Guide to the AI Barnyard, Eli Lilly Hits $1T Valuation, Has AI Ruined the Em Dash? | Julia Steinberg, Bobby Ghoshal

(00:11) - Eli Lilly Hits $1T Valuation (11:24) - Adobe to Buy Semrush for $1.9B (15:27) - Guide to the AI Barnyard (44:13) - AMD Chief Challenges Nvidia Dominance (57:13) - WSJ Mansion Section (01:04:30) - Has AI Ruined the Em Dash? (01:14:36) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (01:52:42) - Julia Steinberg, General Manager of Books and editor at Arena Magazine, discusses the upcoming release of Arena's Issue 006, themed "An Ode to Capitalism," scheduled for December 1st. She reflects on the challenges of large-scale government infrastructure projects, expressing skepticism about their efficiency compared to private sector initiatives. Additionally, she shares her experiences living in San Francisco, highlighting issues like homelessness and public safety, and notes the city's efforts to improve conditions during major events. (02:24:11) - Bobby Ghoshal, co-founder and CEO of Dupe.com, discusses how Dupe serves as a shopping companion that helps users find desired products or similar alternatives at better prices, emphasizing its role in providing confidence to shoppers. He highlights the challenges in building the product experience, noting the importance of partnerships with brands to access live inventory, pricing, and customer behavior data, which are crucial for accurate recommendations. Ghoshal also shares the company's growth, mentioning that Dupe has reached approximately 18 million shoppers and is approaching $100 million in gross merchandise value, with plans to expand into categories like fashion and perfumes. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Restream - https://restream.io Profound - https://tryprofound.com Julius AI - https://julius.ai turbopuffer - https://turbopuffer.com fal - https://fal.ai Privy - https://www.privy.io Cognition - https://cognition.ai Gemini - https://gemini.google.com Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00Jordi Hays?

  You're watching TVP.

• 0:01John Coogan?

  Today's Friday, November 21st, 2025. We are live from the TVP and Ultra Dome, the Temple of Technology.

• 0:07Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:08John Coogan?

  The Capital of Capital. We got to ring the size gong for Eli Lilly. Big Pharma's getting bigger.

• 0:19John Coogan?

  $1 trillion. That's the new market cap for Eli Lilly. They're a $1 trillion company. Normally, you gotta be selling ads. You gotta be a tech company, or you gotta be an oil company to get into the 1 trillion club.

• 0:32Jordi Hays?

  But people did say, back in the day, whoever creates a cure for obesity is gonna be a trillionaire.

• 0:38John Coogan?

  Yep. They did the meme.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  They did the meme.

• 0:41John Coogan?

  They did the meme. Eli Lilly just became the first $1 trillion pharma company in history. I want to see the CEO, Dave Ricks. You know, he went on the Cheeky Pint Podcast. I want to see him post, you know, how to run a 13-figure business. Give me a thread. Give me a thread.

• 1:02Jordi Hays?

  Nobody's done that.

• 1:03John Coogan?

  I'm a 13-figure businessman, and I'm on Instagram giving you some advice. Teach a course. Come on. Tell me how you do it.

• 1:11Jordi Hays?

  Nobody's run that playbook yet.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  But it is a fascinating business. It's one that I'm not super familiar with. And so I wanted to understand exactly how the weight loss market's playing out. Earlier in the year, maybe a year ago, we looked into GLP-1s. We talked about them. We read about Novo, of course.

• 1:30Jordi Hays?

  And we laughed a little. We laughed a little when Novo failed to renew one of their, one of their patents.

• 1:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was crazy.

• 1:38Jordi Hays?

  And I think it cost, I'm gonna look it up, but it was something like that.

• 1:44John Coogan?

  Yeah. So what's been fascinating to me is the, is the lack of importance of intellectual property here. Normally, when I think about, when I think about developing drugs, all pharma, I think about it as like, you get a bunch of scientists in a lab, they, they discover something, and then they patent it, and you have a complete monopoly on that for years. It's like, you know, you have the, you have the patent on the intellectual property. If I have Mickey Mouse, you can't use Mickey Mouse for decades until it enters the, the, the, the public good, the public square.

• 2:19John Coogan?

  But that's not exactly how this is playing out. So Novo has been, was originally the one getting all the attention for kicking off the GLP-1 boom. But over the past few years, Lilly has caught up. It's sort of a Google story. It's sort of like the Google narrative. Novo sort of raced to market. Basically, everyone was working on diabetes drugs. Then they figured out that the, these could be used for weight loss and everyone rebranded, ran a few more studies, and then brought the drugs to market. So now the name of the game is making American GLP-1s. Eli Lilly is building a massive new plant in North Carolina to support what's now a $72 billion market. The, the revenue numbers are really crazy.

• 3:03John Coogan?

  It feels like an AI story, but in this case, AI stands for appetite inhibitor, I guess.

• 3:09Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 3:10John Coogan?

  Long-term forecasts get really massive. Eli Lilly is currently expected to generate $63 billion across their entire portfolio. But by 2034, they're expected to sell over 100 billion just in weight loss. So this new business line is going to be bigger.

• 3:25Jordi Hays?

  Ignoring the entire rest of the business.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  Exactly. It's going to be, it's going to be basically twice as big as they're existing, as, as everything they are now. And they're already a big company. So I was, I was surprised that there was not more of an exclusivity period here. I wanted to dig into it. We were wondering, like, is it some sort of deal? Are they working together, Novo and Eli Lilly? In fact, they are-

• 3:44Jordi Hays?

  Historically, they did.

• 3:45John Coogan?

  No.

• 3:46Jordi Hays?

  Really?

• 3:46John Coogan?

  They were accused of working together.

• 3:48Jordi Hays?

  Oh, interesting.

• 3:48John Coogan?

  And, and that would have been illegal and they would have been colluding. They are bitter rivals going back 80 years. They've never worked together. They, they do not work together. They in fact are fighting over this market completely. And so what actually wound up happening was that the first, you know, the, the, the first drug that kicked this all off was Novo Nordisk. They patented semaglutide, which was marketed as Ozempic and then Wegovy and-

• 4:15Jordi Hays?

  And to my point earlier-

• 4:17John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 4:17Jordi Hays?

  Uh, referencing the Canadian market, this happened around five months ago. Novo Nordisk actually, actually lost Canadian patent protection on Ozempic and Wegovy in Canada because a few years ago they didn't pay a very nominal maintenance fee on their patent.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  It's crazy. It's crazy.

• 4:34Jordi Hays?

  Which will ultimately, you know, cost them billions.

• 4:36John Coogan?

  Well, don't do that. Instead, get on ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 4:46John Coogan?

  So, back to GLP-1s. No one can patent a biological mechanism. You can only patent a particular chemical, a particular structure. You can't just, you can't patent the idea of inhibiting, mimicking GLP-1, which is what all these drugs do. They mimic the GLP-1 hormone, and that's what's important. So Novo patented semaglutide. Lilly had terzepatide already in the works. Again, they were working on diabetes, not on weight loss.

• 5:15Jordi Hays?

  Something else.

• 5:15John Coogan?

  But, but it was, it was already kind of predicted to be a big market. So they are, they both have products. And then as soon as, as soon as Novo is able to pivot to weight loss, Lilly's able to run the same playbook very, very quickly. And accidental discoveries and quick rebrandings are nothing new in pharma. Viagra was initially created by Pfizer as a heart medication.

• 5:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 5:39John Coogan?

  They gave it to both men and women, I believe. And, but male subjects obviously had a particular side effect, and that unlocked an entirely new market. And then that discovery came out of left field completely. So they had a true, Pfizer basically had a true monopoly for five years before Cialis came to the market. This is obviously different because both companies were working on the, the underlying structure.

• 6:03Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 6:03John Coogan?

  Adderall also had a really odd path. Amphetamines have been around for over 100 years. They were used by soldiers in World War II. So obviously you can't patent them. In the 1970s, they were sold as weight loss drugs. And so there was a drug.

• 6:17Jordi Hays?

  It was an appetite suppressant?

• 6:19John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. So it was called Obitral. And Obitral was sold as a weight loss pill. In the 90s, a company bought Obitral and renamed it Adderall.

• 6:29Jordi Hays?

  Meth. It's a great weight loss drug. Try it today.

• 6:33John Coogan?

  It's actually so crazy. I imagine that it didn't really take off as a weight loss drug because it had crazy side effects. I don't actually know. I would imagine it was effective, but probably just very risky to use.

• 6:46Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 6:47John Coogan?

  But. In the 90s, a company purchased Ovotrol, rebranded it Adderall, and then marketed it for ADHD. And they didn't have the patent on the chemical. Remember, you can't patent the chemical amphetamine because it's been around for so long. So what they were able to do is develop a brand. And Adderall is a product that the brand name somehow, it just completely broke through in a massive way. And it's just synonymous with actually ADHD.

• 7:11Jordi Hays?

  Similar to Kleenex.

• 7:12John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. It's actually broken through in such a way that it's synonymous with ADHD. It's synonymous with like, study medication even.

• 7:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:19John Coogan?

  And so it's been wildly successful. They actually did wind up getting a patent later on for Adderall XR. So Adderall XR is a bunch of beads in a capsule. And they were able to patent the delivery.

• 7:31Jordi Hays?

  That's like a form factor.

• 7:32John Coogan?

  Exactly, form factor. Exactly. And so even when you don't have the patent on the underlying tech, you can still patent things around it, patent the biosimilars. There's a bunch of different things you can do.

• 7:44Jordi Hays?

  It is a shame that the Gila monster like never is not really getting any upside.

• 7:49John Coogan?

  Not getting the bag.

• 7:50Jordi Hays?

  Any of these weight loss drugs.

• 7:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:53Jordi Hays?

  Because that really is the origin, right?

• 7:55John Coogan?

  They really should do that. They should do like 1% for the Gila monster. And just 1% off the top, they should donate it to like Gila monster.

• 8:01Jordi Hays?

  Maybe a foundation of sorts.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, a foundation.

• 8:06Jordi Hays?

  A nonprofit.

• 8:06John Coogan?

  A nonprofit that just makes the Gila monster live in absolute luxury.

• 8:10Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 8:11John Coogan?

  As a thank you. So Eli Lilly will be fighting like this endless battle with every other pharmacy.

• 8:16Jordi Hays?

  And to be clear, for those that don't know, it was Novo Nordisk that figured out what was happening in the Gila monster, which...

• 8:25John Coogan?

  Was it the Gila monster? I don't remember.

• 8:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is. It's the Gila monster.

• 8:28John Coogan?

  Because there's two, yeah, there's the Komodo dragon too. And I often get those two creatures confused. But yeah, it's the saliva in the Gila monster, I believe, that uses the same pathway. The GLP-1 hormone. So basically, over the next couple of years, we're going to see this interesting dynamic where Eli Lilly, Novo, and basically every pharmaceutical company like wants, they have to get it on the action because it's such a big market. Obesity is a massive disease. It really is that trillion dollar opportunity. It's been that for a long time. There's, you know, hundreds of millions of obese people. Everyone

• 9:09John Coogan?

  who has that, you know, doesn't want that. The market is so, so broad. And so... What's interesting is that the patents haven't resulted in a perfect monopoly. Where it's not this winner take all situation where Novo is just going to run away with it. Eli Lilly is just going to run away with it. What's actually happening is that they it's a duopoly right now. But demand is so high that they still have high margins.

• 9:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 9:36John Coogan?

  So they're in like a price war, but the price.

• 9:39Jordi Hays?

  And that's even with the competitive dynamics of the compounders, companies like HIM, which are are creating.

• 9:44John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:45Jordi Hays?

  A ton of different GLP one products.

• 9:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:47Jordi Hays?

  You know, just in their own.

• 9:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in their own facilities.

• 9:51John Coogan?

  And so the price has fallen three X. And normally, you know, if you if the price of your good is falling three X, you're charging three. If you're if you're selling a $50,000 car and then.

• 10:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:00John Coogan?

  Couple of years later, you're selling it for 15K. Uh, like that's not great.

• 10:03Jordi Hays?

  Something like in the same range to produce. And so you're just getting massive margin compression. But.

• 10:09John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 10:10Jordi Hays?

  The growth is so insane that.

• 10:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 10:13Jordi Hays?

  It hasn't really mattered.

• 10:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. So the the market is growing so, so much. Uh, margins have fallen from 80% to like 60%. Um, but the mass adoption just completely offsets that. And so they're making way, way more dollars in total. Uh, and so, uh, the next race now, you know, Eli Lilly is a trillion dollar company. What do they have to do next? They have to go and make a make it a pill. They're they're going to try and, uh, make these weight loss products, uh, in pill form. And there's a whole new battle duking it out between Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk again, and some other players.

• 10:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 10:47John Coogan?

  But, uh, it's it's a it's a fascinating time. And there's a lot of, uh, they have their own like little barn or whole economy. There's a lot of analogies to the to the AI race. Uh, trillion dollar companies and high margins and all this.

• 10:58Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 10:58John Coogan?

  But at the end of the day, uh, what matters in the GLP one market is just the actual supply. Like, uh, you have to go and build a massive facility. And it once you get that facility up, people will buy it because, um, just the the demand is so high that if you can make it, you will be able to sell it and you'll be able to sell it at a good, good margin.

• 11:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:17John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about Restream. One live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi stream, go to Restream.com. There was some interesting news in the SEO world. Adobe is buying Semrush for $1.9 billion. Should we do a Seisgong for Semrush?

• 11:34Jordi Hays?

  I think so. I think so. I think so.

• 11:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, fantastic, fantastic outcome. It was notable to me because obviously we've been tracking the generative engine optimization space and there wasn't really a great comp for a lot of those. Like, you know, I remember we were talking about it and it's not like you hear a lot of SEO companies getting acquired in that range. And so anyways, the geo market is still highly, highly, highly competitive. Obviously, we work with Profound, which has been the clear leader in the market to date. But I would expect this to drive even more companies to come in and compete and ask any VC, they're getting pitched companies in this category multiple times a week still.

• 12:24Jordi Hays?

  So people are just piling in and I would expect.

• 12:28John Coogan?

  I wouldn't think of Semrush as a, as a G E.

• 12:31Jordi Hays?

  No, it's not. It's an SEO. It was the SEO leader.

• 12:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:35Jordi Hays?

  That being said, I would expect them to also want to play in geo. It's not like they're going to completely ignore.

• 12:43John Coogan?

  I would almost be thinking about Semrush having their own build versus buy conversation.

• 12:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:49John Coogan?

  It's sort of unclear what it would take them, how much data they have, how they can, how they can jump into the G E O market. Obviously, a lot of companies have been able to get something up and running very, very quickly.

• 13:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 13:02John Coogan?

  And so.

• 13:02Jordi Hays?

  And they, they do already have a tool. It's called Semrush AI Visibility. But, but again, there's so much demand for this, for this kind of new product because every single company is, you know, spending a lot of time thinking about how they're appearing in different L L M queries. So still, still up for grabs.

• 13:21John Coogan?

  Reportedly, Semrush did $250 million in revenue back in 2022, probably grown a little bit since then. Founded in 2008, a true overnight success at 10, almost 20 years to, to get on to the next thing with Adobe. Speaking of Adobe, I, I need to push their tools to the limit at this point.

• 13:49John Coogan?

  They were so behind in terms of generative AI and their models, they were training their own models, but eventually I saw a demo where Nano Banana was in Photoshop and I feel like that is really a potentially a really, really big unlock just for workflow. We've seen so many different examples of this in AI where the models are incredible, but having the harness and having the wrapper, whether that's a product that was introduced five years ago, 10 years ago, 50 years ago, like they're all getting better.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  Adobe works with Fall, so they can integrate pretty much any model in the world and inference it. So I expect them to, it is funny that whatever it was, two years ago, every single player felt like they needed their own, their own models. And now I think the narrative is really flipped.

• 14:42John Coogan?

  Well, speaking of Fall, build and deploy AI video and image models with Fall, trusted by millions to power generative media at scale. And also Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state of the art reasoning, next level vibe coding, deep multimodal understanding. We've been having a ton of fun with Gemini 3 Pro and Nano Banana Pro. We have generated an image of the aura farm, the world, trying to understand a barnyard, a barnyard, sort of an AI market map, but through the lens of a barnyard, because that's really what, what is going on in AI these days. Let's see, I think we need to zoom

• 15:26John Coogan?

  this out just a little bit to get it to line up, but we can show, and we can take you on a tour of our, our farm-based market map to, to explain what's happening in the state of AI in November of 2025. Tyler, do you want to take us through it?

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah. I mean, so, so we like to use a lot of animal idioms on this show. A lot of these you might recognize, but we've kind of expanded out to try to cover all the major players. And, you know, so yes, this was made with Nano Banana Pro.

• 16:01Speaker 02

  Very extremely good model.

• 16:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  But you will notice as you get more and more complex, it gets a little bit sloppy.

• 16:06Jordi Hays?

  There's some slop, sir.

• 16:07John Coogan?

  It does get a little crazy.

• 16:08Speaker 02

  There's some slop in some places.

• 16:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  But broadly, I think it did a very good job. Had a lot of fun making this.

• 16:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, before Nano Banana Pro was released, we would have needed to hire a, somebody that maybe illustrates children's books. And if they were an expert, maybe they could have whipped something together in a day. This took you far longer than that of, you know, prompting over and over and over. But I'm very, I'm very pleased with the outcome.

• 16:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. Okay. So I guess let's just kind of go through each of the animals. Maybe, maybe let's just start with some of the more obvious ones, the ones we've talked about a lot on the show. So let's start over here with the piggies. So here, here we see the pigs at the, at the slop trough.

• 16:50Jordi Hays?

  Who's there?

• 16:51John Coogan?

  Who's there?

• 16:52Speaker 02

  So this is broadly, this is just labeled as meta.

• 16:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  You can imagine a lot of people here, right? You could, you could see Sora here.

• 16:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 16:58Jordi Hays?

  Bill Peebles.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Bill Peebles could be, you know, eating some slop at the trough.

• 17:03John Coogan?

  Yes, meta vibes.

• 17:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 17:05John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  I mean, just like broadly, AI in general, some people think basically all AI is slop.

• 17:11John Coogan?

  They do. They do. There's been a lot of criticism.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I think that one's fairly clear.

• 17:16John Coogan?

  You don't want to be at the, you don't want to be the pig at the slop trough. Although sometimes, you know, maybe the profitability of being a slop farmer is underrated. Obviously, America has a lot of pigs that live at the trough. They eat from the trough. They eventually, the pigs go to slaughter. They become bacon. They are sold into the economy. You can make a good living as a farmer who

• 17:43Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 17:43John Coogan?

  who maintains a trough.

• 17:45Jordi Hays?

  And then there's the Jeremy Gaffon take, which is we hate slop now.

• 17:48John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 17:48Jordi Hays?

  We know that in a few years, it will no longer be slop.

• 17:51John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 17:52Jordi Hays?

  So don't count out, don't count out the piggies yet.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  This is the sloppiest slop will ever be.

• 17:56John Coogan?

  That's true. That's true. Okay. Who else is on this market map?

• 18:00Speaker 02

  So then let's move up. Let's see. We have the hen house here.

• 18:02John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  And so, and who's in the hen house is the fox.

• 18:05John Coogan?

  The fox.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Right? And so, so this you can say is kind of oracle in Sam Altman, right? Oracle is the hen, is the hen house.

• 18:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:11Jordi Hays?

  And they let the fox in.

• 18:12Speaker 02

  They're letting the fox in a little bit.

• 18:14John Coogan?

  Potentially.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. We'll, we'll see what, what, you know, when, what, what ends up happening, but.

• 18:18John Coogan?

  Again, now that I'm looking at this image, the fox isn't actually in the hen house yet.

• 18:23Jordi Hays?

  But he's kind of circling it.

• 18:24John Coogan?

  He's circling the hen house. And there's a question of how far into the hen house has the fox got?

• 18:30Jordi Hays?

  And I think it's notable that the chickens don't seem too disturbed yet.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, they're getting along because the fox could just be browsing, could just be stopping by.

• 18:38Jordi Hays?

  Could be a friendly, friendly fox.

• 18:40John Coogan?

  Yeah. But, but of course, it is, if you have a, if you have a lot of cash flow as a big company, if you have the ability to borrow billions or hundreds of billions in the debt market, you have to protect your hen house because

• 18:54Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 18:54John Coogan?

  Foxes might come by and might want to, might want to use you to co-sign a loan.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Yep. Okay, so then we see the cash cow.

• 19:02John Coogan?

  The cash cow.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  This is Nvidia.

• 19:04Jordi Hays?

  The only profits in AI.

• 19:06John Coogan?

  For a long time, I don't know if anyone has really unseated them. They're certainly the most profitable by far. I think for a long time, they were making more than 100% of the profits across everything. Everyone else is losing money.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, now you're starting to see maybe some cracks with TPUs.

• 19:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  But even then, I mean, they're, they're still doing extremely well.

• 19:26John Coogan?

  It's still a cash cow. We just saw, they just beat, yeah, they just beat earnings. I mean, we have, we have an article here from the journal, Nvidia results fail to quell AI worries. Not enough people are milking the cash cow.

• 19:36Jordi Hays?

  I gave you the perfect quarter.

• 19:37John Coogan?

  Or maybe, maybe the cash cow.

• 19:38Jordi Hays?

  I gave you the perfect quarter.

• 19:39John Coogan?

  I know.

• 19:40Jordi Hays?

  And you still sold off.

• 19:41John Coogan?

  60 billion or something in revenue. Yeah, maybe, maybe the, the cash cow has been overly milked and is out of milk at this point, but.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  I think it's still producing.

• 19:50John Coogan?

  I think it does seem like it's still producing. That looks like a healthy cow to me.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:53John Coogan?

  That looks like a, the crown on the cow in particular definitely helps out there.

• 19:59Jordi Hays?

  All right, moving over, what do we have going on here?

• 20:01Speaker 02

  So here we have the bull in the China shop.

• 20:03John Coogan?

  The bull in the China shop.

• 20:04Speaker 02

  And that's Elon. I think there's a couple of ways you could read into this. So Elon, one is just kind of on the, maybe the data center infrastructure side, where he's, he's kind of the bull. He's, imagine that you're a contractor and you're building data centers for, for these companies and then you see Elon come in and he does it in, in eight months. What took you in a year and a half?

• 20:21John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 20:22Speaker 02

  He's kind of messing up your world, right?

• 20:23John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  He's like, oh, man, this this bull, he's he's messing up my my business. I need to be working way harder, way faster.

• 20:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's also shipping features so fast, like, like, before people could even have a discussion over adult content, it was like, boom, Annie, here it here it is, Valentine.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  So this is the other way.

• 20:38John Coogan?

  So fast.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  This is the other way you could say he's the bull, because there's kind of this maybe unspoken, unspoken rule between the model companies where it's like, OK, we don't want to go too hard into the the companion, uh, you know, space. There were companies doing that, but they weren't. Uh, it wasn't the opening eyes, it wasn't the anthropics, it wasn't the the Geminis.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  And then now you see, now you see a frontier model actually moving into there.

• 20:59John Coogan?

  Also, you know, Grok is, of course, the maximally truth-seeking L L M. Just yesterday, I was asking Grok, who is the strongest CEO in tech? And it told me that Elon Musk is the strongest by far. And it actually compared him to a bull. It said he was stronger than a bull and that he could beat a bull in a fight if he went head to head.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  I believe it.

• 21:18John Coogan?

  With his bare hands.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Absolutely right.

• 21:20John Coogan?

  Yes, absolutely. You're absolutely right. What else is going on here? Uh, so then maybe let's move down.

• 21:25Jordi Hays?

  I bet Claude would agree. If you really pressed Claude on it, they'd say, yeah, I I you're absolutely right.

• 21:30John Coogan?

  You're absolutely right. Who else is going on?

• 21:32Speaker 02

  So let's move down. Here we we have the lipstick on a pig. Um, and I think this, you could say, is, um, Apple Intelligence.

• 21:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  Right? I mean, although I feel like this is actually almost flipped a little bit, right? Because the the pig is usually like the ugly thing, and then you add the makeup to make it look nicer.

• 21:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 21:49Jordi Hays?

  But well, I think that's what they did here, right? They took a bad model and they dressed it up. And they'd said it was great, and they said you should buy a new iPhone because of it. And the model was bad. And and there's no amount of marketing that is going to like change public perception once the product, uh, hit the market.

• 22:05John Coogan?

  You could also run the the the pig is the privacy-focused iPhone ecosystem that is, um, pretty difficult to just run in and throw A I on top of. Like, Apple has been building a brand around, we don't access your data, we don't store your data, we would never train on your data. And and that put them in an awkward position where they couldn't just snap their fingers and deliver a great A I experience, whereas Google. has been, hey, you know, we'll give you Gmail for free, but we'll also, you know, probably train on wherever you go on the web and try and understand and route ads to you appropriately. Meadow is in a similar position. And so those two companies were a little bit more equipped to

• 22:47John Coogan?

  just on day one, go and go and deliver AI features. Apple had to put lipstick on their pig, which is their privacy focused device.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  It was definitely more of like an afterthought. It was more of a kind of shallow integration, you could say. And then hopefully we'll see with the Gemini.

• 23:00John Coogan?

  The marketing for Apple Intelligence felt like they were, it felt like a lot of makeup on top of something. It was not a lot of, it was not a foundational rewrite of iOS in any way.

• 23:09Speaker 02

  Not a lot of substance.

• 23:10John Coogan?

  It didn't feel like an entirely new thing. It just felt like little lipstick all over the place.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then, uh, before we go over there, let's, let's go up here. We have the rooster.

• 23:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's Jordy.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  This is Jordy calling the top.

• 23:22John Coogan?

  Every morning.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Every morning.

• 23:23John Coogan?

  Every morning he wakes up and he comes on the show. 11 a.m. sharp, he calls the top. He says, this is, it's actually over now. It's so over, it's never been more.

• 23:31Speaker 02

  If you call the top every day, eventually you'll get it right.

• 23:32John Coogan?

  Eventually you'll be correct.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  It's true.

• 23:34John Coogan?

  Eventually you'll be correct. Okay, what else do we have?

• 23:37Speaker 02

  So then we have the dark horse.

• 23:38John Coogan?

  The dark horse.

• 23:39Speaker 02

  And this is SSI.

• 23:39John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Of course. We're still yet to see anything really from SSI. Ilya just charging around in the background.

• 23:46John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 23:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, kind of this elusive figure.

• 23:48John Coogan?

  Still hanging out there.

• 23:49Speaker 02

  It's kind of, I mean, like, so, so the big kind of departures from OpenAI, it was Miriam Rati and Ilya, you could say.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  And Miriam Rati's company, Think Machines, I mean, they're, they're

• 23:58John Coogan?

  She's raising up rounds.

• 23:59Speaker 02

  They have, they have blog posts.

• 24:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  And they do actually have a product. They do have a product.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  Let's hear it for Ryan.

• 24:07John Coogan?

  Why did you tell me earlier? Why, why, why'd you bury the lead? They have blog posts.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  They, they are good blog posts. I like them.

• 24:15John Coogan?

  So in a couple of years, we could be seeing vibe reels. Is that what you're saying? We could be seeing launch videos?

• 24:19Speaker 02

  So they do have a product, right? It's like RL fine tuning. Watch your head. There's a hoof.

• 24:23John Coogan?

  The horse is really, really about to hit you. Okay.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  So, but I mean, they're not really dark horse. Like you can, they're a bright horse.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 24:31Speaker 02

  I don't know if that's a phrase, but like you can see what they're doing.

• 24:34John Coogan?

  They're Clydesdale or a beautiful star.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  They're a unicorn 50 times over.

• 24:38John Coogan?

  50 times over.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:39John Coogan?

  We didn't put a unicorn on here. That's an animal. Well, maybe for the next, next iteration.

• 24:43Speaker 02

  At a certain point, I couldn't add anymore. It would just It would get too sloppy.

• 24:48John Coogan?

  Okay, what else do we have? What else is going on on the Aura farm?

• 24:50Speaker 02

  So here, here we see another horse.

• 24:52John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:52Speaker 02

  And there's two ways you could look into this horse, right? One is, is this phrase, look a gift horse in the mouth?

• 24:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Right? Do you want to explain this, John?

• 24:59John Coogan?

  Yes. So, do you know this phrase? You don't know this phrase?

• 25:02Speaker 02

  I actually didn't know this phrase.

• 25:03John Coogan?

  Okay, so looking a gift horse in the mouth is, if someone gives you-

• 25:07Jordi Hays?

  Is this like a term that was thrown around in the 80s?

• 25:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, this is, this is back in my day, back in my day. So, obviously, it, it, just giving someone a horse, a horse is a valuable asset today, but also hundreds of years ago. It's always been a valuable tool on the, on the farm. And the way that you assess the quality of a horse, one way to assess whether it's been taken care of, whether it's healthy, is to look in its mouth, look at the teeth.

• 25:34Jordi Hays?

  Always look a gift horse in the mouth.

• 25:35John Coogan?

  No, never look to get, never look a gift horse in the mouth.

• 25:37Jordi Hays?

  Oh, because it would be offensive.

• 25:38John Coogan?

  It's offensive.

• 25:39Jordi Hays?

  After you get the gift, after you get the gift later, after they leave.

• 25:43John Coogan?

  Imagine if I got you a GT3 RS and you're like, pop in the hood and you're like, okay, like, let me-

• 25:47Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you track this.

• 25:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're, you're, you're feeling the tires. Oh, I don't know about this. It's not that good.

• 25:53Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it only has, it only has 2,000 miles on it, but they're around the Nürburgring.

• 25:57John Coogan?

  Exactly, exactly. That would be looking a GT3 RS in the, in the tread. You don't look in the tread because, you know, yes, if I gave you a horse, just be happy that I gave you a horse. You know, don't look, don't look in the mouth, don't assess it. And so, what's happening with that?

• 26:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like you're not expressing gratitude.

• 26:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  And so I think this, these are just the public market investors, right? We've been given this gift of AI.

• 26:19John Coogan?

  Why are they selling their stocks right now?

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Why are they selling?

• 26:21John Coogan?

  They've been giving, they, they need to be buying.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  This beautiful gift and, and they just don't want it.

• 26:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  They're selling, Nvidia's down.

• 26:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 26:28Speaker 02

  They beat earnings, guys. Why are you not being grateful?

• 26:30John Coogan?

  They need to be buying more, they need to be levering up, they need to be going further into the public markets. With every dollar they have.

• 26:36Jordi Hays?

  Not financial advice at all.

• 26:39John Coogan?

  But instead they're looking at gift horse in the mouth saying, oh, can, can the, can OpenAI afford the, all the different 1.4 trucks?

• 26:46Jordi Hays?

  Is Andy Jass the guy for the job?

• 26:48John Coogan?

  Is, is the Google, you know, is Google set up to, to, you know, actually take advantage of AI? They're, they're digging in a little bit too much.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  They should just be happy that they've been given AI.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 26:57John Coogan?

  The next mega trend.

• 26:58Speaker 02

  Exactly. So also the horse could be a workhorse.

• 27:01John Coogan?

  A workhorse.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  Right? And so I think you could say this is Amazon.

• 27:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  It's kind of, it's a bit hard to define Amazon's AI strategy, right? Part of it is they're building data centers for Anthropic, but they're definitely not getting- Uh overly ambitious. They're not like, you know, getting over their skis. Um but they're just doing the hard work. They're building the data centers. They're serving.

• 27:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:20Speaker 02

  Serving models.

• 27:21John Coogan?

  Maybe not fast enough. They might not be building the data centers fast enough. They might not be super aggressive. They're not, they're not, they're not show jumping. They're just, they're just dragging the plow.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  But they are.

• 27:30John Coogan?

  Consistently dragging the plow. All reliable Amazons cooking along. Um they're, they're, they're, they're staying out of the, they're staying out of the slop trough. They're not doing a deal. Amazon has not done a deal yet with OpenAI for the agentic commerce thing. Maybe that changes, but for now they're just plodding along. Who else?

• 27:48Speaker 02

  Exactly. Um let's go to the black sheep.

• 27:51John Coogan?

  The black sheep.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  So black sheep, there's also a lot of people that could fit in this.

• 27:54John Coogan?

  Yes, of course.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  But I think maybe Carpathia is one of them.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Right. He has some of these contrarian, contrarian takes about, um maybe it's the decade of agents.

• 28:02John Coogan?

  And to be clear, we're not calling him a sheep. He's not, the, the.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  It should be more of a black wolf.

• 28:07John Coogan?

  Black wolf, but the idea is that he's standing out. A lot of people in his, in his class of, of ultra respected, you know, uh technologists, some of the, you know, most experienced, he's really been at Tesla. He's seen the AI wave. He's been working in it for decades. He's really worked on this.

• 28:25Jordi Hays?

  He's printed off of it.

• 28:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, he's done so much.

• 28:27Jordi Hays?

  And yet he's not sitting with the rest of them saying bah.

• 28:30John Coogan?

  He broke, but he broke rank, even though he's worked at OpenAI, even though he's worked at Tesla. He broke rank. He went on the Dwarsh Patel show and said, you know what? I think we're more in a decade of agents. I think AGI might not be right around the corner. Uh he took a contrarian stance at a very controversial time. And he, uh, but it was not, yeah.

• 28:50Jordi Hays?

  And he popped the bubble with it.

• 28:51John Coogan?

  He basically popped the bubble with it. Maybe, we'll see. The bubble will keep going.

• 28:54Jordi Hays?

  Of course, the elephant in the room, the elephant in the room is, is, was in my view, really more of the 1.4 trillion, right?

• 29:00John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:00Jordi Hays?

  That question, that was a big question. That was what everybody wanted to talk about, uh, or, or at least understand better. Brad asked the question and it's been downhill ever since.

• 29:12John Coogan?

  Yes. And it is, yeah, the elephant in the room is, is in every conversation, every, every financing round at this point.

• 29:18Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 29:19John Coogan?

  Uh, is, is this, i- i- is this deal predicated on a continuation of exponential growth in investment in everything? Like how much more, how, how risky is this, uh, relative to the amount of froth in the market?

• 29:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Never, never ask a, a, a woman her age, a man. His salary or a lab founder, how they're going to spend 1.4 trillion.

• 29:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, or how they're going to pay for it.

• 29:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 29:46John Coogan?

  Yeah. Who else we got on here?

• 29:48Speaker 02

  So then in the top right, we have the bird's eye view.

• 29:50John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  So I thought this was, yeah, this is situational awareness. This is Leopold.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  It's the perfect name.

• 29:55Speaker 02

  Right?

• 29:55John Coogan?

  He has the situational awareness.

• 29:56Speaker 02

  He's seeing everything.

• 29:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 29:58Speaker 02

  He's kind of the master of the board.

• 29:59John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  He's taking his bets and he's been doing pretty well off them.

• 30:02John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Um, yeah, that was pretty self-explanatory.

• 30:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love it.

• 30:06Speaker 02

  So then we go down, we have lion's share.

• 30:08John Coogan?

  The lion's share.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  This is Satya. Satya has taken great position in OpenAI.

• 30:12Jordi Hays?

  I'll take, I'll take a third, I'll take, I'll take a third of the company and you can give me 250 billion and I'll take 20% off the top.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  And I'll take all the IP.

• 30:24Jordi Hays?

  As well.

• 30:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, everything.

• 30:25Speaker 02

  I'll also take your chip and I'll make it my chip.

• 30:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  Your chip is my chip.

• 30:29John Coogan?

  The entire contract was basically.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  Two chip as meat.

• 30:32John Coogan?

  The entire OpenAI at Microsoft deal is basically, could just be summarized in one line. I get the lion's share. I get the lion's share.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:40John Coogan?

  And that's what he did. It's fantastic.

• 30:41Speaker 02

  Incredible, incredible dealmaker. So let's go down here and we see.

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  And we can zoom out a little bit.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Yep. We see monkey business. These are the podcasters.

• 30:50John Coogan?

  That's us. We're having fun.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 30:52John Coogan?

  We got props. We got all sorts of stuff, sound effects. Um, we need, we need some, we need some monkey sound effects on there. We have a bunch of, of animal themed sound effects we need to have more fun with. Anyway.

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Um, and then maybe let's go into the pond. We have the sitting duck.

• 31:08John Coogan?

  Yes, the sitting duck is incredibly cute.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  So Reddit, uh.

• 31:12John Coogan?

  Why were they, why were, why was Reddit a sitting duck?

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think they broadly.

• 31:16Jordi Hays?

  It's because whether or not you have a permit, you're getting, you're getting, like the hunters are going to get you.

• 31:22John Coogan?

  I think, I think Alexis Ohanian sort of laid this out saying that, uh, that when, when Reddit did the deal to give the data to OpenAI, they didn't realize how valuable that data was going to be and that relationship has grown, grown, grown. Um, and so they were kind of the sitting duck, just sitting there. They didn't really, it kind of got caught off guard. Maybe could have trained their own model on their data internally. Maybe could have, you know, maybe had something that was more, uh, more of a valuable resource, uh, where they, they would have had more leverage if they'd waited a little bit, but.

• 31:55Jordi Hays?

  It is crazy that CoreWeave and Reddit are sitting at roughly the same market cap now.

• 32:00John Coogan?

  Very interesting. Yeah. Which one is more valuable over the next couple of years? I don't know.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I feel like Reddit has mostly been, you know, they've kind of already gone out to the slaughter in a sense like every model company has trained up them.

• 32:14John Coogan?

  You'd think so, but look at the market cap, it just keeps going up. Like Reddit's been, I mean Reddit was sold for $5 million or something when it launched, like it's been.

• 32:24Jordi Hays?

  It was 10, it was 10 to Conde Nast.

• 32:27John Coogan?

  10 to Conde Nast, that's a crazy, crazy low valuation. And then eventually spun out and then for a long time it was in the hundreds of millions. And no one was thinking this is a tens of billions. For a long time, like people, the narrative was not, oh yeah, this will be orders of magnitude more than Snap.

• 32:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 32:42John Coogan?

  No way, no way. And then, and then it just sort of finally came together.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  So then.

• 32:46John Coogan?

  Who's the headless chicken?

• 32:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, let's go down a little bit and we have the headless chicken. This is Perplexity.

• 32:51John Coogan?

  Perplexity.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  So I think Perplexity, you know, they have a lot of different strategies. Some of them kind of seem opposed to each other, right? Maybe they're doing a browser, maybe they're doing a Bloomberg terminal.

• 33:02Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they're rebuilding Yahoo Finance.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  Maybe they're building.

• 33:05Jordi Hays?

  The browser, the browser to their credit, I do see more positive reviews of their browser than any of the other AI browsers.

• 33:16John Coogan?

  From independent folks or from?

• 33:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, independent, independent people.

• 33:19John Coogan?

  We've had a lot of investors come on the show and say like, I love the browser, but it's hard to take that seriously.

• 33:24Jordi Hays?

  Every investor that's invested in a browser says their browser is the best browser. I don't listen, I don't listen to what they say, but I, I've, I've just repeatedly seen people saying like, the perplexity browser is great. So whether or not that means a win, but, but the headless chicken thing going over and giving, you know, $400 million to Snapchat kind of, you know, I don't know, I think a lot of people, good, good for Snapchat, maybe.

• 33:51John Coogan?

  There's just a lot of stuff going on. It's the Snapchat deal, the trying to buy TikTok, trying to buy Chrome, launching a venture fund, Bloomberg Terminal. It's like. Are you competing with all of these? Really? You're gonna beat TikTok and Chrome and Bloomberg and the next thing and seed the next great company? It is just a lot. It's a lot to process.

• 34:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, like Headless Chicken is kind of like a fun thing to watch and then people, you know, love to talk about perplexity. They love to say like, oh, we're all short perplexity.

• 34:20John Coogan?

  That's true. Yeah, yeah. It's become consensus. Yeah. But let him cook. We'll see what happens.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. So then if we go down a little bit, we have the snake in the grass.

• 34:28Jordi Hays?

  Have you guys ever witnessed a headless chicken?

• 34:32John Coogan?

  No, I haven't.

• 34:34Jordi Hays?

  Growing up in the country, I have.

• 34:35John Coogan?

  You grew up in the country? What are you talking about? I thought you I thought you grew up with the East Bay rationalists.

• 34:40Jordi Hays?

  I was born in Berkeley, but I grew up in wine country.

• 34:43John Coogan?

  Oh, OK.

• 34:43Jordi Hays?

  And I have fortunately, unfortunately, watched my father take one of the chickens, you know, every now and again, a chicken needs to be to move on to the next chapter. And as a child.

• 34:59John Coogan?

  You sound like you're firing the chicken. Very amicable split.

• 35:03Jordi Hays?

  I mean.

• 35:04John Coogan?

  We're wishing we're wishing the chicken the best.

• 35:06Jordi Hays?

  Yes, it's it happens. I will say that it is a real thing. They run for, you know, at least 20 seconds or so. And I'll never forget it.

• 35:21John Coogan?

  Well, before we move on, let me tell you about cognition, the makers of Devon, the AI software engineer, crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. OK, let's continue.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  OK, so next we have the snake in the grass.

• 35:32John Coogan?

  Snake in the grass.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  This is the Chinese open source models, right? These are kind of lurking. I still don't really see that much coverage of Chinese open source models.

• 35:40Jordi Hays?

  Nobody wants to talk about it.

• 35:42John Coogan?

  Well, no one has bags, so they can't pump them.

• 35:44Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of it's almost it's a it's a elephant in the room to some degree.

• 35:49John Coogan?

  So so this is where I sort of disagree with you because Snake in the Grass feels like it's going to attack. Elephant in the room means we got to address it. It's like it's totally possible that the entire open source LLM ecosystem is just like, yeah, there's like a $10 billion business there. It's sort of like, you know, a stalking horse. Another, another animal-based analogy, but it's sort of a stalking horse for like, hey, Gemini and, and Anthropic, like, if you guys don't lower your prices, we will go to the open source option. And that's sort of what Linux, how Linux works. It's like that, that you can kind of bid the closed source models against the open source models. But for all like the

• 36:30John Coogan?

  doomer takes around like, oh, Chinese open sources, like, one day, they're just gonna snap their fingers and all the Manchurian candidates are gonna activate in America. Everyone's gonna be like, I didn't realize I was using Quand and now I believe that nothing happened on Tiananmen Square. It's like, I don't believe that's gonna happen.

• 36:46Jordi Hays?

  It's more of a threat to the, it's, it's, it's a, it's a very real threat to the, the business models of some of the closed, closed source models.

• 36:54John Coogan?

  Maybe, I don't know.

• 36:56Jordi Hays?

  It, I, I, I, again, it's putting, it's certainly a pressure. It's, it's, Kimi is hot on everyone's tails. Yeah. I mean, Brian Chesky, he was talking about. Yeah, Brian Chesky. The other thing is a soft power thing, right? Ask it, ask a Chinese open source model about Tiananmen Square.

• 37:14John Coogan?

  I just don't think that's gonna be that big of a deal. Like, I, I, I don't, I don't, I don't, I don't see, those are two very different things. Like, one is like, Brian Chesky inside of OpenAI, inside of Airbnb.

• 37:25Jordi Hays?

  It becomes a big deal if they proliferate all over the world and it's, and, and I'm not saying it's the end of the world.

• 37:31John Coogan?

  No, no, no. What I'm saying is that, is that.

• 37:33Jordi Hays?

  With TikTok.

• 37:34John Coogan?

  If you're a business owner, like Airbnb, and you're like Brian Chesky at Airbnb, and you're deciding between Kimi, you know, some open source model, like deeper in the stack, like, you're not, you're not surfacing something that has like cultural relevancy, or like, or like, some sort of like, you know, where American values come through. Like, you're using it for like fraud detection, or you're using it to like, transform every Airbnb listing into, like, grammar check every listing that comes through, like, spell check it all. Like, you're doing something that's very commoditized, and it's not, it's not this weird thing where you're gonna inject the, the, like, the, the values of the Chinese people. I, I, I just see that as two separate things. Now, now, if you had a whole bunch of people.

• 38:18Jordi Hays?

  I just think that LLM will be the new, or effectively globally, gonna be history books. And if you have some control.

• 38:24John Coogan?

  So that's true as the application layer.

• 38:26Jordi Hays?

  At the application.

• 38:26John Coogan?

  I think at the application layer that matters. So I would be maybe more worried if it was like, oh, it turns out that OpenAI is going to just use DeepSeek now, under the hood.

• 38:36Jordi Hays?

  Sure, but I'm even talking globally, a bunch of different application layer companies.

• 38:42John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 38:42Jordi Hays?

  Use these models because they're they're cheap and good.

• 38:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 38:46Jordi Hays?

  And then they have like a very specific point of view that's not necessarily aligned to the West.

• 38:50John Coogan?

  I just think that point of view is irrelevant in many, many automation use cases.

• 38:56Jordi Hays?

  For sure.

• 38:57John Coogan?

  Like business.

• 38:57Jordi Hays?

  I'm not worried about I'm not worried about Airbnb using Chinese models for for like business process automation.

• 39:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 39:04Speaker 02

  I also think you can, I think you can probably kind of fine tune a lot of that stuff out.

• 39:08John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  Um, because like the, the, you know.

• 39:11John Coogan?

  Back to perplexity. They did it. Didn't they do a deep sea seventeen seventy six or something like that?

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I also did that. I did that actually before that, but so it's whatever, but.

• 39:19John Coogan?

  It's whatever. Okay, now we see it's personal. That's why you put perplexity there because you got it. You got an axe to grind.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:26John Coogan?

  I did it before they did.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  But but like the Tiananmen Square stuff is probably just a fine tune that they like made it more Chinese.

• 39:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  So you can just undo that.

• 39:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly. I agree.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  One would assume.

• 39:36John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  But, uh, yes.

• 39:37John Coogan?

  So we agree it's a snake in the grass, but unclear how poisonous the snake is, unclear the size of that snake.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:43John Coogan?

  Anyway, let's move on.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Let's move to.

• 39:45John Coogan?

  Who's the early bird that got the worm?

• 39:47Speaker 02

  Early bird that got the worm. There's no sign here. That's a kind of an artifact of of the of the Nano Banana Pro. But, um, early bird that got the worm. This is Josh Kushner.

• 39:55John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  Right?

• 39:56John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 39:56Speaker 02

  He got the worm. The worm is OpenAI.

• 39:58John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  He was very early on.

• 40:00Jordi Hays?

  Early with size.

• 40:01John Coogan?

  Early with size, doubled down many times.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:04John Coogan?

  He got the worm. He's the early bird.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  Incredible. Yeah.

• 40:07John Coogan?

  Okay. Uh, why is anthropic donkey work?

• 40:11Speaker 02

  Donkey work?

• 40:12John Coogan?

  What does donkey work mean?

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Hundred percent sure that this is like a real phrase, but apparently I was asking.

• 40:18Jordi Hays?

  This is a Tyler coinage.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  I asked GPT four point five and I asked Gemini three pro.

• 40:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 40:23Speaker 02

  And they both said it was a real thing.

• 40:24John Coogan?

  Okay, it's boring or laborious part of a job. It's drudgery, donkey work.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I I think there's a lot of ways you could do anthropic.

• 40:31John Coogan?

  Yeah, and topics all over the place.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  So so in this case, I I think it's kind of that anthropic has gone very hard on coding.

• 40:37John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 40:38Speaker 02

  Um, and API and enterprise.

• 40:40John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, yeah, the laborious work.

• 40:42Speaker 02

  It's kind of laborious.

• 40:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, they're not doing like the the really hot sexy like.

• 40:46Jordi Hays?

  They're not doing a browser.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  They're not solving science.

• 40:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're not doing consumer science stuff. Yeah, they're doing the donkey work. This is good. Okay, I get it.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  I think it's some of the more laborious stuff.

• 40:54John Coogan?

  I like that.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  There's a lot of ways you could do.

• 40:54Jordi Hays?

  Dario is sitting there being like, who's gonna take all the jobs?

• 40:59John Coogan?

  Who's gonna take all the jobs?

• 41:03Speaker 02

  But you could do Anthropic as the scapegoat, right? David Sacks really does not like Anthropic.

• 41:10John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  Right, they're kind of the scapegoat.

• 41:12John Coogan?

  They get scapegoated a little bit. They never get invited to the White House, right?

• 41:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're the lame duck.

• 41:17John Coogan?

  Lame duck?

• 41:18Speaker 02

  Is that a?

• 41:18John Coogan?

  No, lame duck is when the president is, that's the second term.

• 41:21Speaker 02

  Forget about it. Ugly duckling.

• 41:23John Coogan?

  Ugly duckling a little bit.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  That's the one I'm thinking of.

• 41:24John Coogan?

  There's a little bit of Chicken Little, The Sky Is Falling.

• 41:27Speaker 02

  Scaredy cat.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  Scaredy cat.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  Scaredy cat, don't worry about safety.

• 41:30John Coogan?

  There's a few of these, but I like donkey work. That feels the most accurate for what they're doing. They're going after the entry level white collar workers. They're doing the donkey work.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:40John Coogan?

  Uh, Google, I just love this image.

• 41:42Speaker 02

  I think this is the last one. Uh, Google is the fat cat.

• 41:45John Coogan?

  Google is the fat cat.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Before we had Google snail's pace, I think this would have been true maybe a year ago.

• 41:51John Coogan?

  Fat cat's so much funnier. Look at that cat. It's so fat. I love it.

• 41:55Jordi Hays?

  All the cash flow, all the TPUs.

• 41:57John Coogan?

  All the TPUs, they're GPU rich. They're rich in every, in every sense. They have a ton of researchers.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  They're releasing, I mean, now they have the best image model, the best text model, depending on what Ben Park do you look at.

• 42:09John Coogan?

  They're on top of the world.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:11Jordi Hays?

  Okay, slightly concerned. We have a sign for golden goose, but there's no golden goose.

• 42:15John Coogan?

  The golden goose was removed, but the sign remains.

• 42:17Jordi Hays?

  Who stole the golden goose?

• 42:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, who killed the golden goose?

• 42:21Jordi Hays?

  Or is there just no gold? If there's no golden goose on the, in the AI barnyard, is that, is that, is that bearish?

• 42:27Speaker 02

  I think one take, uh, maybe the golden goose.

• 42:30John Coogan?

  Wait, so first establish what the golden goose is. The golden goose is a goose that lays a golden egg one every day. And in the parable, in the story, the farmer kills the golden goose to get all of the gold inside. But it is revealed that by killing the goose, you no longer get the, the, uh, the passive income from the golden eggs. So it's a.

• 42:54Jordi Hays?

  Jack from the Beanstalk studied.

• 42:56John Coogan?

  It's being, it's being a little bit too greedy, uh, but we couldn't land on who the golden goose was.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Maybe one take is the golden goose, they were the neocLOUDs and then the market. Is hurting, hurting, is taking the goose away.

• 43:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  Core weave not in the past, past what month they've been selling off a little bit?

• 43:14John Coogan?

  Core weave continues to lay golden eggs, but the market got overheated and so that that sort of killed the gains or something.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  And the gold is the GPUs, subsidized GPUs.

• 43:25John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  In the data center.

• 43:26John Coogan?

  It's not quite.

• 43:27Jordi Hays?

  I mean, there's something with the Bitcoin miners that just had a lot of energy that they that they had, you know, effectively prepaid for that they're unlocking some value from.

• 43:36John Coogan?

  Oh, well, oh, well.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  But I think that's all of them.

• 43:39John Coogan?

  I think this is a, yeah, this is a pretty, now it's pretty clear. This helps you understand how AI is playing out.

• 43:45Jordi Hays?

  There's no more questions.

• 43:46John Coogan?

  No more questions. If you, if you can, if you can see this infographic, it really makes everything crystal clear.

• 43:54John Coogan?

  That's great. Well, thank you for taking us through that.

• 43:57Jordi Hays?

  Great work, Tyler.

• 43:58John Coogan?

  And let me tell you about Adio, the AI native CRM. Adio builds, scales and grows your company to the next level and get started. One company that didn't make the cut for our infographic was of course AMD. And fortunately, there is a great profile in the Wall Street Journal of Lisa Su, the CEO of AMD.

• 44:16Jordi Hays?

  And let's pull this up because this is a fantastic picture minus.

• 44:23John Coogan?

  A very weird reflection.

• 44:24Jordi Hays?

  Very weird reflection in the glass.

• 44:26John Coogan?

  And so if you zoom in on this, it, it, there's something that is right in her nose that looks like a bugger or something. It's a very odd choice of image. Of course, it's just a reflection on the glass. The, the photo otherwise, the, the, like, like her, the way she's positioning herself.

• 44:42Jordi Hays?

  It's powerful.

• 44:43John Coogan?

  She did her job. Everything else, everything looks great from her perspective. She looks great. The, but the photographer just like, didn't quite catch that one reflection. And so it, it just gives a very odd look. But anyway, let's dig into the article. The chip CEO staring down Nvidia and talk of an AI bubble. At a board meeting in late 2022, Lisa Su. Chief executive of chip designer AMD announced that she was radically changing course. Quote, "I'm going to pivot the entire company," she told the directors gathered around a boardroom table at the company's Austin campus. "The rise of AI was a once in a lifetime opportunity," she said, "and the company had

• 45:26John Coogan?

  to put AI at the center of its entire product line." Three years later, the Santa Clara, California-based company has nearly quadrupled in size, its market value rising from $90 billion to more than $335 billion. Despite a recent pullback, AMD's strategy of positioning itself at the center of the global AI race has paid off handsomely, making Sue into a billionaire and her company into one of the only viable designers of powerful chips needed to power advanced AI models. In a market that has recently been completely dominated by Nvidia, Sue is showing that there may be a place for a strong number two that can compete on price.

• 46:06Jordi Hays?

  Insane flow, by the way. Check this out.

• 46:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. Look at that. She's 56 years old. She has a PhD in electrical engineering from MIT and a deep understanding of the physics behind her company's products. She developed a reputation as a giant slayer by outcompeting market leader Intel a decade ago to take the lead in producing central processing units, or CPUs. Now, she's staring down the ultimate Goliath in Nvidia, the world's most valuable company and the foremost maker of the chips that power AI data centers. AMD will have to deliver on its promise to produce chips that are comparable to Nvidia's most of the sophisticated.

• 46:41Jordi Hays?

  Staring down her own cousin, of course.

• 46:44John Coogan?

  It is. True. Investors bid up AMD's stock price in October after the company announced a marquee deal with Oracle and OpenAI, which have both agreed to buy tens of thousands of AMD's newest generation of chips known as the MI450.

• 46:58Jordi Hays?

  Mika says the Jensen Sue Thanksgiving must be wild.

• 47:01John Coogan?

  I wonder if they're close enough to actually have Thanksgiving together.

• 47:05Jordi Hays?

  Their first cousin's once removed.

• 47:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:07Jordi Hays?

  So I think at that point.

• 47:08John Coogan?

  It just depends on how hard you go for Thanksgiving. Some people have, you know, how big is your Thanksgiving? Do you go?

• 47:15Jordi Hays?

  I have a, I have a pretty small.

• 47:16John Coogan?

  I have a pretty small family too. My, uh, my in-laws, we're still doing, we're talking 20 people, maybe is like a typical Thanksgiving. Um, but I know there are some people that are like, yeah, let's get, let's get a hundred people together. Let's turn it into, let's turn it into Woodstock, uh, which, which I'm down for, honestly. It's fun. Maybe you need, you know what you need to do this Thanksgiving? You need to get everyone who's cooking for your Thanksgiving dinner on linear. It's the science, the system for modern software development. It's a purpose built tool for planning and building products. The product you're building this Thanksgiving is a beautiful, bountiful feast. It's a feast, folks, and you need linear to help you plan who's doing what, who's making the pumpkin pie, who's making the cranberry sauce? Can you assign tickets? Can you close those tickets?

• 48:01Jordi Hays?

  Are you using AI agents?

• 48:02John Coogan?

  AI agents. I think that there's something here.

• 48:07Jordi Hays?

  Everyone wants to build coding agents. Nobody wants to build feast agents. And I think that's wrong.

• 48:12John Coogan?

  Get on linear. I love it. Uh, the OpenAI deal turbocharged the roadmap, said Sue. Uh, it represents a huge vote of confidence in the MI450, which of course we've seen from semi-analysis is, is performing very well. Uh, and AMD has caught up a ton this year. They've just been on a tear, uh, taking feedback from all over the tech industry, integrating it very quickly and actually outperforming Nvidia on, with certain models. And, uh, um, uh, all of that's been chronicled by the folks over at semi-analysis in their inference max model. So the growing AI market is a huge opportunity and we want to make sure that we have deep partnerships that enable to get us a big piece of that. The rest will handle itself. Uh, the deal making was on display again this week when the company said

• 48:55John Coogan?

  it would work with Cisco and Saudi Arabian AI venture firm and a Saudi Arabian AI venture firm to build a large cluster of data centers in the kingdom. Uh, Sue attended a black tie dinner.

• 49:06Jordi Hays?

  Is that with humane?

• 49:07John Coogan?

  I think so. Uh, Sue attended a black tie dinner for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, uh, alongside other executives at the house Tuesday. And AMD sent a representative to a US Saudi Arabia investment forum on Wednesday. Until now, data centers have mostly been entirely Nvidia's market. One tech analyst said AMD is in a position to take a more meaningful piece of that. So $1 trillion a year. Here, let's get into it. At the heart of Sue's strategy is her belief that there is insatiable demand for computing power and that as the as the market for AI grows, the company's offering the best and most reliable AI infrastructure will thrive. She said she believes AI is not a zero sum game and that recent concerns about an overheated

• 49:51John Coogan?

  market for chips and data centers are exaggerated. In recent weeks, the massive spending on data centers have intensified concerns that an AI bubble is building AMD's stock, which had jumped nearly 60% in October, has fallen about 20% this month. "I'm not concerned about an AI bubble," Sue said in the interview. "I do think that those who are thinking that way are a bit too short sighted. They don't really see the power of the technology."

• 50:15Jordi Hays?

  It's actually only only down, I don't know exactly when this article was released, but 13 and 3/4 in the last month.

• 50:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:26Jordi Hays?

  Better than some others.

• 50:29John Coogan?

  This is not the time to stay on the sidelines and worry, hey, am I over investing? She said. It's much more dangerous if you under invest than if you over invest, in my opinion. Let's go. I love that. A year ago, she predicted that the market for AI chips would hit 500 billion in sales annually by 2028. At an investor presentation last week in New York, she was even more optimistic. The market for AI and data center computing, she said, will reach 1 trillion a year by 2030.

• 50:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's interesting that that she under predicted or seemingly under predicted because Jensen by himself is saying that he's that Nvidia has a line of sight to 500 in 2026.

• 51:10John Coogan?

  Half a trillion. And that's just for them revenue full year.

• 51:15Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 51:16John Coogan?

  That is a lot of money. Well, very exciting. Well, speaking of Nvidia, Sue is also helping to capitalize on an inflection point in AI. Many executives in the chips industry, including Nvidia chief Jensen Huang, expect demand to shift from clusters designed to assist in large training runs to inference. And the inference doesn't require chips with as much computing muscle as training does, according to the Wall Street Journal. As AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini become increasingly integrated into daily life and as companies design thousands of enterprise software tools that rely on AI models, demand for inference functions is about to go up by a billion times, Wong said last month. Swang and Su and Wong are distant cousins, but they didn't meet until both were established

• 52:00John Coogan?

  executives. That's interesting. So I don't think they'll be hanging out at Thanksgiving together if they're if they're if they just met recently, but maybe, maybe.

• 52:09Jordi Hays?

  Unless that's just a story and they've their entire fam- both their family lines have been colluding to corner the AI chip market for generations.

• 52:17John Coogan?

  It does feel like a storyline from Dune or something. AMD has a strong line of inferencing inference computing chips, but has struggled to design chips powerful enough to compete with Nvidia in training. Let's see, they're they're going, they go into a little bit of her backstory. She was Taiwan-born, Queens-raised. She worked for IBM, where she focused on designing products according to the needs of big customers. When she took over as CEO of AMD in 2014, the company had a market value of less than three billion. It's up 100x since then. She did deals with Chinese partners that helped stabilize the company's finances and move the chip designer deeper into the processors that powered PCs and data centers, capitalizing on Intel's weakness today.

• 52:59John Coogan?

  AMD sells an estimated 41% of data center CPUs up from essentially 0% five years ago. What a run. It was that success that allowed AMD's board of directors to trust Su when she proposed in that fateful board meeting in 2022 to pivot the company to go head-to-head with Nvidia. One of the board members attended said told this story. She had a vision around our ability to be AI from endpoint to data center and everything in between, said Tall Walker, one of the board members who attended the meeting. She had the conviction of the need and the need to move fast. What do you think about vision, Jordy? Is it good that she had vision?

• 53:39Jordi Hays?

  I think vision is still underrated.

• 53:41John Coogan?

  You're pro-vision.

• 53:41Jordi Hays?

  Pro-vision.

• 53:42John Coogan?

  It's a hot take. People, some people don't like vision. Some people are anti-vision these days. I, I think I land on the side of pro-vision. I think it's important.

• 53:50Jordi Hays?

  Sue was able to dispense with Intel as a competitor because Intel had self-inflicted wounds at Daniel Newman C of research firm Futurum Group. That's in sharp contrast to Nvidia, a company that's expected more than 200 billion in revenue. Next year that has gotten thousands of AI developers hooked on the proprietary software that Nvidia chips rely on. But Nvidia can't make enough chips to keep up with demand and the OpenAI deal proved that large AI companies are eager to diversify their supplier base.

• 54:19John Coogan?

  We got some, we got some major, major update here on Lisa Su as a celebrity. As AMD's become a bigger player, she's begun to embrace the spotlight. Earlier this year at an industry summit in Paris, Sue was treated like a celebrity with many young women asking her to take selfies and sign autographs. That's, that's amazing. We, Jensen Huang was signing autographs a couple, a couple of months ago? That was this year, maybe?

• 54:46Jordi Hays?

  It was like five, six months ago. That, that one.

• 54:49John Coogan?

  Well, now she's, now she's also signing, also signing autographs. As, as the, as the industry grows, more and more celebrities are minted.

• 55:01John Coogan?

  Well, in July, Sue attended an AI summit where Trump rolled out his AI strategy. When she addressed the audience, Sue pulled out one of the company's chips out of her pocket and said it had 185 billion transistors and took nine months to make. Such chip can, can cost tens of thousands of dollars. Trump later mentioned her in his speech as one of the notable executives in attendance. She was still in the shadow of Wong, however, who Trump asked to stand while the crowd applauded. "What a job you've done," the president said to the Nvidia CEO. So he's like, he's like, "Thanks for Lisa Su, for being here, but let's give it up for Jensen." And he's giving it up too much for Jensen. He's not having, you know, a balanced approach.

• 55:42Jordi Hays?

  Well, I don't think it's, it's necessarily his job to.

• 55:46John Coogan?

  Well, 10 times the market cap, 10 times the applause, perhaps.

• 55:49Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 55:50John Coogan?

  Market cap weighted by applause.

• 55:55John Coogan?

  Let's see. Over the next decade, AI will transform every industry, every business, every product, every interaction. Our chips are enabling this massive new revolution. Well, very, very interesting. I'd like, I would like to learn more about Lisa Su as a celebrity. I want to see more, more deep dives, more Page Sex style writing is what I'm looking for.

• 56:18Jordi Hays?

  Maybe a New York Post cover.

• 56:20John Coogan?

  Exactly. A lot of, a lot of caught on the street. A lot of like, you know, like, what, what type of coffee does she like? That's what we need to know. We need to get, we need to get her in the mansion section. Should we do some mansion section?

• 56:31Jordi Hays?

  We do. We should.

• 56:32John Coogan?

  There's a big question in the mansion section today. First, let me tell you about graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. The question I know everyone has been asking is, is 200 million the new 100 million in luxury real estate? What do you think?

• 56:49Jordi Hays?

  Many people have been asking that.

• 56:50John Coogan?

  So there's a $200 million house in Indian Creek, a $250 million house in Bel Air, a $300 million house in Aspen, and a $205 million house in Palm Beach. And this is funny because I, we have, we've reviewed like almost all of these houses. We've actually

• 57:07Jordi Hays?

  Gold Rock says Lisa Su on Hot Ones.

• 57:10John Coogan?

  That would be great. Maybe on Theo Von as well. A surge of ultra-rich buyers has pushed asking prices to new extremes, yet many headline-grabbing mega mansions languish on the market or trade for a fraction of their debut numbers just a decade ago. The 100 million price tag was still considered a new frontier for luxury real estate. The first nine-figure home sale occurred in 2011. Wow. By 2019, there had been about 20 sales recorded at that price point. Now, real estate insiders say a new price, pricing benchmark is setting the tone for the high-end market, 200 million. Since 2025, at least five major US properties have listed for 200 million or more, mostly concentrated in South Florida. On Indian Creek, a private island near Miami Beach, Florida, often called the billionaire

• 57:55John Coogan?

  bunker, cosmetic surgeon Dr. Aaron Rollins and his wife Maureen Rollins listed their unfinished waterfront estate for $200 million earlier this month. About 70 miles north in Palm Beach, a circa 2005 mansion, once owned by the late Frank and Maureen Wilkins, is asking 205. In Aspen, a longtime home of California billionaire Stuart and Linda Resnick, listed for 300. The listings raise the question, is this aspirational pricing? Or as the ranks of the global billionaires expand at a rapid clip, is it possible that the top of the market has actually doubled? I would say, yes, it's totally possible. Look at the run up in the stock price. The assets are more valuable than ever.

• 58:36John Coogan?

  There's going to be a massive wave of wealth created from the AI boom.

• 58:42Jordi Hays?

  I would not want to be in the market for a single family home within 20 square miles of OpenAI.

• 58:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, there was some post, I don't know if it made it in the timeline, but there was some post about, there's like 40 people that are looking for houses in the $5 to $7 million range in North San Francisco, and there's none for sale.

• 59:05Jordi Hays?

  All cash offers.

• 59:07John Coogan?

  I'm sure, from the liquidity.

• 59:10Jordi Hays?

  Also, Porsche allocations are going to be pretty rough out there.

• 59:13John Coogan?

  You think so?

• 59:14Jordi Hays?

  I expect it. Matt in the chat says Lisa Su is a car enthusiast.

• 59:19John Coogan?

  No way.

• 59:19Jordi Hays?

  Drives a metallic blue graphite Porsche.

• 59:22John Coogan?

  Ooh, I like that.

• 59:23Jordi Hays?

  She apparently names them after her chips. So she has cars Ryzen, Epic, and Radeon.

• 59:32John Coogan?

  That's cool. That's very fun. Yeah, this Resnick, this Bel Air house, the 250, I remember digging into him and he was part of the telecom build out in 2001. And so even though his company went bankrupt, he still wound up with a fortune that allowed him to buy a huge house. You could think about the same thing happening in the AI boom.

• 59:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, here's another note. AMD sponsors the Mercedes AMG F1 team, which has a new co-owner, the CEO of CrowdStrike. So all eyes on George's team this weekend. We'll see how they do with their new co-owner.

• 1:00:19John Coogan?

  Before we move on to their next story, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent. AI that handles your customer support, the number one AI agent for customer service. Silicon Valley estate sells to mystery buyer. I want you to guess who it is, Jordy. I don't know. I want you to make wild guesses.

• 1:00:36Jordi Hays?

  Wild guesses.

• 1:00:37John Coogan?

  In California Silicon Valley, a roughly 12 acre estate designed in classical Italian style has sold for more than sold for $56 million.

• 1:00:48Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 1:00:49John Coogan?

  There, known as Via del Plato. The property is located in Portola Valley, one of the country's wealthiest towns. The sellers are venture capital investor Bandel Carano and his wife Paula Carano, who built the estate after buying the land in 2013 for 13.625 million, property records show. Hmm, have you looked up Bandel Carano? And what deals he did to be able to afford such a wonderful house? I would love to know the story of his venture capital work. The Caron has put the home on the market for $85 million in February. The most recent was asking price was 65. It went for 56.

• 1:01:33John Coogan?

  It's the priciest home to sell in Portola Valley to date. The prior record was 35 million for a 13 acre estate. The buyer, who currently lives in San Jose, searched for several years before purchasing the Portola Valley property.

• 1:01:48John Coogan?

  The, but they didn't want to name the client. The Caron has didn't respond to a request for comment. Massiveness, you gotta get this.

• 1:01:54Jordi Hays?

  And Del Carano was an investor in Polycom Inc.

• 1:01:57John Coogan?

  Ooh, wait, the Polycom? No way. That's amazing. Well deserved. One of the, one of the most iconic conference call phones.

• 1:02:07Jordi Hays?

  We used to have one.

• 1:02:07John Coogan?

  We used to have one on our desk. It's probably in the studio. It was a prop that we used for a long time. I think it's in the back.

• 1:02:13Jordi Hays?

  You gotta bring it back.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  We never actually used it. We wanted to have it.

• 1:02:16Jordi Hays?

  How long until somebody creates like an AI Polycom?

• 1:02:20John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:02:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, we, that's so crazy. He, he, he did the deal in Polycom and made a bag. I love it.

• 1:02:30John Coogan?

  Listing agent said, okay, they built after raising an old home, completing the project in 2021, in addition, the roughly 23,000, 12,300 square foot main house. Property also has a pool, a pool house, and then another unfinished 5,000 square foot building has a ballroom and a wine cellar. Wow. There we go. They designed property. He's a general partner at Oak Investment Partners, a venture capital firm with offices in Wilton, Connecticut, Menlo Park. In 2024, the Corranos listed a nearly 2,000 acre ranch outside of Bozeman, Montana. Portola Valley had a median sale price of 5.5 million. Interesting. What else is in here that we wanted to look at?

• 1:03:15John Coogan?

  So there is, there is some articles on San Francisco. What's going on there? San Francisco is back after pandemic-related struggles and growing up affluent young families demanding space have elevated the 94127 ZIP code, which is anchored by the walkable West Portal Village Center and encompasses desirable residential neighborhoods such as San Francis Wood. This West Side Pocket reliably offers a rare San Francisco luxury. Detached, single-family homes with yards. The suburbia in the city lifestyle has recently propelled the ZIP code to rival historically more expensive city enclaves. In October, its $2.5 million median

• 1:03:58John Coogan?

  listing price was second only to the $2.7 million median price in premier address Pacific Heights. Interesting. So there are a bunch of shops. People are moving in. The median price per square foot is $952 and the houses are moving. 37 days on the market is all it takes for the median house to find a new buyer. Pretty good. Let me tell you about Profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Reach millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. Should we let AI ruin the M dash? I think the game's over.

• 1:04:38Jordi Hays?

  It's over.

• 1:04:39John Coogan?

  I think AI has already ruined the M dash. I think it's ruined. I think we have to move on from it entirely. But Joel Stein at the Wall Street Journal has another take. Joel says, don't let AI ruin the M dash. And writes a defense of the newly controversial punctuation mark. So.

• 1:04:58Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny because I, M dashes are not even the way that I first identify a lot of AI writing. Like it's often the, it's not this, it's that that hits way harder.

• 1:05:12John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:05:13Jordi Hays?

  Joel says, a few weeks ago, my sixteen year old, sixteen year old son Lazlo, a student journalist, received a tip for his school newspaper. A source had told him that the administration, which had banned all use of AI, had used it to write an email to parents. The email in question was certainly boring enough to be written by ChatGPT, but it was also boring enough to be written by a school administrator. We ran the text through two AI detection tools and both determined that there was a zero percent chance a computer wrote it. I don't know how a computer figures out if it's dealing with another computer, but I'm guessing it asks which of nine photos are motorcycles? So why did this source think AI had written it? Because the email contained M dashes. The M dash, a punctuation mark a bit longer than a hyphen that denotes a long pause,

• 1:05:58Jordi Hays?

  has become the black light on the hotel sheets for AI shamers, a sign that.

• 1:06:03John Coogan?

  Black light on hotel sheets is a good turn of phrase.

• 1:06:07Jordi Hays?

  A sign that an essay, a letter, or any kind of written work was written by a machine and not a human.

• 1:06:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12Jordi Hays?

  The M dash is now a GPTism and is not advisable unless you want people to think your writing is an output of an LLM.

• 1:06:18John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:06:18Jordi Hays?

  On Instagram, the beauty influencer Lux Jen warned that if people don't want to be accused of using AI, they should take out the ChatGPT hyphen.

• 1:06:26John Coogan?

  They just call it the ChatGPT hyphen.

• 1:06:28Jordi Hays?

  Last week, OpenAI CEO posted on X the following brag, "Small but happy win if you tell ChatGPT not to use M dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it's supposed to do." It's, it's interesting that they just didn't release an update that eliminates it. Like they, they seem to think it's a feature, not a bug. And they're asking people to kind of opt out of it by doing custom instructions, which I'm sure like one, one percent of the user base actually uses.

• 1:06:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's weird. It's weird that they couldn't just have a custom instruction that goes over all of ChatGPT that just says like. You don't need to not never use the M dash. Just let's turn it down by 90%.

• 1:07:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. All this M dash shaming has been upsetting because I, a professional writer, love, love, love an M dash.

• 1:07:12John Coogan?

  And he uses a lot of M dashes.

• 1:07:14Jordi Hays?

  In my writing, the chat GPT tells me I use 11 M dashes every thousand words.

• 1:07:19John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:07:19Jordi Hays?

  Other professional writers use them a lot, too. 4.4 times more than the average person. These numbers, upon investigation, could be highly inaccurate since I got them from chat GPT, which explains one reason why my son's schools bans it. But the point is, M dashes are loved by professionals. This is starting to make a lot more sense. What is chat GPT trained on? A lot of professional writing.

• 1:07:41John Coogan?

  They literally have a deal with the Wall Street Journal.

• 1:07:43Jordi Hays?

  And so if it's used 4.4 times more than in everyday writing, it's just gonna come up a lot.

• 1:07:49John Coogan?

  Yeah. I mean, if you if you tried to, you have to give it some direction on like where

• 1:07:54Jordi Hays?

  This is good writing.

• 1:07:55John Coogan?

  sound like. Yeah. And if it just winds up being like, yeah, make it sound like a Reddit comment. It's like, okay, well, that could go all over the place. That could be very, very weirdly worded. And it just would not be very consistent.

• 1:08:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So the point is, M dashes are loved by professionals. Why? Because more than any other punctuation mark, the M dash is deeply human. It's the breath marks of Emily Dickinson, the stream of consciousness of Virginia Woolf, the head-clogging maximalism of David Foster Wallace, or the self-aggrandizing asides of Joel Stein. It's also the mark of discretion when Holden Caulfield tells his writer that he loves it when his classmates digress during a presentation. He says, I don't like it when somebody sticks to the point all the time. The boys that got the best marks in oral expression were the ones that stuck to the point all the time. I admit it. And he admits it naturally with an M dash.

• 1:08:47Jordi Hays?

  Large language models consume a lot of the best writing out there, which is why they use M dashes. Unlike most people today who think a period is a rude way of screaming, AI believes in punctuation. If there's anything to take away from the M dash scare, it's that we should use more of them. Because while most people can't find one on their keyboard and wouldn't know when to use it if they did. That's pretty funny. The M dash requires more nuance than a thumbs up, a heart, or an eggplant. It's less jarring than parentheses, but a bigger interruption than commas. It's the length of an M, which sets it apart from the boring, shorter N dash. In the men's locker room for writers, we make fun of N dashes.

• 1:09:27John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:09:28Jordi Hays?

  Most of all, we should use M dashes because they're a declaration of humanity in the face of AI's onslaught. If only ordinary people would learn how to use them.

• 1:09:38John Coogan?

  Do you, do you see this link? Shorter N dash?

• 1:09:43John Coogan?

  For some reason, it linked to N dash dot I N and that website just goes nowhere.

• 1:09:48Jordi Hays?

  N dash.

• 1:09:49John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 1:09:50Jordi Hays?

  On an Indian domain.

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  I don't know. That's just like a mistake or something. They, they should correct that because N dash dot in doesn't go anywhere. Yeah, I, I, I have never really used M dashes. I also, I like this take. I, I, I mean, I agree with this. This makes sense. He should defend the, defend the castle. The, maybe the bigger tell to your earlier point is around that contrastive parallelism. That it's not this, it's that. That's what that's called. And that contrastive parallels, parallelism, I was wondering about that. And I went through a bunch of the old scripts that I'd written for YouTube and I couldn't find a single example of ever using that. That style, that structure.

• 1:10:37John Coogan?

  I, I would, I've written a lot about a lot of different tech companies and I'd never said, you know. Uh, I've made a whole video about Nvidia. In my Nvidia video, I never say Nvidia isn't just a GPU company.

• 1:10:48Jordi Hays?

  Google isn't just a search company.

• 1:10:50John Coogan?

  I've never, I never said that.

• 1:10:51Jordi Hays?

  It's a holding company of the future.

• 1:10:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I, I don't know. I don't know how that got baked in. I think that's maybe from marketing. From like marketing lingo, because I was trying to run the benchmark of, does this contrastive parallelism creep in?

• 1:11:08John Coogan?

  More when you ask, when you ask the, let's see, what is it? It's antithetical parallelism or contrastive construction or correlative conjunctive conjunction pairs. This is the term. I learned this from them. But that antithetical parallelism, it's not this, it's that.

• 1:11:31Jordi Hays?

  We're not writing a story.

• 1:11:32John Coogan?

  I never use that. And it just, it has a sound that sounds like marketing. It sounds like, it sounds like marketing. Like, I feel like you could probably go through the New Yorker or the Wall Street Journal and you'll see a lot of M dashes.

• 1:11:44Jordi Hays?

  Doesn't sound like marketing.

• 1:11:45John Coogan?

  But you won't see a lot of antithetical parallelism. And so I feel like the antithetical parallelism is an even bigger tell. And Tyler, what do you think?

• 1:11:53Speaker 02

  I also think it's interesting, like, you would imagine that a lot of these like GPT-isms would be, they would only be like with one model, right? It's like just 4O does that.

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 1:12:05Speaker 02

  But it's like not that at all.

• 1:12:07John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:12:07Speaker 02

  It's also not just like OpenAI models.

• 1:12:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  Like I, yesterday I tried Gemini 3 Pro and I asked, write an ad for GT3 RS.

• 1:12:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17Speaker 02

  And then, so I'll just read the start.

• 1:12:18John Coogan?

  Listen to this.

• 1:12:19Speaker 02

  There is a moment at 9,000 RPM where the world stops. The noise isn't just sound, M dash, it's frequency. The vibration isn't just an engine, M dash, it's a heartbeat. Like, it's like the exact same.

• 1:12:30John Coogan?

  It's very similar. It's very similar.

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  It's very strange. I wonder, like, why this is. Like, there's a case, you could say that models are just like training off each other, but it seems, that seems like not something that they're doing.

• 1:12:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I don't know. It's just kind of landed in this zone where that is what is seen as good or something. I don't know. And it's just like sort of decided that antithetical parallelism is the greatest thing. So, thank you to Joel Stein at the Wall Street Journal for writing this article. I will support you in your fight to keep the M dash, but I want to hear your take on

• 1:13:11Jordi Hays?

  But, but, but actions speak. Actions speak louder than words, John. Are you gonna, are you gonna just rip like 20 M dashes in your next essay?

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  So the, the problem is that I, I have never, I'm the guy, I'm the one who doesn't know how to find it on my keyboard. I'm who he's talking about.

• 1:13:27Jordi Hays?

  Just hit dash, dash, space.

• 1:13:30John Coogan?

  Find it on your keyboard and wouldn't know when to use one if they did. I don't know when to use it. I don't know where to find it. I wasn't, it wasn't taught to me in when English class. I just never learned.

• 1:13:38Jordi Hays?

  I'll teach it. You know, I'm teaching it to you right now.

• 1:13:41John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:13:41Jordi Hays?

  Go on your keyboard.

• 1:13:42John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:13:42Jordi Hays?

  Dash, dash, space on iMessage and it will create it for you.

• 1:13:46John Coogan?

  Okay, but when do I use it?

• 1:13:46Jordi Hays?

  You can also do shift, option, dash.

• 1:13:49John Coogan?

  Shift, option, dash. I don't know. I think you can't teach an old dog.

• 1:13:52Jordi Hays?

  Mine is, mine is a.

• 1:13:54John Coogan?

  I don't think you can teach an old dog new tricks. I don't know. I don't know if it's possible to, to teach me to use an M dash. Like reliably. I think I might just throw them in randomly. What if I, what if I start using like two M dashes next to each other? Just throw people off. No one would expect that, right? It's completely unexpected. So you'd be like, oh, well, like this looks like AI, but it's something weird.

• 1:14:17Jordi Hays?

  Be a really bad model.

• 1:14:20John Coogan?

  Whatever model he used was terrible. GPT two for this. Uh, anyway. Uh, let's move on. Let's do some timeline and then I think, I think we can come back to this article on solvency if we have more time. But first let me tell you about TurboPuffer, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage.

• 1:14:39Jordi Hays?

  Used by Cursor Nation, Linear Anthropic.

• 1:14:41John Coogan?

  10x cheaper, extremely scalable. I like when we're talking over each other during the ad reads. That's really the flavor we want to bring through. I love it. Okay, so there's a major shakeup going on at TBD Labs.

• 1:14:54Jordi Hays?

  Augustus.

• 1:14:55John Coogan?

  Augustus Odina is out and I'm giving him a follow for this. He's going, he's going independent free agency.

• 1:15:01Jordi Hays?

  Yesterday I resigned from TBD Labs slash Meta AI. I wasn't there for very long, but I think I got a few useful things done.

• 1:15:08John Coogan?

  Nice.

• 1:15:08Jordi Hays?

  Impressive group of people and it's especially impressive that it got assembled as quickly as it did with such a high talent bar at a large company. Quote, unquote founder mode is real and good. I will certainly miss my coworkers there. I think now is an unusually high leverage time to pursue ambitious new projects at the intersection of AI and other technologies. Please reach out to me if you're interested in that sort of thing and I expect I will have something more detailed to share in not too long.

• 1:15:38John Coogan?

  Is that the sound of a thousand venture capitalists writing term sheets with blank numbers on them?

• 1:15:45Jordi Hays?

  I, I messaged him yesterday and he said, uh, fan of the show, would be honored to be on the show.

• 1:15:51John Coogan?

  Let's get him on when he's ready to.

• 1:15:51Jordi Hays?

  Ready to talk about it.

• 1:15:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:54Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so looking forward to that. Bernie Sanders.

• 1:15:57John Coogan?

  Okay, what's happening with Bernie?

• 1:15:59Jordi Hays?

  Was firing shots.

• 1:16:00John Coogan?

  He's taking shots at the AI oligarchs. He says, here are some of the most powerful AI oligarchs in the world. Enjoying a private dinner with a dictator who murders his own citizens with a bone saw. Whoa. Does anyone really believe they want to wipe out poverty or improve life for ordinary Americans? I don't. And he's sort of mugging Greg Brockman here because he leaves Greg Brockman's net worth. He doesn't even try and estimate it. He just says, question mark, question with a question mark.

• 1:16:26Jordi Hays?

  Guess Bernie Sanders' age.

• 1:16:28John Coogan?

  Uh, 75.

• 1:16:30Jordi Hays?

  Guess again.

• 1:16:32John Coogan?

  78.

• 1:16:34Jordi Hays?

  Guess again.

• 1:16:35John Coogan?

  77.

• 1:16:36Jordi Hays?

  Guess again.

• 1:16:37John Coogan?

  80.

• 1:16:38Jordi Hays?

  Guess again.

• 1:16:39John Coogan?

  82.

• 1:16:40Jordi Hays?

  Guess again.

• 1:16:40John Coogan?

  I have no idea.

• 1:16:41Jordi Hays?

  84.

• 1:16:42John Coogan?

  84. Oh, he's up there.

• 1:16:43Jordi Hays?

  He's up there.

• 1:16:44John Coogan?

  Oh, wow, okay.

• 1:16:46Jordi Hays?

  So grandpa is pissed.

• 1:16:49John Coogan?

  He's pissed.

• 1:16:50Jordi Hays?

  He's absolutely pissed.

• 1:16:51John Coogan?

  But what does that have to do with him not being able to look up Greg Brockman, the CTO of Stripe? Do a back of the envelope, what's Stripe trading for in the private markets? Call some secondary brokers, get, if you're Bernie, you just need to call a bunch of secondary brokers, understand where Stripe is trading, then work backwards from what his Stripe stake is. Then call Satya Nadella, ask him based on.

• 1:17:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he could have used.

• 1:17:12John Coogan?

  Are you marking OpenAI at 500? Or do you think you should market more at like 400 or maybe 600? Are you bullish on that? All of that goes into the DCF.

• 1:17:20Jordi Hays?

  If you really want to.

• 1:17:20John Coogan?

  Build a spreadsheet and then you would have a fair market valuation for Greg Brockman's net worth. And you wouldn't need to use question marks.

• 1:17:26Jordi Hays?

  Chuck got pretty, Chuck got pretty close, 83 and 85. Good work. But, you know, if he really wanted to stick it to these American AI oligarchs, he could have used like Kimmy to, yeah, do the kind of analysis that you were talking about. He would have gotten a lot closer. I think we need, I think we probably need to do more to define oligarch in the AI era, right? Does, does.

• 1:17:54Jordi Hays?

  Does a billion dollar network.

• 1:17:56John Coogan?

  I thought people would use Plutarch, Plutarch, Plutocracy.

• 1:17:59Speaker 02

  Plutarch is a person.

• 1:18:01John Coogan?

  But what's one?

• 1:18:02Speaker 02

  Plutarch's lives.

• 1:18:02John Coogan?

  Plutocrat, there's one that just means.

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  Technocracy.

• 1:18:07John Coogan?

  Technocracy, there's one that specifically means wealth, that's like wealth, where the plutocrats, that's it, right? Plutocracy is, I think plutocracy is plutocracy.

• 1:18:18Speaker 02

  But also, I mean, does Bernie not realize that Greg Brockman?

• 1:18:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, government by the wealthiest plutocracy, oligarchy is something else.

• 1:18:27Speaker 02

  That's just ruled by a few, I think.

• 1:18:29John Coogan?

  Ruled by a few, interesting, a small people, a small group of people having control of a country, an organization, or institutions. Well, you know what Bernie's got to do? He's got to start a lab, start a foundation model company and compete in the free market.

• 1:18:46Jordi Hays?

  I like it, I like that active retirement.

• 1:18:50John Coogan?

  Yes, and then start trading on public.com, investing for those that take it seriously, multi-asset investing, trusted by millions.

• 1:18:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't blame Bernie for being a little bit salty at this point because he's never on those charts of the best political traders in history, right?

• 1:19:07John Coogan?

  That's true.

• 1:19:07Jordi Hays?

  He's been having to sit there and watch Nancy Pelosi go on the most insane run.

• 1:19:12John Coogan?

  And he's just missed out. The FOMO must be crazy. Every day he's opening up and Nancy's up another mill and he's just sitting there like, ah, I missed it, I missed it, the trade of the century. Sam 3D, Meta, we talked about this a little bit, what?

• 1:19:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Atharva is hyped on Meta's new model, Sam 3D.

• 1:19:33John Coogan?

  I forgot about this, so this was purposely released at the perfect time because we were just earlier accusing Meta of slopping it up at the slop trough with Meta Vibes and, you know, there's a little bit of a narrative that was emerging, which is like, okay, you know, Zuck did this whole talent war, he acquired a ton of talent, clearly invested crazy amounts, huge gigawatt, five gigawatt plan, Hyperion, Prometheus, he's going all in on AI, and then the first thing that he came out with was like Meta Vibes, this. Sort of like sloppy TikTok AI clone that didn't really break through and just kind of frustrated everyone in the timeline, did not appreciate it, did not like it.

• 1:20:13John Coogan?

  And so at that point, I think everyone was was calling for, okay, you gotta, you gotta deliver something that's actually solid. You gotta deliver something that's useful, that's valuable, maybe it's a contribution to open source. Maybe it's a, you know, even just an API for coding that's really good, or a model that does something unique, you know, special.

• 1:20:32Jordi Hays?

  Or just free ASI for everyone.

• 1:20:35John Coogan?

  That would also be acceptable. Yes, that would definitely reset the narrative on is is meta slopping it up at the trough. But this is an example of them not slopping up up at the trough. This feels elevated, this feels useful. I'm very excited for where this gets implemented all over the place. This feels like a very serious organization, like the work of a serious organization, the work of a group that's taking their work seriously. And not just trying to, you know, score points, go viral, just make a couple of extra bucks. They're actually doing some real research. So I was excited about this. What was your take?

• 1:21:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, this is really cool. I think people have probably just over indexed too much on vibes.

• 1:21:11John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:11Speaker 02

  Because like I don't even really think of vibes as being like an Alexander Wang project. It's like, it's not like they trained a new model. That's not their model. It's just a project manager to create a new app.

• 1:21:20John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:21:20Speaker 02

  So I think there's still like a ton of really good researchers. I'm very excited to see what they actually put out because I assume that it's gonna be great.

• 1:21:28Jordi Hays?

  And I, and I, and it's hard to know without actually knowing the the usage of meta AI. You can, you can look into it a little bit by just looking at the App Store charts and seeing the kind of traction they have. But I think in hindsight, they would have just been much better off not releasing that or not making it a moment.

• 1:21:44John Coogan?

  Dude, you're telling me you don't like meta vibes, dog? What are you doing?

• 1:21:49Jordi Hays?

  That is Trump in an orange and rainbow suit, dancing.

• 1:21:54John Coogan?

  I thought we had PTZ. I thought we could zoom in on this. Yeah, I mean, there's some, there's some golden stuff. You know what I was actually thinking about was

• 1:22:05John Coogan?

  they kind of, it's kind of a do nothing win situation, right? Because I feel like, at least this year, the vast majority of AI slop will be consumed on Instagram. Like, no matter, even if it gets made in the Sora app, like it's coming over to Instagram if it's gonna do well. And it's gonna be distributed on the other platforms. And so I would be very closely watching the. The actual user minutes, the time onsite, but I would imagine that the amount of Sora generated content, the user minutes is like 100 times on Instagram than on the actual Sora app, just because it's such a bigger, bigger audience. And so even though it's made by Sora, it's distributed elsewhere. Anyway.

• 1:22:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, let's check in with the.

• 1:22:53John Coogan?

  What's going on?

• 1:22:53Jordi Hays?

  App's genius. Sora is still number nine in the charts.

• 1:22:58John Coogan?

  Not bad.

• 1:22:59Jordi Hays?

  Cap cut and Timu, shop like a billionaire are sitting just ahead alongside Go Wish, your digital wish list.

• 1:23:08John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about numeralhq.com. Let numeral worry about sales tax and VAT compliance, compliance handled, so you can focus on growth.

• 1:23:19Jordi Hays?

  Luxury watch guy is concerned about the Bitcoin sell off because he says there are going to be so many effing APs on the market, facepalm.

• 1:23:32Jordi Hays?

  Flooding, flooding the aftermarket. So we'll see how that nets out, but the cryptocurrency industry certainly has been known to enjoy an AP.

• 1:23:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Google's genius, by not selling TPUs, Google allows Nvidia to maintain high GPU pricing, which in turn props up price of inference. Google then captures that inference price premium by running TPUs for inference on GCP. This is a conspiracy theory by Dave 3 and 30 Tepper. I'm not sure how real that is.

• 1:24:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there's also.

• 1:24:11John Coogan?

  They are going to sell TPUs.

• 1:24:12Jordi Hays?

  Just because you have two players in the market, like doesn't mean you can sort of have a, you know, what happens in the soda industry, right? But effectively like.

• 1:24:20John Coogan?

  I was thinking about GLP-1 market. Like, there's just a lot of demand. You don't need to cut prices.

• 1:24:25Jordi Hays?

  That, and you also understand that you can get in, there's, can be reason not to get in a race to the bottom dynamic and effectively have a gentleman's agreement to keep prices in a certain range. Of course, that can go too far.

• 1:24:40John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. Do you mind doing some timeline?

• 1:24:50Jordi Hays?

  Of course. Quick break. Pierre from Cal.com says, "Shower thought. Why is no one doing outbound for pizza? Hey, this is Gigi from Gigi's Pizza calling. You ordered last week. We have a pepperoni pizza ready and could deliver it in 10 minutes. Are you hungry?" Tech sales guy says trillion dollar idea and of course, it goes viral again. Some ideas and bangers are evergreen. Morgan Housel yesterday was saying, "I think the majority of societal problems right now are all downstream of housing affordability." Austin asks, "How would you fix housing affordability?"

• 1:25:32Jordi Hays?

  The current admin has suggested 50-year mortgages. We'll see how much of, we'll see if those go through and how much of an impact that they have. But Morgan Housel says, "Build more homes. Plenty of demand, plenty of capital, mostly a local zoning issue." And that certainly, certainly tracks, living here in California. John Palmer, dear friend of the show and somebody that we are actually working on a little project with, says, "This might sound crazy, but they should pivot." He's talking about Sunday Robotics, which make the cute new robots with fantastic little

• 1:26:17Jordi Hays?

  hats. He says, "This might sound crazy, but Sunday should pivot to a consumer app where you just teleoperate your own memo," which is the name of the robot, "and meet up with your buddies and do fun stuff as robots." I agree. I would, I would love to meet up with the lads in the real world in robot form. I think, I think he might be on to something.

• 1:26:42Jordi Hays?

  There was a story coming out earlier this week. An investigation from The Lever found that a PE firm is buying hockey rinks and banning parents from recording and taking photos of their kids' games.

• 1:26:57John Coogan?

  Based.

• 1:26:57Jordi Hays?

  This story broke.

• 1:26:58John Coogan?

  I think based.

• 1:27:00Jordi Hays?

  Because they tried enforcing the rule on the wrong person, US Senator Chris Murphy. So, a little excerpt here. "As the $40 billion youth sports industry comes under private equity control..."

• 1:27:17Jordi Hays?

  "Corporate-owned facilities and leagues from hockey rinks to cheerleading arenas have begun prohibiting parents from recording their own kids' sports games. Instead, parents are forced to subscribe to these companies' exclusive recordings and streaming service, which can cost many times more than the streaming costs for professional sporting events."

• 1:27:35John Coogan?

  That's so funny, because I was...

• 1:27:37Jordi Hays?

  You still think this is...

• 1:27:38John Coogan?

  I was thinking about how, like, I... I'm such a gear nerd that oftentimes when I'm watching my four-year-old play soccer, I'm like, "One of these days, I'm gonna bring out these, like, PTZ cameras out here and, like, get the most cinematic footage and, uh, they're gonna have to go up against me. I'm gonna be fighting them."

• 1:27:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, every kid's sports team should have a dad or a mom that's the CTO, and their job is just to rig the entire, uh, field with cameras and then provide crazy edits for each kid after, even if they lose, it's like the one moment that they had, you know, they finessed someone. You still think this is base, Tyler? You still saying hello, base department?

• 1:28:26John Coogan?

  I mean, I...

• 1:28:28Jordi Hays?

  You appreciate value creation.

• 1:28:30John Coogan?

  How else do you expect private equity firms to make money? Yeah, how else do you expect them to make money?

• 1:28:35Jordi Hays?

  Hard-working private equity firms.

• 1:28:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, they need to make ends meet.

• 1:28:38Jordi Hays?

  Build, you know, afford their interest payments.

• 1:28:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:41Jordi Hays?

  Uh, in some instances, parents have been threatened that if they chose to defy the rules and record the game, they may end up on a blacklist that punishes their kids.

• 1:28:49John Coogan?

  Well, what they need to do is they need to form some sort of like union, basically where they all say, we all are gonna film or none of us are gonna attend and we're gonna take our business elsewhere.

• 1:28:58Jordi Hays?

  Those threats were even reportedly made to a US sitting, a sitting US senator. I was told this past weekend that if I livestream my child's hockey game, my kid's team will be penalized and lose a place in the standings, said Chris Murphy at a public event. Why is that? Because a private equity company has bought up the rinks. So this, he was trying to livestream his, himself? Like, he was just trying to set up a camera and livestream, like, how does that? Like, at some point, at some point, I, I, I think the obvious solution here is parents can take as many pictures as they want.

• 1:29:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:32Jordi Hays?

  If I'm a parent, I'm gonna take some pictures.

• 1:29:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:35Jordi Hays?

  But I would probably still get the recording. I would probably still subscribe so that family members could watch.

• 1:29:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you wanna, yeah, compete in the free market. Let us both film. Whoever gets the better vibe reel, whoever gets the craziest edit out of it is gonna be able to sell it. And if I can out-edit you and I bring better gear than your, than your private equity backed, you know, videographer, um, you're, uh, I'm not, I'm not paying, I'm not paying for it.

• 1:30:03John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together. You can get started.

• 1:30:12John Coogan?

  The, uh, every time OpenAI says anything, it gets turned into a headline these days. The latest one is that, uh, the, the key word is headwinds.

• 1:30:22Jordi Hays?

  They have to start using sign language. But I guess even that, even that would, would still potentially get turned into a, a headline.

• 1:30:30John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I don't know. It's, it's very tricky.

• 1:30:33Jordi Hays?

  Signing something to, to TGI.

• 1:30:35John Coogan?

  I feel like, I feel like people use, I feel like if you went through, um, If you went through a variety of like earnings call transcripts from plenty of public companies, CEOs say the word headwinds all the time. They're like, oh, yes, like this particular thing, the tariffs, that's a headwind. Oh, this is a headwind. Interest rates might be a headwind. That might be a headwind. Competition might be a headwind. Like, people throw this out all the time.

• 1:31:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you say as a business that we don't have headwinds, you're not going to be taken seriously.

• 1:31:05John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. But OpenAI has somehow wound up in a situation where they're so priced to perfection that even just admitting that there might be more competition is like a massive news cycle now. It's a pretty remarkable. But the the actual quote here is that Sam Altman warned of headwinds from a surge in Google. This, of course, is a story that we've all been tracking through.

• 1:31:29Jordi Hays?

  The quote, create some temporary economic headwinds for our company.

• 1:31:34John Coogan?

  Economic headwinds is pretty wild.

• 1:31:37Jordi Hays?

  Didn't have to say, put that part in.

• 1:31:40John Coogan?

  I wonder how that's going to manifest. Are people going to be unsubscribing from ChatGPT, going over to Gemini as an app, or are they going to, is this on the API side? The API side seems a little bit more like easy to like, like slide around from one to the other. It feels like OpenAI certainly caught up very quickly with with Codex. They were behind for a while and they caught up. But now Google's, you know, sort of out in front, although Anthropic's doing very well. It's all just like a variety of horse races. Some of the revenue should be stickier than others. But when when the when the goal is 100 billion in revenue so fast, with with this serious of competition, it is it is very, very difficult.

• 1:32:22Jordi Hays?

  He also said ChatGPT is AI to most people, and I expect that to continue. So, brand is

• 1:32:28John Coogan?

  100% accurate.

• 1:32:29Jordi Hays?

  powerful element, but not enough to eliminate all competitive threats.

• 1:32:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:32:35Jordi Hays?

  He added, I don't want this to be note to be a downer. We are doing remarkably well as a company, and I expect that to continue.

• 1:32:40John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. Let me tell you about Julius AI, the AI data analyst that works for you. Join millions who use Julius to connect their data, ask questions and get insights in seconds.

• 1:32:53John Coogan?

  What is this story of the FBI raising a bounty for a former Olympic snowboarder who turned alleged drug kingpin?

• 1:33:01Jordi Hays?

  We love, uh, we love these stories. We covered this guy on the show before.

• 1:33:05John Coogan?

  Okay, his name's Ryan Wedding. Ryan James Wedding.

• 1:33:09Jordi Hays?

  He's married to the game.

• 1:33:12John Coogan?

  Is he?

• 1:33:14Jordi Hays?

  No, what, Ryan Wedding.

• 1:33:16John Coogan?

  Oh, Ryan Wedding, okay. Yes, he's married to the drug game, I suppose.

• 1:33:19Jordi Hays?

  He's a former Olympic snowboarder from Canada. He represented Canada at the 2002 Winter Olympics in men's parallel giant slalom.

• 1:33:28John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:33:28Jordi Hays?

  Uh, after the Olympics, it is alleged that he became a transnational drug trafficker and orchestrated the murders of various witnesses.

• 1:33:36John Coogan?

  Whoa.

• 1:33:36Jordi Hays?

  Uh, and he's only 44, so, uh, he's kind of, uh, just kind of hitting his stride. He was added earlier this year, March 6th, to the FBI 10 most wanted. So he's in the top 10.

• 1:33:50John Coogan?

  10.

• 1:33:51Jordi Hays?

  From, uh...

• 1:33:52John Coogan?

  They have any idea where he is? I wonder how he'd hunt this guy down.

• 1:33:55Jordi Hays?

  And, and they, they're saying he's running one of the largest drug trafficking operations and is believed to be the dominant cocaine distributor in Canada. Um, so from the Canadian Olympic team to the Canadian narcotics trafficking MVP status. Pam Bondi, every, the hard thing, the hard thing is when they talk about, like, because drug kingpins have just been the stars of, uh, of, of so many different great, uh, television show, uh, TV shows and movies, Pam Bondi said he's the modern day iteration of Pablo Escobar.

• 1:34:37John Coogan?

  Somebody was about to turn him in, but they hear that and they're like, oh, he's too cool to turn in. Can't do it. It's not worth it. I just gotta be friends with this guy. I'm living through history.

• 1:34:48Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow. So after the 2002 Winter Olympics, he moved back to Vancouver and attended university. He got into bodybuilding and started working as a bouncer. After two years in university, he dropped out and began to speculate in real estate, which he financed by growing marijuana in a massive warehouse. He eventually expanded his operation and joined up with Iranian and Russian smugglers.

• 1:35:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:15Jordi Hays?

  And in 2010, he was convicted of attempting to buy drugs from a US government agent.

• 1:35:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:22Jordi Hays?

  And he went to prison for it.

• 1:35:23John Coogan?

  You know, there are so many startups these days that are going after Palantir's market, competing in enterprise software, enterprise AI, forward deployed engineers. It's all a bunch of memes. Everyone's, everyone's keying off of the, the Palantir strategy. I think if you're trying to play in that market, you gotta take down a most wanted fugitive.

• 1:35:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:44John Coogan?

  You get the 15 million, that's your seed round, and you use this as marketing. The company that finds this guy, I'm gonna believe that your model's pretty good. Whatever you, whatever you're doing, if you, if you can find this guy, I'm gonna be like, yeah, yeah, that's a good, that's enough of an eval for me. You pass the benchmarks. I don't care your MMLU. Tell me how many, how many fugitives have you checked off the FBI top 10 most wanted list? That's what I wanna see.

• 1:36:12Jordi Hays?

  Well, there's a documentary series in the making titled Snow King, From Olympian to Narco.

• 1:36:18John Coogan?

  Okay, yes.

• 1:36:19Jordi Hays?

  Based on a, on a Rolling Stone investigation.

• 1:36:21John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:36:22Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 1:36:23John Coogan?

  Jack Altman says, I heard the term forward deployed VC, meaning investor who's helping a company, and now I'm logging off for the rest of the year. What's funny is like, there used to actually be forward deployed VCs. What's that Genentech story, right? Who was the VC in, in Genentech? It was a...

• 1:36:45John Coogan?

  Ah, who was it? I don't remember. Robert Swanson, a venture capitalist, met with biochemist Herbert Boyer in 1976. There was, I, I think it was either Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins, but one of-

• 1:36:59Speaker 02

  Bob Swanson, I, I believe, was at Kleiner Perkins.

• 1:37:03John Coogan?

  Okay, is that, is that right? There, there was, there was one example of, of a VC who basically was in the office of the company every Friday and was basically just like their financial back office the entire time. Because the, the team was a bunch of scientists who understood the technology, but did not really understand how to, how to build the business. And the forward deployed VC did really go in. That's a lost art because we are in the era of like founder friendly, let the engineer figure out everything, let them hire, like, kind of hands off from the venture capital community. So I, I'm, I'm actually okay with the term forward deployed VC if it's actually forward deploy. Like, like you can't just be like helpful. You need to be like actually in the office-

• 1:37:48Jordi Hays?

  We have a friend on the show who's like basically like probably doing like actually 20 hours a week for one of his portfolio companies and has been for years.

• 1:37:58John Coogan?

  I would, I would give him the forward deployed VC.

• 1:38:01Jordi Hays?

  But he would never call himself a forward deployed VC.

• 1:38:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, it'd be a very bad, bad-

• 1:38:06Jordi Hays?

  That's what matters.

• 1:38:07John Coogan?

  How about forward deployed Privy? Because Privy helps you build on crypto rails, securely spin up white label wallets, sign transactions and integrate on-chain infrastructure all through one simple API. Peter Reinhardt is in the news. This, this article might be a little bit too long, so we might tell you to go read it. But Peter Reinhardt says, "My lobbyists are very nervous about me posting this, but overregulation is working against us. All the costs are astronomical to all, to us, all but hidden."

• 1:38:35Jordi Hays?

  There's one excerpt that I'll read.

• 1:38:37John Coogan?

  Yes, this is the CEO of Charm Industrial. And he has been going viral with a new, a new article about overregulation.

• 1:38:46Jordi Hays?

  And so he's giving an example. So as one example, one state agency asked Revoy to do certified engine testing to prove that the Revoy doesn't increase emissions of semi trucks. And that Revoy must do this certification across every single truck engine family. It costs $100,000 per certification and there are more than 270 engine families for the nine engines that our initial partners use. That's 27 million for this one regulatory item. And keep in mind that this is to certify that a device whose sole reason for existence is to cut pollution by 90% and which is done so across nearly 100,000 miles of testing

• 1:39:28Jordi Hays?

  and operations is not increasing the emissions of the truck. It is a complete waste of money for everyone.

• 1:39:34John Coogan?

  So the Revoy system attaches to the truck and adds as an extra battery pack. It's a way to retrofit a gas powered truck to include an extra electric engine. There's something where I guess if your claim is that you're reducing emissions, I don't have that much of a problem of you trying to certify that you're not increasing emissions because that's the base level for your claim, like your marketing claim. You're claiming that you're reducing emissions. If you're increasing emissions, then you're doing the opposite of your claim. So there is something about like whatever claim you're making, you should be able to back it up. But the main thing is that 27 million.

• 1:40:19Jordi Hays?

  Any type of system that requires you to spend 27 million dollars just to get in the game.

• 1:40:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:25Jordi Hays?

  When you're.

• 1:40:26John Coogan?

  You would think that there'd be a better way to understand the actual impact of this. I mean, there's so many maybe more efficient ways to deal with this, whether it's just like, okay, how widely deployed are these? If they're making 100 million dollars a year, take the taxes. Do some independent analysis, pay for it yourself and then decide, okay.

• 1:40:50Jordi Hays?

  Also, the question in this case is why does it cost $100,000 per certification? Is there like a monopoly in the certification market?

• 1:40:57John Coogan?

  Absolutely, it's the government. The government's the one that does the certification, but yeah.

• 1:41:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, oh, oh, I, I, I thought it was an external, I thought it was an external partner.

• 1:41:04John Coogan?

  Maybe, maybe.

• 1:41:04Jordi Hays?

  But even then, it's hard to imagine that there's like $100,000 of sort of, of services that goes into this. You, you should be able to cut that.

• 1:41:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:13Jordi Hays?

  You know, cut that cost.

• 1:41:13John Coogan?

  That's fair.

• 1:41:14Jordi Hays?

  Uh, pretty dramatically.

• 1:41:15John Coogan?

  Well, uh, before we move on, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy and measure out of home with precision. Casey Hanmer has a big post here. Should we run through some of this or, uh, oh, you want to skip down to this one? Okay, here we go.

• 1:41:32Jordi Hays?

  Got another one-off cockroach. Uh, the, uh, private credit cockroaches have been scuttling.

• 1:41:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:41:40Jordi Hays?

  Around, uh, this time.

• 1:41:42John Coogan?

  Forty-eight, forty.

• 1:41:43Jordi Hays?

  Private lenders are swapping debt for equity. Yeah, in, uh, distressed forty-eight, forty. I am logging into Bloomberg so that I can actually read the article.

• 1:41:56John Coogan?

  Forty-eight, forty.

• 1:41:59John Coogan?

  Private credit lenders are poised to take control of pallet company forty-eight, forty solutions. About a year after providing 1.75 billion dollars of debt to support Summit Partners acquisition of the business. A group of lenders, including Antares Capital, are said to take equity in forty-eight, forty under a proposed restructuring. Other lenders include KKR, BlackRock, Carlyle Group. Uh, the deal would shed one billion of liabilities from forty, forty, forty-eight, forty's balance sheet. Uh, in cases where borrowers were struggling with their liabilities, private credit firms are more frequently swapping their debt positions for equity stakes to try and prevent losses. While swaps can produce upside, they also offer more unpredictable returns than direct loans.

• 1:42:40John Coogan?

  Pretty crazy to be set up to get a payment for the debt and then be like, yep, well, actually, we're just riding with you on the equity side. But it's happening more and more because it's better than the alternative of watching the company go out of business. And so this is, this was originally, the cockroach phrase is that this poster is riffing off of is of course from Jamie Dimon, who was identifying First Brands as the cockroach and was saying, usually when you see one, there's more, there are more cockroaches. That was his whole point. And, and the Blue Owl CEO, co-CEO, executive team kind of fired back and said, like, yeah, maybe at JP Morgan, we're, we're, we're good. And so they've been

• 1:43:25John Coogan?

  kind of duking it out, going back and forth. Here and here is highlighting another cockroach.

• 1:43:30Jordi Hays?

  Fairly concerning conversation with a buddy who has a pretty scaled company in the consumer packaged goods manufacturing space. And he was saying that around a number of the people that he competes with in his category have, have taken on so much debt from various private credit players over the last like five, six years. And a lot of that, you know, at least a number of them, he thinks are just not going to make it out of the next two years without, without a restructuring. So we will see. I'll let you read through this post from Will and then I'll be right back.

• 1:44:13John Coogan?

  Will Minaitis is on a generational run of long posts. He says, on becoming legible to capital, the most underrated factor in the success of firms is the degree to which they are legible to capital. Defining this precisely is hard, you know, when you see it. But an idea, a firm, or a person is legible to capital, which he spells with a capital C, when by dint of their existence, capital forms behind them in excess. Think of an idea being legible to capital as being magnetically charged to the capital markets. Dollars are just attracted to you. Allocators discuss it at cocktail parties. Funds market it at

• 1:44:54John Coogan?

  their AGMs. And Twitter discusses novel financing schemes to get more dollars behind the idea. Becoming legible to capital is the single greatest superpower for a fledgling firm. Look at Ramp, look at Cognition, look at Leopold, look at Tony and Danny. They, these are all superhumans at being legible to capital. It's worth noticing how ideas and people become legible to capital. First, there's no divide between the CEO, management, and the idea. The story is not that of an individual successfully and impressive, of that of an individual, individually successful and impressive individual, bringing their talents to a new platform.

• 1:45:37John Coogan?

  You can see these kind of puff piece stories in many companies that are illegible to capital. The company is never about you. For a founder to be legible to capital, there can be no air between them and the expression of the idea. Their lives only matter insofar as they are building with intensity towards the pure form of the idea. Second, the company can be understood fundamentally as an equation slash trade. In the best case, the most legible companies grow as a super linear function of dollars in. The founders are highly verbal and can clearly articulate and understand the inputs to this growth equation, talent, capital, management, et cetera. The companies that are most legible to capital and the management that runs them at their best feel like clockwork toys in the hand because by looking at them,

• 1:46:22John Coogan?

  the levers of progress and output become immediately clear. They are immediate smack you in the face expressions of an idea that is both small enough that you can feel the thing click around in your hand, but cosmically large enough that the feel, that the idea feels true in some sense beyond literal. When the trade is immensely clear, every capital provider across the stack can immediately understand their role today. But more importantly, their ability to scale to putting 10, 100, 1,000x, the number of dollars into the thing as it reaches maturity. Finally, a company becomes legible to capital when it is clear the entire firm, from capital to management to talent, is singing from the same song sheet. They are all living their lives in expression of the same exact idea.

• 1:47:02John Coogan?

  An idea I've stolen shamelessly from is from Phineas Barnes, Finn Barnes, who was over at First Round, now he's at the GP, is the chocolate cake problem. Many firms have great inputs, eggs, chocolate, flour, some beautiful icing, but management thinks they're cooking a souffle, investors think they're getting cupcakes, and talent thinks they're getting pound cake. The companies that are most legible to capital are obsessive about chasing the tolerances between competing ideas of the firm to zero. By becoming legible to capital, a firm not only can achieve singularity in the private capital markets, i.e. unlimited free capital forever, but more importantly, it can unify the secret that ignites it internally with the world outside.

• 1:47:46John Coogan?

  When that secret is shared, there is truly no limit. Jordi, what's your review?

• 1:47:51Jordi Hays?

  I think of this in the context of, like, when you think about El Segundo specifically and watching companies become more legible to capital over time and the momentum that starts to build, where early on, at the seed stage, there's just like excitement around an idea and a team, and then you watch as these companies like basically bifurcate into sometimes you can have an incredibly talented founder that really stops accumulating capital because the sort of potential still remains unclear and they're not building that momentum. Whereas another one that has the same quality of founder starts to build that legibility.

• 1:48:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. I think there, yeah, Tyler?

• 1:48:35Speaker 02

  There's something kind of interesting. We've been talking about this a little bit where I think Jordi basically said this thing where it's like, maybe the role of the CEO is actually to separate like the valuation from like what it like kind of really should be. So it's almost like it's less legible, right? Where like if you have, if you're in a sector like quantum or something, and it's kind of very, actually, it's quite hard to understand what the fundamentals are. That's actually where you get like higher multiples.

• 1:49:00John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:49:01Speaker 02

  So maybe that's like, kind of against what Will's saying.

• 1:49:06John Coogan?

  Yes. How does the, how does the, how does the meme stock craze fit into that? The meme stock... The meme stock craze is legible to a form of capital. It is legible to retail capital. It is legible in the sense that the retail stock trader, the meme stock trader, understands how the stock will move on the basis of press releases, on the basis of viral moments, CEO comments, enthusiasm. Like if you are in a meme stock army, the legibility is derived from the power of the community.

• 1:49:49John Coogan?

  The apes strong together. Well, how many apes are there and how strong are they? If you notice that your apes are growing-

• 1:49:55Jordi Hays?

  Obi says, "Roaches strong together."

• 1:49:56John Coogan?

  Roaches strong together.

• 1:50:00John Coogan?

  As you grow your ape army and you get stronger and stronger, that's the nature of the legibility. When I think of the examples that he's using, I think of it almost more like just the checklist of questions about a business and the inputs and outputs with regard to the capital. But also, you know, once the TAM is so well established, there's no more questions about it. It's like, well, of course, this is a trillion dollar industry if things execute well. Well, of course, the team is the best one in the market. We've tested every other team. We've tested this idea. And we've seen, we have full coverage of the team. There's no incumbent that's coming behind them.

• 1:50:45John Coogan?

  We know we have the leading team and we know the market's huge. And then also, are we sure that the gross margins are great forever? Are we sure that this is monopolistic and/or not super competitive? Are we sure that Google won't copy this and successfully compete in that space? Like, so just getting super high confidence about, you know, however, whatever framework you want to use, whether it's all the questions in zero to one or five forces or whatever business, whatever spreadsheet or slide deck you want to see at your firm when you're making an investment. Once you've checked that off with a company, it's so many times that everyone's like, yes, this is the winner. They're pulling away. They're doing great. They're a compounder.

• 1:51:29John Coogan?

  The legibility to capital thing is important because- You don't have earnings. You don't, you're not in the public markets yet. And so you need to become this like foregone conclusion and then run from one billion to 50 billion in the private markets. And if you're, if you're illegible and there's still this question about, oh, well, like, when are you shipping? Or what are you doing? Or how does this, how do I put my money in and get my money out? That, and it's more of like a moonshot. It gets a lot harder to just stack up.

• 1:51:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and even at the early stages, it's still underappreciated that people will say like, I have zero faith in this idea, but I'll still back the founder just because they're great.

• 1:52:10John Coogan?

  There is one way to become more legible to capital. Go to getbezel.com, shop over 26,500 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by Bezel's team of experts. Get a hitter, put it on your wrist when you walk into that asset management firm. They're going to whip out their checkbook. You know, you know that, you know it's going to work. You know it's a secret hack.

• 1:52:31Jordi Hays?

  Should we bring in our, our first guest of the show?

• 1:52:35John Coogan?

  We have Julius Steinberg.

• 1:52:36Jordi Hays?

  A legend.

• 1:52:38John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. From Arena Magazine.

• 1:52:42Jordi Hays?

  She's back.

• 1:52:44John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for stopping by. Thanks so much for coming down.

• 1:52:48Julia Steinberg?

  It's nice to see that the studio is real and it's not AI generated.

• 1:52:52John Coogan?

  It is real. It is real. We are here in Hollywood, bringing media back to Hollywood. We appreciate you.

• 1:52:58Julia Steinberg?

  Are you the only ones left?

• 1:53:00Jordi Hays?

  We really are. We're in a huge like complex. And not a, to our knowledge, not a single other firm actually shows up every day.

• 1:53:10John Coogan?

  I do have, there is a, there is a one benefit. There are many benefits to being in Hollywood. One is that it's in between where Jordi and I live, so it splits the commute. The other benefit is that I think it should dramatically increase our chances of winning a, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Because if, if there, it is a lifetime achievement award, you're truly in incredibly rarefied air. You know, Frank Sinatra is there, Leonardo DiCaprio is a star. You truly have to be at the pinnacle of your craft. But if there is some bonus point for actually being in Hollywood, I think we, yeah, it increases our chances dramatically.

• 1:53:49Jordi Hays?

  Lifetime achievement award of, of animal analogies applied to artificial intelligence.

• 1:53:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:56Julia Steinberg?

  I wonder if they'll just start putting influencers on there. Like, where is Alex Earl? Why is she not on the Hollywood Walk of Fame? Because that's what Hollywood is at this point.

• 1:54:04Jordi Hays?

  Portnoy. Portnoy made the most people angry of anyone ever.

• 1:54:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, Portnoy is, I mean, as you walk down the Hollywood Walk of Fame, like, yes, there are some absolute legends, but there are some other folks who are, you know, more mid-tier.

• 1:54:19Julia Steinberg?

  Sort of mid.

• 1:54:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I would say mid. And, and so I would put influencers there. The weird thing is that the influencers aren't in Hollywood. So the question is, like, does the Hollywood Walk of Fame just wind up reflecting what's happening in?

• 1:54:30Julia Steinberg?

  Well, what is in Hollywood?

• 1:54:31Jordi Hays?

  Is it geo-fence? Are the stars, are the stars geo-fence?

• 1:54:33John Coogan?

  Like, when, when does Mr. Beast become eligible? Because he's in North Carolina.

• 1:54:37Julia Steinberg?

  Well, what are they gonna do with Saudi Arabia?

• 1:54:39John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:54:40Julia Steinberg?

  Hollywood Walk of Fame. That's what I'm looking for.

• 1:54:41John Coogan?

  Don't give them the idea. They will definitely do one over there.

• 1:54:44Julia Steinberg?

  They should hire me. I'm open.

• 1:54:46John Coogan?

  I bet the, I bet Hollywood as a, is Hollywood a city? I don't know, but.

• 1:54:50Julia Steinberg?

  I don't think it's an independent city.

• 1:54:51John Coogan?

  I think, I think.

• 1:54:52Julia Steinberg?

  West Hollywood is.

• 1:54:52John Coogan?

  I think Hollywood, there's obviously folks here that want to raise money. They should franchise the name. They should sell the rights to the name Hollywood and put a Hollywood in.

• 1:55:01Jordi Hays?

  Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia should just recreate every city in the world in the desert, and then use it, and then use it to incentivize movies to get made there.

• 1:55:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:12Jordi Hays?

  Bring, uh, bring culture to the desert.

• 1:55:14Julia Steinberg?

  That's what LA did.

• 1:55:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. No, we've been to, we've been to New York on the Fox lot here in LA. They have basically a mini New York.

• 1:55:23John Coogan?

  Full, uh, full, like, representation of, of New York. You can go film whatever you want there. Uh, anyway, give us a, give us an update. Since you've been on the show a few months ago, what's latest in your world?

• 1:55:36Julia Steinberg?

  I.

• 1:55:36John Coogan?

  Are you full-time at Arena Mag, correct?

• 1:55:38Julia Steinberg?

  I am full-time at Arena Magazine. We're getting ready to launch our upcoming issue 006, an ode to capitalism. And that's all I can say. More will be out next week, so keep your timelines open. I remember I was talking with Max. I was like, oh, is like Thanksgiving week, is that a good week to launch? Will, like, more people be online or fewer people be online because they'll be with their families?

• 1:55:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:55:58Julia Steinberg?

  And we had this whole debate about how online people were gonna be during Thanksgiving week and the. The answer that we came down to is actually, people are going to be more online during Thanksgiving week.

• 1:56:08John Coogan?

  I think so.

• 1:56:10Julia Steinberg?

  They, you know, they don't want to be responsible for getting the turkey in or out of the oven. They're, they don't want to argue with their family about Epstein files or whatever, so.

• 1:56:19John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder, I wonder what the online behavior is because, uh, over Christmas, uh, like, we noticed that that's when like that really crazy H1B dust up happened.

• 1:56:28Julia Steinberg?

  No, well, I, I'm Jewish. I don't celebrate Christmas, so I was, I had, you know, I had plans. I had to go get Chinese food.

• 1:56:34John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:56:35Julia Steinberg?

  I had to go to the movies and I was just totally offline and all my Christian friends or my friends who celebrate Christmas, they're hyper aware of the H1B discourse. They could recite, you know, this person says this.

• 1:56:43John Coogan?

  It was very odd timing because a lot of the tech podcasts were off for the holidays and didn't need to comment on it, even though it was this like hot political issue that you would have expected most tech podcasts to touch on. But then by the time everyone got back from New Year's, like, the whole, the whole, like, you know, dust up had sort of moved on, so.

• 1:57:01Julia Steinberg?

  Well, maybe that's good because the H1B issue is just, you, you shouldn't touch it. It's too controversial if you want to be monetized still, like.

• 1:57:07John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:57:07Julia Steinberg?

  So maybe that was some, like, very clever, like, Jewish marketing gimmick by putting the H1B discourse on Christmas so only the Jews could participate or something like that.

• 1:57:15John Coogan?

  I know, I, so I, I do think everyone participates in, in the timeline over holidays. I think it's, uh, but, but maybe it's more phone time, less computer time. Like, people are milling about, they're stepping away from the turkey, but they're not necessarily sitting down and writing a full essay.

• 1:57:32Jordi Hays?

  More good screen, less bad screen.

• 1:57:34John Coogan?

  Wait, which one's the good screen?

• 1:57:35Julia Steinberg?

  I, I feel like I-

• 1:57:36Jordi Hays?

  That's a joke. It's like, I close my bad screen.

• 1:57:39John Coogan?

  The bad screen's the computer?

• 1:57:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:57:40Julia Steinberg?

  Oh, I, I have a, I think my, my good screen is the computer. My bad screen is my phone.

• 1:57:44John Coogan?

  I would agree with this.

• 1:57:46Julia Steinberg?

  On my phone, actually, I had-

• 1:57:47Jordi Hays?

  I mean, you guys are not working, uh, an office job that you hate, so.

• 1:57:52John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:53Julia Steinberg?

  Yes.

• 1:57:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I think there will be people, uh, milling about, reading posts, but they won't have time to sit down and really, uh, we, we were debating this over the stream. Like, will anyone have time to watch like a three hour stream, uh, on Thanksgiving? Of course, we're taking Thanksgiving off, but, um, uh, but-

• 1:58:08Jordi Hays?

  Not Black Friday.

• 1:58:09John Coogan?

  But we are, we are gonna be live on Black Friday.

• 1:58:11Julia Steinberg?

  Well, that's the most important day of capitalism.

• 1:58:12Jordi Hays?

  We're gonna be open for business. We're gonna be celebrating commerce.

• 1:58:13Julia Steinberg?

  Tell me what deals. Tell me what to buy on Amazon.

• 1:58:16John Coogan?

  Yeah, we will. We have some good people lined up. Um. So yeah, what, uh, what, uh, what'd you write about last magazine? And, uh, did the California Forever piece line up with it's going to publish in the next mag?

• 1:58:30Julia Steinberg?

  Yeah, so in the last magazine, I did the review of Dan Wong's Breakneck.

• 1:58:34John Coogan?

  That's right. We talked to him too, a little bit. What was your takeaway?

• 1:58:37Julia Steinberg?

  I think, I really like Dan. I think he's a really smart guy. I've hung out with him a few times. Uh, he gave me a huge stack of the London Review of Books and he's like, this is just like the greatest thing ever. So it was nice bonding over print media with him.

• 1:58:48John Coogan?

  That's great.

• 1:58:49Julia Steinberg?

  Uh, I do think that it's just, I like, I'm very skeptical that the United States government should get involved in these huge infrastructure projects in its current state. Like, I like the idea of engineering, but what makes American engineering so spectacular and so amazing is that we do it in the private market.

• 1:59:06John Coogan?

  It's distributed.

• 1:59:06Julia Steinberg?

  It's distributed. And if we just said, okay, we're, the United States government is going to do this huge engineering project. It's like, do we, do we trust the United States government to do this huge engineering project?

• 1:59:17John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:59:17Julia Steinberg?

  I like, I, I drove down, uh, to LA yesterday from San Francisco and it's like, half the roads were terrible. And it's like, you know what? I sort of wish this whole thing was a toll road.

• 1:59:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:26Julia Steinberg?

  I maybe, I'm not like that, like diehard libertarian where I'm like, government shouldn't do roads. At least not yet. Uh, give me like five years.

• 1:59:33Jordi Hays?

  I, I joke that the G-Wagon is so popular in LA because you actually need a four by four to like get around some of like the crazy.

• 1:59:40Julia Steinberg?

  Well, yeah, I, I still, well, it was raining like crazy yesterday on the freeway and I was driving down and I was like, thank God that my beautiful, beautiful RAV4 has four-wheel drive or else I would die because these roads are terrible and no one knows how to drive in the rain.

• 1:59:52John Coogan?

  Yeah. I was, I was reflecting on, there, there are so many interesting anecdotes about like, is the government equipped to take on the project that you are interested in? Whatever your pet project is, whether it's healthcare or space exploration or whatever you want. And, uh, yeah, I, I, I keep, I keep coming back to this part of like, like step one in any of that is like, fix the productivity problem in government projects.

• 2:00:19Julia Steinberg?

  Yeah, I think the for the for the next issue of Arena zero zero six that's coming out December first, I wrote about California Forever, which is the project to build a new city in Solana County, which is about an hour northeast of San Francisco. And it's it's sort of like an interesting concept to me because it's like, oh, it's this privately funded city, you know, all of the like the Hughes who have Silicon Valley, Lorraine Powell Jobs, the Collison Brothers, Reid Hoffman, Nat Friedman, Mark Andreessen, all these people put money into this. It's privately funded city.

• 2:00:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:48Julia Steinberg?

  But so much of the struggle with getting California Forever off the ground is just because of government. And I remember I was fact checking the essay and I was communicating with Julie, Julia Blystone, who's the California Forever head of comms. And I was said like, okay, well, the next step is there's this like 1,200 I page environmental review. And she's like, no, it's actually 12,000 pages. I don't think I've read 12,000 pages in my life. I don't think anyone in this room has read 12,000. And I read a lot. Maybe I have in my life, but me not at once and definitely not environmental review report.

• 2:01:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:22Jordi Hays?

  Especially a report that somebody is just going to drag into chat GPT and say, uh, turn this into five bullet points, please.

• 2:01:30John Coogan?

  Turn this into one image.

• 2:01:32Julia Steinberg?

  My favorite memory from college, actually, is this is actually when Peter Thiel was co-teaching a class. And I my sophomore year, German two sixty six. And it's a class of like, you know, 60 people. You have to fill out a form to get in. It's supposed to be like, you know, a good class. And it is a very good class. It's a fascinating topic. But my favorite or one of my favorite memories in the class is the kid next to me, who had this startup that was worth like debt millions, if not tens of millions of dollars, put in chat GPT, summarize Hegel in three bullet points.

• 2:02:04Jordi Hays?

  One shot it.

• 2:02:05Julia Steinberg?

  Yes.

• 2:02:05Jordi Hays?

  Don't make mistakes.

• 2:02:06John Coogan?

  That would be, yeah, that's.

• 2:02:08Jordi Hays?

  Well, maybe, maybe, I mean.

• 2:02:11Jordi Hays?

  Stanford whiz kid, his startup's only worth a couple million bucks. Maybe he's actually not that, not that elite.

• 2:02:17John Coogan?

  He knows. Yeah, what is the, what is the mood in the Stanford alumni world right now? There was this question, I was sending you this post from Delia and this question about like, the age old question of like, is this next generation cooked? Is there, is, is AI actually turning off folks' brains to the point where they can't sit down and read Hegel all the way through? That everyone is doing this? Is this a systemic problem? Or is this, you know, just cantankerous old millennials shaking their fist at the younger generation?

• 2:02:49Julia Steinberg?

  Well, I will say this. At Stanford, there's a thing called co-termining. It's like a fifth year masters, you apply, most of the time people get in and you just sort of stick around for another year, finish up a masters and you get two degrees at the end in five years. Apparently a third of my class, the class of 2025 co-termed, where it's co-termining right now.

• 2:03:07John Coogan?

  A third?

• 2:03:07Julia Steinberg?

  A third, 33%.

• 2:03:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, we've seen this a lot. We saw some data that more people are applying to law school.

• 2:03:13Julia Steinberg?

  Oh yeah, the law school thing is terrible. The law school, I have a few friends who are studying for the LSAT right now and I'm like hitting them in the head with their huge LSAT books.

• 2:03:19John Coogan?

  Is that because you think there won't be a, it won't be a career path?

• 2:03:22Julia Steinberg?

  There aren't going to be associates. Maybe there are going to be like five associates, but there aren't going to be 50 associates.

• 2:03:27John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:03:28Jordi Hays?

  It's interesting because if you genuinely are excited about devoting your life to understanding and finessing the legal system, it's probably as good of a time as ever because you're going to be able to learn a lot faster, you're going to be able to be more productive. Like if you're super high agency, you'll find the right firm and attach your career to that and probably be able to have a wonderful career. But deciding to do law school because you don't know what you want to do and you're trying to buy time and you want to do something that's sort of like high, like on a, on a high status track and hopefully high earning without, without being necessarily high agency just feels like a, a train wreck, an inevitable

• 2:04:13Jordi Hays?

  train wreck.

• 2:04:14Julia Steinberg?

  Well, how it seems to me, my dad actually, he just retired from a legal career and he was the first person to say like, yeah, all the associates are sort of screwed because... They're like, they just can't out, can't out compete the AI and law, especially how it's structured. Because there needs to be like a partner on the case as per like this weird agreement that was reached, I think in the early two thousands. Associates can't really be on cases anymore. So there's even less of a need for associates and this is going to be true in all fields. And I think obviously there like these in law specifically, there are these, you know, hundred, two hundred year old firms. That really care about legacy, they care about reputation. So they're like, okay, we need to have like some young people. To carry the firm on, but it's just a question of like, how are those people going to learn anything?

• 2:04:59Julia Steinberg?

  If chat GPT is just doing all their work or Harvey or anything like that. I think how I like, I, I think for, if you're like the top like five percent of like law students, you're probably going to be fine.

• 2:05:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:11Julia Steinberg?

  Uh, we're still gonna have judges, judges are one thing that I'm like, maybe AI should just replace judges. We have a lot of bad judges.

• 2:05:17John Coogan?

  That seems like a cra- that's a crazy idea. The before of, of the courtroom, the thing to replace, you would think would be the stenographer. Like we have dictation and yet and or.

• 2:05:29Jordi Hays?

  Or the illustrator.

• 2:05:30Julia Steinberg?

  I don't know, I use AutoAI all the time. It's not that great.

• 2:05:32John Coogan?

  It's not that great, okay. Uh, we can get into the bear, the bear thesis for AI in a minute, but uh, the, the, the court, uh, the illustrator, what are they, what are they called? Just court.

• 2:05:42Julia Steinberg?

  Courtroom illustrators.

• 2:05:43John Coogan?

  Courtroom illustrator. We have cameras. Why don't we just take a picture?

• 2:05:46Jordi Hays?

  The downside of if you actually use Nano Banana.

• 2:05:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:49Jordi Hays?

  Or any other image model.

• 2:05:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:51Jordi Hays?

  It would, it would not, it would just be like good enough to not produce a funny result and I feel like there's so much humor.

• 2:05:57Julia Steinberg?

  No, it has to be like Studio Ghibli, like murderer or murder, like defendant.

• 2:06:02Jordi Hays?

  No, no, that, that would work. But I'm saying like sometimes the, sometimes the illustrators like botch an illustration so badly that it's funny.

• 2:06:09John Coogan?

  For something, that's what I'm thinking about, yeah. Um, yeah, I, I was shocked by how resilient that uh, job was to automation. Since we do have the camera and we've had the camera for a hundred years almost and it's stuck around as it really.

• 2:06:22Julia Steinberg?

  I think, I don't, like a lot of court or a lot of law is like ritual, like I think in the UK, the judges still have like the weird head things that they need to wear, the wigs. Um, or even like the judges robes.

• 2:06:34John Coogan?

  That makes me feel like this will be around for a really long time, even if the AI can do so much. It just, we will do it out of procedure. You will, we will have these conversations with humans for, for uh, whatever reason, I don't know.

• 2:06:49Julia Steinberg?

  Yeah, procedure is very inelastic and also I think just, you know, lawyers, it's a very easy like cast of person to demonize. And I think just as, you know, McKinsey will stick around so they could say, oh, sorry about the layoffs. McKinsey made us do it. It's gonna be same with the evil lawyers.

• 2:07:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, sure. Yeah, you, you want the buck to stop with someone and not necessarily an AI.

• 2:07:07Julia Steinberg?

  No.

• 2:07:08John Coogan?

  Not necessarily.

• 2:07:08Julia Steinberg?

  Because if you say, oh, sorry, the AI said this, well, they said like, well, you used Grok instead of chat GPT. Can you ask chat GPT? Because that's my preferred AI model. If it's just McKinsey.

• 2:07:18John Coogan?

  Yeah. What's the uh, um, I feel like, I feel like there's still, there's still probably some alpha in uh, becoming a lawyer. You're going down the legal path in twenty twenty five. Uh, if you are basically setting yourself up not to just be, uh, you know, associate fodder for, you know, high margin billing, but in fact you are setting yourself up to gain control over an institution. That would be harder to build independently.

• 2:07:47Julia Steinberg?

  Well, I think with young people especially law, it's because you have, you know, you make like good money in your tw- your like late twenties and thirties, but you start to make really good money in your fifties and sixties.

• 2:07:58John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:07:59Julia Steinberg?

  And I think for.

• 2:08:00Jordi Hays?

  Sort of like an MLM.

• 2:08:02Julia Steinberg?

  Yeah, a little bit, but it's also for people my age who it's like, oh, I could either like work really hard for like thirty years. And maybe if I make partner and I'm one of the really good partners, I can make like a good amount of money. It's like, why do that? When it's like, oh, if I learn how to code and after like ten years, I can make this much money.

• 2:08:19John Coogan?

  Yep. Four years with vesting.

• 2:08:22Julia Steinberg?

  Yeah, with vesting. All you need is the four years.

• 2:08:24John Coogan?

  Yes, at the right hot company at the right time.

• 2:08:26Julia Steinberg?

  Yeah. So it's, it's interesting to me because I feel like with the Gen Z financial incentives, it's so oriented around like make money now.

• 2:08:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:34Julia Steinberg?

  Uh, or even like the, oh, you have X amount of years to make money before AGI hits and the economy is like totally.

• 2:08:40John Coogan?

  Underclass.

• 2:08:41Julia Steinberg?

  Yeah, permanent underclass.

• 2:08:42Jordi Hays?

  I'm still waiting for the, the. Gambling on your student loan debt, you know, the double or not like double your debt or pay nothing, you know?

• 2:08:50John Coogan?

  I I've become I've become very skeptical of the permanency of the underclass phenomenon. I I feel like there will be like the the the strength of the underclass is growing in number, but the permanency is decreasing because at any moment, someone can be plucked from the underclass into the global elite through just one right like parlay or one right actually like building a company, joining a thing. Like distribution on the internet is so so aggressive that you can be languishing in the underclass and then go viral and launch a D to C line. And if you just have like a few things go your way, you become like the the the market just gives you $10 million, basically.

• 2:09:32Julia Steinberg?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:33John Coogan?

  But it's very rare.

• 2:09:34Julia Steinberg?

  It's random, too.

• 2:09:35John Coogan?

  It's random, yes.

• 2:09:36Julia Steinberg?

  Yes.

• 2:09:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's like you were on that plane and you screamed at that person and then you went viral and you became.

• 2:09:41Julia Steinberg?

  And then you started a podcast.

• 2:09:42John Coogan?

  A podcast.

• 2:09:43Julia Steinberg?

  Coin.

• 2:09:44John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 2:09:45Julia Steinberg?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:46Jordi Hays?

  Don't give people ideas. I I think it usually goes the other way.

• 2:09:48John Coogan?

  Screaming at people on. For example, I don't exactly know how it all played out for her, but Haley Welch, like.

• 2:09:53Julia Steinberg?

  Well, she she was stupid with it.

• 2:09:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think she like she launched a coin and it did not execute well, but.

• 2:09:58Julia Steinberg?

  Well, it's a pump and dump.

• 2:10:00John Coogan?

  That type of opportunity is entirely random and every once in a while, the market just comes around. It does not feel permanent to be in the underclass.

• 2:10:08Julia Steinberg?

  So when I start yelling, so on Wednesday, when I fly to see my family for Thanksgiving, when I start like really aggressively yelling at people on the plane, you know, it's time to buy Julia coin.

• 2:10:17John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes. You got to get in early on that, for sure.

• 2:10:20Julia Steinberg?

  Yeah, you have to get in early before I have my like tantrum on the plane.

• 2:10:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. What else is, uh, has has anything updated you on the get your bag culture? Are people now self aware of it? Uh, we were talking to Jessica Livingston and she was referring to the concept being actually not very new. She was saying, uh, carpet baggers.

• 2:10:38Julia Steinberg?

  Yeah. Well, yeah, that was a good term for the Civil War and it was like anti Northerner. It's like, oh, these people are just exploiting business opportunities, which I don't know. It's like, I I don't like the term like exploitative business opportunities. Like, I think we have enough regulations that it's like, are like, how true is that in the United States at least? But I don't know. Something I've been thinking a lot about is, so we're in LA right now. I went to high school like a few miles from here. And I think like a very like core memory for me and was the college.

• 2:11:07John Coogan?

  Core memory, shout out Ashley Vance.

• 2:11:08Julia Steinberg?

  Yes. Uh, the, the college admissions scandal, horsey blues.

• 2:11:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:11:13Julia Steinberg?

  I was, I was a junior in high school when this happened.

• 2:11:15John Coogan?

  Okay, so you experienced.

• 2:11:15Jordi Hays?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:11:16Julia Steinberg?

  I, so my school, actually, the whistleblower's daughter was a senior and she was gonna go to Yale for soccer. And we're all like, oh, it's sort of weird that this girl, I'm gonna call her Suzie.

• 2:11:24John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:11:25Julia Steinberg?

  Suzie is gonna go to Yale for soccer, but she's not on the soccer team at her school and there's not really evidence that she plays soccer.

• 2:11:31John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 2:11:31Julia Steinberg?

  But she's gonna go to play soccer at Yale.

• 2:11:33Jordi Hays?

  One of the most elite teams in women's soccer.

• 2:11:37Julia Steinberg?

  Sure, I don't know anything about soccer, but, uh, this girl was gonna go to Yale, then, you know, my high school was very, like, elite. Everyone was concerned with if they got into Yale or not.

• 2:11:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:45Julia Steinberg?

  So it was all sort of like, oh, like, this is important, like, everyone flagged that Suzie's going to Yale. But we all sort of knew that she didn't play soccer.

• 2:11:53John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:11:53Julia Steinberg?

  And I remember, my, my high school was very small and, you know, it was a college prep school. And the day before the news came out, I had a meeting with the head of school to talk about, like, where I should apply to college. Uh, what my SAT scores was, blah, blah, blah, privileged, blah, blah, I acknowledged that I had a very elite upbringing. But I remember I, the principal was late and this never happened. There seemed to be something very wrong and I was like, I don't know what's happening and she was late to the meeting and it was fine. And I was told that my SAT scores were fine, blah, blah, blah, blah. I, the next day, first period, I have a moral philosophy class. I'm the only junior in the class, it's all seniors. I petitioned to say I can take this elective and we're talking about meritocracy and whether meritocracy is real.

• 2:12:34Julia Steinberg?

  Yes, in the class, we have a reading about meritocracy, it's, is it meritocracy just? Is it something that we should optimize for? Is it something that's unjust because, you know, intelligence is heritable, so it's, it's not earned, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we get to the class and, you know, at seven AM that morning or whenever we all woke up, we all saw that this girl's dad was, you know, he was arrested for securities fraud and part of his plea deal was that he was giving up his college admissions scandal where this. God, this college admissions coach was telling people to put that they were black on their college apps, that they were faking associations with various sports teams, all of these elite schools. So we go in and it's like, okay, like, we're talking about meritocracy. What about

• 2:13:17Julia Steinberg?

  Susie? What about the college admissions scandal? Because we're all sort of fed up with the whole college admissions process. It's a dog and pony show. My little brother's going through it right now. And I'm like, why are they asking you what three words you are? What could this possibly have to do with how good of a student you will be, or anything like this? But I remember going through the college admissions scandal firsthand, just seeing like how corrupt it is, but also in a way, it was sort of like an equalizing form of corruptness. Because like, if your family can donate fifty million dollars to Harvard, you will get it. Like, you have to be like, really, really, really, really bad to not get in if your family donates fifty million. What if your family doesn't have fifty million to donate to Harvard? What if they only have five hundred thousand?

• 2:13:55John Coogan?

  Well, then you have to make fifty million before you apply.

• 2:13:58Julia Steinberg?

  Or you can use the five thousand dollars to buy your spot on the sports team.

• 2:14:01John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. It was only five grand?

• 2:14:03Julia Steinberg?

  Five hundred.

• 2:14:04John Coogan?

  Oh, five hundred.

• 2:14:04Julia Steinberg?

  But it's, that's a lot less than fifty million.

• 2:14:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:14:07Julia Steinberg?

  So it's a sort of more equalizing. So it was for, it wasn't like the like point one percent, but it's still like one percent.

• 2:14:12John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 2:14:13Julia Steinberg?

  Corruption. So I think that experience.

• 2:14:16John Coogan?

  Isn't there a pro libertarian hot take that says like, you should just auction off every slot?

• 2:14:20Julia Steinberg?

  I, I've said this before. Like, I, well, my, my sort of take on this is that college admissions office should just be sold to the highest bidder. It would be a lot more honest than what's done now, because right now, it's, they sort of, they give you the spiel about like, oh, we need to have a super diverse class where we have one cellist and one person who's really good at like studying molecular bio and like.

• 2:14:41John Coogan?

  And a sailor. You have to have a sailor. A Michael sailor.

• 2:14:44Julia Steinberg?

  We actually don't have enough sailors. They're, they're doing walk-ons in the sailing team at Stanford. My best friend in undergrad did that. But, uh, yeah, I think we should just auction off the college admissions office.

• 2:14:53John Coogan?

  We don't have enough sailors in this country anymore.

• 2:14:55Julia Steinberg?

  We don't have enough sailors in this country.

• 2:14:56John Coogan?

  That's so bearish.

• 2:14:57Julia Steinberg?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:58John Coogan?

  We gotta get back into sailing.

• 2:15:00Julia Steinberg?

  But yeah, I think it's, this is actually something I was talking about with my boyfriend is like, how much would it cost if you just auctioned off a spot? Maybe if you only auctioned off 10, if you limited.

• 2:15:11John Coogan?

  Oh, I would think you would, you would auction off literally every slot, all of them. Like, what is the market clearing price? Because, you know, in the luxury watch world, like, there will be a certain number of, I mean, this happens with like the market, what is the market clearing price for Taylor Swift's tickets? But like, you know, there are, if Porsche comes out with a new, a new GT3 RS, there might be, you know, 5,000 made and they will try to find the market clearing price as close as possible to what the market will bear. Sometimes they overprice them, they don't sell them all. Sometimes they underprice them and they immediately trade up on the secondary market. But you could even have a secondary market that, you know, okay, yes, I bought my slot at Harvard for 2 million, but they're going to 3 million now, so I'm going to sell that, go to NYU instead.

• 2:15:55John Coogan?

  You could have, you could have an entire, entire process just to maximize the price.

• 2:16:00Julia Steinberg?

  I just don't know, it's like, if that happens, what percent of the Stanford class would be international? Which is a good question.

• 2:16:05John Coogan?

  It would be hugely international, of course. I mean, it would be, it'd be across the entire world, everyone would just pay to go. And I mean, there's already a little bit of that, but it's, it's definitely like, there's more design to the system than that. There's certainly, I, I would imagine.

• 2:16:16Jordi Hays?

  How, how do you, how do you, how do you defend that against, you know, just eliminating an entire track for young people that maybe have negative capital within their family systems? And even if you tell them, even if you tell the family at birth, like, you know, expect to be able to purchase, you know, if you want to go to, if you want your child to go to Stanford, or the auction range at that point, counting in inflation, will probably be, you know, 70 to 80 million to get into the school.

• 2:16:48Julia Steinberg?

  Well, probably what we'll have is like.

• 2:16:50Jordi Hays?

  And then it ultimately actually destroys, would, would naturally just destroy, I think, some of the, the, would certainly be valuable for students from elite families to network with other students from elite families. But ultimately would, would kill a lot of what makes universities great.

• 2:17:11Julia Steinberg?

  Yes, I, I agree that it would kill a lot of that, but probably what would happen is, you know, now you have a lot of scholarships. When you apply for college, you know, the Coca-Cola scholarship is a very big one. A lot of these are sort of mostly like full rides to college, like the very like prestigious scholarships. And so probably what will happen is that instead of having these scholarships to college, it's like, okay, we, young people of America whose family can't afford the like fifty million dollar sticker price of college admission, apply and we will give you the fifty million dollars to pay your way for this price. But yeah, it's obviously a very flawed system, but it's interesting. It's an interesting like mental model about how much we value college admission, especially because, you know, at a place like Stanford, there are like, what, like seventeen hundred

• 2:17:54Julia Steinberg?

  to two thousand graduates a year. Not all of them do fascinating things.

• 2:17:59John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, what's, uh, where, where, what city are you living in these days?

• 2:18:04Julia Steinberg?

  I live in San Francisco.

• 2:18:05John Coogan?

  What is the mood in San Francisco? Do you think it's getting better?

• 2:18:07Julia Steinberg?

  I don't know. I've only lived there since August, so I can't really say.

• 2:18:11John Coogan?

  There was this narrative in the, uh, in the mansion section today about, uh, about it cleaning up its act.

• 2:18:18Julia Steinberg?

  Okay, I have, I have a fun story.

• 2:18:19John Coogan?

  There's more, uh, there's more demand for West Portal Village Center. I had never heard of that area.

• 2:18:25Julia Steinberg?

  I don't know what that is.

• 2:18:26John Coogan?

  Uh, it is now more expensive to live there than in, uh, Pack Heights, apparently. Two point five million dollar median list price. There's also the, the story about like the OpenAI secondary is driving up, uh, real estate prices. Um, but it's always, it's always interesting to, uh, feel what's actually happening on the ground.

• 2:18:41Julia Steinberg?

  So I live, I, I live in Pack Heights. I live in Lower Pack Heights. And a few weeks ago, there was a homeless guy who just really passed out on my doorstep. I, it was a Saturday morning. I woke up late. It was like nine or 10. I checked my phone in our apartment WhatsApp. It's like, hello, there is an unhoused person on our doorstep. Please don't disturb him. And then in this group chat, we had this huge debate over whether we should call the cops. And the conclusion is just the cops won't come. You can't really do anything about it. He seems nonviolent. Maybe we should wait for him to leave. So I left my apartment at like, you know, ten thirty. I was back at three and he was gone.

• 2:19:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:20Julia Steinberg?

  But it's still like a weird thing to account for.

• 2:19:22John Coogan?

  You sort of want to call an ambulance for someone who is sick.

• 2:19:24Julia Steinberg?

  You just want to call someone.

• 2:19:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:26Julia Steinberg?

  And have, in, in my building, you know, there Probably like thirty people who live in the building.

• 2:19:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:32Julia Steinberg?

  So it's like someone could have called someone or maybe if all thirty of us tried.

• 2:19:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:37Julia Steinberg?

  But it it was very disconcerting because it's one of those things where it's like, oh, everything's better, everything's.

• 2:19:42John Coogan?

  Was everything noticeably cleaner during uh uh Salesforce this year? Salesforce's conference? Because a few years ago, Benioff, like.

• 2:19:51Julia Steinberg?

  Yes.

• 2:19:51John Coogan?

  Just completely cleaned up the entire city. And then the other time that they cleaned up the city was when Xi Jinping was.

• 2:19:55Julia Steinberg?

  Yes.

• 2:19:56John Coogan?

  Everything you remember.

• 2:19:56Julia Steinberg?

  Xi Jinping, I I was in SF that week and it it felt like it was a different place.

• 2:20:00John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:20:00Julia Steinberg?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:20:01John Coogan?

  That's funny.

• 2:20:01Julia Steinberg?

  I think SF generally or urbanism generally, it's just, it's so hard to justify living in one of these places. I think for most people.

• 2:20:10John Coogan?

  I think I I I I agree, but it's almost the flip side where it's it's so easy to justify living in a suburb. Because, yes, you're in the city and it feels like, oh, this is like, like, we gotta clean this place up, we gotta clean this place up. But then uh you you sort of work on that and then you also work on your life and your company and your business and whatever. And then as soon as you have money and a family, it's just so easy to go to a suburb and there's so many fantastic suburbs. And that's always, that was always the thing that annoyed me about the discourse of like San Francisco has fallen or San Francisco is such a bad place to live is like, well, people live in Palo Alto, they live in Atherton, they live in, you know, up up north in wine country, they live in Incline Village, they live all over the place

• 2:20:50John Coogan?

  and they live in these wonderful luxurious places that have no crime, no homelessness, like they they have, they have like fantastically managed cities just a commute distance from San Francisco.

• 2:21:00Julia Steinberg?

  Yeah, I think San Francisco, it's always sort of been like a young person's city.

• 2:21:03John Coogan?

  Totally. When I lived there, it was super rough, but I was like, I'm young, that's fine.

• 2:21:07Julia Steinberg?

  Yeah, I saw a guy on Twitter who's gonna give me a taser, so thank you.

• 2:21:11John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:21:12Julia Steinberg?

  But I think.

• 2:21:14John Coogan?

  Weapons on the internet.

• 2:21:15Julia Steinberg?

  Yeah, giving away weapons on there.

• 2:21:17Jordi Hays?

  You can buy a taser on Amazon, it'll show up this afternoon.

• 2:21:19Julia Steinberg?

  But it's like a taser gun, so I think it'll be easier to use, so I was gonna buy a taser and this this sort of.

• 2:21:24John Coogan?

  Well, those are, yeah, there's legal, you can also just buy this.

• 2:21:26Julia Steinberg?

  Yeah, it's.

• 2:21:27John Coogan?

  But if someone's gonna give you a free one.

• 2:21:28Julia Steinberg?

  Yeah, someone's gonna give you a free one, so SF is sort of, it's it's, you know, the duality of San Francisco is it's great because some random stranger on the internet will give me a free taser gun, but the sort of negative part is that I need this taser gun to stay safe.

• 2:21:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's always been so fascinating. I mean, I wonder, I wonder if the OpenAI wealth will meaningfully change the budget of the city. You know, you did so much, and it's actually, the company's actually in San Francisco.

• 2:21:55Julia Steinberg?

  Yes.

• 2:21:55John Coogan?

  It's not a Mountain View company. It's not a Palo Alto company. It's not a, you know, Menlo Park company. It is a San Francisco company, and you have $500 billion of wealth, loosely, with, you know, tens of billions in the pockets of employees right there. Like, that should wind up doing something, even if it's just some renovations, some private security.

• 2:22:14Julia Steinberg?

  How good are OpenAI employees at spending money?

• 2:22:18John Coogan?

  I don't know. How would they spend it? How would you recommend?

• 2:22:20Julia Steinberg?

  I have, I have a friend who works at OpenAI, and you, you're just like, you know, I don't really know how to spend my money. And I was just like, do you want, like, I can yacht?

• 2:22:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:28Julia Steinberg?

  I mean, cool, get a yacht. I don't know.

• 2:22:30John Coogan?

  That one yacht. There is a marina in San Francisco.

• 2:22:33Julia Steinberg?

  There is, yeah. I like to go over and walk around there. And there are these, like, cool boats and yachts. It doesn't need to be like a super ostentatious one, but I don't know, we're cool clothes.

• 2:22:42John Coogan?

  I think yacht is secondary to, to cleaning up the streets, you know?

• 2:22:45Julia Steinberg?

  Yes, but all of, like, even buying a yacht would help clean up the streets because it is some simulation of the city's economy.

• 2:22:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:22:51Julia Steinberg?

  I don't know.

• 2:22:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, I suppose, yeah.

• 2:22:52Julia Steinberg?

  Speaking of boats, it's like, waters, high tides, rise all boats.

• 2:22:58John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure, yeah.

• 2:23:00Julia Steinberg?

  So, I don't know. It's, I guess, it's sort of, it's silly to say, like, rise, or like, raise the economic output of San Francisco, because it's one of the most economically, like, intensive regions in the country. But I do very strongly believe that, you know, just let market forces do their thing, things will get better.

• 2:23:16John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for stopping by the UltraDome. This is fantastic.

• 2:23:19Julia Steinberg?

  Yes, thank you for having me.

• 2:23:20Jordi Hays?

  Always great to get the update. Excited for 006.

• 2:23:24John Coogan?

  006.

• 2:23:25Julia Steinberg?

  Yeah, and 007 is next, after that.

• 2:23:27John Coogan?

  Amazing. Where can people get it?

• 2:23:29Julia Steinberg?

  People can.

• 2:23:30John Coogan?

  Arenamag.com?

• 2:23:31Julia Steinberg?

  Arenamag.com, and at Barnes and Nobles near you.

• 2:23:34John Coogan?

  Yes, there's a Barnes and Noble deal now.

• 2:23:36Julia Steinberg?

  Yes.

• 2:23:37Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:23:37John Coogan?

  IRL.

• 2:23:38Julia Steinberg?

  So, if you want to buy any romanticy books, which I think is the new, it is the new genre.

• 2:23:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, there's romantic fantasy?

• 2:23:44Julia Steinberg?

  Yes.

• 2:23:44John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:23:45Julia Steinberg?

  That's the new genre that women are supposed to like.

• 2:23:47John Coogan?

  That's not my, it's not my type. I will stick to you.

• 2:23:49Julia Steinberg?

  You have to get on that.

• 2:23:49John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for popping on the show.

• 2:23:51Julia Steinberg?

  Thank you.

• 2:23:51Jordi Hays?

  Great to see you.

• 2:23:52John Coogan?

  This is great. Great to see you.

• 2:23:52Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:23:54John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about 8sleeve.com. Exceptional sleep without exception. Fall asleep faster, sleep deeper, wake up energized.

• 2:24:03John Coogan?

  We have our next guest joining right now. We have Bobby Grochall from Dupe. This is a very fun company.

• 2:24:11Jordi Hays?

  What's happening? Welcome to the show.

• 2:24:14Speaker 04

  Thank you. We made it, guys. We made it.

• 2:24:17Jordi Hays?

  We made it, finally. Great, great setup here you got. You're just daily driving that for Zoom?

• 2:24:24Speaker 04

  That's it. Yeah, I mean, it's comfortable. It's cozy.

• 2:24:28John Coogan?

  Introduce the company. I remember when you launched, I remember seeing a whole bunch of posts go viral, but how are you describing the company today?

• 2:24:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, so Dupe is used by millions of people to find the products that they want or similar products for less. It's a search engine. It's a generative marketplace. I could throw a whole bunch of buzzwords. It's AI-driven, this and that, but ultimately, it's a shopping companion. It's a shopping app that helps give people a confidence pill, a little bit of a boost to know that what they're buying is at the best price and is the right product.

• 2:25:04John Coogan?

  A gent of commerce. OpenAI is talking a big game about it. Is that a headwind for you?

• 2:25:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, it's, first of all, nothing's set in stone yet. Don't, don't count us out. We're also talking to them.

• 2:25:20John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:25:21Speaker 04

  We're, we're building, we're building an app that would be native to ChatGPT. You know, it's like the, the thing I like to say about ChatGPT, Google, all these tools is that they can do everything and that is the problem. It's like you, you can, if you're a chef, you can use a Swiss Army knife to, to cut a tomato, but why would you? I think verticalized AI tools are, are very powerful because they are single purpose and they solve a problem in a, in a, in a, in a more precise way.

• 2:25:53John Coogan?

  It's odd. I have like no doubt that there's people out there that are making. Tens of millions of dollars on Studio Ghibli apps, right? Or, you know, different animation apps, different, different sub apps that maybe could be done in ChatGPT if you know the right prompt, but because it's lower tier on like the prompt ladder, you kind of got to know to go there to get it. It's not coaching you through it. It's not actually giving you all the different harnesses and wrapping that you need to actually do it.

• 2:26:24Jordi Hays?

  How hard has it been to actually build the, like, the product experience? Because I'm assuming you're effectively like browsing the web on behalf of, you know, if I upload a product or I paste in a link and then you guys are browsing the web or you already have and you're, and you're sorting products to find products that look the same and or maybe from a different manufacturer or the same end manufacturer or different brand. But how hard has that product experience been? Because I've been continuously disappointed by computer use and just web browsing from a lot of different LMS at this point.

• 2:27:02Speaker 04

  When you say computer use and you're talking about things like the browsers doing the browsing on your behalf, basically?

• 2:27:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, go out and find this thing. The example that he gives is-

• 2:27:11Jordi Hays?

  I use it for cars, that's my-

• 2:27:13John Coogan?

  Find me a GT3 RS, it's a rare car, it's a specific-

• 2:27:16Speaker 04

  What a great car.

• 2:27:17John Coogan?

  It's a great car.

• 2:27:18Jordi Hays?

  Classic.

• 2:27:19John Coogan?

  But it's not, it's not like find me someone who sells Diet Coke. Like Diet Coke is a commodity, it's sold everywhere. A GT3 RS, there might not be one for sale right now. Like it's possible that there's just none for sale. And so-

• 2:27:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah.

• 2:27:34John Coogan?

  Maybe a few of them.

• 2:27:35Jordi Hays?

  Quite a bit more common, but there are certain cars you look for and it'll say, I found you this one. And it's like, it sold two years ago.

• 2:27:42John Coogan?

  Yeah. And so, and so on that eval of like, go hunt around on the internet, find this particular thing that's not particularly fungible, not particularly commoditized. At least agent mode, these agent, these, these agentic commerce products have not been up to Jordy's standards, at least.

• 2:28:01Speaker 04

  I take it you haven't bought the GT3 RS yet?

• 2:28:04John Coogan?

  Not yet. Not yet. And the only reason is just the AI is not good enough.

• 2:28:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, of course, of course. That's the only reason. Come on, guys. So first of all, I think it's, I too have been fairly disappointed with these browsers that browse on your behalf. That is ultimately not what we're trying to do with Dupe. AI has some flaws in like the shopping universe and maybe that, you know, it speaks to some of the pain points you're finding with, you know, finding your perfect car, which is they don't have live inventory, they don't have live price, they don't have product catalogs, they don't have customer preferences, they don't have customer behavior. There's a lot of data that is missing in the shopping journey. So ultimately what you're left with is the best guess. So to answer your question, how hard has it been?

• 2:28:50Speaker 04

  It's hard because the way you do it, the way you do it right is you got to do it the old school way. All right. In the shopping world, you got to go press palms, kiss babies, hug people, take them out to, you know, to a drink, meet them at conferences, you got to know their names, you got to know their kids' names. It's like a lot of trust building in person. It's not as simple as just kind of plugging it in because when you build that trust, they then trust you with their product catalogs and they give you a commission for sales because, you know, you turn out to be a partner that drives a lot of sales for them. So it has been, it has been pretty hard, but the tech that we have is product ingestion from these partnerships, but also live scraping. So it's, you know, in a sense it is browsing and it's scraping this data for you.

• 2:29:34Speaker 04

  We have vectorized millions of products or tens of millions of products at this point. So we can do kind of a live assessment of what products look like each other, what products should go together, stuff like this.

• 2:29:47Speaker 04

  Ultimately, the way to solve it, you can't, AI is not sort of a panacea. You have to pick your battles. So Dupe, for example, for the last year and a half, has been focused solely on furniture. Why furniture? Well, it turns out, unlike the GT3 RS, a lot of furniture is made in the same few factories, sold back to brands under different names, the brands then upload them to their website under different names, different prices. But it's the same furniture and I know this because I got scammed with buying furniture online and it really pissed me off because I found the same product I wanted for about forty percent less, the exact same, same spec, same color, everything, exactly the same. And so that ultimately is like the lore of what spawned dupe. And I've seen these factories in person, I've visited China.

• 2:30:32John Coogan?

  How do you think about incorporating human feedback? That feels, that feels like something that would be a really valuable resource. I was thinking about like, on Instagram, you see a lot of ads for a bunch of different stuff, some of the stuff is like, it really grabs your attention, people just buy it, but then it's really low quality. And if you could actually have some sort of, you know, okay, feedback, hey, we, you know, we shipped you this dupe, this product, we think we got you the lowest price, but like, tell us how the product actually performed, because that better informs our decision making. Do you think that'll be like a compounding advantage? Do you think that's valuable over the long term?

• 2:31:11Speaker 04

  It's so, it's so, it's so valuable. And we don't even need to ask the customer. First of all, we have access to all these reviews. We also have access to the checkout data and we have access to the return data, because if someone returns something, we don't get paid.

• 2:31:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:26Speaker 04

  All right. So these brands pay us four months after the sales happens, three months after the sales happen, after that return window is set. So we know which products get returned the most. Absolutely, that's a compounding effect.

• 2:31:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes a ton of sense, Jordy.

• 2:31:39Jordi Hays?

  You get a lot of hate mail from, from certain brands that, that, that kind of rely, like, you're providing a service that consumers love and then certain brands out there that, that are sourcing products and setting whatever price they feel like is relevant. And then you're actually in some cases-

• 2:31:57John Coogan?

  You're blowing up my spot. I had a, I had ninety-nine percent margin on this couch.

• 2:32:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, we basically like killed shop, drop shippers, like for sure. Like, the drop shipping industry is a, is a total scam. And, and they hate us. But ultimately, our brands, the part, our partners love us. We drive millions of dollars in sales for them every, every single month. And so why is that? Well, let's say like- Let's take a partner like Walmart. So some people think Walmart has thousands of products. They don't. They have millions of products, right? Millions of products. They're not always in store because a lot of those products are drop shipped. So what we do is, you know, let's say you guys are looking for, we'll take a piece of furniture, for example, that chair right there. I mean, that's, that's not being sold at Walmart,

• 2:32:41Speaker 04

  but let's say you want something like that. And you upload an image to Dupe or you tell Dupe like, hey, that's a Herman Miller. Find me something like that for less. Walmart has 15 versions of that chair. You don't know that. You would probably never even think to look at Walmart for that chair. But Walmart has a great version of that chair and they love us because we merchandise their products at that exact high intent moment where the customer knows what they want. They just want a great deal on it. We surface the partners up. Now, there are some brands, for example, we were sued last year and yeah, yeah, we, we were sued. I'm not going to name the brand. It's very easy to find.

• 2:33:18Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 2:33:19Speaker 04

  The brand, they are the largest, largest furniture brand. Now, the lawsuit essentially like it tried to kill our company. It was, it was like a pretty tough, a pretty tough lawsuit that we, that we had to fight. We settled it to both parties content. Like it, it's fine now, but

• 2:33:37Jordi Hays?

  What was the, what was the claim?

• 2:33:41Speaker 04

  The, there are a couple of claims. So copyright infringement, they were pissed that we were using or letting our customers use images from their website to find similar products. They were, they were pissed that like they were part of, we went super viral when we came out. I did all of these like post, post-it note ad campaigns and stuff that went super. They were pissed that they were in some of those, some of those, uh, social kind of TikTok videos. They weren't even ads. They were literally just social content, uh, talking about our, our website. They were, they were really, really upset about that. And ultimately they were pissed that, uh, we were Unfairly competing essentially. I obviously, you know, we have a public statement on how we felt about all of these claims. And so they basically said we were falsely advertising,

• 2:34:25Speaker 04

  you know, that they were white labeling stuff, that we, that we were unfairly competing and also infringing on their copyrights. So ultimately, you know, cold water under the bridge. We're, we're here. Dupe is alive. It's well, it's working exactly as we wanted to, and it's crushing. And so there are some of those partners, but those are very few and far between. And it tends to be like the, almost a monopoly type partners, you know, that are, that are upset. Everyone else, everyone else, and most of the Fortune 500 that we work, they are thrilled that Dupe exists.

• 2:34:58Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. How'd you get the domain? It's absolutely fire.

• 2:35:02Speaker 04

  We, so the company was called Carrot before it was called Dupe. We had three months of runway before we pivoted the company to Dupe. We worked with Nikita Beer on it. He was a total goat, helped us find like that one.

• 2:35:15Jordi Hays?

  Spent your last, your last 20 grand on intro.co.

• 2:35:19Speaker 04

  Well, we had, we had more than 20 grand. We had about three months of runway, but yes, we definitely spent more than 20 grand.

• 2:35:24Jordi Hays?

  I'm just picking a number. Yeah.

• 2:35:25Speaker 04

  Yes, with Nikita. Probably the best money, probably the best money I've ever spent. Saved our company. Let's be completely honest.

• 2:35:32John Coogan?

  That's actually crazy. I love it.

• 2:35:34Speaker 04

  It, it, like total bananas moment for us. But the, the domain was a very last minute decision. We, we knew we needed a great name to stand out in the, in the kind of shopping space. I did a bunch of Google research on keywords. One of the words was Dupe, and I saw Dupe was on, on Google Trends, 100 rated Google Trend keyword and growing.

• 2:35:54Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:54Speaker 04

  And I saw that no one used, no one was using dupe.com. We reached out to a broker that was sitting on that name. They wanted just the most insane price. We then negotiated a far lower price for dupes.com, went back to the owner of dupe.com and said, if you don't sell this domain to us in like five minutes with this price, which I thought was a fair price. It was all of our money. And we gave them all of our money.

• 2:36:19John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 2:36:19Speaker 04

  And, you know, that we're going to pull the trigger on dupes.com and they sold it to us like on the spot. And they basically said, okay, fine, go for it.

• 2:36:25John Coogan?

  Smart.

• 2:36:26Speaker 04

  That's great. That's how we, that's how we negotiated it.

• 2:36:30John Coogan?

  I love that. That's great. Thank you. That's a good story.

• 2:36:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, but that was like a bet, like a literal bet the company moment. And then Nikita did the most mensch thing ever. He put out a tweet about us and instantly blew us up.

• 2:36:41John Coogan?

  It was crazy. I remember that tweet. He framed it very, very well. And then you can imagine this. It just works on social.

• 2:36:47Jordi Hays?

  What other categories do you think are most ripe other than furniture?

• 2:36:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we do fashion now, handbags, shoes, clothes, a really big one that we don't do very well yet. Because AI doesn't have a sense of smell, you know, it's a vision, perfumes, perfumes are huge.

• 2:37:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's basically I look at as anything without a logo. So like furniture, like there's iconic shapes and silhouettes and, and, you know, materials that get used along that. But ultimately, people don't have, you know, you're not like, you don't have a couch that has like a restoration hardware, big logo printed on it. The challenge with fashion is that people want like the association with a specific like brand and that can come through a logo or a, or a silhouette that actually can't be implemented without getting, you know.

• 2:37:42Speaker 04

  You're right. You're right. Except we're going through this like bizarre moment in shopping where brandless is a thing. And not showing logos is a thing like this, this kind of quiet luxury movement. Like people, people want something to feel good. And that, Buttrus is like, even the brands that you love, they're white labeling guys like they are, they are, none of this stuff is like custom made specifically for a single brand. Maybe if you're going into the couture world, of course, that stuff is, is custom made. But ultimately, you know, when someone sees Skims leggings, like, yeah, they, they want the look. People shop, people shop the look, like that's what they're shopping ultimately.

• 2:38:23Speaker 04

  And it's, it's less about like, you know, people often misconstrue what dupe.com is like, we're not trying to sell you replicas. We actually ban replicas across the board.

• 2:38:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:38:33Speaker 04

  And all those sites. We are trying to get you that look, that garment, you know, that furniture for less. And, and most people shop for the look now, especially in this market.

• 2:38:44Jordi Hays?

  Yep, that makes sense. What, how do you, are you, do you think you'll have enough leverage at some point to get, to get the underlying brands to pay you at the time of sale? Is that even important?

• 2:39:00Speaker 04

  It's actually very important. I'll tell you why it's important. If we were growing 100% month over month and we weren't seeing our cash flow for three months, it stifles our marketing budget. We would have to then either raise credit or go raise a massive round just to pay down the marketing. This is actually like the biggest risk that I that I think about. So one of the things we're partnering with the largest payment network to do Agentic Checkout, Global Checkout, and you know, we're not announcing the the name yet, but we are working through that tech and the idea being, you know, most of these brands are really upset with Agentic Checkout because they they don't get the customer information. But we do it in a way where the checkout would happen on Dupe,

• 2:39:41Speaker 04

  but the brand retains the customer information and the customer relationship. And the only the only reason we want to do that is so that we can, you know, go from net 90 payments to net zero, net one, you know, instant payment back to to our company. So yeah, this is this is very top of mind for us and it's it's definitely a risk that I think a lot about.

• 2:40:01Jordi Hays?

  How how big, how big do you want, do you want Dupe to get?

• 2:40:06Speaker 04

  I think Dupe, we we often talk about a road to a billion shoppers. The way that we're going to do this is we have an MCP, so we, any LLM can plug us in. You know, the the largest LLMs, any long tail LLMs, they can plug us in. Ultimately, we want to be the canonical answer engine for how do I get this for less? Or find me something similar to this. We want to be that answer engine for these websites. The beauty is because they don't have access to the behavioral data, the shopping data, the product catalogs, the product pricing, the moment they plug us in, it's basically zero effort. It's just, you know, a few lines of code. The moment they plug us in, any click going out from our answers that gets monetized, we split that commission back with the LLM.

• 2:40:49Speaker 04

  So it's like instantly monetizing their user base in an entirely entirely new way. So that's that's something that we're very excited about. And when you think about how like the the growth potential of that and the tailwinds for any LLM to really consider partnering with us for our links and for our expertise and the ability to monetize instantly, I think we can get to hundreds of millions of shoppers on our infra. They might not be on dupe.com, but they'll be.

• 2:41:16Jordi Hays?

  You're still monetizing them.

• 2:41:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. That's right.

• 2:41:20John Coogan?

  That's very exciting.

• 2:41:21Speaker 04

  That's right. And the last eighteen months, we, you know, we're right around sub twenty million users. Between. Let's go. Oh, my God. Do I get the con?

• 2:41:31Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 2:41:32Speaker 04

  No, dude.

• 2:41:33John Coogan?

  I wasn't sure if you were gonna give us a number, but we got one.

• 2:41:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, no, no, no. So I'll give you a few numbers. I mean, we're rounding a corner. We're gonna come up on a hundred million in GMV sold through dupe.com.

• 2:41:44Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 2:41:45Speaker 04

  Eighteen million shoppers.

• 2:41:47John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:41:48Speaker 04

  Between one and two monthly, one and two million monthly shoppers, which we just launched our app last week, went number one in the App Store, by the way. Super stoked about, please, everyone listening, go download Dupe, D U P E, look for it in the App Store, leave us, leave us a review and rating, gotta put in the plug. Went number one in the App Store, and of course, we had a lot of fun with that. We're putting a lot of fun content out.

• 2:42:06Jordi Hays?

  How did, how did you go number one? Was it content or some type of like viral incentive?

• 2:42:13Speaker 04

  We have a lot of, we have a lot of users, like these people, they want our app. Like they, you know, they use our website to shop and have used our website to shop for, for many months. They want, they wanted our app and, you know, the way the App Store works is on a twenty-four hour clock, so the, the number of installs you get in a twenty-four hour period, if it's more than any other app, you rocket up to the top. I didn't think it would happen on day one. I actually had a whole, I was convinced that we were gonna go number one, first of all. I called the shot in August on Twitter. I said, we are gonna unseat, dethrone ChatGPT when we launch our app in November. So we, we shot our shot and we, we kind of netted it, but it happened within a couple hours of us going live. I didn't expect that. I expected it to be about forty-eight hours, so it happened very, very quickly.

• 2:42:58Jordi Hays?

  Wow, very cool.

• 2:42:59Speaker 04

  I mean, we still have a lot, we still have a lot of work left. I mean, you know, obviously, we're at the beginning of our journey.

• 2:43:04Jordi Hays?

  Call your shot again, hundred million in GMV. When are you gonna, or when, when are you gonna hit it?

• 2:43:11Speaker 04

  We're a couple months away from that.

• 2:43:13Jordi Hays?

  Okay, well, we got the gong ready for you.

• 2:43:15John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 2:43:15Jordi Hays?

  You're in LA, right?

• 2:43:17Speaker 04

  Uh, New York.

• 2:43:18Jordi Hays?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:43:19John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:43:20Speaker 04

  Well, we should, we should be able to get to that. I mean, this, this shopping season, let's see how Black Friday goes, make sure none of our systems go down, but that, that would be pretty dope.

• 2:43:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's really, this is, this is your Super Bowl.

• 2:43:31John Coogan?

  Very cool. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:43:32Jordi Hays?

  Great hanging, dude. Congrats on all the progress.

• 2:43:34Speaker 04

  Thanks, man.

• 2:43:35Jordi Hays?

  Great stories.

• 2:43:35John Coogan?

  Congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about wander.com. Book a wonder with inspiring views, hotel great amenities, dreamy beds, top tier cleaning, 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better. And that's our show for today. That's this week in TBPN. Thank you for tuning in. Thank you for listening. Thanks for hanging out in the chat, if you've been chatting this week. We love you and we'll see you on Monday.

• 2:44:02Jordi Hays?

  Have a fantastic weekend.

• 2:44:03John Coogan?

  Have a great weekend. Goodbye.