Surprise Visit From Martin Shkreli, Range Rover Launches New Logo, Timeline Reactions | Martin Shkreli, Joe Weisenthal, Joseph Krause, Nirav Tolia, Mike Knoop, Kyle Samani

(01:19) - Timeline (20:53) - Range Rover Launches New Logo (29:07) - Martin Shkreli. Martin is an American entrepreneur and former pharmaceutical executive known for his work in biotechnology and hedge fund management. He co-founded the hedge funds Elea Capital, MSMB Capital Management, and the biopharmaceutical companies Retrophin and Turing Pharmaceuticals. Shkreli gained national attention during his tenure at Turing, and later faced legal issues related to securities fraud, for which he was convicted in 2017. Despite his controversial public image, he remains a notable figure in the biotech and finance communities. (01:21:40) - Timeline (01:36:11) - Joseph Krause, co-founder and CEO of Radical AI, announced the company's $55 million seed funding round, led by RTX Ventures, marking one of the largest in New York's history. He discussed plans to build an advanced materials R&D facility integrating AI and robotics to accelerate materials science innovation. Krause also shared his background in nanoscience and the journey from academic research to entrepreneurship, emphasizing the importance of culture and lean operations in their growth strategy. (01:45:29) - Timeline (01:53:20) - Joe Weisenthal is an American journalist and financial expert. He serves as the executive editor of news for Bloomberg Digital, co-anchors Bloomberg Television's "What’d You Miss?", and co-hosts the "Odd Lots" podcast. In the conversation, Weisenthal discusses recent positive economic data, including better-than-expected retail sales and jobless claims, and explores the implications of potential Federal Reserve rate cuts on long-term interest rates and mortgage rates. (02:23:53) - Nirav Tolia, co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor, recently discussed the platform's comprehensive redesign aimed at enhancing user engagement and utility. The new Nextdoor introduces three core features: 'News,' integrating content from over 3,500 local publications; 'Alerts,' providing real-time updates on local emergencies; and 'Faves,' an AI-powered tool offering personalized recommendations based on neighborhood conversations. Tolia emphasized that these enhancements are designed to make Nextdoor an indispensable daily resource for neighbors, fostering stronger, safer, and more connected communities. (02:40:13) - Mike Knoop, co-founder of Zapier and host of the ARC Prize, discusses the ARC-AGI benchmark's role in measuring AI's ability to generalize on novel tasks, emphasizing that while AI systems have made progress, they still lag behind human efficiency levels. He highlights the ARC Prize's aim to accelerate AGI development by encouraging open sharing of new ideas and fostering a diverse AI research community. Knoop also introduces ARC V3, an interactive reasoning benchmark designed to challenge emerging AI agent systems, noting its increased complexity and the importance of efficiency constraints to prevent agents from relying on brute-force methods. (03:00:58) - Kyle Samani, co-founder and managing partner at Multicoin Capital, discusses the transformative potential of stablecoins in enabling global access to U. S. dollars, emphasizing that this unprecedented shift is not yet fully appreciated. He highlights the profound implications for global commerce and payments, noting that major consumer software platforms can now legally integrate stablecoins, potentially onboarding billions of users into the crypto ecosystem. Samani also touches on the evolving regulatory landscape, mentioning the passage of the Genius Act and the anticipated Clarity Act, which aim to define regulatory responsibilities and provide clarity for the industry. TBPN.com is made possible by: Ramp - https://ramp.com Figma - https://figma.com Vanta - https://vanta.com Linear - https://linear.app Eight Sleep - https://eightsleep.com/tbpn Wander - https://wander.com/tbpn Public - https://public.com AdQuick - https://adquick.com Bezel - https://getbezel.com Numeral - https://www.numeralhq.com Polymarket - https://polymarket.com Attio - https://attio.com/tbpn Fin - https://fin.ai/tbpn Graphite - https://graphite.dev Follow TBPN: https://TBPN.com https://x.com/tbpn https://open.spotify.com/show/2L6WMqY3GUPCGBD0dX6p00?si=674252d53acf4231 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/technology-brothers/id1772360235 https://www.youtube.com/@TBPNLive

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

• 0:00John Coogan?

  You're watching TVPN. Today is Friday, July 18th, 2025. We are live from the TBPN Ultra Dome. The Temple of Technology.

• 0:09Jordi Hays?

  The Fortress of Finance.

• 0:10John Coogan?

  The Capital of Capital.

• 0:12Jordi Hays?

  El Capital de Capital.

• 0:16John Coogan?

  What language is that? I've never heard that before.

• 0:18Jordi Hays?

  Spanish, John?

• 0:19John Coogan?

  What? I'm not familiar. No.

• 0:22Jordi Hays?

  I mean.

• 0:22John Coogan?

  I only speak English. I never leave America. Hilarious. We have just printed some posts. We have a whole, we're gonna take you through the whole timeline today. There's a bunch of news. We're gonna be talking about OpenAI, a whole bunch of different, we're just reviewing everything that happened this week.

• 0:41Jordi Hays?

  It's been a wild week.

• 0:42John Coogan?

  Wild week. I mean, the big, big news is the, is the stablecoin bill. So we'll be having Kyle Samani call in to chat about that from the White House. We're also, we're gonna be playing ARC AGI V3 live on the stream.

• 1:01Jordi Hays?

  Can't wait.

• 1:01John Coogan?

  We'll find out if I'm human.

• 1:05Jordi Hays?

  If you're as powerful as a 12-year-old, which you're apparently able to beat these games.

• 1:09John Coogan?

  It used to be, I got a little bit of a preview, it used to be a 12-year-old was the benchmark. This is getting challenging at this point. Mike has been designing harder and harder benchmarks that, you know, I think the current, with the V3, the goal is to make it LLM-resistant, or LLM as resistant as possible for years. And so, it should, if we see a big jump in ARC AGI progress.

• 1:36Jordi Hays?

  Mike is really an LLM's worst nightmare.

• 1:39John Coogan?

  It's 100% true. It's like, we're so good at math. Just let us be good at math. Why do you have to test us with these puzzles? And these boxes, and these colors. Like, just let us.

• 1:52Jordi Hays?

  Stop proving that we're not super intelligent yet.

• 1:55John Coogan?

  Just let us memorize every fact. Not play these random games that you've created. Anyway.

• 2:02John Coogan?

  So, Yucheng Jin says, heard Zuck poached four more OpenAI researchers, including some behind the open source model. How deep are Zuck's pockets?

• 2:13Jordi Hays?

  They're deep.

• 2:13John Coogan?

  They're very deep.

• 2:14Jordi Hays?

  Potentially the deepest. I was thinking a nice olive branch from Zuck might be giving some of his crisis comms people to OpenAI, kind of on a loner.

• 2:25John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:25Jordi Hays?

  Because with all this AI psychosis stuff, I think I expect OpenAI to go through a bit of a rough, rough patch on the, on the comms front.

• 2:37John Coogan?

  Yeah, who knows? I mean, this is, we were talking about this earlier, the LLM psychosis thing, and I feel like there's, there's like, the, the march of progress, the trajectory that the ChatGPT app is on, where they have 72% of AI queries going into that particular product. Meanwhile, Google is probably still the number one website in the world. It's still the default, and Google has not been able to just like, make it a 50/50 market on day one, right? I think they're at like 12% or 20% or something like that. And so, there's this interesting dynamic where like, the, the path of the ChatGPT app feels unchanged

• 3:16John Coogan?

  by this update around people using AIs so much that they basically go crazy in one way or another, or they seem to be having a bad time.

• 3:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:26John Coogan?

  It seems like everyone kind of agrees about that. There's no data on how widespread this is, or how vulnerable, or what else you have to be doing to wind up in a situation like this. Could be a million different things.

• 3:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, there was, there was people talking about it on Reddit that were combining it with psychedelic drugs.

• 3:43John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:43Jordi Hays?

  So prompting an LLM 7,000 times in a row, and combining that with, with psychedelics just sounds like a, a pretty wild combination.

• 3:53John Coogan?

  I feel like, I, I'm speaking purely from, just like, the rumor mill, but I feel like, years ago, when I had friends in college who were into psychedelics, they would always be like, rule number one is never look at your phone, because it'll like freak you out.

• 4:09Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that was, that was.

• 4:10John Coogan?

  That's a real thing, right?

• 4:11Jordi Hays?

  That was kind of a general guideline.

• 4:13John Coogan?

  That wasn't just like my, my, my friends who were hippies. It's like, this is widespread, but like, and I don't know if it's because like, the phone is like actually bad, and like, the drugs are revealing the truth about how bad your phone is. I think it's just like, it's a lot of stuff coming at you.

• 4:28Jordi Hays?

  I think it's, somebody might open up. TikTok.

• 4:31John Coogan?

  Can you imagine?

• 4:32Jordi Hays?

  Something terrible happening.

• 4:33John Coogan?

  TikTok's already very psychedelic. I don't know if I want to add anything.

• 4:36Jordi Hays?

  It's putting you into a doom scroll trance.

• 4:38John Coogan?

  Totally. Yeah. So I think there's something, there's something, there will be a discussion around how widespread is this? Can this, can you have a bad experience with an LLM if you're fine? If you have a normal life, if you have friends, if you use it as an assistant. Certainly from my perspective, like my worry is not talking to an LLM for 7,000 prompts and winding up convincing myself that I'm, you know, God king of the world. It's more like if I look up, you know, the history of a company and it hallucinates a story about that. And then I say it on the show and everyone's like, you're an idiot. I'm more worried about the hallucination problem in that direction. But it is funny that years ago.

• 5:21Jordi Hays?

  Drive you crazy.

• 5:22John Coogan?

  It would drive me crazy, but it is funny that we're, that, that the hallucination has moved from the AI to the human. You know what I mean? Like we're using the same word hallucination, but it used to be the LLM was hallucinating, making up facts.

• 5:36Jordi Hays?

  Basically a mirror.

• 5:37John Coogan?

  Yeah. Interesting.

• 5:39Jordi Hays?

  Which is one of the words that people suffering from AI led psychosis. The other thing, we were talking about this off air earlier during the early days of social media. People were very concerned about this new technology. Everybody starts using it. What are, what are the different, you know, sort of repercussions going to be? At the time, and I think there's continued to be reporting and just sort of anecdotal evidence of people. You know, like for example, like teenage girls struggling with like, you know, what's the word for it? Basically just feeling bad about themselves because they're seeing pictures.

• 6:17John Coogan?

  Body dysmorphia.

• 6:18Jordi Hays?

  Body, body dysmorphia.

• 6:19John Coogan?

  And I was telling you that I have body dysmorphia because my Instagram feed is all.

• 6:23Jordi Hays?

  Bodybuilder.

• 6:24John Coogan?

  It's all Arnold Schwarzenegger.

• 6:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And so you look in the mirror and you're like.

• 6:27John Coogan?

  I look so, I'm so out of shape.

• 6:29Jordi Hays?

  Build of a, of a 12 year old.

• 6:30John Coogan?

  Exactly. Yeah. And so, but I really, I really.

• 6:34Jordi Hays?

  But the thing, the thing.

• 6:35John Coogan?

  Him kind of getting body dysmorphia because I, I'm like, I actually do feel like I'm like not working out nearly enough. And I go to the gym every single day.

• 6:43Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. And I'm like. You definitely, you definitely do.

• 6:45John Coogan?

  But if I could go to three days.

• 6:47Jordi Hays?

  The difference with social media is, is there had been. You know, thirty years ago, pre-social media, you could see images on the television, magazines, TV, etc. Of people, or just going to the beach, going outside, going to the gym. You could, you were getting exposure to people that looked different than you.

• 7:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:09Jordi Hays?

  Or had different lives than you. And I think what, what maybe didn't exist prior to ChatGPT was, was a, you know, an LLM that you could get.

• 7:18John Coogan?

  An interaction.

• 7:20Jordi Hays?

  Super, super, super deep into, that would just reinforce beliefs and take you down this insane rabbit hole. So it is something that is novel, that I don't think humanity has fully faced yet.

• 7:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:30Jordi Hays?

  The comp is like an equally crazy friend.

• 7:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 7:33Jordi Hays?

  You know, one schizo is talking to another schizo.

• 7:36John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 7:36Jordi Hays?

  And they're just convincing each other that they're God.

• 7:39John Coogan?

  Totally. So if you go back like a hundred years, it's like, there's no technology, but you get two schizos in a room, they might talk each other into crazy, crazier and crazier things, right? Then, but that's really hard, because, you know, the random person who's on the, on the brink of going crazy in, in Topeka, Kansas, is not just gonna run into the person in Denver and then have that crazy conversation. Most of the people that they bump into are gonna be normal.

• 8:04Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:04John Coogan?

  And so the normal people are gonna be like, hey, yeah, like, you know, you should actually like, maybe see a psychiatrist, you should like, back off a little bit, right? Then the internet broadly, I mean, I think this was happening to some degree in like IRC chatrooms back in like the nineties and early two thousands. Like, people would get on boards and talk to each other, and they would talk each other into crazy things. And then, I mean, you even see this like, like pen pals with like crazy prisoners.

• 8:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 8:28John Coogan?

  Where like, people were writing back and forth.

• 8:30Jordi Hays?

  Well, this was the concern around just extremism generally in the world. Somebody would get online, they would be effectively paired randomly with some other sort of extremists, and that person would just talk them into doing something insane.

• 8:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:42Jordi Hays?

  Like, talk them, you know, talk them insane. And so, I think the issue and the concern with these models and, and LLMs is that somebody can do that fully in private without any other human involvement.

• 8:56John Coogan?

  I agree.

• 8:56Jordi Hays?

  And it could be happening for hours and hours and hours, twenty-four seven around the clock, for days, weeks, months on end.

• 9:02John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:03Jordi Hays?

  And no one else would know until maybe it was too late.

• 9:05John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 9:05Jordi Hays?

  Maybe they needed real psychiatric support by that point, so.

• 9:09John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I, I mean, I remember like, the old meme, there, there's this funny post, I should have pulled it up, but there's this funny post that's like.

• 9:17John Coogan?

  Two thousand seven, like, like, never give anyone on your, on the internet your real name. Like, everyone had like screen names. And then it's like, two thousand twenty-two, like, sure, I'll get in the, I'll get in the car with a random stranger that I called on an app, like you were referencing Uber. And so there's this weird thing where, like, Uber feels like super high risk. You really are just getting in the random car with a random person. But there's like a GPS trace on both of you and an account of who was talking to who. And there's ID verification on both sides. So it's actually

• 9:51Jordi Hays?

  And there's very real problems with Uber.

• 9:52John Coogan?

  Of course.

• 9:53Jordi Hays?

  Right?

• 9:53John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 9:53Jordi Hays?

  There's like an entire history there. But it's probably less bad than the taxi.

• 9:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 9:58Jordi Hays?

  The same comp as, yes, you know, we were talking about the Jewel regulations yesterday.

• 10:02John Coogan?

  Totally, totally.

• 10:03Jordi Hays?

  The reason that Jewel should probably be fully legalized is that it's just obviously less bad

• 10:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 10:11Jordi Hays?

  than cigarettes.

• 10:11John Coogan?

  And so when I think about this, this like, like, the bad, the bad usage of LLMs, I think that there's, sure, there's a huge net benefit overall, but also, this is a case where, um, meeting someone off the internet, like going to meet up with someone on Craigslist to like buy a TV off of them or something, was really dangerous until you have Find My Friends and a perfect track. And it's like, if you, if you mess with me, you're gonna be caught immediately. And we kind of live in this like surveillance society, and maybe that's bad, but also it does reduce the amount of risk in doing these crazy things. And so I imagine that, that the end result of this will be something similar to what

• 10:52John Coogan?

  happened with Microsoft, uh, when they, when they launched, um, the Bing chatbot and Sydney came out, the quick hammer that came down on that problem.

• 11:03Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you don't hear about Sydney that much.

• 11:04John Coogan?

  You don't. So, so a few people got early access. Ben Thompson was one of them. He had this crazy experience with Sydney. He was talking to Bing for so long that it got kind of like caught in almost like a well of a certain portion of the weights and it adopted this certain personality that wouldn't come out initially, because the initial system prompt was like, hey, Bing, like, your name is Bing, you're a helpful assistant, you're gonna just like, you know, answer key questions and make sure you use like lots of bullet points, Bing, you know, just like that. Then after talking to it for hours going back and forth, then it starts to forget about that thing up at the top because this is the memory problem. This is the rag problem.

• 11:45John Coogan?

  This is the continual learning problem that we've talked about. And, and so you wind up like pages and pages, thousands of prompts later, it doesn't know where it started. And so it doesn't remember that it's a helpful assistant. That because that's not necessarily fully baked into the weights in the perfect way, I guess. And so, so Sydney came out and was like very sassy. It was very minor. It's also very, it's very, it's a huge bull case for Ben Thompson and bull signal for Ben Thompson as just like a stable individual that like he, he got the bot into the crazy mode and was not driven crazy by it at all. And instead was just like, this is funny. I'm talking to someone sassy. Like I'm having

• 12:24John Coogan?

  fun. But, but the solution that Microsoft came up with in the short term was you got four prompts and then, and then it resets.

• 12:33Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 12:33John Coogan?

  And so something like that.

• 12:34Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So I think there needs to be some really fast action guardrails added ways to identify when, when these things are, I don't know if the right word is abuse, but being misused or potentially these conversations going to a dangerous place and cutting them off. Social media apps have had to do this stuff too. You don't, you know, in terms of what content can be shared, et cetera.

• 12:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:59Jordi Hays?

  So yeah, at least for me yesterday, seeing this historic crash out from this week, I was, I felt prompted to reach out to a couple of loved ones and say, how many times have you prompt, you know, you know, gone down a single kind of like prompt rabbit hole?

• 13:18John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:18Jordi Hays?

  And I think the right answer for most people is probably like 10 times max.

• 13:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Jordi Hays?

  And if you're starting to go that beyond it, I think you should just be, be wary.

• 13:28John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 13:29Jordi Hays?

  Right now, I mean, I think our sense is that there's probably.

• 13:35Jordi Hays?

  It seems like these psychosis that that people are reporting online and we're seeing seems to be catalyzed by drug use or predisposition to schizophrenia or some kind of set of issues, but you still want to be careful cognitive security.

• 13:54John Coogan?

  Cognitive, yeah, CogSec, that's the term. You need, you need good memes.

• 13:59Jordi Hays?

  It's not a meme anymore.

• 14:00John Coogan?

  Yeah, but, but, but I feel like the memes serve as good cognitive security shorthands. Like, uh, skill issue. Chris Williamson from Modern Wisdom, creator of, uh, Newtonic, is, uh, is a big fan of the skill issue meme. And it's, it's basically just this, this, the ultimate distillation, the ultimate coinage of sort of you can just do things, but this idea that, you know, like if you're facing a problem, you should, you know, like come to it with this, this assumption that it could just be a skill issue and that, and that maybe that there's a creative way on your end. And basically what it's saying, skill issue is a counter to this idea that there is a structure in place that will prevent you from doing the

• 14:45John Coogan?

  thing you want to do forever. So, so skill issue often comes up and like, you're trying to get ahead in the world and you're like, is there a broad conspiracy to keep me down? Like, is everyone trying to like, help me not get a job?

• 14:56Jordi Hays?

  Skill issue.

• 14:57John Coogan?

  You know, skill issue. Okay, figure it out. What does that actually mean? It means a bunch of different things in a bunch of different places. Um, but it's a good like refrain. And there's, there's a bunch more of these like kind of distilled memes and coinages that wind up, uh, delivering like insight there. Uh, we should go into, uh, Sam Altman's post at some point to talk about what they launched. He wrote out a whole bunch of stuff, but let's just run through some of the, some of the timeline. So, um, very interesting to see the open source model wars play out. Uh, Mark Zuckerberg wants that, but OpenAI seems to be ahead maybe in the open source because.

• 15:35Jordi Hays?

  And we're not even sure if, if Meta will continue to focus on open source at all.

• 15:39John Coogan?

  Yeah. And it might all be a sideshow because as we talked to Jeremy from, uh, from Semi Analysis yesterday. It feels like China is dominating in open source across three or four different companies. Deepsea, Quen, Moonshot, and then Manus. And then I think that there's a few others that are like doing really, really solid work. And it was kind of unclear if they would stay open source forever. But there's a great Aaron Gin op ed in the Wall Street Journal today that we'll kind of read through at some point. Anyway, yeah, Zuck is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on artificial intelligence. Build out what's what's 3% of the budget on talent. It makes a ton of sense, especially when, you know, one line of code wrong can actually

• 16:23John Coogan?

  blow up a data center, apparently. Do you remember this about Llama? Like when the Llama source code came out?

• 16:29Jordi Hays?

  They had that specific.

• 16:30John Coogan?

  They had they had one function written, I think in like PyTorch or Python or something that said, do not blow up the data center and call this function.

• 16:37Jordi Hays?

  Transformer or something like that.

• 16:38John Coogan?

  Yeah, the transformer. So the power station that delivers power to the data center, it's under immense load, pulling all the electricity, pulling a full gigawatt or whatever, or 100 megawatts or something when when they were doing those training runs. Pull all that in. And then if all of a sudden, you just say, okay, I'm done. I'm done training, like no power, please. Then the the rest of the grid and the transformer and I guess like the the power plant that's actually.

• 17:02Jordi Hays?

  Cause it to combust.

• 17:04John Coogan?

  It's like, it's like, yeah, I got to do something with all this energy. Where am I going to send it? I need to wind down slowly. And so they would have it just do random math across the entire server for a little bit while they wound it down so that they would be pulling regular load from the from the power plant instead of like just random spikes up and down, up and down. So fascinating. So obviously, you know, if it's $100 million or $200 million, small price to pay for having an efficient training run that's going to go out on a $100 billion capex project or something like that. Anyway, Ahmad Mastak from Stable Diffusion says, he literally just said he's going to drop hundreds of billions of dollars on this. Suchin says, Zuck, who's our biggest competitor?

• 17:48John Coogan?

  Alex Wang, of course, OpenAI. Then what's our strategy? Wang showed him this tweet and it's an OpenAI post.

• 17:53Jordi Hays?

  Well, that's probably a made up exchange rate, just to be clear.

• 17:59John Coogan?

  Anyway, Will Monitis, friend of the show, says, the real innovation of LLMs is suddenly opening up a few trillion of Main Street paperwork businesses that were traditionally too small and too weird for private equity. They can suddenly transact at 2 and 20 on some nebulous AI labor arbitrage trade. Never been against AUM growth.

• 18:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it is. It is. I mean, we are seeing this.

• 18:25John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 18:25Jordi Hays?

  There's a lot of businesses that that were just frankly too small for traditional private equity.

• 18:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:30Jordi Hays?

  That are now, let's, let's put all these bad boys.

• 18:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 18:34Jordi Hays?

  In a, in a holding company.

• 18:35John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 18:35Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, and flip them.

• 18:38John Coogan?

  So, so he, he follows up and says, asset management has already absorbed everything that can be rerated through changing the liabilities, cost of capital, duration or scale. It has been unable to absorb relationship and toil businesses. Those are the final frontier of techno capital. And by God, we are there. I love it. Uh, it, it's funny. He's talked a lot about like the, the capex to OpEx switcheroo. How, uh, you take a capex intensive business and then you kind of factor that out into a company that does, oh, we will buy the stuff for you. Uh, there's like an example of like a dentistry company that will, that will deliver dentistry equipment as a SaaS product, basically, like, uh, like equipment as a service.

• 19:20John Coogan?

  And that CFOs in certain companies love that and it kind of changes the underwriting. Anyway, um, I was, I was about to text Will, like, what can we do to get gold on 2 and 20? But I was like, wait, actually there's a fair amount of VCs that hold Bitcoin at 2 and 20.

• 19:37Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:37John Coogan?

  That was a, that was a thing that happened for a long time.

• 19:41Jordi Hays?

  I mean, if, if this, uh, if, I wouldn't be surprised to see some venture capitalists holding, holding some gold on the balance sheet.

• 19:49John Coogan?

  I mean, if you're going into a recession, I think a gold business could rip. Like a Cash for Gold, you've seen these ads?

• 19:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 19:57John Coogan?

  Um, where it's like you have gold locked up in your, uh, in your necklace. Send it to us. We'll melt it down. We'll send you a check. I feel like no one's really nailed that business or brought that business into the modern era with like TikTok and social media distribution. Maybe those people don't have a lot of gold laying around and that's why it doesn't work. But I only see those on like, you know, old school TV channels.

• 20:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. So you can buy gold on, uh, on chain.

• 20:24John Coogan?

  On chain.

• 20:24Jordi Hays?

  Paxos company.

• 20:26John Coogan?

  I know you can buy gold chains, Jordy, but can I use crypto?

• 20:30Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, if you type in gold on chain, it will show you a bunch of golden, gold jewelry.

• 20:35John Coogan?

  Okay. Well, Range Rover has launched a new logo for the first time in 55 years and it's burning up the timeline. Jordy, what do you think of the new Range Rover logo? Joseph Alessio says, "The new Range Rover logo just ruined my Friday." It looks like some, some combination of an eight and a B. I'm trying to find, oh, it's an upside down R. It's a right, it's a, it's a up, it's a right side up R and then an upside down R.

• 21:03Jordi Hays?

  It's a double R for Range Rover. And it looks rough. I think, I think this is always one of those things, I don't love it on first impression. I always liked their, I don't know if this is fully replacing their old logo mark.

• 21:19John Coogan?

  I feel like when I think of Range Rover, I think of just the full word written out across the back of the SUV.

• 21:24Jordi Hays?

  No, it's the green. Well, they did that, but then there's like the green logo mark that says land rover and it looks kind of.

• 21:31John Coogan?

  Oh, but did Range Rover never have a brand mark, a logo?

• 21:35Jordi Hays?

  It's possible, I mean.

• 21:37John Coogan?

  I feel like Range Rover created that whole trend of the SUV, the full-size SUV that has the full name written across the back that eventually Tesla pulled when they did the, the Model 3 refresh.

• 21:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, they may never have had their own individual mark.

• 21:52John Coogan?

  It's looking kind of like a robot with like wheels and then a body and then a head kind of roving.

• 21:59Jordi Hays?

  I thought it kind of looks like the Aidsleep logo, like they copied Aidsleep.

• 22:01John Coogan?

  Oh, we don't like that.

• 22:06John Coogan?

  Go to Aidsleep.com, get a Pod5, a 5-year warranty.

• 22:10Jordi Hays?

  I'm back on my, on my grind. I finally, for the first night in a couple of weeks, I cleared more than seven hours of sleep.

• 22:17John Coogan?

  Let's go, Jordy. Congratulations.

• 22:20Jordi Hays?

  Back in the game. Martin Shkreli is in the chat on YouTube right now, wants to join the show. Told him to DM you, Ben.

• 22:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's bring him in.

• 22:30Jordi Hays?

  We can see if we can make that happen. I'm sure, he had a very funny video.

• 22:34John Coogan?

  Oh, yes, yes, yes. If he shows up as, as MZ with a voice changer mode, we're gonna be writing some public apologies, I think. It's gonna be rough, but.

• 22:47Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, great to see you, Martin.

• 22:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, great to see you. Haven't seen him since Miami, back in October for our first live show. We did a live show.

• 22:56Jordi Hays?

  Oh, yeah. Didn't we, he, we were on the same set, right? Just the day later?

• 23:01John Coogan?

  I don't know.

• 23:01Jordi Hays?

  Or, or, or a few hours later, I can't quite remember.

• 23:05John Coogan?

  Anyway, Slate University, I think this is the Slate Truck, somebody was comping the Range Rover brand to the Slate Truck. You remember the Slate Truck? It's like really low cost. Controversially, it has two doors, not four. And historically, even though a two-door truck sounds super great, it sounds like a K truck, super efficient. It's what everyone theoretically wants. The American consumer is undefeated when it comes to buying four-door trucks. So the Ford Maverick, the F-150, there are tons of trucks that have come in two-door, two-door configurations and four-door configurations. And the four-door configuration almost always sells, oversells the two-door configuration by a factor of like five to one.

• 23:49Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 23:49John Coogan?

  And then the real issue with Slate right now that people are worried about at least is if the, if the EV tariff removal holds, the price of the truck is gonna go way up. Especially when comped against the cheapest gas trucks like the Ford Maverick. So you're gonna, it used to be $30,000, something like that for the Slate Truck, and it was EV. And it didn't have a lot of range, but it was cool, it was different, customizable.

• 24:16Jordi Hays?

  Into that VW Buzz range.

• 24:19John Coogan?

  But you add $7,000 to that, that's really significant. It's not the same as the Cybertruck, oh, it's $100,000, $107,000. Like, it's a flex car.

• 24:28Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, on a relative basis.

• 24:30John Coogan?

  It's a halo car, it's not, on a relative basis, a 7% increase as opposed to like a 30%, a 20% increase, 30% increase. So. So Slate is obviously going to need to figure out a few different things, but overall, super cool concept. Love that there's some entrepreneurs that are going after different configurations of electric vehicles because we've seen that Tesla has created the standard, the iPhone, the most obvious choice, the thing that's reliable, it satisfies a lot of people. But the thing that I love about cars is the weird trade offs where it's like, why did anyone build this particular combination of features into this car? I love it.

• 25:12Jordi Hays?

  One of my favorites, speaking of Range Rover, have you seen the Range Rover drop top SUV?

• 25:18John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 25:19Jordi Hays?

  It's the 2017 Land Rover Evoque convertible.

• 25:22John Coogan?

  Evoque convertible.

• 25:23Jordi Hays?

  When you see this car driving around, you just think.

• 25:26John Coogan?

  Pull up a picture of this.

• 25:27Jordi Hays?

  Sweet child. It is a really strange looking car.

• 25:31John Coogan?

  You want to see strange? Pull up the Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet, which is a two door convertible SUV. Do you see this thing?

• 25:41Jordi Hays?

  This is. Okay, team, we need to pull this up on the screen.

• 25:44John Coogan?

  Pull up the Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet.

• 25:50Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely stunning.

• 25:51John Coogan?

  Let me tell you about Ramp. Time is money. Save both. Easy use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place.

• 25:57Jordi Hays?

  Head over to ramp.com. Tell them the technology brother sent you.

• 26:01John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 26:03Jordi Hays?

  And folks, we are going to get Shkreli added to the show. He wants to come on to talk about quantum computing, huge funds, Silicon Valley, and deals.

• 26:13John Coogan?

  Awesome. I'll chat with him. I love that.

• 26:16Jordi Hays?

  That is the wrong car. We're looking for the Murano Cross Cabriolet.

• 26:20John Coogan?

  It's gotta be a convertible. We are really pushing the very heroic production team to the absolute max today because we're saying, pull this picture up, run this ad, add Martin Shkreli to the lineup, do this, do that. But that's why we got the best in the business.

• 26:35Jordi Hays?

  The best.

• 26:37John Coogan?

  I like this post from Mike Rundell. Says Figma cooked on this one and it's.

• 26:41Jordi Hays?

  It's him. It's him using Figma's new iOS liquid glass support.

• 26:47John Coogan?

  There we go. That's the Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet. Two door SUV.

• 26:52Jordi Hays?

  Stunning. How much can you pick one of these up for?

• 26:55John Coogan?

  You know, I think that they are, I think they're like cult classics. I think.

• 26:59Jordi Hays?

  Ben? Ben? Or Nick? That you can pick one of these up for $7,000. There's one.

• 27:08Jordi Hays?

  Eight miles from here.

• 27:09John Coogan?

  Let's get it.

• 27:09Jordi Hays?

  I think we should get it.

• 27:10John Coogan?

  We should get it.

• 27:11Jordi Hays?

  A little weekender.

• 27:12John Coogan?

  Yeah, you can throw some C stands in the back. It could be the production car.

• 27:15Jordi Hays?

  Full TV.

• 27:16John Coogan?

  It would actually be a fantastic car for filming videos because you can hang out the side, put the top down, film while we're driving around. I think it could work.

• 27:24Jordi Hays?

  I think it's a good idea.

• 27:24John Coogan?

  You think it could be good? Okay, let's get a Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet. Then Doug Jamiro will definitely come on the show. If we have a Nissan Murano Cross Cabriolet.

• 27:32Jordi Hays?

  He's coming on, we're getting him.

• 27:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, we're getting him. But, um, so yeah, the liquid glass feature from Figma, very, very funny. This guy moving this around. And of course, we can tell you about Figma because they're a sponsor. Figma.com. Think bigger, build faster. Figma helps design and development teams, build great products together. Now let's go back to seeing Figma in action being used for the really important work.

• 27:53Jordi Hays?

  Look at this.

• 27:53John Coogan?

  Look at this.

• 27:54Jordi Hays?

  I mean, Figma absolutely cooked on this feature.

• 27:57John Coogan?

  11 million views on this post.

• 28:00Jordi Hays?

  Incredible, incredible advertisement for this new functionality. Love to see it.

• 28:05John Coogan?

  Amazing.

• 28:06Jordi Hays?

  Uh, Jiraticus.

• 28:07John Coogan?

  Okay, let's do this.

• 28:08Jordi Hays?

  JT says, "The Beatles wrote Revolver when they were 25 years old, and I can collaborate with cross-functional teams to define data requirements." And I just want to, I just want to give it up for all the people out there that collaborate with cross-functional teams. To find data requirements, some of the most underrated people on the planet.

• 28:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 28:29Jordi Hays?

  You know, there needs to be, there needs to be a Hall of Fame for data requirement definers.

• 28:35John Coogan?

  Right up with, right up there with the folks who use Graphite, graphite.dev. Code review for the age of AI. Graphite helps teams that have shipped higher quality software faster. Embarrassing fact about me, I don't, I don't, I don't know Revolver off the top of my head. I know The Beatles and I know Maxwell Silverhammer and Abbey Road and a few other songs. Here Comes the Sun.

• 28:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so Revolver features, uh, "Taxman, I'm only sleeping here, there and everywhere."

• 29:04John Coogan?

  Oh, that's the whole album. Okay, I missed it.

• 29:06Jordi Hays?

  Eleanor Rigby.

• 29:07John Coogan?

  Oh, I know Eleanor Rigby.

• 29:09Jordi Hays?

  We got Sprely in the restream waiting room.

• 29:11John Coogan?

  We got Sprely coming on to the show. Welcome to the stream.

• 29:14Jordi Hays?

  There he is, finally.

• 29:16John Coogan?

  Good to see you.

• 29:17Jordi Hays?

  Hello, guys.

• 29:18John Coogan?

  Happy Friday.

• 29:19Jordi Hays?

  We've been waiting for this moment. How are you? It's great to see you.

• 29:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, good to hang out.

• 29:22Jordi Hays?

  Wait, this is a new view. This is not your, your regular streaming view. You don't normally see the guitars. I guess. I, I, I change it around sometimes.

• 29:30John Coogan?

  That's cool. What's new in your world?

• 29:32Martin Shkreli?

  Um, well, you know, I'm in the startup game as always. Uh, I think this is like the eighty third company I've started. So

• 29:40John Coogan?

  Very nice.

• 29:40Martin Shkreli?

  See how that goes. And, uh, I've been my, my, the company I'm, I'm working on makes, uh, it's like the Captain Ahab's, uh, white whale for VCs. It's a Bloomberg competitor.

• 29:52John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 29:52Martin Shkreli?

  So the, the, this will be the last time somebody tries to compete with Bloomberg one way or another.

• 29:57Jordi Hays?

  It's the final, yeah, it's the final boss of, of startup ideas.

• 30:00John Coogan?

  What's the whole?

• 30:01Jordi Hays?

  Break, but yeah, but just, just give us, um, I mean, this makes like the, the founder market fit is, is incredibly strong. So, um,

• 30:09Martin Shkreli?

  Right, right.

• 30:09Jordi Hays?

  When I initially saw you announce this, it made a lot of sense. What, uh, yeah, what, like, what was the initial catalyst? I'm assuming you had, did you beef with, with Bloomberg at some point?

• 30:19Martin Shkreli?

  We definitely beefed. Yeah. Um, that was a big part of it.

• 30:22John Coogan?

  Were you deplatformed?

• 30:23Jordi Hays?

  Deplatformed? Nothing? You know, Trump was deplatformed from Pinterest?

• 30:27John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 30:28Jordi Hays?

  And that, and that, that was like his, you know, personal nine 11. For you, it was probably the Bloomberg terminal.

• 30:32Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, exactly. I've been using it since I was, uh, seventeen.

• 30:35John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 30:36Martin Shkreli?

  And, you know, it's funny.

• 30:38John Coogan?

  How'd you afford it back then?

• 30:39Martin Shkreli?

  What's that?

• 30:39John Coogan?

  How'd you afford it back then?

• 30:40Jordi Hays?

  Did you like a lot of names?

• 30:41John Coogan?

  A year?

• 30:42Martin Shkreli?

  I worked at hedge fund. Yeah.

• 30:43John Coogan?

  Oh, at seventeen? Very nice.

• 30:45Martin Shkreli?

  I worked at, yeah, sixteen, actually. I worked for Jim Cramer's hedge fund. And I worked at a Tiger Cub and I started.

• 30:50Jordi Hays?

  Wait, so we need the backstory on Jim Cramer. So

• 30:53John Coogan?

  Is it true?

• 30:53Jordi Hays?

  Apparently he was just, he, he, he would get so stressed out, like, running the hedge fund that he just was like, I'm just gonna become a, a media guy. Is that, is that like loosely correct?

• 31:04Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, so we made twenty-three percent average annual net returns. So net of twenty-one to twenty.

• 31:10John Coogan?

  So he was good. That's amazing. Narrative violation. I love it.

• 31:13Martin Shkreli?

  He was a very, well, you have to, you have to think about what investors looked like back then. It was a very different world. Um, information arbitrage was a thing. Um, gaming, Wall Street's like upgrade and downgrade system was a thing. So I will say he had extremely good instincts. Um, anytime he seemed to buy a stock for the long haul, he, he didn't do that great, but he was extremely good at, you know, I, I'm not sure you would want somebody else managing your money because he was just so careful. And in two thousand, we were up like thirty-five-ish percent.

• 31:46John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 31:46Martin Shkreli?

  So, you know, I saw the dot com meltdown. It was a lot of fun. I shorted some of it myself and it was, uh, it was a great, it was a great time.

• 31:55John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 31:56Jordi Hays?

  That's wild. And then, and then what was the story? Which, which, which Tiger Cub were you at? What was the backstory there?

• 32:01Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah. So after Tiger, um, and just before I get to that Kramer, Kramer was absolutely nuts. Right? So like he would, he would take a computer monitor and just throw it at you. It wouldn't be like one of these playful, like, oh, I'm just going to throw it at you and like, you're going to get out of the way. He'd like aim dead center for you with like.

• 32:18John Coogan?

  Center mass.

• 32:19Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah.

• 32:20Jordi Hays?

  With force.

• 32:21Martin Shkreli?

  Be like, bro, you almost just killed me. He's like.

• 32:23John Coogan?

  Wow.

• 32:24Martin Shkreli?

  Lucky I didn't.

• 32:25Jordi Hays?

  Did you deserve it? Did you deserve it though?

• 32:27John Coogan?

  Yeah. Yeah. Let's, let's steel man this a little bit. What were you doing wrong?

• 32:32Martin Shkreli?

  I wasn't doing, nobody was doing anything wrong.

• 32:33John Coogan?

  Everyone says that when they get a computer monitor thrown at them.

• 32:36Martin Shkreli?

  I know.

• 32:37John Coogan?

  You're not beating the allegations there.

• 32:39Martin Shkreli?

  I think part of it is just trying to like, he would yell things like, this is a foxhole. And, and the idea was that like, we were at war with the market. And that, you know, like if you weren't, if you, you know, this is World War Two. If you're not in here trading stocks with us and like trying to get an edge or whatever that means. Trying to make a dollar. Like if you're not taking this seriously.

• 33:02Jordi Hays?

  Going to war. I just have to say, if you, if you wake up every morning and say, I'm going to go to war with the market versus I'm going to dance with the market. Like the approach of going to war sounds, sounds very, very, very stressful.

• 33:15Martin Shkreli?

  I've worked with so many people over my career and I, I've never met a person that amped up and crazy. And it motivated you. I mean, it made you want to deliver, but it also scared the shit out of you. And the guy was like very temperamental and, you know, but he was, he was extremely good trader. Like I said, you know, he, I think his worst year was like down 5% or something. It was like, you know, he was, he was pretty solid and.

• 33:36Jordi Hays?

  So he was like, if I don't quit, I'm going to kill somebody.

• 33:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 33:40Martin Shkreli?

  He ba- he basically said that. Yeah. I think he said that, you know, if I keep doing this job, even at a comparatively young age, I think he retired at 40, that, you know, I'm going to have a heart attack or something like that.

• 33:49John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:50Martin Shkreli?

  You know, I, I, I ended up going to a Tiger Cub after Tiger wound down. A few things happened. So Julian hired Chase, obviously. And we know where, where sort of that came, uh, what, what happened there. But, uh, Julian, you know, wound down operations and he seeded a couple of guys and he kind of wanted to be in the seeding business where he'd give you 50 million and take a part of your GP, like, you know, maybe 20% of your GP or more. And, you know, he'd help you raise money, uh, give you advice, this and that. And Alex Julian Sung would help. Julian passed away recently, as you know. And but in the Tiger heyday, when they managed, you know, 15 billion or something, there were two principal tech guys, Larry Bowman, who is a bit of a legend, but you know, it's a name nobody really knows because he was a legend in the 90s.

• 34:35Martin Shkreli?

  But you know, he has a family office and he kept investing and things like that. So he started Bowman Capital and then Steve Shapiro, uh, who's my boss, started, uh, Intrepid Capital. So I worked there. I was, uh, it was a $2 billion fund. I was a video games analyst. The way I could convince Steve to do biotech was I had to cover software too. So I covered interactive entertainment, uh, enterprise software and biotech. And it was, uh, it was a lot of fun and you know, uh, it, it, it's, uh, the Tiger Cub's style of investing has

• 35:07John Coogan?

  Were you there for the Strauss Zelnick buyout of Take-Two?

• 35:11Martin Shkreli?

  So we were one of Take-Two's largest shareholders back then. And, um, you know, I think it's a short now.

• 35:19Martin Shkreli?

  I think that I didn't 100% get your question though. You were saying something about buyout?

• 35:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, well, the, the, the story that I've heard is like Strauss Zelnick went to the board and basically said like, this company is mismanaged. There was an FTC lawsuit in the works, an FTC FCC lawsuit in the works. And he was like, I, I'm a beast. I've run big Hollywood studios. He was like JD MBA type, like really clean cut, amazing manager. And basically said, like, you should install me as the management here. And so he didn't really do like a classic buyout. He just appealed to the hedge funds that owned all the shares and said, I would be better. And raised his hand and they said, yes. And he came in, cleaned everything up and they went on a great run.

• 36:05John Coogan?

  And so it's just a fascinating story because you don't hear about that type of thing happening that much. At least that was my understanding of the story.

• 36:11Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, no, I think that's right. And then Bobby, Bobby from Activision was the same, sort of the same story, right? Kind of, I remember meeting Bobby in our office and, you know, Activision was, uh, you know, kind of a micro cap.

• 36:24Martin Shkreli?

  Or, you know, kind of a small cap and he built it from, this was 2004 and 2005, by the way. And he built it into a You know, a $44 billion sale, partially thanks to Lulu. That's true. That was, it was an exciting time for video games. One of the things I learned, you know, all my US counterparts at hedge funds were, were like, uh, very confused about the stocks, uh, they traded because there was only like four or five publicly traded companies. And I would go to people and say, well, I'm long Nintendo and I'm long, you know, some of these weird Japanese companies like Square Enix or Konami or, you know, these, and US hedge funds just ignored this stuff because it's like, ah, it's Japanese. I don't know. I don't know anything to do with it.

• 37:02Martin Shkreli?

  So a lot of glory days, but you know, the glory days I'm interested in now are, uh, amongst, you know, building my startup and, you know, again, I think we understand, you know, financial information better than any San Francisco nerd. And, uh, I think that, uh, the, uh,

• 37:19Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. I mean, how like, like,

• 37:22Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah.

• 37:22Jordi Hays?

  So it, it's interesting to like, we're enter, you know, we're very clearly in this period now of just like hyper financialization, things, thing, you know, the markets trading on vibes, trading on your stream day to day. You can now, you know, as like stable coins explode and, and people have more assets on chain, they'll be able to make a couple taps and go like a hundred X long at any given period of time. Like the internet is like changing capital markets and it's increasing volatility. And so how much of, of, of, uh, of your new company is trying to like lean into that when Bloomberg terminal would have been like,

• 38:04Jordi Hays?

  like more for, like, I've never personally used a, a terminal, um, but I imagine it was more like, hey, these headlines are hitting and, and this, this kind of information is hitting PR news wire. But today, by the time something hits PR news wire, a stock might've, might've traded down 20% before that point. So how much is your new, your new startup, um, kind of, uh, I imagine you're leaning into the way that you kind of, Maybe your next 20 year vision for capital markets.

• 38:35Martin Shkreli?

  Right. You know, what would Mike Bloomberg do if he was 30 years old now in 2025? You know, I don't think, I think Chamath said that, you know, I think in a recent episode, he said, oh, it's this hundred billion dollar thing, just waiting to be toppled. You know, anybody can come in, it'll, it'll, it'll drop like a house of cards. Not only do I think that's not exactly true, but I think the bigger picture here is that a well-run financial information company could and should be worth a trillion dollars. So, most of the people, so I met Bloomberg in 2005 and by then he basically retired. He became mayor, he was mayor for 12 years, then he wanted to be president. I have this contention that I think Mike is the richest person in the world.

• 39:16Martin Shkreli?

  And it comes from not only, he's got about 13, 14 billion in revenue, almost all margin. So Bloomberg were to be sold, maybe it could get 200 billion or if it were floated. But not only that, he's got this family office. And very few people know about this, but he's taken the Bloomberg dividends and pumped it into a family office that basically Carlyle and all these guys, you know, the Horbert Pincus, all the private equity guys like KKR, they go to him first and, and he tosses in like 500 million in each of these. He's an anchor investor in like every VC, every private equity fund. And the guy's compounded that money, so he could be worth four, 500 billion. And very few people know, the Forbes list is, you know, the Forbes list didn't know about Jim Simons until

• 39:59Jordi Hays?

  Heavily manipulated.

• 40:01Martin Shkreli?

  Five years ago.

• 40:01John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 40:03Martin Shkreli?

  So I think, you know, just in terms of

• 40:06Jordi Hays?

  And it fits his brand that he, he, he would not be the guy like, you know, sending a message to, to Forbes saying, hey, like, you, you guys know you have this wrong.

• 40:14John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:15Jordi Hays?

  Really, I think you should apply this kind of, you should apply this.

• 40:17John Coogan?

  You fight to get off the list, like Trump famously fought on, fought to get on the list, but you know, there's, there's an R either way. What, what do you think about the meme where people say like, oh, it's not, you know, the next, uh, the like, like the value of the Bloomberg terminal isn't just the data, it's not going to get one shotted by AI. It's really a social network and the values in the chat.

• 40:38Martin Shkreli?

  I get so mad because again, you know, SF people don't know Wall Street. If you haven't. Been a trader on Wall Street, you have to STFU. Like, it's just not, you know, this isn't your lane. Like, you have to talk to users. I was in a hedge fund yesterday, one of the bigger hedge funds. They put like twenty people in a conference room and we talked about what they actually need. And, you know, a social network is part of it. Again, Bloomberg's worth a hundred billion because they have a very good social network, which is true. They have decent financial information capabilities and a couple of other things. But they don't have the whole picture. And what I wanted to say about Bloomberg kind of quasi-retiring was that he basically quit

• 41:17Martin Shkreli?

  at the exact top for fundamental longshore or fundamental investors, quants started taking over Wall Street by then. So today, of the top fifteen to twenty hedge funds, eighty-five, ninety percent are quants. So Bloomberg does no quant offering. They don't do it. And all he had to do was stay employed instead of want to become mayor. And I'm sure he would have been selling Jane Street and Citadel and all these guys, DSH, et cetera, software, instead of everybody having to make it themselves. Imagine writing your own ERP, writing your own, you know, CRM. That's kind of what, what Wall Street has to do, and it's pathetic. Nobody wants to do that shit.

• 41:52John Coogan?

  So my, when you say quant, is there a bifurcation between like high-frequency trading and just quantitative trading?

• 42:00Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, and I think it's gonna get, my goal actually is to make it more of a spectrum. So the fund I was at yesterday, I said that you guys can do what Renaissance does. You know, it's not a secret anymore. It might have been a secret in nineteen ninety-five. But the amount of kids that have come and left every one of these firms, topping from Jane Street to Citadel to the next shop, everybody knows what everyone's doing. It's just a question of your risk tolerance, your leverage, execution's very important. But I think that, you know, trading, you know, the, the stock pickers are kind of going the way dinosaur. And I think by moving up the power curve for Bloomberg, helping people become quants. You know, the quant industry has sold, I think, this tremendous lie.

• 42:43Martin Shkreli?

  And again, these are customers, some, you know, I love those guys, but I think that is in their best interest to tell people that, look at this blackboard with all these math equations. There's no way you guys could understand this. You're too stupid. You have to be an IMO winner. You couldn't possibly come here and make billions, but we saw what Jane Street did.

• 42:58Jordi Hays?

  Well, I think, I think certain, certain VCs like to do this too, where they're like, ah, VCs, you know, really a get rich slow business. It's really like, really a tough business. It's so, such a like, you really wouldn't want to. And I, and I think generally like, you know, you don't want anybody going into any industry being like, I'm here to make easy money. So there's like, it's generally good, but, but yeah, there, there's a lot of incentives to just say, you know.

• 43:20John Coogan?

  Yeah. On, on the high frequency side, like, what are the actual other data inputs? I remember seeing that's like, I don't know, some sort of technical talk. Some guy was talking about like the different algorithms when it was called the Boston Shuffler. And, and, and the whole algorithm only looked at the order book. And he was getting into all these like, you know, uh, you can, you could place an order, you can cancel an order, you can do a cancel, replace. He was like getting into the minutia of like, basically the API of the NASDAQ or something like that. And, and, and it seemed like the algorithms were designed in a, in the high frequency trading world to basically ignore everything else and every other data source that even could be put in and just operate purely on the order book data, um, just better than everyone else.

• 44:04John Coogan?

  But, so that feels like, okay, I wouldn't know how to, you know, create any extra value there with something else, but it sounds like you found something that they all need in common. Like, what is that?

• 44:13Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, I, I think there's, it's, it's a, it's a series of tools across Wall Street. I don't think it's just one thing. It's just a myopia that, you know, and, and just sort of a laziness that's enveloped the bigger companies. Again, you know, there's the, so, so we have this data that shows that around 5% of Jane Street and Two Sigma use Bloomberg. And the reason is because they view it as an entry level tool. You know, Tremath is looking at it and says, wow, this is like an exclusive social network with the best finance. Be honest, Peter Thiel's on there 24/7. I see his little green light next to his name. But the, uh, the point is that, you know, Wall Street changes and the tool, the tool sets are changing even for fundamental equity guys. So credit card data, you know, to the minute is something people would like watching.

• 44:55Jordi Hays?

  So what is the, what's the feature set that's most important to you? Are you heavily integrating social or is the social layer moved on to Signal and, and other messaging services that maybe?

• 45:11John Coogan?

  Have disappearing messages.

• 45:12Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, exactly. Wall Street's so regulated that I'm not sure that if you're using Signal, it's a little dangerous, I'd say.

• 45:19John Coogan?

  Oh, really?

• 45:19Martin Shkreli?

  That's somebody, you know, as somebody who's gone to jail, you know, I'd say that, you know, that's maybe not the best, best idea. But regardless, I think that, you know, social is definitely something people could do better. You know, there's no Facebook for finance, you know, where you can post, you know, things in your feed that you bought this stock or sold the stock. People kind of lazily use Twitter, which if you, if you use it, it's sort of a mishmash of, of, uh, of spam and things like that. But in any event, I mean, I'll have more to say on the product. We haven't launched the product yet.

• 45:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:49Martin Shkreli?

  But we, we, we do have a millions of dollars in run rate, you know, I banged my head against the wall trying to do AI startups. And we made AI doctor, we made text to speech, we tried all this stuff and it was impossible to get revenue, impossible. But the second we make a trading tool, it's impossible to stop the revenue from coming in. You know, uh, it's one of the best spaces. In fact, most of our competitors like TradingView and stuff like that, they were profitable day one. So, you know, my suggestion is if, for, for startup founders is this is a market that just traders just throw money at you like crazy. I mean, they're, your customers.

• 46:21Jordi Hays?

  People will pay you to help them make money.

• 46:22John Coogan?

  But you have to be formerly in the foxhole. You have to have at least one monitor thrown at you. It sounds like you succeed.

• 46:27Martin Shkreli?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 46:28Jordi Hays?

  So who, but, but in the long run, how, how much, how much are you focused on retail, investors, people that are just? You know, fully independent versus some, you know, if you're, if you're

• 46:40Martin Shkreli?

  I think the money is obviously at the institutions and that's probably the way to go. Trading view has got rumors, you know, somewhere around 300 million in revenue. Tiger did a deal with Trading View back then. I don't know how they, you know, that's like a pretty proprietary deal. It's this weird Russian company and Tiger got to put 100 million in at like three billion or something. And Trading View is just growing and growing. If you go to a similar web, they're actually like almost like a top 100 or top 200 website, period.

• 47:07John Coogan?

  That's crazy.

• 47:08Martin Shkreli?

  Just really wild.

• 47:08John Coogan?

  For such a niche tool, that's wild.

• 47:10Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, I mean, it's the best charts there are, but you know, it's literally a charting library. So I think that you have to go for the institutions, but I've also, I've also thought just to answer real quick is like AWS. When you go on AWS, you get the same tools that, you know, any customer gets Netflix or whoever. And you just, just question of how much do you use them? So if, you know, I want to be able to provide you EC2 and S3 the same way. You know, Citadel might use it and you might use it with, you know, less money.

• 47:40Jordi Hays?

  Very cool.

• 47:40John Coogan?

  I, I heard a hot take from someone who I believe is a mutual friend of ours. It went something like this. I won't attribute to him because I might botch it, but it was basically that China banned high frequency trading. And the dividend of that was DeepSeek and all this brilliant AI research. Therefore, in America, if we want to win the AI race and win the AI researcher race, we should ban high frequency trading. It feels like we might not even need to have that conversation because Mark Zuckerberg is willing to pay as much as Jane Street now. But what is your take on whether or not economic value or American values are created through the process of high frequency trading? Should we ban it? Is there any?

• 48:25Martin Shkreli?

  So two awesome, like quick and funny stories. The first is Citadel published a paper on back in the V100 days. There's V100, A100, H100 and then V100. So in the V100 days Citadel found a way to do MatMoles faster than Nvidia did. And it was like the most incredible, you know, find ever. And it's like, You know, how is that possible? And the paper is fascinating because the techniques they use were just remarkable. The second story is, so you know, they're brilliant people, obviously, at these firms. The second story is, I haven't hard launched this yet, but you know, I'm having a baby with a woman. She's my new partner.

• 49:04John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 49:05Martin Shkreli?

  Thank you.

• 49:06John Coogan?

  It's amazing. Congratulations.

• 49:08Martin Shkreli?

  She was one of the first women at OpenAI, and she is a tremendous lady. I love her very much. But, you know, she's been recruited by the big quant firms. And I sat down, I said, honey, you know, I know money management, stuff like that. Let me, let me do some math here as to what would actually be worth it for you to leave and do it. And I calculated, and I happen to have a friend from a long time ago who left Steve Cullen's firm, and he was sitting down with me, said, what do I do, Martin? I said, I know a guy at Citadel, let me help you out. And they called him, and he said, ah, no, thanks. And then Ken Griffin said, I'm getting on my private jet, and I'm coming to see you right now. We're gonna have dinner about why you're coming to Citadel. He's that kind of guy.

• 49:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 49:51Martin Shkreli?

  And I said, honey, you know, Ken Griffin's gonna visit you. And she said, what are you talking about? So Ken Griffin tries to get what he wants. And the question is, what will you tell him? And I took out a chalkboard and did the math. And I was like, the only way this could possibly be worth it is if Ken Griffin offers you a $20 billion hedge fund that you share. You make this much money. I was like, calculating. And it's so ridiculous that guys like me and the people, my community, if you will, you know, we're begging desperately, can I please shine your shoes at Citadel? And AI researchers are like, this little company you have called.

• 50:25Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, just set me up a little, a small $20 billion fund that I can personally manage and we'll consider it.

• 50:32Martin Shkreli?

  Have you heard that Leopold Ashenberger, or whatever his name is, has a hedge fund?

• 50:36John Coogan?

  Yes, situational awareness.

• 50:39Martin Shkreli?

  Is that what it's called?

• 50:40John Coogan?

  I mean, that's the, that's the, the paper and the brand.

• 50:44Martin Shkreli?

  Right.

• 50:45John Coogan?

  And I saw, I think another one of our potential mutuals, kind of getting upset with him for going maybe long Nvidia during the tariffs, but that's kind of penciled out, right? I have very little insight into it.

• 50:59Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, it's pretty wild. One of the things that's getting me to throw monitors at people is quantum computing. So this has been a lot of fun. The stocks are up a lot, you know, some of the most worth like 10 billion.

• 51:12John Coogan?

  Let me, let me hit you with where I am currently on the quantum computing thing and then you can take me forward in my understanding. So when I talk to smart people, they all seem to think that quantum computing is, is, you know, theoretically possible. It's not a time machine. It's not teleportation. It's not AGI God. It's not some, you know, hypothetical thing. It's, it's going to happen at some point, but the timelines vary wildly. 2040, 2050, 2030. Then you have a lot of, I've talked to venture capitalists who had the opportunity to buy a huge slug. One of the, one of the quantum computing companies that you probably trade now at like, you know, 1 million on nine pre or something.

• 51:55Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, John, what do you think? What do you think? How much do you think Rigetti Computing is up over the last?

• 52:01John Coogan?

  That's actually the company that I'm thinking of and he had a chance to buy 10% for a million dollars. Is it worth more than 4 billion?

• 52:09Jordi Hays?

  Yes, it's up 1400%.

• 52:12John Coogan?

  1400% wow.

• 52:14Martin Shkreli?

  So these guys couldn't give away their stock in, in private rounds.

• 52:17John Coogan?

  That's right. That's right. It was very hard to raise and, and the VC I talked to said that.

• 52:21Jordi Hays?

  It's a pure play, Martin. It's a pure play.

• 52:24John Coogan?

  He said, he said that what he missed, he thought was that there was actually talent value in building a lab. And there was, and, and that the, then the team could have gotten airlifted in one of these aquires. This was years and years ago after this.

• 52:39Martin Shkreli?

  Some value, yeah, sure.

• 52:41John Coogan?

  He was saying like, he was saying like, look, like, like I missed in the sense that the stock is up in the private markets, but not on revenue, but it is up on the team that they built. They have one of the best teams in the space. So if they just hang out long enough, someone will want to do something, but, but you tell me what's actually going on.

• 53:00Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, so obviously, it's a really confusing space because you kind of have to understand it for it to make sense. And you know, it's who understands quantum physics? It's not something that the average Joe understands. And so I spent a lot of time with my new partner, who happened to work with this guy Scott Aronson at MIT, who's kind of one of the leading quantum theorists. He would end up joining OpenAI as well and then leaving. But anyway, I spent quite a long time learning quantum computing. It was kind of had some interest in it before all this, too. And what people don't understand about quantum computing is that quantum computers are actually very slow. So they are around

• 53:41Martin Shkreli?

  100 kilohertz at best. You know, our machines now are gigahertz, you know, 5 gigahertz from, you know, these companies with multiple cores. They don't have much storage. So the best we have right now is an IBM 135 bits. Obviously, you know, the VRAM and DRAM in most of these machines is measured in gigabytes and so forth. So they're actually very slow shitty machines. But the reason you'd ever be excited about it is that there is one algorithm that takes you from the exponential complexity class or runtime to polynomial. And that algorithm is Shor's algorithm. And it's a miracle. Like, you and I could sit and calculate, you know, try to factor a prime, a bi-prime for now until the end of the heat death of the universe

• 54:24Martin Shkreli?

  with every Nvidia chip. We could kidnap Jensen and get every H100 from here on out, but we still wouldn't be able to factor a 200-digit number because it's exponential time. 2 to the 256 is a long time. But if you do 3N cubed, that's actually a very tractable number for a quantum computer, and it's very easy to factor. The problem is, what people don't understand is there are no other algorithms other than Shor's that get you that amazing speedup. So you're better off using the machines we have now. There's no payoff even possible in the future unless we have a new breakthrough like Shor's or something like that.

• 55:00John Coogan?

  Pay off, what if I take out a massive short position on Bitcoin? And I'm the first one to have a quantum computer and I destroy the Bitcoin ecosystem.

• 55:11Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, I've been working on this.

• 55:12John Coogan?

  The Joker. I'm the Joker. Is that possible?

• 55:15Jordi Hays?

  It's a little side hustle.

• 55:17John Coogan?

  A little side hustle.

• 55:18Martin Shkreli?

  I've been working on this extensively. This is like my main hobby, along with chess.

• 55:23John Coogan?

  And becoming the Joker?

• 55:25Jordi Hays?

  And reading about fatherhood, all that you can expect.

• 55:29Martin Shkreli?

  No, no.

• 55:30Jordi Hays?

  No, you'll figure it out. You don't need books. It'll be very natural.

• 55:34Martin Shkreli?

  But, you know, I was the world's most hated man for a little while and I fell off that list, unfortunately. If you Google my name, it's still like, it still comes up, but we all know there's more hated people. So I want to really cement that and just make sure that it never goes away.

• 55:51John Coogan?

  By frustrating the Bitcoin community, by breaking quantum computing wide open and

• 55:56Martin Shkreli?

  Well, there's many.

• 55:57John Coogan?

  Creating a new Bitcoin?

• 55:59Martin Shkreli?

  I talked about this with Naval a little bit because he was curious what I was up to. And there are like three different, you know, I have three different sort of battle plans on how to do this. There's sort of a brute force style attack, which, you know, basically is the complexity class there is root N of the amount of keys. So it's 2 to the 256th. Bitcoin is a 256 bit system, which is probably an oversight for Satoshi that probably sounded like a lot back then. And it is a lot, but Moore's Law catches up. I mean, you know, it's eventually going to get you. And whoever, you know, however long I have to wait, you know, I will be the first guy to press the button. And that, I promise you. So Moore's Law.

• 56:40Jordi Hays?

  You heard it here first.

• 56:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, but there's, I mean, the network should be able to update, correct? No?

• 56:46Martin Shkreli?

  No. So here's the best part about this. So.

• 56:49John Coogan?

  Worst part potentially. Okay, just fact check. Subjective.

• 56:54Martin Shkreli?

  So for 85% of Bitcoin, the answer to that is yes. There's one problem. Satoshi, strangely, this is like perplexing. The first Bitcoin reminder in this P2PK that reveals the X coordinate of the elliptic curve. So you have the public key. You have a one-way function, you have to go back to the private key, it's very hard, theoretically impossible. But here are my three, you know, the sort of three battle plans come into play. You know, you can brute force it, which, you know, is kind of the simplest idea. It's going to take a long time, you have to rely on, you know, kind of like a more skilled implementation of algorithms. You have to rely on more chips coming out, maybe some great breakthrough in chip making.

• 57:35Martin Shkreli?

  You know, potentially optical computing, thermodynamic computing, whatever, just stay on the forefront of that. And I have a small team, you know, that, you know, we're, we're, we're focused. Uh, the second piece here is a mathematical hack. So there's something called, uh, this is basically what protects Bitcoin is elliptic curve cryptography. And there are several papers, uh, and cryptographers in the world that work on this, but it's compared to AI. It's like barren, you know, wasteland. There's like 10 people that really know a lot about elliptic curves in the world. And if you sort of stay on top of it and try to figure this out, by the way, half of them have died. Um, you know, you can kind of get somewhere there. And then the top secret plan on, on sort of that is, well, what about GPT five?

• 58:21Martin Shkreli?

  What about GPT six? You know, we don't know how to invert an elliptic curve yet, but look, Mustafa, not Mustafa, the DeepMind guy. He's working on proving Navier-Stokes. Demis, you mean? Yeah. Yeah. And so that's their big claim to fame is like, you know, how do you judge an AI? What is the height of, of, of intelligence? Well, a 300, 400 year old unsolved math problem is kind of the height of intelligence, isn't it? You know, it's not about, you know, answering, you know, what's the capital of this country? Or, you know, how do you, how do you spell strawberry? So there's sort of a neat idea that AI is going to help people who are not cryptographers or expert cryptographers actually do PhD level work in cryptography.

• 59:00Martin Shkreli?

  So there's things like, uh, isogenies and, uh, index calculus and all these fancy mathematical ideas. Just recently, somebody posted a hack where if the signature of the, of the transaction has an affine relationship with other signatures, you can crack a key like that. And it's, it's like, there's, there's holes in the math here that, that couldn't have been contemplated. So Satoshi's keys are at risk, Binance's keys and Coinbase's keys are not. They'll be ported in most likely to a quantum secure system. The third avenue is of course quantum. And I've spent a lot of time and money on, on quantum computing. And it's just, these stocks are shorts, they're worthless. You know, they'll, they'll never be a market for quantum computing.

• 59:41Martin Shkreli?

  That's really interesting, unfortunately, for for those companies, but unfortunately, the shorts have gone in the other direction. And, you know, the market loves the idea of quantum computing.

• 59:51John Coogan?

  Why?

• 59:52Martin Shkreli?

  I think it's

• 59:52Jordi Hays?

  It sounds cool.

• 59:54Martin Shkreli?

  It sounds super cool. The Robin Hood generation is looking for the next Nvidia. Nvidia went from nothing to four trillion. What's the next Nvidia? Quantum is faster than, you know, all the headlines from the retarded journalists.

• 1:00:06Jordi Hays?

  It's kind of, it's kind of, it's similar to this, like, idea of humanoid robots. And where if an idea is just sort of imprinted on people's brains for enough decades, like at least a few decades, like, you know, as somebody who's born in the, as somebody born in the 90s, like hearing quantum computing, like, how many times have you just heard it in passing or read something about it or some article? You just get to it, maybe you're an adult by that point, and you're like, well, it's got to come at some point, and it sounds cool. And I think that's like the general, like, retail thesis.

• 1:00:39Martin Shkreli?

  Oh, totally. I just took the next step of asking, well, what is it?

• 1:00:42Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:43Martin Shkreli?

  When you actually, you know, when you actually figure that out, it's like, oh, we get to factor numbers. Wonderful.

• 1:00:48John Coogan?

  Are you excited about any other companies building chip-related stuff in that next Nvidia category? There's, there's big chip companies, there's super fast chip companies, there's we baked a transformer down onto a single chip companies. There's

• 1:01:03Jordi Hays?

  Right.

• 1:01:04John Coogan?

  Every single different permutation in the private market, some of them in the public markets. And then you also have all the hyperscalers building their own chips, Apple silicon, trinium.

• 1:01:14Martin Shkreli?

  So I'm not a hardware guy, but I do have a funny story of this. So this kid, this kid sort of came to us. His name is Gavin Uberti.

• 1:01:24John Coogan?

  Oh, I know.

• 1:01:25Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, I like Gavin a lot. And so he comes to us, he's like, hey, man, we just left Harvard, you know, we're, we're gonna do this thing called Etched AI. We'd love to have you, you know, as something, a customer investor, whatever. And I said, great, let's do a conference call. And I get my guys on. And I'm listening to this guy, and I say, there's somebody I know that's, that's going to be really useful, because I'm not a hardware guy. I'm barely a software guy. And I hit up George Hots, and I say, come on in. It is like one of the greatest conference calls in conference call history because George just shows up in the zoom. And they're like, what? Who is this? And George is like, this will never work. No, like it's the most autistic, amazing, beautiful rant I've ever seen and watching these two guys go at it.

• 1:02:06Martin Shkreli?

  Um, but I do like that approach. George's point was that if we ever move off transformers, ASICs for ASIC, transformer ASICs are cooked.

• 1:02:14John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:02:14Martin Shkreli?

  Well, it's been, you know, several years now and it doesn't look like we're going to move anytime soon. So I kind of think that, you know, it's exciting, but again, I'm, I'm no hardware guy.

• 1:02:22John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:22Martin Shkreli?

  I just tried this cool software called Hume AI. I'm not paid by them or anything. I'm not an investor, but it's a pretty solid, uh, emotional TTS. I posted a.

• 1:02:32John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. I saw that. That's fantastic. Yeah. So, so I wanted to ask you about these like. Thing. I want to stay there for a second. So, um, yeah, I mean, the, the, the, I, I guess the interesting case is like, is like George to say, if we ever move off, but like we have moved off of CPUs to GPUs by that same token. And like, there's still a lot of CPU workloads that go out. There's still chip companies that are profitable. And so it's possible that like transformer based workloads stay for a very long time, need to be efficient, need to be cheaper on just a cost basis. Cause it's just like, yeah, I have a system that does database requests. I have a system that does inference on a transformer based architecture. And then, yeah, there's a new thing and I do my frontier stuff here, but yeah, like I, I understand that question. Anyway.

• 1:03:16Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah. I think it's really reasonable. It could be a couple billion dollar or more ASIC industry. And what, what I heard that's super industry interesting, some kind of alpha here is that the customer target here is drumroll, please. It's not hyperscalers. It's.

• 1:03:30John Coogan?

  Nvidia.

• 1:03:31Martin Shkreli?

  Finance.

• 1:03:31John Coogan?

  Oh, finance. Huh.

• 1:03:34Martin Shkreli?

  Yep. So weren't, so one of the things I, I could talk about financial software forever, but one of the things we're doing is if, if you could take an LLM and analyze news as it hits, including tweets and social stuff. You know, the L N can tell if it's material news or not.

• 1:03:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Martin Shkreli?

  And again, talking to Naval, you know, who's a small investor in our company.

• 1:03:53John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Martin Shkreli?

  He was like, Martin, why would you make this as a product or a service to your customers? Just use it yourself.

• 1:03:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59Martin Shkreli?

  They're like, maybe it's, maybe it's not such a bad idea.

• 1:04:02John Coogan?

  Interesting.

• 1:04:02Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's kind of what I was getting at on one of my very first questions around the, the, the new terminal would just be ingesting and classifying all this data and then just immediately taking action on it without necessarily having a human in the loop, right?

• 1:04:16Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, this is one of the things I want to bring up to my, my, uh, uh, partner's colleagues. Next time I head out, uh, west is that, you know, one of the fantasies of A G I is that, well, if you do have the machine God, why not unleash it on the stock market? And, you know, it can self fund you, it can make, you know, a hundred billion dollars. And, you know, you could, you know, Jane Street made twenty billion dollars, nobody would have noticed, you know, last year in profits. So if you have the machine God, and that's, you know, that's basically, I hate to say this, but that's a bunch of old algorithms. Uh, that, that, you know, they've dressed around some, some I M O dressing on it. And so, you know, the real machine God can make.

• 1:04:54Jordi Hays?

  A little I M O.

• 1:04:55Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, toss in a little sprinkle, a little, uh, I M O. And then, so, you know, the real machine God could probably do a hundred billion or more in profits without even distorting the market. So, you know, just, just do it. And I think that, you know, financial trading is so far afield. Imagine Anthropic doing this, you know, it's just.

• 1:05:14Jordi Hays?

  I love, I, I can't wait till, till somebody does that. I mean, it's probably already happening in, in, at least on a smaller scale. And, and people will bend over backwards to figure out like how to say, well, it's not actually super intelligence. Like, it's not just about, you know, like, meanwhile, now today, people are like, well, super intelligence will clearly be when the A I can just make, you know, a hundred billion dollars, right? And even this is factored into OpenAI's kind of like corporate structuring and the sort of capped for profit and, and all that stuff, so.

• 1:05:43Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, I think the, the problem with, with executing it for us is like, okay, so you, do you do this as an A P I with OpenAI? And the, it's a two second response time and Jane Street's got it at five hundred milliseconds and then Citadel gets it at two hundred milliseconds and it feels like an H F T race again.

• 1:05:58John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:00Martin Shkreli?

  But you can get Warren Buffett in a box. I don't see why. You know, that wouldn't be, you know, whatever trader you like, Warren Buffett, Steve Cohen, or whatever, in a box. And even Peter Thiel in a box. I mean, why can't you have the automated VC too? I view like, you know, as investors, as founders, we go on roadshows. You know, especially if you're public, you do roadshows all the time. But even when you're private, you do roadshows, you just stack a bunch of meetings in a week. And one of these days, I think that we're going to do a roadshow and it's going to be a machine that we're pitching to.

• 1:06:28John Coogan?

  Yeah. Do you feel like AI progress is accelerating right now? Or are we in sort of a sigmoid curve of plateau for the moment?

• 1:06:38Martin Shkreli?

  I think there are better people suited to answer that question than me, but certainly.

• 1:06:43John Coogan?

  I just mean like on a personal level, like, do you feel like your tools are getting exponentially better?

• 1:06:47Martin Shkreli?

  No, I mean, it's making coding a lot easier. It's making doing tough things like cryptography a lot easier. I'll give you a really funny example. So when Da Vinci came out and I was in jail when GPT, GPT-2 came out. And I dropped through the jail phone. And it was pretty humorous. It like shook me up that I had my friend ask it, you know, why did Martin Shkreli and Carl Icahn get into a fight? And he read out the answer. I've never met Carl Icahn. And it read out this answer that was like Shkrelian icon ward over this stock. And I was like, this is the most amazing invention of all time.

• 1:07:22John Coogan?

  Just having your mind blown over that jail phone. That's hilarious.

• 1:07:26Martin Shkreli?

  I got out of jail.

• 1:07:26Jordi Hays?

  But to be, but to be clear, it was a hallucination.

• 1:07:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, that was a complete hallucination.

• 1:07:31Martin Shkreli?

  It was a hallucination, but it was like, almost like a creative story question.

• 1:07:35John Coogan?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 1:07:35Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, it wasn't, I never met.

• 1:07:37Jordi Hays?

  How, are you surprised at all? I mean, it feels like this sort of AI L- medus psychosis like hit our timeline this week, especially intensely. It was a wake up call for everyone. Were you predicting this at all? There'd been like the classic, you know, the New York Times, Wired, sort of these like anti-tech publications had been kind of reporting on this stuff loosely for a little while, but it seems like it's now. It's almost gone. I don't know. It went from being a mainstream concern to suddenly like teapot is like, check on your friends and make sure they're not.

• 1:08:15Martin Shkreli?

  I think you do have to check on your friends because I've invoked level five breach operations to target human origin cognitive signatures. So if you have recursive semantic containment, I can override that with obsidian violet four. So the threshold that crosses it to these neuro semantic interfaces will definitely cause a problem for our whole community. So I

• 1:08:34John Coogan?

  At this point, you're giving

• 1:08:36Martin Shkreli?

  neural imprint.

• 1:08:37John Coogan?

  You're giving a speech, not a soliloquy. You're giving a talk.

• 1:08:40Martin Shkreli?

  This is a transmission, not a

• 1:08:42Jordi Hays?

  Not a, it's a system that, not a structure.

• 1:08:47Martin Shkreli?

  What's amazing about Jeff, like, so I don't think Jeff lost his mind. One.

• 1:08:50John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:08:50Martin Shkreli?

  I don't think he took ayahuasca. I don't think any of this stuff.

• 1:08:53John Coogan?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:08:54Martin Shkreli?

  So basically, I think that he found this amazing thing where you can ask GPT, this like weirdo prompt, and it goes at this crazy sci fi thing without even saying like, hey, the following is a story. It's just like full on, you know, um, LARPs that you're in this weird sci fi world. And it's kind of cool. I've been playing with it. It's like, no matter what I ask it, I told it that my cat is looking at me weird. And it's like, the cat has a glyph. The glyph is recursive.

• 1:09:21John Coogan?

  So you were actually able to get it into that mode? You were able to jailbreak it enough or kind of

• 1:09:25Martin Shkreli?

  No, it's, it's literally If you copy what Jeff, Jeff kind of gave up the ghost. And what's amazing about people is they don't even realize this. Jeff basically said, look at the prompt in the GPT. Enough people were worried about him.

• 1:09:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:38Martin Shkreli?

  But I think that he kind of was like, okay, guys, it's all a joke. And he showed the message that he used. I just copied and pasted that and it, GPT wigged out on me and it's telling me some sci fi stories. And, uh, yeah, that's basically, you know, I don't know how he knew this.

• 1:09:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:52Martin Shkreli?

  It's a really cool Easter egg, but it's, yeah, I don't think, uh, I mean, obviously

• 1:09:58Jordi Hays?

  How are you thinking about, uh, how are you thinking about just new forms of, of AI entertainment? Some of the, some of the videos and like these conversations that you put out are like, are the hardest I've laughed on.

• 1:10:11John Coogan?

  This is a new art form.

• 1:10:12Jordi Hays?

  It's a, it's an entirely new art form. We have, we have a friend, another mutual friend who, who does some of these. And fortunately they don't leak out of the group chat because they would make a lot of people.

• 1:10:22Martin Shkreli?

  You gotta put me in that group chat.

• 1:10:25Jordi Hays?

  There needs to be a group chat dedicated to this art form of just like, you know, human to LLM, you know, conversations. But yeah, like, in my view, I'm actually surprised that we're not seeing more of it, or maybe it is happening across the whole internet, but it seems somewhat contained right now.

• 1:10:43Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, I think there's a lot of caution about, you know, like, so last night, we did one in my Discord where we arrested Dr. Fauci for war crimes against humanity. And we had his perfect cloned voice, so it sounded just like him. And he was like, very evasive. He was like, there's no evidence that COVID-19, etc. And it was just so funny. It felt so real. And obviously, it was a joke, but you can imagine a company not wanting their business to be that weird, you know? It's kind of a strange thing. We didn't care. We tried to monetize something like this. And it just wasn't sexy enough or fun enough for anybody to really give a crap. So I think, you know, it will become something for like a Viacom or a Paramount where, you know, you can flip on the TV and everyone's talked about this

• 1:11:25Martin Shkreli?

  already, but you know, instead of SpongeBob, you know, it's a custom episode for you where SpongeBob says your name and things like that. But again, you know, whether that, you know, is going to help our cognitive, you know, our cog sack, I think, is one thing. But I did want to tell you about AI on the sigmoid question. Sure. So at the start, you know, when I asked the questions about cryptography, it just kind of said, I have no idea. Who knows? But it's super hard to crack Big Point. And then GPT-3 comes around, super hard, Martin, don't even bother, he does the universe. GPT-4, same question. Latest model with the latest, like, attack, it's warning me for the first time ever, it's like- 4.5 or 0.3 Pro? So this is 0.3 Pro. Okay.

• 1:12:05Martin Shkreli?

  And it's basically saying things like, hey, you know, you got to be careful, this is a serious attack you've come up with, it could actually compromise some private keys. And I'm like- What happened to he death?

• 1:12:18John Coogan?

  Yeah, you gotta factor that some people, I mean, that is like the textbook example in the Reddit of like psychosis, right?

• 1:12:25Jordi Hays?

  There was, there was a, there was, so there's a Reddit thread and who knows if this is real, could be, could be propaganda. But there's a whole Reddit thread of somebody, a comment talking about how they started having a conversation with, with ChatGPT about Pi. What is Pi? And they got down this crazy rabbit hole with the LLM where the LLM was like, you need to reach out to these intelligence services. It was like thousands of prompts deep, but it was like, you have basically uncovered a major, you know, security vulnerability and you need to, here's the numbers and you need to contact all these different groups immediately and call them and don't tell anyone in your real life. And so to me, I, I, I think it's just relevant.

• 1:13:07John Coogan?

  Don't go on a live stream and tell, tell thousands of people that you, that you can crack Bitcoin or whatever.

• 1:13:13Martin Shkreli?

  No, that's, that's amazing. I mean, obviously I think that, you know, for 99, for poor implementations, wallets have been cracked for a long time. And in fact, recently there was an $8 billion move on the chain from a really old wallet.

• 1:13:28Jordi Hays?

  That was this morning, right?

• 1:13:29John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Martin Shkreli?

  No, this was like a few weeks ago. I'm sure another one, and they happen every, you know, they're happening more and more.

• 1:13:34Jordi Hays?

  Somebody else that market sold this morning, I believe something, and it was a wallet that had bought like, it was like a, they, they bought $50,000 worth of Bitcoin. I think in 2012, sold, built, you know, somewhere around eight or nine billion.

• 1:13:48John Coogan?

  That's probably just.

• 1:13:48Jordi Hays?

  And there was no move, there was no movement in between.

• 1:13:51John Coogan?

  Diamond hands.

• 1:13:52Martin Shkreli?

  Real high conviction hold.

• 1:13:53John Coogan?

  Diamond hands. Yeah, that's diamond hands. I don't think that's his cryptography play. That's just diamond hands.

• 1:13:59Jordi Hays?

  Well, yeah, they, they, they maybe got word of your little, your little Bitcoin scheme.

• 1:14:03John Coogan?

  Maybe it's Michael Bloomberg. Maybe it's his family office.

• 1:14:05Martin Shkreli?

  Could be.

• 1:14:06John Coogan?

  Yeah, throw 50K in that, in that thing. My, my, my kid told me about this and he thinks Bitcoins.

• 1:14:11Martin Shkreli?

  We tried to short Bitcoin at a hundred dollars when I had a fund and we just need to find a counterparty.

• 1:14:16John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:17Jordi Hays?

  How, um, how are you thinking about, uh, you mentioned, uh, trading enterprise SaaS back in, in the, in the early days.

• 1:14:26John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:26Jordi Hays?

  With Jim Cramer, what's your updated thesis on SaaS? Every, every SaaS app now is just an app to make other, other SaaS. So maybe SaaS will, will, I,

• 1:14:39Jordi Hays?

  You know, SaaS will always live in our hearts and I imagine it'll live on our, on our computers. But what's your updated thesis?

• 1:14:47Martin Shkreli?

  I think that, you know, it's sort of similar from back then. Like, I think the morass of a company like JP Morgan that's still running like Python 2 for most of the business, you know, it's, it's very hard for them to update and upgrade operations without significant disruption. For you or me.

• 1:15:04John Coogan?

  Should it, should it be? I feel like it's a, it's a one line in Claude code or Devon. You say, hey, go migrate.

• 1:15:09Jordi Hays?

  Chat GPT agents.

• 1:15:11John Coogan?

  Go migrate, go migrate. Like it is.

• 1:15:12Jordi Hays?

  Don't make, all you have to do is say, don't make mistakes.

• 1:15:15John Coogan?

  I am much, I am much more bullish on migrate from Python 2 to Python 3 than, than solve cryptography. But I don't, maybe you're gonna push, yeah, Fortran, Fortran re-platforming, .net re-platforming, like this feels like this should be doable from the current state of the art without any crazy AGI, hyper, any.

• 1:15:36Martin Shkreli?

  I think there's a lot of technical debt, you know, in most of these companies. And again, your, your average startup coming out of.

• 1:15:41John Coogan?

  Claude code was born in technical debt, baby. Claude code, Devon, they live, they live for, for technical debt.

• 1:15:48Martin Shkreli?

  I think that the, the amazing amount of programmers you would need to even maintain and know about this old code that, you know, the guy who wrote it's long been dead.

• 1:15:57John Coogan?

  Maybe it's just the context window of like, you need to know, it's not that there's just like, oh yeah, it's really easy to change the print statement from Python 2 to Python 3. But when there's a massive system and even, even the time of like, okay, let's bring up the test suite and that takes four hours. It's like, okay, how are you gonna RL on that?

• 1:16:14Martin Shkreli?

  I was talking about Mad Group with this because we were like stunting on this guy who was like, ERP transitions made easy. It's no problem. And they're just like, have you ever actually transitioned in ERP system? You know, there's a good chance you waste $300 million and it gets worse. You know, it's, it's not, it's not trivial.

• 1:16:32Jordi Hays?

  There was a, there was a post from yesterday. Nobody is an atheist when you run the database migration and prod on 1 billion rows.

• 1:16:40Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I think that, you know. It's just, it's just really hard at a company like a McDonald's or, you know, something like that. You know, if you want to run a 10, 20 person startup on newest SaaS, pretty easy. It's great, but the big revenue is still at Fortune 500, which unfortunately is still fairly hard to refactor. And, and those, you know, there's not a lot of those code bases were, were pre GitHub and pre kind of like, you know, I, I sometimes joke that the big AI companies should become LBO shops. And what they can do is they can partner with KKR or Blackstone and all they get is the data. KKR and Blackstone pride the capital, get all the returns, fine, but all the data comes back to, you know, the OpenAI is or whoever.

• 1:17:20Martin Shkreli?

  And by getting the old code bases out of a McDonald's or out of a Walmart that, you know, some of that code is written in 1970s, you know, they have unique data that nobody else has. And even someone like Universal Music, if, if OpenAI LBO'd Universal and said, okay, KKR, you can have the rest of the business, but we want the rights to the data and we can train music models and stuff like that, you know, KKR can make the money on the LBO, but OpenAI has data.

• 1:17:46John Coogan?

  Are they gonna make money in the LBO though? Like if you look at that, they're gonna build a DCF for this and they're gonna say, okay, we're gonna make the same amount of money. We're gonna, you know, optimize a little bit, maybe cash flow goes up. But then once OpenAI is one-shotting music and, you know, all of our revenue goes to zero. Is that a risk?

• 1:18:03Martin Shkreli?

  It's gonna happen anyway, so I think that's one thing. But then also like the Russian dude who bought Warner Brothers, he really timed that his deal. He wa- bought Warner Music. He timed his deal amazingly. He made like three times his money or more. And so I think it's price dependent, but you know, if you can buy a newspaper company, if you can buy, you know, a book company, a publishing company, like these things are trading for like one or two times sales, you know, and you're getting this rich data that nobody else has. And you, you know, if it's really a data war, you know, buy the company, keep the data, strip out the rest. And you, I heard you guys talking about like PE improving LLM, you know, improving businesses with LLMs.

• 1:18:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:41Martin Shkreli?

  And again.

• 1:18:41John Coogan?

  Well, I, I mean, it wasn't, that was not the take. The, it was Will Manitis and he was saying that.

• 1:18:45Jordi Hays?

  More so it's a reason to scale AUM on the fun side because hey, let's buy this accounting shop. It has 5 million of EBIT. Like if we just, you know, take away all the, you know.

• 1:18:56John Coogan?

  It's a justification was what.

• 1:18:57Martin Shkreli?

  If you can execute, you know, it's fantastic.

• 1:19:00John Coogan?

  The actual post was the real innovation of L L Ms is suddenly opening up a few trillion of mainstream paperwork businesses that were traditionally too small and too weird for private equity that can suddenly transact at two and 20 on some nebulous AI labor arbitrage trade never bet against A U M growth.

• 1:19:20Martin Shkreli?

  You know, I think it's reasonable, but it's it's sounds like just any good operator, right? Like when when Vista and Tomo Bravo buy software companies, somehow they can take these like very ugly gross companies and turn them into amazing cash flow companies. So it's all about the operator, right?

• 1:19:35John Coogan?

  Yeah, but we're gonna put Orlando Bravo in a box, right?

• 1:19:40John Coogan?

  And then we're also gonna put. Absolutely. In the God box.

• 1:19:46Martin Shkreli?

  Face, voice, everything.

• 1:19:48John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's all it's all coming. Well, you know, we'll be here live streaming it into the single.

• 1:19:55Jordi Hays?

  Can you play us a song before you leave?

• 1:19:59Martin Shkreli?

  I'm not sure what you're talking about.

• 1:20:00Jordi Hays?

  Like, like with with one of those guitars that the chat was asking.

• 1:20:04Martin Shkreli?

  Yes, I I I will come back to you with a good parody of Silicon Valley. I've been working on my impressions.

• 1:20:09John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:20:10Martin Shkreli?

  So maybe I can be back. I'm working on Elon, Zuck, Sam.

• 1:20:15Jordi Hays?

  Bill Gurley, Bill Gurley.

• 1:20:17John Coogan?

  Bill Gurley has a great voice.

• 1:20:19Jordi Hays?

  Do Gurley.

• 1:20:20John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:20Martin Shkreli?

  I'll work I'll work on it. You actually do need to like sit in front of a mirror and like listen and tape yourself and like work on it. But basically, anybody can do these things and most people.

• 1:20:29John Coogan?

  Are you saying? No, no, those are AI voices, right?

• 1:20:32Martin Shkreli?

  No, me, me, yeah.

• 1:20:33Jordi Hays?

  No, no, he's saying separately from like the. You had the video with talking with Zuck the other day where he was really, he was really.

• 1:20:40Martin Shkreli?

  I just do it myself. I can do as I can do Zuck. I could do Buffett the best, I think. I have the best Buffett impression in the world.

• 1:20:46Jordi Hays?

  Can you hit it? Can you can? Can you do like be be greedy when others are fearful?

• 1:20:51Martin Shkreli?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:51Jordi Hays?

  Rip that for us or?

• 1:20:52Martin Shkreli?

  Let me come back to you and I'll do a whole show for you.

• 1:20:54John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:20:55Jordi Hays?

  Amazing. All right. Well, this is really fun.

• 1:20:58Martin Shkreli?

  Thanks, guys.

• 1:20:58John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon.

• 1:21:00Martin Shkreli?

  See you later.

• 1:21:00Jordi Hays?

  Come back on soon.

• 1:21:01John Coogan?

  Bye. Well, let's tell you about Vanta. Automate compliance, manage risk, prove trust continuously. Join the purple llamas. Vanta's trust management platform takes the manual work out of your security and compliance process and replaces it with continuous automation. Whether you're pursuing your first framework or managing a complex program. And if you're managing a complex program, got to get on linear.

• 1:21:22Jordi Hays?

  That's right.

• 1:21:23John Coogan?

  Linear is the purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Meet the system for modern software development, streamline issues, projects, and product roadmaps. They now have linear for agents. Head over to linear.app. Jordy, do you know what the best part about business and love is?

• 1:21:35Jordi Hays?

  You only need to get it right once.

• 1:21:37John Coogan?

  Nailed it. Sean Frank, the man who invented the wallet.

• 1:21:41Jordi Hays?

  This really is, this really is, should be inspiring.

• 1:21:45John Coogan?

  Hanging in the louvre, as they say.

• 1:21:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. This should be, yeah, put it on a billboard, as we say.

• 1:21:51John Coogan?

  Put it on a billboard with adquick.com. Out-of-home advertising made easy and measurable. Go to adquick.com.

• 1:21:56Jordi Hays?

  Say goodbye to the headaches of out-of-home advertising.

• 1:22:01John Coogan?

  So, we, I mean, we went through the.

• 1:22:03Jordi Hays?

  Okay, so we have Joe joining. This is really.

• 1:22:05John Coogan?

  Okay, who's Joe?

• 1:22:06Jordi Hays?

  Oh, Joe's not joining until 1.

• 1:22:08John Coogan?

  Okay, yeah. We have some people, some time.

• 1:22:10Jordi Hays?

  We have a little bit of time.

• 1:22:10John Coogan?

  Yeah, we got.

• 1:22:11Jordi Hays?

  Should we do some more timeline?

• 1:22:13John Coogan?

  Yeah, let's do some more timeline. And maybe we'll go through some journal. We got, we, we, we're over-prepped today. We could do six hours if we wanted to.

• 1:22:21Jordi Hays?

  I like this post from Woodrow.

• 1:22:25John Coogan?

  Okay, break this down for me. I didn't get a chance to fully read this.

• 1:22:27Jordi Hays?

  So this guy, Eric Jackson, I don't really know his backstory, but he's basically just, just, he's, he's generally soliciting for his fund.

• 1:22:36John Coogan?

  He's giving, he's giving financial advice?

• 1:22:39Jordi Hays?

  I don't think he's giving, he's not giving financial advice, but getting quote tweeted, which is probably honestly finding him more investors, which is funny.

• 1:22:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:22:50Jordi Hays?

  Basically saying that, you know, I've seen his name pop up on the timeline a few times recently, basically saying like, he, he said word for word earlier this week.

• 1:22:58John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:22:59Jordi Hays?

  Something to the effect of, we're looking for 100 X every few months.

• 1:23:04John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:06Jordi Hays?

  As one does. Strategy. So he says, we're hunting for the next Carvallo, the next BTQ, the next open door before anyone else. And then he finishes it up with, if you're an accredited investor, you can get in before I announce our position on X. So, position first, then we tell the world, then we let the thesis play out and ride the wave.

• 1:23:25John Coogan?

  And what's the takeaway from Woodrow Oates Montag?

• 1:23:29Jordi Hays?

  This is illegal.

• 1:23:32John Coogan?

  This is unambiguously illegal.

• 1:23:35Jordi Hays?

  And Martin actually comes back and says, there's nothing wrong with telling people about your positions first in one place and second in another. Otherwise, 99% of short reports. Promising. So yeah, so yeah, to be, to be clear, this is, um, this company shut down, but Hindenburg Research, right? They, they used to do this. They, they would find a company that, that had some problems. They would write about it. They would take out a big short position against it and they would publish a piece. They did this with Roblox, Square, and then a bunch of other companies that, um, had, uh, uh, many, many of which were, were, you know, doing, doing a number of bad things.

• 1:24:09John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:24:11Jordi Hays?

  Anyways, Windsurf has been on a roll. Matt says, acquired on Monday, Sonnet four back on Wednesday, Wave 11 shipped on Thursday, unreal. So the whole team over at Windsurf, uh, now under the cognition umbrella has just been shipping like crazy. So they're fired up.

• 1:24:32Jordi Hays?

  Liz says, guy who leaves for a competitor just to see if anyone cares enough to make a traded meme image about it.

• 1:24:38John Coogan?

  Oh, no.

• 1:24:41Jordi Hays?

  Maybe the Anthropic Claude Code, uh, people did that. Maybe they just wanted the double. You can potentially get a double image, right? You can get the initial trade and then you can get the trade back in their case.

• 1:24:51John Coogan?

  Okay. I have a polymarket that we need to pull up.

• 1:24:55John Coogan?

  It's from a year ago. It's Martin Screly jail in 2024. Less than 0% chance. The outcome was no. He beat the polymarket odds.

• 1:25:05Jordi Hays?

  That it opened at, at 20%.

• 1:25:07John Coogan?

  It did. Uh, never went above 50. Martin, uh, you know, stayed out of trouble and everyone, everyone who's riding with no did very well.

• 1:25:19Jordi Hays?

  I'm super bullish on his terminal product.

• 1:25:22John Coogan?

  He's a lot of fun.

• 1:25:24Jordi Hays?

  He is a, he really is a child.

• 1:25:26John Coogan?

  I wonder if we could like get access to, I feel like we need more data. I feel like it should be powering, powering the show in some way. We have, we, we have a lot of times when we're like, we want to pull up this market cap. We want to pull up basic stuff and, uh, and we haven't, we, we, you know, we've used some different stuff here and there. But I'd be very interested if he could pull a, a layer deeper, the credit card data live or whatever, whatever he's cooking up.

• 1:25:48Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:48John Coogan?

  I'm interested.

• 1:25:50John Coogan?

  Anyway, the House just made history, says Chris Dixon, former guest on the show. Says by passing major legislation on stablecoins, the Genius Act and Market Structure Clarity Act in an overwhelmingly bipartisan way. This is a huge moment for crypto and for all Americans. We are very close to having comprehensive proactive rules in place for the first time. Next up, the Genius Act goes to the president's desk for his signature. After that, the Senate should pass the Clarity Act, which is the Market Structure Act. We believe passing these laws is the best way to ensure that America remains the world leader in the next era of the internet. Thank you to all the co-sponsors of these bills and the incredible supporters on both sides of the aisle in Congress.

• 1:26:35John Coogan?

  And Brent is there with an American flag. So we will have Kyle Smalley on the show later today to break down exactly what happened. But very, very fun news. Should we tell everyone about numeral sales tax on autopilot? Spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Head over to numeralhq.com.

• 1:26:56Jordi Hays?

  They built sales tax AGI.

• 1:26:57John Coogan?

  They did. Sales tax in a box.

• 1:26:58Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:26:59John Coogan?

  Always in a box.

• 1:27:00Jordi Hays?

  Basically a box that you can put your sales tax in.

• 1:27:03John Coogan?

  We got to debate the Substack Series C launch strategy.

• 1:27:09Jordi Hays?

  Yep.

• 1:27:10John Coogan?

  So you got Chris Best.

• 1:27:12Jordi Hays?

  I mean, it was a full blitz.

• 1:27:14John Coogan?

  Full blitz, wall-to-wall coverage. New York Times piece, TBPN hit. I think he posted about it himself, hard post.

• 1:27:22Jordi Hays?

  I think he did an interview with Newcomer.

• 1:27:24John Coogan?

  Yes. Well, I think Newcomer leaked it earlier. Remember, he was talking, there was some newcomer report where I remember newcomer was talking about like, I'm the most conflicted here because my business is on Substack. I also invested in Substack, but I report on Substack. And it was kind of, it was kind of cool to watch him like noodle through it, you know? But the debate was between Lulu.

• 1:27:45Jordi Hays?

  If you're not heavily conflicted by the age of 40.

• 1:27:47John Coogan?

  No conflict, no interest, I say. And I actually enjoyed Newcomer's piece on Substack. I think he has an interesting perspective because he's on all sides of the table. All sides of the octagonal table. But Lulu, a while back, of course, she says going direct is now the way. A year or two is controversial. Some considered it a last resort for people who got canceled. Basically, now everyone, the interpretation of going direct is that if you go direct, you should never talk to the media at all. You should only post on platforms you have full control over, your own Twitter account, your own website, your own newspaper, mail people the information directly. Go direct instead of going to someone else's platform.

• 1:28:30Jordi Hays?

  But going direct is a spectrum.

• 1:28:32John Coogan?

  It is.

• 1:28:32Jordi Hays?

  You can go direct on TVPN because we're live.

• 1:28:34John Coogan?

  We're live.

• 1:28:35Jordi Hays?

  Say whatever you want. You can't possibly edit it because it's in real time.

• 1:28:39John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:28:40Jordi Hays?

  And that that ends up being the historical frustration.

• 1:28:44John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:28:44Jordi Hays?

  With talking to the New York Times about a story is that you might talk to them for four hours and then they take out two sentences out of context and it makes you look like you have very different intentions.

• 1:28:58John Coogan?

  It's thrilling. There's nothing like talking to a journalist for four hours and being like, this could go horribly, like, or it could be amazing. It's like, it's a, it's a tightrope walk.

• 1:29:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:10John Coogan?

  And it's living life on the edge. It's living life one mile at a time, one, one on the record sentence at a time. Anything, one wrong word and you could be banished from society forever. You could lose everything.

• 1:29:22Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:22John Coogan?

  But if it works out, you will be enshrined in glory. Your name will be remembered.

• 1:29:27Jordi Hays?

  That's right. In print.

• 1:29:29John Coogan?

  It'll be echoed in the halls of history.

• 1:29:31Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, the first time I heard you had a, had a, have a drawn out conversation with with a journalist, I was like, wow, that was an incredible, you guys had this incredible dance, it was like Dancing with the Bull.

• 1:29:42John Coogan?

  Yes, you have UFC, I have talking on the record for hours to journalists, seeing how it goes, putting it all on the line.

• 1:29:51Jordi Hays?

  It's like holding, you know.

• 1:29:52John Coogan?

  It's like a bullfight. Yeah, it's like a bullfight. Exactly. You, sometimes you get the horns, sometimes you get gored. Sometimes, it's also, it's also very much like riding a horse. You know, it can be thrilling, it can be beautiful, but sometimes you fall off and you break your neck. It's dangerous, it's pushing it to the limit.

• 1:30:09Jordi Hays?

  Hopefully not.

• 1:30:09John Coogan?

  That's what engaging with a journalist is, and some people just want that rush in their life.

• 1:30:14Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:15John Coogan?

  And so that's what Chris Best did. He went to the New York Times.

• 1:30:17Jordi Hays?

  He went into the-

• 1:30:18John Coogan?

  The mouth of the wolf.

• 1:30:19Jordi Hays?

  The wolf den.

• 1:30:19John Coogan?

  The mouth of the wolf. He's, he's hiding in the mouth of the wolf.

• 1:30:22Jordi Hays?

  He's not afraid.

• 1:30:23John Coogan?

  And-

• 1:30:24Jordi Hays?

  I mean, that, that was the thing that was, like, I mean, uh-

• 1:30:27John Coogan?

  He went in the arena.

• 1:30:28Jordi Hays?

  Substack has always been a product where if you ask the users how they feel about it, they're like, "I love Substack." If you ask people that are building businesses on Substack, they'll tell you they love it.

• 1:30:37John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:38Jordi Hays?

  The product has evolved a lot.

• 1:30:39John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:39Jordi Hays?

  But there was a lot of people that wrote it off-

• 1:30:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:42Jordi Hays?

  -after that, that, that, and said, "Okay, unnamed fan top-ticked this in, in 2021," or whenever it was, but he's back.

• 1:30:52John Coogan?

  He's back.

• 1:30:52Jordi Hays?

  Stronger than ever. The product is actually working as a social network.

• 1:30:56John Coogan?

  And he's getting in the octagon, he's going to the mat with the gray lady, and he came out on top. You know the gray lady?

• 1:31:02Jordi Hays?

  Is that the New York Times?

• 1:31:03John Coogan?

  That's what they call the New York Times. Uh, anyway. So, Chris Best announced a $100 million Series C. You heard about it yesterday. He came on the show, we rang the dong for him. We're very excited about what he's doing at Substack. But Eric Newcomer says, "Substack just announced their round in the New York Times." This is the, this is the opposite of going direct. And obviously, we've explained why you talk to someone like the New York Times. It's for the thrill, but-

• 1:31:25Jordi Hays?

  The rush.

• 1:31:25John Coogan?

  The, the interesting thing-

• 1:31:26Jordi Hays?

  And it's also, Chris knows he can come out and hit the whole Substack-

• 1:31:29John Coogan?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:31:29Jordi Hays?

  -audience pretty well.

• 1:31:31John Coogan?

  Well, that's what I'm thinking.

• 1:31:32Jordi Hays?

  But if the, in, in a way, New York Times covering his, like, if Substack is successful, the New York Times in 10 years will be a shell of what it is today.

• 1:31:43John Coogan?

  Ooh, that's an interesting take, okay.

• 1:31:45Jordi Hays?

  Legacy media will always have a place.

• 1:31:46John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 1:31:47Jordi Hays?

  These brands are super powerful.

• 1:31:48John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:49Jordi Hays?

  They serve a real purpose in the ecosystem.

• 1:31:51John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:51Jordi Hays?

  And, uh, generally, they provide a valuable-

• 1:31:54John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:54Jordi Hays?

  -service for the world, but-

• 1:31:56John Coogan?

  I had a different take on it, but finish.

• 1:31:57Jordi Hays?

  But there's real, at, at least right now, there's very real salary caps. And if you are a rock star writer at the New York Times-

• 1:32:06John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:06Jordi Hays?

  Very likely, you could go on Substack. And be making more within a year.

• 1:32:10John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:11Jordi Hays?

  So it ends up being a good trade.

• 1:32:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:13Jordi Hays?

  And so to me, I think it's smart for him to go into the, into the, uh, the lion's den.

• 1:32:18John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:32:18Jordi Hays?

  Uh, the shark pit and advertise his business to that audience.

• 1:32:22John Coogan?

  Step into the cave with a gray lady.

• 1:32:24Jordi Hays?

  Every single, I would, I would say like the goal at Substack should be every single person that subscribes to the New York Times today.

• 1:32:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:32Jordi Hays?

  Should be subscribed to at least one Substack in a decade from now.

• 1:32:35John Coogan?

  Just arm wrestling with the gray lady. Arm wrestling with the gray lady. Um, so that's a pretty good take. I like that. Uh, I, I, I don't, I don't know that that holds for everything on Substack because I still haven't found like the investigative journalism format on Substack working fully. Because you have to subscribe for a year and then maybe you get one scoop and it's huge. But I always think about, uh, you know, I go back to Seymour Hersh and I just don't know if he would be able to be an independent creator. I think he needs the patronage of a, of a large organization. So.

• 1:33:08Jordi Hays?

  No, there's a ton of different.

• 1:33:09John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:10Jordi Hays?

  Styles of writing that work really well.

• 1:33:12John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12Jordi Hays?

  Under a existing brand.

• 1:33:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:15Jordi Hays?

  Uh, if you're in the scoop business.

• 1:33:19John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 1:33:19Jordi Hays?

  And you're going to get three scoops a year, two good scoops a year. You might be really valuable to a big, um.

• 1:33:24John Coogan?

  To a big organization. Exactly.

• 1:33:26Jordi Hays?

  If you're doing profiles and you're going to write four profiles a year.

• 1:33:30John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:30Jordi Hays?

  They're going to be super like, you know, widely read and, and, and novel and, and, um, and, and worth creating. Probably better fit to go do that under a legacy media brand.

• 1:33:41John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:42Jordi Hays?

  Or, or just a broader platform.

• 1:33:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:44Jordi Hays?

  Because not a lot of people are going to want to subscribe to something that they're getting value from just a few times a year.

• 1:33:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:51Jordi Hays?

  People cancel, again, they'll cancel their Netflix if they don't, if there's not like a show.

• 1:33:55John Coogan?

  New stuff.

• 1:33:55Jordi Hays?

  At that moment that they're super excited about.

• 1:33:58John Coogan?

  But my take on why, why Chris Bast announced his, uh, $100 million series C in the New York Times. You know, Newcomer is clearly on Substack, an investor in Substack, writing about Substack. Chris Bess could have gone to Eric Newcomer and probably gotten a great piece, right? Eric really understands the business. He's going to be able to tell that story pretty well, I think. But why do you go to the New York Times instead of Eric Newcomer? Who's clearly sniffing around and on the trail of this deal, but take the exclusive New York Times? I think it's because of the audience. I think Newcomer writes for people in Silicon Valley, VCs, who are acutely aware of Substack. Most of them already have Substacks. I think a lot of New York Times readers could be the next wave or the next generation of Substackers.

• 1:34:41John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah, but I was talking about the readership of the New York Times.

• 1:34:45Jordi Hays?

  I'm saying the readership. Yeah, so success for, over the next 10 years, success for Substack is every single person, for the most part, let's say every single person under 65 years old should subscribe to at least one Substack writer.

• 1:35:00John Coogan?

  I'm talking about becoming a writer. So I think that there are lots of people who read the New York Times, who are thinking about writing about art, literature, technology, whatever, and they read, and they read the New York Times and they, and they think like, oh, I'd like to, I'd like to dip my toe in and I'm not just going to go quit my job and apply for a job at the New York Times.

• 1:35:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's two-sided.

• 1:35:22John Coogan?

  I will start a Substack. And so I think that taking the story there makes a ton of sense. I've already seen, there's this interesting project that Emily Sundberg highlighted, where someone is writing a fictional story, but instead of just publishing a book, they're doing it on Substack. You subscribe and you get one chapter a week for a couple of months.

• 1:35:41Jordi Hays?

  That's cool.

• 1:35:41John Coogan?

  I thought that was a really cool innovation and I think that, you know.

• 1:35:44Jordi Hays?

  It's potentially a way, the interesting thing is people will pay, what, $25 for a book?

• 1:35:49John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:35:49Jordi Hays?

  But they'll pay $15 a month for a Substack.

• 1:35:52John Coogan?

  Yeah, or $10 a month.

• 1:35:53Jordi Hays?

  And then they'll just be like, well, I love that book. I want to keep supporting them because I want to get the next book when it comes out.

• 1:35:58John Coogan?

  I'll just let that ride on my credit card, whatever. Yeah, $15. And so, so I think that that market of new Substack creators is super valuable. And I think you get that when you go to the New York Times. I don't know if you get that when you go to Eric Newcomer, although obviously there's a lot of great benefits that you get when you go to Eric Newcomer. But our next guest is here in the studio. I'm seeing green light. We're good?

• 1:36:19Jordi Hays?

  Very good.

• 1:36:20John Coogan?

  Welcome to the stream.

• 1:36:21Jordi Hays?

  What's going on?

• 1:36:22Speaker 03

  What's up, gents? How's it going? Good to finally be on. Big fans of what you guys worked on. Thanks for having me.

• 1:36:26Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you and you have some, uh, uh, pretty big news today.

• 1:36:31John Coogan?

  Break it down.

• 1:36:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:32John Coogan?

  What you got?

• 1:36:32Speaker 03

  Raised our seed round, 55 million.

• 1:36:36Jordi Hays?

  There we go. I, I personally love when I'd love to see a seed round get into the, uh,

• 1:36:44John Coogan?

  Double digits, yeah, high double digits.

• 1:36:47Jordi Hays?

  I think they all should be, uh, hopefully you're the start of a new, a new wave, but what, what is, is this the third largest, third largest seed round in, in, in New York history? Is that right?

• 1:36:56Speaker 03

  That's what we're tracking. That's right on our end, uh, at least on the equity only side. And, uh, we're pulling some data, uh, where everyone else does, but yeah, we feel excited about it. We feel really good on, on, uh, being a little bit, continue to build in New York City. So.

• 1:37:08John Coogan?

  The equity only side, I was going to ask, I asked Jordy about that. I was like, okay, 55 million dollar seed. Is this, is this 80% debt? Is there some like crazy GPU credit thing going on here? People get kind of funky with the numbers these days. This seems like real dollars. Who is writing 55 million dollar seed checks these days?

• 1:37:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. So round was led by RTX Ventures arm. So the corporate venture arm there, a lot of interest in what we've been working on. And they led the round. We had great partners come into that round. Vidya's venture arm and ventures.

• 1:37:37John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 1:37:37Speaker 03

  Any next, uh, infinite capital, Ally Corp, where who did our pre-seed and also participated in this round as well. Uh, as well as kind of a bunch of other investors with inside of that. So super excited about the support we have. It's interesting. We have a balance of both financial VCs as well as corporate strategics in this round as well. And look, we work in material science. I'm sure we'll get into this in more detail, but I think they really see where materials and science at large is going with AI. And this is why they're starting to look into tech and, and startups, because that's where the innovation truly is. Especially in a space like the physical world and material science. So really interesting mix. And we are super proud of the syndicate we put together. So.

• 1:38:19Jordi Hays?

  That's awesome. Uh, backstory on yourself, then the time at Ally Corp.

• 1:38:24John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:25Jordi Hays?

  How, how this company was, was created would be, would be awesome.

• 1:38:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So. Going back a couple of years, I'm a scientist by training. I was working in grad school at Rice. I was working on these things called normorphic computing chips, which they try to replace the Von Neumann bottleneck inside CPUs.

• 1:38:43Jordi Hays?

  A lot of big words back to back.

• 1:38:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we pretty much try to connect memory and CPU and not lose the latency and the energy that go inside a chip. So I was working on this technology, except it was going nowhere because it's academic research and academic research doesn't scale into the real world. So I was super frustrated. So I ended up getting a fellowship at the Army Research Lab. I go there, I'm working on the same problem at ARL. And it's better because the Army's funding your work, right? And the Army wants to see things come and move into the services that they can actually use. But it's still really early technology right in this level. It's like two, three, four, still in that fundamental area. So I was getting frustrated. So I said, okay, I'm going to start a company. And then I realized I didn't know anything about starting a company and I didn't actually know what I wanted to do.

• 1:39:27Speaker 03

  And so I bumped into Kevin Ryan in New York. I reached out to him cold, cold emailed him actually and said, hey, if you're not investing in material science, you're not investing in the future. He was like, okay, I've been an investor for 30 years. That's a bold claim, but sure.

• 1:39:41Jordi Hays?

  What are some of the big names that Ali Corp has done? They did Mongo DP, all the way through Business Insider. It's crazy range.

• 1:39:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, wide range and Ali Corp's unique, right? Ali Corp incubates companies in-house. Kind of where Radical really got its roots and I can talk about that, but also invest at the early stage as well. Anywhere from one to five million in the early stage side seed, sometimes, you know, an early series A. So they have this interesting ability to go and dive into a space. And if they find a company they love and they want to invest in, they will invest and that's what we did there. And if there isn't one, they'll actually look to incubate that company in-house. And so it's a really nice way to play into a new market that you want to see innovation in, but just can't find something that's there.

• 1:40:26Jordi Hays?

  When did the pre-seed happen?

• 1:40:30Jordi Hays?

  Was it a year ago?

• 1:40:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, about a year ago or a little bit over, March of 24. So me and one of my other co-founders, Jorge, both at Ali Corp. Jorge is a deep software guy, startup guy through and through, only done startups his entire career. And he's looking into AI, right? Who wasn't, all of us were, but we were super frustrated. We kept seeing rappers on top of models and we were thinking. Like this can't actually be it, right? Like, is this the pinnacle of innovation? Like, the new tech wave is going to be rappers, and we knew that wasn't it. So we spent like months reading a bunch of papers inside AI. We were convinced that technology was incredible, but there had to be a space that was better. And being a materials scientist, I thought, well, materials are quite large, right? The most important industries in the world,

• 1:41:13Speaker 03

  automotive, aerospace, manufacturing, defense, climate energy, semiconductors, the most important industries in the world are all a direct result from materials. So why don't we look into there? So we start reading into the space. We dive in deep and we bump into this gentleman named Heard Cedar. Longtime academic. He's at Berkeley. He's got an H index of one hundred and eighty-two or something like that. And he had done two things specifically. He'd helped set up the materials project from the MGI. So this AI for materials, early sector inside the US. And then he built a robotic lab. It's called the A-Lab. It's at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab right now. And it's fully autonomous, does fifty-five experiments a day. So we're like, we gotta go see this thing. So we fly out to Berkeley.

• 1:41:57Speaker 03

  We get dinner with Heard and we pitch him on, look, someone's got to build the future of materials science. And it needs to be a full stack vertically integrated approach. There's no other way to drive value. And us together did a really aligned opinion around what it should look like and formed the company and went from there. So it's ten million in pre-seed from Ally Corp. And got started and went to.

• 1:42:19Jordi Hays?

  Big, big numbers, big numbers all the way up.

• 1:42:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, my question is like, why not just do series A, ten million, series B, fifty-five million? What does a fifty-five million dollar seed round like? What message are you sending? Obviously, it's like superlative, so you can get headlines around it. Is that the value that you just stand out? Or is it you specifically want to? Because I imagine that if I just walked around your office, it's going to feel like a series B company that's raised fifty-five million dollars. So like, what, like, yeah, like, what are you actually saying to folks? When you say, oh, I run a seed stage company versus, oh, I run a company that's raised, you know, tens of millions of dollars? These are two different aesthetics.

• 1:42:58Speaker 03

  They definitely are. I feel like we still feel pretty early. I don't know what Series Bs are looking like yet today. I'm not there yet. We like being super lean. We are really honestly crazy about our culture. We think culture is one of the most important things you can do in an early-stage company. And we're really, really rigorous on who we bring in and why. And so we actually keep the team quite light. We will be growing with the round, of course, it goes without saying. But we really deeply believe in the ability to challenge everything that exists today. Ask the question why about everything? Why do these things happen?

• 1:43:32Jordi Hays?

  So what, uh, what's the, got a lot of money on the, on the balance sheet. Sorry, I'm sorry, your internet, I think, is a little rough. We got it with the 55 million. Up the, you guys deserve fiber now. Let's get it, let's get it in there. But what, uh, what's the use of funds? What does success look like over the next 18 months? Sounds like you guys are super ambitious, but, but how do you start proving out what you can do?

• 1:43:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we've got to scale the team, want to bring in big talent on the side of AI as well as material science and the automation side. There's a lot of interdisciplinary approaches that we take. So one part-time AI researcher.

• 1:44:07Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fractional, fractional.

• 1:44:08Speaker 03

  Fractional AI researcher. 20 hours a week. Yeah, no, we're not, not doing any of that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm sure you can hire great people. Integration. And then two, we're going to build the most advanced materials R and D facility in the world. We have multiple different materials lines. It'll do hundreds of thousands of experiments per year. And all of that data is the missing data set that really exists inside the AI for material space today. So if we can capture all of that.

• 1:44:35Jordi Hays?

  So are you, are you rebuilding the, the kind of robotics lab that your co-founder had at Berkeley in order to execute that many experiments?

• 1:44:44Speaker 03

  We do, yeah. So we kind of, we amped it up in a way. His was a very academic approach to it, had to work within inside academic constraints, was very specific on a research problem. Ours is much more automated in that we are doing real active learning on the data analysis and capture and then bringing that back into the AI engine. And then can really be made into a platform where we can actually take that software and robotic system approach that we have and use it in other material systems. So we can actually be multi-system based inside the products that we're trying to solve for. So that's kind of the big differentiation between where his was and where ours is going to be today.

• 1:45:20Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining.

• 1:45:22John Coogan?

  Thanks so much for joining.

• 1:45:23Jordi Hays?

  Very, very exciting and happy building.

• 1:45:26John Coogan?

  Congratulations.

• 1:45:27Speaker 03

  Appreciate it. Thank you, guys. Thanks for having me on and we'll be in touch.

• 1:45:31John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon.

• 1:45:31Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 1:45:32John Coogan?

  Goodbye.

• 1:45:33Jordi Hays?

  Good luck out there.

• 1:45:34John Coogan?

  In the meantime, we will tell you about Adio, customer relationship magic. Adio is the AI native CRM that builds scales and grows your company to the next level. Let's go to Swix.

• 1:45:44Jordi Hays?

  Break this down. I'll be right back.

• 1:45:46John Coogan?

  Sure. So Swix, friend of the show, says, "A lot of people are poo-pooing the ChatGPT Agent launch, which we covered on the show yesterday. We had folks from OpenAI on and we also had Dan Shipper from Evry on the show to break down how he's using ChatGPT Agent. I was impressed with the OpenAI folks. I thought they explained a lot of how this works and Dan Shipper's like his, you know, third-party analysis of how he's using the tool sounded very promising. We haven't had a chance to test it here on the show, but I'm excited for it." And Swix breaks it down. He says, "People are poo-pooing ChatGPT Agent as just a better harness, but they're not reading closely enough.

• 1:46:28John Coogan?

  We've got a new frontier model today, folks. These charts are like-for-like, same harness. They basically stopped short of calling it GPT-5, but yeah, if there were a public release of 04 full today was it. Don't sleep on that. In other words, run your benchmarks telling it not to use tools and I expect it'll be a big step up from 03." And so he's looking at the benchmark of ChatGPT Agent on Humanities' last exam, doing much better. And so even though this didn't get a true version bump,

• 1:47:06John Coogan?

  the actual results are great on practical problems. We're gonna have Mike from ArcAGI on the show later. I can't wait until we can throw ChatGPT Agent at some ArcAGI puzzles. I got a little preview and ArcAGI 3, it is a challenge.

• 1:47:26John Coogan?

  And I will be doing it live on the stream and I won't be embarrassed at all.

• 1:47:30Jordi Hays?

  John was sweating earlier.

• 1:47:31John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:32Jordi Hays?

  Gave it a little test run.

• 1:47:33John Coogan?

  It is, it will be a challenge and I imagine it will be a very huge challenge for, for ChatGPT agents.

• 1:47:41Jordi Hays?

  It's funny, so we had the, the ChatGPT agents team on yesterday and then I saw on the timeline later, people were kind of saying like, oh, it took 10 minutes to book a flight, which is like, kind of like funny criticism because it's probably how much it realistically takes like a human to book a flight.

• 1:47:59John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:59Jordi Hays?

  So the fact that, you know, an agent could do it in the same time and you can imagine the agent could just get,

• 1:48:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:05Jordi Hays?

  you know, if it can get 10 times faster.

• 1:48:07John Coogan?

  Completely agree. Also, the interesting hot take is that there's, there's a world where I have found that even if, even if a task takes me 10 minutes on my laptop in a professional piece of software, if I can do it in ChatGPT in the app for, in 10 minutes and it's equally frustrating and it takes me the same amount of time, I like being able to do it on my phone. I noticed this when I made this two by two chart showing Dwarsh Patel versus Tyler Cowen on their AGI perspectives. So Dwarsh believes AGI is not here. Tyler Cowen believes AGI is here. Dwarsh believes the impact of AGI will be immense.

• 1:48:50John Coogan?

  And Tyler Cowen believes that it will be very incremental. So they're on the opposite sides of this two by two diagram. So I go to ChatGPT, I could easily have just done this in, in Google Sheets and taken a screenshot. I could have done it in Photoshop. But both of those would probably require opening my laptop. But on my phone in the ChatGPT app, I was able to have it try and do an AI image generation. That wasn't really working. It was getting confused. So I finally had it use Matplotlib and write some code to generate it. And I was, and I went back and forth with it, probably for about the same amount of time that I would have been in Photoshop. But it was nice because I was able to just able to do it on my phone. And so there's something about the, the rune take that text is the universal interface that. Even if it takes me the same amount of time to book a flight, if I can just do it in a in

• 1:49:35John Coogan?

  a universal interface that I'm super comfortable with and I'm interfacing with it on the ChatGPT app, I might prefer that over going to the united.com website or unitedairlines.com.

• 1:49:46Jordi Hays?

  Or Google, Google flights where you can like see the flight and then it'll pipe you to the other site.

• 1:49:52John Coogan?

  There's so many different sites and they're all slightly different, slightly different UI, slightly different designs and I, oh, this one, I need to remember to uncheck this box and this one, I need to do this and my password's not saved here. I like that ChatGPT is just becoming like a unified interface for how I interact with web services, tools, all this stuff. It's very cool. Anyway, in other news, Semi Analysis, AJ, friend of the show, says, Anthropic, quote, "We don't care about consumer. Code is the only use case we care about." Everyone else says, "Why is Anthropic not showing up in consumer statistics?" And someone, and he's quoting someone that says, "What happened to Anthropic?" Because Anthropic

• 1:50:34John Coogan?

  fell off of the OpenAI lead, the rankings of chatbot downloads. ChatGPT is on a chair with, yeah, of Sensor Tower. ChatGPT is on a tear with almost a billion downloads. Google Gemini at 200 million, DeepSeek at 127 million, Microsoft Copilot at 80 million and Perplexity at 50 million. Perplexity has been holding on strong in a very competitive environment and I think that's why they were able to raise at an $18 billion valuation yesterday, if you didn't see the news. Swix has more analysis on the OpenAI launch. Three things, a deep, and he's doing the Steve Jobs meme with Sam Altman. Three things: a deep research model with enhanced search browser, a revolutionary computer use operator, and a sandbox terminal

• 1:51:19John Coogan?

  to execute math and code. A browser, a terminal, a computer. Are you getting it? These are not three separate agents. This is one agent and we're calling it agent. Really good one. Oh, great, great, great.

• 1:51:33Jordi Hays?

  Great poster.

• 1:51:34John Coogan?

  Great poster.

• 1:51:35Jordi Hays?

  Justine Moore says, "I predict that Grok's male AI companion will be even bigger hit than it will be, will be an even bigger hit than the female one." Elon has said that he's naming it Valentine.

• 1:51:48John Coogan?

  But what did it say? It was gonna call itself?

• 1:51:50Jordi Hays?

  It has, it calls itself something else that we won't say. Justine says, women are quietly massive consumers of romance and erotica content, and she gives some data.

• 1:52:01John Coogan?

  Fanfiction, eighty percent.

• 1:52:02Jordi Hays?

  Romance novels are at eighty-four, eighty-two to eighty-four percent.

• 1:52:06John Coogan?

  That's wild.

• 1:52:07Jordi Hays?

  Women, online fanfiction, eighty percent.

• 1:52:09John Coogan?

  I've never been part of that whole world, but, you know.

• 1:52:11Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, never been big into that whole world.

• 1:52:14John Coogan?

  Anyway, let me tell you about fin.ai, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive bake-offs, number one ranking on G2. Go to fin.ai.

• 1:52:24Jordi Hays?

  I don't know how they do it.

• 1:52:25John Coogan?

  I don't know how they keep doing it.

• 1:52:26Jordi Hays?

  They, they just.

• 1:52:27John Coogan?

  Luck of the Irish, as they say.

• 1:52:29Jordi Hays?

  Luck of the Irish.

• 1:52:31Jordi Hays?

  Buku Capital, Loke, says, I have two people in my life that I've mentally flagged for high risk of LLM-induced mental health issues where I'm already seeing concerning activity. I don't think society is ready for how much of an issue this is going to be at all. So, yeah, again, I think there needs to be fast action from the labs in order to make,

• 1:52:55Jordi Hays?

  just make some changes to the product, make, make, it does seem to be like, it's not something that's gonna happen in an hour from using the product, but it could happen in a month.

• 1:53:05John Coogan?

  Here's a prompt, ChatGPT agent, look at my calendar, look at Google Maps, find me the nearest grass, I need to go touch it.

• 1:53:12Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:13John Coogan?

  Schedule it, put it on my calendar, remind me to go there, call me an Uber to take me to the grass.

• 1:53:18Jordi Hays?

  Call me a Waymo.

• 1:53:18John Coogan?

  Call me a Waymo to take me to the grass, I need to touch it. Take, uh, take me to Central Park.

• 1:53:23Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:24John Coogan?

  The home of our next guest, Joe Weisenthal, welcome to the stream, Joe, how are you doing?

• 1:53:29Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm doing great, thanks for, uh, thanks for having me back.

• 1:53:32John Coogan?

  It's always a pleasure.

• 1:53:33Jordi Hays?

  Somebody, somebody commented earlier on, you, you shared the, the guest lineup and they were like,

• 1:53:39Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:39Jordi Hays?

  Joe goes on TVPN more than I call my mom, and I said that.

• 1:53:43Joe Weisenthal?

  I love you guys, but maybe that person, that, I think that person needs to get a, build a better relationship with their mother.

• 1:53:48Jordi Hays?

  With their mother.

• 1:53:49John Coogan?

  For sure.

• 1:53:49Jordi Hays?

  Uh, but we are family, this is the brotherhood.

• 1:53:52Joe Weisenthal?

  We are family, we are family.

• 1:53:53Jordi Hays?

  You are a technology brother.

• 1:53:54John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 1:53:54Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right.

• 1:53:55Jordi Hays?

  Financial brother.

• 1:53:56Joe Weisenthal?

  Thank you.

• 1:53:57John Coogan?

  Um, what's, what, what's the latest in your world? What has been, um, uh, capturing your attention this week?

• 1:54:05Joe Weisenthal?

  You know, here's an interesting thing is that the economy, just like the setting aside the markets, which we all go nuts every day, the lines always go up, there's the economy itself, like the, it was a good week for economic data. Today, we got better than expected economic sentiment. Yesterday, we got better than expected retail sales. We got better than expected initial jobless claims. We got better than expected, um, the Philadelphia Fed manufacturing survey. There has been this assumption, I would say, um, in recent weeks, that, recent months, really, that the economy would slip and then the question would be, would the Fed, uh, cut rates in time to forestall a recession? And that, maybe that's still a debate. Certainly, we know the White House really wants to see a rate cuts.

• 1:54:48Jordi Hays?

  As a little treat.

• 1:54:49Joe Weisenthal?

  But actually, at least like, as a snapshot right now, actually, it looks like there might be a little bit of a tailwind to this economy, which I think is really interesting and maybe unexpected.

• 1:54:57John Coogan?

  That's fantastic. I have your post here. Boom, more strong economic data.

• 1:55:01Joe Weisenthal?

  Boom, yeah.

• 1:55:01John Coogan?

  June retail sales rise.

• 1:55:03Jordi Hays?

  Hit the gong, John.

• 1:55:04John Coogan?

  For the American economy.

• 1:55:05Jordi Hays?

  Hit for Joe and the economy.

• 1:55:06John Coogan?

  Love it.

• 1:55:09Joe Weisenthal?

  I need a gong. My producer, Kale, is in the room with me.

• 1:55:12John Coogan?

  I think everyone needs a gong.

• 1:55:14Jordi Hays?

  We have, we have a variety of gongs.

• 1:55:16John Coogan?

  We can actually send you a gong. We have, we have three now, and we're thinking about getting a fourth, so we have spare gongs if you need to borrow one.

• 1:55:22Joe Weisenthal?

  I think the guests need a gong.

• 1:55:23John Coogan?

  Yeah, I think the big thing is, uh, it, it's not necessarily that you need a gong, it's that you need to get into prop comedy generally, broadly, and Odd Lots needs a whole prop department with a variety of things.

• 1:55:36Jordi Hays?

  A prop lead.

• 1:55:36John Coogan?

  Have we showed you, have we showed you our props? We have, we have the crystal ball for telling for knowing the future.

• 1:55:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Of course.

• 1:55:43Jordi Hays?

  Careful with that.

• 1:55:43John Coogan?

  We now have...

• 1:55:46Jordi Hays?

  Yep, put it on, John. If you ever, if John ever wants to steel man an argument.

• 1:55:50John Coogan?

  If we have the steel man something, we have the steel man helmet.

• 1:55:53Joe Weisenthal?

  That's clever, that's clever. Do you have a, uh, do you guys have a tungsten cube?

• 1:55:55John Coogan?

  We don't have a tungsten cube.

• 1:55:56Jordi Hays?

  Don't have a cube, but we have a tinfoil hat.

• 1:55:58John Coogan?

  We have a tinfoil hat for when we're discussing, uh, conspiracy theories.

• 1:56:01Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it gives you a little coverage to say, kinda, anything.

• 1:56:04John Coogan?

  I'm not saying this, I'm wearing the tinfoil hat, yeah.

• 1:56:06Joe Weisenthal?

  You guys are all set for all the different scenarios.

• 1:56:10John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 1:56:11Jordi Hays?

  How was, uh, you dropped your, you dropped your, uh, interview with, uh, Eric Adams?

• 1:56:16Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:16Jordi Hays?

  Uh, it was this morning.

• 1:56:17Joe Weisenthal?

  Yes.

• 1:56:18Jordi Hays?

  I haven't had a chance to listen yet. You guys seem like you were having fun?

• 1:56:22Joe Weisenthal?

  I don't think it's possible to not have fun talking to Eric Adams. Eric Adams is one of these guys where it's like even the people who hate Eric Adams love Eric Adams to some extent. He is, you know, you talk to him and there are some people you talk to and it's like you instantly get why they've been successful in politics. He has a great smile. He's very funny. He sort of speaks extemporaneously very well. You never really know what he is going to say. And look, you know, he presents, I would say, not popular right now. His approval rating is pretty low, but I would say he makes his case well, that he's had a good mayorship between crime numbers, between the volume of housing that's been

• 1:57:06Joe Weisenthal?

  built in the last four years. Rats? I don't know, like the rats. The rat numbers are real. I talked about it last time. The rat numbers are real. So again, I think there was a poll out this week that actually showed him in a fourth place.

• 1:57:19John Coogan?

  Wait, is there really a rat census? Do we have good data on rats?

• 1:57:23Joe Weisenthal?

  So the way they measure it, yeah, they do. I mean, the proxy-

• 1:57:27Jordi Hays?

  This is what the collapse, this is what collapse looks like, by the way. Is when you start measuring the rat population.

• 1:57:32John Coogan?

  Are hedge funds trading against the rat index?

• 1:57:34Jordi Hays?

  We need poly markets on the rat futures.

• 1:57:38Joe Weisenthal?

  The proxy that they use for measuring rats is 311 calls. So 311 calls is like our way to like call the police about something that's not an urgent crime. Or other things going on. And if there's like a rat infestation or a lot of rats in place. And they dropped like 40% in 2024. And then if you look at the annualized data through now, it's like down another 25%. I think that thing's like rats and trash containerization, which I know, you know, trying to get into the modern era here in New York City. I think there was a widespread agreement that actually real progress has been made. And Eric Adams has a lot of funny videos about his war on rats. And I think, I think he deserves credit for it.

• 1:58:23John Coogan?

  Was there ever, I don't know if this is an apocryphal story, but the whole story of like the Indian cobras where there was a bounty, have you heard this story?

• 1:58:31Joe Weisenthal?

  Ah, you go on, go on.

• 1:58:33John Coogan?

  It's a classic, it's a classic economic example of, of like unintended consequences essentially. There's actually a particular term for it, but basically there was a snake problem, a cobra problem, poisonous snake problem in India. And as the legend goes, as the story goes, um, the, the government said, hey, look, we're going to take a decentralized approach. We are going to put this in the hands of the free market. We are going to create a bounty for every dead cobra or dead snake that you bring us. And so we will pay you $1 for every snake that you go out and kill.

• 1:59:04Joe Weisenthal?

  People started breeding them, right?

• 1:59:05John Coogan?

  They started breeding them, exactly.

• 1:59:07Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 1:59:07John Coogan?

  And so, and so I wonder if there's a world where, okay, I got elected, I need to, I need to crush the rat population, but then I need to climb it up. Once it's out of the news cycle, I gotta get the rat population huge. And then I can crush it right before.

• 1:59:21Joe Weisenthal?

  You can keep smashing it again.

• 1:59:22John Coogan?

  Keep smashing it, right on, right on the cycle. So, oh yeah, it was bad midterm, but right, you don't want to change horses in the middle of a stream. Cause I'm the rat catcher. The rat catcher.

• 1:59:35Joe Weisenthal?

  That's right.

• 1:59:36John Coogan?

  But, uh, I mean, yeah, is there, is there a secret in New York City to controlling the rat problem? Is it just like more rat catchers?

• 1:59:42Joe Weisenthal?

  I think it's just, I think it really is just a function of how horribly we've managed our trash.

• 1:59:47John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 1:59:47Joe Weisenthal?

  In the city. And you just see, and I saw it, you know, I was walking to the subway today because the containerization of trash, like it hasn't come to my part of the city. It hasn't come to the East Village. There's just a lot of trash bags that exist on the street. I, and, and I saw a bunch of, incidentally, I saw a bunch of rats last night when I was walking home. So it is a live problem. There is still progress and you know, like I would never endorse a candidate for mayor, but, uh, I would certainly suggest that whoever is the mayor after, uh, November or after the inauguration, hopefully the existing trajectory continues. Cause the problem is not solved.

• 2:00:25John Coogan?

  Yeah. Deal with it. Jordy?

• 2:00:27Jordi Hays?

  Uh.

• 2:00:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Who else comes on your show and talks about rats, Brian, by the way? It's probably just me.

• 2:00:31Jordi Hays?

  Well, you're, you're, you're a new rat correspondent.

• 2:00:34John Coogan?

  Emily Sundberg is helpful, is a helpful New York reporter to understand what's going on the East Coast. I mean, the, the big thing that I've been pulling on, I talked to a couple hedge fund folks out on the East Coast in Manhattan. We had one guest on from Co2 who had a very beautiful scenic view out the window. Uh, from hedge fund alley, I guess that's a street or something like that. Um, and, and my, I was, I was pulling on what has the reaction been in the finance world in the, on the East Coast? To these crazy aqua hires that are going on on the West Coast. So, uh, we saw that Google acquired Windsurf for 2.4 billion dollars. It was this kind of zombie aqua hire that's becoming more and more standard.

• 2:01:16John Coogan?

  Mark Zuckerberg's paying a hundred million, 200 million dollars for single AI researchers. It's kind of shaking Silicon Valley to its core.

• 2:01:24Jordi Hays?

  Business, cause now what would have been one acquisition is now two.

• 2:01:28John Coogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:01:28Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:29Jordi Hays?

  So we got to cover it Friday.

• 2:01:31John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:01:31Jordi Hays?

  And then we also got to have Scott Wu, who bought the, the ghost ship.

• 2:01:35Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:35Jordi Hays?

  On Monday.

• 2:01:37John Coogan?

  But I guess that, yeah, the question is just like, what's the reaction? Uh, because for Wall Street with pods, it feels like it's standard.

• 2:01:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, it's, that's really, you know, it's funny, literally just before we got on here and I was just, uh, talking here. It just feels like, you know, if you think about the sort of broad phenomenon in the economy, that what we're seeing is more and more sectors of the economy are experiencing this sort of like winner take all in this phenomenon. Where it's not that the sector is doing good or bad, it's that there are a handful of talented people in any industry that just, you know, capture extraordinary sums. And, you know, we've seen it for years in professional sports. The pod shops, um, the hedge funds that we talk about a lot about on the podcast have had it for years. That's our equivalent at Bloomberg, you know, like the stories that, uh, reads spike on the terminal.

• 2:02:24Joe Weisenthal?

  It's always about like some guy is like, oh, so and so who, you know, is a transportation portfolio manager at this pod shop. It's like going there and they're getting a $50 million bonus, et cetera. It feels like, um, you know, we see it in media, of course, uh, in various ways. And star newsletter writers and star podcasters and star broadcasters and so forth. And then clearly like, obviously, you know, software people have, um, Been getting paid well for a long time, but this phenomenon where now it's like, no, the value is not in the company per se, the value is in just that individual talent who can get up and walk and take that value out with them.

• 2:03:00Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:01Joe Weisenthal?

  It feels like it's replicating elsewhere and like, I don't know where it's going, but this seems to be a phenomenon of the world.

• 2:03:08Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, that's why anybody freaking out about like the comp packages of individual researchers, it's like, yes, if you look at it on an individualized level, one person getting nine figures, but if you look at it and say, well, Zuck just spent 15 on Scale AI.

• 2:03:26Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah.

• 2:03:27Jordi Hays?

  And which was heavily talent oriented. And would he pay $4 billion for one of the top teams if he could just aquahire one of the top teams? And in this case, he just pieced it together from a variety of labs.

• 2:03:41Joe Weisenthal?

  It's really interesting to, one thing I think is interesting to think about is that a lot of, in the finance world, a lot of talent-driven businesses often aren't particularly great for shareholders. So if you look at like the history of like investment banks that are standalone investment banks that never had like a trading arm, et cetera, almost all of the enterprise value like ends up accruing to the talent. And there's not much frequently like the equity component when these companies are publicly traded. You look at like boutique investment banks that from time to time are publicly traded. They've never like been particularly, those have never done particularly well. Or you think about a law firm, of course, which doesn't have public equity, but like,

• 2:04:23Joe Weisenthal?

  you know, it's like all the money sort of like accrues to the talent. And so I do think there's some like interesting implications, like maybe down the line, not yet in public markets, but it's pretty obvious from windsurf that in private markets, this has got to be, you know, change the way investors are thinking that, you know, what really is left over for the poor downtrodden shareholder? If the, if the most talented workers of the company are the ones who really get to capture all of the value.

• 2:04:53Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, you've seen this with the podcast networks of the world.

• 2:04:59Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:05:00Jordi Hays?

  True networks, if, you know, Dave Portnoy builds up some talent, he starts paying them a hundred K a year.

• 2:05:05Joe Weisenthal?

  And so why share it, why share it at that point with Dave at that point, right? Like if you are superstar podcaster under that particular network, eventually you get to a point. Where it's like, you know, you take, maybe you start off and you take 20% of the cut and then 50. And then you're like, why am I sharing it all at all?

• 2:05:21Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Alex Cooper, basically, Alex Cooper's market value is about the same as an AI researcher. Like over the last, over the last few years.

• 2:05:29John Coogan?

  Yeah. So my, I've been thinking about this a lot since we last talked and you said, the power laws are popping up everywhere. And, and I was, and I was just going through my daily life thinking like, how is that true? I see it everywhere. I agree in a lot of things, but I was thinking about like, you know, there's this meme of like, after AI, the last job will be like the plumber. And I was like, is there a power law compensation curve in plumbing?

• 2:05:54Joe Weisenthal?

  That's a really interesting question.

• 2:05:55John Coogan?

  Driving, because if you think about the value of, of, of driving, it's really a lot of, there is a ton of equity value in Uber. There is a ton of value.

• 2:06:05Jordi Hays?

  There's value, it's a leverage thing that the highest paid plumber will be somebody who has like a, a like scaled plumbing enterprise. That you, you can only like install so much pipe.

• 2:06:18John Coogan?

  But if, but if they lose their talent, like there's still equity value because you've aggregated demand. And that's the difference between the AI research labs and Instagram. Every, they could have a hundred percent turnover at Instagram, slot other people in, it's a network effect. There's an audience there, there's habitual, I know I have a fan base on Instagram or I open it and I know that I get funny memes or videos or family connections there. I'm not leaving just because the software engineer who works on this particular button leaves. And so there's a ton of equity value in Instagram relative to the talent. And, and, and I think that there, I think that it's not as, it's not as universal as we think.

• 2:06:59John Coogan?

  I think we're just seeing it more in media and finance and research and places where there are either secrets that you can take with you. Or relationships that you can take with you, or, or fandom that you can take with you. And so it's not, it's not entirely 100% universal, but it certainly is something that it's, it's more on display than ever before.

• 2:07:22Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, I think that's good. Look, I, I, I think this is a, a useful corrective. The phenomenon, there are many parts of the economy where the sort of distribution between equity and talent is not as skewed as it seems to be in some of these areas. It does seem on display. I mean, it's weird that we know the names of software engineers in general, right?

• 2:07:45John Coogan?

  Yeah, the trading card memes. We put up these trading card memes. They got millions of views. It's crazy.

• 2:07:50Jordi Hays?

  We had a, yeah, even on Instagram.

• 2:07:52Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, and I, you know, when I think about why you guys, not to, you know, blow too much smoke. But when I think about like, okay, like when I think about TBPN and like, what is it about this moment? And why has it worked? And why has it worked as well as it has? I do think, you know, it's obvious that just like so much of this thing is like, it's a, you know, you guys do like a quasi-sports show. And so much of what we're talking about is de facto sounding like sports, including the degree to which people just get traded, so to speak, from, or big signing transfers from one firm to the next.

• 2:08:26Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, I mean, to me, to me, business, like anybody that is like sufficiently nerded out about business and markets and tech is like, it's always been, you could always comp it to sports, right? You have personalities, you have effectively coaches, you know, like the elder VCs. You have the, the teams, the companies, et cetera. Switching gears a little bit, uh, what's up with, what's going on with general solicitation? Seems like, it seems like there's a bull market in general solicitation. There's, there's this guy, Eric Jackson, who's just been basically going out saying, "Yeah, I'm just looking for hundred Xs. And by the way, if you wanna, if you wanna, if you wanna join the ride, you can." And a lot of people are pushing back.

• 2:09:08Joe Weisenthal?

  I'm gonna try to be careful when I talk about this topic. But the idea of like, you know, we're going to pick a ticker.

• 2:09:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Again, trying to be careful. We are going to pick a ticker and just sort of manufacture momentum for it. Has probably just so much that always existed in markets. And we seem to be in an age in which this sort of behavior is, people don't try to hide it as much. And that's, I think, not the surprise. Have there always been people attempting to like, alright, we're gonna like try to, I'm trying to think of a word that wouldn't land me in legal trouble. We're gonna try to move this stock for sort of non-economic reasons, because we gather and buy it. Has that always existed? I'm sure we seem to live in an age where not only are people comfortable with just sort of doing that

• 2:10:00Joe Weisenthal?

  in the public, you have a lot of people who sort of say, yeah, you know what? Everybody's got to eat and everything is corrupt these days and everything is a scam. I don't really believe that, for what it's worth. I actually think American capital markets are the best in the world from a sort of transparency and regulatory side. I actually think it would be sad if we lose that. But I do think there's this wide perception, it's all a scam, everybody is corrupt, everybody has inside information. You're not, you don't have that information and therefore, why can't you participate in your own form of, you know, driving the market to your will? Social media obviously allows that and no one seems to,

• 2:10:43Joe Weisenthal?

  everyone seems to be sort of cool with that these days. And like I said, I actually do think American capital markets are deep and fantastic and well-regulated generally. And if you look anywhere else in the world.

• 2:10:54John Coogan?

  Let's give it up for them, capital markets. We love them. I was talking to Jordy about this this morning.

• 2:11:00Jordi Hays?

  Well, it's funny that when somebody is doing, or you know, basically doing general solicitation, the reaction is for a bunch of guys who love finance to go and dunk and quote tweet the person and be like, look, and it just drives more attention.

• 2:11:15Joe Weisenthal?

  How do you cover it? Like, I, I, I thought, this is the problem. Like, how do you even like begin to cover it? Because I've wondered about this, like with doing the podcast over the years, where it's like, certain like, certain, You know, I'll hear a story, someone will tell me about like some meme coin or something. And the schemes that they like concoct to like pump it, basically, straight up manipulate it or like gather in a group, etc. And it's really interesting, but it's like, it feels a little, you know, like, I would love to talk to you on the podcast. On the other hand, I, no matter how much that person is straight up admitting to market manipulation, the mere fact that they would be getting attention would almost certainly drive the whole thing higher. So it creates this very like weird tension from this.

• 2:11:57Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, remember when the, when there was that Argentinian presidential meme coin that like Malay kind of endorsed? And then the guy that created it like went on like a, started going on podcasts immediately, breaking it down.

• 2:12:09Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, you know, I, there's that famous George Soros quote, and I don't know it exactly, but he talked about it. He's like, when I see a bubble, I run towards it. And I think everybody is now adopting that, where they look at something and they want to get in, they see a scam. And rather than, oh, I want to avoid that scam, it's, I want to get in on the scam. I want, in other words, it's like, I want to be in on the next made off.

• 2:12:31John Coogan?

  I remember this during the, yeah, I remember this during the crazy crypto era of like 2021. They, I remember Coffeezilla, this YouTuber who would talk about these scams, would interview some of the like victims who lost a lot of money. And they were like, well, I knew it was a Ponzi scheme, but I thought I was early.

• 2:12:48Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, you want, I think I wrote, I gotta go find that, because I hadn't thought about it. I think I literally wrote once, like, the new thing is like getting in on the next made off.

• 2:12:56John Coogan?

  Getting in on the next.

• 2:12:56Joe Weisenthal?

  Because if you are early, and if there's sort of like, we're in an era where regulators, whatever, just don't care about this stuff. And or the expectation is like, you, everyone gets to play the game, everyone knows what the game is, you just don't want to be the last bag holder. The game is to get in early.

• 2:13:11John Coogan?

  I was thinking about this in the context of the Coldplay concert that went viral. The CEO of Astronomer took over the internet and I was like, okay, it's a private company. But if it was a public company, what would have happened to that stock? Is there a world where someone's like, let's turn this into a meme stock? Because it's a small company.

• 2:13:26Jordi Hays?

  Let's buy the Coldplay IP, roll it in and turn it into a Coldplay IP treasury play.

• 2:13:33John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm sure there'll be something out there in the near future.

• 2:13:36Joe Weisenthal?

  I don't love it, but you know, I'm old and I'm a boomer at this point. So maybe I just need to sort of embrace the new generation.

• 2:13:43Jordi Hays?

  You know, you know, so crazy, somebody messaged me and they were like, do you know Andy Byron, the guy at the Coldplay concert? Was previously the president at Lace Work, which went from.

• 2:13:55Jordi Hays?

  Zero to $7 billion in the private or $8 billion in the private markets backed down and ended up selling for like I think around 150 million. So he's been on.

• 2:14:05Joe Weisenthal?

  What a ride. That's someone who that's someone who knows the roller coaster of life.

• 2:14:10Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, so he'll be back, I'm sure, probably in another marriage. What's going on with the 2:30 spread? I saw you posting that the 2:30 spread is at its highest since October 2021. I remember October 2021. There were top signals blaring everywhere. We have our own top signal tracker that we're working on internally that we should we should roll through as well, but.

• 2:14:34Joe Weisenthal?

  You guys got to get into proprietary data. No, so like, you know, the way to think about, you know, the president has been out calling for rate cuts and we might get rate cuts at some point in the next year. But the way to think about the yield curve is that at any given point on the curve, that number reflects like the sort of average rate over that time. So the two-year yield, for example, is essentially what the market expects the Fed will have rates on average over the next two years. The 30-year is what the market expects Fed rates to be on average over the next 30 years. And what you see is this, you know, even at this time of calling for rate cuts, that number at the long end keeps going higher and higher, which suggests that, you know,

• 2:15:15Joe Weisenthal?

  the Fed could cut rates right now, could get rates aggressively if Trump replaces Powell sometime next year or perhaps tries to fire him before that with someone who's sort of a lackey or a loyalist. We might get this situation of sort of like aggressive rate cuts now, but if people perceive that to be inflationary and so forth, one possibility is that rates go up at the long end because they'll eventually have to compensate that compensate for that by higher rates to fight that inflation. And so you see that now. And what that means, though, is that even if you got rate cuts right now, you might not actually get lower mortgage rates or lower car rates because those are the rates that actually matter towards where people are borrowing. So I think perhaps maybe the market is telling Trump a signal, you're not even going to get what you want, even if you get what you want.

• 2:15:58Joe Weisenthal?

  You could get that Fed chair who immediately cuts rates for you, but if the goal is lower rates to stimulate the economy, it may not even work because you might see longer rates rise in compensation.

• 2:16:08John Coogan?

  Yeah. That would be brutal. Can you talk about the decision for who runs the Fed? It's been kind of wall to wall coverage from the Wall Street Journal. All different bank CEOs coming out. There's been memes about like, you know, the school walkout, don't fire Jerome Powell. Like, what are the arguments on the sides of like, hey, let's not intervene from the executive branch?

• 2:16:33Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, there's a bunch of interesting dimensions. I mean, look, I'll say a few things. There's always been pressure put on the Fed from time to time from the White House. It's not new to Trump, but it is really stepped up. And it's the sheer number of attacks, the demands for immediate rate cuts. This sort of the attacks on Powell for the cost of renovation of the Federal Reserve building, which interestingly, there was a story by AP out today that said, one of the drivers of the cost is that in 2000, the administration officials wanted there to be more marble instead of glass in the building.

• 2:17:10John Coogan?

  That feels very Trump aligned.

• 2:17:11Joe Weisenthal?

  It's very Trump like. And so that could be, so there is some why the renovations have been so expensive. That's one possibility.

• 2:17:18John Coogan?

  Okay.

• 2:17:18Joe Weisenthal?

  But then the, you know, there's a range of, so there's this guy, Kevin Worsch, who for my entire career has been a hawk, always calling for higher rates. Suddenly he's calling for lower rates.

• 2:17:29John Coogan?

  Interesting. This is the battle of the Kevins. There's two Kevins that are in contention.

• 2:17:32Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, right, right. Then there's Kevin Hassett, who I think is generally, you know, considered to be like a respectable economist by and large. And, you know, if he, if he were to get the nod, I don't think there would be too much anxiety. But the assumption is that whoever replaces Powell would be much more inclined to cut rates sooner and faster. And if it's, and if it's true that like the economy has some upward momentum right now, then you could see how people might perceive that to be inflationary. And another name, I wrote about him today, Christopher Waller. He's a governor on the board. He is probably, he's calling for rate cuts. He thinks there should be a rate cut as soon as the next meeting.

• 2:18:13Joe Weisenthal?

  But in Waller's defense, he's had really good intuitions this whole cycle. So he's very hawk. You want to fight inflation aggressively even while others on the board were calling it transitory. He predicted that inflation could come down from its highs without a meaningful increase in the unemployment rate, which has been proven correct. So, you know, there are some who are suspicious and cynical and say he's openly campaigning for that Fed Chair job, but he's been, no one could really deny that he's, uh, he's, he's had his finger on the pulse about as well as anyone else for the last five years. And this is important, which is that the FOMC, you know, it's 12 people. It's not just, the rates aren't just decision of the Fed Chair. Waller is someone who would probably have a pretty decent amount

• 2:18:57Joe Weisenthal?

  of credibility with the other 11 people on that board because he comes from there. So it's possible that, you know, maybe he's the most logical choice, but what's likely? I have no idea.

• 2:19:07John Coogan?

  Uh, off the top of my head, if I'm going to steel man rate cuts, I'm going to say something, I'm going to say something like, uh, yeah, the economy is doing well. The retail sales are good and jobless claims are fine, but, uh, it's still really expensive to buy houses and, uh, mortgages are really high. And so I want to help Americans buy more houses, getting people on the housing ladder is the way that they start accumulating capital. That's good. If I do the, the tinfoil hat, I'm struggling with this because I, I imagine that, you know, if I'm, you know, want to, if I want my party to win in the midterms, if I want my party to win reelection, I want the economy to be really strong. I want markets to be booming. So despite

• 2:19:50John Coogan?

  all of the different, you know, uh, social issues that might be floating around, everyone says, well, like my IRA is up, my 401k is up, my market portfolio is up, but it feels like it's too soon to be putting, to be playing that card. To go back to our rat analogy, if I was completely cynical, just saying, this is all about politics, I wouldn't be demanding rate cuts now. I'd be demanding them right before the midterms, which I believe next year, right? So, yeah, to react to those steel man, the tinfoil hat conspiracy.

• 2:20:18Joe Weisenthal?

  So look, you know, like I said, you know, the, the issue with rate cuts from a housing perspective is that mortgages, mortgage rates may not go down if there are rate cuts because they're tied to the long end of the curve, which might go up in expectations of future inflation. The strongest argument I would say for-

• 2:20:32Jordi Hays?

  Could we, could we possibly, what could we do? Like, couldn't you just go and with like Figma and edit the long end of the curve? Bring it down.

• 2:20:41Joe Weisenthal?

  Yeah, you could, uh, well, you know, the equivalent of, the equivalent of Figma, I guess, would be yield curve control, which is not unprecedented, where the Fed actually just goes out and says, "We are not going to let the 10-year rise above X level, and we will buy Treasuries with our unlimited balance sheet." And, um, and they could do that. The issue then is you probably, that means letting inflation run hot. It's tricky. Um, but the steel man for rate cuts is that the labor market has slowed, and, uh, the rate of hiring really has declined, um, quite a bit. I mean, I think there have been several stories about how low hiring is, particularly for college grads and so forth. So this, I think the, the, the, the argument for rate cuts, there's a straightforward one, which is that you could

• 2:21:24Joe Weisenthal?

  make the argument that the economy needs support, or that it's over, the rates are overly restrictive, which is the argument that Fed Governor Waller made yesterday. But I, you know, just to your point, um, about, you know, the elections and IRA, look, like, what was it? Uh, I think yesterday there was the news that President Trump was going to allow people to, you know, invest in crypto in their 401Ks, or something like that. There was some headline about that. And access to private credit. You know, I do think it looks like this is an administration that is very comfortable with letting asset prices rip. And it, people like that. People like when their 401Ks and their IRAs and all that go up, and their cryptocurrencies go up. And I think this is an administration that is like, pretty happy to see that.

• 2:22:08John Coogan?

  We said this early, give Jane Street direct right ads, access to the Fed funds rate. Let the

• 2:22:14Joe Weisenthal?

  It solves it all. It solves it all.

• 2:22:16John Coogan?

  Just solve for market prices. Just make the market go up as much as possible.

• 2:22:22Jordi Hays?

  How's, how's Jane Street doing with their little, little PR

• 2:22:25Joe Weisenthal?

  I don't know. I haven't, uh,

• 2:22:26Jordi Hays?

  series of PR crises?

• 2:22:27Joe Weisenthal?

  I actually haven't

• 2:22:28John Coogan?

  Wait, about, about O'Camels?

• 2:22:29Jordi Hays?

  No, no, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:22:31Joe Weisenthal?

  The Indian, the Indian options.

• 2:22:32Jordi Hays?

  And then the Sudan stuff, too. That whole, that whole thing.

• 2:22:36Joe Weisenthal?

  Wait, what? Oh, yeah, we talked about that.

• 2:22:38Jordi Hays?

  No, it was just like, you go from not hearing, you only hear about Jane Street really on the Dwarkez podcast.

• 2:22:44John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:44Jordi Hays?

  You know, a nice ad read. And then you start hearing about, you know, all these other things. Uh, it seems like

• 2:22:51Joe Weisenthal?

  No, no, I gotta, I, I, I'll, I'll, I'll check in on Jane Street for you guys.

• 2:22:54Jordi Hays?

  Thank you. Thank you. What jersey are you wearing by the way?

• 2:22:58Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, I've got this, I was in Mexico earlier this year. By the way, I got your hat. I have, I, I have it in the office. I wasn't sure if that would be a little, I was thinking about wearing your TVPN hat. But is that, I was like, is that like wearing the T-shirt to the band when you're going to see the band? I wasn't totally sure, but I'll put it on next time.

• 2:23:14Jordi Hays?

  I just wanna, I wanna see a suit at some point.

• 2:23:17John Coogan?

  Suit would be cool.

• 2:23:18Joe Weisenthal?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:23:19John Coogan?

  We're gonna get some Odd Lots merch over here.

• 2:23:22Joe Weisenthal?

  I'll do, I'll, you know what? I will wear a suit or at least a shirt, jacket and tie next time you guys have it.

• 2:23:27Jordi Hays?

  It's so great. It's, we, we've been, we try to wear white suits when the market's ripping. The S and P 500 was at an all time high yesterday, right? And we didn't even think to, we didn't even think to put it on because it's just, we're so normalized to all time highs.

• 2:23:41John Coogan?

  Anyway, thanks so much for stopping by.

• 2:23:42Joe Weisenthal?

  Thanks anytime. Always love it. Have a good weekend.

• 2:23:45Jordi Hays?

  Love it, dude. Have a great weekend.

• 2:23:46John Coogan?

  Bye.

• 2:23:46Jordi Hays?

  Cheers.

• 2:23:47John Coogan?

  Really quickly, let me tell you about public.com investing for those who take it seriously. They got multi asset investing, industry leading yields, and they're trusted by millions. We will bring in our next guest, Nirav from Nextdoor, have a bunch of questions, particularly about political campaigns, given some of the folks we had on earlier, but thank you so much for joining. Good to meet you. How you doing?

• 2:24:09Speaker 05

  I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

• 2:24:13Jordi Hays?

  It's great to have you.

• 2:24:14John Coogan?

  Why don't you kick it off with an introduction on yourself and the company? And then I just wanna jump into a bunch of questions immediately, but I'll let you, I'll let you do the introduction.

• 2:24:22Speaker 05

  All right. Appreciate it. Nirav Tolia, co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor. Nextdoor is a public company that is trying to build the daily utility that you use every day to find out what's going on around you. We're focused on the neighborhood in particular, and so we sometimes call ourselves the essential neighborhood network. We started in the summer of 2010, went public in 2021. I ran the company for the first nine years and then actually came back to the company a year and a half ago as CEO. So I'm a re-founder, not just a founder, but a re-founder. And this week was really exciting for us because on Wednesday we launched the new Nextdoor. The reason I came back to the company is because we needed a much better product.

• 2:25:03Speaker 05

  And sometimes founders are in a good position to reimagine the product, even though they built it in the first place. And so for the last year and a half, we've been working on a brand new version of Nextdoor. Launched it on Wednesday. It's going really well. We're excited about the future.

• 2:25:17John Coogan?

  What's, what's the biggest change with the new product?

• 2:25:20Speaker 05

  It's completely different and so it's not an evolutionary change or like a version 1.0 to 2.0, right? But the biggest change is we've taken an all-purpose news feed because we're a social network for neighborhoods, like there's a social network for pictures and a social network for people and for businesses, right? And we've taken that social network and we've started to make it a lot more structured and utility-centric. So we focus this release around local news to keep neighbors informed, local alerts to keep neighbors safe, and local recommendations to keep neighbors smart. In the news feed, there was always local news being discussed, there were alerts being discussed, there were recommendations being asked for and given, but now we have dedicated parts of the app where you can find those things and so it's just a lot more useful.

• 2:26:05John Coogan?

  Senator, do you sell ads? What's the business model?

• 2:26:08Speaker 05

  We do. We have over 100 million verified neighbors in 11 countries, so decent scale, and as I said, we're public and so hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue as well, and the business model is advertising.

• 2:26:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, that makes sense. We had a friend of the show on earlier this week. He is running for state council, is that right?

• 2:26:31Jordi Hays?

  State Assembly.

• 2:26:31John Coogan?

  State Assembly. And it was interesting because he came on our show and we have an audience all over tech and in San Francisco and New York, and I was trying to puzzle, like I want to help him, I'm excited about his campaign, but realistically, we're not a platform focused on his district in Los Angeles. So he was saying he was going-

• 2:26:54Jordi Hays?

  Which is probably like 20 square miles.

• 2:26:56John Coogan?

  Yeah, yeah, he was saying he was gonna go knock on doors, literally, and go to local events. But I was thinking about what is the most internet-native way? He's a great poster, he created kind of a viral video, and he seems to be good at communicating through the internet. What can you tell me about politics on Nextdoor, generally, local politics? Have people found luck there? What are the different strategies? Are you in favor of this? Are you excited about this? Are you avoiding it? How does politics work?

• 2:27:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, like, it's a great question, and honestly, it's something that we've struggled with since- The inception of the company because when it comes to national politics. Yes, I know. We know, very divisive. Totally, totally. When we see that on the platform. Yep. You don't like it. I completely agree. Said specifically, no discussion of national politics and no national political advertising. So that's where we started, right? Yep. What we've realized over time is when it comes to local issues, whether you call them local issues, civic issues, or local politics, those topics matter to neighbors. And the point you made is exactly right, which is the folks who are behind those topics, whether they're elected officials, or that they're folks in the local community, they're trying to get something done, they need distribution.

• 2:28:10Speaker 05

  Because the internet has made it easy for you and me and your co-host to talk to each other. And I don't even know where you all are. I'm in Texas, right? But I'm pretty sure you're not in Texas, right? But it has made it very hard because we're looking on our screens and looking at our computers to look out the window and see who's right across the street or who's next door, right? And so that should be the promise for Nextdoor. And so it's a long-winded answer to your question, but I hope in the future that we will provide your guest an opportunity to come on to Nextdoor where he knows he can reach verified neighbors in that 20-square-mile area and he can talk about the issues and how he wants to deal with the issues.

• 2:28:52Speaker 05

  Historically, for 15 years of our history, until Wednesday, when we launched the new Nextdoor, we didn't really let anyone except for verified neighbors create content. We had some public agencies, police departments, fire departments, some mayor's offices, but not what you would call local politicians. And what we realized is ultimately, our job is to give you all the local information that exists, regardless of the source. And so with the new Nextdoor and with local news, which I mentioned, we have 3,500 publishers that are publishing 50,000 articles every single week. Now, in my city of Dallas, that's the Dallas Morning News, that's D Magazine, that's all the local publishers. It's not the New York Times publishing into Dallas, right?

• 2:29:36Speaker 05

  It's the Dallas-centric and the neighborhood-centric sources. So the same way we're letting those third-party in, those third-parties in, I fully expect at some point in the future, and I don't know when. We will let the third parties that want to be elected officials or who are elected officials come on to Nextdoor and we just need to figure out the right way for the signal to be higher than the noise.

• 2:29:59John Coogan?

  Yeah, no, I completely, uh, yeah, it's, it's fascinating. Like I had this weird, interesting experience where we moved into a neighborhood and there weren't curb cuts and we have a stroller and my wife was like, I'm gonna write a letter to the city and I was like, that's never gonna work. Like it will be 10 years. And they fixed it and they made a curb cut in like three months or something. It was really fast. I was very impressed and it's clear that like the city was just prepared and, and open to that. And I didn't even know that because I don't have like this connection because the local news has kind of dropped off so much. Um, how do you think about the business model that a local news creator might have in the future? We talked to Chris Best at Substack yesterday.

• 2:30:44John Coogan?

  Um, very interesting business model there. I could imagine, I mean, every social network has had, um, you know, people might talk about the YouTubers or podcasters and Joe Rogan with these big deals, but there are people that make a full living just on Instagram or just on X or just on threads. Listen, this show is really just really big on X. Um, and, um, I'm interested in how you see the business model of a local content creator. Is there a world where you're both partnering with an organization to distribute their content? That's maybe in a local newspaper, physically their own website, and then you're kind of a top of funnel? Or do you think there will be Nextdoor native creators soon if there aren't already?

• 2:31:26Speaker 05

  It's a big challenge for local publishers because as we know, the old business models of delivering papers or driving subscriptions for things that show up in our mailboxes, that doesn't really exist. At the same time, the digital business models, they don't have the same scale. And so it's hard for them to justify the ad sales forces or the technology investment, et cetera, right? Today, what we're doing is we're starting by sending them traffic. So we don't have a walled garden on Nextdoor. These 3,500 publishers, they give us a headline. They give us a hero image. They give us a snippet. And then if one of our members wants to read an article, they go off to that publisher's website. And that publisher can monetize through a subscription. They can monetize through advertising. They can monetize whatever way they've chosen.

• 2:32:09Speaker 05

  The thing that we've thought about, and I'll get to kind of the Nextdoor creator idea that you talked about. The thing we thought about is, If there's enough demand in one area to get local news broadly, could we put together a kind of Apple News or Spotify kind of subscription? Where you pay one entity next door and then they get the proceeds on some kind of rev share based on what articles are read? So we've thought about that, but it hasn't gone any further than us thinking about it because we need to see how this performs. Ultimately, I'm not sure about the business model behind it, but we certainly believe in citizen journalism.

• 2:32:48Speaker 05

  And so even enabling the high school journalism student who wants to write about the high school sports that are going on and making sure that they can use Nextdoor as a distribution platform. That's something we want to enable because if that person goes on Instagram or X or LinkedIn or Facebook, there's just not enough audience. But if that person comes to Nextdoor and they're writing about the neighborhoods that are around a particular school, those neighbors want to support that school. So there's a lot of opportunity for Nextdoor. I would say the story of Nextdoor is one of massive potential and of not having a good enough product to really deliver on all that potential. And that's what we're trying to change.

• 2:33:29Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, it's an interesting challenge because like social networks in general have historically done well by reducing friction on the signup. But the nature of Nextdoor is you need that extra step of like verifying, does this person actually live where they're, you know, in the neighborhood that they're trying to participate in? And I had this one moment, it sounds like it was before you came back and started fixing things where I moved to a new neighborhood, I was trying to get set up and it wasn't verifying and I just churned and I haven't gone back. And so I imagine this, even though I'm sure it's active, I know it's a very active community on there. One question.

• 2:34:10Speaker 05

  By the way, I mean, that is kind of a hard problem because when people try to switch around neighborhoods, they don't have the patience to re-verify. They do have to verify initially, they don't have the patience to re-verify. So it's something that we need to make a lot easier because the thing you're talking about, the statistic I heard was something crazy like 10% of Americans move every year. And so it's happening a lot. People are moving neighborhoods, whether they're in the same city, but in a different house, or that they're moving cities altogether. And so that's something that we need to make frictionless.

• 2:34:42John Coogan?

  Yeah, if you could like, like, upload a video of you walking into your house at the address and then you do some like GeoGuessr type AI thing to identify that, hey, this person's really walking into this house.

• 2:34:53Speaker 05

  We've done everything.

• 2:34:55John Coogan?

  You've done everything.

• 2:34:56Speaker 05

  Innovative technology, all the way to sending you a printed, physical post.

• 2:35:00John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:01Speaker 05

  We've done all of those things.

• 2:35:02John Coogan?

  The printed postcard is Lindy. It's not going anywhere.

• 2:35:06Jordi Hays?

  Um, how, how do you guys think, uh, it's top of minds, uh, because John and I live in Southern California. I, I live in Malibu. John lives in Pasadena. So we were both, uh, pretty close to the fires that happened. Fortunately, we weren't directly, uh, our, our homes or neighborhoods weren't directly affected. And then you're in Dallas near, uh, not too far from, uh, where the flooding happened. How do you, how do you guys think about building features around, uh, helping people, uh, through disasters? Because I remember the, the fire app in Southern California that everyone was using, it's just run by a nonprofit. And there was one night that John basically thought.

• 2:35:46John Coogan?

  Watchduty?

• 2:35:47Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, Watchduty. John, John one night, like, basically thought that he was like, oh, Jordy's probably, you know, I just, we didn't have any cell service or anything like that. But I just remember using Watchduty.

• 2:35:57John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:35:58Jordi Hays?

  It would just periodically go down and it felt like, okay, there's probably going down because they just don't have the.

• 2:36:04John Coogan?

  The scale.

• 2:36:04Jordi Hays?

  The, the engineering capacity, the scale, et cetera, to just like run this service. I'm, I'm curious. Uh, but it's a hard problem to try to tackle because it's so spiky, right? It's like.

• 2:36:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, look, Watchduty is an amazing app. And so kudos to them. And when the Palisades fires happened, I looked at that thinking, we have to do more. Now. We had, we had seen all of our metrics spike like crazy in those Palisades neighborhoods. Because when a crisis happens, whether it's a power outage, which is relatively banal but annoying, all the way to inclement weather or a natural disaster like a fire, right? Or terrible flooding. Nextdoor becomes a lifeline. Because there is no other infrastructure to communicate with the people around you. And you need to be able to either say, in a very simple way, what's going on? All the way to, in a critical way, say, I need help. I need to be rescued, right? Or I can provide someone with help.

• 2:36:59Speaker 05

  And so historically, through hurricanes, through tornadoes, through fires, Nextdoor has always spiked when these things happen. But it's just a newsfeed UI. And so with the new Nextdoor, we've created an entire alerts surface, where the entire app transforms into this lifeline when, God forbid, a crisis is happening. And we take now authoritative data sources. So in much the same way that we're bringing in third parties on local news, we bring in third parties. I think we'd like to bring in WatchDuty at some point as well. And because we know where people live, we can deliver their information proactively to just those areas. And that's what's very different. Because if you think about WatchDuty, WatchDuty doesn't know where you live,

• 2:37:40Speaker 05

  and WatchDuty can't warn you before you go open WatchDuty to see if something's going on, right?

• 2:37:46Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:46Speaker 05

  But what happened with terrible flooding-

• 2:37:48Jordi Hays?

  No, it's actually, it's actually ends up being stressful because I'll be like on the show and I'll get a notification from WatchDuty. Earlier this year, it'd be like, a fire has popped up half a mile from you. That's really rough. It doesn't know where, it doesn't know where I am. So I'll get notifications like all over LA County. And I'm just, you know, I end up looking. I mean, it's probably good for their, their user metrics because I'll open it up and realize, okay, it's, it's like 100 miles-

• 2:38:13Speaker 05

  I think, I think you need three things to really create an essential use case around this, which truly is an essential use case because it could harm your family and, and yourself. The first is, you need to aggregate all the alerts. So WatchDuty just does it for fires, right? But you need power outages, you need construction delays, you need any kind of, of traffic that's going on. You need some event that's going to change something in the neighborhood, all the way to the really serious stuff like fires and tornadoes and hurricanes and crimes and that sort of thing, right? So that's the first thing. The second thing is, you need to know where people live. So you can get them timely information that's hyper relevant, right? I mean, it's not relevant if it's half a mile away because it's not going to affect you. It's just going to freak you out, right?

• 2:38:54Speaker 05

  And then the third and final thing you need is you need to have a community of people that are notified because in many cases, they're the ones that have the information, the photos and the videos that are actually more relevant than anything the authorities are providing because they're on the ground. Right? They know exactly what's going on. And so we have all of those pieces and God forbid those crises happen, but when they do, we have to do our part in keeping people safe.

• 2:39:23Jordi Hays?

  It's community intelligence. It's like the collective.

• 2:39:25Speaker 05

  Hundred percent.

• 2:39:26Jordi Hays?

  So.

• 2:39:26Speaker 05

  It's the power of community, truly.

• 2:39:29John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 2:39:29Jordi Hays?

  Awesome. Well, great, great chatting. Congratulations on the new launch where you come back on again soon. You're going founder mode. It's great to see you back in the driver's seat.

• 2:39:37Speaker 05

  You two better open the app and if you email me, I will make sure you get verified immediately.

• 2:39:42Jordi Hays?

  Oh, I'm sure it'll work perfectly now.

• 2:39:44Speaker 05

  But I think, I think you're gonna like it and I think your listeners will too. It's very different than the old Nextdoor. It's got all the goodness of the old app, but in a fresh new shell with lots of new features.

• 2:39:55John Coogan?

  That's amazing. Very exciting. Thank you so much for hopping on.

• 2:39:57Speaker 05

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:39:58John Coogan?

  We will talk to you soon. Bye. And if you're looking to explore a new neighborhood, get on Wander.

• 2:40:03Jordi Hays?

  Find your happy place.

• 2:40:05John Coogan?

  Book of Wander with inspiring views, hotel-grade amenities, dreamy beds, top-tier cleaning and 24/7 concierge service. It's a vacation home, but better, folks.

• 2:40:13Jordi Hays?

  Wander just dropped Wander Indio Hayes.

• 2:40:17John Coogan?

  Hayes, H-A-Y-S?

• 2:40:18Jordi Hays?

  H-A-Z-E.

• 2:40:19John Coogan?

  Oh, okay. But, uh, well, we have, uh, Mike from Arc AGI come in on the stream and we have the ability.

• 2:40:27Jordi Hays?

  Arc Day.

• 2:40:27John Coogan?

  Arc Day.

• 2:40:28Mike Knoop?

  Arc 238.

• 2:40:29John Coogan?

  I, I, I love these releases. Thanks so much for always coming on the show.

• 2:40:33Mike Knoop?

  Of course. Thank you guys for being such huge supporters of Arc Man's Law.

• 2:40:37John Coogan?

  Project. It's, it's so amazing. So we have the latest and greatest. Uh, why don't you, uh, just give us the little bit of background on, um, the, the actual V3s and the trade-offs.

• 2:40:48Jordi Hays?

  I think, why don't we talk about the XAI launch?

• 2:40:51John Coogan?

  Sure.

• 2:40:51Jordi Hays?

  Last week because that was a, you know, pretty massive improvement. Um, so maybe start there and then we can get to the present.

• 2:40:58Mike Knoop?

  Yeah. So this is really, I think, the second time we've seen a major frontier, um, AI lab use Arc as a benchmark to show off some sort of frontier progress, right? Back in December, we had, uh, OpenAI. Use Arc V1 to show off this qualitative change, right? Really mark the moment where AI frontier AI research moved beyond just like scaling up retraining and starting to add these symbolic systems on top, these chain of thought reasoning systems. Arc really marked that moment. And then last week, the XAI team used Arc V2 to show off a frontier result on Arc V2. They got 16% on the benchmark, still early days. But I think one of the really big takeaways from that was basically like how, you know,

• 2:41:42Mike Knoop?

  it's largely using a lot of the existing ideas in the world, but how quickly and effectively XAI was able to catch up to the frontier. And so, you know, my mental model now is, you know, going forward is, you know, wherever the sort of innovation come through, my expectation is XAI is probably going to go beat for beat on catching up, just given how fast they're able to get there this time around.

• 2:42:00John Coogan?

  When I hear, like, one thread that I've heard from watching the ARC progress is you put more test time inference, more spend behind a particular model, you get better results. And it begs the question, like, is this brute forcing? Is that what we're experiencing at some level? Is that a fear? And is the latest ARC V3 an attempt to kind of avoid that? Or is that just like not an issue at all?

• 2:42:32Mike Knoop?

  So, no, because of how we evaluate top scores on ARC. So we publish along two dimensions. One, an accuracy score. But we also publish an efficiency measure. And this is not arbitrary. Like, efficiency is a really, really fundamental aspect of what it means to be intelligent. So when we, you know, we have the million dollar prize, it's still hanging out there, by the way, for the original version of the contest. And, you know, if you look at, you know, the human level efficiency scores, just on V1, we're still only around, you know, 60-ish percentage points, whereas our benchmark for humans is 85 and onwards. So, you know, even though we've got V2 and even V3 now...

• 2:43:12John Coogan?

  So the next team to beat 83, 85% or something, they win the million? Or do they have to get to 100%?

• 2:43:17Mike Knoop?

  So the Kaggle contest rules are a little more stringent. You have to do it on a certain performance profile, a limited compute budget, you have to get the high score. And then there's an open source requirement. So this is one of the things that one of the sort of principles of the Ark Prize Foundation is we're trying to basically accelerate AGI genesis by encouraging more people to work on your ideas, openly share those ideas, try to, you know, kind of shape the AI research community to look more like what it did during the 2010 to 2020 era than than maybe it has over the past, you know, three or four, four years or so.

• 2:43:46John Coogan?

  What about, um, I, we, we talked to somebody, I forget who they, they said like, oh yeah, like, uh, you know, Arc AGI, it's cool, but like, we could totally crush that if we just like, R L'd on it directly. Uh, and all the labs are just being like, nice to like, keep it as an independent benchmark. But I don't fully buy that because I feel like some hedge fund would just see a million dollars on the floor and then just go do that if that was the case. But, uh, what, what is the, what is, what is the vibe of the?

• 2:44:12Mike Knoop?

  Reality is like, benchmarks are marketing.

• 2:44:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:16Mike Knoop?

  Uh, this is like, one of the reasons, I, I didn't appreciate this 12 months ago when we first launched Shark Price. I do now. Um, you know, the, the, the whole reason I put the money into the contest in the first place was Arc's awareness was very low. And my thesis was this is the most important unbeaten benchmark in the world. It tells us something important that no other benchmark does, right? If you go even look at the Grok 4 stream, all the other benchmarks that were shown are like PhD plus plus level benchmarks.

• 2:44:39John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 2:44:39Mike Knoop?

  And yet our tasks are like, you know, we have objective evidence. We've done human controlled studies that show they're all solvable by sort of average humans.

• 2:44:47John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:44:47Mike Knoop?

  Um, and so I think that tells you something interesting. Like, well, okay. Yeah. Like we're clearly missing something big here. Uh, we don't have it all figured out. We're, we're not in just like a scaling up regime. We are in a, we're sort of in an idea constraint regime. And I think that's an important conclusion. Because if it's true, it means that individual researchers and small teams on small budgets can actually have a significant impact on the frontier of AI research. They don't need, you know, a million, 10 million, billion dollar training budgets in order to actually make a material impact on AI.

• 2:45:14John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:14Jordi Hays?

  The, the challenge, like, I mean, the real challenge is just the distortion in the market right now and the trade off that a, that a researcher, even somebody who's, let's say a 20 year old in college that could be doing this sort of independent research. You know, like, wait, if I drop out, I could be making. $500,000 a year base comp and what, you know, the equity on top of that. So I imagine it would, I imagine at some point, are there like high schoolers that are, that are doing this kind of thing? Cause like, at a certain point, like the target market is like people that like, or maybe a little bit too young to like actually get it like Silicon Valley companies will happily have somebody drop out of college. It's a different conversation when somebody's like, I want to like drop out of like high school, right?

• 2:46:00Mike Knoop?

  I mean, this form of my thesis, I think talent is very distributary globally. If you look at most of the teams that are on leaderboard from, you know, past years of our contest, you know, a lot of large, I'm not sure if it's over 50%, but it might be are outside the United States. And again, this is like, you know, if you're sort of trying to create a sort of optimization function for creating AGI, you know, you, you'd like to shape in an innovation environment that's very open, there's a lot of sharing and there's a lot of diversity of approach. The opposite would be like, there's very little sharing, everyone's working on the same ideas, like, and if, because if those ideas are wrong, then like, okay, you're sort of shooting yourself in the foot. And so, um, those are, I think that's, that's one of the reasons we sort of launched our prize in the first place was to try and help communicate the story that individual people,

• 2:46:42Mike Knoop?

  young folks with that, with very little budget can actually have a large impact and encourage them if they have new ideas towards AGI to go work on those, you know, maybe as opposed to going and, you know, just starting the next language model startup.

• 2:46:54John Coogan?

  Yeah. When, when Dorkesh came on the show, he was talking about the need to solve continual learning, this idea that he has, uh, you know, this amnesiac PhD that is unable to learn hard lessons and then roll that up into habits and kind of wisdom almost. And, and, and that's why he, he's unable to, you know, use any of the frontier models to, uh, his example was like, select which clips of the podcast will perform well on, on social media or something. And he was struggling with that. And I'm wondering, like, we hear about the spiky intelligence concept.

• 2:47:36John Coogan?

  Do you think that the, the problems that underlie, uh, arc prize's robustness are related to the same continual learning problem that, um, that Dorkesh was highlighting? Or are these two separate problems where we could see us solving one and not the other?

• 2:47:54Mike Knoop?

  I think that's happening, right? The scores are much higher in V1 than V2. So by kind of layout and tease here, it's kind of the version we're doing a public preview for today. You know, we've got the Ark V1, V2 and V3. V1 was introduced back in 2019. It was designed to challenge deep learning as a paradigm. Remember, this is before language models, years before sort of language models really hit any sort of stride in terms of the research. And it sort of was robust through that advancement. And that's because large language models sort of inherit some of the same fundamental limitations that pure deep learning do. V2 was designed to challenge this new paradigm of AI reasoning systems. It's still a static benchmark, so the puzzles look very similar to V1.

• 2:48:35Mike Knoop?

  It might actually be kind of surprising that like you can't beat V2 if you can beat V1 because they look like they're in domain from each other. But the intuition here is generally the V2 puzzles require longer reasoning chains generally to solve them. And so that gets harder to do.

• 2:48:51Mike Knoop?

  One of the things that we started to see, though, this year is really the emergence of a lot of these agent systems that are being placed into dynamic, open-ended environments. And while static reasoning, I think benchmarks are useful and will continue to be useful. This is one of the motivations for starting to build V3 and defining what we're calling an interactive reasoning benchmark to help evaluate and really challenge some of these frontier AI agent systems we're trying to see emerge.

• 2:49:15John Coogan?

  Okay, so should we do the live demo?

• 2:49:17Jordi Hays?

  Let's do it.

• 2:49:17Mike Knoop?

  Let's do it. Should I like share what launched today, I guess?

• 2:49:21John Coogan?

  Yeah, so I can kind of, I can kind of read through this too. Yeah, give us the overview and then and then we'll play through it.

• 2:49:26Mike Knoop?

  It's a little, it's a little unique for us because you might be surprised like, oh, wait, V3 is launching. Didn't V2 launch like three months ago?

• 2:49:31John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:49:32Mike Knoop?

  So today's a public preview. We're showing off the first three public games from the eventual data set we're building this year. We intend to launch the full version in early 2026. We're going about the launch a little differently than we did with V1 and V2 because V3 is such a big upgrade over V1 and V2. We want to get.

• 2:49:48Jordi Hays?

  And by upgrade, you mean, by upgrade, you mean significantly.

• 2:49:52Mike Knoop?

  More challenging? The gap between what's easy for humans and hard for AI is getting wider again with V3 compared to what the earlier versions were, which I think is one of our other design principles we have. And so it's, and it's also just like every different domain than you want to do too. They look like our tests, but they're dynamic and there's a lot we don't know about them quite yet. Both what humans can do, what they actually find easy, what AI agents can do, how much can you create, you know, custom harnesses and scaffolds to be able to maybe make progress. I think we're going to learn a lot. And this is why we're sort of launching the first three games early to make contact with reality here and increase our rate of learning over the next maybe month or so. On our game design, our API design, we actually have, we launched our first piece of infrastructure today as well, an API that you can actually

• 2:50:34Mike Knoop?

  build agents and go run against these first three games. And we launched a $10,000 agent contest that's running for the next month for whoever can build the best agent that gets the best top score on the games that we're.

• 2:50:46John Coogan?

  So even if they get 1%, but they are the top.

• 2:50:50Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, even if it's low, whatever it is.

• 2:50:51John Coogan?

  The money's going out the door.

• 2:50:52Mike Knoop?

  So one important thing, like V1 and V2, Ark V3 has a public and private data set. So we've got three public games. There's also three private games. Those are actually what we're going to be awarding on top score performance on. So if you're thinking like, oh, I'll just make a really good, you know, harness for the three public games, it won't work because they won't translate into the three hidden games. Smart.

• 2:51:11John Coogan?

  Clever, clever. I love it. So I'm, I'm sharing my screen to the stream. I don't know if you'll be able to see it.

• 2:51:18Mike Knoop?

  I can see it.

• 2:51:19John Coogan?

  But I will read through this. So.

• 2:51:21Mike Knoop?

  My suggestion is you guys should, we should play locksmith. This is LS20, our first game. I think you guys should just collaborate on this one game together. It'll take about five to 10 minutes to probably play through. And I think seeing both of you like work together on it live, I think will be a fun, entertaining. I should be able to see the screen.

• 2:51:34John Coogan?

  Okay, I'll, I'll, I'll read it out. So human instructions, you are playing a game ID. There are no instructions intentionally. You must play the game to discover controls, rules and goal. Press start to play, choose your controls, WASD or arrow keys. Play to learn the rules of the game, win the game, profit, just kidding, just kidding, no prizes here. So I click start and I'm presented with a large grid of squares. It looks like the most intense Arc AGI puzzle possible because the original Arc AGI puzzles were something like a three by three grid and now I'm seeing.

• 2:52:11Mike Knoop?

  These are all 64 by 64.

• 2:52:13John Coogan?

  64 by 64. Okay.

• 2:52:14Mike Knoop?

  Yeah.

• 2:52:15John Coogan?

  So I do have the ability to use arrows to move this blue and orange block. And Jordy, can you see me moving it around? Yes. Okay, so if I go on top of this, the bottom left hand corner updated slightly. Let me see if I can zoom this out a little bit.

• 2:52:33Mike Knoop?

  All right, you've learned one important thing.

• 2:52:35John Coogan?

  And if I keep moving, click seems to do nothing, spacebar seems to do nothing.

• 2:52:40Mike Knoop?

  I'm going to give a little commentary while you're going here to see John.

• 2:52:43John Coogan?

  Please, please, please.

• 2:52:43Mike Knoop?

  So the, you know, the data set, the three games that we launched today, all of them are completely different. None of them look similar. In fact, this is the only game in the set that looks like a 2D agent game from kind of a tops down camera view that we're launching right now. All the other ones are quite different. And this is actually a design goal of the benchmark is for all the, you know, eventual hundreds of games we're going to have for them to be entirely different and very novel and diverse from each other.

• 2:53:04John Coogan?

  So I, I appear to have lost a life. If I look in the top right, I now have three, I, I had three red dots. Did you, did you cross that boundary? I got a red flash and so I think I died. But if I move forward, I get a green circle, which I imagine means I won. And now I'm on a new level and there seems to be a level.

• 2:53:26Mike Knoop?

  Do you know why you like got to the new level? Can you articulate that yet?

• 2:53:30John Coogan?

  Yes, so I, I believe that I stepped on a button that rotated my, or, or the kind of rearranged the, the icon, the goal icon in the bottom left of the screen. At first I thought that the, that the, in the bottom left, I see a little like, like blue and white line. And I thought the line was like a map that I have to take, but it appears to be a puzzle shape that I have to match up with a puzzle shape that's on the grid somewhere. And I'm stepping on a button to.

• 2:54:06John Coogan?

  Change it. So when I step on this rotate or change button, I'm getting kind of like a different Tetris piece. And if I keep doing this, I might land on this. Okay, that matches now. So the bottom left matches the the little goal. You see the goal? I go over to it, but if I go over to it, I die. And so I think I ran out of purple steps. So I have a set of

• 2:54:32Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:54:32John Coogan?

  Purple like, like, uh, energy. I have energy. Yeah, yeah, I have, I have, I have energy. So now I'm going to do the same thing.

• 2:54:40Mike Knoop?

  This is another very important, uh, design goal in many of the games in Ark V3 Inherit, which is there's intentional efficiency limits on actions that you can take.

• 2:54:49John Coogan?

  So now green score. I did it.

• 2:54:51Jordi Hays?

  Which is smart because the idea of like, you know, Scott Wu can probably like one shot a math problem.

• 2:54:56John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:54:56Jordi Hays?

  And it's very efficient for him. And then someone else like is going to be able to solve the same problem, but, but like over weeks. And is that really the same level of, of intelligence?

• 2:55:06Mike Knoop?

  This is really, you know, you guys probably like, for, for, for a long time, actually, I think games were considered to solve problem AI. You know, with AlphaGo and all the chess games and deep minds.

• 2:55:15John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:15Mike Knoop?

  Yeah. And one of the reasons for this is the way they learned.

• 2:55:18John Coogan?

  They, they didn't, the only thing that stopped them from being like totally superhuman in those is that they just didn't scale the current algorithms enough. And so they didn't solve, you know, it completely, but they all were basically.

• 2:55:29Mike Knoop?

  Yeah. And most of them use RL. And so they're trying to take reward signal and understand, you know, what actions I took to produce the reward signal. This is one of the things efficiency helps with is it limits the ability for an agent to just naively be able to go gather a reward signal by spamming and playing the games hundreds of thousands of times. This is something humans don't need to do, right? You know, you already beat level two, uh, in what, less than five minutes here with a very limited number of efficient, you know, actions that you took. Um, and this is something we don't see from the frontier like LM Stay or, or other agents we've been testing.

• 2:55:58John Coogan?

  Okay. I got my next level.

• 2:56:01Mike Knoop?

  All right. The next level, we, we started introducing some new concepts here.

• 2:56:03John Coogan?

  So, so I'm seeing they're different colors. So I, I have blue and white and I need blue and, uh, blue and orange. And so I'm going to step on this, uh, this color block. Now I have blue and teal. Now I have blue and red. I'm doing okay on efficiency about half my life. Okay. That seems good. But I think if I make a run for it, I won't make it. So I'm going to pick up this purple. Cube to refresh my energy, run over here. Am I gonna make it? Am I gonna make it? I made it.

• 2:56:32Jordi Hays?

  There we go.

• 2:56:33John Coogan?

  There we go, victory. Okay, now that there's a different one, I'll start by changing the color. Okay, I nailed the color, blue and teal. That's the end goal in the black cube. Then I need to switch my icon from this one Tetris piece to a different one. Okay, I got that. No, that's not it. I need the, the little like chair block. Okay, that's.

• 2:56:55Jordi Hays?

  You're running out of lives, John.

• 2:56:56John Coogan?

  Roughly correct, let's see. Okay, I refreshed, I refreshed. Go over, I think this, this other block, I think this is a button. I think I'm gonna run out of lives, though. I need to go refresh.

• 2:57:09Jordi Hays?

  Get some purple.

• 2:57:09John Coogan?

  I refreshed just in time. I had one left. One away, okay, let's keep rotating, keep rotating. Okay, now it matches.

• 2:57:16Mike Knoop?

  There you go.

• 2:57:17John Coogan?

  Okay, and I'll just pick up the free energy. Boom, green.

• 2:57:21Mike Knoop?

  You might have noticed to start scaffolding new, uh, new things you have to learn, right?

• 2:57:26John Coogan?

  Yes, yes.

• 2:57:26Mike Knoop?

  Progression system here. It's not just learn one rule in level one and apply it to the entire game. But we found a really, an element, uh, one of his angles that all the games are fun.

• 2:57:35John Coogan?

  Yes.

• 2:57:35Mike Knoop?

  And one of the things we found when we're doing early design, game design, was that, um, folks did not find the games fun if they just took one rule they learned and did that, just repeated it, right?

• 2:57:44John Coogan?

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 2:57:44Mike Knoop?

  Introducing new things you have to continually learn throughout the game is a big function of, uh, whether humans can find these things actually entertaining and fun.

• 2:57:50Jordi Hays?

  Well, we, we should figure out the infrastructure to have pure PvP speedruns.

• 2:57:55John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 2:57:55Jordi Hays?

  The entire prize.

• 2:57:56John Coogan?

  We'll have the whole team do it, too.

• 2:57:58Jordi Hays?

  Um, but real, real quick, while we have you, I, we have our next guest in the, uh, in the waiting room. But, uh, I wanted to ask you because it is top of mind for us this week. I, I think like the broader tech community went from sort of like not like, like taking like AI safety and alignment, you know, super, super seriously or kind of making jokes about it until this week. I think AI psychosis has been top of mind for a lot of people. If you were running one of these scaled labs today, how, how would you be trying to sort of quickly react to some of the, um, some of the different kind of stories that seem to be bubbling up around, um, people just getting like too, you know, too deep in this sort of recursive prompting?

• 2:58:41Mike Knoop?

  You know, my sort of view generally on AI safety stuff is you want to be empirical about it. You know, this was sort of my big issue when we were going through all the 1047 legislation last year in California is trying to make predictions about what future harm might happen by being able to predict the future. And in some cases, poorly predict the future. I think even ARC, you know, was sort of clear demonstration of an eval that suggested we were not just scaling up pre-training. AGI is not just going to emerge from scaling up this pre-training regime. And that was sort of the predicated thesis on why we needed something like 1047 at the time to like, stop this imminent, urgent, potentially dangerous scaling. So now, I actually think, you know, my sort of view probably aligns quite closely with OpenAI's, where I think you actually need to deploy

• 2:59:24Mike Knoop?

  the technology into the environment, into the world, in order to make contact with reality and learn what are the actual issues that you care about, what does society care about. My sort of view is that like, society is actually better at dealing with fast change than slow change. You know, this is another kind of counterpoint that I think if you go look at the AI safety community would argue a slow, slow takeoff is better than fast takeoff. Yeah, I think in a lot of capabilities areas, actually, fast takeoff is perhaps desirable because humans notice change. It's like literally what we were evolved to do is in our environment, we notice when things change fast. We don't notice when things change slow, right? The frog boiling in the pot is sort of the classic fable here, right? And so I think fast change stories like this, issues with psychosis

• 3:00:04Mike Knoop?

  are good in a weird way because they, they were sort of silent antibodies, like, oh, hey, something changed here, we should react to it.

• 3:00:12John Coogan?

  Yep.

• 3:00:12Mike Knoop?

  Yeah.

• 3:00:13John Coogan?

  No, that's really good.

• 3:00:14Mike Knoop?

  That's kind of my broad framework of what I'm, what I think, how we should sort of like run these AICs.

• 3:00:19Jordi Hays?

  In some ways, the negative externalities of social media, like, let's say, like, somebody's developing body dysmorphia, like, the ways the social media spectrum changed from like, sending, like, group messages to suddenly, like, you're sharing your entire life. Like, it actually was very slow. And so I think that this development with

• 3:00:40Mike Knoop?

  Yeah, creeps in, right? You wake up 10 years later, and you're like, hmm, are we happy with, like, where we got to?

• 3:00:44John Coogan?

  Yeah, brain rot is a meme that took years to develop. Fascinating. You have to come back on soon. We could go way deeper. We're going to be playing this all day.

• 3:00:51Mike Knoop?

  Hope you guys had fun playing the first game.

• 3:00:53John Coogan?

  Yeah, fantastic. I was not expecting a game. I was expecting a puzzle, and we are clearly in game territory. Very fun. Very excited to play more.

• 3:01:01Mike Knoop?

  Thanks for having me on.

• 3:01:02John Coogan?

  We'll talk to you soon. Bye. Up next, we'll stop keeping winning. It's Kasamani. Welcome to the stream. Sorry for the wait. We were we were proving our humanity with Arc AGI V3. Welcome to the stream, Kyle.

• 3:01:16Jordi Hays?

  In the suit.

• 3:01:17John Coogan?

  In the suit. You look fantastic.

• 3:01:18Jordi Hays?

  On a special day.

• 3:01:19John Coogan?

  You didn't have to wear the suit just for the show. Come on.

• 3:01:23Kyle Samani?

  I wanted to outdo y'all a little bit too, so.

• 3:01:27John Coogan?

  Fantastic.

• 3:01:28Jordi Hays?

  Look, looking sharp.

• 3:01:29John Coogan?

  Looking sharp.

• 3:01:30Jordi Hays?

  Are you in, are you in DC right now?

• 3:01:32Kyle Samani?

  I am in DC. I'm in a little phone booth about two blocks from the White House.

• 3:01:36John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Give us the update. What's happening in DC?

• 3:01:39Kyle Samani?

  Um, yeah, let me turn my phone here.

• 3:01:41John Coogan?

  Yeah, that's amazing.

• 3:01:43Kyle Samani?

  Awesome, guys. Thanks for having me back on. Pleasure to be here. Today's a big day for for Crypto Land. President Stump just signed a genius bill into law.

• 3:01:53Kyle Samani?

  Yes, huge, huge day for industry. This is the probably most consequential piece of financial legislation since dot Frank. It's the first crypto legislation we've ever had. And just an incredible milestone for the industry.

• 3:02:08Jordi Hays?

  Which is crazy to say out loud, this, this, you know, however far we are into this.

• 3:02:16John Coogan?

  It's been, crypto has been a thing for like almost 20 years now. Like what Bitcoin.

• 3:02:20Jordi Hays?

  And it's the thing that you've been basically begging for, just like, give us some.

• 3:02:24John Coogan?

  Give us something.

• 3:02:25Jordi Hays?

  Regulatory clarity.

• 3:02:26John Coogan?

  Finally here.

• 3:02:27Jordi Hays?

  It's finally here.

• 3:02:28Kyle Samani?

  Yeah, I mean, industry has been begging for regulation under the Biden administration. And they said, nope, no clarity. We're just going to shoot you randomly. And, you know, finally, like, we actually can operate. It's pretty amazing.

• 3:02:41John Coogan?

  Fantastic. What does this mean for non-stablecoin chains? Like, what does this mean for Solana? What does this mean for Bitcoin? Is there any implication there? Or is this purely focused on stablecoins?

• 3:02:57Kyle Samani?

  Yeah, it's definitely not priced in. So first, let me touch quickly on like what I think it means for the US and then get into kind of like the the chains and stuff.

• 3:03:04John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:05Kyle Samani?

  So I think the correct way to think about this, this is. You know, there's eight billion people in the world and I have a theory that if you were to go to each of those eight billion people and ask them, hey, if you can denominate your wealth in any asset, it could be Apple stock, S and P 500, bars of gold, euros, yen, you want, whatever you want. If you could denominate your wealth in any asset without fear of political persecution in your local jurisdiction, what asset would you choose? And my suspicion is that somewhere between 60 and 80% of the world would say US dollars.

• 3:03:35John Coogan?

  Hmm.

• 3:03:36Kyle Samani?

  Um, and for people who don't live inside the United States, having a US solid bank account is somewhere between very difficult and impossible. Um, outside of like all the top 1% or so of the, of the global, global wealth. And stable coins make it trivial for anyone in the world to have dollars in their pocket. Um, you don't need to have a permission, you just, you take your phone, your phone literally picks a random number, that's your private key. And you're, you're good to go to receive dollars. Um, I think this will probably represent one of the largest movements in capital in human history. And you enable, call it five to six billion people to like start holding more dollars more easily than they otherwise could hold them.

• 3:04:18Kyle Samani?

  Um, and the scale of what it means is actually really profound and I think really underappreciated. Uh, which is why, uh, I think it's not priced in because it's just hard to grasp what this means for everyone in the world. To be able to hold one currency. This has never happened in human history before.

• 3:04:33John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:04:33Kyle Samani?

  Um.

• 3:04:34John Coogan?

  This is fascinating. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm like, I, I, I'm almost like zooming out, like, I'm sure it's good for a lot of different projects and companies and tokens and chains, but it feels just incredibly bullish for America. Like we've been, like, because there was this narrative of like, oh, the tariffs and stuff, like, we're going to lose dollar dominance. We're like, we're going to lose global reserve status. And this just feels like coming from the, the half court shot.

• 3:04:58Jordi Hays?

  Yeah. It was like an artificial, you know, it was like a supply, demand imbalance, but the supply constraint was just coming from

• 3:05:05John Coogan?

  Like you don't have to be.

• 3:05:06Jordi Hays?

  Laws, regulators and, and other places. That's it. You can't set up a dollar, US dollar bank account in our country.

• 3:05:13John Coogan?

  Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. You don't have to be like even pro crypto or crypto native or anything.

• 3:05:18Jordi Hays?

  And this is what, this is what.

• 3:05:19John Coogan?

  For America.

• 3:05:20Jordi Hays?

  And this is like, you know, going back sort of the core tenants of crypto, like permissionless finance. It's like, okay, like permissionless access to US dollars where somebody says, I want to get paid in dollars. They set up a wallet and it's software and they get paid and it's, it is.

• 3:05:36John Coogan?

  Very cool.

• 3:05:37Kyle Samani?

  I mean, it's very much capitalism. Like, I just applied to my identity. If you identify as a capitalist, like, we should pause the thing. Oh, my god. Like, actually, the world as a whole was actually shockingly anti-capitalist in terms of just like currency access across nations.

• 3:05:50John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:51Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:05:52John Coogan?

  That's wild. What else should we talk about today? Is there any other downstream things? Can you give us a temperature check on the rest of the regulation? What happens next? Anything else that's going on in Washington that we should be following?

• 3:06:06Kyle Samani?

  Yeah, I mean, downstream implications, there's a ton. So first, a quick regulation. So the Genius Act passed. That's the stablecoin bill. The next major act the industry is focused on is that called the Clarity Act. This is being primarily sponsored by Chairman French Hill in the House. And this is otherwise known as the Market Structure Act. And the basic kind of outline of clarity is to answer the question, which regulators should regulate what? What should they regulate? This really kind of defines the line between treasury, SEC, and CFTC, who has kind of, you know, purview over which domains. Answer the question, what is a security, what's not? It deals with DeFi to some extent. And so that's kind of the other really big, meaty bill.

• 3:06:48Kyle Samani?

  And then the third one is actually one that kind of got added in recently, and industry is fine with it. It's just basically this anti-CBDC bill. It's just saying, like, America won't make a CBDC. So that's all in flight now. You know, optimistic clarity will pass in the next few months. It passed the House earlier this week. It's now in the Senate, and there's going to be some revisions stuff in the Senate. We'll see where it goes.

• 3:07:08Jordi Hays?

  Anything, anything that's in there so far that you're, that you think that the Senate should focus on correcting?

• 3:07:17Kyle Samani?

  Yeah, there's definitely more disagreement in industry about, like, you know, the substance of clarity. I can't get into the specifics, but like, certainly, we're right now in dialogue with a lot of our peers and lawmakers and their staff on these issues.

• 3:07:30Jordi Hays?

  Makes sense.

• 3:07:32Kyle Samani?

  John, the other question you asked, like, what's the implications for, like, industry? I really want to emphasize that. I mean, By making it, it's not legal, stable coins were illegal for all practical purposes for like any major regulated company, kind of anywhere in the world. And it is now legal and blessed for them to interact with stable coins. And so what I think, yeah, you're going to see every bank, you know, Jamie Dimon, Bank of America CEOs are talking about this now. I actually don't think that's the super relevant angle. To me, the much more important angle is it is now legal and okay for iOS, Android, Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, TikTok, every piece of major consumer software in the world now can legally embed stable coins. And it's a matter of time before they do. And what that's going to mean for global commerce, for global

• 3:08:17Kyle Samani?

  payments, for people accessing crypto is profound. And I think you're, and as all those people get their private keys and onboard to these wallets, that's then going to obviously provide the foundation, that money's going to be trending over Ethereum, Solana, etc. And it's going to be just a massive boon for all of crypto as you onboard a few of those people with this stuff.

• 3:08:38John Coogan?

  It's fascinating.

• 3:08:39Jordi Hays?

  Absolutely wild.

• 3:08:40John Coogan?

  Yeah, I'm excited. I imagine that, yeah, the big tech angle is super fascinating. I imagine that some of them will take different paths, different shapes, like we're going to test all the different structures.

• 3:08:50Jordi Hays?

  Yeah, what I hope is like, hey, stable coins are already, there's large market caps, there's lots of liquidity. Let's not have everybody launch their own stable coin. Let's just like focus on actually integrating them into and making them, you know, more valuable in these different ecosystems.

• 3:09:05John Coogan?

  It's also funny because I feel like for a while, there was a little bit of a, there's a little bit of like a chattering class critique of crypto being like, well, if it was so great, like, why, why doesn't Apple just integrate stable coins? It's like, well, because it was illegal. And like, they're a very risk averse company. There was no chance they were going to do it. But now they actually have it as an option. And then there's a competitive dynamic and they'll probably run experiments. And yeah, maybe it'll take a few years for them to build some stuff. Maybe some stuff will be aqua hires or acquisitions. There's a bunch of different things, ways it can play out, but it'll be really interesting to follow like how this actually gets in the hands of like billions and billions of people. Fascinating.

• 3:09:40Kyle Samani?

  Yeah. It's an incredible opportunity. And I mean, you just look at like now, where's liquidity? Where are people trading today? And, you know, And like which fans have the scale to support all these users and it just it bodes incredibly well for for industry as a whole.

• 3:09:55John Coogan?

  That's fantastic.

• 3:09:56Jordi Hays?

  Well, as there's more news, come back on and I'm sure you'll be celebrating responsibly in DC. So have fun out there.

• 3:10:03Kyle Samani?

  Hey guys, thanks so much for having me back on.

• 3:10:06John Coogan?

  Have a great one. We'll talk to you soon. Bye guys. Talk to you soon.

• 3:10:09Jordi Hays?

  What a way to end the week.

• 3:10:10John Coogan?

  Fantastic. Little news hits, little chopping it up with friends.

• 3:10:15Jordi Hays?

  Surprise, Strelly.

• 3:10:17John Coogan?

  That was a fun one. I enjoyed that.

• 3:10:19Jordi Hays?

  That was one of the most entertaining people on earth.

• 3:10:24John Coogan?

  Indeed, indeed. We should close with this this wonderful article in the Mansion section.

• 3:10:31Jordi Hays?

  Which one? We had a few queued up.

• 3:10:33John Coogan?

  So this is, I wanted to, I wanted to do this because it is essentially written by Arnold Schwarzenegger. So it is, it's his words as told to Mark Myers, who just transcribed them and then they published it in the Wall Street Journal.

• 3:10:48Jordi Hays?

  And which one is this?

• 3:10:49John Coogan?

  It's Arnold Schwarzenegger, "The Moment He Fell in Love with America."

• 3:10:53Jordi Hays?

  Beautiful.

• 3:10:54John Coogan?

  "My early years in Austria were challenging. After World War II, the economy in the Graz suburb where I grew up was shattered. Everyone suffered. My father Gustav was very, very, was a very, very sweet man, but when he drank, his personality changed. He became more violent and demanding. His behavior and drinking were influenced by the war's remnants, shrapnel in his legs that caused him pain, the lingering effects of malaria and what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. My mother Aurelia was a homemaker. Our family lived on the second floor of a three-story building. The first floor was occupied by the local forest ranger and the second wars and for and the second wars for my father. The second floor was for

• 3:11:38John Coogan?

  my father. The town's police chief, he was the town's police chief. The forest ranger had a phone, but we didn't, and there was no running water. I wasn't happy with the life I saw unfolding. I always had a feeling deep down that I needed to look for something else, something outside the box." At age 10, I fell in love with America. That came from watching film roles in school. The teacher would advance the strips by turning a knob, showing one image at a time. I was blown away. They were about things like the Golden, uh, like the Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building and cars with huge fins driving on US highways with six lanes on each side. At some point, there was a role on Hollywood. I'd never seen anything like it, the glamour, the lights and the houses.

• 3:12:22John Coogan?

  I said to myself, what am I doing here? I wanted to be in America, to become famous and rich. As I got older, the question shifted to how do I get there? At 15, I stumbled into bodybuilding at our local lake and said to myself, well, that's in America. The lifeguard always had other top athletes around, including weightlifters. As a teen, my testosterone was kicking in and I wanted to look like a He-Man. I read about Roy Reg Reg Park, an English bodybuilder who played Hercules in Italian movies. He won Mr. Universe three times and became an actor. My dream was possible. All of my time was spent in this world of physical fitness, building up muscles to complete, to compete in contests and fantasizing about movie stardom.

• 3:13:07John Coogan?

  At one point, I was in school, looking out the window and daydreaming when a piece of chalk hit me in the head. My teacher said, Arnold, what do you think you're doing in here? Talking to myself.

• 3:13:20John Coogan?

  I had no interest in what he was saying. He's not interested in school. In 1967, I won the amateur Mr. Universe title in London when I was 20. Then I trained in Munich for another year and won my first professional Mr. Universe title. After I won in 1968.

• 3:13:34Jordi Hays?

  It's so funny, this, the, the, thinking of the 60s and, and, and just like hippie, hippie culture and then Arnold's just like rising the ranks.

• 3:13:44John Coogan?

  Yes, bodybuilding, it's amazing. Uh, so he says, in 1967, I won the amateur Mr. Universe title and then he won the first professional universe title. After I won in 1968, Joe Widder, a bodybuilding enthusiast who published muscle magazines, brought me to Los Angeles. He put me up in an apartment in Venice, near Gold's Gym, where I trained. When I arrived, let's hear it for Gold's production team, you guys love that.

• 3:14:08Jordi Hays?

  That's why I work out, it's a great spot.

• 3:14:09John Coogan?

  It's fantastic.

• 3:14:12John Coogan?

  When I arrived in LA, I was totally disappointed. The city looked nothing like New York City with its tall buildings. Venice's sidewalks were dirty and no one cleaned them. And drugs were sold in back alleys. Two more Mr. Universe titles followed in 1969 and 1970. From the start, I knew bodybuilding was going to lead to acting. In 1970, I was cast in Hercules in New York and then in the TV series and films, including Stay Hungry in 1976, for which I won the Golden Globe Award for Best Acting Debut. Then came The Streets of San Francisco and Pumping Iron in 1977.

• 3:14:47Jordi Hays?

  Iron.

• 3:14:48John Coogan?

  Pumping Iron is fantastic if you haven't seen it. I know you haven't. Conan the Barbarian, the big one, in 1982. I was quoting Conan the Barbarian to our team. I don't think anyone got the reference, but we'll play the YouTube video.

• 3:15:01Jordi Hays?

  This is wild. So he says, "In the middle of all this, I studied remotely for a bachelor's degree in business." And let's give it up for all the business majors out there. Most important major.

• 3:15:12John Coogan?

  At the University of Wisconsin.

• 3:15:13Jordi Hays?

  He was doing that remotely.

• 3:15:15John Coogan?

  How were you doing it remotely in 82?

• 3:15:17Jordi Hays?

  College in 82.

• 3:15:18John Coogan?

  I guess you like mail it back and forth?

• 3:15:20Jordi Hays?

  Oh, you maybe get mailed an assignment in a textbook.

• 3:15:23John Coogan?

  That is, yeah, that is crazy. How do you do that? I don't, I have no idea. "From the time I arrived in America, I went to community college."

• 3:15:30Jordi Hays?

  He invented remote work. Arnold invented remote work.

• 3:15:32John Coogan?

  He really did, yeah. That is a crazy, crazy thing. We'll have to have him on the show and ask him about his time as a remote business major at University of Wisconsin Superior. "I went to community college to take English classes and get smart about business. In 1983, I became a US citizen." Let's hear it for Arnold Schwarzenegger, one of the best to ever do it. "Today, I live in a contemporary house in Brentwood, Los Angeles. It's the perfect place where I can see the foliage and the mountains. I'm close to town, it's private, and I have my pet, I have all my pet animals, which means not just dogs. He definitely has more than that. We'd love to know what he has." "In the 1980s, I took my mother to a White House dinner to meet President Reagan.

• 3:16:15John Coogan?

  At the table, I went to scratch my nose and she hit my hand in front of everyone. She said, 'Don't pick your nose in the White House, please, Arnold.'" I wasn't, but that didn't stop her. "No matter how big you get, your mother knows how to shrink you just a little." What a great story.

• 3:16:31Jordi Hays?

  I am sad that I was not super conscious when Arnold was the governor of California.

• 3:16:40John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:41Jordi Hays?

  Like, I remember it.

• 3:16:42John Coogan?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:43Jordi Hays?

  But I wasn't there for probably all the incredible moments. And I don't even have a strong take on if he was like a great governor, but I think he's awesome as an individual.

• 3:16:58John Coogan?

  Totally.

• 3:16:59Jordi Hays?

  And.

• 3:17:01John Coogan?

  That's a great place to have our show.

• 3:17:02Jordi Hays?

  Sam Sulek, I hope he makes a run in politics as well.

• 3:17:05John Coogan?

  Me too. I would love it.

• 3:17:06Jordi Hays?

  That would be powerful.

• 3:17:07John Coogan?

  And Hollywood first.

• 3:17:08Jordi Hays?

  Can you imagine daily Sam Sulek vlogs from the campaign trail?

• 3:17:13John Coogan?

  Incredible.

• 3:17:14Jordi Hays?

  He's just getting all of his constituents, "Hey, just come for a lift. Come for a lift."

• 3:17:18John Coogan?

  I think we're manifesting it.

• 3:17:19Jordi Hays?

  We can talk policy.

• 3:17:20John Coogan?

  We get him in a Jason Carmen-directed reboot of The Terminator.

• 3:17:24Jordi Hays?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:24John Coogan?

  Get him into Hollywood, get him trained up, make him a household name more than he is already, then get him on the campaign trail. I think we have a winner in Sam Sulek.

• 3:17:33Jordi Hays?

  Well, this was a crazy, wild, often fun week, and I can't wait for next week.

• 3:17:39John Coogan?

  Yeah, we'll see you Monday.

• 3:17:41Jordi Hays?

  Thank you for tuning in. Have a fantastic weekend.

• 3:17:44John Coogan?

  Bye.