Netflix's Size is Not Size, Ads in Google Gemini, Prediction Markets on a Tear | Rich Greenfield, Delian Asparouhov, Sarah Harrelson, Morgan Housel, Andrew Pignanelli, Brian Mehler, Will Wilson

(01:57) - Rich Greenfield, a partner and media analyst at LightShed Partners, discusses the complexities of the ongoing bidding war between Netflix and Paramount for Warner Bros., highlighting the antitrust implications and the evolving competitive landscape in the streaming industry. He emphasizes that defining the market narrowly to only include premium subscription streaming services overlooks the vast competition from platforms like YouTube and traditional television, making antitrust evaluations challenging. Greenfield also notes that both Netflix and Paramount aim to leverage Warner Bros.' extensive content library to enhance their offerings, with Netflix's algorithmic prowess potentially revitalizing underutilized assets. (21:06) - Timeline Reactions to WB Bidding War (44:11) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (53:52) - Prediction Markets on a Tear (01:03:11) - Delian Asparouhov is a Partner at Founders Fund and Co-Founder and President of Varda Space Industries, a company pioneering in-space manufacturing of pharmaceuticals and advanced materials. In the conversation, he discusses the appointment of Jared Isaacman as NASA Administrator, emphasizing Isaacman's leadership qualities and the positive impact on the commercial space industry. He also explores the strategic importance of lunar missions, advocating for the Moon as a critical step toward Mars exploration, and highlights the potential of space-based infrastructure like mass drivers for efficient transportation of materials. (01:32:03) - Sarah Harrelson, founder and editor-in-chief of Cultured magazine, discusses the magazine's focus on contemporary arts and its holistic approach to content. She shares insights on the evolving art market, noting a recent correction and the importance of collectors who buy in both good and bad markets. Harrelson also reflects on the current challenges facing Los Angeles's art scene, emphasizing the need for new theaters and innovative approaches to engage audiences. (02:01:25) - Google Adding Ads to Gemini in 2026 (02:06:57) - 𝕏 Timeline Reactions (02:17:32) - Morgan Housel is a partner at The Collaborative Fund and a former columnist for The Wall Street Journal and The Motley Fool. He is the author of the best-selling books "The Psychology of Money" and "Same As Ever," which have sold millions of copies worldwide. In the conversation, Housel discusses his current focus on reading and contemplating future projects, the challenges authors face in balancing audience expectations with creative freedom, and the importance of honest marketing in building a long-term brand. (02:36:55) - Andrew Pignanelli, co-founder and CEO of The General Intelligence Company of New York, discusses the company's mission to enable one-person, billion-dollar businesses through AI agents. He highlights their recent $8.7 million seed funding led by Union Square Ventures and introduces "Cofounder," an AI chief of staff designed to proactively assist businesses by automating tasks and integrating with various tools. Pignanelli envisions a future where AI agents manage entire companies, allowing entrepreneurs to focus on strategic decisions while agents handle day-to-day operations. (02:45:43) - Brian Mehler, CEO of Stable, discusses the recent launch of Stable's mainnet, a Layer 1 blockchain designed to streamline financial transactions using stablecoins, with USDT serving as the native gas token. He highlights the network's key differentiators, including its partnerships with PayPal Ventures and Anchorage Digital, and the use of USDT for transaction fees to simplify user experience. Mehler also emphasizes the network's speed and cost-effectiveness compared to traditional Layer 1 blockchains, aiming to address common frustrations in financial transactions. (02:50:41) - Will Wilson, CEO and co-founder of Antithesis, discusses his company's approach to improving software reliability through deterministic simulation testing. He explains that traditional testing methods often fail to uncover unforeseen issues, whereas Antithesis's platform runs software in a controlled, simulated environment to identify and reproduce rare bugs. Wilson also highlights the significance of their partnership with Jane Street, which began as a customer relationship and evolved into a strategic investment, underscoring the platform's effectiveness in enhancing software quality. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVBN. Today's Monday, December 8, 2025. We are live from the TVBN Ultradome, the Temple of Technology, the Fortunes of Finance, the capital of capital. We have new merch in stock. It's not for sale.

• 0:14Jordi Hays?

  Look how festive it looks. Let's go to the wide with the tree.

• 0:17John Coogan?

  We got the tree with the horse.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  The horse. Can we get the horse cam up?

• 0:20John Coogan?

  Okay. Team is gonna have some fun with the PTZs, move around, figure out what's going on, show you the rest of the studio. We've been having a lot of fun. Also, we've been expensing things on ramp. Time is money. Save Both. Easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, accounting, a whole lot more, all in one place. We've, we have some new merch. We're very excited about this. This will be making its way out into the world.

• 0:42Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 0:43John Coogan?

  We are also excited to talk about Netflix.

• 0:47Jordi Hays?

  This is your first time all year in a sort of a casual fit?

• 0:50John Coogan?

  It is. It is. I have zero days off. I have that dog in me, unlike you, who's been lazy, cozy maxing, taking days off at left and right. The chat is not a fan of whenever you you go casual. I understand that I have a job to do and I'm a professional. And so, but today's a special day because we do have new merch and it's a lot of fun.

• 1:12Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:12John Coogan?

  And so we wanted to show it off. Even Tyler's in it. Tyler's in it as well.

• 1:15Jordi Hays?

  So, some big news this morning.

• 1:18John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:19Jordi Hays?

  I wanted to start this off with a post from Pika Capital. They were highlighting so Paramount is launching a hostile bid worth $108 billion to acquire WB. Pika says, this is crazy. HBO should make a show about billionaire media tycoons trying to buy other media conglomerate and highlight all the behind the scenes drama. So, without further ado, let's bring in our first guest of the show, Rich Greenfield. And we can ask him a bunch of questions. He's a true expert in, in, in the space.

• 1:54John Coogan?

  Yes. Yes. Let's bring him in from the restroom waiting room. Thank you so much for taking the time to jump on the show at last minute. We're also celebrating.

• 2:02Jordi Hays?

  Christmas theme today.

• 2:03John Coogan?

  Celebrating the holiday.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  I want some of your merch. I need some of that merch all there.

• 2:08Jordi Hays?

  We'll overnight some to you. Thank you for joining last minute. So I know in, what is it, 12 minutes, you have got to jump to another call. So let's, let's get right into it. Why don't you give kind of a quick intro on yourself and then we can talk about all the news.

• 2:24Speaker 02

  So I follow media stocks, firm as light shed. We founded it a little over six years ago. We talk all things tech, media, telecom, and we have been obviously following closely what happens with Warner Brothers. And we've had a three-way bidding war. Comcast dropped out, so now we have a two-way bidding war. The board obviously chose Netflix, Paramount is unhappy and is trying to go over the top and go directly to shareholders to get their offer accepted.

• 2:56John Coogan?

  How do you think the antitrust stuff plays into this? Is that something that we're going to see a year from now, once this, like, the current back and forth is resolved, or does it have an effect right now?

• 3:09Speaker 02

  I mean, the irony is, like, think about what we're doing right now.

• 3:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Like, you guys, actually, what you guys are doing and your success to date

• 3:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16Speaker 02

  actually is what makes this antitrust-wise so difficult. Because just imagine, how do you look at this and say, oh, you can't look at YouTube? You can't compare YouTube, right? Like, you can't compare Twitter and live video. Like, what is the market for video?

• 3:32Jordi Hays?

  There's infinite, there's infinite competition.

• 3:35Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, so that's the thing, like, you know, Netflix started talking about YouTube as their competition for time, you know, over a decade ago.

• 3:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  You know, if you're looking at only streaming, are we only going to look at professional streaming? So we're only going to look at Netflix, HBO Max, Disney Plus, and Hulu? If that was the constructs, let's just say we'll take the narrowest, you know, sort of silo to look at this, Netflix is 24% of time spent in streaming, premium streaming today. So that's no YouTube, no linear TV.

• 4:07John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  If you add on HBO Max, you get to 28%.

• 4:10John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 4:11Speaker 02

  Still doesn't seem to violate any antitrust problem. It's certainly a lot, but it's certainly no 40, 50% market share. But... You know, when you watch the NFL on Netflix, you also watch the NFL on ABC and you watch the NFL on CBS. So how is that not part of the competitive landscape? And heck, you know, you two, I don't know if each of you have YouTube TV or have Sunday Ticket, but Sunday Ticket is on YouTube, right? Like, so to sort of narrowly define the market as only being premium subscription streaming seems a little crazy. And even when you think about movie theaters, like some movies come out in movie theaters, some movies come out on streaming.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Are we only going to look at this as sort of like, what's the impact on movie theaters? Or are we going to think about, hey, you know, if Netflix actually owns the movie studio, they'll still do some movies in theaters, but they're going to make a lot more movies in total. And so the antitrust side of this is so complicated. And I, you look, I can certainly make the argument why this is illegal. But the question is, would that actually hold up in court? A court actually has to come out and say, this is illegal. That's where it gets much more difficult. Because if you remember back, not that long ago, guys, you know, the government sued AT&T Time Warner under the Trump administration, the first Trump administration, and they lost in court and the deal closed.

• 5:33John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it was kind of, it kind of wound up being a bad deal, right? Or it was like, maybe they should have stayed separate. Is that the way we remember that or no?

• 5:42Speaker 02

  I mean, the way I certainly remember it is, is when they told them they had to sell something, they should have sold something. They would have done a lot better off, you know, listening to the government. But they fought so they didn't have to sell anything. The rest is history. But my point is, we're still a nation of laws. Like, you actually have to have a legal basis for blocking the transaction. You have to bring a lawsuit and win in court.

• 6:04John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. I was laughing to myself because I was looking for like, the perfect tweet to sum up the fervor around, oh, this is going to create a monopoly. This is a, you know, Netflix is going to face antitrust for this. And I found a bunch of tweets that were people basically saying like, I miss when Netflix was a monopoly and they had everything. And now I have to go all over to all these six different bundles. And I'm like, that's anecdotal, but it's still a funny, funny sentiment out there.

• 6:30Speaker 02

  I mean, the reality is, like, honestly, how often do you turn on HBO Max? Like, honestly, like, how often are you actually watching that? I mean, the viewership is actually pretty small. Like, I love Last of Us. I like White Lotus, but I'm not just turning it on. I mean, the biggest problem HBO has is it's not a daily use activity.

• 6:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, it's like a Sunday night, once a week, when there's a show that's so big in the zeitgeist, if I'm not watching it, people will actively call me out and be like, "You're not watching White Lotus? You're not watching Success... You're not watching Game of Thrones?" And I feel like I'm crazy. And so, I call it like FOMO TV, which is really good. It's like, if I'm not tapped into Game of Thrones, I feel like I'm missing out. Netflix hasn't been able to cover that as much. I feel like they haven't created as much of that. Do you... What do you think this says about Netflix? Is it an admission that they have yet to create that much IP that will be around in 50 years? Batman, I think, is going to be around in 50 years. Squid Game?

• 7:31John Coogan?

  I don't know if we're going to be able to see Squid Game Halloween costumes in 50 years. What do you think this deal says about Netflix's position?

• 7:39Speaker 02

  Look, I think what it says more than anything is that, you know, I mean, Netflix has certainly had a bit more trouble growing engagement over the course of the last year. It's picking up, it's doing better. I mean, they've definitely had a very good slate in the last six months. But engagement isn't growing as much as I think investors would like it to be, especially, you know, again, who is growing engagement the fastest in all of television? It's YouTube.

• 8:01John Coogan?

  YouTube, yeah.

• 8:02Speaker 02

  Which is, you know, probably obvious to a lot of people who are not senior media executives, right? But like, if you look at like consumers, they certainly know. I have three kids, I certainly see the growth of YouTube. There's no doubt that that is the fastest growing place. And I think AI is only going to accelerate that as it gets easier and easier to create higher quality content across the YouTube user-generated ecosystem.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  So I think part of this is Netflix is looking at this going, we need even more IP to play with. If we had all of this IP, we could make even more content. We could move faster. We could, I mean, think about it. You were watching things like Ballers.

• 8:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Not on, and Six Feet Under, not on HBO. People were watching it on Netflix because they licensed it to Netflix. Netflix has this incredible algorithm.

• 8:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  That helps content get discovered.

• 8:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  And I think that's a huge power to this transaction is elevating stuff that is in this Warner Brothers catalog that people just haven't been watching. And so I think that's what Netflix is looking at here is how can we take one plus one and make it equal more than two? By making more content.

• 9:07John Coogan?

  Do you believe that in the K-pop Demon Hunters example? That if K-pop Demon Hunters had not been on Netflix and instead been Warner Brothers small theatrical release, you know, and then put out somewhere, that it wouldn't have been this phenomenon? And the fact that stuff can kind of go viral in the Netflix algorithm. Do you, do you like that thesis?

• 9:29Speaker 02

  I mean, stuff does go viral. I mean, Netflix impacts culture, right? I mean, whether it was Squid Game, look at this show, you know, this, this series in the UK adolescent that premiered on Netflix and blew up all around the world and started having, you know, parents were having some very tough conversations with kids after that because of sort of how impactful it was and how moving. Like, content really does go viral on Netflix and it's part of it's the algorithm, part of it's the interface, part of it's the global infrastructure. And, and, you know, again, you need a service that is used a lot. You know, think about TikTok, think about Reels. Why are those algorithms so good at finding stuff that the two of you want to watch every day? It's because they have so many inputs. It's learning, it's seeing your behaviors.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  The more you engage, the better the algorithm is. The problem with so many of these services, you just mentioned it with HBO, but it would be the same thing with Hulu or Disney Plus or any of these other services. You don't use them that much. And so there isn't that much data to train the algorithm. That is what Netflix is really good at. And I think that's the opportunity of putting these two companies together. It's certainly what Paramount is hoping to get by trying to buy this. Paramount needs a bigger streaming service that is used more often because Paramount Plus, like HBO Max, are both lightly used services.

• 10:43John Coogan?

  Sure, sure. Yeah, that makes sense.

• 10:44Jordi Hays?

  Okay, let's, let's talk about the $108 billion.

• 10:51Jordi Hays?

  That feels like a crazy number. Why do you like the the original Netflix bid, you know, felt felt rich and this feels like on another level?

• 11:03John Coogan?

  Also, the company has tripled in value over the last like six months.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Look, I think you have to step back. Remember, on the on the Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers is splitting into two companies. Paramount is trying to buy the whole thing. So, you know, some of this is a little bit confusing.

• 11:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Right. Paramount is buying everything, meaning the cable network. So they're buying CNN. They're buying the Discovery Channel Food Network. Netflix is not. Netflix is just buying the Warner Brothers studio, which includes the gaming studio, the film and the TV studio, as well as HBO. Whereas Paramount is buying everything. And so these are a little bit apples and oranges. That's why 2775 is actually greater than 30, at least in the if you're the Warner Brothers board. They said that 2775 plus the spun out company is a bigger number than 30.

• 11:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  We can debate that, but they believe that they are getting $31 or $32 in value because of the spun off company. You know, that's the reality here. I don't think this tender offer on the face of it is going to move the board. I think the real question for all of your viewers out there is, is this going to cause Paramount to raise their bid further? Because I don't think I doubt Warner Brothers comes back and says, you know, we like this better. My guess is they're going to say this is still an inferior offer versus Netflix. Sorry. And then it'll be up to Paramount to say, do they want to go to 32 or 34 or 36? Like, where do they want to go next? Do they have more money?

• 12:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:35John Coogan?

  And just to be clear, I believe that the Netflix deal leaves behind the the cable assets, which are about $5 a share. Warner Brothers is currently at $27 a share. So it implies like a $12 billion value on those assets. So you should add that to Netflix offer if you want to get like the fair market of the full value.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  No, because you have you have debt attached to it. So you've got it. You've got debt that's being left on it. So you look. You're somewhere between, let's just say in round numbers, you're probably two to three dollars. Could you be at, you know, Paramount says it's only a dollar. Other people say it's at four. Yeah. Let's just say it's somewhere in the middle. It's two to three dollars a share is probably a reasonable starting point. For what this asset is worth. I mean, look, it's hard to know. It doesn't trade yet. Yeah. So we're talking about the value of a theoretical public company. Sure. That is a dangerous thing to opine on. Especially when you're a levered company because very small differences in valuation have a pretty meaningful impact. And so. Look, I think the reality is, the question is now, the Warner board already made their decision.

• 13:39Speaker 02

  The only way I think this, you know, I'd be surprised if the Warner board did anything different. Unless there was a notably superior offer from Paramount. Yeah. Which we'll see in time, you know, this, like, you're already levering up a lot. I mean, you know, I think one of the things that was really misunderstood. There was this story going around for weeks that, you know, Larry Ellison was writing a check himself, like he was buying this with his, you know. He'd be selling his Oracle stock and he was basically buying this. The reality is, is Ellison is putting up a portion of the dollars, but a lot of the dollars are actually coming from capital they've raised from the Middle East. You know, you've got 24 plus billion dollars is coming from three.

• 14:18Jordi Hays?

  Basically double their, double their, double the Ellison's investment, right?

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Correct. And so the question is, is, is there more capital? Like, is Ellison not willing to spend more? You know, he's backstopping the whole thing, but how much money does he actually want to put in? How much leverage will banks put on this? That is a big question, you know, you're probably, and when you close this deal, you're probably around six. Times, maybe even a little bit more times levered. That's a pretty high leverage. They'll work it down quickly. But it is a pretty high leverage on media assets in 2020. I probably closed in 2020, late 26, 27. That's a lot of leverage. Yeah.

• 14:57Jordi Hays?

  Well, and, and you gotta look at Oracle itself is, is, is pretty levered. So they're the. Father, son are going all in.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, I don't know. I mean, look, there are certainly regulatory issues. I mean, it's funny how Hollywood was coming out and Hollywood was like, oh, we don't like this Netflix transaction. But, you know, combining two studios, I mean, Disney and Fox merged and Fox is, you know, Fox has basically, you know, been reduced to almost nothing. I mean, they don't make a lot of movies anymore, you know, and so, you know, putting two studios together, they can say they're gonna make 30 movies. It would be hard to imagine in three or four years, anybody making 30 movies. I mean, I don't know about, you know, you guys, but like, attendance to movie theaters, Yeah. like, just actual butts in seats. Yeah. Is almost 50% lower in 25 than it was in 2019. So, pre and post pandemic.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  Huge change. 50% reduction. Yeah. In seats, you know, butts in seats, like, that's a huge change. And so, the movie business, I mean, the funny thing is, everyone is talking about, like, oh, my God, the movie business can't change, or, you know, don't hurt the movie business, or don't change the theatrical experience. Consumers are voting with their feet. Consumers have pulled back dramatically on going to movie theaters. I think the movie theater business needs to change and needs to adapt to the realities of, like, unlimited content. I mean, look at what we're doing right now. I mean, you're directly competing with a service like CNBC, like, there is, competition keeps growing from this thing called the internet, and it's not stopping anytime soon.

• 16:38Jordi Hays?

  What should viewers be looking out for this week as the story evolves?

• 16:44Speaker 02

  I guess there's very little this, I mean, look, who knows? I mean, Netflix is gonna speak in a few minutes, which is why I've gotta hop. But, you know, I think investors are probably gonna be trying to figure out two things. One, you know, is Paramount really willing or able to go higher than $30 a share in cash, number one. And two, what is, you know, if they do, what is Netflix's willingness to go above their current bid? I mean, it clearly seems like Netflix raised their offer a couple of times. And so, will Netflix ultimately, in order to seal this, not seal this, but to ensure that it doesn't become unsealed, will Netflix have to raise their bid? I think those are the two things. And as both of you said,

• 17:26Speaker 02

  The price for this is already pretty astronomical. I mean, this was an asset trading at six or seven dollars a share, not that long ago. Now we're talking about effectively-

• 17:35Jordi Hays?

  We have a friend that I'm sure, I'm sure you're friends with too, who was like, there are no other bidders here. And he's like, could not be more connected. This was like, six weeks ago. He was just fully convinced-

• 17:47John Coogan?

  When there were those rumors of a bidding war emerging and people were debating-

• 17:50Speaker 02

  People didn't think there would be one. They thought it was just paramount just win-

• 17:53John Coogan?

  Paramount just running away with it. Yep. But yeah, here we are.

• 17:58Speaker 02

  And I think this is Netflix looking opportunistically and going, hey, you know, can we really, we see what's, how the industry is changing. Can we opportunistically acquire this content? And, you know, basically light a fire under it, meaning like, really, really accelerate the visibility and growth and in, of all of this content. Cause there's just, there is so much content inside of Warner Brothers that has been lying fallow that like, you know, think about when Disney bought Marvel and you got things like Black Panther, right? And, you know, Guardians of the Galaxy, things that you didn't know were really sitting in that library. My guess is there is so much content to play with. That's what's really going on here. And I think that's why Netflix, I mean, again, I would agree, six weeks ago,

• 18:43Speaker 02

  we wrote a piece. There was no way in my mind that Netflix was buying this. I was totally and utterly wrong.

• 18:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. Makes, makes a lot of sense. Last, last, last, last question. Who do you, like, for just film and television enthusiasts, who do you think is, who do you think they're better off with owning, owning Warner Brothers?

• 19:03Speaker 02

  I think the reality is both of these companies are going to inject, I mean, they both want this asset because they want to build with it. So I think ultimately, putting either the, you know, putting Netflix and their global platform behind this, putting the Ellison's with their, you know, second wealthiest family in the world behind it. Either way, I think if you're, you know, if you love content, you're going to get a lot more content out of this combined company than you are today. I mean, HBO, again, doesn't make many shows in a given year. You're going to get a lot more content.

• 19:34Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic. Thank you for hanging out.

• 19:35John Coogan?

  Any picks for movie of the year personally? What'd you like this year? Did you see anything? Or are you also just scrolling short form? So actually, I haven't seen a movie. I mostly stick to analyzing the stocks.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  I mean, look, I mean, Avatar's coming out in a couple of weeks.

• 19:52John Coogan?

  I'm excited for that.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  It's always hard to bet against.

• 19:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  It's always hard to bet against Jim Cameron. I mean, my guess is it probably won't all be in this calendar year, but it probably will be the biggest single dollar, you know, from a box office standpoint, probably the biggest box, even, even if it doesn't live up to the last couple of avatars in box office, it probably still is the biggest box office film of the year.

• 20:10John Coogan?

  That's a great reminder. We got to figure out how to get everyone to see that in the biggest IMAX in Los Angeles in the theater, because that's going to be a wild experience. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  Text me if you learn anything.

• 20:21John Coogan?

  We will see you.

• 20:21Jordi Hays?

  And I'll add it. I'll fill people in.

• 20:23John Coogan?

  Have a great rest of your day.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  And get me some merch.

• 20:25John Coogan?

  We will.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  I want some merch.

• 20:26Jordi Hays?

  We're on it. Guys, text me your address. Cheers.

• 20:30John Coogan?

  Turbo Popper, serverless vector and full text search built from first principles on object storage, fast, 10x cheaper and extremely scalable. Our buddy Riley Walls was posting on the timeline, how do you search vector embeddings? Did you see this? And Jeff Dean replied, who's like the most legendary computer scientist, founder of Google Brain, still a DeepMind legend, and breaks down how to do it sort of like locally. And then everyone else in the comments was just like Turbo Popper, Turbo Popper, Turbo Popper, Turbo Popper. It was awesome. It was a really funny, funny exchange. Anyway, my, I mean, that was very informative. My, my take today was basically like, pretty soft take, just saying like, people who are

• 21:14John Coogan?

  saying that Netflix plus Warner Brothers is the worst possible outcome. I was talking to you about this on Friday. I think they're sort of overplaying that narrative because I could imagine Warner Brothers and Disney being more monopolistic, or Warner Brothers going to Google and YouTube and being like free on YouTube, being like way more anti-competitive. And so this, the Netflix Warner Brothers, like at the very least, it's like the third, the third worst case scenario if you're going to play that game. And as we, as we talked, like, there just really is so much. Competition in media because media is

• 21:51Jordi Hays?

  Anybody can be a media company.

• 21:52John Coogan?

  Exactly. And there's so many free options. And then there's also video games. And

• 21:56Jordi Hays?

  And I think you can argue with how good some video models are getting and, and, uh, you know, audio and voice models, like you, it's, it's going to be even like, you're going to be able to make a cartoon as a single individual and make like many, many, you know, many, many episodes, seasons, right? There's going to be more, more competition than ever at the actual like con- in the content layer.

• 22:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 22:21Jordi Hays?

  Uh, even if some of the platforms consolidate.

• 22:24John Coogan?

  I mean, yeah, just a lot of people are putting on a, they're, they're straight up putting on a two hour podcast instead of a movie regularly. Um, except when you're on the plane flying back from New York, then you got to watch The Fugitive with Harrison Ford. I made Jordy watch it. Give me your review.

• 22:39Jordi Hays?

  Fantastic film. We don't know, we don't know how to make movies like that anymore. I would watch movies if all the movies were like that.

• 22:44John Coogan?

  It's amazing.

• 22:45Jordi Hays?

  I think you just need to give me, you need to, you need to, you should put together

• 22:48John Coogan?

  Movie list. Yeah.

• 22:49Jordi Hays?

  Your movie list.

• 22:50John Coogan?

  I have one.

• 22:51Jordi Hays?

  Like this in the next week or so, so people can watch them while we're, uh, you know, between like, you know, Christmas and New Year's when we're off the air, but absolutely fantastic movie. Fast paced. I felt like they were hitting me with like, uh, you know, Mr. Beast's like brain rot.

• 23:04John Coogan?

  The editing is good. People, a lot of times you go back to like the seventies or the eighties and some of the films are really slow. Like they have these big, long openings where they show you every person, like the opening credits were a thing. That's all gone now. But The Fugitive with Harrison Ford, just really fast paced the whole time. It jumps straight into the action. You're straight into the problem. It's very clear what's going on. I won't give any spoilers, but, uh, there's a lot of fun in this movie. So highly recommend it. If you haven't seen it, uh, it's fantastic. Have you seen it, Tyler?

• 23:34John Coogan?

  Oh, wow. Okay. Uh, well, you, you treat yourself to The Fugitive, um, this holiday season. Uh, also treat yourself to linear. The, the, the system for modern software development. Linear streamlines work across the entire development cycle from roadmap to release.

• 23:51Jordi Hays?

  What else do we need? Should we read a unhappy take on this take from Chris Murphy?

• 23:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, this sounds good.

• 24:00Jordi Hays?

  Chris Murphy, US Senator from Connecticut.

• 24:03John Coogan?

  I thought that was crypto Twitter. I thought it was Chris Murphy crypto Twitter.

• 24:07Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I don't think so. Chris says the Netflix purchase of Warner Bros. would be a disaster. It's illegal, but there's some quietly rooting for it because a Paramount takeover that includes CNN would be worse. A short thread on why that's the dangerously wrong way to look at this. This deal is a classic antitrust violation. It will drive up prices. HBO Max is one of the few things that keeps pricing pressure on Netflix. Hundreds of movie theaters will go under. Writers and production workers in the content business will have terms and wages dictated to them. But some will say, well, if the Paramount and Ellison Trump cabal gets control of Warner Brothers and the deal includes CNN, then Trump would effectively control the bulk of the mainstream media

• 24:49Jordi Hays?

  from CBS all the way to CNN. That's worse than Netflix owning Warner Bros. Yes, it is, but A, a Paramount Warner Brothers deal would be illegal too. Trump shouldn't force us to be for illegal but less corrupt things. B, why do we think Netflix won't agree to the strings Trump puts on this deal? This is about making money, not protecting free speech. Five, tyrants want us to accept blurry moral lines. They want us to accept one level of corruption or illegality just because there is an alternative level that's much, much worse. But that's how democracy disappears, by rules disappearing and constant relativity creeping in.

• 25:25John Coogan?

  So I have two, two points. One, public.com investing for those that take it seriously. They got multi-asset investing, the trust of Ben Millions. And two, the Netflix deal doesn't, so it felt, there was, David Ellison was on CNBC this morning and he was talking and they were asking him about CNN. It's like you're, you own CBS, 60 Minutes, CBS Sunday Morning. And clearly a lot of people are like, are you going to put your thumb on the scale politically? Is there like a political angle to the way you will steward these media assets? And I don't think people are that worried about the political bias. Injected into Foghorn Leghorn or Wiley Coyote or whatever, or even like the Seinfeld catalog.

• 26:07John Coogan?

  It's not like they're gonna like reboot it and it'll be like a right wing Seinfeld. Like I don't, I just don't think that's gonna happen. But people do worry about news coverage like CNN, CBS. But the weird thing is that in the Netflix scenario, CNN is left there in the, in the, in the, in the, in the ghost ship. There's a, it's a ghost ship.

• 26:26Jordi Hays?

  It's a ghost ship.

• 26:26John Coogan?

  And we, we, we know this very well from, from the way tech likes to acquire companies.

• 26:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So is there a scenario where Paramount loses Warner Brothers, but then still buys the cable business?

• 26:37John Coogan?

  Yes, I, I think so. I think so. And they get Shark Week and they get, uh, they get a bunch of fun stuff. HGTV, 90 Day Fiance.

• 26:44Jordi Hays?

  David Ellison with Shark Week. I mean, they would, I mean, putting the Ellison family behind Shark Week.

• 26:51John Coogan?

  People, people think the Ellison's are-

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  That might be good for sharks.

• 26:55John Coogan?

  Indeed, indeed.

• 26:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So here's the thing. So we talked with Rich about how like more competition than ever at the content layer. It's very cheap to create and distribute content. It's effectively free.

• 27:05John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 27:05Jordi Hays?

  Uh, that said, uh, there's feels like in some ways more of a monopoly than ever on truth. If that makes sense. So legacy media properties have a monopoly on truth.

• 27:15John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, if we say something and we have the aesthetics of television, we say this is true. It doesn't hold the same weight as CNBC or CNN or anything like that because they have, uh, they're actually running, generally running-

• 27:29John Coogan?

  It's just the brand.

• 27:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's brand.

• 27:30John Coogan?

  It's just the brand.

• 27:31Jordi Hays?

  It's brand. So when the New York Times says something and, uh, a Substack disagrees with it and says, no, this is what actually happened. Who are people gonna believe? They're gonna believe New York Times 10 times out of 10.

• 27:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 27:43Jordi Hays?

  And so, um, yeah, I think, uh, it is, that, that part of it is, uh, ideally you would want a lot more kind of like distribution between the networks and these brands that, that have a monopoly on the truth.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  Yeah. But at the same time, the fact that, uh, that David Ellison is not cheering at the fact that he, like, you see Warner Brothers and if you're i- i- in the, in the conspiratorial, the tinfoil hat, like David Ellison is trying to control the news narrative that is sort of bubbling up there. The flip side is, is he should be cheering because he's like, wow, they bought everything I don't want. I didn't want Batman. But in fact, he does want Batman. He does. He wants Foghorn Leghorn.

• 28:26Jordi Hays?

  He wants it all.

• 28:27John Coogan?

  He needs Foghorn Leghorn.

• 28:28Jordi Hays?

  He wants it all.

• 28:29John Coogan?

  He needs Wile E. Coyote. He needs Porky Pig. The, the list of as- You don't know Porky Pig?

• 28:36Jordi Hays?

  No.

• 28:36John Coogan?

  How do you not know Porky Pig?

• 28:38Jordi Hays?

  Is that a YC startup?

• 28:39John Coogan?

  It should be. It should be.

• 28:41Jordi Hays?

  Oh, Porky Pig.

• 28:42John Coogan?

  Porky Pig.

• 28:43Jordi Hays?

  Okay, Looney.

• 28:43John Coogan?

  From Wild, yeah, Looney Tunes. The Looney Tunes character. The Looney Tunes Cinematic Universe is great.

• 28:48Jordi Hays?

  There actually was a, um, I think there was a YC company in this batch called Piggy Robotics. Yeah, yeah, we saw. No, the YC companies need to keep-

• 28:56John Coogan?

  New rule. New rule.

• 28:57Jordi Hays?

  Every pig-themed startup.

• 28:59John Coogan?

  When you're booking, when you're booking YC, uh, startups, if it's swine-themed, they're on the show, okay? I don't want to miss a single swine-themed company, ever. Pig, Post-Hog, Piggy. We, we need all these companies. They're all great.

• 29:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, red alert.

• 29:17John Coogan?

  What?

• 29:17Jordi Hays?

  Pig has rebranded.

• 29:19John Coogan?

  No.

• 29:20Jordi Hays?

  The YC company called Pig.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  Wow, spitting in our face.

• 29:22Jordi Hays?

  They're now called Butter.

• 29:23John Coogan?

  Butter.

• 29:26John Coogan?

  It's still like animal-themed? It's an animal product? It's an animal product. What kind of butter is it?

• 29:32Jordi Hays?

  Analyzing it based on its macros.

• 29:33John Coogan?

  Is it goat butter?

• 29:34Jordi Hays?

  Very heavy on-

• 29:35John Coogan?

  Cow butter?

• 29:35Jordi Hays?

  Fat, low protein.

• 29:37John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 29:37Jordi Hays?

  Low carb, low protein, high fat.

• 29:39John Coogan?

  They rebranded to Butter. They stayed on the farm theme. They were like, we have churned into-

• 29:45Jordi Hays?

  We've churned from the name Pig.

• 29:46John Coogan?

  All the customers churned, and churn was so bad, we churned into Butter. Butter never churned.

• 29:51Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get the update.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  Always churned. I don't know.

• 29:52Jordi Hays?

  We gotta get the update. I like the founder.

• 29:54John Coogan?

  I did. I did like the founder. I also like Fall, generative media platform for developers. Develop and fine-tune models with serverless GPUs and on-demand clusters. We have some news from our flight back from New York. We flew JetBlue again.

• 30:12Jordi Hays?

  We did.

• 30:12John Coogan?

  If you, if you're new here, we, a couple of months ago, we flew JetBlue with the whole team, and we got into a little bit of a situation with JetBlue.

• 30:20Jordi Hays?

  They almost had to land the aircraft.

• 30:21John Coogan?

  They almost had to land the aircraft because we were, Jordy and I were sitting in business class. We were served steaks. We tried to pass those steaks back to our friends and colleagues who were sitting in economy, and they told us not. They said- Stop, you can't. I think someone put their hand on your chest.

• 30:39Jordi Hays?

  They didn't.

• 30:39John Coogan?

  Sit down, sir.

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  So it was even worse.

• 30:41John Coogan?

  Sit down.

• 30:41Jordi Hays?

  They didn't put their hand on me, the flight attendant.

• 30:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 30:44Jordi Hays?

  But they grabbed the dessert.

• 30:45John Coogan?

  Oh, they grabbed the dessert that you were trying to pass back.

• 30:47Jordi Hays?

  Pass to the team.

• 30:48John Coogan?

  And, you know, we like to believe in.

• 30:50Jordi Hays?

  Do I not own this dessert?

• 30:51John Coogan?

  We like property rights around here. We like the ability to move freely. And I think possession's nine tenths of the law. You give me the ice cream, you give me.

• 31:00Jordi Hays?

  I control it. I own it.

• 31:01John Coogan?

  I control it. I can do what I want. But on our latest flight, we figured out the ultimate hack for how to pass food back from business class to economy on a JetBlue flight.

• 31:13Jordi Hays?

  And we proved that this works twice.

• 31:14John Coogan?

  And we're sharing, and we're sharing it with you today.

• 31:16Jordi Hays?

  We're sharing this alpha.

• 31:17John Coogan?

  Alpha, deep alpha. And so we'll, we'll hopefully pull up some of the photos, which, so this is, so in, in first class, they give you headphones with a case. And so what I was able to do is I was able to take the food.

• 31:30Jordi Hays?

  So my food.

• 31:31John Coogan?

  And put it into the case.

• 31:33Jordi Hays?

  So we, we all had dinner before the flight.

• 31:36John Coogan?

  That's ice cream in the, in the phone case.

• 31:38Jordi Hays?

  We had dinner before we left. So I show up and I'm not hungry, but Ben's a growing, growing boy.

• 31:42John Coogan?

  Growing boy.

• 31:43Jordi Hays?

  And I, and I'm like, we gotta get, we gotta get my, my dinner back to Ben. And so we put, uh, we, we take the headphone case, we zip it up. I take it back, I pass.

• 31:52John Coogan?

  You insisted on the bread roll going in there. I don't know if Ben enjoyed the bread roll.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  He needed the bread.

• 31:57John Coogan?

  Did you eat the bread?

• 31:59Speaker 04

  I ate all of it.

• 31:59John Coogan?

  Okay, wait, was the bread over buttered? Or did it have the appropriate amount of butter?

• 32:04Speaker 04

  It had a lot of butter.

• 32:04John Coogan?

  It had a lot of butter, right? Jordy insisted, insisted on giving you the full pad of butter. And I thought maybe half a pad would be the right one.

• 32:11Jordi Hays?

  I just wanted you to have optionality.

• 32:12John Coogan?

  Okay, well, yeah, yeah, I guess you had optionality. You could have taken it out. But what would you have done with it?

• 32:16Speaker 04

  I didn't have anybody sitting next to me.

• 32:18John Coogan?

  Oh, you didn't? Okay.

• 32:19Jordi Hays?

  No, but the guy, there was a guy across the aisle from you. He was giving me the dirtiest.

• 32:23John Coogan?

  No way.

• 32:24Jordi Hays?

  I, I thought he, I, I thought he was gonna say, like, if you don't bring me back food too.

• 32:28John Coogan?

  Oh, you wanted, you're just gonna tattletale. That is a risk.

• 32:32Jordi Hays?

  No, but the real, so the real risk when you're running a strategy like this and you need to be highly coordinated.

• 32:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 32:37Jordi Hays?

  Is that the flight attendant in, in the business.

• 32:40John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 32:40Jordi Hays?

  Class section says, where's your cutlery?

• 32:43John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 32:44Jordi Hays?

  Where's that plate?

• 32:44John Coogan?

  You're, you're, you're.

• 32:45Jordi Hays?

  Because, because it's in the back.

• 32:46John Coogan?

  Your knife and fork are gonna be missing. So the, the real, yeah, you can see Jordy going back to drop it off. I took that photo.

• 32:54Jordi Hays?

  We're running, running plays.

• 32:55John Coogan?

  And so, no, no, so, so there's another tip here that, uh, that, that you, you don't wanna jump the gun. So the, the, the, the food service, the dinner service, it takes place over a couple of minutes. All the plates get just, uh, get, uh, passed out and people eat pretty quickly. So typically, the flight attendant, by the time they finish delivering the last plate, they will go and start picking up the plate from the beginning because it only takes a couple, people a couple of minutes to eat the food on the plane. But what you, you wanna wait them out. You wanna, you need a couple of rounds of them coming by and the, and you, and you have the full meal there. And they're like, are you done with that? And you say, no, no, I'm still working, I'm still working. So you gotta say, I'm still working a couple of times. And then they will go back and sit down at the front of the plane.

• 33:38John Coogan?

  They'll kind of relax the post meal break. They might be gearing up for, oh, maybe I'll, I'll get everyone a new glass of wine in 20 minutes. But I'm chilling. That's your opportunity because that's when they're at their weakest. That's when they're not gonna be paying attention.

• 33:54Jordi Hays?

  You almost got caught at one point.

• 33:55John Coogan?

  I got caught?

• 33:56Jordi Hays?

  She came, she, the, the flight is a lovely, lovely woman. She came over and said, uh, she, she came up and said, do you want any tea?

• 34:03John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:03Jordi Hays?

  And you had.

• 34:06John Coogan?

  Missing, missing.

• 34:07Jordi Hays?

  There was, there was food in the headset case.

• 34:10John Coogan?

  The headset case, yeah. I had to close the headset case because you don't wanna get caught with the, with the. Yes, yes, uh, yes, we do need the whole crew on, on business and, and we will be doing that.

• 34:22Jordi Hays?

  We're working on it.

• 34:22John Coogan?

  We're working on it. Yeah, we, we, we, we got a ton of, we got a ton of machinations, but in the meantime, well, we're having fun. Uh, we're also on profound. Get your brand mentioned in ChatGPT. Meet millions of consumers who use AI to discover new products and brands. And, uh.

• 34:39John Coogan?

  People were having fun with the uh.

• 34:41Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if this is real. I saw this posted a few.

• 34:43John Coogan?

  This is a joke.

• 34:45Jordi Hays?

  This account just posts, "Annelli Chapa submitted a last minute bid to buy Warner Brothers forty-five thousand."

• 34:54John Coogan?

  And forty-five K in cash, in cash. It's like, it actually is relevant because the other, the other offers are heavily debt laden. And so if you care about that, if you want an all cash offer, this might be your best get.

• 35:05Jordi Hays?

  It's a pretty good offer.

• 35:05John Coogan?

  This is the best option. If you're, if you only want.

• 35:08Jordi Hays?

  Andy, Andy, who's been on an absolute roll lately, says, "You're laughing at him, but how much did you put up to buy Warner Brothers?" Exactly. Can we pull up Andy? Andy launched, uh, did a, had a launch video like yesterday?

• 35:21John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah. Andy, of course, is the founder of twocents.money. He's been on the show. He has a, uh, he has a, uh, a social, an anonymous social network that links with your bank account. And so you just, your username is just your financial net worth.

• 35:37Jordi Hays?

  The video is at the bottom of the, of the stack, guys, if you can pull it up.

• 35:41John Coogan?

  He's, he's big on financializing everything. He's a, he's a financial.

• 35:43Jordi Hays?

  He was kind of early, early to the trend.

• 35:45John Coogan?

  Early to the trend. Uh, but, but he's always.

• 35:48Jordi Hays?

  Let's play this.

• 35:49John Coogan?

  In sort of a fun, you know, what are we doing here?

• 35:54John Coogan?

  I can't read that. So I don't know. We need to go full screen on this. Okay. Let, uh, while they're pulling that up, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service. Automate the most complex customer service queries on every channel with fin.ai. Um, are we able to play this? It is two minutes and we only have so many minutes. Yeah, let's play it.

• 36:19John Coogan?

  Hi, this is Osmo. We make films. Twocents founder Andy Durom raised three million for his startup and paid us 2.5 million. The, this was the only direction he gave us. I need this to look like the most expensive launch video ever made. It has to look like. Why is he in Albania? Albania? The day before our shoot, Andy was still on his investors boat, chasing a series A.

• 36:42John Coogan?

  Is this rage bait? I feel like this is giving me like, I'm going to be enraged. Uh, we were under contract to spend the entire production. Here's what we made.

• 36:49Speaker 05

  I want a Scarface montage in a mansion.

• 36:55John Coogan?

  There we go.

• 36:56Speaker 05

  Show off our in-house coding models.

• 37:00Speaker 05

  Coding models.

• 37:03Speaker 05

  And they should be coding in Rust, not just tiny apps, but full-scale system architecture.

• 37:09John Coogan?

  The cinematography here is wild.

• 37:12Speaker 05

  And I want the bathtub scene from The Big Short, but add more models and like have one of them explaining the value prop of 2 cents.

• 37:20Speaker 06

  So basically, you know how everyone on social media pretends to be rich? The problem is, it's all fake.

• 37:29Speaker 05

  Then we should have the models reenact that scene from The Wolf of Wall Street. You know, the one where Leo's boat gets seized by the FBI?

• 37:35Speaker 07

  Yo, from Lobster, for the ride home, you fucking miserable prick. No, you can't afford them!

• 37:40John Coogan?

  What was the bid? He said he spent 2.5 million on this? Is that what you're saying?

• 37:46Jordi Hays?

  Alright, this is not PG enough, but it is funny. It's funny to basically run through every single launch video bit that there is.

• 37:53John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 37:54Jordi Hays?

  And narrate and just be narrating. Yeah, just do that one.

• 37:57John Coogan?

  And then do that one, and then do that one, yeah.

• 37:59Jordi Hays?

  Okay.

• 37:59John Coogan?

  Ridiculous. Well, Buco is saying the more he reads about the Netflix deal, the more it seems like, 1, this is bad for everyone that isn't Netflix. 2, this would be very good for Netflix. And 3, it should be blocked if our system still works. So he is a "block the deal" guy. Ernest says it's extremely pro-consumer. New price is going to be lower than the current standalone Netflix plus max price with superior UX for subscribers. And Buco says, "I don't think you can say it's extremely pro-consumer with any sort of confidence."

• 38:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, this is the one-

• 38:31John Coogan?

  "Give them tremendous pricing power."

• 38:33Jordi Hays?

  A few people have said, "Oh yeah, like it's gonna be cheaper." And it's like, "Okay, is it gonna be cheap? It's gonna be cheaper like right away. Is it gonna be cheaper in 10 years? No way."

• 38:43John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah. And I mean, there's nothing, there's nothing more long-term pilled than a public company. Like, they love thinking in decades and like, no, I mean-

• 38:54Jordi Hays?

  They're like-

• 38:55John Coogan?

  Like, a company like Netflix truly can be like, yes, like-

• 38:58Jordi Hays?

  The price is gonna be like $99 a month by 2035.

• 39:02John Coogan?

  It might be a steal. It might be a steal at 99 if you're getting Seinfeld and Foghorn Leghorn and Porky Pig.

• 39:08Jordi Hays?

  This is a good walk-through history. John Ehrlichman says, "December 2010, Time Warner views," this is a New York Times article, "Time Warner Views Netflix as a Fading Star."

• 39:20Jordi Hays?

  For the past year, executives at big media companies have watched Netflix with growing resentment for its success in delivering movies and television shows via the internet for its stock price nearly quadrupling, for its chief executive being named Businessperson of the Year by Fortune Magazine. I imagine at that time, they were thinking, well, it's cool that they can deliver movies, but they'll never be able to make, they'll never be able to make content. And of course, now, recently, Netflix to buy Warner Bros.

• 39:49John Coogan?

  It is such a, such a big deal. Like 83 billion, it's almost, it almost feels like small compared to like all the AI valuations and stuff and the, and the hyperscaler valuations. But Netflix is only a $400 billion business by comparison. So like, this is 20% of their market cap, essentially. Like, it's a, it's a serious merger, and would be, and would be huge, huge integration. I, I, I do wonder about that question of like, how many movies they would be making per year? Would they, would they try and still make 30 big movies or something like that? I feel like you, if you don't make those big movies, you don't get the, you don't, you don't develop the new IP. Like, if you look at what Avatar is,

• 40:32John Coogan?

  Avatar has been, you know, this like incredible undertaking from a, like, just so much money poured into the production there. But it's probably the best chance of getting something that's actually like an enduring legacy. Where it's like, yeah, people are still talking about the Avatar multiverse or cinematic universe in five decades, 10 decades, you know, in a long, long time. It's very, very hard to be, to be sticky if you're not taking big swings and doing things that are like actually really, really bold. Anyway, while we move on, let me tell you about Gemini 3 Pro, Google's most intelligent model yet, state of the art reasoning, next level VOD coding, and deep multimodal understanding.

• 41:14John Coogan?

  Oh, there was this hilarious clip where apparently in 2013, this is from Matthew Ball, everyone's forgetting Netflix Q4 2013 earnings call.

• 41:23Jordi Hays?

  Tyler, you know Ball?

• 41:26Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 41:27John Coogan?

  Which ball?

• 41:28Jordi Hays?

  All.

• 41:28John Coogan?

  Do you know?

• 41:29Jordi Hays?

  All ball.

• 41:31John Coogan?

  Wait, but do you actually know Matthew Ball?

• 41:34Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 41:34John Coogan?

  Oh, here we go. He doesn't know Ball.

• 41:36Jordi Hays?

  Whoa.

• 41:37John Coogan?

  You gotta know every, every analyst with the last name Ball. I wonder if they're related. Uh, anyway, Reed Hastings, uh, is asked about the HBO CEO's thoughts on password sharing. And he replies, I guess he doesn't mind me then sharing his account info. It's [email protected] and his password is Netflix, B I T C H. Um, what a weird thing to do. Was that actually his password? It's such a weird meme. Here, let, yeah, let's play the actual video. I- is that the, is that the clip? I know Trung fan, uh, clipped the actual, um.

• 42:08Speaker 08

  I guess Pepler's, uh, the CEO of HBO doesn't mind me then sharing his account information. So it's, uh, [email protected] and his password is, uh, Netflix bitch.

• 42:21John Coogan?

  This is like an insane, he must be joking, but it's like such a weird sense of humor. Maybe it's just out of context. Maybe, maybe if you watch the full thing or you understand the conversation was happening in 2013 around the two companies. But like, even if that's, even if that's not his password, it's like, it's annoying to share someone's email publicly, right? Cause they just get a bunch of spam, I think. But maybe this earnings call was like so narrowly watched. Uh, that's no one really, you know, would spam him, but I don't know. I would imagine it'd be really annoying to have your email leak on an earnings call. Uh, anyway.

• 42:56Jordi Hays?

  Uh, people really want Lena Kahn back in the driver's seat. Sammy Gold says, Lena Kahn, you can have this one this one time.

• 43:05John Coogan?

  I don't, I don't really understand why people are so against this. It doesn't.

• 43:09Jordi Hays?

  The idea of Netflix owning Succession, The Soprano and The Wire.

• 43:13John Coogan?

  Well, the TV stuff doesn't seem that bad because that was never in theaters. I, I, I guess I do understand people who are saying like, like, like they're gonna own Lord of the Rings. Seeing Lord of the Rings in theaters was a special thing. And that special thing might not happen anymore because it's incompatible with the modern business model. And so if you're, if you're a Lord of the Rings fan and you really like the movies and you did not like the show. Well, then it's like, get ready for more shows and less movies probably.

• 43:39Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I think anybody who's upset because of the impact on traditional cinema and movie theaters. I want to see every sing- I want to see proof of how many movies they've gone to in the last.

• 43:54John Coogan?

  The revealed preference is crazy.

• 43:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the last year, right. They're like, oh, I've seen one movie and it's like, okay.

• 44:00John Coogan?

  I don't know. Well, we should move on. Let me tell you about Restream, one livestream, 30 plus destinations. If you want to multi-stream, go to Restream.com. Nice shot of Tyler before that ad comes in. Apple is changing of the guard. It feels like a ton of executives are leaving, ton of executives are turning over. And everyone's kind of speculating that potentially this is the beginning of the next major, major, you know, executive leadership team coming in, that there'll be some sort of, you know, before and after. Maybe we're exiting the Tim Cook era. I don't think so. I think, I think you just got a double, triple,

• 44:40John Coogan?

  maybe 10x Tim Cook's pay and you're good. But if they wind up turning the entire team over, maybe that's what happens too. So John G. Andreas.

• 44:48Jordi Hays?

  Super out of pocket to include Steve Jobs on this.

• 44:51John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's very odd. But the interesting thing is John Turnus, he is of course leading. He's, there's been a bunch of leaks about John Turnus, the head of hardware, potentially stepping up to the CEO role. That would be very exciting. And there's been rumors swirling, unclear if it's like one of those things where he's leaking or someone else is leaking things. It's, you know, you never really know until the actual news drops. But I remain, I remain positive on Tim Cook's leadership. I think he got the big things right. And I think he missed the hot things, but missing the hot trend that's actually not that existential to the business.

• 45:31Jordi Hays?

  That you could argue they haven't missed yet.

• 45:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You could argue they haven't missed it and you could argue that AI was not existential to them, at least in the short term. But we'll see. But this Justin Bieber post is insane because you read me this and I, and I didn't hear you say, this is from Justin Bieber's account. And I was like, oh, that's funny. There's someone who's mad at Apple, but it's way funnier coming from Justin Bieber.

• 45:56Jordi Hays?

  Put Justin Bieber as a product manager at Apple and I genuinely believe the. Products across the board would improve.

• 46:04John Coogan?

  Get them in Figma. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams build great products together.

• 46:11Jordi Hays?

  So without further ado, Justin says, "If I hit this dictation button after sending a text and it beeps and stops my music one more time, I'm gonna find everyone at Apple and put them in a rear naked chokehold. Even if I turn off dictation, I somehow hit the voice note thing. The send button should not have multiple functions in the same spot." I couldn't agree more. This is so, I mean, it's just absolutely insane. Cause the issue is, yeah, one, this happens a lot. This happens to me. And then it's always nerve wracking because if you have somebody pulled up on text and you happen, let's say I'm like, "Hey, this person is wanting to change the time of this meeting to this other point." And I'm

• 46:54Jordi Hays?

  actually, I'm like, "What do you think? What should we do?" And then it just like happens to be like recording and then you're like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, I don't wanna..."

• 47:00John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 47:02Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, I'm not a dictation maxi. I find it, I think it's very offensive to send people voice notes of any sort. And so I don't do it. I don't appreciate it.

• 47:13John Coogan?

  Apparently we have to issue a correction. Taylor's over there putting us in the truth zone. Apple doesn't have product managers?

• 47:19Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. There's so many, there's this new software. Every time I open an app made by Apple, there's a new, there's a new bug. It is, the software is, a lot of it, I mean, yeah, I'm now living with the new iOS, iOS 1700 for a month or so now.

• 47:42John Coogan?

  It's 26. They're on the car release schedule now, right?

• 47:45Jordi Hays?

  Living with it for a while, I can, I feel like they made every app worse with the new update.

• 47:50John Coogan?

  You're still upset about it?

• 47:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I still...

• 47:53John Coogan?

  I'm fine.

• 47:54Jordi Hays?

  It's not the end of the world.

• 47:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:56Jordi Hays?

  Every app's design is worse. I expected to just, I expected to like get used to some of the new stuff. And I'm still like, oh, the photo app.

• 48:04John Coogan?

  Skill issue. Just get used to it. Um, I'm getting used to it. I feel like a lot of these apps when they go through these.

• 48:09Jordi Hays?

  Brandon Jacoby comes over the top. Says in the X chat, truth zone to the truth zone. They historically have not had PMs, but that recently changed.

• 48:17John Coogan?

  Whoa, okay.

• 48:20Jordi Hays?

  OTP agrees.

• 48:22John Coogan?

  Wow, Apple does have a, have PMs. Taylor, uh, bro, I'm incorrect. Oh, well, I'm glad we have a debate in the chat going. Well, uh, I know for a fact that Apple does have data analysts. I don't know if they use Julius AI, but they should because Julius is the AI data analyst that works for you. Connect your data, ask questions in plain English and get answers in seconds.

• 48:52Jordi Hays?

  Mark Gemini says, Apple, the Germinator, the Germinator. Mark Germinator himself says, Apple executives have floated the idea of combining hardware engineering and hardware technologies divisions as one combined group under Shroji in order to retain him. So this is of course, uh, Apple's chip chief, John, Johnny Shroji. Hopefully I'm pronouncing that correctly.

• 49:15John Coogan?

  Chip chief.

• 49:16Jordi Hays?

  The chip chief, uh, informed CEO Tim Cook. He is seriously considering leaving the company and would likely continue his career elsewhere rather than retire. Apple is urgently pushing to keep him. He remains, at least for now, uh, according to the Germinator. Uh, the Germinator says, um, again, uh, they're floating the idea of combining hardware engineering and hardware technologies as one combined group under Shroji in order to retain him. But that couldn't happen until and if John Turnus becomes CEO. This would make Shroji the clear number two.

• 49:50Jordi Hays?

  In more important news, Mark Newsom, Apple, the designer of the Apple watch, just released a new, uh, watch himself. And, uh, it is mechanical and costs, uh, only $60,000.

• 50:05John Coogan?

  That's a video, by the way, play that, play this. This is a crazy video. Look at this. The, the dial is spinning and.

• 50:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, wow. It really looks like UFO inspired. Uh, it's $60,000? Jumping straight into the, the Holy Trinity tier, I suppose. Um, what's your, what's your honest review on this?

• 50:27Jordi Hays?

  I think it looks very cool. I've never thought I want a watch that looks like it's in the same universe as the Apple Watch.

• 50:35John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 50:35Jordi Hays?

  But at the same time, I can really respect.

• 50:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 50:38Jordi Hays?

  I really, I think this looks very cool. And I think there's a consumer out there where they were like, finally, somebody made a watch for me. I love this.

• 50:45John Coogan?

  Yeah. Should it be sold by Apple? Apple, the Apple Store has a number of products that are not created by Apple. You can go and get, I mean, they had a partnership with Beats for a while. They wound up acquiring Beats. They also will sell different, you know, stands and USB hubs and cases and all sorts of different, you know, accessories that sort of live in the Apple world, but aren't directly Apple products or made by Apple. Should this be sold at the Apple Store? What do you think?

• 51:18John Coogan?

  60K feels like a different tier, but I feel like if I'm trying to sell something for 60K, I'd, I'd go to the Apple Store and say, you know, a lot of people with 60K to spend on a watch, walk into the Apple Store and pick up a couple of laptops.

• 51:31Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Nick, new challenge.

• 51:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 51:33Jordi Hays?

  Get Mark Newsom on the show.

• 51:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 51:36Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, we will talk with him about it.

• 51:39John Coogan?

  Also, get on graphite.dev code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software faster. Um, well, let's keep moving on in the timeline. Uh.

• 51:53Jordi Hays?

  Theo agrees with, uh, with Justin Bieber. He is entirely correct here. I agree with Theo.

• 51:59John Coogan?

  Hmm. Well.

• 52:02Jordi Hays?

  Uh, we gotta pull this, uh.

• 52:03John Coogan?

  Which one?

• 52:04Jordi Hays?

  Video up of, uh, Bill Ackman.

• 52:07John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 52:07Jordi Hays?

  In Japan.

• 52:08John Coogan?

  Uh, this is incredible Aura Farm. There's something so interesting about being caught on, you know, of another country's television, it looks like. Uh, so this is.

• 52:18Jordi Hays?

  I couldn't tell if this was actual TV or, or streamers.

• 52:21John Coogan?

  Who knows? It just has an incredible vibe to it. So it's a Japanese show. Is that man's face blurred out? Why is his face blurred out like that?

• 52:32Jordi Hays?

  Maybe, I mean, that's a respectful thing to do if you didn't want to be.

• 52:35John Coogan?

  Oh yeah, I guess they didn't sign a release, so they can't have him play it.

• 52:39Jordi Hays?

  Here, can you turn it up a little bit?

• 52:40John Coogan?

  I like that she's such a fan.

• 52:46John Coogan?

  She's such a fan of Bill Ackman.

• 52:48Jordi Hays?

  Can you start it over? Because he missed the beginning.

• 52:50John Coogan?

  And these graphics.

• 52:57John Coogan?

  Is that Bill Ackman? Bill Ackman? Japanese TV, see?

• 53:05John Coogan?

  The graphics package is electric. You saw the little... You saw the... You see the stars and the... And, yeah, right there? And if you go back a little bit, there's like... It's like a puff of smoke that comes off of the text. Uh, we don't know how to make text like that. We don't know how to make Chyrons like that in America. Look at our Chyrons, just getting mugged by the Japanese TV channel with, uh, sound effects.

• 53:27Jordi Hays?

  Somebody in the chat says, "Did that woman just pull a Japanese 'May I meet you' on him?"

• 53:30John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, 100%. That's exactly what happened. Why did Andy post "All quiet on the frontal lobe"?

• 53:41John Coogan?

  That's very funny. That just cracks me up. Uh, Privy. Privy makes it easy to build on crypto rails, spin up secure white label wallets, sign transactions, integrate on-chain infrastructure, all through one simple API.

• 53:55John Coogan?

  Um, prediction markets are absolutely tearing up the timeline. They are the current thing every, every day. Uh, the debate rages. Um, this one's hilarious, from Aaron Mars. He says, "Prediction markets will replace buying stuff. I want someone to bring kiwis to my house. I make a prediction market about whether someone will deliver four kiwis to my doorstep and load $15 into 'no'. A guy with an e-bike sees it and picks up some kiwis. Before dropping them off on my doorstep, he bets 'yes'. Drops them off, the market resolves to 'yes', and he gets $15. Rest in peace." Amazon, DoorDash, Uber Eats, et cetera.

• 54:34Jordi Hays?

  Sailor comes in and says, prediction markets will replace relationships. I have a crush on your girlfriend. I make a prediction market about whether she will leave you for me and load 15 to know. She sees this and drives over to my place. Before texting me, she's here, she bets yes, she comes inside, the market resolves to yes, and she gets $15. Rest in peace Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, Dry, Bars, Restaurants.

• 55:01John Coogan?

  So insane. Yeah, the, uh, the, the, the move, the prediction markets are fighting an uphill battle right now. They're on, they're on life support. Prediction, it's such a good, such a good, um, such a good copy pasta. And I, and I, I can only imagine the quote tweets on this post just being like an endless, an endless stream of, of iterations of this exact template. Because it truly is so, so, so funny. The, the financialization of everything. Well, uh, Robin Hanson, who's sort of known as the creator of the prediction market. Do you, do you know a little bit more about his background? He's economist.

• 55:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, he, he was writing about prediction markets or like decision markets.

• 55:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 55:47Speaker 04

  Since like the 90s.

• 55:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 55:48Speaker 04

  And he has this whole idea of like futarchy where you like run the government based off prediction markets.

• 55:52John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 55:53Jordi Hays?

  Wow. He basically, like Brian, uh, Brian Armstrong was like suggesting that Polly maker, uh, policymakers could one day just ask people, how should we grow the economy? And then let prediction markets decide.

• 56:09Jordi Hays?

  Sorry.

• 56:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, anyway.

• 56:10Jordi Hays?

  Joking on this.

• 56:11John Coogan?

  I will read Robin Hanson's post while Jordy recovers. He might need a little bit of a break. A little bit of holiday spirit, getting this. Robin says.

• 56:20Jordi Hays?

  Joking on this podcast in a can.

• 56:22John Coogan?

  I've been asked, what do I think of call she in poly market? These are still very early days. My vision, which I started to articulate in the 90s, is of a, is a world, uh, is of a world very different from. Both the world then and the world of today, a world where markets are accepted as offering more accurate estimates on far more useful topics. So I'm mostly interested in the potential of stuff today to enable and cause that future vision. The politics, policy questions on polymarket and Kalshi trending now seem plausibly like topics where some people might find their estimates useful in making personal or collective choices, but I don't have great confidence in that or know who these people are.

• 57:04John Coogan?

  So I think that, like, we saw a glimmer of this in the sense that if you were running a business that stood to benefit from the Trump administration or hurt because of the Trump administration, maybe tariffs or something like, if you were manufacturing t-shirts in China and you were like, okay, if Trump wins, there'll probably be more tariffs, probably another trade war. What's the probability that Trump wins? What's the probability that I have to do a red, the fire drill, a code red to move my manufacturing to Singapore or something? You could make a business decision based on that. I agree with him, like, I don't really know how many people were doing that seriously. And also, the prediction markets were like 55%, you know? It wasn't, it wasn't like 90%.

• 57:49John Coogan?

  It wasn't like that clear.

• 57:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 57:51John Coogan?

  It wasn't like, oh, everyone just knows what's gonna happen. It was like, oh, yeah, like, you know, slight edge this way.

• 57:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I feel like people remember when they think of prediction markets on the election night, they remember like actually on election night when it did start to go towards like 90% and beyond.

• 58:08John Coogan?

  Totally. And, but yeah, I mean, if you're trying to plan for like a forthcoming Trump administration, it's not like you could go to prediction markets four months earlier and get like a definitive correct answer. Like, that is not the way, that's not, just not the way it played out.

• 58:26John Coogan?

  But he continues, he says, "But if these systems continue to grow in size and to attract users and competitors, they could lower many of the costs of creating and managing such markets, allowing a lot more experimentation with markets like those I find more promising. Read my long-term vision. Of course, if these systems induce a backlash that gets them outlawed or drastically shrunk, that may plausibly block, or at least long-delay my vision. I don't personally mind people having fun knowingly betting on sports, on actions that celebrities can influence, or on topics where insiders have big info advantages, like mentioned markets. But I see many people complaining about these things, and I fear a new prudish

• 59:09John Coogan?

  temperance movement may shut them down, and as a side effect, shut down the more promising markets that I've envisioned." It's an interesting take. I think it's a really big, it's a really big question on the prediction markets. It's not, like, there's, there's the, there's a positive and a normative side of these things. So, in economics, there's positive questions, normative, normative is like, what should happen? Yeah. And positive is what will happen. And so, there's a question, I think a lot of people on the timeline are debating, are, they're debating prediction markets on moral grounds, on what should happen. They, they, they have a thesis on, "I believe that, that this is great, and, and this is good, and it should, it should proliferate." Or, or

• 59:52John Coogan?

  "I think it's bad, and, and it should be shut down immediately." There aren't that many people that are actually thinking clearly right now about, like, what will happen? Like, where, how, how big will these markets be? How prevalent will they be? You know, sports betting has gotten a lot easier, but, you know, it hasn't taken over everyone. Like, I know a lot of people that don't sports bet. I don't personally sports bet, even though it's now available, probably, on my phone. I'm sure I could figure out how to do it without needing to go to Las Vegas. It hasn't come for me. It hasn't just, it hasn't, it hasn't just, like, come and sucked me in. And so, we have Sagar and Jetty coming on the show on Friday to debate some of this more, in more detail. But I think that there's an interesting separation to just try and understand what will happen. And he's, so

• 1:00:35John Coogan?

  he's saying, you know, he fears a new prudish temperance movement, which is very clearly real, lots of people dunking on this stuff, may shut them down. I don't know. It's unclear. Like, will there actually be action related to the prudish temperance movement, or will the prudish temperance movement be confined to spicy quote tweets? Right?

• 1:00:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's also, it's also possible to get to the future that he's envisioned since the 90s. You need to have sports markets.

• 1:01:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:05Jordi Hays?

  And that, again, is not necessarily maybe how he would want things to evolve, but it might be a necessary step to bring enough users to some of these applications to have the durability and the attention necessary to, to create some of these other markets. But I think, I think so many people are just absolutely sick of the marketing

• 1:01:26Jordi Hays?

  and, and just the feuding between Kalshi and Polymarket, that part of, part of people's prediction.

• 1:01:32John Coogan?

  Insiders are, insiders are. Outsiders don't even know the difference.

• 1:01:36Jordi Hays?

  For sure. I'm talking about on X specifically.

• 1:01:38John Coogan?

  They just think like, oh, financialization of everything is bad.

• 1:01:40Jordi Hays?

  X specifically.

• 1:01:41John Coogan?

  But yeah.

• 1:01:41Jordi Hays?

  Like, if we were on X and like FanDuel and DraftKings were just constantly going at each other all day long, everyone would just be like, please leave.

• 1:01:51John Coogan?

  Oh, no, no, I, I, I think they are. Like, I think, I think, I, I, we have the CEO of DraftKings coming on the show tomorrow, but, but I, I do think that, that, that the, that the traditional sports betting world is, is also just very cutthroat.

• 1:02:05Jordi Hays?

  Are they, though? I mean, it's such a.

• 1:02:07John Coogan?

  Dude, go back and read, go back and read some of the.

• 1:02:10Jordi Hays?

  No, no, I'm not, I'm not denying that.

• 1:02:11John Coogan?

  Go back and read about the development of Las Vegas. Like, Caesar's versus MGM. Like, these were knockout, drag-out fights. These were not like, oh, yeah, everyone was like positive sum building.

• 1:02:22Jordi Hays?

  I'm just saying, I, I would be surprised if you have like a marketing manager at DraftKings, like, take, like, saying, like, hateful things to a marketing manager at FanDuel in the year 2025 on the internet.

• 1:02:34John Coogan?

  We, we need to watch Casino because I, I believe in Casino. They did things much worse than that. And not that Casino is a documentary, but I do.

• 1:02:43Jordi Hays?

  Gave in the chats as I talked to the presidents of the National Hockey League and an MLB team about how mad the prediction market, marketing was. They agree, pure slop.

• 1:02:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, it's a crazy time. Time, time, time to study the greats. Time to study history. Time to study Adio, the AI native CRM. Audio build scales and grows your company to the next level. And the next level of this show is Delian Asparouhov, partner at Founders Fund, co-founder of Varda Space Industries in the Restream waiting room. Now he's in the TDP and UltraDome. And if I'm not in In the sun. Are you in Miami?

• 1:03:19Delian Asparouhov?

  You know, there's sunshine in California as well.

• 1:03:23John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:03:24Delian Asparouhov?

  Sometimes I just feel like it.

• 1:03:25John Coogan?

  I'm just wondering about your backdrop. Is this San Francisco? Where are we? Where are we? Take us, I mean, you're so used to seeing you in the Varda office.

• 1:03:33Delian Asparouhov?

  It's true, true. Today you're catching me in the Presidio. If it's too bright, let me know. Turn on the blinds, but I like, I like just getting blasted with sunshine whenever I can.

• 1:03:40John Coogan?

  I think it's actually, I think it's actually adjusting. So you look great.

• 1:03:44Delian Asparouhov?

  Thank you. I feel great.

• 1:03:46John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Take us through, take us through the, it's been a while since we caught up. Thank you for hopping on the show after a hiatus and breaking your silence. I, I, I want, you know, the quick update on Jerick Isaacman first. What's the status of things there? What are the implications? What's the mood in the, in the space economy? What's the mood amongst your team? Are people excited? Are people thinking that that's going to move forward?

• 1:04:15Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, look, I think, I can't imagine you're sort of a better, you're sort of a leader for NASA than, you know, sort of Jared, right? Somebody that like literally is like willing to put their life on the line and actually do some of the likes, I mean, he did literally the first commercial spacewalk that's ever been done in human history, right? So he's like, you know, putting his neck on the line, but then also somebody that's obviously built a phenomenal business and understands, you know, how to think about ROI, how to manage a workforce, you know, how to think about connection into your capital markets. And so, yeah, I generally, generally say like across the entire commercial space industry, like, you know, ecstatic mood, you know, my like, you know, various moles in the Senate, et cetera. They can seem that, you know, things are all, you know, sort of, you know, tracking on plan and, you know, going, going well there. He's definitely got to, you know, sort of pay the piper and, you know, shake hands and

• 1:04:58Delian Asparouhov?

  everything, but he's, you know, you know, done that. And then in some ways it's like the likelihood that they pull it for a second time. It's like, man, you already, you know, shot the guy down to the ground once, like, you know, can't, can't do it again. So I feel highly likely. I think like, there's a ton of implications, you know, for that. Probably the one that I, you know, Get excited for the most, you know, just as an American, is the likelihood that we make sure that we, you know, sort of beat the Chinese, you know, sort of back to the moon. I think just, you know, sort of increase significantly, you know, sort of through, and there's already, you know, some rumors starting to, you know, you know, come out of his interest in starting to get, you know, more and more options to the table in terms of how we, you know, sort of get to the moon beyond what's been, you know, sort of currently contracted. And so I like that. And I like, you know, I think we talked about this in some of like

• 1:05:41Delian Asparouhov?

  our prior, you know, sort of discussions, but I really like this program called CLIPS within the lunar program, where basically rather than trying to set a budget and say, here's how I want you to build XYZ thing, the way that they basically pay contractors is just a flat fee for each kilogram of down mass down to the lunar surface, basically. It's just like, you know, you get something onto the moon, we basically give you, I forget, I think it's like basically a hundred thousand dollars, basically a kilogram, but like you get margin on that, you figure out how to do it cheaper, great, that's all on you. But that's like to me where NASA should be. It's like for these like things that aren't yet really commercial, don't make sense, be the first buyer, establish the market. And then that's what kickstarts basically the commercial, you know, sort of economy side of it. So that's obviously been like a ton of activity. Obviously, there's a whole set of SpaceX things, you know, that have been, you know, sort of happening over the past, you know, sort of month.

• 1:06:25John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's, let's pause on this, on the SpaceX stuff. I want to stay on NASA. The way I was thinking about Jared Isaacman, and just kind of framing like the broader discussion of the lunar economy, the orbital economy was this idea of like, are you a Mars guy or a moon guy in the short term? And, and I don't know if this is like too simplistic, so maybe you can just bring a bunch of nuance, but it does feel like, you know, Elon has been beating the drum on like Mars, Mars, Mars, and like, maybe the moon is like, you know, a pit stop along the way. And then some other folks, some of the more legacy spaceflight providers are a little bit more focused on the tractable get to the moon.

• 1:07:07John Coogan?

  But then you have different folks breaking different ways, like Casey Hanmer is really obsessed with beating China to the moon. Obviously, Mike Solana at Founders Fund is moon should be a state. And, and, and, and there's a whole bunch of different things. But is there, do you think that there's a real trade off between like, should we be prioritizing moon or Mars in the short term? How do you think about that?

• 1:07:28Delian Asparouhov?

  You know, when I think about like why Elon was so dead set on this like, you know, call it, you know, five years ago, 10 years ago, um, I think it had more to do with the fact that, um, the moon can be seen as a distraction if our capabilities as a species are limited because the moon is not a place where you can set up a, you know, sort of permanent colony that is, you know, so sustainable and independent of Earth, right? You know, sort of no atmosphere, terraforming is impossible in some ways, like, you know, because that likely to be highly, highly dependent on Earth. So it's not really like a backup, you know, sort of function, you know, we know relative to, you know, sort of Mars. And so when I think about like Elon 10 years ago, it was basically like, look, we're so decrepit as a industry in the United States or, you know, across the globe, that if we like set

• 1:08:10Delian Asparouhov?

  a goal, we need to like really keep the goal very, very focused. And so you have to go straight to Mars. I think just like the world of today is fundamentally very different where we're just like much more capable of an industry in terms of just like, you know, I don't know if you guys saw this, but I tweeted that, you know, in November was the first time in human history where there were more orbital rocket launches than there were days in the month.

• 1:08:28John Coogan?

  That's right.

• 1:08:29Delian Asparouhov?

  That's the first time that's ever happened, you know, basically in human history. Um, and so that obviously, you know, sort of points to like, we just like are much more capable as a species. And so in that world of more called like space abundance, um, I don't worry as much. And I admit that I've always been more on the like, the moon is absolutely the right pit stop on the way to Mars and, you know, advocated for that for a long time. Um, and I think in this world of abundance, it's a lot easier to see that. And now you even have Elon, you know, in some ways his totally reverse course of like, yeah, he talked about like making a mass driver on the moon. So you make like huge amounts of solar panels and data centers there and then are shipping them up, you know, basically, you know, to orbit.

• 1:09:02John Coogan?

  Sorry, uh, mass driver, define that.

• 1:09:05Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, yes, one second. We just have to shut the blinds real quick.

• 1:09:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, no worries. While he's shutting the blinds, let me do an ad read for cognition. Cognition is the team behind the AI software engineer Devon. Crush your backlog with your personal AI engineering team. He's also an investor, so I don't feel bad doing an ad read for his own company.

• 1:09:24Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I feel like I just kind of got paid for that a little bit too.

• 1:09:27John Coogan?

  There you go.

• 1:09:28Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, Rob, I've got food, baby. So I mean.

• 1:09:31John Coogan?

  If it was a, if it was a competitor, I wouldn't do it, but I, I gotta sneak these things in, gotta pay the bills over here. Uh, anyway, so take us through what is a mass driver on the moon?

• 1:09:41Delian Asparouhov?

  So on Earth, there's been a variety of ways that we've hypothesized basically, you know, sort of getting things up to orbit. Only one that has really worked, right, which is basically, you know, chemical combustion, you know, put, you know, liquid fuel and oxidizer, you know, basically, you know, in a rocket and launch up to space. There's people that have tried to work on other alternatives. So if you guys remember Spin Launch, the company that would basically spin things up really, really fast.

• 1:10:05John Coogan?

  Yeet aerospace. They would yeet it out into the aerospace.

• 1:10:09Delian Asparouhov?

  So that's the spin version.

• 1:10:11John Coogan?

  I love that one.

• 1:10:11Delian Asparouhov?

  You could also imagine the like rocket sled version. It's like an electromagnetic sled that is super, super long, so rather than like spinning fast, you basically like, you know, have like a maglev train effectively, but just like many, many miles long to get it up to space and shoot it up. Now, the reason that that's difficult on Earth is down here on the surface where the spin launches or the maglev sled thing would be are still in the atmosphere. And so by the time you're getting to like, you know, call it if you got to orbital velocity, you're still like in this thick atmosphere. And so it's just like crazy heat, crazy drag, et cetera. It's a really difficult, you know, basically to do. And so it's basically why we effectively use rockets is because like they have a way of starting off slowly while they're in the atmosphere, getting out of it and then going more quickly once you're out of the atmosphere. On the moon, there is no atmosphere. And

• 1:10:56Delian Asparouhov?

  so the advantage there is you can basically set up effectively like a, you know, maglev track. You also don't have to go that fast because the moon's gravity well is way less. And so it's super easy to basically like imagine a world where we, you know, mine a bunch of like very simple metals and things like that on the moon, make this like magnet train. And now all of a sudden, you just have something on the moon that you can like point towards Earth if you want to like send something into like low Earth orbit. But also now, if you want to like point it out to Jupiter or Mars, it's just like a phenomenal, effectively, you can think of it as like train station effectively, where like I wouldn't be surprised that even if we are going to Mars, there's a world where like, you know, yeah, maybe the humans are just going straight from Earth to Mars. But I wouldn't be surprised of like a lot of the materials or metals or like, you know, produce things, especially if we have like an industrial outpost on the moon. The moon is the one that is like

• 1:11:38Delian Asparouhov?

  sending the solar panels to Mars or is sending the bioreactors or like the like agricultural equipment, et cetera. That stuff's all coming from the moon because it's like literally basically like free to effectively like send it, send it to Mars.

• 1:11:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:49Delian Asparouhov?

  And so, yeah, it's an idea that's been talked about in sci fi for a long time, partially in some ways. It's also like it's the best weapon in the world in that like you can just shoot a rock, you know, at the Earth really fast and then hit, you know, anybody that you want and you basically can't stop it. But yeah.

• 1:12:04John Coogan?

  Speaking of space weapons, is there any movement on Golden Dome?

• 1:12:09Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, uh, so I don't know if you guys saw, but, uh, MDA, uh, basically put out this, um, shield, uh, IDIQ for where they're going to do a lot of the Golden Dome work, not all of it. Um, uh, they, I want to say it was like now two Wednesdays ago, um, maybe it was a little earlier than that, um, maybe it was last week, um, but, uh, they basically announced that about, I think it was 3,000 people had applied to be a part of the program, um, you know, about a thousand contractors basically got awarded to be on contract, um, and to, you know, sort of, um, you know, acknowledge my colleagues, thank you to the, you know, sort of Varda team for putting together a great proposal technology and we got to be a part of that. Um, still would say all this stuff is, you know, sort of, you know, early in that, um, there's definitely some, you know, uh, the Space Force actually announced that they, uh,

• 1:12:51Delian Asparouhov?

  you know, gave out their first, uh, space-based intercept, uh, contracts. They didn't, um, name who won those contracts because of national security reasons. But yeah, you're starting to see stuff that was like, you know, sort of theorized early on in the admin, um, and now Space Force has obviously handed out those first contracts, Missile Events Agency has handed out those first contracts, um, and so becoming real, I'd say in terms of like first demos, fielded capabilities, you're still a little ways away. I think by like end of next year, you'll probably start to see some of the first stuff really, you know, sort of happening. And then in 2027 is where I think you'll just have a bunch of like, you know, demonstrations across everything from like space radar, space-based intercept, you know, space-to-ground stuff, um, you know, you know, advanced ground radar systems, advanced hypersonic interceptors that come from the ground, um, from all these, you know, sort of new, um, you know, both your traditional, you know, sort of primes and some of these

• 1:13:36Delian Asparouhov?

  like neo-primes, um, you know, coming to the table for Golden Dome. So, um, yeah, becoming real, I think the important thing for something like Golden Dome is like, you want to make sure that, um, if there's a change in administration, you get to keep some of the advancement capabilities and the best way to ensure that happens is like make sure they're fielded. Like if a new admin comes in and it's still like an R and D land, it's easier for them to cancel it versus like if it's something that like the warfighter literally like has access to and is using, well, then it's like, you know, sort of much more likely that, um, you know, much more likely, um, uh, that they're gonna, you know, sort of keep it, keep it around because the warfighter will insist on like, hey, we like built this and we use it and this helps us deter China, why would we like unfund it basically?

• 1:14:13Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:14Jordi Hays?

  Do you have any idea how, uh, Jared thinks about the NASA budget? It was about $25 billion last year. I could see one stance where it's like $25 billion is a lot of money and it's enough. We can do a lot with it. There's another, I could also imagine him being like, we gotta get those numbers up.

• 1:14:30Delian Asparouhov?

  I think politically right now, the White House's budget was actually less than, you know, so 25 billion. And so the likelihood of him, you know, coming out politically and saying, I want more, probably doesn't totally jive with like, you know, hey, Trump just reappointed you. But I think keeping it flat, but using it far more efficiently, that I can see him being like a huge advocate for. And like, yeah, he's made it pretty damn clear. We've talked about this before, but like, I mean, especially now with, you know, one thing, oh, one thing that we haven't talked about, you know, is New Glenn, right? Like, you know, for the first time, we have a second, you know, orbital rocket that is reusable in the United States. And by the way, that thing is like really big, right? Like, you know, much larger than a Falcon 9. And so at this point, when you've got both Starship flying regularly and you have New Glenn flying regularly,

• 1:15:10Delian Asparouhov?

  the idea of like NASA still building rockets through the like SLS program is like even more crazy because it's like you have multiple commercial providers. And by the way, like Neutron from, you know, Rocket Lab will probably be online next year. Stoke Space will be online. So I think the exciting, you know, thing about, you know, Jared is just like, a strong willingness to go slash out budgets that are things that the commercial industry is already doing more effectively, more cheaply. And then go assign that to things like clips, lunar landings, et cetera, that like are where, you know, the strategic focus needs to be. So I think Jared is going to be the advocate of like, you know, keep it at 25 billion. But we're going to do a heck of a lot more with that 25 billion than we were before, because there's just like a bunch of things that like are very large programs that now can effectively just be cut to zero.

• 1:15:49Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:15:50Jordi Hays?

  Do you know what's going on with asteroid Benu? They discovered some, some like sugars, sugar stardust. This was like last week it got announced, but we didn't really get a chance to cover it.

• 1:16:02Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah. So, um, you know, a funny story of this. So if you remember the first Varda mission where we got stuck up in orbit, right?

• 1:16:09Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09Delian Asparouhov?

  Uh, we launched in June of 2023. The original goal was to land in August, September of 2023. Part of why we chose where we were going to land was because there had been some early like cosmic, you know, sort of dust and, uh, both, uh, sorry, solar dust and cause, uh, and asteroid dust missions. That had landed in that same range. But the other reason that we chose it was because in, uh, it was gonna be Halloween of, I believe, twenty-three, uh, Osiris Rex, the asteroid sample mission from Benyu was also going to land there. Um, uh, obviously, we ultimately ended up getting delayed. And so rather than Varda being first in the asteroid, uh, you know, mission coming in, instead it was the other order asteroid mission came in. But point being, our team paid a lot of attention to that asteroid sample coming in, given that like, that was sort of the precedent for Varda being able to, you know, basically come back, uh, from space.

• 1:16:54Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, and that mission was the one that had the Benyu, um, samples on board.

• 1:16:58Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so it's just now, it's just now getting like disclosed or talked about?

• 1:17:02Delian Asparouhov?

  Uh, yeah, yeah, basically, um, you know, obviously with something this material insignificant, like, you wanna make sure that you, you know, dotted the i's and crossed the t's. And also like, it takes time to go analyze these samples and like handle it, et cetera. So yeah, the asteroid sample, yeah, landed like honestly, October, November of two thousand twenty-three, um, and now obviously this is all starting to get published two years later. Uh, what they effectively, you know, sort of showed was that on the asteroid, uh, you have effectively like the building blocks of, you know, life, uh, which, you know, um, yeah, uh, uh, which, uh, and this is my favorite, you know, term in the world, uh, um, uh, build more data for the panspermia, um, hypothesis. Um, so the panspermia, um, hypothesis is that, uh, uh, the early building blocks of life are plentiful, uh, in the universe.

• 1:17:46Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, and a part of how, um, they, um, get distributed in the universe is through, um, you know, basically collisions that end up, you know, you have like, you know, some early proper planet, it collides with some other big planet. Um, and then there's crazy asteroids that get sent out at high speed, but those asteroids have a little bit of like sugars and ribos, et cetera. And that's what actually like, basically like incept's planet on a future, or incept's life on a future, uh, basically planet. One of my favorite graphs, um, that I saw, uh, uh, you know, um, uh, which I could, you know, pull this up right now, but, um, uh, if you look at the average length of a genome on Earth over various periods of time, right? And if we look at like old fossils, et cetera, um, the most complex genome basically has

• 1:18:28Delian Asparouhov?

  a perfect linear relationship between basically the age of Earth, um, and the, you know, sort of genomic length.

• 1:18:34Jordi Hays?

  Oh.

• 1:18:34Delian Asparouhov?

  The thing though, is if you were to extrapolate that line downwards, if you go to when the start of Earth is, um, it was already at a relatively complex genome. Like if you look at like the length of a human genome, the length of bacteria, length of virus, et cetera, it would predict that Earth- Has not been around long enough to have the level of complexity of genomes that we have, given this linear relationship. And so it strongly supports the idea that like the reason we have life on Earth is actually like there were some earlier solar system planted etcetera that did the early building blocks and got to a certain stage and then kicked us off because like it collided with something, some asteroid then went and landed on Earth and the building blocks sort of started us, you know, a little further in that like, you know, trajectory of life.

• 1:19:15John Coogan?

  It's basically the plot of Prometheus.

• 1:19:18Delian Asparouhov?

  Exactly. So if you look at sort of the like Fermi's, you know, sort of paradox, what this implies is that highly likely the great filter is actually basically behind humanity in that like, um, given that this likely suggests that there is, you know, sort of the building blocks of life all over Earth, but that we do not yet see signals. It means that there is probably some filter that makes it difficult to go from like early building blocks to intelligence, more so than, you know, basically like intelligence being, you know, uh, you know, uh, you know, risky, uh, for, you know, being able to like spread out into the stars. And so it is, uh, uh, there's this great graph that showed like, um, all the potential, you know, basically like, um, answers to Fermi's paradox. But this one basically shifted it significantly

• 1:20:01Delian Asparouhov?

  towards the world of like, there is abundant, um, non-intelligent life in the universe and we just happen to be the first intelligent one. Um, and as we go out, we will probably see lots of early building blocks. And as we spread, we may start to see other very early, you know, sort of life, you know, sort of planets that maybe are just getting into bacteria or like early mammals and things like that. So, um, yeah, it's really, it's a time, um, means the universe is plentiful in terms of life.

• 1:20:27John Coogan?

  That's fascinating. Uh, polymarket just, uh, skyrocketing on the odds of UFO disclosure. Are you, are you long or short aliens being real?

• 1:20:38Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, I mean, especially with this panspermia hypothesis, like, you know, very, you know, sort of, you know, long, um, I think there's obviously some sort of insider gov info that is coming out. Like when you see a polymark market like that spike so much, somebody knows something and has driven on it. Um, so, you know, what I love about polymarket, it's like, we're like, is it insider trading? And it's like, yes, that's the point.

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  Finally, somebody saying it out loud.

• 1:21:02John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, that's wild. What about, I mean, I want to go through a bunch of stuff.

• 1:21:11Delian Asparouhov?

  We go to SpaceX stuff?

• 1:21:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, I mean, I imagine that you can't comment on the actual like IPL rumors, but I would be interested to hear about like what, you know, key, like looking back on 2025 for that company, looking forward to 26, what are you excited about? And then also like, what do you think people might misunderstand about SpaceX that, that, that, you know, is the story that we start seeing told, maybe if they hypothetically go public one day?

• 1:21:41Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, let's see. You know, to me, it feels like the company is like, you know, sort of very on track in that, you know, when people started talking about Starship in like 2020, 21, I remember telling people like, look, this is like super exciting. But if you just look at the complexity of that vehicle relative Falcon 9, it's a huge step up in complexity, but that's also roughly the step up in terms of like size of company that SpaceX is and complexity that they can take on. And so then my like quick math is like, well, then it'll probably take about as much time as Falcon 9 to get to like, you know, true production rate. And so there are people that were like, no, they'll be like, you know, like fully online by 25, commercial flying super regularly. And I always remember saying in like 2020, I was like, I don't think that that's going to, you know, sort of be the case.

• 1:22:23Delian Asparouhov?

  I think it'll be closer to like end of decade because that's, you know, roughly the timeframe that Falcon 9, you know, sort of took.

• 1:22:27John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:22:27Delian Asparouhov?

  And so that's where I kind of see them where it's like, yeah, they like are obviously making phenomenal progress, you know, sort of with Starship. I don't think that we're going to be seeing like, you know, you know, this year it's going to be on the order of, I forget, I think like 200, you know, sort of Falcon 9, you know, sort of rocket launches.

• 1:22:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:40Delian Asparouhov?

  I don't think they were going to see 200 Starship launches until, yeah, probably end of decade would still be my like, you know, sort of rough bet. But I still think it's like a really phenomenal outcome.

• 1:22:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, they're going, they're going similarly on, on timing and speed, but they're blowing up more rockets than Falcon 9. Because I think the third Falcon 9 rocket was successful, something like that. And

• 1:22:59Delian Asparouhov?

  Yes, but they had a bunch of landings that they blew up.

• 1:23:02John Coogan?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:23:02Delian Asparouhov?

  Which is the more, you know, the complex parts out.

• 1:23:04John Coogan?

  More relevant.

• 1:23:04Delian Asparouhov?

  People forget that like, yeah, I mean, for what it's worth, Starship is already functional and online. It's just like not, you know, fully reusable.

• 1:23:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I think a lot of people, I, I think a lot of people misunderstand that like when it's blowing up, it's usually blowing up like on the way down. Like it's not, it very quickly was like, okay, it takes off successfully. It gets up to the top and then it, and then it started blowing up on the way down.

• 1:23:23Jordi Hays?

  It bounces off the.

• 1:23:24John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's not bouncing off anything. It is in fact going to space.

• 1:23:31Delian Asparouhov?

  We are going to space.

• 1:23:32John Coogan?

  It is, space is real, space is real here on this show.

• 1:23:36Jordi Hays?

  It glances off the.

• 1:23:38John Coogan?

  Glances off. That's very funny. Um, okay, are you, are you, yeah, sorry, continue.

• 1:23:43Delian Asparouhov?

  Oh, seriously, yeah, people underappreciate that like Starship is actually a very successful rocket already.

• 1:23:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:47Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, it can take things up to orbit at like very large scale at very cheap prices. Literally today, it just happens to be that like, yeah, they're still figuring out the landing thing.

• 1:23:54John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:23:54Delian Asparouhov?

  But obviously they want to figure that out before they get to like supermass production rate. Um, I think the other story that is really going to start to be told is, um, just their shift to like more things that are, you know, extraterrestrial and that like you are going to see SpaceX do, I think, some very impressive things that are way beyond the bounds of low earth orbit over the coming, you know, sort of couple of years. Obviously they have a huge contract with NASA to like figure out how to land things using them on the moon. And that type of activity is something that they like are spending a lot of resources on.

• 1:24:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:21Delian Asparouhov?

  Sort of internally, but I don't think it's like that public of a story relative to like Starship, Starlink, etc.

• 1:24:26John Coogan?

  I saw something, uh, I saw, I saw this like, uh, article that had like all these motion graphics, uh, very cool. And he was explaining star, how Starship will take stuff to the moon. And it was something like they're going to do like 26 refuelings in space and then get, that just feels like it, we, in the sixties, we could just go straight there. Now we gotta stop for gas 26 times. Like, why should I not be blackpilled on this? Is this like, this is crazy.

• 1:24:52Jordi Hays?

  It's a lost art, John.

• 1:24:52John Coogan?

  It just seems crazy to me, but break it down. What's actually going on?

• 1:24:55Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, so funny, um, historical fact from the like Apollo days, there was actually a huge, um, debate internally at NASA, whether or not to take the, um, like fuel stop approach versus the like shoot straight for the moon approach.

• 1:25:08John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:25:08Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, there was a. Significant chunk of NASA led by, it was like Pete something I want to say, that really wanted to do the gas station approach. The reason being that they saw that as what would make it that going to the moon was just much more long-term sustainable. Because you have these like pieces of infrastructure and it's easy to like send things mission by mission without each individual mission basically being super risky.

• 1:25:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:28Delian Asparouhov?

  And the other, you know, side of the approach, which was just shoot straight for the moon, was largely led by Werner von Braun. A part of why he liked the shoot straight for the moon thing is because it allowed him to just make one really, really big rocket. Launching lots of small rockets.

• 1:25:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:40Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, and I think he was just addicted to rockets, basically. And, you know, that was ultimately what won out. I do think probably that was the right call for the time and allowed us like to get on your skis, et cetera.

• 1:25:49John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:49Delian Asparouhov?

  But counterintuitively, the like refueling and, you know, sort of fuel stations approach is actually the, just like the much more long-term sustainable one. And that like, as we think about like, you know, going to Mars, very regularly going to the moon.

• 1:26:00John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:26:01Delian Asparouhov?

  You don't want to necessarily have to take on the risk of like, you know, just like on a car trip, you don't take all your fuel literally with you, like there are gas on the way. And that makes it the vehicle that is moving things is much simpler.

• 1:26:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:11Delian Asparouhov?

  Same thing, you want to set up a more stable logistics and supply chain, you actually do want, you know, basically these types of fuel stops. Um, but yeah, that's a part of what SpaceX needs to prove is like, um, you know, I think that number that you're citing in terms of number of refuels is more for a full Mars mission.

• 1:26:23John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:26:23Delian Asparouhov?

  For the moon, I think it's more like three refuels.

• 1:26:25John Coogan?

  Okay, okay.

• 1:26:27Delian Asparouhov?

  So it is definitely, you know, sort of simpler by, uh, going, going to the moon.

• 1:26:30John Coogan?

  Also, it does seem like we've rebuilt the capacity to just yeet stuff directly to the moon because didn't Firefly land something up there? Like, like, and China's going up and stuff direct, like, like we, we, we seriously have checked that box like several times. It's not even like humans on the moon once. Like, I think we've sent six manned missions, right?

• 1:26:47Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. But I think we want to get that to like 600, it's going to be like through the fuel stop, you know, approach probably. And what I like is that we're parallel tracking, which is like the things that Firefly and China have done, those things are just amplified by the fuel stop, you know, basically approach when like that, you know, comes online. So I like that we're like parallel tracking it. And this goes back to a little bit of the Jared Isaacman thing where like, man, if I were in Jared Isaacman's shoes right now, I would basically just go to like, you know, NASA and just be like, Hey, Firefly's like figured out how to land on the moon. I don't understand why we wouldn't just jam a bunch of funding down their throats and tell them like, don't just do it once a year, but I want you like doing it on a quarterly basis. I want you to basically now establish like a regular supply chain there. So now I can go fund a bunch of companies that are like making lunar humanoids and lunar robots and pavers and solar panel assemblies, et cetera.

• 1:27:29Delian Asparouhov?

  So like while we're in parallel doing the like Fuel Stop human architecture, we also just like have these direct approaches that are landing robots there. So we're just like landing equipment there nonstop and figuring out how to like, you know, basically make sure that by the time the humans are there, we actually have like a bunch of like robotic infrastructure that's like, you know, autonomous and basically set up.

• 1:27:46John Coogan?

  Super cool.

• 1:27:47Delian Asparouhov?

  Yeah, I think like that, that, that parallel approach.

• 1:27:48John Coogan?

  Okay, that, that, that is super sci fi. I love that. Uh, but that feels like if we can do that, we can certainly put some data centers in space. What's your thinking evolving on that? Because Casey Hanmer just came out pro data center in space. Like you had, you had us in the first half.

• 1:28:04Jordi Hays?

  Elon's been, been posting about it.

• 1:28:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, Elon, I mean, you really kicked the hornets off because like Elon Sundar, this Y C company seems to be doing pretty well. There's like, there's like four different attack vectors on you. And I love it. It's contrarian position, but are you maintaining it or is your thinking evolving?

• 1:28:22Delian Asparouhov?

  Um, look, I'm gonna, you know, uh, maintain my position because no, no information has changed.

• 1:28:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:28:29Delian Asparouhov?

  Uh, you know, people have said words, but they have not presented compelling, you know, sort of arguments.

• 1:28:33John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:28:35Delian Asparouhov?

  Where I think there's a little bit of like a gray area is like, look, I currently have two data centers that are in space.

• 1:28:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:28:44Delian Asparouhov?

  I'm not doing like AI compute on them, but I have like a bunch of computers up in space. They could go do inference and like training, et cetera. Starlink, each of the satellites has compute, et cetera, on board. They could be, you know, basically, you know, sort of data centers in space. So I think the question more is like.

• 1:28:57Jordi Hays?

  You change up your, you change up your tune, Delian. You're looking at the next $20 billion public company.

• 1:29:02John Coogan?

  I think so. Uh, can we smack this? I saw you hanging out with, uh, with Chumav.

• 1:29:08Jordi Hays?

  I don't know if you're doing your duty to shareholders in the way that you're spinning this.

• 1:29:11John Coogan?

  Yeah, just stop being so realistic.

• 1:29:13Jordi Hays?

  Too modest, too modest, too much of a realist.

• 1:29:16John Coogan?

  We're putting a quantum computer on it too.

• 1:29:18Delian Asparouhov?

  I literally have like multiple shareholders that have been like, okay, like, I know that you don't like the data center space thing, but like, what if we use the space factories to make things that go into the data centers?

• 1:29:28John Coogan?

  Exactly. Fab in space.

• 1:29:30Delian Asparouhov?

  I giggle a little bit and I'm just like, love you guys. Like, you know, I, my job is to build a business that like, you know, delivers revenue and shareholder returns, not just pure hype. Um, but yeah, I think it's where it's like, it's on the margin where it's like, look, do I think that like the SpaceX like economics are going to beat out like nuclear powered data centers run by Crusoe in Texas? No, man, come on. Like, I just like, in order for that to work, you have to be like short nuclear, short, you know, optical fiber on the ground, short the ability to like, you know, build buildings, short solar panels, short batteries. It's just like, all of those things are making incredible progress super rapidly and in space, those things are more complex. Are there going to be, you know, sort of marginal, you know, sort of areas and use cases and more broadly, as we just like have more and more of like

• 1:30:14Delian Asparouhov?

  internet and connectivity where there, there are real benefits to being in space. And so then you by default just have more infrastructure up there. And so, yes, some of those things may be dedicated to compute. But like, yeah, is Crusoe almost certainly going to have like better economics than like a space based data center in 2030? Yeah, I think that's going to be the case. And so that might mean that like 98.5% of data centers, you know, are on the ground. If some small sliver for certain use cases, or you're doing like compute on things that are calculated in orbit, or like, you know, um, you know, cameras, you know, that are up there and you're trying to do things, or it's like, there's people that are up in orbit and, you know, they want chat GPT in orbit. Then yeah, again, there might be these like slivers, but it's going to be, yeah, I feel very confident that it's going to be slivers. Who knows? Maybe we'll look at this recording in 2032 and like, you know, I'll have been like

• 1:30:57Jordi Hays?

  People will be mocking you. People will be dunking on you. The young, the young Delian will literally be saying like, Delian's been like the next Delian, you know, the young gun that loves, yeah, they'll be like, oh, he's chopped D cell.

• 1:31:12Delian Asparouhov?

  I'm D cell, maybe, I'm D cell.

• 1:31:15John Coogan?

  You only predicted humanoids assembling pavers on the moon, not data centers.

• 1:31:22John Coogan?

  Anyway.

• 1:31:22Delian Asparouhov?

  Big detail guy.

• 1:31:23John Coogan?

  Thank you. Thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. This is a lot of fun.

• 1:31:27Jordi Hays?

  Always, always great to chat.

• 1:31:28John Coogan?

  Happy holidays. Merry Christmas. We'll see you soon.

• 1:31:31Delian Asparouhov?

  Merry Christmas. See you soon, boys. Bye.

• 1:31:34John Coogan?

  We're going to tell you about eightsleep.com. Delian's an investor. Exceptional sleep without exception. Get an eight sleep for Christmas. Gift it for Christmas. Get a good night's sleep this Christmas with eight sleep.

• 1:31:47John Coogan?

  I got a 92. Jordy, how'd you do?

• 1:31:49Jordi Hays?

  Oof, I got an 86.

• 1:31:50John Coogan?

  I got a 92, but I'm in a terrible sleep debt, which is rough. I'm on like a four hour, five hour.

• 1:31:55Jordi Hays?

  I don't care that you won because I'm in such a good mood because of this Christmas music.

• 1:32:00John Coogan?

  I like it.

• 1:32:00Jordi Hays?

  And we have Morgan coming in.

• 1:32:02John Coogan?

  This is the longest. We have, yes, we have Morgan Housel, author, friend of the show. Welcome to the show. This is the longest sound queue. Thank you so much for taking the time to join us. How are you doing?

• 1:32:14Jordi Hays?

  Welcome back.

• 1:32:14Morgan Housel?

  Good to see you guys. Doing well. I like your shirts. Looking good.

• 1:32:17Jordi Hays?

  Thank you.

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  Yes, we have.

• 1:32:19Jordi Hays?

  One should be in the mail for you.

• 1:32:20John Coogan?

  Yeah, hopefully, all right.

• 1:32:21Morgan Housel?

  Love it.

• 1:32:22John Coogan?

  We'll work on it.

• 1:32:25John Coogan?

  Let's, uh, let's get into it. What is new in your world? Take us through the latest and then I want to go into some psychology of the holiday, psychology of shopping. Uh, we have a bunch of things that we want to run, run through.

• 1:32:37Morgan Housel?

  But yeah, not, not.

• 1:32:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:39Morgan Housel?

  I mean, not, not that much going on right now. I'm not writing a book right now, which is kind of the most enjoyable part of my career because it lets you just spend all day reading and thinking about what's next, which is always the most enjoyable part of it. So I guess to answer your question, I don't know what's next, but I love this area of my life of just doing a bunch of reading and talking to people and thinking about different topics and try to figure out what might be next.

• 1:33:01Jordi Hays?

  How, how, how much have you kind of keyed in on what you want to write about next? Uh, is it?

• 1:33:07Morgan Housel?

  I think I have a pretty good idea of what it would be.

• 1:33:09Jordi Hays?

  Well, what about the next book? What about the next book after that? Is that, is that starting to come into focus? I'm curious.

• 1:33:16Morgan Housel?

  I think that's not, yeah, I think what, what is true, that I have an idea for a distant book. I don't know when this is going to be, but there are so many topics that are worth exploring, but not in a full book. And I do think there is an idea, it's hard to do right, but there's an idea for a book that is a huge hodgepodge of like 80 different ideas, all of which are worth exploring in three or four pages. And obviously the issue with most nonfiction books, particularly business books, is you have a topic that is worth exploring, but not in 250 pages. But then the author has to stretch it out and just keep on rambling about the same topic over and over again. And that's what's, why business books are so difficult.

• 1:33:55Morgan Housel?

  So if you can get around that by just going shallow, or not, not even shallow, but giving the treatment that they deserve on a bunch of small disparate topics. I think that's something I'm interested in.

• 1:34:05Jordi Hays?

  Have you, have you ever been tempted into trying to build a subscription, like newsletter and, and really focus in on that by saying like, hey, there's a bunch of, you know, instead of the next. Three or four books, I'm gonna basically just write the chapters and publish them as I have them. I'm sure you've had, I mean, you've had every opportunity to do that and you haven't. It hasn't been like the focus so far, but I'm curious if that would ever change.

• 1:34:30Morgan Housel?

  I think the reason I have not is because I think you have to be very careful as a, as a content creator, for, for lack of a better word, that you don't become beholden to your audience. That you say, look, my audience is paying me a hundred bucks a month and I have to feed the ducks because they're quacking. That's a very dangerous spot to be in for a content creator of like being forced to say stuff when you have nothing to say is a bad.

• 1:34:51John Coogan?

  You're saying that to the guys that go live for three hours every day and if we don't.

• 1:34:55Morgan Housel?

  Yeah, but, but you're talking differently, like nobody expects you to do your, your PhD thesis every day.

• 1:35:01John Coogan?

  Totally, totally. The bar is like much higher.

• 1:35:03Jordi Hays?

  And we're not, we don't necessarily need to generate the content. The world generates the content and we figure out.

• 1:35:08John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:09Jordi Hays?

  What we want to talk about.

• 1:35:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're kind of like.

• 1:35:11Jordi Hays?

  What about, have you been, have you seen some, there's some, I feel like I've seen some authors like that are writing fiction instead of just writing a book, like releasing the book as a subscription product. That seems somewhat interesting, almost like treating it like you're subscribing to Netflix and Netflix is releasing a show and then sort of dripping it out over time. Do you think that's a model that, that authors could? Like, how powerful is the book industrial complex? Is there enough incentives to keep people from not doing that and not, you know, self-publishing and kind of dripping out content and just staying true to the traditional path?

• 1:35:48Morgan Housel?

  I think it's, I think it's true that books are, and this is true for podcasts as well, that they are the ultimate tail-driven content. Ninety-nine percent of books that are published don't, don't work. And, but the ones that do really, really work, same for podcasts and whatnot. And so I think it's true that if you're an author, you need, particularly if you haven't had that hit yet, you need to figure out your business model in a different way. It's very difficult to say. I'm a talented writer. I'm going to go write books and try to make a living out of it. So for every writer who does that, there are 10,000 who have stumbled and tripped and ultimately failed doing it. It's a, it's a tough model to make it work. And I've, I've seen a much higher success rate in the people that go on Substack or whatever it might be and have that, that level of, of subscription.

• 1:36:31Morgan Housel?

  I think people are more willing to pay 30 bucks a month for your consistent content, your daily or your weekly newsletter, than they are to pay $30 for a book that took you two years to write. And so it's, it's a more stable model, I think, with a higher hit rate to have that paid subscription. Even if the rewards for a book that works can be higher, it's just so much more difficult to make it work.

• 1:36:53John Coogan?

  What do you think about like consumer churn or like conversion to actually consuming the content fully? Because I know that there's this, there's like this odd, uh, you know, a lot of people buy physical books, they gift them and then they sit on bookshelves and, uh, they wind up being props in many cases that people don't just have enough time to read all the books that they acquire. I actually did subscribe to one of those new books as a newsletter fiction. And it was odd because I wound up paying for it for a very long time, but I didn't wind up reading it.

• 1:37:24Jordi Hays?

  As they were, as the chapters were coming in.

• 1:37:26John Coogan?

  And I thought, I went, when I first, when I first subscribed, I was like, oh, this is going to be even easier because it's so bite sized. It's going to be easier. I'm more likely to get through this than if this was just another book that I had added to my Audible.

• 1:37:40Jordi Hays?

  It, it also creates a weird tension where there's an incentive to have like crazy cliffhangers.

• 1:37:44John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:37:45Jordi Hays?

  So that people don't churn. Like if you get a little bit, if you get a little bit bored with a book and you have the ability to churn from the book. You know, think about how often I, I, I'll start a book and if I'm not, you know, I'll get three chapters in.

• 1:37:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:37:58Jordi Hays?

  I'm not like really engaged with it. I'll just say like, cool. I'm not necessarily, uh, hopefully I learned something, but I'm not going to just read it just to see it all the way through.

• 1:38:06John Coogan?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 1:38:07Morgan Housel?

  I think what's true too, for every good nonfiction book is that. People don't remember books so much as they remember a couple of sentences from those books. So, most nonfiction books are about 50,000 words. If you read to the end, which is rare, but if you read all 50,000 words and you come away having remembered two or three banger lines of the 50,000 words, you remember 50 of them. That can be great. And it's true, like some books that I know changed my life, books that I recommend that are so good. If you actually, if you ask me about them, I can tell you two or three sentences, maybe that I remember verbatim that were fantastic and the rest kind of drifts away over time. So, I think that's true even for the absolute best books that can change your life.

• 1:38:50Morgan Housel?

  It's just very small snippets that you're going to remember from them. And so, like one takeaway in that too is that you can, you can remember two or three banger lines from a blog post as well.

• 1:39:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:01Morgan Housel?

  And so, all the books that I've written, most of the ideas started as blog posts. And then I could take that idea, okay, that idea worked, people like that. How can I kind of transform that into a chapter in a book? But the core idea is like, if you can remember one sentence from this idea, from this chapter, I've done my job. That's, that's, that's the goal.

• 1:39:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, I, I, I wonder if I actually read this book, but there's a book that left a really, really long like impression on me. Uh, about all about immortality. It was this very interesting way of, of like framework of thinking about immortality from different cultures. And I don't even know if I actually read the book, but it stuck with me because like the actual idea was so powerful. And then there's other books where I've read the whole thing. There's been a lot of interesting anecdotes, but like it didn't like change my whole worldview. And I, yeah, it's just fascinating. What, sorry, what were you gonna say?

• 1:39:49Jordi Hays?

  Well, I was talking about, I, I wrote an essay called Rage Bait is for Losers. And I, what I wanted people to remember was the title.

• 1:39:56John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:56Jordi Hays?

  Because it, it in itself was.

• 1:39:58John Coogan?

  Titles are important.

• 1:39:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, it was, it was Rage Bait itself. Because if you've been rage baiting and you then are thinking, well, I'm not, I, I like, you kind of want to defend it. Like a strategy and some people.

• 1:40:11John Coogan?

  This is interesting. So, how do you think about Rage Bait in the context of picking a title for a book that might jump off the shelf in a store? Because I can imagine there's a world where a book is called, you know, like. If you don't read this, you'll be poor forever or something that, you know, and then, and then it's like all of a sudden, well, I, I, I'm not going to let them get the best of me. I gotta read that book. Um, but I

• 1:40:35Morgan Housel?

  I think it's, it's no different than any product where you over promise and under deliver. You're just going to piss off your customers. And if you're just trying to get a quick hit and then disappear, maybe that's the right way. If you're trying to build a long-term brand, your title has to be very honest.

• 1:40:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:49Morgan Housel?

  And so my first book, The Psychology of Money, it's, it's a pretty boring title. A lot of the people who are involved in it said, we should not use that as a title. It sounds like an academic textbook.

• 1:40:58John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's a textbook.

• 1:41:00Morgan Housel?

  But it's an honest, but it's an honest title.

• 1:41:01John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:02Morgan Housel?

  What is the book about?

• 1:41:02Jordi Hays?

  Do you think you would have?

• 1:41:03Morgan Housel?

  It's about the psychology of money.

• 1:41:04John Coogan?

  It doesn't have a prompt. It doesn't say.

• 1:41:05Jordi Hays?

  Do you think you would have sold more copies if, if you just changed the title to, How to Get Rich and Stay Rich or something?

• 1:41:13John Coogan?

  Well, it's not even that. It, it, it's like, it's like how to make sure that you have a good psychology of money. How, how to make sure you have a good relationship with money.

• 1:41:22Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think you clearly care about.

• 1:41:23John Coogan?

  You didn't set that in the title.

• 1:41:24Jordi Hays?

  You clearly care about NPS.

• 1:41:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:26Jordi Hays?

  Maybe more than other writers or, or, or publishers might.

• 1:41:32Morgan Housel?

  I heard Rory Sutherland say this on the podcast recently. He said, if you are like a family business and you're in it for the long run, you're trying to build a generational business. By and large, you don't care about metrics. You're not tracking how much your gross profit margin shifted last quarter. What you care about is customer satisfaction and brand. And it's only when you're like a private equity owned business where you're like, we're just trying to flip this thing in the next quarter, that you become very metric driven and you, and you want to measure everything down. So I think to answer your question, if I was very metric driven and it was just like, my goal is to sell as many books as I can next quarter, you can use something bombastic that's going to over promise. That'll probably work in the short run. If your, if your goal is to have a long tail, sales cycle and be like, I want this book to sell for years

• 1:42:17Morgan Housel?

  or even generations, if I'm lucky, it has to be honest. It has to be brand driven where people are like, I enjoyed this book. I'm going to recommend it to my friends and family.

• 1:42:25Jordi Hays?

  Emily Herrera in the chat says, books are just titles and thumbnails. So same, same experience on YouTube, you might, you might have a crazy title and thumbnail. And then if it's not very truthful, then all the comments are just like, congrats on baiting, you know, baiting people into watching this. And, and again, the sort of NPS is, is quite low. Should you write a book on? Gambling.

• 1:42:49Morgan Housel?

  Hmm.

• 1:42:52Morgan Housel?

  I think it's all kind of embedded in behavioral finance. And I think the idea that the proliferation of gambling, whether it's crypto or sports betting, or whatever it might be, I think by and large, this is not a unique take, many people have talked about this, but Daniel Kahneman wrote about when all of your options are bad or perceived to be bad, people become very risk-taking. And so if you feel like, if a young person feels like, if I work hard, excuse me, if I work hard and work my way up the corporate ladder and save my money and buy a house and start a family, that's what you'll do. If you perceive that option as available to you. If you don't, then you're like, who cares? Like, I have no vested stake in this system, might as well throw it all on black and see

• 1:43:37Morgan Housel?

  what happens. And I think that that comes down to it. So I think the psychology of gambling is a pretty deep social issue, and I think you could probably accurately summarize it as youth pessimism. When people are pessimistic, they're much more likely to just throw it all down and see what happens. They have nothing to lose.

• 1:43:53Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I.

• 1:43:55John Coogan?

  I have more on that. So how do you think about the level of risk that people were taking at the time of the American dream? Like, because there's one world where we where we go back and we say like, oh, yeah, it was like the 1950s and you could just get a job at this law firm and it would just be massively successful. Or even if you were coal miner, you'd have a job in healthcare forever and you go to the auto plant and be an autoworker and work your way up from, you know, the person sweeping up the floor at night to the manager at the end of the day. And I'm wondering if there's like, well, like, we remember that as not risky because America was successful. But like, there was an emerging new order where, you know, like, the USSR could have

• 1:44:38John Coogan?

  steamrolled in the in the Cold War and America could have been a disaster. And so, in fact, like, it was risky, but it just worked out well? But I don't know if that's like, am I thinking about that even in the right realm of all at all? What do you think?

• 1:44:52Morgan Housel?

  Yeah, I think I think a lot of that narrative of what the job market used to be and kind of the 1950s Americana nostalgia that we have is is just that. It's it's kind of false nostalgia. It's this idea that, you know, the narrative that you just described of you could go get a job at an auto factory and work your way up and stay there for 30 years. I mean, if you understand the history of the US economy in the 1950s, particularly the 1970s. There were huge recessions. There were huge job losses. And so I think it's easy to put together a charming, you know, Norman Rockwell picture of what it used to be. By and large, it's not the case. But on the flip side.

• 1:45:29Jordi Hays?

  It was like everyone had a, you know, this idea of like, if you were employed, you had a very good shot of owning a home. But the homes were like 750 square feet, right? And they were like.

• 1:45:42Morgan Housel?

  That's, that's true. And I, but I think it's also true that, you know, you can throw around a lot of statistics, and I have, about how the median American family earns more, is wealthier, is better off today than they were in the 1950s, in the 1960s. It's also true, indisputably, that homeownership was more accessible and cheaper back then. And I've, I've, I've been thinking a lot about the topic that I think almost every societal problem that we have today is downstream of housing affordability. It's the single biggest issue that we have, even back to the gambling issue that we were just talking about. If you are 28, and you feel, whether it's true or not, you feel like you will never own a home. It's impossible for you to get there to save the down payment. You

• 1:46:27Morgan Housel?

  become much more likely to be like, I have nothing vested in this system. Might as well throw it all away. I have nothing to lose. I might as well throw it all away. And so, so even if median incomes adjusted for inflation were lower back in the 1950s, if owning a home was more accessible, and by and large, it was for most people, that just gave you more of a vested sense in the system, caused you to take, I think, smarter risks, not betting everything on, on the spread on tonight's game, but taking a risk of, I'm going to move to a new town and try to get a job at an auto factory. That was a risk, but it's more calculated risk than today's gambling mentality. I think there's something to be said, too, of just access, that which we're seeing in the gambling world today. If you

• 1:47:10Morgan Housel?

  gave a 19-year-old boy, Kalshi and, and all the sports betting apps in 1955, they would have latched right onto it. There's nothing unique about today's young generation, by and large. It's just that we didn't have those tools.

• 1:47:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, look up, I encourage people to look up. John and I were going back and forth on this on our on our flight on Friday. We were looking at the how popular gambling was during the fall of the Roman Empire. It was all social classes. We're doing it on the exact same levels that we're seeing today. Sure, they weren't on a mobile device, but it was like everywhere that you would be eating and drinking, and it was in private and public, and it was illegal and and legal in some areas like at certain festivals, it would be legal, and then it would be like illegal otherwise, but you know, it was kind of seen as okay. So there's nothing, there's nothing new.

• 1:48:05Jordi Hays?

  These things just are going in in waves, but it certainly was, I think people were like somewhat nihilistic, and they were just like, sure, like, things are, we're experiencing a collapse, we may as well put it all on block.

• 1:48:19Morgan Housel?

  Yeah, and so I think it's easy to look at the issues of today and and frame it as we have degraded, particularly the younger generation. I don't think that's the case. I think any other previous generation would have become degenerate gamble, it's gamblers and crypto trainers traders if they had the option to, like today's generation does.

• 1:48:36John Coogan?

  Yeah, I wonder how much of it is is just memetic, just like, like, like the myth that we tell ourselves, like, if we can, yeah, I don't know, somehow steer away. I also, I also wonder, like, you know, there, there is the like, the paternalistic, the puritanical, like, ban the bad thing. But there's also the the more optimistic view of just like, maybe just do more of the good thing, like, if we have like, a national project to build something meaningful.

• 1:49:07Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think, I think the thing that that makes you want to put your hand through a wall is people having their in their brokerage account, the ability to one click, you know, sell Apple stock, and then another click, buy trade on sports contracts. Because, I mean, that, again, at least there was historically some separation where there was at least some friction of. Getting out of maybe a higher quality investment and getting into something that's just rolling the dice. And I think that's very clearly going, you know, has gone away in some cases and probably will just continue to erode.

• 1:49:50John Coogan?

  Also, I mean,

• 1:49:50Morgan Housel?

  Yeah, I think it's, I think it's important to point out too, that Vanguard has $12 trillion AUM. You know, Fidelity has $10 trillion AUM. The vast majority of capital these days are people saving in their 401ks, dollar cost averaging. They don't even know their password. It's being invested into good, stable businesses, diversified, low cost. So it's easy to point out around all the crazy speculation that goes on. And look, I'm a free markets person. People want to speculate and do whatever they want with their money. You're allowed to set your financial life on fire. But the vast, vast majority of capital is still being invested in what I would consider to be a pretty smart, conservative, long-term way.

• 1:50:31John Coogan?

  The, the chat has a little bit of a counterpoint. They said that we, we might not be considering the fact that 99% of gamblers quit just before they hit it big. And so that is a little bit of a counterpoint to a lot of the arguments that we're making here. And I just want to make sure we consider that.

• 1:50:49Morgan Housel?

  Fair enough. Yeah. Just one more bet. One more.

• 1:50:52John Coogan?

  Just one more. You're good.

• 1:50:55Jordi Hays?

  Wanted, wanted to go back, get your thoughts on, on startup launches, kind of random. I think everyone has launch, launch video fatigue. I know we did. We were doing a lot of like launch style videos earlier this year and we pretty much stopped completely just because we felt like the, the meta was kind of dead. It wasn't actually a way to like truly break through anymore. And wanted to get your, if you think that writing is underutilized as like a launch, as a launch strategy, there's been some, you know, viral PDFs. I think, you know, situational awareness is a, is a good example of like, just if you can put together a good enough document, you can attract, you know, bill. I mean, obviously

• 1:51:38Jordi Hays?

  Leopold is in a unique situation, but it feels like writing is super underutilized.

• 1:51:44John Coogan?

  My first company went viral on a blog post on Hacker News and drove 10,000 signups, a ton of interest. And people were starting a conversation around that. It was just a blog on some random, random person's website, basically. And it actually broke out massively. But yeah, it's tricky, but I'd love to know your thoughts.

• 1:52:02Morgan Housel?

  I think it tends to be true, and this is not black and white, but it tends to be true that if you can explain your value proposition in a paragraph of text, you will do it. And if you can't, you're much more likely to say, well, we need some glossy pictures. If you can do that, then you kind of work your way down to like, can we just create a movie out of this kind of thing? That's not always the case. But I do think it's the case like, if your idea is so obvious and so good, you can just explain it with crayons on a piece of paper and you're good. You're good from there. And so I think, look, when I started writing books, somebody told me advice that I thought was great for books, but true for almost any product. And it was, if the book is good, you don't need to market it. And if the book is bad, no amount of marketing will help.

• 1:52:43John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:52:44Morgan Housel?

  I think you can apply that to a lot of different things. If your product is good, you don't need to market it. That's not true. I'm being, I'm being very generalized here. Marketing's important. But if your product is good, then it can kind of sell itself. If the product is bad, no amount of marketing will help, particularly in the longer term. And so, look, I like good design. I like flashy videos. I like, I like all that kind of stuff. But good ideas are very obvious. I think that's one of the keys to good writing, is that you don't need to spend a lot of mental horsepower to understand what the author's saying. You can just kind of glance your eyes over a paragraph and be like, yeah, I got it. Makes perfect sense. I don't need any more flashy videos. That one sentence explained everything I need to know. Let's move on from there. I think that tends to be true.

• 1:53:24John Coogan?

  Do you have a book of the year? Do you, do you like looking back and creating like a list of the things that you most enjoyed this year? I know that you don't, this is, this is like a total newsletter fodder, and we already talked about how you're not, you know, you know, in service to people that demand the, the end of the year review. But has anything stuck out to you this year?

• 1:53:45Morgan Housel?

  I thought the best book that I read was probably Andrew Ross Sorkin's 1929. Just absolutely phenomenal.

• 1:53:52Jordi Hays?

  Also the best book launch ever?

• 1:53:55Morgan Housel?

  Yes, I think that's, I think that's probably.

• 1:53:57John Coogan?

  He did both. Great book. And then also like absolute masterclass. I was taking screenshots of you. If you search Andrew Ross Sorkin 1929 on YouTube, you can see that he just did every single podcast. Like he did

• 1:54:08Morgan Housel?

  Yes.

• 1:54:09John Coogan?

  20 or 30 shows. And it was so good. And and I didn't realize like he's someone that everyone knows, but he's not constantly on a tour. So he had a lot of built up energy to like go full tilt and it worked really well. It was a

• 1:54:23Morgan Housel?

  And it's such a fascinating period of American history that to my surprise has not there's not a lot of books written about the Great Depression. There's not like like what's like, what's the classic book on the Great Depression? There's not many. There's not many of them. There are 10,000 books written about World War Two.

• 1:54:38John Coogan?

  World War Two, yeah.

• 1:54:39Morgan Housel?

  As there should be. But but the Great Depression, which was so monumental in the history of this country, there's not a lot written about it. So I thought he did a great job.

• 1:54:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:54:46Morgan Housel?

  Somebody brought this up when they were reviewing 1929. I thought it was such a fascinating point that all of the big characters in the book, except for maybe Jesse Livermore, are pretty much forgotten today. All of the titans of industry, of banking, the Jamie Diamonds of their day are all forgotten now, unless you're at like a history buff, Charlie Mitchell, all those people, we don't remember them anymore. And I think there's something to be said that if your only accomplishment in life is that you made a lot of money, you're going to be forgotten very quickly. And that was true for a lot of the bankers back then. It's probably true for a lot of the private equity hedge fund people today. Nothing wrong with

• 1:55:21Jordi Hays?

  I will remember all the private credit legends. Wall Street's new rich. I will remember them. I'm going to keep this episode or this edition of Barron's, bring it to the grave.

• 1:55:32John Coogan?

  No, what you need to do is you need to wait 100 years. You need to write an amazing book about it. Then you need to turn that book into a movie and a TV show and then cast an iconic actor and then we'll remember. And then that's

• 1:55:42Jordi Hays?

  How are you processing the AI trade in the in the context of history?

• 1:55:48Morgan Housel?

  I think I think historically, the gap between a product changing the world and people making a lot of money off of it can be 20 miles apart. The railroads were probably the most transformational technology ever, way more transformational than anything we've had over the last 100 years. And a few people made ungodly fortunes from it. 99% of railroad investors lost everything. And and that was true for the airplane completely changed the world. A lot of people lost huge fortunes on automobiles. There were 2,000 car companies in the early 1900s. Three of them remained by by the 1930s or so. And so you can go on down the list of like, change the world and 99% of people lost everything. Of course, that was true of the the dot com bubble.

• 1:56:33Morgan Housel?

  Everyone's thesis by and large in the late 1990s of what the internet would become was right. But it didn't mean that you were going to make any money from it.

• 1:56:41Jordi Hays?

  Webvan.

• 1:56:42Morgan Housel?

  Lose everything.

• 1:56:42Jordi Hays?

  Webvan, I think, is such a good example because it's like DoorDash, just

• 1:56:47Morgan Housel?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:48Jordi Hays?

  15 years.

• 1:56:48John Coogan?

  That's dot com. Chewy's a banger company.

• 1:56:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:51John Coogan?

  MP3 dot com. Spotify is the company you want to own. Like, there's just so many, every, every current company, there was some dot com that was doing the basic idea and just didn't get to, didn't get to scale at all. Yeah.

• 1:57:03Morgan Housel?

  I think, so I think, I think that, I think you could easily imagine just based off of history that in 20 years, of course, AI completely changed everything. Nothing is the same. And when we talk about the businesses that have been involved over the previous 20 years, there's two or three unbelievable winners. 99% of companies went to zero. And the three companies that won are either not around today or not the obvious ones today. So if you're talking about the internet in 1998, Google was in a garage. Obviously, Facebook didn't exist yet. There, that, that, that tends to be the story of what it was. The, the, the Wright brothers themselves didn't make very much money from the airplane, if anything. It wasn't until you had someone named William Boeing who came along and he was like, I'm just going to copy your idea, but do it way better than you guys could do it.

• 1:57:46Morgan Housel?

  And that, that, that tends to be the idea is what Google did with Yahoo and, and Hotbot and all the other search engines who were the actual front runners. You just took someone else coming along to be like, great idea. Hold my beer and watch me do it 100 times better than you could.

• 1:58:00John Coogan?

  Speaking of AI, we, we've talked about this before. Obviously, AI is not ready or equipped to write a book or

• 1:58:11Jordi Hays?

  Oh, it'll write it, John. Happily.

• 1:58:14John Coogan?

  It will write it, but it won't write it. But what do you think about AI-generated voices? Do you think that those are past the uncanny valley? Would you listen to an audible book that was, where the, where the voice was AI-generated?

• 1:58:32Morgan Housel?

  I'm not much of an audiobook guy, so I'm probably the wrong person to ask for that. What I will say is, one of the most amazing AI products that I've seen in the last two years, I think a lot of people have had this experience, is Google's Notebook LM. Yeah. Where you go in and you say, here's a topic, make me a 10-minute podcast. And it spits it out, and it's unbelievable. Yeah. So when I first saw that, I was like, this is, this is magic. I can't believe it. And how many Notebook LM podcasts have I listened to since then? Zero. I was about to ask. I think, none, none. I think there's something to be said, and of course, I am literally talking.

• 1:59:04Jordi Hays?

  Actually, I actually think it's, I think, I think the use case there, where they probably have traction, is students that have not studied for an exam, and they have an hour to try to figure it out. So it's not for enjoyment at all. It's pure function, which is that I need to listen to something for an hour that is like, hyper-specific to a topic, and it's boring, so nobody necessarily made the like, definitive podcast episode on it, but I just need it. And then in terms of like, the way that most people, people listen to audio to get, to be entertained, even if it's like, educational, and so they're gonna go to people that are good entertainers, that are opinionated.

• 1:59:39Morgan Housel?

  Yeah. I think that's true. And of course, I am, I am such a biased person to say this as an author myself, but I think what I like about reading books, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is the idea that a fellow human wrote this thing. I could never write this. My brain doesn't work this way, but, but some other authors did, and I feel like that connection is amazing, and it breaks down as soon as you have AI-generated content. And I think that's why I have no interest in a Notebook LM podcast. I'd much rather listen to David Senra, and his, you know, even with all of his quirks, and his stumbles and whatnot, but I'm like, yeah, but David read that. He did this. He's thinking that, and like, I love that. And, and so, I, you know.

• 2:00:20Jordi Hays?

  I listened to an hour of, of OG Senra, the P T Barnum episode yesterday. And then I got to hang out with David for a couple hours last night, for dinner at my house.

• 2:00:30Morgan Housel?

  One of the best guys around. I love him.

• 2:00:32Jordi Hays?

  Truly. Yeah, truly. Yeah, the, the, I, I think, I need to listen to the, the James Dyson episode today, but he released that, and for Senra OGs, you know how significant that episode is, is to him, like, the, the full circle moment of, you know, studying Dyson to being able to, to interview him live. It's very cool.

• 2:00:54Morgan Housel?

  Love it.

• 2:00:55John Coogan?

  Yeah, wild. Well.

• 2:00:56Jordi Hays?

  Um, great having you on the show.

• 2:00:58John Coogan?

  Thank you so much.

• 2:00:59Jordi Hays?

  We hope you have an incredible end, uh, end to the year.

• 2:01:03John Coogan?

  Merry Christmas.

• 2:01:03Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, thank you for being a part of this this year. You're, uh, somebody that, uh, we, uh, one of our favorite guests and, uh, can't wait for next year.

• 2:01:11Morgan Housel?

  Thanks so much for having me. Always an honor to be on. Looking forward to my shirt.

• 2:01:14Jordi Hays?

  Yes.

• 2:01:15John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:01:16Jordi Hays?

  Talk soon.

• 2:01:16John Coogan?

  Have a good rest of your day. numeralhq.com, compliance handled. Numeral worries about sales tax and VAT compliance so you can focus on growth and, uh, putting presents into the Christmas tree.

• 2:01:32Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 2:01:33John Coogan?

  Uh, speaking of presents under the Christmas tree, the Google team is cooking up a present for me in 2026. They're gonna put ads in Gemini. Let's go.

• 2:01:43Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong.

• 2:01:48Jordi Hays?

  Finally, finally.

• 2:01:49John Coogan?

  We've been asking for it.

• 2:01:51Jordi Hays?

  I hear the sleigh bells ringing.

• 2:01:53John Coogan?

  We've been asking for it. Ads in LLMs. We talked to the founder of Perplexity about it. We asked Arvind, why are you gonna put ads? We want ads in Perplexity and he said, maybe, and the tech folks wrote a whole article about it and they got really mad.

• 2:02:09Jordi Hays?

  I'll let Google jump first.

• 2:02:10John Coogan?

  I'll let Google jump first. We've talked to Sarah Fryer. We've talked to the OpenAI team about how badly we want ads in ChatGPT. How badly we want ads in LLMs. Uh, they said, maybe we're gonna do it, maybe we're not. They've been sitting on their hands, but now.

• 2:02:25Jordi Hays?

  I don't know how you can, I, I love listening to your voice.

• 2:02:29John Coogan?

  It's good. It's good. We need a backup track.

• 2:02:32Jordi Hays?

  Uh, yeah, this, this is interesting. Uh, there, there's, this feels like very Google to just be like, yeah, we're, we're the ad business. We're gonna do ads. We're gonna do them first. We're probably gonna do them, uh, better than, than anybody else, at least initially. Uh, but some people were pushing back, just being like, hey, you could have, like, you easily could have, um.

• 2:02:52John Coogan?

  Just crushed, right?

• 2:02:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you easily could have just like kept the product cheap.

• 2:02:55John Coogan?

  A lot of people are excited about, or, or a lot of people are, are, are, are wondering like, hey, there's a, there's a world where Gemini doesn't have ads and is free for two years and it just completely puts the screws to every other, you know, LLM provider.

• 2:03:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and I've, I mean.

• 2:03:13John Coogan?

  What would you do if you were them?

• 2:03:16John Coogan?

  Would you monetize earlier?

• 2:03:18Jordi Hays?

  I don't know.

• 2:03:19John Coogan?

  It can't be that expensive, right? I mean, it would definitely hurt cash flow. Like, it would show up in the financials, for sure.

• 2:03:25Jordi Hays?

  I just, I mean-

• 2:03:26John Coogan?

  Gemini Pro Plus is not cheap, but-

• 2:03:28Jordi Hays?

  Turning on ads for, I mean, I always look back to what would the Instagram business look like if they were forced to monetize it independently? Because it's an amazing ad. Like, it's an amazing platform that's perfectly suited to monetize with ads.

• 2:03:46John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:03:47Jordi Hays?

  And yet, you can imagine Meta ramped ad spend on the platform 10, 20 times faster than maybe an independent operator would have. Because they just had been, they had all the customer relationships. They had all the, they had a strong sense of who the person was already, because they were probably on Facebook as well, so.

• 2:04:05John Coogan?

  I don't think, I don't think ads cause failure to adopt a new product. I would be, I don't know, we'd have to look through the product graveyard, but I feel like of things that die, they rarely die because-

• 2:04:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, people are, people are acting like ads and LMS are going to be like the biggest deal-

• 2:04:22John Coogan?

  No.

• 2:04:22Jordi Hays?

  And are going to be the biggest issue. And I just don't think it's going to be, I think they're going to, I think-

• 2:04:26John Coogan?

  In many ways, they could make the product better or more like sticky in the sense that you're like looking at stuff, doing shopping in there.

• 2:04:32Jordi Hays?

  Personally, I want every LM to have a lot of ads so that I can swap between all of the best models without feeling like I need to sign up. Like, I actually, like, for me, I'm like, there's, there's models that I just don't use because I'm like, okay, I'm not, I don't, I don't want to sign up. I have not that much, I'll let Tyler sign up-

• 2:04:48John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:04:48Jordi Hays?

  Uh, on our ramp cart.

• 2:04:50John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:04:51Jordi Hays?

  But, uh-

• 2:04:51John Coogan?

  Well, do you think, do you think XAI is going to run ads? Do you think they're going to put ads in Grok or ads in, in, in romantic mode?

• 2:04:59Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure they will at some point. I doubt it's a huge, a huge priority for them. There's this company Halftime, which won the Grok hackathon that happened over the weekend.

• 2:05:08John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:05:09Jordi Hays?

  I DM with the founder, he's down to, he's down to come on.

• 2:05:12John Coogan?

  This is, we need to pull this up because when I saw this, I was like- Whoa, like XAI. I didn't realize that it was from a hackathon. I thought it was just this actual company. So it says halftime dynamically weaves AI-generated ads into the scenes that you're watching. So breaks feel like part of the story instead of interruptions. So.

• 2:05:31Jordi Hays?

  Cybrecs in the chat says it just makes you second guess every output you get from the model.

• 2:05:36John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:05:37Jordi Hays?

  I agree, that's the bad case. There's a world where they just give you the the real response and then there's an ad.

• 2:05:43John Coogan?

  Yes, but so, so, so there is a different, there is a different flip. So, um, so to Cybrecs's point, um, you second guess every output you get from the model because you're worried the ad is influencing it. If you go to, you know, your favorite chat app and you say, what are the best headphones? And, and it says, Apple AirPod Pros. And you're like, oh, is it sponsored? Is it not? Are they being objective? Are they not? Yes, that is something that you'd worry about. But there's also the other flip side, which is that if they're not monetizing well, they might be putting you on the cheapest model that's just guessing. And it's just like, oh, yeah, like, I guess it's this product because they didn't, they didn't cook. They didn't give you the, the, the reasoning model

• 2:06:28John Coogan?

  because they can't afford to, because they're not monetizing you well.

• 2:06:31Jordi Hays?

  I think, I think, yeah, one reality is somebody types, what is the best cell phone that I can get for a thousand dollars? And it gives you the iPhone. And then there's an ad for an Android phone right below it. And that's still worth advertising on because it's a high intent.

• 2:06:46John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:46Jordi Hays?

  Query. And it's very, you know, and it's likely ends up being profitable for, for the Android, you know, device manufacturer to advertise against it. But let's pull up halftime. They're dynamically weaving AI-generated ads into scenes you're watching. So breaks feel like part of the story instead of interruptions.

• 2:07:04John Coogan?

  Watching. Wrong. Boo. What do they say?

• 2:07:35Speaker 04

  Jessica, what are you doing here? Getting it. I was just a-

• 2:07:40John Coogan?

  That is so weird. It is so bad.

• 2:07:50Jordi Hays?

  I'm sold. Now I want a Coca-Cola.

• 2:07:53John Coogan?

  Okay, okay, okay. If you want to see, if you want to see how ads are done well in, uh, in, in, in, in video integration like this, uh, we have to pull up the video that's at the bottom of the timeline. Uh, they just reinvented the Star Wars Cerveza Cristal ads. Have you seen these? You've barely seen Star Wars, but at one point, there was a, uh, at one point, there was a, there was an international showing of the original Star Wars, and for some reason, they needed to cut ads into the actual footage. And so we gotta play this with sound. It's one of my favorite things. Let's play it.

• 2:08:31Speaker 11

  You fought in the Clone Wars?

• 2:08:32John Coogan?

  Look at this.

• 2:08:32Speaker 11

  Yes. I was once a Jedi Knight, the same as your father.

• 2:08:40Speaker 11

  I wish I'd known. He was the best star pilot in the galaxy. And a cunning warrior. I understand you've become quite a good pilot yourself.

• 2:08:52Speaker 11

  And he was a good friend.

• 2:08:55Speaker 11

  Which reminds me. I have something here for you.

• 2:08:59John Coogan?

  Look at this.

• 2:09:01Speaker 11

  Your father wanted you to have this when you were older now.

• 2:09:11John Coogan?

  It's the best. It's like pure art. AI could never. It's so good. It's absolutely genius. And they do that two or three other times throughout the movie. And so you're just watching and, and, and it's always when they go to grab something and then they just do the insert shot. So like, so like, if you're watching the Cerveza Cristal version of Star Wars, by the end of the movie, Obi-Wan Kenobi has had like five beers.

• 2:09:41Jordi Hays?

  Whoa. More than cheeky pint.

• 2:09:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, no, he's definitely, he's definitely has buzz going. But, uh, that's one of my favorite little, little bits.

• 2:09:50Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 2:09:50John Coogan?

  Uh, let me tell you about Bantam, really quick. Bantam, automatic compliance and security, AI that powers everything from evidence collection and continuous monitoring to security reviews and vendor risk. Continue, Jordan.

• 2:10:02Jordi Hays?

  So with halftime, we're gonna have the founder Krish Krish on. He's studying CS at Waterloo.

• 2:10:08John Coogan?

  What a great hack project.

• 2:10:09Jordi Hays?

  And then he he's only 20. So we're gonna have him on. I'm excited to have him on. That said, I I wonder if he could work with a movie, like go work with someone like a Netflix early on and say, like, basically, give us inventory.

• 2:10:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:10:25Jordi Hays?

  And then we will like work with a bunch of different. There will be a beverage scene and then we'll generate a bunch of random versions of the scene for different types of people in the audience.

• 2:10:34John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, so this this already happens where ads in the background. So if you're walking around New York City in some romantic comedy, they might actually go and VFX out the billboards that are in the back. And they might put new ads in the background. And that's just a traditional VFX pipeline. Just cut it out and put a different ad in. And so that type of that type of editing can be made a lot more dynamic by through AI. And that's probably how this instantiates itself realistically, as opposed to just the most aggressive. The most aggressive, like, all of a sudden, they're talking about the ad. It's a it's a it's a little bit of a wild, wild move. Anyway, apparently, Ryan McIntosh predicted this. He said, it's coming. He's quoting semi analysis.

• 2:11:18John Coogan?

  Says, how much would Starbucks pay to haunt the background of every mid journey cafe render? A Tesla idling in every AI generated traffic scene. If you're you're thinking small, this is the this is the ambient brand singularity.

• 2:11:32Jordi Hays?

  Dan in the chat says, you know, after you've seen that Cerveza Cristal ad once or twice, you actually are think are thinking about the beer for the rest of time, like wondering when it's gonna come next.

• 2:11:42John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, because it comes randomly.

• 2:11:44Jordi Hays?

  It might come right now. It might come in five minutes. Just be ready.

• 2:11:47John Coogan?

  Should we get? Should we get? Yeah, let's get to Tyler. You needed to grab something off his desk, right?

• 2:11:52Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so this is incredibly bullish.

• 2:11:56John Coogan?

  What is bullish?

• 2:11:57Jordi Hays?

  They're putting ads in ayahuasca trips.

• 2:11:59John Coogan?

  What?

• 2:12:00Jordi Hays?

  Somebody on Reddit.

• 2:12:03John Coogan?

  This is something we would do. This is something we would joke about. Remember our joke about going to Peru with helicopters with massive speakers and playing corporate finance. Tutorials to people who are tripping in the jungle. That's the to get them to come back to corporate America and lock in. What exactly happened here? Break it down, Jordy.

• 2:12:23Jordi Hays?

  Anyone. So somebody on the r slash D M T subreddit says, anyone else getting Amazon ads when breaking through? It's happened to me on my last three trips. Second was ayahuasca. Right as I break through, my trip is paused for a vivid five second ad featuring Jeff Bezos. Am I the only one?

• 2:12:41John Coogan?

  How is this happening? Is that just like their, their, their, their brain is fried and so they're imagining an ad? Or is it like they happen to be listening to something or watching?

• 2:12:49Jordi Hays?

  I think Jeff figured this out a long time ago and he realized there's a lot of people that are using psychedelics. And he, he thought I could productize this and make it available to other merchants on Amazon, or I could just keep it for myself and just have all the inventory for myself. No, of course, joking, but anyways, very, very funny.

• 2:13:11John Coogan?

  In other ads news, get bezel.com shop over 26,000 luxury watches, fully authenticated in-house by bezel's team of experts. But also apparently Anthropic bought every stack trace that gets no results. So if you go to Google and you, and you type in your stack trace, your error while you're programming and nothing comes up. Claude somehow just went to Google and said, hey, well, we'll buy that ad inventory. Genius feels like Google should be buying this, this, their own ad result, or they should actually just have an integration for Gemini so that if it, if you go and you type in a stack trace that no one has, no one's ever run into that particular technical problem before.

• 2:13:53John Coogan?

  Shouldn't they just have a button there that says like, fix it with Gemini right now? Like, we'll do it. It should just do that. This is like a case study in AI mode. Like they should, they should compete. But honestly, incredibly creative from the Claude team. Very.

• 2:14:09Jordi Hays?

  The chat is going off on the, on the ayahuasca ads.

• 2:14:12John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:14:12Jordi Hays?

  A B says, CPMs would be through the roof. Imagine getting one shotted by a Geico ad.

• 2:14:19Jordi Hays?

  2.6 says Jeff Bezos is now monetizing the astral plane.

• 2:14:22John Coogan?

  Making your whole personality Geico.

• 2:14:26Jordi Hays?

  Nick Turley says, I'm seeing lots of confusion about ad rumors in chat GPT. There are no live tests for ads. Any screenshots you've seen are not real or not ads. If we do pursue ads, we'll take a thoughtful approach. People trust chat GPT and anything we do will be designed to respect that.

• 2:14:42John Coogan?

  This was because of a viral post that showed a screenshot of, I think, Target down at the bottom. But that was just like an embedded link. That was like an app that someone built. It was not an advertisement.

• 2:14:51Jordi Hays?

  Bone GPT says, that's crazy. Who would do that? Sounds like he might have been.

• 2:14:56John Coogan?

  Uh, I like, I love Eric Sufer. Uh, he's, uh, he's clearly, you know, one of us, an ad supporter, an ad lover. Uh, and, and he, uh, he is quote tweeting somebody that's saying, that's mentioning that Airbnb still has no advertising business. Of course Uber has an advertising business. That's great. DoorDash has figured out how to do promoted content very well. And those businesses have grown a lot. And Eric Sufer is standing there saying, start an ad network. I, didn't we ask Chesky about this when he was on the show? I think we talked to him about, about doing ads and, and he, he mentioned that it is somewhat of a unique product. Uh, it's, it's a little bit less frequent than an Uber. It's less frequently.

• 2:15:35Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, but you can do hyper local advertising. So if you're staying somewhere, they could be sent, giving you ads for, hey, look at this kayaking trip. You could do in a couple of days or whatever.

• 2:15:45John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:47John Coogan?

  You're laughing at what I'm laughing at.

• 2:15:51John Coogan?

  Now we're into the like attractive people of the show section, I suppose.

• 2:15:55Jordi Hays?

  We have this post from, uh, uh, we have a post here. Apparently we, we now have a national looks maxing strategy of the United States now.

• 2:16:05John Coogan?

  Look at Jacob Halberg. He looks fantastic.

• 2:16:07Jordi Hays?

  Jacob Stuns.

• 2:16:08John Coogan?

  Fun, uh, uh, he's a former guest on the show. Um, he's been.

• 2:16:11Jordi Hays?

  We need to ask Jacob about bone smashing.

• 2:16:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:15Jordi Hays?

  Apparently it's, it's, uh, gaining quite, uh, quite a lot of popularity out there.

• 2:16:20John Coogan?

  Great. Uh, Donald Boat is also apparently very attractive. People have been, uh, talking about that on the timeline.

• 2:16:30Jordi Hays?

  Was this his first Tyler? Don't, don't you know?

• 2:16:32John Coogan?

  Is this a face reveal or? I think this is the first docs by. This is the first docs of Donald Boat. Um, people, people, people are fans. People are fans of Donald Boat. Um, there's also Sean Frank is getting jacked. We're really in like the true category of just like, here, here are attractive people now.

• 2:16:50Jordi Hays?

  The look, the look maxing, the look maxing zone of the show.

• 2:16:53John Coogan?

  It's really, yeah, yeah. Three for three on the looks maxing segment. Uh, Sean Frank says, hit these right after doing about 10 sets of 50 straight. What is this? One-armed pull-ups? He can do one-arm pull-ups?

• 2:17:06Jordi Hays?

  Well, he's holding the other one. So you're using it more like training, it's training. Yeah, but still you're training like grip strength.

• 2:17:11John Coogan?

  That's impressive.

• 2:17:12Jordi Hays?

  Very cool. Come do that in the Ultra Dome, Sean.

• 2:17:15John Coogan?

  You know, you know, Black Friday went well when you're banging out.

• 2:17:18Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, he is, uh, on a, on a high after Black Friday.

• 2:17:22John Coogan?

  Well, let me tell you about adquick.com. Out of home, out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Plan, buy and measure out of home with precision. And our next guest, I believe, is in the Restream waiting room. We have Sarah from Cultured Magazine. She's the founder and the editor in chief of Cultured Magazine. Let's bring her in.

• 2:17:41Jordi Hays?

  Welcome. I hope you don't mind the holiday music. We're having a lot of fun here today.

• 2:17:45John Coogan?

  We're in the holiday spirit.

• 2:17:47Jordi Hays?

  Welcome to the show.

• 2:17:50Speaker 12

  Thank you. Thank you for having me. There's a bit of a lag. It's a bit disorienting.

• 2:17:54John Coogan?

  Oh, I'm sorry. Um, well, hopefully we can, hopefully you can hear us. Okay. I would love to just kick off with.

• 2:17:59Speaker 12

  Can you hear me okay?

• 2:18:00John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, we can hear you just fine. Uh, hopefully you could kick us off with a little bit of an introduction on yourself. Since it's the first time on your show, uh, tell us about, uh, Cultured and, um, and kind of your journey a little bit. That'd be great.

• 2:18:14Speaker 12

  Gosh, where should I start? So Cultured is, uh, a, uh, media company. We cover kind of everything under the creative umbrella with a, with a strong focus on the contemporary arts. So cover, you know, film and theater and literature, um, and kind of look at everything through the lens of, does it intersect with contemporary art? Um, and, you know, if so, how, and kind of try to have a holistic approach to all of the content.

• 2:18:45John Coogan?

  And, I mean, I would love to know your take on Netflix and Warner Brothers, if you have one. We've just been going through all the different IP there. I don't know if anything sticks out to you.

• 2:18:59Speaker 12

  I don't know. I was in LA over the weekend and of course, everyone was talking about it. You know, I don't know. I mean, it's concerning on many levels. Do you think it's gonna go through fully?

• 2:19:13John Coogan?

  I mean, Warner Brothers Discovery is definitely going somewhere. That seems clear. We're, I don't know, where do you stand on it? I think it probably lands with Netflix because there's just so much competition from YouTube, so much competition from Disney.

• 2:19:26Speaker 12

  And Netflix has what, like 300 million subscribers now? I mean, they're the clear streaming winner.

• 2:19:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, and so even though, yes, it is consolidation, it's not a monopoly because people watch YouTube, they watch Instagram, they watch shows like this. We're not on a network and we don't need to be. And so it still feels like, no one's gonna look, you know, a year or two from now, no one's gonna be like, "Oh yeah, Hollywood isn't competitive anymore." Like, no, Hollywood's extremely cutthroat. It's gonna remain cutthroat.

• 2:19:53Speaker 12

  I think it's even more cutthroat.

• 2:19:55John Coogan?

  Potentially, which means it's hard to block.

• 2:19:58Jordi Hays?

  I think a lot of people are so latched on to the past. And we've, yeah, it feels like, I mean, we're based in Hollywood. And so there's a lot of people that are, still have tied their careers to like the old Hollywood and the way things were down in the past. And it's just notable that like, it's never been easier to just create content and create, like when I think about Warner Brothers, it's like, there's a bunch of like cartoon IP. It's like, if you're mad about consolidation and you're a creative person, just make more, make a cartoon, make a new cartoon, just make things, right?

• 2:20:39Jordi Hays?

  The frustration that people have when they're like, "Oh, this is gonna hurt."

• 2:20:47Jordi Hays?

  Uh, I.

• 2:20:48John Coogan?

  Theaters?

• 2:20:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the theater thing, I, the theater thing.

• 2:20:51Speaker 12

  Well, theaters, I think, are already hurt, right?

• 2:20:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:20:53Speaker 12

  I think there is that sense of nostalgia, and I think there is that slice of Hollywood that is rooted in that. Um, but I agree, of course, there's no, there's never been a time where there's been more channels. But it's still, it's almost like there are certainly more channels to reach people, but it's also harder to reach people.

• 2:21:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, the, there, there's something, uh, there's some interesting, uh, like, ratio, if you're trying to quantify it, of like, how much attention something gets relative to the, the, the revenue or the market cap or the value, like, uh, theaters are, they feel so culturally important, they feel such, so, everyone has a story or a memory of their childhood going to the theater, such an experience, and yet I think the actual total revenue of, of, you know, all the movie theaters in America is like, a fraction of what video games make in a month, you know, like, video, the video game industry is like way, way bigger. Or like, the social media industry will be so, so much bigger, like, a thousand times bigger.

• 2:21:52John Coogan?

  Um, and so, but, but there's something where just, just the legacy has broken through to such a degree that even though it hasn't been a big business in decades, and it's smaller than ever, uh, it's still culturally extremely relevant, and so it's hard to.

• 2:22:07Speaker 12

  And I think creatively extremely relevant.

• 2:22:09John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 2:22:10Speaker 12

  I think, I think filmmakers want us to see their movies mostly on the big screen.

• 2:22:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:15Speaker 12

  So, I mean, I think, uh, if you look at it just from a revenue standpoint, of course, I mean, like you said, it's probably been decades since there's been a shift, but I do think that there is still something, uh, nostalgic and important about seeing certain things in theaters. I mean, there's still movies that people say, and I mean, obviously, you know, the filmmakers are often fighting for it to have the release first in a theater.

• 2:22:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:39Speaker 12

  Granted, maybe they're all over forty, but still.

• 2:22:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, I do wonder, I mean, I wonder what the next generation will even look like if they'll, they'll want to go to theaters. Like, we have a friend, Jason Carmen, who's very much of the young and of the new, new age, new creative organization, makes movies, but also makes short films and documentaries and all sorts of stuff. And he still definitely wants to release his films in theaters. He has, he's figured out ways to do that. But I, I, I wonder, I wonder how much that's, at the same time, we're friends with like Adam Faze.

• 2:23:14Jordi Hays?

  I think we need new, it's such an interesting time because like theater, the theater business has been in decline, and yet I think we need new theaters. Like, we need.

• 2:23:23Speaker 12

  They're trying that, I think. I don't know if that's working. You mean, kind of like,

• 2:23:27Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I don't, I don't.

• 2:23:28Speaker 12

  emphasizing it as certain experience or something?

• 2:23:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, if I, I think last time I went and saw a movie was with John and we got like 20 of our friends together to go see Dune. I think, and, and like the actual experience of being in a theater under these, like, you go from being under like bright LEDs in a mall, which I don't go to malls, and I'm in bright LEDs, and I don't like the smell of movie theater popcorn personally, it just, I'm like, that smells like poison. I don't want it. And then you go into, and, and so the whole experience for me is like, yeah, I'm never gonna, I'm never gonna do that. But if you, if you built a theater from the ground up, as in an opinionated way, like some type of, like, almost treating it like a true hospitality experience, there's probably a much better chance that I would

• 2:24:15Jordi Hays?

  go. Not, not certain that there's a real business there yet, but maybe there hasn't been enough attempts there.

• 2:24:20John Coogan?

  Need the Aman Ghari of theaters. It's like two grand per ticket. That's the way to do it. It needs to be an extra lead. I mean, that's, something happened in my town. In my town, there's, there used to be two theaters where you'd sit like shoulder to shoulder with everyone, and now both of those theaters have way down scoped the number of seats. The seats are huge, they serve you dinner, there's wine, there's drinks, and like, they're trying to get 500 bucks out of you, or 200 bucks out of you. You're not going in on a matinee, $10 with like cheap popcorn and getting out of there. They, they want to monetize it like it's a restaurant, because it's a lot of physical space, like the square footage is a lot.

• 2:25:00Speaker 12

  But basically, I mean, someone was just telling me that the theaters really are only still in New York and LA.

• 2:25:06John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 2:25:07Speaker 12

  Yeah, I mean, I was thinking the opposite, frankly. I thought, okay. But someone said, no, you can't even go to a movie theater in a small town anymore.

• 2:25:13John Coogan?

  They've all closed. Wow. It's rough.

• 2:25:15Speaker 12

  This is what someone told me.

• 2:25:17Jordi Hays?

  Let's, I'd love to, I'd love to talk about the, the art, just the art market. Obviously, Miami has gotten a lot of attention over the last week or so.

• 2:25:27Speaker 12

  For the people.

• 2:25:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and, and.

• 2:25:29John Coogan?

  People's going viral again. He's still got it. He went viral a couple of years ago.

• 2:25:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, I'm particularly excited to get your opinion because every now, you keep, I've been seeing some headlines recently where it's like, the art market is back. And then I talk to people that are actually working in art and they're like, it's absolutely not back. And so I think there's somewhat of a disconnect where maybe there's like a effort to like, tell people that it's back, but I don't, I don't know if the sales velocity is really there, but how are you processing things?

• 2:25:58Speaker 12

  Of course, we have to believe our own hype. I mean, I think that there's been a fundamental shift in the art world.

• 2:26:05Speaker 12

  Call it, you know, since 2024 or, you know, I think, I think that there's been so many factors that have changed the landscape of the art world. Certainly has it, has it's been in the last 20 or 30 years. I think that, look, I think, sure, it's better, right? Like, we had Art Basel Paris, everyone said, okay, the art market's back, it's better. I think Freeze London has reported strong sales. I spoke to a big gallery recently that said that 2025, every single Basel this year was a record for them. Now, of course, like anything, you take a fair like Art Basel, there's 300 galleries. So you can take a really strong year where everyone says the market's on fire and you can find a dealer who didn't do well that year.

• 2:26:51Speaker 12

  I think that, I think the statistic that someone was throwing around, and I'm not sure if this is accurate, is something like, you know, total volume of sales is down 10%.

• 2:27:03Speaker 12

  I don't know exactly where the art market is. I think that there's definitely been a very serious correction. I think that a correction ultimately yields a lot of positive things in an art market. So I don't think it's back to the kind of frenzy 800 person waiting list for, you know, a painter two years out of Yale that we were in. But I do think that there's some momentum. I think that there's been, speaking of, some consolidation. There's been, you know, some mid-tier, even some bigger galleries closing and just, you know, I think a lot of shifts in the market. But I think that Miami was, you know, net positive for the most people I talked to in sales.

• 2:27:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:45Speaker 12

  And I think that you still have, I mean, look, call me optimistic, but you still have these collectors who are, you know, they're not the speculative part of the market. They're not buying an artist because they think that they're going to get a multiple of, you know, 10 or 100. I think, I do think, however, that even if the collector isn't looking to ever sell, that kind of data sometimes does kind of feed a little bit of a sparkle and an energy. But I do think that there are collectors who buy in good markets and bad markets. And I think the last, you call it since fall, it's definitely gotten better. Are we back? No. But is it better? Yes.

• 2:28:23John Coogan?

  What's the secret to successfully participating in Art Basel if you're a company or a brand? I've seen a bunch of memes.

• 2:28:31Speaker 12

  Just selling.

• 2:28:31John Coogan?

  Just selling?

• 2:28:33Speaker 12

  The selling. I mean, you know, as you, as you know, it costs them, it's a significant investment, right? They're buying the space, they're shipping the artwork, they're having their team come. You know, they, they put, you know, lots of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars behind the fair. So selling the art, which often can be up to $20 million of art, is success.

• 2:28:55John Coogan?

  Mm-hmm. Makes sense.

• 2:28:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's been

• 2:28:58Speaker 12

  We did an interesting story on the economics of a mid-tier gallery.

• 2:29:01John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:29:02Speaker 12

  That published last week that talks a little bit about how when you're not selling $20 million of art, how you get through Miami or how you get through a fair and make the economics work because there's certainly a tipping point in which it works and a tipping point in which sometimes dealers are trying to meet new collectors, show new work, and it's financially not viable.

• 2:29:20John Coogan?

  What are the highest leverage things that a mid-tier gallery can do is that stuff like leave some of the art at home and, you know, more digital representations of the art and is that the cost structure or the cost savings?

• 2:29:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, part of it is that a certain gallery might represent, like if you represent 20 artists, it's possible that there's a ton of demand for two of the artists and almost zero, like negative demand. You have to pay people to take some of the other stuff. So that's a factor, I think. But tell me if I'm wrong.

• 2:29:56Speaker 12

  I mean, it depends. Look, I think that not every dealer is just, you know, market-driven and there's maybe work that they haven't shown that they want to see how the reaction is or, you know, there's always a surprise of some interest. But yeah, no, it's financially difficult. I mean, a lot of these, a lot of the galleries, you know, it's kind of like I kind of equate it to emerging artists. You know, there's, we all know so many artists who are so successful and so financially successful, but there is that point where, you know, you're just so close to losing money or not quite making it. And that's like a very fine line between the other side and leaving, you know, at a loss.

• 2:30:37Jordi Hays?

  What tech billionaires or tech elite are doing the most for the arts right now? Because I feel like there's historically been a criticism of the tech industry where you have people that make a lot of money and then they're just like, I'm just going to spend, you know, $100 million on anti-aging. I'm not going to fund the next, you know, museum or build a castle or et cetera.

• 2:31:04Speaker 12

  I don't know if that's entirely true. I think what the

• 2:31:06Jordi Hays?

  I don't, I'm not saying, I'm not saying I believe it's true, but I'm just saying historically, that's like one criticism.

• 2:31:12Speaker 12

  Thought, yeah. Maybe, maybe. I mean, I think what a lot of the tech billionaires that I know that have built unbelievable collections have done is not shown their work.

• 2:31:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:31:20Speaker 12

  Not show their collections. So I think a lot of people aren't aware of the level in which some of these tech billionaires are A. Interested in art and B. Collect so deeply. So in terms of, you know, underwriting museums or programs, I don't, I don't, I don't know. I mean, do we need more tech billionaires to buy more art? Of course. And then, yeah, definitely.

• 2:31:45Jordi Hays?

  This is, we're putting, we're putting the word out. I'm sure, I'm sure that will actually, that should catalyze at least, at least a few million of new art purchases for people in our audience that are kind of maybe on the fence about buying.

• 2:31:58Speaker 12

  Not sure, not sure. Yeah.

• 2:32:00Jordi Hays?

  What do you think about, what do you think about the sphere? Because we, we have a general belief that it is.

• 2:32:09Speaker 12

  In Vegas?

• 2:32:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah. No, it just feels like, it, it, there was again, a criticism that we, we forgot how to make beautiful, massive, we forgot how to make cathedrals. And yet, the sphere feels like, it is the most commercial piece of art maybe ever, but when you look at it on the skyline in Vegas, like this is, this is a modern.

• 2:32:30John Coogan?

  It's America's Mona Lisa.

• 2:32:32Speaker 12

  Okay. Let me say, I have never been to the sphere.

• 2:32:36John Coogan?

  Wow. Uncultured.

• 2:32:37Jordi Hays?

  Uncultured. Is this uncultured? Did you start uncultured?

• 2:32:41Speaker 12

  I know. That's what I should really name my magazine. But I have to tell you that I do know a few artists.

• 2:32:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:47Speaker 12

  Who have been to the sphere, who says, pretty incredible.

• 2:32:50John Coogan?

  Yeah. It is wild.

• 2:32:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:32:52John Coogan?

  But yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's remarkable in like a cyberpunk way.

• 2:32:56Jordi Hays?

  Totally, totally.

• 2:32:56John Coogan?

  Not necessarily in like a beautiful way. Absolutely. You should absolutely go to, to experience the new canvas that is the, the sphere. No, obviously, it is a, it is a, it's a capitalist monument.

• 2:33:11Jordi Hays?

  How do you, how do you rate, how do you, how are you processing LA as of late? To me, it's starting to feel like Detroit of the West. It feels like.

• 2:33:23Jordi Hays?

  No, it just feels like this was the center for art and culture and entertainment. And traditional Hollywood has been so battered that it's like the buildings are less beautiful. I think the streets were always dirty, but the restaurants are less full. There's not as many like new great restaurants as I think there may have once been. It feels somewhat kind of

• 2:33:51Speaker 12

  Heartbroken.

• 2:33:52Jordi Hays?

  In secular decline. Heartbroken, too.

• 2:33:56Speaker 12

  I mean, look, I did open an office in New York this year and I've been mostly in New York this year. I think, look, LA is a great city. It's at a downturn. I think that's, you know, I think most people that I know that could leave, left. Someone was saying to me the other day that we're like, we're kind of like just post-COVID now with LA. And how out of COVID, kind of LA was really, all of the sectors and all of the things that you just mentioned, were kind of growing on the up and up. There was a lot of energy around it. And then after the fires last January, things kind of leveled out. And I think that, you know, look, we all know it's a great city. The energy moves. I think the energy's not there right now.

• 2:34:36Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:37Speaker 12

  Sure, it'll come back.

• 2:34:38Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I asked a good friend of mine, a very controversial figure in the art world, Stefan Simkowitz.

• 2:34:46Speaker 12

  Oh, I know him well.

• 2:34:47Jordi Hays?

  I was like, give me-

• 2:34:48Speaker 12

  What did he say? He probably said LA is great.

• 2:34:50Jordi Hays?

  No, no, the example, I was like, hey, we are lease expires next year. We're looking for a new space. And I was like, are there any like massive, amazing art galleries that you think are going to shut down? And he was like, I can, he immediately was like, here's four. And so again,

• 2:35:12John Coogan?

  Are you texting him right now?

• 2:35:14Speaker 12

  No, I didn't text him. They're not four. He's exaggerating, but that's funny.

• 2:35:21Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think there's a handful because I got offered to tour them. But anyways.

• 2:35:30Speaker 12

  I mean, look, LA is not known for its collectors.

• 2:35:33John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:35:34Speaker 12

  There was a great experiment. I mean, look how many galleries opened in LA post 2020. I mean, I know some dealers who said, "I'm just, I'm opening in LA to show great work, not to cultivate more collectors." A lot of the great collectors in LA sometimes buy in New York. So I think the fact that LA is having a, let's just say, a more challenging moment and some of the galleries there are closing. I talked to a few of my friends who have great galleries in LA and they said, "Let's not even talk about sales. Foot traffic is down."

• 2:36:07Speaker 12

  So.

• 2:36:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, and some of the places we've looked at, like, you're spending $100,000 a month for a place that doesn't get any foot traffic. That is like, I mean, when we're visiting, it's like during normal hours and they're just empty. So anyways, definitely correction in the works, but as you said, it can be healthy. Anyways, I wish we had more time. This was super fun.

• 2:36:32Speaker 12

  Thank you, guys.

• 2:36:35Jordi Hays?

  Anytime you want the tech industry to do something, like buy more art, come on the show.

• 2:36:41Speaker 12

  Buy more art, buy more print magazines.

• 2:36:43Jordi Hays?

  But it was great, great to meet you and.

• 2:36:46Speaker 12

  Yeah, nice to meet you.

• 2:36:47Jordi Hays?

  Looking forward to talking again soon.

• 2:36:49John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:36:49Speaker 12

  Thanks so much.

• 2:36:50Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:36:50John Coogan?

  Merry Christmas. Our next guest is from the General Intelligence Company of New York. He's waiting in the restream waiting room. We have Andrew Pignanelli. I hope I'm saying that correctly. Andrew, sorry to keep you waiting. How are you doing?

• 2:37:06Speaker 13

  What's happening?

• 2:37:07John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for hopping on. Please introduce yourself, introduce the company, and give us the news.

• 2:37:14Speaker 13

  Yeah, so my name's Andrew Pignanelli, actually.

• 2:37:17Jordi Hays?

  The flow, the flow. Can we get a side profile of the flow real quick?

• 2:37:21Speaker 13

  Oh, it's quite nice, right?

• 2:37:24Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong for the flow. Hit the gong for the flow. There we go.

• 2:37:28Speaker 13

  Nice, nice.

• 2:37:30Jordi Hays?

  Sorry to interrupt.

• 2:37:32Speaker 13

  They do like the hair. They definitely like the hair.

• 2:37:35Jordi Hays?

  That's great.

• 2:37:35Speaker 13

  Yeah, I mean, I. Sorry, I think it's a little bit of a delay here. My name is Andrew. I run General Intelligence. Today, we just announced our $8.7 million seed round, which...

• 2:37:50Jordi Hays?

  Send it, John. Again.

• 2:37:52Speaker 13

  Let's go.

• 2:37:53Jordi Hays?

  Incredible. Who led it?

• 2:37:57Speaker 13

  It was led by USV. So, you know, we're a New York-based company. We love New York City. We wanted someone who was right here at home. And I only have to walk two blocks for the board meeting, which is really nice.

• 2:38:07Jordi Hays?

  That's amazing.

• 2:38:10Jordi Hays?

  Give us the history. I mean, first time on the show, obviously. Followed you for probably, I don't know, a year, close to a year now. But what, yeah, give us kind of the origins, what you guys are working on, all that good stuff.

• 2:38:25Speaker 13

  Yes. So, we started working on this about a year ago with this kind of crazy idea of like, what if we could get agents to run companies? And we really worked backwards from that. We like, we picked, "Let's go with the craziest thing we can do, because I bet that there's a way for us to get resources for it. And if the idea is a little bit crazier, they'll give us more resources." And so, we picked that, me and my co-founder, Abhi. And we started working on it. We started working on a demo. We worked on it for about two months. And then in March, we were like, "Let's turn this into a company." So, the initial demo was just an agent that could call some tools. And then we did a small round in March, led by Compound. Ran the company for about six months before launching Cofounder in September.

• 2:39:10Speaker 13

  We were able to make that launch go very, very well. And so, we got viral with that. People loved it. People really liked using the product. We went viral through the sweaters, too. The sweaters actually helped us promote our product more than probably the product itself.

• 2:39:26Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so what was Cofounder and what was the sweater? Was Cofounder wearing the sweater?

• 2:39:33Speaker 13

  You know, Cofounder is a plant, so I have a bunch of them right here. That's Cofounder. And it's like this AI chief of staff, so it will let you hook stuff up and do automations. And we've built it into this very proactive, like assistant feeling thing. So you're not just really telling it what to do. It will actually prompt you instead of you having to prompt it. And we wanted to figure out how do we promote this? And so I went and I got these sweaters made and they're like very rainbowy, like they have all the different colors on them.

• 2:40:06John Coogan?

  They have the logo name on there too. That's cool.

• 2:40:08Speaker 13

  Yeah.

• 2:40:09Jordi Hays?

  Underutilized merch format.

• 2:40:12John Coogan?

  Yes, I never see the cozy sweater. That's cool. Very cool.

• 2:40:17Speaker 13

  Yeah. And we posted about it. We just got our first shipment of them. I just posed a photo. And it goes viral. It gets like a million plus views. And I go from having like 300 followers to a couple thousand. And we were going to launch three days later. And so this made it really easy for us to launch and have Cofounder do all.

• 2:40:38John Coogan?

  Yeah. So I mean, how do you think the business actually evolves? Do you think that there's a world where the, you know, the product is plugging into all of the enterprise tools? It seems like with even just the Cofounder branding, it feels like this is an early stage product. Or that's at least like the early adopter would be a small company. You're not coming into a company where it's like, yeah, we already have a data lake and they have 5,000 employees. And we need you to go around and find stuff. It's much more of a, you know, an early stage tool. Is that correct? Or you think it'll grow? Like, how do you think the use case will change over the next few years as you build out the business?

• 2:41:17Speaker 13

  Yeah, so it's definitely early stage. We want people who are, let's say, between like three and 50 people on smaller companies. But we're really going from Cofounder to this full stack AI business. So our goal is to get agents to run companies. And we've decided, you know, we're not going to be able to do that by adding one piece to. An assistant until it gets really far. We're actually working on a full stack AI business. We realized while building ourselves that we had this ability to make these workflows internally, where you're taking like a customer support ticket, and you can directly plug that into an agent that writes some code,

• 2:42:00Speaker 13

  and plug it into an agent that reviews and QA's the feature, and then ships it to prod without any people involved. And so we're sprinting towards this entire business with just agents. And we think we can get there by March.

• 2:42:14Jordi Hays?

  What kind of businesses do you think are most?

• 2:42:20Jordi Hays?

  The name implies you're trying to build a general intelligence. I imagine that means an AI that could run any business. But have you thought about specific types of businesses that are best suited to be run by an agent? And how are you like testing the product? I understand you probably tested internally with your own team. But yeah, when you talk about like timeline to an agent running an entire business by March, like what kind of business is that? What like, how do you make that more concrete?

• 2:42:54Speaker 13

  Yeah, so some of the things that we test are the ability to actually do something end to end, right? So this whole write a piece of code that can get shipped to prod without any people involved. That's something you can test, right? If it breaks prod, it's going to be a failure there. But we're working on this with a couple of businesses, smaller businesses internally, and like they're just not public yet. But the way that the business looks is very similar to ourselves. So it's a software company in B2B. And it also relies a lot on how the agent market develops. So we rely on other agents by other companies, like a coding agent where we're going to be using looks like Factory or Tembo or something like that.

• 2:43:38Speaker 13

  Customer support agents by companies like Sierra and Decagon. And then sales market agents like Rocks. We're going to be building this in a way that leans on those agents. And those are conducive to a B2B software company. And that's really what we're building first.

• 2:43:55John Coogan?

  That's very cool. Are you AGI-pilled?

• 2:43:58Speaker 13

  Very AGI-tilled, you know, we all have different definitions, right? And so my personal definition, it's in my Twitter bio, I keep it the timeline that I think we're gonna have to AGI, and it's much faster than everybody else's. But my definition is like-

• 2:44:10John Coogan?

  Tomorrow, it's tomorrow. My timeline is tomorrow.

• 2:44:14Speaker 13

  Really? 5.2?

• 2:44:18Jordi Hays?

  We'll see.

• 2:44:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, 5.2 is my AGI, for sure.

• 2:44:22Speaker 13

  We're thinking about it like, like, you know, Her, the movie Her?

• 2:44:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:26Speaker 13

  My personal definition is, when do we get that? A, we already have people falling in love-

• 2:44:32John Coogan?

  Don't we already have that, just with some of the population?

• 2:44:36Speaker 13

  Yeah, I mean, we're kind of close, right? Like, like, some of the stuff that you can do today is 90% of what you can do in that movie. And I bet within the next 12 months, it'll be 100%.

• 2:44:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, it's sort of like a diffusion question, because like, smartphones have arrived. There are Amish people that don't use smartphones, right? Like, there are plenty of people that don't, there's probably millions of people that don't use smartphones for a variety of reasons. There were all, I believe, like, for, you know, 100 years, there will be people that will be like, "I don't talk to clankers," right? But, at the same time, like, we are pretty close. Anyway, we could talk about AGI for the next two hours, but we have to move on. So, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on all the progress.

• 2:45:15Jordi Hays?

  Great to meet, finally, congratulations on the progress. We're gonna keep, we should, we should add, like, something to our ticker, like, what is Andrew's AGI time? We'll get the update daily. But, yeah, congrats on-

• 2:45:26Speaker 13

  Thank you, John.

• 2:45:27John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Have a good one.

• 2:45:29Jordi Hays?

  Goodbye.

• 2:45:30John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about wander.com, book of wonder with inspiring reviews, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning, and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks. Our next guest is Brian Mehler from Stable. He's the CEO, and we have some big news from them. Let's bring him in. How are you doing, Brian?

• 2:45:51Speaker 14

  Ho, ho, ho!

• 2:45:52John Coogan?

  Merry Christmas.

• 2:45:53Jordi Hays?

  Welcome.

• 2:45:54John Coogan?

  Good to see you. How are you doing? Please, since you're new on the show, introduce yourself, introduce the company. Love to hear about what you're building.

• 2:46:00Speaker 14

  Sure. Well, thanks for having me. I'm Brian Mehler, I'm the stable, CEO of Stable. For those that don't know, we're a Layer 1 blockchain. We're focused on, you know, redefining the payment rails that money moves through, whether it's cross-borders or across-country. So, you know, we launched earlier today, it was a big, big event for us, we had the mainnet launch, thank you, and-

• 2:46:24John Coogan?

  You launched, that's good.

• 2:46:25Speaker 14

  It's been great.

• 2:46:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh, okay, so.

• 2:46:31John Coogan?

  The obvious question is why another stablecoin, right?

• 2:46:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, well, no, no, no, I mean, not, not necessarily.

• 2:46:36John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:46:36Jordi Hays?

  You're, so you're building a new L1.

• 2:46:38John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:46:38Jordi Hays?

  For payments. Uh, it seems like every single, every single layer one blockchain, maybe not every single one. Some, some are more obviously like hyper liquid, more trading focused and there's others. But everybody's going after the payment opportunity for obvious reasons. Like, how do different layer ones differentiate? What's going to separate stable from other players? Like, how, how is stable kind of more opinionated? I'm sure it's opinionated, uh, in ways that maybe like, you know, Tempo isn't, or Solana isn't it, et cetera. Um, and so, yeah, curious how you're differentiating.

• 2:47:14Speaker 14

  Yeah, it's a great question and we get it a lot. And I think the way that we're able to answer it best is by talking about, you know, whether it's a team that's backed us. So we have PayPal Ventures, we have, um, you know, we have advisors like Paolo from, uh, CEO of Tether.

• 2:47:27John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:47:28Speaker 14

  You know, we were partnered with Anchor, so we have like a very good, um, toolset that we're playing with that's able to help us launch. But in addition to that, like getting a little bit more of the technical side of things is our gas token, which is usually a complication of other chains, is USDT. So for that, you know, when people are moving money, the 70 to 80% of the, uh, stablecoins out there in the world right now is being used as a USDT. And that's what you use to pay your fees on our network rather than having a complication about buying another token and worrying about other chains. For us, you're able to just use USDT and spend USDT. So that's, I think, our biggest differentiator that we have right now. And then in addition to that, it's also the speed. So when you want to use a traditional layer one, let's say Ethereum, you want to move USDT there.

• 2:48:10Speaker 14

  You know, it's slow and it's expensive and it's volatile and gas and, you know, we got tired of that. So we just ripped it out and put in USDT, which everyone knows and is already using as our gas token.

• 2:48:19Jordi Hays?

  Uh, so, sounds like you have some awesome partners lined up already. How does this market shape out? Is it, is it kind of a land grab right now where you're trying to sign up as many, uh, institutions to, uh, support stable? Or, or make you their preferred L1 for moving stablecoins between them and other institutions? Or, or internally, how, how does that look?

• 2:48:41Speaker 14

  Yeah, I mean, you're definitely right there. It's definitely busy. There's a lot of people wanting to get out the picks and shovels and start digging. And I think we're ahead of that. So we already launched, as we said today, and that's kind of like a big milestone for us. So we got into the build phase and got into the launch phase. But I would say in terms of like, why it's an attractive market is that everyone uses money. And there's a frustration of using it, whether you're using traditional credit cards, or checks, or whatever, if you're still using cash. That's just a complication that people are kind of tired of dealing with. And they don't understand why, you know, if you're trying to buy something on the weekend, and you need to like, wire a sum over like $2,000 that you can't go get on Zelle or Venmo, like, you gotta wait till Monday. And that's just a weird complication that I think a lot of people are getting tired of. And so using stable coins in an easy sense is kind of how we're solving that problem.

• 2:49:28John Coogan?

  Go for it. So yeah, I'm just wondering more of like, help me understand what folks are using Tether directly for versus how do you like, what value prop you build. Obviously, you're, you know, friendly and partnered in many ways. But how does that relationship evolve over the next few years with Tether?

• 2:49:52Speaker 14

  Look, I mean, I would say Tether is just on a growth trajectory that is pretty unmatched. So we're happy to be a part of that ride and help facilitate it. I think, you know, Tether exists on a number of chains. And that's one of the facilities that we're able to provide is a chain that it runs faster, easier, and less expensive. That's really what we're doing to amplify their message.

• 2:50:13John Coogan?

  Okay, cool. Yeah, that makes sense. Thank you. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come explain that to us. Appreciate having you on the show. And Merry Christmas.

• 2:50:21Jordi Hays?

  Sure you'll be back on soon.

• 2:50:22John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll talk to you soon.

• 2:50:23Jordi Hays?

  Congrats on the launch. Super exciting.

• 2:50:25John Coogan?

  Have a good one.

• 2:50:26Speaker 14

  Appreciate it.

• 2:50:27John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 2:50:27Speaker 14

  Thanks.

• 2:50:28John Coogan?

  Up next, we have Will Wilson from Intithesis. On December 3rd, Jane Street led Antithesis, their $105 million Series A to make deterministic simulation the new testing standard. They have an incredibly stacked list of investors. Dwarsh Patel, Sholto Douglas, and Patrick Collison.

• 2:50:48Jordi Hays?

  Whoa, two out of the, two out of the three roommates.

• 2:50:50John Coogan?

  Yeah, what happened?

• 2:50:51Jordi Hays?

  What happened?

• 2:50:52John Coogan?

  You didn't do a roadshow where you go from bedroom to bedroom, showing off what you've built, and they're like, "Do you want to invest?" Sharks. I imagine you sit down and you say, "Sharks, here's what I'm building."

• 2:51:03Speaker 15

  You know, it's, it's funny. I think, I think they all ended up coming in for very different reasons, but we're certainly very glad.

• 2:51:09Jordi Hays?

  You got Dylan. He just wasn't, he wasn't big enough to get to the press release.

• 2:51:12John Coogan?

  To the press release.

• 2:51:14Jordi Hays?

  Brutal, brutal.

• 2:51:15Speaker 15

  I cannot comment on investors who may or may not be in our press release.

• 2:51:18John Coogan?

  Okay, well, well, thank you so much.

• 2:51:21Jordi Hays?

  Good fun.

• 2:51:22John Coogan?

  Please, explain this to me like I'm not Dwarsh and I'm not a researcher at Anthropic. What are you, what are you building at like a very, very basic level? Who's the customer? What's the problem you're solving? And then I do want you to walk me through some of the technology as much as we can, but I'd like to start with just like the, the high level problem description if possible.

• 2:51:43Speaker 15

  Sure. Okay. So the super basic problem description is like Marc Andreessen once said that software is eating the world. I think that's true. I think AI has made that more true. And the thing is, that's actually kind of a bad thing in some ways because software doesn't work very well. Like, like we, I feel like we all have Stockholm syndrome about this. Like when I, when I walk into a building, I don't wonder in the back of my head, is this building going to collapse on me? And yet every time I use a software product, I know there's some random chance that it's just going to totally fail. And if you think about it, that's, that's really not okay. And that's what we're, that's what we're trying to fix. We don't think it has to be that way.

• 2:52:21John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:21Speaker 15

  We think the reason it is that way is because people have been building and testing software wrong for the last 70 years, which is like maybe a slightly hubristic and crazy thing to say, but we think we've got a better way to do it.

• 2:52:33John Coogan?

  I have an ongoing war with Rune about whether or not the United app has gotten better or worse over the past few years. Because I use it as a heuristic for like AI diffusion. Because he'll tell, he'll say, hey, the AI models are amazing. Like you just, you just yell at the Codex model. It'll do exactly what you want. I'm like, oh, really? Well, then why did I have a bug in my United app when I was trying to fly across the country?

• 2:52:54Jordi Hays?

  Well, maybe they haven't adopted.

• 2:52:56John Coogan?

  And then he'll tell me it's actually way better. It's actually, they actually are improving their software. But walk me through deterministic simulation. Like, what does that look like in practice? If I have a piece of software, I have some, some vibe coded slop app that I'm worried about completely blowing up and leaking all my users' data and, you know, and failing to work in a bunch of different scenarios. Like, how am I actually using your product? How am I plugging in? What's going on?

• 2:53:21Speaker 15

  Yeah, okay. So, so, so here's the basic idea. Um, so like the traditional way people test software is you have your app and you sit down and you think really hard and you use your big brain. And you're like, what are all the situations that this thing could run in? What are all the things that people could do? What are all the situations it has to handle? And then I sit down, I the developer, right? And I write a bunch of manual test cases for each of those things and make sure that they run in my CI system or whatever. And that's like, hooray, I've tested my software.

• 2:53:48John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:53:48Speaker 15

  Except you've totally not tested your software, right? Because the thing that's actually going to blow up and totally screw you and, and be a disaster is not something that you thought of. It's something that you didn't think of, right? It's like an unknown unknown. And so we have the exact opposite approach. We say instead, we're just going to take your actual software and we're going to run it in a simulation

• 2:54:11John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:54:11Speaker 15

  of the real world. And we're going to throw the kitchen sink at it. We're going to like have the worst users ever doing the worst things ever. And it's going to be running in the worst data center ever. And like computers are going to be crashing and like hackers are going to be trying to break it, whatever. Like, it's just going to be really awful. And then we're going to see what actually happens empirically.

• 2:54:28John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:54:28Speaker 15

  And you can tell us, hey, here's the stuff I promise my software will never do. And we're going to see if we can find a way to make it do that.

• 2:54:35John Coogan?

  Why, why are you framing this as deterministic simulation? That sounds like a whole lot of non deterministic stuff going on.

• 2:54:42Speaker 15

  Yeah, so the key is, we have, the slightly crazy computer science thing we've done, well, no, one of, one of the slightly crazy things we've done, is we've basically built a way to run any computer program fully deterministically, which is, which is a little nuts, but it's really, really important because it gets rid of the like works on my machine thing forever. So if we find some really weird, really rare software problem, which only manifests one a billion times, but like, you know, it launches the nuclear missiles, and so you really don't want it to happen even one billion times, we can perfectly reproduce that. So if we find it once, you can just replay it over and over and over again until you're able to fix it. Interesting. What's the

• 2:55:24Jordi Hays?

  What is the, what is the like sci-fi scenario that you're building against? Like, is this, is part of this tie-in? Like, I'm trying to understand why, like specifically why you got the roommate three-peat? Because software testing is cool, but I imagine there's like kind of this like, you know, 10-year vision, like AGI vision, where we need to test for that, you know, one out of a billion times that the nuclear missile codes get launched, or the whole surface of the planet is blanketed with solar.

• 2:55:56Speaker 15

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I think, I think if you believe that we're about to go into like a very exciting AI future, then I think there's probably going to be a whole lot more software written. And probably some of it's going to be written by entities that are not like you and me. They're like some kind of AI agent, maybe we don't fully understand them, maybe we don't fully understand their incentives, or their motivations, or their failure modes, or whatever. Seems like having a really, really good way of telling if software does what you think it does would be handy in that scenario.

• 2:56:29Jordi Hays?

  That makes sense. So somebody makes an AI agent that That like processes like things that were faxed in and there's like some, you know, faxed into a doctor's office and there's some edge case where it hires a private army and like tries to kill the fax machine company and you're like, well, an agent wrote this agent, so we need to actually test to make sure it's not like secretly like completely insane.

• 2:56:55Speaker 15

  Right, you've got that and then you've also just got more prosaic and boring situations, right? Like I hired an AI agent to like write the next version of the United app and like oops, like if I'm, if I'm in the middle of booking a ticket when my subway train goes into a tunnel, it books like 10 million tickets. Like I don't, I don't want that. United doesn't want that, you know?

• 2:57:12Jordi Hays?

  No, I like, I like this opportunity. You can sell, you can sell the product against like very real problems today and also get the, and still like, you know, have the, this like bigger, very like real kind of like sci-fi element to it.

• 2:57:27John Coogan?

  Okay, so I, I have the interpretation of Roommate Ventures coming in. I don't have the interpretation of the implications of Jane Street coming in. Is this, is this relevant to high-frequency trading software or are they just purely financial investors? Like how strategic are they as a partner?

• 2:57:46Speaker 15

  Oh yeah. So the, the way we got Jane Street in this actually is just that they, it started out as them being a customer.

• 2:57:52John Coogan?

  Okay, wow.

• 2:57:53Speaker 15

  They've been one of our best and largest customers for, you know, a little under a year.

• 2:57:59John Coogan?

  Cool.

• 2:58:00Speaker 15

  And have really put the system through its paces and are using it to do some really, really cool stuff.

• 2:58:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:07Speaker 15

  And basically what initially happened was we were raising a round, we planned to go the standard Silicon Valley route, you know, and, and we were just gonna have Jane Street put in like a small amount of money as a strategic. And then they offered to lead the round, which we were not expecting. And, you know, we sort of thought about it and we were like, wait a minute, that's actually the coolest thing ever. Like, you know, what a, what an endorsement and, you know, from one of the greatest names in software. Like, how can we not do this?

• 2:58:32John Coogan?

  Have you considered writing your code base in OCamel?

• 2:58:35Speaker 15

  I think, I think it's likely that there's gonna be excellent OCamel support in our platform.

• 2:58:42John Coogan?

  Fantastic. That's the best news I've heard all day.

• 2:58:44Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong for that.

• 2:58:49Jordi Hays?

  Very, very cool.

• 2:58:51John Coogan?

  That's great news.

• 2:58:52Jordi Hays?

  One of the more unique fundraising announcements we've had this year.

• 2:58:57John Coogan?

  Yeah, this is a fun, fun project. I really like it. Well, congratulations and thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us.

• 2:59:04Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure you'll be back on soon.

• 2:59:06John Coogan?

  Indeed. Yeah, thank you.

• 2:59:06Jordi Hays?

  I'm sure you're already getting unwanted term sheets, you know, hurled at you.

• 2:59:11John Coogan?

  I believe it.

• 2:59:12Jordi Hays?

  Enjoy, enjoy processing those.

• 2:59:14John Coogan?

  Yeah. Awesome. Have a good one, guys. Thank you. We'll talk to you soon.

• 2:59:17Jordi Hays?

  Good to meet you.

• 2:59:17John Coogan?

  Have a good one. And that brings us towards the end of our show. Perfectly timed, 2:00 PM on the dot. We are in fighting form. We're gonna play you out with some Christmas music, I suppose. In other news, markets are predicting that the time person of the year will either be the Pope, who's concerned about AI, the biggest promoter of AI, Sam Altman, the supplier of the hardware behind AI, Jensen, or just AI.

• 2:59:47John Coogan?

  It seems almost certain it's a lock that time 2025 person of the year will have something to do with AI.

• 2:59:55John Coogan?

  In other news, where else is... Oh, we didn't get to SpaceX news, but it was rumored that SpaceX told, or is reported actually in the information by Katie Roof, that SpaceX told their investors, "We're aiming for IPO late 2026. Late 2026, we're gonna be a public company." But a lot of people are interpreting this, reading the tea leaves. You have Ken Kertland saying, "I'm not exaggerating. It's not doom posting to say this, but this is the end. They are not serious. They are not serious about any part of Mars if this is done. There's no world where shareholders will let you spend tens of billions of dollars with the express intent of no return, which is what Mars Settlement is. In fact, it would be illegal,

• 3:00:40John Coogan?

  literally illegal to do so." Not true at all. Look at the metaverse. Look at what Meta did. If you have control over the company, you can, you can spend, what'd he say, $86 billion is what Zuck spent?

• 3:00:50Jordi Hays?

  I'm just expecting SpaceX's telecom business to do tens of billions of profits.

• 3:00:56John Coogan?

  Yes, yes. If you get big. Enough. I mean SpaceX, I think to date has burnt something like 10 billion across all the fundraising. And a lot of that's been like secondary stuff. So like they haven't burnt that much. Uh, and of course people are dunking on Zuck right now for pulling back on the metaverse. Austin Allred had a good post here. He said, fire Mark Zuckerberg, uh, fired, uh, you kind of botched this, but said, uh, Mark Zuckerberg fired because he lost the company 77 billion. Should probably consider that he also made his company 1.6 trillion. And so, uh, the same thing could definitely be true. So I, I believe if SpaceX went public, that would not necessarily take the foot off the gas of the Mars mission. I don't think that's necessarily what would happen. Um, but Dan Primack has a little bit more nuance of a take here, talking about

• 3:01:39John Coogan?

  what might be happening behind the scenes. Says SpaceX prepping late 2026 IPO per the information, not just Starlink, which is what people were rumoring. They'd spin out Starlink. I don't think that makes any sense. But this comes just after, just comes just days after reports that OpenAI was weighing an entry into space. So maybe it's a bit of PR maneuvering, given that Elon Musk doesn't seem to like having a public company. He took Twitter private and then he wanted to take Tesla private too. And then, uh, and then Katie Roof says, does he even have PR people lol? And Dan Primack says, don't need PR people to have a PR strategy. And, uh, yeah, he might've, he might've, he might've directly emailed all the investors that he knew would leak, you know? And that doesn't require a PR person. Um, and so Elon actually chimed in and he said,

• 3:02:24John Coogan?

  there's been a lot of press claiming that SpaceX is raising money at $800 billion, which is not accurate. SpaceX has been cash flow positive for many years and does periodic stock buybacks twice a year to provide liquidity for employees and investors. Valuation increments are a function of progress with Starship and Starlink and securing global direct to sell spectrum greatly increases our addressable market. And one thing that, and one other thing that is arguably most significant thus far, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway.

• 3:02:56John Coogan?

  Ridiculous.

• 3:02:57Jordi Hays?

  John, I gotta say, I'm bummed that we gotta end the show right now.

• 3:03:00John Coogan?

  We do, we do.

• 3:03:01Jordi Hays?

  You gotta get on with Pasadena.

• 3:03:03John Coogan?

  I do.

• 3:03:04Jordi Hays?

  You've got some celebrating to do over in that, in that area.

• 3:03:06John Coogan?

  Neck of the woods.

• 3:03:08Jordi Hays?

  I can't wait for tomorrow. I'm so happy to be back in the Ultra Dome.

• 3:03:11John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:11Jordi Hays?

  Glad we don't have to travel for the rest of the year.

• 3:03:13John Coogan?

  No travel for the rest of the year.

• 3:03:15Jordi Hays?

  We're hanging out.

• 3:03:15John Coogan?

  We're hanging out.

• 3:03:16Jordi Hays?

  We're podcasting. The team is thrilled. We're thrilled. Thank you for hanging out with us today.

• 3:03:21John Coogan?

  Thank you, everyone.

• 3:03:22Jordi Hays?

  We love you all dearly.

• 3:03:24John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 3:03:24Jordi Hays?

  Have an amazing evening. We will see you tomorrow.

• 3:03:26John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 3:03:27Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 3:03:28John Coogan?

  Bye.