$2B Allergy Drug, ChatGPT Ads, Mansion Section | Billy Boman, Benjamin Miller, Faris Sbahi, Evan Loomis, Anvisha Pai, Ryan Tseng

Sign up for TBPN’s daily newsletter at TBPN.com (01:53) - Novartis to Buy Excellergy for $2B (11:04) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (24:08) - Anthropic Stories (33:06) - Mansion Section (54:23) - Billy Boman, an AI visual creator and educator, discusses his journey from a creative upbringing and formal design education to roles in fashion and tech, culminating in his current focus on AI-driven content creation. He highlights his work on high-profile projects, including AI-generated commercials and music videos, and emphasizes the transformative impact of AI on the creative industry. Boman also shares insights into his teaching role at Berghs School of Communication, where he integrates AI tools into the curriculum to prepare students for the evolving landscape of digital storytelling. (01:27:27) - Benjamin Miller, co-founder and CEO of Fundrise, discusses the company's mission to democratize real estate investing through technology, making high-quality investments accessible to a broader audience. He highlights the recent public listing of the Fundrise Innovation Fund (VCX) on the New York Stock Exchange, emphasizing its role in providing investors with exposure to private technology companies. Miller also elaborates on Fundrise's strategic approach to venture capital, focusing on building relationships with top private companies and leveraging their extensive customer base to add value beyond capital investment. (01:48:47) - Faris Sbahi, Founder and CEO of Normal Computing, discusses how his company collaborates with leading semiconductor firms to design custom silicon and is developing ultra-efficient ASICs focused on energy efficiency. He highlights the industry's shift towards heterogeneous computing, emphasizing the need for specialized chips tailored to specific workloads, and introduces thermodynamic computing as a novel approach to enhance energy efficiency in AI workloads. Sbahi also announces a $50 million accelerator round led by Samsung to further these initiatives. (01:55:38) - Evan Loomis, General Partner at Overmatch Ventures and co-founder of ICON, discusses the firm's recent $250 million fund closure aimed at investing in deep tech, defense, and space sectors, with plans to build a concentrated portfolio of approximately 25 companies. He emphasizes the urgency for the U. S. to lead in critical technologies like artificial intelligence and advanced defense systems, expressing confidence in the nation's innovative capacity despite current challenges. Loomis also highlights ICON's achievements, including 3D-printing the first home in the U. S. and collaborating with NASA to construct a lunar habitat. (02:04:18) - Anvisha Pai, founder and CEO of Moda, discusses the launch of Moda, an AI design tool that enables non-designers to create fully editable slides, social graphics, and landing page mockups. Unlike other AI design tools, Moda offers a fully editable canvas, allowing users to adjust text boxes and move elements freely. The company recently announced a $7.5 million funding round led by General Catalyst, with participation from the founder of Dropbox, Arash Ferdowsi. (02:18:13) - Ryan Tseng, President, Co-Founder, and Chief Strategy Officer of Shield AI, a defense technology company specializing in AI-powered autonomous systems, announced the completion of a $2 billion financing round at a $12.7 billion valuation and the acquisition of Echelon Technologies, a leader in physics-based simulation for high-end aviation training. He discussed the company's mission to protect service members and civilians through advanced aircraft and AI pilots, emphasizing the importance of autonomy in modern defense operations. Tseng also highlighted the integration of Echelon's simulation capabilities to enhance the development and deployment of autonomous systems, aiming to accelerate the proliferation of high-performance, high-assurance autonomy in defense applications. 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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.

• 0:02John Coogan?

  Today is Friday, March 27, 2026. We are live from the TVP and Ultra Home.

• 0:05Jordi Hays?

  The Temple of Technology, the Fortress of Finance, the capital of capital.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money. Save both easy use corporate cards, bill pay accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. Let's go.

• 0:20John Coogan?

  I like that one.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  Glad you like it, John, because it's the only one you have.

• 0:25John Coogan?

  I have two. Okay, let's be clear. I have this and I also have this. So be aware. What is that at the end? I heard some other music. Anyway, let's pull up the linear lineup because we have a great show for you today, folks. It's Friday. We have Billy Bowman, his.

• 0:40Jordi Hays?

  They're calling him. They're calling him.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  The Bowmanator.

• 0:43Jordi Hays?

  The Bowmanator.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  Bowmanator. If you're in, if you're in LA, if you're in Hollywood and you drive down the freeway, you will see as you enter Hollywood, his name as big as the Hollywood sign, basically. There's a massive.

• 0:55Jordi Hays?

  Fiver paid for it.

• 0:57John Coogan?

  And so we're going to have him in the studio talking about what it takes to be a director of AI video, what that even means, how he's using these tools, what he's using. That'll be interesting. Then we have Benjamin Miller from Fundrise talking about taking private stakes in private companies, public on the public stock exchange, right?

• 1:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's up 1300% above NAV.

• 1:20John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:22Jordi Hays?

  So that'll be an interesting.

• 1:23John Coogan?

  And then we have a lightning round and we're closing it out with Ryan from Shield AI, who just raised a massive round. Defense tech is of course booming and we will talk to him a lot about what AI means in the defense stack. Linear, of course, is the system for modern software development. 70% of enterprise workspaces, 75% now of workspaces on linear are using agents and you should be too. So why is no one talking about Xcelergy? I love these titles. Very niche company was in stealth mode for five years, but sold this week to Novartis for $2 billion smackaroos.

• 2:00John Coogan?

  That's a good outcome. Novartis, of course, is the $300 billion Swiss pharmaceutical company and they just paid $2 billion for basically a five-year-old company named Xcelergy.

• 2:10Jordi Hays?

  Is that good?

• 2:11John Coogan?

  It's a great outcome. It's a fantastic outcome. This is an interesting story because it's very much like the biotech playbook done right. They bring in the right CEO.

• 2:20Jordi Hays?

  Yes, Tyler. Tyler is $2 billion exit in five years. From your point of view, is this good?

• 2:26John Coogan?

  Is this good?

• 2:28Jordi Hays?

  That's pretty good. Yeah. Pretty.

• 2:30John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 2:32John Coogan?

  It's, but this isn't, this isn't in the sweet spot for typical tech news, but there, there are some interesting, there are some interesting data points. Amir over at the information said, leading indicator of AI adoption, drug companies like Novo Nordisk, Novo Nordisk Pharma has long been at the forefront of machine learning. Ozempic maker says AI agents are shortening its clinical trials. People think that it's going to a prompt and saying like, cure cancer. It's not, it's like you have a 10,000 page document that you need to send to the FDA. And if there's a comma in the wrong place, they can just send it back to you and say, ah, there's an error. Like, we don't want to deal with it right now. You're back at the back of the queue.

• 3:12Jordi Hays?

  Is that real?

• 3:13John Coogan?

  You can get dinged for crazy, crazy stuff. Like, I, I don't know exactly what I can share, but I've heard of multi-billion dollar companies getting dinged for not showing, like, they will list out, okay, we use this centrifuge to run this assay to understand how this chemical separates, but they didn't say, they didn't list out who the suppliers to that supplier are. They didn't explode, explain the entire supply chain. And there was like very little guidance on it, like little things like that come up all the time. And reading through all the documentation, of course, most of this, when you're talking about Novo, it's like they have a direct line of communication with the FDA. So it's, it's different, but.

• 3:54Jordi Hays?

  Seeing this headline.

• 3:55John Coogan?

  There are tons of situations where you need to like comb through data and organize it.

• 3:58Jordi Hays?

  When it, when it, when, when some type of public company software CEO comes out and says like, everything is accelerating because of AI.

• 4:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:06Jordi Hays?

  Oftentimes I look at the business and if, you know, if revenue isn't accelerating dramatically.

• 4:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 4:12Jordi Hays?

  You think like, okay, this guy just wants an AI narrative. He's just reaching for an AI narrative here. But when I see a pharma company do it. No real context on on pharma personally, it must be true.

• 4:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. No, I mean, I was working on FDA filings like four or five years ago, and there were so many Word documents that needed to be, it was the same application for multiple variations on the product that the FDA was going to review. And so we actually wrote Python scripts to programmatically interact with the Word documents to to basically do like a very advanced version of find and replace. It's like perfect for AI.

• 4:50Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 4:51John Coogan?

  And it just speeds things up a little bit. You submit a week earlier. You have, you know, you can submit more things, more variations, you can give more information, compile more information, investigate other literature, do deep research reports, what else is out there? Let's review all the IP faster, summarize things, find different threads to pull on. Little things like that just squeak out like an extra five minutes here, an extra day there, and it all adds up to acceleration in progress. It's not like an overnight, all of a sudden everything's completely changed. Maybe that happens. But at least right now, there's clearly, you know, a benefit from. Overnight success. But this was an overnight success, at least for Alex Eggle, Ted Jardenski, Luke Pennington, and Jeff Harris, who took academic research, which they've been doing at labs

• 5:36John Coogan?

  at Stanford and Burn, into what is basically a VC-backed biotech company, a drug company. So the goal was simple. What do they actually make? They wanted to make a better allergy drug. So when people have allergies, they, you know, you have a peanut allergy, if peanuts come in, your allergy cells like flare up and you need to fight that back. So the current, the current blockbuster drug in the category is called Zolair. And when someone has an allergic reaction to a food, allergy drugs act quickly to treat the reaction before it does lasting damage to the body. So the key immune molecule at the center of many allergic reactions is called IgE. And Xallergies Lead Program, EXL111, targets IgE. So the

• 6:19John Coogan?

  goal is to work faster, quiet the pathway more deeply, and ideally last longer between doses to fight allergic reactions. And so these will make that less severe. So Red Tree Venture Capital. Seated the company in 2021, but they stayed in stealth for about five years. The team announced their first big fundraiser, a $70 million Series A led by Samsara BioCapital. And this is a pretty typical flow for biotech companies. University of Science first, then they bring on secondary specialist capital, someone with experience in biotech. It's less common to go to like the big names that we know. The Sequoias, the Founders Funds, the Andreessen's.

• 6:57John Coogan?

  They do some stuff in bio, but very often if it's coming directly out of a lab, going to be IPO'd or acquired in a few years. Like that's a pretty traditional biotech VC playbook.

• 7:10John Coogan?

  And so by February of this year, Exelergy dosed its first phase one patients. So they gave the drug to subjects and it was obviously looking good because the Novartis deal signed a few.

• 7:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. How, how well does that phase one trial need to go for somebody to immediately come in and be like, yep, here's two billion?

• 7:28John Coogan?

  Probably really well.

• 7:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 7:29John Coogan?

  But it is like standing on the shoulders of giants. Remember the research was done in 2020, 2021, probably earlier than that. And it's building on an existing pathway. There's, there's some interesting stuff going on. So Novartis.

• 7:44Jordi Hays?

  This guy is such, CEO is such a chat.

• 7:47John Coogan?

  Yeah. Insane. So, yeah, I was like, I didn't want to diminish his accomplishments by reducing it to a playbook. But this isn't his first rodeo. The CEO, Todd Zavodnik, Zavodnik, he joined in 2025, sells the company in less than a year. And you've seen the story twice before, when he was at Zeltic, Allergan acquired it for 2.4 billion. And when he ran Dermavant or he sold that company for 1.2 billion in 2024. So he's seen a unicorn outcome two years ago and he gets a new job. He's like, I was going to take some time off, gets back in the arena and immediately sells the company. So clearly a great operator. And no one was really surprised by this, at least in the stock market.

• 8:32Jordi Hays?

  Here's a tip, join his next company.

• 8:36John Coogan?

  Good idea. Yeah, just follow this guy around.

• 8:38Jordi Hays?

  Three billion dollar acquisitions, back to back. I would, I think it's a good risk adjusted.

• 8:45John Coogan?

  This company. I would love to be a janitor here. I'll actually take all stock. I'll take all stock and I will clean the toilets and get coffee if that's what it takes. Because I know what's gonna happen. I've seen this playbook before. Anyway, Novartis, you know, the stock is not really moving on this news because uh, this is very expected. This is part of their playbook. Uh, they have made, uh, just last year, 2025, they made 1.7 billion dollars in sales of Zolair. The allergy drug that's currently the, the blockbuster drug in the category. Um, and this is a very logical next act in that category. So key Zolair patents are about to expire. So a next generation IGE asset is strategically valuable right now.

• 9:26John Coogan?

  Uh, Novartis's CEO has previous out, has previously outlined a pretty broad acquisition playbook. Um, it's focused on bolt-on deals in core areas. So when they have a business up and running like immunology, like treating allergies. They have all of the sales and distribution. They have an existing product portfolio. The business is working. Add things on to extend the viability of that business line. And X allergy fits squarely inside of that plan. Uh, now the $2 billion acquisition price, it's not all cash upfront. It is split between upfront payment and there's milestones based on development, commercial targets. So if they, if they succeed, if they, all of a sudden they flop in, in phase two trials, probably some of that gets clawed back.

• 10:06John Coogan?

  It needs to actually work and like all of the promises that they may have to play out, but uh, you know, they have Novart, uh, they have, uh, sorry, they, they have uh, Novartis behind them to, uh, you know, propel them through that. And it feels like a pretty standard playbook. So, uh, good stuff there. And in general, it's just like, it's cool. Uh, anyone who's dealt with allergies, either personally or with loved ones, it's always a hassle. Uh, you, uh, you know, everyone has a story of like, someone was on vacation. They got a drink that had a nut in it and someone, you know, had an allergic reaction. And anything that can treat that is obviously good. So another arrow in the quiver of modern medicine, which is great to see. Anyway, let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider

• 10:49John Coogan?

  user favorite to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more, while Railway automatically takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security. And let me also tell you about Sentry. Sentry shows developers what's broken and helps them fix it fast. That's why 150,000 organizations use it to keep their apps working. So.

• 11:05Jordi Hays?

  Breaking news, huge leak. OMG, did you guys know that Anthropic was training a better model this whole time?

• 11:15John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 11:16Jordi Hays?

  This is shocking, according to unemployed capital allocator.

• 11:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 11:20Jordi Hays?

  Of course, referencing a leak, a scoop.

• 11:23John Coogan?

  I wonder if this will trigger the team at DeepMind or OpenAI to consider training a better model. It feels like, it feels like if they're doing, they're gonna have to respond. So you could see multiple companies training new models based on this leak.

• 11:38Jordi Hays?

  Yep. Yeah, interesting story.

• 11:40John Coogan?

  It's more from a marketing perspective and how you actually roll out and manage like vibes and hype.

• 11:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, to me, to me, it doesn't seem improbable that there's been a lot of spud talk.

• 11:53John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 11:53Jordi Hays?

  On the timeline this week.

• 11:54John Coogan?

  You gotta get, you gotta start pumping Mythos.

• 11:56Jordi Hays?

  Mythos talk.

• 11:57John Coogan?

  The most powerful AI model ever developed. It's a good tagline.

• 12:00Jordi Hays?

  And very, very painful for all the SaaS companies out there.

• 12:05John Coogan?

  Oh, yes.

• 12:05Jordi Hays?

  That, that just sell off.

• 12:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 12:08Jordi Hays?

  Whenever Anthropic does something.

• 12:09John Coogan?

  So Prins.

• 12:10Jordi Hays?

  And it's a vicious cycle now.

• 12:11John Coogan?

  Prins wrote a little summary of this. Anthropic has been testing a new model called Mythos with certain customers. They call it a step change in AI capabilities, including dramatically higher scores in coding, academic reasoning, and cybersecurity. I want to know how it will do in Arc AGI V3 because all of the models are under 1% completion on that benchmark. It's the one benchmark that is not saturated, it's not, it's very closely guarded. You can't get into the tests, the actual test set. You can only see the examples. And, and it clearly is, I still, I still love the benchmark and the team over at Arc for what they're doing. So this is part of a new Capybara series of models, which are largely larger and more intelligent.

• 12:54John Coogan?

  than Opus. It's more expensive to run and it's not ready yet for general release, but they are excited about it. Mythos pricing bets coming in from 0.005 seconds. $100 in, 250 out. Subs repriced to $50, 250 and a $1,000 plan might be coming. Who knows? What do you think? Jordy Tyler, any thoughts on the new model?

• 13:22Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's pull up this picture of a capybara just to put, just to put this into context.

• 13:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. Isn't a mythical creature? No, capybara is real. So what's the connection between?

• 13:33Jordi Hays?

  So they're normally quite docile.

• 13:35John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 13:36Jordi Hays?

  But they can get violent. Let's look at this picture.

• 13:41John Coogan?

  Okay, watch out.

• 13:42Jordi Hays?

  I mean, look, look at the, look at the chomp on that.

• 13:45John Coogan?

  This is something we should read into. We should say, what are?

• 13:48Jordi Hays?

  What did they mean?

• 13:49John Coogan?

  What do they mean by this? You know, they, it's clearly some sort of vague post. They're telling you, they're telling you something that, you know, friendly, cute, but also potentially the end of the world. You never know.

• 14:01Jordi Hays?

  There's another picture here we can pull up.

• 14:03John Coogan?

  You're just sending capybara photos? While you pull that up, let me tell everyone about TurboPuffer. Serverless vector and full tech search built from first principles and object storage. Fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. And let me also tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to fin.ai.

• 14:21Jordi Hays?

  I mean, these, these are, these are nightmare fuel. Look at this, John.

• 14:25John Coogan?

  Hmm. It looks like a big hamster or a big guinea pig. How big are these guys?

• 14:29Jordi Hays?

  We'll pull up the next picture and we'll see if you still, see if you still, still think so, John.

• 14:35John Coogan?

  Do you think we could contain it? Do you think if we had one in the studio, we, it would overrun us? Or do you think we could keep it locked up?

• 14:43Jordi Hays?

  I think.

• 14:43John Coogan?

  That's pretty horrifying.

• 14:44Jordi Hays?

  I think four or five of these could take you down.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. Median weight is between 60 and 174 pounds.

• 14:50John Coogan?

  174 pounds. That's a, that's bigger than my dog.

• 14:55John Coogan?

  Wow, that's a big Capybara.

• 14:57Jordi Hays?

  That's what I'm saying. They have these at the Santa Barbara too.

• 14:59John Coogan?

  So this is the metaphor, you know, like these models are getting incredibly powerful. You need to contain them and think about safety and you need to think about how do you keep the Capybara safe? You need to lock it in a box, in a cage. It cannot be allowed to run free.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think just back on the pricing thing, I think like this is generally right. So basically 0.005 seconds is saying like it's just gonna get 10x more expensive. Cause right now I think it's something like $10 in, $25 out.

• 15:27John Coogan?

  People are ready for, people are ready to pay more though. Like they're paying a bunch through the API, they're paying more in cursor.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Maybe we'll talk about this right after, but like the subscription, like technically it's the same price, but the limits are going down. So it's, the tokens are getting more expensive. And as you see like, there's like this insane compute crunch, like I assume that models are gonna get much more expensive as they're getting bigger.

• 15:47John Coogan?

  Yeah, it is interesting. I wasn't expecting to be in the regime of like subscriptions as long as we have been. Like just talking to Ben and our team about how he sort of bounces around from one subscription to the next, like he'll max one out and then move over to the next one and then move over to the different one. And he's, he's like maybe more price sensitive than model sensitive. I would always assume, I'd always assume that most businesses would just be on an API consumption basis and.

• 16:19Speaker 02

  Just like, so the reason like I'm not hitting the APIs is because it's, it is like basically 10x more expensive than using the subscription.

• 16:26John Coogan?

  The subscription, so you do most of the work in the subscription, which is just, I mean, that's economically rational. I, I guess what I'm saying is like, I'm surprised by how many people who are in a business context still make that decision and how much of a price war we're in, how much capital matters here.

• 16:43Jordi Hays?

  Well, let's pull up this video because I'm not sure, I'm not sure, I'm not sure you guys would be making the same decisions with the Capybara family of models if you knew that Capybaras were capable of this kind of thing.

• 16:59John Coogan?

  What's going on here?

• 17:02John Coogan?

  They can swim? Wait, this is a human? Is this AI? Oh my god. That's really attacking her. Wow.

• 17:11Jordi Hays?

  This is why they're calling it their most powerful model ever.

• 17:15John Coogan?

  We need to slow down. We need to slow down with the happy bar.

• 17:17Jordi Hays?

  Alright, we can turn it off. It's horrifying. It's horrifying.

• 17:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, we need to, we need to slow down.

• 17:22Jordi Hays?

  I hope they, I hope they, you know, keep this with the safety team for long.

• 17:26John Coogan?

  I think, I think we need all countries to come together and, and agree to, to control the happy bar population. Uh, because that is truly horrifying.

• 17:36Jordi Hays?

  Lot of chatter on the timeline around, around, uh, around pricing. But, uh, a whole of this is to be expected somewhat. Definitely feels like all the labs will have to introduce some type of surge pricing over time.

• 17:54John Coogan?

  Take him has a, has a very independent take. He's the biggest Nvidia stan and he makes a lot of good points. Uh, but he's, he's making the argument that Anthropic needs more GPUs. Uh, because he's, he's sharing some posts here. To manage growing demand for Claude, we're adjusting our five hour session limits for free Pro Max subs during peak hours. Your weekly limits remain unchanged.

• 18:16Jordi Hays?

  And Take Him is coming on the show Monday.

• 18:19John Coogan?

  I'm very excited to talk to him.

• 18:20Jordi Hays?

  We'll ask him what he thinks about Nvidia.

• 18:22John Coogan?

  Yes. And so a lot of people are getting into, uh, polyphasic sleep because of this. So Claude has different limits at different times. So when the limits are in effect, that's when you need to be sleeping. Tyler, have you gotten into polyphasic sleep yet?

• 18:38Speaker 02

  I'm not there yet, but I'm, I mean, it, the problem is getting worse. I think at some point I'm gonna have to.

• 18:42John Coogan?

  I told you, I, I told Tyler, sometimes I indulge in polyphasic sleep. Uh, after the show, I'll, I'll, I'll sleep for an hour and then, uh, I'll go about my day and then I'll, I'll sleep at night. And he said, that's just a nap. It doesn't count. I guess people really are doing the polyphasic sleep thing to monitor, to monitor their agents. I wonder if that's a, if that's an aberration for this particular moment in time.

• 19:06Jordi Hays?

  You would think by, you would think you would know one person that has done that and stuck with it. Cause I feel like a bunch of people have tried that over time.

• 19:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:16Jordi Hays?

  And then eventually.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  I mean, if, if you're trying to get around the limits, like polyphasic sleep doesn't make sense. You just need to basically be nocturnal, right? Cause you need to be like inverse what like San Francisco hours are, right?

• 19:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  So the peak San Francisco usage, you're gonna be like.

• 19:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, or just move overseas.

• 19:30John Coogan?

  You could do that.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  That, yeah, but the polyphasic sleep doesn't really help, right?

• 19:34John Coogan?

  No, no. No, it seems like it's much better to just, again, you know, have, have a, have a compute desk or a, or a prompt desk that is geographically distributed evenly across the globe. So when your American employee stops the prompting, goes home for the night, then your European colleague steps up and starts prompting on the same project. And then your colleague in Asia can pick up when Europe goes to bed, something like that. You know what I mean? So you have 24/7 coverage.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, but that's still like at, at, during one of those periods, it's still like the peak hours, right?

• 20:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, because these peak hours are, are, are based around US, US hours. I, I was more, so there's actually two things going on. There's one where it's like you're waiting for your agents to respond. And if it's going to take hours for a prompt to return, you should go take a nap because you're better off checking in on a prompt every two hours for the whole day, for 24 hours and, you know, in perpetuity, as opposed to doing, you know, a two-hour prompt, watching TV, come back, do that eight times, and then sleep for eight hours. That's four more two-hour sessions that you could have been letting it cook and like interacting with it.

• 20:55John Coogan?

  That's separate from trying to get around these, uh, these, these, these, uh, these rate limits. Um, yes, uh, everyone agrees more GPUs, more CPUs, more, more chips. We are, continue to be chip constrained. Uh, even Anthropic appears to be, uh, chip constrained, uh, despite, you know, incredible fundraising and, and partnerships with, uh, hyperscalers. Uh, it really, it, it, it really is a vindication of everyone who is saying like AI is not a bubble and that the, the models will get better and that, uh, these crazy deals that Sam Altman's doing and Daria is doing and, and Google's drawing down their cash flow and Meta's drawing down the cash flow, like those all look really good in hindsight, correct? Do you disagree?

• 21:40Jordi Hays?

  I think in general, yeah.

• 21:44John Coogan?

  I mean, last, last March, like a year ago, people were like, fifty billion dollars, hundred billion dollars, two hundred billion dollars, is this stuff that useful? Is it slop? Is it actually going to be that useful? Are these things toys? Like, yeah, they're, they're reasonable for this thing, but what's the real economic value? Certainly, it can't be more than like twenty bucks a month or two hundred dollars a month. And now there's like lots of people that are, maybe they're only paying a few thousand a month because they're using a bunch of subscriptions. But like, they're pretty close to justifying, like, the Jensen, like, two hundred and fifty K a year per engineer thing. Like, that doesn't feel that far away from companies just saying like, yes, I, I, I, I give you the permission to spend

• 22:26John Coogan?

  two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year on AI inference. Do, be as efficient as possible as you can with that budget, but you have my approval. I believe that with the, with that two fifty, you will generate more than that in, in value. As, as, over your salary as well.

• 22:43Jordi Hays?

  The big thing is like, there's going to be more use cases that, that like, that have a similar level of product market fit as code gen that, that use tokens on the level that these code gen tools do.

• 23:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  And we haven't fully identified those yet. There's some early evidence that just like general agents.

• 23:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 23:10Jordi Hays?

  Will, will drive that, but, um, like I would say, an example is like, seems very obvious that models will be very useful for making financial models. But do you need to make five hundred financial models per day? No, right?

• 23:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, that is interesting.

• 23:25Jordi Hays?

  And so there are areas where the models are going to be incredibly, incredibly valuable, incredibly important, used by everybody in any given field, and yet they won't necessarily generate.

• 23:36John Coogan?

  There, there is, there, there are some people that, that would need to make five hundred financial models a day. Like, I think Ro Khanna makes like hundreds of trades every single day. And so if you're doing a proper like full DCF pulling every SEC filing for a company and you're doing that hundreds of times a day because you're trading.

• 23:53Jordi Hays?

  Or he might have hundreds of his individual positions.

• 23:56John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 23:57Jordi Hays?

  Real time.

• 23:58John Coogan?

  Exactly.

• 23:58Jordi Hays?

  Models.

• 23:59John Coogan?

  Sort of like rebuilding a Bloomberg terminal for yourself. I think he needs, I think Bloomberg exists and maybe should, should work there. Anyway, as soon as we're speaking of the government, let's move over to the preliminary injunction re the Pentagon supply chain risk designation. Before we go to Dean Ball, let me tell you about Label Box, RL Environments, Voice Robotics, Evals and Expert Human Data. Label Box is the data factory behind the world's leading AI teams. And let me also tell you about the New York Stock Exchange. Want to change the world? Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. So the news is that Anthropic has been granted a preliminary injunction re the Pentagon supply chain risk designation in California, but is allowing stay for one week.

• 24:41John Coogan?

  I think a lot of people, like the tech community broadly came away with this prediction that this wouldn't hold, that this was, you know, that whatever you thought about how you work with the government and the Ben Thompson thesis, there was, you know, the, the supply chain thing wasn't really going to stick. It was, it wouldn't necessarily hold up in court, but we'll see where it goes. Dean Ball says, this is a devastating ruling for the government, finding Anthropic likely to prevail on essentially all of its theories for why the government's actions were unlawful and unconstitutional. One of the things she mentions is a huge, is the huge range of Amici, Amici briefs. I don't know how to say Amici, briefs, supporting Anthropic by way zero.

• 25:22Jordi Hays?

  Hey, finally a word that John.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  I lost it.

• 25:26Jordi Hays?

  Can't nail instantly. You have an incredible mind that we did find.

• 25:32John Coogan?

  We found my limit. We found my limit. On a personal note, says Dean Ball, some friends and allies of mine on the right who have been angry at me for my own words and actions and all of this. Anyone who thinks I spoke out for personal gain or trivial reasons against an administration I served in is crazy. Yeah, people forget that Dean Ball served not in the first Trump administration, but the second Trump administration. And he was like, look, I wrote the AI policy. I worked on that like this is not the right path and so it always hit a little.

• 25:58Jordi Hays?

  It's a meekie and it's the plural of amicus.

• 26:01John Coogan?

  It's this is brutal for me because I studied Latin and I should be able to nail this because I know it's a Latin word. Anyway, uh, it was a hugely costly decision for Dean Ball. But this judge's ruling shows why I did it. This is a staggeringly illegal act by the government. That is why I'm particularly honored to have been implicitly quoted in the ruling for calling this what it was. When Secretary Hesekah Hesekah made his initial announcement, an attempted act of corporate murder. He's standing with the corporations. This case continues, but Anthropic has scored a very large win here. The real victors, however, are all red-blooded Americans who are, as the founders would have said, jealous of their liberties.

• 26:42John Coogan?

  I love it. Uh, well, congratulations and hopefully everyone can just go back to building good models. You know, uh, all this, uh, all this nonsense in, uh, DC has been, uh, a huge, a huge side, sideshow, side, side project, side quest. As, as the race for compute is so much more important, the race for capabilities is so much more important. And so, uh, uh, the other scoop is coming from Axios. Sam Altman apparently told staff he tried to save Anthropic in the Pentagon clash.

• 27:14Jordi Hays?

  Which he apparently thought was somewhat ironic, given that, uh,

• 27:21Jordi Hays?

  said competitor openly, openly, openly blasted on any, on any podcast that they go on.

• 27:30John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, uh, last Anthropic story IPO, uh, they're trying to go public as early as Q4 with a potential 60 billion raise. They're racing and so let's go over to Kalshi and see who is likely to announce an IPO this year. Anthropic's up at 70% on this news. They jumped up from 46% to over 70%. OpenAI is at 49%. Uh, Jersey Mike's still beating them both 75%. So you Jersey Mike's heads out there, they do very well in the App Store. I like the sandwiches. SpaceX in 94.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  Discord also sitting at 63%.

• 28:10John Coogan?

  Discord, what a crazy story. I love Jason Citrin so much, the founder, but he is out, I think. And he has, he's just, just a wild, wild founder story. I made a whole video about it. It's a lot of fun. Anyway, let me tell you about Vanta, automated compliance and security. Vanta is the leading AI trust management platform. And let me also tell you about Consol. Consol builds AI agents that automate 70% of AI, I T, HR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. We gotta hit the management section. One last note on AI before we move on to the really important thing, real estate.

• 28:42Jordi Hays?

  OpenAI has surpassed 100 million in annualized run rate from its ads pilot.

• 28:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:47Jordi Hays?

  It was launched six weeks ago. It's expanded to 600 advertisers and plans to launch self-serve advertiser access in April. I am close to setting up a new account and/or just churning momentarily so that I get to experience the ads. You know, I love ads.

• 29:04John Coogan?

  I mean, the first ad being for the Wall Street Journal that we know and love is a very good omen. Clearly something's going on. They're happy with each other because they're working together. Yeah, I mean, truly like the alpha for the audience is like, new ad platforms often deliver really good results before people figure them out. Big companies move slower than you. If you can be the first person to advertise, figure it out, you know, Sean Frank at The Ridge is thinking about it. And maybe you should be too. Not to do an ad for ads, but we love ads on this show and we love new ad platforms. And we also love vibe.co. We're DTC brands, B2B startups and AI companies advertise on streaming TV. Pick channels, target audiences and measure sales just like on Meta. So.

• 29:47Jordi Hays?

  What's this news before we go on?

• 29:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:49Jordi Hays?

  Apple's talking about opening up Siri to rival AI services.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  Weird. I don't know. I don't know. Apple's relationship with OpenAI.

• 30:00Jordi Hays?

  Guess who wrote this story?

• 30:01John Coogan?

  I'm going to guess the Germinator.

• 30:03Jordi Hays?

  That's right. Apple plans to open Siri to outside AI assistants.

• 30:07John Coogan?

  Is this a scoop? Do we need to give him?

• 30:10Jordi Hays?

  Let's give him the golden scoop.

• 30:11John Coogan?

  Tyler, hold up the golden scoop award for Mark Germain. The Germinator has has received the golden scoop award for

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  For you, Mark.

• 30:21John Coogan?

  March 27, 2026. Congratulations, Mark Germain.

• 30:25Jordi Hays?

  It is an honor.

• 30:26John Coogan?

  Your scoop wins the golden scoop of the day. There we go. Yeah, the scoop, that's good. Scoop, scoop, scoop, scoop, scoop, scoop, scoop, scoop. There it is. Scoop, there it is.

• 30:39Jordi Hays?

  This headline is incorrect, by the way.

• 30:42John Coogan?

  The scoop is on fire.

• 30:43Jordi Hays?

  It's

• 30:44John Coogan?

  We don't need no water.

• 30:45Jordi Hays?

  Apple plans to open Siri to outside AI assistants. So this implies that things like ChatGPT, Gemini, et cetera, could be allowed to take, effectively take the place of Siri. The company is developing new tools to allow AI chatbots installed via the App Store to integrate with the Siri assistant, enabling users to send queries to services like LLMs. The change is part of an attempt to turn around Apple's fortunes in AI, where it has lagged behind Silicon Valley peers and could allow Apple to generate more money from third-party AI subscriptions through the App Store.

• 31:20John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, because you upgrade through there. That would be good. I think that's part of it. I think there's also the antitrust angle, which is that they have had to allow you to change the default search engine in Safari for a while, even though they have that relationship with Google. When you go to the Safari search bar and you just type in some random words, it searches Google. You could actually reroute that to ChatGPT. I did it. ChatGPT is like, I don't use it like I use Google. Google I use for like, really, I want like a five millisecond query. So the time to actually load ChatGPT and then give you the full answer was not the best experience. But I have wanted for a long time to reroute the Siri button on the side of the phone to just ChatGPT, instant, fast, ultra-fast, just get, just talk to me.

• 32:04John Coogan?

  But every time I do it, I say. ChatGPT, what's the history of the Roman Empire? And it loads and it says, working with ChatGPT. And then it like takes a little bit too long. And then you get like a short note and then you can open it. And it it just sort of like, you're always fighting in the UI between like, are you talking to Apple Intelligence? Or are you talking to Siri? Or are you talking to ChatGPT? And you sort of go back and forth. So we will see where this goes. If I I would be very surprised if people shift away from the default. Like if if Apple iPhones ship with the Siri button, just querying their distilled Gemini model or whatever they're going to wind up doing there. That's probably what most people are going to use. But it's exciting that at least there will be some competition in the market.

• 32:49John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI, their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. And let me also tell you about Eleven Labs. Build intelligent, real-time conversational agents. Reimagine human technology interaction with Eleven Labs. So Barry Diller just paid $11 million for JFK's favorite new JFK's favorite new New York penthouse. Favorite New York penthouse, not favorite new, because of course he has passed away a long time ago. An entity linked to the billionaire purchased Karen Pritzker's co-op at the Carlyle, the same unit where Kennedy famously stayed during his visits to the city. In the 50s and 60s, John F. Kennedy stayed in a duplex penthouse at the Carlyle Hotel

• 33:34John Coogan?

  so often that it became known as the New York White House. After his assassination, his widow and two children, Caroline and John Jr., lived in the Manhattan Hotel for about 10 months. What's the longest amount of time you've ever spent in a hotel? I don't think I've ever done more than like a week or two. 10 months is a is a that's a run.

• 33:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I never I never went through and I never went through an era of my young adulthood.

• 33:57John Coogan?

  That's like sort of a crazy move.

• 33:59Jordi Hays?

  That I could could have afforded to stay in a hotel permanently. But now that I'm a now that I'm a.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  I was walking in some hotel the other day and I was like, I wonder if I could like live here.

• 34:11Jordi Hays?

  It just doesn't it just like with with kids, it would just be it would just be.

• 34:15John Coogan?

  Anyway, now an entity. Linked to billionaire Barry Diller has purchased Kennedy's favorite penthouse for $11 million. Diller bought the co-op unit from another family of prominent Democrats. Film producer Karen Pritzker, an heiress to the Hyatt Hotel fortune, bought the apartment for $12 million in 2007. Pritzker put the apartment on the market for 12.9. It sold for 12.5 in 2007. Interesting that the Chicago high-end penthouse market has not moved that much. The Carlyle opened around 1930 on Manhattan's Upper East Side, one of New York's most storied

• 34:54John Coogan?

  luxury hotels. It's known for iconic venues like Bemelin's Bar, Cafe Carlyle, a cabaret space that has hosted legendary performers. A portion of the building was converted to co-op units decades ago. Kennedy stayed at the hotel so often, starting when he was still a senator in the 1950s, that a direct phone line was installed for him in his regular duplex suite. That's cool. After his assassination, Jacqueline Kennedy moved to the hotel but stayed in a different suite. On rainy days, the Kennedy children played in the lobby. The two-bedroom apartment includes a large foyer with an Art Deco staircase, the listing says. An expansive corner living and dining room has views over Central Park. There's also a bookshelf-lined breakfast room and a corner solarium with a wet bar. Oh, speaking

• 35:38John Coogan?

  of wet bars, forget apres ski because homeowners are now building their own bars in custom spaces where they can relax and get toasty after a day on the slopes. This is also from the mansion section of the Daily Herald today.

• 35:53Jordi Hays?

  Huge.

• 35:54John Coogan?

  For Brian Healy, what comes after a day on the mountain sometimes takes precedence over the skiing itself. When he built his Lake Tahoe area vacation home in 2019, he spent about $800,000 to build a bar area on the main floor of the house. An absolute dog.

• 36:13Jordi Hays?

  Which he can ski to from the slopes.

• 36:16John Coogan?

  It's pretty good.

• 36:17Jordi Hays?

  Of North Star.

• 36:18John Coogan?

  That's bad.

• 36:19Jordi Hays?

  That sounds great. So maybe not ski in, but ski out?

• 36:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, I like that. He said, I've joked that I designed a bar and built a house around it. This is good. This is, this is, this is my dream. I'm gonna build a movie theater and then build a house around it. That's, that's my goal. What would yours be?

• 36:38Jordi Hays?

  John, John was sending me a listing.

• 36:40John Coogan?

  Full surfing ability, one of those endless waves? That's what you need. You need an endless wave pool. You know what I'm talking about? What are those called?

• 36:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, wave, wave pools.

• 36:50John Coogan?

  Wave pool? Yeah, full wave pool?

• 36:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 36:53John Coogan?

  Alright, wait, why are you not excited about this prospect of having a house that's built around this endless wave pool?

• 36:57Jordi Hays?

  Because I live in...

• 36:59John Coogan?

  Oh, I guess you just go to the ocean. Yeah, you could just go, you could just be, be, be walking distance from the beach. Anyway.

• 37:06Jordi Hays?

  It's hard to be.

• 37:07John Coogan?

  Healy51 is an Ireland native, Ireland native. Let's go. Let's hear it for Ireland. He runs an energy company in the San Francisco Bay area. This is a royal flash. I gotta meet this guy. After a day on the slopes, Healy and his pals head to the space dubbed Healy's Bar, leaving their gear in the storage area of the trucky California property. And sometimes other skiers end up at Healy's home after getting lost while skiing through the trees. It's an open door policy. He says, we invite them in for beer. This is our inn. We need to head over to North Star and get lost and wind up at his bar. Oops. Uh oh, we're lost, we're lost. We don't know.

• 37:46Jordi Hays?

  I know some, I know some former guests that are, that are neighbors with this guy. Any, uh, we'll, we'll work on connecting.

• 37:52John Coogan?

  Could you spare Guinness for us, for two Irish chaps who've gotten lost?

• 37:56Jordi Hays?

  I feel like I've read like a children's story of like wandering in the forest and then like, you know, some character offers you something.

• 38:04John Coogan?

  Sometimes it's like that.

• 38:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, usually that can send you on kind of a crazy saga.

• 38:09John Coogan?

  This seems good. So, for Alpine sports lovers, warming up with a few opera ski drinks after a day on the slopes is a time honored tradition, says the journal. But instead of heading to a crowded bar for cocktails, more and more wealthy homeowners are hosting friends at private bar areas with high-end mountain-inspired finishes.

• 38:29John Coogan?

  Real estate agents have said this. In addition to providing entertainment spaces, these cozy areas become additional focal points within the house, like a fireplace or a wine room. Look at that. People are having a lot of fun with the bars. They are creating spaces where the party keeps going and where the kids want to come back and hang out. These bars have features like specialty ice makers, dishwashers, decorative lighting and dramatic finishes. That's not that special. I was hoping for something really crazy.

• 38:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, does he have any, what kind of, what kind of games does this bar come with? Do we have darts, pool?

• 39:02John Coogan?

  Axe throwing.

• 39:03Jordi Hays?

  Axe throwing.

• 39:04John Coogan?

  Let's get the millennials in there.

• 39:05Jordi Hays?

  The ultimate millennial.

• 39:06John Coogan?

  We do things a little differently around here.

• 39:09Jordi Hays?

  Honestly, any space can actually be turned into axe throwing.

• 39:14John Coogan?

  This sounds good. They're coming off the mountain, doing a jacuzzi and going downstairs for an espresso martini. It's pretty good.

• 39:21Jordi Hays?

  Pretty good.

• 39:22John Coogan?

  It's very nicely designed. I love, I love the finishes. I think this is a fantastic, fantastic choice. Bruce Johnson, a retired lumber executive and his wife, wellness coach Peggy Duffy.

• 39:31Jordi Hays?

  Let's give it up for lumber executives.

• 39:33John Coogan?

  They keep mahogany flowing through the global economy.

• 39:38Jordi Hays?

  The official wood of business. The fact that we don't have a mahogany sponsor.

• 39:43John Coogan?

  I think we're, I think we're looking at Bruce Johnson. We gotta get, we gotta get connected to this guy. He might be able to, might be able to send some mahogany our way.

• 39:51Jordi Hays?

  The official lumber partner of TBN.

• 39:56John Coogan?

  So they wanted to inspire, a mountain inspired aesthetic for the bar in their Edwards, Colorado home, which is about 10 minutes from Beaver Creek Resort. Their daughter-in-law, interior designer Jackie Johnson, worked on the $200,000 space, which has open wine storage columns and sconces wrapped in brown suede. The downstairs space also includes a sauna.

• 40:15Jordi Hays?

  I gotta, I gotta show you, after the show, I'll show you a video of me at Beaver Creek in around 2016.

• 40:21John Coogan?

  What are you doing?

• 40:22Jordi Hays?

  I was riding in the train. I was riding in the train park and my buddy was filming. Another buddy was sitting kind of like on the, basically next to the jump. And so one buddy films me. I land, catch an edge and end up like entirely on my head, sliding on my head, like body suspended above. And my other friend, friend doesn't actually see me having this horrific crash. And so my other friend is just like, sitting there like this, like thumbs up to the camera. And I'm just like, chaotically.

• 40:56Jordi Hays?

  Getting thrown across the landing. Good, good fun.

• 40:59John Coogan?

  Okay, we gotta learn about winter forward fabrics because that's important if you're trying to create this opere ski vibe. Jackie suggests using winter forward fabrics such as alpaca fur, heron hides, and mohair. I like alpaca fur, that sounds lovely. In designing his bar, Healy looked to his Irish heritage for inspiration, choosing green leather bar stools, that's our signature color over here, a green marble countertop and vintage green glassware. It's Irish influenced and a little LA at the same time, calling it a modern, but not necessarily nightclub-y vibe. He likes to drive around Martis Camp, the 2000s-

• 41:40Jordi Hays?

  This isn't giving you a little bit of a nightclub vibe?

• 41:42John Coogan?

  It's a little bit of a nightclub vibe. It's not necessarily nightclub-y, though. I think it's, I think it's more Irish influenced and a little LA. Anyway, to create an atmosphere of informal fun, opere ski entertaining spaces are often placed near amenities such as pool tables, golf simulators, hot tubs, and saunas. Developer, I like that we're getting clapped with that. Developer Robert Covington put 80's video games like Pac-Man next to the lower level opere ski bar of a home he recently built in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. The roughly 7,400 square foot home, asking 13 million, is located near the base of Mount Wener. Is that how you pronounce that? Wener? Werner? Werner? And guests can access the

• 42:25John Coogan?

  basement bar directly from the outside. There's another bar in the, in the living area upstairs. The goal was to provide additional gathering spaces throughout the home. You need a lot more seating for families on a ski vacation. For some homeowners, opere ski entertaining is more of a state of mind. Jewelry designer Jane Berg, 64, and her husband, marketing executive Kevin Berg, 70, built a house next to the slopes of Colorado's Aspen Highlands-

• 42:47Jordi Hays?

  Is it a state of mind, or is it just having a drink after skiing?

• 42:51John Coogan?

  It's a state of mind, okay Jordy? Stop asking questions. Sliding doors in the kitchen face the mountains and open to a terrace with fire pits, so the couple end up using the entire primary level of their home for opere ski parties. See? Anything's an opere ski entertaining space if you're in the opere ski mindset.

• 43:10Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 43:11John Coogan?

  Often Jane hires a local-

• 43:14John Coogan?

  Local chef and a bartender to set up the open format kitchen, which has two sinks, one of which gets used as an ice bucket for drinks. People ski in and ski out of here, says Jane. The home has an outdoor ski track near the hot tub where guests leave their skis. This seems, this is, this is gonna get me more into skiing.

• 43:30Jordi Hays?

  When you see a picture like this of champagne in the snow, does it give you, does it, you have like a primal reaction to that?

• 43:37John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. And you know what song plays immediately? Cherry Cherry Lady. Have you ever heard this song?

• 43:44Jordi Hays?

  Of course.

• 43:44John Coogan?

  It's such a good song. Let's play it. Let's play just a little bit so we don't get demonetized. But as soon as I see this image, this is exactly what plays.

• 43:58John Coogan?

  This is like that vibe perfectly.

• 44:07John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Anyway, go listen to it. Modern Talking is the artist behind.

• 44:11Jordi Hays?

  Up next.

• 44:12John Coogan?

  Cherry Cherry Lady. Up next, what do we got?

• 44:14Jordi Hays?

  A retired.

• 44:15John Coogan?

  We got, what? We got Graphite. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And you know what else we got? Gemini 3.1 Pro. You thought that they were done? They did another model. They trained another model and they released it.

• 44:30Jordi Hays?

  A rumor.

• 44:30John Coogan?

  And with a more capable baseline.

• 44:31Jordi Hays?

  They're working on another model.

• 44:33John Coogan?

  I, I don't know. I don't want to comment, but it's entirely possible. And with a more capable baseline, Gemini 3.1 Pro is great for super complex tasks like visualizing difficult concepts, synthesizing data into a single view, or bringing creative projects to life.

• 44:47Jordi Hays?

  A retired pitcher's home with a gym inspired by Fenway asks 23 million.

• 44:51John Coogan?

  Okay, where is this?

• 44:52Jordi Hays?

  Big game James and his wife, photographer, Ryan Shields, spent years designing and building the house just north of San Diego.

• 44:59John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 45:00Jordi Hays?

  James Shields was a star pitcher in the major leagues for 13 seasons. So when he and his wife decided to build a California home in 2018, they were amused to discover that the lot they selected was shaped like a baseball diamond.

• 45:12John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:13Jordi Hays?

  We looked at each other and said, I guess it's meant to be.

• 45:15John Coogan?

  It's meant to be.

• 45:16Jordi Hays?

  They bought the Rancher Santa Fe property the next day for 1.8 million.

• 45:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:21Jordi Hays?

  The pair spent the next few years designing and building roughly 13,500 square eight.

• 45:26John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 45:27Jordi Hays?

  Square foot house with a gym pool, putting green, and bowling alley.

• 45:29John Coogan?

  Bowling alley is underrated. I know some of you folks have seen There Will Be Blood, that bad things can happen in bowling alleys, but great things can happen in bowling alleys. I know Jordy hasn't seen There Will Be Blood. Tyler, have you seen There Will Be Blood?

• 45:40Speaker 02

  No.

• 45:41John Coogan?

  You haven't? Wow, Ben, you got a task.

• 45:46Jordi Hays?

  Team homework this weekend.

• 45:48John Coogan?

  Team homework, there will be blood.

• 45:50Jordi Hays?

  I mean, my first question.

• 45:51John Coogan?

  You don't know about, I drink.

• 45:52Jordi Hays?

  Okay, but first question is, what kind of rig are they using in the bowling alley? Cause we learned earlier this week that maintaining these bowling alley machines.

• 46:02John Coogan?

  You can't win. You can't win. Cause if you go with the good machines, they're from the 50s. It's going to be a nightmare to maintain. You're not going to be able to get parts and you're not going to be able to find mechanics. Cause they've all retired.

• 46:11Jordi Hays?

  What's?

• 46:11John Coogan?

  But if you go with the center, everyone's going to be making fun of you.

• 46:14Jordi Hays?

  If you have a, yeah, yeah. If you have a $23 million home, how much is a reasonable amount to spend on your bowling alley maintenance? Cause if you're willing to spend 5% annually.

• 46:25John Coogan?

  I think you have to re-industrialize America. You have to, you have to get a couple of CNC machines and be ready.

• 46:31Jordi Hays?

  Here's a tip. Here's a tip.

• 46:33John Coogan?

  Fabricate your own parts.

• 46:34Jordi Hays?

  Here's a tip.

• 46:34John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 46:36Jordi Hays?

  Startup focused on bowling alley maintenance.

• 46:38John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:40Jordi Hays?

  Build that, then buy this home, then you won't have a problem.

• 46:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think that's a good solution. Uh, I love.

• 46:45Jordi Hays?

  The pair now looking to spend more time in Idaho. Let's give it up for Idaho.

• 46:50John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 46:51Jordi Hays?

  Where they own property and have several horses. The Shieldses are listing the 2.4 acre California property.

• 46:57John Coogan?

  You got a horse.

• 46:58Jordi Hays?

  Nicknamed Big Game James by teammates and announcers. Shields played for teams, including the Kansas City Royals, San Diego Padres, and the Chicago White Sox. As a lifelong athlete, he put a lot of thought into the gym at the ranch.

• 47:11John Coogan?

  I love this massive door that slides open. They have 16 foot tall glass windows and doors with steel latches. Instead of doorknobs, wood paneling, covers.

• 47:21Jordi Hays?

  Let's pull up this picture of Big Game James getting in a fight on the field.

• 47:31John Coogan?

  I wouldn't want to be his contractor on this project.

• 47:34Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so I can't tell. So he's on the right. He's swinging for the fences.

• 47:40John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, he's swinging. Okay. Yeah. Cause he's a San Diego guy. He's on the Rays, stingrays.

• 47:44Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay. You're acting, you're acting like I'm a.

• 47:48John Coogan?

  Wait, no, wait, wait. Or is he Red Sox?

• 47:50Jordi Hays?

  No, it's the White Sox. He played for the White Sox, the San Diego Padres, and the Kansas City Royals.

• 47:57John Coogan?

  Okay, so which one is he?

• 47:58Jordi Hays?

  So I think the Padres must be the... No.

• 48:01John Coogan?

  No, because there's a Rays. Wait, who is in this image?

• 48:03Jordi Hays?

  They just pulled a random...

• 48:05John Coogan?

  Okay, so the gym has a brick wall to evoke Fenway Park where Shields took a swing at Cocoa Crisp in 2008. So that's like one of his finest moments. So he rebuilt the house to...

• 48:17Jordi Hays?

  He's like, "That swing was a memory I want to cherish forever."

• 48:20John Coogan?

  Honestly, respect. I think I would remember that forever. Well, we should move over to some more heartwarming stories in the mansion section of the Wall Street Journal today. The feel-good tear-jerker moments. Three real estate agents won't forget. We'll just read one, but prepare to not have dry eyes, Jordy, because it's very heartwarming. So, in December, Lauren Toronto, a real estate agent at Coldwell Banker, was at a $12.75 million listing in Naples, Florida. It was a five-bedroom neoclassical home located just one house from the beach. This house has a castle-like feel with rotunda ceilings.

• 48:59Jordi Hays?

  We had Alpha in the chat.

• 49:00John Coogan?

  What do we have?

• 49:01Jordi Hays?

  From Woods Athletics.

• 49:02John Coogan?

  The Tampa Bay Rays.

• 49:03Jordi Hays?

  He played for the Rays, too. There we go.

• 49:05John Coogan?

  Wow, we really know nothing on sports. Well, thank you. Thank you for correcting us. Padres are the San Diego team. Thank you. It's really bad. Anyway. So, this house has a castle-like feel. It has a rotunda, ceilings, turrets in the rear.

• 49:19Jordi Hays?

  Yes, it would like help becoming ball knowers.

• 49:22John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 49:22Jordi Hays?

  Everyone's like, "You guys are like ESPN for tech." I'm like, "What's ESPN?"

• 49:31John Coogan?

  Anyway, this house also has a curved mahogany staircase that serves as a focal point when you enter the home. This real estate agent calls it "the wedding staircase," and it lived up to its name that day. So, she'd been at the property for an open house, but it started to rain, so she decided to close up early. As she was outside taking the signs down for the open house because it rained, she sees a couple in wedding attire on the beach across the street trying to take photos. They'd just gotten married. The woman was wearing a white dress and holding a bouquet, and the man was in a sports jacket with a white boutonniere. She invited them to finish up inside and get out of the rain. They were soaked and the bride's hair was pretty wet. So she dried them off as best she could. And the

• 50:16John Coogan?

  couple and their friend who was shooting the photos came inside. They climbed the staircase and took a few more photos. The couple were adorable, in their twenties and extremely appreciative. I didn't have any champagne in the refrigerator. So we just toasted with water in plastic cups. It was informal, but a darling and magic moment. It made their day in my day.

• 50:33Jordi Hays?

  You're tearing up.

• 50:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's cute. Very, very cute. I love it.

• 50:36Jordi Hays?

  Well, I got, we gotta change the story. I can't keep it together.

• 50:42John Coogan?

  Okay, we're going, we're going over to Drew Barrymore. She put a Westchester home on the market two years after buying it. No?

• 50:48Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 50:49John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 50:49Jordi Hays?

  No, I'm just, I'm in disbelief.

• 50:51John Coogan?

  Wait, about what?

• 50:52Jordi Hays?

  Putting it on. How could she put on the, how could she relist this home?

• 50:56John Coogan?

  Well, let's find out. Maybe the Wall Street Journal did some gumshoe reporting and got to the bottom of why Drew Barrymore is selling her house just two years after buying it. So she was fed up with her long drive to the Hamptons. So the actress and daytime talk show host Drew Barrymore started looking for a weekend home in Westchester County. When she saw a circa seventeen hundreds mansion for sale. Wow, that is very old. Barrymore said she felt a karmic connection to the Harrison County property. I, or Harrison New York property. I walked in and I was like, I know my family's been here. I know that I have work, I have work, I have to work on this house. I know that I'm supposed to be doing this, said Barrymore, 51 years old.

• 51:40Jordi Hays?

  And just immediately flipped it.

• 51:42John Coogan?

  Flipping this in two years will be my life's work. It was, it was like a strange spiritual calling. She lives in Manhattan with her two daughters primarily. It turned out she actually did have a connection to the area. Her great grand, her great aunt, the late actress Ethel Barrymore, had a home in nearby Mama Roenek, where an enclave known as Barrymore Lane is widely believed to be named for the family. Barrymore bought the roughly 12 acre estate for 4.4 million, according to property records. She did an extensive renovation. She has a deep interest in interior design and has considered pursuing it professionally. Between Pinterest, thrifting and a can of paint, there's nothing you can't do, Barry Moore said with a laugh.

• 52:27John Coogan?

  But roughly two years later, the actress is listing the property for 4.99 million. Remember, she bought it for 4.44.

• 52:34Jordi Hays?

  But she put a lot of money into it. So she's flipping it at a loss.

• 52:37John Coogan?

  I think so. The renovation took longer than expected, she said, and the family lives have changed in the interim. The estate includes a roughly 5,600 square foot, five bedroom main house, a pool, a pool house with an additional bedroom. Barry Moore said she previously owned a home in Sagaponak, New York, but the distance from the city and the weekend traffic to the Hamptons became untenable as her children's schedule filled up with social and sporting activities. Harrison, by contrast, offered accessibility and charm. The property located roughly an hour from Manhattan is a short drive from the picturesque Rye in Bronxville, while nearby Bedford has drawn celebrities.

• 53:16John Coogan?

  The median sales price for a home in Harrison is around 1.1 million. The property's expansive acreage gave Barry Moore a sense of being close to nature. It's really like being in your own personal park. There are tons of deer, there are pheasants and ducks, there are rabbits. When she purchased the home, Barry Moore said she thought it would only need a cosmetic renovation. Instead, it turned into a complete internal gut with much, much of the plumbing, heating and air conditioning replaced. Barry Moore also revamped the ground floor to open up the kitchen, which felt dark and boxed in. It took a year of engineering to figure out how to accomplish it.

• 53:52Jordi Hays?

  Well, wonderful opportunity for somebody that wants to live in Westchester.

• 53:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 53:57Jordi Hays?

  You got a, you got a celebrity to handle your remodel for you.

• 54:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, you did.

• 54:03Jordi Hays?

  Effectively at, for, for less than the dollars that were actually put in.

• 54:09John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those that take it seriously. Stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries and more with great customer service. And let me also tell you about MongoDB.

• 54:19Jordi Hays?

  Great to have you on.

• 54:20John Coogan?

  What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI, own the data platform that powers it. And our next guest is here with us in the TVP Alterm.

• 54:31Jordi Hays?

  Here he is.

• 54:32John Coogan?

  Billy Bowman. Good to meet you. How you doing? I'm really good.

• 54:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, how's your week been?

• 54:37John Coogan?

  Well, yeah, what is your life like right now? Are you just getting blown up by everyone?

• 54:42Speaker 03

  Probably. Yes, I haven't even had time to check all the DMs yet. I'm really doing my best just to take care of everything.

• 54:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I was shocked. We were, we were live on the show, reading about this whole thing because we, we had seen, uh, we had seen the ad on the one oh one.

• 54:55John Coogan?

  I saw it in person. I drove right by it.

• 54:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's hard to miss. Uh, and then I, we texted, uh, Nick, one of our producers and he, uh, you seemingly responded within an hour or something like that. It was very fast. So.

• 55:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've been perpetually online.

• 55:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 55:09Speaker 03

  Glued to the screen to not miss anything.

• 55:10Jordi Hays?

  Okay, okay. So yeah, so for anybody that missed it, uh, there is a massive Hollywood sign scale.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, thirty feet tall.

• 55:17Jordi Hays?

  Thirty feet tall.

• 55:18Speaker 03

  Thirty feet, uh, long, wide.

• 55:20John Coogan?

  Two hundred and thirty feet wide.

• 55:21Jordi Hays?

  And on, on a hillside that I haven't seen any out of home advertising on before, so I wanna, yeah, I wanna get the whole story. Uh, like, let's start, I guess, at the beginning. How, how did this happen? Were you on Fiverr, very active? Or you were friends with the Fiverr team?

• 55:37Speaker 03

  So actually, no, but the creative director, Nir Afua, so shout out to Nir for making this happen, uh, reached out to me and basically, do you wanna do this? And I thought like, first of all, you're joking. He was not joking. Then secondly, right, it's just a print, like it's a billboard, right? No, no, no, we're building the sign. And I'm like, oh, right. And then like, as they're sending mockups and stuff, I could see like, it's actually, someone is this, like, the sheer scale of it. So it's been the work since October last year. I don't have full insight into the full production. I've just heard the kind of the stories from the team. So full shout out to the Fiverr team and especially Ellie Peer, who, who is the guy doing this? He pulled off the impossible together with the entire Fiverr team and the

• 56:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  family who kind of just made this.

• 56:18Jordi Hays?

  I'm never gonna, personally, I love ads. I'm never gonna look at any hillside the same way ever again.

• 56:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:24Jordi Hays?

  Because I'm surprised they were able to pull this off.

• 56:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 56:27Jordi Hays?

  Even with the city.

• 56:28John Coogan?

  It's remarkable. Take us back, uh, to the beginning. Like, what did you, did you study? Wha- what did you study in school? How did you get into your business? And then I wanna, uh, sort of go through how AI is affecting your work, but just start as far back as you think is relevant.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  Right, sure. How the hell did I end up here? I typically start with like, of course, like, it's nature and nurture, right? So like creativity is the only thing I'm good at, like I'm terrible with everything else, like bookkeeping or whatever. And I grew up in a creative family. So my mom and dad ran a small advertising agency my entire life. My mom was the kind of, exactly, shout out to mom and dad. Dream upbringing. Yeah, graphic designer and dad was the art director and I grew up, you know, with like putting little, little micro machines in Xerox and it's kind of making collages and all the, all this stuff. So super creative. My, my whole family, my, my sister works as a game designer. My, my brother has done all kind of web design, runs a Dungeons and Dragons startups. So like, we're all very kind of creative. That's, that's all I do. I'm classically trained. I studied at Bemmas College of Design in Stockholm.

• 57:31Speaker 03

  Probably haven't heard of it, but Stockholm, I mean, it was, it was a pretty good idea in Stockholm. Yeah. So classically trained, I ended up going into fashion for whatever reason, worst decision of my life, but I did. I love clothes and it's like aesthetics and how to bring ideas into garments. I worked at All Saints, H and M, a bunch of different brands. I'm a footwear designer doing clothes. No way.

• 57:50John Coogan?

  You would actually decide like where the buttons go on the shirt?

• 57:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Drawstring length of the hoodie and, you know, all the, all that stuff. That's. Why was it the worst decision? Yeah. Well, so it's like, you know, you've seen Devil Wears Prada, right? Like, that's how it actually is.

• 58:03John Coogan?

  Okay. So people have really big, strong opinions.

• 58:06Speaker 03

  I mean, it's, it's constant to this, like, you should be happy to be here.

• 58:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 58:10Speaker 03

  In, in the worst, it's like toxic, like you can get into the sustainability part of it, blah, blah, blah. But like, there's no career prospects. You're basically, what do you say, licking ass for 10 years and maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe you'll be the creative director. With a big maybe. Yeah. So not something for me. So eventually I pivoted to tech. Where it was like, but this is back in 2018, 2019.

• 58:33Speaker 03

  So back then, that was like, you know, job security, like all, all the fun design stuff was kind of going on there, building like branded experiences on web and mobile. So I worked at PayPal in Sweden and Vodafone, a bunch of different brands, until I ended up in an AI startup in 2023. There you go. Good timing. Yes, exactly. This was early. This was, I've tinkered with Midjourney since mid 22. That very first one came out and I'm like, I can actually get like a hovering sneaker. In the air. And it looks like something before then was Disco Diffusion and Dolly and all these kind of weird retro AI now, I guess.

• 59:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, vintage, vintage.

• 59:05Speaker 03

  Vintage AI, exactly. So from there, we did a bunch of stuff over twenty twenty three with which Chapter, as they're called, is a German AI startup.

• 59:13Jordi Hays?

  And you were in Ger- Germany.

• 59:15Speaker 03

  No, so I was working remote from Sweden. So remote, you know, happened as well. So I did that. And eventually they pivoted, we parted ways. And at that time, like tail end of twenty twenty three, I'd been posting some spec ads. It's like a little bit more art directed. Maybe I don't want to toot my own horn too much. Uh, but maybe for the time it was like just a couple of levels up what most people were seeing. And all of a sudden, my DM is like people from like the first AI agencies, monks, the big agencies, like we have to rep you. You have to do AI with us.

• 59:46John Coogan?

  And are these, yeah, explain, explain what, what, what the workflow was for those first ads. Is that static images that are AI generated, then you're doing text layout and something like Figma? Or is it video from start to finish that you're cobbling together? Are you doing like mixed media? We're using some stock footage, some AI video, editing together After Effects. Like, what's the workflow?

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  Well, so that's where we are kind of now. Back then, back then, it was like just getting anything that felt realistic.

• 1:00:11John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  Had a bit of grit and texture to it. That was just like, you know, sheen, plastic, mid journey look.

• 1:00:15John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:00:16Speaker 03

  All in the industry.

• 1:00:16John Coogan?

  So you were able to get away from that with the, with, with the correct prompting?

• 1:00:20Speaker 03

  Correct prompting, just having an eye for art direction, angles, lighting.

• 1:00:23Jordi Hays?

  And then editing.

• 1:00:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, and editing. Yeah, sure. But on a, just where to put the logo and just get, get like good pacing and everything into. So it feels like an ad. And that's, I think, was back then really kind of a bit, a bit lame, so to say. Uh, so, so back, shoot, twenty twenty four, did a bunch of work, did a music video for Hardy and Fred Durst, uh, Valentine's.

• 1:00:43John Coogan?

  Limbasket.

• 1:00:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. They really lean into AI so much.

• 1:00:46John Coogan?

  Ben over there knows who Limbasket is.

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  Done a ton of AI video.

• 1:00:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:49Speaker 03

  Fred Durst and then, yeah.

• 1:00:50John Coogan?

  I mean, I remember like the original, uh, the original uh, cover art for their, for their big album was, uh, I think it was airbrushed, but it, it looks like AI art now.

• 1:01:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, we were just, we were just asking the founder of Suno yesterday on the show, what artist has leaned into AI the most? And he didn't, he didn't want to name names.

• 1:01:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:10Jordi Hays?

  In part because he actually knows who's using the products. He doesn't, and, and a lot of them want to be quiet about it, but he didn't have like a. Really clear answer on like who's leaning in the most, but that seems like leaning in quite a bit if in 2024.

• 1:01:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, a lot of crazy kind of glam rock video.

• 1:01:28John Coogan?

  Yeah, and and there's so many times when an album comes out and they can they have the budget for one classic music video or two or maybe three and it starts to get low budget. It's like, oh, let's use like a DV camera for this shoot. Or let's not bring the let's not rent a soundstage for this. We'll do something a little more organic. Maybe do some tour footage for this one and stretch the budget further. But, you know, you can with AI, you can probably just do a video for every single.

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I mean, that's a real opportunity. People are still like staying in the live action box. It's a fine box when you're doing live action, but like the truly, and we can get into that later. Yeah, it's added. Scale and test to just like do different specific stuff for different channels.

• 1:02:08John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 1:02:08Speaker 03

  All this stuff. We haven't really gotten there yet on the client side. They don't know what to ask for. They just know they should be experimenting with it. So, uh, but yeah, so then 2025.

• 1:02:16John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:02:16Speaker 03

  We did like.

• 1:02:17John Coogan?

  So you're wrapped at this point by agencies or they call you?

• 1:02:20Speaker 03

  A lot of agency rep at that point. Slowly, again, I was nobody on social media. I mean, I'm 30K on LinkedIn. I'm not some huge guy. But like, I have a huge sign, but not a huge guy. Um, so it's building a following, building, building attention.

• 1:02:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:34Speaker 03

  And then eventually that kind of formulated into a huge, huge project over 25. So we did an activation campaign for Taylor Swift. We worked with Luis Capaldi with Google and YouTube.

• 1:02:43John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:43Speaker 03

  Universal Music Group. I mean, yes, a lot of really big brands together with Wonder Studios and a bunch of people like just got to know. Got to know over the, I mean, I worked with Dave Clark back in the day, 2024. Sure. If you hang out on LinkedIn, you've seen.

• 1:02:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:57Jordi Hays?

  And what is your, what does your team look like to execute on all this?

• 1:03:01Speaker 03

  Great question. It's, it's growing, but it's the biggest bottleneck for us is actually finding people like on the artist side. It's super difficult to find people who has like the right circumstances. So I also teach at Sweden's like biggest creative school called Berg's School of Communication. They have at least what we think the world's only AI program at this point, one year in classroom, government funded.

• 1:03:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:22Speaker 03

  And I'm there for three weeks. So do once with a little bit of a freelance appetite, they tend to come to me.

• 1:03:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:27Speaker 03

  And they're getting some really good.

• 1:03:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So like. It's a great recruiting strategy.

• 1:03:30Speaker 03

  Part of the talent funnel is really good. I mean, like Promise, the AI studio, they bought the Curious Refuge, if you saw that.

• 1:03:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:35Speaker 03

  AI online education. So.

• 1:03:38John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 1:03:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so many questions. So like on the projects that you mentioned in 2025, what does a team look like for an individual project? How quickly are you completing them? Like, how would you compare those projects to the same type of production from, you know, a decade ago?

• 1:03:58Speaker 03

  Sure, sure. Well, it's really different, I would say. I mean, and everyone has a different take on this. I think having a lean and mean squad is better than, I was like, we used 30 artists. You can do that, but that creates a kind of a too many chefs problem, I think. We have to have a really strong lead and then delegate that. So structure is also everything in an AI.

• 1:04:16Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and as a cost thing, you're running a small business, a creative agency, right? Like, every incremental person that you bring on is just eating into that overall project fee.

• 1:04:25Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And some are more efficient with prompting and others are not. I mean, the big cost is not necessarily on the credit side, it's hours, the human hours, that's still. And that's the key on, you know, as you know, it's not, what did they say?

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  The LA News Channel, I mean, he just pushed a button. I mean, that's the classic trope, right? So it's definitely that. But smaller teams that can do more, I guess, is the short story of it. And it's super different. Like, I wish there was a formula, always this, always that, you know. But having a lean and mean squad of four or five, I think for Luis Capaldi, we were seven artists in total, working under the Wonder Studios umbrella, who facilitated that.

• 1:05:05John Coogan?

  And for those folks who are joining you and working with you, do they have similar paths where maybe they were classically trained in art or design? And then they narrowed down at some point to fashion or typesetting or typography or visual design or video editing? And then this sort of allows them to zoom back out and sort of almost retreat to the more classic train, the more aesthetic-driven work?

• 1:05:35Speaker 03

  Something like it. I mean, I think the AI kind of family, the global one, we come from a kind of all walks of life creatively. I mean, you have, you know, Gossip Goblin or Zach London, he's blowing up right now. He had, I think, Hollywood Reporter article about him as well. He's an ex anthropology student. So like the beauty of this stuff is that it's not only ex-industry peeps. Of course, you have also live action directors, I have a weird nonlinear design career.

• 1:06:00Jordi Hays?

  Sure.

• 1:06:01Speaker 03

  People come from documentary, all kinds, but again, or just because what truly matters is what's in here and how you can articulate that.

• 1:06:07Jordi Hays?

  And just an obsession with using the tools.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. Yeah, yeah, we can, this never-ending.

• 1:06:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  I'm sure you've seen.

• 1:06:14Jordi Hays?

  What, how has your stack evolved? Like what models, what models were you using in 2024, 2025? I'm assuming you're constantly trying all the new tools.

• 1:06:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, up until 24, I guess, Midjourney was king and queen and it was everything. That was definitely a big model.

• 1:06:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:33Speaker 03

  Then you kind of had Flux and a bunch of other more indie ones coming in and the scene becoming more competitive, which is great. I think that's, I mean, I think that's also what's happening with Zora, you know, not everyone's gonna make it. It's just a testament to a free, healthy market. That's how it should be. So then as Google kind of entered the chat like really bigly to use.

• 1:06:52Jordi Hays?

  VO3 and Banana Banana.

• 1:06:53Speaker 03

  VO3, Banana Banana, the Google Suite has become a kind of industry standard for us. So definitely using that a ton. And then of course now, Kling 3, C-dance 2, they're kind of king of the hill right now in AI video.

• 1:07:06John Coogan?

  How is your access?

• 1:07:08Jordi Hays?

  Over, over VO3?

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. As it stands right now, yes.

• 1:07:11John Coogan?

  How is your access to C-dance 3 or C-dance in general? We've heard that there's like long queues, there's rate limits, it's, it's not something that is easily scalable.

• 1:07:21Jordi Hays?

  Get rate limits.

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  Well, so I was fortunate enough to be in the Drimina CPP, so Creative Partnership Program, and I've had pre-access for.

• 1:07:29Jordi Hays?

  Told you.

• 1:07:30Speaker 03

  A month or so.

• 1:07:31Jordi Hays?

  Don't ever rate limit, Billy Bowman.

• 1:07:34Speaker 03

  So, yeah.

• 1:07:35Jordi Hays?

  The man with his own Hollywood side.

• 1:07:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, you don't want to.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  You gotta have C-dance. They're rolling it out now in a fascinating kind of play there, at least from the rumors I've heard, is that US might be kind of the last on the list.

• 1:07:45John Coogan?

  I believe that.

• 1:07:46Speaker 03

  Because as Europeans, we're kind of.

• 1:07:48Jordi Hays?

  So why is their model better because they just downloaded every Hollywood film ever in history and?

• 1:07:55Speaker 03

  We can only speculate, right? I mean, that's. The data set and the training that went into it sure is, you know.

• 1:08:01Jordi Hays?

  It's just basically higher value data than even YouTube, right? Because YouTube is like.

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  Potentially, potentially, yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:08John Coogan?

  Although, although it feels like at least trailers for every movie are on YouTube. And I would assume like there's like every Marvel fight scene gets clipped and is on like the movie clips channel.

• 1:08:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but that almost that'd be like if L L Ms were only trained on content above paywalls.

• 1:08:23John Coogan?

  I guess you're right. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:08:25Speaker 03

  I mean, it's all kind of what is it the inner workings. So.

• 1:08:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So how is the concept or the like, how has prompt engineering evolved? Because there was a period with just regular L L Ms where everyone was obsessed with prompt engineering. And then the models got it much better. And of course, everyone still has their own prompts and now skills and things like that. But for the average, the average user is not even really caring about prompt engineering, at least with text now. Because the output is just good enough for so many different use cases.

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I love that topic because I think prompt engineering was one and synthography and all these kind of titles around this stuff. I don't care. I mean, it's like making images, whatever.

• 1:09:07Speaker 03

  People tend to want to make things more fancy than what they are because they want to hold on to the old idea. That getting good output is technically difficult and that is gone.

• 1:09:16John Coogan?

  Yes. And that was the, that was the case with like, you're a master of After Effects or Photoshop. And like you're a master of the tool. And so even if your ideas are mediocre, it's like, well, you're the only person that can actually instantiate anything. So if I just give you.

• 1:09:31Speaker 03

  We have this technical mode.

• 1:09:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:09:33Speaker 03

  Used to be that way. So Stephen Bartlett, the CEO of a CEO, this brilliant PDF article on LinkedIn last year. That's called your mode is dead.

• 1:09:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:41Speaker 03

  And that's just summarize all of that. But back to your question, prompt engineering has changed a lot in the sense that the models have gotten so much better understanding natural language. Like you don't need to go super fancy. I mean, I do sometimes because the boring answer, it depends on what you're using.

• 1:09:55John Coogan?

  I remember old mid journey, you'd say like, not, don't do six fingers. Please, please, please do five fingers.

• 1:10:02Speaker 03

  Right. All the negative stuff.

• 1:10:03John Coogan?

  Yeah. And you put in like the lens and the, and the color grade that you had.

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  Which you can still do.

• 1:10:07John Coogan?

  Still do some of that. Some of that, yeah, some of that got, yeah, just abstracted.

• 1:10:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you can still bring it in. And I think that kind of goes back to like everyone that comes into this industry from different walks of life. Will have a new perspective because they sit on a type of terminology and vocabulary and also taste and craft.

• 1:10:25John Coogan?

  And that goes to the anthropologist, who's going to come with a completely different set of language and get very different results.

• 1:10:30Speaker 03

  Or even me, like, I'm not a live action director at all. Like, again, I'm a weird designer guy, but I have a lifelong passion for movies. I've done my fifty thousand hours or whatever. Like, I could go, I mean, I'm in the.

• 1:10:42Jordi Hays?

  You should go, you should go movie for movie with John.

• 1:10:44John Coogan?

  Have you seen Borat?

• 1:10:46Speaker 03

  Oh, God, I'm classic.

• 1:10:47John Coogan?

  It's a classic, exactly.

• 1:10:49Jordi Hays?

  Sorry, sorry. It's a running, running joke.

• 1:10:51John Coogan?

  It's the only movie that he's seen. I've seen a lot of movies. I love movies.

• 1:10:55Jordi Hays?

  But we joke about it.

• 1:10:56John Coogan?

  But he's a.

• 1:10:58Jordi Hays?

  Do you think people are, how good do you think people are at spotting deep fakes today? Because people I think would like to think they're good at spotting it, but there's so many videos out there in twenty twenty six. That people are like, oh, that's AI, or that's not AI.

• 1:11:15John Coogan?

  I've gotten caught a few times. I've noticed these funny vehicles. If it's a funny vehicle and it looks like it's filmed on a.

• 1:11:21Jordi Hays?

  It's gotten to the point where people will be debating like physics. They're like, that, that is not impossible. And they're like, well, look at this study.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  But I think Runway put out a pretty funny post a couple of weeks ago about like, basically an A B test of like, it mixed AI and.

• 1:11:38John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:11:39Speaker 03

  They used real start frames, so like an actual photograph. And then one was just the real video. And then the other one was animated with AI. And anyone can go and take that test right now, but like, we're, we're, we're there.

• 1:11:51John Coogan?

  The New York Times ran a similar thing with poetry, literature, science fiction, all around AI generated content versus non. And a lot of the New York Times readers preferred the AI generated content.

• 1:12:03Jordi Hays?

  What industries, so you're getting hit up by artists, you're getting hit up by companies that want to make ads. What industries are, or what, is there anyone that's like not hitting you up and saying like, we're never going to do this? Because even I think people were pretty surprised when Gucci came out like

• 1:12:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. Alexander McQueen, all the big fresh.

• 1:12:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they came out and said like, yeah, we're making, we're doing and and there was it was they they had an interesting approach where some of the images just looked exactly like normal Gucci photographs and then they had like some GTA-esque images that like clearly were were generated. And and I thought that was an interesting decision because if they just came out and were like, we're using AI, but it looks real.

• 1:12:45Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:12:46Jordi Hays?

  I think people would have had like less of a negative reaction, but then some of the stuff was just like, obviously CGI. So it kind of muddy did a little bit, but but who is it seems like everyone is now starting to experiment.

• 1:12:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:58Jordi Hays?

  Is there anybody?

• 1:12:59Speaker 03

  So I would say overall for us, like being a Stockholm suite and maybe we don't have as much access to the big narrative stuff as you guys have here.

• 1:13:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:06Speaker 03

  Will that change? Maybe, but mostly for us, it's been brand and content and commercials, just because like the the ins we have with agencies is how we position ourselves. That are bread and butter. I'd love to do more narrative.

• 1:13:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:17Speaker 03

  If I ever had time, I would do more short films.

• 1:13:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:19Speaker 03

  Don't have any time. So.

• 1:13:21John Coogan?

  Also, it just does feel like it like in terms of the actual workflow, doing a three hour, two hour, three hour movie from start to finish.

• 1:13:30Speaker 03

  Don't do it.

• 1:13:30John Coogan?

  It's gonna be iffy to say, okay, does the character look exactly the same two hours later?

• 1:13:35Jordi Hays?

  What is what is the what what advantages are companies getting? Is it speed, cost?

• 1:13:43John Coogan?

  Flexibility.

• 1:13:44Jordi Hays?

  Like even even not quality, but yeah, flexibility, like can they do scenes that they never would have been able to?

• 1:13:50Speaker 03

  It's a good question. I think my kind of favorite soundbite that anyone can steal this, I'm not gonna copyright it, but don't spend less on budget. Spend more on imagination.

• 1:13:57John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:13:58Speaker 03

  Don't spend less on budget because that's just like, you're just gonna paint yourself into a corner if everything is about like

• 1:14:03John Coogan?

  Cost reduction.

• 1:14:04Speaker 03

  Cost reduction, like in this media landscape with everything that's going on on every platform and ever competitive and now ads are gonna look better than ever. The rising tide lifts all boats, right?

• 1:14:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:13Speaker 03

  So like, I just think that's a completely backwards strategy. So rather.

• 1:14:16Jordi Hays?

  But but couldn't there be an argument for keeping the budget fixed, but having more variation in the underlying creative?

• 1:14:23John Coogan?

  I think that's exactly what he's saying.

• 1:14:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:14:24John Coogan?

  He's saying that that if you're if you're a branded you're spending a million dollars on creative assets and you say great AI is here I'm only going to spend a hundred K well your competitor is going to spend the same million but they're going to get 10 times maybe a hundred times as much content as many variations as much creativity and they're going to smoke you and so

• 1:14:41Speaker 03

  or even the nature of the content because we can fucking put the camera on an arrow flying through a battlefield and over the monkey and then a squirrel takes it like anything

• 1:14:50John Coogan?

  this guy's a director

• 1:14:51Speaker 03

  anything like totally so so I mean we're waiting for those briefs just to our earlier point clients haven't gotten there yet they they don't know it's just like oh here's we want to do a live action ad can we do it with AI instead it's like can we fit in this old box while the old box is gone you can kind of do anything so that's what's really exciting I mean we did a protein bar ad with a Swedish Nyx they did have Kim Kardashian as a big face a couple of years ago anyway the brief was to like fly through down through the clouds a girl is glamping in like Argentina and she eats a bar and then feeds it to a capybara that starts twerking

• 1:15:23John Coogan?

  no way

• 1:15:24Jordi Hays?

  you know you know capybaras can get violent right

• 1:15:27Speaker 03

  yeah but these were very friendly the AI capybaras

• 1:15:29Jordi Hays?

  this is a this is a good use case for AI because capybaras are some of the most docile creatures until they're not

• 1:15:35John Coogan?

  until they're not

• 1:15:36Jordi Hays?

  we we played a video of a capybara attack earlier on the show

• 1:15:40John Coogan?

  you might have saved a life by using AI to generate the capybara instead of using a real animal handler

• 1:15:44Speaker 03

  and there you have you know the sustainability issue as well like okay the the carbon footprint of flying to Argentina like doing all this the traditional way like yeah good luck and you know we could measure like you'll never win the sustainability argument against AI as well

• 1:15:58John Coogan?

  how interesting take yeah

• 1:16:00Jordi Hays?

  any yeah any

• 1:16:01John Coogan?

  I feel like the AI industry has very much been on its back foot playing defense on that saying no no it's not that it's not that better

• 1:16:07Jordi Hays?

  yeah the example the example the example that I've always used in the in the in the film entertainment context is the idea that you know somebody making a film would fly out 50 people to another continent to get scenes that would ultimately take maybe 60 seconds

• 1:16:26Speaker 03

  yeah just to tear it down

• 1:16:27Jordi Hays?

  just to tear it down yeah it's it's yeah it's certainly going to be more sustainable to like Do the right few hit the keyboard in the right way for enough times to get an output. What what advice are you giving to creatives because what you've done is exactly what we've talked about on the show? And what I think the general point of view, at least from the tech industry is, yeah, if you want to resist AI, you're gonna you might like feel better about yourself for some amount of time. But eventually you're going to get steamrolled by somebody who is loves doing the same type of thing that you're doing is just going to use a different tool set.

• 1:17:13Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, what what advice are you giving to creatives across their kind of career on how to how to actually lean in? And I think there's a way to lean in and get just as much satisfaction, have just as much intensity of the creative process and just as much joy.

• 1:17:31Speaker 03

  And control now.

• 1:17:32Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  We're getting there and truly you don't even have to choose anymore. I typically say it's not about AI or it's AI and because we also did a recent like a Super Bowl commercial for a big airline. All the talent were shot green screen.

• 1:17:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  We background and relit them, put them in like a beautiful cloud environment and all this stuff. So you don't even have to choose anymore.

• 1:17:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:49Speaker 03

  You can keep the human talent, the human performance and all that stuff. But the the advice for creatives, well, just test it. Don't say blah until you tested it like, and if you have tested it and it's not for you, well, then wait or stuff. But this is not going to go away.

• 1:18:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:03Speaker 03

  I I just fully accepted that that like this is not going to go away.

• 1:18:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:07Speaker 03

  I was also scared like I I'm not I'm not I've not always been this like happy-go-lucky optimist.

• 1:18:11Jordi Hays?

  So you started absolutely printing.

• 1:18:16Speaker 03

  We'll see. The jury, we're doing fine. The jury is still out, but to that note, there's more opportunities than ever. The ad world is in kind of flux of like, we need stuff in two weeks. And you again, good luck with CG and live action and you can kind of, okay, I don't always want these two week briefs, but you can help. Your duty is mad.

• 1:18:37Jordi Hays?

  Take the the six month.

• 1:18:38Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, too long for AI. I would say keep it about a month, a month and a half, I think, for for a couple of. Labs or like thirty seconds.

• 1:18:44Jordi Hays?

  But still, that is dramatically more than just like typing into the box what you want.

• 1:18:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Because it's like just going into an AI project. You have to think about casting. Are we doing an AI face? Or are we, we could, where you can choose all the looks, demographics, everything? Or are we doing like?

• 1:19:01Jordi Hays?

  What, what feedback do you give the various labs on what they're doing badly today?

• 1:19:09Speaker 03

  Right. So, I mean, we are in a bunch of these creative partnership programs and it's great because you do get to feedback. And it can be anything from like the, the, if that's what you mean, like the AI providers.

• 1:19:17Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, like the five, the six finger thing.

• 1:19:20John Coogan?

  Cheaper, faster, better with a certain style.

• 1:19:24Speaker 03

  Sure, sure. I mean, what we're doing is what I call like live art directed realism. Yeah, that, that's if it doesn't look like a movie frame, it's not good enough for us. Like, that's, that's where my base level is. So I've, we've found a really neat, I mean, you've seen some of the work, maybe.

• 1:19:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:36Speaker 03

  I'll send it up if you want to pull it up. But if it's not there, it's not good enough. So like realism, that's others focusing and animation, other focusing stylized claymation. There's you, you, again, you can kind of do anything. What I want is better, more human focused interfaces. I think that's like making us the tools more human.

• 1:19:55Jordi Hays?

  You want more sass.

• 1:19:56Speaker 03

  Sorry?

• 1:19:57John Coogan?

  More software, like more of a software wrapper.

• 1:20:00Speaker 03

  I mean, the user experience of, of using the product, like actually, like I want to queue up.

• 1:20:05Jordi Hays?

  You don't just want a chatbot that you can just.

• 1:20:07Speaker 03

  No, God, no, no, no. We don't. I mean, I don't generate in, in the open AI. Exactly.

• 1:20:11John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you, have you thought about getting into like the vibe coding world, building the tools that you want? Or having your team work on that, building a harness around all of the different models?

• 1:20:21Speaker 03

  Our site, new site is actually vibe code in, folks, I understand. There's a really neat workflow plugin that you can use to as a bridge to get into the, to bring Claude into there.

• 1:20:30John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:20:30Speaker 03

  So there's just no time.

• 1:20:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, of course.

• 1:20:33Speaker 03

  I, I hear a lot of people feel the same, like they're just the exhaustion of keeping up. It's insane. I mean, I do my best and I try to focus, you know, branded content, ads, that's what we're doing. But I do want to.

• 1:20:43Jordi Hays?

  How many Super Bowl ads do you think you'll do for next?

• 1:20:46Speaker 03

  We'll see, man.

• 1:20:47Jordi Hays?

  Like, like, over five?

• 1:20:50Speaker 03

  There were AI Super Bowls ads besides ours as well.

• 1:20:52Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I figure you're gonna get at least a.

• 1:20:56John Coogan?

  Do you think next year there'll be more than half, more than 25%?

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  I would, I would guess that certainly more than half will use AI.

• 1:21:04Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. It's gonna be background replacement, relighting, or, you know, combining.

• 1:21:08John Coogan?

  Even, even just like, there is a new AI-driven rotoscoping tool that just replaces the background, and that's AI, but it's just a replacement for sitting there and cutting out something.

• 1:21:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, all this kind of menial task that no one loves to do. It's just like, a machine is better at that? Can we let the machines do it?

• 1:21:24John Coogan?

  Little blemish replacement.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, what I don't want AI to do is like, writing the scripts, coming up with the ideas, because that's the fun stuff for us. Will we get there? Maybe, but right here, right now, it's trash. Like, that's not at all where it's at, so.

• 1:21:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. What, uh, what, what does the integration with Fiverr actually look like? It, it doesn't sound like I can get you to make me a Super Bowl ad for $5.

• 1:21:46Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:21:48John Coogan?

  So is Fiverr just a, is Fiverr just a way to meet you? Is, is this just more of like a, a marketing partnership for Fiverr to open up people's minds about the type of people that they could hire?

• 1:21:58Speaker 03

  Sure, great question. So, uh, besides the name Fiverr, you know, that's kind of stuck for years, but there's a lot more high-budget stuff on Fiverr these days. And what they, what we're doing with the hub is that they've curated like a really solid selection of some of the best, and with different styles also, that you can go and hire now. Because like, our experience as well of talking to agencies, like, yeah, we found this guy on Instagram and DM'd him, and it was terrible. Like, trying to find people who are vetted and really good industry pros is hard, because there's like a handful of people in the world that does this at a, at a level that is good enough for commercial production. So I think that's like the, the opportunity they're presenting on, on, on the hub, like, come and work with these people.

• 1:22:36Jordi Hays?

  Here's, here's a, here's an interesting question. So, I've always felt that at any given point, at least when it comes to kind of startup style design and branding, that there's only maybe like 100 people in the world that actually do great, sort of like, leading-edge work.

• 1:22:56Jordi Hays?

  And I've always thought that was funny because we for so long, you know, millions of people can make a website, can make, you know, product design, etc. And yet there's still like this small group of people that actually are pushing the frontier and kind of like leading from a style standpoint and kind of like setting, setting the tone, setting the actual tastemakers. Do you think that that will stay the same with AI? My, my expectation is that, is that it will to some degree. It feels like an iron law almost that at any given point, regardless of the toolset, there will only be a small number of people that are true, true tastemakers.

• 1:23:31Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I mean, this is true already today. Like if you're on socials, a lot of people are asking for work. Uh, like kind of mid, I mean, people are new. People are kind of happy amateurs playing this stuff. Most people might not have a

• 1:23:42Jordi Hays?

  And there's still, there's still demand for, for kind of the middle of the pack.

• 1:23:46Speaker 03

  Sure. Yes.

• 1:23:46Jordi Hays?

  It's just that you're not going to get the, you know, the, the like quickly people identify the hundred or so and realistically it can get down to like 10 or something like that.

• 1:23:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, I think what's happened is that the floor is raised, but so is the ceiling.

• 1:24:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:03Speaker 03

  So like really standing out is also more difficult because like people make awesome stuff. Like there's so many talented people in the, in the industry. So, uh, cream will rise to the top, but it's also more competitive because that's the baseline. Anyone can make a cool fight. See now, okay, what's next? Like what's, what's actually makes us tick, so to say.

• 1:24:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Uh, where, how are you building the company? You're, you're here in LA because you have your own Hollywood sign, but you're based in Stockholm. You're building out the team there or do you?

• 1:24:32Speaker 03

  Yes. So really, really, really kind of, what do you say? Step by step, brick by brick, really, really carefully selecting who we bring into the team. So we have two assistants at home now holding the fort. Shout out to you guys for, so we could be here. But like to our earlier point, it's really difficult to find people. So what's been a good funnel for me is working with, teaching the stuff as well. And identifying some of the leading talent that are kind of AI native that grow up, kind of going to school with this stuff. They might need more traditional schooling in terms of tools, art direction and stuff that they don't have.

• 1:25:00Jordi Hays?

  How to work with clients.

• 1:25:02Speaker 03

  That too, uh, that too. Uh, being able to take a brief, all this stuff. So really, really slowly and like human at the, at the front and center of everything. Uh, but we have like a temporary office. I mean, it's literally just been me and my co-founder for the last years doing this. So we're some type of, yeah, I don't know.

• 1:25:19Jordi Hays?

  Amazing, amazing. I'm so, so fun to talk with you and because like I'm, we haven't had, we've had plenty of kind of creatives come on the show that are using, uh, using the, the different tools quite effectively, but nobody that's just like made it like I am going to recreate the modern ad agency.

• 1:25:37John Coogan?

  I, I think people sort of wrote off how like the models are so amazing. It's so, it's so magical. When you fire off one prompt and you get something that looks real that people just completely wrote off the middle, which is like actually making a product of like a story or something. We had this idea for an, an AI video that would be, uh, me and Jordy on the microphone throughout history, different, uh, like big innovations. So the invention of the steam engine, the invention of the telephone, the invention of the, you know, Wilbur Wright launching the first airplane. And we're there like sort of talking about it and we, and we generated a still frame, tried to animate them between, and it was just like, it was quickly turning into like a multi-week process that should have been

• 1:26:18John Coogan?

  like a month that we budgeted, but we were like, let's spend 30 minutes on this and like, hopefully we'll make it work. And we never quite got it there. So we just never published it.

• 1:26:26Speaker 03

  You know what you should do? You should film it. You have a green screen here.

• 1:26:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, just the background places.

• 1:26:30John Coogan?

  Oh.

• 1:26:33Speaker 03

  Again, you don't have to choose.

• 1:26:34John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:35Speaker 03

  And.

• 1:26:35John Coogan?

  That's really good. I like.

• 1:26:37Speaker 03

  You have everything here. So we could do it.

• 1:26:38John Coogan?

  Okay. Last question. Aura recently partnered with Chrome Hearts for a ring. Yes or no? Was this something you'd pick up? Is this something you'd reckon? This is fake news?

• 1:26:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. The box already. For the record, I don't, I can't afford Chrome art.

• 1:26:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:26:54Speaker 03

  You know.

• 1:26:55Jordi Hays?

  Yes. Hey, let's give it. Next Super Bowl season, you might be chromed up.

• 1:26:59Speaker 03

  Might be, might be.

• 1:27:00John Coogan?

  Okay. Okay. Well, it's been fantastic.

• 1:27:03Speaker 03

  Likewise, likewise.

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 1:27:04Jordi Hays?

  I'd love to, I'd love to.

• 1:27:05John Coogan?

  We should definitely work together on something.

• 1:27:07Jordi Hays?

  Let's figure out something to work on.

• 1:27:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, that'd be amazing.

• 1:27:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:27:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:10John Coogan?

  I'd love it.

• 1:27:10Jordi Hays?

  Awesome.

• 1:27:11John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Plaid. Plaid powers the apps you use to spend, save, borrow and invest. Securely connecting bank accounts to move money, fight fraud and improve lending now with AI. And let me also tell you about Lambda. Lambda is the super intelligence cloud, building AI supercomputers for training and inference that scale from one GPU to hundreds of thousands. And that brings us into the Lambda lightning round and we are kicking it off with. Benjamin Miller from Fundrise, but first we will pivot that camera around, show you the entire TVP and UltraDome, and we will show you the Lambda Cloud, because we are in the Lambda Lightning round right now. And I believe we have Benjamin Miller from Fundrise in the restream waiting room, so we will bring him into the TVP and UltraDome.

• 1:27:55John Coogan?

  We'll try that again, to bring him into the TVP and UltraDome. How you doing?

• 1:27:58Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:28:00Speaker 04

  Hey guys.

• 1:28:01John Coogan?

  Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. This is the first time on the show. Why don't you introduce yourself and the company?

• 1:28:07Speaker 04

  All right, all right. So my name is Ben Miller. I'm co-founder and CEO of Fundrise. We are an alternative investment platform. I think the largest direct-to-investor platform in the country. Been around 15 years. We've democratized investing into real estate. Ignite success. Yeah, real estate, tech, tech, and private credit. We have 2 million customers. We just took our, our fund, V C X, public last week on the New York Stock Exchange.

• 1:28:33John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 1:28:33Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool.

• 1:28:35John Coogan?

  We love N Y C.

• 1:28:36Jordi Hays?

  Fundrise has been around as long, as long as, as, as long as I've been following, like, tech closely. So, so it's very, very cool to have you on the show. Yeah, let, let's get into the recent launch, because we've obviously seen it all over our timeline. I had a friend of ours message John and I yesterday, seeing something. He was like pissed off. He was like, did we all miss this? So anyways.

• 1:29:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, how long has it been in the works?

• 1:29:08Jordi Hays?

  How does it come together? Because it's not the kind of thing you can just spin up and, you know, there's a lot of moving pieces.

• 1:29:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's so funny, because when we started out, everyone told us a bad idea, which was, we were, we democratized investing into real estate. This is about 2021, 2021, because everything was hot, hot, hot, hot. Real estate was hot, tech was hot. And we were foolish enough to think about like, well, what else could we do that would be really painful and hard and new? And so we, we came up with the concept of why don't we try to expand into democratizing investing into private tech and to venture capital? And we're different than the normal approach. We, we usually start by going in the front door of the S E C. So we go into the S E C, say, this is what we want to do. Can we create a public venture capital fund? And no one had ever done that before. It

• 1:29:55Speaker 04

  took us about two years going back and forth with the staff. And we created the first, you know, the first, it's a venture fund, just like any other venture fund, except anyone can invest in it. And we launched at the end of, I think about the end of 2022. And then, and then stock market collapsed, everything in tech became negative. So we were super lucky because we, we started investing at the bottom of the cycle.

• 1:30:20Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:21Speaker 04

  And so, and so that's how we got access, you know, when we got access to Anduril and Anthropic and Canva, like people were, were like very bearish on tech.

• 1:30:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:34Speaker 04

  And, and that's like, so people are like, how did you get these great names? I was like, well, it's, you know, we, we picked good names, but it was also, there was a lot of luck there.

• 1:30:41Jordi Hays?

  Time.

• 1:30:42Speaker 04

  So anyways, I, I, I'll give you the story, but I don't want to keep, you know, if you want to ask.

• 1:30:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. Continue, continue because, uh, yeah, so, so, so two years working with the SEC, you, you, you actually create the fund, but it's not publicly listed at that time. It's just available in, in your, in your product.

• 1:31:02Speaker 04

  To the public. Yeah. Yeah, this is something that people in tech weren't familiar with, but you can be public and not be publicly traded.

• 1:31:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:10Speaker 04

  And so we were, it's a public venture fund. It was, you know, we were filing, uh, you know, public reporting on the SEC's web, Edgar. And, um, and so we ended up, you know, raising about half a billion dollars across a hundred thousand investors. We have a hundred thousand investors. The fund had had a lot of good returns, like within three years, it had been up like 85% or something, especially in the last year, it was up 65% the last 12 months.

• 1:31:40Jordi Hays?

  And that's, that's NAV, NAV is, NAV being up 65%.

• 1:31:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, I mean, it's just the mark of typically it's just the last round. You know, what was Anthropic's last round was what was, uh, you know, Vanta's last round or Canva or whoever. So we, we, you know, typically marked to the last round valuation. Uh, and, you know, we invested in like. OpenAI and Databricks and all these companies like three years ago. So it ended up doing pretty well. And then so then we said, okay.

• 1:32:08Jordi Hays?

  You're like, I'm in the wrong business. I should have just been the fund manager.

• 1:32:12Speaker 04

  I was in the wrong business. Real estate is so much more brutal than tech. Let me tell you. It's a lot nicer to be an investor than a builder.

• 1:32:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. What, what do you guys look for on the actual asset side? I'm assuming some of the positions are direct, some are, you know, you've bought into SPVs. Like what, how do you qualify on the, on the asset side?

• 1:32:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, our check size grew over time. So now it's like, it wants to be like 20 to 50 to 100 million.

• 1:32:46Speaker 04

  And the way that we did it is that we, we have, Fundrise is 200 people. We have 100 software engineers. We built, you know, fintech platform with millions of customers and payment processing. And then we built a real estate AI product called Real AI. And so we have like a whole AI like initiative. And so that's how we really like got comfortable with the different products that we got to Anthropic, I think, early is that we were building with it. And we're like, oh my God, this is such a better enterprise product than anything else. Go down the list. Like it was, it was almost 80% other than Anduril, which I don't have any killer drones. We were, you know, we really, it's, every time I see it coming,

• 1:33:25Speaker 04

  it comes to me like I got, I got sort of saw some flow for Deal and, and Replit. And I said, like, I just don't know. We don't use the software. So I can't, I can underwrite it with by paper, like an MBA underwriting. But like without being grounded in the, as a, as our true user, like I just, it's, so that was, that's our process, a combination of being, using it, building with it. And then if we build with it and we love it, we usually hunt it down. We usually like, we're not reactive typically. We, we are like, okay, this is a great company. How do we get this? How do we get into this company? How do I harass the CEO and the executives and?

• 1:34:01John Coogan?

  It's MacGrims worst nightmare.

• 1:34:06Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, we work direct with Anduril.

• 1:34:07John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. That's good. I mean, that's the right way to do it. And I think that that's something that is like underrated. And I think a lot of investors don't necessarily know how far you can be away from the cap table.

• 1:34:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what uh yeah, what is your pitch to companies? Is it that, hey, we have, you know, a hundred thousand people in this fund? They they're excited about your company. They want exposure. This is a better way for them to get it than investing in the third or fourth layer of some random SPV? And and or or how do those conversations typically go?

• 1:34:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it, you know, if you've you've sounded, you know, you're around like half the time it's just relationship. It's just like, you know, somebody, they get to know you, they get comfortable. I mean, at least half the time, it's just pure relationship driven. Sometimes it's like more of a hard pitch. And so like Ramp, for example, which we invested in and has done it done really well, that took a couple of like turns of the wheel. And um but but Ramp is sort of very uh marketing minded. If you probably have any sense of Ramp, they are very like aggressive and thoughtful and.

• 1:35:19Jordi Hays?

  We know, we know a little bit about.

• 1:35:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, right, right. So they this is like they're they're like one of their part of their DNA is uh product product marketing. So we said to them, we know we have 2 million customers, like 2 million people like, why don't we work together and invest in Ramp? And see if you guys can um let's see if we can be helpful. And and we went out to half our customer base to a million people and we were the most successful partnership they've ever done. Like hundreds, hundreds of customers. And we know it's free.

• 1:35:49Jordi Hays?

  Because your your customer base is like, I don't I don't know. I I imagine your minimums are quite quite low, but in general, if people are investing in alternative assets like.

• 1:35:58John Coogan?

  Business leaders.

• 1:35:59Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:59John Coogan?

  Like they're business people.

• 1:36:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, it's it's a I thought it we did it with Canva too, and it and it's just like Canva was so big. It didn't move the needle for them. And I've done it with smaller companies where we were like, we drove 25% of their revenue growth in a single year. So so.

• 1:36:14John Coogan?

  That's a great value add, yeah.

• 1:36:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a huge value add. I mean, I think it's like we're we're not we're one of our products we love is Intercom, which is Finn.

• 1:36:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, we love them. We're sponsored by Finn.

• 1:36:23Speaker 04

  Okay, well, we're adopter, we adopted Finn like 18 months ago. It's and we're and we basically like we invested in Intercom and I think we invested more. Yeah. And I think that like it, our customer base is so big. I mean, it's it's it's millions of people. We know where they work. We know what their job is. We know where they live and we have so much data about them. So you said like, I only want to, we did this with Service Titan also because we invested in Service Titan before they went public. So I only want small business owners in the Midwest. Okay, great. You know what? We can target and then we can like, because they are investors, we're not a marketing platform.

• 1:37:00Speaker 04

  So I think that like the, the, the idea that I think will, I mean, it's true, but it's novel is that the people are here. It's like you can have an army of people like driving sales, marketing, brand. I mean, when we listed V C X and when I went, and when I went public last week, um, huge part of the reason it was successful, like very successful was the massive broad-based investor group who is very excited, supportive. We call it network investing. You know, the social network and then there's like network is actually investor networks. Like we, we think that like people are a value separate from their money.

• 1:37:42Jordi Hays?

  So, so you, you become publicly traded quite recently. It immediately trades way, way, way, way, way above NAV. And that creates a problem, which is that I, as an investor, could be very interested in the underlying assets. Think you have a fantastic portfolio, but maybe I don't want to pay way above NAV, even if I'm bullish on the companies. How, how do you think, um, how do you think this kind of like broad-based exposure to privates can evolve over time? Are you thinking about, you know, future products that would, um, kind of solve some of these? You know, clearly there's a massive amount of demand.

• 1:38:24Jordi Hays?

  Investors are excited to be invested in V C X, but there's clearly, there maybe is like more evolved solutions to come.

• 1:38:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's so, so funny how these things, like anybody who's ever had any success, like knows that before that, everybody told you it was not going to work.

• 1:38:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:42Speaker 04

  And so when we, when we conceived this, this idea of taking it public, listing it, every single expert told us it would trade as a, at a discount to NAF. They said it was, you know, don't, and I, we put it to a shareholder vote. I had thousands of people telling me not to do it. It's going to trade down. And our view was, like, you know, every phase of this process, people have a reason to basically be negative. And so originally it was like so novel and like, can, should you democratize investing? And then it was, can you get access to the companies? And then it was, well, now you have access and you've democratized it, but you know, these investors need liquidity. You know, they, they're not, they can't handle liquidity, which by the way, even big institutions

• 1:39:27Speaker 04

  can't either. I've been through, I went through 2008 financial crisis and I watched like Harvard and Dowman have to dump like stuff. And so I, so anyways, so I, I've thought of it as like, okay, they've had great performance. Average client performance was 40% a year, right? So I was like, great, like, we delivered. So let's just give them like clean liquidity and make trade at a premium. I thought it would, but I.

• 1:39:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, there was some precedent that it would, that it would have, that it would have traded some premium, like Destiny, I, I, I remember at least at times has traded, you know, way above that.

• 1:40:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, but, but, you know, Robin Hoods didn't. So, so it was, so it was unclear. I, my view, you know, I, I did a whole like Investor Day presentation where I said to people like, here's why it might trade up, here's why it might trade down. And why my trade up is that, you know, you can't get shares of Anthropic at par in a liquid wrapper, you know, with no carried interest. Like, you can't get Anduril or, and go down your list, OpenAI and, and, and Ramp and Databricks. Like, the idea that you can get these companies.

• 1:40:37Speaker 04

  In a perfectly liquid wrapper, in a low-cost regulated vehicle, like that makes sense to me. They would trade at premium. And that's what I said, that's what could happen. It could also be that like sentiment gets negative, there's a war in the Middle East. Anything could happen. And so it traded at a massive premium. I mean, massive, it's been blockbuster success, validated all of our, of our aims and hopes. And now I'm getting the other side, you know, oh, yes, we trade too much at a premium. I said, well, it's been eight days, right? It's been eight days, like, we have more wood to shop, right? We have more things we're doing. We have just announced a partnership with Kraken to tokenize it. Oh, interesting.

• 1:41:19Speaker 04

  Tokenization, I think is going to be a really like, it's part of financial innovations. We've been doing this for, financial innovation is key to democratization and key to lowering the cost of intermediation. So, I mean, this is where, super early days here.

• 1:41:36John Coogan?

  Yeah. Have you been processing the private credit stories over the last couple of months?

• 1:41:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I've been doing this for 15 years, right? So like, this is like how it always goes. It already happened in real estate where institutional money, they raise a lot of money, it's successful, they raise more money, it's successful. And they just, it just go until it dies. Like, that's just like how, how institutional money works.

• 1:42:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:04Speaker 04

  I mean, like, and so they just did. I mean, it's just, there's a cycle, there's a, every single sector has a cycle. And when this, and if you don't, basically, if you don't have a lot of restraint before you need to, you just always end up in this problem every single time, every single time. And so that's what's happening with private credit. I don't think it's as bad as everybody says, but it's, you know, the problem is that you end up with this vicious cycle where once you get negative sentiment, it actually becomes self-fulfilling.

• 1:42:35John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah, because there's more people pulling out, less people investing.

• 1:42:38Jordi Hays?

  What, how big can VC X get? Like, if I'm a major platform VC fund, do I see this and think, okay, I'm going to have more competition at, at Series B, C eventually? Like, is this something that you can think can scale to tens of billions of AUM? What's your?

• 1:43:01Speaker 04

  Are you a dreamwalker? Are you in my dreams?

• 1:43:05Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, maybe. I can see where you're go- I can see where you're going.

• 1:43:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, the, the, the hope and the goal here, I mean, is there's sort of two sides to the marketplace. So the next turn of the wheel is I need to convince the best private companies, this is a good for them.

• 1:43:22Speaker 04

  You know, we're one company on their cap table, we're a venture fund, to the private companies, we're a venture fund. You know, it's just like any other venture fund, there's no differences, except for our capital is evergreen, right? Forever capital, low cost, passive. Passive, long-term capital, which to me is a founder and a builder, like, that's the best money around. I'd rather have that than value add, quote value add. So I think that we get to a place where structurally, an allocation to passive, long-term money becomes like, the best companies get it.

• 1:43:56Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:57Speaker 04

  The best companies want it.

• 1:43:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:59Speaker 04

  And, and, and so like, kind of a Jack Bogle Vanguard model would be if we can become sort of a structural bridge, then we get scale, we lower, the bigger we get, the lower our fees, the lower our fees, the bigger we get. And, you know, at $100 billion of our fees are, you know, tens of basis points, right? It's super disruptive to the venture industry. I mean, it's good and bad, because they're gonna, they're gonna want us and hate us at the same time.

• 1:44:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's very, it's very, it's very, it's very cool. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, uh, yeah, we never give investment advice here, but I think in general, for 99% of people, if you're excited about great private companies, you should take

• 1:44:44Speaker 04

  Some good picks.

• 1:44:46Jordi Hays?

  Approach.

• 1:44:46Speaker 04

  Good picks.

• 1:44:47Jordi Hays?

  And an index approach that allows you to have liquidity along the way.

• 1:44:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:44:52Jordi Hays?

  Makes, makes a lot of sense. And I, and I think there's like a lot, there's a lot more to come here in the category. I would expect it to be oligopolistic in the way that even like the platform VC funds are, you know, they can all get bigger together, so. Excited to see more, more innovation.

• 1:45:08John Coogan?

  It is funny, I, I, you know, we were tracking like, will VC funds go public? Dan Primack was telling us that that might happen. I never really expected it to go the other way, but it makes so much sense with your strategy where that goes. And the, the value prop that you've given to founders at a particular stage, uh, just makes so much sense. The, the pitch is fantastic.

• 1:45:28Jordi Hays?

  Are you, are you hiring like new kind of quasi VC like partners? Are you going to try to poach from any of the, uh, any of the other funds?

• 1:45:38Speaker 04

  Good question. I mean.

• 1:45:39Jordi Hays?

  Cause I mean, it feels like you're, you're building, you're building Fundrise, which has like millions of investors. And then you're seemingly like now, like basically like, I need to invest in all the products that we love and use.

• 1:45:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:50Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, I imagine you'd like some support.

• 1:45:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, this is, this is my takeaway, and I guess, I don't know if other people have experienced this, but my takeaway is very hard to delegate successfully. There are like, like Fundrise, we've been together, founding team's been together 15 years.

• 1:46:08John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 1:46:08Speaker 04

  You know, every year, maybe we, we hire a hundred people.

• 1:46:12John Coogan?

  Another over that success too.

• 1:46:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, like it, it takes a long time to find people who are just like, you can delegate to, and they just deliver.

• 1:46:22John Coogan?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:46:22Speaker 04

  I've, I think I've almost never had the experience where you hire somebody. I've hired, I've tried, go hire the fanciest person with crazy good resume. They just don't deliver.

• 1:46:36Speaker 04

  They, I, I don't know. I mean, I, I've done it. I've done it with, across different industries and finance and real estate. And, and so I'd be like, maybe there's a mentor person who can just get access and you just pay them, but I sort of doubt that.

• 1:46:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, I think, I think it oftentimes the hardest thing is finding undiscovered talent. But the undiscovered talent is what typically ends up actually being like a game changer in an organization. You know, somebody that doesn't necessarily have the pedigree. And that that could be that could be for you like somebody who's just historically been a software engineer and they're like, I was already always like interested in investing. And then they come in and like bring a new approach to investing that kind of works in the in the structure that you guys have.

• 1:47:24Speaker 04

  But I guess like my, I guess there's two ways you make money venture. One is that you you discover something before it's the hottest thing ever. You come in early.

• 1:47:32John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:33Speaker 04

  The other one is that you just get access when they're already hot and you just ride the product market fit train.

• 1:47:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:39Speaker 04

  And so I'm hoping that

• 1:47:40Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and that's been that's been the the issue. There's been so many attempts at like democratizing the private market within tech and a lot of them end up looking like crowdfunding platforms and then they have this massive

• 1:47:52John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:47:52Jordi Hays?

  Negative selection bias where they're getting the worst companies that come on and crowdfund and then the investors don't end up making money and it creates this vicious cycle and then the companies just go away over time. And and this is like, you know, potentially, it seems like you're guiding to the opposite of that, which is like you have a differentiated value add.

• 1:48:13John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:13Jordi Hays?

  You have a product that no other platform VC can offer.

• 1:48:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:17Jordi Hays?

  And then you talked about all the the potential like positive flywheel of like

• 1:48:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:21Jordi Hays?

  More capital, lower fees, more capital, lower fees, more investors, you know, more value add, so.

• 1:48:27John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the success, the overnight success, 15 years in the making, the chat loves to see it and we appreciate you taking the time.

• 1:48:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great, great to great to finally meet.

• 1:48:38John Coogan?

  Have a great weekend.

• 1:48:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:48:40John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon, Ben.

• 1:48:41Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:48:41John Coogan?

  Bye. Let me tell you about Restream, one live stream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. And let me also tell you about Gusto, the unified platform for payroll benefits and HR, built to evolve with small and medium sized businesses. We are running over, so we'll bring in our next guest, Ferris from Normal Computing. Ferris, how are you doing?

• 1:48:58Speaker 05

  Hey, guys. Thanks for having me on.

• 1:49:00John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for jumping on. Uh, good to see you. Please introduce yourself and the company.

• 1:49:06Speaker 06

  Hey, I'm Ferris, founder and CEO of Normal Computing. So Normal is a company that builds AI software with the world's largest semiconductor companies. So right now, more than half of the top 10 by revenue. Semiconductor companies use Normal to design custom silicon. And we're also using that same capability right now to bring new kinds of chips and ASICs to market ourselves, mostly focused on energy. So, hyper-efficient, ultra-efficient ASICs.

• 1:49:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:49:37Jordi Hays?

  Seems somewhat abnormal, given your stage, to have this level of traction, but continue.

• 1:49:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, where did the name come from?

• 1:49:45Speaker 06

  It's a couple of things. So one is, you know, we're, right now, the ASICs are targeting different kinds of probabilistic machine learning models, like diffusion models. So Normal's kind of owed to the normal distribution. But also, there's this kind of broader view that this is really the way that computing should be. Like, this is the more natural way to process and run, you know, AI inference and AI workloads in general.

• 1:50:12John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah, tell us about the chip landscape, where you see the most activity. There's a lot of news from ARM this week around CPUs. Obviously, everyone's familiar with the GPU. And then, between the TPU and cerebrus and Grok, there's like a few other ASICs that are sort of popular, but it feels like there's a much longer tail that you're going after.

• 1:50:37Speaker 06

  For sure. I mean, so obviously, we had GTC last week, and Jensen put forward what I think is a really nice equation, where he's saying that revenue equals tokens per watt times total available gigawatts. So what that means is, it's, there's two main problems that we should be focused on right now, from our perspective, in chips. One is increasing the amount of energy that's useful and usable by us and for us. But the other is improving the energy efficiency that we have in the silicon that we're using. And so there's a few trends. One of those, I would say, relates to the news that ARM put forward. They have their own chip, you know, real harbor for the first time in 40 years.

• 1:51:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:21Speaker 06

  Historically, an IP licensing business. That's part of this broader trend to, you know, custom silicon and the data center moving to heterogeneous computing, which means that in the future, not that many years from now, rather than having a very small number of different kinds of chips that are running all of our workloads, we're going to have, you know, hundreds, if not thousands, of different kinds of chips that are tailored to each workload and application in the data center.

• 1:51:49John Coogan?

  Are thermodynamic computing chips underrated?

• 1:51:53Speaker 06

  I think so. Yeah. What do you think?

• 1:51:56John Coogan?

  I haven't, I haven't heard that much about them. I, I, I don't know. And it feels like it's very early stage. And so I've seen some demos, but it's very unclear at the demo phase, how much is being done on the actual chip, what the value is. And, and we went through this with Grok and Cerebrus where there was, there was very early pushback around, oh, well, like you'll never be able to run this type of model on that chip, or it will, you'll need to network 1,000 chips together to do anything valuable. And I've, I've been surprised, and I think we've seen some narrative violations around Cerebrus and Grok.

• 1:52:34John Coogan?

  I've used, I've used Codex 4.5 Spark on Cerebrus, and I know it's good. I know it works. We had a founder come on that baked Llama onto a chip and made it available at chatjimmy.ai. And like, you can just feel the value. Yeah, you can just feel the value. And I'm wondering, like, are, should I think about thermodynamic computing just as like another speed versus size or cost trade off? Or if it unlocks a different, a different like vector of optimization?

• 1:53:06Speaker 06

  It is a different vector. So right now, I mean, the two typical vectors that you have, I mean, really, there's three if you include area. But you have speed and energy.

• 1:53:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:17Speaker 06

  Those are typically the trade offs that you're making. But we're introducing a new one, which is noise.

• 1:53:22John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:53:23Speaker 06

  So for these kinds of devices, you can't necessarily run, like you can't run a calculator or something where you need. Full precision, like deterministic calculations. But let's say that you're trying to run something like a diffusion model.

• 1:53:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:39Speaker 06

  Right, which I think is super topical, right? Because OpenAI just winded down Sora this week. It was costing them like $15 million a day to run, 2.1 million revenue. But that's, that's the kind of workload that's a really nice fit for this computing paradigm.

• 1:53:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:56Speaker 06

  Because you're taking something that's noisy and approximate by definition.

• 1:54:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:00Speaker 06

  And mapping it to hardware where the physics maps like really nicely between those equations.

• 1:54:06John Coogan?

  You think that's five years away, 10 years away?

• 1:54:10Speaker 06

  We think less.

• 1:54:11John Coogan?

  Less?

• 1:54:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, we think less right now.

• 1:54:12John Coogan?

  Less?

• 1:54:13Speaker 06

  Yes. So our, yeah, and I think it has to be. So like from our perspective, 2030 is a key date that we talk about a lot internally. Because there's a view that, you know, even by 2028, we're going to have like a 49 gigawatt shortfall in terms of power. And so something, something has to change, something has to give. It's, it could be energy, it could be that we find like new sources or, you know, data centers, space, or one of these other directions. Or it's we have a real breakthrough when it comes to silicon. And that's kind of what we're going after.

• 1:54:47John Coogan?

  That'd be amazing. Tell us about the round. I want to hit the gong.

• 1:54:49Speaker 06

  Oh, awesome. I have my own gong behind me too. I don't know if you saw that. No way. Just for the, it's a $50 million round. We're calling it Accelerator Round. Led by Sam.

• 1:55:02Speaker 06

  Led by, led by who? Sorry, I missed it. Samsung. Samsung. There you go. And what were you doing before this? I was at Google, I was at Google Brand and then Google Axe afterwards, where I'm at my founders, my co-founders. There you go. Somewhat of a non-traditional. Yeah.

• 1:55:18John Coogan?

  It seems like the perfect, perfect team for this. Well, congratulations, very excited. And yeah, come back on the show with more progress. We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:55:25Speaker 06

  Actually, multiple times this year.

• 1:55:27John Coogan?

  Yeah, have a good one.

• 1:55:28Speaker 06

  Thank you. Take care.

• 1:55:29John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Okta. Okta helps you assign every AI agent a trusted identity. So you get the power of AI without the risk. Secure every agent, secure any agent. And let me tell you about cognition. They're the makers of Devin, the AI software engineer. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. And without further ado, we'll bring in Evan Loomis from Overmatch Ventures. Evan, how are you doing?

• 1:55:50Speaker 05

  I'm doing great. It's good to be with you guys.

• 1:55:53John Coogan?

  Kick us off with the news.

• 1:55:55Jordi Hays?

  Just hit us with the number.

• 1:55:56John Coogan?

  Just hit us with the big number.

• 1:55:58Speaker 05

  Oh, man, you're grabbing the gong. I can't wait. We just closed 250 million.

• 1:56:06Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 1:56:07John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:56:08Speaker 05

  Uh, thanks so much.

• 1:56:09Jordi Hays?

  We can put it in, Bill. We can just say a quarter, Bill.

• 1:56:12John Coogan?

  Quarter, Bill. It's a quarter, Bill.

• 1:56:14Speaker 05

  There it is. Uh, we raised the money in a couple of months. I'm so grateful.

• 1:56:18John Coogan?

  Very nice.

• 1:56:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, so that's another funny little noise, too. I kind of need those for my office here.

• 1:56:26Jordi Hays?

  It's Friday. It's Friday.

• 1:56:29Speaker 05

  It is Friday.

• 1:56:31John Coogan?

  Tell us about the investing thesis. I want to know about sector and stage. How much are you saving for follow-on? How concentrated do you want the portfolio to be? Uh, where are you seeing opportunity in the venture landscape?

• 1:56:44Speaker 05

  Our sweet spot is deep tech, defense and space. Um, there's a set of technologies that are existentially urgent and important for the United States to lead in. And so that is our, that is our sweet spot. We do pre-seed through Series A. Uh, I've got an incredible team. Morgan Hidsig, Jordan Blaschek, a bunch of other folks. Um, typically at the pre-seed, we're doing two to three.

• 1:57:08John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:08Speaker 05

  Seed, three to five.

• 1:57:10Jordi Hays?

  Wow, back in my day, a pre-seed was like...

• 1:57:12Speaker 05

  Five to 10.

• 1:57:13Jordi Hays?

  Pre-seed in my day was 500K.

• 1:57:15John Coogan?

  500K. Now, now you're going to come and mill. Still, I mean, that feels like, you know, potentially like 50 companies in this portfolio. Uh, that feels broader. Is that intentional? Is that how you think it will pencil out? Or do you think that concentration will build or you'll wind up taking more bets?

• 1:57:32Jordi Hays?

  I'm betting 25 max.

• 1:57:35John Coogan?

  Okay, let's hear it. What do you think?

• 1:57:36Speaker 05

  Oh, man, I love it. Yeah, you nailed it. Your bet was correct. If I, if I had a gong, I would hit it right now, buddy. Yeah, we're, we're shooting for 25 portfolio companies. Um, we keep about half the fund for reserve. So when, you guys know this probably better than anybody, but the winners kind of move fast day one. They tend to break out and you want to make sure you hold enough for reserve for those.

• 1:58:00Jordi Hays?

  Is the United States overmatched right now?

• 1:58:05Jordi Hays?

  In a way that's like not, you know, clearly, we still have our exquisite systems and aircraft carriers, but it's hard to read into how the war is going, but it certainly hasn't felt like we're in a great spot, given this kind of mismatch in capabilities. And it feels like our adversaries have just been preparing for the last 20 years for a style of conflict with the United States, you know, basically betting that we're going to continue to be one way and that how do we just counteract this threat in a sustainable way. And so far

• 1:58:47Jordi Hays?

  from what I'm seeing, it seems to be like it's been a good strategy. So not, not, not fun to say out loud, but it seems like the reality.

• 1:59:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. It's funny, our name is the intent. The goal is that America has overmatched capabilities strategically and technologically, which is the point. You know, I don't, we're definitely not overmatched by anybody at all. And I don't think we ever will be. But we're a little bit behind in some areas. I'll say that. And I think one of the things that makes our country so wonderful and is that we're like a free people that can do the impossible. Every technological revolution,

• 1:59:39Speaker 05

  historically, we've won. Think about it, like semiconductors, we invented it. Software, we got it. And we're kind of on the end of this software revolution. And the next revolution is going to be denominated by artificial intelligence, advanced chips, certain defense and space capabilities, hypersonics, space offense, defense, robotics, autonomous systems. And so we're going to win. And the reason I'm so confident about that is like,

• 2:00:09Speaker 05

  I get to be on Zoom calls all day and meetings with founders that are like actually architecting the future. So I feel really bullish, but I also feel behind. You know what I mean?

• 2:00:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I'm not overly negative either. I mean, we talk with like, you know, up to six founders a day. So I feel like we get to see the future where I'm like, okay, if we just let these teams cook for five to 10 years, we're going to have a lot more energy. We're going to have a lot more industrial power locally. We're going to have a lot more, you know, batteries made in the United States, et cetera, et cetera. You could just go down the line. But certainly like, we got to get into gear and it just feels like we need. The one concern I have right now is that there's great talent out there that looks at a massive category that's not even monopolistic and thinks like, I shouldn't start a business in that category because this other company started like a year ago

• 2:01:02Jordi Hays?

  and they've already raised a hundred million dollars. And I just think for some of these categories, we're going to want like a bunch of really talented teams.

• 2:01:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, I have a question about that. Our venture capital, capital wars, like startup capital wars where there's two companies in a single category and then the VCs are just pouring money in. That's a textbook, like you're not getting the power law winner necessarily. It's not great for the economic outcome, but is that good for America?

• 2:01:30Speaker 05

  Of course it's good. Yeah, this is great. And this is part of, wow, there's the ego. That's so good. Didn't know you guys had that one up your sleeve. Yeah, of course it's good. And this is how competition works. And this is why, this is why we're gonna, we're gonna win. And I'm so bullish about that. Yeah.

• 2:01:49John Coogan?

  Because we don't typically pick winners. There's always a battle between a bunch of private enterprises and smart entrepreneurs that can go and innovate and the best product usually wins.

• 2:02:00Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 2:02:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, I love it. I love it.

• 2:02:03Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 2:02:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:04Jordi Hays?

  Where are you? Where are you based, by the way?

• 2:02:07Speaker 05

  I'm based in Austin, Texas. I moved, moved back here about a decade ago to co-found a company called Icon, where we 3D printed the first house in the United States in 2018, which was kind of my on train to venture, if you will. Venture was not on the cards at all, ever in my life. And we, we had really good success with that business. And it kind of pulled us really close to the national interest. We picked up major contracts with every branch of the military, the intelligence community, and even won the contract for the moon base. So as you guys know, we're going, we're going, we're going back to the moon as a, as a country and as a species.

• 2:02:48Speaker 05

  And you can't bring two by four in drywall, unfortunately. So we're going to partner with them to make sure that we've got like a permanent civilization up there.

• 2:02:57John Coogan?

  That's awesome.

• 2:02:59Jordi Hays?

  So you're, you're saying you're going to help make it a state?

• 2:03:02John Coogan?

  I like it.

• 2:03:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, Texas is the greatest state in America, for sure. And we

• 2:03:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, I was talking about the moon.

• 2:03:10John Coogan?

  Well, the moon, I don't know, maybe, maybe the Texans don't want the moon to be a state.

• 2:03:13Jordi Hays?

  Well, maybe, maybe the, maybe the moon could just be an extension of Texas. That'd be very, that'd be the new frontier.

• 2:03:19John Coogan?

  We're going to county. We're going to make the moon a county.

• 2:03:21Speaker 05

  If the Texans, if the Texans get there first, then they might try to claim it their own.

• 2:03:24John Coogan?

  So they might, they might. Star state.

• 2:03:27Jordi Hays?

  What, but last, last question, what's that, what's that drone behind you?

• 2:03:31John Coogan?

  That's a boring company flamethrower, right?

• 2:03:33Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it looks like a drone.

• 2:03:35John Coogan?

  That's a flamethrower.

• 2:03:36Jordi Hays?

  Is it working? I don't know if you want to use it.

• 2:03:39Speaker 05

  I don't, I don't have my, I don't have the gas canister on it, mostly because I've got four little kids.

• 2:03:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, I can imagine.

• 2:03:46Speaker 05

  If, if they broke in here, it would be really, really bad for everybody. So, but I keep it back here.

• 2:03:51John Coogan?

  What a design. That is such a good design. I love that thing.

• 2:03:54Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get one of those to the office.

• 2:03:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:57Speaker 05

  You guys definitely need one for your office too. So.

• 2:04:00John Coogan?

  Definitely.

• 2:04:01Jordi Hays?

  We'll work on it. Great, great to meet you, Evan. I'm really glad you're doing this. And I'm sure we'll talk to many of your upcoming portfolio companies.

• 2:04:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're excited.

• 2:04:09Speaker 05

  Awesome. Good to be with you guys. Thank you.

• 2:04:11John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about Phantom Cash. Fund your wallet without exchanges or middlemen. Spend with the Phantom card. And let me tell you about Cisco, critical infrastructure for the AI era. Unlock seamless, real-time experiences and new value with Cisco.

• 2:04:24Jordi Hays?

  Up next, we have Moda.

• 2:04:27John Coogan?

  Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

• 2:04:29Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 2:04:30John Coogan?

  Good to meet you.

• 2:04:31Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm good. Thanks for having me on.

• 2:04:34John Coogan?

  Thanks for joining.

• 2:04:35Jordi Hays?

  Huge week for you.

• 2:04:36John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:04:37Jordi Hays?

  Walk us through the company and the launch.

• 2:04:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:04:41Speaker 07

  Yes, I'm very sleep deprived right now, so apologize for that. Yeah, so I'm Anvisha. I'm the founder and CEO of Moda. Moda is an AI design tool for non-designers. People use our AI design agent to create slides, social graphics, like all kinds of landing page mockups, everything. The difference between us and other stuff is we've created it on a fully editable canvas. So it's not giving you back like a static image that you can't edit. It's like truly drawing shapes. You can click and edit a text box. You can move things around, et cetera. We just announced our seven and a half million dollar funding round led by General Catalyst.

• 2:05:24Jordi Hays?

  General Catalyst and?

• 2:05:28Speaker 07

  Bear, the founder of Dropbox, I used to work at Dropbox. So that one's really special to me to have Arash on board.

• 2:05:35Jordi Hays?

  Let's go. Let's go. Okay, okay, so you came out with a somewhat of a controversial launch. You're the anti-slop company, giving people control over their outputs. Take, Slop might come out, but then you can, you can change it and adapt it, improve it. Yeah, talk about how the launch has gone.

• 2:05:54John Coogan?

  Why are you taking shots at the pigs of the trough? Some of us like Slop.

• 2:05:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, some of us do.

• 2:06:00Speaker 07

  Slop is what you want. You can, you can get it in Moda. You can get it wherever you want.

• 2:06:06Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 2:06:07John Coogan?

  The pro-slop company. No, no, obviously makes a lot of sense, but take us through the thesis.

• 2:06:13Speaker 07

  Yeah, for sure. So the launch, this was unexpected. Like obviously, you know, we put a lot of effort into like putting together this video, this narrative, shout out to Shown Media who helped us with the video and things like that. The, the unexpected part was like the controversy around it. I guess, I mean, I did put a lot of effort into those like first two sentences. I think I spent like, you know, I don't know, many, many hours writing and rewriting them.

• 2:06:37Jordi Hays?

  You baited them.

• 2:06:40John Coogan?

  Okay, remind everyone what the first two sentences were.

• 2:06:43Speaker 07

  Uh, the first two sentences were, uh, we raised seven and a half million to kill AI slop. Uh, introducing Moda, the world's first AI design agent with taste. Now, I know the world's first is like, uh, triggering to people because it's like, you know.

• 2:07:01Jordi Hays?

  You're staking out your territory.

• 2:07:03John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, but it's.

• 2:07:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, uh, yeah, I think, I think part of that, part of that is like, I think generally right now, there's been so many companies in every category that people have launch fatigue and for better or worse. Even if something's like cool and a new approach, they will try to find some way to, to pick it apart. But, uh, but yeah, I think what you're doing makes a lot of sense. How, how are you, how are you seeing the competitive landscape? You know, making slides and websites are things that basically every company, it seems like almost every company in the world is like converging on having a product to do something like this. You guys are specializing in it. That'll give you some edge, but like, how do you, how do you see the space evolving?

• 2:07:44Speaker 07

  Yeah, so, um, I'll say a few things. First of all, our, our launch had, I think, like eight million impressions on like Twitter, across like my video, other content, LinkedIn. Uh, we had a absolute insane amount of signups, like there, the market is saying that our, this problem is not solved yet. Uh, which was my thesis when we started this company. And to give a little bit of background about myself, I'm a second time founder. My previous company, Dover was backed by Founders Fund and NYC. And, um, I've been through product market fit. I've scaled a company. Uh, when I went out to, uh, fundraise for Moda, I was met with a lot of skepticism. Uh, people were like, why are you starting another AI design thingy?

• 2:08:24Speaker 07

  Um, and I think it really comes down to the details here. Um, I don't want to get too much into talking about like competitors right now and like the landscape and like detail. But I will say that, um, everyone is kind of taking this approach of like, let's go with the coding agents. Let's like Claude is really good at writing code, right? Let's get Claude to like slop up a PowerPoint, right? Like just like spit out some HTML, looks like a PowerPoint, let's go. Those PowerPoints all look the same. They all have like boxes and like, you know, and, and then you go and try to edit it, right? And it's like, you're stuck in like this, like weird drag and drop like, uh, kind of world, um, and you don't kind of have that control. Um, so I think that the best AI tools are not the ones that help you save time. They have a place, right? So it's like, a lot of AI tools have this pitch like, oh, like you're a marketer.

• 2:09:09Speaker 07

  You can create like a million ad creatives in like thirty seconds. Great, right? They're all probably your slop. I think the best AI tools are the ones that like let you do things that you never could have done before.

• 2:09:19John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:19Speaker 07

  Right? And this is like the magic of Claude code and things like that. And we want to do that for design. And I think in order to truly do that, you truly need to actually have like a, like this is a little bit technical, but like an actual vector canvas, like where you can put something in one place exactly and move it to another place. You can draw things. You can literally create anything in there, right? And so we took this very different approach where we built an agent that is not outputting HTML. It's not outputting like, you know, an image like Nano Banana or anything like that. It took us like months to build this. They just didn't work for like, we, we tried like five different approaches. It just like didn't work, didn't work, didn't work. Finally, it started working and um, it's just very different from what anyone else is doing. And I think this is going to really unlock this kind of like

• 2:10:02Speaker 07

  next level of creativity for people, in my opinion. And that's going to let them create stuff that they could never do before. Um, so I'm very bullish. Uh, the people who have been signing up, it's kind of been, it's been insane. Like the range is just like, there's like investment bankers, like McKinsey analysts signing up, and then there's like sheepskin farmers in New Zealand, like, other people like messaging me like the craziest shit that they've like done with this product already. And so I'm like, okay, I think we're on to something. Um, and yeah, the competition's gonna be fun.

• 2:10:32John Coogan?

  Yeah, we talked to an AI director, Billy Bowman, earlier today and uh, the, I mean, he was voicing over like the need for tools and like, he doesn't

• 2:10:40Jordi Hays?

  That was his number one request.

• 2:10:42John Coogan?

  He does not want to work in a, in a text box.

• 2:10:44Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:44John Coogan?

  And, and, and he's done this like literal Super Bowl ads, uh, using AI, leaning into AI, being very aggressive about it.

• 2:10:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and the time-saving thing too. He was like, yeah, that our average project is like six weeks, something like that. So he's not, he's not trying to sell entirely on speeding up timelines. He's trying to sell on, how do we do things that we were not possible with traditional, you know, shooting? So, uh,

• 2:11:10Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:11:10Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool.

• 2:11:12Speaker 07

  Yeah, one interesting thing, just as like a side note that might be a second interesting insight. Um, I've been getting so many support requests that I've just started sending people like a Google Meet link and I'm like, can you talk right now? I'm in this Google Meet. So today. Say it again.

• 2:11:26John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just like an open window into whoever wants to talk. Yeah, it's great.

• 2:11:29Speaker 07

  It is an open window. Um, I talked to this guy today who's like, who works at this like firm in the UK. And he set up this like insane Claude plus Moda thing. Um, where he has these like, his entire like job is like in all these Claude dot M D skill files.

• 2:11:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:46Speaker 07

  And he has connected it to all these tools via MCP.

• 2:11:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:49Speaker 07

  And I was like, how did you even do this? Like, yeah, we have an MCP service, like not even like really documented, like, I don't know how he figured all this out.

• 2:11:55John Coogan?

  Reverse engineered, basically.

• 2:11:57Speaker 07

  He, he did some crazy shit. I don't know how he did it.

• 2:11:59John Coogan?

  It's crazy.

• 2:11:59Speaker 07

  Um, but I've been astounded by the amount of like businesses I've spoken to that are like, we need your API, we need your MCP, like. Luckily we have all that, but like it, it's just like the, the way that products are getting used right now is like completely different than anything I've ever seen. Um, it's like everyone wants to like chain together these things. They want like.

• 2:12:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:19Speaker 07

  This level of like things talking to each other and automation, like, um, I've been, you know, building products for many years. Uh, for a consumer product like ours, I would never build an API on day one. Uh, but now I'm like, oh my God, our API needs to be like one of the, the like first party things that we, that we do basically. So that's been interesting as well.

• 2:12:35John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:36Jordi Hays?

  Someone in the chat mentioned, I, I forgot about this, but Google just launched Stitch like last week, which is so funny because the whole idea of like stitches. Transform ideas into UI designs for mobile web application. So it's so funny because 15 years ago, you would have been getting the question, maybe like, what if Google does this? And then of course they, they, they come out with this, but as we've seen with, you know, I expect this market to evolve like similar to code gen where. You know, mass, massive market, tons of opportunities to just focus and, and, uh, you know, you have an advantage being a nimble startup. How big's the team right now?

• 2:13:11Speaker 07

  Uh, we are five people, like the couple of friends that I've dragged into this helping me out right now. So we are hiring if anyone watching this wants a job. Um, yeah, no, it's been absolutely insane. I think that, um, in some ways, like, uh, the, the, the hate is kind of interesting as well because it's like, um, I've been, you know, getting people like retweeting, being like, look at these like people like raising all this venture capital, like doing this. I'm like, yo, we're like a five person team. Like you not expect this, like, uh, we're just like, keep it, gotta keep up right now. And, uh, yeah, but it's been really fun. Um, and, uh, yeah, very excited to sort of see where we go from here.

• 2:13:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Ignore, ignore the haters. Keep shipping.

• 2:13:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:56John Coogan?

  Yeah. Uh, well, thank you so much for taking the time to come.

• 2:13:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's great. It's great to meet you.

• 2:14:00Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:14:00Jordi Hays?

  And, uh,

• 2:14:01John Coogan?

  Stay strong out there.

• 2:14:02Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on the, on the big week. I'm sure, I'm sure you won't have much of a weekend with all the inbound, but, uh,

• 2:14:07John Coogan?

  Good luck.

• 2:14:08Jordi Hays?

  Good luck building.

• 2:14:08John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:14:09Speaker 07

  Thank you.

• 2:14:10John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:14:10Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:14:11John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about AppLovin, profitable advertising made easy with Axon.ai. Get access to over one billion daily active users and grow your business today. And let me also tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. I love that sound cue. We don't have our next guest. He will be joining in just a minute. Um, I'm, I'm just laughing about, uh, you know, I obviously I don't want to diminish your seven and a half million dollar raise. That's a great amount of, uh, funding, but, uh, it's just so funny to imagine like trying to redirect the people, like the type of people that are going to hate on a seven and a half million dollar raise are not going to understand like, well, no, no, no, look at Google's cash flow. Like they're drawing down tens of billions. Like you should be more focused

• 2:14:54John Coogan?

  on them. Uh, but they won't. I think that will fall on deaf ears. Uh, well, in the billions is Josh Kushner's new fundraising for Thrive Holdings. They're in talks to raise two plus billion dollars. Is this the Thrive Capital offshoot? Tyler's happy about it.

• 2:15:10Jordi Hays?

  They're saying he's one of the greatest capital raising athletes.

• 2:15:13John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:15:14Jordi Hays?

  All time.

• 2:15:14John Coogan?

  Bring AI to industries like accounting and IT.

• 2:15:17Jordi Hays?

  I want to pull up this video from Northwestern University. Researchers developed modular robots using AI that can adapt to damage and navigate unpredictable terrain.

• 2:15:27John Coogan?

  Is it, is it a scary robot? Or is it like a nice friendly robot?

• 2:15:29Jordi Hays?

  You're not going to like this robot.

• 2:15:30John Coogan?

  I'm hoping for, oh, that is terrifying looking. What happened here?

• 2:15:35Jordi Hays?

  Get some sound.

• 2:15:36John Coogan?

  You gotta go back to the beginning. This thing is so wild. Oh, well, uh, what a crazy...

• 2:15:42Jordi Hays?

  I can't hear anything yet.

• 2:15:43John Coogan?

  Oh, they're hitting you with a stick. Oh, no. You can't be doing that. Which is why... It can adapt to damage and navigate unpredictable terrain. Let's play, let's play some of this video. Let's play more. This is only 56 seconds.

• 2:15:55Jordi Hays?

  Playing, playing videos is a, it's kind of a lost art form.

• 2:15:59John Coogan?

  We're working on it. It goes back and forth, but apparently the leg breaks off and it keeps, keeps crawling. It keeps going. It's the Terminator.

• 2:16:06Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:07John Coogan?

  Not the one that you've seen. Let's see.

• 2:16:14Jordi Hays?

  It's crazy how terrible it looks.

• 2:16:17John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:18Jordi Hays?

  It's sending very strong negative signals to my brain.

• 2:16:22John Coogan?

  Even just like painting it blue would probably be an upgrade.

• 2:16:27Speaker 02

  I think it's so much better, it's better than when we saw the, um, I think it was the unitary get down on all fours and crawl around.

• 2:16:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was, that was terrible.

• 2:16:34John Coogan?

  There's some very...

• 2:16:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but there's just something about those movements that tells my simple human mind to run.

• 2:16:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, it spikes your cortisol.

• 2:16:43Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:16:43John Coogan?

  No?

• 2:16:44Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 2:16:45John Coogan?

  No? What else is your fear response?

• 2:16:47Jordi Hays?

  I would never let anything spike my...

• 2:16:49John Coogan?

  You said, you said it, it, it stimulates your, uh, your brain. The fear response.

• 2:16:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, I've trained my cortisol response.

• 2:16:56John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:16:57Jordi Hays?

  I've trained my, my mind to be able to...

• 2:16:59John Coogan?

  Well, so has the looks-maxing streamer Kloblikular, who has been arrested, uh, in Florida. He, uh, he was caught in a TMZ mugshot, so that's important news for those who have been following his story. Uh, the video is crazy and we'll see. It's always weird with these stories from the, the kick streamers, whether it's all, uh, you know, a planted story, whether they, you know, got something to go viral and it's engineered or they did it, you know, by accident. I don't know. Uh, but I'm sure that there will be more reporting. I believe Taylor Lorenz is on the case. Um, Nvidia-backed startup seeking to cha- counter Chinese AI eyes a $25 billion valuation. This is from, uh, Reflection. Berber Jin writes in the, in the Wall Street Journal.

• 2:17:44Speaker 02

  I wonder, I am so curious.

• 2:17:49Jordi Hays?

  What their traction, progress.

• 2:17:51John Coogan?

  Is a 25 billion dollar company, he's running like a four billion dollar, a four trillion dollar company, like can he squeeze the pennies out of the couch cushion? I think he can.

• 2:17:59Jordi Hays?

  No, no, it's not that. I'm just wondering.

• 2:18:01John Coogan?

  They're partnered with Nvidia to do open source.

• 2:18:03Jordi Hays?

  There, this is a tremendous valuation for a company that I don't believe has released a product yet, so whatever they're cooking must be pretty darn good.

• 2:18:13John Coogan?

  I'm rooting for American open source AI.

• 2:18:16Jordi Hays?

  Same.

• 2:18:16John Coogan?

  Play that eagle sound, I'm happy about it. Good luck to the folks over at Nvidia.

• 2:18:22Jordi Hays?

  Let's bring in Ryan.

• 2:18:22John Coogan?

  Let's bring in Shield AI. Ryan, how are you doing?

• 2:18:25Speaker 08

  Doing well, how are you?

• 2:18:27John Coogan?

  We're great. It sounds like you're really, really great though, because you have some big news for us. Tell us what happened.

• 2:18:33Speaker 08

  We do have some big news. We just closed our latest financing, raised $2 billion at a 12.7 billion dollar.

• 2:18:40Jordi Hays?

  Hit it again, hit it again, hit it again.

• 2:18:42Speaker 08

  There you go.

• 2:18:42Jordi Hays?

  Two hits, one for each billion.

• 2:18:46John Coogan?

  Wait, did you upsize the round? I have on my sheet 1.5 billion. It seems like the.

• 2:18:51Speaker 08

  As a preferred equity component, technically you can call it 1.5 billion. And then as part of the round, also completed an acquisition.

• 2:18:58John Coogan?

  Really?

• 2:18:58Speaker 08

  You know, the, a company called Echelon Technologies, the leader in physics-based simulation for, you know, high-end aviation training and something that's integral, I think, to the future of AI pilots and autonomy.

• 2:19:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, so, I mean, with that acquisition, sort of reintroduced the shape of the company, software, where are the integration points in the hardware? What do you build? What do you partner on? Who are you selling to? Is it all government? Is there some commercial? I imagine the business has grown. What's the shape right now?

• 2:19:29Speaker 08

  Yeah, so we sell to the United States and friends of the United States. It's all, all government, almost entirely military. If you're not familiar with the company, if your viewers aren't, aren't familiar with the company, we have two, the, the company's focused on protecting service members and civilians in the intelligence systems. You had my brother on here very early when we started.

• 2:19:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, it was great.

• 2:19:49Speaker 08

  Navy SEAL, we started the company together. The mission's very near and dear to us. The way that we get after the mission is, is twofold. Number one, building advanced aircraft, and number two, building AI pilots or advanced autonomy.

• 2:20:02John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:03Jordi Hays?

  What were you doing while, while he was serving? Were you, were you on the startup path always?

• 2:20:10Speaker 08

  Yeah, I was doing nerdy things, working at Qualcomm. I had started a company that did wireless charging. I sold that company to Qualcomm.

• 2:20:18John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:20:19Speaker 08

  And then led the wireless charging efforts at Qualcomm. And then my brother was getting out of the SEAL teams and thinking about what he wanted to do next. And long story short, he came to me and said, I want to bring the best of what's the best of what's going on in the autonomous driving sector to the mission of protecting service members and civilians. His mission was clearing buildings of threats. It was a mission type that had killed more service members and civilians than any other mission type in the preceding 20 or so years. And he felt like if we could take the best of AI and autonomy and bring it to the mission of protecting service members and civilians, it would be a really impactful thing for the world.

• 2:20:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:55Speaker 08

  I thought it was an inspirational mission. I did think it was a stupid business.

• 2:21:00Speaker 08

  My brother's a persistent person and he showed me the light and I'm glad that he did, so.

• 2:21:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, take me through the state of autonomy in the flying vehicles that the military operates because there's so many different vehicles from helicopters to fighter jets to cargo planes. Then if I'm correct, the different branches have different versions of the same airframe sometimes. And so are you selling one piece of software to multiple multiple branches of the military? Are there differences between what you're selling? Are you focused on a particular area within the different airframes that are in service right now? Like where's the biggest opportunity?

• 2:21:46Speaker 08

  Good question. So the state of the autonomy, I'll say like two components. Number one, from the market side, I think that everybody has reached a point where it's undeniable to the customer base that autonomy is one of the most important things of the future of security and stability. That wasn't the case 10 years ago, but I'd say kind of at this point, everybody's fully bought in on the need for the capability. With communications and GPS degraded, you need systems that are going to be able to see, think and act at the edge, even if they can't reach back and communicate effectively with a pilot on the ground.

• 2:22:25Speaker 08

  The state of the technology is moving incredibly fast. You can build very advanced capabilities. We see, I would say, very advanced autonomy deployed on the battlefield. Certainly, we have very advanced autonomy. What we haven't yet seen is very large-scale deployment of autonomous systems. And the focus of SHIELD AI, when it comes to the software side, is fast-forwarding the proliferation of advanced autonomous systems within the United States and friends of the United States to protect service members and civilians at scale. The hard thing about AI and autonomy when it comes to aviation, and frankly, any weapon system,

• 2:23:06Speaker 08

  is sitting at the intersection of enabling very high performance, achieving very high levels of assurance, and supporting very fast development cycles. Traditionally, in this business, it's been pick maybe one, or if you're lucky, two of those three things. You achieve high performance, but it took you a really long time. Or it might not be something that you can certify as airworthy or certify it in a weapon system because, you know, there's just too many things that could go wrong. Or you get a very high level of assurance, but it's just really stupid autonomy, and it took you a long time to build. And so everything that SHIELD AI has focused on building is basically the industrialization of autonomy to fast-forward the proliferation of autonomy by creating, basically, you know, pipelines

• 2:23:51Speaker 08

  that enable developers in countries and companies to deliver high-performance, high-assurance autonomy at the speed of relevance.

• 2:23:59John Coogan?

  I have a few sort of random scattershot questions to help me understand the state of autonomy in military equipment. Do tanks have lane-keep assist? Does cruise control exist on a C-130? Like, are there, is America taking a walk, crawl, run system? Or are we going to jump straight into like AI dogfighting? Because that feels like the Mount Everest of the autonomy challenge versus just like you're tired and your tank is rolling down the highway and you don't want to bump into the person in front of you.

• 2:24:36Speaker 08

  Yeah, well, one of the amazing things about The US military and militaries in general, the spectrum of capability that's in the inventory. There are literally planes that are 80 years old and still fly.

• 2:24:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:48Speaker 08

  And then you have stuff that's that's fresh off the line. So you have the full spectrum of stuff that has the equivalent of landkeep assist to the stuff that is fully manual.

• 2:24:57John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:24:57Speaker 08

  A lot of the focus is on bringing advanced autonomy to the newest systems because that's sort of the easiest to cut in.

• 2:25:02John Coogan?

  That makes sense.

• 2:25:03Speaker 08

  And with the amount of technological change and the huge step up in volumes of systems being deployed in places, you know, around the world, there's just like ample opportunity to cut that software in as new things are coming off the line. We are starting to see some interest in sort of backwards application of advanced autonomy to legacy systems. Because certainly, you know, things are around for a long time. And the more advanced autonomy you can apply kind of throughout your force structure, the more advantage you're going to have. And so certainly we see developments in that area as well.

• 2:25:35John Coogan?

  Talk to me about how your progress tracks with the AI progress in the big labs that we see news from every day. Like the models of the big labs, the LLM companies are getting bigger, they're GPU constrained, they're data constrained. Is that, are the advances in the, in the more like consumer focused, coding focused AI labs, is that transferring and accelerating your progress either because you're reading research papers? Like Google put out one about optimizing KV caches and I could imagine that applies to some companies. The transformer paper might apply to your business.

• 2:26:15John Coogan?

  Or, or at least are you getting benefits from like, yeah, like we're able to use coding models to advance what the software that we're writing at Shield AI?

• 2:26:25Speaker 08

  The benefits are across the full stack, from development to deployed edge systems. The thing that we do is focus on enabling the intersection of high performance and high assurance at the same time. So you know, it's like these models that are used throughout the consumer space and the amount of progress, you see very high levels of performance, you see very fast iteration speed. And then you have things like hallucinations that can. You know, can be counterproductive, which is okay if like you're writing, you know, an essay and make some stuff up. But if you're trying to disambiguate between blue force and red force and you're going to make, you know, consequential decisions, those things are tougher to deal with. Or if it's going to result in your airplane flying into the dirt, tougher to deal with.

• 2:27:07Speaker 08

  And so we absolutely use those things and we bring it together with frameworks that impose very high levels of assurance on the decision making of the algorithms.

• 2:27:15Jordi Hays?

  What, how are, how are the various like Shahed systems? Are they, are they primarily, what do we know about them? Are they primarily remote piloted? Are they using, is there any element that's actually autonomous? Or are they just kind of picking a spot on the map? And sending it off and kind of just saying like, hopefully we hit our target, at least we'll create some chaos.

• 2:27:42Speaker 08

  Yeah. Good, good, good question. So typically those are GPS guided munitions. So they pick a spot on the map and they send it. And then it's got, you know, they can have some terminal guidance that helps it like hit something of value.

• 2:27:58Jordi Hays?

  Terminal, what is, what is terminal?

• 2:28:01Speaker 08

  Sorry, terminal guidance is just to make sure that, you know, a weapon is tracking toward something of interest and so someone.

• 2:28:09Jordi Hays?

  And so if, if one of those turns goes into us, into an area where there's GPS jamming or denial. Is it falling back to camera? It's just going to like still do its best to hit the original target. Like, what do we?

• 2:28:22Speaker 08

  It depends on how sophisticated it is. I would say that like Shahed's by and large and are GPS guided munitions. But some munitions will have cameras that like, so it doesn't fly into blank pavement. It might be able to see like a truck or something else that would look like a valid military target to just make small course corrections that enables like a weapon to hit that instead of an empty parking lot would be the type of corrections that can be made during terminal guidance as opposed to like the, the long transit portion of the mission. But, you know, those types of systems and the same, the same challenge exists in the United States, if you're. If you're just picking targets off of maps without like good intelligence and good

• 2:29:06Speaker 08

  updates and the ability to provide course corrections based on you know what you you're seeing on the edge, you can end up you know wasting a lot of munitions with little effect.

• 2:29:18Jordi Hays?

  What's been your reaction to the news out of Barksdale, Louisiana? I've seen a bunch of reporting this week around some unknown drones flying around the airbase. I don't know how much you can share there, but like this seems like something where an opportunity to assess some enemy's capability, but it feels like there's drones are like the thing I've been processing is like it's it seems like you know historically if you built like an exquisite system like an F-35 and you have a pilot in it, you can't exactly go and test it in in an environment in an enemy environment very easily because you'll

• 2:30:03Jordi Hays?

  you know risk starting a conflict or losing the the plane, all these different things. Whereas with inexpensive drones, like why why would an adversary not just send them out around the world to start testing their capabilities in like a live setting because worst case scenario, you lose the asset, but you know it's it's not super consequential when you look at these overall budgets. So.

• 2:30:25Speaker 08

  Yeah. Well, good, good, good question. One, I'm actually not tracking the latest news in Louisiana. I'll go look it up right after the fact, but I can tell you counter UAS is a major problem for governments globally. These things can be hard to deal with, and if you engage in kinetically, the question of collateral damage becomes one that that is an important consideration. The the small drones that can harass military bases, yes, or like, you know, the.

• 2:30:58Speaker 08

  Other countries can do the same with their largest pieces of hardware. And that's why you see the Chinese like running major military exercises around Taiwan. You know, they could stick to quadcopters, but they choose to use the full spectrum of their capabilities to intimidate and shape the environment. But you did call out something that I think is also very important, which it can be hard to fly your capabilities around and understand their true potential. When you think about some of the security challenges in the Pacific, the distances are so vast, and then if you look at the range space in America, it's relatively confined. And so how do you rehearse and think through some of the problem sets when your range space is way smaller than the theater? And that's where capabilities like Echelon, the simulation environment, come into play.

• 2:31:42Jordi Hays?

  That's your new acquisition.

• 2:31:45Speaker 08

  That's the new acquisition. And so there's a program called the Joint Simulation Environment that started to get after the problem of we can't rehearse the way that we used to because the domains are so large. And what, once people had this realization, they're like, great, well, maybe we'll try in simulation. And what they found in simulation is that there was stove piping across vendors. Every vendor's had their own simulation. Every vehicle platform had its own simulator. And then if you were in space, or on the sea, or in the air, you had a different simulator. And then, by the way, across countries, you had different simulation systems. And so Echelon became the leader in the Joint Simulation Environment, which is one of the reasons we're so excited about it, because it is the only multinational, multi-domain,

• 2:32:30Speaker 08

  multi-vendor, and there's one more multi in there, in the world. And it creates this unbelievable foundation to enable not just what it does today, which is training and rehearsal against like high-end threats and complex scenarios, but it creates the opportunity to introduce, well, what do autonomous systems do in that same sort of environment? So the things like collaborative combat aircraft or advanced weapons, those things get pulled into the environment. And now you can see, well, this is how humans and AI are able to work together in these scenarios to inform the designs of those things. And if you continue to play that forward and you see, you know, it's my belief that in every vertical... Whether it's A and D medicine, like pick your thing.

• 2:33:16Speaker 08

  Vertical leaders will show up when they figure out how to close the feedback loops between, you know, the data aggregation and generation through training, through deployment, and close that loop in their domain. And one of the things we're very excited to do with Echelon and Shield AI together, we're the leader in AI pilots. You might have seen the United States Air Force announcement that Shield is one of the two companies selected to build AI pilots of the collaborative combat aircraft. And so we have some great work on that front. And now by taking the simulation leader across services and domains, we can start substantially scaling that simulation environment,

• 2:33:58Speaker 08

  augmenting all of the real world data and start closing that loop to build extremely high-performance AI pilots that we're able to test against the authoritative threat models with the authoritative blue force models and also train US and allied forces to fight effectively with those AI pilots as part of their formation. So we're very excited about it in the short term and on a decadal basis.

• 2:34:27John Coogan?

  Decadal basis, I like that term. Yeah, decade, thinking in decades, literally. I've never heard that before.

• 2:34:33Jordi Hays?

  What does the actual interface, what are the, like, the interface of Echelon look like? Is it, is this like, am I thinking like flight simulator type of thing? Or is it more, you know, you're just kind of running a simulation and seeing?

• 2:34:47Speaker 08

  Yeah, so you can think of it a very simple view of like a flight simulator. But, you know, with a proper, if you've seen like a flight simulation dome.

• 2:34:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:34:59Speaker 08

  Very realistic physics, very realistic sensor models to include radar, night vision, E O I R or regular light cameras, appropriate physics, appropriate red forces with like, not just like video game style, but these are the actual capabilities across like the electromagnetic and visible spectrum that really enables very advanced training and understanding of performance.

• 2:35:28Jordi Hays?

  Fascinating.

• 2:35:29John Coogan?

  Well, thank you so much for taking the time on a busy launch day. Congrats on the progress and have a great rest.

• 2:35:35Jordi Hays?

  I'm really glad you guys are building this company.

• 2:35:38John Coogan?

  This feels extremely.

• 2:35:38Speaker 08

  Yeah, I appreciate it. Thank you. Love the gong, by the way, and thanks to the two gong strikes.

• 2:35:43John Coogan?

  Of course, of course. It's massive progress.

• 2:35:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, great to have you on, Ryan.

• 2:35:48John Coogan?

  We're glad and thankful for everything that you're doing with the with the rest of the team. So, thank you.

• 2:35:53Speaker 08

  All right.

• 2:35:54John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day. Let me tell you about Figma. Agents, meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your Figma files with the Zion system context in beta starting today. Go check it out.

• 2:36:06Jordi Hays?

  Bill Ackman is saying he's likely down 20% year to date now. He was, I believe, took a big position in Meta not too long ago.

• 2:36:17John Coogan?

  Yeah, he had some contrarian takes. I don't know. It might pencil out. I don't know.

• 2:36:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think it's still, I'm still like, it'd be silly to be bearish on Meta over the long run, but certainly.

• 2:36:30John Coogan?

  Buco Capital bloke gave some more context on what's happening in the market. He said, "The market is just a guy staring at two screens. One has Truth Social, the other is Anthropic's blog. In front of him are five buttons that say Software, Semis, European Defense, Energy, and Gold. Trump or Anthropic post, and he hits a button to make those stocks move 5% up or 5% down." It is, it does feel like that's the nature of the market these days.

• 2:36:56John Coogan?

  Signal had a funny screenshot here. Someone built a, or assumingly vibe-coded an app that turns any TV into a retro flip-flap, split-flap display. These are very cool. You've seen these. They flip around. You see them in old airport terminals for when the flights are leaving. Wayne chimes in and says, "I'm very likely going to build this with Claude Code this afternoon and post a link to a free download to this thread, because this is absolutely ridiculous to suggest that someone should pay $199 for something that probably took about 18 minutes to make."

• 2:37:35John Coogan?

  And Yash, the creator, says, "I will look for your post." And exactly one minute later, "Open source my tool to render your efforts a total waste. Try me." And so, there's a little bit of a standoff in the vibe-coding world. I thought that was very, very funny. Is there anything else you want to?

• 2:37:53Jordi Hays?

  Lastly, some text from.

• 2:37:57Jordi Hays?

  Q1 of last year, Mark Zuckerberg texts Elon. Looks like Doge is making progress. I've got our teams on alert to take down content doxing or threatening the people on your team. Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help. Elon reacted, heart. And he says, are you open to the idea of bidding on the OpenAI IP with me and some others? Zach says, want to discuss live?

• 2:38:17John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 2:38:19Jordi Hays?

  And Matthew Zeitlin, former guest, says you can tell who is used to antitrust investigations.

• 2:38:25John Coogan?

  Well, stay safe out there. If you're planning on bidding for some IP and you're chatting with the richest man in the world, yeah, maybe stick to a phone call. Who knows? Well, good luck out there.

• 2:38:42Jordi Hays?

  It will be an interesting weekend of news. The markets are now closed, which means...

• 2:38:48John Coogan?

  We can go to... Where do we go on the weekends? To the beach?

• 2:38:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, I was gonna say it means that you want to be refreshing Truth Social.

• 2:38:57John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:38:58Jordi Hays?

  If you want to stay up to date.

• 2:38:59John Coogan?

  And it's red. We closed way down. The S&P closed down 1.67.

• 2:39:05Jordi Hays?

  Good opportunity to touch grass. But next Monday, we've got Take Him, Logan Bartlett, we got Cody Co. joining. We got Cody Co. going back to back with Brett Adcock.

• 2:39:17John Coogan?

  Let's go.

• 2:39:18Jordi Hays?

  Never before on a podcast have we had Cody Co. and Brett Adcock back to back.

• 2:39:25John Coogan?

  Territory. I'm very excited. I've been a huge fan of Cody Co. for a long time. I watch a ton of his YouTube videos. It will be very fun. Leave us five stars on our podcast on Spotify, sign up for our newsletter at tbpm.com.

• 2:39:34Jordi Hays?

  We hope you have the best weekend of your life.

• 2:39:35John Coogan?

  We will see you Monday.

• 2:39:36Jordi Hays?

  We love you.

• 2:39:37John Coogan?

  Bye. Flashbang!