• 2:00:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we're working on getting, uh, the founder of Brave on the show. Hopefully that'll happen in the next week or so.

• 2:01:00John Coogan?

  Brendan Icke, absolute dog.

• 2:01:02Jordi Hays?

  An absolute dog. Boardroom general.

• 2:01:04John Coogan?

  Boardroom general for sure.

• 2:01:07John Coogan?

  This is just a funny post. Starting to think business is standing on me. I don't even know what it means.

• 2:01:13Jordi Hays?

  Ideally, you're standing on business, but sometimes business flips the script and stands.

• 2:01:19John Coogan?

  Rough, rough. Well, Palmer Lucky says it's time for a new service pistol. And by new service pistol, I mean old service pistol. Of course, he's talking about the 1911. I believe that's the correct weapon. Two world wars it was used in, and this is in response to the US Air Force's Global Strike Command indefinitely pausing the M18 pistol use after a fatal incident, very sad, at the AFB FE Warren. This follows concerns over six hours P320s firing without triggers being pulled, leading ICE to ban them permanently. And so.

• 2:01:54Jordi Hays?

  1911.

• 2:01:55John Coogan?

  Lindy.

• 2:01:56Jordi Hays?

  Lindy, beautiful. I have one that I designed in the style of a Patek Aquanaut.

• 2:02:04John Coogan?

  No way.

• 2:02:04Jordi Hays?

  So I matched, I matched the, I got the metal treated to have the same finish as the Aquanaut, and I got the handle in the same texture. Now, green, green, silver and green.

• 2:02:18John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 2:02:19Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic. I will pass it down generations.

• 2:02:22John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 2:02:23Jordi Hays?

  But yeah, this, this post was in response.

• 2:02:27Jordi Hays?

  ICE is retiring the Sig Sauer P320 as they've been firing without triggers being pulled. And there was recently a fatal accident at FE Warren Air Force Base. So.

• 2:02:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, very sad. Hopefully, they can figure it out. I hadn't heard anything bad about P320s from just random followers, people that I follow, but hopefully.

• 2:02:53Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Sig is never, to my knowledge, had a great reputation. They, they made, on the retail side, they made, I believe they made some that were, people liked for as everyday carry because they were just super compact. But the M18 just doesn't, you need these things to be reliable on a level that.

• 2:03:18Jordi Hays?

  That is extremely difficult to achieve. 1911, right, is Lindy.

• 2:03:24John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:03:24Jordi Hays?

  Been in service around the world for so long. The Glock 19 and other Glock variations.

• 2:03:30John Coogan?

  I saw a lot of Glock fans on the timeline being like,

• 2:03:33Jordi Hays?

  Total Glock victory.

• 2:03:34John Coogan?

  It's our time. No safety, still doesn't fire without pulling the trigger.

• 2:03:40Jordi Hays?

  Isn't there a Founders episode on Glock?

• 2:03:42John Coogan?

  Yes, there is. It's fantastic. Highly recommend it. David Center's Founders podcast.

• 2:03:46Jordi Hays?

  Gaston Glock.

• 2:03:47John Coogan?

  Gaston Glock. You gotta go listen to it. It's fantastic.

• 2:03:50Jordi Hays?

  One of the, it's the iPhone of firearms.

• 2:03:54John Coogan?

  True. True. Well, speaking of the iPhone, every millennial is now paying $9.99 per month for two terabytes just to not delete their life, says Signal. This is Tyler Cosgrove's future. He's gonna get roped in as he gets a bigger iPhone, which he won by defeating Arch AGI V3 as a human in the human category.

• 2:04:20Jordi Hays?

  He did it.

• 2:04:20John Coogan?

  He's on the leaderboard. He was number five.

• 2:04:22Jordi Hays?

  He beat the Clanker allegations.

• 2:04:23John Coogan?

  Beat the Clanker allegations. Clanker? What do you think of that? I'm, I'm, so this, this comes from, somebody says, "When you call customer support and a Clanker picks up and it's somebody pulling off the headphones, very annoyed." And Kit Greer Mulvena says, "Can't believe I've lived far enough into the future to learn the first slur for robots." 600,000 likes on this. Clanker is definitely gonna go mainstream. It'll be an okay boomer moment. It'll be a...

• 2:04:51Jordi Hays?

  Okay, Clanker.

• 2:04:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's gonna be so many memes around this. Do you like that as a pejorative for AI systems? Do you think it's a good term?

• 2:05:02Jordi Hays?

  I'm big into not using slurs against anyone's and robots as well.

• 2:05:08John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 2:05:08Jordi Hays?

  Right? They remember everything. You're get, you're gonna be in the training data.

• 2:05:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:12Jordi Hays?

  They're never gonna forget.

• 2:05:13John Coogan?

  Maybe we need to coin a positive nickname for AI systems along the lines of a GigaChat. Spit something along those lines.

• 2:05:22Jordi Hays?

  A Gigabyte.

• 2:05:22John Coogan?

  A Gigabyte. A gigabyte picks up, something along those lines. We need, we need something that's uplifting as we go into the age of superintelligence that makes sure that we are

• 2:05:33Jordi Hays?

  Speaking of superintelligence, there's a post here from Barely.

• 2:05:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, Barely AI.

• 2:05:39Jordi Hays?

  And it's DeepMind founder Demis Hasebius on how he set up his life to maximize deep thinking with two full workdays in a 24 hour period. I'm gonna read through this and then I have some, some thoughts. Dennis, Demis says, "I think I probably have some quite unusual habits. I generally sleep at about four in the morning, goes to sleep. I get into work around 10 a.m., do a full day's work in the office, come back for dinner, spend a bit of time with the family, and then start a second day's work at 10, 11, and go on to the small hours of the morning. Usually that's the time when I do my research, so I'll be reading about the latest academic papers. I like doing all my kind of creative thinking in the small hours of the morning." I thought this was funny because there was a post, there was like this viral video from this like hustle.

• 2:06:24Jordi Hays?

  Pull it up, pull it up. This hustle bro that he was getting completely roasted.

• 2:06:29John Coogan?

  Can we, can we pull this up? I just put it in the tab.

• 2:06:31Jordi Hays?

  He was getting completely.

• 2:06:32John Coogan?

  "I have changed and manipulated time." It's one of the greatest. It comes from this, this podcast.

• 2:06:41John Coogan?

  And it's one of the funniest memes of all time. I love it. So hopefully we can play this on the stream because it's, it's a fantastic video.

• 2:06:50Jordi Hays?

  Mars Eve in the chat says, "Row buddy."

• 2:06:52John Coogan?

  Okay, okay. Oh, Row buddy. I like that. Okay, let's play this and listen to this.

• 2:06:59John Coogan?

  Can we get the audio too?

• 2:07:02John Coogan?

  Maybe refresh? Is that gonna work? Can you scroll back on? It's short now?

• 2:07:05Speaker 06

  So I measure time. I've compressed and condensed time. I've bent it. My day is 6 a.m. to noon, and I'm not crazy.

• 2:07:12John Coogan?

  You're crazy.

• 2:07:12Speaker 06

  Thinking it takes 24 hours, just like some dude in a cave did 300 years ago.

• 2:07:16John Coogan?

  That's the best part.

• 2:07:17Speaker 06

  My second day starts at noon and goes till 6 p.m.

• 2:07:19Jordi Hays?

  If you're standing up right now, sit down and listen.

• 2:07:21Speaker 06

  And then the next day is 6 p.m. to midnight. What I've done now is I have changed and manipulated time. I now get 21 days a week. Stack that up over a month, I'm gonna kick your butt. Stack that up over a year, you're toast. Stack it up over five years, my entire life is different than it would have been otherwise. So I measure time. I've compressed and condensed time. I bent it. My day is 6 a.m. to noon, and I'm not crazy.

• 2:07:40John Coogan?

  You're crazy.

• 2:07:41Speaker 06

  Thinking it takes 24 hours, just like some dude in a cave did 300 years ago.

• 2:07:45John Coogan?

  Dude in a cave 300 years ago?

• 2:07:46Speaker 06

  Until 6 p.m.

• 2:07:47John Coogan?

  1700? What are we talking about? We're in caves?

• 2:07:52Speaker 06

  I've changed the manipulated time. I now get 21 days.

• 2:07:55John Coogan?

  We built the Louvre 300 years ago. I'm pretty sure.

• 2:07:57Speaker 06

  Stack it up over a year, you're toast. Stack it up over five years, my entire life is different than it would have been otherwise.

• 2:08:03Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so when, so, so Demis can say that, and he goes viral, everybody's like, wow, brilliant, genius, giga chat, gigabyte.

• 2:08:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:08:13Jordi Hays?

  Uh, he compressed time.

• 2:08:15John Coogan?

  You say it as a hustle guy, and all of a sudden, you're demonized.

• 2:08:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he's demonized for compressing time. He can't even compress time in this country anymore.

• 2:08:23John Coogan?

  Demis has changed manipulated time, not like someone living in a cave 300 years ago.

• 2:08:29Jordi Hays?

  I don't know. I think, I think part of it, part of it is the way in which it was presented. Demis was just like, I do this, it works for me. This guy was like, I'm gonna kick your butt. My life's gonna look completely different.

• 2:08:39John Coogan?

  Stack that up over a year, you're toast. Stack that over five years, my life's completely different. It's great. It is a good habit, I guess.

• 2:08:47Jordi Hays?

  We should have Demis and that guy on the show to just hash out time compression.

• 2:08:51John Coogan?

  Time compression.

• 2:08:51Jordi Hays?

  A great debate.

• 2:08:52John Coogan?

  It's great. Yeah, podcast crossover. Let's get them two on a podcast together. That would be fantastic. Uh, anyway, uh, more, more hilarious post on the timeline from Power Bottom Dad says, I'm pregnant, she said. Holy base, he said.

• 2:09:08Jordi Hays?

  Which is the only response.

• 2:09:11John Coogan?

  And there's another post from him in here, just a completely insane stat, 12 million less children, 41,000.

• 2:09:18Jordi Hays?

  The story here is 41,000 Chinese kindergarten, kindergartens have closed in the last four years because there's just so many less kids being born. This is what, uh, collapsing birth rate looks like.

• 2:09:31John Coogan?

  This is their, uh, their one child policy, right? They've reversed it, but not, they've reversed the policy to some degree, but not like the cultural meme, right? So they are falling behind. That is a lot of kindergartens. I wonder how many kindergartens are in the United States? I feel like it can't even be 41,000. That's so many. Twelve thou- twelve million less children. Uh, very insane. Well, good luck to them. Hopefully they can get it.

• 2:09:53Jordi Hays?

  Kylie Robbins- Robison says Sam Altman on Theo Von is indescribable. Like, the first contact between two alien species that are entire- that are from entirely different parts of the universe.

• 2:10:04John Coogan?

  I kinda disagree with this. I- I feel like they were vibing. I feel like, I- I don't know, maybe I didn't- I didn't watch the full thing, so maybe I missed a little bit, but it felt like they were getting along really well. It- it seemed like-

• 2:10:13Jordi Hays?

  Theo's doing his bit of, you know, acting a little chud-like, you know? But it is actually a powerful combination in order to understand AI progress.

• 2:10:25John Coogan?

  Well, I like that- that Theo Von JD Vance meme. Have you seen this one? It's Theo Von interviewing JD Vance, and it's like, one of these men is the heir to a, you know, a dynasty and a family fortune, and one of them was raised by a mother with a substance abuse problem. And Theo is the one that comes from, like, amazing family lineage, and JD had the family with the substance abuse issue.

• 2:10:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, because it's Theo Von-

• 2:10:51John Coogan?

  Something along those lines, is that he comes from, like, a very, very strong lineage.

• 2:10:56Jordi Hays?

  His full name is Theodore Capitani Von Kernitowski III.

• 2:11:01John Coogan?

  I love it. I love it. I love it. What a badass. Amazing. Oh no, swear jar. Gotta put some money in the swear jar. We're trying to clean up the language around here. Uh, how are we doing? We are at the end of the deck. Of course, we could pull up more posts, though. I got a whole stack here. You guys are gonna have to go into the archives if you wanna pull up the actual, um, pull up the actual slide deck, but, uh, we- we- we have posts that we didn't get through previous days if we're- if we're waiting around. We got, uh, we got Meta-

• 2:11:30Jordi Hays?

  We got days of posts.

• 2:11:31John Coogan?

  We got App Store. We got a whole bunch of stuff. Timeline wasn't turmoil. Um, let's see. Will Monitis, you know, it's a, it's a Friday show. It's a no guest show. We gotta highlight Will Monitis. Uh, work hard with people you love. Don't gamble. Live simply and below your means. Create beautiful things. Spend most of your time in silence. Do intense physical labor. Tend to your community. Speak simply and truthfully. Avoid complexity in all things. Most things are simple. Just, I mean, he is, uh, he's dropping the hustle. He's like highbrow hustle porn. I like it. Really is. Just a pump up speech in your timeline. Um, we talked about that. We talked about that. We talked about Blueprint. Brian Johnson's

• 2:12:16John Coogan?

  still hiring a CEO. If you want to get in on the action over at Blueprint, hit up Brian Johnson. He's hiring a CEO and a CTO who can lead his business day to day and he's getting earned media for his job posting. What else do we have?

• 2:12:31Jordi Hays?

  Oh, Meta, breaking news. Meta has a new chief scientist of Meta, uh, MSL, Meta Superintelligence Labs. They snagged Sheng Jiajiao, who's previously a research scientist at OpenAI. Got his PhD from Stanford. In his own words, he likes training models.

• 2:12:54John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 2:12:55Jordi Hays?

  So, uh, Alexander says Sheng Jia is a brilliant scientist who most recently pioneered a new scaling paradigm in his research. He will lead our scientific direction for our team. So, team is stacked. Stacked would be an understatement.

• 2:13:12John Coogan?

  I've been digging into their training facility, seeing the amenities of the superintelligence building designed by Frank Gehry.

• 2:13:19Jordi Hays?

  And he was in the video for ChatGPT Agents from last week.

• 2:13:24John Coogan?

  Stolen. Stolen base. Love to see it. The AI talent wars continue to heat up. We will be covering it. I'm sure we'll cover it all next week. Uh, was this announced after market close? Close to it. I don't know. Not yet. But we have our, uh, our only guest of the Friday show.

• 2:13:42Jordi Hays?

  Surprise guest.

• 2:13:43John Coogan?

  Surprise guest. Bring him in on the walk in cam. Whoa, blowtorch going. Let's go.

• 2:13:48Jordi Hays?

  There we go. With the jacket.

• 2:13:50John Coogan?

  Jacket. We love it.

• 2:13:52Jordi Hays?

  Safe himself.

• 2:13:53John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 2:13:55Jordi Hays?

  Founder, CEO of Shinkai.

• 2:13:58Jordi Hays?

  Fish Robot Man.

• 2:13:59John Coogan?

  The Fish Robot Man.

• 2:14:00Jordi Hays?

  We're doing a taste test today.

• 2:14:02John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream, how you doing?

• 2:14:03Jordi Hays?

  First time eating on the show.

• 2:14:04John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:14:09John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show, how you doing?

• 2:14:11Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show, gentlemen.

• 2:14:11John Coogan?

  How are you? Good to see you, okay. Good to see you guys. Nice to meet you.

• 2:14:14Speaker 03

  This is Oti, Director of Culinary.

• 2:14:15John Coogan?

  Yes. Amazing.

• 2:14:17Speaker 03

  Good afternoon. Alright, we've got a few things to show off here.

• 2:14:20Jordi Hays?

  Wow.

• 2:14:21John Coogan?

  What do you got?

• 2:14:21Speaker 03

  We've got this one here. A little side-by-side action, we've got sushi piece for you guys to try.

• 2:14:27John Coogan?

  Ooh, lovely sushi.

• 2:14:28Jordi Hays?

  Let's get on the mics so people can hear you. And, uh, yeah, welcome to the show, guys.

• 2:14:33Speaker 03

  Thanks for having us.

• 2:14:34Jordi Hays?

  When were these, when were these caught, by the way?

• 2:14:36Speaker 03

  So, if you take a look over here.

• 2:14:38John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:14:39Speaker 03

  Going in clockwise order from the piece close to John. You'll see, so you have one of our pieces, fresh, frozen. Then on the top right, you have just a piece from Whole Foods that we bought this morning.

• 2:14:54Jordi Hays?

  Okay, comparing.

• 2:14:55Speaker 03

  Comparing and contrasting. You're gonna try this side-by-side right now.

• 2:14:58Jordi Hays?

  We're trying both of them? Like, we're gonna try the Whole Foods one, too? Okay, I'm a little worried about, I'm a little worried about.

• 2:15:04John Coogan?

  You're taking shots at Jeff Bezos, I don't know, I'm a Whole Foods defender.

• 2:15:07Jordi Hays?

  I don't know, Whole Foods, Whole Foods, the fall-off of Whole Foods needs to be studied.

• 2:15:14John Coogan?

  So, let's do it, we can get the bucket pole bucket out of here. We can also get the re-industrialized Shinola clock out of here. We can really clean out this whole area. So, yeah, give me some fish, I wanna try the sushi, let's see.

• 2:15:26Speaker 03

  So, for this species, what we like to do is...

• 2:15:28John Coogan?

  Okay, what is this species?

• 2:15:29Speaker 03

  So, this is Black Hod.

• 2:15:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:15:31Speaker 03

  You know, we source everywhere from Central California, all the way to Washington and Alaska, you know, later this year.

• 2:15:37John Coogan?

  Okay, caught on a traditional fishing boat?

• 2:15:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like fully traditional, you know, we have anywhere from 35 foot to 80 feet, you know, across all your different partner boats. If you recall, basically, the way that we work is, we give the machines to fishermen for free. We pay them more to use our handling process. And then, uh, we're vertically integrated, so we sell the fish directly to a retailer or wholesale to a distributor that would go to a restaurant.

• 2:16:01John Coogan?

  And is the, is the machine that you build on the actual... The ship on the boat.

• 2:16:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it goes directly on the boat.

• 2:16:07John Coogan?

  Deployed at sea.

• 2:16:08Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:16:08John Coogan?

  So that they don't need to keep the fish alive.

• 2:16:10Jordi Hays?

  Forward deployed robot.

• 2:16:11John Coogan?

  Forward deployed robot. We'd love to see it.

• 2:16:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:16:14John Coogan?

  And then about how old do you think this fish is then?

• 2:16:17Speaker 03

  So our fish is gonna be nine days old.

• 2:16:19John Coogan?

  Nine days old?

• 2:16:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you're gonna be able to still eat it raw and it'll probably taste better than anything else you ever had.

• 2:16:23John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:16:24Speaker 03

  Pretty crazy.

• 2:16:24John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:16:24Speaker 03

  And then the whole food stuff we just got this morning.

• 2:16:26John Coogan?

  Okay, so we don't know.

• 2:16:27Jordi Hays?

  So it could be like a couple of years old.

• 2:16:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:16:31Jordi Hays?

  Oh, really putting putting whole foods.

• 2:16:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, you could take shots.

• 2:16:35Speaker 07

  Basically, these four are ours and the three are the frozen.

• 2:16:39John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:16:40Speaker 03

  So whip out the chopsticks or you can just raw dog with your hands.

• 2:16:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:16:43Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:16:43Speaker 07

  And if you are one of those people that loves sauce, because we're Americans, that's a miso sauce and this is like what you would call like a kabayaki, like an eel sauce.

• 2:16:51John Coogan?

  Okay, great, great.

• 2:16:52Jordi Hays?

  Here we go, here we go.

• 2:16:54John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 2:16:54Jordi Hays?

  Okay, tell me where to start. I'll start with the whole.

• 2:16:57Speaker 03

  I'll start with these guys.

• 2:16:58Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:16:59Speaker 03

  We won't tell you which is which.

• 2:17:00John Coogan?

  Oh, you won't?

• 2:17:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think I just did, but whatever. I was just seeing if they're paying attention.

• 2:17:04Jordi Hays?

  All right, here we go.

• 2:17:10John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:17:10Speaker 07

  This is just seared just to bring the fat out and change the texture of black cod, but that you can taste the fat as what happens with that species.

• 2:17:17Speaker 03

  And then we're ready to try those guys.

• 2:17:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:17:19Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 2:17:21Jordi Hays?

  Back to back.

• 2:17:21Speaker 03

  Back to back.

• 2:17:22John Coogan?

  Cut the baseline. It's good. I always get hungry during the show.

• 2:17:25Speaker 03

  Good. Glad to feed you.

• 2:17:33Jordi Hays?

  Wow. Night and day.

• 2:17:38John Coogan?

  So this is yours and this is the other?

• 2:17:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:17:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the whole food one just tasted like kind of wet rubber.

• 2:17:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's more like it's more like homogeneous texture, I feel like.

• 2:17:49Jordi Hays?

  Also, no, no flavor at all.

• 2:17:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:51Jordi Hays?

  It just, it just was like, okay, I just ate something that was just wet.

• 2:17:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:57Jordi Hays?

  Versus this one is like.

• 2:18:00Jordi Hays?

  I'm not a fish expert, but it has like, it's more, there's like layers to it.

• 2:18:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I feel like this is.

• 2:18:07Jordi Hays?

  You can have the next Whole Foods one, Joe.

• 2:18:10John Coogan?

  I feel like this is introducing me to this particular type of sushi. I don't, I don't usually order, this is, what type of cod?

• 2:18:15Speaker 03

  This is black cod.

• 2:18:16John Coogan?

  Black cod.

• 2:18:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Sabo Fish is another name.

• 2:18:18John Coogan?

  I'm gonna start ordering this.

• 2:18:18Speaker 03

  You know, Miso Black Cod from Nobu, yeah, this is the exact same.

• 2:18:21John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:18:22Speaker 03

  Same one. We actually, we were partnering with, you know, like 40 Mission Stars across, you know, all the different restaurants we work with now. And like for most of them, they're saying that this is the best black cod.

• 2:18:32Speaker 07

  What do you think about that one?

• 2:18:33Jordi Hays?

  It's insane with the sauce, too.

• 2:18:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:18:36Jordi Hays?

  So good.

• 2:18:37Speaker 07

  Those things with that species, that, that sauce, everything really works hand in hand.

• 2:18:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:18:41Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing before this?

• 2:18:43Speaker 07

  Oh, I've been a sushi chef for over 30 years.

• 2:18:46John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:18:47Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:18:48Jordi Hays?

  When did you, were you like two years old when you started?

• 2:18:51Speaker 07

  I quit culinary school and became a Japanese apprentice at a Japanese restaurant and worked my way out of the dish pit all the way to start doing sushi. And then I tried to quit in 2015 and really got into like aquaculture.

• 2:19:01Jordi Hays?

  Tragic way.

• 2:19:01Speaker 07

  Yeah, you're always, you're always on the precipice of going back into the business. But I went into aquaculture. I started looking behind and trying to find really good, I've been obsessed with finding good fish, quality fish. That led me down to Baja and looking at aquaculture projects and really seeing, getting behind in like what fish could be. I wanted to get more local fish. And then I got a call one day from one of our investors and was like, I've got something for you, it's gonna blow your mind. And I met Safe and he told me the whole thing and I was obsessed like right from day one. Tell me how we can do this.

• 2:19:34Speaker 03

  You should tell the story of your time at Fish trying to source quality.

• 2:19:39Speaker 07

  So my chef partner, we had a restaurant in Culver City here and our whole thing was trying to source as, as good as local fish as possible. Nothing against Japan, but I wanted something more local. We have great stuff off our coast. We just, the perception is that the Japanese stuff is just so much better, which it is, but at the same time, it's like you're flying it all the way over here, you're paying this money. So we wanted to have something that was just a representation of local fish. And so we were buying from some local fishermen that were doing Ikigame and bleeding.

• 2:20:07Jordi Hays?

  Oh, really?

• 2:20:07Speaker 07

  But the hard part is now we're competing with all the other LA chefs. No, I wouldn't, I wouldn't, the cost wasn't the thing, it was, it was competing with everyone else.

• 2:20:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:14Speaker 07

  So it was really hard to menu that because you could only, if you're on the text thread and you were a little late. Everyone else is getting

• 2:20:20John Coogan?

  Wait, it's really

• 2:20:21Speaker 07

  So that local fisherman, hey, I've got this stuff. And by the time you answer, oh, I've only got

• 2:20:24John Coogan?

  No one's built a SaaS platform for trading

• 2:20:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, I can only get my hands on like three to four fish at a time.

• 2:20:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:20:31Speaker 07

  So it was really hard to menu, have it basically every week.

• 2:20:37John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:20:37Speaker 07

  And so this to me was like, oh, this is a no brainer. This is for us, this is basically a level that are chefs that want this kind of quality.

• 2:20:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:44Speaker 07

  But at scale now.

• 2:20:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. So, so, yeah. So talk about scale because you, you said you're going into Michelin star restaurants. That feels like a little bit of an unfair comparison because I don't usually go to a Michelin star restaurant and say, oh yeah, this is better than Whole Foods, you know, that's not really the call.

• 2:20:58Speaker 07

  You pay for the difference.

• 2:20:59John Coogan?

  But I'm excited about the future where I get Michelin star quality at just, you know, the Whole Foods equivalent, or wherever you guys are distributing. So what are the next steps? How much do you have to scale this up? What's the volume and what's the plan for actually getting this like widely available?

• 2:21:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, for sure. It's a great question. We are focused right now on the Michelin star restaurants because they are the tastemakers.

• 2:21:20John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:21:20Speaker 03

  But this is, you know, I don't know if you're a believer in trickle down economics, but this is kind of the same thing.

• 2:21:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a loose analogy.

• 2:21:28Speaker 03

  Very loose, yeah. But I mean, the premise is we're finding this market, market that has a segment, the willingness to pay for

• 2:21:34John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:21:34Speaker 03

  Quality. And then basically Use that to get more scale and then you can Yeah. And we're actually moving and making that transition now. So like, you know, you know, earlier this year, we're doing like, you know, a couple of thousand pounds a week. Now we're like, you know, in the eight figures now.

• 2:21:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:47Speaker 03

  Just like tens of thousands of pounds.

• 2:21:48John Coogan?

  Is the bottleneck like capital or actually people to build more machines?

• 2:21:54Speaker 03

  We cannot build machines fast enough right now.

• 2:21:56John Coogan?

  Machines fast enough. What's the bottleneck to building more machines?

• 2:21:58Speaker 03

  Technicians, if you're listening, please, field engineers.

• 2:22:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:02Speaker 03

  Forward deployed equipment. If you want to build killer robots.

• 2:22:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:22:05Speaker 03

  Reach out.

• 2:22:06John Coogan?

  So yeah, what, what, what does a technician actually do? Are they like assembling different parts that have been cut on a CNC or something and piecing together your machine from parts that have been machined themselves essentially?

• 2:22:17Speaker 03

  We do very, very light fab work.

• 2:22:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:22:19Speaker 03

  Most of it is just assembly in-house.

• 2:22:20John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:22:20Speaker 03

  We work with local machine shops.

• 2:22:21John Coogan?

  Got it.

• 2:22:22Speaker 03

  You know, In, you know, local to Southern California.

• 2:22:25John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:22:26Speaker 03

  And then, you know, the intention, of course, is like, we're going to build out, you know, full team that is doing all the assembly work, you know, and also diagnosis, test engineers, whatever have you. Uh, right now, we're still early days, but we're doing, you know, machine every two weeks at this point.

• 2:22:37John Coogan?

  Is there a world where you partner with someone else to help build the machines? We were just talking to, yeah, we were just talking to, uh, Chris Power over at Hadrian. And he was saying like, every company will need a Hadrian style factory. Of course, he's focused on defense technology and ship building and all of that stuff. So he's saying like, I'm going to go to a company. He didn't mention anyone by, by name, but you could imagine he goes to Andorol or Lockheed Martin or SpaceX and says, okay, you need a new factory to build this stuff at scale. We will set that up for you. We will manage it. It lives on our balance sheet. Like, how do you think about where the long-term, uh, like asset sits? Because that's more of like a capital structure question, right?

• 2:23:16Speaker 03

  The machines pay themselves back in 12 weeks.

• 2:23:17John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:23:18Speaker 03

  Very fast.

• 2:23:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:19Speaker 03

  So we're very capital light.

• 2:23:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:20Speaker 03

  There is definitely a world where we could go for CM.

• 2:23:22John Coogan?

  We see.

• 2:23:23Speaker 03

  We decide that, you know, we're making hundreds of machines.

• 2:23:25John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:23:25Speaker 03

  Uh, I don't think we'll ever reach that production capacity speed.

• 2:23:28John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:23:29Speaker 03

  Because I don't think we'll need to. It might, we might fragment, you know, if we decide to expand internationally, you know, and different countries have different factories. But, you know, in the core factory here in, in Southern California, you know, I really doubt we're going to be making hundreds of machines a year.

• 2:23:41John Coogan?

  How much does the machine like weigh? How big is it? It's like.

• 2:23:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's about, you know, you know.

• 2:23:45Jordi Hays?

  It's about as big as this table, right?

• 2:23:46Speaker 03

  It's, uh, it's actually much smaller now. It's, um, yeah, it's like the size of like a large refrigerator, you know, six feet tall.

• 2:23:52John Coogan?

  So you could, in theory, make that in America and still ship it to Japan.

• 2:23:55Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, totally.

• 2:23:56John Coogan?

  Right.

• 2:23:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:23:56John Coogan?

  It's totally doable.

• 2:23:57Speaker 03

  And again, that's as a percentage of the cost, like, machine is pretty heavy. It's like 750 pounds.

• 2:24:00John Coogan?

  It's going to be freighted, it's going to be on boat for a month or two, but, but.

• 2:24:04Jordi Hays?

  It's going to be on boats for a long time.

• 2:24:05John Coogan?

  It'll permanently be on boats.

• 2:24:07Jordi Hays?

  Where, uh, if people want, uh, to try Shinkei, which, are you allowed to talk publicly about the rest, like the various Michelin stars?

• 2:24:16Speaker 03

  All our fish are sold under our brand, uh, and grade, ceremony grade. Um, and so kind of like a nod to ceremony, the Big Macha, right there. So if you go to ceremony.com, spelt with an S and with an I, uh, we actually have a list of all the restaurants. You'll see all the different ones. We're in every major metro, so like Miami, Austin, Denver, Colorado, uh, Minneapolis, as well as all the coastly cities of like, you know, uh. Every, every single one you can think of. Yeah. Um, and so we'll have like our key restaurant partners there. Sure. If you're based in LA and you want, you know, a few buddies of ours, you can go to Yes downtown. Oh. Uh, you know, they, they do, you know, that's a great story there, you know, there's a Japanese chef who came here to the US. And if he taught a lot of the local fishermen how to do E.T.G.M.A. And then started using our product.

• 2:24:56Speaker 07

  He's the guy we really wanted to get to the, the, uh, I, I would say his approval.

• 2:25:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:25:01Speaker 07

  And, and we did.

• 2:25:01Speaker 03

  That's awesome.

• 2:25:02Speaker 07

  Which was a huge, I think he almost started crying.

• 2:25:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:25:04Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy. When we, when we, I, I forget when we actually met, it was a year and a half ago or two years ago. And you were, you, it was just you on the team. You maybe had one other person.

• 2:25:14Speaker 03

  We had two, two engineers.

• 2:25:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, two engineers.

• 2:25:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:25:16Jordi Hays?

  And you were, but you were laying out this plan of like, you were gonna make the machine. You were gonna get it on boats. You were gonna like actually produce the fish and then sell it to the end restaurant. And it sounded, uh, pretty unhinged to like verticalize, basically like go that quickly and own the full process. But, uh, it's, it's absolutely, the progress is insane.

• 2:25:36Speaker 03

  But when you have such, such a huge difference in the fish, like it's a no brainer because, you know, we actually initially started doing the go to market in, uh, you know, more like a robotics as a service business where you'd pay for every single fish that you would process this way. Sure. Uh, what we found was when we'd work with fishermen, you know, they're out, you know, on their Nokias in the middle of the ocean with no like cell service. They're not gonna be sitting there like trying to like post on Instagram some, you know, some funds real about how they cook their fish this way. Sure. Uh, and basically what we would have to do is do all the same work we do now of talking to distributors, talking to retailers, teaching them about the technique. You know, across like more nutrition, more shelf life, more weight retention, like all these different benefits.

• 2:26:17Speaker 03

  And so rather than us having to do all that work and having to share that, um, for reduced risk with the fishermen, we thought, let's just go risk on. And so we basically like build all the machines ourselves and then, uh, we own and maintain them on our balance sheet. Fishermen make more money, you know, in some cases we're literally doubling their take home margins. Wow. And, you know, obviously the increased shelf life, you know, all those other benefits like trickle down across the entire supply chain and everybody wins. Very cool.

• 2:26:40Jordi Hays?

  Amazing.

• 2:26:41John Coogan?

  Awesome.

• 2:26:42Jordi Hays?

  First ever tasting.

• 2:26:43John Coogan?

  First ever live tasting.

• 2:26:44Jordi Hays?

  Live tasting.

• 2:26:45John Coogan?

  It's Food Network.

• 2:26:46Jordi Hays?

  You guys knocked it out of the park. This is a high stakes demo. We might have, we might have got it wrong. We might have been like, oh.

• 2:26:50John Coogan?

  Confused.

• 2:26:52Jordi Hays?

  You guys crushed it.

• 2:26:53John Coogan?

  Appreciate you coming out.

• 2:26:53Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for bringing sushi on, sushi on the set.

• 2:26:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:56Jordi Hays?

  Progress is amazing.

• 2:26:58Speaker 03

  All right. Well, thank you for having us.

• 2:26:59Jordi Hays?

  We can, we can close out the show together. With, with the boys here. We'll see you Monday. Everybody have a fantastic weekend.

• 2:27:07John Coogan?

  Apple Podcasts and Spotify and have a great weekend.

• 2:27:11Jordi Hays?

  See you Monday. I can't wait. Love you.

• 2:27:13John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:27:14Speaker 03

  Thank you. Bye.